Barak Kushner
Biographic Data
| ID | 361837 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Barak Kushner |
| GIVEN NAMES | Barak |
| FAMILY NAME | Kushner |
| SIGNATURE | KUSHNER B |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Cambridge |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-2061-0116 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 23 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 10 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 22 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1997 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
Political captives in East Asia
Thought reform campaigns aimed at the psychological transformation of captives have long been tools to enhance national security and political legitimacy in East Asia. Fusing Soviet concepts of human perfectibility and Confucian ideals of transformation through education, sophisticated systems have evolved to convert political opponents. Whether labelled as tenkō in Japan, ‘self-renovation’ in Nationalist China, or ‘new learning’ in the People’s …
Justice in the Time of Cholera
Numerous complex issues concerning the history of Japanese war crimes cloud the trials that adjudicated justice in postwar East Asia. Discrepancies between fact and fiction, or facts that can be proven in a court of law, result in a situation that even today renders what actually happened during the creation of empire and the ensuing war in Asia open to interpretation. More than seven decades after the war, disagreements about the justice or inju…
The Real Manchurian Candidates
The Manchurian Candidate myth that Americans could be psychologically manipulated and turned into secret agents of a foreign power emerged in the early Cold War. The belief combined fears that Soviet/Chinese mind manipulators were so adept that they could transform honorable American soldiers into turncoats. However, while disquiet about the efficacy of communist brainwashing remained palpable in the aftermath of World War II, the result of China…
Heroes, victims and the quest for peace
This chapter examines the four brief examples of constructed or reconstructed memorials of the war: the Miyazaki Peace-War Tower, a 'love statue', Japan's most important Shinto shrine, and a local council memorial. It investigates how venerating or denying aspects of Japan's imperial glory resulted in continued social tensions in the context of post-war Japan's diplomatic and constitutional commitment to the promotion of peace. After 1945, new st…
The Dismantling of Japan's Empire in East Asia
Introduction: Angles of Empire Part I: The New Postwar Order - Meaning and Significance 1. The Decline of the Japanese Empire and the Transformation of the Regional Order in East Kato Kiyofumi 2. De-imperialization in Early Postwar Japan: Adjusting and Transforming Institutions of Empire Kawashima Shin 3. Imperial Loss and Japan's Search for Postwar Legitimacy Barak Kushner 4. Collapse of the Japanese Empire and the Great Migrations: Repatriation…
Dismantling of Japan's Empire in East Asia
Robert Hoppens. The China Problem in Postwar Japan
Robert Hoppens does not offer a mere chronology of Sino-Japanese relations over the last seventy years, rather his deep trawl through significant political moments over the postwar period is refreshing and insightful. Following, one might say, in the footsteps of Baba Kimihiko’s (Sengo nihonjin no chūgokuzō: Nihon haisen kara bunka daikakumei nitchū fukkō made [2010]) encyclopedic investigation of the image of China in postwar Japan, Hoppens has …
Examining Japan's Lost Decades
Preface Introduction Chapter 1: Japan's Demographic Collapse and the Vanishing Provinces Seike Atsushi Chapter 2: Monetary and Fiscal Policies During the Kenneth Kuttner, Iwaisako Tokuo, and Adam Posen Chapter 3: The Two Lost Decades and Macroeconomics: Changing Economic Policies Kobayashi Keiichiro Chapter 4: The Curse of Japan, Inc. and Japan's Microeconomic Competitiveness Chapter 5: Making Sense of the Decades: Workplaces and Schools, Men and…
Men to Devils, Devils to Men
The Japanese Army committed numerous atrocities during its pitiless campaigns in China from 1931 to 1945. Focusing on the trials of Japanese war criminals, Barak Kushner analyzes the political maneuvering and propagandizing in both China and Japan that would roil East Asian relations throughout the Cold War, with repercussions still felt today
Race for Empire
One is not supposed to pen sycophantic book reviews, but this case is a rather different proposition. Rare is the time when one hears a talk from a fellow academic and gets physically excited by the prospect of reading the forthcoming book. Takashi Fujitani’s new research does not disappoint in this regard. Extensive, intricate, filled with stinging potential and pregnant with political significance, Fujitani’s analysis of ideas surrounding racis…
Eri Hotta. Japan 1941
Why does a small country on the periphery of East Asia believe itself powerful enough not only to struggle on the massive Chinese continent, but also to open an armed front against an arguably much larger military foe? This is essentially the question that Eri Hotta starts with in her compelling book investigating the intricacies of why Japan chose war over peace in 1941. Recently a series of Japanese books by Tokyo University scholar Katô Yôko a…
The Rise and Fall of Japan's LDP
The Rise and Fall of Japan's LDP: Political Party Organizations as Historical Institutions." The International History Review, 35(2), pp. 438–439
Ghosts of the Japanese Imperial Army
Journal Article Ghosts of the Japanese Imperial Army: The 'White Group' ( Baituan ) and Early Post-war Sino-Japanese Relations Get access Barak Kushner Barak Kushner Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Past & Present, Volume 218, Issue suppl_8, 2013, Pages 117–150, https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gts037 Published: 17 April 2013
Sweetness and Empire
Sugar has featured strongly in analyses of the consumer revolutions in Europe and North America, with a growing literature looking at the ways in which industrialisation and the consequent changes in social and working lives conditioned the growth of sugar consumption (Mintz 1985; Mazumdar 1998; Akesaka 2002; Woloson 2002). In Japan, too, sugar consumption grew significantly over the course of industrialisation, and this chapter will consider som…
Slurp! A Social and Culinary History of Ramen - Japan's Favorite Noodle Soup
Ramen, Japan's noodle soup, is a microcosm of Japan and its historical relations with China. The long evolution of ramen helps us enter the history of cuisine in Japan, charting how food and politics combined as a force within Sino-Japan relations. Cuisine in East Asia plays a significant political role, at times also philosophical, economic, and social. Ramen is a symbol of the relationship between the two major forces in East Asia – what starte…
Sandra Collins, The 1940 Tokyo Games
Pawns of Empire
Examining the plight of the Taiwanese, who were pawns in the larger conflict of World War Two, helps us to understand the complicated process of the breakdown of the Japanese empire. The postwar legal adjudication of BC class Japanese war crimes in East Asia is a key element in unwinding the historical complexity of postwar power shifts, the formation of a Taiwanese identity, and its connection to Japan's postwar foreign relations goals. This pap…
Treacherous Allies
The postwar US federal government spent a decade, initiated two federal treason trials, and dispensed over one million dollars in legal pursuit of John Provoo for his crimes in the Philippines as a POW and as a propaganda agent for the Japanese. In a strange perversion of justice the US attorney even invited to the federal court Provoo’s former captors — Japanese propagandists, military officials and POW guards — to establish his guilt. Why was t…
Nationality and Nostalgia
(2007). Nationality and Nostalgia: The Manipulation of Memory in Japan, Taiwan, and China since 1990. The International History Review: Vol. 29, No. 4, pp. 793-820
The Thought War
"A major contribution both to the study of Japan and propaganda in the twentieth century. Barak Kushner meticulously and convincingly reveals the full scope of what was assumed to not have existed; namely an organized, multifaceted, and disturbingly resilient system of Japanese propaganda. Based on an impressive array of primary sources, many only recently uncovered, The Thought War provides a fascinating assessment of the complex and often contr…
Digesting Postwar Japanese Media
In June 1946 the first-ever Japanese-language version of the popular U.S. magazine Reader's Digest hit newsstands all over Japan. Its impact was immediate and spectacular. The magazine quickly filled store racks, and within a few years circulation topped 1.5 million copies. Japanese citizens from all walks of life read Reader's Digest. Youths in the capital of Tokyo claimed they enjoyed the journal because they wanted to “break free from the bond…
Laughter as Matériel
formation and, on the home front, of young, determined women in cotton trousers hoisting bamboo spears, ready for the invasion of the home islands. Historians present the war as a monolith of government suppression; an evil conspiracy among military men, who deny the people freedom and force them into battle against Western armies they know to be militarily superior.1 Post-war Japanese intellectuals speaking on behalf of the wartime literati repr…
Cannibalizing Japanese Media
Nationality and Nostalgia
(2007). Nationality and Nostalgia: The Manipulation of Memory in Japan, Taiwan, and China since 1990. The International History Review: Vol. 29, No. 4, pp. 793-820
Pawns of Empire
Examining the plight of the Taiwanese, who were pawns in the larger conflict of World War Two, helps us to understand the complicated process of the breakdown of the Japanese empire. The postwar legal adjudication of BC class Japanese war crimes in East Asia is a key element in unwinding the historical complexity of postwar power shifts, the formation of a Taiwanese identity, and its connection to Japan's postwar foreign relations goals. This pap…
Ghosts of the Japanese Imperial Army
Journal Article Ghosts of the Japanese Imperial Army: The 'White Group' ( Baituan ) and Early Post-war Sino-Japanese Relations Get access Barak Kushner Barak Kushner Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Past & Present, Volume 218, Issue suppl_8, 2013, Pages 117–150, https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gts037 Published: 17 April 2013
Treacherous Allies
The postwar US federal government spent a decade, initiated two federal treason trials, and dispensed over one million dollars in legal pursuit of John Provoo for his crimes in the Philippines as a POW and as a propaganda agent for the Japanese. In a strange perversion of justice the US attorney even invited to the federal court Provoo’s former captors — Japanese propagandists, military officials and POW guards — to establish his guilt. Why was t…
Cannibalizing Japanese Media
Laughter as Matériel
formation and, on the home front, of young, determined women in cotton trousers hoisting bamboo spears, ready for the invasion of the home islands. Historians present the war as a monolith of government suppression; an evil conspiracy among military men, who deny the people freedom and force them into battle against Western armies they know to be militarily superior.1 Post-war Japanese intellectuals speaking on behalf of the wartime literati repr…
The Thought War
"A major contribution both to the study of Japan and propaganda in the twentieth century. Barak Kushner meticulously and convincingly reveals the full scope of what was assumed to not have existed; namely an organized, multifaceted, and disturbingly resilient system of Japanese propaganda. Based on an impressive array of primary sources, many only recently uncovered, The Thought War provides a fascinating assessment of the complex and often contr…
Digesting Postwar Japanese Media
In June 1946 the first-ever Japanese-language version of the popular U.S. magazine Reader's Digest hit newsstands all over Japan. Its impact was immediate and spectacular. The magazine quickly filled store racks, and within a few years circulation topped 1.5 million copies. Japanese citizens from all walks of life read Reader's Digest. Youths in the capital of Tokyo claimed they enjoyed the journal because they wanted to “break free from the bond…
Nationality and Nostalgia
(2007). Nationality and Nostalgia: The Manipulation of Memory in Japan, Taiwan, and China since 1990. The International History Review: Vol. 29, No. 4, pp. 793-820
Pawns of Empire
Examining the plight of the Taiwanese, who were pawns in the larger conflict of World War Two, helps us to understand the complicated process of the breakdown of the Japanese empire. The postwar legal adjudication of BC class Japanese war crimes in East Asia is a key element in unwinding the historical complexity of postwar power shifts, the formation of a Taiwanese identity, and its connection to Japan's postwar foreign relations goals. This pap…
Treacherous Allies
The postwar US federal government spent a decade, initiated two federal treason trials, and dispensed over one million dollars in legal pursuit of John Provoo for his crimes in the Philippines as a POW and as a propaganda agent for the Japanese. In a strange perversion of justice the US attorney even invited to the federal court Provoo’s former captors — Japanese propagandists, military officials and POW guards — to establish his guilt. Why was t…
Sweetness and Empire
Sugar has featured strongly in analyses of the consumer revolutions in Europe and North America, with a growing literature looking at the ways in which industrialisation and the consequent changes in social and working lives conditioned the growth of sugar consumption (Mintz 1985; Mazumdar 1998; Akesaka 2002; Woloson 2002). In Japan, too, sugar consumption grew significantly over the course of industrialisation, and this chapter will consider som…
Slurp! A Social and Culinary History of Ramen - Japan's Favorite Noodle Soup
Ramen, Japan's noodle soup, is a microcosm of Japan and its historical relations with China. The long evolution of ramen helps us enter the history of cuisine in Japan, charting how food and politics combined as a force within Sino-Japan relations. Cuisine in East Asia plays a significant political role, at times also philosophical, economic, and social. Ramen is a symbol of the relationship between the two major forces in East Asia – what starte…
Sandra Collins, The 1940 Tokyo Games
The Rise and Fall of Japan's LDP
The Rise and Fall of Japan's LDP: Political Party Organizations as Historical Institutions." The International History Review, 35(2), pp. 438–439
Ghosts of the Japanese Imperial Army
Journal Article Ghosts of the Japanese Imperial Army: The 'White Group' ( Baituan ) and Early Post-war Sino-Japanese Relations Get access Barak Kushner Barak Kushner Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Past & Present, Volume 218, Issue suppl_8, 2013, Pages 117–150, https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gts037 Published: 17 April 2013
Men to Devils, Devils to Men
The Japanese Army committed numerous atrocities during its pitiless campaigns in China from 1931 to 1945. Focusing on the trials of Japanese war criminals, Barak Kushner analyzes the political maneuvering and propagandizing in both China and Japan that would roil East Asian relations throughout the Cold War, with repercussions still felt today
Race for Empire
One is not supposed to pen sycophantic book reviews, but this case is a rather different proposition. Rare is the time when one hears a talk from a fellow academic and gets physically excited by the prospect of reading the forthcoming book. Takashi Fujitani’s new research does not disappoint in this regard. Extensive, intricate, filled with stinging potential and pregnant with political significance, Fujitani’s analysis of ideas surrounding racis…
Eri Hotta. Japan 1941
Why does a small country on the periphery of East Asia believe itself powerful enough not only to struggle on the massive Chinese continent, but also to open an armed front against an arguably much larger military foe? This is essentially the question that Eri Hotta starts with in her compelling book investigating the intricacies of why Japan chose war over peace in 1941. Recently a series of Japanese books by Tokyo University scholar Katô Yôko a…
Examining Japan's Lost Decades
Preface Introduction Chapter 1: Japan's Demographic Collapse and the Vanishing Provinces Seike Atsushi Chapter 2: Monetary and Fiscal Policies During the Kenneth Kuttner, Iwaisako Tokuo, and Adam Posen Chapter 3: The Two Lost Decades and Macroeconomics: Changing Economic Policies Kobayashi Keiichiro Chapter 4: The Curse of Japan, Inc. and Japan's Microeconomic Competitiveness Chapter 5: Making Sense of the Decades: Workplaces and Schools, Men and…
Heroes, victims and the quest for peace
This chapter examines the four brief examples of constructed or reconstructed memorials of the war: the Miyazaki Peace-War Tower, a 'love statue', Japan's most important Shinto shrine, and a local council memorial. It investigates how venerating or denying aspects of Japan's imperial glory resulted in continued social tensions in the context of post-war Japan's diplomatic and constitutional commitment to the promotion of peace. After 1945, new st…
The Dismantling of Japan's Empire in East Asia
Introduction: Angles of Empire Part I: The New Postwar Order - Meaning and Significance 1. The Decline of the Japanese Empire and the Transformation of the Regional Order in East Kato Kiyofumi 2. De-imperialization in Early Postwar Japan: Adjusting and Transforming Institutions of Empire Kawashima Shin 3. Imperial Loss and Japan's Search for Postwar Legitimacy Barak Kushner 4. Collapse of the Japanese Empire and the Great Migrations: Repatriation…
Dismantling of Japan's Empire in East Asia
Robert Hoppens. The China Problem in Postwar Japan
Robert Hoppens does not offer a mere chronology of Sino-Japanese relations over the last seventy years, rather his deep trawl through significant political moments over the postwar period is refreshing and insightful. Following, one might say, in the footsteps of Baba Kimihiko’s (Sengo nihonjin no chūgokuzō: Nihon haisen kara bunka daikakumei nitchū fukkō made [2010]) encyclopedic investigation of the image of China in postwar Japan, Hoppens has …
The Real Manchurian Candidates
The Manchurian Candidate myth that Americans could be psychologically manipulated and turned into secret agents of a foreign power emerged in the early Cold War. The belief combined fears that Soviet/Chinese mind manipulators were so adept that they could transform honorable American soldiers into turncoats. However, while disquiet about the efficacy of communist brainwashing remained palpable in the aftermath of World War II, the result of China…
Justice in the Time of Cholera
Numerous complex issues concerning the history of Japanese war crimes cloud the trials that adjudicated justice in postwar East Asia. Discrepancies between fact and fiction, or facts that can be proven in a court of law, result in a situation that even today renders what actually happened during the creation of empire and the ensuing war in Asia open to interpretation. More than seven decades after the war, disagreements about the justice or inju…
Political captives in East Asia
Thought reform campaigns aimed at the psychological transformation of captives have long been tools to enhance national security and political legitimacy in East Asia. Fusing Soviet concepts of human perfectibility and Confucian ideals of transformation through education, sophisticated systems have evolved to convert political opponents. Whether labelled as tenkō in Japan, ‘self-renovation’ in Nationalist China, or ‘new learning’ in the People’s …
History (18 works) · Political science (18 works) · Japanese History and Culture (17 works) · Law (17 works) · Sociology (15 works) · Politics (13 works) · China (9 works) · Economic history (9 works) · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies (8 works) · History (7 works)