Gods Left First

1. Auflage 2013
ISBN: 978-0-520-27615-4
Verlag: University Of California Press

Buch, Englisch, 256 Seiten, Cloth Over Boards, Format (B × H): 159 mm x 236 mm, Gewicht: 510 g

At the time of Japan’s surrender to Allied forces on August 15, 1945, some six million Japanese were left stranded across the vast expanse of a vanquished Asian empire. Half civilian and half military, they faced the prospect of returning somehow to a Japan that lay prostrate, its cities destroyed, after years of warfare and Allied bombing campaigns. Among them were more than 600,000 soldiers of Japan’s army in Manchuria, who had surrendered to the Red Army only to be transported to Soviet labor camps, mainly in Siberia. Held for between two and four years, and some far longer, amid forced labor and reeducation campaigns, they waited for return, never knowing when or if it would come. Drawing on a wide range of memoirs, art, poetry, and contemporary records, The Gods Left First reconstructs their experience of captivity, return, and encounter with a postwar Japan that now seemed as alien as it had once been familiar. In a broader sense, this study is a meditation on the meaning of survival for Japan’s continental repatriates, showing that their memories of involvement in Japan’s imperial project were both a burden and the basis for a new way of life.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Barshay, Andrew E.

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Geschichtliche Themen Militärgeschichte
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Geschichtswissenschaft Allgemein Geschichtspolitik, Erinnerungskultur
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Weltgeschichte & Geschichte einzelner Länder und Gebietsräume Geschichte einzelner Länder Asiatische Geschichte
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Geschichtliche Themen Mentalitäts- und Sozialgeschichte

Inhaltsverzeichnis

List of Maps and Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Note on Names and Terms

I. Prologue

The Gods Left First

Sources and Method

II. The Siberian Internment in History

The Prince’s Tale

The Soviet-Japanese War

Hot War to Cold

The Soviet-Japanese Conflict: Prehistory into History

Toward Internment

The Internment Remembered

III. Kazuki Yasuo and the Profane World of the Gulag

Icons of the Profane

The Red Corpse

“My Vision Broadened Tenfold”

The “Siberia Style”

From Image to Text

The Responsibility of the Artist

“The Beauty only I Can Grasp”

IV. Knowledge Painfully Acquired: Takasugi Ichiro and the “Democratic Movement” in Siberia

Thank You, Iosif Vissarionovich!

A Humanist Interprets the Gulag

Siberia, School of Democracy

Ogawa Goro Becomes Takasugi Ichiro

In the Shadow of the Northern Lights

The Gate of Hell

Toward Epiphany

Toward Return

Knowledge Painfully Acquired

V. Ishihara Yoshiro: “My Best Self Did Not Return”

Prologue: Ishihara Yoshiro and Viktor Frankl

The Survivor’s Question

The Primitive Accumulation of Memory

The Life before the Death

Into the Gulag

At Lowest Ebb, Stirrings

Kano Buichi, Enigma

Was this Domoi?

VI. Coda

The People Stalin Didn’t Care About

“A War to Live”: Fujiwara Tei’s The Shooting Stars Are Alive

The Meaning and Message of Survival

Appendix: How Many?

Bibliography

Index

Über Autor(innen)

Andrew E. Barshay is Professor of History at University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of The Social Sciences in Modern Japan: The Marxian and Modernist Traditions.