In the Ruins of Empire

A good attempt at a synthesis with lots of interesting anecdotes worth reading. Sources include a large number of US, British, French, and some Japanese archival docs, as well as others, and a lot of memoirs and other early postwar reminisces some of which are unpublished or took the form of letters to the author.

I can really appreciate how hard it is to bring this all together given the geographic and linguistic scope of the target. It really calls for a collaborative effort, especially in order to better bring in a larger number of voices since this work inevitably has a larger number of Western (and especially military voices) and only some voices from among those who experienced the occupation and its aftermath. However, given the restraints, there is a lot of meat in the book that is really worth looking at.

The section on saving POWs was a bit too long for my liking but will certainly be of interest to many Western readers. Somewhat weak attempt to tie the early postwar situation into an argument about military occupations and US in Iraq. Not enough space to really go into the issues and felt like an afterthought. I also felt the author struggled with the question of where to stop telling the story in each location - since each of the early postwar crises continue for years if not decades after the initial postwar experience.

Of great interest to anyone studying early postwar East Asia - and could well accompany Bayly's & Harper's even more dense Forgotten Wars, which is published around the same time. Whereas Spector's book gives you more of a collection of rich snapshots to accompany the politics of the aftermath of the Japanese empire, B & H's book gives a very detailed narrative of the political and violent struggles that follow. There is room now for another book which focuses more closely on the social and cultural legacies and changes that followed the collapse of the Japanese empire on a large regional scale.