The Japanese Empire

The Japanese Empire PDF Author: S. C. M. Paine
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107011957
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 223

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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.

The Japanese Empire

The Japanese Empire PDF Author: S. C. M. Paine
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107011957
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 223

Get Book Here

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.

The Rise and Fall of Imperial Japan

The Rise and Fall of Imperial Japan PDF Author: Stephen Wynn
Publisher: Pen and Sword Military
ISBN: 1473865514
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 208

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Book Description
The question is, how did a once great nation that built an empire lose it all? From the Meiji Restoration in 1868, restoring Imperial rule under Emperor Meiji, until Japan’s surrender at the end of the Second World War in 1945, the dream lasted a comparatively short period of time: seventy-seven years from beginning to end. Under Emperor Meiji’s rule, Imperial Japan began a period of rapid industrialization and militarization, leading to its emergence as a world power and the establishment of a colonial empire. Economic and political turmoil in the early 1920s led Japan down the path of militarism, culminating in her conquest of large parts of the Asian and Pacific region. The beginning of this path can be traced back to the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, when Japan’s proposal for racial equality was supported and approved by the other members, but overruled by the American President, Woodrow Wilson. Was this rebuttal by the West, and in particular the United States, the moment that changed the course of history? During the empire's existence, Japan was involved in some sixteen conflicts, resulting in the occupation of numerous countries and islands throughout Asia and the Pacific regions. Thousands were under the emperor's control, not all of whom were treated as they should have been. The book culminates with the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which finally brought about Japan’s surrender and the end of the war in Asia and the Pacific.

Imperial Japan at Its Zenith

Imperial Japan at Its Zenith PDF Author: Kenneth J. Ruoff
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 0801471818
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 266

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Book Description
In 1940, Japan was into its third year of war with China, and relations with the United States were deteriorating, but it was a heady time for the Japanese nonetheless. That year, the Japanese commemorated the 2,600th anniversary of the founding of the Empire of Japan. According to the imperial myth-history, Emperor Jimmu, descended from the Sun Goddess Amaterasu, established the "unbroken imperial line" in 660 BCE. In carefully choreographed ceremonies throughout the empire, through new public monuments, with visual culture, and through heritage tourism, the Japanese celebrated the extension of imperial rule under the 124th emperor, Hirohito. These celebrations, the climactic moment for the ideology that was central to modern Japan's identity until the imperial cult's legitimacy was bruised by defeat in 1945, are little known outside Japan. Imperial Japan at Its Zenith, the first book in English about the 2,600th anniversary, examines the themes of the celebration and what they tell us about Japan at mid-century. Kenneth J. Ruoff emphasizes that wartime Japan did not reject modernity in favor of nativist traditionalism. Instead, like Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, it embraced reactionary modernism. Ruoff also highlights the role played by the Japanese people in endorsing and promoting imperial ideology and expansion, documenting the significant grassroots support for the cult of the emperor and for militarism. Ruoff uses the anniversary celebrations to examine Japan's invention of a national history; the complex relationship between the homeland and the colonies; the significance of Imperial Japan's challenge to Euro-American claims of racial and cultural superiority; the role of heritage tourism in inspiring national pride; Japan's wartime fascist modernity; and, with a chapter about overseas Japanese, the boundaries of the Japanese nation. Packed with intriguing anecdotes, incisive analysis, and revelatory illustrations, Imperial Japan at Its Zenith is a major contribution to our understanding of wartime Japan.

Placing Empire

Placing Empire PDF Author: Kate McDonald
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520967232
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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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.

Emperor of Japan

Emperor of Japan PDF Author: Donald Keene
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231518110
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 957

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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

A Battle History of the Imperial Japanese Navy

A Battle History of the Imperial Japanese Navy PDF Author: Paul Dull
Publisher: Naval Institute Press
ISBN: 9781612512907
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 428

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Book Description
For almost 20 years, more than 200 reels of microfilmed Japanese naval records remained in the custody of the U.S. Naval History Division, virtually untouched. This unique book draws on those sources and others to tell the story of the Pacific War from the viewpoint of the Japanese. Former Marine Corps officer and Asian scholar Paul Dull focuses on the major surface engagements of the war—Coral Sea, Midway, the crucial Solomons campaign, and the last-ditch battles in the Marianas and Philippines. Also included are detailed track charts and a selection of Japanese photographs of major vessels and actions.

The Wars for Asia, 1911–1949

The Wars for Asia, 1911–1949 PDF Author: S. C. M. Paine
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139560875
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 520

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Book Description
The Wars for Asia, 1911–1949 shows that the Western treatment of World War II, the Second Sino-Japanese War and the Chinese Civil War as separate events misrepresents their overlapping connections and causes. The Chinese Civil War precipitated a long regional war between China and Japan that went global in 1941 when the Chinese found themselves fighting a civil war within a regional war within an overarching global war. The global war that consumed Western attentions resulted from Japan's peripheral strategy to cut foreign aid to China by attacking Pearl Harbour and Western interests throughout the Pacific in 1941. S. C. M. Paine emphasizes the fears and ambitions of Japan, China and Russia, and the pivotal decisions that set them on a collision course in the 1920s and 1930s. The resulting wars together yielded a viscerally anti-Japanese and unified Communist China, the still-angry rising power of the early twenty-first century.

In the Ruins of the Japanese Empire

In the Ruins of the Japanese Empire PDF Author: Barak Kushner
Publisher: Hong Kong University Press
ISBN: 9888528289
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 253

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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

China's Muslims and Japan's Empire

China's Muslims and Japan's Empire PDF Author: Kelly A. Hammond
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469659662
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 315

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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.

Japan's Imperial Army

Japan's Imperial Army PDF Author: Edward J. Drea
Publisher: University Press of Kansas
ISBN: 0700622349
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 344

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Book Description
Popular impressions of the imperial Japanese army still promote images of suicidal banzai charges and fanatical leaders blindly devoted to their emperor. Edward Drea looks well past those stereotypes to unfold the more complex story of how that army came to power and extended its influence at home and abroad to become one of the world's dominant fighting forces. This first comprehensive English-language history of the Japanese army traces its origins, evolution, and impact as an engine of the country's regional and global ambitions and as a catalyst for the militarization of the Japanese homeland from mid-nineteenth-century incursions through the end of World War II. Demonstrating his mastery of Japanese-language sources, Drea explains how the Japanese style of warfare, burnished by samurai legends, shaped the army, narrowed its options, influenced its decisions, and made it the institution that conquered most of Asia. He also tells how the army's intellectual foundations shifted as it reinvented itself to fulfill the changing imperatives of Japanese society-and how the army in turn decisively shaped the nation's political, social, cultural, and strategic course. Drea recounts how Japan devoted an inordinate amount of its treasury toward modernizing, professionalizing, and training its army-which grew larger, more powerful, and politically more influential with each passing decade. Along the way, it produced an efficient military schooling system, a well-organized active duty and reserve force, a professional officer corps that thought in terms of regional threat, and well-trained soldiers armed with appropriate weapons. Encompassing doctrine, strategy, weaponry, and civil-military relations, Drea's expert study also captures the dominant personalities who shaped the imperial army, from Yamagata Aritomo, an incisive geopolitical strategist, to Anami Korechika, who exhorted the troops to fight to the death during the final days of World War II. Summing up, Drea also suggests that an army that places itself above its nation's interests is doomed to failure.