ABSTRACT
Beginning in the late 1980s, Western historians started to delve into the methods and policies that drove Japan’s empire-building efforts in East Asia, but few examined what occurred after the empire fell. Even as the subject of Cold War studies has expanded and historians in Europe and America have shifted to examining the end of empire and the history of decolonization, there has been little advancement on this issue concerning Japanese history until recently. 1 This volume aims to offer a fi rst step in reconceiving how political and legal authority were reshuffl ed and re-established after the fall of Japanese imperial rule throughout East Asia. Scholarship in Europe about parallel transformations offers some insight, but we cannot fail to observe that the causes of war and its denouement have absorbed our attention, with less focus given to how wars end and what happens after empires disintegrate. 2 The new and original research presented here centers on the collapse and aftermath – or afterlife – of empire. What happened at the ground level to the administrative staff, military offi cers and underlings of empire, those who tried and are still trying to fi nd contingency, to create and make sense of narratives for how and why the Japanese empire foundered? The possibility for such research has increased even more over the last decade with newly available archives throughout East Asia and with the more open and internationalized state of historical research in Japan, which now has a much greater infl uence on scholarship abroad than in the past. Greater opportunities for research collaboration and sharing across languages, national divides and national perspectives provide researchers with pertinent new materials on which to build new historical frontiers.
