Abstract
Like other Japanese across the empire on August 15, 1945, Saitō Tomoya anticipated that this day would be anything but ordinary, perhaps even a turning point in the war and Japan’s imperial history. The media had alerted the empire of the unprecedented announcement to be made that day at noon by the emperor. All subjects were to gather around a radio at that time, which the vast majority did. Although rather allusive in mentioning the ‘end’ of the war or Japan’s ‘defeat’, the prerecorded message succeeded in achieving its primary purpose: to inform subjects of Japan’s decision to accept the Allied terms of surrender as dictated by the Potsdam Declaration. Saitō recalls the imperial message that they must ‘pave the way for a grand peace … by enduring the unendurable and suffering what is insufferable’1 as sufficient in convincing listeners of the decisive turn of events.2
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Notes
‘Imperial Rescript’ quoted from translation found in M Jansen, The Making of Modern Japan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), pp. 660–1.
Saitō Tomoya, P’yŏngyang de sugoshita 12 nen no hibi (Twelve Years in P’yŏngyang) (Tokyo: Kōyo shuppan, 2009), p. 73.
Ian Nish, ‘Regaining Confidence — Japan after the Loss of Empire’, Journal of Contemporary History 15, No. 1 (January 1980): 181–95.
This was even more the case after Germany’s surrender in May 1945 as peoples relocated over the course of the war made the often long land journey across the continent to either return to their homelands or search for a new one. Asian population movement was frustrated by most people having to travel by ship, which slowed the pace and reduced the inter- and inner-group violence. For European examples see B Shepard, The Long Road Home: The Aftermath of the Second World War (New York: Alfred A Knopf, 2010);
K Lowe, Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II (New York: St Martin’s Press, 2012).
RH Spector examines the continuity of the battles that raged throughout the former Japanese empire in the ‘postwar’ period in his In the Ruins of Empire: The Japanese Surrender and the Battle for Postwar Asia (New York: Random House, 2007). For discussions on the ashes of war in Japan see R Rosenbaum and Y Claremont (eds), Legacies of the Asia-Pacific War: The Yakeato Generation (London and New York: Routledge, 2011).
There are too many texts on the Allied Occupation to name here, but some key ones include JW Dower, Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II (New York: WW Norton & Company, 1999);
Takamae Eiji, Inside GHQ: The Allied Occupation of Japan and its Legacy (New York: Continuum, 2002);
I Nish, The British Commonwealth and the Allied Occupation of Japan, 1945–1952: Personal Encounters and Government Assessments (Leiden: Brill, 2013);
and R Gerster, Travels in Atomic Sunshine: Australia and the Occupation of Japan (Melbourne: Scribe, 2008).
Other such studies include: JW Dower, ‘The Useful War’, in JW Dower (ed.), Japan in War and Peace: Selected Essays (New York: The New Press, 1993), pp. 9–32;
chapters in ME Caprio and Yoneyuki Sugita (eds), Democracy in Occupied Japan: The US Occupation and Japanese Politics and Society (London: Routledge, 2007);
and A Heylen and S Sommers (eds), Becoming Taiwan: From Colonialism to Democracy (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2010).
For Korea see B Cumings, The Origins of the Korean War: Liberation and the Emergence of Separate Regimes, 1945–1947 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981);
C Armstrong, The North Korean Revolution, 1945–1950 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003);
BB Oh (ed.), Korea Under the American Military Government, 1945–1948 (Westport: Praeger, 2002);
and S Kim, Everyday Life in the North Korean Revolution, 1945–1950 (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2013).
For a longer discussion about defining ‘military occupation’, see C de Matos and R Ward, ‘Analysing Gendered Occupation Power’, in C de Matos and R Ward (eds), Gender, Power and Military Occupation: Asia Pacific and the Middle East since 1945 (New York: Routledge, 2012), pp. 2–4.
For a history of the comfort women, see C Sarah So, The Comfort Women: Sexual Violence and Postcolonial Memory in Korea and Japan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008);
for military conscription see B Palmer, Fighting for the Enemy: Koreans in Japan’s War, 1937–1945 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2013)
and TT Fujitani, Race for Empire: Koreans as Japanese and Japanese as Americans during World War II (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011);
for labor mobilization see KC Kawashima, The Proletarian Gamble: Korean Workers in Interwar Japan (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2009)
and M Driscoll, Absolute Erotic, Absolute Grotesque: The Living, Dead, and Undead in Japan’s Imperialism, 1895–1945 (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2010).
EW Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1979). Said’s work has encouraged similar discussions on other colonized peoples.
For the American views of Filipinos see EM Holt, Colonizing Filipinas: Nineteenth-Century Representations of the Philippines in Western Historiography (Manila: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 2002).
L Young, Japan’s Total Empire: Manchuria and the Culture of Wartime Imperialism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998).
S Kovner, Occupying Power: Sex Workers and Servicemen in Postwar Japan (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012).
For colonial occupation development see LTS Ching, Becoming ‘Japanese’: Colonial Taiwan and the Politics of Identity Formation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001)
and ME Caprio, Japanese Assimilation of Japanese (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2009).
See also B Yecies and Ae-Gyung Shim, Korea’s Occupied Cinemas, 1893–1948 (New York and London: Routledge, 2011).
Zhou Fohai’s case resembles that of France’s Pierre Laval, whose negotiation with Nazi Germany, he contended, was conducted with the intention of France suffering ‘as little as possible’. See JK Brody, The Trial of Pierre Laval: Defining Treason, Collaboration and Patriotism in World War II France (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 2010), p. 153.
See chapters in I Deák, JJ Gross and T Judt (eds), The Politics of Retribution in Europe: World War II and its Aftermath (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000).
See G Figal, ‘Making and Marketing Self-histories of Showa among the Masses in Postwar Japan’, Journal of Asian Studies 55, No. 4 (November 1996): 902–33. One such history was Senō Kappa, Shōnen H [Boy H] (Tokyo: Kodansha, 1997) that was later made into a popular motion picture.
A similar approach is used in Yoko Kawashima Watkin’s So Far from the Bamboo Grove (Sag Harbor, NY: Beech Tree, 2008), which tells the story of the author’s harrowing journey from northern Korea to Japan. Its adoption by school districts raised controversy among Koreans who viewed it as refocusing its readers’ attention away from the true victims, the Korean people that Kawashima Watkin’s people had initially violated.
See Naoko Shibusawa, America’s Geisha Ally: Reimagining the Japanese Enemy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006).
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© 2015 Mark E. Caprio and Christine de Matos
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Caprio, M.E., de Matos, C. (2015). Before and after Defeat: Crossing the Great 1945 Divide. In: de Matos, C., Caprio, M.E. (eds) Japan as the Occupier and the Occupied. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137408112_1
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