Colonial Surveillance: Technologies of Identification and Control in Japan's Empire

In order to compete with Western powers, Japan began to rapidly modernize its governing institutions, in the process creating a national population registration and identification bureaucracy, the Koseki system, in 1871. A few decades later, when Japan began to extract natural resources from and occupy Northeast China, fingerprint identification was introduced to track the movement of local populations. Taking a historical and sociological perspective informed by surveillance studies, this ...