Paper short abstract

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.

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.

Paper short abstract

This presentation deals with retirement aspirations of permanently residing and designated visa-holding Filipinas in Japan. It compares the quality of their social bonds, and its influence on their decisions to remain in Japan, return to homeland, or carve out a retired transmigrant future.

Paper long abstract

The growing number of Filipino migrant women who have acquired permanent residency demographically hints at their settlement in aging Japanese society. The current study is concerned with the conditions under which aging Filipinas would return to the Philippines. Building on the interviews and focus group discussions with Filipino women with permanent residence and on designated visa status in Tokyo whose lives have been followed from 2010 to the present, the current study relates their migration experiences to the shifting social, economic, and health inequalities between the Philippines and Japan over the years (from the 1980s to the peak of their migration as entertainers, to family formation in the 1990s, to the current decade in which Filipinas are in their 50s-60s). Employing a life course analysis to compare Filipinas of different legal and residency status in Japan, this study examines the social health or the quality of familial and social bonds they have formed over the years, and the extent to which these influence decisions and aspirations to remain in Japan, return and reintegrate into the Philippines, or carve out a retired transmigrant lifestyle.

The study argues that these ageing mobility patterns do not always indicate a deliberate transfer of care burden from Japan to the Philippines, or vice-versa. Rather, these trends suggest that integral to their social health is a continuous assessment of the value of family, kinship, and community life in their aspiration to be socially healthy while ageing. The retirement goals are diverse according to social health challenges, structural conditions and individual strategies of homing for sustaining social wellbeing. This study concludes with some implications for policymaking in the areas of health and social protection.