ABSTRACTS
Nathen Clerici, Assistant Professor of Asian Studies, SUNY New Paltz
Poetry to Persuade the Public: WWII Propaganda and Affect in the Aikoku Hyakunin Isshu
There is an inherent duality embedded in the concept of “passing”: The interior self one claims is at odds with the self that others recognize. Multiple identities exist in opposition, but when the Aikoku Hyakunin Isshu (One Hundred Poems of Patriotism by One Hundred Poets, hereafter AKHNIS) was released to the public in November 1942, war raged in the Pacific and there was little use by Japanese authorities for oppositional identities. The power of the AKHNIS, as propaganda, was found in a different notion of “passing,” namely in the act of transmission—both over time (diachronic) and across media (synchronic)—of patriotic sentiment to efface difference and unite the citizenry in a common literary and cultural heritage. The poems in the AKHNIS, which span from ancient times through the Edo period, were stripped of their original context and organized into a new narrative. This reconstruction allowed the poems to “pass” under the guise of aikoku while retaining the possibility of conflicting interpretations. The AKHNIS appeared first in major newspapers and soon circulated on a large scale in forms that included annotated books, karuta sets, postcards, and more. This study considers how different media, genres and aesthetic traditions are used to mobilize feeling and persuade the public, and asks how court poetry could go from being a product of the premodern imperial household to that of the modern empire.
Daisy Yan Du, Assistant Professor, Division of Humanities, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology
Plasmatic Empire: Animated Filmmaking in the Manchukuo Film Association (1937-1945)
This paper examines animated filmmaking in the Manchukuo Film Association (Manying, 1937-1945), which played an important role in shaping wartime film culture in Northeast China and other Japanese-occupied areas such as North China and Shanghai. Some studies have been conducted on Manying films, but they have focused on documentaries, newsreels, and fictional live-action films, and do not systematically address the cinematic form of animation. Since animation is a different medium, an in-depth study of it will provide a unique perspective from which to understand Manying and the complicated wartime culture of Manchukuo, China, and Japan. The major theoretical problem that this paper tries to address is the convoluted relationship between animation and politics. On the one hand, animation, often regarded as a fantasy art form intended for an audience of children, is widely known for its escapist and apolitical tendencies as it features fairytales, folklore, and talking animals. On the other hand, animation, due to its kinship with caricature and cartoon, can be used as a powerful weapon to disseminate ideologies to both children and adults. In a politically fraught time when the non-political could be highly politicized, how do we locate and dislocate Manying and its animation on the spectrum between escapism and political propaganda?
Joan E. Ericson, Professor of Japanese, Colorado College
Creating the Colonial “Japanese Child”
This paper focuses on the cache of colonial-era children’s journals in Japanese from Manchuria and Taiwan discovered in 2004 in the attic of Hakodate Library in Hokkaido, Japan. Among the written materials were children’s journals not seen to date in any other library holding. A close reading of this children's literature helps us to interrogate what it meant to become a “Japanese child” in the 1930s.
My analysis will focus on Shin dōwa (1931), written for Japanese children raised in Manchuria and the journal Taiwan shōnen kai (1933), which was intended for a Taiwanese youth audience learning Japanese as a second language. How are Japanese children raised far away in Manchuria taught to be Japanese? How do editors critically aware of their position in producing more accessible (and cheaper) journals frame their objective to help “culturally inferior” children excel and exceed those from the Japanese heartland (Naichi ijō ni hirakete iku)? The colonial backdrop provides a context for the interrogation of race and power through text and accompanying pictures for a child audience. A close study of the language and cultural cues of these magazines allows us a look into what was perceived as vital elements of the process of creating a “Japanese” child, including aspects of manners, morals, identity and aspirations.
Shota Iwasaki, Ph.D. Student in the Department of Asian Studies, University of British Columbia
Politics of Pronunciation: National Language, Speech Therapy, and Japanese Colonialism in Isawa Shūji's Writings
When Japan acquired Taiwan as its first formal colony in 1895, the formation of kokugo (the national language) in the context of modern nation-building was an ongoing process in Japan. Isawa Shūji (1851–1917), a key educator and an official in the Ministry of Education at that time, foregrounded the phonetic aspects of language and was actively engaged in the establishment of language education in colonial Taiwan, as well as music education, deaf-mute education, and later, speech therapy for those who stutter and speakers of dialects in Japan. In some of those projects, Isawa implemented a phonetic method called Shiwahō (視話法; Visible Speech), a phonetic notation system originally developed by Alexander Melville Bell in 1867 to represent the positions of the speech organs during the articulation of sounds.
This paper will examine how pronunciation was considered in Isawa’s work in relation to the discourses that surrounded nation-building and colonialism in the Japanese context. In view of its role in the Korean Massacre that followed the Great Kantō Earthquake of 1923, there can be no doubt that pronunciation has operated as an invisible, but significant, ethnic factor in the politics of passing. In disentangling Isawa’s theories regarding national language, speech and hearing disabilities, and colonial language education, this paper addresses issues of speaking in modern Japan and its colonialism.
Faye Yuan Kleeman, Professor of Japanese, University of Colorado, Boulder
A Woman for Every Tribe: Li Kōran and her Construction of Pan-Asian Femininity
In comparative colonial studies, one notices the difference in racial discourse between Eurocentric empire studies and studies of the Japanese empire. In Japan’s East Asian Empire, racial differences are submerged under the bifurcated categories of ethnicity and culturalism. In other words, whereas color of skin was not the primary way to differentiate Japan’s colonial subjects in/from Taiwan, Manchuria, and Korea, rather, the Japanese empire distinguished Japanese and its imperial subjects through a sanctioned and yet illusory metric of “degree of civility” (bunmeido). The concrete biological racial differentiation of degrees of blackness and whiteness was translated into an imagined ethno-cultural orthodoxy that promoted the assimilative process (through language, education, acculturation in every aspect of daily life) with its end goal for the natives to “become Japanese.”
As one of the most recognizable icons of the Japanese high colonial era, the life story of Li Kōran (a.k.a Li Xiang Lang; Yamaguchi Yoshiko, Shirley Yamaguchi) serves as a text for understanding the transnational circulation of cultural production through out the empire and the intra-regional consumption of the said cultural product. Most studies on Li Kōran focus mainly on her life story: her beauty and talent make her a spectacle of the empire and her agility in transforming her identity allowed her to fit into her environment at multiple historical junctures. This paper explores how the unrepresentable ethno-racial dimension in Japanese imperial discourse was presented in popular cultural productions. Rather than focusing on Li herself as a “star text,” I examine Li’s starring roles in many national policy films (kokusaku eiga) in which she portrays a wide variety of female characters that disseminate a Pan-East Asian femininity. Despite her many roles playing naïve young Chinese girls who always fall for Japanese men such as Song of the White Orchard and China Night, I look into some less discussed films of Li. Specifically, films made in Chōsen with Li as a Korean female in You and I (Kimi to boku, 1941), Soldiers (Heitai-san, 1944), and her portrayal of a Taiwanese aboriginal girl Sayon in The Bell for Sayon (Sayon no kane, 1943). These can show us that the cultural and ethnic passing, posing, and persuading that was such an important part of her life resonated with the characters she portrayed on screen.
Kimberly Kono, Associate Professor of Japanese Literature, Smith College
Passing in Colonial Manchuria in Murō Saisei’s Koto of the Continent
This paper will explore the representation of passing in the colonial context through an analysis of Murō Saisei’s novel Tairiku no koto (Koto of the Continent, 1937). One of the main characters, Aiko, is a biracial woman (Japanese and Russian) who was born and raised in Manchuria. Throughout the majority of the novel, she attempts to pass as Japanese and grapples with her ties to both Russia and Manchuria. Such identity struggles are further complicated by her romantic entanglements with men of different backgrounds, which identify her as deviating from conventional expectations of womanhood. Her dilemma reflects the ambivalent status of Manchuria in relation to the Japanese empire as well as comments on the challenges of multiracial subjects and women of the colonies.
Atsumi Nakao, Ph.D. Student in the Department of Asian Studies, University of British Columbia
Projecting the Desired Other: Neo-Imperial Gaze and Okinawan Film
The paper will examine how the film Nabbie no koi (Nabbie’s Love) (1999) is influenced through the neo-imperial gaze as described by Oliver Kühne (2016) in the context of iyashi bûmu (healing boom) in the 1990s. Right after the collapse of Japan’s rapid economic growth, some young Japanese people who felt anxiety about their future soothed themselves with the image of healing (iyashi), such as healing music or healing merchandise. Since Okinawa had been promoted as a tropical island like Hawaii in tourist industry after the war, it became a healing tourist destination from the late 1990s with the Okinawa boom, which the film Nabbie no koi is said to have influenced. However, we cannot embrace this boom as just sequences of economic promotional success in Okinawa because emphasizing the colonized culture from the perspective of colonizers leads to problems which endure to this day. Here, I would like to apply Kühne’s notion of the neo-imperial gaze. Kühne sees the neo-imperial gaze as a way in which historical trauma and political realities are obscured and replaced by the capitalist commodity of fetishized stereotypical narratives. Therefore, creating the narrative of Okinawa as a happy, welcoming, tropical island is an imposition of another form of oppression onto the Okinawan people. Okinawan people are perceived to be racially close to mainlanders. Yet, they are not allowed to enjoy the same economic resources as mainlanders, and there is a historically constructed hierarchical relationship between Okinawa and mainlanders. The paper raises the question of how Okinawa is seen as having a “true self” that is nonreducible to “true Japanese,” which reflexively draws a contour of the image of Japanese in relation to this exoticized image of Okinawa.
Janet Poole, Associate Professor, Department of East Asian Studies, University of Toronto
“I Had Always Been Japanese. . . . ”: Ch’oe Chaesŏ Before and After Liberation
At the height of the Asia-Pacific War the distinguished Korean literary critic Ch’oe Chaesŏ had announced his realization that he had “always been Japanese.” As evidence of this fact, Ch’oe cited his longstanding love for Meiji literature and the Japanese language. He spent the war years recruiting student soldiers for the Imperial Army and writing fiction that would live up to his own theorization of a people’s literature for the Japanese empire. Despite this, Ch’oe never adopted a Japanese name, unlike the majority of Korean public figures of the time. Post-Liberation he was one of the few leading lights of Korea’s colonial-era modernist movement to remain in the southern part of the peninsula, where he turned to academic writing on Shakespeare. My presentation will explore Ch’oe Chaesŏ before and after Liberation, seeking to make sense of his declaration of Japanese identity and asking what happens to the colonial intellectual who has sworn allegiance to the empire in the wake of imperial collapse.
Akito Sakasai, Senior Assistant Professor, Japanese Literature, Tokyo University of Foreign Studies
Kim Talsu’s Self-Censorship Between His Zainichi Compatriots and American Occupation Power
During the American occupation in Japan, the Zainichi Korean writer Kim Talsu actively engaged not only in writing as a novelist but also in editing the journal Minshu Chōsen, which was designed for informing Japanese people on the realities of Zainichi Koreans’ lives. Later years, he repeatedly recalled the time in his memoirs, mentioning the hardships and struggles he had under GHQ/SCAP censorship. Indeed, Minshu Chōsen had been considered “extremely-left” and put under severe surveillance that suppressed the publication several times until the end of the censorship period. However, when examining the actual records of censorship, we find that Kim’s works were actually never suppressed nor deleted even though he wrote more than 50 pieces including fiction and essays during the Occupation period. Then, how could he avoid being censored? And what is the contradiction in his memoirs? Is it a lie? but for whom? In this paper, I will consider Kim Talsu’s struggles of projecting himself toward the Zainichi Korean community as a sincere resistance activist through exploring his consciousness toward the censorship and revisioning of his fiction.
Yoshiko Shimada, Artist, Keynote Speaker for 3P Conference
Art That Makes You Uncomfortable
Artist Shimada Yoshiko is a proponent of feminist art in Japan. In this talk, Shimada presents a selection of her artworks that reflect on cultural memory and the role of women in the Asia-Pacific War, such as Past Imperfect (1991–1997) that examines Japanese women’s roles during the war, Made in Occupied Japan (1998–2000) that looks at military bases as sites for sex, violence, and power; Women in Camouflage (2002) that documents the daily lives of female soldiers in the military; and Becoming a Statue of a Japanese Comfort Woman (2012–ongoing) that responds to historical erasure through performance. In exploring legacies of war, violence, and occupation, Shimada proposes a practice of feminism and art-making as a tool for self-examination, and a means to complicate the victim versus oppressor divide.
Ji Young Shin, Assistant Professor, Institute of Korean Studies, Yonsei University
Traces of “Passing” and the Paradox of “Posing”: Literary Roundtables in Korea, Taiwan, and Japan Immediately After World War II
In the wake of the collapse of Japanese imperialism, a series of cultural and literary roundtables was held in south and north of Korea, Taiwan, and Japan. By revisiting the roundtables, I first discuss what types of utterance behaviors were formed and transformed in the transition from colonial to decolonized space.
The utterances produced in the roundtables reflected traces of “passing” which was a form of the constrained self-identities and pretenses of being Japanese by speaking “the national language,” that is, Japanese. In particular, the traces of colonial legacy remained in the usages of terms for identifying themselves and first-person subjects. Although the debates in the roundtables revolved around common interests of their own ethnic identities, it also revealed agonizing yet shared concerns on the questions of what to write, how to write, and what language to use in writing.
Whereas those who were formerly colonized vigorously positioned themselves within the category of decolonized ethnicity, that is, “posing” as such, the traces of passing which had been formed during Japanese imperialism were paradoxically manifested in the utterances made in the roundtables. By examining the linguistic, racial, and ethnic dynamism in the utterances, I address the question of how the formerly colonized delineated the term decolonization (liberation, independence, and restoration). Given that, I interpret how the “hot war” developed during the Cold War in East Asia.
Kayoko Takeda, Professor of Translation and Interpreting Studies, Rikkyo University
Mediating Communication for the Occupying Foreign Military in Postwar Japan: Status and Stigma
Though widely banished from public education during the fight against the Allied nations, English quickly became a language of opportunity for locals in postwar occupied Japan. In the midst of hunger and devastation, Japanese nationals proficient in English went to serve the former enemy for survival, with thousands being hired as interpreters and translators. Some felt curiosity and excitement about being in contact with Americans. Some found it liberating to work in a “democratic” environment. Nonetheless, they struggled with personal dilemmas and fears of social stigma about facilitating the occupation of Japan. This paper examines what motivated Japanese locals to work for the occupying foreign military as language mediators and propagandists, and how they were positioned in relation to the formerly colonized. In particular, it looks into how Japanese women approached this opportunity and how it may have impacted the status of women then and afterwards in Japan.
Robert Tierney, Professor of Japanese Literature, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Othello in Tokyo: Performing Race and Empire in Early Twentieth Century Japan
In 1903, the theatrical troupe of Kawakami Otojirō was first to perform an adaptation of Shakespeare's Othello on the Japanese stage. Kawakami asked the popular writer Emi Suiin to adapt the play to the circumstances of Meiji Japan. In Emi's version, the dramatic action was transposed from Renaissance Venice and Cyprus to twentieth-century Japan and Taiwan. In this adaptation, Washiō (Othello), a Japanese general, is sent to Taiwan to crush a rebellion led by bandits in league with an unnamed foreign power and later serves as the governor-general of the colony. Washirō is rumored to be a member of Japan's former outcaste community, a "translation" of Othello's identity as an African and Moor. In this essay, I examine this play's script and performance in the context of early twentieth-century discourses of race and empire. The "racialization" of Washirō is a discursive construction that owes much to the domestication of new sciences of race to Japan, notably, eugenics and anthropology. In addition, Osero performs modern Japan in its dual role as a semicolonized nation under Western hegemony and expanding colonial power in East Asia. Osero is at once an allegory of the Japanese empire, a representation of displaced abjection, and a political melodrama.
Nobuko Yamasaki, Assistant Professor of Japanese, Lehigh University
Ri Kōran: Race and Passing
Passed and deemed as Chinese in the eyes of Chinese authorities, the actress and singer Yamaguchi Yoshiko / Ri Kōran /Li Xianglang (1920-2014) was arrested and placed in death row in China at the end of World War Two for treason and collaboration with the Japanese empire. She was not released from detention until she was legally proven to be a Japanese national via her Japanese family registry (koseki). Born in Manchuria and fluent in Japanese and Chinese languages, Yamaguchi lived a dual life as both Chinese and Japanese. In an interview, Yamaguchi once playfully answered, “My life story? Okay. Which one would you like, truth or lie?” She was fully aware of the dual life she was performing. As an actress, mobilizing her linguistic and cultural fluency in many films of the Manchuria Motion Picture Production and Distribution Company (Man’ei 1937-45), Yamaguchi often played a Chinese woman, who at first held anti-Japanese sentiments but transformed into a pro-Japanese woman by falling in love with a benevolent Japanese man. Yamaguchi’s films for Man’ei embodied the ideological slogan of the Japanese empire, “Harmony of the Five Races,” (gozoku kyōwa). This paper examines how Yamaguchi’s performance for Man’ei reveals the Japanese empire’s ideas of race, racial purity, interracial marriages, and interracial reproductions that were negotiating with contemporaneous discourses on Nazi racial purity.