Orientalizing the Pacific Rim: - History, Department of

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everything else about her said ‘American.’ If such assimilated ‘Orientals,’ so obviously different from ‘normal’ Americans, could fool one into thinking they were actually Americans in ‘Oriental disguise,’ then obviously the amount of cultural assimilation which an "Oriental" could undergo was enormous. The distance traversed was as immense as the ocean which physically separated America from Japan. One of the most important results of the opposition between the Orient and the Occident was the way in which it was metaphorically mapped onto the enormous physical distance between Asia and America. When the missionaries and sociologists chose to use the example of ‘Orientals’ as a way of proving the validity of their theories about Americanizaton and cultural assimilation, they were relying upon the presumption of a great cultural difference between "Orientals" and Americans. By putting assimilation along a spectrum from ‘non-American’ to ‘American,’ and by positing "Orientals" as the ultimate exotic non-American other, the sociologists linked the opposition between ‘Oriental’ culture and ‘American’ culture with differences in location and place. Oriental culture was associated with the Asia, and American culture with the United States, and thus the cultural differences between the two were mapped into physical space. The Pacific Rim as an arc from Asia to America encompassed the journey from one extreme to the other, representing the spatialization of cultural differences. ‘Americanization’ became more than a cultural process; it became one of travel, containing within it the movements of migration, from a ‘stagnant Orient’ to a ‘modern America’ based upon mobility. In spatializing cultural difference with their theories, the sociologists had made the distance traversed literal. The Orient was a world away, but ‘Orientals’ could still be made into Americans. The ‘Oriental’ stood at the far end of this opposition, the farthest point away from ‘normal’ America, and a symbol of everything America was not. This was the ultimate meaning which ‘Orientals’ held for not only sociologists and missionaries, but 40
seemingly for all of America, that of the exotic foreigner. ‘Orientals’ were by definition not ‘Occidental.’ In the same way that W.I. Thomas and Roderick McKenzie had used the idea of the sluggish, peaceful Orient as the foil for their description of an Occident full of movement and change (as the unmoving object against which they could orient the direction which Western civilization was travelling), Robert Park was using the ‘Oriental’ in America as the yardstick against which to measure the spread of American culture and ideals. For Park and his colleagues, the Survey of Race Relations was not an opportunity to test the validity of their ideas about cultural assimilation--the sociologists were assuredly not going to abandon their theories no matter what they found. The survey was an opportunity to prove the validity of their theories. The sociologists were fascinated with ‘Orientals’ because of their visible difference, the ‘racial uniform’ and ‘exotic mask’ they wore which permanently marked them as different from ‘other Americans.’ More than any 'white' American ever could, ‘Orientals’ proved the validity of cultural assimilation as a sociological process. Robert Park’s interest in the young American woman in a ‘Japanese disguise,’ just like his interest in Flora Belle Jan, had much to do with her being the embodiment of successful assimilation at its most extreme point--a perfectly ‘normal’ American wearing an exotic Halloween mask. The sociologists used the bodies of ‘Orientals’ as their most prominent proof of the success of cultural interaction. Assimilation was a complex and complicated process involving loosened social control, the changing relationship of individuals to groups, transformations from rural to urban social relations, the transition to a modern, cosmopolitan outlook, but in the end, the products of cultural assimilation were wholly American, irregardless of skin color. Culturally assimilated "Orientals" were the proof. Park concluded at the end of the Survey of Race Relations, just as he had concluded 41
Page 1 and 2: Orientalizing the Pacific Rim: The
Page 3 and 4: small Chinatown in California? What
Page 5 and 6: definitions of the 'Orient.' 5 This
Page 7 and 8: Far Eastern missions, Baptists, Met
Page 9 and 10: Davis recognized that the missionar
Page 11 and 12: struggles over the threat to ‘whi
Page 13 and 14: Emperor was the ultimate fount of t
Page 15 and 16: It is up to us in this country to f
Page 17 and 18: y their adoption of superficial sig
Page 19 and 20: persons experience a sense of relie
Page 21 and 22: sociologists had been ministers or
Page 23 and 24: Baptist Foreign Mission Society bef
Page 25 and 26: with empathy and description than t
Page 27 and 28: Park, though, was forced to exagger
Page 29 and 30: premise of a traveller's expertise
Page 31 and 32: West of the American frontier. In a
Page 33 and 34: communication. 46 Like Park, McKenz
Page 35 and 36: positive force in pushing for chang
Page 37 and 38: American clothes, as opposed to the
Page 39: the ‘Oriental’ was nonetheless
Page 43 and 44: The institutionalization of Orienta
Page 45: institutionalizing knowledge about

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