Recasting Red Cultureturns a critical eye on the influential proletarian cultural movement that flourished in 1920s and 1930s Japan. This was a diverse, cosmopolitan, and highly contested moment in ...Japanese history when notions of political egalitarianism were being translated into cultural practices specific to the Japanese experience. Both a political and historiographical intervention, the book offers a fascinating account of the passions-and antimonies-that animated one of the most admirable intellectual and cultural movements of Japan's twentieth century, and argues that proletarian literature, cultural workers, and institutions fundamentally enrich our understanding of Japanese culture.What sustained the proletarian movement's faith in the idea that art and literature were indispensable to the task of revolution? How did the movement manage to enlist artists, teachers, and scientist into its ranks, and what sorts of contradictions arose in the merging of working-class and bourgeois cultures?Recasting Red Cultureasks these and other questions as it historicizes proletarian Japan at the intersection of bourgeois aesthetics, radical politics, and a flourishing modern print culture. Drawing parallels with the experiences of European revolutionaries, the book vividly details how cultural activists "recast" forms of modern culture into practices commensurate with the goals of revolution.Weaving over a dozen translated fairytales, poems, and short stories into his narrative, Samuel Perry offers a fundamentally new approach to studying revolutionary culture. By examining the margins of the proletarian cultural movement, Perry effectively redefines its center as he closely reads and historicizes proletarian children's culture, avant-garde "wall fiction," and a literature that bears witness to Japan's fraught relationship with its Korean colony. Along the way, he shows how proletarian culture opened up new critical spaces in the intersections of class, popular culture, childhood, gender, and ethnicity.
After camp Robinson, Greg
2012., 20120108, 2012, c2012., 2012-02-07
eBook
This book illuminates various aspects of a central but unexplored area of American history: the midcentury Japanese American experience. A vast and ever-growing literature exists, first on the entry ...and settlement of Japanese immigrants in the United States at the turn of the 20th century, then on the experience of the immigrants and their American-born children during World War II. Yet the essential question, "What happened afterwards?" remains all but unanswered in historical literature. Excluded from the wartime economic boom and scarred psychologically by their wartime ordeal, the former camp inmates struggled to remake their lives in the years that followed. This volume consists of a series of case studies that shed light on various developments relating to Japanese Americans in the aftermath of their wartime confinement, including resettlement nationwide, the mental and physical readjustment of the former inmates, and their political engagement, most notably in concert with other racialized and ethnic minority groups.
Following Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, the U.S. government rounded up more than one hundred thousand Japanese Americans and sent them to internment camps. One of those internees was ...Charles Kikuchi. In thousands of diary pages, he documented his experiences in the camps, his resettlement in Chicago and drafting into the Army on the eve of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and his postwar life as a social worker in New York City. Kikuchi's diaries bear witness to a watershed era in American race relations, and expose both the promise and the hypocrisy of American democracy.
Jim and Jap Crowfollows Kikuchi's personal odyssey among fellow Japanese American intellectuals, immigrant activists, Chicago School social scientists, everyday people on Chicago's South Side, and psychologically scarred veterans in the hospitals of New York. The book chronicles a remarkable moment in America's history in which interracial alliances challenged the limits of the elusive democratic ideal, and in which the nation was forced to choose between civil liberty and the fearful politics of racial hysteria. It was an era of world war and the atomic bomb, desegregation in the military but Jim and Jap Crow elsewhere in America, and a hopeful progressivism that gave way to Cold War paranoia.
Jim and Jap Crowlooks at Kikuchi's life and diaries as a lens through which to observe the possibilities, failures, and key conversations in a dynamic multiracial America.
The seven essays that comprise this volume address the actual processes by which a discreet number of terms in modern Chinese and Japanese came into being, how they outdistanced all competitors, and ...the persons and texts involved in the process.
Questo volume fa seguito al International Festival Japan Contemporary Arts in Venice, The Aesthetics of Emptiness, organizzato nel 2022 dal Conservatorio di Musica Benedetto Marcello, dal ...Dipartimento di Studi sull’Asia e sull’Africa Mediterranea dell’Università Ca’ Foscari e dall’Accademia di Belle Arti di Venezia. La struttura del volume è pensata per far rivivere al lettore l’esperienza del Festival, anche attraverso contenuti multimediali, e condurlo ad approfondire alcuni dei temi emersi. Questo lavoro – fatto di suoni, silenzi, vuoti, pieni, presenze, assenze – è dedicato alla memoria di Bonaventura Ruperti.
Nisei Soldiers Break Their Silence is a compelling story of courage, community, endurance, and reparation. It shares the experiences of Japanese Americans (Nisei) who served in the U.S. Army during ...World War II, fighting on the front lines in Italy and France, serving as linguists in the South Pacific, and working as cooks and medics. The soldiers were from Hood River, Oregon, where their families were landowners and fruit growers. Town leaders, including veterans' groups, attempted to prevent their return after the war and stripped their names from the local war memorial. All of the soldiers were American citizens, but their parents were Japanese immigrants and had been imprisoned in camps as a consequence of Executive Order 9066. The racist homecoming that the Hood River Japanese American soldiers received was decried across the nation.
Linda Tamura, who grew up in Hood River and whose father was a veteran of the war, conducted extensive oral histories with the veterans, their families, and members of the community. She had access to hundreds of recently uncovered letters and documents from private files of a local veterans' group that led the campaign against the Japanese American soldiers. This book also includes the little known story of local Nisei veterans who spent 40 years appealing their convictions for insubordination.
Watch the book trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hHMcFdmixLk
Assimilating Seoul Henry, Todd A
2014., 20140307, 2014, 2014-02-15, Volume:
12
eBook
Assimilating Seoul, the first book-length study written in English about Seoul during the colonial period, challenges conventional nationalist paradigms by revealing the intersection of Korean and ...Japanese history in this important capital. Through microhistories of Shinto festivals, industrial expositions, and sanitation campaigns, Todd A. Henry offers a transnational account that treats the city’s public spaces as "contact zones," showing how residents negotiated pressures to become loyal, industrious, and hygienic subjects of the Japanese empire. Unlike previous, top-down analyses, this ethnographic history investigates modalities of Japanese rule as experienced from below. Although the colonial state set ambitious goals for the integration of Koreans, Japanese settler elites and lower-class expatriates shaped the speed and direction of assimilation by bending government initiatives to their own interests and identities. Meanwhile, Korean men and women of different classes and generations rearticulated the terms and degree of their incorporation into a multiethnic polity. Assimilating Seoul captures these fascinating responses to an empire that used the lure of empowerment to disguise the reality of alienation.
Unthinking Collaboration uncovers the little-known history of
Japanese Americans who weathered the years of World War II on
Japanese soil. Severed from the country of their birth when the
attack on ...Pearl Harbor abruptly halted all passenger traffic on the
Pacific, these Nisei faced the years of total war as members of the
Japanese populace, yet as the target of anti-American propaganda
and suspicion. Whereas their white American counterparts were
sequestered by Japanese authorities, placed on house arrest, or
sent home on exchange ships during the war, American Nisei in Japan
were left to contribute to the war effort alongside their Japanese
neighbors as soldiers, cryptographers, interpreters, and in farming
and manufacturing. When the dust of air raid bombings cleared, many
such Nisei transitioned into roles in service of the Allied
occupation and its goals of democratization and demilitarization.
As censors, translators, interpreters, and administrative staff,
they played integral roles in facilitating American-Japanese
interaction, as well as in shaping policies and public opinion in
the postwar era. Weaving archival data with oral histories,
personal narratives, material culture, and fiction, Unthinking
Collaboration emphasizes the heterogeneity of Japanese immigrant
experiences, and sheds light on broader issues of identity, race,
and performance of individuals growing up in a bicultural or
multicultural context. By distancing "collaboration" from its
default elision with moral judgment, and by incorporating
contemporary findings from psychology and behavioral science about
the power of the subconscious mind to influence human behavior,
author A. Carly Buxton offers an alternative approach to
history-one that posits historical subjects as deeply embedded in
the realities of their physical and discursive environment. Walking
beside Nisei as they navigate their everyday lives in transwar
Japan, readers "un-think" long-held assumptions about the actions
and decisions of individuals as represented in history. The result
is an ambitious historical study that speaks to readers who are
interested in broader questions of race and trust, empire-building,
World War II and its legacy on both the Western and Pacific fronts,
and to all who consider questions of loyalty, treason,
assimilation, and collaboration.
On August 8, 1942, 302 people arrived by train at Vocation, Wyoming, to become the first Japanese American residents of what the U.S. government called the Relocation Center at Heart Mountain. In the ...following weeks and months, they would be joined by some 10,000 of the more than 120,000 people of Japanese descent, two-thirds of them U.S. citizens, incarcerated as “domestic enemy aliens” during World War II. Heart Mountain became a town with workplaces, social groups, and political alliances—in short, networks. These networks are the focus of Saara Kekki’s Japanese Americans at Heart Mountain. Interconnections between people are the foundation of human societies. Exploring the creation of networks at Heart Mountain, as well as movement to and from the camp between 1942 and 1945, this book offers an unusually detailed look at the formation of a society within the incarcerated community, specifically the manifestation of power, agency, and resistance. Kekki constructs a dynamic network model of all of Heart Mountain’s residents and their interconnections—family, political, employment, social, and geospatial networks—using historical “big data” drawn from the War Relocation Authority and narrative sources, including the camp newspaper Heart Mountain Sentinel. For all the inmates, life inevitably went on: people married, had children, worked, and engaged in politics. Because of the duration of the incarceration, many became institutionalized and unwilling to leave the camps when the time came. Yet most individuals, Kekki finds, took charge of their own destinies despite the injustice and looked forward to the day when Heart Mountain was behind them. Especially timely in its implications for debates over immigration and assimilation, Japanese Americans at Heart Mountain presents a remarkable opportunity to reconstruct a community created under duress within the larger American society, and to gain new insight into an American experience largely lost to official history.
