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In order to compete with Western powers, Japan began to rapidly modernize its governing institutions, in the process creating a national population registration and identification bureaucracy, the Koseki system, in 1871. A few decades later, when Japan began to extract natural resources from and occupy Northeast China, fingerprint identification was introduced to track the movement of local populations. Taking a historical and sociological perspective informed by surveillance studies, this book shows how biometric identification became a powerful means of policing and racialization of ethnic others in Japan's empire.
Based on archival research in Japan and China, as well as interviews with the Chinese survivors of Japanese occupation, Midori Ogasawara explores the transformation of identification techniques from Japan to its colonies and the lasting impacts of colonial surveillance on everyday people. Against the historical backdrop of Japan's colonial expansion in the pseudo-state of "Manchukuo," Ogasawara invites readers to delve into the little-known genealogy of modern-day identification systems, and the colonial roots of the troubling and often-invisible surveillance technologies that saturate our digital lives today.
"Identification practices were crucial to Japanese imperial domination and persist in varying forms to the present day—Midori Ogasawara's study of Japan's systems of identification and surveillance provides a major contribution to our understanding of this history." —John Torpey, Graduate Center, City University of New York
"A gripping and poignant historical sociology of Japanese surveillance practices, domestically and, particularly, in colonial incursions in Chinese 'Manchukuo.' Midori Ogasawara breaks new ground in combining intriguing ethnographical fieldwork with thoughtful modifications of surveillance theories to grasp both the stark realities of identification and state scrutiny and their differential impact on families and individuals in Japan and China. Readers are drawn right into the exacting research experience, deepened further by the striking photographs." —David Lyon, author of The Culture of Surveillance: Watching as a Way of Life
"Colonial Surveillance adds a valuable new study to the existing body of work in identification history that characterizes fingerprinting (and other biometric identification technologies) as essentially colonial technologies." —Simon A. Cole, H-Sci-Med-Tech