Colonial Surveillance - 9781503644243

Colonial SurveillanceTechnologies of Identification and Control in Japan's Empire\nAuthor(s): Midori Ogasawara\nFormat: Hardback\nPublisher: Stanford University Press, United States\nImprint: Stanford University Press\nISBN-13: 9781503644243, 978-1503644243\nSynopsis\nIn 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.\n\nBased on archival research in Japan and China, as well as interviews with the Chinese survivors of Ja.