Congratulations on being awarded the 2024 John Legge Prize for the Best Thesis in Asian Studies in Australia in 2023! Can you tell us a bit about your thesis? What’s the topic it explores and what did you find?
My dissertation examines the politics of the marital family in the Japanese empire. It focuses on metropolitan Japan as well as the two major formal colonies of Korea and Taiwan in the 1930s and 1940s. Specifically, it analyses two contemporaneous but conflicting discourses which aimed to reshape marriages in service to the imperial state. The first, “eugenic marriage”, aimed to impress on populations the importance of health and heredity in making marital decisions, and the second, interethnic marriage, aimed to promote marriages between Japanese people and their Korean and Taiwanese colonial subjects. I argue that the ongoing debate over the intimate act of choosing a spouse reveals broader disagreements within imperial discourse over pivotal issues such as public health, assimilation policy, sexual morality and family relations. Ultimately, I suggest, these debates expose persistent anxieties over the imagined future of empire.
Do you have a favourite anecdote, moment or insight from doing your research?
In the broadest sense, I am interested in the connections between widescale political issues—such as war, colonial rule and imperial expansion—and everyday life. I am particularly interested in the ways in which these wider political histories shape the intimate politics of the family. What excites me most about historical research is finding personal stories in the archives which can really bring history to life. To give one example, while conducting archival research in Taiwan, I was able to find a petition written by a Taiwanese man named Lin Qingxiu in 1920 appealing to the colonial state to change family law so his marriage to his Japanese bride could be officially recognised. Reading his letter was fascinating, even if at times frustrating as I tried to decipher his handwriting!
What was the most challenging aspect of doing this research?
The most enjoyable and the most difficult parts of my research involved doing extended archival research overseas in Japan, Taiwan and Korea. In 2020, I was in Korea when the COVID-19 pandemic first began and had to make a hasty return, arriving back shortly before border closures with Korea came into effect. My last few days in Korea, when I was receiving what felt like a constant stream of text message alerts about new cases in the country—amid a mask shortage and before vaccines were available—were rather nerve-wracking! Luckily, I had already conducted significant archival research in Japan and Taiwan so I was able to make some revisions to my research plans and complete my thesis despite not being able to return to Korea for several years.
Is there a particular scholar or scholars whose work you admire or shaped your academic trajectory?
A PhD is a long journey and there are many people I could thank who have supported me along the way. I was lucky to have an incredibly knowledgeable and supportive supervisory team at ANU, including Simon Avenell, Ruth Barraclough, Kyung Moon Hwang, Hyaeweol Choi and the late Carol Hayes. I feel particularly thankful for Carol Hayes, who first approached me when I was an undergraduate student in Japanese studies to ask me if I had considered applying for the Honours program. At the time, I did not know anyone who had pursued higher degree research and had not considered it as a future career option for myself. Carol’s interest in me as an undergraduate student really helped to encourage me and lit the spark that set me on my path towards a PhD and—hopefully—an academic career. Carol’s dedication to mentoring the next generation of scholars was personally incredibly meaningful and it is something I hope I will be able to pass on myself in turn.
What are you working on now?
After submitting my PhD, I spent nine months in Taiwan studying Mandarin at National Taiwan University on the Huayu Enrichment Scholarship. My research previously had predominantly used sources in Japanese and Korean. It had always been a dream of mine to learn Mandarin, but I hadn’t managed to be able find the time to seriously study it before then, and so I was only able to incorporate Taiwanese voices in my dissertation in a limited way. I hope to build on this language learning experience to engage more deeply with Taiwanese scholarship going forward—and to facilitate my love of travelling and Chinese food.
In July this year, I began a Korea Foundation postdoctoral research fellowship at Monash University, where I am currently working on extending my dissertation into a book manuscript. This has given me the opportunity to pick up some of the threads of my research I was unable to complete for the thesis, due to COVID-19 disruptions. I am particularly interested in expanding my dissertation’s comparative analysis of colonial Taiwan and Korea, with the ultimate aim to write a book which intertwines the histories of the colonies and the metropole. To this end, I am currently expanding my dissertation’s analysis of eugenics movements in the colonies by exploring a Korean eugenicist organisation, called the Chosŏn Eugenics Association, and its linkages to the Japanese eugenics movement.
Image: Supplied
