Book launchFriday 6 March 2009
6:00pm – 8:00pm
Japanese Society at War Death, Memory and the Russo-Japanese War
Daiwa Foundation Japan House
Organised by the Daiwa Anglo-Japanese Foundation
Japanese Society at War was launched on 5 March 2009 with a presentation by Dr Naoko Shimazu, chaired by Dr Stephen Large.
As the first international conflict of the twentieth-century, the Russo-Japanese War attracted much contemporary global interest. This is the first full-length study to examine the war from the perspective of its impact on Japanese society, and sheds new light on its implications for modern Japan. What did the war mean to the Japanese people and how did they respond to it? Naoko Shimazu presents a fascinating and highly innovative account of the attitudes of ordinary Japanese people towards the war through a wide range of sources including personal diaries, letters, and contemporary images. She deals with themes such as conscripts and battlefield death, war commemoration, heroic myths, and war in popular culture. Challenging the orthodox view of Meiji Japan as monolithic, she shows that there existed a complex and ambivalent relationship between the Japanese state and society.
This is part of the series, Studies in the Social and Cultural History of Modern Warfare, by Cambridge University Press.
About the contributors
Dr Naoko Shimazu
Naoko Shimazu is Senior Lecturer in Japanese History, Birkbeck College, University of London. Her research concerns the political, social and cultural history of modern Japan. She has published widely in the field, including ‘Nationalisms in Japan’ (editor, Routledge, 2006) and ‘Japan, Race and Equality: The Racial Equality Proposal of 1919’ (Routledge, 1998). She is a Research Affiliate of the Modern East Asia Research Centre (MEARC) at the University of Leiden, and a co-editor of Japan Forum.
Dr Stephen Large
Stephen Large (chair) was Reader in Modern Japanese History, University of Cambridge, and a Fellow of Wolfson College, and retired in 2006. Over the years he was visiting professor at Keio University and the Universities of Warwick, Michigan, Paris Diderot and Melbourne. During his career, he presented numerous papers in the United States, Australia, Japan and Europe. His publications include ‘Emperor Hirohito and Showa Japan: A Political Biography’ and (as editor) ‘Showa Japan: Political, Economic and Social History 1926-1989’ (4 volumes).