Mark Driscoll. Absolute Erotic, Absolute Grotesque: The Living, Dead, and Undead in Japan’s Imperialism, 1895–1945. Durham: Duke University Press, 2010. 361 pp.

• Main Author: Ropers, Erik
• Format: text
• Published: Archīum Ateneo 2013
• Online Access: https://archium.ateneo.edu/stjgs/vol1/iss1/10; https://archium.ateneo.edu/context/stjgs/article/1036/viewcontent/STJGS_201.1_2010_20Book_20review_20__20Ropers.pdf
• Institution: Ateneo De Manila University

Excerpt: In this provocative and ambitious study, Mark Driscoll makes a significant contribution to our understanding of Japan’s colonial empire and the capitalist developments that took place there. Offering a damning critique of Japanese colonialism, Driscoll brings to our attention the overwhelming and omnipresent nature of Japanese capitalism run amok and its subsequent effects on the most vulnerable sectors of society in Japan’s expanding colonial empire. What becomes most clear in this wide-ranging study is the extent to which capitalism infected and, to use Driscoll’s language, vampirized and grotesqued Japan’s empire in East and Northeast Asia. Utilizing a variety of under-used and innovative primary source materials, including literature, memoir, diaries, magazines and journals, news reports, and sexological tracts, Driscoll brings to light the multitude of ways in which Japanese business and politics operated in securing human capital and natural resources in Korea and mainland China.