■Date & Time
Thursday, April 5, 2018/ 18:15～19:45
■Venue
Room 960, Bldg.#14, Waseda Campus
■Lecturer
Joseph Seeley(Ph.d student at Stanford University)
His primary Research interests center on the history of Japanese colonialism in East Asia and environmental history. His dissertation project uses Chinese, Japanese, and Korean-language sources to examine the history of Japanese border security and river engineering along the Yalu River c. 1905-1945. He also have published research on tiger hunting in historical Korea, Korean-Japanese diplomatic history, and he is currently working on a co-authored article about Japanese colonial zoos in Seoul and Taipei.
■Abstract
Historians often write works divided by years, decades, and centuries, but very rarely seasons. This presentation examines the seasonal aspects of Japanese colonial border security on the Yalu River dividing Korea and China from 1931 to 1945. With the changing seasons came changing challenges to border security–from summer floods that consumed local communities to the winter ice that provided a convenient pathway for smugglers, “bandits,” and anti-Japanese guerrillas. Border policing required an intimate knowledge of the Yalu landscape and the comparative advantages and disadvantages offered by its seasonally changing forms.
Border spaces–formerly situated at the periphery of historian’s analyses–have over the last several decades increasingly moved to the center of scholarly narratives. Yet while a vast literature has emerged which documents the diplomatic, social, and cultural processes of border formation, such scholarship typically treats environmental concerns as ancillary to the border creation process. By contrasting imperial Japanese attempts to control the Sino-Korean border region with the seasonally contingent nature of what I call the Yalu River’s “liquid geography,” my research provides critical insight into how physical environments shape life and diplomacy along international borders.
■Coordinator
Naoyuki UMEMORI (Professor, Faculty of Political Science and Economics)
Toyomi Asano(Professor, Faculty of Political Science and Economics)
■Language
English
■Audience
Students, faculty, staff and general public
■Admission
Free
