L’Inalco, l’Université Paris-Cité et le Centre de recherches interculturelles du Meiji Jingū ont le plaisir de vous inviter à la conférence suivante :
“A Deep Empire in the Cold War: Manchukuo and the Birth of Anticommunist Internationalism in East Asia, 1931-1975“
Andrew LEVIDIS (Dr.) Australian National University
Jeudi 17 novembre 2022, 18h00-19h30, Inalco, Amphi 6
65 rue des Grands Moulins, 75013 Paris
Manchukuo’s destruction at the hands of the great powers in August 1945, following the Soviet invasion in 1945 haunted the rightwing imagination, and exerted a profound impact on the transwar Japanese Right’s ideological hostility toward the USSR and international communism in the global Cold War.
The Japanese Right’s invocation of the fallen Manchukuo Empire was no aberration. Nor were they solitary ruminations of a former high official of the deposed Emperor Pu Yi. During the 1950s and 1960s officials of the fallen Manchurian empire, the frontline soldiers of Japan’s Greater East Asian War, sought to halt what they saw as the postwar decadence of Japan and the march of communism in East Asia. These former soldiers, bureaucrats, propagandists, and ideologues sought to frame themselves as soldiers in a larger global and regional ideological war.
We need to widen our angle of approach when considering the imperial afterlives of Manchukuo: as inspiration, moral lesson, or for some an alternative to the global ideological tensions of Cold War binaries. As this talk examines, the memory of the Manchukuo empire formed a key – if contested component – of the Japanese Cold War imaginary, one which a generation of political leaders turned to seek alternatives to the binaries of the Cold War, and as a touchstone for defining Japan’s informal connections with Asia’s anticolonial nationalist leaders during the 1950s and 1960s.
Retransmission par Zoom possible sur demande individuelle.
CONTACT : Alexandre ROY, Maître de conférences, Histoire du Japon moderne / alexandre.roy@inalco.fr