Japan S Political Warfare

After more than six years of active fighting in the Far East and over two years of open war between Japan and the Anglo-Saxon powers, Japanese political warfare was still a factor largely unknown in the Western world. Overshadowed by the much nearer and more closely felt exertions of the Nazi propaganda machine, it came to be regarded as too remote to have any noticeable bearing on the general course of the war. In the months leading up to Pearl Harbour, Tokyo Radio, the official Domei News Agency and the Japanese press jointly conducted an efficient war of nerves which, for all its alleged clumsiness effectively deceived many in Britain and the USA. The attack on Pearl Harbour showed how Tokyo’s political warfare achieved its object: the creation of a political smoke-screen. During the period of Japan’s conquests in 1942 following Pearl Harbour, and before that in China, Japan’s political warfare showed itself quite capable of producing useful results.The volume is divided into two parts: the first deals with machinery and methods and gives as full and detailed a survey of the various government organs directing and controlling political warfare, the structure of the Japanese press, the organisation of Japanese broadcasting, the functioning of censorship and the extent to which education, science, literature, the arts and the cinema are being employed for purposes of propaganda, both in the Japanese homeland and in the wider area of the conquered empire. The second part deals with the aims and policies of Japanese propaganda, and attempts to give an outline of the way in which the machinery is being operated. It includes an analysis of the main groups of standard slogans and catchphrases which recur everywhere in Japanese propaganda and a special chapter is devoted to the use made of religion for purposes of political warfare.

"Japan has long wrestled with the memories and legacies of World War II. In the aftermath of defeat, war memory developed as an integral part of particular and divergent approaches to postwar democracy. In the last six decades, the demands placed upon postwar democracy have shifted considerably—from social protest through high economic growth to Japan’s relations in Asia—and the meanings of the war shifted with them.This book unravels the political dynamics that governed the place of war memory in public life. Far from reconciling with the victims of Japanese imperialism, successive conservative administrations have left the memory of the war to representatives of special interests and citizen movements, all of whom used war memory to further their own interests.Franziska Seraphim traces the activism of five prominent civic organizations to examine the ways in which diverse organized memories have secured legitimate niches within the public sphere. The history of these domestic conflicts—over the commemoration of the war dead, the manipulation of national symbols, the teaching of history, or the articulation of relations with China and Korea—is crucial to the current discourse about apology and reconciliation in East Asia, and provides essential context for the global debate on war memory."

Spanning the 130-year period between the end of the Tokugawa Era and the end of the Cold War, this book introduces students to the formation, collapse, and rebirth of the modern Japanese state. It demonstrates how, faced with foreign threats, Japan developed a new governing structure to deal with these challenges and in turn gradually shaped its international environment. Had Japan been a self-sufficient power, like the United States, it is unlikely that external relations would have exercised such great control over the nation. And, if it were a smaller country, it may have been completely pressured from the outside and could not have influenced the global stage on its own. For better or worse therefore, this book argues, Japan was neither too large nor too small. Covering the major events, actors, and institutions of Japan’s modern history, the key themes discussed include: Building the Meiji state and Constitution. The establishment of Parliament. The First Sino-Japanese and Russo-Japanese Wars. Party Politics and International Cooperation. The Pacific War. Development of LDP politics. Changes in the international order and the end of the Cold War. This book, written by one of Japan's leading experts on Japan's political history, will be an essential resource for students of Japanese modern history and politics.

Seventy years have passed since the end of the Asia-Pacific War, yet Japan remains embroiled in controversy with its neighbors over the war’s commemoration. Among the many points of contention between Japan, China, and South Korea are interpretations of the Tokyo War Crimes Trial, apologies and compensation for foreign victims of Japanese aggression, prime ministerial visits to the Yasukuni Shrine, and the war’s portrayal in textbooks. Collectively, these controversies have come to be called the “history problem.” But why has the problem become so intractable? Can it ever be resolved, and if so, how? To answer these questions author Hiro Saito mobilizes the sociology of collective memory and social movements, political theories of apology and reconciliation, psychological research on intergroup conflict, and philosophical reflections on memory and history. The history problem, he argues, is essentially a relational phenomenon caused when nations publicly showcase self-serving versions of the past at key ceremonies and events: Japan, South Korea, and China all focus on what happened to their own citizens with little regard for foreign others. Saito goes on to explore the emergence of a cosmopolitan form of commemoration taking humanity, rather than nationality, as its primary frame of reference, an approach increasingly used by a transnational network of advocacy NGOs, victims of Japan’s past wrongdoings, historians, and educators. When cosmopolitan commemoration is practiced as a collective endeavor by both perpetrators and victims, Saito argues, a resolution of the history problem—and eventual reconciliation—will finally become possible. The History Problem examines a vast corpus of historical material in both English and Japanese, offering provocative findings that challenge orthodox explanations. Written in clear and accessible prose, this uniquely interdisciplinary book will appeal to sociologists, political scientists, and historians researching collective memory, nationalism and cosmopolitanism, and international relations—and to anyone interested in the commemoration of historical wrongs. An electronic version of this book is freely available thanks to the support of libraries working with Knowledge Unlatched, a collaborative initiative designed to make high-quality books open access for the public good. The open-access version of this book is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), which means that the work may be freely downloaded and shared for non-commercial purposes, provided credit is given to the author. Derivative works and commercial uses require permission from the publisher.

Since the 1990s, questions of Japanese wartime conduct, apologies for aggression, and compensation to former victims of the country’s imperial policies, have been brought to the fore of national and regional politics. The state is undoubtedly the most important actor in the process of memory production and along with conservative legislators and the grass-root revisionist movement there has been a consistent trend towards denying or undermining the existing acknowledgments of responsibility for Japan’s wartime past. However, to fully comprehend war memory in Japan, due attention must be paid to competing discourses that demand an alternative view, and only then can the complexity of Japanese war memory and attitudes towards the legacies of the Asia-Pacific war be understood. The Politics of War Memory in Japan examines the involvement of five civil society actors in the struggle over remembering and addressing the wartime past in Japan today. In studying progressive war memory activists, it quickly becomes clear that the apologia by conservative politicians cannot be treated as representative of the opinion of the majority of the Japanese public. Indeed, this book seeks to remedy the disparity between studies devoted to the official level of addressing the ‘history issue’ and the grass-root historical revisionist movement on the one side, and progressive activism on the other. Furthermore, it contributes to scholarly debates on the state of civil society in Japan, challenging the characterisation of Japanese civil society as a depoliticised space by demonstrating a more contentious side of civil society activism. Drawing important new empirical research, this book will be of huge interest to students and scholars of Japanese civil society, Japanese politics, Japanese history and memory in Japan.

The Pacific War was the most traumatic experience for Japan in modern times. This book examines the politics and culture of Japan during this period: the establishment of the wartime regime--its character and limitations; the actions and reactions of the emperor, the bureaucrats, and thepoliticians; the deposing of the Prime Minister in the middle of the war; political developments under his successors; the role of the press; the behavior of the intellectuals; and prevailing attitudes towards the West. Shillony argues that the wartime regime of Japan was very different fromcontemporary totalitarian states. The political values of the Japanese were part of a wider cultural milieu, in which traditional concepts had already been affected by contact with Western civilivzation.

"Political Warfare provides a well-researched and wide-ranging overview of the nature of the People's Republic of China (PRC) threat and the political warfare strategies, doctrines, and operational practices used by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). The author offers detailed and illuminating case studies of PRC political warfare operations designed to undermine Thailand, a U.S. treaty ally, and Taiwan, a close friend"--