Postwar Japan was ravaged by poverty and desolation as a result of various factors. It lost much of its colonial holdings overseas, which led to a sudden and massive disruption of industry (in particular agriculture, as noted by John W. Dower), along with many other reasons, the most obvious being…

Hello, my name is InSoo Kim. I’m a second-year at Warren studying history, and I love to delve into the imperial relations of East Asia, which is why I’m very excited to be taking this class. What resonates with you about how Solnit and/or Cooke have written about disaster, and…

Content warning — this post contains a photo of several dead bodies. The 1923 Kanto Earthquake and the subsequent massacre of Koreans in the Kanto region serves as a sort of mini-genocide, wherein the residents of Kanto were completely ready to kill any Korean on sight. This microcosm of imperialism…

Are you convinced by Dower’s argument in War Without Mercy that the Japanese and Allied forces expressed a great deal of racial animosity during the war, and that this drove its particularly high civilian casualty numbers? Race is a huge factor in history, and it’s often overlooked in the context…

What does Yoshida’s discussion of the way that the media’s reporting on the Nanjing Massacre downplayed its atrocities tell us about the role that non-state and non-military actors played in Japan’s total war? Through not only the media, wherein Japan’s incursions into China were reframed as fights for justice, but…

I am condensing all of the prompts I’ve missed thus far into three Medium posts; I’ve been incredibly busy lately and haven’t had the time to write them out, I apologize to you if you’re one of my classmates :(. Why do you think Sonia Ryang selected the concept of…

Read “The Way of Subjects” alongside “Goodbye Asia” from week 3. What has remained consistent in the justifications that each piece makes for imperialism, and what has transformed over the course of 55 years? What do you think accounts for the main changes? Japanese imperialism has an incredibly long history…

Put yourself in the shoes of an Ainu person who lived through the extension of the boundaries of the old Tokugawa regime to include your ancestral homelands. How might your life change on an everyday level? …

My relationship with Japan is pretty complex. Growing up in Korea, my country has had many bouts even recently with Japan, especially as a result of our history — the imperial history of Japan involved rape, murder, and other atrocities on the Korean peninsula (and in China, several islands and…