This event will feature a discussion where Prof. Jeremy Yellen will share insights into his research and key themes of the book in conversation with Prof. Kyle Peters.
Japan at War, 1914–1952 is a synthetic and interpretive history that highlights the centrality of war to the modern Japanese experience.
The author argues that war was central to Japanese life in this period—the era when Japan rose and fell as a world power. The volume examines how World War I set off profound changes that led to the rise of a politicized military, aggressive imperial expansion, and the militarization of Japanese social, political, and economic life. War was extraordinarily popular, which helped confirm Japan’s aggressive imperialism in the 1930s and war across the Asia-Pacific in the 1940s. It took a defeat by 1945 and occupation through 1952 to undo war as a national concern and to remake Japan into a peaceful nation-state. In telling this story of Japan in war and peace, this book highlights the importance of Japan in the creation of the modern world.
This study of political power and its influences in domestic and foreign affairs will be of great value to nonspecialist readers who are interested in this period, undergraduate and postgraduate students in introductory classes, and scholars interested in Japanese history and political, military, and international history.
Speaker
Prof. Jeremy A. YELLEN
Associate Professor, Department of Japanese Studies, CUHK
Jeremy A. Yellen is a historian of modern Japan and an associate professor in the Department of Japanese Studies at the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK).
He received a Ph.D. in history from Harvard University in 2012, and taught at Harvard and Boston University before moving to CUHK in 2014. Jeremy’s research projects largely grapple with questions of warfare, empire, diplomacy, and international order, and pair Japanese high policy during World War II with developments in the periphery of Japan’s empire. Much of his work makes use of transnational and comparative elements, and aims to place Japanese history in its proper global context. His first book, The Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere: When Total Empire Met Total War, was published by Cornell University Press in April 2019.
No registration required.
Enquiry: Misaki Nagaoka
