Japan's Colonization of Korea DISCOURSE AND POWER
Alexis Dudden
UNIVERSITY OF HAWAI'I PRESS HONOLULU
===
Contents
Acknowledgments ix
1ntroduction I
I Illegal Korea 7
2 International Terms of Engagement 27
3 The Vocabulary of Power 45
4 Voices of Dissent 74
5 Mission Legislatrice 100
Coda: A Knowledgeable Empire 131
Coda
A Knowledgeable Empire
11
The Meiji state aggrandizers' mission to declare Japan a legitimate imperialist power came at enormous expense both to Japan and the countries Japan colonized. I mention this not to encourage us now to feel sorry, as it were, for the hardships the colonizers endured. Instead, it is important to recognize that by inscribing Japan in the early-twentieth-century world as a so-called first-rank nation, the country's leaders necessarily set about remaking Japan from within in ways that meshed with the nation's policies abroad. Japan's entire national self-definition became that of an imperialist power, a power that eventually met gruesome defeat at home, at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
In the reflexive condition of modern politics, defining a nation as an imperialist power meant that certain practices circled back and forth between the country's colonies and the mainland, all displayable amidst similar practices around the world. Such policies were not mirror reflections of each other, but they were refracted and refined depending on location, budget, and personality, and also on international conditions such as war or anticolonial movements and moods. In all instances, however, colonizers exerted power by defining themselves against the colonized; while simultaneously defining the "other" as dependent, they embedded the relationship as practice and fact as it took shape. Such relationships revealed themselves within Japan as without in the various trappings of the modern state—Foucault's dispositifs—such as education, health care, religious organization, the military, telecommunications networks, museums, bureaucracy, fiscal policy, and, perhaps most tenaciously, in law courts, police, and jails. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, we may all even have come to accept this once radical notion—that the
131
132 Coda
Coda 133
colonizing power also colonized itself—as fairly common sense. If not common sense, then, at least it is a compelling idea.
There are several excellent, recent studies describing various aspects of this recursive formation of modern Japan, a formation dependent on Japan's being
a colonizing power.' One area that still deserves consideration, which dove‑
tails with this book's discussion of how Meiji statesmen described Japan as a legitimate imperialist, is the development of colonial policy studies. Such stud‑
ies were as much an element of the creation of modern Japan as the more visible components of power—the schools in which they were taught, for example—because this discipline confirmed by its logic that the Japanese knowledgeably controlled their colonies. Put differently, colonial policy studies explained to the Japanese how Japan's empire—defined as legitimate in international law—engaged with and also was upheld by the prevailing international political science of the day.
By way of conclusion, then, the pages that follow discuss the place of this new discipline and, in particular, its first imperial professor, Nitobe InazO (1862-1933). Nitobe was Japan's leading internationalist of the era, a man who remains famous (like his own hero, Woodrow Wilson), yet the colonial policy studies that Nitobe espoused taught the Japanese that colonization and empire writ large defined informed knowledge at the time.2 The discipline that he shaped for Japan became required study for young bureaucrats entering government service, as well as for Japanese subjects in general, who wished to maintain a sense of their nation's policies.3 Such studies gave authoritative, academic explanation to the international terms that defined Japan's empire, such as "protectorate" and "annexation." By the time Japan annexed Korea in 1910, colonial policy studies at Tokyo's elite universities, vocational colleges, and high schools alike taught Japanese what this action meant in the larger global context of imperialist politics. The implementation of this new knowledge fostered a common sense that Japan controlled its expanding empire in terms similar to—but not necessarily the same as—U.S. rule of the Philippines and French control of Vietnam.4 The international political atmosphere of the colonizing nations legitimated and sustained a mutually practiced science of domination.
The reason this matters now is, quite simply, that colonial policy studies makes its legacy known in our world in the contemporary form of the study of international relations. If we take seriously, then, this book's aim to offer a more complex understanding of how power functions, it is useful to conclude by examining how this historical discipline fits into the larger frame of Japan's early-twentieth-century empire, because many of its assumptions abound in our world today.
KNOWING KOREA'S PLACE
At first glance, Nitobe InazO appears only as a peripheral figure in Japan's annexation of Korea. His name does not appear in most Japanese procedural records concerning Korean colonization. Taiwan, where he is known as the "father of the sugar industry," is the remnant of Japan's once-colonized terrain where his legacy endures. As the father of colonial policy studies, however, Nitobe was, I believe, the most crucial theorist of the annexation of Korea in international terms.
Nitobe's science of "planting people"—as he defined it—would become an axiom of Japanese political thought and practice in the early decades of the twentieth century. Educated in the politics and mores of the Great Game at both its centers and peripheries, Nitobe's science of colonial policy was international in flavor. Only according to his own Japanese formulation, however, did Japan's colonies even enter into this supposedly international theory.5 As his nation's preeminent specialist, Nitobe explained colonial politics writ large by calculating Japan's control of regions such as Hokkaido, Taiwan, Korea, and Manchuria into his explanations of Japan's place in the international world, in addition to examples of U.S. and British experience. By considering colonies as a component of international political thought, Nitobe introduced into Japan a new form of knowledge about the country's imperialist expansion as well as a new way of discussing the world.
As a young man in the early Meiji era, Nitobe resolved to thrust Japan into competition as an internationally recognized civilized nation, which for him meant a nation in full possession of colonial territories, itself uncolonizable by any other power. In the mid-1880s, during his graduate-school days at Johns Hopkins, Nitobe studied international politics under the famous Herbert Baxter Adams and became enthralled with the so-called civilizing mis‑
sions of self-defined enlightened societies. As a result, he determined to locate Japan as such a society within the world.6 In 1885, he wrote to a friend in
Japan's northern outpost of Sapporo that he would dedicate his life to transforming their nation, beginning with its educational practices, much as his hero Thomas Arnold, the great educator of colonial functionaries, had in England: "Can't I be a doctor Arnold of Sapporo? ... It is, indeed, my earnest desire and sincere prayer."7
11
134 Coda
Coda 135
Nitobe delighted in Japan's colonial acquisitions, and throughout his life he explained to students, politicians, and general reading audiences alike that
a nation's positive control of colonial territory defined enlightened international political theory. His outlook was above all patriotic: "I recently saw an article in which a writer said that a certain person is an internationalist and that another is a nationalist. I wish I could see such a distinction clearly.
A good internationalist must be a good nationalist and vice versa. The very terms connote it." 8 For Nitobe, quite simply, Japan's budding existence as
an imperialist power defined its politics as part of the greater—and morally good—international practice. As his students at the University of Tokyo later remembered, for example, he began each lecture of his colonial policy course in the 1910s by writing the following mantra on the blackboard: "Coloniza‑
tion is the spread of civilization" ).9
As efforts were under way to establish for Nitobe the inaugural lectureship in colonial policy studies in the law school at the University of Tokyo, in the autumn of 1906 he traveled for the first and only time to Korea. It is likely that Nitobe's view of Japan's recently won protectorate was colored by the applied colonial arts he had studied and taught at the Sapporo Agricultural School in Hokkaido, coupled with his studies of international political theory in the United States and Germany and courses in Kyoto.'° In short, Nitobe knew the Koreans before he actually saw them. Following the internationally accredited theories of the day, Nitobe saw that the Koreans awaited their Japanese colonizers to inscribe them in progressive history." For example, Nitobe's journal entries from October and November 1906, "Thoughts on a Dying Country" and "Withering Korea' confirmed and simultaneously compounded the international order in which he had come to have full faith.12 Nitobe's description of Korean laborers sounded like descriptions of Korea made by American travel diarist Isabella Bird Bishop, or the Korea of Yale political scientist and Japan enthusiast George Trumbull Ladd, or the Korea of progressive journalist George Kennan (the elder): "They have absolutely no will to work. The men squat in their white clothes smoking on their long pipes and dream of the past, never thinking of the present nor hoping for the future."3 The trope of the "squatting" and "slothful" native meshed neatly into the prevalent international discourse with which Nitobe identified, one that upheld progress and vigor as the criteria that determined national survival. Nitobe's travels in Korea's southwestern Chólla region propelled him further to name his surroundings "Arcadian' and he judged that the Korean farmers he saw were "not of the twentieth century, nor [were] they of the tenth nor even the first. They [were] a people who predated history."4 The soon-to-be fully colonized
Korean remained in a stagnant limbo, or, as Nitobe described them, clutching their "dead traditions [in a county] soon to be governed by death?"
For Nitobe, the great narrator of Japan's imperialist expansion, the official annexation of Korea in 1910 granted Japan's legitimate entry into the society of nations, the foothold he had been striving for since he first studied international political theory at Johns Hopkins. Throughout the international arena at the time, national aggrandizers described their respective countries' colonial acquisitions as faits accomplis. They defined these spaces and the inhabitants within them as the objects of national missions, sidestepping the messy issue of how these territories became newly shaded colors on world maps. In September 1910, several weeks after the annexation, as principal of the First Higher School in Tokyo—the University of Tokyo's feeder academy —Nitobe addressed the students at the opening assembly of the fall term:
This past August was full of things that will be difficult for me to forget. . . . For example, the terrible floods throughout the country caused damages exceeding 30 million yen.... Another unforgettable event was the annexation of Korea. Such an occurrence takes place only once in a lifetime. Overnight, our country became bigger than Germany, France, and Spain. Many people will comment and make speeches, [but no matter how you look at it] all of a sudden we grew by ten million peo-ple.16
Smoothly incorporating Korea's population into Japan's numbers, Nitobe continued his speech with an image of concentric circles, which later in the 1930s became popular in Pan-Asianist Co-Prosperity Sphere propaganda illustrating the expanding dimensions of the nation:
If one were to draw a circle with a radius of about 180 ri centered on the Noto peninsula at Hokutan point and include Hokkaido, Kyushu, and Korea inside the circle, it would extend right to the border at the Tumen River. If the circle's radius were increased to 320 ri and its center were shifted to 40 degrees north latitude and 135 degrees east longitude, southern Manchuria and the Liaotung peninsula would fit inside, and the circle would extend right to 50 degrees north latitude in Karafuto. And if the circle's radius were increased to 380 ri and its center moved just a little, naturally Harbin would fit inside as would Chichihar in northern Manchuria.17
In a few short phrases of his speech, Nitobe's description of Japan's annexation of Korea brought into relief the grammar of colonizing politics. He nat‑
Image
136 Coda
uralized decades of land grabs, rapes, forced abdications, and other features of colonization into a statement of politics as usual. Nitobe explained that, "Although our nation has not had any thought of invading foreign countries, the reality is that we have become much larger. In fact, the first circle is already an actuality."8 In this innocuous formula—as common to colonizing discourse at the time as it is to a large share of international relations theory today—the annexation of Korea happened without human involvement, but "we" (the Japanese) accrued new meaning in the ranks of the imperializing nations as a result.
In short, Nitobe described to the country's future leaders what he envisioned as Japan's logical and legitimate imperial development. After all, by the
time Japan annexed Korea, the international arena had recognized Japan's "special interests" in Manchuria for several years, so thinking northward occurred naturally in his aggrandizing spheres. He emphasized the students' new status to them:
Our nation has become more of a Great Power than many European countries, and you all [the students] have also become much more important. Japan of a month ago and Japan of today are completely different.19
Nitobe never dreamed that his concentric circles would ever be valued as anything but the outgrowth of enlightened political science.
Shortly after the annexation, in 1911 Nitobe published his inaugural statement as Japan's intellectual authority on colonial policy with an essay entitled, "On the Term 'Colony."20 In Nitobe's estimation, Japan practiced international politics fluently, along with other colonizing nations, but still hesitated from fully declaring itself as such a power. In his understanding, by officially designating what Nitobe viewed as the correct rendering of the term "colony' Japan would make the necessary international declaration. He embraced as native practice concepts that had been, until recently, alien, taking special care to make Japanese usage of these concepts discrete from the Chinese. "So that there wouldn't be any doubt about whether this European word. . . had first been translated into Chinese [or Japanese]' he wrote, "I consulted many French-Chinese and English-Chinese dictionaries. The Chinese language lacked 'colony' as a meaningful term until very recently [and it] is not yet commonly used in our neighboring country.112'
At the beginning of the twentieth century, the European term "colony" and the concept it described were still new in the kanji that were common
Coda 137
throughout Asia. Nitobe's insistence that the Chinese did not understand a term that the Japanese now defined for the kanji-literate world at once placed Japan above China within that sphere and linked Japan to the imperializing nations whose society Nitobe sought. Throughout Japan, Nitobe maintained, people were familiar with the "idea of colonization." "As our countrymen continue to think about the word' he explained, "they become more enlightened about the concept of colonial enterprise. These days national prestige and national strength depend on overseas expansion, and the idea of colonization has reached our nation's people?122
Significantly, Nitobe used his essay to urge the Japanese government to adopt the rendering of the term "colony" that he believed best expressed its meaning in European languages:
The word "colony" first reached our countrymen's ears from the English and the Dutch. . . . The Doeff-Haruma Japanese-Dutch Glossary was published between 1855 and 1858, and I have looked up the word in this dictionary and have found no Japanese translation for the Dutch "zie Volkplanting." Isn't it odd that the Japanese scholars helping Doeff could not come up with the term "shokumin" [planting people]? Did they lack sufficient knowledge? Did they simply avoid it. . . because it was a word that had not been used before? . . . Beginning in 1862, the word "colony" appeared in Hori Tatsunosuke's English-Japanese Dictio-nary.23
Two phonetically identical variants of "colony" (shokumin) existed—"to plant people" (I) and "to increase people" ()—and, as its chief policy promoter, Nitobe encouraged his government to select "planting people" as the standardized term:
Regardless of its general use, however, the characters shokumin (Ms) are used in the vernacular but not yet officially... [Whenever] names of places like Korea, Taiwan or Karafuto are mentioned . . . they are referred to as "new additions to the empire?' Does it suffice to name these newly occupied territories with old expressions? Wouldn't it be better to use the new term—shokuminchi (1)?24
Nitobe argued that "planting people" captured the contemporary European meaning and better translated Japanese policy abroad, defining the arena in which he hoped Japanese imperialist expansion would be understood: that of European languages. Form mattered, and now that Japan was a legitimate
138 Coda
Coda 139
imperialist Nitobe wanted his nation to use the version of terms that made the most international sense.
THE COLONY AS VOCATION
At the outset of the twentieth century, Japan's internationally minded policy-makers also realized that there was a need to teach the colonies, as it were, to students who would serve as functionaries there. In 1898, at a meeting of the recently established Taiwan Society in Tokyo, the society's president and former Governor General of Taiwan Katsura TarO discussed the importance of language training for dealings with Japan's newly acquired colony. 25Members began at once to raise funds for a school attached to the society, but two years later one member spoke to a society gathering at the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo and lamented that both "government officials and people in general are [still] lacking in colonial knowledge.
"26 He delineated concrete plans for a "colonial school" and proposed a curriculum of specialized language study (Chinese and Taiwanese dialects, English) Russian, and Korean), politics, economics, diplomatic history, colonial history, and law.
On 15 September 1900, one hundred high-school-aged students gathered in Tokyo's Fujimicho, and Katsura presided over the opening ceremony of the Taiwan Society School. Classes began two days later. The faculty included Ume KenjirO, whose courses at the school helped earn his 1906 appointment to Korea, where he spent four years rewriting the civil codes under ItO Hiro-bumi.27 And the University of Tokyo's famous war-boosting economist Kanai Noboru taught accounting and finance to future colonial bureaucrats and businessmen.28
Five years later, and shortly after the Japanese government declared Korea its protectorate, Katsura TarO conferred with Nitobe InazO and GotO Shinpei and recognized the expansive directions the Japanese empire was taking. He decided to rename his Taiwan Society the Oriental Society. In a speech to society members including Nitobe and Goto, as well as Ito Hirobumi, Terauchi Masatake, and Hara Kei (all current or future rulers of Japan's Korea), Katsura also asserted that the newly named Oriental Society would also include the Oriental Society Technical School. Several years later, however, its board members changed the name again, this time to Takushoku University (literally, Colonial Development University), and this name held when Nitobe taught there in the teens, and it holds to this day. 29
At the time of renaming the society and school "Oriental' the society counted 1,855 members and had established branch offices in Osaka, Nagoya, Kobe, and Kyoto. The school enrolled 264 students in 1905, by which time 220 had already graduated.'° Noticeably, therefore, and concurrent with GotO Shinpei's efforts to establish Nitobe's lectureship at the University of Tokyo for the nation's elite, GotO and other board members of the Oriental Society stressed the need for separate training for future colonial functionaries. A month after Katsura renamed the organization, GotO summarized the significance of the school's graduates in the future Japanese empire. He proclaimed, "By the time our students graduate, they are able to converse well in the [necessary] languages, and they also know how to write well with a typewriter. They will have no difficulties taking charge of a trading company.113' Whatever his ultimate motivation, GotO's assertion about the connection between knowing something about the colonies and securing future employment indicated that working in the colonies was increasingly an accepted and integrated part of late Meiji society. Demonstrating some mastery of a skill needed to help the colonies function would enhance nonelite students' opportunities as well.32
In the spring of 1907, Katsura met with ItO to discuss opening a branch school in Seoul. Japan's Resident General of Korea provided a building and a little over half an acre of land to open the school, which received its first students on October 1 of that year. Classes and baseball practice started right away. Administrators in Tokyo designed the school in Seoul as a year-abroad program for third-year high school students who elected to concentrate on Korea as their special knowledge. The coursework reflected the Tokyo-approved curriculum—commercial law, public and private law, public finance, international law, and bookkeeping. Hiring Japanese scholars and specialists already in Seoul, the school also featured a class in Korean affairs and intensive Korean language. At the opening ceremony, Kadota Masanori, one of the Oriental Society's founding members, compared the students to the bakumatsu-era "men of purpose/men of action" (the shishi) who had toppled the former Tokugawa regime to found the Meiji state: "You, who come from Tokyo, cannot attain a thorough knowledge of Korean affairs or of the Korean language on your own—let alone the customs here or racial harmony. Together, in accord and without antagonism, you will become men of action in administration and business. Whether you are involved in public or private affairs is irrelevant." 33
The Oriental Society's branch school in Seoul opened around the same time that the Japanese colonial regime secured the abdication of the Korean
140 Coda
Coda 141
emperor and sealed an agreement with Korean officials granting Japanese control over Korea's internal legal affairs. These events were not causally linked. Plans for the school began before the colonial government realized its opportunity for further control. Nonetheless, the construction of the school in Seoul meaningfully conjoined with Japan's expansion. When Katsura arrived in late October 1907 to inspect the school, he brought a contribution from the future TaishO emperor, conveying the Japanese imperial household's appreciation of the school and also of the Oriental Society's purpose in institutionalizing colonizing knowledge on broader levels.
"MISSION OF INTERPRETATION FOR HIS COUNTRY"
Although much of the historiography about Nitobe absolves him of involvement in Japan's push into northern China, in 1932 Japan's great internation‑
alist offered a reasoned defense of Japan's invasion of Manchuria. During the summer after Japan's takeover of various cities and regions there, Nitobe traveled across the United States to explain Japan's actions, justifying them to widespread American audiences in CBS radio broadcasts.14 It is useful here to close our discussion by considering Nitobe's mission to the United States in 1932 as an awkward but complementary counterpart to the Korean mission to The Hague in 1907. Nitobe, too, discovered that he told an "unthinkable story" to his listeners, yet he, like the Koreans, argued that his "story" was legitimate.
Repeatedly claiming to speak on behalf of "thinking" Japan—or, as he often identified himself, as one of Japan's "practical minds"—the terms with which Nitobe expressed the legitimacy of his nation's military and political actions in Manchuria resonated with theories and policies he had advocated throughout his life. Different from his previous tours of the United States, however, former colleagues and acquaintances viewed this final visit with suspicion and mistrust. Nitobe died the following year. Several years after his death, his wife Mary recalled that "those were, indeed, dark days for Japan and for us personally, when my husband and I set forth in 1932 on his mission of interpretation for his country. America was hostile in thought—even friends there often did not understand. Many thought that he had come as a propagandist and protagonist for what he could not endorse—a part that Nitobe never did and never would play."35 A constant companion to her husband throughout his (and their) career, Mary Nitobe campaigned against the rumor that, as punishment for remarks that Nitobe made about the militarists in Tokyo, army generals forced the old man to travel to the United States against his will to defend Japan's image. On the contrary, his radio addresses, the lectures he delivered throughout the following autumn at the University of California, and his wife's posthumous defense suggest that Nitobe did not capitulate to anyone's desires but his own. Coupled with his wife's vindication, his resolve indicates that Nitobe traveled to the United States to explain how Japan's invasion of Manchuria accorded to international terms.
In his first nationwide broadcast across the United States, on 8 May 1932, Nitobe explained to American listeners that he was "afraid the League was not aware that China does not or cannot function as a sovereign state, in the modern sense of the term."36 The United States, of course, had never joined the League of Nations, so Nitobe could invite listening Americans to join him in understanding what League members failed to grasp without thinking he would be heard as anti-American. He challenged the international organization's condemnation of Japan, allowing that the state of affairs had become clouded "due partly to the emotional aspect it assumed, and partly to the insufficiency of knowledge concerning the actual situation in the Far East.,) 37
Declaring absurd the League's decision to criticize Japan, Nitobe elaborated on what he viewed as the informed legal principle in question. By 1932, the world's colonial powers—the United States very much included—had for several decades maintained special privileges, treaty ports, and spheres of influences throughout China. Nitobe did not delve into sticky questions of how foreign special interests interfered in China, but instead focused on the question of China's domestic turmoil. He explained, "The so-called national government, which is represented in Geneva, is the government at Nanking. which exercises control over a very small part of the geographical area known as China. Within that area are several states, independent of the Nanking government. The European or South American states-members of the League are not fully aware of this anomalous condition. They have little practical dealing with China. Not so with us. We have suffered from this situation for years." 38
Shortly thereafter, and a month before Emperor Hirohito sanctioned Pu Yi as the "Last Emperor" of China when he ascended the throne in Manchuria under Japan's watchful gaze, Nitobe made remarks that echoed Ito Hirobumi's words from twenty-five years earlier concerning Korea. Nitobe described Manchuria as the perfected object of decades of Japan's careful concern, explaining that "the salvation of China lies in her co-operation with Japan. Japan's future is bound up with that of China. It is Manchuria that links the two peoples together'39 He argued that the bond between Japan and Manchu‑
142 Coda
Coda 143
na followed the standard political practice around the world, and he chose a particularly germane comparison to underscore his point to American listeners. "That Manchukuo was established with the help of Japan, no one denies' Nitobe explained. "It is common experience of new countries to be founded with the help of others. The example of Panama is far too recent to be for-gotten?'40 Nitobe argued further that "Roosevelt's far-seeing statesmanship favored Japanese expansion in Manchuria' recalling the 1905 agreement that America's former president had brokered to justify his claim.4' Also, the recent Lansing-Ishii Agreement (1917) guaranteed anew Japan's "special interests" in Manchuria because of Japan's proximity to the region, while assuring the United States of Japan's continuing support for America's "Open Door" policies.
Because nearby Manchuria was defined as Japan's "special interest' Nitobe ultimately challenged U.S. Secretary of State Henry Stimson's decision to urge the League to condemn Japan. Quoting John Bassett Moore, Nicholas Murray Butler, and William Shakespeare to justify Japan's actions, he abstracted his reasoning to a higher plane:
Let us not look at Manchuria as merely a law case.. . . Lawyers may find to their satisfaction for their logic and idealists for their conscience, by adhering to the new interpretation of the Pact; but such intellectual satisfaction means the loss of millions of lives and hastens the disintegration of the mighty and venerable civilization which we call China.... In the name of humanity, then, let us exercise a little patience, study the Pact, implement it, make it practical and applicable to the realities—so that the new dispensation may bring lasting peace to the Far East and to the whole world.42
Just before returning to Japan, Nitobe delivered a final lecture—an "unthinkable story" to an unwelcoming audience in California—in which he tried to distinguish Japan's actions from the negative spin ascribed to them by American politicians and opinion makers.43 "Because of unfortunate warlike developments in Manchuria," he said, "Japan's economic penetration there has been dubbed by the opprobrious term of imperialistic invasion. The latter term has another unsavory association.. . . This idea is very far removed from Japan's present position in Manchuria. " 44
In short, Nitobe described Japan's occupation of Manchuria in line with beliefs he had held throughout his career: the Japanese empire extended rationally, in accordance with the flow of civilization. He remained blind to the violence that attended this flow, arguably because its methods meshed with the international politics of planting people. Although Nitobe's appeals fell on deaf ears, on a different level his remarks evoked George Trumbull Ladd's 1908 counter to anyone who challenged Japan's designation of Korea as its protectorate, when Ladd urged upholding Japan's questionably secured agreement for the larger cause of "the peace of the world?14' For Ladd, "the peace of the world" justified forged seals and overthrown emperors, and for Nitobe, "peace . . . to the whole world" sustained his faith in Japan's offer of "salvation" to China.
Throughout the twentieth century, however, "practical minds" such as Ladd and Nitobe and their inheritors continued to mollify takeover, exploitation, and genocide with international terms such as "peace" and, increasingly, "security." As if in judgment of the use of these terms, and also of the entire century, social critic Norma Field described "fiftieth-anniversary-end-of-the-war" 1995 Tokyo by writing, "Peace, peace, peace, peace, peace. The word has been beaten senseless from overuse?'46
CLOSING NOTES
The historiographic tendency to uphold men such as Nitobe InazO—and Ito Hirobumi for that matter—in a separate chamber of history from Japan's acknowledged, imperialist Pan-Asianists of the 1930s has fostered rather deterministic distinctions between the political creation of Japan's colonies and the repression that occurred in them. Nitobe's and ItO's followers demanded faith in their reasoning, for example, that no blurring of lines existed between Japan's carving out of empire and its knowledgeable control of totalitarian policies and practices.47
It has, however, never been more important to understand how rendering Japan's early twentieth century so conceptually discrete from developments in the 1930s and 1940s thwarts our attempts to internationalize the history of Japanese imperialism.48 The legal and epistemological reach of Japan's colonizing practices with reference to the nation's early colonies, then, affords a critical way in to the problem and continues to need more analysis.
Seen differently, Nitobe guided the early Japanese empire in a manner similar, for example, to how America's architect of containment theory, George Kennan (the younger), structured the foundation of the Cold War. In the second half of the twentieth century, the United States and the former Soviet Union might have brought us to the verge of global destruction all the same,
144 Coda
Coda 145
but Kennan's 1946 articulation of containment theory continued to give meaning to the dangerous confrontation throughout the era.49 In the first half of the twentieth century, Japan, China, Russia, England, and the United States likely would have vied over the territories that brought them to the wars they fought, but Nitobe defined Japan's imperialist expansion as informed political practice at its outset. ItO Hirobumi similarly expounded the legitimacy of the empire that he contracted into being in international terms.
In light of Japan's now recognized infamous practice of sexual slavery, for example, historian Yoshimi Yoshiaki has focused on the legal treaties Japan signed during the first few decades of the twentieth century concerning its colonized peoples. According to Yoshimi, the Japanese government not only organized a system of sexual slavery for its military and civilian personnel throughout the empire during the Asia-Pacific War, it made every effort to guarantee that the enslavement of the women was legally ensconced in international law. In keeping with the country's late-nineteenth-century commitment to engage in international law, in 1904, in 1910, and, most important, in 1921, Japan signed the "International Arrangement and Conventions for the Suppression of Traffic in Women and Children." Although there were possibly more exceptions than the rule, these laws specifically forbade the forcible selling of women and children as prostitutes.
In drastic contrast to the humanitarian ideals these agreements encoded, however, these same laws contained clauses that permitted signatory nations to exempt their respective colonial territories from jurisdiction. Clause eleven of the 1910 Agreement and clause fourteen of the 1921 Agreement—"giant loopholes' as Yoshimi calls them—subsequently enabled the Japanese government's hired representatives to force women and girls throughout the empire's exempted colonies into sexual service without breaking the law at the time.50 Just as the international laws of colonization were not broken in 1910 when Japan erased Korea from the world map of nations, the international laws of trafficking certain human beings were not broken when Japanese "recruited" Koreans, Taiwanese, Chinese, Manchukuoans, South Sea Islanders, Indonesians, Malays, Filipinas, Singaporeans, and Burmese. Colonized bodies, defined as such in international law and upheld as such in knowledgeable political science at the time, were less than human.
There remains, then, a very real issue involved with this living element of Japan's former empire, as supporters of the former sex slaves and the women themselves today bring their claims before the United Nations to seek redress from the government of Japan. Yoshimi has suggested that should this case be tried in an international court and encounter difficulties with such "loopholes' it might be possible to demonstrate with other laws or with technical infringements that Japan violated another international code at the time.5' The recently instituted understanding of rape as a war crime in international law might also suffice to declare the comfort stations illegal and the Japanese government guilty of having operated them.52 The problem arises, however, with how such legal judgments would confront the writing of history during a time when precisely the opposite conditions prevailed, when a different story was "thinkable."
As mentioned at the beginning of the book, many thoughtful Korean historians and their colleagues in Japan and elsewhere argue that the legal arrangements providing for Japan's annexation of Korea in 1910 were forged and forced and, therefore, invalid; thus, they say, the whole colonial period should be described in similar terms. By extension, in effect they are urging a definition of the past itself as illegal. Unfortunately, the position such scholars have taken derives from the same frustrations Yoshimi faces. Simply put, the standard parameters for describing Japan's empire—the predominant historical apologisms—continue to constrain the possibility of going beyond ex post facto reasoning that depends on having to find yet another document to demonstrate the already wretched reality.
In the wake of the First World War, historian Sidney Fay noticed the tremendous and instant power held by national narrative in enshrining good and evil as historical truth. Fay countered what he perceived as his fellow Americans' facile jubilation over having been on the conquering side of the war "to save civilization'
' apart from what were described as the wholly evil and guilty Germans. Fay was a respected professor in the less-than-radical Smith and then Harvard history departments. He found repugnant the Versailles Treaty's formula of condemning one nation with having lone responsibility for a multiple-sided, banal willingness to slaughter millions of people. As he dryly phrased it, "the present writer ['s] ... historical sense told him that in this present case, as in the past, no one country or no one man was solely, or probably even mainly, to blame."" But in national history the politics of blame and exculpation—that is, guilty or not guilty reasoning—for the wars that resulted from expanding empires or the empires that resulted from rapacious wars only intensified as the twentieth century ran its course. Fay's challenge to muddy narrations of good and evil in warfare remained marginal-ized—to the extent that in 1995, intelligent newspapers such as the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal ridiculed Gar Alperovitz's attempts to corn‑
146 Coda
plicate the history of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Thus, national narratives of good and evil are increasingly hardening their forms now, during renewed wars of "good" versus "evil."54
With those blind to the history of Japanese troops' massacre of hundreds of thousands of Chinese in Nanking in 1937 at the forefront, in recounting Japan's twentieth century, there are those who flatly deny that the Japanese people perpetrated the acts that archival evidence proves they or their parents did. In apologizing for the past, there are also scholars who do not, however, deny that Japan had an empire, but instead, they continue to explain away the horrors perpetrated in the colonies by describing the details of Japan's overseas acquisitions in so-called rational terms. With over half- a- century's remove from the collapse of Japan's territorial empire, however, the two methods now uncannily work in tandem to complement each other in vindicating history by compensating for the past. As the century rotates, the denier apologists commit violence by swallowing new evidence as fabrication or rewriting it to suit their mythmaking, while the commonsense apologists feed the larger alibi by quantifying colonial brutality into production charts and "thinkable" stories.
Wotes
INTRODUCTION
1. Hilary Conroy, The Japanese Seizure ofKorea, 1868-1910:A Study ofRealism and Idealism in International Relations (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1960); Peter Duus, The Abacus and the Sword: The Japanese Penetration of Korea, 1895-1910 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1995); Yamabe Kentarö, Nikkan Heigo Koshi (1966; reprint, Tokyo: Iwanami Shinsho) 1995); Mori-yama Shigenori,Nikkan Heigo (Tokyo: Yoshikawa Kokubunkan, 1992). A critical exception to the "Western normativity" problem remains E. H. Norman's undervalued article, "The Genyosha: A Study in the Origins of Japanese Imperialism' Pacific Affairs 17, no. 3 (1944): 261-284.
2. Although Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri's acclaimed new study of empire points to inherent hierarchies entrenched in the European history of sovereignty and imperial debate, it, too, fails to offer a historical entry for the non-West as active participant in the origins of globalism. Hardt and Negri, Empire (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2000). Also, see Patrick Wolfe's otherwise substantial review essay, "History and Imperialism: A Century of Theory, from Marx to Postcolonialism' which unhesitatingly acknowledges in the second footnote that "for reasons of space, Japanese imperialism will not be discussed" (Wolfe, American Historical Review 102, no. 2 [1997]: 388-420).
CHAPTER I ILLEGAL KOREA
1. In 1993, Professor Kim Ki-Seok of Seoul National University, while conducting research in Columbia University's Rare Book and Manuscript Collection, unearthed a 1906 letter written by Kojong, the emperor of Korea. In the letter, the emperor regis‑
Image
147
No comments:
Post a Comment