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Paper short abstract

This paper examines how chronopolitics of the Japanese Empire mobilised two competing temporalities – linear temporality flowing from past, present, to future; and teleological temporality with the future reconceiving the past and present – to legitimise its dubious claim to a harmonious empire.

Paper long abstract

In 1940, the Intelligence Bureau of the Japanese Imperial Government circulated a series of propaganda postcards. One postcard, illustrated by prolific political cartoonist Kitazawa Rakuten, depicts individuals in traditional attire—apparently of different racial, ethnic, and cultural backgrounds—happily holding hands in a circle around a Japanese man in a Western-style suit hoisting the Japanese flag. At the bottom of the flagpole is an inscription reading "Great East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere." This imagined future of a unified, harmonious, co-prosperous empire, however, stands at odds with the reality of military conquests, suppression of dissent, mobilisation of ethnic competition, systems of oppression codified in education and cultural (re)production, and exploitation of resources and labour.

How does politics intervene in time to legitimise this imagined future that is completely detached from present reality and that appears, from our present perspective, utopian? By examining various political speeches and writings from government ranks, this paper reveals two intertwined yet competing temporalities undergirding the future imaginary of the Japanese Empire. On one hand, the future as a temporal category is understood, as in many modernist accounts, in a linear fashion: it comes after the present, which is built upon experiences of the past. On the other hand, however, the future as a projection functions as a teleological end that reconstitutes the past and present as preconditions: the future imaginary of the supposedly "humane" Japanese Empire reconceives the past as the source of its legitimacy and the present as a necessary moment of struggle.

Understanding chronopolitics is not simply about identifying what kinds of futures a political project envisions; more importantly, it is about attending to how time is deployed as a political resource and thus as a form of power. The multiple temporalities undergirding the political imaginary of the Japanese Empire suggest that, through chronopolitics, time, temporal registers, and even the utopian—what Mannheim and others view as a critique of the present—become commodities wielded exclusively by power.