Paper short abstract

This paper deploys the concepts of rubble and ruin in two case study heritage sites - Shengli New Village and Mingde New Village - to critically asses contentious contemporary debates in Taiwan around representations of the Japanese colonial era and subsequent single-party ROC rule.

Paper long abstract

At the end of the Second World War, the Republic of China’s armed forces took over Japanese military installations across Taiwan. In the ensuring years, especially after the exodus of the ROC regime to Taiwan in 1949, greater numbers of soldiers and officers’ accompanying families settled in old Japanese garrisons. In recent years, a small number of remaining Japanese-era military settlements that were later inhabited for decades by ROC military personnel have been restored as heritage sites. Through the contrasting lenses of rubble and ruins (Gordillo 2014), this paper explores the reconfiguration of these historical sites as heritage spaces now open to the public. Two sites are of special interest in this paper and serve as anchoring case studies: Shengli New Village in Pingtung County and Mingde New Village in Kaohsiung City. The latter site was a former Japanese navy communications post, while the former was a Japanese air force base, both with adjoining officer residences. Intended as residences for high-rank officers, the homes were luxurious and are widely regarded as exemplars of early 20th-century Japanese colonial modernist design. As spaces connected to both the Japanese colonial era and the ROC’s period of single-party rule, the military residences have given rise to multiple, often contradictory perspectives on the meaning of these spaces and have fueled struggles over how to show these layered histories in and through the built environments of these now-public sites. Considering these heritage spaces as imperial ruins, this paper situates the production of military heritage within contentious debates in Taiwan around history, memory, and heritage and explores how these have turned on the appropriate means of representing the Japanese colonial era as a persistent presence, or what Soler (2013) calls an “imperial effect.”

Paper short abstract

The paper examines how Meiji Japan transformed the imperial chrysanthemum emblem into a modern political taboo. It analyzes the emblem’s institutionalization, legal prohibition, and symbolic sacralization, highlighting Japan’s distinctive path to modern state authority.

Paper long abstract

This paper reexamines the modern transformation of the Japanese imperial chrysanthemum emblem by focusing on its institutionalization as a political taboo during the Meiji period. While existing studies have analyzed the emblem within broader discussions of imperial pageantry, State Shinto, and national symbolism, far less attention has been paid to the emergence of legal and social prohibitions that rendered the emblem “untouchable.” Drawing on Eric Hobsbawm’s theory of invented traditions, the paper argues that the chrysanthemum taboo was neither a simple continuation of premodern customs nor a mere visual marker of the imperial household. Rather, it functioned as a modern state strategy that positioned the emperor at the sacral center of political authority.

In contrast to European monarchies—whose public visibility increased under pressures from parliamentary politics, mass media, and social movements—Meiji Japan reinforced imperial sacrality by restricting access to symbolic forms. Laws and administrative regulations prohibited unauthorized use of the emblem, censored representations deemed disrespectful, and disciplined both officials and subjects through a regime of symbolic control. These prohibitions extended beyond the Japanese archipelago into colonial schools, shrines, and administrative institutions, where the emblem served as a tool for projecting imperial authority and cultivating loyalty.

By analyzing legal documents, administrative orders, and colonial practices, the paper demonstrates how the chrysanthemum taboo shaped the cultural logic of sovereignty in modern Japan. It illuminates the mechanisms through which prohibition produced reverence, how symbolic exclusivity was embedded in everyday governance, and how Japan constructed a distinctive form of modern state authority that relied not on the public accessibility of monarchical imagery but on its regulated inaccessibility. Through this approach, the paper contributes to broader discussions on modern political symbolism, invented traditions, and the diverse trajectories of non-Western states in global modernity.

Paper short abstract

This paper examines the engagement between Japanese noblewoman Kuroda Masako and Ethiopian nobleman Araya Abebe, exploring its global significance as a symbol of transnational solidarity among non-white communities in the 1930s.

Paper long abstract

In 1934, the widely publicized engagement between Japanese noblewoman Kuroda Masako and Ethiopian nobleman Araya Abebe drew international attention, symbolizing hopes for a racially equal world. Using this unrealized union as a point of departure, this paper foregrounds the voice of Kuroda Masako, a racially equal imperial feminist who tried to foster her vision of women's active participation in empire-building, even in new contexts for Japan such as Ethiopia. By illuminating her initiatives, the paper reveals why her perspectives resonated not only in the women’s press but also n a much larger intellectual scene that included Pan-Asian and Pan-African activists. The widespread resonance of the Kuroda-Araya engagement across various non-governmental actors worldwide posed a challenge to state-sanctioned agendas in multiple countries, which were unwilling to endorse an unprecedented alliance among Ethiopia, Japan, and the African American community—an alliance that challenged dominant Western and white civilizational narratives. As a result, the engagement created a rupture between popular sentiment and official policy, ultimately prompting Japan’s disengagement from Ethiopia well before the outbreak of the Second Italo-Ethiopian War.

Paper short abstract

This paper interrogates debates about the boundary between “the artistic nude” and “obscenity” in 1920s–30s Japan through an examination of obscenity laws, censorship practices over nude pictures, and the production, publication and commentary of self-proclaimed “artistic” nude photographs.

Paper long abstract

This paper interrogates the debates surrounding the boundary between “the artistic nude” and “obscenity” in 1920s–30s Japan through an examination of obscenity laws, censorship practices over nude pictures, and the production, publication and commentary of self-proclaimed “artistic” nude photographs in the period. I argue that the discourse created by the publication police and the responses to censorship from photographers, publishers and art commentators together constructed a system of legitimization and delegitimization by establishing “art” and “obscenity” as separate categories.

My research fills in current research gaps in the study of censorship over visual materials in Imperial Japan. I trace the shifts and development in censorship standards for publications with visual depictions of nudity from late Meiji period to early 1930s, and analyze it side by side with an examination of publication activities that constantly responded to, affected by and shaped censorship activities. My research avoids taking censorship as an ahistorical practice that is always dominated by top-down practices of a set of laws and regulations, and I take censorship as not only suppressing but also productive of discourses.

I conduct archival research into obscenity law articles, handbooks for the publication police, and extensive records of censorship practices of the publication police to examine how obscenity laws from mid-Meiji to early-Showa periods struggled to define “obscenity”. I then study the publication, commercialization and commentary of nude photographs on illustrated books, photo albums and magazine publications. The censor’s vagueness in defining obscenity allowed some photographers and publishers of nude pictures to circumvent censorship through camerawork, strategies in advertisement, and art commentaries that argued for nude photograph’s categorization as art. My research shows how the proliferation of self-proclaimed “artistic” nude photography in 1920s–30s pushed the publication police to rethink their criteria for recognizing and regulating “obscenity.” In this way, I investigate how discourses produced by the publisher and discourses produced by the censor mutually informed each other and simultaneously shifted and developed as part of the history of discourses in modern Japan that constructed art and pornography as separate categories. My paper thus denaturalizes such a distinction between art and pornography.

Paper short abstract

Sanada Nobushige resisted the Tokugawa Shogunate at the Siege of Osaka. This paper examines Edo Period literature, theater, and popular art that framed him as an anti-Tokugawa, romanticized hero, revealing hidden resistance under Tokugawa censorship and his enduring cultural legacy.

Paper long abstract

Sanada Nobushige, who also goes by the name of Yukimura, was a widely celebrated samurai of the late Sengoku Period famous for his resistance against the Tokugawa Shogunate during the Siege of Osaka Castle (1614-1615). Though he met his end in battle, his legacy endured, which soon evolved into a powerful cultural symbol in Edo Period entertainment. This paper examines how depictions of Sanada Nobushige in literature, theater, and popular art (such as in the ukiyo-e subgenre of musha-e) framed him as an anti-Tokugawa figure, despite the rigid censorship policies of the Shogunate. By analyzing Edo Period texts, including military chronicles (gunki monogatari), historical fiction, and kabuki and bunraku plays, this study explores how storytellers and playwrights navigated Tokugawa Censorship while presenting Nobushige as a romanticized legendary hero. Furthermore, this study will contextualize Nobushige’s portrayal within the broader tradition of “hidden resistance” in Tokugawa period art and literature, where discontent with the ruling regime was often expressed through cryptic narratives. These include the shifting portrayals of Nobushige from a valiant but doomed warrior to a semi-mythical figure imbued with legendary prowess, mirroring the socio-political undercurrents of the Edo Period. Throughout this examination, the paper argues that Sanada Nobushige’s cultural afterlife exemplifies how historical figures could be reused as symbols of resistance, even within a society under strict political control. His continued popularity in Edo Period entertainment laid the groundwork for his modern-day status as an enduring icon of defiance and martial honor in Japan.

Paper short abstract

This paper reexamines a IJA manual often cited as authorizing the execution of Chinese POWs before the Nanjing Massacre. Using archival context, it argues that this view is overstated. Instead, it marked a step in a longer process that eroded legal restraint and expanded punitive discretion.

Paper long abstract

The Nanjing Massacre (December 1937–March 1938) remains one of the gravest mass atrocities perpetrated by the Imperial Japanese Army. A crucial component of the violence was a deliberate policy adopted by senior officers of the Shanghai Expeditionary Army—one of the two main forces advancing on Nanjing—to deny quarter to Chinese prisoners of war, refuse to accept surrender, and actively pursue and kill former Chinese soldiers who had shed their uniforms and attempted to pass as civilians.

Scholars have frequently linked this policy to a 1933 Japanese military manual, which is often described as granting Japanese troops broad discretion to execute captured Chinese soldiers. Yet the manual itself remains largely inaccessible outside Japanese archives and has never been digitized or published in full. As a result, much of the existing historiography relies on a narrow set of frequently recycled excerpts, cited repeatedly across the literature with little contextual analysis.

This paper forms part of a broader research project that reexamines the 1933 manual within its full institutional, legal, and historical setting. It argues that the text did not constitute an explicit or unrestricted “license to kill.” Rather, it should be understood as a key moment in a longer process, one that began during the Russo-Japanese War, in which formal legal regimes governing prisoners of war were gradually supplanted by expanding operational discretion. I conceptualize this shift as the “banditization of warfare”: a framework that blurred the distinction between lawful combatants and criminal enemies, normalized punitive violence, and laid critical groundwork for the mass killing of prisoners and civilians at Nanjing.

Paper short abstract

The assassination in 1219 of the third shogun, Sanetomo, remains both mysterious and significant. This paper unpacks the motives behind the powerful political figures who manipulated the assassin while highlighting how Sanetomo’s demise triggered events that changed the course of Japanese history.

Paper long abstract

The creation of the Kamakura shogunate—Japan’s first samurai government—is widely recognized as a watershed moment in Japanese history. Founded by Minamoto no Yoritomo in the 1180s, it seems to mark the start of something enduruing: almost seven centuries of warrior rule. But far less attention is paid to the demise of Yoritomo’s line just a few decades later. This paper sheds new light on one of the darkest moments of Kamakura history: the assassination of the third shogun, Minamoto no Sanetomo. It is also a case study in the ways that leading thirteenth-century figures used ideas of “revenge” and “honor” to advance their own political agendas.

Late in the first month of 1219, Sanetomo was murdered by his own nephew on the grounds of the Tsurugaoka Hachimangu Shrine. The nephew believed that he was exacting revenge for the death of his own father some fifteen years earlier, but his actions had much more profound consequences for Japan’s first warrior government. Sanetomo’s assassination not only brought an end to the direct line of Minamoto shoguns but also created a leadership crisis that led to the first (and only) female shogun, the securing of power by the Hojo regents, and the outbreak of war between the imperial court and the bakufu in 1221.

The paper draws on a wide range of primary and secondary sources to argue that Sanetomo’s murder was far more complex than a simple case of revenge; instead, it contends that the nephew was manipulated by relatives and other political figures eager for a shift in the balance of power. By reassessing the motivations and machinations of key bakufu figures, the paper highlights the fragility of the early warrior government as it searched for new solutions to ongoing problems of succession and legitimacy. It also looks at the broader role that concepts of revenge and assassination played in early medieval warrior society.

Paper short abstract

This study examines nationalism in Japanese Protestants through the journals The Japan Evangelist, Kiristokyo Sekai, Rikugo Zasshi, and Shinjin in Meiji Period. Also, it draws attention to the complex and multidimensional relationship between nationalism and Christianity in Japanese Protestant mind.

Paper long abstract

During the Meiji period, Japan established the ideological framework of the state with clear boundaries through the 1889 Meiji Constitution, which enshrined the absolute authority of the emperor in law. This ideology, defined as Kokkashugi, began to permeate every segment of society through the educational institutions and mass media of the period, and was propagated as a state doctrine. It gained increasing momentum in the country, particularly with military victories such as the Sino-Japanese War and the Russo-Japanese War. It had a significant impact on every segment of society, even on minority groups such as Japanese Protestants. The differing approaches of these groups, which questioned the raison d'être of the Japanese state and deeply examined the relationship between the unique characteristics of Japanese identity and Christianity, were echoed both in the reports of foreign missionaries and in the publications of Japanese Protestants themselves.

In this context, this study has examined leading Christian periodicals published during the Meiji period, such as The Japan Evangelist, Kiristukyo Sekai, Rikugo Zasshi, and Shinjin, and has comprehensively analysed how nationalism was expressed in Christian media and what kinds of criticisms were voiced against the mainstream nationalist discourse of the period. These journals were examined with a particular focus on articles written during and after the Russo-Japanese War, especially between 1900 and 1912. As a result of this research, it was observed that certain common themes were addressed in the journals. Among these themes, views that glorify and sanctify state authority and national ceremonies held at Shinto shrines have been criticised under the scope of freedom of belief. National views, meanwhile, have centred on topics such as Japan being a state and nation with a history stretching back over 2,000 years, warnings that national sovereignty must never be transferred to foreigners, Japan's sacred and global responsibilities, the uniqueness of the Japanese people, gratitude towards the Meiji Emperor and patriotism. This research has revealed the complex and multidimensional relationship between the Japanese Protestants community and nationalism. Attention has been drawn to the fundamental principles underpinning this complex and multidimensional relationship.

Paper short abstract

This paper explores how Japanese first-hand accounts about internment in the Soviet Union compare to accounts about the Gulag. It focuses on how these sources reflect Soviet ethnic diversity and what that conveys about the postwar Soviet Union, the internment system, and the nature of memory.

Paper long abstract

Between 1945 and 1956, more than half a million Japanese soldiers were forcefully interned in the Soviet Union, about ten percent of whom died during the internment. The first-hand accounts of those who returned comprise a vast corpus of memory literature which has been studied largely in isolation from similar accounts in other languages. This paper offers a comparative perspective that combines Japanese internment accounts with those about the so-called Gulag—a system of internment for Soviet citizens. While the infamous Soviet camps have been depicted in many languages by former internees, scholarship about the “Gulag literature” is still dominated by an overwhelming focus on Russian texts. Thus, this paper utilizes instead accounts written in Lithuanian, in an attempt to explore the possibilities of multidirectional memory without falling back on the usual sources, such as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s "The Gulag Archipelago." At the center of the analysis is the question of cultural diversity which was characteristic not only of the camps but of the Soviet Union more generally: how is the cultural Other represented in accounts about the internment written in Japanese and Lithuanian? What role do these representations play in the text and what can they tell us about the time they were produced in as well as the period their authors aim to describe? When placed in dialogue with accounts written by Soviet domestic prisoners, the reports and memoirs of Japanese internees reveal an underlying desire to describe not just the prisoner-of-war camps and the hardships endured during internment, but the Soviet Union more generally, including the people that inhabit and sustain it. By recounting numerous encounters with the cultural Other from behind the Iron Curtain, former internees contributed to the Cold War discourse surrounding not just the Soviet Union and communism but also Soviet colonialism and the people who were affected by it.

Paper short abstract

Challenging scholarship that dates Western ideas of Ainu “whiteness” to the 1500s, this paper argues that the classification of the Ainu as racially akin to Europeans is a modern social construction no older than the Meiji Restoration, originating with American naturalist Albert Bickmore.

Paper long abstract

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a large number of Western scientists became preoccupied with the Ainu, whom they viewed as an anthropological anomaly. The Ainu were widely viewed as “white,” “Caucasian,” or “Aryan,” but also as “primitive,” especially in comparison with the “non-white” Japanese who were colonizing their homeland. What did it mean that a “white” people was located in Northeast Asia and seemingly losing out to a “non-white” people in a Darwinian struggle for survival? In my forthcoming book, I argue that the discussion surrounding this “anomaly” was significant not only for Western views of Japan but for Western race science and views of “whiteness” overall.

This paper challenges existing scholarship that dates Western notions of Ainu “whiteness” to the sixteenth century. Instead of forming a centuries-long racial discourse based on an objective “reality” of Ainu physical appearance, I argue that the idea of Ainu “whiteness” in a modern racial sense is a social construction that is no older than the Meiji Restoration. I trace the origin of the “Aryan” or “Caucasian” Ainu discourse to American naturalist Albert Bickmore (18391914), who visited Hokkaido and Sakhalin in 1867 and published scientific articles on the Ainu in 1867 and 1868. Despite his fame as the founding father of the American Museum of Natural History, Bickmore’s writings on the Ainu have been ignored in contemporary scholarship.

This paper contextualizes Bickmore’s racialization of the Ainu with the theories of Orientalist Friedrich Max Müller, and explores their influence on later research. While “Aryan” was originally popularized by Max Müller as a linguistic term intended to describe Indo-European peoples, it gradually morphed into a more specific, racialized physiognomic term. Bickmore’s writings illustrate this shift, theorizing that the Ainu migrated from a proto-Aryan homeland in Central Asia as Max Müller had proposed for other groups, but arguing for their “Aryanness” based on their physical appearance, rather than their language. Though having only a marginal influence on later Japanese anthropology, which was less interested in “whiteness,” these ideas would shape Western perceptions of Japan for generations.

Paper short abstract

This paper examines the Japanese occupation of Central Visayas and traces the shift from conciliation to systematic violence. Using civilian accounts, war crimes records, and Japanese sources, it situates local violence within the broader narrative of wartime atrocities in the Philippines.

Paper long abstract

Japanese imperial forces in the Philippines, at the outset of the occupation, pursued a policy of attraction towards the Filipino people – one which they thought was going to work in convincing the latter of their altruistic intent of emancipating them from western colonialism. This policy, however, failed as most of the Filipinos remained zealously loyal to the Americans. Simultaneously, the Japanese started arresting the men and officers of the USAFFE and consequently, spurring them to organize a guerrilla movement that paved way for the start of a somewhat – not totally – unified resistance against the Japanese occupying forces. Thereafter, sporadic guerrilla ambushes against the Japanese throughout the archipelago commenced, thus resulting to several Japanese deaths. In retaliation, the Japanese forces conducted punitive missions not only against guerillas, but also towards local civilians. This inevitably became the starting point of the many egregious atrocities – murders, rapes, arson, and so on – committed by the Japanese forces throughout the Philippines. In this paper, I will look into the Japanese occupation of Central Visayas – which includes the islands of Cebu, Negros Oriental, Bohol, and Siquijor – and how the Japanese policy of attraction shifted in the latter years of the occupation to a more radical policy of unjust violence towards the civilian populace. I use primary sources taken from perspectives of the Filipino civilians and guerrillas, American intelligence reports and war crimes cases, and accounts of Japanese soldiers to create a narrative as to why the Japanese forces in Central Visayas became quite violent in the latter years of the war. This paper will put into context the experiences of the civilian populace from a micro-level, i.e., Central Visayas – a region that has not really received that much scholarly attention – to the macro-level narrative of Japanese atrocities during World War II.

Keywords: Japanese Atrocities, Guerrilla Warfare, Central Visayas, Philippines, World War II

Paper short abstract

This research contextualizes American public health programs in Occupied Japan within the context of the Cold War. Through a case study of Typhus, it will be argued that geopolitical and domestic considerations made some diseases more important than others, making health decisions deeply political.

Paper long abstract

The Occupation of Japan (1945-1952) presented challenges that went beyond the immediate political and economic challenges of a new post-war world. Public health, particularly in the aftermath of a debilitating war, was a pressing challenge, and by the end of 1945, epidemic diseases like Typhus and Smallpox were on the rise in Japan. The Public Health & Welfare Section (PH&W) under the General Headquarters of the Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers (GHQ/SCAP) ensured that infectious diseases were controlled and immediate inoculation was resumed in Japan. By considering Typhus as a case, this research situates the American Occupation’s public health initiatives as deeply political: designed to engineer ideological stability and create a model of public health governance that could strengthen the U.S. position in Asia and ensure unipolar hegemony during the Cold War. It also argues that public health governance in Japan was influenced by domestic fears and disease anxieties in the United States, as well as a pressing need to protect American troops stationed in Japan. The creation of the United States Typhus Commission in 1942 was in line with the US's motive to curb Typhus elsewhere (in the Middle East, Yugoslavia, Egypt, among others) to prevent disease incidence on its home turf. American public health policy understood that the domestic rise in cases was largely caused by the import of diseases from outside America, with no imminent domestic causes. This research aims to address a fundamental question: How was public health reconfigured to align with the evolving Cold War tensions in Asia? What made some diseases more important than others? The importance accorded to Typhus (compared to Smallpox) and its control in Occupied Japan was an extension of a deliberate process of decision-making, influenced by contemporary geopolitical and domestic realities. During and after the Typhus epidemic of 1946, the Occupation created an elaborate mechanism to trace, eradicate, and inoculate against the disease. This research will demonstrate that Typhus received more attention than any other disease because its eradication and prevention aligned with the fears and apprehensions of the Occupation.

Paper short abstract

This paper explores the civil defense issue in the process of postwar Japan’s rearmament. It sheds new light on how the onset of the Cold War, the legacy of the total war system, and democracy influenced postwar Japanese policymakers’ defense conceptions.

Paper long abstract

This paper explores the civil defense issue in the process of postwar Japan’s rearmament. Existing studies maintain that Japanese conservative politicians in the early 1950s argued for Japan’s rearmament, and that their activities had an important impact on the creation of Japan’s regular defense forces, the Japan Self-Defense Forces (JSDF), in 1954. These studies, however, focus on the process leading up to the creation of the JSDF and thus tend to underrate conservative politicians’ planning of civil defense, which laid a foundation for early postwar Japan’s defense conceptions.

In contrast to existing studies, this paper focuses on the civil defense issue, arguing that leading conservative political figures, such as Ashida Hitoshi, Kishi Nobusuke, and Nakasone Yasuhiro, recognized the creation of regular defense forces as a first step toward the establishment of postwar Japan’s defense system and thus made their efforts to militarily mobilize Japanese ordinary people to maintain Japan’s domestic peace and order against communist threats. After the outbreak of the Korean War in June 1950, they increased their fear of the deterioration of Japan’s internal security caused by communist infiltration, and simultaneously worried about the weakness of Japan’s internal security capabilities. Moreover, they criticized Prime Minister Yoshida Shigeru’s decision to rely on US forces for post-occupation internal security and to suppress domestic left-wing movements to address communist threats, arguing that democracy was essential for safeguarding Japanese society against such threats. Thus, by searching for the creation of civil defense organizations resembling militia associations in Western countries, such as the United States, they sought to strike a balance between military mobilization to safeguard local communities and workplaces against communist activities and the promotion of democracy among the Japanese. Although civil defense organizations were not established in postwar Japan, exploring their attempts sheds new light on how the onset of the Cold War, the legacy of the total war system, and democracy influenced postwar Japanese policymakers’ defense conceptions.

Paper short abstract

This paper analyzes question-and-answer records from shogunal inspections of Tsushima to to show how the domain controlled information about its Chosŏn diplomacy through repetition, partial explanation, and omission.

Paper long abstract

Tsushima Domain played a central role in Tokugawa Japan’s diplomatic relations with Chosŏn Korea, yet the ways in which its diplomatic practices were questioned, explained, and recorded in interactions with the Tokugawa shogunate remain insufficiently examined. While incidents such as the Yanagawa affair (1635) have highlighted problems of diplomatic documentation, less attention has been paid to how Tsushima’s diplomacy was articulated in routine political settings.

This paper analyzes question-and-answer records produced during shogunal inspection missions (junkenshi) to Tsushima. Between 1633 and 1838, the shogunate dispatched such missions on nine occasions, with relatively detailed records surviving for the latter seven. These materials are preserved primarily in Tsushima-domain sources, while shogunal-side documentation is extremely limited. Rather than treating inspections as evidence of systematic supervision, this paper approaches the records as texts shaped by asymmetric knowledge and by Tsushima’s own modes of representation.

Focusing on questions concerning diplomatic documents, procedures, and past practices, the paper examines how inquiries were answered rather than assuming what the inspectors sought to achieve. Particular attention is paid to patterns of repetition, partial explanation, selective omission, and inconsistency within the recorded answers. Questions regarding the formats of diplomatic correspondence and the handling of Korean envoys recur across multiple inspections without leading to standardized clarification, suggesting that certain ambiguities were sustained rather than resolved.

The analysis demonstrates that shogunal inspection questioning did not necessarily produce transparency regarding Tsushima’s diplomatic practices. Instead, the records reveal ongoing efforts to manage and limit the information presented to shogunal representatives. By foregrounding the dynamics of questioning and answering, this paper reframes shogunal–domain interaction not as a simple relationship of supervision and compliance, but as an ongoing process of negotiation conducted under conditions of limited and asymmetric knowledge. In doing so, it offers a new perspective on the operation of diplomacy at the domain level in early modern Japan.

Paper short abstract

This paper examines the Japanese reception of the Polish Solidarity movement in the 1980s through three key words; labor, culture, and journalism. The paper argues that Solidarity movement and the East European case functioned in Japan as an idealized imaginary model of reform in late Cold War era.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines how the Polish Solidarity movement was received and re/interpreted in Japan during the 1980s, a decade marked by the coexistence of advanced capitalism, a weakened domestic socialist movement, and heightened interest in alternative models of social organization. The reception of Solidarity movement in Japan did not take the form of a systematic engagement with Polish politics. Instead, it emerged as scattered debates in labor circles, cultural criticism, and intellectual journalism with different expectations and questions of the Japanese society in mind.

The paper focuses on how Solidarity was translated into Japanese contexts on three different layers: labor consciousness, media culture, and broader social debates on socialism. Within labor movements and union-related publications, Solidarity attracted attention as a rare example of worker-led organization that resisted both state socialism and corporate capitalism.

In cultural circles, Solidarity was considered more as an intellectual revival. Essays, translations, and commentaries highlighted dissident culture over labor activities were printed by a number of Polish enthusiasts. These writings conveniently summarized the movement's essence, reframing it as part of a broader Eastern European critique of modernity and ideological stubbornness.

A third line of reception appeared among socially engaged intellectuals and journalists, who viewed Solidarity as evidence that socialism could be reformed with civic values. In this context, the Polish movement functioned as a reference point for reimagining socialism beyond Cold War binaries.

By looking at these diverse receptions, I argue that the Polish Solidarity movement served in Japan as an imaginary, and to a certain extent idealized, model of reform. Japanese actors projected their own concerns onto a distant movement, using Poland as a conceptual resource to rethink labor, culture, and socialism under late Cold War political realities. This paper ultimately aims to fill the gap of the grand Cold War narrative in the Japanese history.

Paper short abstract

This research focuses on How did the Indonesian students who were exposed to the atomic bomb return home and how did they play a role in rebuilding relations between Indonesia and Japan and contribute to Indonesia's economic and social development after independence

Paper long abstract

Around 1943 and 1944, the Japanese government, especially the Ministry of Greater East Asia and the Ministry of Education, launched an education policy by providing the Nanpou Tokubetsu Ryuugakusei (Southeast Asian Special Exchange Students) scholarship program to Southeast Asian countries. This scholarship program aims to improve knowledge and understanding of Japanese language and culture. In addition, it is hoped that the awardees of these scholarships can replace officials from Western countries who once colonized their land and managed the future of their nation after independence. Students who aspired to become doctors were sent to Kumamoto, those who wanted to study agriculture were sent to Miyazaki, and those who wanted to study education were sent to Hiroshima. These students come from various regions, such as Malaya, Sumatra, Java, Sulawesi, South Kalimantan, Seram, Muang Thai, and Burma. Among the students from Southeast Asian countries, there were several students from Indonesia, such as Syarif Sagala, Arifin Bey, and Hasan Rahaya. However, as the pressure of the Pacific War increased, after the fall of Saipan to the United States and the series of B-29 bomber attacks on Tokyo, the Japanese government began to distribute students from Southeast Asia to regional universities for their safety. After taking the exam for their respective majors, Arifin Bey, Hasan Rahaya, and Syarif Sagala decided to continue their education at teacher training colleges. At that time, in Japan, there were only two "Universities of Letters and Sciences" that educated prospective teachers, one in Tokyo and one in Hiroshima. They were advised to choose Hiroshima because, at that time, the city had never been attacked by American bombers. However, on August 6, 1945, an atomic bomb was dropped by a United States B-29 fighter jet on the city. This research focuses on the implementation of the repatriation program for hibakusha (Nanpou Tokubetsu Ryuugakusei) from Indonesia, their life experiences, and their careers after returning home, along with their contribution to social and economic development in post-independence Indonesia and their role as intermediaries in rebuilding Indonesia-Japan relations.

Keywords: Nanpou Tokubetsu Ryuugakusei, Indonesian Hibakusha, Repatriation, Atomic Bombing of Hiroshima

Paper short abstract

This paper explores how inhabitants of Katsura Shuku, an outcast village in early modern Kyoto, claimed connections to Iwashimizu Shrine, linked their identity to the legendary Empress Jingū, and used other myths and narratives to legitimize their social position and protect their rights.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines documentary strategies employed by the residents of Katsura Shuku, an outcast village located on the eastern bank of the Katsura River in Kyoto that existed until the early Meiji period. Drawing on petitions, genealogical statements, and origin narratives (yuisho), the study explores how villagers articulated claims about their past in response to social marginalization.

The sources analyzed—preserved in the Kyoto City Historical Archives—refer to medieval myths and claim connections to Iwashimizu Hachimangū Shrine, dedicated to Emperor Ōjin (the Hachiman deity) and his mother, Empress Jingū. In these texts, the community is described as “divine people of bows and arrows,” and its origins are traced to the legendary figure of Empress Jingū and her conquest of foreign lands.

The paper argues that such historical narratives were employed primarily in contexts of negotiation with landowners and Edo-period officials. By presenting their status as the outcome of long-standing ritual or martial service (such as participation in ritual archery during the Mongol invasions), villagers sought to justify social rights and protect themselves against discrimination. Attention is paid to how these claims were formulated, what precedents they invoked, and how they were adapted to specific disputes.

By focusing on the language and structure of these documents, this study highlights the role of historical memory and mythic pasts in the self-representation of marginalized communities. The case of Katsura Shuku demonstrates how outcast groups in early modern Japan employed historically grounded narratives to protect themselves against intensifying social stigma by distinguishing their community from other marginalized groups, presenting themselves not as “polluted” but as “divine” people endowed with specialized ritual skills, without formally challenging the existing social order.

Paper short abstract

During his time as the editor of the Matsumoto Shimbun (1877-78), Sakazaki Sakan wrote various articles about women and their plight. Taking a closer look at these articles can help us understand why and how he became a supporter of women activists in the 1880s, as editor of the Jiyū no Tomoshibi.

Paper long abstract

In this paper I will shed light on the writings of Sakazaki Sakan (1853-1912) in the Matsumoto Shimbun of 1877-78, and his views on women in particular. Sakazaki is known as the author of the first novel depicting the activities of bakumatsu hero Sakamoto Ryōma, which he wrote in 1883. At the same time, however, he was an active supporter of women activists: in 1884, as the editor of the Jiyū Shimbun, he provided a stage for Kishida Toshiko and other female contributors, and had, among others, Fukuda Hideko stay at his home. I will argue that the seeds of this engagement can be traced back to his time in Matsumoto, when he quit his position as a judge, became the editor-in-chief of the local newspaper and started making public speeches which helped lay the foundation for the Movement for Freedom and People’s Rights in the region. By taking a closer look at the Matsumoto Shimbun back numbers that were published during his time as editor (October 1877 to September 1878), and focusing on those articles that touch upon the life and social position of women, I will bring to light early examples of those features that can be found in his later writings. One of those is his understanding for the plight of prostitutes, which he refused to reject as morally inferior beings. Another one is the adoption of a female persona, that is: writing articles pretending to be a woman, a technique which is found in the very first of his contributions to the Matsumoto Shimbun and which he more conspicuously used in the Jiyū no Tomoshibi seven years later. Sakazaki’s views were not free of inconsistencies: he did not criticize the construction of a new brothel district near the city of Matsumoto in 1878, and even in 1884, he did not advocate full political equality for women. Still, his contribution stands out as a noteworthy act of support for women’s rights that cannot be reduced to opportunism or blind mimicry of Western ideas.

Paper short abstract

The research analyzes Japan’s civilian exchange with the U.S. during WWII, arguing that it began as an irregular exchange of businessmen rooted in prewar policy, but shifted after 1942 toward convention-based treatment of internees, leading to the abandonment of further exchanges.

Paper long abstract

This research examines how the Japanese government conceptualized and implemented civilian exchange and repatriation during the Pacific War, focusing on the U.S.–Japan exchange ship between 1941 and 1944. Although Japan justified the exchange as “conforming” to the 1929 Geneva Convention, that convention neither defined civilians nor provided for their exchange. This legal ambiguity, combined with the absence of a clear bilateral agreement on eligible categories, rendered civilian exchange an inherently irregular form of wartime diplomacy.

Drawing primarily on records of the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs, this study situates the exchange ship within Japan’s broader prewar and wartime repatriation policies rather than treating it as an isolated humanitarian initiative. It argues that Japan’s initial motivation for including civilians stemmed from prewar efforts to repatriate businessmen and financial personnel, whose return was considered economically and strategically valuable. Examination of exchange lists and negotiation processes reveals that the Ministry, together with former embassies and protecting powers, exercised strict control over selection, prioritizing state utility over humanitarian considerations.

The research further traces a critical policy shift after 1942. Following the second exchange in 1942, the establishment of the Bureau in Charge of Japanese Nationals in Enemy Countries marked a reclassification of Japanese civilians in the United States as “prisoners” under the Geneva Convention framework. This conceptual transition—from selective, temporary exchange toward convention-based negotiations over internee treatment—coincided with the effective abandonment of further exchange ships.

By highlighting the tension between irregular diplomatic negotiations and international legal frameworks, this research argues that both the operation of the exchange ships and their eventual termination cannot be explained solely in military or political terms. Rather, they reveal deeper inconsistencies in Japan’s repatriation policy and the unresolved legal status of civilians in wartime—an issue that continues to resonate within international humanitarian law.

Paper short abstract

Through the work of early women activists, Ishimoto Shizue and Yamada Waka, this paper traces the (re)production of global population concerns (jinkō mondai) within discourse on birth control during the Taishō Era.

Paper long abstract

This paper explores the work of early 20th century Japanese women activists to reveal the inherent relationship between burgeoning population concerns (jinkō mondai) and discourse about birth control. It highlights the diversity of opinion within the women's movement and Japanese social reformers more broadly. It also brings forth the global exchanges, adaptions and reconfigurations of discourse which gave population concerns their long-lasting power. Through this, I contribute a feminist science studies approach to modern Japanese history.

Ishimoto and Yamada held distinctly contrasting perspectives about birth control. Despite this, both women's understanding of the concept, practice and technology was imbued with population politics. My research examines untranslated essays, articles and books published in the wake of World War I to show the diversity of opinion on birth control in Japan. Their ideas are positioned within a vivid landscape of domestic and transnational issues including war, immigration, colonialism and poverty. The problematisation of population within this lively discourse laid the foundations for its' continued entanglement with reproductive rights and health in Japan to this day. It is ultimately revealing of the deep impact population politics has had on the outcomes of contraceptive advocacy and access to reproductive care for all women, regardless of positioning within sex, race and class hierarchies.

My analysis deploys the intersectional lens first conceptualised by Black American feminists to tease out the discursive stratification of bodies within Ishimoto and Yamada's discussion of birth control. Shifting across these temporal and spatial layers constructed by dialogue on reproductive rights and health, I argue that conceptualising population has been inextricable from birth control discourse. The paper highlights the necessity of critically dissecting narratives through which knowledge about birth control has been produced, communicated and contested. Globally, intensifying anti-migration sentiments reveal the prevailing nature of neomalthusian narratives about overpopulation and resource scarcity. It is thus more critical than ever to examine the gendered discourses which have shaped the biopolitical mechanisms concealed in our current conditions.

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This paper examines how early modern samurai society understood the “extinction” (zekke) and restoration of a house (Ie) through lineage narratives. Using the Ito family of the Tsu domain, it argues that house continuity depended on both hereditary legitimacy and active service.

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This paper explores how early modern samurai conceptualized the “extinction” (zekke) and restoration of a house (Ie), focusing on the relationship between lineage narratives (yuishogaki) and social practice. While previous scholarship on the Ie has largely assumed continuity and stability, fewer studies have examined houses that experienced rupture, decline, and attempted reconstruction. By shifting attention to moments of crisis, this paper reconsiders what contemporaries understood as the essential conditions for the existence of a samurai house.

The case study is the Ito family, retainers of the Tsu domain (Todo clan). Drawing on the Ito family documents and a series of yuishogaki texts produced from the eighteenth to nineteenth centuries, the paper traces how narratives of origin and service were repeatedly reconstructed when the family faced loss of status, stipend reduction, or the threat of extinction. Particular attention is paid to the late Edo period, when the seventh-generation head fled the domain, leading his successor, Ito Kuranosuke, to describe the family as having entered a state of "extinction" of the household.

Through close analysis of these documents, the paper demonstrates that “extinction” was not understood merely as the absence of an heir. Rather, it signified the loss of the ability to serve one’s lord as a recognized retainer, especially through the forfeiture of stipend and official post. Conversely, restoration from extinction required not only hereditary legitimacy, expressed through yuishogaki emphasizing past service to the domain founder, but also the demonstrable performance of service and the recovery of material support.

The Ito case reveals that lineage narratives functioned as practical acts of self-legitimation rather than static records of ancestry. They were selectively reproduced and reconfigured in response to political and social circumstances. Ultimately, this paper argues that in late early modern samurai society, the “Ie” was maintained through a dynamic combination of inherited prestige and present achievement, both of which were subject to domainal recognition. Examining "extinction" of the household thus offers a productive lens for understanding the contingent and socially constructed nature of the samurai house.

Keywords: samurai house (Ie), lineage narratives (yuishogaki), extinction (zekke), Edo period

Paper short abstract

This paper examines how postwar Japanese society labeled and morally differentiated prostitutes during the Allied Occupation, focusing on stigma, public opinion, and the contrast between street-based panpan and women in regulated brothels.

Paper long abstract

In the immediate aftermath of Japan’s defeat, prostitution neither collapsed nor vanished; instead, it rapidly reorganized itself under the conditions of military occupation, economic devastation, and moral uncertainty. This paper analyzes how postwar Japanese society perceived prostitution between 1945 and 1952, and how these perceptions were structured through social stigma, moral labeling, and distinctions between different categories of women engaged in sexual commerce.

Focusing on the contrast between street-based prostitutes, most visibly embodied by the panpan, and women working within regulated or semi-regulated brothel systems, the paper argues that prostitution was not treated as a singular social problem. Rather, it was fragmented into hierarchies of moral legitimacy. While panpan were frequently portrayed as symbols of national shame, disorder, and moral decay, prostitutes operating within institutional frameworks such as the Recreation and Amusement Association (RAA) were often framed as a regrettable but functional necessity in the context of occupation and poverty.

Methodologically, the paper employs qualitative historical analysis of GHQ/SCAP archival documents, Japanese periodicals, newspaper articles, and a nationwide public opinion survey conducted in 1948. These sources are supplemented by testimonies and autobiographical writings by women involved in prostitution. Theoretically, the paper draws on Howard S. Becker’s concept of deviance as a socially constructed label and Erving Goffman’s analysis of stigma and “spoiled identity.” These frameworks illuminate how prostitution was less about sexual acts per se and more about boundary-making: between respectable and fallen women; controlled and uncontrolled sexuality; and acceptable sacrifice and unacceptable visibility.

By situating public attitudes toward prostitution within broader debates on gender, morality, and postwar reconstruction, this paper demonstrates how prostitution functioned as a key site where anxieties about defeat, sovereignty, and modernity were negotiated in occupied Japan.

Keywords: Occupied Japan, Prostitution, Social Stigma, Moral Regulation, Public Opinion, Gender and Deviance

Paper short abstract

In this presentation, I will discuss Holocaust remembrance in Japan based on my fieldwork at the two Holocaust-related museums in Japan and how it could be associated with the commitment to peace.

Paper long abstract

In Japan, the Holocaust is hardly integrated in national commemorative culture. Perhaps many Japanese people have still heard of the mass murder of Jews by Nazi Germany in a few sentences in school classes or have encountered it in popular media representations, such as films, TV programmes and comic biographies of Anne Frank or Sugihara Chiune. In this presentation, I will explore how Holocaust memory looks like at two private Holocaust-related museums in Japan: the Holocaust Education Center in Fukuyama city in Hiroshima prefecture, and the Auschwitz Peace Museum Japan in Shirakawa city in Fukushima prefecture.

At one level, in those two museums, the Holocaust is understood as part of 'fu no isan' or difficult heritage which has universal significance for entire humanity, like the atomic bombs dropped in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. 'Fu no isan' of this kind is often associated with the cruelty and suffering caused by war, disaster or injustice. The information about the cruelty and suffering might be horrifying and difficult to digest, but one needs to face it and know it in order to realize the importance of peace and human life and not to repeat the cruelty and suffering.

At another level, drawing on Laurajane Smith’s argument that heritage is a performative practice (Smith, 2021: 25-31), I suggest that the acts of making, running and visiting those Holocaust-related museums are in a way the performative practice of committing oneself to world peace. The involvement in 'fu no isan' by making, running or visiting the Holocaust-related museums gives a sense of doing at least something against war or injustice, instead of becoming indifferent bystanders.

Smith, Laurajane. Emotional Heritage:Visitor Engagement at Museums and Heritage Sites. London; New York: Routledge, Taylor and Francis, 2021.

Paper short abstract

This paper examines how noise as “global knowledge” took shape across Japan and Germany around 1900 through the shared challenges of global industrialization and urbanization, the development of medical knowledge of neurasthenia, and the formation of ideas of East and West.

Paper long abstract

This paper traces how Japan played a role in making knowledge of noise through its global engagement with the rest of the world around 1900, particularly with Germany. It argues that the formation of noise as global knowledge across the two countries occurred at the intersection of three global developments at that time: industrialization and urbanization, the development of medical knowledge of neurasthenia, and encounters and comparisons between East and West. To examine this transformation, this paper first discusses industrialization and urbanization as major preconditions for urban and mechanical noise. A rapid increase in factory machines, trains, and cars emerged as a global challenge that Japan and Germany faced together at the turn of the twentieth century. These brand-new products of industrialization and urbanization led excessive noise to become part of daily life. The second part of the paper explores the ways in which scientists responded to this change. The influx of noise in industrialized countries across the globe transformed human senses, too. The increase in external acoustic stimuli led contemporary intellectuals to devise conceptual frameworks to explain the significance and effects of noise. Among these, neurasthenia provided Japanese and German scientists with a useful framework for attributing the prevalence of noise to the development of modern civilization and for understanding noise’s impact on the human nerve system, labor efficiency, and health. The last part of this paper traces how the idea of noise was embedded in the shaping of imaginary “others” through ideas of East and West. The idea of noise served as a window through which the Japanese and German publics viewed other countries across the border. More specifically, they used noise as a means of criticizing their own cultures and admiring others. On the one hand, noise symbolized the manifestation of the pathology of German and European civilization. On the other, Japan’s inability to control noise meant that it was less civilized than Western countries. By investigating this multi-layered process of making knowledge of noise, this paper proposes a more nuanced understanding of how Japan and Germany were “connected” on different levels beyond diplomatic relationships around 1900.

Paper short abstract

The following paper examines the importance of shipping, trade, and transport infrastructure in the interwar period to reveal how “flagship” Japanese companies competed for trade, market-penetration, and business interests in the emerging markets of Australia, Southeast Asia, India, and South Asia.

Paper long abstract

The commencement of regular Japanese shipping routes: Yokohama-Bombay (1893), followed by Kobe-Calcutta (1911), Kobe-Madras (1933), and the Yokohama-Bombay-Bandar Abbas “Persian route” (1933), not only facilitated voyages and interactions between the people of pre-independent India and Japan, but also an interconnectedness among the port-cities along shipping routes, a mélange of maritime cultures, blending indigenous traditions with influences of distant lands. These people-mediated exchanges—varied in duration, context, and intensity—nucleated new areas and facets of mutual interest and collaborations. While some of these cross-cultural and commercial encounters have received scholarly attention, many remain underrepresented in present-day academic discourse. The research presented here seeks to revisit and illuminate these overlooked narratives through multiple disciplinary lenses, examining materials from the Japanese Company Records Project started with the “gift” repatriation of Japanese commercial records seized (by the Australian government) during the 1941-1945 war with Japan, now held at the National Archives of Japan (NAJ).

Historically rooted in a period marked by transformative aspirations—India’s evolving vision of post-colonial nationhood and Japan’s rapid rise as an Asia’s first industrialized power, culminating indeed with its own “co-prosperity sphere”—these exchanges offer a rich field of inquiry into how people imagined, experienced, and enacted both cultural and diplomatic dialogue and traded internationally for commercial development in the emerging regional markets of Southeast Asia and South Asia. Against the “Weary Titan” narrative of Britain’s purported imperial decline, the rise of Japan as the “Britain of the East” has long captured popular attention and deserves corresponding scholarly analysis. Yet at present, studies concerning the shipping industry—the very infrastructure underpinning these people-mediated exchanges—have become virtually non-existent. Research in historical economic science has replaced that of commercial and economic history, and the wider study of history had become circumscribed from its political economy. Ultimately, a further, long-term purpose of the research associated with the Kizuna India Conference and the Japanese Company Records Project is, therefore, to clarify how shipping and trade frictions in Australasia, Southeast Asia, and South Asia became emblematic of wider political tensions associated with empires and the bloc economies of the interwar period.

Paper short abstract

In prewar Japan, blood donation functioned within a medical, commercial, and moral economy. After the first transfusion in 1919, commercial blood agencies emerged, commodifying blood by the 1930s. This paper explores the tensions between medical practice, commerce, and morality in wartime Japan.

Paper long abstract

Donating blood in prewar Japan was not simply an act of altruism; it was embedded in a broader medical, economic, and social framework that saw the emergence of blood selling (baiketsu 売血) as a profession. Following the first blood transfusion in Japan in 1919, Japanese doctors came to recognize the effectiveness of this new, albeit risky, procedure in saving lives. The need to facilitate the transfer of blood from donors to medical institutions created business opportunities for intermediaries to profit from the transaction of the most vital bodily fluid: blood.

By the 1930s, commercial blood agencies had emerged nationwide, operating alongside hospitals. These agencies became essential in meeting growing demand from urban hospitals and military medicine. As the Japanese empire moved toward total war, securing a steady blood supply became a strategic concern for the state. Nevertheless, the sale of blood remained tolerated until Japan’s defeat in September 1945.

This paper traces the commodification of blood in modern Japan by examining interactions among medical institutions, commercial blood agencies, and the state. Drawing on contemporary print media and medical publications, it shows that the expansion of blood markets provoked sustained public anxiety. Professional blood sellers (shokugyō kyūketsu-sha 職業的給血者) were frequently depicted as morally suspect and socially marginal figures, a view reinforced by media coverage of medical accidents, particularly cases involving the transmission of stigmatized diseases such as syphilis through contaminated transfusions.

These portrayals were shaped by a moral economy of blood that contrasted altruistic donation with profit-driven exchange. Paid donors were cast as threats to public health and social order, while voluntary donors were idealized as selfless and patriotic. Limited state intervention and the absence of standardized medical regulation failed to mitigate these perceptions. When the wartime government attempted to mobilize the home front for blood donation campaigns, entrenched prejudices toward blood sellers posed significant challenges.

Ultimately, the imbalance between high demand and insufficient voluntary supply compelled continued reliance on commercial blood agencies as a core component of wartime blood infrastructure. The commodification of blood in modern Japan thus reveals the enduring entanglement of medicine, commerce, and morality.

Paper short abstract

This paper examines Okinawan POWs and civilian detainees as a lens on Okinawa’s liminal legal status within the Japanese empire, focusing on Honouliuli to show how imperial citizenship and wartime law rendered Okinawan experiences historically invisible.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines the experiences of Okinawan prisoners of war (POWs) and civilian detainees during World War II as a lens for understanding Okinawa’s liminal legal and political status within the Japanese empire and its enduring consequences for postwar identity and historical memory. While Okinawans were formally incorporated as Japanese subjects following the annexation of the Ryukyu Kingdom in 1879, their social, cultural, and legal positioning remained ambiguous—an ambiguity that became especially pronounced during wartime mobilization and detention.

Focusing on Okinawan detainees held at Honouliuli National Historic Site in Hawaiʻi, this paper explores how imperial citizenship, colonial governance, and wartime legal regimes converged to render Okinawan POWs largely invisible within dominant narratives of both Japanese POW history and Japanese American internment. Unlike mainland Japanese nationals or U.S.-born Japanese Americans, Okinawans occupied a liminal position: legally categorized as Japanese yet frequently treated as internal others, and socially marginalized within diasporic Japanese communities in Hawaiʻi.

The analysis situates Okinawan wartime detention within a longer historical trajectory, beginning with Ryukyu’s incorporation into the Japanese state, the imposition of assimilation policies, and the extension of Meiji constitutional subjecthood that prioritized imperial authority over individual rights. During the Pacific War, Okinawa became Japan’s final defensive frontline, resulting in mass civilian mobilization, catastrophic loss of life, and widespread civilian capture. Many Okinawan detainees—often noncombatants, student conscripts, or forced laborers—were classified simply as “Japanese POWs,” obscuring their distinct historical and legal circumstances.

By comparing the absence of Okinawan-specific legal redress with the postwar litigation and advocacy pursued by Japanese American internees, this paper highlights how legal status shapes not only rights but historical visibility. It argues that the marginalization of Okinawan POW experiences reflects deeper structural tensions in Japan’s imperial legacy and postwar memory politics. Re-centering Okinawan POWs within Japanese Studies challenges monolithic narratives of wartime “Japanese” experience and underscores the importance of law as a mechanism through which empire, citizenship, and historical remembrance are constructed and contested.

Paper 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.

Paper 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.

Paper short abstract

This study examines how the Territory of Hawaii became a place of “liberation” for the combatants from the Korean Peninsula and Okinawa Prefecture who had been mobilized into the Japanese Imperial Army prior to and during WWII, when they were transferred there from the battleground of Okinawa.

Paper long abstract

Japanese Army combatants from the Korean Peninsula, at the time a colony of Japan, and Okinawa Prefecture who were mobilized into the Japanese Imperial Army prior to and during World War II went through a complicated process of changing their status as prisoners of war. This history has attracted increased public attention and scholarly awareness since 2015, when the Honouliuli Internment and POW Camp on the Island of Oʻahu, Hawaiʻi, was designated a national monument by the U.S. government. Recent studies have shed light on the confinement of Korean and Okinawan POWs at the camps in the Territory of Hawaii, similar to the situation of Italian POWs there. Koreans and Okinawan POWs were separated from the Japanese Imperial troops after they were captured by the Allies. The POW camps were classified by ethnic group and the POWs were treated based on ethnicity. While the treatment and transfer process of each group of POWs has been investigated, there has been little in-depth research of the holistic exploitation system of the soldiers and former soldiers (POWs) by both the Japanese Imperial Army and the U.S. Army.

In this study, the author shows the process of the mobilization of male combatants and soldiers from the Korean peninsula and Okinawa Prefecture for the Battle of Okinawa, and their subsequent “liberation” from the Army through their transfer to the Territory of Hawaii by US forces. The term “liberation” in this context means liberation from the Japanese Imperial Army, despite having to work for the US Army as POWs. Analysis of the timeline of the forced inclusion of the people from these two places in relation to the war reveals that the Territory of Hawaii became a place of “liberation” for these two groups. Although the reason for the transfer of POWs from Okinawa to Hawaiʻi at that time is still unclear, this study clarifies the pathways of Okinawans and Koreans who were exploited in two countries.

Paper short abstract

This article explores the entangled relationship between the history of print media and representative government in prewar Japan through interactive newspaper and magazine supplements (furoku); including a variety of mail-in questionnaires, ballots, and petitions.

Paper long abstract

In 1889, over a year before Japan's first ever national election, the Tokyo-based Yomiuri Newspaper circulated a mail-in "supplement" (furoku) along with its May 1st issue. In the context of highly restrictive suffrage requirements, an included postcard enabled any purchaser of the paper to cast a virtual ballot for hypothetical candidates running for office in local districts in a mock election. Yomiuri's campaign was just one of many "private elections" (shisen tōhyō) staged by newspapers throughout Japan in the buildup to the first real election to the Imperial Diet. More than a passing effect of the novelty of national elections, I argue that the history of such supplements have much to tell us about the broad relevance of high politics and political culture beyond the narrow socioeconomic stratum allowed to vote in elections and run for office. In doing so, I seek to contribute a new perspective to a growing body of scholarship investigating the mediatisation of politics in Japan from a historical perspective.

Close attention to the diachronic and synchronic contexts in which such print supplements were embedded within enables a more nuanced understanding of the entangled relationship between print capitalism and representative government. Besides ballots, mail-in supplements found in the pages of prewar newspapers and magazines also included questionnaires and petitions, and their history links up to the rise of opinion polling and market research during and after the Second World War. They circulated in a media context that encompassed ballots and sweepstakes pertaining to subjects less directly related to high politics, including popularity and beauty contests. Newspaper ballots eventually became embroiled in controversy and were targeted by the authorities in the early twentieth century. In the 1920s and 1930s, proletarian newspapers and magazines circulated questionnaires to use as the basis of petitions and included mail-in petitions to enable readers to demand changes to government. My presentation shows how the shifting challenges encountered by the enterprising promoters of "virtual" elections and print-led petition movements have much to tell us about popular and elite views of "real" elections before and after the passage of universal male suffrage in 1925.

Paper short abstract

This paper will examine how the imperial court in Kyoto interacted with Sengoku daimyo of the Miyoshi clan during the 16th century. Its main aim is to describe the form of these relationships during the reign of the Miyoshi Nagayoshi.

Paper long abstract

The first half of the 16th century in the Kinai region was marked by political instability. It was caused mainly by the succession crisis in the powerful Hosokawa clan, de facto ruling over the region. Crisis allowed Hosokawa vassals, the Miyoshi clan, to gradually gain power and eventually oust their lords out of the region in 1549. Shortly after, the Miyoshi established their own government led by Miyoshi Nagayoshi.

These political upheavals also had a deep impact on the imperial court in Kyoto. Prolonged warfare impoverished the emperor and his courtiers, forcing them to devise new strategies to ensure their survival. One such strategy was an effort to strengthen ties with samurai elites, which inevitably led to interaction with the newly ascendant Miyoshi clan. This paper examines the forms taken by the relationship between the imperial court and the Miyoshi clan, with particular emphasis on the period of Miyoshi Nagayoshi’s rule.

The analysis is based on primary sources, most notably the diary of the courtier Yamashina Tokitsugu (Tokitsugu kyōki 言継卿記) or the historic epic Hosokawa ryōkeki (細川両家記). By analysing court–Miyoshi relations, this study aims to clarify the stance adopted by the imperial court toward later hegemonic figures such as Oda Nobunaga and Toyotomi Hideyoshi, thereby situating the court’s subsequent activities within a broader historical context.

References:

AMANO, Tadayuki. Miyoshi Nagayoshi: Shonin kore o aogu koto hokuto taizan (三好長慶:諸人之を仰ぐこと北斗泰山). Minerva shobo, 2014. ISBN 978-4623070725.

BUTLER, Lee. Emperor & Aristocracy in Japan 1467–1680 – Resilience & Renewal. ‎ Harvard University Press, 2002. ISBN 978-0674008519.

IMATANI, Akira a AMANO, Tadayuki (ed.). Miyoshi Nagayoshi (三好長慶). Miyaobi shuppansha, 2013. ISBN 978-4863669024.

KANDA, Yuri (ed.). Koko made wakatta Sengoku jidai no tenno to kugeshutachi (ここまでわかった戦国時代の天皇と公家衆たち). 2.dopl. Bungaku tsushin, 2020. ISBN 978-0674008519.

WATANABE, Daimon. Nigeru kuge, kobiru kuge: Sengoku jidai no mazushii kizokutachi (逃げる公家、媚びる公家: 戦国時代の貧しい貴族たち). Kashiwa shobo, 2011. ISBN 978-4760140725.

Paper short abstract

　This presentation focuses on Japanese merchants who conducted business in Vladivostok from the late Meiji to the Taisho period. By analysing their activities after they repatriated, the presentation aims to shed light on how the economic sphere around the Sea of Japan was restructured before WW2.

Paper long abstract

　The purpose of this presentation is to elucidate how the modern economic sphere around the Sea of Japan was reorganised under the influence of social turmoil in the Russian Far East, by analysing the business activities of Japanese merchants who “repatriated” from Vladivostok in the Russian Far East during the late Taisho period.

　Whilst conventional studies of Imperial Japan have focused on population movements between regions and the colonial expansion of Japanese merchants through the lens of immigration and economic history, research centred on the dynamics of regional communities in the mainland has been relatively neglected. This study therefore attempts to illuminate the formation process of the colonial economic sphere from the perspective of regional communities in the mainland, through the activities of merchants moving within the modern Japan Sea region.

　First, focusing on merchants who maintained bases in Vladivostok until the late Taisho period but were compelled to ‘return’ to the mainland or other territories, as evidenced by documents held at the Diplomatic Archives, this study conducts a diachronic analysis of their business trends before and after ‘return’ using various quantitative and qualitative data. Next, taking the port city of Tsuruga in Fukui Prefecture on the Sea of Japan coast as a case study destination for these “withdrawn” merchants, it examines how merchants “withdrawn” to this location expanded trade with Korea and Manchuria even during the stagnation period of trade with Russia (the Soviet Union). Furthermore, it considers how the networks formed during the migration process of these “withdrawn” merchants influenced the transformation of the colonial economic sphere surrounding the Sea of Japan.

　This research re-examines the historical image of Imperial Japan by focusing on people's movements and inland regional societies from a geographical perspective.

Paper short abstract

This paper examines how Imperial Japan used state honours (orders and medals) in colonial Taiwan. From the 1895 campaign to later imperial events, awards to Taiwanese and Japanese residents shifted, revealing honours as a flexible, low-cost tool of governance.

Paper long abstract

This paper reconsiders Japanese colonial rule in Taiwan through the lens of state honours (decorations and medals). Scholarship on colonial Taiwan initially stressed ruler–ruled antagonism but later shifted towards the agency of colonised actors and varied forms of cooperation and resistance. In this trajectory, the Government-General’s Gentry Badge System (Shinshō Seido)—introduced in 1896 to secure the support of local gentry and elites—has been closely examined, including its ties to economic privileges linked to the camphor and opium monopolies. Much less attention has been paid to metropolitan state honours; unlike colonial-specific rewards, these honours signalled direct incorporation into the hierarchy of the Japanese Empire.

This paper examines the conferral of state honours on Taiwanese recipients and Japanese residents in Taiwan across three phases: the early period of “special rule”, the rise of Inner Territory Extensionism (naichi enchō shugi) from the late 1910s, and the wartime turn. I argue that metropolitan honours were deployed in Taiwan from the outset as a flexible, relatively low-cost instrument of colonial governance, and that shifts in award patterns reveal how the colonial state defined loyalty, usefulness, and imperial belonging.

The analysis begins with an exceptional episode during and immediately after the 1895 Taiwan campaign, when 23 Taiwanese civilian collaborators received special decorations—extraordinary given how restricted civilian decorations remained in Japan proper at the time. It then shows that, although rare, medals awarded to Taiwanese already appeared during the period of special rule, prior to the later rhetoric of institutional extension. From 1915 (the Taishō Enthronement), awards associated with imperial events expanded, and honouring practices increasingly accompanied major imperial occasions (for example, the Crown Prince’s visit to Taiwan in 1923).

For Japanese residents, special decorations initially concentrated on bankers but broadened from the late 1920s to include leading businessmen (notably Government-General councillors), a and from the 1940s extended—through both decorations and medals—to educators and actors in social welfare.

The paper draws on Government-General records, politicians’ papers, recipients’ diaries and biographies, and Japanese- and Taiwan-based media, and closes with brief comparisons to British India and colonial Korea.