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This thesis is an historical study of racial government through biometrics in Japan since 1868. As I clarified in Introduction, the central purpose of this thesis is not, however, ‘historical’ in the traditional sense: it is neither simply a history of race and racism nor that of biometrics. Rather, it aims to investigate the politics of security at the level of identification and biopolitical relations between racism and biometrics through an historical lens and the eyes of a non-Westerner. This opening chapter is designed to concretely situate this research trajectory in the context of the existing literature. The main objective of this chapter is twofold. First, the chapter offers a critical review of pertinent subject matters for this thesis – namely, security, biometrics, race, and Japan – in order to establish the rationale for the research. Second, this chapter aims to build the rationale for the methodology of this thesis that I will outline and discuss in greater detail in Chapter Two.

With regard to the first objective, there are four relations that I aim to establish in this chapter. The first relation is one between the politics of security and the politics of identity: Why is the study of identity fundamental to the study of security? Second, and conversely: In what way does the analysis of biometric identification, or identification more generally, contribute to an understanding of security? The third relation is about the role of race in the first relation. That is to say: How, if at all, is the idea of race relevant to the politics of security and the politics of biometric identification? The scope of review here is both historical and contemporary, whether

the idea of race is, and/or was, constitutive of the politics of security. The fourth relation is a geographical one; it is about the translation of the first three relations. To put it bluntly: Why Japan? This is the question of whether the analysis of the Japanese context allows us to understand beyond its context: that is to say, whether this geographical focus is more than about relativism; and whether it sheds light on the politics of security and that of race at the global scale.

Accordingly, this chapter examines four ‘bodies’ of literature in order not only to establish the theoretical grounds that this thesis draws upon and contributes to, but also to identify their limits and the possibilities for further research, which I will present in later chapters. I put ‘bodies’ in inverted commas here because most of them are not coherent bodies of literature; most of them are hardly recognised as ‘schools of thought’ in the strict sense of the term. Nevertheless, pragmatic boundaries are helpful to conduct a literature review with some degree of coherency and consistency, and to offer an overview of relevant theoretical and historical grounds that this thesis is located within.

The first section surveys the literature on poststructuralist approaches to studies of security, and the biopolitics of security in particular, which constitute a core theoretical foundation of this thesis. I will begin with an overview of contributions made by what is sometimes generically called poststructuralist scholars in international studies – notably manifested in the 1989 collective work International/Intertextual Relations (Der Derian and Shapiro 1989), David Campbell’s Writing Security (1992) and Michael Dillon’s Politics of Security (1996) – who problematise the consumption of representation and underline the production of meaning. The section then proceeds to closely examine a number of Foucault- inspired studies – notably the work of Dillon in a number of his articles and chapters

– that conceptualise security in biopolitical terms and bring the question of the collective subjectivity of ‘population’ at the heart of security studies.

The discussion on the biopolitics of security also helps to unravel the important role of biometric identification as an analytical site for security studies, which is the main theme of the second section. I will then examine a number of studies on what Louise Amoore (2006) calls the ‘biometric border’ that characterises the increasing deployment of biometrics as a security measure in post-9/11 Western countries. Albeit varied in their approach and context of analysis (both historically and geographically), this ‘body’ of literature, notably developed by scholars not only in security studies but also in the related fields of border and migration studies, as well as more sociologically-oriented surveillance studies, emphasise the political role of technology. They call for a re-conceptualisation of technology: from biometrics as a- means-to-an-end to biometrics in itself as a security practice that produces the idea of risk and danger, and thus, that enables the very demarcation of populations into risk categories.

If the first two sections focus on current theoretical debates about biometrics, the third section focuses more on historical aspects of biometrics. The increasing deployment of biometrics in the twenty-first century has certainly reflected current scholarly interests in the politics of biometric identification and surveillance. Yet, biometrics is new neither, in the words of Manuel Castells (2010), to ‘the Information Age’, nor to the context of the War on Terror. In this section, I will survey social approaches to the Western history of biometrics – including Simon A. Cole’s (2001) seminal work on the history of criminal identification, as well as Joseph Pugliese’s (2010) recent response to Cole’s history in the light of digitised biometrics – that

elucidate its inextricable relations with race and racism. Here I will also identify the limits of extant analyses in both geographical and historical terms.

The fourth section then turns to the Japanese context in order to explore the possibility of overcoming these limits in view of its peculiar historical and geographical location. Two specific contexts will be focused upon in this section: race and racism in Japan and its history of politics through biometrics. Among a number of scholars, Michael Weiner has contributed to the literature on race and racism in Japan. The analysis of racism in Japan questions the adequacy of the dialectic of European racism (i.e., the European Self and the non-European Other) and of the politics of the colour line (Du Bois 2007: 15) for the studies of race and racism beyond the Western history. This is because the Japanese politics of race, they argue, cannot be succinctly configured in these formats (Sakamoto 1996; 2004; Weiner 1995; 2004; 2009b). Their works contest the ‘general law’, as it were, of modern (European) racism, and are indicative of the complexity that is inherent in racism at the global scale. Second, the literature on biometrics, especially on fingerprinting, in the Japanese context contributes not only to a scientific racial demarcation in a non-Western context. It also helps to investigate an historical gap in the Western literature on biometrics that tends to leap from biometrics as a colonial science to biometrics as an information technology, especially in the context of the War on Terror. The section shows that the history of biometrics in Japan unveils that fingerprinting control was fully deployed to monitor former colonial subjects – most notably, the Korean population – after the dissolution of the empire, the deployment that had been operational throughout the second half of the twentieth century.

At the same time, albeit rich in its historical context, these works on the Japanese context are theoretically underdeveloped to a greater extent: on the one hand, the

critique of race and racism is predominantly based on the critique of ideology; and on the other hand, biometrics has been problematised predominantly at the level of the concept of human rights. Towards the end of this chapter, I will problematise these interpretations and argue that the inevitable consequence of these interpretations for understanding of biometrics is the conceptual separation between politics and technology, an inability to conceptualise biometric technology as constitutive of politics. The discussion of the Japanese context aims to open up the scope for this thesis’s investigations in the light of the biopolitics of security, that is, to develop a study of the history of biometrics at the level of racial government.