Placing empire: travel and the social imagination in imperial Japan

‘What is the relationship (or relationships) between empire and tourism?’ This is the simple question that began a round table discussion conducted for the Journal of Tourism History in 2015 (Baranowski et al., 2015, p. 101). In the opening remarks, political economist Waleed Hazbun argued that scholarship must identify, not only how empire has enabled tourism (offering security, providing the transportation and infrastructure necessary for tourist travel, etc.), but also ‘how tourism has served the building and maintenance of territorial empires’ (2015, p. 102). Finally, after long consideration of the diverse, contradictory, and shifting ways in which empire and tourism are entangled, Stephanie Malia Hom, a scholar working on mobility and colonialism in the modern Italian empire, asks, ‘So, where do we go from here?’ One way, she suggests, ‘is to go deeper historically and comparatively’ (2015, p. 126).

Kate McDonald’s excellent book, Placing Empire: Travel and the Social Imagination in Imperial Japan (2017), is both an answer to these questions and a long-awaited development – the deepening that Hom proposes – of this discussion. Placing Empire examines the shift from building to maintaining territorial empires that occurred in the early twentieth century, and the role that tourism played in ‘placing’ colonized lands within the space of the nation and ‘placing’ the nation on colonized land, what McDonald refers to as the spatial politics of empire’s social imaginary: ‘the use of concepts of space to naturalize uneven structures of rule’ (McDonald, 2017, p. 7).

The central conundrum that kicks off the book is how to legitimate a territorial empire – rule over another place and people based on colonial difference – in the transformed world of the early twentieth century, in which the territorial nation-state was increasingly understood as ‘the “global archetype” of sovereignty and political freedom’ (2017, p. 9). Empires did not, of course, give up colonial rule in the post–World War I era, far from it; but the principle of, and desires for, national self-determination could not be ignored, and the challenges of anti-imperial nationalism and anticolonial liberalism forced changes in how colonial empires were both governed and represented.

How then, McDonald asks, did the Japanese Empire legitimate its claims to colonial land, and maintain hierarchies of people and places within the empire, while acknowledging the demands for nationhood of colonized peoples and Japanese settlers alike? One answer, as Placing Empire persuasively and lucidly argues, is tourism. Guidebooks, travelogues, itineraries, maps, and touristic practices did not simply reflect imperial ideology, they were central to how the Empire was maintained in a period of crises about the form that empires could explicitly and authentically assume.

The book analyzes a fascinating range of travel and touristic texts and practices in the Japanese Empire – Japan (by which I mean the ‘inner territory’ or naichi here, though as McDonald shows, spatial terms such as this shift and mutate rapidly during the period), Taiwan, Korea, and Manchuria/Manchukuo – between 1906 and the beginning of the Second Sino-Japanese War in the late 1930s. Part one examines travel from the end of the Russo-Japanese War to World War I, focusing on how elite metropolitan travelers to colonized lands, and the agencies and individuals who promoted their tours, represented the relationship between Japan and the new territories in terms of a ‘geography of civilization.’ This mode of spatial representation incorporated new lands within the (past, present, and/or future) Japanese nation, but excluded colonized people on the basis of uncivilizedness or backwardness. This avowed failure to transition properly to the modern, or to organize their lives around the economic dictates of investment and circulation, meant that Chinese, Koreans, and Taiwanese people were occluded from guidebooks or depicted in travelogues as ‘out of place,’ not belonging in the new nation. In contrast, through firsthand observation of battlefields and cultural sites in the newly acquired territories, it was hoped that imperial travelers would build affective ties to these places – make them home, in other words. Upon return, the elite status of these travelers would then provide a stage from which to communicate this ‘sense of themselves as a part of a nation that included colonized lands’ to a wide audience (2017, p. 48).

Part two, the longer of the book’s two parts, considers the period after World War I, when questions of territorial gain turned to those of territorial maintenance, and crises of imperial formation came to the fore. As a burgeoning imperial tourism industry offered greater opportunities for non-elite travelers to see colonized lands firsthand, McDonald argues that new modes of travel and geospatial representation emerged to respond to these changing geopolitical and ideological conditions. The ‘geography of cultural pluralism’ that increasingly came to structure travel and touristic representations of empire acknowledged ethnocultural differences within the empire, employing the trope of ‘harmony’ (yūwa) to envision Japan as a multinational state and the Japanese as a multiethnic nation. Yet in so doing, colonized peoples were ‘put […] in their place’ (2017, p. 99), that is, a distinction was made between the Japanese ethnos, who travelled in the empire, and colonized peoples, to whom the same full and equal rights (of mobility, and concomitantly citizenship) were not extended. Rather, Taiwanese, Koreans, and Chinese were depicted as naturally tied to a certain region, status, and role within the empire on the basis of race or ethnicity. In participating in, and propagating, the discourse of cultural pluralism, imperial tourism thus helped stave off the threat posed by ethnic nationalism and anticolonial activism without ‘upsetting the fundamental basis for imperial rule’ (2017, p. 159).

Not only is Placing Empire a great pleasure to read, it makes timely, important contributions to a wide range of academic fields and studies. Indeed, there is so much of use – for scholars of colonialism, imperialism, and nationalism; travel and tourism; and the history of modern Japan – that it feels hard to do it justice in the space permitted here. For this reader, the book makes a particularly powerful intervention into approaches to situating the Japanese Empire within histories and analyses of modern empire. In this, Placing Empire builds on significant and influential earlier research from scholars of empire and tourism in modern Japan, including, for example, Kenneth Ruoff (2010, 2014), Takeshi Soyama (2003), and Louise Young (1998). But the book also makes important advances in its comparative approach to the study of empire – exactly what Stephanie Malia Hom proposed in the round table discussion noted at the start of this review. For example, Placing Empire’s transcolonial analysis of Taiwan, Korea, and Manchuria/Manchukuo allows parallels and interrelations in the spatial discourses of these ostensibly different colonial sites to be identified; this reveals, not only how the transition to a geography of cultural pluralism took place concurrently in Taiwan and Korea as well as Manchuria/Manchukuo, but also how this was part of a wider global shift.

Placing Empire thus inserts Japan into a global history of modern empire, keeping an eye throughout on similarities between the Japanese Empire, other new imperial powers, and longer-running empires such as France and Britain. In so doing, McDonald makes a strong and necessary argument against the uniqueness of Japanese imperialism, adding to a growing body of work within Japanese studies that has engaged with, applied, and – where necessary – revised models of colonial encounter and colonial discourse developed, often by postcolonial studies scholars, from case studies of Western colonial empires (e.g. Driscoll, 2005; Tierney, 2010). Assumptions about Japan’s difference have led to the customary exclusion of Japan from studies of modern imperialism and colonialism – whether Edward Said’s pioneering Orientalism (1978) or the Journal of Tourism History’s more-recent round table; as well as, in studies of Japanese imperialism, its detachment from other modern imperialisms.

As the preface lays out, the grounds for Japan’s anomaly in accounts of modern empire have commonly included the apparent ethnic or racial affinity of Japanese with its colonized peoples, or the fact that Japan was contiguous with its colonized lands. Yet, these factors do not preclude the production of colonial difference, as the case of Ireland and the Irish evidences for the British Empire (Young, 1995) and McDonald explores here for the Japanese. Colonial difference is not, after all, a quality waiting to be discovered; it is something that must, as Placing Empire sensitively and elaborately demonstrates, be produced in order to imagine and legitimate colonial rule. How this happens – the axes along which difference is produced, whether of development or civilization, distance, class, region, language, or culture – and how these shift and evolve over time in order to maintain territorial empire under transformed political and ideological conditions is what McDonald maps so well here.

Placing Empire never loses sight of the practice and possibility of anti-imperial and anticolonial challenge, whether on the level of individual travel responses or national independence movements; indeed, one of the book’s main themes is the response of imperial ideology to such challenges. Nevertheless, it makes a strong case for the power of, in this case, Japanese discourses of dominance to renew themselves and endure through their ambivalence and discontinuity, as Ali Behdad (1994) contended in his influential study of British and French travelers in the similarly transformed conditions of fin de siècle Middle East. By the end of the compelling final chapter on the role of language in policing difference within imperial travel encounters, this reader was left with a profound sense of the impossibility of colonized peoples ever meeting the forever-shifting criteria set for full inclusion in the nation.

McDonald explores how colonized peoples were rather placed into the ambivalent category of ‘perpetually “not quite”’ (2017, p. 159). Is an analogy being made here with Homi Bhabha’s concept of colonial mimicry – ‘almost the same, but not quite’ (1994/2004, p. 123)? The phrasing certainly implies a connection. Does mimicry in the Japanese imperial context contain the same potential for mockery and menace? McDonald suggests as much when she quotes from a travel encounter that occurred in Korea between Ōyama Takeshi, an official in the Bureau of Colonization, and Korean students, who demanded in perfect Japanese, ‘When will you let Korea become independent?’ (2017, p. 141). This is one point about which I would have liked further, explicit explanation; but it seems unfair to ask for more in a concise but already well-packed study.

Placing Empire takes our understanding of the tourism/empire relationship(s) far beyond the mapping of transport and infrastructural connections to demonstrate the central role that tourism played in the maintaining of empire in the early twentieth century. For this reason, it is highly recommended for anyone interested in the workings of imperial and colonial power, both within Japanese studies and outside.

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Notes on contributors

Andrew Elliott

Andrew Elliott is Associate Professor of International Studies at Doshisha Women’s College, Kyoto. His research focuses on anglophone travel writing about Japan and the Japanese Empire from the bakumatsu to the end of the Pacific War, and the reception history of Japan–West historical encounters in popular culture. Articles and chapters on these topics have been published in a range of journals and edited books, including English Language Notes, Journeys: The International Journal of Travel and Travel Writing, The British Abroad Since the Eighteenth Century, Volume 1: Travellers and Tourists (2013), and Studies in Travel Writing. Presently, he is coediting a special edition of Japan Review on war, tourism, and modern Japan.