Orientalizing the Pacific Rim: - History, Department of

and understanding after representatives from Australia, Canada, China, Japan, Korea,
New Zealand, the Phillipines and the United States sat down to talk. Knowledge and
enlightenment would solve the world's conflicts, and the opposition between the Orient
and the Occident could be overcome. If the Survey had defined the meeting of
"Orientals" and "whites" as a worthwhile subject of study, the Institute of Pacific
Relations transformed such meetings into a desirable goal. Creating such meetings of
"strangers" (and turning them into "friends") became an integral part of how the
missionaries believed knowledge was to be produced and used in the modern world.
It was an enterprise fraught with difficulties, an "adventure in friendship" as Robert
Park's assistant Winifred Raushenbush labelled such encounters. 42
The emphasis upon the vast expanse of the Pacific Ocean as the central locus for
such encounters was reinforced by descriptions of a new stage in civilization taking
place around the "rim of the Pacific." The Pacific rim became a descriptive label which
connected Asia to the Americas as the new center of world civilization, replacing the
ancient Mediterranean and the recent Atlantic rim. Robert Park descibed the:
impact of divergent peoples and cultures around the whole rim of the Pacific, as
well as in the scattered islands that lie within its wide circumference. The present
ferment in Asia and the racil conflict on the Pacific Coast of America are but
different manifestations of what is, broadly speaking, a single process... 43
By focussing on the Pacific, and in particular Hawaii, as the center, the Pacific rim
concept moved away from descriptions of Asia as Far East of Europe, or the farthest
42 Raushenbush, "Address to Tentative Findings Conference, March 21-26, 1925."
Findings Conference Folder, Papers of the Survey of Race Relations.
43 Robert Park, "Our Racial Frontier on the Pacific," Survey Graphic 56 (May 1926):192.
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