Japanese Colonies Research Articles

Revisiting the Role of Imperial Universities in Japanese Colonies: The Case of Keijo Imperial University’s Medical Envoy to Thailand

Revisiting the Role of Imperial Universities in Japanese Colonies: The Case of Keijo Imperial University’s Medical Envoy to Thailand

국제연맹의 동양 여성매매 조사와 식민지 조선

The first objective of this paper is to examine the roles played by the Government-General of Joseon, one of the colonial powers, in the process of the Japanese government’s response to the League of Nations’ Commission of Inquiry into Traffic in Women and Children in the East.
 On the one hand, the modern state-regulated prostitution system in Japan shows different aspects depending on the time, region, and political characteristics of the region within the sphere of influence called ‘the Empire,’ but existing studies have a tendency to neglect this fact. This negligence intersects with the methods of history denialists who deny the damages caused by ‘state-regulated prostitution’ and ‘comfort women.’ Substantial truths can be concealed amid the ‘authorized ignorance and strategic disregard’ of historical facts.
 The second objective of this paper is to reveal that such an attitude, which causes difficulty in discussing the historical character of the state-regulated prostitution system and the ‘comfort women’ system of the Japanese army, is shown by the inquiry of Japan by the League of Nations’ Commission and the response of the Japanese government. In other words, it is a contemplation on how the Commission of Inquiry, the Japanese government, and the Government-General of Joseon invisibilized the colonial state-regulated prostitution system, which was strongly associated with human trafficking even compared with Japan. This paper aims to disclose the fact that while Japan struggled to gain recognition in the international society as a late-starting imperialist nation, it steered away from the human trafficking problem of Japanese colonies from an imperialist point of view.

The Corporality of Trauma and Testimony: Nora Okja Keller’s Comfort Woman

The history of sexual violence taken into consideration for the present study goes back to the period of Second World War, where hundreds of thousands of young girls, euphemistically called the ‘comfort women’ from different Japanese colonies of the time like Korea, China, Philippines, Indonesia, and Taiwan, were abducted and rounded up by Japanese Imperial Army to provide sexual services to the Japanese soldiers at the military camps before and during the war. The most heinous acts of sexual violence, multiple gang rape, vaginal mutilation, venereal diseases and suicides are manifested in the testimonies and autobiographies of many former comfort women who after fifty years of silence finally found their voices to talk about their ordeal and the trauma they suffered. For the present work, Nora Okja Keller’s Comfort Woman (1997) is studied with a psychoanalytic lens to explore the traumatic history of the real comfort women or the victims of sexual violence. Further, the essay is divided into three other parts where in the first part, the significance of the survivors’ testimonies is investigated through Wendy S. Hesford’s essay “Reading Rape Stories: Material Rhetoric and the Trauma of Representation” (1999). The second part of the paper discusses the rise of trauma theory that has provided novelists with new ways of conceptualising trauma and has shifted attention away from the question of what is remembered of the past to how and why it is remembered charted out by Cathy Caruth’s 1996 published work, Unclaimed Experiences. And the final part is devoted to the transmission of intergenerational trauma as represented in fictional narratives studied through Anne Whitehead’s Trauma Fiction (2004).

Existential Engagement: Philosophy in Taiwan, the Japanese Era ed. by Hung Tzu-wei

Reviewed by: Existential Engagement: Philosophy in Taiwan, the Japanese Era ed. by Hung Tzu-wei Feng-wei Wu Hung Tzu-wei, ed., Existential Engagement: Philosophy in Taiwan, the Japanese Era Taipei: Academia Sinica & Linking, 2016. Existential Engagement: Philosophy in Taiwan, the Japanese Era (edited by Tzu-wei Hung) is a seminal work about the development of the humanities during the Japanese colonial era of Taiwan (1895–1945). Some of the thinkers introduced in this book are not exactly philosophers as we might call them today, and it may be more apt to call them Geisteswissenschaftler in the sense that Dilthey had in mind. Readers can grasp the Zeitgeist and the lived experiences of Taiwan's colonial era through their works, and this is exactly what this book intends to do. Nevertheless, to call them Taiwanese philosophers is not the result of sloppy scholarship but a considered choice. The reason could be very simple: if you want to trace the genealogy of Taiwanese philosophy to its nascent stage, you would not want to leave out borderline cases just to satisfy methodological neatness. Before entering the details, I would like to discuss three major contributions of this book. Its first contribution is an ethical one. Under the postwar authoritarian regime, Taiwan's colonial past was deliberately kept obscure, and even distorted, in order to beautify the so-called "Return to the Motherland." In the late 1940s and early 1950s, many prestigious intellectuals of Taiwanese descent were persecuted by the regime for political reasons. Some were killed, imprisoned, or forced into exile, and some had to keep a low profile all their life and even had to adapt to the coercive ideology of the regime. Taiwan's colonial past has been an empty page for a long time. This book mends the gap and calls on us to do justice to the past, to make the suppressed heard. The book's second contribution is a historical one. It demonstrates the pivotal role that Japan once played in the cultural enlightenment in East Asia in the first half of the twentieth century. Taiwan is a perfect example. In the colonial era, the Japanese colonists established the first comprehensive public education system and the first university in Taiwan, and most of the Taiwanese thinkers introduced in the book were even able to [End Page 99] study abroad in Japan. Most of them studied in Tokyo or Kyoto, and the influences of Japanese Yōmeigaku and the Kyoto school were ubiquitous in their works. By tracing the genealogy of Taiwanese philosophy, the book shows readers how imperial Japan adopted Western philosophy and transformed it and then passed it on to Japanese colonies. The third contribution of this book is a philosophical one, and arguably the most important. People might wonder: What is Taiwanese philosophy actually? What is its content? Is it mature enough to qualify as a specific philosophy? These are difficult questions. In the informative introduction entitled "The Genealogy and Stages of Taiwanese Philosophy in the Japanese Era" (Tzu-wei Hung, 15–37), Hung argues that prewar Taiwanese philosophers had an immense existential concern for their individual and collective fate due to the pressures of assimilation policy, and that impulse propelled them to engage the sociopolitical reality. Hung argues that the same impulse has not withered away, for the same existential anxiety is still hovering over Taiwan. In that sense, this book is not merely a historical review of a philosophy that has been but also a manifesto for a philosophy that is yet to come. Hung's paper also offers readers a very useful big picture of prewar Taiwanese philosophers and their works. According to Hung's analysis, these philosophers can be divided into four distinct categories, based on their areas of specialization and educational background. The first category is philosophers of "Continental and Japanese philosophy," who were mostly influenced by German idealism, existential philosophy, and the Kyoto school. The second category is philosophers of "American pragmatism," who had studied abroad in the United States or were influenced by the pragmatism of William James and John Dewey. The third category is philosophers of "modern Sinology and Buddhism," who were inspired by Confucianism or Buddhism...

South Korea’s and Taiwan’s Territorial Disputes with Japan, 1990s to 2018

South Korea and Taiwan are former Japanese colonies that have undergone similar processes of state-building since WWII. But they have chosen different rhetorical frameworks in their maritime disputes with Japan. In South Korea, negotiating with Japan can be viewed as threatening the country’s independence and pride, whereas in the Taiwanese government, cooperation with Japan is considered mutually beneficial. Why have these two countries taken such divergent stances toward Japan? This article examines the territorial disputes between South Korea and Japan over Dokdo, and between Taiwan and Japan over the Senkaku Islands. It sets forth a rhetorical framework of comparison, and it proposes a constructivist perspective in understanding South Korea’s and Taiwan’s legitimation strategies toward Japan from the late 1990s to 2018. This comparative study suggests that the differences between their legitimation strategies can be traced to their different colonial experiences with Japan.

Perempuan dalam Pusaran Prostitusi: Kajian Yuridis Normatif dalam Fenomena Prostitusi Online di Indonesia

This paper examines prostitution which in practice has always been identified with women. Prostitution is a social problem that is passed down from time to time with various modes that always develop along with the development of lifestyle and technology. The focus of this study is how is the normative juridical review of the issue of women and prostitution? The method used in this article is the library study method. Through a normative juridical approach, the author will examine the issue of prostitution based on the main legal material, namely to see the arguments originating from the Qur'an and hadith, as well as legislation in force in Indonesia. In the final section the author tries to present a solution to stem the practice of prostitution. In this study it was found that prostitution in Indonesia has existed since the kingdom era, continued during the Dutch and Japanese colonies. Prostitution is a crime that is contrary to Islamic law and legislation in Indonesia. Surat an-Nur (24): 30-33 strictly prohibits the practice of prostitution. This ban applies to anyone not only to women who are prostitutes. Juridically normative legislation in Indonesia concerning prostitution is article 296, 506 of the KUHP, UU No. 11 of 2008 concerning Information and Electronic Transactions, UU No. 44 of 2008 concerning Pornography, UU No. 21 of 2007 concerning Eradication of Criminal Acts on Trafficking in Persons and UU No. 23 of 2003 concerning Child Protection. Efforts to stem the main prostitution began with the family. Optimizing the role of parents -both father, mother and teacher as an extension of their parents' hand- can be a solution in an effort to improve children's moral resilience, which in turn can stem a variety of negative behaviors that conflict with norms and religion, including prostitution.

The Wilsonian moment: Japan 1912–1952

AbstractThe aim of this special issue is to give a new spin to the study of the impact of the liberal Wilsonian moment on Japan, with a focus on the interwar period in a broader historical span. The Wilsonian liberal international order encompasses its fledgling (1914–1945), formative (1945–1952), competitive (1952–1989), and maturity (1989–2018) periods. In this special issue, the four articles deal with the first and second periods. Yutaka Harada and Frederick Dickinson adopt this longer perspective – not just President Wilson's moment of Fourteen Points – each focusing on (1) the vigor of Japan's industrialization and open economic policy in 1914–1931 and (2) the basic continuity between the prewar and postwar periods in terms of normative and institutional commitments with the fledgling, if volatile, liberal international order such as those with the Versailles and Washington treaties after World War I, the war prohibition treaty of 1928, and the naval disarmament treaty of 1930. Ryoko Nakano and Takashi Inoguchi take up the re-examination of two tiny minorities of liberal academics, Yanaihara Tadao and Nambara Shigeru, who at most kept their integrity. Nakano recasts Yanaihara's academic life with its intellectual agony of believing in a national self-determination policy for Japanese colonies. Inoguchi underlines Nambara's stoic self-discipline under wartime dictatorship and active political involvement under US occupation regarding the newly drafted Japanese Constitution. An emphasis is placed on the considerable positive influence of Wilsonian ideas on Japan, an influence that faded in the late 1930s, but re-emerged with considerable vigor after 1945.

平井健介著 『砂糖の帝国 ―日本植民地とアジア市場』

平井健介著 『砂糖の帝国 ―日本植民地とアジア市場』

山本有造著, 『日本植民地経済史研究』, 名古屋大学出版会, 1992年, xi+313頁

山本有造著, 『日本植民地経済史研究』, 名古屋大学出版会, 1992年, xi+313頁

1930年代植民地「工業化」の諸特徴

1930年代植民地「工業化」の諸特徴

Regional Differentiation on the Policy for Chinese Laborers in Modern Japanese Colonies : A Case Study of Taiwan

Regional Differentiation on the Policy for Chinese Laborers in Modern Japanese Colonies : A Case Study of Taiwan

Radio and Urban Rhythms in 1930s Colonial Taiwan

This article examines the history of radio and, how the consumption of radio might have transformed urban rhythms in colonial Taiwan. Being assisted by well-developed cultural industries, including magazines, newspapers, films and popular music, the influences of modernity had penetrated everyday life in Japan by the mid-1920s. The enthusiasm towards modernity reached the Japanese colonies in the 1930s. Until the outbreak of the Second Sino–Japanese War in 1937, Taiwanese society underwent a decade-long proliferation period of consumption, influenced by the convergence of urbanism, colonialism and modernism. The ‘modern’ experiences in 1930s Taiwan were largely influenced by media technologies. By conducting an examination through the story ‘Inviolable Destiny’ and other historical materials, this article shows how the consumption of radio signified multiple distinctions among ethnicities, classes, genders, generations and spaces in colonial Taiwan. The combination of radio and print media constituted an intertwined network that shaped the tempos of urban life. A constructed standard national time converged with rational institutions and generated a massive scale of coordination between Taiwan and the rest of the world. Radio did not only broadcast the content, which transferred public affairs into the private space, but also formulated a hidden rhythm of structured punctuality in daily life.

Japanese Colonialism in Comparative Perspective

This article examines the economic consequences of Japanese colonialism in Taiwan, Korea, and Manchuria between 1910 and 1945 and compares Japanese policies with those implemented by other colonial powers in Southeast Asia. In particular it addresses the writings of an influential group of American scholars who have published widely on Japanese colonial policies over the last fifty years. Their work has been used to support the argument that Japanese colonial policy was more developmental than that of other colonial powers and laid the foundations for the stellar economic performance of Taiwan and the Republic of Korea in the decades after 1950. To challenge this argument, this article compares a number of economic and social indicators in Korea, Taiwan, and Manchuria with those from other Asian colonies, as well as Thailand and showing that while the Japanese colonies, especially Taiwan, score well on some indicators, they do less well on others. The idea of Japanese exceptionalism cannot be accepted uncritically.

Property rights and economic development: the legacy of Japanese colonial institutions

AbstractSeveral studies link development to institutions transplanted by European colonizers and here we extend this line of research to Asia. Japan imposed its system of well-defined property rights on some of its Asian colonies. In 1939, Japan began to register private land in its island colonies, an effort that was completed in Palau but interrupted elsewhere by World War II. Within Micronesia, robust economic development followed only in Palau where individual property rights were well defined. We show that well-defined property rights in Korea and Taiwan secured land taxation and enabled farmers to obtain bank loans for irrigation systems. Considering Japanese colonies, we use the presence or absence of a land survey as an instrument to identify the causal impact of new institutions. Our estimates show that property-defining institutions were important for economic development, results that are confirmed when using a similar approach with British Colonies in Asia.

Japanese Cities in Global Context

Japan has been part of a transnational and cross-cultural exchange of planning ideas for many centuries. A comprehensive analysis of exchange between the island nation, its Asian neighbors, and the larger world is still missing, despite the growing interest in the study of transnational and cross-cultural urbanism. The articles in this special section illustrate the multiple ways in which foreign influences have shaped and changed Japanese urban form and in which Japanese practices have influenced the built environment elsewhere. They explore the theoretical, methodological, and practical results of this exchange. Sites discussed are inside Japan, notably Nagasaki and Tokyo, and also in the Japanese colonies (specifically through the lens of Seoul), and also outside Japan, specifically the United States and Europe. This introduction sets up the background and larger context of urban history and planning in Japan, identifies the threads that link the articles, and proposes further directions for research.

Re-Politicizing Wartime Sexual Violence: A Study of the Sexual Assaults on Japanese Women Who Lived in the Japanese Colonies after World War II

Re-Politicizing Wartime Sexual Violence: A Study of the Sexual Assaults on Japanese Women Who Lived in the Japanese Colonies after World War II

明治・大正期における食品製造業者の輸移入原料調達

This paper aims to determine the factors that led to the improvement of soy sauce brewery management during the Meiji and Taisho Eras. In particular, we focus on how the Takanashi family, now Kikkoman Corporation, procured raw materials from 1887 to 1917.The food manufacturing industry accounted for more than 20 percent of the production volume of all industries in pre-war Japan. Until the 1900s, the soy sauce brewing industry was the third largest producer from among all types of food manufacturing industries. Two factors shaped the brewing industry. First, over 50 percent of the production cost went toward the procurement of raw materials. Second, after the late 1890s, a crucial condition for the expansion of the soy sauce industry was securing stable supply of raw materials not only from domestic regions but also from foreign countries and Japanese colonies. Therefore, we analyze the decision-making process of brewery companies with regard to the raw materials they used.Takanashi produced high quality soy sauce and low quality one. However, the price of the high quality sauce increased considerably after the 1890s. Therefore, Takanashi began to increase the production of the high quality sauce. They also began to procure imported raw materials mainly for the low quality sauce to reduce its cost. For the high quality sauce, they chose good quality raw materials. These raw materials procurement strategies played an important role in improving the competitive position of Takanashi's soy sauce in the market. Nonetheless, because the ratio of the quantity of high quality to low quality sauce increased, Takanashi was no longer able to strike a balance between cost reduction of the low quality sauce and quality maintenance of high quality one. This indicates a limitation of these strategies, and it was one of the causes of the emergence of the Noda Shoyu Company, Kikkoman's predecessor, that was established through a merger of individual proprietorships in 1917.

The Metabolic Transition in Japan

Summary The notion of a (socio-) metabolic transition has been used todescribe fundamental changes in socioeconomic energy andmaterial use during industrialization. During the last century,Japandevelopedfromalargelyagrarianeconomytooneoftheworld’s leading industrial nations. It is one of the few industrialcountries that has experienced prolonged dematerializationand recently has adopted a rigorous resource policy. This arti-cle investigates changes in Japan’s metabolism during industri-alization on the basis of a material flow account for the periodfrom 1878 to 2005. It presents annual data for material ex-traction, trade, and domestic consumption by major materialgroup and explores the relations among population growth,economic development, and material (and energy) use. Dur-ing the observed period, the size of Japan’s metabolism grewby a factor of 40, and the share of mineral and fossil materialsin domestic material consumption (DMC) grew to more than90%. Much of the growth in the Japanese metabolism wasbased on imported materials and occurred in only 20 yearsafter World War II (WWII), when Japan rapidly built up largestocks of built infrastructure, developed heavy industry, andadopted patterns of mass production and consumption. Thesurge in material use came to an abrupt halt with the firstoil crisis, however. Material use stabilized, and the economyeventually began to dematerialize. Although gross domesticproduct (GDP) grew much faster than material use, improve-mentsinmaterialintensityarearelativelyrecentphenomenon.Japanemergesasarolemodelforthemetabolictransitionbutis also exceptional in many ways.www.wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/jie

The Word Is Mightier than the Throne: Bucking Colonial Education Trends in Manchukuo

Japanese within the Manchukuo education bureaucracy stood out from their contemporaries in other Japanese colonies in their opposition to including militaristic and Japanese emperor-centered materials in the schools. As late as 1943, they published textbooks that focused on the students' daily lives rather than on encouraging respect for the military or reverence for the Japanese imperial family. Here, the author discusses how the congruence of an attempt by Manchukuo authorities at gaining authenticity and the progressive background of leading Japanese educators in the region brought about an education system that was unlike any other in the Japanese empire. Using Manchukuo textbooks, education journals, and postwar memoirs, the author examines a school of thought among Japanese colonial language educators, referred to as “reform optimists,” who held that whole language education could solve the contradiction between Manchukuo's stated ideal of ethnic equality and the reality of Japanese domination.

Managing Women: Disciplining Labor in Modern Japan (review)

Reviewed by: Managing Women: Disciplining Labor in Modern Japan Helen MacNaughtan (bio) Managing Women: Disciplining Labor in Modern Japan. By Elyssa Faison. University of California Press, Berkeley, 2007. xiv, 227 pages. $39.95. Elyssa Faison has written a very interesting book on Japanese female textile workers during the interwar period. She focuses on the discourse and [End Page 231] counterdiscourse between employers and workers and the systems of management utilized by large textile companies that aimed to define women workers primarily by their gender in an attempt to dissuade women from organizing and striking as workers. She frames her discussion within key themes of gender, ethnicity, and nationalism and locates it more broadly in a dialogue with the tensions surrounding the social (and economic) roles of women in a modernizing Japan. In chapter 1 Faison relates how women entered the modern textile work force during the Meiji period and notes the emergence of paternalistic labor ideology and the passage of the 1929 Factory Law. In chapter 2 she describes how the industry focused on keeping these women workers busy and "out of trouble" after night work had been abolished (by the 1929 legislation). She describes how textile managers were fearful that increased free time would incite young female workers to sexual depravity (leading to pregnancy or prostitution) or that they might have more time to devote to organizing themselves into collective action. Certainly the latter fear was well founded, as she depicts in her later chapters discussing textile strikes. But in some respects I would have liked Faison to delve further into the legitimacy of fears that these women were "dangerously close to falling into prostitution" (p. 51). For example, how founded does Faison think this fear was for textile managers? While such fears (real or otherwise) no doubt provided some motivation for managers to provide educational and other structured activities for their young female workers, there were also other motivations for this, including (as she notes) a preference for a more "holistic approach to the management of workers" (p. 33). In chapter 3 Faison takes a look at "cultivation groups" and the role they played in gendering both men and women in Japan. In particular she looks at the concept of shūyō (cultivation or self-cultivation) and how textile employers used this as a basis for compulsory programs of learning and activity for their female workers, again in an attempt to limit worker time and thereby preempt activism (p. 54). Her account of the Shōjokai (Young Women's Association) and its interest in female workers in this chapter is valuable, as is the discussion of the tensions inherent within the image of the factory girl as a model of filial piety. The Shōjokai wanted to intervene and protect female factory workers from the "polluting influences of modern machinery, the industrial process and urban life" as well as cultivate them in the "womanly arts and improve morals" (p. 63). Faison also describes how the shūyōdan (self-cultivation units) were keen to provide factory girls with training—primarily calisthenics, cleaning (she provides an interesting description and image of the "dust rag dance" [pp. 73–74]), and etiquette-based programs—to fill their nonworking hours. The tensions between the shūyōdan, textile management, and textile unions are palpable (pp. 78–80) [End Page 232] and it would have been interesting to have gained a clearer sense of how these tensions played out between them during these years. Chapter 4 changes tack somewhat in that it focuses on two women: Tatewaki Sadayo, a labor activist who founded a worker's school for women, and her friendship with the proletarian writer Nakamoto Takako who wrote extensively (in semifictionalized form) on the T ōyō Muslin strike of 1930. In this chapter, Faison describes the events of the T ōyō Muslin strike itself, discusses the indirect association of these two women with this strike, and broadly places this narrative within the textile industry's rationalization efforts, the relocation of production to Japanese colonies, and the rise of proletarian consciousness and labor unrest in Japan at this time. Faison then turns again to this very interesting discussion on the sexuality of...