On 8 July 2022 Abe Shinzō, Japan’s longest serving postwar leader, was gunned down during a last-minute campaign stop in the western city of Nara. His murder laid bare the Cold War-era alliances which underpinned the country’s long history of conservative rule, a history and inheritance personified in Abe’s grandfather, Kishi Nobusuke. Drawing on my forthcoming monograph, A Memory of Empire: Kishi Nobusuke and the Making of Japanese Conservatism, 1918-1960, this talk explores Kishi Nobusuke’s political and intellectual engagements across multiple scales and across the imperial and Cold War eras. A brilliant technocrat, though by no means unpolitical, Kishi oversaw the military-led modernization of the Manchurian empire, and from 1941 the coercive effort that steeled Japan through four years of total war. Arrested as a suspected A class war criminal in 1945 just over a decade later he was named Japan’s ninth postwar premier before being forced from power in the largest demonstrations in modern Japanese history in 1960. Kishi exemplified the reinventions made by the Japanese wartime elite from the prerogatives of empire and imperial competition to Cold War that crystallized postwar conservative hegemony down to the present.

Andrew Levidis is a Lecturer in Modern Japanese History at The Australian National University, with broad interests in intellectual history, international history, and twentieth century East Asia. Before coming to ANU he held postdoctoral fellowships at Harvard University and Cambridge. His monograph – A Memory of Empire: Kishi Nobusuke and the Making of Japanese Conservatism, 1918-1975 – is forthcoming with Harvard University Press. He is the author of ‘The War is Not Over: Kishi Nobusuke and the National Defense Brotherhood’ in the Journal of Japanese Studies and co-editor of In the Ruins of the Japanese Empire: Imperial Violence, State Destruction and the Reordering of Modern East Asia (2020). Recently he co-edited a special issue of History Australia on ruptured histories of Asia and Australia. He is presently overseeing the publication of the official diplomatic record of Australia-Japan relations in the Cold War.