Asia History Events February 2023

KENNAN: A LIFE BETWEEN WORLDS. 2/6, 4:00-5:30pm (EST), ZOOM. Sponsor: Washington History Seminar, Wilson Center. Speaker: author, Frank Costigliola, University of Connecticut; Beverly Gage, Yale University; Barbara Keys, Durham University. 

 PURCHASE BOOK: https://amzn.to/3x0u18J 

PERFORMATIVE RECOLLECTION AND PARALLAX MEMORY: PERPETRATOR AND VICTIM WAR MEMORY IN CONTEMPORARY JAPANESE VIDEO ART DESCRIPTION. 2/8, 5:00-7:00pm (GMT), HYBRID. Sponsor: SOAS Japan Research Centre. Speaker: Ayelet Zohar, Tel Aviv University. 

PRISONERS OF THE ASIA-PACIFIC WAR: HISTORY, MEMORY, AND FORGETTING. 2/7, JAPAN 4:00-7:30pm (JST), 2/8, 9:00am-5:00pm (JST); US EAST COAST 2/7, 2:00-5:30am (EST), 2/7 7:00-10:30pm (EST).  ZOOM. Sponsor: Kyoto University and JSPS (Japan Society for the Promotion of Science). This symposium brings together scholars researching the histories, memorialization and forgetting of prisoners and prison camps of the Asia Pacific War. Speakers include: Robert Cribb, Australian National University; Sarah Kovner, Columbia University; Anoma Pieris, Melbourne University; Taeko Sasamoto, POW Research Network, Japan. Organizer: Daniel Milne, Kyoto University.  [THIS CONFERENCE WILL NOT BE RECORDED]

THE 30 ANNIVERSARY OF WASHINGTON COALITION FOR COMFORT WOMEN ISSUES: CELEBRATING THE LEGACY OF COMFORT WOMEN. 2/7, 11:00am–1:00pm (EST). IN PERSON ONLY, 2168 Rayburn House Office Building (The Gold the Room). Speakers: Margaret Stetz, Professor of Humanities at the University of Delaware; Yangmo Ku, Associate Director of the

Peace and War Center at Norwich University; Bonnie Oh, Georgetown University Emeritus; Dennis Halpin, former staff member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee. Screening of a clip from the documentary: Cry Out: The 30 Years of Comfort Women Redress Movement, Written and Directed by Professor Jungsil Lee, George Washington University. 

THE GHOST AT THE FEAST: AMERICA AND THE COLLAPSE OF THE WORLD ORDER, 1900-1941. 2/8, Noon (EST), ONLINE. Sponsor: Alexander Hamilton Society. Speaker: Author Robert Kagan, Stephen & Barbara Friedman Senior Fellow in the Foreign Policy program at Brookings Institution. 
PURCHASE BOOK: https://amzn.to/3WN9jUB

DISCUSSION WITH FAMILIES OF FORMER US POWS HELD BY IMPERIAL JAPAN. 

2/14, 5:00-6:00pm (JST), 3:00-4:00am (EST), 12:00-1:00am (PST). IN PERSON ONLY. Sponsor: Temple University Japan. SPEAKERS AND POW PROFILES. [THIS CONFERENCE MIGHT NOT BE RECORDED]

MILITARY HISTORY FOR THE MODERN STRATEGIST: AMERICA’S MAJOR WARS SINCE 1861. 2/15, 6:30-7:30pm (EST), IN-PERSON AND ONLINE. Sponsor: New-York Historical Society. Speakers: Author Michael E. O’Hanlon, Phil Knight Chair in Defense and Strategy at Brookings; Moderator: General David H. Petraeus (U.S. Army, Ret.), Commander of coalition forces during the Surges in both Iraq and Afghanistan and Former Director of the CIA. 
PURCHASE BOOK: https://amzn.to/3XyOjRX

THE GENERAL VS. THE PRESIDENT: MACARTHUR AND TRUMAN AT THE BRINK OF NUCLEAR WAR. 2/16, Noon (EST), LIVE WEBCAST. Sponsor: Korea Society. Speaker: author, Dr. Henry W. Brands, Professor and Jack S. Blanton Sr. Chair in History at the University of Texas at Austin. 
PURCHASE BOOK: https://amzn.to/3HGDSXr

IMPERIAL GATEWAY: COLONIAL TAIWAN AND JAPAN’S EXPANSION IN SOUTH CHINA AND SOUTHEAST ASIA, 1895-1945. 2/24, 4:30PM (EST), IN PERSON ONLY. Sponsor: Sigur Center, GW. Speaker: author, Seiji Shirane, Assistant Professor of Japanese History, City College of New York. 
PURCHASE BOOK: https://amzn.to/400aHFW

Blame George Kennan for Abe's Bad History

George Kennan

By James Gibney Editorial writer at BloombergView and APP member

First published on Bloomberg View April 29, 2015

Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s hawkish policies, historical revisionism, and heavy-handed efforts to manipulate domestic and foreign media have infuriated critics in Japan and its neighborhood. They might want to reserve some of that anger for U.S. super-diplomat George F. Kennan.

During the early years of the U.S. postwar occupation, an ungainly mix of idealistic New Deal reformers and right-wing satraps of General Douglas MacArthur, Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers, launched a radical attempt to liberalize Japan's economy and society -- prosecuting war criminals, busting up industrial combines, imposing land reforms and nurturing a labor movement, among other changes. A new constitution largely drafted by U.S. lawyers and civil servants dramatically expanded citizen rights, giving Japanese women what the historian John Dower called “one of the strongest equal-rights provisions in modern constitutional law.” (Dower’s Pulitzer-winning “Embracing Defeat” covers the period brilliantly.) The constitution also formally committed Japan to pacifism under Article 9, in hopes of turning the country into what MacArthur, with typical bombast, called the “Switzerland of the Pacific.”

Kennan, however, saw MacArthur’s reforms as a recipe for strategic disaster. With China torn by civil war, Europe flattened and divided, and the Cold War taking hold, Kennan believed Japan needed to be built into “the cornerstone of a Pacific Security system.” Beginning in 1947-48, he and his allies in Washington engineered a 180-degree turn in U.S. policy. War crimes trials came to an abrupt end, public employees lost the right to strike and the U.S. began to nurture Japan’s businesses and export industries. Not only were conservative pre-war politicians and bureaucrats rehabilitated, but more than 20,000 leftist union members and other workers were fired in what came to be known as the “Red purges.”

One of the bigger beneficiaries of Kennan’s “reverse course” was Abe’s grandfather Nobusuke Kishi, who had co-signed the declaration of war against the U.S. in 1941 and overseen the conscription of hundreds of thousands of Korean and Chinese laborers as head of the Munitions Ministry. Dower called Kishi “brilliant and unscrupulous”; another historian of the U.S. occupation, Michael Schaller, dubbed him “America’s Favorite War Criminal.” In 1948, after spending three years in Tokyo’s Sugamo Prison while being investigated as a Class A war criminal, Kishi was released along with 18 others for lack of evidence.

U.S. money helped Kishi become prime minister in 1957. According to Schaller, President Dwight Eisenhower authorized the CIA to provide secret campaign funds to Kishi and selected members of his relatively new Liberal Democratic Party. In return, Kishi shepherded a revision to the mutual security treaty between the U.S. and Japan that scrapped some elements unpopular with Japanese but secured the U.S. right to retain its bases in Japan and, in a secret protocol, the right to move nuclear weapons "through" Japan. (Protests over the treaty would go on to force Kishi’s resignation.)