2017 Events:
Publication of Yasuko Claremont Citizen Power: Postwar Reconciliation
The Oriental Society of Australia is pleased to announce the publication of Dr.Yasuko Claremont’s bilingual book in English and Japanese, Citizen Power: postwar reconciliation, The Oriental Society of Australia, distributed by the Sydney University Press: http://purl.library.usyd.edu.au/osa/9780959226928 , 111 photographs on citizens’ activities, 200pp.
When the 70th postwar anniversary conference: Wounds, Scars, and Healing: Civil Society and Postwar Pacific Basin Reconciliation, was held in 2015 at the University of Sydney we organized a grassroots workshop, a photographic exhibition on the theme of reconciliation, a screening the 1953 film Hiroshima, and promoted the performance of a new Noh play in English entitled Oppenheimer. This book resulted from the photographic exhibition, focusing on how active the citizens of Japan have been in engaging in reconciliation activities. At the book’s launch Professor Tessa Morris Suzuki, ANU, remarked that “the case studies presented in its pages provide inspiring models for others to follow, and give fresh hope for the future of ‘reconciliation from below.”
ANZAC Day recognition for Dr. Yasuko Claremont by the Australia Japan Foundation
Dr Yasuko Claremont recently retired from the University of Sydney’s Japanese Studies Department, but is still actively publishing several works from a major conference and other events held in 2015 to mark the 70th anniversary of the end of the Asia-Pacific War, for a 5-year project on grassroots post-War reconciliation initiatives. (See also her recent translation of a well-known book about the 321 junior high school students killed by the 1945 atomic bombing of Hiroshima.) One event was a photographic exhibition displayed at the University of Sydney library, and Dr Claremont and photograph contributors are now bringing together photographs and commentaries together into a bilingual book entitled “Citizen Power: Postwar Reconciliation”, published by the Oriental Society of Australia, and distributed by Sydney University Press.
For more details see: Yasuko Claremont et al, Citizen Power: Postwar Reconciliation