ABSTRACT

This chapter examines the processes through which the Japanese empire transformed its imperial institutions after its defeat in World War Two into ones that were consistent with managing a modern nation-state. The issues surrounding what individuals within the empire experienced while being demilitarized and “deimperialized,” if such a term can be used for Japan, as its colonies were unilaterally confi scated by the Americans and European former colonial powers, are fascinating and important historical tropes. The course of these changes also traces how Japanese academic discussions in the immediate postwar were both bequeathed to posterity and repressed in subsequent generations. 1

According to Yamamuro Shinichi, a leading Japanese historian of the Japanese empire, the modern empire takes the shape of a “mother country” that maintains a special set of relationships with all sorts of polities and ethnicities outside of its home borders, which it then has to manage remotely. 2 Decolonization, after Japan’s defeat, involved two simultaneous processes: “both the renunciation by the nationempire ( kokumin teikoku ) of its existence as an empire, and the granting of independence of the former colonies through the acceptance of the mother country’s own new existence as a nation-state. It is through these shifts that the destruction of the nation-empire is completed.” 3 Although the “nation-empire” (or “modernempire”) seems to be in opposition to the principle of the nation-state, it does in fact emanate from it. In Japan’s post-imperial case, colonies did not revert back to their previous form of governance; instead, they turned into new nation-states in their own progressive forms. However, when a colony – a by-product of the nationempire – becomes independent, a paradox emerges in that the colony now has to also transform into a nation-state. Imperial dissolution foisted such immediate burdens on Japan’s former colonies.