The Japanese Empire’s Enduring Vestiges. An Interview with Sherzod Muminov

On 13-14 December 2017, Sherzod Muminov participated in the Exploratory Workshop “The Axis Powers and Decolonisation: Debating Perspectives, Differences, and Entanglements of the End of Empire in Germany, Italy, and Japan” with a paper on “The Japanese Empire’s Enduring Vestiges: Forced Migrations, Negotiations and the Struggle for Dominance in Post-imperial East Asia, 1945-1956.”

In this interview, Sherzod talks about the particularities of the breakdown of the Japanese Empire, gives some examples for its legacies in East Asia and reflects on the term “decolonisation” in relation to the Axis Power Empires.

Interviewer: Alix Winter

Sherzod Muminov (University of East Anglia) is a multilingual historian working with sources in Japanese and Russian, and is also fluent in Turkish. Sherzod received his PhD in East Asian Studies from the University of Cambridge, where he was also a postdoctoral research associate in the ERC Project “The Dissolution of the Japanese Empire and the Struggle for Legitimacy in Postwar East Asia”. He was a Japan Foundation Doctoral Fellow at the Boissonade Institute of Modern Law and Politics at Hosei University in Tokyo. Sherzod’s primary research is in modern Japanese and East Asian History, Japanese-Soviet/Russian relations, the Cold War in East Asia, the post-WWII, post-imperial migrations in East Asia, and the international and transnational history of the Soviet system of forced labour camps for prisoners-of-war.

Exploratory Workshops are part of the strategic cooperation of the Forum Transregionale Studien and the Max Weber Stiftung – Deutsche Geisteswissenschaftliche Institute im Ausland.