Week 8

Harry Harootunian focuses his article on criticizing the field of Asian Studies in the West (particularly the U.S.) and Naoki Sakai examines Tanabe Hajime's lecture entitled 'Death and Life' in terms of the meaning of being Japanese subjects in the Imperial Japan. T. Fujitani's article brings Harootunian's and Sakai's respective arguments together in his discussion of the Reischauer memo.

Harootunian criticizes the field of Asian Studies in the U.S. on several grounds, which include his observation that the area specialists have not been able to completely detach themselves from the area studies' original purpose of providing intelligence regarding the enemy during the Cold War. Due specifically to the problem of receiving funding, what many of these specialists are doing is reinforcing the entrenched ideas of what the East is supposed to be. Therefore, the area specialists have not been able to lead the field of Asian Studies into novel directions. T. Fujitani also writes about how elite academicians, with or without their knowing, have contributed in framing Japan and the Japanese people in a certain way as to meet the needs of the U.S. interests. Therefore, according to Fujitani and Harootunian, there is a close relationship between area studies and policymaking.

Fujitani also writes that the American government, eager to demonstrate that the U.S. did not practice racism, recruited Japanese-American soldiers and sought for new ways to embrace minorities into the American society for purposes of propaganda. President Roosevelt's declaration that "Americanism is a matter of the mind and heart; Americanism is not, and never was, a matter of race or ancestry" (390) is of course contradicted by the ongoing practice of racial discrimination in the U.S., but it is also reminiscent of Tanabe Hajime's conceptualization of the imperial state. Tanabe argued that it was necessary that a state be ethnically diverse because he believed that only when people are granted the possiblity to negate their social grouping, they could become parts of the grouping in more proactive ways. Tanabe's argument was that in order to become a Japanese subject in the Imperial Japan, what is necessary is not the Japanese ancestry, but the devotion to the Japanese state to the point of death. In the cases of both Japanese-American soldiers and volunteer soldiers of the Imperial Japan, even though the reality of ethnic discrimination belied the rhetorics of universalism and equality, these rhetorics were continued to be implemented to solicit devotion to the state order.