Populist Collaborators

Over the decades, students of empire have come to acknowledge the sheer complexity of the relationship between the colonisers and the colonised. Power was always at the heart of empire, but, viewed through frameworks as varied as economics and gender, it was possible to see that relationships were not always simple or indeed simply oppositional. For scholars of the British and French empires, these reflections will come as little surprise. It has taken longer for studies of the Japanese empire to incorporate the nuances that have shaped the study of the European colonies. This is, in significant part, because the legacy of colonial violence in the former Japanese empire still continues to have resonance in contemporary geopolitics: the issue of ‘comfort women’—Korean and Chinese women forced into sex work by the Japanese Imperial Army—is just the most prominent example of this. Yet such nuances do exist, even in the historically deeply troubled relationship between Japan and Korea

Ancient history · Archaeology · Colonialism · Empire · Geopolitics · Political science · Politics · Power (physics · Sociology · Surprise · Asian Culture and Media Studies · Chinese history and philosophy · Gender Studies · History · Japanese History and Culture · Law