Beyond Alleged Peripheries of the First World War - After the War is Before the War: Medialized Experiences and Postwar Discourses in Japan (1914–1919)
Wednesday, July 31, 2024
14:00 – 15:45 (GMT+7)
Book Summary: The experience of the First World War did open a new chapter not only in European history, but also in East Asia. The 2021 German language monograph Nach dem Krieg ist vor dem Krieg: Medialisierte Erfahrungen des Ersten Weltkriegs und Nachkriegsdiskurse in Japan (1914–1919) sets out to challenge the conventional understandings and argues that the First World War did have a significant impact on Japanese society at large. Through analysis of mass media, the ways in which the war was widely received in Japanese society are explained. Further, interpretations and popular discourses about what the war experience meant for the country’s future are traced, and it is analyzed how government bureaucracy and military leadership leveraged these diverse popular discourses to develop and promote the agenda for Japanese politics, both domestically and internationally. This study shows that such reflections also led to a re-evaluation of ongoing social discourses. It is also argued that the wartime post-war discourses - essentially future visions combined with powerful demands - were enabled by a new "space of experience" created by the mediatized perception of the war and by wartime studies, which led to an altered "horizon of expectation" (Reinart Koselleck) and to fundamental changes in the realm of political communication. The book also demonstrates that understanding the role of learning from global experiences requires going beyond conventional elite and intellectual history. The presentation will introduce the book and its central lines of argumention.