Nation-Empire: Ideology and Rural Youth Mobilization in Japan and Its Colonies by Sayaka Chatani (review)

Nation-Empire is based on groundbreaking research about how rural youth across the Japanese empire emerged as a formidable group of supporters of the imperial state during World War II. Bringing together robust primary-source research done in Japan, Taiwan, and Korea, the book not only provides valuable information about little-known linkages across the empire but also sets a new standard for empire-wide study in the field of Japanese imperialism. In addition to the enlightening explanation of what motivated the youth to support the imperial state, readers are provided with novel insights into the minds of the youth that the author excavated from seldom-accessed personal accounts. The book provides unique biographical trajectories and rarely exposed personal feelings. Comparing imperial support in Taiwan and Korea on the same plane is alone a daring pursuit that deserves recognition. As a piece of cutting-edge research on Japanese imperialism, Nation-Empire will become a mainstay in graduate courses for many years to come.

This book answers a fundamental question in the field of Japanese colonialism: Why did young colonial subjects support the imperial war efforts by volunteering to join the Japanese military? Rather than resorting to the conventional and more facile answer of state coercion, Chatani takes seriously youth support for the Japanese empire and illuminates the complicated web of desires and aspirations that resulted in the emotional commitment that produced “volunteer fever” (p. 2). In so doing, Chatani takes us to the local, grassroots level of social relations in a wide variety of rural places across the Japanese empire, from the Tōhoku region of Japan to Okinawa, Taiwan, and Korea. These rural areas were different in many aspects, but they also shared striking similarities, as Chatani notes. Due to the growing economic gap between the rural and urban areas, regions of the countryside across the empire shared a similar sense of alienation and frustration, which fueled the fervent support for the Japanese state ideology of agrarian nationalism. Although the rural youth were the main targets of state propaganda work, Chatani does not emphasize the state’s effort; rather, she highlights the local dynamics in each village that enabled successful youth mobilization. In the end, the youth committed to the imperializing efforts due to what the author calls the “social mobility complex” that emerged from these programs—a mechanism through which they could move up the social ladder (p. 63). Making the most of these new opportunities, youth in the countryside across the empire became “success-seeking modern rural youth” (p. 66).

The book is divided into three parts. Part 1 focuses on Japan proper. Chapter 1 traces the rise of agrarian nationalism during the Meiji period (1868–1912) and shows how youth became the main target of state reform programs. The seinendan 青年団 (youth-training group) movement contributed to the formation of a new identity for rural youth as leaders of modernizing reforms in the countryside. Focusing on one village in the Tōhoku region, chapter 2 examines how seinendan produced the social mobility complex. By providing rare opportunities for rural youth to continue their education and have respectable jobs, such as assistant teachers and temporary instructors in schools and training centers, seinendan enabled young men not only to move up the social ladder but also travel elsewhere in the Japanese empire.

Chapter 3 examines the “Japanization” (p. 80) process that the rural youths underwent as the economy plummeted and war mobilization intensified during the 1930s. Chatani argues that assimilation, or what she calls “nationalization” (p. 5), happened in rural villages in Japan just as it did in the colonial territories. “Interlude,” a chapter on Okinawa, despite being exceptionally brief, nonetheless provides a critical link between rural villages in Japan and the colonial territories (pp. 93–105). As a territory with status between the metropole and the colonies, Okinawa indeed shared many social...