Explore Kuniyoshi's Loyalty To The US

Did Kuniyoshi really create art that showed he was against everything Japanese? Differently, was his loyalty to the United States – and his sense of Americanness – a function of self-preservation at a time of racialization and exclusion? Wang’s article follows well what Elise Lemire asserted last week, namely, that we cannot analyze the inner workings of individuals outside of the historically specific moments in which particular beliefs and actions occur. In this case, Kuniyoshi was faced with a war time effort to create anti-Japan imagery to communicate why we are against Japan, who they are, and the importance of participating in the effort. As Wang argues, Kuniyoshi was caught in between identities: he believed himself to be a fully assimilated American with loyalties to the nation, but the fact of being born in Japan and descendent from Japanese parents stripped him of his status. …show more content…
We may not get there, but what I see Wang doing in this essay is raising the question more than proclaiming that Kuniyoshi was definitely against Japan. In other words, the artist’s efforts reveal his patriotism via his willingness to propagate anti-Japan illustrations. However, what he was actually against may not have been Japan but what Japan represented as a nation in the American imaginary as a result of its militaristic ideology during the world wars. Nevertheless, using Mae Ngai’s term, Kuniyoshi instantaneously became an “impossible subject” after the bombing of Pearl