Security

Chapter 2 is mainly about agency—cooperation, complicity, and resistance—between occupiers and the occupied, reconstructing the informal strategies to police prostitution and venereal disease. It discusses legal debates on prostitution and venereal disease and its control among the occupation’s law divisions, and it closely looks at the enforcement of law by the occupiers’ military police and Japanese police units. It addresses the emergence of unlicensed prostitution after the abolition of licensed prostitution in 1946, in which the streetwalking sex worker surfaced as a new phenomenon in modern Japanese history.

Japanese Reinvention of Self through Hawai‘i’s Japanese Americans

This chapter investigates the relationship between Asian American and modern Japanese history by analyzing the image of Japanese Americans in postwar Japan. Based on a book of photographs featuring Japanese immigrants in Hawai‘i published in 1956, it analyzes how their image was appropriated and redefined in Japan to promote as well as reinforce the nation’s political and cultural alliance with the United States. The photographs showed the successful acculturation of Japanese in Hawai‘i to the larger American society and urged the Japanese audience to see that their nation’s postwar reconstruction would come through the power and protection of the United States. Japanese Americans in Hawai‘i served as a lens through which the Japanese in Japan could imagine their position under American hegemony in the age of Cold War.

Shifts in Patronage Differentiation: Translation from European Languages in Isolationist Japan

This article demonstrates that translation patronage can shift imperceptibly between being undifferentiated and differentiated. It focuses on the passage of time as a factor that could be added to Lefevere’s conceptualization of patronage. Currently this conceptualization approaches history as a series of snapshots, with little focus on transition, most importantly, between one form of patronage and another. With an overview of the development of translation patronage in early modern Japanese history, this article explores the dynamics of translation patronage over a period of well over two centuries, when the country maintained a policy of national isolationism. Under this policy, Christianity became absolutely taboo, and those associated with it were regarded with utmost suspicion. Yet, limited international trade was permitted to continue by a state-owned collegium of interpreters. Under this system, the patronage of translators in Japan was extremely undifferentiated, being obtained solely from governmental sources. However, before the end of this system, patronage had already shifted to a differentiated model, in which translation services were being sought by a wide range of parties beyond the government.

Curse on This Country

Imperial Japanese soldiers were notorious for blindly following orders, and their enemies in the Pacific War derided them as “cattle to the slaughter.” But, in fact, the Imperial Japanese Army had a long history as one of the most disobedient armies in the world. Officers repeatedly staged coups d'états, violent insurrections, and political assassinations; their associates defied orders given by both the government and the general staff, launched independent military operations against other countries, and in two notorious cases conspired to assassinate foreign leaders despite direct orders to the contrary. This book explains the culture of rebellion in the Japanese armed forces. The consequences were dire, as the armed forces dragged the government into more and more of China across the 1930s—a culture of rebellion that made the Pacific War possible. This book argues that brazen defiance, rather than blind obedience, was the motive force of modern Japanese history. The book follows a series of dramatic events: assassinations in the dark corners of Tokyo, the famous rebellion of Saigō Takamori, the “accidental” invasion of Taiwan, the Japanese ambassador's plot to murder the queen of Korea, and the military–political crisis in which the Japanese prime minister “changed colors.” Finally, through the sinister plots of the clandestine Cherry Blossom Society, we follow the deterioration of Japan into chaos, fascism, and world war.

Introduction: Ozu, History and the Everyday

This chapter introduces the scope and purpose of the book. It begins with a survey of the Western theories on the everyday, concentrating on Henri Lefebvre, Michel de Certeau and Walter Benjamin, and suggests central concepts for analysing Ozu’s films such as ‘deviation’ and ‘permeation’. The concept of the everyday is then expanded into the Japanese context by examining the possibility of applying Western ideas to modern Japanese history. Lastly, reviewing the previous Ozu studies in academia, from Richie and Bordwell to Wada-Marciano and Phillips, this chapter introduces and examines the socio-historical approach as the primary methodology of this book.