Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-t7fkt Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-24T09:56:14.276Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Colonialism and the ‘Korea Problem’ in the Historiography of Modern Japan: A Review Article

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 March 2010

Get access

Extract

By the time emperor meiji died in 1912, mourned as the first “modern” emperor, Japan had already acquired a sizeable colonial realm. Two years earlier, Japanese newspapers and magazines had celebrated the annexation of Korea, congratulating themselves on living in an empire that was now 15 million people more populous and almost a third larger than it had been prior to annexation. For journalists and politicians at the time, the phrase “Chōsen mondai” (the Chōsen question) served as a euphemism for the panoply of issues relating to Japanese interests in the Korean peninsula. Yet despite this contemporary recognition of the significance of empire, English-language studies of Japan have been slow to interweave the colonial experience into the history of modern Japan. Today, for modern historians, the question of how, or even whether, to incorporate these events into the history of Japan is itself a quandary—what might be termed the “Korea problem” in modern Japanese historiography.

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © The Association for Asian Studies, Inc. 2000

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

List of References

Altman, Albert. 1984. “Korea's First Newspaper: The Japanese Chōsen ShimpoJournal of Asian Studies 43(4): 685–96.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Barkin, Elazar. 1994. “Post-Anti-Colonial Histories: Representing the Other in Imperial BritainJournal of British Studies 33 (April): 180203.Google Scholar
Borgen, Robert, and Barnes, Gina L.. 1996. Review of The Cambridge History of Japan, Vol. 1, Ancient Japan, edited by Brown, Delmer M.. Journal of Japanese Studies 22(1):129–33.Google Scholar
Brandt, Kim. 1997. “The Folkcraft Movement in Early Showa Japan” Ph.D. diss., Columbia University.Google Scholar
Burton, Antoinette. 1994. Burdens of History: British Feminists, Indian Women, and Imperial Culture, 1865–1915. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.Google Scholar
Buzard, James. 1993. “Victorian Women and the Implications of EmpireVictorian Studies (Summer): 441–53.Google Scholar
Chaudhuri, Nupor, and Strobel, Margaret, eds. 1992. Western Women and Imperialism: Complicity and Resistance. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.Google Scholar
Sŏgyŏng, Ch'oe. 1997. Ilche ŭi tonghwa ideollogi ŭi ch'angch'ul [The creation of Japanese assimilation ideology]. Seoul: Sŏgyŏng munhwasa.Google Scholar
Cohn, Bernard. 1996. Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge: The British in India. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Conroy, Hilary. 1960. The Japanese Seizure of Korea, 1898–1910: A Study of Realism and Idealism in International Relations. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.Google Scholar
Cooper, Frederick, and Stoler, Ann Laura, eds. 1997. Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Darby, Phillip. 1998. “Taking Fieldhouse Further: Post-Colonizing Imperial HistoryThe Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 26(2): 233–50.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dirks, Nicholas, ed. 1992. Colonialism and Culture. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.Google Scholar
Dower, John W. 1975. “E.H. Norman, Japan, and the Uses of History.” In Origins of the Modern Japanese State: Selected Writings of E. H. Norman, edited by Dower, John W.. New York: Pantheon.Google Scholar
Dudden, Alexis. 1998. “International Terms: Japan's Engagement in Colonial Control” Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago.Google Scholar
Duus, Peter. 1995. The Abacus and the Sword: The Japanese Penetration of Korea, 1895–1910. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
DuusPeter, ed Peter, ed. 1988. Cambridge History of Japan, Vol. 6, The Twentieth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Duus, Peter, Myers, Ramon H, and Peattie, Mark R., eds. 1989. The Japanese Informal Empire in China, 1895–37 Princeton: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Duus, Peter, Myers, Ramon H, and Peattie, Mark R., eds. 1996. The Japanese Wartime Empire, 1931–45. Princeton: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Fieldhouse, David. 1984. “Can Humpty-Dumpty Be Put Back Together Again? Imperial History in the 1980sJournal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 12(2): 923.Google Scholar
Fogel, Joshua. 1984. Politics and Sinology: The Case of Naitō Konan (1866–1934). Cambridge: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Fogel, Joshua. 1989. Nakae Ushikichi in China: The Mourning of the Spirit. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Fogel, Joshua. 1995. The Cultural Dimension of Sino-Japanese Relations: Essays on the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries. Armonk, N.Y.: M.E. Sharpe.Google Scholar
Fogel, Joshua. 1996. The Literature of Travel in the Japanese Rediscovery of China, 1812–1945. Stanford: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar
Fujitani, Takashi. 1996. Splendid Monarchy: Power and Pageantry in Modern Japan. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Garon, Sheldon. 1994. “Rethinking Modernization and Modernity in Japanese History: A Focus on State-Society RelationsJournal of Asian Studies 53(2): 342–62.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gluck, Carol. 1985. Japan's Modern Myths: Ideology in the Late Meiji Period. Princeton: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Gluck, Carol. 1997. “‘Meiji’ For Our Time.” In New Directions in the Study of Meiji Japan, edited by Hardacre, Helen with Kern, Adam L.. Leiden: Brill.Google Scholar
Seung-Mi, Han. 1997. “Colonial Subject as Other: An Analysis of Late Meiji Travelogues on Korea.” In New Directions in the Study of Meiji Japan, edited by Hardacre, Helen with Kern, Adam L.. Leiden: Brill.Google Scholar
Hardacre, Helen, ed. with Kern, Adam L.. 1997. New Directions in the Study of Meiji Japan. Leiden: Brill.Google Scholar
Takashi, Hatada. 1969. Nihonjin no Chōsenkan [Japanese Views of Korea]. Tokyo: Keiso shobo.Google Scholar
Howe, Stephen. 1998. “David Fieldhouse and ‘Imperialism’: Some Historiographical RevisionsThe Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 26.2 (May) 213–32.Google Scholar
Jansen, Marius. 1954. The Japanese and Sun Yat-sen. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Jansen, Marius. 1984. “Japanese Imperialism: Late Meiji Perspectives.” In The Japanese Colonial Empire, 1895–1945 edited by Myers, Ramon and Peattie, Mark. Princeton: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Masanao, Kano. 1976. “The Changing Concept of Modernization: From a Historian's ViewpointJapan Quarterly 32(1): 2835.Google Scholar
Kennedy, Dane. 1996. “Imperial History and Post-Colonial TheoryThe Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 27(3): 345–63.Google Scholar
Kennedy, Dane. 1998. “The Imperial KaleidoscopeJournal of British Studies 37(4): 460–67.Google Scholar
Lee, Peter, ed., with Baker, Don et al. 1996. Sourcebook of Korean Civilization Vol. 2. New York: Columbia University Press.Google Scholar
McClintlock, Anne. 1995. Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Conquest. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Mintz, Sidney. 1985. Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History. New York: Viking.Google Scholar
Myers, Ramon, and Peattie, Mark, eds. 1984. The Japanese Colonial Empire, 1895–1945. Princeton: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Tetsuo, Najita. 1993. “Presidential Address: Reflections on Modernity and ModernizationJournal of Asian Studies 52(4): 845–53.Google Scholar
Eiji, Oguma. 1998. Nihonjin” no kyōkai: Okinawa, Ainu, Taiwan, Chōsen shokuminchi shihai kara fukki undo made [The Boundaries of “the Japanese”: Okinawa, Ainu, Taiwan, Chōsen, from colonial rule to the recovery movement]. Tokyo: Shin'yosha.Google Scholar
Prakash, Gyan, ed. 1995. After Colonialism: Imperial Histories and Postcolonial Displacements. Princeton: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Said, Edward. 1978. Orientalism. New York: Random House.Google Scholar
Samuel, Raphael. 1989. “In Search of BritainNew Statesmen and Society 25 August, 2124.Google Scholar
Sansom, George B. 1950. The Western World and Japan. 3 vols. London: Cresset Press.Google Scholar
Kurakichi, Shiratori. 1910. “Wagaga jōko ni okeru Kanhantō no seiryoku o ronzu” [Concerning our power on the Korean peninsula in ancient times] Child koron October, 4455.Google Scholar
Kurakichi, Shiratori. 1969–71. Shiratori Kurakichi Zenshu. [The complete works of Shiratori Kurakichi] Tokyo: Iwanami shoten.Google Scholar
Tanaka, Stefan. 1993. Japan's Orient: Rendering Pasts into History. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Vlastos, Stephen, ed. 1998. Mirrors of Modernity: Invented Traditions of Modern Japan. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Walvin, James. 1997. Fruits of Empire: Exotic Produce and British Taste, 1660–1800. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Macmillan.Google Scholar
Wilson, Kathleen. 1995. The Sense of People: Politics, Culture and Imperialism. New York: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Haech'ang, Yi. 1971. Han'guk sinmunsa yŏn'gu [Studies on the history of Korean newspapers]. Seoul: Sŏngmungok.Google Scholar
Kibaek, Yi, ed. 1996. “Ilbon ŭi taeHan cheguk ch'amt'al ŭi pulbŏpsŏng” [The illegal nature of Japan's seizure of the TaeHan empire] Han'guksa simin kangjwa 19:1133.Google Scholar
Young, Louise. 1998. Japan's Total Empire: Manchuria and the Culture of Wartime Imperialism. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar