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Bodies and Structures 2.0: Deep-Mapping Modern East Asian History

Abduction in reverse

Some women may have felt compelled to leave, and consular police at times appear to have applied psychological pressure to gain their assent. The Foreign Ministry archive does not contain transcriptions of actual dialogues between consular police officers and Japanese women (or Chinese men). But in a travelogue on Fuzhou published in the June 1936 issue of the journal of the Taiwan Communications Association (Taiwan Teishin Kyōkai zasshi), Miyachi Kōsuke recounted an “unknown story of the antlion’s pit” told him by Ishii Kanosuke, the principal of the Japanese elementary school in Fuzhou, concerning one such encounter (Miyachi 1936). In the autumn of 1934, Ishii had accompanied, at his own request, consular police seeking to recover a woman in Fuqing. (According to an article in the Taiwan Nichinichi shinpō in the same year, he had been involved in the extrication of seven or eight women.) Uneducated and illiterate, this woman had separated from her Japanese husband and was working in a small bar in northern Japan when she met a Chinese peddler and accompanied him to Fuqing, along with her Japanese son. But her family lost track of her and requested her recovery.

Finding her and her son in the village, the consular police began to work on her with their own rhetorical tools: “Your family are greatly worried about you and have asked for us to come get you. You’ve discarded your country and moved away from your relatives; don’t you feel unfilial? Just return to Japan for now, and you can always decide to come back here after discussing it with your parents. The government (okami) will even pay your way back to Japan.” She agreed to leave (and the police got her to start walking immediately), but was pursued by her husband, who told her not to believe them, reminded her that despite their poverty, “No one loves you like I do,” and promised to get the other village children to stop isolating her son Ken, whom he had always loved “more than a real son.” As she appeared unsure of what to do, he took the boy in his arms and told her that she could go back to Japan by herself. She didn’t really want to go, but was also tormented by feelings of guilt towards her parents, feeling on which the consular police played repeatedly, finally swaying her. (She took the boy with her.)

After relaying more poignant details from Ishii’s story, the author concluded: “This woman certainly did not go happily back to Japan. It is only that someone with more developed knowledge than she possessed worked their way into her weak woman’s psyche and moved her heart. I wonder if back in Japan, she is now leading a happy life. Compared to when she was working as a maid in a filthy, brothel-like bar, she may have been much happier living as a housewife with a family in China, even if she was materially poor.” In other words, this was an abduction in reverse, with consular police deploying their own “sweet talk” and empty promises, for they surely knew that this woman would never be able to return to China, even if she truly desired to do so. (For the concept of abduction in reverse, see Menon and Bhasin 1998, ch. 2.) While clearly seeking to mitigate sensational images of the antlion’s pit and highlighting the multiple forces affecting women’s lives, this account nonetheless reinforced the image of women as ignorant, hapless victims of guile and psychological manipulation that denied them true happiness.

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"Rescue" and "Recovery" missions
Accounts of "abducted" women, by inciting outrage and appealing to male anxieties, prompted enhanced efforts to reassert patriarchal national control over both Japanese women—seen as weak and frivolous by nature as well as often by their lower-class position—and over Chinese migrants. They also aligned with efforts to establish control over Chinese territory. Much of the work of discovering these women fell on the shoulders of the consular police force, a key instrument of Japanese expansion in Korea and China whose modus operandi was to assert de facto territorial claims for Japan by moving beyond treaty ports and legally recognized concession jurisdictions in tandem with the movements of Japanese nationals (Esselstrom 2009). However, not only did Japanese imperialism itself exacerbate the problem that Japanese authorities sought to control, but official efforts to investigate or recover women from the Fujianese periphery also revealed certain limits on the capacity of the imperialist state to “penetrate” the Chinese interior, prior to 1937, in the face of unreliable collaboration from local authorities.
This pathway focuses on consular police reports to investigate these dynamics. Mobilities are embodied differently, and produce different kinds of friction (Cresswell 2010). A complete study of the multiple, interrelated forms of mobility that the Fuqing-Japan relationship engendered should take into consideration the friction, tension, and uncertainty or fear faced by the consular police as they moved through inhospitable terrain. Their own experiences of movement may have shaped the ways they interacted with not only the Chinese residents of Fuqing and Gaoshan, but also with the Japanese women they were pursuing or investigating there—many of whom preferred (at least from what the reports indicate) to be left alone. The documents don't reproduce the actual conversations (only one magazine article provides any indications); could someone venture an imaginative reconstruction? Could we compare these situations to, say, those depicted by John Demos in his classic The Unredeemed Captive?
But we should also bear in mind that as agents of the Japanese imperial state, these policemen were tasked with surveying terrain, gathering information, and producing maps (like the one at the top of this page) that could expand the military and territorial capacities of the empire. Their experiences were no doubt informed by the tension between their power and their vulnerability.