Overcoming Empire in Post-Imperial East Asia: Repatriation, Redress and Rebuilding ed. by Barak Kushner and Sherzod Muminov, and: 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: Overcoming Empire in Post-Imperial East Asia: Repatriation, Redress and Rebuilding ed. by Barak Kushner and Sherzod Muminov, and: 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 Philip Seaton Overcoming Empire in Post-Imperial East Asia: Repatriation, Redress and Rebuilding. Edited by Barak Kushner and Sherzod Muminov. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020. 264 pages. ISBN: 9781350127050 (hardcover, also available as softcover and e-book). 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. 252 pages. ISBN: 9789888528288 (hardcover, also available as e-book). Overcoming Empire in Post-Imperial East Asia and In the Ruins of the Japanese Empire (hereafter, "Overcoming Empire" and "Ruins," respectively) were produced as part of a 2013–2019 group research project called "The Dissolution of the Japanese Empire and the Struggle for Legitimacy in Postwar East Asia, 1945–1965," managed by Barak Kushner and funded by a European Research Council grant. A simple review of just the two books would comment on the high quality of scholarship across nineteen chapters penned by scholars from a wide range of disciplinary and geographical backgrounds, with the requisite introductory chapters by the editors—in other words, a professional job well done. It would also pick up a few of the key arguments in individual chapters, probably with a little more focus on those chapters to which the reviewer's own research is closely connected. I will adopt that approach in the second half of this review, but first I feel it is important to review the project itself with an eye to the new things its conception allows us to say about the year 1945 and its broader lessons for researchers of East Asian history and beyond. But I should start with a declaration of interest. In November 2016, Barak Kushner invited me to one of his project events at the University of Cambridge to give a talk about my recent fieldwork on contents tourism. Although my paper was not published as part of the project—it ultimately appeared in Japan Review—this experience gave me an appreciation of what was being attempted. Kushner writes on his website that the project coordinated postdoctoral research associates and offered PhD scholarships to investigate "the impact of the fall of the Japanese empire in East Asia."1 The project members held symposia, produced numerous other stand-alone articles, and published a book that predates the two under review here: The Dismantling of Japan's Empire in East Asia: (hereafter "Dismantling").2 It is particularly important to read Overcoming Empire and Ruins with reference to this earlier book if we are to grasp the total scope of the project. Kushner's introduction to Dismantling sets out the project's aims: The [Japanese] empire did not end as cleanly as is often perceived in domestic national histories of Japan, which until recently tended to ignore the legacy of empire outside Japan's [End Page 423] occupied main islands. It is necessary to bring empire back to discussions of postwar East Asian identity and to fold it into a history for the region as a whole with Japan at the center.3 Kushner notes that while there is much scholarship on the creation of the Japanese empire, the common image of Japan's defeat in war has left the dismantling of the empire comparatively underresearched, particularly in transnational perspective. The ambitious scope of these aims mean that they can only realistically be achieved by a team that pools its research expertise in diverse geographical areas, archival material, cultural memories, and disciplinary approaches. Dismantling comprises sixteen research papers, which makes a total of thirty-five papers across the three books. Dismantling has more of a Japanese focus supplemented by a European perspective; Overcoming Empire focuses more on mainland China, Taiwan, and Korea; and Ruins is somewhere in between with coverage across Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and China. The geographical focus of the project, therefore, was East Asia. However, it would have been nice to have a little...