The ANU, in association with the Japan Foundation, will once again host the annual ACT Japanese Language Speech Contest. Now in its 53rd year, this contest aims to encourage Senior Secondary & Tertiary Japanese language learners to showcase their language skills in a challenging context.

The contest will be held on 19 August (Saturday) from 10:00am (specific division times will be finalised after registrations close).

The contest this year will be held virtually via Zoom, as it was last year. Both contestants and guests will receive a protected Zoom link upon registering via Eventbrite.

Participants must register here by 11:59 pm 12 August. Participants will need to provide the Japanese and English titles for their speeches at the time of registration.

High School Senior Division: 2.5–3 minutes

Open Division: 4.5–5 minutes

The subject, content and form of the speeches are left open to each contestant. Entrants who have competed in previous contests may not use the same speech (this includes title and content) presented in previous years.

See here for contest guidelines.

First prize winners in both divisions will progress to the National Finals in October via video entries. Exact dates will be shared at a later stage, with the winner being announced on 13 October.

For more information, visit the Japan Foundation website.

The emperor, the army, aerial bombardment, and the decisive home-island battle: A reconsideration of Japan’s delayed surrender in World War II

This paper, which locates Emperor Hirohito as the driving force behind Japanese surrender in World War II, presents new historical evidence to support its threefold case that (i) the emperor feared aerial bombardment, (ii) the atomic attacks against Hiroshima and Nagasaki magnified that fear, and (iii) this fear was the driving force behind the emperor’s 'sacred decisions' to end the war and submit to foreign military occupation.

This paper also reconsiders the Japanese army’s volatile opposition to surrender. It examines army officers’ fanatical devotion to a decisive home-island battle against invading U.S. forces, and it argues that Japan’s army officers were animated at least as much by romantic dreams of Japan as a nation-in-arms, as they were by the hope of forcing the Americans to the negotiating table. It allows that Soviet entry into the war against Japan played a role in ending those militaristic dreams; it nonetheless finds that the atomic attacks – and the emperor’s reaction thereto – were decidedly more impactful in compelling the army to lay down its arms.

In making these assertions, this paper takes issue with a series of scholarly consensuses and it also wades into several scholarly controversies. These include: (i) the remarkably durable proposition (attributable to Gar Alperovitz and others) that Japan was defeated and on the verge of surrender long before August 1945; (ii) the insistence (attributable to Herbert Bix and others) that the emperor delayed surrender; (iii) the debate (joined by Asada Sadao, Tsuyoshi Hasegawa, and Hatano Sumio) over whether the atomic bombs or Soviet entry into the war caused Japanese surrender; and (iv) the debate (sparked initially by Suzuki Kantarō) over whether Army Minister Anami Korechika was a sincere proponent of the decisive home-island battle, or instead an artful proponent of haragei who professed loyalty to the decisive home-island battle while at the same time undermining the army’s hardline position.

Speaker: 

Professor Peter Mauch teaches modern Japanese history at Western Sydney University (Australia). He has authored TOJO (Harvard University Press, under contract) and Sailor Diplomat: Nomura Kichisaburō and the Japanese-American War (Harvard University Asia Center, 2011). He has contributed essays to the Cambridge History of the Second World War (Cambridge University Press, 2015) and The Road to Pearl Harbor: Great Power War in Asia and the Pacific (Naval Institute Press, 2022), and he has published with such journals as Diplomatic History; Pacific Historical Review; Diplomacy and Statecraft; War in History; and the Journal of American-East Asian Relations. He was a consultant for the two-part NHK documentary entitled 'Shōwa Tennō ga kataru' ('Shōwa Emperor Speaks').

Image: A 1971 painting of the last imperial conference by Shirokawa Ichirō (1908-1944). The original is held in the collection of the Admiral Baron Suzuki Kantarō collection. 

Contact the ANU Japan Institiute Seminar Series Convener: Dr Andrew  Levidis at andrew.levidis@anu.edu.au

Sign up to the ANU Japan Institute mailing list.

Another face of empire: Japanese women’s experiences of repatriation from Manchuria and reintegration to Japan

In August 1945, there were approximately 6.6 million Japanese citizens were overseas. About half of them were civilians, and more than eighty per cent of them resided in the colonised or occupied areas of Imperial Japan. Of those, approximately 1,550,000 were in Manchuria, sustaining the expansion of the Japanese empire. When the Russian army attacked the Manchurian borders on 9 August and started invasion, those Japanese colonisers started their repatriation to Japan. This could rather be called ‘evacuation’, because many of them faced various forms of harsh violence including pillage, mass-killing, and mass-rape perpetrated by the Russian soldiers and local residents who had been previously dominated by Japanese. The turmoil at the end of the war in Manchuria claimed approximately 245,000 Japanese people’s lives. In the postwar Japan, those repatriates faced social discrimination, and most have remained silent about their past. Their memories of colonisation and repatriation have never become the ‘public memory’, and are now fading away.

While the above account displays a rough outline of Japanese citizens’ experiences in Manchuria, we need to note that men and women were positioned differently within the empire and thus experienced the end of the war differently. In the official and/or mainstream discourses of their repatriation, some aspects of women’s experiences are still not fully revealed. For example, while women’s sexual victimisation upon their way home has been well documented, less investigated are their daily lives as colonisers before August 1945 and the surreptitious abortions provided by the government on their arrival in Japan. The Japanese citizens’ repatriation in the aftermath of the war is an ongoing issue.

This paper presents how those Japanese women were represented and recorded in the relevant discourses including their memoirs, paying particular attention to the women’s multi-layered social and political positionalities. By doing so, this paper will locate this issue in contemporary Japan, and contribute to critically reconsider how the Japanese empire ended.

Speaker: 

Dr Mayuko Itoh is Lecturer in Japanese Language and Studies at School of Culture, History and Language, the ANU College of Asia and the Pacific, Australian National University. She received her PhD in History at the University of Melbourne in 2014. Her research interests are on experiences of Japanese women who cross national boundaries at various points in history. She most recently authored a book chapter, “Backsliding to Authoritarianism in Japan? State and Civil Responses to Experiences of Japanese Women Repatriated from Manchuria” in Spires and Ogawa, eds, Authoritarianism and Civil Society in Asia (Routledge, 2022).

Image: Japanese settler women hoe soy in Manchuria (Manchukuo): Courtesy Wikimedia Commons

The seminar is followed by light refreshments. 

Contact the ANU Japan Institiute Seminar Series Convener: Dr Andrew  Levidis at andrew.levidis@anu.edu.au

Sign up to the ANU Japan Institute mailing list.

The year 2021 saw the debut of a few new Japanese boy bands, even in the midst of the COVID-19 crisis. One of these bands was BE:FIRST, a dance and vocal unit of seven young men who were produced by rap artist SKY-HI. This presentation examines the ways in which discourses surrounding BE:FIRST and SKY-HI call into question the assumptions about masculinity and heteronormativity previously attached to the popular boy bands in Japan.

Speaker

Dr Katsuhiko Suganuma is lecturer in the School of Humanities at the University of Tasmania. He has written on the intersection of queer theory and Japanese gender/sexuality.

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