There is already an erasure of agency built into calling August 15th “the day the war ended” or “the day of defeat.” Renaming it “the day the Japanese Empire collapsed” is the starting point for tracing a single continuous structure — from the Meiji era through defeat, through the experience of the Peranakans in Singapore, and on to the ghosts still walking through Reiwa Japan today.
Part One: Introduction — Neither “End of War” Nor “Defeat”
Many people call August 15th “the day the war ended.” Those who go a little further into the history prefer “the day of defeat.” Neither is wrong, exactly. But both are phrases that conveniently erase their own subject.
“End of war” doesn’t say who ended it. It talks about the war the way one talks about a typhoon passing — as if it simply “ended” one day of its own accord, a natural event with no author. “Defeat” is a bit more honest, but it still doesn’t say defeated by what. To the Allied powers, yes — that much is true — but it isn’t enough. What was defeated was not merely an army. It was an entire state system.
So I want to call August 15th “the day the Japanese Empire collapsed.”
Strictly speaking, of course, nothing collapsed. The Meiji Constitution remained in force for another year and a half. The Emperor did not abdicate. The bureaucracy slid almost intact into the new state. So “collapse” isn’t accurate as a matter of fact. But I want to insist on it anyway, because it’s catchy for a reason: what was truly shattered on that day was an ambition — one that the Meiji era had crystallized into a single national project.
The Shape of the Meiji Ambition
Let me sketch that ambition briefly.
The Meiji era began as a coup carried out by lower-ranking samurai from Satsuma and Chōshū. They raised up the Emperor — an ancient authority — as the axis of a newly constructed patriarchal state. They imported Western patriarchy, dismantling the many varied forms of family, region, and community that had existed in Japan before, and remaking them into uniform components of a nation-state built around the “household” (ie) as its base unit. It would be more accurate to say they didn’t so much sever old traditions as they selected patriarchal elements from the samurai household system of the Edo period and poured them into the mold of Western modern law — particularly German civil law — reinventing the result as “Japan’s ancient tradition.” What Eric Hobsbawm called “invented tradition” forms the very skeleton of the Meiji era.
The patriarchal state thus built went on to extend the logic of Western imperialism across Asia essentially unchanged. The explanation that this was a “counter-mimicry” born of fear of being swallowed by the Western powers has a certain persuasive force at the level of motive. But an analysis of motive does not exonerate the outcome. Expansion that begins from defensive anxiety, replicates the very structure of the power it imitated (the West), and then redirects that violence toward someone weaker than itself (Asia) — this pattern, I think, is the single consistent grammar running through Japan’s foreign relations from Meiji through Shōwa.
The Second World War was where this Meiji state system inevitably arrived. A patriarchal state topped by the Emperor, a bureaucracy grafted onto Western modernity, and an expansionism that spread across Asia while imitating Western imperialism — all of these converged in that war. If so, August 15th can be understood not merely as “the day the war ended,” but as “the day the ambition of the grand Meiji national project was finally shattered.”
August 15th: The Reversal in Public Sentiment
From this day, the way Japanese society understood itself flipped with astonishing speed.
Until just months before, many people had internalized the phrase “one hundred million shattered jewels” (ichioku gyokusai) — mass annihilation rather than surrender — not as something abstract, but as a norm for how one ought to live. This was not simply coercion imposed from above; it was, more than that, the result of people themselves absorbing the logic of the regime as “common sense,” through devices that had permeated every corner of daily life — neighborhood associations, women’s national defense groups, school education. The structure Maruyama Masao called the “transfer of oppression” — the psychological mechanism by which oppression received from above is passed down onto someone weaker below — had spread not only through the relationship between state and individual, but into the very fabric of relationships between individuals themselves.
There was, of course, resistance even in this era. Under the powerful apparatus of the Peace Preservation Law, the Japan Communist Party and some intellectuals tried to hold to an anti-war, anti-imperial position. But most of them were crushed before they could grow into any organized movement — through death in prison or forced ideological conversion. This fact should be read not as proof that “resistance was scarce among the people,” but rather as proof that this was “a regime powerful enough to thoroughly uproot any seed of resistance.” The very thoroughness of the suppression tells us how forcefully this state system operated what I’ll call, throughout this essay, the ideology of control.
And from August 15th onward, an astonishing number of people quickly adopted a new story: “We were deceived by the military.” People who, the day before, had lived the logic of the regime as their own, shifted overnight into the position of victims. This too is a version of what Roland Barthes called “mythologization” — the memory of internalized consent to violence rewritten as a story of victimhood. The speed of that rewriting is itself a preview of another theme running through this entire essay: that the Japanese Empire never actually collapsed.
The regime’s signboard fell. But the structure that had held that signboard up — vertical loyalty, the grammar of patriarchal rule, and the technique of retelling inconvenient memories — slid with remarkable smoothness onto the new stage of the postwar era.
Reckoning Soberly with the Atomic Bombings
The bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the immediate trigger for this collapse, deserve a sober reckoning with the facts as well. On August 6th and 9th, 1945, the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki killed an estimated two hundred thousand or more people by the end of that year. Among the dead were Korean laborers who had been conscripted into forced labor in both cities, as well as Allied prisoners of war. The narrative of “hibakusha as a Japanese story” tends to obscure the fact that the structure of colonial mobilization had already cast its shadow into this very memory — one more instance of how the web of Meiji-built domination reached even into the memory of victimhood itself.
The question of whether the bombings were justified remains unresolved even now within historical scholarship, and the American position is far from monolithic. The traditional explanation holds that the bombs avoided even greater mutual casualties from a mainland invasion. A revisionist view counters that Japan was already effectively leaning toward surrender (with some arguing the Soviet entry into the war was the decisive factor), and that the bombings had more to do with demonstrating power to the Soviets after the war than with military necessity. There is also the argument that the use of nuclear weapons against civilians — something never seriously considered against Germany — reflects the racialized image of the enemy specific to the Pacific theater. It is not my place here to declare which of these is correct.
But one thing is worth stating plainly: if we speak of the atomic bomb only as “a tragedy that fell from outside, unilaterally,” we lose sight of the chain of decisions the Japanese Empire itself made leading up to it — the choice to prepare for a decisive mainland battle, the decision to ignore the Potsdam Declaration. The bomb was, at once, a full stop imposed from outside the Japanese Empire’s own project, and one of the consequences of a chain of choices that project had itself accumulated. These two readings do not cancel each other out. Both hold true at once.
Part Two: From Meiji to Defeat — The Changing Face of Japan’s Relationship with Asia
The face of domination that the Meiji state extended across Asia was never, in fact, monolithic. Its logic and methods shifted substantially by period and by region. Tracing this transformation reveals how flexibly — and yet with what consistent grammar — a single blueprint, “the Meiji patriarchal state,” kept repeating itself under different circumstances.
The Starting Point: Datsu-A Ron as an “Application to Join the Western Club”
Fukuzawa Yukichi’s Datsu-A Ron (On Leaving Asia), articulated in 1885, argued for “breaking with Asia’s bad friends and joining the ranks of the civilized nations of the West.” At this stage, Japan was less a subject positioned against the Western powers than an applicant seeking admission to the club of Western “civilization.” But the means of proving this status as a “civilized nation” gradually transformed into “taking on the role of civilizing Asia” — that is, re-enacting the very logic of Western colonialism, now aimed squarely at Asia.
The Korean Peninsula: The Purest Extension of the Meiji State Model
Symbolized by Yamagata Aritomo’s theory of the “line of interest,” the Korean peninsula was consistently positioned, from early Meiji onward, as Japan’s security lifeline. Following annexation in 1910, governance continued in the form of imperialization policies, forced name changes, and mandatory Japanese-language education — essentially transplanting the ie system and imperial ideology wholesale. Compared to any other region, this is where the Meiji patriarchal state model was extended for the longest period and in the most direct form.
Taiwan: A “Showcase of Modernization”
In Taiwan, Japan’s first true colony from 1895 onward, the rhetoric of a “civilizing mission” was foregrounded through infrastructure development and education. This governing style consciously referenced and imitated Western colonial models — particularly the British one — making it perhaps the clearest example of the structure of imitating Western imperialism as a form of resistance to the Western powers.
Manchuria: “Harmony of Five Races” as an Invented Tradition
Manchukuo, the puppet state created through the runaway actions of the Kwantung Army, flew the banner of multi-ethnic prosperity under slogans like “Harmony of Five Races” and “Kingly Way Paradise.” The reality was resource extraction and militarization. This story of “harmony” is a textbook case of what Hobsbawm called “invented tradition,” and it became the prototype for the later Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere.
It is worth noting how domestic Japanese society received this period. Around the time of the Manchurian Incident, the media reported it with fervor, and much of the public accepted it as “legitimate action to protect Japan’s lifeline.” This fervor cannot be explained by top-down coercion alone; it was also the result of an existing groundwork — attitudes toward the outside world shaped by newspapers, radio, and school education — being activated among the populace.
Southeast Asia: The Sharpening of “Liberator” Rhetoric
The advance into the Malay Peninsula, Indonesia, the Philippines, and French Indochina (Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos) had a decisively different character from the regions above. The occupation lasted only a few years, from 1941 to 1945, and began under the banner of “liberating Asia from Western colonialism” — militarily overturning the existing colonial regimes of the Netherlands, Britain, France, and the United States.
Local reactions were far from uniform. Some nationalists, such as Sukarno in Indonesia, initially cooperated with Japan as a “liberator from Western colonialism.” But the reality was harsh domination symbolized by the extraction of resources like oil and rubber, and by forced labor mobilization (rōmusha) — a new structure of domination built behind the banner of “liberation.”
Precisely because the occupation was brief, the density of violence was in some places all the higher. The reality of the occupation of Singapore (renamed Shōnantō under Japanese rule), and in particular the position of the Peranakans, is a subject I want to take up in greater depth in Part Three.
Resistance Under the Peace Preservation Law, and Its Suppression
Domestic resistance was not entirely absent throughout this whole process of external expansion. Under the powerful apparatus of the Peace Preservation Law, the Japan Communist Party and some intellectuals continued to hold anti-war, anti-imperial positions. But most were crushed before any organized movement could take shape, through death in prison or forced conversion.
This fact should be read not as evidence that “the people resisted little,” but as evidence of “a regime powerful enough to thoroughly uproot any seed of resistance.” The very thoroughness of that suppression tells us how strongly, and how carefully, this state system operated its ideology of control.
Summary: Motive Does Not Exonerate Outcome
Surveying these regions together, a trajectory of transformation emerges. Direct, assimilationist rule in Korea and Taiwan; the myth of multi-ethnic unity in Manchuria; the sharpening of “liberator” rhetoric in Southeast Asia — as the logic of domination changed its face over time, the grammar underlying it remained consistent: a patriarchal governance structure topped by the Emperor, repeated again and again against different targets.
The explanation that Meiji elites became imperialists as a form of “counter-mimicry against being swallowed by the Western powers” carries a certain persuasive force for understanding their motives. But the analysis of motive and the evaluation of outcome belong to different layers. Expansion that began from defensive anxiety replicated the very structure of the power it had imitated (the West), and redirected that violence toward someone weaker than itself (Asia) — this repeating pattern is, I have to conclude, the undeniable reality running through Japan’s relations with the outside world from Meiji through Shōwa.
Part Three: The Occupation of Shōnantō and a Focus on the Peranakans
Among all the advances into Southeast Asia, the occupation of Singapore — renamed Shōnantō under Japanese rule — stands out for a density of violence disproportionate to its short duration. The position in which the Peranakans found themselves reveals, in perhaps its sharpest form, the contradiction inherent in the logic of domination that ran continuously from Meiji.
The Peranakans: A People “In Between”
The Peranakans are a people with a distinct cultural position, born from the intermingling of Chinese immigrants and local Malay culture — belonging neither to China nor to the Malay world, but standing in the space between. The full complexity of this position deserves an independent piece of writing of its own someday; here, I want to focus narrowly on what happened during the occupation.
Many Peranakans, having received an English education under British colonial rule, formed a social stratum closely tied to British administrative and commercial networks. This was only one small part of their cultural identity — but the Japanese military administration had neither the room nor the intention to recognize that complexity.
The Violence of Classification: “Pro-British Elite = Enemy Element”
What the Japanese military administration brought with it was a logic of governance that forcibly reduced a complex cultural position into a simple binary of friend or enemy. Looking only at the surface — that they had received an English education and were tied to a British way of life — the Chinese elite, including the Peranakans, was lumped together and classified as “pro-British elite, therefore enemy elements.”
This is a familiar shape of violence in occupation governance: for the sake of administrative efficiency, the inherent complexity of the subject is stripped away and forced into a manageable unit. This is one of the starkest instances of what I called, in Part One, the ideology of control.
Sook Ching and the Destruction of the Economic Base
In February 1942, the Japanese military carried out a purge operation known as Sook Ching, screening and executing those deemed “anti-Japanese elements.” The economic and social elite of the Chinese community, including the Peranakans, was the primary target, with an estimated death toll in the tens of thousands.
At the same time, the economic foundation of the Peranakan community was itself destroyed. Their economic power had depended heavily on commercial and trade networks under the British colonial system, and on access to legal and administrative professions. By dismantling this English-based economic and administrative infrastructure, forcing the use of Japanese, and cutting off existing commercial networks, the Japanese military administration sought to erase the very foundation on which the Peranakans existed as a social stratum.
Exclusion from the Story of “Asian Liberation”
Perhaps the most ironic aspect is the cultural isolation the Peranakans experienced during this period. Within the story of “solidarity among Asians” proclaimed by the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, the Peranakans occupied a strange position. Ethnically Chinese, yet perceived as more British than Chinese in color, they experienced exclusion in a peculiar form: being Asian, yet placed outside the very story of Asia.
This is perhaps the most blatant instance in which the deception of the rhetoric that covered all of Southeast Asia — “liberating Asia from Western colonialism” — was laid bare. While claiming “liberation,” the regime targeted for exclusion and purge precisely those Asians most deeply entangled with the West. This contradiction exposes the fact that “Asia,” as a category, was itself an arbitrary line drawn for Japan’s own convenience — an invention, nothing more. Just as with Manchuria’s “Harmony of Five Races” discussed in Part Two, here too the story of integration functioned, in practice, as a logic of selection and exclusion.
The existence of the Peranakans thus becomes, I think, the clearest possible illustration of what the logic of domination running continuously from Meiji — a logic that refuses complexity and seeks to control its subject through simple classification — actually meant at the level of individual human life and identity.
Part Four: Postwar Singapore and Japan — The Political Selection of Memory
Despite having experienced this level of violence, present-day Singapore is broadly described as pro-Japan. Several factors converge to produce this seemingly contradictory fact.
Lee Kuan Yew’s Pragmatic Choice
Lee Kuan Yew, the founding father himself, belonged to the generation that survived the Japanese occupation and knew its violence firsthand better than most. And yet, after independence, he clearly chose a path that prioritized future practical benefit over past grievance. He chose to make use of Japanese capital, technology, and development models for Singapore’s economic growth, and settled war reparation negotiations with Japan relatively early. This stands in contrast to national strategies that continue to mobilize memory as a long-term political resource — and it was also a cold-eyed calculation for the survival of a small city-state with few resources of its own.
The Contrast with China’s “Century of Humiliation”
This contrasts sharply with one of the pillars of the Chinese Communist Party’s present-day legitimacy: the narrative of overcoming the “Century of Humiliation,” from the Opium War of 1840 to the founding of the People’s Republic in 1949. In China, the memory of foreign invasion, including the Second Sino-Japanese War, remains institutionalized and actively mobilized today as an apparatus that legitimizes present-day state governance.
The same history of victimization can come to serve entirely different political functions depending on the national strategy of the party that received it — Singapore’s pragmatic relativization of memory and China’s political resourcing of memory stand as a striking contrast on this point.
The Postwar Reassessment of the Peranakans
Here lies one ironic reversal. The Peranakans, who during the occupation were classified as “pro-British elite = enemy elements” and became a primary target of the purge, came to be reevaluated after the war as a cultural “bridge” supporting the multi-ethnic nation of Singapore. Their “in-between” position — neither Chinese, Malay, nor British — took on symbolic value in the multi-ethnic coexistence ideals championed by independent Singapore.
The very complexity that had been the reason for exclusion and violence during the occupation was reread, in the postwar period, as an asset of pluralism. The memory of the occupation’s violence and the postwar construction of a pragmatic relationship with Japan coexist within the same society, kept largely separate from one another. The memory of the occupation persists institutionally in forms such as the Civilian War Memorial (whose four pillars represent the Chinese, Malay, Indian, and other communities), but it is positioned as an item of historical education rather than as a central narrative of national identity.
Generational Change and Geopolitical Calculation
As the generation that directly experienced the occupation has largely passed on, memory has shifted from emotional reaction toward “institutionalized memory” carried by education and memorials. In addition, postwar Japan’s deep involvement as a source of investment and aid for Southeast Asia has meant that, generation by generation, the lived sense of relationship with Japan has become more strongly one of “business partner” than “former aggressor.” Amid current regional dynamics shaped by the rise of China, Japan has, in some respects, been redefined less as a past aggressor and more as an economic partner contributing to regional stability.
What Can Be Done to Silence the Ghost
Even having traced all this, I hold no more than a skeptical answer to the question of whether this ghost can ever truly be “killed.” Mythologization and invented tradition are not a pathology unique to Japan; they are a function structurally built into the nation-state as a system itself — a fact China’s own “Century of Humiliation” confirms. If that is so, then what is possible is not “silencing the ghost” but something closer to an endless task: naming it and de-naturalizing it, again and again, every time it shows its face.
Still, there are things that can be practiced at several layers.
At the level of institutions: taking each individual institution — the insistence on male-only imperial succession, the residual patriarchal logic embedded in family registry practices, seniority-based corporate hierarchies — and detaching it from the narrative of “Japanese tradition,” naming it instead, repeatedly, as a historical fact: something invented in the Meiji period for specific political needs. A myth functions only as long as it is believed to be “natural.” The moment it is recognized as a historical construction, it loses at least some of its power.
At the level of language: dismantling and renaming, one by one, euphemisms that erase their own subject — “end of war,” “defeat”; legal problems reframed as matters of “manners”; power relations reduced to “the atmosphere in the room.” As long as language continues to hide the subject and the locus of responsibility, the structure survives unseen.
At the level of organizations: building, even in small settings, a culture where “why” can be asked, where dissent isn’t punished, and where relationships of mutual response can exist — as a counter to the top-down command and self-sacrificial devotion that vertical loyalty structures presuppose. Theoretical critique and the actual practice of building spaces that run on what I’ve been calling the ideology of response can only function together, as two wheels of the same cart.
At the level of memory: continuing to see through the fact that memory, on either the perpetrator’s or the victim’s side, can be mobilized as a political resource for governance. China’s narrativization of the “Century of Humiliation” and Japan’s domestic story of having “been deceived by the military” are different expressions of the same underlying mechanism.
And it is worth noting that August 15th itself continues to generate new narratives even now. When politicians visit Yasukuni Shrine on this day, the act is not merely a personal expression of faith. Yasukuni was founded by the Meiji government specifically to enshrine those who died for the state as “heroic spirits,” giving their deaths meaning as service to the nation — and the very system of ritual it embodies is the Meiji grammar this essay has traced throughout: self-sacrificial devotion to a state topped by the Emperor. Each time a cabinet minister or member of the Diet visits the shrine on this “day of collapse,” the story that “that war was legitimate service to the nation” is re-enacted and renewed, in the form of ritual. This exceeds the intent of any individual politician; through the sheer repetitive power of ritual itself, it functions as a device that faithfully summons the ghost back, year after year. The reason Yasukuni visits keep becoming diplomatic flashpoints, both domestically and abroad, comes down to this single point: the act is read, by neighboring countries and domestic critics alike, not only as mourning the past but as an affirmation, in the present tense, of the Meiji conception of the state.
Perhaps the ghost cannot be killed. But it is possible to keep recognizing that it is a ghost.
Conclusion: The Ghost Has Not Collapsed
The Japanese Empire collapsed on August 15th. But it was the signboard that collapsed — not the structure behind it.
A state topped by the Emperor, a family topped by the household head, a company topped by its president or superiors — all of these are nothing more than variations derived from a single blueprint: a patriarchal pyramid, held together through inclusion by way of self-sacrifice. The national polity (kokutai), the ie system, and the “corporate familialism” of the Japanese employment model have all repeated the same grammar against different targets. The GHQ’s occupation reforms — dissolving the zaibatsu, establishing labor law — rewrote the surface, but the grammar itself, “organization as pseudo-family,” “loyalty exchanged for protection,” slid with remarkable smoothness into the postwar corporation.
The reason this ghost seems to be showing itself “again” in Reiwa Japan is, in truth, that it never fully passed on in the first place. Dysfunction in parliamentary governance; the insistence on male-only succession to the throne — in reality an invented tradition created by the Meiji-era Imperial House Law; political discourse around family values; the rhetoric of conformist pressure captured in phrases like “as Japanese, one ought to…” — all of these are symptoms of the same thing: the grammar of the patriarchal state Meiji built, still surviving beneath the surface of ostensibly democratic institutions — democracy, labor law, gender equality.
And memory, too, does not survive uniformly. While China continues to mobilize the “Century of Humiliation” as a resource of governance, Singapore relativizes memory in the name of practical benefit, and the Peranakans have reread the very complexity once used as grounds for their exclusion as an asset of pluralism. Even among places that suffered the same “Meiji ghost,” how that memory comes to be handled takes an entirely different shape depending on each society’s position and choices.
The Japanese Empire collapsed. But its skeleton, changing shape, still lives on today, in Reiwa, within our states, our families, and our companies. Perhaps it is only by tracing the outline of this ghost that a path toward the next ideology of response can open at all.