2024

January 18th (Online Meeting; Speaker slides available here)

Defining Territorial Waters: Japan’s Evolving Practice of the Three-mile Principle

Jiaying Shen (University of Toronto)

As a non-Western empire, Japan was in an awkward position for many legal historians. On the one hand, it was a great power showing expertise in turning international law to its advantage. On the other hand, it hardly joined the “civilized” Western community in crafting the fundamental principles of the international law system. This article places rare inquiries into Japan’s unique position in the international law system by focusing on its evolving practices of the three-mile principle. Defining the extent of a nation’s territorial waters as three nautical miles, the three-mile principle remained prevalent until World War II. Though cursory, this study marks the first systematic scholarly attempt to explore how the Japanese government’s perceptions of the three-mile principle responded to and contributed to the changing conditions of nations and empires. The first section builds on the seminal works of the historian Takeyama Masayuki to examine the Meiji government’s strategic application of the three-mile rule in the 1870s, excavating how its officials took advantage of the differences in national distance units to extend Japanese maritime reach cunningly. The article then analyzes the Japanese government’s deliberate equivocal stance on the width of territorial waters at the turn of the twentieth century, which enabled greater discretion in its maritime policies. The final part moves to the efforts made by the Japanese Foreign Ministry and its legal advisors to depict Japan as an arbiter of mare liberum that had practiced and advocated a narrow territorial sea limit since the nineteenth century.

In doing so, this article argues that despite their shifting policies towards territorial waters from the 1870s to the 1930s, the Japanese authorities always sought to represent their practices – or ostensible practices – of the three-mile principle as a demonstration of Japan’s “civilized” status, sometimes even at the price of their national interests. While this “civilized” status first referred to the recognition from Euro-American powers as a sovereign state, it later signified the commitment to the principle of navigational freedom, which fell in line with the requirements of the growing Japanese fishing industry during the early twentieth century. The evolving perspectives of the Japanese authorities on the three-mile rule were a manifestation of their changing self-positioning within the global legal order: from a pragmatic adherent striving to exploit the existing system to an ambitious lawmaker endeavoring to construct a new system aligned with its interests.

February 8th

War Picture Returns: Aida Makoto and War Memories in 1990s Japanese Contemporary Art

Patricia Lenz (Zürich University)

In 1996, contemporary artist Aida Makoto (*1965) created the work “A Picture of an Air Raid on New York” that depicts planes of the iconic Mitsubishi A6M Zero type flying in an infinity loop in front of the burning skyline of Manhattan. This enormous Japanese-style painting (nihonga) became the starting point for Aida’s ten-part series “War Picture Returns” (1996-2003). Like the title indicates, Aida engaged with Japanese war record paintings from the Asia-Pacific War (1932-1945), sensō kiroku-ga, when an unprecedented number of painters were appointed by the Japanese state and sent to the frontlines to record the advance of the Japanese nation and mediate the militarist ideology. In doing so, the artist was part of a broader re-evaluation of Japan’s history, particularly its wartime past and the relationship to the U.S. in contemporary art at the time. Most famously, these topics were raised by Takashi Murakami in the internationally successful exhibition “Little Boy: The Arts of Japan's Exploding Subculture” in 2005. In this presentation, I focus on a detailed visual analysis of Aida’s “War Picture Returns” series to show the complex web of references to Japanese art history, popular culture, and contemporary society. Contextualising the series in war-related art in the 1990s, I further argue that Aida’s unique approach offers a more complex narrative than promoted by Murakami.

April 11th (Online Meeting; Video available here)

Nippon (1932): The Journey of Japan’s First Talking Film

Wayne Arnold (University of Kitakyushu)

In this talk, I will provide a timeline and details chronicling the various screenings of the first Japanese talking film, Nippon (1932), produced in Berlin in late 1931. Previous research on this film details several of the critical events that led to its creation; however, until now, extensive examination has yet to detail the journey of the film across Europe after it was shown in Berlin in May 1932. By examining how Nippon was produced and distributed, we can better understand the complex film industry and distribution mechanisms at work during the peak period of the Great Depression. Between 1932 and 1934, Nippon was shown in specific European cities, with the most extensive screening in France. Since much of the research on Nippon has focussed on its release in Berlin, numerous fascinating elements concerning the December film release in Paris have been overlooked. Along with a performance by an acclaimed Japanese dancer, the Paris premiere was attended by the Japanese ambassador to France and several high-profile figures. The gala and subsequent film screening also received numerous reviews, highlighting an evident preference of the French for Japonisme.

May 9th

Curating Empire: National Parks Established, Planned, and Imagined in the Japanese Colonies

Aaron Stark (Brown University)

This talk examines the histories of national parks in the so-called "outer lands/gaichi(外地)" of the Japanese empire and seeks to tie them to histories of placemaking and environmental management. Despite Japan and its former colonies hosting some of the oldest national parks in Asia, Anglophone historiography has yet to extensively engage with such histories, while Japanese-language historiography has tended to downplay or even ignore the imperial aspect of national parks by maintaining a strict and imaginary bifurcation between parks in the metropole and those in the colonies. In this presentation, I contend that examining colonial national parks in all its guises (established parks in Taiwan, planned parks in Korea, and imagined parks in Manchuria) offers a useful and unique lens for understanding how the imperial state sought to create not only a colonial system of environmental management, but a new curated sense of place dedicated to the service of empire. 

June 13th

Becoming (Overseas) Chinese: Taiwanese as Kakyō and Postwar Identity in Japan

Julian Tash (University of Pennsylvania)

This talk examines how Taiwanese who remained in Japan after the end of WWII navigated postwar categories of identity. The need to govern former colonial subjects required a new language of identity that would make Taiwanese legible to the postwar Japanese state, leading the Japanese government to classify Taiwanese in Japan as Overseas Chinese. Under this new identity, Taiwanese accounted for half of the Chinese community in Japan. Due to their educated backgrounds, Taiwanese people secured high levels of representation among the leadership of Overseas Chinese communal institutions and were a driving force shaping the Chinese community. Using memoirs, documents from Overseas Chinese organizations, and government archives, this talk analyzes how the category of Chinese-ness in Japan was shaped by Taiwanese people and their colonial historical experience to shed a new light on the reconfiguration of postwar identity in Japanese society.