The end of Japan’s empire appeared to happen very suddenly and cleanly – but, as this book shows, it was in fact very messy, with a long period of establishing or re-establishing the postwar order. Moreover, as the authors argue, empires have afterlives, which, in the case of Japan’s empire, is not much studied. This book considers the details of deimperialization, including the repatriation of Japanese personnel, the redrawing of boundaries, issues to do with prisoners of war and war criminals and new arrangements for democratic political institutions, for media and for the regulation of trade. It also discusses the continuing impact of empire on the countries ruled or occupied by Japan, where, as a result of Japanese management and administration, both formal and informal, patterns of behavior and attitudes were established that continued subsequently. This was true in Japan itself, where returning imperial personnel had to be absorbed and adjustments made to imperial thinking, and in present-day East Asia, where the shadow of Japan’s empire still lingers. This legacy of unresolved issues concerning the correct relationship of Japan, an important, energetic, outgoing nation and a potential regional "hub," with the rest of the region not comfortably settled in this era, remains a fulcrum of regional dispute.

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. “This third book to emerge from Barak Kushner’s massive collaborative research project on the dissolution of Japan’s empire lays out a new geography of turning the ruins into social, economic, political, and cultural opportunities across Northeast Asia, and with lasting consequences. This book will change the way we research and teach ‘1945’ in a global context.” —Franziska Seraphim, Boston College “Writing imperial history, linking the prewar to postwar, is perilous because it must resist domestic taboos and social pressures. Today’s global society, where history incites extreme nationalism and serves as catalyst for conflict, calls for the creation of a new history of the end of empire as Kushner and his team have done in this volume.” —ASANO Toyomi, Waseda University

A Partnership for Disorder examines American-Chinese foreign policy planning in World War II for decolonising the Japanese Empire and controlling Japan after the war. This study unravels some of the complex origins of the postwar upheavals in Asia by demonstrating how the US and China's disagreements on many concrete issues prevented their governments from forging an effective partnership. The two powers' quest for long-term cooperation was further complicated by Moscow's eleventh-hour involvement in the Pacific War. By the war's end, a triangular relationship among Washington, Moscow, and Chongqing surfaced from secret negotiations at Yalta and Moscow. Yet the Yalta-Moscow system in Asia proved too ambiguous and fragile to be useful even for the purpose of defining a new balance of power among the Allies. The failure of the system was compounded by its obliviousness to Asia's dynamic nationalist forces.

Beginning with the closing decade of European colonial rule in Southeast Asia and covering the wartime Japanese empire and its postwar disintegration, Tensions of Empire focuses on the Japanese in Southeast Asia, Indonesians in Japan, and the legacy of the war in Southeast Asia. It also examines Japanese perceptions of Southeast Asia and the lingering ambivalence toward Japanese involvement in Asia and the war in particular.

Looks at how the end of the war in the Pacific theater of World War II led to all new conflicts and power struggles among the Asian people of the former Japanese empire, analyzing the implications of these battles between political rivals, ethnic groups, nationalist factions, and others in the wake of the war. 35,000 first printing.