Children of Empire: Writing "Greater Japan" from Center and Periphery

Session Submission Type: Organized Panel

Abstract

How do empires reproduce themselves? How do children, as writing subjects, participate in broader conflicts of colonial rule and imperial subjectivity? “Children of Empire” presents three papers that grapple with the question of how children understood themselves as part of empire. Challenging the notion that children were simply blank slates upon which imperial ideologies could be inscribed, these papers explore how children gave voice to their own identities both within and in opposition to institutional frameworks that sought to mold them into ideal, imperial subjects.

The papers proposed here explore these issues from center and periphery, setting their investigations in the context of Korea, Manchuria, and Japan. Andre Haag argues that student writers in Kanagawa used compositions on “Japan-Korea harmony” (naisen yūwa) to subvert expectations, by pairing colonial triumphalism with indictments of the colonizers’ failings. On the continent, Helen J. S. Lee shows how both Korean students in Korea and the children of Japanese settlers in Manchuria struggled to articulate their own place in the empire under imperial subjectification policy (kōminka) of the 1930s. Crossing between these two territories, Kate McDonald investigates how Japanese student travelers used their travel writings to construct affective connections with colonial territory, without necessarily conforming to the expectations of the colonial authorities. Together, we argue that children should not be reduced to mere vessels of imperial ideology. Rather, the children of empire produced new ideologies and discovered new conflicts, which carried ambivalent and conflictual practices of colonial rule and imperial subjectivity into the next generation.

Area of Study

• Interarea-Border Crossing

Session Organizer

• Kate McDonald, University of California, Santa Barbara

Chair

• Kimberly Kono, Smith College

Individual Presentations

• Empire's Sincerest Propagandists: Japanese Student Essays on 'Japan-Korean Harmony' (Naisen yūwa) - Andre Haag, University of New Mexico

• Little Citizens, Big Missions: Kōminka and Imperial Children in Manchuria-Korea - Helen J. S. Lee, Yonsei University

• War, First-Hand, At a Distance: Imperial Student Travel and the Affective Map of Empire - Kate McDonald, University of California, Santa Barbara

Discussant

• Kawamura Minato, Hosei University