One of our regular features on this blog will be documents, photos and artifacts that our faculty have found and/or are using in their research.
This week’s entry comes from Associate Professor Erik Esselstrom, who is a specialist in modern East Asian history. Professor Esselstrom is currently at work on a cultural history of popular Japanese views concerning China during the 1950s and 1960s. One of several topics he is now developing concerns the 1954 visit of Li Dequan to Japan, the first by any member of the Communist Chinese government after the People’s Republic of China (PRC) was established in 1949.
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He writes: This photo is from the October 31, 1954 evening edition of the Mainichi Shinbun, and it shows Li (far right) being greeted by Hiratsuka Raicho (center) at a welcome reception held in Li’s honor in Tokyo. Hiratsuka was one of the most well-known feminist intellectuals in Japan at that time and she and Li Dequan published several essays together that autumn on issues related to women’s rights and peace activism in postwar East Asia.
