Chapter 2. - From Peripheries to Transnational : African Americans in Japan’s Identity Formation, 1872–1940

Summary

Abstract

Before World War II, Japanese engagements with African American people and culture were not prompted exclusively by ideology. African Americans, colored yet modern and Western, offered the Japanese people a valuable gateway to forming their modern identity that transcended both the Western-centered and Asia-centered worlds. Above all, because African American people did not internalize Washington-centric values, they had the freedom to represent the transnational values of education, morality, performing arts, and sports to Japanese people beyond the stifling confines of US–Japanese relations. It is essential to unearth the richly diverse nexus between African American and Japanese people and illuminate how African Americans fulfilled the prewar Japanese desire to relate to the broader world.

Keywords: Vocational education, Moral education, Performing arts, Sports, Booker T. Washington

What did Japan learn from African American success and experience as the nation grew as a modern empire and sought its place and identity in the world? The answer is more than ideological inspiration, such as a transpacific (anti-white) racial alliance and an anti-imperialist Marxist and socialist alliance. Their multifarious and wide-ranging influence did not follow a single plot but changed nature according to the times. It is impossible to encapsulate African American influence on modern Japan's identity formation as having a singular nature. For example, Japanese educators in the Meiji period found the Hampton–Tuskegee model useful. After the Russo-Japanese War, as Japan became an aspiring imperial nation, Booker T. Washington became exemplary for the Japanese people. By the early Showa period, the Japanese had come to appreciate Black music, art, and literature as distinctive from mainstream Western culture. In the 1930s, the Japanese enjoyed emerging global cultures introduced to Japan by African American artists, musicians, and athletes.

The richly diverse nexus between African American and Japanese people was made possible thanks to the convergence of the idiosyncratic factors for both groups. One was the Japanese people's dual racial identity, which ran somewhat parallel to that of African American people: they were colored yet modern. Beginning in the latter half of the 19th century, the Japanese navigated the barrier of racial differences as that between “civilized” Whites and themselves as they pursued full-scale modernization or Westernization.