Guest Editor’s Introduction: Writing the “Empire” Back into the History of Postwar Japan

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Guest Editor’s Introduction: Writing the “Empire” Back into the History of Postwar Japan

Journal Title: International Journal of Korean History - Year 2017, Vol 22, Issue 1

Abstract

Where did the “empire” go in the history of postwar Japan? In postwar Japanese history, one finds a historiographical “amnesia of empire.” The Japanese empire lost its colonies all at once as a result of its defeat in World War II, and the end of the empire was, in the words of Japan historian Lori Watt, a “third party decolonization” managed by the Allied Powers.1 In postwar Japan, this process of decolonization was imagined as a “distant event that happened to other people,” and this conditioned the “amnesia of empire” in collective memory and historiography.2 “The dominant narrative of Japanese historiography,” Japan scholar Leo T.S. Ching claims, “is therefore able to circumvent the dissolution of its empire altogether, insulating itself and moving briskly from defeat to U.S. occupation, from demilitarization to ‘democratization’ and unprecedented economic ‘miracle.’”3 Yet, the presence of Koreans in Japan unsettles this “amnesia of empire.” By the end of World War II, Japan had a population of over two million Koreans, most of whom were both colonial migrant workers and wartime conscripted workers. At Japan’s defeat, issues related to this large colonial population on the empire’s home front formed a critical site where “decolonization” took place, whether in the form of their self-empowerment, their open defiance of Japanese authority, or the U.S. Occupation’s “liberation” and “repatriation” of Koreans in Japan. How can we write the “empire” back into the history of postwar Japan through the prism of the Korean (post)colonial population in Japan? This special issue is intended to be a contribution to the growing body of research on the legacies of empire in postwar Japan.4 With its primary focus on the “postcolonial” Korean population (zainichi Koreans) and the so-called “Korean problem” in U.S.-occupied Japan, this issue seeks to expand the scope of postwar history. In particular, the three articles included here attempt to enlarge the temporal and spatial framework of the existing historiography, which often assumes a temporal divide between wartime and postwar and takes the form of an “island history” centered on a national unit of analysis. In general historical accounts, Emperor Hirohito’s speech announcing Japan’s surrender on August 15, 1945, marks the “postwar” as a “new beginning.”5 The postwar is portrayed as disconnected and inverted from the bleak wartime past, and this idea of discontinuity has dominated the narrative framework for decades. Since the 1990s, however, Japan historians have challenged the idea of discontinuity.6 Studies of the “total war system,” particularly in the volume edited by Yasushi Yamanouchi, Victor Koschmann and Ryūiichi Narita, emphasize the presence of continuity across the divide of the wartime and the postwar.7 Similarly, historians Andrew Gordon and Nakamura Masanori use a “transwar” analysis to understand the recurring dynamic of social change in twentieth-century Japan.8 The new scholarship treats postwar Japan as the product of a long process continuous with past transformations, rather than as a completely “reborn” entity.

Authors and Affiliations

Deokhyo Choi

Keywords

EP ID EP26443
DOI https://doi.org/10.22372/ijkh.2017.22.1.1
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