The New Territories

If the spatial politics of empire was a matter of incorporating colonized lands into a nationalized memory of the past, it was also a matter of placing colonized lands within a national present. Chapter Two explores how the Governments General of Korea and Taiwan and the South Manchuria Railway Company engaged in a spatial politics of empire based on a geography of civilization. Under the geography of civilization, tourist guidebooks represented Japanese imperialism as a "circulating mission" as well as a “civilizing mission.” Through three modes -- the nationalist mode, the historical mode, and the economic mode – the colonial governments used tourist guidebooks to show how colonialism made colonized lands into places within global networks of production and exchange and how colonialism had assimilated, or “Japanified,” these lands into the particular space of the Japanese nation. Travelers also used these modes to mark colonized subjects as "out of place" on colonized lands.