Collaboration in the History of Wartime East Asia
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Volume 6 | Issue 7 | Article ID 2798 | Jul 02, 2008 The Asia-Pacific Journal | Japan Focus Collaboration in the History of Wartime East Asia Timothy Brook Collaboration in War and Memory in East comparative perspective. The symposium Asia: A Symposium includes the following articles: This symposium on collaboration in East Asia during the Asia-Pacific War and its aftermath addresses some of the most fraught issues in 1. Timothy Brook, Collaboration in the History historiography, historical remembrance, and of Wartime East Asia contemporary politics. It also reflects on 2. Prasenjit Duara,Collaboration and the occupation states in Europe and postwar East Politics of the Twentieth Century Asia, while casting important light on3. Suk-Jung Han,On the Question of contemporary issues of collaboration globally. Collaboration in South Korea How are we to assess occupation regimes that 4. Heonik Kwon, Excavating the History of emerged in each East and Southeast Asian Collaboration nation during the Pacific War, as well as in 5. Timothy Brook, Collaboration in the Postwar postwar nations including those occuped by the 6. Margherita Zanasi, New Perspectives on United States or other occupiers. Issues of Chinese Collaboration collaboration in a post-colonial world may be equally salient in reflecting on the experiences of newly independent nations? The issues are Japan Focus anticipates and welcomes closely intertwined with dominant nationalist responses to the symposium. These will be ideologies that have characteristicallypublished in future issues. MS obfuscated and dismissed collaborationist politics while establishing their own legitimacy, or what Timothy Brook calls theirCollaboration in the History of Wartime “untouchability”. In the post Cold War milieu, East Asia and at a time when politicians on both sides of the Taiwan straits, and across the 38th parallel Timothy Brook that divides North and South Korea, are redefining their relationships, it becomes possible to revisit the history of war, revolution, On 30 October 1940, six days after meeting occupation and collaboration. with Adolf Hitler in the railway station at Montoire, Philippe Pétain announced on French This symposium on war and collaboration in radio that “a collaboration has been envisioned East Asia and globally features contributions by between our two countries.” Since then, Timothy Brook, Prasenjit Duara, Suk-Jung Han, “collaboration” has been the word by which we Heonik Kwon, a response by Brook, and a denigrate political cooperation with an further conribution in the form of a response by occupying force. Pétain’s choice of language to Margherita Zanasi. The authors examine war characterize the arrangement he made with and collaboration in China, Korea, Vietnam, Hitler—he claimed he would shield France from and Manchukuo, in history and memory and in the greater threat of military occupation—was 1 6 | 7 | 0 APJ | JF not of his own devising. The French army had the Chinese mainland, occupying the northeast signed an armistice with Germany four months (Manchuria) in 1931 and then moving down earlier that committed French officials “to into the Beijing region in July 1937, in both conform to the decisions of the German instances to international condemnation. authorities and collaborate faithfully with Unable to bring the Chinese government to them.” [1] This first iteration was vague and heel, Japan opened a second and far more innocent; Pétain’s was not, and less and less violent front around Shanghai in August 1937. could be. As war and occupation subordinated The Yangtze Delta—25,000 square miles of France’s economy and polity to German densely populated alluvial land extending from control, collaboration unravelled into a tangle Shanghai upriver to the national capital in of compromises that few could anticipate at the Nanjing—became the battleground for what outset of the war. Japan would call the New Order in East Asia. After the initial military onslaught that fall and The purges of the winter of 1944-45, which winter, the shock of invasion was transmuted consolidated the new postwar regimes across into the daily reality of military occupation, and Europe, sealed the fate of the word. It also conquest shifted to collaboration. Collaboration permitted it to expand, to refer to what Henrik would not begin at the top as it had in France, Dethlefsen, writing of the term’s charged where a hastily reorganized regime came history in Denmark (where the government forward to deal with Hitler. It began, rather, at decided to accept German tutelage), has called the bottom, in the county towns dotting the “the necessary adaptation of the whole society” landscape across which the Japanese army to existing political conditions. Dethlefsen has rolled westward from Shanghai that winter argued that this is “a type of social behaviour toward the capital, Nanjing. There, at the local which is general and which occurs in all level of a new regime that would gradually be periods of history,” and that it should not be brought into being, Chinese elites came inflated to the point of ignoring the peculiar forward to enter into agreements with agents dynamics of collaboration and reducing all who of the occupying Japanese army to “exercise lived under occupation to the degraded status power under the pressure produced by the of “collaborators.” He suggests we restrict it to presence of an occupying power.” what he terms its political definition: “the continuing exercise of power under theIt was a terrifying and devastating presence. pressure produced by the presence of an Japanese soldiers treated Chinese soldiers and occupying power.” [2] This is to say, those who civilians with astonishing violence during their collaborate must exercise power to be said to invasion of the winter of 1937. The disregard have done so. for the conventions of war has left an extraordinary archive of memories. These The study of collaboration has become a rich memories converge with particular force on a field of research and spculation in the ongoing single memory, the capture of the national history of the Second World War in Europe, but capital on 13 December. This atrocity quickly collaboration was hardly unique to Europe. became known in the English-speaking world Three years before Pétain’s meeting with as the Rape of Nanjing [Nanking]. That memory Hitler, collaborative arrangements were being is still alive today and, together with the worked out at the far end of the Eurasian guerrilla resistance, is at the center of the continent, in the hinterland around Shanghai at popular conception of what Chinese call their the mouth of the Yangtze River, between Anti-Japanese War. But it is not the only story Chinese and Japanese. Japan through the 1920s that can be told about those eight long years of and 1930s had been steadily encroaching on occupation and armed resistance, which ended 2 6 | 7 | 0 APJ | JF with Japan’s surrender to the United States in collaboration. Such connections are often not 1945. There were other ways of responding to hard to find. The head of the Nanjing municipal the invasion, other ways of surviving the government under the Japanese had a degree occupation. One of these, almost entirely in law from Hosei University in Tokyo, for unstudied, was to collaborate. example, and the head of the first collaborationist regime in Shanghai had Collaboration and the History of War as studied political economy at Waseda Resistance University. Studying in Japan meant that they had at least a common language with the The history of local collaboration between occupier, which made them likely to be the first Chinese and Japanese is not a story most people whom Japanese agents approached in Chinese wish to hear, or would even recognize their search for local contacts. Explaining as their own. Collective memory recalls this collaboration on the basis of such ties closes off time instead as a period of Japanese atrocity any need to delve more deeply into the problem and Chinese suffering. This is a compelling of what actually motivated these people. But version of the story, and one which everything the problem is not thereby solved, for the written about the period reinforces: the same simple reason that the exceptions to this rule heroes and villains, the same desperate plight outnumber the examples. On the one hand. of Chinese civilians, the same gross misconduct many Chinese who had personal ties with Japan on the part of Japanese soldiers, repeating chose to resist. Ma Chaojun, Nanjing’s mayor in itself, as it did in real life, over and over. To tell 1937, had studied aviation in Japan, yet he the story in any other way would seem merely chose to flee west with the retreating to confirm Japan’s wartime propaganda about Nationalist government rather than the common cause that the yellow races should collaborate. On the other, most of the lesser make against the colonialist white race, and so elites who worked with the Japanese at the to collude in the project that that propaganda local level had never visited Japan. Unlike the did not dare name, Japan’s self-assigned right powerful who congregated in Shanghai and to colonize China. And yet many saw no Nanjing, lesser county elites led lives that were alternative to going along with what the purely local, pursuing what opportunities were Japanese wanted, either because they regarded at hand and dealing with problems that did not compliance as a more realistic survival strategy extend far beyond their horizons. Searching for or, in a few cases, because they actually prior connections to Japan diverts attention welcomed the conquerors as bringers of new from the wide spectrum of real conditions and solutions to China’s problems. Contemporary motivations that induced some Chinese to work Chinese consciousness has no way of making with the Japanese.