Translating Philippine history in America's shadow: Japanese reflections on the past and present during the Vietnam War

2019 ◽  
Vol 50 (2) ◽  
pp. 222-245
Author(s):  
Takamichi Serizawa

In the 1970s, during and right after the end of the Vietnam War, more works by Filipino writers, especially historians, were translated into Japanese than works by any other Southeast Asians. In Southeast Asia, it was in the Philippines that the Japanese and the American forces had fought their fiercest battles during the Second World War. The Japanese translators who translated prominent Filipino nationalist historians such as Gregorio Zaide, Teodoro Agoncillo and Renato Constantino, had personally experienced war, defeat, and postwar life under the US-led Allied occupation of Japan. This article compares the original texts of some of these key Filipino works and their Japanese translations, and examines the ‘noises’ produced in the process of translation. This noise includes strategies such as the deletion and addition of information, opinions, and deliberate misreadings. This article suggests that these strategies reveal the translators’ views on the past as well as their contemporary experience of postwar Japan against the background of the ongoing Vietnam War.

Author(s):  
Phuong Tran Nguyen

The 130,000 Indochinese evacuated out of Saigon and resettled in America were encouraged to become “good refugees” by forgetting past traumas in order to move forward, the same advice Americans were allegedly giving themselves. This chapter argues that the losers of the Vietnam War, both Americans and Vietnamese alike, affirmed the past not by forgetting it, but by rewriting it. Through camp newsletters and other primary sources, we get a close glimpse of the profound sense of guilt and dishonour that compelled the US to employ selective memory in the shaping of a new collective memory, so that the rescue of 130,000 refugees—rather than the war that killed millions of people—would come to define America. As a result, refugees entered a charitable sponsorship bubble that come to shape their expectations vis-à-vis a guilt-ridden American nation. Refugees were expected to be on their best behaviour—exemplified by gratitude and promises of assimilation—by a country compelled by guilt to be on its own best behaviour.


1981 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 47-50
Author(s):  
Geoffrey Rips

What was known in the United States as the ‘underground press’ – self-published newspapers of the youth counterculture sold at street corners and around campuses in American cities during the 1960s and early 70 s – was once a significant network estimated at over 400 publications. Their hallmark was opposition to US involvement in the Vietnam War, criticism of the authorities, of uncontrolled technology and big business, advocacy of sexual freedom and artistic experimentation and, frequently, the advocacy of marijuana, LSD and other psychedelic drugs. Few of these publications have survived the past ten years, and their disappearance has been variously attributed to the cooling of radical interest after the American withdrawal from Vietnam, as well as to the vague and shifting nature of the ‘hippie’ scene. Complaints by their publishers during the early and mid-seventies that printers refused their business, that office rents suddenly doubled, that advertising was cancelled, that papers were lost – these were seen as local accidents and were rarely reported by the established media. Claims of official or officially-sanctioned harassment were dismissed – even by fellow radicals – as paranoid. Recent research by Geoffrey Rips of the PEN American Center has revealed the extent and variety of official pressure exerted against alternative publications during the Vietnam War period. Using evidence from government hearings like the Church Committee, which reported in 1976, actual FBI documents released to American PEN under the Freedom of Information Act, and other sources, Mr Rips argues that such harassment contributed materially to the closure of certain publications and in general terms constituted a gross infringement on the protection afforded to dissenting opinion and to a free press under the US constitution. We publish edited extracts here from Geoffrey Rips' report which will be published in full by the PEN American Center and the City Lights Press.


2019 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 265
Author(s):  
Demas Nauvarian

This paper aims to prove the justification of US democracy in itsconsistency in the Vietnam War for two decades (1955-1975). This wasdone using the content analysis method of the US Department of Defense’sforeign policy documents in Vietnam - the Pentagon Papers - which werethe primary documents related to the process of making US foreign policyduring the Vietnam War. This was later matched with the view of DemocraticPeace Theory (Democratic Peace Theory) which has been widelyargued as the basis for policy making in the proxy war in the Cold Warera. This paper concludes that there are various other considerations,both rational and irrational factors, which were used by the United Statesin the Vietnam War


Author(s):  
John W. Young ◽  
John Kent

This chapter focuses on the United States’s involvement in the Vietnam War. Lyndon B. Johnson inherited the Vietnam conflict in difficult circumstances. He had not been elected president in his own right and so, perhaps, believed that he should carry on with John F. Kennedy’s policies. It was unclear what exactly Kennedy would have done in Vietnam, but Johnson retained his predecessor’s foreign policy team and did not question the basic principle of America’s foreign policy, which called for communism to be resisted. The chapter first considers the escalation of US involvement in Vietnam during the period 1963–1965 before discussing the conflict between the US and North Vietnam in the succeeding years, along with the Tet offensive and its implications. It concludes with an assessment of Richard Nixon’s decision to restart large-scale US bombing of North Vietnam.


2016 ◽  
Vol 6 (4) ◽  
pp. 10-15
Author(s):  
Susan Straight

Thousands of women who survived the Vietnam War, whose husbands were sent to reeducation camps after working with American military, now live in the US, where nail salons anchor almost every strip mall and flourish inside luxury malls as well. The history of how Vietnamese women came to work in the nail industry and how Americans became accustomed to manicures and pedicures is entwined with the loss of home and landscape.


Author(s):  
Robert Pietrygała ◽  
Zdzisław Cutter

The article focuses on the period of the Vietnam War, with particular emphasis on the role played by engineering troops (as a necessary component of individual tactical associations, and a guarantee of success of military operations conducted by the US army). The paper presents the engineering troops’ efforts to build military infrastructure, as well as the assistance provided to the South Vietnamese society. The article contains a list of all engineering units of the American army involved in the Vietnamese conflict, their organizational structure, personnel status, dislocation, as well as the scope of tasks assigned to them. In addition, it shows the cooperation between engineering units and civil contractors at the service of the army (especially in the period preceding the direct involvement of the United States in the war).


Author(s):  
Nguyen Minh Giang

Although located in a region having close historical-cultural relations with the area of Southeast Asia, Australia always considers itself and is considered a special outpost of the West in Asia-Pacific. Since World War II up to now, the strategic alliance between Australia and the US has been developed comprehensively and deeply. Particularly, with the purpose of getting the protection in terms of security from the US towards the Near-North region, it's obvious that Australia had to accept the fact that the number of killed and wounded soldiers, advisories, and military workers during the period of the Vietnam war was equivalent to that of the killed and wounded ones of the two World Wars when Australia participated along with the British troops. To illustrate the aforementioned content, this article focuses on analyzing some objective factors including the development of the movement of national liberation, the founding and rising of Chinese socialism, and the policies of Southeast Asia of the US during the period of post-World War II, along with some subjective factors influencing the founding and development of the strategic alliance between Australia and the US such as the national interest and the role of Australia during the Vietnam war, the economiccultural- political platforms of the US-Australia relations, and three-key factors expressing the depth of these relations including military, politics and diplomacy, culture and education, science and technology.


2017 ◽  
Vol 17 (30) ◽  
pp. 11-26 ◽  
Author(s):  
Linda Steiner

Women began reporting on war in the mid-nineteenth century, covering, among other wars, Europeans revolutions and the US Civil War. The numbers of women reporting on war increased over the twentieth century with the First and Second World Wars and especially the Vietnam War. This increased again more recently, when many news organizations needed journalists in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. Nonetheless, war reporting remains widely regarded as men’s domain. It remains a highly sexist domain. Women war reporters continue to face condescension, pseudo-protectionism, disdain, lewdness, and hostility from their bosses, rivals, military brass, and the public. They also experience sexual violence, although they are discouraged from complaining about assaults, so that they can keep working. This research focuses on the sexism and sexual harassment facing contemporary women war reporters, with particular attention to Lara Logan, whose career demonstrates many of these highly gendered tensions.


Author(s):  
Arthur B. Tarrow

At the beginning of many of its armed conflicts, the United States has found itself unprepared for large numbers of casualties. The Vietnam War was no exception. In August 1965, Marines landed at Chu Lai, just south of Danang in South Vietnam, for their first major unit combat effort. They suffered more casualties than anticipated. They were cared for by Navy physicians and corpsmen in the combat area and then flown by helicopter to the Danang airbase. There, they were further triaged in a small field hospital, which quickly became saturated with those casualties which could not be moved. Those less seriously wounded and those who could be made transportable were flown directly to Clark Airforce Base in the Philippines by C130 combat aircraft, a flight of approximately 3 hours. They arrived unwashed, in their combat gear, with weapons on the litters. A C130 aircraft carries 72 litter casualties when fully loaded. At Clark AFB, after word had been received of the combat action, all patients, who could be discharged, were sent out. All personnel at the base, including wives and dependents, were mobilized to help at the hospital. They washed and moved the casualties as they arrived.


In the late 1960's, unfamiliar people, exotic places and violent battles—all part of the Vietnam War—appeared on television screens around the world, in living color. Film cameras and sound equipment captured shocking images and stories audiences had never seen before. The Vietnam War, presented by popular networks like CBS and told through the words and expert storytelling abilities of respected broadcasters like Walter Cronkite, “magically” appeared in our living rooms. This top down delivery method (i.e., “one to many” mass broadcasting rather than the UGC bottom up distribution model common in YouTube's digital sphere) made the television viewing experience live rather than pre-recorded in terms of the news cast itself. The audience experienced the Vietnam War narrative as if they were actually there but also in a passive way. However, today, YouTube offers the Vietnam War story as an on-demand active experience and the original network broadcasts have been repurposed, rebroadcast, altered, and appended with YouTubers' textual comments and mashed-up videos about the Vietnam War and current worldwide military conflicts. YouTube provides a bridge between the past, present and future, using words, images and sounds that teach us a great deal about the Vietnam, Persian Gulf, and Iraq wars. Important conclusions can be drawn about how these events connect and relate. YouTubers have a lot to say about the Vietnam War and their comments on broadcast television news shows and programming from the past illuminate that time and the future. Broadcast television news video production technology, specifically the reduction in equipment size, accessibility and production equipment cost has facilitated new ways of telling war stories. Today, the concept of the embedded news reporter is common in war reporting and, in fact, very desirable in terms of driving viewers to broadcast network programming as embedded reporting is an effective and engaging story-telling technique. The embedded reporter has evolved and empowered the average YouTuber to take an active role in producing breaking news content and uploading that content live to YouTube and other websites.


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