The central message of Leo T. S. Ching's latest book Anti-Japan is that Japan's war defeat and its incorporation under American hegemony in the early postwar period “replaced decolonization . . . and the possibility of postcolonial reflexivity” in East Asia (p. 8). Because the dissolution of the Japanese Empire did not occur through independence movements in the colonies, as was the case in the French and British Empires, but rather through capitulation and externally mediated war settlements, the process of deimperialization in Japan and decolonization in Japan's former colonies has remained incomplete and suspended in time.
Based on his reading of various texts, films, memoirs, and other representations of popular culture in three East Asian spaces—mainland China, South Korea, and Taiwan—Ching makes two central points throughout the book. The first is that anti-Japanism endures as a powerfully contested sentiment in the region precisely because it has remained “unresolved and...
