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From Pearl Harbor to Hiroshima

CHUSHICHI TSUZUKI

in The Pursuit of Power in Modern Japan 1825–1995

The frontier wars of the 1930s had been more than ‘sideshows’ to the later Asia-Pacific War; they illustrate the process of the ‘abject slide’ into the war. The frontier war with Russia is ... More

The frontier wars of the 1930s had been more than ‘sideshows’ to the later Asia-Pacific War; they illustrate the process of the ‘abject slide’ into the war. The frontier war with Russia is illustrated. It also addresses the transition from French Indochina to Pearl Harbor. Jubilation over the initial victories in the war against the Allies lasted only six months; then came a series of disasters that continued for more than three years and ended in a final catastrophe. In addition, it outlines the Yokusan movement and war fascism, midway and Guadalcanal, ‘Tenshin’ and the ‘absolutely necessary national defence sphere’, and the Burma front. The American attempt to recapture the Philippines began with the landing of their troops on Leyte in October 1944 and on Luzon in January 1945. Discussion on home affairs and Tojo's resignation, the battle for Okinawa, the reckoning of a lost war, Teheran, Yalta, Potsdam, and Hiroshima, and Japanese surrender is given as well.Less

‘Japan Incorporated’ and Radical Challenges, 1965–1973

CHUSHICHI TSUZUKI

in The Pursuit of Power in Modern Japan 1825–1995

This chapter addresses the stability of the Sato Eisaku government that depended largely on continuing high economic growth. It starts by discussing rapid economic growth and its problems. A ... More

This chapter addresses the stability of the Sato Eisaku government that depended largely on continuing high economic growth. It starts by discussing rapid economic growth and its problems. A description on the government of Sato Eisaku is given. Sato managed to secure an automatic extension of the Japan-US Security Treaty in June 1970. The Vietnam War and Japan and the reversion of Okinawa are highlighted. ‘Student Power’, which formed one feature of the Sato era, was only part of the radicalization of society. The citizens' movement can be traced to the Anpo struggle of 1960, when a group called the Voice of the Voiceless People's Association put in its appearance to support the rioting students. This was a spontaneous act on the part of unorganized citizens to show their sympathy with the students' protest.Less

From Conquest to Containment: Asia

C. T. Sandars

in America’s Overseas Garrisons: The Leasehold Empire

This chapter discusses the U.S. government's determination to take sole control of Japan and the Pacific region after World War II. The U.S. was determined to keep other allies, particularly Russia, ... More

This chapter discusses the U.S. government's determination to take sole control of Japan and the Pacific region after World War II. The U.S. was determined to keep other allies, particularly Russia, out of Japan, to prevent their development of offensive bases on the home islands. The Joint Chiefs of Staff were keen on building military bases on the Ryukyus Islands and in Okinawa, but not on a long-term basis. However, they were compelled to maintain a permanent presence on the mainland and home islands to ensure peace and stability along the areas bordering the Yellow Sea and because of the outbreak of the Korean War.Less

Afterword: Traces of the Ryukyu Kingdom

Mamoru Akamine

Robert Huey (ed.)

in The Ryukyu Kingdom: Cornerstone of East Asia

The author summarizes Ryukyu’s historical position in East Asia, noting how its own changes reflected the broader changes East Asian was going through. He argues that, though part of Japan today, ... More

The author summarizes Ryukyu’s historical position in East Asia, noting how its own changes reflected the broader changes East Asian was going through. He argues that, though part of Japan today, Okinawa is still different, and he calls that difference the “its heritage from the Ryukyu Kingdom and its ‘Asian experience.’” Chinese elements in Okinawan culture, for example, are not just the result of centuries of trade and diplomatic contact, but also come from the Kingdom’s conscious effort to “sinify” in the seventeenth century. As for Okinawan’s status today, the author notes that Okinawa’s sovereignty is still seen as an open question by China.Less

Conclusion

Ka-che Yip

in Disease, Colonialism, and the State: Malaria in Modern East Asian History

This section explains that the essays in this book have examined both the temporal and spatial aspects of the development of various approaches to combating malaria during the colonial and ... More

This section explains that the essays in this book have examined both the temporal and spatial aspects of the development of various approaches to combating malaria during the colonial and postcolonial period in Hong Kong, Okinawa, Taiwan, and mainland China. It further shows that the essays consider the historical development of malaria and its control or eradication in modern East Asia as a dynamic process of interaction between the interests and objectives of the state (colonial or sovereign), international interests, the emergence of new medical knowledge and technology, changing concepts of disease and health, and local environmental conditions and local society, as well as the political, social, and economic forces at work in a particular locality at a particular time. It points out that they demonstrate the complexity required in the formulation and implementation of anti-malaria policies, and highlight factors central to the health of a society.Less

“We Are Real Democrats”: Legal Debates and Cold War Unionism before Castro, 1940–1954

Jana K. Lipman

in Guantanamo: A Working-Class History between Empire and Revolution

The U.S. military appeared strong and intact, and its archipelago of bases was well equipped to defend against communism and to maintain U.S. military and economic dominance. The Navy Civil Engineer ... More

The U.S. military appeared strong and intact, and its archipelago of bases was well equipped to defend against communism and to maintain U.S. military and economic dominance. The Navy Civil Engineer Corps', or Seabees', account of Building the Navy's Bases in World War II defined the construction of bases throughout the world, listing its accomplishments: “Bases in the North Atlantic,” “Construction Battalions in France and Germany,” “Bases in Alaska,” “Bases in the Philippines, and Okinawa.” These bases did not fade at the end of the war. The structure and network of U.S. bases morphed into a defensive perimeter against the Soviet Union instead. The U.S. government feared Soviet expansionism and militarism, and it actively sought to support anti-communist governments and protect U.S. economic interests on a global scale. The U.S. military infrastructure that had developed during World War II began to articulate a new Cold War geography.Less

Introduction

Kären Wigen

in A Malleable Map: Geographies of Restoration in Central Japan, 1600-1912

The map of Japan—a collection of forty-three prefectures, forming a smooth arc from Hokkaido in the north to Okinawa in the south—is as familiar as to seem eternal. Japan's best known episodes took ... More

The map of Japan—a collection of forty-three prefectures, forming a smooth arc from Hokkaido in the north to Okinawa in the south—is as familiar as to seem eternal. Japan's best known episodes took place along the state's borders. The Yamato chiefdom eratically expanded from its original home in western Honshu until its descendants had claimed most of the archipelago through a millennium of warfare and diplomacy. The recent study traces the restoration of one bounded region in central Honshu. Its terrain—the sprawling district officially known as Nagano Prefecture, or more colloquially by its older labels, Shinshu and Shinano—is in a singular map in many ways. Shinano is known to students across the country as the home of Japan's highest ranges, longest rivers, biggest ski resorts, and the ur-landscape of a mountainous archipelago.Less

Introduction

Steve Rabson

in The Okinawan Diaspora in Japan: Crossing the Borders Within

This introductory chapter presents a historical background of Okinawa's past in order to reveal the underlying tensions between the prefecture and mainland Japan. Like minorities elsewhere, Okinawans ... More

This introductory chapter presents a historical background of Okinawa's past in order to reveal the underlying tensions between the prefecture and mainland Japan. Like minorities elsewhere, Okinawans experienced prejudice and discrimination in Japan because differences—real and imagined—have caused them to be viewed as outsiders of inferior status. A history and culture distinct in many ways from the rest of the country has forced them to cope with a society in which such differences are often considered “strange” or “wrong,” and with a central government that has long imposed a monocultural standard in education, publicly priding itself on the nation's mythical “homogeneity.” Hence the chapter sets out the terms and methodology to be used in this research, at the same time employing these to debunk the fallacies employed in mainland discourse.Less

The Homeland

Steve Rabson

in The Okinawan Diaspora in Japan: Crossing the Borders Within

This chapter acts as a general overview to the Okinawa Prefecture—its history, geographical quirks, demographics, climate, wildlife, migration patterns, and so on. What the Japanese government ... More

This chapter acts as a general overview to the Okinawa Prefecture—its history, geographical quirks, demographics, climate, wildlife, migration patterns, and so on. What the Japanese government designated as Okinawa Prefecture in 1879 encompasses most of the islands in the Ryukyu chain. First recorded in China, the place-name Liu Ch'iu (Ryūkyū in Japanese) means “circle of jewels.” The boundaries of the Japanese prefecture today include the island groups of Okinawa, Yaeyama, and Miyako, but not the northernmost Amami group, which is administered separately by Kagoshima Prefecture in Kyushu. Patterns of migration from the prefecture's earlier days indicate that, in the centuries that followed, the cultures of Japan and the Ryukyus diverged in dwelling construction, clothing, diet, language, religion, and burial customs—differences that are still clearly evident in Okinawa today amid the ubiquitous influences of mainland Japanese culture.Less

An Occupied Homeland (1945–1972)

Steve Rabson

in The Okinawan Diaspora in Japan: Crossing the Borders Within

This chapter looks at the ways in which Okinawans coped with hardships arising out of Japan's surrender post-World War II and the American military occupation. By mid-August 1945, when Japan's ... More

This chapter looks at the ways in which Okinawans coped with hardships arising out of Japan's surrender post-World War II and the American military occupation. By mid-August 1945, when Japan's government leaders finally made their tragically belated decision to surrender, the occupation of Okinawa, which had started officially with the Nimitz Proclamation on April 1, was well under way. During this period, Okinawa Prefecture had lost about a third of its wartime population. Moreover, civilian communications were cut off, and many on the mainland also lost their homes in Okinawa, and even their land when the American military later seized thousands of family farms and home lots to expand existing bases and build new ones. And though evacuees from Okinawa were treated kindly in many communities where they were relocated, tensions soon arose between the evacuees and their host communities.Less

“Intimate Frontiers”: Disciplining Ethnicity and Ainu Women’s Sexual Subjectivity in Early Colonial Hokkaido

Ann-Elise Lewallen

in The Affect of Difference: Representations of Race in East Asian Empire

Modernist historiography has long bracketed Ezo (present-day Hokkaido) and Okinawa as internal colonies, conventionally dismissing them from discussions of Japan’s imperial project. This historical ... More

Modernist historiography has long bracketed Ezo (present-day Hokkaido) and Okinawa as internal colonies, conventionally dismissing them from discussions of Japan’s imperial project. This historical perspective rationalizes and codifies the narrative that Hokkaido especially is an inherent, inalienable part of Japanese territory. However, this version of history begins to fall apart when we take account of the interrelations between Ainu women and ethnic Japanese men (wajin). The interpellation of Ainu women as objects of sexual desire established the intimate frontiers of Japan’s modernist recasting of Ezo as a distinctly Japanese imperial zone long before its political and administrative incorporation into the Japanese nation-state. The sexual subjectivity of these women in turn provides a different perspective revealing how Japan’s territorial expansion and its nascent imperialism was charted through the terrain of Ainu women’s bodies, and demonstrating how sexual intimacy and sexual violence are corollaries of political and physical power.Less

Corporatist Cabinets and the Emergence of the “1955 System,” 1955–1972

Brian Woodall

in Growing Democracy in Japan: The Parliamentary Cabinet System since 1868

This chapter traces the evolution of Japan’s cabinet system in the first years of the “1955 System,” during which time a seniority system for cabinet ministers became established. Because Liberal ... More

This chapter traces the evolution of Japan’s cabinet system in the first years of the “1955 System,” during which time a seniority system for cabinet ministers became established. Because Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) lawmakers monopolized ministerial portfolios, appointment to a cabinet post became simply another wrung on the perpetually ruling party’s internal promotional ladder. And yet because the LDP was, in essence, a “federation of factions” united for purposes of campaign and legislative strategy, rather than a unified national party, Machiavellian machinations played a role in deciding the party’s president, who doubled as prime minister. Yet, under the surface, differences in style and outlook pitted rival camps of “ex-bureaucrats” and “career politicians,” and the need to maintain balance among intraparty factions dictated frequent cabinet changes, and often, the appointment of ministers with dubious qualifications. At the same time, the autonomy of cabinets in executive affairs was called into question by the actions of an activist government bureaucracy and a hegemonic party that preapproved all major policy departures. Meanwhile, prime ministers and cabinets were forced to respond to challenges produced by high-speed economic growth and dissatisfaction with institutional arrangements put in place during the American-led occupation.Less

Male Sexuality in the Colony: On Toyokawa Zen’ichi’s Searchlight

Ikuo Shinjo

in Beyond Imperial Aesthetics: Theories of Art and Politics in East Asia

This essay examines the ways in which a crisscrossing of homosexual desires in a novella written in US-occupied Okinawa in the 1950s ruptures the structure of military colonialism and eventually ... More

This essay examines the ways in which a crisscrossing of homosexual desires in a novella written in US-occupied Okinawa in the 1950s ruptures the structure of military colonialism and eventually renders that colonial structure inoperative through its illumination of a circuit of certain promiscuous forces. Toyokawa Zenichi's novella "Searchlight" was originally published in the ninth volume of radical students' literary journal Ryukyu University Literature (1956), which was censored, banned, and eventually withdrawn from circulation by the US military apparatus in Okinawa. The novella's disclosure of transference of homoerotic desires across plural bodies and subjectivities offers a fundamental critique of political norms that subtend the US military occupation in Okinawa, including the racialized and gendered hierarchy of the bodies and the equally hierarchical division of the sexual subject and object. The novella's critique of such institutionalized norms through its exploration of mimicry opens up a new circuit of politics that is still missing in Homi Bhabha's theorization of the same practice in postcolonial politics and aesthetics. That is, going far beyond the politics of "subversion" in the early Bhabha and Butler, for instance, the novella discovers a mode of radical mimicry that contaminates and eventually calls into question the very subjectivitiy of the colonizer and the colonized.Less

On the Form’s Edge: Adaniya Masayoshi’s Abstract Paintings and Biopolitics in US-Occupied Okinawa

Mayumo Inoue

in Beyond Imperial Aesthetics: Theories of Art and Politics in East Asia

This essay looks at postwar painter Adaniya Masayoshi's abstract landscape paintings of U.S. military bases in Okinawa in the 1960s as well as the painter's own theoretically sophisticated ... More

This essay looks at postwar painter Adaniya Masayoshi's abstract landscape paintings of U.S. military bases in Okinawa in the 1960s as well as the painter's own theoretically sophisticated reflections on them. By situating Adaniya's painterly figurations of landscape, military infrastructure, and soldiers' bodies alongside recent Foucauldian and autonomist Marxist analyses of "Okinawa" as an effect and product of global imperial politics, this essay seeks to closely analyse Adaniya's lifelong effort to make visible his torqued forms as a rupturing of the mode of racializing biopolitics in U.S.-occupied Okinawa in the time of the Vietnam War.Less

The End of the Kingdom

Mamoru Akamine

Robert Huey (ed.)

in The Ryukyu Kingdom: Cornerstone of East Asia

In what became controversially known as the “Ryukyu Shobun,” the new Meiji government gradually took over Ryukyu, starting by using a massacre of Ryukyuan sailors in Taiwan as a pretext to claim ... More

In what became controversially known as the “Ryukyu Shobun,” the new Meiji government gradually took over Ryukyu, starting by using a massacre of Ryukyuan sailors in Taiwan as a pretext to claim Ryukyuans as “people who belong to the nation of Japan,” who needed Tokyo’s protection. In 1874, the Meiji government compelled Ryukyu to cut its ties to China. In 1879, Tokyo annexed Ryukyu and designated it Okinawa Prefecture. That same year, the Ryukyu King was forced to move to Tokyo, and died there in 1901. China did not have sufficient military power to resist the move, but the chapter also describes activities between China and restorationists in Ryukyu, some of whom went to China, rather than remain as Japanese subjects. However, the first Sino-Japanese War (1894-95), in which China was defeated, effectively brought the restoration movement to an end.Less

Introduction

David J Ulbrich

in War in the American Pacific and East Asia, 1941-1972

The introduction to this anthology connects a diverse collection of essays that examine the 1940s as the critical decade in the United States’ ascendance in the Pacific Rim. Following the end of ... More

The introduction to this anthology connects a diverse collection of essays that examine the 1940s as the critical decade in the United States’ ascendance in the Pacific Rim. Following the end of World War II, the United States assumed the hegemonic role in the region when Japan’s defeat created military and political vacuums in the region. It is in this context that this anthology stands not only as a précis of current scholarship but also as a prospectus for future research. The contributors’ chapters eschew the traditional focus on military operations that has dominated the historiography of 1940s in the Pacific Basin and East Asia. Instead, the contributors venture into areas of race, gender, technology, culture, media, diplomacy, and institutions, all of which add nuance and clarity to the existing literature of World War II and the early Cold War.Less