Ethan Mark, Ph.D.
University Lecturer, Modern Japanese History
Department of Japanese and Korean Studies, Leiden University
Arsenaalstraat 1, PO Box 9515
2300 RA Leiden, Netherlands
Tel.: +31-(0)71-5272310, Fax: +31-(0)71-5272526
E-Mail: e.mark@hum.leidenuniv.nl
Introduction
The story of social engagement in and mobilization for empire-building, nation-building, and war is in many ways the story of the social and cultural making of the modern world. While conventional narratives conceptualize such processes in binary frameworks such as those of nation versus nation or state versus society, considerations of these processes in terms of interactions between states and societies, of multiple and competing interests and loyalties within societies, and of ways in which these loyalties and interests can defy the boundaries of nation and other conventional categorizations of politics and identity, belie and challenge such simple understandings. Such constructions ideally offer not only new vantages from which to question dominant narratives of history, but analytical frameworks within which to better identify, understand, and account for the interwoven social and cultural dynamics of war, empire- and nation-building across time and space.
My work as a historian has long been concerned with these sorts of problematizations, with a particular focus on the war and crisis years in Japan and Asia in the 1930s and 40s and their postwar legacies. My dissertation, Appealing to Asia: Nation, Culture, and the Problem of Imperial Modernity in Japanese-occupied Java (Columbia, 2003), sought to explore the wartime Japanese occupation of Indonesia within this sort of interactive, transnational social and cultural framework. I am currently finishing extensive revision of this manuscript for publication by a major academic press as The Limits of Liberation: The Japanese-Indonesian Encounter in Occupied Java, 1942-1945.
The Limits of Liberation reveals the Japanese occupation of Java to challenge conventional scholarly and popular paradigms not only of Japanese imperialism, but of modern “colonial occupation” itself. It is shown to represent a pioneering variant of a new type of military colonization and social mobilization that has continued to reappear in various guises up to the present day. Reflecting the demands and worldviews of a postcolonial international and social order, middle class hegemony, and the intensified demands of wartime, this self-negating and therefore highly contradictory and unstable form of imperialism offers both revolutionary new forms of social empowerment and—to the extent that its practice contradicts its own liberating promises—revolutionary social volatility. In today’s international context in which military occupation in the name of “liberation” has become the norm, The Limits of Liberation offers illuminating and cautionary historical lessons from an unexpected location.
I recently completed the translation portion of a second major project, an English-language edition of Japanese historian Yoshimi Yoshiaki’s classic study Kusa no ne no fashizumu: Nihon minshû no sensô taiken (Grass-Roots Fascism: The War Experience of the Japanese People), a revolutionary account of the war experience of ordinary Japanese from the “ground-up.” In consultation with Professor Yoshimi, I am currently completing an analytical translator’s introduction and accompanying annotation.
My article “Asia’s Transwar Lineage: Nationalism, Marxism, and Greater Asia,” which appears in the August 2006 edition of the Journal of Asia Studies, represents a part of my forthcoming major scholarly project, a history of evolving notions of national identity, “Asia” and “Asianness” within and across borders in modern Japan, East-, Southeast-, and South Asia, within a regional and global context of dramatic social change, struggle, and crisis in the years 1900-1950.
I began my training as an undergraduate in Japanese history and Japanese language at the University of California, Berkeley, including a year as an exchange student at International Christian University in Tokyo. Subsequent journalistic work for the Japanese-language newspaper The New York Yomiuri honed both my Japanese language skills and my writing and analytical abilities, and inspired Master's research on the history of Japanese journalism. After meeting my wife Gonda Dharmaperwira, a Dutch-Indonesian, I began to combine Indonesian language and history with my ongoing study of Japan. During my graduate training at Columbia University I also studied modern Chinese history, Vietnamese history, Southeast Asian history and economic development, and Indian history, and steeped myself in the literature of colonial and post-colonial history, nationalism, culture, and power. This in turn inspired me to integrate my study of social, cultural, and economic history on the national level into the broader transnational context, with an eye to linkages not only between Japan and Indonesia, but throughout Asia, between Asia and the West, and the "North" and the "South," as expressed in an Asian context.
In my evolution as a scholar I have been fortunate enough to experience much more than just the classroom and the archives. An extensive period of dissertation research allowed me the opportunity not only to work with scholars in Japan, Indonesia, the Netherlands, and the United States, but also to interview and exchange views with such diverse witnesses to history as Japanese veterans, wartime intelligence operatives and former propagandists, and Indonesian former student activists, servants, and factory workers. Over the course of my undergraduate and graduate careers, I experienced Japanese history in the making, from the dizzying changes in Tokyo life before and after the “bubble” economy, to the battered but resilient spirit of the people of Kobe, where I worked as a volunteer coordinator after the earthquake. Living in Jakarta and Ujung Pandang, I observed and analyzed the social toll of modernization and capitalism in the developing world, and the ideologies that seek to hold these troubled young nations together. Closer to home, as both a journalist and scholar, I experienced and explored social conditions in the United States and in the Netherlands neither dissimilar nor unrelated to those in Asia.
I am committed to the study of history as a means of illuminating the processes behind these experiences both national and trans-national, both shared and divergent, underpinned by a constant engagement with the wider world, and by interaction with fellow scholars both within and outside of my own areas of expertise.
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