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

328 pages, Hardcover

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

[风花 · Rating 5 out of 5]

国耻的辨证法：“如果日本在1945年没有战败，我现在就是日本公民了！”
Koga这本书写的非常“机敏”，虽然用了后殖民的话术，但一些有意思的点依然藏在字里行间。Koga田野的地点是东三省，探究中国与日本对“past”的处理方式。政府靠翻新解放前的东三省日本或俄罗斯留下的建筑以开发当地旅游业，或是像大连较为大胆的引进日本外资发展当地经济，当后社会主义遇上“后殖民主义”，并由此震荡而来的一系列关于历史，遗产，“偿还历史债务”与伤痕的讨论。有意思的一点，日本的战争责任在毛时代并没有被强调，甚至在大跃进中把日军的731旧址拆了大炼钢铁。 而今天的吉林省省委，就坐落在曾经的关东军司令部旧址。

作者用了双面镜的隐喻，中国与日本互相持了一柄镜子照向对方，日本的镜子中能看见中国的影像，也能看见中国持着镜子照向日本的这个动作本身，也能看见中国持的镜子中的日本的像，反之亦然。在这样的互相照射，与随之而来的不断的衍射之上，当代的中国与日本如何处理“过去”变得无比复杂，而仅靠日本不断的道歉，完全没办法解决问题，反而让中国觉得种道歉是远远不够的。对中国东北来说，日本既是来自过去的“伤痕历史”，也是代表经济改革的现在与未来的“现代性与工作伦理（工作认真）” 。对日本来说，东北反而代表一种投机的胜地，与日本的僵化经济体制不同（一些在中国的日本外资的日籍经理甚至声称中国才是真正的资本主义，而日本式计划经济），而这种投机胜地的隐喻，又令人联想到30年代满洲国在日本帝国的帝国想象中投射的地位。东北当代年轻人对过去的态度也很矛盾，一边对Koga说历史不重要，挣钱才重要，一边怀疑作者会不会是右翼分子，于是Koga虽未说明白，但是她依然发现了当代中国的一个有意思的地方，一边是去政治化弥漫，一边是旺盛的民族主义。这种旺盛的“民族主义”与中国政府自认为战争的受害者紧密相关，Koga指出，这种只自认为是受害者的定位玩群没办法解决这种双方的历史债务，于是就导致了一个很吊诡的现象，一方面是持续不断的民主主义的鼓动，但是在对于曾经的日本侵略的受害者的帮助方面却毫无动作，中国政府完全缺席了对历史性被损害的人的帮助。

不过Koga也精准地发现了“中国公民对日本罪行的检讨”的潘多拉魔盒性质，Koga在吉林做田野的时候，就会发现中国人的一些令她很震惊的评论，例如一个出租车司机就和她说中国当代的腐败，顺便提到，“如果日本在1945年没有战败，我现在就是日本公民了！” Koga把此事视做中国人对日本的讨论反映了中国人对自己国家的焦虑。在中国人对自身政治体制持续的焦虑之下（却完全没办法公开讨论），Koga也提到，当一个公民去思考日本历史罪行的来龙去脉的时候，这种“对历史罪行的起因”的探讨，是否会引火上身，引发公民对文革的历史罪行与暴力的检讨？

不过作者的讨论只局限在中日的历史及其当代联系之上，如果可以把这种对历史与记忆的讨论放在一个更大的框架下去讨论，我想也许会产生更好的效果。中国与日本的历史与记忆，只是当代中国记忆与历史机器的一个部分，这也启发我们对“国殇的辨证法”的思考。南京大屠杀与天安门事件哪一个才是国殇？为什么大家只记得（被迫记得）南京大屠杀，却忘了（有的时候是主动忘记）天安门事件？“鬼子来了”还是“皇帝活了”，哪一个才是国耻？是中国人被外国人屠戮，还是中国人被中国人屠戮？

[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.