Paul Rusch In Postwar Japan

Paul Rusch first traveled from Louisville, Kentucky, to Tokyo in 1925 to help rebuild YMCA facilities in the wake of the Great Kanto earthquake. What was planned as a yearlong stay became his life's work as he joined with the Japan Episcopal Church to promote democracy and Western Christian ideals. Over the course of his remarkable life, Rusch served as a college professor and Episcopal missionary, and he was a catalyst for agricultural development, introducing dairy farming to highland Japan. In Paul Rusch in Postwar Japan, Andrew T. McDonald and Verlaine Stoner McDonald present Rusch's life as an epic story that crisscrosses two cultures, traversing war and peace, destruction and rebirth, private struggle and public triumph. As World War II approached, Rusch battled racial prejudice against Japanese Americans, yet also became an apologist for Japan's expansionist foreign policy. After Pearl Harbor, he was arrested as an enemy alien and witnessed the Doolittle Raid on Tokyo. Upon his release to the US in 1942, he joined military intelligence and returned to Japan in that capacity during the US occupation. Though Rusch was of modest origins, he deftly climbed social and military ladders to befriend some of the most intriguing figures of the era, including prime ministers and members of the Japanese royal family. Though he is perhaps best remembered for introducing organized American football in Japan, his greatest legacy is the founding of the Kiyosato Educational Experiment Project (KEEP), a vehicle for feeding, educating, and uplifting the rural poor of highland Japan. Today his legacy continues to inspire KEEP in the twenty-first century to promote peace, cultural exchange, environmental sustainability, and ecological preservation in Japan and beyond.

This study examines Japan's development from a defeated nation in 1945 to an economic superpower in the 1980s. Drawing on recent research, it analyzes the significance and legacy of the American Occupation, as well as the political, social and economic fac

The aspiration of an Atlas is to cover the whole world, by compiling cartographical material representing territories from across the five continents. This book intends to contribute to that ideally comprehensive, yet always unfinished, Atlas with pieces gathered from all of the Earth’s regions. However, its focus is not so much of a geographical nature (although maps and geographical reflections are not absent in its pages), but of a historical-analytical one. As such, the Atlas engages in the historical analysis of interpreters (of both language and cultures) in multiple interpreting settings and places, including in zones which are less frequently studied in specialized literature, in different historical periods and at various scales. All the interpreters described in the book share the ability to speak two or more languages and to use them as vehicles; otherwise, their individual socio-professional statuses vary so much that there is no similarity between a Venetian dragoman in Istanbul and a prisoner of war, or between a locally-recruited interpreter and a missionary. Each contributor has approached the specific spatial and temporal dimensions of their subject as perceived through their different methodological lenses. This multifaceted perspective, which is expected to provide fertile soil for future interdisciplinary research, has been possible thanks to a balanced combination of scholars from History and from Translation and Interpreting Studies.

One of the last, great untold stories of World War II—kept hidden for decades—even after most of the World War II records were declassified in 1972, many of the files remained untouched in various archives—a gripping true tale of courage and adventure from Bruce Henderson, master storyteller, historian, and New York Times best-selling author of Sons and Soldiers—the saga of the Japanese American U.S. Army soldiers who fought in the Pacific theater, in Burma, Iwo Jima, Okinawa, with their families back home in America, under U.S. Executive Order 9066, held behind barbed wire in government internment camps. After Japan's surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, the U.S. military was desperate to find Americans who spoke Japanese to serve in the Pacific war. They soon turned to the Nisei—first-generation U.S. citizens whose parents were immigrants from Japan. Eager to prove their loyalty to America, several thousand Nisei—many of them volunteering from the internment camps where they were being held behind barbed wire—were selected by the Army for top-secret training, then were rushed to the Pacific theater. Highly valued as expert translators and interrogators, these Japanese American soldiers operated in elite intelligence teams alongside Army infantrymen and Marines on the front lines of the Pacific war, from Iwo Jima to Burma, from the Solomons to Okinawa. Henderson reveals, in riveting detail, the harrowing untold story of the Nisei and their major contributions in the war of the Pacific, through six Japanese American soldiers. After the war, these soldiers became translators and interrogators for war crime trials, and later helped to rebuild Japan as a modern democracy and a pivotal U.S. ally.

As the influence of the United States in Asia declines with the end of the Cold War, America must look more to brains than military might in achieving our objectives in the region. But after repeatedly allowing Japan - our closest ally in Asia - to mislead us intellectually and psychologically, how well are we prepared to deal with less friendly emerging powers like China and India? Based on three decades of on-the-spot observation and participation in Japan, Ivan Hall's provocative work draws the reader into a world of intellectual manipulation and gullibility, false images, emotional blackmail, financial beguilement, and fatuous expectations. It illuminates the many ways that American ideological hubris and Japanese pleading for special treatment combine to deprive our trans-Pacific dialogue of the honesty, openness, and plain common sense of our trans-Atlantic intellectual ties with Europe.

The Routledge History of U.S. Foreign Relations provides a comprehensive view of U.S. diplomacy and foreign affairs from the founding to the present. With contributions from recognized experts from around the world, this volume unveils America’s long and complicated history on the world stage. It presents the United States’ evolution from a weak player, even a European pawn, to a global hegemonic leader over the course of two and a half centuries. The contributors offer an expansive vision of U.S. foreign relations—from U.S.-Native American diplomacy in eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to the post-9/11 war on terror. They shed new light on well-known events and suggest future paths of research, and they capture lesser-known episodes that invite reconsideration of common assumptions about America’s place in the world. Bringing these discussions to a single forum, the book provides a strong reference source for scholars and students who seek to understand the broad themes and changing approaches to the field. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of U.S. history, political science, international relations, conflict resolution, and public policy, amongst other areas.