>> From the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.. ^M00:00:05 [ Silence ] ^M00:00:25 >>I'm Carolyn Brown. I direct the Office of Scholarly Programs in the John W. Kluge Center, here at the Library of Congress, and it gives me great pleasure to welcome you here this afternoon for a lecture by a very distinguished historian, Dr. Lori Watt, entitled Embracing Defeat in the Colonies; The Allies and the Dismantling of the Japanese Empire after World War II. This lecture is offered in conjunction with a four-week seminar on decolonization, which is a joint project between the National History Center and the Kluge Center of the Library of Congress. Before we begin let me though ask you if you would to please turn off your cell phones, or at least put them on mute, and anything else that might go off and create noise, and interfere with the speaker. All of us are well aware that the world we're living in is marked by the consequences of colonization and decolonization, and the purpose of the seminar then on decolonization is to explore the implications of that history. This is the seventh year, hard to believe, seventh year that this seminar has been ongoing at the library partnership with the National History Center and I should say a word about that organization. The National History Center promotes research, teaching, and learning in all fields of history. It was created by the American Historical Association in 2002 as a public trust dedicated to the study and teaching of history, as well as, to the advancement of historical knowledge in government business and the public at large and you can certainly find out more by going to their webpage, the obvious URL, www.nationalhistorycenter.org. The Kluge Center at the Library of Congress is particularly happy with this collaboration because part of our mission is to promote use of the collections and our electronic resources by bringing scholars to the library. We are a research library without a faculty, so we work particularly energetically to bring scholars who will use the collections in depth. The Kluge Center was established through a very generous donation by John W. Kluge in the year 2000 and it brings together two populations of scholars at the level of -- high level of the most accomplished scholars in the world coming to the library with opportunities as we are able to create them for informal conversations with members of Congress and other public policy officials or to bring together, as we like to say, the world of ideas, the scholars and the world of affairs, the policy makers. But we also have a very vibrant community of younger scholars both some writing dissertations in post docs and together these two groups make a wonderful intellectual community [background coughing] here, at the Library. Both get to draw on the expertise of the Library's curators and specialists as well as the collections. We also promote the scholarly enterprise through lectures such as this and seminars, and other small conferences [clear throat]. You can find out more about the Kluge Center by taking a look at the brochures on the back table, signing up on our webpage, which you can find on the front page of the Library of Congress. So if you're interested, especially in the fellowship opportunities that we have, you might want to especially check out the webpage. Today's lecture will be introduced by Professor Roger Lewis, the co-chair of English History and Culture, an distinguished teaching professor at the University of Texas at Austin, well known and admired for his work on the British empire. He's written and edited more than 30 books on the subject. It was really Dr. Lewis who was one of the great inspiring visionaries behind the creation of the National History Center and he is conceived and funded, and now does the work of organizing these seminars on decolonization. The Library is proud to claim him as the Kluge Chair in Countries and Cultures of the North. He was here in the year 2010 and is a member of the Library's Scholar's Counsel. So Dr. Lewis will introduce today's speaker. Thank you. ^M00:05:27 [ Applause ] ^M00:05:33 >> Thank you. Lori Watt is a former member of the seminar, but I say former member with a qualification because once a member, always a member. This is an ongoing institution. Lori is an Associate Professor of History and Area Studies at Washington University in St. Louis. Among her books is, ^ITWhen Empire Comes Home; The Repatriation and Reintegration in Post War Japan^normal and she is at work on another book entitled, ^ITThe Allies and the Decolonization of the Japanese Empire^normal. She is one of the most prominent of our seminarians by discovering a topic that has broad significance for international history at the end of the Second World War, the dismantling of the Japanese Empire in the Pacific Islands, and she has written about her experience in the seminar in the AHA newsletter, Perspectives, in a way that reveals how the seminar can play a critical part in the evolution of one's own academic and intellectual life. Lori Watt, Embracing Defeat in the Colonies. ^M00:07:06 [ Applause ] ^M00:07:13 [ Silence ] ^M00:07:19 >> Thank you very much. It's a real honor for me to be here today. I'd like to thank Caroline Brown at the Kluge Center here at the Library of Congress. I'd like to thank the National History Center and those who make the Decolonization Seminar possible. As Roger mentioned, I participated in a seminar in 2008 and it was an intellectually life-changing experience for me. My graduate training had been in modern Japanese history and the cross-pollenization offered by the seminar really opened up new ways of thinking. That was thanks to my cohort and the leaders of my seminar and especially Roger. I'd like to begin today on September 8, 1945 in Seoul, Korea, which the Japanese called KeiJo JoseN, a few weeks after the August 15th surrender of Japan. Our informant is Tonaka Masashi, a 30-year-old professor of public health at KeiJo Imperial University, the predecessor of Seoul National University. In his diary, Tonaka reflected on Japanese Colonial rule and compared it to European Colonial rule elsewhere. "Looking at the situation calmly, one can say the following things about Japanese rule in Korea. [Background noise]. Compared to Euro American Colonial rule in various places around the world, Japanese Colonial rules was not cruel. Even though the governed were not treated cruelly, we did not gain their confidence, adoration, or respect. I have no idea what kind of polity Korea will become. I do not think that new political rule will be better than colonial rule, but I think the people will sing its praises anyway." Closed quote. Tonaka then went on to reflect that the Japanese did not yet have the national virtue to lead other races. Now I'm sure that there are those who would disagree with Tonaka that Japanese Colonial rule was not cruel and I do not want to provoke a discussion of comparative bad behavior, but I do, like Tonaka, want to compare European and Japanese Empires or rather I want to consider the end of Japanese Colonial rule in a comparative context. For that reason, I would like to check in with a few other important figures at the end of Empire as of Autumn, 1945. General Archibald Wavell, Viceroy of India had just returned to Delhi from a trip to London to check in with the new labor government that had just been voted into power. Admiral Lord Louis Mountbattin was preparing to accept the surrender of Japanese troops in Southeast Asia. Jan Smuts had just returned to South Africa from San Francisco where, as we learned recently from Mark Mazower's book, ^ITNo Enchanted Palace^normal, he succeeded in having his draft adopted as the preamble to the Charter of the United Nations Organization. I think Mazower succeeds in showing in this book the connections between the League of Nations and the United Nations highlighting the British Imperial origins of the UN and drawing our attention to the uncomfortable fact that the preamble, meant to be the heart of the charter, was written by a man committed to white supremacy. I don't know if you all read that book, it's a good one. Now that we are thinking in terms of the Imperial world in transition in 1945, let me pose my questions. First, how did Japanese Colonial practitioners like Tonaka make sense of the end of Empire? After all, they had put more than 50 years of effort into building the colonies. How did they make the abrupt transition form a colonial formation to a national one? Second, how does the end of the Japanese Empire fit into the world history of post World War II decolonization? With those questions in mind, I would like to provide a brief overview of the history of the Japanese Empire. ^M00:11:57 [ Silence ] ^M00:12:03 >> In the process of becoming a modern nation state, Japan built an overseas empire by colonizing neighboring territory beginning with Taiwan in 1895, Korea in 1910, parts of Manchuria, the politically incorrect way to refer to Northeast China in 1906, and then all of Manchuria recast as Manchukuo from 1932. If you recall the League of Nations refusal to recognize Manchukuo as a bonafide nation state triggered the Japanese departure. Japan also received the South Seas Mandate from the League in 1910, territory north of the equator that had been stripped from Germany after [background noise] the First World War. Japanese civilians spread through the colonies to manage them. Japan also waged an expansionist war on China from 1937 and famously bombing Pearl Harbor four years later on December 7, 1941. You can see from Map One, the furthest extension of the Japanese Empire [background noise]. Let us also take a look at the way that the end of the Japanese Empire is usually told. From 1942, the Allies beat back the Japanese military and then waged war on the home islands ultimately leading to the fire bombings of 67 cities throughout the Archipelago, the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the Soviet entry into the war against Japan on August 8, 1945 at which point the Red Army invaded Manchuria, North Korea, and Sakhalin. As we know from the work of the historian Ronald Spector, with surrender the former Japanese Empire was carved into zones of allied occupation. This is a map, an American military map. It may be a little hard to see, but the Americans are trying to draw lines for these different zones of occupation and count the number of Japanese troops that need to be demobilized. The British were charged with accepting surrender in Southeast Asia and began the process of trying to re-establish British, French, and Dutch colonial rule in the region. Subsequent anti-colonial and anti-communist wars followed. The Chinese Nationalists were charged with accepting surrender in China, parts of Indochina, and Taiwan. The Soviets were charged with accepting the surrender in the areas they had occupied; Manchuria, North Korea, and Sakhalin. Technically, they were allied with the Nationalists, but ideologically they were sympathetic to Mao Tse-Tung Communists and their presence in the north strengthened Mao who eventually waged his successful war against the nationalists. In 1949, the nationalists retreated to the former Japanese colony of Taiwan and China was pinned into Cold War formations with a communist government on the main land and anti-communists on Taiwan. The United States accepted the surrender of Japanese troops in South Korea, the former South Seas Mandate, the Philippines, and the home islands of Japan. As you know, Korea was split between Soviet and American forces, and engulfed in Civil War five years after the end of the Japanese Empire. The Southeast Mandate became a strategic trust, the Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands. The Americans then used parts of that region for nuclear testing making it a critical site in terms of the U.S.-Soviet arms race. The home islands of Japan in what was supposed to be an allied occupation turned into a largely American one. What resulted was an intense Japanese-American relationship with Japan cast as the sturdy American Ally during the Cold War. As you can see from the sketch, the storyline of from Empire to Cold War is a very persuasive one in the East Asian case. Of course, none of this was predetermined. If you recall, Tonaka said that he had no idea what would become of Korea and it has been interesting to go back to 1945 to see what people were saying about the end of Empire. One of the first things I read was a broad sheet published by well-established colonists in Seoul, people like Tonaka. Seoul had not been bombed and so they had material resources and enough personal security to put out a daily newspaper even after defeat. On September 7th, this publication distinguished the civilian Japanese residence of Seoul from the military and the colonial government, and chided them for their past dependency on the state, which they had followed throughout war time and imperial expansion. It then encouraged ordinary people to acquire the spirit of self-rule. Self-rule, as you know, is a key component of anti-colonial activism. Colonizers appropriating a discourse of emancipation struck me as odd. Other statements along these lines continued to puzzle me and that forced me to go back and think harder about the nature of the Japanese Empire. That process led me to the following three points. First, the building of the Japanese Nation State and the running of its colonies were closely connected. Public health systems, for example, inspired mainly by Germany were developed in the 1870s in Japan to be installed 20 years later in Taiwan, sometimes by the same administrator Goto Shimpaei in this case. Communications technology, transportation infrastructure, mining, shipping, these industries were developed in the colonies soon after or even simultaneously with developments in metropolitan Japan. This was true in the educational realm. In order of its founding, Tonaka's employer, KeiJo Imperial University was number six -- was the sixth imperial university. Taihoku Imperial University, which is now National Taiwan University, was the seventh. These were followed by the founding of two metropolitan imperial universities in Osaka and Nogoya [background noise]. Even the firming up of the Japanese national language took place in a colonial context. Teaching Japanese as a foreign language took place for the first time ever in Taiwan, part of assimilation efforts and that forced people back in metropolitan Japan to standardize the language, which is a key component of nation building. So I think it's good to be mindful of how deeply nation building and colony building were intertwined in the Japanese case. Second, to use the words of Peter Doocy [phonetic], Japan's empire was mimetic. Japanese Empire sought advice from the Dutch -- Japanese leaders sought advice from the Dutch, the British, the French, the Germans and Americans on how to build their own nation state, but also in terms in how to manage the colonies. That is, they mimicked European colonies. Another colleague, Robert Skelton has built on this idea and now calls it Recursive Imperialism. That is that European colonial ideas were amplified in Japanese colonial practices. Third, Japanese idiologs believed that there was an anticolonial element in Japanese colonialism. You may be skeptical and you would not be alone. Prosecutors at the International Military Tribunal for the Far East, the Tokyo Trial certainly will -- were and they concluded that the idea that Japan waged war to lead Asia out from white oppression was a smoke screen for war crimes. If one argues that point today, that the war waged to end white colonialism in Asia and this is the storyline of the Yushukan Museum at Yasukuni Shrine one is categorized not unreasonably as a right wing apologist. Nevertheless, as people throughout Asia recognized, Japan was one of the few countries in Asia to thwart Euro-American colonial designs in the 1860s and to industrialize rapidly enough to become a power in its own right on the international scene. Overturning the unequal treaties was one of the most important symbols. Membership in the League of Nations was another. Some Asians admired the Japanese ability to do this. This anti-colonial element of Japanese colonialism expressed itself at times in the ideology of Pan-Asianism and the work of Cemil Ayden and Eri Hotta has gone a long way in explaining how it functioned. For all of the exploitation, atrocities of Empire, and expediency that such an ideology provided, there were true believers. Pan-Asianism as we know from Eri Hotta's fine book had at least three iterations. The first is what she calls T-ists; T as a metaphor for Asia's unmoral like constitution, this strand emphasized Asian commonalities in Asian civilization and included China and India. This included ideas like Westerners focus on material means, but Asians focus on spiritual ends. The second was sinic and that's S-I-N-I-C, as in Chinese not C-Y-N-I-C, meaning an alliance between Japan and China; peoples who shared the same script and confusion intellectual traditions. The third was Japan as leader. That is, industrialized Japan as the country qualified to lead the rest of Asia out from colonial oppression. These strands of Pan-Asianism intersected and changed over time with the Japan as leader version taking on special strength during the 15-years' war on Asia and the specific. As an aside, I'd like to remind you that it's the Japanese and not the Koreans or the Taiwanese who end up at the Asia-Africa conference in Bandung in 1955. And I think the discourse on Pan-Asianism goes a long way towards explaining their presence there. I think that's a topic for another day, but the Japanese were at Bandung. These three larger points on the nature of the Japanese Empire tied to nation state building, mabetic, or recursive and shaped by Pan-Asianism may help us understand what people are saying. So let's go back and take another look at visions for what comes next for the Japanese colonies. First, perhaps not surprisingly, Japanese people wanted to remain in what they believed were their rightful homes and to maintain their businesses and communities. Settlers in Korea wanted to remain on the peninsula. Someone there was reported to have said, "Japan and Korea were not at war. What does defeat have to do with us?" [Background noise] On September 15th the local paper published a vision of how some Japanese might remain. The essay first celebrates the attitude of the Americans. The Americans, they see war like sports -- there are winners, there are losers, but after the game is over all can be friends. It then recommends this approach as a model for the Koreans to follow, encouraging them to let bygones be bygones. [Chuckle] Thank you. After all, the essay asserts the Japanese and Koreans had a long friendship. Quote "These feelings of friendship will be the basis of the rebirth and rising of the two nations on the peninsula into a world nation." Closed Quote. So the idea of a binational world, nation on the peninsula struck me and Dane as farfetched, but at least one person in Washington, D.C.; a very well-informed thermographer working for the Office of Strategic Services was thinking along the same lines. His or perhaps her 1945 report suggests that the Japanese might remain in Korea and Taiwan. He goes on to say that there are several Japanese-held areas where the disposition is uncertain, the most important is Korea. If some form of international control is decided upon, the chances are that at least long-term residents may remain and this will be better if Korea comes under international control. Formosa, according to the thermographer, might be a good home for Japanese from other parts of Asia. That is, Japanese settlers from China and other regions could move to Taiwan. So at least one person in Washington was airing the possibility of multiethnic states in post-war East Asia and intriguingly, this particular OSS officer has his eye on the expulsions in Europe. So published in August of 1945 he's watching what's going on in Europe and he recommends to the US government to work with local Asian governments, not to expel their Japanese populations until a system is in place to start moving these people. ^M00:26:13 [ Silence ] ^M00:26:19 >> As for other visions of the postwar world, Japanese settlers are also trying to figure out who they are, and appear to be reconsidering the category of Oriental and that's Toyogens [phonetic], so Oriental. On September 8th, for example, the day before the Americans were scheduled to march into Seoul, an editorial wrote that, quote, "At this critical moment, we should reveal the magnanimity of the Japanese people and leave behind our mundane affairs and idle thoughts, and show the dignity and imperturbability of the Yamoto race." Closed quote. And Yamoto race here is war-time rhetoric intended to elevate the Japanese. The passage continues though by asserting that, quote, "We should not be that kind of oriental who goes weak in the face of a major shock." Closed quote. Then there are a few other essays that discussed what it meant to be an oriental and whether -- whether the Japanese fit into this category. These attempts to reconnect with the category of oriental are intriguing because just as the Middle East served as Europe's Orient, drawing of course, on the work of Edward Said here, China had served as Japan's Orient. That is, there was an academic industry built around objectifying China in ways that were eventually useful for policy makers within Japan. So for the Japanese to slip themselves back into this category of Oriental, I find interesting. Part of it, I believe, is their positioning themselves vis-a-vis westerners. That is, in their occupation they're going to be Orientals and Westerners and they can anticipate this, but also I think it marks the shift among available strands of Pan-Asianism. Tonaka's statement that the Japanese did not have enough national virtue to lead other races is an effort, I believe, to distance himself from the aggressive Japan as leader strand. Reclaiming an identity of Oriental may be an attempt to switch back to the T-ist strand of Pan-Asianism. Visions about who they are change again once the Americans have occupied South Korea. At that point, the rhetoric begins to look a lot more like what is coming out of Tokyo. They complain that Japanese women are fraternizing with the troops. They worry about their children debasing themselves by begging for chewing gum. They learn the English words for cigarette, souvenir, and how much. It was humiliating for them to go from colonial ruler to occupied, but the experience also seems to provide a way out. So to answer my first question, how do the Japanese colonists make sense of the end of empire? One strategy is to switch from the Japan as leader strand of Pan-Asianism to the softer strand that the Japanese are peace-loving Orientals. Another is, to use the words of John Gower, they embrace defeat. At the beginning of the process of sorting out the end of empire there appeared to be many possible identities. By the end, however, there's one and that is the Japanese as a defeated people. I came across many instances where people say as a defeated people we must comply with the international opinion to Japan. Moreover, it appears that accepting defeat intellectually at least, allowed the Japanese to perform defeat. That is, that occupation forces expect and the defeated people often comply in the acting out of defeat. ^M00:30:15 [ Silence ] ^M00:30:21 In these months after the war when the Japanese on the imperial periphery are trying to figure out who they are, forces were brewing in metropolitan Japan that would transform them once again. The return of the overseas Japanese and there were many of them -- 6.9 million so almost 7 million people were outside of metropolitan Japan at the end of the war. About half of them are military, half of them civilian, and that adds up to 9% of the entire Japanese population. So the return of this large number of people to the devastated home islands put a strain on limited resources and the former colonists also struck the metropolitan Japanese as slightly different from ordinary Japanese as they call them -- ordinary Japanese. Colonial Japanese women, especially, seemed less differential than metropolitan women. At repatriation ports throughout Japan, returnees were placed into the category of repatriate, [foreign language]. Returnees resisted this categorization and offered alternatives, and many were indeed, able to shed the label. But the category of repatriate, someone repatriated from the colonies, lives on to this day in Japan in the social, legal, and popular cultural realms. And I'd like to look at a few pictures here to illustrate this point. So the first one if you can see, not a great photograph, but I [background cough] hope it conveys the mass nature of people moving. It's a ship full of Japanese soldiers on their way home from Korea. As you can see, the Japanese flag is still flying so this is sometime in August, sometime before the surrender, but on the dock are Korean families. Towards the -- on the right foreground, there are some Korean women and a woman with a baby on her back. So they're waiting for the soldiers to get off the ship so that they can get on the ship and return to Korea. ^M00:32:32 [ Silence ] ^M00:32:38 >> This photograph is from 1946, so a year after the war in Manchuria and these too, are Japanese civilians who are waiting to be repatriated. The men in the front of the line are in military uniforms. They may be military men. They may be just civilians working at the refugee camp, but here if you can see, these are families, settlers who had been in Manchuria. These people managed to survive for a year under Soviet and then Chinese Nationalist rule and are eager to get back to Japan. But as you can see, they've all got armbands and they've got name badges on them all lined up in their repatriation battalions as they were called. This group of people have returned to Japan happily, but the point I want to make here is that they are on a train that has been labeled very carefully, a repatriate train. Those are the Japanese word, [foreign language]. So I think that this illustrates part of this labeling process of repatriates. [Background cough] And here's a poster from 1945 encouraging people to donate clothes to repatriates. Here again, this figure, this representation of repatriate is very carefully labeled with this word, [foreign language]. This poster was made by a -- an artist, a famous artist, [inaudible] who worked for Shiseido, the cosmetic company. So if some of those images seem familiar to you, he was a person who wrote for Shiseido. Here's an example of returnees fighting back against this labeling process. The magazine is called Minako as you can see in the upper right hand corner, but above that the subtitle of the magazine asserts that this is the magazine of culture for continentals, so tide gujin, people from the Chinese continent. So here, we see Japanese returnees saying we aren't repatriates, we're continentals, we're international people trying to push back against the labeling process. One of the things that I hope this magazine cover shows, is that it's not only Japanese public opinion that they have to push back against. This magazine is very heavily censored by the American censors. It made the mistake of mentioning the allied occupation, of mentioning the brutality of Russians and of -- including a short a story that made some mention that struck the censor as militarism. So it's all marked up by the American censors so they had a difficult time pushing back against different groups of people. So those images are an attempt to give you a sense of the fate of returnees in immediate post-war Japan. And while the Japanese with the help of the Americans [background noise] are talking and moving themselves out of empire, the Americans with the help of the Japanese are getting more and more involved in the decolonization business. This is true in terms of arranging the transfer of power in Korea for example or coming to govern out right as in the Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands and especially in terms of responding to the migrations that occurred under Japanese colonialism. Like elsewhere, the Japanese Empire was home to a great deal of migration; some if it free, some of it forced. This included the Japanese, more than 3 million Koreans, some Taiwanese, millions of Chinese, partly through colonial practices and partly through labor markets. I do not think that the U.S. intended to get involved in moving civilians even in the midst of mid-20th Century debates on how to solve, "minority problems," but almost inadvertently they do. And this happens, the Allies in Asia they go out to demobilize the troops, but as they spread out through Asia they also found millions of displaced civilians and they began to move those too. The U.S. Navy, for example, wasted no time in moving people out of what is now the Federated States of Micronesia and the Republic of Palau. First they moved military men then they moved civilians. These are Korean men, Korean families, and then they moved Japanese civilians and records show their professions; farmers, dried fish manufacturer, photographer, post office employees, and the head of the local Shinto Shrine. Even Admiral Hosogaya Boshiro the last governor of the South Seas Mandate is loaded onto one of these ships and sent back to Japan. What we see then is the U.S. Navy removing people connected to the Japanese colony in anticipation of future rule. It is interesting to compare this case to Fiji for example, where Indian laborers remained and now make up 50% of the population. In some instances the Allies did not make efforts to undo colonial migration, but the Americans appear unwilling to live with the Japanese colonial labor Diaspora. The allied moving of civilians in Asia was fragmentary at first, but soon the process began to be circulated through the office in Tokyo that controlled shipping resources and that was operations, G3, one of the sections of McArthur's occupation apparatus known as Scout or GHQ. There, Colonel J. H. - J. F. Howell fielded telegrams from all over Asia of people needing or wanting to be moved. These sources show a diversity of views. Some Americans argued that the Japanese needed to be removed from Asian in order to eliminate their influence. Others were aghast at American efforts to aid the enemy. In November 1945, for example, the Commander in Chief at Pearl Harbor wrote to McArthur to object to the use of the Americans in helping the Japanese, writing that he thought they should, "Avoid being drawn into a situation where our navy becomes the transportation agency for the benefit of enemy personnel, to the detriment of our own men." Others, usually young American officers who had not seen combat began to advocate for the people around them. Lieutenant Shamil Ibragimov in Tianjin for example, sends telegrams to operations in Tokyo seeking help for local Koreans abused as they were as Japanese collaborators. Americans in Asia were exposed to a wide range of displaced people and they drew conclusions about them. Officers wrote in to complain about how difficult it was to move the Chinese as they call them compared to the orderly Japanese, Chinese being a very wide category. But the Japanese they were moving in many instances were highly educated colonial rulers. The Chinese were laborers, sometimes forced. Moreover, as I suggested, I think the Japanese were performing defeat whereas other Asians were performing liberation, making them less cooperative. The Americans though did not appear to pay attention to these important class and contextual differences, instead viewed people or at least wrote about them through a national lens. Moreover, because Japanese officials are helping them to categorize people, the American learning process is shaped by Japanese colonial ideas. And there were other ways that a Japanese colonial body of knowledge was transferred to the Americans. The Japanese military and the colonial states were dedicated cartographers. An organization within the Japanese military, the Japanese Imperial Land Survey made detailed maps of Asia and Siberia. Because Japanese military and colonial institutions disappeared, these colonial maps became orphans and were destroyed or distributed to university libraries in the United States, Japan, and Taiwan, only recently have come to light. So if we could take a brief look in this realm in which Japanese colonial ideas may have shaped American rule. ^M00:41:35 [ Background noise ] ^M00:41:40 I know this map may be hard to see. We're going to look at close ups of the bottom square, the middle square, and the top left hand corner. So on your right is an American army map service map from 1946 and on your left is a Japan -- Japanese Imperial Land Survey from 1936. This is the Yongsan Military Base that was a Japanese military base, the Busan Military Base, and then became an American military base used across the postwar period. I was struck by how similar these maps are, that the American map is almost identical to the Japanese map, and it seems to me that the Americans got this usable military base and a terrific map of it all at the same time. Here's another cut out from the American -- the Army Map Service on the right, the Japanese Imperial Land Survey on the left. This is the controversial Korea government general building. It's red on the map on the left, the Joseon-chongdokbu. You may be familiar with this. This was the government general. They built this on the grounds of the Joseon dynasty imperial palace and it blocks the palace from the rest of Seoul. This building was removed in 1995 amidst a great public discussion in Korea. My point here is that it struck me that these maps are almost identical. And I thought to myself, "Oh, my goodness, how will I ever prove that the Army Maps Service used these Japanese maps?" But if you'll read with me, if you read the legend, prepared under the direction of chief engineers by the Army Map Service, US Army, Washington , D.C., compiled in 1945. Number one, Japanese Imperial Land Survey. Number two, Japanese Imperial Land Survey. Number 3, Japanese Imperial Land Survey. Four, five, and six are aerial photography. Seven is the Korea Government General -- seven and eight are the Korea Government General. So the colonial state is involved in map-making as well, and the American's get their hands on those, and 11 and 12 are commercial maps so these are people in business publishing tourist maps. So a great body of colonial maps, then are put to use in the American map-making. [Background noise] So at the very least, the Americans are making use of these Japanese Colonial materials. ^M00:44:36 [ Silence ] ^M00:44:43 >> So my answer to question number two is, how does the end of the Japanese Empire fit into the world history of post-World War II decolonizations? First, perhaps to prove Roger Lewis right, the presence of a powerful third party in decolonization shapes it dramatically, especially if that party is the United States. In this case we see the Allies, especially the Americans, inserting themselves between colonizers and colonized at the moment of decolonization. Second, by getting involved in the population transfer business, the U.S. militaries facilitate a kind of undoing of colonial migration in what appears to be an attempt to match every person with the appropriate national space. Third, one of the goals of the American occupation in Japan was to re-educate the Japanese. On the imperial periphery however, they're exposed to a body of Japanese colonial knowledge. To conclude then, the coincidence of defeat and decolonization had empirical and discursive consequences. Empirical in that defeat put an end to the Japanese colonies and discursive in that defeated nationals was an available identity to the Japanese colonists. Defeat and the Allied presence both simplified and complicated decolonization. It simplified it in that no one in Japan at least put any effort into ending the empire. There were no attempts at federations. There was no attempt at a commonwealth. There were no boundary commissions set out to try to understand the future of the former Japanese colonies. There was no one like Archibald Wavell who spent more than three years negotiating with Ghandi, Nehru and other Indian leaders on the end of British rule. There was a scramble for decolonization but one that took place under the watch of the Americans, not the Japanese state. While mourning the loss of their colonial homes, my historical informants appeared to be relieved that they no longer had to perform the chores of colonialism including the assimilation of Koreans. The fact that a powerful outside force brought an end to colonial rule appeared to make it easier to let go. The allied presence complicated the end of empire or rather forestalled the complications of the end of empire because it pinned East Asia into Cold War formations and the colonial fall-out was postponed. The history and memory wars of the 1990s and 2000s I believe were kind of a colonial reckoning as well, as a war time one. The last thing I would like to do today is follow up on Tonaka Masashi, the diarist I introduced at the beginning of the talk. He spent the rest of Asia -- he spent the rest of autumn 1945 in Seoul working with refugees and was repatriated in January of 1946. During the summer of 1946, he was part of a small group of civilian medical personnel in the repatriation port of Hakata in Kyushu, who looked after the most disenfranchised group of Japanese settlers, women and orphans repatriated from Manchuria. Then, after serving so faithfully as our guide for understanding the unmaking of Imperial Japan, he began to work for the ABCC, the Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission in Hiroshima, which was the American initiative to study the nature of the injuries inflicted by the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And that is where I will leave you with the borders neatly redrawn around the four home islands of Japan incorporated into the best known narrative of Japan, Pearl Harbor and Hiroshima as if the colonies never existed. Thank you. ^M00:49:21 [ Applause ] ^M00:49:33 >> Lori will be glad to take questions. Let me pose a preliminary question, Lori. It's about the coming to terms with the colonial past. In comparison, for example, with the Germans -- the Germans in comparison with the Japanese have been open about the Holocaust; have made reparations while the Japanese have been relatively resatent in coming to terms with the brutality of the troops in China and elsewhere in the Japanese Empire. What do you make of this as a public issue? How does the Japanese public, as well as, the government reflect on the colonial past in this specific problem in comparison with the Germans? >> Thank you, Roger. That's a great question. And to address specifically the comparative aspect of the Germans and their wartime past and the Japanese and their war time past, there's a lot of great work on this by Carol Gluck, by Franziska Seraphim. And Seraphim's work in particular looked at how the Japanese remember World War II. They do remember it; it's just not in ways that are necessarily as clear as other societies. Her argument, which I think is true, is that it was civic society -- it was civil groups in Japan, not the individual, not the state who tended wartime memory in postwar Japan. The problem is that in the world of reparations, it's the state that needs to make reparations. People aren't so interested in reparations from civic groups. So I would say that the main difference between how at least West Germany and Japan dealt with their wartime past is that Germany had a strong state involvement. The government took a leading role. As for ordinary Japanese people, there are plenty of people who don't know that much about the war, who are not that concerned about it, but here were many others on the left, on the right, who spent decades promoting their particular version of the war. As for atrocities in particular, I think that the Japanese military did -- was in fact a very brutal force, especially in China and the evidence that we have came out -- the limited evidence that we have came out of the war crimes trials in Tokyo. I will say the other -- all that we know really about Japanese atrocities in China though are excavated by Japanese historians. These are my colleagues in Japan who spent their lives -- if you go to College Park, the National Archives in College Park and wonder who all those Japanese people are, those are historians. They tend to be on the left looking for evidence of Japanese war crimes, looking for evidence of the comfort women so that they can go armed with evidence to talk to their own state, which has not been especially responsive. ^M00:52:48 [ Silence ] ^M00:52:59 >> [Inaudible] give me the mic. Can I pop -- can I press that a little bit further? >> Yes. >> About these overseas Japanese, have they played a role in other Asian historiographies; Chinese scholars, Korean scholars and so forth, if they are a bit of a blind spot in the Japanese story, is that true also for the Asian neighbors or the last generations of scholarship? >> Are you talking about repatriates or are you talking about... >> Right, right those -- those who came home, but who had lived in these colonies. You know, the sort of Japanese version of [inaudible] I suppose or somewhere else and then repatriated. >> Right. The people who came -- Japanese repatriates went on to play important roles in post-war Japan, especially in the cultural and literary realms. Seiji Ozawa was raised in the colonies. Jazz musicians, a number of people played important roles [background cough] in -- in post-war Japan. Are you talking about whether they had influence in Asia after the war? >> I'd like to know what Chinese scholars think about the fact that [inaudible] Japanese [inaudible]. >> Right. My understanding of the Asian histography -- my limited understanding is that the stories in Chinese and Korean histography is that these people came, they were invaders, they stayed for a while and they left and that it's not [chuckle] -- right, that it's not a big part of their history. Taiwan has a slightly different view -- talks more about development -- Japanese development in Taiwan and then the story sometimes takes a different version, and that's that there's another story line and that is that there were people left behind. They tended to be women and children, tended to be in Manchuria. Chinese peasant families in Manchuria took these children in, raised them as their own, and then in the 1980s when Japan and China re-established diplomatic relations, this all came out. And so by that time these were middle-aged Chinese people who decided that they wanted to go home to Japan. It created a lot of heartbreak all the way around. They needed somebody in Japan to claim them as a relative. That didn't always happen and these Chinese foster families, it was hard for them to see their children go. >> Yes. >> [Inaudible]. >> [Inaudible] by yourself. >> My name -- can you hear me? Okay, my name is Steven Shore [phonetic]. How would you account for the different treatment between Manchukuo where at least the fictive form of independence was created against that of Korea which was -- I understand, fully -- attempted to be fully absorbed into the Japanese Empire? >> Right. I think that I agree with scholars like [inaudible] who argue that Manchukuo was supposed to be a new forum of existence. They really wanted to build a new country and, you know, they had a lot of raw experience in nation state building. They did it in Miyagi, Japan. They were pros at how to put a nation state together and they had all of the symbols of nation state building, you know, flags, a philosophy of harmony between the five peoples, police systems, tried to set up education systems. They knew a lot about state building. The problem was there was no nation [chuckle] to fill in the nation state of the nation state. So I would say Korea is more of a traditional colony along the lines -- very rough analogy, but more like Algeria meant to be part of the -- of Japan eventually, but Manchukuo was something new. >> Yes. >> I was struck by the... >> Identify yourself. >> I'm sorry, Aviel Roshwald, I teach History at Georgetown. Thanks for a great talk. I'm struck by the contrast between the sort of official or semi-official portrayal of the returning Japanese immigrates as repatriates, and their own self-description at least in one instance as continentals. And you suggested that continental meant cosmopolitan, but I wonder if you could elaborate. Often, those -- a lot can be lost in the translation. What are some of the nuances or implications of the term continental as distinct from repatriate? >> Right. When Japanese colonial settlers went out into the colonies, they were usually celebrated, especially if they went in to it in an official capacity as Colonial administrators or working for industry. Perhaps the most celebrated of all were these 250,000 agricultural settlers that were sent up to Manchuria and they were supposed to shore up the borders with the Soviet Union and farm -- settle permanently in Manchuria. So there was a sense that these people are celebrated on their way out. So they're quite shocked when on the way back, they get this one single label of repatriate. So my illustration here is that the particular group of people who published this magazine associate themselves with the continent so [inaudible]. Other people called themselves [inaudible], cosmopolitans. So those were sort of two separate examples. Still others say, you know, we have a lot of international business experience. They ran businesses in the colonies, know -- would claim to know more about Korea and China. Could they put this to use as business people? So these were just some of the ways that they tried to push back against the labeling process. ^M00:59:09 [ Noises ] ^M00:59:16 >> Hi, my name is Al Schmidt. I'm a European historian. However, I was in [background noise] the Philippines when the war ended, and did take the -- use the occasion to go to the war crimes trials of Yamashita and Homma. And I wonder -- of course we read about the way in which Yamashita in particular was railroaded, by you know whom, and I wonder if -- how the Japanese have reacted to these particular trials. It's, as I say, not my field so I'm not really very familiar with a Japanese reaction. Thank you. >> My understanding is that in post-war Japan, people do a lot of distancing from all sorts of things. People try to distance themselves from the military. People try to distance themselves from the colonies. I think this labeling of the repatriates is a way to say those people did the colonies. We metropolitan Japanese did not. So I think that there's a lot of distancing. In the case of the war crimes trials I think people tried to say, [background noise] you know, we were led by these bad men into this war that we didn't want. "They should hang," was one response. But in the case of Yamashita, especially in recent years, there's been a real effort to try to review that trial, I think, led by his family members. I don't really have any more details on that, but there has been a sense in Japan -- films come out that try to look with a little more nuance on these people who were convicted. ^M01:00:55 [ Silence ] ^M01:01:04 >> With the exception I suspect, of China... > > Would you identify yourself, please? >> Yes, Barry Tindel, Falls Church. With the exception of perhaps China, did the military leadership of Japan recruit or draft men, primarily, I guess from the colonies to fight for the homeland? >> Yes, there were colonial soldiers in the Japanese military as we see in other imperial militaries; about 300,000 -- about 300,000 from Taiwan, about 300,000 from Korea. They were brought into the Japanese military first as sort of a labor force, but then as soldiers and fought with the Japanese. Two other points about this; some of the most important leaders of postwar Asia were colonial men who were trained in Japanese military schools. The leader of postwar South Korea -- Park, was trained in a Manchurian military school, and the Taiwanese military had some influential people in that military. So that's one point. People sometimes say what happened to the Japanese military -- it was transferred to South Korea. The second point I wanted to make about -- I guess on the same lines, anti-colonial fighters, people who fought the Japanese went on to play important roles in Asia. Kim IL Sung was the most famous anti-colonial Japanese fighter and went on to rule North Korea. So yes, there were colonial troops, and yes there were men trained by Japan who went on to take on important roles in postwar Asia. In terms of decolonization, one of the problems was that when the Americans demobilized these men, they kept them with their unit so sometimes Korean men would be demobilized to Japan and get to Japan, and then have to make another trip to Korea. Sometimes they were sent directly home in which case they were left out of the paperwork and therefore, according to the Japanese state ineligible for pensions. So there's been a long fight for colonial soldiers in seeking pensions from the Japanese government. >> Are there a couple of concluding questions? [Inaudible]. >> [Inaudible] The Brookings Institution. I have -- I was wondering if you could comment on how the British and the Americans, for example, where they took leads in different areas. Did they deal with the dismantling differently and what were the differences, but also were there differences among American decision makers on how to approach the dismantling of the Japanese Empire? >> So you're -- I understand your second question. Were there differences among the Americans and your first question is? >>Where the -- where the Americans took the lead in dismantling, East Asia especially whereas the Brits took more of the lead in Southeast Asia. Did they approach it differently? I mean, obviously they have different backgrounds there, but were there much discussion about the actual process between them? >> Right. To answer the second question first, of course there was a great deal of differences of opinion in the United States and I think some of our diplomatic historians would be able to run circles around me, but certainly the State Department has one set of views, the Navy has another set of views; kind of blood in the soil argument. They lost men there, they're going to come and take over these territories. General Douglas McArthur has yet a third set of views and his really are -- in many ways, the most important because he's the man on the ground implementing policy, so all sorts of Americans have all sorts of different views. What's been interesting to me though, you know, it's these 22-year-old young American men on the docks saying this family goes here, and this family goes here making these really important decisions. In good faith I'm sure, but it's a lot of responsibility. I just interviewed somebody two weeks ago who was standing on the dock. But in terms of decolonization, certainly the Americans had a vision that these places should be democracies and be independent in due course as the Cairo Declaration states, but yes certainly there was a vision that the sooner that these places can become independent nations [background noise] the better. >> Lori, as the last question since you mentioned McArthur, I'm sure this audience would be interested to know from a Japanese historian's point of view, your assessment of McArthur. >> [Background laughter and conversation] I know a lot about the McArthur archive [laughter]. You know, people in Japan did love him and admired him. And I guess I do have a good answer for this. People in Japan loved him and admired him until he made the mistake of making that comment that the Japanese were like a boy of 12 towards the end of the occupation. He commonly said all of his works to democratize Japan; people sort of dismissed it after that. But I will say one of my elderly Japanese friends; I remember asking him, I said, "Do you remember when the occupation ended?" And he said, "Same as before, nothing changed when the occupation ended. Troops were still here. Everything remained the same." And I said, "Well, what do you remember?" He says, "I remember when Truman fired McArthur." [Laughter] And he said if there was ever a lesson for democracy that was it, that God could be fired. [Laughter] So that was the lessons of McArthur [laughter]. ^M01:07:19 [ Applause ] ^M01:07:24 >> This has been a presentation of the Library of Congress. Visit us at loc.gov.