University of Heidelberg

"Japanese pan-Asianism and the Philippines:
From the Meiji era to the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere"

Sven Matthiessen

The purpose of the thesis is to examine how the Philippines was perceived in Japanese pan-Asianist thought from the days of the Meiji Restoration until the Pacific War and how the Japanese tried to implement the idea of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere (GEACPS) in a country where the majority of the population identified themselves with the Western hemisphere instead of with the Orient.
The following research questions shall be answered:
1.    what role did the Philippines play in Japanese pan-Asianist thought before the war and what was the attitude of Japanese pan-Asianists towards the Philippines becoming part of the GEACPS was,
2.    in how far did pan-Asianists and advocates of the GEACPS have influence on the Military Administration and the occupation policy in the Philippines and
3.    how was pan-Asianism perceived in Philippine politics, scholarship and public discourse.
The backbone of the study will be Japanese and Philippine primary sources as writings by Japanese and Philippine pan-Asianists, military documents and eye witness sources.
The aim of the project is to provide a thorough study of the development of Japanese pan-Asianism between 1868 and 1941 with focus on Southeast Asia and the Philippines as well as examining the ideology’s influence on Japanese occupation policy in the Philippine archipelago from 1941 to 1945.

"Sea-Strokes: Conceptualizing the Maritime World in Early Qing China"

Chung-yam Po

This project ventures to reconstruct how Chinese cultural elites conceptualized the maritime world in both geopolitical and geographical terms during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Given that there is a solid body of private writings reflecting maritime consciousness in the early modern period, I discern that quite a number of early Qing scholars, in their attempt to remap a picture of the world, had already assembled a global system of knowledge related to oceans and continents. Contrary to conventional views, Chinese intellectuals did not isolate themselves from the maritime world before the age of high imperialism.

This research, while fleshing out the dialectics between frontier studies and maritime awareness in the pre-Opium War era, will also address the following questions: (1) On what kind(s) of sources and materials did the early Qing scholars base when conceptualizing “their ocean?” (2) For whom were these “maritime works” written? (3) In terms of circulation, how far did these works reach and penetrate officialdom? (4) What are the impacts of these works on Chinese geopolitical knowledge? (5) What is the relationship between maritime awareness among early Qing scholars and the Self Strengthening Movement took place a few decades later?

Finally, by questioning the influences of the “Chinese maritime models” on Korean and Japanese scholars before the Opium War, this research unifies the asymmetrical experiences of China, Korea, and Japan, thereby, imbuing the fractured, yet inseparable, maritime histories of East Asia with a sense of wholeness.

"Japanese studies on Africa: Historiography of a research area"

Nicole Keusch

Because of their geographical distance and the lack of intense historical interaction, mutual interest between Japan and the African continent is rather superficial. But although Africa is certainly not a main focus of Japanese academic research, African studies in Japan have an interesting and rather special tradition. In my work, I will try to give an overview on the development and current state of Japanese research on Africa.

In order to complement the quantitative survey of African studies in Japan, I will analyse the research undertaken at Japanese institutions and compare the way the Japanese academy deals with the African continent to Western traditions of regional studies. By tracing its historical development, I will try to isolate factors which influence research and seek out their actual relevance in Japan. Based on the focus of Western research on Africa, I currently plan to concentrate on the following aspects:

1. Historical heritage and grown interrelations,
2. Ideological background and the self-positioning in the international framework,
3. Economic and political interest in view of modern globalization.

"Whaling as a Transnational Cultural Practice, Japan 1899-1941"

Lars Schladitz

In this dissertation I will examine Japanese whaling between 1899-1941. I will focus on the transnational transfer, production and appropriation of knowledge about whaling and whales. The exchange of knowledge was not a single-sided transfer of the “western” modernity to Japan, though, but is rather to be understood as a simultaneous movement of modernity (co-eval modernity, Harootunian). Using ego-documents, manuals as well as commercial and scientific publications as source material, I shall examine the forms of appropriation of knowledge and culture as well as the ruptures and continuities that are surrounding it. Furthermore, I will take into account the interaction between the historical actors and their “natural” surroundings. Nature is, hereby, understood both as a cultural construction as well as a factor which influences human agency. In a field of discourses and practices defining the subject of whaling the guiding research question is: how is the meaning and reception of nature changed through the transnational transfer of knowledge?

"Writing the Waves: Historians and Maritime World History"

Martin Dusinberre

My research during my period in Heidelberg will focus on the ‘Asian Sea’ as a site of competition between international shipping companies in the late nineteenth century.  In particular, I shall examine the individual histories of the ships that travelled the Japan-China-Korea and even Indian shipping routes in the 1880s and 1890s—a period when East Asia descended into its first modern war (1894-5).  Unlike many maritime histories of this crucial period in world and imperial history, my focus will be particularly on Japan’s merchant navy and the ships of the Nippon Yusen Kaisha.  Where other contributors to the ‘Asian Sea’ project will study the port cities of Asia, I hope that my work on the ships that sailed between those ports will help the team develop and refine the meaning(s) of ‘Asian Sea’ in the late nineteenth century. 

"Boundaries of Reason: Nation, Empire and Economy at Japan’s Southern Fringe"

Luke Franks

The dramatic emergence of Japan as a modern nation state and colonial empire during the late 19th and early 20th centuries brought in its wake a rapid reconfiguration of power within the East Asian region, and to radical re-imaginings of geography and identity as the borders of Japan and its empire had advanced to include Taiwan and Korea by the end of Japan’s Meiji Period in 1912.  The speed with which Japan’s modern transformation took place inevitably left many ambiguities in its wake, particularly in Japan’s simultaneous campaigns to expand its territorial holdings and to give the Japanese state concrete shape through new bureaucratic and representative institutions.  These ambiguities were particularly apparent and problematic on Japan’s southern fringe, where the islands of the Ryukyu archipelago represented both the boundary and the gateway between Japan, Taiwan, and the greater Chinese cultural sphere. 
My current project examines how Japan’s southern islands, and in particular, the newly formed “Okinawa prefecture” became the venue for a vigorous debate over the nature of citizenship and rights at Japan’s national periphery.  Uncertainties over Okinawa’s status would grow throughout the early 20th century as the islands became incorporated into systems of agricultural production and trade centered on Taiwan’s burgeoning sugar industry; even as Okinawa’s formal position within national institutions was eventually confirmed during the 1910s and ‘20s, its continued economic marginality within national and imperial networks problematized Japan’s southern national/imperial divide throughout the prewar period.  I consider how the Japanese imperial sugar industry mediated politics, culture, and economy as it shaped life in maritime Asia, particularly its intimate relations with evolving notions of economic and cultural “backwardness” in the Asian tropical sphere, and through concrete institutions and interests that linked periphery and metropole.  I also explore how these forces shaped tastes and patterns of travel and consumption in metropolitan and peripheral societies, and provided the basis for an emerging tropical tourism industry during the early 20th century. 

"Geisha-femininity goes West: images of geisha femininity in mid-Meiji souvenir photographs and their semantic transformation in the reception by Western women"

Mio Wakita  

Emerged from the thriving souvenir industry catering to Western customers in the major port cities by the early 1860s, nineteenth century Japanese souvenir photography represented — due to its visual veracity and its wide dissemination — one of the image products with a heavy impact on shaping the Western notion of “things Japanese” (Basil Hall Chamberlain) including Japanese femininity. This research project approaches the cultural transaction process of the Meiji souvenir images from the semiotic perspective of semantic transformation. The focus of the research project will lie on “decoding” the meaning of these transcultural image products in the given historical context, stressing the flow of images across the sea.
The project investigates how the original signification of Meiji femininity represented in nineteenth-century Japanese souvenir photographs was perceived, manipulated, and embodied by their Western female recipients. The forms of reception by Western women, and thus the target objects of investigation, range from interior decoration, photography albums to sartorial performance before the camera for private photography sessions. The aim of this research project is not only to evaluate the cultural impact of the economic image transactions; it also explores how the images of Japanese femininity represented in mid-Meiji souvenir photography transformed the original signification encoded by Japanese photographers when decoded by Western female consumers. The questions to be looked into include what particular significations in the photographic images are playing a role, and in which cultural, social and ideological contexts the souvenir photographic images of femininity were referred to or employed by Western women. The reverse import of the Western concept of Meiji femininity to the contemporary Japanese souvenir image industry, in addition, is another point to be examined, an aspect highlighting the complexity of transnational image transactions.  
Defining Western women as the target group of analysis sheds light on the complexity in the pattern of reception of Japanese souvenir photographs, marking a significant shift from the monolithic “male West vs. female East” model of transcultural relations in understanding cultural consumptions to a more nuanced one. By way of this approach, I aim to elucidate the intricate structure of semantic asymmetry inherent in the transcultural life of the souvenir photographs of geisha, opening up a wider perspective in the scholarship on the nineteenth century transcultural relationship between Japan and the West.