I'm a professional writer hired to pen an occult mystery novella set in pre-war Japan. I'm big on research, however, so rather than write uninformed canard I've been devouring books on the subject, ranging from tea-culture to their day-to-day life to their imperialism and military structure to their native mythologies and ghosts.
However, there's one facet I've been unable to find more than the merest (probably uninformed) statements about: the treatment of westernized Japanese prior to and during WW2.
How were the westernized Japanese treated? Were they marginalized, persecuted, simply ignored? If they were persecuted, by whom and how seriously?
I'm especially interested in full books on the subject, or comprehensive articles. I'm not scared off if these books have a thick veneer of "academicalism," by the way. So any and all recommendations would be fantastic!
Thank you so much for your time and answers!
What is a "Westernized" Japanese? Japan itself was westernized in many respects, and its political and business elites enjoyed connections to the elites in the West. There were also plenty of pro-German Japanese, who probably didn't face much trouble because Germany was their ally.
Members of Christian sects or of the so-called "New" Japanese religions faced pressure from the government because they were reluctant to go along with endorsing worshipful behavior towards the Emperor. The Catholic Church, wanting to avoid a showdown with authorities, told its Japanese members in the 1930's that they were allowed to honor the emperor and visit the Yasukuni Shrine with a patriotic motive.
While not by any means a scholarly work, I enjoyed the recent Japanese film "A Boy Called H." (It is based on a novel of the same title, if I remember correctly) It is about a family of Christian Japanese in Kobe, who face a lot of suspicion from other Japanese because they had friends within the prewar Western community of that city. (Many of the foreigners, especially those from Allied countries, left shortly before the war. Others were deported after internment when the war started.)
Isaac Shapiro, a Russian Jew who came to Japan and lived there through the war years, has also written a memoir about his experiences: Edokko:Growing Up a Foreigner in Wartime Japan