Pacific War Research Articles

Architectures of the Pacific Carceral Archipelago: Second World War Internment and Prisoner of War Camps

Characterisations of the Pacific Basin as a tropical archipelago essentialise its geo-cultural diversity as an alternative way of envisioning the region and its politics. This paper offers a darker projection of this archipelagic imagination as one forged by imperial competition and wartime violence. It traces its genesis across the history of the Second World War internment and prisoner of war camps. Their spatial proliferation as a carceral geography produces a variety of temporary environments where civil and legal rights are suspended. The roles adopted by captors in their treatment of prisoners reflect the social prejudices of the period, the politics of imperialism and the specific responses of warring nations during various stages of the conflict. This paper asks how architectural scholarship might address this imperial history. It draws together diverse models of incarceration related to the Pacific War, acknowledging the different treatment of racially different colonial and national subjects and tracing their passage through multiple spatial configurations of camps. The camps in Australia are contextualised in their wider Pacific geography with special attention to Victoria’s Tatura Group.

The Cambridge history of the Second World War

Following on from earlier three-volume histories of the Cold War and the First World War, Cambridge University Press completes a trilogy with this detailed treatment of the Second World War. Multi-authored in the Cambridge tradition, the individual chapters cover a wide range of events and topics and the 81 contributors, mainly but not exclusively from the United Kingdom and the United States, include both scholars who have already established a reputation in the subject as well as those who are in the process of doing so. Perhaps the greatest strength of the volumes is the treatment given to what may be loosely referred to as the Pacific War. No one who uses them properly is going to have any doubts about the nature and importance of the struggle between Japan and its opponents between 1937 and 1945, and it is particularly encouraging to note the use of Chinese and Japanese sources by the authors, when so many English-language books on the subject cite none. The principal weakness of the enterprise is its division into an unnecessarily complicated series of topics, which is not always adhered to by the authors and which often compels the unfortunate reader to skip backwards and forwards, not only within but between volumes. Despite this flaw, however, this remains an important contribution to the history of the Second World War and will need to be consulted by any serious student of the subject for many years to come. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Literature of the Pacific, Mainly Australian

This lecture is in some ways the ‘lost’ chapter of The Cambridge History of Australian Literature (2009), one eventually not written because the projected author could find not enough literary material even in that vast Pacific Ocean, or perhaps found – as mariners have – only far separated specks in that ocean. Yet Australian literature about the nation’s Pacific littoral and the islands within the ocean and the ocean itself is varied, considerable, and often eccentric. Our greatest drinking song is Barry Humphries’s ‘The Old Pacific Sea’. The Japs and the jungle are the hallmarks of fiction, poetry and reportage of the Pacific War of 1942-5. New Guinea has attracted such writers as James McAuley, Peter Ryan, Trevor Shearston, Randolph Stow and Drusilla Modjeska. The short stories of Louis Becke are the most extensive and iconoclastic writing about the Pacific by any Australian. Yet the literature of the Pacific littoral seems thinner than that of the Indian Ocean. The map on the title page of Rolf Boldrewood’s A Modern Buccaneer (1894) shows those afore-mentioned specks in a vast expanse of water. What aesthetic challenges have Pacific writing posed and how have they been met? Have the waters of the Pacific satisfied Australians as a near offshore playground but defeated wider efforts of the imagination?

Yuma Totani. Justice in Asia and the Pacific Region, 1945-1952: Allied War Crimes Prosecutions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. 274 pp. ISBN 9781107087620. $75.50.

[Extract] In her most recent book, Justice in Asia and the Pacific Region, 1945-1952: Allied War Crimes Prosecutions, Yuma Totani provides an impressive analysis of fourteen trials of senior Japanese military personnel prosecuted by the Allies in the aftermath of the Pacific War. These fourteen trials were part of a massive number of trials conducted by the Allies throughout the Asia-Pacific region from 1945-1952. Those who were convicted of war crimes received either a lengthy jail sentence, or were executed. Although not a stated objective, and perhaps more unwittingly conveyed by Totani, is the inescapable notion that the Pacific War was a collision of colonial interests between Japan and the Allies. Japan belligerently seized territory and resources from the Dutch, the US, the UK, the French, and the Australians to feed its massive war machine in northern China. This rapacious conquest caused a great deal of humiliation for the Allies whom themselves had been the colonial masters throughout the Asia-Pacific for many years. When it came time for the trials, no doubt this humiliation influenced the way the trials were conducted.

The Limits of Hate: Japanese Prisoners on US Submarines during the Second World War

The Pacific War is frequently characterized as a ‘race war’ and a ‘war without mercy’. The experience of Japanese prisoners on American submarines, however, suggests that hatred could often quickly be overcome once combatants spent time in close proximity. The confined space of submarines made a degree of interaction between prisoners and captors unavoidable. Through a series of case studies, the evidence suggests that submariners sometimes contravened the Geneva Convention in extracting work and obtaining information from prisoners. On the other hand, it appears that relations between prisoners and captors were for the most part amicable and at times mutually supportive. Although these relationships were manifestly unequal, occasionally prisoners exercised a degree of influence over submariners’ fates.

La política chilena hacia Bolivia, 1900-1930: la constitución de un discurso estructural

This article analyzes the constitution of international discourse about the conflict of Chile and Bolivia Treaty of 1904, which set the following relations between the two countries. Is selected the period 1900-1930, because it corresponds to the decades during which Chile stabilized its relations with the three neighboring countries through treaties of 1902, 1904 and 1929. The hypothesis proposed in this paper is that during this period the speech and Chilean politics were consolidated. On the one hand, this speech was prepared under a rational and legal approach, which is based on a deeper process and associated withthe establishment of the Chilean identity, whose components catalyzed with the Pacific War. Furthermore, both identity and address, Gritty truths became, whose validity has remained to the present. The preparation of this work is based on the annual report of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Chile, the main source informs us about this speech and politics to which it gave rise.

Amateurism, Aura, Anarchy - The Significance of Modernity for Nakaji Yasui (1903-1942)

Nakaji Yasui is a representative figure of modernity in photographic circles in Japan. He was born at the beginning of the twentieth century and died in the second year of the Pacific War. His works always provide a perspective of society, while also making a connection with the intellect towards civilization. He never abandoned this perspective, which is exceptional for amateurism when the world aspect was rapidly changing. Clearly, it was elaborated in various ways as to how observation leads to truthful inferences of an external world. Here Yasui will be described in terms of intellectual history, rather than the art history of these times. His action and work will be analysed in relation to what Yasui names as

History as Fact and Historical Truth - The Politics of Truth in the Rewriting of the History of the “Pacific War” in Postwar and Post - postwar Japan -

History as Fact and Historical Truth - The Politics of Truth in the Rewriting of the History of the “Pacific War” in Postwar and Post - postwar Japan -

Japan and the South China Sea

This article examines and analyses Japan’s current interest in theSouth China Sea, by first alluding to the historical context of that country’s involvement from the mid-1930s to the end of the Pacific War, 1945. It then outlines Japan’s energy security needs and that country’s national policy relating to securing safety for its flagged ships and those vessels assisting in promoting Japan’s export and import and the diplomatic role that Japan plays towards regional stability. Japan in their Diplomatic Bluebook stated that the priority for Japan is to guarantee the securityandprosperity of the countryand its people. Here,it is clear thatthe Japanese Government will trytodo everything togive the besttoensure their survival. Japan’s interest in South China Sea is because it is deemed critical for the Japanese security.Keywords: Japan, Energy, Maritime Security, Military, South China Sea

Group Accommodation and Repatriation Japanese Military ‘Comfort Women’ in Shanghai, China after Termination of Pacific War

Group Accommodation and Repatriation Japanese Military ‘Comfort Women’ in Shanghai, China after Termination of Pacific War

Stoppage of time in schizophrenia: Similarities to the field of war trauma

Following the tracks of the pioneers of the psychoanalysis of schizophrenia, who discovered the singularity of transference in such cases and, during the wars, among traumatized soldiers, we came to the conclusion that trauma and psychosis belong to the same field of destruction of the symbolic order, that is, an area of death, where time stops, where there is no other, except for a ruthless agency that erases truth and trust. In that field, patient and analyst are co-researchers, exploring and challenging the possible existence of a reliable other as a positive outcome. Such an event “happens in a few sessions” – as described by the late Martin Cooperman, psychoanalyst at the Austen Riggs Center and veteran of the Pacific wars – “but it takes many years to get there.” We will give examples of some critical sessions, when time starts to flow again. They take place at the crossroad of the patient's and of the analyst's story with the catastrophes of History.

An endeavor to estimate seigniorage before the end of and immediately after the Pacific War

This is the first research paper to analyze seigniorage in Japan before, during, and after the Pacific War. As a result of logically categorizing various definitions of seigniorage (opportunity cost approach, monetary approach, and inflation tax), we conclude that these differences pivot on the issue of whether to confine the scope of debts, which is reduced by unexpected inflation, to the usual general government debt or to expand it to the integrated government debt including the monetary base of the Bank of Japan. We also point out the possibility that, in light of the degree of reduction in government debt as a percentage of GDP during and after the Pacific War, the monetary approach or inflation tax (the cases of confining the taxation base to the usual general government debt) are appropriate means to estimate seigniorage obtained by the general government.

Re-orientating Japanese cinema: cold war criticism of ‘anti-American’ films

In the context of the United States’ Cold War strategy in Asia, a range of Japanese films produced shortly after the end of the Occupation (1945–1952), became subject to hostile media coverage by both the American and British press throughout 1953. Such criticism, I argue, was widespread enough to form a more general discourse that post-Occupation Japanese cinema was systematically promoting ‘anti-American’ values. Such a discourse, however, often conflated films based on quite different topics and political persuasions, from ‘communist’ atom bomb films produced by the Japanese independents, to studio films that dealt with subjects generally taboo under the Occupation, such as the Pacific War or American army bases. Despite the attempts of Japanese producers and critics to repudiate some of these charges, in the short term this hostile criticism led to distribution problems for particular films, and in the longer term a decline in studio productions dealing with such contentious topics as well as a sharp division between the studio and independent sectors which had otherwise been significantly intertwined.

Evaluation in US and Japanese history textbooks

Abstract This paper attempts to make a corpus and cross-linguistic study of how the Pacific War is evaluated in US and Japanese history textbooks by drawing upon Systemic Functional Linguistics and the Appraisal System. The global pattern of evaluation in the data is such that the US history textbook gives more value to acts and things, creates an authoritative voice excluding alternative positions, and has a delicate construal for the extent of evaluation. By contrast, the Japanese history textbook displays a subjective affective stance and a flagged authorial voice strengthened by alternative positions. A detailed discourse analysis of the lexicogrammar in the Pacific War narratives of the US and Japanese history textbooks further shows different evaluation orientations for the construal of images of the United States and Japan. The US history textbook characterizes the United States as a state of military power and high morality for its military operations in the Pacific War while censuring Japan’s cruelty of attack, whereas the Japanese history textbook highlights Japan’s tenacity and voluntary acts on the battlefield while condemning the United States for its immorality of bombing.

Museum Activism Against Military Sexual Slavery

AbstractThere has been political tension in East Asia over Japan's avoidance of facing its history of imperial expansion and wartime atrocities. Peace museums have been battlefields for the debate on how to remember the war. One of the fiercest battles has been fought at the Women's Active Museum on War and Peace, known as the WAM, which focuses on the issue of “military comfort women,” those forced to offer sexual service to Japanese soldiers during the Asia–Pacific War. The WAM has been leading political activism against right‐wing nationalists who deny the history of military sexual slavery. I examine museum activism at the WAM, delving into specific strategies for educating and politicizing visitors. I argue that it takes advantage of the museum's two roles as temple and forum. I also want to show that the WAM is collaborative in every aspect of museum creation and operation: finance, collections, archives, research, displays, and education.

A Study on the Promotion and Conclusion of the Small Blast Furnace Construction Project by the Japanese Empire during the Pacific War Period

A Study on the Promotion and Conclusion of the Small Blast Furnace Construction Project by the Japanese Empire during the Pacific War Period

THE DEVELOPMENT OF A DEATH CULT IN 1930s JAPAN AND THE DECISION TO DROP THE ATOM BOMB

In the 1930s Japan developed a death cult which had a profound effect on the conduct of the Japanese armed forces in the Pacific War, 1941–1945. As a result of government directed propaganda campaign after the overthrow of the Shogunate in 1868, the ruling military cliques restored an Imperial system of government which placed Emperor Meiji as the Godhead central to the constitution and spiritual life of the Japanese nation. A bastardised Bushido cult emerged. It combined with a Social-Darwinist belief in Japan's manifest destiny to dominate Asia. The result was a murderous brutality that became synonymous with Japanese treatment of prisoners of war and conquered civilians. Japan's death cult was equally driven by a belief in self-sacrifice characterised by suicidal Banzai charges and kamikaze attacks. The result was kill ratios of Japanese troops in the Pacific War that were unique in the history of warfare. Even Japanese civilians were expected to sacrifice their lives in equal measure in the defence of the homeland. It was for this reason that American war planners came to the shocking estimate that as many as 900,000 Allied troops could die in the conquest of mainland Japan – Operation DOWNFALL. Contrary to the view of numbers of revisionist historians in the post-war period, who have variously argued that the atom bombs were used to prevent Soviet entry into the war against Japan, Francis Pike, author of Hirohito's War, The Pacific War, 1941 – 1945 [Bloomsbury 2015] reaffirms that the nuclear weapon was used for one purpose alone – to bring the war to a speedy end and to save the lives of American troops.

Changi: A Penal Genealogy across the Pacific War

Anglophone scholarship on the Pacific War in Singapore is largely focused on records and memoirs of captive allied forces, extending imperial histories of that period. The punitive environments that incarcerated soldiers and civilians are examined through that lens. This essay approaches the Pacific War as an interregnum in a longer penal genealogy and a historical border to political decolonisation. It reviews this literature as significant for understanding the evolution of the colonial prison and its wartime transformation into a Prisoner of War (POW) camp environment posing questions about incarceration, citizenship and penal labour. It asks how residential carceral facilities such as the prison, the POW camp and the home are adapted and transformed. The main foci of this paper and its genealogy are the Changi Prison and the Changi POW Camp.

The two starting points of World War II: a reexamination from a global perspective

ABSTRACTAlthough the factual chronology of World War II is not in dispute, how to best make sense of these facts and how to objectively evaluate that history have always been limited by political circumstances and personal biases. Viewing WWII seven decades later, we need to move away from Eurocentrism and to stop seeing the war from the prism of a European war or Pacific war. The entire history of WWII, from beginning to end, including its several phases characterized by fermentation, outbreak, climax, and conclusion, is extremely complex. This paper argues that the war has two origins or starting points because it resulted from disparate prewar conditions in Europe and Asia. Viewed from this perspective, the strategic importance of the China Theater in WWII and the enormous sacrifices and contributions the Chinese people made to the victory over Fascism and for world peace ought to be given due credit.

No Refuge from Modernity?: The Intersections of American and Japanese Conservatisms, Russell Kirk, and Shirasu Jirō

The Michigan Historical Review 42:1 (Spring 2016): 35-59©2016 Central Michigan University. ISSN 0890-1686 All Rights Reserved No Refuge from Modernity?: The Intersections of American and Japanese Conservatisms, Russell Kirk, and Shirasu Jirō By Jason Michael Morgan There are circumstances under which it is not only more honorable to lose than to win, but quite truly less harmful, in the ultimate providence of God.1 The Pacific War, fought principally between two of the twentieth century’s mightiest naval forces, the United States and Japan, is often portrayed as an existential struggle between fascism and freedom. As Hollywood filmmaker Frank Capra outlined in his propaganda documentary series Why We Fight; as Ernie Pyle and Studs Terkel wrote in dispatches from the Pacific; as American newspapers—and Japanese ones, too—wrote in breathless editorials and sensational headlines; and as the rank-and-file soldiers on both sides had largely come to internalize and accept, the enemy was barbaric, treacherous, animal-like, brainwashed, vicious, subhuman, wily, rapacious, and cruel.2 The “Japs” on the one hand and the “Meriken” (a pejorative term for “Americans”) on the other were not only threats to one’s own AsiaPacific empire but, more important for propaganda purposes, also imperiled the peaceful world order. At least in the American estimation, the progressive forces of liberal democracy were faced with a mission as 1 Russell Kirk, on American atrocities in Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and Tokyo in 1945. A Program for Conservatives (Washington, DC: Henry Regnery, 1954), 266. 2 Studs Terkel, The Good War: An Oral History of WWII (New York, NY: The New Press, 1997); Harold Guard and John Tring, The Pacific War Uncensored: A War Correspondent’s Unvarnished Account of the Fight against Japan (Havertown, PA: Casemate, 2011); “Jap Fleet Smashed,” New Orleans Times-Picayune, 7 June 1942, 1; “The Enemy’s Dream of a Final Line—But Now They Tremble with Fear at Our Attack—We Will Not Permit Any Fleet to Roam the Pacific,” Yomiuri Shimbun, 11 June 1942. All translations are by the author unless otherwise noted. 36 The Michigan Historical Review divinely-appointed as any Shintoist decree: to bring the light of civilization to the East and set colonized captives free.3 Though it is only slightly over seventy years since Japanese leaders signed the instrument of surrender aboard the USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay—under the same American flag that Commodore Matthew C. Perry had flown aboard his flagship USS Susquehanna when he forcefully opened Japan to commerce ninety-two years before—historically-themed speeches given by both Japanese and American politicians announce the triumph of modernity as witnessed by Japan’s industrialization, democratization, and incorporation into the weak-bordered world of global capitalism.4 Even American historians, who elsewhere have been deeply critical of modernity, have recently lauded the achievements of the modern, postwar Japanese state. Modernity, the apparent victor in the Pacific War, is still proudly triumphant nearly three-quarters of a century after the fighting came to an end.5 Yet what is often removed from the historical narrative of the Pacific War is the role of modernity itself in creating the conditions possible for the occurrence of such a total war in the first place. Seen as a mirrored instantiation of modernity, the Pacific War thus seems much less like a titanic struggle between two juggernauts of radically different ontological type and much more like a thoroughly modern battle for complete domination under the cast of totalizing ideologies.6 The Allied demand for unconditional surrender, too, was symptomatic, not of an existential struggle between two diametrically opposed forces, but rather of the 3 Ian Buruma, “MacArthur’s Children,” review of John Dower’s Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War Two (New York, NY: Norton, 1999), New York Review of Books, October 21, 1999. nybooks.com/articles/archives/1999/oct/21/macarthurschildren ; Peter Duus, The Abacus and the Sword: The Japanese Penetration of Korea, 1895-1910 (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 1998); George Akita and Brandon Palmer, The Japanese Colonial Legacy in Korea, 1910-1945 (Honolulu, HI: University of Hawaii Press, 2015). 4 See Japanese Prime Minister Abe Shinzō’s speech to the...