Overcoming Empire in Post-Imperial East Asia : Repatriation, Redress and Rebuilding, edited by Barak Kushner and Sherzod Muminov

Research Council project entitled, "The Dissolution of the Japanese Empire and the Struggle for Legitimacy in Postwar East Asia, 1945Asia, -1965."."The first volume, The Dismantling of Japan's Empire in East Asia, addressed the macro picture at the end of Japan's colonial and wartime empire, examining issues of regional order, "deimperialization," migration, legitimacy, and justice, along with a plethora of contributions on more specific themes.At sixteen chapters plus an introduction, that first volume provided a comprehensive, if somewhat Japan-centric, reassessment of the period by leading scholars in the field.Many were well-known in Japan but publishing in English for the first time, so the volume added considerable depth to the literature in English on the period.Collectively, it provided a strong corrective to the assumption that, with defeat, Japan effortlessly morphed from a cosmopolitan empire into a homogenous nation-state.It was thus with great anticipation that the reviewer waited for the second volume, and for the most part it does not disappoint.Overcoming Empire in Post-Imperial East Asia is slimmer than its predecessor, with ten chapters plus an introduction, and this time the contributors are largely emerging scholars.The volume should not, however, be seen as leftovers from Kushner's project.First of all, the volume presents a less Japan-centric understanding of how state and society were reformulated in East Asia following the collapse of Japan's colonial and wartime empire.Only two of the chapters are primarily Japanfocused (Doglia, Stegewerns) and thus the second volume supplements the first with more extensive treatment of the situation in China, Korea, and Taiwan.The chapters discuss how issues of reconstruction, migration, and memory-both from the colonial period and as an immediate result of the Japanese empire's collapse-lingered, and to some extent shaped, those societies.There is no sharp divide between the two volumes, but broadly speaking the first addresses the deimperialization of Japan, while the second primarily focuses on the decolonization of East Asia, both messy processes, complicated particularly in the latter instance by civil and cold war conflicts.This second volume is also noteworthy for addressing some of the shortfalls in the study of East Asia's transition from the Japanese colonial empire to the early postwar period.