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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
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
Defeat in 1945 brought an end to the Japanese empire and occupation by foreign powers for the first time in Japanese history. 1 Considering that Japan was the only non-Western country to possess colonies rather than being a colony itself, ‘de-imperialisation’ might be a more appropriate term than ‘decolonisation’ to describe Japanese developments after the Second World War. 2 Japan not only lost the territories throughout Southeast Asia that it had occupied during the late 1930s and early 1940s, but also colonies gained as spoils of war in the 1890s and early
In order to achieve the harmonious merging of the Japanese and Korean people, nothing was more necessary than the [1914] reform which placed both of them on an equal footing in the same administrative framework. 1 Just when the Japanese migration to Korea was soaring – eventually bringing about one of the largest new communities in the colonial world – the colonial authorities in Seoul curiously set out to dissolve it within a unified political body, Chôsen, which was neither Korea
Legacies of colonial empire are present in the demarcations of state borders, in architecture, on the pedestals of monuments, in books, and in other forms. Heroic men have not been forgotten but at the same time erstwhile insurgents rebelling against the colonial order are now celebrated as freedom fighters. Even commodities of daily life, such as coffee or rubber, bear the deep imprint of their colonial histories. This book presents imperial history as a history of interwoven, overlapping, partly contradictory memories in which non-European outlooks are considered on a more equal footing, alongside the recollections of former colonial masters. These include imperial architecture in nineteenth-century Algeria, the Koregaon obelisk in India, the Hungarian monument commemorating the thirteen martyrs of Arad, and Japan's twentieth-century post-war repositories of memories of war, empire, suffering and heroism. The heroes and villains of the imperial era include the Dutch colonial governor Jan Pietersz Coen; Robert Clive, the victor of Plassey; and the explorer and missionary David Livingstone. Other manifestations of memory include Imam Shamil who resisted the troops of Tsarist Russia. The book looks at the fragility and precariousness of repositories of imperial memory. It traces the cycles of obliviousness and remembrance, of suppression and political instrumentalisation that have accompanied the history of Mau Mau uprising in Kenya. The history of Berlin's Botanical Garden is intimately intertwined with Germany's colonial endeavours but this important aspect of the institution's history has remained all but suppressed.
How do countries memorialise their defeat? More specifically: how did imperial Japan deal with the cultural legacy the war bequeathed to the nation in terms of shrines, monumental celebrations of martial victory and a myriad architectural structures that could not be simply erased overnight like words in textbooks? The shift in post-war Japan’s