■Date & Time
Monday, May 14, 2018/ 18:15～19:45
■Venue
Room 960, Bldg.#14, Waseda Campus
■Lecturer
Michiko Suzuki, PhD candidate, SOAS, University of London
Special Research Fellow, Tokyo University of Foreign Studies & Research Support Staff, Waseda University
■Title
Red Cross Nurses on the Battlefield
■Abstract
One of the most salient wartime relief operations of the Japanese Red Cross Society (JRCS) was the battlefield deployment of nurses. According to official records of the Society, between July 1937 and August 1945, the JRCS organised a total of 960 relief parties and sent them to battlefields, medical ships, and hospitals. Of these, 42 teams were sent by colonial offices. The total number of medical aid workers including nurses reached 35,785.
There has been considerable confusion over the historiographies of Red Cross relief nurses and military nurses (jūgun kangofu) on the battlefield. Scholars even failed to examine the humanitarian activities of JRCS male nurses. Most historiographies of JRCS nurses focused on the politicisation of gender roles as women were mobilised by the wartime state. JRCS nurses, however, were still a part of the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement, collaborating with nurses from other National Red Cross Societies during the war. This presentation will be shaped into a counter-narrative to the military and national history of Red Cross nurses, usually told in terms of the controversial relationships between states and humanitarian organisations. It will explore the extent to which the Red Cross nurses applied the principals of humanitarian professionalism to their battlefield operations.
■Coordinator
Naoyuki UMEMORI (Professor, Faculty of Political Science and Economics)
Yoshihiro NAKANO (Junior Researcher, ORIS)
■Language
English
■Audience
Students, faculty, staff and general public
■Admission
Free
