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A bamboo curtain descended on Upper Burma in May 1942. Little news filtered in or out. The warp and weft of everyday civilian life during the Japanese occupation is something of a mystery. In 1945 Rev. Stanley Vincent compiled an important booklet, Out of Great Tribulation , containing the wartime recollections of Burmese Methodists. 1 Two army chaplains (Acheson and Brown-Moffett) wrote brief accounts of separate visits they had made to the Chin States during 1944. In August 1945 Rev. U Po Tun wrote a long
The image of Japan does not immediately evoke that of a colonial power. This may have to do with Japan’s position as a latecomer into the club of predominantly European colonisers. Another explanation lies in the fact that its power and influence were not felt beyond Asia and did not seriously challenge the political and military supremacy of Western powers until the late 1930s. Yet Japan has a fairly long history of colonialism, which started within its own realm, and of population settlement abroad. Historians of
We have it on good authority that, at least up to 1900, the images of, and attitudes to, Japan commonly held in the Western world did not amount to ‘taking Japan seriously’. Whether Japan’s astonishing successes in arms and industry thereafter dispelled the ‘cherry-petal exoticism’ which characterised Victorian perspectives on the Island Empire is less certain. Some
of the Jewish and the Japanese communities of Harbin in the three decades before the Manchurian Incident. Harbin enjoys a unique place in East Asian history. Unlike the great majority of other cities in contemporary China, Harbin does not have a history stretching back hundreds, even thousands, of years. 1 It was constructed at the very end of the nineteenth century by Russian engineers and city planners, and it became something of a melting pot, a city of pioneers. It was a place where even the Chinese were newcomers. As
purposes. In the case of the Japanese empire, an understanding of the status of its colonial citizens under extraterritoriality in China illuminates many facets of imperialism in East Asia. This chapter focuses primarily on Japan’s imperialist advantages that resulted from the anomalous position of its colonised subjects, who, by moving a short distance into treaty port China, also moved into the lower and contradictory ranks of the Great Power colonisers. The categorisation and instrumental use of different types of colonial
v 8 v Hiroshima/Nagasaki, civil rights and anti-war protest in Japan’s Cold War Ann Sherif Twenty years after the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings, the rest of the world had come to regard nuclear destruction as a function of the imagination, visually and rhetorically preparing for apocalypse, defining the looming threat as a permanent feature of modern life. In Hiroshima and Nagasaki, that global imagination co-existed uncomfortably with the living memories, the social challenges, and visible and hidden scars of the hibakusha (survivors of the atomic bombings
This chapter explores the treatment of alcoholism in post-World War II Japan, focusing on drug treatment, rehabilitation programmes and self-help groups. It looks at hospital-centred medical approaches as well as patients’ and their families’ initiatives in dealing with alcohol-related problems, such as Alcoholics Anonymous (AA), and Japanese-style treatments such as Danshukai and Naikan. Alcoholism does not appear to have drawn much government and medical attention until the second half of the
7 Work and activity in mental hospitals in modern Japan, c. 1868–2000 Akira Hashimoto Historians have argued that the modernisation of Japan has not been a simple case of Westernisation, but that in the process of forming a nation state equal to Western countries, modernisation has been intertwined with Japanese nationalism.1 What is more, the Western concept of modernity itself has been questioned.2 Yet, broadly speaking, the course of Japanese modernisation can be mapped in terms of two major sociopolitical changes, both of which were influenced by Western
8 Patient work and family care at Iwakura, Japan, c. 1799–1970 Osamu Nakamura Iwakura is a village located seven kilometres northeast of Kyoto, the ancient capital of Japan. It has a famous legend. During the reign of Emperor Go-Sanjo (reigned 1068–72), a princess who was afflicted with a mental condition was cured after praying to the image of Buddha at Daiunji-Temple in Iwakura and drinking water from the temple well.1 This is a well-known story that highlights the connection between Iwakura and mental illness. It was not uncommon for those suffering from a
This chapter examines the media war unleashed on the Chinese population by the forces of Japan and China during the Second Sino-Japanese War of 1937–1945; comprising one of the essential steps in Japan's military expansion and imperialist strategy. It opens with the Marco Polo Bridge Incident in 1937, which precipitated the official outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War, and ends with the surrender of Japan at the end of the Pacific War (1941–1945). Precisely, this chapter compares and contrasts mass-produced wartime cartoon posters