Boundary Narratives

The representation of the empire as a space of circulation elided the increasingly restrictive and unevenly applied terms under which circulation was allowed. Chapter Three argues that the rise of anti-imperial nationalism and anti-colonial liberal movements produced a shift in the spatial politics of empire. As these movements began to demand political rights for the colonies, the newly-constituted Japanese tourism industry began to promote the imperial nation as a space of free mobility while eliding the differential mobility of colonized subjects. The chapter analyzes intra-imperial border-crossings described by Y?m Sangs?p, Cai Peihuo and other colonized subjects in conversation with promotional materials from the Japan Tourist Bureau and Korea-Manchuria Information Bureau and Japanese imperial travelers’ own accounts of border-crossing to show how a growing corpus of official and unofficial practices treated colonized subjects as “in place” only in colonial territory and imperial citizens as in place anywhere in the empire.