• China
• Japan
• James Palmer

Over the next few weeks, Kimura made his way down to Kalimpong, in British India. There, he sat in a cinema and watched the unmistakable newsreel images of national defeat: a devastated Tokyo, a famished public begging for food, Japanese soldiers surrendering to triumphant Gurkhas in Burma. He spent days afterwards in solitary misery on a rock overlooking the town.

“It all made no sense,” Kimura later recalled thinking. “Why should such a town be here in India, peaceful and serene, and why should I be in it, when my country lay destroyed and suffering?”

In many countries, Aug. 15 is V-J Day—the celebration of the end of World War II in the Pacific. (Thanks to the time difference, some in the United States celebrate it on Aug. 14; the official U.S. commemoration is on Sept. 2, when Japan signed the instruments of surrender.)

But in the Asia-Pacific, where the conflict reached from Lhasa to Hawaii, that victory was far less decisive than the triumph over Nazi Germany—and is a much more conflicted memory. That’s especially the case in China, where the question of which side of a divided country won the right to sit in the victor’s chair remains painfully acute.

Beijing’s leaders love to talk of the “correct” view of the history of  World War II and the “safeguarding” of the postwar order. But what do these statements actually mean?

Japanese prisoners are led by Red Army troops in Manchuria in August 1945.Sovfoto/Universal Images Group via Getty Images

In the Japanese naval base of Truk, bombed to oblivion and then ignored by the U.S. advance through the Pacific, an abandoned and starving garrison waited for some kind of relief; they had already murdered 70 of the “comfort women” who had been kept there, hoping to cover up their crimes. In China, soldiers who had spent years following the policy of “kill all, starve all, burn all” wondered which army they should try to surrender to: the Nationalists, the Communists, the Soviets?

This was a painful and humiliating loss, yet, in a way, the Japanese were the lucky ones. After the self-inflicted misery of the 1940s, Japan boomed in the postwar years as it embraced defeat. By 1955, the country was as rich as before the war; by 1964, when it hosted the Summer Olympics, it was far richer. Businesses such as Honda and Sony went from local shops to global giants.

In Europe, the end of World War II, wreathed in misery as it was, was a clean break. Between 1946 and 1991, there was not a single war between states in continental Europe. (The Greeks fought a nasty civil war until 1949 and lost half of Cyprus to Turkish invasion in 1974.) The Iron Curtain came down, and the superpowers glared at each other across it. In Western Europe, former enemies began to make a transformative union.

Asia was very different. Outside Japan, the fighting barely stopped. A divided Korea was in total war again by 1950, resolved only with an exhausted cease-fire in 1953. In Vietnam, Ho Chi Minh’s army fought the French from 1945 to 1954; the South Vietnamese and the Americans from 1955 to 1975; and then, for an encore in 1978-79, toppled the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia and fought off a Chinese invasion.

British Malaya defeated a Chinese-backed communist insurgency between 1948 and 1960, and then an independent Malaysia fought off an undeclared Indonesian assault from 1962-1966. British India won independence, bloodily divided, and its successor states went to war again and again, including the Pakistani Army committing genocide in the newly created Bangladesh in 1971.

The legacy of the war itself was far more ambivalent and unclear in much of Asia than in Europe. Soldiers who had fought on the side of freedom had often done so under the yoke of colonialism. Collaborators with the Japanese, such as the Indian fascist Subhas Chandra Bose, could be remembered as national liberation heroes—or go on to lead the country, as Indonesia’s Sukarno did. Nobody remembered the Japanese fondly, but there was plenty of oppression to go around.

Sailors of the Russian Red Banner Amur Flotilla drive through the Chinese section of Harbin, Manchuria, after news of the Japanese surrender in August 1945. Sovfoto/Universal Images Group via Getty Images

Officially, China was one of the victors of World War II, included in the “Big Four” of the allies alongside the Soviets, the United States, and the United Kingdom, as well as one of the “Four Policemen” of the United Nations. This was a stark difference to the end of World War I, when China had been treated as an imperial subject, with Germany’s colonial possessions in the country not returned to Chinese sovereignty but instead handed over to Japan. Along with a restored France, China received the ultimate accreditation of victory: a permanent seat on the new U.N. Security Council.

Yet the seeming accolade meant very little. Yes, China was the only nonwhite nation to be recognized by the new global order, theoretically as an equal. But China also barely existed. After the final collapse of the Qing Empire in 1911-12, China had entered a civil war of brutal ferocity and bewildering complexity. Soldiers who had learned their craft on the Western Front dug trenches and entrenched machine guns to shoot their countrymen; others terrorized, extorted, and massacred civilians.

By 1927, the conflict had theoretically evolved into a broad struggle between the Nationalist Party and the Communist Party (which had been allies, this being that kind of war, between 1924 and 1926) but with dozens of individual warlords fighting for their own profit or power. And when the Japanese seized Manchuria in 1931, they were just another party in a long and bloody conflict.

When that became a full-blown invasion of China in 1937, the Nationalists and the Communists reluctantly agreed to put the civil war on hold; in 1945, they picked it right back up. Aided by the Soviet handover of Manchuria, which the Japanese had turned into the country’s main industrial base; by hyperinflation in Nationalist territories; and by the disorder and corruption of their enemy, the Communists chased the Nationalists off the mainland and into Taiwan in 1949.

There was now an (almost) united China. The only problem was that just one side of the Cold War acknowledged it. Until the 1970s, the West recognized Taiwan, not Beijing, as the only legitimate Chinese state—and therefore as the legitimate victors of World War II, undeterred by the Nationalists’ very distinct failure to follow through on that victory.  It wasn’t until 1971 that, in one of the most dramatic reversals imaginable, the leaders of Taiwan went from being a permanent member of the U.N. Security Council to not even being recognized by the United Nations. (It would take another eight years for Washington to fully acknowledge the shift.)

A visitor walks past an exhibit featuring Chinese newspaper reports about Japan’s 1945 surrender in Nanjing, China, on Aug. 23, 2005.China Photos/Getty Images

When Beijing’s leaders—such as President Xi Jinping—talk of “safeguarding” the “victory” of World War II, then, they’re talking about defending the idea of the Communist state as the only legitimate inheritor of “China’s victory”—as well as the idea that China, as a victor of the war, enjoys a naturally superior status to Tokyo, the instigator and loser. At home, it means a history that ignores all the messy horrors of the war, and instead tells a safe, party-approved story of moral triumph.

Chinese sacrifices in the war against the Japanese, of course, were enormous. But there’s one particularly thorny problem with Beijing claiming that wartime victory gives it carte blanche: The Nationalist Party did most of the sacrificing. While many communist guerrillas fought heroically, the Communist Party used the opportunity to rebuild itself in its mountain fastness of Yan’an.

And since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, China’s arguments have become increasingly linked with justifying Soviet imperialism: As the “principal pillars of resistance,” the Soviets, in this telling, have as natural a right to rule Ukraine as China does to rule Taiwan or Tibet or Xinjiang. China’s war commemorations emphasize a dual partnership between the Soviets and China—a history that was once put on hold for decades thanks to the Sino-Soviet split but is now useful again.

So, what did it mean, in the end, to come from the losing nation in 1945? Kimura spent five years wandering the Himalayan borderlands and India as a trader, teacher, and freelance spy—including for the British, who believed in his Mongolian disguise. He feared the consequences of surrender, but in 1950, overcome by homesickness, he went to the captain of a Japanese ship in Calcutta.

Unable to summon up his own language, he scrawled down: “I am Japanese. My name is Hisao Kimura. I have not spoken Japanese for seven years.” After several months in prison in Calcutta, he was returned to Japan, where he spent several happy decades using his language skills to analyze foreign broadcasts for the CIA.