Beyond The 'judgment Of Civilisation' By Ushimura Kei :: Buy from Oxfam on The UK High Street

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Beyond the 'Judgment of Civilisation': The Intellectual Legacy of the Japanese War Crimes Trials, 1946-1949 by Ushimura Kei. Translated by Steven J. Ericson. The Japanese edition won the Yamamoto Shichihei Prize for Nonfiction in 2001. After their country's defeat in World War II, Japanese faced the unprecedented experience of war crimes trials carried out by the victorious Allies in various parts of Asia. At the most celebrated of those trials, the International Military Tribunal for the Far East, commonly known as the Tokyo Trial, Chief Prosecutor Joseph Keenan declared that the Allied nations were waging "a determined battle of civilization." To date no one has investigated in depth the concept of "civilization? proclaimed at the trials and the reactions of those involved, Japanese and foreigners alike. Scholars have examined the Tokyo Trial from the standpoint of international law or politics, and some have criticized it as a case of "victors' justice." In this provocative book, Ushimura Kei presents a fresh critique of the Tokyo and other Japanese war crimes trials based on a close reading of the court proceedings and the writings of participants and observers. The result is a thoughtful and challenging exploration of the "judgment of civilization" and its intellectual legacy for postwar Japan. In Part I Ushimura boldly and convincingly refutes the famous argument by political scientist Maruyama Masao that the thought and behavior of Tojo Hideki and the other " Class A" defendants at Tokyo differed sharply from those of their Nazi counterparts at Nurnberg. In Part II he offers vignettes of critics and dissenters at the Tokyo Trial, ranging from the writer Takeyama Michio and defendant Togo Shigenori to judges Bernard Roling and Radhabinod Pal and defense attorney Ben Bruce Blakeney. Similarly, in Part III he portrays two generals convicted of conventional war crimes in Southeast Asia, Kawamura Saburo and Imamura Hitoshi, who wrote incisively about their encounters with Western culture. And he concludes with a discussion of the role the Pacific War and its aftermath played in the emergence of Japanese writings that grappled with the notion of "civilization. Beyond the "Judgment of Civilization" not only breaks new ground in looking at the Japanese war crimes trials from the viewpoint of intellectual as opposed to legal or political history; it also stands out for its interdisciplinary approach, employing with equal facility the methods and concerns of literature and history and quoting liberally from the writings of literary giants Mori Ogai and Natsume Soseki as well as intellectuals and statesmen like Fukuzawa Yukichi and Mutsu Munemitsu. The book treats a variety of sources-court records, memoirs, diaries, novels, and plays as texts and draws on them to project, through the lens of the war crimes trials, a vivid picture of the "battle of civilization" in the immediate postwar years, a depiction far more profound than the one Prosecutor Keenan put forward Ushimura's achievement will be of interest not only to students of Japanese intellectual and cultural history but to all who are concerned with the promise and peril of intercultural encounters. There are some minor stains on the fore edge and top edge, as well as the jacket of the book, but the pages are very clean and without creases.
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Beyond The 'judgment Of Civilisation' By Ushimura Kei

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