by Alisa Freedman, Professor, Department of East Asian Languages & Literatures
A CSWS Mazie Giustina Fellowship (2015) launched me on a new research path—preserving the personal stories of trailblazing women who changed education, US–Japan relations, and gender norms. This path has led to two books: Women in Japanese Studies: Voices from a Trailblazing Generation (Columbia University Press, AAS Past and Present Book Series, 2023) and Cold War Coeds: The Untold Story of Japanese Women Sponsored by the US Military (in progress). I have chosen to publish my research in books—arguably the most enduring and treasured form of preserving information. My books read more personally than most scholarly monographs.
Personal stories capture intellectual and emotional experiences omitted from public accounts. They disclose hidden histories and reveal genealogies of knowledge production. They show multiple sides of issues. They teach how intertwined the personal and professional are. Due to laws, social conventions, business practices, and additional factors, women have faced different choices in work and family and different access to education, jobs, and politics than people of other genders. Thus, my project is an intervention—a feminist act to provide testimonies that disrupt the dominant narratives codified by institutionalized power structures about things came to be.
Here, I explain my goals and process in preparing Women in Japanese Studies and offer advice for people who hope to compile similar collections of stories. This is the third CSWS Annual Review article about my storytelling project; the first discussed my initial findings (2016), and the second described the value of cross-generational conversations for research and teaching (2020).1 In addition, this article is part of a series of guides to academic publishing that I am preparing based on my experiences as a researcher, writer, teacher, and editor.2
Women in Japanese Studies: Voices from a Trailblazing Generation brings together thirty-two scholars in diverse disciplines to reflect on their careers and offer advice to colleagues. To highlight the educational contexts of the US and Canada and to reveal how notions of US hegemony have influenced the global field of Japanese Studies, all contributors, even those born or raised outside North America, earned advanced degrees in the US. We challenge the common narrative that Japanese Studies was established by men who worked for the US military after World War II or were from missionary families in Japan. This is only part of the story—the field was also created by women who took advantage of postwar opportunities for studying Japan. Women of this generation were among the first scholars to use Japanese sources in research published in English and the first foreigners to study at Japanese universities. Their careers benefitted from fellowships, educational developments, activist movements, and measures to prevent gender discrimination. They explain the impact of civil rights laws (i.e., Affirmative Action and Title IX) on women in academia and Cold War politics on the rise of area studies programs (exemplified by the National Defense Education Act of 1958). Yet there were instances when, due to their gender, women received smaller salaries, faced hurdles to tenure, and were excluded from conferences. We foster academic community by telling stories that resonate with members of other fields; for example, historians of higher education in North America and of gender in the twentieth century will appreciate our discussions of these topics. The women in the book represent the successful tip of a larger iceberg.
Women in Japanese Studies is not an institutional history, exposé, encyclopedia, or time capsule. It is not a defense of area studies, and it does not advocate for one methodology or set of theories above others. Nor is it hagiography. Instead, it is an opportunity to hear polyphonic voices of women who launched their careers during a historical moment characterized both by optimism that education could promote international peace, mutual understanding, and personal development, and by deeply embedded discrimination in the academy and other workplaces. As contributor Sumie Jones writes, “Unlike institutional histories, in which experiences and views are bound into a unified public story that ignores the edges and borders, [personal stories] are based on the premise that any part of the human community should be heard and that each story tells of an individual experience.”3
All contributors are well published in their disciplines, but this is the first time they are publishing essays about themselves for an expansive readership of students, teachers, scholars, and non-specialists. They write in their own words about how they became graduate students, professors, translators, authors, librarians, and administrators, and what their work has meant to them. They explain how they came to research and teach about Japan and dealt with institutionalized patterns of discrimination at universities. They discuss how their careers have influenced other parts of their lives: how they met partners and friends on the job, became mothers and raised families while living between countries, learned to be adaptable, stepped out of their comfort zones to gain skills and join groups, dealt with aggressions and worse, and coped with losses. Their passion for their work has driven them to succeed. Most of the book’s forty-four photographs are from the authors’ personal collections; more than merely illustrative, they show the people and things they value.
The book exemplifies the importance of memoirs in revealing who we are and how we want to be remembered. Generally speaking, a memoir is a first-person, non-fictional narrative told from the author’s perspective and grounded in personal experiences, knowledge, and feelings. Written with the benefits of hindsight, memoirs are contemplations of facts as they are remembered, rather than how they were actually lived. Thus, memoirs show how the present infiltrates the past. Women in Japanese Studies pioneers a new genre of “scholarly memoirs”—personal accounts with conversational titles and academic footnotes. According to Cynthia G. Franklin, academic memoirs “offer crucial insights into the academy because, in offering spaces that are more musing and pliable than those afforded by theory, they can display contradictions between the personal and political without having to reconcile them.”4 The political value of memoirs comes in using them as tools to initiate change.
Our scholarly memoirs focus on transformative interactions with people, places, and texts; they explain the significance of affective relationships in academia. We look inward and delve deeper to write more than the kinds of academic narratives we prepare for tenure and promotion and outline on our CVs; we tell stories that encourage readers to reflect on their own careers, that provide mentorship, and that thank the people who helped along the way. As Takako Lento writes, “All the contributors offered part of their lives in these memoirs not for themselves to reminisce but hoping to inspire or encourage the younger people who are on their way along or peering into a possibility of choosing the path deeper into our fields. Because of the times we happened to be born in, we groped our way into the untrodden territories of the Japan/Asian Studies field by chance, by fate, or by determination. All of us were consciously or unconsciously adventurous.”5
Women in Japanese Studies was inspired by interviews I conducted for my book Cold-War Coeds, which tells the personal stories of approximately 180 Japanese women who attended graduate school in the United States between 1949 and 1952 under the GARIOA (Government Aid and Relief in Occupied Areas) Fellowship Program. I interviewed around thirty recipients, over age ninety, about how this little-known Cold War diplomatic project changed their lives. I delve into a range of materials—military documents, university records, propaganda films, local newspapers, memoirs, guidebooks, and textbooks—to understand why and which kinds of women were given fellowships and how grants promoting American-style democracy gave rise to academic fields that critiqued the very political structures and social systems that had made them possible.6 I combine techniques of creative non-fiction, cultural studies, and history to tell the story of this unacknowledged force of women who used the system they found themselves in to do something extraordinary and to make their voices heard. The women in Cold War Coeds could not write their own stories due to health issues, lack of writing experience, language barriers, and other reasons.
Yet the generation of female scholars in Women in Japanese Studies were willing to do so. The book developed through extensive email discussions among women who bravely stepped forward to tell their stories in engaging, creative, scholarly, and rigorous ways. Our project was conceived as two related panels for the 2020 Association for Asian Studies Conference, which was canceled due to the COVID-19 pandemic. After the cancellation, panel participants continued to collaborate, turned our talks into essays, and invited additional contributors.
Women in Japanese Studies is inspired by projects like StoryCorps (begun with a recording booth in New York City’s Grand Central Terminal in 2003), whose mission is to “preserve and share humanity’s stories in order to build connections between people and create a just and more compassionate world.”7 It is part of a historical moment of telling, awakening, and accountability, promoted by movements like #MeToo and Black Lives Matter that create words for discriminations, aggressions, microaggressions, and violence. Public traumas like the COVID-19 pandemic, along with personal decisions like retirement, influence how we recount our careers and communities. In her chapter, Barbara Ruch tells the book’s student readers, “In short, I was not (and could not be) as you are able to be now. We have now at our disposal tools not dreamed of yesterday, and we can speak about experiences in words not yet coined.”
I undertook many labor-intensive roles in this unconventional book—including project organizer, director, editor, researcher, and writer—out of my admiration for the contributors, whose works I have used in my teaching and research. I am not a member of the generation profiled in this book but someone who has walked the trails they have blazed. I am indebted to them for cultivating the fields I have chosen and combined. I look to them as role models for how to be an engaged scholar. The book has been a turning point in my own career. It dovetails with new courses I am creating on “Women in Modern Japan” and “Japan and Diversity.” Contributors from Women in Japanese Studies have visited my courses and told UO students their stories.8 I will be a Fulbright Scholar in Vietnam (2024) to teach alongside and record the stories of a remarkable generation of young female professors there.
I hope Women in Japanese Studies encourages trailblazers of any gender, generation, and geography to tell their stories and provide broader, more personal views of histories. I hope the book starts larger conversations about gender and inclusion in the academy and educational interchange. The accomplishments and setbacks of this important scholarly generation teach us lessons about women’s roles in the workplace, household, and nation. This project shows that what we consider most meaningful about our experiences provides insight into larger issues concerning gender, nation, and education.
—Alisa Freedman is a professor of Japanese literature, cultural studies, and gender.
Endnotes
1 Alisa Freedman, “The Forgotten Story of Japanese Women Who Studied in the United States,
1949–1966,” CSWS Annual Review (2016), 12–14; “How I Gained 100 Japanese Grandmothers: Reflections on Intergenerational Conversation Inspired by CSWS,” CSWS Annual Review (2020), 26–27 and 29.
2 See, for example, Alisa Freedman, “Publishing in Academic Journals: Pro Tips from U.S.–Japan Women’s Journal.” U.S.–Japan Women’s Journal, special unnumbered issue 2022, 6-13, Project MUSE.
3 Sumie Jones, email message, March 4, 2020.
4 Cynthia G. Franklin, Academic Lives: Memoir, Cultural Theory, and the University Today
(Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2009), 2.
5 Takako Lento, email message, September 23, 2022.
6 My project was inspired by Professor Yoko McClain, who also came to UO through this program in 1952 and later led our university’s Japanese language program for around thirty years. In 2010, I asked Yoko to write a personal essay for Modern Girls on the Go: Gender, Mobility, and Labor, a conference and co-edited volume (Stanford University Press, 2013) supported by CSWS.
7 “About StoryCorps,” StoryCorps, n.d., https://storycorps.org/about/ (accessed January 5, 2023). I thank Christine Yano for discussions about StoryCorps.
8 Takako Lento joined my UO seminar, Women in Modern Japan, by Zoom in 2020 and 2021 to discuss her poetry and translations. Freedman, “How I Gained 100 Japanese Grandmothers,” 27 and 29.