Sayaka Chatani
Why do people decide to fight for their nations and people? What turns people into supporters of an ideology? I have been intrigued by these questions for two decades now, which drove me to study the intersection between the nation, the military, and society in East Asia. I found my academic home in the field of history, but am eager to learn other theories and methods that help me better investigate these issues.
In my first monograph, Nation-Empire: Ideology and Rural Youth Mobilization in Japan and Its Colonies (Cornell University Press, 2018), I examined these questions through the history of youth mobilization by the Japanese empire. In addition to an analysis of the rise of youth discourse and agrarianism, my book presents ethnographical research of villages in northern Japan, Okinawa, Taiwan, and Korea, and comparatively fleshes out a grassroots mechanism of ideological indoctrination. I believe this book is in conversation with many subfields, such as histories of youth, fascism, everyday, and emotions.
Relying on many scholars’ spirit of collective scholarship, I am gradually developing a website, Grassroots Operations of the Japanese Empire: translated primary sources for teaching purposes, which presents a number of primary sources in English translation, along with an expert’s introduction and questions for discussion in each entry. Please contact me if you are interested in contributing a source from your research.
I am currently working with KumHee Cho on the history of Chongryon (the community around the pro-North Korean organization run by zainichi Koreans) in postwar Japan. I am writing two books. The first book, tentatively titled Project Korea: Chongryon in Postimperial Japan, focuses on their community building and network. Drawing on our interviews with hundreds of zainichi Korean people inside and outside of Chongryon, we aim to tell their own nation building as a diasporic group in the midst of complex global and local politics of decolonization, neoimperialism, the Cold War, gender politics, Communist ties, and Japan-North Korean relationship.The second book (coauthored with KumHee Cho), tentatively titled After Exodus: Chongryon and North Korea in Flux,highlight interactions between Chongryon people and North Korean society. Once their family members moved to North Korea starting in December 1959, their interactions expanded and became important conduits between Japan and North Korea. Chongryon people’s visits to North Korea, trade and investment experiences, cultural exchanges show that the Chongryon community gave significant impact on North Korean society, not just vice versa.
Website: https://www.sayakachatani.com
TEACHING AREAS:
- East Asian International Relations
- Modern Imperialism and Colonialism
- The Japanese Empire
- Japanese History
- Korean History (modern)
RESEARCH AREAS:
- Ideologies, beliefs, and emotions in history
- Transnational methods
- Social history, especially oral history
- Decolonization and nationalisms in East Asia
- Japanese imperialism and colonialism
- Korean diasporas
PUBLICATIONS:
- Nation-Empire: Ideology and Rural Youth Mobilization in Japan and Its Colonies (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2018)
- “Revisiting Korean Slums in Postwar Japan: Tongne and Hakkyo in the Zainichi Memoryscape,” Journal of Asian Studies 80 no. 3 (August 2021): 587-610.
- Coauthored with Amy Stanley, Hannah Shepherd, Chelsea Szendi Schieder, and David Ambaras, “Contracting for Sex in the Pacific War”: The Case for Retraction on Grounds of Academic Misconduct,” The Asia-Pacific Journal Japan Focus 19 no. 5, 13. (March 2021)
- “A Man at Twenty, Aged at Twenty-five: The Conscription Exam Age in Japan,” contributed to the roundtable “Chronological Age: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis,” The American Historical Review 125, no. 2 (April 2020): 427-437.
- "Between ‘Rural Youth’ and Empire: Social and Emotional Dynamics of Youth Mobilization in the Countryside of Colonial Taiwan under Japan’s Total War,” The American Historical Review 122, no.2 (April 2017): 371-398.
- "The Ruralist Paradigm: Social Work Bureaucrats in Colonial Korea and Japan's Assimilationism in the Interwar Period," Comparative Studies in Society and History 58, no.4 (October 2016): 1004-1031.
- “Youth and Rural Modernity in Japan 1900s-1920s” In Transnational Histories of Youth in the Twentieth Century , edited by Richard Jobs and David Pomfret (London and New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2015).