Absolute Erotic, Absolute Grotesque: The Living, Dead, and Undead in Japan's Imperialism, 1895-1945 (review)

A good book teaches you things you don't know. A very good book does that and also changes the way you think about things in general. Mark Driscoll's recent study, Absolute Erotic, Absolute Grotesque examines labor and social change in the days of the Japanese empire, and it is a very good book.

Driscoll makes clear from the outset the need to understand the Japanese empire in its global context, and he does so by reexamining the empire's histories in unusual and unusually brilliant ways. Moreover, his interrogation demonstrates by extension that failure to grapple with these histories on as broad (and as deep) a level as possible only leads to repeating known stories, thereby perpetuating and exacerbating the hangovers persisting from that era to today.

There was substantial discussion in the field during the 1990s about the need to examine the complex histories inherent in Japan's imperializing process in transnational terms, yet quite a number of recent studies of the Japanese empire seem to have missed this point, focusing attention instead on the difficulties of being the colonizer. Let me be clear: it is of course important to learn, to analyze, and to know how life rearranged itself (or not) for the Japanese as their nation expanded into a massive territorial space during the first half of the twentieth century. A number of studies over the past several years, however, have stuck to national lines, zeroing in on the hardships endured by those on the perpetrating-side of the still-unaccounted for violence (i.e., maintaining the dichotomy of "Japanese" versus "others"). Smartly—and similarly in this regard to Mark Caprio and his equally unusual and excellent study of assimilation policies in colonized Korea—Driscoll has worked creatively around the "us" versus "them" problem and moved the field forward again by confronting the lived slippage and mess involved in the history of what happened at the time.

In short, Driscoll examines who used whom for what and how. And, yes, in fact, it would appear that chiefly Japanese nationals did most of the "using," while Koreans and Chinese generally bore the brunt of being "used." Driscoll does not deny this, but neither does he play it to an extreme. Rather, his study tells the story and the histories involved, and in so doing, it points the way toward all sorts of future analysis along the transnational—or even supranational—lines it establishes.

For Driscoll, the key lies in reengaging a Marxian analysis of the era, because the importance of the Japanese empire lies in labor (as it does for William Underwood): how labor fed the imperializing machine, and how those in charge subsumed and consumed labor for their own and the empire's continued gain. Driscoll hits readers hard with numerous and pithily researched examples of brutality, which he brilliantly dissects through various categories of capitalizing modernity. One is immediately overwhelmed by the horrors involved, yet there is no turning away. No single nationality or individual emerges as "good," while no single national group or person is "bad" per se (although Kishi Nobosuke and Ishihara Kanji are rightfully further demonized). Instead, Driscoll makes clear on each page (a) that capitalism took over Northeast Asia during and through the workings of the Japanese empire; (b) that those running the show quickly realized that it would take capital to run the empire, and that capital and money were not the same thing; and (c) that to win this historical process, those in charge needed both to define life for those they were subsuming and to take life away from those same individuals (i.e., to consume them) once their capital-generating potential had been exhausted. Driscoll's vampire tropes are not at all overblown: this study pierces an artery, and the reader rightly emerges covered in blood.

Driscoll conforms neatly to the standard 1895-1945...