Empire, Cold War, Global Capitalism, and Modern Japan 

Andrew Levidis is a Lecturer in Modern Japanese History at the Australian National University. He completed his doctorate in History at the Faculty of Law of Kyoto University and has been a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University at the Edwin O. Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies (RIJS) and Program on U.S.-Japan Relations at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs. He was also a Research Associate Fellow in the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Cambridge. 

Dr Levidis is a international historian of Modern Japan and its empire-state. His research stands at the intersection of empire, world order, Cold War and global intellectual history. He is co-editor of In the Ruins of the Japanese Empire: Imperial Violence, State Destruction, and the Reordering of Modern East Asia (Hong Kong University Press 2020) and has articles forthcoming in the Journal of Japanese Studies and Social Sciences Journal Japan. His monograph A Memory of Empire: Kishi Nobusuke and the Transwar Japanese Right explores the international history of Japanese right-wing and the historical rise of conservatism from empire to Cold War. 

My research project An Invisible Empire in the Cold War: Transnational Anti-communism and the Japanese Empire-State, 1937-1975 explores the global history of anti-communist internationalism in East Asia. For nearly three decades the Asian Peoples’ Anti-communist League (APACL), Asian Parliamentarians’ Union (APU), and the international spiritual movement, Federation for Victory Over Communism, structured Japan’s postwar “return to Asia.” These institutions formed the core of East Asian counter-mobilization to the Afro-Asian Conference at Bandung, Indonesia in 1955. By collapsing the historiographical divide between the imperial and postwar, colonial and postcolonial, this project shows how a wartime imperial culture came into existence, how it persisted across the divide of 1945, and how it was transformed across the long mid-twentieth century.