For the past twenty years or so, the scholarship of Japan's empire has become a collaborative endeavor, involving historians of Japan, China, Korea, Southeast Asia, and the Soviet Union (Russia) who, in so doing, have challenged the traditional approach of area studies to the topic. The scholarship of the “unmaking” of Japan's empire, however, has not enjoyed such a status yet, and the reason seems to be quite complicated. The decolonization of the Japanese empire was done by the victorious Allied Forces, and this third-party decolonization transformed much of the political map of Asia.
While this fact certainly demands that we scholars to go beyond a one-nation approach, this somehow did not happen. For example, until recently, most scholars of postwar Japan envisioned the nation as homogenous, as if the multiethnic empire had disappeared from the Earth overnight on the eve of August 15, 1945. With this misconception, the “old”...
