Origin Stories

Prof. Takashi Fujitani

Episode Summary

Prof. Takashi Fujitani is the Dr. David Chu Professor and Director in Asia Pacific Studies at the University of Toronto. His research focuses on modern and contemporary Japanese history, East Asian history, Asian American history, and transnational history (primarily U.S./Japan and Asia Pacific). Much of his past and current research has centered on the intersections of nationalism, colonialism, war, memory, racism, ethnicity, and gender, as well as the disciplinary and area studies boundaries that have figured our ways of studying these issues. He is the author of Splendid Monarchy: Power and Pageantry in Modern Japan and Race for Empire: Koreans as Japanese and Japanese as Koreans in WWII; co-editor of Perilous Memories: The Asia Pacific War(s) and editor of the series Asia Pacific Modern. Prof. Fujitani is joined in conversation with JSAP contributors Harrison Watson, Sophie Hasuo, Rachel Willis, and Prof. Reginald Jackson. Topics of discussion include: the possibilities and politics of naming; growing up in Berkeley; segregation; ties between Black people and Asian / Asian American people; jazz; James Brown; W.E.B. DuBois; disidentifications with whiteness; Malcolm X and Yuri Kochiyama; solidarity politics; the model minority myth; race and racism in the Japanese empire; learning from professors of color; Asian American Studies; responses in Japanese Studies to discrimination about Buraku people and Korean-Japanese people; Clint Eastwood; Asia in the American political unconscious; Indigenous theory; palliative monarchy; the demise of Japanese Studies.

Episode Notes

Prof. Takashi Fujitani is the Dr. David Chu Professor and Director in Asia Pacific Studies at the University of Toronto. His research focuses on modern and contemporary Japanese history, East Asian history, Asian American history, and transnational history (primarily U.S./Japan and Asia Pacific). Much of his past and current research has centered on the intersections of nationalism, colonialism, war, memory, racism, ethnicity, and gender, as well as the disciplinary and area studies boundaries that have figured our ways of studying these issues. He is the author of Splendid Monarchy: Power and Pageantry in Modern Japan and Race for Empire: Koreans as Japanese and Japanese as Koreans in WWII; co-editor of Perilous Memories: The Asia Pacific War(s) and editor of the series Asia Pacific Modern. Prof. Fujitani is joined in conversation with JSAP contributors Harrison Watson, Sophie Hasuo, Rachel Willis, and Prof. Reginald Jackson. Topics of discussion include: the possibilities and politics of naming; growing up in Berkeley; segregation; ties between Black people and Asian / Asian American people; jazz; James Brown; W.E.B. DuBois; disidentifications with whiteness; Malcolm X and Yuri Kochiyama; solidarity politics; the model minority myth; race and racism in the Japanese empire; learning from professors of color; Asian American Studies; responses in Japanese Studies to discrimination about Buraku people and Korean-Japanese people; Clint Eastwood; Asia in the American political unconscious; Indigenous theory; palliative monarchy; the demise of Japanese Studies.

To learn more about Professor Fujitani's research, please watch his JSAP webinar, "Challenges and Opportunities for a Historian of Japan Teaching about Race and Imperialism." In this conversation, Prof. Fujitani mentions his article, "Minshūshi As Critique of Orientalist Knowledges."

This podcast is created with generous support from the University of Michigan’s Center for Japanese Studies.  Recording, editing, and transcription support came from Reginald Jackson, Justin Schell, Sophie Hasuo, Rachel Willis, Harrison Watson, Robin Griffin, and Allison Alexy. Please see the Japanese Studies and Antiracist Pedagogy homepage for more information.

 

Episode Transcription

Japanese Studies and Antiracist Pedagogy Podcast Series

Episode Three Transcript: Professor Takashi Fujitani

This transcript has been edited for clarity

 

 

Sophie Hasuo: So today's guest is Dr. Takashi Fujitani. Dr. Fujitaniis the Director of the Dr. David Chu program in Asia-Pacific studies and Professor in the department of history at the University of Toronto, Dr. Fujitani's research focuses on contemporary Japanese history, Asian American history, and transnational history, specifically looking at the intersections of colonialism, war, memory, race, and gender. Dr. Fujitani, thank you so much for taking the time to talk with us today. We're very excited. 

 

Dr. Takashi Fujitani: Thank you. No, it's great to be here and I'm looking forward to it. 

 

Sophie:Yes. So are we. Just to start, so our listeners get a sense of who you are and what you do, how do you identify and where do you call home? 

 

Takashi:Okay. These are more complicated questions than one might imagine. Because I think when I was younger, I would say, you know, probably Japanese-American or Asian-American. But now I kind of realize that these rubrics are as limiting as they are defining. So in a way, I mean, they're--they're both true. But I thinkI prefer in some way Nikkei because it's more like Japanese-descended and it's a more encompassing term. But I also like even more person of color, which allows for a certain kind of solidarities across difference. So I guess I'm all of those. 

 

Home, again, is kind of complicated because, you know, I grew up most of my life in California and I taught there until my late fifties actually before moving to Toronto. So I would say, rather than not having a home, I have multiple homes, or a sense of home in California, Toronto and Japan, particularly in Kyoto where my partner is from. So that's me, and I identify as he/him. 

 

Dr. Reginald Jackson:Great. Thank you for that, Tak, and welcome again. That's really helpful to hear and I appreciate that you're already from the very beginning getting us to pay attention to the issue of nomenclature and naming and how the politics of naming. 

 

Takashi:Right.

 

Reginald: AndI really appreciate--one of the many reasons we're so glad that you're here is that you and your scholarly work certainly, you've really done a lot to kind of complicate these seemingly pat categories. And so I was just wondering if you could narrate a bit for us a bit of that, the journey towards "person of color" as the preferred designation. And kind of what, if there are certain moments or certain kind of events or books, or kind of concepts that have led you to think more, about identifying that way as opposed to some of the other iterations. 

 

Takashi:Right. You know, I think these namings are all historical. So there was no such thing as a "Japanese-American" for most of the first half of the 20th century. And then suddenly there came to be such a term. And we do know that the term "Asian-American" was coined in 1968 during the third world studies movement, ethnic studies movement. So these are all terms that are in a sense. As Stuart Hall told us long ago about identities, maybe identities are better understood as 

something pointing to the future rather than toward the past. I mean, there is obviously some sort of organic relationship to the past, but these identities should be politically motivated and strategic for future work based upon what's happened in the past. 

 

So I even, I'm not completely comfortable anymore with these common things: Issei, Nisei, Sansei,  Yonsei. I mean, because they all, they belong to a narrative of assimilation to Americanness, basically. How far are you away from the home country and how long have you been here? There's a kind of implication of that, which also erases the enormous diversity within the Nikkei community. And I said, you know, at the beginning that I sort of like Nikkei because it means literally “Japanese descended.”So that also means you can be, you can be Black Nikkei, you can be Nikkei and Black at the same time. And I think this allows for a certain fluidity and encompassing quality to that term. 

 

Now, as far as “people of color,”you know,I mean, that's a relatively new term as well. And I don't know exactly when people started to use it, but I've--you know, for my entire life, I have been very much interested in solidarities across difference. And maybe one of the defining moments was California in the mid part of the 1990s. At that moment there was, as you and listeners will probably know, or may not know--the younger ones--there was an assault on affirmative action, particularly in the mid-1990s. And the affirmative action, or the assault on it, was really about Black and Brown people. But it really disturbed me at that moment. And there was a sort of moment when I felt it would be a good thing to get outside of ourselves as Asian-Americans, Japanese-Americans and, you know, try to make a kind of bigger rubric, in which we could all understand that we're in the same boat together, although, you know, in different parts of the boat. We're not all the same, but we all experience what we might call white supremacy, in different kinds of ways. And I think in recent times that's become even clearer with the anti-Asian activities going on in all of North America leading to violence. And now it's been really inspiring to see quite a few Black people as well, public intellectuals, talking about the problem of Anti-Asianism and the links to Black Lives Matter and so forth. So it's been kind of, I would say, a lifelong journey, but the1990s kind of, you know, really tipped me more in that directionI would say. Although again, I always had that in me somehow. 

 

Rachel Willis:Thank you so much for that. I think it makes a lot of sense. And I think that the connection between, sort of anti-Black racism and anti-Asian racism is at the forefront of a lot of our minds right now, especially because of the events of last summer and earlier this year. I was wondering if you could tell us more about how these identities that you're describing became more solidified for you during your childhood or how the fluidity developed for you. 

 

Takashi: Right. Well, you know, I sent around a piece that I've written recently about growing up in Berkeley, California, and this kind of--exactly on this point, the long trajectory of my life. And it's the first time I wrote something which is in a way personal to me, but I wanted to write it in a way which would be beyond myself and to use my experiences as a gateway to think about larger issues of race within my personal history, within the local history that I grew up in, in Berkeley, and the Nikkei community I grew up in. And then in California, and then kind of gradually, you know, making the circle larger to see how even my small life might somehow fit into world history. So to start with my childhood, you know, I grew up in Berkeley, California. And despite the fact that, you know, there's the University of California up on the hill there which seems as, sort of the symbol of humanism, universalism, you know, the best of American civilization, of Western civilization and so forth. 

 

There's a huge contradiction between that type of promise of inclusion, equality, justice, and what was actually happening in the city of Berkeley. It was a very segregated city. You know, Kamala Harris, when she was on the campaign trail, often talked about her experience being bussed in Berkeley. And I can identify with that. I'm a little bit older than her, so I didn't experience bussing, but I did experience some kind of measures to so-call “integrate”the schools. But even from a very young age, you know, the point about the bussing was that it was such a segregated city with, basically, white people living up in the hills and then all the rest of us down in the flats and, particularly, becoming worse in the Western part of the city and the south part of the city butting up against Emeryville and Oakland, and then down towards the Bay. 

 

So it was a very segregated city and I was very well aware of that. Even as a child growing up, I couldn't really articulate it, but George Lipsitz, a scholar of Black studies, black history in particular, talks about the way in which space makes race and race makes space. And this is part of what it was, a segregated city in which space, the segregation in space, made us understand that there was a reality to this thing that we call race. It had a materiality to it. So I think I was always quite aware of that and doing more historical research, you could see how the city had been segregated through real-estate practices, so-called “red lining,”how schools had been segregated, so on and so forth. So all the Nikkei that I grew up with--and we were, you know, it was a fairly large Nikkei community--I never really quite understood why we all tended to live in particular parts of the city. And those parts of the city are ones that were redlined, the same as Black parts of the city long ago. I think I was sensitive to, you know, our commonness in, you know, what we could call white supremacy or at least a majority supremacism. 

 

So all of those things had a formative impact on me. I would say that even growing up as a teenager, many of us in the Nikkei community really gravitated towards the Black people and what we understood to be Black culture. It didn't mean that we were all, you know, tightly integrated and knew everything about each other. But culturally speaking, I think there was a kind of, or I know there was a kind of disidentification with whiteness, which led us in a certain direction towards Blackness. We knew we weren't Black, but we picked up a lot of the, you know, Black English. We used it, we never thought we were Black, but we thought there was something that tied us together. And, you know, DuBois wrote about this in--he called it a “curious tie of color”between Japanese and Blacks, and this was long ago. So I've taken a lot of inspiration from his writings these days. This is a kind of a long-winded response.

 

But one other thing I would say is that, you know, the music that we listened to was music that we understood to be music that people who weren’t white listened to. And that was Soul, R&B, the Blues, we liked that kind of music. We didn't like, you know, the Beatles or Simon&Garfunkel that, you know--I didn't really understand that there was a politicality to those choices that we made at that time, but we did make them. So I think all that carried into my later in life. You know, there were moments, I would say that I think some of us, which, that--Black people were interested in us as much as we were interested in them.But, you know, doing research later, I found that there was a long history of Black people who are interested in Asians, and I could go on and on about this, but I don't want to go on too long through this one question. But, I just, you know, learned not too long ago, you know, one of the people that we really admired was James Brown. And reading his autobiography,I learned that he had claimed that part of his heritage, you know, his parentage, or ancestry was Chinese. So, you know, the godfather of Soul claims to be partly Asian. And these kinds of things I learned much later, but kind of confirm the curious ties of color that Black people and Asian people have had for since at least the 19th century and probably earlier in some respects. So that was kind of long, but I can return--I can keep talking about it, but maybe I should stop on that for now. 

 

Harrison Watson: That wasn't too long at all. You actually got into a lot of just the interesting things that we read about, you know, based on what you've sent us, you know.Part of me wants to really get back into that music vein and sort of ask you what was it in the music maybe that attracted you, and what did you see in the music, and what was sort of that, that yearning, or that need, that was fulfilled by engaging with Soul and R&B. Maybe just to sort of expand on that sort of disidentification with whiteness that you said you were feeling.

 

Takashi:Yeah, thank you. So, you know, there are ways in which this has a history going back, even further than my generation. There were a lot of Nikkei people who were into jazz and particularly jazz by Black jazz musicians. One of my elementary school teachers, you know, his name was George Yoshida. And GeorgeYoshida was a jazz musician. And I never knew that!He was a school teacher, but, you know, he talked in interviews about his own background in camp and how that music kept them going. So I think there's a much longer traditional history that we need to think about. We do know, for example, that there were also Black musicians in China in the 1920s.There was one fellow, I forgot his name, but a graduate student, maybe at Irvine, who was working on this topic of Black musicians in Shanghai, and talking about the number of venues there were in Shanghai for playing his music. More venues than in Harlem, say, more in Shanghai than Harlem in the 1920s. And there was a kind of reception of Black people in Asia. 

 

And this is why, I mean, one reason why I continue to think it's so necessary to always think about--as Dubois did--globally, about the color line as a global phenomenon. You know, what was it about the music in my generation? So this is like, you know, sixties, seventies, Soul music. And, you know, I have to say a lot of it was just about things that we, as teenagers, get into--love and, you know, emotions and those kinds of things that many of these--like the Motown people would be singing about and that we could somehow identify with more. And then there was the more political kind of music. Some of it was like, you know, as I said, James Brown, and when he sang the song, you know, “I'm Black and I'm proud”somehow, you know, that resonated with some of us. We weren't Black, but somehow, it was the cadence, the funk, and it was the grammar. You know, he said, “we demands,”“we demands a chance.” And James Brown actually was a theorist of music. And he talked about the way in which the beat was on, on the one rather than the two. And the beat on the one was a moment of defiance, of standing proud, standing tall. That kind of thing resonated with us, even though we weren't Black. And the Nikkei writer, Hisaye Yamamoto, actually writes about this, saying that the internment experience actually led her to thinking that there was something about her, the Blackness of it, that she could identify with, even though she was--she knew she wasn't Black, you know? And so, I would never want to say, you know, “I am Black.”But there's something about Blackness that resonated with us and resonated in music, musically, as well as in so many other respects. And later on, you know, I wasn't reading many Black writers--if at all--in like my teenage years. But going up into college, then I did read quite a lot. And I gravitated to some of those Black writers as well. 

 

Reginald:That's amazing stuff, and I really--so many threads to pick up on from what you've just said. You mentioned in the piece, The Autobiography of Malcolm X was really important to you as one of these texts, for instance. And I think for a lot of folks, and I'm struck by first of all, this notion that you bring up of resonance and resonance, something that resonates kind of transracially in terms of this message. And I, you know--he's a fascinating, problematic figure, you know, James Brown for all these, all kinds of reasons. You mentioned his friendship with George Wallace on the one hand, you know, among other things. But, you know, one of the first things that I ever published in graduate school was actually partially about James Brown. 

 

Takashi:Oh!

 

Reginald:Yeah, I know it's one of these weird pieces that is like a litmus test, like people that are “down”and willing to kind of accept me in a broader, more human sense, like that piece.Even though it's, you know, it's over-wrought, it's filled with graduate student insecurity and so forth. But I talk a lot about this notion of “the one.”

 

Takashi: Oh wow!

 

Reginald:Yeah and so when I read that in your piece, I was like, okay, so clearly this person can come to the cookout and we can have lots of conversations. But one of the things that I'm thinking about, you mentionedVijay Prashad as well, and then Everybody Was Kung FuFighting.And I'm just trying to kind of maybe tie some things together, specifically the idea that this announcement of a kind of racial pride could translate and could actually be inspiring, in this case, for Japanese-Americans in particular. Maybe Asian-Americans more, more broadly even if that term wasn't, you know, kind of there in the same way, it wasn't solidified. But also, I'm thinking about things like masculinity, I'm thinking about the one, like, you know, band members talk about James Brown, like how he ran his, you know, bands like military units, right. 

 

Takashi:Yeah, right.

 

Reginald:I'm just thinking about these other kinds of subtexts and some of the other things that you've written about, you know--certainly in the amazing book, Race for Empire and the article version of some of that material as well. Like what it means to think about not just kind of teenage things, but also masculinity in this context and being in some ways, like, interpolated into a version of disidentificatory whiteness on the one hand. But also a kind of post-adolescent awareness of oneself as, as a man or as a kind of nonwhite man, or as a Japanese-American, and women too. But how that might then play into some of these, these choices that are being made at the secondary level in terms of what you're reading or what you're kind of gravitating towards. As we're all kind of trying to find our way forward and navigate. Could you kind of think a little bit through that? 

 

Takashi:Well, I mean, I think, you know, this is a really important question in which I think your project is very much invested in the idea of intersectionality and how we need to think about issues such as masculinity, kind of misogynist view of things in addition to race. So we can't, you know, reduce everything to race. We need to think about class issues. We need to think about gender, sexuality, all those things. And, you know, certainly, I wasn't sophisticated enough in high school and don't know if I'm sophisticated enough today. But I do realize that we need to think about these issues and the way in which, you know, a kind of masculinist bond across people of color, men of color, how debilitating that can be for women of color. So we need to get around that and we need to be feminists as well as we try to work our way through the different people that inspired us to think about the limits of that, even though in some ways they may have inspired us. So if we think about James Brown, again, you know, I mean, he had these problematic songs, like “HotPants,”you know, I don't know if you know about that one, that wasn't too good[laughs].

 

Reginald: I know them all, yeah. [laughs]

 

Takashi: And, you know, he had that song, “But it's a man's world, but it would be nothing without a woman or a girl.” Right? And again, this is a kind of masculinity and kind of a bone thrown to women. You know, “we make the cars,”I forget, exactly, the lyrics, but “manmade the car”and all this stuff, “but there would be nothing without a woman or girl.” So what do you do with that kind of lyric, that kind of music?I was really inspired by a remake of that song,“It's a man's world” by Judith Hill and her Latinx friend,I'm sorry I’m forgetting that artist. But they sang that song in English, Japanese, and Spanish, and in their rendition, I could tell that the emphasis was on, “but it would be nothing,”you know, so it depends on how you're going to recuperate that music again for now. And I think, you know, we need to be prepared to understand that people that we might've been inspired by, had their blind spots, and we could, we could use that. We could use what we can, what's good for us now, but we don't have to accept it all. 

 

And it's the same with Dubois, who many people have pointed out that his one weak spot was, he didn't really understand the violence of the Japanese empire in Japanese colonialism. And I completely agree with that. So do we throw out everything that Dubois said? Or do we take what we can and think, how can we reroute his works in a way that's meaningful for us today? You know, we don't have to start all over again because in the future, I'm hoping, anyway, someone might pick up on say this podcast and say, wow, Fujitani, he was really limited in this way. And then rather than say, okay, let's get rid of everything, but maybe he said something that was--we can use, for the “now.”And that's all I could ask. And I think that's all we can do with people who've gone before us as well. 

 

I think you opened up with Autobiography of Malcolm X and that autobiography was a huge inspiration for me in many ways. I think I never read through a book with such passion and, you know, at a young age I was probably 18 or something, I had never read something that explained the virulence of racism in such a straightforward, elegant, and intelligent way. And in the end, of course, he arrives in his autobiography at an anti-essentialist position when he saw the diversity within the global Muslim world, you know. I could get in one book, the whole passage of a life. And only later did I learn again about the Nikkei relationship to Blackness and Yuri Kochiyama’s relationship to Malcolm X, as many of you probably know she was there at the time that Malcolm X was murdered. It was a really moving experience for me to read that book, yeah. 

 

Reginald:Yeah, thank you for that, Tak. I mean for so many reasons, my mind is blown, first of all. It says a lot for anyone, you know, the pivot from James Brown and thinking about, let's call it, if not toxic at least potentially toxic masculinity, that's also really inspiring to then pivot back to Dubois and then to Malcolm X and thinking about Yuri Kochiyama and, you know, her cradling Malcolm X, you know, and that iconic photograph, right. And that kind of, that moment of a certain version of, you know, cross-racial solidarity, but also mourning. And you know, how to even interpret that, I think is--all of these things that you're kind of weaving together, I think is really...dope. But the way to say it, it's like it's also deeply moving. And I was thinking before you got to that point about, just that really useful thing that you're saying about, you know, what it means to kind of extract tools or to kind of learn lessons from these folks. None of us is perfect and what does it mean to kind of take what we can from, say, Dubois, so you don't want to take the misogyny from James Brown, but maybe, you know, the pride in one's, you know, one's origins, right. Or, the funk. 

 

And you mentioned your teacher, and we've read and talked about in the context of the Japanese Studies and Antiracist Pedagogy project ourselves about Lawson Inada, for instance, a Japanese-American kind of poet who was a massive jazz fan, and something like Legends from Camp talking about his relationship to Black music is, you know, he doesn't say it and he doesn’t use the fancy language of disidentification from whiteness, but that's exactly what's going on, certainly. Thinking about, you know, jazz or kind of Black cultural expression in that context as a means of survival--that disidentification isn't just about just a kind of intellectual choice, but also very much about trying to find resources to survive and to thrive. And if that's, you know, bebop or if that's, you know, kind of, different versions of jazz or funk, I mean, that's a through line, interestingly though. When you're thinking about like teachers of yours who were kind of in a similar mode maybe keeping that part of their lives, you know, concealed, but like, that was also part of what allowed them to kind of teach kids like you, right. And presumably stay somewhat sane and not hate the world, you know, to have fun, pleasure, it’s a kind of release right. 

 

Takashi:Yeah. Well, let me just interrupt you right there for a second. And just to say that, sometimes, you know, things are difficult to articulate in words, especially when we might not be trained as young people to articulate them. But I think what we understood to be Black music really saved us, you know, and it allowed us some pleasure, some relief that didn't seem like it had to go through the mediation of white people. And I think that is a really important thing for any person of color, that it doesn't have to be mediated in that way. And when I wrote about Dubois, when he talked about the color line as a problem of the 20th century, he meant of course, that there was a white supremacy. But on the other hand, the other side of it is that--on the darker side of the color line--we're all in this together and that's become ever clearer today. But again, you know, we need to think about what the limits of thinking only in terms of the color line might be, that there are other kinds of solidarities that we can make that are not necessarily only based upon that color line. But insofar as the current moment goes, yeah, we, you know, definitely it's something we need to recuperate and rethink for our own times. So, Reggie, I don't know if you had, if you were moving towards another question.

 

Reginald:No, no that that's great. I mean, I wanted to turn it over to Sophie. I mean, that's a nice lead into--well, that's a lie. I have a million questions to follow, but I think for the sake of time and for the sake of parity, you know, I want to pivot, you know, we'll talk more offline about all of these. That's really useful. I think the idea of understanding, kind of, how part of what's implied here is like what [are] the possibilities, right? This kind of future orientation towards solidarity, but also historically as well, how that's played out. I mean the Yuri Kochiyama version is in some ways the most kind of, one of those spectacular versions of that. And, you know, it reminds me very much of—maybe you're aware of this kind of radical pedagogue—radical in the best of ways, not the kind of, you know, reactionary kind of way, Bettina Love, who talks a lot about co-conspiratorship. Being a co-conspirator, as opposed to, so contrasting that with allyship and particularly kind of performative, you know, hollow, pretty cynical allyship that we see when a corporation puts up a Black square, and then it's, you know, after killings of Black folks and you know, this kind of emptiness. 

 

So I was thinking by comparison, like what it means for someone like a Dubois or other thinkers after this, to be thinking more about the potential for a kind of co-conspiratorial relationship, among the darker peoples and what that might allow in terms of a grounds for changing the way things work. So I think that Sophie wanted to follow up a bit just in terms of thinking about the question of solidarity politics, particularly in this moment. And also, perhaps, in relation to things like model minority discourse and how that might kind of interact with that, or interrupt some of those things, right? Sophie?

 

Sophie:Yeah, thank you so much, Dr. Fujitani, for going more in depth on your own personal navigation about color lines and this kind of, like, rejection of having to operate within the color lines that are mediated by whiteness and by white supremacy. I think that is really important, especially for like me to think about as well. And I really appreciate your own, like, thinking about what how solidarity can be seen and how it can be re-imagined as, I think you said in the beginning of this conversation, like we are all in a similar boat, even though we might be in different spaces of this boat. So I was wondering if you could speak more about, in this vein, how we can consider and potentially reconsider this model minority myth, as it is a post-war construction? And in relation to how we can reimagine these local and global solidarities, as we've seen that there has been a history of this interracial mutual interest, and these connections that oftentimes are not discussed in history. So if you could speak more about that. 

 

Takashi:Yeah. Well, you know, lately there's been much talk in the--writing in the media about the model minority myth. I think that's a really good sign. Generally, we think that this model minority myth is a product of the Cold War, the way in which Asian people in--and it's really started with Japanese, the Nikkei people--that they're positioned as the model minority.Because you know, what was said at the time in the 1960s is that the Japanese in America, they suffered racism. They went to internment camp and they made it anyway. So they're the model minority. So, the idea there was really, so what is wrong with the Black and Brown people? You know, why don't you make it like the Japanese did like some of the Chinese did?And this has been, you know, really debilitating for everybody except white people, well-to-do white people who like that idea of the model minority. And some people, Asian people, get lured into that, to really want to assimilate, to think, you know, "we might keep some aspects of our so-called culture, and then we don't want to rock the boat and then we're going to make it." 

 

And this has been a huge problem in many respects, but one of which has been that it's made it difficult to have these cross-racial alliances, or solidarities, if we want to call it that. You know, the tendency has been for--the strategy of white supremacy has been to pit us against each other. So we see that in so many instances. One of the most prominent obviously has been the Rodney King uprising and the media really talking so much about this Asian/Black violence, not about the long history of alliances and solidarities that we have had, which were never taught to us, but exists there in popular memory. And people know about these things, but they just don't have avenues to really--mainstream avenues--to talk about it. One other thing about the model minority myth, which has been said quite often these days for the good, is that all the Asian people get lumped together, but obviously all the Asians are not the same. And there are the more recent immigrants, say like Filipinos, who are in a far different, sort of, socioeconomic position in most cases, you know, and they're a product of American imperialism. I mean, their being in the U.S.is a direct result of American imperialism. And yet they're looked down upon and they have, you know, relatively low income compared to, say, Japanese-Americans. So there's a wide diversity among the Asian population. Southeast Asians being in a different position than East Asians, East Asians, different from South Asians. And then there's the whole Pacific Islander matter as well, which is a whole other thing. One of the things that does tie us all together, of course, is American imperialism.But that's a whole other thing, which again, is tied up with the white supremacy that we've been addressing throughout. 

 

But the other thing that I would say is that...while the term model minority is really coined and becomes widespread in the 1960s, that kind of structure has a much longer history. What I'm talking about is Japan, as a kind of what I call a “modern minority nation.”Japan, as we know, is subjected to Euro-American imperialism, racism, but then becomes an empire in its own right. So then it's kind of straddling the color line. And, you know, I mean, for the leaders of Japan at the time, influential people, they had to make a decision, or they made a decision, whether conscious or not. Am I going to be on the white side of the color line or the darker side of the color line?And unfortunately, for most of the people who've dominated politics, they decided to be on the white side of the color line. So someone like Fukuzawa Yūkichi, you know, very famous of course, a liberal thinker, which actually shows the limits of liberalism as well. As some of your listeners may know, he penned this essay on getting out of Asia. And what he said, you know, is “We're not like those other Asian people.”Which is another way of saying, “We're not like those people of color. We are more like the Europeans and the Americans, we’re more like them. And we aspire to be even more like them.”

 

So they became like them, they became an empire, and they had their own racism against surrounding peoples in the Asia-Pacific.But it was always fraught with anxiety, and tension, and resentment. You find that resentment coming out in the 1920s into the 1930s.You have the rejection of the racial equality clause in the League of Nations, led by none other than President Woodrow Wilson, and then, you know, growing frustration. And finally, they said, we’re not going to have this any more. We're going to be Asian now. We're going to slide on this side, but it's a little too little too late. And so they got a lot of pushback as well. Although initially, you know, people in Asia said, “Yeah, we agree. We're tired of this imperialism and racism. And so let's go along with that.”But then they find out that the Japanese imperialists, for the most part, are no better than the Europeans and Americans. And so this is the dilemma. 

 

So after the war is over, then Japan becomes, once again, you know, the model minority nation in the Cold War global structure, and follows along with the United States and the U.S. empire. And that's how they make it. That's how they become, you know, for a time, the second wealthiest country in the world. You know, it replicates so much, it's homologous to the structure of the model minority in the United States, what happened to Japan as a nation. And so they became wealthier, but they also lost, I would say, they lost some of their dignity and they also lost sovereignty. Japan doesn't have full sovereignty. It's always compromised by the United States. Many people want to get rid of the bases in Okinawa, but they can't. Why? Because the United States won't allow it. What sort of sovereignty is that? There’s many different levels on which Japan is not able to have a voice in international politics because it is the global model minority. It can't get out of that spiral. So, having said that, a lot of other people who, historically, from the late 19th century through the whole 20th century in Japan, have refused to follow that line, model minority line, and people who continue to do that today, we need to recuperate more of those people. Although again, getting back to the earlier issue, some of those people were on the far right.So this is another problem we have to address. And I don't feel any kind of sympathy at all for those people. But, you know, there are other people, more sensible, that I might be able to draw some connections to. 

 

Harrison: I appreciate everything that you've been saying. And you're really, sort of, keying into some really strong parallels in the model minority thing, the violence and subordination to white supremacy in American agendas that's involved in that process. And I also want to take it back to something that really resonated with me earlier, talking about how having arts that weren't channeled through, or mediated by, whiteness was something that ended up being very important to you. I think there's something to be said about whiteness having the ability to kind of masquerade as the norm and being able to refract Black culture, or whatever culture, through its own lens. And so breaking out of that is like a really, really important process, I think, for a lot of people. And I'm wondering, could you speak on that trend or theme in relation to your experience in academics and your own work.

 

Takashi:Yeah, sure. If I'm understanding your question, the ways in which, maybe, writers who don't necessarily identify as white may have had some impact upon me, and how those kinds of relations have impacted me. Yeah, I think I could respond to that. Again, you know, I really want to think globally, and I'm always aware, you know, of the limitations of the term “minority”itself. So we might think about, you know, which “minority”intellectuals, maybe had an impact on me, you know, once I made that part of my repertoire as well. But I'm tending not to want to use minority too often. And inevitably we have to use that, just because it's part of the way that we speak in discourse that people understand. And I'm not saying we shouldn't use it at all.But I'm thinking that I prefer something like “scholars of color.”And why I say that is, that this idea of “the minority”is in some sense, a devious trick to make people think that people of color are minorities, when in fact we comprise the majority of the world. And if we think globally, we're not a minority at all. In some states, even like Hawaii, of course, but California, the so-called minorities are the majority. 

 

So if we can think about “scholars of color”and think globally, in addition to within, you know, the United States, I would say there are many different types of scholars of color who influenced me. I would say that the two professors who impacted me the most, I would say, as an undergraduate student. One was Harry Edwards. And the other was Tu Weiming. And I don't know if you or your listeners are familiar with them, but Harry Edwards was a Black professor, a Black sociologist, one of the pioneers in the sociology of sport, who really foregrounded the issue of race in sports. And, you know, I really liked him. He just really said it like it was, about racism, about his own experience of racism, about racism particularly in sports, but, you know, outside of sports as well. And he was the one who's credited with being the architect of the so-called Black Power salute in the 1968 Olympics. And he was an athlete himself. So that kind of, I guess, a live Black person in the university, not Malcolm X or Du Bois, but actual person of color in the university, talking to me about these things, really struck a chord with me and had an influence on me, impacted me to read more, particularly about theory and in history, of Black people and people of color in general. And the interesting thing, I had a conversation with a  Chamorra scholar from Guam, an indigenous woman from Guam, who, over dinner, we were kind of talking about our Berkeley experience. And then we bonded because, you know, she’s not Black either, Pacific Islander. But, she said, you know, one of the professors that really impacted her was Harry Edwards, this Black man. And so we, again, bonded with each other through the mediation of a Black man. I think that's important. And that's really something else that we could recuperate. 

 

Now, the other person who I mentioned, Tu Weiming, really impacted me a lot and he's very well known. I didn't realize it at the time that our politics would be completely the opposite of each other's, but, you know. Because he's rather conservative, he's a kind of culturalist and conservative in his views and adviser for the wrong governments and wrong people. But anyway, he did have a huge impact on me because I studied, you know, Chinese thought with Tu Weiming. I mean, you know, starting at probably when I was 18 years old. And he introduced these Chinese thinkers in a way that was not Orientalist. He introduced them as the peers of Western philosophers. Although I couldn't have articulated at the time, I understand now that this was part of the process of debunking the universalism of Europe. That had a huge impact on me. And when I studied with him, you know, it was like studying with one of the neo-Confucian thinkers, which he was. He was a neo-neo-Confucian thinker. You know, it was like sitting in the room with a later version ofWang Yangming. And so I came to know Wang Yangming, Hu Shih, and so forth throughTu Weiming. 

 

And this was really important because in the university then, especially then, and even now, there are really not many scholars of color, particularly Black people. And even in Asian studies at the time, there were not many Asian professors. It’s an incredible thing. I mean, I could talk more about that later, if you wish, but you know, to stick on point about this kind of way in which different scholars of color have impacted me, that was the beginning. 

 

I had thought about this in anticipation of the podcast today. [Shuffling papers] And yeah, there's so many, but so much good work being done in AsianAmerican Studies. People like Lisa Lowe and her book Intimacies of Four Continents. But even earlier than that, her book on immigration acts. These really broke up the sort of Americanization narrative in AsianAmerican Studies. I think this was in the mid-1990s when Immigrant Acts came out. This was the same period as David Palumbo-Liu, who wrote his Asian-American book. Again, sort of globalizing books that put capitalism, imperialism, war, immigration, law, all these, under the microscope, under critique, rather than buying into the idea of the model minority, rather than buying into the idea of “how we all became American despite racism.”And that narrative of how we all became American, “despite racism”never resonated well with me at all, ever. And so these are really important books that have helped me. And Lisa Yoneyama’s work over the years. You may know she's also my partner, but her works that have applied a transpacific critique, these also have kind of helped in breaking through the boundaries of area studies and trying to link together American studies, critical American studies with critical Asian studies. So that's one large rubric: things happening in Asian-American studies. I would also say, you know, refugee studies. Yen Espiritu, the way that she shows how refugees really came in through the exact networks of American imperialism, where the refugee camps were, where you find the presence of America's empire of bases. 

 

I think that the other category that we might think about is Black Studies of different types and one really directly relevant to my book Race for Empire was Gerald Horne's book. His different works on Blackness in Asia and the Pacific. And here was a scholar of Black history, starting out, who was really branching out and reaching out more globally and reaching out to Asia. And that kind of solid empirical work, which was really calling out white supremacy and reaching out to Asia also has been very inspiring for me. But all of the other postcolonial works, starting out early with Fanon and his dissection of colonialism, the way that the pathology of colonialism, not the pathology of the colonized. These kinds of things really have had a huge impact on me, helped me in understanding the East Asian situation and understanding the U.S. North American situation. 

 

I can think of postcolonial scholars from South Asia, subaltern studies, despite some of its limitations, whichI agree with.But at a moment in the late part of the 1980s, after Gayatri Spivak’s intervention, I learned quite a lot about subaltern studies and the way that it could, if we thought about the subaltern not as an essential thing but in a relation, I think these opened up things for me in thinking about people's history, about the minshūshi movement in Japan. And I tried to think through the subaltern studies movement with the minshūshi movement in Japan. And quite some time ago, wrote an article about it in Positions, if anyone is ever interested. And in particular wrote about one scholar, Yasumaro Yoshio, who had a huge impact on me in terms of his critique of Japanese nationalism and the emperor system. And the ways in which that critique led me to an understanding of how to better think about the so-called people, or the Subaltern people, who are placed in the subaltern position. And then, you know, branching out again, if we think about another really important minshūshi historian, Hirota Masaki, who really introduced me long ago. You know, I think he wrote this book in the mid-1970s, his critique of Fukuzawa Yūkichi. This is a period, you know, when Fukuzawa Yūkichi was so celebrated among everybody, you know, practically. But Hirota really pointed out how problematic Fukuzawa was in terms of his civilizing mission towards common people. And eventually, you know, Hirota talked about and wrote about the issue of sabetsu, discrimination. And he wrote about the discrimination within the context of the emperor system and the way in which modernity itself needs to be understood in thinking about issues such as the discrimination against Buraku people. 

 

And so often the way in which we understand the Buraku people is that it's a carry over from the pre-modern period. You know, like they were people who handled leather or, you know, dead animals and so are unclean, so-called unclean work. And what Hirota pointed out is that there may be some truth to that, but let's think also about how modernity actually really reinforced or made a new, a different kind of modern racism against the Buraku people based upon the notion of hygiene. This point about hygiene has also very much resonated with me in thinking about the race issue, how hygiene is really a racialized concept and how race is really, you know, impacted by notions of hygiene. One of the ways in which the Japanese became a model minority is because they were said to be really clean.They were a really clean people.

 

Reginald: In an orientalist way though, too. 

 

Takashi:Right. That's like, yeah, that's right. So just one more thing about hygiene thing, you know, is that there's a film with Marlon Brando. I forget which one of his bad movies it was, but I think it was The Geisha. I mean, some of his roles have been really good, but the ones when he appears in Japan, they've been really bad. But this is one in which he has relationship with a Japanese woman. And she says– oh, Sayonara, yeah. And he wants to marry her. And the woman says, “I really can't marry you, because what would our babies be?”And Marlon Brandoin this really bad accent--supposed to be a kind of Southern accent, I think, says, “Well, he would be half yella, half white, a good clean baby.”[laughs] The epitome of that racialized hygiene, “hygienized race,”you know? And so anyway, I’ve gone across a lot of stuff. 

 

Reginald: No, not at all. It's fine. And I was thinking--what you're saying about the kind of geisha stuff, I was thinking of two things. We've talked about this in class a bit too, Naoko Shibusawa’s book on America's Geisha Ally and that kind of Cold War moment, pre-Cold War too. But, then also Christina Klein's book on Cold War Orientalism and you know, this notion of the middlebrow imagination. And I think about the Brando movie as fitting into that. Like when, you know, particularly like white audiences in the United States or, you know, Hollywood's help trying to figure out what to make of American intervention in Asia. And there's all this move--this kind of post-total war, vitriolic, racism, you know. All the propaganda about Japanese folks as monkeys or vermin or whatever. And they're trying to recuperate, particularly after the Korean war, all that work that's done to rehabilitate and you know, along with this notion of--you mentioned the Berkeley situation--this kind of city on the hill kind of Enlightenment, post-Enlightenment humanism. 

 

But the other version is that American-sponsored client state democracy version then. And part of that is about this kind of concern over--not miscegenation, but like how, what does this actually look like phenotypically? And then, hygiene is such a part of that. And so I'm just making connections to some of the things we've been thinking about with Leo Ching’s work too, and Taiwan, especially. So much of the rhetoric of folks like Fukuzawa and so forth, and folks who followed him, was about bringing civilization. And one of the markers of this, you know, is, you know, so--toilets, right? Like what does it mean to have like, indoor plumbing and hygiene in these clinics and all these other things, you know. Modernization as being the kind of shining symbol of civilization, you know, under, under kind of Japanese rule. So I think that's great. 

 

But I think Rachel had a question, maybe to pivot back towards the issue of what you were saying and really, I think inspiring terms about just what it meant to have scholars of color as teachers for you in this moment, even if you disagreed with their politics. But what it meant for them to either personally or intellectually model a certain type of engagement with the current world, let's say. Maybe in the more in the case of, first professor, but then also with the ancient world. So this neo-neo-Confucian version of things, but that was also instructive insofar as it taught you more about a kind of non-Western frame of reference that wasn't deficient.Was one of the takeaways there. Which I think is something that, you know, if left to its own devices, we don't really have the benefit of in kind of most educational systems. And so, right. So I think maybe Rachel did disclose this to you before, Tak, but is actually a scholar of francophone Caribbean. And soI think her eyes lit up when you mentioned Fanon--but also I think this question of how this relates to the Academy. Rachel, did you want to kind of elaborate a bit? 

 

Rachel: Yeah, so I just wanted to say thank you, and you've given us so many gems to work with. I really appreciated in particular, what you were saying earlier about interrogating the sort of underlying supremacist logic of the term “minority.”I think that's a great example of the value that anti-racist pedagogy can have in a classroom, especially for language teachers, because--as you know, Fanon wrote about extensively--racism is so embedded even in our language that we can take things like that for granted. So thank you for bringing that up. Sort of building off of that,I just wanted to ask you, how do you sort of envision the role of anti-racism in Japanese Studies and what does anti-racist daily practice look like for you as a teacher? 

 

Takashi:Okay, well, some of the things I've written and some of the things I will say here and in the future, are going to be getting me in trouble in one way or another. [laughs]

 

Reginald:I mean, there's good trouble. We want the good trouble. That's fine. You're quite tenured. 

 

Takashi:Oh yeah, quite tenured. I'm ready to go ride off into the sunset, actually, so it’s not gonna hurt me. 

 

Reginald:Yeah, good trouble, please. 

 

Takashi:Yeah, I've worried about, you know, my students in the past.So at some points, you know, I've been kind of reticent to say too much. And I still have students, so. But I think, you know, the field is changing in some ways. What I would have to say about Japanese Studies is that not enough has been done on the anti-racism front. And we know, for example, right now with this whole case at Harvard of Mark Ramseyer and his controversial article on the comfort women, which talks about, basically, the fact that the comfort women were making the free and rational choice to engage in the sex work that they did. And basically placing the onus on them for the choice that they made. And of course it's a completely absurd, unsubstantiated argument, which is also quite racist in my view. But you know, there are other pieces in his pernicious body of work that haven't received quite as much attention and some people have talked about it, but I’ve seen precious little on his depiction of Zainichi Koreans, of the Buraku people as well. 

 

Reginald:Yeah, yeah, Buraku, as well. He gave a talk here. 

 

Takashi:Oh he did? 

 

Reginald:I'm sorry, just to interrupt, but it's important to say. I will say it was before my tenure as director. That’s all I’ll say. But yeah, but I think that this kind of neoliberal economic logic that's also then subsidizing this pretty racist and deeply culturalist, you know, misogynist, kind of rhetoric at the intersection of all those things, I think is interesting to unpack as you are.

 

Takashi:It is. And I think, you know, one of the keys to the whole body of work, you know, I can't say I've read, you know, several of them, not all of them, because it's just too, you know, ridiculous, in a way, to read too carefully. I think I read abstracts of all of them and really read carefully three maybe.But the piece on Zainichi Koreans, you know, is particularly disturbing to me in that he places the onus of the situation that Zainichi Koreans found themselves in after the war, on them, on their community. Basically he says it was a dysfunctional community and that basically they're criminals. So it's a kind of replication of the criminalization of the Korean population that was rampant in the colonial period and then became picked up by the Americans as well in the occupation period, and then resulted in more oppression of Zainichi post-colonial community in Japan at that time. And he basically replicates that, replicates it in every instance that these are basically dysfunctional communities. The Buraku. Even in the case of the places that are bearing the burden of the nuclear reactors, basically he's calling these dysfunctional communities that invited the reactors in, you know. These kinds of heartless...I don't even want to call them analyses...but statements, rants about, you know, criminalizing them. And this holds true for the Buraku as well. He's basically saying the Buraku movement was a front for criminal activities. And so, you know, why are—

 

Reginald: That was the talk he gave here.

 

Takashi:Oh my god. 

 

Reginald: Yeah we heard that one. 

 

Takashi: Oh my god, you know, and it's just like, you know, these people have to be called out. And you know, it's not just him is what I would say. Japanese studies--it's not enough to--I forgot which one of these groups here mentioned, you know, these kind of bland comments about, you know, “We are all anti-racists,”“We all condemn anti-Asian racism,” you know, and then that's it. “Maybe we'll have a symposium on it,” kind of thing. I noticed that Harvard has done that recently, some of the East Asian units have participated in that denunciation of anti-Asian racism, which is good. But, you know, I looked on the website of the Reischauer Institute and to me, it's a kind of cop-out, they're not really condemning this guy, Ramseyer, directly. They're saying there's some problems and take a look at Andrew Gordon and Carter Eckert piece and some other pieces that have criticized it. And that's it. So what is that institution, the Reischauer Institute, doing?I'm not condemning, you know, everybody there by any means, but as an institution. So we need to talk about the longer history of, not just condemning other folks who are anti-Asian, but the way in which Japanese Studies itself has contributed to anti-Asian racism. I think we need to get there and we haven't gotten there at all. 

 

I wrote this piece about Edwin Reischauer, you know, and Edwin Reischauer and the way that he viewed Japanese-Americans. And he said in this memorandum that I discovered in the archives, he said basically, you know, it was for--it was as an advisor to the State Department that he wrote this. He wrote it directly to his colleagues at Harvard, but he was an advisor to the state department. And I know that the memo circulated within the state department. But basically he said, “You know what? Japanese-Americans so far have been a huge liability for the government. Why? Because we have to evacuate them and then pay for their upkeep. And now we have an opportunity to turn Japanese-Americans into an asset.” So what does he mean by this language of accounting? These are his words, you know, “liability assets.” How can we use them instrumentally is what I would say. And what he said is, “We can have a unit made up of Japanese-Americans who are going to help us in this war in Asia, as well as winning the war, winning the peace after the war is over." What he meant is that we're going to show Japanese-Americans fighting valiantly, heroically for America, and then serving in the occupation of Japan. And then all the Asians and other people will see that America is a country that does not practice racism. And what he mentioned is, “We need to do this because the Japanese are turning this war, the Second World War into a race war, and we don't want that to happen. We want to be recognized as the one who denies racism. And then after the war is over, we're going to need those allies.”And what he meant--and what he said is, “We need to convince the yellow and brown people, the yellow and brown people, that we are not a country that practices racism.” So in other words, he wanted to instrumentalize Japanese-Americans for the management of race in Asia. And that's part of the, sort of—

 

Reginald:The model minority thing.

 

Takashi: The model minority and the strategy for—globally—to turn Japan into the global model minority. So, you know, if other countries want to be successful likeJapan, you have to be like Japan and abide by those norms, those values, which Japan has followed. That's modern minority discourse and modernization theory as applied to Japan. And in fact, Ronald Dore in his book, Shinohata, wrote about this and what he said in that, I forget if it was the introduction, but somewhere near the beginning of the book that, you know, Japan has made this tremendous progress. And there are these, all these other countries, developing. What they have to realize is they're going to have to wait like Japan did. So again, you know, it's a global model minority. So don't make a fuss about it, wait.

 

Reginald: Stay in your place.

 

Takashi: Stay in your place. And so if we see, you know, this sociologist Peterson who wrote the famous article on the Japanese Americans as a model minority. The sociologist, Peterson, who did he cite?He cited Robert Bellah, the Japanese historian of Japan, and then later the United States. And Bellah, as some of you may know, wrote the book on Tokugawa religion, which basically said that in theTokugawa period, Japan had the functional analog to the Protestant ethic. That's why they could succeed. So the implication: all you other folks, if you don't have some kind of version of the Protestant ethic, the burden is on you, you know, not the structure of empire, imperialism, that has put you, all of you people in this developmental stage of capitalism, you know. And then what did they, what did these people do? Then they call these places dysfunctional. They call them like dysfunctional states.

 

Reginald:Third world.

 

Takashi:Third world dysfunctional. And then they say, “Well, in order to help you out, we're going to put, you know, like an authoritarian leader in place." Right? So this is all tied up with monetization theory and it's all tied up with Japanese Studies. So what I want to say is, okay, all well and good, we're going to say, as Japanese Studies folks, let's condemn anti-Asian racism, anti-Asian violence. But also let's look inside and see what we can do better inside Japanese Studies. And I'm afraid not enough people have been doing that. Was that an answer to your question? 

 

Reginald:It was the answer, I think.I think it was the conglomeration of many an answer that poses as many questions. I think that we're heading towards time. I mean, you know, I'm very aware of how we could talk for hours and hours and we will continue the conversation. I should say, you know, I mean, this is just one small drop in the bucket in this project. 

 

Takashi: Yeah. 

 

Reginald: The JSAP project that we're engaged in is aware of all these things that you're talking about. Although maybe not as adept at putting all of these kinds of threads together, the way you have so masterfully throughout the course of this conversation. But, but no, I think, I mean, we agree, we're on the same page, which is why we wanted to have you here. And we're deeply simpatico. I think this is the first of lots of different conversations along these lines. But I think that as we turn towards the end here, at least for this interview, I think Sophie had some kind of final questions or comments so we can wind down. 

 

Sophie: Yes, wow, thank you so much, Dr. Fujitani for all of your words. It's a lot to take in. It's a lot to think about. But I think you sharing your own intellectual formation and lived experiences and how they've kind of served as a gateway to think about these larger issues of race and racism in the global academy is so helpful and productive. And I think it's actually very inspirational to young scholars, especially, who might be frustrated with the Academy at this time. So I really appreciate you being so candid about your own thoughts and your own feelings. Just to wrap up, I wanted to give you an opportunity to highlight any recent or upcoming work that you may have, so listeners can look forward to it. And then I wanted to also just ask you to maybe close out by thinking about what continues to excite you about Japanese Studies or American Studies, especially as we start to conceptualize these alternative modes of thinking.

 

Takashi:Okay, well, I'm working on a number of different things. It would take forever to talk about them all. But before saying that, you know, I also want to say that I don't really want to privilege my own story too much because I do think that there are many roads to the objective of anti-racist activity, work, intellectual work, activism, and so forth. So I want people to think, including, you know, white people, that they each will have their own road to getting to that common goal. And we don't all have to be from the same kind of background. In fact, it's better if we're not. So this is just one story, but maybe parts of it will resonate with some of you and that would be great. In terms of, you know, my own work,I've been doing something that I'm sure will sound strange to many of you, but I'm writing a short book on Clint Eastwood. And, you know, when I say that to people--

 

Reginald: Nice. 

 

Takashi: [laughs]People often start by just laughing and saying, you know, why are you doing this? And the reason is: I was asked at one point to be in a symposium celebrating the work of Clint Eastwood after his two movies on Iwo Jima came out. And I think the idea at Berkeley, where this happened was to get a few historians there who could vouch for the historical accuracy or whatever. And, you know, people who were somewhat, had some specialized knowledge of the second world war and maybe even Iwo Jima. So I was invited to that.

 

And the weird thing about it initially was that he was supposed to receive an award for this--called something like the Japan Award, the Inaugural Japan Award, which was given to people making outstanding contributions to Japan or something like that, you know. And I thought, “Oh, that's really weird, you know, Clint Eastwood?How about, you know, there are plenty of other people--including some who are Japanese--who could get that award.” But anyway, I thought, you know, that'd be interesting. That'd be interesting to go because I found the movies on Iwo Jima somewhat problematic. But I wanted to learn from that experience and to hear what some of the other people had to say of it. And I also had an opportunity to actually meet Clint Eastwood and maybe ask him a few questions. And so I went, and when they saw the film, I thought, there's some interesting things about this film because although I--you know--I'm mostly critical of the political message of the film, he is a masterful filmmaker. There's no doubt about that. And how does he do that, you know? His texts, his movies, are well worth analyzing, even though we might come out the other side thinking quite critically of a lot of things that he does in those films. 

 

But the first thing I noticed about the Iwo Jima film, the one made from the Japanese point of view, was there are no Koreans in that film. I never studied about Iwo Jima in particular, but I thought, okay, there are these, you know, bunkers, there are these long, deep caverns. Who dug those? Who made those?You know, they must be the Koreans who were mobilized, coerced workers, laborers, who were mobilized for that purpose. Sure enough, I go there and Clint Eastwood is being interviewed and he's asked by somebody, you know, "Were you able to interview some of the survivors of Iwo Jima?" And he goes, “Well, no, I couldn't interview any survivors, because there are so few survivors left except for the Koreans." And I'm thinking, wow, that's who you should have interviewed, you know? Anyway, this was after--I'd been thinking about this after Spike Lee had criticized his film on the American side for leaving out the Black people in the U.S. military. So again, I was thinking, wow, this is a double erasure of race on both sides, you know, and interesting. But I never thought I would really write about it at all, but just that it was a one-off symposium conversation and, you know, that's fine. So anyway, I found things really interesting that, you know, I don’t have time to share, but anyway. And then I watched the film Gran Torino. I don't know if somebody, if you listeners have seen that one, but it's, it's horrific. Horrible.

 

Reginald: Yeah, well, I haven't seen it because I've been boycotting Clint Eastwood since Unforgiven, it’s an amazing film and problematic for all the things you're talking about, but yeah. But that line from the Western, as a genre, white supremacy to the kind of Charles Bronson, you know, Clint Eastwood, make my day, you know, kind of white vigilante police kind of version, there’s that through-line, you know.So yeah. Defender of suburbia kind of thing, right? 

 

Takashi: Yeah, yeah, yeah.So, it sounds like you might be a good reader for some of my work actually, but anyway. So then I thought, wow, this is leading somewhere. So I looked into it more. And then I watched, Unforgiven, you know, after many years of having seen it long ago and reading a little bit about it. And then reading somewhere in an interview, he said, “This is actually an allegory for the Vietnam war, the violence of the Vietnam war.”And then I discovered there's a really interesting film by the Zainichi Korean film director, Lee Sang-il, which is a remake of Clint Eastwood's Unforgiven, that's a remake where the location is Hokkaido, the Japanese frontier. And so I'm beginning to think, wow, these things are somehow coming together. 

 

And then discovering he had some other films, including a film called Heartbreak Ridge. Heartbreak Ridge, asI'm sure most of the listeners will know, is a famous place in the Korean war. But it's not about the Korean war. It's about the American invasion of Grenada remembered through a Korean war veteran's memory of the Korean war. And then there's another film called Firefox, which is about the trauma of a Vietnam war veteran. What is it? What's happening here? What Asia has such a repressed presence in so much of the work that Clint Eastwood has done. So I began to think about this as part of what aFrederick Jameson called an American political unconscious.

 

Reginald:Unconscious, yeah.

 

Takashi:Part of that repressed history that is always there, but somehow can’t appear on the surface of our consciousness, except in certain moments. And so to me, for Clint Eastwood and many of the people in that white male generation, Asia is part of their--and particularly America's Wars inAsia--are a part of their political unconscious, and they can't help repeating the memories of America's engagement with Asia. 

 

Reginald:Repetition compulsion.

 

Takashi: Yeah, it's a repetition complex. Every time, even in his--one called The Mule recently, the main character turns out to be a Korean war veteran. There's so many of these veterans, somehow. And it goes beyondClint Eastwood to popular culture, more generally, where for many of these people, the Vietnam war, the Korean war, serve as a kind of point of trauma for their entire life. 

 

Reginald:That version of white masculinity, right? I mean, sovereignty that failed abroad and therefore has to be reworked at, you know, worked at home in these really kind of--

 

Takashi: Over and over again. So, you know, I’m going on pretty long but it's the thing that I'm kind of thinking about on immediate horizon. But then I discover of course, along the way, in thinking about these things that I can't limit it to just Asia and Asians. And if you look in these films, what is it about the American Indian? Why does he deal with the American Indian in these films? So in the Iwo Jima one, one of the main characters is the American Indian who appears and is, you know, relegated to the position of a victim of alcoholism and trauma. And indeed he probably was, but, you know, to go to sort of a kind of stereotypical trope about the Native American as the only place where he engages with some kind of racialized differences, seemed to me also a huge problem. 

 

And then the treatment of American Indians in so many of his other films. So I went back to looking at his other westerns. And I'm talking only about the ones that he was the director, because I don't want to necessarily impose so much responsibility on ones that he was only the actor, although there are certainly some. But all the ones that he actually directed and had, you know, the most masterful hand in making. So I went back to some of those films and, you know, most of them are really terrible, except there are some really, really interesting ones and particularly the earlier ones. But anyway, so this then made me think I have to think more about indigeneity. It's a huge absence in my study up to now. I never really thought fully about it. Although I knew, you know, in general about the conquest and the oppression and the violence, the disease, and all of that, that happened to Indigenous peoples of the Americas and in Hokkaido as well. But, but I felt, you know, “Wow, god, I'm so ignorant about it.”

 

And so I've been reading quite a lot in Indigenous theory as well. And one person that I should have mentioned earlier in the more recent things that I've been looking at is Jodi Byrd and her book TheTransit of Empire, which is really about the indigenous Indian in North America that has served as a kind of launching point for empire. And if you think about it, you know, she didn't really address directly the issue of empire in Asia. But the point is that wherever the American empire has gone, they've always found Indians, you know. And they've always troped the Indian as always already disappearing. You know, you don't have to do anything about it, they're a dying race. So it is continuing to enable the expansion of empire across North America, but then also in Hawaii, you know.These people were assumed to be like Indians and the Ainu were assumed to be like Indians. And therefore you get the connection of American and Canadian indigenous policies towards American Indians and then Canadian Indians, the First Nations people, you begin to have them paralleled or serving as a model for what the Japanese should do in Hokkaido. Anyway, all these things become connected because in Lee Sang-il’s remake of Unforgiven, which is a great film in my view, really takes seriously the issue of settler colonialism and the Ainu question there in Hokkaido. Which Eastwood doesn't really do in his westerns and not at all in Unforgiven.So all of this is to say that now it looks like it could be a short book.

 

Reginald:[laughs] At least.

 

Takashi:[laughs] Yeah, no, it's going to be short because I don't want to write long ones. But, well, maybe later, but not on this one, so. AndI've been working on it on and off for actually quite a long time now. And I just get sidetracked by doing other things, but I hope to really pull that together pretty soon. And I know we’ve gone on pretty long, so I’ll just mention very, very briefly two other books that I'm working on. And we can talk more if there's more time, but I think there's not. 

 

But the second other big project, or bigger one, is a kind of, maybe an expansion of Race for Empire, which would be, the tentative title is Whose Good War?And it's an attempt to try and deal with a good war narrative in the U.S.side of the Second World War. But not just that, also to deal with the, I think, what is the parallel on the Japanese side, which is the right-wing narrative, which is actually a good war narrative of the Japanese empire.I want to try to talk about the U.S. and Japan as comparable empires. And that it actually was not a good war for anybody. That it's a pretend good war for everybody. And it's a horrific war for most of the people who were in the colonized world, the occupied people who were feeling the brunt of it. So it will be focusing on a critique of empires and looking more at colonized people, looking at women, sex, gender issues, other ways of thinking outside the box of the dominant narratives of World War II, as we know them. 

 

So that'll be, I think I want to try to pitch it for our broader audience than Race for Empire. So that's one thing. And then another one is, over the years, you know, after I wroteSplendidMonarchy, I’ve been asked to write articles here and there, some in Japanese and some in English, but on the post-war Japanese monarchy. I'm thinking of trying to pull some of those things together and writing a book, kind of updated versions of this article, which would be a book primarily on the post-war monarchy, because Splendid Monarchy as some of, you know, focused really on the pre-war and especially the Meiji period construction of the modern monarchy. But this would be more about the post-war. Sorry, I've been talking pretty long, but--

 

Reginald: No, that’s okay, go ahead. We'll finish up soon after this. 

 

Takashi:Yeah, it would be a book which is basically about, not just the continuation of the monarchy, but really about what I would call “emperor remains.”And what emperor remains--meaning the double meaning of remains--as a kind of--one that it's continuous, but that it's a kind of ruin of itself.

 

Reginald: Like debris.

 

Takashi: Yeah. And this picks up, I think, from Lisa Yoneyama’s book, the Cold War Ruins book, but, you know, the way in which it continues in a kind of fossil-like, or almost zombie form. And so I think we've come to the moment now of looking at the emperor as something that I call a kind of palliative monarchy. In other words, you know, the monarch goes around the country saying, “Oh, I'm so sorry you had the Kobe earthquake. Oh, I'm sorry for the Fukushima disaster. I really feel your pain. I'm so sorry.” But he has no ability to do anything about it. He only provides palliative care and that's how he's being used. So, I mean, that's part of the story, but anyway, sovereign remains would be one, if I can live long enough to, you know, write these three, then I think that's maybe, maybe I'll be done at that point. 

 

Reginald: You’ll be done at that point, fair enough. Yeah. Well, thank you so much, Tak. This is, I can't even say lots of words here, but it's so great. I mean, to have a sense of just--besides the generosity of spirit with which you've shared so much of your work your story, your biography, and kind of interwoven those. It's been, you know, really compelling for me. And I think it's fair to say for Sophie and Harrison and Rachel as well, and hopefully for the listeners eventually.But also, you know, genuinely excited about the new projects as well, and to kind of hear about how much of the work that you've done up to this point is going to be channeled into other directions. I was thinking, we'll talk about a lot of things, obviously, but I was thinking too about thatClint Eastwood moment where he's talking to the empty chair that's supposed to be Obama, I guess. So like in terms of this kind of particular, like, that is part of the story right?Of like the enemy that's there and not there and kind of how this trauma manifests in terms of-- 

 

Takashi: Oh yeah, that's interesting. I hadn't thought about that. But that's true.

 

Reginald: Yeah like hallucination, hallucination of the Other, what it means to kind of explain. So we'll talk over virtual coffee about all of these things, but I just wanted to end by saying thank you so much for your time. And again, all of the wonderful wisdom you've shared and, you know, your voice. I've always appreciated in your work that kind of, regardless of what the topic is, the kind of clarity and the kind of moral force behind the things that you're writing. I think it's maybe clearer to hear vocally than it is maybe sometimes on the page, but I think that's something else that I've always really admired about your work. And so I hope that there are folks that might not be as familiar with some of the things you've been doing, to say nothing of the people that you've mentioned as well, that will be able to enjoy that and learn from that as we kind of figure out how to make these lessons count and hopefully kind of change things in the world. So thank you so much again. 

 

Takashi:Well, can I just say, thank you all for inviting me and planning this great series and, actually, series of different types of events that you're going to have. And I really appreciate the really great questions that you gave me. And I didn't really get to the point of--but what excites me about Japanese studies--and I just would say one thing, I'm not going to go long, I’m sorry. 

 

Reginald: That’s fine, the floor is yours.

 

Takashi: But just to say, I was about to say, I'm really excited for the demise of Japanese Studies.And not just that, but the ways in which people like you are rebuilding it in new and exciting ways that have an ethics to it and is not instrumentalizing the people that we study about. So on that I'll just end and we can talk more about other things that are exciting me in the new wave of Japanese Studies that we may be making together, okay?So, again, thank you. Thank you all very much. 

 

Reginald:Our pleasure. Thank you so much for those kind words.