An Interview with Naoko Shimazu, Professor of History
This week, we feature a wonderful interview conducted by Dr. Swapna Kona Nayudu with her colleague Professor Naoko Shimazu at Yale-NUS College that tracks her fascinating journey to becoming an “established scholar”. Naoko’s 2014 article in Modern Asian Studies, “Diplomacy as Theatre: Staging the Bandung Conference of 1955” may well be the most cited article on the famed Asian-African conference in recent years; it’s a favourite of the Afro-Asian Networks collective. She has also written more widely about Japanese history from a range of global perspectives. Our exciting new interview series is introduced by Swapna here:
Interviewer’s Note:
In this new series, we will look at the non-linear and wonderfully evocative journeys that thinkers of Afro-Asia have taken. These are historians, social scientists, writers, artists. What is the spirit that these people are trying to capture through their work? How did they come to this instinct? Is Afro-Asia a manifesto or methodology? We begin with a conversation with Naoko Shimazu, who generously agreed to speak with me about her academic path, intellectual interests, and personal motivations to do what she does — write pioneering histories of Afro-Asia. The transcript has been edited for clarity.
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Swapna: We’ll start with your undergraduate education. Do tell us what you did and then tell us why you decided to do it.
Naoko: So, my father was a diplomat and that meant we lived in lots of different countries. I still remember distinctly the moment when I decided to study International Relations, which was the Iranian Revolution of 1979. We lived in Doha, Qatar at the time and our house was really close to the American Embassy, with my corner room facing it. Ayatollah Khomeini and the Iranian Revolution happened. I was maybe 14 at the time and I had just heard the news on the radio, and then Qatari tanks started rolling around the Embassy, to protect the Embassy. And I was thinking, “there are tanks here”. So, I really felt that there was something major happening in Iran. In fact, I had spent a few days in Tehran on the way to Doha in 1977, where it was the last few years of the Pahlavi Dynasty. And this revolution was now happening. That was an incredible shock to me because in those days nobody knew what was happening. Now you know everything almost ahead of time, but in those days, you had no idea. We were listening to BBC News in Doha, and they said there was a revolution in Iran, and the Shah’s family had fled the country. And there was this shock. I was really amazed that what was happening in Iran had a direct effect on my life. I was seeing the changes right in front of my house, through the window, by the American Embassy. That really was a defining moment for me. I thought, “Wow, I can’t believe this is affecting me so directly here in Doha”, which was quite a bit of distance away from Tehran. I thought, “I don’t understand this international relations thing” and I think that’s when I became interested. Of course, as I grew up in a diplomatic family, we often talked about international affairs, not in a scholarly way, but you know about things happening somewhere around the world — that kind of conversation would just crop up. Almost immediately after this, my father got posted to Winnipeg, Manitoba in Canada.
Swapna: That’s a big change. So, tell us about Manitoba!
N: It had nothing to do with Iran. I had a classmate who had escaped from the Khomeini Revolution, and she was an incredible and charismatic young woman. Always wore a leather jacket or had this funky hair. I was thinking as I was also studying International Relations at the University of Manitoba, I can see why she is here. Because the revolution took a conservative turn in Iran. I got really focused on politics and IR, that was my third and fourth year, and I continued to like it a lot. I was thinking about this the other day, quite a few of the professors who taught me, in fact almost all of them, were British educated. They were students at Oxford, some did DPhils, some were at the LSE. I think that is why the Department of Political Studies had a distinctly British approach which was qualitative, historical. There was quite a lot of history of political thought which was taught. And there was very little quantitative stuff, which was already beginning to make head waves. This is in the early 80s. So, I was at the University of Manitoba from ’81 to ’85. It was a four-year undergraduate honors programme. I always thought, you know, I am going to do what I want to do. I am going to study and if it means that this the only place in the world I can go to because they are giving me a scholarship, then I’ll go and study there. And that’s why I ended up at the University of Manitoba.
Swapna: Did you go away to Oxford immediately?
Naoko: After studying IR for four years, I didn’t want to be a diplomat. Mainly because my father was a non-career diplomat and I saw how bureaucratic and hierarchical everything was. I thought, as a daughter of somebody who was a non-career diplomat, I would get treated badly. Just to give you an example, I increasingly wanted to go and work for the United Nations or some UN agency or international organization. At that time, my parents were posted to North Yemen, Sana’a. To go to North Yemen from Winnipeg, you had to transfer planes. So, when I said I wanted to work for the UN, my dad said, well, the Foreign Ministry in Japan has a special little office just within the gates of its compound to recruit Japanese people into international organizations, because Japan was the second largest donor to the UN and yet it had a very small number of people as its professionals. So, I went to this place in Tokyo, and I went on my own and I said I was interested in working for the UN and becoming an international civil servant. There this person said, “Do you speak English?” And I said, “Yes, I graduated from a Canadian university.” To this, he said, “Well that’s no guarantee. You got to be clever, you know? You got to be really good to be an international civil servant and you have to pass lots of tests.” So patronizing! This is very deeply entrenched — perceptions of how good you are depending on your birth and your family.
Then I went to Geneva over the summer because I was so keen on this UN thing. Then, when my sisters and I arrived in Geneva, this is when we were all 20, 18 or so, this very nice man who was my father’s colleague in the Japanese Embassy there took us around and showed us around. One thing I really wanted to do was see the League of Nations. So, he took me there and I looked around, and then he said to me, again something not dissimilar to what this man told me, “Well it’s very difficult to get into the UN system. You must be brilliant to get in.” Basically, implying that with a University of Manitoba degree you will never be able to go there. That’s why I became more and more convinced — I was absolutely determined to get into a top university in the world for my MA. Because even if I graduate as top of the class at the University of Manitoba, it was not going to make any difference. So, I applied to Oxford, Cambridge, and LSE, and I got into all of them. But I chose Oxford because it was a two-year program and I thought I could stay in the UK for two years!
So that’s why I went for the Oxford MPhil in IR from ’85 to ’87. When I went to Oxford, I was very excited, but I went to this intro to IR class, where we were twenty of us in the class and half of them were from the Ivy Leagues and Ivy boys. They all wanted to be lawyers and were so articulate and could sound clever. And I was so, so intimidated because I came from a normal place. This is the power of these degrees, right? I think it was around week 3 or 4 of the first term of my MPhil degree, I went to see my supervisor, now a very famous international lawyer called Benedict Kingsbury. He said to me, “You got to remember that you got into this program on the same merit. So, it’s not like they’re any better than you. You’re the same. Ivy League people are just trained to be articulate. Just listen carefully to what they say. They’re not necessarily saying clever things, you know?” I used to have a massive problem of confidence, I never used to talk in class. I know it’s hard to believe, right? I had serious problems, and I got doubly intimidated by this environment. My supervisor said, “Don’t worry, what you’re saying is just as clever, if not more, than what they are saying.” I remember this one tutorial on something about the balance of power, and he said, “No, no, you’re not thinking. You’re just blabbering. I’m not letting you out of this room until you give me a reasonable answer.” Eventually I said something, and he said, “Right, that will do. You can leave now.” That, for me, was a critical turning point because I realized that thinking about something — you have to sit down and think, instead of just coming up with something that seems like an answer. I am eternally grateful to him for this.
In the MPhil, we had quite a lot of well-known people. Of course, at the time we didn’t know how we were going to turn up. For example, one of my classmates became the Foreign Minister and then, the Prime Minister of the Netherlands, Sigrid Kaag; one went to the Clinton administration.
Swapna: And what kind of courses did you take?
I came from Canada doing what one might call qualitative IR type courses — theory and some kind of deeply empirical history of Europe, a Middle Eastern history course, there was one course which was quite memorable called decision-making theory and I took two anthropology courses. The political anthropology course was absolutely riveting and interesting. And I thought, this is too dangerous; this is too interesting. So, I’m not going to do anthropology ever again. I thought of myself as a very practical, career-minded person. The only thing I regretted from my time at the University of Manitoba is that I never took a sociology course. At Oxford, I sat in one course called the Paris Peace Conference of 1919. I took it because of was already thinking of working on the Racial Equality Proposal. The teacher was Christopher Seton-Watson, who was the younger brother of Hugh Seton-Watson. Christopher came from London to teach me every week at Oxford. So, we had this room in what used to be the Faculty of Social Studies on George Street, which has now become a Modern History faculty building. He was just wonderful because his father had attended the Paris Peace Conference, so he would talk about his father. I felt this sense of history, which was kind of passing down. I think that was the most memorable course I took because I wrote so many essays for it and had this special space and time. I kept up with him and I wrote him a letter before he died, that I always wanted to say how much I appreciated your class.
After Hedley Bull, who I was initially assigned, died, I was assigned Martin Ceadel, but he subsequently fell ill. So, it was Benedict Kingsbury that was my MPhil supervisor, when I first wrote a version of the racial equality book. Before the end of my MPhil, I was introduced to this political historian at the University of Tokyo, Junji Banno. He was a very well-known political historian, a notoriously difficult figure. He thought I was an original thinker, and I just couldn’t understand why, because I hardly knew how to think. But he would say, “This is really interesting! You have a very original, unique perspective.” And I was thinking, “How could that be? I don’t even know how to think properly”. He had an enormous influence in the way I developed as a scholar. He had a way of thinking which was diagrammatic. It was him who told me how to think like that. So, that had a profound impact on the way I learned to think. So, when I’m really stuck, I rake out a blank piece of paper and I start jotting down the key points and think whether they are comparable points or do they not make sense as single points. That sort of cursory but quick categorization of ideas is what I learned — how to connect stories, different categories with each other.
Swapna: So, up to this point, you thought of yourself as an IR scholar?
Naoko: No, I had gotten into International History.
Swapna: During the DPhil?
Naoko: Yes. So, the MPhil thesis was already an International History type of thesis. And, because my supervisor was a political historian, I learned historical methodologies through him. In the good old days, you just didn’t learn methodology. You just kind of did what you did without consciously thinking about methodology. It’s quite unthinkable now, the kind of attitude we had about methodology.
Swapna: But it’s also quite ironic given your work now.
Naoko: Yes, I realized that I’m interested in methodology. Maybe because as I was doing an IR degree, I had two supervisors at Oxford for my DPhil — one was Andrew Hurrell and the other was John Darwin.
I didn’t know that I was ever going to become an academic because I was never interested in becoming an academic. This professor in Tokyo University used to say, “I can’t believe how lucky I am to get this job because you get paid to do research in things you’re interested in.” So, when I went to DPhil, I went to DPhil because I really wanted to work on this racial equality thing and make it into a PhD. That’s why I needed somebody who would really make sure that I get the degree. And Andy Hurrell had this reputation among the students of being someone who could produce PhD graduates. So, I thought I got to get Andy. So, I kind of lobbied by appearing in his class and saying something intelligent. Then, Andy said, “Okay, I’ll take you in as my student but there is somebody else who also wants to take you on.” I said, “Oh, really?” And he said, “Somebody called John Darwin.” So, I went and talked to him. And he explained that he was very interested in the intra-dominion relationship, and particularly their relations with Britain. And the Racial Equality Proposal was an excellent example of how this operated on the level of foreign policy.” So, I said, “Right, I can really see the advantage of this. So, please be my supervisor.” It was actually a wonderful balance, because Andy was this IR and more conceptual leaning. He made sure that it could pass as an IR dissertation. And John was a historian. He was such a knowledgeable guy, and I understood through him this highly nuanced relationship between the dominions; they were so different from each other and there was this slightly difficult relationship between them and how they would negotiate with the metropole.
Swapna: When did you finish the DPhil?
Naoko: I got examined in July 1995. So, the thing about the DPhil years is that I never really wanted to be an academic. This may seem stupidly idealistic, but I thought, “I got something I’m really interested in, and I want to do, but it doesn’t mean that I want to do it for the rest of my life”. I fancied myself becoming a documentary maker without ever doing anything about documentaries — I had a lot of unrealistic ideas. As my pragmatism set in, when I was about to finish my DPhil, I realized this is where I’m most marketable — in the academic market. So, I got this Birkbeck job, which was a brand-new job that they had just created. So, the thing is, I only get brand new jobs. I’m always the first time incumbent. At Yale-NUS College also, I was a first time incumbent as a full Professor in History. I only follow what I’m interested in. It’s the influence of Eric Hobsbawm — what he said at his 80th birthday — that made a lasting impact on the way I thought about how I could think about my career as a historian.
Swapna: Okay. So, Bandung!
Naoko: So, what happened was, after I finished my DPhil, that diplomatic history book, that was really the tail end of what at that time seemed like the decline of International History. And, I was really one of the last people to do what seemed to be a kind of fully fledged International History dissertation. Particularly when I joined Birkbeck, they were saying, “Oh, don’t do that kind of thing, it’s so passé.” I always felt that diplomacy is much more interesting than all this. Because, I grew up as a child of a diplomat, I thought this is such a limiting way studying the subject when it can potentially be so much more interesting. Then, when I finished my Russo-Japanese war book, which was for me my Japan book — I got to know Japan through that book. I had been so into Japan for like decades, I felt like now I want to do the outside world. So, what can I do? Then, I kind of thought the methodologies that I learned through the Russo-Japanese war book, why don’t I apply to diplomacy. Maybe that’s the way to think about diplomacy. Not through International History in the more conventional sense of the term, but something totally different.
I always thought ethnographically, it’s a very interesting group of people, diplomats. They are a very rules-bound community, and they kind of know how to behave with each other. For me, that was the most striking aspect of growing up as a diplomatic child, that there was a language — not a specific language — but a language of communicating and understanding each other. I often wondered about this. Why is it that my dad goes to another posting which is totally at the opposite end of the world, and you still slot into the diplomatic community there. Then he leaves to go to the other side of the world again, and he slots in again. So, I always thought, how does that happen? So, I began to think there must be some community-accepted rules and etiquette that people follow, and therefore, wherever you come from, you know implicitly how to function in a new environment. I always thought diplomacy was very performative. They’re always acting a role. They go to National Day parties and have to wear a kimono — like my mother who used to wear a kimono in 50 degrees Celsius weather. I used to say, “Mom, why do you do this, it’s crazy!” and she would reply, “We got to do this, we got to wear proper attire. See the dress code says it”. So, I said, “So does the Colonel such and such from the French Embassy, does he wear military uniform then?” She said, “Yes, he does.” In this heat? “Yes.” We are all standing there, sweltering. So, I thought, yes, these people are really strange and funny. Diplomacy is theatre for me.
That’s how I got into this whole idea. I got it through this desire to make diplomacy more interesting. Because I always thought it was more interesting than people gave it credit for. I really didn’t know how to do that until I had done this second book on a totally different subject. But methodologically I learned this social and cultural history, what kind of questions to ask and how you can approach this. It felt strangely familiar because I was now going back to what I was studying when I was an undergraduate and MPhil student, like 20th century history of international societies. Initially, I was going to pick about two, three different case studies from the 20th century to apply this idea. Then, I realised that Bandung is particularly interesting because I remember learning about it when I was a third year undergraduate in Canada. I remember my professor being so scathing about it. “Bandung? Huh. They didn’t do anything. They just spoke with each other, these Asians and Africans, and didn’t do anything.”
This is why I was flabbergasted. In 2005, after the 50 year anniversary, there were a lot of new books that came out. By this time I was running this seminar with Sunil Amrith, called the “Comparative Histories of Asia” at the Institute for Historical Research in London. There was so much interest in Bandung, from a generation of scholars at least one or two generations younger than me. I thought, this was interesting. All I remember was this useless conference that didn’t achieve anything. Then why are these people so interested? Then I reread some of the literature that was coming out and thought, yes, of course, it is interesting. This is perfect, because traditional scholarship said it didn’t achieve anything.
This is why this kind of performative element was particularly important because a lot of literature that was coming out from 2005 — that period after the 50th anniversary — essentially, all concluded that whatever Bandung was, it was symbolically important. I got obsessed with these words — “symbolically important”. What does it mean? Nobody explained it in any of the books I read. I thought I’m going to find out what this “symbolic” meant. That’s how the book became about Bandung. This thing of just looking at this Afro-Asian moment really interested me. The fact that the 50th anniversary literature on the whole raved about it meant that there must have been something that is different. Otherwise, they could have easily said it was another meeting of African and Asian leaders in Bandung. Then, when I read more primary sources on Bandung, I thought this conference is really interesting. That’s how I started. Then, I got really interested in working out this methodological framework because nobody had really studied a diplomatic event in this way.
At least that’s what I thought at that time. We always think we’re the first ones and then we realise there was actually some other work. Because I only knew Japanese and English and a little bit of French, I thought I had to actually construct a framework. Which is why IR became handy. I thought I needed to come up with my own thing because there is no thing that I could use as a prototype framework. So, I had liked theatre from the age of 24. I thought, I have seen a lot of theatre in London and I continued to be interested even when I left London. So, I thought, yes, why don’t I think of it as a play.
So, I was able to come here [Singapore] as a Visiting Senior Research Fellow. People here really liked it. I realised that the locality in which these international events take place is very important. Because it must have some effect on the way diplomacy is conducted. If the Bandung Conference had been hosted in New Delhi, it would have been different; it would not have been the same. Yet, when you look at international diplomacy, people hardly ever look at the local context. So, being here, going to Indonesia, I got very interested in Indonesian performance theatre. When you read Indonesian newspaper clippings and stuff from the conference, it kind of says things which were different from other descriptions. I thought these people, seeing what’s happening in front of them, must have thought of it as a play.
Then, when I went to Indonesia, and I realised that the whole staging concept of Wayang is different from the Western stage, and even the Japanese stage. So, I began to think of the Bandung Conference and particular parts of it as a sort of special theatrical space that had been staged by the organisers. It had a much more inclusive atmosphere because it’s the whole city that is inclusive, it’s not just the Gedung Merdeka, the main venue and the conference rooms within it. So, all of this happened because I went to Indonesia and I understood that “you thought you were going to do this diplomacy as theatre thing and you were just like a typical international historian coming from the West and just trying to put this concept of theatre on an event which happened in Indonesia”. I realised that that’s not right. And even the conception of frontstage-backstage, it’s actually quite limiting. The Wayang conception is very different. I began to think that diplomacy is actually a much bigger thing and much more, in some sense, present in society than the real “high politics”. So, this whole idea of an event as a spectacle is actually very important to what I do. And I try to normalise diplomacy as an event that takes place in society. And, what’s interesting for me at the moment is the difference between political theatre and diplomatic theatre. Politics and diplomacy are always overlapping. I’m thinking about that now. When I finish my book, it will be in there somewhere.
Swapna: I think the theorisation in your work is quite explicit. Even where historians end up doing it, it is serendipitous. It’s so implicit. Some historians are so articulate that that articulation leads to a conceptualisation but it’s almost not intended. But, if you are trained as a social scientist, or an IR person particularly, you’re always concerned about the “so what?” question. There is always this idea that what does all this amount to? What is it explaining? Your work, even just the Bandung pieces, are so much of a social science project.
Let me ask you two questions. One is on Afro-Asia. We’re hoping that students and early-career faculty will be reading this interview and learning from it. Of course, you’ve spoken about the methodological ways of approaching this, but what should someone keep in mind, maybe also particularly when they are not trained as a historian and they are approaching Afro-Asia, or are trying to work in this field of Afro-Asian history, is there anything that you think is just so fundamentally different about doing this kind of work?
Naoko: On the whole, people outside of history are more interested in my work, rather than historians. So, I thought, I’m kind of becoming more of a social scientist as I grow older. I just don’t tell stories. It’s not enough for me to tell stories. Of course, historians don’t do conceptualisation, but they manage to convey certain things. But, I kind of need that grip on whatever I am talking about. So, I realised I need some kind of theorisation.
The problem is, it’s so politicised, this field. So, your positionality matters a lot — how you think of yourself as a scholar. I am of a totally different generation. I started functioning as an academic in 1996. That is almost three decades ago. So, what mattered to me then is very different from what matters now. For example, my main thing for a long time had been about how not to pigeon-hole Japan into a culturally essentialist place. So, my first topic was about this international context and Japan was the main player, so were the United States, Britain, and Australia. That places Japan really in this high politics realm of international diplomacy. And then my second book, I had consciously written that book, although it’s on Japan, as comparative modern societies at war. And that was because I was in Britain which has a lot of war history and cultural history. So, I never thought of Japan as a special place. So, that again was really trying to push Japan as one of the modern nation states engaging in modern warfare, so there was some level of comparability.
Then, Bandung is another thing — I’ve never consciously worked on it as Afro-Asia. Because for me, the interest is this global diplomatic moment. I became interested in Bandung and Afro-Asia because it seemed to me to be quite a unique, special moment. But I am interested in Asia, and my comparative advantage as a scholar is doing something about Asia. So, when I tell people who study Japan that I’m doing Bandung, they all think I’m writing about Japan at Bandung. It’s very difficult for them to understand that I’m working on something which has nothing to do with Japan. Because I’m so seen as a Japan scholar by those people. But this is not about Japan at Bandung. I’m just somebody who has had this sort of cosmopolitan life, realising that you can tell some important story about this mid-century moment in the 20th century, and that doesn’t happen to be the Soviets and the US — the Cold War nexus, or something like the China and the Soviet Union. It’s about the countries that were so new and emerging and different. Many of them freedom fighters before and they get together — if you think of the incredible sense of euphoria they must have felt. Like, you finally made it! You were thrown in the dungeon, and now you’re a statesman. And you’re there, in 1955.
So, I thought it must have really mattered, that moment. And of course the Western Cold War literature was like, “But hey, what did they do? Nothing.” Because they are trying to put their yardstick against what this event was. And it just doesn’t work. So, what I really wanted to say through this thing is that actually, there are many different kinds of diplomatic moments. And it doesn’t have to be your moment that is the only moment. This is a basic thing but it is very difficult to get it across to people who study colonial history more generally. If you look at the newspapers in 1955, they were all worried about Bandung. Every single big state. So, I think it actually meant something. It really did. What’s really important is to be able to tell the story from that point of view. What I was trying to do initially, like a typical international historian trying to look at it like this — top-down. But I’m trying to look at it from the bottom-up. So, I’m trying to introduce this concept or maybe it’s already there, that is, why can’t we study global diplomatic events from the grassroots up. And you’re surely going to get a different kind of history coming out of that. Also, something that really amazed me was that somebody told me, maybe a decade ago, when I was here in 2011 when I presented the first version of the Bandung work, which became the Modern Asian Studies paper, this individual said to me, “It’s very interesting how your work connects with each other. Because you did the Russo-Japanese War, which was the big Asian moment vis-a-vis the European big power Russia. And then you did the Paris Peace Conference, which was Japan’s challenge. So, Japan’s challenge in 1905 and Japan’s challenge in 1919 through the Racial Equality Proposal. And now you’re doing 1955, which is the Afro-Asian challenge to the global norms.” I never thought of it like this. I think of my research as very methodologically driven.
Swapna: This leads me to my second question which was that — how do you think of your body of work? We have talked a little bit about all these projects, there are some linkages and we have talked about them in isolation. But in terms of everything you’ve written and thought about so far.
Naoko: This is the point I want to come back to about Eric Hobsbawm, who made a really, really important statement on his 80th birthday conference that Birkbeck College held for him. This was few years after I started at Birkbeck as a young historian. He was involved with Birkbeck all his life and he had turned 80 so he quit the New School in New York and came back to London, and subsequently he became the President of Birkbeck. So, there were fantastic papers being presented by — David Blackbourne, Roy Foster, all these people came and gave amazing papers. Then Eric said in the end, “People often ask me about how I managed to create this thing called the Hobsbawm School of History.” Particularly because he did the initial trilogy. He said in all truth, that he had never seen his work as a system. He had never tried to establish a Hobsbawm School of History. The only thing he ever followed was what interested him in that particular point in time.
And I thought, “Oh my god! Thank you so much for this.” This was the time when people would say, “Are you going to work on World History now? Now that you have done racial equality?” As I was thinking that I cannot think of anything that I’m interested in and then Eric said those words. I thought, thank god, I can just follow my interests. I don’t have to follow any expectations about what I should do next. I just basically decide. He said, “One of my most influential works is The Invention of Tradition. That book, which is supposedly the second most important thing I did, was just an idea, and why don’t we do a conference together?” And that’s how it came about. Conceptually, it’s probably the most important book he has done. And he said it just came out of this great idea that we thought we had.
I was so naive, I thought scholarship was all about building things. You always build things up brick-by-brick. This is why I was so troubled not to be able to think of anything after the Paris Peace Conference book. Because I just couldn’t find anything of interest. And that was because I always thought I had to do this to be this established scholar. I can’t tell you how important those words were for me. That changed my life, because I thought, great, I can read soldier’s diaries then. I don’t have to go back to Kew Gardens [National Archives, London] and figure out what I want to do.
Swapna: That’s excellent. I think that will be the last line in this for sure — “I don’t have to go back to Kew Gardens.”
Naoko: *Laughing* although I have been there though.
Swapna : But you don’t have to and that is the important thing. You talked a little bit about living in Malaysia — how long were you in Malaysia for?
Naoko: For four years from 1966–1970. And that was the first time I came to Singapore. We have photos from that period — visiting Singapore and a photograph in front of the old Merlion which was very small. There was the General Post Office which became the Fullerton. I asked my mother, and she said Kuala Lumpur at the time was such a beautiful place. I said, “What was it like coming to Kuala Lumpur coming all the way from Tokyo?” She said that she just couldn’t believe how beautiful it was. Everything so clean, tidy, immaculate. Kuala Lumpur She was astonished by how hot and steamy and dirty Singapore was when they came here. I went to this kindergarten called Good Shepherd’s Convent from the age of 5. I went back to Kuala Lumpur on a nostalgic trip with my sisters in 2011. I said, I really want to see the Good Shepherd’s Convent, I just hope the building at least exists. It had turned into “Bombay Restaurant”.
Swapna: You’re such a global figure — you have lived in so many places, you have travelled so much, you also do research on so many things. So, it’s interesting to also see this very Japanese you.
Naoko: Yeah, which I didn’t think was Japanese, you see. I just thought this is how I grew up in these four years. I think in retrospect, those four years had a tremendous influence on me. Maybe there are things that I take for granted or do which have originated from that period of total domestic existence in Japan. I couldn’t speak English at all in Japan after six months. So, I led a completely Japanese life. I was perfectly happy.
Swapna: So, when you went to New Zealand and you had to learn English
N: It was terrible. I couldn’t learn. I found it very difficult to learn English. It took me probably around the age of 16 to feel comfortable enough operating in English. By then, I was in Canada and I was in high school — grade 12 which is the last year, and I suddenly saw one day that I am not really having any problems understanding the things I am reading. I can understand everything that is being said, I can say things, and I can write reasonably well. It was a really difficult journey. And it was partly also to do with my attitude to language, which is that, I think that I really want to be able to master the language, which is almost impossible. But I really want to — not just be able to speak and write English — but really get to the core of the language.
This is why, I think it’s Britain’s fault that my Japanese identity got stronger and stronger. Everybody said, “You’re Japanese. You’re from Japan. You’re going back to Japan.” How can I go back to Japan? I left Japan when I was 10. Even when my parents were working, they never lived in Japan. This is why think even though I lived away from Japan for such a long time, maybe the identity remained there steadfastly. In Britain, I was never allowed to forget that I was Japanese. So, in a funny way, here in Singapore, it’s much more sophisticated — this kind of complicated heritage. Whether it is familiar heritage or cultural overlap.
Swapna: Is this why you became interested in Bandung?
Naoko: So, my PhD topic, which was on the Racial Equality Proposal at the Paris Peace Conference. I felt that it was kind of autobiographical question I had all my life living outside of Japan, living in lots of different countries. Why is there racial inequality, racial prejudices, discrimination. That’s why I was intrigued when I read EH Carr’s End of History. I think it had one sentence..” and the Japanese proposed a racial equality clause at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919.” And I didn’t know this. I thought, “Oh, the Japanese did?” Then I kept on thinking why did the Japanese do it? Because I, as a Japanese person, experienced so much prejudice and discrimination growing up outside of Japan. When I read that sentence in EH Carr’s book, also in other textbooks on early 20th century international history, I had no idea that the Japanese did this kind of thing. So, why did they do this and what was it all about? That’s how my PhD topic started. Then I found out that actually, the Japanese were not thinking about universal racial equality. They were thinking about protecting their situation vis-a-vis the white countries in the international system because they didn’t want to be discriminated against and they were at the Paris Peace Conference as the fifth great power. But they were then knocked out, because the five leading powers at the Paris Peace Conference became the Big Four. Japan was knocked out because it became such a summit diplomacy type of situation.
One of the problems with Japanese diplomacy was that all they did was convey information of what was happening in Paris back to Tokyo, and the decision-making structure of Japanese diplomacy was such that it took a month or two to get replies from Tokyo. At that particular time in Japanese history, the foreign ministry essentially did not have decision-making power in foreign policy. So, they had this what was called the transcendental committee, which was officially called the Diplomatic Advisory Council. The idea was that diplomacy was too important to be left to the foreign ministry. So, they had the military, and this clique of top people in the Japanese Government, and also non-official people. They got together and met once every few weeks and discussed things. It might have been okay for the usual range of foreign policy issues, but when you’re talking about the Paris Peace Conference, which was an interesting Conference where things were decided on the spot, Japan simply couldn’t decide anything. So, because they couldn’t make any decisions, they also did not include Japan in the Big Four.
But this became a major source of embarrassment for Japanese foreign policy, the Japanese foreign ministry and the Government. Japan was one of the big five, officially the fifth great power, and now they were kicked out of this group, so where does that leave Japan? We are not a medium power, we are not a small or lesser power, as that was the other group. And China was in that group, Belgium was in that group, and all others. So, that decision-making structure made Japanese diplomacy totally ineffective in Paris. So, whatever they did, particularly on the racial equality issue, was all done essentially without much confirmation from Tokyo. So, Tokyo got very angry about this, because they were told the results of what had happened rather than them conveying the decisions that had to be conveyed. So, the racial equality proposal was an excellent example of this problem that the Japanese faced.
So, I did the PhD and I found out that it was actually a political proposal; it was not a universal principle of justice. I did this very detailed work on the wording of the proposal and how it got to that wording, at which stage it turned to this wording, and who did the drafting. If you read my book, it’s in the first chapter on negotiations. I really traced that down by doing this cross-archival research in Japan, the UK, US. I pretty much nailed it down. The only archives I couldn’t go and check because I didn’t have funding was Australian archives, which I would have really liked to have gone and looked at Billy Hughes’ papers. You’re a PhD student so you don’t have money to do this. Anyway, having done that, I thought…..people make a lot of assumptions about these things. After I wrote that book, I came across this other book that took this issue entirely as a universal racial principle issue. And I thought, that’s actually not what the Japanese were doing. So, it’s not what the British and the Americans were thinking was being discussed. I realised that it’s really tricky, this principles of justice issue. If you look at the title “Racial Equality Proposal”, you would assume that it’s about the universal principle, but it isn’t. It actually has this big political baggage attached with every single country that was involved in this negotiation.
So, for a long time I thought this is the problem with not understanding history. You interpret things in the way you want to interpret things although you may not be historically accurate. It takes a life of its own. And it’s true about other publications too. Once it’s in the public domain, people just think of it whatever they want to, no matter what the original intention was. In the early days, when I was young and idealistic, I used to think, that’s not what it was about. But then, recently, when I got into my 50s, I began to think, people knew it as a Racial Equality Proposal. Nobody actually used the official translation, which was “proposal to abolish racial discrimination”. I thought, one way to look at this is to think that even though historically it’s inaccurate to say that Japan fought for universal racial equality in 1919, still, to be on the agenda internationally at that point…so my conclusion in the book was that actually, it needed Japan to do this because no white country would have ever done this.
So, I thought if I were to rewrite it now, I would mention that more. Because it did help, although initially it was not the reason why it got tabled. But it’s the after effect of the proposal and the principles which were being discussed Now, academically, we are much more into this idea of studying the afterlife of something. But this quite a recent thing. It just certainly wasn’t there in the 1990s. Even in the 2000s not many people talked about the afterlife of something. Because you wanted to understand that moment and not what happened after. Now that we are in an era of studying afterlives, I think that the afterlife of this proposal is very interesting. I don’t think I would have done the whole thing differently, but I would have thought about this much more if I were doing it now.
By now, I had changed my affiliation and my belonging to the History Department, as Lecturer of History at Birkbeck. I thought history was the most liberating subject in the world. I could actually write the history of anything — history of the table, history of pastries, food, history of textiles, history of anything. So, I thought I will do something that I was never allowed to do, or even think was possible, which was Japanese soldiers’ diaries. I really wanted to read the conscripts’ diaries. One of my colleagues at the time was doing this sort of work and I thought why don’t I work on the Russo Japanese War. I didn’t want to work on the Second World War because in Britain there is so much politics and controversy if you want to work on it. So, I thought I actually want to do field research. When I was studying the 1919 Peace Conference, I realised that the 1904–05 war was quite pivotal for Japan, so I’m going to work on that. I spoke to my colleagues and they said, “Oh my god, Naoko. This is so interesting. You should definitely do this. I think about attitudes towards death.” I thought, “how do you study attitudes towards death?” So, they recommended me readings. My colleague Richard Evans suggested, “Why don’t you read these ones and begin — you might get an idea of how to approach this kind of topic.” It was a very interesting time, I had to educate myself again.
Swapna: When you talk about conscripts’ diaries, I am thinking you are kind of doing subaltern history before it became the big subfield it is today.
Naoko: Yes, because I never thought of myself as doing subaltern history at all. The problem was, these things are so powerful, but in order to write about them academically, I had to figure it out. Because soldiers’ diaries are so personal, so how do you actually come up with an academic piece of work from these things? So, I read and thought a lot about how I am going to write these things. So, I actually traced some of the journeys of the soldiers. That book on the social and cultural history of the Russo-Japanese War was to me an incredible introduction to Japan. I travelled to every single prefecture in Japan apart from about 5. There are loads of prefectures in Japan. So, one day I was in Shinkansen, from Tokyo to Okayama or somewhere, but beyond Kyoto. And I was looking out of my window and they were announcing that “We are passing blah blah station”. And I thought this is exactly what those soldiers saw and wrote about. The current day bullet train lines were the main transport lines of that period which were nationalised for the war. The soldiers went on the current Shinkansen lines to Hiroshima. I thought, “I’m sitting here, hundred years later, experiencing the same journey. So, I called it “the journey of farewell” because you kind of mobilise the soldiers’ identities which had been completely localised. There were local identities, i.e., which town you came from or at the most the nearest provincial city. But suddenly they had to adopt this Japanese identity and they never understood this very well because most of them were just about literate. So, you’re told that you are ging to fight as soldiers of this Japanese nation and they think, “We are Japanese people. What is that?”
Swapna: That is amazing.
Naoko: And, for me, I really had to find out about these soldiers’ contexts, like the local milieu. So, I did a lot of local history archival work and also just local history — kind of getting a sense of what it was like living in the village at that time as a tenant or a farmer. I researched everything — what was village life like? I looked at some of the archives of the local village families and how they talked about the others. So, I did amazing amount of research for that book. Incredible amount of work. Then, I also had to learn how to do social/cultural history because my book was about international or diplomatic history before, and this was so totally different. So, when I did that book, I always felt that the problem with studying Japan is that people like to essentialise it, and some of the people who study it like to essentialise it. But what you see in Japanese war-time societies in 1904–05 is what you see in modern societies at war. I had this eye-opening moment when I went to talk at a conference. I was invited by the Cultural Historians of First World War in France and Germany in Paris. There, I gave my spiel from 1904–05, and the whole room was dumbfounded by what I said, because they thought the kind of things that the Japanese did in 1904–05 as a modern society had been created by Europeans during the First World War. And they could not believe that an Oriental nation was doing this ten years before. So, in fact, you can connect 1904–05 to the First World War with this trajectory of modern warfare and how societies experienced warfare and mobilised. So, by connecting with people outside, who were doing comparative studies, they thought it was not even the same war, gave me an incredible insight into my own work.
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An edited volume by Naoko Shimazu & Matthew Phillips entitled Cold War Asia: A Visual History of Global Diplomacy is forthcoming from Cambridge University Press, UK.
