Eighty years after it ended, the Second World War is still making headlines in East Asia. For example, the release of blockbuster Chinese films about Japanese wartime atrocities this year prompted the Japanese government to issue a travel warning. As a professor of East Asian history with numerous publications on wartime and postwar history of Japan and China, Barak Kushner is uniquely qualified to examine the long shadow of the war in these two countries. While his 2015 prize-winning book Men to Devils, Devils to Men: Japanese War Crimes and Chinese Justice (Harvard University Press, 2015) examined how both Nationalist and Communist China put the Japanese on trial, Geography of Injustice probes the larger issue of justice (as well as its denial) against the background of the war crimes trials and their long-term legacies. “Finding justice for Japanese war crimes, or creating injustice where crimes were not committed, is just one example of the weight, emotional baggage that infects East Asia and shapes the current political landscape” (p. 22).

The book’s 13 chapters can be divided into three sections. Centring on the end of the Second World War, Kushner provides a useful reminder that the Sino-Japanese frictions did not start suddenly with that war, nor with a China under the Chinese Communist Party for that matter. He illustrates this with a pair of colossal anchors belonging to the Qing Navy that were acquired by Imperial Japan after its victory in the First Sino-Japanese War of 1894–1895. One of these anchors, long on display in the Ueno Park in Tokyo, was repatriated to China after the Second World War and, decades later, is exhibited in the military museum in Beijing. This “anchor of history,” as Kushner puts it, reveals the paradox that the Chinese Nationalist and later Communist governments seemed to inherit the legacy of Qing-era humiliation even as they portrayed themselves as revolutionary regimes (p. 13).

The next section goes deeper into what Kushner calls “legal zones” – political units that sought to administer justice in distinctive ways – and the competitive search for justice in postwar East Asia. The longest chapter is devoted to what Kushner terms “The Theater of Law in Mao’s China.” It demonstrates how political leaders and legal professionals in the People’s Republic of China (PRC) sought to use war crimes trials of Japanese in the 1950s for clearly political goals: to rebuild relations with a postwar Japan that was under US influence while showcasing new China’s legitimacy to the world.

The last section of the book covers the roughly six decades since the end of war crimes trials. Kushner laments the fact that most of these legal professionals in the PRC – many educated in the Nationalist era and a few even abroad – were soon sidelined or purged during subsequent political campaigns culminating in the Cultural Revolution. Their return to public life during the 1980s not only signalled Beijing’s plan to build a “rule of law” with Chinese characteristics; it also coincided with China’s “new remembering” of the “war of resistance.” Consequently, postwar trials of the Japanese, including the International Military Tribunal for the Far East (“Tokyo Trial”), received official recognition in Beijing so as to demonstrate China being on the right side of justice. This also explains the full endorsement of the verdicts at trials conducted by the Nationalists shortly after the war.

Positing that the legacy of a war could not be brought to an end merely by war crimes trials, Kushner rightly proposes to “look at the situation from both the Chinese and Japanese sides to understand how this seemingly insurmountable structure was erected over time” (p. 22). In Japan, for example, the view of the war crimes trials by the allied powers as “victor’s justice” persisted. It gained popularity in part thanks to films such as Watashi wa kai ni naritai (I Want to be a Shellfish) as well as high-profile cases like the “hundred-man killing contest” that had been tried by the Nationalist government in China in 1946. On the other hand, many Chinese victims of Japanese war crimes would have to wait until the 1990s or later for opportunities to resolve these injustices, and often unsuccessfully. However, this delay in justice, or the prolonging of injustice, as Kushner points out, had as much to do with events inside China as outside, such as Japan’s reluctance to apologize (p. 5). Kushner calls out injustice when he sees it, be it caused by Japan or otherwise. For example, he highlights the incarceration without trial of thousands of Japanese prisoners – first by the Soviet Union and then by the PRC – as well as Beijing’s illegal imprisonment of a senior Japanese Communist Party leader for more than 25 years (p. 141).

Throughout Geography of Injustice Kushner offers his reflections about both the process and meaning of justice after the end of war and empire. Kushner wisely avoids giving a definition of justice; instead, he offers what may be considered a historian’s answer to this problem. According to him, “transnational formulations of justice cannot be deemed solely by law,” but “emerge through convention and practice. Justice is mutually agreed upon by the aggrieved and perpetrating parties” (pp. 4–5). In reality, however, the verdicts from those trials, including those of the aforementioned killing contest, “have evolved into blunter tools that both shaped foreign policy and generated industries of memory that further galvanize public opinion in contemporary East Asian society” (p. 5).

Geography of Injustice draws from an impressive array of archival and published sources in Japan, China, Taiwan, the US and the UK. Kushner has a knack for recovering fascinating human stories from obscure sources and connecting events and personalities across time and space. The book also incorporates his interviews with former participants that provide insights into the otherwise opaque legal processes in the formative years of the PRC. In addition to being a witness at a one of the recent trials on behalf of Chinese victims, Kushner also participated in a Chinese TV production about Japanese war crimes. Having thus gained access to sites and people otherwise off-limits, Kushner adopts the stance of an ethnographer, without losing the critical distance of a historian. As he records in vivid detail the emotional reactions of a Chinese survivor in an on-camera interview, for example, he does not hide his unease “with a moment that defies understanding or challenges our vocabulary,” nor does he shy away from harbouring doubts about the veracity of the testimony (p. 3). In this way, Kushner sets an example for scholars or journalists to navigate the potentially hazardous field of memory-making, particularly in present-day China.

Geography of Injustice is a timely intervention when the conflict over the past continues to feed political frictions in East Asia. Anyone interested in Sino-Japanese relations – journalists and policy analysists among them – can learn much from Kushner’s bi-national approach and his fair-mindedness. The book also contributes to scholarship on the legal ideas and practices as well as the shifting relationship between the state and individuals in the PRC. Ultimately, Kushner’s reflections on the role of judicial processes and the place of justice in memory-making have relevance beyond East Asia, as the world continues to wrestle with mass atrocities and human rights abuses as well as their lasting legacies.