In the Shadow of the Rising Sun: Shanghai under the Japanese Occupation (review)

In the words of the editors, this volume is "not only a first study of the Sino-Japanese War in a local context; it is also a ground-level perspective of an international city of commerce and culture caught in the midst of a national war" (p. xi). It includes some of the papers given at a 1997 conference in Lyons. The book is divided into three parts, which the editors have not titled, although generally part 1 deals with the economy and the movement of people and goods, part 2 analyzes political developments, and part 3 surveys cultural themes. As in any collection of essays, each has its own style and strengths. The range of essays here go from Paul Pickowicz' analysis of one particular film to Alain Roux's fact-filled study of labor, from Christian Henriot's painstaking detail and discussion of data deficiencies to Frederic Wakeman, Jr.'s eclectic and anecdotal presentation on smuggling, from Nicole Huang's suggestive study on print culture to Robert Bickers' rich analysis of the fortunes of British Shanghai.

Perhaps no social and political situation sets up bounded entities more than war. War and peace, collaboration and resistance, occupied and non-occupied, city and country—the line between these pairs seems intuitively strong, producing what seems discrete realities. What emerges in these analyses of Shanghai is a picture of a world in flux, a world of "grey areas," to use Pickowicz' term in his essay, "Women in Wartime Shanghai: A Postwar Perspective" (p. 359). I think the use of "shadow" in the title excellently suggests that this is not a world of sunlight and darkness, of white and black certainties, moralities, commitments, and actions.

In their introduction, the editors assert, "There were, in short, multifaceted experiences of war in Shanghai across class, gender, and ethnic lines" (p. 13). We might well add "time" and "space" to that brief list. For these essays show that if one were inserted into Shanghai during the Japanese occupation, his or her experiences would also be based on the context of time and space. The natural temporal division is 1941, when the China War became the Pacific War. In his essay, Christian Henriot points out that while the years 1938 to 1940 brought business and industry huge profits, in 1941 the economic policies of Wang Jingwei inaugurated a steep decline. In her study of the relationship between Shanghai and the Central China base area, Allison Rottman notes that after 1941 strict secrecy became a necessity in urban-rural relations. For the International Settlement, described by Robert Bickers, 1941 brought Japanese occupation.

But there were also other timing realities. If one had been a radio broadcaster in, say, October 1937, during what Carlton Benson calls the "patriotic interlude," one's experiences would be very different in October 1938. Similarly, if one had been a newspaper editor on, say, December 1, 1937, one's reality would be very different two weeks later, when, as Susan Glosser notes, censorship was imposed. These points may be obvious, but it is important to assert that in "Shanghai under the Japanese occupation" timing determined the wartime experiences.

Similarly, the spatial context often became decisive, again an obvious contingency. But, as with timing, it points to the complexity of the wartime realities. Both Henriot and Parks Coble note how variable was the destruction of industry, depending on where factories and mills were located. Rottman and Frederic Wakeman, Jr., both point out how spatial boundaries between city and countryside in terms of trade and the movement of people and things became negligible. Wakeman quotes from my essay on trade and smuggling between Shanghai and Zhejiang ports to note how war shifted space:

War transformed the Shanghai system of space, making proximate areas in reality "hinterland" and distant areas "near." War destroyed the natural regional urban hierarchy, making small...