- Convenors:
-
Naomi Chi
(Hokkaido University)
Kae Kitamura (Hokkaido University)
Shin Kawashima (The University of Tokyo)
Hyein Han (Asian Peace and History Institute)
Send message to Convenors
- Chair:
-
Shin Kawashima
(The University of Tokyo)
- Discussant:
-
Edward Boyle
(International Research Center for Japanese Studies)
- Format:
- Panel
- Section:
- Interdisciplinary Section: Trans-Regional Studies (East/Northeast/Southeast Asia)
Short Abstract
This panel examines Japanese colonialism through boundary spaces where sovereignty, citizenship, and identity are negotiated. Focusing on comfort women, Indigenous Taiwan, and Zainichi Koreans, it reveals enduring colonial logics shaping postwar security and contested historical memory in East Asia.
Long Abstract
This panel examines Japanese colonialism through the lens of boundary spaces, focusing on three interconnected sites and communities: the comfort women system, Indigenous peoples of Taiwan, and Zainichi Koreans in postwar Japan. While these cases are often studied within separate national, legal, or disciplinary frameworks, the panel brings them into dialogue to reveal how Japanese imperial rule produced spatial, legal, and social borderlands whose effects persist beyond the formal rupture of 1945.
Conceptualizing borders not as fixed territorial lines but as historically contingent zones of negotiation, the panel analyzes how sovereignty, citizenship, gender, and belonging were governed through differentiated regimes of power. The comfort women paper examines the imperial military sexual system as a transimperial boundary space, in which women—primarily from colonized and occupied territories—were rendered legally ambiguous, geographically mobile, and politically disposable. Operating at the intersection of military governance, colonial labor regimes, and gendered violence, the comfort women system constituted a mobile frontier of empire that continues to generate contested legal claims, historical memory, and transnational activism.
The Indigenous Taiwan paper reframes Indigenous territories as internal colonial frontiers governed through exceptional regimes of violence, surveillance, and ethnographic knowledge that rendered Indigenous populations legible to empire while denying full political inclusion. The Zainichi Koreans paper explores how colonial boundary-making was internalized within postwar Japan through nationality law, residency regimes, and everyday discrimination, producing a population positioned as permanently provisional within the nation-state.
Across these cases, the panel argues that Japanese colonialism should be understood not as a closed historical episode but as an ongoing structuring force that generated layered boundary spaces across time and territory. These spaces are characterized by legal ambiguity, bodily vulnerability, liminality, and contested historical memory. Methodologically, the panel draws on history, postcolonial studies, gender studies, and border studies to foreground lived experience and local agency within imperial and post-imperial constraints.
By tracing the continuity of colonial logics across empire and postwar governance, this panel contributes to broader debates on empire, decolonization, and East Asian modernity, demonstrating how boundary spaces—particularly those organized around gendered violence and legal exclusion—remain central to contemporary struggles over justice, identity, and belonging.
| Abstract in Japanese (if needed) |
Accepted papers
Paper short abstract
The presentation frames Zainichi Koreans as a postcolonial internal borderland shaped by Japanese empire and postwar law, showing how provisional citizenship reproduces colonial boundaries while everyday resistance exposes the instability of Japan’s nation-state today persistently.
Paper long abstract
This presentation examines Zainichi Koreans in Japan as a postcolonial boundary space produced through Japanese imperial expansion and sustained within the postwar nation-state. Rather than treating Zainichi Koreans solely as an ethnic minority or immigrant community, the study reframes their presence as an internal borderland where colonial histories of labor mobilization, citizenship, and racial differentiation continue to structure everyday life. Originating from Japan’s colonial rule over Korea, Zainichi Koreans were incorporated into the imperial system as subjects without full political agency, a condition that was reconfigured—but not resolved—after Japan’s defeat in 1945.
The author argues that postwar legal regimes, particularly nationality laws and residency classifications, reproduced colonial boundary-making by positioning Zainichi Koreans as permanently provisional subjects: neither fully foreign nor fully national. This liminal status was reinforced through practices of surveillance, discrimination, and the depoliticization of colonial responsibility. At the same time, Zainichi Koreans actively negotiated this boundary space through legal challenges, cultural production, and transnational forms of belonging, exposing the instability of the nation-state’s borders from within.
By framing Zainichi Koreans as a boundary space rather than a marginal population, the article challenges narratives of postwar Japan as a homogeneous nation and highlights the persistence of colonial logics in citizenship, memory, and minority governance. In dialogue with borderlands and postcolonial studies, it demonstrates how internal borders remain central to Japan’s contemporary social and political order.
Paper short abstract
This paper frames the Japanese military comfort women system as a colonial boundary space, showing how coerced mobility, legal ambiguity, and gendered violence structured imperial governance and persist in postwar politics of memory and responsibility.
Paper long abstract
This paper conceptualizes the Japanese military comfort women system as a boundary space within the colonial empire—neither fully inside nor outside the legal, territorial, or moral order of imperial governance. Rather than treating the system solely as an instance of wartime sexual violence, the paper situates it within the broader spatial and administrative logics of Japanese colonialism, in which borders functioned as zones of exception, mobility, and disposability.
Drawing on colonial records, survivor testimonies, and postwar legal discourse, the paper argues that comfort stations operated as transimperial frontiers where women from colonized and occupied territories were rendered legally ambiguous subjects: incorporated into military labor regimes while excluded from rights-bearing citizenship. Their movement across colonial boundaries—between metropole and colony, battlefield and rear area—produced a form of coerced mobility that both relied upon and destabilized imperial distinctions between civilian and military, legal and illegal, domestic and foreign.
The paper further traces how this boundary-making persisted after 1945, as the unresolved legal status of the comfort women was reproduced through Cold War geopolitics, state apologies without legal responsibility, and ongoing transnational struggles over memory and justice. By framing the comfort women system as a colonial boundary space, this paper demonstrates how gendered violence functioned not at the margins of empire but at its structural core, revealing the enduring colonial logics that continue to shape debates over responsibility, redress, and historical recognition.
Paper short abstract
The presentation frames Indigenous Taiwan as a colonial boundary space, showing how Japanese and postwar regimes governed internal frontiers through exceptional rule, denying full political belonging while sustaining colonial power, inequality, and contested memory beyond decolonization.
Paper long abstract
This presentation conceptualizes Indigenous Taiwan as a colonial boundary space produced through Japanese imperial governance and sustained across political ruptures. Rather than viewing Indigenous peoples as marginal to colonial modernity, the study reframes Indigenous territories as internal frontiers where sovereignty, racial hierarchy, and state power were continuously negotiated. Under Japanese rule, these regions were incorporated into the empire through military pacification, ethnographic knowledge production, and assimilation policies, transforming them into liminal spaces that were formally inside imperial territory yet governed through exceptional regimes of violence and surveillance.
The author argues that Indigenous Taiwan functioned as an unstable boundary zone in which colonial authority was asserted precisely through the denial of full political belonging. Practices of classification, labor mobilization, and cultural regulation rendered Indigenous bodies legible to imperial power while maintaining their status as objects of governance rather than rights-bearing subjects. Crucially, these boundary-making practices did not end with the collapse of the Japanese empire in 1945. Instead, they were reconfigured within postwar state structures, allowing colonial logics of differentiation and control to persist under new political regimes.
By framing Indigenous Taiwan as a boundary space, the article challenges nation-centered narratives of Taiwanese history and highlights the continuity of colonial forms of power beyond formal decolonization. In dialogue with borderlands and postcolonial studies, it demonstrates how internal frontiers remain central to the production of inequality, memory, and contested belonging in East Asia.