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 Annika A. Culver Placing Empire: Travel and the Social Imagination in Imperial Japan. By Kate McDonald. University of California Press, 2017. 272 pages. Softcover, $34.95/£27.95. Kate McDonald’s masterful analysis interweaves theory and primary texts to examine the spatial politics of “place” in the context of imperial Japan. As McDonald argues, the Japanese empire primarily located itself as a social phenomenon that “possessed colonized lands by domesticating, disavowing, and disappearing other claims to that same land” (p. 1). One important means that the state, institutions, and private individuals used to accomplish this end was imperial tourism, which was concerned not only with the manufacture of impressions and images of colonial areas but also with the creation of a politics of the imperial center that enabled both colonizing and colonized elites to measure their own regions with a kind of barometer of modernity fashioned by the dictates of Tokyo. These narratives, of course, elided the fact that Japan itself was noticeably unevenly developed and asynchronously modernized in the early to mid-twentieth century and that pockets of rural and urban poverty remained to rival any in the regions taken over by its empire. McDonald’s book joins other studies on narratives of place by imperial Japanese travelers and writers that have been published by scholars such as Donald Keene (focusing on accounts of the United States, Europe, China, and elsewhere), E. Atkins Taylor (colonial Korea), Robert Tierney (Taiwan), and Kenneth Ruoff (wartime Manchuria).1 McDonald’s study spans from roughly 1906 to 1938, beginning with a discussion of the pivotal role of the Russo-Japanese War in stimulating imperial tourism and seemingly ending with the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945), which no doubt somewhat impeded travel. (The equally ideologically laden travels by Japanese intellectuals and entertainers to support the war effort are not a part of her investigation.)2 Initially, tourism was promoted by imperial boosters to “develop affective ties to the contested territory” (p. 36), such as in the case of trips to Manchurian battlefields in the Russo-Japanese War like the famed “203-Meter Hill” above Port Arthur, where thousands of Japanese and Russian troops lost their lives. Soon the practice evolved into a set of visits that helped to demonstrate the success of Japan’s colonizing mission. Following the First World War, tourism functioned as a means of disseminating visions of the empire’s cultural pluralism; such depictions became increasingly problematic as wartime Japan absorbed multiple Asian peoples after the invasion of China proper in the late 1930s and of Southeast Asia and the Pacific in the early 1940s. McDonald views this process of imperial identity formation via imperial tourism as an essential aspect of state building that was bolstered by “the fiction of a kokumin defined by a shared historical experience” (p. 38). This narrative of supposed unity was, however, also coupled with the “discourse of colonial incivility,” in which the [End Page 111] purported backwardness and social indecency of the out-of-place colonized justified their imperial control by the Japanese (p. 53). After the 1920s, such views would dissipate into accounts expressing astonishment as to how some colonized peoples (such as urban Koreans and indigenous Taiwanese elites) had assimilated the Japanese language and customs a bit too well, leading the imperial observer to question his or her own self-identity. Indeed, by the 1930s Japanese travelers even expected those they encountered in the colonies to speak Japanese well, while they themselves remained in a privileged position in which they “could demonstrate their authentic Japanese-ness by speaking it improperly”—in other words, “native” speakers could flaunt their casual disregard of linguistic rules (p. 143). The first tours of Manchuria and Korea began in 1906, with a fully developed imperial travel industry flourishing by 1918. Such tours were initially prohibitively expensive, allowing only elite travelers access to a firsthand view of the colonies. Later, the imperial government, along with educational and other bodies, subsidized inspection trips through which more middle-class imperial subjects could gaze upon the apparent splendor of their empire as reflected...