Homecomings

The Belated Return of Japan's Lost Soldiers
Erscheinungsjahr 2016
ISBN: 978-0-231-17770-2
Verlag: Columbia University Press

Buch, Englisch, 320 Seiten, Format (B × H): 264 mm x 164 mm, Gewicht: 582 g

Reihe: Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University

Soon after the end of World War II, a majority of the nearly seven million Japanese civilians and serviceman posted overseas returned home. Heeding the call to rebuild, these soldiers helped remake Japan and enjoyed popularized accounts of their service. For those who took longer to return, such as the POWs detained in Siberian labor camps and the fighters who spent years hiding in the jungles of the South Pacific, coming home was more difficult. Their nation had moved on without them and resented the reminder of a humiliating, traumatizing defeat.

Homecomings tells the story of these late-returning Japanese soldiers and their struggle to succeed in a newly peaceful and prosperous society. Some were more successful than others, but they all charted a common cultural terrain, one profoundly shaped by media representations of the earlier returnees. Japan had come to redefine its nationhood through these popular images. Homecomings explores what Japanese society accepted and rejected, complicating the definition of a postwar consensus and prolonging the experience of war for both Japanese soldiers and the nation. The book throws the postwar narrative of Japan's recovery into question, exposing the deeper, subtler damage done to a country that only belatedly faced the implications of its loss.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Igarashi, Yoshikuni

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Weltgeschichte & Geschichte einzelner Länder und Gebietsräume Geschichte einzelner Länder Asiatische Geschichte
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Geschichtliche Themen Besondere Kriege und Kampagnen

Inhaltsverzeichnis

AcknowledgmentsNote on Personal Names and Names of WarIntroduction1. Life After the War: Former Servicemen in Postwar Japanese Film2. The Story of a Man Who Was Not Allowed to Come Home: Gomikawa Junpei and The Human Condition (Ningen no joken)3. Longing for Home: Japanese POWs in Soviet Captivity and Their Repatriation4. "No Denunciation": Ishihara Yoshiro's Soviet Internment Experiences5. Lost and Found in the South Pacific: Postwar Japan's Mania Over Yokoi Shoichi's Return6. Rescued from the Past: Onoda Hiro'o's Endless War7. The Homecoming of the "Last Japanese Soldier": Nakamura Teruo/Shiniyuwu/Li Guanghui's PostwarEpilogueNotesBibliographyIndex

Über Autor(innen)

Yoshikuni Igarashi is associate professor of history at Vanderbilt University. He is the author of Bodies of Memory: Narratives of War in Postwar Japanese Culture, 1945-1970 (2000).