Fear and loathing in imperial Japan : the cultures of Korean peril, 1919-1923
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- This dissertation explores the cultures of colonial terror in imperial Japan's metropole. Concomitant to attempts to discursively contain new resistance from colonized Korean subjects after World War I, narratives of conspiracy and terrorism featuring "treacherous Koreans" (futei Senjin) captivated Japan's imperial imagination through state discourse, tabloid journalism, pulp detective novels, travel writing, leftist literature, and popular rumor. This heralded an interwar era of "Korean Peril" in metropolitan print culture, rife with fictional and actual outbreaks of paranoia and violence. By examining the figuration of Korean Peril, this dissertation proposes that, although colonial vocabularies and narrative tropes worked to fix identities and manage the fear and violence attendant to imperial expansion, the process of popular narration frequently drew attention to the ironic gaps and ambivalent contradictions of Japan's approach to colonial empire. Chapter I documents the rise of Korean Peril in Japanese print as it mutated from an official construct of containment and differentiation into a stereotyped discourse of ethnic terror criminalizing all Korean subjects in sensational newspaper reporting. Chapter II considers how Korean Peril was progressively deformed in the process of exploiting the comingled terror and delight evoked by uncanny Korean figures within the unstable genre of Japanese tantei shōsetsu. These generic experiments ended with ambivalent and even unintentionally subversive twists. Chapters III and IV turn to critique and counter-narration of the discursive demonization of Korean rebels, in order to chart the new spaces that both Japanese and Korean writers used to debate and re-signify the terminology of colonial identity and resistance. In the realm of literary counter-discourse, anti-travelogues by the leftist writer Nakanishi Inosuke tread a fine line between complicity and subversion as they parodied both the colonizer's fear of the colonized and the genres of Korean Peril. Finally, Chapter V juxtaposes narratives and images that aimed to ironically reconstruct the 1923 post-earthquake "Korean Panic, " an explosion of communal violence that led to the murders of thousands of Korean residents of Japan, by treating the farcical trope of mistaken identity as a form of national self-critique.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Form | electronic; electronic resource; remote |
| Extent | 1 online resource. |
| Publication date | 2013 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Associated with | Haag, Andre Robert |
|---|---|
| Associated with | Stanford University, Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures. |
| Primary advisor | Reichert, Jim (James Robert) |
| Thesis advisor | Reichert, Jim (James Robert) |
| Thesis advisor | Carter, Steven D |
| Thesis advisor | Levy, Indra A |
| Advisor | Carter, Steven D |
| Advisor | Levy, Indra A |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | Andre Robert Haag. |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures. |
| Thesis | Ph.D. Stanford University 2013 |
| Location | electronic resource |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2013 by Andre Robert Haag
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
Also listed in
Loading usage metrics...