Conclusion: Japan's Imperial Art World
More importantly, as Aimee Nayoung Kwon pointed out, by the 1930s, the expansion of transport and mass media in the Japanese empire created an appearance of an "imagined community" on an imperial scale (Book, 163-164, 240). This, however, as she emphasizes was an "image of an imperial community" that circulated in the Japanese language press was accessible only to the colonized elites and Japanese settler community and was widely accepted. The existence of such image belied the
KWON This book focuses on the ironic simultaneity of the emptiness yet pervasiveness of such an image of a harmonious “imagined community” in the light of the violent repressions of difference and conflict upon which such an image was constructed.
scholars have long made an important point in their studies of the Japanese empire about the double-faced character of assimilation policies, according to which colonial subjects were given Japanese citizenship (kokuseki), yet were differentiated on the basis of their origins (koseki); they had to meet the obligations of imperial subjects, yet were denied many of the rights (Leo Ching, Morris-Suzuki, Oguma Eiji, Suh Serk Bae).
imilarly, in her study of the circulation of daily metropolitan newspaper Osaka mainichi within the empire, literary scholar Aimee Nayoung Kwon
How to theorize this imperial art world?
ironies
double process
What was the place of Taiwan on the artistic map of the empire? The answer to this question illuminates the contingency of the artistic practice on the shifting understanding of place under Japan's colonialism.
I argue that in the interwar period Japan's was an imperial art world (teikoku bijutsukai), intimately intertwined with the art worlds of Korea and Taiwan. The imperial art world emerged as a powerful idea and a reality in the making, driven by multiple state and private actors. By paying attention to the flows of information, goods, and people within the Japanese empire, we can write an art history that takes into account these contemporary and highly political practices of place-making. Such approach does not aim to replace the national paradigm with an imperial one, but to draw attention to the disavowed impact of the empire-building on modern art in Japan.
KWON 2015 (157-158) As the colony was rigorously incorporated into the discursive space of empire, the spread of modern imperial technologies in education, transportation, and the mass media appeared to link the vast areas of the empire into an imagined community of a broader scale and a more complex affiliations than theorized by Benedict Anderson. => (158) The circulation of the chihoo-ban (local or regional edition) of the metropolitan newspaper Osaka mainichi, which appeared daily across the vast territories of the Japanese empire, created a spectacle of an imagined imperial community that, by the 1930s, appeared to link the metropolitan center of Tokyo to the peripheries of the Naichi proper: from Kyushu, Wakayama, Hokkaido, and Okinawa all the way to the gaichi hinterlands of Karafuto, Taiwan, Korea, and Manchuria.
KWON 2015 (240) It may be worth emphasizing here that I am not making the claim that there was indeed widespread acceptance of the notion of an “imagined community” that seeped into all aspects of the empire - from the official to the popular level. In fact, when we keep in mind that Japanese language imperial newspapers were being read by only a minority throughout the colonies, namely the colonized elites and Japanese colonial settler communities for the most part, one must question just how pervasive the notion of an “imagined community” infiltrated the everyday experiences of the general population living in the empire. An attempt to theorize any overarching sense of the shared experience of an “imagined community” on the scale of empire would require much more complex examinations that I have room for here, and it is not my purpose to make general pronouncements about the effectiveness of imperial ideologies on any grand scale. What I would like to highlight here for the purposes of my own project is the significance of such an image of an “imagined community” that was being circulated in the mass media throughout the empire at this time. It is also important to point out that such an image of a putative imperial community linked by the imperial language was accompanied by violent imperial assimilation policies aimed at the censorship of vernacular languages and customs, and by the repression of vernacular cultural productions and assemblies of the colonized. (…) This book focuses on the ironic simultaneity of the emptiness yet pervasiveness of such an image of a harmonious “imagined community” in the light of the violent repressions of difference and conflict upon which such an image was constructed. IMPORTANT <=> (163) the chihoo editions of the Osaka mainichi … played a significant role in the circulation of the dual logic of assimilation (incorporation) and exoticization (differentiation) through the vast regions of empire. By the 1930s, the Osaka mainichi was being circulated daily throughout the regions of the Naichi and gaichi, seemingly linking these areas into a spatial continuum of an imagined imperial community of an “empty homogenous time,” reminiscent of what Benedict Anderson theorized on the scale of the nation-state. => (164) The overwhelming impression garnered through the pages of the imperial daily Osaka mainichi was that of the empire linked into a smooth continuum through modern imperial technologies and economic prosperity. For the readers of the Osaka mainichi throughout the ever-expanding empire, the borderlines of empire seemed to be opening up for the benefit of all.