In 1907, Japanese Rule in Formosa was published in London. It was the English translation of Taiwan tochi shi (1905), a book about Japan's colonization of Taiwan by Japanese popular historian and liberal politician Takekoshi Yosaburo. Japanese Rule in Formosa proved remarkably influential, both at the time and in postwar historiography. Although isolated quotes from the 1907 work are frequently used by present-day historians, little attention has been granted to the political context in which it was published or the accuracy of the translation. The fact that Takekoshi advocated an unambiguous form of colonial rule in which the Japanese constitution would not apply in Taiwan placed him at odds with other leaders of his liberal Seiyukai party who wanted Taiwan to be merged into Japan's administrative and legal structures. Takekoshi's stance reveals that colonial debates did not always match up with other political or philosophical fault lines. His ideas were, however, consistent with his liberal worldview, and engaged in global, trans-imperial dialogue about assimilation and association in a colonial administration. This article will position Takekoshi's work within the contemporaneous Japanese debate over Taiwan's legal status and argue that, although the timing of its publication meant that it had little influence in Japan, it had a significant effect on the attitudes of colonialist scholars in Europe and America towards Japanese imperialism.

Quels liens trans-impériaux ont existés entre l'empire colonial de la France et celui du Japon? Dans un exemple qui se raconte fréquemment dans l'historiographie coloniale japonaise, l'on discute du conseil que l'expert judiciaire français Michel Revon a présenté en 1895 quant au système administratif que le Japon devrait instaurer à Taiwan. Dans une note de politique, Revon aurait recommandé que l'on adopte un système français d'assimilation, ce qui aurait exercé une influence considérable sur le futur Premier ministre Hara Takashi. Cet article démontre que ce compte-rendu des faits n'est pas tout à fait exact et il présente donc une analyse nouvelle des sources primaires dans le contexte des théories françaises coloniales qui étaient dominantes pendant les années 1890. Nous avançons que Revon était en fait un partisan de l'association et que le programme d'assimilation coloniale de Hara Takashi n'était que superficiellement influencé par des modèles français.

The study of popular imperialism, or the extent to which the ordinary citizens of an imperial metropole were aware of and supported their country's imperial expansion, provides a crucial empirical basis for evaluating the causes of and responsibility for colonial aggression. Nevertheless, this topic has received considerably less attention than comparable topics like fascism, genocide, or nationalism, and a comparative conversation between scholars of different empires is largely lacking. Together with a companion article, "Imperial Ardor or Apathy? A Comparative International Historiography of Popular Imperialism," this article will provide inspiration for future studies by summarizing different approaches to and methodological problems involved in the study of popular imperialism, drawing on a wide range of research on several empires.

Were the ordinary citizens of imperial metropoles during the 19th and 20th centuries arduous supporters or apathetic observers of their country's colonial expansionism, or did their relationship to empire fall somewhere in between? Although this is a central question for understanding the how and why of modern imperialism and evaluating responsibility for colonial wrongs, scholars in the only loosely knit field of popular imperialism have arrived at widely divergent answers. Complementing its companion article, "By Jingo! Methods for Researching Popular Imperialism," this article will present an overview of the conclusions of existing studies and present ways that future studies can become more theoretically and methodologically sophisticated through inspiration from comparative and transnational history, nationalism studies, and genocide studies.

In 1876, the Kaitakushi, the Japanese government agency responsible for the settlement of the northern island of Hokkaido, hired three Americans from Massachusetts Agricultural College: William Smith Clark, William Wheeler and David Pearce Penhallow. Their task was to establish a comparable institution in Hokkaido, Sapporo Agricultural College, that would spread American-style scientific agriculture among new settlers. Although recent historical research has highlighted the colonial nature of the modern settlement of Hokkaido and other American advisors’ role in transmitting modern technologies of settler colonialism, the tenure of these three professors has never been examined from a postcolonial perspective. This article will investigate the writings of engineer William Wheeler, who served as president of the new college for several years and advised the Kaitakushi on numerous infrastructure projects, to look for clues about his attitudes towards and role in Japanese settler colonialism in Hokkaido. Textual evidence reveals Wheeler’s awareness of and complicity in this undertaking.

Even in so international a field as science, those who are hard on luck may sometimes seek a new start overseas. In the 1870s, Massachusetts-native William Smith Clark had accrued many achievements, including a prestigious doctorate from Göttingen University, a successful research career in botany, a position as founding president of a land grant college in his hometown of Amherst and a reputation as a charismatic, skilled orator. Nevertheless, frustrated by university politics, financial difficulties and perhaps a midlife crisis, Clark jumped on the chance to establish a copy of Massachusetts Agricultural College on the northeast Asian island of Hokkaido when recruited by the Japanese government.

Hokkaido at this time was the site of an ambitious settler colonial project undertaken by the new Meiji regime to demonstrate Japan’s credentials as a civilized, “great power.” In this liminal, multifarious contact zone far from New England and even Japan proper, Clark skillfully managed to combine numerous identities, including scientist, amateur missionary, teacher, explorer, farmer, bearded white man, Yankee and father figure to craft a flamboyant persona that won the lasting respect of his students and Japan as a whole. Clark is memorialized with laudatory biographies, statues and history textbook entries in Japan, but his role in Japanese settler colonialism has received less attention. Indeed, his persona was asserted largely at the expense of the indigenous Ainu people. Clark’s success and fame in Japan have also overshadowed his professional demise after returning to America. Unable to successfully reintegrate to American society, Clark’s inflated persona would destroy his academic and scientific career as he embarked on ever wilder and risker adventures, eventually losing everything. Using Clark’s correspondence and publications, this paper will critically investigate the creation of Clark’s complex identity, involving the creative combination of multiple discourses of power in a colonial borderland.

This article uses 1910 Japan–British Exhibition as a case study for examining the strategies employed by Japanese leaders to win Western acceptance for Japan as a ‘great power’ in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Like other contemporaneous imperial powers, Japanese leaders employed colonial imagery and discourses of otherness at large expositions to raise their status compared to ostensibly inferior colonised peoples. This article argues that contrary to some previous assertions, Japan presented its history and traditional culture at Western expositions not as an intentional concession to Western Orientalism but rather in an attempt to show that an alternative path to modernity was possible. Though largely successful in winning Western recognition as an important empire, Japanese leaders were nonetheless unable to fully escape becoming victim to the very colonial tools they sought to employ.

Criticizing one-empire approaches, calls to apply much-needed transnational perspectives and methodologies to colonial history have recently emerged. This groundbreaking scholarship has already revealed that the competition between different European empires after 1850 has typically been overemphasized; in fact, a transnational perspective reveals extensive cooperation between the “great powers” of the age, along with myriad examples of exchanges and transfers of colonial knowledge. In this dissertation, I argue that during the height of the New Imperialism during the latter half of the long nineteenth century, one can go even further and describe the co-production of a “global trans-imperial culture” by all of the colonial powers of the age, facilitated by a common “knowledge infrastructure,” including international congresses, trans-imperial scholarly exchange and expositions. I contend that Japan was an important member of this “colonial club” that was deeply engaged with evolving global colonial discourse and practice throughout this period. Emerging trans-imperial historiography has largely neglected Japan, while historians of Japan have tended to exaggerate its uniqueness in global imperial history and often missed important global trends in colonial policy that explain many characteristics of Japanese expansionism. Furthermore, an oversimplified description of Meiji expansionism as “mimetic imperialism” shared by some Japan scholars and global imperial historians ignores the degree to which all imperial powers imitated each other during this period and the great extent to which Japan was involved in multidirectional inter-imperial exchanges.

The dissertation has three interrelated aims. First, it applies cutting-edge theories of inter-imperial exchanges and cooperation to the Japanese Empire, arguing that Japan took part in a developing global trans-imperial culture throughout the Meiji period. Focusing on connections rather than comparison, it traces how and when different examples of Western colonial knowledge came to Japan and ways in which Japan influenced other empires, investigating trans-imperial conduits like foreign consultants, scholarly texts and international expositions. Secondly, it works to dismantle persistent notions of Japan as a marginal latecomer to this community of imperial powers by demonstrating that Japan engaged with inter-imperially circulating discourses and practices from as early as 1868 and contributed to the development of the culture as a whole. The dissertation joins a growing body of critical work that argues that Meiji-era Hokkaidō is best understood as a colony in which modern technologies of settler colonialism were systematically employed starting directly after the Meiji Restoration.

Finally, it employs theories of colonial association as a kind of overarching case-study to illustrate how ideas and practices of colonial governance circulated over imperial boundaries and concurrently influenced all empires of the time. During the second half of the nineteenth century, the strategy of assimilating colonized peoples became increasingly discredited among the colonial policy elite worldwide. New notions of how best to rule a colonial territory based on Social Darwinism and British and Dutch experiments in indirect rule, later collectively referred to as the “association” of colonizer and colonized with minimal cultural interchange, became correspondingly influential. Although assimilation and association are frequently treated as unchanging traits of specific empires (with France and Japan typically identified as assimilationist and Britain and the Netherlands as associationist), this dissertation contends that shifts between assimilation and association happened concurrently in different empires around the world, providing important evidence of a common trans-imperial culture. I will demonstrate that Japanese colonial elites engaged with these ideas at the same time as their counterparts in Western empires, with Japan’s famous radical assimilation campaign coming only in the final years of its empire. Revealing the strong influence of associationist thought among Meiji leaders helps to illuminate the consistency and “timeliness” of Japanese colonial discourse and practice and challenges anachronistic notions of the Japanese Empire always being characterized by a unique form of colonial assimilationism.

The empirical “body” of the dissertation is divided into three large, thematic sections. Part I investigates the trans-imperial linkages between Japan and the United States during Japan’s colonization of Hokkaidō around the 1870s. Chapters 1 - 3 consider the role of three American professors, William Smith Clark, William Wheeler and David Pearce Penhallow, who were hired to establish an agricultural college as part of the colonial development of Hokkaidō. I argue that these American professors contributed to Japan’s colonial expansionism in at least three ways: by helping the Kaitakushi physically transform Hokkaidō into a Japanese settler colony, by spreading a colonial worldview according to which the Ainu were portrayed as a primitive, dying race similar to Native Americans, and finally by acting as propagandists for Japanese expansionism after their return. Chapter 4 considers continuing links to American technologies of settler colonialism in the next generation through the writings of Satō Shōsuke on Hokkaidō’s colonial status. Satō graduated in Sapporo Agricultural College’s first class and later studied land policy in America before returning and becoming president of his alma mater.

Part II investigates Japan’s early colonization of Taiwan and the debates over its colonial status, which remained highly ambiguous for more than a decade after its acquisition by Japan in 1895. Chapter 5 considers the opinions of three Western colonial consultants from France, Britain and the United States who were engaged by the Japanese government in 1895 from the perspective of assimilation and association. I contend that contrary to previous assertions, all three individuals should be understood as proponents of globally fashionable theories of colonial association rather than as advocates of different national colonial cultures. Chapter 6 is devoted to the writings of Takekoshi Yosaburō, a prominent Japanese proponent of association. I argue that the position of his 1905 book Japanese Rule in Formosa in the domestic political debate over Taiwan’s status has not been fully appreciated and that its 1907 English translation played a crucial role in linking Japan into the trans-imperial academic field of colonial policy studies. Thanks to the efforts of Takekoshi and other propagandists, Taiwan came to be seen as a model colony in the West, especially in the United States where it was widely considered to be a good example for the Philippines, raising Japan’s status among world colonial powers.

Part III shifts focus from colonial territories to expositions, which Japan used to present its empire to a mass public in Japan, its colonies and the West. I argue that expositions were one of the most important sites at which the global trans-imperial culture was created and maintained. Chapter 7 investigates how the Japanese Empire was presented to a Western public at the 1910 Japan-British Exhibition in London, where it displayed its various colonial territories in detail for the first time outside of Japan. Chapter 8 analyzes presentations of the constituent parts of the Japanese Empire at the Takushoku hakurankai or Colonization Exposition that was held in Tokyo two years later.

Based on the above case studies, this dissertation concludes that contrary to common assertions, colonial assimilation was not a salient characteristic of Meiji imperialism, and that Japanese leaders did not emulate specific French assimilationist models as is commonly asserted. Instead, leading colonialists in both France and Japan, as well as other empires, were concurrently influenced by new, anti-assimilationist ideas of colonial association, including conserving resources by allowing indigenous laws and customs to be maintained as much as possible, making colonies financially self-sufficient and endowing a separate colonial administration with vast discretionary power. This is not to say that assimilation did not have proponents in Japan and that it did not sometimes inform Japanese colonial policy, but rather that it did not form the dominant mode of Japanese colonialism at this time. While examples of assimilationism can be found in Meiji Japan, I contend that these have been anachronistically exaggerated by later historians as a result of their greater familiarity of Japan’s later radical assimilation drive. The ideas that would later be collectively known as association so dominated the global trans-imperial discourse of colonial administration at this time that countries like Japan that aspired to influence and respect by the world’s “great powers” could hardly afford to ignore them. Assimilation was widely censured as a failed policy by inept “Latin” colonizers like Spain and could therefore only be advocated by Japanese politicians in a domestic context. Even then, opponents of assimilation had a powerful tool at their disposal in the ostensibly scientific arguments of numerous well-known Western theorists. Though not always completely successful, Japanese overseas propaganda still managed to use presentations of Taiwan’s efficient management along associationist lines to convince many Westerners of Japan’s aptitude for colonization, allowing it to participate in many of the key institutions of the global trans-imperial culture and even, at times, to serve as an inspiration to other empires.

In 1878, Professor William Smith Clark presented clothing and other objects produced by the Ainu people of Hokkaidō to an eager Massachusetts audience. The local newspaper reported:

With the exception of two or three articles, he was able to represent all the Ainos have ever produced, and he said that it was truly a remarkable fact that individuals in our country would accumulate during the period allotted to man more wealth than all the Ainos have during the thousands of years they have lived on the island.[1]

The belief that the nineteenth-century Ainu were a “primitive people” frozen in time remains widespread. In fact, the Ainu had had well-developed agriculture and manufacturing before their gradual suppression from the seventeenth century under Japanese pressure.[2] As this paper will show, the interpretation of the Ainu’s mid-nineteenth century non-agricultural state according to Western anthropological theories ended up cementing the view of the Ainu as a “dying race” that had always lacked agriculture.

Inspired by American expansion into the “Wild West”, Japanese leaders hired American advisors in the 1870s to help them colonize Hokkaidō. Having a “frontier” with “primitive” peoples to “civilize” served them well as they strove to demonstrate Japan’s parity with the West. Especially interested in currying American favor, strategic comparisons were made between Ainu and Native Americans. Nevertheless, the subordination of Ainu, widely believed to be “Caucasian,” to Japanese complicated the standard colonial trope, provoking fascination and horror in the West.

This paper will investigate the transnational circulation of everyday Ainu objects and how they acquired new, colonially-coded significance outside their original context. How did these objects reinforce or challenge standard colonial narratives of development? It will argue that American advisors and the Ainu objects and stories they brought home with them played a key role in legitimizing Japanese imperialism.

[1] “President Clark’s Lecture on the Ainos of Japan,” Amherst Record, 20 November 1878.

[2] Tessa Morris-Suzuki. “Creating the Frontier: Border, Identity and History in Japan's Far North.” East Asian History 7 (1994): 1-24.