Cleansing the Nation: Urban Entertainments and Moral Reform in Interwar Japan

2008 ◽  
Vol 42 (4) ◽  
pp. 705-731 ◽  
Author(s):  
ELISE K. TIPTON

AbstractThis article focuses on Japanese government restrictions and regulation of urban entertainments during the 1920s and 1930s as examples of attempts to rectify what was perceived as the declining morals of a modernizing, industrializing Japanese society. In this respect it adds another dimension to depictions of the Second World War as opposition to the cultural as well as political hegemony of the major Western powers. However, although war no doubt gave added impetus to the state's desire to unify popular support and sense of loyalty to the nation, morality campaigns had been initiated even before war had become an imminent possibility. Restrictions were imposed on cafés, dance halls and other modern entertainments, representing opposition to Westernizing, modernizing trends in social values and behaviour that had become prominent in the cities during the 1920s—individualism, materialism, sexuality, and more particularly, female sexuality. Middle class Protestants played a significant role in promoting and shaping these policies. Although such reformers disagreed with the government on other matters, they actively enlisted governmental support to carry out a moral cleansing of the ‘spiritual pests’ infesting the nation.

Author(s):  
Gregory A. Barton

This chapter traces the expansion of industrial agricultural methods after the Second World War. Western governments and the Food and Agriculture Organization pushed for increased use of chemical fertilizers to aid development and resist Soviet encroachment. Meanwhile small groups of organic farmers and gardeners adopted Howard’s methods in the Anglo-sphere and elsewhere in the world. European movements paralleled these efforts and absorbed the basic principles of the Indore Method. British parliament debated the merits of organic farming, but Howard failed to persuade the government to adopt his policies. Southern Rhodesia, however, did implement his ideas in law. Desiccation theory aided his attempts in South Africa and elsewhere, and Louise Howard, after Albert’s death, kept alive a wide network of activists with her publications.


1970 ◽  
Vol 24 ◽  
pp. 256-276
Author(s):  
Dariusz Miszewski

During the Second World War, the national camp preached the idea of imperialism in Central Europe. Built peacefully, the Polish empire was supposed to protect the independence and security of countries in Central Europe against Germany and the Soviet Union, and thus went by the name of “the Great Poland”. As part of the empire, nation-states were retained. The national camp was opposed to the idea of the federation as promoted by the government-in-exile. The “national camp” saw the idea of federation on the regional, European and global level as obsolete. Post-war international cooperation was based on nation states and their alliances.


Costume ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 55 (1) ◽  
pp. 74-96
Author(s):  
Marta Kargól

In 1932, Nellie van Rijsoort (1910–1996), the Dutch embroidery maker and designer, opened her atelier in Rotterdam. Among her clients were prestigious fashion stores in the Netherlands as well as wealthy middle-class customers. After the Second World War, van Rijsoort left Rotterdam and continued her career in Melbourne in the rapidly developing fashion network of Australia. Today, samples of embroidered fabrics and fashion drawings by Nellie van Rijsoort are part of the collections of the Museum Rotterdam and the National Trust of Australia in Melbourne. These collections provide insight into half a century of history of embroidered fabrics. This article illustrates the largely forgotten career of the embroidery designer. The first part of the article outlines the position and meaning of van Rijsoort's atelier in the fashion networks of the Netherlands and Australia, while the second part provides an analysis of embroidery samples and drawings, which reveal the place and function of embroideries as dress decorations.


Author(s):  
Noel Maurer

This chapter explores how the United States' return to the empire trap played out, starting with Franklin Roosevelt in Mexico through Eisenhower in Guatemala and faraway Iran. Under Franklin Roosevelt, the United States began to provide foreign aid (in the form of grants and loans) and rolled out perhaps the first case of modern covert action against the government of Cuba. Both tools were perfected during the Second World War, which saw the creation of entire agencies of government dedicated to providing official transfers and covertly manipulating the affairs of foreign states. In addition, the development of sophisticated trade controls allowed targeted action against the exports of other nations. For example, after 1948 the United States could attempt to influence certain Latin American governments by granting or withholding quotas for sugar.


Author(s):  
H. E. Chehabi

This chapter traces the formation of a modern middle class that emerged as a result of Reza Shah's rigorous modernization policies in the 1920s and 1930s. The state expanded the educational system and bureaucracy, reaching down from the court to the village level. At the same time, it fostered lifestyles and consumption patterns modeled on those of Europe, which this new and increasingly secular middle class embraced, setting it apart from the rest of society. Given its reliance on state employment, this was not a bourgeoisie stricto sensu. This new middle class existed next to the traditional mercantile elite, which was centered on the bazaar and closely allied to the clergy. In the 1920s, however, many Iranian businessmen adopted a middle-class lifestyle, and, as a consequence, a modern business bourgeoisie gradually emerged that was to some extent a link between the traditional mercantile elite centered on the bazaar and the modern middle class.


Colossus ◽  
2006 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen Budiansky

The paths that took men and women from their ordinary lives and deposited them on the doorstep of the odd profession of cryptanalysis were always tortuous, accidental, and unpredictable. The full story of the Colossus, the pioneering electronic device developed by the Government Code and Cypher School (GC & CS) to break German teleprinter ciphers in the Second World War, is fundamentally a story of several of these accidental paths converging at a remarkable moment in the history of electronics—and of the wartime urgency that set these men and women on these odd paths. Were it not for the wartime necessity of codebreaking, and were it not for particular statistical and logical properties of the teleprinter ciphers that were so eminently suited to electronic analysis, the history of computing might have taken a very different course. The fact that Britain’s codebreakers cracked the high-level teleprinter ciphers of the German Army and Luftwaffe high command during the Second World War has been public knowledge since the 1970s. But the recent declassification of new documents about Colossus and the teleprinter ciphers, and the willingness of key participants to discuss their roles more fully, has laid bare as never before the technical challenges they faced—not to mention the intense pressures, the false steps, and the extraordinary risks and leaps of faith along the way. It has also clarified the true role that the Colossus machines played in the advent of the digital age. Though they were neither general-purpose nor stored-program computers themselves, the Colossi sparked the imaginations of many scientists, among them Alan Turing and Max Newman, who would go on to help launch the post-war revolution that ushered in the age of the digital, general-purpose, stored-program electronic computer. Yet the story of Colossus really begins not with electronics at all, but with codebreaking; and to understand how and why the Colossi were developed and to properly place their capabilities in historical context, it is necessary to understand the problem they were built to solve, and the people who were given the job of solving it.


Author(s):  
Martin Conway

This chapter focuses on the consumption of democracy. What happened in the roughly twenty-five-year period from the end of the Second World War to the late 1960s is perhaps best regarded as a process of gradual acculturation. At different speeds and by different paths, a large majority of Western Europeans came to feel at home in democracy, and began to practise democracy for themselves. However, the new democracies were more equal in their formal structures than in their social reality. The reassertion of boundaries of race, gender, sexuality, and age, after the more fluid and often chaotic experiences of the war years, was reinforced by the evolving but persistent inequalities of social class. Western Europe emphatically remained a class society after 1945. The rapid economic growth that occurred during the post-war years generated new forms of affluence, but these were distributed in ways that reinforced pre-existing class divisions. In particular, the post-war years witnessed a resurgence in the fortunes of the middle class. Whether assessed in terms of its material prosperity, its influence within and over government, or its wider social and cultural ascendancy, the middle class was the dominant social class of the post-war era.


1973 ◽  
Vol 30 (12) ◽  
pp. 2077-2084 ◽  
Author(s):  
L. P. D. Gertenbach

The exploitation of pelagic shoal resources off South Africa’s west (Atlantic) coast began during the second world war, with large-scale expansion beginning in 1947–49. At the end of the forties, the Government lacked the scientific evidence to formulate effective conservation policies, and pending the outcome of the research programs it deemed it advisable to put a brake on the expansion of these fisheries.An obvious measure was a ceiling on the annual catches. But this would not necessarily have prevented further influx into the fishing or the processing phases of the industry. As part of an economy-wide practice to require licenses for various kinds of operations, these were required for all fishing boats and factories. The Government decided in 1949 to refuse the issue of licenses for additional fish-processing factories and to limit the number and capacity to those already in operation or under construction.In 1953 the fishermen, aware of the limitation on the outlets (factory intakes) for their catches, and the continued influx of outsiders into the flourishing fishing side, willingly agreed to the freezing of the number and hold capacity of vessels fishing for pilchards and maasbankers. After the enactment by parliament of the necessary enabling laws, regulations were issued to establish a Pilchard/Maasbanker Boat Limitation Committee consisting of government, factory, and fishermen representatives to apply the controls over the number of boats, their hold capacity and the allocation of this fleet to the various factories.Adjustments, including some increases in the capacity of the fleet, were made from time to time to cope with changing conditions in the resource.A serious weakening in the control system occurred when fishing and processing licenses were granted to operators of fishmeal factory ships.The results of the limitation of entry into the fishing phase and the processing phases include several significant trends, among which are a smaller number of boats, larger-size boats with more powerful engines and equipment, and increased factory-ownership of boats. The factories introduced stickwater plants and other processes to increase the yield of meal from the available tonnage of raw fish.Although the industry has experienced difficult periods, it nevertheless seems, broadly viewed, that through the policy of restricting entry at the early stages of the new industry, it acquired sufficient resilience to cope not only with the ups but also the downs. It appears doubtful that "overcrowded" fishing and processing sectors would have had sufficient resilience to face fluctuating catches and fishmeal prices.


2016 ◽  
Vol 40 (158) ◽  
pp. 230-246
Author(s):  
William Butler

AbstractThis article explores the problems encountered in the formation of the Ulster Home Guard, supposedly a direct equivalent to its well-known British counterpart, as part of the paramilitary Ulster Special Constabulary in Northern Ireland, during the Second World War. Predictably, the Ulster Home Guard became an almost exclusively Protestant organisation which led to many accusations of sectarianism from a variety of different national and international voices. This became a real concern for the British government, as well as the army, which understandably wished to avoid any such controversy. Though assumptions had previously been made about the numbers of Catholics in the force, this article explores just how few joined the organisation throughout the war. Additionally, the article investigates the rather awkward constitutional position in which the Ulster Home Guard was placed. Under the Government of Ireland Act, the Stormont administration had no authority on matters of home defence. It did, however, have the power to raise a police force as a way to maintain law and order. Still, the Ulster Home Guard, although formed as part of the Ulster Special Constabulary, was entrusted solely with home defence and this had wider implications for British policy towards Northern Ireland throughout the Second World War.


2014 ◽  
Vol 73 (1) ◽  
pp. 38-59
Author(s):  
Jürgen Kilian

Abstract After Greece had been conquered by the troops of the Axis Powers in spring 1941, they installed a rule of occupation existing until october 1944. The Government in Athens had to finance this occupation by making payments in advance and besides, making a forced credit available. This method led to an exorbitant overloading of the Greek economy and to a galloping inflation. The German Tax and Finance Ministry played an important, yet hardly noticed role as to the concrete implementation of the monetary exploitation. Almost unknown documents throw a light on the financing of the German Wehrmacht during WW II. Besides, the real burden on the Greek economy shall be estimated and connected with the general questions of war financing in the Third Reich.


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