Download or read book Shibaraku written by Lucille Apcar and published by Lucille Apcar. This book was released on 2011 with total page 166 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Early in the month of September 1945, a small band of American soldiers on a reconnaissance mission through the central mountain region of Honshu, main island of Japan, arrived in Karuizawa ... Here they found us, a motley colony of ragged, half-starved westerners from almost every type of background, thrown together, huddled in drafty, uncomfortable shelters away from cities now ravaged by war ... The informal, easy-going, friendly manner of the Americans soon captivated all. Thus the occupation of a defeated nation commenced, and for my family and me, at least, changed our lives forever."--Page 4 of cover.

Download or read book Hiroshima written by John Hersey and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2020-06-23 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Hiroshima is the story of six people—a clerk, a widowed seamstress, a physician, a Methodist minister, a young surgeon, and a German Catholic priest—who lived through the greatest single manmade disaster in history. In vivid and indelible prose, Pulitzer Prize–winner John Hersey traces the stories of these half-dozen individuals from 8:15 a.m. on August 6, 1945, when Hiroshima was destroyed by the first atomic bomb ever dropped on a city, through the hours and days that followed. Almost four decades after the original publication of this celebrated book, Hersey went back to Hiroshima in search of the people whose stories he had told, and his account of what he discovered is now the eloquent and moving final chapter of Hiroshima.

Download or read book Memory Maps written by Mariko Asano Tamanoi and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2008-10-31 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Between 1932 and 1945, more than 320,000 Japanese emigrated to Manchuria in northeast China with the dream of becoming land-owning farmers. Following the Soviet invasion of Manchuria and Japan’s surrender in August 1945, their dream turned into a nightmare. Since the late 1980s, popular Japanese conceptions have overlooked the disastrous impact of colonization and resurrected the utopian justification for creating Manchukuo, as the puppet state was known. This re-remembering, Mariko Tamanoi argues, constitutes a source of friction between China and Japan today. Memory Maps tells the compelling story of both the promise of a utopia and the tragic aftermath of its failure. An anthropologist, Tamanoi approaches her investigation of Manchuria’s colonization and collapse as a complex "history of the present," which in postcolonial studies refers to the examination of popular memory of past colonial relations of power. To mitigate this complexity, she has created four "memory maps" that draw on the recollections of former Japanese settlers, their children who were left in China and later repatriated, and Chinese who lived under Japanese rule in Manchuria. The first map presents the oral histories of farmers who emigrated from Nagano, Japan, to Manchuria between 1932 and 1945 and returned home after the war. Interviewees were asked to remember the colonization of Manchuria during Japan’s age of empire. Hikiage-mono (autobiographies) make up the second map. These are written memories of repatriation from the Soviet invasion to some time between 1946 and 1949. The third memory map is entitled "Orphans’ Voices." It examines the oral and written memories of the children of Japanese settlers who were left behind at the war’s end but returned to Japan after relations between China and Japan were normalized in 1972. The memories of Chinese who lived the age of empire in Manchuria make up the fourth map. This map also includes the memories of Chinese couples who adopted the abandoned children of Japanese settlers as well as the children themselves, who renounced their Japanese nationality and chose to remain in China. In the final chapter, Tamanoi considers theoretical questions of "the state" and the relationship between place, voice, and nostalgia. She also attempts to integrate the four memory maps in the transnational space covering Japan and China. Both fastidious in dealing with theoretical questions and engagingly written, Memory Maps contributes not only to the empirical study of the Japanese empire and its effects on the daily lives of Japanese and Chinese, but also to postcolonial theory as it applies to the use of memory.

Download or read book A Japanese Memoir of Sumatra 1945 1946 written by Takao Fusayama and published by Equinox Publishing. This book was released on 2010 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of our chief reservations in publishing the memoir lay in the author's description of it as a "documentary novel," but we discovered that the "fictions" in the narrative relate mainly to Dr. Fusayama's dramatization of the action by putting into direct speech his memories of the general tenor of his conversations with some of the major protagonists. As he notes in his Preface, he recorded his recollections immediately after his repatriation to Japan, and it is evident that his rendition of the events he witnessed are true to his perceptions at the time. --

Download or read book History Memory Politics in Postwar Japan written by Kaoru Iokibe and published by Lynne Rienner Publishers. This book was released on 2020 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Memories can be shared-or contested. Japan and Korea, just one case in point, share centuries of intertwined history, the nature of which continues to be disputed, particularly with regard to World War II. The authors of History, Memory, and Politics in Postwar Japan explore Japan's historical narratives, and their impact on both domestic politics and diplomatic relations, as they have evolved from 1946 to the present. Presenting the results of more than a decade of collaborative research, their book is a rich contribution to our understanding not only of Japanese politics, but also of how the historical narratives that we embrace have far-reaching consequences.

Download or read book America s Japan written by Grant Kohn Goodman and published by Fordham Univ Press. This book was released on 2005 with total page 188 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This book is not only a personal chronicle of Grant Goodman's unique experience in Japan. Moving deftly between his role as an Army officer gathering essential information and as a young scholar fascinated by Japanese culture, he provides a vividly drawn portrait of daily life in occupied Tokyo." "Here he looks back at signal events: Japan's responses to occupation, the writing of the new constitution and the de-deification of the Emperor, the International Military Tribunal and the issue of Japanese war crimes, reactions by ordinary Japanese to American occupiers, and much more."

Download or read book Defamiliarizing Japan s Asia Pacific War written by W. Puck Brecher and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2019-10-31 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book From Japan with Love written by Mary A. Ruggieri and published by . This book was released on 2007 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mary A. Ruggieri left college to join the Women's Army Corps during WWII, and volunteered for postwar duty in Japan. Sixty years later she shares that historic period of her life, 1946 to 1948, through her personal letters, journals and photographs from a country just beginning its recovery from war. This is an engaging account of an American WAC, at work and at play, coping with the U.S. Army, marveling at Japan's people, cultures and customs, lamenting the destruction and despair of war, and falling deeply in love with the soldier she would later marry. From Japan With Love is a personal and historical treasure, a story of East meets West, rich with details and striking, evocative images.

Download or read book In the Ruins of the Japanese Empire written by Barak Kushner and published by Hong Kong University Press. This book was released on 2020-02-06 with total page 253 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the Ruins of the Japanese Empire concludes that early East Asian Cold War history needs to be studied within the framework of post-imperial history. Japan’s surrender did not mean that the Japanese and former imperial subjects would immediately disavow imperial ideology. The end of the Japanese empire unleashed unprecedented destruction and violence on the periphery. Lives were destroyed; names of cities altered; collaborationist regimes—which for over a decade dominated vast populations—melted into the air as policeman, bureaucrats, soldiers, and technocrats offered their services as nationalists, revolutionaries or communists. Power did not simply change hands swiftly and smoothly. In the chaos of the new order, legal anarchy, revenge, ethnic displacement, and nationalist resentments stalked the postcolonial lands of northeast Asia, intensifying bloody civil wars in societies radicalized by total war, militarization, and mass mobilization. Kushner and Levidis’s volume follows these processes as imperial violence reordered demographics and borders, and involved massive political, economic, and social dislocation as well as stubborn continuities. From the hunt for “traitors” in Korea and China to the brutal suppression of the Taiwanese by the Chinese Nationalist government in the long-forgotten February 28 Incident, the research shows how the empire’s end acted as a catalyst for renewed attempts at state-building. From the imperial edge to the metropole, investigations shed light on how prewar imperial values endured during postwar Japanese rearmament and in party politics. Nevertheless, many Japanese actively tried to make amends for wartime transgressions and rebuild Japan’s posture in East Asia by cultivating religious and cultural connections. “This third book to emerge from Barak Kushner’s massive collaborative research project on the dissolution of Japan’s empire lays out a new geography of turning the ruins into social, economic, political, and cultural opportunities across Northeast Asia, and with lasting consequences. This book will change the way we research and teach ‘1945’ in a global context.” —Franziska Seraphim, Boston College “Writing imperial history, linking the prewar to postwar, is perilous because it must resist domestic taboos and social pressures. Today’s global society, where history incites extreme nationalism and serves as catalyst for conflict, calls for the creation of a new history of the end of empire as Kushner and his team have done in this volume.” —ASANO Toyomi, Waseda University

Download or read book Memoires of Japan 1946 written by Bernard T. Smith and published by Trafford Publishing. This book was released on 2012-10 with total page 211 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Having served as a member of the Allied Forces' Occupation of Japan, Bernard Smith has produced a book about the time he spent in Japan in 1946 in the city of Iwakuni, near Hiroshima, both of which cities are located on the east coast of Japan alongside its beautiful Inland Sea. Except for his rather mystifying visit to Tokyo in the summer of 1946, his entire book is based almost entirely on his personal diary, and notes which he wrote while aboard his homeward bound ship at the end of his tour of duty at the end of that year, crucially when the events he describes were still very fresh in his mind. He writes about the utter devastation and despair under which people were living after the horrors of Hiroshima, about the Japanese peoples' response to the Allied Occupation, and the resilience and fortitude with which they faced up to their troubles. As opposed to formal and official documents, Bernard Smith writes about human suffering and the harsh conditions under which people were living. He tells us of his meetings with families, with whom he found relaxation from the gloom and with whom he became very friendly. He also describes how the people faithfully continued to follow their traditional Japanese customs and culture, the observance of which he believes sustained them and helped them begin their ultimate recovery.

Download or read book Japanese Army Stragglers and Memories of the War in Japan 1950 75 written by Beatrice Trefalt and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2006-04 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book charts comprehensively the various discoveries in Southeast Asia and the Pacific of Japanese soldiers still fighting the Second World War many years after it had ended. It explores their return to Japan and their impact on the Japanese people, revealing changing attitudes to war veterans and war casualties' families, as well as the ambivalence of memories of the war.

Download or read book Memory Maps written by Mariko Asano Tamanoi and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2008-10-31 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Between 1932 and 1945, more than 320,000 Japanese emigrated to Manchuria in northeast China with the dream of becoming land-owning farmers. Following the Soviet invasion of Manchuria and Japan’s surrender in August 1945, their dream turned into a nightmare. Since the late 1980s, popular Japanese conceptions have overlooked the disastrous impact of colonization and resurrected the utopian justification for creating Manchukuo, as the puppet state was known. This re-remembering, Mariko Tamanoi argues, constitutes a source of friction between China and Japan today. Memory Maps tells the compelling story of both the promise of a utopia and the tragic aftermath of its failure. An anthropologist, Tamanoi approaches her investigation of Manchuria’s colonization and collapse as a complex "history of the present," which in postcolonial studies refers to the examination of popular memory of past colonial relations of power. To mitigate this complexity, she has created four "memory maps" that draw on the recollections of former Japanese settlers, their children who were left in China and later repatriated, and Chinese who lived under Japanese rule in Manchuria. The first map presents the oral histories of farmers who emigrated from Nagano, Japan, to Manchuria between 1932 and 1945 and returned home after the war. Interviewees were asked to remember the colonization of Manchuria during Japan’s age of empire. Hikiage-mono (autobiographies) make up the second map. These are written memories of repatriation from the Soviet invasion to some time between 1946 and 1949. The third memory map is entitled "Orphans’ Voices." It examines the oral and written memories of the children of Japanese settlers who were left behind at the war’s end but returned to Japan after relations between China and Japan were normalized in 1972. The memories of Chinese who lived the age of empire in Manchuria make up the fourth map. This map also includes the memories of Chinese couples who adopted the abandoned children of Japanese settlers as well as the children themselves, who renounced their Japanese nationality and chose to remain in China. In the final chapter, Tamanoi considers theoretical questions of "the state" and the relationship between place, voice, and nostalgia. She also attempts to integrate the four memory maps in the transnational space covering Japan and China. Both fastidious in dealing with theoretical questions and engagingly written, Memory Maps contributes not only to the empirical study of the Japanese empire and its effects on the daily lives of Japanese and Chinese, but also to postcolonial theory as it applies to the use of memory.

Download or read book Japanese Army Stragglers and Memories of the War in Japan 1950 75 written by Beatrice Trefalt and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-01-11 with total page 287 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book charts comprehensively the various discoveries in Southeast Asia and the Pacific of Japanese soldiers still fighting the Second World War many years after it had ended. It explores their return to Japan and their impact on the Japanese people, revealing changing attitudes to war veterans and war casualties' families, as well as the ambivalence of memories of the war.

Download or read book From the Storehouse of Forgotten Memories written by Marilyn Burns and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Fear of a Japanese invasion brought about the forced removal of all people of Japanese ancestry from the West Coast. This ended the academic careers of Japanese American, Nisei, students attending universities in California, Washington, and Oregon. The government agency, War Relocation Administration, overseeing the concentration camps allowed students to leave provided government requirements were met and a school would accept them. The four largest Colorado universities responded, and enrollment increased substantially during the war years, 1941-1946. For identification purposes, student directories, year books, administrative records, the 1940 Census, and information from the National Archives and Records Administration were examined. Due in large part to feelings of shame and embarrassment from being incarcerated, approximately 10 percent of students from camps chose to obscure their origins. Historically, Colorado universities already accepted Japanese Americans but when the need arose were also willing to accept students from the camps and "voluntary evacuees." War hysteria often meant Americans of Japanese ancestry were unwelcome in many places. The experiences of Nisei students in Colorado demonstrated a marginally higher degree of acceptance.

Download or read book Japan s Contested War Memories written by Philip A. Seaton and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2007-03-12 with total page 267 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Japan's Contested War Memories is an important and significant book that explores the struggles within contemporary Japanese society to come to terms with Second World War history. Focusing particularly on 1972 onwards, the period starts with the normalization of relations with China and the return of Okinawa to Japan in 1972, and ends with the sixtieth anniversary commemorations. Analyzing the variety of ways in which the Japanese people narrate, contest and interpret the past, the book is also a major critique of the way the subject has been treated in much of the English-language. Philip Seaton concludes that war history in Japan today is more divisive and widely argued over than in any of the other major Second World War combatant nations. Providing a sharp contrast to the many orthodox statements about Japanese 'ignorance', amnesia' and 'denial' about the war, this is an engaging and illuminating study that will appeal to scholars and students of Japanese history, politics, cultural studies, society and memory theory.

Download or read book War Memory and East Asian Conflicts 1930 1945 written by Eveline Buchheim and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2023-06-29 with total page 275 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores how narratives, exhibitions, media representations, and cultural heritage sites that communicate memories of conflicts in East Asia between 1930 and 1945 spread, interact, and are re-packaged for post-war audiences across national divisions. The contributors examine individual case studies of grassroots engagement with war memory, and collectively demonstrate the necessity of remaining aware of the researcher as participating in another kind of engagement with war memory. Contributions showcase a number of ways of doing research on war memory, alongside case studies from diverse regions of the world. Taken together, they bring a fresh perspective to scholarship on war memory, which has tended to focus on space, text, exhibition, or personal narrative, rather than bringing these elements into dialogue with one another.

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."