Yukiko KOGA

Professeur invité de l’EHESS

Yukiko KOGA Yale University

Yukiko Koga is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Yale University. She explores emerging moral and legal landscapes for post-imperial and post-colonial reckoning in East Asia today as contemporary generations wrestle with Japan’s history of settler colonialism, forced migration, and slavery. Her book, Inheritance of Loss: China, Japan, and the Political Economy of Redemption after Empire, explores how China’s transition to a market-oriented economy opened new spaces of encounter for current generations of ordinary Chinese and Japanese as they navigate colonial inheritances in Northeast China, the former site of the Japanese puppet state Manchukuo, showing how the economic sphere became key for inter-generational transmission of losses. Her book-in-progress, Post-imperial Reckoning: Law, Redress, Reconciliation, ethnographically examines how the transnational legal redress movement in East Asia is reshaping the moral and legal landscape for reckoning with Japanese imperial violence and the stakes for current generations in accounting for distant, yet still alive, pasts.

Conférences

Transitional Injustice and the Unmaking of the Japanese Empire

à Séminaire « Histoire de la Corée moderne : transition historiographique » (A. Delissen) : 
Séance du 19 mai. Salle 0.016 (bât. Recherche Sud). 14h30-16h30

Examining a series of collective lawsuits filed by Asian victims of Japanese imperial violence since the mid 1990s in East Asia, “Transitional Injustice and the Unmaking of the Japanese Empire” explores how the transnational legal redress movement has reshaped and expanded the scope of imperial reckoning, challenging assumptions about accountability. It demonstrates how key moments in the unmaking of empire were not only missed opportunities for transitional justice, but actively became drivers of transitional injustice. Through the lens of transitional injustice emerges a different narration of post-1945 reconstruction, recovery, and prosperity in the region, which was in fact built on the debt to the victimized.

Restless reconciliation

à Séminaire « Usages publics du passé », (S. Loriga. G. Ciarcia. D. Schreiber) :
Séance du 31 mai. Salle 0.017 (bât. Recherche Sud). 10h30-12h30

“Restless Reconciliation” explores what it means and takes to reckon with Japanese imperial violence by examining the 2016 out-of-court settlement between Chinese slave labor victims and Mitsubishi corporation. Through ethnographic exploration of the transnational legal redress movement among Chinese survivors, Japanese lawyers representing them pro bono, and civic activists, I will explore how the work of reconciliation on the ground unsettles assumptions about reconciliation in its attempts to settle accounts: where and how reconciliation takes place, who counts as victims, and whose needs are served. I show how the landscapes of responsibility that emerge out of the work of reconciliation complicate not only the expected narratives of victimhood and perpetration but also what it means to be truthful to the knowledge of the past, especially when the assumed mnemonic communities appear in the form of lineages of perpetration and victimhood in the name of the nation.

Temple of bones

à séminaire Traitement controversé des morts – ANR Cortem (animé par Fl. Galmiche) :
Séance du 10 juin (Univ. Paris Cité – Grands Moulins. 10h-12h. Salle Léon Vandermeersch)

“Temple of Bones” ethnographically illustrates the first wave of grassroots attempts to reckon with Japanese imperial violence in the 1950s and 1960s, through the repatriation of the human remains of the perished Chinese slave labor victims, who were kidnapped in China and enslaved by brand name Japanese corporations within wartime Japan in the 1940s. It tells a story of this corporeal economy, in which the remains circulated as a symbolic currency as Japanese labor activists and Buddhist monks involved in the repatriation saw these remains as the embodiment of Japan’s imperial debt. In doing so, this chapter explores the role of debt in imperial reckoning, then as now.

Post-Imperial Reckoning: Law, Redress, Reconciliation in East Asia

à Séminaire Rendez-Vous du Japon contemporain (A. Kobiljski. C. Castellvi. K. Postel-Vinay) :
séance du 15 juin, 11h-13h, Campus Condorcet, Centre de Colloques, 3-01.

“Post-imperial Reckoning” explores what it means to reckon with imperial violence decades after the Japanese Empire’s demise. Through legal and ethnographic analyses of lawsuits filed by Chinese and Korean survivors of slave labor against the Japanese government and corporations, it examines how the evasion of imperial accountability lies at the core of what I call the “unmaking of empire”—the entwined processes of de-imperialization and de-colonialization, which left certain populations outside the purview of accountability for decades in former perpetrator and victim nations, while enabling former perpetrators to, yet again, acquire unjust gain at the expense of victims’ redressal. I examine how the lawsuits challenge the structures of silencing that left the victims unredressable.