{"id":5281,"date":"2005-10-08T11:47:52","date_gmt":"2005-10-08T16:47:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.froginawell.net\/japan\/?p=131"},"modified":"2014-08-30T14:13:34","modified_gmt":"2014-08-30T14:13:34","slug":"russo-japanese-war-re-visited","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/2005\/10\/russo-japanese-war-re-visited\/","title":{"rendered":"Russo-Japanese War Re-visited"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I fortuitously caught the last twenty minutes or so of a panel discussion titled &#8220;The Meaning of the Russo-Japanese War Today&#8221; on NHK Kyoiku Television (channel 3 in Tokyo).  This panel discussion inaugurated a three-day conference titled &#8220;East Asia and the World in the 20th Century and the Russo-Japanese War,&#8221; which was organized the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.cnc.chukyo-u.ac.jp\/users\/yhiyama\/jameah\/index.htm\">Japanese Association of Modern East Asian History<\/a> and held at <a href=\"http:\/\/www.senshu-u.ac.jp\/\">Senshu University<\/a> in Tokyo.  The conference schedule is posted <a href=\"http:\/\/www.cnc.chukyo-u.ac.jp\/users\/yhiyama\/jameah\/sympo\/\">here<\/a> in Japanese.<\/p>\n<p>Discussants included:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Ikei Masaru (Keio Daigaku)<\/li>\n<li>Matsumoto Ken&#8217;ichi (Reitaku Daigaku)<\/li>\n<li>Oohama Tetsuya (Hokkai Gakuen Daigaku)<\/li>\n<li>Narita Ryuichi (Nihon Joshi Daigaku)<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>The program squeezed a three-hour session into a 70-minute television slot, so I would imagine they had to leave out some of the discussion.  Plus I was able to only catch the last twenty minutes, so most likely I missed much of it.  But here are some of the points raised:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Narita noted that scholars need to be more critical of the idea that the Russo-Japanese war became a symbol of hope for anti-colonial movements around the world.  I always thought that the war was celebrated because it was the first time that a &#8220;non-Western&#8221; nation defeated a &#8220;Western&#8221; country in a modern military conflict.  Yet Narita&#8217;s injunction makes me question this very notion, and I now wonder if this widespread celebration over the Russo-Japanese War by anti-colonial movements is a myth concocted by Japanese militarists in the 1930s to legitimize Japan&#8217;s own imperialist project.  <\/li>\n<li>Matsumoto, after saying that &#8220;globalism&#8221; (which I took to mean &#8220;globalization&#8221;) is similar but perhaps more dangerous than was the idea of an &#8220;East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere,&#8221; then joked that perhaps the best translation of &#8220;globalism&#8221; was &#8220;hakko ichiu,&#8221; a wartime slogan meaning roughly &#8220;eight corners of the world under one roof.&#8221;  I thought that was clever but also a bit misleading.  <\/li>\n<li>There was a general discussion about the production of &#8220;national culture&#8221; (\u300c\u56fd\u6c11\u6587\u5316\u300d was the word used) and whether it was a discursive object produced by the nation-state.  I was not sure why this &#8220;invented tradition&#8221; issue was being debated at that point in the panel discussion, but it seemed to have to do with the general move away from interpreting the Russo-Japanese war as a &#8220;clash of civilization&#8221; and towards an interpretation that takes cognizance of the &#8220;cultural&#8221; aspects of the war.  Unfortunately I probably missed too much to figure out what these &#8220;cultural&#8221; aspects were.  <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>I wish I had caught the earlier half of the program.  In particular I was interested in hearing about how the Russo-Japanese war is related to contemporary issues, such as the Yasukuni Shrine problem.  I wonder if any readers of this blog caught the entire show, or perhaps even attended the conference.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I fortuitously caught the last twenty minutes or so of a panel discussion titled &#8220;The Meaning of the Russo-Japanese War Today&#8221; on NHK Kyoiku Television (channel 3 in Tokyo). This panel discussion inaugurated a three-day conference titled &#8220;East Asia and the World in the 20th Century and the Russo-Japanese War,&#8221; which was organized the Japanese&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":49,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[166,63,84,205],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5281","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-academia","category-japan","category-war","category-205"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p9yoH3-1nb","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5281","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/49"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5281"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5281\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5765,"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5281\/revisions\/5765"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5281"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5281"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5281"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}