Transnational Japan As History

This volume looks at the history of Japan from a transnational perspective. It brings to the fore the interconnectedness of Japan's history with the wider Asian-Pacific region and the world. This interconnectedness is examined in the volume through the themes of empire, migration, and social movements.

What motivates people to become involved in issues and struggles beyond their own borders? How are activists changed and movements transformed when they reach out to others a world away? This adept study addresses these questions by tying together local, national, regional, and global historical narratives surrounding the contemporary Japanese environmental movement. Spanning the era of Japanese industrial pollution in the 1960s and the more recent rise of movements addressing global environmental problems, it shows how Japanese activists influenced approaches to environmentalism and industrial pollution in the Asia-Pacific region, North America, and Europe, as well as landmark United Nations conferences in 1972 and 1992. Japan’s experiences with diseases caused by industrial pollution produced a potent “environmental injustice paradigm” that fueled domestic protest and became the motivation for Japanese groups’ activism abroad. From the late 1960s onward Japanese activists organized transnational movements addressing mercury contamination in Europe and North America, industrial pollution throughout East Asia, radioactive waste disposal in the Pacific, and global climate change. In all cases, they advocated strongly for the rights of pollution victims and people living in marginalized communities and nations—a position that often put them at odds with those advocating for the global environment over local or national rights. Transnational involvement profoundly challenged Japanese groups’ understanding of and approach to activism. Numerous case studies demonstrate how border-crossing efforts undermined deeply engrained notions of victimhood in the domestic movement and nurtured a more self-reflexive and multidimensional approach to environmental problems and social activism. Transnational Japan in the Global Environmental Movement will appeal to scholars and students interested in the development of civil society, social movements, and environmentalism in contemporary Japan; grassroots inter-Asian connections in the postwar period; and the ways Asian countries and their citizens have shaped and been influenced by global issues like environmentalism.

Showcasing moments of convergence between the German and Japanese cultures towards common points of interest over the last one hundred fifty years, the chapters in this book cover such topics as culture, diplomacy, geography, history, law, literature, philosophy, politics, and sports. From the creation of two similar modern nation-states, to the aggressive struggle for national supremacy and subsequent total defeat in 1945, the necessity of coping with their earlier militarism and parallel economic miracles in the postwar era, Germans and Japanese look back on a remarkably similar past.

"Because imperialism has had such an appalling ideological reputation, we’ve lost sight of its excitement, the breathless anticipation of adventures in far-off lands. The Attractive Empire is a tour de force of enthralling historical scholarship that puts the appeal, and seductions, of imperialism on display, without underestimating its ugly consequences. Like its chosen subject, the book covers an astonishing array of texts, events, people, and issues. The clarity and vividness of the writing make it work effortlessly. Baskett’s organizational skills, narrative, and rhetoric deftly orchestrate a complex subject." —Darrell William Davis, University of New South Wales "Michael Baskett removes imperial Japanese film from its solitary confinement and commandingly analyzes how it functioned internationally. He commits a depth of research rarely found in English-language studies of Japanese cinema, and his mastery of the primary and secondary sources from beyond Japan’s borders distinctly set his book apart from previous scholarship on the subject. Not only is this a work that historians and film scholars will appreciate but also one that I look forward to assigning to undergraduates." —Barak Kushner, Cambridge University Japanese film crews were shooting feature-length movies in China nearly three decades before Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon (1950) reputedly put Japan on the international film map. Although few would readily associate Japan’s film industry with either imperialism or the domination of world markets, the country’s film culture developed in lock step with its empire, which, at its peak in 1943, included territories from the Aleutians to Australia and from Midway Island to India. With each military victory, Japanese film culture’s sphere of influence expanded deeper into Asia, first clashing with and ultimately replacing Hollywood as the main source of news, education, and entertainment for millions. The Attractive Empire is the first comprehensive examination of the attitudes, ideals, and myths of Japanese imperialism as represented in its film culture. In this stimulating new study, Michael Baskett traces the development of Japanese film culture from its unapologetically colonial roots in Taiwan and Korea to less obvious manifestations of empire such as the semicolonial markets of Manchuria and Shanghai and occupied territories in Southeast Asia. Drawing on a wide range of previously untapped primary sources from public and private archives across Asia, Europe, and the United States, Baskett provides close readings of individual films and trenchant analyses of Japanese assumptions about Asian ethnic and cultural differences. Finally, he highlights the place of empire in the struggle at legislative, distribution, and exhibition levels to wrest the "hearts and minds" of Asian film audiences from Hollywood in the 1930s as well as in Japan’s attempts to maintain that hegemony during its alliance with Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy.

The incarceration of Japanese Americans has been discredited as a major blemish in American democratic tradition. Accompanying this view is the assumption that the ethnic group help unqualified allegiance to the United States. Between Two Empires probes the complexities of prewar Japanese America to show how Japanese in America held an in-between space between the United States and the empire of Japan, between American nationality and Japanese racial identity.

What motivates people to become involved in issues and struggles beyond their own borders? How are activists changed and movements transformed when they reach out to others a world away? This adept study addresses these questions by tying together local, national, regional, and global historical narratives surrounding the contemporary Japanese environmental movement. Spanning the era of Japanese industrial pollution in the 1960s and the more recent rise of movements addressing global environmental problems, it shows how Japanese activists influenced approaches to environmentalism and industrial pollution in the Asia-Pacific region, North America, and Europe, as well as landmark United Nations conferences in 1972 and 1992. Japan’s experiences with diseases caused by industrial pollution produced a potent “environmental injustice paradigm” that fueled domestic protest and became the motivation for Japanese groups’ activism abroad. From the late 1960s onward Japanese activists organized transnational movements addressing mercury contamination in Europe and North America, industrial pollution throughout East Asia, radioactive waste disposal in the Pacific, and global climate change. In all cases, they advocated strongly for the rights of pollution victims and people living in marginalized communities and nations—a position that often put them at odds with those advocating for the global environment over local or national rights. Transnational involvement profoundly challenged Japanese groups’ understanding of and approach to activism. Numerous case studies demonstrate how border-crossing efforts undermined deeply engrained notions of victimhood in the domestic movement and nurtured a more self-reflexive and multidimensional approach to environmental problems and social activism. Transnational Japan in the Global Environmental Movement will appeal to scholars and students interested in the development of civil society, social movements, and environmentalism in contemporary Japan; grassroots inter-Asian connections in the postwar period; and the ways Asian countries and their citizens have shaped and been influenced by global issues like environmentalism. 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.

Japan's Occupation of Java in the Second World War draws upon written and oral Japanese, Indonesian, Dutch and English-language sources to narrate the Japanese occupation of Java as a transnational intersection between two complex Asian societies, placing this narrative in a larger wartime context of domestic, regional, and global crisis. Japan's occupation of Java is here revealed in a radically new and nuanced light, as an ambiguous encounter revolutionary in the degree of mutual interests that drew the two sides together, fascinating and tragic in its evolution, and profound in the legacies left behind. Mark structures his study around a diverse group of Japanese and Indonesians captivated by the wartime vision of a 'Greater Asia.' The book is not only the first transnational study of Japan's wartime occupation of Java, but the first to focus on the Second World War experience in transnational terms 'on the ground' anywhere in Asia. Breaking new ground interpretatively, thematically and narratively, Mark's monumental study is of vital significance for students and scholars of modern Asian and global history. This book is published in partnership with Columbia University's Weatherhead East Asian Institute (http://weai.columbia.edu/japans-occupation-of-java/).

The 'Opening of Japan' has been central to the retelling of Japan's modern history. Reopening the Opening of Japan fundamentally reconsiders what that historical moment entailed. What did intensified connections between Japan and the world mean both inside and outside of the country, and what does this tell us about Japan's historical significance on a global scale? The chapters excavate a rich array of surprising cross-border connections, from the global trade in mummified mermaids to the Japanese-Russian intellectual links underpinning the work of Akira Kurosawa. Re-thinking connectivity through non-state transnational perspectives, the book guides readers to new ways of doing and writing history. Contributors are: Lewis Bremner, Natalia Doan, Manimporok Dotulong, Maki Fukuoka, Eiko Honda, Sho Konishi, Mateja Kovacic, Joel Littler, Chinami Oka, Yu Sakai, Olga Solovieva, and Warren Stanislaus.