Headshot of Dr.Tze M. Loo

Dr. Tze M. Loo

Associate Professor of History and Global Studies

Global Studies Concentration Advisor, Cultures and Communications

Program Coordinator, Interdisciplinary Studies

  • Profile

    My research is concerned with the colonial dimensions of the modern Japanese nation state, in both its prewar and wartime imperial expansion and also in how colonialism functioned in the making of modern Japan itself. I am interested in how the Japanese state reproduces itself and its power, and I pay attention to two technologies of government in particular. The first is how the Japanese state power makes itself felt through objects of material culture and cultural heritage; secondly, I am interested in the prewar Japanese state’s efforts to discipline the country’s religious landscape through the construction and deployment of State Shinto. I also trace how subjects of the Japanese state resist or contest these same technologies.

    My book, Heritage Politics: Shuri Castle and Okinawa’s Incorporation into Modern Japan, 1879-2000 examines how Japan, America during its 27-year rule of the islands, and Okinawan people use Okinawa’s cultural heritage – particularly its iconic Shuri Castle – to negotiate and articulate the islands’ relationship to the Japanese mainland. While Japanese and the U.S. attempted to use the islands’ cultural heritage to discipline Okinawans according to their political agendas, Okinawans used representations of their cultural heritage as a powerful way to act against these larger powers and to negotiate a more equitable position for themselves within the Japanese national imaginary.

    I am currently working on a new project that traces the Japanese state’s attempt to transpose Okinawa’s indigenous utaki-centered religion into the universe of State Shinto in the prewar period.

    Expand All
  • Publications
    Books

    Heritage Politics: Shuri Castle and Okinawa’s Incorporation into Modern Japan, 1879-2000 (Lanham: Lexington, 2014)

    Journal Articles

    “AHR Reflections: Anxious Empire: Japan and its South Pacific Mandates,” American Historical Review (forthcoming) 

    “Paradise in a war zone”: The U.S. Military and Tourism in Okinawa, 1945–1972 in Japan Review 33 Special Issue: War, Tourism, and Modern Japan (2019): 173–193 

    “Introduction” to Remembering Industrial Development, Preserving the Dark Heritage, A special issue of Japan Focus, Vol. 15, 1: 1 (January 1, 2017) 

    “Escaping its Past: Recasting the Grand Shrine of Ise.” Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, 11:3 (2010), 375-392
    * Also available in Japanese as “Kako kara no da’shutsu: Ise dai jingū no sai kōchiku,” trans. by Takahashi Norihito for Kokugakuin University, 21st Century of Excellence Program, Establishment of a National Learning Institute for the Dissemination of Research on Shinto and Japanese Culture, 2013 (http://21coe.kokugakuin.ac.jp/articlesintranslation/) 

    “Shuri Castle’s Other History: Architecture and Empire in Okinawa,” The Asia-Pacific Journal, Vol. 41-1-09, October 12, 2009

    Book Chapters

    “The Politics of Japan’s Use of World Heritage: From Ratifying the World Heritage Convention to the Mozu-Furuichi Tumulus Clusters,” in Aike P. Rots and Mark Teeuwen (eds.), Sacred Heritage in Japan: UNESCO, “Traditional Culture,” and the Changing Shapes of Japanese Religion (forthcoming from Routledge) 

    “Singapore: Commemoration and Reconciliation,” in Daqing Yang and Mike Mochizuki (eds.), Anniversary Politics: Commemorations of WWII in the Asia Pacific in 2015 (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2018) 

    “Historical Reconciliation in Southeast Asia: Notes from Singapore” in Melissa Nobles and Jun-Hyeok Kwak (eds.), Historical Reconciliation and Inherited Responsibility (New York: Routledge, 2013) 

    “Rearticulating Belonging: The Postwar Rebuilding of Shuri Castle” in Nagai Hiroko and Tito Vincente (eds.), Memories, Monuments and Media: Representations of Conflicts and Creation of Histories in Asia (Manila: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 2012) 

     “The Okinawa Problem,” International Herald Tribune, 10 June 2010 

    Reviews

    Review of A Social History of the Ise Shrines: Divine Capital. By Mark Teeuwen and John Breen (London: Bloomsbury, 2017) Journal of Religion in Japan, 7: 3 (Spring 2019) 

    Review of The Ryukyu Kingdom: Cornerstone of East Asia. By Mamoru Akamine; translated by Lina Terrell and edited by Robert Huey. (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2017), Journal of Japanese Studies, 44: 2 (Summer 2018) 

    Review of Architecturalized Asia: Mapping a Continent through History. Edited by Vimalin Rujivacharakul, H. Hazel Hahn, Ken Tadashi Oshima, Peter Christensen. (Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 2014), Pacific Affairs, 88: 4 (December 2015)

    Other

    Takazane Yasunori, translated and introduced by Tze M. Loo, “Should ‘Gunkanjima’ be a World Heritage site? – The forgotten scars of Korean forced labor,” The Asia-Pacific Journal, Vol. 13, Issue 28, No. 1, July 13, 2015.