Structural shifts facilitate the formulation and reformulation of identities, but they do not predetermine the outcomes of those processes. Within East Asia, and especially for the people who lived within the territory ruled by the Qing Dynasty, one of the most significant structural transformations of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was the imposition of Japanese colonial rule over pieces of that territory. However, the nature of Japanese imperialism varied across space and time, from the formal colonization of Taiwan (1895-1945) to the collaborationist or puppet regimes in Manchuria and the Lower Yangzi Valley (1932-1945). Japan applied its imperial power and policies in a variety of ways from Taiwan to Shanghai to the Liaodong Peninsula, and each of these locations was defined by its own native social contexts and sets of relationships between local elites and Japanese settlers. These divergent contexts produced a range of alternative identities, each of which manifested in new ways under the postwar regimes. This panel will address the identities that evolved in these sites of Japanese colonialism, both during and after the chronological era of Japan’s imperial presence, emphasizing the agency of the colonized populations in constructing their own consciousnesses and using the realities of Japanese colonization for their own purposes.

The four papers on this panel approach the common subject of identity formation from divergent perspectives, and collectively produce a rich, nuanced picture that challenges and complicates existing understandings of the effects of Japanese colonialism on populations within the Chinese cultural sphere. Evan Dawley explores the influence of urbanization and social construction in the port of Jilong (Keelung), Taiwan, on the creation of a local identity that was both shared across, and bifurcated by, separate ethnic groups, during the middle decades of Japanese rule. Margaret Mih Tillman shifts our geographic focus to Japanese-occupied Shanghai and the educational policies of the collaborationist Wang Jingwei regime, which she argues advanced Chinese “nationalistic” and anti-imperialist agendas rather than a “Japanese slave education” program. Rui Hua moves further north, to Yingkou in the Liaodong Peninsula, where he emphasizes that local elites deployed strategies developed during the Japanese period to engage and at times resist the PRC’s Korean War-era mobilization campaigns. Finally, Fang Yu Hu returns us to Taiwan, in the postwar period, to examine how people educated under Japanese rule drew upon those experiences, particularly their gendered dimensions, to develop a unique Taiwanese identity that embraced a form of colonial nostalgia. Commentary by Louise Young will situate these papers more firmly in the history and historiography of Japanese imperialism.

As a whole, we suggest that simple categories of resistance and collaboration are inadequate for understanding the range of historical experiences within the Japanese Empire across Greater China. We also link colonial outposts within this geographic and cultural terrain, and transcend received periodization, in ways that both diverge from the compartmentalization of existing scholarship and highlight the complexity and inconsistency of Japanese influence in its colonies. These findings have strong implications for contemporary relations in East Asia.