[Review of] Roger Goodman. Japan\u27s International Youth: The Emergence of a New Class of Schoolchildren

Japan\u27s rapid expansion in the world of commerce since the 1960\u27s has not only brought economic prosperity to the country but new social phenomena to its isolated monolithic culture. Roger Goodman\u27s book focuses on just one such problem concerning kikokusijo , or secondary schoolchildren returnees who resided abroad more than one year due to overseas assignments of their parents. The increase of returnee school children from 1,543 (1971) to 10,498 (1986) began to raise concerns in the mid-1970\u27s with the Ministry of Education, mass media, and various public and business communities. The creation of remedial schools and special classes was hastened largely due to powerful lobbying by the returnees\u27 parents who are mostly social elite. Why does a handful of returnee children raise a major social concern in this age of global travel and communication? A plausible explanation is the main undertaking of this book

[Review of] Darrell Y. Yamamoto. Monitored Peril

Television has been one of the most influential media in constructing the racialized social image of Asian Americans. Through meticulous examinations of roles and stories given to Asian Americans in television and combined with careful analysis of political and social events, the author successfully reconstructs a comprehensive history of Asian Americans in the entertainment world over the period of the past five decades. In fact, this book merits more than a mere media study of Asian Americans for its delivery of a critical view of historical relationships of the United States with Asia which are responsible for creating continuously popular and distorted images of Asians

[Review of] Joseph J. Tobin, ed. Re-made in Japan: Everyday Life and Consumer Taste in a Changing Society

The introduction\u27s title to Re-made in Japan, Domesticating the West, captures precisely the characteristics of the contemporary westernization of Japanese culture. The book is a collection of twelve papers which were originally presented at the American Anthropological Association meeting in 1986 at the University of Hawaii. Japan\u27s economic success has global receptions, ranging from admiration and envy, to resentment. Yet the role of Japan as an avid importer and consumer of western products and ideas is not appreciated. On the contrary, quick adaptation of the Japanese to western culture arouses curiosity, wonder, and even mockery from Eurocentric perspectives. The contributed papers aim at, with various degrees of success, correcting the mistaken notion of the westernization of Japan being a mere infatuation with the exotic West. Unfortunately, the papers are of uneven quality; some are poorly articulated, while others stray from the theme. In addition, there is no sequence or interrelationship among the papers. One can only deduce from the better presentations a uniform message that Western merchandise is transformed and naturalized to Japanese tastes as the Japanese themselves experience a self-rediscovery in the process

[Review of] Alfred Arteaga, ed. An Other Tongue

People who are regarded as minorities by their dominant peers are pressured to establish their identity as citizens of a nation and as individuals of a distinct culture. Their identity may be articulated differently governed by such factors as language, race, gender, political and economical status, and so on. All of the fifteen essays collected in this book are purported to address various material conditions of discourse revolving around nation and ethnicity with special focus on linguistic conditions in the United States, the Caribbean, Europe, and Asia. These essays roughly fall into two categories according to their focus either on the styles or the content of the discourse in literature, translations, and heteroglossia. The quality of these essays is not uniform. Some are mere exercises in rhetoric with little substance, while some others have too narrow a scope or the points of argument are not clear. As a whole, this book will serve best for those who are interested in theoretical orientations or ethnic writers who are drawn to such figures as Mikhail Bakhtin and Jacques Derrida

[Review of] Bill Hosokawa . Nisei-The Quiet Americans

Nisei, meaning American-born second-generation Japanese, is an epic scale undertaking of the recording of a brief but eventful history of the Japanese immigration to America by a Japanese American journalist. The book consists of twenty-seven chapters which are divided into three parts. The initial focus is on the settlement of the first generation Japanese immigrants in the 1870s, mainly in California and the Pacific states. Then the topic shifts to the emergence of a substantial Nisei population during the 1930-40 period, followed by their maturation through prewar segregation and the wartime internment experience. The third part accounts for the post-internment social ascension of Nisei as respected Americans, along with their success stories in practically every social position and professional field. In legal areas, the determined struggles of Nisei for equality and justice were finally fulfilled when their alien parents who had been ineligible for reasons of their racial origin were finally granted citizenship. Their efforts were extended into the 1960s until racial barriers were removed from the immigration law

Photon Emission in a Cascade from Relativistic Protons Initiated by Residual Thermal Photons in Gamma-Ray Bursts

Gamma-ray bursts are generally considered to be the result of internal shocks generated in an inhomogeneous relativistic outflow that arises from a fireball. In such shocks, the Fermi acceleration of protons is naturally expected to be at least as efficient as that of electrons. We investigate the consequences of proton acceleration in the residual thermal photon field of a fireball, especially those on the emission spectra of photons. In contrast to most other studies, we do not invoke a direct electron acceleration in shock waves. We show that the residual radiation field of the fireball can ignite the photopion production and subsequent cascade, and that the photons emitted in this process further enhance the photon-initiated cascade. We find that Fermi accelerated protons with $\gtrsim 10^{13}$ eV efficiently bring their energy into pion production and subsequent photon emission. The particles cascading from the pions emit photons over a wide energy range. The photons emitted from electron--positron pairs distribute continuously from the GeV range down to the X-ray range, while muons can emit gamma-rays by synchrotron radiation with a break at around 1--10 MeV. We also discuss several radiation processes which may possibly produce a break feature in the MeV range, as observed in addition to muon synchrotron radiation.Comment: 25 pages, 9 fugures. to appear in Publications of the Astronomical Society of Japan 5