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MILITARY MISADVENTURES AND COLD WAR MASCULINITY Two photographs of Richard and his brother, David, are revealing of the ways Cold War militarism impacted their lives. The first photograph shows two boys, aged six and seven, dressed identically in striped shirts and overalls , using their left arms to steady their right shooting hands, with eyes peering down the top of their toy guns. Their guns look like crude replicas of semiautomatics or Colt .s developed after the western era and used in the postwar period. With looks of determination, especially in Richard, they aim at an unknown enemy. If this had been the nineteenth century, they might have been shooting at Native Americans, played out in countless fantasies of cowboys and Indians. If this had been World War II, they might have been shooting at “Japs.” But the photograph is dated May , at the beginning of the Cold War, suggesting that the enemy targeted by these boys were “commies” or other alleged subversives. The second photograph, dated July , shows the same boys, but now with revolver-style toy cap guns and holsters so large they cover their bodies from waist to knee. The big guns these boys carry symbolize the growing strength of the United States as a military, political, and economic world power. Their holsters, cowboy hat (on David), and six-shooters signify their play as a western fantasy. Scholar Michael Kimmel discusses how the explosion of western novels and films in the twentieth century enabled American men, struggling with a crisis in masculinity, to feel manly. By the late nineteenth century, increasing industrialization and urbanization alienated men from control over their labor and bodies and created a need for proof of manhood. Prior to that, writes Kimmel, the independent artisan, small farmer, or shopkeeper achieved a secure manhood through ownership of his work, craft, or body, and the landed gentry exerted power through landownership . Those who could not secure work or property could “go West, young man” to tame the wild frontier. But with the closing of the frontier in the late nineteenth century, manhood no longer achievable through physical expansion could still come through escape to a fictionalized frontier. The heroic cowboy of the western novel served to re-create a rugged manhood for Americans facing a “crisis of masculinity.”33 Although western heroes were notoriously White (another way for fragile manhood to control the encroachments of Reconstruction-era Black rights, women’s rights, and later the Civil Rights Movement), Japanese American boys could identify sufficiently with “I Was a Man by the Standards of the ’Hood”  America, in reality or as aspiration, for them to play out frontier fantasies of masculine power.34 Richard and David were merely boys playing, one might argue. The themes of their play, however, were not arbitrary, but created in a particular historical and gendered context. The Cold War and the masculine ideal produced in that era loom large in Aoki’s narrative, shaping his ideas about nation, work, masculinity, and family. Aoki begins this chapter as an enthusiastic soldier and ends as an increasingly class-conscious worker. Both experiences were shaped by Cold War imperatives. The events of World War II—territorial invasion, colossal killings, and nuclear destruction—created widespread fears, in the United States, Soviet Union, and throughout the world, of nuclear attacks and threats to national security. The Cold War was also an ideological struggle between capitalism and communism, fueled by national desires for global dominance. The United States responded with massive militarization and intense state repression of subversive activities, real or imagined.35 The unprecedented material prosperity in the postwar period could have inspired in the United States a sense of economic and political confidence. Instead, the paradox of the Cold War was that there was anxiety amid abundance . In the midst of plenty, the nation suffered a foreboding anxiety about external and internal threats to its still fragile and recently acquired world power. Recent events spurred this anxiety. The Great Depression hung over the nation as a reminder of how quickly prosperity could turn into despair. Japan’s bombs dropped on Pearl Harbor shattered America’s sense of invincibility . So despite its Allied victory and its growing world hegemony, the United States had a foreboding fear that Soviet threats from abroad and subversive threats from within would weaken the nation. Ongoing Soviet threats of nuclear annihilation, exacerbated by the USSR’s launching of the world’s first intercontinental ballistic missile and first human-made...

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