Once the seemingly invincible conquerors of nearly all of East Asia, today relatively little is known of the exact weapons, uniforms, and lifestyle of World War II Japanese soldiers (the Heitai). In this lavishly illustrated book, readers and historians alike can finally glimpse the precise personal effects of the Imperial infantryman. Thanks to a collection carefully nurtured through the decades, every aspect of the Heitai's daily existence is shown in detail with superb color photography accompanied by informative descriptions. Items range from weapons to clothing (both tropical and arctic), eating implements, communications equipment, awards, helmets, insignia, visual devices, gas masks, canteens, cameras, tents and footwear. Also included are propaganda leaflets and simple reading material issued to the Heitai during long, slow periods of service on isolated (sometimes bypassed) Pacific islands. By examining the exact possessions of a Japanese soldier--from dagger to toothbrush, from hand grenade to undergarments--one is able to see history come to life in a way no cinema or text alone could convey. At the same time, it is of interest to note both the differences between an Imperial fighter's equipment with that of a GI, and how in many ways it was similar. As a companion volume to the bestselling Deutsche Soldaten, this over-sized, one-of-a-kind work on the Imperial Heitai provides a uniquely illuminating view of the Japanese fighting man who was once America's most fearsome enemy.

This work chronicles the writings of Hino Ashihei, who rose to celebrity status during the Pacific War for his accounts of campaigns in China and Southeast Asia. The study shows how writing about the war was read during and after the conflict.

By the turn of the twentieth century, Japan’s military and economic successes made it the dominant power in East Asia, drawing hundreds of thousands of Chinese, Korean, and Taiwanese students to the metropole and sending thousands of Japanese to other parts of East Asia. The constant movement of peoples, ideas, and texts in the Japanese empire created numerous literary contact nebulae, fluid spaces of diminished hierarchies where writers grapple with and transculturate one another’s creative output. Drawing extensively on vernacular sources in Japanese, Chinese, and Korean, this book analyzes the most active of these contact nebulae: semicolonial Chinese, occupied Manchurian, and colonial Korean and Taiwanese transculturations of Japanese literature. It explores how colonial and semicolonial writers discussed, adapted, translated, and recast thousands of Japanese creative works, both affirming and challenging Japan’s cultural authority. Such efforts not only blurred distinctions among resistance, acquiescence, and collaboration but also shattered cultural and national barriers central to the discourse of empire. In this context, twentieth-century East Asian literatures can no longer be understood in isolation from one another, linked only by their encounters with the West, but instead must be seen in constant interaction throughout the Japanese empire and beyond.

On December 13, 1937, the Japanese army attacked and captured the Chinese capital city of Nanjing, planting the rising-sun flag atop the city's outer walls. What occurred in the ensuing weeks and months has been the source of a tempestuous debate ever since. It is well known that the Japanese military committed wholesale atrocities after the fall of the city, massacring large numbers of Chinese during the both the Battle of Nanjing and in its aftermath. Yet the exact details of the war crimes--how many people were killed during the battle? How many after? How many women were raped? Were prisoners executed? How unspeakable were the acts committed?--are the source of controversy among Japanese, Chinese, and American historians to this day. In The Making of the "Rape of Nanking Takashi Yoshida examines how views of the Nanjing Massacre have evolved in history writing and public memory in Japan, China, and the United States. For these nations, the question of how to treat the legacy of Nanjing--whether to deplore it, sanitize it, rationalize it, or even ignore it--has aroused passions revolving around ethics, nationality, and historical identity. Drawing on a rich analysis of Chinese, Japanese, and American history textbooks and newspapers, Yoshida traces the evolving--and often conflicting--understandings of the Nanjing Massacre, revealing how changing social and political environments have influenced the debate. Yoshida suggests that, from the 1970s on, the dispute over Nanjing has become more lively, more globalized, and immeasurably more intense, due in part to Japanese revisionist history and a renewed emphasis on patriotic education in China. While today it is easy to assume that the Nanjing Massacre has always been viewed as an emblem of Japan's wartime aggression in China, the image of the "Rape of Nanking" is a much more recent icon in public consciousness. Takashi Yoshida analyzes the process by which the Nanjing Massacre has become an international symbol, and provides a fair and respectful treatment of the politically charged and controversial debate over its history.

Grassroots Fascism profiles the Asia Pacific War (1941Ð1945)Ñthe most important though least understood experience of JapanÕs modern historyÑthrough the lens of ordinary Japanese life. Moving deftly from the struggles of the home front to the occupied territories to the ravages of the front line, the book offers rare insight into popular experience from the warÕs troubled beginnings through JapanÕs disastrous defeat in 1945 and the new beginning it heralded. Yoshimi Yoshiaki mobilizes personal diaries, memoirs, and government documents to portray the ambivalent position of ordinary Japanese as both wartime victims and active participants. He also provides equally penetrating accounts of the war experience of JapanÕs imperial subjects, including Koreans and Taiwanese. This book challenges the idea that the Japanese operated as a passive, homogenous mass during the warÑa mere conduit for a militaryÐimperial ideology imposed upon them by the political elite. Viewed from the bottom up, wartime Japan unfolds as a complex modern mass society, with a corresponding variety of popular roles and agendas. In chronicling the diversity of the Japanese social experience, YoshimiÕs account elevates our understanding of JapanÕs war and ÒJapanese Fascism,Ó and in its relation of World War II to the evolutionÑand destructionÑof empire, it makes a fresh contribution to the global history of the war. Ethan MarkÕs translation supplements the Japanese original with explanatory annotations and an in-depth analytical introduction, drawing on personal interviews to situate the work within Japanese studies and global history.

In Playing War, Sabine Frühstück makes a bold proposition: that for over a century throughout Japan and beyond, children and concepts of childhood have been appropriated as tools for decidedly unchildlike purposes: to validate, moralize, humanize, and naturalize war, and to sentimentalize peace. She argues that modern conceptions of war insist on and exploit a specific and static notion of the child: that the child, though the embodiment of vulnerability and innocence, nonetheless possesses an inherent will to war, and that this seemingly contradictory creature demonstrates what it means to be human. In examining the intersection of children/childhood with war/military, Frühstück identifies the insidious factors perpetuating this alliance, thus rethinking the very foundations of modern militarism. She interrogates how essentialist notions of both childhood and war have been productively intertwined; how assumptions about childhood and war have converged; and how children and childhood have worked as symbolic constructions and powerful rhetorical tools, particularly in the decades between the nation- and empire-building efforts of the late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries up to the uneven manifestations of globalization at the beginning of the twenty-first.

This cultural history of the Japanese home front during the Asia-Pacific War challenges ideas of the period as one of unrelenting repression. Uchiyama demonstrates that 'carnival war' coexisted with the demands of total war to promote consumerist desire alongside sacrifice and fantasy alongside nightmare, helping mobilize the war effort.

At the height of state censorship in Japan, more indexes of banned books circulated, more essays on censorship were published, more works of illicit erotic and proletarian fiction were produced, and more passages were Xed out than at any other moment before or since. As censors construct and maintain their own archives, their acts of suppression yield another archive, filled with documents on, against, and in favor of censorship. The extant archive of the Japanese imperial censor (1923-1945) and the archive of the Occupation censor (1945-1952) stand as tangible reminders of this contradictory function of censors. As censors removed specific genres, topics, and words from circulation, some Japanese writers converted their offensive rants to innocuous fluff after successive encounters with the authorities. But, another coterie of editors, bibliographers, and writers responded to censorship by pushing back, using their encounters with suppression as incitement to rail against the authorities and to appeal to the prurient interests of their readers. This study examines these contradictory relationships between preservation, production, and redaction to shed light on the dark valley attributed to wartime culture and to cast a shadow on the supposedly bright, open space of free postwar discourse. (Winner of the 2010-2011 First Book Award of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University)

This is a multi-author work which examines the cultural dimensions of the relations between East Asia’s two great powers, China and Japan, in a period of change and turmoil, from the late nineteenth century to the end of the Second World War. This period saw Japanese invasion of China, the occupation of China’s North-east (Manchuria) and Taiwan, and war between the two nations from 1937-1945; the scars of that war are still evident in relations between the two countries today. In their quest for modernity, the rulers and leading thinkers of China and Japan defined themselves in contradisctinction to the other, influenced both by traditional bonds of classical culture and by the influx of new Western ideas that flowed through Japan to China. The experiences of intellectual and cultural awakening in the two countries were inextricably linked, as our studies of poetry, fiction, philosophy, theatre, and popular culture demonstrate. The chapters explore this process of “transculturation” – the sharing and exchange of ideas and artistic expression – not only in Japan and China, but in the larger region which Joshua Fogel has called the “Sinosphere,” an area including Korea and parts of Southeast Asia with a shared heritage of Confucian statecraft and values underpinned by the classical Chinese language. The authors of the chapters, who include established senior academics and younger scholars, and employ a range of disciplines and methodologies, were selected by the editors for their expertise in particular aspects of this rich and complex cultural relationship. As for the editors: Richard King and Cody Poulton are scholars and translators of Chinese literature and Japanese theatre respectively, each taking a historical and comparative perspective to the study of their subject; Katsuhiko Endo is an intellectual historian dealing with both Japan and China.