Epilogue

“Epilogue: Deferred Reckoning and the Double Inheritance” takes readers to second decade of the twentieth-first century, pervaded by heightened political tension over Japan’s “history problem” within East Asia’s new geopolitics. Readers will find victims of mustard gas exposure in Qiqihar––delayed violence inflicted by their unexpected encounters with chemical weapons abandoned by retreating Imperial Japanese Army at end of World War II––in Tokyo High Court, awaiting ruling in lawsuit against Japanese government. Through legal analyses of High Court ruling and ethnographic analysis of Chinese plaintiffs-victims, Japanese lawyers and judges, and citizen supporters, this chapter shows how issue of accountability, which remains latent in economic sphere, becomes publicly recognized as political accountability, bringing with it new challenges and possibilities for reckoning with the past. Inheriting itself is accompanied by losses and debts, and this chapter demonstrates how gaps, folds, and voids created by postcolonial, postimperial, and postwar entanglements have propelled capitalization and abandonment, twin processes of inheriting. Topography of after empire exposes historical responsibility for losses incurred after end of empire through these processes. It directs readers to see structures of violence and injustice after empire as integral parts of colonial inheritance that postgenerations have no choice but to inherit.

Accountability · Empire · Lawsuit · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Chinese history and philosophy · History · Japanese History and Culture · Law