Kyoto-CSEAS Series on Asian Studies. Singapore: NUS Press, 2020. 192 pp. (Tables, B&W photos.) US$36.00, paper. ISBN 978-981-3251-06-9.
In the name of advancing “democracy” after brutal military campaigns across the Pacific (the Philippine-American War and World War II), US authorities sought to cast historical periods immediately preceding the US occupation of the Philippines and Japan as “dark” and “backward.” In the Philippines, Americans waged war against Spanish “tyranny.” In Japan, US forces attacked the fanatic “militarists” who had led the Japanese people astray. The national histories that emerged in those contexts conveniently justified the mass violence committed by the US military as necessary in a teleological march toward “democracy” under American tutelage. Critiquing such linear narratives of history rooted in notions of national progress, Takamichi Serizawa deconstructs the origins and contradictions of national histories in the Philippines and Japan to reveal the intricate links between knowledge production and imperial power in the Philippines, Japan, and the United States.
Rather than proceeding chronologically, Serizawa offers a series of snapshots of particular intellectuals, texts, and fields at particular historical moments to trace their overlapping genealogies. The opening chapter juxtaposes founding US scholars of Philippine history and Japanese history—Dean C. Worcester and Edwin Reischauer, respectively—to illustrate their parallel interpretations of the past and the present that produced and aligned with US discourses on modernization and democracy. After World War II, Serizawa argues, Japanese scholars operated within that discursive context (i.e., America’s shadow) to promote evolutionary understandings of the Japanese state and Japanese scholarship by repudiating wartime militarism and imperialism. To place Japan and the Philippines together as “‘losers’ who once fought against the US, but in defeat accepted its patronage” (33), he suggests, could open up new interpretive possibilities and political solidarities, perhaps beyond the haunting spectre of Japan’s wartime ideology of Pan-Asianism.
Writing History in America’s Shadow is especially adroit at demonstrating the underlying legacies of Orientalism and imperialism on US area studies, including Japanese studies and Southeast Asian studies. Despite their search for objective knowledge removed from politics, US historians of Japan and the Philippines, Serizawa argues, dwelled on feudal relations to explain historical evolution, all within the hegemonic discourse of modernization theory. Rather than studying the impact of US policies, they stressed the enduring and contrasting effects of feudal patron-client relations in Philippine and Japanese histories, both of which inevitably, if unevenly, fell short of a Western liberal democracy presumably epitomized by the United States. Influenced by US scholarship, and reeling from Japan’s military defeat, Japanese historians of Southeast Asia likewise pursued objective knowledge to disavow their previous role in promoting Japanese imperialism, including its potential to forge a Pan-Asian solidarity against the West.
If scholars tended to distance their own work from that of their predecessors, particularly after World War II, Serizawa raises unsettling and incisive questions on intellectual lineage. In separate chapters on Japanese historians dispatched to Taihoku Imperial University in Taiwan in the 1930s and on Japanese writers engaged in wartime propaganda, he unpacks the imperial roots of Japanese studies on the Philippines—from the adoption of Western sources and “scientific” methods to the cooptation of American developmental discourse—to expose historiographical parallels and convergences that can be difficult to recognize amid pervasive depictions pitting the United States and Japan, the West and the East. Serizawa suggests ultimately a startling “continuum” in Japan’s Pan-Asian approach to the Philippines and Southeast Asia: from a force of “civilization” backed by the Japanese empire to a junior Asian ally for “democratization” backed by US hegemony (60).
Serizawa likewise identifies many ironies and contradictions in imperial policies and national politics. The promotion of Tagalog as the national language of the Philippines, for example, had disparate origins in the 1930s, from Sakdalista appeals for popular unity against US colonial rule to Manuel Quezon’s elitist endorsement to legitimize the Philippine Commonwealth. During World War II, Japanese authorities also turned to Tagalog to “de-Americanize” the Philippines, Serizawa argues, but that policy did not displace the prominence of English in the Philippines under Japanese occupation. Japanese authorities relied on English to communicate with Filipino elites; Japanese scholars often upheld the notion of the Roman alphabet’s superiority. As a result, particularly in the wake of Japan’s wartime call for “Asia for Asians,” Serizawa suggests that language and its relationship to national independence remained a contested issue in the Philippines.
Above all else, Writing History in America’s Shadow is an astute meditation on history and politics, modest and at times disjointed in its historical scope but ambitious in its historiographical intervention. In the last chapter, Serizawa turns his attention to the surge in Japanese translations of Philippine historical texts during and after the US war in Vietnam. By probing the translators’ backgrounds and comparing their textual omissions and additions, he frames the translation projects as reflections of Japanese intellectuals’ hopes to foster “peace nationalism,” through a national past that was not permissible or redeemable in postwar Japan but perhaps accessible and viable in the Philippines. The implications for today’s historians, especially US historians, can be profound. How can we see and critique America’s expanding shadow to produce histories beyond the bounds of imperial power and national progress?
Moon-Ho Jung
University of Washington, Seattle