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Nationalism was one of the most important forces in 20th century Japan. It pervaded almost all aspects of Japanese life, but was a complex phenomenon, frequently changing, and often meaning different things to different people. This book brings together interesting, original new work, by a range of international leading scholars who consider Japanese nationalism in a wide variety of its aspects. Overall, the book provides many new insights and much new thinking on what continues to be a crucially important factor shaping current developments in Japan.

During the Second World War, the Japanese military recruited interpreters throughout Asia to assist in interrogating suspected insurgents and managing prison and internment camps. Many interpreters were tried for war crimes by Allied authorities after Japan's surrender. Sentences passed on those who were convicted were often higher than for other low-ranking personnel. Principally using British records, I argue that interpreters were punished because they participated in mistreatment of prisoners. Their punishments were disproportionately heavy because of their close association with the Japanese military police, and as a result of moral outrage by Western courts and Chinese populations in Southeast Asia.

Katō Tetsutarō was a suspected Japanese war criminal tried by US military commissions in Yokohama after the Second World War. He was convicted of murdering an escaped American prisoner of war, and was originally sentenced to death. In a highly unusual move, however, the Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers in Japan, General Douglas MacArthur, ordered a retrial, in which Katō received a sentence of 30 years. He was ultimately released in March 1958. Katō's case provides an especially effective illustration of the tension in Allied thinking about war crimes trials between a desire for justice or vengeance, on the one hand, and recognition of the political pressures of the Cold War on the other, and of the varied forms this tension took as prosecutions progressed.

In 1950s Japan, films about the Second World War, especially the conflict in the Pacific, were very popular. Though some of them concentrated on misery and suffering, others were surprisingly positive in their portrayal of Japanese soldiers. The 1950s have the reputation of a pacifist decade in Japan, when people were only too glad to forget the war as they turned instead to the future. This orthodox view is undermined, however, by the undeniable fact that a great many people wanted to see cinematic dramatizations of the war. The movies they watched left room for pride, dignity, the recognition of Japanese military power and even nostalgia for the war years. They were an important means by which people explored the meanings of the recent conflict. In particular, they explained and dramatized what had happened; presented examples of heroic soldiers and sailors; and contributed to the reintegration of ordinary soldiers who had been convicted as war criminals back into Japanese society. In doing so they played a vital role in reclaiming and validating the actions of military men, and in promoting the idea that there had been positive aspects of the war experience, despite the suffering the conflict had undoubtedly brought.

AbstractThe 1950s in Japan are usually considered to be marked by pacifism or a "victim consciousness" related to World War II, together with a rejection of war and of the military. Yet attention to the popular press and other sources designed to reflect and appeal to a mass audience, rather than magazines carrying debates among intellectuals, shows that throughout the 1950s the recent war was a much more dynamic issue than typically has been recognized, and that former soldiers were far from universally reviled. Connections with the war, in turn, remained an integral part of the evolving sense of nation in Japan. This article examines the vitality of the war as a major and direct theme in political, social and cultural discourse in the 1950s, focusing on soldiers' involvement in politics, issues relating to Class B and C war criminals, films about the war, and the emergence of a new cultural hero in the form of Kaji, the soldier who is the central figure in the novel and film The Human Condition.

Nationalist ideology and nationalist practice in Japan between 1937 and 1945 were fundamentally conditioned by gender. For women, the proper roles of the subject were most fully elaborated through the patriotic women's associations, principally Aikoku fujinkai (Patriotic Women's Association), Kokubo fujinkai (Women's National Defense Association), and Dai Nippon fujinkai (Greater Japan Women's Association). The last of these claimed 27 million members throughout the empire. The women's associations attempted to define the ideal relation between women and the nation, primarily through an emphasis on home and motherhood. Yet, by 1945, wartime requirements had exposed basic flaws in the ideology from the state's point of view. Not only did the emphasis on home and motherhood impede the use of women in the labor force, more fundamentally, leaders of the women's associations and others realized that devotion to family might also lead to women failing to encourage their young sons to join the military. In these circumstances, a strong focus on the family, which had earlier been positively evaluated as the major part of women's gendered contribution to the war effort, came to be redefined as a form of "individualism", which had to be resisted for the national good. By this stage, "family" and "state" could no longer be taken for granted in official rhetoric as mutually reinforcing entities. (Crit Asian Stud/GIGA)

Japan's departure from the League of Nations in 1933 over the Manchurian issue has often been portrayed as an act of national self assertiveness signifying a willingness to defy international opinion and pursue an independent course in world affairs. The physical act by Matsuoka Yosuke and his delegation of walking out of the League Assembly on 24 February promotes an image of a firm and uncompromising attitude on the part of Japan; and as time passed, the interpretation recorded in 1944 by Joseph Grew, US Ambassador to Japan from 1932 to 1942, became a standard one: 'Nobody could miss the political significance of Japan's decision to quit the League of Nations. It marked a clear break with the Western powers and prepared the way for Japan's later adherence to the Axis'.