Reading Colonial Japan

Reading Colonial Japan PDF Author: Michele M Mason
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 0804781591
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 322

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Book Description
“An exceptional achievement and a truly important addition to cultural studies, Asian studies, history, and the study of colonialism/postcolonialism.” —Sabine Frühstück, Professor of Modern Japanese Cultural Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara By any measure, Japan’s modern empire was formidable. The only major non-western colonial power in the twentieth century, Japan controlled a vast area of Asia and numerous archipelagos in the Pacific Ocean. The massive extraction of resources and extensive cultural assimilation policies radically impacted the lives of millions of Asians and Micronesians, and the political, economic, and cultural ramifications of this era are still felt today. During this period, from 1869–1945, how was the Japanese imperial project understood, imagined, and lived? Reading Colonial Japan is a unique anthology that aims to deepen knowledge of Japanese colonialism(s) by providing an eclectic selection of translated Japanese primary sources and analytical essays that illuminate Japan’s many and varied colonial projects. The primary documents highlight how central cultural production and dissemination were to the colonial effort, while accentuating the myriad ways colonialism permeated every facet of life. The variety of genres explored includes legal documents, children’s literature, cookbooks, serialized comics, and literary texts by well-known authors of the time. These cultural works, produced by a broad spectrum of “ordinary” Japanese citizens (a housewife in Manchuria, settlers in Korea, manga artists and fiction writers in mainland Japan, and so on), functioned effectively to reinforce the official policies that controlled and violated the lives of the colonized throughout Japan’s empire. By making available and analyzing a wide range of sources that represent “media” during the Japanese colonial period, Reading Colonial Japan draws attention to the powerful role that language and imagination played in producing the material realities of Japanese colonialism.

Reading Colonial Japan

Reading Colonial Japan PDF Author: Michele M Mason
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 0804781591
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 322

Get Book

Book Description
“An exceptional achievement and a truly important addition to cultural studies, Asian studies, history, and the study of colonialism/postcolonialism.” —Sabine Frühstück, Professor of Modern Japanese Cultural Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara By any measure, Japan’s modern empire was formidable. The only major non-western colonial power in the twentieth century, Japan controlled a vast area of Asia and numerous archipelagos in the Pacific Ocean. The massive extraction of resources and extensive cultural assimilation policies radically impacted the lives of millions of Asians and Micronesians, and the political, economic, and cultural ramifications of this era are still felt today. During this period, from 1869–1945, how was the Japanese imperial project understood, imagined, and lived? Reading Colonial Japan is a unique anthology that aims to deepen knowledge of Japanese colonialism(s) by providing an eclectic selection of translated Japanese primary sources and analytical essays that illuminate Japan’s many and varied colonial projects. The primary documents highlight how central cultural production and dissemination were to the colonial effort, while accentuating the myriad ways colonialism permeated every facet of life. The variety of genres explored includes legal documents, children’s literature, cookbooks, serialized comics, and literary texts by well-known authors of the time. These cultural works, produced by a broad spectrum of “ordinary” Japanese citizens (a housewife in Manchuria, settlers in Korea, manga artists and fiction writers in mainland Japan, and so on), functioned effectively to reinforce the official policies that controlled and violated the lives of the colonized throughout Japan’s empire. By making available and analyzing a wide range of sources that represent “media” during the Japanese colonial period, Reading Colonial Japan draws attention to the powerful role that language and imagination played in producing the material realities of Japanese colonialism.

Colonizing Language

Colonizing Language PDF Author: Christina Yi
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231545363
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 226

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Book Description
With the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War in 1894, Japan embarked on a policy of territorial expansion that would claim Taiwan and Korea, among others. Assimilation policies led to a significant body of literature written in Japanese by colonial writers by the 1930s. After its unconditional surrender in 1945, Japan abruptly receded to a nation-state, establishing its present-day borders. Following Korea’s liberation, Korean was labeled the national language of the Korean people, and Japanese-language texts were purged from the Korean literary canon. At the same time, these texts were also excluded from the Japanese literary canon, which was reconfigured along national, rather than imperial, borders. In Colonizing Language, Christina Yi investigates how linguistic nationalism and national identity intersect in the formation of modern literary canons through an examination of Japanese-language cultural production by Korean and Japanese writers from the 1930s through the 1950s, analyzing how key texts were produced, received, and circulated during the rise and fall of the Japanese empire. She considers a range of Japanese-language writings by Korean colonial subjects published in the 1930s and early 1940s and then traces how postwar reconstructions of ethnolinguistic nationality contributed to the creation of new literary canons in Japan and Korea, with a particular focus on writers from the Korean diasporic community in Japan. Drawing upon fiction, essays, film, literary criticism, and more, Yi challenges conventional understandings of national literature by showing how Japanese language ideology shaped colonial histories and the postcolonial present in East Asia. A Center for Korean Research Book

Kannani and Document of Flames

Kannani and Document of Flames PDF Author: Katsuei Yuasa
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 9780822386971
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 208

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Book Description
This volume makes available for the first time in English two of the most important novels of Japanese colonialism: Yuasa Katsuei’s Kannani and Document of Flames. Born in Japan in 1910 and raised in Korea, Yuasa was an eyewitness to the ravages of the Japanese occupation. In both of the novels presented here, he is clearly critical of Japanese imperialism. Kannani (1934) stands alone within Japanese literature in its graphic depictions of the racism and poverty endured by the colonized Koreans. Document of Flames (1935) brings issues of class and gender into sharp focus. It tells the story of Tokiko, a divorced woman displaced from her Japanese home who finds herself forced to work as a prostitute in Korea to support herself and her child. Tokiko eventually becomes a landowner and oppressor of the Koreans she lives amongst, a transformation suggesting that the struggle against oppression often ends up replicating the structure of domination. In his introduction, Mark Driscoll provides a nuanced and engaging discussion of Yuasa’s life and work and of the cultural politics of Japanese colonialism. He describes Yuasa’s sharp turn, in the years following the publication of Kannani and Document of Flames, toward support for Japanese nationalism and the assimilation of Koreans into Japanese culture. This abrupt ideological reversal has made Yuasa’s early writing—initially censored for its anticolonialism—all the more controversial. In a masterful concluding essay, Driscoll connects these novels to larger theoretical issues, demonstrating how a deep understanding of Japanese imperialism challenges prevailing accounts of postcolonialism.

Under an Imperial Sun

Under an Imperial Sun PDF Author: Faye Yuan Kleeman
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 0824865375
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 329

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Book Description
Under an Imperial Sun examines literary, linguistic, and cultural representations of Japan's colonial South (nanpô). Building on the most recent scholarship from Japan, Taiwan, and the West, it takes a cross-cultural, multidisciplinary, comparative approach that considers the views of both colonizer and colonized as expressed in travel accounts and popular writing as well as scholarly treatments of the area's cultures and customs. Readers are introduced to the work of Japanese writers Hayashi Fumiko and Nakajima Atsushi, who spent time in the colonial South, and expatriate Nishikawa Mitsuru, who was raised and educated in Taiwan and tried to capture the essence of Taiwanese culture in his fictional and ethnographic writing. The effects of colonial language policy on the multilingual environment of Taiwan are discussed, as well as the role of language as a tool of imperialism and as a vehicle through which Japan's southern subjects expressed their identity--one that bridged Taiwanese and Japanese views of self. Struggling with these often conflicting views, Taiwanese authors, including the Nativists Yang Kui and Lü Heruo and Imperial Subject writers Zhou Jinpo and Chen Huoquan, expressed personal and societal differences in their writing. This volume looks closely at their lives and works and considers the reception of this literature--the Japanese language literature of Japan's colonies--both in Japan and in the former colonies. Finally, it asks: What do these works tell us about the specific example of cultural hybridity that arose in Japanese-occupied Taiwan and what relevance does this have to the global phenomenon of cultural hybridity viewed through a postcolonial lens?

The Japanese Colonial Empire, 1895-1945

The Japanese Colonial Empire, 1895-1945 PDF Author: Ramon Hawley Myers
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780069102228
Category : East Asia
Languages : en
Pages : 540

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Book Description


The Japanese Colonial Empire 1895-1945. Based on a Conference Sponsored by the Joint Committee on Japanese Studies of the American Council of Learned Societies and the Social Science Research Council

The Japanese Colonial Empire 1895-1945. Based on a Conference Sponsored by the Joint Committee on Japanese Studies of the American Council of Learned Societies and the Social Science Research Council PDF Author: Ramon H. Myers
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780691053981
Category : East Asia
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description


Reading Colonial Korea through Fiction

Reading Colonial Korea through Fiction PDF Author: Kim Chul
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 1498565697
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 151

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Book Description
Reading Colonial Korea through Fiction is a compilation of thirteen original essays which was first serialized in a quarterly issued by the National Institute of Korean Language, Saekukŏsaenghwal (Living our National Language Anew) in a column entitled, “Our Fiction, Our Language” between 2004 to 2007. Although the original intent of the Institute was to elucidate on important features particular to “national fiction” and the superiority of “national language,” instead Kim Chul’s astute essays offers a completely different reading of how national literature and language was constructed. Through a series of culturally nuanced readings, Kim links the formation and origins of Korean language and fiction to modernity and traces its origins to the Japanese colonial period while demonstrating in a very lucid way how colonialism constitutes modernity and how all modernity is perforce colonial, given the imperial crucibles from which modernist claims emerged. For Kim, denying this reality can only lead to violent distortions as he eschews appeals to a preexisting framework, preferring instead to ground his theoretical insights in subtle, innovative readings of texts themselves.

Manchurian Legacy

Manchurian Legacy PDF Author: Kazuko Kuramoto
Publisher: MSU Press
ISBN: 1628954302
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 260

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Book Description
Kazuko Kuramoto was born and raised in Dairen, Manchuria, in 1927, at the peak of Japanese expansionism in Asia. Dairen and the neighboring Port Arthur were important colonial outposts on the Liaotung Peninsula; the train lines established by Russia and taken over by the Japanese, ended there. When Kuramoto's grandfather arrived in Dairen as a member of the Japanese police force shortly after the end of the Russo-Japanese War in 1905, the family's belief in Japanese supremacy and its "divine" mission to "save" Asia from Western imperialists was firmly in place. As a third-generation colonist, the seventeen-year-old Kuramoto readily joined the Red Cross Nurse Corps in 1944 to aid in the war effort and in her country's sacred cause. A year later, her family listened to the emperor's radio broadcast ". . . we shall have to endure the unendurable, to suffer the insufferable." Japan surrendered unconditionally. Manchurian Legacy is the story of the family's life in Dairen, their survival as a forgotten people during the battle to reclaim Manchuria waged by Russia, Nationalist China, and Communist China, and their subsequent repatriation to a devastated Japan. Kuramoto describes a culture based on the unthinking oppression of the colonized by the colonizer. And, because Manchuria was, in essence, a Japanese frontier, her family lived a freer and more luxurious life than they would have in Japan—one relatively unscathed by the war until after the surrender. As a commentator Kuramoto explores her culture both from the inside, subjectively, and from the outside, objectively. Her memoirs describe her coming of age in a colonial society, her family's experiences in war-torn Manchuria, and her "homecoming" to Japan—where she had never been—just as Japan is engaged in its own cultural upheaval.

In Search of Our Frontier

In Search of Our Frontier PDF Author: Eiichiro Azuma
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520973070
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 368

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Book Description
In Search of Our Frontier explores the complex transnational history of Japanese immigrant settler colonialism, which linked Japanese America with Japan’s colonial empire through the exchange of migrant bodies, expansionist ideas, colonial expertise, and capital in the Asia-Pacific basin before World War II. The trajectories of Japanese transpacific migrants exemplified a prevalent national structure of thought and practice that not only functioned to shore up the backbone of Japan’s empire building but also promoted the borderless quest for Japanese overseas development. Eiichiro Azuma offers new interpretive perspectives that will allow readers to understand Japanese settler colonialism’s capacity to operate outside the aegis of the home empire.

Three-Dimensional Reading

Three-Dimensional Reading PDF Author: Angela Yiu
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 0824838025
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 282

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Book Description
A 29th-century dystopian society seen through the eyes of a mutant-cum-romantic poet; a post-impressionist landscape of orbs and cubes experienced by a wandering underdog; an imaginary sick room generated entirely from sounds reaching the ears of an invalid: These and other haunting re-presentations of time and space constitute the Japanese modernist landscape depicted in this volume of stories from the 1910s to the 1930s. The fourteen stories selected for this anthology—by both relatively unknown and “must-read” authors—experiment with a protean modernist style in the vivacious period between the nation-building Meiji and the early years of Showa. The writers capture imaginary temporal and spatial dimensions that embody forms of futuristic urban space, colonial space, utopia, dystopia, and heterotopia. Their work invites readers to abandon the conventional naturalistic approach to spatial and temporal representations and explore how the physical and empirical experience of time and space is distorted and reconfigured through the prism of modernist Japanese prose. An introduction and prefatory materials provide historical and critical context for Japanese modernism, making Three-Dimensional Reading a valuable teaching text not only for the study of modern Japanese literature, but for world literature, global modernism, and utopian studies as well. The volume also includes drawings by contemporary artist Sakaguchi Kyōhei, whose ability to create a stunning visual reality beyond the borders of time and place is a testament to the power and reverberations of the modernist imagination.