I begin my rejoinder to Timothy Brook and Michael Shin by reiterating the important question with which Brook ends his piece. “[W]hen Hamid Karzai's government falls in Afghanistan, or Nouri al-Maliki's does in Iraq, who then will be the nation's heroes and who the collaborators?” Questions such as this and other present-day conundrums (including the choices I make living in a national security state) were certainly on my mind when I began thinking about collaboration during the Second World War and particularly within the Japanese empire. The line between then and now is direct and short for me. Timothy Brook himself has been the target of an internet smear campaign assailing his work on Chinese collaboration for purportedly preparing an alibi for American mischief in Iraq and Afghanistan. Paramount among my own thoughts was always: what would I do, were I faced with the choices a Yi Kwang-su, a Liang Hongzhi or a Wang Jingwei was? It seems an irresistible reflex to me that we place ourselves in the position of those in the past who wagered and lost, and rehearse their calculations as our own: judgment of their decisions is as inevitable as it is necessary. The question is not if we will judge—to refuse risks our claims to moral agency—it is how. Timothy Brook, whether he once declined or now hesitates, indeed does make ethical judgments (he is on the record, for example, against advocating “collaboration as a morally positive or politically advisable course” [Reference Brook2008]), and indeed he should. That we have not come to similar conclusions only points to our missing consensus on a moral calculus, and not to the lack of an imperative to possess one.

Fredric Jameson once observed that it did not seem to him “North American intellectuals have generally had the kind of experience of history that would qualify them to judge the actions and choices of people under military occupation” (Reference Jameson1991, 256). What I object to first is the assumption that North American history is so poor in precedent. But what I object to more in Jameson's dismissal of my right to judge is his notion that an “experience of history” is obliged before we can use our endowment for rational thinking. If judgment stands upon a subjectivity generated solely through lived familiarity, then imagination must be beside the point and it is not. Historians, like judges, are of course meant to be impartial. The judge's blindfold has its equivalent in the historian's “distance,” but perhaps because I am a student of literature I wonder this: where is the imaginative bond, be it sympathy or representative thought, between ourselves and the past's perpetrators and victims? Modernity, both in representative democracies and totalitarian states, has the stubborn tendency to render us spectators rather than actors, and withdrawing from the faculty of judgment is consonant with that tendency. But I also understand that just as moral judgment will never be wholly objective or universal, nor can it be wholly subjective—it must be inter-subjective, by which I mean it proceeds from picturing ourselves in the place of others and seeking judgment that both we and our imagined others would accept. I agree with Timothy Brook that the “moral certainty” (but surely it was political certainty) with which China after 1949 dealt with wartime collaborators gives us pause; but so should the defense some collaborators advanced at their trials, insisting “if you weren't there, you cannot judge.” That plea was not accepted by the courts, and nor should it be by historians.

Collaborators in the twentieth century, because they were so numerous and in fact constitute a central historical problem in understanding how empires rose and fell, command our attention not only because we are scholars but because we are modern citizens facing our own mundane forks in the road. In hindsight, judging a Hitler does not require much mental toil. But it is the people who made the trains run on time, or processed an empire's paperwork—and did so with no conviction—who constitute the greatest challenge to our human dignity and destiny. To quote Fredric Jameson again, for many collaboration was simply a “job,” and he numbers his friend Paul de Man among them (Reference Jameson1991, 257). That is an indictment, not an excuse, however. The consequences of doing one's “job well” were immeasurable. In current parlance “genocide” has come to mean “mass killing,” so the Holocaust is thought of as genocide, and the Japanese interregnum in Korea not. But the Polish Jew who first coined the word, Raphael Lemkin, thought otherwise. In his Reference Lemkin1944 book Axis Rule in Occupied Europe he defined genocide this way: “Genocide has two phases: one, destruction of the historical pattern of the oppressed group; the other, the imposition of the national pattern of the oppressor” (1944, 79). Under these terms, Japan's assimilationist polices in Korea were certainly genocidal, they came close to depleting our precious store of human plurality, and to the extent they were effective they were aided by all manner of Koreans, including its most prominent writer.

Of course, the collaborators had their rationales, and although I have examined Yi Kwang-su's through the prism of pragmatic philosophy, there are other standards with which to analyze him as well that can generate a range of nuanced verdicts about his actions. I have read some, including Michael Shin's important work, and look forward to more. But I am now convinced that the intentions of collaborators, often cited in their defense, are irrelevant to how we should arbitrate them, just as what the U.S. government “means” to do in pursuing pre-emptive wars is irrelevant to me. Michael Shin worries my argument runs the risk of “confusing the claims of imperial ideology with the ‘reality’,” but in fact it is only reality (praxis) that compels me, not what we may say about it (poesis). My rejection of intention admittedly runs counter to several centuries of our common sense that malice thinking must precede a malice act—manslaughter has been punished differently than murder, for example, for a very long time. But twentieth-century history has shown us the best of intentions—such as a writer's desire to see his country make the best deal with a powerful neighbor that it can—is no bar to disastrous consequences.

Just as intention cannot enter into evidence, neither should remorse temper judgment. Regret is simply another state of mind, often conceived in bad faith, that like intention alters nothing in the world. In his novel Shinpan (The Judgment, Reference Hotta Yoshie1960–63), Hotta Yoshie brings together two war criminals: the Japanese Kyōsuke, who killed a elderly Chinese woman whom his unit had raped, and Paul, an American who had piloted one of the planes that bombed Hiroshima. Both men attempt suicide, spend time in mental institutions, and finally come into each other's lives when Paul visits Japan. The “judgment” that Hotta renders upon these men is eventually a severe one, and early in the novel the novelist makes plain his opinion that repentance, however heartfelt, does not diminish culpability. This is not an easy position for any of us to endorse, if we are sympathetic or merciful by nature, but the unprecedented crimes of our time (Nanking, Auschwitz, Hiroshima) insist upon accountability for what the perpetrators wrought, not what they once thought or later felt.

In fact, I want to conclude my response by accepting Timothy Brook's invitation to think more broadly, beyond collaboration, when he brings up the topic of the Rape of Nanking and the International Military Tribunal for the Far East (IMTFE), a subject on which he has written extensively. He notes in his response to me that “The invitation to hesitate might also open the way to enlarging what we find morally repugnant about collaboration and considering its application elsewhere. This is the controversial standard that Radhabinod Pal, the Indian judge who dissented from the majority opinion at the Tokyo trial.” I am happy to open the way without hesitating, and I find Pal's dissent quite germane to the issues I hope to consider in my larger project of rethinking responsibility and judgment in twentieth-century East Asia.

I do not find Pal quite the “perceptive guide” to the Tokyo judgment that Brook does (Reference Brook2001, 677). Pal makes, in my view, at least two key errors in objecting to the sentences meted out to the Japanese held responsible for the Rape that relate to my argument. “In Pal's view,” Brook has written elsewhere, “the guilt adhered not to the individuals who stood before the bench, but to history” (Reference Brook and Wakabayashi2007, 150). But history cannot be put on trial in a courtroom, nor should it: the venue is designed for individuals. As Brook noted in the pages of this journal ten years ago, the IMTFE “was a military tribunal convened to hear charges against individuals” (Reference Brook2001, 673). But then Pal makes an opposite error as well in his dissent. In another of Brook's works on Nanking, in which part of Pal's dissent is reprinted, Pal concludes that one individual, commander of the Japanese expeditionary force Matsui Iwane, took steps to end criminal activity under his military control that may have been ineffective, but were sincere, thus concluding that Matsui was not guilty of a dereliction of duty (Reference Brook1999, 287). Pal asserts, in other words, that Matsui did not intend for war crimes to happen on his watch, and for that he should be spared sanction. “In Pal's counternarrative,” Brook writes, “Nanking was an unfortunate incident that signified nothing beyond itself” (Reference Brook2001, 694–95). If Brook is correct, Pal came to countenance twentieth-century things that earlier times would have found inconceivable.

Fortunately not all of Pal's fellow jurists agreed with him, and Matsui was hanged. But the idea that Nanking, like a number of other modern atrocities, was not actionable because no one willed it to happen persists. Only a few years ago, an historian of Japan based in the United States made the appalling statement that “[A]s far as the responsibility of Japanese commanders [in Nanking] is concerned, the Atrocity was an accident, albeit a terrible one” (Yamamoto Reference Yamamoto and Wakabayashi2007, 286). What can the word “accident” possibly mean here? There is certainly a hesitation to judge in this historian's words, but that is itself a covert judgment: what lies buried is the implication that no one bears responsibility. I do not believe in judgment without responsibility, and insist we must look for it when we think about the Rape of Nanking, and when we think about the cultural genocide of the Korean people abetted by many of its country's leaders and exemplars. Without exercising judgment, how do we distinguish right from wrong? Without right and wrong, there is no justice.