Ebooks for the Classroom+Faculty

In a Sea of Bitterness: Refugees during the Sino-Japanese War
ISBN: 9780674062986
Platform/Publisher: JSTOR / Harvard University Press
Digital rights: Users: unlimited; Printing: chapter; Download: chapter
Subjects: Sino-Japanese War 1937–1945 -- Refugees;

Opening with an eye-witness account of the 1938 Japanese attack on the city of Qiaosi, which resulted in 1,000 dead within a three-mile radius, Loyola University professor Schoppa traces the historic record of Chinese refugees' "spacial, social, and psychological displacement," and considers the institutional policies and cultural practices that made the dislocation more traumatic. The Japanese invasion led some tens of millions of Chinese refugees to flee their homes. Once they left, many encountered hostility in new localities. The country's relatively few refugee camps were inadequately funded and quickly overrun, and ultimately, only 50% of refugees received aid or relief. Schoppa relies primarily on the direct accounts of diarists to illustrate the confusion and emotional distress that accompanied the physical hardships of being without a home during wartime-particularly for a culture that places such a high value on the concept of home. The era Schoppa revisits in this book is a dark one-as one refugee says, the loss of his home in the war thrust him into a "sea of bitterness"-but with measured analysis and an arsenal of facts, he sheds light on the war's forgotten refugees. (Nov.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

R. Keith Schoppa is Professor and The Edward and Catherine Doehler Chair in Asian History at Loyola University, Maryland.