Salman rushdie calls mythology “the family album or storehouse of a culture's childhood, containing [its] … future, codified as tales that are both poems and oracles” (1999, 83). Myths are, in his words, “the waking dreams our societies permit” that celebrate “the non-belongers, the different ones, the outlaws, the freaks” (73). Of course, all societies have such waking dreams, but women as mythic figures loom rather larger in some cultures than in others. Chinese poets, painters, sculptors, librettists, essayists, commentators, philosophers, storytellers, puppeteers, illustrators, and historians made a veritable industry of myths of womanhood—an industry that, I shall argue today, far outstrips any of its counterparts elsewhere in Asia.

We are currently witnessing two trends in Southeast Asia: first, an increase in what is often referred to as “civil society” activity including action by nongovernmental organizations (NGOs); and second, an increase in various forms of migration, one of the key human rights concerns of the post-World War II era. This article reviews the convergence of these two trends by examining activism on behalf of migrant workers in the largest receiving state of migrants in Asia, Malaysia. With approximately 700,000 documented and over one million undocumented migrant workers, Malaysia has one of the highest percentages of foreign workers in the world (Migrant News [MN], November 1999). Like many other countries with labor shortages, Malaysia needs these workers, but does not want them. Both of these facts are clearly reflected in government policies. There are frequent attempts to get rid of migrant workers, either in response to public concern or because of economic downturn, but with almost every halt to migration there is a corresponding exception allowing workers to stay or continue coming. Throughout this process there is little if any attention paid to the rights of migrant workers by the Malaysian government, or often the migrant's home government. Since this increased migration is occurring at a time of a general increase in activism in Malaysia and regionally, it is reasonable to ask what of this civil society energy is being addressed to the increasingly important issue of migrant rights.

Semicolonialism, as jürgen osterhammel noted, is a label that has been generally applied to China “without much regard for its potential theoretical implications” (Osterhammel 1986, 296). The partial character of semicolonialism—as incomplete colonialism—poses the question of what difference it made that throughout the modern period China never in fact became a subject nation, but retained sovereignty over nearly all of its territory and was recognized as a sovereign nation by international law. The writings of twentieth-century Chinese nationalists and a recent profusion of theorizing about colonialism and “colonial modernity” in China, by emphasizing colonialism (Barlow 1997), have perhaps obscured rather than clarified the answer to this question. Moreover, semicolonialism in China, as a gradual accretion of phenomena associated with imperialism, varied substantially over time. Its significance for understanding nineteenth-century China, when the foreign presence within China was still quite limited, remains unclear. Several decades of research on imperialism in Shanghai have produced much debate, but no clear mapping of “where, when, how and to what effect did which extraneous forces impinge” on Chinese life (Osterhammel 1986, 295).

At noon on december 3, 1937, a Japanese military parade—perhaps in ironic imitation of other processions by foreigners in Shanghai—began marching down Nanjing Road through the foreign concessions in Shanghai and along the Bund. In the lead was a military police (kenpeitai) car escorted by mounted troops bearing sabers at the hilt. They were followed by a large infantry detachment, machine-gunners, and finally by artillerymen. Japanese aircraft flew by overhead, and Japanese civilians lined the route along the way and shouted out choruses of banzai. When they arrived at Jessfield Park, they were met by a contingent of Italian ladies—allies in the anti-Comintern pact—waving Japanese flags. The event lasted until 3 p.m. and involved all 6000 Japanese troops stationed in the city. The next day a smaller contingent of troops marched in orderly fashion from Garden Bridge south to the Bund and through the concessions (Tokyo asahi shinbun, December 4, 1937, and December 5, 1937; cited in Muramatsu 1991, 308–9). Lest there be any doubt about it, this was clearly intended as a victory march, an effort to demonstrate the new reality of Japan's preeminence in Shanghai. However much this display may have been directed at the Chinese, with whom Japan had now been at war for five months, the Western residents of the concessions—with whom the resident Japanese had been at loggerheads for many years—were the primary targets. No such event ever took place in any of the other centers of Japanese residence in China, only in Shanghai, where all the Western powers were present in full force.

By the time emperor meiji died in 1912, mourned as the first “modern” emperor, Japan had already acquired a sizeable colonial realm. Two years earlier, Japanese newspapers and magazines had celebrated the annexation of Korea, congratulating themselves on living in an empire that was now 15 million people more populous and almost a third larger than it had been prior to annexation. For journalists and politicians at the time, the phrase “Chōsen mondai” (the Chōsen question) served as a euphemism for the panoply of issues relating to Japanese interests in the Korean peninsula. Yet despite this contemporary recognition of the significance of empire, English-language studies of Japan have been slow to interweave the colonial experience into the history of modern Japan. Today, for modern historians, the question of how, or even whether, to incorporate these events into the history of Japan is itself a quandary—what might be termed the “Korea problem” in modern Japanese historiography.