Gai Kei: The Japanese consular police in Northeast Asia, 1880--1945

This dissertation explores the role played by the Japanese consular police in the expansion of Japan's colonial empire in Northeast Asia. Beginning in the early 1880s, the Japanese Foreign Ministry initiated a policy of stationing police forces in its treaty port consulate offices across late Choso˘n dynasty Korea, later expanding the practice throughout China after the turn of the century. Charged with the duty to "protect and control" Japanese civilian communities on the Asian mainland, the consular police have the longest history of any Japanese colonial institution. Significantly, my research has revealed that the consular police were deeply involved in the surveillance and suppression of the Korean independence movement in exile throughout Chinese treaty ports and the Manchurian frontier during the 1920s. In fact, they evolved over the years from a relatively benign public security organization into a full-fledged political intelligence apparatus devoted to apprehending purveyors of "dangerous thought" throughout the empire. This aspect of Foreign Ministry activity on the northeast Asian mainland and its consequences dramatically challenge widely held notions about Japan's interwar diplomacy in East Asia.; In broad historiographic terms, the story of the consular police compels historians of modern Japan to reconsider the hard boundaries often drawn between the spheres of "formal" and "informal" empire. In addition, by illuminating the fervor with which consular police forces pressed for unilateral solutions to Japan's continental security crises, my analysis challenges orthodox treatments of the relations between civil and military institutions in the imperial Japanese state. Beyond contributions to the historiography of modern Japan however, this work also adds to an emerging field of East Asian transnational history. Dealing with broader problems of prewar identity and nationalism, this project aims to approach Northeast Asia as a region of complex and dynamic social, economic, and political forces, thereby freeing us from the ahistorical trappings of postwar national history narratives in Japan, China, and Korea.