scholarly journals The Experiences of Nikkei-Australian Soldiers During World War II

2018 ◽  
Vol 10 ◽  
pp. 1-28
Author(s):  
Shannon Whiley

This paper is a biographical case study that explores the distinct experiences of three Australian-born Japanese (hereafter, Nikkei-Australians) who volunteered for Australian military service during World War II: Mario Takasuka, Joseph Suzuki and Winston Ide. It examines the social and political context in which these soldiers lived, concluding that they faced a disconnect between the way they were viewed by the government, their local communities and themselves. Notions of identity and nationalism are also explored in the context of World War II and the White Australia Policy, and are compared with the experiences of non-European soldiers in Australia and Nikkei soldiers abroad. The paper also highlights the ambiguous position of Nikkei-Australian soldiers with respect to military enlistment. At the time, legislation allowed for Nikkei-Australians to be variously classified as loyal citizens capable of enlistment, as not sufficiently ‘Australian’ for duty, or as enemy aliens, depending upon how it was applied in each case. Because there was no uniform approach within the government for applying these laws, the experiences of Nikkei-Australians vastly differed, as illustrated by the stories of the individuals profiled in this study. These stories are important as they add to the growing body of knowledge around non-white Australians who served in World War II, and remind us of how the pro-white, anti-Japanese atmosphere within Australia at the time affected those within the community who did not fit the mould of the White Australian ideal.

2020 ◽  
Vol 46 (2) ◽  
pp. 135-143
Author(s):  
Letitia B Johnson

The forcible relocation of Japanese-Canadians (Nikkei) during World War II has been widely examined; however, little scholarly attention has been paid to the impact of relocation on the medical services provided to, and by, the Nikkei. This article highlights the issue of providing sufficient medical care during forcible relocation and the experiences of one Nikkei physician, Dr Masajiro Miyazaki. His story illustrates both the limitations in the healthcare provided to the Nikkei community during relocation and the struggle for Nikkei medical professionals to continue their practice during the war. The agency of the Nikkei—who constantly balanced resistance and adaptation to oppressive conditions—comes to the forefront with this case study. Dr Miyazaki’s personal records of forcible relocation, as well as his published memoir, reveal aspects of the lived reality of one Nikkei physician who was not included in the government discourse, or in the dialogue among his fellow Nikkei physicians, such as inter-racial medical care. It is evident through this case that there was great diversity in the level of medical care which the Nikkei received during their relocation in Canada. Furthermore, Dr Masajiro Miyazaki’s story proves that healthcare professionals, from doctors to nurses’ aides who were both Nikkei and white, provided extraordinary medical services during the forcible relocation, despite significant constraints.


1999 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 333-350 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adrienne van den Bogaard

The ArgumentThe Netherlands has been a pioneering country in the development of macroeconometric modeling and its use in economic policy. The paper shows that the model was used to overcome the fragmented culture of Dutch pillarization. It proves that the specific use (and institutionalization) of modeling in the policy process is at least partly shaped by a nation's (historical) social structure. The case study relates to the outcome of a controversy within the social democratic pillar in the Netherlands in the period 1930–50 as to how to plan the economic system in the context of the social developments leading up to the crisis, World War II, and the postwar recovery.


2005 ◽  
Vol 46 (1) ◽  
pp. 103-125 ◽  
Author(s):  
HAL BRANDS

After World War II, African ex-servicemen in Kenya sought to maintain the socioeconomic gains they had accrued through service in the King's African Rifles (KAR). Looking for middle-class employment and social privileges, they challenged existing relationships within the colonial state. For the most part, veterans did not participate in national politics, believing that their goals could be achieved within the confines of colonial society. The postwar actions of KAR veterans are best explained by an examination of their initial perceptions of colonial military service. Indeed, the social and economic connotations of KAR service, combined with the massive wartime expansion of Kenyan defense forces, created a new class of Africans with distinctive characteristics and interests. These socioeconomic perceptions proved powerful after the war, often informing ex-askari action.


1994 ◽  
Vol 18 (10) ◽  
pp. 637-639 ◽  
Author(s):  
Manfred Bauer

Discussion of the need to reform psychiatric services in former West Germany started relatively late. It was only in the late 1960s, when the government changed from the conservative Christian Democrats to a coalition of the Social Democratic and Liberal Parties, that psychiatry became a public issue for the first time since World War II. Parliament appointed an expert commission, which after four years gave a comprehensive report in which the inadequate care of mentally ill patients was criticised.


2020 ◽  
Vol 77 (2) ◽  
pp. 217-245
Author(s):  
Andrew Ehrinpreis

This article investigates the use of coca by the Bolivian Army during the Chaco War of 1932–35. I present research that reveals the surprising extent to which the Bolivian Army provisioned coca to its soldiers as a substitute for adequate nutrition; as a morale booster; as a stimulant; and as a medicine. The article explores the social and cultural implications of mass coca consumption by Bolivian soldiers, many of whom were mestizos who had never before chewed the leaf. Ultimately, I argue that the pervasiveness of coca within the traumatic popular experience of the Chaco War sowed the seeds of a historic transformation of the politics of coca in Bolivia. The Chaco War initiated a process by which coca in Bolivia was transformed from a neo-colonial marker of the Indian caste to a material and symbolic element of an emergent interethnic working class. Through a comparative analysis of the Bolivian army's use of coca in the Chaco War with the German army's use of methamphetamine during World War II, this article concludes with a consideration of the ways in which the present case study expands our understanding of the crucial but under-studied historical relationship between drugs and warfare.


2008 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 88-98 ◽  
Author(s):  
Siarhei Danskikh

The article discusses the influence of the process of urbanization on the Belarusian nationality. Due to some historical conditions the Western cities‐communes have not formed in Belarus. At the beginning of the New Ages the Belarusian city has had Magdeburgian law and the trading relations, it has been the centre of the political life, the residence of the State officials and the provinces. Through the social‐economical backwardness of the Russian empire the peasants of Belarus could not move into the towns from the country. The towns and the cities in Belarus were not Belarusian but Jewish and Polish ones. Due to the World War II there have emerged the Polish Holocaust, repatriation and the Soviet industrialization which have made some auspicious conditions for the overtaking modernization in Belarus. During only one generation the peasant Belarusian nation has become the urban one. Such overtaking process of the urbanization has been preventing the formation of the standards and the traditions of the Belarusian city. The basis of the social and cultural life of Belarusians has been forming the traditions of the Soviet culture. That is why we can come to the conclusion that the overtaking modernization is closely related to the radical changes of the national identity. The more overtaking is modernization of the cities and the whole State, the more dangerous is the deprivation of the national peculiarity. The nation whose spiritual life is not utterly formed can hardly successfully adapt itself to the social and economical changes, which are determined by the overtaking modernization. These alterations do absolutely not correspond to its spiritual way of life.


Author(s):  
Žarko Lazarević

The following article focuses on the economic conflicts in the local rural communities in Slovenia until World War II and analyses the example of the privatisation of a public good, the relations between labour and capital, and economic solidarity in form of cooperatives as a tool for ensuring social cohesion at the local level. The author presents a viewpoint that the feeling of social justice (moral economy) represented a cohesive element in the analysed local communities. Justice, defined according to the rules of traditional law, provided the relations in the local communities with a status of legitimacy. If the feeling of justice was questioned, then the legitimacy of the social relations and consequently the cohesion of the local communities were uncertain as well.


Author(s):  
Pavel Gotovetsky

The article is devoted to the biography of General Pavlo Shandruk, an Ukrainian officer who served as a Polish contract officer in the interwar period and at the beginning of the World War II, and in 1945 became the organizer and commander of the Ukrainian National Army fighting alongside the Third Reich in the last months of the war. The author focuses on the symbolic event of 1961, which was the decoration of General Shandruk with the highest Polish (émigré) military decoration – the Virtuti Militari order, for his heroic military service in 1939. By describing the controversy and emotions among Poles and Ukrainians, which accompanied the award of the former Hitler's soldier, the author tries to answer the question of how the General Shandruk’s activities should be assessed in the perspective of the uneasy Twentieth-Century Polish-Ukrainian relations. Keywords: Pavlo Shandruk, Władysław Anders, Virtuti Militari, Ukrainian National Army, Ukrainian National Committee, contract officer.


Author(s):  
Connie Y. Chiang

The mass imprisonment of over 110,000 people of Japanese ancestry during World War II was one of the most egregious violations of civil liberties in US history. Removed from their homes on the temperate Pacific Coast, Japanese Americans spent the war years in ten desolate camps in the nation’s interior. Although scholars and commentators acknowledge the harsh environmental conditions of these camps, they have turned their attention to the social, political, or legal dimensions of this story. Nature Behind Barbed Wire shifts the focus to the natural world and explores how it shaped the experiences of Japanese Americans and federal officials who worked for the War Relocation Authority (WRA), the civilian agency that administered the camps. The complexities of the natural world both enhanced and constrained the WRA’s power and provided Japanese Americans with opportunities to redefine the terms and conditions of their confinement. Even as the environment compounded their feelings of despair and outrage, they also learned that their willingness (or lack thereof) to transform and adapt to the natural world could help them endure and even contest their incarceration. Ultimately, this book demonstrates that the Japanese American incarceration was fundamentally an environmental story. Japanese Americans and WRA officials negotiated the terms of confinement with each other and with a dynamic natural world.


Author(s):  
Christel Lane

This chapter analyses inns, taverns, and public houses in their social context, exploring their organizational identity and the social positions of their owners/tenants. It examines how patrons express their class, gender, and national identity by participation in different kinds of sociality. Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century hostelries afforded more opportunities for cross-class sociability than in later centuries. Social mixing was facilitated because the venues fulfilled multiple economic, social, and political functions, thereby providing room for social interaction apart from communal drinking and eating. Yet, even in these earlier centuries, each type of hostelry already had a distinctive class character, shaping its organizational identity. Division along lines of class hardened, and social segregation increased in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, up to World War II. In the post-War era, increased democratization of society at large became reflected in easier social mixing in pubs. Despite this democratization, during the late twentieth century the dominant image of pubs as a working-class institution persisted.


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