At noon on december 3, 1937, a Japanese military parade—perhaps in ironic imitation of other processions by foreigners in Shanghai—began marching down Nanjing Road through the foreign concessions in Shanghai and along the Bund. In the lead was a military police (kenpeitai) car escorted by mounted troops bearing sabers at the hilt. They were followed by a large infantry detachment, machine-gunners, and finally by artillerymen. Japanese aircraft flew by overhead, and Japanese civilians lined the route along the way and shouted out choruses of banzai. When they arrived at Jessfield Park, they were met by a contingent of Italian ladies—allies in the anti-Comintern pact—waving Japanese flags. The event lasted until 3 p.m. and involved all 6000 Japanese troops stationed in the city. The next day a smaller contingent of troops marched in orderly fashion from Garden Bridge south to the Bund and through the concessions (Tokyo asahi shinbun, December 4, 1937, and December 5, 1937; cited in Muramatsu 1991, 308–9). Lest there be any doubt about it, this was clearly intended as a victory march, an effort to demonstrate the new reality of Japan's preeminence in Shanghai. However much this display may have been directed at the Chinese, with whom Japan had now been at war for five months, the Western residents of the concessions—with whom the resident Japanese had been at loggerheads for many years—were the primary targets. No such event ever took place in any of the other centers of Japanese residence in China, only in Shanghai, where all the Western powers were present in full force.

Hong Kongs Political Development since the 1960s has seemed to indicate bright prospects for democratization, since Hong Kong had attained most of the “prerequisites” for democratization (Lipset 1994). Hong Kong had considerable wealth and a rising middle class, no extreme or intolerable inequalities, and a high level of socioeconomic development. According to the wealth explanation of Lipset (1959) and Huntington (1984), Hong Kong's robust economy should make possible high levels of urbanization, industrialization, education, literacy, and mass media exposure, all of which are conducive to democracy.

This paper seeks to address the theme of this volume by exploring the place of the fabulous in the imaginary geographies of a lost world in the Indian Ocean.

I begin with three enchanted flights of imagination that seek to convey a useful truth. All three are occasioned by travel to a real place—Kanyakumari, the “Cape Comorin” of colonial atlases, and the land's end of the Indian peninsula and of its Tamil-speaking region (“Tamil Nadu”).

In diplomatic settings, the King of Chosŏn Korea showed different faces to different people between 1392 and 1592. The monarch looked toward the Emperor of Ming China as a status inferior and acted as a status equal with rulers of Japan and Ryukyu. In a recasting of the Chinese precept that diplomacy should not be conducted with subjects, he sat upon the throne as status superior to Japanese and Ryukyuans who had been permitted or denied tributary relationships. And he was the “sovereign” before Japanese and Jurchen “subjects” upon whom he had bestowed nominal appointments to military posts. Each posture necessitated a complex of policies, regulations, rites, and practices, including concealment of the tributary from imperial view.

By the time emperor meiji died in 1912, mourned as the first “modern” emperor, Japan had already acquired a sizeable colonial realm. Two years earlier, Japanese newspapers and magazines had celebrated the annexation of Korea, congratulating themselves on living in an empire that was now 15 million people more populous and almost a third larger than it had been prior to annexation. For journalists and politicians at the time, the phrase “Chōsen mondai” (the Chōsen question) served as a euphemism for the panoply of issues relating to Japanese interests in the Korean peninsula. Yet despite this contemporary recognition of the significance of empire, English-language studies of Japan have been slow to interweave the colonial experience into the history of modern Japan. Today, for modern historians, the question of how, or even whether, to incorporate these events into the history of Japan is itself a quandary—what might be termed the “Korea problem” in modern Japanese historiography.

This essay examines the transformation from undifferentiated frontier to geographic region of that part of northeast Asia controversially referred to as Manchuria. This transition—from space to place, as it were—long has tended to be seen primarily in terms of the extension of colonial interests into China in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. However, as I shall argue, the invention of this place began much earlier, in the seventeenth century, and owed substantially to the efforts of China's Manchu rulers, who claimed it as their homeland, the terre natale of the Qing dynasty (1644–1912). Even as the area was joined to the larger empire, Qing emperors took care to invest what I define as “Greater Mukden” with a unique identity.

As key components of the “peculiar metaphysic of modernity,” geographers in nineteenth-century Japan began to remap the world in the name of science and “civilization” (Mitchell 1991, xii). What is often overlooked in this equation of the map with modernity, however, is Japan's history of mapmaking before the modern period. Although the earliest imperial governments in Japan practiced administrative mapmaking on a limited scale beginning in the seventh century, it was only during the reign of the Tokugawa shogunate (1603–1868) that comprehensive land surveying and mapmaking by the state were standardized and regularized. The Tokugawa ordered all daimyo to map their landholdings in 1605; these edicts were repeated numerous times, such that by the early nineteenth century the bakufu had organized five countrywide mapmaking and surveying projects, and produced from those surveys four comprehensive maps of Japan.

In His Science-Fiction Novel The Diamond Age (1995), Neal Stephenson envisions a post—nation-state world of the future, where countless fragmentations of cultural identity differentiate humanity into spatially discrete tribal zones. Identity has become entirely spatialized, rendering its historical basis—that is, the experiences that generate a “collective memory” for a community—into a decontextualized montage of nostalgia. Stephenson writes a world where modernist notions of progress and development through linear time have been replaced by cultural differentiation across space: history has been conquered by geography. History has become little more than a resource for borrowed cultural traits that are mapped onto discrete territories, and identity is self-consciously constructed by adopting the ready-made form of a particular cultural group. As Stephenson allows us to observe the excesses of this kind of postmodern tribalism, China comes to represent the ultimate form of spatialized cultural identity. In The Diamond Age, China is represented more as an organic cultural system than a historically progressing nation. But it is only China's interior that is represented as such. The People's Republic has been splintered into an extremely wealthy coastal strip—essentially one big export processing zone—and an increasingly impoverished interior, which, in a self-orientalizing twist, now calls itself the “Celestial Kingdom,” and is ruled not by a Communist Party leader (Marxism having long since been denounced as a Western plot to undermine Chinese values) but by a self-proclaimed “Chamberlain to the Throneless King,” that is, a minister representing Confucius himself. Whereas the coast has rich and cosmopolitan cities that are among the finest in the world, the interior claims a moral superiority that comes only from its assertion of cultural purity; the interior is the “true” organic China.