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In Transit

The Formation of a Colonial East Asian Cultural Sphere

By Faye Yuan Kleeman; Series edited by Joshua A. Fogel
University of Hawaii Press

This work examines the creation of an East Asian cultural sphere by the Japanese imperial project in the first half of the twentieth century. It seeks to re-read the “Greater East Asian Co-prosperity Sphere” not as a mere political and ideological concept but as the potential site of a vibrant and productive space that accommodated transcultural interaction and transformation. By reorienting the focus of (post)colonial studies from the macro-narrative of political economy, military institutions, and socio-political dynamics, it uncovers a cultural and personal understanding of life within the Japanese imperial enterprise.

To engage with empire on a personal level, one must ask: What made ordinary citizens participate in the colonial enterprise? What was the lure of empire? How did individuals not directly invested in the enterprise become engaged with the idea? Explanations offered heretofore emphasize the potency of the institutional or ideological apparatus. Faye Kleeman asserts, however, that desire and pleasure may be better barometers for measuring popular sentiment in the empire—what Raymond Williams refers to as the “structure of feeling” that accompanied modern Japan’s expansionism. This particular historical moment disseminated common cultural perceptions and values (whether voluntarily accepted or forcibly inculcated). Mediated by a shared aspiration for modernity, a connectedness fostered by new media, and a mobility that encouraged travel within the empire, an East Asian contact zone was shared by a generation and served as the proto-environment that presaged the cultural and media convergences currently taking place in twenty-first-century Northeast Asia.

The negative impact of Japanese imperialism on both nations and societies has been amply demonstrated and cannot be denied, but In Transit focuses on the opportunities and unique experiences it afforded a number of extraordinary individuals to provide a fuller picture of Japanese colonial culture. By observing the empire—from Tokyo to remote Mongolia and colonial Taiwan, from the turn of the twentieth century to the postwar era—through the diverse perspectives of gender, the arts, and popular culture, it explores an area of colonial experience that straddles the public and the private, the national and the personal, thereby revealing a new aspect of the colonial condition and its postcolonial implications.

Faye Yuan Kleeman’s In Transit: The Formation of the Colonial East Asian Cultural Sphere provides a fascinating description of Japan’s empire and the cultural exchanges that flowed within it through the life stories of ten of its subjects and citizens. . . . Kleeman has made a significant contribution to the study of Japan’s empire through her sensitive exploration of the lives of individuals who made up the Japanese colonial cultural sphere. Pacific Affairs

Introduction

Modernity, Colonialism, and the Formation of a Cultural Empire

In Around the World in 80 Days (1873), Jules Verne created the “most perfect gentleman of English society,” the righ teous Phileas Fogg, Esq., who romped across continents and seas to win a 20,000 pound wager. Verne created this par tic u lar character to act out the fantasies and dreams of his readers. The fascination with the potential of modern technology, including trains, steamers, and hot air balloons (in the filmic version but not in the book), that Verne explored in the adventurous tale was backed by the actual circumstances of the completion of the transcontinental railway in the United States and the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, which made a tourist- like rapid circumnavigation possible. This scenario of a new kind of voyage has subsequently played out over and over again across the world in different incarnations: translations, dramatizations, and films. Indeed, after the book’s publication, a flurry of journeys around the world occurred among the European upper class. But as much as the novel is about the marvel of modern technology, albeit in the imagination of nineteenth- century readers, it is also a story about the British empire. With London as its starting point, the journey involved traversing the Suez, traveling to Bombay, Calcutta, Hong Kong, and Yokohama, arguably all colonial cities, and then circling back to London in time to claim the reward. The adventure highlighted the scope of the British empire on which “the sun never set” and the gradually accelerating pace of movement of peoples within the empire. Certainly, Verne, a pioneer in the genre of science fiction, was interested more than anything in highlighting the potential capabilities of the technological innovations of the future that would revolutionize human movement to overcome natural geographical distance and cultural divergence.

The interwoven schema of colonialism, technology, and movement also manifested itself in East Asia, during the time referred to as the high colonial period of the Japanese empire. From 1895, when Japan acquired its first colony of Taiwan, to 1945, with its loss of the Pacific War to the United States, the Japanese empire grew to cover an unprece dented area, from the Sakhalin and the Kurile Islands in the north (acquired 1905) to Manchuria (1905), Korea (1910), a swath of China, Taiwan, and the Pacific Islands in the south (1919). During the last few years of the war, Japan took over many parts of the Southeast Asian countries previously colonized by Eu ro pe an powers, including Hong Kong, Burma, Indonesia, Vietnam, and Singapore. Though less global than the travels of Verne’s character, in a sense a cosmopolitan chain of modern colonial cities was formed with the mediation of Japanese colonialism, extending from Dalian to Seoul, Tokyo, Shanghai, Taipei, and later to Hong Kong and Saigon. From Northeastern Asia to the South Pacific, Japanese influence could be seen in all aspects of life, from economic, military, and po liti cal systems, to education and legal systems, to everyday customs and practices. Modern facilities for hygiene, medicine, transportation, postal services, and schools were built and managed with firm hands in a style that combined Western technology and Japanese know-how. The modernizing endeavor that Japan adopted from the West less than half a century earlier was now being exported to its colonies, which produced a kind of colonial modernity for the first time.

This overlapping of the modernist vision and the circular route of colonial cities that cut across oceans and continents resonates with an issue that postcolonial theorists grapple with— that is, how to discern the complicated and at times complicit relationship between colonialism and modernity. Various issues surrounding “modernity” have been hotly contested across a range of academic disciplines. Modernity can be demarcated, for example, by major technological events, such as the arrival of the printing press, the industrial revolution, the steam engine, and other innovations that fundamentally changed the lives of millions in terms of their access to knowledge, modes of production, and ability to move from place to place. Later, cameras and phonographs were invented to record and capture culture for the first time. At each stage of the evolution of new technology, modernity was redefined.

There are other ways of defining modernity. It can be demarcated by major historical events, such as the French Revolution, American Revolution, Russian Revolution, Meiji Restoration, or Chinese Revolution, that brought some sort of systemic change for society, illustrating the violence that often comes with modernity. As stated above, modernity entails social, political, cultural (including material culture), and even spiritual dimensions that constitute a complex, multifaceted, and interrelated system.

Within the East Asian context, the scope of Japan’s territorial expansionism never reached the scale of the British or French empires, but perhaps precisely due to this proximity of distance, the migration of technologies, material culture, and human resources was even more frequent and significant. One of the most influential Meiji thinkers, Fukuzawa Yukichi (1835– 1901), equated enlightenment and civilization (bunmei kaika) with transportation (kōtsū),1 and the Meiji nishikie woodcut prints2 were full of pop u lar images of steamships, trains, balloons, and rickshaws, demonstrating the fascination people had with the ability to break away from their everyday lives and venture into the unlimited possibility of the world beyond.

One aspect of the Meiji state’s brand of modernization was the zealous and wholesale translation of Euro-American culture. The extent of the radical adaptation of this alien modernity was not limited to systems of politics, polity, military, education, or finance and industry, and permeated even the most mundane and intimate aspects of personal life. In many short stories by the Taishō writer Akutagawa Ryūnosuke (1892– 1927), often referred to as his “tales of enlightenment” (kaikamono), the author dealt with the desires, conflicts, and struggles brought on by the clash of the new and the old in the state- sanctioned, public cultural transformation that demanded every Meiji citizen participate. Two examples illustrate the desire for self- transformation and the ambivalence toward this transformation: Akutagawa’s short stories “The Ball” (Butōkai, 1920) and “The Hina Dolls” (Hina, 1923).

Both “The Ball” and “The Hina Dolls” use a similar narrative device, employing the perspective of an older woman as narrator who reminisces about events that occurred when she was young. In “The Ball,” Akiko was once a beautiful young girl, decked out for a Western-style ball at the palatial, newly constructed Rokumeikan.3 Akutagawa infuses the story with opulent and exotic items like pale blue ribbons, laces, rose- colored ball gowns, silver and glass utensils, champagne, piles of towering pomegranates, and ice cream. Though the short story was written for readers living in 1920s Taishō Japan, and the objects and terms parading through the story had already taken on a nostalgic patina, Akutagawa was no doubt trying to capture the early excitement that

Meiji subjects must have experienced during their first encounter with another civilization. The young Akiko, a Meiji version of the modern girl and bedazzled by the sumptuousness, felt both excited and inadequate. The sense of modernity, both visual and tactile, is felt through the exhaustive and dizzying listing of objects of desire. Written around the same time, “The Hina Dolls” adopts a more conventional narrative mode and is permeated by a somber sense of resignation. In “The Hina Dolls,” a prestigious family who has seen better days is now under pressure to sell the daughter’s extravagant set of festival dolls to survive. The dolls, in the end, spare the family from perishing, and in exchange the family is able to install a gaslight, where they gather to have their meal in silence, feeling both elated and defeated at the same time.

In both stories, the personal desire for the modern and the exotic come at the price of great ambivalence and anxiety. A transaction exchanging the intangible (traditional values, indigenous identity, etc.) for material objects and technology is part and parcel of colonial modernity. This acculturation of the quotidian can be seen in numerous handbooks published in the Meiji period. Illustrated pamphlets served as pedagogical materials full of practical information on topics ranging from items of Western-style clothing, interior décor, and the function of furniture such as tables, beds, and chairs, to detailed explanations of dining utensils and food items, to the intriguing mechanism of a clock. Thus, the transmission of modernity carried out through an extensive geographical and temporal span was manifested not only through grand discourses of geopolitics, economy, and military force but also through the most minute and mundane objects of everyday life. Essentially, it was through the everyday people who subscribed to the ideas and ideal of the modern that the project was fully realized.

The uncertainty and uneasiness articulated in Akutagawa’s enlightenment stories were soon to be a sentiment of the past as Japan took on its role as the sole colonial power in the region. The Meiji project of modernizing domestic realms was carried out to the accompaniment of territorial expansion. With the incorporation of Hokkaidō in 1869, followed by the control of Okinawa in 1879, Japan proceeded along the path of empire building swiftly. Alan Christy notes that the “Meiji government initiated a program of assimilation (dōka), signifying the imperative that Okinawans transform their speech, dress, work, and leisure activities from those labeled ‘Okinawan’ to those designated ‘Japanese.’ ”4 This assimilation of others in the vicinity of Japan proper eventually extended from Hokkaidō and Okinawa to Taiwan, Korea, and other parts of Asia, forming a great East Asian empire.

Komori Yōichi, who describes the duality of Japan’s colonialism at the dawn of the modern period, sees the Japanese as vacillating between two views of colonialism. On the one hand, they largely ignored the external colonial pressures that led to Japan’s rapid modernization and social transformation, a state Komori characterizes as “colonial disregard” (shokuminteki muishiki); on the other, the Japanese actively pursued the colonization and assimilation of Korea and Taiwan on the basis of what Komori terms “colonial regard” (shokuminchishugiteki ishiki). In other words, the Japanese suppressed the sense of crisis associated with the idea that Japan might have been colonized by Western colonial powers and instead focused upon the discourse of modernity as manifest in the spontaneous, self- determined ( jihatsuteki) mission of “civilization and enlightenment” (bunmei kaika). “Colonial disregard” was constructed through a pro cess of erasure wherein the Japanese concealed their internalized self- colonization, while “colonialist regard” was ex-pressed through mimicry of the Western superpowers. Although most Western media of the day still considered Japan an underdeveloped country, the Meiji elite willingly accepted the mission of civilizing their fellow Asians as part of their destiny.5

Tokyo, capital of the new, modernizing state of Japan since 1868, was throughout this period both the prime example of a modern Asian city and the center of intellectual engagement with Western ideas. But for many years it straddled the divide, maintaining much of old Edo urban culture while constructing a Western- influenced cityscape. The 1923 Tokyo earthquake was the turning point for the transformation of Tokyo into a true modern city. The earthquake erased the old Edo and afforded the city a chance to rebuild itself into a modern mega-metropolis.6

In the decade beginning in 1894, Japan participated in three foreign military operations, the First Sino–Japanese War (Nis-Shin Sensō, 1894–1895), the Boxer Rebellion (1900), and the Russo–Japanese War (1904–1905). These engagements with the outside world, although military in character, marked a dramatic departure from the Tokugawa isolation policy.7 Japan’s colonies further opened the country to Asia, and its rapid modernization made Tokyo a magnet for people across Asia seeking new ideas like progress, freedom, democracy, socialism, and revolution. Reformers looked to the Meiji government for inspiration, which was dominated by reformers eager to adopt Western institutions, ideals, and technologies. In 1905, the city hosted eight thousand students from the neighboring Qing China alone. Most of them were sent by their government to learn about the modernization process Japan was successfully following, and to bring that knowledge back to their own country. The list of Chinese students who studied in Japan during this period is a who’s who of the movers and shakers of republican China. They included revolutionaries like Qiu Jin, Zou Rong, Xu Xilin, and Huang Xing, who were at the forefront of the revolution that toppled the Qing dynasty, as well as future po liti cal leaders like Zhou Enlai, Chiang Kai- shek, and Wang Zhaoming, and major writers and intellectuals such as Lu Xun, his younger brother Zhou Zuoren, Guo Moruo, Yu Dafu, Chen Duxiu, and the playwright Tian Han.8 Political exiles from China and Korea also came to Japan to seek refuge from their own governments and to raise funds and support for their po liti cal activities. For example, the founding father of the Republic of China, Sun Yat- sen, the failed reformer Kang Youwei, the Korean activist Kim Okgyun (Kin Gyokukin), and the Indian revolutionary Rash Behari Bose

(aka Bose of the Nakamuraya) all found refuge in Tokyo.9

Tokyo was much more than a mecca for the discontents and revolutionaries of Asia, however. It was also the capital of an increasingly far-flung empire and, as such, was a crossroads for the emerging Modern East Asian cultural sphere. This was an age of population movements that saw, in particular, the opening of Manchuria to large- scale immigration. As noted above, Japan grew initially through the incorporation of Hokkaidō and Okinawa into Japan proper, then through a series of conquests resulting in colonial possessions. People, goods, and ideas moved freely throughout the empire. At the end of World War II, approximately 3.5 million Japanese, equivalent to 5 percent of Japan’s population, lived outside of Japan, spread across the empire.10 While many of these Japanese moved abroad to seek better economic opportunities, at the same time many colonial subjects moved to Japan in search of the same sort of opportunities, and their numbers rose to about two million.11

Araragi Shōzō, in his definitive work on migration, categorizes population movement within the Japanese empire into three diasporatic patterns: between the metropole and the colonies; between various colonies; and the repatriation (hikiage) of Japanese from the colonies after the dissolution of the empire.12 While most colonial migration studies have focused on the traffic between Japan and colonies and on repatriation, Araragi’s focus on the circulation of population among colonies reveals that complex trajectories of human movement within the empire were not symmetrical. Differing inflows and outflows of people, both Japanese and imperial subjects alike, profoundly shaped the experiences of both the settlers and the natives. For example, compared to Korea, the movement of people in colonial Taiwan was almost unilaterally from Japan to the island colony, while there was a much greater influx of Koreans into the metropole. On the other hand, many Taiwanese colonial subjects moved southward to the southern islands (referred to as the Inner Southern Sea [Uchi- Nanyō]) and Southeast Asian countries (referred to as the Outer Southern Sea [Soto- Nanyō]) that were under the jurisdiction of Japan. Elite Taiwanese students who studied in Japan were also often drafted to serve in high- level administrative positions in the newly formed Manchuguo as Japanese experts, bypassing the metropole and their own colonial homeland. Other Taiwanese students, attracted by the idealistic slogans about harmony among the Five Ethnic Groups, chose to study at Manchuria’s Kenkoku University as an alternative to studying in Japan.13 The process went on long enough to accommodate secondary migration: many of the Japanese immigrants to Manchuria had first settled in Korea.

This intraregional flow of people between the metropole and the various colonies may have been largely one way in the beginning, but by the 1940s many of the colonial cities rivaled the metropolitan cities of Tokyo and Osaka. Between 1920 and 1940 the populations of major cities in Japan, China, India, Latin America, and Africa grew around 15 percent every five years. However, in the sixteen major cities in Manchuria during the same time, the growth rate was 48 percent, with Taiwan and Korea seeing a growth rate of 35 percent. These numbers attest to the rapid population influx in Japan’s colonial cities. The populations of colonial cities such as Mukden (Hōten, modern Shenyang) and Seoul (Keijō) in 1940 reached about a million people each, rivaling major metropolitan cities such as Kyoto, Nagoya, Kōbe, and Yokohama, and dwarfed only by Tokyo (6.78 million) and Osaka (3.25 million).14 Travel during this high colonial period was thus truly multidirectional.

In his discussion of the cultural dimensions of globalization phenomenon, Arjun Appadurai articulates his view of cultural activity (“social imaginary” to use his term) and delineates five dimensions of global cultural flow: ethnoscapes, mediascapes, technoscapes, ideoscapes, and finanscapes.15 Similarly, I intend to examine aspects of the intercultural flows between the metropole and the colonies of the Japanese empire, exploring the patterns and trajectories of knowledge flow and cultural exchanges. I propose a streamlined schema that focuses on three aspects of the exchanges, namely, the movement of people ( jinryū),16 the flow of cultural knowledge and ideology (bunryū), and the circulation and transmission of art and material culture (butsuryū). In doing so, I hope to unpack the abstract, totalizing concept of “colonial modernity” disseminated by Japan to its neighbors in East Asia through the medium of cultural transactions.

To address cultural aspects of Japan’s colonial world, this study shifts perspective from the grand level of regional geopolitics down to the intimate, personal level in order to illustrate the intertwined and multifarious relationship between the personal and the national, the private and the public, in the grand scheme of the Japanese colonial enterprise. It asks: What did the common people gain from the empire? How were they persuaded to accept the ideology of Japanese imperialism? What sustained their interest in the project of empire building?

This examination of human interaction between the metropole and the colonies proposes that it was not through the ideologies championed by the state apparatus that people were persuaded to participate in the imperial enterprise; rather, it was through the lure of desire and pleasure, through their romantic imaginations that everyday people came to be engaged in the seemingly abstract concept of empire. Simple drives to see the world outside, to better one’s social and financial standing in society, and to experience the vicarious pleasure of information about new and exotic places drew individuals into the narrative of the empire.

In Transit explores the potential to reread the po liti cal concept of the “Great East Asian Co- Prosperity Sphere” (Daitōa Kyōeiken), not as an ideologically rooted term but as a space for cultural interaction and transformation in East Asia during the first half of the twentieth century. The Konoe cabinet first proposed the concept “New Order in East Asia” (Tōa Shin Chitsujo) in 1937 soon after the Second Sino– Japanese War erupted. In 1940, when the second Konoe cabinet was formed, “A Basic Outline of National Policy” (Kihon kokusaku yōkō) was issued, defining the Great East Asian Co- Prosperity Sphere more concretely. Promoted by the government as official policy and supported by intellectuals such as Ozaki Hidemi and Miki Kiyoshi, this strategy went through several conceptual incarnations as the New Order in East Asia, the East Asian Alliance (Tōa Renmei, 1937), and the East Asian Cooperative (Tōa Kyōdōtai, 1938). As Japan went to war with the United States in December 1941, the acquisition of other Asian territories accelerated. After the occupation of Hong Kong (December 1941), the Bismarck Islands (January 1942), the Philippines (February 1942), Malaysia (February 1942), Burma (March 1942), and Dutch East India (March 1942), Japan proclaimed an end to its southern advance in May of 1942. The contours of the Japanese empire were finally complete, and the sense of the term “Great East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere” was standardized.17

After the war, scholars denounced the Great East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere as propaganda for Japan’s drive to empire, and it certainly defined the boundaries of the Japanese empire and its “civilizing” mission. It was clearly used in a variety of ways to camouflage and elide the cultural and social violence inflicted on colonized populations.18 One must also acknowledge, however, that the idea of such a sphere had persuasive force in East Asia because it reflected a zone of cultural interaction that by 1940 had for decades linked disparate parts of Asia, especially Taiwan, Korea, and Manchuria, but also cosmopolitan colonial centers like Dalian, Shanghai, and Hong Kong. Novelists, poets, painters, and filmmakers from all these places interacted and shared their literary and dramatic products in an unprecedented way. Even after Japan’s entry into World War II, such figures were recruited and sent throughout the colonies to promote literary exchanges with local writers.19 Musicians, stage actors, and dancers were also part of this cultural project, demonstrating and promoting Japanese performing arts in gaichi for both local audiences and Japanese soldiers.20 Moreover, the exchange was not unidirectional; the Japanese learned much about their Asian neighbors through these exchanges. For example, writers who lived and traveled abroad produced an unprecedented body of literature on the colonies, and musicians brought back new musical elements from the occupied territories, creating a genre called continental melodies (tairiku merodi) that filled the pop charts.21 Moreover, because Japan was the first nation in the region to adopt and adapt Western ideas and aesthetic principles as well as scientific concepts and practices associated with modernity, the cultural sphere associated with the Japanese empire provided an entrée to these ideas that was in many ways more accessible and more acceptable that their original representation in the languages and cultural artifacts of Western colonizers. To be sure, these literary and artistic interactions were not free of cultural imperialism, and in the immediate aftermath of World War II they provoked a certain backlash against Japanese culture, but they also created a familiarity with Japan that was conducive to the popularity of Japanese art, literature, drama, and culture in contemporary East Asia and also shaped Japan’s more open attitude toward its Asian neighbors in the post– Cold War world. In short, a cultural program conceived to advance the strategic, military, and commercial interests of the empire reflected a broader reality of interaction and cooperation, as well as exploitation.

It is this empire-wide cultural sphere, energized by human interactions, passions, pleasure, and self-interest (rather than national interest), that is the primary focus of this book. This East Asian contact zone was geo graph i cally diffuse and distinct yet unified (if nominally) by the core of imperial authority. It gradually evolved into an intellectual topography that was not the property of a single nation, nor a jumble of discrete if nascent nationalisms, but rather a zone of critical engagement that defined a psychogeograph i cal terrain associated with colonial modernity.

The increased circulation of information in a variety of forms was key to the creation of this cultural sphere. In the pre-television and pre-Internet era, newspapers, magazines, the phonograph, radio, movies, expositions (hakurankai), and department stores were major sites for popular culture that formed the backbone of the mediascape. These sites, as opposed to state institutions such as schools, libraries, the postal system, museums, concert halls, and Shinto shrines, served as both cultural and material mechanisms for fostering a common, transregional culture. Yoshimi Shunya identifies the 1930s as a crucial moment when the media industry of Japan and the colonies merged into one massive market. He underscores the spatial and temporal continuities

of the mediascape, insisting that urban life in Tokyo, Seoul, Ōsaka, or Taipei was essentially the same; that inhabitants of these cities expressed interest in similar types of events; and that they consumed cultural products synchronically (dōji heikō [literally, “simultaneous and parallel”]).22

The distribution of the metropolitan culture to the colonies is important, as Yoshimi demonstrates, but it is equally critical for us to pay attention to issues of local reception. In this sense, Li Chengji’s study of media history and the formation of a mass readership in colonial Taiwan is informative. He traces the rise and fall of a native newspaper, Taiwan Minbao (also known as Taiwan Shinminbao), the first newspaper funded by native capital and touted as “the only space for the Taiwanese voice.”23 Its origins lie in a monthly Japanese/Chinese bilingual newsletter titled Taiwanese Youth (Taiwan seinen), edited by a group of Taiwanese students studying in Tokyo in 1923. In 1927, under the condition that it would increase its Japanese- language content, it was allowed to begin publishing in Taiwan as a weekly. In 1932, it was finally allowed to launch as a daily paper, but with the eruption of the Second Sino– Japanese War in 1937, its Chinese section was suspended (only classical poetry in Chinese was permitted). Until 1944, when it was officially shut down, it was always under the close scrutiny of the authorities, and publication was frequently suspended.

Much preceding scholarship on this publication has emphasized the nationalistic resistance the newspaper represented, but Li focuses on the media market, pointing out that between 1931 and 1937, even though the censorship mechanisms had intensified, both circulation and the readership doubled. Funded through special permission from the Governor-General’s Office the year after the Manchurian Incident, the paper fulfilled the needs of an increasingly sophisticated local readership who not only had achieved a high degree of literacy in the Japanese language but were also seeking a more diverse voice to report on authentic local life. However, with the maturation of the communication infrastructure, especially the introduction of regular air traffic between Japan and the colony and the extension of the postal system (which also began to offer lower rates for bulk mail), the two major metropole national newspapers, Asahi and Mainichi, began daily same-day delivery to the colony. Moreover, because the great majority of the expatriates in Taiwan hailed from Kyūshū and western Japan, a minor regional paper that appealed to settlers from that region, the Fukuoka Nichinichi shinbun, soon had the third- largest circulation on the island. In this sense, as discussed above, in the late 1920s and 1930s not only did all roads lead to Tokyo but even the colonies were truly living on Tokyo time.

Throughout its history, Taiwan Minbao competed with the three major colonial newspapers supported by the colonial authority and those that were imported from Japan. Li’s case study on the demise of Taiwan Minbao, with its genesis in the metropole and later incarnation in the colony, and its ever-changing ratio of language use, tells us much about the dynamics of cultural flow and market forces within the empire.

Li’s work on the circulation of enbon in the colonies, where they found a secondary market, also complements Japanese scholars’ work on the subject. Enbon, literally “one-yen book,” was a sensational cultural phenomenon in the early Shōwa period, when publishers issued literary works, including popular genres and anthologies targeted to women and children, in a mass- produced, affordable format. Tens of millions of enbon were sold in a span of three or four years.24 By making literature accessible and affordable (at roughly the same price as a magazine), the enbon boom brought in the urban middle class and students and created a massive new reading class. The feverish proliferation dissipated around 1929, but in what was called “the second enbon boom,” great numbers of the books were sold in the countryside through used bookstores and street vendors at greatly discounted prices, with the remainder sold to Korea, Manchuria, and Taiwan.25

The symbiotic dynamism between the circulation of ideas and material culture is evident in the popular media mentioned above. But the cultural ripple effect does not stop at readership: it also spilled over to the creative domain. Imperial Japan could no longer think of itself as introverted. Its great fascination with the outside world, particularly Asia and its colonies, was translated into literary works that gained prestigious awards during the mid- 1930s. For example, Ōshika Taku’s (1898– 1959) sensational narrative on the aboriginal tribes in Taiwan, Barbarian (Yabanjin), was made known to the world by means of a fiction competition sponsored by the journal Chūōkōron in 1935. His narrative satisfied the masses’ prurient curiosity about the aboriginal Takasago-

zoku, in a sense bringing the imagination of the frontier and, with it, Japan’s civilizing mission back to the home front.

Bungeishunjū, a conservative magazine with one of the highest circulations in Japan, also opened up its forum to accommodate a diverse body of literary works.26 Bungeishunjū is a middle- of- the- road weekly that today mostly caters to male, white- collar office workers. But what makes it a significant presence in the cultural scene is that it hosts the most prestigious literary award in Japan, the Akutagawa Literary Award (Akutagawashō). The founder and editor in chief, the pop u lar writer Kikuchi Kan (1888– 1948), established the award in 1935 in the memory of his good friend, the writer Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, who committed suicide. The prestigious Akutagawa award, which is an institution in its own right, plays a major role in defining what Japanese literature is. Receiving the award guarantees fame and success as a writer, with most winners continuing on to become major writers who represent modern and contemporary Japanese literature to the world. Throughout the postwar era, the award has been more or less exclusively the domain of Japanese writers (with the exception of a few resident zainichi [Korean–Japanese] writers),27 and not until 2008 did a nonnative writer win.28

A quick look at the first decade of the Akutagawa Literary Award from its commencement in 1935 to the end of the war in 1945 reveals that a series of works related to themes and locales outside Japan were awarded the prize. Ishikawa Tatsuzō’s (1905– 1985) The Masses (Sōmō), which deals with Japanese peasants who immigrated to Brazil, was the inaugural winner. Oda Takeo (1900– 1979), a diplomat stationed in China, won in 1936 for a story set in China, “Outside of the Wall” (Jōgai). Tada Yūkei’s (1912– 1980) “Yangzi River Delta” (Yōshikō deruta, 1941), Ishizuka Kikuzō’s (1904– 1987) “Foot Binding” (Chanzū no koro, 1943), and Yagi Yoshinori’s (1911–1999) “Mr. Liu Guangfu” (Ryū Kōfuku, 1944) were all about China and Manchuria. Yagi shared the award with Obi Jūzō (1908–1979), whose story “Climb” (Tōhan, 1944) depicts the relationship between a Japanese teacher and his Korean students in colonial Korea, a story partially based on the author’s own experience working in Korea.

After gaining a certain level of competency in the Japanese language, colonial subjects were eager to participate in the production side of this transaction. Many took the only route available to them and sent their writings to competitions held by various magazines. A closer look at the people who submitted their works of fiction and criticism for consideration reveals that many were from Korea, Manchuria, and Taiwan.29 Writers from the colonies such as Chan Hyokchu (Chō Kakuchū in Japanese, 1905– 1997) from Korea and the Taiwanese writer Long Yingzong (1911–1999) found fame by winning the competition held by the progressive journal Kaizō.30 Taiwanese writer Yang Kui (1906– 1985) wrote his first work “The Paper Boy” (Shinbun haitatsufu) in 1932. The first part of this story about a Taiwanese student working and studying in Tokyo who comes to develop an affinity with the working classes of Japan was published in Taiwan Minbao, but the colonial authority banned the second half. It was not until 1934 when he submitted the work to the magazine Literary Criticism (Bungaku hyōron) in Tokyo and won its top award that readers were able to read the piece in full. The first story of the talented Taiwanese writer Lü Heruo (1914–1951), titled “Ox Cart” (Gyūsha), was also introduced to metropole readers through the same journal.

Thus the Japanese literary scene (bundan) in the 1930s was a vibrant space for literary interaction between the metropole and the colonies. The cross- fertilization of literary ideas and production grew from an isolated metropole literary scene into a much broader and cosmopolitan arena that one might call an imperial literary realm (teikoku bundan). The imperial expansion provided Japanese writers with opportunities to travel and work outside of Japan and, as a consequence, opened up the literary landscape for modern Japan. The cross- cultural mass audience of the empire boosted the Japanese publishing industry and provided the publishers with a much larger market and a new readership.31 Further, it created a shared language that enabled non-Japanese writers to write and publish in Japanese, with the potential to gain readers not only in Japan but across the empire. This gave rise to a new category, “Japanophone literature” (Nihongo bungaku), as colonial subjects wrote in the language of their masters. After the eruption of the Second 30 Taiwanese writer Yang Kui (1906–1985) Sino–Japanese War in 1937, the Imperial Subject Movement (Kōminka Undo) aggressively promoted language assimilation and forced a name change. In a move to consolidate its control over all cultural activities throughout the empire, in 1939 all art and literature groups throughout the various colonies were organized into a single unit called the Central Association for the Art and Literature of Japan (Nihon Bungei Chūōkai), with its stated goal being “the creation of a national culture that is of the highest standard.”32 Similar cultural organizations were established throughout the empire in order to influence and monitor creative endeavors by artists and to ensure that they adhered to the national policy on war time art. The drive culminated in three Greater East Asian Writers’ Conferences, attended by prominent writers from Japan and the colonies from 1942 to 1944. The relations between the metropole and colonial writers were always asymmetrical, but the construction of a shared literary and cultural domain of this scale was a unique development in East Asian history. The mediascape of the empire had reached a certain maturity in the 1930s, creating a literary scene that was in a sense even more diverse and global than the current literary landscape.

Here I would like to reiterate my intention of exploring this shared cultural space. I am fully aware of the danger inherent in any attempt to reread or reappropriate any term designating “greater East Asia.” This particular historical moment was fraught with conflict and engendered long-lasting trauma and lingering resentment. Even to this day, when East Asia has evolved into a collaborative economic entity with multiple commercial and cultural interfaces, the unresolved conflicts of the colonial past continue to percolate just below the surface and reemerge from time to time in controversies like those surrounding sexual slavery (ianfu), wartime orphans (zanryū koji), religious observances at Yasukuni Shrine, and the portrayal in official textbooks of historical events. It is therefore not the intention of this book to invoke a misplaced nostalgia or put a positive patina on a painful past by glorifying this conceptual space and its proponents. This cultural sphere did not emerge organically from the free interaction of equally privileged individuals but rather was engendered and shaped by Japan’s military actions and imperial dogma imposed upon individuals occupying radically different power positions. It did not produce a utopian age of camaraderie and cooperation, and many colonial subjects were inspired to “write back” against the empire by their experiences of oppression and subjugation. It is my hope that In Transit’s articulation of the social and cultural experiences of individuals living in this cultural sphere can portray the complex relations of gender, class, and ethnicity that existed between dominant and subordinated cultures. After all, it was not abstract concepts and ideologies but people who carried the empire forward. In this regard, I would echo the writer Murakami Haruki’s response to Japan’s recent dispute with its neighbors over the maritime territory of the Senkaku (Diaoyutai) Islands. In an essay published in Asahi shinbun, he cautions Japan not to be intoxicated by indulgence in nationalist sentiment (which he likens metaphorically to “cheap wine”) at the cost of blocking the passage of “souls traversing national borders.”33 Hopefully, the remarkable life stories to be revealed in the following pages will provide a glimpse into these souls that traversed the empire.

Organization of the Book

This book is divided into three parts, loosely organized in a chronological fashion. Part I deals with early interactions of Japan and East Asia at the turn of the twentieth century. The geopolitical landscape of early twentieth- century East Asia was shaped by a shared cognizance of the threats represented by the West and Russia. Japan’s rapid rise in industrial might made it the dominant power in East Asia and saw it replace the Chinese empire, whose power and prestige were on the wane. This part of the book examines the emergence of an early Pan- Asianism that was strikingly different from the abrasive propagandistic rhetoric of the 1930s and 1940s. I discuss two figures whose cultural ties to China led them to work toward the creation of a transregional East Asian culture that acknowledged a shared cultural heritage and sought peace and prosperity based on mutual trust between China and Japan.

Chapter 1 traces the early Meiji political activist and writer Miyazaki Tōten’s engagement with Asia in general and with the Chinese nationalist revolution in par tic u lar. Miyazaki’s worlds, both real and fictional, are full of vitality, (male) camaraderie, and the free exchange of ideas. His upbringing in remote Kyushu, far way from the center of the empire, gave him a unique perspective on Japan’s relationship with other parts of Asia, a perspective diametrically opposed to the expansionist Meiji government. Chapter 2 explores the transculturation of Japan and the margins of the Asiatic continent through the female educator Kawahara Misako. Kawahara’s pioneering work in establishing a modern educational system for the women of Mongolia was inspired by a blend of benevolent Pan-Asian idealism deeply rooted in traditional Confucian values and a Japanese version of the civilizing mission. Her good standing with the Harqin court of Mongolia during the Russo–Japanese War aided Japanese military endeavors in the region, and she made her name within the popular imagination as a patriotic spy who put herself in peril for her country. Part I explores the genealogy of the emerging empire and how this imperial project gradually took shape through the exchange of abstract ideas (Pan-Asianism, republicanism, the civilizing role played by education, and patriotism and gender) and concrete actions (revolution and the building of a school for girls). Miyazaki and Kawahara are transitional figures that represent the social and historical shift from a nineteenth- century shared Confucian-centric East Asian culture. Their bold ventures (and the styles of their memoirs) were a mixture of forward- looking progressive agendas and the traditional worldview of premodern Japan.

Parts II and III continue the focus on women in the empire, exploring the female experience of (post)coloniality. Through a closer investigation of gender and imperialism, these chapters seek to understand the intersection of colonialism, modernism, the body and gendered subjectivities, and women’s engagement with colonial culture. Part II consists of two chapters focused on near- legendary women and their engagements with the empire that offer windows onto some alternative aspects of Japan’s imperial project in the high colonial period (i.e., the first half of the Shōwa period, from approximately 1926 to 1945). It focuses on two types of female personalities: royals and celebrities. Each chapter focuses on a pair of women to compare and contrast the many different paths they traversed during the colonial and postcolonial periods. These women, all remarkable in their own way, illustrate how the line between the private and the public was blurred as their personal bodies were mobilized for national purposes, at times against their own volition.

Chapter 3 traces the lives of two aristocrats, Nashimoto Masako and Saga Hiroko, who were respectively married to the last king of Korea’s Yi dynasty and the brother of the last emperor of the Qing dynasty (who had become the new emperor of Manchukuo). The chapter looks at the ways in which racial politics and real politics clashed and how aristocratic women were recruited to serve the greater good of the nation-state. Chapter 4 focuses on two figures who were huge celebrities in their day. The lives of Kawashima Yoshiko, a Manchurian princess who was raised as a Japanese, and Ri Kōran, a Japanese movie star who passed as a Chinese, filled the tabloids and fascinated the masses across Asia. Their self- narratives reveal how individual agency was co-opted by the national agenda; their disparate postwar fates are the result of the new postwar reality of the region. At the same time, we see how these iconic figures were able to create translocal personas that appealed to multiple audiences across East Asia.

Part III carries on the theme of the female body and its artistic engagement with the empire by shifting attention to writers and dancers whose private lives were intertwined with the imperial project, and who were motivated by their passion for artistic expression and self- realization. Their pursuit of artistic accomplishments (both textual and somatic) highlight the intermediary role Japan played in the dissemination of European avant-garde art to its Asian colonies. In Chapter 5, we examine Masugi Shizue and Sakaguchi Reiko, two rare examples of writers who moved between colonial Taiwan and the metropole in search of a writing career. Masugi escaped the backward colony of Taiwan but found herself relegated to exotic tropical fantasies by the canonic metropole writers. Sakaguchi, on the other hand, eschewed a comfortable upper-middle-class life to embrace the primitiveness of colonial Taiwan. The subject matter of their writings foregrounds feminine and maternal bodies and questions the uneasy relationship between gender and nation. Chapter 6 further contemplates the interconnections of the private body and the empire, as seen in the life experiences of two dancers, Choi Seunghee from colonial Chōsen, and Tsai Juiyueh from colonial Taiwan. Both moved to Tokyo to study modern dance with Ishii Baku, the founding father of modern dance in Japan, before returning to their native lands. This chapter focuses on one aspect of intercultural artistic flows between the metropole and the colonies that is direct and unmediated by verbal language. Moreover, both women were persecuted cruelly in their own native countries in the postcolonial period, revealing the irony of colonized bodies liberated by colonial cosmopolitanism but later bound again by the nationalist ideological splits in Cold War–era East Asia.

This book adopts an interdisciplinary and multitextual approach to its subject matter. It aims to transcend previous studies of the Japanese empire as a hegemonic macrosystem with unifying governing principles. Rather than focus narrowly on one figure or one specific genre or text, it aims to provide a fuller picture of Japanese colonial culture by pursuing diverse perspectives filtered through the lenses of gender, personal narratives, and popular culture. It takes a microscale approach to the concept of empire with a focus on individuals, their actions, and the consequences of their actions. To reconstruct the life stories of my subjects, I rely on autobiographies, biographies, memoirs, epistolary exchanges, and newspaper and popular magazine articles, as well as the secondary research of other scholars. I explore the incongruities and subtle differences between historical records and the subjects’ own memories. I also compare the discrepancy between autobiographies and biographies to examine how pop u lar imagination shaped the conceptualization of an event or a figure. Biographies and biographical study, although a legitimate and fertile ground for research in premodern Japanese literary studies, is nevertheless one of the weaker areas in modern Japanese studies.34 I hope this book sheds at least some light on this area. But this book is not just about the tumultuous life of these remarkable men and women; it is also an exploration of related issues such as genre (feminist autobiography), identity (ethnic, social, and national), and the transculturation of colonial politics and personal lived experience. Through these characters—some household names, some anonymous, some heroic, and some complicit—I hope to tell a more intimate, personal story that provides a glimpse into the microhistory of the Japanese empire and informs us about how public and private, the national agenda and personal interest, intersected and collided.

Colonial studies by their nature transcend geographical and national boundaries. Recent scholarship on Japan’s colonial period has gradually shifted from the restricted study of a singular national literature and culture to encompass the multiregional, multicultural diversity of the empire, often from transnational and comparative perspectives. This new cross-regional approach has already produced some stimulating new research. Leo Ching (1996) and Taylor Atkins (2010) have examined the interaction and consumption of colonial popular culture and its implications in postcolonial East Asia, especially between Japan and Taiwan and Japan and Korea. Michael Baskett’s (2008) study of transnational film culture explored another popular medium of imperial Japan. Kim Kono’s (2010) examination of cross-racial romance, family, and nation in Japanese colonial literature; Karen Thornber’s (2010) exploration of the transculturations of Japanese literature in Taiwan, Korea, and China; and Noriko Horiguchi’s (2011) investigation of the complex and complicit relationship between women’s bodies, female agency, and the national body (kokutai) in the work of three boundary-crossing women writers have all demonstrated how literary production transcends borders.

We also have seen some path- breaking works in the area of colonial cultural studies. Mariko Tamanoi’s (2009) creation of memory maps that draw on the recollections of former Japanese settlers, the children left behind by them, and the Chinese who lived under Japanese rule in Manchuria attempts to reconstruct a multidimensional remembrance to mitigate the resurrected (or “re- remembered”) utopian justification for Manchuria. Mark Driscoll’s (2010) scrutiny of the role the working class and the fringes of the society played in advancing the Japanese empire prompts us to rethink the empire in a stimulating bottom-up way. Michele Mason’s (2012a) study on Hokkaido foregrounds the colonial project there as a major force in the production of modern Japan’s national identity, imperial ideology, and empire, often at the expense of the indigenous Ainu culture, by recasting the nascent nation-state of Japan as a timeless, unified, civilized entity.

In Japan, scholarship on a transregional Japanese colonial culture has flourished in recent years, too. Itō Ruri et al. (2010) explored the relationship between empire, capitalism, and gender across East Asia in Modern Girl and Colonial Modernity, focusing on the transregional modern icon of Moga. Similarily, Chen Zhengyuan (2006) examines the circulation and transformation of the concept of “Good Wife, Wise Mother” across East Asia, and Hayakawa Noriyo (2007) investigates the role of gender in the formation of the nation-state in East Asia.

Other than abstract concepts such as gender and modernity, there are also many studies on infrastructure and on the cultural and religious institutions of the empire. For example, Gao Chengfeng (1999 and 2006) and Takahashi Yasutaka (1995) look at the railroad system in the Japanese colonies, shedding light on the ways in which the railroad played a significant role in consolidating the physical empire. With the railroad system came robust tourism to the colonies, as Gao Yuan (2002) indicates in her study. Chida Minoru (2005), on the other hand, looks at the spread of Shintoism (the Ise Shrine cult in par tic u lar) in the colonies and the re sis tance from the local religious community. Tonoshita Tatsuya’s (2008a,b) exploration of how the Japanese Musical Culture Association mobilized music (kokuminka) to create a unified, shared music culture is another attempt to look at the formation of a totalizing popular cultural sphere. This recent scholarship provides the foundation for the current project, which explores the emergence and formation of the Japanese empire as an organic, holistic, and interactive cultural sphere from the standpoints of the popular and the quotidian, and will advance further this new perspective. By looking at colonialism and modernity through the lenses of the individual and the popular, I hope to understand the enterprise not as a rigid, static, and top-down political system but as a fluid, interconnected site that is dynamic, complex, and full of multiple possibilities and conflicted, competing values and ideas.

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