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Body of Empire, by Mariko Nagai, recounts the experiences of women in war with a focus on Japanese women, specifically nihonjin women, in the context of the Pacific War/World War II.

What I liked:

• Coincidentally, I once considered writing my undergraduate thesis on the experiences of Asian women in the American West, specifically Japanese women, and even more specifically, Japanese women doing sex work. Nagai’s work appears to have been published after I graduated, but I very much wish I would have had access to this book at the time, not only as a research source, but also as an example of the type of scholarly research being conducted by a fellow Japanese woman. I attended a very white college with a very white faculty – I believe they are slowly improving, emphasis on slowly – and was quite frankly discouraged from pursuing a major related to anything Asian because the chairs of all the Asian-related departments (including languages!) were white men. I often wonder what would have happened if I had chosen to attend the other school in my top two, a much larger university with a correspondingly larger number of faculty and students of color. Ah well, spilled milk and all that. Anyway, all this to say, I really appreciate Nagai researching and writing this book. I imagine some of the sources were difficult to work through, to say the least, and I admire her for presenting the final project in such a straightforward and unembellished manner.
• The postwar photographs of nihonjin women and US soldiers felt like such an important piece of documentation to include in this book. I think particularly of the photographs where the nihonjin women – women who look like me, who could be my family members – are smiling as white soldiers physically wrest them into certain positions or appear to be pressuring them to look a certain way. Any Japanese person who has ever witnessed nihonjin interact with white people, white Americans, in a situation that might have resulted in a conflict if the other party was not nihonjin, likely knows what I’m talking about. I even hear from non-Japanese POC USians how ‘Japanese people are so nice’ and so on, and I often marvel at the depth of the white default mentality behind this attitude.
• Nagai’s juxtaposition of testimony from women survivors and ex-soldiers (should they also be considered survivors in the same breath?) emphasizes the mental aspect of people’s wartime experiences. Although I have read several works highlighting the horrors experienced by women in the war, I’m far less familiar with the firsthand experiences of nihonjin soldiers. This may perhaps represent an (un)conscious desire on my part to avoid digging too deeply into the nihonjin side of wartime experiences (as opposed to nikkei wartime experiences, which blog readers know is a major focal point for me). I had not previously considered what it takes for humans to act in the ways nihonjin soldiers acted during the war. I had not thought about the role of dehumanization in creating a soldier or what the psychological profile of a nihonjin soldier might look like. None of this excuses how nihonjin soldiers treated other humans during the war. I am grateful to Nagai for providing a diversity of soldiers’ perspectives, to remind readers to look beyond the basic assumption that all nihonjin soldiers did what they did out of unquestioning loyalty to the empire.

What I learned:

• Reading this book made me think about the gaps in my own family history. My mother’s parents would have lived through the war in Japan; I wonder how their lives intersected with the human trafficking happening at the time. Some of my aunts would have been young children in the immediate postwar period – what were they told about staying safe around the occupying troops? What kinds of impressions of the US did my grandparents and their children develop during and after the war? I hope I remember to ask the next time I visit.

Questions I had:

• Is there a Japanese edition of this book? If so, did Nagai write it herself? I’m not familiar with the politics and practices of academic translation in Japan, but I think of, for example, the potential differences between translations by a nihonjin woman versus a nihonjin man.
• Is this book widely available? I actually searched online for the publisher and bought directly from them and did not check Amazon or any other major retailer, but I certainly hope, for the future of nikkei, Japanese, and World War II studies, that this book is not only easily available to students and rising academics, but also included on the syllabus of any course focused on human experiences during World War II.
• Have any women survivors of the war read this book? If so, what was their reaction?
• Did Nagai envision a particular audience for this book? Did she envision a particular reaction to this book?
• How are the stories of today’s women in today’s wars being told? For example, I noticed the primetime news provided deep coverage of the experiences of Ukrainian people in the immediate aftermath of the Russian invasion, but rarely comments on the military situations in Africa or Latin America.

Follow-up:

• I look forward to Nagai’s next academic work.