McDonald - Placing empire: travel and the social imagination in imperial Japan

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Placing Empire

The publisher gratefully acknowledges the generous support of the Philip E. Lilienthal Asian Studies Endowment Fund of the University of California Press Foundation, which was established by a major gift from Sally Lilienthal.

Placing Empire

Travel and the Social Imagination in Imperial Japan

Kate McDonald

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu .

University of California Press

Oakland, California

2017 by Kate McDonald

Suggested citation: McDonald, Kate. Placing Empire: Travel and the Social Imagination in Imperial Japan. Oakland: University of California Press, 2017. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/luminos.34

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons CC BY-NC-ND license. To view a copy of the license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses .

This project was supported in part by funding from the University of California Presidential Faculty Research Fellowships in the Humanities, MR-15-328710.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: McDonald, Kate, 1981- author.

Title: Placing empire : travel and the social imagination in imperial Japan / Kate McDonald.

Description: Oakland, California : University of California Press, [2017] | Includes bibliographical references and index. |

Identifiers: LCCN 2017009063 (print) | LCCN 2017012735 (ebook) | ISBN 9780520967236 (ebook) | ISBN 9780520293915 (pbk. : alk. paper)

Subjects: LCSH: Tourism--Japan--20th century. | Tourism--Political aspects--Japan--20th century. | Japan--Colonies--Description and travel--20th century. | Korea--Description and travel--20th century. | Manchuria (China)--Description and travel--20th century. | Taiwan--Description and travel--20th century.

Classification: LCC G155.J27 (ebook) | LCC G155.J27 M44 2017 (print) | DDC 306.4/819089956051--dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017009063

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For Max

For, whatever else it may be, nationalism always involves a struggle for land, or an assertion about rights to land; and the nation, almost by definition, requires a territorial base in which to take root and fulfill the needs of its members.

ANTHONY D. SMITH

Its not just like Japan. It is Japan.

ARAKAWA SEIJIR , UPON DISEMBARKING AT THE PORT OF PUSAN , KOREA (1918)

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This project started with a simple question. What did Japanese travelers see when they went to colonial Korea, Manchuria, and Taiwan? Put differently, what did it mean to see Korea, Manchuria, or Taiwan as a Japanese traveler under empirewhat did it mean to see territories that were once decidedly foreign and then, suddenly, were not? Japanese travelers in the early 1900s remembered clearly the transformation of these lands into Japanese colonies. But the issue is not one of Japanese history alone. Early American travelers to Hawaii traveled with memories of the independent Hawaiian kingdom and its overthrow by American colonists in 1893. And though travelers from Great Britain and France operated within empires of longer standing, they too found themselves struggling to negotiate how the many pasts of colonized lands could reasonably be transformed into evidence of the progressive history of their imperial nations.

Because of the global context in which we might ask this question, its answer bears directly on long-held assumptions about the uniqueness of Japanese imperialism. In the first major English-language study of the Japanese Empire as a whole, Mark R. Peattie set out what would become the standard framework for defining the Japanese Empire within the larger history of modern imperialism. As the only non-Western imperium of recent times, he wrote, the Japanese colonial empire stands as an anomaly of modern history. He further elaborated on the peculiar nature of Japanese imperialism: Because it was assembled at the apogee of the new imperialism by a nation which was assiduously striving to emulate Western organizational models, it is not surprising that it was formally patterned after the tropical empires of modern Europe. Yet the historical and geographic circumstances of the overseas Japanese empire set it apart from its European counterparts and gave it a character and purpose scarcely duplicated elsewhere.

For Peattie, the unique circumstances were three. One, Japan had become an imperial power at precisely the moment when it extracted itself from its own unequal treaties with the United States and other Western powers. Thus, the Japanese government saw clearly the significance of territorial expansion to geopolitical power. Two, the Japanese Empire was late to the scene, in the sense that Japan acquired its first formal colony, Taiwan, in 1895. The lateness of Japans empire meant that there were few unclaimed territories, especially in Asia, which had been the site of intense colonization by European empires for over a hundred years. And three, the cultural and ethnic makeup of the territories Japan did acquire was markedly different from what the world had seen in European and American empires. Because it was an Asian empire, Peattie argued, its most important colonies, Taiwan and Korea, were well-populated lands whose inhabitants were racially akin to their Japanese rulers with whom they shared a common cultural heritage. This sense of cultural affinity profoundly shaped Japanese attitudes toward colonial governance once the empire was established.

The idea that its geographic contiguity and internal cultural cohesion set the Japanese Empire apart from European and, indeed, all other modern empires, has had a long life. In their widely influential introduction to Tensions of Empire, Ann Stoler and Frederick Cooper refrained from addressing the meaning of empire in regard to contiguous territory... in which the colonial pattern of reproducing difference might in theory be mitigated by the geographic possibility of absorption more readily than was the case overseas.

Yet, as did their imperial counterparts in the United States, Great Britain, and France, hundreds of thousands of Japanese people traveled to the Japanese colonies of Korea, Manchuria, and Taiwan during the first half of the twentieth century to pursue precisely this question of whether their imperial territories were, or would necessarily produce, a coherent political, historical, linguistic, and cultural space. Indeed, it was the apparent need for an answer to this question that motivated their travel in the first place. Querying what it meant for a Japanese traveler to see Korea, Manchuria, or Taiwan under Japanese colonial rule thus became a concrete approach for exploring questions of deep relevance not just to the provincial realm of modern Japanese history but also to the history of modern empire: what do representations of place have to do with the production and reproduction of imperial formations in the context of colonialism, capitalism, and nationalism? How does place bear on the postcolonial history of settler colonialism, which, since most colonial empires did not abandon the entirety of their colonial holdings, is not so post colonial after all? And what does imperial tourism, a phenomenon of equally global provenance, have to do with all of the above?