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This panel seeks to discover how “...empire’s ruins contour and carve through the psychic and material space in which people live and what compounded layers of imperial debris do to them.” (Stoler, 2013). How does the visual representation of Empire fade out of our direct vision, yet continue to potently shape the contemporary world? The representations of Empire addressed in this panel urge us to develop a more complex understanding of Japanese Imperialism and its links to such eminently contemporary phenomena as land, art practice, and the global rising tide of fascism. Japanese Imperialism began as, and remains, a geographically expansionist agenda, crashing through and blurring national territorial boundaries and framings while assembling a collection of differentially integrated colonial settlements and possessions. Attempts to grasp the full significance of Japanese empire must likewise treat national frameworks as but one among several pertinent interwoven territorial scales. This panel documents artworks attempting to animate this trail of colonial trauma as well as its powerful presence in shaping the form of political liberalism Japan claims to have embraced in the postwar period and the recent rise of aspirational fascism across the Transpacific today. We will examine architectural traces of colonialism in Korea, the work of Japanese calligraphers stationed at Japanese Embassies in China, and portraits of Japanese painters as members of the Imperial Army. Taken together, the panel invites a timely critical re-envisioning of our collective future.