WHA Annual Meeting: Korea 2026

Operation Mincemeat was a British deception operation in 1943 designed to persuade Axis leaders that the Allies would invade Greece and Sardinia rather than Sicily. Intelligence officers Ewen Montagu and Charles Cholmondeley planted forged invasion documents on an unclaimed corpse later identified as Glyndwr Michael, staged as the fictional Royal Marine “Major William Martin.” When the body washed ashore near Huelva, Spain, German intelligence acquired the papers and accepted them as genuine, helping divert Axis attention and resources away from Sicily before the Allied invasion in July 1943. Using Montagu’s The Man Who Never Was, relevant archival materials, and scholarship by Ben Macintyre and Denis Smyth, this paper reconstructs how the hoax was built and why Mediterranean politics and intelligence practices made it credible. It also evaluates Montagu’s memoir as a curated postwar account shaped by censorship and self-presentation, highlighting the moral ambiguity of wartime misinformation.

Patriarchy is often treated as a natural social order, but evidence suggests it is a constructed system maintained through coercion and control of women’s labor. Drawing on James C. Scott’s Against the Grain (2017), this paper argues that patriarchal hierarchies persist because institutions enforce them legally, socially, and violently when women’s labor is essential to power. The argument is developed through two comparative case studies. First, the paper examines Western Europe during Romanization, showing how imperial laws and citizenship formalized women’s subordination within households and public life. Second, it analyzes the Japanese military “comfort women” system in World War II as an extreme form of state-organized sexual exploitation mobilized for military objectives. Read together, these cases demonstrate that patriarchal power intensifies when states and empires require reliable labor, disciplined households, and restricted female autonomy, revealing coercion as a core mechanism of gender hierarchy.

The biwa, a traditional Japanese lute played with a wedge-shaped plectrum (bachi), has long served as both musical instrument and storytelling medium. This paper argues that the biwa's endurance in Japanese history lies in its portability and adaptability as a vehicle for narrative and memory. It introduces key traditions, including the courtly gagaku biwa and the heike biwa, then examines later developments such as the satsuma biwa, which broadened the instrument’s social reach and performance settings, including theatrical contexts like noh and kabuki. The paper also considers the biwa’s twentieth-century decline in the aftermath of World War II, followed by its more recent resurgence. Contemporary performers have revitalized the biwa by sustaining traditional techniques while blending them with new genres and audiences. The biwa’s evolution demonstrates how cultural traditions survive disruption and continue to shape identity, heritage, and historical imagination.

This paper examines the impact of war on the people of Japan by tracing the nation's transformation from an agricultural society to an urbanized one following World War II. It explores Japan's economic evolution from the Tokugawa and Meiji periods through its wartime boom and subsequent collapse, highlighting the relationship between industrial ambition and imperial expansion. Drawing on testimony primarily from Japan at War: An Oral History, the paper illustrates the dramatic shifts in daily life as Japan entered the the war. Additional testimony gathered through the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum captures the devastation wrought by the atomic bombings at the close of the Pacific Theater. Together, these sources underscore a central argument: civilians bear the true cost of war. Through a synthesis of economic history and lived experience, the paper illuminates the enduring human toll of conflict and the resilience of those who survived.