Soviet Repatriation Policy, U.S. Occupation Authorities, and Japan's Entry into the Cold War

This article examines how the defeated and demoralized Japanese, faced with Soviet detention and repatriation policies, were embroiled in Cold War antagonism that originated with the division of Europe. The article addresses three main questions. First, how did the Japanese government seek to facilitate the return of Japanese from the Soviet-occupied zone? Second, how did negotiations over Japanese repatriation intersect with U.S.-Soviet relations? Third, how did Soviet repatriation policy effect Japanese foreign policy in the initial stage of the Cold War? This episode brings out important aspects of U.S.-Soviet-Japanese interactions during the early Cold War.

The Gendered Classroom: Girls' and Boys' Experiences in Postwar Germany

At the end of World War II, German educational administrators in the Soviet occupied zone of their nation decided to implement coeducation; that is, the schooling of girls and boys in the same classroom. This policy represented a radical break with German educational traditions, as well as with the western German zones' continued practice of gender-segregated schools. The reason for this move was as simple as it was ambitious: educational reformers of the Soviet zone were committed to a new kind of school, one that would offer all children the same education in order to permit active and equal participation of all citizens, male and female, in the “new Germany.” Educators estimated that over 90 percent of school-aged children attended school in the postwar years, approximately 15 percent of the entire population. Major change in young people's education could thus potentially bring about major social reform. Yet coeducation did not resolve the so-called “woman's question” of structural inequality, a theory elaborated by the nineteenth-century socialist August Bebel and of grave concern to the “antifascist democratic, educators of the postwar years. The implementation of the coeducational classroom, although an important move towards erasing gross disparities in educational opportunities for girls, still allowed for and even perpetuated gender-specific educational lessons and experiences.