Author: S. C. M. Paine Publisher: Cambridge University Press ISBN: 1107011957 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 223
Book Description
An accessible, analytical survey of the rise and fall of Imperial Japan in the context of its grand strategy to transform itself into a great power.
Author: Barak Kushner Publisher: Hong Kong University Press ISBN: 9888528289 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 253
Book Description
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
Author: Donald Keene Publisher: Columbia University Press ISBN: 0231518110 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 957
Book Description
The renowned Japanese scholar “brings us as close to the inner life of the Meiji emperor as we are ever likely to get” (The New York Times Book Review). When Emperor Meiji began his rule in 1867, Japan was a splintered empire dominated by the shogun and the daimyos, cut off from the outside world, staunchly antiforeign, and committed to the traditions of the past. Before long, the shogun surrendered to the emperor, a new constitution was adopted, and Japan emerged as a modern, industrialized state. Despite the length of his reign, little has been written about the strangely obscured figure of Meiji himself, the first emperor ever to meet a European. But now, Donald Keene sifts the available evidence to present a rich portrait not only of Meiji but also of rapid and sometimes violent change during this pivotal period in Japan’s history. In this vivid and engrossing biography, we move with the emperor through his early, traditional education; join in the formal processions that acquainted the young emperor with his country and its people; observe his behavior in court, his marriage, and his relationships with various consorts; and follow his maturation into a “Confucian” sovereign dedicated to simplicity, frugality, and hard work. Later, during Japan’s wars with China and Russia, we witness Meiji’s struggle to reconcile his personal commitment to peace and his nation’s increasingly militarized experience of modernization. Emperor of Japan conveys in sparkling prose the complexity of the man and offers an unrivaled portrait of Japan in a period of unique interest. “Utterly brilliant . . . the best history in English of the emergence of modern Japan.”—Los Angeles Times
Author: Kelly A. Hammond Publisher: UNC Press Books ISBN: 1469659662 Category : Religion Languages : en Pages : 315
Book Description
In this transnational history of World War II, Kelly A. Hammond places Sino-Muslims at the center of imperial Japan's challenges to Chinese nation-building efforts. Revealing the little-known story of Japan's interest in Islam during its occupation of North China, Hammond shows how imperial Japanese aimed to defeat the Chinese Nationalists in winning the hearts and minds of Sino-Muslims, a vital minority population. Offering programs that presented themselves as protectors of Islam, the Japanese aimed to provide Muslims with a viable alternative—and, at the same time, to create new Muslim consumer markets that would, the Japanese hoped, act to subvert the existing global capitalist world order and destabilize the Soviets. This history can be told only by reinstating agency to Muslims in China who became active participants in the brokering and political jockeying between the Chinese Nationalists and the Japanese Empire. Hammond argues that the competition for their loyalty was central to the creation of the ethnoreligious identity of Muslims living on the Chinese mainland. Their wartime experience ultimately helped shape the formation of Sino-Muslims' religious identities within global Islamic networks, as well as their incorporation into the Chinese state, where the conditions of that incorporation remain unstable and contested to this day.
Author: Hiroko Matsuda Publisher: University of Hawaii Press ISBN: 0824877071 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 225
Book Description
Okinawa, one of the smallest prefectures of Japan, has drawn much international attention because of the long-standing presence of US bases and the people’s resistance against them. In recent years, alternative discourses on Okinawa have emerged due to the territorial disputes over the Senkaku Islands, and the media often characterizes Okinawa as the borderland demarcating Japan, China (PRC), and Taiwan (ROC). While many politicians and opinion makers discuss Okinawa’s national and security interests, little attention is paid to the local perspective toward the national border and local residents’ historical experiences of border crossings. Through archival research and first-hand oral histories, Hiroko Matsuda uncovers the stories of common people’s move from Okinawa to colonial Taiwan and describes experiences of Okinawans who had made their careers in colonial Taiwan. Formerly the Ryukyu Kingdom and a tributary country of China, Okinawa became the southern national borderland after forceful Japanese annexation in 1879. Following Japanese victory in the First Sino-Japanese War and the cession of Taiwan in 1895, Okinawa became the borderland demarcating the Inner Territory from the Outer Territory. The borderland paradoxically created distinction between the two sides, while simultaneously generating interactions across them. Matsuda’s analysis of the liminal experiences of Okinawan migrants to colonial Taiwan elucidates both Okinawans’ subordinate status in the colonial empire and their use of the border between the nation and the colony. Drawing on the oral histories of former immigrants in Taiwan currently living in Okinawa and the Japanese main islands, Matsuda debunks the conventional view that Okinawa’s local history and Japanese imperial history are two separate fields by demonstrating the entanglement of Okinawa’s modernity with Japanese colonialism. The first English-language book to use the oral historical materials of former migrants and settlers—most of whom did not experience the Battle of Okinawa—Liminality of the Japanese Empire presents not only the alternative war experiences of Okinawans but also the way in which these colonial memories are narrated in the politics of war memory within the public space of contemporary Okinawa.
Author: Kate McDonald Publisher: Univ of California Press ISBN: 0520967232 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 272
Book Description
A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press’s Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more. Placing Empire examines the spatial politics of Japanese imperialism through a study of Japanese travel and tourism to Korea, Manchuria, and Taiwan between the late nineteenth century and the early 1950s. In a departure from standard histories of Japan, this book shows how debates over the role of colonized lands reshaped the social and spatial imaginary of the modern Japanese nation and how, in turn, this sociospatial imaginary affected the ways in which colonial difference was conceptualized and enacted. The book thus illuminates how ideas of place became central to the production of new forms of colonial hierarchy as empires around the globe transitioned from an era of territorial acquisition to one of territorial maintenance.
Author: Ramon H. Myers Publisher: Princeton University Press ISBN: 0691213879 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 556
Book Description
These essays, by thirteen specialists from Japan and the United States, provide a comprehensive view of the Japanese empire from its establishment in 1895 to its liquidation in 1945. They offer a variety of perspectives on subjects previously neglected by historians: the origin and evolution of the formal empire (which comprised Taiwan, Korea, Karafuto. the Kwantung Leased Territory, and the South Seas Mandated Islands), the institutions and policies by which it was governed, and the economic dynamics that impelled it. Seeking neither to justify the empire nor to condemn it, the contributors place it in the framework of Japanese history and in the context of colonialism as a global phenomenon. Contributors are Ching-chih Chen. Edward I-te Chen, Bruce Cumings, Peter Duus, Lewis H. Gann, Samuel Pao-San Ho, Marius B. Jansen, Mizoguchi Toshiyuki, Ramon H. Myers, Mark R. Peattie, Michael E. Robinson, E. Patricia Tsurumi. Yamada Saburō, Yamamoto Yūzoō.
Author: Sayaka Chatani Publisher: Cornell University Press ISBN: 1501730770 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 482
Book Description
By the end of World War II, hundreds of thousands of young men in the Japanese colonies, in particular Taiwan and Korea, had expressed their loyalty to the empire by volunteering to join the army. Why and how did so many colonial youth become passionate supporters of Japanese imperial nationalism? And what happened to these youth after the war? Nation-Empire investigates these questions by examining the long-term mobilization of youth in the rural peripheries of Japan, Taiwan, and Korea. Personal stories and village histories vividly show youth’s ambitions, emotions, and identities generated in the shifting conditions in each locality. At the same time, Sayaka Chatani unveils an intense ideological mobilization built from diverse contexts—the global rise of youth and agrarian ideals, Japan’s strong drive for assimilation and nationalization, and the complex emotions of younger generations in various remote villages. Nation-Empire engages with multiple historical debates. Chatani considers metropole-colony linkages, revealing the core characteristics of the Japanese Empire; discusses youth mobilization, analyzing the Japanese seinendan (village youth associations) as equivalent to the Boy Scouts or the Hitler Youth; and examines society and individual subjectivities under totalitarian rule. Her book highlights the shifting state-society transactions of the twentieth-century world through the lens of the Japanese Empire, inviting readers to contend with a new approach to, and a bold vision of, empire study.
Author: David H James Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 1136925465 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 380
Book Description
This volume is a history of the Japanese drive for the conquest of Greater East Asia. It includes an account of the Malayan campaign and the Fall of Singapore, followed by an outline of the dominant features of the campaign in S E Asia and the Pacific and ending with the attack on Japan and the unconditional surrender. As a prisoner in Tokyo, the author was able to observe the reactions of the people and the government to the bombing of Japan, and by revealing their overwhelming defeat, to dispose of the fiction that surrender was brought about by two atomic bombs. The outstanding value of the work is its analysis of the fundamental problems of Japan.
Author: S. C. M. Paine
Author: Barak Kushner
Author: Donald Keene
Author: Kelly A. Hammond
Author: Hiroko Matsuda
Author: Kate McDonald
Author: Ramon H. Myers
Author: Sayaka Chatani
Author: David H James
Author: Ken'ichi Gotō