Sayaka Chatani. Nation-Empire: Ideology and Rural Youth Mobilization in Japan and Its Colonies.

Abstract

In Nation-Empire: Ideology and Rural Youth Mobilization in Japan and Its Colonies, a strikingly original new work on pre-1945 Japan and its empire, Sayaka Chatani begins by posing a simple but compelling question: Why did tens of thousands of young men across the Japanese empire in the 1930s and 1940s, not only in Japan but also in colonies such as Korea and Taiwan, embrace the military mobilization of the period and even seek to enlist voluntarily in the Imperial Army? Chatani frames her answer around a conception of Imperial Japan as a “nation-empire,” an attempt “to form a nation across imperial domains” (4) through a radical and atypical process of imperial ideological assimilation in which Japan sought to make its colonized subjects “similar” to the colonizer and to integrate them into the Japanese “Yamato race.” She takes as her main focus the government-sponsored “village youth associations” (seinendan) (22) that proliferated throughout the empire, which she regards as the most important top-down vehicle for youth mobilization. And here Chatani makes the first of several bold interventions in the existing scholarship. Since Andre Schmid’s famous critique twenty years ago of Japanese historiography for its neglect of empire (and of Korea specifically) as part of the study of Japanese modernity, the field has been greatly enhanced by many studies of one or more aspects of Japanese imperialism. But there have been few studies, especially in English, that look at the empire holistically through the lens of a common question or theme. One reason for this is the daunting linguistic challenges such studies face. At a minimum, the responsible scholar must be able to handle not only Japanese but also Chinese and Korean. Chatani appears to excel in this regard, drawing deeply from primary and secondary sources, including personal interviews, in all three languages, as she takes readers chapter by chapter from seinendan in Japan and Okinawa to those in Taiwan and Korea, highlighting “translocal” similarities but also pointing out key differences in each case. In focusing on the youth associations, moreover, which were all located in the countryside, Chatani makes another important scholarly intervention. The histories of modern East Asia have for the most part been studies of urban change and modernity, but as Chatani rightly notes, the vast majority of the populations in the Japanese empire were farmers living in rural areas, and to neglect this key demographic is to leave out a crucial part of the modern story. In the case of Korea, for example, where more than 80 percent of the colonial population were peasants, the dominant “colonial modernity” scholarly paradigm has to a great extent ignored the rural population, seeing “modernity” as essentially an urban phenomenon.