Category: History

I got to be tea lady again for the Sino-Japanese history research society (日中関係史研究会) which my professor Hirano helps run. It is great opportunity because in exchange for pouring tea I get to hear some interesting presentations on the Sino-Japanese war that usually only a small group of professors get to attend. The group is the Japanese chapter of the Joint Study of the Sino-Japanese War project.

Today’s presentation was by 小浜正子, a professor at 鳴門教育大学 talking about refugee relief in wartime Shanghai. Her presentation was filled with detailed statistics on relief efforts, fund raising, refugee flows, and the various organizations who did the work. A lot of her materials were from Red Cross records, the popular Shanghai newspaper 申報 and records from 上海市档案馆. She also discussed a Japanese book I’m going to have to look at: 『日中戦争期の上海』edited by the 日本上海史研究会. Because her essay, full of rich empirical material will probably be published in a year or two I don’t want to go into her presentation in detail, but the interesting discussion following the presentation often revolved around whether or not you could treat the highly successful fund raising campaigns for refugees as part of an outpouring of anti-Japanese resistance sentiment. I found one of the slogans she dug up as quite telling: 不救難民不能談救國 (If we don’t save the refugees, how can we save the country?) I think the phrase is playing on one of the popular slogans during the war of the resistance: 抗日救國 (Resist Japan, Save the Country).

I attended the DIJ forum on Thursday. The presentation, 「国際刑法からみた東京裁判」 was in Japanese and given by a young German scholar Philipp Osten.

Since he was looking at the Tokyo War Crimes trials from a legal perspective, I didn’t expect the talk or the discussion to get that controversial and that he would most likely delve into lots of legal details I wouldn’t understand. Instead, his talk, which was delivered in beautifully fluent Japanese, was mostly a general overview which did get into the more central controversies of the trials during discussion.

He looked at three categories of crimes covered in the trials, the “conventional war crimes” (通例の戦争犯罪) which makes up the B and C class criminals who were tried all over Asia, the “crimes against humanity” (人道に対する罪) and “crimes against peace” (平和に対する罪). He seemed to be most interested in the last of these categories.

The first category is covered by treaties like the Geneva and Hague conventions. The latter two always become an issue when looking at the postwar war crime trials (and incidentally, also for the treason trials that I have been researching lately in China) because the charges brought against the accused were based on laws that didn’t exist when they committed the acts (a violation of the old legal principle of “nullum crimen, nulla poena sine lege“). This is also a problem in the case of trying Chinese “traitors” who cooperated with the Japanese after the war. Many of the treason or 漢奸 laws were made from scratch during or after the war with Japan. The war crimes trials, the treason trials, and many other early postwar events like it have been recently grouped and studied as examples of “political retribution“. My own interest in the study of treason and collaboration, and especially how it figures into postwar political and historical discourse can be said to fit under this category…
Continue reading The Tokyo Trials and International Criminal Law

I went to a presentation at Waseda University tonight called “Images of Imperial Womenhood: Japanese Women in Colonial Korea and Their Modes of Domination, 1930-45″ by Atsuko Aoki, a grad student at Brown University. She had a couple of observations from her research that I found interesting. One was the apparent fact that in colonial Korea there were apparently far more Korean men marrying Japanese women than the other way around, as far as the data will show. I had expected the opposite to be true. The other was her observations on the views of Japanese towards Japanese women who were born or raised in the Korean colony as “spoiled”, “flippant” or “incompetent” or “lazy” and needing “rectification and re-education” as proper wives, or the fact that they weren’t considered fit to be wives at all. There followed an interesting discussion on this.

Stanford’s Peter Duus questioned her on this. Daqing Yang, a professor whose writings I have always liked, and a number of students chimed in with lots of other interesting observations. A student from U Chicago, (who is also in one of my Waseda classes where we will be struggling together through Harootunian’s Overcome by Modernity with a professor who is currently translating it into Japanese) recounted other examples from her studies of art and literature from colonial Dalian of how the colony was seen to have changed or defiled the purity of the Japanese original of something, giving it a “continental” look. I’m sure references to this can be found in a lot of places. I seem to remember seeing something about this in some reading on India as well.

Atsuko mentioned going on to look at some Korean women who were later branded as collaborators, research that brings it close to my own interest. I hope I can learn from many grad students who are working on these areas.