From 'master' to 'student'

Trials for war crimes forged a new partnership, no longer based on extraterritoriality but equality and shared diplomatic values. It is important to think about early postwar Japan as not only an occupied nation but also a country that submitted to legal adjudication by many former colonies and occupied lands. Certainly one can see how the Japanese perceived themselves as victims, so divorced were they from their intoxicating vision of an empire. It is important that China was among those judging postwar Japan because the action brought into relief the fact that Japan's empire had crumbled.

Japan's postwar Constitution embodied those shared values, but administrative behavior took a longer time to follow suit. And herein lies the divided nature of postwar Japan. The Japanese government paid lip service to new modes of transnational organizations-especially the United Nations and the use of international law-and insisted that Tokyo was set toward peaceful relations but domestically such convictions appeared less fervent.

Declarations about postwar Japan's international orientation and support for transnational agreements did not always sit squarely with domestic practice and political dialogue. These forces tended to strip away at an already shaken-up and transformed postwar Japan that had previously stood as the archetypal "modern" nation in East Asia. Instead of leading, postwar Japan faced many trials for war crimes that flipped the former imperial hierarchy of the region in which China now holds a legal upper hand. Japan, which had long since been the "master" of Northeast Asia since the 1860s, had become the pupil.

Barak Kushner, an associate professor on modern Japanese history at the University of Cambridge