Sayaka
- Feb 24, 2023
- 2 min
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Sayaka Chatani
茶谷さやか 차타니 사야카 茶谷亮
A historian of people. in modern east asia
my interests
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 and half 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.
I teach histories of modern East Asian societies, ideology and emotions, and the Japanese colonial empire as an associate professor in the department of history, National University of Singapore. I have two beautiful children and two bunnies.
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Anchor 1
“Strategies of Belonging in the Bandung Era: Diaspora and Cold War Asia”
This article illustrates how the so-called “Bandung Moment” in the mid-1950s created a dynamic that forced emigrant communities in Asia to adopt new strategies of belonging. It compares the circumstances of three major diasporic communities—the Indonesian Chinese, the Philippine Chinese, and Koreans in Japan. Although the “Bandung era” usually has an undertone of celebrating Third World internationalism, its embrace of such nation-to-nation internationalism came at the expense of these diasporic groups’ previously fluid and ambiguous identities. Many people in these groups decided to commit themselves to the nationalizing projects of their external “homelands,” which also meant siding with one Cold War camp or the other. Our comparison shows that this dynamic was not coincidental, but rather intrinsic to Bandung internationalism. It ironically undermined the espoused solidarity against Cold War divisions and instead contributed to deepening these divisions.
This co-authorship is my first attempt to globalize the history of zainichi Koreans. By unpacking layers of historical contexts and connecting zainichi history to histories of Chinese diasporas, I attempted to highlight both the unique quality and commonalities of zainichi experiences from a global perspective.
“Belief and Ideology”
In A Cultural History of Youth: The Age of Empire, edited by David Pomfret (London: Bloomsbury, 2023), chapter 7.
This chapter discusses how the embrace of new beliefs and ideologies shaped the experiences of young people in the Age of Empire. It follows two threads of history. The first concerns organized religion, specifically Christian missionaries’ operations which presaged or accompanied imperialist interventions and local youth’s reception of the faith as this spread into new contexts; and the second is the rise of anti-colonial nationalism, which led to the popularity of political ideologies such as communism and fascism. These two threads—religious belief and political ideology—usually do not intersect in historiography, but both informed “youthful” experiences of imperialism. Bringing together these seemingly unrelated histories can help to reveal how young people made sense of their shifting social surroundings in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and how they came to embrace an identity as “youth” within their newly formed worldviews.
Recent Work
Current Editing Project
Grassroots Operations of the Japanese Empire
I am hosting a website to solve my own teaching problem: we don't have many primary sources that we can use in English-speaking class!
In addition to choosing from the sources I have, I am asking a number of historians to contribute theirs to enrich our options of teaching material . Each excerpt accompanies a short introduction about the piece, data of the original source, and the English translation. I have hired competent student/postgraduate translators for this project, and I have uploaded fascinating sources that I received already: https://www.japaneseempire.info/
If you are interested in contributing a source along with an introduction (and if you can, the translation as well), please contact me.
![昭南神社鎭座祭[1].jpg](https://static.wixstatic.com/media/987274_f3b7b96b067d4ce9a104d8d26fb08e01~mv2.jpg/v1/crop/x_96,y_99,w_1458,h_992/fill/w_78,h_53,al_c,q_80,usm_0.66_1.00_0.01,blur_2,enc_auto/%E6%98%AD%E5%8D%97%E7%A5%9E%E7%A4%BE%E9%8E%AD%E5%BA%A7%E7%A5%AD%5B1%5D.jpg)
Current Project
Education Against Historical Denialism
In early 2021, I got involved in a case surrounding an academic article that viewed (Japanese and Korean) "comfort women" as voluntarily contracted prostitutes. Four other concerned historians and I conducted fact-checking. We found that the article distorted and nearly fabricated a large number of pieces of evidence it cited. We co-wrote this letter, requesting that the journal editors conduct a proper investigation. See also our follow-up statement in 2023.
Through this experience, we expanded our knowledge of the common tactics, ideological goals, and major outlets of historical denialism on the atrocities the Japanese military committed during World War II. We also learned that the history of "comfort women" has been the most popular topic for these deniers. As we turned vocal against their baseless claims, we started getting harassed by anonymous accounts and a small number of right-wing scholars on Twitter.
Moving on from fact checking and protecting the professional standard of academic integrity, we think it is important to arm students and scholars with the contents and contexts of relevant sources to confront historical denialism. A number of scholars and institutions are fighting on this front. We would like to add our contribution to this collective endeavor.
Thus my Grassroots Operations of the Japanese Empire now hosts a translation of the deniers' favorite Home Ministry document, "Concerning the Management of Women Traveling to China" (Feb 23, 1937). Prof. Amy Stanley kindly offered the translation and put together an introduction of the context. We designed it for classroom use, but it is a concise read for anyone interested in why many deniers want to refer to this particular document.
Book Projects
Cornell University Press
Dec 2018
Nation-Empire: ideology and rural youth mobilization in Japan and its colonies.
I examine the questions of ideological belief, identity, and imperialism through the history of youth mobilization by the Japanese empire. In addition to an analysis of the rise of youth discourse and agrarianism, it presents ethnographical research of villages in northern Japan, Okinawa, Taiwan, and Korea, and 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.
Current Research Project
Decolonizing in Postimperial Japan:
A History of a Korean Diasporic Community
I am currently finishing up my manuscript on the history of Chongryon (the community around the pro-North Korean organization run by zainichi Koreans) in postwar Japan. The book, tentatively entitled, Decolonizing in Postimperial Japan: A History of a Korean Diasporic Community, focuses on their community building and network. Drawing on the interviews my research partner, KumHee Cho, and I conducted with hundreds of zainichi Korean people inside and outside of Chongryon, the book tells 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, regional Communist ties, and shifting Japan-North Korean relationship.
In this book, I situate Chongryon Koreans in global politics and unveils their mental geographies that sharply focused on their communal space as well as their direct link to their "homeland," North Korea. By fleshing our their perspectives and mental geographies, I hope the book will offer an upside-down, inside-out history of postwar Japan and the Japanese left's deimperialization attempts.
The book is under advance contract with Stanford University Press.
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