Overcoming Empire in Post-Imperial East Asia

Barak Kushner is Professor of East Asian History at the University of Cambridge, UK. He is the author of Men to Devils, Devils to Men: Japanese War Crimes and Chinese Justice (2015), Slurp! A Culinary and Social History of Ramen (2012), and The Thought War: Japanese Imperial Propoganda (2006). Sherzod Muminov is Lecturer in Japanese History at the University of East Anglia, UK. He is the co-editor of Japan's Empire in East Asia (co-edited with Barak Kushner, 2017).

• Introduction: Overcoming Empire, Sherzod Muminov (University of East Anglia, UK)1. Trapped between Imperial Ruins: Internment and Repatriation of the Taiwanese in Postwar Asia-Pacific, Shi-chi Mike Lan (National Chengchi University, Taiwan)2. China's Refugees: Postwar 'Foreigners' and the Attempt at International Aid, 1945-1956, Meredith Oyen (University of Maryland, USA)3. Early Narratives of Japan's Korean War, Samuel Perry (Brown University, USA)4. Reconstructing Architectural Memories of the Japanese Empire in South Korea, Hyun Kyung Lee (Seoul National University, South Korea)5. The Cinematic Reconstruction of East Asia in Postwar Japanese War Films, Dick Stegewerns (University of Oslo, Norway)6. Anti-Imperialism as Strategy: Masking the Edges of Foreign Entanglements in Civil War-Era China, 1945-1948, Matthew D. Johnson (Taylor's University, Malaysia)7. From the Ashes of Empire: The Reconstruction of Manchukuo's Enterprises and the Making of China's Northeastern Industrial Base, 1948-1952, Hirata Koji (University of Cambridge, UK)8. Empires and Continuity: The Chinese Maritime Customs Service in East Asia, 1950-1955, Chihyun Chang (Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China)9. Inverted Compensation: Wartime Forced Labor and Post-Imperial Reckoning, Yukiko Koga (Hunter College, USA)10. Japan, Chemical Warfare and Okunoshima: A Postwar Overview, Arnaud Doglia (University of Geneva, Switzerland)BibliographyIndex

Overcoming Empire is an ambitious volume that explains how Japan's former empire was re-formulated after 1945. Beyond merely preaching the virtues of transnational and comparative work, this diverse team of experts put this methodology into practice, working across borders, languages and disciplines. The results are clear: post-imperial Japan, China, Korea, and Taiwan can no longer be analysed solely as a sub-topic of national histories.