Discourses of race, nation and empire in pre‐1945 Japan

Abstract

Abstract The treatment of Japan's minority populations remains circumscribed by racial assumptions first articulated during the Meiji period, and subsequently reinforced by the construction of a Japanese national identity. In this article an attempt is made to analyse the interrelationship between nationalist, ‘racial’ and imperial discourses during the period 1868–1945 which facilitated the construction of this identity. In contrast to the voluminous literature covering the political, economic and institutional aspects of Japan's transformation from a relatively weak semi‐feudal state on the periphery of East Asia to an empire capable of challenging the European powers, relatively little work has been done on the construction of the national ethos which accompanied this process. A second and related theme developed here is the creation of a uniquely powerful polity embodied in the notion of the Kazoku Kokka (family state). Although ‘racial’ nationalism was but one of a number of nationalisms present during this period, the centrality of ‘race’ in determining membership in the national community grew over time. The essence of this ‘racialized’ national culture was dependent upon a kind of historical forgetfulness which recast the whole meaning of ‘Japaneseness’ in powerful images of the enduring purity and homogeneity (racial and cultural) of the nation, the family and the Japanese way of life. A corollary of the construction of a Japanese ‘race’ was the simultaneous categorization of subordinate populations (both within Japan ‐ Ainu and burakumin ‐ and within the empire generally ‐ Koreans and Taiwanese) as members of equally distinct but inferior ‘races’. The approach taken here will be to analyse the conditions under which ‘racial’ categorization took place in Japan, and the implications this had for the treatment of subordinate peoples within the empire. A comparative perspective will be employed to highlight parallels within nineteenth‐century Europe, and, more generally, the relevance of social‐Darwinian notions of ‘race’ imported from Europe in the construction of the modern Japanese identity.