Sandra Wilson

The U.S. and the War in the Pacific, 1941-45 analyzes the Pacific War with a focus on America’s participation in the conflict.

Fought over a great ocean and vast battlefields using the most sophisticated weapons available, the Pacific War transformed the modern world. Not only did it introduce the atomic bomb to the world, it also reshaped relations among nations and the ways in which governments dealt with their own peoples, changed the balance of power in the Pacific in fundamental ways, and helped to spark nationalist movements throughout Asia. This book examines the strategies, technologies, intelligence capabilities, home-front mobilization, industrial production, and resources that ultimately enabled the United States and its allies to emerge victorious. Major themes include the impact of war, conceptions of race, Japanese perspectives on the conflict, and America’s relations with its allies. Using primary documents, maps, and concise writing, this book provides students with an accessible introduction to an important period in history.

Incorporating recent scholarship and conflicting interpretations, the book provides an insightful overview of the topic for students of modern American history, World War II, and the Asia Pacific.

Beginning in late 1945, the United States, Britain, China, Australia, France, the Netherlands, and later the Philippines, the Soviet Union, and the People's Republic of China convened national courts to prosecute Japanese military personnel for war crimes. The defendants included ethnic Koreans and Taiwanese who had served with the armed forces as Japanese subjects. In Tokyo, the International Military Tribunal for the Far East tried Japanese leaders. While the fairness of these trials has been a focus for decades, Japanese War Criminals instead argues that the most important issues arose outside the courtroom. What was the legal basis for identifying and detaining subjects, determining who should be prosecuted, collecting evidence, and granting clemency after conviction? The answers to these questions helped set the norms for transitional justice in the postwar era and today contribute to strategies for addressing problematic areas of international law.

Examining the complex moral, ethical, legal, and political issues surrounding the Allied prosecution project, from the first investigations during the war to the final release of prisoners in 1958, Japanese War Criminals shows how a simple effort to punish the guilty evolved into a multidimensional struggle that muddied the assignment of criminal responsibility for war crimes. Over time, indignation in Japan over Allied military actions, particularly the deployment of the atomic bombs, eclipsed anger over Japanese atrocities, and, among the Western powers, new Cold War imperatives took hold. This book makes a unique contribution to our understanding of the construction of the postwar international order in Asia and to our comprehension of the difficulties of implementing transitional justice.

This book examines representations of the Second World War in postwar Chinese and Japanese cinema. Drawing on a wide range of scholarly disciplines, and analysing a wide range of films, it demonstrates the potential of war movies for understanding contemporary China and Japan. It shows how the war is remembered in both countries, including the demonisation of Japanese soldiers in postwar socialist-era Chinese movies, and the pervasive sense of victimhood in Japanese memories of the war. However, it also shows how some Chinese directors were experimenting with alternatives interpretations of the war from as early as the 1950s, and how, despite the "resurgence of nationalism" in japan since the 1980s, the production of Japanese movies critical of the war has continued.

This is a rare account of early post-war Japan from the cutting edge of day-to-day work in the Allied occupation, by an Australian soldier trained in the Japanese language for occupation work. It provides a wealth of insights into the lives both of the soldiers in the British Commonwealth Occupation Force and of the Japanese with whom they lived and worked. Basil Archer writes vividly about his journey to Japan via Morotai in Indonesia, his intelligence work as an interpreter in a country area, the places he visited and th people he encountered - Japanese, English, Scottish, Indian, American and Australian. Basil Archer served in Japan during 1946 as a language officer in the British Commonwealth Occupation Force. After discharge from the Army he worked for the Western Australian State Electricity Commission, then for the Government Chemical Laboratories and finally as Laboratory Manager of the Chemistry Department of Curtin University of Technology. He is now retired and lives in Perth, where his is Secretry of the BCOF Association of Western Australia.

Nationalism was one of the most important forces in 20th century Japan. It pervaded almost all aspects of Japanese life, but was a complex phenomenon, frequently changing, and often meaning different things to different people. This book brings together interesting, original new work, by a range of international leading scholars who consider Japanese nationalism in a wide variety of its aspects. Overall, the book provides many new insights and much new thinking on what continues to be a crucially important factor shaping current developments in Japan.

This book explores the reactions to the Manchurian crisis of different sections of the state, and of a number of different groups in Japanese society, particularly rural groups, women's organizations and business associations. It thus seeks to avoid a generalized account of public relations to the military and diplomatic events of the early 1930s, offering instead a nuanced account of the shifts in public and popular opinion in this crucial period.

The Russo-Japanese War of 1904-05 has been widely seen as a historical turning-point. For the first time in modern history an Asian nation competed on equal terms with a European country and overturned the prevailing balance of power. Based on a wide range of sources in Russian, Japanese and other languages, this book goes beyond the military and world-political grand narratives to examine the war's social, cultural, literary and intellectual impact in its historical context. In Japan the war reinforced the country's self-image as a 'coming' nation, while in Russia, with the revolution of 1905 and later political and social upheaval, it was seen as separating the old régime from the new. Throughout the world, `spirit' was seen to be a decisive factor, and everywhere cultural considerations determined the war's interpretation. Containing contributions by established scholars in the fields of military history and the history and literature of both Russia and Japan, this book offers for the first time a comparative perspective on the symbolic meaning of the conflict.