The disorder of killing in the Pacific War: the colonial soldiers, forced laborers and local peoples at the Japanese empire’s edge

FAIN: FO-289831-23

Kirsten Ziomek
Adelphi University (Garden City, NY 11530-4213)

Research and writing leading to publication of a book on the Japanese military and the colonial subjects and local populations involved in its Asian-Pacific operations during World War II. 

This book reshapes the narratives of World War II by focusing on the various ethnoracial people involved in the Japanese military’s operations spanning the transimperial Pacific. It emphasizes the very fractured and fragile composition of the Japanese armed forces and their porous boundaries: an Indigenous soldier might fight to achieve full acceptance or turn around and kill his commander, or get shaped from an ordinary person into a perpetrator of a war crime. But there are also stories of those who resisted against their colonial overlords or managed to escape their wretched working conditions. This is a new military history, in terms of who the subject is, how the histories are narrated and the kinds of evidence used to reconstruct these histories. It uses the methodological tools of the new history of empire in order to dismantle, from the ground up, the very notion of nation as ethnic unity, war as a well-oiled machine, and the male soldier as a deterministic kind of human being.