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14 results in Japan's Imperial Underworlds

  • 5 - Epilogue

  • David R. Ambaras, North Carolina State University
  • Book:
    Japan's Imperial Underworlds
    Published online:
    24 July 2018
    Print publication:
    09 August 2018, pp 209-237

  • Summary

    The collapse of Japan’s empire in 1945 closed off the South China Sea as a space of Japanese imaginations of future adventure, but in the early postwar era (in the 1940s and 1950s) this maritime space remained open for cultural productions intended to conclude the Sino-Japanese romance on favorable terms. As regional maritime territorial disputes have intensified in the twenty-first century, the repository of fantasies from an earlier time is always available for resuscitation and adaptation to new geotemporal needs. Meanwhile, intimate Japanese encounters (both personal and vicarious) with the Sinosphere in the imperial era have continued to inform the popular imagination of China as threat and of Chinese immigrants as potential exploiters and victimizers of a hapless Japanese polity and people. In highlighting the stories of Japanese and their descendants who lived in Fujian and "returned" to Japan in recent years, the epilogue elucidates the ironies of border practices that have included certain marginal people as a means of extending state reach into new territory in one period, only to disavow them and use state power to redefine or externalize their marginality in another.

  • 1 - Treaty Ports and Traffickers

  • David R. Ambaras, North Carolina State University
  • Book:
    Japan's Imperial Underworlds
    Published online:
    24 July 2018
    Print publication:
    09 August 2018, pp 29-72

  • Summary

    Chapter 1 focuses on the trafficking of children from Japan to China.  It shows how, following the opening of treaty ports in Japan, local markets in children were brought into contact with Chinese-centered regional markets, and how Japanese authorities endeavored to prevent this type of integration or subsumption by increasing their capacity for territorial control at the physical borders of Japan, in the Japanese state's diplomatic interactions with the Qing state, and in the legal regulation of family relationships and transactions in people. Their efforts were never completely successful.  Moreover, stories of Japanese children being trafficked to China constituted a powerful element in popular memory and imagination, fueling rumors about Chinese organ-snatchers and blood-takers (themselves rooted in a much older folklore derived in no small part from Chinese sources) as well as anxieties about Japan's place in the region.  By the 1930s, these stories were invoked to justify Japanese military actions in pursuit of a greater East Asian empire.

  • Introduction

  • David R. Ambaras, North Carolina State University
  • Book:
    Japan's Imperial Underworlds
    Published online:
    24 July 2018
    Print publication:
    09 August 2018, pp 1-28

  • Summary

    The Introduction discusses the concept of the Sinosphere; the history of the extension of Chinese commercial networks into Japan in the nineteenth century; the movement of Chinese into Japan and of Japanese into the South China littoral; Japanese anxieties regarding China and efforts to displace it as the center of the regional order; and the imaginative geographies that these developments engendered. It introduces the theories of space, territory, and place that frame the studies in each chapter, showing in particular how different spatialities intersected in the construction and contestation of borders. It treats borders as historically evolving entities, both spatial and epistemological, and highlights the importance of viewing border-making and border-crossing as processes of embodiment. It shows how new approaches to the study of intimacy permit multiscalar histories of empire, nation, family, and identity that avoid reifying any of those categories. The Introduction also addresses the role of the sensationalist media and operations of fantasy in shaping Japan's imperial world. Finally, it connects the subjects of this study to present-day relations betweeen Japan and China.

  • 3 - Embodying the Borderland in the Taiwan Strait

  • David R. Ambaras, North Carolina State University
  • Book:
    Japan's Imperial Underworlds
    Published online:
    24 July 2018
    Print publication:
    09 August 2018, pp 115-161

  • Summary

    Chapter 3 offers a remarkable example of the intersection of diverse multiscalar processes and mobile spaces in the life of Nakamura Sueko (1909–?). In the late 1920s, Nakamura eloped from northern Hokkaidō, the frontier of Japan's transmarine capitalist economy, to Fuqing, where she became involved in smuggling across the Taiwan Strait and then, after leaving her first husband, gained notoriety as the wife of a Chinese pirate leader, himself a member of a group of university-educated Protestant revolutionaries working to break Fujian free from the control of Jiang Jieshi's Guomindang government. Navigating the unruly borderland between China’s fragmented national territory and Japanese colonial space, Nakamura also became a resource for others, including Japanese military agents. A deterritorialized woman, she was ultimately unplaceable. Refashioning her identity claims in relation to changing circumstances and the queries of the Japanese media, Nakamura became for Japanese audiences a symbol of women’s libidinal excess that both incited prurient curiosity and threatened to destabilize the social order, even as it enabled fantasies of the world beyond empire’s limits.

  • 4 - Borders in Blood, Water, and Ink

  • David R. Ambaras, North Carolina State University
  • Book:
    Japan's Imperial Underworlds
    Published online:
    24 July 2018
    Print publication:
    09 August 2018, pp 162-208

  • Summary

    Chapter 4 explores the textual mappings of the South China Sea produced by Andō Sakan (1893–1938), whose “adventuristic” reportages and fictional accounts of overseas prostitutes, Japanese medicine men, and Chinese pirates appeared in everything from pulp magazines to highbrow journals, thus making this mobile space legible to diverse metropolitan audiences. Andō fashioned himself through repeated transgression of physical borders, using the ambiguities of this process to further his career. Yet as an ideologue of ethno-nationality and empire, Andō focused on the fragility of the borders of Japanese identity, and depicted China as a primordial entity that threatened to overwhelm Japanese who became too intimate with it. Nonetheless, Andō’s writings, framed as a series of romances in liminal space, demonstrate that the construction of borders and boundaries could entail as much a desire for that which lay on the other side as a sense of menace from what it portended. Together with the preceding chapter, Chapter 4 also contributes to our understanding of the location of pirates, quintessential borderland actors, in the physical and conceptual spaces of Japanese imperialism.

  • 2 - In the Antlion’s Pit

  • David R. Ambaras, North Carolina State University
  • Book:
    Japan's Imperial Underworlds
    Published online:
    24 July 2018
    Print publication:
    09 August 2018, pp 73-114

  • Summary

    In the early twentieth century, Chinese who migrated to Japan as petty traders, especially peddlers from Fuqing, in Fujian Province, often cohabited with or formally married Japanese women, and in many instances returned to their native places accompanied by their Japanese wives and Sino-Japanese children. As lurid stories began to circulate of women's hardships in their new locations, the Japanese government in the 1920s and 1930s implemented operations to "rescue" these "abducted" women, thus imposing on them a narrative that deprived them of agency, further reduced Chinese migrants to the image of criminal invaders of Japanese territory, and posited the Japanese state as the patriarchal protector of national honor against a rapacious China. Rescue operations, however, were confounded not only by local resistance, Chinese civil war, and the topography of Fujian's coastal hinterland, but also by the responses of women whose more nuanced comprehensions of their situations often challenged the official narratives. Chapter 2 takes up the heretofore unexamined history of this cross-border tug-of-war.