Paper short abstract:

This paper analyzes relations between nationalist formation and development of capitalist markets in Northeast Asia. By focusing on the Japanese response to US imperialism, I will explore the role of nationalist precepts in reordering Japanese society and the Korean peninsula in economic terms of industrial capitalism

Paper long abstract:

Ideas of globalization have stifled the imagination of social scientists and anthropologists, leading many to the naïve belief that national states are declining in the face of global capital. Ironically European invention of nationalism, and its uncanny ability to naturalize the capitalist state, was not only preceded by global markets but conditioned by the emergence of the global system of industrial capitalism. Many of the forecasts of the nation-state's demise are premised on a naturalization of state power that is eerily similar to the myths nationalists used to simultaneously build states and capitalist markets in the 19th Century. This paper analyzes relations between nationalist formation and development of capitalist markets in Northeast Asia. By focusing on the Japanese response to US imperialism, I will explore the role of nationalist precepts in reordering Japanese society and the Korean peninsula in economic terms of industrial capitalism. In building a strong nationalist state and a vast colonial project throughout East Asia, Japan laid the cultural and structural basis for the modern Korean states as well as South Korea's so-called economic miracle. Through this unique colonial experience, Japanese governors imposed capitalism and the politics of nationalism on the Korean peninsula. Central to these developments were the novel ways that the Japanese state directed capital, technology, and labor in terms European ideas of race and nation.