Accounting for Silence: Narration, Nation, and the Politics of Redress in China and Japan

FAIN: FO-50146-11

Yukiko Koga
Brown University (Providence, RI 02912-9100)

This project is an anthropological, legal, and historical exploration of postwar compensation for Japanese colonial violence and injustice in the first half of the twentieth-century. I examine the politics of redress through the lens of postwar compensation surrounding Chinese forced laborers. While considerable recent studies shed light on the wartime slave labor practice, surprisingly little research exists on what happened to them after the war ended. My fieldwork draws attention to a pervasive and academically under-explored silence that many survivors maintained until the 1990s when they became plaintiffs in lawsuits against the Japanese government and corporations. This study explores how the dramatic disappearance and reappearance of the survivors and their archival traces—in both Japan and China—have produced distinct forms of giving voice to past injustice. This, in turn, allows for an exploration of what it means to account for silence.

Associated Products

Accounting for Silence: Inheritance, Debt, and the Moral Economy of Legal Redress in China and Japan (Article)
Title: Accounting for Silence: Inheritance, Debt, and the Moral Economy of Legal Redress in China and Japan
Author: Yukiko KOGA
Abstract: Legal efforts seeking official apology and compensation for Japanese colonial violence have, since the 1990s, become a prime site of Chinese and Japanese attempts to come to terms with the past. This ethnography explores what it means to legally account for Japanese imperialism decades after the original violence ended with Japan’s defeat in World War II. Examination of recent compensation lawsuits filed by Chinese war victims against the Japanese government and corporations shows how legal interventions publicly reveal artificially separated, yet deeply intertwined moral and monetary economies that present postwar compensation as a question of the generational transfer of unaccounted-for pasts and accompanying debts. I elucidate how accounts and accounting address overdue responsibility for postwar generations and, against the background of generational shift and the changing balance of economic power between China and Japan, show how the crux of this issue has shifted from apology to inheritance and accountability.
Year: 2013
Primary URL: http://www.americanethnologist.org/
Primary URL Description: The website for _American Ethnologist_, the journal for the American Ethnological Society.
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: American Ethnologist
Publisher: American Anthropological Association

Between the Law: The Unmaking of Empire and Law’s Imperial Amnesia (Article)
Title: Between the Law: The Unmaking of Empire and Law’s Imperial Amnesia
Author: Yukiko Koga
Abstract: Asian victims of Japanese imperialism have filed lawsuits against the Japanese government and corporations since the 1990s, which became prime sites for redress decades after Japan’s defeat in World War II. As this ethnography demonstrates, this process paradoxically exposes a legal lacuna within this emergent transnational legal space, with plaintiffs effectively caught between the law, instead of standing before the law. Exploring this absence of law, I map out a post-imperial legal space, created through the erasure of imperial and colonial subjects in the legal framework after empire. Between the law is an optic that makes visible uneven legal terrains which embody temporal and spatial disjuncture, rupture, and asymmetry. The role of law in post-imperial transitions remains underexplored in literatures on transnational law, legal imperialism, postcolonialism, and transitional justice. I demonstrate how, at the intersection of law and economy, post-imperial reckoning is emerging as a new legal frontier, putting at stake law’s imperial amnesia.
Year: 2016
Primary URL: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/lsi.12173/abstract
Primary URL Description: Journal page
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: Law & Social Inquiry
Publisher: American Bar Foundation (ABF)

Inheritance of Loss: China, Japan, and the Political Economy of Redemption after Empire (Book)
Title: Inheritance of Loss: China, Japan, and the Political Economy of Redemption after Empire
Author: Yukiko Koga
Abstract: How do contemporary generations come to terms with losses inflicted by imperialism, colonialism, and war that took place decades ago? How do descendants of perpetrators and victims establish new relations in today’s globalized economy? With Inheritance of Loss, Yukiko Koga approaches these questions through the unique lens of inheritance, focusing on Northeast China, the former site of the Japanese puppet state Manchukuo, where municipal governments now court Japanese as investors and tourists. As China transitions to a market-oriented society, this region is restoring long-neglected colonial-era structures to boost tourism and inviting former colonial industries to create special economic zones, all while inadvertently unearthing chemical weapons abandoned by the Imperial Japanese Army at the end of World War II. Inheritance of Loss chronicles these sites of colonial inheritance––tourist destinations, corporate zones, and mustard gas exposure sites––to illustrate attempts by ordinary Chinese and Japanese to reckon with their shared yet contested pasts. In her explorations of everyday life, Koga directs us to see how the violence and injustice that occurred after the demise of the Japanese Empire compound the losses that later generations must account for, and inevitably inherit.
Year: 2016
Primary URL: http://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/I/bo25122530.html
Primary URL Description: The University of Chicago Press webpage.
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 9780226412139
Copy sent to NEH?: Yes

Prizes

Francis L. K. Hsu Prize
Date: 1/1/2017
Organization: American Anthropological Association
Abstract: AAA section: Society for East Asian Anthropology (SEAA) This award recognizes the English-language book published in the previous calendar year judged to have made the most significant contribution to the field. The prize is named for the late Francis L.K. Hsu (1909-2000), renowned cross-cultural anthropologist and former President (1977-78) of the American Anthropological Association.

Anthony Leeds Prize in Urban Anthropology
Date: 1/1/2017
Organization: American Anthropological Association
Abstract: AAA section: Society for Urban, National, and Transnational/Global Anthropology (SUNTA) For outstanding book in urban, national and/or transnational anthropology. The prize is named in honor of the late Anthony Leeds, a distinguished pioneer in urban anthropology. The prize is awarded to a book that uses ethnographic data from complex, transnational, urban societies in methodologically and theoretically innovative ways. The goal of the prize is to showcase model studies that advance the research agenda of anthropologists.

“Law’s Imperial Amnesia: Transnational Legal Redress in East Asia” (Book Section)
Title: “Law’s Imperial Amnesia: Transnational Legal Redress in East Asia”
Author: Yukiko Koga
Editor: Anne Bloom
Editor: David Engel
Editor: Michael McCann
Abstract: pp. 317-350
Year: 2018
Publisher: New York: Cambridge University Press
Book Title: Injury and Injustice: The Cultural Politics of Harm and Redress

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