Download or read book Interwar Japan beyond the West written by Oliviero Frattolilio and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2014-07-24 with total page 145 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the late nineteenth century, Japan was the only non-Western country to have successfully faced the challenges of Westernization. At the end of the Meiji Era, just three decades after the end of the country’s feudal age, it became Great Britain’s ally, while its soldiers were deployed in Beijing, operating alongside the great European powers. Meanwhile, in Japan, the perception of a scientifically and technologically advanced West came to be imbued by negative connotations, generated by the threatening Western presence in Asia. In order to avoid succumbing to the European imperialist yoke, Japan has itself gradually converted its international status by embracing an imperialistic identity. The new image of the world responding to the current historical situation could only result from a philosophy immersed in historicity, far from its metaphysical dimension. In a philosophy mediated by history, self-awareness would have coincided with the “historical manifestations of history”. Based on these premises, the Chūōkōron group seemed to have presented Japan’s hegemonic aspirations as an expression of its “real historical manifestation”. This sounded like an explicit declaration of ideologically supporting the country’s involvement in the war. But what is the meaning that the participants in the debates attributed to the idea of Japan’s “real historical manifestation”? The answer lies in a moral obligation that the country saw as “the duty” of world history: overcoming modern civilization while promoting a new culture.
Download or read book A Cultural History of Postwar Japan written by Oliviero Frattolillo and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-07-14 with total page 215 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is a political and cultural history of the early postwar Japan aiming at exploring how the perception and cultural values of everyday life in the country changed along with the rise of the kasutori culture. Such a process was closely tied with both a refusal of the samurai culture and the interwar debate on modernity, and it resulted in a decadent way of life, exemplified by intellectuals such as Sakaguchi Ango. It depicts a short-lived radical cultural and social alternative, one that forced people to rethink their relationship to the kokutai, modernity, social roles, daily practices, and the production of knowledge. The subjectivity and daily practices in those years were more important in shaping the cultural identities of the Japanese than the new public ideology of the nation. This challenges some Euro-American historical notions that the new private sphere has emerged in Japan as an effect of the country’s Americanization, rather than from within it. This work not only looks at the immediate aftermath of WWII from the perspective of Japan, but also tries to rethink Westernization in the light of its global appropriation. This volume is addressed to specialists of Japanese or Asian history, but it will also attract historians of the United States and readers from political and intellectual history, cultural studies, and historiography in general.
Download or read book Overcome by Modernity written by Harry D. Harootunian and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2011-11-28 with total page 475 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the decades between the two World Wars, Japan made a dramatic entry into the modern age, expanding its capital industries and urbanizing so quickly as to rival many long-standing Western industrial societies. How the Japanese made sense of the sudden transformation and the subsequent rise of mass culture is the focus of Harry Harootunian's fascinating inquiry into the problems of modernity. Here he examines the work of a generation of Japanese intellectuals who, like their European counterparts, saw modernity as a spectacle of ceaseless change that uprooted the dominant historical culture from its fixed values and substituted a culture based on fantasy and desire. Harootunian not only explains why the Japanese valued philosophical understandings of these events, often over sociological or empirical explanations, but also locates Japan's experience of modernity within a larger global process marked by both modernism and fascism. What caught the attention of Japanese thinkers was how the production of desire actually threatened historical culture. These intellectuals sought to "overcome" the materialism and consumerism associated with the West, particularly the United States. They proposed versions of a modernity rooted in cultural authenticity and aimed at infusing meaning into everyday life, whether through art, memory, or community. Harootunian traces these ideas in the works of Yanagita Kunio, Tosaka Jun, Gonda Yasunosuke, and Kon Wajiro, among others, and relates their arguments to those of such European writers as George Simmel, Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin, and Georges Bataille. Harootunian shows that Japanese and European intellectuals shared many of the same concerns, and also stresses that neither Japan's involvement with fascism nor its late entry into the capitalist, industrial scene should cause historians to view its experience of modernity as an oddity. The author argues that strains of fascism ran throughout most every country in Europe and in many ways resulted from modernizing trends in general. This book, written by a leading scholar of modern Japan, amounts to a major reinterpretation of the nature of Japan's modernity.
Download or read book International Architecture in Interwar Japan written by Ken Tadashi Ōshima and published by . This book was released on 2009 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Following World War I, a generation of young architects in Japan took part in a movement toward "international architecture," or kokusai kenchiku, designing houses for people who blended Japanese and Western customs in their daily lives, and public buildings--from schools and hospitals to weather stations and golf clubhouses--that encompassed modern forms and new materials, especially earthquake-resistant reinforced concrete, yet systhesized the new with the old.--Ken Tadashi Oshima is assistant professor of architecture at the University of Washington.
Download or read book Japan and the Great War written by Antony Best and published by Springer. This book was released on 2015-10-05 with total page 201 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this book, seven internationally renowned experts on Japanese and Asian history have come together to investigate, with innovative methodological approaches, various aspects of the Japanese experience during and after the First World War.
Download or read book Japan Italy and the Road to the Tripartite Alliance written by Ken Ishida and published by Springer. This book was released on 2018-09-20 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book employs a comparative approach to explore the decision-making processes behind the Japanese and Italian foreign policies concerned with East Asia, Africa, Europe and the Mediterranean. It explores these policies in relation to the Axis powers and Britain in the 1930s. Both Japan and Italy shared significant similarities in their decision-making processes, which help to illustrate the workings of ultra-nationalist and fascist foreign policy. The work examines the mechanism of decision-making in the foreign ministries, rather than the personalities of leaders, in order to understand why and how both countries finally chose unexpected partners. The Tripartite Alliance has often been perceived through the diplomatic motives and arbitrary manners of dictatorial leadership in Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy and ultra-nationalist Japan individually. This book compares the foreign policies of Italy and Japan and looks outwards to their diplomatic relations with Britain, a key imperial factor in their expansions into East Asia and Africa, contrasting these Axis powers with Germany, usually thought to typify fascist diplomacy.
Download or read book Japan Prepares for Total War written by Michael A. Barnhart and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2013-03-22 with total page 293 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The roots of Japan's aggressive, expansionist foreign policy have often been traced to its concern over acute economic vulnerability. Michael A. Barnhart tests this assumption by examining the events leading up to World War II in the context of Japan's quest for economic security, drawing on a wide array of Japanese and American sources.Barnhart focuses on the critical years from 1938 to 1941 as he investigates the development of Japan's drive for national economic self-sufficiency and independence and the way in which this drive shaped its internal and external policies. He also explores American economic pressure on Tokyo and assesses its impact on Japan's foreign policy and domestic economy. He concludes that Japan's internal political dynamics, especially the bitter rivalry between its army and navy, played a far greater role in propelling the nation into war with the United States than did its economic condition or even pressure from Washington. Japan Prepares for Total War sheds new light on prewar Japan and confirms the opinions of those in Washington who advocated economic pressure against Japan.
Download or read book Diplomacy in Japan EU Relations written by Oliviero Frattolillo and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-06-26 with total page 164 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since the 1950s, Japan-Europe relations have been characterised by a mutual coldness in terms of diplomatic dialogue, punctuated by a number of trade disputes. This book analyses the development of the political and diplomatic relationship between Japan and Europe, and shows that – especially during the Cold War years – whilst they share a wide range of political values and goals, the quality of diplomatic relations has often been sacrificed to both overcome trade issues and as a result of systemic factors. Focusing on the institutionalization of relations between Japan and the EU, this book examines both the historical-diplomatic dimension and political-strategic discourse. It traces the historical development of the relationship from the post-war years, to the signing of the Japan-EU action plan in 2001, which marked a key turning point in the relationship. It goes on to examine the achievements and criticisms of ASEM, the Asia-Europe Meeting, which whilst meeting successfully for the past sixteen years, has also been condemned as little more than a talking shop. Crucially, Oliviero Frattolillo’s analysis clearly demonstrates how the interaction between Japan and the EU has been constructed on the basis of their perceptions of each other, thus underlining the inherent impact of different political identities, cultures and values on international relations. Providing a keen insight into Japan-EU relations, this book will appeal to students and scholars of Japanese and European history and politics, as well as those interested in the history of international relations and security studies.
Download or read book Japanese Foreign Policy in the Interwar Period written by Ian Nish and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2002-07-30 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This comprehensive, up-to-date analysis of Japanese policy between the two world wars utilizes both English and Japanese sources to present Japan as an independent agent, not a state whose policy was determined by the actions of other countries. Beginning with Japan's disappointment with the Versailles Peace Treaty in 1919, Nish examines the roots of Japanese discontent and feelings that ambitions in China were being unreasonably restrained. He explains British and American policies in the region as reactive, but concludes that their responses helped to determine which factions would dominate Japan's political arena. This non-partisan account is even-handed in apportioning responsibility for the events leading to the Second World War. While some Japanese politicians in the 1920s tried to follow the international path, there were others who tended to side with the army in establishing Japan's position, first in Manchuria and later in North and Central China in the 1930s. Conscious of the nation's unpopularity in the western world, Japan allied itself with Germany and Italy in the Anti-Comintern Pact of 1936 and the Tripartite Alliance of 1940. To pursue its own national objectives, Japan joined her allies in making war on the United States and the colonial empires of Britain, France, and the Netherlands. Its forces succeeded in overrunning many colonial territories; and, with a view to easing the problems of occupying them, Japan liberalized its harsh military policies, granting independence to Burma and the Philippines and welcoming Asian leaders to Tokyo for the Greater East Asian Conference of November 1943.
Download or read book Japanese Geopolitics and the Western Imagination written by Atsuko Watanabe and published by Springer. This book was released on 2019-03-04 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is the first attempt to comprehensively introduce Japanese geopolitics. Europe’s role in disseminating knowledge globally to shape the world according to its standards is an unchallenged premise in world politics. In this story, Japan is regarded as an enthusiastic importer of the knowledge. The book challenges this ground by examining how European geopolitics, the theory of the modern state, traveled to Japan in the first half of the last century, and demonstrates that the same theory can invoke diverged imaginations of the world by examining a range of historical, political, and literary texts. Focusing on the transformation of power, knowledge, and subjectivity in time and space, Watanabe provides a detailed account to reconsider the formation of contemporary world order of the modern territorial states.
Download or read book Japan 1941 written by John E. Moser and published by W. W. Norton. This book was released on 2020-11-02 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reacting to the Past is an award-winning series of immersive role-playing games that actively engage students in their own learning. Students assume the roles of historical characters to practice critical thinking, primary source analysis, and both written and spoken argument. Adopted by thousands of instructors at all types of institutions, Reacting to the Past games are flexible enough to be used across the curriculum, from first-year general education classes and discussion sections of lecture classes to capstone experiences and honors programs.
Download or read book Music Modernity and Locality in Prewar Japan Osaka and Beyond written by Alison Tokita and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-12-05 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This anthology addresses the modern musical culture of interwar Osaka and its surrounding Hanshin region. Modernity as experienced in this locale, with its particular historical, geographic and demographic character, and its established traditions of music and performance, gave rise to configurations of the new, the traditional and the hybrid that were distinct from their Tokyo counterparts. The Taisho and early Showa periods, from 1912 to the early 1940s, saw profound changes in Japanese musical life. Consumption of both traditional Japanese and Western music was transformed as public concert performances, music journalism, and music marketing permeated daily life. The new bourgeoisie saw Western music, particularly the piano and its repertoire, as the symbol of a desirable and increasingly affordable modernity. Orchestras and opera troupes were established, which in turn created a need for professional conductors, and both jazz and a range of hybrid popular music styles became viable bases for musical livelihood. Recording technology proliferated; by the early 1930s, record players and SP discs were no longer luxury commodities, radio broadcasts reached all levels of society, and ’talkies’ with music soundtracks were avidly consumed. With the perceived need for music that suited 'modern life', the seeds for the pre-eminent position of Euro-American music in post-Second-World war Japan were sown. At the same time many indigenous musical genres continued to thrive, but were hardly immune to the effects of modernization; in exploring new musical media and techniques drawn from Western music, performer-composers initiated profound changes in composition and performance practice within traditional genres. This volume is the first to draw together research on the interwar musical culture of the Osaka region and addresses comprehensively both Western and non-Western musical practices and genres, questions the common perception of their being wholly separate domains
Download or read book Beyond Pearl Harbor written by Beth Bailey and published by University Press of Kansas. This book was released on 2019-07-24 with total page 222 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the United States, December 7, 1941, may live in infamy, in President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s phrase, but for most Americans the date’s significance begins and ends with the attack on Pearl Harbor. On December 8 (December 7 on the other side of the International Date Line) Japanese military forces hit eight major targets, all but one on western colonial possessions and military outposts in the Pacific: Kota Bharu on the northeast coast of Malaya (now Malaysia); Thailand, the one site not claimed by a western power; Pearl Harbor, O’ahu; Singapore, key to the defense of Britain’s Asian empire; Guam, the only island in the Mariana chain not controlled by Japan; Wake Island; Hong Kong; and the Philippines. Told from multiple perspectives, the stories of these attacks reveal the arc of imperialism, colonialism, and burgeoning nationalism in the Pacific world. In Beyond Pearl Harbor renowned scholars hailing from four continents and representing six nations reinterpret the meaning of the coordinated, and devastating, attacks of December 7/8, 1941. Working from a variety of angles, they revise and expand, to an unprecedented extent, what we understand about these events—in particular, how Japan’s overwhelming, if short-lived, victories contributed to emerging solidarities and nationalist identities within and across Pacific societies. In their essays we see how various elite actors incorporated the attacks into new regimes of knowledge and expertise that challenged and displaced existing hierarchies. Extending far beyond Pearl Harbor, the events of December 1941, as we see in this volume, are part of a story of clashing empires and anti-colonial visions—a story whose outcome, even now, remains to be seen.
Download or read book Moderate Modernity written by Jochen Hung and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2023-02-06 with total page 275 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Focusing on the fate of a Berlin-based newspaper during the 1920s and 1930s, Moderate Modernity: The Newspaper Tempo and the Transformation of Weimar Democracy chronicles the transformation of a vibrant and liberal society into an oppressive and authoritarian dictatorship. Tempo proclaimed itself as “Germany’s most modern newspaper” and attempted to capture the spirit of Weimar Berlin, giving a voice to a forward-looking generation that had grown up under the Weimar Republic’s new democratic order. The newspaper celebrated modern technology, spectator sports, and American consumer products, constructing an optimistic vision of Germany’s future as a liberal consumer society anchored in Western values. The newspaper’s idea of a modern, democratic Germany was undermined by the political and economic crises that hit Germany at the beginning of the 1930s. The way the newspaper described German democracy changed under these pressures. Flappers, American fridges, and modern music—the things that Tempo had once marshalled as representatives of a German future—were now rejected by the newspaper as emblems of a bygone age. The changes in Tempo’s vision of Germany’s future show that descriptions of Weimar politics as a standoff between upright democrats and rabid extremists do not do justice to the historical complexity of the period. Rather, we need to accept the Nazis as a lethal product of a German democracy itself. The history of Tempo teaches us how liberal democracies can create and nurture their own worst enemies.
Download or read book The New Japanese Woman written by Barbara Sato and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2003-04-16 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: DIVA study of the "modern" woman in Japan before World War II./div
Download or read book Mestizo International Law written by Arnulf Becker Lorca and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2015-01-01 with total page 421 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The development of international law is conventionally understood as a history in which the main characters (states and international lawyers) and events (wars and peace conferences) are European. Arnulf Becker Lorca demonstrates how non-Western states and lawyers appropriated nineteenth-century classical thinking in order to defend new and better rules governing non-Western states' international relations. By internalizing the standard of civilization, for example, they argued for the abrogation of unequal treaties. These appropriations contributed to the globalization of international law. With the rise of modern legal thinking and a stronger international community governed by law, peripheral lawyers seized the opportunity and used the new discourse and institutions such as the League of Nations to dissolve the standard of civilization and codify non-intervention and self-determination. These stories suggest that the history of our contemporary international legal order is not purely European; instead they suggest a history of a mestizo international law.
Download or read book The Dilemmas of Growth in Prewar Japan written by James William Morley and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2015-03-08 with total page 538 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The sixth and final volume in the series published for the Conference on Modern Japan reviews the political, economic and foreign policy problems faced by Japan during the 1930's and '40's. James Morley's introductory chapter, "Choice and Consequence," and Edwin O. Reisehauer's conclusion. "What Went Wrong?" define the context of the discussion. Contents: "Foreword," John Whitney Hall. 1. "Introduction: Choice and Consequence," James William Morley. PART ONE: Political and Military. II. "The Bureaucracy as a Political Force, 1920-45," Robert M. Spaulding, Jr. III. "Retrogression in Japan's Foreign Policy Decision-Making Process," Chihiro Hosoya. IV. "The Failure of Military Expansionism," Akira Iriye. V. "The Radical Left and the Failure of Communism," George M. Beekmann. PART TWO: Economic and Social. VI. "Rural Origins of Japanese Fascism," R. P. Dore and Tsutomu Ouchi. VII. "The Economic Muddle of the 192O's," Hugh I. Patrick. VIII. "Big Business and Politics in Prewar Japan," Arthur E. Tiedemann. PAKT THREE: Intellectual. IX. "Intellectuals as Visionaries of the New Asian Order," James B. Crowley. X. "Nakano Seigo and the Spirit of the Meiji Restoration in Twentieth- Century Japan," Tetsuo Najita. XI. "Oyama Ikuo and the Search for Democracy," Peter Duus. PART FOUR: Comparisons and Conclusions. XII. "Japan and Germany in the Interwar Period," Kentaro Hayashi. XIII. "What Went Wrong?" Edwin O. Reischauer. Index. Originally published in 1972. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
