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| Srl | Item |
| 1 |
ID:
103309
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| Publication |
2011.
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| Summary/Abstract |
China's long war against Japan from 1937 to 1945 has remained in the shadows of historiography until recently, both in China and abroad. In recent years, the opening of archives and a widening of the opportunity to discuss the more controversial aspects of the wartime period in China itself have restored World War II in China ('the War of Resistance to Japan') to a much more central place in historical interpretation. Among the areas that this issue covers are the new socio-political history of the war that seeks to restore rationality to the policies of the Guomindang (Nationalist) party, as well as a new understanding in post-war China of the meaning of the war against Japan in shaping Cold War and post-Cold War politics in China. In doing so, it seeks to make more explicit the link between themes that shaped the experience of World War II in China to the war's legacy in later politics and the uses of memory of the conflict in contemporary Chinese society.
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| 2 |
ID:
150575
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Studies of childhood in Japan frequently neglect to engage with the texts and images that young people produced, focusing instead on the adult imagination of youth. By looking solely at adults’ conceptions, we miss the importance of other children in forming their peers’ subjectivity. By analyzing the diaries, letters, postcards, yosegaki, and artwork of evacuated children during World War II, this article shows how adults framed the process of language acquisition, but also that children contributed to the creation of a shared language for describing their experiences. When children combined language learning with group experience, which was inscribed through collective writing practices, evacuees came to embrace a strong group identity. Grasping the relationship between collective experience, life-writing, and children’s culture is crucial to understanding how children perceived their world. Apart from these methodological considerations, dismissing the documents left behind by evacuees as mere recapitulations of adult discourse does the history of childhood a great disservice.
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| 3 |
ID:
150572
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Historical research on modern Japan has often given insufficient attention to the lives and experiences of children and young people. However, this situation is beginning to change, as historians start to exploit the rich documentary resources, including children’s diaries and letters, that have been collected by institutions across Japan. Japanese children’s responses to disaster and war are especially well documented, and the articles in this special issue begin to explore the potential of these resources. They illuminate different ideals of childhood in Japan during the years between 1920 and 1945, and show how tensions and conflicts between these ideals played out under the stresses of natural disaster and man-made catastrophe. In analysing documents written by children, one crucial methodological and theoretical question is how to assess the degree of agency that such documents show. Adult influences on children’s writing cannot be ignored, and in modern Japan, the education system was arguably the most important channel for such influences. However, we should remember that children also influence one another, and also that the writing of children is, as is of course the case with adults, powerfully shaped by contemporary cultural and social contexts.
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| 4 |
ID:
103319
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| Publication |
2011.
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| Summary/Abstract |
This paper examines the role that veterans played in the construction of historical memory narratives in mainland China, Taiwan, and Japan. I argue that veterans, who had long established a 'language community' with a particular way to speak about the war, found it difficult to communicate with post-war audiences that did not share that experience. The paper analyses six categories of 'memory writing' that veterans used to engage with memory debates: post-war diaries, 'testimonial literature', articles and literary works, surveys and oral histories, memoirs, and paratext. This study thus proposes that veterans do not avoid discussion of war, but can only be 'heard' by members of their language community, or by a post-war society that is prepared to 'listen' to their message with little mediation. This is a direct consequence of their experience of the war, and how they crafted their language community at that time.
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