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The reign of Emperor Hirohito (1926–89), known as the Shōwa era, witnessed the dramatic rise and fall of Japanese military power. The nation achieved success in joining the ranks of the great powers as a colonizing nation just as the territorial grabs of nineteenth-century imperialism were coming to an end. In pursuing expansion, Japan entered a collision course with the other powers. Like earlier imperialists, Japan administered its colonies in a manner that left a mixed legacy of development and repression, uplift and brutality.
Imperialism deeply shaped not just the occupied territories but the metropole itself; the colonizer was as affected by the experience as the colonized. The territories of the empire transformed the Japanese economy and quickly became an important part of Japan’s national pride and imagination of self. The empire animated popular culture, with depictions of life and adventure in the colonies in film, literature, and media that prompted tourism in Japanese-held territories. Control of new lands also enabled mass migration, with Japanese agents traveling to labor in all corners of the empire, while subject populations moved to fulfill the home country’s labor needs under both voluntary and coercive conditions.
POLITICAL AND SOCIAL DEVELOPMENTS
The European and American imperial powers lauded Japan’s unexpected victory in the First Sino-Japanese War (1894–95), which catapulted Japan from semicolonial status to an imperialist nation with its first major colony, Taiwan. The war was fought in Korea. Japanese leaders had long been concerned over the fate of Korea; they called it “a dagger pointing at the heart of Japan,” because its proximity to Kyushu meant that if Russia or another power gained control of Korea, it was then but a small step to attack Japan. Hoping to spur its East Asian neighbor to undertake its own path of strengthening and modernization, Japan borrowed from the playbook of Commodore Perry. In 1876, it used “gunboat diplomacy” to force Korea to open to commercial trade under unequal conditions. In 1894, a large religious uprising, the Tonghak Rebellion, threatened Korea’s Joseon dynasty. Both China, its traditional protector, and Japan intervened to help quell the violence, coming into conflict themselves. The world expected that the great Qing empire would defeat the upstart nation, but Japan prevailed in less than a year, owing to its heavy investment in modern military training and equipment. The victors imposed a harsh treaty on the Qing, including a massive cash indemnity and cession of Taiwan, the Pescadore Islands, and the Liaodong Peninsula.
Japan’s leaders, mass media, and citizenry alike were jubilant over the outcome. They would have to swallow their pride, however, when other nations intervened to reinforce Japan’s unequal status with the other great powers. Because the Liaodong Peninsula was prized as a militarily strategic promontory, France, Germany, and Russia forced Japan to return the peninsula to Chinese control in an event known as the Triple Intervention.
Nevertheless, given Japan’s new status as an imperialist nation and a modern military power, its leaders were finally able to begin renegotiating the old, unequal treaties, achieving an end to extraterritoriality in 1899, with the promise of regaining full tariff autonomy by 1911. In 1900, when foreign legations were under attack in Beijing during the Boxer Rebellion, a popular religious rebellion that opposed foreign incursions into China, Japan was a major participant in internationally coordinated efforts to defeat the Boxers. Its efforts earned new respect from Great Britain, resulting in the Anglo-Japanese Alliance of 1902, a guarantee that the British Royal Navy would come to Japan’s assistance in the event of conflict with a third country. Both viewed Russia as their most likely foe. Following the Triple Intervention, Russia had taken control of the Liaodong Peninsula, and after the Boxer Rebellion, it refused to withdraw a large army from Manchuria, threatening Korean independence. War fever mounted in Japan, with a jingoistic press clamoring to chastise the Russian bear.
With its back covered by the Anglo-Japanese Alliance, Japan attacked Russian ships at Port Arthur in February 1904 and declared war. Battles were brutal, with massive losses on both sides. In the Manchurian city of Mukden, corpses of Russian and Japanese soldiers littered the streets. By spring 1905, nearly fifty thousand Japanese soldiers were dead. A great naval victory turned the situation to favor the Japanese. Admiral Tōgō Heihachirō (1848–1934) gathered ships in the Tsushima Straits between Korea and Japan to await the Russian fleet, which he successfully annihilated, sinking all battleships and most cruisers while losing just three torpedo boats.
FIGURE 52. Watanabe Nobukazu, print depicting battle at Port Arthur, 1904. Courtesy of Rijksmuseum.
The Battle of Tsushima altered the course of world history. The defeat was a severe blow to the ruling Romanov dynasty and contributed to the mass political and social unrest surrounding the Russian Revolution of 1905. Russia’s defeat seriously destabilized the European balance of power, contributing to the onset of World War I. Furthermore, the weakening of the tsar aided the cause of the 1917 revolution that resulted in the creation of the Soviet Union. In the eyes of the world, Japan’s victory over Russia heralded its arrival as a major world power. The victory especially attracted attention among nationalists in territories colonized by other nations. Arab, Indian, and Asian nationalist leaders—including Sun Yat-Sen (1866–1925), father of the Republic of China, established in 1911, and Ho Chi Minh (1890–1969), leader of Vietnam’s independence movement—found inspiration in Japan’s achievement. Colonized peoples everywhere celebrated the first modern Asian victory over a Western power as a strike against white supremacy. It gave nationalists hope that they too might be able to overthrow their colonial overlords.
In August 1905, President Theodore Roosevelt brokered a peace settlement between the exhausted combatants at Portsmouth, New Hampshire, later receiving the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts. Negotiations were difficult. In the end, Japan compromised in order to avoid more war, something neither country could afford. The Portsmouth treaty gave Japan the Russian leasehold at Port Arthur on the Liaodong Peninsula, the tsar’s railroad and mining rights in Manchuria, and sovereignty over the southern half of Sakhalin, an island north of Hokkaido that the Japanese called Karafuto. The Japanese had hoped for a large war indemnity, such as the one received from the Qing, because the conflict had severely sapped national wealth.
MAP 8. Battlefields of the Russo-Japanese War. Published by P.F. Collier & Son, 1904–5.
Among the ordinary Japanese masses, the Portsmouth settlement was seen as inadequate. The jingoistic press had trumpeted reports about Japan’s stunning victories but had not reported the full stories of losses. An outpouring of visual propaganda, including woodblock prints and, increasingly, photography, had kept the public abreast of war events and helped mobilize support. Photographic images of the conflict were widely reproduced in magazines and newspapers and as part of movie newsreels. Tens of millions of war-related postcards were purchased by patriotic countrymen. Wartime imagery was not limited to print but was reproduced on fans, cakes, lanterns, fabrics, toys, and other products. Writer Lafcadio Hearn was surprised that even silk dresses for baby girls might feature scenes of naval battles, burning warships, and torpedo boats.
The people had enthusiastically supported the war: sacrificing their sons, converting their savings to war bonds, and folding good-luck origami for the troops. They felt a personal connection to the war and expected a large indemnity or the cession of a major territory, such as Siberia. The treaty was popularly judged a disgrace, and large crowds gathered in Tokyo’s Hibiya Park on the day it was to be signed. Rioting soon broke out and spread throughout Tokyo and other cities, lasting several days. Martial law was declared to restore order, but crowds had already destroyed 250 buildings in Tokyo alone, including the residences of ministers, pro-government newspapers, and police stations. The Hibiya Riots provided indisputable evidence of popular support for Japanese expansionism.
Following the victory, Japan sought to formalize its authority over Korea, forcing representatives to sign a treaty that made the nation a protectorate of Japan, turning over its sovereignty in international diplomacy, police affairs, and the legal system. In 1910, Japan fully annexed Korea as a colony, launching broad transformations to its political, educational, and social structures, mirroring the rapid changes undertaken in Japan during the early Meiji period. Colonial administrators built railways, roads, harbors, a telegraph system, and a modern postal system to support economic development that benefited the homeland. They constructed modern hospitals and a modern education system to replace traditional schools focused on Confucian classics. In theory the Koreans, as subjects of the Japanese emperor, enjoyed the same status as the Japanese; but in fact they were treated as a conquered, inferior people, deprived of freedoms of assembly, speech, and press.
After Germany’s defeat in World War I, Japan acquired some of its territories and colonies, including the leasehold on China’s Shandong province and the Marshall, Caroline, and Mariana islands in the South Pacific, holdings that the Japanese collectively called Nan’yō (South Seas). In the late 1910s, political liberalization in Japan under Taishō democratic movements began to influence policies and attitudes toward the colonies. Political parties pushed for both more democratic domestic policies and better treatment of colonial populations. Japan’s brutal suppression of nonviolent demonstrations in Korea in 1919 brought criticism from around the world. In response, Prime Minister Hara Takashi began to reform colonial administration, emphasizing assimilation of Koreans as fully Japanese. Assimilation policies took several different forms, from teaching the Japanese language in schools to forced attendance at Shinto shrines and pressure to abandon Korean names for Japanese ones. Change was slow, and often deeply resented for its intent to destroy traditional culture.
In the early 1930s, Japan felt a sense of crisis that raised new doubts about capitalism and about the ability of political parties and party-based cabinets to address entrenched social and economic problems. The sense of national emergency was based on two developments: the Great Depression and the Manchurian Incident of 1931, described below, when Japan’s Kwantung Army, headquartered at Port Arthur, occupied Chinese territory without approval from their commanders in Tokyo. The renegade soldiers instigated several more incidents in the early ’30s that placed Japan firmly on an expansionist path in China, eventually leading the two countries to another war. The fighting in Manchuria erupted when Japan was experiencing the worldwide effects of the depression. Between 1929 and 1931, Japan’s exports fell in half and investment in plants and equipment dropped by a third. In the cities, more than a million men and women lost their jobs as big businesses scaled back and medium-sized and small firms collapsed in bankruptcy. Many returned to their home villages but found that rural communities were faring even worse. In the ’30s, the perception of national emergency was accompanied by increasingly authoritarian and militarist state policies.
Farms and villages, hard-hit by several years of famine, were seen as the worst victims of the depression. Mass emigration programs seemed to offer a potential solution to the rural economic crisis; Japan had earlier sponsored such programs in Hokkaido and Korea. Many young army officers in the Kwantung Army came from rural families and saw expansion on the continent as a solution for rural distress. Control of Manchuria’s rich natural resources would further offer a “lifeline” for Japan.
Kwantung Army officers had presented Tokyo with a plan for expansion in Manchuria, but when told to wait for provocation by the Chinese, they decided to stage their own pretext, dynamiting a section of the South Manchurian Railway near the city of Mukden on September 18, 1931. They blamed the action on the Chinese, using the ploy to militarily occupy Manchuria. The incident shocked the cabinet in Tokyo. The army minister telegraphed orders to refrain from further hostile acts, but the Kwantung Army continued to expand territorial control, justifying their actions by claiming field command. The public and mass media applauded the army’s bold actions and did not question the claims of Chinese instigation. When censured by the League of Nations for its invasion of Manchuria, Japan withdrew from the league and began to abandon treaties and agreements it had signed with other powers. In 1932, a pro-Japanese puppet state called Manchukuo was created to include the captured territories, with Pu Yi (1906–67), the Qing monarch deposed by China’s 1911 Republican Revolution, installed as its emperor. By 1945, nearly three hundred thousand Japanese immigrants resided in Manchukuo.
In the early 1930s, thousands of small radical groups proliferated, made up of students, activists, and military officers who condemned the selfishness of party politicians and big business. They envisioned a Shōwa Restoration to push aside a corrupt, incompetent regime, in the spirit of the Meiji Restoration. Societies such as the Cherry Blossom Society (Sakurakai) and the Blood Brotherhood (Ketsudankai) plotted domestic revolution and assassination of political and business leaders who had enriched themselves at the expense of farmers and poor workers. In the May 15th Incident of 1932, eleven young naval officers stormed into Prime Minister Inukai Tsuyoshi’s residence and shot him to death. The original plan included killing film star Charlie Chaplin, visiting Japan at the time, but Inukai’s son had taken Chaplin to a sumo wrestling match, saving both their lives. The most dramatic event by activists was the February 26th Incident of 1936, an attempted coup d’état in which twenty-one junior officers led over fourteen hundred soldiers in a mission to overthrow the government. Assassination squads shot several important officials; Prime Minister Okada Keisuke barely escaped death, fleeing his house disguised as a woman. Soldiers seized the center of Tokyo and demanded the installation of a cabinet more sympathetic to their aims. The emperor, angry over the murder of high officials, ordered the military to squash the mutiny, and the rebellion was quickly ended. The incident sobered the nation, and after 1936 there were no more large, violent challenges to state authority.
Mishima Yukio (1925–70) authored a short story entitled “Patriotism” (1960) that centers on this incident. The protagonist, a young lieutenant, has been ordered to attack the mutineers, his longtime colleagues, and is torn between loyalty to the emperor and to his friends. He chooses to commit seppuku, asking his wife to serve as his witness, but she vows to die with him. In 1966, Mishima released a highly stylized film of the story. An ardent nationalist who had created his own right-wing militia, Mishima himself committed seppuku in 1970 after a failed attempt at coup d’état.
Newspaper and radio accounts of the period itself, however, created an image of a country united behind its government. A few dissidents expressed opposition to overseas aggression, but they found it increasingly difficult to speak out because of censorship and peer pressure. The mainstream mass media encouraged people to unite behind war and expansion efforts. Majority opinion increasingly called for the preservation of the kokutai, or the unique national essence, a vague term that referred to the family-like ties uniting the divine emperor with his loyal subjects. In 1937, the Ministry of Education issued Kokutai no hongi (Cardinal principles of the national essence), an official booklet intended to further indoctrinate the Japanese in patriotic values and quell social unrest. Conservatives became increasingly intolerant of anyone who failed to conform to their ideology. This included the scholar Minobe Tatsukichi, whose Taishō-era “organ theory” stated that the emperor was but one organ within the larger body of state. Although this idea had been widely accepted by politicians a decade earlier, in 1935 Minobe was accused of lèse-majesté and his theories were officially condemned by the Diet.
The Home Ministry’s Special Higher Police (Tokkō) significantly increased its surveillance and suppression of political and religious groups on both the right and the left, as the government lost tolerance for dissidents of any persuasion who challenged its authority. Communists, socialists, and radical right-wing groups alike were arrested and pressured to publicly renounce their views. Writers associated with the Proletarian Literature Movement, suspected of supporting communism, were arrested and tortured. The 1933 “conversion” (tenkō) of jailed Communist Party leader Sano Manabu, who renounced allegiance to the Comintern and pledged his loyalty to the emperor, led to a wave of other defections. The government also cracked down on nonofficial religious groups, arresting leaders of some of the most popular movements. The new religion Oomoto, which claimed eight million supporters, had established its own patriotic society; its membership included Diet members and top military officials. The police feared Oomoto’s potential to unite the fragmentary right wing. In December 1935, they launched a massive campaign against the group, arresting over five hundred members and demolishing millions of dollars’ worth of property. The Diet then passed a Religious Organizations Law that allowed authorities to dissolve any group judged incompatible with the kokutai. Two other large, nonofficial religions were crushed under the law in 1938 and 1939.
In the summer of 1937, Japan’s military expansion in China escalated into all-out war. It began with a skirmish at the Marco Polo Bridge near Beijing in July. When Tokyo was informed, army leaders ordered local commanders to work out a settlement. They believed that war in China would become a quagmire, sucking up manpower and resources and leaving the nation vulnerable to threats from other imperial powers. Chiang Kai-shek (1887–1975), leader of China’s Nationalist Party, rejected negotiations. Chiang faced pressure from Mao Zedong’s Communist Party, which called for Chiang to join them in a “united front” against Japanese aggression. Ten days after the incident, Chiang delivered a stirring address that concluded, “If we allow one more inch of our territory to be lost, we shall be guilty of an unpardonable crime against our race.” In this way, the Bridge Incident was magnified into one that demanded settlement by national governments. Japan responded with a show of force, hoping this might persuade Chiang to back down, but violent clashes broke out between the two sides. By August, the Japanese army occupied Beijing. In Shanghai, Chinese nationalists bombed Japanese settlements and naval installations; the Japanese responded by dispatching additional troops to the continent, leading to a full-fledged war, which continued for eight years, until Japan’s defeat by the Allied Powers. By the end of 1938, the Japanese found themselves stalemated. As the situation shifted into a bitter war of attrition, casualties mounted. By 1941, nearly three hundred thousand Japanese and one million Chinese were dead; the war had indeed turned into a quagmire. The Second Sino-Japanese War was the largest Asian war of the twentieth century, resulting in more than 50 percent of the casualties in World War II’s Asian theater.
Chiang was strongly backed by the United States. His wife, Soong Mei-Ling, daughter of a wealthy missionary, had attended Wellesley College, where she made many influential friends. Madame Chiang made several U.S. tours to generate support for the Chinese nationalist cause against Japan. In 1943, she addressed both houses of Congress, becoming the first Chinese person and the second woman ever to do so. Her friend Henry Luce, the publishing magnate, whose parents had been missionaries in China, supported her efforts through a torrent of anti-Japanese, pro-Chinese pieces in Time and Life magazines.
In Japan the hawkish media heralded victories, but the public remained ignorant of atrocities committed by the army in China. The Rape of Nanking—a six-week orgy of arson, brutality, rape, and murder—began in December 1937 after the Japanese captured the nationalists’ capital at Nanking, although Chiang had already escaped, eventually setting up new headquarters in Chongqing. Eyewitness and photographic accounts—from foreign residents, Chinese survivors, and journalists—documented troops engaged in rampant acts of violence against civilians. The extent of the death and destruction remains a sensitive subject and a stumbling block in Sino-Japanese relations today. Foreign observers estimated forty thousand deaths, later histories up to three hundred thousand. A small but vocal group of nationalistic historical revisionists in Japan even denies the massacre altogether, insisting that the Chinese killed in Nanking were all military operatives.
Nanking was not unique, however. Throughout China, Japanese soldiers were ordered to plunder, rape, and murder. In the north, where villagers were suspected of communist sympathies, soldiers tortured peasants, set them on fire, bayoneted pregnant women, and forced children to walk in suspected minefields. Other atrocities occurred at the notorious Unit 731 in the city of Harbin, where biological-warfare tests and chemical experiments were conducted on live human subjects. Test subjects included not only captured soldiers and criminals, but also infants, the elderly, and pregnant women. After infecting them with diseases like plague, cholera, smallpox, syphilis, and botulism, scientists performed vivisections on live victims, amputating limbs and removing organs to study the effects of diseases. Between ten thousand and forty thousand victims died on site; another two to six hundred thousand died as a result of field experiments. Despite the horrendous nature of these war crimes, General Douglas MacArthur (1880–1964), during the postwar occupation of Japan, exempted those who had directed Unit 731 from prosecution so that they could contribute to U.S. intelligence.
In 1940, Japanese officials announced the creation of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, a zone centered on Japan, Manchukuo, and China but also including French Indochina and the Dutch East Indies. Japan desired access to the resources of these colonies in the Pacific and Southeast Asia because it still depended heavily on the United States, China’s ally, for imports of raw materials, machine tools, and especially oil. In 1940, Japan got nearly 80 percent of its fuel from the United States. Southeast Asia offered a treasure trove of raw materials that could free Japan from dependence on increasingly hostile Americans. In September of that year, Japan signed the Tripartite Pact, allying itself with the Axis Powers, Germany and Italy, and its military forces commenced occupation of northern Indochina. The United States countered these actions with economic sanctions that would be lifted only if Japan withdrew from all of China. This was unacceptable for the Japanese, as it would roll back fifty years of hard-won gains. The United States, followed by several other nations, then issued a total embargo on oil exports to Japan, which meant strangulation of Japan’s war in China unless it could gain fuller access to Southeast Asian resources. Japanese leaders began accepting the inevitability of war with the United States, believing that if Japan retreated fully from China, the latter would fall into communist hands, endangering Korea, Manchukuo, and then Japan itself. Furthermore, they imagined that Americans would not have the fortitude to fight a two-front war in Europe and in the Pacific. If Japan could quickly strike the U.S. fleet in Hawaii and gain access to Southeast Asian oil and resources, they could wage a defensive war and eventually negotiate for peace.
After the United States rejected Japan’s final efforts for a peaceful resolution, which proposed withdrawal from Indochina and all but a few northern territories in China, the Japanese ratified the call for war and sent their fleet toward Hawaii with orders to strike Pearl Harbor at dawn on December 8, 1941. Japanese pilots were surprisingly successful in their nimble Zero fighter planes. They sank or damaged eight battleships, destroyed nearly two hundred planes, and inflicted nearly four thousand casualties, while losing just a few dozen aircraft and sixty-four men. Just hours after Pearl Harbor, Japanese airplanes destroyed most American aircraft in the Philippines. Two days later, bombers sank British battleships off the Malay Peninsula. Troops occupied Hong Kong on Christmas day and marched into Manila on January 2, where they accepted the surrender of American and Filipino forces. For several months Japan’s military seemed invincible; in February they captured Singapore, Britain’s “impregnable fortress.” They seized control of Sumatra’s oil fields and occupied the Dutch capital at Batavia (now Jakarta) and the British capital at Rangoon in Burma. By the end of 1942, however, the American counterattack shifted into high gear.
The vision of a Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere expressed Japan’s opposition to Anglo-American hegemony and contained a pan-Asian racial idealism advocating that Asian nations unite and benefit their own peoples, rather than white imperialists. This idea was welcomed by many colonized Asian nations. Nationalist activists in Burma, Indochina, and Indonesia initially welcomed the Japanese as a means of removing the yoke of their overlords. The Japanese played on these hopes, granting “independence” to territories they occupied, such as Burma and the Philippines. Many nationalist leaders soon found out, however, that the Japanese were as exploitative and brutal as their former colonizers, especially under the harsh conditions of war. The military controlled local economies to prioritize production of energy and war-related materials. Oil from the Dutch East Indies ended Japan’s petroleum shortage. The Philippines and Burma supplied metals and minerals. Rubber and tin came from Thailand and Indonesia. Acquisition policies were carried out only with the needs of the home islands and military in mind, and many early supporters of the Japanese became disillusioned.
Local women, especially, suffered under the so-called “comfort woman” system, the Japanese name for officially condoned military prostitution, instituted to provide for soldiers’ “recreation” while monitoring venereal disease. Japanese prostitutes were initially recruited, but too few were available to meet military needs. Recruiters deceived and coerced young women from throughout the occupied territories, enlisting them to work in overseas factories but sending them to primitive brothels instead, where the women were forced to service as many as fifty soldiers per day. Korean women made up the majority of comfort women, but Chinese, Filipina, Malaysian, and Dutch women were also forced into this degrading practice. In all, as many as 250,000 women were brutalized by the system. The autobiography of Maria Rosa Henson, a Filipina, testifies to the tragic conditions of sexual slavery faced by young comfort women:
Twelve soldiers raped me in quick succession, after which I was given half an hour rest. Then twelve more soldiers followed. . . . I bled so much and was in such pain, I could not even stand up. . . . I could not resist the soldiers because they might kill me. . . . At the end of the day, I just closed my eyes and cried. My torn dress would be brittle from the crust that had formed from the soldiers’ dried semen. I washed myself with hot water and a piece of cloth so I would be clean. I pressed the cloth to my vagina like a compress to relieve that pain and the swelling.1
Wartime Japanese occupation brought immense carnage and suffering. The Philippines suffered 125,000 civilian and combat-related deaths. Famine under Japanese rule killed hundreds of thousands of Indochinese. A United Nations report estimated that four million Indonesians were either killed by the Japanese or died from hunger, disease, and lack of medical care under Japanese occupation. The number of Chinese soldiers and civilians killed is estimated at a nearly unfathomable nine to twelve million. This was the brutal reality of Japan’s ideal of pan-Asian brotherhood; wartime savagery against and mistreatment of civilians remain major reasons why tensions linger between Japan and its Asian neighbors, especially Korea and China, today.
JAPANESE COLONIALISM
During the Meiji period, authorities had extended control over the populations of indigenous Ainu in Hokkaido and the Ryūkyūan islanders of Okinawa, engaging in a form of domestic colonialism. The Hokkaido Colonization Office opened in 1869 to encourage migration to the northern island and to try to assimilate the native Ainu population. It encouraged ex-samurai families to populate the northern frontier so the outside world would recognize Hokkaido as an indivisible part of Japan, offering loans to buy land and providing settler families with a house, utensils, farm equipment, and a three-year supply of food. Nearly eight thousand ex-samurai settled there. In the 1890s, the office broadened its bid to all classes, offering rent-free homesteads for ten years; the number of new settlers rose substantially.
The Japanese tried to assimilate the native Ainu population by ordering them to stop wearing earrings and tattooing themselves, pressuring them to adopt Japanese clothing and hairstyles instead. Ainu were compelled to assume Japanese names, speak the Japanese language, and worship at Shinto shrines. The state tried to eradicate their hunting-and-gathering lifestyle by teaching them to farm and giving them small plots of land, but Japanese settlers often swindled the Ainu out of their holdings. Many ended up working in fisheries and living in city slums. By the end of the Meiji period, Hokkaido was indisputably Japanese. In 1908, the Ainu constituted only 1.25 percent of the island’s population of 1.5 million. Yet while official policy dictated assimilation, mainstream Japanese continued to view Ainu as exotic tourist attractions, and Ainu villages were often part of official anthropological exhibitions intended to contrast Japanese civility with barbarian ways of life.
The Ryūkyū Islands to the south were an independent kingdom and a Chinese tributary state. Satsuma had exercised dominance over the islands during the Tokugawa era, profiting from Ryūkyūan trade with China and Southeast Asia. Ryūkyūan sovereignty was nominally maintained to avoid conflict with China, but in 1871, when the domains were abolished, the Meiji government claimed the islands. In 1879, the last king was forced to abdicate and the Ryūkyūs were formally incorporated into Japan as Okinawa prefecture. As with the Ainu and later colonies, native language, culture, and religion were suppressed as Okinawans were forced to assimilate but never really treated as equals with the mainlanders.
As Japan acquired its first territories overseas, it modeled its colonial policies and actions after Western examples. Nevertheless, the Japanese empire differed from its competitors in several important ways. First, it was a late imperial power and had itself been subject to semicolonial subjugation under unequal treaties. Japan’s overriding concern was strategic national security. Aware of its weakness vis-à-vis the other imperialist powers, Japan justified acquisition of empire as a measure for preserving national independence in a turbulent geopolitical environment. Leaders wanted “buffer zones” to protect the homelands and the new colonies. By contrast, other imperialist nations had predominantly economic motivations, concerned with opening new markets and new investment opportunities on foreign shores. European colonies were often established to protect thriving economic interests, as in British India and the Dutch East Indies. Japan began imperial expansion, by contrast, with a shortage rather than an excess of capital. A second, related difference was the compact size of Japan’s empire, especially in comparison to the globe-spanning colonies of Great Britain, France, and the Netherlands. The Japanese empire centered on East Asian neighboring areas to maximize their more limited economic and military resources. A final key difference was the sense of cultural affinity with its subject peoples, particularly in Taiwan and Korea—the idea that Japanese were of the same racial stock and shared cultural and religious beliefs, values, and practices with the peoples of their colonies. This situation, unique among the imperial powers, deeply shaped Japanese attitudes toward colonial governance.
FIGURE 53. Postcard depicting Ainu bear festival, 1902–18. Courtesy of Special Collections and College Archives, Skillman Library, Lafayette College, and the East Asia Image Collection.
Colonial life is often described through simple binaries of collaboration and resistance, but these do not accurately reflect the reality for many colonized peoples, who usually cooperated with pressures to assimilate, in order to survive or gain advantages, even if they felt sorrow or resentment at loss of local sovereignty. All successful colonial enterprises require a degree of cooperation and support among the colonized. Many of the elite and wealthy among them—who had the most to lose or sensed opportunities for advancement or profit—worked cooperatively with Japanese officials. Most did not then believe they were betraying their nation, but the perception of collaboration with foreign rulers usually became a highly sensitive issue in the years following independence.
The Japanese leadership considered acquisition of overseas colonies as proof of its level of civilization. Like other late empires, including Germany and the United States, Meiji leaders initially studied and often mimicked European colonial practices. They described their colonial holdings in the same derogatory terms—as dirty, noisy, barbaric, and uncivilized. Like their predecessors, they used international law to justify Japanese rule over other peoples, adopting the “civilizing mission” of extending the benefits of civilization to benighted and backward nations. Japanese colonialism, however, was distinct from its Western competitors in a significant manner. Namely, while the European and American colonialists drew a clear line between themselves and those they ruled, emphasizing the “otherness” of colonized peoples, Japanese colonial policy and propaganda emphasized the “sameness” between themselves and their subjects, at least in rhetoric, if not in popular consciousness or popular culture. As the Japanese colonized their East Asian neighbors and the islands of the South Seas, they presented themselves as brothers-in-arms with shared racial and cultural roots who had also suffered from Western imperialism.
Emerging academic disciplines like ethnography and anthropology also helped rationalize the expansion of the empire. Japanese scholars and intellectuals began to conceive of their home islands not as an isolated archipelago but as part of a continuum that included the Asian continent and the Pacific islands. Shared heritage with the peoples of occupied territories was more obviously applicable in East Asia than in the South Seas. Intellectuals began to theorize that the Pacific islands were the birthplace of the Japanese people—in prehistoric times, islanders had traveled across the ocean and became the homeland’s original residents. Thus, the Japanese were said to also share roots with their subjects in Nan’yō, who needed their help to civilize and develop, providing a rationale for the expansion of empire.
Taiwan
When Taiwan was ceded to Japan following the First Sino-Japanese War, the Meiji government had no experience as a colonizer and no real long-term objectives for the island. Chinese officials did not seem to consider the island a major loss. Statesman Li Hongzhang reportedly dismissed its cession to Japan by remarking to the Qing empress dowager, Cixi, that “birds do not sing and flowers are not fragrant on the island of Taiwan. The men and women are inofficious and are not passionate either.”
Japanese authorities planned to redevelop Taiwan, especially the capital city Taihoku (known today as Taipei), into a model colony to improve Japan’s standing among the imperialist powers, in hopes of negotiating revision of unfair treaties. Officials extensively researched European colonial policies and implemented a massive modernization program that established school systems, hospitals, and transportation and communications infrastructures, transforming a backward territory into a modern colonial possession. Taihoku featured tree-lined boulevards, parks, and fountains. The colony was an expensive burden for the fledgling colonial power, however, and had to be made economically self-sufficient as quickly as possible. State monopolies in sugar, camphor, and other agricultural products helped achieve this goal.
The Japanese attempted to win over local leaders by sponsoring tours of the home islands, allowing colonial representatives to witness Japanese modernity in person. Nevertheless, from 1895 to 1915, popular resistance to Japanese rule was high, and the world questioned whether a non-Western nation such as Japan could effectively govern its own colony. In 1897, the Japanese Diet debated whether to sell Taiwan to France. Han Chinese immigrants in Taiwan first resisted the Japanese, engaging in guerrilla tactics to combat colonial rule. After they were suppressed, the colonial regime turned to subduing aborigines in the mountainous interior. In 1909, they launched a genocidal five-year campaign against aboriginal groups. In the 1915 Tapani Incident, Han Chinese and aborigines, united by popular religious beliefs that they were invulnerable to modern weaponry, launched an attack on Japanese police stations. As a result, colonial authorities took steps to ameliorate their rule, but aboriginal tribes continued their resistance nonetheless. In the Musha Incident of 1930, six villages protested forced labor policies by attacking a school athletic event and killing 134 Japanese. Educated, urban Taiwanese also initiated movements for home rule and equal rights, but these were nonviolent and never seriously challenged the colonial order.
There were two distinct views on how Japan should approach ruling Taiwan. The first, supported by the head of civilian affairs, Gotō Shinpei (1858–1929), held that the Chinese and indigenous inhabitants of Taiwan could never be completely assimilated and that the island could not be governed like the homeland. The opposing viewpoint, that assimilation and equality were possible, was represented by political party leaders Hara Takashi and Itagaki Taisuke. They believed that the Taiwanese (and later Koreans) were similar enough to the Japanese that the same legal and governmental approaches used domestically should be adopted in the colonies, and that colonial populations should share the same privileges and duties as Japanese citizens.
FIGURE 54. Mori Ushinosuke, postcard depicting Formosan (Taiwanese) “savages,” 1902–18. Courtesy of Special Collections and College Archives, Skillman Library, Lafayette College, and the East Asia Image Collection.
Gotō, a medical doctor by training, served in a remarkable range of official positions, including as first director of the South Manchuria Railway, seventh mayor of Tokyo, first director of NHK (the state broadcasting company), home minister, foreign minister, and chief scout for the Boy Scouts of Japan. He believed that Taiwanese habits and customs called for distinct policies. Opium addiction was a significant problem, but rather than prohibiting the drug, Gotō designated a licensing system for official suppliers, earning major revenues for the colonial government. Taiwanese elites who cooperated with the regime were granted opium licenses as a reward for loyalty. Colonial policy mainly followed Gotō’s approach between 1898 and 1918. Japanese authorities passed special laws and wielded complete executive, legislative, and military power. Japanese colonists, enjoying high levels of expatriate privilege, heavily opposed any attempts to grant the Taiwanese equal rights. Following World War I, however, the perception of colonialism was changing dramatically around the world, with support for national self-determination gaining ground and independence movements among colonies growing across the globe. Most colonial powers began making greater concessions to subject populations.
When Hara Takashi became prime minister in 1918, he appointed Taiwan’s first civilian, rather than military, governor-general and advocated pursuit of assimilation (dōka), under which Taiwan would be viewed as an extension of the home islands, and Taiwanese would be educated to understand their role and responsibilities as Japanese subjects. Over the next twenty years, colonial authorities instituted local governance, gave Taiwan seats in the Diet’s Upper House, and forbade caning or corporal punishment of islanders by Japanese settlers. Previous administrations had been concerned with demonstrating Japan’s civilizational influence by providing railways and sewage systems. They were unconcerned that the Taiwanese were second-class citizens in their own land, abused by Japanese settlers. Dōka initiatives aimed to reduce inequalities. A new public school system for the benefit of Taiwanese was established, encouraging and rewarding the use of the Japanese language. Fifty-seven percent of the population had become literate in Japanese by 1941. With the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War in 1937, efforts to more fully “Japanize” the Taiwanese intensified. Locals were pressured to convert to Shintoism, adopt Japanese names, and volunteer for the Imperial Japanese Army and Navy.
Korea
Meiji-era oligarch Itō Hirobumi was appointed as the first resident-general of the Korean protectorate in 1905. It was the final appointment of the Chōshū statesman’s long career, and he hoped to replicate in Korea the achievements he and his fellow oligarchs had engineered in Japan following the Meiji Restoration. With the help of several thousand Japanese officials, he began to forcefully modernize Korea, but the Korean court resented his presence and resisted his efforts. King Gojong sought international support to regain control of Korea, sending representatives to the 1907 Hague Peace Convention to plea for help from foreign governments. Itō ordered Gojong’s abdication in favor of his young, weak-minded son, Sunjong (1874–1926). Japan’s efforts to build Korean wealth and strength could hardly evoke the same support they received at home during the Meiji period, when they were designed to seek national independence rather than benefit an occupying nation.
Japanese actions in Korea neither surprised nor upset other imperial powers. On the contrary, the disparity between Korean and Japanese power made it seem inevitable. Under the 1905 Taft-Katsura agreement, the United States traded Japan’s recognition of American control of the Philippines for American recognition of Japan’s superintendence of Korea. As in Taiwan, colonial administrators initiated broad and rapid transformations of Korea’s political, educational, and social structures: constructing railways, harbor facilities, roads, and modern telegraph and postal systems to aid in economic development; introducing modern medicine and facilities for improved public hygiene; and replacing traditional schools centered on Confucian classics with a modern educational system. Primary-school enrollments rose from 1 percent in 1910 to 47 percent by 1943. Development benefited Japanese settlers and Korean residents unevenly. By 1940, for example, all Japanese households in the colony had electrical service, compared with only one in ten Korean households.
In addition to the strategic advantages that Japan gained through control of Korea, there were several economic advantages. Fishing, timber, and mining rights were distributed to Japanese firms to facilitate imports of food and raw materials to the home islands. The products of Japan’s light industry, such as cotton cloth, watches, buttons, eyeglasses, matches, and kerosene lamps, were exported to a captive Korean market. In addition, the colony provided new job opportunities for the Japanese; by 1908, over 125,000 had taken up residence there. Beyond the bureaucrats and military men, Japanese workers occupied a wide range of positions: laborers sought temporary work in construction or as porters for the army; small merchants peddled Japanese goods at military camps, in village markets, or door to door. Some Japanese settled more permanently, opening small factories to produce leather goods and ceramics. Land confiscated from Korean elites was taken over by Japanese farmers, reducing many Korean peasants to tenancy or forcing them to migrate to Japan or Manchuria for work as laborers. In the cities, Japanese immigrants opened restaurants, teahouses, and brothels catering to the expat community. Economic development brought little benefit to Koreans, as virtually all industries and businesses were owned by Japanese corporations or individuals.
Unlike many Western colonies, in which powerful states exerted control over diverse tribal or ethnically heterogeneous groups in Africa, India, Southeast Asia, and South America, Korea had been a unified country for at least as long as Japan. Furthermore, it shared cultural, religious, and linguistic roots deriving from China with its colonial master. While some elite Koreans welcomed modernization projects and cooperated enthusiastically with the Japanese, others fiercely resisted what they saw as an illegitimate takeover of their homeland. Opposition took different forms. Some high officials committed suicide when Korea became a protectorate. Many former members of the Korean military forces, disbanded by Itō in 1907, turned to guerrilla resistance activity, forming “righteous armies” that fought skirmishes against Japanese police, armies, and armed settlers. Such struggles claimed eighteen thousand Korean and seven thousand Japanese lives. In 1909, a young Korean patriot gunned down Resident-General Itō at a railroad station in Manchuria. His assassination made it clear to Tokyo that Koreans would not cooperate with Japanese control unless more stringent measures were taken. One result was full annexation in 1910 and the appointment of the iron-fisted army general Terauchi Masatake (1852–1919) as Korea’s first governor-general.
Following World War I, U.S. president Woodrow Wilson’s declaration on the right to national “self-determination” motivated popular protest. On March 1, 1919, a massive assembly gathered in Seoul’s Pagoda Park to hear a Proclamation of Independence. The statement included a list of complaints about discrimination against Koreans, including unequal opportunity in education and careers, mistreatment by settlers and officials, and suppression of Korean heritage and language. The crowds erupted, setting off street riots and demonstrations throughout the country, involving an estimated two million Koreans. The Japanese military police could not contain the riots and called in the army and navy to help quell them, resulting in a violent suppression that claimed thousands of Korean lives.
U.S. and European leaders were horrified by the brutality of the campaign and expressed strong critiques of Japan’s colonial administration. In response, the governor-general instituted a series of reforms known as “cultural rule” that prioritized assimilation over coercion. Cultural rule permitted limited press freedoms and the formation of labor and political movements while promising better educational and employment opportunities for Koreans. A civilian police force replaced the brutal military police. As in Taiwan, measures to ameliorate colonial life were strongly opposed by Japanese settlers who wished to preserve their own privileges.
By the end of the 1920s, protests declined as the elite and middle classes, educated in Japanese and accustomed to Japanese-controlled mass media, began to identify with the culture of colonial modernity, enjoying the same types of urban entertainment found in the metropole, such as radio and cinema. In the 1930s and ’40s, as in Taiwan, the war in China resulted in tighter control and heightened development of heavy industry. Assimilation policy was more rigidly enforced: the Korean language was banned in schools and public offices, and subjects were ordered to take Japanese names and worship at Shinto shrines. Over four million Koreans were drafted, coerced, or kidnapped to work in mines and factories in Japan and Manchuria, or as comfort women to serve the Japanese military.
FIGURE 55. Postcard depicting “Civilized Korea” that combines traditional customs with Japanese modernity, 1907–18. Courtesy of Special Collections and College Archives, Skillman Library, Lafayette College, and the East Asia Image Collection.
Enforcement of assimilation was accompanied by increased rhetoric on the “sameness” between Koreans and Japanese, who shared common ancestry and linguistic roots, expressed in the official slogan “Japan and Korea as One Body” (Naisen ittai). Koreans were said to be indistinguishable from Japanese in cranial and body measurements. Thus, scholars argued that both Japanese and Koreans were part of a single racial and cultural grouping that encompassed most of North Asia and had originated in archaic times in the Pacific.
Nan’yō
During World War I, Japan seized several groups of Pacific islands—including the Marianas, Carolines, Marshalls, and Palau—that had been ruled by Germany since the late nineteenth century and were highly desirable for their strategic locations. These islands were collectively known as the Nan’yō. The relatively docile populations offered little real resistance to the Japanese naval forces that took control. The islands were poor in natural resources, and any significant economic development was considered infeasible because of their distance from the homeland.
Civilian government of the islands was far less authoritarian than the administration of Taiwan and Korea. Japanese educational and language programs were instituted and were well received by many islanders, but the dispersed nature of territories meant a wide variety in islanders’ attitudes toward the Japanese. In Saipan and Palau, deep resentment grew over time. In Saipan, the Japanese developed a plantation economy in sugar and a fishing industry that required large labor forces, but they did not employ indigenous people, considered undesirable workers, instead importing laborers from Okinawa and Korea. Over three decades of rule, the settler population eventually outnumbered indigenous Saipanese by ten to one. Palau, as the seat of colonial government, also experienced a sharp influx in the population of Japanese, causing local frictions. In 1943, when the war reached the Pacific islands, the military population swelled further and made increasingly harsh demands of the islands’ inhabitants.
Manchukuo
Unlike the examples above, Manchukuo was never a formal colony of the Japanese; the fiction of the puppet state was created to mask Japanese control of northeastern Chinese provinces. To create an air of legitimacy, the last Qing emperor, Pu Yi, deposed by China’s 1911 revolution, acted as the head of state over the historical homeland of the Manchus, founders of the Qing dynasty. Nevertheless, Manchus formed a minority in Manchukuo; the largest ethnic group was Han Chinese. Other large minorities included Koreans, Japanese, Mongols, and Russians.
The Japan-Manchukuo Protocol of 1932 confirmed recognition of Manchukuo as a state and defined a mutual defense agreement, allowing Japanese troops to be stationed there indefinitely. Japanese firms invested heavily in extracting Manchukuo’s rich natural resources, and the area soon became an industrial powerhouse, the “lifeline” that could save Japan from its economic woes. Manchukuo’s Legislative Council was largely a ceremonial body, created to rubber-stamp decisions issued by the Kwantung Army. The commanding officer of the army served as Japanese “ambassador” to Manchukuo and possessed the power to veto decisions by Pu Yi or his cabinet. The façade of independence was constructed for the sake of international opinion in an era when direct annexation was no longer condoned. Japan wished to misleadingly assure other imperialist powers that it was not pursuing expansion in China, but rather following the demands of local residents in Japanese-occupied territories, who favored partition from China and the return of Emperor Pu Yi.
Pu Yi is one of the most tragic figures of modern Chinese history. Named emperor at the age of three, he was deposed just a few years later by China’s Republican Revolution but was initially allowed to keep living within the Forbidden City while receiving a stipend. This arrangement was canceled in 1924 and he was expelled from the palace. In 1931, Pu Yi sent a letter to the Japanese minister of war, expressing his desire to be restored to the throne in a Manchurian state. His wish was granted, but his activities were closely controlled by the Kwantung Army. In 1946, during the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal, Pu Yi testified against the Japanese, denying all collaboration, claiming that the letter was fake and that he had been kidnapped. In a later autobiography, he admitted that he had falsified his testimony to protect himself. When the Chinese Communist Party came to power in 1949, Pu Yi spent ten years in a prison reeducation camp. After he was declared reformed, he spent the remainder of his life in a modest editorial position. Bernardo Bertolucci’s 1987 film The Last Emperor beautifully captures the tragedies and ironies of the life of the last ruler of China’s final dynasty.
The establishment of Manchukuo as Japan’s “lifeline” had far-reaching effects for Japanese society, providing significant new economic and career opportunities during the depression. Hundreds of Marxist and liberal intellectuals, unwelcome in Japan, took bureaucratic or commercial positions that allowed them to pursue progressive social agendas in Manchukuo. The largest number of emigrants came from the poor tenant-farmer class. An official colonization program envisioned resettling five million impoverished farmers—that goal was never reached, but over three hundred thousand farmers, mostly from hard-hit northeastern provinces, emigrated. The South Manchurian Railway Company, known as Mantetsu, a semi-private organization involved in most aspects of Japanese economic development and control of Manchuria, produced a pamphlet that glorified settler heroism in facing bandits and hardships for the sake of expanding the sacred Japanese empire. It victoriously declared: “We are the apostles who descended to Manchuria from the holy land of Japan. Just as in the ancient age of the gods the children of heaven descended to the home of the gods, now we will build a new home of the gods in a corner of North Manchuria.”2 Such pronouncements confirmed that, despite propagandistic official rhetoric extolling racial equality and opportunity for all Asians, many Japanese believed that a hierarchy of civilizations indeed existed. Their superiority over other Asian nations provided the rationale for aggressive expansion.
FIGURE 56. Postcard commemorating Pu Yi’s 1935 visit to Tokyo. Courtesy of Special Collections and College Archives, Skillman Library, Lafayette College, and the East Asia Image Collection.
MAP 9. Japanese empire, with dates of expansion.
COLONIAL CULTURES
Japanese journalists, novelists, and bureaucrats mimicked Western writers and officials in their imagination and representation of savage populations among the colonies they ruled. Their stories emphasized exotic locales and promiscuous local women. Like author Robert Louis Stevenson and artist Paul Gauguin, travelers to Nan’yō fancied themselves romantics fleeing modern civilization for a primitive tropical paradise. Exoticized portrayals of the colonies tended to dominate popular culture about Nan’yō and Taiwan, where aborigines represented only 2 percent of the population but were portrayed disproportionately in literature and media. The image of “the savage” offered writers and artists a romanticized alter ego, a glimpse into their primordial self. The spectrum of colonial barbarity represented ranged from the frightening cannibals among Taiwanese aboriginals to the happy, childlike peoples of Nan’yō. While colonial policy and propaganda claimed racial affinities between the Japanese and their subject populations, depictions of colonial savagery allowed them to imagine that Japan occupied a different temporal space than their backward relations, whose archaic lifestyles were part of Japan’s deep past. Thus, some writers argued that Taiwanese headhunters were noble savages, with courage and military skill that recalled the samurai of Japan’s bygone days.
Literature
Japanese writers in Taiwan often conveyed romanticized views of the colony and its natives and/or highlighted the primitivism, violence, and superstitions of aboriginal hill tribes for home audiences. Satō Haruo’s 1923 tale “The Devilbird” was based on the indigenous legend of a white bird with red claws trained to kill by hereditary lineages of shamanic masters. In reality, those suspected of being bird masters were often persecuted and murdered. Satō recorded a tale he had heard about the victimization of one such family. In their brutal pacification campaigns, the Japanese army would gather all the adult males of a village into a single hut and burn it down. As the army approached one village, its residents blamed the fate they faced on the actions of a family suspected of shamanism. Villagers trapped the family in a hut and set it on fire, but the teenage daughter and son escaped and lived in the forest. The day the daughter died, a rainbow appeared, reportedly to provide her with a bridge to her bird-master ancestors. Nakamura Chihei’s 1939 short story “The Mist-Enshrouded Barbarian Village” fictionalized the 1930 Musha Incident, framing the rebellion as the dying gasp of a “pure, simpleminded people.” Nakamura used familiar tropes to describe the motivation for Musha: “These barbarians were driven by their evanescent, lingering savageness. They tried one last fight, however ineffectual, against civilization, against a lifestyle that did not suit them.”3
After several decades of colonial education policy, native Taiwanese writers began emerging as a modern class of intellectuals, educated in Japanese but maintaining cultural ties to China. They wrote literature that explored their hybrid identities, publishing their works alongside Japanese writers in local journals such as Bungei Taiwan (Literary Taiwan). Two different strands were apparent in the local literary scene. One group of writers, active especially in the 1920s and ’30s, maintained ties to their Chinese roots and were critical of colonial policies, although heavy censorship dictated that their critiques be indirect. Another group, ascendant in the ’40s, advocated embracing assimilation and becoming true imperial subjects.
Among the first group, the works of Yang Kui highlighted the social and economic inequities of the colony and expressed anti-imperialist views. His short story “Water Buffalo” describes the colonial government’s program of confiscating domesticated buffalo from Taiwanese peasants in order to send them to Nan’yō to aid in plantation development. The narrator is a student who has returned to his home village for the summer and strikes up a friendship with a young girl who used to care for her family’s now seized livestock. With the loss of the family’s livelihood, the girl’s father plans to sell his daughter to the polygamous father of the narrator. Lu Heruo’s 1935 story “The Oxcart” similarly describes how an oxcart driver has been driven out of business by Japanese cars and trucks. In order to earn funds and buy a plot of land to farm, his wife must become a prostitute. The story concludes with the driver being fined for using his old cart on modern roads. In these stories, local characters are trapped by both oppressive colonial economic policies and patriarchal Chinese social practices. Japanese-educated elite Taiwanese who observed these conditions expressed frustration over both colonial inequities and the rigidity of tradition.
In the early 1940s, some Taiwanese writers turned to the question of how to become better imperial subjects. Writers whose entire education had been in Japanese, many of whom had also lived in Japan, believed in the benevolence of their colonial masters and sought their approval—which would earn them scorn as collaborators in the postcolonial era. “Volunteer Soldier,” an award-winning story by Zhou Jinpo, epitomizes the “imperial subject” movement in literature. Zhou spent his childhood in Japan but returned to the colony after the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923. The protagonist of the story has returned to Taiwan after studying in Japan and feels uncomfortable with the cultural backwardness of his home. He debates the most effective means for truly Japanizing Taiwan with a childhood friend. The narrator believes it best to raise the level of local culture, while his friend advocates joining the Patriotic Youth Brigade and achieving spiritual union with Japanese deities through worship at Shinto shrines. Shortly after their conversation, the friend volunteers for the Japanese army, earning the deep respect of the narrator. The story reflects Taiwan’s military recruitment system, initially fully voluntary but more coercive over time. In wartime, those who failed to volunteer were expelled from school and forced into war-related factory labor.
Like their Taiwanese colleagues, many Korean colonial authors held complex attitudes about their cultural hybridity and many received their higher education at elite Japanese institutions, where they were immersed in both Western literary theories and Japanese modernist writing. They endeavored to develop a unique Korean literary voice that articulated their own anxieties as ethnically and racially separate from the Japanese and thus subject to discrimination, yet culturally and intellectually the peers of their masters. The sad saga of author Yi Kwangsu (1892–1950) demonstrates the complexity and instability of colonial intellectual identity. Yi was a leader of the 1919 movement, had studied at prestigious Waseda University in Tokyo, and seemed destined to become a nationalist leader. But in the 1920s, he suddenly returned from Japan and withdrew from the independence movement. After an arrest for nationalist activity in 1937, Yi transformed into an enthusiastic proponent of Japanese rule, becoming one of the first to change his name, urging Koreans to volunteer for the Imperial Japanese Army and celebrating the sacrifices of Japan’s kamikaze pilots. After Korea gained independence, he was ostracized as a collaborator. During the Korean War (1950–53), when North Koreans briefly occupied Seoul, they rounded up collaborators, including Yi, and sent them north to be imprisoned. He died in a prison in Pyongyang in 1950.
Yi’s 1917 work Mujong (The Heartless) is often considered the first modern Korean novel. It was serialized in the colony’s sole Korean-language newspaper and became an immediate sensation. The plot centers on a love triangle. A shy, chaste young man teaching English at a middle school is torn between two women, the traditionally raised daughter of his mentor, who was forced through family misfortune to become a kisaeng entertainer (like geisha, kisaeng sang, danced, and played music for patrons), and a modern young woman from a Christian family who planned to study in the United States. When the kisaeng is raped, she decides to commit suicide, as she is no longer pure enough to marry the teacher, but is saved by a chance encounter on a train when a modern young woman urges her to reconsider. Like Yi’s other early works, Mujong addresses conflicts between traditional ideals and colonial modernity. The narrative is highly critical of the custom of arranged marriage, which resulted in husbands who kept concubines and frequented kisaengs, while their oppressed wives contemplated suicide.
Writer Yom Sang-sop was also educated in Tokyo. His 1924 short story “On the Eve of the Uprising” expresses the anxiety and melancholy of cosmopolitan Koreans forced to return to colonial existence. The protagonist, a student in Tokyo, receives a telegram that his wife is dying and that he must return home. Before departing, he dawdles in the city, visiting his favorite café waitress and shopping for gifts at department stores. During the journey from Tokyo to Shimonoseki to Pusan, he must confront ethnic discrimination and his hybrid identity. On the train from Tokyo, he can pass unnoticed as a Japanese, but on the ferry from Shimonoseki, where people of different classes and ethnicities intermingle, he overhears anti-Korean slurs—yet feels himself superior to money-grubbing Japanese hoping to earn profits by exploiting Korean resources and labor. At a train stop in Korea, he observes a group of mournful Korean criminals in the custody of Japanese police, including a woman with a baby on her back, prompting the narrator to exclaim that his homeland is a graveyard: “A graveyard swarming with maggots! . . . all will be decomposed by the maggots and become particles and soil, and it will enter my mouth and your nose. . . . Be gone! Be removed; not even a sprout left! Collapse! Be ruined! When it all ends there might emerge someone who will make a little better of a man.”4 The impending death of the narrator’s wife and legal troubles he faces over his family’s burial site under colonial law support the theme of his homeland as a graveyard, where colonial rule is decomposing and degrading the Korean nation.
From the early twentieth century, Japanese traveled to Nan’yō in search of adventure or riches, their imaginations fired by depictions in Japanese popular culture of a primitive tropical paradise. Meiji educator Nitobe Inazō saw Japan’s role in the South Seas as a form of manifest destiny. He used the famous folktale of Momotaro the Peach Boy as a metaphor for Japanese expansion. In the original story, a boy born from a peach is adopted by a childless old woman. He eventually leaves home to travel to Ogre Island, planning to capture riches held there. Nitobe interpreted Ogre Island as Japan’s constantly receding frontier and portrayed Momotaro’s journey there as a “homecoming,” in which he encounters “proto-Japanese” people.
FIGURE 57. Shimada Keizō, illustration from Bōken Dankichi, 1934. Dankichi is depicted leading a native to a Shinto shrine.
Daring Dankichi (Bōken Dankichi), a popular 1930s boys’ manga comic and animated film series, depicted Japan’s role in Nan’yō. Dankichi is an ordinary boy who falls asleep while fishing with his friend Kariko the rat. They awake after drifting far away to a Nan’yō island inhabited by dark-skinned primitives. Dankichi discards his schoolboy uniform for a grass skirt but keeps his shoes and wristwatch, emblems of his more advanced civilization. He proceeds to dazzle the natives with his intelligence and ingenuity and they make him their king, but he cannot distinguish between his dark subjects, who have names like Pineapple and Banana. His solution is to use the sap of a rubber tree to paint white numbers on their chests. For audiences, Dankichi represented the desire to bring civilization to ignorant peoples by demonstrating Japanese superiority. Critics have noted how stories like Dankichi freely jumbled the floras, faunas, and populations of a diverse range of cultures from Africa, India, and South America, along with the South Pacific, creating wildly inaccurate stereotypes of the actual colonial territories in Nan’yō.
Film
Film is widely recognized as an especially powerful medium for propaganda. The government used film and other media to mold domestic popular consensus behind the war effort and to justify its actions to the peoples of Asia. Two primary messages were stressed in propaganda films: that Japan had a sacred mission to wage war against the West in order to liberate the people of Asia and enable all nations to be at peace; and that the West was immoral, racist, culturally imperialistic, and ambitious to dominate the East. To ensure that people understood these messages correctly, officials increased their control of the mass media, censoring stories that suggested popular discontent or pessimism. Propaganda via print, radio, film, and even children’s literature was a powerful weapon that targeted human emotions, encouraging Japanese subjects to think and behave in a manner supporting the state’s wartime goals.
Beginning around the 1910s, the major Japanese film studios established movie theaters in Taiwan and Korea. By the end of 1945, there were sixteen theaters in Taipei alone. Studios were even more active in Korea. The largest—Nikkatsu, Shochiku, and Tekine—established branch offices in Seoul for distribution and production. Colonial officials believed that films provided an effective tool for both indoctrinating colonial subjects and managing the colony’s image internationally. Unlike literature or theater, the mass colonial populace could grasp films without knowing the Japanese language. They could actually see how modern life in Japan appeared, thus learning to appreciate the superiority of their colonial masters while envisioning their own future potential. Authorities sponsored film screenings that usually combined educational and feature films. Educational films might explain colonial structures, presenting figures like the police or teachers as helpful, enlightened forces for civilizing the colony. The Korean Colonial Cinema unit produced around two films per month that were intended to “spread a correct understanding” of Korea to Japan while making the “mother country familiar to Koreans by introducing them to Japanese scenery.”5
Feature films about Taiwan and Korea, however, were not very popular with Japanese audiences. By contrast, movies about Manchuria, which were shot on location and typically told a “wild west” story about frontiers inhabited by bandits and treacherous Chinese, had been popular since the 1920s. The semiofficial Manchurian Motion Picture Corporation, known as Man’ei, was established in 1937 and quickly became the most extensive film facility in Asia, with a stable of well-established stars and its own studio film magazine. Man’ei successfully competed with Japanese, Chinese, and European films in its home markets because it made films by and for Manchurians, intended to entertain rather than propagandize.
Around 1941, the Japanese film industry announced the Greater East Asia Film Sphere, which would produce films that represented the pure “Oriental spirit” and protect Asian film markets against the decadent products of Hollywood. As with the Co-Prosperity Sphere, Japanese leadership of this sphere was assumed. Films were often set in China, with Japanese protagonists constructing modern roads and canals to help backward people in underdeveloped areas lead better lives. A classic example of the genre is 1940’s Vow in the Desert. Its hero, Sugiyama, is a Japanese engineer sent to build a road from Beijing to Xian. As he and his Chinese colleague Yang stand on the Great Wall, watching camels cross the sands below, Yang calls the wall “a useless colossus” because “you can’t drive a truck over it.” Sugiyama responds, “Why don’t we build a Great Wall that you could drive a truck on. A modern Great Wall that could stand up to this one.” The gist is clearly that Japanese technological and engineering accomplishments have superseded China’s ancient glories and hold the key to China’s future well-being.
This film and others set in China and Manchuria made a star of actress Yamaguchi Yoshiko (1920–2014), better known as Ri Kōran, a Japanese national born and raised in Manchuria. A bilingual beauty with a strong singing voice, she could change costumes or languages to play characters that were Chinese, Manchurian, Korean, and even Russian, and she soon became a popular star throughout Asia. Her Japanese identity was hidden by Man’ei to heighten her appeal to Chinese and Manchurian audiences. Yamaguchi often starred in interracial love melodramas that formulaically featured a strong Japanese male who captures the heart of a beautiful, feisty local woman, metaphorically representing Japan’s hopes in Asia. In 1940’s China Nights (Shina no yoru) she plays Keiran, an upper-class Chinese woman who has lost her parents and home to Japanese bombs and has resorted to begging on Shanghai streets. She despises Japan and initially cannot see the good intentions of the Japanese boat captain Hase, yet after he slaps her face to bring her to her senses, she falls in love with him. The film was released in different national versions: in China, the couple lives happily ever after, while in the Japanese version Keiran commits suicide.
The Film Law of 1939 abolished films considered sexual, frivolous, or as commenting on sensitive issues. Instead, films were to elevate patriotism and present the wartime situation appropriately. Propaganda films for the home front were often sentimental and melodramatic, depicting hardships and suffering associated with war to elicit empathy from the audience. Unlike U.S. propaganda films that tended to portray the American military as invincible, Japanese films often portrayed their own military as the underdog. A common storyline depicted how families coped when a son or father went off to war or died honorably for his country. One classic, 1940’s Chocolate and Soldiers, depicts a father-son relationship during the war in China. While fighting at the front, the father takes the time to regularly send chocolate to his son, who reciprocates this paternal concern by mapping the movements of his father’s platoon. The depiction of their mutual devotion and sacrifice touched audiences’ heartstrings and was designed to inspire support for the troops. Another frequent theme of wartime films was self-sacrifice, giving up individual desires for the greater good. Kurosawa Akira’s propagandistic work The Most Beautiful (1944), which opens with a screen reading “Attack and Destroy the Enemy,” depicts the lives of teenage girls living in a dormitory while working at a factory producing optical equipment for weapons. The film portrays their patriotic fervor in refusing to miss work, even when ill or when a family member dies at home. Every morning the girls recite a pledge, “Today we will do our best to help destroy America and Britain.” Other films attempted to generate sympathy for soldiers on the front; 1939’s Fighting Soldiers and Mud and Soldiers, for example, both display the endless tedium and emotional exhaustion that characterized soldiers’ lives in China.
Animated features were also used as vehicles to glorify Japan’s civilizing mission and war against the immoral West. The epic Momotaro: Divine Soldiers of the Sea (Momotaro umi no shinpei, 1945) employs animal characters, including dogs, rabbits, bears, and monkeys, to represent members of Japan’s military forces. After completing their training at home, the forces are stationed on a Pacific island, where they construct an airbase with the help of the locals, portrayed as jungle animals such as elephants, cheetahs, and crocodiles. The simplistic natives are eager to share their food and resources with the glamorous new arrivals. A key sequence depicts a soldier attempting to teach the savage animals the Japanese syllabary, resulting in chaos. When he sets his lesson to music, however, the natives finally begin to understand and begin to sing along while cooperating with the military: doing their laundry and cooking, and engaging in other forms of heavy or menial labor for the benefit of the clearly superior Japanese. When the Japanese general, Momotaro, leads an attack on an Allied fort, cowardly British soldiers panic and quickly surrender to Japanese rule.
Museums
Museums were deployed throughout the empire to celebrate Japanese achievements and demonstrate their stewardship of the arts and resources of their colonial possessions. Exhibits worked to position Japan as an advanced and civilized metropole, placing Korea, Taiwan, and other colonies hierarchically beneath the homelands as regions with an inferior status. The first museum opened in Taiwan in 1908, with the aim of educating the public on the island’s natural resources and promise for industrial development. Exhibits emphasized natural sciences, such as geology, botany, zoology, and maritime resources; they minimized historical ties between Taiwan and China. Museum contents were, however, at odds with those of Taiwan pavilions at Japanese expositions, which highlighted primitive or exotic aspects of island life, from opium smoking to aboriginal head hunting. In 1915, the museum began to include more anthropological materials on indigenous groups and their “ancient customs,” which were being eradicated through Japan’s civilizational influence. During the 1920s and ’30s, colonial authorities constructed a network of prefectural and municipal museums throughout the colony that collectively presented an imperial version of Taiwanese history and heritage. These museums identified Taiwan with nature and the primitive, in contrast with the culture and modernity of the homeland.
In Korea, three museums were established on palace grounds in Seoul, displacing the royal family and opening previously exclusive spaces to the general public. Museum exhibits tended to emphasize the ties between Japan and Korea in ancient history and suggest the colony’s more recent decline. The Yi Royal Family Museum, opened in 1909, exhibited ancient arts, including calligraphy, Buddhist imagery, and especially pottery. Celadons from the Goryeo dynasty (918–1392) dominated pottery collections and were deemed the “quintessence of Korean art,” suggesting that the current Yi dynasty was responsible for Korea’s artistic deterioration.6 The Government-General Museum of Korea opened in 1915 to celebrate the fifth anniversary of annexation. It featured archaeological treasures that revealed ties between ancient Japan and the Korean Peninsula. A 1938 official report on the museum, in English, stated:
Tyosen [Korea], one of the oldest countries of the Orient, was once a highly advanced nation from which Japan learned many arts and crafts. . . . Though Japan was always ready to lend a helping hand to Tyosen in the maintenance of her independence and in the promotion of her welfare, Tyosen was utterly unable to stand on her feet owing to long years of misgovernment, official corruption, and popular degeneration. . . . [I]n view of the situation Japan came to the conclusion that the best way to save Tysosen was by making her a Japanese protectorate.7
The Yi Royal Museum of Fine Arts opened in Deoksu Palace, a former residence of the king, in 1933. It showcased modern paintings, sculptures, and fine craftwork, all created by Japanese artists. It purported to guide and educate aspiring Korean artists, but it served to emphasize the difference in status and perceived levels of accomplishment.
By 1932, museums in colonial Karafuto and Japanese-controlled territories in Guangdong China joined Taiwan’s four and Korea’s six museums. These featured confiscated artifacts from nobility, temples, and aboriginal peoples and engaged in research that justified Japanese expansionism.
Tourism and Consumption
Tourism and consumption provided other avenues for the Japanese and their colonial subjects to expand their relationship with the empire. Department stores in both Japan and the colonies regularly featured exhibitions on occupied territories. A 1939 exhibition on Karafuto at Tokyo’s Isetan contained a life-sized diorama of a traditional village; department stores in Taipei and Manchukuo featured exhibitions on Korea. Nearby tourism desks could assist spectators with planning travel to visit these places themselves. Japanese imperial consumers developed passions for Korean folk arts and folk music, such as the hit song “Arirang.” Fondness for Korean folk culture reflected a nostalgic view that Korea still maintained the “beautiful customs of the past,” lost in Japanese modernity.
Popular enthusiasm for visiting imperial heritage sites in the homelands and colonies was stimulated through the booming travel industries, which produced a flood of tourist publications and promotional films. Domestically, prefectures competed among themselves to earn official recognition of (often mythological) imperial sites, such as the starting point of legendary Emperor Jimmu’s campaign to unify Japan. Intra-empire tourism was aided by developments in transportation, including commercial flights that allowed well-heeled Japanese travelers to reach Korea in six hours and Manchukuo in nine. Passenger steamships and a comprehensive system of railway networks offered more affordable travel alternatives.
Colonial authorities promoted tours as a way for imperial subjects to experience exotic cultures in safe, Japanese-controlled spaces with familiar amenities, such as Japanese restaurants, hot-spring resorts, and department stores. Korean itineraries featured visits to experience unspoiled nature in the Diamond Mountains (Kongōsan). Tours of Seoul were conducted by female bus guides in traditional costume who pointed out ancient sites, like the city’s South Gate (Namdaemun) and Pagoda Park, along with markers of Japanese domination, such as the Chōsen and Keijō Shinto shrines and the museums and gardens built on sites confiscated from the royal family. Tourist tastes for exoticism were fulfilled through visits to the pleasure quarters, where kisaeng performed traditional songs and dances; by eating Korean specialties like grilled meat (yakiniku) and barbecued beef ribs (kalbi); and by buying local handicrafts. Another popular tourist activity was taking commemorative photos dressed in local costumes. The consumerist taste for experiencing cultural difference existed in tension with official assimilationist rhetoric emphasizing sameness.
Tours to Manchuria became popular in the early twentieth century and focused on sites from the First Sino-Japanese War and the Russo-Japanese War. The most important was Port Arthur, the location of gripping war campaigns that sealed Japan’s destiny as an imperialist power. Battlefield monuments in major cities were considered sacred sites that validated Japanese control of Manchuria by reminding visitors of the sacrifices made. Mantetsu railway funded trips throughout Northeast Asia for famous writers, such as Natsume Sōseki, Akutagawa Ryūnosoke, Yosano Akiko, and Tanizaki Jun’ichirō, who published travelogues or articles about their journeys through Manchuria and Mongolia. After 1931’s Manchurian Incident and subsequent Japanese occupation, many more facilities were constructed for tourist comfort. In Manchukuo’s modern new capital, Shinkyō (Xinjing in Chinese, known as Changchun today), visitors could choose among hotels and restaurants in Japanese, Chinese, Korean, and Western styles. Many visitors played golf or attended horse races. For exotica and souvenirs, tourists favored the cities of Mukden, where they could view the mausoleums of Manchu Qing emperors; and Dairen, where they could shop at chaotic traditional street bazaars.
OTHER ASPECTS OF CULTURE ON THE HOME FRONT
On the Japanese home front, the state organized labor to support war-related industries, taking control of wages to channel workers into strategically important economic sectors. The military’s manpower needs, however, were paramount. By August 1945, 7.2 million men had been drafted for military service. As factories lost workers, coercive methods were needed to obtain factory labor. A National Mobilization Law authorized the state to register males aged sixteen to fifty-nine and unmarried females from twelve to thirty-nine as potential conscripts for factory work. Women were never actually drafted, but they were intensely pressured into “volunteering” for war-related work and entered heavy industries in higher numbers than ever before. As labor shortages mounted, the state turned to schools, drafting millions of middle and high school students for labor at munitions factories. Prisoners of war and forced labor from Korea and other colonies filled the shoes of drafted workers in dangerous, arduous jobs such as coal mining.
To build popular support for the war, state agencies began to create mass organizations. Sanpō, an organization for industrial laborers, made certain that workers understood production targets, ran consumer cooperatives, and dispensed extra rations of sake and rice to diligent employees. Membership climbed from 3.5 million in 1940 to nearly 6.5 million by the end of the war. Following Sanpō’s success, patriotic associations were created for nearly every occupational, age, and gender group in the country. Farmers, writers, and ikebana teachers alike were herded into their own associations. The Greater Japan Young Adults Corps, composed of fourteen million males from ten to twenty-five years of age, was charged with cleaning parks and repairing roads and schools. The Greater Japan Women’s Society mandated membership for single women over age twenty and all married women. It had nearly nineteen million members, responsible for arranging send-offs, assembling care packages for soldiers at the front, and engaging in national defense activities. Members vowed to forgo extravagance and promote frugality by, for instance, renouncing permanent hairstyles that wasted precious chemicals or preparing Rising Sun bento lunches—consisting simply of white rice with a red pickled plum in the center to resemble the Japanese flag—for their families. A postcard promoting women’s defense activities reads, in part, “C’mon enemy aircraft, we’re ready for you! We can rely on the brave, firefighting girls in monpe pants. With them protecting our skies, we are safe.”
Buddhist institutions also mobilized for war. Their involvement in war may shock those who expect Buddhists to universally advocate peace and nonviolence, but it is not fundamentally different from Christian churches’ support of American military ventures during and after World War II. It is important to recall that Japan’s Buddhist institutions had been closely tied to the state for over a millennium. After the suppression of Buddhism during early Meiji, most Buddhist leaders expressed strong support of imperialist expansion. Japanese Buddhist philosophers contorted doctrines on selflessness into teachings that advocated unquestioning obedience to the state, encouraging soldiers to give their lives without hesitation or regret—or face religious punishments.
FIGURE 58. Nitta Yoshiko, postcard depicting firefighting activities of Neighborhood Home Defense Brigade, 1940s. Courtesy of Special Collections and College Archives, Skillman Library, Lafayette College, and the East Asia Image Collection.
FIGURE 59. Propaganda poster labeled “Sacrifice and Gratitude on the Home Front,” depicting the Rising Sun bento, 1937. Courtesy of Special Collections and College Archives, Skillman Library, Lafayette College, and the East Asia Image Collection.
Propaganda directed toward children included textbooks, manga comic magazines, and kamishibai (“paper theater”), a form of storytelling. Itinerant kamishibai practitioners set up easels on street corners and used a sequence of illustrated boards to help explain their stories. They earned a living by selling candy to children in the audience. Cheaper than movies and more accessible than radio, kamishibai was an excellent tool for indoctrination. In 1933, there were reportedly 2,500 such storytellers, who performed up to ten times a day in Tokyo alone. They helped persuade millions of children that the war was glorious through tales of heroic soldiers who sacrificed their lives on battlefields, becoming “gods of war” who made their families proud. More practical stories instructed children on how to respond to air-raid warnings or urged them to save money, obey their parents, and keep physically fit to maintain their “fighting spirit.” Kamishibai were also specifically produced for children in colonial territories, where stories centered on praise for the “paradises” achieved under Japanese rule.
In summary, the acquisition of colonies through war and other means helped lift Japan’s economy and international status to that of the major imperialist powers. Governance of Japan’s colonies resembled that of territories held by other nations, exploiting native labor and resources while building up facilities to benefit the homeland and Japanese residents. Unlike the other powers, however, Japan also promoted the ideal of full assimilation, deemed a possibility because of purported racial and cultural similarities between colonizer and colonized. In the 1930s, as the Great Depression and rural crisis spurred cries for greater expansion on the continent, Japanese forces seized several provinces in northern China, creating a puppet state that provided invaluable natural resources to Japan. Conflict with China erupted into a brutal, all-out war in 1937, followed by the onset of the Pacific War with the United States and its allies, which opposed Japan’s expansionist policies. To support war efforts, increasingly harsh demands were made of colonies and newly occupied territories in Southeast Asia.
FIGURE 60. Children’s alphabet card for the letter “I” that reads “The Kewpie Soldier is always smiling brightly,” 1935. Courtesy of Special Collections and College Archives, Skillman Library, Lafayette College, and the East Asia Image Collection.
Japanese of all classes and ages embraced their nation’s role as a world power, destined to dominate Asia. Conditioned by both the state and mass media, they believed in the righteousness of Japan’s cause and did their part to assist with war efforts. Peer pressure and official intimidation made it difficult to dissent, but most Japanese had no wish to do so; they were patriotic supporters of their nation. Most never imagined, however, the scale of destruction that would accompany their defeat.
FURTHER READING
Aso, Noriko. Public Properties: Museums in Imperial Japan. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014.
Baskett, Michael. Attractive Empire: Transnational Film Culture in Imperial Japan. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2008.
Ching, Leo T.S. Becoming “Japanese”: Colonial Taiwan and the Politics of Identity Formation. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001.
Duus, Peter. The Abacus and the Sword: The Japanese Penetration of Korea, 1895–1901. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998.
Fujitani, Takashi. Race for Empire: Koreans as Japanese and Japanese as Americans during World War II. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013.
Henry, Todd A. Assimilating Seoul: Japanese Rule and the Politics of Public Space in Colonial Korea, 1910–1945. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014.
Kleeman, Faye Yuan. Under an Imperial Sun: Japanese Colonial Literature of Taiwan and the South. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2003.
Soh, C. Sarah. The Comfort Women: Sexual Violence and Postcolonial Memory in Korea and Japan. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2009.
Tansman, Alan. The Aesthetics of Japanese Fascism. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009.
Tierney, Robert. Tropics of Savagery: The Culture of Japanese Empire in Comparative Frame. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010.
Uchida, Jun. Brokers of Empire: Japanese Settler Colonialism in Korea, 1876–1945. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014.
Young, Louise. Total Empire: Manchuria and the Culture of Wartime Imperialism. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999.
RECOMMENDED FILMS
Japanese Devils. 2001. Documentary film directed by Matsui Minoru. Interviews with former Japanese soldiers who committed war crimes in China.
Millennium Actress. 2001. Animated feature film directed by Kon Satoshi. Tale of an actress, loosely based on the life of Setsuko Hara, who moves to Manchukuo in the 1930s.
Nanking. 2007. Documentary film directed by Bill Guttentag. Combines actors reading from the diaries and letters of Western missionaries and businessmen during the Rape of Nanking with archival footage and interviews with survivors.
Senso Daughters. 1989. Documentary film directed by Sekiguchi Noriko. Investigates the exploitation of local comfort women in Papua New Guinea.
The Human Condition. 1959–61. Feature film directed by Kobayashi Masaki. Epic film trilogy based on a series of novels by Gomakawa Junpei on the travails of a pacifist who moves to Manchuria and is drafted by the Kwantung Army.
The Last Emperor. 1987. Feature film directed by Bernardo Bertolucci. Lavish film based on the autobiography of Pu Yi, from childhood to life under the Japanese regime to rehabilitation by China’s Communist Party.