Tsutsui W.M. A Companion to japanese histоry

Подождите немного. Документ загружается.

Dower, John. War without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War. New York: Pantheon,

1986.

Dower, John. Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II. New York: Norton 1999.

Drea, Edward. In the Service of the Emperor: Essays on the Imperial Japanese Army. Lincoln:

University of Nebraska Press, 1998.

Dudden, Alexis. Japan’s Colonization of Korea: Discourse and Power. Honolulu: University of

Hawai i Press, 2004.

Duus, Peter. The Abacus and the Sword: The Japanese Penetration of Korea, 1895–1910.

Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995.

Duus, Peter, ed. with intro. The Japanese Discovery of America: A Brief History with Documents.

Boston: Bedford Books, 1997.

Duus, Peter, Myers, Ramon, and Peattie, Mark, eds. The Japanese Informal Empire in China,

1895–1937. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989.

Duus, Peter, Myers, Ramon, and Peattie, Mark, eds. The Japanese Wartime Empire, 1931–1945.

Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996.

Eskildsen, Robert. ‘‘Of Civilization and Savages: The Mimetic Imperialism of Japan’s 1874

Expedition to Taiwan.’’ American Historical Review 107:2 (Apr. 2002): 388–418.

Esselstrom, Eric. ‘‘The Japanese Consular Police in Northeast Asia, 1880–1942.’’ Ph.D.

dissertation, University of California, Santa Barbara, 2004.

Fogel, Joshua. Politics and Sinology: The Case of Naito

Konan. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard

University Press, 1984.

Fogel, Joshua. Nakae Ushikichi in China: The Mourning of Spirit. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard

University Press, 1989.

Fogel, Joshua. The Cultural Dimension of Sino-Japanese Relations: Essays on the Nineteenth and

Twentieth Centuries. Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1995.

Fogel, Joshua. The Literature of Travel and the Japanese Rediscovery of China, 1862–1945.

Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1996.

Fogel, Joshua, ed. Nanjing Massacre in History and Historiography. Berkeley: University of

California Press, 2000.

Fogel, Joshua, trans. Life Along the South Manchurian Railway: The Memoirs of Ito Takeo.

Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1988.

Fogel, Joshua, trans. Travels in Manchuria and Mongolia: A Feminist Poet from Japan En-

counters Prewar China, by Yosano Akiko. New York: Columbia University Press, 2001.

Fujitani, Takashi, White, Geoffrey, and Yoneyama, Lisa, eds. Perilous Memories: The Asia-

Pacific War(s). Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001.

Hagihara Nobutoshi. Nihon no meicho, 35, Mutsu Munemitsu. Tokyo: Nihon no Meicho,

1969.

Hamashita Takeshi and Kawakatsu Heita, eds. Ajia ko

ekiken to Nihon ko

gyo

ka, 1500–1900.

Tokyo: Riburo Po

to, 1991.

Hara Takeshi. ‘‘Nichi-Ro

senso

no keikyo

.’’ Gunji shigaku 36:3/4 (2001).

Hasegawa Yu

ichi, ed. Taisho

ki Nihon no Amerika ninshiki. Tokyo: Keio

Gijuku Daigaku

Shuppankai, 2001.

Hattori Ryu

ji. Higashi Ajia kokusai kankyo

no hendo

to Nihon gaiko

1918–1931. Tokyo:

hikaku, 2001.

Hein, Laura, and Selden, Mark, eds. Living with the Bomb: American and Japanese Cultural

Conflicts in the Nuclear Age. Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1997.

Hein, Laura, and Selden, Mark, eds. Censoring History: Citizenship and Memory in Japan,

Germany, and the United States. Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2000.

Hesselink, Reiner. Prisoners from Nambu: Reality and Make-Believe in Seventeenth-Century

Japanese Diplomacy. Honolulu: University of Hawai i Press, 2001.

EXTERNAL RELATIONS 219

Hirama Yo

ichi. Daiichiji sekai taisen to Nihon kaigun: gaiko

to gunji to no rensetsu. Tokyo: Keio

Gijuku Daigaku Shuppankai, 1998.

Hirobe, Izumi. Japanese Pride, American Prejudice: Modifying the Exclusion Clause of the 1924

Immigration Act. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2001.

Hiyama Yukio, ed. Kindai Nihon no keisei to Nisshin senso

: senso

no shakaishi. Tokyo: Yu

zankaku

Shuppan, 2001.

Hotta-Lister, Ayako. Japan-British Exhibition of 1910: Gateway to the Island Empire of the East.

Richmond, UK: Japan Library, 1999.

Hunter, Janet, and Sugiyama Shinya, eds. The History of Anglo-Japanese Relations, 1600–2000,

vol. 4, The Economic-Business Dimension. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000.

Iguchi, Haruo. Unfinished Business: Ayukawa Yoshisuke and U.S.–Japan Relations, 1937–1953.

Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003.

Iriye, Akira. After Imperialism: The Search for a New Order in the Far East, 1921–1931.

Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1965.

Iriye, Akira. Nihon no gaiko

: Meiji ishin kara gendai made. Tokyo: Chu

ronsha, 1966.

Iriye, Akira. Across the Pacific: An Inner History of American–East Asian Relations. New York:

Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1967.

Iriye, Akira. ‘‘Toward a New Cultural Order: The Hsin-min Hui.’’ In Akira Iriye, ed., The

Chinese and the Japanese: Essays in Political and Cultural Interactions. Princeton: Princeton

University Press, 1980.

Iriye, Akira. Power and Culture: The Japanese–American War, 1941–1945 Cambridge, Mass.:

Harvard University Press, 1981.

Iriye, Akira. ‘‘The Internationalization of History.’’ American Historical Review 94 (Feb.

1989).

Iriye, Akira. Japan and the Wider World: From the Mid-Nineteenth Century to the Present.

London: Longman, 1997.

Iriye, Akira, ed. Mutual Images: Essays in American–Japanese Relations. Cambridge, Mass.:

Harvard University Press, 1975.

Iriye, Akira, ed. The Chinese and the Japanese: Essays in Political and Cultural Interactions.

Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980.

Ishikawa Hiroshi. ‘‘Meiji ishin to Cho

sen, taima kankei.’’ In Meiji Ishin Shigakukai, ed., Meiji

ishin to Ajia. Tokyo: Yoshikawa Ko

bunkan, 2001.

Ito

Yukio. Rikken kokka to Nichi-Ro

senso

: gaiko

to naisei, 1898–1905. Tokyo: Bokutakusha,

2000.

Ito

Yukio. Seito

seiji to tenno

. Tokyo: Ko

dansha, 2002.

Ito

Yukio and Kawada Minoru, eds. Niju

seiki Nihon no tenno

to kunshusei. Tokyo: Yoshikawa

bunkan, 2004.

Jansen, Marius. Japan and Its World: Two Centuries of Change. Princeton: Princeton University

Press, 1975.

Jansen, Marius. China in the Tokugawa World. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,

1992.

Kamiyama Kazuo and Iida Yasuo, eds. Tairitsu to dakyo

: 1930 nendai no Nichi-Bei tsu

sho

kankei.

Tokyo: Daiichi Ho

ki Shuppan, 1994.

Kane, Robert. ‘‘Hammering Down Nails: Politics, Diplomacy, and the Quest for National

Unity in Japan and America, 1912–1919.’’ Ph.D. dissertation, University of Pennsylvania,

2002.

Kasahara Tokushi. Nankin jiken to Nihonjin: senso

no kioku o meguru nashonarizumu to

guro

barizumu. Tokyo: Kashiwa Shobo

, 2002.

Kawamura, Noriko. Turbulence in the Pacific: Japanese–U.S. Relations during World War I.

Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2000.

220 FREDERICK R. DICKINSON

Kitaoka Shin’ichi. Nihon rikugun to tairiku seisaku, 1906–1918-nen . Tokyo: Tokyo Daigaku

Shuppankai, 1978.

Kitaoka Shin’ichi. ‘‘Shoki Taiyo

ni miru Amerika zo

.’’ In Suzuki Sadao, ed., Zasshi Taiyo

kokumin bunka no keisei. Tokyo: Shibunkaku, 2001.

Kobayashi Michihiko. Nihon no tairiku seisaku, 1895–1914. Tokyo: Nanso

sha, 1996.

Komiya Kazuo. Jo

yaku kaisei to kokunai seiji. Tokyo: Yoshikawa Ko

bunkan, 2001.

Kranzler, David. Japanese, Nazis, and Jews: The Jewish Refugee Community in Shanghai.

Hoboken, NJ: KTAV Publishing House, 1976.

Krug, Hans-Joachim, et al. Reluctant Allies: German–Japanese Naval Relations in World War

II. Annapolis, Md.: Naval Institute Press, 2001.

Kubota Yoshitake. ‘‘To

aDo

bunkai no ‘shimei’ to ‘manazashi’.’’ Rekishi Hyo

ron 614 (2001).

Kurosawa Fumitaka. Taisenkanki no Nihon rikugun. Tokyo: Misuzu Shobo

, 2000.

Laver, Michael. ‘‘A Strange Isolation: The Japanese, the Dutch, and the Asian Economy in the

Seventeenth Century.’’ Ph.D. dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, 2005.

Levine, Hillel. In Search of Sugihara: The Elusive Japanese Diplomat who Risked His Life to

Rescue 10,000 Jews from the Holocaust. New York: Free Press, 1996.

Lone, Stewart. Japan’s First Modern War: Army and Society in the Conflict with China, 1894–

95. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994.

Lone, Stewart. Army, Empire and Politics in Meiji Japan: The Three Careers of General Katsura

Taro

. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000.

Lu, David J. Agony of Choice: Matsuoka Yo

suke and the Rise and Fall of the Japanese Empire,

1880–1946. Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2002.

Martin, Bernd. Japan and Germany in the Modern World. Providence, RI: Berghahn Books,

1995.

Matsusaka, Y. Tak. ‘‘Human Bullets, General Nogi, and the Myth of Port Arthur.’’ In John

Steinberg and David Schimmelpenninck, eds., The Russo-Japanese War Reexamined. Leiden:

Brill, 2005.

Meskill, Johanna Menzel. Hitler and Japan: The Hollow Alliance. New York: Atherton, 1966.

Mitani Taichiro

. Kindai Nihon no senso

to seiji. Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1997.

Morley, James W illiam, ed. Deterrent Diplomacy: Japan, Germany, and the USSR, 1935–1940.

New York: Columbia University Press, 1975.

Myers, Ramon, and Peattie, Mark, eds. The Japanese Colonial Empire, 1895–1945. Princeton:

Princeton University Press, 1984.

Nagazumi Yo

ko. Shuinsen. Tokyo: Yoshikawa Ko

bunkan, 2001.

Nihon Kokusai Seiji Gakkai Taiheiyo

Senso

Gen’in Kenkyu

bu, ed. Taiheiyo

senso

e no michi,8

vols. Tokyo: Asahi Shinbunsha, 1962–3.

Nish, Ian. The Anglo-Japanese Alliance: The Diplomacy of Two Island Empires, 1894–1907.

London: Athlone Press, 1966.

Nish, Ian. Alliance in Decline: A Study in Anglo-Japanese Relations, 1908–23. London:

Athlone Press, 1972.

Nish, Ian. Japan’s Struggle with Internationalism: Japan, China, and the League of Nations,

1931–1933. London: Kegan Paul, 1993.

Nish, Ian, ed., Britain and Japan: Biographical Portraits, 4 vols. Folkestone: Japan Library,

1994.

Nish, Ian, ed. The Iwakura Mission in America and Europe: A New Assessment. Richmond, UK:

Curzon, 1998.

Nish, Ian, and Kibata, Yoichi, eds., The History of Anglo-Japanese Relations, 1600–2000: The

Political-Diplomatic Dimension, 2 vols. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000.

Nomura Minoru. Nihonkai kaisen no shinjitsu. Tokyo: Ko

dansha, 1999.

O’Brien, Phillips Payson, ed. Anglo-Japanese Alliance, 1902–1922. London: Routledge, 2004.

EXTERNAL RELATIONS 221

Ochiai Hiroki. ‘‘Meiji shoki no gaiseiron to higashi Ajia.’’ In Furuya Tetsuo and Yamamuro

Shin’ichi, eds., Kindai Nihon ni okeru higashi Ajia mondai. Tokyo: Yoshikawa Ko

bunkan,

2001.

Oguma Eiji. ‘‘Nihonjin’’ no kyo

kai: Okinawa, Ainu, Taiwan, Cho

sen, shokuminchi shihai kara

fukki undo

made. Tokyo: Shinyo

sha, 1998.

Okazaki Hisahiko. Mutsu Munemitsu to sono jidai. Tokyo: PHP Kenkyu

jo, 1999.

Patterson, Wayne. The Korean Frontier in America: Immigration to Hawai i, 1896–1910.

Honolulu: University of Hawai i Press, 1988.

Perez, Louis. Japan Comes of Age: Mutsu Munemitsu and the Revision of the Unequal Treaties.

Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1999.

Rekishigaku Kenkyu

kai. Taiheiyo

senso

shi, 5 vols. Tokyo: To

Keizai Shinpo

sha, 1953.

Reynolds, Douglas. ‘‘Training Young China Hands: To

aDo

bun Sho

in and Its Precursors,

1886–1945.’’ In Duus et al., eds., The Japanese Informal Empire in China, 1895–1937.

Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989.

Rimer, J. Thomas, ed. A Hidden Fire: Russian and Japanese Cultural Encounters, 1868–1926.

Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1995.

Sakamoto, Pamela Rotner. Japanese Diplomats and Jewish Refugees: A World War II Dilemma.

Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1998.

Schencking, Charles. Making Waves: Politics, Propaganda, and the Emergence of the Imperial

Japanese Navy, 1868–1922. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2005.

Seki Shizuo. Taisho

gaiko

: jinbutsu ni miru gaiko

senryakuron. Tokyo: Minerva, 2001.

Shibasaki Atsushi. Kindai Nihon to kokusai bunka ko

ryu

– kokusai bunka shinko

kai no sosetsu to

tenkai. Tokyo: Yu

shindo

bunsha, 1999.

Shimazu, Naoko. Japan, Race and Equality: The Racial Equality Proposal of 1919

. New York:

Routledge, 1998.

Shimazu, Naoko. ‘‘Love Thy Enemy: Japanese Perceptions of Russia.’’ In John Steinberg

and David Schimmelpenninck, eds., The Russo-Japanese War Reexamined. Leiden: Brill,

2005.

Stephan, John. Hawaii under the Rising Sun: Japan’s Plans for Conquest after Pearl Harbor.

Honolulu: University of Hawai i Press, 1984.

Takahashi Hidenao. Nisshin senso

e no michi. Tokyo: Tokyo So

gensha, 1996.

Takemae Eiji. Inside GHQ: The Allied Occupation of Japan and Its Legacy, trans. and adapted by

Robert Ricketts and Sebastian Swann. New York: Continuum, 2002.

Teow, See Heng. Japanese Cultural Policy toward China, 1918–1931. Cambridge, Mass.:

Harvard University Press, 1999.

Terasaki Hidenari. Sho

wa tenno

dokuhakuroku: Terasaki Hidenari goyo

gakari nikki. Tokyo:

Bungei Shunju, 1991.

Tobe Ryo

ichi. Nihon rikugun to Chu

goku ‘‘Shina-tsu

’’ ni miru yume to zasetsu. Tokyo:

dansha, 1999.

Toby, Ronald. State and Diplomacy in Early Modern Japan: Asia in the Development of the

Tokugawa Bakufu. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984.

Toby, Ronald. ‘‘Kara no kanata yori.’’ In Furuya Tetsuo and Yamamuro Shin’ichi, eds., Kindai

Nihon ni okeru higashi Ajia mondai. Tokyo: Yoshikawa Ko

bunkan, 2001.

Tsuchimochi, Gary. Education Reform in Postwar Japan: The 1946 U.S. Education Mission.

Tokyo: University of Tokyo Press, 1993.

Tsunoda Jun. Manshu

mondai to kokubo

shin. Tokyo: Hara Shobo

, 1967.

Unno Fukuju. Kankoku heigo

shi no kenkyu

. Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 2000.

Usui Katsumi. Nitchu

senso

: wahei ka sensen kakudai ka. Tokyo: Chu

ronsha, 1967.

Usui Katsumi. Nitchu

gaiko

shi kenkyu

: Sho

wa zenki. Tokyo: Yoshikawa Ko

bunkan, 1998.

Walker, Brett L. The Conquest of Ainu Lands: Ecology and Culture in Japanese Expansion, 1590–

1800. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001.

222 FREDERICK R. DICKINSON

Watanabe Hiroshi. Higashi Ajia no o

ken to shiso

. Tokyo: To

kyo

Daigaku Shuppankai, 1997.

Wells, David, and Wilson, Sandra, eds. The Russo-Japanese War in Cultural Perspective, 1904–

05. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999.

Wetzler, Peter. Hirohito and War: Imperial Tradition and Military Decision Making in Prewar

Japan. Honolulu: University of Hawai i Press, 1998.

Yoneyama, Lisa. Hiroshima Traces: Time, Space, and the Dialectics of Memory. Berkeley: Uni-

versity of Califor nia Press, 1999.

Young, Louise. Japan’s Total Empire: Manchuria and the Culture of Wartime Imperialism .

Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997.

FURTHER READING

Several years ago, renowned specialist of US–Japanese relations Akira Iriye defined

‘‘international history’’ as a field that attemp ts ‘‘to go beyond the national level of

analysis and to treat the entire world as a framework of study’’ (‘‘The International-

ization of History,’’ American Historical Rev iew 94 (Feb. 1989) ). Although this is a

tall order, the most compelling recent studies of modern Japanese external affairs do

place Japanese ties with the outer world within a very broad setting, encompassing

both an expansive domestic and an international comparative context. They recog-

nize that transnat ional ties have both an official and an unofficial component and that

they influence and are affected by a variety of social, cultur al, political, military,

intellectual, and economic forces within and without Japan.

Given that international historians must, ideally, follow state-to-state ties, gauge

internal trends, and highlight comparative international developments at the same

time, it is difficult to expect the perfect treatment from any one scholar. But two

recent studies stand out for the remarkable breadth of their scope. John Dower’s

analysis of the Allied occupation of Japan is a mod el international history in the

complex interplay it details between domestic and external forces. Far superseding the

parochial focus on American policy-making of earlier histories, Embracing Defeat

(New York: Norton, 1999) highlights US–Japan relations in the early postwar period

as ‘‘many occupations,’’ that is, as an intricate negotiation of both public and private

actors in the context of the profound political, social, cultural, economic, and intel-

lectual effect of the war upon Japan. Eiichiro Azuma’s Between Two Empires (Oxford:

Oxford University Press, 2005), an analysis of early twentieth-century Japanese

immigrants in California, is a model ‘‘transnational’’ history in its rigorous empiri-

cism and novel description of a people with a distinct identity shaped by the complex

social, cultural, political, economic, and intellectual forces of two ‘‘empires’’ (Japan

and the United States).

EXTERNAL RELATIONS 223

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

The Japanese Empire

Y. Tak Matsusaka

Introduction

The modern Japanese nation state took form in the crucible of nineteenth-century

imperialism and, narrowly escaping subjugation itself, emerged as one of the

more aggressively expansionist powers of the first half of the twentieth century. The

opportunities and constraints generated by Japan’s imperial project in East

Asia channeled the course of its national development, molded its institutions, and

fueled the aspirations and anxieties of its people. In ways both intended and unantici-

pated, Japanese imperialism acted as an agent of transformation in East Asia as

a whole. Japan’s impe rial designs and resistance to them on the part of subjec t

peoples, along with the more nuanced processes of negotiation and mutual adapta-

tion that made the empire work, did much to define the basic contours of East

Asian modernity. It was through the agency of imperialism, too, that Japan made

its first entrance as a principal actor on the world stage. Consistent with the

mimetic pattern that marks much of Japan’s early national development, its

empire reproduced many of the structures, practices, and even ideologies of its

contemporary European counterparts. At the same time, the Japanese forged their

Asian dominion in an ultimately unsuccessful bid to challenge the Western-domin-

ated world order. In this respect, the Japanese project might be regarded as the first

of many such challenges to the primacy of the West that would mark the twentieth

century.

Driven initially by the need for a rigorous post-mortem on the catastrophe of

World War II, historians have devoted considerable attention to the record of Japan-

ese imperialism. Early studies tended to treat the empire in light of a Japanese

Sonderweg that began in the dislocation s of the late nineteenth century. The rising

thematic pre-eminence of modernization studies during the 1960s and 1970s partly

displaced the emphasis on retracing the road to war.

The more broadly comparative

orientation of such lines of inquiry encouraged historians to regard Japanese imperi-

alism as a derivative of European practice, linked inseparably to the paradigms of

modernity adopted by the Japanese in the Meiji era.

An important corollary of the

trend toward comparison was the growth of Japanese colonial studies. Broader

developments in the historiography of modern imperialism, characterized by declin-

ing interest in problems of origins and causality, further strengthened this direction.

A Companion to Japanese History

Edited by William M. Tsutsui

More recently, the gathering momentum of social and cultural historiography, lea-

vened by the influence of postmodern, interdisciplinary, and transnational studies, has

eroded the once privileged place of political and economic approaches to the subject.

The end of the protracted cold war, along with a reconfiguration of the related but

distinct North–South division of the world, have also done much to transform the

climate of inquiry. All of these factors have contributed to making Japanese imperi-

alism an increasingly diverse and intellectually vibrant field of study more deeply

integrated into the history of modern East Asia and offering richer possibilities fo r

comparative investigation.

The Structure and Scope of the Japanese Empire

Any discussion of the Japanese empire must begin with a definition of the geographic

and conceptual scope of the subject. Over the course of a relatively short history,

Japan exercised dominion over its East Asian neighbors through a variety of

means that entailed different degrees of control and that changed significantly over

time. The relatively small colonial component of the empire, which Japan ruled

directly, consisted of Taiwan (annexed 1895), Karafuto (southern Sakhalin, annexed

1905), Kwantung (the present day Lushun–Dalian metropolitan area, leased 1905),

Korea (annexed 1910), and the Nan yo

(Caroline and Marshal l Islands, League

of Nations Mandate, 1922). Although Japan’s imperial architects regarded these

colonies as vital, it was the indirect domination of China that, over the long run,

drew the lion’s share of their attention. Japanese power insinuated itself into

the national life of its larger neighbor through a variety of means: the unequal treaty

system in which Japan became an increasingly dominant player as the gendarme

of East Asia, the control of regional spheres of influence, the management of a

network of treaty port enclaves, the establishment of special economic and cultural

institutions and, when conditions permitted, the cultivation of client regimes.

Northeast China, known to foreigners as Manchuria, was subject to a particularly

active form of Japanese control after 1905 that gradually approached the colonial

threshold. The armed occupation of this region in 1931 pushed Japanese power

across that threshold, but in the place of conventional colonial arrangements, Japan-

ese authorities established a nominally independent and purportedly allied state

known as Manchukuo. Japan’s imperial power in Asia reached its zenith during

World War II with the occupation of much of the Chinese heartland and

the incorporation of Manchukuo, occupied China, and Western colonial territory

in Southeast Asia into a formation known as the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity

Sphere.

Strict constructionists might ob ject to the inclusion within the Japanese empire of

areas of East Asia not under direct colonial rule.

Although the distinction between

formal and informal patterns of control is important, too analytically energetic a

separation between the two may exaggerate the differences, a perspective reflected

in recent trends in research. There is good reason to believe, indeed, that the

heterogeneous, malleable, and loosely organized structure of the Japanese empire

was intimately related to the nature of the imperial project. Moreover, as will be

THE JAPANESE EMPIRE 225

discussed subsequently, many of the analytical approaches and concerns of colonial

history, which emphasize structures of power and relationships on the ground, are

indispensable to an understanding of non-colonial parts of the empire.

Most historians of Japan today would agree that the nation’s drive toward expan-

sion stemmed from multiple sources: economic, strategic, geopolitical, and social-

imperialist or otherwise domestically political.

Moreover, a variety of interested

parties, from soldiers and bureaucrats to private individuals pursuing wealth and

opportunity, pushed and pulled the project in directions they favored. It is also

commonly understood that the impulses driving expansion changed in character

and varied in intensity over time. A pattern of expansion that emerged during the

Meiji era peaked during World War I and was followed by a trough of moderat ion

during the 1920s that witnessed few new initiatives. Aggressive expansionism

resurged in the 1930s, although some would argue that the imperialism of this era

represented a new phenomenon linked in some way to radical dom estic currents that,

at least superficially, resembled fascism.

Within this framework of multiple causality and diversified initiative, however, a

strong case may be made for the primacy of national security considerations, cham-

pioned by an army that also possessed a strong institutional interest in promoting a

sustained continental mission.

A concept of forward defense, articulated by Yama-

gata Aritomo in terms of a ‘‘line of interest’’ doctrine in 1890, lay at the core of the

logic of the Japanese empire. In Yamagata’s view, Japan’s survival depended on the

establishment of a cont inental defense perimeter from which all potential adversaries

would be excluded, through indirect means if possible, but through occupation and

direct control if necessary. Korea and Manchuria thus became vital targets, and as

Japan graduated into higher leagues of strategic competition concomitant with its

growing power, Yamagata’s security cordon came to encompass China as a whole.

Threats to national security provided the principal casus belli in all of Japan’s major

wars, and almost all of its expansionist initiatives were ultimately justified in the name

of defense. The paramount role of security in Japanese imperialism is consistent with

an exclusive emphasis on expansion in the ‘‘near abroad,’’ a point Mark Peattie has

underscored.

Japan’s concerns in East Asia bore more similarity to Germany’s in

Europe than they did to, say, than those of Britain in Asia or Africa. Ronald Robinson

has observed that ‘‘all the powers, even the French, agreed in the end that it would be

absurd to fight a European war for the sake of more colonies in Africa and Asia.’’

The Japanese, operating in their own backyard, however, were playing for different

and considerably higher stakes than their European and American counterparts. It is

no coincidence, indee d, that the only full-s cale war fought between any great powers

in East Asia before the 1930s pitted Russia, which had national territory in the region,

against Japan.

A forward defense policy, which dovetailed with Japan’s long-term economic

interests in pre venting the domination of East Asia by rival powers, allowed for the

occupation of the near abroad if need be but tended to favor pre-emptive action by

less costly and risky means. This generally exclusionary as opposed to acquisitive

orientation of Japanese imperialism did not preclude the taking of territory if pre-

sented with an easy opportunity in which the marginal costs of direct rule as opposed

to indirect control were low enough.

Members of Japan’s imperialist coalition,

moreover, were certainly not averse to taking advantage of opportunities created by

226 Y. TAK MATSUSAKA

a pre-emptive defense policy for a range of economic, political, and social goals.

Acquisitiveness, nonetheless, played a secondary role. The ideology of Meiji imperi-

alism that set forth Japan’s East Asian aims in terms of securing Korea’s independ-

ence, safeguarding China’s territorial integrity, and guaranteeing the peace in East

Asia were consistent with this exclusionary approach to exercising power in the

region. So too were later formulations of an Asian Monroe Doctrine and a pan-

Asian alliance, however hypocritical these prouncements of principle might appear in

view of actual Japanese behavior. Japan’s relative poverty and weakness also fueled a

preference for indirect means, particularly given expansive definitions of the zone of

exclusion. Significantly, all but one of Japan’s colonies had been acquisitions of

opportunity adjunct to wars fought for reasons other than territorial aggrandizement.

In the case of Korea, the one exception, it should be noted that more than three

decades of informal engagement, including enforced tutelage and various protector-

ate arrangements, preceded annexation in 1910.

Contrary to the claims of older

intentionalist arguments about Japan’s seizure of Korea, more recen t scholarship

points to the fact that these indirect forms of control were not conceived by the

Japanese as stepping stones to annexation but as normative arrangements in their own

right.

The instability and ineffectiveness of indirect management ultimately led to

direct control. A similar pattern may be seen in Manchuria where the successive

breakdown of informal structures, despite efforts to preserve them, gave way to

tighter forms of domination. Colonial r ule, then, represented only one, and not

necessarily the most desirable, of many political options in a polymorphous empire.

Variation in the forms of domination found in the empire was also a reflection of

Japanese innovation and adaptation. Creativity became particularly important be-

cause Japanese expansion in East Asia found itself confronting an increasingly inimical

international environment after the Russo-Japanese War. Rising nationalist challenges

and the declining legitimacy of nineteenth-century-style imperialism in the eyes of

rival great powers forced the Japanese to modify their approaches repeatedly. Japan’s

position in the contested and strategical ly vital region of Manchuria between 1905

and 1931, for example, rested nominally on rights granted the great powers under

the unequal treaty system, which governed all foreign activity in China. Dire ct

colonial rule over the region, its possible advantages notwithstanding, would exceed

the boundaries of great power toleran ce and was not considered by most informed

Japanese before 1931 a workable option. In practice, however, through the control of

a railway monopoly, the possession of special real estate holdings, and in the 1920s, a

relationship with a local client warlord, Japan exercised a degree of power on the

ground in Manchuria unparalleled elsewhere in China.

The creation of the puppet

state of Manchukuo following the Japanese army’s invasion and partition of the

territory in 1931, too, might be regarded as an adaptive strategy that recast conquest

as liberation under the banner of self-determination and pan-Asian cooperation.

Given the tight control Japan exercised from within the state apparatus, appointing

all high officials and seconding them with Japanese assistan ts, and from without,

through mutual security and trade treaties, Manchukuo might be regarded as a

colony disguised as a sovereign state. At the same time, recent scholarship on

nationalism would warn against too facile a distinct ion between ‘‘genuine ’’ and

‘‘false’’ nation-states. As Prasenjit Duara observes, authenticity is a contested claim

central to the nation-building process.

The asymmetry of international power

THE JAPANESE EMPIRE 227

relationships, moreover, renders the notion of ‘‘pure’’ sovereignty entirely free of

subordination and depen dency illusory.

Taxonomically ambiguous arrangements simi lar to those governing Manchukuo

became the theoretical model for the control of occupied territories during World

War II and formed the basis for efforts to reconstruct the Japanese empire as an

alliance of Asian states. Commitments to ‘‘liberate’’ Asia ironically accelerated policies

of forced assimilation in Korea and Taiwan, reflecting an attempt to eliminate the

problematic category of ‘‘colony’’ through the full integration of these territories

into the metropole. The reality of Japanese rule over its conquered dominions during

the war remained, despite its pan-Asianist and anti-colonial claims, a brutal and

expedient military occupation relying on administrative and programmatic makeshifts

that offered little in the way of ‘‘normal’’ arrangements, even by the standards set by

Manchukuo. What form a Co-Prosperity Sphere at peace might have taken, of course,

is something we cannot know, since it collapsed with Japan’s defeat in 1945.

Managing the Empire

Where indirect methods employed powerful clients, as in China during World War I,

effective control required little penetration bey ond the higher levels of the state and

could be exercised through military sticks and financial carrots. In most cases,

however, Japanese domination, even where indirect, entailed considerable interven-

tion in the life of subject communities in order to deepen control and to extract value,

if for no other reason than to offset the costs of rule. The management of empire

became an unavoidable problem wherever Japan established a significant measure of

control, and, with the long view in mind, the task of management became a project

aimed at the transfor mation of the lands and peoples under Japanese rule.

Much of our understanding of Japan’s transformative and social engineering

efforts in its subject territories is relatively recent, drawn largely from colonial studies

undertaken since the 1970s. This body of work, well represented in the volume The

Japanese Colonial Empire, 1895–1945, has made a particularly important contribution

by placing Japanese colonialism in a comparative context.

On the one hand, Japan’s

wartime practices, including widespread milit ary atrocities, human experimentation,

slave labor, and institutions such as the ‘‘comfort woman’’ system, remain uniquely

egregious. On the other hand, the management of its peacetime empire, although

occupying, in the case of Korea, the brutal end of the spectrum in contemporary

colonial practice, was by no means entirely off the compar ative scale. Japan drew its

models from European colonialism in Africa, inheriting its pseudo-scientific ethos, its

notions of development, and its moral claims of a mission civilatrice. Japanese colonial

policy-makers vacillated between the French idea of integration and assimilation and

the British mode of separate rule through modified or reinvented indigenous ar-

rangements. Development policies, broadly similar to colonial practices elsewhere,

defined a colony–metropole division of labor that emphasized increasing agricultural

productivity, especially in rice, and promoted specialization, such as sugar cultivation

in Taiwan. Japan’s colonial development policies began to depart from European

practice sharply in the 1930s, particularly after the outbreak of the China War in

1937. Under an empire-wide program of military-led industrialization, an unusual

228 Y. TAK MATSUSAKA