This two-day international conference will bring scholars from East Asia and North America together to interrogate various intersections of cultural production (including literature, film, popular magazines, manga, and more) in imperial Japan through the lens of racial, ethnic, and linguistic passing. As indicated in our conference title, we are particularly interested in considering how propagandists attempted to “persuade” colonized subjects to identify with their Japanese colonizers while simultaneously subjugating them as colonial subjects, thus marking any attempts to self-identify as Japanese as a form of ontological “passing” or fraudulent “posing.”