Placing Empire: Travel and the Social Imagination in Imperial Japan

Kate McDonald
History
UC Santa Barbara

Placing Empire explores the spatial politics of empire at precisely the moment when commentators declared the death of place and distance. The Japanese government adopted tourism as a tool of state policy in the years immediately following its colonization of Taiwan in 1895. As the practice grew to encompass hundreds of thousands of travelers, colonial officials and Japanese settlers around the empire harnessed tourism as a way of challenging the spatial and social order of Japanese society. Placing Empire argues that place became one of the most powerful tools for sustaining liberal empires in the early twentieth century. This book shows how Japanese settlers used travelogues, guidebooks, magazines, and textbooks to disseminate a new view of the Japanese nation far and wide, reformulating the original sin of colonialism into a self-evident map of geographic and cultural complementarity. Placing Empire challenges historians of empire to treat place as an argument from somewhere rather than a view from nowhere.