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Book Launch - "Colonial Surveillance" by Midori Ogasawara

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Event Overview

This video is a hybrid book launch and panel discussion for Midori Ogasawara’s book Colonial Surveillance, hosted by CAPI/UVic. It focuses on how biometric and registration systems—including fingerprints, ID cards, household registers/Koseki, and labor-control documents—emerged from Japanese imperial governance and helped enable colonial violence.

A key theme throughout is how dehumanization can come to feel “administrative” or neutral, embedded in documentation, procedure, and routine governance.

Main Flow / Plot of the Event

  1. Host opening + schedule

    • The moderator welcomes attendees and online viewers.
    • He outlines the plan: a book overview by Ogasawara, followed by two commentators, then Q&A and closing.

  2. Commentators introduced

    • Emily Hill (Queen’s University; history of 20th-century China)
    • Annabel Sloan (UVic; Indigenous studies, critical mapping, environmental justice)

  3. Ogasawara’s presentation

    • Ogasawara presents the book as interdisciplinary and research-driven, examining surveillance’s social consequences and its historical roots in Japanese colonial contexts.

  4. Panel reactions + Q&A

    • The audience connects historical surveillance to:
      • modern surveillance practices,
      • internal systems of inclusion/exclusion,
      • contemporary biometric barriers and mobility restrictions.

Highlights from Ogasawara’s Book Talk

Personal origin story (facial recognition, 2003)

Ogasawara describes a moment in 2003 while working as a journalist at a Japanese airport: a facial recognition system fails to recognize her. This becomes a central question of the talk:

Who defines identity when a system claims certainty?

Surveillance is not “neutral”

She argues surveillance establishes a hidden power relationship between watcher and watched, with effects often materializing later rather than immediately.

Snowden as a “rare public window”

The discussion references Edward Snowden’s 2013 revelations as a rare opportunity to see invisible digital surveillance networks, helping motivate Ogasawara’s historical investigation.

Origin in PhD, later expansion

Ogasawara notes the book began as her PhD project, later reorganized and expanded with additional chapters.

Northeast China research + material evidence

Drawing on interviews and archives (including an ID-card museum), she shows that Japanese occupation used fingerprint-based systems, sometimes alongside (or instead of) household registration.

She highlights a mismatch in witness experience:

  • Chinese interviewees often treated biometric ID as a “small” part of occupation.
  • Their lived experience was dominated by civilian violence.

This mismatch becomes one of the book’s core themes: surveillance and violence are intertwined.

Manchukuo / labor control

  • Workers were required to provide fingerprints at forced-labor sites.
  • Those with protest/strike history could be removed and punished/tortured.
  • Biometric records helped track people and deny later employability.
  • She describes extremely high death rates at major projects (including sites connected to the Fushun-related dam), portraying workers as disposable “resources.”

Unit 731 and “special transfer”

Ogasawara revisits Unit 731, Japan’s biological warfare lab, describing how victims were selected through bureaucratic classification.

Her chilling argument: paperwork and categories turned victims into “living ingredients”, often stripping people of full human status—described in testimony and quoted narration as being treated like “logs.”

Key conclusion

Surveillance enabled imperial rule by identifying, classifying, and automating selection of targets. Once a system frames a population as potentially threatening, victims can become “anyone.”

Notable Emotional + Factual Moments

  • Ogasawara includes interviews with survivors’ families and presents rare documentary evidence, including files containing victims’ photos.
  • She emphasizes that Japanese society often lacks awareness, and that textbook erasure under more right-wing politics has contributed to ongoing ignorance.

Host Moderator’s Reaction (Tone + Relevance)

The moderator praises Ogasawara’s meticulous methodology. He jokingly references the practical difficulties of gaining access to places and records (e.g., “how to get into a police station…”), using this to underscore the work’s investigative, on-the-ground depth.

He also stresses that surveillance is not only digital or AI-based—it can be “paper” systems and infrastructure-linked governance.

Emily Hill’s Commentary

Registration as a “naturalized” technology (Koseki/Huji)

Hill explains that Ogasawara had to register quickly in China because household registers exist there as well. She connects the book’s colonial surveillance focus to how registers shape identity and status.

She argues that systems such as:

  • Japan’s Koseki, and
  • China’s Huji/hukou

feel “normal,” making coercion easier to overlook.

Historical bridge: hukou and famine

Hill connects Japanese-era registration/pass logics to China’s later hukou-style stratification and the Great Leap Forward famine, describing it as an “inclusive exclusion” mechanism—categories that claim to manage belonging while producing suffering.

Closing question posed

Hill ends with a direct question:

Are such systems continuation of colonialism—or a more general mechanism of hierarchy and exclusion?

Annabel Sloan’s Commentary

Koseki as lateral surveillance inside families

Sloan centers Koseki as a foundational surveillance technology operating laterally within households—where families deputize each other.

She highlights:

  • Koseki’s patriarchal/hierarchical structure (male/female, age, lineal bloodline)
  • colonial testing in settler contexts such as Hokkaido/Ainu and Okinawa
  • differences across colonies (e.g., Manchukuo versus Taiwan/Korea)
  • how colonial governance produced states of exception (invoking Agamben)

Connection to present-day legacies (Ainu delegation + Fengman Dam)

Sloan describes a story of an Ainu delegation visiting Northeast China in the 1970s, shown the dam/labor-site horrors associated with the Fengman Dam. The commentary includes an extremely graphic quotation about skulls and remains, used to underline the long afterlife of colonial surveillance and industrial extraction.

Q&A Highlights (Audience Reactions + Contemporary Comparisons)

Dehumanization and categorization

An audience member asks whether numbering and victim categorization make atrocities easier. Ogasawara agrees that categorization does not automatically cause genocide, but it enables automation of violence—invoking comparisons to Nazi/racialized systems and Rwanda dynamics.

Mobility restrictions today (biometrics, borders, vulnerability)

Another question compares current biometric/ID-linked restrictions affecting Palestinians (e.g., visa and biometric collection at borders/checkpoints), and also notes Canadian impacts on Indigenous mobility.

Ogasawara responds by arguing that “neutral” IDs enable authority to stop, question, and constrain movement—creating real vulnerability.

Surveillance without modern computers (Manchukuo question)

A final question (from Korea) asks how Manchukuo organized surveillance without modern computing.

Ogasawara explains using:

  • training programs,
  • bureaucratic fingerprint bureaus,
  • card-based storage,
  • and numeric fingerprint indexing/combination matching—identifying individuals through ink-and-paper systems.

Overall Standout Effect

The video stands out for combining:

  • first-hand, research-driven historical material (archives, interviews, documentary artifacts),
  • theoretical framing of surveillance as imperial “infrastructure,” and
  • explicit moral urgency, linking historical identity regimes to how modern systems still restrict movement and enable harm.

Main Personalities Appearing

  • Victor (moderator/host; chairs and introduces)
  • Midori Ogasawara (author; presenter)
  • Emily Hill (online commentator)
  • Annabel Sloan (second commentator; planned participant)
  • Online audience members (including a participant from Korea, plus others who ask questions)

Original video