This article assesses the planning, management and repatriation of Japanese civilians in Shanghai between 1945 and 1948. It examines four interwoven dimensions of this history. The first is the removal of Japanese expatriates as the centerpiece of the Kuomintang and Allied Powers' project to end Japanese colonialism once and for all. The second is how the Japanese community continued to exert a degree of autonomy and agency under the extremely unfavorable postwar circumstances. The third is the nature of postwar attempts to match each person with a definitive ethnic-national category. The fourth is how postwar history was experienced at the individual level among Japanese of different social strata and experiences.

This essay provides insights into the circumstances and potential societal impact of more than 10 million evacuees who fled Japan's firebombed cities during World War II. Informed by interviews conducted by the United States Strategic Bombing Survey with Japanese citizens immediately after surrender, this analysis establishes a new vantage point from which to understand the complex social circumstances of Japan in the final months of the war.

Tsuyoshi Hasegawa, a US citizen who was born in Japan, has taught in both countries. Applying his specialized knowledge of Russian history to an analysis of the US decision to drop atomic bombs on Japan, he challenges the prevailing American view that the US decision to drop the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki was justified. The prevailing view is based on two premises: first, the use of the atomic bombs was the only option available to the US government to avoid launching a costly invasion of the Japanese homeland; and second, the atomic bombings had an immediate and direct impact on Japan's decision to surrender. Dr. Hasegawa rebuts both assumptions. He also assesses a third – and often hidden – justification for dropping the bombs, namely, the American desire for revenge. He argues that, even before the atomic bombings, the United States had already crossed the moral high ground that it had held. He views the US use of atomic bombs as a war crime. But he asserts that this action must be understood in the context of Japan's responsibility for starting the war of aggression and committing atrocities in the Asia–Pacific War.

Onodera Makoto (1897–1987) served as the Japanese military attaché in Stockholm 1941–45. His accomplishments during WWII made him instantly famous when they became known to the public in 1985 with a documentary about him on NHK based on a memoir by his wife, Yuriko. One of his famous deeds took place in mid-February 1945 when he allegedly sent a telegram to the Japanese General Staff shortly after the Yalta Conference in February 1945 warning that Stalin during the conference had promised that the USSR would attack Japan three months after the German surrender. After the German capitulation on 7 May, the Soviet Union joined the war against Japan on 9 August, precisely as Onodera had predicted. The problem is that no one has been able to trace this telegram. However, wartime documents, most of them traced in Swedish archives, show that the famous story of ‘the lost Yalta telegram’ is invented.

In 1969, a group of Japanese veterans returned to New Guinea to find the remains of their comrades and conduct funeral rites, one of many such postwar missions to former battlefields. The group documented its search in photographs and published a book of these photographs in 1970. This article shows how the visual cues of the photographs functioned to blur the temporal distance from war and encouraged an emotional response in the viewers by contrasting the recognizable, shattered remains of the dead with the peaceful and ostensibly timeless environment in which they were now found. The photographs also reveal unequal power relations between Japanese veteran visitors and their New Guinean hosts, and the enduring nature of the veterans' colonial viewpoints. This article argues that the aim of the veterans in presenting these photographs to the greater public was to contribute an emotionally engaging argument against forgetting the sacrifice of veterans in the war, underlining the powerful mechanisms that allowed conservative alliances of veterans, bereaved families and politicians to bypass debates about war guilt by appealing instead to emotions connected to grief and mourning.

This paper explores a previously unexamined context to the firebombing of Japan. Analysis of the decisions leading up to construction and military testing conducted in 1943 at the Japanese Village at Dugway Proving Ground in Utah allows important insights into the evolution of US bombing strategy. The shift in US strategy from precision to carpet bombing, the testing and development of incendiary weaponry, and the institutionalization and rationalization of pursuing civilian targets throughout Japan are considered alongside this untold history. Additionally, a broader appreciation of World War II timelines is suggested.

In these notes, we share our experiences of researching and co-authoring a recent article on the comparative treatment of Japanese residents and internees by the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China in the first decade following World War II. This collaboration started from our surprising realization that despite their shared ideology and friendly relations, Moscow and Beijing adopted different approaches to dealing with Japanese citizens under their control. Here we recount the decade-long path our collaborative research took as we consulted multilingual government archives, survivor interviews, and memoirs to reconstruct the early years of Sino–Soviet cooperation and to argue for a more comprehensive, empirical approach to the evolution of early Cold War international relations in East Asia. The article, ‘“Japan Still Has Cadres Remaining”: Japanese in the USSR and Mainland China, 1945–1956‘, was published by the Journal of Cold War Studies in its Summer 2022 issue.

This article provides a critical analysis of the representations of collective memory of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of the Asia-Pacific theatre of World War II. The discussion of the “subject debate” over the inscription of the Cenotaph for the A-bomb Victims, politics over the construction of the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park and the preservation of the A-bomb Dome transpired the memory mechanisms at work with regard to the US responsibility for the A-bomb, the Japanese aggressive war leading up to the A-bomb, Japan's colonial rule of Korea, and denationalization and universalization of the A-bomb experience in Japan as a result. The article analyzes the chronology of the “only A-bombed nation” notion in the post-WWII Japanese “peace” discourses and concludes that it was a process to reconstruct Japanese national victimhood as a reaction to the “discovery” of the Korean A-bomb victims and the DPRK nuclear program. The article overall challenges the notion of “peace” and “pacifism” in post-WWII Japan that revolve around the experience of the atomic bombing.

Tsuyoshi Hasegawa, a US citizen who was born in Japan, has taught in both countries. Applying his specialized knowledge of Russian history to an analysis of the US decision to drop atomic bombs on Japan, he challenges the prevailing American view that the US decision to drop the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki was justified. The prevailing view is based on two premises: first, the use of the atomic bombs was the only option available to the US government to avoid launching a costly invasion of the Japanese homeland; and second, the atomic bombings had an immediate and direct impact on Japan's decision to surrender. Dr. Hasegawa rebuts both assumptions. He also assesses a third – and often hidden – justification for dropping the bombs, namely, the American desire for revenge. He argues that, even before the atomic bombings, the United States had already crossed the moral high ground that it had held. He views the US use of atomic bombs as a war crime. But he asserts that this action must be understood in the context of Japan's responsibility for starting the war of aggression and committing atrocities in the Asia–Pacific War.

Seiji Shirane's Imperial Gateway: Colonial Taiwan and Japan's Expansion in South China and Southeast Asia, 1895–1945 (forthcoming with Cornell University Press in December 2022) explores the political, social, and economic significance of colonial Taiwan in the southern expansion of Japan's empire from 1895 to the end of World War II. Here's the unabridged introduction to the volume.

The impact of microbiologically influenced corrosion on underwater archaeological sites has spurred recent advancements in research examining the link between microorganisms and historic preservation. Although the microbiomes of steel shipwreck sites have been the subject of DNA sequencing studies and other interdisciplinary investigations, aluminum submerged aircraft wrecks, a prominent symbol of World War II, have yet to be the focus of similar research. This article represents the initial attempt to fill this void by describing a biofilm collection method used to obtain samples for DNA sequencing from World War II aircraft sites off Hawaii. Rather than relying on proxies for microbial growth on wrecks or on destructive sampling, the focus is on a methodology that is productive but minimally intrusive. The protocols resulted in the successful collection of in situ biofilm samples from four submerged aircraft wrecks. The methodology was found to be affordable, time efficient, and reproducible, thus feasible for archaeological site management. The development of viable in situ collection methods for biofilm should aid efforts to empirically assess the relevancy of microbiologically influenced corrosion to submerged aircraft while enabling longitudinal studies of microorganisms that potentially affect site preservation.

The 1943 Tour of Eight West African editors to London formed a major event in World War II United Kingdom–West Africa relations. The tour is often understood in terms of the symbolic importance of Azikiwe's landmark Memorandum on the Atlantic Charter. This article argues that we should reappraise our understandings of the tour and pay closer attention to African actors and networks beyond the Colonial Office. We must understand Britain as a periphery to a West African social, cultural, and political centre. The tour reveals how Britain was mediated in West African terms. Existing historiography focused on Azikiwe's Memorandum or decision-making within Whitehall has ignored both the importance of the tour in West Africa and the diversity of Africans in Britain involved in the tour. The present article focuses on African responses to the tour and, drawing on the historiography of print culture and wartime African mobilities, prioritises African-authored sources. Cumulatively, it situates the tour within an evolving historiography of global mobilities in WWII Nigeria. Rather than simply seeking to unite the metropole and colony in a single field, the article suggests that we must consider more deeply the ways that Africans provincialized the metropole, while centring African colonies.