For the past twenty years or so, the scholarship of Japan's empire has become a collaborative endeavor, involving historians of Japan, China, Korea, Southeast Asia, and the Soviet Union (Russia) who, in so doing, have challenged the traditional approach of area studies to the topic. The scholarship of the “unmaking” of Japan's empire, however, has not enjoyed such a status yet, and the reason seems to be quite complicated. The decolonization of the Japanese empire was done by the victorious Allied Forces, and this third-party decolonization transformed much of the political map of Asia.
While this fact certainly demands that we scholars to go beyond a one-nation approach, this somehow did not happen. For example, until recently, most scholars of postwar Japan envisioned the nation as homogenous, as if the multiethnic empire had disappeared from the Earth overnight on the eve of August 15, 1945. With this misconception, the “old” imperial subjects of Chinese, Koreans, and Taiwanese also disappeared from the purview of Japanese study. In addition, scholars of China, Korea, and Taiwan were busy studying the major postwar (but not necessarily postimperial) political events, the civil war and Communist Revolution in China, the Korean War and subsequent division of the Korean peninsula, and the arrival of Nationalist China to Taiwan. Restated, while the fall of Japan brought every “imperial” subject of Japan onto the same stage under the directorship of not Japan but the United States, the stage was subsequently buffeted by the waves of Cold War and globalization, the reason why the concept of “decolonization” has long been absent in the study of post-1945 Asia.
Lori Watt is too modest in stating that the goal of her book as “to tell the story of repatriation as Japanese people lived it” (p. 206). When Empire Comes Home is much more than that, setting scenes and providing stage directions for the drama, and encouraging us to study this important yet neglected topic of the unmaking of Japanese empire beyond the postwar border of Japan into the rest of Asia and the United States.
The book is composed of five chapters in addition to an introduction and a conclusion. Chapter 1, “New Maps of Asia,” traces the slow history of migration in the Japanese empire, which was terminated abruptly, with little discussion among Allied powers. The empire was randomly divided into zones of occupation under the United States, Nationalist China, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union, creating new maps of Asia.
Chapter 2, “The Co-Production of the Repatriate, 1945–49,” illustrates how the category of “repatriates” (hikiagesha) was coproduced between 1945 and 1949 in negotiations between them and the Japanese state/society, with the latter being the clear “winner.” The “repatriates” were thus marked as distinct from the “ordinary” citizens of Japan, while Koreans, Chinese, and Taiwanese already in Japan proper became “foreigners” or so-called Third Country Nationals (sangokujin). This process of marking “repatriates” and “former colonial subjects,” then, moved Japan away from its past imperial project.
Chapter 3, “The Future of the Japanese Race and Argumentative Types,” focuses on the returns of Japanese women from Manchuria in the immediate postwar years and of Japanese men—the “red” repatriates—from the labor camps of the Soviet Union in Siberia after 1949. Both groups of repatriates threatened the “purity” of postwar Japan's national integrity for different reasons: while the bodies of women in Manchuria might have been contaminated by the Soviet soldiers, the brains of men in Siberia might have been infected by communism. Here, postwar Japan clearly emerged as a homogeneous nation without its “imperial” past.
Chapter 4, “In the End, It Was the Japanese Who Got Us,” examines the fictional figures of the repatriates who have appeared in Japanese popular culture since the late 1950s. Through the analysis of various forms of cultural productions (literature, films, and songs), this chapter aims to explore the history of the unmaking of the Japanese empire that was suppressed in the allegedly “non-fictional” and “official” accounts.
Chapter 5, “No Longer Hikiagesha,” discusses the fate of women and children who were left behind in Northeast China at the end of the war. Without husbands and fathers, these women and children were left to themselves in the turmoil of the end of empire but saved by Chinese families through marriage and adoption. Unlike the earlier repatriates, they are no longer “repatriates” once settled in Japan, for they are culturally Chinese. This chapter, then, locates “repatriation” in East Asia in the wave of globalization since the 1980s, for these “repatriates” have also brought their own Chineseness, along with their Chinese spouses and children to Japan.
To narrate the history of the unmaking of Japan's empire, Watt relies on the method of letting a huge array of documents speak. These documents include the Japanese government's documents, such as the massive volumes of publications by the Japanese Ministry of Health and Welfare that describe the history of its efforts in aiding repatriates from overseas. They also include a variety of national and local newspapers, as well as newspapers published by numerous groups of repatriates overseas and in Japan. In addition, Watt uses repatriates' memoirs, popular monthly and weekly magazines, cartoons, posters, literature, films, songs, and so on. Indeed, the number of facts presented in this book from all these sources is often overwhelming.
My small quibble comes in here. While the conclusion of the book, which places the movement of people in postwar East Asia in a comparative perspective with Europe, is important, I wanted to see more of the author's analysis of the abundant facts presented, in the form of answering the questions that Watt seems to have posed in the main section of the book. For example, why did the object of hikiagesha discourse move over time from the bodies of Japanese women to the minds of Japanese men, and then to the “Chinese” bodies of more recent repatriates from China since the 1970s? Is this simply the reflection of changing postwar history of Japan? Do the images of all these bodies not coexist today? Or, how do the figures of hikiagesha in postwar Japanese cultural productions differ from the figures of “overseas Japanese” in wartime Japanese popular literature? Or, how did the entry of the United States onto the stage of Japanese empire's decolonization help to obliterate “imperial” Japan and create postwar “national” Japan? I understand that the author is already planning to answer some of these questions in full in near future.
Despite this quibble of mine, When Empire Comes Home is, in my view, the first book that has opened up the history of the unmaking of Japan's empire onto Asia and the United States.
