Transwar Asia

Transwar Asia
Author: Reto Hofmann
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 314
Release: 2021-12-16
Genre: History
ISBN: 1350182834

This volume considers the possibilities of the term 'transwar' to understand the history of Asia from the 1920s to the 1960s. Recently, scholars have challenged earlier studies that suggested a neat division between the pre- and postwar or colonial/postcolonial periods in the national histories of East Asia, instead assessing change and continuity across the divide of war. Taking this reconsideration further, Transwar Asia explores the complex processes by which prewar and colonial ideologies, practices, and institutions from the 1920s and 1930s were reconfigured during World War II and, crucially, in the two decades that followed, thus shaping the Asian Cold War and the processes of decolonization and nation state-formation. With contributions covering the transwar histories of China, Indonesia, Korea, Japan, the Philippines and Taiwan, the book addresses key themes such as authoritarianism, militarization, criminal rehabilitation, market controls, labor-regimes, and anti-communism. A transwar angle, the authors argue, sheds new light on the continuing problems that undergirded the formation of postwar nation-states and illuminates the political legacies that still shape the various regions in Asia up to the present.

The End of Empires and a World Remade

The End of Empires and a World Remade
Author: Martin Thomas
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 672
Release: 2024-03-19
Genre: History
ISBN: 0691190925

A capacious history of decolonization, from the decline of empires to the era of globalization Empires, until recently, were everywhere. They shaped borders, stirred conflicts, and set the terms of international politics. With the collapse of empire came a fundamental reorganization of our world. Decolonization unfolded across territories as well as within them. Its struggles became internationalized and transnational, as much global campaigns of moral disarmament against colonial injustice as local contests of arms. In this expansive history, Martin Thomas tells the story of decolonization and its intrinsic link to globalization. He traces the connections between these two transformative processes: the end of formal empire and the acceleration of global integration, market reorganization, cultural exchange, and migration. The End of Empires and a World Remade shows how profoundly decolonization shaped the process of globalization in the wake of empire collapse. In the second half of the twentieth century, decolonization catalyzed new international coalitions; it triggered partitions and wars; and it reshaped North-South dynamics. Globalization promised the decolonized greater access to essential resources, to wider networks of influence, and to worldwide audiences, but its neoliberal variant has reinforced economic inequalities and imperial forms of political and cultural influences. In surveying these two codependent histories across the world, from Latin America to Asia, Thomas explains why the deck was so heavily stacked against newly independent nations. Decolonization stands alongside the great world wars as the most transformative event of twentieth-century history. In The End of Empires and a World Remade, Thomas offers a masterful analysis of the greatest process of state-making (and empire-unmaking) in modern history.

Cold War Ruins

Cold War Ruins
Author: Lisa Yoneyama
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 319
Release: 2016-09-15
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0822374110

In Cold War Ruins Lisa Yoneyama argues that the efforts intensifying since the 1990s to bring justice to the victims of Japanese military and colonial violence have generated what she calls a "transborder redress culture." A product of failed post-World War II transitional justice that left many colonial legacies intact, this culture both contests and reiterates the complex transwar and transpacific entanglements that have sustained the Cold War unredressability and illegibility of certain violences. By linking justice to the effects of American geopolitical hegemony, and by deploying a conjunctive cultural critique—of "comfort women" redress efforts, state-sponsored apologies and amnesties, Asian American involvement in redress cases, the ongoing effects of the U.S. occupation of Japan and Okinawa, Japanese atrocities in China, and battles over WWII memories—Yoneyama helps illuminate how redress culture across Asia and the Pacific has the potential to bring powerful new and challenging perspectives on American exceptionalism, militarized security, justice, sovereignty, forgiveness, and decolonization.

Confluence and Conflict

Confluence and Conflict
Author: Brian Hurley
Publisher: Harvard East Asian Monographs
Total Pages: 350
Release: 2022-06-14
Genre:
ISBN: 9780674267909

Writers and intellectuals in modern Japan have long forged dialogues across the boundaries separating the spheres of literature and thought. This book explores some of their most provocative connections in the volatile years of the 1920s to 1950s, revealing unexpected intersections of literature, ideas, and politics in a global transwar context.

Transwar Asia

Transwar Asia
Author: Reto Hofmann
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 240
Release: 2021-12-16
Genre: History
ISBN: 1350182826

This volume considers the possibilities of the term 'transwar' to understand the history of Asia from the 1920s to the 1960s. Recently, scholars have challenged earlier studies that suggested a neat division between the pre- and postwar or colonial/postcolonial periods in the national histories of East Asia, instead assessing change and continuity across the divide of war. Taking this reconsideration further, Transwar Asia explores the complex processes by which prewar and colonial ideologies, practices, and institutions from the 1920s and 1930s were reconfigured during World War II and, crucially, in the two decades that followed, thus shaping the Asian Cold War and the processes of decolonization and nation state-formation. With contributions covering the transwar histories of China, Indonesia, Korea, Japan, the Philippines and Taiwan, the book addresses key themes such as authoritarianism, militarization, criminal rehabilitation, market controls, labor-regimes, and anti-communism. A transwar angle, the authors argue, sheds new light on the continuing problems that undergirded the formation of postwar nation-states and illuminates the political legacies that still shape the various regions in Asia up to the present.

Redacted

Redacted
Author: Jonathan E. Abel
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 376
Release: 2012-08-18
Genre: History
ISBN: 0520273346

This study examines the contradictory relationships between preservation, production, and redaction to shed light on the dark valley attributed to wartime culture and to cast a shadow on the supposedly bright, open space of free postwar discourse.

Race for Empire

Race for Empire
Author: Takashi Fujitani
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 513
Release: 2011-11-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 0520950364

Race for Empire offers a profound and challenging reinterpretation of nationalism, racism, and wartime mobilization during the Asia-Pacific war. In parallel case studies—of Japanese Americans mobilized to serve in the United States Army and of Koreans recruited or drafted into the Japanese military—T. Fujitani examines the U.S. and Japanese empires as they struggled to manage racialized populations while waging total war. Fujitani probes governmental policies and analyzes representations of these soldiers—on film, in literature, and in archival documents—to reveal how characteristics of racism, nationalism, capitalism, gender politics, and the family changed on both sides. He demonstrates that the United States and Japan became increasingly alike over the course of the war, perhaps most tellingly in their common attempts to disavow racism even as they reproduced it in new ways and forms.

Tenkō Cultures of Political Conversion in Transwar Japan

Tenkō Cultures of Political Conversion in Transwar Japan
Author: Irena Hayter
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages:
Release: 2021-06-18
Genre:
ISBN: 9780367235796

This book approaches the concept of tenkō (political conversion) as a response to the global crisis of interwar modernity, as opposed to a distinctly Japanese experience in postwar debates. Tenkō connotes the expressions of ideological conversion performed by members of the Japanese Communist Party, starting in 1933, whereby they renounced Marxism and expressed support for Japan's imperial expansion on the continent. Although tenkō has a significant presence in Japan's postwar intellectual and literary histories, this multi-authored volume is one of the first in English-language scholarship to approach the phenomenon. International perspectives from both established and early career scholars show tenkō as inseparable from the global politics of empire, deeply marked by an age of mechanical reproduction, mediatization and the manipulation of language. Chapters draw on a wide range of interdisciplinary methodologies, from political theory and intellectual history to literary studies. In this way, tenkō is explored through new conceptual and analytical frameworks, including questions of gender and the role of affect in politics, implications that render the phenomenon distinctly relevant to the contemporary moment. Tenkō: Cultures of Political Conversion in Transwar Japan will prove a valuable resource to students and scholars of Japanese and East Asian history, literature and politics.

Engineering Asia

Engineering Asia
Author: Hiromi Mizuno
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 269
Release: 2018-08-09
Genre: History
ISBN: 1350063940

Weaving together chapters on imperial Japan's wartime mobilization, Asia's first wave of postwar decolonization, and Cold War geopolitical conflict in the region, Engineering Asia seeks to demonstrate how Asia's present prosperity did not arise from a so-called 'economic miracle' but from the violent and dynamic events of the 20th century. The book argues that what continued to operate throughout these tumultuous eras were engineering networks of technology. Constructed at first for colonial development under Japan, these networks transformed into channels of overseas development aid that constituted the Cold War system in Asia. Through highlighting how these networks helped shape Asia's contemporary economic landscape, Engineering Asia challenges dominant narratives in Western scholarship of an 'economic miracle' in Japan and South Korea, and the 'Asian Tigers' of Southeast Asia. Students and scholars of East Asian studies, development studies, postcolonialism, Cold War studies and the history of technology and science will find this book immensely useful.

Grassroots Fascism

Grassroots Fascism
Author: Yoshimi Yoshiaki
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 357
Release: 2015-03-24
Genre: History
ISBN: 0231538596

Grassroots Fascism profiles the Asia Pacific War (1937–1945)—the most important though least understood experience of Japan's modern history—through the lens of ordinary Japanese life. Moving deftly from the struggles of the home front to the occupied territories to the ravages of the front line, the book offers rare insights into popular experiences from the war's troubled beginnings through Japan's disastrous defeat in 1945 and the new beginning it heralded. Yoshimi Yoshiaki mobilizes diaries, letters, memoirs, and government documents to portray the ambivalent position of ordinary Japanese as both wartime victims and active participants. He also provides penetrating accounts of the war experiences of Japan's minorities and imperial subjects, including Koreans and Taiwanese. His book challenges the idea that the Japanese people operated as a mere conduit for the military during the war, passively accepting an imperial ideology imposed upon them by the political elite. Viewed from the bottom up, wartime Japan unfolds as a complex modern mass society, with a corresponding variety of popular roles and agendas. In chronicling the diversity of wartime Japanese social experience, Yoshimi's account elevates our understanding of "Japanese Fascism." In its relation of World War II to the evolution—and destruction—of empire, it makes a fresh contribution to the global history of the war. Ethan Mark's translation supplements the Japanese original with explanatory notes and an in-depth introduction that situates the work within Japanese studies and global history.