scholarly journals His Majesty Emperor Hirihito of Japan, K. G., 29 April 1901 - 7 January 1989

1990 ◽  
Vol 36 ◽  
pp. 241-272

The biographer, reflecting on the long and manifold life of the Showa Emperor, cannot but be struck by many contrasts. None, perhaps, is greater than that which distinguished the Scholar Emperor and Imperial Biologist, about whom this memoir is written, from His Imperial Majesty the Emperor and Statesman. Many short articles have appeared in illustration of his biological prowess (Egami 1989; Guillain 1989; Hamburger 1962; Kitamura 1988; Komai 1972; Reischauer 1975; Steam 1989; Taku 1972), and there is the early book by Hino (1931). The substantial biographies of the western press, however, treat it as if it had been a pastime (Haas 1975; Mosley 1966; Packard 1987; Sayle 1988; Takeda 1988). It was far more. No amateur could have encompassed and mastered the vast field of nature that he did and have risen to international authority. His enjoyment of biology not only provided comfort and relaxation, as others have remarked, but reflected his confidence in natural science as a means, so dear to his heart, of uniting all mankind. With much greater resources than others, he assembled a biological court of advisers in whom he had implicit trust, and became the first emperor to have devoted his spare time to science. Said to have entered this world alarmingly slight as an infant, he developed the physique and resolution to reign for 62 years, longer than any monarch in history, and he passed away still dwelling on that research. He wore two faces. There was the placid, impassionate, and, even, obedient leader in public regard, and there was the eager intent of the original investigator whether in the field or the laboratory, bent on discovery and understanding. A boy, raised strictly in the aura of the one divinely to ascend the Chrysanthemum Throne, found not respite so much as inspiration in studying the humblest orders of life. Surrounded with beauty and detesting conflict, he was led into the second and most frightful world war, to rescue his country, for the first time in its history, from shattering and abject defeat, by that very humility which his science had nurtured. A dual image has already been ascribed. Takeda compares an arrogant monarchy with the democratization of post-war and modem Japan. Others have contrasted the impassionate emperor with the endearing father who loved his children; and in both regards there is a profound chapter in one of the books of Elizabeth Vining (1970). Neither aspect, however, reveals the true personality which was manifested in that love of nature, respect for all living things, and confidence in the brotherhood of science. So far from being a side-issue, it is a cardinal consideration; it was the force that kept him going through troubled times. In the words of Professor Woodroofe, when we were conversing in Tokyo, Hirohito was a born naturalist who had to be the emperor. In the course of this memoir about one who was both botanist and zoologist, I have kept two questions in mind. What led the young Prince to biology and what was the scientific outcome? Perhaps, the nearest answers have already appeared in the charming reminiscences of Kanroji (1975), written at the age of 96 years after he had served the Imperial Court for 70 years. With Japanese text and splendid illustration, there are the book of the National Science Museum, Tokyo (Anonymous 1988) and those of the Asahi Publishing Company (Anonymous 1989 a ; Senzo 1989).

2021 ◽  
Vol 17 (6) ◽  
pp. 564-575
Author(s):  
Irina I. Rutsinskaya

An artist who finds themselves in the last days of a war in the enemy’s defeated capital may not just fix its objects dispassionately. Many factors influence the selection and depicturing manner of the objects. One of the factors is satisfaction from the accomplished retribution, awareness of the historical justice triumph. Researchers think such reactions are inevitable. The article offers to consider from this point of view the drawings created by Soviet artists in Berlin in the spring and summer of 1945. Such an analysis of the German capital’s visual image is conducted for the first time. It shows that the above reactions were not the only ones. The graphics of the first post-war days no less clearly and consistently express other feelings and intentions of their authors: the desire to accurately document and fix the image of the city and some of its structures in history, the happiness from the silence of peace, and the simple interest in the monuments of European art.The article examines Berlin scenes as evidences of the transition from front-line graphics focused on the visual recording of the war traces to peacetime graphics; from documentary — to artistry; from the worldview of a person at war — to the one of a person who lived to victory. In this approach, it has been important to consider the graphic images of Berlin in unity with the diary and memoir texts belonging to both artists and ordinary soldiers who participated in the storming of Berlin. The combination of verbal and visual sources helps to present the German capital’s image that existed in the public consciousness, as well as the specificity of its representation by means of visual art.


2002 ◽  
Vol 45 (1) ◽  
pp. 211-227 ◽  
Author(s):  
DAVID REYNOLDS

This review examines some of the recent British, American, and Russian scholarship on a series of important international transitions that occurred in the years around 1945. One is the shift of global leadership from Great Britain to the United States, in which, it is argued, the decisive moment was the fall of France in 1940. Another transition is the emergence of a wartime alliance between Britain and America, on the one hand, and the Soviet Union, on the other, followed by its disintegration into the Cold War. Here the opening of Soviet sources during the 1990s has provided new evidence, though not clear answers. To understand both of these transitions, however, it is necessary to move beyond diplomacy and strategy to look at the social, cultural, and economic dimensions of the Second World War. In particular, recent studies of American and Soviet soldiers during and after the conflict re-open the debate about Cold War ideology from the bottom up.


2018 ◽  
Vol 18 (2018) (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Bogdan Kolar

Category: 1.01 Original scientific paper Language: Original in Slovenian (Abstract in Slovenian and English, Summary in English) Key words: Pope Benedict XV, First World War, Catholic Church, Austria-Hungary, Slovenia Abstract: After the death of Pope Pius X in 1914, Benedict XV was elected as his successor. His pontificate was marked by the First World War and the settling of international relations after its end. Because of the fierce opposition of Italy to his involvement in peace mediations, the pope spent most of his effort and attention in the humanitarian and social fields, easing the consequences of the war. He reorganized the spiritual care of military units. His peace initiatives were opposed by most of the countries in both warring camps, and in many countries also by the bishops who adopted state policies as their own. From all the initiatives, the one that generated the most traction was sent to all countries involved in the war on August 1, 1917. In this note the three years of war was called "useless slaughter". The principles he set out for an end to the fighting and the post-war arrangement of the world were echoed in the Points presented in early 1918 by American president Th. W. Wilson. The discussion also contains and overview of the echoes of and responses to the pope's peace initiatives in Slovenian Ethnic Lands.


2019 ◽  
Vol 54 (5) ◽  
pp. 1395-1445
Author(s):  
MANU SEHGAL ◽  
SAMIKSHA SEHRAWAT

AbstractBy providing the first comprehensive account of the role of the British and Indian press in war propaganda, this article makes an intervention in the global history of the First World War. The positive propaganda early in the war, intertwined with a rhetoric of loyalism, contrasted with how the conservative British press affixed blame for military defeats in Mesopotamia upon the colonial regime's failure to effectively mobilize India's resources. Using a highly emotive and enduring trope of the ‘Mesopotamia muddle’, the Northcliffe press was successful in channelling a high degree of public scrutiny onto the campaign. The effectiveness of this criticism ensured that debates about the Mesopotamian debacle became a vehicle for registering criticism of structures of colonial rule and control in India. On the one hand, this critique hastened constitutional reforms and devolution in colonial India and, on the other, it led to demands that the inadequacy of India's contribution to the war be remedied by raising war loans. Both the colonial government and its nationalist critics were briefly and paradoxically united in opposing these demands. The coercive extraction of funds for the imperial war effort as well as the British press's vituperative criticism contributed to a post-war, anti-colonial political upsurge. The procedure of creating a colonial ‘scandal’ out of a military disaster required a specific politics for assessing the regulated flows of information, which proved to be highly effective in shaping both the enquiry that followed and the politics of interwar colonial South Asia.


1987 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 111-131 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter M. Jones

In 1983, for almost the first time since the end of the Second World War, defence became a major party political issue at a general election. In that year it was one of the major campaign issues between the political parties and, according to one poll, ranked second only to unemployment as an issue influencing voter behaviour. Indeed, poll evidence indicated that the Conservatives held an unprecedented and overwhelming 54 per cent lead over Labour on the question of British retention of nuclear arms. Furthermore, of those who thought of defecting from the Labour Party, 42 per cent gave defence as the main reason. Such figures as these suggest strongly that by 1983 the inter-party consensus which had governed defence issues since 1945 had broken down, particularly in view of the fact that the question of defence had not been raised as an issue affecting voting intentions in the 1979 election. The breakdown of consensus may thus be judged by the emergence of defence as a party political issue. It might even be said that in 1983 it was an electiondeciding issue, especially when one set of policies could be represented by opponents as being contrary to the continuation of British membership of NATO, the one issue on which all parties were agreed. Defence thus moved from being a peripheral issue to one at the centre stage of the election campaign and it had a major impact on the outcome of the election. However, the.demise of inter-party consensus was not reflected in the electorate as a whole, which chose to continue to support the tried, and trusted policies of the past rather than adopt the radical alternative presented by the Labour Party, If a new consensus is to emerge—and it is beyond the limits of this particular paper to consider whether a consensus in defence policy is desirable—then all parties will have to review their present policies. However, before turning to the reasons for the breakdown, it is instructive to consider the nature of the post-1945 consensus and the origins of its apparent demise.


2004 ◽  
Vol 47 (2) ◽  
pp. 379-398 ◽  
Author(s):  
MARK MAZOWER

This article explores the origins of the UN's commitment to human rights and links this to the wartime decision to abandon the interwar system of an international regime for the protection of minority rights. After 1918, the League of Nations developed a comprehensive machinery for guaranteeing the national minorities of eastern Europe. But by 1940 the League's policies were widely regarded as a failure and the coalition of forces which had supported them after the First World War had disintegrated. German abuse of the system after 1933, and the Third Reich's use of ethnic German groups as fifth columns to undermine the Versailles settlement were cited by east European politicians as sufficient justification for a new approach which would combine mass expulsion, on the one hand, with a new international doctrine of individual human rights on the other. The Great Powers supported this because they thereby escaped the specific commitments which the previous arrangements had imposed on them, and which Russian control over post-war eastern Europe rendered no longer practicable. But they also supported it because the new rights regime had no binding legal force. In respect, therefore, of the degree to which the principle of absolute state sovereignty was threatened by these arrangements, the rights regime of the new UN represented a considerable weakening of international will compared with the interwar League. But acquiescing in a weaker international organization was probably the price necessary for US and Soviet participation.


1992 ◽  
Vol 8 ◽  
pp. 27-48
Author(s):  
Bülent Gökay

The end of the First World War marked the complete disintegration of the multi-ethnic Ottoman Empire. This disintegration was followed by a powerful surge of various nationalistic currents on the one hand, and an international power struggle for the control of the region on the other. The 1918-1923 period, therefore, represents a crucial phase, for not only were the overall forms of the international power relations in the area defined during these years, but the political structures and the orientations of various social and political interests within the states concerned were also similarly determined.


2020 ◽  
Vol 68 (2) ◽  
pp. 467-485
Author(s):  
Sanja Petrovic-Todosijevic

The paper is an attempt to point out the problems faced by the new communist authorities in Yugoslavia in the years after the victory in the War and the Revolution in the process of emancipation and additional feminization of the teaching vocation, with particular emphasis on the period until the adoption of the General Law on Education (1958). Particular emphasis will be placed on policy analysis as well as concrete measures that have led to a different profile of the role of the teacher in the post-war society. On the one hand, it will highlight the concrete measures taken by the state to motivate as many women as possible to opt for the teaching job. On the other hand, they will point out the many problems faced by many teachers whose professional and professional qualities, in assessing the quality of their work, are not so infrequently subordinated to their ?moral characteristics?.


2019 ◽  
pp. 299-307
Author(s):  
Oleh RADCHENKO

The peculiarities of legal regulation of pension provision of servicemen and their families on the territory of modern Ukraine in the XVIII–XX centuries are investigated. In particular, it has been established that for the first time the right to pension provision was regulated by Peter I in 1720 in the Marine Statute, which provided service pension, disability pension and survivor’s pension. It was also determined that during the royal period, the provision of pensions was not properly arranged. The new pension system for servicemen began to be built up after the overthrow of the tsarist regime, which was the reason for the October Revolution of the Bolsheviks, but it was far from perfect. Consolidation of the right to pension, its types and conditions of appointment at the normative level did not mean the receipt of pensions. From 1919 till 1924, pension provision for servicemen and their families on the territory of the Ukrainian SSR developed as a republican, in accordance with the regulations of the normative legal acts adopted by the SNK of the UkrSSR, and from 1924, all-Union bodies were formed, therefore further legislation, in particular the one that concerned pension provision, has developed not as a republican, but as all-union. It was also found out that despite the fact that in the period of the Great Patriotic War and the post-war period, the social security of servicemen in general, and pensions in particular, were placed in priority areas, their financial situation and members of their families were at a very low level. It has been established that a number of features of retirement provision for servicemen and members of their families, established in pre-Soviet and Soviet periods, have survived to the present. In particular, it is relevant to types of pensions, stimulation of a later retirement, and differentiation of the size of the pension depending on the disability group, etc.


1978 ◽  
Vol 31 (5) ◽  
pp. 435-447
Author(s):  
Philip C. Almond

There is no doubt that the writings of Karl Barth give evidence of a critical attitude to the anthropocentric theology of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This critical attitude springs both from the failure of nineteenthcentury theology to make significant inroads into the twentieth century due to the traumatic experience of the first World War, and from Barth's own tlieology as it developed in the post-war years through to the early 1960s. Hence, to expound the relationship between Karl Barth and anthropocentric theology is a two-sided task. On the one hand, his attitude to nineteenthcentury theology may be assessed from his investigations of the theologians of that period. On the other hand, this critical attitude must of necessity be related to and contrasted with his own theological development. In this article, I shall be concerned to examine his attitude to anthropocentric theology in the light of his own developing theology.


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