| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.4

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Asia

Alexis Dudden . Japan's Colonization of Korea: Discourse and Power. (The Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute.) Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press. 2005. Pp. x, 215. $45.00.
From their first days in power, the leaders of Japan's Meiji government (1868–1912) understood the importance of capturing the minds of their Western counterparts through the use of "standard"—i.e. European—diplomatic rules and vocabulary. Indeed, says Alexis Dudden, language was nearly (although not quite) as important as actions in winning international support for Japan's colonial takeover of Korea between 1873 and 1910.	1
In a short work that is sometimes meandering, often polemical, and always provocative, Dudden argues not only that Japan mastered that era's "vocabulary of power" (p. 1) and of "enlightened exploitation" (p. 8) but that the colonial nations of the West cooperated wholly—and willfully—in what was, in effect, the "legal erasure of a country" (p. 12). While Japan's activities in Korea have been described quite fully by other scholars, most recently in Peter Duus's The Abacus and the Sword: The Japanese Penetration of Korea (1995), Dudden is the first to analyze their "discursive aspects" (p. 2). Drawing on a rich menu of diplomatic treatises (French, English, and Japanese), journalistic accounts (including Korean newspapers), missionary archives, and government documents, she discusses both the importance of rhetoric in shaping international relationships and the need to incorporate Japan's experience into the broader theories of imperialism, most of which have either ignored Japan's case or glibly labeled it "late" or "different" (p. 24).	. . .

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