Inheritance of Loss: China, Japan, and the Political Economy of Redemption after Empire

by Yukiko Koga

How do contemporary generations come to terms with losses inflicted by imperialism, colonialism, and war that took place decades ago? How do descendants of perpetrators and victims establish new relations in today’s globalized economy? With Inheritance of Loss , Yukiko Koga approaches these questions through the unique lens of inheritance, focusing on Northeast China, the former site of the Japanese puppet state Manchukuo, where municipal governments now court Japanese as investors and tourists. As China transitions to a market-oriented society, this region is restoring long-neglected colonial-era structures to boost tourism and inviting former colonial industries to create special economic zones, all while inadvertently unearthing chemical weapons abandoned by the Imperial Japanese Army at the end of World War II.
 
Inheritance of Loss chronicles these sites of colonial inheritance––tourist destinations, corporate zones, and mustard gas exposure sites––to illustrate attempts by ordinary Chinese and Japanese to reckon with their shared yet contested pasts. In her explorations of everyday life, Koga directs us to see how the violence and injustice that occurred after the demise of the Japanese Empire compound the losses that later generations must account for, and inevitably inherit.

Genres: Japan, Nonfiction

307 pages, Paperback

First published November 28, 2016

About the author

Yukiko Koga specializes in the areas of political economy, legal anthropology, history and memory, post-colonial and post-imperial relations, and transnational East Asia (China and Japan). She is the author of the award winning, Inheritance of Loss: China, Japan, and the Political Economy of Redemption after Empire, which explores how the introduction of the market-oriented economy in China created new dynamics concerning the contested yet under-explored past for both Chinese and Japanese.

Reviews

[Rebecca · Rating 5 out of 5]

Inheritance of Loss is a book for intellectuals and academics that grapples with, among other things, the Japanese postimperial topography of guilt, resulting from the Japanese colonial era in China in the early 20th century that was not without violence and cruelty. Taking on the intellectual challenge and giving myself time to read Inheritance of Loss over a period of days, a little at a time, I found that I could assimilate the concepts and absorb the material. What makes the work accessible to the lay reader above all is the fact that Koga’s interest in the former Japanese colonial region in eastern China (known in the west as Manchuria) is not only academic, it is personal. Koga’s grandparents lived there when her grandfather worked for the South Manchuria Railway Company, which built a southern link from the Trans-Siberian Railroad from Harbin via Changchun to Dalian, a city on the coastal peninsula east of Beijing that juts into the Yellow Sea. This personal connection brings Koga emotionally close to the material, warming what otherwise might have resulted in a purely academic treatise.
Koga conscientiously and thoroughly elucidates and illustrates, with anecdotes from her research, interviews, and her time working in China as a docent in Changchun at the Imperial Palace Museum of the Puppet State Manchukuo, many concepts expressed in English and Japanese vocabulary, unfamiliar to me, such as external interiority, positionalities, mythistorical, suzhi, inverted victimhood, renzhen, moral economy of debt, and postmemory.
Koga contrasts her observations of the three cities (her on location research done in the early 21st century), each of which served as dynamic examples of the various concepts she thoroughly explains, the, in her words, “different modes of appropriating the past.” For a rough sketch, completely oversimplified: Changchun has impressive Emperor’s Crown Style architecture and the guilt-trip inducing Imperial Palace Museum of the Puppet State Manchukuo; Harbin is proud of its colonial nostalgia but also grapples with the legacy of chemical weapons left behind by the Japanese; and Dalian is the more future oriented city, boasting the Dalian Economic and Technical Zone, a small Japanese-style modern capitalist campus.

A Few Quotes from the Book

Japan:
“…the tangible lack of postimperial consciousness in Japanese society, with its absences, taboos, and elisions of Japanese imperial violence, creates a desire for more discussion of it. Like the famous episode of the British television series Fawlty Towers in which the British innkeeper tries so hard not to talk about the war to his German guests that all he does is talk about it….”

“As many have observed, postdefeat national narratives foregrounded Japan’s own victimhood, while its role as a perpetrator was effectively erased by a focus on the atomic explosions in Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the American occupation.”

Changchun:
“Situated at the intersection of market and history in Manchukuo tourism, we will see in Changchun the dynamics that thwart the attempts of second and third generations of Japanese to seek postmemory in this city filled with remnants of Japan’s failed empire.”

Harbin:
“'I feel it’s wrong that Chinese expect all this support from Japanese who volunteer to do so from a strong sense of justice and for whom it is a redemptive act for what their parents' or grandparents’ generations did in the past. My goal is not to be the leader of those victims. My goal is to encourage these people to take their own action. My goal is not to be the leader.’” Wang Xuan

Dalian:
"'Industrious Anxiety: Labor and Landscapes of Modernity in Dalian,' looks into this excess through the Chinese concept of renzhen (conscientiousness/conscience)."

Grappling with Existential Questions:
“If we demolish traces of history, does it mean that history disappears? That’s not how things work.”

“Chinese victimhood became invisible within the Communist hero narratives, while Japanese victimhood was highlighted.”

Inheritance of Loss is primarily written for the academic community. There are 45 pages of notes and a thorough index at the back. Yet if you can focus on it a little at a time, there is much to learn. The book speaks to everyone who cares about how history is presented for future generations, who care about finding the truth in history, and who would like to learn more about the late 19th and early 20th century history of eastern China and imperial Japan.

[Nick · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is essential reading for anybody interested in the historical problems between Japan, China, and Korea. Koga shows how many Japanese are conscious of and attempting to make amends for the the trauma inflicted on China by Japan during World War II and how the Chinese government frequently mistreats the Chinese victims of World War II and the post-war when it is politically inconvenient. It is also interesting to consider what the political economy of tragedy as Koga describes how one city, Changchun, has used the capital of its historical memory to attract tourists while another, Dalian, has used its historical capital of knowledge of the Japanese language and culture to attract billions of dollars of Japanese investment. This book will challenge assumptions about how China and Japan both deal with issues of historical memory and should prompt its, hopefully many, readers to apply the lessons elsewhere.

[Paul · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a tough book to evaluate. Five stars for academics. Especially those into post-colonial theory. A difficult slog for most everyone else. Academics of a different theoretical bent may be left with many questions. What portions of the populations hold the views she studies? How have things changed over the almost twenty years since she began her fieldwork? There are few dates in the book. And even fewer statistics. What are the measurable effects of renewed industrialization on the population and environment?

[Rafael Munia · Rating 3 out of 5]

Fresh lenses on a new problem

This book offers a refreshing take by being a theoretically informed book about a topic (Japanese colonialism in Northeast China) that is rarely written about with the theoretical sophistication it deserves.