Abstract
Let us imagine being an intelligent, inquisitive, and creative person in wartime Japan. What could one do to remain intellectually free? One might, for example, try to keep a low profile and guard one’s inner thoughts like gold and hope that it would all be over soon. More courageous people might speak up against the regime at the risk of imprisonment or even death. Yet the reality was slightly more nuanced, as many intelligent, sensitive, and well-meaning individuals opted to support Japan’s war.
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Notes
William Miles Fletcher III, The Search for a New Order: Intellectuals and Fascism in Prewar Japan (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982).
See Miyake Masaki, ed., Shōwashi no Gunbu to Seiji [The Military and Politics in the History of Showa] (Daiichi Hōki Shuppan, 1983), and Hata Ikuhiko, Gun Fashizumu Undōshi [History of Military Fascist Movement] (Kawade Shobo Shinsha, 1962).
Tanaka Sōgorō, Nihon Fasizumushi (Kawade Shobō Shinsha, 1972), 131–34.
Monbusho, ed., Kokutai no Hongi [Cardinal Principles of the National Polity], 1937.
For a classic analysis of the phenomenon of Tenkō, and its semantics, see Shunsuke Tsurumi, An Intellectual History of Wartime Japan 1931–1945 (London: KPI, 1986), 5–14.
Haruhiko Fukui, “Chapter 4: Postwar Politics, 1945–1973,” in The Cambridge History of Japan: Vol. 6, The Twentieth Century, ed. Peter Duus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 146, and
Kisaka Junichirō, Taiheiyō Sensō [The Pacific War] (Shōgakukan, 1994), 93.
Though the “Nanking Incident” has been a perennial issue, the polemics and emotional stakes with it have been markedly heightened by the publication of Iris Chang’s The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II (New York: Basic Books, 1997). David Askew’s “New Research on the Nanjing Incident” in The Japan Focus best summarizes the origins and the present state of this debate,.
Matsumoto Shigeharu, Shanhai Jidai: Jānarisuto no Kaisō [Shanghai Years: A Recollection of a Journalist], vol. 2 (Chukō Shinsho, 1974), 209.
For example, the ambivalent position of some Japanese Christian women during and after the war is explored in Karen Garner, “Global Feminism and Postwar Reconstruction: The World YWCA Visitation to Occupied Japan, 1947,” Journal of World History 15, no. 2 (June 2004): 191–227.
The benchmark study on Nomonhan is Alvin D. Coox, Nomonhan: Japan against Russia, 1939, 2 volumes, (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1985).
Marius B. Jansen, The Making of Modern Japan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 618.
Kenneth Colegrove, “The New Order in East Asia,” The Far Eastern Quarterly 1, no. 1 (November 1941): 6.
For an excellent account of this debate, see Gregory J. Kasza, “Fascism from Below? A Comparative Perspective on the Japanese Right, 1931–1936,” Journal of Contemporary History 19, no. 4 (October 1984): 607–29. Also on the theme of fascism, see
E. Bruce Reynolds, ed., Japan in the Fascist Era (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004). In Japanese, the benchmark study is Tanaka, Nihon Fashizumushi.
In addition to Fletcher, also see James B. Crowley, “Intellectuals as Visionaries of the New Asian Order,” in Dilemmas of Growth in Prewar Japan, ed. James William Morley (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1971), 319–73.
See Ian Buruma and Avishai Margalit, Occidentalism: The West in the Eyes of Its Enemies (New York: Penguin Press, 2004).
See Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney, Kamikaze, Cherry Blossoms, and Nationalisms (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002).
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© 2007 Eri Hotta
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Hotta, E. (2007). The China War and Its Pan-Asian Rescue. In: Pan-Asianism and Japan’s War 1931–1945. The Palgrave Macmillan Series in Transnational History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230609921_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230609921_6
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