Thursday, April 5th: Jiakai Sheng, “Homeward Bound: The Postwar Repatriation of Japanese Civilians in Shanghai, 1945-1947”

Jiakai Sheng

PhD Student, Department of History

“Homeward Bound: The Postwar Repatriation of Japanese Civilians in Shanghai, 1945-1947”

Thursday, April 5th, 4-6 PM

John Hope Franklin Room

Please join the East Asia: Transregional Histories workshop in welcoming Jiakai Sheng as he presents his paper titled “Homeward Bound: The Postwar Repatriation of Japanese Civilians in Shanghai, 1945-1947.” He has provided the following abstract:

Following the end of WWII, the Allies returned 6.5 millions overseas Japanese nationals back to their homeland, which was regarded by the former as part and parcel of the effort to dismantle Japan’s fifty-year colonial enterprise. This essay focuses on the management and repatriation of over 100,000 Japanese civilians in Shanghai between 1945 and 1947 as an important case of how mass population transfer was planned, negotiated, and executed in the context of postwar East Asian. By examining an array of ideological and logistical issues surrounding postwar Shanghai’s “Japanese Nationals Concentration Zone,” this essay seeks to reconstruct the dynamic interplay between the Chinese authorities, the U.S. military, and the Japanese repatriates. Rather than reducing the politics of postwar repatriation and decolonization to a simplistic story of the “defeated” being dominated and displaced by the “victorious,” this essay interprets it as being constantly shaped by the agency of multiple parties as well as the continuation of certain aspects of the prewar configuration of Shanghai’s Japanese settlement. Moreover, through highlighting the role played by people’s identities, connections and preferences, this essay intends to show how repatriation was experienced at individual level in variegated ways.

Jiakai’s Paper can be found at the post below.

As always, first-time attendees are welcome. Light refreshments and snacks will be served.

If you have any questions or require assistance to attend, please contact Spencer Stewart at sdstewart@uchicago.edu or Robert Burgos at rburgos@uchicago.edu

Friday, January 26th: Sandra Park “Crusading for the Twentieth Century: Christianity, Chaplaincy and Militarism in Cold War South Korea, 1945-1973”

Sandra Park

“Crusading for the Twentieth Century: Christianity, Chaplaincy and Militarism in Cold War South Korea, 1945-1973”

Friday, January 26th, 3-5 p.m.
Location: CEAS 319 (1155 E. 60th St.)
Co-sponsored with the Arts and Politics of East Asia Workshop

Discussant: Jun-Hee Lee (PhD Candidate, History)
This Friday, East Asia Transregional Histories Workshops and Arts and Politics of East Asia workshops are proud to host Sandra Park (PhD Student, History). She will be presenting a draft of her dissertation proposal, which she summarizes as follows:
My anticipated dissertation, “Crusading for the Twentieth Century: Christianity, Chaplaincy and Militarism in Cold War South Korea, 1945-1973,” elucidates the origins of Christianity’s increasing social and political influence from the Korean War (1950-1953) through 1973, when the Billy Graham Seoul Crusade attracted over three million people (the largest gathering in global Church history). Two decades before the Seoul Crusade, Graham visited American GIs and Korean Christians during the Korean War in 1952. At the time, wŏllam (those who went south) Korean Christian leaders like Han Kyung-Chik (who interpreted for Graham) and Hwang Ŭn-gyun articulated the conflict with communism in North Korea in eschatological language, invoking the imagery of medieval European crusades. My proposal engages the trope of “crusades” articulated during the Korean Cold War as reflective of the ways in which Christianity and militarism were folded into each other. At this stage, I expect to trace three currents that were formative to the relationship between Christianity and militarized politics in Cold War South Korea: the discursive, transpacific politics of Billy Graham and Han Kyung-Chik (1945-1950), the institutional history of the Republic of Korea (ROK) military chaplaincy from its inception in 1951, and the hegemonic culture of militarism and dissent.

Sandra’s paper can be found in the post below.

As always, first-time attendees are welcome. Please make note of the distinct time and location for this event.

 

Thursday, November 16th : Jonathan Henshaw “Remembering and Forgetting: Commemorations of the Second World War in Nanjing”

Jonathan Henshaw

PhD Candidate, Department of History, University of British Columbia

“Remembering and Forgetting: Commemorations of the Second World War in Nanjing”

Thursday, November 16th 4:00-6:00 PM

John Hope Franklin Room [SSR 224]

Discussant: Kyle Pan, University of Chicago History Department

Please join the East Asia: Transregional Histories workshop in welcoming Jonathan Henshaw [University of British Columbia] as he presents his work-in-progress, titled “Remembering and Forgetting: Commemorations of the Second World War in Nanjing.” Mr. Henshaw provides the following abstract:

The manipulation of wartime commemoration in China by the CCP exists as a commonplace in English-language scholarship. Under the People’s Republic, the retreat of Maoism, contact with Taiwan and renewed (anti-Japanese) nationalism have indeed provided context for recent manipulation of wartime commemorations, but such accounts cut short much of the history of wartime commemoration in China by beginning only in the 1980s. Nanjing, as a former capital, has a large collection of monuments and relics that suggest a longer, more complex narrative. This paper marks an intervention in the literature by extending the history of Chinese wartime commemoration back to 1938, while the war still raged, and by setting the received national narrative of the war against the local record contained in commemorative sites in Nanjing and local accounts of the war. In doing so, it opens a productive space for considering the dynamic between local and national narratives, and also points to how efforts to commemorate the war have evolved in step with developments in China’s international relations. As Gail Hershatter has suggested of the practice of “speaking bitterness,” the post-war national narrative of resistance has China functioned more as a matrix that local or individual accounts must be recuperated within (or be forgotten), as opposed to an outright script. Drawing on newspaper reports, steles and Chinese secondary sources dealing with Nanjing, this paper traces the history of wartime commemoration to its earliest iteration in the wartime era, when collaborationist Nanjing politicians were faced with the task of mourning the dead in a city that was both under Japanese occupation, and still reeling from the 1937 Nanjing massacre. Following the war, Chiang Kai-shek’s victorious Nationalists returned to Nanjing and appropriated the site of a former Japanese Shinto shrine for use as a museum that advanced their own triumphalist narrative of resistance. The establishment of the PRC in 1949 greatly reduced such public commemorations, which fit uneasily within the reigning anti-imperialist framework, but did not entirely eliminate them. Instead, wartime commemoration was refashioned into the reigning paradigm of anti-imperialism. In 1960, when historians in Nanjing took up a formal research project on the Nanjing massacre, it was within this framework that they portrayed the war. Their work, published only in 1979, castigated Japanese brutality and Western complicity, but their anti-imperialist framework soon gave way to the more familiar rhetoric of Chinese victimhood that has taken hold in the post-Mao era. These successive revisions not only highlight the ways in which local experiences of the war have been re-worked within a national framework but also point to the malleable nature of a history that is often presented as above question in China.

Jonathan’s paper can be found in the post below.

As always, first-time attendees are welcome. Light refreshments and snacks will be served.

If you have any questions or require assistance to attend, please contact Spencer Stewart at sdstewart@uchicago.edu or Robert Burgos at rburgos@uchicago.edu

 

Thursday, April 6, 4-6 PM : Kyle Pan — Aiding War Criminals in the “New” Japan

Kyle Pan

University of Chicago

“Aiding War Criminals in the ‘New’ Japan: A Study of The War Convicted Benefit Society, 1952-1958.”

April 6th, 4-6 PM

John Hope Franklin Room (SSR 224)

Please join us as the East Asia: Transregional Histories workshop welcomes our own Kyle Pan as he presents his second year seminar paper to the workshop. In “Aiding War Criminals in the ‘New’ Japan: A Study of The War Convicted Benefit Society, 1952-1958,” Kyle examines the nature and activities of The War Convicted Benefit Society from 1952 to 1958 in order to show that war crime trials and other policies intended to dismantle the “militarism” in Japanese society had unexpected yet significant consequences for the postwar Japanese state and society.

Kyle’s whole seminar paper is posted on the East Asia: Transregional Histories workshop website. He has also provided a more focused range of pages that he would like feedback on: 5-6, 13-15, 23-29, 33-34, 41-44, 47-48, 50-51 and the conclusion.

As always, first-time attendees are welcome. Light refreshments and snacks will be served.

If you have any questions or require assistance to attend, please contact Jessa Dahl at jdahl@uchicago.edu or Erin Newton at emnewton@uchicago.edu.

Thursday, March 30th 4:30-6:30 PM : Covell Meyskens – The Demilitarization of Chinese Socialism

Covell Meyskens

Assistant Professor, Naval Postgraduate School

“The Demilitarization of Chinese Socialism”

Thursday, March 30th, 4:30-6:30 PM

Social Sciences Tea Room (SSR, 2nd Floor)

Discussant: Weichu Wang (University of Chicago)

Please join the East Asia: Transregional Histories Workshop as we welcome University of Chicago alumni Covell Meyskens (Naval Postgraduate School), who will present the first chapter of his new book project for workshop discussion. The chapter, titled “The Demilitarization of Chinese Socialism,” examines the CCP leadership’s approach to the security of socialist China between the late 1940s when they founded the PRC and the late 1970s when a new leadership under Deng Xiaoping rose to power after Mao’s death in 1976.

As always, first-time attendees are welcome. Light refreshments and snacks will be served.

If you have any questions or require assistance to attend, please contact Jessa Dahl at jdahl@uchicago.edu or Erin Newton at emnewton@uchicago.edu.