CCNY Historians Receive NEH Awards:

Yaari Felber-Seligman & Seiji Shirane (2021)

CCNY Humanities & Arts

Spotlight (Spring 2016)

Seiji Shirane, Assistant Professor of History

(Social Science Research Council Postdoctoral Research Fellowship)

Tell us briefly about your current project and the way that these grants are helping your research?

My book project examines how the Japanese transformed their first overseas colony of Taiwan (1895–1945) into an imperial center for expansion into South China and Southeast Asia. In American academia, Taiwanese history has been orphaned in-between the research fields of Japanese and Chinese history. My goal has been to make colonial Taiwan's history an integral part of the regional study of Asia and dissolve the artificial divides of nation-based histories.  One of the key imperial innovations by the Japanese was to mobilize its overseas Taiwanese subjects in South China. The majority of Taiwan's population were Han Chinese who had migrated from South China beginning in the 17th century. The Japanese valued the Taiwanese as imperial intermediaries—as merchants, teachers, doctors, and later during World War II as military translators, laborers, nurses—because of their ethnic and linguistic ties to China.  My fellowship has given me the opportunity to collect essential Japanese- and Chinese-language materials to reshape my project, which had previously focused on imperial institutions and policies. I have incorporated more biographical details, including transcribed oral histories, to write a broader social history that illuminates the interactions and tensions between Japanese, Taiwanese, and Chinese individuals "on the ground" of Japan's southern empire.  During my stay at the University of Tokyo's Institute for Advanced Research on Asia, I have also presented my work and received valuable feedback from historians of Taiwan and Sino-Japanese relations. By collaborating with scholars of this period, I hope to contribute to a much-needed cultural and historical dialogue across the Taiwan Straits and between China and Japan.

What drew you to your current project?

I entered graduate school in 2008 wanting to study Japanese imperialism in China and its controversial postwar legacies, but at the time Taiwan was hardly on my academic radar. I had lived in China from 2004 to 2007, during which I personally witnessed the rise of anti-Japanese Chinese nationalism in reaction to the Japanese government's "whitewashing" of its imperial history in the media and school textbooks. While much of the important scholarship of the last two decades on Japan's northern expansion in Korea and Northeast China, I thought a lot of Japan's imperial project in the south was being overlooked. During a research trip to Taiwan in 2009, I came across a vast archive of materials that revealed how colonial Taiwan served not only as a central base for Japan's southern expansion, but also as a political and cultural intermediary between Japan, South China, and Southeast Asia.

I became particularly fascinated by how Taiwanese subjects used passports and colonial subjecthood that challenged our conventional notions of "Japanese" and "Chinese" identity. Although the Taiwanese were relegated to second-class status in Taiwan due to discriminatory colonial policies, in China the Taiwanese enjoyed "extraterritorial" rights (exemption from Chinese taxes and laws) as Japanese nationals. The overseas Taiwanese thus found opportunities for financial profit and social mobility unavailable to them within the colony. Yet they were not merely pawns of empire. To the dismay of Japanese authorities, Chinese and Taiwanese alike exploited legal loopholes in imperial nationality to engage in illicit opium businesses and gang violence that inflamed Sino-Japanese tensions. Other Taiwanese evaded Japanese rule by forming anti-Japanese alliances with Chinese and Korean activists throughout China.

What sources do you use to conduct research, and what are some of the greatest challenges to your research process? What are some of the rewards?

My historical sources are divided largely into five types that I have collected over the past five years from Japan, Taiwan, China, Singapore, Britain, and the United States. (1) Japanese Colonial Government archives in Taipei; (2) Japanese Foreign Ministry and Military Defense archives in Tokyo; (3) Chinese archives from South China; (4) Chinese-language newspapers and oral histories by Taiwanese in China and Southeast Asia; (5) British and American diplomatic reports on Taiwanese activity in China.

One of the challenges of studying Japanese empire is that imperial ambitions were rarely unified among leaders, but often divided between institutions (just like in the British, French, and other Western empires). I thus compare Japanese sources from Taipei and Tokyo to trace how the Taipei Colonial Government at times actively competed with Tokyo's Foreign Ministry, Army, and Navy in shaping the direction of Japan's southern advance.

Another methodological challenge in writing imperial history is that Japanese- and Chinese-language documents tend to privilege the nationalist frameworks of Japan and China, respectively. Japanese newspapers often describe Taiwanese as "victims" of South China's "lawlessness and banditry" who needed to be protected by additional Japanese police or soldiers. By contrast, mainland Chinese-language reports depicted the overseas Taiwanese as collaborators and "running dogs" of Japan who preyed on the local Chinese population. Such nationalist narratives fail to capture the contingency and individual motivations of overseas Taiwanese in China.

With few extant sources directly written by the overseas Taiwanese between the 1900s and 1920s, I incorporate contemporary British and American consular reports from South China for additional perspectives on the Taiwanese that go beyond Japan- and China-centered frameworks. Such English-language sources illuminate how boundaries between "Taiwanese" and "Chinese" participation in illicit businesses or pro-Japanese activities were quite blurred and did not necessarily align with national interests. I also refer to transcribed interviews and memoirs from Taiwanese oral history projects (1990s–2000s) to include first-hand testimonies by Taiwanese who served in the Chinese and Southeast Asian warfronts in the 1930s–40s.

One of the main rewards of research has been to draw on a combination of documents from different languages and regions that reveal the messiness and unexpected tensions of empire on the ground. The overseas Taiwanese were not easily divided between "resisters" or "collaborators," but often pursued individual interests overseas that at times played multiple imperial powers off against each other. Indeed, responses by Japanese, Chinese, and Western officials toward the Taiwanese were contingent and improvisatory: they were as much about reacting to, rather than simply directing, the unpredictable behavior of shrewd Chinese and Taiwanese.

How does your research influence your teaching?

At City College, I teach courses that incorporate some of the central issues in my book project such as imperialism, war, race, and migration. For instance, in mobilizing and monitoring Taiwanese overseas, Japanese colonial officials adopted a passport system based on British Hong Kong and the Straits Settlements. Yet compared to their British and other Western counterparts, the Japanese actively recruited wealthy and well-connected Chinese and naturalized them as "Taiwanese subjects" to extend Japan's sphere of influence in China. In my course on "Japanese Empire," students grapple with similar questions of how the Japanese at times imitated Western models of empire, yet at other times innovated new "imperial tools" to compete for hegemony in East and Southeast Asia. Within Japan's empire, moreover, colonial practices in education and economy differed in Taiwan, Korea, Manchuria, Micronesia, and Southeast Asia. Just as my research compares Japan's southern expansion in Taiwan with northern expansion in Korea, I challenge my students to think of similarities and divergences when juxtaposing different regions and periods of Japan's empire.

My teaching, in turn, has also influenced revisions for my book project. Students in my "Japanese Empire" and "Japanese-Chinese Relations" courses have continuously critiqued the Japanese-heavy perspective of existing monographs as they want to hear more of the "voices" from Taiwanese, Korean, and Chinese subjects. While there are obvious source-limitations to capturing first-hand views of the colonized, thanks to my students I have made greater efforts in my research to highlight Taiwanese and Chinese as individual protagonists of my narrative. My hope is to publish a book that will educate future students about the multiple, often conflicting layers of imperial relations engendered by Japan's southern empire.