ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a groundbreaking discussion of how Japanese social scientists committed themselves to producing discourses on ethnicity in wartime Japan. As Japan conquered northern China in the early 1930s and at the same time faced the rise of ethnic nationalism in the colonies, Japanese social scientists became increasingly aware that the notions of race or racial similarity could no longer be the logic of sustaining the stability of empire. In considering the term minzoku (民族) as an alternative driving force for the empire-building project, they paid special attention to the question of how the notion of minzoku could provide a dialectic process of subject formation, that is, an imperial subject maintains one’s own ethnic identity and at the same time belongs to the Japanese empire, the community of destiny. The main question this chapter poses is why the seemingly particularistic, intrinsic and thus unscientific term minzoku became a major research theme for Japanese social scientists who had been searching for objective, rational and universal passages into modernity. This chapter pays special attention to two leading Japanese sociologists, Shinmei Masamichi and Takata Yasuma. Instead of limiting their discourses on ethnicity to the issue of intellectuals’ temporary wartime commitment, I will propose the thesis that their social scientific research in the 1920s paved the way for producing the logics of empire in the late 1930s and early 1940s.
