Suchergebnisse

Frontmatter -- Contents -- List of Illustrations -- Preface and Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- Part One. The Geography of Civilization -- 1. Seeing Like the Nation -- 2. The New Territories -- Part Two. The Geography of Cultural Pluralism -- 3. Boundary Narratives -- 4. Local Color -- 5. Speaking Japanese -- Conclusion -- Appendix: Place Names -- Notes -- Selected Bibliography -- Index

Japan joined the League of Nations in 1920 as a charter member and one of four permanent members of the League Council. Until conflict arose between Japan and the organization over the 1931 Manchurian Incident, the League was a centerpiece of Japan's policy to maintain accommodation with the Western powers. The picture of Japan as a positive contributor to international comity, however, is not the conventional view of the country in the early and mid-twentieth century. Rather, this period is usually depicted in Japan and abroad as a history of incremental imperialism and intensifying militarism, culminating in war in China and the Pacific. Even the empire's interface with the League of Nations is typically addressed only at nodes of confrontation: the 1919 debates over racial equality as the Covenant was drafted and the 1931-1933 League challenge to Japan's seizure of northeast China. This volume fills in the space before, between, and after these nodes and gives the League relationship the legitimate place it deserves in Japanese international history of the 1920s and 1930s.

How do contemporary generations come to terms with losses inflicted by imperialism, colonialism, and war that took place decades ago? How do descendants of perpetrators and victims establish new relations in today's globalized economy? With Inheritance of Loss, Yukiko Koga approaches these questions through the unique lens of inheritance, focusing on Northeast China, the former site of the Japanese Puppet State Manchukuo, where municipal governments now court Japanese as investors and tourists. As China transitions to a market-oriented society, this region is restoring long-neglected colonial-era structures to boost tourism and inviting former colonial industries to create special economic zones, while unexpectedly unearthing chemical weapons abandoned by the Japanese Imperial Army at the end of World War II. Inheritance of Loss ethnographically chronicles these sites of colonial inheritance tourist destinations, corporate zones, and mustard gas exposure sites to illustrate deeply entangled attempts by ordinary Chinese and Japanese to reckon with their shared yet contested pasts. In her explorations of everyday life and economy, Koga directs us to see how structures of violence and injustice that occurred after the demise of the Japanese Empire compound the losses that later generations must account for, and inevitably inherit

ABSTRACT:The formation of Manchuria in 1932 gave local cities along the Japan Sea coast new hope for development. However, their interpretation of imperialism was in terms of the city rather than the nation. The ways in which these discourses of nation and region played out in ideas of urban development are particularly clear in Kanazawa, the major city on the Japan Sea coast, in the rhetoric surrounding the presentation of empire and region in its exposition that spring.

'Army, Empire and Politics in Meiji Japan: The Three Careers of General Katsura Taro' by Stewart Lone is reviewed.

By the end of World War II, hundreds of thousands of young men in the Japanese colonies, in particular Taiwan and Korea, had expressed their loyalty to the empire by volunteering to join the army. Why and how did so many colonial youth become passionate supporters of Japanese imperial nationalism? And what happened to these youth after the war? Nation-Empire investigates these questions by examining the long-term mobilization of youth in the rural peripheries of Japan, Taiwan, and Korea. Personal stories and village histories vividly show youth's ambitions, emotions, and identities generated in the shifting conditions in each locality. At the same time, Sayaka Chatani unveils an intense ideological mobilization built from diverse contexts—the global rise of youth and agrarian ideals, Japan's strong drive for assimilation and nationalization, and the complex emotions of younger generations in various remote villages.Nation-Empire engages with multiple historical debates. Chatani considers metropole-colony linkages, revealing the core characteristics of the Japanese Empire; discusses youth mobilization, juxtaposing the Japanese seinendan (village youth associations) with the Boy Scouts and the Hitlerjugend; and examines society and individual subjectivities under totalitarian rule. Her book highlights the shifting state-society transactions of the twentieth-century world through the lens of the Japanese Empire, inviting readers to contend with a new approach to, and a bold vision of, empire study.