Wartime Japanese Anthropology in Asia and the Pacific (review)

In December 1999, a workshop on "Wartime Japanese Anthropology in Asia and Oceania" was held at the National Museum of Ethnology in Osaka. The present volume is an outcome of that workshop. Since the end of World War II, Japanese wartime anthropology has been a field growing in stature and credibility, beginning as an outgrowth of Japanese colonization in Asia, as well as colonization by other nations in Southeast Asia. The Japanese army's invasion of Manchuria in 1931, and soon of other parts of China, was the start of a long period of war involving many people and large areas of land in Asia and the Pacific Islands. After much serious and bloody fighting, the Japanese were driven from Asia and the Pacific by UK and US military forces.

The compilers of this volume contend that wartime Japanese anthropology is a field of its own today. In the first chapter, "Wartime Anthropology: A Global Perspective," Jan van Bremen looks for general and distinctive traits in Japanese and American anthropology during wartime. He makes the point that, in the case of both nations, anthropology studies coincided with the time the countries were at war. He further asserts that in Japan and America "the history of anthropology ran synchronically with the history of wars for as many decades as anthropology enjoyed a time of peace" (4). These wartime realities significantly affected anthropological craft and technique so as to call now for a singular consideration of wartime anthropology.

The next chapter is "Anthropology and the Wartime Situation of the 1930s,and 1940 s: Masao Oka, Yoshitaro Hirano, and Eiichiro Ishida and Their Negotiations with the Situation." In this chapter, author Akitoshi Shimizu considers how anthropologists were involved in the 1930s, and 1940s,in Japan, and notes how both Americans and Japanese were attempting to redefine anthropology. He refers to the work of the three leading Japanese anthropologists of their time and how they negotiated the changing situations during wartime and the immediate postwar years.

The following three chapters focus on topics concerning anthropological research in wartime and postwar periods in Japan. Kevin M Doak's chapter, "Nakano Seiichi and Colonial Ethnic Studies,"explains how Nakano Seiichi developed his theory of minzoku, a kind of nationalism that was manifested in the Japanese Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. Doak regards sociologist Nakano Seiichi as the one who filled the gap between speculative and empirical sociology, and thus legitimized the ethnic policies of imperial Japan.

Teruo Sekimoto, in "Selves and Others in Japanese Anthropology," traces the changing focuses of anthropological interests through an analysis of the work appearing in the Japanese Journal of Ethnology. He demonstrates that the Pacific War was too short for the journal to report wartime research, and also notes that its publication was suspended for two years beginning in 1944.

Atushi Nobayashi's "Physical Anthropology in Wartime Japan" focuses on the trends and investigations in that discipline, and indicates that the main focus was the Japanese population.

The following five chapters are concerned with regional focuses in Japan's colonies or in areas overrun during wartime and deal with a variety of topics and academic and nonacademic practices. They include Eiichiro Ishida's researches in South Sakhalin island; Korean folklore in the case of Akiba Takashi; Korean studies in Japan; Taiwanese folklore; Chinese peasant societies in Japan; and colonial studies in Indonesia.

The last chapter, "Resuscitating Nationalism: Brunei under the Japanese Military Administration, 1941-1945, " by B AHussainmiya, addresses the development of nationalism in Brunei during the Japanese occupation of that country. Hussainmiya explains that the Japanese occupation policies comprised some measures that contrasted so much with previous British policies that the political and cultural sensibilities of the Brunei people were awakened, resulting in the enhancement of nationalist sentiments.

All told, this is an important volume in the history of...