井の中の蛙

Tessa Morris-Suzuki’s recent Japan Focus article, “Migrants, Subjects, Citizens: Comparative Perspectives on Nationality in the Prewar Japanese Empire” is an ambitious attempt to integrate identity, legal and strategic issues related to the problem of citizenship in the context of migrations within and between empires.¹ The primary comparative material is to British examples, and students of “empire” as a category will find both familiar and new material to work with. Japan itself had such complicated migratory patterns that it really is a whole class of “comparative” study in itself. Morris-Suzuki pretty much covers the whole gamut: Japanese emigration to Hawai’i, N. America, S. America and Asia; Korean, Chinese and Taiwanese migration under Japanese imperium to places within Japan and within the empire.²

What makes the article particularly interesting, aside from the valiant attempt to clarify the various legal contortions of Imperial citizenship³ , is that it parallels some of the arguments I made in January (and June) — that Japanese attitudes towards emigration and immigration are structured by nationalistic and imperialistic narratives which obscure important aspects and which lay the foundation for current problems with immigrant assimilation. Morris-Suzuki is taking a more legal and strategic approach, noting the various places in which the end of Japan’s Empire left former colonial subjects stranded without citizenship, and the political and diplomatic problems, some of which are still unresolved, and seemingly unresolvable.

Some of these problems clearly should have been solved by the US and allies after WWII: full repatriation of Korean subjects in the Japanese home islands, Sakhalin and Manchuria, for example, would have been entirely appropriate. Or would it? Part of me thinks that the diversity represented by Koreans in Japan should have been a good thing for leavening, a bit, Japan’s self-definition as homogenous, but clearly, if it was supposed to accomplish something with regard to multi-cultural understanding, it’s a gloriously failed experiment. The paper almost invites counter-factual speculation: if the lines had been drawn differently, would there have been a significantly different result? Could Japan, in the early 20th century, have developed a version of Imperial Nationalism which wasn’t racialist, or a citizenship system which wasn’t patriarchal and instrumentalist?⁴

1. It also contains a citation to one of my own publications, which is always fun, but it’s on a minor point, and her main discussion of material related to my article comes from other sources. Oh, well. [↩]
2. She does talk about the integration of Okinawans to some extent, but leaves out their anomalous status after WWII. Not a complaint or a criticism, though it does raise fascinating questions. There’s just not enough room in the world to cover everything. [↩]
3. and in this regard, Japan’s koseki family registration system seems to be arguably simpler and more reasonable than several of the British attempts to both authorize and limit the mobility of colonial subjects [↩]
4. there was an article in one of my regular journals recently — AHR, JAS, JJS — which argued that Japan’s Imperium forced it to adopt a more flexible definition of multicultural national identity, but I can’t remember which one and the move has obliterated any organization I had in my journals. I wasn’t terribly convinced at the time, and a large part of my reservation had to do specifically with what Morris-Suzuki highlights: the rhetoric of integration was one-sided and the legal status of colonial subjects was never considered a subject for rectification. [↩]

Tang Dynasty Times has the latest — and a great collection it is, too — and promises to have a second edition in a month!

A friend of mine here in Taiwan lent me what is probably the best historical documentary I have seen in a long time: 緣的海平線 SHONENKO 臺灣少年工的故事.

Whenever I come across a beautiful work like this, I am reminded of how horrible the vast majority of historical visual material I have seen in the way of television documentaries and other programs on the history of wartime or colonial East Asia. While the rich texture, narrative style, historical research, and quality of the content in this documentary are of the kind we have come to expect in, say, a US Civil War documentary, I wish I could say the same for much of what I have seen in our own field. I can only hope that this documentary can serve as a model to future content creators.

This documentary focuses on the lives of a group of children who were recruited to work in Japanese wartime industry in Japan and tells the story of their hopes, dreams, and the reality of their wartime and postwar suffering. It is mostly in the Taiwanese and occasionally Japanese languages but there are Japanese and English subtitles available.

I was really impressed with the amazing combination of materials they brought together for this high quality production: wartime films, plentiful pictures, primary documents, and interviews of the now elderly Taiwanese and some of the Japanese who interacted with the children (a teacher responsible for recruiting the children, and someone responsible for them in the factory).

The other thing which impressed me with this work was that the message of the program, unlike so many other documentaries on Japan’s war and colonial rule, wasn’t simply to beat the viewer in the head with how evil the Japanese empire was. The narrative is certainly a tragedy but the experience of the children, the deceptive promises of the initial recruitment (familiar surely to many young workers within Japan as well as in the colonies), their disappointment with what met them in Japan, the barbaric conditions of their work, their suffering at the hands of US bombing, and the fate that met them after the war was over all make for, surprise, surprise, a more complex experience that doesn’t lend itself well to a dedicated sermon against anyone or thing in particular. Instead we get a sensitive look at those who lived in and experienced total war, who worked around the clock in factories, repeated daily the exhortations to ever greater wartime production (e.g. 勝つために一機でも一艦でも多く前線へ送れ), who heard the sounds of falling bombs overhead, and then faced the horrors of a chaotic early postwar period in Japan or back to Taiwan or mainland China (as in the fascinating but tragic case of one of the children interviewed).

The first of two parts of the 21st Asian History Carnival will be coming soon on August 23rd to the Tang Dynasty Times!

Read more and submit your nominations for the carnival here:

21st Asian History Carnival.

I still hate this time of year. Though the post and comments are of generally high quality, and the introduction of actual Japanese scholars and sources into the debate is welcome, I still haven’t seen anyone address the “sufficient ≠ necessary” issue to my satisfaction. There’s an awful lot of post hoc ergo propter hoc in the discussion, as well as an awful lot of “plausible, therefore true” fallacies on the other side.

It’s really one of the nastiest questions of historical causality: there’s counterfactuals, personality/psychological considerations, cultural considerations, long-term strategic and moral implications, the inevitability trap, and self-justification and distortion in the sources on all sides, not to mention huge gaps in the record on critical persons and times. The problem, really, is to approach it the way we do every other historical question, because to treat it as a sui generis issue (which it really looks like) can lead to the use of arguments and methods which are unacceptable in other contexts (and should be unacceptable in this one).

Like Eric Rauchway, I rarely spend a lot of time on the atomic bombings in either my World History or Japanese history courses, partially because, like him, I put it in the context of the general escalation of air war and military technology (a theme that runs through my World courses in particular) and partially because the debate is driven more by ethical than by historical questions. Otherwise we would have moved on ages ago, because the consensus position of Japanese historians reached almost a half century ago still largely stands: The combined shock of the atomic bombs and Soviet entry pushed the Japanese cabinet to the point where they could accept the unconditional end of the war, but things happened so fast that there’s really no way to tell whether one or the other would have been sufficient in isolation, nor can we know for sure whether a conditional surrender could have been reached earlier because nobody tried very hard.

The Asian History Carnival #20 is now up at Jottings from the Granite Studio! It comes in three parts:

Asian History Carnival #20 Part I

Asian History Carnival #20 Part II

Asian History Carnival #20 Part III

We are looking for volunteers to host the September and November installments. Read more on the carnival homepage.

I’m sitting in the Taiwanese National Library here in Taipei and just finished looking through an unusual publication put out in December, 1946 by 臺灣新生報社, the publisher of an important newspaper going by that name. It is entitled, 『民主とは何ぞや』(What is Democracy?)

What is immediately striking about the pamphlet is the fact that it is published in the Japanese language over a year after the end of the Japanese colonial period in August 1945. The general editor of the 臺灣新生報, Wu Jinlian (吳金煉) discusses the reason for this choice of language in a special explanatory preface:

本省は光復滿一週年を契機として新聞雜誌から日文版を撤廢した、日治五十年の必然結果として日語日文が本省の文化面に淺からぬ根を下していることは否定出來ない事實であるが、しかし光復と共に一日も早く速かにこの日本的殘滓を洗除すべきことは一般省民なかんづく青年層の國語國文の習熟度に鑑みる時，日文版の廢止は全く時期尚早の感なきを得ない。從つてここに當然何らかの過渡期的辦法が講究されなければならない。本叢書は實に如上の社會的要求に應じて生れたものである。

It says that Japanese versions of newspapers and magazines were banned¹ a year after the 1945 liberation of Taiwan but that no one can deny the depth of penetration of the Japanese language during the fifty years of Japanese colonial rule. While most people want to get rid of this “Japanese remnant,” it was simply not seen as realistic to completely abandon the use of Japanese in publications so soon, given the weak abilities of the youth in the “national language” (Mandarin Chinese). The pamphlet was thus published in Japanese in “response to this demand of society.”

While this is the only “issue” of what seems to be part of multiple similar publications that I could find in Taiwan’s National Library here, it was interesting to note that, in addition to some thirty pages dedicated to the main topic of defining and discussing what democracy is, some dozen or so pages of recent “Science News” were included in the back, including a list of nobel prize winners, all nicely summarized in Japanese for an audience that, presumably, prefers to or can only read it in that language.

The piece opens with a short history of fascism, along with an outline of Sun Yatsen’s (國父) approach to democracy, a detailed explanation of its relationship to ethnicity or race (民族) and a description of how Japan took advantage of cries for “self-determination” (民族自決) to peel away parts of the Chinese nation (8).

Another chapter talks about the social foundation for realizing democracy, including a section that opens with a sentence that shows the target for the readership: “We are what are known as intellectuals.” (我らはいはゆる知識分子である。21) Intellectuals are further described as the “leaders of society.” (社會のリーダである） Oh, those where the days, eh? Perhaps not.

One of the most interesting sections, however, is on the relationship between those in the military and democratic politics (軍人と民主政治 30-39). We can see this pre-2/28 incident publication as an example of the considerable freedom of press in Taiwan during the time not only in the fact that it was published in Japanese but in this section which offers a sustained critique of Chinese politics by blaming the failure of democracy in China on the close connections between military and political power. It is unlikely that the same critique would made it into print only a few months or a year later.

Since I need to focus on other things, I didn’t get a chance to read the whole thing thoroughly but 『民主とは何ぞや』 is an interesting look at a critique of Chinese politics and the promotion of democracy from the perspective of Japanese speaking Taiwanese intellectuals in late 1946. Check it out in a library (perhaps not so) close to you.²

1. I found a reference to this ban on Japanese which actually happens a bit later than this quote might suggest, not on August 15th but on October 25th, the first anniversary of Chen Yi’s official staging of the Taiwan handover: 「撤除本省境內所有新聞紙，雜誌附刊之日文版，並令各縣市政府遵照…」in 《臺灣光復和光復後五年省情》（上）p391. [↩]
2. You can request the work on the 6th floor Japanese/Korean materials room (日韓文室) of the Taiwanese National Library. Submit a request sheet there with the title and the call number 571.6 8444. [↩]

You grade sixty tests, and what do you get?
Three months older and deeper in debt.
St. Peter don’t you call me, cause I can’t go!
I owe book orders to the campus bookstore….

***

Books that still need to be written about Meiji Japan¹ :

• A good comprehensive history of the Meiji era²
• A good social history of the post-abolition samurai class. Aside from the Hirschmeier-Yamamura economic debate, there’s hardly anything.
• a full-length biography of Kido Takayoshi (aka Kido Kōin). We’ve got Ito, and Yamagata, and Okubo and Meiji (now we need an abridged one) and Katsura Taro and Shibusawa Eiichi, and Saionji Kimmochi.
• a history of the modernization of martial arts

***

Adamu at MutantfrogTravelogue did a nice survey of the Yasukuni Shrine’s Yushukan museum which ignited a 60-response comment thread. One of the subtler distortions in the Shrine is their history of Korea-Japan relations. Adamu writes

The arguments made did not seem particularly pernicious or dishonest, though certain claims (such as “Japan had repeatedly proposed national independence for Korea, but the West rejected the idea” prior to formal annexation in 1905) seemed kind of disingenuous.

My contribution to the comments was to clarify:

On the Korean issue, they are being blatantly disingenuous: the various calls for Korean independence were targetted at blunting the influence of other regional powers over the Korean court, on the grounds that—according to Japanese strategic calculations—the only natural and legitimate influence in Korea should be Japanese. They called for Korean independence from China before the Sino-Japanese war (after which China explicitly recognized Japanese interests in Korea), then independence from Russia before the Russo-Japanese war (after which Russia and the US explicitly recognized Japanese innterests in Korea). It’s still not a settled question as to when Korean annexation became Japanese policy, but there never was any question (after about 1876 or so) that control of Korea was critical to Japan’s strategic situation.

1. inspired by the difficulties my Meiji class students had with their topics [↩]
2. this is the only one of this list which I would consider taking on myself [↩]

After creating an OS X dashboard widget to converting Korean 檀紀 years into to western years, it was only a matter of time before another moment of distraction got me to playing with the idea of creating widgets for converting Japanese and Chinese calendars. After a long day of reading about US rice control policies in Korea 1945-1948, I treated myself to some more tinkering and managed to slap together a new widget for some Japanese dates:

Japan Calendar Converter Dashboard Widget v1.0

It unfortunately appears that the widget will not work on OS X versions earlier than 10.4.3.

When you install the widget, just select the period you want (or leave it on whatever period you used last), type the number of the year you want, and press return. It will convert the date into western years. It currently supports conversion from 明治, 大正, 昭和, and 平成 years. If there are a lot of comments here expressing interest, I can add earlier periods easily enough, but I won’t bother unless there is some demand for it.

UPDATE: While looking around for an online version of a chart detailing the conversion of pre-Meiji Japanese dates, I found that there is no reason for me to upgrade this little widget to cover the premodern. There is already a great widget out there with full support for these older periods. Anyone studying pre-modern Japanese history who uses a Mac should definitely check out the fantastic NegoCalc application, which includes a dashboard widget! Read more and download the application here:

NengoCalc Download Page

Sean Malloy has withdrawn the pictures once touted as “newly discovered” photographs of Hiroshima in the immediate aftermath of the atomic bombing. Over the last few days, after the pictures were reported by HNN, the Huffington Post, and Wired, among others, members of the Japanese studies community took a closer look and began to doubt. I saw it unfold at H-Japan: questions about the clothing worn by the people standing in the photos, injuries that didn’t match the atomic bombing, topography issues. Most of all, there were similarities to other known pictures from the Kanto Earthquake of 1923 and the anti-Korean/anti-leftist massacres which followed: the injuries, topography and clothing are more consistent with that disaster/atrocity. How the pictures acquired the Hiroshima story is still a mystery though, as one commenter pointed out, there’s a three day gap between the bombing and the first known pictures which we’d dearly love to fill.

By a curious coincidence, I (and a lot of other innocent scholars of Asia, I warrant) got an email from an ironically named Japanese group¹ whose sole purpose is to deny the realities of Japanese WWII atrocities, and one of their highlight publications is an attempt to debunk as many Nanjing Massacre photographs as possible. Daqing Yang, one of the premier scholars on the Nanjing Massacre has written

Even photographic evidence, as many of them have come to realize, can be fraught with danger if its origins cannot be ascertained. When a conservative Japanese daily newspaper made a news story out of a wartime photograph used with the wrong caption in Kasahara’s book, he offered a swift public apology for his negligence and replaced the photograph.94 One of Kasahara’s historian colleagues has included a cautionary note about the use of photographic evidence in a college textbook on historical sources, using the Rape of Nanjing as an example.95

A few days back, peacay wrote me to get clarification on a satirical map found in the ‘Block Prints of the Chinese Revolution’ collection at Princeton. The problem with it, what was confusing peacay, is that the map seemed to be too broad and didn’t say much about the 1911 Revolution. The archival commentary wasn’t helpful, being a general statement about the whole collection. So, I got a good look at it and reported back that it was actually a Japanese-drawn (that much peacay already knew, which is why I got the call) WWI satire, dated late 1914, and the sum total of Chinese commentary was to depict China as a Mandarin pig, anxiously looking at a rain gauge. (peacay has a nice detail shot of it) The rest of the collection seems to actually be from Shanghai and relate to the 1911 revolution (at least, I assume Alan would have said something!). I don’t know that Princeton is going to withdraw the out-of-place image — they’ve already got a disclaimer on the collection saying that they don’t endorse any of the sentiments contained therein — but I expect that their in-house cataloging is more detailed and accurate. I hope so, but that’s no protection for researchers who aren’t in New Jersey.

This is going to come up more and more: as archives and collections become more public, the likelihood of discovering errors (or worse, propogating them in our research) is going to increase. As others have noted, I’m sure, historians are rarely trained specifically in the critical use of visual evidence, photographic or artistic. I’ve seen some grossly overinterpreted and casually thoughtless uses of visual materials.² Nor are many archivists, though we rely heavily on their record-keeping and expertise. But it’s getting harder and harder to excuse this kind of carelessness, while our training is not at all keeping up with the materials we’re expected to use.

1. I’ll tell you if you really want, but I don’t want to give them any more publicity than they deserve [↩]
2. I used a world history textbook once which both: a. presented a photograph of modern African folk dancers in a chapter on pre-1500 African history, the only instance in which a modern photo was used as evidence in a pre-modern context; b. and claimed that the solemn expressions on native Americans in a mid-19c picture were evidence of their social and cultural plight instead of the long exposures of contemporary technology [↩]