The Meiji era (1868–1912) marks the initial process of Japan's passage into modernity through Westernization, and its identification as a modern nation-state. As part of the process of identifying with European discourses, of altering its position in Asia, and of adopting Western models and values, Japan changed its political, social and cultural dispositions towards industrialization and capitalism, as well as towards nationalism and colonialism, cultural and artistic creation.

Over the course of modernization, and of adapting various Western discourses on science and culture, Japan accepted several new approaches, especially those setting Europe apart and above from the rest of the world. As a result, Japan saw the rise of racial discourses, which eventually contributed to the state's imperial expansion into Asia.

Japan's path to modernity was a twofold movement: on one hand, it was an internal struggle for association with Western civilizations and adoption of their modernity. On the other hand, Japan sought to conceptually distance itself from Asia, only to return a few decades later as a conquering and imperial power. In the Japanese imagination, European cultures served as a perfect model for its own reformation, yet, at the same time, Japan found itself on a pendulum movement between Europe and Asia. Japan distanced itself from what it perceived as a primitive, underdeveloped region and its cultures, while simultaneously seeking to include China and India in its vision of a unified Orient, a stronghold of Asian cultures positioned against the Occident. Ultimately, Japan's self-definition came about through the notion of Otherness: the concept of “Japan” was defined primarily against the background of European civilization, but also, against a range of other cultures, including China and the United States, as well as its own immediate past of Tokugawa Japan.

In the first stage, the primary task was to set Japanese culture apart, and essentialize “Asia” as its Other. The desire to associate Japan with the West then led to a sense of Japan's “inferiority” (especially in terms of technological and scientific achievements), at the same time that Japanese leaders adopted a Western position in claiming “superiority” over Asia. The double movement of association (with Europe) and disassociation (from Asia) produced a new subtext to the binary opposition between the advanced and sophisticated, versus the primitive and simple-minded. This double movement, much like the binary logic that drove Western colonialism, laid the foundations for racial ideologies and imperial practices in Hokkaidō and Ryūkyū, Korea and Taiwan, Manchuria and China, as well as the South-Pacific Islands and Southeast Asia.

The articles in this issue look at the roots of the discourses on race in the Meiji era, in tandem with the Japanese empire's development in the latter part of the 19th Century. These concepts of race and empire lay at the center of Japan's racist ideologies and imperialist fantasies, and now serve as the focus of our discussions.

At the turn of the twentieth century, Euro-American colonialism remade the lives of thousands of Samoan, Melanesian, and Chinese workers on coconut plantations in Samoa. Since plantation discipline was strict, workers resisted the heavy demands on their bodies through a broad arsenal of behaviors, ranging from keeping crops for themselves to making appeals to the state to waging violent attacks on overseers. Resistance against colonial subjection turned workers in Samoa into subjects of their own lives and allowed them to forge bonds of solidarity beyond the spatial, social, and racial boundaries maintained by colonial administrations. In doing so, Samoa's workers shaped their own version of Oceanian globality.

Drawing from the author's The Opium Business: A History of Crime and Capitalism in Maritime China (Stanford University Press, 2022), this essay explores China's history as an opium-exporting nation in the early twentieth century. For several decades, southeast coastal China served markets from San Francisco to Manila to Rangoon with illicit opium, morphine, heroin, and cocaine. The essay explains the multiple causes of these developments and argues that this history has been so poorly understood because of its uneasy place within broadly accepted metanarratives about opium, empire, and national victimization.

Over the twentieth century, various types of synthetic fibers were invented, mass-produced, and widely distributed across the globe. This article analyzes the political power that was exercised to generate this innovation in musical instrument industries. Synthetics also contributed to the growth of the global garment, textile, sporting goods, and military industries, among many others. This article specifically discusses the politics behind the transition from the use of silk to nylon during the World War II and Cold War eras. Modern cultural industry's tendency in the mid- to late twentieth century to favor synthetic and other “man-made” fibers over natural ones was importantly shaped by political-economic—and political-ecological—conflicts between the United States and Japan, especially during World War II. These conflicts prepared the ground for the rise of global capitalism's synthetic regime.

This article looks at three recent Japanese mass market works about poverty, arguing that each is representative of a different mode of depicting economic disparity and want in contemporary Japan – individualization, nationalization, and generalization. These modes of representation contribute to a comparatively low level of awareness of poverty as a major social problem as well as political inaction. Following Raymond Williams' interrogation of social “keywords” as well as critical discourse analysis to identify the interplay of absences and presences in these accounts, this article will argue that even empathic approaches toward poverty can obscure its complex interconnections, disparities such as its disproportionate impact on Japanese women, and block the thinking of social and economic alternatives.

This article examines four recent South Korean action drama films dealing with the Japanese colonial period and the Korean nationalist resistance movement in particular – Chung Chiu's Modern Boy (2008), Ch'ae Tong-hun's Assassination (2015), Kim Chi-un's The Age of Shadows (2016), and Hŏ Chin-ho's The Last Princess (2016). It explores the ways in which these films valorize armed anti-colonial resistance through a spectacular form of violence detached from real everyday politics during the colonial period and which hermetically seals such past political involvement from any corresponding activity in the present. The result of this, I will argue, is the repression not only of the memory of mass political mobilization under Japanese rule, but of the 1980s-era minjung or “people's” movement as well, having significant implications for how contemporary social movements may be imagined and represented.

This article begins by critiquing Kathryn Tanner’s Christianity and the New Spirit of Capitalism on two fronts. It suggests that her presentation of ‘Financially Dominated Capitalism’ (FDC) is problematically one-dimensional, and it takes issue with her theological construal of time. The article then argues for an alternative temporal vision which both makes better sense of Christian experience and finds resonance with economic policy proposals that undercut FDC.

This entry in the dossier about Joe Cleary’s Modernism, Empire, World Literature asks questions about it based on recent scholarship by others working with the same key terms. The scholarship of David Damrosch, Franco Moretti, and Mary Burke provides productive interplays with Cleary’s readings, revealing strengths of the current volume as well as sites for further investigation.

The authors in this collection start with the insight that not all instances of semiotic indeterminacy are produced in the same way, that they can be located differently in the process of semiosis, and this fact shapes how and when semiotic indeterminacy is deployed by formulators and interpreters. The authors explore patterned uses of semiotic indeterminacy in Brazil, Bulgaria, Iran, and the United States to examine the role indeterminacy plays in institutional attempts at control and persuasion.