The Ideological Background of Japanese Expansionism, C. 1900

This paper examines the ideologies informing the expansion of Japanese rule at c. 1900. The core feature discussed is the idea of tenka (天下; literally translated: all under heaven), constituting the group of ruled in terms of a universalist indigenat (kokumin 国民), which allowed its expansion beyond the Japanese archipelago at government discretion. The concept of the universalist indigenat, having been tied to the Confucian perception of the world as a well-ordered and change-absorbing entity, conflicted with the European concept of the nation as a particularistically conceived type of group, tied to the perception of the world as a dynamic and largely unruly entity. During the latter third of the nineteenth and the early years of the twentieth century, some Japanese intellectuals came to appreciate the dynamism enshrined in the European perception of the world and worked it into established universalism. The fusion produced a powerful ideology of colonial expansion targeted primarily at East and Southeast Asia as well as the South Pacific. By contrast, European military strategists and political theorists, unaware of the Japanese strategic conceptions, expected that solely Russia formed the target of Japanese military expansion.

‘Comfort women must fall’? Japanese governmental responses to ‘comfort women’ statues around the world

This article examines Japanese governmental responses to memorial statues dedicated to ‘comfort women’ – women across the Asia-Pacific whom the Japanese military forced into conditions now recognised as sexual slavery before and during World War Two. This article discusses four cases around the world in which Japanese government officials have demanded the removal of comfort women statues: 1) Glendale, California; 2) San Francisco; 3) Manila; and 4) Berlin. The global expansion of comfort women memorialisation is significant to contemporary statue politics and crises of memory in three ways. Firstly, East Asian diasporas have become important actors in the remembrance of Japanese colonialism and the Asia-Pacific War outside East Asia. Secondly, these statues constitute attempts by diasporas to recover and reclaim a traumatic past through material culture. Thirdly, despite the global geographical reach of comfort women memory activism, neither nationalism nor the power of the nation-state have declined in today’s transnational world.

An Image of Korean Women during the Japanese Occupation of the Peninsula, as It Emerges from Literary Masterpieces

This paper1 aims to offer a picture of the darkest period in the history of the Korean women, namely that of the Japanese colonial rule (1910–1945). The only advantage Korean women enjoyed as a result of their country’s annexation to Japan was access to institutional education, even if this was done in Japanese and from Japanese course books. But this came with a price: many of the Korean teenaged females were turned into comfort women (sex-slaves) for the Japanese soldiers before and during the Pacific War. Not only did these girls lose their youth, but they also lost their national and personal identity, as they were forced to change their Korean names into Japanese ones and to speak Japanese. To build the image of the fate of the Korean women during this bleak period, the research method I have used is a simplified version of content analysis, “an analysis of the content of communication” (Baker 1994, 267). I have explored the content of fragments from a couple of novels authored by Korean or American-Korean authors, which cover the historical events in the peninsula leading to the end of WWII (Keller’s Comfort Woman (2019) and Bracht’s White Chrysanthemum (2018), to mention just a few) and which are focused on the topic of comfort women,2 i.e. young women that were sexually exploited by the Japanese military. The results of the analysis indicate that many of the surviving victims became “unpersons” and led a life of solitude and misery until their death.

‘The Japanese Stand Today as Teachers of the Whole World’: American Food Reform and the Russo-Japanese War

Japanese food first became the focus of serious attention in the United States during the Russo-Japanese War (1904–1905), when Japan’s victory over the Russian empire signaled that nation’s arrival as a new world power. This newfound interest had nothing to do with gastronomy. The conviction driving it was that diet and preventative health care in the Japanese military, which had been critical to its unexpected success, could serve as models for the United States. Military doctors, home economists, dietitians, businesses, vegetarians, and physical fitness fans joined this discourse, each with their own agendas. Many participants were women whose advocacy linked the supposed innate feminine propensity for nurturing and care giving with a shared faith in science to solve the problems facing the modern world. All believed Japan’s rice, vegetable, and fish-based diet contributed to the exceptional physical strength and stamina of the Japanese people because, unlike their own, “it was plain, rational, and easily digested, metabolized and assimilated.” More enthusiasm than knowledge in their claims, but this mattered little since the goal was not to popularize Japanese culinary culture, but to reform U.S. eating habits. This article examines the American discourse on Japanese food and health and how it shaped and reflected domestic political, social, and economic priorities in the 20th Century’s first decade.