Turning American: Popular Culture and National Identity in the Recent American Text of Japan

TERRY CAESAR Turning American: Popular Culture and National Identity in the Recent American Text ofJapan At one point in Jay Mclnerney's novel, Ransom, the hero, Christopher Ransom, thinks as follows: "He vaguely imagined Japan as ... a strange island kingdom at the edge of the world, a personal frontier, a place of austere discipline which would cleanse and change him" (73). Such an image constitutes a quite consistent one of Japan in the whole of American literature. Although it took time for the country to be what Earl Miner terms "a proper literary subject"—as distinct from "the Orient"— Japan has represented for generations of Americans a consummately timeless aesthetic or spiritual location (18). As such, Japan gradually emerges in the American text as not only free from the dangers of the rest of Asia (Ransom is on his way in the South China Sea and shudders to think of what happened to his friends on the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan) but, more importantly, free from the prédations of the self. To put the matter as crudely as possible : Americans go to Japan—customarily with the accent on its "austere discipline"—to be reborn.1 But of course it is not quite this simple, even in Ransom. For one thing, there is popular culture. A former Japanese girlfriend, for instance , accuses Ransom of taking a roundabout route from his place to hers because he deliberately wants to avoid the McDonald's in between ; she takes the restaurant to represent American popular culture, Arizona Quarterly Volume 58, Number 2, Summer 2002 Copyright © 2002 by Arizona Board of Regents ISSN 0004-1610 114 Terry Caesar and she counters it with the Japanese: "It spoiled your idealized Japanese vista—pagodas and misty mountains" (65-66). She has just wondered why Americans are attracted to "all the quaint and reactionary aspects of Japanese culture." Her example is karate, which is precisely what Ransom has been studying for the past two years. What is the relationship between McDonald's and karate? Or rather, how to account for a Japan in which both exist? The American text ofJapan—much in contrast to the far less significant text of India or China—has become absorbed in recent decades in the influence of American popular culture . It is as if Japan has come to represent to Americans a hope now fused with a fear: a country whose culture has traditionally marked a space of absolute difference from that of the United States is now one in danger of either being overcome by that of the United States or, worse, of absorbing that of the United States. Consider another example. Crickett Collins, the hero of David Galef 's TurningJapáñese (although set in the late 1970s, the most recent of the seven American novels set in Japan to be mentioned here), reflects at one point thus: "In a way he envied the few expats who'd been here since the Occupation: geisha, lacquered umbrellas, antique customs involving salt and rice, shopkeepers who used an abacus instead of a calculator , and levels of politeness verging on the risable. You could still see those scenes here and there, though they were dying out to the point where retro-chic was just beginning" (122). Turning Japáñese is troubled by American popular culture in a different way than Ransom; Japan in Galef's narrative appears to have no power to withstand it. Therefore, at one point, Crickett compares his experience to "some version of 1950s America. Even the rebellion against mass conformity was dated, from the motorcycle gangs called bosozoku to the massworship of James Dean" (112). But the novel is troubled, and for the same reason as Ransom: American popular culture suggests a realm by which Japan is divided from itself. At its simplest, Japan is a replica of America. At its most provocative, Japan becomes a zone that either has assimilated American popular culture or else recreated on its basis something even more strange and disturbing that eludes precise national determination. The representation of any country in the literature of another of course prompts the question of what is at stake in the representation— not so much with...