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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.

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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.

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Paper short abstract

The presentation examines Indigenous Taiwan as an internal colonial frontier where warfare, medical education, and anthropology converged to transform Indigenous bodies into resources for imperial knowledge and governance, sustaining unequal belonging, colonial power, and contested memory beyond decolonization.

Paper long abstract

Human skeletal collections transferred from the Taiwan Governor-General’s Medical School to Taihoku Imperial University and later to National Taiwan University have recently been re-evaluated in medicine and anthropology as “indispensable research materials.” Under the banner of “revitalizing human skeletal collections,” new research projects have sought to restore their scholarly significance.

Anatomical dissection has long occupied a crucial place in modern medical research and education. Yet the questions of whose bodies became research materials, by whose hands, through what processes, and what kinds of knowledge were produced from them remain deeply complex.

This presentation examines early research practices at the Taiwan Governor-General’s Medical School, a subject that has received little scholarly attention. It asks how the bodies and skeletal remains of Taiwan Indigenous Peoples became available for medical and anthropological research, and what institutional, social and political conditions sustained these practices. In particular, it focuses on the intersection of medical education in colonial Taiwan, anthropological research within the Japanese empire, and colonial warfare against Taiwan Indigenous Peoples.

The presentation argues that Taiwan Indigenous bodies became a significant component of an unfinished project of “Japanese” anatomy, which emerged in response to critiques of anatomy based on the “European” body as a universal norm. Researchers sought to classify and characterize racial differences within the Japanese Empire, using Indigenous bodies as empirical evidence. As a scientific effort to demonstrate and systematize such differences, however, the project never produced definitive conclusions.

Scientific research using the bodies of Taiwan Indigenous Peoples failed to reach sufficient conclusions. Nevertheless, Indigenous bodies continued to be put to use as teaching materials for medical education, as specimens for physical anthropology, and as epistemic resources supporting colonial governance; at the same time, they also continued to meet national and social expectations surrounding the formation of a “Japanese” self-image. In this sense, this presentation sheds light on the trajectory of a project that persisted as unfinished.