Inheritance of Loss: China, Japan, and the Political Economy of Redemption after Empire by Yukiko Koga (review)

Relations between China and Japan have long been contentious and entangled. After centuries as the undisputed hegemon of East Asia, a beleaguered China was resoundingly defeated by an ascendant Japan in the Sino-Japanese War (1894–1895). For the next fifty years, Japan leveraged its newfound military might to progressively expand its foothold in China, extracting economic concessions and establishing the puppet state of Manchukuo in 1931 before waging an all-out invasion in 1937. This empire collapsed in 1945, and Sino-Japanese rapprochement only came three decades later, impelled by economic and political exigencies during the Cold War. Today, relations are economically intimate yet diplomatically tense. China is repeatedly frustrated by the Japanese government’s ostensible insincerity in atoning for the country’s imperialist past while Japan is increasingly uncomfortable with the growing military and economic clout of its neighbor.

Yukiko Koga’s impressive work examines the enduring and problematic legacies of this relationship. Unlike other studies that explore Sino-Japanese relations through the lens of high politics or international diplomacy, Koga’s anthropological study focuses on encounters between ordinary Chinese and Japanese generations removed from any direct experience with Japanese imperialism. Embedding herself in museums, factories, and even karaoke bars, she interviews a diverse cast of activists, workers, scholars, officials, and others in contemporary China and Japan still coming to terms with the complex legacies of their countries’ relationship. Framing their interactions is what Koga calls the “political economy of redemption”—“the moral economy of seeking redemption for the unaccounted-for past [that] is inextricably linked to the formal economy of exports, consumption, and the citywide pursuit of middle-class dreams” (3). Delineating how the weight of history continues to shape the personal interactions and economic exchanges of the present is the book’s primary goal.

Koga explores different ways the political economy of redemption has unfolded across different cities in northeast China, the former puppet state of Manchukuo. In Harbin (Chapter 2), dilapidated colonial-era hotels, stores, and cathedrals once neglected and damaged have been repurposed as tourist attractions. For officials, these projects of “historical preservation” represent attempts at transforming colonial inheritance into desperately needed capital that could revitalize a rust belt city plagued by high unemployment and simmering discontent. For residents, however, rehabilitating the city’s colonial inheritance has also generated nostalgia for “Old Harbin” that inadvertently placed the city’s current woes in stark relief. But regardless of how colonial inheritance is deployed, reinterpreted, and accepted, Koga finds that its celebration relies on a form of selective remembrance. Harbin can reclaim a seemingly cosmopolitan past as it tries to reposition itself for future success in the global economy— but only by eliding the thorny legacies of colonialism.

Colonial inheritance is certainly more salient for the Chinese, who are surrounded by its most manifest traces. Yet as Koga demonstrates, the Japanese too wrestle with their forms of colonial inheritance, less tangible but still real. In Changchun (Chapter 3), the former capital of Manchukuo has become a popular destination for Japanese tourists eager to engage with an imperial past almost completely erased back home. Working as a guide in a local museum, Koga follows different tourists sifting through the remnants of Japan’s failed empire, from older repatriates reliving the memories of their youth in Manchukuo to younger students grappling with the inherited burden of their country’s wartime guilt. She finds that Japanese efforts to recognize past atrocities—however genuine—are often met with Chinese skepticism filtered through preconceived notions of Japanese recalcitrance as well as pervading anxieties about ostensible Chinese backwardness. Despite coming together in the same urban space, Chinese residents and Japanese tourists form divergent opinions of one another while pursuing different paths in coming to terms with the unaccounted-for past.

Whereas Harbin and Changchun capitalized on their colonial inheritance by...