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of Black Studies

The History of Black Studies in Japan: Origin and Development

Tsunehiko Kato
Journal of Black Studies 2013 44: 829
DOI: 10.1177/0021934713517236

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517236
research-article2013
JBSXXX10.1177/0021934713517236Journal of Black StudiesKato

Article
Journal of Black Studies
44(8) 829­–845
The History of Black © The Author(s) 2013
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DOI: 10.1177/0021934713517236
and Development jbs.sagepub.com

Tsunehiko Kato1

Abstract
In the pre-war days, the most of Black studies in Japan were politically
exploited to justify the national imperialistic policy. In the post-war period,
however, with the start of the Cold War, Japan Black Studies Association
(JBSA) was established in 1954 by the people who believed that the American
democracy was problematic as long as Blacks were segregated in the South.
From the middle of the 1950s and the 1960s, to study the struggles of Black
people for freedom in the world encouraged JBSA members in their efforts
to be part of social movements for democratic transformation of Japanese
society. And from the 1970s and the 1980s, when the agenda of women
liberation was on the table in Japan, JBSA focused upon the works of Black
women in the world. And the works of Caribbean women writers as well as
those of Black British writers also came into view.

Keywords
Afrocentricity, African religion, Caribbean culture, Caribbean languages,
history, immigration, Americas

When W. E. B. Du Bois wrote at the turn of the century that “the problem of
the twentieth century is the problem of the color line,” he was referring not
only to the racism in the United States but also to the 19th-century world
where the peoples of color in Africa, Southwest Asia, South America, the

1Ritsumeikan University, Kyoto, Japan

Corresponding Author:
Tsunehiko Kato, Ritsumeikan University, 56-1 Kitamachi Tojiin Kitaku, Kyoto 603-8577, Japan.
Email: tsunkato@ir.ritsumei.ac.jp

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830 Journal of Black Studies 44(8)

Caribbean, and Asia were being colonized by the Western White race
(Chandler, 2012, p. 4). And Japan which started to catch up with the West in
the middle of the 19th century was driven by a seemingly similar worldview:
in 1899, Tomizu Hirondo who was a professor of Law and a fervent national-
ist at Tokyo Imperial University, after describing in his book1 how Africa was
being divided by the Western powers and how the railways and telecommu-
nication systems were being constructed there by them, wrote that

a few years ago, Africa was called the dark Africa, but it would be the source
of wealth in the next decade and it would be the white race that would gain
profits from it, not the yellow race. Yellow race do not think big like white race
and unless they do so, they would become slaves of the white race themselves.
[And he concluded the book by saying that] the active stages of the 20th
centuries will be China and Africa. (Furukawa & Furukawa, 2004, p. 80)

Tomizu’s view of the world seems quite similar to that of Du Bois in rec-
ognizing the threatening power of White race to the Black and Yellow races,
but in reality they were quite contrary to each other because what Tomizu
recommended Japan do in the face of the threat of White domination of Asia
was to replace White imperialism with Yellow imperialism, that is, the colo-
nization of East Asia by Japan. In other words, Tomizu did not question the
idea of racial exploitation and domination, which Du Bois, of course, did.
And unfortunately it was this racialized imperialistic view of the world that
drove Japan into the Russo-Japan war (1904-1905) over the domination of
Korea and the concession in Manchuria. What permeated the subsequent
military-led aggressions into Manchuria and then in China were this racial-
ized imperialism, which clashed head on against the Chinese people’s nation-
alistic resistance as well as the U.S. open-door policy to Chinese market. And
domestically, this military expansionism took the form of militarism under
which all the dissenting voices were denounced as unpatriotic and were
totally suppressed from the middle of the 1930s.
It is under such a political framework that the Black studies started and
developed in Japan. Furthermore, this development can be seen in the period
after the Russo-Japan War when the children of the Japanese immigrants in
San Francisco were segregated into the Oriental School together with Korean
and Chinese children in the wake of the Great San Francisco Earthquake in
1906. This was a part of the “Yellow peril” in California that had hit the
Chinese immigrants in the late 19th century. American attitudes provoked a
strong protest from the Japanese government, but in 1908 the Gentlemen’s
Treaty was concluded to restrict the Japanese immigration into the United
States. Then in 1913, a bill was passed in the Congress to ban the

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Kato 831

landownership of Japanese immigrants. It was under such circumstances that

the Japanese delegation at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 made a pro-
posal to ban racial discrimination in the international community. Woodrow
Wilson was the chair of the committee. The Japanese appeal was rejected
because the conference was unable to gain a unanimous vote. Three years later
in 1921, the Immigration Act was enacted in the United States to make it virtu-
ally impossible for further Japanese immigration to the United States. This
series of discriminatory measures against Japanese immigrants drew the atten-
tion of Japanese scholars, journalists, and politicians to the root cause of the
discrimination against Japanese, namely, the overwhelming discrimination
against the Black people in the United States. And in the next few decades
until the end of the War, many books on Black people were written and many
works of Black literature were translated into Japanese. Unfortunately, most
of the Japanese in Black Studies in those days supported the Japanese military
expansion into China and their works were politically exploited as the justifi-
cation for the Japanese aggression into China (Furukawa & Furukawa, 2004).
The most typical case of the political exploitation of Black studies for war-
purposes was that of Hikita Yasuichi (1890-1947) who witnessed the Harlem
Renaissance and became a very well-known figure as Prince Hikita in the
Black community. He joined National Association for the Advancement of
Colored People (NAACP) and personally knew many of its officials and other
well-known figures. That is why he was instrumental in inviting such famous
Black writers as James Weldon Johnson in 1929 and W. E. B. Du Bois in 1936
to Japan (Furukawa, 2004). Yasuichi also translated one of Walter White’s
(1924) novel, The Fire in the Flint, without the permission of White. Of course,
White, the head of the NAACP, was critical of Japanese aggression into China.
The book described the Black lynching in the South and it was published in
1935 and 1937, at a time when the U.S. public opinions raged against the
Japanese invasion of Manchuria and China. The book sold well in Japan due to
the active support of the Japanese government that found the book politically
useful because it exposed the cruel treatment of Black people in the American
South (Furukawa, 2004). Yasuichi was later hired by the Japanese Consulate
General in New York in 1938 and defended the Japanese aggression into China
in the Black community meetings in Harlem until he was investigated by FBI
and came back to Japan in 1942. According to Roi Ottley, Hikita Yasuichi in
one of such meeting, explained the Japanese invasion of China as an effort to
rid China of Whites and to modernize it in the spirit of Asia for Asians in 1941
(Furukawa & Furukawa, 2004).
However, there were other strong but isolated voices: Katayama Sen
(1859-1933) at the time of the Russo-Japan War denounced the war as impe-
rialistic and said that “We as socialists are against the war nor do we

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832 Journal of Black Studies 44(8)

recognize national boundaries nor racial differences because we are all

human brothers” in his speech at the Second International Socialist Congress
in Amsterdam (Furukawa, 2004, p. 79). Katayama had attended Mary Ville
College, a small Black college in Tennessee for a while before he took a
degree from Yale Divinity School. And Katayama became friends with
Claude McKay, a Black writer while they were working for The Liberator, a
radical magazine. When McKay visited Moscow to attend the Fourth
Communist International Conference in 1922, Katayama who was close to
Lenin, helped McKay in many ways. In the Conference, McKay was asked to
talk about the plight of Black people in the South and during the discussion
session, McKay was very impressed with the candid way Katayama as an
officer of Comintern in charge of racial issues, criticized White comrades
from the United States for their unconscious prejudice against Black people
due to their upbringings, and asserted that if they really wanted to understand
Black people, they should learn about them and be educated among Black
people like he was educated among them. (Furukawa & Furukawa, 2004).
There were also liberal and leftist trend in American literature. Takagaki
Matsuo’s (1946) posthumously published book, The Background of the
American Literature2 was a case in point. The book was a collection of arti-
cles published in English Studies from 1931 to 1933 (Yoshida, 1946). In the
seventh chapter, he gave a detailed account of the slave trade and slavery
based on the works of social scientists and then proceeded to describe the life
of William Lloyd Garrison, an abolitionist.
And it was the work of Takagaki that the founder of the Japan Black
Studies Association (JBSA) Nukina Yoshitaka (1911-1985) referred to as one
of the pioneers of Black Studies in Japan in pre-war days (Nukina, 1976,
1986). And one of the early works of Nukina was on William Lloyd Garrison
and the abolitionist movement. It seems obvious that there was continuity
between them.
Nukina belonged to a generation of intellectuals who were against the
military aggression into China, but whose voices were suppressed under the
growing militarism. They were Marxist-Liberal progressive intellectuals who
joined the new wave of the democratization movement in the post-war period.
Nukina began learning Esperanto when he was only 12 years old on his
own (Onishi, 2013, No. 1914/5692) and since then he continued to work on
it. When he went to Naniwa High-School (present Osaka University) under
the old school system, he joined a social science association, a Marxist ori-
ented study circle organized in high schools and colleges and he rebelled
against the military training officer in the class (Akamatsu, 1986; Kobayashi,
1986). He entered Kyoto Imperial University in 1932 and majored in
American literature. He witnessed how law students made protest at the time

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Kato 833

of Takigawa Incident in 1933 (Akamatsu, 1986), where the liberal law pro-
fessors at Kyoto Imperial University were expelled from the University. The
Takigawa Incident was a crackdown upon liberalism by the government at
the start of the military aggression into the North China. It was during his
undergraduate days that he came upon Takagaki’s articles mentioned above
(Nukina, 1986). In 1939, he entered graduate school at Kyoto Imperial
University and started to study Thoreau and his relationship with the aboli-
tionists. While attending graduate school, he was appointed as a professor at
the English Department in the First Kobe Girls High School in 1941. And he
helped the dangerous illegal anti-war political activities as a fellow-traveler
(Akamatsu, 1986; Kobayashi, 1986). But he was enlisted in the next year and
went to Java as an army civilian employee, and came home after the war.
Within 6 months he was hired as a professor at the Kobe Municipal College
of Foreign Affairs that was promoted in 1946 to a college and renamed as
Kobe City University of Foreign Studies under a new educational system.
And he soon published two articles on William Lloyd Garrison and the abo-
litionist movement in the college journal (Furukawa, 1986). By this time he
was one of the leading Esperantists in Japan and established one of Esperanto
Association branches in Kobe. Based on the experience of it, he decided to
establish JBSA (Onishi, 2013, No. 1921/1953). But what made him decide to
do so? It had much to do with the post-war political, social, and cultural
situations.
First, it is related to the changing political situation where, with the begin-
ning of the Cold War, the General Headquarters (GHQ) seemed to have
changed its character from the liberator of democratic forces in Japan in its
first few years to the oppressor of people’s democratic movement.
During this early period after the war, many people including Japanese com-
munists regarded the “American occupation forces as the army of liberation.”
But with the beginning of the Cold War, MacArthur began to see the rise of the
communist-led labor movement as a threat to the purpose of the occupation pol-
icy. As a result of that, the MacArthur decided to ban the planned historical
General Strike of early 1947. Ordered to stop the strike by a GHQ general, the
strike leader Ii exclaimed “What kind of democracy is this?” This incident
became the “turning point for left-wing anti-Americanism.” “By 1949, ‘Red
purge’ had become one of the fashionable new terms of the occupation” (Dower,
1999, pp. 255-272). And with the beginning of the Korean War, Japan became the
front base of the U.S. military. And the “reverse course” was set in motion which
led to the establishment of Japan Self-Defense Forces in 1954.
Under such a new situation, the issue of what to think of America and
American democracy became crucial for peace-loving Japanese people and
Nukina knew that Black studies was one of the keys to the answer.

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834 Journal of Black Studies 44(8)

Second, in spite of American democracy becoming increasingly problem-

atic, Nukina was alarmed that most of the Japanese seemed to be possessed
with a blind admiration of America and American democracy. Nukina
recalled with bitterness that the superficial cultural Americanization was
going on everywhere. “Some people even asserted in a discussion in the
English newspaper that the shortest way to democratize Japan is for Japan to
become part of the US after Hawaii.” “To those admirers of America, ‘democ-
ratization’ meant ‘Americanization.’ Indeed, the post-war Japanese who were
desperate due to poverty and hunger without any hope for the future, were
overwhelmed by the material wealth of America and almost wished to be
Americans” (Nukina, 1986, p. 6).
Third, Nukina (1986, pp. 4-5) was keenly aware that even the word
“black” was not familiar to ordinary people and except for a few intellectuals
like Takagaki, even highly educated people were totally indifferent to or did
not take seriously the “Negro question” or were deeply prejudiced against
Black people because of the propaganda spread by the White colonizers in
the 19th century.
Fourth, in spite of those discouraging cultural tendencies, within 6 month
after the defeat, there emerged a national cultural organization called Bunren,
literally Democratic Cultural Alliance (1946-1950). Bunren was an umbrella
organization established by the initiative of the Cultural Branch of Japanese
Communist Party, under which many progressive intellectuals and artists
organized or participated in various cultural and academic circles and asso-
ciations. Those people who joined the Bunren branches shared the “anger
against the war and barbaric cultural policies during the war days” and were
inspired to create a new democratic Japanese culture on their own. The
Esperanto Association Nukina organized in Kobe in Hyogo prefecture was
one of the local branches of Bunren. Nukina was very impressed with the
open and democratic spirit of the Bunren branch activities where professors,
students, and ordinary citizens got together at the meetings and freely made
discussions. This open, democratic and egalitarian spirit of Bunren, as he
recalled, was a deliberate alternative to the authoritative cultural organiza-
tions during the war and it became an organizational model for JBSA when
Nukina established it 4 years after the demise of Bunren (Nukina, 1986). And
following this spirit, there was no president or chair of JBSA until much later
and JBSA was and still is open to anybody (Akamatsu, 1986).
Fifth, through the involvement in Bunren activities, Nukina came to know
a small bookstore in Kobe where he could obtain progressive English publi-
cations about Black people earlier than anybody else in Japan. “Without the
positive influence of Bunren and the small bookstore,” he wrote, “the estab-
lishment of JBSA must have been further delayed (Nukina, 1986, pp. 7-8).

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Kato 835

Thus, the small bookstore became an arsenal that provided weapons for
JBSA.
So those various factors converged to motivate Nukina to establish JBSA.
Akamatsu (1986), a former student of Nukina, later noted that Nukina was
always talking to his students in his seminar that

whether you like America or not, it was a country you really need to know in
its true nature; whether you are interested in American politics, economy, or
literature or language, you cannot really understand it as long as you ignore the
Negro Question. (p. 13)

Furukawa Hiromi and Akamatsu who had gone through the war years as a
student-worker at a munitions company and as a soldier, respectively, had been
attracted by the idea of American democracy as advocated by American teachers
at their college because it sounded so fresh and liberating to them after the war-
time experience. But at the same time, Nukina’s reference to Blacks in American
history and society ringed true to them because their makeshift college campus
stood close to one of the segregated military camps and they knew that there was
another one for Black soldiers in other part of Kobe and even Red Cross was
segregated. They had often heard the rumor that White and Black soldiers fought
with each other in the street. And according to Akamatsu, one day when Furukawa
happened to talk with a Black soldier about America being a democratic country,
the Black soldier without saying a word just pointed his finger to his own Black
face, meaning “Do you think it is true with me?” (Akamatsu, 2013, p. 92). And
when Furukawa began to teach English as a high school teacher, he noticed that
there were no textbooks dealing with Blacks in American life. And Furukawa
being also an Esperantist, one day met Nukina at one of the meetings of the
Esperanto Association and talked about it, and Nukina responded to him enthusi-
astically and showed him his recently published articles on abolitionists. Thus,
most of the eight founding members of JBSA were his former students in his
seminar (Furukawa, 1986).
At first Nukina thought that JBSA should be established in Tokyo and he
visited Tokyo several times to talk to intellectuals he knew there, sharing with
them the idea of establishing an association focusing on Black studies. But he
could hardly find anyone who would agree with his idea. It was during this
time that he came to notice the prejudice among Japanese intellectuals against
Black people. And even after the establishment of JBSA, he often had to hear
such questions as “Why did you establish such an association?” or “What is
worth studying about blacks or black literature?” (Nukina, 1986, p. 5).
Thus, he decided to start it without further delay, located its Office at Kobe
City University of Foreign Studies. The original members of the JBSA were

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836 Journal of Black Studies 44(8)

his two other colleagues, Konishi Tomoshichi who were interested in Black
English, Ebonics, as a linguist and Kawamura Seiichi in Western history, and
five of his former students, including Furukawa with Akamatsu joining a year
later. Nukina convened the first meeting of JBSA on June 22, 1954, a few
months after the Brown Decision (Furukawa, 1996).
According to Akamatsu, Nukina played a leading role in defining the main
characters and directions of the JBSA: he stressed that the premise upon
which JBSA was to be founded should be that the “Negro question” was the
test of American democracy, which was a view that posed a crucial question
about the way Japanese scholars had been studying America. As for the
objects of study, Nukina said that it was a social responsibility of himself and
JBSA to make a genealogy of Black people not only in Africa but also in
America and Latin America (Akamatsu, 1986). As a result, JBSA started as
“an organization to study black life, culture, history and other related issues”
(Furukawa, 1996, p. 234). As for the name of the Association, “Association
for Negro Studies” was adopted after much discussion and much later
changed to JBSA.
Due to such a wide and interdisciplinary approaches to Black people all
over the world, from the start the people who joined the JBSA were keenly
interested in and enthusiastic about not only the development of the civil
rights movement in the United States but also in the ongoing worldwide
move toward independence of the former Western colonies in Africa, Asia,
and Latin America. Such a stance of JBSA was unique in Japan when she was
called “an orphan of Asia” because of her strong pro-U.S. attitude (Nukina,
1986).
As for the organizational aspects of JBSA, the main pillars of its activities
have been basically two-folds: (a) holding monthly meetings except on
August and March with a national conference at the end of June and (b) pub-
lishing journals several times a year until it became one time a year since
1973. And since then Newsletters were published a few times a year
(Furukawa, 1996). As for the meetings, they have reached almost 600 times
this year. As for the Journals, the latest volume as of 2013 is the 82nd. Besides
those regular activities, JBSA has collectively published four books and held
special National Conferences on every 10 years. And the year 2014 will cel-
ebrate the 60th Anniversary.
As for the recruitment efforts for JBSA, it was continued by young
Furukawa and Akamatsu who often went to Tokyo to persuade scholars inter-
ested in Black studies to join JBSA. In those days, the bullet trains were still
to come and it took about 10 hours to get to Tokyo. This time, however, their
efforts and enthusiasm began to be rewarded: Honda Souzo in Black history,
Hashimoto Fukuo, Sekiguchi Isao, Takahashi Toru, Hamamoto Takeshi,

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Kato 837

Ikegami Hideo in Black literature, and Kijima Hajime, a famous poet and a
translator of Black poems, agreed to join it. Thus, the Tokyo branch was
established in 1961, holding a meeting every 2 months. Sekiguchi took the
responsibility of coordinating the branch activities and its activities contin-
ued until 1967. It was around the start of the Tokyo branch that Saruya
Kaname, who was still a young scholar in Black history in the United States,
but later became a prominent figure in the field along with Honda, came to
one of the meetings and expressed his wish to join it (Akamatsu, 2013).
In terms of JBSA branches, Kyoto branch was newly added in September
1966. It was Hashimoto who persuaded his friend Ito Kenji from Ritsumeikan
University in Kyoto to establish Kyoto branch. And Ito along with his col-
league Suda Minoru, both in American literature and, then Miyamoto
Masaoki in African studies, started Kyoto branch at Ritsumeikan University
and it continued its activities until 1974 (Ito, 1984).
As for the membership of JBSA, it increased from the original 8 to some
80 at the end of the 1960s, and maintained 80~90 during the 1970s, and
80~100 during the 1980s. In terms of the fields of studies of JBSA members,
although people who studied literature constituted only 38% at the start, the
rate steadily increased to the majority (Furukawa, 1996) and this tendency
still continues.
Then what accounts for the organizational development of JBSA from the
middle of 1950s through 1960s? The historical struggles of African Americans
as well as Africans had obviously attracted the media attention and “black
boom” had arrived. But without paying attention to the domestic political and
social developments, we cannot really tell the real reasons for such a rise of
membership.
Domestically, this period of the “reverse course” experienced the greatest
national mass movement for peace and democracy in Japanese history and it
climaxed in 1960 when hundreds of thousands of people surrounded the Diet
building in protest against the steamrollered revision of the U.S.-Japan
Security Treaty, which overthrew the Kishi Liberal Democratic Party (LDP)
Administration and compelled Ikeda, who succeeded Kishi, to put aside the
controversial security issues and to concentrate on the policy of the economic
development of Japan (La Feber, 1997). And the late 1960s also witnessed
the nationwide rise of the student movements for democratization of Japanese
institutions of higher education as well as the movement against the Vietnam
War and against the use of Okinawa military bases for the war efforts.
Beneath the political turmoil of this period, however, deeper social and
cultural changes as well were going on, accelerated by the fast growing econ-
omy, accompanied by the rapid urbanization: Objectively, Japan was resum-
ing the once frustrated task by the 15-year war, of modernizing Japan in a

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838 Journal of Black Studies 44(8)

new direction. The main task at this stage was, while keeping the peace, to get
rid of poverty and to realize freer and more democratic society where indi-
viduals were respected. And this is why JBSA members could identify them-
selves with Black people’s struggles for freedom and equality in the United
States and in Africa. The Black people’s struggles were a sort of metaphor for
what people wished to realize in Japan and they encouraged Japanese people
in their efforts to create freer and more democratic Japanese society.
The people who joined JBSA were more or less individually involved in
or deeply concerned with those social changes for democracy. And their com-
mitment to Black studies was not merely one of the academic pursuits but a
form of social commitments as intellectuals. However, it must be also noted
that JBSA as a research organization has never committed to any political
sects nor its political agenda nor activities, thus avoiding any sectarian con-
flicts to be brought into JBSA, which was credited to the wisdom of the first
generation of JBSA members and one of the secrets of its longevity as a
research association.
As part of such social commitments, during the 1960s, JBSA and its mem-
bers did several memorable collective projects to meet the public demands to
know the background of the Black people’s struggles in the United States as
well as in Africa.
First, from 1961 to 1963, The Collected Works of Black Writers in 12 vol-
umes with the 13th devoted to the essays by Japanese scholars was published
with Hashimoto as the editor.3 It was not only the first occasion to introduce
to the Japanese readers a considerable body of literary works under the rubric
of African American literature but also the first attempt by Japanese scholars
in American literature at the canonization of Black writers prior to the Civil
Rights era.4 Native Son by Richard Wright, Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison,
Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin, Not Without Laughter by
Langston Hughes, Cane by Jean Toomer, and various essays by Black writers
were translated into Japanese. And to know how much cultural impact this
project had, you only have to see the names of the liberal and leftist intellec-
tual celebrities from various fields, who attended the publication party
(Sekiguchi, 1984).
Second, the Kobe branch held a series of public lectures on African
American and African history, society and culture in 1965 and in 1974, and
did local radio lectures in 1968 and 1975 (Furukawa, 1996; Kobayashi,
2011). Tokyo branch also had a special event in 1963, commemorating the
100th Anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation, featuring Ooe
Kenzaburo the winner of the Nobel Prize in literature later in 1994 who made
a special lecture on “Japanese literature and black literature” with the atten-
dance of about 230 audience. And at one of the meetings where a new novel

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Kato 839

by Ariyoshi Sawako, Not Because of Color, which depicted a marriage

between a Black GI (US soldier) and a Japanese woman and their later life in
Harlem, was to be discussed, unexpectedly Ariyoshi herself came to the
meeting and she was invited to join the discussion (Sekiguchi, 1984).
Third, in 1966, JBSA published a book5 titled Black Liberation Movement
in America: Emerging Negro Leaders, edited by Furukawa, as part of the
celebration of the 10th Anniversary of JBSA. The book was a collection of
translated essays by W. E. B. Du Bois, M. L. King Jr., Malcom X, James
Baldwin, John Mayfield, Kenneth Clark, and so on with detailed commentar-
ies by JBSA members on each essay. This book successfully conveyed in
wide, historical and social perspectives how the racist America was being
challenged by Black revolts. This book was a milestone marking the maturity
of JBSA after a decade of commitment to Black studies.
Then, what characterized the research activities of JBSA during this
period? In the field of history, two distinguished works were published: The
History of African Americans by Honda in 19646 and The Liberation of
African Americans in 1968 by Saruya.7 These are the standard texts for
Japanese readers even now.
African studies in JBSA seemed to have experienced its peak during the
1970s and the 1980s when people in African studies like Nukina, Kobayashi
Shinjiro, Miyamoto, Furukawa, Kusunose Keiko, Kitajima Gishin, Kitagawa
Katsuhiko, and Okakura Takashi visited Africa, translated important aca-
demic works about Africa and the post-colonial African literature into
Japanese, published books on Africa, and made presentations at monthly
meetings, held a symposium on Africa at the annual conference in 1985.
Anti-apartheid activities in solidarity with African National Congress were
another important aspect.
As a result of such activities, African writers, scholars, and people from
African National Congress (ANC) in turn visited Japan, made lectures and
academic exchanges with JBSA members during this period. For example,
JBSA had visits of Ngugi wa thiong’o, a Kenyan writer in 1981; Mazisi
Kunene, a great Zulu poet long in exile in America in 1983; Sembene
Ousmane, a Senegalese writer in 1984; and others.
In literary studies within JBSA, until the late 1970s Richard Wright was
by far the most discussed author followed by James Baldwin, Langston
Hughes, and Ralph Ellison. (Furomoto, 1993). But from the perspective of
the general trend of American literary studies, African American literature
was still not considered to be a legitimate field of academic studies and
Furomoto Atsuko’s story tells us about this fact.
Furomoto with her childhood experience of the war against the United
States chose American literature as her major when she went to college in the

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840 Journal of Black Studies 44(8)

late 1950s because she felt the need to reconcile the contradictory images of
a fearful memory of Americans as “devils” and the post-war image of
America as the progenitor of democracy. Another concern of hers was a ques-
tion that began to bother her if the study of literature could contribute to the
society or help other people live. In her pursuit for these social concerns, she
came upon Sinclair Lewis’s (1947) Kingsblood Royal in which he depicted a
tragedy caused by a drop of Black blood in a White man. By reading the
book, she knew for the first time how serious was the racial issue in America.
But in the English department where she studied, there were no course to
teach Black literature. Then she went to a graduate school in the early 1960s
when the civil rights movement was at its peak; still nothing was mentioned
in the graduate course about Black literature. It was much later around 1970
that she knew that JBSA existed and attended a panel held by JBSA members
on Black literature at one of the conferences. That was an eye-opening expe-
rience for her and she immediately joined it. And as she went on studying
Black literature and came upon Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison and much
later Meridian by Alice Walker and Beloved by Toni Morrison that the ques-
tion that bothered her before began to be replaced by a conviction that the
study of Black literature could change people’s minds, thus contribute to the
transformation of the society.
Still through the 1970s, the prevailing attitude toward Black literature in
the mainstream English Literature Association in Japan was indifference or
cynicism. It was not until the 1980s that the atmosphere began to change
(Furomoto, 2010).
The change was being brought about by the rise of feminism and then the
emergence of Black women writers such as Alice Walker and Toni Morrison
in the United States.
Interestingly, there arose a corresponding move in Japan as well: There
arose what was called “women lib” movement from the early part of the
1970s. Just like Black feminists were born through their experience of par-
ticipating in the civil rights movement, the feminist movement in Japan
emerged from among those young working women who had experienced the
student movements in the 1960s. Those were of the generation who were
taught under the democratic new constitution that men and women were
equal, but who had to live through a society where the traditional and feudal
gender division of work and old ways of thinking about how women should
be still held sway over them. They were learning from the feminist movement
and the theories developing in the United States during the 1960s and began
to hold teach-ins to share with each other the problems women had about
being women in Japanese society. Thus, the feminist movement and Gender
Studies began in Japan (T. Inoue, 1991/2011).

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Kato 841

Then on the international scene in the 1970s, the United Nations began to
focus on improving the plight of the third-world women by establishing
International Women’s Year and Day, which strongly appealed to some of the
JBSA members like Kusunose who, as the author of this article remembers,
began to actively attend such international women’s conferences as the Third
World Conference on women in Nairobi, 1985 to come back greatly empow-
ered and began working on African women’s literature with further vigor.
Under such circumstances, the Selected Works of Black Women Writers in
the United States were published by a major publishing company8 in the early
1980s to be welcomed with enthusiasm mainly by those women in their 30s
and 40s who had feminist concerns. The title of the series well expressed this
shared concerns across the Pacific Ocean: The Contemporaneousness of
Women Experiences.
The activities of JBSA had a sort of lull period from the late 1970s until the
early part of 1980s (Kobayashi, 2010), but the emergence of Black women writ-
ers overcame it and opened a new stage for Black literary studies. In 1983, for
example, there was a sudden increase of presentations on the works of African
American and other minority women writers as well as African women writers at
the monthly meetings. In response to this, a symposium was held, focusing on the
works of Toni Morrison, Alice Walker and Maxine Hong Kingston at the 30th
Anniversary Conference of JBSA in 1984. It was the first attempt in Japan to
highlight the emerging women writers, followed then by a similar one at the
American Literature Association Conference in 1987 in Japan and there appeared
in Japan some English departments which would look for teachers who could
teach the works of Black women writers (Furomoto, 2010).
Then a drastic change happened in 1993 when Toni Morrison won a Novel
Prize in literature: at the American Literature Association’s National
Conference held immediately after it, a room for a panel on Toni Morrison’s
works was for the first time packed with audience. Furomoto and Kato who
were the moderators of the panel felt that at last the study of Black literature
was recognized as a legitimate field of study in American literature.
During the 1980s and the 1990s Black literary studies began to diversify
into several streams. Praisesong for the Widow by Paule Marshall and then
Tar Baby by Toni Morrison attracted researchers into the Caribbean world.
And the interest was further fueled by the appearance of the immigrant writ-
ers from the Caribbean such as Jamaica Kincaid in the middle of the 1980s
and Eldwidge Danticat in the early 1990s.
The study of the Caribbean writers then led them to the Caribbean immi-
grant writers in the United Kingdom who appeared after World War II, that is,
those of African descent and Indian descent such as Caryl Phillips and V. S.
Naipaul.

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842 Journal of Black Studies 44(8)

Another product of the diversification process was the establishment of

Asian American Literature Association as an independent Association in
1989. Then much later in 2005, Multi-Ethnic Studies Association was estab-
lished, which was born as a successor of JBSA Tokyo branch, yet as an inde-
pendent Association.
As for the African American literary studies, the study of Toni Morrison’s
works has now acquired a position formerly held by that of Richard Wright
until late 1970s and a new light is now being shed upon relatively unknown
women writers in the Harlem Renaissance period.
It should also be pointed out that such diversification of study fields since
the 1980s was greatly accelerated by the increasing mobility of scholars
across the national boundaries since the 1980s. During this period, many
members of JBSA began to participate in various international conferences or
stayed at various universities or research institutions, which helped them
update their knowledge in their fields or find new themes in their researches
and find new contacts and friends, which in turn contributed to the increase
of scholars and writers visiting Japan, often featuring the annual conferences
as guest-speakers or keynote speakers.
From the late 1980s, JBSA invited distinguished guests almost every year at
the annual conferences and at other opportunities: Lawrence H. Mamiya of
Religion in 1987; Alexis De Veaux, a Black woman poet from New York in 1988;
Johnnetta B. Cole, the first African American President of Spelman College in
1989; and Gabriel Entiope from Martinique in 1990. In 1994 at the 40th
Anniversary of JBSA, prominent guest-speakers such as Ronald T. Takaki, a pio-
neer in the ethnic studies; Paule Marshall, a writer; and Ali Jimale Ahmed, a
Somalian poet and a scholar were invited as guest-speakers. In 1996, Ishmael
Reed made a keynote speech at the annual conference. Barbara Christian, a pio-
neer of Black women literary feminism, was a guest speaker at the Kyoto Seminar
at Ritsumeikan University in 1998 and JBSA members played a key role in invit-
ing her and held a panel on her paper. And in 2004 at the 50th Anniversary of
JBSA, Kiuchi invited Keith Byerman and five other Black scholars.
After 2005, one theme which underlay the recent conferences whose annual
topics and guest-speakers are listed in the conference programs in English on
JBSA website was to explore the roots of Black studies in countries other than the
United States or Africa. For that purpose, at the annual conference in 2006,
Kitajima Gishin, former President of JBSA, invited Lee Yu-chen from Taiwan’s
Academia Sinica to make a keynote speech on “Asianising African American
Studies.” In 2010, the annual conference in Okinawa focused on the analogy
between Blacks in the United States and Okinawa in Japan. And the topic of the
2011 annual conference in Kyoto was “Black Studies and Globalization,” and
scholars not only from the United States but also from the United Kingdom and

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Kato 843

Taiwan participated in it. And in 2013, guest-speakers from Korea, China, and
Taiwan were invited. These recent topics of the annual conferences reflect the
growing awareness in JBSA of the necessity of probing into the Asianic or local
roots of Black studies. And this article itself is an attempt to re-consider the his-
tory of Black studies in Japan from that point of view.

Author’s Note
In Japan, the surname precedes the given name. Thus, in both the main text and the
notes, I have used this order for people residing in Japan and publishing their work
mostly in Japanese. I am responsible for all English translations, including the titles of
Japanese books when they appear in the text for the first time.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research,
authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publi-
cation of this article.

Notes
1. Afurika no Zento, Tomizu Hirondo,Yuuhikaku Shobou, 1899.
2. Amerika Bungaku no Haikei, Takagaki Matsuo, Bungei Shunjuu Sha, 1946.
3. Kokujin Bungaku Zenshuu, ed., Hashimoto Fukuo, Hayakawa Shoten, 1961-1963.
4. In the Afterword of the first volume, Hashimoto noted that the standard by which
he selected the novels to be included in the anthology was that they were good
novels even in the tradition of American literature. He also mentioned that he
included Cane, Native Son and Invisible Man because Robert Bone also rated
these as the three greatest Negro novels in The Negro Novel in America in 1958.
5. Amerika Kokujin Kaihou Undo: Atarashii Niguro Gunzou, ed., by JBSA, Mirai
Sha, 1966.
6. Honda Souzo Amerika kokujin no Rekishi, Iwanami-shinsho, 1964, 1991.
7. Saruya kaname, Amerika Kokujin Kaihou Shi: Doreisei Jidai kara Kakumeiteki
Hanran made, Saimaru Shuppankai, 1968.
8. Onnatachi no Doujidai: Hokubei Joseisakka Senshuu, Fujimoto Kazuko hen,
Asahi Shuppan, 1981-1982.

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Author Biography
Tsunehiko Kato is Professor Emeritus of Ritsumeikan University, Kyoto, Japan. He
is currently the President of the Japan Black Studies Association.

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