Volume 6 | Issue 7 | Article ID 2802 | Jul 02, 2008 The -Pacific Journal | Japan Focus

Collaboration in the Postwar

Timothy Brook

Collaboration in the Postwar Timothy Brook, , Suk-Jung Han, Heonik Kwon, a response by Brook and a Timothy Brook further response to the symposium by Margherita Zanasi. The authors examine war and collaboration in , Korea, Vietnam, Collaboration in War and Memory in East and Manchukuo, in history and memory and in Asia: A Symposium comparative perspective. The symposium includes the following articles: This article is a contribution to a symposium on collaboration in East Asia during the Asia- 1. Timothy Brook, Collaboration in the History Pacific War and its aftermath, which addresses of Wartime East Asia some of the most fraught issues in2. Prasenjit Duara,Collaboration and the , historical remembrance, and Politics of the Twentieth Century contemporary politics. It also reflects on 3. Suk-Jung Han,On the Question of occupation states in Europe and postwar East Collaboration in South Korea Asia, while casting important light on4. Heonik Kwon, Excavating the History of contemporary issues of collaboration globally. Collaboration How are we to assess occupation regimes that 5. Timothy Brook, Collaboration in the Postwar emerged in each East and Southeast Asian 6. Margherita Zanasi, New Perspectives on nation during the Pacific War, as well as in Chinese Collaboration postwar nations including those occuped by the United States or other occupiers. Issues of Japan Focus anticipates and welcomes collaboration in a post-colonial world may be responses to the symposium. These will be equally salient in reflecting on the experiences published in future issues. MS of newly independent nations? The issues are closely intertwined with dominant nationalist ideologies that have characteristicallyHenry Rousso, writing in the 1980s about obfuscated and dismissed collaborationist memories of Vichy France, argued that the politics while establishing their own legitimacy, French experience of having collaborated with or what Timothy Brook calls theirthe Nazi occupation has “played an essential if “untouchability”. In the post Cold War milieu, not primary role in the difficulties that the and at a time when politicians on both sides of people of France have faced in reconciling the Taiwan straits, and across the 38th parallel themselves to their history.” [1] To judge from that divides North and South Korea, are the insights of the three colleagues who have redefining their relationships, it becomes generously responded to my work in this issue possible to revisit the history of war, revolution, of Japan Focus, much the same may be said of occupation and collaboration. the people of East Asian nations. Interestingly, it has taken these people, as well as their This symposium on war and collaboration in historians, far longer to recognize what Rousso East Asia and globally features contributions by observed of France: that collaboration is not

1 6 | 7 | 0 APJ | JF only part of the history of twentieth-century East Asia but an essential feature of the postwar experience. As Suk-Jung Han nicely phrases it in his contribution to this forum, collaboration continues to “haunt” postwar East Asia. Until its legacies are recognized and addressed, East Asia will remain caught in “the postwar.”

More than just a period of time, “the postwar” is the condition of suspended animation created by the politics of the Cold War. After the Second World War, the bids of Japan and Germany to attain hegemony over world- Vichy cabinet with Marshal Pétain and regions through military invasion were Pierre Laval center replaced by the more subtle efforts of other powers to assert postwar hegemony over the Collaboration’s haunting of the postwar world entire globe. Hot war and military occupation has been particularly strong in Korea, a nation continued to be strategies in that competition, whose fractured modern history has been but they were dwarfed by the use of diplomatic fundamentally shaped by forced collaboration and economic pressure to force support from with China, Japan, the USSR, and the US. Its lesser states. In such a climate, postwar continues to be utterly entangled by collaboration—so recently condemned as an these collaborations. Vietnam, as Heonik Kwon immoral and unpatriotic response to external shows, exhibits an equally complicated web of pressure—was reconstituted as the modus wartime and postwar collaborations, especially operandi of leaders obliged to work with in the south, to the point of nearly complete superpowers to secure their nations’ economic moral incoherence. In China, Prasenjit Duara advantage and their own political survival. notes how recent fascination for Zhang Ailing’s Dressed in the extravagant moral norms that ambiguous wartime fiction, intensified by Ang postwar ideology favored—“liberation,” Lee’s filmic version of her story Lust/Caution, “revolution,” “freedom,” “the exposes the extent to which “the seething market”—collaboration became almost realities that ideologies miss” are now escaping everywhere the necessary response to external the draconian mechanisms of postwar power. In some places, new postwar forgetting. Of course, this is precisely what collaborators arose to take the place of old; in ideologies are designed to do: to encourage others, former collaborators shifted their people to miss a great deal; in this case, to allegiances to new hegemons. In neither, forget how people really experienced the war however, was collaboration a topic that the and to simplify the liberationist narratives and history of the war could accommodate. It was a nationalist identities on which postwar regimes shame best forgotten. have rested their claims to legitimacy. This seems especially true in postwar East Asia, where political contests beyond the war exposed what Kwon calls the “bedrock of human collaboration.”

Wartime collaboration continues to shape East Asia today. Access to state power, despite the

2 6 | 7 | 0 APJ | JF unpredictable rupturing and reforming of propagandists could broadcast the virtues of political landscapes over the past sixty-odd what they liked to call “the kingly Way” years, has been determined almost exclusively (ōdō) were those where the Japanese army by the outcomes of the war. In China, that exerted full military control. And the only access depended vitally on not havingChinese whom the Japanese could induce to collaborated with Japan. In Korea, by contrast, cooperate with them were those they could the dependency went quite the other way. As compel to do so. There was no plan to deal with Han observes, Koreans who collaborated with the current situation, nor any strategy to Japan, or their heirs, were returned to power bridge the gulf between occupier and occupied. with, as Han notes, “only the slightest change of ideas, plans, institutes, even the very words Hora observes that Japan had to control its employed.” This insight applies as well to markets in China if it hoped to benefit from the Japan’s postwar leadership. Putting Japanese current state of affairs, but that this object leaders and non-Japanese collaborators on trial could be achieved only by force. Chinese will (or not, as the case was) did not only end the never accept foreign control of their economy, war, as the victors claimed; it paved the way Hora tells his audience. A wealthy nation might for the politics of the postwar. By allowing most be able to impose an economic solution on “the of Japan’s wartime oligarchy to remain intact, China problem” (ChÅ«goku mondai), but Japan the Cold War blocked the possibility that Japan lacks the financial and logistical capacity to do might enter into a healing dialogue with former so. Its only means is violence. His conclusion is victims. It also induced Japanese and non- that Japan must treat China as an equal and Japanese alike into forgetting that many independent sovereign state, and therefore that Japanese opposed the Greater Asian War that a political solution, not a military one, is called the army precipitated. for. As for the leaders who have come forward to collaborate, Hora points out, they are of no Hora Shinzō is a case in point. A professor at help in such a compromised situation. Wang Hōsei University, Hora worked in Dalian and Jingwei, having so recently defected from the then Tianjin before returning to Japan early in Nationalists, has changed his allegiances too 1939. In March of that year, the Department of often to enjoy any real esteem among the the Economy of the Kobe city government Chinese. Even should he manage to deploy his invited him to address them on the present charisma to fashion a regime, he will have no situation and future prospects of what was still successor to take his place. Wang’s bid to lead being euphemized as “the China Incident” the country can only fail. The fault is not (ChÅ«goku jiken). In his presentation, Hora Wang’s so much as Japan’s. Japan needs goes utterly against the official rhetoric of the cooperation, not collaboration, yet time, politely condemning everything Japan had collaboration is precisely what prevents done or aspired to do in China since 1937. No genuine cooperation from arising. one had expected that Japan’s punitive actions that summer would grow into a full-scale Speaking almost two years after the invasion of occupation, Hora observes, because no one had China, and more than two before Japan’s anticipated that Chinese would actively resist. expansion into the Pacific, Hora could see that They had, and that resistance had turned Japan’s path in China must lead to disaster. He Japan’s intervention into a full-scale war. This regarded Japan’s so-called war of construction spirit of resistance, especially among younger as nothing but a war of destruction, and Chinese, was not only uniting China against understood as well that its consequences for Japan but tying down three million Japanese postwar Japan would be dire. Hora does not troops. The only areas in which warphrase his critique in the language of

3 6 | 7 | 0 APJ | JF

“imperialism,” though that is the concept Wang’s screed has excited much discussion on framing his analysis, as telltale references to the internet, and deservedly so, for it boldly Japan’s economy as “capitalist” reveal. For challenges certain comfortable notions about Hora, collaboration is but one of the challenges the benign effects of liberalism. His enthusiasm that a colonizing Japan will never be able to for exposing the nefarious tricks of “American meet or overcome. The postwar has forgotten scholarly authorities” (among whom I am people such as Hora Shinzō. Of him I know mildly dismayed to find myself counted) counts nothing beyond what appears in theas good entertainment for those of us familiar mimeographed typescript of his talk that I with the totalizing rhetoric of Maoist found in the collection of wartime documents in denunciation. It does, nonetheless, block him the Economics Research Institute at Kyoto from acknowledging the contemporary context University. [2] I offer his analysis simply to of Chinese state power, in which the judgment remind us that Japanese were keenly aware of against collaboration is securely embedded. the predicament facing invaders who relied on Neither Ang Lee nor Fred Wakeman nor I collaborators to fashion a regime favorable to advocate collaboration as a morally positive or their interests. politically advisable course. What we argue for is the need to recognize the politics at work at Postwar ideology has discouraged Japanese the time of Japan’s occupation, but even more so, the politics controlling the memory of that from remembering that China hands such as occupation such that certain Chinese state Hora Shinzō strove to make their voices heard elites were able to legitimize their claim to during the war, or that agencies such as the monopolize state power in the postwar. Kobe city government wanted to hear them. So too it has discouraged the rest of us from From my perspective, Wang’s instrumentalist realizing that not everyone enacted the logic is undercut by his quaint fetishization of national virtues or sins retrospectively assigned the “working class” as the analytical category to them. [3] Recent responses to Lust/Caution that solves the puzzle of collaboration. Wang’s indicate, however, that some Chinese are working class is loyally obedient to the unwilling to let moral ambiguity muddy the interests of a transcendent China and never once clear waters of the story of virtue’s collaborates with enemies of that triumph over evil. Wang Qitao, a graduate of transcendental entity. Yet if the historical Peking University currently pursuing arecord of collaboration demonstrates anything, doctorate in comparative literature in the US, it is that class does not operate as an has vigorously denounced the movie for failing independent variable within the field of to depict collaboration as the political choice of wartime politics; it gains political salience only a bourgeois class fraction. Adopting a Maoist through alliances to state power. When that critical perspective, Wang goes on to denounce state is an occupation state, the concept of both Frederic Wakeman and me forclass has little capacity to analyze the political “energetically reversing the verdict” onterrain or anticipate political outcomes. collaboration. He darkly suspects that our work Occupation, like revolution, overrules class; it is part of an ideological campaign to justify the cannot be reduced to it. To assume otherwise is US government’s anti-terrorism program, to obscure the class interests at play in making attack Third World resistance to Western sure that history is written in a certain way. imperialism, build sympathy for Iraqi collaboration with the United States, and Other Chinese commentators have been less “brainwash” Chinese elites to the desires of critical of foreigners digging down to the Western imperialism. [4] bedrock of collaboration. In a relaxed

4 6 | 7 | 0 APJ | JF discussion of the need to include collaboration [6] Bai Xian provocatively ends his essay with in a non-partisan history of the war, Bai Xian Chen Yinke’s reminder that history outlasts the draws heavily on Collaboration to argue for states whose history it records. Although some removing modern Chinese history from its old Chinese readers are not yet ready to cast off moralizing framework. History as it has been their cultural legitimacy from state moorings, written in China, Bai declares, is nothing but a others sense that a change is needed to allow series of stories designed to cow the people the stories beneath the surface of public into a servile patriotism. He praisesmemory to come to light. Now that the postwar Lust/Caution by regretting that no Chinese may be coming to an end, many are preparing movie has previously attempted to show that to listen. life under the occupation consisted of more than resistance success stories and maudlin Timothy Brook is concurrently Principal of St. accounts of victims. Bai also draws attention to John’s College, University of British Columbia, recent work on collaboration by Chinese and Shaw Professor of Chinese at Oxford historians, appropriately so, as a new scholarly University. He is the author ofCollaboration: subfield on collaboration is just now producing Japanese Agents and Local Elites in Wartime its first significant yield in China. [5] As China. Chinese historians begin to publish more independent assessments of collaboration, and Tim Brook wrote this article for Japan Focus. as readers encounter their work, the story will Posted July 4, 2008. change. Still, this new research is unlikely to gain intellectual authority so long as the Notes Communist Party roots its legitimacy in its wartime struggle against Japan. The regime’s [1] Henry Rousso, The Vichy Syndrome: History current perception of threat from ethnic and Memory in France in 1944 (Cambridge, minorities suggests that there will be no Mass.: University Press, 1991), p. 9. digging under those foundations for the[2] Hora Shinzō, “Shina jiken kaiketsu no shu foreseeable future—which, among othermondai to Shina ni okeru shōhin ryÅ«tsÅ«” effects, means that the Chinese translation of (Questions concerning the resolution of the Collaboration will remain unpublished for the China Incident and the circulation of time being. commodities in China), Kobe shi keizaibu sangyōka (Industry Office of the Department The untouchability of collaboration is not of the Economy of Kobe City), April 1939. I am purely a political issue, of course. So long as grateful to Hamashita Takeshi for alerting me some Chinese invoke Japanese atrocities to to this collection of documents, and to Hori imagine for themselves a future as a unified Kazuo for providing access. ethnoculture in a globalizing world, it will be a [3] A significant attempt in the realm of popular cultural issue. Posthumously indictingculture to recalibrate the wartime standards of collaborators is a way of asking who deserves good and evil away from national causes to to be a “good Chinese” and who does not. It is individual actions is Clint Eastwood’s pair of also a way of reinscribing Japanese as the films, Flags of our Fathers and Letters from enemies of China’s aspiration for hegemony in Iwo Jima. East Asia. And yet, despite the appeal of [4] Wang Qitao, “Renxing lun, jinxiandai simplifying what happened during the war, zhongguo de lishi yuyan yu guozu jianshe zai Chinese themselves are increasingly willing to tantao” (Further reflections on human nature, revisit the war of resistance to an extent that historical discourses on modern China, and will eventually undermine the old certainties. nation-building), Xueshu zhongguo (Scholarly

5 6 | 7 | 0 APJ | JF

China), January 2008. The book by Frederic Digest. Among the significant new Wakeman that Wang singles out is Shanghai scholarly contributions to the rethinking of Badlands: Wartime Terrorism and Urban collaboration is Pan Min’s Jiangsu Ri-wei jiceng Crimes (New York: Cambridge University zhengquan yanjiu (1937-1945) (Studies in the Press, 1996). puppet political regime at the local level in [5] Bai Xian, “Ruhe kandai lunxianqu nei de Jiangsu, 1937-1945) (Shanghai: Shanghai yudi hezuo” (How to look at cooperation with renmin chubanshe, 2006). the enemy in the occupied zone), Huaxia [6] Didi Kirsten Tatlow, “Truth and kuaidi, posted on 25 December 2007 on China Reconciliation,” South China Morning Post, Online Edition, 30 March 2008.

6