Director ＆ Collaborators' Essey
[Lecture Overview]The Dismantling of Empire and Japan’s Overseas Assets through U.S. Military Eyes: The Origins of Postwar Japan–South Korea Relations, by Toyomi ASANO (in Japanese)
Faculty of Political Science and Economics, Waseda University Professor
Following the end of the war in 1945, hundreds of thousands of Japanese residents overseas returned to Japan. In Japan, they are remembered as “repatriates”: victims who lost their homes and livelihoods to the devastation of war. In Korea, formerly under Japanese colonial rule, these same people are often described as “settlers”: participants in, and beneficiaries of, colonial domination. How did such divergent understandings of the same people emerge? Why had so many Japanese moved overseas in the first place, and what compelled their return after Japan’s defeat? How, moreover, did these experiences give rise to the unresolved emotional and moral divisions that continue to separate the peoples of the two countries?
On September 7, 2025, Toyomi Asano, Professor at Waseda University, delivered a lecture entitled “The Dismantling of Empire and Japan’s Overseas Assets through U.S. Military Eyes: The Origins of Postwar Japan–South Korea Relations” at the Memorial Museum for Soldiers, Detainees in Siberia, and Postwar Repatriates. The lecture accompanied the special exhibition “An Arduous Journey: Memories and Records of Repatriation from Korea,” marking the eightieth anniversary of the end of the war. Taking Japanese residents overseas as its point of departure, the lecture traced the formation of empire in modern East Asia and decolonization after Japan’s defeat as a continuous historical process. It also explored how the emotional and moral questions left unresolved in that process developed into contemporary disputes over historical memory and interpretation.
Although the exhibition commemorated eighty years since the end of the Second World War, Japan’s history encompasses more than one “postwar” era. Asano’s lecture brought three such eras into view: the aftermath of the Russo-Japanese War, the aftermath of the Second World War, and the period following the Cold War. For a Japan that had undergone rapid modernization in response to the impact of Western powers in the closing years of the Tokugawa shogunate, victory in the Russo-Japanese War marked a decisive assertion of its international standing. It also inaugurated a new phase in the consolidation of Japan’s empire. The establishment of a protectorate over Korea, its subsequent colonization, and the Manchurian Incident formed successive stages on the path toward the Second World War—a war Japan fought as an imperial power.
The settlement following the Second World War involved the reorganization of former imperial territories into sovereign states under the principle of national self-determination. Guided by the conviction that excessive monetary reparations after the First World War had helped bring about the catastrophe of the Second, the Allies adopted a reparations model centered on capital assets rather than monetary payments. Crucial to this approach were Japan’s overseas assets: the industrial facilities of Japanese enterprises and the private property of Japanese nationals left behind in the former colonies.
Colonial rule involved more than the appropriation of authority over another country or people. It also advanced through the privileged occupation of modern sectors—including railways, finance, trade, mining, manufacturing, and education—by the colonizing power and its nationals. Whereas migration conventionally understood entails movement between sovereign states on an equal footing, with migrants expected to accommodate themselves to the host society, colonial migration followed the unequal relations of power connecting metropole and colony. Those who moved from the imperial homeland into colonial territories entered local society with the backing of their government’s authority and the institutions of colonial rule.
Here lay the source of conflicting postwar understandings of private property overseas. For Japanese residents, such property represented their personal possessions and the lives they had built. For those subjected to colonial rule, however, it also represented wealth accumulated within an unequal structure of power. Without reconciling these perspectives, the postwar settlement ultimately subsumed the disposition of these assets within an interstate process of decolonization, and the property was confiscated as part of reparations.
What was settled “completely and finally” in the postwar settlement was this material dimension. Questions of how to judge colonial rule, or how to acknowledge memories of war preserved in family and local histories, proved far more difficult to resolve. These emotional and moral questions remained largely unaddressed, including in the negotiations between Japan and South Korea, and were effectively sealed away.
The third postwar era—the end of the Cold War and the wave of democratization across Asia—brought these long-suppressed questions to the surface. Issues that had remained unresolved for nearly half a century erupted into public debate, particularly in East Asia, as disputes over historical memory and interpretation. Seen in this light, the three postwar eras constitute an inseparable historical sequence, of which the present is a direct continuation.
This perspective also brings a series of interconnected questions into focus. Why and how did so many Japanese settle overseas, and why did their return take the form of repatriation? What did they leave behind at the moment of defeat, and how did those legacies become sources of postwar contention? Asano’s lecture approached these questions from several interrelated perspectives. It recognized repatriates’ experiences as part of the history of Japanese suffering, while also situating them within a global history of the formation and dissolution of the Japanese empire, decolonization, and the movements of people these transformations entailed.
Japanese residents overseas stand at the intersection of two historical representations: victims in Japan and perpetrators in the former colonies. Situating their experiences within wider social relations offers a way to reconsider East Asia’s disputes over the past, in which the same historical events have been narrated through divergent interpretive frameworks and made the grounds of political confrontation.
A global history of the processes through which people, property, institutions, and memories were reconfigured across borders does not simply cancel out these differing understandings of victimhood and responsibility. Rather, it illuminates the historical conditions under which each understanding emerged and establishes an intellectual foundation for bringing conflicting interpretations into dialogue. Building such an intellectual infrastructure for reconciliation lies at the heart of the International Reconciliation Studies Project. Asano’s lecture offers an exemplary realization of that approach.