Unrepayable Debt

What does it mean, and take, to repay the unrepayable?

Unrepayable Debt explores belated attempts to reckon with the savage plundering of labor and life under the Japanese empire. Located within global conversations on reparations for colonialism and slavery, and centered on slave labor lawsuits brought by Chinese victims seeking overdue justice in Japanese courts, Yukiko Koga traces a sea change in the legal sphere propelled by an unprecedented transnational redress movement. The lawsuits exposed not only the original violence but also a structure of transitional injustice etched onto the unmaking of the Japanese empire, which left victims silenced and unredressable for decades.

Challenging the idea of reckoning as a discrete event that brings closure through settlements, apology, or compensation, Koga’s ethnography details the slow and messy intergenerational work of reconciliation on the ground. The book shows how the re-pairing of severed relations, separated by lineages of victimhood and perpetration, lies at the core of repair. By bringing to the surface the prolonged and entangled processes of decolonization and deimperialization, Unrepayable Debt compels a rethinking of what redress, repair, and reconciliation mean, how they are practiced, and where accountability lies.

Yukiko Koga is associate professor of anthropology at Yale University. She is the author of Inheritance of Loss: China, Japan, and the Political Economy of Redemption After Empire, also published by the University of Chicago Press.