East Asia Seminar Series - Dr Hannah Shepherd

A Tale of Two Cities: Fukuoka and Pusan in the Japanese Empire

Unlike most European empires, Japan's colonies lay in close proximity to its home islands. This talk looks at the closest two urban areas on either side of this divide – Fukuoka and Pusan - which were separated by a narrow body of water crossed in both directions by migrants, colonists, and networks of capital, information, and goods. This talk introduces Dr Shepherd’s current research project as a tale of two port cities—one Korean, one Japanese; one colonized, one expansionist—separated yet linked by the Korea Strait. The talk will trace the flows and backlogs of people into and between these two cities and connect this movement of people to urbanization and migration patterns across the Asia Pacific, as well as asking wider questions about the relationship between urbanization and imperial expansion on a global scale.

Dr Hannah Shepherd (Ph.D. Harvard University 2018) is a Title A Fellow at Trinity College Cambridge. She is currently working on transforming her doctoral dissertation into a book manuscript, tentatively titled Cities into Empire: Fukuoka, Pusan, and Japan’s Imperial Urbanization, 1876-1953. Her research focuses on the linkages between urban growth and the expansion of empire in Japan, Korea and beyond in the first half of the twentieth century. She has been a visiting researcher at Waseda University, Tokyo, Yonsei University, Seoul and Kyushu University, Fukuoka. She received her MA in Japanese Studies from SOAS, University of London (2009).