The Complete Collection of Documents relating the Japanese Home Front during the Showa Era
第1回配本 ２０１２年12月刊行済み 本体７５、０００円＋税 ISBN978-4-905421-28-3
第2回配本 ２０１３年５月刊行済み 本体７５、０００円＋税 ISBN978-4-905421-32-0
第3回配本 ２０１３年12月刊行済み 本体７５、０００円＋税 ISBN978-4-905421-36-8
The Complete Collection of Documents relating the Japanese Home Front during the Showa Era, total 9 volumes, 225,000 Yen (total all volumes), 2012-2013, edited and commented by Toshiya Ichinose, published by Rikka-Press
During the period of the China and Pacific Wars (1931-45), how did the Japanese army, government and communities comfort, encourage, control, and suppress the home front, another battlefield, in order to ensure that soldiers would be willing to give their lives? The Collection shows and sheds light on forgotten and real situations arising in relation to how to mobilize the population and how to support the war on the home front. Families that lost wage-earners, families of soldiers who died in the war, disabled soldiers and returned soldiers ― the Japanese army, government and communities gave them all kinds of aid and support by using female advisers and social workers, assisting “widows” with finding jobs, controlling their sexuality, settling disputes over the distribution of pensions, assisting disabled soldiers with finding wives, and so on, in order to mentally and materially control them. At the same time community groups provided home-front support by editing and publishing ”stories from home” for soldiers at the battlefront.
We select and reprint 66 documents relating the home front. The documents are indispensable to research and study of Japanese modern history, including women’s history, military history, the history of military education, and life histories in wartime.
In the 1920s, when the concept of “child rights” began to be recognized in the world and eugenics was thought of as an innovative science, and when many children had been neglected, treated like toys, and abused, this magazine was published by the Humane Association for Children of Osaka (Japan). The Association was founded under the banner of the dignity of children in order to promote the welfare of children at the national level.
The Association held so-called “research meetings for babies” (Akanbo Shinsakai) in civic halls in Osaka City, with the cooperation of women’s groups and college students, seeking the healthcare and welfare of children. Not only in the Kansai area but also in places including Tokyo, Nagoya, Sapporo, Korea, and Taiwan (the last two countries were Japanese colonies at the time) the movement developed widely. Through periodical health checks by doctors and nurses, it raised consciousness as to child health, and through detailed observational research of mothers, it identified their folkloric conditions of child bearing and child raising and their consciousness of child raising. Through its existence of twenty-one years, the Association’s journal “A Century of Children” published any and all information relating to children: poverty of children, children in war, children in natural disaster, health conditions of children, children with disabilities, children having need of protection and supports, working mothers, birth control, health care of mothers and their children, discrimination against illegitimate children, etc.
The collection reprints valuable and long-awaited documents that are very useful for research of various issues before and during the Second World War: protection and education of children, children’s literature, folklore, child psychology, protection of mothers and their children, eugenics, women’s problem and so on.