http://www.japanfocus.org/products/index/category_id/162 Look Back in Anger. Filming the Nanjing Massacre David McNeill A crop of new movies released to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the Nanjing Massacre is set to again dredge up the controversy about one of the 20th Century’s most notorious events. How will Japan react? One way to learn what happened in one of history’s most noxious but disputed episodes is to ask Mizushima Satoru. After what he calls “exhaustive research” on the seizure of the then Chinese capital by Japanese troops in 1937, estimated to have cost anywhere from 20,000 to 300,000 lives, Mizushima offers a very precise figure for the number of illegal deaths: zero. “The evidence for a massacre is faked,” explains the president of right-wing webcaster Channel Sakura. “It is Chinese communist propaganda.” For support, he brandishes a book containing what he says are dozens of doctored photos. One shows a beheaded Chinese corpse with...http://www.japanfocus.org/products/details/2599 Ruth Benedict’s Obituary for Japanese Culture: an exchangeToru Uno and C. Douglas LummisWhat is the nature of Japanese Culture? Japan Focus published Douglas Lummis’s critique of Ruth Benedict’s Chrysanthemum and the Sword, arguably the most influential work ever written on Japanese culture.Below find a response from Toru Uno and Lummis’s rejoinder. Japan Focus welcomes further contributions to this debate. How to Critique: Lummis on the Legacy of Ruth BenedictToru UnoRuth Fulton Benedict’s intellectual presence is still being felt in the field of comparative cultures and beyond, even though almost six decades have elapsed since her passing. We have come to see her epistemological orientation as our own as much as uniquely hers. So much so that we are no longer conscious of our indebtedness to her pioneering work today. In observing a culture different from our own, we try, almost instinctively now, to elicit a discernable pattern while...http://www.japanfocus.org/products/details/2597 Revising the Past, Complicating the Future: The Yushukan War Museum in Modern Japanese History Takashi Yoshida I. Introduction In this three part series, we introduce historical museums in Japan and their role in public education. Following this introduction to peace museums, Ms. Nishino Rumiko, a founder of the Women’s Active Museum on War and Peace (WAM), introduces WAM’s activities and the 2000 Citizens Tribunal on the ‘comfort women’. The final article is by Mr. Kim Yeonghwan, the former associate director of Grassroots House Peace Museum who describes the peace and reconciliation programs that the Museum sponsors. Both museums are privately funded and modest in size. One may perhaps call them micro museums, as their exhibition spaces are limited. What is noteworthy, however, is that both museums display artifacts that preserve memories of the victims of Japan’s colonialism and devastating atrocities during the Asia-Pacific War;...http://www.japanfocus.org/products/details/2594 The Manchurian Incident, the League of Nations and the Origins of the Pacific War. What the Geneva archives reveal Yoshizawa Tatsuhiko At 9:18 p.m. on Sept. 18 of this year, I was standing in front of the Sept. 18 History Museum in Shenyang, China. It was raining. A siren went off. It sounded like the wailing of a fire engine. On this day each year, Shenyang holds a ceremony to mark the anniversary of a military crackdown against the city's unsuspecting citizens by the Imperial Japanese Army. This year was the 76th anniversary of that event. Japanese forces swiftly overran a vast area of northeastern China. The annual ceremony seeks to keep this memory alive. It is also serves as a prayer for peace. The wailing of the siren, reminiscent of an air-raid alert, lasted three minutes. High school students, soldiers and armed police officers all turned out for the ceremony and stood rigidly at attention in the rain. Two days later, I was in the nearby city of Fushun to attend a symposium...http://www.japanfocus.org/products/details/2593 From Indochina to Iraq: At War With Asia Noam Chomsky interviewed by Kevin Hewison Vietnam and Laos 1970 Kevin Hewison: The Journal of Contemporary Asia (JCA) is now in its thirty-seventh year of publication, and you have been on the Editorial Board since Volume 1, No. 2. Could you tell us how it was that you came to be associated with this new journal, and why issue 2 rather than issue 1? Noam Chomsky: This was 1970, which was a pretty complicated time in Southeast Asia, Indochina and the United States. I had been very active in the anti-war movement since the early 1960s, but at that time it was peaking. 1970 was absolutely the peak, with colleges closed; the country was falling apart and there was tremendous opposition to the war in Vietnam. This opposition was explicitly elicited by the Nixon-initiated invasion of Cambodia at a time when there had been enormous pressure to withdraw. The reaction in the administration to this pressure was to escalate - not unlike what is happening...http://www.japanfocus.org/products/details/2590 The Ainu and Their Culture: A Critical Twenty-First Century Assessment Chisato ("Kitty") O. Dubreuil Chisato (“Kitty”) Dubreuil, an Ainu-Japanese art history comparativist, has charted connections between the arts of the Ainu and those of diverse indigenous peoples of the north Pacific Rim. Currently finishing her PhD dissertation, Dubreuil co-curated, with William Fitzhugh, the director of the Smithsonian Arctic Studies Center, the groundbreaking 1999 Smithsonian exhibition on Ainu culture. Insisting on the inclusion of the work of contemporary Ainu artists, as well as art and artifacts of past Ainu culture, her input redefined the scope of the exhibition and reflected her ongoing activism to challenge the “vanishing people” myth about the Ainu. Dubreuil explains, “We are still here and our culture is still vibrant.” Dubreuil, with Fitzhugh, co-edited Ainu: Spirit of a Northern People, published by...http://www.japanfocus.org/products/details/2589 Sun Yat-sen's 1911 Revolution had Its Seeds in Tokyo Sato Kazuo Introduction: In four years, China will be celebrating the centenary of the 1911 Revolution which toppled not only the Qing dynasty but imperial rule itself, a system that can be traced back 2,132 years when "China" was a much smaller place. In order to understand the central role played by a handful of extremely energetic (and in some cases equally eccentric) Japanese, it is helpful to consciously try to forget much of what has occurred in the intervening century, especially the two decades leading up to the Marco Polo Bridge Incident in 1937 and commencement of the Sino-Japanese War. A motley group of activist Japanese, men whose activities were not necessarily coordinated, but who felt impelled to risk their lives for the Chinese cause, early on identified Sun Yat-sen (Sun Zhongshan) as the leader to bank on and offered him their wholehearted support. Native Anglophones have for the past half-century...http://www.japanfocus.org/products/details/2587 Seduced by Nationalism: Yone Noguchi’s ‘Terrible Mistake’. Debating the China-Japan War With Tagore Zeljko Cipris Believe me that I am never a eulogist of Japanese militarism, because I have many differences with it. But I can not help accepting as a Japanese what Japan is doing now under the circumstances, because I see no other way to show our minds to China. Of course when China stops fighting, and we receive her friendly hands, neither grudge nor ill feeling will remain in our minds. Perhaps with some sense of repentance, we will then proceed together on the great work of reconstructing the new world in Asia. Yone Noguchi If you can convince the Chinese that your armies are bombing … that they are only being subjected to a benevolent treatment which will in the end "save" their nation, it will no longer be necessary for you to convince us of your country's noble intentions. … Do you seriously believe that the...http://www.japanfocus.org/products/details/2577 Nationalism and Globalization on the Inner Mongolia Frontier: The Commercialization of a Tamed Ethnicity Li Narangoa [1] Introduction: Imaging Urban Development on the Frontier The history of Inner Mongolia during the last century has been in important respects a story of Sinicization. On the one hand, massive immigration by Han Chinese has transformed the Mongol community into a minority of around 20% in their homeland. On the other hand, as is the case of other minority peoples in China and elsewhere, there has been a steady erosion of the distinctive identity of the Mongols, especially in urban regions. Many now speak and read no Mongolian and have adopted Chinese names, dress and other markers of Chinese culture. Visitors to the capital of Inner Mongolia, Hohhot, as recently as ten years ago would have found it very similar in appearance to a dozen or more Chinese cities of about the same size. It comes as a surprise therefore that, in the last decade, the cityscape of Hohhot has...http://www.japanfocus.org/products/details/2575 Murder of an Anarchist Recalled: Suppression of News in the Wake of the 1923 Tokyo Earthquake The Asahi ShinbunThe murders recalled below were facilitated by the enormous earthquake, with countless aftershocks in the ensuing 24 hours, that hit the Tokyo-Yokohama area at about noon on September 1, 1923. Chaos ensued as the population took to the streets, dodging debris and fallen buildings, and spreading rumors as they ran. Cooking fires had been burning in most homes, and when the buildings collapsed, the fires spread rapidly, sooner or later killing over 100,000 people and leaving 70-80% of the population homeless. Among the rumors spread in the days and weeks following the shock was the report that Korean residents were looting, setting fires, and committing other crimes. The rumors led to the formation of local vigilante organizations, some of which set out to punish Koreans and ended up killing large numbers – at least several hundred, and perhaps several thousand. The confusion...http://www.japanfocus.org/products/details/2569