Background
Miyoshi, Masao was born on May 14, 1928 in Tokyo. Came to the United States, 1952. Son of Katsunai Miyoshi and Hisae Takahama.
( What is the connection between the United States' imba...)
What is the connection between the United States' imbalance of trade with Japan and the imbalance of translation in the other direction? Between Western literary critics' estimates of Japanese fiction and Japanese politicians' "America-bashing"? Between the portrayal of East-West relations in the film Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence and the terms of the GATT trade agreements? In this provocative study, Masao Miyoshi deliberately adopts an off-center perspective--one that restores the historical asymmetry of encounters between Japan and the United States, from Commodore Perry to Douglas MacArthur--to investigate the blindness that has characterized relations between the two cultures. Both nations are blinkered by complementary forms of ethnocentricity. The United States--or, more broadly, the Eurocentric West--believes its culture to be universal, while Japan believes its culture to be essentially unique. Thus American critics read and judge Japanese literature by the standards of the Western novel; Japanese politicians pay lip service to "free trade" while supporting protectionist policies at home and abroad. Miyoshi takes off from literature to range across culture, politics, and economics in his analysis of the Japanese and their reflections in the West; the fiction of Tanizaki, Mishima, Oe; trade negotiations; Japan bashing and America bashing; Emperor worship; Japanese feminist writing; the domination of transcribed conversation as a literary form in contemporary Japan. In his confrontation with cultural critics, Miyoshi does not spare "centrists" of either persuasion, nor those who refuse to recognize that "the literary and the economical, the cultural and the industrial, are inseparable." Yet contentious as this book can be, it ultimately holds out, by its example, hope for a criticism that can see beyond the boundaries of national cultures--without substituting a historically false "universal" culture--and that examines cultural convergences from a viewpoint that remains provocatively and fruitfully off center.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0674631757/?tag=2022091-20
(The Japanese novel, lately so widely translated, is findi...)
The Japanese novel, lately so widely translated, is finding a broader and better informed readership than ever before. Until now, however, no comprehensive critical discussion of the form has been available in a Western language. Masao Miyoshi offers an intensive reading of several outstanding novels of the past hundred years. He explains that the Japanese novel, usually regarded as basically Western in style, retains native elements that utterly resist Western influence. Citing Western, especially English, novels for comparison, he demonstrates how the Japanese novel differs in important formal aspects.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0520025407/?tag=2022091-20
(In 1860, the empire of Japan sent 170 officials to tour t...)
In 1860, the empire of Japan sent 170 officials to tour the United States, the first such visit to America. Politics and curiosity, on both sides, mixed to create an amazing journey. This work relates the tale of entrenched assumptions, startling impressions, and bewildering conclusions.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00EQC2NXA/?tag=2022091-20
( "Masao Miyoshi's masterful account is, by turns, alarmi...)
"Masao Miyoshi's masterful account is, by turns, alarming and hilarious as two cultures meet at the court of President James Buchanan. Their mutual incomprehension is, alas, still relevant as inscrutable East fails to make sense of mysterious West, and vice versa."—Gore Vidal "Miyoshi has given a marvelous and revealing account of a dramatic case of confrontation of cultures and civilizations. It yields much insight into our own society, as seen from a sharply different perspective, and into the culture of the viewers as well-insights well worth pondering today."—Noam Chomsky "As We Saw Them is a pioneering work in the relationship between cultures. With extraordinary tact and brilliance Miyoshi in effect reconstructs the mind of Japan at that time, a pregnant moment of self-examination and emergence. For contemporary readers As We Saw Them is an invaluable work of insight and interpretation."—Edward Said In 1860 the empire of Japan sent 170 officials—samurai and bureaucrats, inspectors and spies, half a dozen teenagers and one Confucian physician—to tour the United States, the first such visit to America and the first trip anywhere abroad in two hundred years. Politics and curiosity, on both sides, mixed to create an amazing journey. Using the travelers' own journals of the trip and American accounts of the group's progress, historian and critic Masao Miyoshi relates the fascinating tale of entrenched assumptions, startling impressions, and bewildering conclusions. Miyoshi finds in this unique encounter an entertaining adventure story of discovery and a paradigm of the attitudes and judgments that have ever since shaped American and Japanese perceptions of one another. This revealing account of "otherness" is still relevant today as we strive to understand peoples whom we think of as foreignand therefore strangely other than we. Masao Miyoshi was Hajime Mori Professor of Japanese, English, and Comparative Literature at the University of California, San Diego. He is the author of Off Center: Power and Culture Relations between Japan and the United States. Carol Gluck, George Sansom Professor of History at Columbia University, specializes in modern Japan, from the late nineteenth century to the present.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1589880234/?tag=2022091-20
三好将夫
writer English literature educator
Miyoshi, Masao was born on May 14, 1928 in Tokyo. Came to the United States, 1952. Son of Katsunai Miyoshi and Hisae Takahama.
Born in Tokyo, he graduated from the University of Tokyo, majoring in English, and earned a Fulbright Fellowship to gain advanced degrees at New York University.
Specializing in Victorian literature, he first taught at the University of California Berkeley, where he started working on Japanese literature as well. Eventually moving to the University of California, San Diego, he increasingly focused his writings on the relations between Japan and the United States and the problems of globalization. Miyoshi"s books include The Divided Self: A Perspective on the Literature of the Victorians (1969), Accomplices of Silence: The Modern Japanese Novel (1975), As We Saw Them: The First Japanese Embassy to the United States (1860) (1979), Office Center: Power and Culture Relations Between Japan and the United States (1991), and The University in "Globalization": Culture, Economy, and Ecology (2003).
He also edited and co-edited anthologies on globalization, post-modernism, and the future of area studies.
( What is the connection between the United States' imba...)
( What is the connection between the United States' imbal...)
( "Masao Miyoshi's masterful account is, by turns, alarmi...)
(The Japanese novel, lately so widely translated, is findi...)
(In 1860, the empire of Japan sent 170 officials to tour t...)
(194 pages, softcover book)
(Book by Miyoshi, Masao)
Member Modern Language Association, Association for Asian Studies, International Comparative Literature Association.
Married Elizabeth Ann Lester, July 27, 1953 (divorced 1977). Married Martha L. Archibald, April 8, 1977 (deceased September 2003), Christine Lindeley Cameron, Jun. 24, 2006; children: Kathy Michele, Owen Malcolm, Melina Cybelee.