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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.

Paper 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.

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Paper short abstract

Analysing Singapore’s 2021 Secondary Two history textbook, this paper shows how the Japanese Occupation is taught through managed historical empathy and an emotional regime that recodes wartime memory into nation-building and Total Defence, with implications for Japanese Studies.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines how Singapore’s 2021 Lower Secondary History syllabus and Secondary Two textbook narrate the Japanese Occupation (1942–45) and mobilise inquiry tasks to shape students’ affective and emotional orientations. For Japanese Studies, it highlights how “Japan”, as an imperial power and wartime aggressor, is constituted not only through domestic memory politics but also through curricular governance in a former occupied society. Focusing on the chapter “What Did the People in Singapore Experience During the Japanese Occupation?”, I combine discourse analysis of narrative passages with close reading of source-based activities and a diary-writing task that asks students to inhabit the perspectives of a Chinese businessman, a Malay student learning Japanese, or an Indian soldier considering the anti-British Indian National Army (INA). I argue that the curriculum institutionalises a managed form of historical empathy: it foregrounds differentiated wartime experiences yet steers students toward a state-sanctioned repertoire of emotions (fear, hardship, endurance, solidarity) that can be shared across ethnic lines. By embedding the Occupation within the longer arc of “Singapore’s Struggle for Independence (1942–1965)” and linking wartime suffering to civic resilience and Total Defence, the textbook recodes traumatic memory into a nation-building narrative. The extreme compression of the Second Sino-Japanese War to a brief contextual note further prevents the Occupation from being read through a China-centred victimhood frame, re-situating “Japan’s war” within Singapore-centric mnemopolitics. Conceptually, I read these pedagogical designs as an emotional regime that governs which feelings are legitimate and which, including divisive and ethnicised grievance, are marginalised, enabling a postwar positioning of Japan compatible with contemporary regional order and pragmatic bilateral relations. The paper concludes by noting tensions between this emotional regime and postmemory carried in families and minority communities, and it proposes avenues for transregional comparison.

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Paper short abstract

Over the past few decades, as Brazilian and Peruvian children have adjusted to Japan's educational system, the system has also adapted to meet the needs of foreign children. This paper aims to demonstrate how inequalities in education interact, adapt, and resist change.

Paper long abstract

It has already been more than three decades since the descendants of the Japanese immigrants who had settled in South America, mostly in Brazil and Peru, have “returned” to the land of the ancestors. At home, the second generation employ their parents’ native language, Portuguese or Spanish, to communicate with them, or alternatively basic Japanese or a mix of their home-country language and Japanese, due to the limited Japanese language ability of their parents. For many Brazilians and Peruvians of second generation the lack of Japanese proficiency represents a serious barrier to pursuing high school or tertiary education that it has been possible to circumvent thanks to special entrance examinations for applicants with foreign background who live in Japan. By taking these special examinations, second-generation Brazilians and Peruvians can go on to the next educational levels, in which they can develop their own potential regardless of their scarce competence in Japanese language.

Japanese language education has been a continuum of long-term care that also includes learning school and university cultures in a Japanese setting provided by institutions of secondary and tertiary education. In the last decades, these educational institutions have been offering special entrance examinations for applicants with overseas background and Japanese language learning support, to attract potential students to palliate the serious shortage of students due to the low birth rate in Japan.

Based on semi-structured interviews to six subjects, this research aims at showing the path Brazilian and Peruvian students have gone through in Japan while navigating successfully the Japanese educational system. The sample is composed by students whose lack of Japanese language proficiency have challenged them in different ways as they were faced with several difficulties in their way, but this inadequacy of Japanese competence has not been determinant in their studies and subsequent career building. This research also introduces us to the special admission for applicants with overseas roots and Japanese language support offered by Japanese educational institutions, which is aligned with the changes in Japanese society, low birth rates and the need of welcoming foreign workers and their families.