J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists

Abstract:

This essay is an overview of almost a century old history of Mark Twain Studies in Japan. It starts with the discussion on Masajiro Hamada's pioneering English articles on Twain in the 1930s, suggesting that they were in fact the earliest thorough scholarly examinations even outside of Japan that chose to discuss as the central theme Twain's writings of social satire that attacks injustices toward the oppressed. This essay also reveals that, to justify the studies of "enemy's literature" during WWII, the wartime discussions on Twain tended to utilize this representative American author as a means to understand "enemy's characteristics." Then, it also suggests that although the negative tone in the wartime discussions on Twain was diminished, this tendency to view Twain as an embodiment of America was inherited by Japanese scholars even after the war. Towards the end, the essay introduces some data that evidence the significant jump in productivity of Twain scholarship in Japan particularly after the 1990s, the time when the Japan Mark Twain Society was founded. In the end, the essay concludes with the introduction to the new trends of the 21st century, such as the globalization of its scholarship and publication of academic journals specialized in Twain Studies.