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.