Organizer and Chair: Jennifer Robertson, University of Michigan
The main political, economic, and bureaucratic aspects of Japanese imperialism and colonialism have been expertly charted. However, as Mark Peattie has observed, comparatively little work has been done on the culture of Japanese empire building, or the affective, aesthetic, practical, and often ambivalent ways in which a new "Greater East Asian" culture was conceived and experienced by both the Japanese and peoples under Japanese domination. In illuminating the engendered, embodied, and exhibited Kulturpolitik of Imperial Japan, the panelists explore several key strategies devised by a diverse group of Japanese ideologues eager to actualize their utopian visions of Greater East Asian culture. The incorporation of some of these strategies and visions into popular cultures throughout East Asia was a central concern of the Japanese imperial state, which sought to contain and reconstitute the histories, ethnic, and cultural differences represented and embodied by non-Japanese Asians. Collectively, the panelists contribute to diversifying the "colonial discourse," from which Japan—along with other "non-Western" colonizers—has been mostly excluded. Frühstück traces the development of geography and ethnographic mapping as technologies of Japanese colonialism, and Robertson explores the cultural and historical aesthetics of "blood" ideology informing the doctrine of assimilation, one cogent form of colonial containment. Lo focuses on colonial medicine in Taiwan, the proving ground of Japanese "scientific colonialism," and Cwiertka considers the ways in which food reflected the practical ways in and through which Japanese colonizers encountered and interacted with other Asians.
A Passion for Power: Geography and the Culture of Empire-Building in Modern Japan
Sabine Frühstück, University of California, Santa Barbara
The construction and dissemination of geographical knowledge were important features of Japanese colonialism. In the 1880s, the Japanese state gave the Army Ministry the role of mapping, measuring, and quantifying the land and peoples of East Asia. Military officers trained in the Ministry’s Land Survey Office documented the demographic and "racial" features, customs and morals, as well as the political, economic, and social condition of the peoples whose lands were "captured" on topographical and geological maps. This intensive, extensive, and systematic process of knowledge production made accessible to colonial administrators, the cultural and geographic domains that would later be incorporated as Greater East Asia. I will show how geography, as a technology of colonialism, was central both to the pragmatics of Japanese military expansion and to the culture of empire building. Practically and symbolically, maps and ethnographic reports produced in the late nineteenth century guided later Japanese imperialist claims on Asia. A distinctly Japan-centric cartography, with Japan placed prominently in the center as the omniscient leader of a Greater East Asia, created a powerful perspectival relationship between the colonizer and the colonized. Moreover, the cultural geographic knowledge pursued and produced by the Army was disseminated to civilians, who were thereby introduced to the different places, peoples, and cultures making up the Japanese Empire.
Scientific Colonialism: Taiwan as Japan’s Medical Utopia (or Not)
Ming-cheng Lo, University of California, Davis
As an Asian nation engaged in colonizing other Asians, Japan constructed its role as an "anti-colonial colonizer"; that is, as the leader of Asia in the battle against European and American imperialism. With this self-imposed mission in mind, and through diligent studies of comparative colonialism, Japanese colonial officials developed one of their central colonial theories, "scientific colonialism." Japanese colonialism, they explained, was scientific in two senses: it featured a systematic, research-oriented approach, and it aimed to bring science and civilization to the colonies. I investigate both the desired effects of Japan’s scientific colonialism and its unintended consequences, as documented in the exemplary case of colonial medicine in Taiwan, the proving ground of Japanese scientific colonialism. In examining the innovation and implementation of Japanese medical policies in colonial Taiwan, I discuss the ways in which Japanese medicine was deployed to transform and contain the mind and body of colonial subjects. I also consider the ways in which Taiwanese doctors related themselves to this "modern" science and developed changing interpretations of the relationship between medicine and the nation. In short, my investigation addresses the question of how the Japanese ideologues conceptualized and justified their colonial policies in the absence of a "color code," among other modes of containment and control, and provides insights into how colonial subjects experienced the ambivalent dynamics of Japanese "scientific colonialism."
To Mix or Not to Mix: "Blood" and the Politics of Assimilation in Imperial Japan
Jennifer Robertson, University of Michigan
A euphemism for both "racial essence" and "shared hereditary material," "blood" (chi, ketsu) figured centrally in the often fractious public debates in early twentieth-century Japan about the cultural role the Japanese should play in Asia. I explore the cultural and historical aesthetics of "blood" ideology informing the colonial doctrine of assimilation, which was envisioned as a mode of containing and neutralizing the ethnic and cultural difference posed by Asian peoples under Japanese domination. Popular debates and official policies on miscegenation and "racial hygiene" dwelled on the cultural merits and demerits (to all parties) of two essentially incommensurable positions, which I call the "pure blood" and the "mixed blood" positions. The former argued for the preservation of the "purity" of Japanese "blood," and the later, for the mixing of Japanese "blood" with that of the "inferior" peoples of Greater East Asia. Some of the "bloody" utopian and dystopian scenarios associated with assimilation are critically reviewed.
Gut-Level Colonialism: Foodways of Imperial Japan (1910–1945)
Katarzyna Cwiertka, Leiden University
Cuisine and food stuffs are highly relevant if under-acknowledged sites of colonial practices and experiences. A privileged zone for the observation of culture due to its intricate connection with central processes of social life, food reflects and refracts the practical ways in and through which Japanese colonizers encountered and interacted with other Asian peoples. I focus on the various strategies—some utopian—employed by the Japanese imperialist state in constructing a sufficiently and efficiently fed empire. The armed forces were the first to address, in the late nineteenth century, the logistics of providing the proper nutrition for Japanese troops dispatched to foreign locations. Later, when an increasing number of Japanese people immigrated to areas under Japanese domination, the state took steps to secure an adequate supply of foodstuffs enabling them to maintain their Japanese foodways and to signify in turn the Japanization of those areas. On the other hand, however, some ideologues argued that the adoption by immigrants of a local diet over a Japanese one was more practical and economically advantageous. At the same time, the mass-media introduced Korean, Chinese, and other colonial cuisines to Japanese citizens as part of a domestic propaganda campaign. Articles on and photographs of exotic-looking dishes and unfamiliar dining customs, often accompanied by recipes for non-Japanese meals, helped to transform the abstract idea of empire into a concrete, if utopian, experience.