Remembering Seonjeong Yi Lebrun: Mourning with narratives of care

It is hard to coherently narrate traumatic memories as they are intensely emotional and fragmented. I created this narrative inquiry in the hope of enacting care and performing mourning for the unexpected death of Seonjeong Yi Lebrun (1983–2017). Seonjeong was a Korean-born art education researcher in Canada whose work exemplified how artistic approaches to narrative evoke empathy and connectivity. Her research spanned arts-based self-study to participatory action research about comfort women (Korean sex slaves for the Imperial Japanese Army during the Second World War). In performing mourning for Seonjeong through examining her research, I endeavour to have my research possibly initiate a new form of arts-based collective care for her, comfort women and those suffering from other forms of trauma.

Japan: The Culture of Insubordination in the Army, 1868–1945

The soldiers and sailors of Imperial Japan (1868–1945) are often presented in Western popular publications as obedient robots, unblinkingly following their commanders to certain death. In fact, however, the Imperial Japanese Army and Navy were among the most disobedient military forces in modern history. Structural flaws in the political code of the early Japanese state, as well as a series of misguided reforms to the Army, incubated an ideology of military independence from civilian rule. The Army, placed directly under the Emperor, did not institutionally believe it had to unconditionally obey the civilian government. Even worse, generals used their connections with the sovereign as an excuse for their individual disobedience. In the 1920s, this ideology of military independence converged with a subculture of insubordination from below, recalling revolutionary traditions of the mid-19th century. According to this ideology, prevalent among both officers and civilian activists, spontaneous political violence was justified when motivated by sincere patriotism and imperial loyalty. By the 1930s, insubordination from above and from below converged to produce a strong sense of military superiority, independence from any kind of civilian supervision, and endemic violence. The result was an unending series of unauthorized military operations, political assassinations, and coups d’état. These terrified the civilian leadership and eventually drove Japan to imperial overreach and disastrous, unwinnable wars.

Nanjing Massacre

Also known as the “Rape of Nanjing,” Nanjing Massacre refers to the mass killings of disarmed Chinese soldiers and civilians, as well as other atrocities such as rape and looting, committed by the Japanese troops after they occupied Nanjing in the winter of 1937–1938. It is widely regarded as one of the worst Japanese war crimes in World War II. Shortly after the Imperial Japanese Army entered the Chinese capital of Nanjing (previously written as Nanking) on December 13, 1937, Western newspapers reported horrific conditions in the fallen city including mass execution of Chinese captives. Wartime records, mostly compiled by a few Westerners who stayed in the city and organized a refugee zone, showed widespread Japanese atrocities of rape, random killing, and looting that continued for weeks. After Japan’s defeat in 1945, the Nanjing Massacre became a leading case of Japanese war crime at the military tribunals conducted by the victorious Allies between 1946 and 1948. Citing witness accounts and burial records, these tribunals put the total number of Chinese killed in the Nanjing area variously from 100,000 to over 300,000. In addition, they estimated that there had been around 20,000 cases of rape and that one third of the city had been destroyed by the Japanese troops within six weeks of occupation. Largely overlooked before the early 1970s, the Nanjing Massacre has since become a hotly contested issue in Japan and between Japan and China. In 1985, China opened a large memorial museum in Nanjing, where the number of 300,000 victims is on prominent display. The Chinese government has designated December 13 a day of national commemoration. Documents related to the Nanjing Massacre submitted by China have become part of the UNESCO Memory of the World registry. In recent decades, many important first-hand evidence has emerged and makes it both possible and necessary to reassess this historical event. Wartime Japanese military and personal records confirm that at least several tens of thousands of Chinese had been killed in mass executions that were condoned, if not ordered, by the high command of the Japanese army in China. Moreover, killing disarmed Chinese captives and atrocities against Chinese civilians had already begun well before Japanese troops reached Nanjing; many such atrocities continued long afterward, thus suggesting there was more than a temporary breakdown of Japanese army discipline in Nanjing. Western and Chinese accounts add vivid details of sexual violence, indiscriminate killings, and looting by Japanese soldiers. They also reveal grave errors on the part of the Chinese defense that likely made the situation worse. Despite these points of convergence among historians, however, there is still disagreement over the exact number of victims and causes of the Japanese atrocities in Nanjing.

A Report on “Old Map Collection” by Geospatial Information Authority of Japan

<p><strong>Abstract.</strong> Historical maps are valuable resources to understand the topography, land use, and land cover of the country in the past. Recently they have been used as basic data in fields such as education, disaster prevention or research on local history. Geospatial Information Authority of Japan (GSI) has been working on collecting and archiving historical maps which were drawn before than Meiji period. However, public use of these maps is often confined because they are almost non-existent or have the possibility of being damaged. Therefore, in order for everyone to use these maps, GSI created a website “Old Map Collection” (Figure 1), which provides various digitized historical maps. In this presentation, we introduce the summary of “Old Map Collection” and some of its new contents.</p><p>In 2005 GSI created a website “Old Map Collection” to provide historical maps for public use as historical, cultural, and academic documents. Users can browse about 1,500 map sheets including various related information, e.g., name, size, date-of-creation, author, and pictorial image. Also all maps are categorized into 15 fields such as maps made in Meiji period, maps of Japan, world maps, and Ino’s maps, based on their age of publication, range of area, and purpose of use, which enables users to find maps more easily.</p><p>2018 marked the 150th anniversary since the beginning of Meiji period, when the modernization of Japan started. In order to bequeath the history of Meiji to future generations, Japanese government has promoted the policy named “MEIJI 150th”. One of the projects GSI conducted related to “MEIJI 150th” was the additional release of 1:20,000 scale original rapid survey map, e.g., Figure 2, on “Old Map Collection”. This map was created from 1880 to 1886 (the 13th -19th years of Meiji period) in advance of the national survey by General Staff Office of the Imperial Japanese Army, and is now owned only by GSI. It contains 921 colored map sheets which cover the area of capital Tokyo and its surrounding regions.</p>

The Shōwa Political Crisis, July 1940: The Imperial Japanese Army Courts a Breach with its Sovereign

This article examines a criminally understudied moment in modern Japanese military and political history. It is well known that the Imperial Japanese Army, in July 1940, toppled the cabinet of Prime Minister Yonai Mitsumasa. Yet, the damage thereby inflicted on the army’s relationship with the emperor remains virtually unnoticed. So, too, are the army’s subsequent efforts at repairing its relationship with its emperor. By exploring these issues, this article enters the long-standing and polarized debate concerning the Shôwa Emperor’s role in Japanese aggression in the 1930s and early 1940s.

Invented Histories: The Nihon Senshi of the Meiji Imperial Japanese Army

Nihon Senshi (Military History of Japan) was part of the new Imperial Japanese Army’s attempt to tie itself to examples from Japan’s “warring states” period, similar to scholars who created a feudal “medieval” time in the Japanese past to fit into Western historiography, and intellectuals who discovered a “traditional” spirit called bushidō as a counterpart for English chivalry. The interpretations of these campaigns, placing the “three unifiers” of the late sixteenth century as global leaders in the modernization of military tactics and technology, show the Imperial Japanese Army’s desire to be seen as a “modern” military through its invented “institutional” history.