Bitter Victories, Sweet Defeats

This seminar is a sustained look at a major aspect of East Asian history in the first half of the 20th century: war. The course will not be “military history” in the sense of battles and campaigns but, instead, a look at war’s deep impact on politics, society, and culture in China and Japan from the 1890s to the 1950s, as governments and people prepared for war, waged it, propagandized for it, and rebuilt in its wake. For China, we will focus on the link between prolonged warfare and revolution. The Second Sino-Japanese War (1937-45) was preceded by decades of violent struggles among warlords and revolutionary parties and was followed by the PRC’s first major international conflict, the Korean War. The importance of these long years of warfare for the Chinese revolution cannot be overstated. We will ask how men were mobilized, how wars affected civilians, how revolutionary leaders and parties made use of warfare, why some Chinese collaborated with the Japanese, and why a regime whose flag was barely hoisted over Tiananmen Square decided to fight one of the world’s superpowers. For Japan, war was no less crucial but in different ways. To understand Japan’s disastrous imperial adventure and the effects of defeat, we will reverse the China rubric to look at the connections between aggressive militarism and the Meiji political “revolution” (1868), as well as later brushes with social revolution. The Nanjing Massacre (December 1937) will be dissected, as we attempt to understand the anatomy of that atrocity. Finally, we will look at the ramifications of defeat. How was “responsibility” for the war determined? Using scholarly studies, fiction, and the photographs of Shomei Tomatsu, we will ask what it meant to be an occupied country and what changes US occupation brought in its wake. We will confront the difficult issue of Japan as “victim” by discussing the atomic bombs—a singular event in world history—and their cultural effects in Japan.