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- Convenors:
-
Paul Kreitman
(Columbia University)
Edward Boyle (International Research Center for Japanese Studies)
Tatiana Linkhoeva (New York University)
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- Chair:
-
Sheldon Garon
(Princeton University)
- Format:
- Panel
- Section:
- History
- Location:
- Lokaal 1.12
- Sessions:
- Saturday 19 August, -
Time zone: Europe/Brussels
Short Abstract:
This panel explores Japan's shifting imperial and post-imperial borders through its southern islands, with a focus on Taiwan, Ishigaki, Yakushima and the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands. Themes include the policing of human mobility and the economic shift from resource extraction to heritage conservation.
Long Abstract:
In recent years historians have devoted increasing attention to charting how the geographical, juridical and ethnic borders of the Japanese body politic have been constructed, adjusted, challenged, and reconfigured.. This panel devotes particular attention to shifts in Japan's archipelagic borderland in the seas to its south. Since at least the 17th century this region has consisted of nested colonial polities. Han Chinese settlers colonised indigenous Taiwan lands with support from the Qing dynasty, while the domain of Satsuma invaded the Ryukyu Kingdom, itself a quasi-imperial state, with support from the Tokugawa Shogunate. In 1895 the Qing ceded Taiwan to Japan, and another rupture occurred in 1945 when the United States invaded Okinawa and the Chinese Nationalist government (re)-captured Taiwan.
All these geopolitical shifts created new borders that disrupted existing rhythms of circulation around the East China Sea littoral. Colonial governments asserted monopolies over trade in particular commodities, and established new forms of surveillance as tools of counter-insurgency, creating new documentary hurdles to mobility. The collapse of the Japanese empire was immensely disruptive, as various successor states constructed new ethnic and juridical definitions of citizenship and erected new borders that partitioned formerly imperial space. Taiwanese colonial subjects were stripped of their Japanese citizenship, and the US occupation of Okinawa (1945-1972) introduced new restrictions on travel to and from the archipelago. The emergence and deployment of novel nationalist imaginaries also shaped archipelagic economies and ecologies, with new apparatuses of heritage classification reconfiguring geographically marginal extractive zones as discursively central to the national geobody.
Paper A examines how Japanese colonial authorities innovated new forms of passport control and identification in order to police cross-strait mobility between Taiwan and mainland China. Paper B explores the history of Taiwanese migration to the Okinawan island of Ishigaki during and after the Japanese colonial period. Paper C explores how postwar Okinawan naturalists stoked a panic about Taiwanese bird "poachers" on the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands. And Paper D shows how the economy of Yakushima transformed from a site of extractive forestry under Satsuma rule to a UNESCO World Site in 1993.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Saturday 19 August, 2023, -Paper short abstract:
This paper explores how Okinawan naturalists have campaigned to protect biodiversity on the disputed Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands since the end of World War II. It shows how concerns to protect nature have mingled with anxiety to demarcate the islands as part of the post-imperial Japanese body politic.
Paper long abstract:
In 2013 China Central Television aired a news bulletin with a provocative headline: ‘Japan is snatching our islands using the pretext of environmental protection!' This fiery denunciation was a reaction to an announcement by the Yamashina Institute, a conservation NGO with close links to the Japanese royal family, that a new variant of albatross had been discovered nesting on the disputed Senkaku (Ch: Diaoyu) Islands. Might this accusation by Chinese state media might have a kernel of truth to it?
This paper begins by exploring the politics of heritage preservation in Okinawa under US occupation, before showing how nature conservation on the Senkaku became tangled up in the sovereignty dispute over the islands in the 1960s. In the early 1960s the Ishigaki-born naturalist Takara Tetsuo led a series of expeditions under Government of the Ryukyus auspices, aimed at promoting economic development of the (then largely uninhabited Senkaku Islands. These forays came to nothing, but in the run-up to Okinawan Reversion in 1972, Takara helped stoke a nationwide panic about Taiwanese fishermen 'poaching' seabird eggs on the Senkakus. Later, in the early 2010s, a diplomatic dispute broke out between China and Japan when the Japan Coast Guard arrested a Chinese fishing captain who "trespassed" into the islands' territorial waters. Japanese nationalists led by Tokyo Mayor Ishihara Shintarō used nature conservation as a pretext to lobby the central government to take harder line on the dispute. Prominent Japanese conservation ecologists, including former students of Takara Tetsuo, joined in the campaign even whilst disavowing any nationalist motivations.
The involvement of purportedly apolitical scientists in diplomat disputes raises questions about the relationship between science, nationalism and state power. It also suggests continuities between colonial and postcolonial strategies of staking claim to territory.
Paper short abstract:
This paper examines the pre- and post-war migration of Taiwanese to the island of Ishigaki. It will detail both the history of their presence and how memories of that history are reshaped in the present, examining the intersection between geographical and administrative border policies.
Paper long abstract:
Japan’s borders are now the subject of attention across diverse areas of scholarship. One field of interest has been Japan’s island borderlands, in which recent research has examined their histories (Yamamoto 2023), their presents (Iwashita 2016), and changes in policies towards them (Furukawa 2021). Another has looked at the management of population movements, through studies of pre-war emigration (Azuma 2019; Lu 2020) and the waves of repatriation and migration to Japan (Watts 2008; Liu-Farrer 2020; Boyle and Chi 2023), while also looking to analyse the country’s demography today. However, connections between changes in border and of populations have been highlighted in some cases, while remaining obscure in others.
The southern Okinawa island of Ishigaki presents one obvious blind spot. The geographical proximity of Ishigaki to Taiwan and the extensive connections that existed between the two under the Japanese empire have been examined (Matsuda 2020), but the pre- and post-war migration of Taiwanese to the island has attracted less scholarly attention. Nevertheless, this movement of people from Taiwan over several generations is central to the island’s history and topography, and how it is narrated in the present.
This paper offers a preliminary study into the presence of Taiwanese on Ishigaki, which seeks to capture both the history of their presence and how memories of that history are being reshaped in the present. In so doing, it will survey a site at which the intersection between geographical and administrative border policies is particularly pronounced, and draw out its broader implications.
Paper short abstract:
This paper examines the pre- and post-war migration of Taiwanese to the island of Ishigaki. It will detail both the history of their presence and how memories of that history are reshaped in the present, examining the intersection between geographical and administrative border policies.
Paper long abstract:
Japan’s borders are now the subject of attention across diverse areas of scholarship. One field of interest has been Japan’s island borderlands, in which recent research has examined their histories (Yamamoto 2023), their presents (Iwashita 2016), and changes in policies towards them (Furukawa 2021). Another has looked at the management of population movements, through studies of pre-war emigration (Azuma 2019; Lu 2020) and the waves of repatriation and migration to Japan (Watts 2008; Liu-Farrer 2020; Boyle and Chi 2023), while also looking to analyse the country’s demography today. However, connections between changes in border and of populations have been highlighted in some cases, while remaining obscure in others.
The southern Okinawa island of Ishigaki presents one obvious blind spot. The geographical proximity of Ishigaki to Taiwan and the extensive connections that existed between the two under the Japanese empire have been examined (Matsuda 2020), but the pre- and post-war migration of Taiwanese to the island has attracted less scholarly attention. Nevertheless, this movement of people from Taiwan over several generations is central to the island’s history and topography, and how it is narrated in the present.
This paper offers a preliminary study into the presence of Taiwanese on Ishigaki, which seeks to capture both the history of their presence and how memories of that history are being reshaped in the present. In so doing, it will survey a site at which the intersection between geographical and administrative border policies is particularly pronounced, and draw out its broader implications.
Paper short abstract:
This paper examines how Japan built a system of personal identification in order to police crossborder mobility in early colonial Taiwan. It examines the lessons drawn from other Asian colonies and argues the resulting system preceded the developments in Europe that existing studies have focused on.
Paper long abstract:
Conventional history of passports considers WWI and the postwar reshuffling of the European regional order to be the watershed moment that consolidated its global reach (Salter 2015). Other scholars stressed the process of co-creation of border control across the Pacific, especially through the treatment of Chinese migrants (Lee 2004, McKeown 2008). However, the document's crucial development in colonial Asia at the intersection of race discourse and personal identification technology has so far received insufficient attention (Mongia 2018).
One key aspect that requires attention is the use of ID photographs. In 1897, passports went through a quiet but significant metamorphosis in colonial Taiwan: there, Japan became the first government to legally demand photographic portraits from all passport applicants, including settler citizens from the metropole. This was a move inspired by the border control measures in the British colonies, especially Malaya and Southern Africa, which were used to screen non-British labor migrants. I argue that colonial Taiwan led this process of amalgamation of photographs and passports because it was there that the distinction between imperial subjecthood and national membership was the most ambiguous.
By tracing the practice of attaching photographic portraits to identification papers from British colonies to Japanese colonies and then to the global politics increasingly demarcated by the ‘color line’, this paper traces the hitherto overlooked significance of inter-colonial connections in Asia that proved to have a lasting impact on global mobility control focused on individual identity. Through the study of British and Japanese colonial archives, this paper proposes that the global ubiquity of crossborder mobility was accomplished only at the cost of subjugating ordinary citizens to incessant state surveillance.
Paper short abstract:
This paper shows how the economic transformation of Yakushima from a site of extractive forestry under Satsuma rule in the early modern period to a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1993 shaped the islanders’ sense of identity and political allegiance over time.
Paper long abstract:
Yakushima belongs to the Ōsumi Islands chain located in the East China Sea and is part of Kagoshima Prefecture in southern Kyūshū. Just over five-hundred square kilometre wide, its mountainous terrain is richly forested, especially with cedar trees, some of them supposedly several thousand years old. This natural wealth has shaped the island’s connections with the outside world. Yakushima paid tribute in forestry products to the Satsuma domain during the early modern period. The island’s resources were further exploited for national goals during the Meiji, Taisho and early-Showa eras. In 1993, the island was designated as a UNESCO World Heritage site, thereby growing in significance beyond Japan’s borders.
This paper probes Yakushima’s identity and that of its inhabitants over time. How did regional dominance, centralisation and industrialisation, war and reconstruction, and environmental concerns amongst others both define and disrupt the island’s political and cultural trajectory? How did the changing value placed on resources determine people’s livelihoods and sense of belonging? The history of Yakushima shows how exceptional natural wealth has imposed shifting allegiances and repositioned the small territory at the confluence of global forces.