Short Abstract

This paper analyses how Taiwanese migrants in Japanese Manchuria navigated ambiguous forms of imperial subjecthood. Drawing on oral histories and state archives, it shows how governance operated through classification, affective judgments, and embodied negotiations of identity.

Long Abstract

This paper examines how Taiwanese migrants in Japanese-occupied Manchuria navigated the ambiguous and shifting politics of imperial subjecthood. The analysis draws on a multilingual oral history collection based on materials recorded in Taiwan between the 1980s and early 1990s, read together with colonial labour reports, police directives, and administrative surveys from Manchuria. Despite their administrative visibility, Taiwanese migrants remain largely absent from scholarship on the Japanese empire, which has tended to foreground Japanese settlers, Korean labourers, and local Manchurian communities. These oral accounts suggest that Taiwanese migrants—neither fully privileged nor fully marginal—occupied a precarious middle position shaped by classificatory uncertainty, political suspicion, and biopolitical regulation.

The paper traces how imperial governance operated through bodily markers that migrants recalled vividly: the accent that “betrayed” one’s schooling history, the haircut or posture read as too Japanese or not Japanese enough, or the uneasy negotiation of whether to respond in Japanese or Chinese when addressed by strangers. Such details, mentioned across interviews, show how appearance, linguistic performance, and bodily comportment signalled proximity to—or distance from—“Japaneseness.” These markers sometimes granted mobility or temporary protection, but they also heightened exposure to surveillance when misrecognition or racialised suspicion occurred. These micro-level encounters reveal a mode of rule enacted not only through institutions but through affective judgments in everyday interactions.

By reading oral narratives against state-generated documentation, the paper identifies these testimonies as a counter-archive that illuminates corporeal experiences missing from official sources. Accounts of food shortages, dislocation, enforced mobility, and wartime trauma illustrate how colonial authorities simultaneously mobilised Taiwanese migrants as productive imperial bodies while managing them as potentially unreliable ones. The analysis considers how transportation networks, communication systems, and bureaucratic technologies structured migrants’ movements and interactions, and how contemporary digital preservation reshapes access to these memories.

The paper contributes to debates on layered coloniality, imperial governance, and the politics of subjecthood by showing how Taiwanese migrants negotiated, embodied, and contested their unstable place within the Japanese imperial order. More broadly, it argues that diasporic memory—articulated through speech, silence, and bodily recall—offers critical insight into forms of ambiguity and regulation that structured Japan’s northeast Asian empire.