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This essay explores the role of radio broadcasting at the height of Japanese imperial expansion during the last phase of the Asia Pacific War. In an era when the growing demands of the war effort forced the empire to make inclusionary gestures to its colonial subjects and the various ethnic groups in newly occupied territories, how did the technology and cultural practice of radio succeed or fail to evoke a sense of community? Wartime Japanese broadcasters knew that the awareness of simultaneous co-listeners did not automatically turn listeners into a community, which required the establishment of strong emotional ties. An analysis of radio scripts, broadcasting policy, NHK’s publications, listeners’ letters, memoirs, and newspaper articles reveals the various strategies adopted to evoke affective ties through radio: an intimate style of address, a passionate tone of announcement, and around-the-empire reports of events that invited reactions to wartime broadcasts from the multi-ethnic audiences.

This chapter explores modern Japan’s pharmaceutical interest in and competition over women’s bodies in the 1920s and 1930s, analysing how patent drugs as “medical commodities” promoted multiple and competing representations of health and femininity not only to citizens but also to its colonial consumers. These commercial tonics contested the racialized and politicized Japanese bioscience and its hierarchies, presenting cosmopolitan ideals of health and beauty. Yet, when political shifts required it, the medical capitalists easily transitioned to marketing their products for child-bearing imperial female subjects.

This chapter describes and analyses Japan’s influence on the Taiwanese fishing industry. It attempts to determine why the colonial government opted to turn Taiwan into a principal base of the fishing industry, and the geographic advantages possessed by Taiwan and the port of Kaohsiung in relation to the fishing grounds of Southeast Asia. It discusses the business interests, technical contributions, and fishing methods introduced to Taiwan by Japan, including the development of trawl-fishing as opposed to rafts and small boats. It details the construction of the Takao fishing port and the development of rail and sea routes that enabled fishing exports to reach Japan. In summary, Japan’s expansionist policies, modernised fisheries, and the large-scale exploitation of marine resources in Southeast Asia laid the foundation for an advantageous Taiwanese fishing industry in postwar Asia.

This chapter discusses events surrounding the world of kabuki in 1945. These include the wholesale decline of kabuki theater in the first six months of 1945 due to the collapse of the Japanese Empire; the fall of Okinawa; and the bombing of Osaka and Tokyo. A national survey in 1943 reported that kabuki and other old plays accounted for just 10 percent of theater production nationwide. In 1945, production of “old plays” collapsed even further. Mainline kabuki actors were like helpless parents, watching their families scatter and stumble in the dark toward an uncertain future. Conditions were so chaotic in bombed-out Tokyo that from March through July, Shōchiku was able to mount just one commercial kabuki program. On the eve of surrender on August 14, three kabuki productions were running in Japan.

This introductory essay foregrounds "aesthetics" as a fundamental mode of inquiry that enables scholars to question and overcome many "imperial" assumptions that still govern East Asia studies to this day. Through this renewed focus on art and aesthetics in the age of neoliberalism, the chapter seeks to extend the earlier efforts to critique the area studies paradigm and its methodological nationalism by Naoki Sakai, Rey Chow, Harry Harootunian, and Masao Miyoshi. By underscoring the ways in which global protocols of capitalist accumulation, biopolitics, and warfare require their local legitimation through the fundamentally aesthetic figures of nation, race, and culture, this essay theorizes toward a critically liberating mode of aesthetics that seeks to undo the imperial categories of thinking and politics in East Asia. Notably, this chapter critiques how imperial aesthetics often works in the guise of local culturalism, making the task of aesthetic critique more urgent in East Asian and North American intellectual space.