3 - Embodying the Borderland in the Taiwan Strait

Summary

Chapter 3 offers a remarkable example of the intersection of diverse multiscalar processes and mobile spaces in the life of Nakamura Sueko (1909–?). In the late 1920s, Nakamura eloped from northern Hokkaidō, the frontier of Japan's transmarine capitalist economy, to Fuqing, where she became involved in smuggling across the Taiwan Strait and then, after leaving her first husband, gained notoriety as the wife of a Chinese pirate leader, himself a member of a group of university-educated Protestant revolutionaries working to break Fujian free from the control of Jiang Jieshi's Guomindang government. Navigating the unruly borderland between China’s fragmented national territory and Japanese colonial space, Nakamura also became a resource for others, including Japanese military agents. A deterritorialized woman, she was ultimately unplaceable. Refashioning her identity claims in relation to changing circumstances and the queries of the Japanese media, Nakamura became for Japanese audiences a symbol of women’s libidinal excess that both incited prurient curiosity and threatened to destabilize the social order, even as it enabled fantasies of the world beyond empire’s limits.