Amy King and Sherzod Muminov recount their experiences researching in Chinese and Soviet archives
Japanese soldiers returning from Siberia, January 1946 (Wikimedia Commons)
In a new research note published in The Asia-Pacific Journal | Japan Focus, Sherzod Muminov and I share our experiences researching and co-authoring a recent article on the comparative treatment of Japanese residents and internees by the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China in the turbulent years after World War II. Our collaboration sprung from the discovery that in spite of their apparently shared ideology and friendship under what would eventually become the Sino-Soviet alliance, Moscow and Beijing adopted significantly different approaches to dealing with Japanese citizens under their control. Here we recount the decade-long path our collaborative research took as we consulted multilingual government archives, survivor interviews, and memoirs to reconstruct Sino-Soviet conceptions of Japan during East Asia’s unsettled order transition from the end of World War II to the onset of the Cold War. The article, ‘“Japan Still Has Cadres Remaining”: Japanese in the USSR and Mainland China, 1945–1956’, was published by the Journal of Cold War Studies in its Summer 2022 issue.
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