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• New Books on Japan: "Entwined Atrocities: New Insights into the U.S.–Japan Alliance"

  • When
    April 07, 2025
  •  
    7:00 PM - 8:30 PM
  • Location
    Zoom

  Monday, April 7, 2025 | 7:00-8:30 PM ET
  Tuesday, April 8, 2025 | 8:00-9:30 AM JST | 9:00-10:30 AEST
  
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  Entwined Atrocities: New Insights into the U.S.–Japan Alliance (Peter Lang, 2023)

  Author: Yuki Tanaka, Research Professor Emeritus, Hiroshima City University

  Discussant: Kirsten Ziomek, Associate Professor of History, Adelphi University

  The Modern Japan History Association invites the wider community to a conversation with Yuki Tanaka, who will be speaking about his new book Entwined Atrocities: New Insights into the U.S.–Japan Alliance (Peter Lang, 2023). Entwined Atrocities reconsiders the fire and atomic bombings of Japan during World War II in the context of the U.S. justification of the crime of indiscriminate bombings and its relationship to Japan’s political exploitation of the atomic bombing to cover up Emperor Hirohito’s war responsibility. In addition, it examines the fundamental contradiction in Japan’s peace constitution between the concealment of Hirohito’s war crimes and the responsibility of the United States. Readers will learn how Japanese and U.S. official war memories were crafted to justify their respective wartime performances, exposing the flaws and failing of present-day democracy in Japan and the U.S. This book also explores how Japanese people could potentially create a truly powerful cultural memory of war, utilizing various forms of artwork including Japan’s traditional performing art, Noh. Kirsten Ziomek (Adelphi) will serve as interlocutor.

  
  

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• New Books on Japan: "The Translocal Island of Okinawa: Anti-Base Activism and Grassroots Regionalism"

  • When
    May 26, 2025
  •  
    8:00 PM - 9:30 PM
  • Location
    Zoom

  

  Monday, May 26, 2025 | 8:00-9:30 PM ET
  Tuesday, May 27, 2025 | 9:00-10:30 AM JST | 10:00-11:30 AM AEST | 12:00–1:30pm NZST
  
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  The Translocal Island of Okinawa: Anti-Base Activism and Grassroots Regionalism (Bloomsbury, 2024)

  Presenter: Shinnosuke Takahashi, Senior Lecturer in the Asian Languages and Cultures, Victoria University of Wellington

  Discussant: Grant Jun Otsuki, Associate Professor of Cultural Anthroplogy, University of Tokyo

  Moderator: Simon Avenell, Professor of History, Australian National University

  The Modern Japan History Association invites the wider community to a conversation with Shinnosuke Takahashi, who will be speaking about his new book The Translocal Island of Okinawa: Anti-Base Activism and Grassroots Regionalism (Bloomsbury, 2024). The Translocal Island of Okinawa reveals the underrepresented memories, visions, and actions that are involved in the making of Okinawan resistance against its subordinated status under the US-Japan security system beyond the narrowly defined political, cultural and geographical borders of locality. As Okinawa's base politics is a problem deeply rooted in the context of East Asia, so is the history of the people's protest movement. The issue examined in this book is the arbitrary distinction of scale between 'local', which tends to be employed for a particular territory demarcated by a cohesive culture, and 'regional', a larger area that consists of myriad localities. Locality, Shinnosuke Takahashi argues, is neither self-evident, fixed, nor homogenous but is established through historical processes that involve interaction, conflict, and negotiation of individuals and communities across territorial and cultural boundaries. The concept of Okinawa as a translocal island offers a new way to understand locality in the context of Okinawan activism as a product of multiple cultural and human flows, as opposed to the conventional way of framing the local community as fixed, internally cohesive, and rigidly bordered. It makes an exciting contribution to the field of modern Japanese and East Asian studies by stimulating discussions on the richness and scale of local civic activism that is increasingly becoming a key political feature of the East Asian region. Grant Jun Otsuki (Tokyo) will serve as interlocutor.

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