The Ōita gōdō shinbun reports on the Korean War in 1950.
Current Research Projects
Garrison Life: Militarization and Everyday Life in Japan at the Dawn of the Postwar American Empire
A Japanese employee and a U.S. soldier reenact the shooting of Yamagata Shinnosuke by a U.S. sentry in August 1947.
My current book project, under contract with Columbia University Press, is tentatively titled Garrison Life: Militarization and Everyday Life in Japan at the Dawn of the Postwar American Empire. It revises research from my dissertation, “Base Towns: Everyday Life In and Around the Garrisons of Postwar Japan, 1945–1954,” to show how ongoing processes of militarization in occupation base towns played an important role in the history of postwar Japan. By examining how the U.S. military shaped local communities in fundamental ways—the military prosecution of Japanese citizens for offenses against the Occupation, the regular commission of crimes by U.S. soldiers, the employment of hundreds of thousands of Japanese workers, and the local procurement of vast quantities of Japanese supplies, among others—I show that many Japanese experienced the Occupation as a concrete project that directly impacted their everyday lives. In the process, I demonstrate that the Korean War represented an important turning point in the course of the Occupation. While the political reforms of the early Occupation wound down after 1950, the military project of the Occupation leapt into high gear: U.S. military courts began to prosecute antiwar activists, front-line soldiers on leave contributed to surges in local crime rates, and the military drew many new Japanese employees and industries into its economic orbit. This research shows that everyday life in Japanese base towns remained shot through with military power, even as Occupation reforms were ostensibly stripping military power from Japan.
“Nisei Soldiers or Nise Soldiers?: The Role of Impersonation in the Military Occupation of Postwar Japan”
A 1948 reproduction of a fake military “identification card” created from a copy of a Newsweek subscription form by a Japanese civilian.
I have also written an article on the history of Japanese civilians who impersonated members of the U.S. military during the Occupation. Although they have received virtually no attention from historians of postwar Japan, hundreds of these military impersonators were arrested and prosecuted by U.S. military courts from 1945 to 1952. These impersonators took on various different guises, but most often they posed as interpreters, military police (MPs), or agents of the Counter-Intelligence Corps (CIC) or Criminal Investigation Detachment (CID). They tended to operate in larger cities, but also ran scams in far-flung villages. Most used impersonation as a means to swindle their fellow Japanese, but a few attempted to use false papers to obtain supplies or food directly from the U.S. military. Examining these military impersonators reveals some of the material aspects of life in the base towns of postwar Japan. It also shows how impersonators were sometimes able to transgress otherwise firm lines drawn around race and nationality in occupied Japan. This article is currently under review with the Journal of Japanese Studies, which has encouraged me to revise and resubmit the manuscript.
“‘A Justifiable Action’: Sakai Naka, William Girard, and Official Violence in Postwar Japan”
A 1958 Asahi shinbun politial cartoon critiques shootings by U.S. soldiers; the caption reads “We are not targets.”
I have also written a book chapter that examines the history of officially-sanctioned shootings of Japanese civilians by U.S. sentries and military police officers. The most infamous example of such a shooting was the so-called “Girard incident” of 1957, in which Army specialist third class William Girard shot and killed Sakai Naka, a Japanese woman working as a tamabiroi (literally “ammo-picker”) on a U.S. firing range near Tokyo. While the shooting of Sakai has garnered significant attention from historians for its subsequent impact on U.S.–Japanese relations, the focus on the Girard incident obscures the fact that Girard’s actions were unusual in large part because they generated a controversy at all. Military shootings took place with remarkable frequency in postwar Japan, with more than two-hundred such incidents during the Occupation of Japan and potentially scores of others that took place in the aftermath of the Occupation’s official end in 1952. This paper locates the shooting of Sakai within this trajectory of violence by connecting it to contemporaneous shootings of individuals such as Negami Unue, Miyamura Sachiyuki, Katsumata Yuki, and Tanikai Tsuyoshi. In the process, it argues that this kind of official violence was an irreducible aspect of the occupying—and after 1952 the garrisoning—of early postwar Japan. This paper was written as part of a workshop at Georgetown University. The edited volume that resulted from this workshop, tentatively titled Shaping a Peaceful World: U.S. Post-Conflict Diplomacy since 1783, is currently under review with Oxford University Press.
Correcting Society: Japanese Prisons in the Global Twentieth Century [Tentative Title]
I have two major research projects planned for the future. The first is a transnational history of Japanese prisons in the twentieth century. This project developed out of the work I did for my current book project. When researching the history of the system of military provost courts created by the United States during the Occupation, I discovered that virtually no work exists on the history of the Japanese prison system after the end of the nineteenth century. A history of Japanese prisons would broaden our understanding of Japanese history in two major ways. First, it would show how prisons were used as tools to manage state-society relations, both during Japan’s major twentieth-century wars and after. Second, it would connect the history of Japanese prisons to a growing body of literature on the global history of carceral states. A history of Japanese prisons would show how Japan negotiated the influence of U.S. reforms during the Occupation period and how it participated in transnational flows of knowledge about the proper role of carceral technologies and techniques. Understanding how the prison system in Japan diverged from the U.S. system of mass incarceration may also provide insights into how systems of mass incarceration can be deconstructed in the future.
MPs!: A Global History of the Military Police [Tentative Title]
A U.S. military police officer and a Japanese police officer work together to patrol the streets of Kumamoto, circa. 1947.
My second major research project is a transnational history focused on the military police. Recently, historians have examined how programs and policies implemented by the U.S. military and paramilitary apparatuses in far-flung countries crucially shaped the nature of policing and official violence back home. A number of scholars have argued that these deep historical linkages mean that it doesn’t make sense to characterize recent trends in police forces as the “militarization of the police.” Militarization implies a process, these scholars argue, but, in this case, no such process has taken place because there was no need for it to take place. The police were always already militarized. Although this idea remains the subject of vigorous debate, it is interesting that almost no scholarship has looked at the sector of policing that was inarguably always already militarized: namely, the military police. This is even more remarkable given the fact that the U.S. Army Military Police Corps is arguably the largest single police organization in the United States, employing more people than even the New York Police Department. A history of the U.S. military police forces, both at home and abroad, would trace new connections between police power and military power. It would also expand our understanding of the kinds of violence that marked the U.S. presence in Asia after 1945. I plan to explore this history using hitherto unexamined files housed in the U.S. National Archives.