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.
July 18th (Online Meeting)
Miyazaki Tōten and Naniwabushi: The Popular Performance of Dissent during the Russo-Japanese War
Joel Littler (University of Oxford)
Joel Littler discusses his latest article, ‘A Song of Fallen Flowers: Miyazaki Tōten and the making of naniwabushi as a mode of popular dissent in transwar Japan, 1902–1909’, published in Modern Asian Studies. The popular genre of sung and spoken performance—naniwabushi—was the biggest ‘craze’ during the first decade of the twentieth century in Japan.
In this talk, Joel uncovers how Miyazaki Tōten (1870–1922), a revolutionary and thinker who became a naniwabushi balladeer, was instrumental in the rise of naniwabushi as a popular art form constituting a democratic site of dissent during the Russo-Japanese transwar period (1902–1909). He uses a transwar frame to examine how Miyazaki Tōten created ‘new’ naniwabushi to deliberately link the techniques and rhetoric of the Freedom and People’s Rights Movement from the 1880s to the Russo-Japanese War (1904–1905). Tōten used naniwabushi to articulate his concepts of autonomous freedom, nihilism, and anarchist communitarianism in a time udsually characterized by the heavy suppression of dissent. The study of Tōten’s naniwabushi performances counters the impression of the wholesale embrace of nationalism and support for Japanese imperialism and shows how Japan’s urban poor engaged in political discourse through popular entertainment that was critical of Japanese expansion.
October 28th
Koume’s World: Writing the Life of a Samurai Woman
Simon Partner (Duke University)
In this talk, I will discuss my recent project on Kawai Koume, a wife and mother in a family of bushi scholars in Kishū domain (now Wakayama prefecture), who kept a diary from the late 1830s to the early 1880s. Since my research on this topic has already been published (Koume’s World: The Life and Work of a Samurai Woman Before and After the Meiji Restoration, Columbia UP, 2023), after summarizing some of my content and conclusions I’d like to invite discussion of the challenges of research and writing in this genre. How to work with a diary? How to make sense of the random and mundane events of a life? How to maintain narrative momentum while also developing a meaningful scholarly argument? How to do justice to (and gain the necessary expertise in) the wide of variety of themes thrown up by the daily activities and events of a diarist’s life? How to connect the granular history of a family to the great historical events through which its members lived?
November 11th (Online Meeting; Video available here)
Toward an East Asian Utopia: Ambition and Illusion in Imperial Japanese Military Music
Emily Lu (Florida State University)
Gunka, or Japanese military music, provided crucial assistance to propaganda-building in imperial Japan. Introduced through British military bands during the Meiji period, Japan’s own military music had taken off since the Russo-Japanese War and only gained popularity through the decades as Japanese imperialism intensified. Although gunka faded out of everyday life in postwar Japan, its wartime ubiquity should not be overlooked. In this dissertation, I posit that music-making and -consumption in imperial Japan was a valuable propaganda tool for the Japanese authority and served as a ubiquitous and effective media for conveying the falsehood of a united East Asia utopia under Japanese tutelage. In this workshop, I seek to demonstrate through contents of specific songs, their wartime propagation, and wartime writings, the intellectual notion that music was crucial to the making of imperial Japanese character and new-age leader of East Asia. In addition, I examine the lively wartime German-Japan musical alliance that substantially propelled the propaganda music movement.
December 2nd (Online Meeting)
Japanese Grand Plan in India during World War – II: Analysing the Motives, Methods, and Missed Opportunities
Saroj Kumar Rath (University of Delhi, New Delhi)
In recent years, the National Archives of India at New Delhi declassified new documents on how the Japanese envisaged a strategy to conquer India during the Second World War. The Japanese grand plan, as these declassified documents reveal, included the assimilation of India within Japanese sway, and then use the Indian soil to reach Europe via Afghanistan. The Japanese stratagem was not a spontaneous event. The genesis of the plot could be traced back to the pre-war period starting in 1935 onwards when Japan showed her interest in Afghanistan, India, and Burma. Japanese planners systematically started propaganda against the British Empire in India. The medium of the propaganda was Buddhism as well as Samurai events. Some of the Japanese were even working as agents in different parts of India. The plan was partially detected by British intelligence when they arrested and deported 13 Japanese nationals who landed on the Madras Coast in March 1944 and were suspected to be Japanese Agents. The Japanese secret agents were clandestinely planted in consul offices in different parts of India such as at Mussoorie, Calcutta, Bombay and even Delhi. Sometimes they used women, who systematically got married to Indian men, to facilitate their secret mission. In 1943 the Japanese army slowly losing their control over the Pacific region and wanted some new area where they could hold a strong position to spread their imperialism in Asia. They prefer North East India as the main gate to control the British Empire. Meanwhile, they fully controlled Singapore and the Indian war prisoners of the British army offered to join the Japanese force to conquer Burma and India. Those who refused to join forces with the Japanese were punished severely. Former Congress President and leader of the Indian National Army Mr. Subhas Chandra Bosh was also in touch with the Japanese Government with a division of the Indian National Army. The Imperial General Headquarters (GHQ) in Tokyo devised a method that could give Japan a spectacular victory. A plan submitted by Lt. Gen. Renya Mutaguchi, “the victor of Singapore” and commander of the 15th Army in Burma suggested ‘an assault on the British Empire from northeast frontiers of India’. On 9 January 1944, Prime Minister Hideki Tojo authorized the plans for Operation U-Go against North-eastern India. Most of the available literature talks about the decisive Japanese defeat in north-east India. Also, existing available work in the public domain narrates only the events of the war that occurred in Burma and North East India. Literature is abundant about the battle of Kohima and Imphal. However, the question of why the Japanese were interested in India has never been dealt with in the existing literature. The grand plan was never analyzed. The foiled or failed plan needs academic scrutiny. This study offers an analytical examination of the Japanese grand plan in India.