In the Ruins of the Japanese Empire : Imperial Violence, State Destruction, and the Reordering of Modern East Asia / edited by Barak Kushner and Andrew Levidis.

Includes bibliographies and index.

Introduction : the search for meaning in defeat and victory / Barak Kushner -- section 1. Collaboration and dilemmas of deimperialization. The politics of collaboration in post-liberation Southern Korea / Mark E. Caprio -- Punishing Han traitors beyond Chinese borders / Yun Xia -- Colonial legacies, war memories, and political violence in Taiwan, 1945-1947 / Victor Louzon -- Bullets of a defeated nation : the 1946 Shibuya Incident / Adam Cathcart -- section 2. Negotiating past and present in the military and political realms. The repatriation of surrendered Japanese troops, 1945-1947 / Rotem Kowner -- Ordered to disarm, encouraged to rearm : Japan's struggles with the postwar / Garren Mulloy -- Politics in a fallen empire : Kishi Nobusuke and the making of the conservative hegemony in Japan / Andrew Levidis -- section 3. Returning to the continent, Japan's relations with new China. Diplomatic salvation : Buddhist exchanges and Sino-Japanese rapprochement / Lauren Richardson and Gregory Adam Scott -- Reconstructing Sino-Japanese friendship : East Asian literary camaraderie in postwar Japan's Sinitic poetry scene / Matthew Fraleigh.

In the Ruins of the Japanese Empire concludes that early East Asian Cold War history needs to be studied within the framework of post-imperial history. Japan's surrender did not mean that the Japanese and former imperial subjects would immediately disavow imperial ideology. The end of the Japanese empire unleashed unprecedented destruction and violence on the periphery. Lives were destroyed; names of cities altered; collaborationist regimes--which for over a decade dominated vast populations--melted into the air as policeman, bureaucrats, soldiers, and technocrats offered their services as nationalists, revolutionaries or communists. Power did not simply change hands swiftly and smoothly. In the chaos of the new order, legal anarchy, revenge, ethnic displacement, and nationalist resentments stalked the postcolonial lands of northeast Asia, intensifying bloody civil wars in societies radicalized by total war, militarization, and mass mobilization. Kushner and Levidis's volume follows these processes as imperial violence reordered demographics and borders, and involved massive political, economic, and social dislocation as well as stubborn continuities. From the hunt for "traitors" in Korea and China to the brutal suppression of the Taiwanese by the Chinese Nationalist government in the long-forgotten February 28 Incident, the research shows how the empire's end acted as a catalyst for renewed attempts at state-building. From the imperial edge to the metropole, investigations shed light on how prewar imperial values endured during postwar Japanese rearmament and in party politics. Nevertheless, many Japanese actively tried to make amends for wartime transgressions and rebuild Japan's posture in East Asia by cultivating religious and cultural connections.

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