Abstract
By the end of World War I in 1918, the Japanese and Americans had contemplated each other for close to seventy years, from the time of Commodore Perry’s opening of Japan in 1853. In this time both developed strong images of the other. Though these images did not accurately or completely reflect the reality of the other, they were nonetheless powerful because they represented the building blocks of the unofficial U.S.-Japanese relationship. Although it would be inaccurate to say the United States and Japan went to war over mutually antagonistic images, perceptions of the other help us begin to piece together an explanation of tensions that made war seem inevitable by 1941.
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Notes
Analysis of the Reader’s Guide to Periodical Literature by James Uregen, October 2003.
Walter Lafeber, The Clash: U.S.-Japanese Relations Throughout History (New York: W.W. Norton, 1998), 84.
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Sheila K. Johnson, The Japanese through American Eyes (Stanford University Press, 1988), v.
A.B. Simpson, Larger Outlooks on Missionary Lands (New York: Christians Alliance Publishing, 1893), 551, 542.
Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Random House, 1979).
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Ibid., 105–106. Mari Yoshihara, Embracing the East: White Women and American Orientalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000). Stefan Tanaka, “Imaging History: Inscribing Belief in the Nation,” The Journal of Asian Studies, Vol. 53, No. 1. (February 1994), 24–30.
J.O.P. Bland, China, Japan, and Korea (New York: Charles Scribner and Sons, 1921), 318.
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Stephen King Hall, Western Civilization and the Far East (London: Methuen and Co., 1925), 30, 118.
Andrew Gordon, Labor and Imperial Democracy in Prewar Japan, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991).
Marguerite Harrison, Yellow Dragon and Red Bear (London: Brentano’s Ltd., Published in United States by George H. Doran Company, 1924), 40.
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Russell F. Weigley, “The Role of the War Department and the Army,” Pearl Harbor As History: Japanese-American Relations, 1931–1941, Dorothy Borg and Shumpei Okamoto, eds. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1973), 186.
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© 2007 Jon Thares Davidann
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Davidann, J.T. (2007). American Perceptions of Japan: Liberal Modernity or Feudal Militarism. In: Cultural Diplomacy in U.S.-Japanese Relations, 1919–1941. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230609730_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230609730_2
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