When empire comes home
Subtitle: repatriation and reintegration in postwar Japan
By: Lori Watt.
Series: Harvard East Asian monographs -- 317
Publisher: Harvard University Asia Center
Published: 2009
Place of publication: Cambridge, MA
Language: eng
Number of pages: 238
ISBN-13: 9780674033429
Subjects: World War, 1939-1945 -- Forced repatriation; Return migration -- Japan -- History -- 20th century; Social integration -- Japan -- History -- 20th century; Decolonization -- Social aspects -- Japan; National characteristics, Japanese; Japan -- Social conditions -- 1945-; Japan -- History -- Allied occupation, 1945-1952
Description: "Following the end of World War II in Asia, the Allied powers repatriated more than six million Japanese nationals from colonies and battlefields throughout Asia and deported more than a million colonial subjects from Japan to their countries of origin. Depicted at the time as a postwar measure related to the demobilization of defeated Japanese soldiers, this population transfer was a central element in the human dismantling of the Japanese empire that resonates with other post-colonial and post-imperial migrations in the twentieth century. Lori Watt analyzes how the human remnants of empire, those who were moved and those who were left behind, served as sites of negotiation in the process of the jettisoning of the colonial project and in the creation of new national identities in Japan. Through an exploration of the creation and uses of the figure of the repatriate, in political, social, and cultural realms, this study addresses the question of what happens when empire comes home."--Jacket.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.