When Empire Comes Home: Repatriation and Reintegration in Postwar Japan (review)

In her book, When Empire Comes Home: Repatriation and Reintegration in Postwar Japan, Lori Watt offers the first comprehensive study in English of the large-scale repatriation that ensued after Japan's defeat. This is a thorough and extensive work: she has consulted numerous sources in order to explore various aspects of this multifaceted event. Watt's attention to the diversity of the repatriation experiences and willingness to situate them in a long span of history makes her text valuable not only to students of modern Japanese history but also to those who are interested in the issue of decolonization in general.

The book begins with a brief history of migration within Japan's empire and a discussion about the political conditions that surrounded immigrants at the time of Japan's defeat. When Japan accepted the Potsdam Declaration in the summer of 1945, Imperial Japan lost all of its colonial territorial gains and was reduced to Japan proper. While Japan's national boundaries were redrawn overnight, the new national spaces that emerged from this political arrangement were still burdened by Japan's colonial legacies. At the time of Japan's defeat, 6.9 million Japanese civilians and soldiers lived outside of Japan's mainland. There were also colonial subjects who had migrated to Japan as well as population movements among Japanese colonies. The Allied powers' decision undid Japan's multiethnic empire by moving people back to where they had originally come from. Because of the Allied intervention, the majority of overseas Japanese returned home at an early stage of the postwar period. However, the conditions of homecoming varied widely, reflecting the divergent approaches taken by the powers (the United States, Britain, Nationalist China, Communist China, and the Soviet Union) that were responsible for repatriating the Japanese from the areas under their control.

The second chapter elaborates one of the central claims of the book: the category of repatriates (hikiagesha) was a historical construct, which took shape in the contested political and ideological terrains of immediate postwar Japan. Under the aegis of the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers, various Japanese government agencies carried out the task of repatriating the overseas Japanese. Among them, the Ministry of Health and Welfare played the most direct role in handling the repatriation and "was most responsible in the process of labeling returnees hikiagesha" (p. 69). By underscoring the postwar process of returning home, the term dissociated the repatriates (and postwar Japan by extension) from Japan's colonial enterprises, which had brought them to the colonies in the first place. Once the returnees arrived at Japan's shores, they found they were placed in a separate category of hikiagesha—not quite Japanese. Doused with DDT, they were literally marked with otherness. The repatriated groups did not silently accept the label given to them by postwar society; instead, they tried to endow it with positive meanings in the early postwar years.

Ultimately, the label for the returnees said more about the Japanese who stayed in the homeland. Although it emphasized the postwar identity, the category of hikiagesha externalized the blame of the war, relieving the homeland Japanese of colonial responsibilities. Watt makes a clear case for the marginalized identity of hikiagesha. However, her argument is not as forthcoming in the section where she discusses the Koreans and the Taiwanese, former imperial subjects. A corollary of her argument is that the redefinition of former imperial subjects into foreigners had much to do with the production of the category, hikiagesha. What exactly was the relationship between these two ideological categories? Is it possible to claim that hikiagesha assumed the not-quite-Japanese identity that the former colonial subjects used to occupy?

In chapter 3, the author examines the shift in the popular images of hikiagesha. In the first few years of the postwar period, the primary focus was on women who had repatriated from Manchuria. Numerous women were subjected to sexual violence...