Ann
Waswo
Ann
Waswo is the Nissan Lecturer in Modern Japanese History and Faculty
Fellow (elected 1981) at Oxford University. She was Director of
the Asian Studies Centre,1991-94. An American national, she currently
serves as Sub-Warden of St. Antony's College. Her work centers on
the social history of modern Japan, from the mid-nineteenth century
to the present: in particular, she has focused on landlord and tenant
issues.
She has published, among others, Housing in Postwar Japan: a
Social History (2001); Modern Japanese Society, 1868-1994
(1996); and Japanese Landlords: the Decline of a Rural Elite
(1977). One notable book for the general reader on Japan is The
Soil by Nagatsuka Takashi, a novella on rural life in Meiji
Japan, which she translated in 1989. She is now co-editing a volume
of essays on farmers and village life in twentieth-century Japan.
Dr. Waswo received her M.A. and Ph.D. from Stanford University.
She is fluent in Japanese.
Interview: June 17, 2002
Let's start with the most obvious question: What sparked your
early interest in Japan?
Growing up in southern California in the late 1940s/1950s, for
starters, in a seaside community (Newport Beach) that was committed
to keeping the Japanese out. The then-recent war certainly played
a part in that commitment, but the view among old-timers there that
Japanese competition in the early postwar years had destroyed the
Newport fishing fleet was another important factor. I didn't much
like Newport Beach, although the weather, the swimming and the school
system certainly were very good, and so I suppose that my dislike
of the community kindled a curiosity about its enemy, Japan.
What made you pursue the country academically as a historian?
At Stanford (class of '61), after doing pretty poorly as a student
of physics, I ended up majoring in American history—I probably
would have opted for the history of science had Stanford had a program
of that sort back then—and chose the 'international relations
of the Far East' as my mandatory non-western history course. It
soon became clear that a lot of the notions I had picked up about
Asia in general and Japan in particular were simply not true. That's
what I was learning in my American history classes too, of course,
but the discovery was somehow more invigorating so far as Asia was
concerned, and the issues seemingly a lot larger.
Stanford was about to open its study center in Tokyo (now the inter-university
center in Yokohama), government grants were available for the study
of such 'neglected' languages as Chinese, Swahili and Japanese,
and the anti- Security Treaty demonstrations of 1960 were headline
news. I had nothing better to do after graduation, so I applied
and was accepted. At the outset I just wanted to have a look for
myself. I very definitely had no intention of doing a Ph.D. in Japanese
history, much less becoming a Japanese historian.
So what led to your change of heart?
On reflection, I think I was 'handled' pretty craftily by Thomas
Smith, subsequently my thesis supervisor, when he took over from
a somewhat other worldly philosopher as director of the center in
1962. I had already decided to stay on a second year, because I
was just beginning to get a viable grip on the language, and had
secured an extension of my 'cold war'/National Defense Act funding
to permit that. I had also decided that I must become either the
NY Times correspondent for East Asia, so that I could tell it like
it was to the folks back home, or the US ambassador to Japan, mostly
so that I could invite some of my Zengakuren friends to the embassy
for drinks. Smith informed me that I would have to follow some other
career first if I ever wanted to be US ambassador to Japan (According
to him, if I joined the US Foreign Service I would at most get two
tours of duty in Japan, and my knowledge of the language and familiarity
with the country would disqualify me to represent US interests properly
as ambassador) and that if I wanted to start out as a stringer for
the NY Times, I might well enjoy it for a time, but what would I
do if I didn't make it to the top? Why not go back to Stanford and
take your qualifying exams for the Ph.D., he suggested. Then you'll
have options. Seemed sensible to me, and by the time I passed those
exams I was all fired up to do thesis research. And then to get
an academic position so that I could do more research...
To make a long story considerably shorter, I think it's fair to
say that I drifted into Japanese studies out of steadily increasing
curiosity (and a suddenly discovered passion for sushi). It wasn't
until the 1970s, when Japan had risen to economic superpower status,
that studying the country became at all mainstream.
Could you please tell us a little bit about your current projects?
This [I am assuming you have your list of questions to hand]
is a somewhat embarrassing one. I have done little else in the past
three years or so than finish a book titled Housing in Postwar
Japan: A Social History and co-edit a book on Farmers and
Village Life in Twentieth-Century Japan, and now that I have
finally sent the typescript of the latter off to our publisher I
am looking for a bit of respite. I haven't at present the faintest
idea what I will study next. Maybe something else on postwar social
change? Maybe back to the Meiji/Taishô eras? Or perhaps the 'Oxford
novel' I have been musing about for years, one of whose major characters
will be a middle-aged Japanese woman.
Do you see a recurring theme throughout the body of your work
and in the questions you ask about Japan?
I see very little in the way of common themes in the body of
my work, other than attention to what might broadly be defined as
the social history of modern Japan. I think too much has been written
about Japanese elites, and too little about how the majority of
Japanese have lived and have viewed their lives. I suppose it could
be said that I have tried to fill to some major gaps in western
images of modern Japan.
What did you choose to translate the Japanese novel, The Soil?
How did you come upon the manuscript?
The honest answer to this question is that I had one weekend during
which to draft a research proposal for sabbatical leave from the
University of Virginia, where I was then employed; I had been advised
some years previously by the doyen of rural Japanese studies, Furushima
Toshio, to read Tsuchi, and had dutifully bought a copy,
recently reprinted, but had not yet read much of it it. So I did
a quick read of some other bits and decided I would propose to translate
the whole. I had no idea at the time how taxing, or interesting,
translating any Japanese novel into English would be, but I am glad
in retrospect that I opted more than a little recklessly for this
project. The novel is very definitely not a neglected masterpiece
of literature, but it is a fine ethnography, and I think it contributes
to a better understanding of Japan's past.
You once called yourself a "barefoot empiricist." What does that
mean and do you think the approach is suitable for public policy
studies as well as history?
I had just been confronted for the first time with 'the prisoner's
dilemma' and some theory based on a cattle rancher in the USA that
had a bearing of sorts on trust. I am not against theory per se,
but I think it should be used very cautiously in studies of the
past, and reined in more than a little in studies of the present.
I accept that social scientists have an obligation to test theory,
and ideally to generate it, but I do wish more of them would do
so in plain English. I also wish more of them would take a reasonably
'time-sensitive' approach to their subjects. As I tell my Oxford
undergraduates when they start reading books on Japan's postwar
economy and politics, 'Watch out. Don't take the present tense verbs
you encounter as definitive of Japan's long postwar era. These are
just social scientists defining reality as they saw it when they
did their research. Always consider the date of publication and
allow for the possibility of change.' It seems to me that a lot
of controversy in public policy studies about Japan and other countries
is generated by the application of a theory of the moment to the
data of the present, and could be avoided if just a modicum of allowance
for evolving circumstances over time were made. That doesn't mean
that all scholarly studies of Japan were correct at the time they
were published. Far from it: some have been downright stupid or
considerably off the mark. But too many social scientists just dismiss
their predecessors as mistaken (or worse), without due regard to
the historicity of the phenomena under examination.
As a social historian who is interested in untangling complexities,
I confess that it is rational choice theory that causes me the greatest
anguish. Its application to the past obliterates all the nuances
of lived experience that I and other scholars of my persuasion have
sought to illuminate. By the way, it was a political scientist who
first described me, just a tad dismissively, as a 'barefoot empiricist'
and I adopted the characterization just a tad defensively. I would
prefer to describe myself as a 'lightly shod empiricist' who can
still feel the ground beneath her feet while enjoying a bit of structured
support.
Is there a relationship between academic focus on area studies
and the subject country's economic performance? Put another way,
with the implosion of Japan's "bubble economy," has there been a
demonstrable shift away from Japan-centric area studies towards
other regions, in your view?
Definitely. I think there has been a marked correlation between
the perceived economic and/or geo-strategic importance of any non-western
country and the number of persons studying that country in the West
since the late 1960s, when 'area studies' of various sorts coalesced
into separate entities within many universities. There were certainly
benefits to that coalescence, not least among them obtaining the
necessary funding for language courses and promoting inter-disciplinary
study of the area concerned, but there was a downside as well in
the form of the 'ghettoization' to which you refer. Area specialists,
no matter how solid their disciplinary grounding, were generally
thought of as 'second rate' by their purely disciplinary counterparts
(who seemed unaware that they too studied an area, the modern west),
and the more theoretically grounded the discipline—e.g. economics
and, to a lesser extent, politics—the more easily area specialists
could be dismissed. Some area specialists certainly contributed
to their marginalization by writing books and articles laced with
so many foreign terms that only their fellow area specialists could
understand them. That was certainly the case with a lot of writing
about Japan past and present, replete as many of those writings
were with bakuhan taisei or kazoku kokka this and
keiretsu, nenkô jôretsu or habatsu that.
Is the "Japanology industry" dead?
Having negotiated my way back to Japan, let me say that I would
have no regrets if the "Japanology industry" were well and truly
dead. So much celebratory and denunciatory fluff was produced in
the 1980s and early '90s that it gave Japanese studies a bad name,
not to mention making it increasingly difficult for those of us
who might have something useful to say to find publishers for our
work unless we could claim that it had a bearing on the secrets
of Japan's success or 'inherent' defects, as the case might be.
Nor would I be particularly uneasy if undergraduate and graduate
degree programs in Japanese studies were phased out of existence.
In theory, at least, enough groundwork should by now have been laid
and enough 'relevance' of the Japanese case to an understanding
of a host of issues demonstrated for the integration of Japan into
'mainstream' curricula. But there would still be a necessity for
real expertise on Japan, including a research command of the language,
within a range of academic departments, and I am not entirely sure
how or whether that will be assured. 'Flying over the country in
daylight' and relying on English-speaking informants or English
translations of the works of Japanese scholars is not the way forward!
2001 was an eventful year for many reasons, both economic and
political. So much so that the Washington-Beltway now seems concerned
with more pressing issues than Japan. Publications in English on
Japan seem to be suffering as a result; the Japan Economic Institute
(JEI) in Washington D.C. phased out its operations and the Japan
Quarterly ceased publication in December 2001, to name just
two examples Can Japan studies survive in a non-subsidized environment?
I guess you could say that I'm prepared to regard country/region-specific
area studies as a transitional phenomenon, essential to 'mapping'
unfamiliar terrain and certainly requiring subsidies and other incentives
for a time. Thereafter, they should sink or swim on their own, as
should be the case with all academic programs, or be integrated
into discipline-based departments, allowing resources to be concentrated
on new, less geographically defined 'areas' of concern.
What are reading right now? In general, what do you like to read?
I am about to make a start on the ca. 6 linear feet of unread
books in a corner of my workroom, and I will begin with a few books
by former students, most of them in my possession for well over
a year. In general, I prefer non-fiction to (recent) fiction, but
I always buy novels—preferably thrillers—for long-haul
flights.
