On Yoshie Hotta’s Experience of Employment in China : “Cultural Affairs Committee on Japanese” and Japanese People in Post-war China

DING, Shili

doi:2019.8.1.173

The Journal of Japanese Language Literature Studies > Volume 8(1); 2019 > Article

Article

Border Crossings: The Journal of Japanese-Language Literature Studies 2019;8(1): 173-190.
doi: https://doi.org/10.22628/bcjjl.2019.8.1.173

On Yoshie Hotta’s Experience of Employment in China : “Cultural Affairs Committee on Japanese” and Japanese People in Post-war China

Shili DING

四川外国語大学日本語学部講師

堀田善衞の被徴用体験

Correspondence Shili DING ,Email: dingshili1990@163.com

Published online: 30 June 2019.

This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License ( http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

ABSTRACT

From December 1945 to December 1946, Hotta Yoshie (1918-1998) was employed by the Cultural Work Committee on Japanese, a group under the Central Publicity Department of the Nationalist (Kuomin) government. The predecessor of the committee was the International Research Institute and the International Publicity Office of the Central Publicity Department, which were known as intelligence agencies on Japan for the wartime Chongqing Nationalist government. Some Japanese prisoners, who would later become members of Chongqing faction of the committee, were appointed by both agencies to engage in propaganda towards Japan. At the same time, many Japanese who had settled in Shanghai after the war were recruited by the Cultural Work Committee on Japanese when it was established. Those Japanese people are tentatively defined as the Shanghai faction in this article. Although Hotta belonged to the Shanghai faction, he maintained constant contact with the Chongqing faction. Unlike many other members of both factions, Hotta reflected on the Japanese invasion of China after the war. He also criticized China for being, as he saw it, oversensitive to the revival of Japanese militarism.

Keywords: Cultural Affairs Committee on Japanese, The International Research Institute, The International Publicity Office of the Central Publicity Department, Recruited by the Nationalist(Kuomin) government, Perceptions of China

キ―ワ―ド: 対日文化工作委員会, 国際問題研究所, 中央宣伝部国際宣伝処, 留用, 中国認識