ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews how the convict work program developed along with changing ideas of punishment and rehabilitation. It discusses the flows in and out of prisons throughout the empire, which had to do with the cultivation of penal labor and its mobility as part of the modernization of punishment. The chapter focuses on how mobility was employed in the historical operation of prisons. Flows of travel through the colonial prisons in Taiwan, Korea, and Lushun in fact tell a story much more complicated than one merely of forced penal labor as a corrective practice or as a strategy to enhance self-sufficiency. Prisons, like some other sites, then, were a destination, or crossroads: they exemplified Imperial Japan as a young, modern nation-state struggling in between Western powers to perform its newly appropriated authority, by controlling (im)mobility in its domestic territory and colonies.
