Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2018. xiv, 347 pp. (Maps, B&W photos, illustrations.) US$55.00, cloth. ISBN 978-1-5017-3075-7.
Sayaka Chatani opens her book with a question: Why did youth in Korea and Taiwan, both colonies in the Japanese empire, volunteer for military service during the Asia-Pacific War? It might not surprise most readers that a certain section of elite-educated youth in the colonial cities, who looked to Japan as the pinnacle of modernity in Asia, might seek benefit from participating in the Japanese war effort; but what motivated large numbers of young people in the countryside to do the same? Chatani focuses on youth group organizations (seinendan) in Japan, Taiwan, and Korea to answer this seemingly simple problem.
The book is divided into three parts, the “so-called” inner territories of Okinawa and northeast Japan, the outer territories of Korean and Taiwan, and a short third part about consequences. Part 1 builds upon earlier work on seinendan, exploring the types of ideologies that the state tried to promote among youth groups, in particular nationalism and agrarianism, and how youth groups organized themselves for the betterment of local communities in general. What shines in this part is the local and microhistory case studies—what individuals wanted to gain from joining seinendan and how they appropriated activities for their own purposes. Chatani introduces the phrase “social mobility complex,” a concept woven throughout her book, referring to youth who not only used seinendan for career mobility, but also to have the emotional sense of themselves as upwardly mobile, modern youth. I like Chatani’s decision to use the word “complex” because it emphasizes the tension inherent to changing ideological messages about rural youth throughout Japan and the empire. Rural youth are at once seen as uneducated and unmodern compared to their urban counterparts, but at the same time, more hardy, closer to a “pure” Japanese identity, and harder workers. And in marginal, inner territories, youth had to face stereotypes about being from northeastern Japan or Okinawa.
Part 2, about “outer territories” of Taiwan and Korea, continues to focus on the seinendan to support several claims. First, because the seinendan were created in Japan and acted as a prism focusing the light of Japanese state and military ideology—but actually operated differently throughout Japan and in the colonies—Chatani demonstrates that nation and empire building occurred simultaneously. Thus, encouraging patriotism and identifying with the “Yamato race” was not an ideological project confined to Japan, but, unlike colonialism by Western powers, informed the assimilation activities in the colonies as well. Youth activities that emphasized self-discipline, Japanese language acquisition, martial training, and the like, gave young people in the colonies a sense of belonging to the select young people who often deemed it a privilege to conduct training in special youth corps events. Some truly felt that they belonged to an empire that was leading the good fight against Western countries. Moreover, each place had its own unique challenges—ethnic conflict was a big issue in Taiwan but not in Korea, while generational tensions were more pronounced in Korea.
Part 3 is short and introduces topics that would require further study elsewhere, namely, memory. Indeed, any one of the three parts could be its own book, which I intend as a compliment not a critique. This third section nicely rounds out the rest of the study by recounting some the author’s interviews with former seinendan members—a generation that will, sadly, no longer be alive within the next few years; one would hope that some scholar somewhere will follow up with other interviews of this generation. Through diaries, which, Chatani notes, were often essays intended for newsletter publication, we know what young people from different countries thought about each other during international seinendan conferences; for example, that Koreans and Taiwanese believed that youth groups in the colonies were purer than those in Japan, where, some felt, groups had been coopted by politicians.
Nation-Empire contributes to a number of fields and should be widely read outside of East Asian history. First, this is a much-needed study of what was occurring outside of colonial metropoles. Second, as the author notes, studying seinendan brings with it an analysis of youth as a category; and scholars of childhood, its own field of study, would benefit from this book when doing comparative projects. Third, while there are other works that address the local-global dynamic as it applies to colonialism in East Asia and elsewhere, Chatani raises the bar by adding several layers to both the local and “global” without slighting one over the other. Sometimes, however, the large swaths of otherwise interesting details lead to conclusions that might not be so surprising; for example, that the closer historians look, the more complex or “messier” things appear. Ideology and emotion are concepts invoked throughout the book but are not fully explored. Some might accuse me of playing “terminology police,” but since the subtitle of the book has “ideology” in it, and both ideology and the history of emotions are fields onto themselves with complex interdisciplinary insights from psychology, critical theory, and philosophy, it would have been nice to see some comment about how the author’s approach changes the way we think about those concepts. This is only a minor complaint and is more properly a critique of the field and how graduate students are trained. It does not take away from the landmark nature of Chatani’s contribution.
Michael Wert
Marquette University, Milwaukee