Search Results

The introduction proposes the framework of study, namely, to examine Yasukuni Shrine through its three components, Yasukuni the belief, Yasukuni the site, and Yasukuni the issue. It also outlines the key concepts that are woven throughout the main text: the relationship between memory and spatial practice, the discourse of victimhood, and the idea of postwar responsibility. The introduction also presents an overview of the book chapters.

Chapter 4 covers the Asia-Pacific War period during which all of Japan was mobilized for the war effort. I trace one soldier’s fate after battlefield death, including cremation, return of the ashes, local memorial services, and Yasukuni enshrinement, with a particular focus on the bereaved family members. I juxtapose this particular soldier’s journey with other Yasukuni-related episodes compiled from media sources and material produced by the shrine. During this war, grief related to war death was institutionalized into a national event. Furthermore, participants came to perform an “acceptable” kind of emotional response to war death, e.g., pride rather than grief, joy rather than sorrow. I argue that such performances did not result merely from widespread and strong belief in the Yasukuni myth. Instead these performances were shaped by organizations, including elementary schools, neighborhood associations, and women’s groups, that exerted pressure on the bereaved to conform to specific conventions of behavior.

This chapter reviews the history of the early development of the modern Japanese intelligence community, focusing on how the shifting strategic context, technological development, and failure influenced collection, analysis, communication, and covert action. Since there was no democratic oversight of authoritarian Japan's intelligence community, the chapter discusses the element of protection and its connection with Japan's authoritarian politics. It shows the early evolution of the Japanese intelligence community and how it did not always go smoothly. The half century from Japan's first modern foreign war against China to the larger Asia-Pacific War that ended in 1945 may have been in part consecrated to the establishment of a modern intelligence system. The extent of the challenge across each of the three generic drivers, and the relative inexperience of Japanese strategists, produced uneven performance by an unsteady intelligence community across each of the elements of the intelligence enterprise.

The Asia-Pacific War (1931–1945) witnessed a boom in forced prostitution of Japanese, Dutch, and Korean girls, with the last nationality constituting the bulk. This chapter seeks to discern the effect that sexual enslavement has had on reproductive health of comfort women (the term for these women in common parlance) survivors by analyzing their life-historical testimonial stories with a focus on the Korean cases. From a macrolevel structural perspective, class and ethnic discrimination under colonialism were the fundamental variables that precipitated their recruitment into military prostitution and sexual slavery in the first place. From a microlevel sexual and social psychological perspective, in contrast, there are intragroup differences that further complicate the causal factors for social inequality and personal suffering of former comfort women. The common thread between the subjects and the researcher in terms of pervasive gender discrimination in patriarchal societies such as Korea, inducts the inquiry into participatory research.

This chapter chronicles the sacrifices made by Japanese allies and conscripts in Indonesia, Burma, the Philippines, and China, and how their stories reveal yet more illuminating facets upon the complicated history of the Asia-Pacific war. Through the experiences and memoirs of these people the uglier side of Japanese imperialism are seen through the eyes of the Japanese who were either stationed or residing at other Asian nations that were swallowed up by the conflict. The role of Japan as victimizer is palpable here—some of the subjects of these memoirs were even oppressed by their fellow Japanese, further highlighting the wartime complexities straining the relationship between nation and citizen. Yet some of the people mentioned in these anecdotes have also committed atrocities of their own against fellow Japanese, alongside their crimes against the natives of the country they have occupied—actions that some would later contemplate with regret.

This chapter explores how the accommodation by Japanese leaders to U.S. power and to the public's widespread aversion to security affairs shaped and stunted the Japanese intelligence community during the Cold War and beyond. Japan's intelligence failures in the Asia-Pacific War contributed to the new strategic environment that, in turn, drove the subsequent transformation of each element of Japan's intelligence community. The subordination of Japanese foreign and security policy to U.S. priorities set strict limits on the shape, pace, and direction of intelligence reform. In the nearly half century from 1945 to 1991 during which Japan was a junior partner to its conqueror, Japan's degenerated intelligence community became an undersized, compromised, and organizationally handicapped operation. Analysts have called Japan's Cold War intelligence community “a stark transformation from the past” marked by sharp “discontinuity.”

The introductory chapter clarifies the goal of the book, which is to question the monolithic understanding of wartime film and to focus on the complexities and contradictions of national identity formation of cultural texts in this period. The chapter begins by providing a brief summary of the era’s film industry. Then, it introduces the state of research of wartime Japanese film studies through an examination of the definition of ‘national policy film’ or kokusaku eiga. Finally, it underlines the significance of interdisciplinary and relational approaches to wartime Japanese film by discussing the methodologies and narratives of other national film histories that have informed this project. (105 words)

Chapter 5 shows how wartime mobilization led to the unprecedented compression and expansion of space. For one, the culture of an increasingly militarized Namsan began to penetrate Korean homes through the installation of household altars and the distribution of Ise talismans. This “Shintō-ization” also occurred on larger scales. For example, the 2,600th anniversary celebrations, in 1940, encouraged the colonized population to expand their vision as imperial subjects, subordinating local and familial affiliations. Although Koreans with close military ties began think of themselves in this way, the late-colonial state never managed to erase differences that had shaped previous projects of assimilation and that continued to determine the complex contours of imperial subjectification.

This essay explores the role of radio broadcasting at the height of Japanese imperial expansion during the last phase of the Asia Pacific War. In an era when the growing demands of the war effort forced the empire to make inclusionary gestures to its colonial subjects and the various ethnic groups in newly occupied territories, how did the technology and cultural practice of radio succeed or fail to evoke a sense of community? Wartime Japanese broadcasters knew that the awareness of simultaneous co-listeners did not automatically turn listeners into a community, which required the establishment of strong emotional ties. An analysis of radio scripts, broadcasting policy, NHK’s publications, listeners’ letters, memoirs, and newspaper articles reveals the various strategies adopted to evoke affective ties through radio: an intimate style of address, a passionate tone of announcement, and around-the-empire reports of events that invited reactions to wartime broadcasts from the multi-ethnic audiences.

Korea’s colonial modernity (1910-45) notably produced both female pop stars and legions of sex workers, a sex-industrial development which reached its zenith in the “comfort women,” the Japanese military’s wartime system of sexual slavery during the Asia-Pacific War (1931-45). The concurrent rise of the female voice in Korean popular music and the rise of colonial sex industries are not the result of opposing forces of modernization and barbarism, but deeply intertwined parts of the search for the place of women in colonial modernity. This chapter, through a detailed analysis of the references to popular music and dance in the testimony of former Korean “comfort women,” seeks to reconstruct the place of these performing arts in the “comfort women” system.  Legitimization of colonial modernization, the commodification of women, and new opportunities for women enabled by the figure of the colonial female pop star can also be found in her dystopian sibling, the “comfort woman.” The musical life of the “comfort women” system provides a stark example of the deeply ambivalent place of entertaining women in emergent Japanese and Korean popular cultures, and of the grain of the voice of East Asian colonial modernity.

This Prelude to Chapters One through to Six introduces the story of three generations of the Akamatsu family, whose tri-generational patriline illustrates well the changes which shaped institutional and lay Buddhism in the five decades from the Buddhist Enlightenment through the beginning of the Asia Pacific War.