French Journal of Japanese Studies, 4 | 2015, « Japan and Colonization » [En Ligne], Mis En Ligne Le 01 Janvier 2015, Consulté Le 08 Juillet 2021
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Cipango - French Journal of Japanese Studies English Selection 4 | 2015 Japan and Colonization Édition électronique URL : https://journals.openedition.org/cjs/949 DOI : 10.4000/cjs.949 ISSN : 2268-1744 Éditeur INALCO Référence électronique Cipango - French Journal of Japanese Studies, 4 | 2015, « Japan and Colonization » [En ligne], mis en ligne le 01 janvier 2015, consulté le 08 juillet 2021. URL : https://journals.openedition.org/cjs/949 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/cjs.949 Ce document a été généré automatiquement le 8 juillet 2021. Cipango - French Journal of Japanese Studies is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. 1 SOMMAIRE Introduction Arnaud Nanta and Laurent Nespoulous Manchuria and the “Far Eastern Question”, 1880‑1910 Michel Vié The Beginnings of Japan’s Economic Hold over Colonial Korea, 1900-1919 Alexandre Roy Criticising Colonialism in pre‑1945 Japan Pierre‑François Souyri The History Textbook Controversy in Japan and South Korea Samuel Guex Imperialist vs Rogue. Japan, North Korea and the Colonial Issue since 1945 Adrien Carbonnet Cipango - French Journal of Japanese Studies, 4 | 2015 2 Introduction Arnaud Nanta and Laurent Nespoulous 1 Over one hundred years have now passed since the Kingdom of Korea was annexed by Japan in 1910. It was inevitable, then, that 2010 would be an important year for scholarship on the Japanese colonisation of Korea. In response to this momentous anniversary, Cipango – Cahiers d’études japonaises launched a call for papers on the subject of Japan’s colonial past in the spring of 2009. 2 Why colonisation in general and not specifically relating to Korea? Because it seemed logical to the journal’s editors that Korea would be the focus of increased attention from specialists of East Asia, at the risk of potentially forgetting the longer—and more obscure—timeline of the colonisation process. Indeed, the annexation of Korea was preceded not only by that of Taiwan, but also by a growing Japanese presence in Manchuria as of 1904. This is in addition to Japan having established a position of dominance in Korea as of 1876. Moreover, while the fall of Japan’s colonial empire coincided with the defeat of 1945—for Japan, decolonisation went hand in hand with military defeat—current events are a reminder that to this day, and perhaps more than ever, the country’s colonial past continues to poison relations between modern-day nations. Focusing solely on Korea under colonial rule thus seemed overly restrictive and it was decided to widen the call to include papers treating Japan’s colonial past in its entirety. 3 Admittedly, the term “colonial past” (in French, fait colonial) is vague. Nevertheless, we felt it more effective at encompassing a range of disparate phenomena linked to the effects (direct or indirect) of colonisation, both in the context of the time and in that of the postcolonial period. Accordingly, the title of this issue of Cipango should be understood as being thematically and chronologically open, reflecting our desire to attract contributions from a diverse range of disciplines. The aim was to avoid a purely historian perspective and enable scholars from other disciplines to express their views, not only on the colonial period itself, but on anything potentially connected to it, even outside of the time frame in question. 4 The response exceeded our wildest expectations, amounting to almost nine hundred pages of text written on an extremely wide variety of subjects. Only half of these submissions were eventually published due to space constraints and the need to ensure Cipango - French Journal of Japanese Studies, 4 | 2015 3 a coherent whole. Of the two issues published in French—Cipango 18 on the colonial period (1880s-1920s) and Cipango 19 on the postcolonial period (1950 to the present day) —, five papers (in other words half of the original publications) appear in this English- language version of Cipango and will be presented in more detail below. 5 The papers chosen for publication faithfully reflect our original desire to illustrate the variety of subjects relating to Japan’s colonial past. Accordingly, readers will find articles focusing on the colonial societies themselves, on the colonial memory, on cultural and economic history, and even on diplomatic and military history. Our challenge was to provide an overall coherence to these texts. This of course proved impossible beyond the chronological boundaries of the period. Japan during the Age of Empire 6 The present issue of Cipango focuses on the colonisation that took place during the late modern period, as carried out by the nation-states born during the long nineteenth century defined by Eric Hobsbawm and more recently adopted by Christopher Alan Bayly. And yet, much could also be written about other examples of colonisation, such as those carried out by the Old Regimes (during the early modern period), those relying on tributary relationships, or those that took place during ancient times. Indeed, the ancient world served as an argument in colonial and postcolonial discourses, as was the case for many European colonial powers. Just as Great Britain claimed to be the heir to the Roman Empire, Imperial Japan used protohistory and early antiquity as a historical justification of its desire to control the Korean peninsula. In a kind of mirror effect, formerly colonised peoples, who often choose to adopt this discourse to some extent, draw on this revisited past when constructing their modern ethnicity. However, this process cannot be attributed solely to colonisation and the nation-building efforts seen during the postcolonial era: archaeology is well known to have shown itself historically to be an “eminently national science”. This is eloquently illustrated by Pai Hyung II’s work on Korea. Similarly, Penny Edwards has demonstrated the extent to which French archaeology at Angkor has served to forge a particular history of Kampuchea and the Khmers.1 Accordingly, modern-day nations often owe much to these tools for constructing—and reformulating—the past in the present. In this respect, the postcolonial nation-states reflect the same processes that underpinned the formation of nation-states like France and Germany. 7 This formidably complex interweaving of immemorial past, history, colonial rule and nation building could not possibly be covered here. Instead we will restrict our ambitions to exploring the colonisation carried out during what French historians call the époque contemporaine (running from 1789 and the creation of the nation-state through to the present day, whereas Japanese historians use the term kindai 近代, literally the “near period”, usually deemed to run from the Meiji Restoration to the end of the Pacific War. This is understood in Anglo-American historiography as the “modern era”). 8 The Sepoy Rebellion of 1857 marked a watershed in modern colonisation, when mercantile colonisation—based on trading posts and port enclaves—began to venture into territorial and fiscal colonisation. The “modern” form of colonial domination via trading posts gave way to the more “contemporary” form of the protectorate, and most of all the colony, involving the territorial and fiscal exploitation of regions in order to Cipango - French Journal of Japanese Studies, 4 | 2015 4 “develop their productive value” for the benefit of the metropole. This transformation —which was described by Lenin in 1917 in Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism—, occurred roughly between 1857 and 1874. It then accelerated during the final third of the nineteenth century through to the 1920s, during a phase referred to in English- language historiography as New Imperialism or High Imperialism. Japan also joined in the “Great Game” played by the colonial powers by establishing its own empire during this same period: a foothold was gained in the Korean peninsula in 1876 thanks to the signing of an unequal treaty (one of the famous treaties of amity and commerce) with the Kingdom of Joseon; Japan’s colonial possessions—whatever their official titles might have been—subsequently grew until 1914. At this point the country’s colonial empire consisted of the island of Taiwan, a former frontier of the Qing Empire won by Japan in 1895, the Korean peninsula (made a protectorate in 1905 and annexed in 1910), the southern half of Sakhalin Island (captured in 1905), the Liaodong Peninsula, located in southern Manchuria (1905), and the islands of Micronesia (1914). In 1931-32, Japan secured the entire South Manchuria after having extended its presence in the region as of 1905. After Decolonisation 9 Let us now move on to the subject of decolonisation. The date of August 15, 1945 is highly complex and multi-layered in meaning, marking on the one hand Japan’s military defeat in the Asia-Pacific War (1937-45), and on the other, the loss of its colonial empire, as decided at the Cairo Conference in November 1943. For Korea, August 15, 1945 marks the anniversary of the end of colonial rule, as signalled by the Korean term kwangbok 광복, meaning “the return of light”. This expression, which is little used elsewhere in the sinicised world—and not at all in Japan—, is also employed in Taiwan, where it is given the Chinese reading guangfu 光復. Yet in the case of Taiwan, there is no reference to “independence” since the island was restored to the Republic of China (with which Japan resumed dialogue in 1956) before being separated from the mainland once again in 1949. Obviously, this does not signify the absence in Taiwan of a debate on the issue of colonisation. On the contrary, it constitutes a highly complex web of subjects that are tied up with the memory of the war led by the Chinese “mainlanders” who had recently arrived on the island. Furthermore, the other former Japanese colonies also received new masters: Sakhalin and the Kuril Islands were incorporated into Russia, Manchuria passed to China, or more precisely, to the People’s Republic of China after 1949, before eventually being culturally sinicised.