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Lisa Yoneyama in Toronto; Readings on the ‘Comfort Women’ System
Yesterday I had a chance to meet briefly in Toronto with Lisa Yoneyama, who is one of the most prevalent scholars working today on issues of transnational war memory politics and World War II in Asia....
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Angela Merkel and Japan’s Wartime Past
The German Chancellor was in Tokyo for a couple of eventful days. Although Merkel sees Abe Shinzo regularly, she noted before leaving that she has not been to Japan, the country that she tactfully...
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Old Chapters, New Chapters: The Memory Wars in East Asia
From the very beginning of the so-called ‘post war,’ the territorial and temporal parameters of the memory wars between China and Japan were never drawn particularly cleanly. The war ended formally in...
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Keeping Tabs on Revisionist Groups Active on the ‘Comfort Women’ Issue
Gaining even a cursory familiarity with the statements and logic of some right-wing revisionists groups in Japan is a salutary experience. While most Japanese people (judging from polling data) find...
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Chinese Journalists and the U.S. Occupation of Japan
At the conclusion of eight years of Japanese occupation of nearly every major city in the Republic of China, Chinese journalists were prepared not just to celebrate victory but to join the Allied...
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Pu Yi as Witness
In his 1946 testimony at the International Military Tribunal for the Far East (the Tokyo Trials), Pu Yi, the former Emperor of the Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo, proved to be an exceptionally...
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Atrocities, Insults, and “Jeep Girls”: Depictions of the U.S. Military in...
Controversy continues to surround various military occupations in East Asia in the 20th century. Specifically, the connection between military occupation and sex work carried out by women the occupied...
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The Bombs Kept Falling in the Wake of Hiroshima
In a Saturday essay for the Yorkshire Post, a very fine newspaper based in Leeds, I argue that there is more continuity than rupture in the historical legacy of the US atomic bombing of Hiroshima: On...
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On the ‘Cairo Declaration’ Fiasco
While the tendency of the CCP to insert itself at the main junctures of Chinese history in the 20th century is anything but new, there has been an increasing alignment with the earlier Republic of...
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Opium and National Humiliation: Another Commemoration
On June 8, 1944, the German Embassy in Tokyo sent a report back to the Auswärtiges Amt (Foreign Ministry). Unlike so many other files dealing with foreign affairs, at this particular dispatch showed no...
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On History and the “Comfort Women” Debate
As illuminated by recent anniversaries and commemorations, history is both a malleable plaything and an obsessive object of dispute for states in Northeast Asia. In Tokyo, Abe Shinzo and his Liberal...
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Report on Opium in China from the German Embassy in Tokyo, 1944
On June 8, 1944, the German Embassy in Tokyo sent a report back to the Auswärtiges Amt, or Foreign Ministry. Unlike so many other files dealing with foreign affairs, at this particular dispatch showed...
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Wartime History and Beijing’s Response to the New Defence Minister in Tokyo
In the wake of the Upper House elections in Japan, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has completed a reshuffling of his cabinet. As described by Japan hand Michael Cucek, it was not a particularly inspiring...
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Karl Haushofer and Japan (1): Geographers and Intellectual Links into the...
This is the first in a multi-post project on German geographers and intellectuals and their interaction with Japan in the 1930s and 1940s, with a nominal focus on Manchuria and the border region...
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Women and the Workplace in Japan, Abe and the Emperor, Japan and Brexit
I feel this story describes more my mother’s generation than my own — then again Japan never fails to shock on the gender front. Guess my own marriage is hardly typical, what with my Japanese husband...
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