My research explores what it means and takes to come to terms with catastrophic state violence long after that violence ends. Through three book projects, I examine the shifting moral and legal landscapes for post-imperial and post-colonial reckoning in East Asia, investigating how contemporary generations wrestle with the history of settler colonialism, forced migration, and slavery, decades after the formal end of Japanese imperial violence.
Inheritance of Loss
My award-winning first book, Inheritance of Loss: China, Japan, and the Political Economy of Redemption after Empire (University of Chicago Press, 2016) explores how ordinary Japanese and Chinese, generationally removed from the direct experience of Japanese imperialism, navigate colonial inheritances through everyday encounters in the former Japanese puppet state Manchukuo in Northeast China, where municipalities now court Japanese investors and tourists.
Using the lens of colonial inheritance, my book shows how the tenacious question of reckoning with the past lurks beneath the rhetoric of economic prosperity. Through quotidian encounters in the workplace, on streets, and in residential complexes, I identify a new mode of generational transmission that links the moral economy of seeking redemption for unaccounted-for pasts to the formal economy of exports, consumption, and the pursuit of middle-class dreams. The book illuminates how colonial modernity and its losses redefine and articulate the relationship between socialist and post-socialist modernity. In so doing, it presents an ethnographic understanding of how Western and Japanese imperialism from the mid-nineteenth to mid-twentieth century––what the Chinese call “national humiliation”–– has shaped China’s present and its ambitions as a global power.
Unrepayable Debt
My most recent book, Unrepayable Debt: Law, Redress, Reconciliation, and the Unmaking of Empire (University of Chicago Press, forthcoming 2026), explores what happens when moral and financial debts accrued through imperial violence both demand and defy repayment. Located within global conversations on reckoning with colonialism and slavery, I examine the generational dynamics in East Asia of seeking legal redress for the savage plundering of labor and life of people enslaved by the Japanese empire.
Centered on a series of slave labor lawsuits in which Chinese victims sought overdue justice in courts across Japan, my ethnography reveals the labor of reckoning both inside and outside the courtroom. It shows how Chinese victims, their descendants, and Japanese lawyers and activists forged transnational and intergenerational collaborations, leading to a sea change in the legal sphere and settlements with implicated corporations. Yet the lawsuits exposed not only the workings of imperial violence, but what I call “transitional injustice” incurred through the unmaking of empire, which left the victims silenced and unredressable for decades, laying bare the complicity and implication of contemporary societies. At the same time, grassroots attempts at reckoning produced new social relations that opened underexplored yet key sites of repair and reconciliation.
Arguing against reckoning as a discrete event that brings closure through settlements, apology, or compensation, I demonstrate how reckoning entails intergenerational processes driven by new forms of indebtedness. Grappling with the nature and the scale of imperial violence and the prolonged and entangled processes of de-colonization and de-imperialization, Unrepayable Debt compels rethinking of what redress, repair, and reconciliation mean, in practice, across generations.
Victims’ Justice
My current book project entitled “Victims’ Justice: Imperial Violence in Post-colonial Courts” explores what happens when Asian victims of Japanese imperial violence are, for the first time, becoming able to seek legal redress in the courts of victim nations. This historic jurisdictional shift is a newly emerging legal frontier for the legal redress movements, as they shift their cases from Japanese courts to jurisdictions in China and South Korea. The Korean bench, working through over sixty open cases concerning slave labor and sexual slavery, has recently deemed the Japanese colonization of Korea illegal and rejected Japanese state immunity. This sets a dramatic international legal precedent while also controversially highlighting the complicity of the South Korean state and corporations in silencing victims. Domestic pressure is also mounting in China, where attempts to file cases continue despite governmental intransigence.
The project explores how these new developments open a new, turbulent chapter in imperial reckoning, in which both former perpetrator and victim nations become forced to account for their actions and inactions in the unmaking of the Japanese empire that led to decades of abandonment of the victims. It thus explores how this new legal frontier is reframing the overdue question of imperial accountability both as Japan’s post-imperial question and as victims’ states’ post-colonial question. I aim to explore how this frontier is developing new legal technologies to address the issue of imperialism and colonialism, an area that the international legal framework has long avoided.
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I earned my Ph.D. in Anthropology from Columbia University, MA in Political Science from the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University, and Bachelor of Laws from Keio University in Tokyo.
My research and writing has been supported by the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in Paris, Program in Law and Public Affairs (LAPA) at Princeton University, Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies, Cogut Center for the Humanities at Brown University, Association for Asian Studies, National Endowment for the Humanities, Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, Social Science Research Council, Fulbright-Hays, and the Ford Foundation.