Japan's Carnival War

Japan's Carnival War

Author: Benjamin Uchiyama

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2019-03-14

Total Pages: 293

ISBN-13: 1107186749

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This cultural history of the Japanese home front during the Asia-Pacific War challenges ideas of the period as one of unrelenting repression. Uchiyama demonstrates that 'carnival war' coexisted with the demands of total war to promote consumerist desire alongside sacrifice and fantasy alongside nightmare, helping mobilize the war effort.


The Japanese Community in Brazil, 1908 - 1940

The Japanese Community in Brazil, 1908 - 1940

Author: S. Lone

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2001-10-31

Total Pages: 220

ISBN-13: 1403932794

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On the eve of the Pacific war (1941-45), there were 198,000 Japanese in Brazil, the largest expatriate body outside East Asia. Yet the origins of this community have been obscured. The English-language library is threadbare while Japanese scholars routinely insist that life outside of Japan was filled with shock and hardship so that, as one historian asserted, 'their bodies were in Brazil but their minds were always in Japan'. This study redraws the world of the overseas Japanese. Using the Japanese-language press of Brazil, it explains the development of a community with its own, often aggressively independent or ironic views of identity, institutions, education, leisure, and on Japan itself. Emphasising the success of Japanese migrants and the openness of Brazilian society, it challenges the perceived wisdom that contact between Japanese and other peoples was always marked by hostility and racism.


Japan's Living Politics

Japan's Living Politics

Author: Tessa Morris-Suzuki

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2020-05-07

Total Pages: 399

ISBN-13: 1108804993

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The first two decades of the twenty-first century have witnessed a rise of populism and decline of public confidence in many of the formal institutions of democracy. This crisis of democracy has stimulated searches for alternative ways of understanding and enacting politics. Against this background, Tessa Morris-Suzuki explores the long history of informal everyday political action in the Japanese context. Despite its seemingly inflexible and monolithic formal political system, Japan has been the site of many fascinating small-scale experiments in 'informal life politics': grassroots do-it-yourself actions which seek not to lobby governments for change, but to change reality directly, from the bottom up. She explores this neglected history by examining an interlinked series of informal life politics experiments extending from the 1910s to the present day.


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

Published: 2020-03-03

Total Pages: 1107

ISBN-13: 1324002115

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"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.


Japanese Society at War

Japanese Society at War

Author: Naoko Shimazu

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2011-06-30

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9780521294775

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As the first international conflict of the twentieth century, the Russo-Japanese War attracted much contemporary global interest. This text was the first full-length study to examine the war from the perspective of its impact on Japanese society, and sheds light on its implications for modern Japan. What did the war mean to the Japanese people and how did they respond to it? Naoko Shimazu presents a fascinating and highly innovative account of the attitudes of ordinary Japanese people towards the war through a wide range of sources including personal diaries, letters, and contemporary images. She deals with themes such as conscripts and battlefield death, war commemoration, heroic myths, and war in popular culture. Challenging the orthodox view of Meiji Japan as monolithic, she shows that there existed a complex and ambivalent relationship between the Japanese state and society.


Post-Fascist Japan

Post-Fascist Japan

Author: Laura Hein

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2018-02-22

Total Pages: 273

ISBN-13: 135002581X

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In late 1945 local Japanese turned their energies toward creating new behaviors and institutions that would give young people better skills to combat repression at home and coercion abroad. They rapidly transformed their political culture-policies, institutions, and public opinion-to create a more equitable, democratic and peaceful society. Post-Fascist Japan explores this phenomenon, focusing on a group of highly educated Japanese based in the city of Kamakura, where the new political culture was particularly visible. The book argues that these leftist elites, many of whom had been seen as 'the enemy' during the war, saw the problem as one of fascism, an ideology that had succeeded because it had addressed real problems. They turned their efforts to overtly political-legal systems but also to ostensibly non-political and community institutions such as universities, art museums, local tourism, and environmental policies, aiming not only for reconciliation over the past but also to reduce the anxieties that had drawn so many towards fascism. By focusing on people who had an outsized influence on Japan's political culture, Hein's study is local, national, and transnational. She grounds her discussion using specific personalities, showing their ideas about 'post-fascism', how they implemented them and how they interacted with the American occupiers.


Farewell to Manzanar

Farewell to Manzanar

Author: Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Published: 2002

Total Pages: 216

ISBN-13: 9780618216208

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A true story of Japanese American experience during and after the World War internment.


The Making of Modern Japan

The Making of Modern Japan

Author: Marius B. Jansen

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2009-07-01

Total Pages: 933

ISBN-13: 0674039106

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Magisterial in vision, sweeping in scope, this monumental work presents a seamless account of Japanese society during the modern era, from 1600 to the present. A distillation of more than fifty years’ engagement with Japan and its history, it is the crowning work of our leading interpreter of the modern Japanese experience. Since 1600 Japan has undergone three periods of wrenching social and institutional change, following the imposition of hegemonic order on feudal society by the Tokugawa shogun; the opening of Japan’s ports by Commodore Perry; and defeat in World War II. The Making of Modern Japan charts these changes: the social engineering begun with the founding of the shogunate in 1600, the emergence of village and castle towns with consumer populations, and the diffusion of samurai values in the culture. Marius Jansen covers the making of the modern state, the adaptation of Western models, growing international trade, the broadening opportunity in Japanese society with industrialization, and the postwar occupation reforms imposed by General MacArthur. Throughout, the book gives voice to the individuals and views that have shaped the actions and beliefs of the Japanese, with writers, artists, and thinkers, as well as political leaders given their due. The story this book tells, though marked by profound changes, is also one of remarkable consistency, in which continuities outweigh upheavals in the development of society, and successive waves of outside influence have only served to strengthen a sense of what is unique and native to Japanese experience. The Making of Modern Japan takes us to the core of this experience as it illuminates one of the contemporary world’s most compelling transformations.


Absolute Destruction

Absolute Destruction

Author: Isabel V. Hull

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2013-02-15

Total Pages: 399

ISBN-13: 080146708X

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In a book that is at once a major contribution to modern European history and a cautionary tale for today, Isabel V. Hull argues that the routines and practices of the Imperial German Army, unchecked by effective civilian institutions, increasingly sought the absolute destruction of its enemies as the only guarantee of the nation's security. So deeply embedded were the assumptions and procedures of this distinctively German military culture that the Army, in its drive to annihilate the enemy military, did not shrink from the utter destruction of civilian property and lives. Carried to its extreme, the logic of "military necessity" found real security only in extremities of destruction, in the "silence of the graveyard."Hull begins with a dramatic account, based on fresh archival work, of the German Army's slide from administrative murder to genocide in German Southwest Africa (1904–7). The author then moves back to 1870 and the war that inaugurated the Imperial era in German history, and analyzes the genesis and nature of this specifically German military culture and its operations in colonial warfare. In the First World War the routines perfected in the colonies were visited upon European populations. Hull focuses on one set of cases (Belgium and northern France) in which the transition to total destruction was checked (if barely) and on another (Armenia) in which "military necessity" caused Germany to accept its ally's genocidal policies even after these became militarily counterproductive. She then turns to the Endkampf (1918), the German General Staff's plan to achieve victory in the Great War even if the homeland were destroyed in the process—a seemingly insane campaign that completes the logic of this deeply institutionalized set of military routines and practices. Hull concludes by speculating on the role of this distinctive military culture in National Socialism's military and racial policies.Absolute Destruction has serious implications for the nature of warmaking in any modern power. At its heart is a warning about the blindness of bureaucratic routines, especially when those bureaucracies command the instruments of mass death.