Throughout much of the twentieth century, citizens of nations have accessed each other less through direct face-to-face personal encounters, and more through popular images from media and the arts. In the case of the Japanese empire and the American Cold War sphere, the arts and media served as a site of cross-cultural encounters within the context of unequal power relations: of masters and natives, and of unequal allies. This panel will examine historical case studies of cultural contact through the media and the arts in United States, colonial Korea, and Japan to understand how transnational arts and media culture can be used for national self-reflection and to introduce new ideas into society. In all cases, these cross-cultural art and media encounters took place within the context of hierarchical power relations. Producers and audiences used aspects of the Other, real or imagined, to both critique and legitimize their national culture and international power relations. In the colonial era, the Japanese ethnographic imagination of a subordinate colonial Korea contained a subtle critique of Japanese modernity. In the postwar, citizens of a defeated Japan learned to love and fear the Americans they saw on TV. In the U.S., American audiences learned  to reimagine Japanese as friendly allies subordinate to the United States through portrayals of Japanese in Hollywood movies.

E. Taylor Atkins, Northern Illinois University

Several scholars have demonstrated that academic anthropology, archaeology, and ethnomusicology in Japan benefited enormously from colonial access to Korea.  This essay, however, goes beyond looking at "anthropology in service to empire" to analyze ethnographies of Korea as a means to Japanese self-reflection.  I argue that the very choice of ethnographic objects (in photography, song collection, field observation, etc.) reveals a nostalgic longing for primordial identities ravaged by modernity.  While the Government-General boasted of the "progress" occurring in the colony, ethnographic scholarship largely eschewed such celebratory perspectives and offered a subtle yet powerful critique of the modern condition.  By looking at Japanese ethnographic photography, anthropological scholarship, folklore studies, travel literature, and preservation and curatorial projects in occupied Korea, I argue that the Japanese gaze on Korean folk culture and performance art was more than merely an exercise of colonial power, but also a means for critical self-reflection by Japan on its own status as a modern nation.

Naoko Shibusawa, Brown University

This paper argues that Hollywood films were part of an informal publicity campaign to showcase the former enemy Japanese as a Cold War ally. Going beyond textual analyses to examine Hollywood decisions about scripting, casting, staging, and marketing, this chapter explains how filmmakers self-consciously strategized to get across a message of domestic racial and gender harmony, to depict a friendlier, humanized relationship with the Japanese, and to try to make a hefty profit all at the same time. As many American policymakers, intellectuals, educators, and writers increasingly realized at the time, notions of white supremacy not only harmed the U.S. social fabric not but also undermined their nation’s ability to deal effectively in the world. The overall campaign to refigure the Japanese to the American public largely worked because it promoted racial tolerance by appealing to familiar, patriarchal notions of gender and maturity. In the hands of Hollywood filmmakers, the publicity campaign to encourage Americans to accept the Japanese as friends became thoroughly oriented toward consumption and to soften domestic and international opposition to opening markets for Japanese products. The paper thus argues that postwar spectacles of Japan affirmed not only U.S. policy to reintegrate Japan into the U.S.-led liberal capitalist framework, but also beliefs that Americans were legitimately equipped to lead it.

Jayson Makoto Chun, University of Hawaii, West Oahu

As late at 1964, Japan represented the third largest market (in dollar volume) for American exports of television programs. American programming made up a large portion of early television broadcast schedules in the early years of Japanese television and like in many parts of the world, Japanese viewers found it hard to disassociate American media culture from American ideology. So long as they felt familiar with the American culture they were bombarded with on TV, namely pro wrestling and cowboy westerns, a whole generation of Japanese viewers learned to made America the object of political attention. American television programs also managed to defuse much of the anti-American feeling that had simmered over from the Anpo protests of 1960 and accelerated the impact of American cultural influences that had already established a foothold in prewar Japan and in postwar Japanese media spaces. Although television allowed American cultural products to reach a mass audience and enter into homes on a scale unprecedented in imperial Japan, Japanese audiences did not necessarily accept American ideas wholesale, but rather used them to reformulate their own version of Japanese nationalism