When Empire Comes Home: Repatriation and Reintegration in Postwar Japan

Description

Following the end of World War II in Asia, the Allied powers repatriated over six million Japanese nationals from colonies and battlefields throughout Asia and deported more than a million colonial subjects from Japan to their countries of origin. Depicted at the time as a postwar measure related to the demobilization of defeated Japanese soldiers, this population transfer was a central element in the human dismantling of the Japanese empire that resonates with other post-colonial and post-imperial migrations in the twentieth century. Lori Watt analyzes how the human remnants of empire, those who were moved and those who were left behind, served as sites of negotiation in the process of the jettisoning of the colonial project and in the creation of new national identities in Japan. Through an exploration of the creation and uses of the figure of the repatriate, in political, social, and cultural realms, this study addresses the question of what happens when empire comes home. When Empire Comes Home: Repatriation and Reintegration in Postwar Japan Acknowledgments Contents Maps, Figure, and Tables When Empire Comes Home: Repatriation and Reintegration in Postwar Japan Introduction: Repatriation, Decolonization, and the Transformations of Postwar Japan 1. New Maps of Asia History of Migration in the Japanese Empire Defeat in the Colonies Allied Repatriation of the Overseas Japanese Conclusion 2. The Co-Production of the Repatriate, 1945–49 Japanese and American Responses to the Postwar Migration The Repatriate Relief Bureau The Regional Repatriation Centers Responses of the Repatriate Community From Imperial Subject into Foreigner Conclusion 3. “The Future of the Japanese Race” and “Argumentative Types”: Women from Manchuria and Men from Siberia “For the Sake of the Future of the Japanese Race” Reception at Home The Return of the “Red Repatriates,” 1949 Problems at Home Soviet Detainees as “Repatriates” Repatriation from China, 1948–1972 Conclusion 4. “In the End, It Was the Japanese Who Got Us”: Repatriates in Literature, Songs, and Film Repatriates and Popular Culture Early Fictional Treatment of Repatriation The End of Colonial Manchuria in 1950s Fiction Conclusion 5. No Longer Hikiagesha: “Orphans and Women Left Behind in China” The Movement for Compensation and the Domestication of Repatriation Historical Narration, Commemoration, and Bringing Repatriation to an End Bureaucratic Efforts in Ending Repatriation 183 Orphaned by Empire Conclusion Epilogue: The Postwar History of Tsukada Asae Conclusion: Third Party Decolonization and Post-Imperial Japan Repatriation and Deportation in Okinawa The “Unmixing of Peoples” in Postwar East Asia in a Comparative Context Reference Matter Works Cited Index Harvard East Asian Monographs