Andrew E. Barshay

Barshay explored dimensions of social trauma in modern Japanese history through three books that combine scholarly rigor with moral interrogation, a signature of his work throughout a substantial body of additional essays. His books deal with the dilemmas for principled public men of responding to the ever-widening scope of state violence as Japan moved toward the Pacific War; with the emergence of a prewar social science shaped by strong presumptions of Japan's backwardness; and with the repatriation after 1945 of some six million Japanese stranded in a now vanquished empire. The last is a treatment of war responsibility and punishment--both personal and societal, both fixed in time and exemplary--that uses biography to plumb the experience of victimizing and victimization.