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Welcome to the new books network. Hi, my name is Nathan Hopson and I've hosted four new books in Japanese Studies, a member of the new books network. Today, I'll be talking with Dr. Anne Gjilen Gudapda about her book, Tohoku Unvounded, Regional Identity and the Mobile Subject in Pre-war Japan, which is out from Brill in 2022.
Tohoku Unvounded centers cross-border mobility in its narrative of the history of Japan's total region in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The book is a challenge to the stereotypical image of the Northeast as static and isolated. Focusing on Pacific migration to Asia, to North America and to the Philippines, could act pieces together in account of how mobility and movement were instrumental in creating modern Tohoku's regional identities and how this process was, in turn, integral to Japan's modern self-image. In the sense, Tohoku Unvounded contributes to a growing body of literature exploring factors such as mobility and region in the construction of the modern world of nation-states.
Okay, Dr. Gudapda, welcome to the podcast. Thanks for joining us. So we're going to be talking about your book, Tohoku Unvounded, Regional Identity and the Mobile Subject in Pre-war Japan.
And of course, I want to ask you first how it is that you became interested in this project. Some of our listeners may know it's a, we have a shared interest in the Tohoku region. So I'm very curious to know both on a personal as well as a professional level how you became interested in Tohoku. Thank you so much, Nathan, and please do call me Anne, especially as a fellow Tohoku lover.
I actually got started being interested in the Tohoku region in general because of my placement as a jet. I was working as an ALT in Jornimoshi, which is just south of Sendai about 20 minutes, south by train. And when I first got my placement, a bunch of my Japanese friends, they all started commiserating with me. They felt so sorry for me because I was going to be all the way up in Tohoku.
Where nothing ever happens. And I'm from the Central Wisconsin where nothing ever happens. So I was like, okay, I can handle this. It won't be what I was expecting, but it'll be great.
And then I arrived. And it was not, Central Wisconsin, let's put it that way. Plenty of rice veals, lots of farmers. But it was very much modern Japan as I had always imagined it.
Sendai at the time had over two million people. It was one of the largest cities in the nation. And I took pictures of them all and I was like, oh, Tohoku is beautiful. And I was like, oh, that's not like that.
Sendai. And because I wanted to be able to interact better with the students, I wanted to work in my Japanese. I picked up a copy of Harry Potter. And I figured it would be a nice conversation piece that we could make.
And I could work on some of my more colloquial Japanese because University Japanese did not cut it when you're talking to seventh graders. And I was doing fine reading it. And then I hit Hagrid. And Hagrid's dialogue was very hard to understand.
And I asked some of my colleagues like, what's going on? Because I knew Hagrid speaks with the accent in the American version. And they said, oh, speaking of Ziziban. He's speaking Tohoku-ban.
I was like, wait, what? And it made me start to really think about why my friends commiserate with me about winding up in this wonderful place. Why was it that Hagrid is being translated into the local dialect? I did some more research on the local dialect as well as the dialect around where I was in Miyagi.
And I started realizing how it's used in translation. The full in Shakespeare is translated into Tohoku-ban. When they translated Uncle Tom's Cabin from English into Japanese, they used slave dialect. And I was told about it.
I went, what is going on? So that kind of planted this idea in my head of what is going on. Why is it this place and all my experiences here are so different from the way it was represented in the modern contemporary time period? When I went to graduate school, I was walking to the parking garage with one of my advisors there at all.
And she's like, all right, so it's time you need to figure out your dissertation project. And I've been playing around with some ideas about Hokkaido education. And she's like, well, just the one piece of advice I have for you is this. Whatever you do, make sure you can live with it for 10 to 20 years.
Because this is what you're going to do for graduate school. And then this is what all your job talks are going to be on. And then this is what your book is going to be on. And this is what your book talks are going to be on.
Just like you're committing to a topic for 20 years. And if you don't love it, you're going to regret it. And so I knew at that point, it had to come. I'd fall in love with the region that was there.
I wanted to do more research. I wanted to get at some of those questions that have been plaguing me. And so that's how I decided on Tohoku. Yeah, so that's funny.
Not only do we, of course, share research interests, but a lot of that personal history rings true. I had a similar experience of being told back in 1996 when I first went to a homestay in Tohoku as a student that I was going to be Tibet of Japan. I was not like, but Tibet's pretty good too. Was Scotland was, of course, the other one.
Yes. And then, of course, a similar experience when I took a job in Iowa in the States, everybody commiserated and told me, but, you know, I think you're might be missing something here. And so, yes, it is sort of interesting to see that that sort of shared personal history that we have. And it's reflected in, and I know we've sort of talked about this off air, this idea of the work that we've each done about is complementary in an interesting way.
And so you're doing, you're developing a lot of themes that I was completely blind to when I was doing my own research. And so I want to start by jumping into, I think, the biggest theme here, which is for you, mobility. And that was something that was completely off of my radar. So thank you for opening my eyes to that.
And your book is really a major case study of mobility or the people of the Tonga region, mostly the pre-war period, which you're focusing on. But you have sort of positioned this as part of a bigger agenda to think about rural mobility and thinking about that in the context of modernization and mobility itself as a modernizing force in Japan and the broader Pacific world as you put it. So you're centering your analysis on this paradox, right, which we've already started to identify, which is the paradox of the image of Tōko as this provincial backwater isolated, even with in Japan, the Tibet of Japan, the, you know, that everybody needs to commiserate when you move there, kind of. And the reality, which of course we both experienced more recently, but you also point out in the pre-war that it was not really an apt description of much of what was going on.
So what is it that drew you to that part of the sort of Tōko-problematic idea of mobility, even within that larger interest of Tōko? Thank you. Yeah, again, it's somewhat anecdotal, but I was teaching a night class for senior citizens when I was there as a chat in English. And I had all these students who were born, some actually a major in Tōko, and they started talking to me about stories from when they were children because they knew I was interested in history.
And I was just blown away by how much internationalism was in there. The books that they read, the conversations they had, the correspondence that they had, the ways in which people were going and coming back and their awareness of the greater world began to really straighten you then. And so for me, I wanted to think about this idea of mobility. This was right at the very, very cost of the start of mobility turn when people were, you know, I was there in 2003.
People had started to look a bit more at diaspora studies, largely outside of Japan studies, but also you have, like, actually, you have some of the pieces that are coming out about diaspora studies as well with Japan. And I thought about the ways in which I saw internationalism as there. To me, mobility was a hyper-modern conception, right? Whenever we think about the journey, we think about rural mobility, yes, but it's always push factors that push people out.
Or the void that is left behind from brain drain. And I started to pair that with the contradiction of the majority that I thought when I was within the total region. And I began to think, is this really a one-way road, right? Is it just everyone leaves and they leave back in this behind?
Or is it something so much more? And, you know, working on a lot of the theory that I developed both undergraduate graduate about alternative majorities and multiple, plural majority, I began to wonder what is rural modernity? Is it really this gaping hole as people leave? Or is it more?
Is the act of ability something that can give us an insight not into the missing pieces, but in fact make the missing pieces whole? And so when I started looking at the correspondence and return migration, the very act of these villages coming together and discussing world events, but also thinking about sending sometimes whole chunks of their villages into other places. I said this is a profoundly hyper-local event. And it's an event that when I was doing more research on migration, you know, everyone thinks about social matter, they think about all of these different ways in the South.
And every time I read books on migration, usually the third or fourth largest population group that was moving from Togo, right? They were from Fukushima, they were from Noggy, they were from Noggy, and I was like, what? I understand why people focus on the big three or four. I completely understand and thank them so much for doing their research on it, but what happens to the rest, right?
Why are we happy to be done at that moment? And so I figured that, you know, you have these international ties everywhere, we have it back and forth. I want to get to the root of why the Togo region is seen as rural, and I think part of that is tied to these assumptions that are made about mobility, being supportive. And so I wanted to create a voice where mobility was additive within a rural setting.
Yeah, I think it's an interesting pairing with another book that I've had the privilege talk about here on podcast, which is John Trape against book. We're about rural cosmopolitanism in contemporary, you know, rural Japan, but specifically again focusing on the Togo region. But the idea that the rural areas are in fact defined very much by their connections to the world. And that as you said, that's additive in an interesting sense.
And so I want to jump into the book and to start thinking about how you sort of unfold that historically, starting with chapter one, which is called looking north, assessing the boundaries of the Meiji state. And so here you're looking at the colonization of Hokkaido as a formation, a moment not for Hokkaido, but for sort of Tohoku's regional identity, obviously it's important for Hokkaido as well. But in the context of what we're doing here, you're arguing that settlements in Hokkaido and I'm quoting you here facilitated a form of Japanese modern regionalism quite independent from the top down directives of Tokyo as a total identity emerged and flourished. So yeah, I'd like to sort of unpack this a little bit.
What about those particular circumstances of modern expansion into Hokkaido encouraged and facilitated the emergence of a specific Tohoku identity? I think at this time period, the ways in which the redefinition of the state and these earliest years of Meiji really territorially marked the Tohoku region, both definitionally as well as I think within the nation state's perception of the role of people from that area. Tohoku becomes what I call a borderland in transition. So much of Japanese history from earliest times really talks about a marching frontier.
And as the frontier continues to push up through Honshu Islands, it's always moving and changing and being renegotiated in these limited spaces that become Luzendela in the O region. And so when you are a samurai on the periphery of Japan, then you're closing, you know, you're helping to protect the country, you're helping to settle these wild spaces. You know, when you read like Boscho, things like that, it's always about this definition between the civilization of Japan pushing out into these wild spaces. But what happens when you're not on the border anymore?
What happens when these wild spaces that used to be definitional to an identity of being part of a frontier suddenly are internal and therefore underdeveloped? And so I wanted to look at the ways in which that shapes the identity and a lot of these chapters about the transition to being Shizoku, to being former samurai. How does that shape some of the most dominant families in the samurai world? How does it change when, not only do as Michael Werkholz made your restoration losers, how do you go from losing a war to then being in a space that's seen as hopelessly underdeveloped?
On top of that, you have the government legislating. I should say I have a spike, but kind of I have a spike. Again, these clans that did not agree with the major restoration. And the result of that was that for a number of people that are part of the issue, double class, but also others, they decide that perhaps they don't want to stay in that space.
When given another opportunity to settle Hokkaido, that seems like it's in line with a lot of the world in which they had previously placed their identity in. Hokkaido was a really interesting space because it had a lot of not just tax breaks, but it also reinforced a lot of the pre-major hierarchical stereotypes. When you have the Tundanais settlers, they all are retaining both soldier and settler. And you have people like Tamara Kinney, who is in Edo during the restoration, writing to Dr.
Nachidiyi saying, listen, we need to go settle kite. It will give us a new mission. It will change us from being loyalists to the children's loyalists to the state. This is some way we can redefine who we are.
And then when you look at the ways in which they set up their new colonies up there, they're given the worst parts of Hokkaido. They're given territories that according to other land surveyors are fairly formal. Having never been to Hokkaido, nothing of armor, I don't know if that's true, but that's what the documents we say. And so they have a soft landing of sorts.
They're able to use patronage systems. They're able to bring people from their regions up with them. And then even the governmental projects are, as you have the stripping of a lot of samurai rights in other areas of the country, you still have this elite status and special rates that come along with being things like the Tundanais. They can keep their military positions.
And so I kind of explore the ways in which that happens, but it's still very much tied into clamps, right? And so because I want to explore this transition with total identity, I need to understand how the clamps are going to break down. And instead, it becomes divided into people from the northern regions versus the other samurai-tongued-hay-ther coming from other places, which actually brought the whole book as a through line, also comes down a lot to dialect. People can't understand each other from this out in the north.
And so when the pedagogy and others begin to put together the Tundanais settlements, they realize they can't mix these different bombers in right together. They have to separate them out because it just doesn't work that well otherwise. And so you begin to see people relocating either directly from one community to another, moving on mass, which we see with some early page image works like the DOTA, those sort of areas, or you see them putting them together. Because they begin to realize that while we're from different areas in total, we can at least understand each other.
And so we see this discovery that regional settlement, that settlement using region is very, very productive and useful. The samurai, former samurai are able to close that northern gates. They're able to have a lot more freedom outside of the thalmon of major control. And the most successful of these settlements are very much tied to region, putting people together.
And then you have, following on that, the Dontai, organized, and you have village division location patterns as well. So for me, I think that looking at the way that Telvago Identity is created is a lot of once people leave home, they realize who they are. And this experience from me is American trauma abroad. It's hard to realize that I'm American until you're somewhere where no one else is American.
And then you're like, oh, I guess that's a thing. And so you begin to see them grouping together in these ways. And most importantly, especially because it comes back in the fifth chapter, the government realizing that this is the way to do it. And the settlement of Hokkaido becomes a template that we see in that area as well.
Yeah, and so that's a set up that gets us into the 20th century, which is really the sort of heart of what you're doing. And we're going to start talking about that in relation to chapter two, exporting regionalism to Hokkaido, Japanese immigrant culture. So, like I said, this takes us into the 20th century to Hokkaido residents are beginning to now emigrate, not to Hokkaido, but from Japan in larger numbers. And when they reach destinations such as Hawaii, they're again sort of finding that their identities have been circumscribed in advance by the definitions of Japanese established by earlier waves of migration.
From other regions around Japan. And so again, you have this sort of question of, as you just put it, you don't really realize who you are until you leave home kind of problem. And so when these Tōku migrants end up in places such as Hawaii, there's a kind of flattening of Japanese identity. And what did this do to the regional and perfection, excuse me, perfectual identifications that have been built up amongst the people at Tōku as they moved into these new spaces?
You know, it's this is kind of the heart of where a lot of my dissertation work was, as I call my dissertation from the inside out, because I was fascinated with the historiography of mobility. And when we looked, especially when I was looking back in the Tōku, the Oz migration literature about Japan, a lot of it was coming from the historiography of the animations. So a lot of it was coming from the amazing work done by Japanese American, Japanese American historians, people like Zuma and Daniel and many others. And so when I looked at that, the work was amazing, but the one thing I wanted in there, which of course was not part of their project, because I wanted to reach this one.
But so much of that literature focuses, of course, on the interaction between the Americans and the Japanese, or the Canadians or the Japanese, or the Filipinos or the Japanese. And so when you look at the Japanese immigrant community from that lens, it gets very much black, right? The Japanese to the receiving nation are all one body. But because of the work I'd already been looking at, I knew that that that wasn't necessarily a case from a Japanese perspective, right?
Just like Americans, down here from the South of the Midwest or from the West Coast, like there are different identities. And so from the outside, the Japanese were just Japanese, but internally, I wanted to see how that broke down. What does that mean in these foreign spaces? And how can that help me to structure the regionals?
And so I looked at Sully Kokumu-wenae, I probably built a church name, he is a scholar out of New York, Chicago, and he has a lot of fascinating work written on the Founders principle. And the Founders principle is the idea that the first populations that it go to and give a place set a template. So what is Japanese as to the Americans of Hawaii? It's tied to the Southwest, because those are the people who came.
So the observation of the Japanese, it wasn't Tokyo, it was the Southwest, which within Japan, Harvard was not seen necessarily as the height of civilization either. So, you know, props also to the South Westerners were setting up Founders principle good for them. But for the people from the Northeast, from Togoku, many of them, especially because they were coming slightly later, many of them had much higher education based on memoirs, which is not necessarily representative. But I had a lot of them were actually Christian, which, you know Togoku is not actually a huge shock, but for many people studying Japan, I'd be surprised.
And then they also tended to be more, you know, they were older. A lot of them were coming in their twenties, when they were 30s and 40s. And so they're a very different population. Many of them also do have backgrounds in language that's coming out of Tokyo, but they can't speak people for themselves.
And so they're greeted by the populations there as basically people who can't speak Japanese properly. They don't really understand them, they don't fit in with their worlds. And so you see the creation, not just with Togoku, but really in general, in these migration populations, you have the creation of Kenshin coming, which are pre-vactual associations. For Togoku, you also have regional associations for all of Togoku, you have Subtohoku, jinkai, also that appear, because, you know, it becomes hyper-local when it comes to those founder principles of founders, because they're coming from a town in Hiroshima.
They'll have their own pre-vactual, their own town association. But the Togoku people, a lot of people, a lot of people, a lot of people, a lot of population, they would group into larger groups, some of them would be more regional. And for them, what they wanted to do is they wanted to find, like, people, you know, when they go to Brazil, there's translators of Brazil that speak Japanese, and there are translators in Brazil that are not in Brazil. And there are translators in Brazil that speak Okinawan, because that's a huge population.
But the Togoku people can never really talk to the Japanese translators that well, either. And so you see it as a division within their own community. The mini-micro Japan is happening, but it's condensed into a port city, and it's surrounded everywhere by people who see them as the same as people who they don't associate themselves with. So you see the creation of Kenshin Kai that really become a home away from home.
But as we see in a lot of literature about China towns, in particular, the image of Japan that gets created and recreated and constructed in the Kenshin Kai is not necessarily reality. And so these people from Iwabe and Yamagata and Miyagi are all coming together, and they're constructing what they imagined to be Togoku, what they have in common. And that's where we see this formation of an unbounded region, right? It's not in Japan, it's happening.
It's being forced into basically COVID, and this pressure cooker that is internationally. And then when people are imagining what is Togoku-ness, how are we all similar, how are we different? And then many Japanese migrants are not settlers or soldiers. So they come home.
And their idea of the important traditions are also relevant. Their idea of what it is to be from here from my native place is brought home. And so that's what that chapter is doing. It's telegraphing the ways in which you have the total Kujavines, right?
It's a new hypenity identity. They're not just Japanese immigrants, they're immigrants, they're immigrants, what they need. And so they're bringing home what Togoku-ness is with them. Yeah, and so then in the next chapter, which is normalizing the exceptional history, myth, and memory in immigrant ethnicity, you're exploring what you call a migrant mythos over time and the way that was sort of created and evolved.
And in addition to the different ways that stories of quote unquote pioneering migrants were interpreted and reinterpreted over time, you did us through a collection of case studies. And the one I kind of want to focus on here, which I think is familiar to some people outside of our original Greek here as well. And that is the story of okay, and the refugees of the civil war that brings in the major period, who established a colony in California. This is the Wakamatsu colony, and this has been talked about, interpreted, reinterpreted in different times and places.
But can you tell us how, well, first of all, a little bit about the colony itself and the people who founded it, but also how this fits into the overall story that you're telling about specifically Togoku, rural mobility and migration. Yeah, this is a topic that I came across pretty early in my research, and I was thrilled actually that there's been a lot of work done. I have to start off before I say anything about A2Ozima's work on, okay, which he has a wonderful article about, okay, interpretations of 30s, and it also comes up in two of his books. But okay, it's a really fascinating example of this, because what I found when I was looking through the pre-federal records in Japan, Prober about immigration during these time periods, is there's lots of discussion of these men who were part of the grass.
And they become heroes back home, even in the Tisho and Shoa period, the stories of local boy makes good. Okay, it's different. Okay, it's a story of a woman who was working as a nursemaid. She was actually part of the resistance movements in Isawakkamatsu when the castle was being attacked, and she winds up leaving with, at one point they're dutching, at one point they're crushing, but the Chanel brothers are both actually gun suppliers during the Bolsheviks of the war, and one of them winds up marrying into the family.
And so when they leave, they need to bring a nursemaid with them, and they bring, okay, they flee and throw Chanel sets up a new tea and silk colony in California, and there they begin to, it's a bail colony. It only lasts about two or three years. When you read the New Super articles in the American press, they talk about these princes that are refugees that are fleeing the disorder in their home country and are coming to a new life in America, and then over time it begins to transition to how these Europeans are exploiting. The Japanese who come up with them and how they're horrible living conditions, and that's why the colony fails.
It kind of disappears in the radar for a while, with the exception of an allocation once a dying very soon after, right around the colony is failing and she gets buried on its lonely hill. In the 1930s, Japanese newspaper man shows up trying to research some of his early, little patterns, and he comes across, okay, and everyone's been treated across the two because within early Japanese American migration women were very rarely migrants. But he kind of rescues the story, he finds some people who used to know her, and grinds up her and brings this tale. And the reason I love, okay, is because of the way her alternative changes.
I actually published an article in the Journal of Social History that chronicles it, it's not as much of a book, a lot of it's not that article. But I called that article just enough mystery, and it's because the Centennial Committee, the guys who are welcome to call me in California, actually has, you know, it's still rare when we're historians that we're reading these documents to get like the perfect moment of quote, and they said she was just enough mystery to be able to basically fill her up with narrative, right? We don't know that much about her. With relation to the book, one of the interesting things about okay is that she was a refugee, right?
She was someone who was waiting a home man that no longer existed. She could never go home, not only was it literally burned to the ground, but the Japan that she knew was Edo Japan. She didn't know they'd be Japan, but she becomes imagined and reimagined every 30 or 40 years to become this new vessel for whatever the speaker wants it to be. And at first you have Japanese nationalists who want to talk about how okay as well as you might as amazingly and as article in his books, this vessel for imperial expansionism.
Like look, even though she was, she was on the wrong side of the war, she wanted to expand Japan. She wanted to bring that to you shores, how wonderful. After the war, the very same author writes another article, and in that, okay, suddenly is no longer this epitome of Japanese expansionism, she becomes the heart of Japanese American friendship. But he calls that article when she writes in English, the Japanese may fly.
And there they tie okay to the idea of these people who are fleeing problems in their homeland, much like the American colonists, they're fleeing problems in their homeland. And there they find, yes, it's a tortured past, meaning possibly like grown up. But it's a tortured past, but it is indeed a valiant past that shows the ways in which the Americans welcomed them in after war and started a good narrative with the 1950s and 60s. But the reason I started researching it was actually from the 1990s, from the 1980s.
There was a group from Izawakamatsu who actually did a pilgrimage to okay, is great. And they're standing there in California in front of okay, is great. And they're singing songs about how much she loved Izawakamatsu and her nostalgia for home and how hard it must have been 30 so far away about how she had placed roots in this American country, never forgetting her past. And these Japanese from Izawakamatsu were standing next to Japanese Americans who also mythologized Japan, okay, in their own way, right?
Because they have this makeover idea, the idea of the tragic beginnings that becomes the root for their entire migrant weavos themselves. And so she comes this interesting cauldron, she's made and remade over and over again to the point where her origin story doesn't even matter so much as the way she's used. But the idea that you have these different groups all standing next to each other on that one hill talking about now Japanese internationalism and how okay, what's inside, okay, from Izawakamatsu, which is really rural and backwater, but actually it was the first. Right, we planted roots in America before anyone else in Japan had.
But the Japanese Americans were looking at saying, but this is our mother and they talk about how she becomes the mother of the entire Japanese American movement. And you have Ronald Reagan who actually makes a declaration, including okay about the important history and legacy of Japanese America. It shows the ways in which to help us show the weird places and is deeply, deeply entrenched in the notions of what it is to be Japanese abroad and also what it is to be Japanese in Japan. Yeah, and this is a great segway into your chapter three, which is really talking about the ways that Japan is seen in the vis-a-vis this idea of modernity and modernization.
So this is writing domestic regionalism seeking authentic in big, say, quote, stopo ku in interwar Japan. Before we jump into this, I did want to say that the chapter on okay, this sort of interest in the partially empty vessel that can be filled up with narrative. And one of the places where a research crosses over most nicely. But again, I was not thinking of this in any way in terms of the mobility and the sort of image of talk outside of Japan.
So for me, as somebody who went into this actually knowing the okay story before I read your book, there was that moment of, oh, so those things fit together in a way that I never saw. And that was really interesting for me to see okay and that light of the kind of discourse that I was interested in about told domestically, which is a little bit more what you're talking about in chapter four, right, the domestic regionalism part of this. So by the 1920s, world Japan talk in particular is seen by many people in Japan, sort of the thinking and chattering classes, especially as the kind of a site of authentically Japanese national identity on corrupted by modernity is a little bit of a sort of invented tradition to this and there's a little bit of xenophobia to this and there's, you know, kind of trying to find some sort of definition of Japanese in this in a world where the definitions of Japanese are a little bit up for grabs in the rapid changes of modernity modernization. And the flip side of this, of course, is that as you show told who is simultaneously quote is portrayed as an implacable holdout against modernity.
And yet also as a case study of the worst tendencies of modernity. And so this is, you know, sort of a triple paradox in a way we're running into a lot of paradoxes which is of course why I think both of us spent those 20 years with it. So this was not the only paradox in the image of Tohoku at the time, as you write what popular culture representations created a Janice-faced identity for the region ignoring its empirically outward looking and mobile history in favor of type passing Tohoku as inward looking and static. So this is kind of the point that I think we're you're looking at how this image of Tohoku as somehow isolated as somehow the sort of backward image of Tohoku is really being brought into being here.
And what was it about the 20s that makes this happen? What are the factors in Japanese society at the time that creates this particular vision of Tohoku? I really fell in love with the idea of the folk horn with min in particular. When this book got to becomes huge in Japan, released in the 10s and 20s, right, with Yami Bi-kuno writing here is word of Tohoku, right, which the tales of Tohoku and Tohoku are being in Tohoku region.
And as I began to read through those stories, I began to become very aware of just the very anthropological project, right, of having people from Tohoku coming up into the Tohoku region and trying to chronicle and as Naira Naira says, you know, write down the discourses of the dash, right? There's this vanishing true authentic Japan this is appearing. And we need to write down as quickly as we can. And we're going to use hyper-modern anthropological discourses in order to do so.
And when you read the introduction of the film look after me, like it's just so obvious that a level of disdain in which you see from this scholar from Tohoku is writing about a simple provincial people appear, right? And look how adorable it is that they believe these things are true. And so you have this recasting in the 10s and 20s, you know, when Japan is no longer seeking to be recognized as modern, but it has been acknowledged as modern on international stage, you begin to have, you know, harry, harry, harry, tune in and call it over come by the dirty, right? Like, who are we?
Before we lose to who we are, we need to find it and discover it and write it down and keep it in a little bottle. And that bottle becomes Tohoku, as well as other places. I mean, believe me, it's not Tohoku, but I'm obsessed with Tohoku, so that's where I went. And so the way I wanted to kind of pick this apart was to talk about, you know, the idea of regionalism, the ways in which we did alism is being created, both with in intellectual circles in Tokyo, but also with intellectual circles coming in intellectuals often outside of it.
They're from Tohoku, but they're not living there anymore. And so you begin to see in the work of some of this literary production, the, this tension. Yes, I'm obsessed with paradoxes. I think Tohoku is a wonderful place.
I think Japan is a wonderful place for paradoxes. I think history is a wonderful place for paradoxes. But I decided to look at it, particularly this idea that you pointed out of like the worst tendencies of modernity, as well as a whole doubt against it, I paired a bunch of different pieces of literature. I looked at like Connie Kosa, which is probably one of the most famous pieces of proletarian literature.
They came out in the 20s, early 20s. And then I also paired it with Sobou, which is this really fascinating piece. One of the first literary prizes, which name, I always say, and I'm not going to say that, that's going to be offensive to people who might get it wrong. But it's by Ishikawa Plazuzou.
And what Sobou does is it looks at migration to Brazil, and it takes a group of people from Tohoku region. And they're fleeing the Tohoku region because it is a place that is no longer a place they can live in anymore. It's not modern. They're impoverished.
They're losing their land. Of course, the weather is terrible, which is what everyone was in Tohoku. And so it looks at them in a migration center in Kove before they even leave. And throughout the whole thing, the idea that keeps coming up over and over again, the very first question they're asked by immigration people is, who are you and where you are?
And where you form becomes definition. And you see in those migration centers, them pairing together and gripping together by region. And so they're leaving because the new capitalism that has basically been knighted to the Tohoku region. They can't say home.
They have to go. And then Connie Kosa, which actually predates that I shared with them, that story. But Connie Kosa is another work, which is a piece of proletarian literature that is really focused on life on this carry boat. And it's all of these modern day for the time period that I said you like working with home people.
And it's about how horrible life is on the carry boat. When you read the original Japanese, there's a lot of dialect in there as well. The location where people are very important. But it's showing the ills of what capitalism has brought.
Like the capital's majority of the West has created untenable life for people in the Tohoku region. And one that there's either seeking to overcome or they're fleeing. And I thought that that was an interesting way of looking at it. Like why is it that we look at Tohoku as on modern as traditional?
Where nothing ever happens and it's insulated. And yet we see them represented within some extremely famous fiction that was read all throughout Japan as being in these very modern positions. And I started thinking about foils and the ways in which you can craft your narrative, especially for these Tohoku natives, by taking someone who's supposed to be insulated from it all and placing them in the worst situations possible of capitalism is a statement. But it's also a construct.
And it's a construct that reifies itself over time. So when we look at these classic words of literature, I mean, I started reading Kite Kolesan in 2008 because I was just going through an airport and leaving Japan. It was like on the best-sellers list. And I was like, wait, what?
But this goes to Japan. It's going down on the turn. Down turn, right? And so I pulled it off.
And I'm like, I noticed it's about Tohoku. It's actually about the Koleoka. I'm like, what is going on? I sat down and read it and went, okay, this is what's happening here.
And so we also see the ways in which the Tohoku imagery transcends the time it was written in. It's being used artistically by people who are from the region, but it's portraying this visualization. And I'm like, here's maybe one of the pieces of puzzle. Maybe why I got condolences for being out there.
Right? It's a benighted region. And it's a benighted region that is still very much remade through classic words of literature. Yeah, I think the literature of Tohoku is quite interesting.
One of the works that a lot of people know about, but we haven't talked about, and a lot of people know about, but haven't read it. It's one of those classics is Kite Kite Kite Kine, which sort of takes, it's an attempt to invert many of the things we've been talking about, these sort of images of Tohoku has backward. And I think it's interesting in that, I hate the expression, but it's kind of that exception that proves the rule problem, which is that it doesn't work as a great work of literature, which it is, unless you already have all of these stereotypes built up and you have this body of literature, both in a sense of sort of academic and non-fiction literature and also in the sense of literature as fiction and as art. And this is what's sort of interesting again, as you say, is that these images are recycled over and over again.
Once these tropes are created in the years that you're talking about, they continue to have currency in the same way that in point out both in the book and in the article you referenced earlier with, okay, yes, they continue to have currency, but the meanings keep shifting. Right, so they're just, they're part of a sort of landscape of tropes and ideas that keep coming back as cheap shortcuts to explain various aspects of what it is to be Japanese or what it is to be modern or what it is to not be modern. And in this sense, it's actually like, I keep, I've been thinking recently that this is kind of, you know, in some ways, it's very much before the so-called Nihon Jinro, or Discourses of Japanese and Booms of the 60s and 70s, but there's definitely this sort of long lineage of thinking about, you know, Tōhoku as a way to either exemplify what it is to be Japanese, the sort of, you know, refuge from modernity. It is all the things that haven't been corrupted.
Or as a way to say, you know, this is what we have left behind and become modern and we're so much better off now that we're not like those Tōhoku people and all the rest of us have been saved and all is left. It's for us to fix Tōhoku and then everything will be fine, right? So this is, you know, I think to me, it's an interesting discourse. Of course, is in no way limited to Japan, right?
I mean, this is the problem with the Tōhoku is not a Japan problem, right? However, the problem that you take up in the last chapter of your book kind of is, so this is leading to the Hōhoku-Asia regional identity within Imperial Japan. So we take, here, it's kind of a rough face from what we've been talking about. It's the 1930s, those of us who are familiar with history, you know, as long as you read up to about the 1930s, everything's fine, you stop there, it's all good.
But as Tōhoku-born intellectuals begin to see Tōhoku as a potential leader in the growing empire, we say a real change in the way that they're thinking about what it is to be Tōhoku. And this is the, you know, can we be exemplars of what it means to be modern, ultra-modern, really, in the sense of Imperial? So what are the elements of history and regional identity that they're drawing on to make this argument? And how did they then disseminate this message?
And I guess, you know, at some level, there's this question of, okay, that's nice, but did it have any effect? So I wonder if we could talk about that as well. Effects on the perceptions of Tōhoku, both locally, regionally, in Japan, writ large and perhaps beyond if there's something to talk about there as well. And yeah, a big shout out for Kitty Kitty, which is always worth reading.
I talk about it briefly in my book, but yeah, it's a fun one. Well, for those of you who thought that reading Hagrid's dialogue was hard in Harry Potter, the Japanese version of Harry Potter, good luck to you. Yeah. It's a push, but it's a worthwhile push.
And it's much like when I read anything in dialect in English, read it out loud. If you read it out loud, it'll be a lot worse. Let's see, get through it a lot faster. Okay, so yeah, the fifth chapter was, it was a chapter that I really debated, do I want to go there?
Because it is a pretty big about face. And I remember having conversations with my advisors because I wanted to put me in a dissertation and they're like, you know, it's kind of a big topic. One of my advisors was a little easy on it, so like, yeah, I do it with a big topic. But I decided to hold off on it until the book, and I really decided that if I wanted to do the whole archive too, I wanted to make sure that I covered, if I was going to do Hokkaido, I felt like I have to do Manchuria as well as domestic, as domestic, often nationalism, and the ways in which that helped you to be identity because the total identity, of course, in the post-war, I would recommend you reading this book.
It will tell you a lot about it. I wasn't touching that with the tent, but I didn't think that we could leave silent 30 points. It just, you can't. I think it would be academic malpractice for me in that sense.
So what we see in the 30s and 40s is developing out of really the 20s. It's developing out of this push for regionalism, right? Domestic acceptance and embrace of a regional identity is wonderful. But what happens when regionalism is superseded by nationalism?
What happens when if you are more attachment to your region than your nation, you're in a longer picture. And so what we see in the 30s and 40s is the intellectuals scrambling a little bit, but not having to look too far to be able to take their works from the 20s that have the 20s and reimagine them in this idea of the nation. So how can we be both attached to our regional identity and proud of it and not be going into the nation? Particularly because total rule has a little bit of a problematic relationship historically speaking with the central government, particularly after the duration of revolution.
So what we see is some scholars like Atodalia, Rezo, and others who are trying to bind nationalism and internationalism to native places. And the way they do this actually, because there's been such tumultuous back and forth about the place of total rule within the nation, which doesn't fit their narrative, right? So it goes back where it is under the books. They don't want the national narrative.
But international, they're the house not to work with it. Even though directives out of Tokyo had long been ignoring internationalism as we see throughout my book, internationalism is very much present throughout the total region. And so they go back early. They go back to during the Edo period.
They go back to the early Date clan. They sent an ambassador to Rome because again, I told you there's some Christianity background in the total region that we don't want to talk about. And they look at the ways in which you have these kuzalake, right? These trailblazers, right?
Tōhoku actually has been leading international migration. Tōhoku is how is Tōhoku? How do you get? Tōhoku is how is Tōhoku?
That we need to use Tōhoku. These people know they're from rugged backgrounds, right? They understand that only from the frontiers. They've been doing it.
They've been doing it in the Philippines. They've been doing it in the wilds of Canada. They've been doing it in the wilds of America, right? In fact, frontier is more to the migration is pretty much the heart of a lot of Tōhoku migration in general.
Whereas you see people from the Southwest are often going into urban spaces. The people from Tōhoku go into other agricultural spaces. They go into Vancouver and around Vancouver, not just into Vancouver. And so when they go, they go out to the bow, right?
And the bow in the Philippines, as we see from Jojo Abanale's work, was actually sort of a Japanese court of call in the 1920s and 30s, right? Now, Japanese maps, they include that. It's a Japanese court of calling them though. The Americans would not appreciate that.
The Americans would not appreciate that. The Americans would not appreciate that. The Americans would not appreciate that. The Philippines would have either.
But they've been doing that. And, you know, having traveled to the bow, even in the modern period, it's certainly, the city itself is plenty urban, but there's a lot of rural space as well as there is driving down. So we have the recasting of the entire history of mobility that I told throughout the rest of the book comes to a head in the 30s. And you have very, very intellectual, intelligent intellectuals who take that history.
And they say, look at us. We are the leaders of the Northeast Asia. We are the ones who need to be looking to. You ignored us.
All throughout modernization, that's fine. You guys are taking care of you. But if you want us to take care of you now, you need to look at us. We can take care of everybody.
And so you have essay contests. The son of a grande of the Togoyo Nishi-Ching-Boon was one of my favorite sources in the entire book. And it's a series of essays that come out in 1942. And they ask people from Togoyo to write.
How can we be leaders of our Northeast Asia? Yeah, Northeast Asia. And they write. And they write about how international Togoyo is.
They talk about the long history of Togoyo. They talk about how it's always been a leader. How it's always been on these frontiers, always pushing out, always expanding, always spreading the cultural spirit of Japan. And therefore, we not only are we nationally proud of who we are.
We are the embodiment of Japanese expansion and be able to watch us. Great in the 1930s. 40 is a little bit icky when we move past there. And I think that the interesting thing is it's a moment in Togoyo.
It's a moment when I think Togoyo scholars in Togoyo, the local regionalist historians embrace the whole of a mobile pastor Togoyo. I don't think it was much further. It's not like people in Togoyo are like, oh, let's do that. People in Togoyo are going, hey, let's use them to colonize the interior.
I mean, that's a great idea. They don't, they need the help, right? We get these United people to move. We had a great life in Hokkaido.
We'll be able to move them. You have the start of the village division programs so that we as young wrote about them extensively actually in reverse book, where you and others, of course. We have the village division programs where you take big villages in the Togoyo region and you basically take about a third of the population. You just plant them in the Manchurian.
And so they're planting the flat for Japan. So they're used that way by actors in Tokyo and planners. They also play a partially large role in early 30s Japanese part of Army politics, which I will tell you, I was not expecting, because I'm not a military historian. You're reading, you're like, oh, the Manchurian is in.
Okay. Thank you, Sendai. Awesome. But you see all of this idea that gets folded in.
They use that history also a lot in the 40s. They talk about why the Japanese from the Togoyo region should be leading. But I don't think that it has a huge impact. I don't think that this essay contest in Sendai was read broadly by some of the people in Sendai and me.
And you, if you want to go and find it, it's fun. And so I see it as a moment where the intellectuals and the idea of Togoyo as idea comes to fruition in the pre-war period, right? It's the transition from the Ocean War and the losers of the restoration into the Togoyo region as a product identity among people in that region. I don't think it resonates past that.
But it does come forth perhaps a little bit, and not entirely just from that. But I think I see lingering so that when we see the triple disaster and the idea of persistence and the hard nature and as Nathan's written in the wonderful article about it at the time, we see a lot of those. I think they're not only from the 30s imagination, but I think the 30s imagination helped it. Yeah, and thank you for referencing that article.
It's the thing that I was thinking about when I was listening to you. Of course, which is this, you know, to repeat myself a little bit here, this idea that you set up all of these sort of lexicon, right, of possible ways to think about and talk about it all with what it means to Japaneseness. And I had the good fortune to commit the academic malpractice of not having to do all this sort of legwork that you've done with the vulnerability side of it, which is particularly the last chapter here. We're thinking about the regional identity in the 1930s.
I relied very heavily on Konishi, Konishi, the MGT's work, and you've expanded my horizons there. So I appreciate that very much. So this is a good place, I think, to end with, you know, sort of mutual appreciation society, but before we do, because obviously we could nerd out about this forever, but before we end the call here. Now that the book is out, what is on your plate these days?
What do you up to? And what are your future plans? I've got one ongoing project and then I have the nascent idea of a book. My ongoing project, I actually got some funding to do interdisciplinary work with a colleague of mine at Seton Hall, where I turn the case on.
I'm a student anthropologist of the Philippines. And Sherry and I were talking about the idea and cultures of disaster, speaking of the triple disaster and the great total earthquake. And as someone who's both lived in the Philippines, as well as someone who lived, you know, just outside of Sendai before the earthquake, we started talking about, you know, Greg Bangkok's ideas of cultures of disaster, and we started talking about named disasters. The disasters that kind of leave this market imprint in society that people talk about and it becomes a moment in time, right, before the after, but also where were you in moments.
And we decided that we were both really interested in learning some new skills. So we decided to a project that looked at digital humanities tools and taking as a starting off point, Harvard State, Yale, the Japanese disaster archive. We started playing around with it and seeing what was present and what was there. And we wanted to think about it as a data mining and creating open access materials.
And so we decided that we wanted to learn our and we were going to search through using Twitter and Facebook posts of underrepresented voices with regards to the Great Teleport earthquake in 2011 and also Hurricane Wanda, no international American high on in 2012 and Philippines. And we kind of want to create something we wanted to create something kind of like the JDA for the Philippines, but when we started digging in and we had a mentor as a consultant for us who is a friend and he also was the director of the JDA as a postdoc right after it was in 2012. We had them come in and we were talking about what JDA does and we realized that it is a lot of crowdsourcing from individuals who sent in materials. It wasn't a lot of data mining.
And so we have been trying to learn how to pull these stuff. Things have got messy now that Twitter is a lot closer to deal with right now. They changed a lot of the rules for academic research. We talked to another consultant who was working at the time of GMA, which is one of the major news outlets in the Philippines.
And we've been trying to figure out how we can start creating these data sets. Right now it's mainly just informational and learning, but in the future, I would love to create modules along the lines of the JDA where we could have open access data sets that students would be able to work with faculty dating through. And we want to do it with both the Alanda as well as the 311 disasters and then maybe spend out over time, but that's a key project. And then the other project is the monograph.
I have a tentative title from everywhere and nowhere unpacking Japanese expatriate identities and the Arab liberalism. And this comes from my experience living as an expat for 10 years in 17 countries. I realized when I came back to an Arab club that I had more in common when it came to my identity, but people who lived in multiple countries. It didn't matter where they lived.
Where they lived in multiple serial, serial, serial, that we had a different perspective than many of our countrymen. Someone would expand that and explore it. I think about doing it phonetically. I think one chapter is probably going to be on natural disasters experience from abroad.
Because I remember 311. I had just been sitting in Washington, especially in the U.S. It was pretty hard. And then I want to pair that in the U.S.
for Tokyo Fire. I think we'll have a chapter on dark tourism about the experience of going to these sites abroad, which really may show my culpability. I think we're probably going to have a chapter also maybe about more contested domestic legal debates and also cultural shopping coming. So I kind of want to look at that.
In general, as you must know, it starts over from here, which is, I can't say anything about it, such a spectacular book, made me think about expatriates even more. Because he's looking at multiple mobilities. You start on one side and you move to another post. But I want to see the impact of what happens to national identity when you're not in your national space.
Well, I'm sure we'll be keeping you busy for another 20 years. Hopefully we will get you back on the podcast before then with a book of some sort. And as a serial expat myself, I'm very much looking forward to that as well as to seeing how the data mining goes. But better you than me having to deal with Twitter's API right now.
But yeah, so I'm excited to see how that all works out. And thank you once again for joining us on the podcast and congratulations on recently getting tenure here. So yes, enjoy the rest of your summer. Take care.