Really interesting panel, thank you to all the presenters.

I wanted to toss out a bit of a different question that ties into some of the reasons I like AskHistorians much. And thats this: What are the benefits of sharing different perspectives like this and adding counter points to traditional narratives?

(And I should say, I love AH because of how it exposes me to such different perspectives, but it would be great to get your thoughts on what seems like a common reddit question.)

Thanks for this panel!

I'll try to ask something so any of the panelists could respond-

Can you talk more about resistance to imperialism? Was resistance a popular movement or more elite driven? How did emigration from Asia to western countries shape ideas of imperialism and resistance as individuals or members of their families created these cross-cultural ties?

Thanks for the great panel folks! Much like I asked yesterday, I'm very curious to hear if you have any tips or advice for finding sources or doing research that looks at a different perspective while wading through the overwhelming "traditional" voices that tend to flood the narrative?

What motivates you to write on these kind of topics? Is there a personal connection, a larger goal, or just cause you find it neat?

I think its reasonable to say that all of these perspectives must experience a fair amount of push back, especially from various factions against revising history against the traditional narrative. How do you deal with something like that? Are there attempts to convert naysayers and reeducate them? How can you continue to share your history in the face of attempts to silence it?

One of the things I really notice is that many of the panels touch on problematic expressions of Asian nationalism or national histories. To what extent is it useful to frame things as European Imperialism when we look at the rest of the context?

Hi, so this is going to be more of a comment than a question… har har. I hope this comment is useful anyway.

Shirin’s presentation describes the collective work of three Meiji intellectuals in constructing a gorgeous pavilion at the Chicago World’s Fair which reinforces kōkoku shikan, a historical view of the Japanese archipelago as constituting a single culture based on the unifying force of the emperor system.

I wonder whether we might be able to identify significant differences within the trio on their beliefs about civilization and the potentials and risks of the centralized nation-state. Okakura Kakuzō wrote in English, regarding the stereotypical Western man’s view of Japan:

He was wont to regard Japan as barbarous while she indulged in the gentle arts of peace: he calls her civilised since she began to commit wholesale slaughter on Manchurian battlefields.

This is an idealized view of Tokugawa Japanese relations with its neighbors, but it is regardless a critical view of global imperialism. Elsewhere in his writings, Okakura suggests that Lafcadio Hearn is a writer who really understood “Japan” as he means it — but Hearn, like Okakura himself, is an aesthete who sees Japan as primarily a place of aesthetic and spiritual insights into the human condition, rather than a nation-state in the 19th century sense. Hearn has no lost love for the changes of Meiji and you might even say that he is critical of the concept of “Western civilization” in general. I think this makes him an interesting choice for Okakura, at direct odds with the viewpoint of the Chicago World’s Fair.

Anyway, as I said there is not much of a question here, but I don’t mean to criticize the general thesis. I agree with your conclusion that Japan’s pavilion at the Chicago World’s Fair was meant to construct an image of Japan as a centuries-old advanced civilization and that Okakura helped create this. I just wanted to suggest that the fascinating diversity of viewpoints within Meiji thought are less easily amenable to reconciliation than set phrases like “kōkoku shikan” would suggest. Do you agree?

Don't really have a question but thanks so much for this panel! I loved this topic and the conversation around it.

Everyone was excellent and I'd like to learn more. Is there somewhere we can read or see more of your work?

I’d like to learn more about the creation of a single “Japanese” culture from the perspective of Japanese minorities the Dowa people and Ainu?

Good evening and welcome to the conference panel Q&A for "All Aboard the Orient’s Expression: Reclaiming Asian Perspectives & Identity in the Age of Imperialism"! This panel discusses how various Asian groups responded to the imperial world of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

This panel features:

Syafiqah Jaafar (/u/thebramblingthorns) presenting her paper, "'Merchants now rule our land': Early British Rule in Singapore (1819-1840) through the Eyes of the Native Trading Classes"

Dominant narratives surrounding the history of Singapore tend to cast the arrival of British rule on the island in 1819 as positively transformative. It was the ideal success story of rags to riches: the happy tale of a sleepy fishing village suddenly bursting to life as a bustling metropole continues to echo in popular accounts and representations of Singapore, both locally and internationally.

Yet in maintaining such a narrative of success, we hardly consider how the arrival of such a new ‘order’ impacted and was received by those already residing in and around the island. What did the change in trade laws meant for the existing native trading classes? How did they make sense of these changes? Were they able to cope? And how did it come to be that their existence was gradually erased out of historical memory? What is also notable is historians’ general silence on this erasure, despite 19th century Malay poetry being consistent in airing the grievances of the native trading classes. Is it sufficient to point to a lack of language capability amongst those working on colonial Singapore history as a hindrance to do so?

In discussing these questions, I will make reference to three understudied works of Malay poetry by writers based in Singapore. They are Tuan Sim's Syair Dagang Jual Beli (Poem of Buying and Selling) and Syair Potong Gaji (Poem of Wages Cut), and Abdullah bin Abdul Kadir's Syair Singapura Terbakar (Poem of Singapore Ablaze). All three works were composed between the years 1820s to 1840s, coinciding with the early decades of British rule in Singapore.

Simon Lam (/u/hellcatfighter) presenting his paper, "Contemporary Anxieties, Selective Memories: The Missing Narrative of the Indian Prisoner of War in Hong Kong"

In December 1941, around 4,000 Indian soldiers laid down their arms and went into captivity following the fall of Hong Kong. The Japanese, eager to demonstrate their Pan-Asianist credentials, attempted to entice Indian prisoners-of-war (POWs) into joining the Indian Independence League and its military counterpart, the Indian National Army. Indian POWs in Hong Kong were faced with a difficult choice – to partake in anti-colonialist collaborationism or retain military loyalty to a colonial overlord. The Japanese appeal greatly alarmed British intelligence in the South China region, which devoted substantial resources to monitor Indian activities and assist the escape of Indian POWs.

Despite the wartime struggle over Indian loyalties, Indian perspectives are conspicuously absent from post-war memories of the Japanese occupation. Prisoner-of-war literature and remembrances have almost exclusively focused on European (including Canadian) and Eurasian experiences of captivity in Hong Kong. In such narratives, Indians exist on the periphery as prison guards, policemen and fellow captives, and only emerge from the background as foils to European actions. Indian POW perspectives are similarly absent in historiography, with an academic tendency to emphasise Chinese or European experiences in wartime Hong Kong due to the greater range and easier accessibility of related sources.

By examining British intelligence documents, pro-Japanese wartime media and POW memoirs, this paper seeks to restore the missing narrative of the Indian POW in Hong Kong, exploring the complex decisions made by POWs in the name of anti-colonialism, Pan-Asianism and military loyalty. Through colonial, political and social frameworks, this paper will also investigate why wartime Indian experiences have been marginalised in both post-war memory and historiography, tying the Indian experience of Japanese occupation with historical and contemporary representations of Hong Kong’s Indian community.

Shirin M. Sadjadpour (/u/shirinmikiko) presenting her paper, "Three Wise Men of Meiji: Forging a Japanese Aesthetic Tradition at the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893"

After the collapse of the Tokugawa regime in 1868, Japan transformed its feudal, agrarian society into an industrialized, global competitor that was politically and economically capable of meeting Western standards of modernity. Despite this achievement, the fledgling Meiji government grappled with a profound crisis: Japan had successfully averted the imperial powers that endangered its Asian neighbors, but at the cost of abandoning traditional elements of its national identity.

Japan’s entrance into the global arena generated a discourse on the language of beauty and cultural conceptions of art, particularly in the context of international expositions. The propagation of Western beliefs that cultural origins, distinctiveness, and progress were manifest in a nation’s art provoked a reevaluation of Japan’s own art history; consequently, efforts to define and codify the contours of a national aesthetic tradition were deeply entangled with Japanese assertions of autonomy and nationhood.

The emergence of what is understood today as “Japanese art” can be attributed to the collaborative efforts between a baron, Kuki Ryūichi; an aesthete, Okakura Kakuzō; and a professor, Ernest Fenellosa. Together, they formed a history of Japanese art that exalted Japan’s indigenous ways while preserving a sacred cultural essence. Their vision of Japanese art challenged Western stereotypes that rendered Japan as underdeveloped, backward, and degenerate while also reversing what Japanese intellectuals perceived to be the destructive influence of Westernization.

Japan’s resulting display at the World’s Columbian Exposition (1893) was an artistic and architectural feat that not only embodied a universally recognizable, linear advancement of the nation, but also presented a largely Anglo-American population of fairgoers with a society that was a feasible, if not superior alternative to those of the West. This growing sense of aesthetic nationalism shaped a mentality of Japanese exceptionalism and would eventually function as an integral ideological pillar of 20th century Japanese fascism.