Author: Kazuko Kuramoto
Publisher: MSU Press
ISBN: 1628954302
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 260
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Book Description
Kazuko Kuramoto was born and raised in Dairen, Manchuria, in 1927, at the peak of Japanese expansionism in Asia. Dairen and the neighboring Port Arthur were important colonial outposts on the Liaotung Peninsula; the train lines established by Russia and taken over by the Japanese, ended there. When Kuramoto's grandfather arrived in Dairen as a member of the Japanese police force shortly after the end of the Russo-Japanese War in 1905, the family's belief in Japanese supremacy and its "divine" mission to "save" Asia from Western imperialists was firmly in place. As a third-generation colonist, the seventeen-year-old Kuramoto readily joined the Red Cross Nurse Corps in 1944 to aid in the war effort and in her country's sacred cause. A year later, her family listened to the emperor's radio broadcast ". . . we shall have to endure the unendurable, to suffer the insufferable." Japan surrendered unconditionally. Manchurian Legacy is the story of the family's life in Dairen, their survival as a forgotten people during the battle to reclaim Manchuria waged by Russia, Nationalist China, and Communist China, and their subsequent repatriation to a devastated Japan. Kuramoto describes a culture based on the unthinking oppression of the colonized by the colonizer. And, because Manchuria was, in essence, a Japanese frontier, her family lived a freer and more luxurious life than they would have in Japan—one relatively unscathed by the war until after the surrender. As a commentator Kuramoto explores her culture both from the inside, subjectively, and from the outside, objectively. Her memoirs describe her coming of age in a colonial society, her family's experiences in war-torn Manchuria, and her "homecoming" to Japan—where she had never been—just as Japan is engaged in its own cultural upheaval.
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Languages : en
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Book Description
Kazuko Kuramoto was born and raised in Dairen, Manchuria, in 1927, at the peak of Japanese expansionism in Asia. Dairen and the neighboring Port Arthur were important colonial outposts on the Liaotung Peninsula; the train lines established by Russia and taken over by the Japanese, ended there. When Kuramoto's grandfather arrived in Dairen as a member of the Japanese police force shortly after the end of the Russo-Japanese War in 1905, the family's belief in Japanese supremacy and its "divine" mission to "save" Asia from Western imperialists was firmly in place. As a third-generation colonist, the seventeen-year-old Kuramoto readily joined the Red Cross Nurse Corps in 1944 to aid in the war effort and in her country's sacred cause. A year later, her family listened to the emperor's radio broadcast ". . . we shall have to endure the unendurable, to suffer the insufferable." Japan surrendered unconditionally. Manchurian Legacy is the story of the family's life in Dairen, their survival as a forgotten people during the battle to reclaim Manchuria waged by Russia, Nationalist China, and Communist China, and their subsequent repatriation to a devastated Japan. Kuramoto describes a culture based on the unthinking oppression of the colonized by the colonizer. And, because Manchuria was, in essence, a Japanese frontier, her family lived a freer and more luxurious life than they would have in Japan—one relatively unscathed by the war until after the surrender. As a commentator Kuramoto explores her culture both from the inside, subjectively, and from the outside, objectively. Her memoirs describe her coming of age in a colonial society, her family's experiences in war-torn Manchuria, and her "homecoming" to Japan—where she had never been—just as Japan is engaged in its own cultural upheaval.
Author: Rocio G. Davis
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 082483092X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 250
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Book Description
An analytically innovative work, Begin Here widens the current critical focus of Asian North American literary studies by proposing an integrated thematic and narratological approach to the practice of autobiography. It demonstrates how Asian North American memoirs of childhood challenge the construction and performative potential of national experiences. This understanding influences theoretical approaches to ethnic life writing, expanding the boundaries of traditional autobiography by negotiating narrative techniques and genre and raising complex questions about self-representation and the construction of cultural memory. By examining the artistic project of some fifty Asian North American writers who deploy their childhood narratives in the representation of the individual processes of self-identification and negotiation of cultural and national affiliation, this work provides a comprehensive overview of Asian North American autobiographies of childhood published over the last century. Importantly, it also attends to new ways of writing autobiographies, employing comics, blending verse, prose, diaries, and life writing for children, and using relational approaches to self-identification, among others.
Author: Michael Meyer
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1620402866
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 385
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Book Description
Explores the change most of rural China is undergoing via the story of a privately held rice company that has built new roads, introduced organic farming, and constructed apartments for farmers in exchange for their land rights.
Author: Heonik Kwon
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
ISBN: 1442215771
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 234
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Book Description
This timely, pathbreaking study of North Korea’s political history and culture sheds invaluable light on the country’s unique leadership continuity and succession. Leading scholars Heonik Kwon and Byung-Ho Chung begin by tracing Kim Il Sung’s rise to power during the Cold War. They show how his successor, his eldest son, Kim Jong Il, sponsored the production of revolutionary art to unleash a public political culture that would consolidate Kim’s charismatic power and his own hereditary authority. The result was the birth of a powerful modern theater state that sustains North Korean leaders’ sovereignty now to a third generation. In defiance of the instability to which so many revolutionary states eventually succumb, the durability of charismatic politics in North Korea defines its exceptional place in modern history. Kwon and Chung make an innovative contribution to comparative socialism and postsocialism as well as to the anthropology of the state. Their pioneering work is essential for all readers interested in understanding North Korea’s past and future, the destiny of charismatic power in modern politics, the role of art in enabling this power.
Author: T. Ngo
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 113743838X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 293
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Book Description
Atheist Secularism and Its Discontents takes a comparative approach to understanding religion under communism, arguing that communism was integral to the global experience of secularism. Bringing together leading researchers whose work spans the Eurasian continent, it shows that appropriating religion was central to Communist political practices.
Author: Susanne Hohler
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 178673124X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 272
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Book Description
The history of the Russian fascist movement in Harbin, Manchuria during the 1930s has become increasingly relevant to our understanding of modern Russia. As a railway junction and an important centre of the Jewish Diaspora, the city of Harbin became a focus of Russian emigration to Manchuria in the early 1930s, partly because of its proximity to the resource-rich Manchurian plains. In this multicultural and cosmopolitan setting the first Russian fascist groups were established. Based on an analysis of Russian civil society, Fascism in Manchuria sheds light on the impact of the newly-founded All-Russian Fascist Party on the Russian emigre community, employing the concept of 'dark' civil society. Suzanne Hohler demonstrates how fascist involvement in local civil society increasingly determined public opinion, examining the power of the military organizations, the symbols and style of the fascist organizations, the cult of the leader as well as the 'public-relations' activities of the fascist organizations and of the so-called Russian Club. In this context the book provides not only insights into the history and ideology of the far eastern branch of Russian fascism and its transnational connections, but also touches upon a variety of issues of daily life in the city, issues such as education, drug addiction and hooliganism among Russian youth, the local YMCA, the famous Kaspe kidnapping and the rise of anti-Semitism. Fascist literature from Harbin is being republished in today's Russia, and Fascism in Manchuria provides an important historical context for the thinking and motives which drive the Russian right."
Author: Caroline Elkins
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136077464
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 322
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Book Description
Postcolonial states and metropolitan societies still grapple today with the divisive and difficult legacies unleashed by settler colonialism. Whether they were settled for trade or geopolitical reasons, these settler communities had in common their shaping of landholding, laws, and race relations in colonies throughout the world. By looking at the detail of settlements in the twentieth century--from European colonial projects in Africa and expansionist efforts by the Japanese in Korea and Manchuria, to the Germans in Poland and the historical trajectories of Israel/Palestine and South Africa--and analyzing the dynamics set in motion by these settlers, the contributors to this volume establish points of comparison to offer a new framework for understanding the character and fate of twentieth-century empires.
Author: Frans Coetzee
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 9781571810670
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 388
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Book Description
The unprecedented scope and intensity of the First World War has prompted an enormous body of retrospective scholarship. However, efforts to provide a coherent synthesis about the war's impact and significance have remained circumscribed, tending to focus either on the operational outlines of military strategy and tactics or on the cultural legacy of the conflict as transmitted bythe war's most articulate observers. This volume departs from traditional accounts on several scores: by exploring issues barely touched upon in previous works, by deviating from the widespread tendency to treat the experiences of front and homefront isolation, and by employing a thematic treatment that, by considering the construction of authority and identity between 1914 and 1918, illuminates the fundamental question of how individuals, whether in uniform or not, endured the war's intrusion into so many aspects of their public and private lives.
Author: Yeeshan Chan
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136883908
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 204
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Book Description
This book relates the experiences of the zanryu-hojin - the Japanese civilians, mostly women and children, who were abandoned in Manchuria after the end of the Second World War when Japan’s puppet state in Manchuria ended, and when most Japanese who has been based there returned to Japan. Many zanryu-hojin survived in Chinese peasant families, often as wives or adopted children; the Chinese government estimated that there were around 13,000 survivors in 1959, at the time when over 30,000 "missing" people were deleted from Japanese family registers as" war dead". Since 1972 the zanryu-hojin have been gradually repatriated to Japan, often along with several generations of their extended Chinese families, the group in Japan now numbering around 100,000 people. Besides outlining the zanryu-hojin’s experiences, the book explores the related issues of war memories and war guilt which resurfaced during the 1980s, the more recent court case brought by zanryu-hojin against the Japanese government in which they accuse the Japanese government of abandoning them, and the impact on the towns in northeast China from which the zanryu-hojin were repatriated and which now benefit hugely from overseas remittances from their former residents. Overall, the book deepens our understanding of Japanese society and its anti-war social movements, besides providing vivid and colourful sketches of individuals’ worldviews, motivations, behaviours, strategies and difficulties.
