This chapter explores the Japanese colonial origins of Angang between 1915 and 1945. The outbreak of World War I reconfigured the geopolitical balance in East Asia, enabling Japan to develop ironmaking in Anshan. World War I also led to the rise of the Soviet Union, prompting interest in economic planning among many outside Russia, including Japanese researchers in Manchuria. These new developments in the interwar years crystallized in state-directed industrialization in Northeast China under Japanese occupation from 1931 to 1945. Through Soviet-inspired economic policies, the Japanese-sponsored puppet regime of Manchukuo developed Shōwa Steelworks in Anshan to support Japan’s war and imperial expansion. Reflecting the quintessentially colonial nature of Manchukuo, Chinese workers faced various forms of violence and discrimination on a day-to-day basis, increasing the forced labor mobilization of Chinese prisoners of war. Through planning and violence, the Japanese occupation regime turned Manchuria into the largest heavy industrial region on Chinese soil.

This chapter delves into the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) takeover and reconstruction of state-owned enterprises (SOEs) in Manchuria between 1948 and 1952. It was here, during the Civil War, that the CCP first experimented with Soviet-style centralized economic planning. In the early People’s Republic of China, Manchuria emerged as the largest center of socialist industrialization, owing to the heavy industry facilities built by the Japanese and the SOE system developed by the Nationalists. The CCP drew on the expertise of the remaining Japanese and Nationalist engineers, managers, and skilled workers to reconstruct Angang and other major SOEs in Manchuria. The party co-opted these knowledge workers by carefully incorporating former Nationalist Chinese as members of the new regime and segregating the Japanese from the local Chinese community. The CCP’s reliance on Japanese and Nationalist experts came to an end as Cold War tensions intensified during the Korean War.

Fundamentals of our National Polity (Kokutai no hongi), where these quotations are from, was published by Japan’s education ministry in March 1937, months before the nation plunged into war against China and, subsequently, the Second World War.1 A portable canon of imperial ideology, the Fundamentals attacked the alien ideas that had become too prominent in Japanese society, particularly “individualism, which is the root of modern Occidental ideologies.”2 Yet the booklet contained more than simple propaganda; by instructing the imperial subjects to reaffirm their loyalty to the emperor and the nation, it reflected the Japanese state’s attempt to enlist citizens in its revolt against the West. As such, the pamphlet provides a useful historic vantage point. It illuminates, retrospectively, what had gone wrong in Japan’s quest for modernity over the preceding eight decades, which ended in an all-out confrontation with the Allied powers.

While much of the literature on nationalism focuses on the formation or construction of national identities and nation-states, the story does not end with the creation of a polity claiming to embody a nation’s identity. Conceptions of nationhood continue to be contested and to change over time within the framework of national sovereignty, even as the breadth and depth of popular attachment to, and identification with, the nation-state wax and wane under changing conditions. This is just as true of long-established nation-states as it is of recently formed ones. Terminological usage may obscure this, insofar as nationalism is commonly used to describe movements or efforts directed at gaining a people’s independence or asserting its purported rights to contested territory or resources. Loyalty to a long-established country is more often referred to as patriotism – and by virtue of being consigned to this category, has been subject to less thorough analytical scrutiny in the theoretical and comparative literature on nationalism.

Shortly after the conclusion of the Korean War in 1953, the Buddhist monastic community in South Korea was beset by an internal schism concerning celibacy that turned into a power struggle for control of the Korean sangha. Aside from the temples themselves, the secular courts were the primary battleground in this dispute over monastic marriages and celibacy. The legal case at the heart of the “purification movement” (chŏnghwa undong) offers insight into the monastic community’s attempts to navigate the legal landscape of post-war South Korea. The secular courts had no legal basis under the post-1948 Constitution for deciding whether celibacy was required in order to maintain one’s status as a Buddhist monk. The cases focussed instead on the legality of revising the Chogye Order’s own Constitution (chonghŏn), or more specifically the meeting or gathering in which these changes were authorized. This chapter looks at the intersection of Buddhism and constitutional law in Korea as revealed in these historical events.

The chapter examines violence and the Japanese empire from the beginning of the empire’s existence in the late nineteenth century to its collapse in 1945. The chapter analyzes not only the war crimes initiated by the Japanese empire, but also the various individual recipients and perpetrators of violence from 1937 to 1945. Both the second Sino-Japanese War (1937-45) and the Pacific War (1941-45) tore apart the lives of millions of individuals. All involved were exposed to extreme violence, and every individual had to endure such periods of violence in one way or another. Chinese and Korean forced laborers, women forced into sexual servitude, Japanese leftists killed in the prison, American and European prisoners of wars, and Japanese and Korean suicide pilots are among those who addressed in this chapter. My essay attempts to illuminate complicated aspects of the wars that Japan experienced and provide a better understanding of these wars and their effects on various individuals in Asia and the Pacific.