This book examines representations of the Second World War in postwar Chinese and Japanese cinema. Drawing on a wide range of scholarly disciplines, and analysing a wide range of films, it demonstrates the potential of war movies for understanding contemporary China and Japan. It shows how the war is remembered in both countries, including the demonisation of Japanese soldiers in postwar socialist-era Chinese movies, and the pervasive sense of victimhood in Japanese memories of the war. However, it also shows how some Chinese directors were experimenting with alternatives interpretations of the war from as early as the 1950s, and how, despite the "resurgence of nationalism" in japan since the 1980s, the production of Japanese movies critical of the war has continued.
Divided Lenses: Screen Memories of War in East Asia is the first attempt to explore how the tumultuous years between 1931 and 1953 have been recreated and renegotiated in cinema. This period saw traumatic conflicts such as the Sino-Japanese War, the Pacific War, and the Korean War, and pivotal events such as the Rape of Nanjing, Pearl Harbor, the Battle of Iwo Jima, and the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, all of which left a lasting imprint on East Asia and the world. By bringing together a variety of specialists in the cinemas of East Asia and offering divergent yet complementary perspectives, the book explores how the legacies of war have been reimagined through the lens of film. This turbulent era opened with the Mukden Incident of 1931, which signaled a new page in Japanese militaristic aggression in East Asia, and culminated with the Korean War (1950–1953), a protracted conflict that broke out in the wake of Japan's post–World War II withdrawal from Korea. Divided Lenses explores the ways in which events of the intervening decades have continued to shape politics and popular culture throughout East Asia and the world. The essays in part I examine historical trends at work in various "national" cinemas, including China, Taiwan, Japan, Korea, and the United States. Those in part 2 focus on specific themes present in the cinema portraying this period—such as comfort women in Chinese film, the Nanjing Massacre, or nationalism—and how they have been depicted or renegotiated in contemporary films. Of particular interest are contributions drawing from other forms of screen culture, such as television and video games. Divided Lenses builds on the growing interest in East Asian cinema by examining how these historic conflicts have been imagined, framed, and revisited through the lens of cinema and screen culture. It will interest later generations living in the shadow of these events, as well as students and scholars in the fields of cinema studies, cultural studies, cold war studies, and World War II history.
The immediacy and perceived truth of the visual image, as well as film and television's ability to propel viewers back into the past, place the genre of the historical film in a special category. War films--including antiwar films--have established the prevailing public image of war in the twentieth century. For American audiences, the dominant image of trench warfare in World War I has been provided by feature films such as All Quiet on the Western Front and Paths of Glory. The image of combat in the Second World War has been shaped by films like Sands of Iwo Jima and The Longest Day. And despite claims for the alleged impact of widespread television coverage of the Vietnam War, it is actually films such as Apocalypse Now and Platoon which have provided the most powerful images of what is seen as the "reality" of that much disputed conflict. But to what degree does history written "with lightning," as Woodrow Wilson allegedly said, represent the reality of the past? To what extent is visual history an oversimplification, or even a distortion of the past? Exploring the relationship between moving images and the society and culture in which they were produced and received, World War II, Film, and History addresses the power these images have had in determining our perception and memories of war. Examining how the public memory of war in the twentieth century has often been created more by a manufactured past than a remembered one, a leading group of historians discusses films dating from the early 1930s through the early 1990s, created by filmmakers the world over, from the United States and Germany to Japan and the former Soviet Union. For example, Freda Freiberg explains how the inter-racial melodramatic Japanese feature film China Nights, in which a manly and protective Japanese naval officer falls in love with a beautiful young Chinese street waif and molds her into a cultured, submissive wife, proved enormously popular with wartime Japanese and helped justify the invasion of China in the minds of many Japanese viewers. Peter Paret assesses the historical accuracy of Kolberg as a depiction of an unsuccessful siege of that German city by a French Army in 1807, and explores how the film, released by Hitler's regime in January 1945, explicitly called for civilian sacrifice and last-ditch resistance. Stephen Ambrose contrasts what we know about the historical reality of the Allied D-Day landings in Normandy on June 6, 1944, with the 1962 release of The Longest Day, in which the major climactic moment in the film never happened at Normandy. Alice Kessler-Harris examines The Life and Times of Rosie the Riveter, a 1982 film documentary about women defense workers on the American home front in World War II, emphasizing the degree to which the documentary's engaging main characters and its message of the need for fair and equal treatment for women resonates with many contemporary viewers. And Clement Alexander Price contrasts Men of Bronze, William Miles's fine documentary about black American soldiers who fought in France in World War I, with Liberators, the controversial documentary by Miles and Nina Rosenblum which incorrectly claimed that African-American troops liberated Holocaust survivors at Dachau in World War II. In today's visually-oriented world, powerful images, even images of images, are circulated in an eternal cycle, gaining increased acceptance through repetition. History becomes an endless loop, in which repeated images validate and reconfirm each other. Based on archival materials, many of which have become only recently available, World War II, Film, and History offers an informative and a disturbing look at the complex relationship between national myths and filmic memory, as well as the dangers of visual images being transformed into "reality."
For many East Asian nations, cinema and Japanese Imperialism arrived within a few years of each other. Exploring topics such as landscape, gender, modernity and military recruitment, this study details how the respective national cinemas of Japan's territories struggled under, but also engaged with, the Japanese Imperial structures. Japan was ostensibly committed to an ethos of pan-Asianism and this study explores how this sense of the transnational was conveyed cinematically across the occupied lands. Taylor-Jones traces how cinema in the region post-1945 needs to be understood not only in terms of past colonial relationships, but also in relation to how the post-colonial has engaged with shifting political alliances, the opportunities for technological advancement and knowledge, the promise of larger consumer markets, and specific historical conditions of each decade.
A Foreign Affairs Book of the Year A Spectator Book of the Year “Insightful...a deft, textured work of intellectual history.” —Foreign Affairs “A timely insight into how memories and ideas about the second world war play a hugely important role in conceptualizations about the past and the present in contemporary China.” —Peter Frankopan, The Spectator For most of its history, China frowned on public discussion of the war against Japan. But as the country has grown more powerful, a wide-ranging reassessment of the war years has been central to new confidence abroad and mounting nationalism at home. Encouraged by reforms under Deng Xiaoping, Chinese scholars began to examine the long-taboo Guomindang war effort, and to investigate collaboration with the Japanese and China’s role in the post-war global order. Today museums, television shows, magazines, and social media present the war as a founding myth for an ascendant China that emerges as victor rather than victim. One narrative positions Beijing as creator and protector of the international order—a virtuous system that many in China now believe to be under threat from the United States. China’s radical reassessment of its own past is a new founding myth for a nation that sees itself as destined to shape the world. “A detailed and fascinating account of how the Chinese leadership’s strategy has evolved across eras...At its most interesting when probing Beijing’s motives for undertaking such an ambitious retooling of its past.” —Wall Street Journal “The range of evidence that Mitter marshals is impressive. The argument he makes about war, memory, and the international order is...original.” —The Economist
When Emperor Hirohito announced defeat in a radio broadcast on 15th August 1945, Japan was not merely a nation; it was a colossal empire stretching from the tip of Alaska to the fringes of Australia grown out of a colonial ideology that continued to pervade East Asian society for years after the end of the Second World War. In Overcoming Empire in Post-Imperial East Asia: Repatriation, Redress and Rebuilding, Barak Kushner and Sherzod Muminov bring together an international team of leading scholars to explore the post-imperial history of the region. From international aid to postwar cinema to chemical warfare, these essays all focus on the aftermath of Japan's aggressive warfare and the new international strategies which Japan, China, Taiwan, North and South Korea utilised following the end of the war and the collapse of Japan's empire. The result is a nuanced analysis of the transformation of postwar national identities, colonial politics, and the reordering of society in East Asia. With its innovative comparative and transnational perspective, this book is essential reading for scholars of modern East Asian history, the cold war, and the history of decolonisation.
A Financial Times “Summer Books” Selection “Will become required reading.” —Times Literary Supplement “Elegantly written...with a confidence that comes from decades of deep research on the topic, illustrating how influence and power have waxed and waned between the two countries.” —Rana Mitter, Financial Times China and Japan have cultural and political connections that stretch back fifteen hundred years, but today their relationship is strained. China’s military buildup deeply worries Japan, while Japan’s brutal occupation of China in World War II remains an open wound. In recent years both countries have insisted that the other side must openly address the flashpoints of the past before relations can improve. Boldly tackling the most contentious chapters in this long and tangled relationship, Ezra Vogel uses the tools of a master historian to examine key turning points in Sino–Japanese history. Gracefully pivoting from past to present, he argues that for the sake of a stable world order, these two Asian giants must reset their relationship. “A sweeping, often fascinating, account...Impressively researched and smoothly written.” —Japan Times “Vogel uses the powerful lens of the past to frame contemporary Chinese–Japanese relations...[He] suggests that over the centuries—across both the imperial and the modern eras—friction has always dominated their relations.” —Sheila A. Smith, Foreign Affairs
In Rana Mitter's tense, moving and hugely important book, the war between China and Japan - one of the most important struggles of the Second World War - at last gets the masterly history it deserves.
In The Shock of War: Civilian Experiences, 1937-1945, Sean Kennedy shifts the reader's focus from the battlefields of the Second World War to the civilian experience. This short yet comprehensive history complements existing studies of the war that document diplomatic and military operations. While many of these studies acknowledge the significance of the conflict for civilians, The Shock of War places civilians at the centre of events, drawing attention to the many different regions of the world affected by the conflict, and comparing various facets of the civilian experience. Kennedy's fresh approach emphasizes the diverse and complex impact of the war, which was profoundly destructive, yet, in some societies, provided opportunities and the potential for positive change.
Critical theory and popular wisdom are rife with images of surveillance as an intrusive, repressive practice often suggestively attributed to eastern powers and opposed to western liberalism. Hollywood-dominated global media has long promulgated a geopoliticized east-west axis of freedom vs. control. This book focuses on Asian and Asia-based films and cinematic traditions obscured by lopsided western hegemonic discourse and—more specifically—probes these films’ treatments of a phenomenon that western film often portrays with neo-orientalist hysteria. Exploring recent and historical movies made in post-social and anti-Communist societies such as China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Vietnam and South Korea, the book picks up on the political and economic concerns implicitly underlying Sinophobic and anti-Communist Asian images in Hollywood films while also considering how these societies and states depict the issues of centralization, militarization and technological innovation so often figured as distinctive of the difference between eastern despotism and western liberalism.
