Colonial Surveillance: Technologies of Identification and Control in Japan's Empire

Speaker: Midori Ogasawara, Assistant Professor, Department of Sociology, University of Victoria

Moderator: Victor Seow, John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Social Sciences, Department of the History of Science, Harvard University

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In order to compete with Western powers, Japan began to rapidly modernize its governing institutions, in the process creating a national pulsation registration and identification bureaucracy, the Koseki system, in 187. A few decades later, when Japan began to extract natural resources from and occupy Northeast China fingerprint identification was introduced to track the movement of local populations. Taking a historical and sociological perspective informed by surveillance studies, this seminar will illuminate how biometric identification became a powerful means of policing and radicalization of ethnic others in Japan’s empire. Based on archival research in Japan and China, as well as interviews with the Chinese survivors of Japanese occupation, Midori Ogasawara explores the transformation of identification techniques from Japan to its colonies and the lasting impacts of colonial surveillance on everyday people. Against the historical backdrop of Japan's colonial expansion in the pseudo-state of “Manchukuo,” Ogasawara invites audiences to delve into the little-known genealogy of modern-day identification systems, and the colonial roots of the troubling and often-invisible surveillance technologies that saturate our digital lives today.

About our speaker: Midori Ogasawara is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Victoria, British Columbia, Canada. Her research focuses on the social consequences of surveillance and technologies, from modern/colonial times to the digital age. Her book Colonial Surveillance: Technologies of Identification and Control in Japan’s Empire was published by the Stanford University Press in 2026.