Bibliographical Essay

Studies of violence and the Japanese empire are rich in Japan. Particularly since the early 1980s too many monographs to be listed have tackled this topic, inspired by the dispute over the textbook description ofJapan's wartime aggression.

While a few books on violence and the Japanese empire were published in English, such as lenaga Saburo's The Pacific War, 1931-4} (New York: Pantheon, 1978) prior to the 1980s, studies in English language on this topic has been growing since the mid 1990s. Sheldon Harris's Factories of Death: Japanese Biological Warfare, 1932-45, and the American Cover-Up (New York: Routledge, 1994) examines Japan's biological warfare during the war, and is primarily based on English-language sources such as the American archival documents at the National Archives. Brian Victoria analysed the role of the Soto school of Buddhism during the war and its priests' war responsibility in his Zen at War (New York: Whetherhill, 1997). Joshua Fogel edited the first scholarly book on the study of the Nanjing Massacre in history and historiography: The Nanjing Massacre in History and Historiography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000).

Despite the fact that the publications on Japan's war crimes and atrocities have been growing, far more scholarly books have been published on World War II and memory in postwar Japan. They include Lisa Yoneyama, Hiroshima Traces: Time, Space, and the Dialectics of Memory (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999); James Orr, The Victim as Hero: Ideologies of Peace and National Identity in Postwar Japan (Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2001); T. Fujitani, G. White and L. Yoneyama, Perilous Memories: The Asia Pacific War(s) (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001); Takashi Yoshida's The Making of the ‘Rape of Nanking': History and Memory in Japan, China, and the United States (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006); Carol Gluck, ‘Operations of Memory: “Comfort Women” and the World', in S. Miyoshi and R. Mitter (eds.), Ruptured Histories: War, Memory, and the Post-Cold War in Asia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), pp. 47-77; and Franziska Seraphim's War Memory and Social Politics in Japan, 1945-2005 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2007).

Compared with scholarly accounts, non-scholarly accounts and websites on violence and the Japanese empire are already abundant and widely available. These non-scholarly accounts, whether written in Chinese, English, Japanese or Korean, tend to provide simple dichotomous narratives between good and evil. While the scholarly books listed above certainly have strengths and weaknesses, many of these books try to go beyond this nation-state oriented analysis.