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October 2007 History Professor Explores Turmoil of Postwar Asia in New Book
By Julia Parmley For Americans, World War II ended with Japan’s surrender on Aug. 14, 1945. But for most of Asia, peace was still years away. GW Professor of History and International Affairs Ronald H. Spector explores the battles, conflicts, and violence that absorbed postwar Asia in a new book titled In the Ruins of Empire: The Japanese Surrender and the Battle for Postwar Asia. A sequel to Eagle Against the Sun, Spector’s 1985 book detailing the American struggle against the Japanese during World War II, In the Ruins of Empire chronicles military occupations, civil wars, and the rise and fall of political movements in Asia in the decades following the war. Among other things, it examines the powerful influence of communism, the resurgence of longstanding ethnic feuds, and the rise of nationalist political movements. Spector explains that when he was a guest professor at Tokyo’s Keio University in 2000, he discovered Japanese had stayed in China, Indochina, Indonesia, and other parts of Southeast Asia after the end of the war and that their stories and experiences were worth exploring. “As a military historian, I was very happy to learn that a number of post-World War II conflicts in Asia hadn’t been explored much by American scholars,” says Spector. “Some of the individual experiences of these countries had been looked at by their own citizens, but I don’t think anyone had really examined this period as an era of spectacularly unsuccessful occupations.” Spector traveled across Asia and the South Pacific to complete his research. He read soldier accounts at the Australian War Memorial in Canberra, Australia; visited a former prisoner of war (POW) camp in Shenyang, China; looked at the records of the Japanese Foreign Ministry in Tokyo; and listened to a collection of oral histories of people from the postwar period from the National Archive of Singapore in Syonan, Singapore. Spector also wrote to U.S. Marines who served in China in 1945-46 and examined records of POW rescue missions in the Japanese empire—which included Manchuria and other parts of China and Korea—from the Office of Strategic Services, the predecessor to the Central Intelligence Agency. An underlying theme Spector’s research uncovered was how much of Asia’s conflicted postwar period led to resentments that linger to this day. “There are groups who feel they were victimized in the aftermath of the war and still haven’t been recognized for their suffering,” he explains. “For instance, many of the Japanese who had to leave Manchuria, China, didn’t survive. The lucky ones were able to go home as penniless refugees, and they felt they had been abandoned by the Japanese government and army and left to fend for themselves. Those people are still very active in Japan; they have alumni groups.” Just published in July, Spector’s book has already received acclaim. It is the August main selection of the History Book Club and was named “history book-of-the-month” for Book-of-the-Month Club News. Spector says he enlisted the help of many GW colleagues during the writing process, including Edward McCord and Daqing Yang, associate professors of history and international affairs, and Kirk Larsen, director of GW’s Sigur Center for Asian Studies, as well as seven GW students who served as research assistants. GW’s Elliott School of International Affairs and Sigur Center for Asian Studies helped fund Spector’s overseas travel. Spector says that although more than six decades have passed since the end of World War II, the effects of Asia’s postwar upheaval are never far from the surface. “For many people, these are the defining events for the history of their country or their community,” he says. “It’s a very important, dramatic period.”
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