Unrepayable Debt: Law, Redress, Reconciliation, and the Unmaking of Empire

By Yukiko Koga

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

In the 1990s, a series of lawsuits was raised on behalf of Chinese survivors of violence and enslavement by the Japanese empire. Both inside and outside the courtroom, a movement emerged as Chinese victims, their descendants, and Japanese lawyers and activists forged transnational and intergenerational collaborations, seeking redress and reconciliation, and leading to a sea change in the legal sphere and settlements with implicated corporations.

Asking what happens when moral and financial debts both demand and defy repayment, Unrepayable Debt explores what it takes to reckon with the nature and the scale of imperial violence, set against the entangled processes of decolonization and deimperialization.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0226845982
• ISBN13: 9780226845982
• Release Date: June 2026
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Length: 240 Pages