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In the 1950s and 1960s, the modern Japanese state employed overseas cultural promotion as a way to maximise its interests and image not only in international contexts but also at home. By juxtaposing the Takarazuka Revue’s performances in the United States and Japan during the postwar period, this paper argues that the overseas promotion of this Japanese theatre troupe both depended upon and reinforced the Japanese populace’s nationalistic pride in its culture. The paper also addresses the ways in which the Japanese government used Takarazuka’s theatrical presentations as a means of pursuing its domestic and diplomatic agendas: improving Japan’s international position by proposing shared aspects of popular culture with the US and increasing its sense of nationalism by propagating cultural pride. In doing so, the paper explicates the ways in which Japanese popular cultural considerations interfaced with political concerns in the shaping of postwar Japan’s national identity. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

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This article examines how American girls and young women in the early republic formed a new sense of a "corporeal" national identity while touring areas of the Hudson River valley and the Great Lakes. Based on a reading of the travel writings of fifteen white, middle and upper-middle class, American girls and young women travelling between 1802 and 1835, it demonstrates first that during the tours within the United States the girls underwent a multisensory familiarisation with the landscape, which both bolstered their confidence and concretised much of their theoretical knowledge gained during their studies. Second, when touring the Canadian shores of the Great Lakes their focus was on constructing both its landscape and its people as "other". The article closes with a consideration of how these young women's travel writings may offer a new perspective for the study of a gendered national identity formation in the early United States. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What does it mean to be 'American'? Drawing on in-depth interviews with 76 undergraduates attending elite universities and 72 teenaged citizen children of immigrants living in mostly lowincome households, we identify understudied economic narratives of Americanness: as future-oriented economic opportunities for elite undergraduates or stratified notions of current economic condition among immigrant-origin teens. We also find, depending on social location, that economic notions of Americanness overlap with other boundaries: whiteness for some immigrant-origin youth, and civic membership for elite undergraduates. Elite students place themselves at the centre of Americanness; immigrant-origin youth, even though they are U.S. citizens, sometimes place themselves outside these symbolic boundaries. Still, youth in more disadvantaged social locations sometimes appropriate markers of Americanness in strategies of what we call 'defensive inclusion', employing symbolic boundaries of hard work, multiculturalism and birthplace to contest perceived social boundaries of race and class that might exclude them from the core of 'Americanness'. Our findings suggest that researchers should include measures of economic national identity in future survey-based work and examine discursive practices of defensive inclusion in fieldwork. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Honor endorsement might predict an intertwining of personal and national identities that facilitates taking country-level threats personally. If true, this could help explain why honor endorsement predicts support for defensive reactions to national provocations. In a sample of US college students (Study 1) and adults (Study 2), a latent honor variable predicted (1) personalizing national threats, and (2) defensive responses to illegal immigration and terrorism. The first of these associations was mediated by respondents' identification with the nation, and the second was mediated sequentially by national identification and the resultant tendency to personalize national threats. Together, these results highlight a mechanism by which the honor–national-defensiveness association emerges and opens the door for further research on honor and group-level processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholars have devoted considerable attention to the concept of national identity. In a globalizing world, however, identity is increasingly shaped not only by one's own nation but also by foreign nations. With this in mind, this study theorizes international identity as a communicative process. We propose four features of international identity-that it is distinct, relational, contextual, and stratified-and examine these features in one crucial context: the modern American presidency. Our content analysis of every mention of a foreign entity in 74 years worth of presidential discourse-2480 mentions in all-supports our conception of international identity and begins to identify the parameters of this construct in American political communication. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]