According to recent theories on the intersection of status and race, a combination of a rising power's pursuit of status and its encounter with the racial hierarchy at the international level does not bode well. This is the case because one can assume that such moments drive a rising power to be more aggressive. Given Japan's racial humiliation associated with the rejection of its racial equality proposal at the Versailles Peace Conference in 1919 and the Japanese Exclusion Act of 1924 in the United States, why did Japan concede to an inferior ratio in naval size and remain committed to the Washington naval system from 1921 to 1930? Why by the early 1930s did Japan profoundly overturn its status policy and not earlier? Drawing on critical appraisals of the theories that address a rising power's status and its racial anxiety, this article argues that Japan's orthodox foreign policy idea prioritized its higher civilizational status relative to the Western great powers and the rest of East Asia, which generated an elite consensus among civilian and military leaders on accepting the trade-off between reduced military capabilities and increased status from 1921 to 1930 despite racial humiliation. Japan's status-driven restraint persisted until this elite consensus collapsed and the political-economic consequences of the Showa Depression defeated social expectations.
Declining smoking rates in the United States during the 1980s forced transnational tobacco companies to look abroad for new markets. In East and Southeast Asia, they found countries, such as South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, and Thailand, where scores of smokers were walled behind protectionist trade policies. By utilizing Section 301 of the 1974 Trade Act, the United States threatened sanctions against these countries if they did not open their domestic markets to foreign tobacco. From 1985 to 1988, the Republic of Korea (ROK) slowly acquiesced to U.S. demands and liberalized its cigarette market, culminating in the signing of a Record of Understanding in May 1988. While the final agreement was a significant win for the United States, the bilateral negotiations that resulted in this deal have remain understudied. Utilizing archival documents from both the ROK and the United States, as well as industry documents, this article argues that the precedence of deals reached with Japan and Taiwan weighed heavily on the negotiations with South Korea, and that, despite common perception, the ROK government was able to secure important concessions in the negotiations.
This article explores the legal and ethical debates among U.S. leaders surrounding China’s Reorganization Loan of 1913. It argues that American empire in China justified itself not only on the idea that China was a lesser or unequal state, but also, paradoxically, on the idea that China was a coequal sovereign that “consented” to foreign involvement. The Reorganization Loan was a large loan that the Chinese government took out from a consortium of foreign banks. As a condition on the loan, China agreed to concede power to foreign advisors over the country’s salt administration, a major source of public revenue. The Reorganization Loan sparked debate among U.S. leaders. President Woodrow Wilson eventually demanded that U.S. banks withdraw from the deal, claiming that the loan trespassed on China’s independence. The controversy reveals the importance of the idea of “consent” in the operation of American empire in China. This finding deepens understanding of the legal structure of U.S. empire in China. It also reveals continuities between the international lending regime of “semi-colonial” China and the international lending regime that prevails today – where participants still struggle to identify the source and content of limits on the terms to which borrowers can “consent.”
This is a biographical study of Anton L. C. Portman, who played a central but underappreciated role in early U.S.-Japan relations. Portman had begun as a commodore’s clerk on the Perry Expedition to Japan in 1853 when his multilingualism unexpectedly thrust him into the spotlight as the Dutch-English interpreter for the Americans. In doing so, he made personal connections with members of the Japanese government. Capitalizing on those relationships, he later returned to Japan when once again serendipity provided him with the appointment of legation interpreter. Portman worked with the first four U.S. resident ministers over the course of ten years, providing diplomatic continuity amid changing leadership at the legation. The institutional memory and cultural knowledge about Japan that this accidental diplomat provided as ministers came and went was invaluable in the advancement of U.S. interests.
In 1870, Anson Burlingame, a renowned American abolitionist, orator, legislator, and diplomat, met a sudden and agonizing death in Russia while leading a diplomatic mission on behalf of the government of China. Newspapers around the world reported that 49-year-old Burlingame died of natural causes, but fragmented evidence that this article pieces together suggests something more sinister. An assessment of information in detailed accounts appearing in diplomatic dispatches, official reports, private letters, and medical journals in multiple languages indicate a likely assassination. Moreover, Burlingame’s symptoms, their severity, and progression from onset to death over six days, point to arsenic as the probable weapon of choice. This article argues that a conclusive determination is still possible more than 150 years later and is necessary for the sake of justice and a correction of the historical record.
Supermarkets in California Orange County’s Little Saigon are key sites in the negotiation of ethnic identity in Vietnamese refugee communities. Vietnamese supermarkets operate within global capitalist frameworks, while simultaneously serving as local spaces where community dynamics and ethnic identities are continuously redefined. This article outlines the economic, political, and social systems that structure refugee lives and undergird their right-wing and/or politically conservative positions. The study traces the supermarket industry post-World War ii and the role of Vietnamese refugees in the 1970s in developing Bolsa Avenue’s commercial strip. Conventional narratives of successful businesses and refugee assimilation, however, overlook ethnic stratification, as well as poverty and welfare dependence, among newer refugee groups. As Vietnamese Americans navigated global shifts in the late 20th Century, they anchored their claims for cultural authenticity in the transnational politics of South Vietnamese memory, ethnic heritage, and the American neoliberal embrace of multiculturalism. Histories of colonization and military intervention, however, often do not support these connections.
Chinese fiction on the 1905 Chinese boycott of American goods and trade appeared in response to increasingly racist American immigration laws and Qing government failure to safeguard the interests of overseas laborers. The boycott literature that Ku Shehui ( Bitter Society ) in 1905 and Biheguan Zhuren’s Huangjin Shejie ( Golden World ) in 1907 represent advocated a cross-class alliance between working- and middle-class Chinese and created what American philosophy professor Martha C. Nussbaum calls “poetic justice,” the public imagination of a justice that has real-life impact. This article first shows how literary genre and style form a fictional cross-class alliance, then examines the use of the fictional ocean steamship as a location for this alliance, and reveals how globalized markets doomed its destiny. It finally analyzes the utopian and settler colonizing incentives hidden in the blueprint. Reading the late Qing novels against American immigration law demonstrates a way to evaluate how a literature born of social crisis changed conceptions of class, race, gender, and nation.
During the U.S.-led occupation from 1945 to 1952, Japan was a legal and cultural refuge for queer men and women such as Donald Richie and Earle Ernst. Simultaneously in the United States, a “lavender scare” prompted a broad crackdown on suspected homosexuals in government and public life, while in Japan there was relative freedom and social acceptance. This article uses writings of the time and archival sources in Japan and the United States to examine the lives of key sexual exiles. Their cultural encounters led them to become influential scholars of Japanese literature, theater, and film; their erotic encounters led them to accept their queer sexuality; and their emotional encounters led them to envision a queer utopic future. Yet these encounters also triggered pushback and reflected inequalities of racial, political, and cultural power that existed in postwar Japan.
Abstract Historians long have overlooked the role of American scientists in the production of knowledge about Chinese society during the Cold War that they made available to other scientists and interested members of the general public in the 1970s. This article draws on the record of a delegation of prominent American computer scientists who visited the People’s Republic of China (prc) in 1972 and explores how they not only conveyed scientific knowledge, but also acted as observers of Chinese society and political environment and transmitted this knowledge to the American audience. The article thus highlights the role of scientists as agents of social knowledge production. While American social scientists were important agents of knowledge circulation, scientists also played the role of facilitating the growth of information about China’s society and its political situation through their first-hand observations. The reaction of American computer scientists to the arranged tour also reveals the limited effectiveness of Chinese leadership to use scientific visits as a means to showcase the successes of socialism in the prc.
