Placing Empire: Travel and the Social Imagination in Imperial Japan by Kate McDonald

Abstract

Reviewed by: Placing Empire: Travel and the Social Imagination in Imperial Japan by Kate McDonald Jessamyn R. Abel (bio) Placing Empire: Travel and the Social Imagination in Imperial Japan. By Kate McDonald. University of California Press, Berkeley, 2017. xviii, 254 pages. $34.95, paper. Since at least the publication in 1998 of Louise Young's path-breaking Japan's Total Empire, scholars have been exploring the many ways in which cultural activities and materials helped shape Japanese imperialism through their impact on the goals, desires, and expectations of the Japanese people. Kate McDonald's excellent Placing Empire takes this ongoing work along a new path, asking about the roles in empire building of mobility and representations of place, specifically through tourism promotion and travel writing. Through thoughtful analysis of a wealth of varied materials related to travel within the empire, she demonstrates that Japanese tourism to Korea, Taiwan, and Manchuria (and, conversely, the tight restrictions on colonial [End Page 411] travel to the Japanese islands) contributed to what she labels the "spatial politics of empire," by which she means "the use of concepts of place to naturalize uneven structures of rule" (p. 7). McDonald traces the changing ways in which travel and the promotion of tourism by a variegated group of people she refers to collectively as "colonial boosters" helped to convince the Japanese public that colonial territories were and should be an integral part of the empire, while at the same time clarifying and maintaining a hierarchy among these disparate spaces, thus helping to remake ideas about the "inner territory," the colonies, and the empire as a whole. The preface of this book places it in the context of the study of imperialism, both in general and of Japan in particular, but its impact extends well beyond that field, contributing equally to scholarship on mobility and tourism. Taking the lead from scholars primarily in geography, sociology, and anthropology who have examined the meanings of movement for our understandings of space and place, historians have begun to consider the significance of space and mobility from our own disciplinary viewpoint. McDonald brings this field into conversation with the study of imperialism, highlighting the significance of mobility—and, importantly, the contrast between mobile and immobile populations—in the conceptualization, creation, and maintenance of empire and national identity. She also engages with work on tourism, showing the tremendous political significance of this leisure activity, as the collective experiences of Japanese tourists enjoying the sights in colonized territories helped legitimize and structure the empire. McDonald skillfully links together various levels of analysis, for instance, by showing how changes in international norms following the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 prompted new approaches to selling imperial tourism, which in turn impacted the spatial politics of Japanese empire. The book's overarching narrative about the spatial politics of empire demonstrates a shift from the early promotion of colonialism through a "geography of civilization" to the careful differentiation among diverse spaces and peoples within the empire through a "geography of cultural pluralism." In the two chapters that make up the first of the book's two sections, McDonald shows how advocates of empire used tourism to foster a sense of the colonies as part of Japan but lagging behind. They "placed" the colonies within Japan's history, economy, and nation by shaping the places travelers would visit and sights they would see through guidebooks and itineraries. For instance, situating important battle sites of the Russo-Japanese War as must-see tourist destinations for visitors from Japan engendered an affective connection to Korea and Manchuria, while highlighting the infrastructures of circulation and production displayed the close integration of the colonies in the empire. In contrast, the people of these spaces were consistently portrayed as uncivilized, stuck chronologically behind the Japanese nation. In these ways, colonial promoters mobilized tourism to doubly justify Japanese [End Page 412] imperialism: first, by convincing travelers that these territories were proper parts of Japan; and second, by suggesting the civilizing benefits of Japanese rule. The second section of the book, consisting of three chapters, shows how the spatial politics of Japanese imperialism was transformed by the two-pronged change that marked the empire and the...