Seeley, Joseph. Border of Water and Ice: The Yalu River and Japan's Empire in Korea and Manchuria. : Cornell University Press, 2024. 210 pp. $23.95 (paper), ISBN 9781501777387.

Reviewed by Tim Chamberlain (Birkbeck College, University of London)
Published on H-Environment (May, 2025)
Commissioned by Daniella McCahey (Texas Tech University)

Printable Version: https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showpdf.php?id=61472

Borders define the limits of modern nation-states. They are the spaces where such imagined concepts are made manifestly real. They represent geographical divisions that are meant to signify territorial ownership, identity, inclusion/exclusion. We often talk of crossing borders, of negotiating borders, of transcending borders, and we usually think of them as being lines drawn on maps, but in truth, borders are more than simple territorial demarcations. Sometimes, regardless of whether they are agreed upon or disputed, borders can also be blurred zones where things meet, mingle, merge, and become neither one nor the other. Whether they are defined physically (for example, in the form of mountain ranges, coastlines, or rivers) or purely in cartographic terms (for instance, in the form of a boundary line drawn between a particular set of map coordinates), borders represent a very human conception of political, economic, and cultural control. Yet while borders are essentially human constructs, it is important to remember that they can also be shaped and influenced by forces that extend beyond our control.

Joseph A. Seeley’s Border of Water and Ice: The Yalu River and Japan’s Empire in Korea and Manchuria takes a transdisciplinary approach that unites perspectives drawn from empire, environmental, and borderland studies and applies them to a riverine border that has served as both an international and intraimperial boundary. Specifically focusing upon the period of 1905-45, Seeley explores the significance of the Yalu River as “a pivotal site for shoring imperial control over Japanese-occupied Korea and for projecting imperial power further into Manchuria” (p. 2). Drawing upon an impressive, multilingual range of primary sources in Japanese, Korean, Chinese, and English found in official state archives, newspapers, and magazines, as well as private diaries and published oral histories, Border of Water and Ice sets out to analyze the “seasonally contingent human and non-human mobilities” that “defined the limits of Japanese imperial expansion in Northeast Asia,” as seen through a conceptual lens which Seeley describes as the Yalu’s “liquid geographies” (p. 2). His use of this term is multilayered. It serves to describe and define the political tensions and conflicts that arose between the Chinese, Korean, and Japanese actors on both sides of the river, while also being highly cognizant of environmental influences, primarily in the seasonally alternating forms of water and ice when the river either flowed, flooded, or froze. These ever-changing environmental conditions and its riparian ecology were highly significant factors in shaping and determining the nature and outcomes of these interactions across the river.

The Yalu, using its Chinese name (Chinese: Yalu Jiang; Korean: Amnokkang; Japanese: Ōryokkō), rises from its headwaters on the slopes of Mount Paektu/Changbai and flows across the northern regions of the Korean peninsula until it reaches the Yellow Sea. It is the longest river in Korea, almost twice as long as the longest river in Japan, and has multiple major tributaries. Along its course it has long sustained a range of different livelihoods, from the fishermen of its wide, sandy delta to the hunters and timber cutters who utilized the forests that lined its upper reaches. Due to its shallow depths and steep gradients, particularly in its middle and upper reaches, it was only navigable by shallow-bottomed boats and the rafts of timber cutters who used the river as a means of commercial transportation for the logging industry until the river’s course was eventually impeded by successful Japanese imperial efforts to bridge and dam the Yalu.

As with most international borders the transit of people and goods were the main preoccupation of border police and customs officials; consequently, in the early part of the period examined in this book the Yalu was a heavily militarized space between China and Korea, “where smugglers, bandits, and anti-colonial rebels openly and violently clashed with Japanese authority” (p. 8). Similarly, this state of affairs continued even after Japan occupied Manchuria in 1932: “Even as the overall goals of the Japanese Empire demanded the economic and political integration of Manchukuo [as the Japanese renamed Manchuria] and colonial Korea, disputes over smuggling regulation, fishing rights, and other issues underscored the persistence of border conflicts that originally pre-dated 1931. Such tensions were only exacerbated by the difficulty of dividing the Yalu border’s fluid and seasonal contingent topography into discrete Korean and Manchurian zones” (p. 9).

Seeley examines this “contingent topography” in detail by focusing upon certain aspects that were clearly characteristic of designated themes, which he represents over the course of five chapters. Chapter 1 deals with reeds, fish, and timber as industries that in effect defined the river’s economic exploitation. Chapter 2 examines the engineering challenges of bridging of the Yalu as a means of controlling the flow of both goods and people. Chapters 3 and 4 look at how the changing seasons affected the physical aspects of border policing and the ways in which environmental constraints either aided or abated the efforts of smugglers and partisans. And chapter 5 examines how dam construction dramatically altered and redefined the Yalu, particularly in terms of its exploitation by humans as both a means of stabilizing parts of the river and of supporting new factories and hydroelectric sites that served to promote and further Japanese imperial expansion in northeast Asia. All five chapters utilize Seeley’s eloquent metaphor of “liquid geographies” as a conceptual means “to narrate how the fluid motion of peoples, goods, water, ice, sediment, and other human and non-human elements of the Yalu borderland together shaped the politics of the colonial Sino-Korean border” (p. 9). Consequently, the idea of “liquid geographies” is proposed as term that represents a conscious effort to avoid the anthropocentrism which has hitherto largely characterized more conventional borderland studies that treat “physical landscapes as mere backdrops rather than dynamic central actors in border histories” (p. 10).

Seeley makes excellent use of various case study materials to examine how the Japanese authorities utilized preexisting Sino-Korean sovereignty disputes concerning river islands that emerged and shifted as part of the natural processes of flooding and sedimentation that facilitated the harvesting of reeds, but also prompted disputes between the rival claims to these natural resources on the Korean and Chinese sides of the river. Likewise, he looks at the ways in which Japanese imperialists sought to control and monopolize the fishing and timber industries on the Yalu by actively driving out and excluding Chinese fishermen, as well as their implementation of new rules and regulations concerning the harvesting of driftwood deposited by seasonal floodwaters. All of these illustrative episodes are seen as typical examples of assertive imperial border-making efforts, yet they also demonstrate how such efforts were largely governed by or shaped in direct response to the seasonal cycles of the river itself.

The Japanese first crossed the Yalu using temporary pontoon bridges during the Sino-Japanese War (1894-95) and crossed the river again during the Russo-Japanese War (1904-5). In doing so, they discovered that the powerful dynamics of the Yalu and the ever-changing nature of its riverbed, characterized by strong tidal flows, flooding, and ice, were factors that would pose significant engineering challenges to the construction of a major railway bridge, which opened in 1911. This bridge was to become a key piece of Japan’s imperial infrastructure that enabled them to cement their colonial control over Korea and helped to project their power into Manchuria, “providing a regulated, spatially fixed means of passage and transport over an otherwise dynamic and seasonally changing landscape” (p. 42). The construction of this bridge also caused new settlements to arise along the river that fostered both legitimate and illicit, cross-border trade, as well as helping the Japanese authorities to regulate and monitor the flow of people and goods. However, despite the fact that these human interventions were beginning to alter the river, these interventions were still subject to the larger forces of nature and so constantly needed to respond to the environmental influences of the river itself.

Seasonal changes, such as the Yalu freezing over during the winter and its thawing in spring and summer, drastically altered the human permeability of the border in dynamic ways, which meant border police and customs officials got little rest and consequently needed to remain vigilant at all times. Whether traveling by boat in summer or by sled or on foot during winter when the river froze, the “fluid mobilities of actors”—both human and nonhuman—in the form of anti-Japanese guerilla fighters and smugglers as well as changes in plant cover and food supplies, along with floods, changing river channels, snowfall, and shifting ice flows corresponding to seasonal changes in extreme heat and cold, were all factors that required constant surveillance and control (pp. 65-66). Violent confrontations were not uncommon. But the construction of the Sup’ung Dam, which was completed in 1944, at the time the second-largest dam in the world, went some way toward changing the Yalu’s dynamics, either preventing or shortening the period of its freezing during winter in its lower reaches as well as curtailing the seasonal transportation of logs by means of huge timber rafts that had once been commonplace, thereby to certain extents subordinating some of the river’s natural aspects and rhythms to greater degrees of human control. However, the benefits of hydroelectric power generation came at the cost of local livelihoods, forcing the centers of the lumber-processing industry to relocate, and in order “to stem protests from river boat captains, the Yalu River Hydropower Company simply purchased most river transportation companies and brought them under its monopoly” (p. 133).

Japanese imperial propagandists were quick to exult their “conquest of nature” as part of their broader colonial project in the wider region, even while their insistence on maintaining the Manchukuo-Korean political boundary served to undermine the consolidation of such control (p. 129). Ultimately, Japan’s prolonged war with the United States brought an end to its imperial project on the Yalu in 1945, just as it did in the rest of Asia. But, as Seeley very ably and adeptly demonstrates, that project had a lasting effect on the reengineering of the river and its surrounding region that has left an enduring legacy in terms of river management, as well as elements of its infrastructure, that serves to highlight that the essential nature of Japanese imperial border governance was always environmentally contingent.

As both a transnational and transdisciplinary study, Border of Water and Ice is a fascinating, richly researched, and accessibly recounted history that will appeal to a wide range of scholars variously interested in empires, environments, borderlands, and area studies relating to East Asia, especially in regard to how these different aspects mutually intersect and can help to inform one another.

Citation: Tim Chamberlain. Review of Seeley, Joseph. Border of Water and Ice: The Yalu River and Japan's Empire in Korea and Manchuria. H-Environment, H-Net Reviews. May, 2025.
URL: https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=61472

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.