Mapping Neighborhoods in Japan’s Empire: A Digital Humanities Project on Infrastructure’s Socio-Political Influences 

During Japan’s colonial rule in Manchukuo from 1932 to 1945, the government erected large-scale physical infrastructure, which led to the breakdown of former communities and generated unprecedented tensions among the diverse ethnic groups in Manchuria. This project uses methods of digital humanities to explore how imperial infrastructure reconfigured ethnic relations. Mapping Neighborhoods extrapolates data from two sets of documents, telephone directories and merchants-industrialists’ directories that Japanese institutions in various cities in Manchuria published regularly. Using ArcGIS/QGIS, this is the first project that will revive the spatial dwellings of different ethnic groups on historical maps down to the street level. My mapping will shed light on how each ethnic group related to each other and to key infrastructure facilities differently. This project not only contributes to the current studies of Japan’s empire by going beyond the limitations embedded within official archives and written records, yielding a more diverse and accurate view of how inter-ethnic relations played out in space and time, but also converses with studies of infrastructure to show how the dual force of imperialism and capitalism manufactured differences within Japan’s empire in Manchukuo and how empires reproduced social and political hierarchy through manipulating spatial relations.

Biography

Yuting Dong is an assistant professor in the Department of History at University of Chicago. She works on infrastructure, history of technology, labor and expertise in Japan and East Asia at large. Her current book manuscript shows how Japanese colonial engineers and officials negotiated and engaged with Chinese laborers, brokers, and craftsmen in the building of the urban landscape in Northeast China. Her work is published in Technology and culture, Modern Asian studies, and the international journal of Asian Studies.