Defamiliarizing Japan’s Asia-Pacific War

Defamiliarizing Japan’s Asia-Pacific War
Author: W. Puck Brecher
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
Total Pages: 249
Release: 2019-10-31
Genre: History
ISBN: 0824879678

This wide-ranging collection seeks to reassess conventional understanding of Japan’s Asia-Pacific War by defamiliarizing and expanding the rhetorical narrative. Its nine chapters, diverse in theme and method, are united in their goal to recover a measured historicity about the conflict by either introducing new areas of knowledge or reinterpreting existing ones. Collectively, they cast doubt on the war as familiar and recognizable, compelling readers to view it with fresh eyes. Following an introduction that problematizes timeworn narratives about a “unified Japan” and its “illegal war” or “race war,” early chapters on the destruction of Japan’s diplomatic records and government interest in an egalitarian health care policy before, during, and after the war oblige us to question selective histories and moral judgments about wartime Japan. The discussion then turns to artistic/cultural production and self-determination, specifically to Osaka rakugo performers who used comedy to contend with state oppression and to the role of women in creating care packages for soldiers abroad. Other chapters cast doubt on well-trod stereotypes (Japan’s lack of pragmatism in its diplomatic relations with neutral nations and its irrational and fatalistic military leadership) and examine resistance to the war by a prominent Japanese Christian intellectual. The volume concludes with two nuanced responses to race in wartime Japan, one maintaining the importance of racial categories while recognizing the “performance of Japaneseness,” the other observing that communities often reflected official government policies through nationality rather than race. Contrasting findings like these underscore the need to ask new questions and fill old gaps in our understanding of a historical event that, after more than seventy years, remains as provocative and divisive as ever. Defamiliarizing Japan’s Asia-Pacific War will find a ready audience among World War II historians as well as specialists in war and society, social history, and the growing fields of material culture and civic history.

Defamiliarizing Japan's Asia-Pacific War

Defamiliarizing Japan's Asia-Pacific War
Author: W. Puck Brecher
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2023-12-31
Genre:
ISBN: 9780824892579

This wide-ranging collection seeks to reassess conventional understanding of Japan's Asia-Pacific War by defamiliarizing and expanding the rhetorical narrative. Its nine chapters, diverse in theme and method, are united in their goal to recover a measured historicity about the conflict by either introducing new areas of knowledge or reinterpreting existing ones. Collectively, they cast doubt on the war as familiar and recognizable, compelling readers to view it with fresh eyes. Following an introduction that problematizes timeworn narratives about a "unified Japan" and its "illegal war" or "race war," early chapters on the destruction of Japan's diplomatic records and government interest in an egalitarian health care policy before, during, and after the war oblige us to question selective histories and moral judgments about wartime Japan. The discussion then turns to artistic/cultural production and self-determination, specifically to Osaka rakugo performers who used comedy to contend with state oppression and to the role of women in creating care packages for soldiers abroad. Other chapters cast doubt on well-trod stereotypes (Japan's lack of pragmatism in its diplomatic relations with neutral nations and its irrational and fatalistic military leadership) and examine resistance to the war by a prominent Japanese Christian intellectual. The volume concludes with two nuanced responses to race in wartime Japan, one maintaining the importance of racial categories while recognizing the "performance of Japaneseness," the other observing that communities often reflected official government policies through nationality rather than race. Contrasting findings like these underscore the need to ask new questions and fill old gaps in our understanding of a historical event that, after more than seventy years, remains as provocative and divisive as ever. Defamiliarizing Japan's Asia-Pacific War will find a ready audience among World War II historians as well as specialists in war and society, social history, and the growing fields of material culture and civic history.

Perilous Memories

Perilous Memories
Author: Takashi Fujitani
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 472
Release: 2001-06-21
Genre: History
ISBN: 0822381052

Perilous Memories makes a groundbreaking and critical intervention into debates about war memory in the Asia-Pacific region. Arguing that much is lost or erased when the Asia-Pacific War(s) are reduced to the 1941–1945 war between Japan and the United States, this collection challenges mainstream memories of the Second World War in favor of what were actually multiple, widespread conflicts. The contributors recuperate marginalized or silenced memories of wars throughout the region—not only in Japan and the United States but also in China, Southeast Asia, the Pacific Islands, Okinawa, Taiwan, and Korea. Firmly based on the insight that memory is always mediated and that the past is not a stable object, the volume demonstrates that we can intervene positively yet critically in the recovery and reinterpretation of events and experiences that have been pushed to the peripheries of the past. The contributors—an international list of anthropologists, cultural critics, historians, literary scholars, and activists—show how both dominant and subjugated memories have emerged out of entanglements with such forces as nationalism, imperialism, colonialism, racism, and sexism. They consider both how the past is remembered and also what the consequences may be of privileging one set of memories over others. Specific objects of study range from photographs, animation, songs, and films to military occupations and attacks, minorities in wartime, “comfort women,” commemorative events, and postwar activism in pursuing redress and reparations. Perilous Memories is a model for war memory intervention and will be of interest to historians and other scholars and activists engaged with collective memory, colonial studies, U.S. and Asian history, and cultural studies. Contributors. Chen Yingzhen, Chungmoo Choi, Vicente M. Diaz, Arif Dirlik, T. Fujitani, Ishihara Masaie, Lamont Lindstrom, George Lipsitz, Marita Sturken, Toyonaga Keisaburo, Utsumi Aiko, Morio Watanabe, Geoffrey M. White, Diana Wong, Daqing Yang, Lisa Yoneyama

Tower of Skulls: A History of the Asia-Pacific War: July 1937-May 1942

Tower of Skulls: A History of the Asia-Pacific War: July 1937-May 1942
Author: Richard B. Frank
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Total Pages: 784
Release: 2020-03-03
Genre: History
ISBN: 1324002115

“A sweeping epic.… Promises to do for the war in the Pacific what Rick Atkinson did for Europe.” —James M. Scott, author of Rampage In 1937, the swath of the globe east from India to the Pacific Ocean encompassed half the world’s population. Japan’s onslaught into China that year unleashed a tidal wave of events that fundamentally transformed this region and killed about twenty-five million people. This extraordinary World War II narrative vividly portrays the battles across this entire region and links those struggles on many levels with their profound twenty-first-century legacies. In this first volume of a trilogy, award-winning historian Richard B. Frank draws on rich archival research and recently discovered documentary evidence to tell an epic story that gave birth to the world we live in now.

Divergent Memories

Divergent Memories
Author: Gi-Wook Shin
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Total Pages: 371
Release: 2016-09-07
Genre: History
ISBN: 0804799725

No nation is free from the charge that it has a less-than-complete view of the past. History is not simply about recording past events—it is often contested, negotiated, and reshaped over time. Debate over the history of World War II in Asia remains surprisingly intense, and Divergent Memories examines the opinions of powerful individuals to pinpoint the sources of conflict: from Japanese colonialism in Korea and atrocities in China to the American decision to use atomic weapons against Japan. Rather than labeling others' views as "distorted" or ignoring dissenting voices to create a monolithic historical account, Gi-Wook Shin and Daniel Sneider pursue a more fruitful approach: analyzing how historical memory has developed, been formulated, and even been challenged in each country. By identifying key factors responsible for these differences, Divergent Memories provides the tools for readers to both approach their own national histories with reflection and to be more understanding of others.

Legacies of the Asia-Pacific War

Legacies of the Asia-Pacific War
Author: Roman Rosenbaum
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 268
Release: 2012-09-10
Genre: History
ISBN: 1136936211

When we look in detail at the various peripheral groups of disenfranchised people emerging from the aftermath of the Asia–Pacific War the list is startling: Koreans in Japan (migrants or forced labourers), Burakumin, Hibakusha, Okinawans, Asian minorities, comfort women and many others. Many of these groups have been discussed in a large corpus of what we may call ‘disenfranchised literature’, and the research presented in this book intends to add an additional and particularly controversial example to the long list of the voice- and powerless. The presence of members of what is known as the yakeato sedai or the generation of people who experienced the fire-bombings of the Asia–Pacific War is conspicuous in all areas of contemporary Japan. From literature to the visual arts, from music to theatre, from architecture to politics, their influence and in many cases guiding principles is evident everywhere and in many cases forms the keystone of modern Japanese society and culture. The contributors to this book explore the impact of the yakeato generation - and their literary, creative and cultural and works - on the postwar period by drawing out the importance of the legacy of those people who truly survived the darkest hour of the twentieth century and re-evaluate the ramifications of their experiences in contemporary Japanese society and culture. As such this book will be of huge interest to those studying Japanese history, literature, poetry and cultural studies.

Japan's Pacific War

Japan's Pacific War
Author: Augustine Kobayashi
Publisher: Createspace Independent Publishing Platform
Total Pages: 148
Release: 2016-04-20
Genre:
ISBN: 9781532859465

In Decemeber 1941, WW2 became a truly global war with Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor, dragging the US into the war both in Europe and Asia. What is not widely known is that war had been going on since 1931 in Asia, provoked by Japan seeking dominance of Asia. Why Japan chose such aggressive course of action is even less well understood. This book seeks to explain how Japan's internal conditions and external relations led her to a war in Asia that would in turn lead to a head-on collision with the US and the Western colonial powers. Japan did not plan for such a general conflict with the entire West. Japan's frustration at the failure to defeat China, however, made her decide that they had no choice but to fight the US also. Japanese strategic thinking was thus still very premature, with Japanese military leaders unable to think through the likely consequences of such a course of action; they certainly did not have flexibility to adjust to changing strategic environment due to change of technology, economic balance and the sheer commitment of the US to the war aim of completely defeating Japan. Neglecting war logistics and obsessed with the idea of decisive fleet action, the Japanese were worn down by the increasing air and naval power of the US and was crushed in the end. Such outcome had been anticipated by the Western Allies in their war studies before the 1940s. Hence the tragedy is Japan's failure to come up with any effective scheme to defeat American strategy. Defeated comprehensively in war of logistics, starving Japanese soldiers acted badly everywhere, a legacy of WW2 in Asia which Japan has to live with even today. Read more: http: //www.quest-publications.com/books/japans-pacific-war/

The Japanese in War and Peace, 1942-48

The Japanese in War and Peace, 1942-48
Author: Ian Nish
Publisher: Global Oriental
Total Pages: 484
Release: 2010-12-13
Genre: History
ISBN: 9004212817

Writers of materials included are generally from the lower rungs of society; they provide an insight into the attitudes of citizens who are often neglected in accounts of the Allied Occupation, providing scholars, researchers, etc. with a valuable new dimension to our understanding of this Occupation history and its impact on the Japanese nation.

The Unpredictability of the Past

The Unpredictability of the Past
Author: Marc Gallicchio
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 356
Release: 2007-08-21
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780822339458

DIVCollection explores the formation and uses of memory about the Asia-Pacific front of World War II, considering how it continues to shape political and diplomatic discourse./div

The Pacific War, 1931-1945

The Pacific War, 1931-1945
Author: Saburo Ienaga
Publisher: Pantheon
Total Pages: 334
Release: 1979-07-12
Genre: History
ISBN: 0394734963

A portrayal of how and why Japan waged war from 1931-1945 and what life was like for the Japanese people in a society engaged in total war.