Japans Occupation of Java in the Second World War: A Transnational History (SOAS Studies in Modern and Contemporary Japan) - Hardcover

Ethan Mark

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1350022209 ISBN 13: 9781350022201

Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018

Synopsis

Japans Occupation of Java in the Second World War draws upon written and oral Japanese, Indonesian, Dutch and English-language sources from both wartime and the postwar period to narrate the Japanese occupation of Java as a transnational intersection between two complex Asian societies. It places this narrative in a larger wartime context of domestic, regional, and global crisis that was not only military, but also social, cultural, and economic: a crisis of imperial and liberal capitalist modernity itself. Japans occupation of Java is here revealed in a radically new and nuanced light, as an ambiguous encounter revolutionary in the degree of mutual interests both practical and psychological that drew the two sides together, fascinating and tragic in its evolution, and profound in the legacies left behind. Mark structures his study around the diverse group of propagandists, interpreters, advisors, teachers and students mostly members of the nation-building subelites or middle classes who were most captivated by the wartime vision of a Greater Asia. The book is thus not only the first transnational study of Japans wartime occupation of Java, but the first study to focus on the Second World War experience in truly transnational terms on the ground anywhere in Asia. The volume offers both nuance and sweep in bringing together two profoundly distinct national histories, relating the hitherto unknown story of a diverse, transnational cast of characters from before the occupation through to its end. Breaking new ground interpretatively, thematically and narratively, Marks monumental study is of vital significance for students and scholars of modern Asian and global history.

About this title

About the Author

Ethan Mark is Lecturer in Modern Japanese and Asian History in the Japanese and Asian Studies programs at Leiden University, The Netherlands.

Edition details

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Publication date: 2018
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1350022209
• ISBN 13: 9781350022201
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 368