Aaron William Moore

China in World War II, 1937–1945: Experience, Memory, and Legacy *

Chinas long war against Japan from 1937 to 1945 has remained in the shadows of historiography until recently, both in China and abroad. In recent years, the opening of archives and a widening of the opportunity to discuss the more controversial aspects of the wartime period in China itself have restored World War II in China (‘the War of Resistance to Japan’) to a much more central place in historical interpretation. Among the areas that this issue covers are the new socio-political history of the war that seeks to restore rationality to the policies of the Guomindang (Nationalist) party, as well as a new understanding in post-war China of the meaning of the war against Japan in shaping Cold War and post-Cold War politics in China. In doing so, it seeks to make more explicit the link between themes that shaped the experience of World War II in China to the wars legacy in later politics and the uses of memory of the conflict in contemporary Chinese society.

The Problem of Changing Language Communities: Veterans and Memory Writing in China, Taiwan, and Japan

This paper examines the role that veterans played in the construction of historical memory narratives in mainland China, Taiwan, and Japan. I argue that veterans, who had long established a ?language community? with a particular way to speak about the war, found it difficult to communicate with post-war audiences that did not share that experience. The paper analyses six categories of ?memory writing? that veterans used to engage with memory debates: post-war diaries, ?testimonial literature?, articles and literary works, surveys and oral histories, memoirs, and paratext. This study thus proposes that veterans do not avoid discussion of war, but can only be ?heard? by members of their language community, or by a post-war society that is prepared to ?listen? to their message with little mediation. This is a direct consequence of their experience of the war, and how they crafted their language community at that time.

The Chimera of Privacy: Reading Self-Discipline in Japanese Diaries from the Second World War (1937–1945)

This article has two main goals for its examination of wartime diaries: (1) to argue against the idea that a diary’s reliability is directly related to the degree of privacy that its author enjoyed, and (2) to suggest an alternate use for these texts by scholars—namely, the construction of the author’s concept of self through acts of “self-discipline.” The article briefly outlines military diary writing and reportage in modern Japan, showing how “fact” and “truth” came to be understood in diaries. Through an examination of published and manuscript diaries, the article addresses theoretical premises such as “intended audience, ”“ private language,” and the nature of “privacy” itself. Finally, the article provides an alternative reading of diaries: The texts represent the author’s attempt to construct a compelling and coherent subject position. Because diarists are involved in the construction of their identities, the article suggests that scholars use diaries to move beyond examinations of subjectivity solely reliant on disciplinary institutions.

Growing Up in Nationalist China Self-Representation in the Personal Documents of Children and Youth, 1927–1949

The study of childhood and youth in modern China features few investigations that make engagement with personal documents by young people their focus. In order to understand how images of childhood and youth constructed by adults affected juvenile subjectivity, it is necessary to begin exploring how young people in China expressed themselves. This article first highlights the importance of youth in the Republican culture of mass education, when new opportunities for juvenile self-expression emerged. The success of the Northern Expedition, led by the Chinese Nationalist Party (Guomindang [GMD]), accelerated the spread of instructions for and publication of young people’s personal accounts. Finally, the article examines young people’s diaries, letters, and autobiographies (zizhuan) during the Nationalist period to argue for a greater emphasis on the contribution of children and adolescents to the conceptualization of youth, and the unique image of “modern China” that their personal documents reveal.

Historical Interrogations of Japanese Children amid Disaster and War, 1920–1945

ABSTRACT Historical research on modern Japan has often given insufficient attention to the lives and experiences of children and young people. However, this situation is beginning to change, as historians start to exploit the rich documentary resources, including children’s diaries and letters, that have been collected by institutions across Japan. Japanese children’s responses to disaster and war are especially well documented, and the articles in this special issue begin to explore the potential of these resources. They illuminate different ideals of childhood in Japan during the years between 1920 and 1945, and show how tensions and conflicts between these ideals played out under the stresses of natural disaster and man-made catastrophe. In analysing documents written by children, one crucial methodological and theoretical question is how to assess the degree of agency that such documents show. Adult influences on children’s writing cannot be ignored, and in modern Japan, the education system was arguably the most important channel for such influences. However, we should remember that children also influence one another, and also that the writing of children is, as is of course the case with adults, powerfully shaped by contemporary cultural and social contexts.

Kunming Dreaming:: Hope, Change, and War in the Autobiographies of Youth in China’s Southwest

During World War II, Kunming was bombed, inundated with desperate citizens from other cities, encircled by Japanese forces, but never occupied. While it was part of ‘free China’, the city was comparatively free from KMT and CCP control, and filled with student activists, intellectuals, and Youth Army soldiers who fled the various provinces of occupied China. The student body of the Wuhua Academy, based in Kunming, therefore included local rural youth, urban refugees, and migrants of various classes and ethnic backgrounds, as well as female applicants aspiring to a university education. In dozens of autobiographies written in the late 1940s, first-year Wuhua students frankly discussed their tribulations in wartime China and its immediate postwar period. These accounts show a sharp decline in the power of early modern urban institutions such as native-place associations, which helps us to understand the transformative nature of the Republican Era and the war itself. Student accounts reveal the ebb and flow of wartime China’s urban/rural divide, Republican socioeconomic class mobility, and the gradual suffusion of national consciousness among the post-1911 generations.

From Individual Child to War Youth: The Construction of Collective Experience among Evacuated Japanese Children during World War II

ABSTRACT Studies of childhood in Japan frequently neglect to engage with the texts and images that young people produced, focusing instead on the adult imagination of youth. By looking solely at adults’ conceptions, we miss the importance of other children in forming their peers’ subjectivity. By analyzing the diaries, letters, postcards, yosegaki, and artwork of evacuated children during World War II, this article shows how adults framed the process of language acquisition, but also that children contributed to the creation of a shared language for describing their experiences. When children combined language learning with group experience, which was inscribed through collective writing practices, evacuees came to embrace a strong group identity. Grasping the relationship between collective experience, life-writing, and children’s culture is crucial to understanding how children perceived their world. Apart from these methodological considerations, dismissing the documents left behind by evacuees as mere recapitulations of adult discourse does the history of childhood a great disservice.