Tokyo Life, New York Dreams: Urban Japanese Visions of America, 1890-1924 (review)

Mitziko Sawada’s transnational, cross-cultural migrant study reminds us how important a carefully researched historical analysis can be in generating new lines of thinking. This ground-breaking book offers many provocative insights and sensitive thumbnail portraits of a pioneer generation of hi-imin (elite non-immigrants or non-laborer visitors such as students, professionals, and merchants) Japanese men who came to New York City during the decades surrounding the turn of the twentieth century. By focusing on these striving Meiji-era Tokyojin (people from Tokyo) males smitten with tobei netsu (crossing-to-America fever), Sawada has made a significant contribution to bridging East Asian and Asian American history. At the same time, she has written a history resonant with post-1965 middle-class migrants.

In this history, New York City is the imagined masculinized destination of personal, cultural, and political economic desire. Using a variety of Japanese language sources, especially success literature, novels, magazines, and guidebooks, Sawada contextualizes this New York fever within the Meiji patriarchal transformation of rural social relations into the Tokyo-centered, corporate hierarchies devoted to capitalist competition. New York became the romanticized promised land of various male escapes—from limited educational access, individual conformity to the family and state, social inequities, strained gender roles, ad infinitum. The actual experience of living and working in New York City, of course, proved to be a rude awakening. Most men ended up working as servants, found little time to study, and encountered racism. Those who stayed constituted the beginnings of a small but important Japanese New Yorker community.

Tobei netsu in Westernizing cosmopolitan Tokyo became an important cultural mechanism that reformulated the Japanese male personality by recoding Western, Protestant capitalist ways into Japanese terms (wayo) for middle-classness (churyukaikyu). The inflection of Japanese qualities into Western forms of modernity (kindai) enabled aspiring individuals to compete in universalized capitalist terms. The embrace of Western ways led to a state-imposed curb, for example, on male and female public bathing so as not to offend visiting Westerners and later to the intense male exploration of renai (individual “free” love), which began to significantly shift everyday social life. Hence, the rise of Japanese capitalist modernity played a critical role in generating a cultural space of desire among the Tokyojin to change their relationship to traditions and reconstitute themselves as wannabe New York cosmopolitans.

Tobei netsu encouraged aspiring Japanese men to dream of leaving and finding their place in the construction of a new imperial Japan. Not only would they learn the ways of Western power and wealth to bring home, but they could also become the outposts of Japanese power in a new pan-Asian empire. Such an ideology of overseas Japanese hi-imin was distinct from the lowly, rural agricultural imin (contracted skilled and unskilled emigrant laborers) who capitalists recruited to Hawaii, the U.S. Pacific coast, Brazil, and Peru. The process of becoming middle class in Japan, therefore, not only stimulated settlements overseas, but brought the island nation into a globalizing set of capitalist-state relationships. The Japanese state and elite consistently thought itself better than the stumbling Chinese empire and people. Thus the Japanese government voluntarily curbed its own immigration to the United States with the Gentleman’s Agreement of 1907 to protect the continued admission of students, merchants, and scholars, who became a critical component of an industrial policy premised on expansion into China, Korea, and the Pacific. In this way, the reconstituted modern, urban Japanese male became the harbinger of Japanese-U.S.-Pacific dynamics and policies which would forecast Japanese imperialism in the years to come.

Indeed, what Tokyo Life exemplifies is the importance of understanding the interplay between the culture of the Japanese middle class and the capitalism of urban port cities in the proliferate exchanges of people, ideas, and profit. The Japanese state policy to modernize created an entrepreneurial space in which the cottage industry of American dreaming...