The Hoover Institution Library & Archives and Hoover Institution Press Present the Fanning the Flames Speaker Series in Celebration of the Publication Fanning the Flames: Propaganda in Modern Japan edited by Kay Ueda. The second session highlights “War Fever” as Fueled by the Media and Popular Culture: The Path Taken by Meiji Japan's Policies of “Enrich the Country” and “Strengthen the Armed Forces” on Thursday, June 10, at 4:00 pm PDT.
Japan’s Meiji Restoration brought swift changes through Japanese adoption of Western-style modernization and imperial expansion. Fanning the Flames brings together a range of scholarly essays and collected materials from the Hoover Institution Library & Archives detailing how Japanese propaganda played an active role in fostering national identity and mobilizing grassroots participation in the country’s transformation and wartime activities, from with the First Sino-Japanese War (1894–95) to the end of World War II.
The Fanning the Flames Speaker Series highlights conversations with leading scholars of modern East Asian history, art, and propaganda and is presented in conjunction with the book and upcoming physical exhibitions. To learn more and to see past events, videos, and highlights, please visit our new interactive online exhibition website, Fanning the Flames: Propaganda in Modern Japan .
WATCH THE DISCUSSION
Participant Bios
Barak Kushner
Barak Kushner is professor of East Asian history and the chair of Japanese Studies in the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Cambridge. He has edited numerous books and written several monographs, including the award-winning Men to Devils, Devils to Men: Japanese War Crimes and Chinese Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015). In 2020 he hosted several episodes of a major Chinese documentary on Japanese war crimes and is currently writing a book titled The Construction of Injustice in East Asia: Japan versus Its Neighbors.
Michael R. Auslin
Michael Auslin is the Payson J. Treat Distinguished Research Fellow in Contemporary Asia at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. A historian by training, he specializes in US policy in Asia and geopolitical issues in the Indo-Pacific region. His publications include Negotiating with Imperialism: The Unequal Treaties and the Culture of Japanese Diplomacy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004) and Asia’s New Geopolitics: Essays on Reshaping the Indo-Pacific (Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, 2020). Auslin was an associate professor of history at Yale University, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, and a visiting professor at the University of Tokyo.
Toshihiko Kishi
Toshihiko Kishi is a professor at the Center for Southeast Asian Studies, Kyoto University. His research covers twentieth-century Asian history, East Asian regional studies, and media studies. He has published extensively on East Asian history, most recently as co-editor of Picturing Taiwan: The Asahi Shimbun Press Photo Selections (Taipei: Institute of Taiwan History, Academia Sinica, 2020), and many other books. Professor Kishi is also a member of the Science Council of Japan and a senior researcher at the Research Center for Science Systems, Japan Society for the Promotion of Science.
Kaoru (Kay) Ueda
Kaoru (Kay) Ueda is the curator of the Japanese Diaspora Collection at the Hoover Institution Library & Archives. She curated many of the materials used in the Fanning the Flames book and exhibition. Ueda manages the Japanese Diaspora Initiative, endowed by an anonymous gift to promote the study of overseas Japanese history during the Empire of Japan period. She is the editor of On a Collision Course: The Dawn of Japanese Migration in the Nineteenth Century (Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, 2020).
