Erik Esselstrom
Biographic Data
| ID | 290861 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Erik Esselstrom |
| GIVEN NAMES | Erik |
| FAMILY NAME | Esselstrom |
| SIGNATURE | ESSELSTROM E |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Vermont |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 11 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 5 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 11 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2005 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 1 |
Diplomatic Heavyweights: Sumō Wrestlers and Japan-China Relations in the Early 1970s
To commemorate a new age of friendship between Japan and the People’s Republic of China (PRC) upon the postwar normalization of their diplomatic relations in 1972, the PRC sent a pair of giant pandas to Tokyo where the adorable animals received a warm welcome from the Japanese public. In a less widely known act of reciprocation, Japan dispatched to Beijing its own delegation of giants – sumō wrestlers – who enjoyed an equally enthusiastic recepti…
The Japanese Discovery of Chinese Fiction: The Water Margin and the Making of a National Canon by William C. Hedberg
Reviewed by: The Japanese Discovery of Chinese Fiction: The Water Margin and the Making of a National Canon by William C. Hedberg Erik Esselstrom (bio) The Japanese Discovery of Chinese Fiction: The Water Margin and the Making of a National Canon. By William C. Hedberg. Columbia University Press, New York, 2019. xii, 250 pages. $65.00, cloth; $64.99, E-book. It is a rich irony of historical imagination that Japan-China relations today are so freq…
One hundred million philosophers: Science of thought and the culture of democracy in postwar Japan
Crossing Empire's Edge: Foreign Ministry Police and Japanese Expansionism in Northeast Asia
For more than half a century, the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs (Gaimusho) possessed an independent police force that operated within the space of Japan’s informal empire on the Asian continent. Charged with "protecting and controlling" local Japanese communities first in Korea and later in China, these consular police played a critical role in facilitating Japanese imperial expansion during the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Rem…
From Wartime Friend to Cold War Fiend: The Abduction of Kaji Wataru and U.S.-Japan Relations at Occupation's End
This article examines archival evidence related to the abduction and interrogation of the leftwing Japanese writer Kaji Wataru by U.S. military intelligence operatives in Tokyo in the early 1950s. The detention of Kaji became a cause célèbre in December 1952 when he publicly claimed that he had been seized in November 1951 and held against his will until late 1952, some seven months beyond the formal end of the U.S. occupation. Kaji said that U.S…
Red Guards and Salarymen: The Chinese Cultural Revolution and Comic Satire in 1960s Japan
This article explores how Japanese comic artists represented the early years of the Chinese Cultural Revolution in popular print culture, especially lowbrow comic magazines. It posits that Japanese cartoonists in their role as both purveyors of everyday humor and keenly observant social commentators employed the imagery and rhetoric of the Red Guard movement to critique the conservative social and economic order of Japanese corporate culture duri…
Making Tea, Making Japan: Cultural Nationalism in Practice by Kristin Surak
Reviewed by: Making Tea, Making Japan: Cultural Nationalism in Practice by Kristin Surak Erik Esselstrom Surak, Kristin — Making Tea, Making Japan: Cultural Nationalism in Practice. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012. Pp. 272. All nation-states and their political and social elites are keen to embrace cultural practices and products that embody the characteristics of a unique national essence in order to reaffirm ironically enough both…
The 1960 "Anpo" Struggle in The People's Daily: Shaping Popular Chinese Perceptions of Japan during the Cold War
The final reading is Erik Esselstrom's essay "The 1960 'Anpo' Struggle in The People's Daily: Shaping Popular Chinese Perceptions of Japan during the Cold War." After World War II and the victory of the Chinese Communists in 1949, the U.S. government enlisted Japan as an important Cold War ally in the effort to "contain" China. While this arrangement was in some ways favorable to Japan, it was extremely unpopular among Japanese citizens who wante…
The 1960 'Anpo' Struggle in The People's Daily 人民日報: Shaping Popular Chinese Perceptions of Japan during the Cold War
Rising China-Japan friction in 2012 has centered on territorial claims over the Diaoyu/Senkaku islands. Like many such clashes since the early 1990s, it is bound up with unresolved legacies of the Asia-Pacific War. As much valuable research on the politics of memory in contemporary East Asia has demonstrated, the politicized anger and bitterness that characterize the China-Japan relationship today have a complex archeology in which popular temper…
The Life and Memory of Hasegawa Teru: Contextualizing Human Rights, Trans/Nationalism, and the Antiwar Movement in Modern Japan
This essay reflects on the experience of a remarkable Japanese woman, Hasegawa Teru, whose life story can help us both historicize and contextualize the emergence of a human-rights discourse in modern Japan and connect it to the struggle of the social and political Left in Japanese society against state-sponsored militarism from the wartime era until the present day. One of the most compelling and courageous figures in the history of the modern J…
Rethinking the Colonial Conquest of Manchuria: The Japanese Consular Police in Jiandao, 1909-1937
Historians often characterize Japan's foreign policy regarding China during the 1920s as dominated by economic priorities and a commitment to peaceful cooperation within a collaborative system of treaty port imperialism. In that narrative, the Manchurian Incident of 1931 thus stands as a watershed moment in modern East Asian history when Japan returned to a policy of acquiring formal colonial territory. Akira Iriye made this thesis famous with hi…
Rethinking the Colonial Conquest of Manchuria: The Japanese Consular Police in Jiandao, 1909-1937
Historians often characterize Japan's foreign policy regarding China during the 1920s as dominated by economic priorities and a commitment to peaceful cooperation within a collaborative system of treaty port imperialism. In that narrative, the Manchurian Incident of 1931 thus stands as a watershed moment in modern East Asian history when Japan returned to a policy of acquiring formal colonial territory. Akira Iriye made this thesis famous with hi…
From Wartime Friend to Cold War Fiend: The Abduction of Kaji Wataru and U.S.-Japan Relations at Occupation's End
This article examines archival evidence related to the abduction and interrogation of the leftwing Japanese writer Kaji Wataru by U.S. military intelligence operatives in Tokyo in the early 1950s. The detention of Kaji became a cause célèbre in December 1952 when he publicly claimed that he had been seized in November 1951 and held against his will until late 1952, some seven months beyond the formal end of the U.S. occupation. Kaji said that U.S…
The Life and Memory of Hasegawa Teru: Contextualizing Human Rights, Trans/Nationalism, and the Antiwar Movement in Modern Japan
This essay reflects on the experience of a remarkable Japanese woman, Hasegawa Teru, whose life story can help us both historicize and contextualize the emergence of a human-rights discourse in modern Japan and connect it to the struggle of the social and political Left in Japanese society against state-sponsored militarism from the wartime era until the present day. One of the most compelling and courageous figures in the history of the modern J…
Rethinking the Colonial Conquest of Manchuria: The Japanese Consular Police in Jiandao, 1909-1937
Historians often characterize Japan's foreign policy regarding China during the 1920s as dominated by economic priorities and a commitment to peaceful cooperation within a collaborative system of treaty port imperialism. In that narrative, the Manchurian Incident of 1931 thus stands as a watershed moment in modern East Asian history when Japan returned to a policy of acquiring formal colonial territory. Akira Iriye made this thesis famous with hi…
The Life and Memory of Hasegawa Teru: Contextualizing Human Rights, Trans/Nationalism, and the Antiwar Movement in Modern Japan
This essay reflects on the experience of a remarkable Japanese woman, Hasegawa Teru, whose life story can help us both historicize and contextualize the emergence of a human-rights discourse in modern Japan and connect it to the struggle of the social and political Left in Japanese society against state-sponsored militarism from the wartime era until the present day. One of the most compelling and courageous figures in the history of the modern J…
The 1960 'Anpo' Struggle in The People's Daily 人民日報: Shaping Popular Chinese Perceptions of Japan during the Cold War
Rising China-Japan friction in 2012 has centered on territorial claims over the Diaoyu/Senkaku islands. Like many such clashes since the early 1990s, it is bound up with unresolved legacies of the Asia-Pacific War. As much valuable research on the politics of memory in contemporary East Asia has demonstrated, the politicized anger and bitterness that characterize the China-Japan relationship today have a complex archeology in which popular temper…
Making Tea, Making Japan: Cultural Nationalism in Practice by Kristin Surak
Reviewed by: Making Tea, Making Japan: Cultural Nationalism in Practice by Kristin Surak Erik Esselstrom Surak, Kristin — Making Tea, Making Japan: Cultural Nationalism in Practice. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012. Pp. 272. All nation-states and their political and social elites are keen to embrace cultural practices and products that embody the characteristics of a unique national essence in order to reaffirm ironically enough both…
The 1960 "Anpo" Struggle in The People's Daily: Shaping Popular Chinese Perceptions of Japan during the Cold War
The final reading is Erik Esselstrom's essay "The 1960 'Anpo' Struggle in The People's Daily: Shaping Popular Chinese Perceptions of Japan during the Cold War." After World War II and the victory of the Chinese Communists in 1949, the U.S. government enlisted Japan as an important Cold War ally in the effort to "contain" China. While this arrangement was in some ways favorable to Japan, it was extremely unpopular among Japanese citizens who wante…
From Wartime Friend to Cold War Fiend: The Abduction of Kaji Wataru and U.S.-Japan Relations at Occupation's End
This article examines archival evidence related to the abduction and interrogation of the leftwing Japanese writer Kaji Wataru by U.S. military intelligence operatives in Tokyo in the early 1950s. The detention of Kaji became a cause célèbre in December 1952 when he publicly claimed that he had been seized in November 1951 and held against his will until late 1952, some seven months beyond the formal end of the U.S. occupation. Kaji said that U.S…
Red Guards and Salarymen: The Chinese Cultural Revolution and Comic Satire in 1960s Japan
This article explores how Japanese comic artists represented the early years of the Chinese Cultural Revolution in popular print culture, especially lowbrow comic magazines. It posits that Japanese cartoonists in their role as both purveyors of everyday humor and keenly observant social commentators employed the imagery and rhetoric of the Red Guard movement to critique the conservative social and economic order of Japanese corporate culture duri…
Crossing Empire's Edge: Foreign Ministry Police and Japanese Expansionism in Northeast Asia
For more than half a century, the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs (Gaimusho) possessed an independent police force that operated within the space of Japan’s informal empire on the Asian continent. Charged with "protecting and controlling" local Japanese communities first in Korea and later in China, these consular police played a critical role in facilitating Japanese imperial expansion during the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Rem…
One hundred million philosophers: Science of thought and the culture of democracy in postwar Japan
The Japanese Discovery of Chinese Fiction: The Water Margin and the Making of a National Canon by William C. Hedberg
Reviewed by: The Japanese Discovery of Chinese Fiction: The Water Margin and the Making of a National Canon by William C. Hedberg Erik Esselstrom (bio) The Japanese Discovery of Chinese Fiction: The Water Margin and the Making of a National Canon. By William C. Hedberg. Columbia University Press, New York, 2019. xii, 250 pages. $65.00, cloth; $64.99, E-book. It is a rich irony of historical imagination that Japan-China relations today are so freq…
Diplomatic Heavyweights: Sumō Wrestlers and Japan-China Relations in the Early 1970s
To commemorate a new age of friendship between Japan and the People’s Republic of China (PRC) upon the postwar normalization of their diplomatic relations in 1972, the PRC sent a pair of giant pandas to Tokyo where the adorable animals received a warm welcome from the Japanese public. In a less widely known act of reciprocation, Japan dispatched to Beijing its own delegation of giants – sumō wrestlers – who enjoyed an equally enthusiastic recepti…
Law (10 works) · Political science (10 works) · Japanese History and Culture (9 works) · Politics (8 works) · History (7 works) · Sociology (7 works) · China (5 works) · Asian Culture and Media Studies (4 works) · Gender Studies (4 works) · Law (4 works)