Pacific War Research Articles

Between Asia and empire: infrastructures of encounter in the archive of war

ABSTRACTIn this essay, we stage a conversation about our experiences researching everyday histories of encounter between Asian and Asian diasporic subjects during the Pacific and Vietnam Wars. Through readings of materials from the archives of two empires, Britain and the United States, with bloody records of military intervention in east and south-east Asia, we show how wartime inter-Asian, Afro-Asian, and Asian diasporic geographies of relation overlapped with and animated one another, helping to (re)produce trans-local communities of affinity over space and time even as they also functioned as infrastructures for empire. Throughout, we reflect on the infrastructures – material, institutional, epistemological, affective – that make inter-referencing possible, both for our subjects and, importantly, for ourselves. If our archives resonate, what does this tell us about the trans-imperial durability of the intimate infrastructures we show taking shape in 1940s China and 1960s Vietnam respectively?

Looking Both Ways: Gi Songs and Musical Exoticism in Post-World War II Japan

GI songs or shinchū-gun songu in Japanese are legacies of the U.S. occupation of Japan, which started in 1945 with Japan's defeat in the Pacific War. Although the occupation officially ended in 1952, many American soldiers continued to arrive and remained in Japan even after 1952. This was due to the outbreak of the Korean War (1950-53), which made Japan America's advance base. GI songs generally refer to compositions addressed to American soldiers stationed in Japan during this occupation period and through the 1950s.

Economic Opportunity and Strategic Dilemma in Colonial Development: Britain, Japan and Malaya’s Iron Ore, 1920s to 1950s

The importance of Malaya’s iron ore has been downgraded from both an economic and geo-strategic perspective. Under colonial administration, iron-ore mines owned and operated by Japanese enterprises and individuals, and the resultant exports to Japan, were central to economic development in the east-coast states of the peninsula. But this also made British Malaya a site of international contestation as Anglo–Japanese relations became estranged in the run up to World War Two in Asia and the Pacific. British administrators had to balance economic opportunity with strategic cost, and securing iron ore was a key factor in Japan’s occupation of Malaya after December 1941. Pre-war dilemmas resurfaced after the Pacific War. Nevertheless, exports to Japan both resumed and expanded. The combination of Japanese regeneration and Southeast Asian development in the context of the Cold War once again placed Malaya’s iron ore at the centre of geo-strategic and economic priorities for what was fast becoming the terminal colonial regime. This analysis is supported by the wide range of primary sources consulted from the records of the Malayan state administrations to British intelligence assessments, as well as the evaluation of quantitative data.

Competing Narratives of Victimhood and Aggression: Japanese Memory of Wartime in Sakae T time in Sakae Tsuboi’s Nijushi No Hit s Nijushi No Hitomi

The conclusion of the Pacific War witnessed the emergence of contradictory narratives that soon competed for ownership of Japan’s official wartime memory. As ardent nationalism was replaced with pacifism and a global outlook, Japan’s total military defeat was largely refigured into a narrative of victimhood. Simultaneously, the aggression of the past was purposefully downplayed. Pacifism is enshrined in the Article 9 of Japan’s Constitution. That clause represents a cherished part of the country’s postwar identity. This study investigates the memory of war as described in Sakae Tsuboi’s novel, Nijushi no Hitomi, that depicts the lives of a teacher’s and her 12 students in a hamlet on Shodo Island who experienced the Pacific War. Using Sakae’s novel as a lens, this paper considers Japanese memory of war with from the dialectic of the nationalistic spirit propagated during the war and the later commitment to pacifism. Employing the narrative discourse theory proposed by Genette, the narration of war memory is explored through the analysis of the actions and events surrounding the characters in the text. Narrative voices in the text are examined to reveal the perspective of each character in forming different memories of the war. The memories of war are discussed based on Hashimoto Akiko's theory which proposed that there are three kinds of Japanese memories about the war; i.e as a hero, as a victim and as a perpretator. This paper shows that there are two kinds of narrative in the Japanese memory related to war: i.e memory of victimhood and heroism. Memories of victimhood provoked trauma which in part gave rise to the Japanese commitment toward pacifism. At the same time, memories of heroism can lead to unvarnished nationalism, with can still cause the commitment to pacifism to waver.

Nishida’s Bow: Evaluating Nishida’s Wartime Actions

ABSTRACTThis paper examines Nishida’s later work on the historical world and religious transformation in an effort to clarify his political writings during the Pacific War. It sheds new light on the debate over the interpretation of Nishida’s wartime actions through reflection on a brief interaction Nishida had with the student Kiyoshi Kato during World War II. Shinran’s influence on Nishida will also be analyzed to reveal that the moral and religious insufficiency of the practitioner is a key aspect of his view of religious consciousness. Considering Nishida’s view of religious transformation together with his political writings and his interaction with Kato will lead to a deeper understanding of his view of history.

Can the Atomic Bombings on Japan Be Justified? A Conversation with Dr. Tsuyoshi Hasegawa

ABSTRACT Tsuyoshi Hasegawa, a US citizen who was born in Japan, has taught in both countries. Applying his specialized knowledge of Russian history to an analysis of the US decision to drop atomic bombs on Japan, he challenges the prevailing American view that the US decision to drop the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki was justified. The prevailing view is based on two premises: first, the use of the atomic bombs was the only option available to the US government without launching a costly homeland invasion; and second, the atomic bombings had an immediate and direct impact on Japan’s decision to surrender. Dr. Hasegawa rebuts both assumptions. He also sets out the third – and often hidden – justification for dropping the bombs, namely, America’s sense of revenge. He argues that, even before the atomic bombings, the United States had already crossed the moral high ground that it had held. He views the US use of atomic bombs to be a war crime. But he asserts that this action must be understood in the context of Japan’s responsibility for starting the war of aggression and committing atrocities in the Asia–Pacific War.

The French Colonization and Japanese Occupation of Indochina during the Second World War: Encounters of the French, Japanese, and Vietnamese

Author(s): Namba, Chizuru | Abstract: This article seeks to clarify the relationships that formed among the French, Japanese, and Vietnamese when they coexisted in Indochina during the Second World War. The French and the Japanese jointly ruled Indochina, due to their respective interests in preserving suzerainty and securing bases for the Pacific War. These two groups maintained constant mutual awareness in this complicated and unstable relationship while avoiding conflict and seeking the support of the Vietnamese population. However, despite efforts of French and Japanese authorities, the contradiction of mutual coexistence between France, as the “missionary of civilization,” and Japan, as the “liberator of Asia” from Western colonialism, could not be concealed. Whereas the Japanese government’s policy of “maintaining peace” in Indochina ensured that interactions between the Japanese and Vietnamese were limited, the relationship between the French and the Vietnamese shifted during this time, with the effect of stimulating the local population’s identity and leading to France laying the groundwork for postwar decolonization. By examining the quotidian facets of the Franco-Japanese rule of Indochina, this article reveals how mutual encounters among the French, Japanese, and Vietnamese undermined French colonization and Japanese occupation. Keywords: Indochina, Japan, Vietnam, French colonization, Japanese empire, Second World War, Pacific War, colonization, decolonization

Curse on This Country: The Rebellious Army of Imperial Japan by Danny Orbach

Reviewed by: Curse on This Country: The Rebellious Army of Imperial Japan by Danny Orbach Antony Best (bio) Curse on This Country: The Rebellious Army of Imperial Japan. By Danny Orbach. Cornell University Press, Ithaca, 2017. xii, 367 pages. $39.95. The topic of this volume might on the face of it appear to be a relatively familiar one: how to account for the tendency toward insubordination that bedeviled the Imperial Japanese Army in the 1930s. This is of, course, a subject on which we already have useful studies such as Richard Storry's The Double Patriots: A Study of Japanese Nationalism (Chatto & Windus, 1957) and Ben-Ami Shillony's Revolt in Japan (Princeton University Press, 1973). However, Orbach's work is by no means an exercise in repetition, for his purpose is to look more broadly at the issue of radicalism and insubordination as a consistent theme in the history of the Japanese army from its origins until the Pacific War. Orbach begins his study by locating the origins of the problem of radicalism in the shishi (men of purpose) of the 1860s who took up arms against the Tokugawa shogunate and helped to bring about the imperial restoration of 1868. He contends that the fact that insubordination in the name of a higher cause led to the birth of the Meiji regime meant there was from the start a precedent for "righteous rebellion" in modern Japan. Moreover, he argues convincingly that the lifestyle and beliefs of the shishi constituted an intoxicating brew for later generations of young men looking for adventure. In particular, he draws perceptive political and cultural parallels between those who assisted in carrying out the Meiji Restoration of 1868 and those who sought to emulate their achievement with a Showa Restoration in the 1930s. The book then proceeds through a series of well-chosen and well-written case studies, which draw on an astonishing amount of research into difficult primary sources, to present us with a detailed history of the post-1868 evolution of insubordination within the army. Some of these episodes, such as the Satsuma revolt of 1877 and the coup attempts from the 1930s, are already very familiar, but others are less so, most notably the Saga rebellion of 1874 and the army's involvement in the assassination of Queen Min of Korea in [End Page 157] 1895. Moreover, in the case of the Taisho political crisis of 1912–13, Orbach reshapes a familiar episode to allow us to see how it can be construed as an army-led nonviolent coup d'état. Orbach marshals his case studies to illustrate a number of the significant traits that played out over time. For example, he shows how those engaged in the subversion of government policy became increasingly junior in rank as time progressed, and he also maps how the existence of factions meant that, despite its outward strength, the army essentially lacked strong, coherent leadership. In order to frame his argument and explain the phenomenon of insubordination, Orbach postulates that three "bugs" compromised the successful working of civil-military relations, these being the constitutional position of the army, the drive for overseas expansion, and the vagueness of the imperial ideology. The first of these problems is familiar and well explained, for it is clear that the concept of the "Supreme Command," which gave the army general staff a free rein over operational matters, was a grave flaw. However, the latter two factors are left rather undeveloped and needed more assured handling. Also, the use of the word "bugs" rather grates; such usages can become anachronistic. In addition, the book would have benefited from describing in more detail a factor that is mentioned a few times in passing, but which is surely essential to the story—the valorization of the shishi and its consequences for army discipline. Orbach notes on pages 23–24 that from 1875 the souls of those who fought in the Boshin War of 1868–69 were enshrined at the Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo and that this further legitimized the idea of "pure rebellion." However, as actions such as this would later backfire against the government, it would be interesting to know...

Gertrude Stein's Atomic Bombs: Her Pacific War

Gertrude Stein's Atomic Bombs: Her Pacific War

The History of US-Japan Relations: From Perry to the Present ed. by Tosh Minohara

Reviewed by: The History of US-Japan Relations: From Perry to the Present ed. by Tosh Minohara Peter Mauch The History of US-Japan Relations: From Perry to the Present. Edited by Tosh Minohara. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. 352 pages. Hardcover, €88.39/¥12,317; softcover, €25.99/¥3,509. This overview of the Japanese-US relationship throughout history is an English translation of Nichibei kankei shi (Yūhikaku, 2008), a Japanese-language volume edited by preeminent diplomatic historian Iokibe Makoto and containing chapter-length contributions by teams of Iokibe's students and associates, including Kusunoki Ayako and Shibayama Futoshi. The translation, which has been ably edited by Tosh Minohara (himself one of Iokibe's many students), was sponsored by the Japan Publishing Industry Foundation for Culture as part of its ambitious Japan Library collection. The book under review is a worthy addition to the series, especially when considered as a text for the undergraduate classroom. The work opens, logically enough, with the arrival in Edo Bay of Commodore Matthew Perry's Black Ships. Chapter 1 introduces the reader to Japan's mid-nineteenth-century entry into the international order conceived and dominated by the West, and it does a good job of locating the Japanese-US relationship within that broader context. Chapter 2 deals with the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, including Japan's successful wars against China and Russia and the United States' victory over the Spanish. It gives genuine insight into this intensely interesting period in relations between the two countries, which was characterized by the coincidental arrival of both "at the center stage of international politics" (p. 23). The next two chapters move on to a time of increasing trans-Pacific friction. Chapter 3, which concerns itself with the years before, during, and after World War I, is particularly lucid in its treatment of the "race issue" (pp. 46–49, 60–61). Chapter 4 opens with a brief but illuminating summary of Prime Minister Hara Takashi's foreign policy, followed by a discussion of the Japanese-US relationship through the Washington Conference and beyond. At that conference, the two nations, together with Britain, limited naval armaments according to the ratio of 5:5:3 for the United States, Britain, and Japan and also agreed not to interfere in Chinese politics, allowing Japan and the United States to "revert to a policy of mutual cooperation" (p. 69). The chapter discusses these as well as less positive currents, most notably the problem of Japanese immigration to the US. [End Page 305] Chapter 5 begins with an account of the "differing approaches to China" taken by the two countries (p. 83). It documents Japanese aggression toward China from the 1931 Manchurian Incident onward and the US response thereto, moving seamlessly into a discussion of Japan's subsequent designs on Southeast Asia and the crisis these events precipitated in Japanese-US relations. Readers will doubtless find the analysis valuable, although the parts on Foreign Minister Matsuoka Yōsuke's foreign policy may come across as confusing. Why did Matsuoka conclude the Japanese-Soviet Neutrality Pact and set Japan on a course to "pursue its southward advance policy" (p. 96) if he genuinely hoped to avoid war with the United States? Why did he, almost as soon as he concluded the neutrality pact, abandon the southward advance policy and instead urge military action against the Soviets? This is particularly puzzling if, as the authors suggest, Matsuoka was aware even before the conclusion of the pact "that Germany planned to . . . open up a new front against the Soviets" (p. 96). Such questions are not meant to imply that the authors are wrong in their assessment of Matsuoka's actions; rather, the confusion perhaps indicates the difficulties inherent in summarizing Matsuoka's complicated and (frankly) incoherent policies. This reviewer admits to having read chapter 6, on the Pacific War and the subsequent military occupation of Japan, with particular interest. In a nod to Iokibe's scholarship, the chapter focuses less on battles and military successes and losses than on wartime planning in Washington (and, to a lesser extent, Tokyo) for the postwar future. It provides a neat overview of the endgame...

Osaka Modern: The City in the Japanese Imaginary by Michael P. Cronin

Reviewed by: Osaka Modern: The City in the Japanese Imaginary by Michael P. Cronin Andrew Murakami-Smith Osaka Modern: The City in the Japanese Imaginary. By Michael P. Cronin. Harvard University Asia Center, 2017. 246 pages. Hardcover, $39.95/£28.95/ €36.00. A course I teach investigates the possibilities of an "Osaka tradition" within modern Japanese literature as an alternative to a Tokyo-centric narrative of Japanese literary history. No such tradition is recognized by Japanese literary critics and historians, but most Japanese would be able to name several "Osaka works" (Ōsaka mono), including those by well-known natives such as Oda Sakunosuke (1913–1947) and Tanabe Seiko (1928–) and by lesser-known authors like Uno Kōji (1891–1961) and Kamizukasa Shōken (1874–1947). Kamizukasa's Hamo no kawa (Skin of the Pike Conger Eel; 1914) was seen by both Oda and Uno as an early example of Ōsaka-mono in the modern era. The list could also include works by major names like Kawabata Yasunari (1899–1972), who was born in Osaka and raised nearby in what is now the city of Ibaraki, [End Page 297] and Tanizaki Jun'ichirō (1886–1965), a Tokyo native who relocated to the Kansai area after the Great Kantō Earthquake of 1923 and set many of his subsequent works in and around Osaka. Thus an Osaka tradition would not constitute an independent stream or even a tributary to the mainstream of modern Japanese literature, but rather an alternative, decentering reading of the existing canon and tradition. This is precisely the kind of reading that Michael P. Cronin brilliantly carries out in Osaka Modern: The City in the Japanese Imaginary. The heterogeneity of the Osaka tradition alluded to above—writers major and minor, Osaka natives and non-natives—and its historical breadth, extending back to Chikamatsu and Saikaku in the Edo period and forward to the present day, preclude an exhaustive survey. In any case, since to postulate an Osaka tradition is to perform a decentering, genealogizing reading of Japanese literature, any treatment should avoid the temptation to tell a totalizing story. Cronin's analysis wisely centers on just four works by two authors, Tanizaki and Oda, in the period between the world wars, with a final main chapter on the postwar writer Yamasaki Toyoko and postwar film adaptations of Osaka literary works by these three and others. Cronin's purpose in focusing on the interwar period is to posit what he calls a "treasonous" Osaka—the possibility that the local, as manifested by Osaka, constituted a base of resistance to the Tokyo-centered national narrative of militarism and imperialism leading up to the Pacific War. The final chapter, however, pessimistically delineates the subsequent enervation of the local in an ever-more Tokyo-centric national, and global, system of consumer capitalism. The question of whether Osaka or any locality can continue to offer possibilities for resistance to Japan's current political, economic, and cultural centralization in Tokyo—and to the homogenizing and commodifying forces of global consumer capitalism—is left to other scholars. Cronin's introduction, titled "Osaka as an Idea," opens with an impressionistic depiction of what it means for an individual to live in a city: We know a city in manifold ways. We inhabit it as a collection of spaces: streets and alleys, waterfronts and canals, neighborhoods and squares. We traverse it as a set of itineraries: commutes, after-dinner strolls, convenience-store runs, and subway rides. We experience it, too, as a sensorium of voices and noises, tastes, smells, sights, and touches. We encounter it as a series of individuals who belong to populations and types characteristic of cities or of that particular city. Above all, we know a city as a set of practices that subsume these other knowledges as we catch a taxi or jaywalk or carry a police whistle or join a festival crowd. (p. 1) In this passage, Cronin paints a sensory panorama of city life, deftly conjuring the variegated panoply that makes any city interesting to experience or visit, and indeed to read about or to investigate through academic research. While his discussion then naturally moves to knowledge of a city "through...

Postcolonial Grief: The Afterlives of the Pacific Wars in the Americas

Book Review Postcolonial Grief: The Afterlives of the Pacific Wars in the Americas, Jinah Kim. Duke University Press, 2019. 185 pages. ISBN: 9781478002796. US$23.95. With her sights narrowed onto a complex target, Jinah Kim in Postcolonial Grief: The Afterlives of the Pacific Wars in the Americas tries to do something special. Tracing the literature, art, and films of U.S. based Asian diasporic writers, Kim looks at an understated, lost-in-development, and still grieving community. Central to everything here is the feeling of a lack of resolution, a wilful or naïve failure to address the pain of recent history. The challenge, of course, is how this continued suffering (“Melancholia”) should be defined (“Afterlives”) and understood (“transpacific subjectivities, aesthetics”); how you designate a perpetrator from complex interactions (“U.S. imperialism and militarism”), and what responsibility you insist should be owed for this (“generate transformative antiracist and decolonial politics”). It is the kind of work that implies new moral explanations, new breakthroughs in knowledge, a new understanding of the world, and our place in it. The relationship between grieving and memory, pain and history, is not a new topic—not even close. There is a worn and uncertain path here. Uncertain, due to the complexities of the human condition, the differences between individuals; and so with this the failures of singular, accurate, universalised approaches. What Kim is trying to do—it is a return to that Korean Studies © 2019 by University of Hawai‘i Press. All rights reserved. 1 “collective” element, to understand people, their motivations, their morality, and their suffering, through the groups they belong to. It doesn’t start with the events, but with the “afterlives”—the emotions. The intentions, and circumstances in history are less important than the feelings and the memories. And perhaps there is something in this—ontological versus epistemological truth—but there is also something clearly missing. Postcolonial Grief is largely a literary study, and so its philosophy might understandably be second-hand. But it is still central to the whole enterprise. Kim is not instructing her audience toward a high-brow reading list, but toward the truth she sees in those authors’ works. In any event, it’s not nearly close enough to what she is hoping to achieve. One or two selected works per chapter is helpful in partitioning her work and the readers mind, but also forces the query “what did she leave out?”, “what was the selection criteria?” Every lens here is onto an absolute—a truth that makes the reader think and doubt, but which Kim never offers a proper critical analysis of. Sentences like “The fear that prolonged and unchecked grief will lead to violence is one of the reasons grief is pathologized and surveilled by the state,” stop the reader dead in their tracks. It is laden with presuppositions—what is meant by “pathologized” and “surveilled”?—but the time is never given, and the language just moves forward. Occasionally ideas are built from the ground-up, but the language remains tautological and gimmicky: “the diagnosis of melancholia against the Algerians paradoxically authorizes violence as the sole provenance of the colonial state and now the post-colonial liberal nation-state’s domain.” Kim is consciously trying to be “intersectional” here—and as is the risk with such an approach, it comes across as scattergun. The solution? Segway to authority statements, phrases like “ . . . has argued,” “ . . . demonstrates” dominate the prose and hinge the book in new directions; but again it is also used as a way to introduce new ideas without spending the necessary time explaining or justifying them. There is a motivation, an ideological sense, behind this. Kim entertains the claim, at multiple places in the book, that the problem she faces might just be knowledge itself. That knowledge is not universal, but specific to people and places (“as endemic to U.S. knowledge production”). Yet regardless of the victim, the perpetrator here is always capitalism and modernization; as if these are only dogmas and never synonyms for freedoms, progress, and improvements. And with this, history begins to bend: the downfall of imperial Japan becomes an American aggression; a moment of ruthless opportunism...

Imperial Nostalgia

Imperial Nostalgia Minsoo Kang (bio) In the winter of 1943, when my father was weeks away from completing elementary school, he lay awake through many nights in utter dread of the future. A great and terrible war was raging across the Pacific, but the source of his anxiety was much closer to home as he found out that he was to attend an elite middle school in the new year. His concern was not over how he would perform academically, but from the frightening stories he heard of the treatment he was bound to receive there. Most of his classmates would be done with formal education upon graduation and go work in the city or at the farms. But kids from better-off families took a test that determined whether they would get vocational training or go on to middle school. My grandfather was a high school teacher with a university degree so he had ambitions for his oldest son who was one of the smartest kids in his class. He once told me that it was one of the great misfortunes of his life that his high test scores not only qualified him for continued education but also put him in a small group of students who were selected to go to a Japanese school. This was in his hometown of Pyongyang, now the capital of North Korea but back then the third largest city in the peninsular which was a colonial territory of the Empire of Japan. Two decades before his birth, the Korean kingdom of Joseon lost its sovereignty to the foreign power. By the time the Pacific War began in 1941, over 700,000 Japanese lived in the colony, government bureaucrats and soldiers as well as entrepreneurs, engineers, teachers, journalists, laborers, shopkeepers, adventurers, gangsters, and prostitutes. They ruled over the native population of twenty-five million people. During my father's childhood, there were some 30,000 Japanese in Pyongyang, about a quarter of the city's population, the third highest concentration of them after Keijo (Japanese for Gyeongseong, the old capital of Joseon dynasty and today's Seoul) and the southern port city of Busan. The middle school that my father was to attend was an institution for privileged Japanese boys whose fathers were colonial administrators, military officers, and successful businessmen. Every year a small number of the highest-scoring Koreans were placed there to be groomed as the next generation of loyal collaborators. On the first day of school, my father put on a new military-style uniform and entered the place with its intimidating modern buildings of vast concrete walls and a wide, well-maintained exercise field. He knew, of course, that he was not a citizen of a sovereign nation but a subject of a foreign power, but the reality of that condition was not something that he had to face on a daily basis when he spent most of his time with his Korean family, classmates, and teachers. But he was made painfully aware of his subordinate status from the moment he set foot in that school, as he became a member of a despised minority among foreigners living in his hometown. In the following decades, my father would experience the Korean War as a refugee as well as a soldier and live through the impoverished years of the post-war era, but he remembered the two years he attended that middle school as the worst time of his life. [End Page 61] The prevalent slogan of that era was naisen ittai, the notion that the Japanese and Koreans were one. It was based on a historical myth that was constructed in the colonial era, that the people of the two countries were essentially of the same ethnicity who became separated through migrations in ancient times. Koreans were, however, the less developed and more primitive cousins of the Japanese, their cultural and intellectual growth having been stunted by the corrupt and oppressive feudal rulers of the previous dynasties who were only interested in enriching themselves at the expense of the common people and kowtowing to the Chinese. The Japanese were there to help their poor relatives catch up to the level...

The Japanese Empire: Grand Strategy from the Meiji Restoration to the Pacific War by S.C.M. Paine, and: To Stand with the Nations of the World: Japan's Meiji Restoration in World History by Mark Ravina

Reviewed by: The Japanese Empire: Grand Strategy from the Meiji Restoration to the Pacific War by S.C.M. Paine, and: To Stand with the Nations of the World: Japan's Meiji Restoration in World History by Mark Ravina Scott C.M. Bailey The Japanese Empire: Grand Strategy from the Meiji Restoration to the Pacific War. By s.c.m. paine. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017. 210 pp. $24.99 (paper). To Stand with the Nations of the World: Japan's Meiji Restoration in World History. By mark ravina. New York: Oxford University Press, 2017. 312 pp. $29.95 (hardcover). Japan underwent tremendous economic, military, political, and cultural transformations during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Scholars of Japanese history and world historians who study Japan are involved in a process of intense debate about modern Japanese history, in an attempt to dissect how Japan made the transition to modernity. The process of that transitional period, between tradition and modernity, and how Japan emerged from the transition as a completely changed nation, and as a fully-fledged imperial state, is a main consideration in both of these very riveting studies. A common question addressed in both of these books is the degree to which the Japanese leadership, including the emperor himself, as well as the Meiji oligarchs or the later Diet party leaders and members of the imperial council, military leaders, were orchestrators of the changes which took place in the country. What drove the overall architecture of historical change in Japan, especially in terms of the planning of empire and military development? And did the other myriad changes which occurred during the Meiji era happen as a result of deliberate internal planning, or was it a natural outgrowth from an era of increasing international contacts, or a combination of the two factors? S.C.M. Paine of the United States Naval War College argues that Japan's modernization project in the Meiji involved a deliberate westernization of the country, which she contrasts with Qing China's self-strengthening movement, which rejected westernization (p. 6). This had major consequences for the immediate futures of both nations. Meiji Japan developed rapidly towards a militarized and industrialized nation, while the Qing's economic and military development was [End Page 448] minimal at best. This split in pathways for the two nations was a major contributing factor to conflict between the two in the first Sino-Japanese War. Paine writes that, "Japan took a U-turn on the road to civilization when it traded in sinification for westernization and the Chinese have never gotten over it" (p. 7). These deliberate choices also resulted in a relatively easy victory for Japan in the war because, "Japan westernized, China did not, and there were consequences" (p. 15). This was reflected in the enormous technological disparity between the two nations at the time, in which Japan's infrastructure was extensive, and China's was not, because, according to Paine, "Railways disrupt fengshui …" (p. 24). Paine found that the break which took place between the two nations in their attitude towards westernization has created an over one century long "downward spiral" of relations "from which … neither country has emerged" (p. 42). A strength of The Japanese Empire is its attention to the details of the many military campaigns which Japan has fought since the Meiji period. She includes chapters which are titled "The First Sino-Japanese War (1894–1895)," "The Russo-Japanese War (1904–1905)," "The Second Sino-Japanese War (1931–1941)," and what she calls "The General Asian War (1941–1945)."1 Each chapter describes military strategy, outcomes of particular battles, underlying and proximate causes, and complex discussions of the intersection of military planning and international relations theory. For military historians, this book will be especially useful, especially since Paine has also effectively integrated source materials from Japanese historians. The intellectual scale of the book is immense, and Paine moves seamlessly from detailed discussions of battlefield tactics to larger strategic concerns of the military and the government. One of the major arguments she makes is that the Japanese leadership faced a tough strategic decision as to whether pursue its military strategy and relations from the standpoint of...

The Japanese and the War: From Expectation to Memory by Michael Lucken

Reviewed by: The Japanese and the War: From Expectation to Memory by Michael Lucken Aaron William Moore The Japanese and the War: From Expectation to Memory. By Michael Lucken. Translated by Karen Grimwade. Columbia University Press, 2017. 376 pages. Hardcover, $65.00/£50.00. This translation of the French work Le Japonais et la guerre by Michael Lucken presents a thoughtful and wide-ranging discussion of war experience and, more importantly, memorialization. The translation is fluent and very approachable for a general audience. Each chapter is split into small, digestible units focusing on specific issues, such as the imperial household and war responsibility, or the Allied Occupation and State Shinto. The book gives lucid insights into what Lucken defines as the second (1943–1952) and third (1952–present) stages of the transwar experience. Its greatest strength is, however, sometimes bedeviled by its narrative style—namely, its occasional representation of "Japan" as a singular protagonist, despite the powerful arguments the author himself makes about the pluralism of wartime experience and memory in Japan compared with other countries such as South Korea. One shortcoming of Lucken's approach is that the periodization he embraces artificially separates Japan from its empire, and more importantly from the war in China. For Lucken, the experience on the home front (Japan's main islands), which has dominated memory in Japan, is the most salient, because for many Japanese the war in China, for example, was a "serious but distant" event that they understood but poorly (p. 1). Certainly, Shanghai is far from a city like Akita or Miyazaki, but so is Tokyo; the "territories" may well have been a "land of fiction" dreamed up by tourism companies and professional writers (p. 28), but might we also not say the same about a supposedly timeless and traditional Kyoto, or even the putative hypermodernity of the metropole? Separating the home islands as a known space and the empire as an unknown one may create anachronistic discrepancies between wartime and postwar memory discourses. For example, why should the soldiers and civilians who periodically returned from Manchukuo to their families in Japan's northeast be less relevant to "Japanese" memory than children evacuated from Osaka, with whom the residents of other parts of Japan had little or no contact? Correspondence from China kept home front and battlefield linked, despite the censorship regime. Movement to and from Japanese enclaves in Southeast Asia and Latin America also destabilized notions of "Japan" that became more fixed in the postwar period.1 More importantly, I think it is becoming axiomatic in the historiography that the conflicts in China were the primary transformative factor, along with the Great Depression, in Japanese politics during the 1930s. Lucken argues that "memory in isolation from the events being remembered" is less productive than the discourses that "structure and predetermine" wartime experiences (p. xvi), but this claim is better served by integrating the empire and the China war with the home front experience, not isolating them—particularly with respect to his second stage of the transwar era. [End Page 316] Chapter 1 summarizes the process behind the conflicts in East and Southeast Asia that led to the Pacific War in 1941, analyzing state efforts to establish a national ideology; mobilize civilians; "repress and rehabilitate" dissenters; and "control" media, bodies, and time. As Lucken points out, as of 1937 Japanese authorities do not "appear to have had a long-term plan" for war in China, despite their attempts to organize nationally for war (pp. 9–10). He describes the subsequent period, in which the 1938 General Mobilization Law was enacted and crackdowns on intellectuals and dissident politicians intensified, as having mainly had an impact on the "middle classes," whereas for "the peasant families that still made up the majority of the population, war was a reality only in terms of their concern, tinged with pride, for the young men doing their duty on the battlefields" (p. 11). It is certainly true that conscription disproportionately affected rural families, but characterizing the changes in Japanese politics and culture of the time as a concern solely of the middle classes risks undermining the dire consequences of this systemic shift. Farmers were not subject...

태평양전쟁 시기의 이승만의 대미 외교활동에 미친 제랄딘 피치(Geraldine T. Fitch)의 역할

태평양전쟁 시기의 이승만의 대미 외교활동에 미친 제랄딘 피치(Geraldine T. Fitch)의 역할

태평양전쟁 시기의 이승만의 대미 외교활동에 미친 제랄딘 피치(Geraldine T. Fitch)의 역할

태평양전쟁 시기의 이승만의 대미 외교활동에 미친 제랄딘 피치(Geraldine T. Fitch)의 역할

태평양전쟁 시기의 이승만의 대미 외교활동에 미친 제랄딘 피치(Geraldine T. Fitch)의 역할

태평양전쟁 시기의 이승만의 대미 외교활동에 미친 제랄딘 피치(Geraldine T. Fitch)의 역할

Trends of Geosciences after the Pacific War in Japan, 1945 to 1965 Part 6

Trends of Geosciences after the Pacific War in Japan, 1945 to 1965 Part 6

Depictions of the Battle of Okinawa and its Social and Cultural Complexity using a transmedia approach: The Case of Gima Hiroshi (1923-2017)

The battle of Okinawa of 1945 was one of the bloodiest battles of the Asia Pacific War, with nearly a quarter of the Okinawan population perishing. This paper examines paintings, woodblock prints and manga that depict this battle, and through analysis of these works I show how deeply they reflect significant issues relating to Okinawan history, culture, and society, notably the struggles of its citizens and Okinawa’s social and political complexities. This paper explores several artists’ visual descriptions of the brutal and catastrophic Battle of Okinawa, particularly in terms of how their works disseminated the artists’ views on the battle, as well as war in general, to an audience beyond Okinawa prefecture. Art that concentrates on the Battle of Okinawa, either as a focal point or a cultural influence, has been little studied so far, most probably because it has been treated as a sensitive and controversial issue, culturally and especially politically. Artists are grouped and discussed according to regional identities (Okinawa or non-Okinawa), generation (pre-war or post-war), and gender. I also analyse the complexities of the objectives and challenges of each artist who was trying to create works that exposed the social reality, though my main focus is on the woodblock print artist, Gima Hiroshi, who was an Okinawan diaspora artist with a more transmedia approach than 2 contemporary painters such as Maruki Toshi (1901-1995), Maruki Iri (1912- 2000), and war-theme (sensō) manga artist, Kyō Machiko (b. 1978).