"No art, however pure, can be created or understood apart from the politics of its time." So writes coeditor Marlene Mayo in her introduction to this extremely interesting collection. Its genesis was a 1992 University of Maryland conference entitled "War, Reconstruction and Creativity in East Asia, 1920-1960," the aim of which was to draw attention to the problems of writers and artists in China and Japan and Japanese-occupied Taiwan and Korea in the years before, during and after World War II.
Augmented, the collected papers are now divided into three sections. The first is devoted to the occupied territories, the second to World War II in East Asia and the Pacific, and the third to occupied Japan and postcolonial Asia. The second section is of particular interest, as much of this material has never been written about before.
Japan, as is well known, mobilized the arts in its attempted creation of a Greater East Asia. Writers, painters and film directors were given militant roles whether they wanted them or not, something which occasioned dilemmas, decisions and self-deceptions, as well as a great deal of self-serving memory loss once World War II was finally over.