End Of Empire Migrants In East Asia

This book provides an interdisciplinary study about the migration of approximately 9 million people who became end of empire migrants in East Asia following the collapse of the Japanese Empire in 1945. Through the collection of first-hand testimonies and examination of four key themes, the book uncovers how the Japanese government’s repatriation policy intersected with people’s experiences of end of empire migration in East Asia. The first theme, repatriation as historiography and discourse, examines how repatriation has been studied, debated and represented in Japan since the end of the Second World War. The second theme, finding home in the former empire, reveals the diversity of experiences of the peoples of former colonies as the borders ‘shifted under their feet’ through first-hand testimony. The third theme, government policy, explores the changing Japanese government policy from the 1950s to the 1970s. The fourth theme, integration after repatriation, reveals how Japanese former colonial residents integrated into Japanese society following repatriation. Presenting the collective research of 14 international authors, this book will be of interest for researchers of East Asian history, modern Japanese history, migration studies, postcolonial studies, Japanese studies, Korean studies, post-war international relations and Cold War history.

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. “This third book to emerge from Barak Kushner’s massive collaborative research project on the dissolution of Japan’s empire lays out a new geography of turning the ruins into social, economic, political, and cultural opportunities across Northeast Asia, and with lasting consequences. This book will change the way we research and teach ‘1945’ in a global context.” —Franziska Seraphim, Boston College “Writing imperial history, linking the prewar to postwar, is perilous because it must resist domestic taboos and social pressures. Today’s global society, where history incites extreme nationalism and serves as catalyst for conflict, calls for the creation of a new history of the end of empire as Kushner and his team have done in this volume.” —ASANO Toyomi, Waseda University

This book provides an overall picture of East Asian international politics during the early interwar period and examines the various foreign policy trends of the major powers involved, including Japan, China, Britain, the United States, and the Soviet Union. Based on extensive original research, it posits that East Asia experienced four waves of international change during the interwar period: the transition to the post-World War I international order; the appearance of Nationalist China and the Soviet Union as actors in East Asian international politics; the Japanese invasion of Manchuria; and Japanese implementation of the North China Buffer State Strategy. It considers the new challenges brought about by each of these waves, how the powers – particularly Japan, Britain, and the United States – were able to meet these challenges by working together, and how this became more difficult as time went on. It argues that the Washington System – the international order established at the 1921–1922 Washington Naval Conference – was not a break with the past, as is frequently argued, on account of new forms of foreign policy, including the ideological approaches of the United States and the Soviet Union, but that rather spheres of influence diplomacy continued as before. In addition, in discussing Japanese foreign policy, the book provides a comprehensive picture of the diversity of views towards China among Japanese actors and the ways these shifted over time. The Open Access version of this book, available at www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 license.

What are the origins of the hostile environment for immigrants in Britain? Chosen as a BBC History Magazine Book of the Year 2021 and shortlisted for the PEN Hessell-Tiltman Prize 2022 In the wedded stories of migration and the end of empire, Ian Sanjay Patel uncovers a forgotten history of post-war Britain. After the Second World War, what did it mean to be a citizen of the British empire and the post-war Commonwealth of Nations? Post-war migrants coming to Britain were soon renamed immigrants in laws that prevented their entry despite their British nationality. The experiences of migrants and the archival testimony of officials and politicians at home and abroad, retold here, define Britain’s role in the global age of decolonization.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Japan, China, and both Tsarist Russia and later the USSR, vied for imperial dominance in Northeast Asia. In the process, they contested and at the same time adopted many of the physical and rhetorical features of Old-World imperialism, mitigated by domestic political forces and deeply ingrained cultural and historical values. With chapters written by scholars from Europe and Asia, including Russia, this collection offers new international and interdisciplinary perspectives on competitions between imperialisms in Northeast Asia in the period 1894–1953, exploring encounters between old rivals and new protagonists. Bringing together specialists from different disciplines and drawing on newly discovered and hard-to-access sources, it presents a uniquely comparative and holistic perspective on the symbiotic relationships between these regional powers and resistance to them. The contributors focus on four key areas: ideology, rivalry and territoriality, social factors, and visual representations. A valuable resource for students and scholars of modern Northeast Asian history, and highly pertinent to understanding the imperial posturing between some of the same protagonists today.

This book examines key aspects of the Asia Pacific War (1931–1945), that was initially waged between Japan and China, before Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor drew in the U.S.-led allied forces from 1941 to 1945. Part I of the book examines three interlocking components, the origins of the war; its impact on combatants and civilians; and its short-term legacy, including the huge changes that took place in the postwar governance of Japan. Part II explores the ongoing impact and legacy of the war for those in postwar Japan, and later generations, particularly through the examination of the ambiguity of state-led reconciliation with Japan’s neighbors, the growth of dynamic civil reconciliation efforts, and the prominent role of the arts in peace movements. Through a people-centered approach it filters historical events through the lens of the war’s impact on individuals, who found themselves players within a larger frame of the social history of Japan and caught up in the international power dynamics of the nuclear age. Featuring studies of contemporary peace activism, this will be a valuable resource to students and scholars of Modern Asian and U.S. History, as well as those interested in postwar memory and reconciliation.

This book argues that the prevailing view of colonialism – that it was a negative and destructive phenomenon – needs to be rethought. It focuses on the experiences of the South Indian working class, large numbers of which came to Malaya in the early years of the twentieth century, emigrating from socially, economically, and environmentally inhospitable south India. It examines the opportunities which colonialism presented for these people, highlighting also the British approach to colonialism in Malaya, an approach which emphasised conservativism and tradition, and which protected the interests of the Malay aristocrat classes and, by extension, the Malay masses in order to compensate for European economic dominance and the influx of a non-Malay labour force. Overall, the book demonstrates that the South Indians, a class whose identity, social existence, and prospects were inextricably linked to imperial processes, benefitted from colonialism, and should be viewed as an active transnational entity within a constructive system, rather than as passive victims of repressive, destructive forces.

Nationalism and Decolonisation in Singapore analyses Singapore’s decolonisation movement between 1953 and 1963 and provides a framework to understand the deepest and most important unresolved conflicts in Singaporean society. This book demonstrates how these conflicts stem from four unresolved schisms dating from the decolonisation period: race, class, language, and the meaning of self-determination. The author argues that these schisms drove the events of decolonisation, the creation of Malaysia, and Singapore’s separation and continue to actively shape Singapore today. Using contemporary English- and Chinese-language sources from a wide array of perspectives, as well as numerous declassified official documents, this book provides a new approach to the most formative period of Singapore history. It explains in detail the different ideologies, institutions, and conflicts which shaped Singaporean politics and society during decolonisation. In particular, the book focuses on the leaders of the main groups which most heavily influenced Singapore’s anti-colonial nationalism – the Chinesespeaking, the working class, and left-wing intellectuals. It looks at Singapore in the context of global movements of nationalism, socialism, and decolonisation and provides a framework which can offer insight into similar attempts by postcolonial governments to construct new nation-states from plural societies. A novel study of Singapore’s independence struggle that incorporates and analyses multiple linguistic, socioeconomic, and political viewpoints, the book will be of interest to researchers of Southeast Asian history and politics and those interested in decolonisation, nationalism, identity, and the politics of race, class, and language.