scholarly journals Depictions of the Battle of Okinawa and its Social and Cultural Complexity using a transmedia approach: The Case of Gima Hiroshi (1923-2017)

2018 ◽  
pp. 57-84
Author(s):  
Eriko Tomizawa-Kay
Keyword(s):  
Focal Point ◽  
Asia Pacific ◽  
Pacific War ◽  
Cultural Complexity ◽  
The Social ◽  
Woodblock Prints ◽  
Okinawa Prefecture ◽  
Battle Of Okinawa ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Post War

The battle of Okinawa of 1945 was one of the bloodiest battles of the Asia Pacific War, with nearly a quarter of the Okinawan population perishing. This paper examines paintings, woodblock prints and manga that depict this battle, and through analysis of these works I show how deeply they reflect significant issues relating to Okinawan history, culture, and society, notably the struggles of its citizens and Okinawa’s social and political complexities. This paper explores several artists’ visual descriptions of the brutal and catastrophic Battle of Okinawa, particularly in terms of how their works disseminated the artists’ views on the battle, as well as war in general, to an audience beyond Okinawa prefecture. Art that concentrates on the Battle of Okinawa, either as a focal point or a cultural influence, has been little studied so far, most probably because it has been treated as a sensitive and controversial issue, culturally and especially politically. Artists are grouped and discussed according to regional identities (Okinawa or non-Okinawa), generation (pre-war or post-war), and gender. I also analyse the complexities of the objectives and challenges of each artist who was trying to create works that exposed the social reality, though my main focus is on the woodblock print artist, Gima Hiroshi, who was an Okinawan diaspora artist with a more transmedia approach than 2 contemporary painters such as Maruki Toshi (1901-1995), Maruki Iri (1912- 2000), and war-theme (sensō) manga artist, Kyō Machiko (b. 1978).

Women and the Judiciary in the Asia-Pacific

2021 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Gender Equality ◽  
Empirical Studies ◽  
Gender Composition ◽  
Asia Pacific ◽  
Gender Justice ◽  
Women's Issues ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Social ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Core Part

Courts can play an important role in addressing issues of inequality, discrimination and gender injustice for women. The feminisation of the judiciary – both in its thin meaning of women's entrance into the profession, as well as its thicker forms of realising gender justice – is a core part of the agenda for gender equality. This volume acknowledges both the diversity of meanings of the feminisation of the judiciary, as well as the complexity of the social and cultural realisation of gender equality. Containing original empirical studies, this book demonstrates the past and present challenges women face to entering the judiciary and progressing their career, as well as when and why they advocate for women's issues while on the bench. From stories of pioneering women to sector-wide institutional studies of the gender composition of the judiciary, this book reflects on the feminisation of the judiciary in the Asia-Pacific.

Making Icons

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jennifer Coates
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Asia Pacific ◽  
Pacific War ◽  
World War ◽  
Peak Period ◽  
Japanese Cinema ◽  
The Media ◽  
Rigorous Study ◽  
Post War

A distinctive feature of post-war Japanese cinema is the frequent recurrence of imagistic and narrative tropes and formulaic characterizations in female representations. These repetitions are important, Jennifer Coates asserts, because sentiments and behaviours forbidden during the war and post-war social and political changes were often articulated by or through the female image. Moving across major character types, from mothers to daughters, and schoolteachers to streetwalkers, Making Icons studies the role of the media in shaping the attitudes of the general public. Japanese cinema after defeat in the Asia Pacific War and World War II is shown to be an important ground where social experiences were explored, reworked, and eventually accepted or rejected by audiences emotionally invested in these repetitive materials. An examination of 600 films produced and distributed between 1945 and 1964, as well as numerous Japanese-language sources, forms the basis of this rigorous study. Making Icons draws on an art-historical iconographic analysis to explain how viewers derive meanings from images during this peak period of film production and attendance in Japan.

scholarly journals Collective Memory

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Félix Krawatzek
Keyword(s):  
Collective Memory ◽  
Political Science ◽  
Truth Commissions ◽  
Asia Pacific ◽  
Pacific War ◽  
Research Strategies ◽  
Political Sciences ◽  
Post Conflict ◽  
Conceptual Clarity ◽  
The Social

Scholarship on collective memory from an explicit political science perspective has expanded over the last decade. This growth speaks to political dynamics unfolding across the world, as history has once again become part of political confrontations. The ongoing dispute about an acceptable name for Macedonia, the role of truth commissions in post-conflict societies, and the international tensions stemming from the memories of Japanese aggression on the Asian continent during the Asia-Pacific War illustrate that political science needs to include questions of collective memory in its analysis. Although political science’s focus on collective memory is new, it would be erroneous to believe that memory has started to shape politics only recently. The study of the societal significance of present-day representations of past narratives has a long history. Its intellectual forebears can be found notably in late-19th-century French sociology, and the topic has gained in prominence in the humanities and sociology since the 1980s and is now marching into the political sciences. This latter expansion also changes the methods and research strategies that scholarship on collective memory employs. Nevertheless, studying collective memory will remain an inherently interdisciplinary endeavor and uniquely integrates the social sciences, humanities, and natural sciences. Given the field’s quick shifts, a number of central conceptual tools retain an elasticity less common in other branches of the discipline. Meanwhile, the number of topics that can be approached through the prism of collective memory is inexhaustible. The field is therefore held together primarily by its underlying conceptual apparatus. Conceptual clarity is thus particularly relevant for a dialogue within and across the disciplines, and also to integrate the insights related to collective memory generated in political and social theory. The state of the scholarship illustrates, however, that studies of collective memory have overwhelmingly been motivated by empirical puzzles and at times continue to analyze memory as being a tangible phenomenon. While not necessarily shortcomings, many of the empirical contributions have thereby shied away from a more thorough theoretical investigation.

Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hiro Saito
Keyword(s):  
Field Theory ◽  
Political Parties ◽  
Institutional Environment ◽  
Focal Point ◽  
Japanese Government ◽  
Asia Pacific ◽  
Pacific War ◽  
Political Actors ◽  
Political Opportunities ◽  
Political Struggles

In essence, East Asia’s history problem resulted from a collision of nationalist commemorations in Japan as well as in South Korea and China. To understand how the history problem evolved, this chapter draws on field theory and proposes to analyze the history problem as a field inhabited by various political actors—governments, political parties, NGOs, and so on—competing for the legitimate commemoration of the Asia-Pacific War. The Japanese government is the most important actor in this field because it has the power to define Japan’s official commemoration, the focal point of political struggles. In addition, commemorative positions of the Japanese government and other relevant actors can be identified in terms of the spectrum ranging between nationalism and cosmopolitanism—the two logics of commemoration available in the institutional environment. These actors then try to influence Japan’s official commemoration by exploiting available mobilizing structures and political opportunities.

scholarly journals Technology, Listening and Historical Method: Placing Audio in the Post-War British Home

2017 ◽  
Vol 142 (2) ◽  
pp. 367-399
Author(s):  
Tom Perchard
Keyword(s):  
Academic Writing ◽  
Historical Method ◽  
The Social ◽  
New Meanings ◽  
Audio Equipment ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Post War ◽  
British Home ◽  
Design And Manufacture ◽  
Home Furnishing

ABSTRACTThis article explores the ways in which audio in the home was figured in (and helped shape) changing consumer and gender roles in post-war Britain. It looks at the ways in which innovations in home-furnishing and audio-equipment design and manufacture created an environment with new tactile as well as sonic qualities; it examines the ways in which changing music styles helped develop new markets for audio equipment and new meanings for audio discourse. But before it does so, the article sets out some arguments on cultural-historical method. Extant academic writing on post-war home audio tends to privilege the study of media representation – and the critique of ideology constructed therein – at the expense of other kinds of enquiry and source-work. In making use of a broader range of sources and interpretative approaches, this piece aims for a thick reading of the ‘social’ along with the ‘cultural’.

Processual archaeology and gender politics. The loss of innocence

2011 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 59-86 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rachel Pope
Keyword(s):  
Social Role ◽  
Slow Increase ◽  
The Social ◽  
Positive Discrimination ◽  
Personal Histories ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Post War ◽  
The Impact

AbstractProviding a younger woman's perspective, and born out of the 2006 Cambridge Personal Histories event on 1960s archaeology, this paper struggles to reconcile the panel's characterization of a ‘democratization’ of the field with an apparent absence of women, despite their relative visibility in 1920s–1940s archaeology. Focusing on Cambridge, as the birthplace of processualism, the paper tackles the question ‘where were the women?’ in 1950s–1960s archaeology. A sociohistorical perspective considers the impact of traditional societal views regarding the social role of women; the active gendering of science education; the slow increase of university places for young women; and the ‘marriage bars’ of post-war Britain, crucially restricting women's access to the professions in the era of professionalization, leading to decades of positive discrimination in favour of men. Pointing to the science of male and female archaeologists in 1920s–1930s Cambridge, it challenges ideas of scientific archaeology as a peculiarly post-war (and male) endeavour. The paper concludes that processual archaeology did not seek to democratize the field for women archaeologists.

The Politics of Disease and Disorder in Post-War Malaya

1990 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 88-113 ◽  
Author(s):  
T.N. Harper
Keyword(s):  
Political Action ◽  
Political Life ◽  
Pacific War ◽  
Nationalist Movement ◽  
The Pacific ◽  
The Social ◽  
Military Administration ◽  
Present Decade ◽  
Post War ◽  
Malaysian Politics

It has become a commonplace of Malayan historiography that the period following the end of the Pacific War witnessed the establishment of a pattern of political life which has persisted in its main features into the present decade. Existing accounts have focused around the restructuring of the British presence in Malaya under a military administration and the introduction of, and opposition to, the Malayan Union scheme in 1946 and the Federal structure which succeeded it in April 1948. These years saw the emergence of an ethnically based nationalist movement and the defeat of a radical challenge to its predominance. The communal and insurrectionary violence which was a feature of the period has been represented as a constraint to subsequent political action — as a limit to what the structure of Malaya's pluralism could tolerate — and the constitutional struggles as a lost opportunity to effect its transformation. Whilst it is hard to exaggerate the importance of these events in shaping the landscape of Malaysian politics, there is a sense in which the sophistication of these political and constitutional preoccupations suggests uneven development within the historical writing as a whole. The social context which stimulated change, and the breadth of the local response which dignified it, has been marginalized in many accounts. There has been a tendency to conceive the state system and the colonial presence in Malaya within the bounds of a paradigm governed by the constitutional settlement, and the various phases of insurrection and political change as primarily the products of the subversive or nationalist imagination.

Nazistowski mord na Żydach w prasie polskich komunistów (1942–1944).

2006 ◽  
pp. 54-75
Author(s):  
Klaus Peter Friedrich
Keyword(s):  
Shared Responsibility ◽  
The Political ◽  
Right Wing ◽  
Social Democrats ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Government ◽  
Post War ◽  
Polish Government ◽  
The Right ◽  
Political Right

Facing the decisive struggle between Nazism and Soviet communism for dominance in Europe, in 1942/43 Polish communists sojourning in the USSR espoused anti-German concepts of the political right. Their aim was an ethnic Polish ‘national communism’. Meanwhile, the Polish Workers’ Party in the occupied country advocated a maximum intensification of civilian resistance and partisan struggle. In this context, commentaries on the Nazi judeocide were an important element in their endeavors to influence the prevailing mood in the country: The underground communist press often pointed to the fate of the murdered Jews as a warning in order to make it clear to the Polish population where a deficient lack of resistance could lead. However, an agreed, unconditional Polish and Jewish armed resistance did not come about. At the same time, the communist press constantly expanded its demagogic confrontation with Polish “reactionaries” and accused them of shared responsibility for the Nazi murder of the Jews, while the Polish government (in London) was attacked for its failure. This antagonism was intensified in the fierce dispute between the Polish and Soviet governments after the rift which followed revelations about the Katyn massacre. Now the communist propaganda image of the enemy came to the fore in respect to the government and its representatives in occupied Poland. It viewed the government-in-exile as being allied with the “reactionaries,” indifferent to the murder of the Jews, and thus acting ultimately on behalf of Nazi German policy. The communists denounced the real and supposed antisemitism of their adversaries more and more bluntly. In view of their political isolation, they coupled them together, in an undifferentiated manner, extending from the right-wing radical ONR to the social democrats and the other parties represented in the underground parliament loyal to the London based Polish government. Thereby communist propaganda tried to discredit their opponents and to justify the need for a new start in a post-war Poland whose fate should be shaped by the revolutionary left. They were thus paving the way for the ultimate communist takeover

PAR Method

2010 ◽  
Vol 3 (3) ◽  
pp. 355-375 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michelle Billies
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Low Income ◽  
Critical Consciousness ◽  
Design Method ◽  
Participatory Action ◽  
Community Members ◽  
Context Analysis ◽  
Gender Nonconforming ◽  
The Social ◽  
And Gender

The work of the Welfare Warriors Research Collaborative (WWRC), a participatory action research (PAR) project that looks at how low income lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and gender nonconforming (LG-BTGNC) people survive and resist violence and discrimination in New York City, raises the question of what it means to make conscientization, or critical consciousness, a core feature of PAR. Guishard's (2009) reconceptualization of conscientization as “moments of consciousness” provides a new way of looking at what seemed to be missing from WWRC's process and analysis. According to Guishard, rather than a singular awakening, critical consciousness emerges continually through interactions with others and the social context. Analysis of the WWRC's process demonstrates that PAR researchers doing “PAR deep” (Fine, 2008)—research in which community members share in all aspects of design, method, analysis and product development—should have an agenda for developing critical consciousness, just as they would have agendas for participation, for action, and for research.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document