H199 Prompt for Final Essay

The final paper is not a "Research Paper" per se. You should not necessarily at this stage try and go explore a brand new topic. It will be a longer paper (8-10 pp) than the shorter response papers, but I am not looking for a paper with a lot of outside sources that are not already covered on the syllabus or in the readings we have already done.

So, you want to work smart and look into issues like war memories and reconciliation, women's liberation and feminism in the 1970s, specifically, the stories of women found in Changing Lives, also the comfort women issue, the Asian Women's Fund, the Kono Statement (Doc. 7 Kiningston), PM Abe's equivocating about it, the recent Settlement Agreement signed with South Korea that is already on shaky ground.

Another viable topic could be some aspect of the postwar economic miracle, the demographic time bomb, the bursting of the economic bubble, the issue of US bases in Okinawa, the controversy over the fate of Okinawan civilians during the Battle of Okinawa, etc.

The Documents in the Kingston book may also offer you some fruitful ideas. In the field of history, we always value primary materials, maybe voices from people who lived through and participated in events and left some account of their experiences.

And btw, all semester I have been correcting punctuation errors in your papers that arise with the use of quotation marks. Of course, a "Block Quote" for a few sentences or more is INDENTED and this by itself signals that it is a direct quote, so you do not need to employ Quotation marks at all! But when you do,

--Periods and Commas go INSIDE of quotation marks, like "this," or "that."

--Colons and Semi-colons go OUTSIDE of the quotation marks like "this"; or "that":

So, please try to remember that when preparing your final papers.

 

Other topics that seem to lend themselves well to this Assignment:

--Changing Lives, Ch. 1, how the war's end might have affected men and women differently, looking at the stories of Okabe Itsuko, Shinya Eiko, and Yoshitake Teruko. You could maybe even go into some of Yoshitake's story in Ch. 2, education, employment, and her sense of what the postwar world should be like. Both Kingston and Allinson have chapters on the U.S. Occupation so you could "frame" your discussion drawing on their perspective. Yoshitake has things to say in her Ch. 2 about learning how to organize and become politically engaged, including where she talks about the protest against the Sunagawa Base, against the Uchinada firing range, and also about the struggle of the Mother's Group "Shibokusa," against the North Fuji Practice Range (pp. 71-76). This would make it possible for you to bring things together, the context being about how women situate themselves historically in these citizen-group movements and this roots them in historical experience. Lots of materials and ideas to work with.

--You could build on your 6th Response Paper and take one of the Changing Lives chapters (3, 4) on either Yoshitake or Kishino, and triangulate it with the Muto article on "The Birth of the Women's Movement in the 1970s," and the Ripples/30 Years of Sisterhood DVDs and focus on the Women's Lib Movement. This is a natural; lots of voices and experiences for you to draw upon. A key here would be adding in the PDF by Shigematsu on WISE which probes the role of Tanaka Mitsu in the movement and draw on things Tanaka said in the DVDs (I have some of them gathered on one of my pages). And for Ms. Tanaka, there are also several pages in which she is quoted in the Muto PDF (pp. 162-67) that you could use effectively in your paper. See also this translation of excerpts from Tanaka's manifesto, "Liberation from the Toilet." here. If you have experience studying 2nd wave feminist movements in other parts of the world, you could bring in a nice comparative perspective.

What did "women's Lib" bring to the participants that they had not had access to before? How did it help provide them a place and a language to graple with women's issues and define, for themselves, a "feminine consciousness"?

----If you want to write (more) on feminism and the women's movement in Japan, there are also other women you could bring in from earlier periods, too, like: Takamure Itsue, Kaneko Fumiko, Oku Mumeo, Takai Toshio, Sata Ineko, Nishi Kiyoko, Fukunaga Misao, Miyamoto Yuriko--some of whom are excerpted in my earlier book, Telling Lives (2004). The advantage here is that you are looking at memoirs which are primary materials, voices speaking to us from Japan, which is always a good thing. It is important to have some authoritative voices in your papers that are either from primary materials or from secondary scholarly works that themselves draw on such primary materials.

--Yet another idea: if you are interested in the problem of Japan's demographic time bomb, you could tie in some of Kanamori's writing from Ch. 5 in Changing Lives, dovetail it with Kingston's Chs 7 and 8, and the relevant Documents he places in the back of his book, and round it out with some additional library or online materials. What challenges to aging societies pose for contemporary economies? How/Why is Japan's dilemma particularly acute? The Documents in Kingston's book seem like great jumping off places for paper ideas.

--You could also go back to the readings on the Environment--George and Walker on Minamata--and considering also what Kingston says in his chapter on "Environmental Issues," deal with Minamata and how government and corporate Japan responded to this situation. There is also the nice update in relation to Fukushima also by Timothy George.

Or, you could build off of George's point about citizen groups and Minamata and graft it on to the Sasaki Material on Ampo, along with the materials from my linked page, and come up with something about citizen's movements, postwar democracy, the response to the Bikini Atoll Bomb test, even things like the debate over subjectivity (the shutaiseiron) and how that was part of what Kurosawa was thinking about while making No Regrets.

This might bring to mind, as noted above, Yoshitake's material about learning how to organize and become politically engaged, including where she talks about the protest against the Sunagawa Base, against the Uchinada firing range, and also about the struggle of the Mother's Group "Shibokusa," against the North Fuji Practice Range (pp. 71-76). These are mentioned very briefly by Tanaka Mitsu in her "Liberation from the Toilet" pamphlet as discussed in Muto's article, p. 165 and in his footnote. See also here. The context is about how women situate themselves historically in these citizen-group movements and this roots them in historical experience. Therefore they do not need a "logic" to guide them as men do. So there could easily be an Ampo tie-in here.

--We have been watching a lot of films this semester...anybody want to continue in this mode? Two films come to mind:

1. Twenty-four Eyes (1954) recognized as top Japanese film of the year. Directed by Kinoshita Keisuke. Kind of a tear jerker about an elementary school teacher on Shodoshima, another Inland Sea setting like MacArthur's Children, from 1928 through the end of the war. Might include spoilers but see Synopsis here. There is a nice resource in a chapter (Ch. 5) of James Orr's book, The Victim as Hero that discusses this film directly within a framework of "sentimental humanism." This essay is available as a PDF on Wise H199 Orr Sentimental Humanism.pdf.

2. Fires on the Plain (1959), directed by Ichikawa Kon, based on the novel by Shohei Ooka, about the end of the war in the Philppines where Japanese soldiers were pretty much abandoned by the government and had to fend for themselves. Fairly brutal at times, as this comment suggests: "Private Tamura treks across an unfamiliar Philippine landscape, encountering an increasingly debased cross section of Imperial Army soldiers, who eventually give in to the most terrifying craving of all. Grisly yet poetic, Fires on the Plain is one of the most powerful works from one of Japanese cinema’s most versatile filmmakers." Spoiler alert, but if intertested, read more here. The library has the novel but not the DVD, it would appear. I do have a personal copy....

3. To tie things together, you could incude some discussion of Harp of Burma (which the library does have) based on the short novel by Michio Takeyama which you could read. Some notes here after you watch the films. Also James Orr's critical reflections on several films are available in a PDF on Wise. See: H199 Orr Sentimental Humanism.pdf.

 

Other topics growing out of occupation reform policies that you could look at, that are not necessarily limited to gender or feminist issues include some broad topics like:

-- educational reform, land reform, economic deconcentration, as well as topics like
--the spread of radical unionism and labor unrest, the call for the General Strike, the Reverse Course,
--the issue of war responsibility, the protection of emperor Hirohito from inquiries into his role and the opposition to his abdication,
--the framing of the postwar constitution and the issue of constitutional reform today, etc. Possibilities abound there.

The main guideline here is to keep within the course materials but perhaps put them together in ways that we did not do in class, and perhaps also bring in some outside materials. Admitedly, some of these broader topics might be better suited to the final paper.

 

Again, you certainly might select a topic such as
--Japan's postwar economic miracle and the economic situation today
--environmental issues arising from unbridled growth,
--the question of prewar and wartime history in Japanese textbooks and in museums, etc. Japanese apologies and reconciliation issues
--the Korean minority in Japan, its challenges and future
--the issue of US bases in Okinawa, and Japan's future
--the controversy over the fate of Okinawan civilians during the Battle of Okinawa
--the position of women in contemporary Japanese society
--as already indicated, the women's lib movement and its impact, the role of Tanaka Mitsu, etc.
--the question of the comfort women, the Asian Women's Fund, the Kono Statement, and other wartime atrocities like Unit 731: what should Japan do now?

--If you would like to pursue the work of a postwar Japanese writer or filmmaker, you could do this by discussing some of their principal works and what they have to say about postwar Japanese society or culture, and tie them back into some of the course materials.

--More contemporary issues like "school refusal" and "social withdrawl" (hikikomori) and "bullying" (ijime) and how they impact education in Japan as part of a glimpse into how postwar Japan has been changing.

 

Please don't hesitate to come talk with me about your ideas.