Bodies and borders in post-imperial Japan: a study of the coloniality of biometric power

ABSTRACT

In this article, I conduct a study of what may be called the coloniality of biometric power. In recent years, scholars in social sciences and humanities have shown the continuities of colonialism and racism in the politics of biometric identification. Not only are the origins of biometrics closely related to colonial governance and scientific racism, but contemporary biometric technologies also continue to carry on colonial and racial dimensions in their infrastructures and operations. Inspired by Quijano’s notion of ‘coloniality of power’ and departing from existing social and cultural studies of biometrics, the article explores how biometrics is used for the racial classification of people, the (re)production of colonial structures and subject-object relations during and after colonialism. The article focuses on the case of fingerprinting border controls and surveillance in post-imperial Japan. This particular case geographically expands the literature on the relationship between biometrics and colonialism, which has been largely centred upon European and North American contexts. It also helps to understand how one mode of racialization through biometrics is replaced by another, which empowers a new form of racial governance. Drawing on my analysis of the postwar Japanese fingerprinting system, I suggest that it is important to register different forms of racialization through biometrics as there are different forms of racialized control in different historical and geographical contexts.

KEYWORDS:

• Biometrics
• borders
• colonialism
• coloniality
• Japan
• racialization

Acknowledgements

Some of the contents of the article were part of my PhD thesis submitted to the Department of Politics and International Studies at the University of Warwick in 2016. I would like to thank my supervisors Nick Vaughan-Williams and Chris Hughes and examiners Michael Dillon and Stuart Elden for their support and comments. The present version is substantially revised from the original thesis. I am grateful to two anonymous reviewers for their constructive suggestions, which significantly helped to improve this article. I also thank Nick Taylor for his valuable comments on the text.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The term ‘biometrics’ literally means ‘measurements’ (metrics) of ‘life’ (from the Greek bios). Across social sciences and humanities, the term has been typically used to denote measurements of the body in general, which include, but are not limited to, facial recognition and fingerprinting (Ajana, 2013; Breckenridge, 2014; Browne, 2015; Dillon, 2008; Introna and Wood, 2004; Madianou, 2019; Magnet, 2011). The common use of the term today might refer exclusively to computerized and machine-readable identification technologies. For example, Kelly Gates (2011, p. 45) has noted that the term was not usually used in reference to fingerprinting before digitization. However, while traditionally non-digitized measurements may not be understood as biometrics, several studies have suggested to include them in order to understand their complex origins (for example, Pugliese, 2010, p. 10). In this article, I use the term ‘biometrics’ in this broad sense and examine (non-digitized) fingerprinting for a study of biometrics. I do not claim that the history of fingerprinting and that of biometrics in general are the same thing; the former should be understood as part of the latter. Nevertheless, as existing historical analyses of fingerprinting have shown (Cole, 2001; Nishiyama, 2015; Pugliese, 2010), and as will be explored in this article, histories of fingerprinting can help understanding the relationship between biometrics and colonialism in the past and present.

2 Keijō was an administrative district of Korea under Japanese rule, which was established in today’s Seoul.

3 A similar but more extensive table was produced by Furuhata’s student in the 1930s (Hibino, 1935).

Additional information

Funding

The preliminary research was funded by an East Asia Postgraduate Fellowship from the Department of Politics and International Studies at the University of Warwick. The main research was funded by the Academy of Finland RELATE CoE [grant number: 307348]. It was completed during my Academy of Finland Postdoctoral Researcher's grant [grant number: 321755].

Notes on contributors

Hidefumi Nishiyama

Hidefumi Nishiyama is Academy of Finland Postdoctoral Researcher in the Geography Research Unit at the University of Oulu.