Mordecai George Sheftall is an American author and scholar living in Japan since 1987.
He is a professor of modern Japanese cultural history and communication in the Faculty of Informatics at Shizuoka University, a branch campus of the Japanese national university system. Sheftall's writing and research activities focus on the modern evolution of Japanese national identity, with particular emphasis on the Japanese experience in World War II and the lingering effects of that conflict on both collective and individual Japanese consciousness.
Fluent and literate in Japanese, he is a frequent commentator on modern Japanese history, culture and identity issues in public symposia and Japanese broadcast and print news media. He has also been a featured commentator and technical advisor on the History Channel series "Dogfights." He has contributed chapters to scholarly volumes on the legacy of the Second World War in modern Japanese society and on the historical, cultural and sociological analysis of the effect of military defeat on modern societies. His most important work to date has been the critically acclaimed Penguin Group title Blossoms in the Wind: Human Legacies of the Kamikaze (2005), based on interviews with survivors of Japan's wartime kamikaze program.
Sheftall graduated from Stuyvesant High School in New York City, attended the United States Military Academy at West Point for two years as a member of the Class of 1984, and received a B.A. in Political Science/International Relations from Fordham University in 1985. He holds master's degrees from California State University and the University of Birmingham, and received his Ph.D in International Relations Studies from Waseda University in Tokyo. Sheftall's Waseda dissertation employs a methodological framework based on Terror Management Theory to analyze the evolution of kamikaze ideology during Japan's Imperial Era (1895-1945) and the interpretive discourse of this historical legacy in postwar Japan.
From 2012-2013, he was a visiting research fellow at the International Research Center for Japanese Studies in Kyoto, researching discourses of war memory in postwar Japan and the effect of same on modern Japanese culture.
Kamikaze, officially Shinpū Tokubetsu Kōgekitai, were a part of the Japanese Special Attack Units of military aviators who flew suicide attacks for the Empire of Japan against Allied naval vessels in the closing stages of the Pacific campaign of World War II, intending to destroy warships more effectively than with conventional air attacks. About 3,800 kamikaze pilots died during the war in attacks that killed more than 7,000 Allied naval personnel, sank several dozen warships, and damaged scores more.
Hegemony is the political, economic, and military predominance of one state over other states, either regional or global.
The Yokosuka MXY-7 Ohka is a purpose-built, rocket-powered human-guided kamikaze attack-aircraft deployed by Japan against Allied ships in the Pacific Ocean theater toward the end of World War II. Although extremely fast, the Ohka had a very short range, so it had to be carried into action as a parasite aircraft by a much larger bomber that was vulnerable to carrier-borne fighters. In action during the Battle of Okinawa in 1945, Ohkas succeeded in sinking or damaging some escort-vessels and transport ships, but never sank any major warships. The Japanese developed improved versions in an attempt to overcome the aircraft's shortcomings, but they came too late for deployment.
Stuart Henry McPhail Hall was a Jamaican-born British Marxist sociologist, cultural theorist, and political activist. Hall — along with Richard Hoggart and Raymond Williams — was one of the founding figures of the school of thought known as British Cultural Studies or the Birmingham School of Cultural Studies.
Takijirō Ōnishi was an admiral in the Imperial Japanese Navy during World War II who came to be known as the father of the kamikaze.
Nihonjinron is a genre of ethnocentric nationalist literary work that focuses on issues of Japanese national and cultural identity. Nihonjinron posits concepts such as Japanese being a "unique isolate, having no known affinities with any other race", and has been described as racist.
Ango Sakaguchi was a Japanese writer, who wrote short stories and novels and was an essayist. His real name was Heigo Sakaguchi.
Kokutai is a concept in the Japanese language translatable as "system of government", "sovereignty", "national identity, essence and character", "national polity; body politic; national entity; basis for the Emperor's sovereignty; Japanese constitution" or nation.
Masafumi Arima was an admiral in the Imperial Japanese Navy in World War II. An experienced aviator, he is sometimes credited with being the first to use the kamikaze attack, although official accounts may have been invented for propaganda purposes. Arima personally led an air attack against United States Navy Task Force 38 in the Formosa Air Battle and was killed in action.
Hybridity, in its most basic sense, refers to mixture. The term originates from biology and was subsequently employed in linguistics and in racial theory in the nineteenth century. Its contemporary uses are scattered across numerous academic disciplines and is salient in popular culture. Hybridity is used in discourses about race, postcolonialism, identity, anti-racism and multiculturalism, and globalization, developed from its roots as a biological term.
USS LSM(R)-189 was a LSM(R)-188 class Landing Ship Medium (rocket) of the United States Navy during World War II. She was commanded by Lieutenant James Malcolm Stewart, USNR during the Battle of Okinawa.
Akira Iriye is a Japanese-born American historian and orientalist. He is a historian of diplomatic history, international, and transnational history. He taught at University of Chicago and Harvard University until his retirement in 2005.
Chen Yingzhen was a Taiwanese author. Chen is also notable for having served a prison sentence for "subversive activity" between 1968 and 1973. He was active as writer from the late 1950s until his death in 2016.
Kiyohide Shima was an admiral in the Imperial Japanese Navy during World War II.
Shigeyoshi Miwa, was an admiral in the Imperial Japanese Navy during World War II. He commanded the Japanese submarine forces during the attack on Pearl Harbor.
Postcolonialism is the critical academic study of the cultural, political and economic consequences of colonialism and imperialism, focusing on the impact of human control and exploitation of colonized people and their lands. The field started to emerge in the 1960s, as scholars from previously colonized countries began publishing on the lingering effects of colonialism, developing a critical theory analysis of the history, culture, literature, and discourse of imperial power.
Postcolonial international relations is a branch of scholarship that approaches the study of international relations (IR) using the critical lens of postcolonialism. This critique of IR theory suggests that mainstream IR scholarship does not adequately address the impacts of colonialism and imperialism on current day world politics. Despite using the language of post-, scholars of postcolonial IR argue that the legacies of colonialism are ongoing, and that critiquing international relations with this lens allows scholars to contextualize global events. By bridging postcolonialism and international relations, scholars point to the process of globalization as a crucial point in both fields, due to the increases in global interactions and integration. Postcolonial IR focuses on the re-narrativization of global politics to create a balanced transnational understanding of colonial histories, and attempts to tie non-Western sources of thought into political praxis.
Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney is a noted anthropologist and the William F. Vilas Professor of Anthropology at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. She is the author of fourteen single-authored books in English and in Japanese, in addition to numerous articles. Her books have been translated into many other languages, including Italian, Korean, Polish and Russian. Ohnuki-Tierney was appointed the Distinguished Chair of Modern Culture at the Library of Congress in DC in 2009 and then in 2010 Fellow of Institut d’Études Avancées-Paris. She is a member of The American Academy of Arts and Sciences, its mid-west council member, and a recipient of John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship among other prestigious awards.
Rotem Kowner is an Israeli historian and psychologist specializing in the history of modern Japan, and a full professor in the Department of Asian Studies at the University of Haifa.
Takashi Inoue is a public relations practitioner, scholar, and theorist. His theories include the "three forces of hyper-globalization", the "Self-Correction Model of Public Relations", and the "Japan model". He was the first to teach public relations courses at a major university in post-war Japan and is the Chairman and CEO of Inoue Public Relations, which he founded in 1970. He is a visiting professor at the Graduate School of Management, Kyoto University and at Kobe Institute of Computing. He was quoted in foreign press reports on the East Japan Earthquake and the 2018 arrest in Japan of Nissan chairman Carlos Ghosn. He has written about modern Japan's lack of PR skills and has described the resulting "Deficiency of Japanese diplomacy", and in 2010 he wrote that corporate Japan's scandals have created "A culture of apologies: Communicating crises in Japan"
This page is based on this Wikipedia article Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.
