Searching for Postwar Justice: Japanese War Crimes and Chinese Law, 1945-1990

Abstract:What happened after the Japanese empire collapsed in East Asia? Who took over and how? More importantly, how was order and a sense of justice restored? Using recently opened Chinese and Japanese government, diplomatic, military archives and personal diaries I trace the process of how BC class Japanese war criminals were tried throughout China. I first chart how Japanese rule was restructured on the continent and then detail the Chinese pursuit and prosecution of Japanese war crimes in China. In conclusion, I will demonstrate how competition between the Chinese Nationalists (KMT) and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), themselves embroiled in civil war, sought to implement justice under the new banner of international law at the dawn of the Cold War. The way in which these trials were legally recorded and remembered in both China and Japan continues to play a role in contemporary politics, even today.

Profile:Barak Kushner is Reader in Modern Japanese History at the University of Cambridge and has a PhD in History from Princeton University. He has written three books: Men to Devils, Devils to Men: Japanese War Crimes and Chinese Justice (Harvard University Press, 2015); Slurp! A culinary and social history of ramen – Japan’s Favorite Noodle Soup (Brill, 2012), awarded the 2013 Sophie Coe Prize for Food History; and The Thought War – Japanese Imperial Propaganda (Hawaii 2006). He recently finished a translation of Media, Propaganda and Politics in 20th-Century Japan (Bloomsbury Publishers, 2015), and co-edited a volume about Japan’s lost decades with former Asahi Shimbun editor-in-chief, Funabashi Yoichi, entitled Examining Japan’s Lost Decades (Routledge, 2015). In March 2013 he launched a 5-year European Research Council funded project, « The Dissolution of the Japanese Empire and the Struggle for Legitimacy in Postwar East Asia, 1945-1965 » (www.warcrimesandempire.com)

Moderator : Arnaud NANTA (UMIFRE 19 – MFJ)
Org.: Bureau français de la MFJ
Co-org.: CCI France Japon
* English without translation