Information Bureau Research Articles

Radio Broadcasting and the Nationalization of the Masses in Wartime Japan: The Case of Radio Listening Guidance

This paper traces the history of the practice known as “radio listening guidance” in wartime Japan (1931-1945). During this era, the politicization of the masses into self-conscious citizens and imperial subjects consumed the attention of the political and cultural elite. Radio, a brand-new electronic and auditory medium, was considered to be a useful and effective tool for this purpose. Despite radio’s penetrating and homogenizing power, however, transmission alone did not guarantee the desired effects: radio’s real effect depended on how listeners engaged with the medium on an everyday basis. Thus, form the 1930s onward, the Japan Broadcasting Corporation attempted to make concrete interventions into the life and behavior of the masses in order to create “proper” listening habits and attitudes. The Ministry of Communications, the Information Bureau, prefectural governments, educators, and local elites also took part in this attempt. By investigating the discourses and practices of listening guidance, as well as their effects and limits, this paper shows that the making of “proper” radio listeners constituted a significant site of negotiations and struggles between mass audiences and the political and cultural elite of the nation. This study argues that the desire to regulate the thought and behavior of the masses and train them in self-discipline was inherent in the basic design of listening guidance. For this reason, the attempt to create self-disciplined radio listeners smoothly meshed with the wartime state’s mobilization campaigns to turn the masses into responsible and useful imperial subjects for the war effort. Despite this continued guidance, the gap between the ideal listener and the listeners in reality did not sharply narrow by the war’s end. The history of wartime listening guidance suggests that controlling the thought and behavior of the masses through radio was never an easy operation, thereby challenging the conventional representation of Japanese radio audiences during the war as passive victims or blind followers of top-down media messages.

Kazimierz Kumaniecki in evolucija klasične filologije v Ljudski republiki Poljski (prevedla Lara Unuk)

Kazimierz Kumaniecki (1905–1977), profesor na varšavski univerzi, je odločilno vplival na oblikovanje klasičnofilološke skupnosti v obdobju Poljske kot ljudske republike; ob prizadevanju za krepitev njenih struktur v smislu akademskega profila in kvalitete je s svojim delovanjem hkrati skrbel za njeno povezanost. Svoj čut za poslanstvo je črpal iz dveh virov, iz lastne konspirativne izkušnje v Informacijsko-propagandnem biroju glavnega štaba Domovinske vojske (Armia Krajowa) med drugo svetovno vojno ter iz izročila klasičnofilološke skupnosti v Galiciji za časa poljske razdeljenosti, ko je študij starega veka služil tudi kot orodje pri zavzemanju za Poljsko kot del Evrope. Študija vsebuje gradivo iz arhivov tajne policije.

Disability and the League of Nations: the Crippled Child’s Bill of Rights and a call for an International Bureau of Information, 1931

In Disability Studies the evolution of conceptual models is often portrayed as linear, with a nineteenth-century charity model shifting to the medical model that dominated disability discourse in the twentieth century. This is then assumed to be largely unchallenged until the 1970s, when an emergent Disability Rights Movement re-framed issues into the social model, from which evolved a rights-based model. This paper documents two early efforts to address disability issues submitted to the League of Nations: the Crippled Child’s Bill of Rights in 1931 and a ‘Memorial’ requesting the establishment of an International Bureau of Information on Crippled Children in 1929. Neither submission achieved its stated goals, yet both reflect early attempts to place disability within wider social contexts.

US intelligence and Chinese spies in the civil war

Throughout the civil war, US intelligence in China reported on the operations of the Bureau of Information and Statistics (BIS) of the regime of the Kuomintang (KMT) – the ruling Chinese National People’s Party of the Republic of China – the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) and Soviet intelligence (the NKVD – later the MBG and its military intelligence counterpart the GRU) in the vast urban centres of Shanghai, Nanjing, Tietsin and Beijing, as well as in key ports and coastal cities. Opponents multiplied in the complex and ruthless world of espionage, and honest allies were hard to find. The descendant of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the Strategic Services Unit (SSU), the X-2 Branch (the surviving counter-intelligence branch of the OSS), Army and Naval Intelligence, the Central Intelligence Group (CIG) and ultimately, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) were the key agencies handling secret human sources, witnessing the rapid decay of the KMT regime, the performance of its security apparatus, and the PLA’s secret activities among the urban population. US intelligence also noted the extensive recruitment of Japanese intelligence networks and operators to serve the Soviets, the KMT regime and the Communist Party of China (CPC); only a couple of years earlier Japanese spies were the enemy, and now they were deemed expert intelligence assets, to be employed without hesitation. One could say that in espionage yesterday’s fanatical enemy is tomorrow’s unscrupulous associate.

Shaw and Bertrand Russell versus Gilbert Murray on Britain's Entry into World War I

Shaw and Bertrand Russell versus Gilbert Murray on Britain's Entry into World War I

South Australia Red Cross Information Bureau records: a web resource and indexing project at the State Library of SA to commemorate the Centenary of ANZAC

South Australia Red Cross Information Bureau records: a web resource and indexing project at the State Library of SA to commemorate the Centenary of ANZAC

Wine tourists’ use of sources of information when visiting a USA wine region

This study investigates the sources of information people ( n = 334) use when deciding to embark on a wine tourism excursion by visiting a USA wine region environment. The study’s overall aim was to establish whether there are differences between first-time and repeat and between in-state- and out-of-state-based visitors in terms of sources of information they use to plan their visit to a wine region and how situational and sociodemographic variables relate to these. Specific differences exist in the information sources used by first-time and repeat wine tourists. Repeat visitors use informal sources such as exposure to a regional winery’s label, attending a tasting elsewhere and previous visits to the region significantly more than first-time visitors, who are more inclined to use formal sources such as brochures/pamphlets and the visitor information bureau. Word of mouth is used more than any other source by both in-state- and out-of-state-based visitors. Across the board, wine tourists did not differ much in their use of these sources by gender or age generation, with the exception of female millennials, in which case word of mouth and brochures/pamphlets were used significantly more.

Clinical toxicology in Edinburgh, two centuries of progress

The Scottish Poisons Information Bureau was established in Edinburgh in September 1963 and shortly afterwards one of the wards of the city's Royal Infirmary was designated a Regional Poisoning Treatment Centre. Both units were soon to be brought under one roof. To mark this 50th anniversary, we review how they built upon a history dating from the early 19th century and highlight their influence on current clinical toxicological practice and the delivery of poisons information. While many centres worldwide seek to improve the care of poisoned patients, the contribution of Edinburgh over the past 50 years has been notable.

Elizabeth Bowen’s Ireland? Film, Gender and the Depiction of 1960s Ireland

At the start of Ireland’s transformational decade of 1960s, the American network CBS contacted Padraig O’Hanrahan, the Director of the Irish Information Bureau in Dublin. They were interested in gaining government assistance for a program being planned for its popular television series The Twentieth Century. The episode envisioned would address social, political, economic, and cultural developments in the country and provide an accurate portrayal of everyday life in Ireland. The Dublin government readily agreed but was unaware that the Irish novelist Elizabeth Bowen, a writer with very distinct cultural and political prejudices, had been hired to write the script for the program. The narrative of the film produced by Elizabeth Bowen is revealing as it allows the viewer a unique perspective into a society undergoing significant change. The film addresses a wide array of issues including the evolving role of women in Irish society at the start of a decade characterized by rapid change. What at first may seem like a rather awkward American effort to ‘capture’ the real Ireland, warts and all, was a more complex effort, strongly influenced by a remarkable Irish writer. The program is also revealing as it deeply upset an Irish Government concerned about its image and desperate to present itself in the words of Taoiseach Sean Lemass as ‘a progressive nation seeking efficiency’.

Mezhdunarodnyi krizis 1939 goda v traktovkakh rossiiskikh i pol´skikh istorikov (The International Crisis of 1939 in the Works of Russian and Polish Historians) (review)

M. M. Narinskii and S. Dembski, eds., Mezhdunarodnyi krizis 1939 goda v traktovkakh rossiiskikh i pol'skikh istorikov (The International Crisis of 1939 in the Works of Russian and Polish Historians). 480 pp. Moscow: Aspekt Press, 2009. ISBN-13 978-5756705799. As interest in the Soviet experience of World War II continues to gather steam, it was perhaps inevitable that the tumultuous year spanning the period between the Munich Conference and the signing of the Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact should become a focus of discussion once again. The diplomatic history of that period has been enmeshed, as few other topics were, in the framework of the Cold War propaganda conflict. The defining battle of its historiography was launched when the Allies brought to light documents captured from the German Foreign Ministry. Published in January 1948, Nazi-Soviet Relations, 1939-1941 was a carefully arranged and selected collection illuminating the scope of cooperation between the USSR and Hitler's Germany. (1) The implication of this material was that, in the run-up to World War II, the Soviet Union acted as a disruptive influence in international affairs and shared a substantial degree of blame for causing the war. The USSR wasted little time in responding by launching its own historiographical broadside. In February of the same year, the Soviet Information Bureau published a communique titled Falsifiers of History, singling out the Western policy of appeasement as the main contributing factor in Hitler's rise to dominance of Central and Eastern Europe. (2) Within the Soviet bloc, the version established by Falsifiers of History persisted until the 1990s as the defining framework for interpreting the causes of World War II. Western historiography, however, was in fact both more polyphonous and more volatile. Thus A. J. P. Taylor, in the course of his revisionist account of the interwar years, sympathized with the Soviet view that Stalin was essentially committed to the collective-security approach and was forced into accommodation with Hitler only by the machinations of the Western appeasers. (3) His modern heirs, for example Geoffrey Roberts, to this day maintain that--governed by ideological as well as realist concerns--the Kremlin had been genuinely committed to the ideals of collective security. (4) This school of thought, in turn, was problematized by the postrevisionists of the late 1970s and 1980s, such as Jonathan Haslam, who envisioned Stalin's foreign policy as the product of ruthless realpolitik adaptation, based on pure self-interest, with the Soviet Union's security as the ultimate touchstone. (5) Neither long-term plans nor ideology guided Stalin's actions; rather, all possibilities were considered as they presented themselves. This approach currently reflects the dominant Western view on this issue. It is not without its critics, however. Scholars who give considerably more weight to the ideological features of the Soviet decision-making process have taken the lead in countering it. The so-called German school and historians like Ernst Topitsch argue that an ideological mindset framed Stalin's policy, the core of which was provocation of war between the capitalist states. These historians postulate that the Non-Aggression Pact was the culmination of a concerted effort on Stalin's part to woo Hitler and to reestablish Soviet-German post-Rapallo cooperation. (6) This conception then presents Stalin as the key architect of the conflict, with the Pact as a blank cheque issued to Berlin. The Western debates over war guilt reached their apogee with the Icebreaker controversy. This polemic followed Viktor Suvorov's suggestion that the German attack on the USSR was essentially a preventive measure that preempted an imminent Soviet invasion. (7) Largely dismantled by historians like Gabriel Gorodetsky and David Glantz, Suvorov's thesis today occupies a marginal position in Western scholarship, although it remains relevant for the wider Western public and among some scholars in post-Soviet Russia and Eastern Europe. …

“Where have all researchers gone?” Use and abuse of polls for the 2010 elections in Tanzania

More than any other period in the history of Tanzania since the introduction of multipartism in 1992, opinion polls for the 2010 general elections were highly disputed by stakeholders on the ground that they were partisan. It was claimed that the polls by the Research and Education for Democracy in Tanzania (REDET) and the SYNOVATE were in favour of the ruling party, Chama Cha Mapinduzi (CCM) while that by the Tanzania Citizens’ Information Bureau (TCIB) leaned towards the opposition party, Chama Cha Demokrasia na Maendeleo (CHADEMA). In this article, the methodological rigor of these polls was compared and the use and abuse of research were unpacked. Three interrelated questions formed the central focus of this article: Were polls biased against or in favour of particular parties and or candidates? How successful were pollsters in projecting electoral support for candidates or political parties that reasonably reflected the actual electoral outcomes? And what were the sources of errors committed by pollsters? In order to respond to these questions, a critical examination of research methodology for each pollster was made. The article found that the sampling, framing of questions as well as reporting were either by default or design flawed culminating in controversial polling outcomes.

UNION DEFENCE FORCES : STATISTICS OF THE WOUNDED AND PRISONERS OF WAR DURING THE SECOND WORLD WAR 1939-1945

In 1943, after active service as ROMS of Die Middellandse Regiment in the Western Desert during which he escaped capture at Tobruk and was present at the battle of EI Alamein, S/Sgt later Capt J.E. Loraine-Grews was posted to War Records (now Military Information Bureau SADF) in Pretoria where he was to remain until 1966 when he was transferred to the Military Museum at the Castle in Cape Town. While at War Records he compiled the Union of South Africa Roll of Honour 1939-1945. Capt Loraine- Grews also compiled statistics of the wounded and prisoners of war and since these have never been published, may be of value to researchers and would be a monumental task for a researcher to compile afresh. They are published below.

DIE SLEUTEL VAN JERUSALEM

The article below, dealing with the role of the South African Artillery in the capture of Nebi Samwll (8 km northwest of Jerusalem) during World War 2, is but a short extract from a much more comprehensive work on the SA artillery that is being undertaken by the Military Information Bureau, Pretoria. One of the burning questions that still remains unanswered is: what happened to the historic canon, on which the Key of Jerusalem was engraved, that played such a vital part in this particular campaign? If anyone should have information on the whereabouts of these canon, he is requested to contact the Military Information Bureau at Private Bag X 289, Pretoria 0001 (telephone no 28-1731 X 554), as soon as possible.

Uit die geskiedenis van die ''Corps Staatsartillerie" van die Zuid-Afrikaansche Republiek

The author of this article has put together diverse military historical notes on the "Corps Staatsartillerie" of the "Zuid Afrikaansche Republiek" and has dedicated his article to the memory of the late brig Willem Otto, in life Director of the Military Information Bureau.

Characteristics of Interest Groups

An organised interest group is a totality of many parts, which form its characteristics. The main characteristics of an interest group consist of its organisation, membership, leadership, office, election system, constitution and finance. The ideology of an interest group provides the basis for its functions and activities. The activities of an interest group include security to its members, presentation of demands through seminars, workshops and conferences, maintenance of information bureau and participation of members in seminars and similar activities. The centre point of group activities are the institutions of the government. It concentrates its activities on legislature, executive and judiciary. Besides, it also seeks support from political parties, like-minded institutions and persons. In a democratic system, an interest group has many opportunities for the pursuit of its interests.

Britain Finds Andy Hardy: British Cinema Audiences and The American Way of Life in The Second World War

The years 1942 and 1943 saw great concern, on both sides of the Atlantic, about Anglo-American understanding. Almost one million American servicemen were to arrive on British shores by the end of 1...

Transnationale Parteienkooperationen in der politschen Praxis: Die Sozialistische Internationale im 20. und 21. Jahrhundert

International cooperation of left parties has been developed in the 1860s due to the international agenda of the parties. In the 20th century the conflict between Communist and Social Democratic parties became more and more important. In 1951, in opposition to the Soviet dominated Communist Information Bureau (Cominforn), the Socialist International was reestablished by 34 predominantly European member parties. Links to non-European parties, mainly incurred in joint efforts to decolonization. Since 1976, under the chairmanship of Willy Brandt, the SI expanded purposefully in all regions of the world. The SI was a key player in the cold war – both due to the conflict with communist parties, as well as by the opposition to right-wing authoritarian systems and through contacts with the KPDSU. After the implosion of the communist parties in Eastern Europe, the SI supported the formation of social-democratic parties and fostered their integration into the social democratic party family, but failed to establish strong non-European member parties in the US, in India Abstracts 155 and in Brazil. Ideologically, the SI is focused on the post-1989 democratic and social globalization, on conflict mediation and on disarmament. Institutionally, the SI primarily becomes active in its bi-annual meetings of the Council which were attended by over 100 parties. The Council meetings are nodes in a network that can be used continuously for mutual assistance in case of elections, in national or international conflicts or even in preparing negotiations for the UN Security Council. The article examines in how far the international features of transnational party cooperation are shaped by peculiarities and specifics – also in comparison to the European wide party cooperation.

The Indian Farmer, Middlemen and the APMCs

The Indian Farmer, Middlemen and the APMCs

Activity of Libraries and Village Reading Rooms in Mari Village during the Great Patriotic War

The article analyzes the activities of libraries and village reading-rooms in the Mari village during the Great Patriotic War. It describes the changes in libraries’ work at the beginning of the war, forms and methods of cultural and educational work. Special attention is paid to lectures, talks, newspapers and news briefs of the Soviet Information Bureau, conferences, literary evenings, collective radio programmers hearings, stands with central and local newspapers and help to the front. The article also considers the work with the rural youth and the organization of mobile libraries.

SICOT at “80”

SICOT at “80”