Dr Beatrice Trefalt
Qualifications
Contact Details
Teaching Units
Supervision
Research Interests
Major Publications
Biography
Arriving in Australia from Swizerland in 1990, I first developed my interest in Japan and Japanese in my undergraduate degree at La Trobe University, where I completed a double major in history and Japanese. I was able to indulge my fascination with post-war Japanese history in my Honours year, when I studied the Shōwa Emperor’s Monologue and wrote a thesis on the manipulation of symbols by Japanese elites and Occupation Forces after the defeat. Thanks to a summer scholarship at the Australian War Memorial, I was further able to develop my interest in war and its place in national memories.
My Phd, focussed on the return of so-called 'stragglers’ (soldiers who didn’t know the war was over) to Japan over the period between 1950-1975, and their representation in the Japanese media as a way to trace the development of popular memory of the war in Japan. A Japanese government scholarship enabled me to spend two years in Tokyo to carry out research..
After several years in the history department of the University of Newcastle, where I taught Japanese history, as well as Chinese and world history and historical theory and method courses, I joined the staff of the Japanese studies section at Monash in 2006.
I continue to research topics relating to the war and to legacies of the war in Japan. In particular, with the help of grants from the Australian Research council, I am completing a manuscript on the political activities of Japanese repatriates both during and after the Occupation, and am working with Robert Cribb (ANU) Sandra Wilson (Murdoch) and Dean Aszkielowicz (Murdoch) on a book dealing with the repatriation and release of Japanese war criminals.
Qualifications
PhD, Murdoch University, 2002
Title of thesis: Unexpected Returns: Japanese Army Stragglers and Memories of the War in Japan, 1950-1975
Certificate of Japanese Language Proficiency Level 1, Tokyo, 1997
Bachelor of Arts (First Class Honours), La Trobe University, 1994
Contact Details
| Room: | W420 Menzies Building (Building 11), Clayton Campus |
| Phone: | 61 3 9905 5118 |
| Email: | Beatrice.Trefalt@monash.edu |
| Fax: | 61 3 9905 5437 |
| Mailing Address: | Dr B. Trefalt School of Languages, Cultures and Linguistics Building 11 Monash University Clayton Australia 3800 |
Teaching Units
I teach units in Japanese studies and Asian Studies, including a unit on Japanese history called Japan as Empire: from Meiji to 1945 (ATS2652/3652), and a unit on the politics of war memory and commemoration in the Asia Pacific called War and Memory in the Asia Pacific: legacies of World War II (ATS2382/3382). I also contribute guest lectures in a number of other units, and am involved in the teaching of Honours at School level.
Supervision
I have previously supervised Honours, masters and PhD theses dealing variously with history, political debates about history, oral history, popular memory in Japanese studies but also other settings.
I am willing to supervise in the following areas:
- Topics relating to Japanese history, especially post-war history, occupation history, history of war crimes, any aspect of the 1950s, war legacies, disputes about representations of the past
- Topics relating to the Second World War, on the Japanese homefront, in the colonies, and in the occupied areas of China, Southeast Asia and the Pacific.
- Migration topics, especially forced migration, dislocation and forced repatriations, especially in the wake of World War II.
- Topics relating to constructions of national identity, migrant identity, minority group identity etc.
- I would also be glad to discuss possible topics in gender studies, minority studies, and popular cultures.
Research Interests
I am currently researching and writing on the topic of post-war repatriation to Japan from the end of the war to the end of the 1950s, the experiences of Japanese soldiers in the Asia Pacific Wars and after demobilisation, and the politics of repatriation and release of Japanese BC level war criminals, and on aspects of the Occupation of Japan.
At the same time, I continue to work on various aspects of the Asia-Pacific War, on the representation of the war with Japan in Australia and elsewhere, on the experiences of Japanese soldiers, and on the Occupation of Japan.
Major Publications
Japanese Army Stragglers and Memories of the War in Japan, 1950-1975, London, RoutledgeCurzon, 2003
Books
Repatriation to Defeated Japan, London, Routledge, forthcoming 2011
Competing Voices from The Pacific War (with Sean Brawley and Chris Dixon), Denver, Greenwood Press, 2009
Chapters in Books
'Australia, the war, Japan – and the absence of Asia’ in Outside Asia: Japanese and Autralian identities and encounters in flux, ed. Stephen Alomes et alt. Clayton: Japanese Studies Centre,61-72.
'Remnants of Empire in the Cold War: how post-war repatriation to Japan occasionally kept open the 'bamboo curtain’’, in Localisation and Globalisation in Asia, Vol 1, ed. James Baxter, Kyoto: International Research Centre for Japanese Studies, 2010, 155-170.
'Coming Home Defeated: Japanese Soldiers and Transitions from War to Peace after World War II’, in Aranzazu Usandigaza and Andrew Monnickendam (eds), Back to Peace: Recrimination and Reconciliation in the Afterwar Period, Indiana, University of Notre Dame Press, 2007.
‘The Japanese Imperial Army and Fanaticism in the Second World War’, in Matthew Hughes and Gaynor Johnson, eds, War and Fanaticism, London, Frank Cass, 2005.
‘War, Commemoration and National Identity in Japan, 1868-1975’, in Sandra Wilson (ed.), Nation and Nationalism in Japan, London, RoutledgeCurzon, 2002, 115-135
Refereed Articles
'Hostages to international relations? The repatriation of Japanese war criminals from the Philippines, Japanese Studies, vol 31, no 2 (2011) pp. 191-209.
‘After the Battle for Saipan: the Internment of Japanese Civilians at Camp Susupe, 1944-1946’, Japanese Studies, vol. 29, no. 3 (December 2009), 337-352.
‘A Peace Worth Having: Delayed Repatriations and Domestic Debate over the San Francisco Peace Treaty’, Japanese Studies, Vol. 27 No. 2 (September 2007), 173-187.
‘Opposition to Peace: Repatriation groups and the San Francisco Peace Treaty’, forthcoming.
‘A homecoming of Aliens: repatriations of Japanese citizens from China, 1953’, forthcoming.
‘Waiting Women: the Return of Stragglers and Japanese Constructions of Womanhood in Collective Memories of World War II, 1972-1974’, Intersections: Gender, History and Culture in the Asian Context, issue 5, May 2001 (http://wwwsshe.murdoch.edu.au/intersections/issue5/beatrice.html).
‘A Straggler Returns: Onoda Hirō and Japanese Memories of the War’, War and Society, Vol. 17, no. 2 (October 1999), 111-124.