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

Lori Watt tells the story of the nearly seven million Japanese nationals who returned from the former colonies after Japan's defeat in World War II. The dominant narrative of the Japanese nation, which includes the acquisition of colonies as part of a strength- and wealth-building exercise in the nineteenth century and the loss of those colonies in the middle of the twentieth, generally omits the hardships endured by the Japanese living away from the home islands at war's end. The national experience has been defined by the bombing—both atomic and conventional—that devastated Japan's cities, events from which the former colonists were absent; those repatriated (hikiagesha) have come into the telling of that story only as an additional drain upon the food supply and the limited housing stock. Watt reminds us that the repatriates were once highly visible figures on the postwar landscape, inescapable reminders of Japan's history as an imperial power and status as a defeated nation.

Watt argues that the term hikiagesha was coproduced by returnees and "regular Japanese" on the home islands. The definition changed over time, and the people so labeled were as varied as the empire itself. Technically, repatriates were civilians who returned to the home islands through one of the postwar processing centers. Soldiers back from overseas, especially those who had been held in Soviet labor camps, sometimes embraced the label. In the 1960s, legal language on recompense began to cast repatriates not as impoverished individuals in need of welfare, but as citizens who deserved recognition for their service and losses.

The hardships of the repatriates began when surrender transformed the colonies into non-Japanese territory and Japanese colonists "were exposed, like fish stranded on a beach after high tide" (p. 35). The Allied Occupation authorities limited the amount of money returnees could bring back to the home islands, thus depriving repatriates not only of their property but also of their former prosperity. The lack of a regional accent and ties to a particular hometown "added up to a failure to reach the bar of authentic Japaneseness" (p. 58). Repatriates, suspected of carrying disease and of participating in the black market and engaging in other criminal activities, were excluded from the category of "ordinary Japanese."

Although the majority of repatriates came from Taiwan, Korea, and China south of the Great Wall, Watt has chosen—because of their centrality to popular images—to devote special attention to those from Manchuria. Once the Soviet Union declared war on Japan on 8 August 1945, Japanese settlers in Manchuria fled, facing terrifying conditions including assault, hunger, sickness, and death. Because most Japanese men had been conscripted by war's end, the first returnees from Manchuria in 1946 were women and children. Watt explores the image of the female repatriate, her virtue in question because of the dangers to which she had been exposed. She also raises provocative questions about the availability of abortions to Japanese women violated by Soviet troops before they reached safety. The quintessential male repatriates from Manchuria were the Soviet-indoctrinated ones who arrived back in Japan in the summer of 1949, singing socialist songs and ignoring waiting wives and mothers.

Watt draws on official statistics and histories, memoirs, interviews, newspapers, songs, posters, cartoons, television documentaries, film, and fictional representations. She carefully explains the laws and regulations—both those of the Japanese government and those of the Allied Occupation—that created the category of repatriate. The book's first three chapters add the dimension of the dismantling of empire to our understanding of the Allied Occupation of Japan. In the remaining two substantive chapters, Watt traces the image of the repatriate in popular culture and history after the official end of the repatriation process in 1958. She devotes chapter 4 to popular songs and fiction, including in her analysis acclaimed authors such as Tanizaki Jun'ichirō, Abe Kōbō, and Murakami Haruki as well as...