Objectives

The aim of this project is to clarify how legal and political systems and their implementation affect identification of individuals who migrate, travel across borders, or reside outside their native countries. We are exploring how, throughout the life cycle from birth to death, the identification documents required of travelers and residents, affect both immigrants and their descendants. By examining passports, other travel documents, and other forms of personal ID, we are trying to understand how they affect both personal identification and social transnationalism. We note, too, that these documents become important links between the generations, as second and third-generation immigrants pass through life stages from birth and childhood, education, employment, marriage, divorce, residence, family life, community building, retirement, death and burial.. To understand how these documents have changed over time and how they are used in a transnational era with a borderless economy is a research topic of the highest importance. To directly address, through a global process and networking, human rights and other issues surrounding the role and administration of personal identification from anthropological, sociological and legal perspectives will be of major significance for immigration policy.

Our goal is to offer concrete proposals for how to safeguard human rights while taking into account the needs of the legal and administrative systemsof nation states.

Research Results

Since the commencement of this joint research, we have had 12 research reports by joint researchers and 10 research reports by guest lecturers. Each researcher worked to link the study of gramophone records to their own specialty from their own standing. Summarizing the researchers’ presentations at meetings, we reached the following five research results: (1) Changes in traditional music observed in gramophone records: In the 1910s when gramophone records of what we now call traditional music were released, some music genres were still under development. Therefore, reconsidering the musical expressions and texts at that time through gramophone records was effective for understanding the process by which current styles were formed; (2) Movies and record music: The survey of record sales and sales volume as well as newspaper articles allowed us to understand how the phenomenon of hit singers derived from soundtracks, how popular such hit songs were, and how it affected society. We also confirmed the existence of the movie “talker” who told the story of the movie in the silent picture days; (3) Study of popular songs: Popular songs are considered to reflect the social conditions and musicals styles of their times. Through our case studies, a gramophone record released in Shanghai around the 1930s or 1940s was discovered, and detailed studies of the relationship between the record, composer and recorder of the record enabled us to broaden our viewpoints; (4) Radio and records: Out of radio broadcasts, the ratio of record music such as classical music and children’s songs was relatively large. Meanwhile, it became clear that Taiwanese under Japanese colonial rule and Japanese who lived in Taiwan at that time listened not only to music programs including record music but also to Japanese radio dramas and the reading of Japanese literature; and (5) The process of the manufacture and release of records in Taiwan under Japanese colonial rule: Some correspondence was revealed that had been exchanged between a Taiwanese subsidiary of Nippon Columbia Co., Ltd. and the headquarters in Japan through the order sheets sent from Taiwan Columbia to the headquarters in the time of Japanese colonial rule.