Barak Kushner, The Geography of Injustice

Readers of this journal know the Cold War as a global history that manifested differently around the world in a wide variety of local settings. But rarely is the superpower conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union so underplayed as in the book under review here, The Geography of Injustice, which details the ill-fated politics of justice in war-torn East Asia in the framing stages of the Cold War and beyond. Barak Kushner rightly insists that to understand how the Cold War took shape in East Asia (i.e., Japan, China, Taiwan, and the Korean peninsula), “we need to place the end of the Japanese empire at the center of it” (p. 38). He goes further by explaining how the major political players in Japan and China in the first few years after the Second World War—when Japan was occupied by U.S. forces and China was wracked by civil war—confronted war crimes trials of Japanese military officers in the late 1940s and 1950s and why these events of more than 70 years ago still matter in regional relations today.This monograph follows on the heels of a highly regarded and productive five-year European Research Council–funded collaborative research project led by Kushner at the University of Cambridge from 2013 to 2019. Titled “The Dissolution of Empire and the Struggle for Legitimacy in Postwar East Asia, 1945–1965,” it brought together scholars of East Asia from four continents and resulted in three edited volumes of original research essays: The Dismantling of Japan's Empire in East Asia: Deimperialization, Postwar Legitimation and Imperial Afterlife (London: Routledge, 2017) and Overcoming Empire in Post-Imperial East Asia: Repatriation, Redress and Rebuilding (London: Bloomsbury, 2020), both edited with Sherzod Muminov; and In the Ruins of the Japanese Empire: Imperial Violence, State Destruction, and the Reordering of Modern East Asia (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2020) edited with Andrew Levidis. In an excellent review of these volumes for Monumenta Nipponica in 2021, Philip Seaton suggested that a work of synthesis showcasing the key approaches and main conclusions of the project as a whole would be most effective in clarifying the major points of comparison and difference that emerge over the three volumes.The book under review here does not intend to do this. Instead, it reconnects with Kushner's earlier award-winning book Men to Devils, Devils to Men: Japanese War Crimes and Chinese Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013) with the aim of demonstrating that current struggles over war memory and reconciliation between China and Japan have everything to do with the legacies cast by the war crimes trials he had previously examined in scholarly detail. In 2013, Kushner pointed to “legal judgments . . . [as] a form of public memory that create precedents on which foreign policy and future strategy are built” (Men to Devils, p. 17). In his new book, he claims to be dealing with “history on two levels: . . . the history of justice lost in East Asia and . . . the life of the memory and commemoration of, or absence of, these trials in East Asia” (p. 24). Together, they form a “geography of injustice” with China and Japan at its center, each divided in different and shifting ways on the issue of empire and war. A transnational framework that takes the regional dynamics of empire and its afterlife in Asia seriously is salient in all of Kushner's work on this topic and leads him to both critique the Eurocentrism of international law and displace the assumed centrality of the United States to this history. There is room for argument here, given that the United States was successful in building its own sphere of influence on the ruins of Japan's empire after retreating from mainland China, where Japan had failed most profoundly.As a book addressing fellow scholars, The Geography of Injustice is difficult to place. It is obviously based on Kushner's extensive work on Chinese war crimes trials and the dissolution of Japan's empire but gives no sense of how his perspectives have evolved in light of his own and others’ work over the course of more than a decade. Recent archival visits in China and Japan and the incorporation of new research produced there have filled in some details, but the lack of a bibliography makes it hard to trace this material. The thirteen chapters are loosely organized to do three things: (1) to set up the historical situation in Asia at the end of World War II; (2) to detail the “constituent legal zones” and “competitive justice” between and among political players in China, occupied Japan, and Japan's former colonies; and (3) “to examine how the verdicts evolved into blunter tools that both shaped foreign policy and generated industries of memory that further galvanized public opinion in contemporary East Asian society” (p. 5). This is not easily discernible from the table of contents. Chapter 2 (“The Shape of Justice,”) offers an analytical frame for understanding the role of law, but most chapters are chopped up into very short pieces with grand subtitles that center on examples, stories of individual lives, and Kushner's personal interviews traveling in China. Kushner is obviously deeply knowledgeable about and invested in the lived experience, past and present, but it does not overwhelm the object of analysis. It is as if the finer analytical points and arguments have already been made elsewhere and do not warrant repeating here. This makes for an intriguing but sometimes disjointed read.Kushner's remarkably even-handed treatment of the legal and political conundrums with which people of responsibility in Japan and China were faced in their race for rebuilding legitimacy is admirable. The injustices were co-created, if only unevenly, both before and certainly after 1945. This is because a “colonial empire” keeps dividing along multiple lines long after it is formally gone, and the patterns of division can be remarkably similar on different sides. The comparative discussion of the 1946 Shibuya Incident in Tokyo, the February 1947 Incident in Taiwan, and the violence on Korea's Jeju Island in 1948–1949 in Chapter 4 shows this most directly, even though it does not bear on war crimes trials. The book offers ample material for making such connections, though Kushner rarely does so explicitly, mostly leaving readers to make the comparisons themselves

Ancient history · Battle · Geography · Injustice · Political science · History · Law · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies