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The present paper analyzes the travel diary of writer Shimazaki Tōson (1872-1943), writen after being dispatched to South America by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Empire of Japan in 1936. The diary, titled Junrei (Pilgrimage), and written in 1937, performs an aestheticization of the journey's official objectives: in the first place, to undermine the negative image that the Empire had acquired within the international community due to its expansionism through Asia during the early 1930s; in the second place, to establish links with the Japanese community in Latin America so that it could become instrumental to the government's expansionist entrerprises. The paper will provide evidence of such veiled objectives by offering specific examples, and it will analyze the complex standpoint that Shimazaki took in regards to the official discourse. ; El presente artículo aborda y analiza el diario de viajes que el escritor Shimazaki Tōson (1872-1943) escribió luego de su viaje por Sudamérica tras ser enviado por el Ministerio de Asuntos Exteriores del Imperio de Japón en 1936. Dicho texto, titulado Junrei (Peregrinaje) y escrito en 1937, consta de una estetización de los propósitos oficiales que habían motivado el viaje originalmente: en primer lugar, mitigar la imagen negativa que el Imperio había empezado a desarrollar en la comunidad internacional después de su expansión por Asia durante los primeros años de la década del treinta; segundo, establecer vínculos con la comunidad japonesa en Latinoamérica con la intención de que fueran instrumentales al gobierno en su proyecto expansionista. El artículo brindará ejemplos específicos que muestren dichos propósitos ocultos, pero también analizará la postura compleja que tomó Shimazaki ante ese discurso oficial.

"Japan's preparation for her present constitution. An address by Tokyokichi Iyenaga": p. 31-47. ; Mode of access: Internet.

Commemoration by members of the Johns Hopkins University interested in the study of political science of the formal promulgation of the constitution of Japan. ; Mode of access: Internet.

AbstractBetween 1895 and 1945 Japan assembled one of the largest empires in modern world history. It vanished abruptly in the summer of 1945 at the end of the Second World War, and seemed to leave no trace in public consciousness. Historians, too, have portrayed postwar Japan as characterized by a virtual erasure of the imperial past. This article draws on recent scholarship to argue that things were more complicated than that. While references to the imperial past indeed dwindled after about 1960, immediate forgetting did not exhaust the reactions by individuals and interest groups. Some social milieus experienced the dissolution of the empire much more profoundly than official discourse would suggest. Since the mid-1990s, Japan's imperial past has reemerged as a major field of historical inquiry and a more general concern in public debate. In this article I situate the dialectic of remembering and forgetting within larger processes and transformations of the postwar order in East Asia, in particular the American occupation and the emergence of the Cold War.