Interest in race and racism in modern East Asia has recently reached new heights and a potential climax given the flurry of academic publications on these and related topics.Footnote 1 Coming some seventy years after the demise of the Japanese colonial empire and the subsequent collapse of the Western colonial regimes in Southeast Asia, this interest is timely. More than ever before, we seem to have acquired a sufficiently distant historical perspective, alongside the political acumen, to offer a reasonable analysis, if not a judgment, of the origins, mechanisms, and repercussions of the various racial phenomena that afflicted East Asia in the modern era. Lest it be misunderstood, the topic is not completely new. It was more than three decades ago that Christopher Thorne's seminal article “Racial Aspects of the Far Eastern War of 1941–1945” and John Dower's magisterial War without Mercy called our attention to the pivotal role played by racial perceptions and hatred during the Pacific War.Footnote 2 In the ensuing decades, a thin but constant trickle of publications has further contributed a great deal to our knowledge of the prewar and postwar manifestations of race and racism in the region.Footnote 3 All in all, however, the awareness of these issues as underlying factors in modern East Asian affairs is still way behind that of Europe and North America's, where the academic attention paid to these topics has been exhaustive.
The Affect of Difference adds a novel and stimulating perspective to this rising discourse on racial constructions and racism in East Asia. It focuses on the manifestations of race and on its repercussions within the Japanese colonial empire over the course of more than a century, starting long before it was founded and ending about a decade after its collapse. Apart from a gripping introduction, the volume offers fourteen articles—the outcome of a series of workshops that were held at Dartmouth College and at the University of California between 2009 and 2013. In attempting to avoid creating another series of descriptive case studies, however, this collection of articles is highly conceptual. Editors Christopher Hanscom and Dennis Washburn, who also organized the workshops, envisioned a book that would address “the question of how representations of race and the particular affects they produce shed light on imperial formations in East Asia in the twentieth century” (p. 1). Relying on Ann Stoler's coinage, they define imperial formations as “particular relations of force that ‘harbors those mutant, rather than simply hybrid, political forms that endure beyond the formal exclusions that legislate against equal opportunity, commensurate dignities, and equal rights’” (p. 2). Furthermore, they posit, again based on Stoler, that imperial formations not only shape the organization of knowledge but also determine “what constitutes a category and which subjects are viable as sources or objects of knowledge” (p. 5). Another novel intent, at least in the East Asian context, is the focus on affect (“the moods and sentiments produced by representations of difference”) and the contention that its operations are central to state power (p. 5).
With this theoretical conceptualization in mind, the volume's fourteen chapters provide an engaging frame of reference and touch new grounds. They further offer an uncommon outlook on the subtle daily mechanisms by which representations of difference were manifested in the Japanese empire. Due to limited space, however, it is only possible to offer a brief synopsis of each chapter in the present review.
Ann-Elise Lewallen deals with a relatively unknown aspect of the Japanese (Wajin)-Ainu encounter since the eighteenth century, arguing that Ainu women constituted the intimate frontier of Japanese expansion into Ezochi (Hokkaido). In essence, her chapter describes a rather common asymmetric encounter between male colonists and native females, which took place in every overseas European colony, but it provides no testimony pertaining to specific policies applied against Ainu women. Nonetheless, its importance lies in suggesting the formation of certain antecedents and their later materialization in individual encounters with, and even in state policies against, local women in the Japanese colonial empire in Asia years later.
Paul D. Barclay, in turn, examines the early twentieth-century production of “race cards,” that is, picture postcards that feature anthropometric photographs, in Taiwan—Japan's first substantial overseas colony. Focusing on the island's aboriginal population, these cards, Barclay argues, dehumanized their subjects, and women in particular, while increasingly belying the rapid changes this population was undergoing under colonial policies.
Turning to another colony, Todd A. Henry's chapter, a republication of an earlier article in Positions, seeks to unveil the insidious everyday practices of differential incorporation that marked life in colonial Korea. In this example of “affective racism,” which tends to thrive in the presence of ethnic proximity and the potential for cultural assimilation, the article focuses on the cultural scorn (“yobo-ization”) and sense of superiority, but also anxieties, that Japanese settlers expressed toward the native population and on the latter's responses to them.
In another chapter dealing with the Japanese colonial policies in and attitudes towards Korea, Chul Kim offers a perceptive examination of the efforts to objectify the local population through the use of the recently established scientific discipline of physical anthropology, and anthropometric measurements in particular, and the Korean (“the abject's”) response to these and others objectifications.
Continuing with the theme of colonial Korea, Gyewon Kim's chapter explores the use of portraits of “ideological criminals” in the public sphere as a departure point for the construction and spread of new physiognomic ideas based on Japanese notions. Although this topic seems to hold great potential, Kim does not provide substantial evidence for the racial content of this trend. As is well known by scholars in the field, the attempt to force Japanese-language education in both Taiwan and Korea was another aspect of Japan's colonial empire.
Kate McDonald's chapter, however, shows that this supposedly assimilative policy did not include all colonial subjects, as Taiwanese aborigines were not expected to master Japanese.
Moving to Manchuria, Kari Shepherdson-Scott's chapter examines the mid-1930s Japanese touristic photographs of Mukden (present-day Shenyang) in an attempt to expose their impact on the discourse of difference and on the construction of social and political relationships in the region—all against a backdrop of the discourse of “racial harmony” in Manchukuo.
Within the mass media sphere, Ji Hee Jung offers a precursory examination of the use of affective communication through radio broadcasts with a view to evoking a sense of community throughout the Japanese empire during the last phase of the Pacific War. While harboring fascinating implications, the chapter offers scant information on the broadcasting aimed at non-Japanese listeners and especially on whether it had any affective impact on them at all, let alone a different impact than that experienced by the Japanese.
Turning to the cinematic medium, In Young Bong's chapter looks at the affect produced by representations of White Russians living in Harbin in the Japanese film Watashi no uguisu (My nightingale, 1943) while seeking to examine the formation of racial and cultural boundaries in multiethnic Manchukuo. Indeed, a close analysis of wartime Japanese films may provide some further insights into representations of race and the affect they produce, but this descriptive chapter and the single musical chosen add little in the way of depth to our understanding of this topic.
In another single case study, John Whittier Treat provides an impressive narration of the intriguing but apparently not too uncommon biographic and literary production of the pro-Japanese writer Chang Hyokchu, who was born Korean in Taegu in 1905, took Japanese citizenship after the war, and died in Japan as Noguchi Minoru in 1997.
Remaining in the realm of diasporic literature, Edward Mack's chapter analyzes three literary works written by Japanese immigrants in Brazil during the decade preceding the Pacific War. The stories and the racial implications they convey suggest that immigration to the Americas, far beyond the boundaries of the Japanese empire, was not conceived as part of that colonial endeavor but as a terminal departure from the collective in pursuit of individual ends.
Shifting the focus to the postwar and postcolonial era, Kim Brandt's captivating chapter investigates the spread of aesthetic surgery in 1950s Japan, and argues that it was the outcome of the continuing effect, and a tool, of “layered empire,” that is to say the interactions of European, American, and Japanese imperialism in East Asia. While the chapter does not probe too deeply into aesthetic preferences during the imperial period nor show the effect of Japanese imperialism in this regard, it does hint at the fragile racial confidence, and low body image in particular, that certain Japanese did not get rid of even during the zenith of their colonial enterprise, let alone after its demise.
Examining another aspect of the same era, William H. Bridges IV's chapter deals with the postwar cultural history and racial implications of the popular translation of the English children's book Little Black Sambo into Japanese.
Finally, Angela Yiu considers the representation of the leading Chinese literary figure Lu Xun in wartime and postwar Japan.
Altogether, and despite their diverse focuses on race and affect and their occasional uneven quality, the volume's constituent chapters shed new light on many racial practices of difference in the Japanese colonial empire. But does the book as a whole satisfy its intent to offer “a new perspective on the history of race and racial ideologies in modern East Asia”? Does it “challenge conventional definitions of empire by calling attention to the politics of comparison?” I would say it does, but with a few qualifications. By often focusing on the more mundane and insidious colonial practices of framing the Other and marking her or him as inferior, it broadens our knowledge of the operational mechanisms involved in the conception of race, certainly within the Japanese empire, but not necessarily in East Asia as a whole. On the other hand, the book does not seem to challenge any conventional definitions of empire, at least not explicitly. In fact, it offers no parallel view of any another modern empire or the how race operated there, nor does it question any broad theory of empire in general.
As for unveiling colonial affect in East Asia, I find the book lacking. While the chapters invariably discuss the various responses expressed by colonial subjects (and their masters) to the policies and attitudes applied toward them, they do not analyze the specificities and repercussions of the subjects’ affect (with the notable exception of Chul Kim's chapter). Throughout the book, the concept of affect remains fluid, if not obscure, and lacks a clear methodology for verifying its existence and proving its impact. Moreover, the chapters largely overlook both the vast and pioneering literature that deals with colonial impacts on the individual and on postcolonial legacies elsewhere (Franz Fanon, for example, is only mentioned briefly in a single footnote), as well as the large body of social-psychological research on the affective response to discrimination and racism, to an extent that might indeed call the use of “affect” in the title into question.
The book's subtitle, Representation of Race in East Asian Empire, warrants another comment in and of itself. It is necessary to read the book's table of contents carefully or browse through it in its entirety to find out the identity of the anonymous “East Asian Empire” mentioned on the cover, front flap, and other promotional blurbs. The aversion to using the terms “Japan” and “Japanese colonial empire” is odd and a cause for some bewilderment as to its underlying motives. The Japanese empire was neither generic nor a model for other East Asian empires. It was the only empire (rather than a branch or periphery of an external empire) in modern East Asia and the major instigator of the concept of race and racial discrimination in the region as of the late nineteenth century, and definitely after 1931. By so being and doing, it exerted a huge impact on the construction of race in East Asia and the affect that accompanied it. Indeed, would it be possible to imagine a similar book focusing on racial policies in Nazi Germany (not that the two axis empires were similar in this regard, vive la différence!), entitled Representations of Race in [a] European Empire?
These minor misgivings with the book's title and some of its unfulfilled objectives notwithstanding, The Affect of Difference does perform a great service in illuminating several new domains in which race operated in the Japanese empire. It is my hope that this volume, along with several other groundbreaking books that have been published lately, will facilitate a multilayered and less reluctant outlook on the role race played in modern East Asia and on the way its repercussions still linger to this very day.
