How Pakistan Got Divided

Abstract

and rebellion. Therefore, as Lori Watt astutely points out on the back cover, Nation-Empire “makes a valuable contribution to the world history of youth.” In the final analysis, Chatani’s book points to the importance of probing the transhistorical and crosscultural substrates that dictate human behavior. One of the most striking features of Chatani’s inquiry into Japan’s “nationempire” building is that she pays scant attention to the role of the Japanese emperor, which is often identified as the ideological backbone of Japanese nationalism, imperialism, and militarism. The lesser significance attached to emperor worship is particularly interesting in light of the attraction of younger generations to such charismatic leaders as Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin, Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, Chiang Kai-shek, Mao Zedong, and Kim Il-Sung. Cults of personality are a widely accepted explanation of the uncanny but powerful relationship between youth and totalitarianism. In the opening pages of NationEmpire, Chatani speaks of “volunteer fever” among Taiwanese youth in terms of their zeal to “demonstrate their heartfelt loyalty to the Japanese emperor” (2). The rest of the book, however, devotes little attention to emperor-centered nationalism, because the social mobility complex occupies the center of her inquiry. Precisely because exclusive groups of colonial youth adopted a success-oriented mindset, total mobilization dampened their enthusiasm and induced them to escape military service and labor conscription. This was a paradoxical consequence of universal conscription in the early 1940s, attesting to the fundamental inadequacy of cultural Japanization at youth training institutions in Taiwan and Korea. In the actual lives of village youth, the lure of personal economic advancement was decidedly prioritized over the augustness of imperial authority. Because of the cardinal importance he gives to the pragmatic nature of the social mobility complex, Chatani winds up revealing the insufficiency of ideological indoctrination in Taiwan and Korea. It is, perhaps, for this reason that the theme of nationempire, “a nation across imperial domains” (4), is somewhat disconnected from rural youth mobilization in Japan’s colonies. Indeed, when reading Nation-Empire, one gets the impression that imperial policies of nationalization were of secondary importance compared to the powerful allure of educational opportunities and job prospects for capable young men. It was as if young colonial subjects had shrewdly followed such imperialist campaigns as moral suasion (ky oka) and self-cultivation (sh uy o) in pursuit of purely private ends. We may safely assume, therefore, that colonial youth were not truly ideologically invested in pan-Asian unity. Their actions were propelled more by their own self-interest than by a grandiose vision of imperial brotherhood. As Chatani acknowledges, Japan’s nation-empire turned out to be “an illusion and an assumption” (248). This is not surprising, because youth education rested, ultimately, on utilitarian benefits, rather than on selfless devotion to Japanese imperial nationalism. Admittedly, primary sources like colonial magazine essays and the jacket photographs convey a strong sense of dedication. It is not certain, though, whether we can take them at face value, if self-advancement, rather than nationalist ideology, was the primary impetus behind youthful ardor. As Chatani notes, even when Japanesespeaking, non-Japanese volunteer soldiers aspired to prove that they were more Japanese than the Japanese, they were mainly concerned with satisfying their ethnic pride. The primary value of this research lies in “micro-level social tensions and relationships” (18), as Chatani relies heavily on stories from such individuals as Kat o Einoj o (Shida village in Miyagi Prefecture, Japan); Xu Chongfa and Huang Yuanxing (Beipu village in Hsinchu County, Taiwan); and Kim Y ong-han (Kwangs ok village in South Ch’ungch’ong Province, Korea). Her ultimate goal is to promote a new approach to the history of imperialism, but it is questionable whether this has been successfully achieved when it comes to Japanese empire studies. With the individuals’ accounts highly privileged, this work falls short of illuminating how such intimate testimonies are important in the big picture. Okinawa and Manchuria, integral parts of Japan’s national empire, are relegated to the margins, as they do not fit the pattern of the social mobility complex. In addition, the focus on rural situations ends up being a convenient excuse to sideline anticolonial urban intellectuals. Chatani is curiously silent about the controversies surrounding Japanese colonial brutality, as her analysis is geared toward blurring the boundaries between the colonizer and the colonized in the process of nationalizing Japan’s colonial empire. If the empathy she displays for her nonJapanese interviewees is intended to challenge the resistance-collaboration dichotomy, she must also guide our reflections on the suffering of the colonized. The social and local dynamics that molded the minds of ambitious rural youth are not necessarily oriented to producing an ethical standpoint. Chatani’s study is undeniably an important addition uncovering hitherto little-known facts, but it fails to provide an enlightened point of view that would revolutionize our understanding of Japanese colonial rule in its entirety.