Socialist Magnanimity Kushner, Barak
Men to Devils, Devils to Men,
01/2015
Book Chapter
Unlike the kmt’s goal of merely seek ing justice, Communist China’s aim for its Japanese prisoners—in the words of the prisoners, Chinese guards, and Beijing bureaucrats—was to make war criminals ...reflect on their crimes and to turn them from “devils back into men.” Very rarely in KMT special military tribunals or BC class trials in other venues did Japanese soldiers admit their crimes, but in the 1956 CCP trials amazingly every single Japanese prisoner did. Suzuki Hiraku had never been an ideal prisoner of the Chinese Communists, but he had studied and pondered his crimes over many years
Taiwan Kushner, Barak
Men to Devils, Devils to Men,
01/2015
Book Chapter
The u.s. government often cozied up to its former enemies and found them crucial employment when technological exigencies of the Cold War demanded.¹ The story of American recruitment of Nazi ...scientists is well known, so it should come as no surprise that the Chinese Nationalists (KMT) were equally culpable of patriotic duplicity when it came to the former Japanese enemy.² The Americans marshaled a special military program, Operation Paperclip, to recruit former Nazi scientists to the United States not only to improve American technology but also to keep it from leaking into the USSR and the United Kingdom.³ While the
Devil in the Details Kushner, Barak
Men to Devils, Devils to Men,
01/2015
Book Chapter
In somewhat the reverse manner in which Japanese struggled to save face after defeat, discourse about the Chinese victory over Japan is exceedingly important to con temporary mainland Chinese ...identity and national pride.¹ These potent discussions continue to provide a significant counterweight to history and a proud sense of national political purpose. Beijing University professor Xu Yong wrote in an online discussion in 2002 on thePeople’s Dailywebsite, “Victory in the war of resistance against Japan is the greatest and most important site of victory against an aggressive war in the 19th and 20th centuries.”² A Chinese academy of
Unwarranted attention Barak Kushner
Humour in Chinese Life and Culture,
08/2013
Book Chapter
Humour is as much a cultural force in China as it is in other East Asian regions, although in the English-speaking world we might not always regard the offerings as “funny” in a strict laugh-out-loud ...sense. Humour in East Asia, as elsewhere, is often clever and instructive, but it can also be biting, sarcastic and mean-spirited. As a deep-seated barometer of social attitudes, humour is an informative historical set of values through which to examine the last century of Sino-Japan relations. For two nations as geographically proximate as China and Japan, we might well expect the old adage of the
...in the mid 1980s, Japanese history itself was put on trial. According to Takahashi, contemporary Japan is trying to recreate the triad of the Japanese military, patriotic education and Yasukuni. ......this experience in Japan through Yasukuni and the state efforts, where the "grief of the bereaved families was to be converted into feelings of joy", has unfortunately come to mitigate the grief of the personal loss, in Takahashi's estimation (p. 120). ...Yasukuni helps maintain a positive attitude toward the war, glorifies death and "counterfeits history". ...Breen directs us toward the French critic Eric Santher, who writes of French postwar war museums that fail because they "suppress the trauma of the war experience, of defeat, of occupation and of collaboration", p. 160.
