scholarly journals Colonial policy studies in Japan: racial visions of Nan'yo, or the early creation of a global South

2022 ◽  
Vol 98 (1) ◽  
pp. 165-182
Author(s):  
Tomohito Baji
Keyword(s):  
Global South ◽  
Distinct Region ◽  
Policy Studies ◽  
Japanese Imperialism ◽  
Colonial Policy ◽  
Policy Debates ◽  
Tropical Areas ◽  
Japanese Colonial ◽  
Formed Part ◽  
Racial Hierarchies

Abstract This article examines Japanese colonial policy studies (shokumin seisaku gaku) with a particular focus on its relationship with the distinct region of ‘Nan'yo’ (the South Seas). Specifically analysing the works of Takekoshi Yosaburo (1865–1950), Nitobe Inazo (1862–1933) and Yanaihara Tadao (1893–1961), it seeks to uncover the ways in which the exponents of this study area accounted for Nan'yo based on their conceptions of race. It also shows how they inflicted envisaged racial hierarchies on the southern Pacific and how such attempts were related to colonial policy debates behind the practice of Japanese imperialism. Part of the findings point out that Takekoshi's and Nitobe's comparable projections of strict racial hierarchies on the Malays served to justify the southward colonization of the Japanese. Yanaihara's depiction of Nan'yo islanders as radically underdeveloped was tailored to championing Japan's sustained espousal of the League Mandate. The article argues that their accounts of Nan'yo formed part of a transnational knowledge chain about colonial and racial victimization. Like their western counterparts including Gustav Le Bon, Paul Leroy-Beaulieu, Paul S. Reinsch and J. A. Hobson, they built purported racial pyramids with the tropical areas at their bottom, the bulk of which correspond to today's global South. They have been accomplices in this colonial present.

Auf dem Weg zu einem Völkerbund: Yanaihara Tadaos Kritik an der japanischen Kolonialpolitik auf Taiwan

2020 ◽  
Vol 0 (0) ◽  
Author(s):  
Fabienne Hofer-Uji
Keyword(s):  
Equal Treatment ◽  
Martial Law ◽  
Japanese Imperialism ◽  
Colonial Studies ◽  
Taiwanese Identity ◽  
Colonial Policy ◽  
National Movement ◽  
Japanese Colonial ◽  
Post War ◽  
The Impact

AbstractWith the abolition of martial law in 1987 and the following democratization process, Taiwan’s four mayor ethnic groups (si da zuqun) began to develop an ethnic identity as well as a collective sense of identity. These emerging identities were though not just a mere product of the post-war era, but had been constituted by the crucible of Japanese colonial rule (1895–1945).Many Han-Chinese in Taiwan conceived the Qing-Dynasty’s cession of Taiwan to Japan in 1895 as a betrayal. As they didn’t receive equal treatment with Japanese during the ensuing fifty years of Japanese rule, many Han Taiwanese felt neither belonging to China nor to Japan. Caught in this field of tension between China and Japan, Taiwanese intellectuals started to draw attention to their “special situation” and engaged in a “national movement” (minzoku undô).In respect to the struggle for identity of these intellectuals, a discussion of Yanaihara Tadao’s work is very instructive. As professor for colonial studies at Tokyo Imperial University (1920–1937), he compiled the detailed study Taiwan under Japanese Imperialism. The critical and comprehensive approach adopted made it a fundamental source for postcolonial research on Japanese rule in Taiwan, as well as the “national movement”. Based on Yanaihara’s study on Taiwan, this article shows the impact Japanese colonial policy had on Taiwanese livelihood, thus explaining the reasons for the formation of the Taiwanese “national movement”. By comparing Yanaihara’s colonial criticism and alternative with the claims of the proponents of the “national movement”, and the affirmation of Taiwan’s current multicultural identity, this article illuminates parallels between Yanaihara and Taiwanese identity in both past and present day Taiwan.

Promoting Mass Movements- A New Perspective On Japanese Wartime Imperialism In Korea

2015 ◽  
pp. 1-22
Author(s):  
Shinyoung Kim
Keyword(s):  
Extended Family ◽  
Direct Access ◽  
Mass Movements ◽  
Japanese Imperialism ◽  
Local Practices ◽  
The Social ◽  
Japanese Colonial ◽  
New Perspective ◽  
Economic Bloc ◽  
Colonial Government

This article aims to explore the Japanese colonial government’s efforts to promote mass movements in Korea which rose suddenly and showed remarkable growth throughout the 1930s. It focuses on two Governor-Generals and the directors of the Education Bureau who created the Social Indoctrination movements under Governor-General Ugaki Kazushige in the early 1930s and the National Spiritual Mobilization Movement of Governor-General Minami Jirō in the late 1930s. The analysis covers their respective political motivations, ideological orientation, and organizational structure. It demonstrates that Ugaki, under the drive to integrate Korea with an economic bloc centered on Japan, adapted the traditional local practices of the colonized based on the claim of “Particularities of Korea,” whereas the second Sino-Japanese War led Minami to emphasize assimilation, utilizing the ideology of the extended-family to give colonial power more direct access to individuals as well as obscuring the unequal nature of the colonial relationship. It argues that the colonial government-led campaigns constituted a core ruling mechanism of Japanese imperialism in the 1930s.

Cheap and Efficient? Chinese Migrant Workers and Japanese Policies in Colonial Korea, 1920s–1930s

2020 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 110-136
Author(s):  
Byungil Ahn
Keyword(s):  
Labor Market ◽  
Migrant Workers ◽  
Foreign Exchange Market ◽  
High Efficiency ◽  
Labor Costs ◽  
Construction Sites ◽  
Colonial Korea ◽  
Colonial Policy ◽  
Japanese Colonial ◽  
Chinese Migrant Workers

This study examines how Japanese colonial policies and the foreign exchange market conditioned unskilled Chinese construction workers to dominate the Korean construction labor market during the 1920s and the 1930s. The dominance of Chinese laborers in construction was the main cause of conflicts between the two ethnic groups in colonial Korea that often erupted as a series of anti-Chinese riots, culminating in the 1931 Pyongyang massacre of Chinese immigrants. Past studies simply attributed the Chinese dominance to high efficiency and low labor costs and as purely a result of the labor market. However, this article concludes that efficiency of the Chinese laborers in Korea was facilitated by Japan’s ethnic division of the labor markets within the Japanese empire. The imperial Japanese authority allowed Koreans, as colonial subjects, to travel and find jobs at the construction sites of mainland Japan, while Chinese laborers could only move to colonial Korea. Strict restrictions were placed on the Chinese who wanted to work in mainland Japan. As a result, massive numbers of Korean laborers, who were considered desirable workers, migrated to Japan hoping to earn higher wages and leaving a less efficient labor pool to compete with the Chinese in Korea. The dominance of Chinese laborers at Korean construction sites was a byproduct of Japanese colonial policy and international economic circumstances.

FRENCH EMPIRE ELITES AND THE POLITICS OF ECONOMIC OBLIGATION IN THE INTERWAR YEARS

2009 ◽  
Vol 52 (4) ◽  
pp. 989-1016 ◽  
Author(s):  
MARTIN THOMAS
Keyword(s):  
The State ◽  
Development Plan ◽  
Popular Front ◽  
Political Elites ◽  
Civilizing Mission ◽  
French Empire ◽  
The Third ◽  
Colonial Policy ◽  
Policy Debates ◽  
Cultural Terms

ABSTRACTThis article considers the changing ways in which French political elites understood imperial obligation in the interwar years. It suggests that the economics of imperial rule and disputes over what could and should be done to develop colonial economies provide the key to understanding both the failure of interwar colonial reforms and the irreversible decline in France's grip over its colonies. In making this case, the article investigates four related colonial policy debates, all variously linked to changing conceptualizations of economic obligation among France's law-makers. The first concerns Albert Sarraut's 1921 empire development plan. The second reviews discussions over the respective obligations of the state and private financiers in regenerating colonial economies during the depression years of the early 1930s. The third debate reassesses policymakers' disputes over colonial industrialization. Finally, the article revisits the apparent failure of the investigative studies of economic and labour reforms conceived by the left-leaning Popular Front in 1936–8. The point is to highlight the extent to which senior political figures clashed over concepts of ‘colonial obligation’ viewed less in the cultural terms of ‘civilizing mission’ than in the material sense of economic outlay.

The Global South and International Security

2018 ◽  
pp. 381-396
Author(s):  
Rita Abrahamsen ◽  
Adam Sandor
Keyword(s):  
International Security ◽  
Global South ◽  
Central Place ◽  
The Other ◽  
Weak State ◽  
Major Threat ◽  
Policy Debates ◽  
The One ◽  
Peacekeeping Missions

This chapter shows how areas of the global South have moved from the periphery to the center of academic and policy debates about international security. It argues that speaking about the global South as a singular, uniform unit is fraught with difficulties, analytically and politically, and that areas of the global South are occupying an increasingly central, yet ambivalent and contradictory position, within contemporary international security. On the one hand, the global South appears in the figure of the “weak state” as a major threat. On the other, the global South performs as the “intervener state” by contributing the majority of personnel to peacekeeping missions in the world’s trouble spots. The chapter seeks to capture this contradictory position of being part problem, part solution. It concludes that the global South is likely to continue to occupy a central place within international security and that the contradictions are likely to multiply.

Rethinking Empire

2017 ◽  
pp. 248-230
Author(s):  
Louise Young
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Second World War ◽  
World War ◽  
Japanese Imperialism ◽  
Colonial Studies ◽  
Regional Dynamics ◽  
Imperial Power ◽  
New Imperialism ◽  
Japanese Colonial ◽  
Second World

During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the world’s territory was carved into a handful of colonial empires. With few exceptions, the so-called ‘new imperialism’ of these years incorporated states into the world system either as colonizers or colonized. Japan’s case was unusual: the country started out as a victim of imperialism in the nineteenth century, but became an aggressor in the twentieth. Accounts of Japan’s empire have often fixated on the peculiarities of a non-Western, late-developing imperial power—what one of the architects of the field of Japanese colonial studies called ‘an anomaly of modern history’. The inter-connections between Japanese imperialism in mainland East Asia, the conclusion of the Chinese civil war, and heightened Cold War friction in the immediate post-Second World War period are re-examined here as distinct regional dynamics for the end of one empire and the rise of others in the 1940s and beyond.

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