In honor of the 70th anniversary of the Japanese attack on the US at Pearl Harbor, the Society for the History of American Foreign Relations has published a series of essays on the event and historical memory issues; HNN has reprinted it (with a useful index post). John Gripentrog’s “The Road to War” is a solid discussion of the political and ideological differences which put the US and Japan on a collision course. HNN’s supplemental piece, by Rupert Colley, tracks how the attack brought the US into the European conflict. And Emily Rosenberg discusses how iconic attacks like Pearl Harbor and 9/11 and their rhetorical and cultural resonances.

Those are fine, but the articles I find most interesting are the other two. Greg Robinson writes about the effect of the Pearl Harbor attack on Japanese Americans at that time and the way in which it becomes part of the rhetoric of race and bias in the decades to come.¹ Finally, Yujin Yaguchi describes an intercultural teachers’ seminar which brought together Japanese and American teachers with time to explore their biases, perspectives, and to encounter new ones. The historiographical issues aren’t terribly new to academic historians, but for teachers working in a national curriculum context, it was quite enlightening.

Update: This article by Jonathan Parshall and J. Michael Wenger is the first interesting new scholarship I’ve seen on Pearl Harbor in years. Mostly it’s about the development of the Japanese aircraft carrier group as an operational unit, an unforseen shift in naval tactics.

1. The twitter chatter as the disaster this spring unfolded frequently, shockingly, referenced Pearl Harbor with a vicious karmic glee

One of our graduate assistants came in recently with an old newspaper that her husband had found on a deconstruction job. Considering that it was, apparently, stored in a wall for decades, the December 7, 1941 Pittsburg Sun was in fairly good condition: brittle, but almost entirely intact and clear. I didn’t want to force the folds into a flatbed scanner – the paper clearly isn’t going to survive too much handling, and the next step is to show it to our archivist – so I took some pictures with my camera to share.

Interestingly, we got an email today indicating that the Governor has declared today a half-staff day, in honor of the anniversary, so consider this our contribution to the remembrance.

I have uploaded images of all four pages of the Extra edition in the Flickr set, as well as detail shots of some of the more interesting bits. My favorite bits, aside from the Japanese Consul General in Hawaii’s attempt to deny the raid(!) are the maps on page 4, which were obviously prepped and ready to go, possibly previously run material that they reprinted.

	Map Heading: “The Pacific – Which is No Longer Pacific” Map shows US, Pacific Ocean, East Asia and Australia, illustrating proximity of US outposts to Japanese mandate territories. Caption reads: “Japan, fortifying herself with new bases in strategic Indo-China, has challenged American and British might in the vast Pacific. In any clash the bases for naval operation will dominate the strategy of all participants. The long string of American naval bases and air stations stretching from Panama to the Philippines all have been assigned roles in a master plan for keeping most of the Pacific secure. Britain’s bases, centered on armed-to-the-teeth Singapore, keep an eye on the East Indies corner. But Japanese roots stretch farther and farther from Tokyo. And Nipponese vessels cross and recross vital British trade lanes. Now the powder keg has been fired.”
	Map Heading: “Three-Front Warfare” Map shows Germany, Russia, Balkans, Eastern Mediterranean including Libya and Egypt. Caption reads: “New outbreak of warfare in Yugoslavia forces the armies of Germany to fight on a much-feared third front at a time of allied pressure on both her other battle zones. Map shows how the widely separated fronts created extended supply and troop transport problems for the axis.”
	Map Heading: “Why Free Seas are vital to U.S. Defense” Global map showing transportation lines from all continents. Labels include: Tin, Mica, Antimony, Vanadium, Tungsten, Manganese, Graphite, Chrome, Nickel, Quinine, Rubber, Mercury.

The whole paper is worth browsing through, and I haven’t had time, at this point in the semester, to do it justice. The main thing that I noticed is a great deal of war news: the coming of war is clearly surprising, but doesn’t seem shocking. The Washington Daybook, for example, which is about industrial and refugee diamonds, and the “Free Seas” maps above, not to mention the Jayhawk Ordinance Works dedication and the War Bonds cartoon, point to a substantial wartime footing already in place.

Paul Krugman wrote a column in which he argued that the last decade in the US has been a waste of time, economically speaking:

But from an economic point of view, I’d suggest that we call the decade past the Big Zero. It was a decade in which nothing good happened, and none of the optimistic things we were supposed to believe turned out to be true.

It was a decade with basically zero job creation. …
It was a decade with zero economic gains for the typical family. …
It was a decade of zero gains for homeowners, even if they bought early …
… it was a decade of zero gains for stocks, even without taking inflation into account. …
So here’s what Mr. Summers — and, to be fair, just about everyone in a policy-making position at the time — believed in 1999: America has honest corporate accounting; this lets investors make good decisions, and also forces management to behave responsibly; and the result is a stable, well-functioning financial system.

What percentage of all this turned out to be true? Zero.

What was truly impressive about the decade past, however, was our unwillingness, as a nation, to learn from our mistakes.

Even as the dot-com bubble deflated, credulous bankers and investors began inflating a new bubble in housing. Even after famous, admired companies like Enron and WorldCom were revealed to have been Potemkin corporations with facades built out of creative accounting, analysts and investors believed banks’ claims about their own financial strength and bought into the hype about investments they didn’t understand. Even after triggering a global economic collapse, and having to be rescued at taxpayers’ expense, bankers wasted no time going right back to the culture of giant bonuses and excessive leverage.
…
So let’s bid a not at all fond farewell to the Big Zero — the decade in which we achieved nothing and learned nothing. Will the next decade be better? Stay tuned. Oh, and happy New Year.

My mother sent me the column, and I wrote back the following comparison:

It’s almost like we had the same Lost Decade that the Japanese had in the 90s, but in a much more dramatic fashion. They had the Aum Shinrikyo gas attacks; we had 9/11. They had the Hanshin Earthquake, we had Katrina; both triggered a discussion about emergency preparedness and civil society. They had a bubble burst and zero growth; we had several bubbles burst and, ultimately, zero growth.

Unfortunately, it’s very clear that Japanese leaders and citizens didn’t learn very much from the experience: it took almost another decade before a major change in leadership, and their economy remains extremely weak. Not a happy comparison.

Just received this from friends at the Japanese American National Museum:

The Japanese American National Museum is accepting film & video submissions for their Second annual ID Film Festival, a series of films that challenge and celebrate what it means to be Asian.

To take place from October 1-3, ID Film Fest will showcase both shorts and features to be screened digitally in the Democracy Forum, a state of the art theater in downtown Los Angeles.

ID Film Fest welcomes film and video works of all lengths and genres that challenge and celebrate what it means to be Asian and/or Asian American. Please direct all inquiries to ksakai@janm.org

To see the films that we screened at last year’s festival, visit http://www.janm.org/events/2008/idfilmfest/films/
Please send a one-paged synopsis of the work along with contacts (e-mail, address and phone), a short biography of the filmmaker and a DVD screener to the:

Japanese American National Museum
Attention: Koji Steven Sakai
369 E. First St.
Los Angeles CA 90012

There is no submission fee and no entry form is required. Submission deadline is AUGUST 1, 2009.

Premodernists, particularly those who focus on history, sometimes feel gloomy about the state of premodern Japanese studies in the U.S., where a number of large graduate programs have shrunk, disappeared, or fundamentally changed in emphasis in the past two decades. Some of us have even been known to eulogize the field, as if the heart of our collective endeavors had already stopped beating. Is the field more like a rotting corpse, or perhaps a mummified one? Have we been subject to cremation, leaving behind only bone fragments to be buried in an urn? Or was the corpse of the field left lying on the banks of the river, food for the crows and source of anxiety for locals, known as “wind burial”? (Thanks, PMJS!)

Two upcoming events prove that the rumors of the death of medieval Japanese studies were greatly exaggerated.

This weekend, Princeton University is hosting “Pieces of Sengoku: Interpreting Historical Sources and Objects from Japan’s Long Sixteenth Century”

202 Jones Hall, Princeton University

***April 25th (Saturday)***

9:00am – 9:30am   Registration and Breakfast

9:30am – 12:00pm   Session I

Opening Remarks by David L. Howell (Princeton University)

Special Remarks by Andrew M. Watsky (Princeton University) Re-assembling the “Pieces of Sengoku”

【黒印状】 Tomoko Kitagawa (Princeton University) Who Owned the Black-Seal?: The Black-Seal Letter Issued (not) by Kusu

【書札礼】 Taizo Noda (Kyoto Kōka Women’s University) Hierarchy in the Manners of Writing: The Letters from the Uesugi Collection

【御置目】 David Eason (SUNY, University at Albany) Affective Law in the Long Sixteenth Century: The Rokkaku-shi Shikimoku Revealed

12:00pm   Lunch 1:00pm – 2:30pm   Session II

【西笑承兌】 Masatoshi Harada (Kansai University) Monks of the Five Mountains and the Unification of Japan: Excerpts from Seishō Oshō Bun’an

【西笑承兌】Nam-lin Hur (University of British Columbia) Truce Negotiations in the Final Phase of the Toyotomi Regime’s Invasion of Korea

2:30pm – 3:00pm   Break 3:00pm – 4:30pm   Session III

【禁制】 David Spafford (University of Washington) Violators Will Be Punished: Kinzei Placards and the Performance of Local Authority

【過所旗】 Peter Shapinsky (University of Illinois at Springfield) Japanese ‘Jolly Roger’: The Functions and Symbolism of ‘Pirate’ Flags in Sixteenth-Century Japan

4:30pm – 5:00pm   Break 5:00pm – 6:30pm   Session IV

【肖像画】Hiroshi Kitagawa (Osaka Castle Museum) Deification and the Political History of the Sengoku Period: The Portraits of Toyotomi Hideyoshi

【御道具帳】Morgan Pitelka (Occidental College) The Social Life of Ieyasu’s Things: Tokugawa Probate in the Long Sixteenth Century
***April 26th (Sunday)***

11:00am – 1:30pm     Round Table Discussion and Lunch

Then, May 8-10 – Text and Context: New Directions in Medieval Japanese Literary and Historical Studies

A Colby Bates and Bowdoin (CBB) Initiative, to be held at Bowdoin College on May 8-10, 2009.

Organized by Thomas Conlan, Vyjayanthi Selinger, Roberta Strippoli

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Presentations (diacritics-free version)

Soundscapes: Music and Ritual in The Tale of the Heike and other Medieval Texts – David Bialock University of Southern California

Sovereign Authority and the Medieval Japanese State – Thomas Conlan Bowdoin College

Why’d They Do That & How d’ya Know?:  Some Thoughts on Reconstructing Early Medieval Warfare – Karl Friday University of Georgia

Warriors and Illness – Andrew Goble University of Oregon

Ghosts Along the Road: The Kaidoki and the Jokyu Rebellion – Elizabeth Oyler University of Illinois

Analyzing Japan’s Early Medieval Economy – Ethan Segal Harvard University

The Heike monogatari and Manuscript Textuality – Vyjayanthi Selinger Bowdoin College

Gio’s Temples, Landmarks, and Documents: When Literature Becomes “History” – Roberta Strippoli Bates College

Seppuku: A Methodological Problem – Hitomi Tonomura University of Michigan

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The symposium is open to the public, but space is limited.  Those who plan to attend should get in touch with Roberta Strippoli  (rstrippo@bates.edu) to reserve a seat.  Roberta will also provide a   more detailed program.

Sponsored by CBB and the Luce Foundation