Yukiko Koga
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- May 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780226411941
- eISBN:
- 9780226412276
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226412276.001.0001
- Subject:
- Anthropology, Asian Cultural Anthropology
Inheritance of Loss explores how contemporary generations come to terms with losses inflicted by imperialism, colonialism, and war that happened decades ago, and how descendants of perpetrators and ...
More
Inheritance of Loss explores how contemporary generations come to terms with losses inflicted by imperialism, colonialism, and war that happened decades ago, and how descendants of perpetrators and victims establish new relations in today’s globalized economy. Approaching these questions through the lens of inheritance, rather than memory, it focuses on Northeast China, the former site of the Japanese puppet state Manchukuo. As China transitions to a market-oriented society, this region is restoring long-neglected colonial-era structures to boost tourism while inviting former colonial industries to invest, all while inadvertently unearthing chemical weapons abandoned by the Imperial Japanese Army at the end of World War II. This book explores how long neglected colonial remnants are transformed into newly minted capital through the rhetoric of “inheritance.” It chronicles sites of colonial inheritance––tourist destinations, corporate zones, and mustard gas exposure sites––to illustrate entangled attempts by ordinary Chinese and Japanese to reckon with their shared yet contested pasts. It identifies the political economy of redemption as a new mode of generational transmission of the past that makes visible the entangled processes of “after empire,” which points to the often invisible, displaced, or seemingly separate postcolonial and postimperial processes that shape the afterlife of losses and their redemptions, to envisioning present and future relations to what remains, and to renewed desires for going after empire. Inheritance of Loss shows how structures of violence and injustice after the demise of the Japanese Empire compound the losses that later generations must account for, and inevitably inherit.Less
Inheritance of Loss explores how contemporary generations come to terms with losses inflicted by imperialism, colonialism, and war that happened decades ago, and how descendants of perpetrators and victims establish new relations in today’s globalized economy. Approaching these questions through the lens of inheritance, rather than memory, it focuses on Northeast China, the former site of the Japanese puppet state Manchukuo. As China transitions to a market-oriented society, this region is restoring long-neglected colonial-era structures to boost tourism while inviting former colonial industries to invest, all while inadvertently unearthing chemical weapons abandoned by the Imperial Japanese Army at the end of World War II. This book explores how long neglected colonial remnants are transformed into newly minted capital through the rhetoric of “inheritance.” It chronicles sites of colonial inheritance––tourist destinations, corporate zones, and mustard gas exposure sites––to illustrate entangled attempts by ordinary Chinese and Japanese to reckon with their shared yet contested pasts. It identifies the political economy of redemption as a new mode of generational transmission of the past that makes visible the entangled processes of “after empire,” which points to the often invisible, displaced, or seemingly separate postcolonial and postimperial processes that shape the afterlife of losses and their redemptions, to envisioning present and future relations to what remains, and to renewed desires for going after empire. Inheritance of Loss shows how structures of violence and injustice after the demise of the Japanese Empire compound the losses that later generations must account for, and inevitably inherit.
Yukiko Koga
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- May 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780226411941
- eISBN:
- 9780226412276
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226412276.003.0003
- Subject:
- Anthropology, Asian Cultural Anthropology
“From Memory to Inheritance: Postimperial Topography of Guilt in Changchun” examines Japanese encounters with Manchukuo remnants in Changchun, which has become locale for displacement of guilt and ...
More
“From Memory to Inheritance: Postimperial Topography of Guilt in Changchun” examines Japanese encounters with Manchukuo remnants in Changchun, which has become locale for displacement of guilt and “real history” in the Japanese popular imaginary. Based on participant-observation as official tour guide at Palace Museum of the Puppet Emperor of Manchukuo, this chapter follows Japanese tourists—repatriates (hikiagesha), schoolchildren, backpackers, businessmen, and farmers—and local Chinese perceptions of Japanese visitors. It shows how, through the refractive structure of transmission, Japanese postgenerations’ encounters with colonial remnants, which they hope would allow them to attain postmemory––“real history” that they feel missing in Japan plagued with imperial amnesia–– actually reveal something else: the double inheritance of their own and of the Chinese, as well as moral debts not only from Japanese violence but also from the lack of accountability after the empire’s demise. We shall see how Japanese postgenerations’ encounters with traces of unaccounted-for pasts simultaneously reaffirm and defy assumed mnemonic communities of former colonizer and the colonized, further unsettling certainties about which loss is being transmitted. This chapter suggests how Japanese and Chinese attempts to come to terms with the past are intricately connected, implicated, and affected by each other.Less
“From Memory to Inheritance: Postimperial Topography of Guilt in Changchun” examines Japanese encounters with Manchukuo remnants in Changchun, which has become locale for displacement of guilt and “real history” in the Japanese popular imaginary. Based on participant-observation as official tour guide at Palace Museum of the Puppet Emperor of Manchukuo, this chapter follows Japanese tourists—repatriates (hikiagesha), schoolchildren, backpackers, businessmen, and farmers—and local Chinese perceptions of Japanese visitors. It shows how, through the refractive structure of transmission, Japanese postgenerations’ encounters with colonial remnants, which they hope would allow them to attain postmemory––“real history” that they feel missing in Japan plagued with imperial amnesia–– actually reveal something else: the double inheritance of their own and of the Chinese, as well as moral debts not only from Japanese violence but also from the lack of accountability after the empire’s demise. We shall see how Japanese postgenerations’ encounters with traces of unaccounted-for pasts simultaneously reaffirm and defy assumed mnemonic communities of former colonizer and the colonized, further unsettling certainties about which loss is being transmitted. This chapter suggests how Japanese and Chinese attempts to come to terms with the past are intricately connected, implicated, and affected by each other.
