Alexis Dudden. Japan's Colonization of Korea: Discourse and Power.Japan's Colonization of Korea: Discourse and Power. (The Studies of the Weatherhead East AsianInstitute.) by Alexis DuddenReview by: By James L. HuffmanThe American Historical Review, Vol. 110, No. 4 (October 2005), pp. 1147-1148Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Historical AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/ahr.110.4.1147 .

Accessed: 28/06/2014 17:37

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

.

Oxford University Press and American Historical Association are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize,preserve and extend access to The American Historical Review.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 91.238.114.163 on Sat, 28 Jun 2014 17:37:27 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Modern Japanese history is full of ideas that emergedfrom the moment of change and continue in ourinterpretations. The accounts, perspectives, and mem-ories of the actors often prevail in our historiography.This is true of Japan’s foreign relations despite (orbecause of) the long rise of Japanese studies amid theCold War, cemented by the very strong bond betweenthe United States and Japan. It is striking that we havehad so few monographs on U.S.-Japan relations andfewer still on Meiji foreign policy. It is a familiar story:in 1854 Commodore Matthew Perry “opened” Japanfrom its isolation, in 1858 Consul Townsend Harrisnegotiated the first of the “unequal treaties,” and Meijileaders finally renegotiated those treaties in 1894.

Now Michael R. Auslin gives us a monograph thatfills in the story of foreign policy negotiations duringthe critical final years of the Tokugawa era. It tells ofbakufu (military government) efforts to take charge offoreign policy, to negotiate with the United States andGreat Britain, primarily in order to avoid being colo-nized, and to defend the “ideological, intellectual, andphysical boundaries between [Japanese] and Western-ers” (pp. 9–10). Auslin is at his best when he piecestogether the documents, especially letters and dis-patches, to lay out the negotiations and the unfoldingof bakufu policy. He brings out the predelictions andpersistence, the folly and determination of these elitefigures, the officials and agents representing variouscountries, showing how they shaped this part of thepast. His most welcome contribution is to historicizethe early encounter and the unequal treaties, unset-tling the common narrative line. He goes over themany incidents in which Western countries soughtentry to the archipelago prior to 1854 (too bad that hedid not include Commodore James Biddle’s failed1846 attempt), and he covers the changing attitude ofbakufu officials, and later Meiji leaders, toward treatynegotiations. We see the bakufu focused on limitingaccess generally, disregarding issues surrounding tradeand tariff, and we learn that the most onerous condi-tions were agreed to by the Meiji government in thetreaty signed with Austria-Hungary. (It is regrettablethat this treaty, a “major break,” did not receive thesame level of analysis as bakufu negotiations.)

We are at a moment in our historiography when wesense that many of the categories and narratives thatwe have inherited are no longer apposite and seek newframeworks. Auslin is to be commended for his ambi-tious thesis that “the transformation of diplomaticculture led to sweeping changes in Japanese society”(p. 2); he brings us “the beginnings of modern Japan’sinternational history” (p. 3). But by concentrating onthe bakufu and stopping in 1872, he has given us moreof an ending than a beginning. More important, Aus-lin’s beginnings are framed by notions of negotiationand of a culture of diplomacy. Negotiation allows himto argue that the bakufu possessed agency and “re-sisted” the West (p. 4), supplanting an older pattern ofencounter/reaction, or stimulus/response. Diplomaticculture stands in for traditional/modern, placing the

interaction within an international system rather thansituating it in an encounter between two completelydifferent forms of social/cultural relations, one basedon status and tribute and the other based on reasonand money.

As implemented in this book, however, such anapproach using negotiation and culture of diplomacyreturns us to the teleology of modernization. The ideaof negotiation narrows our field to the interactionbetween representatives of the various Western na-tions and those of the bakufu speaking for Japan(succeeded by Meiji officials). But because “the ideo-logical, intellectual, and physical boundaries” thatJapanese sought to defend are ill defined, we return tothose oft-repeated units of analysis, Japan and theWest. Diplomatic culture, interestingly, allows reentryfor the category of the primitive. The bakufu comesout as one of those “uncivilized partners” (p. 7) whosesole purpose is to “preserve and protect” (p. 16) thoseboundaries. Antiforeignism reinforces this theme.Omitted from the story is the complexity of thismoment: the contestation of the several major actors(such as Satsuma and Cho� shu� ) as they engaged withthe West to enhance their position only appears in theconclusion (pp. 202–203), and we fail to learn aboutthe efforts of numerous Tokugawa officials and intel-lectuals such as Honda Toshiaki, Sakuma Sho�zan,Yoshida Sho� in, and Yokoi Sho�nan to reform thesystem to acknowledge trade and the monetary econ-omy as well as the utility of Western concepts. Whilethe antiforeignism theme persists into the Meiji periodthrough the deliberative councils called for in ArticleOne of the 1868 Charter Oath, Articles Four and Five,which recognize the new international conditions aswell as the importance of acquiring knowledge fromWestern countries, are absent.

In the end, I cannot help but feel that this mono-graph was rushed. The will is there, as is a robustempirical base illustrating the simplistic nature of thestandard narrative on bakumatsu foreign policy. Thereis a need for more work before we can appreciate therole of the unequal treaties in the trajectory of modernJapanese history.

STEFAN TANAKA

University of California,San Diego

ALEXIS DUDDEN. Japan’s Colonization of Korea: Dis-course and Power. (The Studies of the WeatherheadEast Asian Institute.) Honolulu: University of Hawai�iPress. 2005. Pp. x, 215. $45.00.

From their first days in power, the leaders of Japan’sMeiji government (1868–1912) understood the impor-tance of capturing the minds of their Western coun-terparts through the use of “standard“—i.e. Europe-an—diplomatic rules and vocabulary. Indeed, saysAlexis Dudden, language was nearly (although notquite) as important as actions in winning international

Asia 1147

AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW OCTOBER 2005

This content downloaded from 91.238.114.163 on Sat, 28 Jun 2014 17:37:27 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

support for Japan’s colonial takeover of Korea be-tween 1873 and 1910.

In a short work that is sometimes meandering, oftenpolemical, and always provocative, Dudden argues notonly that Japan mastered that era’s “vocabulary ofpower” (p. 1) and of “enlightened exploitation” (p. 8)but that the colonial nations of the West cooperatedwholly—and willfully—in what was, in effect, the“legal erasure of a country” (p. 12). While Japan’sactivities in Korea have been described quite fully byother scholars, most recently in Peter Duus’s TheAbacus and the Sword: The Japanese Penetration ofKorea (1995), Dudden is the first to analyze their“discursive aspects” (p. 2). Drawing on a rich menu ofdiplomatic treatises (French, English, and Japanese),journalistic accounts (including Korean newspapers),missionary archives, and government documents, shediscusses both the importance of rhetoric in shapinginternational relationships and the need to incorporateJapan’s experience into the broader theories of impe-rialism, most of which have either ignored Japan’s caseor glibly labeled it “late” or “different” (p. 24).

Dudden’s dominant point is that Japan showed abrilliant, if hypocritical and inhumane, capacity forusing Western legal discourse to justify each steptoward its 1910 annexation of Korea. She shows howJapanese diplomats replaced the centuries-old, Chi-nese-dominated “kanji order” with English-based di-plomacy, insisting early on that English be used as themediating language in negotiations with the Chineseover Korea, first at Tianjin in 1885 and then in endingthe Sino-Japanese War at Shimonoseki in 1895. Shealso describes Prime Minister Ito� Hirobumi’s astuteunderstanding of Western rhetorical nuances when helabeled the Sino-Japanese War a “Korean War ofIndependence” and called Japan a “victorious libera-tor and benevolent protector” (p. 48).

In less than two decades, Dudden shows, Japan’sofficials “negated the old regional order . . . and theydid so in the fully legal terms of enlightened exploita-tion” (p. 49). Even the era’s leading internationalist,the Quaker Nitobe Inazo� , used Western legal struc-tures early in the 1900s to develop a new Japaneseacademic field of colonial policy studies, which justi-fied “planting people” (p. 133) as the proper task of acivilized nation.

The thing that makes this use of Western legaldiscourse so important is its role in securing worldsupport for Japan’s policies. In episode after episode,Dudden shows that the Americans and Europeansgave wholehearted approval to Japan’s colonizingsteps, ignoring or denying Korean complaints aboutcruelty and unfairness. She argues that the powers’approval was more complete than earlier scholars,such as Duus and Akira Iriye, have previously acknowl-edged. When Koreans approached the Second Inter-national Conference on Peace at The Hague in 1907 toargue the case for Korean independence, for example,the conferees refused even to listen to them, maintain-ing that “according to international law, without Ja-

pan, Korea no longer existed in relation to the rest ofthe world” (p. 8).

In one of the book’s more vivid sections, Duddenportrays American diplomats and officials giving fullapproval to Japan’s actions in a brutal 1911–1913roundup of Korean activists, which included jailings,torture, and even deaths—because, in the end, Japanhad followed standard “civilized” trial procedures.Even brutal floggings were countenanced by the West-erners because Korea was “barbaric” and becauseflogging was “an ‘old Korean custom’ ” (p. 116). Andwhy not, she adds, since all of the colonial powersallowed their own “useful exemptions” in the coloniesto homeland legal practice? (p. 115).

Dudden’s work suffers occasionally from an overlypolemic tone. It also is diminished by a skimpy indexthat omits most concepts and many names. And thenarrative is disjointed at times, with some topics (e.g.Nitobe’s defense of Japan’s takeover of Manchuria inthe 1930s) discussed at length without a clear tie to thework’s central theme. A chapter on people who dis-sented from Japan’s colonial policies catalogues a widevariety of interesting and important dissidents butnever shows how their views related to the “discursiveaspects of Japan’s annexation of Korea” (p. 2)—or toeach other.

That said, this book is a welcome and importantaddition to a growing body of works that show not onlyJapan’s emergence as an imperialist power but itsintegration into the broader colonial system. It caststhe entire imperialist enterprise—with Japan as anintegral part of that enterprise—in a fresh light, evenwhile it raises disturbing questions about the implica-tions of Japan’s experience for contemporary America.

JAMES L. HUFFMAN

Wittenberg University

INDRANI CHATTERJEE, editor. Unfamiliar Relations:Family and History in South Asia. New Brunswick:Rutgers University Press. 2004. Pp. 302. $60.00.

This thought-provoking collection of essays traces thereproduction of the family through time, adding torecent scholarship reevaluating kinship and gender inSouth Asian history. The volume’s particular strengthslie in the questions it raises about the longue dureehistory of family, and in highlighting the manifold waysin which kinship was constructed in cultural codes,genealogies, languages, and other discursive and ma-terial power structures. The more creative essaysstraddle the “divide” between the “precolonial” andcolonial period and critically assess the extent ofchange in the constitution of kinship during the tran-sition to British rule.

Editor Indrani Chatterjee’s precise and pointedintroduction asserts that the history of kinship, hith-erto a “poor relation in South Asian history,” needs tobe studied in its own right (p. 1). Chatterjee distin-guishes the questions fueling this book from prevailingdominant analyses of the family, which, she suggests,

1148 Reviews of Books and Films

AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW OCTOBER 2005

This content downloaded from 91.238.114.163 on Sat, 28 Jun 2014 17:37:27 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions