Japanese Imperialism

Although the understanding of Japanese history, as Eiichiro Azuma observes, often remains confined to the boundary of its archipelago, the fact that Japan’s colonial history took place across geographical, cultural, and national lines demands more investigations of such history in a more fluid, transnational framework. Azuma’s and Mariko Tamanoi’s studies are products of this idea, i.e. Japanese colonialism as “borderless colonialism” (Azuma 1191). Despite their seemingly irrelevant subject matters, the two studies do share some common concerns about how the official ideology and theory differed from the reality understood in daily practice by its own “Japanese” settlers overseas, and about how the notion of nationalism and national identity

He pinpoints the specific historical context of the establishment of Manchukuo in the 1930s as the moment from which the latter was incorporated into the former by the Japanese government. It is within this trans-national and trans-colonial context that the history and the identity of the Issei Japanese in America were reinvented and possible to be reinterpreted in service of Japan’s imperialist scheme in Manchuria and elsewhere. Tamanoi questions the reality of the colonizers’ power and knowledge in Manchuria by examining the racial classification of the Manchurian population initiated by the colonial bureaucrats and practiced by Japanese settlers. Her larger attempt is to understand Japan’s colonial racism by situating it across time and space. By paying close attention to the understanding of races by the Japanese in Manchuria, such as the diary of Minato, an intellectual, and the narratives of peasant-settler returnees in the post-war era, Tamanoi is able to confirm her arguments that the “officializing procedures,” such as calculating and labeling the population, only betray the vulnerability of colonialism in practice as well as the fluidity of “Japanese” identity at home or in the

On the other, it is an alternative approach to the working of Japanese expansionism in the pre-war era. It is interesting to see how the intellectuals and the popular culture at the specific historical moment both turned to the Japanese at the other side of the Pacific, emptied their identity and history, and repackaged them with a new face, i.e. the legitimacy of Japan’s colonial expansion in the guise of transnational emigration history. This is precisely where the histories of the US and Japan clashed with each other that questions the possibility of any mono-identity in a trans-national condition. Tamanoi deals with this issue by looking into the aftermath of orthodoxy formation, which is the making of Manchukuo. The personal diary of an elite and personal accounts by peasant returnees from Manchuria serve to not only deconstruct the myth of “Japanese” as a monolithic and unified identity shared by all “Japanese” by blood, but also successfully problematize the making of Japan’s transnational ideal of East Asia through the making of Manchukuo. It is through the transnational framework that opens a new window to the understanding of the history that both Azuma and Tamanoi are able to explain the complexity of the transformation and consequences of Japanese colonialism in the 1930s