Post-imperial Reckoning: Transitional Injustice and the Unmaking of the Japanese Empire in East Asia

Abstract This essay explores what it means to reckon with imperial violence decades after the Japanese Empire’s demise in 1945. Through legal, historical, and ethnographic analyses of civil lawsuits filed in courts across Japan since the 1990s by Chinese and South Korean victims seeking apologies and monetary compensation from the Japanese government and corporations involved in enslavement, I explore how the lawsuits exposed a politics of abandonment that left victims of imperial violence unredressable for decades. This evasion of imperial accountability, I argue, was etched into the legal, economic, and diplomatic structures of what I call the unmaking of empire—the entwined processes of de-imperialization and de-colonization. The move from empire to nation-state thus produced transitional injustice which calls for post-imperial reckoning: a double task of accounting for both the original imperial violence and the politics of abandonment after empire in perpetrator and victim nations. I show how new legal and moral landscapes for imperial reckoning are expanding the scope and agency of accountability, challenging accepted models of redress and raising the stakes for current generations to reckon with unaccounted-for pasts.