In December 2022 and January 2023, Global Asia Research Center, Waseda University hosted special lectures entitled “Emplotting the Japanese empire” (帝国日本：筋書き化の問題) presented by Jordan Sand, Professor at Georgetown University. On December 21^st, the first lecture, The Japanese Colonial Empire: Problems and Approaches, was successfully held.

Professor Sand explained the importance of the historiographic problem presented by the colonial Empire. For example, Taiwan and Korea were a part of Japan for long years, and they were decolonized to be nation states now. On the other hand, The people of Okinawa recognize themselves as under Japanese sovereignty and with the rights of Japanese citizens. Still, we know they are culturally different from Japanese people. The historiographic problem is how to understand these interconnected histories, talk about them, and narrate them without minimalizing the violence in the harms of colonial rule.

Then, professor Sand explained the concept of “emplotment.” The word “emplotment” came from Hayden White’s classic work, Metahistory. White analyzed some of the classic works of nineteenth-century European historians as if they were fiction and concluded that there are four basic plots. They were called romance, satire, comedy, and tragedy. Professor Sand suggested that we would apply these plots to the Japanese Colonial Empire. In the romance narrative, the colonial era was a year of terrible, but eventually, colonial subjects liberated themselves. The satire says that the colonial era had no overarching meaning, so it just was a series of events. The comedy says it was terrible, but there were moments of transcending and some kind of reconciliation as well. Finally, the tragedy says the colonial era was terrible, but things didn’t get better, so there was no liberation.

Professor Sand moved on to the subject of anglophone historiography. There was a regional turn from a focus on the Japanese archipelago to a broader focus on the East Asian region and beyond the writing of the history of Japan. It started here in Japan in the 1990s and followed about a decade later in Anglophone writing about Japan. One of the most important studies of the Japanese colonial empire was Ramon Myers and Mark Peattie and Myers (eds), The Japanese Colonial Empire, 1895-1945. Myer and Peattie provided a theoretical series of binaries such as metropole vs. colony, formal empire vs. informal empire, and Naichi (内地) vs. Gaichi (外地). Then, Andre Schmidt published ‘Colonialism and the ‘Korea Problem’ in the Historiography of Modern Japan’ in the Journal of Asian Studies and challenged Myers and Peattie’s work. He insisted that most of their stories were told from the point of view of the colonial administrators of the Tokyo government. He emphasized that the issue was the voice of the colonized. Finally, professor Sand pointed out that the geography of studies of the Japanese empire had just started to expand in all directions. Eiichiro Azuma dealt with the migration issue as the trouble linked with Empire. His works showed us that the issue of Japanese imperialism and Japanese migration could not be separated.

At the end of the lecture, Professor Sand discussed the possibility of writing Japanese imperial history in a comedy narrative. Professor Sand referred to Waseda University as an imperial cultural network, Choi Seung-hee and Li Xianglan as trans-cultural icons, and anarchists Kaneko Fumiko and Pak Yol as a small moment of transcendence.