| The experience of violence has powerful consequences in the transformation of culture. The Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923 marked a moment of unprecedented material destruction and cultural rupture in the Japanese empire. The disaster soon became subject to human interpretation and political manipulation, for the trauma of earth tremors and subsequent fire produced not only physical chaos but also rumors and violence against the colonized in the metropole. Such violence manifested itself in the massacre of Koreans immediately following the earthquake---triggered by rumors of arson, murder, and rebellious riots by Koreans in the Tokyo-Yokohama area. Despite the shock of the rumors and the violence, the lack of critical evidence and the contradictions in the testimonies has rendered the incident a historical enigma, panic-driven aberration, or conspiracy in modern Japanese and Korean history.; Interestingly, precisely because of this unsettled nature of the violence---which thus defies any singular narrative that satisfactorily explains the incident empirically---the massacre of Koreans sheds light on the development of subjective narratives on collective violence in the culture of empire. In an attempt to explore the relationships that weave together disaster, rumors, massacre, and narrative-making in an empire, this project explores rumors, trial discourses, and commemoration as sites of analysis to create a window on the contested construction of multiethnic modern Japan. By analyzing a wide range of texts such as children's writings, paintings, and testimony, this project demonstrates the centrality of the colonial regime of representations in imagining the colonized others and the Japanese public. This project calls for methodological innovation in colonialism and imperialism studies by taking an archival journey to explore such non-conventional sites of historical analysis as rumors and other spaces of competing narratives through the visual, artistic, and literary manifestation across the metropole and the colony. Thereby, Instability of Empire calls attention not only to the impact of the presence of the colonized in the metropole but also the power of human imagination in practicing and interpreting violence, thus highlighting the incomplete nature of narrative control and the imperative imagining historical agency within the social in and beyond the archives . |
