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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 May 2025
This symposium on collaboration in East Asia during the Asia-Pacific War and its aftermath addresses some of the most fraught issues in historiography, historical remembrance, and contemporary politics. It also reflects on occupation states in Europe and postwar East Asia, while casting important light on contemporary issues of collaboration globally. How are we to assess occupation regimes that emerged in each East and Southeast Asian nation during the Pacific War, as well as in postwar nations including those occuped by the United States or other occupiers. Issues of collaboration in a post-colonial world may be equally salient in reflecting on the experiences of newly independent nations? The issues are closely intertwined with dominant nationalist ideologies that have characteristically obfuscated and dismissed collaborationist politics while establishing their own legitimacy, or what Timothy Brook calls their “untouchability”. In the post Cold War milieu, and at a time when politicians on both sides of the Taiwan straits, and across the 38th parallel that divides North and South Korea, are redefining their relationships, it becomes possible to revisit the history of war, revolution, occupation and collaboration.
[1] See Gerhard Hirschfeld's introduction to Collaboration in France: Politics and Culture during the Nazi Occupation, 1940-44, co-edited with Patrick Marsh (Oxford: Berg, 1989), p. 2.
[2] Henrik Dethlefsen, “Denmark and the German Occupation: Cooperation, Negotiation or Collaboration?,” Scandanavian Journal of History 15:3 (1990), pp. 198-99.
[3] Teemu Ruskola, “Legal Orientalism,” Michigan Law Review 101:1 (October 2002), p. 225.
[4] Rebecca West, The Meaning of Treason (reprint, London: Phoenix Press, 2000), pp. 94, 102, 114.
[5] On the myth of resistance in postwar France, see Henry Rousso, The Vichy Syndrome: History and Memory in France since 1944 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991); Alan Morris, Collaboration and Resistance Reviewed: Writers and the Mode Rétro in Post-Gaullist France (New York: Berg, 1992); and Éric Conan and Henry Rousso, Vichy: An Ever-Present Past (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1998).
[6] Letter from the Huangpu West Residents' Association to the Shanghai municipal government (14 January 1939), archived in the Shanghai Municipal Archives (Shanghai shi dang'anguan), File R18-126.
[7] Shanghai Municipal Archives, File R18-689.
[8] Kato Kozan's memoir, “Congshi xuanfu gongzuo zhi huigu” (My reminiscence of doing pacification work), appeared serially in the Nanjing xinbao (New Nanjing daily) on 2-3 July 1939.
[9] On “collaborationism,” see Stanley Hoffman, Decline or Renewal: France since the 1930s (New York: Viking, 1974), p. 27.
[10] The phrase “Hitler's willing executioners” is the title of the controversial book in which Daniel Goldhagen argues that moral responsibility for the Holocaust falls not on a limited subset of Germans but on the German people as a whole; Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1998), p. 9.
[11] Michael Marrus and Robert Paxton, Vichy France and the Jews (reprint, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), p. xii.
[12] “Thickets of ambiguity” is taken from Roderick Kedward's introduction to Vichy France and Resistance: Culture and Ideology, coedited with Roger Austin (London: Croom Helm, 1985), p. 5.
[13] Michael Ondaatje, Running in the Family (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1982), p. 53.
[14] Rousso, The Vichy Syndrome, pp. 6-8.
[15] For a more balanced assessment of the indirect negotiations between the Nationalist regime and the Japanese that is the exception proving the rule, see Huang Meizhen and Yang Hanqing, “Nationalist China's Negotiating Position During the Stalemate, 1938-1945,” in Chinese Collaboration with Japan, 1932-45: The Limits of Accommodation, ed. David Barrett and Larry Shyu (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), pp. 56-76.
[16] For attempts to analogize the Rape of Nanjing to the Holocaust, see Joshua Fogel, The Nanjing Massacre in History and Historiography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000).
[17] See Rana Mitter ‘s critique of the effect of resistancialism on assessments of the Japanese occupation of Manchuria; The Manchurian Myth: Nationalism, Resistance, and Collaboration in Modern China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), p. 226.
[18] Robert McClure's comment appears in an undated letter in the United Church Archives (Victoria College, University of Toronto), Finding Aid 186, Box 8, File 141. McClure's movements behind Japanese lines induced the Japanese army in April to offer a reward for his capture; see Munroe Scott, McClure: The China Years (Toronto: Canec, 1977), p. 214.
[19] Chugoku noson kanko chosa (Studies of Chinese village customs) (reprint, Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1981), vol. 1, pp. 101-102.
[20] Zhang Yibo, Zhenjiang lunxian ji (A record of Zhenjiang under occupation) (reprint, Beijing: Renmin chubanshe, 1999), p. 37.
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