The odyssey of 600,000 imperial Japanese soldiers incarcerated in Soviet labor camps after World War II and their fraught repatriation to postwar Japan.
In August 1945 the Soviet Union seized the Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo and the colony of Southern Sakhalin, capturing more than 600,000 Japanese soldiers, who were transported to labor camps across the Soviet Union but primarily concentrated in Siberia and the Far East. Imprisonment came as a surprise to the soldiers, who thought they were being shipped home.
The Japanese prisoners became a workforce for the rebuilding Soviets, as well as pawns in the Cold War. Alongside other Axis POWs, they did backbreaking jobs, from mining and logging to agriculture and construction. They were routinely subjected to “reeducation” glorifying the Soviet system and urging them to support the newly legalized Japanese Communist Party and to resist American influence in Japan upon repatriation. About 60,000 Japanese didn’t survive Siberia. The rest were sent home in waves, the last lingering in the camps until 1956. Already laid low by war and years of hard labor, returnees faced the final shock and alienation of an unrecognizable homeland, transformed after the demise of the imperial state.
Sherzod Muminov draws on extensive Japanese, Russian, and English archives—including memoirs and survivor interviews—to piece together a portrait of life in Siberia and in Japan afterward. Eleven Winters of Discontent reveals the real people underneath facile tropes of the prisoner of war and expands our understanding of the Cold War front. Superpower confrontation played out in the Siberian camps as surely as it did in Berlin or the Bay of Pigs.
The Maoist state’s dominance over Chinese society, achieved through such watersheds as the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, is well known. Maoism at the Grassroots reexamines this period of transformation and upheaval from a new perspective, one that challenges the standard state-centered view. Bringing together scholars from China, Europe, North America, and Taiwan, this volume marshals new research to reveal a stunning diversity of individual viewpoints and local experiences during China’s years of high socialism.
Focusing on the period from the mid-1950s to 1980, the authors provide insights into the everyday lives of citizens across social strata, ethnicities, and regions. They explore how ordinary men and women risked persecution and imprisonment in order to assert personal beliefs and identities. Many displayed a shrewd knack for negotiating the maze-like power structures of everyday Maoism, appropriating regime ideology in their daily lives while finding ways to express discontent and challenge the state’s pervasive control.
Heterogeneity, limited pluralism, and tensions between official and popular culture were persistent features of Maoism at the grassroots. Men had gay relationships in factory dormitories, teenagers penned searing complaints in diaries, mentally ill individuals cursed Mao, farmers formed secret societies and worshipped forbidden spirits. These diverse undercurrents were as representative of ordinary people’s lives as the ideals promulgated in state propaganda.
Using both grand conceptualizations and grounded case studies, Allan Pred and Michael Watts look at how people cope with and give meaning to capitalism and modernity in different times and places. As capital accumulation has grown and taken new forms, it has affected technology and labor relations which in turn have affected people's daily lives. These changes have not always been either welcome or easy. Pred and Watts focus on the symbolic discontent and cultural confrontations that accompany capitalism. They depict people struggling over the meaning of change in their lives and over new relations of power.
Modernity is experienced differently in different times and places. To illustrate this point, Pred and Watts offer four case studies that range across time and space. These studies remind us that there are multiple capitalisms and mutiple reactions to capitalisms. Watts begins with a study of a Muslim millenarian movement that arose alongside the Nigerian oil boom of the 1970s. When a Muslim prophet and disenfranchised followers tried to create a distinctive community and identity, they came into brutal conflict with state authorities. Thousands died in the resulting oppression. Watts's next case is less bloody, at least in the short run. He tell us what happened when technological change was introduced in rice production in West African peasant society. Peasants were drawn into the world economy as contract farmers. This changed work relations and affected everyday life in peasant households. Families began to fight over who would work and under what conditions. They struggled over gender indentity and property rights. We move back in time and across space for ther third case study. Pred discusses changes in the daily life of the Stockholm working class at the end of the nineteenth century. He writes of the various forms their discontent took as they struggled with economic restructuring. Even conflict over street names took on special meaning. For the last case Pred takes us to a steel mill in California. When a South Korean company became half owner of the mill, there was money for modernization and the threat of layoffs was reduced. But the workers remained unhappy. They protested low wages, unsafe conditions, and unfair recruitment practices. Their labor issues turned into issues of nationalism, morality and identity. All four case studies demonstrate the shock of modernity and how the resulting struggles affect daily life.
The essays collectively explore the shifting dynamics and power relations between the civic coalitions that pursue the Winter Olympics and the social movements that oppose their efforts. The contributors look at specific Games impacted by dissent and probe the issues that swirled around failed and withdrawn bids. In addition, contributions on the contemporary Olympics describe current or future bids while delving into the campaigns demanding host nations pay attention to economic, social, humanitarian, and environmental concerns.
A first-of-its-kind collection, Winters of Discontent profiles the wide range of activists and social movements that have organized against the Winter Olympics.
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