SOAS Studies in Modern and Contemporary Japan. London; Oxford; New York; New Delhi; Sydney: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020. xiii, 246 pp. (B&W photos, illustrations.) US$115.00, cloth. ISBN 978-1-350-12705-0.
Comparative surveys of twentieth-century decolonization often pay little attention to the dismantling of the Japanese empire. The varied ways occupied peoples struggled against and/or worked with Japanese colonial authorities is typically left to scholarship devoted to individual colonialized jurisdictions, as are the legacies Japanese imperial rule left behind. It is on those post-war legacies that this volume focuses in ten concise, readable chapters that follow on from the editors’ kindred collection, The Dismantling of Japan’s Empire in East Asia: Deimperialization, Postwar Legitimation and Imperial Afterlife (Routledge, 2017). As in that work, the focus here is on the East Asian empire, including Japan itself, rather than on Southeast Asia. The legacies considered concern not the kinds of deep structures Mahmoud Mamdani has highlighted as entrenched remnants of European colonialism. Instead, the contributors here throw light on pressing vestiges of the colonial order that stared post-colonial governments and societies in the face, mainly in the decade after 1945. Two welcome features of this book, as elaborated in Sherzod Muminov’s introduction, are the editors’ commitments to highlight the experiences of non-Japanese subjects of the empire and to push beyond a single-country focus so as to approach remnants of the colonial order transnationally. In practice, the volume’s focus on pressing remnants of empire might somewhat attenuate the theoretical ambition to explore transnational horizons—of its 10 chapters, three thus focus primarily on China, three on Japan, and one each on Korea and Taiwan. Nonetheless, the richness of the primary sources the contributors marshal is such that any country-specific grounding strengthens the transnational research horizon.
Muminov’s introduction identifies three major themes explored in this volume. Repatriation is explored in the first two chapters, which treat the little studied movement of non-Japanese subjects who after war’s end chose or were required to move to their countries of origin or adoption. Shi-chi Mike Lan sketches the troubled itinerary of homeward-bound Taiwanese military personnel who were resented as agents of empire in Japanese-occupied Hong Kong and the Dutch East Indies. He contrasts their experience with that of returning Taiwanese women and children transiting Australia who were depicted as Chinese victims of war by a nationalist Kuomintang (KMT) government intent on asserting its sovereignty over the island. Meredith Oyen explores how post-World War II Chinese governments, nationalist (KMT) and communist (CCP), cooperated with United Nations refugee-relief agencies to raise each government’s international profile through managing two populations: nanyang Chinese seeking to return to Southeast Asia after fleeing the Japanese and a mélange of White Russians, Central European Jews, and Russian Jews, none of whom wanted to be “returned” to the Soviets.
Post-colonial representations, or what Muminov calls “the creation of narratives,” constitute a second major theme. The spectrum of early 1950s Japanese literary treatments of the Korean War is elucidated by Samuel Perry, who juxtaposes vocal anti-war opinion in parts of the press with the Cold War anti-communism of the popular-fiction writer Chang Hyŏk-chu, aka Noguchi Kakuchū, a notorious collaborator during the war who thereafter obscured colonialism’s negative impacts on Korea. In chapter 4, Hyun Kyung Lee explores nuances of South Korean attitudes to the colonial past by contrasting the histories of two architectural monuments: the now nearly forgotten Grand Shrine of Joseon, colonial Korea’s premier Shinto temple, demolished soon after World War II; and Seodaemum Prison, which remained in operation until 1987—an enduring tool of repression for the colonial regime and its post-colonial successors, but now a symbol of the courage of opponents of oppression. In chapter 5, Dick Stegewerns examines Japanese representations of Asia in post-1945 films, focusing on several distinct models: an anti-war genre that depicted Asia as a place where Japanese killed and were killed; a genre that portrayed Asia as an exotic domain of relative freedom, including sexual freedom; and, from the late 1950s, an anti-anti-war genre that re-embraced Japanese military efforts to rid Asia of Western imperialism. Finally, in a chapter as much about “rebuilding” as “representation,” Matthew Johnson highlights how much during the Chinese Civil War both the KMT and the CCP, fearful of the US reconstruction of Japan, promoted discourses of anti-imperialism and anti-Americanism while pursuing their respective accommodations with the United States and the Soviet Union, both of which denounced the other for interfering in China.
Muminov’s third major theme, “living traces” of empire, covers early post-liberation “rebuilding” and claims for “redress” that emerged later. Analyzing the CCP’s 1948–1952 reconstruction policy in Manchuria, Koji Hirata documents the origins of many of China’s state-owned enterprises in pre-1945 Japanese factories and mines, and shows that communist officials charged with rebuilding employed thousands of Japanese and KMT-inclined engineers and skilled workers, with whom they maintained remarkably friendly relations. Next, examining the fiscal sector, Chihyun Chang traces the twentieth-century evolution of the originally British-dominated Chinese Maritime Customs Service (CMCS). Having become a site of growing British-Japanese competition from 1895, the CMCS was reconstituted after 1945 when—stripped of foreign influence and its Chinese employees’ pension-funds—it provided a foundation for the customs services of Kuomintang Taiwan and the People’s Republic of China (PRC), and served as a model for occupied Japan’s service. The volume’s final chapters both relate to claims for redress that involved state-suppressed evidence. Yukiko Koga elegantly analyzes the case of Chinese captives who were forced into slave-labour in wartime Japan, and then sought compensation after Japan and the PRC restored diplomatic relations. Repeatedly denied standing in Japanese courts, the plaintiffs gained a major breakthrough against their former corporate masters with the dramatic resurfacing of long-hidden documents. Finally, Arnaud Doglia tells the story of how the massive secret dumping of toxic components for Japanese chemical weaponry by both wartime officials and US occupation forces was in due course brought to light by Japanese citizen-victims, researchers, and lawyers, who mobilized in the 1980s through oral testimony and sensational documentation to seek appropriate medical care and recognition of responsibility for their suffering.
The research presented in this volume will interest specialists in comparative decolonization as well as East Asian specialists. The engaging presentation makes it well suited for advanced students.
Gregory Blue
University of Victoria, Victoria