Japanese Perceptions of Papua New Guinea: War, Travel and the Reimagining of History

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Japanese Perceptions of Papua New Guinea exposes the interactions between two ostensibly opposing worlds: war and travel. While soldiers deployed to Eastern New Guinea during the Second World War recalled first-hand their experience of war, post-war tourists visited battle-sites, met locals, and drew their own conclusions about the Pacific island from the Japanese media. This book, in bringing travel and war closer together through a comparative analysis of veterans memoirs and the records of postwar travelers, explores how individuals consume, create, and recreate war histories. As a result, Ryota Nishino reveals the extent to which the memory of defeat - for both soldiers and civilians alike - influenced the Japanese perceptions of Papua New Guinea and shaped future relations between the countries. Translating a diverse range of Japanese primary and archival sources, this book provides the first English-language analysis of the social and political impact of Japanese interpretations of the PNG campaign and its aftermath. As such, Japanese Perceptions of Papua New Guinea: War, Travel and the Reimagining of History is an important text for anyone seeking a sophisticated understanding of war, nationalism, and memory culture in Japan and the Pacific Islands.

Reviews

Nishino investigates memoirs and narratives of Japanese wartime experience in New Guinea. Nearly all 150,000 servicemen deployed there died of illness or starvation. Japanese culture, subsequent events, and the passage of time have shaped memory, and Nishino astutely follows a chain of alternative portrayals of the Japanese as heroes, victims, or perpetrators in war memoir, film, manga, and travelogue from the 1940s to the present. English readers will appreciate new insight into Asia-Pacific war memory from the Japanese perspective. * Lamont Lindstrom, Kendall Professor and Chair of Anthropology, University of Tulsa, USA *
A fascinating account of how Papua New Guinea has featured in Japanese popular culture representations of the Asia-Pacific War. Through this microcosm the brutality of the war and the painful processes of memory-making it spawned are brought into admirably clear focus. The discussion of postwar travel to PNG is a particularly important and innovative contribution to our understanding of Japanese war memories * Philip Seaton, Professor, Tokyo University of Japan Studies, Japan *

Author Bio

Ryota Nishino is Designated Assistant Professor at the School of Law, Nagoya University, Japan. Previously he was Senior Lecturer in History at the University of the South Pacific, Fiji. His research interests revolve around the circulation of history and historical memory in various media such as school textbooks and travelogues.