Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2016. vii, 365 pp. (Illustrations.). ISBN 978-0-8248-5280-1.
In the early 1970s a wave of books and articles on the essence of “Japaneseness” (Nihonjinron) swept Japan. Drunk with success from two decades of miraculous economic growth, the Japanese public enthusiastically embraced self-congratulatory theories about the uniquely homogeneous Japanese race. Works by foreign observers reaffirmed this exceptionalism, even touting postwar Japan as a model for the world, exemplified by Ezra Vogel’s bestselling Japan as Number One: Lessons for America (1979). Nihonjinron reinforced the age-old myth of a uniform society with common features, a self-sufficient, homogeneous community contained within the confines of the Japanese archipelago.
The Nihonjinron wave proved to be a fad, discredited in subsequent decades, but it highlights a crucial contrast between wartime and postwar. Those who embraced narrowly national exceptionalism had comfortably forgotten that a mere three decades prior, in the early 1940s, Japan was a sprawling, multi-ethnic empire at its zenith striving to “unite the eight corners of the world under one roof” (hakkō ichiu), and to liberate Asia from the yoke of Euro-American colonialism. Nihonjinron theories were proof that the multi-racial imperial project had been successfully effaced from postwar Japan, overtaken by the Japanese nation-state. Japan’s complex, if brief, relationship with its colonies and the intricate structures of control and differentiation were erased in this transition from empire to nation-state.
The Affect of Difference: Representations of Race in East Asian Empire is a collection of essays that aims to return these erased entanglements to the limelight. Christopher P. Hanscom and Dennis Washburn have put together a superb volume that challenges what they call “received notions of the history of Japanese imperialism” that have dominated both scholarly works and public consciousness. The book succeeds in doing so by, first, questioning the “simplistic periodization of empire or colonization as something that is over and done with,” and second, rising above “a standard nationalist account that emphasizes the role of nation building in overthrowing colonial rule” (1). Taking “affect” as the lens to analyze interactions between the colonizers and the colonized, the Japanese and their Asian subjects, the essays in the book scrutinize imperial practices that emphasized and institutionalized the differences—in appearance, language, gender, representation—to create and maintain distance between the ruler and the ruled. The affects of difference underpinned the imperial edifice that claimed to have been built (in propaganda slogans) on harmony and co-prosperity.
The greatest merit of The Affect of Difference is in the diversity of issues it addresses; that many of the topics have long been unknown to Anglophone audiences adds more value to the book’s contributions. The essays introduce an unprecedented range of previously unstudied (in English, at least) imperial practices—the use of images, words and other means to classify, signify, and subjugate the imperial subject. Each chapter deals, uniquely, with these practices in varying contexts, analyzing a different medium of interaction, reflection, and control between the Japanese colonizers and the Asian colonized—language, photography, propaganda, etc. The chapters are linked by the spread of these practices independent of geographical setting; ideas of colonial exploitation and control give the volume its conceptual unity. Persistent throughout the book is the desire to highlight, document and classify the ways in which the Japanese created and amplified the difference between imperial Self and colonial Other.
The span of regions and the range of issues covered by the volume is impressive, although this contributes to the book’s bulk (365 pages of closely set pages). Following the editors’ introduction, one finds analyses of the subordination of Ainu women’s (and men’s) lives and livelihoods to the logic of empire (chapter 2), the evolution of “race cards”—photographs of Taiwanese aborigines—as reflections of “shape-shifting” colonial subjects (chapter 3), the usage of condescending labels (yobo, in chapter 4), physical anthropology of “abject bodies” (chapter 5), and physiognomy, portraiture, and photography (chapter 6) to mark the “porous boundaries” between the Japanese and their Korean subjects. Japanese language as spoken by Taiwanese subjects serves as a marker of racial difference in the multi-ethnic empire (chapter 7), while images of walled Manchurian cities betray the empire’s desire to control and contain its subjects (chapter 8). Chapter 9 examines radio broadcasts during the war as a means of creating imagined imperial community, linking colonies with the metropole and battlefields with home front, while chapter 10 uses the medium of film to highlight the Japanese Empire’s ambition to establish its own modern, multi-ethnic cinema culture. Chapter 11 recounts the life and aspirations of a Korean author-collaborator who abandoned his Korean identity and became Japanese after the war, while chapter 12 analyzes the postwar popularity of cosmetic surgery as a means to look more “modern.” The last three essays all offer analyses of literary works: “intraracial” (Japanese to Japanese) alterity in Japanese migrant literature in South America (chapter 13), the evolution of race-awareness in twentieth-century Japan on the example of Little Black Sambo (chapter 14), and the interpretations of the influential Chinese writer Lu Xun by three Japanese authors (chapter 15).
The collection is well edited; the reader’s eye hardly ever stumbles upon a typo, and the standard of English employed is impressive. In fact, in some essays the style is so impressively verbose that it borders on impenetrable. One contributor, for example, writes about “insidious practices of differential incorporation that depended on ethnic proximity and the lure of cultural assimilation as the basis for temporality” (81–82); another, in the middle of an especially unyielding analysis of “racialized sounds,” discusses “multiple modalities of viewing processes and the unsettled, elusive nature within images and their unlocatability” (236). Confronted with such passages, this reviewer had to wonder about the book’s intended audience, and whether the editors and contributors have put it beyond the reach of the non-specialist reader. Few undergraduates will find the book accessible, putting it beyond classroom walls; while this does not diminish the value of its contributions, it surely limits its readership to a narrow group of specialists.
Its challenging prose notwithstanding, The Affect of Difference is a treasure trove of knowledge and insight about Japan’s short-lived but influential empire, whose legacies continue to haunt contemporary East Asia. It will also be interesting as a meticulous dissection of imperial/colonial relations regardless of geographical focus; scholars of European empires’ policies of differentiation and control come first to mind as a potential audience for this volume.
Sherzod Muminov
University of East Anglia, Norwich, United Kingdom