Empire Of Japan Research Articles

“Asia for Asians”: Revisiting Pan-Asianism through the Propaganda Arts of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere

Abstract The slogan “Asia for Asians” has been a central concept of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere and propagated by Japan as it imperialized parts of East Asia, Southeast Asia, South Asia, and Oceania. Without bias to the resulting historical developments and realities, Pan-Asianism is revisited through the propaganda arts and materials proliferated by the Empire of Japan towards its agenda of a unified Asia. Aided by knowledge of art history and criticism, six specifically chosen propaganda arts are analyzed using theories of image analysis drawing from the works of Guillermo (2001), Bartmański, Alexander, and Giesen (2012), and Ross (2002). Three main themes are analyzed: the image of the sphere, the collective identity of the countries in the sphere under Japan, and the meaning of co-prosperity. The themes provide an insight into the development of Pan-Asianism as propagated by the Japanese Empire in its attempt towards Pan-Asianism through the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere.

Fragmented geographies: Tada Fumio and the Japanese empire in Manchuria, Mengjiang and Korea

This paper explores the placement and function of the discipline of geography in the expansion of the Japanese empire, doing so through the prism of the work and field research of Tada Fumio, a leading geographer in Japan both before and after 1945. This examination of this aspect of Tada Fumio's career and its interweaving with the construction and consolidation of Japan's empire will broaden recent studies of imperial Japan's simultaneous encounter with geopolitics and fascism while engaging with Japan's developing ideas about geography as a political and cultural discipline. This paper demonstrates the importance of the entwined histories of Japanese and German geographers in the Japanese empire, as well as documenting Tada Fumio's activities in Manchuria (northeast China) and on the Korean peninsula. Finally, the paper reveals fissures in the historical record of Japanese geographers in continental Asia and, until such time as more subaltern voices can be found, seeks to lay down the foundation for further research on the study of geography in the Japanese empire.

일송 김동삼의 역사인식과 독립투쟁

Born in Andong in Gyeonsangbuk-do in Korea, Kim Dong-sam (pen name: Ilsong) participated in Hyeoksin Yurim (referring to the innovative Confucians in Korean) with Yi Sang-ryong and Yu Insik among others. He also established the Hyepdong School and struggled against the tyranny of Japanese rule by serving as a member of the Andong Branch of Daehan Association, and the Daedong Young Man Group. After the fall of the Korean Empire, he sought asylum in Manchuria for the Korean armed independence movement. He engaged in many of the resolving struggles between Koreans who migrated earlier than 1910 and those who did so after 1910 in the organizations, including Gyeonghaksa, Gongrihoe, Bumindan, and Hanjokhoe, and made every effort to support their settlement and education.
 He also devoted himself to solving and settling conflicts with the Chinese. As the person recognized for his the military authority in the military organizations, including the Military School of the New Rising, Baekseo Nongjang, Sero Gunjeongseo, Daehan Tonguibu, he is highly thought of as an independent activist, who integrated and coordinated independence movement associations throughout Manchuria.
 It can be deemed that his consistent and tireless struggle was based on his strong will for liberation and was highly influenced by Daejongism.
 Yi Sang-ryong, Yu Insik, Shin Chae-ho, Yun Se-bok, who interacted with Kim Dong-sam, were closely related to Daejongism. Yun Se-bok recorded that Kim was the most important person in Daejongism and it can be also ascertained in the report written by the Empire of Japan.
 Before moving to Manchuria, Kim Dong-san was already aware of the historic view of Shin Chae-ho and of Dangunist (with Dangun referring to “the divine progenitor”) nationalism, which had transcended to attaining independence by armed independence struggles after entering asylum in the region.
 His belief in the armed independence movement had a great influence on the Korean National Party led by Kim Gu, which engaged in the independence movement inside of China and the Korean National Revolutionary Party by Kim Won-bong, which can be demonstrated by the memorial ceremony held by the two parties on a large scale after his death.

Seeds of Control: Japan's Empire of Forestry in Colonial Korea by David Fedman (review)

Seeds of Control: Japan's Empire of Forestry in Colonial Korea by David Fedman (review)

SOCIAL CONFLICT IN PETER TIERYAS’S THE MECHA SAMURAI EMPIRE SERIES

This study discusses the social conflict in Peter Tieryas's Mecha Samurai Empire Series. The aim of the study is to find out the reason for the causes of social conflict and their effect in the three novels and to find out the categories and types of social conflicts that appear in the story. The writer chooses the novel series because of the depiction of social conflict in the post-World War two settings where Nazi Germany and the Empire of Japan win the second world war. In this study, the writer uses the qualitative descriptive method and sociological literature approach. To analyse the social conflicts of the novel series, the writer uses Ralf Dahrendorf's social conflict theory. The writer finds that there are two factors why social conflict appears in the novel, the background of the conflict and the attempt of each group in each novel to become the conflict group. Aside from that, the writer finds that the categories of conflict in the United States of Japan and Mecha Samurai Empire novel are exogenous conflict while Cyber Shogun Empire is endogenous conflict. There are four types of social conflict in the story. In the United States of Japan, the type of conflict is George Washingtons against the Empire of Japan. In Mecha Samurai Empire, the type of conflict is the National Revolutionaries of America against the Empire of Japan. In Cyber Shogun Revolution, there are two types of conflict, the Sons of War against the Empire of Japan and the Bloody Mary Group against the Empire of Japan.

China's Muslims and Japan's Empire: Centering Islam in World War II by Kelly A. Hammond

Reviewed by: China's Muslims and Japan's Empire: Centering Islam in World War II by Kelly A. Hammond Selçuk Esenbel (bio) China's Muslims and Japan's Empire: Centering Islam in World War II. By Kelly A. Hammond. University of North Carolina Press, 2020. xviii, 294 pages. $95.00, cloth; $29.95, paper, $22.99, E-book. In China's Muslims and Japan's Empire: Centering Islam in World War II, Kelly Hammond examines the Japanese empire's cultivation of China's [End Page 453] Muslims—primarily Sino-Muslims—amidst the multiethnic composition of the Japanese-occupied territories in China. Identified as regional collaborators in East Asia, Sino-Muslims were also designated as representatives of Japan's interests in the wider world of Islam beyond East Asia, reaching out to Muslim communities in South East Asia, the Middle East, and North Africa through their longstanding transnational network across the Muslim world. The book's first chapter discusses Japan's growing interest in Sino-Muslims from the Meiji period through the puppet regime of Manchukuo until the end of World War II. The second chapter exposes the difficult situation of Sino-Muslims "sitting on a bamboo fence" between the Chinese Nationalists and the Japanese empire. The third chapter situates Sino-Muslims in the Japanese empire's Islam policy projects to "undermine Soviet Communism and Western imperialism" (p. 109)—projects such as presenting Japan as the savior of Islam, the 1938 opening of the Tokyo Mosque, and providing haven to anticolonial and anti-imperialist Muslims and to Tatar Muslims. The latter were officially designated as Japan's Muslims. The Japanese authorities built mosques, erected schools for the education of Sino-Muslim men and women, and sponsored the 1938 Sino-Muslim religious pilgrimage (Hajj) to Mecca and Medina and the pilgrimages of Japanese Muslim agents during the 1930s. The government formed the Greater Japan Islamic League (Dai Nippon Kaikyō Kyōkai) in Tokyo in 1938 for Islamoriented public relations propaganda, with General Hayashi Senjurō as its president and the Russian Muslim Tatar religious cleric-activist Abdurresid Ibrahim as the Muslim "face" of the organization. In 1937 Japanese authorities had already founded the All China Muslim League in Beijing with Wang Ruilan as chairman and Takagaki Shinzō as the Japanese advisor. Chapter 4 moves on to the deployment of Sino-Muslims in Japan's aspirational empire in regions beyond East Asia, discussing the reports of the Greater Japan League which argued in favor of using Sino-Muslims as a "model" for modern Muslims and as a commercial network to sell tea in the Middle East and North Africa as part of Japanese "cultural diplomacy." The final chapter 5 and the conclusion link Japan's policy toward Islam with fascist entanglements, whereby "Islamic spaces and overlapping interests" (p. 183) tied policies of the Japanese empire to those of Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy within the global fascist project. The book concludes that both the Chinese Nationalists and the Chinese Communists were in their postwar regimes impacted by Japan's Sino-Muslim policies factoring in the formation of Sino-Muslims as an ethnic community—Hui minzu. It ends with an epilogue on lessons of history, addressing the current violent and repressive Chinese oppression of Uyghurs. Highlighting the connection of Sino-Muslims to imperial Japan's prewar "Islam policy" (frequently termed kaikyō seisaku in the writings of [End Page 454] Japanese Pan-Asianist intellectuals such as Ōkawa Shūmei), Hammond makes particular use of the photographs, journals, and policy reports of the Greater Japan Islamic League, the Japanese government's propaganda and networking agency targeting Muslim lands near and far. Many publications on Islam in Japan were written by the first generation of Japan's own Islamic studies experts. These included the Arabist scholar Kobayashi Hajime, who was educated in Egypt and became an instructor in the Army Academy during the war; Tanaka Ippei, an expert on Chinese Muslims and interpreter for the Imperial Army; and the Japanese Muslim Suzuki Takeshi, who participated in and wrote about the Japanese Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca. Hammond tapped other rich materials deposited in Waseda University's Dai Nippon Kaikyō Kyōkai database, including the journals Isuramu (Islam) and...

Seeds of Control: Japan's Empire of Forestry in Colonial Korea by David Fedman

Reviewed by: Seeds of Control: Japan's Empire of Forestry in Colonial Korea by David Fedman Robert Winstanley-Chesters Seeds of Control: Japan's Empire of Forestry in Colonial Korea by David Fedman. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2020. Pp. xvii + 292. $40.00 hardcover, $40.00 e-book. "The mountain ranges in Korea cover more than half the total area of the country. Owing to indiscriminate felling of trees without public supervision, which was practiced for a long time past, most of the mountain slopes … have become denuded of trees."1 Traditionally, academic histories of Korean forests almost inevitably start with the assertions of the Japanese colonial authorities, such as this quotation from a report published by Tokyo's famous precolonial Resident-General Itō Hirobumi 伊藤博文 in 1907. In this colonial narrative, Korean forest history, in comparison with Japan's, was not auspicious. The Chosŏn dynasty bequeathed only degraded forests and mountains, covered not in trees but in vividly red soil. Japan has a long history of appointing forest wardens (yamamori 山守) and timber magistrates (zaimokuishi bugyō 材木石奉行) to quantify and survey national, regional, and local [End Page 158] timber resources. In comparison, "the ownership of forests" in Korea was historically ambiguous.2 When it comes to environmental history, these colonial presumptions became commonsense knowledge globally; they have been both internalized by Koreans and projected onto postcolonial Korean narratives about the peninsula's own forests. This intellectual inheritance from the colonial period means that to most academic readers, Park Chung-hee's 박정희 efforts at greening South Korea, through the New Village movement (K. Saemaŭl undong 새마을운동) and other projects in the 1960s and 1970s, are a huge surprise and feel in some way counter to the grain of Korean history. The barren slopes close to population centers in North Korea, with their damaged and depleted ecologies, are what we expect when it comes to Korean forest spaces. This unbalanced narrative inherited from pre-1945 prejudices is of course not true. It was never true. But academic writing is only recently beginning to find a more nuanced and empirical direction. While Conrad Totman's masterful 1989 book outlines in beautiful, intricate detail the minutiae of pre-Meiji Japanese forestry, we have waited until now for a piece of work that does the same in Korean history in English.3 David Fedman's Seeds of Control aims for a historical frame closer to our present time than Totman's, but it shares similar ambitions. It is worth saying at the outset that Fedman's work is the first in an emergent body of work in Korean environmental history. John Lee's doctoral work on Chosŏn's "kingdom of pines" sets the tone for a complete reconfiguration of Korea's forest history: Lee illuminates the reality that Korea had a long history of coherent forest management revolving around red pine (Pinus densiflora) and black pine (Pinus thunbergii), which were perhaps not as practically attractive as the hardwoods most important and traditional to Japan.4 Fedman's book beautifully plays off colonial horror on Korea's alien red soil, as much as it plays on James Scott's words for its title: if states have to see in a particular way to assert political claims and their legitimacy, then they have to seed in a similar way, both agriculturally [End Page 159] and arboreally.5 Seeds of Control explores the various processes by and through which Japanese imperialism constructed a particular vision of modernity on Korean forest landscapes. As with most developmental narratives related to colonial Korea, the approach Fedman describes does not apply to the later period of total-war mobilization, when all the peninsula's resources, including its trees, served Tokyo's military strategy. Fedman's work is most fascinating for the unexpected glitches in the colonial system it describes. Just like the colonial administration, Japanese scientists were unimpressed by Koreans' love for red pine. Pine associations (K. songgye 松契), Korea's traditional institutions for local forest management, were regarded with suspicion and deemed ripe for modernization. According to the Japanese, "Songgye had failed to curb deforestation on a national scale … precisely because of their parochialism. Their legacy was atomized pockets of protected...

Prelude to “Dance of Agony”, and: Memories, and: With Moon, and: Three Flower Songs, and: Nights in Andong, and: When It Snows

Prelude to “Dance of Agony”, and: Memories, and: With Moon, and: Three Flower Songs, and: Nights in Andong, and: When It Snows Kim Ok Translated from the Korean & Introduced by Ryan Choi Born in 1896 in the North when it was just the “north,” in the twilight of the Joseon Dynasty, which had thrived for over five centuries as the last in a long line of kingdoms, Kim Ok was an early Modernist poet, literary translator, and editor. Beyond these endeavors he was known as a secondary school teacher, freelance lecturer, and administrator at the Gyeongseong Central Broadcasting Company (the predecessor of the modern Korean Broadcasting System). A gifted linguist who lived through Korea’s modernization, as well as its colonization and eventual liberation from Japan at the end of the Second World War, he was sent to study at Keio University in Tokyo in 1913, which was common for the Korean academic elite of the time. Notable for being among the first literary translators to work from original texts, Kim was capable in a range of languages beyond his own—Japanese, Chinese, English, French, and even Esperanto—introducing to the Korean language Western literary theory in his essays, as well as English and French Symbolist poetry in Dance in Agony (1921), a landmark anthology of 84 translations of poems by Paul Verlaine, Remy de Gourmont, Charles Baudelaire, W. B. Yeats, and more. This volume, together with Kim’s essays and foreign-inspired poetry, would become a catalyst for the Modernist movement in Korean poetry, which was defined as much by the assimilation of Western aesthetics like free verse and the extension of subject matter beyond Chinese-influenced folk themes (of love and nature, moral and historical pedagogy) as by the rise of Japan, which— having replaced China as the portal to the outer world—would act as both model and foe for Korea, being on the one hand the occupying power but on the other the first country in the region to modernize successfully. Many of the Korean intellectual luminaries who had gone, like Kim, to study in Japan during this era were impressed by Japan’s achievements in everything from basic infrastructure to university academics, and returned home with a vision for the same in their homeland. (By this point in time, Japan had translated a substantial amount of the Western canon, both classical and contemporary. Japan was also up to date in the physical and social sciences, mathematics, medicine, architecture, engineering, law, philosophy, and most other standard areas of academic study.) Although Kim is classified as a Modernist, the label is most appropriate for the early part of his career. After a stint translating Rabindranath Tagore and Sarojini Naidu, Kim—circa 1925, under the sway of an increasingly complicated political scene—deserted the theories and aesthetics of the West that defined his early work, and turned to classical Chinese literature and the folk songs of his country, at which point his own poetry transitioned from the overtly innovative rhythms of [End Page 66] his youth (represented in the following selection by “Prelude to ‘Dance in Agony,’” “Memories,” “With Moon”) to styles and themes indebted to tradition (see: “Cosmos,” “When It Snows”). Also key to this change in subject and tone was a relationship Kim had made as a teacher at the Osan Middle School, where his pupil was Kim Sowol (1902–1934), another gifted student sent to study in Japan, who would posthumously become one of the most celebrated poets of the 20th century in Korea, famous for his only book Azaleas (1925), which is still taught in schools today as an exemplar of modern Korean verse. Osan Middle School was a Christian school, eventually closed by the Empire of Japan (but later reopened and still standing today) for the purpose of limiting the influence of Christianity and inculcating in the Koreans a reverence for the Japanese emperor. In these circumstances, Christianity became a key point of cohesion for the Korean Independence Movement, and it is partly for this reason that it maintains until this day a foothold in South Korean society and identity. Relatedly, during this same period, communism was also making its own inroads...

Kelly A.Hammond: China's Muslims and Japan's Empire: Centering Islam in World War II. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2020; pp. xviii + 294.

Journal of Religious HistoryVolume 46, Issue 1 p. 250-252 BOOK REVIEW Kelly A. Hammond : China's Muslims and Japan's Empire: Centering Islam in World War II. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2020; pp. xviii + 294. Frederick R. Dickinson, Corresponding Author Frederick R. Dickinson frdickin@sas.upenn.edu orcid.org/0000-0003-1138-9827 University of PennsylvaniaSearch for more papers by this author Frederick R. Dickinson, Corresponding Author Frederick R. Dickinson frdickin@sas.upenn.edu orcid.org/0000-0003-1138-9827 University of PennsylvaniaSearch for more papers by this author First published: 07 January 2022 https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9809.12836Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat No abstract is available for this article. Volume46, Issue1March 2022Pages 250-252 RelatedInformation

Japan's Empire of Birds: Aristocrats, Anglo-Americans, and Transwar Ornithology by Annika A. Culver

Reviewed by: Japan's Empire of Birds: Aristocrats, Anglo-Americans, and Transwar Ornithology by Annika A. Culver Miriam Kingsberg Kadia Japan's Empire of Birds: Aristocrats, Anglo-Americans, and Transwar Ornithology. By Annika A. Culver. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2022. 328 pages. ISBN: 9781350184930 (hardcover; also available as e-book). On the surface, few activities seem as apolitical as birdwatching. In 2020, however, the pastime became a national flashpoint when a white woman, Amy Cooper, spuriously accused Christian Cooper (no relation), an African American birdwatcher in New York City's Central Park, of harassment. As feathers flew in the wake of the incident, journalists did not fail to remark upon the long-standing absence (some argued, exclusion) of people of color from the hobby. Did Christian Cooper's participation reflect changes in the traditionally white-dominated, elite ranks of avian enthusiasts? In her latest monograph, historian of East Asia Annika A. Culver unveils the complicated racial and class politics behind the human study of birds through the case of Japan. Japan's Empire of Birds: Aristocrats, Anglo-Americans, and Transwar Ornithology joins a burgeoning body of literature tracing, as its title suggests, both continuity and change across the chronological watershed of Japan's defeat in World War II. The book proceeds forward in time, beginning with the origins of Japanese ornithology (the scientific study of avian species) following the Meiji Restoration of 1868. Early investigations of birds melded enduring Japanese enjoyment and interrogation of avian life with the importation of zoological knowledge and research methods from the West, particularly Great Britain and the United States. Japanese [End Page 352] ornithology initially developed primarily in the hands of "gentleman-scientists," typically men of great wealth with ties to the imperial house and former shogunate. At home, these scholars hunted and collected specimens on their vast estates; abroad, they rubbed shoulders with members of their class at elite institutions such as Harvard and Cambridge, raising Japan's international profile and transforming Euro-American scientific networks into truly transnational circuits. Museums emerged to display not only bird skins and taxidermies, but also the symbolic power of their collectors over the human and natural worlds. Culver draws a provocative comparison between early Japanese ornithologists and "otaku"—predominantly male, contemporary Japanese youths who exhibit a single-minded commitment to their subject of choice: video games, Pokémon, media, trains, and so on. Then (as now), men drew together in homosocial enjoyment of "masculine" pastimes that largely excluded women or relegated them to supporting roles such as typists, research assistants, and caretakers. While Nakanishi Gotō (1895–1984) supervised meetings of the Yachō no Kai (Wild Bird Society), his wife cleaned up after his pet owls. Within the miniscule world of prewar ornithology, Marquess Hachisuka Masauji (1903–1953) loomed large. A "main character" of sorts for the book, he exemplifies the imbrication of avian science, masculinity, and political and social transformation. After fatefully disappointing his illustrious father by breaking his engagement to a Japanese princess for reasons that remain intriguingly vague, Hachisuka departed for a period of study at Cambridge. His experiences at the university, Culver argues, reveal the limits of prewar racial tolerance and the predicament of "honorary whiteness" within the Anglo-American scientific world. During his time in Europe, Hachisuka came to know French aristocrat Jean Théodore Delacour (1890–1985), a noted ornithologist and president of the Ligue pour la protection des oiseaux (League for the Protection of Birds). Some evidence suggests that the pair's shared passion for avian species may have awakened amours of another kind: throughout his life, Hachisuka's most emotionally satisfying relationships appear to have been with men. In any case, Culver concludes, "in terms of contemporary Japanese society's expectations for men [Hachisuka and his peers] could be considered 'queer' to the degree by which birds defined their lives" (p. 63). In the 1930s, Hachisuka built his scholarly reputation on the strength of a five-volume study, published under the title Contributions to Birds of the Philippines, that was based on research conducted during a 1929 expedition to the American colony. While in the field, he formed connections with US ornithologists that were to prove useful during the postwar...

Memorials’ politics: Exploring the material rhetoric of the Statue of Peace

This paper discusses the material rhetoric of the Statue of Peace built in front of the Japanese Embassy in Seoul, South Korea. Installed in 2011 to commemorate so-called “comfort women”—the former sex slaves forced to work in brothels during Korea’s occupation by the Empire of Japan—, several identical-looking copies of the statue have since spread throughout the country and beyond. While many observers have noted the symbolic politics of the sculpture, I argue for taking into account its material dimension too—with the aim of furthering our understanding of how commemorative practices are enabled by mnemonic installations. Building on the scholarship that has addressed the rhetoric of objects and places of remembrance, I ask how the statue acts on and engages with its viewers. Among others, site visits, observations, own experiences, interviews, and visual documentation serve as the basis of the discussion.

Socio-Economic and Political Changes and the Cultural Hybridization of Early Childhood Education and Care since South Korean Independence in 1945

South Korean ECEC has been transformed by dynamic socio-economic and political changes. In these changes, the Korean culture as it is embedded in ECEC is continuously being retranslated and reshaped in the new, and ever-changing context by means of globalization and from those who travel abroad and bring back new ideas. Previous research is limited in that it fails to connect broader Korean cultural and societal changes to changes in ECEC over time. In this paper we illustrate the history of South Korean from its independence from the Empire of Japan in 1945 to today and identify connections between socio-political and economic benchmarks and changes in South Korean ECEC. In doing this, we consider the nature of the centralized South Korean educational system, the human capital approach, care versus education, and cultural hybridity.

Railroads of the Glorious Empires in the late 19th Century: From the Great Game to the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-5

Railroads have been an inevitable part of countries’ expansionist and imperialist policies throughout history. Easing commodity distribution as well as human mobility, railroads also provided the transfer of knowledge and became a means of intelligence sharing. In this view, one can plausibly observe that nations are inclined to allocate budgets for railroad construction in order to extend their power. Moreover, they also followed expansionist policies by constructing ‘transitive’ railroads, connecting extensive regions, or even continents. Hence, investigating railroads sheds light on world history, for it enables one to comprehend the ultimate motives countries had before embarking upon such endeavors. The present research, therefore, analyzes railroad construction, focusing on the nineteenth century. It commences by introducing a brief history of the railroad construction around the globe. Then, it moves on to the Great Game theory and analyzes how the rivalry between the British and Russian Empires increased the speed of constructions with imperialist and expansionist policies behind them. This research also elucidates what impacts railroads built by the Russian Empire had on the Empire of Japan, and how it led to the escalation of the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-5. Moreover, it focuses on the conflicts taking place between the Russian Empire and the United States, in connection to their impacts on the British Empire. In conclusion, the paper demonstrates a trend of how railroads shaped world history, taking into account the example of the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-5.

Overcoming Empire in Post-Imperial East Asia: Repatriation, Redress and Rebuilding ed. by Barak Kushner and Sherzod Muminov, and: In the Ruins of the Japanese Empire: Imperial Violence, State Destruction, and the Reordering of Modern East Asia ed. by Barak Kushner and Andrew Levidis

Reviewed by: Overcoming Empire in Post-Imperial East Asia: Repatriation, Redress and Rebuilding ed. by Barak Kushner and Sherzod Muminov, and: In the Ruins of the Japanese Empire: Imperial Violence, State Destruction, and the Reordering of Modern East Asia ed. by Barak Kushner and Andrew Levidis Philip Seaton Overcoming Empire in Post-Imperial East Asia: Repatriation, Redress and Rebuilding. Edited by Barak Kushner and Sherzod Muminov. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020. 264 pages. ISBN: 9781350127050 (hardcover, also available as softcover and e-book). In the Ruins of the Japanese Empire: Imperial Violence, State Destruction, and the Reordering of Modern East Asia. Edited by Barak Kushner and Andrew Levidis. Hong Kong University Press, 2020. 252 pages. ISBN: 9789888528288 (hardcover, also available as e-book). Overcoming Empire in Post-Imperial East Asia and In the Ruins of the Japanese Empire (hereafter, "Overcoming Empire" and "Ruins," respectively) were produced as part of a 2013–2019 group research project called "The Dissolution of the Japanese Empire and the Struggle for Legitimacy in Postwar East Asia, 1945–1965," managed by Barak Kushner and funded by a European Research Council grant. A simple review of just the two books would comment on the high quality of scholarship across nineteen chapters penned by scholars from a wide range of disciplinary and geographical backgrounds, with the requisite introductory chapters by the editors—in other words, a professional job well done. It would also pick up a few of the key arguments in individual chapters, probably with a little more focus on those chapters to which the reviewer's own research is closely connected. I will adopt that approach in the second half of this review, but first I feel it is important to review the project itself with an eye to the new things its conception allows us to say about the year 1945 and its broader lessons for researchers of East Asian history and beyond. But I should start with a declaration of interest. In November 2016, Barak Kushner invited me to one of his project events at the University of Cambridge to give a talk about my recent fieldwork on contents tourism. Although my paper was not published as part of the project—it ultimately appeared in Japan Review—this experience gave me an appreciation of what was being attempted. Kushner writes on his website that the project coordinated postdoctoral research associates and offered PhD scholarships to investigate "the impact of the fall of the Japanese empire in East Asia."1 The project members held symposia, produced numerous other stand-alone articles, and published a book that predates the two under review here: The Dismantling of Japan's Empire in East Asia: (hereafter "Dismantling").2 It is particularly important to read Overcoming Empire and Ruins with reference to this earlier book if we are to grasp the total scope of the project. Kushner's introduction to Dismantling sets out the project's aims: The [Japanese] empire did not end as cleanly as is often perceived in domestic national histories of Japan, which until recently tended to ignore the legacy of empire outside Japan's [End Page 423] occupied main islands. It is necessary to bring empire back to discussions of postwar East Asian identity and to fold it into a history for the region as a whole with Japan at the center.3 Kushner notes that while there is much scholarship on the creation of the Japanese empire, the common image of Japan's defeat in war has left the dismantling of the empire comparatively underresearched, particularly in transnational perspective. The ambitious scope of these aims mean that they can only realistically be achieved by a team that pools its research expertise in diverse geographical areas, archival material, cultural memories, and disciplinary approaches. Dismantling comprises sixteen research papers, which makes a total of thirty-five papers across the three books. Dismantling has more of a Japanese focus supplemented by a European perspective; Overcoming Empire focuses more on mainland China, Taiwan, and Korea; and Ruins is somewhere in between with coverage across Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and China. The geographical focus of the project, therefore, was East Asia. However, it would have been nice to have a little...

The Art of Persistence: Akamatsu Toshiko and the Visual Cultures of Trans war Japan by Charlotte Eubanks

Reviewed by: The Art of Persistence: Akamatsu Toshiko and the Visual Cultures of Trans war Japan by Charlotte Eubanks Max Ward (bio) The Art of Persistence: Akamatsu Toshiko and the Visual Cultures of Trans war Japan. By Charlotte Eubanks. University of Hawai'i Press, Honolulu, 2020. xviii, 314 pages. $72.00. In the last decade, scholars have started to explore the explosion of artistic activity in Japan following the defeat of militarism and the collapse of Japan's empire in 1945. This activity was part of a wider cultural project carried out by writers, intellectuals, and others to find new forms of political subjectivity to account for the past and to develop new liberatory [End Page 527] modes of cultural and social practice. Indeed, recent scholarship has revealed that some of the most intense debates over political responsibility and subjectivity took place in the domain of cultural production, both in the immediate postwar period and continuing later into the 1960s, including William Marotti, Money, Trains, and Guillotines (2013), Namiko Kunimoto, The Stakes of Exposure (2017), and Justin Jesty, Art and Engagement in Early Postwar Japan (2018), among others.1 Whereas much of this recent work has focused on the politics of artist groups and their collaborations in the postwar period, Charlotte Eubanks's well-written and extensively researched new book The Art of Persistence: Akamatsu Toshiko and the Visual Cultures of Transwar Japan focuses on an individual artist and extends the historical scope to the "transwar" period—roughly 1930–60—in order to explore the ways in which one "might have attempted … to live a socially engaged life as an artist across the ages of empire, war, defeat and protest politics" (p. 4). Eubanks's approach thus counters one of the dominant assumptions informing art historical (and historical) scholarship on Japan, in which 1945 functions as a clear divide, distributing artists and their creative works into clean pre- and postwar periodizations, what Namiko Kunimoto has called elsewhere the "postwar paradigm."2 Such a paradigm also elides the more complicated task of understanding the messy political valences across what might be called Japan's "long transwar" period between 1920 and 1960. Writing against this paradigm, Acts of Persistence thus not only contributes to art historical scholarship but can also be read along with other histories—literary, intellectual, and political—that have explored the experiences of imperialism and war mobilization in Japan during the 1930s and 1940s, and the reckoning with such mobilizations in the postwar period.3 The Art of Persistence centers on the experiences, writings, and artwork of Akamatsu Toshiko (1912–2000)—more commonly known as Maruki Toshiko—across the interwar, wartime, and postwar periods. Eubanks analyzes an impressive amount of sources that include Akamatsu's formal artworks and sketches, but also her travel diaries, publications, and manifestos, [End Page 528] thus combining artistic/visual analysis with close textual readings. Eubanks traces Akamatsu's settler-colonial upbringing in Hokkaido and her travels to Japan's South Seas Mandate (chapter 1), her work illustrating children's books during the Pacific War (chapter 2), travels to the Soviet Union (chapter 3), Akamatsu's political transformations and activities during the Allied occupation (chapters 4 and 5), through to what Akamatsu is best known for: her postwar pacifist artwork (chapter 6), in particular her Genbaku no zu (Nuclear panels, 1950–52), created and exhibited with her husband Maruki Iri (1901–95).4 Similar to Namiko Kunimoto's analysis of Katsura Yuki's (1913–91) transwar artistic activities,5 Eubanks hopes to expand our understanding of Akamatsu beyond just her postwar art and activism by exploring Akamatsu's "wartime activity and its moral implications" (p. 5), not to indict or vindicate, but to "narrat[e] a social history of art" (p. 3) through Akamatsu's individual experiences. To this end, Eubanks proposes a "microhistorical" analysis in which Akamatsu's "lived experience" between 1930 and 1960 and the artworks she produced open into larger "issues in modern Japanese history and visual culture: empire, colonialism, violence, and gender" (pp. 2–3). At times, Eubanks returns to a more conventional biographical mode of analysis whereby she contextualizes Akamatsu's primary sources by citing secondary scholarship on particular historical...

China's Muslims and Japan's Empire: Centering Islam in World War II by Kelly A. Hammond

China's Muslims and Japan's Empire: Centering Islam in World War II by Kelly A. Hammond

Seeds of Control: Japan's Empire of Forestry in Colonial Korea by David Fedman

Seeds of Control: Japan's Empire of Forestry in Colonial Korea by David Fedman

The panorama in Meiji Japan: horizontal and vertical perspectives

ABSTRACT The panorama was introduced to Japan in 1890, two decades after the collapse of the feudal society. Not only the horizontal 360-degree view was a novelty for Japanese audiences, but also the realistic oil paintings drawn in perspective. In the same year, a 12-story viewing tower was erected and the first hot air balloon ascent took place, both in the adjacent Asakusa and Ueno districts where the two major panorama halls stood. These spectacles offered new visual experiences to the masses who were experiencing the new world that had opened to them with the freedom of travel and choice of profession. In other words, with the arrival of late-nineteenth century modernity, people’s gaze expanded both horizontally and vertically. During this period, Japan was in the midst of a rapid process of modernization, aiming at catching up with the Western Great Powers. Concurrently, the Japanese Democracy movement that endorsed values of liberty and civil rights had spread nationwide, and its theorists were among cultural figures who promoted modern and cultural entertainment forms – including the panorama. However, the earlier promises of the Meiji Emperor on creating a democratic society were soon replaced by the pursuit of Japanese Monarchy. The Constitution of the Empire of Japan in 1890 put an end to the Democracy movement and to the freedom of expression. Excavating the visual culture around the panorama and its environment, this article offers an alternative viewpoint on the atmosphere of Japan in the late nineteenth century.

Euiyeoldan’s plan to attack to Japan and Park yeol’s struggle

Founded on Nov. 9, 1919, Chosun Euiyeoldan(義烈團) steadily waged a righteous struggle. In the wake of the failure of the first general attack plan in Korea, the Euiyeoldan reorganized its departments into classified, executive, and propaganda departments from the first half of 1922, establishing a command system, and promoting the second plan through the operation of a number of the first half of 1922. The Euiyeoldan held a secret general meeting in June 1923 and a group of members in October to publicize the Japanese attack at home and abroad. The event in Japan was planned to be carried out in October when the wedding of the Japanese crown prince is scheduled. As a result, Kim Won-bong(金元鳳) dispatched his members to Taiwan, Tokyo, Kobe, Osaka, and Yoko Hama from the first half of the year. The practice of living in Tokyo was left to a group of Park Yeol(朴烈). In the spring of 1922, Park Yeol met Choe Hyok-jin(崔爀鎭), a member of the Euiyeoldan, and signed an agreement with Kim Han(金翰) in Seoul around the fall to deliver the bombs to Tokyo. Park Yeol negotiated the purchase of the bomb through the Shanghai Euiyeol Group and is believed to have succeeded in bringing the bomb safely to somewhere in Tokyo. However, he planned to go on a grand march in October, but he was frustrated when the unexpected September 1 earthquake in Kanto occurred and was arrested during the Korean massacre. Despite the failure, the Euiyeoldan’s plan to move to Japan continued. The attack against Japan, which was carried out by Kim Ji-seob on January 5, 1924, was followed by the “Gyeongbuk Uyoldan Incident” in which 11 members of Beijing’s Euiyeoldan unit were arrested after being smuggled into Korea to collect funds for bomb purchases aimed at attacking Tokyo. In the heart of imperialism, the righteous army’s plan to stage a massive Euiyeoldan struggle against Japan Empire was steadily pursued until the winter of 1922 and 1925.

Multiethnicity and Multilingualism in the Minor Literature of Manchukuo

Although claimed as a nation-state, with a government, a territory, and citizenry, Manchukuo (1932–1945) is a colony of the Empire of Japan, appropriated from Northeast China. As such, Manchukuo’s literary identity complicates the relationship between nationalism and literature, inviting us to rethink the history of Chinese literature in specific and East Asian literary history in general. This article tackles the thorny problem of Manchukuo literary formation by going through Shuimei Shih’s concept of sinophone and Chen Pingyuan’s notion of the multiethnic, only to conclude via a reading of Deleuze and Guattari’s elaboration of Kafka that Manchukuo’s corpus is best approached as a minor literature of its own. The very colonial and local complexity of Manchukuo’s minor literature lies in its multiethnicity and multilingualism. A close reading of Mei’niang, Yokoda Fumiko, and Arsenii Nesmelov, through their deterritorialized Chinese, Japanese, and Russian stories, demonstrates the range of indigenous and exiled writers in their diverse imagination of Manchukuo’s ambiguous sovereignty.