Japan's invasion of Manchuria in September of 1931 initiated a new phase of brutal occupation and warfare in Asia and the Pacific. It forwarded the project of remaking the Japanese state along ...technocratic and fascistic lines and creating a self-sufficient Asian bloc centered on Japan and its puppet state of Manchukuo. InPlanning for Empire, Janis Mimura traces the origins and evolution of this new order and the ideas and policies of its chief architects, the reform bureaucrats. The reform bureaucrats pursued a radical, authoritarian vision of modern Japan in which public and private spheres were fused, ownership and control of capital were separated, and society was ruled by technocrats.
Mimura shifts our attention away from reactionary young officers to state planners-reform bureaucrats, total war officers, new zaibatsu leaders, economists, political scientists, engineers, and labor party leaders. She shows how empire building and war mobilization raised the stature and influence of these middle-class professionals by calling forth new government planning agencies, research bureaus, and think tanks to draft Five Year industrial plans, rationalize industry, mobilize the masses, streamline the bureaucracy, and manage big business. Deftly examining the political battles and compromises of Japanese technocrats in their bid for political power and Asian hegemony,Planning for Empireoffers a new perspective on Japanese fascism by revealing its modern roots in the close interaction of technology and right-wing ideology.
The Japanese Wartime Empire, 1931-1945 Peter Duus, Ramon H. Myers, Mark R. Peattie / Peter Duus, Ramon H. Myers, Mark R. Peattie
2021, 1996, c1996., 2021-07-13, 19960101
eBook
With this book the editors complete the three-volume series on modern Japanese colonialism and imperialism that began with The Japanese Colonial Empire, 1895-1945 (Princeton, 1983) and The Japanese ...Informal Empire in China, 1895-1937 (Princeton, 1989). The Japanese military takeover in Manchuria between 1931 and 1932 was a critical turning point in East Asian history. It marked the first surge of Japanese aggression beyond the boundaries of its older colonial empire and set Japan on a collision course with China and Western colonial powers from 1937 through 1945. These essays seek to illuminate some of the more significant processes and institutions during the period when the empire was at war: the creation of a Japanese-dominated East Asian economic bloc centered in northeast Asia, the mobilization of human and physical resources in the older established areas of Japanese colonial rule, and the penetration and occupation of Southeast Asia.Introduced by Peter Duus, the volume contains four sections: Japan's Wartime Empire and the Formal Colonies (Carter J. Eckert and Wan-yao Chou), Japan's Wartime Empire and Northeast Asia (Louise Young, Y. Tak Matsusaka, Ramon H. Myers, and Takafusa Nakamura), Japan's Wartime Empire and Southeast Asia (Mark R. Peattie, E. Bruce Reynolds, and Ken'ichi Goto), and Japan's Wartime Empire in Other Perspectives (George Hicks, Hideo Kobayashi, and L. H. Gann).
In War and Revolution in South China, Edward Rhoads recounts his childhood and early teenage years during the Sino-Japanese War and the early postwar years. Rhoads came from a biracial family. His ...father was an American professor while his Chinese mother was a typist and stenographer. In the late 1930s and the 1940s, the Rhoads family lived through the turbulent years in southern China and Hong Kong. The book follows Rhoads’ childhood in Guangzhou, his family’s evacuation to Hong Kong, his father’s internment and repatriation to the United States, and his and his mother’s flight to Free China. He recalls his reunion with family members in northern Guangdong Province in 1943, their retreat to China’s wartime capital of Chongqing, where his father worked for the American government, and how they returned to Guangzhou after the war. The Rhoads family then witnessed the socioeconomic recovery in the city and the regime change in 1949. The book ends with their departure from China to the United States in 1951, a year and a half after the Communist revolution. The book fills an important gap in the scholarship by examining the impact of the Sino-Japanese War in southern China from the perspective of one family. Rhoads reveals that the war in this region, while often neglected by scholars, was in fact no less turbulent than it was in northern and central China. He combines autobiography with serious historical research to reconstruct the lives of his family, consulting a large number of archival documents, private correspondence, and scholarly literature to produce a rare study that is both scholarly and accessible.
Recounts the social, racial, and political dramas that attended the deployment of a major Deep South infantry division, both at home and abroad Chris Rein's study of the Thirty-First Infantry ...Division, known officially as the "Dixie Division," illuminates the complexities in mobilizing American reserve units to meet the global emergency during World War II. Citizen soldiers from Alabama, Florida, Louisiana, and Mississippi formed the core of one of the ninety infantry divisions the Army successfully activated, trained, equipped, and deployed to defeat fascism in Europe and race-based imperialism in the Pacific. But the Army mobilized ideas along with manpower, and soldiers from across the Jim Crow South brought their racial ideas and views with them into the ranks and then exported these across the South Pacific. If the American victory in World War II represents a "double victory" over racism abroad and at home, the division's service is a cogent reminder that the same powerful force could pull in opposite directions.While focused on the division's operational service during the war years, Mobilizing the South: The Thirty-First Infantry Division, Race, and World War II spans the division's entire service from 1917 to 1967, from an interwar period highlighted by responses to natural disasters and facing down lynch mobs through a postwar service that included protecting activists in the most important struggles of the civil rights era. But the division's extended service as a training establishment highlights lingering resentments and tensions within the American military system between the active and reserve components. Despite this, the division performed well in General Douglas MacArthur's island-hopping campaign across the South Pacific. Using official records as well as details drawn from correspondence and oral histories, Rein captures how individual soldiers framed their exposure to a larger world, and how service alongside African American, New Guinean, and Filipino units both reinforced and modified views on race and postwar American society.
In 1937, Japan blundered into a debilitating war with China, beginning with a minor incident near Peking (now Beijing) that quickly escalated. The Japanese won significant battles and captured the ...capital, Nanking, after a horrific massacre of its citizens. Chiang Kai-shek, China's acknowledged leader, would not surrender--each side believed it could win a war of attrition. The U.S. sided with China, primarily because of President Roosevelt's personal bias in their favor. At first proposing an ineffectual "quarantine" approach to Japan, he eventually took active steps to block Japanese aggression. Drawing on a wealth of sources including interviews with key players, from soldiers to diplomats, this history traces America's unexpected and unpopular involvement in an Asian conflict, and the growing recognition of Japan's threat to world peace and the inevitability of war.
This compelling book provides a rare glimpse into the heart of wartime China. Kathryn Meyer draws us into the perilous world of the Garden of Grand Vision, a ramshackle structure where a floating ...population of thousands found shelter from the freezing Siberian winter. They had come to the northern city of Harbin to find opportunity or to escape the turmoil of China in civil war. Instead they found despair. As the author vividly describes, corpses littered the halls waiting for the daily offal truck to cart the bodies away, vermin infested the walls, and relief came in the form of addiction. Yet the Garden also supported a vibrant informal economy. Rag pickers and thieves recycled everything from rat pelts to cigarette butts. Prostitutes entertained clients in the building’s halls and back alleys. These people lived at the very bottom of Chinese society, yet rumors that Chinese spies hid among the residents concerned the Japanese authorities. For this population lived in Manchukuo, the first Japanese conquest in what became the Second World War. Thus, three Japanese police officers were dispatched into the underworld of occupied China to investigate crime and vice in the Harbin slums while their military leaders dragged Japan deeper into the Pacific War. While following these policemen, the reader discovers a remarkable and unexpected view of World War II in East Asia. Instead of recounting battles and military strategy, this book explores the margins of a violent and entrepreneurial society, the struggles of an occupying police force to maintain order, and the underbelly of Japanese espionage. Drawing on the author’s years of rediscovering the historical trail in Manchuria and research based on top-secret Japanese military documents and Chinese memoirs, this book offers a unique and powerful social and cultural history of a forgotten world.
Between 1932 and 1945, more than 320,000 Japanese emigrated to Manchuria in northeast China with the dream of becoming land-owning farmers. Following the Soviet invasion of Manchuria and Japan’s ...surrender in August 1945, their dream turned into a nightmare. Since the late 1980s, popular Japanese conceptions have overlooked the disastrous impact of colonization and resurrected the utopian justification for creating Manchukuo, as the puppet state was known. This re-remembering, Mariko Tamanoi argues, constitutes a source of friction between China and Japan today. Memory Maps tells the compelling story of both the promise of a utopia and the tragic aftermath of its failure. An anthropologist, Tamanoi approaches her investigation of Manchuria’s colonization and collapse as a complex "history of the present," which in postcolonial studies refers to the examination of popular memory of past colonial relations of power. To mitigate this complexity, she has created four "memory maps" that draw on the recollections of former Japanese settlers, their children who were left in China and later repatriated, and Chinese who lived under Japanese rule in Manchuria. The first map presents the oral histories of farmers who emigrated from Nagano, Japan, to Manchuria between 1932 and 1945 and returned home after the war. Interviewees were asked to remember the colonization of Manchuria during Japan’s age of empire. Hikiage-mono (autobiographies) make up the second map. These are written memories of repatriation from the Soviet invasion to some time between 1946 and 1949. The third memory map is entitled "Orphans’ Voices." It examines the oral and written memories of the children of Japanese settlers who were left behind at the war’s end but returned to Japan after relations between China and Japan were normalized in 1972. The memories of Chinese who lived the age of empire in Manchuria make up the fourth map. This map also includes the memories of Chinese couples who adopted the abandoned children of Japanese settlers as well as the children themselves, who renounced their Japanese nationality and chose to remain in China. In the final chapter, Tamanoi considers theoretical questions of "the state" and the relationship between place, voice, and nostalgia. She also attempts to integrate the four memory maps in the transnational space covering Japan and China. Both fastidious in dealing with theoretical questions and engagingly written, Memory Maps contributes not only to the empirical study of the Japanese empire and its effects on the daily lives of Japanese and Chinese, but also to postcolonial theory as it applies to the use of memory.
Strategic Instincts Johnson, Dominic D. P
2020, 2020-09-08, Letnik:
171
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"A very timely book."—Anne-Marie Slaughter, CEO of New America How cognitive biases can guide good decision making in politics and international relations A widespread assumption in political science ...and international relations is that cognitive biases—quirks of the brain we all share as human beings—are detrimental and responsible for policy failures, disasters, and wars. In Strategic Instincts, Dominic Johnson challenges this assumption, explaining that these nonrational behaviors can actually support favorable results in international politics and contribute to political and strategic success. By studying past examples, he considers the ways that cognitive biases act as "strategic instincts, " lending a competitive edge in policy decisions, especially under conditions of unpredictability and imperfect information.Drawing from evolutionary theory and behavioral sciences, Johnson looks at three influential cognitive biases—overconfidence, the fundamental attribution error, and in-group/out-group bias. He then examines the advantageous as well as the detrimental effects of these biases through historical case studies of the American Revolution, the Munich Crisis, and the Pacific campaign in World War II. He acknowledges the dark side of biases—when confidence becomes hubris, when attribution errors become paranoia, and when group bias becomes prejudice. Ultimately, Johnson makes a case for a more nuanced understanding of the causes and consequences of cognitive biases and argues that in the complex world of international relations, strategic instincts can, in the right context, guide better performance. Strategic Instincts shows how an evolutionary perspective can offer the crucial next step in bringing psychological insights to bear on foundational questions in international politics.
Japan's total empire Young, Louise
1998., 19971202, 1998, 1999, c1998., 1998-01-01, Letnik:
8
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In this first social and cultural history of Japan's construction of Manchuria, Louise Young offers an incisive examination of the nature of Japanese imperialism. Focusing on the domestic impact of ...Japan's activities in Northeast China between 1931 and 1945, Young considers "metropolitan effects" of empire building: how people at home imagined and experienced the empire they called Manchukuo. Contrary to the conventional assumption that a few army officers and bureaucrats were responsible for Japan's overseas expansion, Young finds that a variety of organizations helped to mobilize popular support for Manchukuo—the mass media, the academy, chambers of commerce, women's organizations, youth groups, and agricultural cooperatives—leading to broad-based support among diverse groups of Japanese. As the empire was being built in China, Young shows, an imagined Manchukuo was emerging at home, constructed of visions of a defensive lifeline, a developing economy, and a settler's paradise.
Mere months before the attack on Pearl Harbor, President Franklin D. Roosevelt sent a volunteer group of American airmen to the Far East, convinced that supporting Chinese resistance against the ...continuing Japanese invasion would be crucial to an eventual Allied victory in World War II. Within two weeks of that fateful Sunday in December 1941, the American Volunteer Group—soon to become known as the legendary "Flying Tigers"—went into action. For three and a half years, the volunteers and the Army Air Force airmen who followed them fought in dangerous aerial duels over East Asia. Audaciously led by master tactician Claire Lee Chennault, daring pilots such as David Lee "Tex" Hill and George B. "Mac" McMillan led their men in desperate combat against enemy air forces and armies despite being outnumbered and outgunned. Aviators who fell in combat and survived the crash or bailout faced the terrifying reality of being lost and injured in unfamiliar territory. Historian Daniel Jackson, himself a combat-tested pilot, recounts the stories of downed aviators who attempted to evade capture by the Japanese in their bid to return to Allied territory. He reveals the heroism of these airmen was equaled, and often exceeded, by the Chinese soldiers and civilians who risked their lives to return them safely to American bases. Based on thorough archival research and filled with compelling personal narratives from memoirs, wartime diaries, and dozens of interviews with veterans, this vital work offers an important new perspective on the Flying Tigers and the history of World War II in China.
