Wartime Atrocities and the Politics of Treason in the Ruins of the Japanese Empire, 1937-1953

About this book

This dissertation explores the relationship between violence and betrayal in retribution against military and police collaborators who helped maintain Japan's wartime occupations up until its defeat in 1945. Looking at the approaches taken in the colonies of British Asia, postwar treason trials in the Philippines, and Chinese Communist approaches in wartime and postwar Shandong province, this study argues that the laws and rhetoric of treason were deeply flawed tools for confronting the atrocities of war. At the very moment that war crimes trials were defining a set of acts that constituted crimes against all humanity, around the world thousands of individuals who helped perpetrate them were treated as primarily guilty of crimes against the nation. Each of the chapters in this work examines the costs and consequences of this for postwar societies on the eve of decolonization and civil war.