Hyun Kyung Lee, and Shu-Mei Huang (2023) Asia's difficult heritage-making between nationalism and transnationalism: Colonial prisons in South Korea, Taiwan and China. In Jongil Kim and Minjae Zoh (eds), Asia's Heritage Trend: Examining Asia's Present through Its Past. London: Routledge.
At the turn of the twentieth century (from 1895 through 1905, to be precise), the First Sino-Japanese War (1894–1895) and the Russo-Japanese War (1904–1905) together played a decisive part in shaping the geopolitical context of the penal heritage to be explored in this chapter. Following the Meiji Restoration, the First Sino-Japanese War was a conflict between China (the Qing Dynasty) and the Meiji Japan primarily over influence in Korea, and the Russo-Japanese War was fought between the Empire of Japan and the Russian Empire over rival imperial ambitions in Manchuria and Korea. Imperial Japan won both wars, and the two wars set in motion Japan’s agenda of becoming the first Westernised Asian country: Japan soon expanded its colonial reach in Northeast Asia and East Asia (Harada, 2016; Keene, 1998; Kwon, 2006; Paine, 2005). In the pursuit of modernisation, Western-style prisons became significant markers of the militarised expansion to which both Japan and the West contributed, leaving a legacy for contemporary society to make sense of today.