Barak Kushner teaches Japanese history at the University of Cambridge and is the author of Men to Devils, Devils to Men: Japanese War Crimes and Chinese Justice (winner of the American Historical Association's 2016 John K. Fairbank Prize).

Sherzod Muminov is a Research Associate in the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Cambridge, UK.

Introduction: Angles of Empire

Part I: The New Postwar Order - Meaning and Significance

1. The Decline of the Japanese Empire and the Transformation of the Regional Order in East Asia

2. "De-imperialization" in Early Postwar Japan: Adjusting and Transforming Institutions of Empire

3. Imperial Loss and Japan's Search for Postwar Legitimacy

4. Collapse of the Japanese Empire and the Great Migrations: Repatriation, Assimilation, and Remaining Behind

Part II: War Criminals, POWS, and the Imperial Breakdown

5. The Shifting Politics of Guilt: the Campaign for the Release of Japanese War Criminals

6. Allied POWs in Korea: Life and Death during the Pacific War

7. Carceral Geographies of Japan's Vanishing Empire: War Criminals' Prisons in Asia

8. Prejudice, Punishment and Propaganda: Post-Imperial Japan and the Soviet Versions of History and Justice in East Asia, 1945-1956

Part III: Diplomacy, Law, and the End of Empire

9. Sublimating the Empire: How Japanese Experts of International Law Translated "Greater East Asia" into the Postwar Period

10. The transformation of a Manchukuo imperial bureaucrat to postwar supporter of the Yoshida Doctrine: the case of Shiina Etsusaburo

11. North Korean Nation Building and Japanese Imperialism: People's Nation, "People's Diplomacy" and the Japanese Technicians

12. Humanitarian Hero or Communist Stooge? The Ambivalent Japanese Reception of Li Dequan in 1954

Part IV: Media and the Imperial Aftermath

13. The "Pacifist" Magazine Sekai: A Barometer of Postwar Thought

14. Post-imperial Broadcasting Networks in China and Manchuria

15. Parting the Bamboo Curtain: Japanese Cold War Film Exchange with China

Comparative Epilogue

16. Germany as a role model? Coming to terms with Nazi War deeds, 1945-2015

The end of Japan's empire appeared to happen very suddenly, and cleanly - but, as this book shows, it was in fact very messy, with a long period of establishing or re-establishing the postwar order. Moreover, as the authors argue, empires have afterlifes, which, in the case of Japan's empire, is not much studied. This book considers the details of de-imperialization, including repatriation of Japanese personnel, the redrawing of boundaries, issues to do with prisoners of war and war criminals, new arrangements for democratic political institutions, for media and for the regulation of trade.