CHAPTER 1 Introduction: The Synthesis of Foreign and Indigenous Constructions of Race in Modern East Asia and Its Actual Operation Rotem Kowner and Walter Demel There is a wide consensus that the modern concept of race originated in Europe, and, by the same token, that in modern times this continent and its overseas offshoots had seen more than their fair share of extreme forms of racism. It is no wonder, then, that Western scholarship has focused on the racial attitudes towards and the impact of these attitudes on groups residing within these geographical domains. Notable among these are Black Africans in North America and Jews in Europe, and, to a lesser extent, also Amerindians and gypsies in these two continents, respectively. And yet, what is often forgotten is that in many cases European race theories targeted humanity in general, and that this broad scope also includes other groups, many of whom are virtually missing from the scholarship on race. Moreover, despite their cardinal role in this regard, Europeans have not been the sole producers of racial theories or the sole promulgators of racist agendas in modern times, and certainly not since the latter half of the nineteenth century. East Asia, as we have demonstrated in our earlier volume, Race and Racism in Modern East Asia: Western and Eastern Constructions (2013), is a pertinent and timely case study for a broader analysis of the way in which the concept of race has developed and expanded and of the way in which the mechanism of racism operates. More specifically, we assert that a careful study of the Western (European and North American) racial views of East Asians alongside the racial theories that emerged in modern East Asia are of exceptional scholarly interest. Such a study is likely to shed light not only on the rise of the concept of race and on the spread of racism in modern times, but also on the turbulent inter-regional relations between the West and East Asia during the last two centuries as well as on the recent tensions and internal relations between China, Japan, and the two Koreas. In our previous volume, we did this by juxtaposing the constructions of race in these two regions. This structure helped us to present the origins, continuity and developmental similarities within and between the West and East Asia. In the present volume, we seek to go one step further by focusing on topics we dealt with sketchily in the © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2015 | doi 10.1163/9789004292932_002 2 Kowner and Demel earlier volume and by filling in a number of lacunas that were not covered at all. These topics are located in several domains: The exact place of East Asians in the initial European constructions of race in modern times; the interplay between Western and indigenous constructions of race in East Asia; the interaction between nationalism and race; and the links between race, gender and lineage in the region. These domains and issues are obviously not unique to East Asia. Nevertheless, we believe that their examination in this specific regional context could broaden existing knowledge about the way they operate in general and in non-Western environments in particular. To facilitate generalizations and inferences from the case studies presented in this book to a general model, we shall proceed to offer several premises about the mechanisms race and racism employ to operate in and with regard to modern East Asia. Theory is a tool for further research although it may at times constrain our peripheral vision. When initiating this project, we refrained from offering any theoretical guidelines or preliminary assumptions for the construction of race and racism in East Asia, mostly because the bulk of the evidence needed to be established first and partly due to the divergent background and distinctive response each of the main nations displayed. However, based on the material gathered, we are able now to propose a number of theoretical observations. These, in turn, will allow us to reflect upon the actual operation of race and racism in this region and the reasons for their specific manifestation in the concluding chapter. The ensuing 21 chapters thus seek to elaborate upon and validate the following premises: 1. 2. 3. 4. East Asians played a significant role in the European construction of the idea of race since the late Enlightenment and throughout modern times. The modern constructions of race in East Asia and in the West (with regard to East Asians) have been the outcome of both ongoing interactions and the exchange of knowledge between the two regions. This process, in turn, resulted in hybrid constructions of self and Other, somewhat inconsistent at times but steadily changing and adaptive. Nationalism is associated with both racism and racial constructions in the sense that both strengthen each other and lead to a further distinction of self from Other and the elevation of the former. This is because both nationalism and racism tend to facilitate the mobilization of ingroup members in the pursuit of political self-determination for that group. Ethnic nationalism thrives in nations in which the local population is relatively homogeneous, enjoying a long-lasting common heritage and a tradition of popular mobilization against external groups alongside a Introduction 5. 6. 3 limited democratic tradition in modern times. These conditions are found throughout modern East Asia. Racism is associated with gender and especially with gender-based discrimination since it has traditionally been focused on masculine power, and uses gender symbolism to elevate the self and derogate the Other. East Asians were victims of this association but also exploited it against minority groups. Societies in which lineage plays a significant role experience the impact of race and racism upon the inclusion and exclusion of ingroup and outgroup members more acutely. This is because the ideology of lineage emphasizes the purity of ancestral “blood,” meaning that the fear of its “contamination” tends to lead to a greater exclusion of outgroup members. This phenomenon is easily observed throughout modern East Asia. Before we move to explore these topics, a word of caution. “Race” and “racism” are not straightforward concepts, and there is no consensus on their exact definition. Nonetheless, we have striven towards a specific rather than an extended meaning of “race” and “racism” in this volume, as we had done in Volume 1, and have therefore avoided such phrases as “proto-racial thinking” or “racism without races.”1 This notwithstanding, we certainly do acknowledge that there are forms of discrimination, degradation, and social exclusion based on such constructs as “culture,” “way of life,” “religion,” “language,” or “purity,” which have been used as functional equivalents to “race” from antiquity (e.g., the denigration of barbarians by Greeks and Romans) to the present day (e.g., the use of such concepts as “neo-racism,” “cultural racism,” or “culturalism”). It is for this reason that we will argue hereafter that the line between racism and culturalism is frequently ambiguous. This, of course, does not prescribe our definitions and linguistic usages to our contributors, although we have tried, as editors, to ensure that every chapter elucidates, at least from its context, what its authors mean when they use this basic term. The outcome, however, is inevitably heterogeneous, especially where nomenclature is concerned. This may seem incoherent at times, since many chapters do not relate to each other. Nonetheless, questions regarding “Race and racism in Modern East Asia” are a rather new domain of inquiry in which some research has apparently been done in the past. And yet, nobody has thus far made a comprehensive attempt to sketch out the entire range of the topics involved. As one peer-reviewer aptly puts it, we tried “to put the various currents of the development of racial discourses in East Asia and Europe since the eighteenth century in one place” 1 For defnitions of “race” and “racism,” see Kowner & Demel, 2013b: 5–8. 4 Kowner and Demel in a hope “that the reader who is particularly interested in some of the chapters will also find the rest of the book relevant.” In the following part, we shall discuss the four main issues under examination in this volume and elaborate on the way each of the 21 thematic chapters attempts to broaden our understanding in this respect. 1 Antecedents: A Detailed Examination of Early Western Racial Constructions of East Asians The first section of this book is devoted to a detailed examination of the rise and formation of European views of East Asians. The four chapters in this section seek to demonstrate that the peoples of East Asia played an important and at times even crucial role in the way in which the leading European theorists construed race during the critical periods of the late Enlightenment and the nineteenth century. This section also describes the genealogy of racial theories with regard to the place and status of East Asians and with regard to the way in which these theories spread geographically both within and outside Europe and permeated through new media such as encyclopedias and newspapers. For those familiar with early modern constructions of race in Europe, it may not be surprising that the first chapter deals specifically with Carl Linnaeus, the notable Swedish naturalist, taxonomist and racial theorist. First published in 1735, Linnaeus’s rudimentary taxonomy of humankind in his Systema naturae, heralded the rise of modern racial thought. Within this context, Rotem Kowner and Christina Skott’s chapter examines the descriptions and status of Asians (Homo Asiaticus) in Linnaeus’s taxonomy and their transformation during his lifetime. The Linnaean description of Asians, the authors argue, marks a watershed in the way in which they were viewed by Europeans. This was not only the first time in which Asians were clustered together and depicted as having common physical and mental traits within a larger natural system, but also one of the first times in which they were explicitly and immutably relegated into a secondary position in a fledgling hierarchy of humankind. Still more, the chapter has specific relevance to East Asians. Linnaeus’s use of the broad term “Asians” notwithstanding, the authors argue that his detailed description of this “variety” was based on Swedish reports and notions of East Asians, and particularly of the Chinese of Canton, rather than of the people of the entire continent as known to Europeans at the time. In order to demonstrate this, the chapter explores the sources of the Linnaean racial worldview and the impact it exerted on subsequent racial theorists and their view of East Asians. Introduction 5 Linnaeus’s taxonomic eminence notwithstanding, he was still far from singlehandedly shaping the European idea of race during the following decades. Walter Demel’s chapter offers an examination of the network of leading racial theorists in eighteenth and early nineteenth-century Europe. His chapter seeks to demonstrate that the constructions of racial theories in general and theories on East Asians in particular were not the outcome of a few “isolated” thinkers but rather of a web of numerous scholars, mostly naturalists, physicians and philosophers. These were invariably interconnected by an international network of scientific academies which extended throughout Enlightenment Europe and shared common terms and similar sources. This interconnectivity does not mean that the resulting theories were identical or that they functioned within a uniform pattern. In point of fact, the “founding fathers” of modern racial theories—notably Linnaeus, le Comte de Buffon, Immanuel Kant and Petrus Camper—developed rather divergent ideas with regard to racial taxonomies in general and with regard to the place (East) Asians were allocated within these taxonomies in particular. The subsequent generation of theorists diverged even further, using some of the founding fathers’ ideas but mostly developing their own concepts in different directions. Significant figures in the field were also extensively linked to a scholarly network and, it goes without saying, stood on the shoulders of their predecessors: Charles White, for example, popularized and coarsened Camper’s ideas, Bernard Germain de Lacépède and Julien-Joseph Virey followed Buffon, and Bory de Saint-Vincent was an adherent of Linnaeus. Moreover, while Johann Friedrich Blumenbach and James Cowles Prichard could be described as “mild” racists at best, many others held a more critical view of East Asian cultures and shared polygenist inclinations. Alongside the analysis of the canon of race writings in this period, there are also other ways to explore the spread of racial discourse on East Asians. Since their emergence in early-eighteenth-century Europe, modern encyclopedias became one of the most important sources of knowledge on ethnography and geography, as well as on the emerging concept of race. Georg Lehner’s chapter examines the entries on the East Asian “race,” or rather “races,” in nineteenth-century works of general reference and the manner in which they reflect a broad variety of strands of discourse. These entries show a vast number of different classifications of “races” developed by European scholars, the prevalence of many of the most influential theories, and the place given to the peoples of East Asia in each of the systems. Furthermore, by presenting information on race, these encyclopedias relied on a broad range of sources, such as travelogues and works by ethnographers and anthropologists. 6 Kowner and Demel By offering detailed accounts of East Asian countries, works of general knowledge utilized descriptions of East Asian peoples with inevitable racial inputs. At times, these works merely referred to anthropological issues, but— more often than not—they merely repeated widespread prejudices and wellestablished stereotypes concerning a supposed “national character” and enumerated the alleged traits of the Chinese and Japanese. Aiming to enhance their information on the concept of race in general, European and North American encyclopedias not only presented tables and ethnographic maps but also included plates showing “typical” members of the different peoples of Asia. These stereotyped illustrations played a significant role in allowing the Western public to visualize “East Asians” for the first time. Another early source of racial constructions of modern East Asia was the newspapers and magazines which were founded by Westerners in several major port cities in the region from the mid-nineteenth century onwards. These provided a stream of stereotyped information on the locals that helped to shape the opinions of short-term visitors and sojourners alike. Olavi Fält’s chapter examines how these newspapers and magazines reflected the racial image of the Japanese during the crucial period of the first two decades since the emergence of Western journalism in Japan in 1861 and during the interlude between the feudal era and the onset of modernization. While the chapter identifies a slow deterioration in the way in which these sources described the Japanese “race,” it also demonstrates that throughout this period neither the journalists nor their editors relinquished the conviction that their own culture and race were greatly superior. 2 Interactions: The Fusion of European and East Asian Constructions of Race The detailed mechanisms involved in the emergence of East Asian constructions of race and in the circumstances in which they mutated, interacted with, or occasionally even shaped foreign constructions are the core issue explored in this volume. The second section presents eight chapters and case studies that focus on this topic. They invariably examine the interactions and causal relations between international, regional, and domestic constructions of race and their impact on repeated reconstructions of this concept and the resulting race-related policies. Needless to say, every single interplay described in this section is not unique to one region or nation or even one specific period; it is found both in the West (e.g., early twentieth-century Britain’s perspective on Introduction 7 East Asian immigration, and Nazi Germany’s view of Japan) and in East Asia (e.g., mid-nineteenth century China’s adoption of the concept of race, imperial Japan’s constructions of the Southern Chinese and postwar South Korean views of self and the American Other). Daniel Barth’s chapter, the first in this section, is a fine example of an early fusion of foreign and domestic constructions of race in modern China. It compares and analyzes several texts about racial theories that were written and published by European missionaries stationed in China since the middle of the nineteenth century and examines their domestic acceptance. These texts represent the earliest documents espousing European racial taxonomies in Chinese script and pre-date the more elaborate publications which appeared around the turn of the century when Chinese intellectuals began to weigh in on the issue. In most cases, the emergence of these racial taxonomies was an appendix to an exposition of geographical or medical knowledge, two areas of great interest to Qing scholars. Since they were mere byproducts of larger fields of scientific knowledge, there was no organized effort underlying their propagation. Some of them, however, did exert a substantial impact in local scholarly circles. A case in point is the earliest publication of this sort, a book written by a Portuguese scholar and adapted to Chinese shortly after the First Opium War. This and similar early race-related texts, this chapter suggests, mirror the political and intellectual development of the period and reflect an increased domestic interest in Western knowledge and learning. They do so by integrating Western worldviews into the cosmological perspective and by providing an alarmist vision of racial demise if no suitable reforms are implemented in response. This is the juncture at which the first modern Chinese intellectuals took over and utilized this negative and critical view of Chineseness to alarm their fellow countrymen. As such, these texts reveal a slow and deliberate process of assimilating foreign ideas and creating modern, nationalistic sentiments in late imperial China. By the late nineteenth century, and certainly after its colonization of Taiwan in 1895, Japan witnessed what is arguably the region’s most dynamic and heated debate about race. Huei-Ying Kuo’s chapter examines the emergence of Japanese discourses on the Southern Chinese—including those residing in China’s Fujian and Guangdong provinces, as well as their overseas counterparts in Taiwan and the “South Seas” (nan’yō; present-day Southwest Pacific area)— and their further development until the eve of the Pacific War. Like slightly earlier European typologies of racial groups within Japan and the region as a whole, Japanese colonizers regarded the differences among the mutually unintelligible southern Chinese speech-groups as proving the existence 8 Kowner and Demel of irreconcilable racial groups. It should not be surprising, then, that these views challenged various endeavors seeking to offer racial constructions of other Asians since they undermined the Chinese nationalists’ efforts to create an all-encompassing Han identity. In this vein, it is tempting to frame the motivations involved in constructing the racial discourses in terms of Japan’s disparagement against its “Oriental others,” a post-Meiji era mentality that was modeled after Western imperialism. In retrospect, however, the discourses on the Southern Chinese reveal a more complex and nuanced reality. That is, Japan’s racial constructions of these groups reflected its own colonial experiences in Taiwan and its reactions to a surging Chinese anti-Japanese nationalism in the South Seas to a considerable extent. All in all, this chapter points out the dearth of consistent views about the racial status ascribed to southern Chinese “races” in the Japaneseled pan-Asian order. This appears to be the outcome of vacillation between Western racism and Pan-Asianism, and between an emulation of Western colonial experience and the generation of indigenous knowledge within the colonial administration overseas and among members of the intelligentsia at home. The need to negotiate one’s own theories of race and adapt them to a shifting power balance and Realpolitik was not the lot of East Asians alone. While focusing on East Asia, Antony Best’s chapter illustrates the interplay between strategic needs, Realpolitik, and racist motivations in pre-World War I Britain. Recent research on the clashes over immigration between Japan and the white settler communities in the Pacific Rim during the early years of the twentieth century shows the development of a ‘white’ coalition that united the British Dominions and the United States in opposition to any influx of Asian laborers. However, this view has largely ignored the British response to the immigration controversy. Accordingly, Best’s chapter looks at the reverberations of the anti-Japanese riot that took place in Vancouver in September 1907 in Britain. While acknowledging that certain members of the British elite were prone to racial fears, it demonstrates that the British government under the leadership of the Foreign Secretary, Sir Edward Grey, sought to contain the crisis and to ward off the efforts by the American President, Theodore Roosevelt, to create an international front opposed to Japanese immigration. Moreover, Grey refused to countenance proposals from within the Empire that an international conference should be convened to seek an amicable solution to the problem. To Grey, any attempt to address immigration threatened to erode the foundations of the Anglo-Japanese Alliance, which he saw as a vital Introduction 9 element in British imperial defense and in the containment of the German naval threat. The body, and the way it functions in sport, has been another domain in which Westerners and East Asians have negotiated their respective constructions of race.2 The recent Beijing Olympic Games of 2008 seem to provide an ample amount of fresh insights on this topic, but the buds of negotiations in this domain actually emerged much earlier. Stefan Hübner’s chapter focuses on the racial elements associated with the transfer of sporting values by the American branch of the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA) to East Asia about a century ago. Amateur sports values such as team spirit, fair play, self-control, respect for duly-constituted authority, competition, and personal effort were regarded during the turn of the century as the implementation of white American Protestant values in the realm of physical education. Sportive Christian citizenship training was thus meant to serve as a tool for making “backward” and “barbaric” Asians ready for self-government. Following positive experiences in the Philippines, where the YMCA was supported by the American colonial administration, the Far Eastern Championship Games (1913–1934) were founded as a means of popularizing muscular Christianity among a transnational Asian audience. The responses in the region varied substantially. Chinese sportspersons, for instance, eagerly promoted the Games in order to shatter the “Orientalist” discourse of physical weakness and “degeneration.” The Japanese, however, who already perceived themselves as sufficiently “modern,” initially refused to be involved in such an American-led “civilizing” attempt. Altogether, the Games can be viewed as an important step towards illustrating, but also challenging negative perceptions of “inferior” Asians. Nonetheless, they also show the reluctance of East Asians to accept the visible racial hierarchies of white “teachers” and Asian “pupils.” Another case of the tacit negotiation of racial constructions is presented in Gerhard Krebs’s chapter on the racial views on and racist policies against East Asians in Nazi Germany (1933–1945). Japanese residing in Germany tended to perceive the Nazi discrimination of the offspring of German-Japanese couples and propaganda in this regard as particularly insulting inasmuch as the government in Tokyo issued several official protests. As a result of this 2 There is an extensive literature on the association between race and the body. For recent studies, see Toulalan & Fisher, 2013; Teslow, 2014; and Nash, 2014. Sport too is a well-documented domain in which race is manifested and negotiated. See, for example, Brownell, 2008; Hylton, 2009; Carrington, 2010; Adair, 2011; Dunkel, 2013; and Smith, 2014. 10 Kowner and Demel pressure, the 1935 Nuremberg race laws defined only Jews as non-Aryans, and the publication of “Yellow Peril” literature was suppressed. Furthermore, when Germany’s political and military ties with Japan became closer, Nazi propagandists sought to demonstrate that the Japanese were no ordinary colored race, but must have had, at least partially, an Aryan heritage. Ironically, it was the oppressed and discriminated Ainu, the aboriginal inhabitants of Japan’s northern island of Hokkaido who offered some Nazi theorists the key to the superior endowment of the Japanese. These theorists did not hesitate to consider the Ainu a European race. Other proofs for the superior origins and makeup of the Japanese were found in their heroism and bushidō, which could have allegedly only originated from Aryan, Indo-German or Nordic peoples. Still, these explanations did little to mitigate the Nazi dualism towards the Japanese before and after the outbreak of the war. Following their overwhelming victories in the early stages of the Pacific War (1941–1945), the Japanese also won the admiration of the German public. At the same time, however, fears of the “Yellow Peril” rose again and had to be suppressed by the authorities who had received repeated complaints to this effect from the Japanese embassy. Although a relative newcomer to the modern racial discourse, Korea was another vibrant site of negotiation between European, Japanese, and indigenous constructions of race. Vladimir Tikhonov’s chapter deals with the discourses of race in the Korean Peninsula from the late nineteenth century to the end of the Japanese colonial rule in 1945. It emphasizes the presence of racial and racist thinking in Korea even before its annexation by Japan in 1910. Overlapping with the Confucian belief in the importance of lineage and blood ties, the local discourse of race first popularized a variety of pan-Asian discourses concerning the “Yellow race alliance,” and then played an important role in representing Japanese as “our racial brethren” rather than invaders from a country Koreans tended to traditionally dismiss as much less Confucianized than Korea. Nevertheless, under Japanese rule the idea of “racial unity” with the colonizer was, naturally enough, largely stripped of its nationalist credentials. It was resurrected in the late 1930s and early 1940s, but in the form of a new wartime orthodoxy: Now, the Japanese and Koreans were supposed to fight for the “liberation of the non-White races.” The extent to which this orthodoxy was believed outside the circle of the more or less assimilated educated and propertied classes remains in doubt. This was even more so upon Japan’s defeat, when Koreans were left to define themselves as a nation rather than as members of a “Yellow race.” That said, the liberation of the Korean Peninsula did not obliterate the colonial era’s racial discourse but merely altered its content. Based on interviews, Introduction 11 ethnographic observations and analyses of documentary films, Nadia Y. Kim’s chapter examines the system of racialization and racism in postwar South Korea, one that interrelates with the dominant American military presence in the country. In charting the specifics of what Kim calls this post-World War II “imperialist racial formation,” the chapter shows that Korean informants drew on largely Euro-American, Japanese and internal post-1945 ideologies to conceive themselves as existing “in-between” Whites and Blacks in the United States as well as across the globe. The chapter suggests, however, that many South Koreans have been critical of Black Americans’ significant power over their own people as either agents of the American occupational forces or as part of a Euro-American White-Black order that renders South Korea less visible in the global order. A major dimension of this racialization relies on the Korean awe of the American militarist and cultural imperialist agenda and the assimilation of remapped racial stratification and ideology-construction. Nonetheless, together with these reactionary views, certain elements of South Korean society reject White superiority and Black inferiority and thereby feel an increased identification with American Blacks and other marginalized peoples. The final chapter in this section deals with the northern periphery of East Asia, namely contemporary Siberia under Russian control. This area has never stood at the core of the racial discourse on the region but this did not prevent stereotypes and prejudices from taking their toll. David Lewis’s chapter reveals how Western views of East Asians, and those of Chinese and Japanese in particular, were partially adopted in Russia and applied to the indigenous peoples of Siberia. Based on interviews with indigenous Siberians, Lewis describes several cases of contemporary racism in the area. He finds that contemporary racist attitudes in Siberia are associated with or compounded by economic and social problems such as unemployment or alcoholism, but that there are also cultural factors such as variant attitudes towards time and work schedules. In addition, the chapter also identifies deeper roots to the current negative attitudes towards this group, including early European constructions of rae and the intellectual consequences of the Marxist philosophy of history. Admittedly, the Soviet regime attempted to build a more ethnically harmonious society, and this was often achieved by the use of force in the suppression of latent ethnic conflicts which re-emerged when Soviet power declined. It is not surprising, then, that today’s post-Soviet Russia, these conflicts have resurfaced, although there are a few grass-roots attempts to promote forgiveness and reconciliation among ethnic groups and notably between the Russians and some of the indigenous peoples of Siberia. 12 3 Kowner and Demel Nationalism: Interactions between Race and Ethnic Nationalism in East Asia The concepts of race and racism are related to nationalism in many ways, although these relations are neither universal nor self-evident. Nationalism is an extremely comprehensive and flexible, not to say fluid, concept which has been associated with a wide variety of political and cultural notions. In its barest manifestation, it may be defined as “either a form of political mobilization that is directed at rectifying a perceived absence of fit between the boundaries of the nation and the boundaries of the state; or the ideology that justifies this.”3 Nationalism derives from nation, at least etymologically, although the relations between the two concepts are complex. In fact, a number of scholars have argued that the origins of modern nations and even the very idea of a ‘nation’ are the outcome of nationalist sentiments constructed in large part by young intellectual elites and later on spread to the “masses.” However unclear, the relations between nationalism and nation beg us to define the latter. In the context of nationalism, at least, nation could be defined as “an ethnic group whose members are mobilized in the pursuit of political self-determination for that group.”4 Still, in the past, and especially before the term obtained its modern meaning, “nation” often denoted a group of people within designated borders, a state, as well as a subgroup of race.5 The theorization of “race” and “nation” took place at about the same time and place, since both crystalized in eighteenth and nineteenth-century Western Europe. They also shared a similar context for their emergence, that is “internal European political and economic reorganization and external European expansion, in the course of which the range of human cultural and physiological variation became more widely known to a larger number of people.”6 Moreover, both concepts are tightly associated with the issue of inclusion and exclusion and thus form clear boundaries that separate ingroups from outgroups. 3 Coakley, 2012: 12. 4 Coakley, 2012: 12. 5 In the past, “nation” had other meanings too. For example, in the late Middle Ages “student nations” were groups of students subsumed on the basis of coming from a certain number of countries located in a specific direction from a University (In Orléans, for example, there were 10 such nations: France, Normandie, Picardie, Bourgogne, Aquitaine, Champagne, Lorraine, Touraine, Ecosse and a “nation germanique” made up of students from the Holy Roman Empire, but also from Poland, Denmark, Italy, Dalmatia, and even England). A similar case is the four, then five “council nations.” In a political sense, ‘nation’ was a term for the noble elite which could participate in the governance of a country or an empire. See Schulze, 2004: 117–119. 6 Miles, 1987: 29. Introduction 13 “Nation,” “race” and their derivates are all socially constructed. In this sense, one may regard them, as Robert Miles has suggested, as “imagined communities” of shared characteristics and a supposed sense of comradeship. This is because they do not have genuine biological foundations and since members of those “communities” do not know each other.7 No wonder then that “race” and “nation” were often used (or misused) associatively until the end of World War II and even later. The confusion between the two concepts is well demonstrated in an observation made by the British public intellectual Gilbert Murray. In reviewing the world’s state of affairs at the turn of the twentieth century, he stated: “There is in the world a hierarchy of races . . . those nations which eat more, claim more, and get higher wages, will direct and rule the others . . .”8 This close association between race and nation notwithstanding, modern theorists of the rise of nations and nationalism have tended to consider race and ethnicity as mere background factors rather than dominant elements in the rise of nationalism. Whereas race denotes a group distinguished by hereditary transmitted phenotypical characteristics or at least one sharing a common history and geographical distribution, nation, they postulated, implies an “aspiration to achieve political sovereignty or statehood.”9 Some theorists have even regarded nationalism as opposing if not replacing the notion of race and ethnicity.10 In contrast, a more recent approach tends to regard nations “as a specialized development of ethnic ties and ethnicity, and as a result it claims that we cannot hope to comprehend the powerful appeal of the nation without addressing its relationship with ethnic ties and sentiments.”11 The outcome of this approach, among other things, is the distinction between a pure form of nationalism and ethnic nationalism. Ethnic nationalism, occasionally also referred to as ethnonationalism or even racial nationalism, figures prominently in this section not just because it spans the concepts of race/ethnicity and nationalism, but also because it seems to be particularly prominent in East Asia.12 The focus of this strain of nationalism is the ethnic group, whose members share a long heritage, often including ancestry, language, faith, and tradition. This group is arguably not 7 8 9 10 11 12 Miles, 1987: 26–27. Quoted in Banton, 1977: 96. Spickard, 2004: 10. See Coakley, 2012: 39–40. Smith, 2006: 169. For recent studies of ethnic and cultural nationalism in East Asia, see, for example, Robinson, 1988; Yoshino, 1992; Befu, 1993b; Gladney, 1998a; Guo, 2004; Starrs, 2004; Zhao, 2004; Shin, 2006; Surak, 2013. 14 Kowner and Demel only identifiable but traditionally seen as entitled to self-determination. Some theorists, notably Anthony D. Smith, have viewed ethnic nationalism as nothing but a non-Western version of nationalism.13 It stands in opposition to the Western notion of civic nationalism, where the willingness to observe given laws and in turn receive legal privileges replaces traditional criteria of belongingness, such as ethnicity, language and religion. This may sound like an outright generalization but it is nonetheless one that may be relevant to East Asia. Culture is an important aspect of the shared heritage of any national groups and so ethnic nationalism often overlaps with cultural nationalism inasmuch as some use these two concepts almost interchangeably.14 Evidently, as this case suggests, the line between race and ethnicity, race and culture, and even racism and culturalism is frequently ambiguous. This vagueness of “race” is not unique to East Asia, where the above notions have been used more or less indiscriminately. More than twenty years ago, the Franco-Bulgarian philosopher Tzvetan Todorov predicted that the term race would be “replaced by the much more appropriate term ‘culture’; declarations of superiority and inferiority, the residue of an attachment to the universalist framework, will be set aside in favor of a glorification of difference . . . What will remain unchanged, on the other hand, is the rigidity of determinism (cultural rather than physical now) and the discontinuity of humanity, compartmentalized into cultures that cannot and must not communicate with one another effectively.”15 The growing awareness of the theme of cultural nationalism not only within East Asian studies in the last two decades suggests that Todorov’s prediction was quite to the point.16 The relations between nationalism and racism seem at first very obvious, but the two concepts do not necessarily stem from the same origins. To some, racism is seen as an extreme form of nationalism or an alternative form of expression.17 In this sense, the two concepts overlap occasionally, since certain forms of nationalism contain an unmistakable racial substance and discrimination.18 To others, racism and nationalism are not competing or complementary concepts despite certain similarities in form and attitude. Benedict Anderson, for example, emphasized the differences between the two. 13 14 15 16 17 18 Smith, 1983, 2010. For various definitions of cultural nationalism and its sources, see Hutchinson, 2013. Todorov, 1993: 156–157. E.g., Befu, 1993b; Desai, 2004; Hein, 2008; Hsiau, 2000; Ni, 2011; Starrs, 2010; Tsukada, 2012, and Wang, 2012. See Wimmer, 2002: 12–13. Gellner, 1983; Mosse, 1995: 163. Introduction 15 Nationalism, he argued, “thinks in terms of historical destinies, while racism dreams of eternal contaminations, transmitted from the origins of time through an endless sequence of loathsome copulations.”19 In other words, nationalism manifests itself across national borders, whereas racism manifests itself within. With this theoretical complexity in mind, we shall turn to modern East Asia. To explore the above issues and their interactions, the third section presents five chapters. The first, Lü Xun’s chapter, employs the Korean War as a case study for examining how racial factors interacted with nationalism in both the United States and the People’s Republic of China. Wars and conflicts are not only fertile grounds for ultra-nationalist sentiments but also for racial pride and prejudice. The interplay between race and nationalism is particularly conspicuous in this conflict due to the divergent ideological backgrounds of the Chinese and American belligerents and since the conflict was essentially a foreign war to both. More specifically, this chapter examines the sources for the mutual racial hatred, its unique manifestations, and its subsequent consequences. It shows that the escalating ideological and military confrontation on both sides strengthened racial hostility not just between the two countries, but also towards individuals within them. Whereas Chinese residents in the United States were the target of a “yellow peril” scare due to their ethnic origin, American citizens residing in China were condemned as “devils,” not so much for their deeds as for their physical appearance. Thus, the public in each nation fostered a sense of racial superiority towards the other, which was supported by, and at times also originated from, a growing sense of patriotism and nationalist propaganda. Popular culture is another arena for the interaction between racism and nationalism. Yinghong Cheng’s chapter introduces the creation and popularization of gangtai (the abbreviated term for Hong Kong and Taiwan in Chinese) patriotic songs as a political genre of pop music in China since the early 1980s and explores their relationship with the politics of nationalism. It argues that the lyrics of these gangtai patriotic songs have constructed an explicitly racialized discourse of Chinese identity and history. More specifically, the chapter reveals how such a discourse has been incorporated into contemporary Chinese nationalism at the state level through a tacit collaboration between capitalist gangtai cultural producers and the party-state, and at the popular level through interactions between the performers and the audience within China’s pop music market. Focusing on the politics of the two Japanese concepts of race, jinshu and minzoku, Yuko Kawai’s chapter addresses the depoliticization of Japaneseness 19 Anderson, 1983: 136. 16 Kowner and Demel and its implications for Japanese views toward racism. It argues that the Western idea of race has influenced the Japanese ontological understanding of Self and Others since the emergence of Japan as a modern nation-state in the late nineteenth century. Moreover, Japanese government officials, academics, and politicians have appropriated Western theories of race and used them in order to construct their own versions of racial thought. One of the outcomes of their efforts was the emergence of a new vocabulary concerning race and nation, and most notably the terms jinshu and minzoku. Popularized in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, respectively, they defined what it meant to be Japanese before the end of World War II. Today, however, the two terms are no longer used for denoting the Japanese in everyday discourse. Kawai’s chapter discusses how jinshu and minzoku were conceptualized and transformed by borrowing from the West and challenging its notions of race, Volk, and ethnicity. Based on an analysis of focus group interviews, the chapter also suggests that the present-day meaning of Japaneseness is still shaped by the concepts of jinshu and minzoku even though the words are absent from Japan’s current discourse of identity. Kowner and Befu’s chapter deals specifically with the ongoing discourse of identity in Japan and examines its current racial tenets. Known as Nihonjinron, this discourse serves as a societal force shaping the way in which the Japanese regard themselves. Its influence has become so significant, that with time it has turned into a hegemonic ideology and an ‘industry’ whose main producers are intellectuals and whose consumers are the masses. Although Nihonjinron literature may have leveled off a bit in recent years, it still seems to be extremely popular and its tenets can be easily traced in a broad range of other public discourses. Prominent among these are the discourses on Japan’s place in the world, its modern history and the problems caused by its relations with foreign countries and non-Japanese peoples. While Nihonjinron is primarily concerned with questions of local identity and nationalism (often defined as cultural nationalism), this chapter reveals that it also contains an unmistakably racial, and at times even racist, common denominator that pervades its premises. The closing chapter in this section is devoted to North Korea, a state that does not receive an extensive degree of attention in the field of race studies and which appears in our project for the first time.20 Tatiana Gabroussenko’s chapter is an attempt to deconstruct a fundamental, albeit paradoxical, dichotomy between ethno-nationalism and internationalism in the North Korean attitude towards foreigners. Based on an investigation of official North Korean 20 But see Myers, 2010. Introduction 17 media, state-sponsored art and literature, as well as interviews with North Korean refugees and with people who have extensive experience of living in this secluded country, the author analyses North Korean ideological practices as they pertain to the nation as well as to a wide range of ‘foreigners’. These practices are also compared to those forming part of the Soviet perspective of the foreign world with all its conditionality and inconsistencies. 4 Gender and Lineage: The Impact of Domestic and Foreign Racial Constructions Race and racism are also linked to gender. Although simplistically defined as “the social meaning of sex,” the latter concept encapsulates a variety of meanings and theories ranging from the expression of traditional social roles ascribed to men and women via their psychological orientation and objective experience as a sexed embodiment towards a more symbolic entity of sexuality.21 A broad interpretation of the term racism may incorporate gender, since it concerns sexual inequality and a consciousness of oppression and self-perception, notably among women, as being racially grounded. This association is even more pronounced in the case of groups subjected to racial discrimination and stereotyping. In this case, the women of that group may experience a doubleedged discrimination, first for their race or ethnicity and second for their gender.22 Nineteenth-century racism in Europe, as George Mosse has observed, had adopted a neo-classical male aesthetic. National stereotypes have also focused upon the male body, thereby honing a gender-based difference.23 In a similar fashion, racist ideologies have frequently used gender symbolism to valorize the self (usually described as masculine) and demean the Other (usually described as feminine).24 In the case of East Asia, Europeans have applied stereotypes of femininity to the local population, and the Chinese in particular, from the Age of Exploration to this very day.25 21 22 23 24 25 See Haslanger, 2000: 37. See, for example, MacKinnon, 1987: 32–45; Haslanger, 2000. For a recent empirical study of the dual real-life impact of race and gender, see Galinsky et al., 2014. Mosse, 1995: 166–167. A quintessential example is Weininger, 1906. This is said, certain representative figures of the European nations were more often feminine than masculine (i.e., Anglia, Germania, Francia, and also Marianne), whereas the “Deutsche Michel” is rather a ridiculous figure. For gender-based stereotypes of East Asians, see Kowner, 2004, 2008, 2014: 123, 279. 18 Kowner and Demel The link between race and lineage is more straightforward, since race was traditionally associated with “blood” and with the hereditary endowment of physical characteristics. In the same vein, the more recent concept of ethnic nationalism, too, emphasizes the common ancestry and descent of members of a group, and in this case a nation. The link to lineage enhances the ingrained tendency of race and racism towards inclusion and exclusion, since the “contamination” of ancestral “blood” leads to exclusion. This is the reason proponents of racial thought have been greatly concerned about miscegenation (e.g., the hypodescent “one-drop rule” in North America) to the extent of implementing various measures against it including anti-miscegenation laws. In this section we first set forth two chapters examining the link between race and gender, one concerning women and the other men. Bang-Soon Yoon’s chapter focuses on the victimization of Korean “comfort women” by the imperial Japanese military during World War II. It analyzes the intersections of race, sex, gender and nationalism by bringing forth three arguments. First, that it was institutionalized racism which enabled the Korean “comfort women’s” victimization en masse. In other words, the sexual enslavement of these women was not possible without state involvement, whether directly or indirectly. Second, that Japan’s colonial rule in the Korean peninsula made it possible for a large number of young Korean females to be systematically trafficked into Japan’s “comfort women” system. The Japanese colonial government’s national mobilization and cultural integration policies were thus important tools in the recruitment and subsequent transfers of these women to war zones. And third, that since Japan’s colonialism set the stage for the Korean “comfort women’s” victimization, nationalism has constituted a core component of the “comfort women” issue in South Korea during the postwar era and at present in particular. The gender-neutral nationalist approach, Yoon argues, has contributed to the silencing of the women-specific aspects of the “comfort women” issue for decades. Silence-breaking campaigns led by Korean feminist NGOs since the early 1990s have been significant in engendering this issue by providing the surviving victims with material benefits and facilitating public education on the issue. More often, however, it was South Korean national pride that occasionally superseded the individual victims’ personal interest. In another chapter related to gender, Kai-man Chang investigates the intertwined identity formations of race, gender and nationality in Hong Kong’s martial arts cinema. As one of Hong Kong’s most important cultural assets, martial arts cinema is not only extremely popular among Chinese audiences, but is also a site in which images and ideas of Chineseness come into being. Considering films as a meaning-power-money-laden communication process, Introduction 19 this chapter looks into the recent success of Wilson Yip’s Ip Man (2008) and Ip Man 2 (2010) in order to examine the ever-shifting narratives of Chinese nationalism, anti-Japanese sentiment and gender politics in Hong Kong. Focusing on the transnational production and consumption of heroic masculinity as exemplified by several martial arts cinema actors, (e.g., Bruce Lee, Jackie Chan, Jet Li and Donnie Yen), this chapter argues that the complexity of racialized, gendered and nationalist personas embodied by these martial artists is not merely rooted in Hong Kong’s unique postcolonial condition and transnational cultural lineage, but also in the Chinese audience’s collective memories and desires. As for the link between race and lineage, this section presents two case studies. Although both focus on mixed-race offspring of East Asians and Westerners, one deals with their experience in Europe whereas the other deals with their experience in East Asia. Aya Ezawa’s chapter examines the role of racism in the identity formation of Indisch-Japanese children conceived by Indisch (Dutch colonial-Indonesian) mothers and Japanese fathers during the Japanese occupation of the Netherlands East Indies (1942–1945) and currently living in the Netherlands. Raised in communities and families heavily affected by the wartime internment of the Dutch population, and often without any knowledge about their fathers, the Japaneseness of these Indisch-Japanese descendants is not a matter of ethnic or cultural heritage, but rather a product of the wartime memories of their families and communities. Challenged by racist slurs and averse reactions to their Japanese features, many internalized the assumption that their Japanese heritage made them essentially as cruel as the wartime Japanese experienced by their communities, and guilty of a war they had never experienced. Their ongoing struggle to come to terms with their identity, therefore, takes place on a discursive level. “Being Japanese,” in this case, is not about finding one’s roots, but rather about negotiating the way in which their Japanese origins can be thought of and talked about in the context of the history and memory of World War II. Another discourse on “mixed-race” offspring has taken place in South Korea. Taejin Hwang’s chapter examines the intersection of discourses and policies relating to the transpacific migration of mixed-race “Amerasians”— most often the children of American military personnel and Korean women— from Korea to the United States during the cold war. Focusing on the passage of the Amerasian Immigration Act of 1982 in the United States, this study explores the two nations’ respective representations of Amerasians and the ways in which each nation grappled with the question of responsibility. For the United States, facilitating Amerasian immigration was constructed within 20 Kowner and Demel the nexus of American “responsibility” for its military policies and framed as a “rescue” of Asia’s “outcasts.” Presented as an act of both patriotism and humanity, the opening of its immigration gates for “GI babies” also offered an opportunity to reassert America’s self-image as an exceptionally multicultural nation. To South Korea, however, the existence of “mixed blood child(ren)” (Kor. honhyeola), as they have been commonly referred to, had challenged the identity of a nation-state that had defined itself as racially homogeneous and served as an unwanted reminder of the national subordination of women’s bodies for state building. Hence, for decades during the cold war, the South Korean state and society considered the out-migration of the mixed-race population to the United States, through both inter-country adoptions and adult Amerasian emigrations, as the only viable solution to the problem.