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"This book will be an essential touchstone for our understanding of twentieth-century imperialism, and of the transformation of labor under twentieth-century capitalism. Mark Driscoll's elaboration of the notion of the biopolitical is the most imaginative and productive use of the concept that I have seen. His meticulous and wide-ranging research, drawing on Chinese and Korean sources as well as on his thorough mastery of Japanese archival and scholarly literature, not only makes a clear case for the specificity of the Japanese imperial project but offers crucial genealogical insights into the emergence of modern East Asian regimes of capital. Written with commitment, wit, and vision, it is also a great pleasure to read."--Christopher Leigh Connery, author of "The Empire of the Text: Writing and Authority in Early Imperial China"

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ABSOLUTE EROTIC, ABSOLUTE GROTESQUE

Duke University Press

Contents

Preface.............................................................................................ixAcknowledgments.....................................................................................xviiAbbreviations.......................................................................................xxiIntroduction........................................................................................11. Cool(ie) Japan...................................................................................252. Peripheral Pimps.................................................................................573. Empire in Hysterics..............................................................................814. Stubborn Farmers and Grotesqued Korea............................................................101Intertext I. A Korean is being beaten; I, a Japanese colonizer, am being beaten.....................1195. All That's Solid Melts into Modern Girls and Boys................................................1356. Revolutionary Pornography and the Declining Rate of Pleasure.....................................161Intertext II. Neuropolitics Sprouts Fangs...........................................................2037. The Opiate of the (Chinese) People...............................................................2278. Japanese Lessons.................................................................................263Conclusion: Bare Labor and the Empire of the Living Dead............................................295Notes...............................................................................................315Bibliography........................................................................................327Index...............................................................................................345

Chapter One

We must find new lands from which we can easily obtain raw materials and at the same time exploit the cheap slave labor that is available from the natives of the colonies. CECIL RHODES

Desire, combined with what North Chinese themselves called the "desperation pushing us into Manchuria" (chuang guandong), drove one of the largest movements of people in modern history. What Thomas Gottschang and Diana Lary (2000) call the "great migration" to northeastern China saw roughly twenty-five million people move there from the densely populated North China provinces of Shandong and Hebei from 1890 to 1940. Only the century-long emigration of fifty-two million people from Europe between 1840 and the 1930s was larger. To talk about migration initially in terms of desire is not to downplay the various forces that induce the desperately poor to sever themselves from home and enter a labor diaspora. In the case of the Shandong "coolies," even considering the relatively short several-hundred-mile move into neighboring northeastern China, it would be hard to underestimate the miserable conditions in which poor farmers, skilled workers, and itinerant laborers found themselves in the 1890s and early twentieth century.

After the Second Opium War, Euro-American powers imposed the "Open Door" policy of free trade with China, designed to provide easier access for their capitalists, hungry for market share of what had been, until the 1840s, the world's largest economy. This regime of unequal treaties laid the groundwork for the initial accumulation by dispossession of North China by England, the United States, Germany, and others. Northeast China was likewise forcefully inserted into the global economy, first by Russia and Britain and then by Japan.

The areas in China being buffeted by these political and economic pressures had, during the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911), suffered droughts in 233 of those years and floods in 245 of them. Environmental and geopolitical catastrophes like these impelled some Japanese elites to foreground what Wendy Brown calls, in a somewhat different context, the "states of injury" of hapless Chinese (Brown 1995). However, as Brown warns, hegemonic power is working whenever states of injury are enumerated. The injurious state of Chinese coolies at the hands of brutal Euro-American colonizers and gunboat imperialists was played up by Japanese imperialists intent on showing how, as Asians, their own treatment of Chinese labor was necessarily brotherly and humane. The civilizing missionary positions taken by Japanese colonizers were proclaimed with the confidence that a racial unity with Chinese and shared cultural history with China would mystify the fact that coolie labor-waged much lower than it was sold-single-handedly produced value in Japanese-controlled and colonized Northeast China.

Japanese colonialists also justified the move to continental Asia as a selfless desire to civilize. They pointed to their tentacle-like railroad system-first laid down on top of an incipient Russian base in 1905 and continually expanded until the end of the Second World War-and the discounted fourth-class passage that seasonal Chinese workers occasionally received to usher them to multiple labor sites as Japanese imperialism's emblem of a modernizing system. This emblem, of course, was also a symptom of capital's need for cheap labor. For the new railroads were Japan's imperial response to the problem identified by Foucault as specific to both capitalism's formal subsumption and to biopolitics: the problem of population. Railroads answered the question of the population with the fixed capital to "attach workers firmly to the production apparatus, to settle them or move them where it needs them to be-in short, to constitute them as a labor force" (Foucault 1997, 34).

To extend only slightly the epigraph from the journalist Adachi, the history of the de- and repossession of Northeast China by Japan's imperialism is the story of the Chinese coolie, nothing more. Japanese dreams of empire in Asia built on the backs of cheap coolie labor surfaced even before the consolidation of its modern nation-state in 1868. In London in 1862 the Satsuma diplomat Godai Tomoatsu was reported to have "asked about the possibility of using Chinese and Indian laborers under Japanese direction to establish an East Asian center of industrial economic power" (Jansen 1965, 59-60). This wish was fulfilled immediately after the treaty ending the Russo-Japanese War was signed in New Hampshire on 5 September 1905. Thereafter, Tokutomi Soho, Natsume Soseki, and other imperialists saw Japan's imperial future in the Manchurian present embodied in the reserve army of coolie labor. Soseki was initially disconcerted by the sheer number of "filthy" coolies he saw when he first landed at Dalian Harbor in September 1909, describing them as "a surging multitude ... buzzing and swarming like angry wasps" (2002, 39). The famous novelist was invited to visit Japan's new colony by his school friend Nakamura Zeko, the second president of the South Manchurian Railway Company. However, by the end of his trip through...