Final Report Summary - DOJSFL (The Dissolution of the Japanese Empire and the Struggle for Legitimacy in Postwar East Asia, 1945-1965)
The six-year ERC project, The Dissolution of the Japanese Empire and the Struggle for Legitimacy in Postwar East Asia, introduced three major new findings into the scholarship on empire, war, and the pursuit of justice.
First, the team investigated how the arrival of the global juridical moment, which employed international law in East Asia to reorder the region, witnessed the novel use of special military tribunals to judge empire and war crimes. This move demonstrated that the long shadow of the Japanese empire would spill into the postwar as newly established states would consistently emphasize their break with this past as evidence of their own legitimacy. The project’s research argues for a transnational shift in our historical perspective, one which sees the convulsive transformations of East Asia after 1945: the Japanese imperial disintegration in 1945; the declaration of the People’s Republic of China in 1949 following the victory of Mao Zedong in the revolutionary war (1937-1949); and the division and wars of the post-colonial lands of the Korean nation (1950-1953) as part of a series of interconnected wars emerging from imperial dissolution. However, Japan's imperial legacy did not end with the conclusion of war. The main cause behind such fragility stemmed, in part, from the manner in which competing former colonial powers jockeyed for position with emerging nationalist and ethnic forces.
By zeroing in on the post-imperial dimensions, this project forces us to reckon with the blood-soaked aftermath that followed in imperial Japan’s wake. Far from mirroring a Cold War in Europe, postwar East Asia saw renewed struggles for dominance following the power vacuum with Japan’s downfall. For instance, hundreds of thousands were starved and killed in the Chinese Communist’s siege of Changchun – the former capital of Manchukuo that Japan abandoned and the Chinese Nationalists could not maintain power. In post-colonial Korea, several million became victims of a civil war over legitimacy fought among communists, imperial collaborators, landlords and peasants. In many ways, all were remnants jostling to decide who benefitted and who had not from Japan’s empire. Even in Southeast Asia, we can see an arc of colonial and nationalist wars which fundamentally altered the legitimacy of Western concepts of rule due to the appearance and then the failure of the Japanese empire.
Second, in the realm of global legal and intellectual history the project tracked imperial hierarchies and the rise of a new sovereignty. In doing so the project reimagined war crimes trials as a foundational space for the transition from a world of empire to competitive engagement between post-imperial and post-colonial powers vying for supremacy. In the entanglements of civil war, global war and imperial demise, this history draws our attention to the ideological and imperial structures which divided empire and nation. We need to dive into and probe how the death of imperial control in that region was a necessary prerequisite for the birth of postwar East Asia and what such transformation that entailed.
Third, post-1945 Japanese history is most commonly see through two frames: postwar - which privileges the centrality of the Asia-Pacific War, and the United States occupation period; or transwar which is utilized by scholars to prove the continuity in terms mostly of capitalist, technological and bureaucratic or indeed “fascist” interruptions. By contrast, this project argued for the need to see the 1940s and 1950s as an era of de-imperialization in law, politics, society, and colonial ties – a process which both overlapped with American occupation – and extended far beyond it into the 1960s and 1970s. There is immense serendipity in this gap between the end of war and the formation of a postwar, not necessarily yet accounted for. It is the complex history of this moment in time that does not precisely contour to state boundaries but shapes our views of the Japanese empire, its legacy, and the continuing contested media discussions of its historical representation.
First, the team investigated how the arrival of the global juridical moment, which employed international law in East Asia to reorder the region, witnessed the novel use of special military tribunals to judge empire and war crimes. This move demonstrated that the long shadow of the Japanese empire would spill into the postwar as newly established states would consistently emphasize their break with this past as evidence of their own legitimacy. The project’s research argues for a transnational shift in our historical perspective, one which sees the convulsive transformations of East Asia after 1945: the Japanese imperial disintegration in 1945; the declaration of the People’s Republic of China in 1949 following the victory of Mao Zedong in the revolutionary war (1937-1949); and the division and wars of the post-colonial lands of the Korean nation (1950-1953) as part of a series of interconnected wars emerging from imperial dissolution. However, Japan's imperial legacy did not end with the conclusion of war. The main cause behind such fragility stemmed, in part, from the manner in which competing former colonial powers jockeyed for position with emerging nationalist and ethnic forces.
By zeroing in on the post-imperial dimensions, this project forces us to reckon with the blood-soaked aftermath that followed in imperial Japan’s wake. Far from mirroring a Cold War in Europe, postwar East Asia saw renewed struggles for dominance following the power vacuum with Japan’s downfall. For instance, hundreds of thousands were starved and killed in the Chinese Communist’s siege of Changchun – the former capital of Manchukuo that Japan abandoned and the Chinese Nationalists could not maintain power. In post-colonial Korea, several million became victims of a civil war over legitimacy fought among communists, imperial collaborators, landlords and peasants. In many ways, all were remnants jostling to decide who benefitted and who had not from Japan’s empire. Even in Southeast Asia, we can see an arc of colonial and nationalist wars which fundamentally altered the legitimacy of Western concepts of rule due to the appearance and then the failure of the Japanese empire.
Second, in the realm of global legal and intellectual history the project tracked imperial hierarchies and the rise of a new sovereignty. In doing so the project reimagined war crimes trials as a foundational space for the transition from a world of empire to competitive engagement between post-imperial and post-colonial powers vying for supremacy. In the entanglements of civil war, global war and imperial demise, this history draws our attention to the ideological and imperial structures which divided empire and nation. We need to dive into and probe how the death of imperial control in that region was a necessary prerequisite for the birth of postwar East Asia and what such transformation that entailed.
Third, post-1945 Japanese history is most commonly see through two frames: postwar - which privileges the centrality of the Asia-Pacific War, and the United States occupation period; or transwar which is utilized by scholars to prove the continuity in terms mostly of capitalist, technological and bureaucratic or indeed “fascist” interruptions. By contrast, this project argued for the need to see the 1940s and 1950s as an era of de-imperialization in law, politics, society, and colonial ties – a process which both overlapped with American occupation – and extended far beyond it into the 1960s and 1970s. There is immense serendipity in this gap between the end of war and the formation of a postwar, not necessarily yet accounted for. It is the complex history of this moment in time that does not precisely contour to state boundaries but shapes our views of the Japanese empire, its legacy, and the continuing contested media discussions of its historical representation.