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The discourse of Korea's failed history has been mostly a production of Japanese colonial scholarship, but the early texts that American authors produced were what guided the Western understanding of Korean history during the long 20th Century. Despite the importance of these texts that left significant imprints on later academic works and policy decisions, scholars have not as yet examined properly the American discourse of failure in Korean history. This article analyzes the representative American books on Korean history of authors William E. Griffis and Homer B. Hulbert to describe the emergence of the American discourse of Korea's failed history in the late 19th and the early 20th centuries. It argues that early American authors of accounts of Korean history wrote them in a specific narrative structure that depicted Korea's past as a story of gradual decline that ended with failure. These works identify three major themes – isolation, victimization, and dependency – as explanations for why Korea failed. Then, the article examines the doctoral dissertations of Harold J. Noble and George M. McCune to show how this early narrative framework during the 1930s and the 1940s continued thereafter to shape U.S. understanding of Korea even into the 1950s, informing both policymakers and scholars. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores new reading paradigms of the Korean folktale Ch'unhyangjŏn under Japanese colonization. I examine how Korean and Japanese literary and political intellectuals during the colonial period respectively envisioned new affiliations for Koreans through competing, yet occasionally connected, reinterpretations of Ch'unhyangjŏn. Korean intellectuals, including nationalist and leftist writers, attempted to inspire readers to imagine a new society beyond the Confucian social order through their modern interpretations that challenged conventional ways of understanding this nationally symbolic literary piece. In contrast, Japanese colonial officials confined this classical literary piece in the framework of a Korean past in an attempt to tighten their control over Koreans during Japan's wartime mobilization. This reading practice by colonial officials, which I call the colonial interpretation, prevented open interpretive practices of Ch'unhyangjŏn that could continuously produce new values of classical Korean literature. With its historical and thematic literary power, along with its popularity, Ch'unhyangjŏn attracted intellectuals from both Korea and Japan and was used to newly affiliate Koreans with either modern Korea or imperial Japan, depending on varying political and social intentions in the early twentieth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study aims to discuss how the government and society of Taiwan have appropriated the heritage from Japanese colonial rule into the discourse of Taiwanese culture to bolster the national identity of Taiwan. The interconnected theoretical concepts of 'imagined communities' and 'nationalising the past' ground the analytical framework of this study. With a focus on the 'selective' presentations of the colonial heritage in historic Tainan City, this study explores how the official and social discourses have trivialised, reorganised, simplified, and recontextualised the historical intricacies of legacies of the Japanese colonial era through the process of heritagisation. The research results suggest that the meaning of colonial legacies has been shaped and reshaped from being a mark of the dark past and deprivation to constitute a glorious contribution fulfilling the discourse of multi-faceted Taiwanese culture. This case also suggests the possibility for a post-colonial society to extricate itself from a mimicking mentality and to redevelop their culture discourse as a buttress of the national identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the second half of the nineteenth century, the ethnic Japanese (wajin) population of Hokkaido ballooned from roughly sixty thousand residents, primarily living on the island's southern tip, to more than two million people, scattered across the island. This explosive colonization was part of a global wave of settler colonialism. The wajin colonial regime and the foreign advisers they hired helped turn indigenous Ainu territory into Japan's first modern colony and one of its most important agricultural breadbaskets, resembling the so-called Neo-Europes of the Anglophone settler world. Hokkaido's history fits into the framework of ecological imperialism developed by Alfred Crosby and expanded by many scholars since. But the role of city building in processes of ecological imperialism remains understudied. Scholars who do discuss urbanization in the context of ecological imperialism focus on cities' roles as markets, downplaying their importance as sites of state power and political interventions. In Hokkaido, however, the politics and policies of city building were crucial tools of Japanese ecological imperialism. Colonial authorities built Hokkaido's capital, Sapporo, as a colonial laboratory, importing ideas from Japan and abroad, recording their experiences in Hokkaido, and ultimately exporting that knowledge to Japan's later colonies in East Asia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents translation of "America's National Character" by Watsuji Tetsurō. Topics discussed include Watsuji's criticism of the character of Anglo-Saxons as ideological propaganda; Watsuji's argument concerns the contradiction of beliefs and actions exhibited by pioneers in America; and comparisons between Anglo-Saxons and the Japanese Empire.

The events that occurred in the Korean peninsula in the past 100 years, such as the conversion of Koreans to Christianity, which appealed to many women especially due to the fact that "it advocated human rights, social equality, and other democratic principles" (De Mente 2017, 661), the Japanese colonization of the country (1910-1945), which granted the Korean women the right to institutional education, and the rapid growth of industry starting with the early 1960s, a phenomenon that enabled young girls to work outside their houses as soon as they graduated from high school or college were important factors in the social emancipation of Korean women. This emancipation brought with it a change in the 'jobs' or 'occupations' women had, from more traditional ones, like jungmae (matchmakers), haenyeo (sea divers), to more modern ones, such as factory workers, university professors or office employees. The current paper aims to bring to the fore these changes by making use of primary data gathered from various novels authored by Korean and American-Korean, as well as secondary data (Statistics Korea), and to show that these changes are part and parcel of women's liberation movement. The theoretical framework employed is content analysis (Baker 1994, Cohen et al. 2018), according to which the fragments excerpted from the novels will be categorized in terms of the occupational themes. The findings of the analysis will show that despite the fact that for a long period of time Korean women were enslaved, being confined in their parents' or inlaws' homes, their aspirations for better jobs, mainly held by men, were fulfilled only when they achieved a certain degree of social freedom. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article argues that American missionaries came to revisit the relationship between church and state, as in the case of the shrine crisis in colonial Korea which laid bare American missionaries' dependence on the state. Topics discussed include how political sensibilities acquired in the mission field found their ways into twentieth-century U.S. politics, information on the rule by permit that marked a prominent feature of colonial Korea, and hallmark of the shrine crisis in the late 1930s. It also mentions advice given by the U.S. government to missionaries in Japan and its territories in late 1940, alerted by heightened militarism in Imperial Japan and possible hostilities that could endanger Americans there.

In the wake of the March First Independence Movement of 1919, expatriate Koreans in the United States, as part of a global campaign, carried on the peaceful struggle for the liberation of Korea. This essay analyzes the public relations campaign in the United States from March 1919 to February 1922 between Koreans who advocated for national independence and Japanese who defended colonial rule. Koreans presented the colonial regime in Korea as illegitimate and brutal, they cautioned Americans that Japan's territorial ambitions threatened the balance of power in Asia, and they criticized the colonial regime's mistreatment of Christians. The Korean media efforts won support from average Americans who joined the League of the Friends of Korea, churches that condemned the persecution of Christians, and congressmen who voiced concern over Japanese aggression in Asia. However, the Japanese state responded with a propaganda effort that maintained Japan had acted legally to colonize Korea, portrayed Koreans as incapable of self-rule, and asserted that Koreans were content with colonial governance. Despite the failure of the March First Movement to secure recognition from the United States, it succeeded in solidifying the identity of Koreans in America and improving American public opinion of Koreans. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Colonialism affects post-colonial social formations in a variety of ways. Japanese colonial rule had a far-reaching influence on South Korean post-colonial social formation. Most legacies of colonialism diminished as time went by, but one legacy of colonialism continued or even increased its effects on the South Korean political economy from the 1960s – namely, the division of Korea. This article provides an alternative Gramscian approach to the analysis of the social formation of South Korea, with due consideration of the division of the peninsula. For that purpose, it introduces the concept of a division bloc, adapting Gramsci's concept of a historical bloc to develop an analysis of a social formation that is unique to South Korea. Then, I explicate the two events that have been most damaging for the division bloc – the 1997 economic crisis and the 1998–2007 inter-Korean reconciliation – describing them as an organic crisis and a hegemonic project, respectively. Following this, I present reasons why the counter-hegemonic efforts of liberal nationalists to overcome the division bloc failed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the zoological gardens established by Japanese imperialists in colonial Seoul (1908) and Taipei (1914). Drawing on multilingual sources, it argues that zoos explicitly exposed the unequal interethnic and interspecies hierarchies that undergirded the colonial project. The colonial zoo was an ambivalent "dreamscape": a carefully constructed landscape of iron cages and manicured pathways wherein colonizers' dreams of ordering the natural world and colonized populations existed in uneasy tension with the actual experiences of zoo visitors and encaged zoo animals. Intellectuals sometimes criticized zoo excesses or identified the bondage of caged animals with the colonized experience. Yet these zoos also enjoyed immense popularity as Japanese, Korean, and Taiwanese visitors alike participated in the physical and discursive subjugation of zoo animals. Sensitivity to these contradictions, this essay contends, is essential for understanding both the broader significance of these institutions and their contested legacies today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study identifies and interprets dominant developments in the Taiwanese literary field by examining data included in publication catalogs of literary journals and supplements from 1940 to 1953. Utilizing social network analysis, it focuses on both ruptures caused by crucial political events and continuities that spanned these ruptures. The study revisits central tenets of Taiwanese literary history and, by seeking to articulate structuring principles, also unveils new perspectives on how to map and interpret the dynamics of literary systems and the ways in which they mesh with society. It thereby exemplifies how digital humanities can guide researchers toward new historical insights. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The archives of Jinhua 金華 City, Zhejiang 浙江 Province, contain a Japanese Jinhua Gyerim Association articles and register (金華雞林會會則及名簿 Jinhua jilinhui huize ji mingbu). This Korean townsmen association register was created in April 1944 and obtained by Chinese intelligence officers. This short name list with just over 200 people conceals much information on the "comfort women" (慰安婦 wei'anfu) system of sexual slavery established by the Japanese army in the Jinhua region. After confirmation through textual research and on-site investigations, the register contains records of 11 "comfort stations" (慰安所 wei'ansuo) with 8 "comfort station" overseers, 7 managers, and a total of 126 "comfort women." This accounted for 60% of all Koreans in the Jinhua Gyerim Association 雞林會, and the youngest was only 17 years old. There was a total of 141 people involved in the "comfort stations," accounting for 67.19% of all Koreans in the Jinhua Gyerim Association, a very startling proportion. This partially reflects the prevalence of the Japanese army's system of sexual slavery, so this Jinhua Gyerim Association articles and register is a valuable historical source that reflects the rule and atrocities of the Japanese invasion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A century after the victorious Allied powers distributed their spoils of victory in 1919, the world still lives with the geopolitical consequences of the mandates system established by the League of Nations. The Covenant article authorizing the new imperial dispensation came cloaked in the old civilizationist discourse, entrusting sovereignty over "peoples not yet able to stand by themselves under the strenuous conditions of the modern world" to the "advanced nations" of Belgium, England, France, Japan, and South Africa. In this series of AHR "reflections" on the mandates, ten scholars of Europe, Africa, the Middle East, Asia, and the international order consider the consequences of the new geopolitical order birthed by World War I. How did the reshuffling of imperial power in the immediate postwar period configure long-term struggles over minority rights, decolonization, and the shape of nation-states when the colonial era finally came to a close? How did the alleged beneficiaries—more often the victims—of this "sacred trust" grasp their own fates in a world that simultaneously promised and denied them the possibility of self-determination? From Palestine, to Namibia, to Kurdistan, and beyond, the legacies of the mandatory moment remain pressing questions today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses about Korean Housemaids who worked for Japanese families in Colonial Korea. Topics include the landscape of the Japanese community in Korea in the early period of Japanese migration; work of Kajiyama Toshiyuki which details the importance of native female household workers; and the connection of native Korean women with Japanese expats in the domestic arena such as intermarriage and inter cultural relations.

The article focuses on Japanese colonialism in Taiwan during the first half of the 20th century. It argues while the historiography of the colonial paradigm tends to assert the European powers as colonizing forces , the way power in occupied Taiwan impacted the lives and identities of Taiwanese people to recognize their colonizers' superiority and nevertheless to try to assimilate, creating a psychic trauma for characters negotiating their national and personal relations.

Abstract: Recent scholarship has brought together the study of Imperial Japan and its colonies with the movements of people West across the Pacific and East into Asia. The result has been the opening of new fields of enquiry in the history of Japan's emergence as a modern nation state and imperial power. This article contributes to such scholarship by showing how Japan's overseas expansion was connected to local as well as national and global changes, via an investigation into the origins, nature, and destinations of Fukuoka's Meiji migrants in the years between 1876 and 1905. It reveals the qualitative differences between Fukuokans' overseas migration to Hawai'i and their travel to Korea, via 'networks of regional migration'. It shows how these movements connected the dual processes of domestic urbanization and industrial growth with Japan's expansion into Asia. Ultimately, the movement of Fukuoka's Meiji migrants helped to transform their home from a domestic periphery into a staging ground for Japan's 'imperial urbanization' and brought Fukuoka within a new region spanning the Tsushima Strait. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article demonstrates how discourse about those repatriated from Japan’s former colonial empire was constructed in early postwar Japan. US Occupation planning assumed that a repatriate had a ‘home’ to return to from which he or she could make a ‘new’ start. Aware that repatriation was more complex, Japanese officials tried to respond more flexibly but met with little success until an intensifying Cold War rivalry prompted US officials to intervene in repatriate affairs due to a concern that communist ideology might appeal to repatriates. Hokkaido officials’ response to the Cold War imperative for a more nuanced policy toward repatriates from Karafuto (Sakhalin) was to promote a narrative of the ‘Karafuto repatriate’. Intended by officials to help Karafuto repatriates ‘resettle’ in postwar Hokkaido, this narrative harked back to aspects of the settler identity promoted by colonial officials in the 1930s and early 1940s. In addition, using a rare set of notes from officials’ group interviews with repatriates, this article analyses the importance of settler identity for repatriates’ coming to terms with the transition from Karafuto to Sakhalin to Hokkaido. Hokkaido officials' and Karafuto repatriates’ interpretations of regional connections were crucial for reintegrating in trans-war, post-imperial society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study is an attempt to analyze the changes and morphological analysis of the one length hair style of women in the Imperial Japanese colonial period, and the purpose of this study is to analyze the components of hair design such as shape, texture, and color based on the precedent and the book and to make possible various styles of one length hair style cut. From the results of this study, one‐length hair style showed the outline shape with no step height of cut length, natural hair texture and natural hair color in 1910s to 1920s. In the 1930s, the one length hair style showed a slight cut length step height and a slight discoloration using a diamond shape, a narrow wave of natural texture, hydrogen peroxide or oxygenated water. In the 1940s, one‐length hair style did not find any singularity to pursue brilliant beauty(美) in terms of form, texture, and color. This study may enable a deep and detailed follow‐up study on one‐length hair style, and will be a cornerstone for the development of basic data of hair beauty education and trend of new mode. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses articles in the issue on topics including diplomatic tussle in 1940 between British Burma and Imperial Japan; Kalimpong Chung Hwa School as a site of international espionage; and concept of Asia and its relation to issues of universality.

Background: The propagation of modern medicine in the colonies has often been described in terms of modernism and nationalism, focusing on the action-reaction conflict with colonial power, but the propagation of modem medical care and hygiene in colonial Chosun seems not to be explained by this perspective. So how can we explain this aspect? Answering this question could provide new implications for the many controversies surrounding the “colonial modern" acceptance. Methods: In order to examine the pattern of colonial acceptance of modern medicine, three cases of Britain and India, Japan and Taiwan, Japan and Chosun were set and compared, and the characteristics of colony Chosun were examined in-depth. Results: The existence of the 'traditional medicine doctors' who played an important role in the dissemination of public health in colonial Chosun can be explained from the understanding of the identity of Confucian intellectuals who played a role in the traditional Chosun society. Conclusion: The proliferation of modern medicine in the colonies has often been explained in terms of modernism and nationalism; however, the acceptance of a modern sanitary system in colony Chosun has been influenced by the traditional elements of the society. When considering these factors, the relationship between colonialists and the colonized society can be examined from a more interrelated perspective.

Abstract: In this article we examine the impact of pre‐colonial educated elites and colonization on modernization. Using the case of Joseon, as Korea was known before being colonized by Japan in 1910, we investigate how the civil exam system and scholarly traditions, as well as the provision of public schools under Japanese colonial rule, influenced levels of literacy in the colony. We introduce novel data from Joseon's historical court examination archives, colonial education records, and censuses dating back to 1930. Our findings suggest that the spread of Korean literacy during the early colonial period was strongly correlated with the historical presence of civil exam passers from the Joseon Dynasty. Regions with a greater presence of educated elites later had higher numbers of Korean teachers, as well as more private schools established as alternatives to the colonial public schools. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: This article studies the interrelation between spot and futures prices in the two major rice markets in prewar Japan from the perspective of market efficiency. Applying a non‐Bayesian time‐varying model approach to the fundamental equation for spot returns and the futures premium, we detect when efficiency reductions in the two major rice markets occurred. We also examine how government interventions affected the rice markets in Japan, which colonized Taiwan and Korea before the Second World War, and argue that the function of rice futures markets crucially depended on the differences in the structure of rice spot markets. Initially the increased volume of imported rice of a different variety from domestic rice disrupted the rice futures markets. Then, government intervention in the rice futures markets failed to improve the disruption. Changes in colonial rice cropping successfully mitigated the disruption, and colonial rice was promoted in order to unify the different varieties of inland and colonial rice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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The eight-year-long period from Japan’s initiation of the Second Sino-Japanese War in 1937 to its unconditional surrender in 1945 forced Japan to invest its national economy and industrial and scientific technologies in the war. In addition, in the name of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, Japan initiated its assimilation and Kominka (Japanisation) policies (皇民化政策) in the colonies Korea and Taiwan. Japan used education as a tool to expand its influence over members of society, and attempted the frequent use of Japanese and Kominka (皇民化) in daily life to penetrate the awareness of people in the colonies. Japan also started to enforce various assimilation policies. A comparison of the implementation of Kominka policies (皇民化政策) in Taiwan and Korea shows that, in terms of school admission rates and frequency of use of Japanese, the proportion of school admission rates for frequent speakers of Japanese to primary education in Taiwan are significantly higher than those in Korea. Moreover, in terms of primary education, national schools were implemented in both Taiwan and Korea according to the “National School Order” promulgated in 1941. Japan made use of the term “education equality” to win people over. In fact, it aimed to strengthen the concept of Kominka (皇民化), the education of militarism, and to force the Taiwanese and Koreans to become “imperial citizens” loyal to the Emperor. Japan’s ultimate objective was to create an environment that met military needs for civilian and military resources. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article offers insight to the repatriation of Korean forced laborers from Japan and reconciliation in East Asia. Topics include role of and Japanese volunteer organizations in escorting the remains of 115 young Korean men from Hokkaido, Japan to Seoul, Korea; analysis of the culture during Japanese colonial period; and a film "So Long Asleep, Waking the Ghosts of a War" addressing pilgrimage across the Japanese islands as we carried those remains for proper funeral ceremony and reburial.

The article examines the economic consequences of Japanese colonialism in Taiwan, Korea, and Manchuria from 1910 to 1945 and compare Japanese policies with those implemented by other European powers, especially in Southeast Asia. It addresses the writings of an influential group of American scholars who have published widely on Japanese colonial policies over the last fifty years. It also discusses the Japanese emphasis on expanding access to education.

The article discusses Japan's English teaching industry focusing on the concepts of race, gender, and empire in the teaching industry. Topics include employment of Americans in Japanese teaching industry, Filipino labor force, and histories of colonialism and racism. Also discussed is Japanese neoliberal policies, U.S. engagement in both Japan and the Philippines, and transnationalism.

The work of the Australian mission in the southern part of Korea during the first half of the twentieth century has been a relatively undeveloped subject in scholarly research. By focusing on the educational work of the mission between 1910 and 1941, this article provides an overview of how the missionaries interacted with the Japanese colonial authority and the Korean people. The purpose of this article is twofold. First, it traces how the missionary work in South Gyeongsang Province evolved in terms of education. Second, it identifies the process by which mission education and Japanese educational policy interacted, focusing on the two secondary schools of the mission: the D.M. Lyall Memorial School and the J.B. Harper Memorial School. Mission education during this period had three different implications: religion, modernity and politics. For the missionaries, education was intended to spread Christianity; for the Koreans, the mission schools provided opportunities for modern learning; for the Japanese authorities, schooling was considered a vehicle for political socialisation. The educational work of the Australian mission shows how the agendas of the missionaries, the Koreans and the Japanese colonial authority intersected and conflicted. Although the Australian mission comprised a smaller group of missionaries who worked exclusively in the southern part of the country, their records are significant. This case study provides a basis for a further comparative analysis within the larger context of colonial Korea. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article sets out to elucidate the role of Japanese Protestants in the education of Koreans during the early twentieth century. Scholarship has often assigned only marginal roles to Japanese Protestants within the history of Japanese imperialism, despite the remarkable success of western missionaries in Korea at the time. As imperial expansion progressed, Japanese Protestants intensified their efforts to take up a leading role in the education of Koreans in colonial Korea and in the metropole wishing to spearhead the assimilation of Koreans. By drawing on the colonial discourses of East Asian unity under Japanese leadership, Protestant churches strove to mediate and facilitate colonial policies in Korea. Yet there were also voices of dissent from prominent Japanese Protestants critical of the assimilation policies implemented by colonial authorities in Korea. This ambivalent stance of Protestantism towards Korea is further complicated by the fact that the Korean Young Men’s Christian Association in Tokyo served as an important venue of the Korean Independence Movement. Examining Christian magazines and journals of the time, this paper delves into the contentious debates among Japanese Protestants concerning the Korea Mission and the Japanese government’s strategy of assimilation through education. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Identity construction in Taiwan travels a discursive course, along which contingencies - generally outcomes of war defeats not attributable to the Taiwanese common, but have required their sacrificial forbearance - have played a significant role. This construction cannot be succinctly classified as of an essentialist, or constructivist nature. Rather, it demonstrates a hybrid characteristic, which shows a lineage, in different contexts and at different periods, to either an ethnic-based sentiment or a civilisdc construction of identification. This identification, for most of the time, is a product of political maneuvering, or to the least, vulnerable to policy lead-and-shape. Politics is, thus, one weighing factor, shedding critical lights in identity formation during authoritarian rule. Put frankly, politics have played a decisive role in delineating the licit-ness of all social events, and had become a critical determinant to the projection and expectation of a social identity for the individual. Yet, its influence starts fading when democratization began in the 90s. While political influences continue, liberalization of the society in all aspects have opened the door to other factors to join this identity re-configuration and refurnishing process. As a result, political and cultural factors are able to co-prospect in this new democratic platform, which gradually has seen a harmonious symbiotic co-existence, yielding voluminous energies to wheel forward this identity re-formation process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that the Meiji government’s programs of colonial migration to Hokkaido established the intellectual foundation for the earliest wave of Japanese trans-Pacific migration to the US and colonial expansion in the South Pacific and Latin America between the 1880s and 1894. The experiences of migration-based colonial expansion and the trans-Pacific diaspora in modern Japan have been studied in isolation in existing literature. This article shows that these two experiences are actually inseparable from each other. The ideological origins of both were the migration-driven expansionism that emerged from the Meiji government’s colonial project in Hokkaido from 1869 to 1882. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The Yasukuni shrine was founded in Tokyo in 1868 by the Emperor Meiji to celebrate the memory of Japanese warriors fallen during battles for the Emperor and the country. As religious institution devoted to honor these “brave souls”, it became the symbol of Japanese militarism. However, among the families who lost relatives during the war, some have sued the administration of Yasukuni to get the names of their relatives deleted from the lists of the shrine. This article describes the genesis of those trials and exams also the anti-constitutional nature of the repeated visits of Prime Minister Koizumi to Yasukuni.

Since the 1930s, Japan had organized the kidnapping and mass deportation of young Asian women into military brothels campaign in the occupied territories. Although the facts were known at the time of the Tokyo trial (the International Military Tribunal for the Far East), and trials of BC war criminals, sexual violence against women were not recognized as full war crimes, and the whole story remained was largely ignored until the coming out of Korean victims in the 1990s. Following the mobilization by those women from Korea and other Asian countries, an opinion court was held in Tokyo in December 2000, at the initiative of VAWW-NET (Violence against Women in War Network). The goal was to indict those responsible and to consider remedial measures. The article presents the meaning of the court and examines further perspectives.

Nationalism plays a critical role in creating and reformulating collective identity and membership in a political community, notably the nation-state. Yet precisely how it does so and with what consequences for the colonial society remains unclear. Tracing the change of nationalist discourses during the Japanese colonial period in Korea, this essay examines the mechanism through which various forms of anticolonial nationalism provoked ideological schism among indigenous people. It directs particular attention to how Korean nationalist groups integrated notions of the ‘nation’ and ‘people’ into their anticolonial narratives in different ways and why they engaged in political and ideological conflicts among themselves through their interactions with the colonial state. Highlighting the fragmentation of the ‘nation’, ‘state’ and ‘people’ through the dynamics of nationalist groups and colonial power, the essay advances the argument that Japanese colonialism led to internal boundaries in Korea, thus rearticulating the meaning and people's perception of the nation and a sense of belonging. Based on this historical analysis, the essay illuminates the effect of a colonial context as a particular political field upon the formulation of nationalist frameworks. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Information is provided on the conference titled "Axis Empires. Toward a Global History of Fascist Imperialism" at Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich, Germany from November 23-24, 2015. The conference's theme of fascism from the 1920s through the 1940s with topics, including Italian imperialism, Japanese occupation of former Dutch colonies in Southeast Asia and the relationship between the British Empire and Italian fascist imperialism, is discussed.

This paper seeks to understand how the diverse historical views on Wiman Joseon were formed and evolved, as well as what caused these changes in perspective. In particular, it focuses on how conceptions of Wiman Joseon influenced research and the interpretation of archeological materials following the establishment of modern historical studies. The traditional understanding of Wiman Joseon in early Korean history changed with the emergence of the modern Korean nation from the late nineteenth century, while the modern concept of colony was applied to Wiman Joseon by Japanese scholars starting from the Japanese colonial period (1910-1945). The understanding of the archeological culture of Wiman Joseon was not established independently, but was a by-product of research on the Lelang Commandery. Based on such research, the governing structure of Lelang Commandery was interpreted as a so-called "dualistic ethnic governance structure." It is important to reflect on whether the modern attempt to establish the state character of Wiman Joseon through the analysis of the ethnicity of Wiman and Wiman Joseons ruling class has still failed to emerge from out the shadow of nationalistic and colonialist perceptions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores how Okinawan returnees from Micronesia, particularly the Marianas and Palau, struggle to maintain memorial services in the post-Pacific War period. Okinawans adopted two strategies to keep these services alive: incorporating younger people in both Okinawa and Micronesia, and maintaining close ties with local communities that assist their activities. Okinawans, through their marginalizing and traumatizing wartime experiences in Nan'yō Guntō (Micronesia), have adopted a broad perspective that transcends national boundaries. Their memorial practices are authentic and have the potential to overturn nationalist discourse, although they also risk absorption into Japan's national memory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Japan, as a latecomer to imperial expansion, began to seek a food supply for its empire in its neighbor Korea's southern rice basket--the Honam Plain. With the outbreak of the Russo-Japanese War (1904-1905), a massive wave of Japanese immigration brought many settlers to the Honam Plain, where they initiated their own development (takushoku) and production (shokusan) activities centered around their farms, ahead of officials and merchants. Emerging in time as local "elites or notables" (K. yuji, J. yūshi), these settler farm owners extended their activities to the arena of public and community projects by organizing and supporting a host of public and semi-official organizations. Economically based on agricultural farms tilled by Korean tenants, they succeeded in turning themselves into colonial masters in their localities by dominating the colonial public sphere that was largely closed to Koreans and local politics. During the period of the well-known Campaign to Increase Rice Production (1920-1933), they served as symbiotic local partners of the Government-General of Korea in implementing assimilation (doka) through local development. Their activities also allowed the authorities to present their rule in a positive light, in spite of worsening conditions for the Korean rural population. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article provides an overview of late nineteenth-century Japanese settler colonialism in Hokkaido, a land long inhabited by indigenous people, the Ainu, with a particular theoretical question in mind: What was the precise relationship between the settler colonization of Hokkaido and the Japanese government's drive for primitive accumulation of capital? This question deepens our understanding of the intrinsic relation between the formation of a capitalist nation-state and that of its colony, a relation through which indigenous people such as the Ainu lost their means of sustenance-the land-and were eventually driven nearly to extinction. It also compels us to rethink the way historians and social theorists, especially those informed by Marxian approaches, have discussed the relation between settler colonialism and primitive accumulation. The article suggests that the Marxian analysis of colonialism seriously consider politics of death, or thanatopolitics, which constitutes the matrix of settler colonization, as an integral component of capitalist formation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study calculates the cost of subsistence and respectability consumption baskets to derive 'welfare ratios' for 11 cities in the Japanese Empire as defined by Allen and his colleagues. Nominal wages tended to be higher where higher prices prevailed, and vice versa. Prices and nominal wages remained highest in Japan and lowest in Manchuria, with Korea and Taiwan being placed in between. Welfare ratios remained roughly comparable in the 1910s in the imperial cities outside Manchuria, where unskilled workers enjoyed substantially higher living standards. Interwar decades saw real wages rise in Tokyo, but fall in Dalian, which caused convergence in workers' income levels. Wage divergence occurred within Manchuria, as workers in Shenyang and Changchun enjoyed an improving welfare ratio. Real wages rose more slowly in Korean and Taiwanese than in Japanese cities. Replacing a subsistence lifestyle with a 'respectable' lifestyle yields a significantly different picture of the evolution of the real wage gap within the empire, which contradicts findings reported by existing studies in important respects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay investigates the conditions of portrait photography in Taiwan during Japanese colonization. After a brief introduction to the theoretical issues concerning the indexical nature of the photograph, I consider the Japanese colonial photographic industry and its products (portraits) in three contexts: the state of photographic technology in the world at that time, the ideological machinery of colonization in Taiwan, and the wider phenomenon of colonial mimicry. In this consideration, I offer a diachronic analysis of photo albums and commercial directories that contain formal portraits of politically and economically influential (almost exclusively) men. Bringing these considerations together suggests an aspect of the colonial ideological machinery that has been underrepresented in other studies: the colonial portrait as a mask in several forms. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Liu Na'ou (1905-1940) was born in Taiwan during the Japanese occupation period. Pursuing his high school education in Japan, he proceeded to learn French at Aurora University in Shanghai after graduation. These experiences added to his colonial background and "multi-modem" perspective, which embraced the linguistic and cultural features of Europe, Japan, Taiwan, and China. Through extensive exposure to a broad range of modernist works as well as his translation of modernist novels by Japanese authors and Paul Morand (1888-1976), Liu Na'ou adopted the two approaches of gaze. This, in turn, inspired him to emerge as a hybrid-cultural middleman. Based on this foundation, he continued to write novels that reflected various degrees of colonialism, showing a different gendered gaze than that found in the West and Japan. This paper examines the development of Liu Na'ou's translations, particularly with regard to the manifestation of gendered gaze and colonial gaze. In addition, the paper discusses the significance and impact of Liu Na'ou as a hybrid-cultural translator. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]