Japan and the United States are an odd couple. The two societies have had an enduring mutual fascination and have suffered powerful antagonisms that led to war and to major trade conflicts. Michael Auslin's book about cultural exchanges between Japan and the United States focuses mainly on the fascination, and the cultural history mentioned in the subtitle relates mainly to the history of formal organizations of cultural exchange that Auslin describes in the latter two-thirds of the book.
The first chapter explains the history of Japan's restricted contact with the outside world during the early modern period and America's expansion across the Pacific, and the second chapter describes the cultural interactions of Americans and Japanese from the initiation of diplomatic relations between the two countries in the mid-1850s until the end of the nineteenth century. Chapter 3 explains how the earliest cultural exchange organizations in Japan evolved out of groups of students who had studied in the United States, and it describes the founding and early activities of such groups as the Japan Society of New York and the America-Japan Society of Tokyo. Chapter 4 takes the narrative from roughly the 1920s through the beginning of the Pacific War, and includes an interesting description of the baleful influence on formal activities of cultural exchange that was caused by the Immigration Act of 1924, which strictly limited Japanese immigration to the United States. It also describes the increasing involvement of Japanese cultural exchange organizations in the shaping of foreign opinion through propaganda and more subtle manipulations of the media. Chapter 5 describes how the activities of cultural exchange organizations expanded rapidly and took on new forms during the first half of the Cold War, including the creation of the Fulbright Program in America and International House in Japan. Chapter 6 describes the creation of the Japan Foundation in the 1970s and the proliferation of nongovernmental exchange organizations. It also continues the discussion started in chapter 5 about the growing influence of Japanese popular culture in the United States. Scattered throughout Auslin's discussion are many references to important politicians, business leaders, scholars, and other dignitaries who participated in cultural exchange organizations.
The strength of the book lies in its firm grounding in archival sources that explain the history of cultural exchange organizations, and it will appeal most to readers who are interested in that history. Auslin devotes little attention to theoretical works about globalization or the history of international organizations, although the notes include references to secondary sources on those topics. The book does share an affinity with Akira Iriye's work on international organizations, however, and to a lesser extent with Joseph Nye's work on “soft power,”Footnote 3 and it will likely appeal to readers who are acquainted with the work of those scholars.
Questions about the relationship between culture and the state lie at the heart of the book, but it does not probe deeply into the complex relationship between culture and politics. Auslin frames his discussion of cultural exchange by distinguishing between “private actors” and “the state, which ran its own cultural outreach and often sought to use private cultural exchange for its own purposes” (pp. 4–5), but the distinction between public and private is often blurred because many of the people involved operated in both capacities and because the cultural exchange organizations served multiple and contradictory interests. Auslin describes, for example, how the “private” American Friends' Association (Beiyū kyōkai) became “enrolled in official service” through the activities of its leader Kaneko Kentarō, who, acting at the request of the Japanese government, sought to calm American fears about Japan's rising power during the Russo-Japanese War. Auslin writes that Kaneko, in his efforts to influence American opinion, “transcended mere power considerations by asserting that Japan's aim ‘. . . [was] to introduce to the distant and long-neglected East the blessing of Western civilization’” (pp. 94–95). According to this formulation, assertions of Asian backwardness, Western cultural superiority, and Japanese cultural superiority based on an appropriation of Western civilization transcend power considerations. One can see a similar view of culture in Auslin's explanation of the way that the Cold War influenced cultural exchange organizations in the postwar period. Auslin writes that during the Cold War, proponents of cultural exchange in Japan and the United States “shared an unquestioned commitment to the U.S.-Japan relationship, one that was largely defined as cultural and animated by a cosmopolitan impulse. Neither group was overtly political, nor did they have any pecuniary interest deriving from their exchange activities” (p. 217). For Auslin, then, even during the unabashedly political years of the Cold War, cultural exchange remained fundamentally outside of politics.
While Auslin's book sidesteps many issues concerning the relationship between politics and culture, it nevertheless provides a wealth of information about the formal organizations of cultural exchange between Japan and the United States. By tracing the formation, proliferation, and changing purposes of these organizations, Auslin provides readers a window into the influence the organizations exerted on mutual perceptions and formal relations between Japan and the United States during the twentieth century.
