KCQK1_AMER0095

The host of the Imperial Republic podcast reflects on whether the United States can be considered an empire. He argues that the country's history shows both anti-imperial sentiments and imperial ambitions. He suggests viewing America through an imperial lens to better understand its development and foreign policy. The host then discusses the rise of Japanese fashion and its connection to American power and influence. He explains how American occupation and cultural influence led to Japan's adaptation of Western fashion. He highlights the significance of American soft power and its ability to subtly influence people. The host acknowledges the crimes and sexual violence that occurred during the occupation but emphasizes that this is how American power operates. He also explores the historical context of Japan's adaptability and its previous experience with Western influences. The story of Japanese fashion is seen as an example of how American power operates through cultural influence. Th Hello, hello. Welcome to another episode of the Imperial Republic. I'm your host. It is simply wonderful to have you with us. If you're a first time listener, I want to thank you especially for tuning in and giving us a shot. So I want to begin today with the hotly debated question, is the United States an empire? At various points, I have definitively taken one side or the other in my mind, and I felt very strongly that the answer was obvious and that it was very clear. And it's only recently that I've started to reflect on the futility of that premise and some of the limitations that come along with it. And I think the issue is that when you're dealing with something as vast and as contradictory as the United States and as American history, it's never going to be all one or the other. Because if you look at the history of the country, you'll find plenty of examples of a nation with a very proud anti-imperial streak, one where politicians and leaders are genuinely put off at the concept of empire and find it incompatible with their understanding of the American story. And then I'll say that, and then you'll see plenty of examples where that is absolutely not the case and where the U.S. is genuinely clearly motivated by empire, shows a very clear inclination to be an imperial power and to compete with the great imperial powers of the time. So I think a much better mindset here is that of Paul Kramers, who's a very gifted historian. And his view is to view America through an imperial lens, that's when it starts to make more sense. Rather than it being a binary case of empire or republic, it just becomes one of many lenses to view specific moments in its development and its foreign policy. So going off that, I want to try to use the imperial lens to look at the story of Japanese fashion and, more specifically, the rise of Japan as a maker of high-quality, quintessentially American fashion and the role the U.S. played in that story. However, if you've just heard that and you are not one of the people that spends their days thinking of men's sweaters and men's button-downs and the history of them, let me begin by saying that I admire you and that I am someone that has wasted countless hours of productivity daydreaming about exactly that. So if you're not one of these people, if you're not bizarre enough to find this stuff really interesting, why does it matter? Why does it have any significance beyond what a bunch of fashion designers decided to do? And so my answer to that very legitimate question is that this is really a story of how American power operates and how the imperial lens can be used to dissect an instance of massively expanding American soft power. So while the U.S. has, at times, had an explicitly old-school European attitude of go-out-and-conquer, you know, in the same model of the Spanish Empire, really, and especially recently in the last 100, 150 years, the United States is able to achieve its foreign policy aims, especially through this hegemonic cultural influence that it has. While it's not exactly a voluntary process, much of the world simply goes along with what the United States does because it is too inescapable not to. And that isn't all done at a national level. If you look at yourself and what you're wearing and what you're listening to in the last movie that you watched and some of the trinkets in your room, you'll see the full weight of American capitalism and the ability that it has to very subtly influence people. That's an extremely powerful thing that there just isn't historical precedent for. And so that exact phenomenon is really what happens in Japan and is the story of Japanese fashion. And I hope this does not whitewash some of the crimes and sexual violence that came with the occupation, but this is very much how American power operates. It operates by people being impressed by the American way and replicating it. So the rise of Japanese fashion is set in the backdrop of the larger context of Japan in the mid 20th century. And at that point, Japan had just lost the Second World War and had done so in devastating fashion. Nuclear bombs had been dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the United States had occupied the country, hoping to turn it into a capitalist democracy, but really into a Cold War ally against the Soviet Union and to a secondary extent, the newly communist People's Republic of China. Forgive me if this is generalistic, but some very interesting things about the Japanese national character I think are going to come into play here. Japan is both a very proud and important nation, as well as a very adaptable one. Prior to the American occupation, they never had a foreign occupier in their history. They enjoyed a relatively unprecedented historical span of being a sovereign nation, of being able to interact with their neighbors, trade with their neighbors, go to war with their neighbors, make peace with their neighbors as equals and as their own entity. But during the occupation, the U.S. was effectively dictating to them how their country was to be governed and how their society was to be structured. In a way, it would seem even more severe than the traditional notions of imperialism and colonialism that Europeans would have practiced, because the U.S. was, it was certainly interested in benefiting from Japanese occupation, but it was far more interested in changing Japanese society. And that was a fairly humiliating affront to their national character. However, Japan had experienced something very similar relatively recently. They had undergone a long period of isolationism known as Sokoko, literally meaning a closed country. That was their foreign policy for the better part of three centuries. And it ended in 1858 when Commodore Matthew Perry from the U.S. showed up on Japanese soil with the not so implicit threat of force behind him that Japan was going to end their isolationism and open up and interact with the West. And Japan not only did so, although to be fair, they didn't really have a choice, but they did so while noticing the sophistication of American and Western technology and weaponry. And they then began a period of adapting to this and focusing in a very concentrated way to industrialize their nation and bring it up to par with the West. And that's a pretty consistent theme that is going to come into play. And so let's return to Japan at the end of the Second World War. Defeated, vanquished, humiliated. They have Americans on their shores and they're starting to do the same thing. They're starting to adapt. They're starting to notice maybe not how far along, but how different America is in certain ways. And they're getting that up close and personal. And so this begins in Tianjin, China, with a young man named Kensuke Ishizu. And at the time, Ishizu was regarded as a very odd person. In an era where Japanese men especially would not be caught dead caring about what they wore or wearing Western clothing, he was obsessed with basically everything about Western fashion. And there's this old story that he had begged his parents to send him to a different boarding school when he was growing up because he liked their uniforms more. And so that is who Ishizu is. And he's in Tianjin, China. He was doing some work over there during World War II. And he meets an American GI who's just liberated Japan, excuse me, liberated Japanese occupied China. And there he meets Lieutenant O'Brien. There does not seem to be any record of him having a first name. But there he meets Lieutenant O'Brien, who was an American soldier and a Princeton grad. And he starts talking to Ishizu. They strike up this very easy friendship. He starts talking about his undergrad years at Princeton and what Westerners dressed like. And Ishizu is just blown away. And so he moves back to Japan, pretty much setting out to create Ivy League Western fashion in Japan. And when he returns to Japan, he notices that prostitutes, prostitutes that cater to American GIs are starting to deck themselves in Western clothing. So of all groups of people, it's a little strange, but there is already a movement towards Western fashion because of just how many American GIs there are stationed in Japan. And so he notices this trend and he starts to basically do what the prostitutes are doing, which is hang around American military camps trying to get their attention. And what he's really interested in is the post exchange, which is basically a little shopping mall at the center of every American military base for American GIs and their wives and anyone who might be working on the base. And there it has the highest quality and the newest in Western fashion. And so that's how it continues. He makes friends with American GIs and starts to be able to access this little personal shopping mall. And within a few years, he's the biggest name in Japanese fashion. But admittedly, that still doesn't quite mean much because it's not until the Korean War that Japanese citizens care enough about fashion, but more importantly, have the money to start buying it in the same sort of disposable way that Westerners do. And then the Korean War changes everything. There's so much money being flooded into Japan. It's basically an armory for the war. And there's more and more GIs descending on the country. And fashion designers, specifically Ishizu, are noticing this. They copy jeans, they copy leather jackets, they copy everything until all of a sudden, just through military bases, Japan is the menswear center of the world. But then once you've gotten to this point, once every Japanese boy or girl wants to dress like a surfer from California or like an undergraduate at Yale, why does that matter? And the answer to that is a little hard to operationalize, partially because it is kind of self-evident. A population that is sympathetic and appreciative of American culture will in turn be sympathetic and appreciative to American foreign policy. Admittedly, that is just a theory. But it's a theory that forms the underpinning of a lot of American diplomacy. Every cultural exchange program the United States has is based on that idea. It's all designed to strengthen the American state. Every time a student from the U.S. goes abroad to study, every time a foreign student studies in the U.S., it's just designed to expose them to American culture. I want to leave you with one last thought. One of the high-ranking Japanese diplomats sent to San Francisco to sign the Treaty of San Francisco that formally ended the American occupation in Japan, boarded his plane to the United States wearing Levi's jeans. This has been the Imperial Republic. Thank you so much for tuning in. Take care.