This paper is an exploration of Layers in Time, a mapping process to visualize water-related events in New Orleans. This paper shares how the project was conceived, including the considerations and aspirations that guided its development, the design process for selecting tools and protocols for mapping, and the limitations and future possibilities of the work. Designed using Python, Layers in Time guides viewers through the accompanying dissertation by chapter, while also allowing them to explore its features in sandbox mode. A case study will be examined to illustrate how this mapping process can be used to understand historical contingency, evaluate existing narratives and claims, and generate new knowledge.
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The Shapiro Digital History Seminar invites proposals for sessions in its 2026-2027 series. The Seminar introduces audiences to the inner workings of in-progress projects that depend on digital methods, such as the translation of analog primary sources to a digital format, the use of computational tools for research and analysis of historical data, and the creation of “publications” in any form of digital media to communicate with audiences. The series emphasizes engagement with archival source materials, and presentations include works intended for academic scholarship and/or for public history. Attendees are encouraged to provide feedback, and presenters usually recommend review of circulated materials before the session meeting. Sessions may take place virtually or in a hybrid format as conditions allow.
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Ogasawara, Midori. Colonial Surveillance: Technologies of Identification and Control in Japan's Empire. : Stanford University Press, 2026. 295 pp. $32.00 (paper), ISBN 9781503644717.
Reviewed by
Simon A. Cole (University of California, Irvine) Published on
H-Sci-Med-Tech (April, 2026) Commissioned by
Penelope K. Hardy (University of Wisconsin-La Crosse)
The role of Japan in the development of modern fingerprint identification is well known to identification historians. Scottish physician Henry Faulds proposed the idea of fingerprinting in his 1880 letters to both Nature and Charles Darwin, written from Japan, where he was serving on a mission. William Herschel, a British colonial official serving in India, quickly responded to Nature that he had already proposed the use of fingerprints several years earlier. Faulds eventually returned to Scotland whereupon he commenced a priority dispute with Herschel over who “discovered” fingerprinting, which lasted the rest of their lives.[1]
Colonial Surveillance: Technologies of Identification and Control in Japan's Empire, by sociologist Midori Ogasawara, could be viewed as following a new thread of fingerprint history by remaining in Japan, instead of returning to Britain with Faulds. Japan revived fingerprinting in 1908 after exposure to the system in Germany, which itself was based on the British Henry System. The novelty of fingerprinting in Japan was that, rather than being treated as an individual identification technology as it was in Europe, its colonies, and the Americas, it was integrated into koseki, Japan’s patriarchal, family-based system of identification.
Koseki, Ogasawara tells us, operated differently in Japan and in its colonies, and it is this use in the colonies with which the book is primarily concerned. The three chapters at the heart of Colonial Surveillance trace the use of fingerprinting in what Ogasawara calls the “pseudo-nation” of Manchukuo, the region of Northern China previously known as Manchuria, which Japan occupied from the end of the Russo-Japanese War in 1905 until the end of the Second World War in 1945. “Fingerprint identification was proposed as an effective, scientific solution in the early stages of nation building in Manchukuo” (p. 95).
The Japanese used fingerprinting to control the mobility of the population of laborers, much as fingerprinting was used in India, South Africa, and, briefly, California. “The colonial and the criminal were treated synonymously as categories of people, as they had been in India and South Africa” (p. 129). In 1932, a Japanese encyclopedia boasted that “Manchukuo is the top runner in a world that combines fingerprinting schemes into the koseki system” and predicted that its system would soon “be most accurate all over the world” (p. 104).
Japanese officials demanded fingerprints from both laborers, beginning with coal miners and then extending to other workers, and suspected dissidents (sometimes called “bandits”). “Manchukuo embraced fingerprint identification technology throughout its existence on two fronts: labor control and security operations” (p. 156). Workers in state-run industries were required to deposit fingerprints on “employment cards.” Copies were retained by the government and by the employer. This allowed employers to screen potential workers who had been dismissed from previous positions or were otherwise perceived as “troublemakers” (p. 125). It also restricted workers’ ability to change jobs. “Thus, originally, fingerprint identification was used in the workplace to select diligent workers, make them stay to maximize productivity, and restrain potential resistance” (p. 124). The individuals targeted for fingerprint identification were thoroughly racialized: More than 97 percent of the fingerprint records were from Chinese people. In 1939, a Fingerprint Management Bureau was established, and within two years it had a collection of 2.7 million fingerprint records.
The identification project culminated, in 1944, with the establishment of a National Passbook System. A new law required all men over fifteen years old to register fingerprints and carry a passbook containing them, along with pages of additional information, including employment and residential history. The system combined records of native Manchurians and migrant laborers from other provinces. Though the system aspired to total able-bodied adult male population identification in Manchukuo, Ogasawara is dubious that it came anywhere close to that goal, given that the system was established only twenty months before the war ended and Manchukuo collapsed.
As Ogasawara recounts, all of this occurred during a period in which Japan was carrying out terrible atrocities in Manchukuo, including human experimentation. Ogasawara implicates the fingerprint system in facilitating the identification of suspect bodies for transfer to the notorious units that carried out torture, human experimentation, and execution, arguing that identification is an “early stage of slow violence” (p. 206).
Colonial Surveillance adds a valuable new study to the existing body of work in identification history that characterizes fingerprinting (and other biometric identification technologies) as essentially colonial technologies. Ogasawara writes, “Biometric technology had dual capabilities: monitoring the movements of colonial bodies as sources of resistance while mobilizing the same bodies as profitable labor power and a source of wealth” (p. 203). As in other national settings, Japan developed fingerprinting in the colonies, but eventually it returned to the metropole, arguably treating the citizenry like colonial subjects.
Colonial Surveillance contains valuable historical research and uses archival sources, but Ogasawara is a sociologist, not a historian. Therefore, each of the three main chapters ends with interviews with survivors, or family members of survivors, of the Japanese occupation and system of surveillance. These add valuable human faces to this significant new contribution to the intertwined history of identification and violence.
Note
[1]. Chandak Sengoopta, Imprint of the Raj: How Fingerprinting Was Born in Colonial India (Macmillan, 2003).
Citation:
Simon A. Cole.
Review of
Ogasawara, Midori.
Colonial Surveillance: Technologies of Identification and Control in Japan's Empire.
H-Sci-Med-Tech, H-Net Reviews.
April, 2026. URL:
https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=62642
The Dialogues on Mental Health Records (DMHR) project is a platform organized by the Hogg Foundation for Mental Health to address the challenges of managing historical public mental health records through a series of nationwide convenings.
The DMHR Presentation Series are monthly virtual talks highlighting the work of state hospital preservation throughout the country. These presentations will include projects on state policy, community collaboratives and archives, state hospital museums, and other preservation efforts.
April's presentation will be on Thursday, April 30, 1:00-2:15pm CDT. Lucy Costa, Geoffrey Reaume, and Christina Foisy will present on the Psychiatric Survivor Archives of Toronto
Geoffrey Reaume and a collective of other psychiatric survivors founded the Psychiatric Survivor Archives of Toronto (PSAT) in 2000 and is dedicated to preserving the history of people who have experienced the psychiatric system. Donations of original newsletters, first-person accounts, news stories, artwork and recordings of talks from all over the world -- Canada, the United States, Holland, Norway, Mexico and Brazil -- provide an invaluable record of psychiatric survivor activism especially since the 1970s.
If you have any questions or concerns you can contact Elizabeth Stauber, archivist & records manager at the Hogg Foundation and the project director of the Dialogues on Mental Health Records project, at elizabet...@austin.utexas.edu.
I am pleased to invite you to the next session of the Science and Technology in Asia online seminar series @ Harvard on Tuesday, April 14, 10:30 am over Zoom.
Our speaker is Michitake Aso of the University at Albany, SUNY, and he will be our 100th speaker in the series! The details of his talk are as follows:
AFTER AGENT ORANGE: HOW DIOXIN KNOWLEDGE SHAPED POSTWAR RECONCILIATION BETWEEN THE UNITED STATES AND VIETNAM
This talk examines how Vietnamese scientists and medical doctors built the evidentiary case against Agent Orange and its contaminant TCDD dioxin during the 1990s and early 2000s. It traces two dynamics that shaped the relationship between knowledge production and justice in postwar reconciliation efforts between the United States and Vietnam. First, knowledge about TCDD dioxin was produced through a process that was both collaborative and adversarial, and shaped by the American government’s rejection of legal and political responsibility. While necessity may have spurred invention, the resulting science wove together herbicide data, laboratory analysis of blood samples, and epidemiological fieldwork into a transnational evidentiary framework that was harder to dismiss than one controlled by a single country. Second, the Vietnamese government’s classification of dioxin data as a national security secret, even after it had been published, revealed that the primary obstacle to environmental justice was not scientific ignorance but the state control of knowledge. The same Vietnamese state that authorized Committee 10-80 to study TCDD dioxin also confiscated research materials from international researchers. These actions reveal a coherent strategy of managed engagement in which the state sought knowledge about TCDD dioxin without ceding control over its political implications. Understanding this dynamic is essential for rethinking how postwar reconciliation actually worked.
About our speaker: Michitake Aso is an Associate Professor of History at the University at Albany, SUNY. He researches the environmental, medical, and scientific histories of Vietnam, and is the author of Rubber and the Making of Vietnam: An Ecological History, 1897–1975 (University of North Carolina Press, 2018), which won the Agricultural History Society’s Henry A. Wallace Award and the Forest History Society’s Charles A. Weyerhaeuser Award.
Artificial intelligence is often seen as a silver bullet for authoritarians, a breakthrough technology making repression cheaper, faster, and more precise. But it has inherent weaknesses, and dictators can’t escape these dilemmas.
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