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January 7, 2011

[SSJ: 6483] Thurs. Jan. 20, 2011, ICAS Event: Ken Ruoff on Wartime Japan Reconsidered

From: Eriko Kawaguchi
Date: 2011/01/07

* Feel free to circulate this invitation to friends or colleagues.

Wartime Japan Reconsidered
based on Ken J. Ruoff new book "Imperial Japan at its Zenith"

Date: Thursday, January 20, 2011
Time: 7:00p.m. (Talk will start at 7:30p.m.)
Venue: Temple University, Japan Campus, Azabu Hall 303
2-8-12, Minami azabu, Minato-ku, Tokyo (access:
www.tuj.ac.jp/maps)

Speaker: Kenneth J. Ruoff
Moderator: Kyle Cleveland
Admission: Free (Open to general public)
RSVP: icas@tuj.ac.jp
*If you RSVP you are automatically registered. If possible, we ask you to RSVP but we always welcome participants even you do not RSVP.

Outline

The Japanese often remember the war as a "dark valley"of unrelenting suffering, but was this really the case? For example, 1940 was the peak year for tourism in Imperial Japan, with tens of millions of Japanese touring the archipelago, and many hundreds of thousands touring the empire. The most popular national heritage site outside of Japan proper was Port Arthur, a battle site in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-05 rendered sacred in the aftermath of that war, and especially after the Manchurian Incident of 1931. This paper provides a window into what Japanese tourists experienced on their guided bus tour of Port Arthur circa 1940, and analyzes the carefully packaged historical narrative that these tourists consumed during their visit. It also introduces the notion of national heritage tourism as a form of self-administered citizenship training, and debunks the notion that the war was a blanket dark valley for the
Japanese.

Speaker

Kenneth J. Ruoff is Professor of History and Director of the Center for Japanese Studies at Portland State University. He is the author of Imperial Japan at its Zenith: The Wartime Celebration of the Empire's 2,600th Anniversary. He is also the author of The People's
Emperor: Democracy and the Japanese Monarchy, 1945-1995, the Japanese translation of which was awarded the Osaragi Jiro Prize, Japan's equivalent of the Pulitzer Prize, in 2004 for the best book in the social sciences published the previous year.
________________________________________
Robert Dujarric
Director
Kyle Cleveland
Associate Director
Eriko Kawaguchi
Coordinator

Institute of Contemporary Asian Studies
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