Panel 3
Rana Mitter, chair

The Trial to Criticize a Historical Data: Recording Photographs In the Case of A History of the Falling 10 Days of Shanghai Settlement
Hirofumi Takatsuna, Nihon University
takatuna@cd.nihon-u.ac.jp

Capturing Terrorists: Japan and Chinese Resistance on the Eve of WWII
Brett Sheehan, University of Wisconsin, Madison
bsheehan@wisc.edu

Abstracts

The Trial to Criticize a Historical Data: Recording Photographs In the Case of A History of the Falling 10 Days of Shanghai Settlement
Hirofumi Takatsuna, Nihon University, Japan

A History of the Falling 10 Days of Shanghai Settlement is a photo album
that shows a photographer named Jin Makita covered the 10 days from the
withdrawal of the American Marine on Nov. 28, 1941 to the outbreak of the
Pacific War & the occupation of Shanghai Settlement by the Japanese Army on
Dec. 8. My report critically gives historical comments to the photographs in
A History of the Falling 10 Days of Shanghai Settlement.

Capturing Terrorists: Japan and Chinese Resistance on the Eve of WWII
Brett Sheehan, University of Wisconsin, Madison

Throughout the 1930s tensions between Japan and China ran high in the
northern Chinese city of Tianjin where a number of violent clashes between
Chinese and Japanese occurred. Japanese residents in Tianjin and Japanese
newspapers at home worked hard to portray the Chinese perpetrators of these
incidents as criminals and assassins. Chinese, for their part, tried to
simultaneously minimize the level of Chinese-instigated violence while
portraying themselves as victims of Japanese aggression. Photographs played
an integral role in both the planning of violence and in the public
discussion thereof. This paper uses rare materials from collections in
Japan, China, and the United States to show how photography and violence
became intimately linked in the Chinese-Japanese clashes of the 1930s. In
all cases - Chinese and Japanese, public and private - users of photographs
assumed that they represented a kind of "international" or "universal"
medium of communication that could overcome barriers created by language,
culture, political orientation, or education level.