Wartime Past Research Articles

Looking to the past, uncertain about the future: Japan's politics in an era of disaster and stagnation

The Japanese state and society face major challenges due to more than 20 years of economic stagnation and steady political transformation. The books reviewed here dissect a nation in the midst of change: its politics, political economy, and response to the triple disaster of the Tohoku earthquake, tsunami and Fukushima nuclear incident (commonly referred to by the Japanese as 3.11) in 2011. John Dower considers Japanese difficulty in confronting its wartime past, while Frances Rosenbluth and Michael Thies lay out the broad sweep of Japan's political history. Ellis Krauss and Robert Pekkanen focus an institutional lens on the evolution of the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) from hegemonic to merely dominant party, while Leonard Schoppa and colleagues examine the emergence of a two-party system since the political shakeup of 1993–1994. Robin LeBlanc employs a gender approach to parse the nature of male values and show how they shape the actions of political candidates and activists. Lucy Birmingham and David McNeill provide an on-the-ground view of individuals reacting to the 3.11 calamity. The McKinsey & Co. collection includes varied articles, from optimistic pieces urging Japan towards a quick rebound to more sober assessments of long-term national decline. Together, these books provide an excellent snapshot of Japan at a metaphorical turning point.

Locked in a Dusty Cupboard, neither Accessible on the Policy-makers’ Desks nor Cleared for Early Publication: Llewellyn Woodward’s Official Diplomatic History of the Second World War

Sir Llewellyn Woodward’s official diplomatic history, though part of Britain’s Second World War official histories, had a very different history from the rest of the series. Commissioned originally during the war as confidential internal histories intended to help future policymakers learn from the wartime past, from 1946 onwards the official histories were targeted through publication at a wider academic and public audience outside Whitehall. The American audience proved a high priority. Unlike other volumes, in 1950 Woodward’s diplomatic history, though still in preparation, was subjected to a prime ministerial ban on publication because of infringements of the rules concerning official histories. Completed in 1956, the five-volume official history was not published until the 1970s, although a sanitised one-volume version was cleared for publication in 1962. Prior to publication Woodward’s full history was available for confidential use by policymakers, but in reality remained locked away in the departmental cupboard, excepting occasional access by politicians like Lord Avon writing their memoirs. Highlighting government efforts to manage the presentation of Britain’s wartime past as well as the difficulties of integrating history into the policymaking process, this study offers illuminating insights into Woodward’s experience of writing official history. In particular, as an academic historian based at Oxford and then Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study, his work as an official historian required him constantly to balance professional standards and reputation against government demands and pressures.

Emily Greble . Sarajevo, 1941–1945: Muslims, Christians, and Jews in Hitler's Europe . Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press. 2011. Pp. xiv, 276. $35.00.

Across much of the postwar socialist world, from Yugoslavia to China, millions of now middle-aged people know something about the provincial city of Sarajevo. What they know they learned from a 1972 film, Valter Defends Sarajevo, about a communist partisan leader who coordinated the antifascist insurgency in the city during World War II. The film offers a picture of the city as stubbornly, heroically defiant, and ultimately victorious against the German occupiers. In her book, Emily Greble cites the film's most famous line, in which a German spy sent to hunt Valter down is about to leave the city, having failed in his mission. Walking with another German officer in the hills, he gestures toward the city below: “Do you see this city? Das ist Valter” (p. 150). Valter Defends Sarajevo was part of postwar mythmaking about Sarajevo's, and indeed Yugoslavia's, wartime past. It is a beautiful story, the kind one wants to believe. Greble does not allow us to keep it, but she gives us another one instead, rooted in careful archival research and rich with characters and anecdotes. The wartime city in her fascinating book is more conservative, even reactionary, than progressive, and its inhabitants are more anxious than visionary about its future. Her actors—ranging from Ustasha officials, to local Catholic, Muslim, Jewish, and Orthodox religious, political, and cultural elites—struggle to navigate the constantly shifting landscape of alliances and power constellations that emerge and as rapidly disappear during the course of the war.

The Return of the Repressed: Uncanny Spaces of Nostalgia and Loss in Tracircgraven Anh Hung's Cyclo

Trần Anh Hùng is best known for three films: The Scent of the Green Papaya (1993), Cyclo (1995), and Vertical Ray of the Sun (2000), known as his Vietnam Trilogy. In this article I propose the notion of the return of a repressed, painful, and violent wartime past, which takes form narratively through a meditation on uncanny spaces—spaces of wandering, longing, anxiety, and loss.I argue that Hùng's Cyclo represents the return of themes that have been repressed in Vietnamese cinema and literature and in everyday life in general in Vietnam, until recently. Nostalgia and loss can now be expressed in film and literature, which was not possible until the 1990s. This stems from a reevaluation of wartime suffering occurring now, a generation after the end of war in Vietnam in 1975. This also results from a gradual easing of state controls on arts and media in Vietnam in the 1990s. Recent Vietnamese films and literature have begun to focus on the massive human costs and painful aftermath of the war. These are articulated through tropes of mourning, silences, and loss. My hypothesis is that the uncanny occupies a privileged place in contemporary Vietnamese visual and written narratives because of this “return” of themes that had been repressed for political reasons since the end of the war.Trần Anh Hùng was born in Vietnam in 1962. He and his family left as refugees at the end of the war in 1975. Cyclo, filmed on location in the first large-scale foreign production in Vietnam, marked his return to his birthplace. Hùng reembodies his torn Vietnamese identity through montage of spaces of poverty, crime, and loss. The chain-smoking poet, played by Hong Kong actor Tony Leung Chiu Wai, drifts silently through interiors that seemingly bear no relationship to the dangerous, grimy streets outside. I examine the spatial opposition between streets and interiors, and why Hùng focuses so strongly on abjection, silences, and failed articulation of desires. The figure of the poor, beautiful woman forced into prostitution to save her family is almost a cliché in Vietnamese fiction—and so is that of her poor young brother, who struggles for survival in a threatening urban underworld. I query whether these familiar narrative tropes of abjection provide new spaces for understanding the shift away from a war-torn society, or whether they replicate a persistent, romantic self-Orientalizing thread in modern Vietnamese fiction.

Memory and myth: the bombings of Dresden and Hiroshima in German and Japanese TV drama

Japan is often blamed for not coming to terms with its own wartime past and for focusing solely on its role as a victim of the war. Germany, however, is often seen as the model that Japan has to emulate, having penitently accepted responsibility. Thus, in order to work out how these popular myths are being perpetuated, the media prove to be a good source of information, since they help to uphold memory and myth at the same time. In this paper, it will be examined how the “memory” of the bombings of Dresden and Hiroshima is being upheld in Japan and Germany 蜢 and what kinds of “myths” are being created in the process. In focusing on two TV dramas, it shall be worked out to what extent Japan and Germany are represented as “victims” and to what extent, if at all, the issue of war responsibility features in these dramas.

Somewhere in Europe (1947): Locating Hungary within a shifting geopolitical landscape

ABSTRACTSomewhere in Europe/Valahol Európában (Radványi, 1947) was one of the first films made in Hungary after 1945. Financed by the Hungarian Communist Party (MKP), it loudly proclaimed a broad European pertinence in an effort to privilege the universal narrative of childhoods disrupted by the war over narrowly national political concerns. The film's story of a gang of half-starved children battling for survival in a bombed-out Central European landscape places it squarely within a transnational post-war film-making tradition. Similarities with both Italian neorealism and Soviet socialist realist cinema indicate a shared European experience of the war, but is also attributable to the international training and experience of the film's personnel. The director Radványi had worked in the Italian industry, while the scriptwriter was the well-known film theorist Béla Balázs, who had worked in Weimar Germany and Soviet Russia. This article argues that in spite of its ostensible commitment to a communist and humanist ideology, the film gives an insight into the Hungarian national obsession with territorial integrity. Hungary's participation in World War II on the side of the Axis, and its position as a defeated nation under Allied occupation, are seen to complicate the film text. This article contends that in spite of its transnational flavour, the film's focus on lost children wandering in a borderless Europe suggests a preoccupation with the country's uncertain position within a shifting geopolitical landscape. In turn, the film's official reading by Nemeskürty shows an eagerness to accept the film's representation of Hungary as a blameless victim of the war, and gives evidence of a need to insert a (false) break between the country's wartime past as a member of the Axis, and the country's 1968 present as a member of the Communist world order.

Общественно‑культурная среда уездных городов Саратовской губернии: города‑крепости в конце XVIII – первой половине XIX века

The article examines socio-cultural environment (or cultural community) of Saratov province district towns that had been founded as fortresses: Tsaritsin, Kamyshin and Petrovsk. Their social structure did not differ much from that of the other district towns of the province. Their socio-cultural environment was dominated by folk culture marked by legends, traditions and relics that kept the memories of the war-time past of the fortress-cities alive.

Remember History, Not Hatred: Collective Remembrance of China's War of Resistance to Japan

AbstractChinese leaders have repeatedly insisted upon the contemporary relevance of the ‘War of Resistance to Japan’ (1937–1945). However, the content of the official history of the war and the lessons drawn from it have changed dramatically from 1949 through 2010. This paper begins by reviewing theories of collective remembrance and then covers four historical periods: China's ‘benevolent amnesia’ on Japan's wartime atrocities before 1982; China's patriotic education campaign from the mid-1980s; the rise of history activism in China in the late 1990s; and the post-2005 reversal in official rhetoric on Japan and the wartime past. It concludes that, while the party-state retains an impressive capacity to shape the narratives of critical periods of modern Chinese history, Chinese leaders are likely to find themselves increasingly constrained by domestic forces and by external events beyond their control.

War veterans as peace builders

In the period from 1991. to 1999. over 1500000 people in former Yugoslavia were members of dozens military formations that participated in the war in different manners and with various motives. These persons have actively contributed to the tragedy caused by war, that was and for some time will be the most important factor of social and personal relationships between individuals and the nations in the member states of former Yugoslavia. They are now left on their own and exposed to manipulation by nationalist centers and certain politicians. Because of their wartime past, they are usually depicted as the carriers of nationalistic and warmongering ideas on the 'other' side. However, viewed from the aspect of peace-building, ex-soldiers represent a significant potential, because many of them, in fact, have a need to contribute to building a more just society and feel responsible for what happened. In this paper it is discussed how some war veterans decided to join forces and contribute to the reconciliation in the former Yugoslavia by their joint activities.

China in the Japanese Radical Gaze, 1945–1955

AbstractJapanese images of China have much to tell us about the way Japan sees its own modernisation and its place in the international system. Contrary to popular belief, Japan did not turn unabashedly toward the USA after 1945. During the first decade after World War II, a number of important Japanese radical historians and thinkers decided that modernisation could be accomplished without the help of the West. Just when many in Japan were looking to America and Europe as exemplars of modernisation, others looked instead to revolutionary China and its past struggles against Japanese colonialism in the construction of a very different historical position from that ordinarily associated with the early post-war years. Certain Japanese historians, inspired by the push toward decolonisation in Asia, set about writing the history of the present in ways that aligned Japan with modern Chinese history. Even though China had just been liberated from Japanese colonial rule, Japanese Marxists saw their own position—under American imperialism—as historically and politically congruous with China's past war of resistance against Japan (1937–45). Through campaigns to develop a kind of cultural Marxism on the margins of Japanese society, they sought to bring about post-war Japanese ‘national liberation’ from American hegemony in ways that consciously simulated past Chinese resistance to Imperial Japan. Replacing Japan's own cultural Marxist traditions from the pre-war era with the more palpable and acceptable example of China, they also hoped a new form of Asian internationalism could remedy the problem of Japan's wartime past. The historical irony associated with this discursive twist deferred to future generations the problem of how the Left* would come to terms with the past.

The ethics of aesthetics in trauma fiction: memory, guilt and responsibility in Louise L. Lambrichs's 'Journal d'Hannah'

This article engages with two themes which are key to the special issue, 'The Witness and the Text': (i) the relations between the individual and history, between the private and the public in relation to traumatic events; and (ii) the ethics and aesthetics of testimony and bearing witness, and the role of fiction in this respect. These themes are addressed through analysis of Louise L. Lambrichs's 'Journal d'Hannah' (1993), a fascinating novel, in diary format, about the psychological effects of an abortion, set against the backdrop of the Holocaust. The Jewish woman who reluctantly aborts her second child is in her own mind at once victim, perpetrator and survivor, and consumed by guilt. First, the article considers the mirroring structure of the novel, which arguably invites a comparison between the trauma of the abortion and the trauma of the Holocaust. It then examines the historical context of the setting and the writing of the novel. Finally, it identifies the ethical impetus of the text in its treatment of guilt and responsibility, with particular regard to contemporary France's troubled relationship with its wartime past.

The ethics of aesthetics in trauma fiction: memory, guilt and responsibility in Louise L. Lambrichs’s Journal d’Hannah

This article engages with two themes which are key to the special issue, 'The Witness and the Text': (i) the relations between the individual and history, between the private and the public in relation to traumatic events; and (ii) the ethics and aesthetics of testimony and bearing witness, and the role of fiction in this respect. These themes are addressed through analysis of Louise L. Lambrichs's 'Journal d'Hannah' (1993), a fascinating novel, in diary format, about the psychological effects of an abortion, set against the backdrop of the Holocaust. The Jewish woman who reluctantly aborts her second child is in her own mind at once victim, perpetrator and survivor, and consumed by guilt. First, the article considers the mirroring structure of the novel, which arguably invites a comparison between the trauma of the abortion and the trauma of the Holocaust. It then examines the historical context of the setting and the writing of the novel. Finally, it identifies the ethical impetus of the text in its treatment of guilt and responsibility, with particular regard to contemporary France's troubled relationship with its wartime past.

Negotiating War Legacies and Postwar Democracy in Japan

This article surveys the ongoing struggles over legacies of World War II within Japan's postwar history. As in Europe, different types of responsibility for the wartime past manifested themselves in changing international and domestic contexts and continuously redefined the relationships between victors, perpetrators of crimes, survivors, and a growing population for whom the war — and increasingly the postwar past — registered only as memory. Under the Allied occupation, Japan's criminal past loomed large in war crimes trials, political reforms, and intellectual discourse but contributed mightily to the deep divisions that have characterized Japan's political landscape ever since. Struggles over Japan's militarist past animated these domestic political divisions through the 1970s over questions of history textbooks, commemorations of the war dead, social relations, as well as Japan's compromised position within Cold War Asia. Globalisation processes beginning in the 1980s brought Japan's colonial past to the fore as questions of individual compensation and state reconciliation began to connect formerly domestic struggles over the legacies of the war to the international politics of historical memory. Both the chronology and the political uses of the wartime past followed a different pattern from Europe, not only because of stark differences between the wars themselves but more critically because of the historical developments that kept Asia as a region divided for decades.

The Japanese History Textbook Controversy in East Asian Perspective

Controversy over the inadequate presentation of Japan's colonial and wartime past in the country's history textbooks is one of the most protracted, notorious, and politically relevant “history problems” currently troubling East Asia. This article provides an overview of the controversy's evolution since 1982, situating it in changing domestic and regional contexts, analyzing its particularities and interrelations with other controversial issues, and evaluating its impacts on textbooks and societies at large. It shows how increased domestic and foreign scrutiny and contestation have triggered cycles of greater openness, conservative counterreactions, subsequent backlashes, and renewed debate in the field of textbooks and have overall contributed both to reinforcements and to reconsiderations of foreign relations in the region.

Positioning in Accounting for Redemption and Reconciliation

This article offers an analysis of the discursive practice of reconciliation occasioned in the accounts of former British prisoners of war of their captivity and of other related events of World War II during a reconciliation trip to Japan. The overall aim is to examine ways in which autobiographical accounts about the past, as produced in interviews, constitute relevant identities and membership within social relations. In telling narratives of post-war experiences of reconciliation, the participants account for changes in their lives. I use the term `narrative of redemption' to describe those narratives in which the participants address the moral sensibility of the problematic status of their wartime past and reconfigure and reformulate the significance of the past in relation to their present position of reconciliation. Adopting positioning theory as a guiding analytic concept, my analysis demonstrates how such talk shapes experiences of reconciliation with a problematic past. I focus on the redemption narrative to uncover the interactional work of positioning with special attention to similar concepts such as footing and reported speech. I discuss, although briefly, implications of applying positioning theory to the work of reconciliation studies.

‘War Fantasy’ and Reality—‘War as Entertainment’ and Counter-narratives in Japanese Popular Culture

In Japan, there exist popular works in a number of media that use fictional narratives of the nation's wartime history as the foundation for science fiction or ‘what-if’ entertainment. These titles are commonly described as ‘war fantasy’ and have been condemned as revisionist or even immoral by critics both inside and outside Japan. These criticisms, however, overlook important counter-narratives present in ‘war fantasy’ titles. Some works look critically at Japan's wars of the 1930s and 1940s as a campaign of aggression and even contain representations of Japanese war crimes and important discussions of past atrocities. This article will examine key examples of Japanese ‘war fantasy’ to assess how critical views of Japan's wartime past are articulated in popular works. Popular narratives of war often run counter to both government perspectives and the expectations of ‘military fans’ who consume images of war as a form of entertainment. While many commentators have highlighted a recent shift to the right in Japanese discourse, the trends discussed in this essay suggest that genre works often branded as rightist can manifest important anti-war, anti-militarist themes, demonstrating the pluralistic character of Japanese war representation.

Kitsch & Kunst: Presentations of a Lost War

This book examines the presentation of, and attitudes to, the Second World War in post-war West German prose fiction. The fierce public reactions which some of these works provoked at the time of their publication are taken into account in this study since their reception provides a picture of the psychological relationship West Germany had with its wartime past in the immediate post-war period and beyond. Writer of

Reconciling Colonial Memories in Korea and Japan

The Republic of Korea and Japan share a tumultuous history, but arguably no period has caused greater trauma in bilateral relations than the twentieth century. After Japan’s four-decade long colonial occupation of Korea, the two countries took two decades just to establish diplomatic relations. Subsequent interactions have remained seriously compromised by the memory of colonialism. This article reviews the tensions behind the tempestuous bilateral relationship, focusing on the depiction of Japan’s wartime past in school textbooks. We advance three suggestions for reconciliation: viewing reconciliation not as the restoration of a harmonious pre-conflict order, but as an ongoing, incomplete process; expanding promising bilateral dialogues; and accepting that there will always be differences between Korea and Japan, most notably with regard to representations of the past. Rather than being an inevitable source of conflict, these differences should contribute to an ongoing process of negotiation between the two neighbors.

Dr. Space : The Life of Wernher von Braun (review)

Reviewed by: Dr. Space: The Life of Wernher von Braun Rainer Eisfeld Dr. Space: The Life of Wernher von Braun. By Bob Ward. Annapolis, Md.: Naval Institute Press, 2005. ISBN 1-59114-926-6. Photographs. Pp. 282. $29.95. The author of this book, Bob Ward, is a former editor-in-chief of the Huntsville [Alabama] Times who has previously published several collections of humorous anecdotes about the space program and about von Braun. To the extent that his latest work dwells on von Braun's merits as a ballistic missile and space vehicle designer (V-2, Redstone, Jupiter, Saturn), a rocket team manager, a "space gospel" popularizer, even a supposed philosopher, these have been set forth in earlier biographies, most amply in Stuhlinger and Ordway's 1994 Wernher von Braun: Crusader forSpace. On that score, the volume adds nothing substantial. But Ward's book is also advertised on the dust jacket as a "balanced" study, "rejecting both the highly idealized and the bitterly harsh versions of von Braun's life found in previous books." In his preface, Ward himself lays claim to "journalistic objectivity" (p. xii). Indeed, he is the first biographer to acknowledge that "not all of von Braun's [post-1945] space visions were benign" (p. 90), referring to the latter's 1952 proposal (first published by the U.S. Business Advisory Council, subsequently in the U.S. Army journal Ordnance) to build an orbital station that might be used as a launching platform for nuclear missiles—"the 'ultimate weapon'" against Soviet aggression, according to von Braun. However, Ward omits an additional ominous ingredient of the concept: von Braun advocated threatening the Soviets with a preemptive strike ("a determined, power-packed 'NO'")—patently involving the risk of global nuclear conflict—when "the enemy" was "only beginning his development of manned space-craft." Other instances demonstrate the same ambivalent approach: When discussing a 25 August 1943 engineers' meeting chaired by von Braun (p. 47), Ward bypasses the fact that the engineers (as shown in the minutes) recommended further use in underground production of the concentration camp [End Page 1177] inmates who had started arriving in Peenemuende two months before. Ward also attempts to minimize the well-documented fact that von Braun sought out qualified detainees at the Buchenwald concentration camp and arranged for their transfer to the underground Mittelwerk production plant, claiming that these detainees "were assigned living quarters within Mittelwerk . . . preferable to the horrific Dora labor camp" (p. 48). Not a shred of evidence has been produced for that assertion. Forced laborers worked in the Mittelwerk factory and lived as inmates in Dora; transfer from Buchenwald to Mittelwerk meant transfer to Dora. Elsewhere, while admitting that "roughly 80 percent" of Peenemuende employees who came to the United States as "Paperclippers" had joined the Nazi Party "or related groups" (p. 36), Ward leaves the reader with the impression that they did so "primarily to hold on to their jobs." He does not discuss individuals such as Arthur Rudolph, Redstone and Pershing Project Director, subsequently Saturn V Program Manager, who became a party member in mid-1931 (No. 562007), or Konrad Dannenberg, in charge of developing the Jupiter IRBM, who joined the Nazi Party nine months after Rudolph (No. 979652), or Cape Kennedy Launch Operations Director Kurt Debus, an early (1933) SA member who entered the SS in 1939 (No. 426559). Ward's assertion to the contrary (p. 46), Rudolph admitted to OSI interrogators in 1982 that, at the Mittelwerk, he could and had in fact requested more forced laborers. And did "the Bonn government," after Rudolph's return to Germany, actually "investigate Rudolph's wartime past, absolv[ing] him of any war crimes," as Ward contends (p. 158)? It did nothing of the sort. Rather, the Hamburg District Attorney's Office instituted preliminary proceedings against Rudolph, which were closed for lack of evidence of premeditated murder—the only offense not statute-barred, therefore still punishable, under German law. Even though the book's British edition (Stroud: Sutton Publishing, 2006) has been entitled From Nazis to Nasa, the Nazi pasts of von Braun and other top Huntsvillers is consistently downplayed by Ward. Rainer Eisfeld University of Osnabrueck Osnabrueck, Germany...

Community-Focused Apologia in International Affairs: Japanese Prime Minister Tomiichi Murayama's Apology

The author examines community-focused apologies within international affairs. Specifically, he argues that this form of rhetoric functions as a rhetorical first step to healing relationships that have been hurt by the transgressions one group committed against another. In international affairs, transnational actors, typically nation-states through their political leaders, articulate community-focused apologia to mend relations between peoples, which may serve build a common path toward peace and deepen relationships between these actors. To illustrate this idea, he uses Japanese Prime Minister Tomiichi Murayama's 1995 apology for crimes Japan committed during its wartime past. Murayama's apology was an important step in mending relations between Japan and its neighbors. This article provides a better understanding as to the motives and options rhetors may use in apologizing for past injustices and serves to broaden the way we conceptualize the rhetorical genre of apologia.