My Peace Study

If you are born in Japan, you get peace education. As the anniversary of the end of the war comes around, war-related content is served up to you. It is a gloomy business overall, and some people would rather not. Some people think, oh, the war again. I am fairly much that type myself.

Still, one day a year to think about peace is not too much to ask. "My Peace Study" is a peace-education site made for the people who think, oh, this again.

Tap a heading to open the pieces in that chapter

日本語

What this is, what I learned, what you can learn here, and what to read first

What is this?

  • A site where you can do peace education
  • The data I made here is free to use in educational work (data made by other people needs checking)
  • The author has no connection to any particular political organization

What I learned

  • I researched what ordinary people were doing, across every period
  • I read the prefaces and afterwords of roughly 6,000 books published right after the defeat
  • I thought while doing the above, and researched what surrounded it

What you can learn here

  • A slice of the liberal arts
  • The war and the defeat, seen from another angle
  • What it is for a human being to be alive

Recommended

Big events and individuals2 pieces

Big events and individuals, side by side. Events happen because people are there. But there are also people with no connection to the events.
Next Door to the Big EventsWhat people were doing right next to the events that make it into a chronology. Switch to whichever reading style you like. The Numbers at the Defeat: Macro and MicroNational statistics and the numbers that turn up in personal records, laid side by side.

Reading the prefaces and afterwords3 pieces

Read the prefaces and afterwords. Read all of them that can be read. Doing that, some things become clear.
The Image of the Defeat, and What the Prefaces Actually SaidEleven widely held images of the defeat, checked against the actual prefaces. Reading Some of the Prefaces and AfterwordsFollow the tags and read the prefaces and afterwords of the period as they are. The Same Person, Two RecordsThe 23 people who appear in both "Next Door to the Big Events" and the prefaces and afterwords, matched by name.

What I wrote while doing this peace education9 pieces

Pieces written while doing the peace education. Beyond the prefaces and afterwords, I researched what surrounded them. I publish books too, so I think the quality is decent.
The People Who Felt Refreshed When the War Beganabout 1,100 wordsQuite a lot of people felt refreshed about it. The People Who Listened to Shortwave Radio During the Warabout 1,200 wordsYouth in wartime: hard-line leftists and hard-line rightists breaking the law together, on good terms. The People Who Wanted to Keep Publishing Magazines Even in Wartimeabout 3,800 wordsThe force of Tsuchiya Bunmei; those who kept their promise, those who could not, and those who carried it on. The Stubborn Old Man of the Gas Industry Who Did Not Flip His Position Between the Eve of Defeat and Just After Itabout 1,200 wordsThe intellectuals are said to have turned 180 degrees. There were stubborn old men who did not turn at all. The People the War Made Stupiderabout 2,000 wordsThe war made part of some very intelligent people's minds go stupid. The People Who Published in 1946about 1,600 wordsIn 1946, with printing conditions at their worst, people forced books and magazines out anyway. I Read All 5,728 Prefaces and Afterwordsabout 22,000 wordsA record of reading every preface and afterword in the books published between June 1945 and September 1946. The Repentance of the Hundred Million Was Probably an "Oh, That Again, Lol"about 1,400 wordsThere was a hundred-million-strong self-reflection during the war too. So the repentance was not a new story either. If a World Championship of War Remorse Broke Out, Japan Might Winabout 3,300 wordsTry to measure remorse and you stop knowing what it is you are supposed to measure.

Counting what I read2 pieces

My subjectivity; the numbers are objective.
Analyzing Subjective Data ObjectivelyMeasuring the notes I picked subjectively, first of all as subjectivity. The Skew in the NDC Categories Just After the End of the WarCompare the 3,564 items published in 1945-46 against 1.58 million across all periods and you can see which kinds of books are abnormally frequent.

For people who want to study a bit more3 pieces

Information for people who want to study war and peace in the ordinary way.

A Road Map to General KnowledgeFor people who have come to want to study the war directly. Studying Peace Through Back Issues of Municipal NewslettersReading the defeat and the recovery out of municipal newsletters. How to Build a Small SystemA guide for people who want to systematize what they have learned.

Cautions, what I think peace education is, and who I am3 pieces

The data used here, the reason it was made, and the person making it.
About the Data Used Here: How It Was Counted, and How It Is SkewedHow the counts are made, and the four skews in this data (subjective extraction / it is promotional copy / it passed censorship / the people who could publish were a minority). What I Think Peace Education Is, and How I Made ThisWhy I made it, and how I made it. About meThis is the kind of person making it.