scholarly journals My Fate is in Your Hand

2017 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 48-59
Author(s):  
Alex Cateforis
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
American Art ◽  
The United States ◽  
Japanese American ◽  
Art World ◽  
Pacific War ◽  
The People ◽  
The Pacific ◽  
American Artist ◽  
Artistic Achievement

Yasuo Kuniyoshi (1889-1953) was a Japanese-American émigré artist active and successful in the United States from the mid-1920s until his death. However, despite his artistic achievement and integration into American culture, Kuniyoshi’s life and fate turned tragic as the Pacific War erupted, which intensified extreme racism toward the people of Japanese heritage and increased nationalism in the United States. Kuniyoshi’s 1950 painting My Fate is in Your Hand reveals the artist’s dual and conflicted identity, his social and political fate in the U.S. after Pearl Harbor, and suggests that a year before his death, the artist no longer controlled his fate. A majority of white Americans and the conservative American art world rejected him as an Asian “other.” Kuniyoshi grew weary, stressed, and anxious, an artist caught between success and rejection and his split Japanese and American identity. In this essay, I argue that each major portion of the work’s title— “My,” “Fate,” and “Your Hand”— reveals the symbolic meaning of the painting and suggests the artist’s inner state in 1950. I also analyze four of Kuniyoshi’s earlier works to provide insight into the meaning of My Fate is in Your Hand and to tell the story of the Japanese-American artist.  

China and the United States: Business, Technology, and Networks, 1914–1941

2020 ◽  
Vol 27 (2) ◽  
pp. 119-141
Author(s):  
Wu Lin-chun
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Chinese American ◽  
The United States ◽  
Scientific Management ◽  
Business Organizations ◽  
Pacific War ◽  
World War ◽  
The Pacific ◽  
The World ◽  
Business Technology

This paper studies the activities of American enterprises, technology, and related business organizations and engineering groups in China from the outbreak of World War i to the Pacific War and explains how these activities helped establish connections between China and the world. It borrows the concept of “networks” from Professor Sherman Cochran’s extraordinary book titled Encountering Chinese Networks, but broadens the scope of the term to include activity at the level of management and competition, as well as placing Sino-American relations in transnational perspective. Using a multi-archival approach to examine China’s major attempts at internationalization, this article focuses on the cases of the American Asiatic Association, the American Chamber of Commerce of China, and the Association of Chinese and American Engineers to show how these networks played important roles in the development of Chinese-American relations. It also discusses the issues of standardization, “scientific management,” and professionalism of entrepreneurs and engineers in influencing network making.

Coda

2019 ◽  
pp. 177-182
Author(s):  
Wen-Qing Ngoei
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Southeast Asia ◽  
The United States ◽  
Southeast Asian ◽  
Pacific War ◽  
Soviet Power ◽  
Domino Effect ◽  
The Pacific ◽  
At Home

This coda concludes the book by examining how the United States and its Southeast Asian allies responded to the fall of Saigon to communist forces in 1975. It shows that the regimes of the arc of containment did not proceed to topple like dominoes to communist factions at home, or bow to Chinese or Soviet power, but instead elected to reinforce their ties with Washington. Equally, U.S. policymakers discerned this “reverse domino effect” across Asia (or so they termed it) and unreservedly renewed American economic, political and military commitments to their allies in the region. Given that the arc of containment underpinned imperial transition and the rise of U.S. empire in Southeast Asia, the coda contends that reversals of the domino theory, not its fulfilment, were the true prevailing motif of American interference in the region’s fraught decolonization after the Pacific War.

War and Welfare Policy in Japan

2002 ◽  
Vol 61 (2) ◽  
pp. 417-435 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gregory J. Kasza
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Welfare State ◽  
Welfare Policy ◽  
Well Being ◽  
The United States ◽  
Public Welfare ◽  
Pacific War ◽  
Welfare Provision ◽  
The Pacific ◽  
The Welfare State

The pacific war (1937–45) marked the most innovative period in the development of public welfare in Japan, comparable to the 1880s in Germany, the 1908–14 era in Britain, and the 1930s in the United States. Wartime welfare policy set precedents that shape many aspects of welfare provision in Japan to this day. It is a cruel paradox, but war, despite its immediate, catastrophic effects on human well-being, has played a major role in the evolution of the welfare state.

“The Pacific Era Has Arrived”: Transnational Education among Japanese Americans, 1932–1941

2003 ◽  
Vol 43 (1) ◽  
pp. 39-73 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eiichiro Azuma
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Urban Areas ◽  
American Woman ◽  
The United States ◽  
Japanese Woman ◽  
Japanese Americans ◽  
Japanese American ◽  
Study Program ◽  
Native Land ◽  
The Pacific

Looking back on the two years at Keisen Girls' School, I am so grateful for the opportunity to have been able to study here…. Our teachers have taught us that it was mistaken if we simply aspired to mimic the ways of Japanese woman. Cognizant of our special position as Americans of Japanese ancestry, we must instead strive to promote the U.S.-Japan friendship. Furthermore, we must adapt the merits of the Japanese spirit [that we have acquired here] to our Americanism. Back in the United States, we will dedicate ourselves to the good of our own society as best possible citizens, cooperating with Americans of other races and learning from each other…. Such is the mission of the Nisei as a bridge between Japan and the United States—one that we have come to appreciate [through our schooling in Japan].Just about two years before Pearl Harbor, a young Japanese American woman took this pledge to herself when she completed a special study program in Tokyo, Japan. Although the shadow of war loomed increasingly over the Pacific, thousands of American-born Japanese (Nisei) youth like her flocked to their parents' native land during the 1930s to pursue cultural and language learning, as well as formal secondary and higher education. In any given year following 1932, an estimated 1,500 young Nisei students from North America resided in Tokyo and other urban areas of Japan. Often referred to as Kibei after returning to their native land, these young women and men attempted to embrace their ethnic heritage and identity during their sojourn in Japan with the support of Japanese educators.

The Eagle has Landed: Groping for a Korean Role in the Pacific War

2014 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 5-33
Author(s):  
Mark E. Caprio
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
The United States ◽  
Pacific War ◽  
World War ◽  
The Pacific ◽  
Southern Korea ◽  
History Of ◽  
Military Support ◽  
First Americans

The first Americans to arrive in Korea following Japan’s surrender at the end of World War II brought with them a quartet of Korean soldiers that U.S. officials had recruited for the Eagle Project, the most ambitious American effort to use Koreans in the Pacific War that punctuated a long wartime effort to enlist Allied diplomatic and military support for overseas Koreans. In response, U.S. officials had insisted that Korean exiles in the United States unify their efforts. This condition referenced squabbles among Korean groups in general, with the most transparent being those between Syngman Rhee and Haan Kilsoo. While Korean combatants on the Asian mainland managed to gain some U.S. support for their cause, recognition of their potential came too late in the war for them to help liberate their country. Ultimately, the United States turned to the Japanese and Japanese-trained Koreans to assist in this occupation. Reviewing the history of both Korean lobbying and U.S. response to it provides the opportunity to ask whether better handling of the Korean issue during World War II could have provided U.S. occupation forces with better circumstances to prepare southern Korea for a swift, and unified, independence.

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