We are pleased to discuss with Professor Seiji Shirane the intermediary role of colonial Taiwan and overseas Taiwanese subjects in the Japanese Empire’s southern advance in South China and Southeast Asia. 

Professor Shirane is a historian of modern Japan at The City College of New York (CUNY). His first book is Imperial Gateway: Colonial Taiwan and Japan’s Expansion in South China and Southeast Asia, 1895–1945 (Cornell University Press, 2022). His research has received support from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Fulbright, Social Science Research Council, and Japan Society for the Promotion of Science.

The interview was conducted online in English on February 2, 2023 and has been edited for clarity. The interview is published in two parts. Part 1 details Professor Shirane’s academic trajectory and the historiographical interventions that his scholarship builds on and further extends. Part 2 covers Professor Shirane’s thoughts on his book’s potential reception in Taiwan, his pedagogical and historiographical interventions in the field of modern Japanese history, the goals of the newly founded Modern Japan History Association (MJHA), and his advice to graduate students studying Taiwan history in North America. 

Interviewed and edited by Sabrina Teng-io Chung
Cover image: East Asia Image Collection, Lafayette Digital Repository

Taiwan Gazette: You undertook your undergraduate studies at Yale University and completed your Ph.D. degree in History at Princeton University. Can you share with us your training in modern Japanese history? What might be some of the historiographical trends that motivated or informed your research interest in Sino-Japanese relations prior to or during your Ph.D. studies?

Seiji Shirane: I’ll start with my time at Yale, which was from 2000-04. I was very fortunate to have taken my first Japanese history class on the Japanese Empire with Professor Lori Watt, who is now at Washington University in St. Louis. Some of the major works that informed my earlier understandings of Sino-Japanese relations include Louise Young’s Japan’s Total Empire (1998) which uncovers the importance of Japan’s wartime empire and Manchuria to the Japanese metropole. We also read Peter Duus’ The Abacus and the Sword (1995), the leading monograph on Japanese imperialism in Korea at the time. 

As a Japanese-American, I didn’t grow up with Japanese as a native language, but I studied a lot at Yale to improve my reading and writing abilities. I did not have Chinese-language skills at the time, but I discussed with Lori Watt about how there were very few English-language studies of Japanese history that engaged with Chinese-language sources and publications seriously. For the most part, American historians of modern Japan at the time only used Japanese-language sources.

By fortuitous circumstances, I took a two-week exchange trip organized by the Yale-China Association to the Chinese University of Hong Kong in 2002. That was really an eye-opening experience. Prior to the trip, I’d never been anywhere outside of Japan when visiting Asia. I was amazed by how fascinating Hong Kong was. We took a two-day trip to Guangzhou and for the first time, I really felt the anti-Japanese sentiment and how much the wartime memory mattered to people in China. That sparked the fire for me to learn Chinese. After I graduated in 2004, I went to Yale-China and taught two years of English at Sun Yat-sen University with the goal of learning Chinese so that I could return to my studies both with Chinese- and Japanese-language skills. That was a life-changing and very formative moment for my personal and academic career. Later, I spent one year each in Beijing and Yokohama on language fellowships.

When I arrived in Princeton in 2008, I was planning to work on modern Sino-Japanese relations. I wasn’t sure where to begin with my research at first if my focus wasn’t going to be Manchuria, Shanghai, or other regions conventionally covered by the existing literature back then. On the advice of my Chinese history advisors—Benjamin Elman, Susan Naquin, and Janet Chen—I took research trips after my first year in 2009 to Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Taipei. The research trip to Taiwan was really a turning point in my studies. While in the US, I didn’t really know much about colonial Taiwan except for Leo Ching’s book on Becoming Japanese (2001). But the field of Taiwan history was really thriving in Taiwan. I read up on the pioneering scholarship on Taiwan history by Taiwanese scholars including Chung Shu-min (鍾淑敏), Hsu Hsueh-chi (許雪姬), and others who would later become my mentors at Academia Sinica. Also, the Taiwan Government-General Archives, which were opened to the public in the 1990s, as well as colonial-era publications based in Academia Sinica and National Taiwan University, were very accessible. Looking at those materials, I saw that Japanese colonial officials were not only interested in ruling Taiwan per se but really targeted South China and Southeast Asia as potential sites of imperial expansion. In my book, I coined the term “imperial gateway” to understand the centrality of colonial Taiwan and overseas Taiwanese subjects in Japan’s project of southern expansion. At the time, the Japanese themselves called Taiwan nanmon, or a southern gateway for further imperial advance. 

When I returned to the US to work on my dissertation project, I decided to use Taiwan as a focal point to investigate the role of not only Japanese but also overseas Taiwanese subjects in South China and Southeast Asia. The critique posed by Andre Schmid in his 2000 Journal of Asian Studies review article on the historiography of modern Japan revealed how much of the literature on the Japanese Empire had been dominated by Japanese-language sources and Japanese imperial perspectives. In light of Schmid’s critique, I really wanted to incorporate non-Japanese perspectives in my research. And that’s what led me to the multi-lingual and multi-archival project where Taiwan became a lens to examine the regional and inter-ethnic dynamics among Japan, Taiwan, and South China on the one hand, and among Japan, Taiwan, and Southeast Asia on the other. 

Taiwan Gazette: You’ve briefly touched upon your encounter of anti-Japanese sentiments while you were in Guangzhou. Can you further explain what forms those sentiments were expressed? Were those sentiments directed towards you as a Japanese-American, or to the country of Japan in general? What was happening in Sino-Japanese relations at that time?

Seiji Shirane: My first encounter with Chinese university students in Guangzhou in 2002 was at once jarring but also fascinating. Many of the local students might have met American teachers before, but they hadn’t really met any Japanese (or Japanese-Americans) in person. They considered me to be Japanese and asked for my thoughts on Japan’s wartime crimes and massacres and inquired whether I would apologize on behalf of Japan. I didn’t take it personally and explained to students that I was Japanese-American and in fact needed to learn more about the history. So, if anything, the experience pushed me to learn more about modern Chinese history and Sino-Japanese relations so that I could be better informed.

Later on, during my three years of working and studying in China (2004–07), I saw that Japan was often casted in a negative light in media representations regarding Japan’s wartime activities. Beyond media representations, there were fewer opportunities than today for Chinese to develop more nuanced understandings of Japan either through travel or study. In 2005, Sino-Japanese tensions increased as a result of Yasukuni Shrine visits, Japanese history textbook controversies, and Japan’s attempt to become a permanent member of the UN Security Council, which led to nationwide demonstrations. I never felt personally in danger during the height of anti-Japanese sentiment in China, but I was able to experience first-hand such negative sentiments in China towards Japan. 

But the situation has changed much over the years. With the lifting of Japanese travel restrictions, many of my students and friends from China have been able to visit and even study in Japan. The rise of anti-Americanism has also taken some of the cultural and rhetorical space of previous anti-Japanese sentiments. 

Taiwan Gazette: I raised the question about anti-Japanese sentiments in China because it seems that your experience in China and Taiwan could have been very different depending on how you were positioned as a Japanese-American. Can you discuss if your positionality as a Japanese-American changed or shifted the dynamics in terms of how you proceeded with your research on Sino-Japanese relations in Taiwan? 

Seiji Shirane: I would say that the anti-Japanese hostility that I witnessed in China initially motivated me to study modern Sino-Japanese relations rather than Taiwan per se. When I began to spend more time in Taiwan, though, I found Taiwanese scholarship on Sino-Japanese relations to be more balanced and not organized around binaries of Japanese aggression and Chinese resistance. In China, it would have been difficult to engage in academic conversations about Sino-Japanese wartime relations in ways that were not about resistance or collaboration. In Taiwan, however, many scholars of Taiwan history received their academic training from, and maintained personal and professional connections with, Japanese and American academia. This made it intellectually and academically easier for me to converse with scholars such as Chung Shu-min, Chou Wan-yao (周婉窈), Chang Lung-chih (張隆志), Wu Mi-cha (吳密察), and others. 

I’m very grateful to how open and accepting Taiwanese scholars and students were to me during my research year in Taiwan (2010-11), allowing me to join their seminars, attend their workshops, and use their archives and materials. Without Chung Shu-min, Hsu Hsueh-chi, and other scholars at Academia Sinica’s Institute of Taiwan History, I would not have been able to conduct my primary research. At National Taiwan University, I also audited seminars on Taiwan history with Chou Wan-yao, and most of my training in Japanese-language scholarship on the Japanese Empire came from Chung Shu-min’s seminar there. She taught me how to read kuzushiji, or the hand-written documents from the Taiwan Government-General. She really is the leading expert in this field.

I also benefited from the generosity of Japanese scholars and students during my research years in Tokyo (2011-12; 2015-16). I received great training in kuzushiji with Ikeda Maho (池田真歩), who at the time was a graduate student at the University of Tokyo (she is currently a professor at Hokkai-Gakuen University). She led a study group on kuzushiji and also tutored me to read Meiji-era handwritten documents. I also audited a modern Japanese history seminar by Katō Yōko (加藤陽子) at the University of Tokyo and benefited from Kawashima Shin’s (川島真) “History of Chinese Foreign Relations” seminar. One of Kawashima’s Chinese students, Xu Hang, became a close friend, and she also helped tutor me in reading handwritten KMT archival documents. 

So, as you can see, a lot of my formative training during graduate school took place not just at Princeton but also in Taiwan and Japan. One piece of advice I would share with graduate students is to be active in broadening your academic networks in your relevant research fields in Asia. It is rare to have a set of courses during your fieldwork that is directly relevant to your research because each topic is going to require different skills and materials. You have to be creative with how you are going to get trained in Asia, whether it is finding fellow students, professors, or tutors to try to make the most of your own time in the field.

On a separate note, I would also reiterate that students and scholars of colonial Taiwan really need to engage with the pioneering Chinese-language scholarship done by Taiwanese scholars. If you look at the endnotes and bibliography of my book, I heavily cited some of the best scholarship on colonial Taiwan by Taiwanese scholars such as Chung Shu-min, Hsu Hsueh-chi, Lin Man-houng (林滿紅), and many others. 

A lot of Chinese-language scholarship on colonial Taiwan has not yet been introduced and explored in the English-language literature. In this sense, I see one of my roles as an academic and cultural mediator for introducing such important scholarship to the English-language field. My book is the first English-language monograph on colonial Taiwan in the regional context of Japan’s southern expansion over the course of fifty years. In the body chapters of my book, I was able to develop a holistic view of the roles of the Japanese colonial government in Taiwan and overseas Taiwanese subjects in the empire’s expansion in South China and Southeast Asia, a research topic that has only been discussed in bits and pieces by different scholars in Japanese, Chinese, and English. Another contribution of my book is to make the story of colonial Taiwan relevant to the case studies of Korea or the Japanese Empire at large, putting Taiwan in the historical context of global empires—a case in point being the British Empire in India—and getting a wider audience for Taiwan history while shedding a new analytical light to Anglophone studies of global empires. I am of course aware of certain historiographical trends in Taiwan that emphasize the need to differentiate Taiwan from China and Japan, and to make the people of Taiwan the center of their own histories. However, even Taiwanese scholars such as Chang Lung-chih and Wu Mi-cha have publicly encouraged the historiographical effort to approach Taiwan history in a global or regional framework. Highlighting the multi-regional dynamics shaping the history of colonial Taiwan and its subjects, my book had such ambitions to build on but also differentiate itself from the scholarship of Taiwanese historians.

Taiwan Gazette: It is very interesting that you have just referred to yourself as a mediator of different language sources and scholarship. Can you further discuss your intervention in the existing English-language historiography on Japan’s southern expansion? How has this focus not just on South China but also Southeast Asia contributed to the historical knowledge production about the Japanese Empire in the South?

Seiji Shirane: We need to be mindful of the artificial divisions in area studies that have conventionally categorized South China and Southeast Asia as separate regional units of analysis. In fact, the Japanese treated South China and Southeast Asia as an extended geostrategic unit of Nanshi Nan’yō (南支南洋) or Nanpō (南方). In my dissertation, however, I didn’t have time to fully compare the role of colonial Taiwan and overseas Taiwanese subjects in both South China and Southeast Asia, but I expanded on this when revising my dissertation into a book. Also, my mentors who read my dissertation all encouraged me to include and expand on my discussion of Southeast Asia in my book project. They considered it important to compare how South China and Southeast Asia were different and similar and to seriously address the regional dynamics shaping Japan’s southern expansion. I have to thank colleagues and friends for encouraging me to remain ambitious throughout the revision process, because at times it felt like it would be too much to handle.

Before I go into some of the specifics of what I’m challenging or building upon in terms of the English-language historiography on Japanese southern expansion, I need to mention the other bodies of scholarship that informed my work. I was also inspired by Indian Ocean studies where scholars of the British Empire and colonial India, including Thomas R. Metcalf and Sugata A. Bose, didn’t just focus their research on India per se but followed where the Indians went, which was into Africa and Southeast Asia. And so, my research was inspired in part by the idea of following where the Taiwanese went. In this sense, I was trying to engage in dialogue with Indian Ocean studies. I was also inspired by French Mediterranean scholarship by scholars such as Mary D. Lewis, Julia A. Clancy-Smith, and others who examined the formal and informal extensions of the French empire in Tunisia, Morocco, Algeria, and elsewhere. Their analysis was useful for my understanding of extraterritoriality, imperial subjecthood, and flexible citizenship in the context of French and Ottoman Empires. I see a lot of parallels between these case studies and what was happening in Japan and East Asia. 

In terms of my intervention in Japanese Empire studies, I’ll begin with a discussion of Mark R. Peattie, one of the pioneering English-language historians on Japanese southern expansion. Peattie was an expert on rivalries between the Imperial Navy and Army during military southern expansion in the 1930s and 40s. He also wrote a book called Nan’yo: The Rise and Fall of the Japanese in Micronesia, 1885-1945 (1988). My book contends that in addition to the navy and army and Micronesia, we have to take the regional dynamics between Taiwan, South China, Southeast Asia, and other areas seriously. In addition, the story of southern expansion does not only involve the navy and army in the 30s and 40s but also includes the intra-imperial rivalries between the Foreign Ministry and Taiwan Government-General, both prewar and during the war. Peattie didn’t have access to the Taiwan Government-General archives and didn’t look at Taiwan as a focal point of analysis. This is one of my book’s contributions to Peattie’s wonderful work from the 80s to the 90s. 

More recently, we also have the publication of excellent works on Japanese occupation of different regions of Southeast Asia—ranging from Indonesia, Burma, the Philippines, and elsewhere—by scholars such as Jeremy Yellen, Ethan Mark, and Paul H. Kratoska. That said, I think the literature on Japanese-Chinese-Taiwanese relations and the Japanese occupation of Southeast Asia have been divorced from each other. For instance, in the works on Japanese occupation of Southeast Asia, Taiwanese and Korean subjects seldom enter into the frame of analysis, let alone Japanese-occupied China and colonial Taiwan. You have to read separate books. So, another intervention of my work is to overcome the disciplinary divides in area studies, shedding light on the interconnectedness of Japan’s activities in Taiwan, South China, and Southeast Asia.

There have also been great publications on mobility and ethnicity by Hiroko Matsuda, Eiichiro Azuma, David R. Ambaras, and others who examine the border crossings of Taiwanese and other imperial subjects throughout the Japanese Empire and across the Pacific. My work is different from this scholarship in that it takes seriously the colonial state (Taiwan Government-General) both as an actor and an institution of Japan’s southern advance in addition to its colonial subjects. My work investigates colonial institutions’ power over their subjects, as well as their limits, while at the same time illuminating how these subjects themselves were imperial actors overseas.  

Lastly, in the field of China studies and Southeast Asian studies, increasing scholarly attention has been directed towards the study of overseas Chinese (diasporic) subjects and Sinophone migration networks. At present, historians of modern Japan have yet to really engage with scholarship on the overseas Chinese diaspora or Sinophone studies. Occasionally, we might see discussions on the overseas Chinese anti-Japanese boycotts throughout the 1930s. But the Japanese Empire was also trying to tap into the diasporic southern Chinese network in Taiwan, South China, and Southeast Asia from as early as the 1910s up through the 1940s. My work tries to contribute to the existing historiography of Japanese southern expansion by placing it in conversation with Chinese migration and Sinophone studies. 

Taiwan Gazette: A lot of your discussion focused on the geographical scope of your book, but I’m also interested in the temporal dimension of it, because in the epilogue, you actually include the postwar into your temporal framework. Why is it necessary to include that part of history into your work?

Seiji Shirane: In my dissertation and the initial manuscript that I sent to Cornell University Press, my conclusion didn’t really touch on the postwar period. But rather than reiterating my major arguments and interventions in the conclusion, thanks to the advice of Evan Dawley (author of Becoming Taiwanese, 2019), I later decided to trace the really complicated, ambivalent, and oftentimes tragic postwar aftermath of overseas Taiwanese subjects in South China and Southeast Asia. What kind of Taiwan were they returning to, given their ambivalent wartime roles in-between the Japanese and Chinese? What happened to them under KMT rule? What happened to those who were punished as war criminals by the Allied Powers? These questions could totally be covered by another book-length project and so it was really challenging to discuss the postwar legacies in a short epilogue. But I thought it was important to include the postwar period to show what happened after the collapse of the Japanese Empire. 

Lastly, my book aims more than just to introduce a new geographical and temporal scope of analysis to studies of the Japanese Empire. It also tries to engage with the vibrant scholarship on colonial Korea, Japan’s northern advance, and the role of Korean subjects in Manchuria by scholars including Alyssa M. Park, Hyun Ok Park, Joseph A. Seeley, Jun Uchida, and many others. My book seeks to contribute to an understanding of the differences and similarities between Taiwan and Korea before and during the war (see especially Chapters 1, 2, and 4). 

Taiwan Gazette: Since the publication of your book in December 2022, you have delivered numerous book talks in universities across North America. How was your book received by audiences? What might be some of the most productive and challenging exchanges you have had so far?

Seiji Shirane: It’s been gratifying to interact with professors and students not just interested in Japan but also China, Southeast Asia, and even India—people whom I am not usually in direct dialogue with in my place of work at The City College of New York (CUNY). Having such a diverse body of students and scholars come and engage with my work has been a privilege. But of course, there’s also going to be some pushback from such diverse audiences.

For example, one historian of Southeast Asia suggested that my book’s focus on Japanese and Taiwanese actors could have been expanded upon to further account for the perspectives of local Southeast Asians and Chinese civilians. I think this is a totally valid criticism. Scholars of China and Southeast Asia could indeed contribute to the uncovering of local perspectives with different sources and frameworks, and I think this is a field of future research that has a lot of potential. If I myself criticized previous generations of scholars of the Japanese Empire for not including non-Japanese perspectives such as those from Korea, Taiwan, or China, I equally need to acknowledge that there are other perspectives that could not be adequately covered by my work based on my priorities of time and space. 

Another challenge that I received from audiences has to do with my approach to take the focus away from the metropole and toward the colony and neighboring regions. One historian of South Asia pointed out that the power hierarchies that played out in the metropole mattered and in fact continued to resonate across Taiwan and South China and Southeast Asia. I think it’s certainly an important challenge to try to keep the role of the metropole in clear view when narrating the history of Japan’s southern advance. 

As for a self-criticism of the book, I would say that given its focus on the impact of Japan’s southern expansion on the overseas Taiwanese subjects in the Southern Regions, it does not sufficiently address the impact of southern expansion on societies within Taiwan and especially the Japanese metropole. What did southern expansion mean to Japanese civilians in the metropole who never traveled outside of mainland Japan? Or even to the Taiwanese who did not leave Taiwan during the prewar and wartime period? Such questions could serve as points of inquiry for future scholars.

Read Part 2 of the interview here.