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