CC. The Larger Context

12. Popular images of Japan in Britain and the United States.

The fullest and most satisfying accounts of the emergence and effects of popular Western images of Japan before the Second World War are Lehmann (4), Yokoyama (7), and Littlewood (10). The most useful of other studies that turn to the subject or extend it to include the years after the war (as does Littlewood) are Akira Iriye, ‘Japan as a Competitor, 1895-1917’, in Mutual Images: Essays in American-Japanese Relations (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1975); Sheila K. Johnson, The Japanese Through American Eyes (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1988); and Charles Wordell, Japan’s Image in America: Popular Writing About Japan, 1800-1941 (Tokyo: Yamaguchi, 1998). John Dower’s War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War (New York: Pantheon, 1986) and Japan in War and Peace (New York: New Press, 1993) include analysis of the nature and effects of the imagery of racism in American representations of Japan. The collection of essays edited by Phil Hammond, Cultural Difference, Media Memories: Anglo-American Images of Japan (London: Cassell, 1997), is over-reliant on secondary sources and includes numerous errors of fact, and so must be used with caution.