‘America’ as desire and violence: Americanization in postwar Japan and Asia during the Cold War

Abstract

The self as ‘America’ in east Asia What has ‘America’ meant in everyday terms for the people of East Asia since the end of the Second World War? What indeed does it continue to mean for us in the present day? Would it not be possible to review the relationship with America, built up especially during the period of the Cold War from a comprehensive regional perspective, taking into account the level of people’s everyday consciousness and culture besides military and politico-economic aspects? At least as concerns such countries as Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, the Philippines, Vietnam and Indonesia, ‘America’ has had a uniquely strong and significant presence, which it has not had in quite the same way in any other region, whether South Asia, West Asia, Europe or South America. Most of these countries of the Pacific Rim were once under either temporary or long-term Japanese military occupation. They have since been incorporated into the American sphere of influence as bases for the activity of the American military and multinational corporations. As seen from the perspective of American Cold-War strategy, there can be no doubt that the Pacific Rim area, extending from Japan to Indonesia, formed a continuous space for the establishment of hegemony in Asia. Looking at the everyday consciousness and cultural practices among the people living in this region, does one find a similarly distinctive presence of ‘America’? Is there also a spatial continuity whereby the cultural responses to ‘America’ are similar throughout the region? Despite the evident importance of research on such a wide-ranging and complex phenomenon, hardly any attempt has been made until very recently to study the significance of ‘America’ in a region-wide context from the perspective of everyday consciousness and culture while also considering political and military issues. Some work has recently begun on international political relations and strategies involving America and the East Asian region as a whole. However, such work remains largely restricted to politics in the narrow sense. Very little has yet been done in order to analyse international political relations in the broader sense of the politics of everyday culture. For example, no concerted international comparative research has yet been undertaken on the influence of American military bases on urban musical culture and sexuality in Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and the Philippines, despite the fact that this issue has been proposed as an interesting research topic by a number of commentators. Whenever the influence of postwar American culture in Asia has been adopted as a research topic, it has almost always been confined within the national perspective of a single country. To illustrate my point, let us consider a three-volume publication in dictionary form published in Japan at the beginning of the 1980s with the title ‘American Culture’. This was a very valuable attempt to examine from various perspectives how ‘America’ had penetrated into Japanese culture and customs since the end of the Second World War. It divides the postwar era until the 1970s into three periods. The first period, from 1945 to 1960, is called the ‘Period of Love/Hate towards America’. This was an age in which the wartime feeling of unease