The Spanish-American War fought between two imperial powers, each disputing over Spanish colonies and the entitlement of land against native wishes, brings about some interesting sources. Looking at mainly primary sources written and spoken in English, specifically American-published sources regarding the Spanish-American War, it seems that Americans were initially trying to paint a picture as if they were non-belligerent and were only involved in the war because the Spanish coerced or pushed them to war. Films that were published highlight Americans were forced into the war after damage to their naval ship, the U.S.S Maine, exploded by a Spanish mine on Havana Harbour, implicitly connotes Americans as non-belligerent as “[they] did not start it!”. However, this was not necessarily true as time went on. In the Philippines, films and tour guides paint a slightly different picture of Americans as belligerent actors against “native” Filipinos, as they try to assimilate the Philippines into their domain after the Treaty of Paris (signed on December 10, 1898). Therefore, I will argue that films and tour guides implicitly display American agendas of either being non-belligerent actors in Cuba and after the Treaty of Paris was signed (which gave the United States the Spanish colonies of Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Philippine Islands, Guam and the West Indies), they pursued a more imperial doctrine of conquering and ‘assimilating’ Filipinos through violent means.

The first film to be discussed is a panning shot of the USS Maine destroyed by a Spanish mine on the Havana Harbour in Cuba, which ultimately led to the Spanish-American War.[1]

https://www.loc.gov/item/98500970/?

The film pans across the ship’s side to see that the ship looks ‘cut in half’, caused by an explosion. The film depicts a ‘sad loss’ of naval soldiers as the ship took countless lives. The explosion ignited a gunpowder keg of tension between the Spanish administration in Cuba and the United States. This film provides a source of documentation that not only shows us the damage by the Spanish administration but highlights the power that one act can set off a year of belligerence and brutality.[2]

During the war, Philippine Insurgents worked together with American Imperial forces against the Spanish colonisers. However, as the battle drew to a close with the Spanish forces, and after the Treaty of Paris was signed in December (which led the United States to buy the Philippine Islands from the Spanish), American forces decided to ‘benevolently assimilate’ the Philippines into their domain ‘by any means necessary’.[3] One film that highlights American belligerence is below:

https://www.loc.gov/item/98501198/?

This film shows some Filipinos retreating from American infantry after a few were gunned down. The brutality of the war is depicted here, highlighting the imperial doctrine Americans embraced to control the Philippine Islands eventually.[4]

Another clue into Americans’ brutality and their Imperial objectives are in a tour guide published in 1899. The tour guide ‘notes’ section implicitly depicts the American colonisation process. The “extraordinary circumstances” that led to the guide not mentioning a few details, including “residents of American and Spanish authorities”, are something not to be missed in this guide. The lack of studied areas in this guide also implicitly depicts that those areas were used for war and possibly other gruesome acts.[5]

In conclusion, these primary sources are nuggets of clues that indicate American objectives in the Spanish-American War. Initially, a film was produced to show Spanish damage to the U.S.S Maine. After the Treaty of Paris was signed in December 1898, the American objective changed into an imperial role of assimilating the Philippines as one of their colonies; brutally taking down Filipino men and massacring tens of thousands of civilians in the process.

[1] Paley, William Daly, “Wreck of the Battleship ‘Maine’”, Thomas Edison Inc. (United States: Edison Manufacturing Co, 1898). <https://www.loc.gov/item/98500970/?>

[2] ‘Chronology for the Philippine Islands and Guam in the Spanish American War’, The World of 1898: The Spanish-American War, (Library of Congress, 2011). https://www.loc.gov/rr/hispanic/1898/chronphil.html

[3] Ibid.

[4] James H. White and New Jersey National Guard, ‘Filipinos retreat from trenches’, Thomas Edison Inc. (United States: Edison Manufacturing Co., 1899). <https://www.loc.gov/item/98501198/?>

[5] Manila Guide For Foreigners: A Useful Book for All, (Manila, 1899).

An authoritative score of road networks spans out in front of us; a pleasingly rectangular stamp on a colourful blue-sky background. This is Shinkyo. But if we adopt Michel de Certeau’s argument that a bird’s eye view of a city is inadequate and instead search for the spatial “acting out” of the city, does the “tour” of Shinkyo correspond with its “map”?[1]

In 1932, the Japanese developed a planning proposal which saw the Manchurian town of Changchun transformed into the visionary city of Shinkyo (also Xinjing) and represented the zenith of Japanese industrialisation and competition with the West. The city was developed closely in line with the ideals of the Japanese Guandong Army who had occupied Manchuria, and who prioritised state planning, economic domination, and a unified and obedient public.[2] The proposal included regular street layouts, European-style squares, parks, grand central buildings, and industrial domination. Notably, these developments occurred alongside the increasing importance of the South Manchurian Railway (SMR) which was imagined as the vehicle which would propel Shinkyo into a modernity beyond the access of the West.

The map (see below) was published in 1936 by the State Capital Construction Bureau of the State Council of Manchuria.[3] It is a bird’s eye view of Shinkyo, showing the construction plan with detail of individual streets, monumental centres, railway lines and shrine complexes. It is accompanied by a photographical print of the building progress on the city to that date. The publication of this map by the State Council is valuable in revealing the ideology of spatial reconstruction in Manchuria. The map is striking for its obvious grid pattern. Goto Shimpei, the SMR’s first president and contributor to the planning proposal for Shinkyo, was influenced by European city planning in Germany and subsequently introduced the idea of wide streets and zoned areas according to commercial, residential or commemorative function.[4] The map enhances the impression of this functional zoning by elevating the viewer so that the grid pattern is more pronounced and we adopt the view of the planner or architect who works on the landscape as if it is an operational subject. It implies that the planned vision of Shinkyo was developed independent of the realities of the Manchurian landscape or environment- the plan is flat, the planner has had no need for confrontation with mountains or freezing temperatures. Indeed, the grid pattern on the map fades off to the edges, where the landscape continues as a flat, blank canvas. Historians have categorised this as the utopian “blank page”, planning that only existed on paper.[5] It reveals the desire of Japanese authorities to spatially reconfigure a previously Chinese space into a new centre of Japanese modernity and industrialisation, without any cultural or social challenges. It suggests that city planning during the early 20^th century adopted a unique “space-time conception”, where physical construction of roads, monuments and shrines could inaugurate a new era of progress that only Japan could access.[6]

This utopian vision of the future is seen in the detailed features of the map- uniform illustration of housing and additions of minute, unspecified people. This artistic representation disseminated as propaganda suggests that the planners had “free reign of creative vision” and did not include the reality of social structures within the lived city, a vision which filtered down into popular conception of Manchuria. It is true that the uniformity of their plan in some ways translated into reality. Shinkyo did become a hugely efficient commercial centre as the designation of certain spaces for economic and agricultural activity meant that the connective function of the SMR could be fully exploited, for example in the expansion of the soybean trade.[7] However, the static uniformity of the plan does not equate to the reality of 20^th century Xinjiang. Even the photograph, evidenced alongside the drawing of the map as if to ratify the existence of the hexagonal dream, is taken before people are included into the equation of the city plan. The uniform housing excluded the presence of the Chinese, who were designated as the enemy, and consequently disrupted the utopia with the erection of immigrant houses on the outskirts of the city. This diverged from the Japanese-style housing and temples assigned on the map. Moreover, cottage industries (largely run by the Chinese) prospered, alongside the domination of the Chinese in banking and moneylending. A tarnish to the vision of a collective Japanese modernity. The map’s neglect of Chinese and Russian commercial districts is compounded by the tiny brushstroke figures we see pounding the streets. They are orderly and unidentified- they pose no social or nationalistic threat to the new Japanese modernity as they are all the same.

The lofty birds eye view of the map, whilst not representational of reality, is valuable in its suggestion of Japanese planning as a means to “scientifically manag[e] energy” in the newly acquired territory of Manchuria to create a distinctly Japanese space.[8] Whilst De Certeau rejected the engineered “concept city”, in the study of 20^th century Japan, it becomes valuable for its insight into social and political aspirations.[9] City planning often involved the rejection of real forces of social and environmental change, but created an entirely new space in the administrative imagination- an uninhabited utopia where order and dominance could be asserted through spatial categorisation and management.

 

Bibliography

Primary Sources

Manshukoku Kokumuin Kokuto Kensetsukyoku, Kokuto Kensetsu Hansei Chikashi (Map of Shinkyo), (China 1936).

Secondary Sources

De Certeau, Michel, The Practice of Everyday Life, (California 1985).

Esherick, Joseph, “Railway City and National Capital: Two Faces of the Modern in Changchun”, in Joseph Esherick (ed.) Remaking the Chinese City: Modernity and National Identity, 1900-1950, (Hawaii 2000), pp.65-90.

Tucker, David, “City Planning Without Cities: Order and Chaos in Utopian Manchukuo”, in Mariko Asano Tamanoi (ed.), Crossed Histories: Manchuria in the Age of Empire, (Hawaii 2005), pp.53-82.

Young, Louise, Japan’s Total Empire: Manchuria and the Culture of Wartime Imperialism, (California 1988).

 

[1] Michel De Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, (California 1985), p.98, p.118.

[2] Joseph Esherick, “Railway City and National Capital: Two Faces of the Modern in Changchun”, in Joseph Esherick (ed.) Remaking the Chinese City: Modernity and National Identity, 1900-1950, (Hawaii 2000), p.65.

[3] Manshukoku Kokumuin Kokuto Kensetsukyoku, Kokuto Kensetsu Hansei Chikashi (Map of Shinkyo), (China 1936).

[4] Esherick, “Railway City”, p.74.

[5] David Tucker, “City Planning Without Cities: Order and Chaos in Utopian Manchukuo”, in Mariko Asano Tamanoi (ed.), Crossed Histories: Manchuria in the Age of Empire, (Hawaii 2005), p.60.

[6] Tucker, “City Planning Without Cities”, p.63.

[7] Ibid, p.70.

[8] Esherick, “Railway City”, p.81.

[9] De Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, pp.95-6.

Space is rarely an asymmetrical imposition of power which all agents are subjected to equally. This is a very crude and underwhelming statement, but it is one whose implications we should always remind ourselves of when adopting new historical approaches. Those implications are drawn out much more elegantly by Michel de Certeau who, in one of the critiques he aims at Michel Foucault in L’invention du Quotidian, characterises the Foucauldian perspective on space as perceiving it as a part of a structure of power.[1] Space, in this understanding of Foucault, becomes a tool from which systems of power may better categorise, hierarchise, and discipline society into conformity. These dichotomic divisions of society ‘draw their efficacy from a relationship between procedures and the space that they redistribute’[2] in order to deepen the chains of significations that reaffirm the logic of these categorical separations. In other words, our relative understandings of where we position ourselves in relationships of power are conceptualised spatially and are reinforced through spatial practices.

What de Certeau offers as an alternative to this argument is a realm in which the individual agent escapes the structuralising nature of ordered space through ‘multiform, resistance, tricky and stubborn procedures that elude discipline without being outside the field in which it is exercised.’[3] In drawing out the implications of this position, we open up broad new approaches to history in which we can frame past events as belonging to a process of resistance and individuality, rather than one of inevitable and encroaching control and repression; essentially, giving agency back to the agent. Furthermore, by looking at the historically constant and individualised reappropriations of spaces, we can see how disordered spatial practices can snowball and perhaps undermine the structuralising effects which the hierarchical relationships of power that ordered spaces attempt to create could have on other individuals. In this instance, we can use the example of Rangoon to justify this statement.

Twenty years after the conquest of Rangoon, its restructuring upon a gridiron system, and its bureaucratisation as the colonial capital of British Burma, the British colonial authorities decided to conduct a census across the entirety of their Burmese territories in 1872.[4] Rangoon had been planned by the British using a similar model to other colonial cities they had planned, relying upon centuries of intellectual refinement from the “grand modell”, and, as a consequence, Rangoon resultingly shared many of its demographic features with these similarly planned Asian cities: a multicultural and polyglot population, as well as a significantly imbalanced gender ratio.[5] However, As this census would suggest, the urban techniques that the British had used to assert their bureaucratic and cultural power across the globe were not so effective an apparatus of power as they would have believed.

In the census report’s section focusing upon the enumeration of towns, the report’s author states that it was ‘the easiest work of all’ and that it was mostly ‘taken in one night.’[6] “mostly” is the operative word here, since the report’s author emphasises that there was the significant ‘exception of Rangoon Town.’[7] What occurred in Rangoon is described by its town magistrate as thus:

‘The night of the 15th was a fine night; and, with a hope of securing correct numbers, &c., of the cooly classes who live in barracks and lodging-houses of various kinds, I instructed the Police, and had the Inspectors told off to superintend the work during the night. The Assistant Superintendent of Police, the Assistant Magistrate, and myself went about the town to exercise general supervision. We then witnessed the great want of legal authority in the work, for in some of these barracks, &c., the people pretended to be asleep, and not to hear the order of the Police to open their doors and bring lights. All was darkness, and the Police dare not resort to force. Delay ensued, and it was found quite impracticable to carry out my original intention; I was therefore obliged to cause the forms to be checked by sending Police and enumerators round the town for a week to test the accuracy of the forms, and make corrections.’[8]

In other urban spaces, such as the mostly natively constructed Thayetmo, no such issues were encountered and the colonial authorities could impose much more aggressive tactics due to the effectiveness of their enumeration, including the detention of boats trying leave or enter Thayetmo on the night of the 15^th of August.[9] Instead, by refusing to wake up, the low wage, contracted, potentially even indentured labourers who had been housed in regimented communal living spaces, perhaps by the town authorities or the capital interests that they were serving as a way of reinforcing their economic and social positions in the city’s hierarchy, were appropriating these spaces as places of their own rest and security, and they therefore felt no need to comply with the disciplining attempts of the state’s agents. Rather than being spaces of order and compliance, these people used these spaces to reposition their relative proximity to the state and its control over them. This simple act of sleeping and the bravery to not answer the door was enough to change the nature of the census, warping it from a comprehensive survey being imposed upon them outside of working hours, to a rough survey which was conducted around their work schedules for their convenience. By resisting attempts to be categorised by the state through sleeping in their beds, the repressed of Rangoon restricted the state’s ability to enforce future policies within this city space due to the more greatly inaccurate abstract conception of the demographic makeup of the city’s population that colonial authorities now had. Due to this assertion of agency and ownership from the bottom-up, the people within this urban space, which was designed to order and control them to a greater extent than those urban spaces which, in actuality, ended up being more compliant, resisted the degree of hierarchisation of this new colonial space that the colonial authorities wanted to impose.

Space played a vital role in this small moment of history, but it was a role of resistance which those self-empowering individuals chose to give it, rather than one of control and imposition.

[1] Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (University of California Press, 2011), 96.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Ibid.

[4] H. T. Duncan, Report on the Census of British Burma: Taken in August 1872 (Rangoon, 1875).

[5] Robert K. Home, “The ‘Grand Modell’ of Colonial Settlement” in Of Planting and Planning: The Making of British Colonial Cities (1996), 9-37.

[6] Duncan, Report on the Census of British Burma, 3.

[7] Ibid.

[8] Ibid.

[9] Ibid.

The Japanese Annexation of Korea in August 1910 prompted a rebuilding of Korean urban space under a Japanese state ideology. The Government-General worked to physically change the city of Keijo in particular, in order to mentally transform the identities of Korean colonial subjects in a project of assimilation. In his publication Assimilating Seoul: Japanese Rule and the Politics of Public Space in Colonial Korea, 1910-1945, Todd Henry describes the desacralisation of the Korean Royal House, state planning projects involving roads, harbours and street layout, government building construction and the alteration of sacred spaces.[1]  These were state-building colonial projects that sought to imbue Korea with a Japanese self-confidence in nationalism. The project of spatial reorganisation is recorded in Japanese government reports of the early 20^th century which document the progress of urban construction in contrast with the “history” of Keijo and its inadequacies.[2] These reports are valuable in revealing the ideology behind spatial planning, but also in their more surprising corroboration with Henry’s argument that Japanese spatial organisation was not all subsuming.

The Annual Report on Reforms and Progress in Chosen, 1921-22, begins with a narrative on the history of civil engineering in Korea, bolstering the journal’s later claims of progress and innovation through a contrast with pre-colonial Korea. “Public properties were in a most neglected state and subject to abuse by the people”.[3] This implies that the state of Korean cities caused a disunity and lack of respect among their citizens, who are depicted as aggressive and barbaric. The attack on the physical stature of the city implies that the identity of Korea was being destroyed internally, consequently presenting the construction work of the Japanese as the rebuilding of national identity. This is ideology is evident in examples such as the Keijo City Planning Research Association which was established in 1921. The organisation placed emphasis on the scientific management of space to create an organic urban system which simultaneously overcame ethnic and class divisions.[4] This displays the ideological vision which is exposed in the Annual Report of 1921 that Korean society was a malleable entity which could become part of a larger Japanese nationality through their integration into the physical environment of the city. Consequently, the development targets for roadbuilding and harbours which the Annual Report mentions can be seen as part of a project to maintain an unbroken Japanese imperial line across borders. The historical report of conditions prior to colonial occupation describes roadbuilding as an “unknown science…preventing economic and cultural development”.[5] This further elevates the Japanese role as one of ‘saviour’ implying that they facilitated the emergence of Korea onto an international stage. This did occur as newly developed roads and other transportation networks facilitated lowered transport costs and the development of integrated market systems.[6] On the level of town planning, however, road development acted as a both a physical and metaphorical entity which cut through the ancient Korean past and reshaped the city as a focal point of modernity- “straightening, grading and widening” streets.[7]

However, in his publication, Henry suggests that the ideological development of Korean cities was not always successful, and that the Japanese ability to integrate Japanese and Korean citizens was “highly variable and partial”.[8] This was a result of the human ability to add additional layers of meaning to a space, which, observed through the analytical lens of Lefebvre, became a space of social struggle.[9] The Annual Report corroborates this, despite its celebratory tone. In road building “resort[ing] to the old custom [was] allowed only in the case of third-class roads, as these were closely connected with local interests”.[10] This implies that investment was concentrated at a central level, meaning that first and second-class roads which connected with the city centre and Japanese quarters were prioritised. It suggests that central planning was orientated toward the Japanese presence, resulting in uneven development and neglect of the smaller, local “capillary networks”.[11] Indeed, in the report, these local areas remain associated with an unsophisticated Korean past, implying that Japanese development projects were far from total or all-subsuming, supported by the statistic presented by Henry that 85.5% of Keijo retained its pre-colonial administrative boundaries.[12]

The Annual Report provided by the Japanese administration is valuable in revealing the ideology behind the physical transformation of Korean cities after its annexation. The 1921-22 report demonstrates the use of derogatory Japanese visions of old Korea in elevating their own colonial projects of improvement. Moreover, it demonstrates the use of town planning as both a physical and mental tool which was used to reshape and define Korea under Japanese terms of nationalism. This source is useful when examined alongside secondary literature such as Todd Henry’s Assimilating Seoul which assesses the limitations of Japanese town-planning as an ideological tool without practical implementation on all social levels.

 

Bibliography

Primary Source:

Government-General of Chosen, Annual Report on Reforms and Progress in Chosen (Korea), 1921-22, (Korea 1923), pp.159-167 <https://archive.org/details/annualreportonreformsandprogressinchosen korea192122/page/n203/mode/2up> [accessed 27^th September 2021]

Secondary Sources:

Caprio, Mark, Japanese Assimilation Policies in Colonial Korea, 1910-1945, (Washington 2009).

Henry, Todd, Assimilating Seoul: Japanese Rule and the Politics of Public Space in Colonial Korea, 1910-1945, (California 2014).

Merrifield, Andy, Henri Lefebvre: A Critical Introduction, (2006).

Pao-San Ho, Samuel, ‘Colonialism and Development’ in Kenneth Pomeranz, Dennis O Flynn, Arturo Giraldez (eds), The Pacific in the Early Age of Industrialisation, (London 2009), pp.347-398.

 

[1] Todd Henry, Assimilating Seoul: Japanese Rule and the Politics of Public Space in Colonial Korea, 1910-1945, (California 2014), pp.28-32.

[2] Government-General of Chosen, Annual Report on Reforms and Progress in Chosen (Korea), 1921-22, (Korea 1923), pp.159-167.

[3] Annual Report on Reforms and Progress in Chosen (Korea), p.159.

[4] Todd, Assimilating Seoul, p.45.

[5] Annual Report on Reforms and Progress in Chosen (Korea), pp.159-160.

[6] Samuel Pao-San Ho, ‘Colonialism and Development’ in Kenneth Pomeranz, Dennis O Flynn, Arturo Giraldez (eds), The Pacific in the Early Age of Industrialisation, (London 2009), p.352.

[7] Annual Report on Reforms and Progress in Chosen (Korea), p.162.

[8] Todd, Assimilating Seoul, p.6.

[9] Andy Merrifield, Henri Lefebvre: A Critical Introduction, (2006), p.115.

[10] Annual Report on Reforms and Progress in Chosen (Korea), pp.159-160.

[11] Todd, Assimilating Seoul, p.37.

[12] Todd, Assimilating Seoul, p.37.

As I am thinking about potential topics for the Long Essay due in December, I have stumbled upon some interesting thoughts, two to be precise: the empirical versus the theoretical.

Firstly, a potential topic for my essay would be the discussion of Catholic spaces and general Catholicism brought into the Philippines by Spanish conquistadors versus Protestantism (and possibly other non-Catholic Christian religions) and Protestant spaces brought into the Philippines by Americans.

During my brief research, I found that the first Protestant minister, Arthur Prautsch, served as a missionary in Manila in 1899. He became a local preacher for the Methodist church in Manila for a Bishop named James M. Thoburn. Shortly after this, more missionary groups followed, and by 1916, the Methodists had “50 missionaries and 45,000 converts”, the Presbyterians had 65 missionaries with 15,700 members by 1925, the Baptists had 2,858 converts in 1925, and finally, the Disciples of Christ and the Foreign Christian Mission Society became the “third-largest non-Catholic church in the Philippines with 7,326 members” by 1925.[1]

I found the empirical research, the growing number of followers for Protestant religions to “save” Filipino’s from the “unchristian” and “corrupt” Latin Catholicism highly fascinating. The missionaries’ goal to “save” Filipinos by “preaching the Gospel and erecting churches” became noteworthy for me due to the concept of the “Church” versus churches.[2] This brings me to my second thought, the theory.

The churches built by Protestant missionaries are actual physical spaces. The spaces are physical landmarks where people interact with the space. People go inside a church; they sit on pews and listen to a sermon, light some candles, and they talk and interact with others (to be honest, I am not a churchgoer, so the technicality of what someone does in a church is still a bit lost on me). Nevertheless, what provoked me, is not just the physical space of a church; it is the concept. The Catholic Church versus the Protestant Church. The capitalisation of the letter ‘C’. The discourse surrounding it is a representation of the space rather than a representational (lived and interacted with its physicality) space. In my understanding, Lefebvre’s triad Churches are multi-dimensional spaces, and the way it is talked about can be considered just as powerful as a physical space or building.[3] The conceptualised idea of a Church holds just as much power as the actual building of a church; the conversations held around the Catholic Church versus the Protestant Church. For example, how the Protestant Church found Roman Catholics and its clergy “wealthy and corrupt [whom they] failed to promote morality, closed the Bible to the people, and based the faith also on tradition and not just on holy scripture.”[4]

To summarise my contemplations, I believe this could be an exciting topic of study for my Long Essay, with primary sources ranging from plans of churches to the discourse surrounding Churches. However, it seems quite convoluted, and the topic needs further deliberation.

[1] Jose S. Arcilla, ‘Review: Protestant Missionaries in the Philippines’, Review of “Protestant Missionaries in the Philippines, 1898-1916. An Inquiry into the American Colonial Mentality” by Kenton J. Clymer, Philippine Studies, 36: 1 (1988), p. 106.

[2] Ibid., pp. 106-107.

[3] Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space (xx, 1974), pp. 38-39.

[4] Arcilla, ‘Review: Protestant Missionaries in the Philippines’, p. 109.

“Memory is constantly on our lips because it no longer exists.”

Written by Pierre Nora in the first paragraph of his general introduction, ‘Between Memory and History’, the phrase argues that memory has been lost due to the acceleration of history, which has overtaken the “the equilibrium between the present and the past”. [1] An incorrect conclusion when we examine the demolition of the Japanese Government-General Building in Seoul in 1995. A building which was at the forefront of the debate over Japan’s legacy and visual memory in Korea, for its construction resulted in the partial destruction of Kyŏngbok Palace, a Chosŏn dynasty palace which was constructed in 1395. From GCB’s completion in 1927 it’s memory was contested on multiple levels; Korean architects, for example, saw it as an embodiment of early cosmopolitan architectural ideas, originating from Europe at the turn of the 20th century. [2] For many Koreans, however, it was a painful colonial legacy which was affecting the national spirit of the country and so needed to be demolished to allow for the restoration of the Kyŏngbok Palace. [3] A demand which is interesting to note as it demonstrates memory emerging victorious over history, for the historical significance of the Palace within Korean national identity before the construction of the GCB was minimal, having been abandoned for large parts of its history.

Nora had attempted to counter this, when he addressed the use of his work in understanding memory in Franco’s Spain. His criticism centred on the fact that the investigation was too contemporary and so did not fit the definition of the concepts he had provided for places as memory, a term he called ‘les lieux de mémoire’. [4] A defence which Eugenia Allier Montaño states, ignores the historiographical debates of the late sixties and seventies which affirmed the validity of studying history of the present. [5] This is important as the ‘les Lieux de mémoire’ provides a developed framework for spatial historians to explore sites of collective memory. For example, Nora requires places to be material, symbolical and functional, to allow memory to crystallise and secrete itself and so should not be limited by periodisation of the term. [6]

The Chiang Kai-Shek Memorial Hall in Taipei stands testament to this argument; it is still a contested place of memory for many Taiwanese today. The site encompasses much of modern Taiwan’s collective memory, reminding many, through its design, the connection the nation has to the Chinese mainland, as well as serving for some as a painful legacy of occupation and oppression. [7]

Pierre Nora is right, history and memory can and do conflict, however, they are not binary opposites. Memory as I have shown has not lost out to history. Instead, often, the two work in tandem, allowing ‘les lieux de mémoire’ to offer unique insights into the collective past of social groups.

[1] Michael Rothberg, ‘Between Memory and Memory: From Lieux de mémoire to Noeuds de mémoire’, Yale French Studies 118/119 (2010), p. 4.

[2] Jung-sun Han, ‘Japan in the public culture of South Korea, 1945–2000s: The making and remaking of colonial sites and memories 1945-2000’, Asia-Pacific Journal 12:15:2, <https://apjjf.org/2014/12/15/Jung-Sun-Han/4107/article.html>[25 April 2020].

[3]Ibid.

[4] Eugenia Allier Montaño, ‘Places of memory. Is the concept applicable to the analysis of memorial struggles? The case of Uruguay and its recent past’, Cuadernos del Claeh 2:31:96-97 (2008) pp. 87-109, <http://socialsciences.scielo.org/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S0797-60622008000100001#_ftn25>[25 April 2020].

[5] Ibid.

[6] Ibid.

[7] Marc Andre Matten, “The Chiang Kai-Shek Memorial Hall in Taipei: A Contested Place of Memory” in Axel Schneider and Susanne Weigelin-Schwiedrzik (ed.), Places of Memory in Modern China: History, Politics, and Identity (Leiden, 2011), pp. 51-86.

Bibliography:

Han, Jung-sun, ‘Japan in the public culture of South Korea, 1945–2000s: The making and remaking of colonial sites and memories 1945-2000’, Asia-Pacific Journal 12:15:2, <https://apjjf.org/2014/12/15/Jung-Sun-Han/4107/article.html>[25 April 2020].

Matten, Marc Andre, “The Chiang Kai-Shek Memorial Hall in Taipei: A Contested Place of Memory” in Axel Schneider and Susanne Weigelin-Schwiedrzik (ed.), Places of Memory in Modern China: History, Politics, and Identity (Leiden, 2011), pp. 51-86.

Montaño, Eugenia Allier, ‘Places of memory. Is the concept applicable to the analysis of memorial struggles? The case of Uruguay and its recent past’, Cuadernos del Claeh 2:31:96-97 (2008) pp. 87-109, <http://socialsciences.scielo.org/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S0797-60622008000100001#_ftn25>[25 April 2020].

Rothberg, Michael, ‘Between Memory and Memory: From Lieux de mémoire to Noeuds de mémoire’, Yale French Studies 118/119 (2010), p. 3-12.

Japan’s growing tourism industry from the late nineteenth century through to the twentieth century has been written about in extensive detail. The features of the growing tourism industry may be defined through the “experiences of the globetrotters.”[1]As Allan Hockley’s essay has examined such a groups experiences, perceptions and impressions which were left behind.

However, when defining what in fact was meant by the term “Globetrotter”, Hockley has provided a number of examples in order to better understand the label, as well as its associated connotations. Through detailing the boom of Thomas Cook within the early 1870’s, Hockley designates the group as being wealthy individuals who embarked upon travel, made available due to improvements in transport links to Japan and other areas of the globe. He points out however that individuals did not have to travel to multiple places across the globe to earn the title of “Globetrotter”. The first use of the term arose in William Elliot Griffis employment of the term in his The Mikado’s Empire,1876, as Hockley has proposed. Griffis described the group as having “become so frequent and temporarily numerous in Yokohama as to be recognized as a distinct class.”[2] The issue was thus not the naming of said group, however the connotations which were associated with the group which were determined by “a manner of travel [through] commercial tours.”[3] Such publications were curtailed to enforce this manner of commercial travel such as W.E.L Keeling’s 1880 Tourists Guide to Yokohama.[4] Whilst this in itself may hardly be considered as negative, it was however viewed in this manner by critiques of the group such as Basil Chamberlain who saw such types of  travel as “ a superficial engagement with the places, people and culture one encountered.”[5]Thus, the term “Globetrotter” fell to the realms of largely negative responses from late nineteenth century travel writers within Japan at the time.

Bibliography

Hockley, Allan, ‘Globetrotters’ Japan: Places, Foreigners on the Tourist Circuit in Meiji Japan’ ”MIT Visualising Cultures, 2010, <https://visualizingcultures.mit.edu/gt_japan_places/ga2_essay01.html> [accessed April 2020].

 

[1] Allan, Hockley, ‘Globetrotters’ Japan: Places, Foreigners on the Tourist Circuit in Meiji Japan’ ”MIT Visualising Cultures, 2010, <https://visualizingcultures.mit.edu/gt_japan_places/ga2_essay01.html> [accessed April 2020].

 

[2] Ibid.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Ibid.

Following the outcome of the Russo- Japanese War, growing dissatisfaction evolved from terms of the peace treaty, which saw an end to the war in 1905. The Treaty sparked rioting within Tokyo, culminating in the “first major social protest of the age of imperial democracy.”[1]Following a failure to obtain a substantial and “profitable peace settlement”, local factions with in Toyoko rebelled and were only quelled when the government were forced to enact martial law[2]. The demonstration on the 5^th September 1905, became known as the Hibiya Riot, which would last for three days. As Andrew Gordon has described, this was “the first in a series of violent incidents that took place over the first and second decade of the century after which time social protests.. took on a more organised and less violent form.”[3]

 

As time progressed, social protests have been described by Andrew Gordon as taking on an increasingly organised approach as well as moving away from violence.It may well have been the intention of the protestors to move away from violence but the report from the Japan Chronicle published 5^th June 1930 suggests that the response of the authorities was increasingly hard line and utilised excessive violence against the protestors, which created a violent incident. Following the article’s  title of “The New Weapon of the Tokyo Police”, the article alleges that the Metropolitan police service in Tokyo took on the role of aggressor by employing the use of tear-gas to quell what started as an orderly protest of Tokyo Communications Labour Union workers who had gathered near Hibiya Park. It was further reported that “soon orderliness, however, gave way to something alike to riot when the police strove to stem the march.”[4] It is questionable why in fact the Police had taken these steps to prevent the protest as the organisers had  discussed the protest  with the Metropolitan Police in a previous meeting. The use of tear-gas by the Police in order to disperse the crowds, was viewed as an intentional weapon by representatives of the Tokyo Communications Labour Union, who “filed a joint protest against the use of tear-gas revolvers by the Hibiya Police against the members of the Tokyo Communications Labour Union.”[5]

 

However, it was not the fact of the supposed use of the police’s “new weapon” in order to quell the demonstration which is illuminating, it is the apology which the police gave in light of the protest filed against its use. As the article goes on to examine, the apology given by the Police Bureau, suggests no remorse in the use of tear-gas as a weapon on protestors. Moreover, it details how explicitly “the Police Bureau.. do not consider the tear-gas revolver as a weapon.”[6] However, the response of the Police Bureau subsequently debates how the use of the product was used to determine its weaponry status.  Moreover, the Police Bureau’s response offers a contradiction by asserting that “to try and make out that the pistol is not a weapon would therefore seem to open the way to wholesale without a licence and indiscriminate use.. in quiet places.”[7] By further concluding that “it is a weapon and nothing else, even if its use does not involve death, and should certainly be licensed.” [8]

The article thus serves as an insight into the police response to protest in the period. Whilst they were clearly concerned with the spreading of armed protest by use of “articles of everyday use”, they were unprepared to take accountability for their use of the weaponry against protestors, as examined with the example above. This account serves to highlight how as Andrew Gordon suggests, the trajectory of protests in Toyoko towards less violent response was definitely varied.

Bibliography

 

Gordon, Andrew “Social Protest in Imperial Japan, The Hibiya Riot of 1905”,MIT Visualising Cultures, 2011, < https://visualizingcultures.mit.edu/social_protest_japan/trg_essay01.html>[ 14 December 2019].

 

SMPA Archive, ‘Protest by Labour:The New Weapon of the Tokyo Police’,The Japan Weekly Chronicle, Tokyo, 5 June 1930, <Shanghai Municipal Police Files>[accessed 14^th December 2019.]

[1] Gordon, Andrew “Social Protest in Imperial Japan, The Hibiya Riot of 1905”,MIT Visualising Cultures, 2011, < https://visualizingcultures.mit.edu/social_protest_japan/trg_essay01.html>[ 14 December 2019].

[2] Ibid.

[3] Ibid.

[4] SMPA Archive, ‘Protest by Labour:The New Weapon of the Tokyo Police’,The Japan Weekly Chronicle, Tokyo, 5 June 1930, <Shanghai Municipal Police Files>[accessed 14^th December 2019.]

[5] Ibid.

[6] Ibid.

[7] Ibid.

[8] Ibid.