A Philip E. Lilienthal Book in Asian Studies. Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2017. xvii, 254 pp. (Tables, maps, illustrations.) US$34.95, paper. ISBN 978-0-520-29391-5.
In Placing Empire, Kate McDonald recreates a portrait of the prewar Japanese colonial territories of Taiwan, Korea, and Manchuria as they were depicted in tourist materials and seen and experienced by metropolitan travellers. Drawing from a range of guidebooks, tour brochures, and travel memoirs from each territory, McDonald trains her sights on the tourist industry as a lens for examining how Japanese colonial officials, colonial boosters, and imperial travellers sustained claims of legitimacy over the colonies by “domesticating, disavowing, and disappearing other claims to that same land” amidst changing attitudes towards imperialism (1). McDonald traces the contours of this “spatial politics” of the Japanese empire over five chapters spread across two parts, “The Geography of Civilization” and “The Geography of Cultural Pluralism.”
Chapter 1, “Seeing Like the Nation,” repositions the colonies as sites where imperial travellers defined what it meant to be a national subject (kokumin) as they authenticated the colonies as national territory (kokudo) by forging affective ties to nationally significant sites overseas. Schoolchildren on observational travel (shisatsu ryokō) tours to the Liaodong Peninsula, for example, emotionally recalled the sacrifices of Japanese soldiers during the harrowing battle for 203-Meter Hill during the Russo-Japanese War. Such tours were an attempt, McDonald argues, to stimulate popular support for the new territorial acquisitions and the war in general. But, in the process of stoking affective ties to colonial sites, imperial tourism contributed to the effort “to produce and reproduce a hegemonic social imaginary in which identity was territorial and difference spatial” (42).
Chapter 2, “The New Territories,” rounds out McDonald’s discussion of the “Geography of Civilization” in part 1 by shifting the focus from travellers’ accounts to tourist guidebooks, to reconstruct how colonial boosters cultivated legitimacy over the colonies “[b]y carefully curating what travelers saw” (51). In response to anxiety over the future of Japanese colonial rule, colonial officials and tourist agencies like the Japan Travel Bureau wrote the colonies into the Japanese nation by embellishing economic, historical, and nationalist linkages to the metropole, even as they wrote the colonized natives out. McDonald points out that guidebooks and tourist itineraries touted the dams, port facilities, and other infrastructural developments constructed by Japanese colonizers, emphasizing that Japanese imperialism was a circulating mission as much as it was a civilizing one (62). Tourists were directed to historical sites, meanwhile, to legitimate historical claims to Japanese rule. All the while, the increasingly invisible colonized natives were depicted as “out of place” in the progressively “Japanified” colonies (76–77).
Part 2, “The Geography of Cultural Pluralism,” starts with the premise that post-World War I ideas of self-determination and uprisings in Korea, China, and Taiwan called into question the legitimacy of Japanese rule and irrevocably reshaped Japanese colonial policy to be more inclusive of native cultures. As chapter 3, “Boundary Narratives,” outlines, however, the resulting social imaginary of Japan “as a multinational state and the Japanese people as a multiethnic nation” was always fraught with internal tensions and contradictions over the relationship between mobility and nationality (85). Even as tourist agencies promoted the free mobility of imperial travel as a privilege of the Japanese national subject, accounts by, and of, colonized natives revealed many more social and structural barriers preventing their travel, and consequently, their acceptance as Japanese nationals. Thus, “mobility came to serve as one of the axes along which travelers understood their own status as ‘citizens,’” McDonald concludes, “as well as an axis along which the boundaries of citizenship were enforced” (101).
Chapter 4, “Local Color,” details how changing attitudes towards imperialism and the growth of consumer culture in the metropole in the 1920s impacted depictions of the colonies in tourist advertising. Whereas previous tourist literature had highlighted the progress of the colonies and their imminent Japanification, thereafter, materials emphasized their exotic difference from the metropole. The native cultures of the colonies were now repackaged as selling points for travellers from the metropole seeking new forms of erotic grotesque nonsense, and often personified in the form of must-see indigenous labourers in each colony: the chige-kun in Korea, the Takasago-zoku in Taiwan, or the coolies in Manchuria (121–122). Rather than encompassing a single geography or culture, the Japanese empire was now imaged to be “a variegated space of diverse and commensurable cultural regions and a national body composed of multiple ethnic nations” (105).
Chapter 5, “Speaking Japanese,” reiterates the unevenness of the variegated space of the Japanese empire and the impossibility of colonized subjects ever fully becoming Japanese. Returning to travellers’ accounts of interactions with colonial natives, McDonald relates how linguistic skill was used to “create a new hierarchy of imperial culture that situated imperial travelers as the examiners … and colonized subjects as the examined” (159). Inability to speak proper Japanese was read as a “sign of the continued unfitness of colonized subjects for full inclusion into the nation,” even as speaking perfect Japanese “marked colonized subjects as colonial” (136, 159).
Finally, the conclusion considers the “re-placing” of the empire following defeat in World War II, when the colonies were stripped away and Japanese national territory was restricted to the four main islands. Postwar tourist campaigns likewise attempted to dismantle memories of Japan’s imperialist past as they sought to attract foreign visitors.
Placing Empire is a welcome addition to the field of the history of the Japanese empire. Not only does it introduce into English the first book-length study of Japanese colonial tourism, the book reinforces the advantages of surveying trans-colonial spaces. Rather than viewing the colonies as individual, isolated, and distant, Placing Empire delineates pan-imperial commonalities that tied the colonies to each other and to the metropole. Moreover, by stressing the symbiotic processes of colonial integration and national identity formation, McDonald amplifies recognition of the co-constitutive development of the Japanese nation-state and empire.
Tristan R. Grunow
The University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada