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Author: Hitomi Koyama
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351611925
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 283
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Book Description
In Japan, people often refer to August 15, 1945 as the end of "that war." But the duration of "that war" remains vague. At times, it refers to the fifteen years of war in the Asia-Pacific. At others, it refers to an imagination of the century long struggle between the East and the West that characterized much of the 19th century. This latter dramatization in particular reinforces longstanding Eurocentric and Orientalist discourses about historical development that presume the non-West lacks historical agency. Nearly 75 years since the nominal end of the war, Japan’s "history problem" – a term invoking the nation’s inability to come to terms with its imperial past – persists throughout Asia today. Going beyond well-worn clichés about the state’s use and abuse of discourses of historical modernity, Koyama shows how the inability to confront the debris of empire is tethered to the deferral of agency to a hegemonic order centered on the United States. The present is thus a moment one stitched between the disavowal of responsibility on the one hand, and the necessity of becoming a proper subject of history on the other. Behind this seeming impasse lay questions about how to imagine the state as the subject of history in a postcolonial moment – after grand narratives, after patriotism, and after triumphalism.
Author: Hitomi Koyama
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351611925
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 283
Get Book Here
Book Description
In Japan, people often refer to August 15, 1945 as the end of "that war." But the duration of "that war" remains vague. At times, it refers to the fifteen years of war in the Asia-Pacific. At others, it refers to an imagination of the century long struggle between the East and the West that characterized much of the 19th century. This latter dramatization in particular reinforces longstanding Eurocentric and Orientalist discourses about historical development that presume the non-West lacks historical agency. Nearly 75 years since the nominal end of the war, Japan’s "history problem" – a term invoking the nation’s inability to come to terms with its imperial past – persists throughout Asia today. Going beyond well-worn clichés about the state’s use and abuse of discourses of historical modernity, Koyama shows how the inability to confront the debris of empire is tethered to the deferral of agency to a hegemonic order centered on the United States. The present is thus a moment one stitched between the disavowal of responsibility on the one hand, and the necessity of becoming a proper subject of history on the other. Behind this seeming impasse lay questions about how to imagine the state as the subject of history in a postcolonial moment – after grand narratives, after patriotism, and after triumphalism.
Author: Hiro Saito
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 0824874390
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 293
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Book Description
Seventy years have passed since the end of the Asia-Pacific War, yet Japan remains embroiled in controversy with its neighbors over the war’s commemoration. Among the many points of contention between Japan, China, and South Korea are interpretations of the Tokyo War Crimes Trial, apologies and compensation for foreign victims of Japanese aggression, prime ministerial visits to the Yasukuni Shrine, and the war’s portrayal in textbooks. Collectively, these controversies have come to be called the “history problem.” But why has the problem become so intractable? Can it ever be resolved, and if so, how? To answer these questions author Hiro Saito mobilizes the sociology of collective memory and social movements, political theories of apology and reconciliation, psychological research on intergroup conflict, and philosophical reflections on memory and history. The history problem, he argues, is essentially a relational phenomenon caused when nations publicly showcase self-serving versions of the past at key ceremonies and events: Japan, South Korea, and China all focus on what happened to their own citizens with little regard for foreign others. Saito goes on to explore the emergence of a cosmopolitan form of commemoration taking humanity, rather than nationality, as its primary frame of reference, an approach increasingly used by a transnational network of advocacy NGOs, victims of Japan’s past wrongdoings, historians, and educators. When cosmopolitan commemoration is practiced as a collective endeavor by both perpetrators and victims, Saito argues, a resolution of the history problem—and eventual reconciliation—will finally become possible. The History Problem examines a vast corpus of historical material in both English and Japanese, offering provocative findings that challenge orthodox explanations. Written in clear and accessible prose, this uniquely interdisciplinary book will appeal to sociologists, political scientists, and historians researching collective memory, nationalism and cosmopolitanism, and international relations—and to anyone interested in the commemoration of historical wrongs. An electronic version of this book is freely available thanks to the support of libraries working with Knowledge Unlatched, a collaborative initiative designed to make high-quality books open access for the public good. The open-access version of this book is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), which means that the work may be freely downloaded and shared for non-commercial purposes, provided credit is given to the author. Derivative works and commercial uses require permission from the publisher.
Author: Charlotte Eubanks
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 082488230X
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 342
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Book Description
The Art of Persistence examines the relations between art and politics in transwar Japan, exploring these via a microhistory of the artist, memoirist, and activist Akamatsu Toshiko (also known as Maruki Toshi, 1912–2000). Scaling up from the details of Akamatsu’s lived experience, the book addresses major events in modern Japanese history, including colonization and empire, war, the nuclear bombings, and the transwar proletarian movement. More broadly, it outlines an ethical position known as persistence, which occupies the grey area between complicity and resistance: Like resilience, persistence signals a commitment to not disappearing—a fierce act of taking up space but often from a position of privilege, among the classes and people in power. Akamatsu grew up in a settler-colonial family in rural Hokkaido before attending arts college in Tokyo and becoming one of the first women to receive formal training as an oil painter in Japan. She later worked as a governess in the home of a Moscow diplomat and traveled to the Japanese Mandate in Micronesia before returning home to write and illustrate children’s books set in the Pacific. She married the surrealist poet and painter Maruki Iri (1901–1995), and together in 1948—and in defiance of Occupation censorship—they began creating and exhibiting the Nuclear Series, some of the most influential and powerful artwork depicting the aftermath of the Hiroshima bombing. For the next forty or more years, the couple toured the world to protest war and nuclear proliferation and were nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1995. With abundant excerpts and drawings from Akamatsu’s journals and sketchbooks, The Art of Persistence offers a bridge between scholarship on imperial Japan and postwar memory cultures, arguing for the importance of each individual’s historical agency. While uncovering the longue durée of Japan’s visual cultures of war, it charts the development of the national(ist) “literature for little citizens” movement and Japan’s postwar reorientation toward global multiculturalism. Finally, the work proposes ways to enlist artwork generally, and the museum specifically, as a site of ethical engagement.
Author: Martin Dusinberre
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 0824861124
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 266
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Book Description
Hard Times in the Hometown tells the story of Kaminoseki, a small town on Japan’s Inland Sea. Once one of the most prosperous ports in the country, Kaminoseki fell into profound economic decline following Japan’s reengagement with the West in the late nineteenth century. Using a recently discovered archive and oral histories collected during his years of research in Kaminoseki, Martin Dusinberre reconstructs the lives of households and townspeople as they tried to make sense of their changing place in the world. In challenging the familiar story of modern Japanese growth, Dusinberre provides important new insights into how ordinary people shaped the development of the modern state. Chapters describe the role of local revolutionaries in the Meiji Restoration of 1868, the ways townspeople grasped opportunities to work overseas in the late nineteenth century, and the impact this pan-Pacific diaspora community had on Kaminoseki during the prewar decades. These histories amplify Dusinberre’s analysis of postwar rural decline—a phenomenon found not only in Japan but throughout the industrialized Western world. His account comes to a climax when, in the 1980s, the town’s councillors request the construction of a nuclear power station, unleashing a storm of protests from within the community. This ongoing nuclear dispute has particular resonance in the wake of the 2011 Fukushima crisis. Hard Times in the Hometown gives voice to personal histories otherwise lost in abandoned archives. By bringing to life the everyday landscape of Kaminoseki, this work offers readers a compelling story through which to better understand not only nineteenth- and twentieth-century Japan but also modern transformations more generally.
Author: Jeremy Adelman
Publisher: Psychology Press
ISBN: 9780415921527
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 340
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Book Description
First Published in 1999. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.
Author: Harry Harootunian
Publisher: Asia Perspectives: History, Society, and Culture
ISBN: 9780231190206
Category : HISTORY
Languages : en
Pages : 384
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Book Description
Few scholars have done more than Harry Harootunian to shape the study of modern Japan. Uneven Moments presents a selection of Harootunian's essays on Japan's intellectual and cultural history from the late Tokugawa period to the present that span the many phases of his distinguished career and point to new directions for Japanese studies.
Author: Stephen S. Fugita
Publisher: University of Washington Press
ISBN: 0295801832
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 222
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Book Description
Why do some groups retain their ethnicity as they become assimilated into mainstream American life while others do not? This study employs both historical sources and contemporary survey data to explain the seeming paradox of why Japanese Americans have maintained high levels of ethnic community involvement while becoming structurally assimilated. Most traditional approaches to the study of ethnicity in the United States are based on the European immigrant experience and conclude that a zero-sum relationship exists between assimilation and retention of ethnicity: community solidarity weakens as structural assimilation grows stronger. Japanese Americans, however, like American Jews, do not fit this pattern. The basic thesis of this book is that the maintenance of ethnic community solidarity, the process of assimilation, and the reactions of an ethnic group to outside forces must be understood in light of the internal social organization of the ethnic group, which can be traced to core cultural orientations that predate immigration. Though frequently excluded from mainstream economic opportunities, Japanese Americans were able to form quasi-kin relationships of trust, upon which enduring group economic relations could be based. The resultant ethnic economy and petit bourgeois family experience fostered the values of hard work, deferred gratification, and other perspectives conductive to success in mainstream society. This book will be of interest to sociologist and psychologist studying ethnicity, community organization, and intergenerational change; and to anyone interested in the Japanese American experience from an economic or political perspective, Asian American studies, or social history of the United States.
Author: Kumiko Nemoto
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501706217
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 293
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Book Description
The number of women in positions of power and authority in Japanese companies has remained small despite the increase in the number of educated women and the passage of legislation on gender equality. In Too Few Women at the Top, Kumiko Nemoto draws on theoretical insights regarding Japan’s coordinated capitalism and institutional stasis to challenge claims that the surge in women’s education and employment will logically lead to the decline of gender inequality and eventually improve women’s status in the Japanese workplace. Nemoto’s interviews with diverse groups of workers at three Japanese financial companies and two cosmetics companies in Tokyo reveal the persistence of vertical sex segregation as a cost-saving measure by Japanese companies. Women’s advancement is impeded by customs including seniority pay and promotion, track-based hiring of women, long working hours, and the absence of women leaders. Nemoto contends that an improvement in gender equality in the corporate system will require that Japan fundamentally depart from its postwar methods of business management. Only when the static labor market is revitalized through adoption of new systems of cost savings, employee hiring, and rewards will Japanese women advance in their chosen professions. Comparison with the situation in the United States makes the author’s analysis of the Japanese case relevant for understanding the dynamics of the glass ceiling in U.S. workplaces as well.
Author: John Hoyte
Publisher: SCB Distributors
ISBN: 1948749173
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 244
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Book Description
John Hoyte was a student at Cambridge University who realized one day that a grant he might get could provide an interesting and unusual summer vacation. And thus was born the idea of leading an elephant over the Alps via the trails, paths, and mountain passes taken by Hannibal with his army and war elephants in 218 B.C to do battle with the Roman empire. Hoyte’s successful mission, with an elephant named Jumbo on loan from the Turin zoo, became a media sensation, leading to international coverage and starting him on the way to a fifty-year career as an inventor and entrepreneur in Silicon Valley. Hoyte’s story is a fascinating one, beginning with the six years of his childhood spent in a Japanese internment camp in China during World War II. Throughout the years that followed, he has taken each surprising twist and turn of fate and used it to help build a life infused with purpose, creativity and fulfillment.
Author: Blai Guarné
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 1785339605
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 208
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Book Description
From melodramas to experimental documentaries to anime, mass media in Japan constitute a key site in which the nation’s social memory is articulated, disseminated, and contested. Through a series of stimulating case studies, this volume examines the political and cultural representations of Japan’s past, showing how they have reinforced personal and collective narratives while also formulating new cultural meanings, both on a local scale and in the context of transnational media production and consumption. Drawing upon diverse disciplinary insights and methodologies, these studies collectively offer a nuanced account in which mass media function as much more than a simple ideological tool.
