Andrew BarshayAndrew E. Barshay teaches modern Japanese history at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of three books. The first, State and Intellectual in Imperial Japan: The Public Man in Crisis (UC Press, 1988), exploredthe notion of the “public” in imperial Japan, finding it to have been hegemonized by the state, and left open to remaking by Japan’s defeat. The second, The Social Sciences in Modern Japan: The Marxian and Modernist Traditions (UC Press, 2004), turned to the idea of developmental backwardness or lateness in Japan and tracked its persistence among social thinkers and social scientists from the 1890s and across the divide of 1945. The most recent, The Gods Left First: The Captivity and Repatriation of Japanese POWs in Northeast Asia, 1945-1956 (UC Press, 2013) delved into the experience of imperial collapse through a study of the internment in Siberian labor camps and eventual repatriation of some 600,000 captured soldiers of Japan’s Kwantung Army. In his current research, Barshay uses the history of Japan’s national railway system to understand how Japanese society remade itself in the wake of catastrophic defeat in 1945. Read More Read Less