T Morris-Suzuki
Biographic Data
| ID | 7032 |
|---|---|
| NAME | T Morris-Suzuki |
| GIVEN NAMES | T |
| FAMILY NAME | Morris-Suzuki |
| SIGNATURE | MORRIS-SUZUKI T |
| AFFILIATIONS | Australian National University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-6145-5952 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 118 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 158 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 116 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 4 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1984 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 7 |
Japan’s Ocean Borderlands
In the Wake of the Whale
In the 19th century, the massive growth of commercial whaling transformed the face of the Pacific, causing widespread ecological destruction, but also creating new links between island and shoreline communities across the region. By exploring that history from the mobile viewpoint of whaleships as they crossed and re-crossed the ocean, this essay seeks to develop a ‘liquid area’ approach to 19th century transformations in the Asia-Pacific region.…
Response to Chizuko T. Allen’s Review of Seeds of Control
Disclosure statementThe authors have no conflicts of interest to disclose
The 'Comfort Women' Issue, Freedom of Speech, and Academic Integrity
In December 2020, an article by J. Mark Ramseyer of Harvard University about the so-called 'comfort women' issue was published in the International Review of Law and Economics. This article caused widespread controversy amongst scholars, many of whom responded with serious criticisms of its content. On the other hand, some commentators argued that Ramseyer's critics were seeking to suppress his right to express controversial opinions. In the past…
Japan Search
At a time when many libraries are struggling to maintain their budgets and collections and fieldwork travel is restricted, access to online research databases has become more important than ever for scholars around the world. This makes the new open access research tool 'Japan Search'(https://jpsearch.go.jp/) - launched in September 2020 - particularly welcome
On the Frontiers of History: Rethinking East Asian Borders
On the Frontiers of History
Japan and its Region
In May 2018, indigenous people from Australia, New Zealand, North America, Hawai'i and Japan gathered in Canberra to share knowledge and ideas about an issue of profound concern to all of them: the task of reclaiming and repatriating the remains of the dead, dug up by colonial scholars or trophy collectors and removed to museums and universities around the world. The European imperial knowledge system, in its nineteenth-and twentieth-century sear…
A History of Japanese Economic Thought
Economics, in the modern sense of the word, was introduced into Japan in the second half of the nineteenth century. However, Japanese thinkers had already developed, during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a variety of interesting approaches to issues such as the causes of inflation, the value of trade, and the role of the state in economic activity. Tessa Morris-Suzuki provides the first comprehensive English language survey of the deve…
Indigenous Diplomacy
Indigenous people are often depicted as helpless victims of the forces of eighteenth and nineteenth century colonial empire building: forces that were beyond their understanding or control. Focusing on the story of a mid-nineteenth century diplomatic mission by Sakhalin Ainu (Enchiw), this essay (the second of a two-part series), challenges that view, suggesting instead that, despite the enormous power imbalances that they faced, indigenous group…
Indigenous Diplomacy
Indigenous people are often depicted as helpless victims of the forces of eighteenth and nineteenth century colonial empire building: forces that were beyond their understanding or control. Focusing on the story of a mid-nineteenth century diplomatic mission by Sakhalin Ainu (Enchiw), this essay (the first of a two-part series), challenges that view, suggesting instead that, despite the enormous power imbalances that they faced, indigenous groups…
Indigenous People Between Empires
In 1901, British traveller Charles Henry Hawes (1867-1943) made a journey down the Tym' River on the island of Sakhalin, visiting villages occupied by indigenous Nivkh and Uilta people along the river and at its mouth on the Sea of Okhotsk. The island was at that time under Russian control, and had become notorious as a penal settlement, but Japanese influence was also strong: four years after Hawes' visit, following Russia's defeat in the Russo-…
Indigenous Rights and the 'Harmony Olympics
The dynamics of Japan's indigenous rights struggles are not well understood, but the 2020 Tokyo games may spark serious debate on restoring and promoting the social, cultural, economic and political rights of the Ainu people. It appears that people from throughout Japan and the world curious about Ainu culture may be disappointed in the Olympic ceremonies and the new Upopoy National Ainu Museum and Park that opens in 2020. The Olympic moment offe…
Liquid Area Studies
Area studies has always been controversial. Over the decades, the field has been criticized for lacking theoretical rigor and accused of complicity with the political agendas of the Cold War. More recently, controversy has tended to focus on the notion of “area” itself. The image of the area as a territorial block, bound together by long-standing geographical and cultural forces has come under increasing critical scrutiny. Debates on the notion o…
The Living Politics of Self-Help Movements in East Asia
The Neverending Story
Beyond Utopia
This article takes the story of the New Village, a Japanese intentional community founded in 1918 by novelist Mushanokōji Saneatsu, as a starting point for exploring non-state visions of politics in twentieth-century East Asia. Modern East Asian political thought is often seen as highly state-centred, but the history of the New Village (which still exists today), and of similar experiments in community living, highlights the diversity and influen…
Performing Ethnic Harmony
On 14 May 2018 the Japanese government's Council for Ainu Policy Promotion accepted a report sketching the core features of a much-awaited new Ainu law which the Abe government hopes to put in place by 2020. The law is the outcome of a long process of debate, protest and legislative change that has taken place as global approaches to indigenous rights have been transformed. In 2007, Japan was among the 144 countries whose vote secured the adoptio…
Special Issue
1. The Constitution, Human Rights and Pluralism in Japan: Alternative Visions of Constitutions Past and Future - Tessa Morris-Suzuki2. We, the Japanese People: Rethinking the Meaning of the Peace Constitution - C. Douglas Lummis3. Prime Minster Abe's Constitutional Campaign and the Assault on Individual Rights - Okano Yayo4. Affirmative Action Policies Under the Postwar Japanese Constitution: On the Effects of the Dōwa Special Measures Policy - N…
The Constitution, Human Rights and Pluralism in Japan
Recent moves by the Abe administration to change the Japanese constitution may result in the most fundamental change to Japanese political life since the 1940s. Although there has been widespread debate on the possible revision of Article 9 - the constitution's Peace Clause - other profound implications of the push for constitutional change have received scant attention. This special issue edited by Tessa Morris-Suzuki and Shinnosuke Takahashi ai…
Concepts of Nature and Technology in Pre-Industrial Japan
Borderline Japan
This book offers a radical reinterpretation of postwar Japan's policies towards immigrants and foreign residents. Drawing on a wealth of historical material, Tessa Morris-Suzuki shows how the Cold War played a decisive role in shaping Japan's migration controls. She explores the little-known world of the thousands of Korean 'boat people' who entered Japan in the immediate postwar period, focuses attention on the US military service people and the…
The Korean War in Asia
Carving status at Kŭmgangsan
Carving status at Kŭmgangsan: elite graffiti in premodern Korea." Asian Studies Review, 47(2), pp. 415–416
Maximizing Australia's Asia knowledge
This report is neither a celebration nor, to say it in Australian, a whinge. It provides a snapshot of a national asset---Australia's Asia knowledge. It points to areas of achievement in expanding that knowledge since the last similar report in 1989. But it emphasizes that much remains to be done for Australians to acquire the understanding of their immediate neighbourhood that is essential for cultural, economic and strategic well-being. It argu…
Anti-Area Studies
The recent resurgence of various forms of popular nationalism and ethnocentrism in Australia and elsewhere raises questions about the impact which area studies have had in promoting international understanding. In the contemporary context of globalisation, it could be argued that the spatial framework of area studies is at times an obstacle rather than a help to understanding the world we live in. By reviewing the emergence of area studies and ex…
The Social Sciences in the Asian Century
A key focus of this book is the importance of intellectual engagement with Asia. Particular emphasis is placed on the new theoretical and practical insights that can be gained by doing so that are relevant to a range of social scientists, regardless of their regional specialisation. In that context, the performance of the Chinese economy in the past 30 years provides a smorgasbord of food for thought (and rethought) about the role of the state in…
Beyond Racism
The special issue ‘Rethinking Race and Racism from Japanese Experiences’ explores how racism operates in modern Japan. This article contributes to that exploration by examining how racism is situated within a nexus of interrelated forms of discrimination and marginalization. In the article I propose the notion of ‘semi-citizenship’ as one framework which can help us to go beyond unfruitful zero-sum-game visions of marginalization put forward by r…
Re-Inventing Japan
Invisible Immigrants
The economic "bubble" of the 1980s is widely assumed to mark the start of large-scale immigration to postwar Japan. This article questions that assumption by examining the neglected topic of immigration to Japan in the decades immediately following the Pacific War. Though the scale of immigration to Japan in these decades is difficult to assess, there is good reason to believe that tens of thousands of "illegal" migrants (so-called mikkōsha) ente…
Disaster and Utopia
This article takes the notion of the ‘disaster utopia’ as a starting point for reconsidering the impact of the Japanese triple disaster of 11 March 2011 (3/11). It has often been observed that disasters may lead to utopian longings for a better world, and that these may, in some cases, lead to long-term social and political change. Drawing particularly on the ideas of Charles Fritz and Rebecca Solnit, the article briefly surveys the history of ‘d…
The Social Sciences in the Asian Century
In this collection of essays, we reflect on what it means to practise the social sciences in the twenty-first century. The book brings together leading social scientists from the Asia-Pacific region. We argue for the benefit of dialogue between the diverse theories and methods of social sciences in the region, the role of the social sciences in addressing real-world problems, the need to transcend national boundaries in addressing regional proble…
"The Invention and Reinvention of "Japanese Culture
A specter is haunting europe and, indeed, the rest of the world: not, of course the specter of Communism, but of that other big C-Culture. At the 1991 Conference of the International Association of Historians of Asia, Prof. Ying-Shih Yu of Princeton University argued in his keynote address that the most important current trend in historical studies was the recognition of "culture as a relatively autonomous force in history" (Yu 1991, 21). For too…
Debating Racial Science in Wartime Japan
Japan's role in the new international division of labour - a reassessment
Maximizing Australia's Asia knowledge
This report is neither a celebration nor, to say it in Australian, a whinge. It provides a snapshot of a national asset---Australia's Asia knowledge. It points to areas of achievement in expanding that knowledge since the last similar report in 1989. But it emphasizes that much remains to be done for Australians to acquire the understanding of their immediate neighbourhood that is essential for cultural, economic and strategic well-being. It argu…
New Worlds from Below
In Asia today, the grand ideologies of the past have lost their power over the popular imagination. Even in many of the region's democracies, popular engagement in the political process faces profound challenges. Yet amidst this landscape of political disenchantment, groups of ordinary people across Asia are finding new ways to take control of their own lives, respond to
An act prejudicial to the occupation forces
This article uses previously neglected archival material to shed new light on issues of frontiers, migration and the status of Koreans in occupation‐period Japan. When Japan surrendered on 15 August 1945, there were some two million Koreans in Japan. The occupation authorities had little understanding of the Korean community in Japan, and the policies they introduced towards them were often harsh and contradictory. In particular, the imposition o…
Ethnic Engineering
positions: east asia cultures critique - Volume 8, Number 2, Fall 2000
Invisible countries
A few hours after leaving Narita Airport, I saw the landscape of Hong Kong ≡ Masses of buildings crowded in on either side of the runway. For some reason, as I saw this landscape, I felt my heart glow and gradually expand within me. ‘This is Asia’, I thought (Kobayashi 1996, 311)
Prisoner Number 600,001
Among more than 100,000 prisoners captured by United Nations forces in the Korean War, there was just one Japanese prisoner of war (POW). Matsushita Kazutoshi, Prisoner Number 600,001, had served in the Japanese army in China, both Nationalist and Communist armies in the Chinese Civil War, and in the Chinese People's Volunteers in North Korea, and was to end his military career in the ranks of the South Korean army. Using his forgotten story as a…
Defining the Boundaries of the Cold War Nation
This article examines policies towards zainichi Koreans in Cold War Japan. In particular, it focuses on the redrawing of the legal and conceptual boundaries around the Japanese nation in the wake of Japan's defeat in the Asia-Pacific War. The creation of postcolonial and Cold War boundaries, it is argued, involved an active process of exclusion which had profound consequences for the lives of Koreans in Japan. The article traces this process from…
A dream betrayed
Virtual memories
2002). Virtual memories: Japanese history debates in manga and cyberspace. Asian Studies Review: Vol. 26, No. 2, pp. 147-164
The Japanese Internet
An examination is made of how the development of the Internet in Japan is likely to affect civic rights and the relationship between citizens and their government. This was undertaken to determine if the trajectory of Internet development in Japan, with its distinct locational and corporate biases, has followed the predictions of two prominent Japanese commentators: the visionary Kumon Shumpei who espoused an expansive international perspective t…
Multicultural Japan
Performing Ethnic Harmony
On 14 May 2018 the Japanese government's Council for Ainu Policy Promotion accepted a report sketching the core features of a much-awaited new Ainu law which the Abe government hopes to put in place by 2020. The law is the outcome of a long process of debate, protest and legislative change that has taken place as global approaches to indigenous rights have been transformed. In 2007, Japan was among the 144 countries whose vote secured the adoptio…
The Nature of Empire
Over the past quarter of a century, research on the connection between empire and environment has flourished worldwide. Most writings, though, have focused on the history of European empire-building or American westward expansion; few have anything significant to say about the Japanese empire. The present essay aims to address this lacuna by exploring interrelated changes to the forest landscape in imperial Japan’s colonies of Korea, Taiwan and K…
The View Through the Skylight
(2000). The View Through the Skylight: Nishio Kanji, Textbook Reform and the History of the World. Japanese Studies: Vol. 20, No. 2, pp. 133-139
Lines in the Snow
One of the most significant pieces of unfinished business left over from the Second World War is the signing of a peace treaty between Japan and Russia and a resolution of the continuing dispute over Japan's northern border with Russia. Against a background of continuing negotiations over the border issue, this article looks at the historical processes behind the definition of the frontier between Russia and Japan. A particular concern is to exam…
Robots and Capitalism
‘The key to innovation is not to be found in chemistry electronics, automatic machinery, aeronautics, atomic physics, or any of the products of these science-technologies, but rather in the transformation of science itself into capital’. Harry Braverman, Labour and Monopoly Capital
Japan's role in the new international division of labour - a reassessment
Capitalism in the Computer Age
Norbert Wiener, in the early 1960s, foresaw a parallel between the process of automation and the nature of magic as it has been depicted in countless fantasies, from Goethe’s tale of the sorcerer’s apprentice to W.W. Jacob’s Monkey’s Paw. The characteristic of magic in these stories is its
The Japan panels for the A.S.A.A. conference 11–15 February 1988, Canberra
The ‘Communications Revolution’ and the Household
In recent years there has been much debate on the likely impact of new communications media on the household. In Japan, where progress in the development and application of communications technology has been rapid, a large-scale experiment was conducted between 1984 and 1987 to test public acceptance of these media. This article examines some of the major findings of the experiment. It concludes that household use of the new media in the immediat…
Asaa
Japan panels
Japanese studies association of Australia conference (2)
Women in Japanese economic development
Area reports
The environment in Japanese economic history
(1990). The environment in Japanese economic history. Asian Studies Review: Vol. 14, No. 1, pp. 80-87
A History of Japanese Economic Thought.
1. Economic Thought in Tokugawa Japan 2. The Introduction of Western Economic Thought: From the Meiji Restoration to the First World War 3. Economic Debates in Interwar Japan 4. Postwar Marxian Economics 5. Economic Theory and the 'Economic Miracle' 6. Contemporary Japanese Economic Thought
University of New England
A History of Japanese Economic Thought
Sericulture and the Origins of Japanese Industrialization
The opening of the silk trade with the West is one of the best known of all episodes in Japanese economic history. The story, as told in countless school histories and academic texts, goes something like this. At the very time when Matthew Perry and his black ships were breaching Japan's isolation from the rest of the world, the European silk industry was falling victim to a devastating silkworm plague-the pebrine. During the 1850s and early 1860…
Rewriting History
Technology in modern Japan
Is there any Japanese technology
Sustainability and ecological colonialism in Edo period Japan
"The Invention and Reinvention of "Japanese Culture
A specter is haunting europe and, indeed, the rest of the world: not, of course the specter of Communism, but of that other big C-Culture. At the 1991 Conference of the International Association of Historians of Asia, Prof. Ying-Shih Yu of Princeton University argued in his keynote address that the most important current trend in historical studies was the recognition of "culture as a relatively autonomous force in history" (Yu 1991, 21). For too…
Multicultural Japan
This book challenges the conventional view of Japanese society as monocultural and homogenous. Unique for its historical breadth and interdisciplinary orientation, Multicultural Japan ranges from prehistory to the present, arguing that cultural diversity has always existed in Japan. A timely and provocative discussion of identity politics regarding the question of 'Japaneseness', the book traces the origins of the Japanese, examining Japan's indi…
The Technological Transformation of Japan from the Seventeenth to the Twenty-First Century
Multicultural Japan
The Technological Transformation of Japan
1. Introduction Part I. The Tokugawa Heritage 1603-1867: 2. Society and technology in Tokugawa, Japan 3. Opening of doors Part II. Technology in Industrialising Japan 1868-1945: 4. Technology and the Meiji State 1868-1912 5. Systems-building and science-based industry 1912-1937 6. A war of science and technology 1937-1945 Part III. The Making of a Technological Superpower Since 1945: 7. Technology and the 'economic miracle' 1945-1973 8. High-tech…
Europe in the making of Japanese values
With the Meiji Restoration the first steps were taken in the third quarter of the 19th century to set up a national system of education in Japan. European educational theories were influential. Samuel Smiles became a reference for moral principles and Western heroes from Socrates to Florence Nightingale were exemplars. The articles explores the complex relationship of Western ideas with indigenous Japanese culture
Political science (86 works) · Japanese History and Culture (61 works) · History (60 works) · Law (55 works) · Sociology (47 works) · Geography (30 works) · Politics (30 works) · Ancient history (22 works) · History (22 works) · Korean Peninsula Historical and Political Studies (19 works)