Opinion and Comment
Rent from DeepDyve- Opinion and Comment
- Reply to Review by Simon Partner
In his review of my book Daily Life in Wartime Japan, 1940–1945 (JJS, Vol. 43, No. 1 [2017]), Simon Partner made three serious mistakes. The first concerns my citation of other works. Partner writes:
There is by now a considerable body of work in English (and much more in Japanese) on civilian Japanese experiences of World War II. Yamashita has drawn liberally on some of the classic works in English (e.g., Thomas Havens’s Valley of Darkness and John Dower’s essay “Sensational Rumors, Seditious Graffiti, and the Nightmares of the Thought Police”), though without actively engaging (or even mentioning) these influential works in his text.
(p. 190; emphasis added)
Obviously, I have the highest regard for the work of both Tom Havens and John Dower and recognize that my project would have been much more difficult without their pioneering work. For the record, I cite Havens’s Valley of Darkness five times in my work and Dower’s “Sensational Rumors, Seditious Graffiti, and the Nightmares of the Thought Police” three times. My citing Havens’s Valley of Darkness five times speaks for itself. What may have led Partner to conclude that I had not even mentioned Dower’s groundbreaking essay was that I did not refer to it by title but instead cited the volume in which it appeared, Japan in War and Peace: Selected Essays (New Press, 1993).
Partner also mistakenly argues that I did not “actively engage” Havens’s and Dower’s work. I do engage their work but don’t trumpet that fact because it is so obvious. My approach is, by design, very different from theirs: They look at wartime Japan from the top down, whereas I start at the bottom, with the diaries of ordinary Japanese. My approach also implicates an important methodological issue, one revealed in the way that Partner and I define “daily life.” He defines “daily life” as “the everyday experiences of a broad cross-section of the population” (p. 189). Although I don’t disagree with that definition, “daily life” is my translation of the German word alltags, “every day.” My use of “daily life” was a signal to readers that I am using the approach developed by German historians studying the [End Page 251] Nazi phenomenon who wrote what they called Alltagsgeschichte, literally, a “history of everyday life.” Partner also wondered whether the “category [of ordinary people] actually exists.” In fact, “ordinary people,” my translation of the German term kleine Leute, is the starting point for those of us attempting to write the history of everyday life in wartime Japan.
Partner suggested as well that I used what he called the “ ‘brainwashed victims’ approach,” when, in fact, I used the Alltagsgeschichte approach precisely because it allowed me to move beyond that approach and to assess the war responsibility of ordinary Japanese. My research revealed that although most Japanese accepted the wartime order and did as they were told, many defied it out of necessity, as when they shopped on the black market, went to the countryside to buy directly from farmers, or stole scarce commodities or food.
Samuel Hideo Yamashita is the Henry E. Sheffield Professor of History at Pomona College. He is author of Daily Life in Wartime Japan, 1940–1945 (Kansas, 2015) and Leaves from an Autumn of Emergencies: Selections from the Wartime Diaries of Ordinary Japanese (Hawai‘i, 2005). His current research is on Japanese food and Pacific Rim fusion cuisine.
- Reply to Samuel Hideo Yamashita
I apologize sincerely if Professor Yamashita interpreted my review as questioning his academic integrity. His sources are indeed clearly labeled in the endnotes, and I never intended to suggest otherwise. I believe I am to blame for my ambiguous use of the word “text.” I had intended by this to refer to the main text of the book—in other words, to the analysis and discussion contained in the book (which neither mentions nor discusses the works by Havens and Dower), as opposed to the endnote references. Perhaps, as Professor...
