Japanese Americans and the Making of Cold War Culture

FAIN: FT-59990-12

Edward Tang
University of Alabama (Tuscaloosa, AL 35487-0001)

From Confinement to Containment: Japanese Americans and the Making of Cold War Culture is a book project that examines popular representations of Japanese Americans in the postwar period (late 1940s to early 1960s). During the Second World War, the Japanese were a hated enemy, while Japanese Americans were a maligned minority, those on the West coast forced into internment camps because of suspected loyalties to Japan. Yet the Cold War helped shift how most Americans perceived the Japanese and Japanese Americans. Japan became a valued anti-communist ally in the Pacific, and Japanese Americans supposedly became a model minority embodying the best of American values. Even before the activist movements of the 1960s and 70s, Japanese Americans were able to create imaginative spaces within popular culture (films, magazines, newspapers, and other artifacts) that allowed them not only to re-embrace their cultural connections to Japan but also to debate the legacies of their internment.

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From Confinement to Containment: Japanese/American Arts during the Early Cold War (Book)
Title: From Confinement to Containment: Japanese/American Arts during the Early Cold War
Author: Edward Tang
Abstract: During the early part of the Cold War, Japan emerged as a model ally, and Japanese Americans were seen as a model minority. From Confinement to Containment examines the work of four Japanese and Japanese/American artists and writers during this period: the novelist Hanama Tasaki, the actor Yamaguchi Yoshiko, the painter Henry Sugimoto, and the children’s author Yoshiko Uchida. The backgrounds of the four figures reveal a mixing of nationalities, a borrowing of cultures, and a combination of domestic and overseas interests. Edward Tang shows how the film, art, and literature made by these artists revealed to the American public the linked processes of U.S. actions at home and abroad. Their work played into—but also challenged—the postwar rehabilitated images of Japan and Japanese Americans as it focused on the history of transpacific relations such as Japanese immigration to the United States, the Asia-Pacific War, U.S. and Japanese imperialism, and the wartime confinement of Japanese Americans. From Confinement to Containment shows the relationships between larger global forces as well as how the artists and writers responded to them in both critical and compromised ways.
Year: 2019
Primary URL: https://tupress.temple.edu/book/20000000009278
Primary URL Description: Temple University Press page for From Confinement to Containment: Japanese/American Arts during the Early Cold War
Publisher: Temple University Press
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 9781439917497
Copy sent to NEH?: No

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