Conclusion

IN TRANSPACIFIC STUDIES: FRAMING AN EMERGING FIELD (2014), the editors Janet Hoskins and Viet Thanh Nguyen introduce this collection of essays by highlighting a basic tension in how scholars consider the complex relations among peoples, cultures, and nations across the Pacific. On the one hand, the history of these interactions divulges a series of “conquest, colonialism, and conflict” in Asia, exacted by not only the United States and western Europe but also Japan, China, and other nations. On the other hand, such contacts show how marginalized populations create “collaborations, alliances, and friendships” through counternarratives and social movements that challenge the hegemony of regional powers.¹ We should note, too, how both antagonisms and agreements among colonizers, collaborators, and the subjugated change over time. This span of reactions even occurred simultaneously in the case of the United States and Japan throughout the Cold War. Yesterday’s enemy can become tomorrow’s ally, but not without misunderstandings and residual resentments that contribute to uneasy political, economic, military, and cultural attachments. These relationships among once and future imperial states also affect more vulnerable communities and territories caught up in the currents of transpacific engagements, to which they then have to adjust or respond accordingly. From these myriad exchanges among friends, foes, and the nonaligned arise shifting hierarchies of power within and between nations, as well as opportunities to contest these institutions within more localized populaces and places.²

The artists and writers examined in From Confinement to Containment—Hanama Tasaki, Yamaguchi Yoshiko, Henry Sugimoto, and Yoshiko Uchida—offer suggestive instances of how performing cultural work was particularly difficult and compromised because they functioned within the broader frictions between two powerful nation-states before and during World War II and in the ensuing alliance afterward. In one creative form or another, the four figures revealed cosmopolitan sensibilities that were aspirational in reaching across cultural and national borders, even as they accepted in varying degrees the dominant values of a liberal nation that policed and invaded such borders. As the United States extended its influence throughout the world, it also wanted to avoid having its actions seen as new versions of European colonialism by showcasing itself as a multiethnic democracy that appreciated all cultures and populations. Yet more than a few American officials, intellectuals, and cultural producers insisted that their allies and developing countries follow the U.S. lead in endorsing liberal principles to combat the spread of communism. The use of violence, as manifested in the wars in Korea and Vietnam, was one way to achieve this aim. These four Japanese/American artists and writers opposed introducing specific structures or ideologies to other lands by force, especially given their own terrifying wartime experiences of Japanese imperialism (for Tasaki and Yamaguchi) and of the Japanese American confinement (for Sugimoto and Uchida). Yet they did not necessarily question how democratic and capitalist systems coincided with overseas military involvements and internal restrictions against minority populations, thinking instead that these governing measures had been misapplied. For these artists and authors, their views of domestic and international affairs became influenced by the imposing power of Cold War liberalism, which appeared to them as the norm, especially since they worked within the Western cultural environment and sought approval from mainstream American audiences.

We then see how these Japanese/Americans could not simply resist the expectations and demands of U.S. Cold War culture. Hanama Tasaki warned postwar Americans through his novels about the dangers of following imperial Japan’s path when occupying other nations. He also valorized liberal individualism and the multiethnic democracy of Hawai‘i as models for societal possibilities. But to advance these positions, he had to remake his past and ignore the racial slights he endured as a Nisei that contributed to his voluntary service in the Imperial Army. Yamaguchi Yoshiko enjoyed the plurality of cultures encouraged in Japanese-occupied Manchuria, just as she was a willing participant in the empire’s propaganda machine that urged moviegoers to accept Japan’s dominance. Similarly, she desired stardom in Hollywood films, only to discern how the United States relied on orientalist images of her ancestral land to underscore American supremacy. Henry Sugimoto embraced cosmopolitan aesthetics in his art, while realizing the hazards of being a Japanese national during his wartime confinement. Even then, in later interviews he evaded criticizing his adopted country’s racism against ethnic minorities, despite what his paintings revealed, leaving this task up to younger generations of Asian American activists to reframe the significance of his work. As a youth, Yoshiko Uchida sought acceptance from the white mainstream to escape the racial stigma associated with her Japanese background. She was able to find new avenues of healing and creativity from her ancestral culture after the trauma of her wartime incarceration. At the same time, the children’s author argued that postwar Japan should create its own version of a tolerant, middle-class society when mixing its traditions with liberal modernity. From these evolving viewpoints, the artists and writers tried to formulate through their affective work visions of more peaceful societies. But these outlooks also revealed ambivalent, if not contradictory or unstated, feelings toward the American Cold War state’s impact on its citizenry and on the rest of the world.

Assessing the dimensions of transpacific subjectivities as an alternative or a supplement to nation-based ethnic studies thus requires careful contextualizing of such identities and works within specific historical, political, and cultural developments. For instance, cosmopolitanism as an analytical category or as a description of experiences may present alluring possibilities, freeing individuals from parochial limits and expectations and allowing them to welcome and learn from societal differences across the globe, even if they have localized perspectives.³ Yet, following Lisa Lowe and Anthony Pagden’s cautionary arguments, we should consider the historical and structural roots of cosmopolitanism, ones entangled with those of liberalism and imperialism. Western narratives of freedom, progress, and individualism have often justified liberal states’ bureaucratic penchant for generating hierarchies through racism, exploitation, violence, and empire building, within which universal rights are reserved for some, rather than applied to all.⁴ In this light, scholars working in transnational studies are rethinking past approaches, as seen in such works as Hoskins and Nguyen’s Transpacific Studies. Theorists of cosmopolitanism have expanded the term’s connotations beyond the traditional understanding of privileged men from the West who traverse the globe to construct a “citizen of the world” persona. Critics recognize how naturalized “cosmopolitanism” has become in its supposed universality as they more closely examine its modern formations amid the shadows of empires. Calls now arise for including immigrants, servants, refugees, and other types of stateless persons, displaced or otherwise, as part of this new and more intricate universe.⁵ In their efforts to contest or to move beyond what nations could dictate or destroy, however, the four Japanese/American writers and artists discussed here demonstrate the challenges of working as transpacific cosmopolitans, negotiating around the powers and paradoxes of the liberal state to create artistic possibilities.

Indeed, these matters resonate in current political events, in which new forms of Cold War struggles and debates are occurring over U.S. immigration policies, the integration and control of global markets, the confinement and deportation of “subversives,” the demonization of political opponents, and the nation’s ongoing military engagements throughout the world. This study has emphasized how Japanese/American artists and writers rendered more visible, and how they could thus critique, the interrelatedness of domestic and overseas affairs. Fears of Asian immigrants from the late nineteenth century onward, as Henry Sugimoto traced in his paintings, affected how the nation later incarcerated Japanese Americans, viewing them as threatening racial Others. We likewise see, in a different context, the worries in the United States over Islamic influence and calls for detaining Muslims that have developed from U.S. interventions in the Middle East. These past and present subjects have even converged, when the Japanese American confinement became a cited precedent for banning and containing peoples of Middle Eastern ancestry. In response, those who suffered through the wartime mass imprisonment and their descendants, including Madeleine Sugimoto (Henry’s daughter), have joined civic protests against such executive orders, because they understand the consequences of this prejudicial treatment.⁶ Yet “America First” intentions and internal restrictions persist alongside U.S. overseas involvements, both having evolved in a post-9/11 environment. Commentators from a variety of fields have criticized the impact of the American military in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as in other interventions (with the support of authoritarian client states) that have encouraged political instability, terrorism, and ethnic chauvinism.⁷ Many of these U.S. commitments have contributed to producing “unwanted” immigrants and refugees in the name of safeguarding national security and of spreading freedom and democracy around the world. Another replay of Cold War hostilities—albeit with different principals, purposes, and technological capabilities—has also emerged from these quandaries. As enduring geopolitical rivals, Russia and China have disclosed desires similar to those of the United States to sway events in the Middle East, Central Asia, and on the Korean peninsula. Adopting a critical transnational stance from the perspectives of redefined, subaltern cosmopolitans may then broaden and deepen interrogations into the extensive reach and ruinous practices of global powers. Studies have considered, for example, the adaptations made within and against these shifting, competing authorities by marginalized peoples, whose ability to survive and to create cultural forms appears as modes of resistance.

Such inquiries are evident in Asian American studies, where scholars have established how artistic, literary, social, and legal formations offer sites of cultural critique of American power and Asian atrocities within late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century transpacific locations. Several works have examined the Cold War’s cultural legacies on U.S.-Asia relations and on the battles within Asia through such “outsiders” as orphans, mixed-race populations, expatriates, “comfort women,” and refugees who yearn not only to achieve recognition and recovery but also to attain justice.⁸ My study shows a different kind of positioning that artists and writers occupied through their work in the pre-1965 era of the Cold War. The irony here is that most of these figures became known in post-1965 national and activist frameworks, in which Asian Americanists deemed Sugimoto and Uchida as relevant voices opposing their wartime confinement, and Asian Studies scholars assessed Yamaguchi and Tasaki through the prism of Japanese war guilt and antimilitarism.⁹ Yet, when placed within larger geopolitical settings, the four individuals’ diverse postures suggest not only how war, empire building, immigration, confinement, and occupation were intertwined. They also tell us how various communities across state boundaries coped and healed in the aftermath of such disruptive events, through which struggles over power, definitions of race and place, and avowals of humanity in the face of subordination become apparent. However compromised, the artists and writers’ lives and labors during the early Cold War made these connections clear, with creative interests springing from their hindsight, hope, and resolve to belong in the wider world.