I went to a presentation at Waseda University tonight called “Images of Imperial Womenhood: Japanese Women in Colonial Korea and Their Modes of Domination, 1930-45″ by Atsuko Aoki, a grad student at Brown University. She had a couple of observations from her research that I found interesting. One was the apparent fact that in colonial Korea there were apparently far more Korean men marrying Japanese women than the other way around, as far as the data will show. I had expected the opposite to be true. The other was her observations on the views of Japanese towards Japanese women who were born or raised in the Korean colony as “spoiled”, “flippant” or “incompetent” or “lazy” and needing “rectification and re-education” as proper wives, or the fact that they weren’t considered fit to be wives at all. There followed an interesting discussion on this.
Stanford’s Peter Duus questioned her on this. Daqing Yang, a professor whose writings I have always liked, and a number of students chimed in with lots of other interesting observations. A student from U Chicago, (who is also in one of my Waseda classes where we will be struggling together through Harootunian’s Overcome by Modernity with a professor who is currently translating it into Japanese) recounted other examples from her studies of art and literature from colonial Dalian of how the colony was seen to have changed or defiled the purity of the Japanese original of something, giving it a “continental” look. I’m sure references to this can be found in a lot of places. I seem to remember seeing something about this in some reading on India as well.
Atsuko mentioned going on to look at some Korean women who were later branded as collaborators, research that brings it close to my own interest. I hope I can learn from many grad students who are working on these areas.