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.
The creation of the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) in November 1955 remains one of the most significant moments in modern Japanese political history. The political stability inaugurated in 1955, ...followed by more than seventy years of mostly unbroken conservative government, has inured us to the striking persistence and durability of conservative ideas, institutions, and men across the political divide of 1945. At war’s end, imperial Tokyo was a city under foreign occupation; war and revolution engulfed much of northeast Asia, while in Japan socialism and communism seemed on the verge of removing Japan’s monarchical mode of government. By the early
The end of the Kishi era Levidis, Andrew
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Magazine Article
Recenzirano
Until he was assassinated during a last-minute campaign stop in the western Japanese city of Nara on 8 July 2022, Shinzo Abe-Japan's longest serving post-war leader-was a central and dominant figure ...in Japanese politics. Post-war Japanese history has been punctuated by spectacular instances of murder, arson and religious violence that serve as a stark reminder that parliamentary democracy has not been attained bloodlessly. Abe was no stranger to this past. In 1960, during massive demonstrations over security treaty revisions, Abe's grandfather, then prime minister Nobusuke Kishi, was stabbed by a rightist youth angry over Kishi's perceived betrayal of the nation. Assessments of Abe's impact on national affairs have been intensely contested. On one hand are those who praise his accomplishments in national defence and foreign affairs. On the other are detractors who denounce the ethical tawdriness and democratic erosion which marred Abe's tenure. Yet neither the achievements nor failings of the man tell us much about the historical forces that made Abe possible, and how those forces will play out in a future without him.
