Greetings!
Herbert
Bix expands on themes from his recent New York Times op-ed on
the official history of the life of the Shōwa Emperor released last month
by the Imperial Household Agency. The massive biography, based on a trove
of previously inaccessible documents is notable for its omissions and
silences, indicative of the continued efforts of the Japanese government to
shape historical consciousness in the service of its nationalistic
political agenda.
An
Asia-Pacific
Journal report assesses the retraction in August by the Asahi
Shinbun of stories on the wartime "comfort women" published in
the 1990s. It also presents a statement in defense of academic freedom by
the Hokusei University Support Group, which has organized to protect the
persecuted Asahi journalist, Uemura Takashi, who reported in 1991 on a
surviving comfort woman and is under attack by mainly anonymous
neonationalist groups.
Tessa
Morris-Suzuki continues her investigation into the threads of
espionage, counter espionage, smuggling, and "special renditions"
(in current usage) that linked American intelligence and key figures of
Japan's wartime military, drawing on recent scholarship and her own
investigation into newly declassified CIA and other documents. She follows
covert politics including smuggling and kidnapping at the dawn of the
Cold War from Sakhalin and Korea to Taiwan and Indochina, finding
continuity between Japan's wartime regime and that of the postwar US
Occupation authorities.
Elisheva
A. Perelman traces tropes of silence and seclusion present in
the mytho-historical chronicle of the eighth century Kojiki at the
dawn of the Japanese imperial house down to the present. Likening women of
the imperial family to contemporary hikikomori, who retreat from the world,
she argues that attempts to subjugate the women of the imperial household
following these tropes continue to today.
