[PDF] Imperial Japan At Its Zenith eBook

Author : Kenneth J. Ruoff
Publisher : Cornell University Press
Page : 263 pages
File Size : 35,45 MB
Release : 2014-09-18
Category : History
ISBN : 0801471818

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In 1940, Japan was into its third year of war with China, and relations with the United States were deteriorating, but it was a heady time for the Japanese nonetheless. That year, the Japanese commemorated the 2,600th anniversary of the founding of the Empire of Japan. According to the imperial myth-history, Emperor Jimmu, descended from the Sun Goddess Amaterasu, established the "unbroken imperial line" in 660 BCE. In carefully choreographed ceremonies throughout the empire, through new public monuments, with visual culture, and through heritage tourism, the Japanese celebrated the extension of imperial rule under the 124th emperor, Hirohito. These celebrations, the climactic moment for the ideology that was central to modern Japan's identity until the imperial cult's legitimacy was bruised by defeat in 1945, are little known outside Japan. Imperial Japan at Its Zenith, the first book in English about the 2,600th anniversary, examines the themes of the celebration and what they tell us about Japan at mid-century. Kenneth J. Ruoff emphasizes that wartime Japan did not reject modernity in favor of nativist traditionalism. Instead, like Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, it embraced reactionary modernism. Ruoff also highlights the role played by the Japanese people in endorsing and promoting imperial ideology and expansion, documenting the significant grassroots support for the cult of the emperor and for militarism. Ruoff uses the anniversary celebrations to examine Japan's invention of a national history; the complex relationship between the homeland and the colonies; the significance of Imperial Japan's challenge to Euro-American claims of racial and cultural superiority; the role of heritage tourism in inspiring national pride; Japan's wartime fascist modernity; and, with a chapter about overseas Japanese, the boundaries of the Japanese nation. Packed with intriguing anecdotes, incisive analysis, and revelatory illustrations, Imperial Japan at Its Zenith is a major contribution to our understanding of wartime Japan.

Author : Mark Stille
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing
Page : 102 pages
File Size : 16,17 MB
Release : 2012-05-20
Category : History
ISBN : 1780967772

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The Imperial Japanese Navy was a pioneer in naval aviation, having commissioned the world's first built-from-the-keel-up carrier, the Hosho. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, it experimented with its carriers, perfecting their design and construction. As a result, by the time Japan entered World War II and attacked the United States at Pearl Harbor in 1941, it possessed a fantastically effective naval aviation force. This book covers the design, development and operation of IJN aircraft carriers built prior to and during World War II. Pearl Harbor, Midway and the first carrier vs carrier battle, the battle of the Coral Sea, are all discussed.

Author : Osamu Tagaya
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing
Page : 146 pages
File Size : 26,69 MB
Release : 2012-06-20
Category : History
ISBN : 1782000658

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The fateful attack on Pearl Harbor forced the Western world to revise its opinion of Japan's airmen. Before the war, Japanese aviators had been seen as figures of ridicule and disdain; yet the ruthless skill and efficiency of their performance in December 1941 and the months that followed won them a new reputation as a breed of oriental superman. This book explores the world of the Imperial Japanese Naval airman, from the zenith of his wartime career until the turning of the tide, when the skill and experience of the average Japanese airman declined. Cultural and social background, recruitment, training, daily life and combat experience are all covered.

Author : Jeremy A. Yellen
Publisher : Cornell University Press
Page : 303 pages
File Size : 22,5 MB
Release : 2019-04-15
Category : History
ISBN : 1501735551

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In The Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, Jeremy Yellen exposes the history, politics, and intrigue that characterized the era when Japan's "total empire" met the total war of World War II. He illuminates the ways in which the imperial center and its individual colonies understood the concept of the Sphere, offering two sometimes competing, sometimes complementary, and always intertwined visions—one from Japan, the other from Burma and the Philippines. Yellen argues that, from 1940 to 1945, the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere epitomized two concurrent wars for Asia's future: the first was for a new type of empire in Asia, and the second was a political war, waged by nationalist elites in the colonial capitals of Rangoon and Manila. Exploring Japanese visions for international order in the face of an ever-changing geopolitical situation, The Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere explores wartime Japan's desire to shape and control its imperial future while its colonies attempted to do the same. At Japan's zenith as an imperial power, the Sphere represented a plan for regional domination; by the end of the war, it had been recast as the epitome of cooperative internationalism. In the end, the Sphere could not survive wartime defeat, and Yellen's lucidly written account reveals much about the desires of Japan as an imperial and colonial power, as well as the ways in which the subdued colonies in Burma and the Philippines jockeyed for agency and a say in the future of the region.

Author : A. Morgan Young
Publisher : Read Books Ltd
Page : 336 pages
File Size : 11,67 MB
Release : 2021-03-22
Category : History
ISBN : 1528760131

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Many are the books on Japan they mostly follow a prescription, reviewing different aspects of a country which is strangely unlike the lands of Christendom, though it has entered into economic competition with them. I have here tried to present something rather different. Encouraged by the fact that Japan in Recent Times, 1912-1926, has been found useful by other makers of books as well as by readers who sought to increase their knowledge, I have attempted here to present a sequel though it is only part of the same story in the sense that it continues the record. A reign that seemed likely to be quiet and humdrum has proved so full of happenings that it has been difficult, even at slightly greater length, to record these eleven years as adequately as the previous sixteen. But for readers who would like the facts rather than my gloss upon them, here is a book full of them. During ten of the eleven years I was seldom absent from the editorial desk of the Japan Chronicle., so there was little about current events that did not come my way, and I have tried to select from the mass the most significant and most closely related. Sometimes so many things were happening at once that it has been impossible to observe a strict chronology and the subject rather than the date has had to be considered. As in my previous book I have adhered to the Japanese custom of putting the surname first and the personal name after also, where titles are concerned, I have used the highest attained instead of explaining that the Mr. of one day was the Baron of the next.

Author : S. C. M. Paine
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 223 pages
File Size : 36,93 MB
Release : 2017-03-06
Category : History
ISBN : 1107011957

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An accessible, analytical survey of the rise and fall of Imperial Japan in the context of its grand strategy to transform itself into a great power.

Author : Kate McDonald
Publisher : Univ of California Press
Page : 272 pages
File Size : 38,51 MB
Release : 2017-08-01
Category : History
ISBN : 0520967232

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A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press’s Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more. Placing Empire examines the spatial politics of Japanese imperialism through a study of Japanese travel and tourism to Korea, Manchuria, and Taiwan between the late nineteenth century and the early 1950s. In a departure from standard histories of Japan, this book shows how debates over the role of colonized lands reshaped the social and spatial imaginary of the modern Japanese nation and how, in turn, this sociospatial imaginary affected the ways in which colonial difference was conceptualized and enacted. The book thus illuminates how ideas of place became central to the production of new forms of colonial hierarchy as empires around the globe transitioned from an era of territorial acquisition to one of territorial maintenance.