Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique 21, no.

1 (Winter 2013): 51-71

Tabloid Coloniality: A Popular Journalist Maps Empire

Mark Driscoll
What convergetit set of historical formations of racialized gender, of gendered race,
of the sexualization of racial ideals, or the racialization of gender norms, makes
up both the social regulation of sexuality and its psychic articulations."" Judith
Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex"
The distinction between active and passive provides an example of a verbal category
which seems designed to confuse our usual habits of thought: it appears necessary,
and yet many languages do not have it; simple, and yet we have great difficulty in
interpreting it; symmetrical, and yet it abounds in conflicting expressions. Emile
Benveniste, Problems in General Linguistics
The March i, 1919, demonstration for Korean independence was the single largest threat to Japan's imperial rule in its half century of existence.
Referred to reverently in Korean as the Sam'il Undong (March i Movement), the protest was initially centered in Seoul hut quickly extended to
positions 2\:i DOI 10.1215/10679847-1894281
Copyright 2013 by Duke University Press

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every town and village in Korea. After ten years of military colonialism
{budan seiji) that had seemingly pacified the Koreans, and after a decade of
easy expropriation of surplus from the expanding pool of Korean renters
and growing reserve army of poor Korean labor, Japanese colonizers were
caught off guard by the mobilization. As was the case more than a decade
earlier with the brutal scorched-earth crackdown in southern Korea the
Namhan Daetobulthe Japanese Army responded mercilessly, violently
smashing the peaceful demonstrations and killing an estimated seven thousand people and arresting forty thousand before the smoke cleared.'
In reacting to the peaceful demonstration, imperial elites both in the colonies and in Japan dusted off and trotted out the imperial binaries they had
deployed in Taiwan and earlier in Korea (civilized/savage, rational/irrational,
etc.) to dismiss the protests as "barbaric" (yaban) and "blindly reckless"
ipid)} However, one new phrase that appeared to codify the Korean's
unwillingness to be civilized by Japan was "ignorant people" (gumin).
Gumin were not the same bratty children and wild savages that Japan dealt
with parentally in the first decade of the twentieth century; they were grown
adults who were stubbornly refusing to recognize the great sacrifices that
Japan was making in trying to drag Korea into the modern world (ibid.,
3334). After it was clear the mobilization was going to be repressed by
the Japanese military regardless of the damage this would do to Japan in
the eyes of the world, the editors at Chosen l^ron (Korea Review) began to
hone in on the realgumin, the male Korean intellectual elites who were the
ringleaders in the demonstrations. In their lead editorial of May 1919 called
"The Korean Riots and Improvements in the Governor-General's Policies,"
the monthly provided a profile of this recalcitrant male elite: "Although we
wouldn't go so far as to call them modern or enlightened, these intellectuals
provided the ideas that led to the riots. Others participated because they felt
truly threatened by this group. . . . At this point, the intellectuals resorted
to a kind of hypnotic, psychological crowd [gunsh shinri] control. Before
anyone with any sense could stop it, violent, illogical ideas were transmitted
to otherwise good, law-abiding people [ryminY' (CK, May 1919, 23).
The decent and wholesome Japan-loving Koreans were apparently poisoned by the Eurocentric notion of "ethno-national self-determination"
{minzo^u ji^etsushugi) shamelessly and uncritically parroted by these male

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Korean intellectuals. This one idea, originating in Europe and recently

pitched by President Woodrow Wilson,
has resulted in the type of theater of the absurd [\asgef(i] we witnessed
here in Seoul . . . it's the primary cause of all the troubles in our colony
and is distracting Japanese from our one reason for being in Korea to
guide and enlighten [zend kyka\ We need to refocus on this mission so
the borrowed, foreign ideas of the violence-prone Korean intellectuals no
longer influence the good Koreans who recognize all the positive things
that we've done for them (ibid., 34).
When we look at the opinion pieces in the newspaper Keij nipp {Daily
Seoul)., it becomes clear that Japanese colonizers were identifying innocent
Korean women and children as those in most need of being "rescued" from
these corrupt male intellectuals. And male imperialists needed no further
corroboration than the demonstrations themselves to prove their point that
the Korean women, children, and illiterate men needed Japanese presence
and pedagogy more than ever.^ Some colonizers even went so far as to justify the violent repression of the peaceful mobilizations as necessary to "save
[l{yshutsu\ the good women of Korea from the uncivilized behavior of
Korean men" {KN., Aug. 19, 1919).
The structure of disavowal in these colonial texts is easily decodable. By
all accounts, the independence demonstrations were orderly and peaceful,
and it was generally agreedeven by several sober contemporary Japanese
accounts that violence was the exclusive prerogative of the colonizer side.'^
Daily pictures of the peaceful and orderly protests in Japan's colonial press
during the demonstrations belie the accusations of Korean male intellectuals'
savagely calling for Japanese blood, and of Korean men forcing women to
participate in the protests against their will.^ Moreover, it is well known that
Korean women played crucial roles in the anti-Japanese movement, and some
worked in women-only groups in activities contributing to the beginning of
the Korean women's movement.^ The fact of the several thousand Koreans
killed in the following months of "pacification" points to the real savagery in
this encounter between colonizer and colonized. Nevertheless, because these
texts spoke the ideological common sense/feeling of Japan's imperialists, I
want to pause and look at what they are accomplishing. How can we account

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historically for this psychic operation of disavowal and inversion in the Japanese editorial in which colonizer violence is displaced and substituted for by
male Korean violence, and the courage of the Korean women mobilizing
against the Japanese colonizer occupation is reversed and transformed into a
desperate plea for help addressed to these same colonizers?
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak identifies a homologous structure of address
in nineteenth-century British colonialism in India. In what might be
the most famous essay in colonial discourse analysis, "Can the Subaltern
Speak.?" she dismantles the British colonial discourse on widow sacrifice
(sati) in colonial India.^ Spivak argues that the paternalism of the British
colonizer opposition to the tradition of widow sacrifice should be configured as "white men saving brown women from brown men."^ Moreover,
as she analyzes the ideological violence of imperial paternalism that insists
on saving colonized Indian women from male-controlled traditions, she
provocatively suggests that this colonial discourse be considered together
with Sigmund Freud's analysis of the rather slippery sentence, "A child is
being beaten" (296). What I think Spivak is getting at with this leap is to
argue that the structure of disavowal in the colonial address is homologous
to the logistics of fantasy in Freudian theory. In psychoanalytic theory, fantasy emerges when an original object is displaced and lost to the subject
and, later, is reproduced when a traumatic antagonism (such as unexpected
protests against colonial occupation) threatens the subject. The ideological function of fantasy in psychoanalysis is to translate, reverse, and eroticize this traumatic antagonism. This function of fantasy is crucial because
trauma-inducing antagonisms have the power to annihilate the individual
subject's sense of psychic integrity.^ To secure the subject against any potential threats, fantasy dissimulates trauma by substituting a "scene" of desire
that allows a psychic recovery and rearticulation of threatening loss, albeit
in a more reassuringly erotic way for the (male) subject. This mise-en-scne
operates by ignoring the "normal" distinction between subject, object, and
verbal act of desire; the "subject" can appropriate and inhabit any of the
positions of the fantasy.'^ Freud's 1919 essay "A Child Is Being Beaten," published the same year as the Korean independence uprising, describes several
of his patient's fantasies of a child being beaten, which, under the pressure of
analysis, reveal three different phantasmatic identifications for each patient:

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(i) My father is beating the child whom I hate; (2) I am being beaten by my
father; and (3) A child is being beaten." In their influential reading of this
essay, Jean Laplanche and J.-B. Pontalis insist that fantasy doesn't entail an
identification with a single position within tbe fantasy; rather, identification
is distributed among the three positions of active, passive, and verbal action
of the scene. They write, "Fantasy is not the object of desire, but its setting.
In fantasy the subject does not pursue the object or its sign; one appears
oneself caught up in the sequence of images. . . . As a result, the subject,
although always present in the fantasy, may be so in a desubjectivized form,
that is to say, in the very syntax of the sequence in question."'^ Fantasy,
then, is not something "possessed" by a subject but a place where the subject becomes predicate in the staging of the multiplication and proliferation
of identifications and desires. Slavoj Zizek argues that through its role of
mediating between symbolic law and wordly objects "fantasy constitutes
our desire, provides its co-ordinates; that is, it literally 'teaches us how to
desire.' "'^ In the essay introduced above, Laplanche and Pontalis claim that
fantasy "provides the possibility of experience."'''
Laplanche and Pontalis follow Freud in identifying the psychic register of
fantasy as that which enables the subject to deal with external threats to its
sense of sovereign integrity. Fantasy comes to dominate other psychic operations because only it can provide mechanisms to defend the subject against
serious splitting. These mechanisms include reversing the threat masochistically so as to generate pleasure from it; inverting the threat completely
through projection and negation; and, as I've already suggested, eroticizing
the threat in a way that reassures the subject that the external threat is actually a misplaced appeal for love.
In the case of the Japanese colonial elites desperate to disavow their own
responsibility in producing an oppressive colonial situation in Korea, fantasy worked to invert the antagonistic threat from the Korean independence
movement by miraculously dissimulating actually existing anti-Japanese
Korean subjects into Korean subjects imagined as needing and desiring
more Japanese colonial control. Fantasy is what enabled some Japanese subjects to psychically adapt to what had been unthinkable previously: nationwide popular resistance to Japan's colonial rule. Spivak usefully suggests
that both the slippage between different positions (the logistics of fantasy)

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and "primary" defense reactions and reversals are locatable in the ideological software of the "civilizing mission" of British imperialism in India.
Within these psychoanalytic and colonial discourse reading protocols
then, how can we configure the "sequencing and syntax" of the colonizer
subject in the Seoul Daily Report editorial condemning the demonstrations
for Korean independence? Can we identify the classical slippages in phantasmatic identification among the three positions of active, passive, and
desiring gaze in this example of Japan's colonial discourse? If we can, will
the location of slippages between these three (at least) identificatory positions
tell us anything new about the architecture of Japan's colonial empire? How
would this "new" argument about Japan's colonial imperialism differ from
previous historical and cultural interpretations?
First, it would help us to apprehend the insistent appeal to Pan-Asianism
in Japan's imperial discourse as much more than a cynical camouflage for
Japanese ethno-racial superiority and right to dominate Asia. Although
there were plausible pragmatic and historical reasons for Japanese elites
to invoke a shared ethno-cultural history among the peoples of East and
Southeast Asia, by taking the psychic operation of fantasy seriously, we can
locate one more explanation for the ubiquitous invocation of Pan-Asianism
in Japan's imperial ideology. A fortiori, the operations of fantasy that I
briefly introduced above, involving the replacement of a traumatic antagonism by something more reassuringly erotic along with the sliding back
and forth on the part of the holder of the fantasy between normally distinct
subjects can go some ways toward identifying an important ideological
aspect of Japan's imperialism. Different from assuming that Japanese elites
espoused Pan-Asianism and ethno-racial similarity while deviously believing among themselves in Japanese exceptionalism a common assumption
among Euro-US-based Asian studies scholars until recently'^ when we
foreground the operations of a historically specific ideological formation,
it is easy to notice the impossibility for someone speaking within its confines to espouse one thing while secretly harboring the opposite. Ideology is
the "common sense" of hegemonic power. Therefore, it's impossible to live
and think in this or that society without buying into most of its ideological
assumptions. Accordingly, it would have been difficult for any literate adult
of means in Japan during the period under discussion not to have accepted

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to a great extent the imperial ideology of a shared ethno-racial endowment

with East and Southeast Asians.'^
Nevertheless, when we recall the ways in which fantasy what izek
explicitly calls "ideological fantasy" follows a logic of noncontradiction
in which erstwhile antagonistic and opposed positions can coexist harmoniously, it follows that Japanese elites could hold nationalistic positions assuming Japanese superiority alongside more explicitly Pan-Asian positions.
The psychic operation of fantasy not only allows for such contradictions to
cohabit in the same ideological field, but it often requires them to. In many
different kinds of societies, ideological fantasy provides much of the explanation of how hegemonic rule can comfortably incorporate threats and criticisms to it. The slippage between and conflation of opposed subject positions
allow ideological hegemony to appropriate almost anything, even claiming a
proprietary relation to that which attempts to threaten and depose it.
In Laplanchian and Lacanian psychoanalytic theory, the mise-en-scne
of sado-masochism (different from the erotic practice) has sometimes been
privileged to dramatize these improbable reversals of power. My reading of
the ideological responses on the part of Japanese imperialists to the March
I, 1919, mobilization for Korean independence through Spivak touched on
Laplanche's position. My hope is that this abstract mapping might help us
understand more completely some of the responses of specific Japanese imperialists, as well as the larger ideological elasticity characteristic of Japanese
imperial discourse. The reversals of active and passive and colonizer and
colonized that we saw above were not limited to crisis situations in Japan's
imperial rule. Because of the ever-present threat to Japanese imperialism
and the generalized sense of lurking danger that characterized the daily
experience of many Japanese living in the colonial periphery, it shouldn't
be surprising to come across frequent representations of sado-masochism
in Japanese colonial discourse. For even before the consolidation of S/M as
a common trope in mass and high culture discourse inside metropolitan
Japan in the mid-i92os, it was frequently deployed as a way to ideologize
and therefore explain some of the wild and improbable contradictions of
Japan's imperial endeavor. In so doing, the codifications of S/M functioned
to sustain and even extend hegemonic rule.
Beginning in the early 1920s, the colonial newspapers were puzzled by

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sex scandals that seemed to involve costumes, bondage, and role playing.
A Mansh nichi nichi shinbun {Manchuria Daily Newspaper) column from
this period titled "Was It Just Another Pickpocket? Or Was It Perverse
Sexual Obsession?" depicted an incident in which a bourgeois Japanese
woman named Kadozaki Haruko was either the victim of a pickpocket at
the upper-class Yamato Hotel or "involved in an erotic game of pickpocket
sadist and victim masochist."'^ Although it would be unusual for a common thief to have access to the well-policed Yamato, the article states that
Kadozaki was apparently tied up by a thief who entered her room and stole
her purse. The article also reported that Kadozaki was not fazed at all by
the incident and "actually was in very good spirits," hypothesizing that it
could just be another incident of sexual role playing involving robbers and
helpless victims that "have become increasingly popular at the hotel." The
Keij nipp of June ii, 1922, investigates a similar incident of role playing
involving light bondage and "play" of soldiers and victims, this time at the
upper-class Chosen Hotel in Seoul. These might be construed at least in
part as acts of fantasy in which colonial antagonisms are worked out and
resolved pleasurably.
The figure that did the most to publicly stage the operations of ideological
fantasy was tabloid and investigative journalist Ishimori Sei'ichi, who wrote
regularly for the monthlies Chosen /^ron {Korea Review) and Chosen oyobi
Manshu {Korea and Manchuria) during the 1910s. Although we should be
careful before accepting at face value Chosen ^ron's hype that Ishimori was
the most popular journalist in the colonies, it would be difficult to locate
another figure who published as widely in Japanese on the themes of urban
life in the colonial cities of Keij (Seoul) and Dalian, on Japanese immigration to Asia, and on colonizer/colonized interactions. For six years, beginning in September 1913, Chosen ^ron ran a regular series by Ishimori called
"Strange, Uncanny Phantasms That Appear and Disappear" ("Kiki kaikai
hengen shutsubotsusen").'^ Although the piece was alternately signed with
three different names, in each case the names were followed with the same
title, "hens ^isha" journalist in disguise, or drag. Ishimori promised to
introduce readers to the "dark underbelly" {an/^o^umen) of the new colonial
world,'^ a world where he claimed the "overworked bodies are weak, but
the appetite for desire is strong" {CK, Jan. 1914, 122). Like "sleazy characters

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in Russian novels" (ibid., 123) and "immoral representations la Flaubert,"

Ishimori boasted that the "real people" of Seoul, Pusan, and Dalian will be
shown in all their "decadent [daraf{u] glory," amidst their "living, breathing
contradictions" {CK, Oct. 1913, 107). These "real people" of Japan's colonialism included the lesbians who fled Japan for the relative freedom of the colonies; the liberals in the colonial bureaucracy who turn into "sex maniacs"
{shi/^ima) and prey on women at night {CK, Sept. 1915, m ) ; destitute Chinese
and Korean sex workers who are so bold that they will "have sex with you
right in front of their parents for money" {CK, Aug. 1915, 114); the modern
colonizer working women who insist on doing everything in a rejection of
tradition {CK, Apr. 1914, 90); cross-dressing Japanese and Russian women
sex workers {CK, Oct. 1915, 97); Japanese pretty-boy gigolos {dansh) whom
colonial women pay for sex {CK, Jun. 1914, 117); notorious Japanese poison
women {do\ufu) who gather dead "horny little devils" {irogaf^i) of Korean,
Chinese, and Japanese heritage in their mosquito nets {CK, Jul. 1914, 109);
and thrill-seeking Japanese youth {tsJ^aiji) who become wretched {santantaru) sacrifices to the dangerous, epistemological opacity of Japan's colonial
cities in East Asia {CK, Oct. 1913, 81).
The series features the detective/writer in various kinds of gender and
ethno-racial drag that grants him the freedom to do a kind of "fieldwork"
on people living in the margins of colonial society. Some of the disguises
include that of Chinese coolie in Dalian, elderly Korean male drifter in
Seoul, Japanese woman sex worker in Seoul and Pusan, French detective
tracking Russian criminals in Manchuria and Russia, elderly Russian man
in Dalian, and Japanese migrant worker in Seoul, where the journalist puts
on black face (^ao ni l^uroi de sumi) to convince the locals that he is really a
lower-class Japanese {CK, Aug. 1915, 150). Many of the installments emphasize the hallucinogenic elements of the colonial world, {CK, April 1914, 87;
CK, October 1914; and CK, December 1913) and the introduction to the
October 1914 installment insists that because the ethnographic work of the
drag journalist operates through the logic of the dream, readers should be
encouraged in a similar way to let their "imaginations run wild."
Ishimori's character sketches are populated by personages as varied as
the "hypocritical bureaucrat," the proto-feminist "new woman," dispossessed Korean migrant workers, Korean and Japanese female sex workers.

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and Japanese merchants obsessed with the commercial sex districts. The
fieldwork of Ishimori's texts also provides Japanese readers with remarkably detailed mappings of the colonial cities, featuring lavish descriptions
of bars, back alleys, train stations, Chinese restaurants, and underground
Korean resistance meeting houses. Although the writer sensationalizes the
"unknowability" {etai no shirenu) and "uncanny" (bu^imi) sense of the colonial topoi (similar to what Michael Taussig has described as the "epistemic
murk" of colonialism^^), this is partially overcome through mapping the
space and discursive "working the field." Moreover, the reader is asked to
identify through the drag journalist with a truly universal conglomeration
of gendered and ethnic speaking subjects: French, Russian, Korean, Japanese, and Chinese. Thus the series can be homologized with the mise-enscne of the multiplication of identifications in fantasy; the Japanese male
imperial subject enjoys a radical slippage among seemingly contradictory
identifications. In other words, alongside the ethnographic "fieldwork," the
series is undertaking important ideological "dream work" as well, which
I've been arguing is the pleasurable work of fantasy.
Nevertheless, despite the proliferating subjectivities that Ishimori's texts
put up, the identities that Ishimori drags aren't infinite, and crucial positions are excluded and disavowed. As Judith Butler argues, "certain exclusions and foreclosures institute the subject and persist as the permanent
or constitutive spectre of its own idealization."^! I read Freud and French
psychoanalytic theory above to help make the argument that fantasy is an
eroticized response to a traumatic antagonism that threatens the subject
with dissolution. The ideological role of fantasy is to diffuse, transform,
and substitute this threat with nonthreatening eroticized replacements. This
eroticizing capacity of ideological fantasy must be seen first as a response,
a secondary and parasitic eroticization meant to confine and contest the
oppositional antagonism coming from colonized subjects. Ideological fantasy is beneficial for imperial subjectivity both because it works to contain
explicit antagonism allowing imperialists to continue believing that the
colonized subaltern desires them and their superior societyand because
it expands and amends the available identifications for imperial subjects.
In these Japanese imperial texts ideological fantasy takes on a well-nigh
miraculous power to transform a decolonizing desire to banish the Japa-

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nese from Korea into a plea for more contact and intensified presence on
the part of the colonized. But this power is limited by one fundamental
position, a position that couldn't be eroticized within the intense heterosexuality that characterized Japanese imperialism. Despite the expansive,
amending power of ideological fantasy to eroticize and grotesque, this fundamental antagonism and pain must be absented from phantasmatic staging, at least in Ishimori's texts. Consequently, the identifications dragged
by Ishimori don't contain the obvious ones of Korean men below the age of
sixty (theoretically the easiest position for the thirty-something Ishimori to
mime), young working-class males (the ChinesejVwn^A driver in Dalian
is elderly), and nonheterosexual men. These subject positions are the most
threatening to tbe heteromasculinity of Ishimori and cannot be performatively acknowledged.
Written under the name of "Butterfly Child," Ishimori's two-part column
of March and May 1915 called "A Story of Love Drenched in Blood" ("Koi
no chidarake monogatari"; CK, Mar. 1915, 1049) '^ '^^^ f many sketches
depicting heterosexual relations between colonizer and colonized. Tbis
one describes the love affair of a young Korean kj^eang, Li Hyun-gi, with
a Japanese businessman named Shirai Kenzaburo, a "good friend" of Ishimori's.22 A frequent champion of mixed-race relations ("the most effective
and pleasurable road to colonial assimilation [dka\" he joked^^), Ishimori
speculates philosophically on the first page about the erotic: "The erotic
{seiyoku\ transcends all boundaries of race and power. It shouldn't matter
if I'm in love with a Korean or a beggar. . . . Originally [ganrai], nobody
cared if a Japanese took a Korean as his wife" {CK, Mar. 1915, 105). The
imperial propaganda links up with the "blood-soaked love" when Ishimori
tells us that Shirai's family in Japan is furious about his relationship with
the Korean woman. The Shirai family has apparently arranged a marriage
for him and wants him to return immediately to Japan once his two-year
contract expires.
Ishimori strongly defends, the new colonial relationships, saying that love
is "truly free" in Korea and Japanese-controlled Northeast China where
people aren't burdened by those "feudal marriages between families in
Japan, where there's never any passion at all" (ibid., 106). But even more than
the normally "free" erotic relations among Japanese, Chinese, and Koreans

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here in the Japanese colonies,^'' Ishimori depicts the relationship between

Li Hyun-gi and Shirai as "liberated from any notion of common sense as
it's usually applied to love affairs" {CK, Mar. 1915, 107), claiming that their
relation was "way off the beaten path" (jo^i 0 hazureta). The rumors about
it were that it involved Shirai becoming very violent to Li sometimes and at
other times being very soft and sweet. The reports of these reversals between
"extreme cruelty" and softness "really excited" Ishimori when he first heard
them, at which point he decided to write it up as a story.
Ishimori describes Shirai as someone so handsome that "everyone thought
he was gorgeous" (ibid., 106). The sexiness of Shirai is intensified by his
"Slav-like" reversals of extreme cruelty and soft "sentimentality" (ibid., 107).
Despite his sentimental side though, it was apparently impossible to satisfy
him sexually, and this "animal-like" appetite made him famous in the commercial sex establishments in Seoul. Li Hyun-gi was a perfect partner for
him, just as beautiful, and just as obsessed with sex. However, Ishimori
reports rumors to the effect that she was particularly attracted to Shirai's
cruelty and was often seen with bruises on her face and arms the day after
they had spent a night together (ibid., 108). Together with the physical comelinfess of Shirai and Li, the "strange, cruel" quality of their eroticism qualified this as a story of "blood-drenched love" (ibid., 108).
In the introduction to the final installment of May 1915, Ishimori reports
that Shirai has reluctantly agreed to the forced marriage and returned to
Japan, although he and his new Japanese bride have agreed not to have a
sexual relationship and to live like "brother and sister." Once a year, Shirai
returns to Korea whereupon he and Li resume their "hallucinatory world of
pleasure" i^nrakukyo no gen'ei) {CK, May 1915, 109). But she doesn't spend
her time waiting around for him. This was a Korean "who didn't resemble
Korean women at all," in that it was "impossible to repress her sexuality"
(ibid., 98). In this regard, she was more like "a decadent eighteenth-century
Tokyoite [Edo^^o]"^^ but the Japanese colonies seemed to recreate this
"flavor of Edo," and in the end Li was "not really that exceptional" (C/C,
May 1915, 99). It's interesting here that Ishimori's text works to naturalize
Korean women's obsession with Japanese men. His ardent support of what
would become official encouragement for mixed marriages between colonizer and colonized in 1921, through his cheerleading for mixed couples

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and commercial sex between colonizer and colonized not only displaces,
reverses, and eroticizes fundamental colonial antagonisms but also elides
the historical fact that in the first and second decades of Japan's occupation
in Korea (190525), there would have been almost no interaction outside
the red-light districts between colonizer men and Korean women. Looking
at the featured Japanese-Korean mixed relationships in the monthly magazine Chosen kpron and, to a lesser extent. Chosen oyobi Manshu, during the
1910s approximately 80 percent of them are Japanese women together with
Korean men, a pattern that would change into the early 1920s and then
change back again in the late 1930s and early 1940s. In other words, the
majority of real (as opposed to phantasmatically produced) interactions during the time Ishimori is writing happened between Japanese women and
colonized men and women. Nevertheless, following the protocols of ideological fantasy, Ishimori represents a colonial world of Korean and Chinese
women enchanted and seduced by Japanese men.^^ These reversals of the
actual conditions within which eroticization and antagonism take place are
essential for the kind of dream work ideological fantasy undertakes.
Returning to Li, the annual reunion romp with Shirai is apparently
not enough for her, and she continues her pattern of obsessive and selfdestructive relations with Japanese men. The last installment of "A Story of
Love Drenched in Blood" describes her abusive relationship with a Japanese
sumo wrestler who she "threw herself on" (CAT, May 1915, 99). The beginning of the article depicts her continuing desperation and incipient hysteria.
For example, she is found screaming at people in bars, "I'm not a woman
who does it for money! I'm not that kind of woman!" (ibid., 99). She frequently breaks out in fits of crying and screaming in public and increases
her drinking. Gradually, it becomes clear to everyone tbat the burns and
cuts on her body have been inflected in acts of "cruel sexuality" {zangyaku
seiyoku). The installment ends sadistically and predictably with Li Hyun-gi's
suicide, the final act of "love drenched in blood" (ibid., ioi).
On several occasions in his work, Ishimori performs a passivity vis-vis powerful and strong colonial women. This is both a titillating game
undertaken from a position of money and power and the inscription of the
pleasure involved in giving up power. For example, in one of his columns
that ran from June to September 1914, he describes his fascination with a

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Japanese white-collar criminal and femme fatale {dof^ufu). Ishimori writes

throughout the introductory installment that he is "scared out of his wits"
{dogimo 0 nuita) investigating this woman (CK, Jun. 1914, 115). He attributes
his fear both to the fact that she has a habit of shooting her pistol anywhere
she wants (ibid., 118), and to her reputed preference for sadistic sex. This
domineeringness is defined by the way she manages her erotic relations to
men: ordering her Japanese lover to have sex with her when she wants (ibid.,
116) and often paying Korean and Japanese "gigolos" {dansh) for "special
sexual services" (ibid., 117).
In the July installment the unnamed femme fatale is described as "castrating men" {kyosei suru) with her cruelty and erotic obsessiveness (CK, Jul.
1914, 112). This installment focuses more on her financial schemes involving bank fraud and loan sharking, and as it tracks some of these activities
in northern China and Korea, we read about all the men she has "under
her spell." These include Chinese, Korean, and Japanese, and some of the
Japanese men have given up "jobs and good families" in Japan to follow her
around the colonies (ibid., no). Rumors circulate that when she gets tired
of these men sexually she has ways of "making them disappear" (ibid., 112).
All the rumors about her violence, sexual cruelty, and beauty are enough to
convince Ishimori that when the investigation is over, he will "stand in the
line of men waiting to be her next lover" (ibid., 115).
Here again, opposed to the objectively historical situation in which Japanese men enjoyed almost unchecked authority in the Korean colony, we
have what I've been calling a phantasmatic inversion. In Ishimori's textual
fantasies, the objective situation of male rule is reversed, and Korean and
Japanese women enjoy sovereignty over Japanese men. Ideological fantasy
is the operation that generates this reversal inside the psychic faculties of
Japanese men.

S/M Textuality

One of Ishimori's signature styles is the deployment of the passive-causative

Japanese verb construction. Although this is used rarely in spoken Japanese,
it's also evident in some of the panicked Japanese responses to the March i,
1919, demonstrations that I referred to above (especially in the frequently

Driscoll I Tabloid Coloniality

65

deployed grammatical construction of Japanese being "forced to

saserareta" innocent Koreans). For example, in the October 1914 installment
be claims that he is being made to explore {tangen saseraremashita), the sordid colonial conditions for the "enlightenment of colonial readers" {CK, Oct.
1914, 124). In the September 1916 issue he writes that he was seduced by a
beautiful geisha and by an "unconscious wish" was "forced to tail her [bi^
saseraremashita]" {CK, Sept. 1914, 114).
I want to bring Emile Benveniste's theory of the middle-voice construction into my argument here. As the passive-causative verbal structure in
Japanese functions in a similar way to the middle voice, it can help us get at
some of the slippages in identification in colonial-imperial discourse. In the
passage quoted at the head of this essay, Benveniste introduces the middle
voice as that which can help solve the "great difficulties" and "conflicting
expressions" present in the accepted distinction between active and passive
voices. For Benveniste, the opposition between active and passive is spurious.
Instead, he argues that the "passive is a modality of the middle (voice)."^^
Therefore, the Indo-European verb is "characterized by an opposition of
only two diatheses, active and middle" (147). As Benveniste is concerned
here with presenting the middle voice as one that interrupts the false binary
between active and passive, he theorizes it as "[denoting] a certain attitude
of the subject with relation to the process." He continues, "In the active,
the verbs denote a process that is accomplished outside the subject. In the
middle, which is the diathesis to be defined by the opposition, the verb indicates a process centering in the subject, the subject being inside the process"
(148, my emphasis). While the actively voiced subject is an agent engaged
in action external to the subject, the middle-voiced subject is engaged in
a self-reflexive process; it is affected by its own effects and actions. Thus
Benveniste rearticulates the active/passive relation as active and middle so as
to complicate and displace a simple subject/object opposition. This insight
offers considerable complexity to the middle voice, because the middle is
neither simply acted upon nor passive, but its subject is in the "seat of the
process," both agent and object of it (149).
I want to argue that the doubleness of this structure that moves at once
outward toward objects and inward toward the self inscribes a protosadomasochistic reversal at the level of grammatical structure. In Ishimori's

positions21:1 Winter 2013

66

texts it supports the structure of erotic affect that oscillated between being
both externally aggressive and "numbed and passified" into being easily
manipulated. I'm not sure what to make of his frequent claim that he usually ends up having sex with the women he's investigating {CK, Sept. 1915,
113), but at the very least it underlines the reversals and slippages of identification and desire. Although he is for the most part aggressively sadistic
toward women,^^ in certain cases he is seduced by women he describes as
"cruel" (zangya^ute^i) and vicious.
It may at first seem far-fetched to claim that Ishimori's texts and other
colonial texts in which ideological fantasy appears heightenedsuch as the
examples I gave of Japanese responses to the March i Korean independence
movementcan tell us anything significant about how Japanese imperial power functioned. However, let's consider again the problem evident
in Japanese colonial studies about how to configure the discourse of PanAsianism and the claim on the part of Japanese elites of a shared cultural
history among themselves and Koreans, Taiwanese, South Pacific Islanders,
and Manchurians. Until quite recently, scholars have tended to assume that
most Japanese imperialists didn't grant credence to the concept but merely
deployed it when it was politically expedient, all the while continuing to
believe in Japanese ethno-racial exceptionalism.^^ However, the operations
of ideological fantasy can show how both these positions (Pan-Asian and
Japanese exceptionalism) and more could work together within the same
representation system. To be sure, the gossip and tabloid investigation genres
that Ishimori preferred tend to facilitate the wild oscillations among different subject positions. But as I tried to show in the beginning of this essay,
some of these slippages were fundamental for the ideological common feeling of Japanese imperialism "on the ground" in the colonial periphery.
Rather than treating ideological fantasy and its amending capacity to
conflate wildly contradictory elements, eroticizing and grotesqueing them
into something more comforting for colonizersas something insignificant and marginal in Japanese imperial discourse, I want to argue that it
was a central mode in which imperial power articulated and augmented
itself. A certain imperial common sense or feeling that is, was updated and
amended by ideological fantasy. However, the dream work of ideological
fantasy didn't operate in a vacuum. The ability of Japanese imperial subjects

Driscoll I Tabloid Coloniality

67

to identify with and contradictorily confuse and configure themselves with a

wide variety of subject positions was sustained by two other layers of social
discourse. The first was the "scientific" fact of the hybrid origins of "Japaneseness,"^o something that has become axiomatic in East Asian studies in
the last decade or so. The second, frequently overlooked aspect, is the ways
in which Japanese capitalism ideologized a homogeneity between colonizer
and colonized. For example, in advertisements in the colonial press showing
Japanese and colonized subjects coveting the same products, at commodity
exhibitions where colonizer and colonized mixed, and through the establishment in the mid-i92os of the "yen block" as common currency throughout the empire,^' there was a phantasmatic staging of the slippage and
reversibility between Japanese and colonized subaltern.^2 -phe abstracting
power of commodity capitalism replaces specific individuals with homogenizing abstractions such as "wage-laborer," "renter," and so forth. These
violent abstractions of capitalism that produced biopolitical subjects such as
"worker" and "capitalist" also produced the general category of "consumer,"
which at the ideological level of commodity capital flattened and blurred the
difference between "Japanese," "Koreans," "Chinese," and so on.
To conclude, the additional aspectual elements of a scientific, ethnological
Pan-Asianism, together with the abstractions of all subjects in the Japanese
empire by the leveling of commodity capitalism, contributed to the blurring of subject and object and colonizer and colonized in colonial ideology.
When considered as part of an ideological package constitutive of Japan's
colonialism, Pan-Asianism and commodity capitalism augmented the
effects of fantasy, some of which I have presented here. Therefore, the capacity of Japanese imperial men to ward off and transform threats and antagonisms generated by ideological fantasy was sustained by Pan-Asianism and
the commodified life world produced by colonial capitalism. This made it
that much easier for Japanese colonizer men to psychically invert the threats
directed against imperial rule and to confuse and reverse the subject positions of colonizer/colonized, active/passive, and male/female. Finally, not
only was Japan's colonial empire not interrupted by serious threats against
it, but this ideological packaging of fantasy, Pan-Asianism, and commodity
capitalism allowed it paradoxically to expand in the face of resistance and
threats,

positions 21:1

Winter 2013

68

The interpretations of Japan's colonialism we have in English-language

scholarship fall largely into two camps: modernization-inspired scholarship that locates the expanding dynamic of Japan's capitalist-imperialism
in the imperial mtropole, and more critical scholarship that focuses on the
ways in which the cynical deployment of tropes such as "Pan-Asianism" and
"coprosperity" was designed to mask Japan's raw power grab. My essay takes
a different approach and tries to demonstrate how resistance to Japan's colonial rule by Koreans was contradictorily a force that allowed colonization
to expand and intensify. Not cynical or explicitly manipulative, male colonizer psychic operations exhibit typical patterns of gender privilege found
in most other situations; Japanese male colonizers responded to threats and
attacks on them exactly as Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalytic theory has
hypothesized. That is to say, they psychically inverted antagonisms directed
againt them from Koreans and Chinese and configured them not as aspects
of a decolonial struggle but as pleas for more colonialism, and they reversed
violent and nonviolent resistance and rendered it as something resembling
admissions of love for Japan on the part of the colonized.

Notes
1. The Japanese Army claimed that just over five hundred people died in the incident, but
the Korean independence leader Pak Eun Sik argued in his authoritative 1920 The Bloody
History of the Korean Independence Movement (Hangu/{ dongnip undong ji hyeolsa) that 7,509
were killed and 46,303 arrested. This has become the standard figure ever since; see for
example Bruce Cumings, Korea's Place in the Sun: A Modern History (New York: W.W.
Norton, 1997).
2. Chosen llorn {Korea Review), April 1919, 4-8; hereafter, CK.
3. Keij nipp {Seoul Daily Report), March 7 and 8, [919; hereafter, KN.
4. See Moriyama Shigenori, Nif{/(an heig {The Merger of Japan and Korea) (Tokyo: Yoshigawa
Kbunkan, 1992); Iwanami Kza, ed., Kindai Nihon to sho/(uminchi {Modern Japan and Its
Colonies), vol. 6, Tei^ to {utsuj {Resistanceand Submission) (Tokyo: Ivvanami Shoten, 1992);
and Kang Chae-on and Iinuma Jiro, eds., Sho^uminchi^i Chosen no sha^ai to teif( {Society
and Resistance in Korea under Japanese Colonial Rule) (Tokyo: Miraisha, [982).
5.

See forexample the front-page pictures of elderly Korean men and religious leaders protest-

6.

See Keij nipp, November 6, 1920, and several commentaries in the Korea Review ranging
from June 1919 to May 1920. See also Hyun-Ok Park's "Ideals of Liberation," in Danger-

ing in Keij nipp of March 5, 1919.

Driscoll I Tabloid Coloniality

7.

8.
9.

10.

11.
12.
13.
14.
15.
16.
17.
18.

69

ous Women: Gender and Korean Nationalism, ed. Chungmoo Choi (New York: Routledge,
1998). The standard reference work in Japanese for the Korean liberation movement is
Kim Chng-myng's six-volume Chosen dol^uritsu undo (The Korean Independence Movement) (Tokyo: Hara Shobo, 1967).
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, "Can the Subaltern Speak?" in Marxism and the Interpretation
of Culture, ed. Lawrence Grossberg and Cary Nelson (Urbana: University of Illinois Press,
1988).
Ibid., 297. Spivak suggests that the British widely circulated sensationalist stories of widow
burning in order to justify more intervention in India.
Jacques Lacan offers a formula for fantasy as $ (the being o\esubject "sacrificed" to meaning) < > a. "< >" means "desire for or of" and "a" indicates the object that has replaced the
lost object. The object of desire is extremely variable and fluid and always contains part of
the sacrificed subject itself. See Jacques Lacan, Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis,
trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1978), 203-9; ^"d "Kant avec Sade," in crits
(Wor{s) (Paris: ditions du Seuil, 1966), 765-92. The most influential account of this in
recent critical theory is by Slavoj izek; see his The Sublime Object of Ideology (London:
Verso, 1989).
Judith Butler has perhaps the clearest analysis of this process, and I will be relying heavily
on her essay "Phantasmatic Identification and the Assumption of Sex," in Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex" (New York: Routledge, 1993), 93-120.
Sigmund Freud, "A Child Is Being Beaten," in Sexuality and the Psychology of Love (1911;
repr.. New York: MacMillian, 1963).
Jean Laplanche and J.-B. Pontalis, "Fantasy and the Origins of Sexuality," in Formations of
Fantasy, ed. Victor Brgin and Cora Kaplan (London: Methren, 1986), 26.
Slavoj izek. The Plague of Fantasies (London: Verso, 1997), 7-8.
Laplanche and Pontalis, "Fantasy," 24.
For a welcome exception to this, see Eri Hotta's Pan-Asianism and Japan's War ig^i-ig^
(London: Palgrave McMillan, 2007).
See Oguma Eiji. Tan'itsu minzo^u shinwa no /(igen (A Genealogy of Japanese Self-images)
(Tokyo: Shinyosha, 1995).
Mansh nichi nichi shinbun (Manchuria Daily Newspaper), March 18, 1924; hereafter, MNNS.
As the reader can see by the page numbers of these essays, this kind of tabloidlike and sensationalistic feature always appeared in the last part (gossip and readers' voices sections) of
these colonial monthlies following sections on politics (first forty to fifty pages), economics
(second thirty pages), and then education and technology (third thirty pages).
On the necessity for critics to read tabloid pieces together in the same ideological formation with middle- and high-brow forms, Gayatri Spivak wrote, "I choose the New Yor/(
Times because the broad spectrum that contains the Sunday supplements of newspapers.
Scientific American, Psychology Today, as well as the National Enquirer, constitutes part of an

positions 21:1

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70

ideological apparatus through which the consumer hecomes knowledgeable, the subject of
'cultural'explanation." Spivak, "Scattered Speculations on the Question of Value," in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Urbana:
University of Illinois Press, 1988), 169.
19. Chosen /(ron, August 1915, 151.
20. Michael Taussig, Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man: A Study in Terror and Healing
(Chapel HjII: University of N o r t h Carolina Press, 1987), xiii.
21. Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex" (New York: Routledge,
1993), 116.
22. A l^iseang is almost identical to a geisha in Japanese, as they are both entertainers and
trained niusicians and often, especially in the case of young and lower-class ^iseang, sex
workers.
23. See Chosen f(ron, November 1917, 117. This is very much like Warren Beatty's line in his
1998 film Bulworth in which he chirps that the best way to overcome racism is through
"reproductive racial deconstruction," or interracial sex. Beatty repeated the line in numerous promotional interviews for the film including an appearance on the Tonight Show. The
example in Beatty's film is the pathetic one of a sixty-two-year-old powerful white politician
and a beautiful twenty-six-year-old black fly-girl played by Halle Berry.
24. I want to be clear here that Ishimori is romanticizing relations that in most cases arose from
commercial sex transactions. There is very little that Is "free" about the original structure
of these relations for the Korean, Japanese, and Chinese women sex workers involved. Of
course^ there is a singularity to each of them whereby degrees of agency can be negotiated,
but the hierarchy determined by niarket exchange couldn't be any less free. My research on
the colonial monthlies Chosen llorn and Chosen oyobi Manshu published in the 1910s leads
me to the conclusion that erotic relations of all kinds were more numerous between Japanese women and Korean men, and these relations between colonizer women and Korean
men involved commercial sex work much less often and were structurally more democratic.
Ishimori is much less interested in those.
25. Chosen kpron. May 1915, 98. Edo^f(p means an "Edo kid"; Edo was the pre-1868 name for
Tokyo.
26. See his long essay championing erotic relations between Chinese and Japanese in Chosen
l{ron, August 1916.
27. Emile Benveniste, Problems in General Linguistics, trans. Mary Elizabeth Meek (Coral
Gables, FL: University of Miami, 1971), 146.
28. Both in the hints about his sexuality fln in the sadistic narrative mode of a male investigator
pursuing and investigating women month after month.
29. The 2007 >vork by Victor Koschmann and Sven Saaler, eds., Pan-Asianism in Modern Japanese History (New York: Routledge, 2007), has brought a welcome close to thisj together
with Hotta Eri s book mentioned in note 15.

Driscoll I Tabloid Coloniality

71

30. The Pan-Asian origin of Japan's phylogenesis was considered a scientific fact from the late
1800S, supported by archaeological and ethnological evidence produced both in Japan and
Europe. On this see Oguma, Tan'itsu minzoku shinwa no kjg^n, 134; Gavan McCormack,
ed.. Multicultural Japan: Paleolithic to Postmodern (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996);
and Nishikawa Nagao, Kokumin kpkjia kfisei to bunka hen'yd {The Formation of the NationState and Cultural Transformations) (Tokyo: Iwanami, 1996).
31. On the yen block, see Nihon Teikpkushugishi {Japan's Imperialism), vol. 2 (Tokyo: Daigaku
Shuppankai, 1987); and Matsumoto Toshir, Shinryaku to kflihatsu {Invasion and Development) (Tokyo: Ochanomizu Shobo, 1992). In English, see Michael A. Barnhart's/a;>an Prepares for Total War: The Search for Economic Security, igig-ig^i (Ithaca, NY: Cornell East
Asia, 1988).
32. The introduction and intensification of mass-produced commodities and the hegemony
of finance capital and debt are, of course, completely different processes. They are two of
the three formulas for capital (commodity, finance, industrial) that Karl Marx introduces
in Capital. Commodity capitalism or M-C-M is analyzed in Capital 1, part i, and finance
capital is dissected as M1M2 in Capital 1, part 2, chapter 4, "The Transformation of Money
into Capital," and in Grundrisse, "The Chapter on Capital." For a historical analysis of the
difference between the capitals in colonized Korea, see Keij Teikoku Daigaku Hgakkai,
Chosen keizai no kenky {Studies on the Korean Economy) (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1938).