The Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus Newsletter
 
Newsletter No. 11. 2014    

March 18, 2014    
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In This Issue
 
Greetings! 

 

Between 2002 and 2013, the Visualizing Cultures (VC) project at M.I.T. produced a number of "image-driven" online units addressing Japan and China in the modern world. Co-directed by John Dower and Shigeru Miyagawa, VC tapped a wide range of hitherto largely inaccessible visual resources of an historical nature. Each topical treatment formats and analyzes these graphics in ways that open new windows of understanding for scholars, teachers, and students. VC, like the Asia-Pacific Journal, endorses the "creative commons" ideal, meaning that everything on the site, including all images, can be downloaded and reproduced for educational (but not commercial) uses. The full VC menu can be accessed at visualizingcultures.mit.edu.

With publication of Andrew Gordon's "Social Protest in Imperial Japan: The Hibiya Riot of 1905, we inaugurate a wide-ranging collaboration between VC and APJ emblematic of APJ's commitment to expand its introduction of image-driven scholarship and digital teaching materials. In the course of the next two months we will present a series of four units on popular protest drawn from VC. New, previously unpublished units presently in preparation to follow. We welcome suggestions for future articles and units from researchers.

We recently introduced an important new feature: a PDF is provided for all articles, accessible by a click on the PDF symbol located at the top right of each article. Readers printing out articles may find the new feature particularly convenient. The PDF offers features that permit commenting on and underlining the text for those who work online. Let us know of any problems or suggest improvements in this feature as we fine tune it.

Interested in seeing our most widely read articles ofthe last month, year, or ten years? Find out here.

Thanks to  the generous support of our readers, we succeeded in raising more than $12,000 to fund the Journal for 2014. The Journal will remain free. You can still support the journal at our home page with your 501 (C) tax-deductible gift.


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John W. Dower
Visualizing Protest in Modern Japan  
 
Between 2002 and 2013, the Visualizing Cultures (VC) project at M.I.T. produced a number of "image-driven" online units addressing Japan and China in the modern world. Co-directed by John Dower and Shigeru Miyagawa, VC tapped a wide range of hitherto largely inaccessible visual resources of an historical nature. Each topical treatment formats and analyzes these graphics in ways that, ideally, open new windows of understanding for scholars, teachers, and students. VC, like the Asia-Pacific Journal, endorses the "creative commons" ideal, meaning that everything on the site, including all images, can be downloaded and reproduced for educational and public purposes.

This article provides critical context for understanding these image-driven VC explorations of protest in Japan, which begin in 1905 and end with the massive "Ampō" demonstrations against revision of the U.S.-Japan mutual security treaty in 1960. Dower introduces the four treatments to be reproduced in The Asia-Pacific Journal, beginning in this issue with a piece by Andrew Gordon (see below).

This inaugurates a partnership between VC and APJ that will unfold in the months and years ahead.
    
John W. Dower is emeritus professor of history at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His books include Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II (1999); Cultures of War: Pearl Harbor / Hiroshima / 9-11 / Iraq (2010); and two collections of essays: Japan in War and Peace: Selected Essays (1994), and Ways of Forgetting, Ways of Remembering: Japan in the Modern World (2012).  
 
Andrew Gordon
Social Protest in Imperial Japan: The Hibiya Riot of 1905  
 

On September 5, 1905, a massive three-day riot erupted in Tokyo protesting the disappointing terms of the peace treaty that ended the Russo-Japanese War. A decade earlier, after emerging victorious in the Sino-Japanese War, Japan had demanded and received a huge indemnity from defeated China. Although the war with Russia was far more costly in casualties and money, both sides were exhausted by 1905 and Japan was in no position to demand an indemnity from Russia. Because the Japanese public had been bombarded with reports of victory after victory, expectations of a profitable peace settlement were high and the outrage when this did not materialize was enormous. The anti-treaty riot - commonly called the Hibiya Riot after the park where the demonstrations began - marked the first major social protest of the age of "imperial democracy" in Japan that began with the promulgation of the Meiji constitution in 1890 and extended into the early 1930s.

 

This article, the first of four online "image-driven" units from the MIT Visualizing Cultures project (see Dower summary above), focuses in detail on the visual record of this spontaneous anti-government demonstration as presented in The Tokyo Riot Graphic, an extraordinary special issue of an illustrated magazine that was published at the time and featured both photographs and artistic renderings of the unfolding violence.


Andrew Gordon teaches modern Japanese history at Harvard University with a primary research interest in labor, class and the social and political history of modern Japan. He is the author of A Modern History of Japan and the editor of Postwar Japan as History. His most recent book is Fabricating Consumers: The Sewing Machine in Modern Japan.

 

Ngai Pun, Shen Yuan, Guo Yuhua, Lu Huilin, Jenny Chan, and Mark Selden
Worker-Intellectual Unity: Suicide, trans-border sociological intervention, and the Foxconn-Apple connection
 
What are the implications for global public sociology and labor studies when more than a score of Foxconn workers jump to their death and when a wave of protests, riots and strikes occur in their wake? This article documents the formation of a cross-border sociological intervention project and illustrates how sociological research fueled regional campaigns that gradually developed into a global campaign. This experience confirms the important political contribution that social science can make when linked with grassroots politics.

The authors shed light on how social and economic injustice was creatively challenged by combining the strengths of workers, researchers and transnational movement activists. The study uses both quantitative and qualitative methods to provide insights concerning the experiences, world views and collective agency of Chinese workers who are struggling to make sense of the global production regime they inhabit and to contest the forces that shape their working and social lives.

*Pun Ngai is Professor in the Department of Applied Social Sciences, Polytechnic University of Hong Kong. *Shen Yuan and Guo Yuhua are Professors in the Department of Sociology, Tsinghua University. *Lu Huilin is Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology, Peking University. *Jenny Chan is a Ph.D. candidate in Sociology and Chinese 

Labor Studies at University of London. *Mark Selden is Senior Research Associate in the East Asia Program at Cornell University and a Coordinator of The Asia-Pacific Journal.
 
Peter Dale Scott
The State, the Deep State, and the Wall Street Overworld (updated March 13, 2014)

In the last decade it has become more and more obvious that we have in America today what the journalists Dana Priest and William Arkin have called

two governments: the one its citizens were familiar with, operated more or less in the open: the other a parallel top secret government whose parts had mushroomed in less than a decade into a gigantic, sprawling universe of its own, visible to only a carefully vetted cadre - and its entirety...visible only to God.

The author explores the workings of the US deep state in recent and contemporary wars in East Asia and the Middle East by examining the intersection of Wall Street and the CIA from the 1940s to the present.

Peter Dale Scott, a former Canadian diplomat and English Professor at the University of California, Berkeley, is the author of Drugs Oil and War, The Road to 9/11, and The War Conspiracy: JFK, 9/11, and the Deep Politics of War. His most recent book is American War Machine: Deep Politics, the CIA Global Drug Connection and the Road to Afghanistan.  
   
Nick Turse
Misremembering America's Asian Wars, 2003-2053:
The Pentagon's Latest "Mission Accomplished" Moment

In 2012, the Pentagon kicked off a 13-year program to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Vietnam War, complete with a sprawling website that includes a "history and education" component.   Billed as a "public service" provided by the Department of Defense, the United States of America Vietnam War Commemoration site boasts of its "resources for teachers and students in the grades 7-12" and includes a selection of official government documents, all of them produced from 1943-1954; that is, only during the earliest stages of modern U.S. involvement in what was then called Indochina.

 

Mention of Vietnamese dead and wounded in these accounts is, to put the matter as politely as possible, in short supply. This article serves as a corrective to the most egregious historical oversights committed by the Pentagon's Vietnam War commemoration.  

   
Nick Turse is the managing editor of TomDispatch.com and a fellow at the Nation Institute. His work has appeared in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Nation, on the BBC, and at TomDispatch.  He is the author of Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam.