Bio
Yuko Yamamoto is Associate Professor of American literature at Chiba University, Japan. Her articles have appeared in Japanese and in English in a number of journals and books, including Studies in English Literature, Studies in American Literature, the Faulkner Journal of Japan, the Journal of Modern Periodical Studies, and Faulkner and Hemingway (Southeast Missouri State UP, 2018). Her most recent essay is forthcoming in Faulkner’s Families (UP of Mississippi). Her main research interest lies in the relations of literary modernism and popular culture, with particular emphasis on periodicals and photography.
The Art and Science of Cold War Modernity: William Faulkner, Hideki Yukawa, and USIA Films in 1955 Japan
When he visited Japan in his state-sponsored goodwill tour of Asia and Europe in 1955, William Faulkner, who received the 1949 Nobel Prize in Literature, paid a courtesy call on Dr. Hideki Yukawa, the Japanese physicist who won the 1949 Nobel Prize in Physics, and who was then ill at his home in Kyoto. This friendly gesture—an American Nobel laureate paying homage to a fellow Japanese Nobel laureate—was set up by the United States Information Agency (USIA) to demonstrate the equal and mutually respectful bilateral relationship between Japan and the US. This curious episode during Faulkner’s visit to Japan reminds us of yet another USIA publicity stunt in which both men appeared in documentary films produced by the USIA.
The Yukawa Story (1954) and Impressions of Japan (1955) are just two among hundreds of USIA films produced for audiences overseas during the Cold War. As of 1955, the USIA films had been distributed through 210 film libraries in over 80 countries. In 1955 and in Japan alone, according to the 1957 USIS Film Catalogue, 31 films were released. Among them were these two films featuring two 1949 Nobel laureates, one who represented art-for-art’s sake and the other pure science.
This talk analyzes USIA documentary films on Nobel laureates Faulkner and Japanese physicist Hideki Yukawa in the context of the “Atoms for Peace” campaign under the Eisenhower administration, in order to show how these leaders in literature and science, respectively, were portrayed on film as embodiments of American-style patriarchal power.