Unpredictable Agents: The Making of Japan's Americanists During the Cold War and Beyond (Yoshihara Mari)(Paperback)

In Unpredictable Agents, twelve Japanese scholars of American studies tell their stories of how they encountered "America" and came to dedicate their careers to studying it. People in postwar Japan have experienced "America" in a number of ways—through literature, material goods, popular culture, foodways, GIs, missionaries, art, political figures, celebrities, and business. As the Japanese public wrestled with a complex mixture of admiration and confusion, yearning and repulsion, closeness and alienation toward the US, Japanese scholars specializing in American studies have become interlocutors in helping their compatriots understand the country. In scholarly literature, these intellectuals are often understood as complicit agents in US Cold War liberalism. By focusing on the human dimensions of the intellectuals’ lives and careers, Unpredictable Agents resists such a deterministic account of complicity while recognizing the relationship between power and knowledge and the historical and structural conditions in which these scholars and their work emerged. How did these scholars encounter "America" in the first place, and what exactly constitutes the "America" they have experienced? How did they come to be Americanists, and what does being Americanists mean for them? In short, what are the actual experiences of Japan’s Americanists, and what are their relationships to "America"? Reflecting both the interlocked web of politics, economics, and academics, a
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