The Gods Left First: The Captivity and Repatriation of Japanese Pows in Northeast Asia, 1945-1956 - Rilegato

Barshay, Andrew E.

Rilegato

ISBN 10: 0520276159 ISBN 13: 9780520276154

Casa editrice: Univ of California Pr, 2013

Riassunto

At the time of Japan’s surrender to Allied forces on August 15, 1945, some six million Japanese were left stranded across the vast expanse of a vanquished Asian empire. Half civilian and half military, they faced the prospect of returning somehow to a Japan that lay prostrate, its cities destroyed, after years of warfare and Allied bombing campaigns. Among them were more than 600,000 soldiers of Japan’s army in Manchuria, who had surrendered to the Red Army only to be transported to Soviet labor camps, mainly in Siberia. Held for between two and four years, and some far longer, amid forced labor and reeducation campaigns, they waited for return, never knowing when or if it would come. Drawing on a wide range of memoirs, art, poetry, and contemporary records, The Gods Left First reconstructs their experience of captivity, return, and encounter with a postwar Japan that now seemed as alien as it had once been familiar. In a broader sense, this study is a meditation on the meaning of survival for Japan’s continental repatriates, showing that their memories of involvement in Japan’s imperial project were both a burden and the basis for a new way of life.

Su questo libro

L'autore:

Andrew E. Barshay is Professor of History at University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of The Social Sciences in Modern Japan: The Marxian and Modernist Traditions.

Dalla seconda/terza di copertina:

"In a gripping narrative, Andrew Barshay analyzes the geopolitical context of the Soviet internment of Japanese soldiers in Siberia, followed by a searching exploration of three wisely chosen individual cases. The result is a masterful account of the diverse and devastating experience of men seeking to make sense of loss on the desperate edge of Japan's wartime empire."—Andrew Gordon, author of Fabricating Consumers

“The Gods Left First bears witness to the little-known story of Japanese POWs in Stalin's postwar gulag. From among the thousands of scarred survivors who would eventually stagger back to Japan, Andrew Barshay singles out a handful who struggled for the remainder of their lives to wrest meaning from their Siberian internment through painting, poetry, and prose. His commitment to understand these men takes the author deep into the terrain of psychology, philosophy, and theology. A masterful, haunting account.”—Kären Wigen, Stanford University

“The fate of the many hundreds of thousands of Japanese soldiers captured by Soviet forces in the last days of World War Two is a story hardly known outside of Japan. Barshay’s sensitive rendering of the trauma experienced by the Siberian internees is told with the narrative gift of a first-rate historian. It brings to life a new dimension of the despair and pathos of ‘ordinary Japanese’ after surrender.”—Kenneth B. Pyle, Henry M. Jackson Professor of History and Asian Studies, University of Washington

Su questa edizione

• Editore: Univ of California Pr
• Data di pubblicazione: 2013
• ISBN 10: 0520276159
• ISBN 13: 9780520276154
• Rilegatura: Copertina rigida
• Numero di pagine: 239