When Emperor Hirohito announced defeat in a radio broadcast on 15th August 1945, Japan was not merely a nation; it was a colossal empire stretching from the tip of Alaska to the fringes of Australia ...grown out of a colonial ideology that continued to pervade East Asian society for years after the end of the Second World War. In Overcoming Empire in Post-Imperial East Asia: Repatriation, Redress and Rebuilding, Barak Kushner and Sherzod Muminov bring together an international team of leading scholars to explore the post-imperial history of the region. From international aid to postwar cinema to chemical warfare, these essays all focus on the aftermath of Japan’s aggressive warfare and the new international strategies which Japan, China, Taiwan, North and South Korea utilised following the end of the war and the collapse of Japan’s empire. The result is a nuanced analysis of the transformation of postwar national identities, colonial politics, and the reordering of society in East Asia. With its innovative comparative and transnational perspective, this book is essential reading for scholars of modern East Asian history, the cold war, and the history of decolonisation.
In the Ruins of the Japanese Empire concludes that early East Asian Cold War history needs to be studied within the framework of post-imperial history. Japan’s surrender did not mean that the ...Japanese and former imperial subjects would immediately disavow imperial ideology. The end of the Japanese empire unleashed unprecedented destruction and violence on the periphery. Lives were destroyed; names of cities altered; collaborationist regimes—which for over a decade dominated vast populations—melted into the air as policeman, bureaucrats, soldiers, and technocrats offered their services as nationalists, revolutionaries or communists. Power did not simply change hands swiftly and smoothly. In the chaos of the new order, legal anarchy, revenge, ethnic displacement, and nationalist resentments stalked the postcolonial lands of northeast Asia, intensifying bloody civil wars in societies radicalized by total war, militarization, and mass mobilization. Kushner and Levidis’s volume follows these processes as imperial violence reordered demographics and borders, and involved massive political, economic, and social dislocation as well as stubborn continuities. From the hunt for “traitors" in Korea and China to the brutal suppression of the Taiwanese by the Chinese Nationalist government in the long-forgotten February 28 Incident, the research shows how the empire’s end acted as a catalyst for renewed attempts at state-building. From the imperial edge to the metropole, investigations shed light on how prewar imperial values endured during postwar Japanese rearmament and in party politics. Nevertheless, many Japanese actively tried to make amends for wartime transgressions and rebuild Japan’s posture in East Asia by cultivating religious and cultural connections.
Based on research in Chinese and Japanese, as well as interviews with comedians, food service professionals, entertainment managers, store-owners, customers, and scholars of food history, Kushner ...explores the history of ramen and Japan's noodle culture over the last 1,000 years.
The Japanese Army committed numerous atrocities during its pitiless campaigns in China from 1931 to 1945. Focusing on the trials of Japanese war criminals, Barak Kushner analyzes the political ...maneuvering and propagandizing in both China and Japan that would roil East Asian relations throughout the Cold War, with repercussions still felt today.
The Manchurian Candidate myth that Americans could be psychologically manipulated and turned into secret agents of a foreign power emerged in the early Cold War. The belief combined fears that ...Soviet/Chinese mind manipulators were so adept that they could transform honorable American soldiers into turncoats. However, while disquiet about the efficacy of communist brainwashing remained palpable in the aftermath of World War II, the result of China's communist treatment of prisoners of war did not create, as was greatly feared, actual Manchurian candidates capable of misleading their native publics once repatriated. If brainwashing in the American understanding of the term did not occur, what was the actual outcome and what sort of processes were used on Asians who were not part of the communist masses? We need to unravel the PRC's take on the processes of “thought reform” to understand why it kept returning to a policy designed to “re-educate” prisoners of war, often doubly labeled as war criminals. These policies not only reveal how the CCP aimed to render justice beyond the conclusion of its war with Japan but also demonstrate how this practice then grew into a later catalyst for unification plans in PRC-ROC relations during the 1970s.
Introduction Kushner, Barak
In the Ruins of the Japanese Empire,
05/2020
Book Chapter
World War II dragged on in East Asia for three more months than in Europe, where the Allies declared victory on May 8, 1945. The formation of the United Nations was announced in San Francisco on June ...26, 1945, and soon it became clear that Japan’s imperial demise would be entirely different from the Nazi collapse. World War II fractured the political spectrum in East Asia: the result was a cacophony of groups vying for postimperial authority in a situation where nothing was preordained and where no result was inevitable.
The Cold War would more solidly divide these new alliances
The focus of this article centres on a discussion of how the Japanese military and civilian society responded to defeat and the changing nature of Japan's relationship with the Chinese Nationalists ...(KMT). The goal is to provide a transnational grasp of the setting of a key region where Japanese power collapsed and the Chinese took over. My research suggests that we need further analysis of how wars end and that the idea of unconditional surrender constantly referenced in western scholarship concerning the end of Japan's war might not fit so neatly into the actual circumstances that evolved in East Asia at the periphery of Japan's failed empire. Such an approach dovetails with the parameters set out in the introduction to this supplement where the authors call for new analytical approaches that privilege the non-western world. In addition, this ambiguous notion of defeat, when examined from outside the tidy confines of national history, demonstrates the porous nature of identity in areas where Japanese authority had previously been dominant. Understanding the elastic nature of post-war allegiances, often based on both ideology and pragmatism, opens up more avenues for understanding the particular circumstances in which Chinese and Japanese found themselves on the eve of momentous change in East Asia. Political scientist Consuelo Cruz reminds us that 'identity should figure prominently in scholarly debates about conflict resolution, migration, citizenship, transnational alliances', and in this vein I want to consider the Japanese perceptions of defeat and how the Chinese sought to employ their adjudged legal responsibility for it in their favour. Because such issues from the immediate post-war period tie so deeply into the salvation of the KMT as a political entity, and thus the evolution of Taiwan as a separate Chinese sphere outside of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) management of mainland China, I would argue these transnational relations are fundamental to an expression of post-war Taiwanese/Chinese and Japanese nationalism. By untangling this interaction we can review the end of the empire and the emergence of the new post-war states. Adapted from the source document. Reprinted by permission of Oxford University Press
