I
I don’t know America very well. Needless to say, I’ve never set foot on American soil nor made a systematic study of American literature. All I know about it is from the several Americans with whom I’ve spoken, the section of America represented by the military bases, and the image of America as reflected inside of us through what I’ve seen on the film screen.
In sum, this is not America itself but a mere secretion made up of the country’s existence and daily life. Yet I feel I must write about certain things regarding America that have not often been discussed. I fully understand from my trip to Czechoslovakia last year how foolhardy this is. A discovery does not depart from conclusions that are already glimpsed, but rather must always be based on the inexpressible details that lead up to them. It is not necessarily the case that one understands what one sees, but one understands less what one doesn’t see.
Nevertheless, Franz Kafka wrote the novel Amerika without seeing America. Among Kafka’s works, which dwell constantly on rejection and protest, this is the one book filled with light and hope. While this is not so-called “America,” it is a resource that cannot be overlooked when thinking about America. In the novel, America begins on a ship, which is an artificial maze made of iron. As always, the protagonist fears becoming forever lost on the ship—it is, after all, America—but he is able to safely disembark. Next he meets the successful uncle who lives in a skyscraper. This uncle’s behavior is informed by the principle of absolute freedom. The uncle, who embodies the unity of these two incompatible principles of freedom and the absolute, is a kind of god of contradiction, and the two characters do not get along at all. Finally the protagonist is mercilessly, but certainly not maliciously, thrown out. (Although one senses that this heartless contradiction is a reflection of the ancient city of Prague, Kafka’s birthplace, most Europeans who come in contact with America seem to be bewildered by it. Graham Greene refers to this in his remark that “innocence is a kind of insanity.”)1
Many Europeans seem to be bewildered by America. In many cases, its contradictions appear as confusion and are thus seen as strictly negative. As one might expect, however, Kafka foresaw what lay ahead. Of course this remained a prediction: although he tried to depict a shining world, the light of that world remained strangely empty and even carried a scent of death. Light could be found but this was a world without substance, and so nothing existed to receive this light and shine. The novel was discontinued prior to completion. Perhaps this was because Kafka lacked the necessary details to use as a stepping-stone to discovery.
During our respective journeys of six weeks, I deeply experienced the importance of detail while traveling through Kafka’s native Prague, whereas Sartre discovered the virtual absence of detail in his trip to America, which contrasted with the wealth of detail to be found in the Old World. Even if Kafka had gone to America, then, would he still have been unable to complete Amerika? Precisely because Sartre saw the reality of America despite the fact that he found no details there, he reached the same point that Kafka had previously. Sartre explains very implicitly that the conformism of America symbolized by its roads and the individualism symbolized by its skyscrapers are only superficially incompatible, since they coexist three-dimensionally. Yet he cleverly avoids mentioning anything further. Or rather, actually, he refuses to do so: “New York moves Europeans in spite of its austerity. … Yet, for Frenchmen of my generation, it already possesses a melancholy of the past. … [Skyscrapers] were the architecture of the future, just as … jazz [was] the music of the future. … [Yet jazz is] in a process of slow decline. Jazz is outliving its day.”2
If Kafka had gone to America, would the conclusion of his novel have been, as always, one of eternal rejection? It seems that Sartre, at least, would reply “yes.” Yet this question remains for me a troubling mystery. What could America be concealing behind its contradictions?
II
Sartre’s point concerning the absence of detail in America is unsettling and yet familiar. If the reader lacks the ambition to write the conclusion to Kafka’s novel—in other words, if he wishes to stop at the level of the problematic raised by Sartre—then ignorance of detail might not be such an obstacle.
That is fine, as far as I’m concerned. For what I want to, and indeed must, write about is not America itself but rather my own discovery of America as a problematic—specifically America as a kind of “criminal” vis-à-vis Japan. Concerning such matters as the trial, attending to the family left behind, helping find work upon release from prison, etc., it is best to leave these to the various interested parties. Like a detective in a mystery novel, it is quite possible that I’ll achieve my goal simply by deducing things from the criminal’s footprints and items left behind at the scene of the crime. Even if that is the only evidence I have, the present situation compels me to do this.
In Japan, fortunately, the criminal’s—or what appear to be the criminal’s—footprints and items left behind at the crime scene can be found everywhere. For example, the Czech writer Adolf Hoffmeister visited Japan the other day as a representative of the PEN Club. When I asked him if Japan was actually as he had expected it to be, he replied evasively that he wasn’t sure yet, but that there was something about Tokyo that at least superficially reminded him of an American city, particularly one on the West Coast.
Of course the experts will regard this remark as based merely on trivial customs, and that regardless of whether one supports or rejects America, it does not provide a clue to this debate. But I wonder if it is not precisely such narrow-minded fastidiousness that lies behind the confusion and vulgarization that characterizes the manner in which intellectuals view America. A clever criminal has a trick of scattering about many false clues as a way of concealing the real ones. Yet these real clues can be discovered only by first examining the false ones. I, for one, find such matters of custom to be of considerable interest.
In terms of a nation’s customs having such mass influence on other nations, no example really comes to mind except that of America. Purely on this basis alone, can’t we say that customs are important in thinking about America? It was for this reason, no doubt, that old-fashioned intellectuals found this topic too much to handle and ended up vigorously ignoring it. American culture has clearly been ignored. It is seen as a nuisance for both the left and right.
In his essay “Nihon chishikijin no Amerika zō” [The Image of America on the Part of Japanese Intellectuals], Tsurumi Shunsuke writes the following: “Apart from the very brief years at the end of the Edo period and the immediate postdefeat, Japanese intellectuals have been slightly embarrassed to go against fashion and view America as a topic of intellectual seriousness. Even at present, we are invariably influenced by America in our daily life through deep entanglements of interests, and yet we intellectually ignore America as much as possible. This pose of being attached in the lower body while forcing oneself to turn away with the upper body is common among Japanese intellectuals.”3
Tsurumi explains that this attitude is due to the inner workings of a sense of inferiority on the part of these intellectuals. I certainly agree with his assessment, but is that really the only reason? Although this may well amount to the same thing, my sense is that the style of thinking on the part of Japanese intellectuals is hardened by European thought, or a commonplace form thereof. These intellectuals readily agree with the phrase about “Chaplin, who couldn’t become Americanized even after forty years,” but they don’t ask whether it is not precisely this Chaplin that is most American. According to Sartre, however, it is also characteristic of American intellectuals to openly criticize their own country, something which Europeans find difficult to understand. Nevertheless, “Do not imagine that any of them … believe that they are speaking ill of America. For a Frenchman to denounce an injustice is to speak ill of France, for he sees France in terms of the past and as unchangeable. For an American, this is to prepare a reform.”4
In other words, American intellectuals have not yet lost their transformational thought. Can we not then say that the Chaplin who was driven out of America is at least as, if not more, American than the America that drove him out?
Yet Sartre also writes of those people who constantly ask themselves if they are irreproachably American. As he points out, however, these people are not necessarily of a different type than those who wish to escape from Americanism. Doesn’t this ambivalence—the “antinomy of anguish”—somewhat resemble the attitude of Japanese intellectuals toward Japan? Japan and America are seen as extreme contrasts, situated in a crude oppositional relation, but common elements may actually exist between them. It seems to me that the tendency on the part of Japanese intellectuals to neglect America is connected, at a deeper level, to their tendency to neglect Japan.
Seen in this way, one could list numerous commonalities between Japan and America. For example, what do you imagine when you read the following passage? “The striking thing is the lightness, the fragility of these buildings. The village has no weight. … Then [the European] is struck by the lightness of the materials used. In the United States stone is less frequently used than in Europe. … Even in the richest cities and the smartest sections, one often finds frame houses. … Everywhere you find groups of frame houses crushed between two twenty-storied buildings. … The result is that in the States a city is a moving landscape for its inhabitants, whereas our cities are our shells.”5
Although this appears to be a description of Japanese cities, it is actually a passage from Sartre’s travel account in America. Of course one can regard this as a rhetorical or actual coincidence. In the case of Japan, this problem is typically attributed to poverty and lack of planning. In wealthy America, however, other reasons must be sought. These reasons have less to do with lack of planning than the fact that future planning has become too much a part of everyday life—in negative terms, Americans remain stuck in their own dreams. As a result, buildings forever end up as merely comfortable campsites. Don’t the Japanese also harbor within themselves this same overly functionalist notion of buildings?
Countless other commonalities between Japan and America can be listed here as well. But I will have to address this problem later. Now I would like to return to the discussion at hand and reconsider these infamous American customs.
III
“There are good things even in America”: Following Khrushchev’s critique of Stalin, these words have often come to be heard among so-called “leftist intellectuals.” Of course this is not a bad thing. Compared with the intellectual brokers, who discuss the relation between western art and Japanese conditions or preach at great length about man while nevertheless pretending to see neither anticommunism nor economic subjugation, these words are sensible and smart. It must be said, however, that the substance of these good things remains extremely dubious. There seems to be no discernible difference here with the views of Nakaya Ken’ichi, who could not in any way be called a leftist. Nakaya makes the following remark in the round-table discussion “Chibeishugi no teishō” [A Call for Americanology]: “Ultimately, Japanese people know about America only through such trivial and partial phenomena as film and jazz. Because of the scarcity of solid empirical research, there is no true knowledge of America. … There has been a clear tendency to look down upon the extremely empirical methods of England and America, although recently things have gradually improved.”6
In other words, the good things about America include, for example, a pragmatic way of thinking, and this is treated as clearly distinct from the country’s trivial customs. Otherwise one would gradually go back to the America of automation and cybernetics, or perhaps that of Faulkner, Hemingway, and Melville, and then slightly more leftist to the America of the New Deal and Whitman, until finally one ended up at the words “Reminiscing of the past and the woven banner of American independence.”7
This song about bamboo spears and woven banners is of course refreshing and memorable. And it must certainly be the point from which we think about America. Insofar as we grasp the substance of this woven banner merely impressionistically or conceptually, however, it is in no way linked to the America of chewing gum and Superman. “Oh America, where art thou?”
Even anticommunists cannot directly oppose customs. They can only politically fight back by introducing such neologisms as “capitalism of the people.” Yet Americanism comes to be forgotten in the shadow of this debate. It appears to friend and foe alike as nothing more than a frivolous, superficial form of popular culture. Tsurumi Shunsuke’s reference to the “pose of being attached in the lower body while forcing oneself to turn away with the upper body” is much less conspicuous among intellectuals than among those unintellectual bureaucrats who have begun calling for a revival of moral education.
Must we then link Kafka’s novel with a sense of disillusionment and grow used to such descriptions of the Statue of Liberty as that offered by the protagonist of The Quiet American: “an emblematic statue of all I thought I hated in America—as ill-designed as the Statue of Liberty?”8
My view is slightly different.
America permeates everything from the woven banner to chewing gum, from Poe to Hollywood and television, from Eugene O’Neill to slapstick and musicals, from Whitman and Jack London to Mickey Spillane and King Kong. Unless we understand how deeply America permeates everything, it will be impossible to conceive of the real America—and even of the America-like shadow that infests everything around us.
Regardless of their leftist or rightist tendencies, the inability on the part of intellectuals to link together the woven banner and chewing gum is due simply to the fact that they are bound by certain fixed ideas. Even our Americanologist Nakaya Ken’ichi (I do not refer to him as pro-American since he lacks the courage to recognize American customs) attempts to deceive us by replacing Americanism with something Anglo-Saxon in speaking of the country’s good points with reference to England and America. In other words, the cause of this prejudice is the narrow-mindedness that I warned of earlier, for Japanese intellectuals associate the rational spirit strictly with the logic of the Old World. That sounds nice, but in fact the basic reason is the status consciousness of intellectuals. They simply accept as a priori such value judgments as the distinction between classy and vulgar, refined and coarse. Or rather, their inability to question this produces a kind of blind optimism.
Even the parallel lines that never intersect in Euclidean space freely touch and separate in non-Euclidean space. The two things seen by a certain system of thought can become one thing when seen by another system of thought. Of course the reverse is true as well. Thus we can be fairly sure that a site exists in which the notion that the woven banner is tied to chewing gum exists alongside another notion in which Superman is not necessarily tied to American imperialism. Wouldn’t this site precisely be called the infrastructure of Americanism?
IV
There exists one myth in America: a unique kind of legend of a liberated and free “people.” This myth seems to be fundamentally different from the image of democracy in the Old World. Of course present-day America is the world’s most powerful imperial nation, it has deported Chaplin as well as lynched a black minister over the issue of mixed schooling, and even Americanologists are forced to offer pained excuses: “Apart from the question of whether this is good or bad, the fact is that America is currently establishing a semiwartime framework, and Japanese people should know this. While the Japanese believe that this is a time of peace, the Americans believe they are in a semiwartime framework. A major discrepancy can be seen here.”9 For these reasons, America has been taken to task by progressive intellectuals, who argue that imperialism has even distorted its concept of freedom, but it seems that this concept contains other discrepancies as well.
These discrepancies perhaps derive from its origins. Democracy in the Old World was revolutionary in weakening power, but in the New World it has had the opposite meaning: “Very generally, the absence of a European class system, vast and plentiful nature, and thus relatively easy possibilities for independent farmers. On the other hand, the need for cooperation among people in order to found a ‘society’ in the wilderness, and then the demand for voluntary participation in power in order to secure that cooperation. Or rather: not simply voluntary participation, for even compulsory participation was necessary. Attendance at town meetings was obligatory, as was attendance at general (colonial) meetings.”10
Seen as a laboratory event, this really must be described as a perfect democracy. Rather than a moral ideal, the principle of equality in political participation appears as an actual means of livelihood. Yet I add the disclaimer about this as a laboratory event because, despite the fact that success was perfect microscopically at the level of livelihood, a correspondingly macroscopic worldview was utterly lacking. Ultimately, a powerful capitalist class rose up, weaving its way around this excessively optimistic blind spot in which “society” was equated with “government.” Interestingly, this capitalist class did not attempt to destroy the budding local system of direct democracy; rather, it sought to concentrate power by means of a “pseudo-communalization of the Union,” which made a show of strengthening that direct democracy. Thus it worked to extend the microscopic sense of unity between “society” and “government” to the level of the central government while preserving the myth of the people.
This situation created within Americans an innocent or naïve sense of democracy as well as a fatal weakness, for as long as they were protected on a microscopic level (or given the illusion thereof), they remained unaware on a macroscopic level of how they were being led around by the nose. Intellectually, for example, Americans achieve fine results at a microscopic level, but these results are ultimately flawed: “[Pragmatism] possessed many good qualities that were overlooked by European socialism, which derived from German idealism and was clearly systematized by Marxism. At the same time, however, it shared the particular blind spots of American socialism in failing to grasp both the development stages of world history and the economic forces that drive history independently of individual will.”11
These facts might appear to signify the ingenuity of the ruling class and the stupidity of the masses—and such aspect certainly exists—but one can also say that the “myth of the people” is so strong and deeply rooted among the American masses that it has not been controlled by even the world’s largest monopoly capitalist. Even if this myth is appropriated by imperialism or takes the form of an isolated and suffocating democracy, it unquestionably remains a myth of the people and is in no way a myth of the ruling class. Here one also finds the foundation that produces the apparently grotesque new amalgam of “capitalism of the people.”
The “myth of the people” lives on and reaches full bloom in American customs as well. Even in Hollywood films, all the American heroes are “nameless people”: a jazz star’s success story, the expert gunslinger in westerns or the reformed juvenile delinquent. The French avant-garde painter and self-proclaimed elitist Georges Mathieu visited Japan the other day and pretentiously remarked, “Americans, I am a reactionary like you!” This was a serious miscalculation on the part of someone who only had a European notion of reactionism. Such manner of speaking would not be accepted by Americans. Things won’t go well unless one speaks like the protagonist Lonesome in the film A Face in the Crowd: “Shucks, I’m just a country boy.”12
There may be critics who contend that such matters are merely part of the drug culture created by the media. I don’t necessarily disagree: “In the process of communicating, each person is transformed into a receptor of the messages transmitted by the media, and the opportunities for response are remarkably limited.”13 At the same time, however, as Tsurumi Shunsuke states, “The media does not necessarily cause the masses to become more passive.”14 If the media contains an objective law, then it must not be forgotten that the masses also have such a law. The film Celui qui doit mourir [He Who Must Die], directed by Jules Dassin after he left America, is interesting in its hinting of this relationship. Common villagers are selected by the village elders as characters in the Passion play, to be performed on festival day. These villagers are ordered by the priest to identify with their various characters, such as Christ and his apostles. While trying to do so, they become leaders of a rebellion and soon find themselves aiming their guns at the village elders.
Nevertheless, I have no intention of becoming a believer in this “myth of the people” and singing praises to the good health of Americanism. One can certainly see here the projection of the media. There is an overflow of myths that have lost their creativity and become mere shells of themselves. At the same time, however, it should not be forgotten that the will of the people is also reflected in the media. American imperialism contains in its pocket a sleeping lion. This lion is in no way lulled to sleep by chewing gum or westerns, for these things are themselves the very form of the lion. It is not the case that revolution in America can begin only by renouncing chewing gum and westerns, as liberals imagine. On the contrary, revolution will begin precisely through a revolt on the part of these things themselves.
V
It is thus utterly impossible to endorse Sartre’s remark that “jazz is outliving its day.” One might conceivably understand these words as expressing a general view that everything produced by Americans will become a mere shell of itself. As an assessment of jazz itself, however, this view seems all too liberal, which is unlike Sartre.
It seems to me that nothing displays so fully as jazz the contradictions and energy concealed within the “myth of the people.” However, my point is not that it is the wild primitivism of black culture that excites those who are drained by the city. Such a situation was extremely popular even among European modernists following World War I. This phenomenon is significant in and of itself, but it seems that the question of jazz is more deeply rooted in the infrastructure of the masses.
First, jazz is now a custom. The masses took this new form that derived from no mother country and rapidly made it into a custom, and one can appreciate the efforts involved here in breaking with the past and bonding with the present. These efforts correspond with the will to create a unified America: “He is an American, who, leaving behind him all his ancient prejudices and manners, receives new ones from the new mode of life he has embraced, the new government he obeys, and the new rank he holds” (Crèvecoeur).15 Americans don’t originally exist, they are created. And the people themselves must subjectively participate in that creation.
Second, this new form was, of all things, taken from the black slaves. It seems unnecessary to explain what blacks signified to Americans in the past. They were merely putty in sealing up the gaps in this cracked “myth of the people.” This reveals a horrible contradiction, and also functions as powerful evidence behind the theory that this myth was a sham. Leaving this point aside for the moment, however, how did these dirty Negro songs become popular songs among whites? The active rhythm of this music, of course, perfectly fit white sensibility. But it was more than that. Although this might seem contradictory, whites did not actually feel a sense of superiority as the dominant race. There is no better example of a subject race culture being embraced and fully assimilated with so little resistance. It is here that one finds the populist expression “myth of the people” as the basic trait of American culture. This expression is exactly the same as Lonesome’s laugh as he dashes down the path toward becoming a television star while pretending, “I’m just a country boy.”
While whipping blacks in reality, America raised the world of jazz into a magnificent art. I happened to see a performance of African dance by the Katherine Dunham Dance Company and felt that it was much more intense and melodically creative than the Bolshoi Ballet, which retains something of the patrician about it. A comparison between Dunham and Bolshoi is interesting in several ways. In the Soviet Union, people receive things from an exalted past and attempt to breathe new energy into them. In America, by contrast, people receive things from a lowly past and assimilate them into themselves. Although both countries actively seek out new energy, Soviet culture remains at a very human (in a conceptual sense, and thus very psychologistic) level, whereas America breaks down and reconstructs that energy more mechanically. (Even in the Soviet Union, however, there are of course exceptions such as Eisenstein and Mayakovsky.)
In sum, everything about American culture emerges from its roots in the “myth of the people,” and this culture is so fundamentally populist that it has become fully assimilated to American customs. While it is easy to define American culture as “imperialist decadence,” such definition loses sight of everything about America. Of course it is the decision of each individual whether they wish to neglect America, just as it is the decision of each whether they wish to ignore the Soviet Union. Yet if one recognizes that the Soviet revolution was not limited to the single nation of Russia but rather signified a revolt against world capitalism, then the particularity of American culture (i.e., populism) must also be openly seen as one hint or prediction of the world’s future, even if it is limited by being a laboratory event. This is unrelated to the question of whether one is procommunist or anticommunist. Socialism and capitalism are at war, not Russians and Americans.
Numerous other examples can be cited that reveal the populism of American culture. For example, the roughness and humor of its literature; the technocratic leanings and craftsmanship of its writers as well as the diversity of their backgrounds; the immediacy of expression; the extreme ups and downs in status. The populism of American culture is clearly inscribed in both its positive and negative aspects.
Even in the context of the works, there is the hard-boiled issue in mystery novels and the semidocumentary issue in film. Fields that were traditionally undervalued in realist art theory have come to emerge with the support of American traits. I have, for example, already mentioned Jules Dassin. With his films The Naked City and Brute Force, Dassin was regarded as a writer with merely an excellent eye but no real thought—in other words, as someone who did not escape the limits of Americanism. Yet in contrast to the directors of Italian realism, who also sought a new form of immediacy and were considered artistically superior but whose works lost their theme and so devolved into melodrama, Dassin unearthed new themes from the site where Italian realism had lost theirs. In this way, he was able to make the groundbreaking work Celui qui doit mourir. One must resist the conventional view that good work cannot be done in America. Dassin would still be a brilliant American no matter where in the world he works. What is important to note is that one could read the birth of Celui qui doit mourir as anticipated by the semidocumentary techniques that emerged out of Americanism. These techniques embodied new critical methods. They represented new evaluative criteria that could foretell the energy of the American people, even in gangster films.
Finally, I shall end with just one more typical case—the musicals that have achieved popularity even in Japan these days (I too have gotten in on this). As goes without saying, this uncertain new art has its origins in pure spectacle. In this sense, it is somewhat similar to the emergence of Chaplin. In his book Gendai Amerika bungaku shuchō [Major Currents in Contemporary American Literature], Donald Richie describes musicals as “an important compromised success,” but they have certainly been an important compromise.16 This is because musicals represent a compromise with popular sensibility, as they are broken down to the mechanical level (i.e., the level of universality) that I discussed earlier. Musicals do not always center on music, as the name suggests, since they are based on the actions of everyday life. Given that they represent a very universal sensibility, characters have come to include not only individuals but crowds and neighborhoods as well. Thanks to George S. Kaufman and Morrie Ryskind’s Of Thee I Sing, musicals suddenly broke free of melodrama and became art. Here as well it is noteworthy that success was achieved not by escaping popular or mass appeal but rather by making inroads into the universality of the masses.
The proximity between creativity and the popular in American art might be a weakness, but it is even more a source of infinite possibility.
Yet it seems that Americans themselves are not necessarily aware of this point. This no doubt is one of the self-contradictions of the “myth of the people.” The other day I met John Dos Passos, whose bargain basement anticommunist convictions I found quite irritating, if entirely predictable. It finally got to the point where I wanted to say, along with Graham Greene’s protagonist, that “innocence is a kind of insanity.” But let’s not engage in simple judgments here. While such insanity is of the utmost danger, it also conceals a positive energy that can be understood only through the criterion of Americanism. For the time being, though, let’s leave Americans to the Americans.
The more serious problem concerns the American presence that permeates throughout Japan. Many thoughtful people have described this presence as the result of America’s imperialist policies as well as the workings of Japanese comprador politicians, but are there really no other reasons? Might it be possible to conceive not only of external factors but also of corresponding elements that already existed latently within Japan, and which were triggered by American proximity?
Surprisingly, one can cite numerous concrete similarities between Japan and America. Differences, of course, are plentiful and easier to see. I won’t compare individual instances here, but it is not necessarily the case that differences outnumber similarities. We can imagine this simply by considering the speed and depth with which Americanism spreads throughout Japan today. Just as western European liberalism proves to be an impediment in assessing American culture, isn’t there a risk that a simple criticism of this culture might result in suppressing the energy that one has now finally begun developing within oneself?
Let’s abandon ready-made concepts and confront reality directly. Without trying to fully explain the formative process of Meiji authority by the concept of European-style democratization, we should ask whether new discoveries can be made by relating it to American particularity. It is entirely possible that what appears positive might actually be insignificant, and that what appears insignificant might actually conceal valuable energy.
It is said that the CIA is happily applauding the Americanization of Japan. To be sure, this is a bit worrying. Yet matters concerning the Japanese people should be left to Japan, and it is not worth discussing the CIA’s assessments and judgments. It is not only Mephistopheles who “would do ever evil, and does ever good.”17 It may be that those CIA officials are Europeanized and haven’t noticed the populism contained within Americanism.