“To Develop a Second Taiwan”: Imperial Memory and Cold War Development in Japan’s Vision for the Iriomote Tropical Research Center, 1959-1965
Between the late 1950s and early 1960s, Japanese policymakers and scientists envisioned transforming Iriomote—the largest island of the Yaeyama archipelago, south of Okinawa—into a living laboratory for tropical research. Spearheaded by politician Takaoka Daisuke, Iriomote was imagined both as a “second Taiwan,” a comparable ecological zone suited to tropical agriculture, and as a “peace base” designed to advance Japan’s foreign policy ambitions in Southeast Asia. This talk examines how the proposed Iriomote Tropical Research Center embodied the entwined logics of postwar development and imperial afterlife, revealing how environmental surveys, technical planning, and regional diplomacy converged within Japan’s Cold War strategies toward Okinawa and Southeast Asia. By tracing how policymakers, scientists, and local actors mobilized the island’s landscapes and colonial legacies, this study reconsiders tropical research not as a mere scientific enterprise, but as a vital site for interrogating the entangled boundaries between empire, environment, and expertise in the twentieth-century Asia-Pacific.
About the Speaker
Catherine Tsai is an historian of modern Japan, with an interest in the colonial and postwar experiences of Taiwanese and Okinawans. Her dissertation focuses on the agrarian development of the Yaeyama Islands, the southernmost archipelago of Okinawa, under Japanese empire and American Occupation. She is also in the early stages of researching her second book project, which traces the transnational impact of the 1968 Liu Wenqing Deportation Incident and the experiences of Zainichi Taiwanese in Japan's postwar social movements.
Catherine received her Ph.D. in History and East Asian Languages from Harvard University (2025). She received a Bachelor of Arts in History and International Relations from the University of California, Davis. Her work has received the support of the Japan Foundation, the Center for Chinese Studies (Taiwan), and the Reischauer Institute for Japanese Studies at Harvard.