scholarly journals The Internment and Repatriation of the Japanese-French Nationals Resident in New Caledonia, 1941–1946

Author(s):  
Rowena Ward

The pre-1941 Japanese population of New Caledonia was decimated by the French administration’s decision to transfer most of the Japanese residents to Australia for internment at the outbreak of the Asia-Pacific theatre of the Second World War. Among the men transferred to Australia were ten men who had been formerly French nationals but had lost their French nationality by decree. The French Administration’s ability to denationalise and intern and then subsequently repatriate the former-Japanese French-nationals was possible due to changes to the French nationality laws and regulations introduced by the Vichy regime. This paper considers the case of the Japanese who had taken French nationality and were denationalised in the context of the changes to the French nationality laws that, in turn, negatively affected the post-1945 sustainability of the Japanese community in New Caledonia.

2019 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 220-246
Author(s):  
Tadd Graham Fernée

This article comparatively examines French and English literature based on two novels published in 1947, Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano and Jean-Louis Curtis’ The Forests of Night. Both novels employ the mythic device to construct narratives on the twilight of the British Empire and the German occupied French Vichy regime, respectively, depicting experiences of resistance and collaboration on the eve of and during the Second World War. Both invent a system of symbolic imagery modelled on the Surrealist template in Jean Cocteau’s The Infernal Machine, that turns the classical mythic device still prevalent in the early 20th century (i.e. in Joyce or Eliot) upside down. The revolution in Mythic Imagination follows the Structuralist Revolution initiated by Durkheim, Saussure and Bachelard, evacuating fixed ontological architecture to portray relational interdependency without essence. These novels pursue overlapping ethical investigations, on “non-interventionism” in Lowry and “fraternity” in Curtis. The novels raise questions about the relation between colonialism and fascism and the impact of non-Western mythic universes (i.e. Hinduism) upon the Mythic Imagination. They have implications for our understanding of gender relations, as well as the value of political activism and progress.


2002 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
pp. 371-390 ◽  
Author(s):  
Simon Kitson

The French police during the Second World War were used both as a tool of collaboration between the Vichy regime and the Nazi occupier and to enforce an internal political reform, known as the National Revolution. The police initially responded enthusiastically, since an input of new resources was promised and the regime's main opponents – communists and foreigners – were also traditional police targets. A fierce repression ensued, police actions including the handing over of communists to the Nazis and playing an important role in deporting foreign Jews to their deaths. However, after two years police support began to falter, and by mid-1943 many police forces were at collapsing point. The police were suffering from an acute patriotic identity crisis and were the target of Resistance propaganda. The promised new resources had largely failed to materialise, which both demoralised the police and further undermined their efficiency.


2012 ◽  
pp. 89-93
Author(s):  
Gyunghee Park

Japan’s brutal military occupation of Korea from 1910 until the end of the Second World War is generally remembered as a period of grave injustice which has defined a large part of what it means to be Korean. Though the list of crimes is vast, today it seems that one of the most barbaric offences committed at the time was the formation of ‘comfort stations’ – a euphemistic term used to describe the sexual exploitation of mostly Korean women by the Japanese military and government. After a decisive end to Japan’s military conquest of control over the Asia Pacific with the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, former ‘comfort women’ were silenced for over half a century by a deeply systemic sense of shame. Korean patriarchy pressed many survivors to hide their plight or even back into different sectors of the sex industry. However, South Korea’s democratization in the late-1980s ...


Author(s):  
Alma Rachel Heckman

Chapter 2 focuses on the Second World War and its effects on Moroccan Jewish and Muslim political life. With France’s fall to Nazi Germany in 1940, the collaborationist Vichy regime applied anti-Semitic legislation in Morocco. While unevenly enforced, such legislation called for severe restrictions on employment, education, and housing for Moroccan Jews. This chapter examines Vichy rule in Morocco and the related spikes in anti-Semitism and fascism. It also describes the efflorescence of political possibilities for Moroccan Jews and Muslims that followed the success of Operation Torch. Yet, the previous fluidity of political choices hardened into mutually exclusive possibilities. Moroccan Jews asked themselves whether it was best to stay in Morocco or to leave. Simultaneously, the chapter charts the transformation of the Moroccan Communist Party into a nationalist organization that included a critical number of politicized Jews.


2019 ◽  
Vol 16 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 11-28
Author(s):  
Benjamin Hiramatsu Ireland

This article interrogates both the legal and social identities of Japanese-Melanesians (or ‘Nippo-Kanaks’) residing in the Free French territory of New Caledonia at the beginning of the twentieth century to the years following the Second World War. The first part of the article details how, fearing an imminent Japanese attack on New Caledonia after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the French Empire began the process of deporting nearly all Japanese emigrants residing throughout New Caledonia to Australian internment camps on 8 December 1941. French officials in New Caledonia sequestered all property belonging to the Japanese émigré community, and later sold it to the French public. Nippo-Kanaks, who were children at the time of the incarceration and deportation of their Japanese fathers, maintained a problematized legal identity as Japanese nationals residing in Pacific French territory. Although the French Empire granted French citizenship to mixed race Kanaks in 1946, French authorities in New Caledonia specifically denied French citizenship to Nippo-Kanaks, who then had to petition for French naturalization. The second part of this article interrogates the social identity of Nippo-Kanaks viewed from the perspective of Jeannette Yokoyama, a second-generation Nippo-Kanak whose Japanese father was deported to Australia. Yokoyama’s father was forcibly repatriated to Japan after the Second World War, but by writing letters he maintained communication with his family in New Caledonia. The letters that Jeannette received from her father allowed her to forge personal memories of her absent father that shaped her social, mixed race identity as a Nippo-Kanak. For Yokoyama’s father, the letters served as a means to enculturate Jeannette as a Japanese daughter from afar. Jeannette’s memories of her beloved father, coupled with the embrace of her Japanese heritage, represent a symbolic resistance to French administrators’ efforts to erase the presence of the Japanese community in New Caledonia.


2017 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 37-44
Author(s):  
Stephanie Kates

During the Second World War in France, a fascist government known as the Vichy Government replaced the Third French Republic. In 1995, the French government publicly admitted that shortly after signing an armistice with Nazi Germany in 1940, the Vichy regime was responsible for implementing racist policies and contributing to the deaths of tens of thousands of people. The purpose of this paper is to begin exploring the extent to which the Vichy Government participated and collaborated in the killings, internment, and discrimination of many thousands of people during the Second World War. The following article focuses on three major aspects of the Vichy Government’s collaboration: anti-Semitic legislation, the internment camps in France, and the roundup at the Vélodrome D’Hiver. The case study of the Vélodrome D'Hiver alongside the other aspects of collaboration are illustrative examples that offer new insights suggesting that Vichy France's government operated as an emphatic collaborator with Nazi Germany rather than simply submitting to or passively assisting this adminstration. The article's thesis advances the notion that this emphatic collaboration was implemented mostly without direction or instruction from the authorities of the Nazi occupying forces. 


2019 ◽  
Vol 10 (6/1) ◽  
pp. 13-16 ◽  
Author(s):  
Oleg V. GRIGORIEV

The article is devoted to questions of distortion of historical events in the modern world, which became a real weapon used in the war “for the minds of people”. According to the author, such a war, with the use of a wide arsenal of information and psychological means, against the Russian Federation has long been under way. The author is worried about the fact that in the Chinese media recently extensive information propaganda aimed at advancing Chinese historians’ assessments of the significance of the Chinese army during the Second World War and, thus, undermining the role of the Soviet Union in the victory over militaristic Japan. The author argues that this cannot be regarded as a well-thought out strategic information operation whose ultimate goal is to form the international public opinion on the recognition of China’s decisive value in Second World War. It is anticipated that this will provide China with a moral right to occupy a dominant position in the Asia-Pacific region, as well as additional opportunities to qualify for leadership in the modern international security system. The article examines some historical aspects of China’s role in the victory over militaristic Japan. A brief description of the assistance of the Soviet Union of China during the Second World War is given. The paper argues that the Chinese side maintained superiority in the fight against Japan, in connection with which it suffered a 35millionth loss. The author cites the opinion of the Russian military historians who believe that judging the contribution of one or another party only in terms of the number of victims does not seem to be quite correct, both from the militarypolitical point of view and purely psychological position. In conclusion, the article concludes that existing disagreements in approaches and assessments need to be eliminated on the principles of good-neighborliness and mutual respect. This requires active and consolidated performances by Russian and Chinese scientists and specialists at different levels, media support and other significant actions based on the agreed position of the leadership of the Russian Federation and the People’s Republic of China.


Author(s):  
Jacques Semelin

Between the French defeat in 1940 and liberation in 1944, the Nazis killed almost 80,000 of France's Jews, both French and foreign. Since that time, this tragedy has been well-documented. But there are other stories hidden within it--ones neglected by historians. In fact, 75% of France’s Jews escaped the extermination, while 45% of the Jews of Belgium perished, and in the Netherlands only 20% survived. The Nazis were determined to destroy the Jews across Europe, and the Vichy regime collaborated in their deportation from France. So what is the meaning of this French exception? Jacques Semelin sheds light on this 'French enigma', painting a radically unfamiliar view of occupied France. His is a rich, even-handed portrait of a complex and changing society, one where helping and informing on one's neighbors went hand in hand; and where small gestures of solidarity sat comfortably with anti-Semitism. Without shying away from the horror of the Holocaust's crimes, this seminal work adds a fresh perspective to our history of the Second World War


Author(s):  
Robert W. Lewis

This chapter explores how the stadium became central to a mode of political spectacle in France, from the mid-1920s up through the end of the Second World War, at a moment when it was also critical to politics elsewhere in Europe. A range of political luminaries and groups, from the anti-fascist Popular Front coalition to the Vichy regime, promoted stadium-based spectacles as a visible manifestation of political vitality, mass support and masculine citizenship. The stadium gave politicians a vast spectator space that proved ideal for staging political rallies, political plays or religious ceremonies that both aspired to transform spectators into active participants and that entailed efforts to discipline the public. But while the crowd may have been disciplined and mobilized inside the stadium, it also eluded those constraints and often disappointed those politicians seeking to create a unified public. In the years after the Second World War, the French stadium gradually disappeared as a pre-eminent staging-ground for mass politics, as the stadium crowd itself became progressively depoliticized.


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