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.