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"Tourism 'made' the empire and was instrumental in turning Asian lands into Japanese space. In her thoughtful and sophisticated study, Kate McDonald shows how traveling to overseas battlefields and cultural sights not only brought the empire closer for many Japanese, but also made it home."—Sebastian Conrad, author of The Quest for the Lost Nation: Writing History in Germany and Japan in the American Century
"McDonald re-creates a geographic and social imaginary of colonial incorporation through Japanese travel and tourism. Bold and ambitious, this book contributes to the understanding of the spatial politics of empire building, a subject of great interest to scholars of Japanese empire and beyond."—Leo T.S. Ching, Duke University
"Richly researched and written in an accessible language, Placing Empire interrogates imperial tourism as an essential engine that drove the making of empire. McDonald brings into focus the mechanisms of imperial tourism to explain how colonial territories—Korea, Manchuria and Taiwan— were incorporated into the empire, not only in terms of geography but, more important, of social imagination. A long-awaited and timely contribution to the field."—Helen J.S. Lee, Yonsei University
List of contents
List of Illustrations
Preface and Acknowledgments
Introduction
Part I. The Geography of Civilization
1. Seeing Like the Nation
2. The New Territories
Part II. The Geography of Cultural Pluralism
3. Boundary Narratives
4. Local Color
5. Speaking Japanese
Conclusion
Appendix: Place Names
Notes
Selected Bibliography
Index
About the author
Kate McDonald is Associate Professor of Modern Japanese History at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
Summary
Examines the spatial politics of Japanese imperialism through a study of Japanese travel and tourism to Korea, Manchuria, and Taiwan between the late nineteenth century and the early 1950s. This book shows how debates over the place of colonized lands reshaped the social and spatial imaginary of the modern Japanese nation and more.
Additional text
"[McDonald's] examination of the Japanese pursuit of a multicultural empire through the lens of travel is a singular achievement; it deserves to be widely read."
