In the Ruins of the Japanese Empire: Imperial Violence, State Destruction, and the Reordering of Modern East Asia ed. by Barak Kushner and Andrew Levidis

Abstract

Reviewed by: In the Ruins of the Japanese Empire: Imperial Violence, State Destruction, and the Reordering of Modern East Asia ed. by Barak Kushner and Andrew Levidis Kelly Anne Hammond (bio) In the Ruins of the Japanese Empire: Imperial Violence, State Destruction, and the Reordering of Modern East Asia. Edited by Barak Kushner and Andrew Levidis. Hong Kong University Press, 2020. vi, 246 pages. $65.00, cloth; $40.00, E-book. Edited collections can be tricky. They often lack cohesion and feel like they are strung together by a theme that is either too broad or too narrow, or the quality of the chapters varies widely. Luckily, this is not the case with Barak Kushner and Andrew Levidis's edited volume, In the Ruins of the Japanese Empire: Imperial Violence, State Destruction, and the Reordering of Modern East Asia . The book presents cutting edge scholarship on many different facets of the underacknowledged and underrepresented continuities between the Japanese imperial project and the postimperial reconstruction throughout East Asia. Essentially, the book is a smorgasbord of postimperial history: there is something for everyone who is interested in the legacies of Japanese imperialism throughout East Asia. Although I do not have the space to review all the chapters, I hope that readers will be prompted by my review to check out the book and see what suits their own interests. This volume examines how political systems and society were rebuilt in the postwar period while simultaneously considering how the collapse of the Japanese empire impacted East Asia (p. 2). The postwar experiences of those living scattered throughout the remains of the defunct empire were varied, as were the processes of "deimperialization" (pp. 3–4). At its core, the edited volume examines the ways that the violence inflicted by imperial Japan informed both the tangible (political and military, especially) legacies as well as the postwar memories of people living throughout East Asia (p. 11). The book coalesces around two central themes. All the chapters address how "newly independent entities, or states reclaiming independence" successfully or unsuccessfully came to terms with Japan's imperial programs in their territories. The collection also investigates how postimperial Japan "worked to reframe" these new political, military, and civilian relationships within the new cold war geopolitics in East Asia (p. 15). For the authors, the "indelible mark" of the Japanese empire is all over East Asia, although it is not fully recognized, nor is it fully reconciled (p. 23). The chapters are divided into three thematic sections: "Collaboration and Dilemmas of Deimperialization" (four chapters); "Negotiating Past and Present in the Military and Political Realms" (three chapters); and "Returning to the Continent, Japan's Relations with New China" (two chapters). [End Page 247] When I started my PhD in 2008, Tim Brook had only recently published Collaboration: Japanese Agents and Local Elites in Wartime China (Harvard University Press, 2007). Although there is a cottage industry in French studies about Vichy and French collaboration with the Nazis, Brook's work was really the first monograph in English to deal with collaboration with the Japanese empire. Such studies have become more frequent and nuanced (see, for example: Jeremy Yellen, The Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere: Where Total Empire Met Total War [Cornell University Press, 2020]; and A. Carly Buxton, Unthinking Collaboration: American Nisei in Transwar Japan [University of Hawai'i Press, 2022]). Yet, there is still a lot of work to do on the postwar legacies of these collaborators. Many of the chapters in this book (including Levidis's chapter on Kishi Nobusuke and the wartime antecedents of the Liberal Democratic Party [LDP]) are a step in this direction. Beyond the volume, Ernest Leung's recent article in Palladium (August 2021), "The School That Built Asia," echoes many of the points the authors in this section make about the legacies of wartime collaborators in postwar East Asian politics. In section 1, the authors are attempting to "[b]ring attention to spaces where imperial control ceased but was not really replaced" (p. 18). There were often conflicts about how to handle collaborators in postwar East Asia. The Tokyo War Crimes Trials were so different from Nuremburg (see Tim Brook's article "The Tokyo...