Japan's victories in the Sino-Japanese War and the Russo-Japanese War led to the creation of a multinational empire, first with the acquisition of Taiwan in 1895 and later with the absorption of Korea in 1910.This was followed by the gradual takeover of Manchuria that culminated in the early 1930s with the creation of Japan's puppet regime in Manchukuo.The acquisition of new territories is a simpler task than the governance of these regions and the management of relations between the peoples of the colonizing nation and those in the colonies.Kate McDonald, a professor of Modern Japanese History at the University of California, Santa Barbara, explores the relationships between Japanese and the locals of their newly acquired territories from the beginnings of the Japanese empire in 1894-95 through the end of the Allied Occupation of Japan in 1952.Her book is about the "spatial politics" of Japanese imperialism, that is, how the newly formed Japanese empire took over colonized lands by domesticating, disavowing, and disappearing other claims to the same land.McDonald stresses how the idea of place became central to the production of new forms of colonial hierarchy as empires in the age of imperialism tried to make the transition from territorial acquisition to one of territorial maintenance.The focus of the book is on imperial tourism-how native Japanese toured their newly acquired empire and interacted with Taiwanese Chinese, Koreans, and the peoples of Manchuria, as well as how elite groups from these territories came to Japan to experience firsthand the modernity and power of their colonizers.The main actors of this work are "imperial travelers," namely students and other Japanese who often took
Daniel A. MÉTRAUX (Wed,) studied this question.