| 6．Race and Racizm in imperial Japan
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| TOMIYAMA, Ichiro (Graduate school of Letters, Osaka University, Japan, BQE04666@nifty.ne.jp) |
| The concept of race was imported to Japan with
other Western ideas in the mid- 19th century. In examining such process,
it is important to note its self-reflexivity: the fundamental characteristics
of the idea of race in modern Japan lies in her nation-building and representing
herself as a nation-state both internally and externally with such imported
ideas. In the end of the 19th century the national border was fixed and the
modern system such as conscription was established. This process was accompanied with a series of anthropological research on the inhabitants of northern and southern borders, “Ainu” and “Ryukyu-jin (Okinawan people)” as well as the statistical registration of the state citizens. Hence, anthropology and statistics were tied to each other in their usage for both capitalism and colonialism. However, this means that Japanese society, modernizing herself rapidly, had ambivalence: she had to define her uniqueness in modern world while appealing its inclusion in the West with such terms as commodity and labor power. In the process of Japan’s becoming empire, the empire was obsessed with western modernity which had universal terms, and the “race” was displaced by other essentialized, but cultural terms. The displacement means not only the ambivalence of Japanese modernism but the difficulty of capitalism as territorial empire. I will focus my point on this difficulty to consider that this kind of race disguised in cultural terms remains potential to play a new role in the age of globalization. |
| TOMIYAMA, Ichiro Associate Professor, Graduate school of Letters, Osaka University, Japan, His main research interests are historical and cultural studies of the Japanese Colonialism. Major works: Kindai nihon to ‘Okinawa-jinn’ (Nihon keizai Hyouronnsha, 1990, in Japanese); Bouryoku no Yokann: Iha Haruyuki ni okeru kiki no mondai (Iwanamishotenn, 2002, in Japanese); Sensou no Kioku (co-ed., Nihon keizai Hyouronnsha, 1996, in Japanese). |