Short Abstract

This paper argues that photographs of marketplaces in Japan’s colonies were a central visual technology for naturalizing settler colonial capitalism. They staged a “phantasmagoria of circulation,” transforming complex local exchange into spectacles of managed imperial integration and productivity.

Long Abstract

This paper examines photographs of marketplaces taken in Japan’s colonial territories—primarily Korea, but also Manchuria and Okinawa—to argue that they functioned as a central visual technology for articulating and naturalizing settler colonial capitalism. Moving beyond understanding these images as mere documentation of commercial exchange, I propose that they constructed a “phantasmagoria of circulation,” visualizing a complex ideological field where economic control, ethnographic management, and imperial fantasy converged.

Scholarship has begun unpacking the market’s role. Itagaki Ryūta, for instance, reveals how systems like the cocoon bargain sale in Sangju monopolized agricultural profits for the state and large capital, a dynamic made visible in commercial photographs. Similarly, Kawamura Minato analyzes literary and visual depictions of Dairen’s “illusionary” markets, where illicit circulation, as in photographs of thief’s markets (shōtō-ji), underscored a wonderous yet controlled commercial chaos. These sites—from the Kushiro horse market to the brassware markets photographed by Torii Ryūzō—were proliferated through ethnographic studies (e.g., Maruyama Chijun), South Manchuria Railway reports, tourist guides, and postcards, forming a coherent visual archive of imperial political economy.

This paper contends that the photographic composition itself performed crucial ideological work. Market photographs did not merely display transactions; they visualized commodity fetishism through overwhelming “oceans” of goods and people. More critically, they manipulated the collective gaze. The camera often rendered Korean marketgoers as an undifferentiated native crowd, a visual deindividuation that nonetheless held the latent possibility of individuation as economic actors within the Japanese imperial system.

Analyzing vantage points is essential. The prevalent bird’s-eye view, showcasing vast, bustling inclusivity, served to present the market as a microcosm and prototype of the empire itself—a space of managed diversity and productive integration. Yet, within this totalizing frame, the many specific gazes of sellers, brokers, and customers persisted, hinting at bargains, disagreements, and social negotiations that belied a smooth imperial narrative.

Ultimately, this paper argues that market photographs were key sites where the intricate relationships of settler colonial capitalism—between state policy, capital accumulation, ethnographic knowledge, and colonized agency—were both displayed and disguised.