UC Press Blog

by Charles Dawn-William Huxley

The winter issue of Pacific Historical Review (scheduled to publish online on February 1) brings new insights into the Potsdam Declaration and the dropping of the atomic bomb. Additional articles include Chinese youth during the Cold War, and the labor and environmental justice work of the California Rural Legal Assistance. Read a preview of the issue's articles below:

“Mokusatsu Revisited: Kazuo Kawai and Japan’s Response to the Potsdam Declaration” by Brian P. Walsh

It may seem surprising that the Pacific Historical Review is refuting one of its own articles. But in the PHR’s winter issue, author Brian Walsh takes on a widely accepted myth about the end of World War II, and traces its origins to a 75-year-old essay in the journal. 

In 1945, the Allies’ “Potsdam Declaration” demanded the immediate and unconditional surrender of Japan’s armed forces; after Japan declined, the United States unleashed the atomic bomb. Five years later, scholar Kazuo Kawai published a Pacific Historical Review article arguing that U.S. officials had misunderstood Japan's response to the demand, by mistranslating a single word, “mokusatsu.” Kawai’s idea–that the atrocity of the atomic bomb was the catastrophic consequence of a simple, accidental mistranslation–soon became a staple of both popular media and academic literature. Historian Brian Walsh, however, carefully analyzes Japan’s response and argues that there was no misunderstanding on the part of U.S. officials at all and that Kawai’s mistranslation story is simply untrue.  

“The Qiaosheng “Problem:” The United States, Great Britain, and the Mobility of Overseas Chinese Youth in the Early Cold War” by Soo Chun Lu

Concern over allegiance to communism was a staple theme in the Cold War era. In the 1950s, this obsession created tensions among Britain, the United States, and ethnic Chinese populations in Southeast Asia. These colonizing powers worried that the migration of ethnic Chinese youth to and from mainland China was a security concern due to their allegiance to communities in the region. The result? Travel restriction policies and schemes by Britain and the United States to control migration. Lu shows how this mixed and complicated brew of tension brought what had previously been a normal part of travel in the Chinese community to the unwelcome attention of Britain and the United States. 

“Workers in the Field and Lawyers in the Court: The California Rural Legal Assistance, Poverty Law, and Environmental Justice in Rural California” by Taylor Cozzens

 Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers Union usually take the spotlight in studies of the farm labor movement of the 1960s; but the largest poverty law agency in the nation, the California Rural Legal Assistance, also deserves its own chance to shine. This agency, historian Taylor Cozzens argues, played a foundational role in the farm labor and environmental justice movements in rural California. Mexican American communities used the CRLA to fight exploitation, exercise their agency, assert their humanity, and combat harmful policies and practices. Significant wins included restrictions on pesticide use and the reform of field sanitation and work conditions. 

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Print copies of the winter issue of Pacific Historical Review (issue 94.1) as well as other individual issues of PHR, can be purchased on the journal’s site. 

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We publish PHR in partnership with the Pacific Coast Branch of the American Historical Association.