Professor Barak Kushner manages a 3-year Chiang Ching-Kuo Foundation-Newton Trust project: “Charting the Geography of Power: Visualizing the Shifting Landscape from Imperial to Postwar East Asia through War Crimes Trials.” This project aims to move the history of war crimes studies into another paradigm. The goal is to visualize the connections between war crimes and their legal prosecution in postwar East Asia. The project investigates the ways in which the wartime Japanese authorities adapted to postwar contingencies, and how the Nationalist/Communist Chinese governments and other western allies responded in turn. 
Dr Kuan-Jen Chen is the postdoctoral research associate for the initiative. He contributes to establishing an interactive digital platform that charts the defendants’ data and trial statistics for the trials in East and Southeast Asia implemented by the Chinese, Americans, Australians, British, Dutch, Filipinos, French, and Soviets. This website aims to act as a platform to further analyze the war crimes statistics of BC class Japanese war crimes and the legacies of cultural heritage in East Asia under Japanese rule. This will hopefully allow users to gain further historical insights using geographic plotting (GIS) methods. Additionally, Dr Chen acts as a bridge between western and East Asian academia. He liaises between Professor Kushner and other scholars who jointly participate in this project in China, Japan, South Korea, along with the UK, US, and Taiwan. He has been involved in the organization and administration of a variety of international workshops and lectures with the aim of providing a venue for on-going dynamic collaboration and dialogue between East Asian and western scholars.
The project is an ongoing effort and the managers look to take it live in late 2021.
For more background see Professor Kushner’s personal webpage: http://www.barakkushner.net
See an article about the previous 6-year ERC project from which this website initiative emerged: https://www.cam.ac.uk/research/features/out-of-the-ashes-of-empire
