This thesis examines the role of photographs of childhood and children in regulating the Japanese postwar ‘imagined community’. Such representations, especially photographs, with the exception of images of young girls within Japanese pop culture, have attracted little scholarly interest. Equally, the link between the pervasive circulation of photographic images of children and formations of Japanese national identity has been neither recognised nor explored. I make an original contribution to knowledge by addressing these absences and by asking: how discourses of childhood are nuanced by the concerns of the Japanese state; in what ways such images are embedded within the formulation of a Japanese ‘imagined community’ as set out by Benedict Anderson (1983); to what degree the dominant photographic images offer and promote normative representations of childhood; and whether a homogeneous representation of childhood throughout the post-Second World War period can be identified. I demonstrate that a range of dominant discourses about childhood in postwar Japan have disciplined the child in specifically “Japanese” ways and have helped to construct a wider national identity. Thus, state apparatuses use photography to construct a privileged “truth” about childhood and the imagined community through the production of discursive formations. I highlight in the different chapters three such discourses of childhood, each of which articulates some historically specific formations while contributing to an overarching discourse around the nation and the child. The first is that of the healthy child born to a young married couple and raised by a devoted mother, the dominant discourse of state apparatuses concerned with the so-called “fertility crisis” of the 1990s-2000s. The second is the child of the Second World War whose innocence and playfulness were used to define a new postwar Japanese identity of victimhood. The third is the child as model pupil and future ‘little citizen’, socialised into appropriate gender roles and hierarchical relationships through the regulatory experience of schooling. The various discourses explored in the thesis, each dominant in different contexts while also sharing common elements, have provided the state with a pool of available representations which shaped and regulated Japan’s national identity and its sense of belonging throughout the last sixty years.

The Japanese Empire, like other empires, had a potential for extreme group-destructive violence. This potential was unleashed at times between 1937 and 1945 as the Japanese military, engaged in wars fought, ostensibly, for the liberation and reconstruction of an ‘Asia for the Asiatics’, embraced measures which paradoxically allowed for the elimination of substantial parts, and sometimes the whole, of Asian population groups in specific areas. Despite the genocidal undercurrents of this violence, Imperial Japan has not typically been included within genocide and mass violence scholarship. Furthermore, because the emergence of extreme violence in the Empire was a turbulent and chaotic process, as opposed to a pre-meditated master-plan for the annihilation of a race, as popular understandings of genocide would suggest it should be, area specialists have eschewed involvement with this conceptual field. I address this neglect in this thesis. Using a methodological approach derived from consideration of more recent scholarship which has explored genocide and mass violence in European empires, I aim to trace the genocidal characteristics of violence in the Japanese Empire. In particular, I analyse this violence as part of a dynamic process of radicalisation and escalation. I show that, while Imperial Japan does not neatly conform to models of genocide based on conceptualisations which place it as essentially synonymous with the Nazi’s ‘final solution’, the insights of genocide scholarship are useful to understanding how, in the absence of an overarching intention to destroy Asian peoples, genocidal violence became an option in the Japanese Empire.

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This thesis interrogates how geopolitics as a political theory travels inter-regionally in an effort to expand the field of inquiry of critical geopolitics to non-Western states. As a case study, it examines the impact of German geopolitics on Japan during the second quarter of the last century, with a particular focus on the theory of the state as a living organism. Existing studies of critical geopolitics argue that geographical knowledge oppressed local knowledge by discursively actualizing the divided world when it was disseminated all over the world, However, given that critical geopolitical literature on non-Western countries is scarce, there is limited understanding on how classical geopolitics was interpreted in non-Western contexts. Contrastingly to common assumptions, aiming to fill this knowledge gap, this thesis argues that geopolitical knowledge becomes power in a foreign community only when it fits into the vernacular that is embedded in the local landscape. This thesis highlights the role of cognitive gaps that arise between analytical spaces in the course of the travel. In the gaps, the local mode of power mutates the concept without changing its appearance. Seeing intellectuals as a part of the wider community, this thesis unearths the neglected evolution of a traveling theory by thoroughly clarifying the context of the space of interpretation. Thus, it aspires to examine how spatial difference is manifested in International Relations discourses and why and how knowledge is making the world ostensibly one, despite the absence of consensus and therefore unsynthesizable. Japan is a country that is said to have become the first non-Western state by importing a number of European political theories. Analysing scholarly articles and discussions on space and knowledge in Japan, this thesis argues that in Japan, geopolitics helped Japanese people to imagine a different shape of the world. This was a borderless world in which the modern states dissolved into regions. Geopolitical theories supported Japanese government’s attempt to replace the deteriorating European world order of states with a regionalism called the Greater East Asia Co- Prosperity Sphere. In Japanese geopolitical discussions, its environmental determinism tuned into ecological fatalism. Therefore, at least in the first half of the twentieth century, geopolitics was knowledge that rationalized a localized worldview, but not a particular (European) geopolitical tradition, exposing the diversified political practices in world politics.

This dissertation analyses the effect of the rise of Japan on the ‘British world’ during the early twentieth century, from the Russo-Japanese War (1904-5) to the outbreak of the First World War. Victory over Russia in 1905 transformed Japan’s international position, elevating it to the rank of a Great Power, and allowing it to become an increasingly significant actor in East Asia and the Pacific. As its presence expanded, so did the scope for interaction with the British imperial system, bringing Japan into closer, and often frictious contact with Anglophone communities from the China coast to western Canada. This dissertation seeks to analyse that process, and assess its significance both for the changing nature of the Anglo-Japanese relationship, and the evolution of the British imperial system. By incorporating sources from Britain, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the China coast within a single study, this dissertation integrates disparate historiographies that have taken either the imperial metropolis or the colonial nation as their object of study. It reaches three primary conclusions. First, it demonstrates that the imperial ‘periphery’ came to play an increasingly central role in how the British relationship with Japan was construed. Second, it showcases that a sense of external pressure from Japan, often interpreted in racial as much as geopolitical or commercial terms, became a prominent factor in how colonial elites came to redefine their position in a wider British world. Third, it shows that diverging racial views, in particular, came to constitute a structural problem in the management of the AngloJapanese relationship. The following study opens with an analysis of British assessments of the Russo-Japanese War, and proceeds to scrutinise several contexts in which Japan’s rise presented new forms of competition and rivalry: the British ‘informal empire’ in China; Japanese immigration to North America; and naval defence in the Pacific. Finally, it examines how these new controversies, in turn, forced the Anglo-Japanese alliance to evolve. As such, this dissertation aims to shed new light on both on the internal dynamics of the British imperial system, and its changing position in the world.

This thesis will present a comparative and internationally contextualised history of Anglo-French relations in Japan between 1858 and 1868. It will introduce the concept of ‘enclave empires’ to describe the conduits for Western informal imperialism that were created in Japan by the imposition of the treaty-port system in 1858. It will aim to address longstanding gaps in the historiography by assessing that system as a multinational construct that depended upon the cooperation and collaboration of each treaty power operating within it. At the same time, it will show how the management of the Japanese treaty-port system was increasingly dominated by the British Empire and the French Second Empire, the two most powerful Western trading nations in Japan during the 1860s. It will examine how global contexts impacted upon British and French foreign policymaking during this period, and how this catalysed an increasingly bitter AngloFrench struggle for control over the ‘enclave empires’ in Japan. It will also seek to broaden the scope of the historiography beyond the sphere of diplomatic relations by considering the perspectives of prominent non-diplomatic British and French actors whenever relevant. Finally, it will address significant historiographical oversights in the use of relevant primary source material through the critical appraisal of contemporary private paper collections. By adopting this four-pronged methodological approach, this thesis will demonstrate that Anglo-French relations fundamentally defined the process of creating and developing informal ‘enclave empires’ in Japan in the decade between the conclusion of the ‘unequal treaties’ in 1858 and the Meiji Restoration in 1868.

No description available.

This thesis examines the foreign policy evolution of Japan from the time of its modernization during the mid-nineteenth century though the present. It is argued that infringements upon Japanese sovereignty and geopolitical vulnerabilities have conditioned Japanese leaders towards power seeking policy objectives. The core variables of statehood, namely power and sovereignty, and the perception of state elites are traced over this broad time period to provide a historical foundation for framing contemporary analyses of Japanese foreign policy. To facilitate this research, a unique framework that accounts for both the foreign policy preferences of Japanese leaders and the external constraints of the international system is developed. Neoclassical realist understandings of self-help and relative power distributions form the basis of the presented analysis, while constructivism offers crucial insights into ideational factors that influence state elites. Social Identity Theory, a social psychology theory that examines group behavior, is integrated to conceptualize the available policy options. Surveying Japanese foreign policy through this framework clarifies the seemingly irreconcilable shifts in Japan's foreign policy history and clearly delineates between political groups that embody distinct policy strategies and norms. Consequently, the main contribution of this thesis lies in the development of a theoretical framework that is uniquely positioned to identify historical trends in foreign policy. Owing to the numerous shifts in modern Japan's foreign policy history, this research identifies and examines three distinguishable Japanese “states”: Meiji Japan (1868 - 1912), Imperial Japan (1912 - 1945), and postwar Japan (1945 - present).