School of Historical and Philosophical Studies - Theses
Permanent URI for this collection
Search Results
1 - 2 of 2
-
ItemSarin traces: memory texts and practices in postwar Japan, 1995-2010( 2011)This thesis explores the aftermath of the 1995 Tokyo subway gassing, which killed 13 people and impacted over 6,000. In contrast to existing scholarship on this incident, the thesis is primarily concerned with how this incident has been culturally represented through the wide range of memory texts and practices produced in response to it in subsequent years. These responses include life narratives of victims, perpetrators and others associated with the sect responsible; commemorative processes; and proposals for permanent memorialisation. The thesis reformulates understandings of the gassing by focusing on victim experience and action as central to the incident’s cultural meanings. Victims have articulated their experiences through referencing historical narratives of victimisation such as the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, while also developing transnational connections with victims of other incidents of political violence, such as the terrorist attacks in the United States on 11 September 2001. These connections provide the means for victims to find common articulations of their experience, while also risking an over-simplification which elides differences between different historical and cultural contexts. Victims have also developed commemorative strategies that actively intervened into public space. These interventions allowed for re-engagement with sites of violence, and through this the construction of alternative meanings for these locations. The category of victim emerges as historically contested, moving from a narrow definition of victimisation applied to those directly impacted to a more expansive one. This expansion connects victim experience with a broader human vulnerability to violence in attempting to articulate ways through which further victimisation may be prevented. Those associated with perpetrators also struggled with their experiences of violence, creating a difficult relationship to questions of responsibility.
-
ItemMutable history: Japanese language historiographies of wartime Korean enforced labor and enforced military prostitution, 1965-2008( 2011)In this thesis I analyze Japanese-language historiography on Korean enforced labor and enforced military prostitution which took place during the Greater East Asia War. Utilizing discourse analysis, I focus on works published from 1965 to 2008, examining variant historical narratives of these same historical events. The existence of both enforced labor and enforced military prostitution has been widely known since the war itself, and both topics have been widely written about and debated by researchers, scholars, and activists across the postwar period. However, while there has been a great deal of archival research on both topics, there has yet been no significant attempt to analyze the decades of accumulated historiography on either issue. Nor has there been any serious effort to present a comparative analysis of both topics across the postwar period. This research reveals that the interpretations of similar or identical source materials has yielded vastly different or conflicting analyses in historical narratives on enforced labor and enforced military prostitution. I argue within that there are hitherto unrecognized similarities in the ways these two sets of narratives are constructed despite their polarization in the historical literature along lines of gender. By exploring the production of historiography of enforced labor and enforced military prostitution, this thesis contributes to the ongoing political and academic debates about the veracity of Japanese war crimes and explicates Japanese-language thought and debate on these topics.