Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2024. US$28.00, paper. ISBN 9780824896300.
Passing, Posing, Persuasion: Cultural Production and Coloniality in Japan’s East Asian Empire brings a fresh perspective to the study of Japanese empire through the framework of performative identity. Continuing and expanding upon the important study of colonial identity under Japanese imperial assimilation policies (Leo Ching, Becoming ‘Japanese’: Colonial Taiwan and the Politics of Identity Formation, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001) and utilizing a transpacific framework to understand more broadly how ethnic minorities are “persuaded” to embody and act in service of national agendas (Takashi Fujitani, Race For Empire: Koreans as Japanese and Japanese as Americans during World War II, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), this volume gathers focused studies on the cultures and literatures of the Japanese empire at transitional moments.
The term “passing” is most familiar to scholars in North America through the extensive network of scholarly conversations centred on racial passing, pertaining to racially ambiguous individuals who choose to present as white to circumvent unequal legal and social limitations. The phenomenon of passing in the context of North America, especially in literatures about the Antebellum and Jim Crow South, points to the ambiguity that exists within racial constructs that rely on visible difference. In this collection rooted in the study of the Japanese empire, passing serves as a useful comparative framework to understand the complexities of identity under Japanese imperial ideologies that proposed the “sameness” of Asian subjects, like Koreans, Taiwanese, and Okinawans, to justify expansion in the early twentieth century. This implicit comparison with the United States shows how, similarly, fears, hopes, and anxieties around passing increased when existing perceptions of identity were destabilized amidst sweeping social and political change. Robert Tierney’s chapter on the Japanese adaptation of Shakespeare’s The Tragedy of Othello, the Moor of Venice, Osero (1903) shows how racial hierarchies from the West were borrowed, translated, and performed to serve the ideological agenda of modern Japan at the beginning of the twentieth century. Outcast groups in Japan, “new commoners” (31) at the turn of the century, were mobilized to the colonies to expand the Japanese state. Nayoung Aimee Kwon’s chapter examines the passing writings of Korean writer Kim Saryang and American writer, Langston Hughes, whose writings were written at the same time from different racialized contexts: Hughes, from the Jim Crow South, and Kim, from colonial Korea under Japan. Both Tierney’s and Kwon’s chapters illustrate how literatures and performances of passing, across the Transpacific, reveal the shifting and unstable boundaries of the nation and its conceived Others.
In applying a framework of passing more broadly to the study of Japanese empire, passing becomes more than a conversation about racial difference at the surface of the skin. As this collection of scholarly articles reveals, under the Japanese empire¾a non-Western empire¾difference was also gauged through the intersection of other metrics, like the performance of gender, class, civility, and culture. Kimberly Kono explores a novel by Murō Saisei, Koto of the Continent (1937), that features a female protagonist, a racially ambiguous woman and object of Japanese male desire, travelling from Japan to Manchuria. Kono describes how the protagonist’s civility is measured through her proximity with cultures of the Japanese metropole, illustrating myriads of other intersectional measurements¾ethnicity, class, sexuality¾that determined an “upstanding” Japanese woman. Similarly pointing to Japanese discomfort with Japan’s assimilation of foreigners, Andre Haag’s chapter explores the stories, cartoons, and news reports that reflected Japanese anxieties about the incorporation of Koreans. As Haag illustrates, paranoia around passing was propagated by the surveillance state, erupting in “mass hysteria” (82) and violence like the massacre of Koreans after the Great Kantō Earthquake in 1923. Both Kono’s and Haag’s scholarship point to Japanese unease and delusions around the infiltration of foreigners in the Japanese mainland, marked by fraught conversations around alleged passings.
Chapters by Joan E. Ericson, Faye Yuan Kleeman, and Nobuko Yamasaki consider the “posing” of the ideal Pan Asian subject through children’s literature from Taiwan and the entertainment media of actress Ri Kōran, also known as Li Xianglan. Ericson illustrates how representations of children in youth magazines presented the ideal imperial subject, both rehabilitating Japanese children living in the colonies with the normative behaviour of the imperial metropole and teaching Taiwanese children to become “civilized” through learning the Japanese language, history, and culture. Similarly, Ri Kōran, a Japanese actress who posed as a multitude of ethnoracial characters in her media and life, embodied the presentation of the desired Pan Asian woman. Kleeman illustrates how Ri was a paradigmatic shapeshifter easily adopting the languages and bodily presentation of the Chinese, Manchurian, Taiwanese, and Korean representative of fictive imperial ideology that proposed the fluid interchangeability of a transethnic Asian subject. Yamasaki’s chapter reinforces Ri’s importance as a romantic figure that lured and persuaded the audience of this utopian Pan Asian ideal but argues that her passing was fraught, and in lesser-known wartime films like China Nights (Shina no yoru, 1940), often ill received by Chinese audiences. Conversely, films like China Nights undermined the utopian ideal of racial sameness, by discouraging miscegenation in favour of racial purity.
In the last chapter of this volume, Kang Yuni (translated by Cindi Textor) poses the question of how “passing, posing, and persuasion” moves to the contemporary context and shows the importance of considering this framework in the present. While more than seven decades have passed, Kang proposes that the history of Japanese imperial assimilation discourse remains an important issue, particularly within scholarly conversations about ethnic minorities and the forced Korean adoption of Japanese names (sōshi kaimei). Kang destabilizes existing ethnonationalist judgements about identity in Japan through the examination of Zainichi writer Yu Miri’s novel The End of August (2004), a work that questions the postcolonial burdens, exemplified by sōshi kaimei, on the Zainichi community. Kang’s chapter fittingly concludes this fascinating volume, showing the potentials of continuing this research question in other contexts and complicating existing frameworks of ethnic and racial identity in East Asia.
Kimberly Chung
McGill University, Montreal