| Abstruct |
At the end of the New York Philharmonic’s Japan tour in the summer of 1979, Leonard Bernstein, the icon of twentieth-century American music, met Kosuke Yamanaka (pseudonym), a Japanese man young enough to be his son, and the two men spent the maestro’s last night in Tokyo together. Between then and Bernstein’s death in 1990, Yamanaka sent 355 love letters, all of which Bernstein carefully kept and sometimes replied in writing or by phone. The affection between the two men was mutual and lasting, despite the distance in geography, culture, age, and status. Using Yamanaka’s letters, I interweave the micro narrative of intimacy and love and the macro account of the historical, political, economic, and cultural forces that shaped this relationship. I place the two men’s relationship within multiple contexts—including the growth of the culture industry in the United States, the changing dynamics of U.S.-Japan relations in the post-WWII decades, the politics of sexuality in both societies, the culture wars in the age of Reagan, and cultural diplomacy in the Cold War—to show how the two men’s relationship was enabled by, and embedded in, these larger structures and yet not entirely defined by them. |
