The Japanese Empire: Colonial Livesand Postcolonial Struggles
Kirsten Ziomek
Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus
Course Reader no. 8
2013

The Japanese Empire: Colonial Lives and Postcolonial Struggles

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VOLUME EDITORKIRSTEN ZIOMEK
Hamilton College

SERIES EDITORLAURA HEIN
Northwestern University

EDITORIAL BOARD
Mark Caprio
Lonny Carlile
Parks Coble
Sabine Frühstück
Tom Grunfeld
Laura HeinJames Huffman
Jeffrey Kingston
Susan Long
Laura Miller
Mark Ravina
Mark Selden
Stephen Vlastos

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The copyright of all material in this course reader is held by the respective authors, except whereotherwise noted.
The article “Mamiya Rinzō and the Japanese exploration of Sakhalin Island: cartography andempire” by Brett L. Walker was originally published in the Journal of Historical GeographyVol. 33, pp. 283-313 (2007). © 2006 Elsevier Ltd. Used with permission. All rights reserved.
The article “Memories of Okinawa: Life and Times in the Greater Osaka Diaspora” by Steve
Rabson was originally published in Islands of Discontent: Okinawan Responses to Japanese andAmerican Power, ed. Laura Hein and Mark Selden. © 2003 Rowman & Littlefield. Used withpermission. All rights reserved.

The volume editor can be contacted at kziomek@hamilton.edu. From Fall 2013 Ziomek can becontacted at Adelphi University, where she will begin her appointment as an assistant professor in the
Department of History.

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The Japanese Empire: Colonial Lives and Postcolonial Struggles
Introduction

5Part I: Expanding the Contours of the Japanese Empire

8

Brett Walker

9

Brett Walker, “Mamiya Rinzō and the Japanese Exploration of Sakhalin
Island: Cartography and Empire,” The Asia-Pacific Journal, February 3,
2008.
Vivian Blaxell

44

Vivian Blaxell, “Designs of Power: The ‘Japanization’ of Urban and RuralSpace in Colonial Hokkaidō,” The Asia-Pacific Journal 9.35.2, August 31,
2009.
Prasenjit Duara64

Prasenjit Duara, “The New Imperialism and the Post-Colonial Developmental State: Manchukuo in comparative perspective,” The Asia-Pacific
Journal, January 30, 2006.
Part II: Experiences of the Colonized85

Katsuya HIRANO

86

Katsuya Hirano, “The Politics of Colonial Translation: On the Narrative of
the Ainu as a ‘Vanishing Ethnicity,’” The Asia-Pacific Journal 4.3.9, January
12, 2009.
PARK Yuha
Park Yuha, “Victims of Japanese Imperial Discourse: Korean Literature
Under Colonial Rule,” The Asia-Pacific Journal, October 16, 2008.

108

The Japanese Empire: Colonial Lives and Postcolonial Struggles
TOMIYAMA Ichiro

4
129

Tomiyama Ichiro, “On Becoming ‘a Japanese’: The Community of Oblivion
and Memories of the Battlefield,” The Asia-Pacific Journal, October 26,
2005.
Steve Rabson

145

Rabson, Steve. “Memories of Okinawa: Life and Times in the Greater
Osaka Diaspora.” Islands of Discontent: Okinawan Responses to Japaneseand American Power. Ed. Laura Hein and Mark Selden. Lanham, Maryland:
Rowman & Littlefield, 2003. 99-134.
Part III: Postcolonial Struggles

174

Scott Simon

175

Scott Simon, “Formosa’s First Nations and the Japanese: From colonial
rule to postcolonial resistance,” The Asia-Pacific Journal, January 4, 2006.
KAWABATA Shunichi and KITAZAWA Yuki

193

Kawabata Shunichi and Kitazawa Yuki, “A Story That Won’t Fade Away:
Compulsory Mass Suicide in the Battle of Okinawa, The Asia-Pacific
Journal, July 12, 2007.
William Underwood

198

William Underwood, “New Era for Japan-Korea History Issues: Forced
Labor Redress Efforts Begin to Bear Fruit,” The Asia-Pacific Journal, March
8, 2008.
ann-elise lewallen

208

ann-elise lewallen, “Indigenous at last! Ainu Grassroots Organizing andthe Indigenous Peoples Summit in Ainu Mosir,” The Asia-Pacific Journal
48.6.8, November 30, 2008.
Recommended Further Reading

237

The Japanese Empire: Colonial Lives and Postcolonial Struggles

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Introduction
This reader analyzes the formation of the Japanese empire and also challenges
traditional ideas about the origins and contours of the Japanese empire. Instead of viewing
the 1895 Chinese cession of Taiwan as Japan’s first colonial acquisition and the start ofJapan’s imperial drive, the authors featured in this reader locate the beginnings of Japaneseimperialism earlier in the 19th century, when rising western powers created a sense ofcrisis and threat in Japan. These fears first led to the colonization of territories whosesovereign nature was ambivalent—namely Hokkaido (Ezochi) in 1869 and Okinawa (theformer Ryūkyū Kingdom) in 1879. Locating the first imperialist acts here reminds us thatsome regions of Japan today were independent two hundred years ago. Essays in thisreader examine how and in what ways the Japanese government simultaneously worked toevade becoming a colony of other powerful nations and asserted that it had the right tocontrol other places.
While early Japanese imperialism was fueled by this attempt to resist colonization
by western powers, this imperialist drive would later take on a more aggressive form.
Japan’s increasingly isolationist policies and creation of the puppet state of Manchukuo
would propel it into a multi-front war, known as the Asia-Pacific War, which ended inJapan’s defeat in 1945. The Japanese empire’s brutal wartime aggression during wartime
led to many horrors: the recruitment of military “comfort women,” the medical
experiments conducted on human subjects by Unit 731, the Nanjing Massacre, and theJapanese Imperial Army’s encouragement of Okinawans to commit suicide during theBattle of Okinawa, to name just a few. Although colonial policies restricted freedoms andthe ways in which colonial subjects could participate in everyday life in Japan even before
war broke out, the advent of war altered colonial subjects’ lives to an even greater extent.
Some colonial subjects believed they could become Japanese by serving in the Imperial
Army while other colonial subjects’ experiences of war reconfirmed their lowly status in
the empire. For example, some were conscripted into forced labor typically under muchworse conditions than experienced by Japanese. A second example is the many Okinawans
who were singled out by the Japanese Imperial Army as “spies” during the Battle of
Okinawa, since the Japanese distrusted the local civilians due to exaggerations of theirsupposed differences.
The Japanese empire comprised a variety of legally subordinated areas: formalcolonies (Taiwan, Korea, Karafuto), an ostensibly independent puppet state (Manchukuo),
and territories which it controlled under a League of Nations Mandate (islands in
Micronesia). In addition, as mentioned above, the formerly independent areas of Okinawa
and Hokkaido were naturalized (made to appear as if it already belonged) into the nation
state proper (naichi).1
1 Although Okinawa and Hokkaido were both incorporated into the nation state somedifferences in their governance distinguished them from other prefectures. For example,
the military conscription of Okinawans and Ainu began in 1898, twenty-five years after
implementation of the nationwide conscription law in 1873. Furthermore, differences in
educational and economic administration distinguished both Okinawa and Hokkaido fromother prefectures. In Okinawa, land reform, tax reform, and full representation in the Diet
were all delayed.

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Most essays in this reader explain the contours of the empire, the processes ofimperialization, and what it meant for colonial subjects to “become Japanese.” Theseessays do not fully show the brutalities of the colonial experience, in part because some of
the worst events took place during the Asia-Pacific War. Those interested in the wartime
experiences of the colonized should also examine the APJ course readers, “Minorities inJapan,” edited by Gerald Iguchi (2013) and “War in Japanese Popular Culture,” edited by
Matthew Penney (2012).
The essays chosen for Part I illustrate current trends in analyses of the Japanese
empire, which consider the processes of empire building to be synonymous andintertwined with those of modern nation building. Each author uses a different lens to
examine Japanese empire building, such as the colonization and transformation of urban
and natural space, the mapping of territories, and the creation of new forms of imperialismthat were not modeled on the empires of European powers. While these new forms ofimperialism—as exemplified by Manchukuo—were influenced by the west and evenshaped by that influence, their institutional framework and the rhetoric underlying theirestablishment were themselves original creations.
The essays in Part II all explore colonial subjecthood through an examination ofcolonial literature, non-fiction writings of colonial subjects, and the memories of colonialsubjects seeking to “become Japanese.” All the authors in this section argue for acomplicated and ambivalent understanding of the location of subalterns (those of inferiorrank)2 in the empire. The diversity of colonial experiences and the complexity ofrelationships formed between colonizer and colonized cannot be depicted in the black-andwhite terms of oppressor and oppressed. Essays in this reader illustrate this ambivalenceby showing how colonial subjects understood and negotiated their place within the empire.
Beyond demonstrating this multiplicity of experiences, the essays in this collection
also show how colonial subjects created mixed and hybrid identities in the postcolonial
period: some former colonial subjects rejected their heritage to maintain their
Japaneseness, some fiercely guarded their ethnic diversity with pride, and still otherssought a dual identity as not either/or but both. Authors of these essays would agree that
there is no singular Korean, Okinawan, Ainu, or Taiwanese Aborigine voice, and that ethnic
identities are constantly being reformed and rearticulated well into the postcolonial period.
This postcolonial experience is the main theme of Part III. The harsh realities offorced labor and military conscription of colonial subjects before 1945 continue to affectdiplomatic relationships between the Japanese government and former territories once
under Japan’s rule, such as Korea and Taiwan. These tensions flare up over such issues asrepatriating both people and the remains of the dead, and controversies over depictions ofcolonial histories and war. These issues illustrate the very real struggles by former
colonized subjects to receive compensation or acknowledgement of their past oppression.
2 “Subaltern meaning ‘of inferior rank,’ is a term adopted by Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937)

to refer to those groups in society who are subject to the hegemony of the ruling classes.”
He defined peasants, workers and other groups denied access to “hegemonic power” assubaltern but in colonial and postcolonial studies subaltern has become synonymous withdefining both the colonized and those at the peripheries of society due to their race orgender as well as Gramsci’s class concerns, or a combination of all these factors. See Bill
Ashcroft, Post-Colonial Studies: The Key Concepts (London: Routledge, 2001): 177-8.

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In the postcolonial world order, some former colonized people—such as the Ainu andTaiwanese Aborigines—have become involved in a transnational movement predicatedupon a platform of indigeneity (the state of being native or belonging naturally to the land).
As indigenous people they fight for three main goals: 1) the recognition of their indigeneity
by the government, 2) a stake in the political process, and 3) redress for the effects ofcolonization, discrimination, or economic marginalization. Many former colonized subjects
struggle to maintain their individual points of view in a climate in which various groups
attempt to mobilize ethnicity and indigeneity for different geo-political purposes. The
issue of indigeneity, and contestations over who has the right to speak on behalf of an
indigenous group, remind us that claims of representation are often contested processes
imbued with power struggles among the members of indigenous groups. For study beyond
the introduction to the Japanese empire that these essays provide, interested individuals
are encouraged to consult the suggested reading list at the end of this course reader.

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Part I: “Expanding the Contours of the Japanese Empire”
The articles included in Part I challenge traditional understandings of Japanese
empire, approaching the issue in three different ways. Brett Walker’s article counters theconventional thinking that the roots of Japanese imperialism began as a response to the1853 arrival of Commodore Matthew Perry and his black ships, which forced the openingof Japan in the form of the unequal treaties he imposed upon Japan. Walker instead argues
that the Tokugawa government was aware of many threats to its national defense in theearly 19th century, and its attempt to map Sakhalin—a territory whose borders werealready contested between Japan and Russia—was a way to claim sovereignty, backed by
one of the traditional tools of empire, cartography. The next article, by Vivian Blaxell,
examines how the colonization of Hokkaido was aided by efforts to naturalize and Japanize
both its urban and rural space. Blaxell’s article does two things: first, it acknowledges that
Hokkaido was the Japanese empire’s first colony; second, it treats nation-building andempire-building as twin forces that fed into each other and were often inextricable. Finally,
Prasenjit Duara’s article points out that Manchukuo maintained the façade of a legallysovereign nation while it was in reality under the ultimate economic and political control ofanother power, Japan. Duara argues that Japan’s new kind of imperialism set the precedent
for countries like the Soviet Union and the United States, who later adopted similar
practices.

Walker: Mamiya Rinzō and the Japanese Exploration of Sakhalin Island

9“Mamiya Rinzō and the Japanese Exploration of Sakhalin Island: Cartography and
Empire”
Brett Walker
February 3, 2008
http://japanfocus.org/-Brett_L_-Walker/2655
In this article Walker argues that Japanese imperial processes began much earlier
than other scholars often assume; the Tokugawa government was well aware of various
geo-political threats that certain countries posed to Japan’s national defense in the early
19th century. Specifically, both the Qing Empire and Russia were poised to claim
sovereignty over Sakhalin, an island in the North Pacific, through their competing attempts
to map the territory. Walker examines the journeys of several Japanese cartographers,
especially Mamiya Rinzō, who were commissioned by the Tokugawa government to map
Sakhalin first and determine the borders between Japan and Russia. Walker argues that,while European countries were often “centers of calculation” that sought to amass scientificknowledge for the benefit of imperial projects, the Japanese cartographic efforts were an
attempt by a “periphery of calculation” to rival these claims.3 The Tokugawa government’s
mapmaking activities were not only a way to fend off European colonialism, but used thesame technology as the Russians, which allowed Japan to claim that it was a scientificallyadvanced society and therefore had a right to control Sakhalin. According to Walker,
mapping distant lands was “an inherent exercise in state logistical power” because it
showed that the state was strong enough to amass the manpower and ships to embark onsuch endeavors. The imperial processes that would enable Japan to successfully
incorporate the southern part of Sakhalin (called Karafuto) into the Japanese empire in1905 were thus set into motion almost a hundred years prior to Karafuto’s colonization.
Throughout the 19th century the contested borders of the Kuril Islands, Hokkaido,
and the Ryūkyū Kingdom provoked similar fears that if Japan did not act to claim
sovereignty over these territories, other nations would. Walker goes on to discuss how
Japanese surveyors tried to define the level of civility or barbarity of other people byexamining differences in customs and practices. Early modern Japanese constructednotions of ethnic identity through a delineation of concentric circles, in which the people
who were the furthest away from the Japanese core had the most customary differencesfrom the Japanese, and thus were considered the most barbaric. While the Japanese saw
these people as Other, in the first half of the 19th century they did not yet share the western
analyses of biological race but saw these differences in terms of culture. The western
discourses, which emphasized the idea that civilization was tied to race, only began topermeate Japanese articulations of empire in the late 19th century.

3 Walker uses a “center of calculation” to denote an imperial power that was alreadyglobally strong and the “peripheries of calculation” to describe territories that had notachieved parity with the imperial powers.

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Mamiya Rinzō and the Japanese Exploration of Sakhalin Island: Cartography and Empire
Brett L. Walker
A New Introduction by Brett L. Walker
Maps can be powerful tools of nation building and empire, and therefore powerful historicalsources. Whether they delineate tidal patterns, measure altitude, chart seafloors, identify ethnic
communities, or bind nations, maps provide a potent lens through which people view the world
and, in turn, spatially contextualize their experiences. Because of their power as historicalsources, maps also serve as useful pedagogical devices when teaching about Japan. Recently,
major research universities have pushed the importance of “original” undergraduate research.
This is complicated if the student’s interest is Tokugawa Japan, because archival documentation
is notoriously difficult to read. Maps, however, offer an alternative. Of course, maps –particularly pre-modern maps drawn before the global spread of the cartographic sciences –contain marginal text; but because they are visual sources, they can, with the aid of an adept
teacher, appeal to the creative inclinations of a notoriously visually oriented generation. Students
learn that maps often represent – and often even drive – major historical events. This is certainly
true of the maps drawn by Mamiya Rinzō, a collection of beautifully preserved pieces held at the
Resource Collection for Northern Studies (Hoppō Shiryō Shitsu) at Hokkaido University.
Because they are such rich sources, and because there are so many kinds, maps can beinterpreted in numerous ways. They can depict cadastral surveys; they can also depict Buddhist
cosmologies. Bruno Latour argued that maps, when crafted by European imperialists according
to the “language of science,” and then dispatched to “centers of calculation,” concentrated
scientific knowledge in the hands of imperial states. In this process, local “beliefs” (of native
groups) were transformed into normative “knowledge” to be deployed by European states inelaborate colonial projects. Indeed, with the crafting of maps according to the language ofscience, the “implicit” understanding of locals became “explicit” information used in Europe’s
capital cities; and “local” ways of knowing succumbed to European “universal” knowledge. In
this manner, maps were stable and movable inscriptions that charted the pathways and borders of
the colonial enterprise. Michael Bravo, by contrast, has cautioned that even “stable, portable”
maps, ones drawn according to the language of science, need to be seen as the results of thecross-cultural production of knowledge. European mapmakers negotiated with locals for accessto geographical information. Even as the product of cross-cultural negotiations, however, they
still proved compelling tools in the anticipation and creation of empire.
J.B. Harley argued that maps represent a kind of historical language, one that speaks as loudly as
written documents. Sometimes they can speak even louder. Maps can be tricky, however,
because, as a product of cartography, they can be disguised as just another “valueless” or“objective” science. Historians have become adept at interrogating and deconstructing written
documents, but they have proven less adept at exposing the “historically specific codes”
contained in maps. Because maps serve as an “authoritative” resource, one often controlled by
the state, they were used to delineate nations and anticipate empires. That is, as Daniel Clayton
writes, maps provided the scientific “geopolitical framework” for colonial projects. Mostly, they
provided a “geopolitical framework” for nineteenth-century European powers; but China andJapan also deployed modern maps to anticipate their empires.

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In this article, which appeared in the Journal of Historical Geography, I argue that early modern
Japanese maps, specifically those drafted by Mamiya Rinzō (1775-1844) and Inō Tadataka(1745-1818), function in multiple capacities and, therefore, contain layers of “historicallyspecific codes” that, if contextualized properly, enhance our understanding of Japanese history
and, more broadly, East Asian history. To begin with, maps by Mamiya and Inō served as spatial
parallels of an emerging “national consciousness” in Japan, one that was taking place in“nativist” (kokugaku) discursive communities around the country. These national maps, which
traced the coastal boundaries of Japan, bound the abstract “collective memory” (as Eiko Ikegami
describes it) or the “library of public information” (as Mary Elizabeth Berry describes it) thatemerged in the late eighteenth century. In other words, if for “nativist” scholars, imagining thenation meant “restoring” the emperor to power through the study of ancient texts and poems, forcartographers such as Mamiya and Inō, it meant geographically binding (according to global,
normative cartographic standards), and thereby delineating, the physical country called Japan.
Cartographers, too, imagined the nation, only they did so with maps.

Records of exploration of the Sakhalin and “Todatsu” (eastern Siberia) regions in 1808-09 (Bunka 5, 6) byMamiya Rinzo, which were presented to the Tokugawa Shogunate

Maps also hastened Japan’s thrust into the modern age and, by anticipating empire and emptying
foreign lands of their native inhabitants, facilitated later Japanese colonial projects in the North
Pacific. Modern, scientific maps emptied lands of peoples, sequestering this information(peoples’ customs [fūzoku], for example) in illustrated ethnographies. Hence, maps vacatedThe Japanese Empire: Colonial Lives and Postcolonial Struggles

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foreign lands, preparing them for occupation. Maps also brought foreign lands to the “centers of
calculation,” among which Edo (and Tokyo), not only European capitals, must be included.
Maps were brought to Tokugawa policymakers in Edo such as the astronomer Takahashi
Kageyasu (1785-1829), who sought information on the borders that separated Japan, Russia, andthe Qing Empire. Maps provided Takahashi with a “geopolitical framework,” one different fromthe Sinocentric tributary order that had dominated East Asian geopolitics for centuries. In
essence, Takahashi sought a more modern way of looking at the world. Maps also facilitated theJapanese response to European imperialism by marking the boundaries of Japan in a languagethat Europeans understood, the language of science; but maps also facilitated Japan’s nineteenthcentury move into Sakhalin Island and beyond by anticipating empire.
This article explores these facets of early modern maps, and many others, including where these
two mapmakers came from and what their activities tell us about early modern Japanese society.
It also narrates the travels of Mamiya and his Sakhalin guides (Mamiya’s partners in the crosscultural production of cartographic knowledge), as they trod through these cold, northern
territories, naming mountains (and thereby possessing them), surveying forests and fisheries (forfuture exploitation), and tracing the coastline of Sakhalin Island and beyond. Often, historians ofJapan reserve discussion of the scientific mapping and surveying of foreign lands for the postMeiji experience, when Japan imported the modern methods of nation building, industrialization,science, and imperialism. What the maps of Mamiya and Inō demonstrate is that Japan’s lurch
into the modern age predates the Meiji Restoration, as does Japan’s emergence as an East Asianimperial power.

Mamiya Rinzō and the Japanese exploration of Sakhalin Island: cartography and empire
Brett L. Walker
Abstract
In 1808-1809, a Japanese cartographer named Mamiya Rinzō (1775-1844) traveled to Sakhalin
Island, called Kita Ezo or Karafuto by the Japanese, to map the land and document its
inhabitants and natural features. In the seventh month of 1809, according to the lunar calendar,
Mamiya arrived at Deren, a Chinese outpost along the Amur River in the Heilongjiang region.
When Mamiya mapped Sakhalin and central Heilongjiang, he employed Western cartographic
sciences to guard Japanese sovereignty by delineating national borders between Russia, China,
and Japan; but he also ‘anticipated empire’ in a manner reminiscent of European powers. His
maps placed Sakhalin on a universally recognizable grid and emptied the land of its inhabitants,
who were formally relegated to the pages of illustrated ethnographies. Mamiya’s activities, aswell as those of cartographer Inō Tadataka (1745-1818), suggest a global early modern
experience with cartography and ethnography, one in which Japan emerged as a periphery of
calculation and deployed cartographic tools to construct nation and empire.
In 1808, only after ice on the North Paciﬁc began to break apart, a Japanese explorer named
Mamiya Rinzō (1775-1844), traveling with his colleague Matsuda Denjir (b. 1769), an ethnic
Nivkh guide, and a handful of survey tools, was stopped dead in his tracks at Cape Rakka, on thewest coast of Sakhalin Island, by deep, stinking beds of rotten kelp. Reportedly, the kelp covered
the littoral landscape for as far as the eye could see and proved, along with cold weather, anWalker: Mamiya Rinzō and the Japanese Exploration of Sakhalin Island

13

insurmountable obstacle for a survey mission that had held so much promise. The Tokugawa
shogun and his chief science adviser, the astronomer Takahashi Kageyasu (1785-1829), hadsponsored the mission, seeking to map, with the best survey technologies available, the nationalboundaries between Japan, Russia, and the Qing empire. Disappointed by the rotten kelp (butcertainly not the existence of kelp given the ingredients of Japanese cuisine), Mamiya boarded asmall boat and paddled westward, some 2000 m or so, oﬀ the coast and into the strait. Once
there, he carefully positioned the craft and gazed northward and conﬁrmed, as no other explorer
had, that Sakhalin was an island and not a peninsula. Eventually, looming signs of Sakhalin’s
harsh winter forced Mamiya and Matsuda to return southward, but the next year Mamiya
traveled alone as far as Deren, a Chinese outpost in Manchuria, making contact with Qingoﬃcials and other local headmen and traders.1
When Mamiya had positioned his small craft in those cold waters, he navigated historicalcurrents both common and uncommon to early modern experiences with the social constructionof space. Mamiya’s mission to determine borders in the north constituted a calculated shogunal
response to the threat posed by Western surveying in the region, an eﬀort to turn European
cartographic tools of empire into tools that resisted imperialism by geographically binding and,
thereby, cartographically guarding Japan’s sovereignty: tools that proved capable of delineating
Japan’s borders in a manner recognizable e and hence more legitimate e to predatory Western
nations. But Mamiya’s scientiﬁc maps of Sakhalin proved not only instrumental in defending
Japan’s sovereignty and regional interests, they assisted with later Japanese claims in the North
Paciﬁc. That is to say, Mamiya’s maps anticipated Japanese imperialism on Sakhalin in a mannerreminiscent of the role maps played in British claims in Australia, India, and the Paciﬁc Northwest of North America.
In the case of Japan, Mamiya’s maps evidenced a new manner of viewing national sovereignty
and geographic space, similar to what Laura Hostetler has argued of eighteenth-century Qing
Chinese cartography. In Mamiya’s Sakhalin maps no multiple or overlapping sovereignties
existed and they, unlike earlier Japanese maps, could be deciphered by all who knew thelanguage of the cartographic sciences, which made the shoguns covet them for several reasons. 2
To begin with, Mamiya’s use of spatial technologies to delineate borders and anticipate
Northeast Asian empire demonstrates that Japan, though not always motivated by the same goals
as Western nations, was becoming part of a global early modern order, one where European
countries, the United States, and the Qing empire (1644-1911) all deployed similar cartographic
technologies in elaborate mapping projects that met the needs of mutually understood nationaland geopolitical concerns. Importantly, Mamiya drafted maps of Sakhalin simultaneous to Inō
Tadataka’s (1745-1818) successful eﬀort to map Japan’s entire coastline: Mamiya’s projectillustrates Japan’s early anticipation of empire in the north, while Inō’s illustrates Japan’s
cartographic fortiﬁcation of the nation against the real threat of Western imperialism.
Such maps and, in the case of Mamiya’s writings, empirically-generated ethnographies, provided
visual representations of Japan’s future empire and its people well before the Japanese everformalized sovereignty over southern Sakhalin in 1905 after war with Russia. Placing the Qing
empire, as Hostetler has done, and Tokugawa Japan within a global cartographic order serves tocomplicate the notion that early modernity (and its accompanying mapmaking projects) remains
the exclusive domain of European countries. Western cartographers invented many of the
cartographical tools used in China and Japan to map those East Asian realms, but more relevant
is that Qing and Tokugawa policymakers invented new ways and discovered new places toThe Japanese Empire: Colonial Lives and Postcolonial Struggles

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deploy them for their shared nation-and empire-building projects.3
Hostetler also points out that such cartographic projects paralleled the development of an
emerging ‘national consciousness’ in eighteenth-century China. Similarly, Inō’s mapping ofJapan’s coastline and Mamiya’s mapping of Sakhalin paralleled the rise in prominence of‘nativist’ learning, as represented by such ﬁgures as Motoori Norinaga (1730-1801) and Hirata
Atsutane (1776-1843), and other ‘proto-modern’ national discourses, including the politicallycharged Mito School ideology, which sought to weaken the de-centered Tokugawa feudal orderand ‘restore’ the emperor to his rightful position as ruler.4 Nativist scholars focused theirconsiderable talents on parsing early Japanese songs and poems to distinguish them fromwritings that used Chinese characters, as well as to separate Shinto beliefs from imported
Buddhist ones, the Japanese emperor from China’s less-majestic ‘Son of Heaven,’ and NeoConfucianism from the native stories that, according to Eiko Ikegami, exempliﬁed the Japanese‘collective memory’. Ikegami argues that, through ‘tacit modes of communication’ that took
place in public spheres outside the feudal order and that transcended the ‘status system,’ theJapanese forged mutual notions of public ‘civility’ in the early modern period and, in turn,developed a ‘proto-modern’ national consciousness by evoking the shared aesthetic networks
and cultural assumptions in which all Japanese participated.5
Mary Elizabeth Berry calls these networks the ‘library of public information,’ which, after theadvent of Tokugawa rule, ‘created from ﬁssured parts an integrally conceived ‘‘Japan’’’.6 Of
course, maps proved an important part of this process. For nativist scholars, however, the unifying symbol of ‘aesthetic networks’ or the ‘library of public information’ was the Japanesemonarchy, which, they submitted in the early nineteenth century, needed to be ‘restored’ topower.7 Mapmaking was part of this project to imagine the nation: Japan’s late eighteenth andearly nineteenth-century ‘collective memory,’ or nascent national consciousness, did not
manifest itself in the ﬂamboyancy of the crashing symbols and trumpeting brass of a Europeanstyle military parade, but rather more serenely in the national networks of haikai poetry circles
that brought together people from all walks of life to share in Japan’s ‘tacit modes ofcommunication’. Such aesthetic modes of communication set Japan apart from its European
counterparts to be sure, but they proved no less instrumental in the development of full-blown
Japanese nationalism after the Meiji Restoration of 1868.
Late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century maps of Japan visually represented the spatial
borders of Japan’s ‘collective memory,’ or what Benedict Anderson called an ‘imaginedcommunity’.8 Inō and Mamiya scrapped the traditional Japanese practice of writing extensive text
or drawing taxonomic representations of barbarian ‘others’ on maps themselves in favor of
longitudinal and latitudinal lines and other elements of the ‘language of science,’ ones morecommon to the global early modern community than to earlier Japanese practices. Ethnography,
in turn, became characterized by empirical observations rather than second-hand information
about fantastic ‘barbarians,’ mostly derived from older Chinese encyclopedias.
In other words, on Mamiya’s maps, the ‘land’ mapped cartographically became disassociatedfrom the ‘people’ documented ethnographically; through separate categories of scientiﬁcknowledge the land was emptied, placed on a grid for all cartographically literate people to read,and then made available to policymakers in Edo (present-day Tokyo), the Tokugawa capital.9 As
Hostetler writes in the case of China, ‘Both in the formation of modern nation-states and in
expansion abroad, territory came to be viewed more and more as a resource to be dominated orWalker: Mamiya Rinzō and the Japanese Exploration of Sakhalin Island

15

controlled by a political center. The land took on a value separate and distinct from those who
occupied it’.10 For his part, Mamiya deﬁned ethnic groups not according to their relationship tothe land, but according to important Confucian concerns, such as their various rites and rituals.11
As with most eighteenth and nineteenth-century Japanese who wrote about their travel
experiences, Mamiya focused on the ‘customary’ diﬀerences of Sakhalin people from Japanese,
because highlighting such diﬀerences served as another powerful spatial tool, just as thecompass, astrolabe, and map did. One aspect of Mamiya’s travel writings that diﬀers from theEuropean experiences with cartography and ethnography is that descriptions of diﬀerent peoples
and places still served as a spatial device, particularly when most people in Japan, including the
Tokugawa shoguns, remained more or less illiterate to the intricacies of the newly imported
European language of science. Generally, what they understood was this: the more diﬀerently
people looked and acted from themselves, particularly when it came to food and hairstyles, themore distant they must be, because ‘Japanese-ness,’ as we shall see below, was largely (but ofcourse not exclusively) deﬁned in spatial terms, as proximity to the ancient capital and cultural
center of Kyoto (Japan’s aesthetic hub and where the emperor resided) and a handful of otherJapanese cities.
When he drew his maps, Mamiya abstracted Sakhalin from its local milieu and positioned it on arecognizable grid and its inhabitants within ethnographic categories so that it could be seen froma decidedly early modern vantage point. Mamiya initiated a ‘process of valuation’ that was the
product of early modern imperial values and not native Sakhalin or even native Japanese ones,
and such values framed the parameters of maps, ethnographies and, by extension, the organizational grid modern nations came to impose on their known world. The Mamiya expedition
presented new ways of assigning value to Sakhalin, ones that contributed to nineteenth-century
Japanese nation-building and, later, empire-building in the North Paciﬁc.12 Once Mamiya’s
cartographies and ethnographies were brought back to Edo, and then disembodied andcalculated, Tokugawa oﬃcials proved able to ‘see like a state,’ as James Scott describes thissimpliﬁed, modernist vantage point, on the northernmost boundaries of the Tokugawa realm.13
Mamiya’s science
Most Japanese cartographers involved with the exploration of Sakhalin (and Japan’s earlymodern cartographic projects in general) came from the peasantry. In Japan, the Neo-Confucian
ideology adopted by the Tokugawa shoguns in the seventeenth century established a natural
hierarchy that placed the ‘samurai’ at top of the social heap, while the ‘peasantry,’ ‘artisans,’ and‘merchants’ descended in that order. This brand of Neo-Confucianism, along with Shinto
teachings and certain Buddhist creeds, formed the orthodox ideology of early modern Japan.14 As
David Howell explains, the ‘status system,’ though supposedly static, remained quite dynamic
and actually held little weight in Tokugawa legal practice. Often, in legal ledgers of various
sorts, peasants, artisans, and merchants comprised the categories of ‘commoner,’ who were
‘townspeople’ when in the cities and ‘peasants’ when in the countryside. Therefore, peasantry, asa status category, needs to be seen more as an occupational title than an actual description of
livelihood, because peasants worked many types of jobs.15 Subsequently, many peasants
supplemented their livelihoods through non-agricultural means: this fact made Japan’seighteenth-century commoner status an extraordinarily diverse segment of society.16
Certainly, this helps explain why a number of explorers who emerged during Japan’s age ofThe Japanese Empire: Colonial Lives and Postcolonial Struggles

16

exploration—roughly the period from the Tenmei era (1781-1788) through the ﬁrst decades of
the nineteenth century; an age that included Mogami Tokunai (1754-1836), Matsuda Denjirō, Inō
Tadataka, Mamiya Rinzō, and others involved with surveying Ezochi (present-day Hokkaido),
Kita Ezo or Karafuto (Sakhalin Island), and Chishima (the Kuril Islands)—came from among thecommoners. Regrettably, the commoner background that makes Mamiya so fascinating also
leaves most of his early life shrouded in obscurity. Historians know one thing for sure: he wasborn in Kamihirayanagi Village in Hitachi Province (Ibaraki Prefecture) along the banks of theKogai River (see Fig. 1).17 His father, Shōbei, reportedly struggled to support his family and so
he supplemented his income by crafting iron bands for wooden barrels. Mamiya’s humble
background evidences the ﬂuidity of Japan’s eighteenth-century society, including the ability ofcommoners to ﬂow into the spatial sciences and other realms that required expertise, whether in
the arena of road and dam designs or national mapping projects. It also suggests, however, thatrural cultivators possessed knowledge and expertise beyond agronomics that proved useful to the
Tokugawa state: the state relied on these rural cultivators for its national mapping projects. In
other words, ‘seeing like a state’ in early modern Japan required a degree of negotiation withknowledgeable rural cultivators.

Walker: Mamiya Rinzō and the Japanese Exploration of Sakhalin Island

Fig. 1. Mamiya Rinzō’s travels on Sakhalin Island and in the Amur River Estuary, 1808-1809.
Map by Dale Martin.

17

The Japanese Empire: Colonial Lives and Postcolonial Struggles

18

Mamiya garnered a local reputation in riparian engineering. By the eighteenth century, civilengineering in Japan had developed into a sophisticated science, one that principally revolved
around tsutsumi (dikes, dams, and fortiﬁed embankments) construction. Engineers designed
tsutsumi from soil, clay, and wooden posts and beams and, although solid for a time, they nearly
always sprung leaks and eroded, because of the wear-and-tear of water pressure. By Mamiya’sday, engineers had started fortifying tsutsumi with an elaborate mesh of weight rocks in bamboo
baskets supported by even more posts and beams; better designed ‘water gates’ served toalleviate water pressure and better irrigate even more far-ﬂung paddies. Not surprisingly, thedevelopment of Japanese mathematics paralleled such elaborate riparian projects, as tsutsumi
building necessitated complex calculations regarding water pressure as related to the slope,
width, and depth of irrigation channels.18
While studying at a local village temple, Mamiya demonstrated a talent for mathematics, which
played a critical role in his developing skills as a cartographer. Ironically, however, among themany sciences practiced in early modern Japan, the samurai elite held mathematics in the most
disdain: Confucian scholars, such as Ōgyu Sorai (1666-1728), churlishly denounced higher
mathematics, because of its association with the greedy, bean-counting merchant class.19 Earlyon, whatever mathematics the clever Mamiya did know, caught the attention of a traveling
Tokugawa ‘construction oﬃcial’ when Mamiya became involved with the Oka dam project justeast of his home village. Importantly, historians speculate that this oﬃcial was probably the
ethnographer of Ainu ‘customs,’ Murakami Shimanojō (also Hata Awagimaru: 1764-1808),
whose Ezotō kikan (‘Strange sights from Ezo Island’, 1800) endures as among the best
ethnographic renditions of late eighteenth-century Ainu life.20 Around 1784, Murakami had
caught the attention of the ‘senior councilor’ and conservative reformer Matsudaira Sadanobu(1758-1829), who dispatched Murakami to survey the various provinces of the Kantō (theagriculturally rich plain around Tokyo), a mission that lasted until 1798 and produced several
surveys.21 The region of Shimōsa Province (Chiba Prefecture), where engineers built the Okadam, was a likely stop on Murakami’s itinerary and where he probably met Mamiya.22
Every spring, during the equinoctial week, locals rebuilt the Oka dam, because it channeledwater from the Kogai River and irrigated rice paddies connected to some thirty-three villages in
Shimōsa Province; but the dam typically broke apart shortly thereafter. Mamiya impressed thevisiting oﬃcial and accompanied him back to Edo (probably in the early 1790s). After arriving
in Edo, Mamiya became an assistant to Murakami and they even lived together for a spell whilein the capital.23 Murakami and Mamiya surveyed together and alone, with the younger Mamiya
sent to oversee surveys on Kyushu and Shikoku islands. The Tōdatsu chihō kikō (‘Travels in theregion of eastern Tartary’, 1811), Mamiya’s main Sakhalin travel narrative—written with
Murakami Teisuke (1780-1846), the adopted son of Murakami Shimanojō, and presented to
Tokugawa oﬃcials in 1811—explains that
The author of this book, Mamiya Rinzō, was born in Hitachi and came from a peasanthousehold. He departed for Edo where he became an attendant (zuijin) to [Murakami]
Shimanojō and with whom he studied geography (chiri no gaku). With this geography, he
explored between roads throughout the realm; he also knew to discern the local customs ofthese areas. Murakami, of course, investigated Japan thoroughly, including Hachijōjima,Ōshima, and other islands. Rinzō investigated Kyushu and Shikoku.
Mamiya’s later Sakhalin maps, as mentioned, emptied the land of people; but, in his earlier

Walker: Mamiya Rinzō and the Japanese Exploration of Sakhalin Island

19

surveys, the study of ‘geography’, as taught to him by ethnographer Murakami, included theneed to ‘discern the local customs’ of peoples. But Murakami’s inﬂuence over Mamiya persisted
even during the Sakhalin project, principally in the form of separate illustrated ethnographies:
investigating the diﬀerent ‘customs’ of people, whether Japanese or Sakhalin Ainu, became atechnique for rendering nation and empire. Direct observations bolstered his ethnographies, suchas the Kitaezo zusetsu (‘Illustrated explanation of northern Ezo’, published posthumously in1855), which served as an instrument to document the inhabitants of Sakhalin and Manchuria.
In 1799, Murakami and Mamiya traveled together to Ezochi for the ﬁrst time after the shogunate
conﬁscated control of the island from the Matsumae family, who had overseen Ezochi for two
centuries from its southern territory called Wajinchi, or ‘Japanese land’. The shogunate ordered
surveys of its newly acquired northern territories.24 While the two stayed near Hakodate, thecartographer Inō Tadataka visited them (see Fig. 2). Later, Inō furthered Mamiya’s education in
cartography and lent him important surveying tools (Indeed, we might speculate that it was under
the tutelage of Inō that Mamiya began emptying his maps of human taxonomies and relegating
the investigation of ‘local customs’ to separate ethnographies.) Himself born a commoner, Inōmust have seen a younger version of himself in Mamiya. Before becoming a cartographer, Inō,perhaps Japan’s most famous mapmaker, had served as a ‘village head’ in Sawara Village (Chiba
Prefecture) but, at the age of ﬁfty, departed for Edo to study celestial topics with the astronomer
Takahashi Yoshitoki and through their studies he had risen to hold samurai status.25 In 1800, Inōbegan surveys of the Paciﬁc coastline of Ezochi. Seventeen years later, Tokugawa oﬃcials
ordered Inō to survey the entire coastline of Japan and draw a map of the realm. He surveyed thecoast and drew the map; but only after 1821, with Inō’s death, did the monumental ‘Dai Nippon
enkai yochi zenzu’ (complete map of greater Japan’s coastline) become available.26 It makes
sense that Mamiya assisted Inō with the section on Ezochi, because of Mamiya’s familiarity withthe lands north of Japan.27

Fig. 2. The statue of Mamiya Rinzō located at the Mamiya Rinzō
Memorial Museum, near his original home at Kamihirayanagi Village.
Courtesy of the Mamiya Rinzō Memorial Museum, Kamihirayanagi Town, Ibaraki Prefecture.

The Japanese Empire: Colonial Lives and Postcolonial Struggles

20

Cumulating and calculating cartographic knowledge
Countries other than Japan sought to accumulate cartographic knowledge of the Japanesearchipelago and Sakhalin and their North Paciﬁc environs, which proved one reason Tokugawa
oﬃcials had sought to generate their own map. In the late eighteenth century, European kings
and their cartographers had shown an interest in Sakhalin Island for reasons of commerce andempire. Francois La Pérouse (1741-1788) began surveying the coastal areas around Japan in thelate eighteenth century. In 1787, under orders from Louis XVI, he surveyed the northerncoastline of Japan, the Maritime Provinces, and the western coast of Sakhalin. He crossed the
Sōya Strait (probably the ﬁrst European to do so) and landed on the Kamchatka peninsula whereanother adventurer, Jean B.B. Lesseps (1766-1834), transported La Pérouse’s invaluable journals
back to Versailles, where the Revolutionary Committee published them in 1797.28
La Pérouse navigated these northern waters searching for Sakhalin, an island he knew both as‘Oku-Jesso’ (‘Inner Ezo,’ probably a term learned from Japanese) and ‘Ségalien’. La Pérouse
instructed his crew to survey the contents of the ocean ﬂoor when dredging for oysters and to
take depth soundings every half hour; he also ﬁxed his location with a compass, took periodic
longitudinal and latitudinal readings, and carefully monitored barometric pressure. Once his crewspotted Sakhalin, they began naming, and hence ‘possessing,’ prominent natural features. For the‘loftiest of these mountains,’ explained La Pérouse, the name ‘Lamanon Peak’ was appropriate,
because it honored the natural philosopher Robert de Lamanon (1752-1787). When La Pérouse
named natural features on Sakhalin, he ‘eﬀaced local designations and brought those spaces into
European circulation for the ﬁrst time’.29
However, the ‘object of our mission,’ La Pérouse wrote, was to determine whether ‘Jesso,’presumably Hokkaido and Sakhalin, was connected to the Eurasian continent. He never madethis determination with his own eyes and instrumentation, but once he landed on the shores of
Sakhalin, local islanders assured the cartographer that Sakhalin—the island locals called‘Tchoka’—was indeed separated from Manchuria by a strait that could be navigated by evenlarge ships. When he told local elders that he ‘wished them to delineate their country,’ the elders
did so by drawing decidedly ephemeral maps of their island in the island’s tidal sands; theymeasured distance in relative terms by using hand gestures. Not surprisingly, La Pérouse likened
the islanders to ‘noble’ savages and, not surprisingly, concluded that the ‘knowledge of the wellinformed class of Europeans is in all points far superior’ to that of the Sakhalin natives. The
shape of Sakhalin drawn in the sand did not qualify as knowledge for the cartographer: therelative and relational images they carefully traced and gestured with their hands remaineduseless until they had been placed on a longitudinal and latitudinal grid, ‘universalized’
according to the global rhetoric of science, and properly processed in the capitals of Europe.30
William Robert Broughton (1762-1821), an English navigator, surveyed northern Japan, thecoastline of Ezochi, the southern Kuril Islands, Sakhalin, and the Maritime Provinces between
1796 and 1797. During that time he visited Muroran, a port town in southern Ezochi, where heencountered stubborn, though curious, Japanese oﬃcials representing the Matsumae family. He
was actually the ﬁrst European to cross the Tsugaru Strait (separating Honshu and Hokkaido)
and, though he surveyed the ‘Coast of Tartary’ (the northern Maritime Provinces and the western
coast of Sakhalin), he erroneously concluded that Sakhalin was connected to the Eurasian continent and gave the waters contained therein the name ‘Gulf of Tartary’.31 Less than a decade later,
Ivan Fedorovich Kruzenshtern (1770-1846), born in Estonia but an admiral for the Russian em-

Walker: Mamiya Rinzō and the Japanese Exploration of Sakhalin Island

21

pire, commanded a vessel, with Nikolai Petrovich Rezanov (1764-1807) on board, that called on
the southern port city of Nagasaki hoping, for a second time, to open formal diplomatic andcommercial ties with Japan. After being rebuﬀed by alarmed Tokugawa oﬃcials,
Kruzenshtern— on his way home—surveyed the coasts of Japan, Hokkaido, the Kuril Islands,
and the northeastern coast of Sakhalin; but he proved unable to navigate the Amur River and so
he surveyed the region from the south determining, erroneously as well, that Sakhalin wasconnected to the continent by a reef or sandbar and hence was a peninsula.
According to Bruno Latour, these initial European forays to Sakhalin exemplify the means bywhich European kings and their experts at the ‘centers of calculation’ sought to cumulatescientiﬁc knowledge for the beneﬁt of the state and imperial enterprises. That is to say, mapping
distant lands was inherently an exercise in state logistical power, as ships needed to be mannedwith sailors and expensive instrumentation as well as ﬁnanced. When La Pérouse landed on
Sakhalin on 17 July 1787, he did so because the French king had commissioned him andequipped him with two ships, which weighed heavy with complex instruments of calculation, todetermine whether Sakhalin was an island or a peninsula. Shoring up French commercial lanes in
the North Paciﬁc depended on La Pérouse’s ability to map the entire Paciﬁc arena, which
required knowledge regarding Sakhalin. Latour likens La Pérouse’s two ships to orbiting
satellites today, with clocks to measure time and instruments to measure longitude and latitude;
botanists, mineralogists, naturalists, and artists surveyed and sketched the island, while cashbought favor, food, and information from local peoples. Despite all this cartographic equipment,
however, La Pérouse remained unable to determine for himself whether Sakhalin was an island
or a peninsula and he relied on the islanders. Once his information arrived safely in Versailles,
La Pérouse made the ‘implicit’ native knowledge of Sakhalin, illustrated by maps drawn in thesand, ‘explicit’ when he placed it on permanent, cartographically designed maps; he made ‘local’knowledge ‘universal’ in the eyes of cartographers and their state sponsors; and the ‘beliefs’ ofnatives transformed into scientiﬁc ‘knowledge’ to be utilized by Europeans in the creation of
empire. Importantly, this transformation from ‘ethno-geography’ to full-blown scientiﬁc‘geography’—turning ‘implicit’ understanding to ‘explicit’ information and ‘local’
understanding to ‘universal’ knowledge— depended on La Pérouse’s ability to transport his
surveys and maps back to Versailles, where they could be calculated and cumulated for futureuse. Indeed, when the next European ships arrived on the shores of southern Sakhalin, this‘universal’ knowledge made it as if they had been to the island before.
When William Robert Broughton cruised these North Paciﬁc waters ten years later he saw, for
all intents and purposes, the most prominent features of Sakhalin for a second time, because De
Lesseps, as we have seen, managed to transport La Pérouse’s maps back to Versailles to be calculated. Sketches and ethnographies were included in this information, and so Broughton could
better ‘domesticate’ the islanders, because he understood them; they remained frozen in time andspace, basically ethnographic relics. With Broughton’s trip, there was, according to Latour, ‘lesssounding, less fumbling in the dark’. Latour calls this the ‘cycle of accumulation,’ when cartographic and ethnographic information was brought back safely and placed in the hands of kingsand calculators so that, in the case of France, members of the Admiralty could spread out maps
and see Sakhalin and arrange expeditions for others to bring back even more information. When
cartographers rescaled these maps to conform to the needs of the state and other explorers, writes
Latour, the ‘cartographer dominates the world’.32
As Michael Bravo has argued, however, the maps drawn in the sand by Sakhalin Ainu at De

The Japanese Empire: Colonial Lives and Postcolonial Struggles

22

Langle Bay need to be seen not as decisive metaphors for the creation of ‘stable, portableinscriptions,’ as Latour utilizes them, but as the product of lengthy ﬁeld encounters and the
linguistic ‘cross-cultural commensurability’ that occurs between people in order to generate the‘geographical gift’. That is, La Pérouse oriented himself through ethnographic and linguistic
mapping as much as he did through cartography, and he carefully orchestrated his encounterswith Sakhalin Ainu in a manner that led to exchanges in knowledge that ultimately determined
Sakhalin was an island. Bravo has concluded that the famous map traced in the sands of Sakhalin‘comes into existence only as an ethnographic exercise in cross-cultural production ofknowledge’.33 Sakhalin ﬁeld encounters notwithstanding, however, Bravo follows the‘metropolitan perspectives on science and engineering’ inherent in ‘actor-network’ theory,
because, ultimately, the maps do travel to European ‘centers of calculation’. But the case of
Mamiya’s Sakhalin maps demonstrates that the metropolitan perspective of ‘actor-network’
theory is not immune from criticism, especially where it is assumed that those metropolitan
centers be European ones. Tokugawa oﬃcials deployed the same cartographic tools and maps toresist European domination: they turned the science of cartography, with its claim to ‘stable,
portable inscriptions,’ against their would-be colonizers by creating competing peripheries ofcalculation.
In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Japanese scholars, many students of ‘Dutch
learning,’ became interested in the question of whether Sakhalin was an island or a peninsula;they also sought to determine if the location Japanese called ‘Karafuto’ was the same as what
Europeans called ‘Ségalien’ or ‘Sakhalin’. In eﬀect, their interest in Sakhalin hardly diﬀeredfrom those of their European counterparts, though many early Japanese surveys focused on the
discovery of sea cucumber ﬁsheries and other potential resources not shipping lanes for global
commerce. Long before Tokugawa oﬃcials discovered Mamiya in Shimōsa Province, explorers
associated with the Matsumae family had already traveled to southern Sakhalin to survey theisland.
In 1635, for example, the Matsumae lord dispatched three vassals—Murakami Kamonzaemon,
Satō Kamoemon, and Kakizaki Hiroshige—to survey potential ﬁsheries along the coast ofsouthern Sakhalin. They brought back some geographic information to Fukuyama Castle (thestronghold of the Matsumae family), but, apparently, most of it burned in later ﬁres. Nonetheless,traces of the geographic information they gathered appeared on two seventeenth-century maps ofEzochi, which included crude renditions of Hokkaido, Sakhalin, and the Kuril Islands (see Fig.
3). One year after this expedition, the Matsumae lord dispatched Kōdō Shōzaemon to Sakhalin
and he traveled as far as Taraika, on the eastern coast of Sakhalin. Throughout the eighteenth
century, Japanese merchants, associated with the Matsumae family, continued to travel to
Sakhalin, but they did so principally to exploit herring and sea cucumber ﬁsheries, as well assuch valuable pharmaceuticals as eburiko lichen (Ainu: siw karus or kuy karus; Linn.: Fomes
oﬃcinalis). At this juncture, Japanese interest in Sakhalin related to the identiﬁcation ofcommercial ports and remained linked to Japan’s eighteenth-century economic expansion:
merchants and their feudal allies crafted space in the context of Japan’s ‘proto-industrialism’.34
But in the 1790s, just two decades before Mamiya’s journey, Tokugawa oﬃcials began toinvestigate the ‘Santan’ trade route and, later, the Russian presence on Sakhalin. Basically, the‘Santan’ trade was a commercial network that stretched from Qing posts along the Amur Riverregion to Ainu villages in southern Sakhalin and northern Hokkaido. The trade route brought avariety of valuable items, including rare silk clothing. In 1792, Mogami Tokunai traveled toWalker: Mamiya Rinzō and the Japanese Exploration of Sakhalin Island

23

Sakhalin, along with several other Tokugawa oﬃcials; but he, like later oﬃcials, mainly
documented trade abuses perpetrated by Japanese merchants on Sakhalin islanders. The fear wasthat Ainu would defect to Russian controlled areas and convert to Christianity. Of course, heincluded some ethnographic information and maps in his writings; but his mission was never tothoroughly map Sakhalin.35 Interestingly, Mogami actually served as an assistant to Aoshima
Shunzō (d. 1790), another Tokugawa oﬃcial, who the shogun had dispatched along with
Yamaguchi Tetsugorō, Satō Genrokurō, Ōishi Ippei, and Ihara Yaroku to survey Ezochi anddetermine the extent of the Russian presence. On two diﬀerent occasions, elements of this 1785
survey team traveled as far as Tarantomari and Kushunnai on the western coastline of Sakhalin.36

Fig. 3. The painted portrait (shōzōga) of Inō Tadataka.
Courtesy of the Inō Tadataka Memorial Museum, Sawara City, Chiba Prefecture.

By the late eighteenth century, Japanese cartographers had, like their European colleagues,
become interested in the question of whether Sakhalin was a peninsula or an island. Indeed,Japanese, including Mamiya, had come into contact with copies of La Pérouse’s map (thatdepicted Sakhalin as an island); but they also viewed maps by Broughton and Kruzenshtern (thatclearly depicted Sakhalin as a peninsula), and so the actual geographic status of Sakhalincontinued to be debated even in the peripheries of calculation.37 Only three years after
Kruzenshtern’s diplomatic mission to Nagasaki, Tokugawa oﬃcials dispatched Mamiya todetermine the exact geographic status of Sakhalin according to the global language of science—the same language being used in European maps. But what made Tokugawa oﬃcials interested
in mapping the North Paciﬁc at this time was less contributing to European debates regarding
Sakhalin and more anxieties concerning Russian designs for Sakhalin, the Kuril Islands, andThe Japanese Empire: Colonial Lives and Postcolonial Struggles

24even Hokkaido. Once alarmed, they sought to deploy maps and ethnographies as a means toproject national borders between Japan and the Qing and Russian empires. In the minds ofTokugawa oﬃcials, geographic and ethnographic continuities translated into national ones,
which, with the steady increase of Russian ships in Japanese waters, could spell trouble for theJapanese presence on Hokkaido. This attempt to ‘ﬁx the territorial consciousness’ of theJapanese, as historian Akizuki Toshiyuki has identiﬁed it, corresponded with two raids on
Japanese ﬁshery posts in the North Paciﬁc by disgruntled Russian captains in the wake of
Kruzenshtern’s failed visit to Nagasaki.
In 1804, when Kruzenshtern’s ship had sailed into Nagasaki harbor, the ambassador Nikolai
Petrovich Rezanov had eagerly awaited to disembark and proceed with his mission to strike a
diplomatic arrangement with the shogunate. The Russian czar had ordered Rezanov to open tradewith Japan, and the ambassador carried a promissory letter, stamped by earlier Tokugawa
oﬃcials, that had been received by diplomat Adam Kirillovich Laksman in 1792-1793, when heattempted to make ﬁrst contact with Japanese oﬃcials on Hokkaido.38 Typical of Tokugawa
tactics for diplomatic relations with European countries, the shogunate, after six months ofstalling, ordered Rezanov to go home; but Rezanov believed that trade with Japan was critical tothe economic development of the Russian empire. In 1807, without authorization (and seemingly
counterproductive to the goal of opening peaceful trade), Rezanov ordered naval oﬃcers (alsoemployees of the Russia-America Company) Nikolai A. Khvostov and G.I. Davydov to attack
Japanese possessions in the North Paciﬁc. They attacked ﬁshery outposts on southern Sakhalin,
Rishiri Island, and defeated Nanbu and Tsugaru garrisons on Iturup (Etorofu) Island and took
several Japanese prisoners. Illustrating how people (even if reluctantly) exchanged scientiﬁc
information within the ﬂuid ethnic and political space of the North Paciﬁc, there is evidence that
one of these Japanese prisoners, Nakagawa Gorōji (1768-1849), returned to Japan in 1812 withthe ability to perform Jennerian smallpox vaccinations. A precious handful of documents suggestthat Nakagawa vaccinated a Japanese woman in Hokkaido in 1824; while one of his disciples,
Shiratori Yūzō, appears to have vaccinated people near Akita. But medical historians still debate
whether these vaccinations actually occurred, at least as how existing documents describe theprocedure as having took place.39
Stationed at Shana on Iturup Island (or Etorofu Island) when the Russians attacked in the fourth
month of 1807 was Mamiya and his actions, as depicted by at least two ﬁrsthand observers,
provide a window into his personality and motivations; they reveal Mamiya to be a stern nationalist when it came to the defense of the realm, which provides some insight into what he thought
he was doing when he, a year later, mapped Sakhalin. In 1807, a Matsuyama domain physician
named Kubota Kentatsu (or Itō Kentatsu) accompanied Japanese garrisons to Iturup Island. His
unpublished diary, Hokuchi nikki (‘Diary of northern territories’, 1807), portrays the Japanese
defense of the island as a farce; but he also befriended the hotheaded Mamiya at Shana. Kubota
wrote that he knew the Japanese defense of Iturup was oﬀ to a terrible start when, during one of
his ﬁrst nights there, he fell into a pit toilet and, despite his best eﬀorts to scrub himself clean,reeked of human excrement thereafter. His assessment of the legendary samurai ﬁghting prowess
was not ﬂattering: shot molded on the island was not sized properly for the guns and hence
proved useless; gunpowder had been used up for a ﬁreworks display and the barrel contained
only items traded with local Ainu; and ﬁeld captains had even forgotten how to properly fasten
their decorative battle helmets. Of Mamiya, Kubota wrote that initially, Tokugawa captains hadordered him to head the kitchen, which he staunchly resisted: he proved far more anxious to oﬀer

Walker: Mamiya Rinzō and the Japanese Exploration of Sakhalin Island

25

advice on how to deal with the Russians. According to Kubota, Mamiya became extremely upset
when oﬃcials disregarded his advice to shoot Russians on sight for disobeying orders to not
approach Japanese territory. In the end, Mamiya proved highly critical of the handling of the
defense of Iturup.40 But taking Mamiya’s advice could be dangerous. Ōmura Jigohei (d. 1813), in
his Shizanki (‘My bequeathed diary’, 1809), had a far less ﬂattering portrayal of Mamiya during
the defense of Iturup. According to Ōmura, when the Russians ﬁrst approached, they ﬁred threeshots from their boat. Fancying himself as an expert on Western manners, Mamiya insisted that
this was a form of ‘decorum’. Sadly, when a Japanese translator was dispatched to exchange thecourtesy, Russians shot him. From this point forward, Ōmura had few generous things to say
about the know-it-all Mamiya.41
During the 1807 attack, along with maddening Mamiya, routing Japanese garrisons, and taking
Nakagawa prisoner, Khvostov and Davydov left a letter e written in Japanese, Russian, andFrench, so as not to be misunderstood e that if shogunal oﬃcials continued to stall, Russian ships
would take over Japanese territory in the North Paciﬁc. They then demanded an answer by thefollowing spring. In response, the Matsumae magistracy, the shogunal authority on southern
Hokkaido, suggested that Japan open trade relations with Russia; but they also suggested that,
because the Russians had ‘called Karafuto ‘‘Sakhalin,’’ and speak of it as their own territory,’
surveyors be dispatched to determine the actual boundaries between Japan and Russia.
Councilors in Edo agreed and in response to their recommendation, the Matsumae magistracy
dispatched Mat-suda Denjirō and Mamiya to survey Sakhalin. Having experienced ﬁrsthand thehumiliation at Shana, Mamiya was no doubt itching to resolve the Russian question: this timewith maps.
Anticipating empire
Eighteenth-century transformations in European politics and culture compelled cartographerssuch as La Pérouse, Broughton, and Kruzenshtern to explore and, in their travel writings, to map
and document the peoples and places they encountered. Mary Louise Pratt argues that such explorers had ‘imperial eyes,’ because they understood that all the natural things they saw could bescientiﬁcally ordered and classiﬁed and, by extension, systematically named, controlled, and possessed.42 Previously, the triumph in the seventeenth century of a more quantitative and, hence,
more measurable manner of understanding their surroundings underwrote the science and theclassiﬁcatory system that, once provided with political and economic incentives, propelled
European cartographers and explorers to all corners of the globe.43 Of course, that La Pérouse’s
ship, the Astrolabe, bristled with powerful geodetic and other quantitative measuring devices
enabled him to ﬁx Sakhalin on a globally understood longitudinal and latitudinal grid and,
thereby, enabled Broughton and Kruzenshtern to ‘return’. Starting with La Pérouse’s expedition
Europeans began to see Sakhalin with ‘imperial eyes’.
As J.B. Harley has famously argued, once historians see maps as a form of language it thenbecomes easier to identify and decipher the ‘historically speciﬁc codes’ embedded in them.
These codes include questions regarding readership and authorship, local and global cartographic
literacy, and the ‘nature of the political statements which are made by maps’. Disguised as justanother benign, ‘valueless’ science, cartography and the knowledge it produced represented aform of power that reproduced the world abstractly and that reﬂected the expansive geopoliticalimperatives of eighteenth-century European states. As forms of ‘authoritative resources,’ orknowledge controlled by the state, maps engendered forms of spatial control that facilitated

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imperialism.44‘Insofar as maps were used in colonial promotion, and lands claimed on paper before they wereeﬀectively occupied,’ writes Harley, ‘maps anticipated empire’.45 Similarly, in his study ofAustralian exploration, Simon Ryan observes that the map, when designed according to theglobal, measurable, and divisible language of science, became ‘an imperial technology used tofacilitate and celebrate the further advances of explorers, and display worldwide imperial
possessions’.46 Daniel Clayton has identiﬁed this as the ‘spatiality of imperialism,’ a process
wherein maps created the ‘geopolitical framework’ for colonial projects around the globe, even
before there were colonial boots on the ground.47
Japanese explorers and cartographers such as Mamiya Rinzō and Matsuda Denjirō also saw
Sakhalin with ‘cartographic’ and ‘imperial’ eyes, and their travel literature—both cartographiesand ethnographies—anticipated Japanese empire-building in the early twentieth century.
Interestingly, similar to Mamiya, who we discussed above, and other age of exploration
cartographers, Matsuda was the son of a commoner from Echigo Province (Niigata Prefecture).
In Echigo, Matsuda demonstrated a knack for surveying when he became a supervisor of a road
construction crew and, later, rose to become a Tokugawa oﬃcial in Edo. In 1799, when the
shogunate took direct control of aﬀairs in Ezochi, Matsuda volunteered for service in the newly
acquired territory. Not only did he open up an Ezochi products ‘trade post’ in the capital of Edo
to promote goods from Japan’s northern territory, but he made several trips to Hokkaido,
wintering at the Shana post on Iturup in 1803 and, while on Hokkaido for a third time,
accompanying thirty Tsugaru samurai to Sōya, on the northernmost tip of Hokkaido. He received
orders from the shogunate to explore Sakhalin Island with Mamiya while he wintered at Sōya in
1808. Until control of Ezochi again reverted to the Matsumae family in 1821, Matsuda, for aperiod of over two decades, oversaw and explored much of Hokkaido and Sakhalin. In 1809, one
year after exploring Sakhalin with Mamiya, he became a regional governor of sorts, representing
Japanese interests on Sakhalin. He was also commander of the military escort that famously
imprisoned the Russian Vasilii Mikhailovich Golovnin (1776-1831) in Fukuyama in 1813, who,
incidentally, met Mamiya personally while incarcerated.48
Mamiya and Matsuda departed for Sakhalin from Sōya, on the northernmost tip of Hokkaido, on
the thirteenth day of the fourth month of 1808, landing at Shiranushi that same day.49 Once at
Shiranushi, Matsuda and Mamiya went separate ways: Matsuda traveled northward in a small
boat up the western coastline of Sakhalin to Noteto and then, from there, traveled on foot, becoming the ﬁrst Japanese to reach Cape Rakka. From Cape Rakka, as mentioned earlier, Matsuda was not able to proceed, because of beds of rotten kelp and weather. Nonetheless, from thecape, Matsuda saw that the sea ran between Sakhalin and the Eurasian continent and came tobelieve that Sakhalin was an island and not a peninsula. Later, he reported this information to
Takahashi Kageyasu and oﬃcials with the Matsumae magistracy. Meanwhile, Mamiya had
traveled up the eastern coastline of Sakhalin in a small Ainu boat. He passed Naibutsu where,
several years earlier, the Matsumae explorer Nakamura Koichirō had arrived, and landed atTaraika, home of the Uilta people. Mamiya then turned south, crossed Taraika Bay, and landedon the northern side of Sakhalin’s Shiretoko Peninsula (the explorer C.J. Coen had also
attempted this route). He retraced his steps, crossed the width of Sakhalin to Kushunnai; he thenfollowed Matsuda’s route landing just north of Cape Rakka. As mentioned in the introduction, hethen paddled a small boat some two thousand yards oﬀ the coast and conﬁrmed as no othercartographer had (with the exception of Matsuda) that Sakhalin was an island. Mamiya andWalker: Mamiya Rinzō and the Japanese Exploration of Sakhalin Island

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Matsuda both returned to Sōya in the sixth month of 1808.50
That winter, Mamiya remained disappointed that he had been unable to survey the northernmost
reaches of Sakhalin and so, while in Sōya, he sought permission from Matsumae magistrate
Kawajiri Haruno (1756-1815) to explore the island again. On the thirteenth day of the seventhmonth of 1808, Mamiya crossed over to Shiranushi alone.51 After securing an Ainu boat (anotherimportant cartographic technology), he reached Tonnai, the northernmost Japanese ﬁshery on thewestern coastline of Sakhalin, and there he recruited six Sakhalin Ainu guides. Together, on theﬁfteenth day of the eighth month, they reached Riyonai by boat; but because of a lack of provisions they returned to Tonnai where they spent the winter. Mamiya then sent a written report anddraft map to Tokugawa oﬃcials (much as La Pérouse had to Paris decades earlier), detailing theinitial phase of his expedition. He sent the map to an ‘inquiry oﬃcial,’ Takahashi Shigekata (alsoSanbei: 1758-1833), a ﬁgure concerned principally with political boundaries on Sakhalin. No
doubt alarming Takahashi, Mamiya explained that on the west coast of Sakhalin, Ainu living
north of Nayoro paid tributary visits to Qing oﬃcials at Deren; Qing oﬃcials then bestowed
oﬃcial titles on Ainu elders.52 These tributary titles consisted of haraida (xingzhang, ‘head ofsurname group’) and gashanda or gashanida (xiangzhang, ‘village elder’) and, once bestowed,
they entrusted local Ainu elders with the task of ‘keeping the peace’ on the boundaries of the
Qing empire. By the mid-eighteenth century, Qing oﬃcials had appointed some ﬁfty-six surname
groups as haraida; of these, six clans and 148 households were those of Ainu and Nivkh living
on Sakhalin.53 As Mamiya discovered, overlapping Japanese ‘proto-industrial’ space on southern
Sakhalin was Qing colonial space in the form of the tributary order; and one way that the Qing
oversaw the ‘production of space’ on Sakhalin was through the dissemination of oﬃcial titles
and tributary duties. But for his part, Mamiya was struck less by economic and political borders
than by the ethnic ﬂuidity on Sakhalin, as the northern Sakhalin Ainu had converted to thecustoms of the Ul’chi people (called ‘Santan’ in early modern Japanese documents), and manyother continentals just came and went on the island as they pleased.
At the end of the ﬁrst month of 1809, Mamiya and his guides again traveled north to Noteto, on
Cape Tuiku. North of Noteto, the ocean was still frozen, and so they could no longer proceed byboat. Mamiya decided to stay in Noteto until the seventh day of the ﬁfth month of 1809, whenhe, now with two Nivkh guides, departed for Pokob6e (along the Mamiya Strait on the Sakhalinside). He made it as far north as Nanio, in northwestern Sakhalin, but rough seas made him
cancel his plans to go any further north. Mamiya then returned to Noteto where he stayed in thehome of a Nivkh chief named Kōni. Once again, much as La Pérouse had done with other native
headmen, Mamiya listened eagerly as Kōni told him stories of the northern territories and thetwo became friends. Even though Mamiya relied heavily on his Nivkh guides and Chief Kōni, in
his maps he ‘erased all traces of the indigenous knowledge [he] had relied on’. In his maps,
Mamiya carefully ‘dissolved the local geography of native peoples’ and, ultimately, one is left
with the impression that Sakhalin was empty, an ‘unoccupied land’ ready for Japanese
occupancy.54
To complete these maps, Mamiya departed Noteto with Kōni and arrived on the Eurasian continent where they entered Kiji Bay. From Kiji Bay they navigated up the Amur River and arrived
at the Qing outpost of Deren on the eleventh day of the seventh month of 1809. There, Mamiya
noted that some ﬁfty or sixty Qing oﬃcials had gathered for the tributary trading season. Threeoﬃcials summoned Mamiya to their boat, and there the four men had a written conversation using Chinese characters.

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Unlike most European explorers who traveled across space but, because of assumptions regarding historical progress, also back in time, to confront more ‘savage’ peoples, Mamiya confronted
Qing oﬃcials who were not only highly literate, but who wrote using more or less the same
Chinese characters as the Japanese. Mamiya had encountered, in the Amur region, the edge of arival center: the ‘Central Kingdom’ (Chinese: Zhongguo). Mamiya departed shortly thereafter(on the seventh day of the eighth month), and en route to Sakhalin surveyed the width and routeof the Amur River, sketched roughly on the map ‘Mankō bunzusho’ (Map of the Amur region;
1809). Mamiya parted with his travel partner, Kōni, on the eleventh day and shortly thereafter
met with Matsuda in Shiranushi on southern Sakhalin.55
When Mamiya and Matsuda returned to Sōya after the ﬁrst attempt to explore Sakhalin, theyreported to oﬃcials at the Matsumae magistracy. They also presented a map, the ‘Karafuto tō
taigai chizu’ (‘A general map of Sakhalin Island’, 1809), to oﬃcials with the magistracy.
Importantly, the map depicts Sakhalin as an island and not a peninsula; the southwestern andsoutheastern sections of the island (where Matsuda and Mamiya had traveled) contain fairly
detailed geographical information. The shape of Aniwa Bay, for example, was better represented
than on an earlier map, the ‘Karafuto kenbu zu’ (‘A map of Sakhalin’, 1801), drawn by explorers
Takahashi Jidayū and Nakamura Koichirō. Moreover, Takahashi and Nakamura, as
demonstrated by their highly innovative map, had fallen short of determining whether Sakhalin
was an island or not and so improvised with a roll-down ﬂap (see Figs. 4 and 5).

Fig. 4. ‘Genroku kuniezu’ (1700). The northernmost island on the map is an early Japanese rendition of
Sakhalin; the small cluster of islands oﬀ the western coast of Ezo (present-day Hokkaido) represents
Chishima (or the Kuril archipelago). Courtesy of the Resource Collection for Northern Studies, Hokkaido
University Library.

With the information Mamiya brought back from Sakhalin after his second trip, Tokugawa
oﬃcial Takahashi Kageyasu and a team of cartographers e ensconced in Edo’s periphery of
calculation—came up with the ‘Shintei bankoku zenzu’ (‘Newly revised map of all thecountries’, 1810), to be used in determining borders in diplomatic aﬀairs. Later, in 1816, theWalker: Mamiya Rinzō and the Japanese Exploration of Sakhalin Island

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shogunate issued an oﬃcial copperplate engraving of the map, one with revised sections of
Sakhalin based on the Chinese ‘Huangyu quanlan tu’ (‘Map of a complete view of imperial
territory’, known as the Kangxi Jesuit atlas) from 1718.56 In order to contribute to the ‘Shintei
bankoku zenzu,’ once Mamiya had returned from his second expedition, he stayed in Sōya andbegan, under the direction of Arao Nariaki of the Matsumae magistracy, to consolidate his maps
and notes with the help of Murakami Teisuke, the adopted son of Murakami Shimanojō. In theseventh month of 1810, Mamiya completed draft manuscripts of Kitaezo chibu (The region ofnorthern Ezo) and Tōdatsu kikō, as well as the ‘Kitaezo tō chizu’ (A map of northern Ezo island),a monumental map divided onto seven large sheets with a scale of 36,000 to 1. The Hokui bunkai
yowa (Reﬂections on northern barbarian borders) appeared at the same time of the ﬁnal versionof the Tōdatsu chihō kikō, in the third month of 1811. Mamiya presented both texts to oﬃcials at
the shogunate. Mamiya reduced the monumental ‘Kitaezo tō chizu’ map to one sheet, giving it
the rather exotic scientiﬁc title, ‘Kokuryūkō chūshū narabi tendō’ (Central Heilongjiang [AmurRiver] with latitudinal lines) (see Figs. 6 and 7).
Cartographically speaking, the ‘Kokuryūkō chūshū narabi tendō’ was more useful than earlier
Sakhalin maps. The one cartographic discrepancy with the map was a product of Mamiya’s
being unaware of how to calculate latitude based on celestial surveys. Mamiya used Inō’s
meridian calculation that one degree equaled 28.2 ri (one ri equals 3.93 km), and then conductedlinear measurements to determine the latitudinal numbers. According to Akizuki Toshiyuki,
when Mamiya calculated the distance between Shiranushi and Natsuko (at 137 ri), this put him
oﬀ by about 4.9 degrees.57 Nonetheless, Mamiya had ﬁxed Sakhalin on a globally recognizablegrid as no other cartographer had. He also contributed to resolving global scientiﬁc debates at the
periphery of calculation by determining that Sakhalin was an island rather than a peninsula.

The Japanese Empire: Colonial Lives and Postcolonial Struggles

Fig. 5. Takahashi Jidayū and Nakamura Koichirō, ‘Karafuto kenbu zu’ (1801), depicting Sakhalin as anisland. Courtesy of the Resource Collection for Northern Studies, Hokkaido University Library.

30

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Fig. 6. A detail of the northern section of Takahashi Jidayū and Nakamura Koichirō, ‘Karafuto kenbu zu’(1801). With the innovative ﬂap down, Sakhalin could be depicted as a peninsula.
Courtesy of the Resource Collection for Northern Studies, Hokkaido University Library.

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Fig. 7. Mamiya Rinzō ‘Kokuryūkō chūshū narabi tendō’ (Central Heilongjiang [Amur River] with latitudinallines). Courtesy of the Resource Collection for Northern Studies, Hokkaido University Library.

Cultural diﬀerence and spatial distanceIn seventeenth-century Europe, a decidedly quantitative and empirically based ethnography had
developed simultaneously to the cartography that allowed kings and their calculators to see
foreign territories and future empires on maps.58 This new ethnography allowed Europeans to see
other people more scientiﬁcally and quantitatively as well; as disassociated from their lands andrelocated to taxonomies related to their degree of ‘savagery’ or ‘progress.’ In the Japanese case,Mamiya’s travel writings, after ﬁxing Sakhalin’s cartographic information on de-humanized
maps, investigated the customs and practices of the peoples who called Sakhalin home. His maps
emptied Sakhalin of human inhabitants, preferring a scientiﬁc grid over relative and relational

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information; similarly, his ethnographies employed empirical observations to classify theislanders of Sakhalin, as well as other useful ﬂora and fauna, according to early modern Japanesetaxonomies and economies.
Most likely, in 1809, when Mamiya had reached the Qing post at Deren, he had traveled as far
northward as any Japanese had ever ventured, at least oﬃcially. Today, we know where Mamiya
ventured: through Sakhalin into the Heilongjiang (or Amur River) region and back. Nonetheless,for most learned Japanese, the North Paciﬁc had remained mysterious. In the medieval years(1185-1568), Japanese had referred to the region explored by Mamiya—not only Sakhalin, but
Hokkaido and the Kuril Islands as well—as Ezogashima, or ‘barbarian islands’. For medieval
Japanese, the beginning of Ezogashima represented the northern edge of the medieval Japanese
realm: the end of Japan’s geopolitical knowledge.59 Later, in the early modern years (16001868), Japanese simply referred to the region as Ezo or Ezochi, an ethno-geographic term thatreferred to both the land and its Ainu inhabitants. When Japanese spoke of Ezo (or the Ezojin,‘Ezo people’) they spoke of the Ainu; but they might also refer to other ethnic groups that
inhabited Hokkaido, Sakhalin, and the Kuril Islands, including Sakhalin Ainu (Hatsushimapeople), Uilta (Orokko people), Nivkh (Sumerenkuru or Gilyak people), and Yukagir of Sakhalin
Island, as well as Kuril Ainu and the Kamchadal of the Kamchatka Peninsula. Exploring
Sakhalin meant encountering foreign peoples, exotic animals, and alien environments. Sakhalin,
as seen with Japanese ‘imperial eyes,’ was indeed an exotic and distant place, but one directly
related to Japanese geopolitical concerns.
One manner in which early modern Japanese constructed notions of their own ethnic identity wasthrough the delineation of concentric circles of lessening degrees of customary diﬀerence thatemanated out from the Japanese core.60 According to this epistemology, ethnic space was entirely
relational to the Japanese and, to a lesser degree, the Chinese core and the Confucian customs
practiced there. For this reason, civility was more a spatial experience than a temporal one:space—not history in the form of historical ‘progress’—provided the measure of Japan’s moral
civilization. The signposts designating these concentric circles of civility were the ‘customs’ of
diﬀerent people—customs described or depicted in illustrated ethnographies as their industry,
housing, tools, hairstyles, food, trade, marriage practices, and ancestral rites—and so Japanese
explorers traced the distance of their travels not only through days of travel (their actual temporal
distance from home according to linear measurements of ri and the Chinese zodiac), but throughcarefully documenting their ethnographic encounters. As Marcia Yonemoto explains, Japanese
travelers in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries often embellished the landscapes andcustoms they wrote about because that helped to ‘conjure up for the reader visions of unknown
places’. Even within Japan, travelers sought to ‘witness, analyze, and catalog diﬀerence’ because
diﬀerence implied distance, and so they focused on ‘deﬁning and measuring degrees of
strangeness within the homeland itself’.61‘The eye of the historian,’ writes Tessa Morris-Suzuki, ‘tends to look for change over time rather
than diversity across space,’ but prioritizing time over space only distorts the experiences of
early modern Japanese explorers. In short, she argues for sensitivity to ‘spatial diversity’ as wellas ‘temporal change’.62 Morris-Suzuki writes that the ‘cornerstone’ of Japan’s frontier relations
was ‘the logic of diﬀerence,’ even if Japanese sometimes exaggerated or trumped up
diﬀerences.63 Importantly, Japanese, through encyclopedias and maps, created a ‘world made up
of concentric circles of increasing strangeness, stretching almost inﬁnitely outwards from afamiliar centre,’ and to explore was to travel through these concentric circles, in eﬀect measuring

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distance from the orbit of the Japanese core through descriptions of rings of cultural diﬀerence.64
This is not to say, however, that Japanese maps or portrayals of customary diﬀerence did not
erect boundaries between Japan proper and the outside world; rather, only that these boundaries
were never neat and clear cut, as modern borders often are, but instead represented the ‘ragged
edges’ of Japan.65
Although Mamiya described many encounters with customary diﬀerence in the Tōdatsu chihōkikō, his best ethnography is the Kitaezo zusetsu (‘Illustrated explanation of northern Ezo’,
1855), which was published nine years after his death (see Fig. 8). If the Tōdatsu chihō kikō
produces space through narrative, geographic names, and descriptions of distance based on
Chinese calendric months and days and Japanese linear measurements, the Kitaezo zusetsu oﬀers
a more poignant sense of distance through empirical renditions, both narrative descriptions andcarefully drawn images, of the peoples who called Sakhalin home. In eﬀect, Mamiya, throughthe illustrated ethnography, created a sense of distance in the Japanese spatial imagination: thesheer cultural ‘strangeness’ of these people conjured a far away place, and so let us turn to thisimportant document by exploring what it says about the peoples of Sakhalin, speciﬁcally theirhairstyles and culinary cultures, as both hair and food served as important cultural signposts forearly modern Japanese. Indeed, exotic hairstyles and food proved such potent signposts ofcustomary diﬀerence that Nagakubo Sekisui (1717-1801), in his domestic travel writings,
conjured a sense of foreignness and distance even while describing the Dutch and Chinese in thedecidedly Japanese city of Nagasaki.66

Fig. 8. A detail of the strait between Sakhalin Island and Amur Estuary from Mamiya Rinzō,
Kokuryūkō chūshū narabi tendō’ (Central Heilongjiang [Amur River] with latitudinal lines).
Courtesy of the Resource Collection for Northern Studies, Hokkaido University Library.

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In the Kitaezo zusetsu (Fig. 9), Mamiya described his encounters with Sakhalin Ainu, as well as
the Uilta and the Nivkh. When describing Sakhalin Ainu, Mamiya started out by highlighting
cultural signposts all Japanese could understand—their strange hairstyles or general hairiness. In
early modern Japan, hairstyles were extremely important, as they served to demarcate the placeof people within the status system; but hairstyles also became what historian Ronald Toby refers
to as ‘codes of Other,’ identifying, as few physical and cultural attributes do, people notmembers of Japan’s cultural or ethnic community.67 Perhaps even more importantly, the trope of
hairiness—many northern peoples were described as mōi, or ‘hairy barbarian’; most Europeans
were known as kōmō, or ‘red hairs’—remained common throughout East Asia for describing
exotic ‘barbarian’ people.

Fig. 9. The four volume Kitaezo zusetsu (1855).
Courtesy of the Resource Collection for Northern Studies, Hokkaido University Library.

Tapping into such traditions, Mamiya explained that Sakhalin Ainu resembled Ainu on
Hokkaido, but that many did not have ‘connected eyebrows’ and they had ‘less robust beards’.
Women’s hair hung down about shoulder length. In contrast to Sakhalin Ainu, Uilta and Nivkh
men did not cut their hair and let it hang down their backs in ﬂowing and stylized bundles. Uilta
women also wore their hair hanging down their backs, as well as bundled on top of their heads.
Unlike Ainu women, Uilta and Nivkh women combed their hair and adorned themselves withearrings and other elaborate jewelry. In short, Mamiya colored his ethnographic discussion with

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cultural signposts, including brief descriptions of native Sakhalin hairstyles. These were simple
yet extremely pregnant descriptions, and served to delineate spatial distance.
Conclusion
In the aftermath of the Khvostov and Davydov attacks of 1807, Takahashi Kageyasu, theshogun’s oﬃcial astronomer, oversaw the creation of a world map that could structure Japan’s
approach to diplomatic aﬀairs at the dawn of a new century. In order to depict the most contested
area—Kita Ezo, or Sakhalin Island—Mamiya Rinzō was dispatched to explore the northernmost
reaches of Japan’s geopolitical knowledge. In doing so, Mamiya did not really explore Sakhalin,
but rather he created it anew, and thereby positioned it in the context of the boundaries of Japan’sburgeoning nation state and empire. The importance of this process is hard to overestimate.
Because maps played a critical role in the establishment of European empires, the creation ofuniversally comprehensible cartographic renditions of Sakhalin proved critical to the national
security interests of Japan as well as to the imperial ambitions of Russia and other European
powers.
As L.M. Cullen explains, Sakhalin served as an important steppingstone for Russian ambitions in
the North Paciﬁc, but because Sakhalin’s exact geography had been unknown, Mamiya’s maps
‘had the security rating of, say, drawings during the Cold-War period of highly secret nuclear
installations’. The ‘Von Siebold Aﬀair’ of 1828 illustrates this point: when Takahashi Kageyasu
ill-advisedly handed over some the most up-to-date maps of Ezochi to Philipp Franz von Siebold(1796-1866) in 1826, who was then caught with them two years later when trying to leave thecountry, the shogunate (apparently spurred on by the patriotic Mamiya) started proceedings
against Takahashi and later jailed him along with several of Von Siebold’s students (even though
Von Siebold himself was later vindicated). In eﬀect, Takahashi’s surrendering of Ezochi maps
proved contrary to the state’s interests and, in eﬀect, treasonous.68 When Mamiya mapped
Sakhalin with European surveying technologies and according to the logic of scientiﬁccartography, he positioned the island on the global grid—its locations ﬁxed for all nations to ﬁnd
and see—but he had also placed early modern Japan among those nations competing to
implement their imperial designs in the North Paciﬁc. This process of placing Sakhalin on a
global grid proved common to other early modern experiences with the science of cartography
and the anticipation of empire.
The nineteenth- and early twentieth-century history of the colonization of Sakhalin Island iscomplicated. Basically, after the signing of the Treaty of St. Petersburg in 1875, Japan gave control of all of Sakhalin to Russia after a period of joint occupation, and the island served as a
brutal penal colony for the czarist regime for decades. After its military victory over Russia in
1905, Japan declared control over all of Sakhalin; but, following the signing of the Treaty ofPortsmouth on 5 September 1905, Japan departed negotiations with control over the southernhalf of the island below the ﬁftieth parallel, which it called ‘Karafuto’.69
The Ainu inhabitants fared poorly under Japanese rule. In 1875, after Japan conceded Sakhalin to
Russia in exchange for the Kuril Islands, Japanese oﬃcials relocated some 841 Sakhalin Ainu,
now Japanese nationals, from the Aniwa Bay area to Hokkaido. These Ainu hoped to settle on
northern Hokkaido, which was similar ecologically to their native Sakhalin home. Instead,Japanese oﬃcials relocated the Sakhalin Ainu to the Tsuishikari settlement, near the Ishikari
River and the northern capital of Sapporo. A decade later, nearly 350 members of theWalker: Mamiya Rinzō and the Japanese Exploration of Sakhalin Island

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settlement—almost half of the total population—died in smallpox and cholera epidemics causedby their close proximity to Japanese, who carried the smallpox virus endemically.70 Many Ainu
also ﬂed back to Russian Sakhalin to labor in ﬁsheries. By the time southern Sakhalin reverted toJapanese control, only about 120 Ainu lived at the Tsuishikari settlement; and all but twentyseven of them decided to return to Sakhalin after 1905.71 Japanese control over southern Sakhalin
persisted until 11 August 1945 when, in the concluding days of the Paciﬁc War, the Soviet Union
thrust across the ﬁftieth parallel and drove the Japanese from southern Sakhalin.72
Mamiya’s maps signify more than the anticipation of empire: they also provide evidence that the‘universality’ of cartography could be a sharp, double-edged sword for Western imperial designs.
Given Japan’s brutal imperial legacies in Korea, China, and elsewhere, it is easy to forget thatJapan, in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, was once menaced by predatory
Western powers, ones that circled the small island chain in their gunboats like sharks around a
fragile raft. Indeed, the same Western surveyors that sought to place Sakhalin on a scientiﬁc griddid the same with the Japanese Islands, sending information about the island country to Europe’s‘centers of calculation’. But Japan’s embrace of Western cartography to guard its nationalsovereignty and to anticipate empire demonstrates that the mapmaking tools of empire could also
be wielded as tools to resist empire, particularly when underwritten by developing native
conceptions of the nation. That is, in the peripheries of calculation, such as the Tokugawa capitalof Edo, surveyors deployed the science of cartography as a means to guard newly articulated
notions of sovereignty. Think of it this way: in the 1850s, Western diplomats, circled around anegotiating table at Yokohama, might have yawned at claims of Japanese national sovereignty
based on cherished aesthetic networks of haikai poets, but they knew well the power of maps,
particularly ones constructed according to their own cartographic standards. In other words,
Mamiya’s maps reveal Japan’s early commitment to modernization in the face of Western
encroachment well before the Meiji Restoration and, in turn, how cartography mastered in the
periphery of calculation could be used to foil Western imperial designs.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Montana State University postdoctoral emeriti Bob Wilson and Arn
Keeling, as well as their skillful mentor Graeme Wynn, for their thoughts, insights, and editorialcomments related to this article. Generous funding through a National Science Foundation Small
Grant for Training and Research, titled ‘Mile High, Mile Deep: Imagining and Modifying Topographical and Subterranean Environments,’ allowed these geographers to visit MSU and, in turn,made publishing this article possible. Participants at the following conferences and lectures also
oﬀered helpful advice: ‘Exploration, Encounter, Empire: The Lewis and Clark Expedition in
Comparative Perspective,’ University of Nebraska, Lincoln, NE (2003); NEH Faculty
Humanities Seminar, MSU (2003); ‘Japanese Border Histories and Transnational Contexts,’
Western Conference of the Association for Asian Studies, Tempe, AZ (2003); ‘Creating Spaces’
Conference, part of the ‘Mile High, Mile Deep’ project at MSU (2004); Travel Literature
Lecture, University of Oregon (2004); and Geography Colloquium, University of British
Columbia (2005). Yet, despite the best eﬀorts of the talented scholars at these venues, mistakes
surely remain, and those are my responsibility.

The Japanese Empire: Colonial Lives and Postcolonial Struggles

38

Notes
1 See T. Akizuki, Nichirō kankei to Saharin tō: Bakumatsu Meiji shonen no ryōdo mondai,

Tokyo, 1994; more recently, T. Akizuki, Nihon hokuhen no tanken to chizu no rekishi, Sapporo,
1999.
2

The importance of not having multiple or overlapping national sovereignties on maps would beclear to Japanese policymakers once they entered the modern diplomatic treaty regimen with theEuro-American powers in the 1850s. Mamiya, by drawing cartographically accurate maps, notonly anticipated Japanese empire in the North Paciﬁc, but anticipated one of the tools required innegotiating with the West. On these treaties and the clever Japanese negotiating that went into
them, see M.R. Auslin, Negotiating with Imperialism: The Unequal Treaties and the Culture ofJapanese Diplomacy, Cambridge, MA, 2004, 11-33.
3

L. Hostetler, Qing Colonial Enterprise: Ethnography and Cartography in Early Modern China,
Princeton, 2001, 1-3.
4

S.L. Burns, Before the Nation: Kokugaku and the Imagining of Community in Early Modern
Japan, Durham, 2003; H.D. Harootunian, Toward Restoration: The Growth of Political
Consciousness in Tokugawa Japan, Berkeley, 1970; J.V. Koschmann, The Mito Ideology:
Discourse, Reform, and Insurrection in Late Tokugawa Japan, 1790-1864, Berkeley, 1987.
5

This sophisticated and compelling argument is advanced in E. Ikegami, Bonds of Civility:
Aesthetic Networks and the Political Origins of Japanese Culture, Cambridge, 2005, 46, 47, 230,
231. This is a departure from earlier debates on the topic of the origins of a national
consciousness in Japan. Famously, theorist M. Maruyama argued that the eighteenth-century decentered feudal order inhibited the emergence of a national consciousness in Japan. He submitted
that only with the arrival of European ships in the nineteenth century did Japan begin to develop
a sense of ‘political solidarity’ and ‘national unity’. For more on this line of thinking, see M.
Maruyama, Studies in the Intellectual History of Tokugawa Japan, M. Hane (Trans), Princeton,
1974, 327.
6

M.E. Berry, Japan in Print: Information and Nation in the Early Modern Period, Berkeley,2006, 209.
7

T. Najita, Japan: The Intellectual Foundations of Modern Japanese Politics, Chicago, 1974, 58.

8

B. Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reﬂections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism,
revised edition, London, 1991, 163-185. For more on maps and nation-building, see T.
Winichakul, Siam Mapped: A History of the Geo-Body of a Nation, Honolulu, 1994.
9

For another example of people being mapped out of the landscape by others with imperial
designs, see K.G. Brealey, Mapping them ‘out’: Euro-Canadian cartography and theappropriation of the Nuxalk and Ts’ilhqot’in ﬁrst nations’ territories, 1793-1916, The Canadian
Geographer/Le Géographe canadien 39, 2 (1995) 140-156.
10

Hostetler, Qing Colonial Enterprise (note 3), 15, 16.

11

Hostetler, Qing Colonial Enterprise (note 3), 5, 6.

Walker: Mamiya Rinzō and the Japanese Exploration of Sakhalin Island

1239

D. Harvey, Justice, Nature & the Geography of Diﬀerence, Malden, 1996, 10, 11, 222.

13

J.C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition have
Failed, New Haven, 1998.
14

This point regarding a Confucian orthodoxy is a bit of an overstatement. Herman Ooms has
demonstrated that the Tokugawa ideology took longer to coalesce and was not as strictly
Confucian as often claimed. See H. Ooms, Tokugawa Ideology: Early Constructs, 1570-1680,
Princeton, 1985.
15

D.L. Howell, Geographies of Identity in Nineteenth-century Japan, Berkeley, 2005, 24, 25, 46,
47.
16

By far the most comprehensive treatment of Japanese social history comes from Amino
Yoshihiko. Although he wrote on Japan’s medieval years, his books do illustrate the incredible
diversity of Japanese society in the late medieval and early modern years. See Y. Amino, Nihon
chūsei no minshūzō, Tokyo, 1980; Y. Amino, Nihon shakai no rekishi, 3 Vols, Tokyo, 1997.
17

T. Hora, Mamiya Rinzō, Tokyo, 1960, 38-47.

18

K. Nagahara and K. Yamamura, Shaping the process of uniﬁcation: technological progress in
sixteenth-and seventeenth-century Japan, Journal of Japanese Studies 14, 1 (1988) 83-88. On the
Chinese origins of many of these hydrologic systems, see M. Elvin, The Retreat of the
Elephants: An Environmental History of China, New Haven, 2004.
19

J.R. Bartholomew, The Formation of Science in Japan, New Haven, 1989, 23, 24.

20

An original copy can be found at the Resource Collection for Northern Studies, Hokkaido
University Library.
21

For an English-language biography of Matsudaira Sadanobu and a treatment of many of his
conservative reforms, see H. Ooms, Charismatic Bureaucrat: A Political Biography ofMatsudaira Sadanobu, 1758-1829, Chicago, 1975.
22

Hora, Mamiya Rinzō (note 17), 47-52.

23

Akizuki, Nihon hokuhen no tanken to chizu no rekishi (note 1), 286.

24

Maps and surveys emerged as just one part of a more comprehensive shogunal policy to assert
control over Ezochi and its Ainu inhabitants. For more on Tokugawa policies in Ezochi,
particularly with regards to disease and medicine, see B.L. Walker, The early modern Japanesestate and Ainu vaccinations: redeﬁning the body politic, 1799-1868, Past and Present 163 (1999)
121-160. On the manner in which Japanese policies of assimilation reconﬁgured Ainu relations
to once-worshipped animals such as wolves, see chapter 2 in B.L. Walker, The Lost Wolves ofJapan, Seattle, 2005; see also J.J. Stephan, Ezo under the Tokugawa Bakufu, 1799-1821: an
aspect of Japan’s frontier history, Ph.D. Diss., University of London, 1969.
25

Astronomy (and its close-cousin calendar making) was among the more prominent preindustrial sciences in Japan. For more on pre-industrial Japanese science, see M. Sugimoto and
D.L. Swain, Science and Culture in Traditional Japan, A.D. 600-1854, Cambridge, MA, 1978.

The Japanese Empire: Colonial Lives and Postcolonial Struggles

40

26

For more on the science of Inō Tadataka’s cartography, see R. Ōtani, Tadataka Inō: The
Japanese Land-Surveyor, K. Sugimura (Trans), Tokyo, 1932; more recently, M. Hoyanagi, Inō
Tadataka no kagakuteki gyōseki: Nihon chizu sakusei no kindaika e no michi, Tokyo, 1974.
27

Akizuki, Nihon hokuhen no tanken to chizu no rekishi (note 1), 287.

28

Akizuki, Nihon hokuhen no tanken to chizu no rekishi (note 1), 285.

29

D.N. Livingstone, Putting Science in its Place: Geographies of Scientiﬁc Knowledge, Chicago,
2003, 156.
30

A Voyage Round the World, Performed In the Years 1785, 1786, 1787, and 1788, By the
Boussole and Astrolabe, Under the Command of J.F.G. De La Pe´rouse: Published by Order of
the National Assembly, under the Superintendence of L.A. Milet-Mureau, Brigadier-General in
the Corps of Engineers, Director of Fortiﬁcations, Member of the Constituent Assembly and
Fellow of several literary Societies at Paris, Vol. 2 (London: G.G. and J. Robinson, PaternosterRow; J. Edwards, Pall-Mall; and T. Payne, Mews-Gate, Castle-Street, 1799), 18-27.
31

W.R. Broughton, A Voyage of Discovery to the North Paciﬁc Ocean: In which the Coast of
Asia, from the Lat. of 35 degrees North to the Lat. of 52 degrees North, the Island of Insu
(commonly known under the name of the Land of Jesso), the North, South, and East Coasts ofJapan, the Lieuchieux and the Adjacent Isles, as well as the Coast of Corea, have been Examined
and Surveyed. Performed in His Majesty’s Sloop Providence, and her Tender, in the years 1795,
1796, 1797, 1798 (London: T. Cadell and W. Davies in the Strand, 1804), 274-297.
32

B. Latour, Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society,Cambridge, MA, 1987, 215-228.
33

M.T. Bravo, Ethnographic navigation and the geographical gift, in: D.N. Livingstone and
C.W.J. Withers (Eds), Geography and Enlightenment, Chicago, 1999, 204, 205, 211, 213, 214,
230, 231.
34

Kären Wigen has demonstrated how early modern Japan’s proto-capitalism shaped the spatial
development of the Ina Valley, creating, by the early twentieth century, a ‘Japanese periphery’.
That is, the Ina Valley transformed ‘from a diverse proto-industrial center to a precarious
industrial supply zone.’ See K. Wigen, The Making of a Japanese Periphery, 1750-1920,
Berkeley, 1995, 12. For more on the geographic imagination in early modern Japan, see K.
Wigen, The geographic imagination in early modern Japanese history: retrospect and prospect,
Journal of Asian Studies 51, 1 (1992) 3-29.
35

B.L. Walker, The Conquest of Ainu Lands: Ecology and Culture in Japanese Expansion, 15901800, Berkeley, 2001, 138-150. Mogami Tokunai wrote several ethnographies and accounts of
his travels, but perhaps the most famous is Ezokoku fūzoku ninjō no sata [1791], in: S. Takakura(Ed.), Nihon shomin seikatsu shiryō shūsei, Vol. 4, Tokyo, 1969.
36

K. Unno, Cartography in Japan, in: J.B. Harley and D. Woodward (Eds), The History of
Cartography: Cartography in the Traditional East and Southeast Asian Societies, Vol. 2,
Chicago, 1994, 445, 446. The 1785-1786 survey produced the Ezochi ikken [1784-1790], in:
Hokkaidō (Ed.), Shin Hokkaidōshi, Vol. 7, Sapporo, 1969.

Walker: Mamiya Rinzō and the Japanese Exploration of Sakhalin Island

41

37

Akizuki, Nihon hokuhen no tanken to chizu no rekishi (note 1). For more on European
cartographers and spatial renditions of Ezochi, see A. Boscaro and L. Walter, Ezo and its
surroundings through the eyes of European cartographers, in: L. Walter (Ed.), Japan: A
Cartographic Vision, Munich, 1994, 84-90.
38

C. Totman, Early Modern Japan, Berkeley, 1993, 484, 485.

39

Walker, The early modern Japanese state and Ainu vaccinations (note 24), 137e139.

40

K. Kubota, Hokuchi nikki (1804). Resource Collection for Northern Studies, Hokkaido
University Library, Sapporo, Japan. I am grateful to Tsuchiya Tatsuhide for bringing thisdocument to my attention and for helping to decipher it.
41

J. Ōmura, in: S. Mori (Ed.), Shizanki: Ōmura Jigohei ni yoru Etorofutō jiken, Tokyo, 1977,
266.
42

M.L. Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation, London, 1992, 9-15.

43

A. Crosby, The Measure of Reality: Quantiﬁcation and Western Society, 1250-1600,
Cambridge, 1997.
44

J.B. Harley, in: P. Laxton (Ed.), The New Nature of Maps: Essays in the History of
Cartography, J.H. Andrews (Intro), Baltimore, 2001, 52e55. On the relationship between maps
and imperialism, see M.H. Edney, Mapping an Empire: The Geographical Construction of
British India, 1765-1843, Chicago, 1999; B.E. Mundy, The Mapping of New Spain: Indigenous
Cartography and the Maps of the Relaciones Geograﬁcas, Chicago, 2000; I.J. Barrow, Making
History, Drawing Territory: British Mapping in India, ca. 1756-1905, Oxford, 2004.
45

Harley, The New Nature of Maps (note 44), 57.

46

S. Ryan, The Cartographic Eye: How Explorers Saw Australia, Cambridge, 1996, 4, 5

47

D. Clayton, The creation of imperial space in the Paciﬁc Northwest, Journal of Historical
Geography 26, 3 (2000) 328, 329; more recently, see D. Clayton, Islands of Truth: The Imperial
Fashioning of Vancouver Island, Vancouver, 2000.
48

Akizuki, Nihon hokuhen no tanken to chizu no rekishi (note 1), 286; see also D. Matsuda,
Hokuidan (n.d.), in: S. Takakura (Ed.), Nihon shomin seikatsu shiryō shūsei, Vol. 4, Tokyo,
1969. Golovnin actually met Mamiya while incarcerated. He wrote:
In the meanwhile we formed an acquaintance with a geometrician and astronomer, named
Mamia Rinso, who had been sent from the Japanese capital. [He] shewed us his
instruments, which consisted of an English sector, an astrolabe, with a compass, a case ofmathematical instruments, and quick-silver for forming the artiﬁcial horizon, and requested
that we would shew him how the Europeans employed these things. He visited us everyday,
and frequently remained with us from morning until evening, during which time he gave us
an account of his travels, and produced his plans and sketches of the diﬀerent countries hehad visited. We inspected them with the greatest curiosity. The Japanese looked upon him
as a very learned man. They always listened to him with the utmost attention, and wondered
how he could have travelled to so many diﬀerent places: he had visited all the Kurile

The Japanese Empire: Colonial Lives and Postcolonial Struggles

42

Islands, as far as the seventeenth, Sagaleen, and even the land of Mandshuren [Manchuria],
and had sailed through the river Amur.
See Captain Golownin (Vasilii Mikhailovich Golovnin), Memoirs of a Captivity in Japan,
During the Years 1811, 1812, and 1813; with Observations on the Country and the People, Vol.
1, London, 282, 283.
49

Mamiya Rinzō’s two expeditions to Sakhalin Island are well documented in the secondary
literature and, in some respects, are the stuﬀ of legends in Japan. See, for example, E. Akaba,
Mamiya Rinzō: Hoppō chirigaku no kensetsusha: Tokyo, 1974, 78-113; T. Uryū, Mamiya Rinzō,Tokyo, 1974, 102-126; T. Arai, Mamiya Rinzō: Nihon sokuchigaku no sentatsu, Tsuchiura,
Ibaraki Prefecture, 1981, 35-50; S. Nakamura, Hoppō senri o yuku: Mamiya Rinzō no shōgai,Tokyo, 1982, 118-128; T. Ōtani, Mamiya Rinzō no saihakken, Tsuchiura, Ibaraki Prefecture,
1983; A. Koyano, Mamiya Rinzō onmitsusetsu no kyojitsu, Tokyo, 1998, 56-86.
50

Akizuki, Nihon hokuhen no tanken to chizu no rekishi (note 1), 288.

51

See R. Mamiya (with T. Murakami), in: T. Hora and S. Tanisawa (Eds), Tōdatsu chihō kikō,Tokyo, 1988, 116-165.
52

Akizuki, Nihon hokuhen no tanken to chizu no rekishi (note 1), 290.

53

Walker, The Conquest of Ainu Lands (note 35), 134, 135.

54

Livingstone, Putting Science in its Place (note 29), 155.

55

Akizuki, Nihon hokuhen no tanken to chizu no rekishi (note 1), 290-292.

56

Akizuki, Nihon hokuhen no tanken to chizu no rekishi (note 1), 435, 438, 439.

57

Akizuki, Nihon hokuhen no tanken to chizu no rekishi (note 1), 294.

58

M.T. Hodgen, Early Anthropology in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century, Philadelphia,
1964.
59

On Ezogashima as the northern edge of the medieval Japanese realm, see B. Batten, Frontiers
and boundaries of pre-modern Japan, Journal of Historical Geography 25, 2 (1999) 166-182;
more recently, B. Batten, Nihon no ‘kyōkai’: Zenkindai no kokka, minzoku, bunka, Tokyo, 2000;
B.L. Batten, To the Ends of Japan: Premodern Frontiers, Boundaries, and Interactions,
Honolulu, 2003.
60

T. Morris-Suzuki, The frontiers of Japanese identity, in: S. Tønnesson and H. Antlöv (Eds),
Asian Forms of the Nation, Richmond, 1996, 42, 44; see also T. Morris-Suzuki, Re-Inventing
Japan: Time, Space, Nation, New York, 1998, 11-20.
61

M. Yonemoto, Mapping Early Modern Japan: Space, Place, and Culture in the Tokugawa
Period (1603-1868), Berkeley, 2003, 6, 67, 101.
62

Morris-Suzuki, The frontiers of Japanese identity (note 60); see also Morris-Suzuki, ReInventing Japan (note 60).

Walker: Mamiya Rinzō and the Japanese Exploration of Sakhalin Island

63

43

Morris-Suzuki, The frontiers of Japanese identity (note 60), 51.

64

For more on this literature, see B.L. Walker, Foreign aﬀairs and frontiers in early modern
Japan: a historiographical essay of the ﬁeld, Early Modern Japan: An Interdisciplinary Journal
10, 2 (2002) 51-55. This essay can also be found in J.E. Hanes and H. Yamaji (Eds), Image and
Identity: Rethinking Cultural History, Kobe, 2005.
65

R.P. Toby, Kinsei-ki no ‘Nihon zu’ to ‘Nihon’ no kyōkai, in: H. Kuroda, M.E. Berry and F.
Sugimoto (Eds), Chizu to ezu no seiji bunkashi, Tokyo, 2001, 79-102.
66

Yonemoto, Mapping Early Modern Japan (note 61), 78, 79.

67

R.P. Toby, The ‘Indianness’ of Iberia and changing Japanese iconographies of other, in: S.
Schwartz (Ed.), Implicit Understandings: Observing, Reporting, and Reﬂecting on the
Encounters Between Europeans and Other Peoples in the Early Modern Era, Cambridge, 1994,
331.
68

L.M. Cullen, A History of Japan, 1582-1941: Internal and External Worlds, Cambridge, 155,
156.
69

J.J. Stephan, Sakhalin: A History, Oxford, 1971, 63-65.

70

The history of disease exchange between Japanese and Ainu is covered in chapter 7 of Walker,
The Conquest of Ainu Lands (note 35). On the endemic nature of smallpox and other diseases inearly modern Japan, see A.B. Jannetta, Epidemics and Mortality in Early Modern Japan,
Princeton, 1987.
71

Howell, Geographies of Identity (note 15), 186-189.

72

Stephan, Sakhalin (note 69), 142, 143.

The Japanese Empire: Colonial Lives and Postcolonial Struggles

44“Designs of Power: The ‘Japanization’ of Urban and Rural Space in Colonial Hokkaidō”
Vivian Blaxell
August 31, 2009http://japanfocus.org/-Vivian-Blaxell/3211
Blaxell treats the naturalization and Japanization of the land formerly known as
Ezochi (literally “land of the barbarians”) into Hokkaido. Blaxell discusses thetransformation of the urban space of Sapporo in the 1870s and 1880s by Japanese working
with American advisors. The result was neither Japanese nor American, but distinctly
modern and evocative of the imperial age. Blaxell touches upon the simultaneous erasingof the indigenous people, the Ainu, from the land during this re-conceptualization of
Hokkaido as Japanese space and land. (The policies directed toward the Ainu after
Hokkaido’s colonization are discussed in Hirano Katsuya’s article in Part II.) Blaxell uses
the importation of a quintessentially Japanese characteristic—rice—to the unforgiving
climate of Hokkaido and its eventual acculturation as an example of how the processes ofcolonization helped to naturalize a landscape as Japanese. Her article encourages us not totake for granted the geographic space—whether urban or “natural” —and understand how
it is the result of both constructive (for some people but not others) and destructive humanactions.

Blaxell: Designs of Power45

Designs of Power: The “Japanization” of Urban and Rural Space in Colonial Hokkaidō
Vivian Blaxell
It is Japan, but yet there is a difference somehow.
—Isabella Bird, 1878.
A whole history remains to be written of spaces—which would at the same time be the history of
powers—from the great strategies of geo-politics to the little tactics of the habitat.
—Michel Foucault, “The Eye of Power”
Though Hokkaidō may seem a natural part of Japan, manacled to Tokyo as it is by law, bylanguage, by economics, and by the 54 kilometer undersea Seikan Tunnel, Hokkaidō was notalways Japan. Hokkaidō was not always Hokkaidō. Hokkaidō was modern Japan’s first foreign
conquest; its first colony in a deliberate imperial trajectory begun in 1869, concluded in 1945 andeventually encompassing vast tracts of East and Southeast Asia. The colonization of Hokkaidō
took place in many ways, most especially through the catastrophic de-culturation, dispossession
and subjugation of the island’s indigenous population, the Ainu. [1] Yet, the business of making
Hokkaidō, “Hokkaidō,” of turning the island known as Ezochi, a wild untrammeled sort of place,
into an integral part of modern Japan was also about space, about creations of space and about
remaking local space in ways that delivered Ezochi up to Hokkaidō and surrendered Hokkaidō toJapan.
To be sure, the late 19th century sequestration of the Ainu on small farms and in designatedvillages, conversion of the landscape from forest and grasslands into mines and fields for cash
crops, immigration of Japanese settlers, along with the simple privatization of the island’sgeography produced spaces within which colonial subjects and the colonial political entity could
themselves be effectively produced. But Hokkaidō’s colonization occurred before thegeopolitical gesture contained in the 1918 Wilsonian ideal of self-determining nation-states.
Hokkaidō became Hokkaidō at a time when Japan’s imperial discourse and its elaborations in thematerial realm tended to vigorously assimilate colonized space and colonized subjects asJapanese (Hokkaidō, Okinawa, Korea) or represented colonial spaces and subjects as becoming
Japanese (Taiwan and Micronesia.)[2] In Hokkaidō, this “being Japanese” required more thandestruction of Ainu economics and culture, more than the introduction of American andEuropean cash crops. It required careful productions of Japanese spaces on the island. Without
Japanese spaces elaborated from Japanese myth, history and contemporaneous discourses aboutmodernity, the Japanese identity of the island could not be well forged and thus its subjects’“Japaneseness” could not be assumed. This essay attends to the elaboration of discourse in, andthe production of, Japanese spaces in colonial Hokkaidō: the design of Sapporo; the architectureof some of Sapporo’s most important 19th century buildings; the introduction of wet rice
agriculture, for it is at these historical spaces that more about the technologies of Japan’s
takeover of Ezochi and its transformation into Hokkaidō, into Japan, more about Japanesecolonialism, and more about what Foucault calls “the history of powers”, is to be found.
The samurai and the city
For more than 200 years the shoguns in Edo (Tokyo) asserted rights of suzerainty over Ezochi,
the island that would become Hokkaidō. Matsumae, the northernmost feudal domain in
Tokugawa Japan, held a border fief with a small castle town capital at the far south of the island.

The Japanese Empire: Colonial Lives and Postcolonial Struggles

46

Yet for most of the Tokugawa era the shoguns’ claims to Ezochi were rhetorical rather thansubstantive. The Matsumae clan used Japanese middlemen to control a profitable trade with the
Ainu in herring and other small fish processed and sent south to the island of Honshū to be usedas fertilizer for rice cultivation. The trade resulted in Ainu adoption of elements of Japaneseculture: rice consumption and the use of lacquerware, for example, but beyond the small space
governed by Matsumae at the extreme southern tip of a peninsula just across the strait from
Honshū, Ezochi was essentially a foreign land in theoretical fealty to Japan. The arrival offoreigners in Japanese waters during the 1840s culminating in the demands for treaties and trade
made by the American, Matthew Perry, in 1853 changed all that.
The treaty concluded with the United States by the shogun, Tokugawa Iesada, in 1854 stipulated
the opening of two ports where foreign ships could re-supply and consular representatives could
be stationed. One of those ports was Hakodate. The southernmost harbor settlement in Ezochi,
Hakodate was under direct control of the shogun in Edo and the resting place of the first
American citizen to be buried in Japan. In almost immediate response to American demands, theshogunate posted a governor to Hakodate, an early sign of the importance Ezochi would
henceforth assume in Japanese national projects. At the same time, fear of the expansionist
tendencies of the Russian Empire in Siberia turned Ezochi from a foreign land into a Japanese
fortification against the designs of Saint Petersburg. Even as it was disintegrating, the shogunal
government began plans for development of Ezochi. For a brief period at the end of the civil war
between the shogunate and the supporters of Emperor Meiji, Ezochi became the site of a shortlived republic after the northern clans still loyal to the Tokugawa regime retreated across thestrait. But with the Boshin War concluded, the ingestion of Ezochi began in earnest. In early Julyof 1869 the new Meiji government established the Kaitakushi (Hokkaidō Colonization
Commission), an official entity to lead and oversee colonization of Ezochi. Less than a month
later the government in Tokyo re-named the northern island: Ezochi became Hokkaidō andHokkaidō became a vital part of Japan’s plans for the future. Officials departing Tokyo for toursof duty in Hokkaidō left with exhortations at once imperious and benevolent ringing in their ears:
Hokkaidō is the most important place for the Northern Gate of the Empire. With regard to the
proclaimed development, sincerely carry out the Imperial Will, and make efforts to spread
welfare, education and morals with kindness. With the gradual immigration of mainlanders,make sincere efforts to encourage harmony with the natives and a prosperous livelihood. [3]Hokkaidō colonial headquarters, Sapporo

Blaxell: Designs of Power47

The Imperial Will demanded a capital city for the newly named island. The Kaitakushi charged
Shima Yoshitake, a former samurai of the Saga domain, with the design and construction of
Sapporo. In surviving pictures, Shima is grave for the camera, the beard of a Chinese sage
garnishes his chin, and in one, perhaps taken at the time he received honors from the Meiji
emperor, he is dressed in the formal headgear and kimono of a senior feudal retainer.

Shima Yoshitake

He looks very much a traditionalist. And in the syncretic revolutionary fashion of the first Meiji
modernizers, he was: born to substantial privilege on October 26, 1822 (Bunsei 5) into an umamawari (around the lord’s horse) family that had been on the inner circle of the Saga lords forgenerations. The family was entitled to the generous income of 300 koku of rice.[4] Shimainherited the family fortune in 1844 and went to study with Satō Issai and Fujita Tōko in Edo.

The Japanese Empire: Colonial Lives and Postcolonial Struggles

48

According to Kōzen Noburu, Shima appears to have been especially influenced by Fujita, asenior retainer in the Mito domain and a central figure in the 19th century intellectual attempt toreconcile neo-Confucianist ethical universalism with the Japanese nativism of kokugaku(national learning) in which the source of Japanese history and culture was not China but Japan
itself. Kōzen argues that Shima agreed with Fujita that the right course to set for national
independence and strength was to actively open the country to modern technologies andmethods; keep the Westerners out and retain a “traditionalist” even “native” form of politics andculture with the resuscitated imperial institution above it all. Shima also agreed with Fujita thatthe island of Ezochi was vital to the defense and future of Japan. [5]Fujita Toko

Back at Saga, Shima resumed service to the Saga daimyo, Nabeshima Naomasa. Even six years
prior to the intrusion of the United States in Japanese waters, Shima was much concerned about
how Japan was to respond to foreign efforts to engage with Japan. In this context, Shima andNaomasa demonstrated significant concern with the defense of both the Saga domain and of
Ezochi. Though far to the northeast of Saga, the island that would become Hokkaidō held a placeof keen interest in the intellectual and political life of the domain leadership which, having beenin contact with Russian ships at Nagasaki and elsewhere on the southwestern coast, saw a clear
threat to Japan’s northern borders posed by the flimsy Japanese sway over such a large andundeveloped island proximate to the eastern borders of the Russian Empire.
In 1856 Naomasa sent Shima on an official expedition to survey and assess Ezochi and Karafuto(Sakhalin). Upon his return the following year, Shima produced a record of his expedition,

Blaxell: Designs of Power49

Nyūhokki [Account of being in the North). Shima also wrote kanshi (Chinese language poetry)during his travels in 1856 and 1869. Kanshi was an essential art for a samurai of Shima’s status
and time, but though its genealogy harked back to Chinese poetry and it was written using only
Chinese characters, by the nineteenth century kanshi in Japan had become a “native” Japanesepoetic form. Shima’s kanshi constitute a sort of abbreviated biography of his experiences, his
impressions, and his consciousness, a “poetic journal.” The 1869 kanshi are rich in all the sortsof tropes and figures one might expect of an early Meiji official, educated in Mitogaku andcharged with colonization, indeed “civilization,” of territory: imperial edicts linked to thelandscape and Shima’s journey to it and through it; invocations of Shinto deities as protection
and as witnesses of his submission to the Imperial will. The poems work less as poems than assigns of Shima’s interior discourse and his place in the exterior ideologies and discourse of histimes. His kanshi reveals the late Tokugawa vision of the island in Shima’s thinking:inhospitable; frightening; exotic:
Mountain after mountain, heavy going,
scaling the next mountain keeps the chill windy days warm.
Suddenly, the howling voice of a wolf echoes lonely in the ravine below,
desolate crescent moon in the sky above
glitters coldly on the mountain peaks.
In the valley, hanging clouds hide the moon
the path ahead is dark,
a mountain rivulet flows at my feet, its waters sounding angry.
I am quite unnerved,
but then local people come to welcome us
bearing scarlet paper lanterns.
A tradition of the land, used in place of normal torches.
And as we travel on, our hands light up, a blushing red.
But in another poem we find signs of a different consciousness about Ezochi and mobilization ofa Japanese screen through which to understand the island:
I peek at the deep drop from a cliff 100 feet high,The steep path snakes right and left again.
The scenery here is astonishingly beautiful.
It seems to be a sansui landscape painting, just like nanga. [6]Shima’s concern with the natural landscape is a standard trope for this type of Japanese poetry.
Like other cultured, high-ranking samurai, Shima cultivated an aesthetic and spiritual sensitivity
to nature. More importantly for the discussion here and for the design of Sapporo, the final lineof the latter poem with its attempt to frame the landscape of Ezochi in nanga painting, itself anativized Chinese art form like the kanshi poetic form, domesticates the new and strange byframing them in the old or familiar. This is of course a conventional strategy for understanding
the new and the other in travel writing. On her visit to Hokkaidō in 1878, Isabella Bird could notresist likening the island to Scotland, Ireland and even Gibraltar. In the 1940s as the Japanese
empire pushed into tropical Southeast Asia, newspapers and magazines published photographs,
cartoons and drawings of Filipino and Javanese volcanoes and likened them to Fujisan, while
elements of Malay culture were identified as proto-historical Japanese characteristics, all as away of making the new, old, and the strange, familiar. But while Shima’s poems about Ezochi

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employ this common device of travel narratives, there is also a repeated framing of the island interms of Japan and its nativist or mythical traditions throughout the poems. In some, Shinto
deities inhabit the landscape. In others, the island is a geographical subject of the emperor.
Mountains, lakes and rivers remind Shima of Saga or of tales from the Kojiki and the Nihongi.
Ezochi is at once foreign and Japanese to Shima.
Shima’s repetitive slippage into writing Ezochi in terms of a nativist vision of Japan and its
history suggests something beyond making the strange, familiar, and the incomprehensible,
comprehensible. Just as the sonnō jōi (revere the Emperor; expel the barbarians) samurai
envisioned a future Japan by simultaneously looking back at an imaginary time when theJapanese emperor was revered and foreign influences had done nothing to sully the purity ofJapanese culture, yet at the same time bought guns and Western technology, Shima looked at the
spatial future of Japan in Ezochi in terms of a largely invented Japanese past yet one tempered by
the sort of pragmatism required for the emerging nation to survive in a world dominated by thewestern imperial powers. We can find delicate traces of this future/past vision of Ezochi in
Shima’s poetic voice, but when it came to the design of Sapporo, Shima turned explicitly to theold to make the new. In July 1869 Shima’s aging daimyo, Naomasa, appointed Shima to theposition of Kaitakushi hangan, Hokkaidō Colonization Commissioner, charged with designingand building a capital city for the new territory. Shima was already 49 years of age, no longer ayoung man by the standards of Japan at the time and already beyond retirement age for an upper
level feudal retainer. But he was close to Naomasa; his committed service to the forces leading
the fight against the shogunate and for the restoration of the imperial institution to its politicalplace above politics, along with his knowledge of Hokkaidō brought him the reward and burdenof imperial service in the northern district.
Shima saw his work as a service to the emperor but also to his vision of a Japanese imperial statewith its modernity profoundly conditioned by the nativist vision of the past. His design of
Sapporo stands as a spatial testament to his imperial loyalty and his concept of a natively modern
state. The received wisdom has it that the vision for Sapporo came to Shima in the autumn of1869 as he viewed the Ishikari Plain from the high flanks of a hill to the west of where the city
now stands. Even today, there are still patches of old growth forest here where Shima sat, and azoo where in winter one can encounter giraffes looking bemused in the snow. Shima designatedthe hill as a city park. He named the park “Maruyama,” which is the name of a famous park in
the heart of Kyoto, Japan’s imperial capital city until 1868. Then Shima situated a Shinto shrine
next to his Maruyama Park and in it, he installed the tamashiro of three deities newly dedicatedto colonization by the religious office of the government in Tokyo, the Jingikan.[7] Construction
and dedication of a jinja at the site of Sapporo represented a vital step in the creation of Japanesespace in the regions of Hokkaidō beyond Shiraoi and what had been the Matsumae domain. The
shrine that was to become the Hokkaidō Jingu elaborated the ideological and administrative
discourses about Shinto and its power to unify the state and its subjects around the imperial
institution in material space. Thereafter, construction of jinja became a central spatial techniqueof Japanese colonialism, a means of Japanizing possessions from Toyohara and Naha to Seoul,
Taipei, Shinkyō in Manchuria, Rangoon and Singapore.
By the time he arrived on the Maruyama belvedere, Shima already had a design for the city of
Sapporo in mind, a plan for a new city inspired by the ancient imperial capital of Kyoto, a designfor the future of Hokkaidō grounded in the Japanese past.[8] The 8th century planners of Kyoto
had imported and adapted the Chinese imperial design of the Tang capital city, Chang’an, intoBlaxell: Designs of Power

51

Japan to produce Kyoto as “a magical act, the aim being to bestow on the Yamato Court thepower of its Chinese counterpart.”[9] For Shima, however, the act of importing Kyoto into
Hokkaidō for the production of Sapporo was both magical and political. In his design for
Sapporo, Shima found new meanings “for older materializations of space and time.”[10] In
Hokkaidō the gobannome (Go board rectangular grid plan) of Kyoto and its spatial orders(governmental power to the north, trade to the south) achieved two ends: it brought the center tothe periphery so that the periphery could be brought into the Meiji imperial order, and it gave
spatial elaboration to the ideology circulated by Shima and other leaders in the early Meiji
modernization of Japan that modern and western were not coterminous and that the new was infact the old.

Shima Yoshitake’s Plan for Sapporo

Although other important cities were built in colonial Hokkaidō and played major roles in theisland’s political economy and in its colonization, they were designed on the principles ofAmerican urban planning and Sapporo with its spatial recovery of the past for the purposes ofmodernization remained at the heart of colonial governance. As Japan’s first planned colonialcity then, Sapporo stood as a material elaboration in space of a particular 19th century Japanesevision of Japanese modernity based on a mythical historicism and founded in an ideologicaleffort to remake Japan as a natively modern state. Sapporo stood too as a stamp of Japaneseimperial ambitions and practices on the face of Hokkaidō. In its spatial elaboration of nativist
discourse and Heian imperial symbology recovered for a modern future, Shima’s Sapporo
represents a first pass at the practice of colonial urban design by a Japanese planner. In later
years other Japanese planners would design and produce colonial urban spaces at Toyohara in
Karafuto, Japanese settler towns in Japanese Micronesia and the cities of Dairen and Shinkyō inthe puppet state of Manchukuo, all imbued with the ideological and symbolic freight of their
discursive times.[11]In January of 1870 Shima was dismissed, ostensibly for fiscal extravagance in the constructionof Sapporo, but more likely because of deep differences with his superior, Higashikuse, overwhat sort of modernity Japan should have. Yet his vision of Sapporo as a new but also traditional
Japanese space persisted. In 1873 Shima penned a jōsho memo to Iwakura Tomomi arguing that
Sapporo should be renamed with the same characters used for Peking, the imperial capital of

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Qing China, and designated as the imperial residence for the emperor during his summer
retreat.[12] Sapporo was thus a spatial container for Shima’s dream of a modern Japan
uncontaminated by foreign forms, the same dream that led him with Eto Shimpei into the failed
Saga Rebellion, itself an act of protest against the western forms Japanese modernity had begun
to take by 1874. Beheaded for his role in the rebellion, his head was displayed to the public.
Discursive architectures
After Shima, the development of Sapporo came under the direction of Kuroda Kiyotaka, whowent on to become Japan’s second Prime Minister from 1888 to 1889. Kuroda sometimes drank
far too much, turned nasty and violent when inebriated, and later was rumored to have killed hiswife in a drunken fury. But Kuroda was one of the heroes of the war against the shogunate andthe job of managing the colonization of Hokkaidō was a reward for his services. Born into afamily of samurai retainers to the Satsuma daimyo, Kuroda had once imagined a native form ofJapanese modernity.

Kuroda KiyotakaBlaxell: Designs of Power53

This vision he shared with Shima, but only for a time: after a visit to the United States in 1871
Kuroda quickly adopted the view that the form of modernity mattered less for Japan’s survival in
the world of the imperial powers than modernity itself. As head of the Kaitakushi, Kuroda
secured a huge increase in the budget. He used a substantial part of it to employ Americans toshape the colonization of the island and its transformation into a productive and placid part ofJapan. Soon a variety of men “bitten with Orientalism”[13] or simply in need of a job, or
nostalgic for a “frontier experience” already elusive in America, arrived from the United States
to help the Japanese government enact its imperial dream in Hokkaidō. The conduct of some ofthese men in Hokkaidō was at times violent and licentious: one shot six Ainu hunting dogs while
in a drunken rage, smashed up an inn and stabbed the Japanese military officers who tried torestrain him, but the miniaturized American look of rural Hokkaidō, still much remarked upon in
travel literature today, is part of their legacy. The barns and silos that remind 21st century
tourists of Wisconsin were ordered from the Sears Roebuck catalogue and assembled in alandscape now “rural-ized” and given over to orchards, dairy farming, corn and beet cropping.
Under Kuroda, Sapporo grew beyond its original design. New buildings rose along Shima’s
geomantic streets. Several of these buildings survive today and supply some of the city’s
identity, just as they did when Kuroda and the Kaitakushi undertook their construction. Indeed,
one of the most enduring symbols of Sapporo for Japanese from other islands is the Sapporo
Clock Tower, built in 1878 as the Drill Hall of the Sapporo Agricultural College (the predecessorof Hokkaidō University) to an American design by William Wheeler. With white clapboards,
sash windows and fretwork eaves, the Sapporo Clock tower could have been lifted directly fromalmost any New England town. In 1970 the government in Tokyo designated the Clock Tower as
an Important Cultural Property. Visitors to the city invariably stop to admire it, though it now
seems so diminished in a surrounding thicket of office towers that the Clock Tower is classed bysome as one of the “three great disappointments of Japan” (Nihon san-dai gakkari), the two othergreat disappointments being the Harimayabashi, a tiny red painted bridge spanning a filled-inriver in the city of Kochi on the island of Shikoku, and the Eiffel-esque Nagoya Television
Tower.[14]But disappointing or not, the 19th century buildings of Sapporo look very American. The firsthead office for the Kaitakushi burned to the ground in 1879, yet from the perspective drawings
and photographs available in the archive, it was a neat blend of the design of the original
Massachusetts state house and the Maryland capitol building in Annapolis. Its successor, theAkarenga, was built of red bricks. In 1888 bricks were still a novel and expensive construction
material in Japan: it was bricks along with gas lighting that had made the Ginza such a vital signof modernity and the power of the Meiji state in 1872, and the red brick Akarenga provided an
important symbol of state authority and modernity in Hokkaidō; the building is an elegant
Japanese rendition of late nineteenth century American Baroque revival architecture. The houseof the prefectural governor might pass as a neo-Tudor mansion in Bethesda or Bel Air, exceptthat there is something not quite right about the half-timbering. But European or American
looking as they were, these Sapporo buildings from the 1870s and 1880s were also quite
Japanese; products of a Japanese spatial practice in which the debates about Japanese modernity
were elaborated in architecture and architectural embellishment. The red bricks of the Akarenga
repeated in Hokkaidō a particularly Japanese vision of modernity and state power previously
elaborated in Ginza, and the uncanny neo-Tudor half-timbering of the governor’s mansion

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gestures to debates about how perfectly “western” modern forms in Japan needed to be to build
the state.
In contrast to Shima’s city plan with its modernity grounded in an imagined Japanese past, manyof the new buildings constructed under the aegis of Kuroda took their principles of construction
and the bases of their design from architecture in the West, principally from the United States.
But their details and often their interiors derived as much from Japanese architectural themes andvisions as they did from America. In this at least, such buildings complied with the beginnings ofa discursive resolution reached in the second decade of Meiji as traditionalists like Shima, Eto,and Saigo Takamori increasingly lost control over meaning to men like Ito Hirobumi and even
Iwakura Tomomi, whose vision of Japanese modernity ousted the last nativist mutteringsof “revere the emperor; oust the barbarians” and replaced them with their opposite: Westernlearning; Japanese spirit. Now the Japanese modern took a newer form than that imagined by
Shima. And we can detect this in two Hokkaidō buildings: the Seikatei and the Hōheikan Guest
House. While not among the grandest of Sapporo’s buildings from the period, both were
designed and built to accommodate the Emperor Meiji on his visits to the city. The alloy of
American, European, and Japanese design found in these buildings was carefully formulated,attesting to the effort to transform built space in the city in ways that recirculated the prevailingdiscourses of modernity and Japaneseness.
Both the Seikatei and the Hōheikan guest house were built in 1880. The mix of Western stylewith Japanese features that creates a distinctive spatial realization of Japanese modernity isimmediately apparent in the little Seikatei house, where a bay window and horizontal clapboards
consort with a glassed-in traditional Japanese porch, engawa.

The Seikatei

The interior is divided between washitsu traditional Japanese rooms and western rooms in a
fashion that continues in Japanese houses to the present day. The kitchen has a floor of earth in
the traditional Japanese manner. At first glance, the Seikatei in its stand of hemlocks evokes anunpainted New England house, or summer cottage on the shore of one of the Finger Lakes inBlaxell: Designs of Power

55

upstate New York, but the alloy of Japanese and western design testifies to something different,a spatial operation most apparent in Hōheikan.
William Coaldrake suggests that the American expert Louis Boehmer supervised construction of
Hōheikan, but Boehmer can only be credited with design of the gardens in which the building
originally stood.[15] Certainly the method of construction was western. Certainly too, as
Coaldrake suggests, it is easy to imagine Hōheikan as home to a rich nineteenth century New
England family in the Pondside neighborhood of Boston: the architectural foundations of thedesign are patently American. But Hōheikan is more complex and interesting than that. The
design of the building owes as much to a Japanese way of doing modernity as it does to an
American template. Hōheikan was one of only three major Kaitakushi building projects during
the 1870s and early 1880s: the Kaitakushi headquarters building; the Kaitakushi
Bussanurisabaki-sho trading and reception center in Tokyo; Hōheikan.[16]The Hōheikan

Unlike the original headquarters of the Kaitakushi building which appears to have been almost
entirely free of Japanese characteristics and was reportedly designed by Horace Capron, andunlike the Bussanurisabaki-sho Kaitakushi trading center designed by Josiah Conder, Hōheikan’s“architect” was Japanese: Adachi Kikō, a senior Kaitakushi construction department official.[17]Ōoka Sukeuemon managed construction.[18] The technical fundamentals of Hōheikan are
American: a timber frame behind clapboards. But many of the details of the design are Japanese.
The balcony above the main entrance to Hōheikan is topped by an open segmental pediment,
itself descended from the pediments on Michelangelo’s tomb for Lorenzo di Medici but also
common in late nineteenth century American Georgian Revival and Beaux Arts architecture.
There is nothing Japanese about this. But the Georgian style pediment transported to Hokkaidō
has a gegyo, a traditional decorative Japanese gable pendant that recovers the Japanesearchitectural conventions of an earlier time. And the pediment has a prominence on the front of
Hōheikan more Japanese than American, a prominence that refers us to the considerable
frontality of karahafu entrance gate gables in elite Tokugawa dwellings and temples.

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The Japanese gegyo on the Hōheikan pediment

The interior of the Hōheikan seems to be an especially Japanese translation of an Americaninterior. The ceilings are astonishingly high, meters higher than any Japanese traditional ceilingand much higher than those in any Boston ballroom. These days the interior of Hōheikan isdecorated in a Victorian style, but much of the interior fittings and furniture were added in thelate twentieth century as exhibits, an evocation of the period that does not well represent thestark appearance of the rooms and public spaces in the 1880s. Even the famed chandeliers
depending from plaster mouldings embellished with a cherry blossom theme were added to
Hōheikan some years after construction. This alloy of American construction and basic design
with Japanese motifs, themes and stripped down interior represents the 1880s Meiji moment in a
built structure and invokes the rhetoric of “Japanese spirit, Western learning.” Hōheikan is lessAmerican than it is Japanese and, as one of the three major built spaces designed and constructed
the Kaitakushi in the 1880s, it must be understood as a major architectural elaboration of
discourse and colonial purpose: its design played a role in Japanizing the still uncertainly
domesticated space of Hokkaidō.
The core design of Sapporo and the design of Hōheikan and the Seikatei house embody two
different points in a uniquely Japanese project: the construction of a unified modern Japanese
identity drawing on reworked forms from Japan’s past and selected Western forms. As such, they
do not then represent the American or Western impact on the development of Hokkaidō so muchas they show how vigorously the Kaitakushi and the Meiji government in Tokyo sought toJapanize the island by reworking its built space into Japanese spatial orders that elaborated
discourses of modernity and furthered the mission to subjugate Hokkaidō in service to a Japanese
dream.

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Rice and the Postmaster
While the urban design and the design of public buildings in Sapporo functioned as instrumentsof power elaborating Meiji ideologies about Japanese identity and modernity on the island space,
they did so in a sort of delimited and talismanic space. For Japanization of space to be more
widely implemented, ideological signs of Japanese identity needed to be elaborated on a wider
scale. This meant the island landscape. “Landscape patterns are both material and conceptual”
writes Andrew Sluyter.[19] They are comprised of physical matter and symbolic
communications and capital. Colonial transformations of landscape space change both thephysical matter of the land and what the land means. In the Hokkaidō countryside north of thesouthern Hakodate region, Tokyo engaged in two sorts of landscape transformation after 1868.
Initially, American and Japanese experts acting on Kaitakushi policy began the job of turning theindigenous Ainu off their land, turning forest and grassland into farms for crops of beets andcorn, into orchards, and into pasture for cattle. The impact on the landscape and human life in thelandscape space was significant and included eradication of the local wolf [20] and catastrophic
destruction of Ainu culture and economics. Hunting and gathering, subsistence agriculture andindigenous fishing enterprises were replaced by a landscape transformed both materially andsymbolically for the modern business of colonists, cash-cropping, resource exploitation andcommercial fishing. These transformations of space represented significant instruments of power
for Japanese colonialism, yet in symbolic terms it was the introduction of wet rice culture to
Hokkaidō that did most to turn the landscape of the island into Japanese space.
The matrix of rice, Japanese territory and Japanese identity has been well set out by Emiko
Ohnuki-Tierney, but it bears reiteration here.[21] Rice is Japan, and rice in Hokkaidō makes theisland Japanese. Nothing is more a complete and doxological sign of the business of being
Japanese than rice and rice paddies. Rice and wet rice fields do two things in Japan: they signify
what it is to be Japanese, and they constitute or make the Japanese, Japanese, and Japan, Japan.
The signs of rice and rice fields as both symbols and instruments of Japanese identity spreadthickly and historically through Japanese culture, society, politics and business. Rice, not coin or
precious metal, was the currency of feudal Japan; samurai stipends were paid in rice, though by
the end of the Tokugawa period the line between rice and coin was quite blurred. Traditional
Japanese flooring, tatami, is made from woven rice stalks. Rice bran provides a facial scrub andrice starch, glue for binding books. Where Americans and Australians might imagine a man in
the moon, Japanese see a rabbit pounding rice to make sticky rice cakes. During the time ofJapan’s imperialism in Asia, rice came to symbolize the purity of Japanese intentions in a worldof struggle. It was rice, and thus the Japanese themselves, that was to be saved by territorial
expansion and wars to preserve expansion. Lunch boxes appeared with representations of thenational flag: a square of white rice with a red pickled plum in the center. And this was only
natural: both emperor and the imperial institution were and still are powerfully linked to rice.
Rice plays a crucial part in the imperial enthronement and accession ceremonies. Japaneseemperors bless the rice crop every year and bear ritual responsibility for good harvests, forJapanese rice is not just a grain it is a divine being: each grain of Japanese rice has a soul (inadama) and each ina dama is a Shinto deity, a kami known as Uka no Kami. In the 1990s huge
furors erupted in Japan about the importation and sale of rice grown in California, Western
Australia, and Thailand, and though the uproar was usually couched in economic terms, the fuss
was less about the economics of an increasingly uncompetitive Japanese agricultural industry
than it was about Japanese identity. Rice is at the center of both community and ownership in

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Japan. In Japan rice is “our” food and rice paddies are “our” lands, and when it comes to
Hokkaidō, it was rice, rice paddies and their spatiality that transformed this chilly northern island
into a home island of Japan.
Wet rice cultivation should be impossible in all but the southern tip of Hokkaidō. Sapporo andthe surrounding regions in which wet rice is grown are at the same latitude as Marseilles and
Milwaukee, but the climate is more like Wisconsin than southern France. Thanks to mountain
ranges, cold ocean currents originating in the Arctic, the Yamase winds and the proximity of theSiberian landmass, winters are brutally cold. In January the average temperature ranges from alow of minus 12 degrees Celsius to a high of minus 4 degrees Celsius. Hokkaidō summers arevery short with up to 15 hours of daylight. These were not conditions for growing wet rice. Rice
accumulates amylose, a kind of starch, if the temperature remains low for an extended period oftime when its grains ripen. That causes the rice to become less sticky when cooked and then its
taste suffers. In Hokkaidō, Japanese immigrants had their Shinto deities newly minted by theEmperor Meiji. They had land. They had government money to build homes and barns. They had
the beginnings of a modern infrastructure. They even had ample supplies of rice imported fromthe islands further south. But what the immigrants to Hokkaidō did not have was a vital practiceof Japanese space and Japanese identity: wet rice agriculture.
This represented a serious absence. How could the land and its new inhabitants be Japanese
without the business of rice? How could rice be grown in such inhospitable climes? It fell to
Nakayama Kyūzō, an amiable looking postmaster, to make Hokkaidō truly Japanese. Born
second son into a reputable family of farmers in the Kansai region, Nakayama seemed to beconstantly heading north. In 1845 at age 17 he defied his family, left the family farm at thevillage of Kasuga near Osaka and moved to Edo, the great capital city of the shoguns. For awhile Nakayama became a bit of a wanderer along the Tōkaidō highway between Osaka andEdo, but in 1853 he met Katakura Eima and headed further north. Katakura was a member of ahigh-ranking samurai family, senior retainers to the Date lord. Nakayama entered service to
Katakura as hanshi, a low-ranking local retainer. He moved from Edo to Sendai, the Date clan’scastle city in the northern Tōhoku region. Still moving northward, Nakayama shuttled between
Sendai and Shiraoi, a little settlement on the southern coast of Hokkaidō where the Date clan was
attempting to establish a foothold. In 1868, the Date clan sided with the Tokugawa Shogunate in
the civil war against the modernizing samurai and the Emperor Meiji, fighting on even after thelast Shogun had surrendered and Edo had fallen to the Imperial forces. The final defeat of theDate clan and their allies and retainers in the autumn of 1868 sent Nakayama Kyūzō and manyother loyalists into a sort of exile near the vanquished shogun Tokugawa Yoshinobu at the prettyseaside area of Shizuoka for a while, but the attraction of the northern regions never left him. In
1869 Nakayama made his way back to Sendai, apparently a troubled and sorrowful man, full of
doubts about the course his life had taken. At Sendai, Nakayama made what must have been thevery difficult decision to quit his service to Katakura Eima, and he returned to Hokkaidō, toShiraoi, but not for long, before he left the island again and travelled to his hometown near
Osaka. In 1871, however, the urge to go north reasserted itself and Nakayama traveled back to
Hokkaidō, this time as an immigrant, first to Tomakomai and then to the wetlands of
Shimamatsu where he settled on the south bank of the Shimamatsu River, an area between
present-day Eniwa and Kitahiroshima. He returned to farming and in 1884 also became master ofthe Meiji communications station at Shimamatsu, handling postal services and at one point, avisit by the Meiji emperor.

Blaxell: Designs of Power

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Nakayama Kyūzō

Determined Japanese patriot and adventurer that he was, Nakayama saw the problem posed by
the absence of rice cultivation in the northern island, and set about solving it. He struggled foryears to germinate rice in wet fields on the Hokkaidō plains. He used a variety of rice that was
resistant to cold: Akagi. Cold days and even colder nights in the growing season reduced thetemperature of the water in the paddies too much for germination, so Nakayama cut shallow zigzag canals in his fields, filled them with water taken from the river, and left it to warm in the sun
before carrying it to the rice plants. On especially cold nights he toted warm water from hisbathtub into the fields. Finally his tenacity paid off and in the autumn of 1883, Nakayama
produced 345 kilograms of rice per 1000 square meters. Nakayama’s success encouraged otherimmigrant farmers to grow wet rice and to stamp the occupied land with the geometry of wet rice
fields, to mark Hokkaidō with the insignia of Japanese identity and possession.[22] Just as
Shima’s historically inspired grid design for the city of Sapporo produced an urban space thatrecovered a Japanese past for deliverance of a Japanese future for Hokkaidō, Nakayama’s victory
over the limits to rice cultivation in Hokkaidō produced a specifically Japanese landscapecharacterized by both production of a central sign of Japanese identity and culture and by ageometry analogous to the gobannome Go board rectangular grid plan of both the city and therural landscape of the rest of Japan.

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The geometry of rice cultivation, Hokkaidō 1909

For years, wet rice cultivation challenged farmers in Hokkaidō and each killing summer freeze,each dismal harvest seemed to threaten the miracle of possession wrought by Nakayama’stransformation of heterogeneous rural space into home space. Reversing its policy of
encouraging alternative crops, and ignoring the evidence that rice cultivation in Hokkaidō might
never turn a profit, the government in Tokyo now opted to promote rice cultivation and thereby
promote the rhetoric of Japanese identity and ownership articulated in the spaces required forrice cultivation. It fixed the price of rice high enough to make even the most capital intensive
forms of rice cultivation profitable, and it encouraged the Chubetsu Agriculture Experimental
Station, set up in 1886 at Asahikawa, to develop a new strain of rice that could be sown,germinated, grown, ripened and harvested in Hokkaidō’s short growing season: a hundred daysor less. The project succeeded, or it succeeded enough to make wet rice cultivation and the marksof Japaneseness that cultivation bears, an enduring feature of Hokkaidō. But the solution, though
clever, was never perfect and Hokkaidō’s farmers always battled crop failures, poverty,
sometimes famine, when winter arrived too soon. The land under rice cultivation expanded untilby the end of the twentieth century it represented approximately 20 percent of all cultivated landin Hokkaidō. In 1940, Hokkaidō produced 3.2 percent of all rice grown in Japan. By 1968, theisland produced 6.8 percent.[23] At the end of the 20th century, rice grown in Hokkaidō
represented 10 percent of the total Japanese rice crop.[24] These days Hokkaidō Oborozuki riceis one of the most prized rice varieties in the cities of southwestern Japan: transformed fromother to self by the practices of space, the colony exports the identity of the center back to its
origins and the imperial transaction is complete; a transaction begun with Nakayama Kyūzō’stransformation of rural space in Hokkaidō into rice cultivation space, from foreign to domestic.

Blaxell: Designs of Power

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Concluding remarks
As Henri Lefebvre argues, when space is understood and analyzed as empirical material rather
than mental matter, social and political relations appear as operations within space and bothproduced by and productive of space.[25] Attention to the material spaces of late 19th century
Hokkaidō reveals the spatial technologies of modern Japan’s first colonial project. Meiji designsof built space in the city plan of Sapporo, the architecture of some its major buildings, and thetransformation of a landscape seemingly inhospitable to wet rice agriculture into a landscapemarked by rice paddy provided Tokyo and its colonizers with a central strategy of colonialism;with ways to pacify the problem of Hokkaidō’s otherness. Here the destructive practices
involved in Ainu dispossession and subjugation and in turning the island into a part of the newnation state’s modernizing economy occurred in concert with constitutive practices, for in
Shima’s city streets with their recovery of a certain history, in the syncretic architectural styles ofpublic buildings and in the spread of wet rice fields, discourses and ideological registers about
Japanese identity and Japanese modernity were elaborated in material form to produce spaces atonce Japanese and productive of “Japanese-ness” in Hokkaidō thereby easing the passage of theisland from wild and foreign place to a productive and naturalized unit of the Japanese state.
I thank David Tucker, Philip Seaton and Verena Laschinger for their incalculable and generous
assistance in the preparation and research for this work.
Notes[1] See for example, Richard Siddle. 1996. Race, Resistance and the Ainu of Japan. London:
Routledge and Brett L. Walker. 2001. The Conquest of Ainu Lands: Ecology and Culture in
Japanese Expansion, 1590-1800. Los Angeles: University of California Press.
[2] See Dick Stegewerns. 2003. “The Japanese ‘Civilization Critics’ and the National Identity of
Their Asian Neighbours, 1918-1932: The Case of Yoshino Sakuzo” Li Narangoa and R. B.
Cribb, eds. Imperial Japan and National Identities in Asia, 1895-1945. London: Routledge, pp.
107-128. Also, Vivian Blaxell. 2008. “New Syonan and Asianism in Japanese-era Singapore.”
The Asia-Pacific Journal, January 23.
[3] Quoted in Siddle, op.cit. p. 53.
[4] Kōno Tsunekichi. 1902. Kōno Tsunekichi-shi kengensho. [Memoriam of Kōno Tsunekichi],Nihon hokuhen kankei kyūki mokuroku, document held in the Hoppo Shiryoshitsu, University of
Hokkaidō.
[5] Kōzen Noburu. 1978. Shisetsu kaitaku hangan Shima Yoshitake den. [The Life of Hokkaidō
Colonization Commissioner Shima Yoshitake: An Historical View] Tokyo: Shima hangankenshokai, pp. 38-39.
[6] Both poems translated into English by the author from a 1978 translation of the original poem
into standard Japanese and found in Kōzen Noburu, op.cit. pp. 123-124.
[7] Aoi Akihito. 2005. Shokuminchijinja to teikoku Nihon. [Colonial Shrines and Imperial
Japan]. Tokyo: Yoshikawa Kobunkan, p. 93.
[8] Kawamura Hisashi, Katayama Kaori, Tamaki Shingo. 1999. “Sapporo-shi ni okeru toshi kōsō
to hōi: Meiji zenki Hokkaidō ni okeru shokumintoshi sekkei shuhō ni kansuru kenkyū (sono 2)”

The Japanese Empire: Colonial Lives and Postcolonial Struggles

62[Town planning and direction in Sapporo: Research on the design techniques of colonial cities inearly Meiji period Hokkaidō – No. 2] Summaries of the technical papers of the Annual Meetingof the Architectural Institute of Japan: Urban planning, building economics and housing
problems. Vol 1999, pp. 261-262.
[9] Berque, Augustin. 1997. Japan Cities and Social Bonds. Yelvertoft Manor,
Northamptonshire: Pilkington Press. Translated by Chris Turner, pp. 51-52. Berque insists,
however, that though the go-board pattern of urban design originating in Kyoto was used in
Sapporo, the urban plan itself was very much influenced by American urban planning principles
and by American experts. There is no evidence for this. Shima’s plan was developed and put into
construction at least two years before the arrival of American expertise.
[10] Harvey, David. 1991. The Condition of Post-Modernity, London: Wiley Blackwell, p. 204.
[11] See: Morris-Suzuki, Tessa. 2002. “Shokuminchi to shisō to imin: Toyohara no chōbō kara
[Colonialism and migration: From the landscape of Toyohara] in Komoro Yōichi, et al. eds.
Iwanami Kōza Kindai Nihon no bunkashi 6: Kakudai suru modaniti 1920-30 nendai 2 [Iwanami
lectures on modern Japanese cultural history, 6: Expanding modernity in the 1920s and 1930s, 2)Tokyo 2002, pp. 185-204; K. Ono and J. Lea. 2001 “Colonial towns of the northern Marianas:
Rediscovering the urban morphology of Saipan and Tinian” Seminar presented at the Resource
Management in the Asia-Pacific Series, Research School of Asian and Pacific Studies,
Australian National University, Canberra, 31 May 2001; Louise Young, Japan’s Total Empire:
Manchuria and the Culture of Wartime Imperialism, Berkeley: University of California Press,
1997, 248-250.
[12] Mentioned in Kōno Tsunekichi. 1902. Kōno Tsunekichi-shi kengensho.
[13] Quote attributed to Benjamin Smith Lyman, a geologist from Northampton, Massachusetts
who surveyed Hokkaidō’s mineral resources in the 1870s. Accessed July 8, 2008.
[14] See this link and numerous other websites such as this when 日本三大がっかり is used asa search term in Google.
[15] Kunishitei jyūyōnukazai Hōheikan [A National Important Cultural Property: The Hōheikan],
Accessed August 27, 2008.
[16] Endō Akihisa. 1986. “Hōheikan saisetsu” [The Hōheikan Revisited] Summaries of thetechnical papers of the Annual Meeting of the Architectural Institute of Japan: Urban planning,building economics and housing problems. Vol. 1986, p. 1.
[17] Adachi was also the architect for the Nemuro Prefectural Government Office, which bears aremarkable resemblance in overall design to the Hōheikan. See Endō Akihisa. 1965. “Adachi
Kikō bunsho ni yoru Nemuro kenchōsha” [The building of the Nemuro Prefectural Government
Office as found in the archives of Adachi Kikō] Transactions of the Architectural Institute ofJapan, extra summaries of technical papers of the annual meeting of AIJST, No. 40, p. 668.
Accessed August 19, 2008.
[18] Endō Akihisa. 1961. “Kaitakushi goyōkai Adachi Kikō ni tsuite: Dai 1 hō Rireki to sono
gyōseki no gaiyō.” [Concerning Hokkaidō Colonization Commission official Adachi Kikō:
Report 1, An outline of his career and achievements] Nihon kenchiku gakkai kenkyū hōkoku. No.
56, pp. 75-83. Accessed August 20, 2008. Also Hōheikan – Seikatei, Sapporo bunko 15,

Blaxell: Designs of Power

63

Sapporo-shi kyoiku iinkai hen www.sapporobunko.jp Accessed August 17 2008. This website
offers digitized publications about Sapporo authorized by the city government. The Japanese
language software T-Time 5 is required to read the downloaded texts. And Zenkoku namae jiten
at Accessed August 20, 2008.
[19] 2002. Colonialism and Landscape: Postcolonial Theory and Applications, Rowman andLittlefield, p. 9.
[20] See Brett L Walker. 2005. The Lost Wolves of Japan. Seattle: University of Washington
Press, for an illuminating study of the fate of the Hokkaidō and Honshū wolves of Japan.
[21] 1993. Rice as Self: Japanese Identities Through Time. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press.
[22] All information about Nakayama Kyūzō is taken from Kōno Tsunekichi. 1900. Nōgyō
tokushisha Nakayama Kyūzō-ō jiseki torishirabe yōryō [Outline of the investigation into theagricultural contributions of Mr. Nakayama Kyuzo] a document held in the Hoppo Shiryoshitsu,
University of Hokkaidō, and this site, Accessed December 3, 2007.
[23] [Link] Accessed July 1, 2009. Sum Kong Sut. nd. “Rice Cultivation in Japan and its Related
Problems” Accessed July 1, 2009.
[24] Ohnuki-Tierney, Emiko. op. cit. p. 18.
[25] See The Production of Space, Wiley-Blackwell, 1992.

The Japanese Empire: Colonial Lives and Postcolonial Struggles

64“The New Imperialism and the Post-Colonial Developmental State: Manchukuo incomparative perspective”
Prasenjit Duara
January 30, 2006
http://japanfocus.org/-Prasenjit-Duara/1715
Duara argues that the relationship between Manchukuo and Japan was a new formof imperialism, rather than a mirror-image of European imperialism. As Duara explains,
the political relationship between the two showed “a strategic conception of the peripheryas part of an organic formation designed to attain global supremacy for the imperial power.”
The Japanese developed this strategy in response to growing nationalist movements bycolonized people for independence after World War I. Many Japanese also thought they
could win the cooperation of those movements by stressing their own frustrations at racial
discrimination in the international sphere. Further exacerbating the sense that they werecriticized by everyone, the Japanese faced racial discrimination when they tried to emigrate
to Europe and North America and were refused even the principle of racial equality at theParis Peace conference in 1919. Japan thus began to articulate itself as the anti-imperialist
leader in Asia, set to lead the other Asian nations and throw off the yoke of westernimperialism.
While the Japanese presence in Manchuria began shortly after its victory in the
Russo-Japanese war in 1905 with its acquisition of the Kwantung Leased Territory, soon
the presence of the Japanese Kwantung (Guandong) army, numerous Japanese settlers, andthe extension of the South Manchurian railroad enabled the Japanese to claim that they had
a vital interest in the area. After the 1931 Manchurian Incident, the Japanese recognized
Manchukuo as an independent nation in 1932, and propped up the last Qing Emperor, Puyi,
as its ruler. Unlike colonies where relationships were based on differentiating between
colonized and colonizer, Manchukuo was rearticulated as a model of racial harmony inwhich five races co-existed peacefully although of course the reality was very different.
Unlike colonies, which were often left with inferior economic infrastructure, the Japanese
government poured money into Manchukuo, making it a highly developed region, whichfunctioned purely to help the Japanese metropole achieve economic autarky. Duara argues
that Japan’s relationship with Manchukuo later became the model for the relationships theSoviet Union and the United States of America had with Eastern Europe and Latin America
respectively, places they had under their economic domination.
Duara not only challenges conventional wisdom that Japan’s imperialism was basedon European models, but inverts it with his argument that Japan’s relationship with
Manchukuo was a template for future international relations in the 20th century. That is,large superpowers would come to dominate subordinate regions and use their resources
for their own benefit, all the while discussing the relationship in anti-imperialist terms, inthe same way that Japan dominated Manchukuo. This “new imperialism” wasdemonstrated by Japan which “sought to bring its client-states into a structure ofgovernance that not only permitted dominance but integrated them into a regional andultimately, global game plan.” This form of control, later copied by the Soviet Union and theUnited States, is, as Duara reminds us, still imperialism, even though the old forms haveceased to exist.

Duara: The New Imperialism and the Post-Colonial Developmental State65

The New Imperialism and the Post-Colonial Developmental State: Manchukuo incomparative perspective
Prasenjit Duara
With recent developments in Iraq and elsewhere, an argument is beginning to appear—or reappear-- that much of twentieth century imperialism might better be thought of as a kind offederalism. Thus, Anthony Pagden, who provides the most cogent version of this argument,
believes that “it would be far wiser to look upon both the United States and the European Unionas, in their very different ways, attempts to revive a federalist rather than an imperial object.”
Pagden traces his ideas to thinkers like Joseph Schumpeter and Jean Monnet (credited with theidea of a “United States of Europe”). According to Pagden, the ages of conquest and commerce
were, by the twentieth century, being replaced by a global order in which the 18th century
European idea of sovereignty was transferred from the nation-state to “something more
amorphous: a modern, or postmodern, global society.” At the base of this development was theidea of empire, which survived the competitive nationalisms of the 19th century, as an “extended
protectorate” and in the words of Edmund Burke, a “sacred trust”.(1)A closer look at the mid-twentieth century transformations of imperialism suggests that Pagden’s
argument has greater credibility than many might want to give it. But I believe Pagden isfundamentally mistaken in his assumption that nationalism has basically been overcome,
especially on the part of the imperial or “federating” power. Ironically, one of the earliest andbest instances of what Pagden describes is not one that Pagden writes about: the relationshipbetween imperial Japan and Manchukuo, its puppet state in northeast China that existed between
1932 until 1945.
Manchukuo was the first full-blown instance of what I call the “new imperialism”—animperialism rooted in the historical circumstances of the United States, the Soviet Union, andJapan, rather than in those of the older European colonial powers.(2) The new imperialism
reflected a strategic conception of the periphery as part of an organic formation designed toattain global supremacy for the imperial power. The imperialism that evolved through the middle
fifty or sixty years of the twentieth century differed especially from earlier European colonial
imperialism in several ways. While the new imperialists maintained ultimate control of theirdependencies or clients through military subordination, they often created or maintained legallysovereign nation-states with political and economic structures that resembled their own.
The new imperialists espoused anticolonial ideologies and emphasized cultural or ideologicalsimilarities; they made considerable economic investments, even while exploiting these regions,and attended to the modernization of institutions and identities. In other words, these imperialist
formations were not founded in principle upon the sustained differentiation between rulers andruled characteristic of most colonial formations.
Moreover, the new imperialism occasionally entailed a separation of its economic and militarypolitical dimensions. Although subordinate states were militarily dependent upon the metropole,
it was not necessarily in the latter’s interest to have them economically or institutionally
backward. In some situations, as in the Soviet Union-Eastern Europe and the Japan-Manchukuo
relationship, massive investments and resources flowed into the client states thus breaching theclassical dualism between an industrialized metropole and a colony focused on the primarysector. In this way, too, my conception of the new imperialism differs from theories ofThe Japanese Empire: Colonial Lives and Postcolonial Struggles

66

neocolonialism, which continue to emphasize underdevelopment and traditional forms of
exploitation.(3)Another aspect of this new kind of imperialism was its tendency to form a regional or(geographically dispersed) bloc formation, promoting economic autarky as a means for theimperial power to gain global supremacy or advantage. In this formation, while benefit to themetropole continues to be the rationale for domination, benefit does not necessarily derive fromtransferring primary wealth to it but often entails the industrialization of the puppet- or clientstate. Thus, the new imperialism depended on a variety of nationalism that extends the benefits
and pains of creating an integrated, globally competitive entity, but extends them unevenly over
the whole. By the same token, the imperial formation is often ripped apart by enduring
nationalist prejudices fostered in earlier and simultaneous processes of nation-building,especially within the imperial metropole.

The Japanese empire, 1942

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Anti-imperialism and Imperialism in the Interwar Period
The emergence of anti-imperialist nationalism represented, of course, one of the most importantconditions for the transformation of imperialism. Anti-imperialist nationalism attained a newheight in East Asia with the March 1919 protest against colonialism in Korea and the May 4th
movement in China of the same year. While both movements were directed against Japaneseimperialism, ironically the Japanese also began to develop an anti-imperialist discourse—thediscourse of anti-Western pan-Asianism. Japanese nationalists tended to represent themselves as
victims of Western imperialism and racism while building their own empire and brand of racist
nationalism. But they were also bound by a pan-Asian rhetoric of common victimhood as they
developed their contiguous empire in a region occupied by people whom the Japanese perceived
as culturally or racially continuous with themselves. In other words, while Japanese imperialism
targeted East Asian societies, it at the same time sought to incorporate them through ideas of
pan-Asian brotherhood. It is, I believe, less fruitful to view this idea of brotherhood as a smoke
screen than to understand it as a self-contradictory ideology of the new imperialism, in which
domination and exploitation coexisted with development and modernization.
Of course, historically, modern imperialism had always been closely identified with nationstates. From a world-systems perspective, capitalism was a product of competition between
states for global resources: the more sophisticated versions of this theory eschew simple
economic arguments. According to Giovanni Arrighi, the creation and maintenance of global
capitalism was made possible by the fusion of “two logics,” territorial and capitalist.
Competition among states in the early modern period entailed the capture of mobile capital for
territorial and population control, and the control of territories and people for the purposes ofmobile capital. Beginning in the seventeenth century, the territorial state (possessing absolutejurisdiction within its boundaries and growing military and organizational capabilities) became
necessary to control the social and political environment of capital accumulation on a world
scale. In Arrighi’s scheme, the hegemonic power in the competitive system of European states—
Dutch power in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, British power in the nineteenth—was
successively challenged by latecomer territorial states that sought, in the drive to become
globally competitive, to first mobilize the economic and human resources within their own
jurisdictions, thus producing some aspects of nationalism. Immanuel Wallerstein is more
explicit, declaring that nationalism became the means whereby a state or social formation sought
to leverage itself out of the periphery of the world system and into the core.(4)By the twentieth century, nationalism had become the driving force behind imperialism, just as
imperialism had become an important means in the formation of some nationalisms.(5)Nationalist principles became still more deeply implicated with imperialism in the intensifying
competitive environment. Responding to this heightened competition among themselves,
including military competition, several imperial formations sought to organize colonies into
relatively autarchic regional structures or economic blocs. In Britain and France, the value of
empire for military competition was not fully recognized until World War I when colonial troops
and resources played a vital role. In Britain, Joseph Chamberlain’s neomercantilist ideas ofcolonial development (which had been largely ignored before the war) and ideas of “imperial
preference” began to be taken more seriously. Even so, only once before 1940 did expenditure
on colonial development creep above 0.1% of British Gross National Product.(6) The post-WorldWar I transformation of French attitudes to the colonies is summed up in Albert Lebrun’s words
that the goal was now to “unite France to all those distant Frances in order to permit them toThe Japanese Empire: Colonial Lives and Postcolonial Struggles

68

combine their efforts to draw from one another reciprocal advantages.”(7) But while the Frenchgovernment extended imperial preference and implemented reforms, particularly with reference
to legal and political rights in Africa during the 1930s, investments in economic and social
development projects were insignificant until the creation of the Investment Fund for Economic
and Social Development in 1946.(8)In order to compete with Britain and France, Germany had sought to develop a regional bloc inCentral and Eastern Europe since the end of the nineteenth century.(9) This trend accelerated
during the interwar years, and German commercial influence before the war reached its peak in1938 when Austria was incorporated into the Reich and Hitler annexed the Sudeten region ofCzechoslovakia. The German economic New Order in Europe, built upon states that were
essentially German puppets or had German military governors, was designed to supply the Nazi
war effort. However, there were also plans to build an economic region around a prosperous
Germany, linked to new industrial complexes in Central Europe and the captured areas of thewestern Soviet Union. This unitary European market, however, remained a nationalistic German
vision—and we should be wary of seeing it as a predecessor of the European Union. The
German plan represented in several ways no more than an aborted version of the newimperialism.(10)The Japanese economic bloc built throughout the 1930s and intensified during the Pacific war
resembled the German New Order in that the entire occupied zone became subordinated toJapanese war needs and Japan’s defeat represented a failure of the new imperialism. Still,
Japan’s initial experience with Manchukuo reveals the lineaments of a more functional versionof the new imperialism, not entirely driven by wartime needs, though often representing apreparation for war. Moreover, beginning especially in the 1930s after the establishment ofManchukuo, the Japanese exploitation of colonies such as Korea was accompanied by increases
in productive capacity. As the Korean economist Sub Park has demonstrated, while Indian
growth between 1900 and 1946 was under 1% annually, the yearly mean growth rate of grossdomestic production in Korea was 3% during the period from 1915 to 1940.(11) The
accumulated per capita British investment in India and Japanese investment in Korea were eight
dollars and thirty-eight dollars respectively in 1938.(12) Given the common global climate, how
and why did Japanese colonial policy become more oriented toward economic development than
European colonial policy did? Pan-Asianism had emerged as an ideology incorporating Japan’s
curious role as both victim and victimizer in the imperialist game; and that ideology permitted
the Japanese the conceit that it was obliged to lead the Asian nations against the West. Suchclaims were, however, belied by the vigorous nationalism of Asian peoples against the Japanese.
In response to this complicated scenario, Japanese colonial bureaucrats, military officers, andintellectuals began to experiment with modes of association and alliance that would reinvent
empire and nation.
Manchuria and Japanese Imperialism
From early in the Meiji period, Japanese imperialism was justified by nationalism, and mainland
northeast Asia was characterized as the outer zone of national defense against the advancing
EuroAmerican powers. Japanese expansionism in northeast Asia during the first three decades of
the twentieth century was accompanied by the rhetoric that Korea, Manchuria, and Mongolia
represented the “lifeline” of the Japanese nation. The Treaty of Portsmouth which concluded the
Russo-Japanese War of 1904–1905, while acknowledging in theory China’s sovereignty inDuara: The New Imperialism and the Post-Colonial Developmental State69

Manchuria, granted Japan the Russian lease on the Kwantung peninsula and the South
Manchurian Railroad. From this time, Japanese interests and influence grew, particularly after
the annexation of Korea in 1910 and during the imperialist power vacuum in East Asia during
World War I.(13)The economic and political affairs of the leased territories were managed by the Kwantung
government and the South Manchurian Railway Company, a quasi-governmental corporation
with many subsidiary enterprises and one of the largest research organizations in the world until
1945. Japanese investment in the South Manchurian Railway Company in 1920 alone was 440
million yen. By 1927, 85% of Japanese foreign investment was in China, and of its Chinese
investments, 80% was in Manchuria. In 1932, Japan’s share of the total industrial capital in
Manchuria was 64%, while the Chinese share was 28%.(14)As early as the 1920s, the Japanese controlled Manchuria economically and militarily by meansof an unstable alliance with the warlord of the region, Zhang Zuolin. Each party had its own
reasons for the alliance and Zhang’s desire to control Beijing increasingly militated against theJapanese interests in Manchuria, whereupon the Japanese murdered Zhang. Zhang’s son andsuccessor, Zhang Xueliang, was, however, even more China-directed and declared his allegianceto the KMT. It was under these circumstances that elements in the Kwantung army overthrew theZhang regime on September 18, 1931 and established the puppet state of Manchukuo in 1932.
Until recently, Manchukuo was thought to represent a break in Japanese imperial policy. In this
scenario, the Japanese government in the 1920s sought through diplomacy to secure concessions
from imperial powers and subject nations such as China. The 9/18 Manchurian Incident is said toconstitute a new turn because army officers took the initiative and presented the Japanese
government with a fait accompli. This event may be seen as the first in a sequence of faits
accomplis in the 1930s, enabling the military to take over the civilian government in Japan andultimately lead Japan into the China war (1937), the Pacific war (1941), and ignominious defeat.
But recent scholarship has changed this account of events in several ways. First, while military
officers, with or without the tacit approval of higher authorities, did present the Japanese
government with imperialist faits accomplis, there was enormous popular support mobilized fortheir actions. After fifty years of steady and forceful nation-building, by the 1920s Japanesenationalism had developed a life of its own not fully within state control. The emergent mass
media, the various social and political organizations such as labor unions, political parties, andsocial associations, were infused with high nationalist—and imperialist—sentiment that military
officers could and did easily mobilize. By the late 1920s, with the onset of the depression which
affected Japanese farmers acutely, agrarian radicals, together with young disgruntled military
officers—the Showa restorationists, who felt that capitalists, politicians, and bureaucrats hadabandoned the true bushido spirit of Japan—catalyzed this popular nationalism and laid theconditions for support of imperial expansion.
Second, as Yoshihisa Matsusaka and others have pointed out, new imperialist ideas had been
incubating, especially in the military stationed in the colonies and Manchuria since the last years
of World War I. The primacy of diplomatic and multilateralist approaches of party governments
during the 1920s kept these ideas out of the limelight, but several advocates of the newimperialism were busy experimenting with them in the 1920s, especially in Manchuria. The scaleand duration of World War I convinced the Japanese military that the competition for global
resources would be a long-drawn-out war for which Japan would need to be economically self-

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sufficient. Thus was born the idea of “strategic autarky” which entailed an entirely new
conception of imperialism: the colony or dominated region was to be made structurally andorganizationally amenable to imperialist intent by utilizing the principle of the nation-state andnationalism. Military analysts like Major Koiso Kuniaki, who would later become chief of staffof the Kwantung army, conceived of resource mobilization within a regional rather than merely
national framework. For Koiso, the idea of autarky implied an alliance: the Chinese would
supply land, resources, and labor, and the Japanese would furnish technology and capital. He wasmindful that a genuine autarky would involve some sacrifice of Japanese interests for the sake of
the whole.(15)With the growth of nationalism in these territories and the spread of pan-Asianist ideas among
various Japanese groups in the 1920s, the conditions for regional control came to be seen,
increasingly, to involve cooperation (or forced cooperation) with potential allies. Matsuoka
Yosuke, who argued the Japanese case for the independence of Manchukuo from China at the
League of Nations in 1933, best exemplified the strategy of the new imperialism. In the 1920s,
when he served on the board of directors of the South Manchurian Railroad Company, hedeveloped the idea of autarky by creating a relationship of dependent alliance with Zhang
Zuolin; and Matsuoka’s ideas were embraced at the time by the Kwantung army. Through aseries of loans for railroad construction and other projects, Matsuoka sought to transform
Zhang’s administration into a client state. At the same time, according to Tak Matsusaka,Matsuoka’s vision transcended the old imperialist game of dealing with native allies merely togain concessions and privileges. Rather Matsuoka’s goal was first to bring the regional
government, principally through financial ties, firmly under Japanese control, and subsequently
to pursue economic policies for developing Manchuria as a whole. Development was to takeplace not by excluding Chinese and others but by encouraging them to contribute to theprosperity of the region. The Japanese (who were presumed to be the principal actors and natural
leaders of this effort), could only benefit from this general development.(16)
While the new imperialism was being tested in Manchuria, experimentation with strategies ofcolonial development also characterized the 1920s in Korea. The shock, to the Japanese, of the
March 1919 nationalist uprisings in Korea was processed originally by academics, journalists,and colonial bureaucrats, and emerged as a policy called “Cultural Rule.” Cultural Rule wasdesigned to produce cooperation between colonizer and colonized in economic and politicalmatters. Characterized by slogans of “Japanese Korean joint rule” (Nissen dochi) and doctrinesof “coexistence and coprosperity” (kyoson kyoei), Cultural Rule was in many respects a failure:
the Japanese would have had to give more autonomy to the Koreans than they were prepared to
do. The new thinking in Japanese colonial discourse was driven, according to Michael Schneider,by middle-class professional and managerial classes keen to align Japanese colonialism with thenorms of international modernization, respond to the rising nationalism of the colonized, anddevelop the colony within a wider program of regional integration and management underJapanese leadership. The policy of Cultural Rule was, as Schneider has said, “an attempt to fit
Japanese colonialism into the new internationalism of the 1920s.”(17)In the aftermath of World War I, Japanese imperialism came to be rethought radically in thecontext of pan-Asianism, the new discourse of civilization that began at the time to burgeon in
Japan and many other parts of the continent. Pan-Asianism also had a special meaning forJapanese nationalists and thinkers during the 1920s because of the growing perception that,

Duara: The New Imperialism and the Post-Colonial Developmental State71

despite Japan’s effort to become a world-class nation-state (with colonies to boot), the Japanesecontinued to encounter racism and discrimination. Discrimination was perceived in theinternational conferences in Washington (1922), the London Naval Conference (1930), andwherever Japan was allotted a lower quota of ships than the British and Americans. But most ofall, it was the build-up of exclusionary policies in the United States and the final Exclusion Laws
prohibiting Japanese immigration in 1924 that galled Japanese nationalists. In their view, Asian
civilization did not exhibit inhuman racist attitudes and policies of this kind, and for militants
like Okawa Shumei and his followers in the Kwantung army, these ingrained civilizational
differences would have to be fought out in a final, righteous war of East against West.
In providing a moral explanation for wrongs inflicted upon Japan, pan-Asianist discourse also
demanded empathy for the other exploited peoples of Asia, including those that Japan itself
colonized. The ideas behind the Cultural Policy in Korea reflected, in theory, some of thisempathy. During the 1920s, many intellectuals argued that Japanese and Koreans had the sameancestors, and this idea grew together with a theory of the mixed origins of the Japanese. Notethat this expression of pan-Asianism led ultimately to the policies of assimilation of the Koreans(and Taiwanese) into the Japanese nation.(18) In Manchuria, pan-Asianism was expressed not ina strategy of assimilation and homogenization but of independence and alliance. Not only would
it have stretched the contemporary imagination outrageously to argue that the Chinese andJapanese had the same origins, but the national movement and international opinion regarding
the status of China was much too strong for the Japanese to seek to assimilate the Chinese in
Manchuria, whom they insisted on calling “Manchurians.” Here pan-Asianism, expressed asshared Asian ideals and common history (especially against Western imperialism), spoke to the
new conceptualization of global domination through regional autarky.
In order to achieve an industrial-resource base in Manchuria, the Japanese military had todevelop an alliance with key groups in this society, among the Chinese but also among theJapanese settler community in the Kwantung peninsula. Accordingly, the military was compelled
to champion the rhetoric of these allies, which included talk of a sovereign state. Ishiwara Kanji
and his associates in the Kwantung army, Itagaki Seishiro and Doihara Kenji, recognized thatthey could ignore the new discourse of rights and autonomy only at their peril.(19) Pan-Asianism
thus necessarily served as the basis of this alliance and “economic bloc.” Whereas figures like
Ishiwara were motivated primarily by Japanese nationalism, their nationalism was itself framed
by a vision of the inevitable confrontation between East and West. The cooperation of China andManchuria under Japanese leadership was necessary for success in this holy war or righteous
duty (zhengyi, seigi).(20) Ishiwara allegedly became a convert to the pan-Asianist idea of theformal equality of Asian nations. He found no contradiction between viewing the alliance as
representing the supposed difference between Asian ideals and Western imperialism or viewing
it as a means in a final war for global dominance.(21)The idea of an autarkic Japan-Manchuria bloc was influenced by models of autarky in fascist
Europe but was understood within the civilization discourse of pan-Asianism. By the mid-1930s
the bloc idea had helped to produce the East Asian League (Toa renmei) and the East Asian
Community (Toa kyodotai), and still later the Greater East Asian Co-prosperity Sphere (Dai-Toa
Kyoeiken). Indeed, figures associated with the propagation of these institutions were critical of
Nazi theories of racial superiority and emphasized cooperation with the Chinese in a regional
alliance under Japanese leadership.(22) To be sure, commitment to the idea of an alliance—andeven to the notion that Japan should renounce extraterritoriality in Asian countries—was

The Japanese Empire: Colonial Lives and Postcolonial Struggles

72

premised on the Japanese belief in their intrinsic superiority and the need for these Asian nations
to accept Japanese leadership. Yet it is impossible to fully understand why the military
encouraged the rapid modernization and industrial build-up in Manchuria without grasping theframework of pan-Asianism.
Manchukuo
In an earlier period, Manchukuo might have become a colony. But the new conceptualization ofimperialism entailed that the might-have-been colony become more like a subordinate ally or
client-state in global competition. The status of the dependent state under the new imperialism
was quite fluid, in part because the rapidly changing demands of global competition could,
depending upon the circumstances, give it more leverage (as in the case of the relationshipbetween postwar Hong Kong and Britain) or generate more resistance and further subordination.
The status of Manchukuo over its fifteen-year history gradually shifted, in official rhetoric, fromthat of an independent nation-state—with Japan conceived as a friendly country (Ch. youbang, J.
yuho) and ally (Ch. mengbang)—to that of a dependent kinsman, even a child or younger
brother. In the end, the rhetoric used was Confucian: the language of the “family state” model ofimperial Japan. By the time of the Pacific war, Manchukuo had become, in the words of its
ambassador to Japan, Li Shaogeng, “the eldest son of the Greater East Asian Co-prosperity
Sphere.”Pu Yi, the last Manchu emperor—who became first president and then emperor of Manchukuo—
underwent a rebirthing ritual in 1940, from which he emerged, as from the womb of Amaterasu,
as the younger half-brother of Hirohito, the Japanese emperor.(23) Ridiculous as this may soundto us (and as it did to the Chinese), it is fruitful to think of this ritual relationship as an innovation
made possible by the theory of the mixed origins of the Japanese nation, a theory studied closely
by Oguma Eiji. According to Oguma, the imperial “family state” ideology was able toincorporate this theory because it privileged the (modern) Japanese ideal of the ie or household
which, unlike the lineage model, could accept outsiders by adoption into the family: “In thissystem,” Oguma writes, “as long as ancestors of the ie are linked to the current membership,
blood is of secondary importance.”(24) Becoming the younger brother of the emperor, entailed,of course, a strictly dependent and subordinate status. Brotherhood in the Confucian
understanding reflected a hierarchical relationship. In more modern rhetoric, brotherhood wasoften invoked instead to characterize egalitarian relationships: Sun Yat-sen used the slippage inthis trope to rally secret fraternal societies (of the inegalitarian kind), while entering them in thehistorical record as at the core of revolutionary brotherhood (of the egalitarian kind).(25) The
same slippage in the idea of brotherhood was also very important in pan-Asianism, and we mighteven say that brotherhood was the pivot that joined the hierarchical “family state” ideology with
pan-Asianism.

Duara: The New Imperialism and the Post-Colonial Developmental State73

Pu Yi as emperor of Manchukuo

Brotherhood or, more broadly, the family relationship among East Asian peoples implied sharing
a mission regardless of one’s preferences. It was the obligation of the patriarch or the older,dominant brother to create the ethos of the family, its enterprise, and deliver the goods it
promised. Japanese rhetoric did not fully develop this metaphor to embrace the relationshipbetween Japan and Manchukuo, and the rhetoric always appeared somewhat contradictory,
perhaps because of the continued lip service to the independence of Manchukuo. Nonetheless, by
1940 the “family state” model was utilized to characterize the relationship of citizen to state
within Manchukuo: “National citizenship is the expanded version of family membership. Just as
the family member has an obligation to obey the family unconditionally, so does the citizen haveto obey the state.”(26) Manchukuo was developed as an East Asian brother or son who set up a
house modeled closely upon, and subordinate to, that of the Japanese patriarch. Practically, thisstructure meant using Chinese officials at all levels, including in the top administrative andpolitical positions, but having their activities supervised by Japanese officials responsible
ultimately to the Kwantung Army.
Developing the family enterprise and delivering the goods amounted to creating the modern
developmental state in Manchukuo, which emerged as the most industrialized part of Asia
outside Japan. The Manchukuo banking system was reformed and for the first time the currencyof the region was unified. The new currency was made equivalent in value to the Japanese yen,which facilitated its integration into the yen bloc. There was a dramatic rise of Japanese
investments which, according to Louise Young, grew to almost six billion yen between 1932 and1941 (in 1941 exchange rates)—a figure far greater than any other transfer from a metropole to acolony. By 1945, Japanese investment in Manchukuo exceeded the combined total of its
investment in Korea, Taiwan, and the rest of China.(27) Industrial production tripled between

The Japanese Empire: Colonial Lives and Postcolonial Struggles

74

1933 and 1942, and producer goods output grew the fastest.(28) Considerable attention was also
paid to the social infrastructure, at least in the urban areas: to the system of public health andeducation.(29) The new regime always touted these achievements as having reversed the decadesof warfare and economic chaos perpetuated by the previous warlord government.

Manchukuo’s industrial production

The rapid increase in industrial employment meant that immigration from China continued topour in, although the government sought to limit it for a while. Koreans came into Manchuria inlarge numbers from the 1920s and their numbers reached almost 800,000 by 1935. The Japanese
had a plan to bring in five million Japanese settlers into Manchukuo, but the rural settler
population never exceeded 250,000. In the mid-1930s, the total Japanese population was under
600, 000. Demographically, over 90% of the population was Han Chinese. (30)Duara: The New Imperialism and the Post-Colonial Developmental State75

Manchukuo’s future, 1937

The other side of this development state was the brutality of an occupying army. The massacresof the resistance, the notorious human experiments with bacteriological toxins developed by Unit
731 in Harbin, the dispossession of agricultural land from Chinese farmers, and other brutal
crimes have been well recorded. Manchukuo presents us, on the one hand, with a record of cruelviolence; and, on the other hand, with the record of a developmental state.
There is perhaps no better symbol of the antithetical structure of the modern state in Manchukuo
than its police. Manchukuo’s huge police force conducted punctiliously detailed censuses andsurveys; made extensive and complex plans for settlements; paid close attention to hygiene andwelfare; made available education, drinkable water, and shelters; and mobilized the population
for inoculations—sometimes at gunpoint.(31) But there were many modern states characterized
by this duality. What made Manchukuo different from Italy, Germany, the Soviet Union, orJapan was that it lacked the legitimacy of a nation. In a time when nation-states allegedly
represented the “will of the people,” the Manchukuo regime claimed instead to represent theessence of Asian culture.

The Japanese Empire: Colonial Lives and Postcolonial Struggles

76

The “kingly way” was presented as the ancient Chinese ideal of the just and moral ruler, a tropethat Sun Yat-sen extended beyond Chinese civilization in a lecture on pan-Asianism delivered in
Kobe. In Manchukuo, the kingly way, related notions, and the example of the Manchu emperor
were deployed as symbols of pan-Asian civilization, bringing together diverse groups who,
whether by choice, opportunism, or necessity, came to support the new regime. These included
many of the warlords and political leaders of the old society, dyed-in-the-wool Confucianmonarchists, and, most numerously, the deeply religious and universalist redemptive societies.
The followers of the redemptive societies in China and Manchuria included many millions, and,while some were closely associated with sectarian traditions including the worship of Buddhist
and folk deities, they mostly represented the late imperial syncretic tradition (sanjiaoheyi), which
combined the three religions of Confucianism, Buddhism, and Daoism into a single universal
faith. These societies had historically been persecuted by the Chinese state, both imperial andmodern; and the Japanese in Manchuria sought to reach out to them. Tachibana Shiraki, architectof Manchukuo ideology, said that the redemptive societies exemplified the essence of Asiaticcivilization and were amenable to mobilization as civic organizations.(32) Less easy tomanipulate than the Japanese had hoped, these societies seized the opportunity to pursue theirown goals: by the late 1930s, the Morality Society of Manchukuo claimed a membership of eight
million out of a total population of forty million.(33)
The second legitimacy claim made by the puppet regime was that it represented the “concord ofnationalities” (minzoku kyowa) a conceit that was supposed to represent two advances over oldercolonial ideas. Not only was the concord supposed to reject exploitation and the reproduction ofdifference between ruler and ruled, but it was also designed to counter the homogenization ofdifferences that nationalism had produced and that had led to nearly insoluble conflicts. By
allegedly granting different peoples or nationalities their rights and self-respect under a state
structure, Manchukuo presented itself as a nation-state in the mode of the Soviet “union ofnationalities”. Among others, Tominaga Tadashi, the author of Manshu no minzoku(Nationalities of Manchuria), wrote copiously about the early Soviet policy towards national
self-determination. It was a policy that fulfilled the goals of federalism and protected minority
rights, while at the same time it strengthened Soviet state and military power particularly withregards to separatism in the old Tsarist empire. Thus, nationalism ought not to be suppressed, butrather utilized positively for the goals of the state.(34)

Duara: The New Imperialism and the Post-Colonial Developmental State77

The “concord of nationalities”

These sources of support were managed, maintained, and mobilized by the Concordia
Association (Ch. xiehehui, J. kyowakai), which was effectively the Manchukuo regime’s party.
But whereas in theory the Association was to represent the will of the people and was ultimately
destined to replace the Kwantung army, by mid-decade it was purged of its original leadershipand made into an instrument of the army and government.(35) Less a means of ethnic, cultural,and occupational representation than of mobilization and surveillance, the Concordia Association
closely resembled contemporary “totalitarian parties” in Europe. The leaders refrained fromcalling it a party precisely because the appellation smacked too much of partisanship. The
association enrolled all officials and government functionaries, including teachers, as well as
important figures in society. All youth between the ages of sixteen and nineteen werecompulsorily enrolled beginning in 1937; and by 1943, the association included about 10% of
the population (as compared to 5% for the Chinese Communist Party in the PRC today).
Like its fascist counterparts, the Concordia Association was corporatist, anticommunist,
anticapitalist, and sought to overcome class divisions by organizing people through theircommunities, both occupational and ethnic, while promoting a dirigiste economy. But theThe Japanese Empire: Colonial Lives and Postcolonial Struggles

78

association was distinctive in representing Asian communities—Mongols, Manchus, Hui
Muslims, Koreans, Japanese and white Russians accounted for about 10% of the population), as
well as the majority Chinese—and their traditions. This commitment often meant supporting thereligious leadership among these peoples: Mongol lamas, Manchu and Daur shamans, Muslimahongs, Bud¬dhist monks, and Confucian moralists. The regime’s control of local society wasenhanced by the work of association units established within, for example, Manchu villages, Huimosques, and the Chinese community self-surveillance system (baojia). Thus pan Asianism
came to play an important role in maintaining both the corporatist, fascistic character of theregime and its claim to legitimacy based upon adherence to the “kingly way.”
At the same time, the Concordia Association had been founded to realize the modern goals of
jianguo (Ch: nation-state building; J: kenkoku). Japanese ideologists like Tachibana saw nocontradiction between the goals of republicanism, equality, and modernization, on the one hand,
and the “Eastern” values of community, solidarity, and the moral state, on the other. After all,
did not Japan exemplify a synthesis of the best of both worlds? In practice, however, the very
different programs and interests pursued by modernizers and pan-Asianists led to many tensions
and conflicts that leave us with a view of Manchukuo as a polarized rather than harmonious
society. Mongol youth demanded modern education and the elimination of the power of thelamas; Chinese supporters were fiercely divided between those who favored the restoration of
the emperor and those who opposed it. Propaganda activists were frustrated by their inability tomobilize redemptive societies for wartime work. The contradiction reflected in particular thetensions of an artificial nation-state dominated by an imperial power in an age of nationalism.
The inability to construct a truly independent nation-state led Manchukuo to cling toconstituencies that would have to be gradually overcome in the process of nationalmodernization. As it was, the wildly ambitious Japanese imperialist military leadership derailed
the entire process by plunging this carefully constructed state into a mad and destructive war.
Conclusion: Trajectories and Affinities
The Japanese domination of Manchukuo represented a new form of imperialism. As nationalism,
rights consciousness, and social mobilization developed in the colonized and semi-colonial
world, the costs of direct colonial rule increased while the conditions for indirect rule wereenhanced. With the creation of modern institutions in the military dependencies, it became
possible to control them more economically by dominating their institutions of resource andsocial mobilization (such as the Concordia or redemptive societies). Japan, like the later Soviet
Union and the United States, sought to bring its client-states into a structure of governance that
not only permitted dominance but integrated them into a regional and ultimately, global, gameplan.(36)
We have already alluded to the perception and influence in Manchukuo of the Soviet Union’s
internal nationality policy as an instrument of control. During the post-World War II era, theSoviet Union’s creation of a regional system of militarily dependent states in Eastern Europe
reflected many features of the new imperialism. A shared anti-imperialist and anticapitalist
ideology sanctioned a centralized economic and political system. The Soviet Union combined
economic leverage and military threat to integrate what were often states more economicallydeveloped than itself into a regional economy. In some ways, the imperialism of the Soviet
Union revealed the counter-economic consequences of this logic of empire. Not only were theclient-states of the Soviet Union in Europe often more developed, the U. S. S. R. may have beenDuara: The New Imperialism and the Post-Colonial Developmental State79

subsidizing their economies by supplying them with cheap oil and raw materials while importing
finished products from their economies. This was the price paid by the imperial power to create
and maintain dependence upon it and assure its security.(37)In part because of the consciousness of its own colonial past, and with the exception of a few
places (most notably, the Philippines), the U.S. had long practiced imperialism withoutcolonialism. After the Spanish war in 1898, the U.S. created a system of client states around the
Caribbean basin in Central America. These nominally independent states became increasingly
dependent on the United States, which accounted for more than three fourths of the region’s
foreign trade as well as the bulk of foreign investment.(38) During the decade of the 1920s, when
Japan was experimenting with indirect imperialism in Manchuria, the US too was seeking todevelop and refine informal control over Central American countries especially as it faced antiYankee, and frequently revolutionary, nationalism in the region. Officials, diplomats andbusiness groups stressed means such as US control of banking, communication facilities,
investments in natural resources, and the development of education—particularly the training ofelites in American style constitutions, “free elections” and orthodox business ideas. But thethreat and reality of military intervention remained close at hand.(39)
Of course, American imperialism was characterized not only by the Monroe Doctrine but also by
the Open Door policy. Although there were contradictions and tensions between the two
approaches, there were also continuities, most importantly, in the practice of using sovereign or
nominally sovereign polities to advance American interests. In 1917, Woodrow Wilson saw thecontinuities when he declared that the nations of the world should “with one accord adopt thedoctrine of President Monroe as the doctrine of the world…..no nation should seek to extend its
polity over any other nation or people.” But just two weeks before, Wilson had sent troops to the
Dominican Republic and committed US military forces in Haiti and Mexico as well.(40) The USsought to foster an ideological and economic hegemony among its client states by creating themas reliable emulators subject to external economic and military constraints. Note, however, that
this imperialism did not become developmentally oriented until the 1950s in response to the
Cuban revolution.(41)The tensions between American interests and global enlightenment were to be contained not only
by military power, but perhaps more importantly by the notion of a limited self-determination,
the idea of tutelage. As Secretary of Interior, Franklin Lane wrote in 1922: “What a people holdthey hold as trustees for the world…It is good American practice. The Monroe Doctrine is anexpression of it….That is why we are talking of backward peoples and recognizing for themanother law than that of self-determination, a limited law of self-determination, a leading-stringlaw.”(42) Little wonder then that the Japanese representative at the League of Nations hearings
on Manchukuo repeatedly insisted on the Asiatic Monroe Doctrine as the basis of Japan’s
prerogative in Asia.
In the post-WWII period, this combination of interest, enlightenment and military violence hasdeveloped into what Carl Parrini has called “ultraimperialism.” The latter refers to U. S. efforts
to maintain cooperation and reduce conflict among imperialist nations who were busily
scrambling to create monopolistic or exclusive market conditions in various parts of the world
during the first half of the century.(43) “Ultraimperialism” is secured by a chain of military basesaround the globe—and structures such as the International Monetary Fund, General Agreement
on Tariffs and Trade, and the World Bank—to enable the conditions of cooperation among

The Japanese Empire: Colonial Lives and Postcolonial Struggles

80

advanced capitalist powers and to facilitate the new (developmental or modernizing) imperialism
in the decolonized world.(44) Although the U. S. is hardly a regional power any longer, as a
global empire it employs, in the words of Arrighi, Hui, Hung and Selden, a vast system of“political and military vassalage” and fosters a “functional specialization between the imperial
and vassal (nation) states….” In this respect, the post- war US represents the apogee of the newimperialism.(45)
Looking at Manchukuo comparatively, it is clear that its creators were influenced by both the US
and the Soviet Union and by German ideas of the economic bloc. But Manchukuo alsosynthesized and crystallized these ideas into the prototype of the developmental client state
within a new imperialist formation that could be found after World War II in Eastern Europe,
French Africa, the British sterling zone and the US empire. The US in particular favored themodel of modernizing client nation-states centered on royal identity in Asia, witness Japan,
Vietnam, Iran, Saudi Arabia and others.
Despite the differences between this form of imperialism and the “classical” nineteenth-century
form, nationalists emphasize the continuities between the “classical” and the clientelistic or
dependent forms, and they are right to note the lack of autonomy in both.(46) But does the abilityof power-holders to influence and manipulate institutions and rhetoric overwhelm the effects of
new institutions and policies in changed domestic and international circumstances?
To be sure, Manchukuo remained a highly exploited society. For instance, rural society remained
stagnant largely because the landowning classes represented an important base of support for the
regime. Chinese workers received less than a third of wages paid to Japanese workers in statefactories. The Manchukuo government and Japanese enterprises, which controlled 72% of total
invested capital, made it hard for Chinese capital to penetrate the modern sector.(47) At the sametime, the idea of strategic autarky necessitated the development of Manchukuo as adevelopmental state with advanced technologies of economic growth, generating higher
standards of urban life until the Pacific war.
In general, the state in Manchukuo was able to deploy modern technologies of control,
surveillance, discipline, and mobilization among the populace. The regime and its affiliatedorganizations—such as the Concordia Association and the redemptive societies—penetrated thelives of people to keep a stricter watch on them but also to generate new consciousness
regarding, for instance, the proper nuclear family, consumer spending, engagement inafforestation programs and other projects prioritized by the mobilizing state. If some of theseprojects were driven by the immediate needs of the metropole, others were driven by the logic ofa modernizing state.
The immediate factors behind the failure of Manchukuo had to do with its growing dependence
on Japan and the role that it was forced to fill in the Japanese wartime empire. Indeed, theManchukuo model of client states was partially extended to regimes in occupied China and inSoutheast Asia during the Pacific war. This regional imperial formation bent upon global
domination was characterized by a set of interdependencies within an imperially-dictatedenterprise. A simple model of economic exploitation, utilizing existing modes of production andcolonial difference, was to be supplemented (if not replaced) by high levels of investment, thedevelopment of new modes of mobilization and identity production, and a rhetoric ofbrotherhood and regional federalism. All of this came to nought with defeat.

Duara: The New Imperialism and the Post-Colonial Developmental State81

Ultimately, however, the case of Manchukuo reveals the fault lines of the new imperialism. By
pointing to the wartime emphasis on the fact that the Japanese were of mixed origins, Oguma
Eiji has stressed the importance of assimilation over nationalist-racist elements within Japaneseimperial ideology. Others, such as Komagome Takeshi have persuasively argued that while
Japanese imperialism reflected the extension of the principles underlying national integration,
Japanese nationalism was a contradictory affair composed not only of the principle of common
language and culture (or civilization) but also of “blood descent.” Whereas language and culture
created possibilities of integrating the colonized based on assimilation or alliance, historically theexclusionary principle of blood descent invented new ways—institutional, legal, or attitudinal—
to circumvent the incorporation of non-Japanese in the empire as equal citizens.(48)Imperialist competition in the first half of the twentieth century was catalyzed by a particularconfiguration of capitalism and nationalism. Although novel formations and ideals—then andnow—have sought to transcend both capitalism and nationalism, the force of nationalist identity
and interests from the earlier period has proved remarkably tenacious, particularly as they
develop new linkages with competitive capitalism. The globalization, cooperative economic
blocs, and regional formations of our own time are not unprecedented developments—and theprecedents are not encouraging.
Notes
1) Anthony Pagden, “The Empire’s New Clothes: From Empire to Federation, Yesterday andToday” in Common Knowledge 12:1 Winter 2006, (36-46), 13-14. The present essay is a revisedand extended version of my response to Pagden in the same volume. Prasenjit Duara,“Nationalism, Imperialism, Federalism and the Example of Manchukuo: A Response to Anthony
Pagden” Common Knowledge 12:1 Winter 2006 47-65. For another expansive and revisionist
view of empire, see also Frederick Cooper Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge,
History Berkeley, University of California Press, 2005.
2) The German case also exhibited many aspects of this new imperialism (see below). However,Nazi racism and defeat in the war obscure the extent to which Germany would have developed
along these lines. Manchukuo, on the other hand, represents a moment of the new imperialism
before the wartime drive destroyed it.
3) It is also to be distinguished from the older historiographical term “new imperialism” referringto the late 19th century scramble for Africa and efforts to “slice the Chinese melon” among otherdevelopments that destabilized the imperialism of free trade. Creating nominally sovereign
modern nation-states was not part of that imperialism.
4) Giovanni Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power, and the Origins of Our Times(New York: Verso, 1994), 34–58. Immanuel Wallerstein, “The Construction of Peoplehood:
Racism, Nationalism, Ethnicity,” in Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities, ed. Etienne
Balibar and Wallerstein (London: Verso, 1991), 81-82.
5) See Eric Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Program, Myth, Reality(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 102; and Hannah Arendt, The Origins of
Totalitarianism (1948; New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1973), 152–53.

The Japanese Empire: Colonial Lives and Postcolonial Struggles

826) Stephen Constantine, The Making of British Colonial Development Policy, 1914–1940(London: Frank Cass, 1984), 25, 276. Michael Havinden and David Meredith, Colonialism andDevelopment: Britain and its Tropical Colonies, 1850–1960 (London: Routledge, 1993), 148–59.
7) As quoted in D. Bruce Marshall, The French Colonial Myth and Constitution-making in the
Fourth Republic (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1973), 44.
8) Marshall, French Colonial Myth, 224-26.
9) Barry Eichengreen and Jeffrey A. Frankel, “Economic Regionalism: Evidence from Two
Twentieth-Century Episodes,” North American Journal of Economics and Finance 6.2 (1995):
97.
10) See Richard Overy, “World Trade and World Economy,” in The Oxford Companion to
World War II, ed. Ian C. B. Dear and M. R. D. Foot (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).
11) Sub Park, “Exploitation and Development in Colony: Korea and India,” Korean Journal of
Political Economy 1.1 (2003): 5.
12) Sub Park, “Exploitation and Development,” 19.
13) C. Walter Young, The International Relations of Manchuria: A Digest and Analysis ofTreaties, Agreements, and Negotiations Concerning the Three Eastern Provinces of China(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1929), 136–52.
14) Gavan McCormack, Chang Tso-lin in Northeast China, 1911–1928: China, Japan, and theManchurian Idea (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1977), 7-8.
15) Yoshihisa Tak Matsusaka, Making of Japanese Manchuria, 214–23.
16) Yoshihisa Tak Matsusaka, Making of Japanese Manchuria, 285.
17) Michael A. Schneider, “The Limits of Cultural Rule: Internationalism and Identity inJapanese Responses to Korean Rice,” in Colonial Modernity in Korea, ed. Gi-wook Shin andMichael Robinson (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 1999), 122.
18) Oguma Eiji, A Genealogy of “Japanese” Self-images, trans. David Askew (Melbourne:
Trans Pacific Press, 2002), 125–42.
19) Komagome Takeshi, Shokuminchi Teikoku Nihon no Bunka Togo (The Cultural Integrationof the Japanese Colonial Empire) (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1996), 236–37.
20) Yamamuro Shinichi, Kimera: Manshukoku no shozo (Chimera: A Portrait ofManzhouguo)(Tokyo: Chuo koronsha, 1993), 42–48.
21) Mark R. Peattie, Ishiwara Kanji and Japan’s Confrontation with the West (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1975), 167, 281, 335.
22) Tessa Morris-Suzuki, Reinventing Japan: Time, Space, Nation (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe,
1998), 97–101.
23) Yamamuro Shinichi’s Kimera emphasizes the parent-child relationship between the Japaneseemperor and Pu Yi, but the image of brotherhood was also current, even in the passages that
Yamamuro himself cites (261–64).

Duara: The New Imperialism and the Post-Colonial Developmental State

8324) Oguma Eiji, Genealogy, 337.
25) See Prasenjit Duara, Rescuing History from the Nation: Questioning Narratives of Modern
China (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), chap. 4.
26) Chianbu keisatsushi (Law and Order Ministry, Police Dept), ed. Komin (Citizen) (Xinkyo:
Manshukoku tosho kabushiki geisha, 1940), 41.
27) Louise Young, Japan’s Total Empire, 183–84, 213–15. Francis Clifford Jones, Manchuria
Since 1931 (London: Royal Institute of International Affairs, 1949), 139.
28) Kungtu C. Sun, The Economic Development of Manchuria in the First Half of the TwentiethCentury, ed. Ralph W. Huenemann (Cambridge, MA: East Asian Research Center, Harvard
University, 1969), 101-2.
29) Suk-jung Han, “Puppet Sovereignty: The State Effect of Manchukuo, from 1932 to 1936”(PhD diss, University of Chicago, 1995), chaps. 3-4.
30) Han Suk-jung, 1995, 233. Yoshihisa Tak Matsusaka The Making of Japanese Manchuria,
1904-1932. (Cambridge, MA, Harvard Univ Press, 2001), 414.
31) Suk-jung Han, “Puppet Sovereignty,” chaps. 3-4.
32) Komagome Takeshi, Shokuminchi Teikoku no Bunka Togo 265.
33) Shao Yong, Zhongguo huidaomen (China’s Religious Societies) (Shanghai: Renminchubanse, 1997), 321.
34) Tominaga Tadashi, Manshukoku no minzoku mondai Shinkyo, 1943, 43-45.
35) Peattie, Ishiwara Kanji, 171, 174.
36) Further, creating similar institutions fostered a similarity of interests and goals between elites
in the metropolitan and dependent societies. Thus Latin American societies have found it
difficult to sustain socialist states or even large-scale public expenditures without incurring the
disfavor of the United States; and the Soviet Union would not tolerate “market-happy”
bourgeoisies. Manchukuo too began to resemble (and in several instances, led) the militarydominated dirigiste economy and centralized political system that developed in Japan beginningin the 1930s.
37) See Paul Marer and Kazimierz Z. Poznanski, “Costs of Domination, Benefits ofSubordination,” in Dominant Powers and Subordinate States: The United States in Latin
America and the Soviet Union in Eastern Europe, ed. Jan F. Triska (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 1986), 371–99.
38) John Coatsworth, Central America and the United States: The Clients and the Colossus (NewYork: Twayne, 1994), 18–19, 52–53.
39) Robert Freeman Smith “Republican Policy and the Pax Americana, 1921-1932” in William
Appleman Williams ed., From Colony to Empire: Essays in the History of American Foreign
Relations, John Wiley and Sons, NY, 1972. 273-275.

The Japanese Empire: Colonial Lives and Postcolonial Struggles

8440) Andrew J Bacevich, American Empire: The Realities and Consequences of US Diplomacy
Harvard U P, Cambridge, MA 2002. 115-116. See also Bacevich for the quotation. 115.
41) Coatsworth 1994, 90–91.
42) Quoted in Robert Freeman Smith 1972, 271.
43) Carl Parrini, “The Age of Ultraimperialism,” Radical History Review 57 (fall 1993):7–9.
44) Parrini, “Age of Ultraimperialism,” 8–11. Bruce Cumings, “Global Realm with No Limit,
Global Realm with no Name,” Radical History Review 57 (fall 1993): 53–54.
45) G. Arrighi, P K Hui, H F Hung and M Selden, “Historical capitalism, East and West” in G.
Arrighi, T Hamashita, and M. Selden, ed, The Resurgence of East Asia: 500, 150 and 50 year
perspectives. Routledge, 2003, 301.
46) To be sure, even within the power structure in Manchukuo there were forces working forautonomy. On several occasions, special Japanese rights were attacked by the Kwantung army,
most notably in 1936 when extraterritorial rights for Japanese citizens were abolished and aseries of significant privileges began to unravel. The Japanese government also raised tariffs
against the overwhelming exports from Manchukuo. In general, more recent research takes
seriously the Kwantung army’s autonomy from the despised civilian governments at home—atleast until the war in Asia. Suk-jung Han, “Puppet Sovereignty,” 257–58. Young, Japan’s Total
Empire, 205, 211.
47) Prasenjit Duara, Sovereignty and Authenticity: Manchukuo and the East Asian Modern,
2003, 67-70.
48) Komagome Takeshi, Shokuminchi Teikoku Nippon no Bunka Togo, 356–70.

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Part II: Experiences of the Colonized
The articles in Part II explore life in the Japanese empire for colonized people. They
faced various assimilation policies, endured discriminatory treatment, and reacted with awide range of responses. For example, Chiri Yukie, a young Ainu woman featured in
Hirano’s article, helped Japanese linguist Kindaichi Kyōsuke translate volumes of Ainu oral
stories and poems, proudly asserting her Ainu ethnicity. Her ethnic pride was apparent in
the way in which she promoted the transcription of the Ainu language into the Roman
alphabet, and in her claim that some Ainu expressions could not be translated into any
language. Hirano refrains, however, from upholding Chiri’s actions as an example ofresistance, advocating for a more nuanced and ambivalent understanding of the complex
negotiations involved between those who were dominant (the Japanese) and those who
were dominated (the Ainu).
In juxtaposition, Park focuses on Korean literature written during the Japanesecolonial period by individuals who hoped to “become Japanese,” as some Koreans actively
self-assimilated. Park’s conclusions are grounded in the analysis of discourse, that is,through analyzing the set of meanings through which a group of people communicate, often
via written text and spoken word. In contrast to Park, Tomiyama examines actual scenes ofimperialism; he explores the process by which colonial subjects in Okinawa became
Japanese through lifestyle reform. Lastly, Rabson discusses Okinawans living on themainland of Japan and the variety of their responses to assimilation policies anddiscrimination. All these articles explore ways that Japanese colonial subjects definedbeing “Japanese” in their daily lives and what was at stake for those who chose not toassimilate. No matter the choice, they faced unequal treatment institutionalized by law andsocial practices.

The Japanese Empire: Colonial Lives and Postcolonial Struggles

86“The Politics of Colonial Translation: On the Narrative of the Ainu as a ‘Vanishing
Ethnicity’”
Katsuya HIRANO, trans. Gavin Walker
January 12, 2009http://japanfocus.org/-Katsuya-HIRANO/3013
Japanese imperial authorities sought to justify their imperial project in Hokkaido by
racializing the Ainu, whom they displaced in 1869. At the time, the Ainu, with their
Caucasian features and beards, were considered racially and culturally distinct from theJapanese (wajin), explaining why some western anthropologists marveled at the feat of ayellow race colonizing a white race. Therefore, the Japanese racialization of the Ainu as aculturally inferior and primitive race at the brink of extinction turned conventional racial
taxonomies on their head. In this article Hirano introduces the term “colonial translation,”referring to the process by which the cultural and social differences between the Ainu andJapanese were rewritten to cast the Ainu as primitives. The institutionalization of these
depictions of Ainu as primitive people enabled the colonizer to justify rule over thecolonized. Although by the turn of the 19th century the majority of Ainu were engaged inwage labor or trade with the Japanese, the passage of the 1899 Protection Act attempted toturn the Ainu into farmers. More precisely, the imperial project in Hokkaido was justified
by the argument that the Ainu were not capable of settling the land and cultivating it; theJapanese as a more civilized and advanced race needed to take charge. Expropriation ofland and the limitation of Ainu hunting and fishing rights all occurred simultaneously withthe “nativization” of the Ainu.
Using this idea of colonial translation, Hirano then discusses the relationshipbetween Japanese linguist Kindaichi Kyōsuke and Ainu Chiri Yukie. Kindaichi worked topreserve Ainu oral stories; he thought they were primitive relics of the past that faced
oblivion if not collected soon. He also thought of Chiri as an intermediary between thatsoon-to-disappear past and contemporary Japanese society. According to Hirano, thedynamic behind Kindaichi and Chiri’s collaboration was predicated upon theunderstanding that Chiri would record and preserve her culture “just as it was,” while
Kindaichi’s role was to provide ethnographic interpretation and meaning for the “raw data”
Chiri supplied. In reality, however, Hirano argues that Chiri’s active involvement intranslation as well as her numerous other writings illustrates how she went beyond being a
supplier of raw data—she was actually a voice asserting Ainu pride, rejecting assimilation.
Her insistence that the Ainu language be translated into Roman letters and not into
Japanese script was a way to emphasize Ainu uniqueness. Furthermore, in her writings she
argued that there was an Ainu voice that could not be expressed in any written forms oflanguage. Hirano is careful to warn the reader away from concluding that Kindaichi wasmerely an oppressor and Chiri a victim or resister. Instead, he describes a more
ambivalent relationship in which Chiri and Kindaichi had a mutual affection for each other.
Hirano uses the example of Chiri Yukie to illustrate how “the politics of colonial translation
were incapable of completely taming the voices of the colonized Ainu” and how her
relationship with Kindaichi was more a negotiation between the dominant and dominatedthan pure subjugation, which is often the case during colonialism.

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The Politics of Colonial Translation: On the Narrative of the Ainu as a “Vanishing
Ethnicity”
Katsuya HIRANO
Translated by Gavin Walker
The History of Hokkaido, compiled and published by the Hokkaido regional authority in 1918,
explains why the Hokkaido frontier was “opened” (kaitaku) by the Japanese (wajin) rather thanby the Ainu: [1]With respect to their old customs, the great majority of the Ainu have not yet managed to escapea savage and uncivilized stage…From the very outset, the task of opening the frontier can only
be accomplished by an ethnos that has reached a certain cultural level. It is of course impossible
to hope that this opening of the frontier could be performed by the people of Ezo themselves, apeople that has not yet left behind a period of primitive savagery – the only ethnos among those
close to Hokkaido and near to the Ezo people which possesses a culture capable of enduring thisduty is unquestionably the Japanese. [2]The formulation of a cultural hierarchy seen in this passage provided the logic that enabled theJapanese state to justify the necessity for its people to appropriate and rule the territory of
Hokkaido in place of the Ainu by making the former the assumed subjective motor-force of this“opening,” while rendering the latter into an ethnicity (minzoku) that had “not yet managed toescape a savage and uncivilized stage.” Further, the new anthology of Hokkaido history
compiled in 1937 insisted on the point that the “opening” made it possible for the Japanese to“enlighten the Ainu,” who had “for a long time continued their primitive lifestyle,” through theimperial assimilationist educational policy (kominka kyoiku) and it brought about a realpossibility for the Ainu to “be granted universal brotherhood, and treated as national citizens.”[3]

The Japanese Empire: Colonial Lives and Postcolonial Struggles

Ainu group in a Japanese representation in Edo

Thus the territorial expropriation of, and assimilationist policy towards, the Ainu wasrationalized through this term “opening,” which in turn rested on two of the major ideological88Hirano: The Politics of Colonial Translation

89

standpoints of the modern world, that is, historicism and ethnocentrism. The former was an
ideology linked to an understanding of time in which all human societies, despite their historicaldifferences and diversities, follow the exact same linear path of progress; the latter was an
ideology linked to a spatial understanding in which people who share the same cultural origins –language, history, religion, customs – form the nucleus of the community as a specificallynational community.

Ainu chief, 1920s.

What allowed historicism and ethnocentrism to become such hegemonic ideologies—and not
only in Japan—was precisely that they were so successful at rewriting and representing in theformer case, the history of capitalism, and in the latter case, the history of the nation-state asuniversal narratives. In other words, history came to signify the process by which the universal
manifested itself in particular forms (cultural or territorial difference). The ethnos was thereby
posited as a supra-historical subject whose existence predated history, and history itself wasdetermined as the process (whatever its variations) by which ethnicities proceeded from the
backward circumstances of the primitive era to a higher form of civilization (capitalist
civilization). As a result, the historical process through which capitalist society and the ethnic
community were produced – a contingent and hazardous process – was concealed and forgotten.
This conception of history is precisely what Foucault referred to as “metaphysics,” that is, it is an
ideology which is formed through the presumption of “the existence of immobile forms [i.e.,

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ethnicity, the universal law of progress] that precede the eternal world of accident andsuccession.”[4]Seen in this way, we can understand that the discourse of “opening” operates as a universalistic
expression of the ethnic enterprise and its progressiveness. A society like that of the Ainu,
possessing neither the form of the nation-state nor the structure of capitalism, is thus posited asan ethnicity which utterly lacks the ability to manage itself, to say nothing of the ability to“open” frontiers. It is the “undeveloped” or “childlike” remnant left behind by the historical lawof “progress,” one whose only option is to survive through the leadership and patronage of amore “progressive” ethnicity. Consequently, historicism and ethnocentrism resolve themselves in
reducing the rich historical experience of mankind to the binary structure of “progress or
stagnation,” and each ethnicity is thereby rewritten into a narrative of its oscillating rise and fall.

Ainu family, 1906

Rewriting social difference or heterogeneity as “savage” or “backwards” and the task of
substantiating and institutionalizing it is a strategy of control that every colonial system engages
in – I refer to this here as “colonial translation.” “Translation” in this sense does not merely
indicate the process of the linguistic or semiotic symbolic operations related to the strategies ofcolonial rule, but rather points to the application of material power to fundamentally dismantle
and then reorganize the social, economic and political relations that obtained prior tocolonization (the inscription of heterogeneity on the land) in order to insert them into thecapitalist production process. In other words, this translation should be understood not as a formof free and equal “exchange” or “communication,” as theorized within nineteenth century

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liberalism, but as an instance of the destruction, expropriation, and absorption of theheterogeneous and multiple forms of life under conditions of the inequality of power, what
Deleuze and Guattari refer to as “deterritorialization” and “reterritorialization.”[5] The quotation
at the beginning of this article splendidly illustrates the narrativization of this process by which,once the difference and heterogeneity of the Ainu had been reread into the form of savagery,their land and water, that is, the provisions for their livelihood were “legally” expropriated.
While the Japanese state, not to speak of the Ainu themselves, had recognized nighttime trout
and salmon fishing in the Ainu rivers and their tributaries as legitimate Ainu activities during the
Tokugawa period, by the beginning of the Meiji era this was considered a “failure to address along-standing abuse” and was summarily prohibited in 1879. For the Meiji government, whose
avowed aim was modernization of Ainu life, this was justified as a means to transfer the right tofish from Ainu to Japanese while promoting the fisheries industries on a massive scale under the
rubric of policies intended for the “increase of production in industrial enterprise” (shokusan
kyogyo). The Ainu, who had thus been robbed of their livelihood, appealed to governmental
agencies for a delay of the ban on nighttime fishing, which covered not only the major rivers but
the smaller tributaries as well. This was denied on the basis of the “former natives’ illiteracy andignorance of law.” Thereafter, it was the Japanese “openers” of the frontier who, with thebacking of the Meiji government, “legally” expropriated and monopolized the fisheries industries
in Hokkaido. [6]Ainu fishermen c. 1900

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It is crucial to heed the fact that the expropriation of territory and their rights to life proceeded
simultaneously and parallel to the process by which the Ainu, a term connoting a proud person or
people, was transformed into the humiliating term “native” (dojin), a word indicating a savage or
uncivilized people. Because, when we turn our attention to this historical fact, we canimmediately understand that the operation of the representation of the subject (from human to“native”) and the material destruction and expropriation of non-capitalist society are two deeply
imbricated strategies. Racism (one form of the representation of the subject) justifies theoperation of reification in capitalism (in a Lukascian sense) as natural – social relations amongst
human beings are formed through the mediation of things (the commodity), and thus humans
themselves come to exist as things or commodities. The slave trade, in other words, theexemplary commodification of human beings, cannot be explained without an understanding of
the justifications of racism or its operations of representation, nor can we understand the historyof the expropriation of the Ainu without considering the relationship between racism andreification.
Yet the position of the Ainu as enclosed within Japanese capitalism also differed from that of thepoor peasantry, who were torn from the earth in the process of the accumulation of capital andmade into “free” labor – in other words, labor as a commodity (the proletariat). Through theirenclosure into the name “native” and the system of racism, it was not merely that their means of
livelihood were expropriated, but that their very right to life was lost. That is, the lesser or the
powerless (muno na mono tachi) who were left out of this struggle for survival were reduced toan existence incapable of even becoming wage labor (incapable of even being commodified).
The only path of existence left for them was to irrevocably discard their “Ainu” ways of life andbecome as close to human (Japanese) as possible; in short, the only path left for them was
assimilation. In fact, those who “succeeded” at assimilation were consolidated into the system as
the lowest strata of labor or came to be fetishized as a “rare material” of disappearing species. It
seems necessary for us to once again examine Marx’s crucial insight – that the primitive
accumulation of capital and the advent of the new mode of production that accompanies it isformed and unified through the violent disintegration of the foundations of traditional society –from the viewpoint of translation (the total reorganization of non-capitalist society, including thestrategies of the rewriting of history and culture). In any case, the Japanese state created its“ideal” national subjects (those with absolute loyalty to the divine authority of the Emperor) in
the form of the “imperial subject” (komin, or “loyal subject,” shinmin) in order to spur on
modernization and the transition to capitalism. The fact that the Ainu were situated andsubjugated as the polar opposite of this imperial subject suggests that the formation of themodern Japanese state and people was from the very outset developed around the axis of racism,that this process also connoted the formation of the imperial world and the annexation of its
various neighboring societies. [7]***In this short essay, I want to consider the politics that emerge from within the process of colonialtranslation by focusing on the role played by Japanese linguistics, in particular through the prismof the relation between Kindaichi Kyosuke (1882-1971), known as the father of linguistic
research on the Ainu language, and Chiri Yukie (1903-1922), an Ainu woman who worked as his
assistant and passed away at the age of 19 in his residence in Tokyo.

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93

Kindaichi Kyosuke

There are three characteristics of the politics that become visible in colonial translation: 1)
Colonial enterprise is intrinsic to the institution of the nation-state and in the creation andreinforcement of its ideology. 2) The relation between discrimination and assimilation(difference and identity) which forms the basis of colonial rule, is not an opposition as is
generally thought, but rather must be understood as a mutually complementary, complicit
relation. 3) Colonial rule does not succeed in perfectly subjugating and subordinating thecolonized through assimilation and discrimination, but rather is always and constantly exposed tocontradictions, cracks, frictions, and tensions through the enunciations and actions of thecolonized.
In order to grasp the first point, we must consider for what purpose the National Language
Research Center at Tokyo Imperial University was established. Tsuboi Hideto points out that it
was “precisely based on the premise that by investigating and researching peripheral languages,
and seeking out their relation to Japanese, their work would connect to the search for an ancientJapanese language, that is, proto-Japanese.”[8] Subsequently, research on ancient Japanese,
Korean, Ryukyu, Chinese, and Ainu began in the middle of the Meiji Period under the directionof Ueda Kazutoshi (1867-1937). Kindaichi Kyosuke’s words, in reflecting on his motives formaking Ainu the object of his research, confirm this:Everyone was doing linguistics in relation to Japanese – questions like, what are theorigins of Japanese, where in the world were languages spoken which had the same
origins as Japanese, where was Japanese spoken before it came to these islands? These
questions were shared by all of us. Each one of us took up this question in our own ways,
and we had to clarify the relation between Japanese and the other surrounding national
languages. So it was clear that someone had to deal with the relationship between
Japanese and Ainu… [9]Thus Japanese linguistics began as a discipline from the overarching goal of starting a study of“national language” through the classification and analysis of the languages of neighboring

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societies. This research methodology, whereby Japanese is placed at the center, and Ainu,
Ryukyu, Korean, and Chinese are located on its periphery, could only exist on the basis of thepremise that these languages reflect the origins of this central language, in other words, theassumption that the traces of proto-Japanese remain in these latter four languages. What thismeans therefore, is that they objectivized, mobilized, and utilized the neighboring languages inorder to affect the beginnings of Japanese as an institution. Kindaichi recalls his excitement upon
encountering the oral epic stories of the Ainu, the Yukar:
They had no writing, so it wasn’t in the form of a book, but it was something guarded by
the elders, passed down from mouth to mouth up until the present day. It was athoroughly rare set of materials for someone investigating ancient times…I felt that I wastouching on the life of the ancients within the present age, that I was seeing a primeval
form of literature before my very eyes.[10]The notion that the Ainu language retained within it a form of the “ancient past” through its oral
tradition would never have emerged without the presumption that (in comparison with Japaneseculture), Ainu culture still continued to be “primitive.” In order for Ainu language to become an
important research object for linguistics (the study of the “national language (kokugo)”), thispresumption of “primitiveness” was essential. The heterogeneously inscribed, fertile history of
the Ainu was renarrated as “primitive” and frozen in time. Where Japan’s history was viewed interms of progress, the Ainu culture of oral tradition was positioned as merely a set of “rarematerials” dealing with the ancient past, reduced to the status of a “specimen.” And a specimen,
moreover, which could reveal clues to the Japanese past.
This notion of a search for the “origins of the Japanese language” was born from the desire to
explain and clarify the cultural origins of the Japanese ethnos, a desire shared on a general levelby the statesmen and intellectuals of the Meiji era. This desire itself was generated by the will toground the Japanese ethnos as a self-identity, a drive which was popularly encouraged by the
Meiji state. It was not only a case of linguistics – rather, from the late Meiji era onwards, history,
folklore studies, anthropology, archeology, aesthetics, literature and so on all tried to explain the“particular” cultural-historical character of the Japanese people through a search for its “ethnic
origins.” It goes without saying that in examining the various nearby societies from thisparticular perspective, these disciplines were organized through a Japanese ethnocentrism. This
problematic is clearly and thoroughly conveyed in the memoirs left behind by Kindaichi on thesubject of his encounter with Chiri Yukie and their exchanges. Just when Chiri Yukie wasundertaking the task of translating the Yukar into Japanese, Kindaichi’s words are recorded in
one of their exchanges as follows:
Because the Ainu live on a far-away island where the light of civilization was delayed inreaching, you are like children born late – there’s nothing embarrassing in the fact thatyour older brother has run ahead while you are still only crawling. […] I believe that, in
addition to the Greek, Roman, Indian, and Finnish epics, the Yukar is one of the world’s
five great epic poems. In the distant past there were also narrative storytellers in Japan,
and in the same way they too continually recited their tales, but as it was an era when
there were not yet phonetic letters, and in which writing instruments and materials were
hard to come by, none of these tales were written down in their full forms – O no
Yasumaro instead left us mere summaries, and these are the oldest extant classics atpresent. Anyway, you are all still living through the conditions of this pre-literary era –Hirano: The Politics of Colonial Translation95

personally, I don’t find it regrettable to devote my lifetime to this task, but for you young
people it’s different. Despite all this ancient stuff, please go on steadily learning new
knowledge and become fine Japanese people who no one can criticize. [11]Precisely because the Ainu were considered a remnant left behind in a barren wasteland
untouched by the light of civilization, they were thought to have retained an archetype of anancient culture predating written language, as in the form of oral storytellers, who had
disappeared from Japan long ago. Thus this logic according to which research into the Ainu
constituted a mirror image illuminating the origins of ancient culture (Japanese ethnic-national
culture) is stated here as something self-evident. Consequently, the “civilized” Japanese
intellectuals unquestioningly believed that their destiny was to make these childlike, immaturepeople of the periphery, who were incapable of self-sufficiency, into an object of research, and at
the same time, to extend a helping hand to them so that they might “become fine Japanese people
who no one can criticize”: this is precisely the space where we can locate Kindaichi.
Kindaichi’s “sympathy” for the Ainu is well known, but it is inextricably linked to this sense ofdestiny; in fact, he could possess this sentiment only because he grasped the Ainu from the outset
as a “vanishing ethnicity.” Nothing expresses this more clearly than Kindaichi’s comment that
the Ainu shinyoshu (Anthology of Ainu Mythology), the slender volume of Yukar that Chiritranslated and compiled, was the work of “a young woman who was determined to attempt totransmit and record for eternity a commemoration of the existence of her race.”[12] For him, theShinyoshu signified the tombstone of an ethnicity on the verge of extinction, a last will andtestament.
His contemporary, the ethnographer Torii Ryuzo (1870-1953) approached his interest in the
study of the Ainu, Ryukyuan, Korean, and Indochinese from the same vantage point. It is wellknown that when Torii investigated Northern Sakhalin and the Amur River Basin, he constantly
compared the customs of the Stone Age within the Japanese islands to those of the Ainu, andemphasized their similarity. According to Tessa Morris-Suzuki, while Torii paid great respect tovarious aspects of the cultures of these indigenous peoples, in particular to the beauty of theirtraditional woodcraft and embroidery, he simultaneously considered them to be “peoples that are
naturally destined to vanish.”[13] Precisely because Torii believed that the Ainu retained thetraces of the primitive past of Japan’s Stone Age, he paid respect to their vanishing culture,
becoming interested in them as an object of investigation.
What I want to emphasize and ask here is: what were the ideological conditions that gave rise tothis view of the Ainu held by Kindaichi, Torii and their colleagues? As briefly explained above,
we can consider two conditions here. First and foremost, during the 1880s-90s at the dawn ofmodern Japanese anthropology and linguistics, the discourse of the Japanese as an independent“ethnic group” or “race” was continually propagated. Similar to the notion of a unique language
and culture. This ideology saw the unbroken line of the Imperial family in the same light as thatwhich ensured the historical continuity of homogeneous language and culture (this was referred
to as the theory of the national polity [kokutai], and Japanese ethnocentrism was formed on thistheoretical basis). Secondly, driven by Social Darwinism (“the survival of the fittest”), there wasan increasingly widespread belief around the same time that history was the unilinear andincessant movement of progress. Kindaichi and Torii were well aware of the actually occurring
plunder of the Ainu at the time (the expropriation of the right to livelihood, as exemplified byfishing and hunting rights, affected through the policies associated with the opening of theThe Japanese Empire: Colonial Lives and Postcolonial Struggles

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frontier that I mentioned earlier). They chose to frame this as the inevitable outcome of “nature”
or “destiny”, holding that the only path available for the Ainu was assimilation (“becoming a fineJapanese”). In other words, Kindaichi and the leading historians, anthropologists and linguists ofthe time continued to repeat this patently contradictory mantra according to which the Ainu
could only continue to live precisely by their own total negation – becoming one part of theJapanese ethnos or national body – without feeling the slightest ethical misgiving. In fact, the“sympathy” shown by Kindaichi towards Chiri Yukie should be understood as the product of acolonial relation of power utterly lacking any consideration of alterity.
If these intellectuals believed that Ainu’s “survival” depended on the complete eradication of
their culture, it comes as no surprise that they saw the need to record Ainu culture at the momentof its rapid extinction not because they were concerned with the actual causes of Ainu’s
tribulations but because they wished to uncover a “primordial” cultural form that might offer
clues to the cultural origins of the Japanese ethnos. It is precisely here that we can see howcolonial enterprise is intrinsic to both the self-formation of the nation-state and its reinforcement.
The study of the other was purported to serve the purpose of discovering oneself. Or the interestin Ainu culture was based on the lack of interest in their actual/historical conditions. This very
paradox – a deep structure of colonial epistemology shared by many colonial powers, as Michel
de Certeau points out in The Writing of History, explains why people such as Kindaichi and
Torii unconditionally accepted the discourse of the “peripheral ethnicities destined to vanish”
despite their close relations with the Ainu.
On the second point: how did this mode of recognition of “difference and identity” function
within Japanese colonial policy on the level of the creation and implementation of colonial
relations of power? Here the fact that Kindaichi constantly emphasized that Chiri Yukie had aworking knowledge of two languages, in other words, that she was bilingual, has a crucial
significance. Kindaichi praised her command of the “national language” (Japanese) as so perfectthat “even a local aristocratic lady could not measure up,” and noted that her Ainu language,
learned by conversing with and listening to her grandmother recite the Yukar, was exceptional,
superior even to Ainu adults.[14]This bilingualism, the object of endless praise from Kindaichi, was of course a by-product of thecolonial policy of assimilationist education pursued by the Japanese government.[15] In 1899,
the year of the enactment of the “Laws for the Protection of Former Natives,” the percentage of
Ainu children attending school was 22.5%, while in 1909, the year Chiri Yukie enteredelementary school it had risen to 89.8% and in 1915 to 95.9%.[16] From these statistics, we cansee that the saturation of Japanese-language education took place with frightening speed: without
this type of colonial policy, Kindaichi’s research into the Ainu language could not have existed.
To put it another way, the system of knowledge in linguistics produced by Kindaichi was deeply
connected to the process through which the Japanese state assimilated the Ainu.

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Chiri Yukie

The collaboration which Kindaichi so eagerly sought in his relations with Chiri Yukie has to beunderstood within this context. The organizing principle of their relationship for Kindaichi was
the division of labor between object and subject, between the native informant as object of
research and the researcher who analyzes her. Since it was “destined to vanish,” the role
expected of the Ainu object was to record and preserve her culture “just as it was,” and therefore
to “faithfully” visualize (alphabetize) her own statements, enunciations, and oral traditions. It
was Kindaichi’s role to provide these with an ethnographic interpretation. This relation ofknowledge production in which the Ainu is the supplier of “raw data” while Kindaichi gives“meaning” to this data thus exactly reflects the power relations between the colonizer and thecolonized. The Ainu can never become the subject of the interpretive act; rather it is the selfappointed Japanese guardian or leader who provides the interpretation in their place. Thus theworld of meaning is appropriated from the Ainu, and they are dispossessed of their enunciative
subjectivity. Perhaps we can define assimilation as the attempt to control the other’s world of
meaning. Linguists and ethnographers attached a crucial significance to the fact that Chiri wasconversant in her native language and possessed sufficient ability in the “national language” tofaithfully translate into it insofar as she performed her bilingualism within the limits of thecolonial relations of power. (Kindaichi did not encourage Chiri to compile the Ainu shinyoshu
with a hope that the work would raise a fundamental question about Japanese colonial policies orurge the government or scholars towards a deeper sense of reflection. Rather, the Ainu shinyoshu
was nothing more than a “commemorative” monument for the preservation of the “vanishing”
Ainu culture, a set of “materials” through which the cultural origins of the Japanese ethnos might
be understood)
At this point we need to further consider the question of what exactly assimilation is. As Frantz
Fanon and Albert Memmi have pointed out, assimilation does not at all signify the attribution toThe Japanese Empire: Colonial Lives and Postcolonial Struggles

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the colonized of the same civil rights that the colonizer possesses, nor does it mean to berespected as an equal human being. However much the colonized attempts to assimilate (theattempt to acquire the language, culture, and knowledge of the colonizer), in the end he/she ismerely seen as a skilled “mimic,” but is never treated as an equal human being. At the same timeas the colonized is transformed into a member of society, he/she remains an “other” eternallyinscribed with this heterogeneity.
Through assimilation, the Ainu were given the position of loyal subjects (shinmin) of theJapanese empire, but were never permitted to become truly “authentic Japanese.” The Ainu of
Hokkaido were included into the family register system as “former natives,” and although theyheld Japanese citizenship, attended Japanese schools and were subject to taxation and the draft,
but prior to Japan’s defeat in the Pacific War, they were not guaranteed equal civil rights, such as
the right to vote or the right to participate in government. The Ainu of the Sakhalin islands werereferred to as “Sakhalin natives” (the fact that the term “former” is not used here reflects the
judgment that they were considered even more “backward” and “uncivilized” than the Ainu of
Hokkaido): just like those in Hokkaido, these Ainu were given Japanese names, and spoke
Japanese, but were not included in the family register; rather they were entered into a “Native
Name Register” (dojin meibo). Further, since Sakhalin Ainu were not under the protection ofJapanese criminal or civil law, not only were their rights to acquire property or administer abusiness not recognized, they possessed no representation in the Diet. [17] In other words,
assimilation indicates the operation by which the “heterogeneous other” is subordinated and is at
the same time integrated under the sovereignty of the empire. It was precisely this seemingly
contradictory mechanism of discrimination and integration that formed the nucleus of thecolonial policy of the Japanese empire. Etienne Balibar argues that the modern state requires thenation-form in order to successfully facilitate the capitalist system. The form is made up on the
one hand of patriotism, the principle of equality which inspires the spontaneous participation of
the people, and on the other hand it rests on the principle of discrimination on the basis ofgender, race, and class, which legitimizes and justifies difference as something natural. This
double principle of the nation form is the essential condition for the state’s management of
capitalism because a creation of patriotic sentiments of common destiny and spontaneousparticipation inspired by the sentiments help neutralize or dissipate potential antagonisms
emanating from fundamental inequalities such as division of labor and the wage differential
necessary for profit-making. In the same way, we can say that the imperial state, which requires
the loyal subject in order to profit from exploitation and expropriation, depends on this double
principle for its survival: on the one hand, the loyalty of the subject to the empire (being
Japanese) engendered through assimilation, and on the other, political and economic
discrimination based on ethnocentrism (not being fully Japanese). [18]It is by no means an accident that this double principle exists in a disquieting imbrication withthe structure of the linguistic doubling, or bilingualism of Ainu people such as Chiri Yukie(difference and identity, in other words, the heterogeneity or primitiveness of the Ainu and theirassimilation or belonging to the Japanese empire). Why is there such a crucial significance to thisoperation by which the Ainu replaced their “primitiveness” with the language of the Japanese,
this “national language,” by their own actions? It is precisely because it was this process oftranslation which verified and substantiated the fact that the Ainu were a “different” ethnos andat the same time belonged to the Japanese empire. In fact, without this effect of making
difference and identity something substantialized, the Ainu shinyoshu would not have been

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conceived of by Kindaichi. In other words, without the premise of the Ainu language’s
primitiveness, its subordination to and eventual destiny to be replaced by Japanese, the “national
language,” it would not have been compiled in the first place.
Ainu language was therefore enclosed within the Japanese empire, and yet continued to be its
outside. Ainu thus bore the sign of an exteriority within the interior. The empire configures its
own continuity through the production, maintenance, and mobilization of precisely this type of
exteriority. While the Ainu people were seen as the origin of the Japanese ethnos as a result of
their “primitiveness,” and thus as the interior of the empire, they were constantly made the objectof discrimination as something eternally different (an inferior race). The Japanese empire
cleverly utilized these policies of assimilation and discrimination, ensuring the flourishing of its
capitalist development by dispossessing the Ainu of the land and water that had been the basis of
their livelihood, and silencing their voices of resistance by denying them civil rights.
On the third point: during the preparation of the Ainu shinyoshu, it seems that Chiri Yukie madethe point to Kindaichi that there was something like an Ainu “voice” that could not be expressedin any written forms in any language. Tsuboi Hideto refers to this as Chiri’s “modest
resistance.”[19] Leaving aside the question of whether Chiri consciously attempted to resist, thisexample exactly demonstrates that the lived history of the Ainu and the narratives thattransmitted it always held something unrepresentable, something that could not be assimilated tothe institution of language, through the hegemonic linguistic system, the “national language”(Japanese). We might say that it shows us that assimilation policy and the politics of colonialtranslation sustaining it does not simply end with the relation of unilateral domination.
It is true, as Fanon brilliantly outlines in Black Skin, White Masks, that the inferiority complex
implanted within the interior of the colonized through a socially, institutionally, andeducationally formulated system of discrimination plays an essential supporting role for colonial
rule. The Ainu people were also made to internalize the racial discrimination forced on them by
the Japanese, gradually accepting this negative self-image as an irrefutable truth. In 1913, one of
the Ainu from Sakhalin, Yamabe Yasunosuke stated, “Somehow, someway, I really want toquickly make those poor Ainu children into good imperial subjects, just like the average
Japanese.” In 1917, Takekuma Tokusaburo, also from Sakhalin, recorded that it “is my longcherished desire for the Ainu to assimilate to the Japanese (wajin) and become fine citizens of
the Japanese nation (nihonjin).”[20] Here again we can see that assimilation and discrimination
are not an oppositional relation, but rather function in a mutually complementary fashion. The
desire for assimilation was here spurred on precisely by the sense of anxiety or despair at the factthat they could never attain the ideal of becoming Wajin (the perfect, true Japanese).
Yet, Chiri Yukie held her own position in her refusal to submit to this ideal of becoming Wajin
despite being tormented and perturbed by her racial inferiority complex and its horrificpsychological violence. When Kindaichi’s friend Okamoto Chiaki, who wanted to include an
advertisement for the ShinÅshÅ« in the magazine Jogaku sekai solicited a contribution andphotograph from Chiri, Chiri hesitated to have her picture taken (in fact, it was Kindaichi who
wrote this “contribution”). Noticing Okamoto’s puzzled responses to her reluctance, Chiri
speculated that Okamoto saw it as stemming from “an anxiety along the lines of “If I remainsilent about my Ainu origin, nobody would notice who I am, but, contributing to magazines like
Jogaku sekai (Women’s World) I would expose and thus denigrate myself, and I wouldn’t likethat.”[21] Chiri went on to write as follows:

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To think that way seemed a bit strange to me. I’m Ainu. Completely Ainu. What part ofme is supposed to be shisamu (wajin; Japanese)?! Wouldn’t I still be Ainu whether or not
I called myself shisamu? The idea of becoming shisamu just through that kind of lipservice is ridiculous. Who cares about becoming shisamu? I’m Ainu, so doesn’t thatmake me another human being? I’m still a human being just like them. I’m happy being
Ainu. […] Because I’m Ainu, I’m looked down upon, but it’s still fine. If my utari(compatriots) were looked down upon but I wasn’t, what kind of a situation would thatbe? I’d rather that I was looked down upon together with my utari. [22]Chiri’s sensitivities about Okamoto’s gaze and her adamant assertions and defense of her Ainu
identity indicate the degree to which the abject subject of the “inferior Ainu” deeply impinged on
Chiri’s consciousness. Nonetheless, Chiri refused to embrace this “destiny” to vanish assumed
by Yamabe and Takekuma, and hoped for the possibility to save the Ainu from this “destiny.”
When she states, “I’m still a human being just like them. I’m happy being Ainu,” we can clearly
see the affirmative meaning she gave to Ainu identity in her determined declaration to share thefate of her compatriots.
Chiri Yukie’s avowal that “there is something like an Ainu ‘voice’ that can not be expressed inany written forms in any language” needs to be understood in relation to this positionality. And
the fact that she produced such a high level Japanese translation of the Yukar, one thateffortlessly crosses the linguistic boundaries of Ainu, Japanese, and the Roman script,
demonstrates not only her mastery of the dominant language, but also perhaps shows her
determination to safeguard the inassimilable otherness of the voices of the Ainu themselves. This
extraordinary achievement by Chiri would not have been possible without her acting out what
Fanon called “mimicry,” the attempt of the colonized to behave in perfect synchrony withassimilation. It is a tragic irony of colonialism that the voices of the colonized were “savable”
only through the mediation of the colonizers’ language, an impeccable mimicry. [23]In the Ainu shinyoshu, Chiri Yukie never clearly explained what she intended by expressing the
Ainu language in the Roman script, then placing her Japanese translation of the text in parallel,that is, in opposition to it, but Sato-Rossberg Nana argues that Chiri Yukie produced asuperlative and unprecedented Japanese translation, one that uses a variety of devices toeffectively convey the rhythmic movement and vitality of its retelling and performance of the
Yukar.[24] This translation, which places its emphasis on the performative aspect, allows us torecall the fact that the Yukar is an orally narrated story configured around the narrator’s
improvisation and creativity. In this sense, it is not a “tradition of thousands of years”
safeguarded through recitation, but a form of art continually emerging anew in the here and now.
Further, Chiri successfully re-introduces the voices of the Ainu by utilizing the Roman script inplace of the Japanese katakana, which had previously been used to express Ainu phonetics. In
particular, Chiri’s annotations in the Roman alphabet differed from the previously standard
system of John Bachelor, the English missionary and researcher of Ainu culture, in that theycame to be regarded by linguists as closer to the phonetics of the Ainu language itself. A good
example is the term Yukara – in Bachelor’s system this ends in a vowel, while Chiri renders it“yukar,” ending in a consonant. Today this has become common knowledge, but at the time it
seems to have been a groundbreaking innovation. [25] In any case, this new method oftranslation and transcription expressed a certain rhythmic movement of the Ainu voice, a voicethat cannot be entirely captured in writing, and thus this method itself can be viewed as a trace ofHirano: The Politics of Colonial Translation

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Chiri’s desperate struggle to seek out the possibilities of Ainu survival, a task she regarded
increasingly as unattainable.
I think the fact that Chiri re-introduced the voices of the Ainu by choosing to notate the Ainu
language in the Roman script bears some important implications. In particular, if we consider thevariant meanings ascribed to the Roman alphabet in modern Japan, we can see the topology of
Chiri’s annotations. For example, Kindaichi’s friend, the poet Ishikawa Takuboku (1886-1912),
considered the Roman alphabet to be a method of representation for the direct exposure ofhuman interiority and desire, while Kindaichi’s teacher, who guided him into the study of the
Ainu language, Ueda Kazutoshi, argued that, in aiming to build a new civilized nation, Japanought to use the Roman alphabet, since learning Chinese characters was a massive waste of timeand energy. Whatever the case may be, we cannot merely grasp the attention paid at the
beginning of the Meiji period to the Roman script as a new method of transcription as a form ofEurocentrism or its adoption. By using the Roman script, an “ambiguous” system of annotation,
Chiri attempted as best she could to restore the rhythmic movement of the voices of the Ainu, tocommunicate something that could never be represented within the existing linguistic systems(the hiragana and katakana syllabaries, as well as Chinese characters). In other words, theRoman script was used here to liberate the voices of the Ainu from the yoke of theinstitutionalized and dominant language. Chiri’s creativity, which amazed Kindaichi and his
friends, precisely indicates that, far from being a mere informant, she was an enunciative,
interpretative subject in her own right. Chiri’s mimicry and act of translation suggested a
possibility of dislocating, upsetting, even threatening the colonizer’s putative superiority andracism that supported it by appropriating the colonizer’s language and creating new semantic
horizons. [26] Thus the division of labor that I previously mentioned, the relation of subject andobject (analyzer and analyzed) between Kindaichi and Chiri, was something far more unstableand volatile than is generally thought.

Representation of Chiri Yukie’s “Fox’s Song”

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The complex relations of power that emerge from this process of translational mimicry warn us
against any simplistic schematics of Kindaichi as oppressor and Chiri as victim or resister. In
fact, Chiri harbored great affection, gratitude, and respect for Kindaichi, while he never ceased
praising her character, ability, and creativity (of course, as I have already argued, we can neverconsider this affective level of relationality as separate from colonial relations of power).
Further, their collaborative work continued without a clear self-awareness of the latentdiscordance and incongruity between the differing goals each may have had in their transcribing,translating and editing of the Shinyoshu (later the linguist Chiri Mashiho, Chiri Yukie’s brotherand Kindaichi’s disciple, would confront this problem)[27]. For instance, it seems that Chiri fully
accepted Kindaichi’s understanding of the meaning of the Yukar. In 1922, as soon as she arrived
in Tokyo to live with the Kindaichis, she asked herself why she would sit down at a desk every
day and pursue this translation work, writing in her diary as follows:
Jotting down letters in blue ink on the white page that look like the tracks of earthworms
as they crawl…that’s it. What will just doing this lead to? For me, for my ancestors,
and….In order to share reference materials with my teacher who continues to research
our language (akoroitaku) and the precious work he’s doing in line with it, for the sake oflearning, for the nation of Japan, for all the nations of the world….what an immense task.
I have to wrench these things from out of this little head and into my brush…just doing
this much – I have to write, as much as I know, as much as my life can bear, I have towrite – this glittering morning – this green morning.[28]Here in discussing her goals, she states that the translation is for herself, the Ainu, Japan, theworld, and Kindaichi, and seems to see no contradiction or difficulty in reconciling these witheach other. We can certainly glimpse the optimism and strength of her spirit in this declaration of
intent to expend all the energy in her “little” self on this immense task. But in a poem written justbefore her death, this somewhat naïve optimism has completely vanished to be replaced bytragedy and despair:In the evening moon
When the leaves show their pale undersides in the autumn wind
The leaves at night
And the flickering lamps
The lizards awed by its beauty
At last forget the ugliness of their bodies
And crawl into the light
Burning to death in the flame
I saw them leave behind
These ugly carcasses.
We Ainu women
Are exactly like
The lizards of Tokyo.
Those who can do nothing
Will remain
Stuck in a dark place
In the corner of the world.
Like the lizards
Bewitched by the beauty and splendor

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Of the light of the world,
Whose white underbellies are showing
And who leave behind their ugly carcasses
The Ainu
Are vanishing.[29]Chiri’s conception here of the Ainu, whose spirits were bewitched by the dazzling light ofcivilization, only to be destined to be burned to death by this light, leaving behind their unsightly
and hideous corpses, is diametrically opposed to the optimistic sentiments expressed in theprevious quotation. Although in the previously quoted passage she saw no contradiction intranslating for the survival of the Ainu and participating in the light of Japanese, and indeed
world civilization, here she comes to understand that it is precisely this lure and power ofcivilization that is destroying the Ainu. For the Ainu, civilization does not mean salvation or apromised future, but rather it leads to death and extinction, in other words, a place where atombstone awaits them. It seems that Chiri, in approaching death at the age of 19 in the land ofmodern civilization, this foreign land of Tokyo, opened her eyes to the violence and destructive
force of civilization experienced by the Ainu, and for the first time, came to accept anunderstanding of the Ainu as an “ethnicity destined to vanish.” Further there is significance inthe fact that she came to understand herself as an Ainu woman. Although she does not elaborate,
she must have come to consciousness of herself as an Ainu woman while feeling the(discriminatory) gaze of the Japanese (wajin) in this metropolis of Tokyo where she spent thelast four months of her life (she records in her diary that after coming to Tokyo, she is tormented
by her “ugly” body). Whatever the case may be, the “ugliness of the body” that Chiri spoke of isperhaps a figure of speech directed also at herself, not merely as “Ainu” but also as “woman,” anexpression of the alienation, loneliness, and despair she felt at the rejection and negation of her
body and spirit by the force of “civilization.” She passed away a mere four months after arrivingin Tokyo. Approximately one year later, the Ainu shinyoshu was published, in which she wasintroduced not as the “translator,” but as the “editor,” once again erasing Chiri as interpretive,
enunciative subject from the face of the world and consigning her to oblivion.
As we have seen above, when we turn our eyes to Chiri’s translation of the Ainu “voice,” atransversal crossing of the boundaries of several linguistic systems, with all the allegories andindeterminacies of meaning produced by it, we come to understand the politics of translation notsimply as the one-sided exercise of power on the part of the dominant order, but as a subtly
unfolding process of negotiation within the relationality between the dominant and thedominated. In other words, although Chiri was frightened and alarmed in the face of thesubordination and the threat of extinction visited upon the Ainu by Japanese assimilation
policies, she simultaneously opened up a path through which the Ainu could go on living, bytranslating their voices into both the dominant language (Japanese) and the Roman script. She
did this not to preserve Ainu epic stories as a set of “materials” for academic research, a“commemorative” tombstone of a vanishing ethnicity, or a body of “primitive literature” of apeople left behind by civilization, but as an attempt to continue the narration of a living language
and society. In the violently contradictory and ruptured feelings she expresses in the preface to
the Ainu shinyoshu – self-respect and inferiority, hope and despair, resistance and submission –we can hear Chiri’s cries, her plaintive wish for the survival of the Ainu:
The forms of nature of the ancient times faded into the shadows before we knew it, andthe whereabouts of the many peoples who used to live joyously on the plains are also

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unknown. The small number of us in our tribe who remain can only watch the world as it
moves onwards with an astonished and overwhelmed gaze. But we have lost the beautiful
and radiant spirit of the ancient people whose eyes were governed by their religious
sentiments as they took in every action, every movement, and now full of anxiety, weburn with distress, growing ever more dull and unable to see with discernment – now we
can only depend on the compassion of the outside, oh, the wretched forms of those whoare vanishing….This is what we are known as now – vanishing – what a sorrowful name
we have come to possess.
Our blessed ancestors of long ago could scarcely have imagined that their native land
would end up in such a miserable state. Time constantly flows and the world ceaselessly
moves forward. Perhaps the day will come when, even among us, who now face theshame of defeat in this fierce realm of competition, two or three strong ones among ournumber might emerge, capable of walking in step with the world as it progresses forward.
This is our ardent wish, what we pray for continually, day in and day out.
And yet, perhaps the many languages, the old sayings and tales that our dearly loved
ancestors used with each other to ascribe meaning to the rhythms of their daily life may
disappear along with the timid, vanishing, and weak among us. Oh, this is the mostheartbreaking anguish we face. [30]The politics of colonial translation was incapable of completely taming the voices of thecolonized Ainu. The proof of this lies in Chiri’s voice, full of irreconcilable thoughts andfeelings, her prayers and outcries, an essential site of materiality where no power can claim atotal interpellation. [31]To reclaim and listen carefully to these voices, long ago consigned to oblivion by modern
historiography and literature, is to come face-to-face with the fact that the systems of knowledge
gathered and centered on the nation-state were deeply complicit with the legitimation andinstitutionalization of the violence of the imperial state and its capitalist enterprise. This requires
us to reconsider the process through which the oppressed are forced to live the “state of
exception” (the violence of discrimination, assimilation, expropriation, and subjugation) as“normality.”[32] But above all else, these voices alert us to the fact that the situation in which the“state of exception” operates as “normality” is by no means merely something in the past, butrather is an ongoing and continual reality of our “here and now,” a reality that will exist as longas the institution of the nation-state itself, and the relentless capitalist expansion that
accompanies it, continues to shape and dictate the possibilities of our imagination and praxis.
Whether Chiri Yukie’s voice will be a mere tombstone which continues its eternal silence or aliving voice is a question that will be determined by how we choose to face the past and thefuture.
Notes
This article is based on comments in Japanese prepared in response to Tsuboi Hideto’s
presentation “Mizukara no koe o honyaku suru” for the workshop Gurobarizeshon to imin
(Globalization and Migration), held at Cornell University in 2007. Gavin Walker translated theoriginal version of this text which has been expanded and substantially revised for The AsiaPacific Journal. I wish to thank Tom Lamarre, Tessa Morris-Suzuki, and Mark Selden for theirvaluable comments on the earlier versions of the article. My thanks also go to Gavin Walker who

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translated the original version of the article which has been expanded and substantially revisedfor The Asia-Pacific Journal. Walker is a Ph.D. candidate in East Asian Literature at Cornell
University. His article, “The Double Scission of Mishima Yukio: Limits and Anxieties in the
Autofictional Machine,” is forthcoming in positions: east asia cultures critique.
[1] The difference in use of the terms “wajin” and “Nihonjin” from the Meiji to the Taisho
periods is a crucial point. While “wajin” was meant to connote the pure ethnicity of the people
living in this archipelago from the Yamato period (300-550 CE) onwards, the term “Nihonjin”(“Japanese” in contemporary language), was used for any single citizen of the Japanese empire,
and therefore indicated membership. At the base of this differentiation is the assumption thatwhile the Ainu or the Ryukyu people could become “Japanese” through the process of
assimilation, they could never become “wajin.” Clearly, Ainu themselves came to use wajin as away to distinguish themselves from people on the archipelago in the process of assimilationist
policies. Chiri, Yamabe and Takekuma all used this term to mean “authentic Japanese ethnos” asopposed to “Japanized” Ainu.
[2] Hokkaidoshi, vol. 1 (Hokkaido-cho, 1918), 3-5.
[3] Shinsen Hokkaidoshi (Hokkaido-cho, 1937), 47.
[4] Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” in Language, Counter-Memory andPractice (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), 142. My addition in brackets. Foucault goes on
to argue that “if the genealogist refuses to extend his faith in metaphysics, if he listens to history,
he finds that there is something altogether different behind things: not a timeless and essential
secret, but the secret that they have no essence or that their essence was fabricated in a piecemeal
fashion from alien forms.” My critique of history based on the conceptions of ethnicity andprogress is aimed precisely at this kind of metaphysical assumption of essence and timelessness.
And I believe that the perspective of colonial translation is an important corrective to historicism
and ethnocentrism because of its ability to unpack historical processes in their singularity,
heterogeneity, and contingency.
[5] Deleuze and Guattari use the term “deterritorialization” to explain the process by which theright to utilize a certain piece of land is revoked, and the land itself expropriated from those who
previously used it for their own livelihood. They use “reterritorialization” to indicate thereordering of the multiplicity of place and territoriality into a unitary space, the process by which
the heterogeneous inscription in the land is translated into a homogenized, geometric space. In
the context of colonialism, “deterritorialization” is the process of the violent seizure from its
indigenous people of the means of production (land and the forms of life based on it) necessary
for their existence, while “reterritorialization” is the reintegration of these means, now
transformed into the means of capitalist production, into a homogeneous, geometric territoriality.
What I refer to in this article as “colonial translation” indicates this total process. See Gilles
Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Mille plateaux (Paris: Gallimard, 1980); A Thousand Plateaus, trans.
Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988).
[6] Iwasaki Naoko, Rekishi to Ainu: Nihon wa doko e iku no ka (Tokyo: Kodansha, 2003), 209211.
[7] The history of Japan’s early colonies such as Okinawa also attests to the point here.

The Japanese Empire: Colonial Lives and Postcolonial Struggles

106[8] Tsuboi Hideto, “Mizukara no koe o honyaku suru” in Ikyo no shi, eds. Nishi Masahiko andSakiyama Masaki (Tokyo: Jinbun shoin, 2007), 87.
[9] Otomo Yukio, Kindaichi Kyosuke to Ainugo (Tokyo: San’ichi Shobo, 2001), 29-30.
[10] Kindaichi Kyosuke, “Ainu no dan: Kokoro no komichi yowa” in Gengogaku gojunen(Tokyo: Takara Bunkan, 1955), 201-203.
[11] Otomo, Kindaichi Kyosuke to Ainugo, 83-84.
[12] Kindaichi, “Chiri Yukie san no koto” in the Kyodo kenkyusha reprint of Ainu shinyoshu, 2nded. (Chiri Mashiho o kataru kai, 2002), 1.
[13] Tessa Morris-Suzuki, Henkyo kara nagameru (Misuzu Shobo, 2000), 110.
[14] Kindaichi, “Chiri Yukie san no koto,” 2.
[15] This bilingualism should be distinguished from that which Ainu had gained long before the
Meiji period in order to trade with the “Wajin.” The former was a by-product of colonial policyof monolingualism that forced Ainu to renounce their language and adopt Japanese as theirown.
[16] Ogawa Masato, Kindai Ainu seidoshi kenkyu (Hokkaido tosho kankokai, 1997), 10.
[17] Morris-Suzuki, Henkyu kara nagameru, 136-138.
[18] Etienne Balibar, “The Nation Form: History and Ideology” in Etienne Balibar andImmanuel Wallerstein, Race, Nation, Class (London: Verso, 1991), 86-106.
[19] Tsuboi, “Mizukara no koe o honyaku suru,” 107.
[20] Yamabe Yasunosuke, Ainu monogatari, ed. Kindaichi Kyosuke (Hakubunkan, 1913), 189.
Takekuma Tokusaburo, Ainu monogatari (Fukido Shobo, 1918), 14-15.
[21] Maruyama Takashi, “Chiri Yukie no shi/shi” in Ikyo no shi, 15.
[22] Maruyama, “Chiri Yukie no shi/shi,” 16.
[23] Of course, this is not necessarily the case for other colonial societies. Neither did the peopleof the Dutch East Indies lose their languages to the Dutch, nor did the Koreans or the Taiwaneselose theirs under Japanese colonialism. It would be important to point out that one importantdimension for the elimination of language is that it often took place in societies whose linguistic
system was grounded in oral transmission. The question of the size of the colonized andcolonizer populations is also a factor.
[24] Sato-Rossberg Nana, “Chiri Yukie to Chiri Mashiho no Ainu shinyo yaku” in Ikyo no shi,
133-137.
[25] Otomo, Kindaichi Kyosuke to Ainugo, 89.
[26] Yukie’s reminder that Yukar was an improvisational art form suggests that storytelling wasunderstood by Ainu people not primarily as an act of reciting/recording but of creating/writing.
In this regard, the conventional wisdom that Yukie’s contribution in Ainu shinyoshu was toHirano: The Politics of Colonial Translation

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record the vanishing Ainu language needs to be reconsidered: she was an author of the stories inthe volume.
[27] Chiri Mashiho (1909-1961), a younger brother of Yukie, was a linguist trained at theImperial University of Tokyo. He taught at the University of Hokkaido while conducting
extensive research on Ainu language and culture. He remained critical of his mentor Kindaichi’sscholarship about Yukar and Ainu language throughout his life.
[28] Maruyama, “Chiri Yukie no shi/shi,” 30.
[29] Nakai Miyoshi, Chiri Yukie: jukyusai no igon (SairyÅ«sha, 1991), 240-241.
[30] Chiri Yukie (ed.), Ainu shinyoshu [Kyodo kenkyusha reprint, 2nd ed.] (Chiri Mashiho okataru kai, 2002), 1-3.
[31] After having been neglected for years, Chiri’s Ainu shinyoshu was republished by a major
publisher, Iwanami, in 2001. There is clearly a marked resurgence in serious scholarly interest in
Ainu history in Japan and elsewhere in recent years. This seems to correspond to the rising tideof postcolonial studies in the global scene in the last few decades or so. It is yet to be seen
whether this renewed interest in Ainu history could be an important momentum for rethinking
the very conditions of modernity.
[32] Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History” in Illuminations (New York:
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1968), 257.

The Japanese Empire: Colonial Lives and Postcolonial Struggles

108“Victims of Japanese Imperial Discourse: Korean Literature Under Colonial Rule”
PARK Yuha, trans. Gavin Walker, ed. Melissa Wender
October 16, 2008
http://japanfocus.org/-Park-Yuha/2923
In contrast to the previous article, in which Hirano upholds Ainu Chiri Yukie as an
example of a colonized subject who established an ethnic pride in her Ainu identity, Park’s
article examines the other side of the colonial coin by focusing on the notion of selfassimilation in “pro-Japanese literature” (shin’nichi bungaku in Japanese, chin’il munhak in
Korean). Such writing was written in either the Korean or Japanese language by Koreans
who portrayed Japanese colonial rule in positive terms. Park argues for a re-evaluation ofthis literature which is “often taken as nothing more than an explicitly state-approved
literature;” the writings can provide insights into the thinking of Korean colonial subjects ofthe time. He claims that “in fact, no writing more effectively expresses the confusion of
Koreans during the late 1930s to mid-1940s, when the pressure to become ‘Japanese’ took
place under the banner of ‘Japan and Korea as one body’ (naisen ittai).”Park analyzes the work of several Korean writers to show various experiences ofJapanese rule and provides several interpretations of what “becoming Japanese” meant.
His study of Yi Kwang-su first defines becoming Japanese as a physical and mental process
in which the body becomes regimented and orderly. Instead of viewing assimilation as aprocess that was forced from the top-down, Park uses Yi to examine colonial subjects who
willingly participated in assimilation, and became Japanese by changing their daily routines,
bowing in the direction of the imperial palace, and speaking Japanese. In Yi Kwang-su’s
writings, the imitation of everyday life and customs of the Japanese was a “world ofdiscipline modulating everyday behavior;” everything from how one dined to how one sat
could bring an individual closer or farther away from becoming Japanese. To become
Japanese was “loyalty manifested through ritual,” so every morning repeatedly bowing
while facing toward the imperial place (kyūjō yōhai)—a practice that many Japanese
themselves adhered to in their affirmation as Japanese subjects—could make one Japanese.
Park next discusses writer Sŏ Jŏng-ju, whose work demonstrates the idea that eventually
one could become Japanese—as Park terms it—through the “renunciation of individuality
and subjectivity, and placing the nation state as [the] pinnacle.” In other words, the final
step in the renunciation of self was becoming a soldier and dying for the emperor.
Park also examines pro-Japanese literature to uncover the gender implications in
the process of becoming Japanese. Korean women could only express themselves asJapanese by supporting men going off to war. Korean women were therefore often
characterized as hindrances to men becoming Japanese if they hesitated when sending
their sons off to the military. The model for Korean women was to become more like
Japanese women who purportedly could stoically send their sons and husbands to war
without shedding a tear. Park contends that many Korean men fought in the military inpart to become Japanese and to differentiate themselves from and assert their superiority
over Korean women. By serving in the Japanese army—a privilege open only to men—
Korean men simultaneously became Japanese and found a sense of empowerment in asociety that had previously emasculated them as non-Japanese. Thus, Park sees thesubordination of Korean women in colonial society as the result of actions by Korean men
as well as of Japanese policies.

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Victims of Japanese Imperial Discourse: Korean Literature Under Colonial Rule
Park Yuha
Translated by Gavin Walker
Edited by Melissa Wender
It is by now commonplace to observe that Japanese imperial ideology, or tennōsei, whose roots
can be traced to the Meiji state, subjugated individuals in the name of the progress of the nationstate. [1] One element of tennōsei, as is also now well known, was the notion of kokutai,
literally “the national body,” the idea of Japan as functioning as an organic, even human,
body. What has been examined less frequently, however, is the character of the oppression facedby residents of Japan’s colonies, particularly Korea. The Japanese empire not only took over thegovernance of the Korean peninsula but obliterated the very bodies of Korean imperial subjects
by subsuming them into the larger body of the empire. Or, I would argue, this is how we should
understand the catchphrase naisen ittai, or Japan and Korea as one body.
While the catchphrase naisen ittai might seem to suggest that Koreans were accepted as being
Japanese in their very bodies, in fact, it required considerable effort on the part of Koreancolonial subjects to acquire a national identity as “Japanese.” For example, evidence suggeststhat many volunteer soldiers believed that it was only through death that they could finally proveto themselves and others that they had become Japanese. Near the end of the colonial era in
Korea, the notion that Japanese national identity was neither a given nor a unitary experience
became widespread. Interestingly, we can find clearest evidence of this fact within the body ofso-called pro-Japanese literature (shin’nichi bungaku, chin’il munhak). Indeed, pro-Japanese
literature itself can be understood as part and parcel of such efforts to acquire “Japanese”
national identity, speaking as it does of the stories of individual people under the spell ofJapanese imperial ideology.
However, these texts have been largely ignored until recently, mostly for ideological reasons.
Their importance for gauging the effects of the ideology of the Japanese empire is unparalleled,since despite the fact that the colonial era in Korea lasted for 40 years, there are few other worksof Korean literature of the colonial period that contain “true to life” depictions of Japanesepeople and Koreans’ everyday interactions with them. If we consider that even before annexation
there were many Japanese migrants to the Korean peninsula, the period during which Koreans
could actually observe Japanese up close lasted for more than 50 years. [2] Given both this fact
and that imperial discourse insisted that Korean people become Japanese, one would expect there
to be works contemplating just what it meant to be Japanese. However, for the most part modern
Korean writers did not include Japanese characters in their texts. When they do appear, forexample in what is known as “resistance literature” (teikō bungaku), they generally emerge onlyin stereotype. In this sense, perhaps we might say that in Korean literature of this time, Japan
appears only as a shadow. So, although colonialism meant that most Koreans had direct contact
with Japan, Japanese, and Japaneseness, ironically Japanese people rarely appear as an object of
direct representation.
Even after independence, when there was no need for Korean authors to fear censorship, andJapan could be freely depicted, Japanese generally appeared only in the stereotypical form of an“evil” aggressor. Cho Chŏng-nae’s 12 volume serial novel Arirang (Arirang), published in theThe Japanese Empire: Colonial Lives and Postcolonial Struggles

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1990s, is representative of this tendency: It portrays the Japanese of the colonial period asinvariably cunning and violent, cruel and lewd. [3] Much the same is true of Kim Chin-myŏng’s
Mugunghwa kkoch’i p’iŏssŭmnida (The Rose of Sharon Bloomed, 1993), which sold millions ofcopies on the strength of this image of Korea as beautiful and good in contrast to “evil Japan.”This image of the cruel ruler was the easiest – and most politically correct -- means of depicting
Japanese for Koreans in the 1990s.
Thus it is that although they afford us only the barest glimpse of the everyday life of Japaneseand Koreans living in the colony, the texts of so-called pro-Japanese literature, they areinvaluable. These works are often taken as nothing more than an explicitly state-approved
literature, but in fact, no writing more effectively expresses the confusion of Koreans during thelate 1930s to mid-1940s, when the pressure to become “Japanese” took place under the banner of“Japan and Korea as one body” (naisen ittai). For example, full-blown imperialization policies(kōminka seisaku) such as forced name changes from Korean to Japanese (sōshi kaimei) or“worshiping the Imperial Palace from afar” (kyūjō yōhai) were required rituals for becoming“Japanese.” Because these policies affected all Koreans, in contrast to the expropriation of landor labor-power, they constituted the first form of directly experienced Japanese rule for mostpeople. This body of “pro-Japanese” literature effectively enables us to reflect upon how people
experienced this immediate connection to policies of control.
1. Japan as Ordering Mechanism
Although he is known for his significant contributions to early modern Korean literature, Yi
Kwang-su has been treated dismissively as a representative pro-Japanese writer. In his novel
Their Love (Kŭ tŭl ŭi sarang; Karera no ai), Yi portrays the feelings of a Korean student living in
a Japanese household for Japan as follows:
What Wŏn-gu was most strongly struck by was that the Nishimoto family went to bed
and woke up at the same times every day. Even though there wasn’t an alarm that would
go off, it was as if everyone in the house heard a bell inside themselves saying, “go tosleep” and “wake up.” It seemed like it was the chimes of the old clock on the second
floor in the Professor’s study that let the house move forward from moment to moment.
Wake up at 6:00 am, go to bed at 10:00 pm, breakfast at 7:00 am, lunch exactly at noon,
be at the table for dinner at 6:00 pm. [4]For the Korean student, the everyday life of the Japanese is more than anything understood as a
type of “ordering mechanism,” marking the sensation of the passage of time from moment tomoment. He is “strongly struck by” this well-regulated life in which the “sound of the chimes”“let the house move forward from moment to moment.” The student protagonist soon becomesaccustomed to and trusts in this lifestyle, while the author, Yi Kwang-su, was in his non-fiction
writings promoting a Japanese style of living: “We must work vigorously towards the goal ofreconstructing ourselves in our everyday lives as imperial subjects. The new spiritual system will
only come to be completed in as much as it manifests itself in everyday life”. [5]For Yi, it was through the imitation of “everyday life” that Koreans would be able to effect a“reconstruction [of themselves] as imperial subjects” (kōminkateki kaizō). What he meant by
everyday life or the Japanese style of living was, for example, that adults and children should not
eat “separately,” but rather “the entire family should gather around the table with correct

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manners” and “should sit correctly [Japanese-style] to the extent possible.” One ought to “keepone’s back straight,” “children should remain silent,” and meals should be treated as “important
events and at the same time as rituals.” Yi remarks that “at meal times, it is the Japanese spirit to
first make an offering to the gods and Emperor and then eat.” He argues that this is due to thefact that “every grain, every drop of liquid is thought to be changed into something given by thegods and His Majesty the Emperor, and at the same time one should think of the hardships
endured by one’s ancestors and brethren and give thanks, expressing true feelings ofappreciation.”
This is the type of setting in which the official gaze begins to enter the private space known as
the ‘everyday’. For Yi the everyday life of Japan was a world already rooted in a totalitarianorder, as in the “entire family gathering around the table,” a world of discipline of the bodywherein one “should straighten one’s back” and “sit correctly.” Thus, as expressed in the preceptthat the meal should be conceived as a type of grace conferred by the gods and the emperor, we
can see that what unifies and controls this order and discipline is the emperor. More precisely, Yi
understood the existence of the living emperor as giving a physical reality to the discipline andorder maintained by imperial subjects.
Through the act of “worshiping the Imperial Palace from afar” (kyūjō yōhai), the emperor’sostensibly official existence is invited into the space of the everyday, and thus it is precisely bymeans of the existence of the emperor and nation-state that the private space of the individual ismentally and physically ingrained. This ritual of kyūjō yōhai, in which one turns to face Japan –or more precisely, the emperor in the Imperial Palace – and bows, began in tandem with theThird Chosŏn Educational Act (1938), which had been amended by Minami Jirō, the Governor
General in Korea, and which was enforced with a siren in the cities that rang out at 7:00 am
every morning. Yi Kwang-su describes it as follows:
I first opened my eyes at 6:00 in the morning. The 6:00 a.m. siren rang. It was the sirenthat told all Japanese nationals (Nihon kokumin) to get out of bed. Nothing like this had
happened before. We were free to choose when to sleep and when to get up. From now
on, the fatherland (sokoku) told all nationals (kokumin) to get up at 6:00 am. If we didn’t
do it, the great work being carried out by the state (kokka) would be difficult. I finally
opened my eyes at 6:30 in the morning. I couldn’t hear the 6:00 a.m. siren anymore. I got
to sleep late because I was working on my manuscript last night. The manuscript is also
something for the state, but that still no excuse to oversleep. As I was told by themother’s association (mama-kai), I read a book after cleaning. Another siren rang out.
“What do you think it’s for?” Since I still haven’t gotten used to this type of national life
(kokumin seikatsu), I didn’t realize that it was the 7:00 am siren for worshiping theImperial Palace from afar. When you hear that siren, the whole family, even servants,
immediately clean up and stand in place, worshiping with all their hearts. [...] Yesterday,
at the Great Chosŏn Fairgrounds, I heard the noon siren and thought to set my watch, but
I forgot to offer a silent prayer. I’m still not that good at national life. I suppose you’ve
probably got to really try for years before you learn how to live like this. [6]National education to become Japanese began with controls such as regulating the time when theentire nation woke up “at once.” Private time, in which “we were free to choose when to sleep
and when to wake up,” was for the first time in modern Korean history under official control. It
goes without saying that this was an unmistakably modern experience of oppression.

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Like being trained to think of one’s meal as something given by the grace of the emperor, thiswas an experience designed to make one conscious of being in “official” space from the very
moment one opened one’s eyes. It is the emperor that is at the apex of the segmentation of
everyday time through sirens and clocks, and thus the possibility for Koreans of rapidly
becoming “Japanese” was based on how quickly they could effectively internalize the existenceof the emperor. In this sense we can say that in their everyday lives “Japaneseness” wassynonymous with the “emperor.”This means, ironically, that anyone who honored the emperor could become Japanese. In acertain sense, we can say that the regulated “national life” required to become a “national
subject” (kokumin) of the emperor could be acquired simply by doing things like making sure tolisten for the morning siren, and making sure not to forget the silent prayer at noon. The
condition enabling one to become Japanese was neither language, culture, nor blood, but rather aloyalty manifested through ritual.
Of course, Yi points out that “mastering” (mi ni tsuku) or making this life one’s own requires“many years of effort,” but this indicates precisely that even only with “many years” and some“effort,” the national identity called “Japanese” could become a possibility. When it compelled
Korean people to refashion themselves as Japanese, the Japanese empire stressed that this was a
possibility because of the fact that Koreans and Japanese shared a common ancestry (Nissendōsōron). And yet, while it touted the notion that this common fountainhead was the essence ofnational identity, at the same time the very idea that Koreans had to become Japanese exposedthat in fact national identity had to be acquired belatedly through bodily training, or, in otherwords, that was not something essential, or in-born.
In reality, Yi’s children had already completed adapted to this “national life.” The “six year-old
girl” did as her father told her, and quietly worshiped the Imperial Palace from afar, while his
young son and daughter stopped in the middle of eating to worship, and upon their father’s returnto the room, turned toward him and said with concern in Japanese, “Father, that siren just now
was the siren for worshiping!” These children had become nearly perfect young Japaneseimperial subjects not through any blood connection but through the acquisition of language andphysical discipline. What had allowed these children to adopt the physical code or discipline of“worshiping the Imperial Palace from afar” so readily was precisely that their bodies had notbeen already inscribed into another regime of discipline that might conflict with the new one.
This is not to imply that Korean children could become truly Japanese, because in reality they
continued to be treated differently from the Japanese. But these children, who used “Japanese
language,” who performed rituals as “Japanese people,” never doubted their own“Japaneseness.” [7] In a certain sense, the greatest problem for the colonial
peoples was not the act of being colonized per se, but rather the wide gap between the official
rhetoric, which proposed that they could become Japanese and thus equal members of theempire, and the true nature of colonial rule, which would keep them forever subjugated.
2. The Sorrow of “Pro-Japanese” Literature – The Case of Sŏ Jŏng-ju
Sŏ Jŏng-ju, perhaps post-liberation Korea’s greatest poet, published a short story called“Postman Ch’oe’s Military Longing” in October 1943, conveys understanding of the national
identity “Japanese” as the internalization (mi ni tsukeru koto) of order and discipline. [8] In Sŏ’s

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story, the protagonist, Ch’oe, a “postman in a small town by the sea in southern Korea,” isdesperately trying to acquire Japanese identity. Ch’oe is a “reliable and trustworthy man of
average build,” who delivers the mail not only in his own village, but also far and wide to “small
villages in the deep mountains and down by the seashore.” Although his wife has passed away,
he has a “mother who is blind in one eye,” and “a son who is a second-year student in elementary
school.”A bronze statue of Sŏ Jŏng-ju. While respected as Korea’s greatest poet, the controversy surround his work
as a pro-Japanese writer continues to rage in Korea.

In the text he is portrayed as a hardworking and sincere person who wakes up before dawn every
morning in order to clean the house and garden, make breakfast for his mother, and help his son
get ready for school.
While he was doing this, the sun had risen, so Ch’oe stopped what he was doing andchanged into his postman’s uniform. He left the garden and, gazing to the east, called out
to his son,”Toshio!” As soon as Toshio heard his father’s voice, he immediately
responded in military style, “Hai!” and stood in line next to his father. They both wore
somewhat worn-out uniforms, but the buttons were all neatly in place.

The Japanese Empire: Colonial Lives and Postcolonial Struggles

114“Kyūjō yōhai!” In fact, the one who barked this out like an order wasn’t the father but theson. The truth is that it was Ch’oe who used to say it when they first started “worshiping
the Imperial Palace from afar,” but he always mispronounced it as “Ku-jo-yo-uhai.” Ever
since his son corrected him one day after he’d become a second-year student, Ch’oe
passed that duty onto his son. [9]Even though no one is watching them, they gather at the same instant to perform this ritual assoon as the sun rises – for this father and son, “Japan” itself is a regime of discipline and controlof the body which manifests itself in a precisely ordered physical style and command to ritually
bow. Not only in his “military style response,” “Hai!” to being hailed by his Japanese name, butalso in his continual chiding of his father’s halting Japanese through the use of “correct”
Japanese, this young boy has already thoroughly internalize this discipline. In the figure of thefather, who accepts his son’s admonishment for his incorrect Japanese pronunciation, we can see
precisely the pitiful reality of the colonized position, making this work a type of inconspicuous
resistance literature.
In any case, it shows that while the acquisition of the national identity “Japanese” was not easy
for him, simultaneously we can see that simply by sufficiently learning the discipline of being a“national subject” (kokumin), he can express a certain degree of “Japaneseness.” His growing
accustomed to “belonging to the military” (gunzoku) is a direct result of this.
On the other hand, this text reveals one instance which powerfully resists this type ofinternalization of national identity as “Japanese.”
After the ritual of worshiping the Imperial Palace from afar was over, Ch’oe’s motheralways prepared a modest breakfast, and then sat waiting for her son and grandson. When
Ch’oe first started worshiping the Imperial Palace from afar, he tried to persuade hismother to do it together with them, but no matter how many times he asked her, she neveragreed. “She’s getting on a bit, and her back’s not what it was, so it’s fine if we just do
her share ourselves.” Thinking this to himself, Ch’oe realized that he’d better give up
trying to convince his mother.
Ch’oe understands his mother’s unwillingness to worship the Imperial Palace from afar because
her “back’s not what it was.” But in fact, his mother’s refusal to participate in a ritual to“become” “Japanese” is her negation of their “performance” of national identity. [10] Later, after
Ch’oe enters the military, she participates in this “performance,” but this does not directly
constitute proof of any kind of “pro-Japanese” sentiment (shin’nichisei). Indeed, there hadarisen by this time generational differences in Koreans’ receptivity to becoming Japanese. For
example, some of those who willingly accepted the idea of becoming Japanese even criticized
their parents for their resistance to Japanization. Here we might read the mother’s decision to
engage in the ritual of bowing toward the palace as her recognition that she has no other choicebecause she will be living off her son’s earnings and she cannot make him look bad.
As he walked in the door, taking off his cap, Ch’oe would sometimes try to exclaim “I’mback!” (Tada ima!) in Japanese (kokugo), not to Toshio, but to his mother. As he would
have rather just said, “ŏmŏni!” (“mother!”) I’m sure you can all understand his lonely
state of mind.

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After silently eating his dinner, he would ask, of course in Japanese (kokugo), “Toshio,
have you done all of your studying?”
Only after checking his son’s answers would he relax and close his eyes, which had been
open throughout the day. [11]Having begun his day by worshiping the Imperial Palace from afar, Ch’oe returns home at theend of the day and greets his mother by saying “Tada ima!” in Japanese, the national language.
Although he uses the Japanese phrase “tada ima,” Ch’oe would prefer to “just say ‘ŏmŏni!’“ andfeels lonely and confused as a result of his as-yet imperfect acquisition of “Japan.” Thecomplexity of this depiction undercuts the typical analysis of Sŏ Jŏng-ju as merely a proJapanese writer.
3. Renunciation of the Individual - Permeation of the Official
When brushing your teeth, do it with all your might; when washing your face, do it withall your might; when eating a meal, devote all your energy to eating; when playing,concentrate hard. Wŏn-gu felt that this was the Japanese spirit, the Japanese way. [12]For this boy who thinks that the “Japanese spirit,” the “Japanese way of life,” is signified by“enthusiasm,” “sincerity,” and “devoting all your energy” to every aspect of everyday life, it
isn’t just that Japanese people work at everything with all their might – as he watches the people
around him work neatly and diligently, he thinks to himself: “As if you could stand before thegods at any moment.” This was a phrase that Wŏn-gu mulled over a lot. [13]In other words, the individual who sincerely follows the “official” demands of everyday life is
one who is always conscious of the eyes of the gods or the Emperor as “official,” and it is thispreparedness – never forgetting the nation-state – which is precisely the “Japanese spirit” heidentifies. At the time, it could also be seen in imperialization policies being put into practice. No
Ch’ŏn-myŏng referred to this as “taking to heart both divine favor and indebtedness to theemperor, becoming an imperial woman appropriate to the new system, and at the same timelearning knowledge and capabilities for the expansion of production.” We can see it in things
such as training through communal living from 6:00 am to 9:00 p.m., “without even the slightest
waste,” or in impressions such as “to feel things most sincerely is the life of duty.” [14]In the phrase, “This life becomes possible only in as much as you know divine favor andindebtedness to the emperor,” there is a self-awareness that individual life is possible only
predicated on the existence of subjects of the nation-state (kokka shutai) encapsulated in suchphrases as “divine favor” and “indebtedness to the emperor.” We can say that this is not a visionof the nation-state as a collection of individuals, but rather a moment of inversion founded on thenotion that the individual can exist only in as much as there is a nation-state.
Precisely because this process existed, an almost religious schema, emphasizing the renunciationof individuality and subjectivity, and placing the nation-state at its pinnacle, could be created:“Your brother belongs to His Majesty the Emperor. Your husband belongs to His Majesty theEmperor. Your body belongs to His Majesty the Emperor. This is the Japanese spirit.” [15]In an essay in which he emphasizes individual responsibility toward the nation-state, Yi Kwangsu more clearly develops this idea:

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In other words, if you eat the grain of the nation-state, you should work for the nationstate. In the new order, there will be nothing like your own body, your own property, or
your own son. Everything will belong to the nation. The way of thinking which says –this is mine, so I will do with it what I like – is inexcusable, it is individualism,
liberalism, and it is incompatible with the ideology of the new Japanist value system(Nihonshugi shintaisei shiso). [16]For Yi, who speaks about his own text as a “service to the nation,” the “new system” of “Japan”
is one in which there is no longer “your own body, your own property, or your own son.” Even if
they were to exist, “body,” “property,” and “son” can only exist as belonging to the nation.
Beyond understanding “Japanism” merely in this sense, it is a matter of course for Yi that“individualism and liberalism,” which emphasize the right to exist as an “individual,” areincompatible with it.
It is also a given that this “Japanese spirit,” which does not even categorize the family in its
relationship to the self, necessarily acts to negate the “self”, and thus “it is clearly understoodthat making excuses for yourself, overemphasizing yourself, showing off, and so on, have little
to do with the Japanese spirit.” [17] The fact that in colonial Korea the “Japanese spirit” was one
that would not allow for making excuses for or overemphasizing the self demonstrates that the
new Japanese spirit is merely a new appellation for that which formerly had been valorized as the“Meiji spirit,” and which likewise had required the destruction of the “self” (onore). [18]Another example of a Korean subject’s recognition of the degree to which participation in theempire require suppression of the self can be found in what the poet Sŏ Jŏng-ju, whom I referred
to above, wrote about his military training:
I’ll tell you something truly important. For some reason, ever since I came here, my voice
has gradually been sinking into my interior. Far from orders like, “come here,” “staythere,” and so on, I don’t even have the confidence to raise my voice and respond, “Yes!”
when someone calls to me, “Shizuo!” I see my “self” becoming completely formless andfading away. Perhaps this feeling is making me realize and reflect on how much I used tomeaninglessly rely on this thing called a “self.” I guess I need to be reborn into sometotality. [19]He is unable to hide his confusion at the thought that his “self” is “becoming formless and fading
away,” but is also able to make himself comprehend this by means of another type ofunderstanding: “I” “need to be reborn into some totality.” Within an oppressive situation inwhich the “self” was fading away into nothingness, colonial Koreans, in order to makethemselves understand themselves, required precisely this collective fantasy of “being reborn
into some totality.”
4. The Inversion of Loyalty
Amongst the colonized, those who most required this image of being “reborn” into a “totality,”
were the soldiers. Here is a contemporary description of the situation:
In any case, it has been continually reasserted that the foundation of the urgent task webear, that is, the great work of historical creation, is located in individual national selfawareness (kokuminteki jikaku). In other words, as is often said, the individual isPark: Victims of Japanese Imperial Discourse

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connected to the whole, and totality is formed by means of individuals. Individual andwhole are not established through mutual separation; in our country, thankfully the wholeis the emperor, while the individual is the “people,” as derived from the leading families.
It goes without saying that the Western view of the world and life, formed through thetraditional principle of the individual, has been corrected in our country and returned toits original true form through the supreme idea of the nation-state as the basis of a newworldview and view of life. That is, there is a people only because there is a nation-state,
and there is culture only because there is a nation-state. Thus, to rid yourself of petty
thoughts of the ego and die a noble death (tōtoi sange) that dwells in the greater self is tolive forever in that totality. [20]What this final sentence emphasizes in order to justify offering up one’s life in a “noble death”(sange) is that the emperor is not an individual but a totality, and that in living for this totality
one has the possibility of becoming not merely “ego” but part of? a “greater self.” To die a“noble death” itself is to “live forever in the totality” of the emperor, that is, to accomplish a true
“unification” with Japan, the expected outcome of which is becoming Japanese. Koreans were,after all, nothing more than the man-made, or artificial, children of the Emperor, but just as forJapanese soldiers dying for the Emperor meant becoming natural, authentic “people” of theEmperor, thereby guaranteeing an eternal cycle of birth-rebirth as “Japanese,” so too for
Koreans. This type of logic is what allowed them to so easily rush into the negation of the self as
an “individual.” [21]Becoming a soldier was, for Koreans moreover, a method for maximizing their internalization of“Japan” as an ordering mechanism. Another text written to encourage Koreans to become
volunteer soldiers discusses this method of internalization in the context of a critique of Korea’s“neglect of military training” during the Choson Dynasty:
For Koreans in particular, a sense of proper hierarchy was disrupted, and the respect andlove between older and younger students were lost. Koreans are now agitated -- much
like a fish thrown onto a stove begins to twitch of its own accord when a flame is lit
under it.
Training as volunteer soldiers has opened a new path to Koreans who have been living ina world lacking order. Not only has it become possible for Koreans in this untrained andunordered situation to learn discipline, this system of volunteer soldiers has enabled arecognition of a sense of a duty to the nation-state, and has thus made the Korean spirit
purer. [22]For them, Japan more than anything represented an existence in which discipline of militarytraining had been internalized, a mode of being through learning by example.
Yet, we must not forget that more than Japanese, this type of ordering and discipline is modern.
While depicting the everyday soldier’s life from waking at 6:00 am to clean, worship theImperial Palace from afar, and recite the oath of imperial subjects (,Ham praises them for “maintaining order even when eating,” in the belief that “trained people,
and a trained nation (minzoku) are indeed strong.” It should be noted here that the Japanese
ideology of strength that had aimed, since the Meiji period, for a strong sense of nation(minzoku), was spreading its roots to the colony.

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That is to say, for Koreans, to neglect your body, given to you by your parents, was to go against
the Confucian conception of filial piety to which they were accustomed, and thus in this sense,
the concept that dying for the nation-state constituted an act of “loyalty” ran counter to ingrained
notions of filial piety.
For example, in Chang Hyŏk-chu’s “Saeroun ch’ulbal” (Atarashii shuppatsu), the young man
who enters the training camp writes a letter to a friend saying “All I think of every day” is “howto revive our concept of filial piety more broadly as a spirit of loyalty.” The friend who receives
this letter thinks, “The greatest task of spiritual education consists in bringing the unique ethicalsense of young Koreans into the Japanese spirit and remolding it into something new.” They
think this is something “truly important,” but simultaneously recognize that it is nearly
impossible.
We clearly understood the true feelings of the imperial soldiers for their parents, as theywould happily go to their deaths for one parent, in this case, the emperor. There were avariety of tasks in the training camp, but the primary one was the correction of this notionof loyalty, and the next was becoming habituated to life in Japan proper (naichi) – inother words, we lived our everyday life in Japanese style (naichi shiki).
When it came time for correcting his views of loyalty, no matter how different he was from theother Korean trainees, he too couldn’t completely discipline his spirit. In as much as he was quite
patriotic, he still had a lot of things in himself that he needed to correct before he could
understand the correspondence between his patriotism and loyalty to his rulers as well as filial
piety. [23]“Patriotism” is the subject here, but there is a young Korean boy who hasn’t yet reconciled
patriotism with imperial loyalty. Just as the unity of loyalty and filial piety, which became
possible only in as much as the emperor was positioned above the parent, was also debated inJapan at the end of the Meiji period, this was not something easily internalized by a Korean
youth of the time. But he thinks, “The ability for Korean youth to become excellent Imperial
soldiers will depend on their ability to correct their views on loyalty and filial piety.”
We must think of filial piety as not only pertaining to our biological parents, but also to
His Majesty the Emperor, who is also our parent. This is the spirit of loyalty, in which thelesser piety is contained within the greater piety – that is, there must be developmentfrom the lesser piety towards the greater piety. To put it another way, this is the unity ofloyalty and filial piety. The primary goal in the training camp is to cultivate the spirit tounderstand that to be loyal is itself to demonstrate filial piety. However, to stop at filial
piety and not develop it into loyalty is an outdated merely filial spirit of the former familysystem, one that is unsuitable for our country. To correct our views of loyalty and filial
piety, everyone must take up the training of the spirit as the single most essential task.
[24]
Because of this troubling incompatibility between loyalty and filial piety, Chang and other socalled pro-Japanese Koreans treated piety towards one’s parents as “lesser piety,” and piety
towards the emperor as “greater piety,” and through this schema in which greater piety isprioritized over lesser piety, they came to understand and accept themselves.

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In a poem called “Student Soldiers of Korea,” [25] Yi Kwang-su advises young men debating
whether or not to become volunteer soldiers not to “hesitate,” precisely at this moment of
inversion, when for the first time in Korea, the “nation-state” was elevated into a position
superior to the categories of “father” or “individual” based on the logic of “if there is no nation
there are no parents.” What sustained this inversion were the two notions that individualism wassomething Western, and that the doctrine of filial piety, which elevated parents to the highest
position, was outdated. In this sense, both the position of the emperor and the centrality of thenation-state were justified through the convenient use of the ideologies of civilizational
difference and traditionalism.
5. Colonial Desire and Gender
However, while certain intellectuals provided such rationales, the young men of the time
absolutely were inclined to “hesitate.” These problems were real for them. What is especiallyworthy of notice is that it was not they but their mothers who were strongly criticized for this“hesitance.” For example as Chang Hyŏk-chu argued, “Korean mothers are engrossed with love
for their children,” and “never think of making their children strong or sacrificing them for thenation.” The young man in Chang’s novel thinks that “this coddling weakens the youth of
Korea,” and that responsibility for preventing them from “training of the soul” lies with the“expressions of affection of the mothers of the Korean peninsula.” Conversely, when one young
man sends his mother a letter worrying about her, she responds by saying that it is unbecoming
for one “becoming a soldier of His Majesty the Emperor” to worry about family. Consequently,
she is praised as an “excellent Japanese mother.”
Of course, the model against which this is measured is the group of genuine (honmono no)
Japanese mothers. Here is the logic of one Korean observer:
The reason that Japanese women are today revered as the most devoted mothers of all the
military powers in the world derives from their religious faith, the foundation of which is
the tradition of the emperor. Thinking about the practical orientation of Korean families,
I feel anxious, doubting that Korean women will be able to act as such noble wives andmothers to military men. We should consign our rationalistic and practical lifestyle to thepast, raise our children with constant prayer, and send them out into the world with faith[that allows them to] happily give up their lives for the emperor. [26]Choosing “faith” is to eschew “practicality” and “rationality,” and to embrace something“irrational” is considered worthy. In their “traditional religious belief in the emperor,” thisauthor argues, the women of Korea ought to mimic the women of Japan.
This praise for “Japanese mothers” can also be seen in the following example from a play set in
the coal mines. Two young men criticize one of their mothers for hesitating to send the younger
brother, who wants to be a soldier, into the military.
Kanemura: “The women in Japan were just as amazing as I thought. I saw this for myself,
you know, I was really moved. At Osaka station, a mother was with her son, who was
departing for the front. When I saw it, I thought, this country of bushidō is reallysomething else. She didn’t shed a single tear in front of her son, just sent him off cheerily
and waited till he’d gone to feel sad. It’s a bit embarrassing to say, but what’d happen if
this were in Korea? It’d be awful if she grabbed her son and started wailing.”

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Kil-dol: “Yeah...the reason Japanese soldiers are the strongest in the world must be
because they’ve got mothers like that, huh?”
Kanemura: “That’s right, it’s ‘cause Japanese mothers all think of their sons as something
to sacrifice for the nation, not just as their own individual child. So they can offer theirchild to the state at any time, and send them off to the front with encouragement, nevershedding a tear.” [27]For these young men, “Japan” is an attitude in which certain things are possible – for example,
even if you are a mother, you give up your “individual child,” and rather than protecting yourson, send him “without shedding a single tear” to the battlefield. At the time, this type ofunderstanding was the backdrop against which women took up drill training. But it wasn’t sosimple for Korean women to become “Japanese mothers.” In the end they were presented
through the male author’s image of the exemplary woman: “Older brother, please become asoldier. I’m a woman so I can’t go. You’re a man, aren’t you? So please join the army. Pleasebecome a brave soldier and fight for His Majesty the Emperor.” [28]That is, for Korean men whose aim was to become “Japanese,” Korean women were presented
as a hindrance. In the colony, to become a “soldier” was to express your value as a “man,” thepath to realize the dream of a bright future. For example, here a young man who has sent his
younger brother off to the army, turns to his mother and says: “I wanted him to just go to a goodschool, and be a success too. But these days, the only way for him to be a success as a man is tobe a soldier.” Of course, this primary type of ability to make oneself a success is a privilege only
afforded to “men”:“Women seem pretty clever, but they’ve got less brains than us, don’t you think?”“Yup.”“Listen, it’s a real privilege that we were born men. Got it? The point is, men are greaterthan women. So we’ve got to do at least that much.” [29]For these men, the notion that men are greater than women is connected to their sense of
mission, the feeling that they “must accomplish something for the world.” They understand theirpersonal choice to become soldiers as a means of quickly becoming “Japanese,” and that it istheir duty as men to demonstrate this ability not in the private space of the household, but in theofficial space of “the world.” To be a soldier and subject of the Emperor, something a woman
can never be, is to be a privileged “chosen one,” thereby giving proof of “greatness.” In otherwords, they come to see the act of choosing itself as what proves their masculinity, but in the end
this masculinity is only attainable through becoming a soldier, and through “Japan,” a factobscured by the attention paid to public participation as men’s responsibility. [30] Here we canclearly see the way that men became complicit with both the sovereign power and the colonizednation because it gave them some sense of themselves as powerful.
That is, in colonial society, one of only a few ways, and arguably the most effective way, for a
man to assert his masculine identity was to join the Japanese military and become an imperial
soldier. In this manner Korean men could fulfill their notions of superiority over Korean women,
deeply rooted in society, and escape the oppression and emasculating effects of Japanesecolonization within their own society.

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We must grasp Chang’s novel from this perspective. In it, a young man who is encouraged by
the news that his friend has decided to join up, is subsequently ashamed to learn that he cannot
join the military because he is too old. He has been in Japan a long time, and faithfully attends
the sending-off party for the soldiers, expressing feelings of gratitude. In the end, he is forced tosay,“Well, I can’t go into the army ‘cause of my health, so the least I can do is see you off...”Hearing this someone said, “Really? But you seem so healthy!”
He explained that when he was younger, he had eagerly considered doing so.
“[But] the truth is that at the time there wasn’t a system of conscription in the Korean
peninsula yet.”
However, perhaps he was being a bit too easy on himself. Still, he comforted himself bythinking that he was thankful that the volunteer system was [now] in place, so just as inJapan (naichi), many young Korean men on the continent who wanted to be a shield forand give their lives for the emperor could do so.” [31]This still relatively young man, who says that his health and age prevented him from entering thearmy shows us that “going into the army” was seen by some to be a privilege. We can see his
inferiority complex here, as someone who, while he seems to “be so healthy,” to have all thephysical characteristics to become a soldier, nevertheless cannot enter the military.
The right to “become the shield of the emperor” or to give one’s life was only conferred upon
those who had gone through physical and spiritual “training,” and had passed the test of
becoming “Japanese” by training as soldiers. “Giving your life” was therefore a privilege, since
it was the sole way for Korean men to become equals as both “Japanese” and “masculine.” This
is why the man here feels it necessary to explain why he had not joined the military by notingthat he had been too old to join under the extant regulations. Koreans who wanted to become
Japanese, or rather who felt that they had to become Japanese, discovered their difference fromJapanese people when their loyalty was called into question.
Let us examine a passage from Yi Kwang-su on the concept of “Japan and Korea as one body”(naisen ittai):
Until now, “Japan and Korea as one body” meant throwing away that which is Korean
and learning from that which is Japanese. This in the first place means cultivating thespirit of loyalty towards the Imperial Household. The feelings of Japanese people towards
the Imperial Household are truly unique, and it will require a great amount of study for
Koreans to approach this level. It is not the same thing as what we used to call “loyalty to
the ruler and love of country” (chūkun aikoku).
The feeling of loyalty of Japanese people cannot be explained merely with the Chinesecharacter “loyalty” (chū, 忠), but rather resembles the loyalty of the Jews to Yahweh.
Japanese people think of all good fortune bestowed on them as something that stems fromthe Emperor. One’s land belongs to the Emperor, one’s household belongs to theEmperor, one’s children belong to the Emperor, one’s body and life belong to theEmperor. Because your body belongs to the Emperor, if the Emperor calls upon you, youThe Japanese Empire: Colonial Lives and Postcolonial Struggles

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happily give up your life. The Emperor is a living god. This is an entirely different
relation from that found in China or Europe between the ruler and subject. [32]Koreans in the colonial period tried to acquire the national identity “Japanese” by means oflearning what constituted loyalty the Emperor. The different significations of Japan, for instance“order” and “discipline,” were fully integrated into the figure of the Emperor. In my mind, thedefinition of Japaneseness through the use of such terms was a consequence of the success of theideas about “Meiji spirit,” which had allowed Japan to resist the incursion of the West. The“Japanese spirit,” like the Meiji one, required the populace to be willing to give up their lives forthe nation-state or Emperor. Many colonial men came to deeply internalize this logic and even tosacrifice their lives for the empire. To understand why they did so, we must not forget that doing
so also made it possible for them to differentiate themselves and assert their superiority over the
women of the colony.
6. War and Death/Poetry in Kike, Wadatsumi no koe
The internalization of such ideologies of self-sacrifice from the Meiji period onward not only
affected the men of the colonies, but obviously also can be found in the writings left behind by
the young men who lived in Japan itself. Kike, wadatsumi no koe (Listen to the Voices From theSea), which became a widely-read “classic” after Japan’s defeat, and which clearly documents
the internal struggles of student-soldiers who had misgivings about the war, demonstrates for us
how deeply rooted this mode of thought was for the wartime generation. [33] The text was animportant one for postwar anti-war thought, yet some of the sentiments expressed in it also
reveal how thoroughly the Meiji ideology of self-sacrifice had permeated the populace.

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As mentioned above, Kike, wadatsumi no koe, which clearly records the inner thoughts ofstudent soldiers who felt ambivalence about the war, was very important for postwar anti-war
thinkers. However, at the same time, the unfortunate truth is that those on the right wing also
have taken up the memoirs and letters published in Koe to argue that “all of the students killed in
the war were troubled by the illogicality of the war, and yet affirmatively accepted the way
things were, came to terms with it, and went to their deaths. It is unconscionable to stress only
half the story, to forget their [having ultimately decided to go to their deaths].” [34] In The
Fatherland and Youth (Sokoku to seinen), we see the students of Koe being utilized inpropaganda to spur Japanese young people to war : “In the students who rose up to help when
their fatherland was in trouble, we see what is a universal will or spirit, and that which also was
the key to Japan’s rebirth” [after the war]. That is to say, while Koe surely has these two sides toit (despite having been used far more frequently been used for anti-war purposes), neither theright wing nor the left has done anything but propagate its own understanding of the text.
When members of the right wing talk about these students, they do so in order to praise them forhaving gone to their deaths having accepted their need to go to war. Our efforts to discredit thisunderstanding of the students’ actions will be most effective if we can show what sort of thought
it was that made the students “accept” what they had to do. Here I would like to point out simply
that they fell into a similar trap to that of colonial men who participated in the war (and saw
themselves as one with the nation-state): They acted as “subjects” within a structure that did notallow them to be free subjects, within a backdrop of the exclusion of women, and both traditional

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and enlightenment thought being used whenever convenient (and inconsistently, because they
contradicted one another). [35]That is, the young men in Kike wadatsumi no koe also believed that sacrificing their own lives
was something they “must do to connect the individual to the greater life of the nation-state,”that they should “cut off personal feelings” for “blood relatives.” We have already seen theconcept of the nation-state as a “greater life” in the thought of the colonial men examined
earlier. I would argue that this mode of thinking finds its origins in the idea of the nation as anorganic body (minzoku yūkitai shisō), a notion that was influential from the Meiji period
onwards. Belief in such ideas, of course, helped these men to “plunge in headlong while
continually praying only for the eternal development of Japan’s life” (Mikuriya Takuji).
One can also see this in the attitude of the “abandonment of the individual” - “At the moment I
both am and am not myself. Or I am the concentration of the prayers of a billion national
citizens” (Ichijima Yasuo). Here again, in order to be unified with the nation-state, it is necessary
to hollow out the hitherto-existing “I” or regard the self as “the concentration of the prayers of abillion national citizens,” a receptacle filled with the “will” of an imagined “totality.”
Further, for these soldiers, “spirit” and “science” confront each other, and they understand Japanas an existence placed on the side of “spirit”:
I want to confirm that it is a fact that what can ensure the final victory is not somethingmaterial, but spiritual power. I’ve come to this harmonious way of thinking. Or rather, inorder to save the nation-state, I realized that I had to think like this. (Takushima
Tokumitsu)
If we compare the Russo-Japanese War and the Great East Asia War, we can see that therelation of material and spiritual forces is being inverted. The history of humanity’s
development is vividly displayed here. He who honors culture will prosper, he who
ignores it will perish. The power of culture is terrible. (Uehara Ryōji)
In America, there is no “spirit.” If anyone in America truly had a heart, I’m sure theywould be aware of this. In emphasizing the Japanese “spirit” and “heart,” I believe I’mcertainly not the first to point this out. (Sugimura Hiroshi)This type of framework, which grasps the “West” solely as the world of “science,” and Japan as
the possessor of “culture” and “spirit,” is of precisely the same strain of thought as that of
Natsume Sōseki in the early twentieth century.
Thus the soldiers aestheticize “death” into “poetry,” and valorize this way Of thinking as
something stemming from Japan’s unique “culture”:
Even if there is science in foreign (ketō) thinking, there is no poetry. Only Euclid got tothe single absolute origin of learning. But even though it’s incisive, it has no elegance.
Even journalists are throwing away the pen and relying on machines. By contrast, evenan illiterate Japanese takes poetry to heart. Originally, poetry did not signify material
forms of expression such as tanka or free-verse poetry. Poetry was a type of leisure of thespirit, a refined state of mind delighting in for example, thinking of the cause of the cold
wind as the sprouting of the evergreens. (Nishimura Hidehachi)

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In this sense, the schema since Meiji of “West = civilization = science” played an important rolein the soldiers’ decisions to take the path towards death. They discover “poetry,” “spirit,” and“culture,” in throwing away their lives, and are thus able to repress their natural fear of killingand dying. The following words show us once again that for the Japanese soldiers, the battlefield
was, more than anything, something which confirmed themselves as “men”:
Argh! I’ve got to stop these sissy feelings. My affairs are in order, nothing left to do, mybody condition’s in perfect shape, I’ve done my duty standing guard, my life’s in myhands, and I’ve headed off towards where it’s covered in palm trees. It’s a man’s lifelong
ambition, if I hear the call, I swear to stand ready without shame as one soldier in theImperial Army. Ready to suffer. (Shinozaki Jirō)
One part of a man is devoted to the family he supports, while in another part things likepride and ambition come together and rise to the level of society. That’s where wars
without the fireworks always start. (Tasaka Tokutarō)
Since the Meiji period, a national identity rooted in empire and tennō led to the sacrifice of theyoung men, not only of the colonies, but of Japan. However, I would not argue that Japanese andKorean youth were equally oppressed by this ideology. Korean men participated in the war, butthey did so in an effort to become “Japanese,” a desire that rather indicates the extent to which
the discriminatory structure of the Japanese colonial system was both deeply-ingrained andobscured. Nonetheless, Korean soldiers became wrongdoers by virtue of their participation in
the war effort, and it is necessary for us to examine that wrongdoing if we are to truly understandthe complicated nature of the wrongs done to them. I am not suggesting that Japan and Korea
should be evaluated with the same criteria, but rather that by more carefully identifying thecomplex manner in which the colonial structure is implicated here, we will be able to better
recognize the ingenuity of imperial discourse. For example, in Korea today, it is entirely
forgotten that during the colonial era, Korea acted as an aggressor vis-à-vis both China and theAllies, and even B and C-class war criminals are classified as “victims” of the colonial
period. In the end, this sort of historical amnesia results in the continued obscuration of themultiple contradictions of the colonial era.
What directed both Japanese and Korean men towards the battlefield without the slightest
skepticism about their membership in nation or empire was the discourse originally formed in
Meiji modernity. Here the word modernity never connoted the freedom of human beings to dowhat they will, but instead functioned as a vehicle for internal oppression. In this sense, wecannot appraise the actions of these young men of Japan and Korea as the free choice of true
subjects. Rather, they were the victims of the discourse and discipline of their era. Yet at thesame time, we must acknowledge that their sense of themselves as worthy human beings was
acquired through the very thing that victimized them, participation in nation/empire throughmilitary service. We must also recall that the notion of such actions as worthy was, in turn,predicated on the exclusion and subordination of women. Only when we confront the multiple
conflicting emotions and senses of obligation that faced these men will we be able tocomprehend what drove them to offer up their very lives to the nation-state.
Notes[1] This article is based on a presentation given in September 2001 at Nihon University’s postcolonial studies group. An earlier version of the text was published as “Meiji gensetsu noThe Japanese Empire: Colonial Lives and Postcolonial Struggles

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giseisha tachi: ‘Shin’nichi’-sha to gakutohei tachi no shi ni itaru shisō,” chapter 9 of Nashonaru
aidentiti to jendā:Sōseki, bungaku, kindai (Kurein, 2007), 261-288 [Trans.].
[2] According to the 1876 Japan-Korea Treaty of Amity signed in the wake of Japanese gunboat
diplomacy, Japan had the right to create a settlement for Japanese within the Korean peninsula,and the ports of Pusan and Inchŏn were subsequently opened. As a result, the immigration ofJapanese to Korea began before annexation, and by the time of annexation in 1910 there werealready 20,000 Japanese living in Pusan, and more than 10,000 in Inchŏn. See Hashiya Hiroshi,“Busan, Inchon no keisei” in Iwanami kōza: Kindai Nihon to shokuminchi 3: Shokuminchika tosangyōka (Iwanami Shoten, 1993).
[3] See Park Yuha, Pan’il minjokjuŭi rŭl nŏmŏsŏ (Seoul: Sahoe Pyŏngronsa, 2000); Han’nichi
nashonarizumu o koete, trans. An Cha-sik (Kawade Shobō Shinsha, 2005).
[4] Yi Kwang-su, “Kŭ tŭl ŭi sarang” (“Karera no ai”) in Sin sidae, January-March 1941.
Contained in Kim Byŏng-gŏl and Kim Kyu-dong, eds. Chin’il munhak chakp’um sŏnjip, 2 vols.
(Seoul: Silchŏn Munhaksa, 1986). All references to “pro-Japanese” texts are to these volumes.
[5] Yi Kwang-su, “Simjŏk sinch’eje wa Chosŏn munhwa ŭi chinro” (“Shinteki shintaisei to
Chōsen bunka no shinro”) in Maeil sinbo 1940, September 4-12.
[6] Yi Kwang-su, “Simjŏk sinch’eje wa Chosŏn munhwa ŭi chinro” (“Shinteki shintaisei to
Chōsen bunka no shinro”) in Maeil sinbo 1940, September 4-12.
[7] In Kurementain no uta (Bunwa Shobō, 1980), Kim Si-jong writes of the crisis of identity
experienced by a 16 year-old boy celebrating the independence of the colonies.
[8] “Ch’oe ch’ebu ŭi gunsok chimang” (“Yūbin haitatsunin Che no gunzoku shibō”), originallypublished in Chogwang, October 1943, in Kim Byŏng-gŏl and Kim Kyu-dong, eds. Chin’il
munhak chakp’um sŏnjip, 2 vols. (Seoul: Silchŏn Munhaksa, 1986).
[9] In November 1939, one aspect of all-out imperialization policy, the policies related tochanges of name from Korean to Japanese (sōshi kaimei, literally “creating family names andchanging given names”), took effect, and were enforced beginning in February of the next year.
See Miyata Setsuko et al. Sōshi kaimei (Akashi Shoten, 1992). Since the protagonist is called“Ch’oe,” but his son’s name is Toshio, we can assume that they also
had a Japanese family name. Emphasis mine.
[10] See Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (London:
Routledge, 1989).
[11] In 1911, the year after annexation, the first Chosŏn Educational Act was promulgated,making Japanese the “national language” (kokugo), and referring to Korean as “Chōsengo.” See
Ch’oe Yuri’s “Ilche malgi hwangminhwa chŏngch’aek ŭi sŏnggyŏk: Ilbonŏ pogŭp undong ŭlchungshim ŭro” in Hanguk gŭnhyŏndaesa yŏngu 2 (Seoul: Hanguk gŭnhyŏndaesa hakhoe,
1995). After the third Chosŏn Educational Act of 1938, policies which had allowed for the joint
use of “Chōsengo” were changed, and Japanese was enforced not only as a “classroom
language” but also as the language of “daily use.” nationwide.See Miyata Setsuko’s Chōsenminshu to kōminka seisaku (Miraisha, 1985). Subsequently, in 1942, the movement for the
diffusion of Japanese language went into full-blown enforcement under such names as“Movement for Universal Understanding of National Language” and “Movement for the Use of

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National Language,” but this was something designed in preparation for the enforcement ofconscription in 1944. In fact, in August 1944, the slogan “Let us carry out our lives in thenational language to become excellent soldiers” (“Rippa na gunjin ni naru tame ni kokugo
seikatsu o jisshi shiyō”) was widely propagated (see Ch’oe Yuri, above).
[12] Yi Kwang-su, “Kŭ tŭl ŭi sarang” (“Karera no ai”) in Sin sidae, January-March 1941.
[13] Yi Kwang-su, “Kŭ tŭl ŭi sarang” (“Karera no ai”) in Sin sidae, January-March 1941. The“Korean League for the Total Mobilization of National Spirit” (Kokumin seishin sōdōin Chōsen
renmei) adopted the principle of “Japan and Korea as one body” (naisen ittai), and publicized its
articles for practice in 1939. Included in their platform, known as “The Cultivation of theImperial Spirit,” was an article called “Life Reform” (seikatsu no kakushin). See Son Chŏngmok, Ilche kangjŏmgi tosi sahoesang yŏngu (Seoul: Iljisa, 1996). In the training camps forvolunteer soldiers, “‘Japanization’ was always the aim, even in minor matters of everyday life.
Baths were taken together, and the correct style of bathing was taught, meals were overseen indetail, designed to instill correct manners and feelings of gratefulness. Things such as the correct
way to use the toilet, how to walk through the halls, and how to enter a room were all taught.”
See Miyata’s article cited in note 10 above.
[14] No Ch’ŏn-myŏng, “Josei rensei – Hamgyŏng (Kankyō) josei kunrenjo kanranki” (“Yŏinyŏnsŏng,” originally in Japanese) in Kokumin bungaku, June 1943.
[15] Yi Kwang-su, “Haha, imōto, tsuma tachi e” in Sanzenri (Samchŏlli) July 1940.
[16] Yi Kwang-su, “Simjŏk sinch’eje wa Chosŏn munhwa ŭi chinro” (“Shinteki shintaisei to
Chōsen bunka no shinro”) in Maeil sinbo 1940, September 4-12.
[17] Chang Hyŏk-chu, “Saeroun ch’ulbal” (“Atarashii shuppatsu”) in Kokumin sōryoku, vol. 5,
no. 12-18, 1943.
[18] See Park Yuha, “Kojinshugi no hatan – Kokoro,” chapter 7 of Nashonaru aidentiti to jendā:
Sōseki, bungaku, kindai (Kurein, 2007).
[19] Sŏ Jŏng-ju, “Podohaeng – Kyŏngsŏng sadan ch’ugye yŏnsŭp ŭi twi rŭl ttarasŏ” (“Hōdōkō –Kyōjō shūki renshū to tomo ni”) in Chogwang, December 1943.
[20] Kwak Chong-wŏn, “Kyŏljŏn munhak ŭi inyŏm” (“Kessen bungaku no rinen”) in Kokumin
bungaku, April 1944.
[21] As a result of the Special Army Volunteer Act, the military volunteer system came into
effect in Korea in 1938. Only those who were recognized to have the characteristics of an“Imperial subject,” as observed in certain types of training, were allowed to volunteer. They
entered the forces as new recruits on active duty, and after their discharge would return to theirhometowns to become the driving forces of imperialization policy. See Miyata’s article cited innote 10 above.
[22] Ham Tae-hun, “Uridŭl kwa chiwŏnbyŏng” (“Bokura to shiganhei”) in Chogwang,
December 1940.
[23] Chang Hyŏk-chu, “Saeroun ch’ulbal” (Atarashii shuppatsu), Kokumin sōryoku, vol. 5, no.
12-18, 1943.

The Japanese Empire: Colonial Lives and Postcolonial Struggles

128[24] Chang Hyŏk-chu, “Saeroun ch’ulbal.”[25] Yi Kwang-su, “Chosŏn ŭi hakdoyŏ” (“Chōsen no gakutohei”) in Maeil sinbo, November
4th, 1943.
[26] Ch’oe Chae-sŏ, “Chingbyŏngje silsi ŭi munhwajŏk ŭiŭi” (“Chōheisei jisshi no bunkatekiimi”) in Kokumin bungaku, May-June 1942.
[27] Cho Yong-man, “Kwangsan ŭi pam” (“Kōzan no yoru”) in Kokumin bungaku, January
1944.
[28] Yi Kwang-su, “Haha, imōto, tsuma tachi e” in Sanzenri (Samchŏlli) July 1940.
[29] Oh Yŏng-chin, “Chŏlm-ŭn yong ŭi kohyang” (“Wakaki ryū no furusato”) in Kokumin
bungaku, December 1944.
[30] See Park Yuha, “Kyōbō suru hyōshō 1: Yanagi Muneyoshi to kaihōgo Kankoku no jikokōchiku,” ch. 10 of Nashonaru aidentiti to jendā: Sōseki, bungaku, kindai (Kurein, 2007).
[31] Chang Hyŏk-chu, “Saeroun ch’ulbal.”[32] Yi Kwang-su, “Simjŏk sinch’eje wa Chosŏn munhwa ŭi chinro” (“Shinteki shintaisei to
Chōsen bunka no shinro”) in Maeil sinbo 1940, September 4-12.
[33] Kike wadatsumi no koe (1949). I here use both the 1995 edition Kike wadatsumi no koe
published by Iwanami Bunkō and the 2003 edition Dainishū Kike wadatsumi no koe.
[34] See Suzuki Yoshimitsu, “Sengo, gakutohei no shuki wa dō yomarete kita ka: ‘Kike
wadatsumi no koe’ to ‘Senkan Yamato no saigo’ o megutte” in Sokoku to seinen (Nihon seinenkyōgikai, October 2003). The quoted portion is the statement of Satake Ichirō.
[35] Ibid., the lead sentence of the title page in the special collection “Gakuto shutsujin rokujū
shūnen.” Sokoku to seinen (Nihon seinen kyōgikai, October 2003).

Tomiyama: On Becoming ‘a Japanese’129“On Becoming ‘a Japanese’: The Community of Oblivion and Memories of theBattlefield”
TOMIYAMA Ichiro, trans. Noah McCormack
October 26, 2005
http://japanfocus.org/-Tomiyama-Ichiro/2160
Tomiyama addresses the main issue introduced by Park and Hirano, the process of
becoming Japanese. While Park analyzes literature to argue that becoming Japanese
involved individuals disciplining their bodies and everyday actions, Tomiyama explains
how lifestyle reform movements were ways in which the Ainu, Koreans, and Okinawans
worked to improve themselves and become Japanese, or “good people of society.”
Tomiyama uses a different approach to explore this question because he believes thatanalyzing discourse is limited; instead he argues that we must consider “imperialism’s
actual scenes” and understand that, for colonial subjects, becoming Japanese was realized
through concrete actions that “unfolded as the performance of a model lifestyle.”
Tomiyama also stresses a connection between this self-disciplining in everyday life andmobilization to work and fight for the nation. Tomiyama argues that colonial subjects’mutual surveillance of each other and auto-surveillance of themselves in everyday life was
the first step in their “mobilization for the violent invasions of others.”
In the second half of his article Tomiyama focuses on one such actual scene ofimperialism: Teruya Chuei, an Okinawan teacher who promoted lifestyle reform, in waysthat amounted to “surveillance over and denunciation of detailed aspects of everyday life”
that failed to conform to the Japanese norm. Then, during the Battle of Okinawa Teruya
fought on the side of the Japanese. Ironically, however, the Japanese military eventually
executed him as a “spy.” It was common for Japanese soldiers to suspect Okinawans of
spying for the Americans if they heard them speak an Okinawan language, because it
sounded foreign to them and thus aroused suspicion. Tomiyama situates Teruya’s deathwithin the larger context of Japanese imperialism by focusing on the trauma of Teruya’s
execution rather than blaming his death on the confusion of the battlefield, the violence of
the Japanese troops, or on the policy of imperial subject making. If one blames his death on
any of those causes, his death is explained away as a regrettable mistake—and Teruya’s
thwarted attempt to become Japanese is reduced to “oblivion.” If they were to focus theirattention on Teruya’s execution, the Japanese could not remain a “community of oblivion,”a term Tomiyama uses to highlight the deliberate forgetting of Japanese imperial violence.

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On Becoming ‘a Japanese’: The Community of Oblivion and Memories of the BattlefieldTomiyama Ichiro
Translated by Noah McCormack
Written in the aftermath of the first Gulf War, and later re-worked in Memories of the Battlefield
published on the fiftieth anniversary of Japan’s surrender, this essay presents wartime violence
not as something distant and exceptional, but rather as a pervasive condition of our lives.
Tomiyama attempts here ‘to bring out the battlefield in the everyday’, and then from thebattlefield, ‘to reconstitute the everyday’. In a time when war and violence can be seen
everywhere and yet felt at a remove, his ideas are as pertinent as ever. N.M.
The community of oblivion
Just what sort of business is it, to become ‘a Japanese’? Given that ‘the Japanese’ exist as an
outcome of imagining, it is necessary to examine how they are concretely enacted as an‘imagined community’. [1] Without such an examination, we cannot critique the ‘myth of themono-ethnic nation’. For, merely to propose the existence of ‘minority groups’, including the
Ainu people, Okinawan people, Korean people and ‘foreign people’, thereby to point to the‘diversity’ of Japanese society, leaves intact the ‘ethnic myth’ that there exist ‘the Japanese’,merely restating it into the gentler language of ‘we “Japanese people” who are the majority
group in Japanese society’. This essay problematizes ‘the Japanese’, and what it is to become ‘aJapanese’.
Needless to say, when problematizing ‘the Japanese’ as an outcome of imagining, the main issue
is the ‘invented tradition’ [2] of the ‘emperor system’. But the perspective of ‘Japanese
Orientalism’ drawn from Edward Said’s concept of ‘Orientalism’ and used by Kang Sangjung
and others to explore ‘the Japanese’ as a mode of controlling and re-making Others [3], is also
extremely important in analyzing ‘the Japanese’ in the emperor-system state that from the first so
consistently conducted the colonization of the Ainu Moshir, the Ryukyus, Taiwan, Korea, theSouthern Islands, ‘Manchuria’, and Asia. Here, I wish to take up Murai Osamu’s work in which
he, like Kang, uses the perspective of ‘Orientalism’, in Murai’s case to examine Yanagita
Kunio’s concept of ‘the common people’ (jomin). [4]An underlying concern with the question, ‘who are the Japanese?’ ran through Yanagita’s
thinking, and this concern is inseparable from his concept of the ‘common people’. Murai sees
two critical moments in Yanagita’s forging of that concept. The first was when, himself deeply
involved as an official in the ‘annexation’ of Korea, and witnessing at first hand the massacre of
Koreans in the aftermath of the Great Kanto Earthquake, Yanagita found himself unable toassimilate the emperor-system state’s imperialist violence into his own theory of Japaneseness,and sought refuge in flight. The second came when Yanagita discovered the ‘Southern Islands’(Nanto), the destination of his flight, as a ‘place of healing’. These ‘Southern Islands’ were an
Other, to be ‘taken, domesticated, and modelled into a difference, thereby to create a “Japan”
that could be identified with’ [5]; this Other was to be discovered, educated, and disciplined as ‘aproto-Japanese’ or as a child of ‘Japan’. In short, having fled because of an inability to facedown the Others subjugated by imperialism’s violence who yet irrepressibly rose up against it,
Yanagita attempted to retain his identity as ‘a Japanese’ by re-establishing a subservient Other
who required instruction.

Tomiyama: On Becoming ‘a Japanese’131

Murai’s essay directs our attention to how the ‘imagined community’ of ‘the Japanese’ was bornof the discovery of an Other, as well as to how the power of discourse determines our relations
with the Other in, for example, the very instant are uttered the words, ‘we Japanese people’.
More concrete inquiry along these lines is necessary. Here, however, rather than looking at
issues relating to this kind of discourse analysis, I would like to make some points concerning
the limits of discourse analysis.
In examining the discourse equating ‘the common people’ with ‘the Japanese’, it is highly
significant that Murai directed his attention to the turning points of Yanagita’s life history: ‘flightfrom the site of imperialism, oblivion, and then his discovery of a subservient Other’. He thereby
makes the point that, above all, ‘the Japanese’ are ‘a community of oblivion’ [6], as well as a
discourse that requires oblivion to come into being. So what is it that needs forgetting? Nothingother than the actual sites of imperialism, and imperialism’s violence.
The major pitfall of discourse analysis lies in supposing that power operates exclusively throughdiscourse and speech acts. However, it was not discourse, but primarily the state apparatus ofviolence that is the military, which realized the processes of invasion so consistently conductedby the emperor-system state against the Ainu Moshir, the Ryukyus, Taiwan, Korea, the Southern
Islands, Manchuria, and Asia. And it is none other than ‘the Japanese’ who first come into being
through flight from these sites of violence, who are oblivious to imperialism’s violence. Further,
the Other who is inaugurated together with the ‘Japanese’ is not just an Other in cultural andsocial relations, but also in state-mediated relations. [7]If in this way we consider imperialism’s actual scenes, which exceed the discourse of ‘theJapanese’, it becomes necessary to examine ‘the Japanese people’ at these sometimes violent
actual scenes, rather than the intellectuals’ visions of, and structured discourses about, ‘theJapanese’.
In a letter from the battlegrounds of Bougainville Island, a Japanese soldier from Okinawa wrote
on his son’s birthday, ‘From the dawn of our victory in this Greater East Asian War, we peopleof Okinawa will be treated the same as the Japanese people. That’s why, if we win this battle,
our family will be able to go to Japan, to live in friendly harmony.’ [8] In these short last words,
the aggression that was the Greater East Asian War and a family life of ‘friendly harmony’ arelaid out together as the process of becoming ‘Japanese’. This series of linkages, in which
everyday yearnings beget the dream of becoming ‘a Japanese’, and eventuate in the exercise ofviolence against others, encompasses all the issues that I wish to consider in this essay.
There are two points of note. One is that everyday life is where one actually becomes ‘aJapanese’. The other is that related to this process of becoming ‘a Japanese’, it is from the sitesof everyday life that mobilization for the violent invasion of others is realised. At these sites,
there is a risk that actual scenes of imperialism, which cannot be explained within the‘community of oblivion’, of the sort from which Yanagita fled, may come into view. Since thisviolence that comes into view needs already to have been forgotten, it is not immediately voiced,
but gives rise to silence. However, silence is not oblivion, but no less than internalized memory.
[9] How should memories of the past be narrated as experience?
Tsurumi Shunsuke says, ‘from the kitchen, there is no severance in history on the 15th of August
1945’, and attaches importance to this ‘unsevered kitchen’ as a site of resistance. [10] But whilst
fully agreeing with Tsurumi’s point, or precisely because I agree with him, I want to draw

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attention to the point that many people marched forth from their kitchens as imperial soldiers.
Becoming ‘a Japanese’ is no less than a process mediating everyday life and mobilization for thebattlefield, enacting them as one. The imperial soldier from Okinawa died in battle. The Greater
East Asian War ended in defeat, and his attempt to become ‘a Japanese’ ended in failure.
However, this failure was neither the death of ‘emperor-system ideology’ nor of ‘ultranationalism’, but first and foremost the death of everyday life, the death of the kitchen. It is truethat everyday life was not severed on the fifteenth of August 1945. But surely its continuity must
be informed by the deaths within it. How should the death of daily life, that battlefield
mobilization etched as memory, be narrated?
Lifestyle reform
With reference to Koreans resident in Japan, Kang Sangjung writes about the current situation of‘Japanese Orientalism’ as follows. ‘Because of the astonishing “productivity” of [Japanese]
Orientalism, “South Korean and North Korean people resident in Japan” have continually been
tempted to apply it to themselves and to others.’ [11] The lure of daily life being improved andgetting better inclines them towards becoming ‘Japanese people’. This is by no means an issue
concerning only Korean people resident in Japan. In the psychological make-up of Japanesecolonists in Korea and ‘Manchuria’, Yoon Keuncha sees the coexistence of a sense, which was
expressed as imperial consciousness in colonial society, of being Japanese, with animosity
towards hometowns, of a sense of victimhood. [12] Concerning the latter, this sentiment can also
be seen among those who were forced to leave their villages by economic circumstances.
Therein lies bitterness at no longer being able to survive at home, together with a powerful desire
to better everyday lives. The wish to improve everyday living even a little is connected to
becoming ‘a Japanese’.
Of course, the existence of living people who ply their Japanese nationality strategically mustalso be noted here, for to assume that such a wish for betterment leads directly to becoming ‘aJapanese’ would be to lose sight of their ‘soft resistance’. [13] However, as mentioned above,
here I wish to emphasize the point that it was from everyday life that mobilization towards theviolent invasion of others was realized.
As is well known, many of the colonists of Manchuria, whose imperial consciousness Yoon
demonstrates, were recruited from peasant villages during the Economic Reorganization
Campaign starting in 1932, in which lifestyle reform was a central pillar. However, it was not for
impoverished peasants alone that lifestyle reform was tied to ‘the Japanese people’. For Ainu
people, Okinawan people, and Korean people resident in Japan too, all invaded and violently‘annexed’ by the emperor-system state, lifestyle reform lay at the heart of the so-called kominka
or imperial subject-making policy.
It must not be overlooked that in the case of the Ainu and the Okinawans, lifestyle reform was byno means just a government-devised slogan. Among the activities of the Hokkaido Ainu
Association founded in 1930 was lifestyle reform conducted by the Ainu people themselves, andtheir activities connected up with the campaign to abolish the ‘Hokkaido Former Aborigines
Protection Law’. [14] The case of Okinawa was analogous. As I will explain below, thecampaign for the promotion of standard Japanese, which was a central element in lifestylereform, penetrated profoundly. Use of the Okinawan language was subjected to daily
surveillance, such that by the 1930s, it is said that people spoke standard Japanese even within
their homes. Similarly, the campaign for the abolition of secondary Okinawan-style funeral rites

Tomiyama: On Becoming ‘a Japanese’133(senkotsu) was conducted by Okinawan women and was aimed at their own liberation. [15]Further, these lifestyle reform movements linked up with Ainu people’s push into a ‘Manchuria
without discrimination’, as well as with the southern push by Okinawan people as ‘leaders of theSouthern Ocean’.
For anti-discriminatory movements to be co-opted by nationalism even as they proclaim lifestylereform, thereby to be mobilized towards invasion, is a pattern that not even the Levelers’
Association (Suiheisha) that combatted Buraku discrimination was able to avoid. As Kim Jonmi
points out, the National Levelers’ Association, some members of which saw themselves at thetime as being of a different race from ‘the Japanese’, converted to Japanese nationalism during
the [Taisho – early Showa] Conciliation Movement centered on lifestyle reform, and promoted
emigration by Burakumin to ‘Manchuria’ on the grounds that, ‘if we live in Manchuria,
discrimination will fade away’. Kim strongly attacks this switch as ‘an alliance for “defending
lifestyle and rights against Buraku discrimination” based on the sacrifices of the people of Asia’.
[16]
Lifestyle reform meshed with becoming ‘a Japanese’, with the result that people were mobilized
into violent invasion of Others. Thus lifestyle reform offered people a path to participation in the‘community of oblivion.’ Focusing on this point, let us consider a framework in which to think
about lifestyle reform. [17]Firstly, just what did lifestyle reform target for improvement? To list the categories for lifestylereform in the case of Okinawa, they reached deep into everyday life, including such things as the
Okinawan language, going barefoot, pit toilets, graves, Okinawan-style funeral rites, familynames, divining, shamanism, Ryukyuan clothing, drinking alcohol, dating parties, songs
accompanied by the sanshin, festivals, hygiene, and local methods of keeping time. The
categories for reform in the case of Okinawans who had come to live in Osaka likewise touchedon all parts of their lives, including the Okinawan language, Ryukyuan clothing, Ryukyuan
dance, songs accompanied by the sanshin, living in enclaves of Okinawans, festivals, childrearing methods, diet, the drinking of Awamori liquor, and so on. A similar attention to detailcan be seen in the lifestyle reforms of the Ainu people.
From these few examples, rather than concluding that imperial subject-making, in the form of‘becoming Japanese’, constituted the oppression of a specific culture, we can make the point thatit unfolded as the performance of a model lifestyle, and of improvements towards its
achievement. The categories targeted by lifestyle reform were both tangible and detailed; these
directives indicated the requisite or model lifestyle in various daily scenes. If one were to takejust the case of the eradication of the Okinawan language, that is indeed the elimination of aparticular language. However, I would like to concentrate on the point that such eradication, in
combination with, for example, reforms targeting drinking and bare feet, constituted theperformance of a model lifestyle. Of course, no doubt there were degrees of difference in theimportance of each directive, and it is necessary to consider those differences. But whatever thecase may be, the categories for improvement must not be construed as a particular culture thatcan be somehow objectively defined. It was concrete ways of doing things in everyday life thatwere problematized. For people generally, to become ‘a Japanese’ was to engage in lifestylereforms aiming for the better life performed by ‘the Japanese’.
Why, then, were these detailed directives accepted as improvements towards a better life? Thereis another aspect of lifestyle reform here, which cannot simply be reduced to the issue ofThe Japanese Empire: Colonial Lives and Postcolonial Struggles

134

nationality. Concrete directives about everyday life do not alone constitute lifestyle reform.
Polarized normative values such as ‘clean / unclean’, ‘healthy / sick’, ‘science / custom’,‘advanced life / backward life’, and ‘prosperous people / poor people’ are also involved. The
various categories needing to be improved are set up so as to indicate the negative values of‘uncleanness’, ‘sickness’, ‘customs’, the ‘backward’, and so on, with their improvement positedas proof of the positive values of the ‘clean’, the ‘healthy’, the ‘advanced’, and so on. As recent
work in urban history and social history indicates, a society in which people are caught between
such polarized normative values, and in which they begin to move unidirectionally, is precisely amodern society. Following Anbo Norio, let us call that society possessing the desirable positive
values, the ‘society of good people’. [18] Lifestyle reform is a movement aimed at attaining this‘society of good people’.
In the better life performed by lifestyle reform are joined the two vectors of becoming ‘aJapanese’ and becoming ‘good people’. And everyday life is where the joining of the ‘society ofgood people’ and of nationality actually takes place. Consequently, moves seeking participationin the ‘society of good people’ connect with nationalism. It needs to be noted that no society
constituted by ‘good people’ exists separate from nationality. It is the joining of ‘the Japanese’and ‘the good people’ that indicates the very ‘society of good people’ of Japan enclosed by thestate. Thus, this tendency for nationality and ‘good people’ to join, that can be seen in thelifestyle reform of the Okinawan people and the Ainu people, is by no means a limited issue
solely concerning Okinawans and Ainu contained within Japanese society as ‘heterogeneousgroups’. [19]Also, the fact that ‘the Japanese’ and ‘the good people’ are joined allows the suggestion that non’Japanese people’ are associated with those various values, namely ‘uncleanness’, ‘sickness’,‘customs’, ‘backwardness’, ‘poverty’ and so on, that are excluded from the ‘society of goodpeople’. Non-’Japanese people’ can consequently be set up as objects requiring education,
treatment, and improvement. This point overlaps with the above-mentioned issue of the other in‘Japanese Orientalism’.
Edward Said writes, ‘The Oriental was linked thus to elements in Western society (delinquents,
the insane, women, the poor) having in common an identity best described as lamentably alien.
Orientals were rarely seen or looked at; they were seen through, analyzed not as citizens, or evenpeople, but as problems to be solved or confined or – as the colonial powers openly coveted theirterritory – taken over.’ [20] There is a need to examine concretely just what sorts of others are
made to embody the various elements excluded from the ‘society of good people’ as needing
treatment and improvement, in the process of becoming ‘a Japanese’.
The particularity of lifestyle reform is that it is a form of self-help, in which one attempts toimprove one’s own daily life. In other words, one attempts to improve the self, thereby tobecome ‘a Japanese’. This involves a subjectivity like that of a good patient who treats andimproves the self to get better, as well as an auto-disciplining of the self, in which one engages insurveillance over one’s own everyday life. Moreover, because the categories of surveillancecover everyday minutiae, this also advances the disciplining of everyday life. In exhortations
such as ‘don’t lose to the Japanese! (yamatonchu)’ or slogans such as ‘advance Okinawa,
beginning with its language!’ that surfaced frequently in lifestyle reform, there can obviously begrasped a dynamic that can be called subjectivity, but which at the same time is also oriented
towards disciplining.

Tomiyama: On Becoming ‘a Japanese’135

If ‘the Japanese’ were exclusively defined as a ‘natural entity’ and the boundary between‘Japanese people’ and non-’Japanese people’ were postulated to be natural, or in other words if‘the Japanese’ were to be set as something utterly unalterable, then discrimination against the
Ainu people and the Okinawan people, contained within ‘the Japanese’ as ‘heterogeneousgroups’, would become an unrelenting racism. However, as a consequence of the joining of ‘theJapanese’ and ‘the good people’, it is not simply ‘different races’ who are excluded, but‘different races’ who are ‘lazy’ and ‘unclean’.
Étienne Balibar has made this point with reference to France’s ‘foreign labour problem’.
Namely, it is not the ‘Arab’ or the ‘Black’ who is excluded, but the ‘Arab (as) junky’ or‘delinquent’ or ‘rapist’ and so on, or equally, ‘rapists’ and ‘delinquents’ as ‘Arabs’ and ‘Blacks’.
Balibar considers this to be a new development in racism, terming it neo-racism. [21] Underlying
the self-help attempts by the people of Okinawa to eliminate ‘Okinawan people’ who are‘unclean’ and ‘lazy’ is precisely this kind of complex condition that Balibar terms neo-racism.
This structure of self-help signifies that even as the Other is excluded, it is also internalized. And
it is precisely this internalized Other which functions as the menace that brings about
discrimination against, surveillance over, and disciplining of, the self. Further, to promote thatfunction, the internal Other is sometimes given a concrete face and excluded so as to provide a
cautionary example. This can be said to correspond to Kan Takayuki’s point about the structureof the emperor system, in which ‘only on assenting to discrimination can one become a memberof the community’. [22]Incidentally, the kinds of subjectification and self-disciplining visible in self-help have thepotential to tie up readily with labour discipline and military discipline. That is, self-help unfolds
as the process of becoming ‘a Japanese’, but the eventual outcome is a disciplining that lays thegroundwork for mobilization as labour force or military force. Even so, the processes in whichpeople are constituted as labour force or military force proceeds as the fact of subjectively
becoming ‘a Japanese’. Based on this point, the ‘Japanese people’ is none other than anaggregation of ‘resourceful persons’. [23] The everyday life that lifestyle reform performed was
one that induced mobilization.
Death of a teacher
Keeping in mind this somewhat abstract framework concerning lifestyle reform, I would like totake up the life history of a teacher who set about lifestyle reform in Okinawa. [24]Born in Izumi, Motobu village, Okinawa prefecture in 1892, Teruya Chuei entered Okinawa
Teacher’s College in 1911. In Okinawa at that time, apart from success outside of the prefecture,prospects for advancement were largely limited to accumulating schooling and becoming an
official or a teacher. And even for success outside of Okinawa, academic qualifications were adecisive factor. Consequently, the notion that advancement required education was extremely
powerful. But people were confronted by the economic problem posed by education fees; theproportion of the peasant strata able to cover secondary education costs was less than 20 percent.
[25] There was, however, a somewhat unusual way of getting ahead in the world, in which thisobstacle was overcome by means of parents going overseas as migrants, and remitting funds fortheir children’s secondary education. [26] And so it was in Teruya’s case, with remittances fromhis father, who had migrated alone to North America, enabling him to proceed on to Okinawa
Teacher’s College.

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After graduating from Okinawa Teacher’s College in 1914, Teruya began his teaching career as
an instructor at Ogimison Kijoka Middle School, and he then became primary instructor at
Haneji Yagachi Middle School in 1916. In 1919, he was named deputy to the headmaster at
Motobu Middle School. In 1920, he began as an instructor at Okinawa Teacher’s College
Elementary School, and in 1924, at the youthful age of 32, he became the headmaster ofKunigami Middle School. After that, in 1927 he took the position of headmaster of Nakijinson
Amesoko Elementary School, working there for 15 years. In 1942, he became Motobu National
School headmaster. While Teruya may have devoted himself to public education, his curriculum
vitae obviously reflects a record of personal advancement.
During his teaching career, and especially during his long stint as headmaster at Amesoko,
Teruya actively promoted lifestyle reform. To give a few examples of his activities, firstly
regarding hygiene issues, to borrow the words of one of his then colleagues, he bewailed‘constantly the Okinawan people’s deficient sense of hygiene’, and strived for ‘domestic
cleanliness, order and neatness, and the eradication of trachoma and skin diseases such as
scabies’. He also took part in study groups and educational activities, and as headmaster,undertook analyses of drinking water quality in the school area, stationed a hygiene officer at theschool, encouraged the installation of improved toilets, and so on. [27] These lifestyle reform
activities brought not just students but people in the 6 districts and 41 hamlets of the school area
to establish and follow comprehensive standards of living. In 1938, he was decorated by theImperial School Hygiene Association in recognition of his activities.
About Teruya’s education in standard Japanese, a former student related that, ‘One day, I was
cleaning the classroom with a few friends. It was after school hours, and perhaps we relaxed alittle. Before we knew it, we were speaking in dialect, which was easier for us. Then suddenly
Teruya appeared, his angry voice roared out like thunder, and he hurled chairs at us.’ [28]Similar unswerving insistence on the education of standard Japanese appeared also on theoccasion of the establishment of a Children’s Association, in Teruya’s declaration that he wishedto ‘discipline the sluggish minds of the Okinawan people, who are unable to present their own
opinions before others confidently.’ [29] Teruya was also enthusiastic about improving
Okinawa’s ‘outdated customs’, and patrolling at night with a bamboo staff, he would rail against
dating parties and the singing of songs accompanied by the sanshin. [30]
It is easy to see an orientation towards becoming ‘a Japanese’ in Teruya’s lifestyle reform. As we
can see from his statements, when he said ‘the Okinawan people’ had a poor sense of hygiene
and were poor speakers, ‘the Japanese people’ were always in mind as the model objects ofcomparison. When Teruya was a youth, the Moral Improvement Campaign – part of the postRusso-Japanese War Local Improvement Campaign – was unfolding in Okinawa. This Moral
Improvement Campaign, which was to link up with lifestyle reform, targeted not just the
Okinawan language, Ryukyuan clothing and tattoos, but also called for hair to be cropped short.
Given the existence among the former Ryukyuan military classes of an ‘Obdurate Party’ of
Sinophiles opposed to ‘annexation’ by Japan, cutting one’s hair became an important act inbecoming ‘a Japanese’. Teruya was a primary school student at the time of the Moral
Improvement Campaign, and said that when he had his hair cut short, he was overjoyed at his
success in becoming ‘a Japanese’ [yamatonchu]. [31] Teruya grew up in the midst of the lifestylereforms that modern Okinawa ceaselessly promoted.

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This orientation of Teruya’s, towards becoming ‘a Japanese’ or ‘a Yamato’, can also be
discerned in the fact that during his time as headmaster of Amesoko Elementary School, he was
the first in the prefecture to construct a shrine to house the Imperial Portrait and the Imperial
Rescript on Education, and to erect a statue of Ninomiya Sontoku [the nineteenth century modelof the upwardly mobile Japanese peasant]. But in those acts there was, at the same time, aconcern for his ‘native land’, Okinawa. What Teruya emphasized above all in his educational
practices as a teacher was education about local and rural matters. In his essay, ‘Thoughts on thesubject of geography’, published in the journal Okinawa Education (vol. 12, 1928), he raised thecase of Okinawa in arguing for the need for a geography education that drew on local resources,from which can be grasped his strong attachment to his ‘native land’ of Okinawa. Further, hedelimited this native land as ‘that area which the children are able constantly to see and hear’,with local resources comprising ‘everyday living materials’. His concern for his ‘native land’ of
Okinawa tied up with the area that one could ‘constantly see and hear’, and was further to link up
with lifestyle reform.
In the midst of the Lifestyle Reform Movement in 1939, the then Okinawan governor Fuchigami
Fusataro argued for the ‘annihilation of Okinawan culture’, and he and the Folk Art Movement’s
Yanagi Soetsu, who visited Okinawa the following year, engaged in the ‘Okinawan Dialect
Debate’. Born in Fukuoka prefecture, Fuchigami became an Interior Ministry bureaucrat after
graduation from Tokyo University’s Law Faculty, and in that capacity he was dispatched to
Okinawa as prefectural governor in 1938. While it can be said that both Fuchigami’s call for the‘annihilation of Okinawan culture’ and Teruya’s lifestyle reform both arose within the sameprocess of imperial subject-making that took the form of ‘becoming Japanese’, I wish to
distinguish clearly between the two. What can be grasped from Teruya’s orientation towards
Japan as Yamato is concern for his ‘native land’ of Okinawa, and his discovery of everyday life
as the site in which to translate that concern into practice. An acquaintance of Teruya’s later
termed him ‘a teacher who loved Okinawa, and a teacher who loved Japan’. [32] These two
facets, which at first glance appear contradictory within the context of the policy of imperial
subject-making, were understood to be the same thing in the domain of everyday life. Because heloved his ‘native land’ of Okinawa, Teruya neither called for the ‘eradication of Okinawan
culture’, as Fuchigami did, nor did he urge the protection of ‘Okinawan culture’ as having a‘national treasure-like value’, as Yanagi Soetsu did. Instead, he turned to the site of practice thatwas everyday life. This means, to put it differently, that becoming ‘a Japanese’ is somethingceaselessly confirmed within specific individual practices.
People like Teruya were by no means exceptional cases. Many Teruyas existed throughout
Okinawa’s modernity, practicing lifestyle reform. This is why there is a need to confirm thesocial consequences of that fact. It can first be pointed out that wherever his concern forimprovement sprang from, Teruya was a leader who engaged in surveillance over anddenunciation of detailed aspects of everyday life. On hearing the Okinawan language being
spoken, he would hurl chairs at the speakers, while at night, he would patrol with a staff,
listening for echoes of the sanshin. Many such Teruyas created and maintained the mutual
surveillance regime of Okinawan society manifested in people’s secret denunciations of eachother as ‘moral criminals’ for speaking the Okinawan language [33], in the policing byregulations of going barefoot as ‘unclean’, and in the massive crackdowns on shamans as
symbols of ‘outdated custom’. Moreover, surveillance extended to the leaders themselves. At thetime, the leaders of lifestyle reform, as moral leaders who engaged in surveillance over ‘moral

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criminals’, themselves had to present a model to emulate, through embodying the morality thatwas lifestyle reform. [34] It is this self-disciplining, in which people engage not just in mutual
surveillance but also in auto-surveillance, that is the social result of lifestyle reform.
There is another point that needs to be made regarding the union of Teruya’s concern for his
native land and his orientation towards becoming ‘a Japanese’. Namely, from the latter part ofthe 1930s, a path enabling the two to join without the mediation of everyday life was being
formed. This path was provided by the emergence of the discourse of Okinawa as the ‘leader of
the Southern Ocean’, which accompanied Japan’s southwards advance. From the late 1930s to
the 1940s, when it is generally held that imperial subject-making policies penetrated Okinawa
even more profoundly, a positive reappraisal of Ryukyuan culture, especially by the Okinawan
Cultural League, was taking place. In this reappraisal, as can most evidently be seen in Asato
En’s History of Okinawa’s Oceanic Development [35], the tradition of ‘the Okinawan people’ as‘an ocean-going people’ was lauded, and the tradition of ‘the Okinawan people’ as leaders of the‘Southern Ocean’ was ‘invented’. This new discourse did not replace lifestyle reform; rather, itfunctioned to reinforce it. That is, in order to become ‘a Japanese’ and ‘an Okinawan’ who was a‘leader of the Southern Ocean’, it was even more necessary to improve daily life. [36] I wish to
draw attention to the point that the Other known as the ‘Southern Ocean’ appeared in the processof becoming ‘Japanese people’ that gripped the people of Okinawa.
Lastly, the fate of the discipline constructed by lifestyle reform must be mentioned. As Japanadvanced into Asia, the work of Teruya in, for example, organizing women’s patriotic labour
units and soliciting and convincing volunteers for the navy took on the character of war
mobilization. And when prefectural administrative functions were transferred to the 32nd Armystationed in Okinawa, and as a full battlefield administration was established, those teachers andofficials and others who until then had been the leaders of lifestyle reform began preparations forthe steadily approaching battlefield mobilization by arming the populace, forming militias anddefence units. A certain Colonel Udo’s unit was stationed in Motobu, where Teruya had been
appointed school headmaster after his time in Amesoko, and it is said that Teruya’s cooperationin assisting in the provision of food and labour was quite exceptional.
The moral leaders of lifestyle reform changed into leaders of battlefield mobilization, just as thediscipline that lifestyle reform gave birth to changed into military discipline. And another namewas given to those ‘moral criminals’ who were interior Others: that of ‘spy’. During the battle of
Okinawa, Japanese troops massacred numerous residents for being ‘spies’. A violence beyond
words rules the battlefield, and at first glance, this discourse about ‘spies’ is but the written formof allegations made by Japanese troops as they exercised violence. But more than that, it was thewartime shape taken by the peacetime discourse about ‘moral criminals’. For it was the‘suspicious characters’ of peacetime who were re-construed as wartime ‘spies’. [37]Having furthered lifestyle reform and enthusiastically cooperated with the Japanese military,
Teruya Chuei was slaughtered as a ‘spy’ by Japanese forces at the height of the battle of
Okinawa. News of his slaughter spread rapidly across the battlefields. In the midst of incredulity,
anger, and fear, one person, his whole body shuddering violently, cried out, ‘If it has come tothis, then even my own life is no longer precious! What is this talk of friendly troops, they’reworse than the US forces!’ [38] Teruya’s death decisively propelled residents’ estrangementfrom the military discipline of the Japanese troops. This estrangement was not just driven byfear, it also contained an anti-military resolve replete with anger. This was an anger at having

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been betrayed, fuelled by the fact that Teruya had so obviously been a fervent cooperator with
the Japanese troops. This anger at betrayal, intense because of the prior cooperation, was widely
seen on the battlefields of Okinawa, and led to the formation of various anti-military movements.
However, the impact that Teruya’s death had upon people was not solely due to the fact that hehad been a cooperator with the Japanese military. It was also conditioned by Teruya’s own life,
which had led him to cooperate with the Japanese military, and ultimately mobilized him to his
death.
Memories of the battlefield – back in daily life
Tsurumi Shunsuke introduces as an exemplary case of a soldier’s ideological conversion that of
Yoshida Mitsuru: ‘Although aware of the collapse of the old hierarchical order in the external
world’, Yoshida Mitsuru, a communications sub-officer on board the battleship Yamato that was
sunk en route to the Battle of Okinawa, ‘continued in his own inner world to cling to a correctlyordered hierarchy of the past that he held separate from the outside world.’ [39] The disciplinethat brought about his mobilization into the navy survived intact into the post-war as a bankworker’s discipline. Everyday life gave rise to discipline, and discipline tied up withmobilization. Regarding Yoshida’s ideological conversion, in which discipline carried over into
the postwar, it is necessary first to point out the continuity of the everyday life that enabledconversion. Given this continuity, ‘the post-war situation, in which more Japanese people arecompany employees and civil servants than soldiers, does not constitute proof that Japan has
switched to pacifism from militarism.’ [40] However, it is also the case that Yoshida Mitsuru
was troubled by this continuity; he tried to stop to consider it, and that brought him to write his
recollections of war.
While attempts to narrate battlefield memories are premised on an everyday life that preserves anastonishing continuity with the pre-war even as it moves into the post-war, they are also
concerned with discovering and trying to explain battlefield memories that do not harmonize
with that continuity. Furthermore, and to repeat the point, the everyday life that continues is still
one that fosters mobilization. How are memories of the battlefield narrated? Or how are they
forgotten? To consider these questions is also to discover everyday life as the scene ofideological struggles over mobilization.
In 1977, on the 33rd anniversary of Teruya’s death, a memorial stone was erected in Motobu
town, Okinawa prefecture, and the following year in 1978 appeared a compilation of memoirs
about him written by 67 of his friends, acquaintances, former students and relatives. It is entitled
Spirit Appeasing Elegy. But the writings collected within it feel as if thoughts that people had
stored away in their hearts for 33 years after the war had suddenly erupted. Rather than‘appeasing spirits’, it raises them. [41]It hardly needs to be said that the cause of this ‘spirit raising’ is the fact that Teruya was not justkilled in action on the battlefield, but was killed by Japanese troops as a ‘spy’. On this point,memories of the battle of Okinawa concerning Teruya differ from those relating to Yoshida
Mitsuru. For Teruya was not only mobilized towards his death, he was killed as an ‘enemy’
despite being mobilized.
Discipline did not only bring about mobilization towards death. There is no telling when theinternal Other who maintains discipline will appear as an enemy. We must look here at theThe Japanese Empire: Colonial Lives and Postcolonial Struggles

140

intervention of the state, which organizes and conducts mobilization. But graver still, since theenemy is tied to the internal Other, the enemy may appear as one’s own self. Teruya’s tragedy
lies in the fact that the Other born of his lifestyle reform suddenly appeared as his own self, to be
killed as the ‘enemy Other’. The Teruya who lived for lifestyle reform and the Teruya as the‘enemy Other’ are mutually exclusive. Herein lies the reason why Teruya’s death exists as a
trauma for all those involved in lifestyle reform.
How can this trauma be narrated? The most common approach in the above-mentioned
compilation was to praise the Teruya who lived for lifestyle reform, and to denounce theJapanese troops who attributed to him the face of the Other and killed him as an enemy on thatbasis. For example, the epitaph on his memorial stone reads: ‘Our teacher Teruya Chuei, ofexalted character, faithful and wise, with a strong sense of duty, was a practical educator who
lived according to his own teachings. However, during the Greater East Asian War, here in theland of his birth, in the confusion of the decisive battle for Okinawa, he was dealt a cruel end.
We, former students, colleagues, friends and acquaintances, recall the greatness of our teacher,and erect here a sorrowful stone of remembrance.’
The more the fact that he was a ‘practical educator who lived according to his own teachings’ isstressed, the more the sorrow increases, and leads to intense anger towards ‘the crazed andhateful friendly troops’, towards the ‘madness of the Japanese troops’. Such anger has much incommon with that which arose as news of Teruya’s massacre spread across the battlefield. Thus
it leads also to anti-militarism and attempts to determine responsibility. But beyond the fact that
it is based on Teruya being a ‘practical educator’ who enthusiastically advanced lifestyle reform,
and who did not hold back in cooperating with the Imperial Army, this ‘sorrow’ cannot but makethe attribution to him of the face of the ‘enemy Other’ a factor of the madness of war and the
responsibility of ‘crazed’ Japanese troops. While we must not understate the significance of theanti-military movements and attempts to determine responsibility based on the anger arisingfrom this ‘sorrow’, nor must we forget that the resultant style of critique, depending on the
degree of anger involved, held that ‘his murder was a misunderstanding’, a ‘step too far’, or‘deplorable’. By making his murder as the Other a factor of the external problems of ‘insanity’and the ‘battlefield’, this kind of approach skirts the trauma of Teruya’s death. Also, the life
recounted therein is limited to that of the Teruya who lived for lifestyle reform.
The next approach visible in the compilation is to seek the cause of his murder not in ‘madness’or ‘misunderstanding’, but rather in the lifestyle reform movement. In the assertion that thehistory of imperial subject-making in pre-war Okinawa laid the groundwork for the battle of
Okinawa, there is a slim chance of simultaneously narrating the two mutually exclusive Teruyas.
But in this approach, lifestyle reform is equated with the policy of imperial subject-making, andnarration of Teruya’s own practice in daily life is avoided. The policy and practice of imperial
subject-making are made responsible for his death. With regard to this approach, too, we cannot
understate its significance as agitation denouncing imperial subject-making. But by making his
murder a factor of the external issues of ‘politics’ and ‘policy’, the trauma of Teruya’s death isagain avoided. This approach does not narrate Teruya’s life, nor does it hold the possibility ofreferring to the fate of the interior Other born of lifestyle reform. In fact, it might even be said
that this approach could turn everybody into a victim of imperial subject-making.
There is no mistaking that both these approaches are ‘spirit raising’, with regard to memories ofthe battlefield. And it is certain that both provide potential foundation for organizing movements

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against the military and against the emperor. But within them there is also the avoidance of
trauma, and oblivion. Further, they also contain the danger of bringing about oblivion of the fateof discarded Others.
The compilation contains a piece by Teruya’s third daughter Mariko, who was in her penultimateyear at Okinawa First Prefectural Girls High School at the time of his death. [42] She was with
Teruya up until just before his death. When she first heard the news of her father’s passing, she
was not told that he had been massacred as a ‘spy’. She says that she thought, ‘so, as I feared, he
has met his end in battle, cooperating with the military.’ Subsequently learning that he had beenmurdered, although distraught, she quelled her anguish out of consideration for the kindness of
those around her. ‘If I despaired, the people around me would be even more burdened, so I tried
as much as possible not to think about that hateful war. And so I would recall with fondness
peaceful and pleasant childhood events.’ But it is not something that can be forgotten througheffort. Rather than oblivion, the term silence is apt.
The Teruya who engaged in lifestyle reform does not appear in the daily life with her father that
she recounts. She is silent about the trauma of her father’s death. Instead, scenes of ‘peaceful andpleasant childhood’ are picked out, as photos in an album. One could dismiss this as nostalgia,
but there is also a silence here that declines to engage in too simplistic a ‘spirit raising’. And
Teruya Mariko, who had become silent in the face of trauma, discovered a beautiful everyday
life in the past, which looks also like a future to look forward to.
In the everyday life that she evokes, there is a description of when her father played a record forher on the gramophone, just before the start of the battle of Okinawa. ‘Listening, my father said
to me, “Music today is almost all military anthems, but this music is really wonderful, Mariko.
Let’s listen to it”. He lowered the volume, mindful of outward appearances, and we listened’.
That gramophone never played music again.
If we accept the continuity of everyday life posited by Tsurumi, it would surely first be
discovered in the task of constituting memories of the past, confirming them one by one. Thatwould also constitute the discovery of everyday life as the scene of ideological struggle, and posethe problem of solidarity, of calling back the presence of the Others discarded in the process of
becoming ‘a Japanese’. But, to discover this continuity, perhaps we need dreams of the futurethat look back to a beautiful past.
This article, published in Yoseba, volume 6, March 1993, was adapted and expanded in Senjo no
kioku (Memories of the battlefield), Tokyo: Nihon Keizai Hyoronsha, 1995.
[1] Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (London and New York: Verso, 1983).
[2] Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (eds.), The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1983).
[3] Kang Sangjung, ‘Showa no shuen to gendai Nihon no “shinsho shinri” ‘, Shiso, vol. 876,
1989, and Kang Sangjung, ‘ “Nihonteki Orientarizumu” no genzai’, Sekai, February 1987.
[4] Murai Osamu, Nanto ideorogi no hassei (Tokyo: Fukutake Shoten, 1992).
[5] Murai, Nanto, p. 14.

The Japanese Empire: Colonial Lives and Postcolonial Struggles

142[6] See Ukai Satoshi’s essay on Ernest Renan: ‘Furansu to sono boreisha tachi’, Jokyo, 2 January
1992, p. 72.
[7] Étienne Balibar, ‘Migrants and racism’, New Left Review, no. 186, 1991, p. 15.
[8] Kim Jonmi, ‘Dochaku no bunka ha kaiho no buki tariuruka’, Zenkoku Kaiho Kyoiku
Kenkyukai (ed.), Ningen (1975), pp. 116-117.
[9] Obviously, Benjamin’s theses relating to past memories come into the discussion here. See
Walter Benjamin, ‘Experience and poverty’; and ‘The storyteller’, in Hannah Arendt (ed.),Illuminations, translated by Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), pp. 83-109.
[10] Tsurumi Shunsuke and Ikeda Hiroshi, ‘Taberu ba kara no senso to hansen’, Inpakushon, vol.
72, 1991, pp. 13-14.
[11] Kang, ‘Showa’, p. 54.
[12] Yoon Keuncha, ‘Shokuminchi Nihonjin no seishin kozo’, Shiso, vol. 778, 1989.
[13] Matsuda Motoji, ‘Minzoku saiko’, Inpakushon, vol. 75, 1992.
[14] Kaiho Yoko, Kindai Hopposhi (Tokyo: Sanichi Shobo, 1992), pp. 128-130.
[15] Tomiyama Ichiro, Kindai Nihon shakai to ‘Okinawajin’ (Tokyo: Nihon Keizai Hyo¯ronsha,
1990); Baba Kiyoko, Inaguyananabachi (Kyoto: Domesu Shuppan, 1992).
[16] Kim Jonmi, ‘Chosen dokuritsu / hansabetsu / hantennosei’, Shiso, vol. 786, 1989, p. 115.
[17] Concerning lifestyle reform, see the writings of Tomiyama and Kaiho cited above.
[18] Anbo Norio, Minato Kobe korera / pesuto / suramu (Kyoto: Gakugei Shuppan, 1989).
[19] Yoon Keun Cha, Ishitsu to no kyozon (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1987). While this essay
does not refer to it, see Nunokawa Hiroshi, ‘Toshi “kaso shakai” no keisei to nashonarizumu,
Nihonshi Kenkyu, vol. 355, 1992) in relation to the so-called ‘problem of racial intermingling’.
[20] Edward Said, Orientalism (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978), p. 207.
[21] Etienne Balibar, ‘Racism and nationalism’, in Etienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein,Race, nation, class (London and New York: Verso, 1991), p. 49.
[22] Kan Takayuki, ‘Sengo shiso no genzai wo megutte’, in Tsurumi Shunsuke (ed.), Sengo toha nanika (Tokyo: Seikyusha, 1985), p. 128.
[23] Okochi Kazuo, who was involved in war-time labour policies with the Industrial Patriotic
Movement, for example, argued that the significance of ‘life renewal’ lay in fostering ‘humanresources’ in the shape of ‘a strong “labour force” ‘, ‘able to be armed’, for the purpose of‘engaging effectively in modern battle’. On that basis, he claimed that, ‘ “human resources” arenot only objective entities in economic terms. They are also the human and individual operatorsof that resource, and to that extent, they also know best their own resourceful existences, and cansubjectively utilise their own potential. Through recognizing that “human resources” are also
“resourceful persons”, I’d like to stress that they will best become able to harness their abilities
as “human resources”.’ To Okochi, fascinated by ‘resourceful persons’, must arise the question

Tomiyama: On Becoming ‘a Japanese’143

of ideological conversion. Okochi Kazuo, ‘Senji shakai seisaku ron’, 1940, in Okochi Kazuo
chosakushu, vol. 4 (Tokyo: Seirin Shoin Shinsha, 1969), pp. 247-248.
[24] Teruya’s life-history here is reconstituted from accounts contained within the memorial
volume that is Teruya Chuei Itoku Kenshohi Kiseikai (ed.), Chukonpu, 1978.
[25] Tomiyama, Kindai Nihon, pp. 220-222.
[26] For example, the Administrative Continuance Documents of the Special Superior Section,
Okinawa Prefectural Police, contained in the Governor’s Administrative Continuance
Documents problematizes the abrupt end to migrant remittances related to the outbreak of war
that result in the termination of children’s education. Okinawa Shiryo Henshujo (ed.), Okinawa
Ken Shiryo, Kindai 1, 1987, p. 611.
[27] Chukonpu, pp. 83-84.
[28] Chukonpu, p. 139.
[29] Chukonpu, p. 80.
[30] Chukonpu, p. 156.
[31] Chukonpu, p. 171.
[32] Chukonpu, pp. 100-101.
[33] Naha Shi, Naha Shi shi, Shiryo hen 2, Chu 3, 1970, p. 430.
[34] Tomiyama, Kindai Nihon, pp. 124-125, note 12.
[35] First published as The History of the Oceanic Development of Okinawa (Okinawa kaiyo
hattenshi) in 1941, it was later retitled The History of Japan’s Southern Development (Nihon
nanpo hattenshi).
[36] While we can see therein how the subjectivity of ‘the Okinawan people’ is linked to ‘theJapanese people’ in the Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere, at the same time, there is aneed to note the possibilities for disruption too. This point is related to the argument for
Okinawan independence in the period immediately following defeat in the war. I’d like to treat
this question separately on a later occasion.
[37] Tomiyama, Kindai Nihon.
[38] Chukonpu, p. 157.
[39] Tsurumi Shunsuke, ‘Gunjin no tenko’, in Kyodo Kenkyu Tenko gekan (Tokyo: Heibonsha,
1962), p. 214. See also Tsurumi Shunsuke, Tenko Kenkyu (Tokyo: Chikuma Shobo, 1976), p.
367.
[40] Tsurumi, ‘Gunjin’, p. 214.
[41] Ueda Masaaki says that ‘spirit-appeasing thought that breaks with and attempts to quiet
vengeful spirits belongs to the ruling classes’, and further, defines ‘spirit-raising’ as ‘spiritappeasing acts’ that re-ignite the ‘menace of the curses of vengeful spirits’. Ueda Masateru,‘Tamafuri no sho’, in Seki Hironobu (ed.), Gendai no Okinawa sabetsu (Kaifusha, 1987).

The Japanese Empire: Colonial Lives and Postcolonial Struggles[42] Chukonpu, pp. 214-222.

144

Rabson: Memories of Okinawa

145“Memories of Okinawa: Life and Times in the Greater Osaka Diaspora”
Steve Rabson
2003
Islands of Discontent: Okinawan Responses to Japanese and American Power
Rabson’s chapter explores the experiences of Okinawans in mainland Japan,
specifically the diaspora communities that developed in Osaka from the early 20th century
to the present. These communities faced discrimination much like Irish, Jewish, and Italianimmigrants in America. Rabson’s likening of Okinawan experiences on the mainland tothat of foreigners trying to assimilate in a new country is an apt analogy. For example, as inAmerica, some Okinawans changed their names to de-emphasize their Okinawan ethnicity,and laborers found they earned a lower wage than did other Japanese, and at times weretold not to apply for certain jobs. Worsening economic conditions in Okinawa in the first
decades of the 20th century had caused the sudden migration of Okinawans to the mainland,
while other Okinawans migrated to Taiwan and the islands of Micronesia during thecolonial period.
Rabson’s interviews with members of the Okinawan diaspora in Osaka reveal that
not all experiences on the mainland were negative. Some Okinawans looked back fondly attheir ability to earn any wages, even if they were low, and celebrated their experiences
growing up in the hollows (kubun gwa in Okinawan dialect) of Taishō ward in Osaka, also
referred to as the “Okinawan slums.” Some migrants embraced their Okinawan identity inthe solace of Okinawan enclaves such as Taishō ward, where Okinawan cultural practices
were observed, the Okinawan dialect was spoken, and Okinawans enjoyed a strong
community spirit. However, other Okinawan memories focused on experiences of
discrimination by Japanese who exaggerated ethnic and linguistic differences between
Okinawans and Japanese. The experiences of discrimination led other Okinawans in Osaka
to promote assimilation to eradicate their Okinawan-ness, that is, the qualities that madethem targets of discrimination.
After the defeat of Japan in World War II, Korea and Taiwan became independent
sovereign nations, although some would say that is debatable in Taiwan’s case, as it cameunder Kuomintang/Guomindang (the Nationalist Party, also known as the KMT) rule.
Okinawa, on the other hand, was given to the US military in exchange for restoring
Japanese sovereignty on the mainland, and it remained under American rule from 1952 to1972. After strong Okinawan pressure for reversion, in 1972 American rule ended andOkinawa was returned to Japanese sovereignty. Okinawans expected that reversion would
mean equality with the mainland, but, as Rabson notes, this hope was dashed; Okinawans
discovered that discriminatory views toward them still persisted. Further, the US militarybases continued as well. And so, the experiences of Okinawans who live on the mainland
are similar to Ainu who live in Tokyo and other cities. Both groups still face discriminationand struggle to come to terms with their place in the nation state. Rabson also makes clearthat Okinawans who lived in Okinawan diaspora communities found many ways to be
Okinawan on the mainland and a plethora of ways to embrace or reject their identity. In
some cases, Okinawans today reconcile their ambivalent place in the nation by claiming adual identity as both Okinawan and Japanese.

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Memories of Okinawa: Life and Times in the Greater Osaka Diaspora
Steve Rabson
This chapter is based on a study of people who have migrated from Okinawa to greater Osakaand their descendants. Okinawans are defined as individuals with at least one grandparent or two
great-grandparents from Okinawa, including those who moved to greater Osaka between late1945 and early 1972 when Okinawa was officially called “The Ryukyu Islands”1 by its American
military occupiers.2 From July 1999 until June 2001, I administered a survey questionnaire to
313 respondents, interviewed more than 100 individuals, collected writings by and about
Okinawans in greater Osaka, and attended their social functions, performance events, andinformal gatherings. Throughout the two years of this study, I lived among Okinawan neighbors
in the largest residential community of Okinawans in greater Osaka which is located in TaishōWard of Osaka City. This chapter summarizes the history of Okinawan migration to greater
Osaka; presents interviews and writings that describe, in particular, their experiences residing inwhat Okinawan scholars have called “ethnic communities”3; examines the role of prefectural
associations and other organizations of Okinawans in greater Osaka; and discusses the ways inwhich individuals in this diaspora remember Okinawa or view their relationship with anancestral homeland where many of them have never lived.
Why they came to greater Osaka
Okinawans started moving to greater Osaka in significant numbers, mostly for temporary
periods, around 1900, the same year commonly cited for the start of Okinawan emigration
abroad. Most came either to work in factories or to sell Okinawan products, such as sugar,
awamori, and textiles, after regular boat service was established between Naha and Osaka.
During this period, Osaka was becoming known as “the Manchester of the East” for its many
textile mills that recruited large numbers of workers, mostly women, including many from
Okinawa and Korea as well as rural areas on the mainland. Families in Okinawa usually received
a lump-sum payment for contracts negotiated through recruiters, and the factories provided theirchildren, often girls as young as thirteen, with gainful employment, regular meals, dormitory
lodging, and wages that helped support the household back home.4
Unlike the vast majority of women from Okinawa who emigrated abroad either to join theirfamilies or marry male emigrants, women and girls who went to work in mainland textile
factories earned an independent income. Looking back decades later, many recall that, despite
horrendous working and living conditions that were exacerbated by prejudice and discrimination,
they felt proud to be earning money to help support their impoverished families and financeeducations for their brothers. Retrospective accounts of this experience show a striking diversityof memories. In contrast to the first-hand accounts of exploitation and discrimination (quoted
below) in Fukuchi Hiroaki’s 1985 book Okinawa jokō aishi (The tragic history of Okinawa’s
women factory workers), Higa Michiko published a series of interviews ten years later in the
Okinawa Taimusu quoting women who remember spinning factories as “good places where, aslong as you could work, you could eat three meals a day. Even orphans could make a living.”5
Such memories remind us of desperate conditions in Okinawa, especially during the 1920s and1930s when many families were short of food.
For mainland Japan, however, World War I brought enormous economic benefits. Besides
adding former German concessions in China and German territories in the South Pacific to its

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empire after Germany’s defeat, Japan gained a huge export market, which greatly stimulated its
domestic industries. Manufacturers were deluged with orders for munitions and supplies as they
displaced American and European manufacturers in large sectors both of the domestic consumer
market and Asian markets.
The rural economy in Okinawa, already languishing, was devastated by the collapse of world
sugar prices in 1921, compelling more Okinawans to leave for South America, Hawaii, and thePhilippines, however, the largest number moved to mainland Japan. Meanwhile, expansion of theindustrial and consumer economy on the mainland that started during the “World War I boom”
intensified competition for workers among recruiters and employers. This resulted not only inbetter wages for women and men working in factories, but also made possible access to moreprestigious jobs, especially for women, some of whom were now able to leave the spinning
factories for work as department store clerks and telephone operators.6 New factories in Osakaand its environs brought a rapid increase in the city’s textile, construction, metal processing, andlumber industries. Shipbuilding firms also opened assembly plants in what was then the city’s
Minato (“Harbor”) Ward where Osaka’s largest Okinawan community settled in the eastern
portion that split off in 1932 to create Taishō Ward.
By late 1914 , when Okinawan communities had begun to form, two-fifths of the population of
Osaka’s Kita Okajima Precinct (part of Taishō Ward after 1932) was estimated to be from
Okinawa.7 Of the approximately 20,000 who came to the mainland from Okinawa every year
during the 1920s and 1930s, nearly half worked as manual laborers in the factories of greater
Osaka. In 1925, for example, of 19,926 Okinawans moving to the mainland, 8,994 came to the
Osaka-Kobe area. The recorded population of Okinawans residing there grew from 1,575 in
1920 to 8,994 in 1925 and 20,356 in 1930, declined to 16,929 in 1935, and grew again to 53,678
in 1940. During this same period for the mainland as a whole, the resident population grew from9,626 in 1920 to 19, 926 in 1925 and 43,150 in 1930, declined to 32,335 in 1935, and grew again
to 88,319 in 1940.8 By 1940, the population of Okinawans on the mainland was approaching 15
percent of the total population of Okinawa Prefecture itself, some 600,000 at the time.
In contrast to Osaka, known as a “labor market,” Okinawans thought of Tokyo as a “center ofarts and culture” where young people went to attend school and begin careers in such fields asliterature, journalism, and painting, as well as in business. A popular saying in Okinawa at theturn of the twentieth century was “The rich emigrate abroad, the students go to Tokyo, and thepoor go to Osaka.”9 In reality, of course, students also went to schools and colleges in Osaka andKyoto. And, despite this “working-class” image of Osaka, many Okinawans in professions suchas medicine, pharmacy, law, and education settled there after completing their schooling on themainland. Okinawans in Osaka worked on the prefectural police force, in the city hall, on
newspapers as reporters, and in local hospitals as physicians. By 1910 Osaka had approximately
sixty Okinawan schoolteachers and thirty firefighters. Okinawans also worked in banks, shipping
companies, and retail stores, managed restaurants and clothing stores, and owned small
businesses in the city.
Yet in Okinawa today, there is a tendency to heroicize Okinawan emigrants abroad, especiallythose who have achieved prestigious social status, and to minimize discussion of Okinawan
communities in greater Osaka which are still associated with poverty, day labor, unemployment,
and slum conditions that no longer exist.10 To be sure, there are Okinawans in greater Osaka
working in factories and on construction sites, but I also interviewed company presidents, aThe Japanese Empire: Colonial Lives and Postcolonial Struggles

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middle level executive in a nationwide pharmaceutical company headquartered in Osaka, awoman who was sales manager in the local branch of one of Japan’s largest insurance carriers,
the minister of a Christian church, teachers in public and private schools, university professors,
including one specializing in the Man’yōshū and another in Shakespeare, and a magazine
journalist who had just written her first novel. Commemorative volumes published by Okinawa
prefectural associations in greater Osaka accentuate Okinawan residents in high-status
occupations at least partly to counter negative stereotypes in Okinawa and among mainlanders.
When discussing Okinawan migration, mainlanders invariably refer to the “palm tree hell”(sotetsu jigoku). This ironic phrase is commonly used to describe economic conditions in
Okinawa during the years following the collapse of world sugar prices in 1921. The devastating
shock, felt first by farm families, spread rapidly to related businesses and banks which failed one
after another. Employers could not meet their payrolls, and even the Okinawa Prefectural
Government, unable to collect taxes, went bankrupt.11 As in times of famine in the former
Ryukyu Kingdom, people resorted to eating the seeds and lower stalks of Japanese fern palm
(cycad) plants that provided nourishment, but required careful cooking to avoid food poisoning.
Okinawans, however, criticize the term “palm tree hell,” noting that it sounds like some kind ofnatural disaster, obscuring the responsibility of the Japanese government for its discriminatory
policies toward Okinawa where, before World War II, people paid higher taxes and received
fewer social services than in any other prefecture. Okinawans also note that, far from protecting
the local sugar industry, the Japanese government abandoned it in favor of an intense program todevelop sugar plantations in Taiwan, Japan’s colony acquired as one of the spoils of victory in
the Sino-Japanese War of 1894-95.12
With Okinawan migration to greater Osaka increasing thirteen-fold between 1920 and the early
1930s, the national government dealt with depression-era conditions in Okinawa by rejecting
proposals for relief and, instead, sending 56,000 Okinawans as emigrants to Japanese island
territories in the South Pacific where by 1940 they outnumbered local populations.13
Okinawan residents of greater Osaka today include people who came to rural areas of themainland initially in the massive evacuation that began in late 1944, and others who barely
survived the Battle in 1945. Memories of the evacuation, the Battle, and the firebombing of
Osaka in 1945 comprise an important legacy of the Pacific War in the Okinawan community. A
former resident of Motobu in northern Okinawa Main Island who migrated to Osaka in 1978
recalled his experience as a teenage survivor of the Battle in a September, 2000 interview.
I was drafted at sixteen for construction labor on the airfield at Kadena. The Imperial
Army soldiers had plenty of food, but for meals they gave Okinawan workers only one
brown-rice ball (nigiri) apiece. We were housed in Kin Village and, when it was bombed,
I was the lone survivor on our block, and had to take the bodies of my neighbors to theirrelatives. By this time our rations had dwindled to almost nothing, so we chewed sugar
cane leaves and filled our stomachs with river water. After evacuating back to northern
Okinawa, I found Motobu in ruins and was wounded slightly in the head and leg byshrapnel from an exploding shell nearby. I couldn’t find any of my relatives, so I stayedwith a family we had known well. The father fished for food in the bay off Sesoko Island
where he also swam to pick up leftovers that had been thrown away by crews on U.S.
warships. The American soldiers put us in a refugee camp, but I escaped and fled back toRabson: Memories of Okinawa

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Motobu, hiding inside caves and tombs along the way. After the war I was ill for a timefrom malnutrition.
In published reminiscences, Miyagi Masako, who later migrated to Amagasaki in Hyōgo
Prefecture, remembered the Battle from when she was eight years old.
We had dug an air raid shelter under our house, but when the bombing and shelling got
heavy, it was too dangerous and we had to leave. …We stayed for a while inside thefamily tomb, but couldn’t get any food there. …After one of my cousins died of
starvation, we decided to set out for evacuation to northern Okinawa. …What I remember
most after that is stepping over dead bodies and drinking water full of mosquito larvae. I
tried not to look at the bodies, but they lay everywhere, swelling up grotesquely as days
passed. I got so thirsty that I scooped up rain water with my hands from wash-tubs wherebaby mosquitoes were swimming. Finally, with no food or water and exhausted fromwalking, we became prisoners-of-war and ended up in the refugee camp at Koza.14
When the war finally ended, many Okinawans who had lived on the mainland or evacuated there
before the Battle were unable to return during the period Okinawans call “kaosu” (chaos)stretching into the aftermath of massive destruction in which whole families were annihilated,villages obliterated, property demolished, and the landscape altered irrevocably. Thousands were
finally able to go back, at least temporarily, beginning in 1946, but travel to and from Okinawa
was strictly controlled under the U.S. “Military Government” which began requiring that people
wanting to return provide family registers that had also, in many cases, been destroyed in the
Battle. Those wanting to go to Okinawa included Okinawan soldiers returning from military
service abroad or from prisoner-of-war camps in the U.S.S.R., as well as civilians. Occupation
authorities on the mainland first established an office in Fukuoka to provide alternative
documents, but many people were unable to obtain them. Later, U.S. occupation authorities in
Okinawa issued what were euphemistically called “passports” for travel between the mainland
and Okinawa, but were really more like the old Soviet exit visas, obtainable only after what weresometimes lengthy investigations. Those who did manage to return in the early postwar years
often arrived to find their families decimated, their homes in ruins, little prospect for
employment and, in some cases, their lands seized, without compensation, for U.S. militarybases. As a result, many had to make U-turns back to the mainland. Kinjō Isamu recalls his
family’s U-turn.
Both my parents had come to Osaka when the war started. My father got a job hauling
military supplies, and my mother worked in a cotton-spinning factory. They fell in love,
got married, and a daughter was born just as the war ended. But there wasn’t enough foodin the place where they’d evacuated, and she died of mal-nutrition. They returned to
Okinawa, where I was born, but couldn’t make a living there, so they took us back to
Osaka. …Carrying our “passports,” the family—my parents and us five children—rode
the boat over rough seas for three days and nights. …The first thing I remember about
arriving in Osaka in 1954 at the age of three is that it was cold.15
A woman in her mid-fifties, born in Taishō Ward, commented on her questionnaire that “amonth before I entered high school [in 1959], my parents took me for my first visit to Okinawa.
It seemed so strange to me that we had to get a passport for traveling to what had been myparents’ home prefecture in Japan. I loved the beautiful scenery, but was shocked by all the
military bases there, and it hurt me to see how many people were poor.”16The Japanese Empire: Colonial Lives and Postcolonial Struggles

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Having sacrificed 147,000 Okinawan lives in the 1945 war of attrition,17 the Japanese
government continued to treat Okinawans as expendable after the war by agreeing in the 1951
San Francisco Peace Treaty not only to relinquish its colonies and territories, but also to handover the Ryukyu Islands to the U.S. military in exchange for regaining Japanese sovereignty on
the mainland. Many argue that the Japanese government’s discriminatory treatment of Okinawa
continues today with post-reversion economic polices aimed at keeping the U.S. militarypresence concentrated in Okinawa by vastly increasing the “rents” paid Okinawans whose lands
are still occupied by the bases, and by establishing a large “sympathy budget” (omoi-yari yosan)
to fund construction in surrounding communities. The comparatively high unemployment rate
(often twice the national average) resulting from this distorted economy still compels many inOkinawa to seek “work away from home” (dekasegi) on the mainland.
Where they settled: growth, movement, and changing conditions in the greater Osakadiaspora
Kansai, the mainland region with the largest number of migrants, encompasses Osaka, Hyōgo,
and Kyoto Prefectures, but can also refer, along with Kinki, to a wider area including Mie, Nara,
Shiga and Wakayama Prefectures. Okinawans reside throughout this region, but by far thelargest numbers live in Osaka and Hyōgo, the only prefectures in Kansai with Okinawan
residential communities. This is why, for the sake of convenience, I refer to Osaka and Hyōgo
Prefectures as “greater Osaka.” Residential communities of Okinawans can still be foundelsewhere on the mainland in Yokohama and Kawasaki, while in Fukuoka, Nagoya, Hiroshima
and other cities, where such neighborhoods existed in the past, Okinawan migrants and theirdescendents have now largely dispersed, a process that occurs among migrant and immigrantdiaspora in many countries. Such dispersion has also occurred in greater Osaka where
Okinawans have settled in other neighborhoods and may have little or no connection with theresidential communities.
Precise figures for Okinawans now residing on the mainland are not available. Until 1940 suchstatistics were compiled periodically from official family registers (kōseki) by the prefectural
police in Okinawa. However, since the war, family registers of most Okinawans born in greater
Osaka have indicated domiciles on the mainland, not in Okinawa. And many migrants
established new family registers on the mainland after their official records were destroyed
during the Battle of Okinawa. Prefectural associations have compiled estimates based on theirmembership lists, but, until recently, these have enumerated households, not individuals, and do
not include non-member households. A more comprehensive, though imprecise, mainland-wide
survey was published by the Okinawa Prefectural Association of Hyōgo (Okinawa Kenjin-kai
Hyōgo-ken Honbu) in November of 2000 which estimated that the two largest populations by far
were 36,500 in Yokohama City and 70, 000 in Osaka Prefecture. Other sources estimate thepopulation of Okinawans in Osaka City’s Taishō Ward at 19,000,18 by far the largest in Kansai.19
Like migrant and immigrant communities elsewhere, Okinawan communities in greater Osaka
formed near where jobs were available and where other Okinawans already lived who could
provide support and contacts, especially important for newcomers. Many Okinawans alsopreferred an environment for daily life where it was possible to speak the dialects, eat the food,practice the religious observances, and maintain other social and cultural customs of thehomeland to the extent possible in what were, for most, unfamiliar urban conditions. And, likemigrants and immigrants in many places, people from Okinawa chose to live in suchRabson: Memories of Okinawa

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communities in order to cope with prejudice and discrimination, including denial of lodging andemployment, they encountered because societies at large have often tended to look down on or
exclude people with differences, real or imagined. Relentless pressures to “assimilate” (dōka),coming both from mainlanders and from Okinawans themselves, caused many to abandon muchof what was distinctively Okinawan when they stepped outside the community, but inside it
people could still live, in many ways, as they had before coming to the mainland. In 1996 Kinjō
Isamu recalled his early childhood in Taishō Ward shortly after his family moved there from
Okinawa in 1954. By this time, Okinawans had been settling there for some three decades, andhis childhood memories are far more positive than those of people who had migrated in the
1920s when the community was still going through its early growing pains. (See Oyakawa
Takayoshi’s reminiscences below.)
My parents maintained our Okinawan lifestyle so completely that sometimes we forgot
we were in Osaka. We always spoke in Okinawa dialect and, since we were among manyother Okinawans in the Manzai-bashi section of Kita Okajima Precinct, it was easy tolive this way. My father raised pigs [for the many cuts of pork used in Okinawan cuisine]and grew gōyaa [bitter gourd] in a vacant lot, and he made brown sugar candy. My
mother had her weaving implements sent from Okinawa, and wove [Okinawan style]kasuri splash-patterned cloth. We conducted all the annual religious observances strictlyby the old lunar calendar, including the spring shiimii festival of feast and prayer whenrelatives gather to honor departed ancestors, and the summer o-bon festival [when spiritsof the ancestors are said to return to this world for a brief visit].
The distribution of the Okinawan population in greater Osaka has changed over time withshifting labor and consumer demands as old factories closed and new ones opened. The
Okinawan community in Wakayama, a center of the prewar textile industry, virtuallydisappeared after World War II as many of its residents moved to the growing Okinawan
community in Amagasaki where small and medium-sized metalworking shops were opening.
Such shops can be found as well in Taishō Ward of Osaka, where community residents also
work in the two large metal-parts factories, Kubota and Nakayama. Other Taishō residents work
as proprietors or employees in stores, selling mostly consumer goods and services, including
those which line the three-block long shopping arcade (shōten-gai) in Hirao Precinct, and also as
professionals in real estate, pharmacy, medicine, dentistry, and teaching. Many single maleresidents in Taishō Ward work for local private contractors at construction sites, while, as
elsewhere in Japan, there is a large and growing population of retirees.
Major movements of population have also occurred within localities, particularly starting in thelate-1950s when families of Okinawans, as well as many mainland Japanese, moved from houses
or tenements to apartment blocks (danchi) being built in large numbers at the time. This
movement, however, was not always voluntary. In Taishō Ward, for example, residents of makeshift houses and barrack-like tenements in a low and often-flooded riverbank area of Kobayashi
Precinct that Okinawans called “the hollows” (kubun-gwa in Okinawa dialect) were relocated by
the city of Osaka to newly constructed municipal apartments nearby in the late 1960s and early
1970s. This was part of a citywide “slum clearance” plan that targeted this area of marshy,
unclaimed land officially deemed unsanitary and unsafe. Okinawans had begun living there in
the chaotic period just after World War II, which had left much of greater Osaka devastated fromfire-bombings. On what had been unclaimed land they constructed dwellings from tarpaper, tin,

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cardboard, plywood, and scrap lumber without official building permits. Interviewed in 1999, aformer resident described the origins and growth of the hollows.
Many poor people began living there shortly after the war. When one person put up a
house, others followed, building houses, moving in, and starting families. In theaftermath of recent bombings, there were always big puddles everywhere. Around 1950
people began putting up barrack-like tenements using lumber, tarpaper, and cement.
Landlords living elsewhere also built tenements they rented.
There was electricity in the hollows, but the puddles slopped over with what seemed likesewer water. They were pumped out occasionally, but most of the time people had to put
down boards for walk-paths to avoid sloshing through them.20
Kinjō Isamu recalled the hollows from the 1950s.
About one-third of the people there were Okinawans, with many of the others from
Kyūshū and Shikoku. When new people moved in from Okinawa, their friends andrelatives would come to help put up a house using discarded lumber and other materials.
No one owned most of the land, so it was squatters’ rights for the first to claim an open
space. My father built his first house this way with help from other Okinawans. Instead of
paying them, he served food and drink afterwards. This was one of the ways the yuimaru(cooperative labor) system, used in Okinawa for such hard work as cutting sugar cane,also came to be applied in Osaka.21
Though called by the media at the time an “Okinawa slum,”22 some of the approximately 1500
Okinawan migrants and their descendants who lived there recall the hollows wistfully as a placewith “a spirit of community cooperation” (kyōdō-tai seishin) where people helped build
dwellings by yuimaru and loaned money to each other under the coop system, called “moai” in
Okinawa, of pooling funds among relatives and close friends that is also practiced elsewhere in
Asia. In addition, they made room in their homes for displaced neighbors, especially during suchtroubled times as when “typhoon Jane” leveled many dwellings and flooded the area in 1950.23
But other former residents call nostalgia for the hollows a romanticization of the past, and recall
freezing winters, sweltering summers, flooding waters where sewage floated, swarming
mosquitoes, devastating fires that fed on tar- paper, and taxi drivers who would refuse to takepassengers to Taishō Ward for fear of soiling their vehicles in mud puddles or damaging theirtires in potholes.24 Kinjō Isamu recalled that
Conditions there were much worse than in the neighborhoods of soggy old houses
crammed together that we saw in a documentary film shown by one of our teachers at
school with a passionate interest in the “Buraku problem.” I realized then that, like
Buraku people, many Okinawans were hired only for grueling, dirty jobs, but that, in away, we faced worse discrimination because, unlike them, we needed “passports” to visit
our hometowns [in Okinawa under U.S. military occupation].25
In 1996 Kakinohana Yoshimori remembered his first impression of the hollows from the early
1970s, shortly after he had moved to Osaka from Miyako Island.
Now people in Taishō Ward dress neatly, wearing the latest fashions, but in those days
laborers walked the streets in baggy work fatigues. On the one hand, I was relieved to beamong other Okinawans, but the place was depressingly poor. When I first saw theRabson: Memories of Okinawa

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hollows, before the relocation, I was appalled, wondering if this was how Okinawans on
the mainland had to live. It truly was a slum, though people from there would be angry tohear me say that today. But it’s the truth. One glance at the outdoor sinks and toilets, themaze of alleys, the houses patched together with boards and tin, and anyone would haveto agree.26
The current fascination among mainland Japanese with things Okinawan, which includes
Okinawan communities on the mainland, could explain, in part, why a place commonly called a“slum” in the past has become the object of recent nostalgia in Japan for the early postwar period
and of admiration for the resourcefulness of its residents in the face of adversity. This trend
could also explain why it has come to acquire a more positive image in the current memories ofsome Okinawans, and why published interviews and writings like those quoted in this chapter
have been appearing recently. In May of 2001 the Kansai Okinawa Bunko (Culture Center)
presented a four-day exhibition of work by Okinawan photographers who had been long-time
residents of Taishō Ward. It was advertised as “photographs of the hollows,” and drew a steadystream of visitors, mainlanders and Okinawans alike, as well as coverage by the greater Osaka
media.
Still, whatever “narrative” of the hollows one accepts today, for most residents it was their one
and only home when Osaka City targeted it for “clearance” in 1969. Okinawan student leadersorganized protests, applying such tactics as sit-ins at municipal government offices learned fromlocal Buraku activists. Protracted negotiations with the city dragged on until most residents
agreed to move, with negotiated rent subsidies, to new municipally owned apartment buildings(shi-ei danchi) in the early 1970s. The smaller number of people living in the hollows with deeds
to their land were offered alternative lots, though of somewhat smaller size, in nearby
precincts.27 Interviewed in 1999, one former resident recalled that “the compensation money thecity was offering us to evacuate didn’t amount to a sparrow’s tear. They built fine apartments at
the places we were relocated, but moving there put us all deeply in debt. I can still remember
how worn out with worry members of the tenants’ association were as they ran around every day
trying to scrape up the money for moving expenses.”28 The last tenant to hold out, an elderly
woman, finally moved to a municipally owned apartment in 1979. “She was the last one to stayand fight the city’s evacuation order,” long-time Taishō Ward resident Kinjō Kaoru recalled in
1996. “Her life had been hard since she was a child. She couldn’t read and had no marketableskills. I once saw her walking alone through the pouring rain back to the hollows. She looked solonely, though she never showed her sadness when she was with other people.”29
After that, the hollows was sunk underwater, flooded deliberately for the artificial expansion of
Osaka Bay. Meanwhile, some mainland Japanese living elsewhere in Taishō Ward voiced
resentment because they were not offered relocation rent subsidies in the new apartments oralternative parcels of land. Today, nothing of the hollows or anything like it remains in TaishōWard. Apartment buildings, large and small, and one-family houses predominate, along withresidences storekeepers have built above or behind their shops. The Okinawan community there
is now a modestly prospering, though far from affluent, neighborhood of merchants and working
people roughly comparable in cultural distinctiveness and economic circumstances to Brooklyn’s
ethnic neighborhoods in Williamsburg (Italian) and Greenpoint (Polish). As for land, virtually novacant lots or open spaces remain today like those still available when Kinjō Isamu’s family
moved to Taishō in 1954, so Okinawans can no longer raise pigs. However, many families still
maintain small gardens of gōyaa that are so numerous on one street in Kobayashi Precinct that it

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has come to be known as “gōyaa dōri.” Okinawan foodstuffs for preparation at home and inrestaurants are sold in many neighborhood stores, including some run by mainlanders. 46% of
the respondents to my questionnaire indicated that they ate Okinawan food regularly; 40%
indicated that they observe Okinawan religious practices; and 60% indicated that they perform or
listen to Okinawan folk music, which one can often hear walking along neighborhood streets inthe evening.
How they coped: adjusting to differences and responding to prejudice and discrimination
People from Okinawa have encountered hardships on the mainland because of differences thatare real, but more often imagined or exaggerated in the minds of mainlanders. A proportionallylarger population from Southeast Asia and the Pacific Islands settled in the Ryukyu Islands inprehistoric times than in what is now mainland Japan.30 As a result of this early migration,
physiological characteristics distinguishing Okinawans from mainland Japanese include shorter
average stature, darker skin, fuller chests, and rounder eyes. Yet many Okinawans are physicallyindistinguishable from a majority of people on the mainland where there is also significant
individual and regional variation to the extent that some mainlanders are even said to “lookOkinawan.” Mainlanders have tended to exaggerate or invent “differences,” cultural as well as
physiological, fostering stereotypes which are likely to be activated when someone is thought tobe Okinawan. Furthermore, people who are said to “look Okinawan,” like Okinawans
themselves, have been ridiculed for features that are, in fact, envied by many on the mainland. In
what is one of the most popular cosmetic surgical procedures in the country today, women havetissue removed to enlarge their eye openings. And the beaches in Okinawa are crowded yearround with women and men from the mainland assiduously darkening their skin, suntans
acquired in the pursuit of leisure being a mark of wealth and sophistication often associated withtravel abroad.
While their physical features have often attracted unwanted attention, language differences have
posed more serious problems for Okinawans on the mainland. Again, both real and imagineddifferences are involved. During the U.S. military occupation of Okinawa, mainlanders
sometimes asked people from Okinawa if they spoke English at home. As for actual differences,the dialects of mainland Japan and the Ryukyus are closely related structurally, and are said tohave diverged from a single “mother dialect” in a process thought to have occurred between thesecond and seventh centuries A.D.31 Today Ryukyu dialects have come to be the most divergent
among all local dialects in Japan, a distance which has been compared to the difference between
French and Italian.32 And, like dialects in northern Honshū and southern Kyūshū today, thedialects of the Ryukyu Islands, some of which are mutually unintelligible, are not understood bypeople in other parts of the country unless they make a special point of studying them. On theother hand, for more than a century, since the middle of the Meiji Period (1868-1912),“standard” Japanese has been promoted by the media in Okinawa and required—at times
punitively—in local schools. With daily discourse among those under fifty now conductedalmost entirely in “standard” Japanese, the dialects of Ryukyu are gradually dying out despite
recent efforts at preservation in the arts and education.
Nevertheless, many Okinawans on the mainland, especially those migrating after earlychildhood, have struggled, at least to some extent, with “standard” Japanese. Even younger
migrants who have mastered it in Okinawa as their first language often retain a distinctively“Okinawan accent” and may be unfamiliar with certain local idioms, resulting in ridicule and a

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self-consciousness that hinders their ability to express themselves fully. An “Okinawan accent”
includes a more fluctuating intonation (as opposed to a flatter mainland intonation) along withthe occasional lengthening and shortening of vowels contrary to the mainland standard(Amagasaki pronounced as “Amagasaaki” and Osaka pronounced as “Osuka”).33 A woman in
her late fifties who had come to Osaka in 1953 reported that one reason she had become active inthe local Okinawa Prefectural Association was so that “I could feel comfortable about speaking
with others in an Okinawa accent (Okinawa-namari).”34 When speaking to each other in Osaka,
first generation migrants from Okinawa often mix words and phrases from Okinawa dialect with
Kansai Japanese. In an ironic reversal, the recent “boom” of interest in Okinawan culture has
given the dialect a “trendy” status in Japan today so that mainlanders are now picking up
expressions like chura (pretty girl or handsome boy), waji-waji (angry), and kūsu (awamori aged
at least five years), as well as learning the words for such Okinawan cuisine as gōyaa (bitter
gourd), mimi-gaa (pickled pigs’ ears), and saada-andagii (spherical donut).
Among Okinawans interviewed for this study who recalled struggles with language on themainland was a woman in her fifties who had moved to Osaka from Nago in the early 1960s.
After finally receiving her “passport,” she arrived in Osaka and was hired in an office where she
had to answer the telephone and take messages. She often needed to ask callers to repeat
information because she could not understand it the first time or worried that her reply was not
being understood by the caller. At such times she would apologize, explaining that she hadarrived only recently from Okinawa.35
A woman in her mid-forties who had come to greater Osaka in the mid-1970s told in a June,
2001 interview of a co-worker from Okinawa at a supermarket who was harassed relentlessly byhis supervisors because he couldn’t adjust immediately to local customs of repeatedly greetingand thanking customers with the correct phrases of Osaka dialect. And, in a case that became a“cause celebre” in the Taishō Ward community, a nurse trainee from Okinawa was fired in 1977
by a local hospital for alleged “inefficiency” because, her supervisor said, she spoke with an
Okinawa accent. Despite intimidation by yakuza thugs, her supporters lodged a formal protest
with the hospital director and the young woman’s dismissal was rescinded. She subsequently
resigned her job, received compensation from the hospital as part of a settlement, and returned toher home on Iheya Island.36
Interviewed in April of 2000, a 48-year-old neighbor of mine who had migrated to Osaka in theearly 1970s and remains single gave struggles with language as the main reason he never dated
women born and raised on the mainland, though he had been approached a number of times over
the years, including on two occasions during my residence there, by such women who said theyfound him attractive. And a woman from Nago in her early thirties who had migrated as recently
as 1985 reported that “I had real trouble with language when I first arrived, especially because
idioms and intonation was different. I felt depressed because I was often unable to express
myself or understand completely what others said. Even today, I have occasional problems.”37
It is important to note, however, that Okinawans are not the only people from local areas ofJapan to struggle with language. As noted above, some dialects spoken on the mainland,
especially in northern Honshū, southern Kyūshū, and other mountainous or rural areas, are also
largely incomprehensible outside their localities of use. People from these areas have also
encountered language problems when they left home for work in Osaka and elsewhere in Japan.
Even today, people from other places on the mainland who live in Osaka are said, often

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disparagingly, to speak with “a Kyūshū accent” or “a Shikoku accent.” Speaking Japanese withan accent or lacking immediate mastery of local greetings hardly justify the mistreatment
Okinawan workers have suffered at the hands of mainland employers who have sometimes
sought to exclude them altogether.
Aside from language, other differences exaggerated or invented have spawned prejudices anddiscrimination in their most virulent forms. Japanese who traveled or worked in Okinawa earlyin the Meiji Period initially conveyed stereotypes that were already widespread and deeply
rooted in Japan by the turn of the twentieth century. Perhaps the most blatant (and subsequently
most studied) manifestation of these attitudes was the notorious 1903 “human pavilion incident”
at the Fifth World Trade and Industrial Exhibition, held that year in Osaka. The so-called“scientific human pavilion” (gakujutsu jinrui-kan) was not one of the official, governmentsponsored exhibits, but was designed and constructed as a private business venture in
consultation with Tsuboi Seigorō,38 known as “the founder of Japanese anthropology.” What has
subsequently been described as a “freak show” was located just outside the main entrance to theexhibition grounds where it could easily attract some of the estimated 5,300,000 visitors to what
was Japan’s largest yet international exhibition. Scheduled to open on March 10, it was to feature
twenty-one highly exoticized “representatives” of “eight peoples:” five Ainu, four Taiwanese,
two Koreans, three Chinese, three (Asian) Indians, one Javanese, one Bulgarian, and two
Okinawans, all dressed in their “native” (genjū-min) clothing and displayed in cubicles that werelater compared to animal cages at circuses.39 Protests from the Chinese Embassy and from
Koreans in Osaka led to cancellation of exhibits from these countries (Korea was “annexed” by
Japan as a colony seven year later in 1910), and protests from Okinawa, such as an angry
editorial in the April 7, 1903 Ryūkyū Shinpō declaring “We must never tolerate such
humiliation,” led to removal of the “Ryukyu” exhibit in May after two months of display.
Poet Yamanokuchi Baku (1903-1963), born in Naha, who spent virtually all of his adult life on
the mainland, poignantly evoked mainland stereotypes of Okinawans. In his short story “Mr.
Saitō of Heaven Building,”40 the narrator recalls the experience “of living in Tokyo as a manfrom ‘Ryukyu’ for the past sixteen years. I’ve run into people wherever I go who…stare at me
strangely—as if I’m not even human. And in those stares I can hear their questions. Is Ryukyu in
Okinawa Prefecture? Do the people there eat rice?”41 More recently, during the U.S. militaryoccupation when far fewer mainlanders than now made visits to Okinawa which then required
passports and entry permits, people from Okinawa on the mainland were asked such questions as
whether they lived in a jungle, wore grass skirts, or ate with knives and forks.42
Moving from Okinawa to Osaka in 1925 at the age of nine, Oyakawa Takayoshi recalls his firstfew weeks in school on the mainland.
Some of the other students would look at me derisively, calling me “Ryukyuan.” …I wasshocked, having no idea why they made fun of me because I was from Okinawa. …It got
so bad I couldn’t stand it, and stopped going to school for about a week. My parents
understood what was happening, though, and didn’t scold me.43
Drafted into the Imperial Japanese Army in 1937, Oyakawa writes, “the first unit I was assigned
to was all Okinawans because, it was explained in the company briefing, soldiers from eachprefecture were trained in separate units. But the company commander made fun of us, saying it
was really because ‘Okinawa is thirty years behind the mainland.’”44

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Okinawans have encountered prejudice on the mainland whether, like Oyakawa, they settled
there or came temporarily for “work away from home.” Kinjō Tsuru went to work in 1919 at the
Fukushima Spinning Factory in Shikama, Hyōgo Prefecture.
My contract was for three years, but I ran away after working for only one. …I justcouldn’t stand it anymore, always being made fun of because I was from Okinawa.
I was taunted especially by the woman of about fifty who was in charge of our rooms inthe dormitory. Whenever she talked to me, she would yell out scornfully, “Hey, you,
Ryukyu” or “Listen here, Ryukyu.” I’m no weakling, though, and yelled back at her.
…”So what’s wrong with being from Okinawa?” or “Didn’t you also come out of awomb?” …
We Okinawan women formed a group that stood up to her, and there were a lot of big
arguments. I remember Ms. Yonamine especially. She was about forty and really told thatroom manager off. “We might be under contract here,” she said, “but we haven’t sold ourlives to you.” I’ll never forget how good that made me feel. …
If we were late getting back for the five-o’clock curfew, we’d be called into the office thenext day for a bawling out of “you Ryukyu girls.” Only one person there, a man working
in the kitchen, treated us well because, he said, we had come from so far away. We called
him Dad.45
Besides barbs and insults, the problems people faced on the mainland simply because they camefrom Okinawa manifested themselves in material ways that directly affected their lives andlivelihoods. Starting in the 1920s, some employers and landlords posted signs in front offactories, employment offices, and lodging houses announcing “Koreans and Okinawans
prohibited” (Chōsen-jin Ryūkyū-jin o-kotowari). In explaining such exclusion, employers
sometimes complained that Okinawans tended to change jobs if they were offered better
conditions elsewhere, and landlords claimed that Okinawans tended to live with too many
relatives in lodgings meant for fewer tenants. It is true that people who traveled long distances to“work away from home” often lived with relatives, at least temporarily until they got settled. But
Okinawans were certainly not the only ones coming from remote rural areas of Japan to lodge
with relatives in cities like Osaka, especially during the acute prewar housing shortage.
Furthermore, large families that often included in-laws and grandparents were still the norm inJapan at this time. And, while it is true that Okinawans would change jobs for higher wages,
especially since they had to send at least part of their earnings back to their families, they weresurely not the only workers in Japan leaving one workplace for better conditions at another.46
In fact, Okinawans might have been motivated, at least in part, to change jobs because employers
seem to have considered it smart business practice to offer them lower wages and inferior
working conditions. Extensive statistical records from the 1920s and 1930s reveal a pattern of
discrimination in employment contracts, housing, and even workplace safety measures.
Tomiyama quotes published interviews of company officials who recalled that, seeking workers
at low wages, “we made a special effort to recruit factory women from among Koreans,
Okinawans, and Burakumin.”47 Employers at mainland cotton spinning factories in particularassumed that

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158“Ryukyuans” could be paid lower wages, would put up with abusive working conditions,and did not require compensation for fires or accidents. This discriminatory attitude
manifested itself in a number of management policies, such as housing Okinawans
separately and giving them different meals from mainland workers.48
Statistics also show that women from Okinawa were disproportionately assigned the mostdangerous and arduous jobs in spinning factories.49 Arakaki Kaeko, who worked in 1927 at the
Fukushima Spinning Factory, in Hyōgo Prefecture, describes one of several successful protests
against discriminatory treatment of workers from Okinawa.
They deducted 15 sen from our monthly wages for meals, but served only leftovers to the
Okinawans. The mainland workers got warm rice, while ours was always cold. It was
clearly discrimination.
Finally, we couldn’t stand it anymore, and six of us Okinawan factory women decided totake action in protest. “The hell with this,” we told them. “You deduct all this moneyfrom our pay, and give us nothing but leftovers.” Then, as soon as they served us thefood, we hurled it back in their faces and knocked the serving trays down on the floor.
This really shocked the company, and after that we got the same food as the mainland
workers.
Also, among other insults, our supervisors were always telling us that “Okinawans are
dirty because you eat garlic and pork, like Koreans who eat red pepper.”So one day all the Okinawans gathered for a protest in the factory yard. We sat down on
the ground and refused to work or eat in what today would be called a hunger strike.
Then, maybe after the company contacted him, the president of the prefectural
association, Mr. Kinjō, arrived in a hurry to check out the situation. “We can’t work any
more in a place like this,” we told him. “Please get us the money for our return fares.”At last the factory manager showed up and apologized to us, and since the supervisors
had to go along with him, our treatment suddenly improved.50
As recalled in interviews, these experiences from the spinning mills indicate, first, that
Okinawans did not necessarily accept prejudice and discrimination passively, and, second, thatmainland co-workers and supervisors were responsive at times to their protests. Blatantdiscrimination persisted well into the postwar years despite the fact that it was now illegal. Twopeople I interviewed for this study reported seeing signs in front of apartment buildings in TaishōWard as late as 1973 announcing, “Okinawans and members of Soka Gakkai not admitted”(Okinawa to Soka Gakkai, nyūkyo o-kotowari), and a local community leader reported in 1987
that some landlords in the city were still refusing to rent to Okinawans.51 A woman interviewed
in April of 2000 said she was told by landlords that Okinawans tend to live with too many
relatives, the same excuse given in earlier decades, and that members of Soka Gakkai, a Buddhist
sect that actively recruits and proselytizes, tend to hold crowded, noisy prayer meetings at night.
Signs excluding Okinawans on taverns and restaurants in Tokyo and Yokohama have been
observed as late as the mid-1980s, and were given by one interviewee in March of 2001 as amajor reason for moving from Yokohama to Osaka.

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Protests by women mistreated in textile factories and by supporters of the nurse fired in 1977 forspeaking with an “Okinawan accent” represent some of the many ways Okinawans on themainland have responded to these injustices. Considering that the source of prejudice anddiscrimination is often psychological—presumptions of superiority by a majority over aminority—many Okinawans have sought to associate themselves in mainland minds with the
majority by undertaking prodigious efforts to “assimilate.” Throughout the prewar and wartime
years, and during the U.S. military occupation, Okinawans have often identified themselves withthis majority by vigorously emphasizing their Japanese nationality. Published reaction from
Okinawa in 1903 to the “human pavilion” at the Fifth World Trade and Industrial Exhibition in
Osaka did not criticize the inhumanity of such a display, but its inclusion of Okinawans with
Ainu and Taiwanese. An April 7 editorial in the Ryūkyū Shinpō declared that “it is a great insult
for people of our prefecture to be singled out for inclusion with Taiwanese tribesmen and Ainu.
…Our prefecture is making rapid strides today in education and in conforming with (itchi suru)
other prefectures in all matters, such as styles of dress for men and women.” The writers
objected, not to the exhibit in principle, but to its inclusion of “Japanese citizens of Okinawa
Prefecture,” and complained that “lining up citizens of Okinawa Prefecture with Taiwanesebarbarians (seiban) and Hokkaido Ainu is to view Okinawans…as one of these.” With heavy
overtones of scapegoating, the editorial described this “humiliation” as the result of “being
portrayed as an ‘inferior race’ (rettō shuzoku).”This attitude has been characterized as the victims of discrimination becoming its perpetrators,
and was also observed among women factory workers in Osaka from Okinawa and Korea whoare said to have hurled the derogatory epithets “Korean whore” (Chōsen pii) and “Ryukyu pig”
(Ryūkyū buta) at each other during arguments.52 Furthermore, Okinawans sometimes assign highand low “status” among themselves. A first-generation migrant from Miyako Island, interviewed
in April of 2001, reported that some migrants to Osaka from Okinawa Main Island (hontō) havetended to look down on people from the outer islands (ritō). Protesting “the evils of discrimination” with a more positive appeal to shared national identity, Okinawan novelist Kushi Fusako
pointed out in 1932 that “Like mainlanders, Okinawans serve in the military and perform theirother duties as citizens.”53
Okinawans who emphasize their Japanese nationality have often, but not always, de-emphasized
their Okinawan ethnicity. Their efforts to “assimilate” culturally with majority Japanese(Yamatun-chu) have included not only practicing mainland customs of dialect, diet, dress, interpersonal formalities, and religious observances, at least outside the home or neighborhood, butalso rejecting traditional Okinawan religious practices and such art forms as classical dance(ryūbu) and folk songs (min’yō or shima-uta), or performing them in private, away from the eyes
and ears of Yamatun-chu. Oyakawa Takayoshi recalled that, after moving to Osaka in 1925 as achild, he developed a strong aversion for things distinctively Okinawan.
I hated Okinawan dance and sanshin [Okinawan shamisen] music…and despised theword ‘Ryukyu.”54 …In Chitose Precinct there was an open field where performers
erected a lean-to stage, set up a booth for collecting admission, and put on Okinawan
plays. Mainlanders would gather to watch in fascination, but they made fun of
Okinawans in loud voices and I felt ashamed.

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Another thing I hated was when people riding the trains or walking down the street spokein Okinawa dialect. I thought that in public they should always use standard Japanese or
Osaka dialect.55
Perhaps the most conspicuous way Okinawans on the mainland have sought to de-emphasize orconceal their ethnicity has been changing the pronunciations, and sometimes the Chinesecharacters, in their distinctive Okinawan names. This trend started in Okinawa itself after Japan’s
victory in the Sino-Japanese War of 1894-95 when more and more Okinawans wanted to identify
themselves with a nation rising in wealth, power, and status. Name-changing is, of course, anexpedient familiar to many Americans, like myself, whose names were changed from those ofrecognizably Irish, Italian, or Jewish origin to inconspicuous “Anglo” alternatives. My
grandfather, who emigrated from Russia to the Lower East Side (then a Jewish ethnic
community) of Manhattan in 1900, agreed somewhat reluctantly when his children changed thelegal family name from the obviously Jewish Rabinowitz (meaning rabbi’s son) to “Rabson”
during a time of widespread anti-Semitism in the 1930s. (Despite the legal change, he never used
“Rabson.”) Okinawans changed their family names around the same time in mainland Japan sothat Kinjō became “Kaneshiro,” Higa became “Hiyoshi,” and Kabira became “Kawahira;” andmen also changed their personal names from, for example, Shin’yū to “Masahiro,” Ryōmei to“Yoshiaki,” and Shōtoku to “Masanori.”56 In Japan before 1945, changing one’s name tocharacters or their readings more common on the mainland was a relatively easy procedure, andeven officially encouraged at a time when the Japanese government was also endeavoring to“assimilate” residents of colonies in Taiwan and Korea as “imperial subjects.” In fact, suchchanges were made mandatory in Korea by the notorious “Name Order” of 1939 requiring
Koreans to adopt Japanese names.
Yet even during the prewar years when pressures to assimilate were at their peak, some
Okinawans on the mainland opposed tendencies to reject their traditional culture, vigorously
asserting its value. In 1927 sanshin performer Fukuhara Chōki founded a record company inOsaka devoted to Okinawan folk music; and Kushi Fusako wrote five years later, “I do notbelieve that our customs that differ from those on the mainland should be despised or discarded.
[They] have deep roots in our culture [and] natural environment.”57 Interviewed in 1996, Kinjō
Kaoru, who immigrated to greater Osaka as a small child in 1954, asserted that “people being
different doesn’t make them better or worse. I think it’s been a mistake for us to try to become
Japanese to the extent of destroying our own ethnicity.”58 Published in 1996 during a nationwide“boom” of interest in Okinawa, such affirmations of the value of Okinawan ethnicity could wellhave had more resonance among readers in contemporary Japan than Kushi’s affirmations would
have had in 1932 when government policy and popular trends for assimilation were intensifying
after the Manchurian Incident the previous year.
How they organized: changing forms and agendas of the Okinawa prefectural associations
Along with the sometimes-painful efforts to “assimilate” with mainland Japanese, migrants from
Okinawa have had notable successes organizing for their mutual benefit and advocacy as
Okinawans. This organizing, crucial to survival for people dealing with poverty, culturaldifferences, and discrimination, began informally with the first “pioneer” migrants who provided
material assistance and networks of contacts for housing, employment, and even marriage, tofriends, relatives, and fellow-villagers moving to the mainland. The first formal organization inRabson: Memories of Okinawa

161

greater Osaka was the Kansai Okinawa Prefectural Association (Kansai Okinawa Kenjin-kai),founded in 1924. The association’s newspaper Dōhō (Comrades) explained:
Our prefecture is under the same government as the rest of Japan, but, because we are ina remote location and have a different history and economic structure, we encounterunexpected misunderstandings and insults from the people of other prefectures. If we areto overcome the many obstacles imposed only on our prefecture and advance, sociallyand economically, to the status of people in other prefectures, we cannot possibly rely on
the strength of disparate individuals. …It is through one organization that we must moveinto society.59
The authors of this article go on to support their call for organizing with comparisons that pose
discrimination in global terms, but are sure to raise eyebrows today.
As individuals, the Jewish people have produced great numbers of outstanding
individuals compared with other peoples of the world, and, it is fair to say, have beenpraised and honored since ancient times as being truly the highest among races in humansociety. Yet, the reality of their daily lives is precisely the opposite. In Europe andAmerica today, Jews are subjected to outrageous insults. This is because their strength asindividuals is dispersed and they have not organized as a group. …In the reverse
phenomenon, the Burakumin have not produced outstanding individuals of worldrenown, but, in less than four years time, they have built an organization and forged an
ethnic solidarity that have made them the largest and most powerful social movement inJapan.60
Despite a founding statement that contained apparently unintended slights of Burakumin andfactual errors (there were numerous Jewish organizations in Europe and America in the 1920s),
the Kansai Okinawa Prefectural Association built on appeals for ethnic solidarity to establish
numerous local branches and subdivisions. The association has subsequently gone through one
dissolution and rebirth as well as several re-organizations. Meanwhile, separate associations havebeen formed in the other prefectures of greater Osaka, the largest and most active today being the
Hyōgo Okinawa Prefectural Association (Okinawa Kenjin-kai, Hyōgo-ken Honbu), founded in
1946. People have also organized into groups from local areas of Okinawa, and today there are
hometown friendship associations (kyōyūkai) of migrants and their descendants for Nakijin,
Haneji, Haibaru, Kochinda and other localities from which large numbers of people have moved
to greater Osaka.
The roles of the prefectural associations have, of course, differed from each other and changed
over time. In the early years, they provided essential support systems, including loans andtemporary housing, to new arrivals and, unlike today, they led the movement for improved
conditions among Okinawan factory workers. While they have continued to aid new arrivals
from Okinawa, they function more as social and cultural facilitators today, presenting concerts
and Okinawan products expositions, arranging and providing venues for classes in Okinawan
performing and design arts, and organizing regular gatherings of community members. Whilethey cooperate with each other in a wide range of ways, disagreements have arisen from time totime within and among prefectural associations over, for example, whether and how to become
involved in political issues.

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The first incarnation of the Kansai Okinawa Prefectural Association was led by activists
committed to Marxist ideals, and organized on the model of a political party. Established in
1924, it was deeply involved in labor-union efforts to improve the wages and working conditionsof factory workers in Osaka, many of whom came from Okinawa. However, within two years,
this organization was virtually decimated by arrests of its leaders following brutal government
suppression in 1926 of a strike by Okinawan workers that association leaders helped organize at
the Tōyō Cotton Industries’ Sangenya factory, located in the present Taishō Ward of Osaka. On
August 11 union members submitted a fifteen-point written petition to company officials seeking
compliance with factory labor laws, freedom to leave the company grounds, an end to mandatorytransfers of workers’ earnings to their families in Okinawa, equalization of wages, and reformsof other discriminatory practices. The company responded by firing forty of the petitioning union
members. A strike began in the early morning of August 14 with 200 factory women from
Okinawa leaving the dormitory. The police were quickly mobilized to drag them forcibly back to
the factory grounds where many were beaten, kicked, and thrown in the mud by company
supervisors. Now the police arrested more than 50 labor activists in the Kansai Okinawa
Prefectural Association on charges of inciting a riot, and jailed many of them. Two years later
the labor organizing activities of the association were effectively shut down by the massive
police round-ups of “leftists” and others viewed as dissidents on March 25 and April 16, 1928,
and continuing government suppression resulted in an end to all the association’s activities in thelate 1920s.61
This experience has loomed large in the memories of older Okinawans in Osaka, and was citedby Okinawan sociologist Shingaki Masami as one reason that the current leadership of the Osaka
League of Okinawa Prefectural Associations (Osaka Okinawa Kenjin Rengō-kai), established in
1946, a successor organization to the Kansai Prefectural Association, has been reluctant topursue an active agenda on social and political issues today. 62 When the Kansai Okinawa
Prefectural Association was re-established in 1931, the labor activists were gone and its newleadership was comprised of professionals with university degrees who turned away from labor
activism.63 In place of the former political-party structure, the leaders re-centered theorganization around the hometown friendship associations of people from local areas of
Okinawa. Though debate resumed over the relative merits of assimilating or living as
Okinawans, leaders called for Okinawans to speak “standard Japanese,” associate more withpeople from other prefectures, minimize the practice of Okinawan customs, and abandon
Okinawan religious practices in favor of mainland Shintō. This was, of course, a highly
repressive period of growing militarism in Japan when the government was compelling theworship of state Shinto and banning indigenous religious practices as part of the “policy to makeimperial subjects” (kōminka seisaku) in Okinawa, as well as in Japan’s colonies and territories.
Since World War II the leaders of prefectural associations have continued to disagree on how to
respond to pressures for assimilation and whether or how to advocate on political issues.
However, as in Okinawa itself, overwhelming support developed among members for reversion,
particularly after U.S. seizures of private land for military bases brought many involuntary“migrants” to greater Osaka. Okinawans there felt increasingly cut off from their homeland after
what they called the “disappearance of Okinawa Prefecture” in 1945 and the Japanese
government’s agreement to a Peace Treaty that “severed Okinawa from Japan” in 1952.64
Overcoming initial reluctance among leaders of the Osaka League, prefectural associations ingreater Osaka and elsewhere on the mainland went on to play a major role in the reversion

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movement. They organized large demonstrations in 1956 which featured speakers from Okinawa
as part of the “land struggle” (tochi tōsō) protesting U.S. seizures of land for military bases in
Okinawa and occupation rule generally. Subsequent protests calling for reversion drew many
participants, including a demonstration by more than 10,000 in Osaka City on October 1, 1966
during which a petition was presented to visiting Prime Minister Satō Eisaku.
Large numbers of mainland Japanese joined the struggle for reversion, though Okinawans
sometimes complained about ulterior motives among those on the right who seemed interested
mostly in recovering territory lost in war and those on the left who seemed intent on using “theOkinawa problem” as a political football to attack the conservative government.65 Nevertheless,achieving reversion was crucial materially and psychologically for the entire Okinawan diaspora,
removing the stigma of Okinawans as “an occupied people” and freeing the flow ofcommunication, information, and travel.
Japanese citizens no longer needed “passports” to enter Okinawa, and published materials fromthe mainland were no longer screened by military censors. However, as in Okinawa itself, theterms of the reversion agreement provoked anger and a sense of betrayal because U.S. bases
remained virtually intact despite the Japanese government’s constantly repeated promises toreduce the military presence in Okinawa to “mainland levels” (hondo-nami). As a result, thereversion agreement (henkan-kyōtei) came to be known sarcastically among Okinawans as the“discriminatory agreement” (henken kyōtei).
While the Hyōgo Okinawa Prefectural Association has continued to advocate for removal of thebases, including a petition drive in 2001, the Osaka League has been comparatively quiet on theissue. Residents of the community in Taishō Ward explained to me that one reason is that, since
reversion, some community residents, including prominent League members, have been
receiving substantially increased “rental” payments from the Japanese government for land
seized from them by the U.S. government in the 1950s. In an effort to “stabilize” land-use forbases after reversion, the Japanese Defense Facilities Agency immediately increased thesepayments to “military landowners” (gun-jinushi) by as much as six times the pre-reversion rates
paid by the U.S. government.66 During 2000 and 2001 I met four individuals receiving suchpayments, including one interviewee in Taishō Ward who showed me her contract from the
Defense Facilities Agency that specified annual payments of 12 million yen or about $100,000 in
2001. Her land in Oroku, seized originally to build barracks for U.S. Naha Air Base, is now adependents’ housing area for Japan’s Air Self-Defense Forces which took over the base after
reversion.
The Japanese government’s “hush money” strategy has not always worked, however, either in
Okinawa, where “antiwar landowners” (han-sen jinushi) have formed an active protest
organization, or on the mainland. Another interviewee in Taishō Ward told me in February of2000 that his family in Okinawa, whose land was confiscated in the 1950s to expand Kadena Air
Base, contributes these payments to support the anti-base movement while he personally devotes
much of his time to organizing protests and speaking at rallies in greater Osaka. Meanwhile, inanother example of diverse opinions on this issue, not all Okinawan residents of Hyōgo
Prefecture agree with that association’s opposition to military bases. One interviewee from the
Hyōgo Okinawan community in Takarazuka City told me in April of 2001 that her father, who
also receives “rent” for land seized in the 1950s, gets angry whenever he reads about another

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protest demonstration, insisting that, if the bases are to be removed, landowners should receive
compensation for lost income.
Partly because of such diversity of views and circumstances among members, Osaka League
leaders have sometimes been hesitant to “lead” on other issues as well, taking up the banner only
after a clear membership consensus develops. Officials explain that their organization, descended
from the second, less activist incarnation of the Kansai Okinawa Prefectural Association, has amore conservative membership and is necessarily less “political” than the Hyōgo association,founded in 1946 during a time of vigorous activism on issues such as reversion and militarybases in Okinawa. League leaders in Osaka are still haunted by memories of the brutal
government suppression during and after the 1926 strike at the Tōyō Cotton Industries’
Sangenya factory, and see their most pressing issue as maintaining their organization of an
estimated 7,000 members of whom an increasing proportion are elderly, first-generation
migrants.67 This trend is borne out by results from my survey which showed a 20% higher rate ofprefectural association membership among respondents in their 60s and 70s (53.6% and 51.5%
respectively) as compared with respondents in their 40s and 50s (35.7% and 30.4% respectively).
Some League officials believe that elderly members would prefer not to be reminded ofhardships they have suffered simply for being Okinawan, or to attract too much attention. In theyears before Okinawan culture became trendy in the early 1990s, one official discouraged agroup of younger community residents in the mid-1970s from organizing performances of eisa
dances and presenting this annual Okinawan festival in the neighborhood because he feared that,for mainlanders to see these traditional dances in colorful costumes, would “embarrass” theOkinawan community. Another League official in his late sixties has refused to acknowledge ininterviews that there has been discrimination against Okinawans in Osaka. Such denials
contradict League publications which fully document it,68 and interviews by me and others of
League members who described discrimination they have personally encountered.69
Nowadays, amidst the nationwide “Okinawa boom,” all the prefectural associations in greater
Osaka organize events to which the public is eagerly welcomed, where eisa-odori and othertraditional dances and music are performed. The Osaka League now actively supports andpromotes Okinawan culture in many ways, sponsoring concerts, offering space for training
studios in the performing arts, and inviting speakers in various fields from Okinawa to lecture in
the Osaka area. The most important functions of this organization today include providing spaceand organizational support for such social occasions as banquets to celebrate the New Year,honor elderly members, and commemorate such special occasions as the anniversary of the
League’s founding, events at which Okinawan music and dance are almost always performed.
The League also organizes the annual September “sports festival” in which local Okinawa
prefectural associations in greater Osaka and nearby prefectures compete in relay races and otherevents. In addition, the League sells tickets and rents buses for the semi-annual pilgrimages toroot for Okinawa’s representative team in the National High School Baseball Tournament held at
Kōshien Stadium in Nishinomiya, an Osaka suburb, where officials from the Osaka League andHyōgo Association also distribute tickets, arrange bus transportation, help rooters find seats, andclean up discarded trash at the game’s conclusion.
Over the years, the prefectural associations have not only provided for survival-support,
advocated vigorously in the 1920s for labor reform and in the 1950s and 60s for reversion, buthave also contributed to postwar infrastructural and economic improvements in the community.

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Prefectural associations in greater Osaka were crucial for the community during the chaotic
period immediately after World War II. They aided in the resettlement both of Okinawa residents
who had evacuated to rural areas on the mainland, but whose status changed to “refugees” after
their prefecture was devastated by the Battle; and, of Okinawan soldiers and civilians who choseto be repatriated to greater Osaka from Taiwan, Micronesia, the Philippines, and other areas
formerly part of the Japanese empire because many of them had nothing left to go back to in
Okinawa. Prefectural associations continue to assist new arrivals from Okinawa to settle ingreater Osaka. The Osaka liaison office of the Okinawa Prefectural Government also helps
people from Okinawa to find jobs in greater Osaka, and to secure housing. In the years following
reversion, this office recruited migrants to work mostly in factories, while in today’s economy
they are more likely to work as nurse trainees, cooks, or waitresses. Approximately 260 young
people each year find jobs in greater Osaka through this office. Although some of these people
settle in the area, often becoming managers of stores, restaurants, or small factories, virtuallynone choose to live in Okinawan communities, preferring, like many other Okinawans coming to
the mainland today, to reside near the places where they work or study.70 In contrast, many who
migrated in the early 1970s before reversion in “group hirings” (shūdan-shūshoku) organized bycommercial recruiters settled in Taishō Ward after their contract periods ended.
Where things stand: lingering prejudice, a new pride in “roots,” and mixed blessings of the“Okinawa boom”
From what were often troubled beginnings, life for most residents of the Okinawan communities
in greater Osaka has improved over the years as many migrants saved their factory wages, started
businesses, bought property, and sent their children to colleges or professional schools. And,
while their economic resources have not reached the average level of Japanese “salarymen” inmore upscale residential areas, many have enjoyed relative prosperity in recent years.71
Mainlanders living in the more affluent areas of greater Osaka refer to these communities as“downtown” (shita-machi) or, in the case of Taishō Ward in southwestern Osaka, somewhat
disparagingly as “the deep south.” With the currently heightened interest in Okinawa throughout
Japan, many mainland visitors have been attracted to the community where they shop in storesthat sell Okinawan products, eat in restaurants serving Okinawan cuisine where Okinawan music
is often performed, and learn to perform Okinawan dance and music themselves at the culture
centers and studios. This influx has provided relief for some in the community from theeconomic doldrums that have been felt in Japan as a whole since the early 1990s.
In the year and a half between June of 1999 and December of 2000, a new store selling
Okinawan products and four new restaurants, one with nightly performances of music and dance,
opened in a four-block area near the Taishō train station. There were already three Okinawan
restaurants, one offering live performances, making a current total of seven in this area which isstill three miles from the Okinawan neighborhoods in Kobayashi, Hirao, and Okajima wheresuch businesses can be fond in virtually every block. Community residents often make fun of the
Yamatun-chu tourists, and sometimes express regret for what they see as growing dilution (or“mainlandization”) of Okinawan arts and culture. But most proprietors eagerly welcome thelarge crowds of visitors who regularly pack local restaurants offering Okinawan cuisine and live
music, especially on Saturday nights when even the local regulars (jōren) are turned away unlessthey have reservations.

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Many Okinawans in greater Osaka today have themselves developed greater interest and pride in
their “roots” (rūtsu), using the English word in describing this trend.72 Today, second and thirdgeneration Okinawans, as well as mainlanders, are studying the traditional performing arts,
design arts, and cuisine, along with learning some Okinawa dialect. Their motivations are manyand varied. Interviewees cited the influence of parents and grandparents, strong impressions froma visit to Okinawa, or the effects of a performance they had attended. A professional writer in herlate thirties said in November of 2000 that she had never felt pride in her family’s origins, largely
because she associated being Okinawan with being poor, until Shō High School became the firstteam from Okinawa to win the national high school baseball tournament in April of 1999. She
felt proud, she said, because Okinawans had “finally beaten the Yamatun-chu at something.” She
is now writing her first novel which is based largely on her father’s experience as a migrant from
Okinawa living in Osaka. On the other hand, some second and third-generation Okinawans ingreater Osaka still seek to minimize their connections with Okinawa, emphasizing, for example,
that “I’m Osakan, though my father came from there.”73
Today, amidst the “Okinawa boom” and a popular trend for exploring one’s ethnic “roots,” it ismuch too easy to look back with a smirk at people who never spoke their local dialect or ate
Okinawan foods in public, only practiced sanshin secretly in closets, and changed their names.
Yet it must be remembered that, during the years of malicious prejudice and blatantdiscrimination, for Okinawans living and working on the mainland, the issue was often physicaland psychological survival. Though discrimination is now illegal, it has by no means disappeared(see interviews cited above). Today prejudices based on stereotypes persist on the mainland
despite—and to some extent because of—the recent fascination in Japan with an exoticized andcommercialized “Okinawa” that has made recordings of Okinawan pop music into best sellers
and singers from Okinawa into super-stars. A woman in her mid-sixties who had migrated togreater Osaka in 1962 commented on her questionnaire that “I was shocked when I first came at
how many people were ignorant about Okinawa, mostly because it wasn’t mentioned in school
curriculums. But nowadays everyone’s trying to ride the wave of interest in it.”74 Since
reversion, community residents are no longer asked if people in Okinawa speak English at homeor use knives and forks for daily meals, but they are still subjected to such double-edged praiseof Okinawans as “so relaxed and carefree” (implying a certain indolence and lack of
responsibility) or “so casual and easy-going” (implying a lack of courtesy and diligence).
Koreans and Chinese are also subjected to such “praise” in Japan for being “clever” (implying
wily or tricky). The president of a loan agency in Taishō Ward told me he never lends money to
Okinawans because “they don’t pay it back.” And an executive of a manufacturing company inOsaka told me his firm decided not to locate a factory in Okinawa because “people there can’t doquality work.”
In official ways, too, there are still problems, as when the All-Japan High School BaseballFederation banned the wearing of eisa robes by second-generation Okinawan rooters from
Amagasaki for the semi-annual national baseball tournament at Kōshien Stadium in
Nishinomiya, near Osaka. The Federation explained that its regulations forbid the wearing of“strange” (kii) garments, though the Okinawan rooters pointed out that fans from Kōchi andHiroshima Prefectures were allowed to wear their brightly colored local costumes. Fans havedefied this ban recently by carrying their packaged eisa robes in through the stadium entrances,then changing clothes in the rest rooms. In recent years, teams from Okinawa have placed high inthe tournament, regularly reaching the finals or semi-finals. Then in the spring of 1999, whenRabson: Memories of Okinawa

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Okinawa Shō High School became the first team from Okinawa in the tournament’s 55-year
history to win the championship, residents of Okinawan communities on the mainland, which
always send bus-loads of rooters to their games, celebrated joyously. Savoring this victory of
Uchinaan-chu over Yamatun-chu, Okinawans commented that “the postwar period is finally overfor us.” This is a mocking reference to the phrase used by Prime Minister Satō Eisaku who
negotiated the Okinawa reversion agreement with U.S. President Richard Nixon in 1969, viewed
by Okinawans as yet another mainland betrayal for failing to include promised reductions in the
U.S. military presence.
In September of 1995, the movement among community activists opposing American militarybases in Okinawa shifted into high gear after the September, 1995 rape of a twelve-year oldelementary school girl in Kin by two U.S. marines and one sailor.75 Protest marches wereorganized in Osaka to coincide with the massive demonstration of an estimated 85,000 in
Ginowan City, Okinawa. Subsequent marches and rallies drew large numbers of participants in
Osaka and Kyoto. In addition, regular information meetings (gakushū-kai) have been held in
public auditoriums and university lecture halls with activists and scholars from Okinawa as
featured speakers. Former Okinawa Governor Ōta Masahide has given a number of wellattended lectures recently in Osaka auditoriums. In greater Osaka and elsewhere on themainland, singers from Okinawa perform anti-war and anti-base protest songs at regularconcerts. Yet, while members of the greater Osaka Okinawan community often take the lead inorganizing these events, the proportion of community residents who participate in politicalactivism is comparatively small. Among respondents to survey questionnaires, only 6.8% of
migrants and 4.5 of descendants indicated such participation. Though many Okinawans ingreater Osaka joined protests against the military bases following the 1995 rape, most of the time
one tends to notice the same core of activists from the community turning out for events, whichusually draw larger numbers of mainlanders, and for organizational meetings.
The “Okinawa boom” has also made residents aware of the need to convey full and accurate
information about the communities to outsiders, especially to the media which is now reportingon them frequently. To keep up with growing demands, the Kansai Okinawa Bunko (Culture
Center) has assumed what has become an increasingly heavy burden, offering written materials,
recordings, video tapes, lectures, and guided tours to the public at very low cost and with anextremely small, largely volunteer, staff. Groups of students and teachers from public and private
schools in greater Osaka and nearby prefectures come regularly to the Bunko for “field work”
seminars that include lectures and guided tours as well as performances of Okinawan music.
Demands on the Bunko for information and interviews reached a fever pitch during the months
leading up to the 2000 G-8 Summit Conference held in Okinawa. Scholars from the Taishō Ward
community and from Okinawa have subsequently met there regularly to prepare fuller
information and check existing materials for accuracy.
Though the influx of tourists and consumers has provided income for some, the greater Osaka
communities, where small and medium industries depend heavily on sub-contracts from larger
companies, have been hit hard by economic doldrums afflicting Japan as a whole in the 1990s
and 2000s. Residents have suffered in the continuing series of lay-offs, euphemistically called“restructuring” (risutora), at the medium-size metalworking factories, and orders for extracted
metal and molded metal parts have dwindled at the smaller workshops. Local merchants often
complain that business has fallen off sharply since the “bubble burst” on Japan’s economy in
1990-91, and the incomes of construction workers have dropped sharply with local labor

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agencies offering fewer jobs. A growing number of homeless wander Osaka streets now,
sleeping on sidewalks or in parks, as elsewhere in Japan’s cities. And, as elsewhere, the economy
is the issue community residents say is of the greatest concern to them.
Clearly, the “Okinawa boom” has brought mixed blessings to Okinawan communities in greater
Osaka as well as to Okinawa itself. Nowadays visitors from the mainland sometimes comprisethe majority in audiences at live performances there of Okinawan music and a high proportion of
the participants in such anti-base demonstrations as the recent “human chains” around Kadena
Air Base. Okinawans themselves are divided over whether to welcome mainlanders to partake inthe islands’ culture and politics, or to discourage their participationn. At least one eisa
performance group in Osaka bars mainlanders because, as the director explains, eisa has special
religious significance for Okinawans. (This group does accept people with only partial Okinawan
ancestry.) Okinawans inside and outside the prefecture are caught between a desire, on the one
hand, to convey accurate information about their culture and political oppression to mainlanders
and non-Japanese, and frustration, on the other, when these efforts result in a superficial
fascination with “Okinawa” that encourages dilettantism, stereotyping, and commercial
exploitation.
Interviewed in April of 2000, a teacher at a local junior college in his early forties complained
that, for too many mainlanders, “Okinawa” has become a “tasty morsel” to consume in the media
and on forays to Okinawa or the greater Osaka community; and, that, for some academics, it has
become a “hot topic” they can use to publish research which is too often based on onedimensional portrayals of Okinawans and the issues confronting them. Perhaps the mostimportant message conveyed in the interviews and questionnaires collected for this study is that
Okinawans in greater Osaka have responded in a wide variety of ways to these challenges, andthat their responses have frequently changed over time to adjust to new conditions. What is often
presented as a dichotomy of “assimilation versus cultural preservation” is, more often today, acontinuing series of choices made in daily life that depend on individual preferences rather thanon decisions to take one side or the other. An eighteen-year old musician interviewed in Februaryof 2001 explained that, although both her parents were from Okinawa, she had chosen to makeher career performing mainland folk music from northeastern Japan (tsugaru-jamisen) because
she was better able to express what she felt in its melodies and rhythms. At the same time, she
preferred Okinawan food which her mother cooked at home.
Nowhere is diversity more evident than in the ways Okinawans in greater Osaka remember orconceptualize a “homeland” they might have left many years ago or where they never lived atall. Among interviewees, several women who came originally to work in textile factories before
World War II said they had decided to remain in greater Osaka after their contract periods ended
because Okinawa did not offer comparable economic prospects for them, their spouses, or theirchildren. Other migrants from both the prewar and postwar period cited limited social andcultural horizons in the rural Okinawan villages where they grew up as reasons for remaining on
the mainland. Descendents who had visited Okinawa only during the U.S. occupation period
described a place of natural beauty, but with widespread poverty and an oppressive atmosphere
under foreign military occupation. Other descendents associated Okinawa with poverty on themainland as well as with discrimination their parents experienced there, and tried to minimize
their connections with it. The magazine journalist quoted above, who came to appreciate herheritage after Shō High School won the national baseball tournament in 1999, had previously
associated Okinawa with her family’s poverty, employment discrimination her father had

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encountered, and teasing she had suffered in school for her parents’ origins. On the other hand,
many Okinawans in greater Osaka, migrants and descendents alike, have visited their“homeland” regularly and describe highly positive memories, associating Okinawa with acongenial natural and cultural environment, as well as a leisurely and healthy lifestyle, where
people suffer less stress and live longer. A number of individuals over 60 expressed a desire to
relocate to Okinawa when circumstances in their lives, such as family obligations, would permit.
In the case of one couple in their 70s, the husband had in fact returned in 1999 to enjoy hisretirement years living in the family’s home on the seashore in a quiet village north of Nago
while his wife remained to live with their son’s family in Taishō Ward where she preferred theurban life style. Such diverse responses, shared by people in many places with memories of anancestral “homeland,” should remind us that, far from being static and monolithic, attitudes andchoices vary widely among individuals in diaspora communities.
Notes
1. “Ryukyu” never caught on as a place name during the U.S. occupation, either in Okinawa or on
the mainland. This was partly because the word “Ryukyu” evoked memories of derogatoryreferences by mainland Japanese who identified people from Okinawa Prefecture with what had
recently been a “foreign” kingdom. This implied that Okinawans were not fully Japanese and, thus,“inferior” to mainlanders.
In addition, Okinawans at home and on the mainland easily saw through the U.S. military’s
insistence on calling Okinawa “The Ryukyu Islands” and the people there “Ryukyuans” as part ofa heavy-handed effort to separate them from from Japan. The failed American attempt to re”Ryukyuanize” Okinawans was undertaken in hopes of suppressing the reversion movement,
which had gained support steadily since the early 1950s.
2. In a sense, I was one of those “occupiers,” though my job as a U.S. Army draftee in themaintenance platoon at an ammunition depot in Henoko from July, 1967 to June, 1968 had
nothing to do with administering the occupation.
3. Kaneshiro Munekazu,”Esunikku gurupu to shite no ‘Okinawa-jin” (Okinawans as an ethnic group),
Ningen Kagaku, no. 37, (1992): 29-57.
4. Fukuchi Hiroaki, ed., Okinawa jokō aishi (The tragic history of Okinawan factory women)(Haibaru, Okinawa: Naha Shuppan-sha, 1985), 18, 37.
5. Higa Michiko, “Jokō” (Women factory workers), Yōju (Banyan), (April 1996): 3.
6. Meiō University historian Higa Michiko, interview, November 2000.
7. Yūhi (Launching forth), Volume of essays and photographs commemorating the 40th anniversaryof the founding of the Osaka League of Okinawa Prefectural Associations (Osaka Okinawa Kenjin
Rengo-kai, 1987), 40,47; Yūhi (Launching forth), Volume of essays and photographs commemorating
the 50th anniversary of the founding of the Osaka League of Okinawa Prefectural Associations(Osaka Okinawa Kenjin Rengo-kai, 1997), 50, 62.
8. Kaneshiro, 1992.

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9. Yūhi, 50, 61.
10. Interviews in Okinawa, June, 2000. Officials at the Okinawa Prefectural Association of Hyōgo
complained to me in June of 2001 that commemorative publications of recent “Uchinan-chu
Taikai,” highly publicized gatherings of people from the Okinawa diaspora held periodically in
Okinawa, devote many pages of text and color photographs to participants from Hawaii and Northand South America, but include barely two paragraphs on a back page for Okinawans in greater
Osaka.
11. Okinawa-ken heiwa kinen shiryō-kan: sōgō annai (Okinawa Prefectural Peace Memorial
Museum guidebook), (Okinawa: Itoman, 2001), 27.
12. Ryūkyū Shinpō-sha, ed., Okinawa: Nijū seiki no kōbō (Okinawa in the twentieth century),(Naha: Ryūkyū Shinpō-sha, 2000), 130-31.
13. Okinawa-ken Heiwa Shiryō-kan, 31.
14. Shima o deta tami no sensō taiken-shū (Collected war experiences of people who left the islands)(Okinawa Kenjin-kai Hyōgo-ken Honbu, 1995), 276-279.
15. Ōta Jun’ichi, Osaka no Uchinaan-chu (The Okinawans of Osaka) (Osaka: Burein Sentaa, 1996), 8889; more of this interview is translated in Chalmers Johnson, ed., Okinawa: Cold War Island, (Japan
Policy Research Institute, 2000), 89.
16. Questionnaire, April 2001.
17. This currently estimated figure is cited in such official publications of the Okinawa Prefectural
Government as “Heiwa no ishiji” (Cornerstone of peace), 1995, and “Okinawa heiwa shiryō -kansōgō annai” (Okinawa peace museum guidebook), 2001.
18. Kaneshiro, 1995.
19. They are concentrated mostly in its Hirao, Kobayashi, Kitamura, Kita Okajima and Minami
Okajima precincts, and comprise about one-fourth of the ward’s total population officially listed at
75,043 for the year 2000 (Taishō Ward Office, General Affairs Section, 2001). For the othercommunities in greater Osaka, unofficial and unpublished estimates are that 7500 migrants and theirdescendents live in Osaka’s Nishinari Ward, next to Taishō Ward, and approximately 10,000 live inor around the Tonouchi section of Amagasaki City, just across the Kanzaki River from Osaka City inHyōgo Prefecture where another 1500 are estimated to live in the Takamatsu section of Takarazuka
City and 900 in Itami City.
20. Mizuuchi Toshio, Ōsaka Okinawa Ajia: Ōsaka Shiritsu Daigaku Zengaku Kyōtsu Kyōiku
Sōgō Kyōiku Kamoku: Ajia no Chiiki to Bunka Enshū, Osaka: Osakai Shiritsu Daigku Kyomubu,
1999, 46-47.
21. Ōta, Osaka no Uchinaan-chu, 89-90.
22. “Hochi sareru Okinawa suramu” (Okinawa slum long-neglected), Asahi Shinbun (July 15, 1968).
23. Mizuuchi, 1999, 47-48.

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24. Interviews for this study conducted in September 1999.
25. Ōta, Osaka no Uchinaan-chu, 91.
26. Ōta, Osaka no Uchinaan-chu, 119.
27. Mizuuchi, 2000.
28. Mizuuchi, 1999, 52.
29. Ōta, Osaka no Uchinaan-chu, 98.
30. Arasaki Moriteru, 44.
31. Hokama Shuzen, Okinawa no rekishi to bunka (Okinawan history and culture) (Chūkō Shinsho,1989). 94-99.
32. Tomiyama Ichirō, Kindai Nihon shakai to “Okinawa-jin” (Modern Japanese society and“Okinawans”), (Tokyo: Nihon Keizai Hyōron-sha, 1990), 1.
33. Some Okinawans over fifty articulate the consonant “s” as “sh” in words like sensei (teacher),pronounced “shenshei,” or sensō (war), pronounced “shenshō.” Some of them also articulate thevowel sounds “o” and “e” as “u” and “i,” respectively, in words like teiki (commuter pass),pronounced “tiiki,” and hako (box), pronounced “haku.”
34. Written comment on questionnaire, April 2001.
35. Interview, April 2000.
36. Uda Shigeki, Uwa- nu ukami-sama: Tokeshi Kōtoku no han-sei (The divine pig: The life ofTokeshi Kōtoku) (Nara: Uda Shuppan Kikaku, 1999), 173-96.
37. Written comment on questionnaire, December 2000.
38. Shinjō Eitoku, “Kansai ni okeru Uchinaanchu no ayumi” (The history of Okinawans in
Kansai), Jichi Okinawa, no. 353, (July 1996): 18.
39. Chinen Seishin’s acutely satirical stage play “Jinruikan” (Human pavilion, 1976) features auniformed “trainer” brandishing a whip who barks commands at “male” and “female” specimens.
40. Yamanokuchi Baku, “Mr. Saitō of Heaven Building” (Tengoku-biru no Saitō-san) (originallypublished in 1938) translated by Rie Takaki in Michael Molasky and Steve Rabson, eds., Southern
Exposure: Modern Japanese Literature from Okinawa, (University of Hawaii Press, 2000).
41. Molasky and Rabson, Southern Exposure, 89.
42. Interviews, June and August 2000.
43. Oyakawa Takayoshi, Ashiato: Oyakawa Takayoshi no kaisōroku (Footprints: recollections of
Oyakawa Takayoshi) (Matsuei Insatsu, 1995), 21-22.
44. Oyakawa, Ashiato, 26.

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45. Fukuchi, Okinawa jokō aishi, 78-79.
46. Nakama Keiko, “1920, 1930 nendai ni okeru zai-Han Okinawa-jin no seikatsu ishiki” (Life styles
among Okinawan residents of Osaka in the 1920s and 1930s), Osaka Jinken Hakubutsu-kan Kiyo
(Bulletin of the Osaka Human Rights Museum), no. 3, (1999): 61-74.
47. Tomiyama, Kindai Nihon, 130.
48. Tomiyama, Kindai Nihon, 111.
49. Higa, 6.
50. Fukuchi, Okinawa jokō aishi, 120.
51. Kinjō Kaoru (March 20, 1987), “Osaka to Okinawa” (Osaka and Okinawa) month-long series
of interviews in Mainichi Shinbun March 9 to April 9, 1987. Mainichi Shinbun interview, March
20, 1987.
52. Ryūkyū, Okinawa: Nijū seiki no kōbō, 52, 56.
53. Molasky and Rabson, Southern Exposure, 82.
54. Though references to the former Ryūkyū Kingdom and its cultural legacy were usually freeof negative connotations, calling someone “Ryūkyū” or “Ryūkyū-jin” was more problematic. As
in examples quoted above, mainlanders used the term “Ryūkyū” or “Ryūkyū-jin” derisively
when scolding factory workers returning late for curfew; or, when announcing on signs in frontof factories and rooming houses “Chōsen-jin, Ryūkyū-jin o-kotawari” (Koreans and Ryukyuans
prohibited). Women from Okinawa who were displayed like circus animals in the notorious“Human Pavilion” at a 1903 international exposition in Osaka were called “Ryūkyū-jin.” And
Hirotsu Ryūrō’s 1926 novel, which he titled “Samayoeru Ryūkyū-jin” (The vagabond Ryukyuan),
was widely criticized by Okinawans on the mainland for a protagonist caricatured from negative
Okinawan stereotypes. Its author subsequently made a public apology and canceled scheduled
reprintings.
Recently, however, the status of the word “Ryūkyū” seems to have improved among Okinawans
and mainlanders alike, though some connotations remain problematic. Okinawans at home and in
the diaspora express varying degrees of pride and nostalgia from historical memories of theformerly independent Ryūkyū Kingdom, in part because hopes have been unrealized for asignificant reduction of the military presence and healthy economic development in Okinawa after
reversion. Furthermore, there is currently a widespread fascination among mainlanders with
cultural manifestations of an often exoticized “Ryūkyū,” which has been exploited commercially.
N.H.K. television’s 1993 serial historical drama, criticized by some Okinawans for stereotyped
characterizations, was entitled, like the book it was based on, “Ryūkyū no kaze” (The Winds of
Ryukyu). The word “Ryūkyū” now occurs frequently in the titles for recordings of widely popular
Okinawan folk and folk-rock music, such as the 1995 c.d. “Ryukyu Magic” (Air-4001, Tokyo).
Okinawans in the prefecture and on the mainland offer lessons in Ryūkyū buy ō (classical dance),
Ryūkyū ryōri (cuisine), and Ryūkyū min’yō (folk music) to a growing clientele.
55. Oyakawa, Ashiato, 2-22.

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56. Johnson, Okinawa: Cold War, 77.
57. Molasky and Rabson, Southern Exposure, 82.
58. Quoted in Ōta, Osaka no Uchinaan-chu, 97-98.
59. Quoted in Nakama, “1920, 1930 nendai,” 99.
60. Quoted in Nakama, “1920, 1930 nendai,” 99.
61. Tomiyama, Kindai Nihon, 164.
62. Interviewed in September, 1999.
63. Miyawaki Yukio, “Kansai ni okeru Okinawa shusshin-sha dōkyō sōshiki no seiritsu to tenkai”(The establishment and development of organizations of Okinawans in Kansai), Ningen Kagaku
Ronshū, 28, (1997): 91; Oyakawa, Ashiato, 293.
64. Koko ni yōju ari (The banyan tree here) Volume of essays and photographs commemorating
the 35th anniversary of the founding of the Hyōgo Okinawa Prefectural Association (Okinawa
Kenjin-kai Hyōgo honbu, 1982), 145-216.
65. Koko ni Yōju ari, 94-95; Steve Rabson, Okinawa: Two Postwar Novellas, (Institute of East AsianStudies, University of California, Berkeley, 1989) (reprinted 1996), xi-xii and 22-23.
66. Arasaki, 71-72.
67. Interview, November 2000.
68. See Yūhi, 1987 and 1997.
69. See Ota Jun’ichi.
70. Interviews of Yamashiro Kenkō, Osaka Office of Okinawa Prefecture, September 2000.
71. Johnson, Okinawa: Cold War, 88.
72. Published interview of Kinjō Kaoru, co-director of the Kansai Okinawa Bunko (Culture
Center), in Yomiuri Shinbun, May 13, 2001.
73. Comment from interview of descendant in his mid-30s, February 2001.
74. Questionnaire, March 2001.
75. For analysis of this crime and its impact in Okinawa, see chapter by Linda Angst in thisvolume.

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Part III: Postcolonial Struggles
To this day, groups formerly oppressed by Japanese imperialism do not enjoy total
equality, and the articles in Part III illustrate how these present-day controversies bothstem from the Japanese colonial past and are intertwined with contemporary geo-politicalconcerns in East Asia. In his study of anti-Japanese activism by certain TaiwaneseAborigines, Scott Simon examines how ethnicity is used to mobilize nationalist movements
in Taiwan and explores the political consequences reaching beyond the legacies of Japanesecolonialism. Next, Kawabata and Kitazawa discuss the legacy of the Battle of Okinawa andthe controversy over how it should be portrayed in textbooks within the context of thelonger history of Okinawa’s colonization. Kawabata and Kitazawa suggest these presentday controversies show the persistence of discriminatory treatment that harkens back to
the colonial period. In sharp contrast to these recent controversies, William Underwood’s
article about the repatriation of the bones of conscripted Korean soldiers to what are now
South and North Korea illustrates a positive step toward reconciliation by the Japanese
government. Lastly, ann-elise lewallen tracks progress in Japanese official recognition of
the Ainu, particularly formal acknowledgement that they are an indigenous group in 2008.
This development, together with Ainu participation in the Indigenous Peoples Summit(IPS), is a historic moment in the Ainu struggle to redress injustices of the colonial period
by asserting their agency on a platform based upon their indigeneity. She argues that the
IPS is part of a larger global phenomenon across the world in which indigenous groups areclaiming the authority to speak out about both indigenous rights and issues that concern
humanity in general, like environmental conservation.

Simon: Formosa’s First Nations and the Japanese

175“Formosa’s First Nations and the Japanese: From colonial rule to postcolonial
resistance”
Scott Simon
January 4, 2006
http://japanfocus.org/-Scott-Simon/1565
Simon’s article profiles the Atayal, one of the fourteen officially recognized groups ofindigenous people in Taiwan4 (also collectively referred to as Taiwanese Aborigines), whotoday comprise 2% of the total population.5 Simon raises many important concerns facedby former colonized subjects both Taiwanese and people still living in Japan, such as the
Ainu and zainichi Koreans today, and particularly focuses on the issue of representation
and who has a legitimate claim to speak on behalf of an oppressed group. In comparison to
Chinese and Koreans, Taiwanese (including Taiwanese Aborigines) tend to have a morepositive view of the Japanese colonial period, especially when contrasted with later
Kuomintang (Guomindang) rule. Simon then illustrates how memories of the Japanesecolonial period are often mobilized for anti-Japanese protests and other nationalist
purposes. For example, in 2005 an Atayal woman May Chin organized demonstrations at
Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo. May Chin and her supporters demanded the removal of thenames from Yasukuni Shrine of an estimated 10,000 Taiwanese Aborigine volunteer
soldiers who fought on the side of the Japanese during the Asia-Pacific War. To the
Aborigine activists, the removal of the names would symbolize the return of theirenshrined souls. (Although the spirits of the dead are said to reside at Yasukuni it is not theactual place of interment and there are no physical remains there).
Simon explains that May Chin’s protest at Yasukuni Shrine is part of a larger panAsian movement; for instance, Koreans and Chinese have also protested against theJapanese prime minister’s visits to Yasukuni Shrine. He also explains that some of thegreatest tension over these issues is not between external groups such as Taiwanese andJapanese; rather, the greatest tension occurs among Taiwanese Aborigines themselves.
Indeed, there are many critics of May Chin within the indigenous community; some point to
her “inauthentic” ancestry (she is half Atayal, half Han Chinese), while others question her
motivations, citing her background as a former actress, challenging her attempt to be alegitimate spokesperson for the Atayal. Showcasing these divsions, at the same time May
Chin was protesting the enshrinement of Aborigine soldiers at Yasukuni, some former
Aborigine soldiers were fighting for the right to have a monument in Taiwan thatcommemorated their service to the Japanese empire. Thus, it is clear that May Chin does
not represent all Atyal let alone Taiwanese Aborigine voices..
The past experiences of Taiwanese Aborigines during wartime and the colonial
period were multi-faceted, and Simon’s article explores how and why these memories aremobilized for political means. Simon argues that one must understand postcolonial issues
Beyond those officially recognized, some indigenous groups, like the Siraya, continue toseek official government recognition as an indigenous group.
5
In contrast to the Taiwanese Aborigines, or those considered indigenous peoples, the other 98%
percent of the population of Taiwan refers to the “native Taiwanese” or those of Han ethnicity,from the Hoklo and Hakka groups who emigrated from China between the 17th and 19th centuries
and settled in Taiwan.
4

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within two contexts: within the highly politicized debate over Taiwanese independence,and in relation to events before 1945. In Taiwan, assertions against or for the Japanese
empire are often linked to the divide between “pan-green” and “pan-blue” parties—those
who advocate Taiwanese autonomy from China, and those who wish for unification with
China, respectively. Simon explains how May Chin’s protest was emblematic of a pan-blue
movement supporting eventual unification of Taiwan with China, pitting her against pangreen parties supporting Taiwanese independence. Simon complicates the issue further bypresenting the results of his fieldwork in Taiwan, conducted among the Taroko communityof the Atayal people, consisting of interviews he conducted with Aborigine elders about
their experiences of Japanese colonialism. Simon’s interviewees did not align themselves
along green and blue lines, and reveal differing views of the colonial period, including bothcondemnatory and fond memories.

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Formosa’s First Nations and the Japanese: from colonial rule to postcolonial resistance
By Scott Simon
Abstract
The Japanese administration of Formosa from 1895-1945 changed the island’s social landscapeforever; not least by bringing the Austronesian First Nation people of eastern and central
Taiwan under the administration of the modern nation-state for the first time. The Taroko tribeof Northeastern Taiwan (formerly part of the Atayal tribe) was the last tribe to submit toJapanese rule, but only after the violent subjugation of an anti-Japanese uprising in the 1930s.
Shortly thereafter, however, Taroko men were recruited into the Japanese Imperial Army. The
names of those who died during the war are now honored at the Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo, asituation that occasionally becomes the object of protests by Taiwanese politicians. This article,
based on field research in a Taroko community in Hualien, looks at how social memories of theJapanese administration have contributed to both Taroko identity and to various other forms ofnationalism in contemporary Taiwan. How do Taroko individuals and collectivities remember
the Japanese? How do these memories articulate with nationalist ideologies in the larger
Taiwanese society?
On June 13, 2005, Taiwanese independent legislator May Chin, who claims an Atayal identity,
arrived in Tokyo with a group of fifty comrades-in-arms representing nine indigenous tribes
from Taiwan. Their goal was to protest in front of the controversial Yasukuni Shrine where thespirits of 2.5 million war dead are honored. Among the dead commemorated in the shrine are
28,000 Taiwanese, including approximately 10,000 aboriginal men, who fought for the JapaneseImperial Army during the Pacific War. Although the families of Taiwanese soldiers have longdemanded compensation from Japan for unpaid pensions, this protest made only one demand:
that the names of aboriginal soldiers be removed from the shrine.
When May Chin and her cohort arrived at the shrine on June 14, Japanese police refused to letthem get off the bus, allegedly in order to protect them from Japanese right-wing extremists who
had already arrived at the scene. For a few days, this became the leading news item in Taiwan,
with television news broadcasting images of Taiwanese aborigines in traditional dress being
prevented from exiting their bus by Japanese police. May Chin accused Japan of violating theirdemocratic rights of protest. This event, part of the tensions between Japan and its neighbors,underscores the importance of memories of Japanese occupation to contemporary indigenous
peoples in Taiwan.

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May ChinChin’s aboriginal protest occurred at a time of widespread protest against Japan that involves
more than Formosan aboriginal grievance against the former colonial overlords. During the same
summer, the Chinese and South Korean governments also objected publicly to both JapanesePrime Minister Koizumi Junichiro’s visits to the shrine and revisions to history textbooks inJapan. During the race for Taiwan’s KMT (Chinese Nationalist Party) leadership, candidate
Wang Chin-ping also led protests against Japanese occupation of the Senkaku (Tiao-yu-tai)Islands which Taiwan claims is a part of the Republic of China. May Chin’s protests at the
Yasukuni Shrine thus articulate with a larger pan-Asian mobilization against Koizumi. The
memories of the deceased aboriginal soldiers, depicted as victims of Japanese imperialism by
Chin and her group in much of the Taiwanese media, are potent symbols when mobilized in thatstruggle. As this essay attempts to illustrate, however, Taiwanese memories of Japanesecolonialism are very different from Chinese and Korean memories. Korean and Chinese anger
toward the Japanese has been much more potent than that of the Taiwanese, many of whom also
remember positive dimensions of their experience under Japanese colonial rule. It is thus crucial
to contextualize the local meaning of anti-Japanese protest and to grasp how memories of theJapanese occupation are mobilized to different ends in different situations.
Scholars working on collective memory, following in the footsteps of Maurice Halbwachs (1980[1950]) and Henri Lefebvre (1991 [1974]), point out that social space is the product of struggle
between conflicting groups of people attempting to give concrete form to collective memory.
Through her protests at the Yasukuni Shrine over several years, May Chin brought Japan’s
Formosan aboriginal soldiers into Taiwanese social memory as symbols of Taiwanese, andparticularly aboriginal, suffering and injustice during the colonial period. In understanding theseand other political events, the job of the anthropologist is to look beyond media images andpolitical symbolism, elucidating and understanding social memory within a broader ethnographic
and political economic context (Gupta and Ferguson 1997).

Simon: Formosa’s First Nations and the Japanese179

Like most issues in Taiwan, memories of Japanese administration must be understood as part ofthe contending nationalisms of “pan-blue” and “pan-green” political discourse which shape thenational political agenda. The Chinese Nationalist “pan-blue” parties include the KMT, thePeople First Party (PFP), and the Chinese New Party (NP). In favor of eventual unification with
China, at least under the conditions that China democratizes and becomes prosperous, theyemphasize the importance of unity among ethnic groups and highlight memories of cross-ethnic
resistance against Japan. The Taiwanese nationalist “pan-green” parties include the ruling
Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) and the Taiwan Solidarity Union (TSU). Stressing
Taiwanese autonomy from China, they emphasize Taiwanese differences from mainland
Chinese. They thus celebrate aboriginality as a non-Chinese identity; and perceive both Japaneseand Chinese rule as colonialism at the expense of all Taiwanese. One important element of pangreen discourse is that the Japanese brought modernity to the island, making its Taiwanese
inhabitants more civilized and advanced than the Chinese who arrived with Chiang Kai-shek in1945 and afterwards. These two ideologies color different spots on the maps of these contested“imagined communities” (Anderson 1983) on the island.
May Chin’s aboriginal protest at the Yasukuni Shrine was part of this larger struggle between
pan-blue and pan-green camps. Just two months earlier, Taiwan Solidarity Union (TSU)
Chairman Shu Chin-chiang had paid a visit to the shrine and was greeted upon his return toTaipei by May Chin and a group of protesters who pelted him with eggs at the airport. Two days
later, a coalition of veterans who had served in the Japanese military protested outside of
Taiwan’s legislature in favor of Shu’s visit to the Shrine and against May Chin’s actions. Chen
Chun-chin, president of the Association for the Bereaved of Taiwanese Serving as JapaneseSoldiers, defended Shu and others of his generation who regularly visit the Yasukuni Shrine topay respect to their former colleagues and relatives. He said that the KMT has consistently
neglected former Japanese soldiers, as they failed to bring many survivors back from Japan after
the war and subsequently failed to seek compensation from Japan on their behalf. The TSU thus
promised to seek compensation for the veterans and build a Shinto Shrine in Taiwan for the
memory of those who died in the war.
May Chin began organizing her trip immediately after this conflict, making the Yasukuni Shrine
into an aboriginal issue. Without anthropological study of the memory of Japanese colonialism,
however, it is difficult to understand the extent to which May Chin and other politicians
represent the grievances of indigenous communities or merely use aboriginality in the service ofother political goals. Based on fieldwork in Taroko communities, we query the relationshipbetween the mobilization of social memory in such protests and aboriginal perceptions of theJapanese period. How and why are memories of the Japanese period contested in theircommunities? What is at stake for these people? What other social memories exist, and what
alternative political possibilities do they suggest?
Memories of Japan: Voices from the Field
In the summer of 2005, I spent three months doing field research in a Taroko village which I willcall Bsngan. I had previously established an ongoing relationship with the village, having visited
it several times since 1996 and having worked with members of the community on issues
surrounding the Asia Cement excavation on land belonging to villagers. The village lies at thefoot of the Taroko National Park and has a frequently contentious relationship with park

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administration. This village is inhabited largely by members of the Truku subgroup of the
Taroko tribe, which is composed also of the Tkedaya and Teuda subgroups.
The Taroko are related to the Atayal tribe of which May Chin is a member, being born of an
Atayal mother and Mainlander father. The Taroko broke away from the Atayal tribe, however,on January 14, 2005, when Taiwan’s Legislative Yuan recognized their long-standing claims to
be an independent ethnic group. Many observers, including some members of the tribe, argued
that this reclassification was divisive and reduced the numbers of the tribe, hence politicalinfluence. Taroko claims to be different from the Atayal, based on linguistic and cultural criteria,
nonetheless, are recorded in Japanese-era ethnographic studies (Taiwan Governor-General
Provisional Committee 1996: 5). The reclassification gave the Taroko greater autonomy andpositioned them to perhaps become the masters of Taiwan’s first indigenous autonomous region.
As discussed below, the establishment of a Taroko autonomous region is currently promoted by
the Presbyterian Church, an institution with strong historical links to the pan-green parties in
Taiwan. In Bsngan, the Presbyterian Church has its roots in the Japanese period, when the local
authorities tried to suppress all forms of Christianity and the local people were forced to holdservices clandestinely in a cave.
As in most Taiwanese indigenous villages, the people of Bsngan have vivid memories of theJapanese occupation that ended with the conclusion of World War II. This village of 2,224
people, with its main residential area located at the mouth of the Taroko Gorge, was important as
the site of armed resistance against the Japanese. Even before the tribe was subdued, it was a
trading post where aborigines could sell hides to Japanese and Hoklo-speaking Han Chinese(now the “Native Taiwanese”) in exchange for such items as alcohol, matches, and salt. Like
most communities in Taiwan, the village is dotted with Japanese-era construction. In Bsngan,
those architectural reminders include a Japanese-era power plant, an abandoned campus ofworkers’ dormitories, a few homes, and the former nursing station.
The Japanese language can still be heard every day in Bsngan, not just in the conversations of theelderly, but also in songs crooned in road-side karaoke stalls and in everyday Taroko
conversation. Even young people use “arigatoo” to say thank you, some shopkeepers are in the
habit of calculating money in Japanese, and the Taroko language is interspersed with Japanesewords. Church sermons, for example, are delivered in Taroko peppered with Japanese words inboth the Presbyterian and True Jesus churches. These are not just foreign church-related terms
like kyokai (church), and kamisama (gods), but also such words as jikan (time), ishoo ni(together), and tokubetsu (especially). The use of Japanese time measurements, including thedays of the week and even usages such as nansai da to ask a person’s age or nanji da to inquire
about the time, all reveal how modern usages of time were introduced by the Japanese. The
young as well as the old incorporate Japanese into daily conversation.
Memories of the Japanese era come up in daily conversation, and not just by people who lived
through that era, showing that the Japanese experience is central to Taroko identity. In contrast to
the historical memories promoted by politicians such as May Chin, who cast themselves in a
Manichean drama of good versus evil, memories of Japan in the villages are far more nuanced.
This paper draws its examples primarily from conversations with members of the Mawna family.
[This, like all names of private individuals, is a pseudonym.] The courtyard of Ukan Mawna,
decorated with photos from the Japanese era, is often the site of dinners and conversation overtea between leading members of the community. Along with the courtyard and exhibition hall ofSimon: Formosa’s First Nations and the Japanese181

his brother, who has done research on the tribe’s custom of facial tattooing, this is also one of thefirst places that a visitor to the village will see. The memories of this family are highlighted here
not only because they can be said to be representative of the tribe, but also because they illustrate
the complex articulation between personal and social memory.
The Japanese as Agents of Modernity
Like the entire Taroko tribe, the family of Ukan Mawna has had a close relationship with Japan.
Their mother, whose biological mother had traveled around the island making facial tattoos formembers of the Atayal tribe, spent most of her childhood in the home of a Japanese policeman.
After the Japanese sent her to nursing school, she worked in the clinic in the village. Her children
boast that she vaccinated the entire village. With her medical training, in fact, she was one of themain agents of Japanese modernity and a key part of the process of displacing traditional Taroko
healers from their position in society. In the past, each village had healers, who could contact thespirit world and prescribe cures for medical and other ailments. Now Bsngan has no healer. The
nearest healer is an elderly woman in a neighboring village. [1]Ukan’s father had a much more conflictual relationship with the Japanese, especially with thepolice. One of the earliest aboriginal converts to the True Jesus Church, which was illegal underJapanese occupation, he established the congregation in Bsngan. In the many social gatherings at
his home, Ukan Mawna delights in telling the miraculous story of his father. At one point, theJapanese arrested him, put him on trial, and planned to execute him for his illegal missionary
activities. They imprisoned him in a bamboo hut to await execution. On the night before his
execution, however, a typhoon struck the island and destroyed his bamboo prison. He managed
to escape through the forest and his sentence was later commuted. Ukan concludes his story bysaying that his father subsequently received a Japanese education and learned to love theJapanese in the village. “My father never let anyone say a bad word about the Japanese,” he says
with every re-telling of the story.
Ukan, a retired policeman, participates regularly in meetings to discuss development plans in thevillage. He is an outspoken proponent of restoring Japanese-era buildings as tourist sites, and haseven suggested rebuilding the Shinto Shrine as a tourist site and historical museum. On one ofmany drives through the countryside in which he pointed out Japanese-built irrigation systems,
water towers, power plants and an alcohol distillery, he summed up his perception of Japan’s
legacy in the village:
There are no Taroko who hate the Japanese. Quite the contrary. They love the Japanese.
Why do they love the Japanese? Because of the charity of the Japanese. The Japanese
took them from the worst kind of feudalism and brought them civilization. It was theJapanese who brought them roads and electrical power plants.
Neither Ukan nor most members of his tribe are apologists for Japanese colonial expansion. In
contrast to pan-green revisionists, they do not use nostalgic memories of Japan to criticize the
KMT. Ukan, in fact, is a staunch supporter of the KMT in his village, is an acquaintance of May
Chin, and has even made a TV series on the 1930 Wushe Incident, in which violent conflict rose
between the Japanese and the Taroko. In that series, he portrayed the Japanese as cruel overlords
who manipulated differences between the Truku, Tkedaya and Teuda to gain control of theirterritory, even using some groups in military attacks against the others. These and othermemories of Japanese rule, also a part of village life, emphasize the pain of colonial rule. Unlike

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the social memories mobilized by politicians, however, individual memories such as those of his
parents are often contradictory, highlighting the brutality of the Japanese but also theircontributions to the community.
Memories of Japan: the Price of Development
Older women remember vividly one of the most painful episodes of the colonial era, as it was theJapanese who banned the Atayal and Taroko custom of tattooing their faces. Whereas facial
tattoos were formerly considered a sign of female beauty and were necessary conditions formarriage, the Japanese quickly brought an end to the custom. Older women recall that they had
to have their facial tattoos removed in order to attend school, which they and their families
wanted because Japanese education held out the promise of a better life. [2] The girls thus
removed their tattoos by having the skin removed surgically, which sometimes disfigured theirfaces permanently. One graduate student at Donghwa University told me that she hadinterviewed several of these women, one of whom burst into tears at the memory of the painful
and humiliating operation as well as subsequent disfigurement.
Taroko men identify strongly with the forest, so closely associated with their lifestyle of hunting
and gathering. They recall how they once lived in villages high in the mountains, but were forcedby the Japanese and later by the KMT state to move down into the plains. The Taroko stilllament the fact that this forced relocation removed them from their ancestral lands and made it
more difficult to access their traditional hunting territories. The move also incorporated them into
a new social system that included agriculture and the use of cash rather than commodity
exchange in trade relations. Many claim that they were better off with a lifestyle of hunting andgathering than they are today, when most men make a living as construction or cement workers
if they have regular employment. Those who venture into the forests to hunt in the nearby
National Park that covers their traditional hunting territories risk being arrested as poachers.
Frequently, however, the men contrast Japanese rule with subsequent Chinese rule under the
KMT, adding subtle nuance to negative colonial memories by contrasting that experience withwhat came afterwards. Ukan Mawna, for example, said that the Japanese left the former village
intact and they often visited it after moving to the plains. The roads to the village weremaintained and the Japanese constructed a Shinto shrine there. Another elder pointed out that theJapanese cut down camphor and other trees, but they always negotiated with the indigenous
peoples about access to land. They also took good care of the aboriginal people with educationand health care, even sending the sick to be treated at Taiwan Imperial University hospital if
necessary. This theme of the Japanese era as the “good old days” is not uncommon in Taroko
reminiscences of the era, even as the same interlocutors also acknowledge the pain of colonial
occupation.

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Japanese and Ayatal in Taroko

Memories and Identity: Comparing Indigenous and Native Taiwanese Experiences
These indigenous memories of Japanese occupation articulate with, but remain distinct from,those of the so-called “Native Taiwanese.” They are thus not merely the result of the Native
Taiwanese taking over the construction of political discourse under the presidencies of Lee
Teng-hui and Chen Shui-bian. The Native Taiwanese are the Hoklo and Hakka groups whose
ancestors arrived in Taiwan from Fujian and Guangdong Provinces between the 17th and 19th
centuries. Unlike the Mainlanders, who arrived after World War II with Chiang Kai-shek, theNative Taiwanese lived through Japanese occupation. For many Native Taiwanese, memories of
the Japanese occupation are central to their ethnic identity. For them, Japan is primarily a symbolof modernity and their Japanese education a sign of their higher levels of development comparedto Mainlanders (see Simon 2003). For aboriginal people, however, the Japanese period was also
important to identity formation because it positioned them as resisters against colonial
encroachment. This makes their memories of Japan very different from those of the Native
Taiwanese. Whereas Native Taiwanese collective memory focuses on the trope of modernity, theTaroko use memory to highlight their fierce resistance to outsiders.

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In Bsngan, even young people take pride in what they describe as the “fierceness” of their tribe.
One young woman, whom I shall call Biyuq here, explained to me over coffee in her shop how
her tribe had resisted the Japanese for decades. The Japanese built many roads up into themountains, she explained, in order to transport heavy artillery up to high places and shoot downon the local people. It was very hard for the Japanese to take over Taroko territory, however,
because the hunters would hide in the forest and then attack the Japanese with bows and arrows.
By far the best-known event in Taiwan is the Wushe Incident of 1930, the memory of which hasoften been mobilized by pan-blue parties as evidence of “Chinese” resistance to Japanese
occupation. On October 27, 1930, a group of over 300 Atayal warriors led by Mona Rudao
attacked Japanese spectators at a sports event in Wushe and killed 130 people. It took Japaneseforces two months, and the deaths of 216 aboriginal people, to completely quell the uprisingsthat followed (Ukan 2002). In an account that emphasized Taroko rather than Chinese identity,
Biyuq explained that the Wushe Incident was meant to be the final battle, and that one village
decided to sacrifice themselves for the good of the tribe as a whole. According to her version of
events, all of the women and children committed suicide to encourage the men to sacrifice theirlives willingly. [3] The men then went out to fight the Japanese to the death. Without families toreturn to, they had no need to fear death and could fight to the end to drive the Japanese out of
the forests forever.
Although the ultimate result was military defeat, mass slaughter and loss of territory, the Taroko
still remember this event as a tribute to their tribal fierceness. They are not mistaken. According
to John Bodley 4,341 Japanese and Han Chinese settlers died at the hands of indigenous
Formosans between 1896 and 1909 (Bodley 1999: 56); and a further 10,000 casualties wererecorded during the 1914 pacification campaigns against the Taroko (Nettleship 1971: 40). [4]This experience of resistance, which is constantly revived and celebrated through collective
memory, altered Taroko life forever. Although the suppression of the Tribe in the Taroko,
Hsincheng and Wushi Incidents eventually ended control over their own territory, it also madethe Taroko self-conscious subjects of history. This has been translated from personal to social
memory in the Taroko Gorge. It remains, however, a social memory very different from that
promoted by May Chin in Tokyo.

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185

Funeral pyre at the Wushe Elementary School

Museum Identity: Social Memory of the Taroko Incident
In the summer of 2005, the Taroko tribe became the subject of a special exhibit in the basementof the Taroko National Park Visitors Centre. This exhibit, designed by temporary curator Chin
Shang-teh (a Han from Tainan and a graduate student at National Donghwa University in
Hualien), illustrated the history of the Taroko Incident with photos and artifacts he had collected
in Japan. The exhibit showed how the Japanese slowly encircled indigenous villages, evenconstructing electric fences to restrict their movement, in order to get them to surrender toJapanese forces.
In 1910, the Japanese Governor-General Sakuma Samata launched the “Five Year Plan to
Subdue the Barbarians.” In May 1914, Japanese troops attacked the people of the Taroko Gorge
by coming in simultaneously from Hualien City in the South and Wushe through mountainpasses from the West. The Taroko resisted fiercely for 74 days, but were ultimately forced tosurrender control of their lands to the Japanese.

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Sakuma Samata

The exhibit contained graphic photos of the military expeditions, including the electric fences,
Japanese artillery, and Taroko people resisting with simple hunting guns. Many of the photos
were taken from memorabilia albums sold in Japan at the time to celebrate the victory. The final
panel of the exhibit, a drawing of the sun setting over the mountains, brought the issue ofresistance to contemporary Taiwan. The text said that the Taroko came down from themountains, saw their land occupied by outsiders, and “have not yet been able to return to theirancestral lands.” Putting it into context, museum visitors could recognize that the arrival of the
Republic of China and later the establishment of the Taroko National Park were precisely
extensions of imperial conquest, the replacement of one colonial overlord with another. This
written discourse repeated Taroko activist Tera Yudaw’s contention that the Taroko National
Park is a form of “environmental colonialism” (Tera 2003: 169).

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Return our land

According to the curator, the exhibit almost never saw the light of day. When the Han parksuperintendent viewed the exhibit the day before the opening ceremony, she asked the curator to
remove the final panel with its oblique reference to the National Park as another colonial power.
She said that it risked inciting “ethnic conflict.” The curator refused to comply and threatened toremove the entire exhibit if she removed the plaque without his permission. The superintendent
backed down and allowed the exhibit to open with the final panel in place.
In the subsequent months, however, the National Park refrained from advertising the exhibit to
the surrounding communities. Instead, the Presbyterian Church, which has close links with theindigenous social movements, took the lead in inviting their members to visit the exhibit. This
move was consistent with other church actions in promoting Taroko identity. The Presbyterian
Church, in fact, has become the main institution behind the recognition of the tribe as distinct
from the Atayal, and now the most important lobbyist for the establishment of autonomous
indigenous regions in Taiwan. [5] The Presbyterian Church is well-known for its close
relationship with both the DPP (Rubinstein 1991, 2001) and indigenous social movements

The Japanese Empire: Colonial Lives and Postcolonial Struggles

188(Stainton 1995, 2002). They hope that local recognition of indigenous sovereignty will
eventually lead to international recognition of Taiwanese sovereignty.
The difficulties encountered by the curator of this exhibit and its promotion by the Presbyterian
Church rather than by the park administration and the local government reveal the political fault
lines underneath these contested social memories. The main difference centers on indigenous
autonomy, an issue that divides the pan-blue camp and the pan-green camp in indigenous
communities and beyond. The DPP has promised to establish autonomous districts forindigenous peoples as part of its desire to emphasize the non-Chinese identity of the island. Its
policy assumes that self-determination should be the basis for activities in indigenous areas justas they insist on the right of self-determination for Taiwan. The pan-blue parties favor moreassimilationist policies toward indigenous peoples, emphasizing economic development andemployment over autonomy. Their parties thus say little about self-government and justify theemployment-generating activities of mining and other companies on indigenous land. Just as thememories of Japan evoked by May Chin fit into a larger pan-blue imagining of Taiwan, thememories exhibited in the park exhibition fit into a wider pan-green discourse. In this context,
ownership of indigenous social memory has potential implications that go far beyond the local
community.
Conclusion
Anthropologists John and Jean Comaroff have called for bringing historical understanding into
ethnography, saying that, “No ethnography can ever hope to penetrate beyond the surface planesof everyday life, to plumb its invisible forms, unless it is informed by the historical imagination”(1992: xi). It is important to note, however, that the historical imagination is often also a national
imagination; part of contested ideologies that can very well influence the fate of a people. Yet
every time historical memory is mobilized in support of contemporary nationalist narratives,conflicting personal memories are silenced. This dynamic is especially visible in Taiwan, asociety torn between two conflicting historical imaginations.
May Chin, in attacking the former colonial overlords, has long used highly publicized protests todraw indigenous support away from the pan-green parties. In this case, she managed successfully
to draw attention away from pan-green TSU attempts to seek compensation for the veterans andeven to portray that party as complicit with Japanese imperialism. In doing so, she discredited
locally the same people who promise indigenous autonomy within the framework of the existingstate on Taiwan. She is able to do so at relatively low cost by mobilizing resentment against
Japan, which also articulates well with the larger geopolitical context in which both China andKorea protest against state visits to the Yasukuni Shrine, preeminent symbol of Japanese wartime
nationalism and empire.
In the months leading up to the local elections in December, 2005, the KMT continued toappropriate indigenous social memory by covering their headquarters in Taipei with a large
image of Wushe hero Mona Rudao. This tactic has the twin effect of appealing to Mainlanderanti-Japanese sentiments and of positioning the KMT as the voice of indigenous peoples. The
party’s consistent support in indigenous areas, including overwhelming support in the December
2005 local elections, suggests that this strategy has contributed to electoral success. May Chin’s
protests are only a part of this larger struggle.

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Mona Rudao, center

Taroko perceptions of May Chin, however, are just as ambivalent as are their memories of Japan.
In fact, although most aboriginal people support the pan-blue KMT and PFP parties (Wang 2004:
695) and although May Chin was re-elected, there was very little enthusiasm in Bsngan for her
well-publicized protest trip to Japan. As the news came on TV the morning after her trip, I asked
the people around me in the breakfast shop (an important place for anthropological research)what they thought of the commemoration of aboriginal soldiers in the Yasukuni Shrine. One
middle-aged man and Presbyterian Elder stated matter-of-factly that the news has nothing to dowith him, since the protesters are not Taroko. He added that May Chin has spent so much timewith Mainlanders that she no longer understands aboriginal needs.
When I asked if any Taroko had served in the Japanese military, he said that they had. He
insisted, however, that many groups are commemorated in the Yasukuni Shrine, so it would beunreasonable for any one group to ask for their spirit tablets without returning them to thecountries and families of all 2.5 million spirits. The breakfast shop owner, who is a member ofboth the Presbyterian church and the KMT intervened by saying that the Taiwanese who foughtfor the Japanese were not volunteers. The conversation turned into a discussion of reasons why
they would serve, the man saying they were forced to join the army by circumstances of poverty,
not by Japanese conscription. Despite different interpretations of the Japanese period, however,one perception emerged as consensus: that May Chin was acting primarily for personal politicalgain, trying to position herself as the primary advocate of indigenous communities even incomparison to other aboriginal KMT candidates. If it were not for her political manipulations,which included getting funding for the trip, it is unlikely that her group of aboriginal people
would show up to protest at the shrine.
Personal memories of the Japanese era in the Taroko community are thus ambivalent, showing
both positive and negative aspects of the occupation. As Halbwachs observed, historical memoryis preserved not just in regions, provinces, parties, and classes, but also in certain families and in
the minds of individuals. It is thus important to make a distinction between individual andcollective memory (Halbwachs 1980: 51). The individual memories of Japanese colonialism are
now passing away with the individuals who carry them. The few remaining Taroko men who
served in the Japanese military show no resentment against the Japanese; if anything, they were
well treated (Nettleship 1971: 43). It is striking, in fact, that few Taroko individuals even bringup the issue of having been forced into the Japanese military, focusing instead on issues of forest
resources, education, health, and tattooing. This gap, more than anything, illustrates how thosespecific memories are mobilized by politicians more than they are discussed by individuals.

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Collective memories persist, given expression through monuments, actions in space including
demonstrations, as well as words spoken in the community; they often reflect current politicalstruggles and can be mobilized for political goals. Since May Chin’s protests at the Yasukuni
Shrine are so obviously tied to pan-blue politics, there are good reasons for the Taroko to remain
ambivalent about those events. They know that the discourse comes from outside of theircommunity and is tied to a political agenda not of their own making. The social movement forautonomy is also led by Taroko community members, including Presbyterian ministers andschool teachers. In spite of pan-blue success in the elections, they provide a very prominent
alternative to the historical imagination of the KMT and its allies; albeit one that is also widely
perceived as coming from outside of the local community. The struggle for indigenous memory
is in many ways a struggle for indigenous future as local members of different parties claim to be
the legitimate heirs of Taroko fierceness. Like any claims for a valuable inheritance, they are
hotly contested. The ultimate outcome, especially whether or not they will choose a pan-green
version of local autonomy, is thus far from certain.
In any event, it is clear that the Japanese occupation of Taiwan was the defining moment that
constituted aboriginality as it is currently imagined in Taroko territory. Before the Japanesearrived, the Qing Dynasty had merely labeled the Taroko and other unassimilated tribes as “rawbarbarians” (shengfan) and had not attempted to administer their territories. The threat of having
their heads cut off, in fact, was sufficient deterrence to keep Chinese settlers out of indigenous
territories -- especially in Taroko land. The Taroko tribe was known as “wild people” and was
only “civilized” after the Japanese came to Taiwan (Nettleship 1971: 39). When they finallyencroached on those territories with far superior weaponry, however, the Japanese also createdthe conditions for resistance that became the core of Taroko identity for members of all subgroups.
As aboriginal individuals subsequently became agents of Japanese modernity, even as soldiers
for the Japanese army, they were conscious of doing it as members of the fierce Taroko tribe. It
was thus the Japanese occupation that fashioned the Taroko into self-conscious historical actors.
The various social movements of this tribe in recent years, with demands for name changes, landsettlements, and now autonomy, show that this spirit of resistance is alive and well. As “savages”
become soldiers, and soldiers become social activists, the tribe has rapidly developed a First
Nations identity as advocates of both stripes mobilize memories of past resistance in different
contexts. Whether the state is green or blue, therefore, Taroko memories will continue to shape
the relationship between state and tribe.
Thanks to Mark Selden and Jim Orr for their comments on earlier drafts of this article.
References
Anderson, Benedict. 1983. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of
Nationalism. London: Verso Press.
Barclay, Paul. 2003. “Gaining Trust and Friendship’ in Aborigine Country: Diplomacy,
Drinking, and Debauchery on Japan’s Southern Frontier.” Social Science Japan Journal 6 (1):7796.

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191

Bodley, John. 1999. Victims of Progress. Mountain View, CA: Mayfield Publishing.
Comaroff, John and Jean. 1992. Ethnography and the Historical Imagination. Boulder: Westview
Press.
Gupta, Akhil and James Ferguson. 1997. Culture, Power, Place: Explorations in Critical
Anthropology. Durham: Duke University Press.
Halbwachs, Maurice. 1980 (1950). The Collective Memory, translated by Francis Ditter andVida Yazdi Ditter. New York: Harper and Row.
Honda, Katsuichi. 2000. Harukor: an Ainu Woman’s Tale (translated by Kyoko Selden).
Berkeley: University of California Press.
Huang, Shiun-wey. 2004. “ ‘Times’ and Images of Others in an Amis Village, Taiwan.” Time &Society 13 (2&3): 321-337.
Kayano, Shigeru. 1994. Our Land was a Forest: an Ainu Memoir (translated by Kyoko Selden).
Boulder: Westview Press.
Lefebvre, Henri. 1991 (1974). The Production of Space, translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith).
Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
Nettleship, Martin A. 1971. An Experiment in Applied Anthropology among the Atayal of
Taiwan. Ph.D. thesis in Anthropology, London School of Economics.
Rubinstein, Murray. 1991. The Protestant Community on Modern Taiwan: Mission, Seminary
and Church. Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe.
_____. 2001. “The Presbyterian Church in the Formation of Taiwan’s Democratic Society, 19452001.” American Asian Review 19 (4): 63-96.
Simon, Scott. 2003. “Contesting Formosa: Tragic Remembrance, Urban Space, and National
Identity in Taipak.” Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power 10 (1): 109-131.
Stainton, Michael. 1995. Return our Land: Counterhegemonic Presbyterian Aboriginality in
Taiwan. M.A. thesis in Social Anthropology, York University, Toronto.
_____. 2002. ‘Presbyterians and the Aboriginal Revitalization Movement in Taiwan.’ Cultural
Survival Quarterly 26 (2): 63-65.
Taiwan Governor-General Provisional Committee on the Investigation of Taiwanese Old
Customs. 1996. Report on the Old Customs of Barbarian Tribes, Volume 1, Atayal Tribe,translated by Academia Sinica Institute of Ethnology Translation Group. Taipei: Academia
Sinica.
Tera Yudaw. 2003. Muda Hakaw Utux (Crossing the Ancestor’s Bridge). Hualien: Tailugezu
Wenhua Gongzuofang.
Ukan, Walis. 2002. “The Wushe Incident Viewed from Sediq Traditional Religion: a Sediq
Perspective” Pp. 271-304 in From Compromise to Self-Rule: Rebuilding the History of Taiwan’s
Indigenous Peoples, ed. by Shih C.F., Hsu S.C. and B. Tali. Taipei: Avanguard Publishing
Company.

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Wang, Fu-chang. 2004. “Why did the DPP Win Taiwan’s 2004 Presidential Election? An Ethnic
Politics Interpretation.” Pacific Affairs 77 (4): 691-696.

Endnotes[1] After a long period in which these practices had fallen out of favor and were perceived as
sinful, there are signs of a revival. She now has two apprentices. That, however, is beyond thescope of this essay.
[2] For similar accounts about how the Ainu of Hokkaido were forced to end tattooing practices
and join Japanese modernity in colonial Hokkaido, see Honda 2000 and Kayano 1994.
[3] I have not seen this account of the Incident in historical accounts of the event, but that does
not mean she is mistaken. It is interesting how her story makes the women critical agents of
Taroko history.
[4] Unfortunately, neither of these authors could break down the statistics into different nationaland ethnic groups of the victims.
[5] To outsiders, it may seem unclear why they would support Taroko independence from the
Atayal. From the perspective of the activists, however, it is a logical strategy. Considering thatindigenous communities get many financial resources from county governments and thatpolitical factions are closely tied to county electoral processes, it will be much easier for them todevelop the necessary consensus within the smaller Taroko tribe rather than within a larger
Atayal tribe spread throughout several counties and one urban area in northern Taiwan. Eventhen, it is likely that the Taroko Autonomous Indigenous Region will only include the Taroko of
Hualien because those in Nantou do not support the project. Members of pan-blue factions
accuse the DPP and their Presbyterian allies of manipulating the Taroko in order to gain anelectoral foothold in Hualien County.

Kawabata and Kitazawa: A Story That Won’t Fade Away

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“A Story That Won’t Fade Away: Compulsory Mass Suicide in the Battle of Okinawa”
KAWABATA Shunichi and KITAZAWA Yuki, introduction by Matthew Allen
July 12, 2007
http://japanfocus.org/-Mathew-Allen/2471
Kawabata and Kitazawa’s article addresses the Battle of Okinawa, which was fought
as a war of attrition; the Japanese government leaders knew that the more they prolonged
a battle in Okinawa, the longer they would be able to stave off invasion of mainland Japan.
One of the horrors of war that unfolded during the nearly twelve-week conflict was theJapanese military’s abandonment of the civilian population. The number of civiliancausalities reached around 100,000, among the highest total for any single battle in the
Pacific Theater during the Asia-Pacific War. During the battle the Japanese Imperial Armyencouraged Okinawan civilians to kill themselves rather than surrender to American
forces, asserting that the Americans would rape, torture, and sadistically kill them. Over
one fourth of the Okinawan civilian population died and many of these deaths have been
attributed to the Japanese army’s direct orders to commit suicide. The army distributed
grenades and poison and instructed families on how to commit group suicide. Even thoughmany survivors of the battle have recounted their experiences, the Japanese Education
Ministry in 2007 challenged their accounts, insisting that the military leaders had not
demanded that Okinawans die for the emperor. The Education Ministry called for theremoval of the term “group suicide” (shudan jiketsu) from history textbooks, a step thatmost Okinawans view as an attempt to whitewash history. The authors of this article
recount several survivors’ stories of the battle, including the Japanese army’s
encouragement that they commit suicide. Okinawans believe it is important to remember
their treatment by the Imperial Army as well as the horrors of civilian suicides, because it ispart of a longer legacy of colonization and discriminatory treatment by those from themainland.

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A Story That Won’t Fade Away: Compulsory Mass Suicide in the Battle of Okinawa
Kawabata Shunichi and Kitazawa Yuki
Introduction by Matthew Allen
From early in 1945, Okinawa’s geopolitical location at the southern border of ‘Japan proper’made it an obvious and immediate target for the Allies’ invasion of the mainland of Japan. In themost intensive land attack launched against Japan by the United States, the so-called ‘typhoon ofsteel’ rained down on Okinawans for months as the Japanese military dug in for a war of
attrition.
Okinawans, who became ‘Japanese’ after events in the late nineteenth century led to annexationof the former independent kingdom, were perceived by Tokyo, and particularly by the Japanesemilitary, as potentially disloyal subjects. The concept that Japan should protect civilians, andespecially those from the margins of nation – i.e. Okinawans – was anathema for the military,
who tended to see Okinawans as impediments to their defence campaign (Ota, 2000). This
distrust of Okinawans as ‘the other within’ (Tomiyama, 2000), led to a policy of disseminating
disinformation about the motives and behaviour of the invading Americans, which in turn led toa directive that Okinawan civilians should choose to die by their own hand rather than at thehand of the evil, rapacious Americans.
Grenades were distributed to villagers, and many families, hiding in caves on the outer islands
in particular detonated the devices, killing themselves and their families. This state-sponsoredself-sacrifice was seen as necessary by the Japanese government at the time. Okinawans werecaught in a conundrum; they were told that the military would not protect them, that were theycaught they would be raped and/or tortured, and that in order to demonstrate their loyalty to theemperor, and for practical reasons, they were expected to die rather than surrender. That morethan one quarter of the population died in the battle is evidence of the sacrifice Okinawans madefor Japan. From survivors’ accounts, there is little doubt that a considerable number of these
deaths were directly or indirectly caused by the Japanese army and its policies, including directorders to commit suicide.
Today, 35 years after the postwar reversion of Okinawa to Japanese rule, the Japanese
education ministry has decreed that the military policy of enforcing villagers in the front line of
the land invasion to lay down their lives ‘for the sake of the emperor’ is historically ‘debatable’
and therefore references to ‘shudan jiketsu’ should be expunged from seven new high school
textbooks. Such perspectives do great harm to the rapprochement which Tokyo and Okinawa
have been developing since Japanese recovery of Okinawa in 1972. Moreover, such perspectives
demean Okinawans, their sacrifice during the Pacific War, and their extraordinary will tosurvive against all odds. Already condemned to a footnote of Japan’s history as a nation,
Okinawa’s wartime history is being officially rewritten in a way which denies the discrimination
with which the former independent kingdom was viewed by officials in Tokyo in 1945.
Decisions such as that taken by the education ministry reinforce the idea that there are some inpower in Japan who would like to see history cauterised, and in doing so reject the lessons that
one can learn from a more critical, reflexive, and informed perspective of history. It is exactly
such historical recidivism that concerns China, Korea, and indeed many nations in Asia today.

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References
Ota Masahide 2000. Essays on Okinawa Problems. Gushikawa City: Yui Shuppan.
Tomiyama Ichiro 2000. “‘Spy’: Mobilization and Identity in Wartime Okinawa.” In Japanese
Civilization in the Modern World XVI. Nation State and Empire, edited by T. Umesao, T.
Fujitani, and E. Kurimoto. Osaka: Senri Ethnological Studies, no. 51, National Museum of
Ethnology.
Under the education ministry’s screening of history textbooks, references to coercion by theJapanese military in forcing Okinawan civilians to commit mass suicide in 1945 have beenerased.

Miyahira Haruko points to the site of a bomb shelter where she says she was told by a soldier to kill herself.
(Kawabata Shunichi)

But what will not vanish is survivors’ memories. Time and again, survivors of the bloody Battleof Okinawa have spoken of how they were told to kill themselves, often in groups, rather than beshamed by being taken prisoner by invading American forces.
Of the roughly 200,000 casualties, 94,000 were civilians, accounting for nearly one-quarter of
Okinawa’s population.
The testimony of survivors adds to a barrage of criticism against the government, which has
instructed many publishers of high school history textbooks to alter descriptions that refer to theJapanese military’s direct involvement in the mass suicides of islanders.
In the Kerama islands, plenty of survivors are willing to tell their stories. Miyazato Ikue, 82, isone. She told The Asahi Shimbun that she was told by a Japanese soldier to take her life bypulling the pin on a hand grenade.

Kerema Islands

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Miyazato was working at a Japanese army unit stationed on Zamamijima island when U.S. forces
started aerial bombing raids of the Kerama islands on March 23, 1945, in a prelude to landing on
the Zamamijima and Akajima islands on March 26 and Tokashikijima island on March 27.
Miyazato said she asked Japanese soldiers to take her with them when they rallied tocounterattack.
Refusing her request, a Japanese soldier handed her a grenade, saying, “In an emergency, killyourself with this (grenade).” He then showed Miyazato how to detonate the device.
Mass suicides of local residents occurred March 26, the day U.S. troops began to land on theisland. The previous night, islanders had been told to gather in front of a monument near theirvillage. Because of heavy shelling by U.S. forces, some islanders didn’t make it.
It emerged that many residents committed suicide separately and in groups at various locations,such as in dugouts and caves.
Miyazato later learned that her mother and a sister had committed suicide together. She, too,
contemplated committing suicide with a group of friends but the grenade she was given did not
explode.
Miyahira Haruko, 80, said she was also told by a soldier to kill herself rather than be taken
captive when she took cover from the bombing in a shelter on Zamamijima island.
“Please have the good grace to kill yourself to avoid being caught,” Miyahira quoted the soldier
as saying.
Uezu Sachiko, 84, said a Japanese soldier told a group of evacuating islanders, including her, tocommit suicide before they were found by U.S. troops.
Uezu was fleeing with her mother and her elder brother’s wife, among others, when they met
with another group of residents in a mountainous area.
A Japanese soldier who was with the group told them to kill themselves by any means possible,
even by biting off their tongues, if they were found by the Americans.
According to Uezu, one of the islanders, a young man, began to cry, saying he did not want todie.
Many of the Zamamijima islanders fled into the mountains after U.S. troops landed.
On Tokashikijima island, mass suicides occurred March 28.
Yoshikawa Yusuke, 78, said he had no doubt that Japanese army soldiers ordered the suicides.
Yoshikawa, who then worked at a village office, was with his father and mother when civilians
started taking their lives en masse.
He now lives in Aichi Prefecture. He said that he and other residents reached a site near aJapanese army position after an all-night walk while watching U.S. troops landing on the island.
Local residents drafted into military service also gathered with their families. Many took hand
grenades with them, Yoshikawa said.

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Typically, mass suicides occurred after a village mayor had been contacted by a locally draftedsoldier who served as a messenger.
Yoshikawa said he could not hear what the messenger was saying above the roar of shelling.
Soon after, he heard a series of explosions caused by grenades all around him.
Yoshikawa’s father tried to set off an explosion by hurling four grenades, one after another, tothe ground. But none of them blew up.
Aniya Masaaki, professor emeritus at Okinawa International University, said it was impossible
for civilians, including islanders who had been drafted into military service, to prepare hand
grenades for use in mass suicide without receiving orders from superiors.
However, some survivors deny the Japanese army played a direct role in the suicides.
Chinen Choboku, 84, former officer of a naval special volunteer unit on Tokashikijima island,said he had never heard his unit chief hand down such instructions.
This article appeared in the International Herald Tribune/Asahi Shimbun on May 15, 2007 andwas posted at Japan Focus on July 12, 2007.
Matt Allen teaches Asian history at the University of Auckland and is a Japan Focus associate.
He is the author of Identity and Resistance in Okinawa.

The Japanese Empire: Colonial Lives and Postcolonial Struggles

198“New Era for Japan-Korea History Issues: Forced Labor Redress Efforts Begin to Bear
Fruit”
William Underwood
March 8, 2008
http://japanfocus.org/-William-Underwood/2689
While Kawabata and Kitazawa’s article regarding the whitewashing of history anderasure of the term “group suicide” from history textbooks shows the Japanese government
trying to hide its crimes of the colonial period, Underwood describes a more positive—
albeit small—step forward in redressing colonial harm. Due to former South Korean
President Roh Moo-hyun’s actions between 2003 and 2008, the process of repatriating theremains of Koreans to South Korea has begun, after several attempts by previous
administrations stalled.
On January 22, 2008 the remains of 101 Korean military conscripts were returned
to South Korea from Yutenji Temple in Tokyo following an official memorial ceremony.
Over one thousand sets of remains were scheduled to follow soon after. This achievement
was based on Roh’s tough stance toward Japan, which he saw in terms of a diplomatic war,
and a desire among both Koreans and Japanese to resolve this issue. The fruits of Roh’slabor were not realized until the presidency of his successor, President Lee Myung-bak(2008-2013), who called for a “mature relationship” with Japan focusing on the future, andso downplayed Roh’s policies, which focused on redressing colonial harm. The repatriationof the bones from Yutenji Temple in Tokyo in 2008 was intended to be the first step in
redress between both Koreas and Japan– a process that would include repatriation,compensation, and truth-finding commissions–but Underwood is pessimistic due to
President Lee’s weaker commitment to redress.
Furthermore, although Underwood sees the Yutenji repatriations as a positive firststep, he also discusses several cases in which the Japanese government rejected redress;for example, the government has refused to help repatriate Korean civilian, as opposed tomilitary remains, and has also refused to return money in post-office savings accounts that
Korean laborers deposited during the colonial period. Underwood explains that there is
still much work to do, including finishing the repatriation of over 2000 sets of remains of
Korean civilians who died in Japan, many of whom had essentially been kidnapped andbrought to Japan as forced labor.
The repatriation process does not involve just bones, but also living people. After
Japan’s defeat in the Asia-Pacific War, Russia regained control of the entire island of
Sakhalin (previously divided at the 50th parallel, with the southern portion, Karafuto, aJapanese colony). In his other articles published with the Asia-Pacific Journal, Underwood
explains that, even sixty years after the end of colonial rule, South Koreans who had been
forced to work in Karafuto in coal mines and lumber yards still were trapped there because
neither Japan nor the Soviet Union worked to bring them home. Similar issues are ongoingregarding Koreans in Japan who have citizenship in North Korea, as Tessa Morris-Suzuki
explains in another article published with APJ. Please see the Recommended for Further
Reading section at the end of this course reader for the full citations to these articles.

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New Era for Japan-Korea History Issues: Forced Labor Redress Efforts Begin to Bear
Fruit
William Underwood
Historical issues involving Japan and South Korea have entered a new phase with theinauguration in Seoul on February 25 of a conservative president and the repatriation in Januaryof the remains of 101 Koreans who died while forcibly serving in the Japanese military during
World War II.
President Lee Myung Bak has said he “does not want to tell Japan to apologize or engage in selfreflection,” calling instead for future-oriented ties and a “mature relationship” with Japan. Lee
replaced President Roh Moo Hyun, who spoke of a “diplomatic war” with Tokyo over history.
Yet the tough stance of the previous president, coupled with vigorous cross-border activism
involving South Korean and Japanese citizens, has begun yielding results. Tokyo is cooperating“on humanitarian grounds” in resolving some historical legacies, but it is digging in its heels on
many others.
Japan’s mixed track record prior to and during the Roh era is most evident in the case of wartime
labor conscription. Roughly 700,000 Koreans were forced to work for private companies within
Japan. More than 300,000 Koreans were forced to serve in the Japanese military in fighting andsupport roles; 22,182 are known to have died.
On January 22, the remains of 101 Korean military conscripts killed in nearly a dozen countries
were returned to South Korea from Yutenji Temple in Tokyo, following an official memorial
ceremony attended by high-ranking diplomats from Japan and South Korea. The Japanese
government, for the first time, invited 50 South Korean family members to attend the
ceremony—paying their travel and lodging expenses and providing about $300 in condolencemoney for each fatality. The South Korean government extended similar condolence payments.
South Korea’s ambassador to Japan called the repatriation of the remains a “valuable start to heal
historical wounds.” The 1,034 sets of Korean bones still stored at Yutenji Temple are slated to be
returned later this year to South Korea and perhaps, subsequently, to North Korea, the ancestral
home of 431 of the war dead. The remains belong mostly to military conscripts killed onoverseas battlefields, but they include civilians (some of them women and children) who died in
the accidental sinking of the Ukishima-maru transport ship soon after the war.
During the Yutenji memorial ceremony, a Japanese government representative expressed “deepremorse and apology” for suffering inflicted upon Koreans under Japanese colonial rule from1910 to 1945, quoting from the written apology offered by former Prime Minister Obuchi Keizo
to former President Kim Dae Jung in 1998.
Access to the main ceremony, however, was tightly restricted by the Japanese government.
Media personnel, members of Japanese activist and religious groups, and even a current JapaneseDiet member were barred from attending. Japan’s Foreign Ministry claimed in the days before
the event that South Korean family members had requested the private service, but this depiction
was rejected by the South Korean government. Larger, more inclusive memorial rites were held
for the war victims on January 23 at the Manhyange Dongsan national cemetery in Chonan,
South Korea.

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Memorial services for Korean remains repatriated from Japan six decades after World War II wereconducted in a variety of religious traditions at the Manhyange Dongsan national cemetery in South Korea inJanuary. (Nanba Koji photos)

Returning Korean military conscript remains has been a fitful, decades-long process. Japan
reportedly sent 6,000 sets of remains to South Korea during the Occupation under American
supervision, followed by an additional 8,800 sets in 1969. Using military name rosters supplied
by Japan, Seoul authorities during the 1970s worked to track down relatives and return remains,
but a public backlash ensued because Tokyo provided bereaved families with no apologies andonly inexpensive obituary gifts.
This helped to derail the remains repatriation process within South Korea and essentiallystranded the bones now at Yutenji Temple, which had been stored in the compound of Japan’s
Health Ministry until 1971. It has also recently come to light that Japanese officials attempted tosend the Yutenji remains to both South Korea and North Korea in the 1970s. Seoul’s anticommunist regime, however, blocked the plan because it might have led to warmer North KoreaJapan relations.
Former Prime Minister Koizumi Junichiro promised former President Roh at their December
2004 summit meeting that Japan would promptly return the Yutenji bones and assist South
Korea’s broader efforts to settle forced labor issues. But reparations work bogged down due toemotional history disputes that erupted in 2005, scuttling what was supposed to be a “Year of
Friendship” marking 40 years of restored diplomatic ties. The main flashpoints were Koizumi’svisits to Yasukuni Shrine, Japanese history textbooks, and the ownership of a group of tiny islets(known as Dokdo in the East Sea to Koreans and Takeshima in the Sea of Japan to Japanese).
Roh stated that Japan’s forced labor and comfort women systems were tens of thousands of times
worse than the abductions of Japanese citizens by North Korea in the 1970s and 80s. He
repeatedly charged that Japan had failed to live up to global norms of morality concerning
historical wrongdoing, and suggested that legal claims by A-bomb survivors, former comfort
women and former conscripts abandoned on Sakhalin Island have not been resolved.
South Korea’s 85-member Truth Commission on Forced Mobilization under JapaneseImperialism has received over 220,000 statements from elderly former conscripts or family
members since 2005. Among the 60,000 cases of forcible conscription certified so far are
Koreans who were convicted of Class B and C war crimes stemming from mistreatment ofUnderwood: New Era for Japan-Korea History Issues

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Allied prisoners of war. The commission described the men as “double victims” whose honor
should be restored.
Public hearings held across South Korea have helped former conscripts reclaim their dignity andproduced a historical record of the forced labor experience—along with a list of more than 2,000Japanese firms that benefited. Oral histories have been published, in Korean and Japanese, and adocumentary movie is being planned. A truth commission website helps former conscripts locate
wartime companions, with the site’s database of high-resolution photos being searchable by yearof conscription, destination and type of work. The South Korean government plans to eventually
open a forced labor museum and research center, most likely in the southeastern city of Pusan.
Last fall the Truth Commission on Forced Mobilization reported that Yasukuni Shrine has
inaccurately listed the names of 60 Koreans among the rolls of Imperial Japanese war dead.
Forty-seven of the Koreans were confirmed to have died after World War II, but 13 are still
alive. Shrine officials, however, refuse to remove the names of individuals once they have beenenshrined. Yasukuni received the names of Korean military fatalities from the Japanese
government, which never attempted to notify Korean families of their relatives’ fates.
Guided by local Japanese activists, Korean truth commission members have also conducted factfinding investigations at former mines and construction sites across Japan where civilian
conscripts toiled and frequently died. The ambitious goal is to find, identify and repatriate theremains of forced laborers still in Japan.
The Japanese government claims, despite much historical evidence to the contrary, that the state
was never directly involved in labor conscription by Japanese companies. On this basis, Tokyo
insists it does not know how many Korean civilians were conscripted or how many died in thecustody of private firms—and displays little interest in finding out.
In addition to the Yutenji bones, some 2,000 sets of civilian Korean remains have been located inJapanese temples and charnel houses since 2005, following a Japanese government request to
corporations, municipalities and religious bodies to supply information. Hundreds of the remains
may belong to forced laborers who died during the war. But most probably belong to Koreans
who died before or after the conscription years (1939-1945) or were not labor conscripts; thelatter category would apply to perhaps two-thirds of the two million or so Koreans in Japan at
war’s end. South Korean and Japanese officials have jointly inspected charnel houses containinga small number of these civilian remains. Most Japanese companies are declining to assist
researchers.

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Left: Community researchers in August 2006 describe a former Mitsubishi coal mine in Iizuka, Fukuoka, toSouth Korean truth commission members and Korean relatives of a forced laborer who died in a wartime
explosion there. Right: Historical rendering of the Mitsubishi Iizuka mine tower from the landmark’s
signboard. (William Underwood photos)

The Roh administration in 2005 made public all 35,000 pages of diplomatic records involving
the 1965 treaty that normalized relations with Japan, setting a new regional standard for
information disclosure. The accord provided Seoul with the equivalent of $500 million in grants
and loans, but it also states that claims “concerning property, rights and interests” of the South
Korean government and its citizens “have been settled completely and finally.” Disclosure of therecords cemented the public perception that the treaty’s “economic cooperation” formula had
betrayed the countless individual Koreans harmed by Japanese colonialism.
In response, Roh spearheaded the passage in November 2007 of a law granting compensationfrom South Korean coffers to individual victims of wartime forced labor. The measure will
provide just over $20,000 to families of military and civilian conscripts who died or went
missing outside of Korea; conscripts who returned to Korea with disabling injuries; and families
of conscripts who returned to Korea with injuries and died later. Payouts are expected to begin in
May 2008.
In addition to fixed-amount compensation, the new law also calls for the South Korean state to
make individualized payments to former conscripts and families based on financial deposits now
held by the Bank of Japan (BOJ)—money that forced laborers earned but never received. The
60-year-old deposits consist largely of unpaid wages, pension contributions, and death anddisability benefits for both civilian and military conscripts.
Partly to discourage Koreans from fleeing worksites in wartime Japan, companies funneled theirsalaries into “patriotic savings accounts” and made mandatory deductions for the national
welfare pension fund. Japan’s Welfare Ministry ordered companies to deposit all unpaid sums
for civilian conscripts into the national treasury in October 1946. American Occupation officials
approved of the Japanese government directive, which was considered a first step towardUnderwood: New Era for Japan-Korea History Issues

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remunerating the large numbers of ex-conscripts in Japan and Korea. The former industrial
workers were viewed as a potentially destabilizing force in both societies precisely because they
had been harshly mistreated and then cheated out of their pay.
Wages for Korean soldiers and support personnel conscripted into the military were similarly
deposited into postal savings accounts during the war. Japanese authorities deposited salaryarrears and related benefits for Korean (and Taiwanese) military conscripts into the BOJ in
February 1950. Japan’s Finance Ministry reported the total amount of these deposits to
Occupation officials later that year, with the figures broken down by branch of military service.
It has only recently become clear that the Japanese government prior to 1965 made extensive
preparations to compensate the families of Koreans killed while serving with the armed forces,even earmarking funds for this purpose in the national budget. Likewise, the original intent of thecivilian deposit system was to disburse to workers the funds they had earned. The final form of
the normalization treaty, however, sidestepped the question of compensating individuals forconscription and recast reparations as a purely state-level diplomatic issue. The South Korean
government was aware, at least in a general sense, of Japan’s two postwar deposit schemes.
The Koizumi administration conceded in response to Diet questioning in 2004 that the Bank ofJapan continues to possess more than 2 million yen in financial deposits related to Korean labor
conscription. The deposits could be worth $2 billion today, if adjusted for six decades of interestand inflation. Japanese courts have confirmed the existence of wage and pension deposits inindividual cases, while ruling that the 1965 treaty nullified the rights of Korean plaintiffs toclaim the money. Judges have also found that the Japanese state never notified or attempted to
notify ex-conscripts or families about the deposits, even when it would have been possible to doso.
The future status of these financial deposits, which remain shrouded in secrecy and are virtually
unknown to the Japanese public, represents a major piece of unfinished reparations business.
Japan’s commitment to historical reconciliation is now being tested by South Korean requests fordetails about the deposits and other aspects of labor conscription.
Seoul will not be able to fully implement its domestic compensation program without fuller
Japanese cooperation at least in providing records. The South Korean truth commission has
requested Japanese welfare pension records in order to verify that applicants for compensation
were conscripted during the war. To provide individually tailored payments, the commission will
also need a Japanese document known as the Unpaid Financial Deposits Report.
At a state-level conference last December, Japanese officials reportedly supplied their Koreancounterparts with name rosters and, for the first time, financial deposit information for 11,000
military conscripts. Japan is inching toward open discussion of the deposits based on theunderstanding that Tokyo is not legally responsible for wartime conscription and the money will
not be released. However, the Japanese side stated that similar data for the far larger class ofcivilian conscripts is dispersed across Japan and would be difficult for the central government tocompile.
This double standard is consistent with Japan’s past practice, for foreigners as well as Japanesenationals, of privileging the status of military victims of the Asia Pacific War over civilian ones.
Since 2006 the Japanese government has footed half the bill for memorial visits by Korean

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family members to battle sites in Okinawa and six South Pacific nations where their conscripted
relatives died. There is no similar program for visits to places in Japan where civilian laborers
perished.
Neither is the Japanese government helping to send the bones of civilian conscripts home to
Korea. In late February, a citizens group called the Hokkaido Forum returned the remains of
three Korean teenagers killed at Nippon Steel’s Muroran foundry in July 1945 during an
American naval bombardment, along with the remains of a fourth conscript who died at a nearby
coal mine during the war. The government rejected the group’s request for an official
representative to attend the Muroran memorial service and for travel expenses, funeral expenses
and condolence money to be paid to visiting relatives—as in the case of the Yutenji Temple
remains in January.
Repatriation of all civilian conscript remains in Japan could take years. Community activists say
the project should include compensation, apologies by the state and corporations involved, andexplanations about causes of death. Systematic government cooperation concerning cremation
records and domicile registries would greatly speed up the work of identifying remains. But local
authorities in some cases are withholding such dusty data on privacy grounds, a practice that
activists say shields Japanese companies by masking deaths on the job.
A Fukuoka-based citizens group called the Truth-Seeking Network for Forced Mobilization wasformed in 2005 to facilitate the work of the South Korean government’s truth commission within
Japan. A month-long project in 2006 featured public memorial rites and symposiums at 27 sites
nationwide, as well as visits by 20 Korean relatives of conscripted workers who died in Japan.
More than 200 people excavated a communal grave in an open field in Hokkaido, containing theremains of 10 Koreans who died while constructing an airfield and were apparently cremated on
the spot.

Identifying the bones of Korean forced laborers exhumed in August 2006 from a field in Sarufutsu village,
Hokkaido. (Peacetown photos)

Beginning in 1991, dozens of compensation lawsuits have been filed in Japanese courts against
private companies and the Japanese state for civilian and military conscription. Related litigation
demanding apology and compensation has involved Koreans who were forced into militarysexual slavery, exposed to the atomic bombings, killed in the Ukishima-maru accident, convictedUnderwood: New Era for Japan-Korea History Issues

205of Class B and C war crimes, abandoned on Sakhalin Island, interned in Siberia, and enshrined in
Yasukuni against their families’ wishes.
Virtually all of these legal efforts have failed due to the claims waiver language in the JapanSouth Korea treaty and time limits for filing claims. A decision by the Toyama District Court in
September 2007 was typical. Judges dismissed the suit by elderly female plaintiffs, but agreed
that as teenagers they had been threatened or deceived into going to Japan and then forced towork at a factory where they were confined without pay. Three companies—New Nippon Steel,
NKK, and Nachi-Fujikoshi—have compensated a handful of Korean forced labor victims overthe past decade in isolated cases through out-of-court settlements. Led by Mitsubishi, Japan’s top
wartime munitions manufacturer, Japanese industry has otherwise evaded all responsibility forthe massive forced labor program.
In an unprecedented ruling in November 2007, the Japan Supreme Court found that the
government’s refusal to provide health-care benefits to A-bomb survivors living overseas isillegal, and ordered the state to pay damages. The top court confirmed that the plaintiffs had been
forcibly taken from Korea and forced to work for Mitsubishi Heavy Industries in Hiroshima, but
rejected their demand for back salary. In a December 2007 decision that could aid reparations
activities, the Tokyo District Court ruled that the Ministry of Foreign Affairs violated Japan’s
information disclosure law by failing to respond in a timely manner to a request for documents
concerning the 1965 accord. The Japanese government has appealed the decision.
More than 600 elderly Koreans were moved—at Japanese expense—from Sakhalin to South
Korea last October, in the latest phase of a program that has resettled 2,300 people since 1992.
Japan denies official responsibility for encouraging or coercing as many as 150,000 Koreans tomove to Sakhalin before 1945, but Tokyo has quietly spent millions of dollars building a special
village for the repatriates in South Korea. Late last year a dozen Sakhalin Koreans, now living in
Sakhalin, South Korea and Japan, filed a new lawsuit seeking the refund of money they
deposited into postal savings and postal life insurance accounts when the island was part of theJapanese empire.
The tens of thousands of Korean “comfort women” represent an egregious class of forced laboroutside the formal conscription system. In operation from 1995 to 2006, the Asian Women’s
Fund (AWF) was a landmark initiative by Japanese standards of postwar responsibility,
extending prime ministerial apologies and compensation from private sources. But only about
300 women across East Asia accepted the payments due to deep suspicions about Japanesesincerity. The response by Japanese citizens to the government’s appeal for AWF donations wasembarrassingly weak; it is likely that much of the private funding was covertly provided by theJapanese government, whose overriding concern was avoiding legal responsibility. The South
Korean government has offered financial assistance and medical benefits to former comfort
women since 1993.
Last year former Prime Minister Abe Shinzo suggested that comfort women had not been forced
into providing sex for Japan’s military. Abe first implicitly repudiated, then under internationalpressure explicitly supported, the Kono Statement of 1993 acknowledging direct military
involvement. The firestorm of controversy prompted national legislatures in North America andEurope to pass resolutions calling on Japan to do more to repair the injustice. In Seoul lastmonth, the eight hundredth “Wednesday demonstration” was held in front of the Japanese
Embassy, demanding more robust apologies and compensation based on legal culpability.

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North Korea is obviously a central player in Japanese-Korean reconciliation efforts. Pyongyang
has often undermined redress efforts through exaggerated propaganda, nuclear weapons
development, missile launches and, above all, the abduction of Japanese nationals. Japan iscurrently excluding North Korea from the remains repatriation process, and North Korean
relatives of deceased conscripts have been barred from entering the country to take part incommunity events.
Tokyo has been trying since the early 1990s to normalize relations with Pyongyang using the
economic assistance strategy it employed with Seoul. But North Korea has insisted on formal
state reparations for war and colonial responsibility. Around ten percent of forced laborers camefrom northern Korea and their compensation claims, for damages as well as the salary arrears
essentially being held in escrow by Japan’s treasury, remain open. While the Japanese
government is keeping silent about its ultimate plans for the BOJ financial deposits, it seems
clear that the funds will remain frozen until ties with North Korea are established.

Late 1970s photos of the former Akasaka coal mine in Fukuoka operated by Aso Mining, the family firm ofprevious Japanese Foreign Minister Aso Taro, and a Korean forced to work there during the war. Aso
Mining used an estimated 12,000 Koreans, as well as 300 Allied prisoners of war, for forced labor.
(Hayashi Eidai photos)

President Lee Myung Bak vowed during his election campaign to roll back key features of thepast ten years of liberal leadership in South Korea, especially the “Sunshine Policy” of tolerant
engagement with the north that the Roh administration inherited from his predecessor Kim Dae
Jung. Lee indicated during the presidential transition that he will allow the Truth Commission on
Forced Mobilization to expire when its funding mandate ends in late 2008. Although Lee waselected on a primarily economic platform, one reason for the rise of South Korea’s “New Right”
is waning public support for the state’s 14 historical commissions, several of which target
colonial-era collaboration with Japan. Lee and Japanese Prime Minister Fukuda Yasuo haveagreed to resume reciprocal summit meetings this spring.
Lee himself was born in Japan in 1941 to voluntary Korean immigrants who returned to their
homeland in 1946. He was jailed in 1964 for taking part in student demonstrations against theSouth Korean government and the treaty with Japan. Two years from now, he will oversee
commemorations of Japan’s annexation of Korea in 1910, an event that promises to be both
painful and cathartic.
The global trend toward repairing historical injustices offers few parallels for the recent direct
involvement of the South Korean government in redress efforts targeting a neighboring
democratic state. Japanese and Korean civil society actors will try to maintain the momentum ofUnderwood: New Era for Japan-Korea History Issues

207

the Roh years and continue healing the scars of forced labor. The effect upon Japanese-Korean
reconciliation of Lee’s weaker commitment to reparations remains to be seen.
William Underwood, a faculty member at Kurume Institute of Technology and a Japan Focus
coordinator, completed his doctorate at Kyushu University on forced labor in wartime Japan.
Note on Sources
Much of this article is based on unpublished information obtained from the Kyosei Doin Shinso
Kyumei Nettowaku (Truth-Seeking Network for Forced Mobilization), a Japanese group
comprised of leading academic historians and community-based researchers. The Truth-Seeking
Network cooperates closely with citizens groups in South Korea and the South Korean
government’s Truth Commission on Forced Mobilization under Japanese Imperialism. The
group maintains an extensive website for its “Together with Korean Families” project, aimed at
resolving the conscript remains issue. The author subscribes to the group’s closed email
discussion list, which features daily Japanese translations of history-related articles from Korean
media sources. The email list frequently includes “on background” postings by central actors in
the remains repatriation process describing developments not reported elsewhere. For generalbackground see Utsumi Aiko, Uesugi Satoshi and Fukudome Noriaki. Ikotsu no Sengo:
Chosenjin Kyosei Doin to Nihon (Remains after the War: Forcibly Mobilized Koreans andJapan). Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 2007 (Iwanami Booklet No. 707).

The Japanese Empire: Colonial Lives and Postcolonial Struggles

208“Indigenous at last! Ainu Grassroots Organizing and the Indigenous Peoples Summit
in Ainu Mosir”
ann-elise lewallen
November 30, 2008
http://japanfocus.org/-ann_elise-lewallen/2971
In this article, lewallen discusses a pivotal moment in Ainu history, when on June 6,
2008, the Ainu were formally recognized as an indigenous people by the Japanese
government. For a people whose history of colonization has often been brushed aside instudies of Japanese history, such as in textbooks, this official recognition appears to be a
step in the right direction. However, this is probably not the last battle. The government
recognized the Ainu as indigenous due to international pressure that came when the G8summit was hosted in Toyako, Hokkaido in 2008; it was a potential cause for
embarrassment if the host country was seen to be blatantly ignoring indigenous people’s
rights. Therefore, some Ainu leaders have doubted the commitment of the Japanese
government to their needs, since Japanese officials have not acknowledged that imperial
government policies marginalized and impoverished Ainu. Fundamentally, it remains to be
seen whether the government will enact policies that actually redress colonial treatment of
the Ainu.
The Ainu push for formal recognition as an indigenous people is part of a growing
global movement across the world in which indigenous peoples are building a transnational coalition that advances indigenous rights, since their indigeneity was often theexcuse for colonization or other discriminatory policies in the past. This is the first step tochanging the way in which legislation that affects indigenous people is created and passed.
This international movement led to the Indigenous Peoples Summit (IPS), which included
indigenous people from all over the world and met in Hokkaido prior to the G8 Summit in2008. The IPS was the first international gathering in the context of a G8 Summit to focus
exclusively on indigenous peoples, as well as to their responses to “climate changesolutions,” and their critique of the “the global economic model being promoted by G8
nations.” The Ainu organizers who participated in the IPS sought to affect national policies,
to empower Ainu youth, and to connect Ainu issues to the larger transnational indigenous
movement. They also insisted on the importance of including indigenous people’s points ofviews in future environmental policy making. Ainu participation in the IPS is envisioned asa way to grow a larger network of “global Ainu and indigenous grassroots organizing,” andas an alternative to the traditional channel of reform, the Ainu Association, the oldest
government-sanctioned organization in Hokkaido, established in 1930.6 At the end of her
essay, lewallen warns that the IPS may represent some of the interests of Ainu in Hokkaido
and throughout Japan, but the diversity of Ainu in general must not be overlooked; Ainu
individuals have a variety of priorities and areas of concern that may not align with thegoals of the IPS.

6 The Ainu Association website is at http://www.ainu-assn.or.jp/english/eabout04.html(accessed 29 October 2012).

lewallen: Indigenous at last!

209

Indigenous at last!
Ainu Grassroots Organizing and the Indigenous Peoples Summit in Ainu Mosir
ann-elise lewallen
On June 6, 2008, Ainu people across Japan achieved a long-sought goal: they were unanimously
granted recognition as an indigenous people by both houses of the Diet with passage of the“Resolution calling for the Recognition of the Ainu People as an Indigenous People of Japan.”
Although the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (DRIP) wasapproved in September 2007 with a “yes” vote from Japan , the government continued to refuseindigenous recognition for Ainu people, citing the absence of an international standard forindigeneity. This June lawmakers forced the government’s hand by adopting the resolution; theCabinet Secretariat accepted the resolution on the same day. It would seem that the Cabinet
Secretariat was the last to realize what international society and indigenous peoples across theworld had acknowledged since the 1980s and what Hokkaido governor’s Utari Affairs Council
had determined in 1988; that Ainu rightfully belonged to the community of indigenous
peoples. Japan ’s plan to host the G8 Summit in Hokkaido during July and much-anticipatedglobal attention were undoubtedly the primary factors in the hasty adoption of the resolution; theIndigenous Peoples Summit in Ainu Mosir created added pressure vis-à-vis grassroots
mobilization. As such, the G8 Summit made possible a critical moment – a moment forarticulating agency – whereby a new generation of grassroots Ainu leaders were able to launch
new initiatives, by harnessing the wave of international attention focused on Hokkaido in earlyJuly to articulate a new politics of Ainu indigeneity, which this time had received the imprimaturof Japanese officialdom.
Aside from a small group of Ainu living in Kamchatka, Ainu today reside across Japan, andHokkaido or Ainu Mosir is considered by most Ainu to be their ancestral territory.[1] “In thepast our ancestors lived abundantly on this earth [Hokkaido], unrestrained and freely carrying on
their lives, and its an unmistakable fact that we have inherited this vast earth from our ancestors,”
Ainu organizer Shimazaki Naomi emphasized.[2] International and domestic attention to
indigenous issues was elevated with DRIP’s passage, and the Japanese government anticipatedheightened international attention to Ainu issues, with the G8 scheduled for
Hokkaido. Expecting that Ainu groups might orchestrate protests in downtown Sapporo orTokyo thereby exposing the bankruptcy of Japan’s progressive stance on social issues –especially concerning human rights legislation – many have argued the Diet adopted the
Resolution to avoid a public shaming before the world community. Legislators were concernedthat if Japan, the world’s second largest economy and an aspiring leader among so-calledadvanced nations, were held to international standards for human rights, it would rankembarrassingly low on the global scale. [3] Their concerns were warranted as Ainu and otherminority groups have disparagingly categorized Japan a “third world nation” by human rights
standards, and they did organize protest marches straight to the Diet. But these took place in
May before the G8 started. Japan ’s reported sensitivity to international opinion and externalpressure (gaiatsu) has long been exploited by minority communities to improve human rights
inside Japan , and domestic rallying to pass the resolution ahead of the G8 Summit once again
supports this argument.
Undoubtedly attention to indigenous issues has been amplified through adoption of DRIP andglobal civil society has been responding to the indigenous movement in recent years. In Latin

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America, indigenous peoples have emerged as significant leaders of the new social movements;
Bolivians elected an indigenous Aymara leader, Evo Morales, as President in 2006, andParaguayan President Fernando Lugo recently appointed an indigenous woman as Minister ofIndigenous Affairs. In the Commonwealth, Kevin Rudd’s apology to Australia’s “Stolen
Generation” (February 2008) has been widely considered a defining moment for initiating areconciliation process,[4] followed by Steven Harper’s official apology to survivors of Canada’s“Indian Residential Schools” (June 2008),[5] and recently the New Zealand governmenttransferred ownership of 176,000 hectares of forest land to seven Maori tribes.[6]Just ahead of the G8 Summit, twenty-four indigenous delegates gathered in Hokkaido to discuss
climate change and indigenous survival during the Indigenous Peoples Summit (IPS) in Ainu
Mosir 2008, from July 1 to 4. “Because the main theme of the Toyako Summit was“environmental issues,” [the Japanese government] created a situation where indigenous Ainu
could not be ignored,” Ainu organizer Shimazaki Naomi argued. “We felt that it was critical to
make an appeal to the G8 leaders that Ainu are still living here and thriving, and communicate
the thoughts of indigenous peoples [during the G8 Summit]. Holding the IPS ahead of the G8
Summit also had a major ripple effect. This impacted not only Ainu people but represents a big
step forward for rights reclamation for indigenous people overseas as well.”[7]Indigenous Delegates and Ainu organizers at IPS Opening

The IPS represented an historic moment: it was the first international gathering in the context ofa G8 Summit to focus exclusively on indigenous peoples’ responses to climate change solutions
and critique the global economic model being promoted by G8 nations. These were also the firstG8 meetings to be held since the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (DRIP)
was adopted in September 2007.

lewallen: Indigenous at last!

211

Staging Ainu at the G8: The only official stage granted to Ainu was this tourist-style photo-op of G8 spouses
in borrowed Ainu cloaks, posing with Ainu Association head Kato. (Photo courtesy of Philip Seaton)

The G8 host site, Toyako, was located in the heart of Ainu ancestral territory and this summit
represented an opportunity for indigenous peoples to urge G8 nations to look beyond economic
growth-based models for solutions to the current environmental crisis, to urge non-signatory
states [8] to adopt the DRIP, and heed the appeals of indigenous peoples in each nationstate. The G8 Summit provided an occasion for the Japanese government to present Ainu as a“model of man [sic] living in harmony with nature,” according to one media report. [9] While
this media report offers a compelling portrait of how Ainu might strategically position
themselves to advise visiting G8 delegations on designing eco-friendly policies, to myknowledge the Japanese government displayed no formal interest in Ainu or other indigenous
peoples’ sustainable practices during the actual G8. According to Utari Association
representatives, several traditionalist kimonos were created by local Ainu women cloth artists tobe formally presented to G8 leaders. The Utari Association also requested to perform akamuynomi ritual blessing ceremony to welcome G8 leaders Ainu-style. Both requests wereturned down. The kimonos were placed on display in the Rusutsu Press center and madeavailable for international media to play dress-up. [10] The only case in which Ainu were“presented” in any formal way took place when G8 First Ladies were invited by Hokkaido
Governor Takahashi Harumi to don traditional Ainu coats for a group photo, before being
whisked off to First Lady Kiyoko’s Japanese tea ceremony.
As the first event of this magnitude to be organized principally by an Ainu-centric Steering
Committee – outside government-sanctioned networks of power such as the Ainu Association of
Hokkaido [11] - the IPS constitutes a pivotal moment for grassroots and Ainu activism in Japanand the forging of international bonds.[12] The IPS Steering Committee received an unexpectedboost from the Japanese Diet when, after twenty years of organized campaigns and 140 years ofcolonization and assimilation, the Ainu were abruptly recognized as indigenous peoples on June
6. Thanks to the Diet resolution and G8 “summit fever,” the IPS enjoyed international media
attention across Europe, Asia, and North America, and was attended by roughly 1800 people,
including between 200-250 Ainu. Momentum from the resolution created a mood of celebrationand indigenous delegates attending the IPS officially welcomed Ainu into the community ofThe Japanese Empire: Colonial Lives and Postcolonial Struggles

212

indigenous peoples. Meanwhile, some Ainu leaders were suspicious that this eleventh-hourhaste to recognize Ainu indigeneity was another deal brokered for the G8.
The IPS offers one site for critically examining the dynamics of this emergent politics ofindigeneity in the Ainu community today. One indicator that the IPS exemplifies a critical
moment for Ainu activism, in connection with the indigenous movement globally, is that key IPS
organizers plan to formalize this body into a network of global Ainu and indigenous grassroots
organizing. Until now, the principal mouthpiece for Ainu rights recovery has been the Ainu
Association. As a national and future trans-national network, the IPS group provides acounterpoint to the solitary voice of the Ainu Association and is expected to interject dynamic
dialogue into the wider Ainu community itself. The Ainu Association has been criticized for
failing to meet the needs of many Ainu-identified persons, especially Ainu outside Hokkaido
who are ineligible for membership and for government-issued social welfare subsidies funneledthrough the association. [13] the Ainu Association originated as a social welfare organization
with close ties to the prefectural government, and is now widely perceived as governmentdependent and fundamentally undemocratic. Leadership is seen as being out of step with anincreasingly diverse Ainu-identified population roughly 4,000 of which are members, or 12,000
including total household members. (The official Ainu population numbers roughly 24,000
inside Hokkaido and 5,000 in Greater Tokyo, though observers cite unofficial figures closer to
100,000 throughout Japan .) The Board of Directors is internally-appointed and membership isdependent on these directors for leadership and accountability, both of which are lacking. Key
deliberations affecting the Ainu community are not expeditiously communicated with regional
branches, and after 21 years of sending delegations to UN indigenous consultative bodies, themajority of Ainu members remain under-informed about DRIP contents.
In contrast, IPS organizers achieved a degree of indigenous protocol through reintroducing
practices such as ukocaranke, or intensive dialogue to work through disagreements. As
Shimazaki Naomi put it:“Holding ukocaranke discussions is a tradition we revived. There are few places inside large
Ainu organizations for speaking openly or asserting an opinion. We disgorged our true
intentions from the pit of our stomachs and created a spirit of thoroughgoing discussion until all
parties reach consensus [inside the Steering Committee]. From these discussions there was much
reflection and sometimes emotional pain, but in the end this process led to mutual understanding
and trust developed between us. This summit allowed me to understand the importance offorming trust-based relations between generations. Our Indigenous brothers and sisters gave us
great encouragement with these words, “We were shocked to see how much the Ainu people
have matured, it’s clear that they no longer need us!”[14]During the IPS itself, with Ainu participants gathered from across Hokkaido and Japan , there
was a sense that the Ainu community had begun a process toward a nation-wide dialogue,
including communities and stakeholders dispersed across Japan . As one delegate described it,
the IPS encapsulated a “watershed moment,” a moment toward “creating a national Ainu
organization that includes all Ainu...all Ainu communities in Japan, men and women, old andyoung, rural and urban.”[15]lewallen: Indigenous at last!

213

Gestures of thanks from the Executive Council at IPS Start

A Note on Positionality
I have been involved with the Ainu community in various capacities since 1998. In
this article I have written about the IPS in Ainu Mosir from my perspective as a member of theSteering Committee. My initial intention in joining the steering committee was to contribute to
the Ainu community by providing resources and information about indigenous campaigns
overseas, and help link Ainu with indigenous communities internationally. Anthropologists andarchaeologists have been intensely scrutinized in the Ainu community because of unscrupulous
research practices and I hoped in part to counterbalance that history through work on the IPS
project. [16] As I discuss below, the political and social currents in Japanese society concerning
Ainu and indigenous rights shifted dramatically from September 2007-July 2008. Though I
sought to avoid factionalism and maintain a neutral position as a supporting member, the IPS
itself was controversial within the Ainu community. I was swept up in politicized currents
surrounding IPS planning and had difficulty adjusting my position to gain impartiality. In thisarticle I attempt to analyze developments of the previous year and their implications for theongoing Ainu quest for indigenous rights.
“Ripple effect”: The G8, the Indigenous Peoples Summit, and the Diet Resolution
G8 Summit-related events – including the IPS in Ainu Mosir 2008 – have been identified as the
key elements which pushed the Diet toward granting Ainu indigenous recognition. Certainlyinternational and domestic media touted the IPS as a major factor in the Diet
Resolution.[17] “The Summit was a great success from many angles,” organizer Kayano Shiroreflected, “however, we had the benefit of timely developments in society and it was the
manipulation of those changes to our advantage that made the summit successful. The June 6
Resolution [recognizing Ainu indigeneity] was adopted in the Diet and other actions werepreventive measures to protect the reputation of the Japanese government which served as hostnation for the G8 Summit. All of these developments were favorable for our Summit.”[18]The Japanese Empire: Colonial Lives and Postcolonial Struggles

214

However, IPS-related events in fact represent only a small piece of the larger chain of events
leading to the resolution. Although Japan had joined 144 other nations to vote in favor of DRIP,[19] the Japanese government persisted in its claim that “no indigenous peoples [as referred tounder the declaration] reside in Japan .”[20] Japan ’s “yes” vote came with a caveat: Japan would
not recognize “self-determination” if this might harm the sovereignty of existing nation-states, or“collective rights” if these might endanger the human rights of existing citizens. After adopting
DRIP, Japanese government representatives distributed clandestine surveys to 100 UN-member
states seeking their definitions of indigeneity, local interpretations of self-determination, andpolicies for “collective human rights.”[21] Whether this was a well-meaning attempt to gather
information about other nations' interpretations of DRIP in domestic contexts, or an attempt tosubvert Ainu calls for DRIP implementation, is difficult to assess. The tone of the survey
indicated reservation about DRIP’s impact on Japanese sovereignty and hesitation toward thecollective rights concept and international interpretations of indigeneity more generally.
Adopting DRIP in September 2007 prompted a series of more aggressive-than-usual initiatives
by Ainu organizations across Japan which gained momentum toward July and the opening of theG8 summit. In early 2008, the Tokyo-based Ainu Utari Liaison Group organized a petition drivein downtown Tokyo.[22] In May 2008, they delivered upwards of 6600 signatures to the Prime
Minister together with the following requests: 1) that Ainu be recognized as indigenous peoples,2) that the government issue an official apology to Ainu people, 3) that a nationwide survey of
Ainu living conditions be enacted as a precursor to implementing a national policy; 4) that the
Ainu Cultural Promotion Act (1997) be reviewed; 5) that a new Ainu/ethnic law be
implemented; and 6) that a commission of inquiry be set up to design this Ainu/ethnic law. If themounting domestic pressure were insufficient, international society added its own support in
mid-May. During the Universal Periodic Review of Japan, member states in the UN Human
Rights Council’s Working Group recommended the Japanese government initiate dialogue with
Ainu and undertake a review of land and other legal rights of Ainu people as steps toward
implementing DRIP in Japan . [23]Tokyo: Mass Ainu March for Indigenous Rights, May 22, 2008 (Photo: author)lewallen: Indigenous at last!

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The Ainu Associationalso piloted initiatives that were reminiscent of campaigns to support the
proposal for the “Ainu New Law” in 1984, which was substantially revised and adopted as the
Ainu Cultural Promotion Act (1997), Japan ’s first multicultural legislation. Focusing initiallyon Hokkaido legislators and later expanding to national coalition party leaders, the Association
orchestrated visits to legislators, recruiting lawmakers to Ainu political rights work. In March
2008, their efforts bore fruit when the “Legislative Coalition to establish Ainu People’s Rights”
was established to push for a resolution “recognizing the Ainu’s pride and dignity as indigenous
peoples” ahead of the G8 meetings in July. [24] On May 22, the association coordinated a marchon the nation’s capital, attended by more than 400 Ainu from across Japan . Adorned in
traditional kimonos and waving placards anticipating the G8 environmental theme, “Ainu arekind to the earth” and “the Earth is on loan from our children,” the group marched toward theDiet buildings. Here Ainu Association directors formally read and delivered a formal request for
indigenous rights to assembled lawmakers.

Ainu Women: A vocal majority for indigenous recognition (Photo: author)

One legislator, Suzuki Muneo (New Party Daichi), was especially insistent in pressing for Ainu
indigenous rights. Readers may recall Suzuki’s 2002 indictment and arrest for accepting bribes
from a Hokkaido lumber company, and connection with perjury, bribery, and bid-rigging with
Hokkaido construction companies providing government-sponsored development aid to Russianheld Kurile Islands in the late 1990s. [25] Suzuki, who was thereafter forced out of the Liberal
Democratic Party, has refashioned himself as an advocate for the long-suffering Hokkaido
economy, and is now championing Ainu issues as well.
Observers have suggested that Suzuki’s political tenacity combined with the Ainu Association’s
one-on-one visits to Diet members provided sufficient pressure leading to the Resolution
recognizing Ainu indigeneity. From September 2007-July 2008, Suzuki sent a total of sixteen
official Diet inquiries pressing the Japanese government to honor DRIP and recognize Ainu as
indigenous peoples. This is the same Suzuki who, in 2001 had described Japan as an ethnically

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homogeneous nation, brushing Ainu aside as “largely assimilated.”[26] Clearly the politicalwinds have shifted. In 2007, his New Party Daichi ran the first Ainu woman candidate on theirticket, [27] and still issued no formal apology for the 2001 statement. [28] Suzuki is neverthelessa career politician and certainly had additional rationales for pushing Ainu indigenous status,
namely his interest in liberating Japan from “energy poverty.” The Russian government has
indicated a willingness to negotiate with Ainu in returning the southern Kuriles to Ainu as theindigenous inhabitants of the islands. [29] Suzuki argued, therefore, that the Japanese
government would gain leverage in bargaining with Russia for transfer of the islands if Ainu are
granted status as Japan ’s Indigenous People. By establishing Ainu indigeneity as irrefutable andlocating Ainu within the context of Japan the nation-state, Suzuki believes Japan may gain
access to these long-disputed islands, and simultaneously reduce its dependence on foreign oil
and gas. [30]
On June 6, the electronic display board in the Upper House read “261 In Favor, 0 Against,” and“480 – 0” in the Lower House – unanimous votes passing the Resolution in bothhouses.[31] However, the Resolution had been significantly revised. The original text placed
historical responsibility for Ainu assimilation and colonization on the shoulders of the Japanese
government.[32] The revised version masks the linkage between colonial policy and naturalizes
the Ainu plight as an unintended casualty of modernity, policies that were indispensable forJapan’s economic and global prowess. While supporters were generally thrilled with the
Resolution, many were critical and called it an empty symbolic gesture, especially because its
only legal requirement is to set up an Expert Panel.
On July 1 (Day 1 of the IPS), the Cabinet Secretariat announced appointees for the “Expert
Meeting on Ainu Policy” (hereafter “Expert Meeting”) established under the Resolution. The
Expert Meeting is entrusted with 1) evaluating the situation of Ainu livelihoods anddiscrimination, 2) evaluating government-sponsored Ainu policy through the present, 3)
conducting a review of indigenous policies implemented in other nations, a reference to DRIP,
and 4) considering future Ainu policy development, and reporting back to the Cabinet Secretariat
in July 2009. Ainu Association Executive Director Kato Tadashi was the only Ainu
representative appointed, and while this is a great improvement from the 1995 Expert Meetingon Ainu Affairs with zero Ainu representatives, this limits the diversity of Ainu opinions to one
voice. There is room for optimism. During an Ainu Association-sponsored “Ainu Peoples
Summit” this July, Tokyo Ainu Liaison members joined with Hokkaido Ainu and Karafuto Ainu
descendants to form the first-ever national coalition to issue recommendations to the Expert
Meeting. [33] This coalition; however, does not represent the opinions of all Ainu. Althoughslightly more than half of the Ainu-identified population in Hokkaido are members of the Ainu
Association (roughly 12,000), grassroots organizations including the IPS and the non-vocal
majority may not be reflected in this coalition. Moreover, in Hokkaido, dialogue about Expert
Meeting deliberations has been limited to the Association’s Board of Directors, and thus local
members cannot contribute to policy recommendations discussed at the meetings.
In its initial gathering, Expert Meeting members suggested questions of granting indigenous
rights to Ainu be shelved during the year-long deliberations, and the government has indicatedindigenous rights may not apply to Ainu in any case. In response to an official Parliamentinquiry about whether “indigenous peoples” as referred to under DRIP were equivalent to“indigenous peoples” as referred to under the Diet Resolution granting Ainu indigenous status,
the government replied, “we are unable to conclude [whether they refer to] the same meaning inlewallen: Indigenous at last!

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this situation.”[34] In other words, the June resolution may simply indicate symbolic"indigeneity" for Ainu.
Ainu Association representatives have criticized the short twelve-month period allotted fordevising a national Ainu policy, and have responded with their own strategy: to achieve as many
concessions from the government as possible, aside from constitutional amendments. Based onrecommendations from the national coalition, Kato is pushing to expand the Utari Taisaku (Utari
Welfare Measures) to the national level. Ainu Association officials often refer to the proposed
Ainu New Law (1986), noting that only a small percentage of these proposals were included in
the CPA (1997), and that they still seek redress on the same issues.[35] Notably, education,pensions for elderly Ainu, and overcoming the gap between Ainu and majority householdincome are priority items on this agenda. Together with fellow Ainu in Kanto, Hokkaido Ainu
also seek a formal apology from the Japanese government for colonialism, assimilation, andinstitutionalized discrimination, and seek retribution payments through this process. Most Diet
legislators are largely ignorant of Ainu history and the Ainu Association is sponsoring study
sessions to bring supporting Diet legislators up to speed on historical and current Ainu issues andgain their advocacy to draft an official apology backed by compensation payments.[36] Finally,
the Ainu Association will push the government to set up a commission of inquiry with half ormore representatives from the Ainu community, to continue discussions on indigenous rights andother issues which emerge when the Expert Meetings have been completed in 2009.
Evaluating the Indigenous Peoples Summit
The IPS forged a space for a new generation of Ainu leaders to articulate their visions of Ainu
indigenous politics and highlights Ainu as viable actors in Japanese civil society, but it was notwithout its weaknesses, nor its critics. I argue the summit serves as a barometer to gauge theposition of the Ainu movement internationally and understand key areas for future growth.
From July 1 to 4, twenty-six delegates representing the Americas (Maya Kachikel, Miskito,
Nauha, Lakota Sioux, Mohawk, St’at’imc, Cherokee, Comanche and Pueblo); Europe (Saami),
the Pacific (Chamoru, Hawai’i, Maori, Yorta Yorta, and Uchinanchu); and Asia (Taiwan, Juma,
Igorot, and Ainu) gathered in Biratori and Sapporo to discuss indigenous issues. The main
summit program featured delegate position speeches, a keynote address from Victoria TauliCorpuz (Chair, United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, hereafter UNPFII) andintercultural exchange, followed by themed workshops focusing on the environment, education,and rights recovery on the second day. On day three, delegates visited Ainu sites in Biratori
threatened by development and then traveled to Sapporo for a ritual kamuynomi prayer
ceremony, cultural exchange, and an Ainu traditional foods banquet. Two separate appeals, theNibutani Declaration of Indigenous Peoples and the Appeal from the IPS to the Japanese
Government were drafted and then read for approval at the main assembly in Sapporo. [37] Bothappeals were adopted by thunderous applause.
In the Appeal to the Japanese Government, delegates addressed future Ainu policy, demanding
that: 1) at least half of the designated Experts should represent the Ainu community in theExperts Meeting; 2) an official apology be issued to Ainu people for colonization and earlier
Ainu policies; 3) recovery of Ainu indigenous rights as elaborated in DRIP be granted; 4) Ainu
language and history be included in Japan’s public education; 5) Ainu representatives be
included in southern Kurile negotiations, and 6) the government make strides toward forging “amultiethnic, multicultural” society in Japan. In the Nibutani Declaration, delegates argued that

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climate change, the global food crisis, high oil prices, increasing global poverty, and escalating
violence around the world are all symptoms of growth-based economic models promoted by G8
nations and are therefore fundamentally unsustainable. The declaration urges non-signatory
nations to approve DRIP immediately and asks that indigenous peoples be included in futureclimate talks and assessments to evaluate the impact of climate mitigation measures. Both
documents were submitted to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs for distribution to G8 leaders andposted online. With these appeals now circulating globally, IPS organizers have now begun
focusing specifically on recommendations to the government-established Expert Meeting inJapan, because this panel will determine future Ainu policy by July 2009. They will also
continue to strengthen international ties established through the IPS to hold the Japanese
government accountable to Ainu and fellow minority communities across Japan, and toindigenous peoples worldwide.

Indigenous Music Festival in Ainu Mosir 2008 poster (Design: W. L. Ding-Everson)

One purpose of the IPS – aside from the political objectives – was to facilitate leadershipdevelopment and empower young Ainu through the organizing process. Reluctance to engage inpower-sharing among Ainu Association elites combined with members’ collective focus on
cultural revival since introduction of the Cultural Promotion Act (1997, hereafter CPA), hasproduced a contingent of Ainu youth who are disillusioned with overemphasis on traditionalism
and unresponsive leadership, disengaged from indigenous rights issues, and often shirk the Ainu
community. “We hoped to involve many young Ainu” organizer Shimazaki reflected. “Throughhosting the summit, the younger generation of Ainu who have lacked opportunities for selfexpression until now, were central organizers and have now developed a new network among
themselves and are working to expand their global network. It was evident that many Ainu were
reawakened to their identity as Ainu, they gained self-confidence, and were able to recoverassurance in an Ainu way of living.”lewallen: Indigenous at last!

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Recovering Indigeneity: Trajectory from Colonization to Innovation

Leaders of up-and-coming Ainu fusion music groups including Ainu Rebels’ Sakai Mina andSakai Atsushi, and Ainu Art Project’s leader Yuki Koji, formed the core of the steeringcommittee. Youth who do openly identify as Ainu have begun to articulate identities and modesof self-expression which focus on hybridity, blending resistance musical genres such as hip-hop,
electronica, reggae, and dub with more traditionalist Ainu music, and adapting dance and othercreative forms to convey their newfound pride. The grand finale of the IPS was the Indigenous
Music Festival, featuring the widest slate of Ainu artists on one stage in history, including Kano
Oki and his Dub Ainu Band, [38] the Marewrew vocal group, Toko Emi, Ainu Art Project, [39]and Ainu Rebels. [40] The music festival offered a space for showcasing contemporary Ainu
expression as polyvocal, challenging traditionalist imperatives. In this forum, organized byyoung Ainu members of the Steering Committee, Ainu youth broke away from the politicizedrhetoric of the summit to celebrate ethnic distinctiveness through performance, as an articulation
independent of politics.

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Resistance music: Ainu Rebels blend hip-hop and electronica to create a new Ainu vibe

Ainu rock in the family: Ainu Art Project performs traditional songs with hard rock beat220

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Music for all ages. Kano Oki and his Dub Ainu Band brought the audience to its feet

In planning the Summit, organizers concentrated on three major objectives. The first objective
was internationally oriented – to connect Ainu issues and agendas to the indigenous movement
internationally and gain from the knowhow of fellow indigenous peoples who had won both
political and symbolic historical gains from their respective governments. Secondly, IPS
planners hoped to create a network of engaged Ainu persons working outside the usual loci of
power, in particular the Ainu Association, and to work on a domestic level for policy change andrights recovery. A third objective was to harness the symbolic capital generated by the G8 itself
to urge international leaders to heed indigenous peoples’ concerns, to protect indigenous
livelihoods threatened by global warming, and to ensure indigenous participation in futureenvironmental policy-making on a global level.[41]Objective 1: Globalizing Ainu
The fact that Ainu have now achieved indigenous status enables a reinterpretation of history andthe emergence of a new narrative of Japan as a multicultural nation, with historically multiethnic
internal populations. Moreover, state-level acknowledgment that Ainu are an indigenous people
ultimately exposes Japan’s position as an erstwhile and ongoing colonial occupier in Hokkaido
by extension.[42] This implication notwithstanding, the Diet Resolution recognizing Ainu
indigenous status did not include direct references to colonialism. Now that Ainu have achieved
greater recognition in the eyes of the Japanese state, they can more effectively press forindigenous rights, land restoration, compensation, and other forms of government
accommodation, including an official apology for colonialism. As the first ethnic minority to
win multicultural legislation (CPA 1997), and achieve indigenous recognition (2008), they also
bear responsibility for pushing Japanese society toward greater acceptance of all minorities, bothinternal historical minorities including Okinawans, Burakumin, Hibakusha, and persons withdisability, and immigrant minorities such as Resident Koreans, Nikkei immigrants, and foreign
nationals more generally. While a handful of Okinawans are also campaigning for indigenous
recognition, they were not included in the Diet Resolution, and only peripherally in the IPS. [43]The Japanese Empire: Colonial Lives and Postcolonial Struggles

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Since Ainu organizations began sending delegations to the United Nations Working Group on
Indigenous Populations in 1987, the thrust of the Ainu movement has been to pressure theJapanese government to first acknowledge that an Ainu minority exists in Japan (achieved in1991), and second, to accord recognition that Ainu are indigenous peoples (achieved in2008). Interest in establishing and strengthening a network between Ainu and indigenous
comrades overseas primarily reflects the need for guidance at home, on how to move theJapanese government toward accountability. [44] In both international and domestic contexts,
Ainu political elites have focused almost entirely on achieving recognition. This hyper-focus onrecognition has eclipsed development of a strategic plan for pursuing indigenous rights beyond
becoming “indigenous”; the Resolution has resulted in momentary inertia.
Ainu alignment toward domestic action is in sharp contrast to the focus of IPS indigenous
delegates who benefit from treaties and more progressive domestic policies. Many are involved
with international organizing and trans-national ventures such as collaboration and leadershiptraining; others serve as leaders of regional indigenous blocks and represent these constituencies
in international contexts. They are therefore apprised of the techniques of international law andfamiliar with the vernacular of international legal-speak. Producing the Nibutani Declaration
was an extension of ongoing work on the DRIP for international indigenous leaders.

Tauli-Corpuz keynote on indigenous peoples and sustainability

Producing these appeals involved calling up resources and expertise beyond the range of IP
Summit organizers themselves. The Nibutani Declaration, for example, was based on proposals
generated from workshop discussions and pre-summit proposals. Program time scheduled fordeveloping this appeal was insufficient, as many delegates noted, and Tauli-Corpuz relied on her
own knowledge of international mechanisms and climate change discussions from the UNPFII in
May to draft the Nibutani Declaration. The scheduled plan to draft an international declaration
based on a single day of negotiations in workshops without any fruitful dialogue in plenarylewallen: Indigenous at last!

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sessions was effectively impossible. The fact that a mere handful of indigenous delegates andAinu representatives were involved in the process exposes the unfairness of these negotiations
and the degree to which an impossible program forced these participants to forego consensusbased indigenous protocol. Meanwhile, on the other side of the room, Ainu representatives
feverishly drafted the Ainu Appeal. Here again, the disparity between Ainu representatives’
focus on the local, and international delegates’ focus on the global was thrown into relief. Ainu
planners and indigenous delegates praised the finished versions of these two documents although
they remained dissatisfied with the composition process. One planner lamented, “The next time
we plan an international meeting, we shouldn’t settle with the satisfaction of “all’s well that ends
well.” Rather, I think it’s critical to work out a detailed plan and a strategy for obtaining
maximum results from the international meeting well in advance of its start.”[45]Impromptu guitar: Zack Bishara shares Maori music

Inevitably, language – both language for communication and legal-speak – is a central issue for
Ainu in the international arena, and at the IP Summit. The lack of knowledgeable English andSpanish speakers has posed a significant barrier to Ainu networking overseas, leading to adependency on interpreters who are not always sympathetic to Ainu or indigenous issues. Thisdependency has its roots in a long history of discrimination manifest in lack of confidence inschool-based learning which plays into lower educational achievement than majority Japanese,and limited opportunities for exposure to English as a communicative system. All of thesefactors have produced a wedge between Ainu persons and possibilities for indigenous-based
networking which have been critical for indigenous peoples’ organizing elsewhere.
Summit planners initially hoped to invite foreign-language competent Ainu working overseas toserve as interpreters and showcase their skills through the Summit, but this plan was foiled byinsufficient funding. Lack of English and Spanish language ability ultimately served to be amajor barrier to full Ainu engagement with the planning process. As one indigenous delegatewith an active language revival program noted, English, Spanish, and Japanese are all “colonial

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languages,” and indigenous peoples need bi- or tri-cultural interpreters who are skilled in one ormore of the colonial languages and their own language to facilitate enhanced communication
between all parties.[46] This is not now a central issue for Ainu persons as speakers of Ainu
language, as all Japanese Ainu are now fluent in Japanese, and those who do speak Ainu as
heritage speakers or are self-taught, are not sufficiently fluent in English or other “colonial
languages” to negotiate all three linguistic domains. One positive outcome of the IPS is thatyounger Ainu organizers are now considering study abroad with newfound indigenous comrades
overseas.

Ukocaranke on Education: Workshops lead to intergenerational discussion

Objective 2: Expanding the Grassroots to the Nation
Regarding the second goal, to create a grassroots network of Ainu, many Ainu point to the needfor power redistribution inside the Ainu Association and without. Insiders charge that the nearly
all-male Board of Directors, notoriously cozy with Hokkaido Prefecture and government
authority, must make way for a wider network more reflective of the diversity of identity andpurpose in today’s movement, not to mention gender and regional differences. The IPS was
designed to present an alternative voice on Ainu and indigenous matters, a means toward
generating grassroots perspectives to counter Ainu Association hegemony. Despite the obstacles
to forging this network, many organizers still argue the summit successfully fomented
empowerment among Ainu. “I think we can take pride in the fact that we held the firstIndigenous Peoples Summit-named meeting in the host site for the G8 Summit,” organizer
Kayano opined. “The fact that we were able to successfully organize an international meetingwith our own hands led us Ainu to feel more confident in ourselves. Some members of theSteering Committee achieved remarkable growth through this process. I believe that among
fellow Ainu, a feeling of solidarity was born. Through this opportunity, I anticipate that Ainu
will achieve greater unity.”[47]lewallen: Indigenous at last!

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Communicating the IPS’ purpose to Ainu across Japan proved a central hurdle through the final
day of the Summit. Since the IPS Committee included both Ainu and non-Ainu members, it was
criticized as being dominated by non-Ainu. Working outside official channels was risky because
summit organizers lacked the backing of the Ainu Association which is a necessary ingredientfor entrée into rural Ainu communities. They were thus unable to promote the IPS
widely. Outside urban areas, the Association is the primary “glue” uniting Ainu. In Biratori, thehost community for the summit, planners did not engage the community in advance and wereunable to recruit logistical support or local participation.
The urban-rural gap was remedied by a creative initiative led by young Ainu planners. In June,
three Tokyo Ainu women embarked on a “Caravan Tour” across Hokkaido to promote the
IPS. Colonization and assimilation have splintered Ainu communities and now Ainu live
scattered across Hokkaido and Japan. Caravan leaders zig-zagged to these communities andplotted their progress in an online blog [48] and through video, which was aired at the IPS. This
Caravan Tour provided a context for Tokyo Ainu to connect with Hokkaido Ainu and forge new
networks where before there had been separation, silence, and resentment. Their work toconnect Ainu across Japan was one of the most productive grassroots efforts to emerge from
Summit planning and brought greater numbers of Ainu to the Summit than any other strategy.
Objective 3: Climate in Crisis, Indigenous Peoples, and G8 Responsibility
Taking place just ahead of the Toyako G8 Summit with its climate change centered theme, the
IPS sought to highlight environmentally-sound practices embedded in indigenous lifestyles, andto critique the growth-based economic model advocated by industrialized nations. Indigenous
communities argue that they have a special mandate to address the global environmental crisis
because they are directly dependent on the natural environment for their livelihood, experience
immediate consequences when the environment fluctuates, and have observed and experienced
global warming-related changes for decades.[49] Mitigation measures now being introduced tocombat global warming have also adversely affected indigenous communities in what might be
dubbed “neo-energy colonialism.” During the last century, indigenous peoples’ lands weretargeted for fossil fuel extraction; now indigenous-managed lands are being targeted for corn,soybean, and oil palm plantations for bioethanol production. [50] Indigenous peoples areexperiencing loss of traditional gathering and agricultural lands due to competition with biofuel
plantations and hydroelectric dams. [51]The Japanese Empire: Colonial Lives and Postcolonial Struggles

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Aerial view of Nibutani Dam, nearly submerged by silt and driftwood during the 2003 typhoon

The Ainu community has not been immune to these issues. Hokkaido Ainu were faced with ahydroelectric project, the Nibutani Dam, the subject of a protracted legal battle between two
Ainu landowner-farmers and Japan’s Ministry of Construction. [52] The case was launchedbecause construction of the Nibutani Dam would radically transform the landscape of the Saru
River, submerge several places of spiritual, economic and cultural import, and destroy several
acres of farmland. Although the Ainu plaintiffs won the case through appeals, dam construction
had been completed and the court ruled it could not be removed. Ultimately Ainu plaintiffs
continued the case to force the court to recognize Ainu as indigenous peoples – a goal achievedin 1997. Ironically, Nibutani Dam has now proven ineffective. During a devastating typhoon in
2003, the dam nearly buckled from a deluge of debris and silt. A second dam scheduled forconstruction upstream on the Saru River, Biratori Dam, has been rationalized as a panacea tocorrect the weaknesses of the earlier dam, but opponents argue that it too will fail to meetprojected goals and ask that dam construction be stopped.

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In Biratori, the dam issue has been especially divisive within the Ainu community because many
residents see these public works projects as deliverance from a sluggish economy and ruraldepopulation while a minority is concerned about cultural and environmental sustainability
locally. Biratori Dam construction will necessitate submerging three sacred Ainu sites(cinomisir), 17 archaeological sites, and destroy habitat for Ezo Brown bears, an endangered
species of falcon, and wild mountain vegetables which have sustained Saru River Ainu
communities for centuries. The proposed Biratori Dam was also a focal point of theEnvironment workshop. During the IPS fieldwork program, a local Ainu elder led a tour of thedam construction site.

Maori delegation offers a prayer in respect for cinomisir and Ainu ancestors (Photo: Author)

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Standing before the sacred mountain her grandfather had worshipped, this lifelong resident ofBiratori explained her ambivalence about the project. She feels wedged between pressure to
support the local economy through dam construction and realization that the natural environment
which nourished her community for generations will be forever changed. She mentioned that she
likely would not live long enough to see the dam to its completion. Next, indigenous delegate
Joan Carling described the Filipino San Roque Dam project, describing how Igorot communities
welcomed the development until they lost their homes, farmland, and then began to oppose dam
projects.
Indigenous peoples are said to have the “smallest ecological footprints on earth” in greenhousegas emissions, but will bear the brunt of the ecological damage from failed environmental policy.
[53] Currently there are reportedly 370 million indigenous peoples scattered in communities
across the globe today many of whom will be deeply affected by climate change; however,indigenous peoples in industrialized nations occupy a more complex position. The majority of
IPS delegates came from industrialized nations, yet all continue to practice indigenous life ways
in these industrialized nations, and many have abandoned contemporary consumption practices
to reinstate traditional economies. They did not elect to be assimilated, and colonization has no
doubt wrought tremendous damage to their communities. In their pre-colonial phases each ofthese cultures incorporated a self-preservation strategy based on respecting natural resource
limits without over-harvesting.
As Japanese citizens, Ainu also consume the energy, resources, and cheap commodities being
circulated under G8 policy and globalization. As unwitting beneficiaries of Japan’s trade andinvestment policies across Asia, Ainu are at the same time a colonized people and Japan’s only
nationally-recognized indigenous people. As such Ainu occupy an ambivalent and complex
position within Japan, within Asia, and among indigenous peoples worldwide.

Indigenous Women en force: Shimazaki, Tauli-Corpuz and Mayan and Miskito delegates at IPS

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On the other hand, the largest portion of the world’s 370 million indigenous peoples must copewith the threat of invasive development and the fallout from overdevelopment. There is a
palpable sense of urgency that indigenous peoples themselves will be the first “environmental
refugees,” or human populations displaced by climate change, unless drastic policy changes are
introduced soon. Indigenous peoples have the capacity to choose sustainable practices, choices
which have protected 80% of the world’s biodiversity, concentrated in indigenous-held lands.
[54] One of the summit’s larger objectives was to force G8 leaders to heed indigenous peoples’
demands for partnership in finding solutions to climate change issues. Indigenous peoples havebeen largely excluded from global climate change talks until now.[55] In 2009, they will hold an
Indigenous Peoples’ Global Summit on Climate Change, and will officially join the Copenhagen
global climate talks.[56]At the same time, indigenous peoples are exercising some degree of strategic essentialism topush an agenda of “traditionalists vs. moderns.”[57] There is a danger in broad brushing all
indigenous peoples as “ecologically noble savages,” [58] even if these images are in part selfauthored. Effectively, strategic essentialism obscures the actual complexity, fluidity, andhybridity of most indigenous peoples today who have become flexible interpreters of their own
cultures, who combine modernist and traditionalist livelihoods, and who, by necessity, havelearned to adapt to the shifting political and physical landscapes in their home communities andbeyond. This model also masks the realities of urban indigenous peoples who have been
displaced from their land, or who live in cities for economic security, by declaring themsomehow less indigenous by virtue of their urban-ness. And most importantly, this image does
not account for the complex situation facing Ainu, who have been displaced from their land,
have been robbed of their connection to the natural sphere where human-deity relations arenegotiated, have lost access rights to the raw materials of cultural reproduction, and have been
forcibly assimilated to majority Wajin lifestyles.[59] I do not intend to discount the majority of
Ainu-identified persons today who trace their involvement to the cultural revival movement
which emerged in tandem with but did not necessarily politically align with Ainu ethnic
nationalism in the 1960s and 1970s. Even for Ainu cultural revivalists, however, cultural
practice is continued in a separate domain from livelihood, which is predominantly aligned withthe majority Japanese economy of consumption. A glimpse of the global diversity indigenous
peoples represent was in evidence at the IP Summit. Indigenous perspectives spanned the gamut
between industrialized and developing nations, land-rich and land-poor, environmentallyengaged and rights-focused, urban and rural, the global South and the global North, andlanguage-intact and language-moribund communities.

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Drawing everyone into the circle: Giant Poro Rimse dance at IPS Finale

Conclusion
As I have described, the IPS was a turning point for the Ainu community and significant for theinternational indigenous movement as a display of indigenous agency in the face of neoliberalpolicies advocated by the world’s leading capitalist economies. Nevertheless, it is difficult toevaluate the efficacy of the IPS because there is no clear indication that G8 leaders actually will
respond to or act upon the IPS appeals. There were however significant internal gains from the
IP Summit. Younger Ainu were able to participate fully without age-based hierarchies which
often constrain youth participation in larger Ainu organizations. Perhaps most importantly,
planners overcame geographic, political, economic, and mental barriers to build solidarity as anorganizing body for the summit. With the strength of this unity as their base, they now hope totransform the IPS organization into a nationwide coalition of Ainu and work toward deepening
the international network which emerged from the Summit.
Here I have tried to emphasize the diversity of positions both within the Ainu community, andwithin the larger indigenous people’s movement. The Ainu movement inside Japan has sufferedfrom prolonged political inertia since passage of the Ainu CPA (1997), although Tokyo Ainu
have actively sought an “ethnic law” expanding the scope of Ainu policy beyond the Tsugaru
Strait. Since 1987 Ainu Association leaders have pressed the state for indigenous recognition
through international fora, and as of June 2008 have finally achieved this goal. Many insiders
are wary of the next step, however. Specifically, they cite the crisis of leadership and absence ofa long-term strategic plan as the main barriers to future rights recovery for Ainu people. On thewhole most self-identified Ainu embrace generalized ideas about reparations for colonizationand institutionalized discrimination; yet few are acquainted with how to articulate these in thelanguage of indigenous rights, or with how the DRIP may serve their specific needs. The nondemocratic and government-reliant structure of the Ainu Association has fostered blind
dependence on leadership and overall apathy concerning rights-work. To counter thesetendencies IPS organizers are now planning study sessions to empower Ainu individuals inknowledge and application of the DRIP; they are also forging community-based networks
between Ainu and majority Japanese supporters to formulate appeals for submission to thelewallen: Indigenous at last!

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Expert Meeting in Tokyo. To continue the momentum generated by the IPS Ainu groups are
now working on spreading their newfound empowerment to the wider Ainu
community.
Concerning the IPS, despite my criticism of “native ecology,” I want to recognize the agency ofindigenous peoples to choose their own narratives and locate potent symbols to articulate theirconcerns to the international community in the language of international law. Fundamentally,
indigenous peoples’ right to self-determination is ensured by Article 3 of DRIP, and I support
unimpeded realization of this right. Yet, not all Ainu or indigenous people may be painted as
unapologetic ecologists; they are sandwiched between competing demands of the ideals ofmodernity, allegiance to ancestral systems, and modernity-in-crisis. The international
indigenous community has managed to form an effective global bloc in part throughemphasizing commonalities to defend themselves against multinational corporations’ and stateled encroachment into their territories. The threat of climate change and the potential damage tomany Pacific Islanders, permafrost dwellers, and countless other communities who do depend on
the resiliency of the ecosystem to sustain themselves, is immediate and real. Having the supportof the world’s indigenous peoples to pressure nation-states for accountability to their own
populations together with other vulnerable populations overseas, is essential for drafting better
policy to ensure survival for humans, flora and fauna. Asserting that the eyes of the world are oneach of the nation-states mentioned in the Nibutani Declaration is key to regaining not only
rights, but also dignity and self-respect – two critical ingredients for survival and adaptation.
References[1] Ainu Mosir means the “domain of humans,” in the Ainu language (as opposed to
kamuymosir, or the “domain of the gods”) and is currently the most widely-accepted term for
Hokkaido. Some Ainu language scholars argue that yawnmosir, or “land country” (as opposed to
repunmosir or “ocean country”) is a more fitting name for Hokkaido. Technically there is no
overarching term in the Ainu language which refers specifically to Hokkaido, because Ainu
historically dwelled in Southern Sakhalin and the Kurile Islands, Hokkaido, and Northern
Honshu, and did not conceptualize their terrain using modernist concepts of territory such as thenation-state.
[2] Shimazaki, N. 2008. “ Senju’uminzoku Samitto Ainu Mosir 2008 kara takusareta mono.” In
IMADR-JC Tsu’ushin 155.
[3] Imazu Hiroshi (House of Representatives) led a group of non-partisan Hokkaido politiciansin launching the “Legislative Coalition to establish Ainu people’s rights” in March 2008.
[4] See Zablonski and Seaton in this special edition of Japan Focus.
[5] United States president elect Barack Obama has suggested that he may consider an official
apology to Native Americans for the legacy of discrimination and abusive treatment they havereceived at the hands of the U.S. government (Obama at Unity Journalists of Color Convention,
Chicago: July 27, 2008).
[6] Associated Press. “New Zealand gives Maori tribes forest in largest-ever settlement.”
International Herald Tribune, June 25, 2008.

The Japanese Empire: Colonial Lives and Postcolonial Struggles

232[7] Shimazaki, N. 2008. “Senju'uminzoku Samitto Ainu Mosir 2008 kara takusareta mono.” In
IMADR-JC Tsu’ushin 155.
[8] Non-signatory states include Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United States; Russia
abstained from the DRIP. In the Nibutani Declaration, IPS delegates focused principally on G8
nations, and therefore included Australia and New Zealand only indirectly.
[9] Kuhn, Anthony. “Japan recognizes indigenous group.” All Things Considered, National
Public Radio: August 12, 2008(http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=93540770, Access date: August 13,
2008.)[10] Personal Communication: Sato Yukio, 25 August 2008.
[11] Membership of the Ainu Association voted in May 2008 to revert the organization’s namefrom Utari Association (Utari Kyokai) to the original Ainu Association (Ainu Kyokai) in April
2009. However, the name was never changed in English translation, because “Utari” is thought
to be confusing and the organization wanted to be clear that they represented Ainu people(Interview: Sato Y., 16 September 2008) (Ainu Association website)[12] During the 1989 International Indigenous Peoples Conference, Ainu were not included in
the planning process and were involved only tangentially; in the 1993 Nibutani Forum Ainu
organizers were centrally involved but lacked local community support; and during the 2005
Biratori-Nibutani Forum local Ainu organizers formed the core of the planning team and enjoyedcommunity support, but Ainu were not involved on a national or global scale.
[13] For a thorough history of the Ainu movement during the 20th century, including a detailed
discussion of the Ainu Association, see Siddle, Richard. 1996. Race, resistance and the Ainu ofJapan. London; New York: Routledge. x, 269 pp.
[14] Shimazaki, N. 2008. “Senju’uminzoku Samitto Ainu Mosir 2008 kara takusareta mono.” In
IMADR-JC Tsu’ushin 155.
[15] IPS Survey response, 28 August 2008.
[16] lewallen, ann-elise. 2007 “Bones of Contention: Negotiating Anthropological Ethics within
Fields of Ainu Refusal.” Critical Asian Studies 39 (4): 509-540.
[17] See, for example Azuma, Shoko. 2008. "Culture & More: Ainu come out from obscurity toreclaim rights". Asahi Shimbun; Foster, Malcolm. 2008. "Indigenous peoples criticize Canada,
blame G8 for global warming". The Sault Star. July 5; Ito, Masami. 2008. "Diet officiallydeclares Ainu indigenous". Japan Times. June 7; Kambayashi, Takehiko. 2008. "Japan's Ainu
hope new identity leads to more rights". Christian Science Monitor. June 9; Koike, Masaharu.
2008. "[G8 Toyako Samitto Orutanatibu] senju minzoku samitto Ainu Mosir 2008 Sakai Mina
san ni kiku”; Makino, Catherine. 2008. "Ainu people to press demands at G8 Summit". Inter
Press Service News Agency. April 28; Mochida, Takeshi. 2008. Yoyaku mitomerareta Ainu
'retto no senju minzoku' ketsugi. In JanJanNews; Onishi, Norimitsu. 2008. "Nibutani Journal:
Recognition for a people who faded as Japan grew". The New York Times. July 3; Pellegatta,
Leonardo. 2008. L'altro volto di un summit. ALIAS. 30 August 2008: 6-7; and Takayama,
Hideko. 2008. "Japan's Parliament recognizes Ainu as indigenous people” In Bloomberg.com.

lewallen: Indigenous at last!

233[18] Kayano, Shiro. “Reflections on the Indigenous Peoples Summit in Ainu Mosir 2008.”
August 2008.
[19] The final vote for DRIP were 143-4, with 11 abstentions. Negative votes were cast by the
CANZAUS states; Canada, the US, Australia, and New Zealand. Votes of abstention were castby Russia, Azerbaijan, Israel, and Georgia, among others.
[20] Hokkaido Shimbun, September 14, 2007; Indigenous Peoples Summit in Ainu Mosir
Guidebook 2008: 13.
[21] Kobayashi Junko. 2008. “Shutoken no Ainu minzoku ni yoru shomei katsudo-Nihon seifu ni‘Senju minzoku’ to mitomesaseru tame ni.” Senju minzoku no 10-nen nyusu 144: 10.
[22] Ainu Utari Liaison Group (Ainu Utari Renrakukai) is composed of four main organizations:
Rera no Kai, Tokyo Ainu Kyokai, Kanto Utari Kai, and Pewre Utari Kai, all located in thegreater metropolitan area. (Ainu Utari Renrakukai blog)[23] Specifically, the UNHCR Working group issued the following comments, “Review, interalia, the land rights and other rights of the Ainu population and harmonize them with the United
Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (Algeria); Urge Japan to seek ways toinitiating a dialogue with its Indigenous peoples so that it can implement the United Nations
Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (Guatemala)” ï¼ˆOnline, Accessed August 22,
2008ï¼‰.
[24] Imazu Hiroshi cited in Ito, “Ainu press case for official recognition,” Japan Times, 23 May
2008.
[25] See for example article on the Kunashiri Project and article on Suzuki-backed aid to
Kunashiri, also see the high court's February 2008 ruling on Suzuki's case.
[26] On July 2, 2001, Suzuki stated, “I think it’s reasonable to say [that Japan is] a ‘one nation,
one language, one race/ethnicity nation-state.’ In Hokkaido, there are these people known as the
Ainu, and I’m sure there are those who will object to this comment, but they [the Ainu] arecompletely assimilated now” (Hokkaido Shimbun. July 3, 2001). At the time Suzuki was an
upper house legislator representing the Liberal Democratic Party.
[27] For discussion of Suzuki’s influence on Tahara’s candidacy, see Japan Times article.
[28] In fairness, I should note that Suzuki reportedly negotiated with top representatives of the
Ainu Association in a closed-door meeting in October 2001, and then held a press conference
where Association officials agreed that they issue had been resolved (lewallen field notes,
Sapporo, May 2007).
[29] The Governor of Sakhalin stated in 1994 that he recognized Ainu as indigenous peoples, aswell as their former inhabitation of the so-called Northern Territories, i.e. Etorof, Kunashiri,
Shikotan, and Habomai (Hokkaido Ainu Association. 2001. Kokusai Kaigi Shiryoshu, 19872000 [Records from international meetings] Sapporo: Hokkaido Ainu Association.).
[30] Note these comments from an endorsement speech for Upper House Candidate Tahara
Kaori in May 2007: “If we succeed in establishing Ainu rights, Japan will for the first time be ina position to share international standards and international values [with the rest of theworld]. Through that, we can find a solution for Japan’s weak point, the energy question, andThe Japanese Empire: Colonial Lives and Postcolonial Struggles

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improve relations with Russia...Northern Territories’ residents recognize Ainu to be an
indigenous people; the Russian government also recognizes Ainu indigeneity. By properly
calling for [recognition of] Ainu indigeneity, I believe we can launch a new approach to the
movement to return the Northern Territories, and [work toward] a solution” (Speech: Suzuki
Muneo. May 2007, translation by author.)[31] Legislators in both houses were reportedly in attendance for the yes vote; although one
legislator later claimed he “did not understand the implication of the Resolution” after voting infavor of it (Interview: Sato Y., 16 September 2008.)[32] The ruling Liberal Democratic Party cited this text as “too emotional”: “We mustacknowledge the historical fact that, in the course of Japan’s modernization, because Ainu
people were constrained as forced labor and exploited, destruction of Ainu culture and society
was accelerated, and in addition, as a result of the so-called assimilation policy, their traditional
lifestyles were restricted and eventually prohibited, and due to the damage resulting from thesepolicies, great numbers of Ainu persons were subjected to discrimination and forced to live inpoverty even though they are Japanese citizens and equal under the law (Original Paragraph 2 of
the “Resolution calling for the Recognition of the Ainu People as an indigenous people ofJapan”).
[33] Online, Accessed 16 September 2008.
[34] Suzuki, Muneo “June 24 Shitsumon Shuisho” cited in Kobayashi, Junko. 2008. “Ainu Mosir
2008 ‘Natsu’.” Senju minzoku no 10-nen nyusu 147: 2-4.
[35] Interview: Abe K., September 7, 2008.
[36] According to the Ainu Utari Renrakukai’s survey of Diet legislators conducted in February
2008, while a handful of legislators had an extraordinarily high level of awareness and concern
about Ainu issues, the majority were poorly informed (Kobayashi, Junko 2008. “2008-nen
harukara natsu he, Ainu minzoku no doko – Senju minzoku no kenri kakuritsu wo motomete.”
Senju minzoku 10-nen news 143: 14-15). While the survey had a 10% response rate, it should be
noted that respondents were likely self-selected with a prior interest in Ainu issues which
compelled them to respond.
[37] The full text of both appeals is available in English and Japanese Online.
[38] Kano Oki's website[39] Ainu Art Project website[40] Ainu Rebels website[41] This third objective aiming to link indigenous relationships with the natural environment toecological practice served as a central symbolic metaphor for marketing the IP Summit toindigenous guests, supporters, and funding agencies.
[42] By that extension, all settler nations, including Canada, the US, Australia, and New Zealand,for example, may also be considered as erstwhile and ongoing colonizers with varying degrees ofrecognition among the general population and not always satisfactory government policy
advocated by different administrations. Indigenous-identified persons from these settler nations

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often correct discussion of “post-colonialism” by emphasizing that their own experience ofcolonialism is ongoing or “advanced colonialism.”[43] The principal Okinawan group now sending advocates to the UN Permanent Forum on
Indigenous Issues is the Association of Indigenous Peoples in the Ryuukyuus (AIPR). They haveworked closely with the Shimin Gaikou Center, a Tokyo-based NGO which has also supported
Ainu representatives’ attendance at the UNPFII in New York and the Working Group on
Indigenous Populations in Geneva. Okinawans seeking recognition as indigenous peoples
represent a tiny fraction of the larger Okinawan population, even among those Okinawans whoseek independence. See Hook, Glenn and R. Siddle. 2003 Japan and Okinawa: Structure andSubjectivity. Routledge: New York for more discussion of the Okinawan indigenous advocacy
movement.
[44] I do not intend to claim that the Ainu movement will necessarily follow a similar trajectoryof empowerment and political mobilization as evident in other indigenous communities.
Canadian First Nations, New Zealand Maori, Australian Aboriginals and Sami, for example,
each have separate histories of colonial invasion and treaty-building with their respective nationstates, and their paths to rights recovery each involve separate trajectories. In particular, because
Ainu lack any sort of treaty with the Japanese government they face a formidable challenge infuture legal action. But it is worth noting that many Ainu activists perceive indigenous peoples
overseas as comrades in work toward political rights recovery work.
[45] Kayano, Shiro. “Reflections on the Indigenous Peoples Summit in Ainu Mosir 2008.”
August 2008.
[46] Personal Communication: IPS delegate, August 2008.
[47] Kayano, Shiro. “Reflections on the Indigenous Peoples Summit in Ainu Mosir 2008.”
August 2008.
[48] IPS Caravan Tour Blog.
[49] Indigenous peoples have witnessed an increase in droughts, desertification, coastal andriverbank erosion, erratic weather patterns (stronger hurricanes, typhoons, flooding, extreme
cold/heat), an increase in tropical diseases and disease-resistant insects, loss of biodiversity,changes in flora and faunal habitats and related food insecurity due to speciation change, and lossof agricultural land to the above factors.
[50] Tauli-Corpuz, Victoria and Tamang, Parshuram. “Trouble Trees.” Cultural Survival
Quarterly 32:2. (Online).
[51] Tauli-Corpuz, Victoria and Lynge, Aqqaluk. “Impacts of Climate Change Mitigation
Measures on Indigenous Peoples and on their Territories and Lands.” United Nations Permanent
Forum on Indigenous Issues (7th session). April 2008: 4-5.
[52] For a more detailed review of the Nibutani Dam issue, see Stevens, Georgina. Forthcoming.
"The Ainu, Law, and Legal Mobilization: From 1984 to 2007". In Re-visioning Ainu Studies: A
Critical Introduction, ed. Hudson, Mark, ann-elise lewallen, and Mark Watson, eds. Honolulu:
Hawai'i University Press; and Levin 2001 Online.
[53] Tauli-Corpuz and Lynge 2008: 4.

The Japanese Empire: Colonial Lives and Postcolonial Struggles

236[54] Cherrington, Mark. “Indigenous Peoples and Climate Change.” Cultural Survival Quarterly
32:2. (Online, Access date: 27 August 2008).
[55] Tauli-Corpuz and Lynge 2008: 4[56] The Global Summit will be sponsored by the Inuit Circumpolar Council (Online, Accessdate: 30 August 2008).
[57] By “strategic essentialism,” I refer to symbolic and other strategies employed by indigenous
peoples such as emphasizing shared values and similar histories to accentuate essential
characteristics to achieve political objectives.
[58] Lopez, Kevin Lee. Returning to fields. Cultural Survival Quarterly. Winter 1994: 29.
[59] In some cases Ainu chose to be assimilated to have better access to education andlivelihood, especially under Ainu Association campaigns in the 20th century. But in the earlycolonial period most Ainu resisted assimilation, although the lines where assimilation policies
started and Ainu autonomy ended were often blurred.

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Articles Recommended for Further Reading
Part I: Expanding the Contours of the Empire
From Asia-Pacific Journal“Japan’s Pan-Asianism and the Legitimacy of Imperial World Order, 1931–1945”
Cemil Aydin
March 12, 2008
http://japanfocus.org/-Cemil-Aydin/2695“Migrants, Subjects, Citizens: Comparative Perspectives on Nationality in the Prewar
Japanese Empire”
Tessa Morris-Suzuki
August 28, 2008
http://japanfocus.org/-Tessa-Morris_Suzuki/2862
From Other Sources
For work that explores the importance of combining imperial and national histories see:
Andre Schmid, “Colonialism and the ‘Korea Problem’ in the Historiography of Modern
Japan: A Review Article,” The Journal of Asian Studies, vol. 59, no 4 (2000): 951-976.
For other work that explores the origins of Japanese imperial behavior see:
Alan Christy, “The Making of Imperial Subjects in Okinawa,” positions 1:3 (1993): 607-639.
Robert Eskildsen, “Of Civilization and Savages: Mimetic Imperialism of Japan’s 1874
Expedition of Taiwan,” The American Historical Review, vol. 107, no 2 (April 2002).
Matthew Fraleigh, “Transplanting the Flower of Civilization: The ‘Peony Girl’ and Japan’s
1874 Expedition to Taiwan” International Journal of Asian Studies 9, 2 (2012): 177209.
Tessa Morris-Suzuki, “The Frontiers of Japanese Identity,” in S. Tonnesson and H. Antlov,
eds., Asian Forms of the Nation (London: Routledge, 2003).

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Brett Walker, The Conquest of Ainu Lands: Ecology and Culture in Japanese Expansion, 15901800 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001).
For colonial policies directed toward the Karafuto people see:Tessa Morris-Suzuki, “Northern Lights: The Making and Unmaking of Karafuto identity,” in
The Journal of Asian Studies vol. 60, 3 (August 2001): 645-671
For more on the ways that customs such as hairstyles and clothing were used to define the
Ainu as barbaric see:David Howell, Geographies of Identity in Nineteenth Century Japan (Berkeley: University ofCalifornia Press 2005).
Part II: Experiences of the Colonized
From Asia-Pacific Journal“The Song the Owl God Himself Sang. “Silver Droplets Fall Fall All Around,” an Ainu Tale
Kamuichikap kamui yaieyukar, “Shirokanipe ranran pishkan”
Transliterated in Romaji and Translated from Ainu \into Japanese by Chiri Yukie, translated
into English and introduced by Kyoko Selden
January 24, 2009http://japanfocus.org/-Kyoko-Selden/3026“The Ainu and Their Culture: A Critical Twenty-First Century Assessment”
Chisato (“Kitty”) Dubreuil
November 26, 2007
http://japanfocus.org/-Chisato__Kitty_-Dubreuil/2589“Japanese Tourism to Korea, Circa 1940: The Tension between Tourism Promotion
and Assimilation Policies”
Kenneth Ruoff
March 14, 2011
http://japanfocus.org/-Kenneth-Ruoff/3498“Being Okinawan in Japan: The Diaspora Experience”
Steve Rabson
March 19, 2012
http://japanfocus.org/-Steve-Rabson/3720

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From Other Sources
For an overview of the Japanese empire see:
Michelle Mason and Helen Lee, editors, Reading Colonial Japan Text, Context, and Critique(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012).
For more on the Ainu and Japanese colonization see:Kayano Shigeru, Our land was a forest, trans. Kyoko Selden (Boulder: Westview Press,
1994).
Richard Siddle, Race, Resistance and the Ainu of Japan (London: Routledge, 1996).
David Howell, Making “Useful Citizens” of Ainu Subjects in Early Twentieth-Century Japan,”
The Journal of Asian Studies, vol.63 no.1 (February 2004).
For more on Japanese colonization in relation to Taiwanese Aborigines see:Paul Barclay, “Contending Centers of Calculation in Colonial Taiwan: The Rhetorics ofVindicationism and Privation in Japan’s ‘Aborigine Policy,’” Humanities Research XIV
no. 1 (2007): 67-84.
Paul Barclay, “Cultural Brokerage and Interethnic Marriage in Colonial Taiwan: Japanese
Subalterns and Their Aborigine Wives, 1895-1930,” Journal of Asian Studies 64,2
(May 2005): 323-360.
Paul Barclay, “‘Gaining Trust and Friendship’ in Aborigine Country: Diplomacy, Drinking,and Debauchery on Japan’s Southern Frontier,” Social Science Japan Journal 6,1(April 2003): 77-96.
Andrew Morris, Colonial Project, National Game: A history of baseball in Japan (Berkeley,
University of California Press, 2011).
Robert Tierney, Tropics of Savagery: The Culture of Japanese empire in a comparative
framework (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010).

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For more on the experiences of Koreans during the colonial period and in the army see:Takeshi Fujitani, Race for Empire; Koreans as Japanese and Japanese as Americans during
World War II (University of California Press: Berkeley: 2011).
Part III: Postcolonial Legacies
From Asia-Pacific Journal“Yasukuni Shrine and the Double Genocide of Taiwan’s Indigenous Atayal: New court
verdict”
Tanaka Nobumasa
http://japanfocus.org/-Nobumasa-Tanaka/1928“Desecration of the Dead: Bereaved Okinawan Families Sue Yasukuni to End
Relatives’ Enshrinement”
Tanaka Nobumasa
May 7, 2008
http://japanfocus.org/-Nobumasa-Tanaka/2744“Okinawan Perspectives on Japan’s Imperial Institution”
Steve Rabson
February 16, 2008
http://japanfocus.org/-Steve-Rabson/2667“Okinawa’s Turbulent 400 years”
Gavan McCormack
January 12, 2009http://japanfocus.org/-Gavan-McCormack/3011“Exodus to North Korea Revisited: Japan, North Korea, and the ICRC in the‘Repatriation’ of Ethnic Koreans”
Tessa Morris-Suzuki
May 30, 2011
http://japanfocus.org/-Tessa-Morris_Suzuki/3541“Hundreds of Ethnic Koreans from Sakhalin to Return Home: A Colonial Legacy”
Korean Overseas Information Service and William Underwood
September 7, 2007
http://japanfocus.org/--Korean_Overseas_Information_Service/2515

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241“Redress Crossroads in Japan: Decisive Phase in Campaigns to Compensate Korean
and Chinese Wartime Forced Laborers”
William Underwood
July 26, 2010
http://japanfocus.org/-William-Underwood/3387
From Other Sources
For more on the Battle of Okinawa see:
Ota Masahide, Battle of Okinawa: The Typhoon of Steel and Bombs (Tokyo: Kume Pub. Co,
1984).