| Research Abstract |
During the year 2001, Sato Gayle, Professor at Meiji University, acted as the head of our project, but in 2002 , she was allowed a one-year leave to stay at the University of Hawaii, so during that year Kobayashi became the head, while Kawarasaki joined us as a new member. So overall our project has been conducted by four members in total.
In 2001, Sato, Hiraishi, and Kobayashi visited respectively the University of Hawaii, UCLA, and UC Berkeley and were able to collect first-hand materials concerning our project. In 2002, Hiraishi got a half-year leave to stay at UC Davis and Stanford University, while Kobayashi and Kawarasaki made visits to UCLA and UC Berkeley, each engaging in lively exchange with Japanese American writers and scholars in the those universities. Above all the significant were the interviews Kobayashi and Kawarasaki conducted in the Southern California area-namely with the Japanese American playwright Velina Hasu Houston and the promising young Japanese American lite
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rary scholar Traise Yamamoto. Both writers' works are characterized by the multi-cultural hybrid writing. This seemed especially marked in writing by Houston, borm as a mixed child between her US-borm father, who himself had a mixed heritages of his African American and native American parents, and her Japanese-born mother who came to the US as a "war bride." Houston celebrated her rich cultural resources received in her hybrid multi-cultural environment, However, both Yamanoto and Houston emphasized that the concept of hybridity be not easily accepted by mainstream US society, still prone to the whiteness as the norm Interestingly enough, even Japanese American commuunity had long been antagonistic against the so-caled "hapa" people as somewhat "degenerate" and "impure." It is only recent that they began to accept the sense of hybridity as the new dynamic force to activate the otherwise somewhat stagnant Japanese American community.
It is our desire that the result of our two-year project add a new dimension to the scholarship in Japanea American literature which has tended to focus on the issues of family and community, and open up the newly revitalized discussion in the future. Less
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