Event

Early impressions of Japanese visitors to the United States were naive – and usually positive. The country and its people often appeared to them exotic, confusing or opaque but rarely threatening. By the turn of the twentieth century, however, their observations became more complex, tinged with criticism, resentment and often hostility. Some have characterized this as the beginning of Japan’s “love-hate” relationship with the United States but that hardly does justice to the ambivalence of Japanese perspectives on the United States during the American Century.  It oversimplifies their range, and it ignores the fact that positive and negative perspectives often went hand in hand. As one postwar visitor noted, “Can someone close to us sometimes be our enemy and our conqueror, sometimes our lover and our teacher, and moreover our dominator too? . . .For the Japanese, the United States of America is a country just like such a person.”  The talk will explore the ambivalence reflected in accounts of visitors to America as it emerged as a hegemonic world power and as a society that often awed and appalled them.

* Co-sponsored by CEAS and the Japan America Society of Greater Philadelphia