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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 May 2025
This article is a contribution to a symposium on collaboration in East Asia during the Asia-Pacific War and its aftermath, which 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] Henry Rousso, The Vichy Syndrome: History and Memory in France in 1944 (Cambridge, Mass.: University Press, 1991), p. 9.
[2] Hora ShinzÅ▯, “Shina jiken kaiketsu no shu mondai to Shina ni okeru shÅ▯hin ryÅ«tsÅ«” (Questions concerning the resolution of the China Incident and the circulation of commodities in China), Kobe shi keizaibu sangyÅ▯ka (Industry Office of the Department of the Economy of Kobe City), April 1939. I am grateful to Hamashita Takeshi for alerting me to this collection of documents, and to Hori Kazuo for providing access.
[3] A significant attempt in the realm of popular culture to recalibrate the wartime standards of good and evil away from national causes to individual actions is Clint Eastwood's pair of films, Flags of our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima.
[4] Wang Qitao, “Renxing lun, jinxiandai zhongguo de lishi yuyan yu guozu jianshe zai tantao” (Further reflections on human nature, historical discourses on modern China, and nation-building), Xueshu zhongguo (Scholarly China), January 2008. The book by Frederic Wakeman that Wang singles out is Shanghai Badlands: Wartime Terrorism and Urban Crimes (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
[5] Bai Xian, “Ruhe kandai lunxianqu nei de yudi hezuo” (How to look at cooperation with the enemy in the occupied zone), Huaxia kuaidi, posted on 25 December 2007 on China News Digest. Among the significant new scholarly contributions to the rethinking of collaboration is Pan Min's Jiangsu Ri-wei jiceng zhengquan yanjiu (1937-1945) (Studies in the puppet political regime at the local level in Jiangsu, 1937-1945) (Shanghai: Shanghai renmin chubanshe, 2006).
[6] Didi Kirsten Tatlow, “Truth and Reconciliation,” South China Morning Post, Online Edition, 30 March 2008.
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