SMLC Seminar:
From Internment to Occupation: A Japanese American Observer’s Transpacific Sociological Practices

Dr. Noriaki Hoshino ( Department of History at Hong Kong Baptist University)

Date: 11 Apr 2018 (Wed)
Time: 4:30 pm – 6:00pm
Venue: Room 4.34, Run Run Shaw Tower, Centennial Campus, HKU

This presentation deals with the Japanese American Sociologist Shibutani Tamotsu’s observational record of Japanese American soldiers in the United States and Japan during and after World War II. Shibutani Tamotsu (1920-2004) was a second-generation Japanese-American who served as a participant–observer in an academic research group during the Japanese American internment in World War II. He later focused his observations on a single Japanese American military unit, which was stationed in Japan during the early period of American occupation. Based on this observation, he later published The Derelicts of Company K (1978), which, contrary to the dominant narrative of wartime Japanese American soldiers, described turmoil and “demoralization” within the unit. My presentation analyzes this book and his unpublished records, as it reveals a complicated relationship between racial politics and knowledge production during the occupation of Japan and wartime America.

Noriaki Hoshino is an Assistant Professor in the Department of History at Hong Kong Baptist University and earned his PhD in History from Cornell University. His areas of specialization include modern Japanese, East Asian, and Asian American Studies/history, transpacific studies, intellectual history, and cultural/postcolonial studies. He has published articles in both Japanese and English and is currently working on a book manuscript on transpacific Japanese migrations and multiethnic imperial formations in Japan and the United States.

All are welcome. No registration is required.

For enquiries, please contact Dr. Emily Chow, at echowq@hku.hk.