The United States Army's History of World War II

1955 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 32 ◽  
Author(s):  
M. C. Helfers
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
The United States ◽  
World War ◽  
History Of

Japanese American Buddhism

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michihiro Ama ◽  
Michael Masatsugu
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Cultural Practices ◽  
The United States ◽  
Japanese American ◽  
World War ◽  
Japanese Buddhism ◽  
American Buddhism ◽  
History Of ◽  
Jodo Shinshu

Japanese Buddhism was introduced to the United States at the Parliament of World Religions in Chicago in 1893, but the development of Japanese American Buddhism, also known as Nikkei Buddhism, really began when Japanese migrants brought Buddhism with them to Hawaii and the continental United States during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It has been influenced by, and has reflected, America’s sociopolitical and religious climate and the US relationship to Japan, to which generations of Japanese Americans, such as Issei (literally, first generation, referring to Japanese immigrants), Nisei (second-generation American-born offspring of the Issei), and Sansei (third generation), responded differently. While adapting to American society, Japanese American Buddhists maintained their cultural practices and ethnoreligious identity. The history of Japanese American Buddhism discussed in this article spans from the late-19th Century to the 1970s and is divided into three major periods: the pre-World War II, World War II, and the postwar eras. Japanese American Buddhism is derived from the various Buddhist organizations in Japan. The Nishi Hongwanji denomination of Jōdo Shinshū, a form of Pure Land Buddhism known as Shin Buddhism in the West, is the oldest and largest form of ethnic Japanese Buddhism in the United States. In Hawaii, Nishi Hongwanji founded the Hompa Hongwanji Mission of Hawaii (HHMH) in Honolulu in 1897. On the continental United States, it established the Buddhist Mission of North America (BMNA) in San Francisco in 1898, currently known as the Buddhist Churches of America (BCA). Other Japanese Buddhist organizations also developed in the United States at the beginning of the 20th century. They include the Jōdo-shū, another sect of Pure Land Buddhism; Higashi Hongwanji, another major denomination of Jōdoshin-shū; Sōtō-shū, a Zen Buddhist school; Shingon-shū, known as Kōyasan Buddhism; and Nichiren-shū. The characteristics of Japanese American Buddhism changed significantly during World War II, when approximately 120,000 persons of Japanese descent living in the West Coast states were incarcerated because of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066. The postwar period witnessed a rapid transformation in the status and visibility of Japanese Buddhism in the United States. This transformation was driven by the promotion of ethnonational Buddhism by Nisei and by the growth of interest in Zen Buddhism among the general American public. The positive reception of Japanese Buddhism in the United States reflected and reinforced the transformed relationship between the United States and Japan from wartime enemies to Cold War partners. While they experienced greater receptivity and interest in Buddhism from nonethnics, they could no longer practice or espouse Jōdo Shinshū teachings or adapted practices without clarification. Debates concerning the authenticity of Jōdo Shinshū Buddhism and Japanese American Buddhist practices were interwoven within a longer history of American Orientalism. By the 1960s, Japanese American Buddhist communities were transformed by the addition of a small but vocal nonethnic membership and a new generation of Sansei Buddhists. Demands for English-speaking ministers resulted in the creation, in 1967, of the Institute of Buddhist Studies, the first graduate-level training program in the United States endorsed by Nishi Hongwanji. This article is an overview of Japanese American Buddhism with a focus on the development of the Nishi Hongwanji Shin Buddhist organizations in the United States. English scholarship on the development of other Japanese Buddhist organizations in the United States is still limited. Throughout the history of Japanese American Buddhism, Nikkei Buddhists negotiated with America’s political institutions and Christian churches, as well as with Euro-American Buddhists, over Buddhist and cultural practices to maintain and redefine their ethnoreligious tradition. Buddhist temples provided the space for them to gather and build a community of shared faith and cultural heritage, discuss their place and the role of Buddhism in American society, and express their concerns to America’s general public.

In Defense of Justice

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eileen H. Tamura
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
The United States ◽  
Concentration Camps ◽  
Japanese Americans ◽  
Japanese American ◽  
World War ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of

As a leading dissident in the World War II concentration camps for Japanese Americans, Joseph Yoshisuke Kurihara stands out as an icon of Japanese American resistance. In this biography, Kurihara's life provides a window into the history of Japanese Americans during the first half of the twentieth century. Born in Hawaiʻi to Japanese parents who immigrated to work on the sugar plantations, Kurihara was transformed by the forced removal and incarceration of ethnic Japanese during World War II. As an inmate at Manzanar in California, Kurihara became one of the leaders of a dissident group within the camp and was implicated in “the Manzanar incident,” a serious civil disturbance that erupted on December 6, 1942. In 1945, after three years and seven months of incarceration, he renounced his U.S. citizenship and boarded a ship for Japan, never to return to the United States. Shedding light on the turmoil within the camps as well as the sensitive and formerly unspoken issue of citizenship renunciation among Japanese Americans, this book explores one man's struggles with the complexities of loyalty and dissent.

Brainstorming Revisited

2020 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 50-69
Author(s):  
Claudia Mareis
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
The United States ◽  
World War ◽  
Creativity Research ◽  
Human Creativity ◽  
Self Actualization ◽  
History Of

This article discusses a particular strand in the history of creativity in the mid-twentieth century shaped by an instrumental, production-oriented understanding of the term. When the field of creativity research emerged in the United States after World War II, debates around creativity were driven not only by humanist intents of self-actualization but also by the aim of rendering individual creative potentials productive for both society and economy. Creativity was thus defined in terms of not mere novelty and originality but utility and productivity. There was a strong interest, too, in methods and techniques that promised to systematically enhance human creativity. In this context, the article looks at the formation of brainstorming, a group-based creativity method that came into fashion in the United States around 1950. It discusses how this method had been influenced by concepts of human productivity developed and applied during World War II and prior to it. Using the brainstorming method as a case in point, this article aims not only to shed light on the quite uncharted history of creativity in the mid-twentieth century, but also to stress the conducive role of allegedly trivial creativity methods in the rise of what sociologist Andreas Reckwitz has identified as the “creativity dispositif”: a seemingly playful, but indeed rigid, imperative in post-Fordist and neoliberal societies that demand the constant production of innovative outcomes under flexible, yet self-exploitative working conditions.

America: Promised Land or Wasteland

1973 ◽  
Vol 35 (3) ◽  
pp. 291-301 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kenneth W. Thompson
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
The United States ◽  
Foreign Affairs ◽  
World War ◽  
Promised Land ◽  
The World ◽  
Anniversary Issue ◽  
History Of ◽  
Hans Morgenthau

Hamilton Fish Armstrong, retiring editor of the influential quarterly, Foreign Affairs, writes in its fiftieth anniversary issue: “Not since we withdrew into comfortable isolation in 1920 has the prestige of the United States stood so low.” Lest his judgment be construed as political rhetoric, it should be noted that Armstrong has been an advisor to both major political parties. And if anyone doubts that there is cause for this critique, he need only consider the following: the United States, which in the 1940's and 1950's had an “automatic majority” in votes at the United Nations, has learned in the 1960's what it means to be outvoted in this same assembly. Americans, who during and after World War II trumpeted the cause of anticolonialism and the end of aggression, are today condemned as imperialists and aggressors. And while we have been heralded since 1946 as the most powerful nation in the history of the world, a tiny and divided nation among the less developed of Southeast Asia has fought us to a standstill. Is it any wonder Armstrong can write of the decline of America and point to the loss of our prestige in the world? Or that Hans Morgenthau can say: “America no longer sets an example for other nations to emulate; in many respects it sets an example of what to avoid”

History of the United States Naval Operations in World War II

1955 ◽  
Vol 42 (1) ◽  
pp. 148
Author(s):  
Albert F. Simpson ◽  
Samuel Eliot Morison
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
The United States ◽  
World War ◽  
History Of ◽  
Naval Operations

Conclusion—Where Did We Go Wrong?

2021 ◽  
pp. 527-560
Author(s):  
Mark Lawrence Schrad
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Great Depression ◽  
The United States ◽  
Political Rights ◽  
World War ◽  
Economic Rights ◽  
The Great Depression ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Masses

Having finished our history of prohibitionism, Chapter 18 asks: Where did our historical understandings go wrong? The chapter begins with the autumn years of Pussyfoot Johnson during the Great Depression, when prohibitionists had been thoroughly discredited. With the rise of Hayekian neoliberalism after World War II in the United States, any infringement on individual economic rights became understood as a necessary infringement on political rights too—which has made it difficult for contemporary historians to understand prohibitionism. In the 1950s and 1960s, Richard Hofstadter and Joseph Gusfield cast prohibition as solely a moral, religious issue, rather than a political or economic one, motivated by equal parts of “Marx, Jefferson and Jesus.” Ultimately, prohibitionism was a transnational normative shift about the inappropriateness of benefiting from addiction and misery of the masses, and an attempt to put the welfare of society ahead of the needs of the state.

The Eagle has Landed: Groping for a Korean Role in the Pacific War

2014 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 5-33
Author(s):  
Mark E. Caprio
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
The United States ◽  
Pacific War ◽  
World War ◽  
The Pacific ◽  
Southern Korea ◽  
History Of ◽  
Military Support ◽  
First Americans

The first Americans to arrive in Korea following Japan’s surrender at the end of World War II brought with them a quartet of Korean soldiers that U.S. officials had recruited for the Eagle Project, the most ambitious American effort to use Koreans in the Pacific War that punctuated a long wartime effort to enlist Allied diplomatic and military support for overseas Koreans. In response, U.S. officials had insisted that Korean exiles in the United States unify their efforts. This condition referenced squabbles among Korean groups in general, with the most transparent being those between Syngman Rhee and Haan Kilsoo. While Korean combatants on the Asian mainland managed to gain some U.S. support for their cause, recognition of their potential came too late in the war for them to help liberate their country. Ultimately, the United States turned to the Japanese and Japanese-trained Koreans to assist in this occupation. Reviewing the history of both Korean lobbying and U.S. response to it provides the opportunity to ask whether better handling of the Korean issue during World War II could have provided U.S. occupation forces with better circumstances to prepare southern Korea for a swift, and unified, independence.

The Evolution of the Arctic Submarine

1984 ◽  
Vol 37 (3) ◽  
pp. 380-397 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alfred S. McLaren
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Arctic ◽  
World War ◽  
The Past ◽  
Jules Verne ◽  
History Of ◽  
John Wilkins

This paper examines the evolution of the arctic submarine and the ever-increasing scientific and commercial potential which have accompanied this evolution over the past 340 years. It is a sporadic history of arctic submarine ideas, concepts and actual experiences with vessels at sea. It happens to be a history that is largely American, with important additions as a result of the experiences of the Germans, Soviets and the British, particularly during World War II. Finally, it is a history in which five early visionaries in particular stand out: Bishop John Wilkins of England; Jules Verne of France; Professor Anschutz-Kampfe of Germany; the submarine designer Simon Lake, of the United States — whose influence extended over four decades until well into the twentieth century; and Sir Hubert Wilkins of Australia.

Unconventional Histories

2018 ◽  
pp. 166-180
Author(s):  
Stephanie C. Moore
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Social Justice ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
National Security ◽  
Essential Role ◽  
The United States ◽  
World War ◽  
Latin Americans ◽  
Yellow Peril ◽  
History Of

This chapter highlights how many women historians, like the author, delve into the histories that have been marginalized by the dominant canon, finding palpable relevance to present-day social justice issues. The chapter then turns to the little-known history of the internment of Japanese Latin Americans in the United States during World War II, a case of extraordinary rendition. Focusing on the internment of the Japanese Peruvians, this chapter argues that global “yellow peril” and eugenic ideologies played an essential role in U.S. and Peruvian policies during WWII. Further, it challenges readers to consider how purported policies of national security have been motivated by thinly veiled racism.

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