Sport in camps unsettles both contemporary witnesses and students of history. It seems impossible that human beings would perform anything like sport within the harsh camp reality of repression, hunger, violence, and possibly even murder. Yet, sport in penal and internment camps is a historical reality and studying this history allows for new insights into the reality of i…
The Second World War was a new type of war; it was a global, mobile and unpredictable war. It was ‘among the most destructive conflicts in human history’, in which over forty-six million people perished, often in the most frightening and inhuman conditions.1 The latter years of the inter-war period witnessed a modernisation of the mili-tary technologies that had been use…
While these displays are all fascinating in their own ways, they do not cover much beyond the defeat of Japan in 1945; no objects related to the JMSDF are on display. “I do think we should display items related to the JMSDF,” said Captain Furush? as he showed us around. “But regrettably, we currently only have displays related to the I…
On August 8, 1942, 302 people arrived by train at Vocation, Wyoming, to become the first Japanese American residents of what the U.S. government called the Relocation Center at Heart Mountain. In the following weeks and months, they would be joined by some 10,000 of the more than 120,000 people of Japanese descent, two-thirds of them U.S. citizens, incarcerated as “domestic enemy aliens” du…
On 3 October 1944 American forces in the Pacific Ocean Areas received a directive to seize positions in the Ryukyu Islands (Nansei Shoto). Okinawa is the most important island of the Ryukyu Group, the threshold of the four main islands of Japan. The decision to invade the Ryukyus signalized the readiness of the United States to penetrate the inner ring of Japanese defenses. For the enemy, fail…
y work for the past two decades has dealt with Micronesians’ memories of the Pacific War. Historians have produced libraries of books on that war’s military strategy, on air, naval, and land battles, on the experiences of leaders and ordinary soldiers and sailors—even, more recently, on the meaning of battle sites to Japanese and Americans today. But …
018 marked the 100th anniversary of Armistice Day, 11 November 1918. Ironically, “the war that would end all wars” turned out to be a war whose end was long anticipated but “that failed to end” nevertheless.1 For some, the end of the war was already in sight in 1917: the Russian revolution, the American entry into the war, the Brest-Litovsk Treaty (signed in March 1918 between Germany a…