Article contents
Camera Men: Techno-orientalism in Two Acts
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 July 2017
Abstract
During the years of Japan's “bubble” economy, writers and artists in the United States became increasingly susceptible to “Japan-bashing,” a discourse that objectified Japanese for their trade practices, overseas purchases, and tourist presence. In the following article, I draw upon a range of cultural texts, from Truman Capote's novella Breakfast at Tiffany's to Michael Crichton's novel Rising Sun, in order to investigate how the trope of the camera-toting Japanese expatriate encapsulated the fears of the era. I then move to explore the ways in which Japanese Americans negotiated these tropes in their writings, paying particular attention to Ruth Ozeki's novel My Year of Meats. I hypothesize that Japanese Americans remained aware of the phenomenon of “Japan-bashing” throughout the era, yet did not confront it in a sustained fashion. Instead, tropes were either dismissed out of hand or, as in Ozeki's case, incorporated into a narrative before undergoing a process of gradual dismantlement.
- Type
- Articles
- Information
- Copyright
- Copyright © Cambridge University Press and British Association for American Studies 2017
References
1 Vidal, Gore, “The Day the American Empire Ran Out of Gas,” in Vidal, , ed., Imperial America: Reflections on the United States of Amnesia (New York: Nation Books, 2005; first published 1986), 41–54, 41Google Scholar.
2 Ibid., 53–54.
3 That the size of the Japanese economy posed an existential challenge to the Cold War in its US–USSR bipolar form was not lost on Japanese intellectuals either. Three years later, the same premise was advanced in an essay titled “The Japan That Can Say No: Why Japan Will Be First among Equals,” coauthored by the outspoken fiction writer-turned-politician Shintaro Ishihara and Sony chairman Akio Morita.
4 Huang, Betsy, “Premodern Orientalist Science Fictions,” MELUS, 33, 4 (Winter 2008), 23–43 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 23–24.
5 Some scholars assert that there is now a greater degree of realization on the part of Americans that their national economy is too heavily integrated into global trading networks for outright demonization to be a worthwhile response to China, an observation advanced in Shinn, Christopher A., “Homicidal Tendencies: Violence and the Global Economy in Asian American Pulp Fiction,” in Nguyen, Mimi Thi and Tu, Thuy Linh Nguyen, eds., Alien Encounters: Popular Culture in Asian America (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), 111–29Google Scholar, 115.
6 Ma, Sheng-mei, East–West Montage: Reflections on Asian Bodies in Diaspora (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2007), xiGoogle Scholar.
7 Miyoshi, Masao, Off Center: Power and Culture Relations between Japan and the United States (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), 63Google Scholar.
8 An example of recently recovered source material is a reproduction of a poster from the AutoWorld theme park, photographed by Helen Zia and published in Tchen, John Kuo Wei and Yeats, Dylan, eds., Yellow Peril! An Archive of Anti-Asian Fear (New York: Verso, 2014), 262Google Scholar. The plethora of audiovisual material that survives from the era not only substantiates scholarly studies but also finds its way into retrospective documentaries on Japan and/or the US–Japan trade wars. Informative radio programs that do this include “Misunderstanding Japan,” Archive on 4, dir. Keith Moore, BBC, 8 Aug. 2015; “NUMMI,” This American Life, dir. Ira Glass, PRX The Public Radio Exchange, Chicago, 17 July 2015.
9 Littlewood, Ian, The Idea of Japan: Western Images, Western Myths (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1996)Google Scholar; Buruma, Ian, “Wake Up, America,” in Buruma, , ed., The Missionary and the Libertine: Love and War in East and West (New York: Vintage, 2001), 270–77Google Scholar; Andrew C. McKevitt, “Consuming Japan: Cultural Relations and the Globalizing of America, 1973–1993,” PhD dissertation, Temple University, 2009, 89–135.
10 Sato, Kumiko, “How Information Technology Has (Not) Changed Feminism and Japanism: Cyberpunk in the Japanese Context,” Comparative Literature Studies, 41, 3 (2004), 335–55CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 340.
11 This genre drew upon themes of invasion that had emerged in the “future war” novels of the late nineteenth century and thus possessed a certain lineage or “pedigree” on that basis, though these precursors were never acknowledged by the authors. See Davis, Madison J., “Interpreting the East to the West,” World Literature Today, 80, 6 (Nov.–Dec. 2006), 13–15 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 14; Tatsumi, Takayuki, Full Metal Apache: Transactions between Cyberpunk Japan and Avant-pop America (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 63–70 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Walker, David, “Godless Heathen: China in the American Bestseller,” in Ferrall, Charles, Millar, Paul, and Smith, Keren, eds., East by South: China in the Australasian Imagination (Wellington: Victoria University Press, 2005), 136–55Google Scholar, passim.
12 During the 1980s, studies tended to itemize political disputes between Japan and the US with little attention to ideologies. A precursor to Morley and Robins that went somewhat further than these was Robertson, Roland, “Japan and the USA: The Interpenetration of National Identities and the Debate about Orientalism,” in Turner, Brian S., Abercrombie, Nicholas, and Hill, Stephen, eds., Dominant Ideologies (London: Routledge, 1990)Google Scholar, 182?98, passim.
13 Said, Edward W., Orientalism (London: Penguin, 2003; first published 1978), 38Google Scholar.
14 For a critical reading of Hollywood films of the era see Cornea, Christine, “Techno-orientalism and the Postmodern Subject,” in Furby, Jacqueline and Randell, Karen, eds., Screen Methods: Comparative Readings in Film Studies (London: Wallflower Press, 2005), 72–81 Google Scholar, passim. Non-scholarly discussions of techno-orientalism as it features in mainstream films are also available, such as Umapagan Ampikaipakan and Johanan Sen, “Techno-orientalism,” What The Flick, podcast audio, 18 March 2012, at www.bfm.my/wtf-technoorientalism-1703.html.
15 Sterling, Bruce, “Shinkansen,” Whole Earth Review, Winter 1990, 76Google Scholar.
16 Ueno, Toshiya, “Techno-orientalism and Media-Tribalism: On Japanese Animation and Rave Culture,” Third Text, 13, 47 (Summer 1999), 95–106 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 95.
17 Roh, David S., Huang, Betsy, and Niu, Greta A., “Introduction,” in Roh, David S. et al. , eds., Techno-orientalism: Imagining Asia in Speculative Fiction, History, and Media (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2015), 1–22 Google Scholar, 3, 7.
18 Ingrassia, Paul, Engines of Change: A History of the American Dream in Fifteen Cars (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2012), 196Google Scholar.
19 Morita, Akio, “The Trouble with the American Economy,” in Duus, Peter and Hasegawa, Kenji, eds., Rediscovering America: Japanese Perspectives on the American Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011 [1989]), 331Google Scholar.
20 That the trade disputes were analogous to war became a commonplace assumption. As the automobile executive Lee Iacocca put it, “Right now, we're in the midst of another major war with Japan. This time it's not a shooting war, and I guess we should be thankful for that. The current conflict is a trade war. But because our government refuses to see this war for what it really is, we're well on the road to defeat.” See Iacocca, Lee, Lee Iacocca: An Autobiography (New York: Bantam Books, 1984), 315Google Scholar.
21 Mitsuko Shimomura, “Glorious America, Where Are You?”, in Duus and Hasegawa, 314–17, 315–16.
22 Manchester, William, Goodbye Darkness: A Memoir of the Pacific War (London: Michael Joseph, 1981), 282Google Scholar; Linenthal, Edward Tabor, Sacred Ground: Americans and Their Battlefields (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1993), 192–96Google Scholar.
23 Weber's narrative dwells upon the effect of Japanese tourism upon Pacific islanders, as in the case of a Samoan taxi driver: “The Japs have taken over the real-estate market again, like they did back in the mid-to-late eighties. They come in, buy millions of dollars of property in a few weeks, real estate people jack up the prices, they buy more, and so on. The locals, we ain't got a chance, man.” See Weber, Joe, Honorable Enemies (New York: Putnam's, 1994), 84Google Scholar.
24 Farber, David and Bailey, Beth, “The Fighting Man as Tourist: The Politics of Tourist Culture in Hawaii during World War II,” Pacific Historical Review, 65, 4 (1996), 641–60CrossRefGoogle Scholar, passim.
25 Turner, Louis and Ash, John, The Golden Hordes: International Tourism and the Pleasure Periphery (London: Constable, 1975), 19Google Scholar.
26 Crang, Mike, “Travel/Tourism,” in Atkinson, David, Jackson, Peter, Sibley, David, and Washbourne, Neil, eds., Cultural Geography: A Critical Dictionary of Key Concepts (London: I. B. Tauris, 2005), 34–40 Google Scholar, 39.
27 Cobb, Nora Okja, “Behind the Inscrutable Half-Shell: Images of Mutant Japanese and Ninja Turtles,” MELUS, 16, 4 (Winter 1989–90), 87–98 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 91; Lewis, George H., “From Common Dullness to Fleeting Wonder: The Manipulation of Cultural Meaning in the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Saga,” Journal of Popular Culture, 25, 2 (Fall 1991), 31–43 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 38.
28 Kato, Megumi, Narrating the Other: Australian Literary Perceptions of Japan (Clayton: Monash University Press, 2008), 177–84Google Scholar.
29 Dong-Hoo Lee, “East Asian Images in Selected American Popular Films from 1930 to 1993,” PhD dissertation, New York University, 1996, 218–19.
30 Tanner, Ron, “Toy Robots in America, 1955–75: How Japan Really Won the War,” Journal of Popular Culture, 28, 3 (Winter 1994), 125–54CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 125.
31 Capote, Truman, Breakfast at Tiffany's and Three Stories (New York: Vintage, 1993; first published 1958), 7Google Scholar.
32 The same juxtaposition of modern Japanese and premodern black communities occurs in fictional narratives of the Pacific War, in which the armaments and portable compasses of the imperial Japanese contrast with the drums and spears of island natives. See McKay, Daniel, “Enter the Japanese Imperial Marine: Postwar Comedy and Errol Brathwaite's An Affair of Men ,” arcadia: International Journal of Literary Culture, 49, 2 (Nov. 2014), 368–91CrossRefGoogle Scholar, passim.
33 Crichton, Michael, Rising Sun (New York: Arrow Books, 1992), 121Google Scholar.
34 Ibid., 107.
35 Ibid., 79.
36 David Lawrence Abney, “Japan Bashing: A History of America's Anti-Japanese Acts, Attitudes and Laws,” PhD dissertation, Arizona State University, 1995, 317.
37 Crichton, 168–69.
38 Ibid., 166–67.
39 Ibid., 121.
40 Floyd D. Cheung, “Imagining Danger, Imagining Nation: Postcolonial Discourse in Rising Sun and Stargate,” Jouvert: A Journal of Postcolonial Studies, 2, 2 (1998), para. 15, http://english.chass.ncsu.edu/jouvert/v2i2/CHEUNG.HTM.
41 Robyn Rodriguez and Vernadette Gonzalez observe that the rise of Japan's export industry also enabled young Asian American males to express their masculinity through association, particularly in the subculture of “rice rocket” car imports. See Robyn Magalit Rodriguez and Vernadette Vicuña Gonzalez, “Asian American Auto/Biographies: The Gendered Limits of Consumer Citizenship in Import Subcultures,” in Nguyen and Nguyen Tu, Alien Encounters, 248–66, 255.
42 Crichton, 392.
43 Ibid., 32–33, 71.
44 Winks, Robin W., “The Sinister Oriental: Thriller Fiction and the Asian Scene,” Journal of Popular Culture, 19, 2 (Fall 1985), 49–61 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 51.
45 This fear recurred in thriller novels of the era. Reviewing Tom Clancy's Debt of Honor (1994), the critic Christopher Buckley summarized it as follows: “It all plays into the crudest of cultural paranoia, namely, that what these beastly yellow inscrutables are really after is – our women.” See Christopher Buckley, “Megabashing Japan: World War II Wasn't Half Enough for Tom Clancy,” New York Times Book Review, 28 Oct. 1994, 28, underlining in original.
46 Hicks, Heather J., The Culture of Soft Work: Labor, Gender, and Race in Postmodern American Narrative (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 149CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Okihiro, Gary Y., Margins and Mainstreams: Asians in American History and Culture (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2014), 138Google Scholar.
47 Pursell, Carroll W., The Machine in America: A Social History of Technology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007), 330CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
48 In Gibson's own words, “the Sony Walkman has done more to change human perception than any virtual reality gadget. I can't remember any technological experience since that was quite so wonderful as being able to take music and move it through landscapes and architecture.” See William Gibson, Time Out, 6 Oct. 1993, 49.
49 Crichton, 15.
50 Loeffler, Carl Eugene, “Video in Japan,” Whole Earth Review, Winter 1990, 84Google Scholar.
51 Ken Provencher, “Japan in Transnational Hollywood: Industry and Identity, 1985–1995,” PhD dissertation, University of Southern California, 2013, 2.
52 Crichton, 72–74.
53 Ibid., 150–56.
54 Ibid., 288–89. The narrative is broken up into a series of episodes in which Smith is the pupil and Connor the learned “Japanologist,” with the latter discoursing on Japanese culture from the vantage point of the perpetual outsider. See Raz, Jacob and Raz, Aviad E., “‘America’ Meets ‘Japan’: A Journey for Real between Two Imaginaries,” Theory, Culture & Society, 13, 3 (Aug. 1996), 153–78CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 156.
55 Crichton, 297.
56 McKay, Daniel, “The Japanese Tourist Survival Guide: Undead Tropes of the Pacific War in Contemporary New Zealand Literature,” Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 49, 1 (March 2014), 130–34CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
57 Moore, Alexander, “Rosanzerusu Is Los Angeles: An Anthropological Inquiry of Japanese Tourists,” Annals of Tourism Research, 12, 4 (1985), 619–43CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 632.
58 Kurashige, Lon, Japanese American Celebration and Conflict: A History of Ethnic Identity and Festival, 1934–1990 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 191–201 Google Scholar.
59 Crichton, 136–40.
60 Crichton may have been aware that the distinction between Japanese nationals and Asian Americans had been violently blurred on several occasions in the decade preceding publication. See Jo, Moon H. and Mast, Daniel D., “Changing Images of Asian Americans,” International Journal of Politics, Culture and Society, 6, 3 (March 1993), 432–35CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
61 Rosenberg, Emily S., A Date Which Will Live: Pearl Harbor in American Memory (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 54CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
62 Morris, Narrelle, Japan-Bashing: Anti-Japanism since the 1980s (Abingdon: Routledge, 2011), 103–7Google Scholar.
63 Mura, David, Turning Japanese: Memoirs of a Sansei (New York: Anchor Books, 1992), 8Google Scholar.
64 Niu, Greta Aiyu, “Techno-orientalism, Nanotechnology, Posthumans, and Post-posthumans in Neal Stephenson's and Linda Nagata's Science Fiction,” MELUS, 33, 4 (Winter 2008), 73–96 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 84.
65 Chin, Frank and Chan, Jeffrey Paul, “Racist Love,” in Kostelanetz, Richard, ed., Seeing through Shuck (New York: Ballantine Books, 1972), 65–79 Google Scholar, passim.
66 Ma, Sheng-mei, The Deathly Embrace: Orientalism and Asian American Identity (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), xi–xiii Google Scholar; Park, Jane Chi Hyun, Yellow Future: Oriental Style in Hollywood Cinema (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), xiGoogle Scholar.
67 Kim, Jodi, Ends of Empire: Asian American Critique and the Cold War (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), 132–33CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Cheng, Emily, “Meat and the Millennium: Transnational Politics of Race and Gender in Ruth Ozeki's My Year of Meats ,” Journal of Asian American Studies, 12, 2 (June 2009), 191–220 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 191–92.
68 Blouin, Michael J., Japan and the Cosmopolitan Gothic: Specters of Modernity (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 111CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
69 Ozeki, Ruth L., My Year of Meats (New York: Viking, 1998), 29–30 Google Scholar.
70 Ibid., 33.
71 Ibid., 43–44. On the underdevelopment of expatriated Japanese males as characters in Ozeki's writing see Fish, Cheryl J., “The Toxic Body Politic: Ethnicity, Gender, and Corrective Eco-justice in Ruth Ozeki's My Year of Meats and Judith Helfand and Daniel Gold's Blue Vinyl ,” MELUS, 34, 2 (Summer 2009), 43–62 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 54.
72 Wallis, Andrew H., “Toward a Global Eco-consciousness in Ruth Ozeki's My Year of Meats ,” Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, 20, 4 (2013), 873–54CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 843.
73 Chiu, Monica, “Postnational Globalization and (En)gendered Meat Production in Ruth L. Ozeki's My Year of Meats ,” Lit: Literature Interpretation Theory, 12, 1 (2001), 99–128 Google Scholar, 113.
74 Ibid., 101.
75 Ozeki, Ruth L., “From Meat to Potatoes: An Interview with Ruth Ozeki” by Estok, Simon, Foreign Literature Studies, 31, 6 (Dec. 2009), 1–14 Google Scholar, 6.
76 Ozeki, My Year of Meats, 132–33.
77 Ibid., 138.
78 Mari Suvanto, “Images of Japan and the Japanese: The Representations of the Japanese Culture in the Popular Literature Targeted at the Western World in the 1980s–1990s,” PhD dissertation, University of Jyväskylä, 2002, 48–49.
79 Crichton, Rising Sun, 142. The sexual undertones associated with samurai references could also be employed in critiques of “Japan-bashing,” as in one review of Crichton's novel which suggested that a suitable cover for the paperback version “might be a caricature of World War II-era Prime Minister Tojo skulking off into Rockefeller Center with Doris Day over one shoulder and an eighteen-inch dildo sheathed where his samurai sword would have been.” See Karl Taro Greenfeld, “Return of the Yellow Peril,” Nation, 11 May 1992, 636.
80 Ozeki, My Year of Meats, 139.
81 Ibid., 34, 190.
82 Ibid., 265.
83 Ibid., 267.
84 Williams, Laura Anh, “Gender, Race, and an Epistemology of the Abattoir in My Year of Meats ,” Feminist Studies, 40, 2 (2014), 244–72Google Scholar, 249.
85 Ozeki, My Year of Meats, 276.
86 Cornyetz, Nina, “The Meat Manifesto: Ruth Ozeki's Performative Poetics,” Women & Performance, 12, 1 (2001), 207–24CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 218.
87 Crichton, 398.
88 Russell, Emily, Reading Embodied Citizenship: Disability, Narrative, and the Body Politic (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2011), 131Google Scholar. An important stylistic difference between Crichton and Ozeki is that the former began with a self-conscious political agenda, whereas the latter came to her political position in the course of writing. See Ozeki, Ruth L., “‘A Universe of Many Worlds’: An Interview with Ruth Ozeki” by Ty, Eleanor, MELUS, 38, 3 (Sept. 2013), 160–71Google Scholar, 161.
89 Ozeki, My Year of Meats, 299.
90 Johnson, Leigh, “Conceiving the Body: Sandra Cisneros and Ruth L. Ozeki's Representations of Women's Reproduction in Transnational Space,” Transformations: The Journal of Inclusive Scholarship and Pedagogy, 19, 2 (Fall 2008–Winter 2009), 32–41 Google Scholar, 36.
91 Ozeki, My Year of Meats, 302.
92 Wark, McKenzie, “From Fordism to Sonyism: Perverse Readings of the New World Order,” New Formations, 15 (1991), 43–54 Google Scholar, 45.
93 Arnold, Robert F., “Termination or Transformation? The ‘Terminator’ Films and Recent Changes in the U.S. Auto Industry,” Film Quarterly, 52, 1 (1998), 20–30 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 22–23.
94 This observation was offered by Mimi Thi Nguyen and Thuy Linh Nguyen Tu apropos the character “Data” in Steven Spielberg's 1985 film The Goonies. See Mimi Thi Nguyen and Thuy Linh Nguyen Tu, “Introduction,” in Nguyen and Nguyen Tu, Alien Encounters, 1–4.
95 Sohn, Stephen Hong, “Minor Character, Minority Orientalisms, and the Borderlands of Asian America,” Cultural Critique, 82 (Fall 2012), 151–85CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 155.
- 2
- Cited by