Dr Beatrice Trefalt
Qualifications
Contact Details
Teaching Units
Supervision
Research Interests
Major Publications
Biography
I joined the staff in Japanese Studies at Monash University in 2006.
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, supported by an Australian Postgraduate Award and supervised by Dr Sandra Wilson, 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 Mombushō scholarship enabled me to spend two years in Tokyo to carry out research. I then took up an appointment 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.
My current research, funded by an Australian Research Council discovery grant, focuses on the post-war repatriation of Japanese from the former Japanese Empire, their integration into the post-war nation, and the nexus between cultural notions of national identity and institutional symbols of citizenship.
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: | (03) 9905 5118 (international: 61 3 9905 5118) |
| Email: | Beatrice.Trefalt@arts.monash.edu.au |
| Fax: | (03) 9905 5437 (international: 61 3 9905 5437) |
| Mailing Address: | Dr B. Trefalt School of Languages, Cultures and Linguistics Building 11 Monash University Clayton Australia 3800 |
Teaching Units
In 2007, I will teach the Japanese Studies Units JPS1090 Understanding contemporary Japan, and JPS2710/3710 Australia-Japan Relations. I am also looking forward to developing a unit on the Second World War in the Asia Pacific. On the language side, I am responsible for JPL2752/3752 Intermediate Reading, and endeavor to make reading Japanese a less forbidding prospect than many students seem to expect.
I am also the Honours coordinator for the Japanese program and the coordinator of the Master of Asian Studies.Supervision
I have previously supervised Honours and masters theses dealing variously with oral history and popular memory in a variety of settings.
I would be glad 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. I am particularly interested in the mechanics of the mass population movement that took more than six million people from various points of the Japanese Empire, but especially northeast Asia, back to Japan within a very short period. I am interested in the integration of these repatriates in the post-war nation, and in the construction of their national identity, and in consequence, the construction of the Japanese post-war national identity. This raises a number of interesting points of comparison with the experiences of other former colonial powers, and the reintegration of the colonial migrant in the home country (France, Great Britain, Holland provide interesting comparisons. Even closer is the case of German forced repatriations in the wake of the war). In this period, of course, the impact of the Cold War and its ideologies is clearly visible, but another major theme in this repatriation is the development of a ‘nostalgia’ for the old colonial order. I explore these themes in my writing.
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.
I am also leading a research cluster on Japanese migrants to Australia within the School, where we explore the notion of diaspora and migrant identities.
Major Publications
Monograph
Japanese Army Stragglers and Memories of the War in Japan, 1950-1975, London, RoutledgeCurzon, 2003
Chapters in Books
‘Remnants of Empire in the Cold War: how post-war repatriation to Japan occasionally kept open the ‘bamboo curtain’, forthcoming.
‘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
‘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.