Description
Book SynopsisVivid accounts of human experience at the margins of empire shed new light on Sino-Japanese relations in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This study centers on categories of people not usually considered in the context of East Asian mobility of the period, including trafficked children, peddlers, 'abducted' women and a female pirate.
Trade Review'Japan's Imperial Underworlds is an extraordinary piece of scholarship. David R. Ambaras reconstructs marginal lives - including those of pirates, peddlers, and child abductors - on the maritime edge of the Japanese empire. The world he evokes is unfamiliar and unforgettable; and as a framework for understanding modern Sino-Japanese relations, the book is an absolute must-read.' Martin Dusinberre, University of Zurich
'Through vivid microhistories, Japan's Imperial Underworlds redraws the social and political boundaries of empire in modern East Asia. Ambaras deftly reveals how the movement of migrants, smugglers, pirates, and trafficked people between China and Japan - and their sensationalization in the popular press - created surprising cross-currents in the politics of Sino-Japanese relations during the years of Japanese imperial expansion.' Jordan Sand, Georgetown University, Washington, DC
Table of ContentsIntroduction: border agents; 1. Treaty ports and traffickers: children's bodies, regional markets, and the making of national space; 2. In the Antlion's pit: abduction narratives and marriage migration between Japan and Fuqing; 3. Embodying the borderland in the Taiwan Strait: Nakamura Sueko as runaway woman and pirate Queen; 4. Borders in blood, water, and ink: Andō Sakan's intimate mappings of the South China Sea; 5. Epilogue: ruptures, returns, and re-openings.
