![]() I conclude, then, that although “mimicry” is a useful concept regarding very specific vectors of Japanese colonial history in Asia, it cannot account for variations among Japan’s colonized and occupied spaces. To account for this, I suggest that differences in the timing, character, and duration of Taiwanese and Korean resistance movements tipped the balance. State-sponsored photographers and publishers, however, bequeathed divergent visual legacies to Japan’s colonies. Two prominent Western scholars have thus characterized Japanese imperialism as “mimetic.” As a mimetic power, Japan imposed a hastily imported bundle of Western-inspired policies and rhetoric on militarily weaker Asian neighbors, making its overseas empire in some sense “derivative.” More important, as an almost Great Power, a “white but not quite” junior member of the imperialist club, itself a target of Western civilizing–mission policies and rhetoric, Japan’s status as an agent of “enlightenment and progress” was especially unstable. Structurally, Japan occupied the in-between position of object and author of Euro-American-style gunboat diplomacy in the nineteenth-century world of competitive empire-building. This regional variant on colonial modernity is of special interest because the dominant power was a non-Western nation-state. At issue in that debate is the extent to which illiberal, coercive, and even brutal Japanese regimes-externally imposed governments general in Korea and Taiwan and an imperial police state in Japan-laid the institutional, infrastructural, and ideological groundwork for today’s democratic states of East Asia. In the past decade or so, a number of scholars have examined corporal punishment in early-twentieth-century Taiwan and Korea to position Japan and its colonies in broader discussions of colonial modernity. ![]() Second, this essay brings new sources to bear on debates about judicial flogging in the Japanese empire. Because Taiwan's colonial subjects were flogged proportionately to Korea’s-under previous regimes and during the Japanese occupation-this discrepancy requires explanation. ![]() The contrast with Korea, where such imagery proliferated, is pronounced. First, it attempts to account for the absence of mass-circulation photographs of floggings and cangues from colonial Taiwan. This essay examines corporal-punishment imagery in early-twentieth-century Japanese print media, with a focus on pictures from colonial Taiwan and Korea. ![]()
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