In 1945, defeat and occupation did not bring peace to Japan. Across the connected worlds of the mid-twentieth century, anticommunist politics became a transnational site of ideological ferment and cultural mobilization in Japan. From the era of imperial geopolitics to the Cold War, anticommunism in East Asia was transnationally oriented, conditioned by the prerogatives of empire, imperial competition, and enmeshed in a world of international spiritual movements, anticommunist leagues, and American conservative media circuits.

What does the global history of the Cold War look like when we recover Japan as a major node of transnational anticommunism? What were the limits and contradictions of the international solidarities that anticommunism engendered in East Asia? The era of decolonization gave rise to alternative imaginaries and organizations on the Left and Right which imagined a different international order. This panel builds on a burgeoning historiography centered on the assumptions, memories, and visions of the past and future that constitute anticommunism as a global phenomenon. This scholarship – and the temporal and ideological maps they embody – underlined the importance of illiberal internationalism and counter-organizations of the Right as transnational force across the twentieth century. However, these works have largely overlooked East Asia. By interrogating the intersection of anticommunist circuits with modernization, developmentalism, and decolonization, this panel demonstrates how Asian political elites waged their local, international, and global Cold Wars.

Post-1945 Japan is an important national space to examine the personal, conceptual, and practical bonds that connected anticommunism in East Asia to the global Cold War. Ideationally and spatially, anticommunism in Japan was grounded in civil wars in China and Korea, Japanese imperialism’s formal collapse, and military occupation by the United States. If the context was nation-specific, the imaginaries, interactions, and mobilities were global. How anticommunism was reinvented in postwar Japan provides new insights into the complex ways the Cold War was waged across Asia, highlighting the tensions generated as networks of solidarity crossed national, regional, imperial, racial and social boundaries.

The political struggles between state agents and transnational movements are persistent themes in all three papers. Hao Chen places conservative and counterrevolutionary visions of international order at the heart of his history. Through the Asian Peoples’ Anticommunist League, Chen examines the effort by Taiwan to bring Japan into a transnational Bandung-of-the-Right and develop a distinctive vision of anticommunism as the ‘authentic’ reincarnation of pre-1945 imperialism in East and Southeast Asia. Andrew Levidis explores the limits and contradictions of anticommunist internationalism in East Asia through the Asian Parliamentarians Union (APU). By connecting anticommunism with modernization, Levidis examines the contradictions and limitations of Japanese conservatives attempt to redirect and shape the Asia-Africa movement. Delving into the Japanese attempt to mediate an end to the Konfrontasi (1963-1966) in Southeast Asia, Giulia Garbagni highlights the back channels, diplomatic freelancers, and political brokers which were pivotal in Japan’s “return to Asia.” Garbagni’s paper demonstrates how Japanese leaders drew on a vision of common wartime heritage, including pan-Asianism, to imagine a realignment of anticolonial nationalism with the anticommunist West.