The geopolitics of whaling and Japanese colonialism in Korea

Abstract

ABSTRACT Although Japanese colonialism in Korea lasted less than half a century (1910–45), Korea served as a critical foothold for Japanese expansion into Asia and the Pacific. The Japanese Empire once encompassed a fifth of the globe, and its reach was just as contingent upon dominating marine environments as it was on land-based conquest. Reading Japanese colonialism as a volumetric undertaking, we examine colonial archives, whaling statistics and legal documents to understand how geopolitical ambitions shaped, and were shaped by, colonial whaling projects to dominate marine spaces around colonial Korea. Japanese whalers employed volumetric techniques to control voluminal marine space and its constitutive elements – including whales – and to satisfy the political and economic needs of colonial and later wartime Japan. However, while Imperial Japan's extensive subordination of marine space has earned it the moniker of a ‘pelagic empire’, we find its territorialization was always partial and incomplete, impeded as it was by material realities. Our analysis of Japanese colonial whaling demonstrates how the ongoing process of (re)making marine territory is intertwined with, and reliant upon, terrestrial and aerial volumes.