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The Dismantling of Japan’s Empire in East Asia

The Dismantling of Japan’s Empire in East Asia
The Dismantling of Japan’s Empire in East Asia: Deimperialization, postwar legitimation and imperial afterlife
Edited by Barak Kushner and Sherzod Muminov
Routledge, 2016
Review by Roger Macy

A widespread view has been that the Japanese Empire became an entirely closed chapter after August 1945, when it collapsed abruptly at the end of World War II. Whilst historians, and in particular historians of Japan, have been aware of isolated threads connecting before and after 1945, the subject has gained renewed interest through work in unexamined areas and access to closed archives, particularly in the Soviet Union and China. This renewed research was stimulated by a five-year European Research Council-funded project, centred at Cambridge. After a conference, a book of sixteen papers has been produced, The Dismantling of Japan’s Empire in East Asia: Deimperialization, postwar legitimation and imperial afterlife. It was jointly edited by Barak Kushner, reader in Modern Japanese History at Cambridge and Sherzod Muminov, then also at the FAMES faculty at Cambridge and now lecturer in Japanese History at the University of East Anglia. These authors in particular have been able to draw from material in a wide range of relevant languages. But by adding translations of papers written in Japanese, they have been able to aggregate an impressive and influential addition to historical knowledge.

Being an academic book from Routledge, it is not cheap, but many readers could profit from time within its covers. The book has a decent index, whilst the bibliography is contained within the notes for each chapter. With the list of contributors sensibly in alphabetical order by family name, any ambiguity in reading can be ironed out (although characters here would have been helpful). Brief views of each chapter follow.

Kato Kiyofumi starts the volume with an overview of events, ‘The Decline of the Japanese empire and the transformation of the regional order in East Asia’. Although the author wrote in English, his focussing on Japanese historians makes his synthesis instructive. The division of Korea along the 38th parallel is narrated as the accumulation of events in the dying days of the Japanese administration, rather than a wartime great-power agreement as has been narrated in Western sources, such as by Bruce Cummings. It is enlightening to read western motivations from an Asian perspective but sometimes I thought his judgements too unqualified. For example, it was not “unthinkable” that Great Britain, in 1945, ‘would ever consider following the mantra of decolonization’. Au contraire, it was Labour Party policy. But, given that the UK’s military actions in East Asia in the 1940s were so far from its thoughts, Kiyofumi can be forgiven for framing this viewpoint.

A key point, that has rarely been emphasized enough, is the effect on individuals of the precipitously instant jump of Japan’s borders from that of an empire to a confined island-state. Part of the Potsdam pill that the Japanese government had to swallow in August 1945 was the countervailing ethnic clearances that were already under way in Europe. The scale of this debacle in terms of millions in forced migrations is addressed by Araragi Shinzo below. But there were also millions who stayed put. How individuals were affected at the cultural level when political and language barriers suddenly jumped over them is beyond the scope of this volume. Kawashima Shin, in ‘“Deimperialization” in early postwar Japan’, finds another focus, examining the adjustments made, or not made, by historians and institutions in the postwar Japan to the new reality. He then navigates through the different ways Taiwanese who found themselves in postwar Japan were categorized. Continuing to use Taiwan as a focus, he examines the attitudes of Japanese historians themselves and argues that, for different reasons, writers on opposite ends of the political spectrum made ‘Taiwan: a colony consigned to oblivion’.

Barak Kushner headlines his chapter, ‘Japan’s Search for postwar legitimacy’. But my reading of his wide-ranging research is that there was not so much a search as an attempt to preserve legitimacy by not looking very hard. It seemed the new borders of Japan formed a wall against knowledge of the state’s conduct in the erstwhile colonies. He summarises, ‘Unfortunately, the national amnesia about empire in the narrative [of reconstruction], which the war crimes trials uncovered and revealed both to the international community and to Japan itself, demonstrates that this understanding of tragedy was limited and did not include the damage that Japan visited upon the rest of East Asia and the Allies’.

An implied comparison with adjustments in Germany is left to the last chapter of Kushner’s and Muminov’s book but the essential legal difference in the two defeats is only implied and ought to be stated: the German government was destroyed in 1945 and rebuilt institutionally from the bottom up; the Japanese government had legal continuity of all its institutions and personnel. SCAP’s legal and actual position was to direct the defeated Japanese government.

Driven by Allied public opinion, the first major focus of SCAP, was to demilitarize and pursue war criminals. But Kushner shows that, in the immediate post-defeat era, the Japanese government competed with Allied military authorities to prosecute war criminals. But they had quite different objectives and in particular a different understanding, or rather understandings, of ‘responsibility for the war’. Kushner has left the competing narratives around the defences at the Allied trials, much covered by dramatists and their critics, to be examined by Sandra Wilson below.

Kushner has a section on the ‘Media and Society’ but is hampered, like all researchers of the period, by the paucity of records on the major mass media of the era, radio; and a section with this title might reasonably acknowledge this. Fictional treatments of the period at least allude to the wholesale broadcasting of the proceedings as casting a ‘dirty’ shadow. But indirectly, the research of Kushner and his co-authors only confirms the transience of any ‘democratizing’ influence of radio, so my quibble does not affect the main arguments.

Kushner, as an American (I presume) fairly introduces a comparison with failures to come to terms with the aftermath of the American Civil War. This reviewer, as British born, is, by similar reasoning, on thin ice in not making comparisons with a tardiness in addressing the aftermath of the British empire.

In ‘The collapse of the Japanese empire and the great migrations’, Araragi Shinzo gives us an overview of his research in short survey translated by Sherzod Muminov. He has numbers for each of the migrations in Japan’s modern era and, no doubt, reference to his original work would clarify the sources for each number. The numbers are staggering: the estimate is 6.6 million Japanese required to remove back to the home islands, of which 3.67 million were employed by the state, in military or civilian roles. Of agricultural settlers in Manchuria, only about half ever survived to be repatriated. Millions of non-Japanese also had to move. Araragi concludes by saying that ‘The human migration caused by Japanese imperialism and its total war have left an enduring legacy of pain and psychological wounds in many countries…’, and he makes more than a start in contextualizing these migrations and in considering for each to what extent they were economic, forced or contingent. His willingness to consider Japanese responsibility as a historian is admirable, especially as his survey could have justified a pre-qualifying phrase that migrations can and do happen in the absence of imperialism. He also admirably abstains from any kind of ‘not just us’ qualification; but British readers should reasonably consider that aspect.

‘The campaign for the release of war criminals’ in the Japanese media, examined by Sandra Wilson, is likely to be new information to any postwar Briton without access to Japanese-language media, and so is valuable, and helps the more recent viewer to see that the inflation of a comfort zone in more recent media representations is nothing new.

Wilson says, ‘It would have been very difficult to express open sympathy for war criminals between 1945 and 1952 or portray them in a positive light. In 1952 and 1953, on the other hand, at least five popular movies were made portraying the prisoners favourably’. The Thick-walled Room (Kobayashi Masaki, 1956), however, portrays Japanese war conduct unfavourably, so I am not sure that it is “evident” that the 3-year delay in its release is lay at the desk of the U.S. government. Kobayashi’s film title is correctly transcribed as Kabe atsuki heya. However three of the other four titles have errors in transcription. That of Saeki Kiyoshi (not ‘Saiki’) is Arashi no naka no haha, Aoyagi Nobuo’s is Montenrupa no yoru wa fukete, and Sasaki Keisuke’s is Haha wa sakebi naku.

Her ‘conclusion’ goes on to new ground of Allied attitudes to the later abandonment of trials and release in 1958 of the remaining prisoners. This, without instantiation, seems to generalise ‘the Allies’ in a way that does not accord with my reading of British media or archives.

Sarah Kovner’s account of ‘Allied POWs in Korea’ also uncovers an area not usually heard about by Western readers. Mostly, Kovner narrates events before the surrender. But this allows her to show the weaknesses in the subsequent Allied trials, the lack of proportionality in the incarceration of commandants of prisons relatively well administered, as well as the path not taken in looking at underlying causes of fair or brutal treatments.

Franziska Seraphim looks at ‘War criminals’ prisons in Asia’. Recent visitors to Tokyo might, like me, be unaware that the mall now developed as ‘Sunshine City’ is built on the site of the notorious Sugamo prison which, in the postwar era, increasingly concentrated those charged or convicted of war crimes. Seraphim paints a picture ‘of Sugamo prison in Tokyo being the only visible reminder of Japan’s ‘vanished empire’. But Seraphim starts at the Empire’s peripheries, relating how those further-flung prisons were reported back to the postwar Japan.

In the rewarding kernel of the book, ‘Post-imperial Japan and the Soviet versions of history and justice in East Asia, 1945-1956’, Sherzod Muminov has researched the Siberian internment at state and individual level, bringing new sources to our attention. In this chapter, he focuses particularly on the USSR’s role in the trials of war-criminals. He also focuses on the likely motives of Stalin in the sudden decision in August 1945 to transport half-a-million Japanese soldiers across the border and intern them there, for years of labour in trying and often deadly conditions. This he characterizes as a reaction to an abrupt curtailment of ‘loss of levers’ over Japan itself. Similarly, after failed attempts to bring Japan’s bacteriological warfare to the centre of the Tokyo trials, the USSR focussed on trials of its Japanese internees under Soviet internal law. Muminov marshals and summarizes his widespread sources with a care that is difficult to give justice to by any further condensation.

Urs Matthias Zachmann looks at influential thinkers in the field of international law, showing some surprising continuities between thinking before and after 1945. Indeed, even by March 1945 a study of the United Nations had been completed for an arm of the Foreign Ministry.

Kanda Yutaka looks at the particular case of Shiina Etsusaburo following the opening of his diaries in 2012. Linked to several postwar prime ministers, he was ‘the closest of Kishi’s aides’ after the war, having acted for him in Manchukuo previously. But Kanda shows that, although Shiina kept his asianist mindset after the war, his position continued to evolve, persuaded by the facts of Japan’s economic rise. Shiina eventually proved an able supporter of Ikeda’s economy-first policies.

Park Jung Jin examines the history of North Korea, as it affected the repatriation of both Japanese left behind in 1945 and 1948, as well as those Koreans in Japan who identified with the Communist regime. Just as in other East Asian countries, there was a need and desire to keep Japanese technicians after Japan’s abrupt collapse. Park takes us through the frequent changes of policy both as regard individuals and groups as well as relations with Japan.

Erik Esselstrom recounts the story of the visit of Chinese Health minister LI Dequan in 1954 from Beijing. Rather over-shadowed since, the visit of the PRC’s Minister of Public Health was anything but obscure at the time with a media frenzy reporting this visit at the height of the Cold War. One needs to be reminded that as late as this, the Chinese government had non-Communists heading ministries. Li brought the long-awaited list of remaining Japanese detainees in the PRC, and these men soon started returning to their families who had been in a limbo of bereavement. But the reactions to Li highlighted the complete array of Japanese political viewpoints at this time, possibly also coloured by her gender.

Sato Takumi selects the general-interest magazine Sekai as ‘a barometer of postwar thought’. Launched by the relatively high-brow publishing house, Iwanami, the magazine reflected how pacifist viewpoints held the mainstream throughout the post-war period.

Shirato Ken’ichiro finds the sinews connecting another limb of Japan’s empire to its postwar through the broadcasting industry. He delves into the history of the vertically integrated Manchurian Telegraph and Telephone Company. This powerful organisation also managed broadcasting, unlike in other colonies, where radio was under the control of NHK. Probably the most important factor in the development of MTTC was that it did not have a monopoly of the airwaves on the Chinese mainland and had to reach out to appeal to its audience. Entertainment programmes flourished, particularly in Chinese, often using the voice of the singer Li Xianglan (to use one of Yamaguchi’s many names). One distinctive characteristic of Manchukuo broadcasting, which it shared only with Taiwan, was paid advertising and sponsored programmes. Although this disappeared at the apex of spiritist polity, it was redeployed in Japanese postwar commercial broadcasting often by personnel with continuity of experience.

Michael Baskett sheds light on ‘Japanese Cold war film exchange with China’. From the Japanese side this topic has historically, if considered at all, been considered an unbreached wall. This chapter brings back into the view the delegation to China, led by the well-known film director Kinoshita Keisuke. The reactions of both sides are tantalising but Baskett also shows that competition for influence in Asian markets was mediated through festivals that had strong functional lines back to the colonial era.

The final chapter by Kerstin von Lingen briefly surveys how Germany has come to terms with Nazi war deeds from 1945 to 2015. Lingen shows that it has not been a straight inexorable line but demonstrates that waves of trials have been both the result and cause of political movements. As early as 1958, ‘a coordinating legal body was established to systematically investigate deeds in the former Nazi empire that stretched far beyond the postwar borders of the Federal Republic’. A new wave of trials started as late as 1999. Lingen states, ‘These moves certainly help to distinguish Germany from Japan, where no equivalent proceedings at the behest of the government have ever taken place’. The new trials ‘sharpened the reputation of the Federal republic as a credible guardian of the law and to separate the current government morally from previous regimes’.

I would only add that, as the trials in Germany have dried up with the deaths of the remaining suspects, the divergence in the two nations’ regard of history has only widened. I have seen nothing to compare with the National Socialist Documentation centres which have been opened in major German cities.