Download or read book Japan Rearmed written by Sheila A. Smith and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Modern Japan is not only responding to threats from North Korea and China but is also reevaluating its dependence on the United States, Sheila Smith shows. No longer convinced they can rely on Americans to defend their country, Tokyo's political leaders are now confronting the possibility that they may need to prepare the nation's military for war.
Download or read book War Memory and Social Politics in Japan 1945 2005 written by Franziska Seraphim and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2020-03-23 with total page 440 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Japan has long wrestled with the memories and legacies of World War II. In the aftermath of defeat, war memory developed as an integral part of particular and divergent approaches to postwar democracy. In the last six decades, the demands placed upon postwar democracy have shifted considerably—from social protest through high economic growth to Japan’s relations in Asia—and the meanings of the war shifted with them.This book unravels the political dynamics that governed the place of war memory in public life. Far from reconciling with the victims of Japanese imperialism, successive conservative administrations have left the memory of the war to representatives of special interests and citizen movements, all of whom used war memory to further their own interests.Franziska Seraphim traces the activism of five prominent civic organizations to examine the ways in which diverse organized memories have secured legitimate niches within the public sphere. The history of these domestic conflicts—over the commemoration of the war dead, the manipulation of national symbols, the teaching of history, or the articulation of relations with China and Korea—is crucial to the current discourse about apology and reconciliation in East Asia, and provides essential context for the global debate on war memory."
Download or read book Japan s First Student Radicals written by Henry DeWitt Smith (II) and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 1972 with total page 380 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Long obscured by the more dramatic activities of post-World War II student activists, the history of the Japanese left-wing student movement during its formative period from 1918 until its suppression in the 1930s is analyzed here in detail for the first time. Focusing on the Shinjinkai (New Man Society) of Tokyo Imperial University, the leading prewar student group, Henry DeWitt Smith describes the origins and evolution of student radicalism in the period between the two World Wars. He concludes with an analysis of the careers of the Shinjinkai members after graduation and with an explanation of the importance of the prewar tradition to the postwar student movement.
Download or read book When Empire Comes Home written by Lori Watt and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2020-03-17 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Following the end of World War II in Asia, the Allied powers repatriated over six million Japanese nationals from colonies and battlefields throughout Asia and deported more than a million colonial subjects from Japan to their countries of origin.Depicted at the time as a postwar measure related to the demobilization of defeated Japanese soldiers, this population transfer was a central element in the human dismantling of the Japanese empire that resonates with other post-colonial and post-imperial migrations in the twentieth century.Lori Watt analyzes how the human remnants of empire, those who were moved and those who were left behind, served as sites of negotiation in the process of the jettisoning of the colonial project and in the creation of new national identities in Japan. Through an exploration of the creation and uses of the figure of the repatriate, in political, social, and cultural realms, this study addresses the question of what happens when empire comes home."
Download or read book Japan in the American Century written by Kenneth B. Pyle and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2018-10-15 with total page 440 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: No nation was more deeply affected by America’s rise to power than Japan. The price paid to end the most intrusive reconstruction of a nation in modern history was a cold war alliance with the U.S. that ensured American dominance in the region. Kenneth Pyle offers a thoughtful history of this relationship at a time when the alliance is changing.
Download or read book The United Nations in Japan s Foreign and Security Policymaking 1945 1992 written by Liang Pan and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2020-03-17 with total page 413 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: " In the mid-1950s, as part of Tokyo’s goal of reinstating Japan as a full member of the international community, Japan sought and gained admittance to the United Nations. Since then, it has been a proactive member and a generous financial contributor to the organization. This study focuses on postwar Japan’s foreign policy making in the political and security areas, the core UN missions. It analyzes these two policy arenas from three perspectives--international political structure, domestic political organization, and the psychology of policymakers. The intent is to illustrate how policy goals forged by national security concerns, domestic politics, and psychological needs gave shape to Japan’s complicated and sometimes incongruous policy toward the UN since World War II. In contrast to the usual emphasis on the role of the foreign-policy bureaucracy, however, the author argues that we must view the bureaucracy as functioning within a larger framework of party politics and interactions among government agencies, political parties, and other actors associated with these parties. The last part of the book addresses the psychological aspect of Japan’s UN policymaking in an effort to elucidate the role of national prestige in generating Japanese policy toward the UN. "
Download or read book The Making of Japanese Manchuria 1904 1932 written by Yoshihisa Tak Matsusaka and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2020-03-23 with total page 550 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "In this history of Japanese involvement in northeast China, the author argues that Japan’s military seizure of Manchuria in September 1931 was founded on three decades of infiltration of the area. This incremental empire-building and its effect on Japan are the focuses of this book. The principal agency in the piecemeal growth of Japanese colonization was the South Manchurian Railway Company, and by the mid-1920s Japan had a deeply entrenched presence in Manchuria and exercised a dominant economic and political influence over the area. Japanese colonial expansion in Manchuria also loomed large in Japanese politics, military policy, economic development, and foreign relations and deeply influenced many aspects of Japan’s interwar history."
Download or read book Japan s Local Pragmatists written by Neil L. Waters and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2020-03-17 with total page 191 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Japanese local history is used as an ingredient in historiographical theories designed to prove that the rapid pace of change in Japan led either to phenomenal success or to dismal failure. Against the backdrop of a comprehensive overview of Japanese historiography, Neil Waters examines in detail the local politics of the Kawasaki region during the late nineteenth century. Historians have hitherto focused primarily upon those regions that experienced violent peasant uprisings, class conflict, or extreme government repression. He points out that localities which survived the transition between governments without violence far outnumber those marked by open struggle. This study is one of the few to cover the political and economic history of a region in which “nothing happened.” From an examination of the implementation and impact of Restoration programs on the day-to-day level of local government in the Kawasaki region, a fascinating picture emerges of the adaptation and modifications local leaders were able to chart between open rebellion and outright capitulation."
Download or read book Five Mountains written by Martin Collcutt and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2020-03-17 with total page 430 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This work provides an in-depth history of the Rinzai Zen monastic institution in Medieval Japan. Contents include chapters on Japanese zen pioneers and their patrons; Chinese émigré monks and Japanese warrior rullers; the gozan system; Zen monastic life and rules; the monastery and its subtemples; and the Zen monastic economy. Includes a foreword by Edwin Reischauer.
Download or read book Islands of Eight Million Smiles written by Hiroshi Aoyagi and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2020-03-17 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: " Since the late 1960s a ubiquitous feature of popular culture in Japan has been the ""idol,"" an attractive young actor, male or female, packaged and promoted as an adolescent role model and exploited by the entertainment, fashion, cosmetic, and publishing industries to market trendy products. This book offers ethnographic case studies regarding the symbolic qualities of idols and how these qualities relate to the conceptualization of selfhood among adolescents in Japan and elsewhere in East Asia. The author explores how the idol-manufacturing industry absorbs young people into its system of production, molds them into marketable personalities, commercializes their images, and contributes to the construction of ideal images of the adolescent self. Since the relationship between the idols and their consumers is dynamic, the study focuses on the fans of idols as well. Ultimately, Aoyagi argues, idol performances substantiate capitalist values in the urban consumer society of contemporary Japan and East Asia. Regardless of how crude their performances may appear in the eyes of critics, the idols have helped establish the entertainment industry as an agent of public socialization by driving public desires toward the consumption of commoditized fantasies. "
Download or read book Deus Destroyed written by George Elison and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2020-03-17 with total page 564 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Japan’s “Christian Century” began in 1549 with the arrival of Jesuit missionaries led by Saint Francis Xavier, and ended in 1639 when the Tokugawa regime issued the final Sakoku Edict prohibiting all traffic with Catholic lands. “Sakoku”—national isolation—would for more than two centuries be the sum total of the regime’s approach to foreign affairs. This policy was accompanied by the persecution of Christians inside Japan, a course of action for which the missionaries and their zealots were in part responsible because of their dogmatic orthodoxy. The Christians insisted that “Deus” was owed supreme loyalty, while the Tokugawa critics insisted on the prior importance of performing one’s role within the secular order, and denounced the subversive doctrine whose First Commandment seemed to permit rebellion against the state. In discussing the collision of ideas and historical processes, George Elison explores the attitudes and procedures of the missionaries, describes the entanglements in politics that contributed heavily to their doom, and shows the many levels of the Japanese response to Christianity. Central to his book are translations of four seventeenth-century, anti-Christian polemical tracts."
Download or read book Ennobling Japan s Savage Northeast written by Nathan Hopson and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2020-10-26 with total page 383 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Ennobling Japan’s Savage Northeast is the first comprehensive account in English of the discursive life of the Tōhoku region in postwar Japan from 1945 through 2011. The Northeast became the subject of world attention with the March 2011 triple disaster of earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear meltdown. But Tōhoku’s history and significance to emic understandings of Japanese self and nationhood remain poorly understood. When Japan embarked on its quest to modernize in the mid-nineteenth century, historical prejudice, contemporary politics, and economic calculation together led the state to marginalize Tōhoku, creating a “backward” region in both fact and image. After 1945, a group of mostly local intellectuals attempted to overcome this image and rehabilitate the Northeast as a source of new national values. This early postwar Tōhoku recuperation movement has proved to be a critical source for the new Kyoto school’s neoconservative valorization of native Japanese identity, fueling that group’s antimodern, anti-Western discourse since the 1980s.Nathan Hopson unravels the contested postwar meanings of Tōhoku to reveal the complex and contradictory ways in which that region has been incorporated into Japan’s shifting self-images since World War II."
Download or read book Japan 1941 written by Eri Hotta and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2013-10-29 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A groundbreaking history that considers the attack on Pearl Harbor from the Japanese perspective and is certain to revolutionize how we think of the war in the Pacific. When Japan launched hostilities against the United States in 1941, argues Eri Hotta, its leaders, in large part, understood they were entering a war they were almost certain to lose. Drawing on material little known to Western readers, and barely explored in depth in Japan itself, Hotta poses an essential question: Why did these men—military men, civilian politicians, diplomats, the emperor—put their country and its citizens so unnecessarily in harm’s way? Introducing us to the doubters, schemers, and would-be patriots who led their nation into this conflagration, Hotta brilliantly shows us a Japan rarely glimpsed—eager to avoid war but fraught with tensions with the West, blinded by reckless militarism couched in traditional notions of pride and honor, tempted by the gambler’s dream of scoring the biggest win against impossible odds and nearly escaping disaster before it finally proved inevitable. In an intimate account of the increasingly heated debates and doomed diplomatic overtures preceding Pearl Harbor, Hotta reveals just how divided Japan’s leaders were, right up to (and, in fact, beyond) their eleventh-hour decision to attack. We see a ruling cadre rich in regional ambition and hubris: many of the same leaders seeking to avoid war with the United States continued to adamantly advocate Asian expansionism, hoping to advance, or at least maintain, the occupation of China that began in 1931, unable to end the second Sino-Japanese War and unwilling to acknowledge Washington’s hardening disapproval of their continental incursions. Even as Japanese diplomats continued to negotiate with the Roosevelt administration, Matsuoka Yosuke, the egomaniacal foreign minister who relished paying court to both Stalin and Hitler, and his facile supporters cemented Japan’s place in the fascist alliance with Germany and Italy—unaware (or unconcerned) that in so doing they destroyed the nation’s bona fides with the West. We see a dysfunctional political system in which military leaders reported to both the civilian government and the emperor, creating a structure that facilitated intrigues and stoked a jingoistic rivalry between Japan’s army and navy. Roles are recast and blame reexamined as Hotta analyzes the actions and motivations of the hawks and skeptics among Japan’s elite. Emperor Hirohito and General Hideki Tojo are newly appraised as we discover how the two men fumbled for a way to avoid war before finally acceding to it. Hotta peels back seventy years of historical mythologizing—both Japanese and Western—to expose all-too-human Japanese leaders torn by doubt in the months preceding the attack, more concerned with saving face than saving lives, finally drawn into war as much by incompetence and lack of political will as by bellicosity. An essential book for any student of the Second World War, this compelling reassessment will forever change the way we remember those days of infamy.
Download or read book Japan at the Crossroads written by Nick Kapur and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2018-08-06 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1960, when Japan revised the postwar treaty that allows a U.S. military presence in Japan, the popular backlash changed the evolution of Japan’s politics and culture, and its global role. Nick Kapur’s analysis helps resolve Japan’s essential paradox as being innovative yet regressive, flexible yet resistant, imaginative yet wedded to tradition.
Download or read book The Afterlife of Toyotomi Hideyoshi written by Susan Westhafer Furukawa and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2023-11-20 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Popular representations of the past are everywhere in Japan, from cell phone charms to manga, from television dramas to video games to young people dressed as their favorite historical figures hanging out in the hip Harajuku district. But how does this mass consumption of the past affect the way consumers think about history and what it means to be Japanese? By analyzing representations of the famous sixteenth-century samurai leader Toyotomi Hideyoshi in historical fiction based on Taikōki, the original biography of him, this book explores how and why Hideyoshi has had a continued and ever-changing presence in popular culture in twentieth- and twenty-first-century Japan. The multiple fictionalized histories of Hideyoshi published as serial novels and novellas before, during, and after World War II demonstrate how imaginative re-presentations of Japan’s past have been used by various actors throughout the modern era. Using close reading of several novels and short stories as well as the analysis of various other texts and paratextual materials, Susan Furukawa discovers a Hideyoshi who is always changing to meet the needs of the current era, and in the process expands our understanding of the powerful role that historical narratives play in Japan.
Download or read book Power and Culture written by Akira Iriye and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 1981 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Power and Culture challenges existing assumptions about the war in the Pacific. By focusing on the interplay between culture and international relations, one of the world’s most distinguished scholars of United States–Japanese affairs offers a startling reassessment of what the war really meant to the two combatants. Akira Iriye examines the Japanese–American war for the first time from the cultural perspectives of both countries, arguing that it was more a search for international order than a ruthless pursuit of power. His thesis is bold, for he convincingly demonstrates that throughout the war many Japanese leaders shared with their American counterparts an essentially Wilsonian vision of international cooperation. As the war drew to a close, these statesmen began to plan for a cooperative world structure that was remarkably similar to the ideas of American policymakers. Indeed, as Iriye shows, the stunning success of Japanese–American postwar relations can be understood only in the light of a deep convergence of their ideals. Iriye has drawn his conclusions from original research, using official Japanese archives and recently declassified American documents. These offer a totally new perspective on the ways leaders in both countries actually viewed the war they were waging.
Download or read book Significant Soil written by Emer O'Dwyer and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2020-05-11 with total page 540 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Like all empires, Japan’s prewar empire encompassed diverse territories as well as a variety of political forms for governing such spaces. This book focuses on Japan’s Kwantung Leasehold and Railway Zone in China’s three northeastern provinces. The hybrid nature of the leasehold’s political status vis-à-vis the metropole, the presence of the semipublic and enormously powerful South Manchuria Railway Company, and the region’s vulnerability to inter-imperial rivalries, intra-imperial competition, and Chinese nationalism throughout the first decades of the twentieth century combined to give rise to a distinctive type of settler politics. Settlers sought inclusion within a broad Japanese imperial sphere while successfully utilizing the continental space as a site for political and social innovation.In this study, Emer O’Dwyer traces the history of Japan’s prewar Manchurian empire over four decades, mapping how South Manchuria—and especially its principal city, Dairen—was naturalized as a Japanese space and revealing how this process ultimately contributed to the success of the Japanese army’s early 1930s takeover of Manchuria. Simultaneously, Significant Soil demonstrates the conditional nature of popular support for Kwantung Army state-building in Manchukuo, highlighting the settlers’ determination that the Kwantung Leasehold and Railway Zone remain separate from the project of total empire."
