Koga writes elegantly in her book of the inheritances of colonialism and imperialism: loss, victimhood, betrayal, but also possibly redemption through the formal economy. In her exploration of legacies of Japanese imperialism in Northeast China, she focuses on everyday interactions between Chinese and Japanese in spaces that embody these different inheritances. While Koga's work contributes to our understanding of how the memories of conflict with the Japanese has been used in Chinese politics and society, her main contribution is the ethnographic focus on ordinary economic interactions. This book fits a key piece into the puzzle of Sino-Japanese relations: how market interactions can thrive while mutual animosity grows. Koga's detailed ethnography of three sites – Harbin, Changchun and Dalian, and an epilogue discussing the unsuccessful attempt of Chinese victims of war-era mustard gas to find justice in a Tokyo court – is a significant contribution to the literature on how we understand the tensions between political conflicts and economic exchange in China.
Koga argues that loss and redemption are translated and experienced by Chinese and Japanese through economic interaction. Northeast China's imperialist past serves as reminder of loss, and at the same time is an instrument of economic revival and growth. As Chinese use sites redolent with imperial memories for economic opportunity, they are also forced to confront the past. The building of a new industrial site digs up old chemical weapons, severely injuring young Chinese. Old imperial buildings are used for commerce and museums, pulling in foreign capital through investment or tourism. Economic growth thus serves as a mechanism for redemption between Japan and China, even as it forces the two countries to confront the negative inheritance of colonialism.
Political scientists, in particular, should pay attention to the micro-level mechanisms of how economic interactions can simultaneously bring mutual benefits and unearth animosity, discomfort and the unsettled past. Much has been written about similar tensions at high levels of politics, where the Chinese state at once tries to attract inward Japanese investment and inflame anti-Japanese sentiment. The rich data and insights in this book should be brought to bear upon the high politics issues that are usually their focus.
Inheritance of Loss focuses on dualities: colonial sites bring wealth, but also force a reckoning with history. Koga uses powerful imagery of a “double mirror” (awase kagami in Japanese) to describe how Chinese and Japanese are forced to confront themselves, each other, and both the imperial and “after empire” past. At the same time, the emphasis on the formal economy has meant a neglect of the moral economy – an honest accounting of colonial and post-colonial tragedies – an intentional choice made during the process of diplomatic normalization.
Koga argues in the introduction that memory was politically deployed in the 1980s and economically deployed from the 1990s. This characterization is unconvincing for reasons Koga herself discusses, such as heightened tensions around maritime territories, Yasukuni shrine visits, and the use of historical sights in patriotic education even after the 1980s. Koga uses the case of Harbin to demonstrate a transition: from a municipal focus on Unit 731 and Japanese atrocities in the 1980s to a focus on colonial buildings in the 1990s that ignored their role in colonialism and also in the Cultural Revolution – more than one history is being pushed aside. There is another duality here: the tension between the Chinese centre and locality, where the centre continues to deploy memory as a political tool, even as some localities use their colonial inheritance for economic gain.
The chapters on Harbin and Changchun examine cultural and economic inheritances of empire. In Harbin, Koga examines the shift from political to economic deployment of historical sites in “old Harbin.” The chapter on Changchun adds valuable insights into the interactions between Japanese tourists who visit old imperial structures that have been re-rendered into “historical” sites. They must reckon with Japan's imperial past, and Japan's inadequate response to war atrocities, while under the observation of Chinese. The Dalian case most clearly highlights the “political economy of redemption,” or how memory can be used in the quest for mutually beneficial market relationships. This chapter is key for scholars who wish to understand how lasting (and binding) economic relationships have been maintained throughout political turbulence.
The book is highly recommended for scholars of Sino-Japanese relations specifically, and the politics of memory and post-colonialism more generally. Indeed, Koga ends the book persuasively urging scholars of post-colonialism to more fully consider East Asia as an important case, arguing that the length of occupation does not preclude an important “after empire.” Inheritance of Loss would be a challenging read for undergraduate students, but should be required for advanced students and scholars of Sino-Japanese relations.
