Tropics of Savagery: The Culture of Japanese Empire in Comparative Frame

By Robert Thomas Tierney

Tropics of Savagery is an incisive and provocative study of the figures and tropes of "savagery" in Japanese colonial culture. Through a rigorous analysis of literary works, ethnographic studies, and a variety of other discourses, Robert Thomas Tierney demonstrates how imperial Japan constructed its own identity in relation both to the West and to the people it colonized. By examining the representations of Taiwanese aborigines and indigenous Micronesians in the works of prominent writers, he shows that the trope of the savage underwent several metamorphoses over the course of Japan's colonial period--violent headhunter to be subjugated, ethnographic other to be studied, happy primitive to be exoticized, and hybrid colonial subject to be assimilated.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of California Press
• Release date: May 20, 2010
• ISBN: 9780520947665

Robert Thomas Tierney

Robert Thomas Tierney is Assistant Professor of East Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.

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Tropics of Savagery

ASIA PACIFIC MODERN

Takashi Fujitani, Series Editor

Erotic Grotesque Nonsense: The Mass Culture of Japanese Modern Times, by Miriam Silverberg

Visuality and Identity: Sinophone Articulations across the Pacific, by Shu-mei Shih

The Politics of Gender in Colonial Korea: Education, Labor, and Health, 1910–1945, by Theodore Jun Yoo

Frontier Constitutions: Christianity and Colonial Empire in the Nineteenth Century, by John D. Blanco

Tropics of Savagery: The Culture of Japanese Empire in Comparative Frame, by Robert Thomas Tierney

Tropics of Savagery

The Culture of Japanese Empire

in Comparative Frame

Robert Thomas Tierney

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

Berkeley Los Angeles London

University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu.

University of California Press

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University of California Press, Ltd.

London, England

© 2010 by The Regents of the University of California

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Tierney, Robert Thomas, 1953–

Tropics of savagery: the culture of Japanese empire in comparative frame / Robert Thomas Tierney. — 1st ed.

   p. cm. — (Asia Pacific modern; vol. 5)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-520-26578-3 (cloth: alk. paper)

1. Japan—Colonies—History. 2. Imperialism—History. 3. Indigenous peoples—History. 4. Indigenous peoples—Public opinion. 5. Public opinion—Japan. 6. Popular culture—Japan—History. 7. Japanese literature—History and criticism. 8. Colonies in literature. 9. Imperialism in literature. 10. Indigenous peoples in literature.

I. Title.

DS843.T49    2010

Manufactured in the United States of America

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This book is printed on Cascades Enviro 100, a 100% post consumer waste, recycled, de-inked fiber. FSC recycled certified and processed chlorine free. It is acid free, Ecologo certified, and manufactured by BioGas energy.

For Hiromi Matsushita

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1.  From Taming Savages to Going Native: Self and Other on the Taiwan Aboriginal Frontier

2.  Ethnography and Literature: Sat Haruo’s Colonial Journey to Taiwan

3.  The Adventures of Momotar in the South Seas: Folklore, Colonial Policy, Parody

4.  The Colonial Eyeglasses of Nakajima Atsushi

Conclusion: Cannibalism in Postwar Literature

Notes

Glossary of Japanese Terms

Bibliography

Index

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

A work of scholarship is inevitably a collaborative endeavor; here, I would like to acknowledge the people who made the most significant contributions to my research over the past decade.

I am most indebted to Jim Reichert, my dissertation adviser at Stanford University, who was a wonderful mentor throughout my graduate studies. I would also like to thank Peter Duus and Miyako Inoue, who challenged me with the broader perspectives of their respective disciplines and helped me to approach my project from an interdisciplinary viewpoint. Susan Matisoff and Tom Hare were both exacting teachers who inspired in me a deep love for Japanese literature and for the craft of translation. During my last years at Stanford, I was greatly stimulated by the critical comments from Kären Wigen and Steven Carter. Throughout my years as a graduate student, I had the good fortune to be surrounded by friends with whom I have shared both ideas and laughs. I would especially like to thank Julia Bullock, Claire Cuccio, Michael Foster, Mark Gibeau, David Gundry, Shu Kuge, Miri Nakamura, Christopher Scott, Ethan Segal, Roberta Strippoli, Daniel Sullivan, and Michiko Suzuki.

In Japan, I had the honor of working with Kawamura Minato, a scholar at H sei University who has almost single-handedly created the field of Japanese colonial literature studies. Professor Kawamura offered me access to his book collection from the colonial period and shared with me his extensive understanding of the field. I would also like to express my appreciation to Professors Araki Masazumi and Yoshihara Yukari for inviting me to take part in the Critical Culture Research Group at Tsukuba University. Through my regular participation in this group, I met and exchanged ideas with many young Japanese, Taiwanese, and Korean scholars and had a chance to present my own research to this exacting group. I would particularly like to thank Hibi Yoshitaka, Sait Hajime, Washitani Hana, and Wu Peichen for their encouragement and advice.

As a graduate student at Stanford University, I received financial support from the Department of Asian Languages, the Center for East Asian Studies, and the Institute for International Studies. I began to conceive of my dissertation project during one year at Shizuoka University on a generous fellowship from the Shizuoka Prefecture. I conducted most of my archival research at H sei University with support from the Department of Education and the Fulbright Foundation. At the University of Illinois, I received a Mellon Foundation Grant for Junior Faculty in 2006–7, which released me from teaching responsibilities for one semester and enabled me to turn my dissertation into a book manuscript. From 2008 to 2009, the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) provided financial support for me to spend a year in Japan. I would like to thank the Department of Comparative Cultures at the University of Tsukuba for hosting me during the period that I was revising the final manuscript.

Since I began to teach at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, I have been fortunate to be surrounded by colleagues with whom I can exchange ideas. I would especially like to thank Nancy Abelman, Nancy Blake, Marilyn Booth, David Goodman, Wail Hassan, Karen Kelsky, Sho Konishi, Elizabeth Oyler, Dan Shao, Ron Toby, and Hairong Yang for their warm support and friendship. I would also like to express my gratitude to the following individuals who commented on earlier versions of my work, whether conference presentations or drafts of articles: Paul Barclay, Leo Ching, Kim Kono, Helen Lee, Michele Mason, Ann Sokolsky, and Mariko Tamanoi. I would like to thank Naomi Kotake at the Stanford University East Asian Library and Setsuko Noguchi at the University of Illinois for their assistance in finding my way through Japanese source materials.

I must thank Reed Malcolm, editor at the University of California Press, and Tak Fujitani, editor of its Asian Pacific Modern series, for their faith in my project and their patience; two anonymous readers for UC Press provided invaluable suggestions to improve my manuscript. I am deeply indebted to Jacqueline Volin and Andrew Frisardi, whose informed and careful editing of my manuscript has made my prose more readable. I am also grateful to Daniel Sullivan, who proofread the book. I would also like to express my appreciation to Deng Xiang Yang, who provided me the photograph of the second Musha Incident that appears on this book’s cover. Chapters 2 and 4 of this book are expanded versions of my articles "Ethnography, Borders, and Violence: Reading between the Lines in Sat Haruo’s Demon Bird," in Japan Forum 19:1 (2007), pp. 89–110; and The Colonial Eyeglasses of Nakajima Atsushi, in Japan Review 17 (2005), 149–96. I would like to express my gratitude to Ann Waswo, editor of the Japan Forum, James Baxter, editor of the Japan Review, and to the anonymous readers for both publications for their many helpful comments and suggestions.

Last but not least, I would like to thank Hiromi Matsushita, my partner over the past twenty-five years. While I often doubted my ability to bring this project to completion, Hiromi never wavered in his confidence in me. I dedicate this work—and others to follow—to him.

Introduction

Tropics of Savagery looks at the culture of imperial Japan, the most important non-Western colonizer of modern times. It consists of a series of historically situated studies of literary works and of colonial tropes focusing on the theme of savagery in Japanese imperial culture.¹ Borrowing from Hayden White’s Tropics of Discourse, the title plays on the dual meaning of the word tropics to refer to two related aspects of Japanese imperialism. On the one hand, Japan ruled over colonies situated in the tropics, although this fact has not seemed especially important to most historians of the Japanese empire. On the other, Japan exercised domination over its colonies through the deployment of tropes, that is, figures of speech, as well as through military conquest, political control, and economic exploitation. As Nicholas Thomas writes of the English empire: Colonial culture includes not only official reports and texts related directly to the process of governing colonies and extracting wealth, but also a variety of travelers’ accounts, representations produced by other colonial actors such as missionaries and collectors of ethnographic specimens, and fictional, artistic, photographic, cinematic and decorative appropriations.² In this book I focus on tropes of savagery in Japanese literature and representations that Japanese writers made of the tropics during the colonial period.

Many Japanese writers traveled to Japan’s tropical colonies and wrote fictional works, travelogues, popular articles, and a vast variety of other texts about savage or primitive societies. In this book I consider works by shika Taku, Sat Haruo, Akutagawa Ry nosuke, Nitobe Inaz , Hijikata Hisakatsu, and Nakajima Atsushi that appeared during Japan’s colonial period (1895–1945). These writers made the savage a foil against which the Japanese constituted themselves as members of a modern, civilized nation. At different stages of Japan’s colonial trajectory, the savages were headhunters to be eradicated, primitive societies to be studied, noble savages who had escaped from the blight of Japan’s industrial modernity, or hybrid subjects expected to conform to Japanese cultural norms. Just as images of savagery changed over time, the Japanese defined themselves in various ways in relation to those they colonized: as conquerors bearing the gifts of civilization to backward others, as ethnographers studying these others to find the hidden order of their society, as nostalgic romanticists in flight from civilization, and as colonial officials promoting assimilation policies. As I will show, savagery in these literary texts is less a realistic description than a polyvalent trope that writers have employed to depict their encounters with other cultures and histories, as well as to tell about their own ambivalent experiences as Japanese colonizers. As a result, these works open an especially important window onto both the images of the societies that Japan ruled and the lived experience of Japanese colonizers.

Alongside literary works, I also examine other discourses in Japan’s colonial archives: ethnography, anthropology, colonial policy studies, folklore, and eugenics. In the late nineteenth century, Japanese scholars imported new academic disciplines from the West, but they quickly established autonomous branches of these disciplines within Japan. These disciplines offered paradigms of knowledge that were sometimes applied to solving the practical problems of ruling an empire. In return, the realities of ruling an empire informed the conceptual framework of these disciplines and shaped representations that the Japanese made of themselves and their nation. To consider only the case of the human sciences, Japanese anthropologists, ethnologists, and archaeologists—all pioneers in newly created fields of knowledge—formulated new ideas of Japan that situated it in the new spaces of empire and defined its relationships to the colonies. First, they conceived of Japan not as constituting an isolated archipelago but rather as forming a continuum with the continent of Asia and the Pacific region. Second, they stressed resemblances and analogies, rather than differences, between the people whom Japan ruled and the Japanese people. These new paradigms of knowledge justified empire as a territorial unification of areas originally one but later divided, and they legitimized colonialism as a system of rule over people who were related to the Japanese. In this book, I pay close attention to the development of these new paradigms of knowledge in order to situate literary texts in their context and link these texts to the wider sociopolitical nexus in which they were embedded.

In my studies of Japanese colonial writers, I highlight the connections between literary texts and social and intellectual contexts and ignore the boundaries that traditionally demarcate literature, popular culture, social science, and history. While I approach each literary text as a singular work to be understood on its own terms, I also believe that literature is in dialogue with other social discourses, including legal writings, scientific reports, Western colonial narratives, popular songs, and school textbooks. In my view, the fiction writer is not the architect who designs the habitation of social discourses or the builder who constructs it. Rather, he or she is the tenant who has little choice but to make a home there, much as he or she inhabits the language in which he or she writes. Nor is the writer’s relationship to environing discourses predetermined, simple, or unidirectional. A writer may sometimes parrot, paraphrase, reproduce, and disseminate the tropes or topoi that circulate within society at any moment, but he or she may also invert, ridicule, and transform dominant discourses by relativizing or parodying them, or simply by inscribing them in a fictional world. Indeed, even when a literary work restricts itself to reproducing these social discourses, it inevitably distances itself from them by the playful nature of the literary text. In A letter on Art in Reply to Andre Daspre, Althusser argues that literary works are significant because they make us perceive "from the inside, by an internal distance, the very ideology in which they are held." In short, Althusser treats ideology as the raw material that literature transforms and puts on display.³

Furthermore, the works that I study mirror the shifts in Japanese views toward imperialism and the trajectory of Japan’s imperial expansion over time. Nitobe’s essays are products of the early formation of the Japanese empire and of Japan’s incorporation into a global imperialist order. The stories of Sat and Akutagawa resonate with the liberal critique of colonialism in the 1920s. shika’s work offers an interesting counterpoint to the return to Japan movement in Japanese letters in the 1930s, and Nakajima’s South Seas fiction intersects with 1940s rhetoric of the Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere. In my studies of specific texts, I locate literature within changing configurations of Japan’s empire and highlight the instability of imperial discourse over time.

In addition to studying literary works and their relationship with social discourses, I use these studies to complicate the application of Western-oriented paradigms to Japanese colonial literature. Japan is largely neglected in the major works of postcolonial studies. Yet its place in the history of modern empires is paradoxical. Modern Japan was never colonized; nevertheless it was the product of a semi-colonial collision between an Asian society and the expanding West. After Commodore Perry forced the Tokugawa shogunate to open its ports to international commerce, Japan signed unequal treaties with Western powers according to which Western nationals residing in Japan enjoyed the privilege of extraterritoriality. Japan remained under this system until the early twentieth century.⁴ At the same time that Japan was renegotiating with Western powers to replace these one-sided treaties with reciprocal agreements, it was quickly moving to establish its own unequal treaties with its Asian neighbors. Indeed, Japan emerged as a colonizer in its own right by 1895, when it took over Taiwan, and it later went on to build a vast empire in East Asia. In fact, Japan was the paramount imperial power in East Asia during the first half of the twentieth century.

Tropics of Savagery studies the dynamics of a hybrid imperialism that was different from, but also mimetic of, Western imperialism. It challenges the dyadic models that underlie most postcolonial theories, proposing alternate models with which to understand Japan. By focusing on the case of Japan, I also hope to illuminate the imperial cultures of other mimetic, late-developing empires, and of postcolonial nations for which Japan often provided a template and an example.

Finally, I will note that Tropics of Savagery is in close conversation with two recent studies of Japanese imperial literature: Faye Yuan Kleeman’s Under an Imperial Sun and Leo Ching’s Becoming Japanese. Kleeman’s work is an excellent study of literary writing by Taiwanese and Japanese writers during the colonial period. Like Kleeman, I center my attention on literature, but unlike her, I focus on the theme of savagery in literary works and situate this theme in the context of broader social discourses and new disciplines of knowledge. In addition, I approach Japanese colonial literature from a comparative vantage point and seek to uncover both similarities and differences between it and the literature of Western empires. Rather than a study of literature, Tropics of Savagery is a work of cultural studies that explores the links between Japanese literature and discursive disciplines that influenced it within the global context of competitive imperialism.

Leo Ching’s Becoming Japanese, a pioneering work on Japan’s colonial culture, defines Japanese imperialism as a non-Western imperialism that both resembles and differs from Western imperialism. Building on Ching’s analysis, I problematize the relationship between Japan and the West by showing how Japanese discourse is always produced in relation to, and in a certain sense, refracted through, Western imperialism. Indeed, I show that Japanese imperialism (and its colonial literature) has a mimetic relationship to Western models. For example, Nakajima Atsushi modeled himself on Robert Louis Stevenson, although his literary works differ in fundamental ways from those of his model. In Tropics of Savagery, I also offer readings of texts that go beyond Taiwan (the focus of Ching’s book) and extend to the South Seas. I am interested in the figure of the savage, a theme that is peripheral to Ching’s study of Taiwanese intellectuals.

ALLEGORIES OF THE SELF

Japanese writers used savagery as a polyvalent trope to write about their encounters with the different cultures and societies that Japan colonized. At the same time, they wielded this trope to tell their own stories as modern Japanese people. Accordingly, the savage in the works I study is often highly romanticized, an alter ego who has preserved what modern Japan has lost, even the mirror of its authentic culture. This archaic, estranged other sometimes offers the writer access to hidden desires or his or her primordial self. By writing about savages, modern writers sometimes critique their own society in a veiled way, confess their own ambivalences, explore their experiences of modernity, or otherwise construct an imaginary terrain to write about themselves. Just as savages became alter egos of the Japanese, the islands of the South Seas were reconfigured as a space with important meanings. Far from being peripheral to Japan, this region came to be seen as central to its culture and as the birthplace of the Japanese people.

As writings about cultural otherness, one can characterize the literary works I consider in this book as ethnographic in the broadest sense. Yet, as James Clifford argues in On Ethnographic Allegory, every ethnography about another culture is also an allegory and an extended metaphor that contains additional meanings about the ethnographer’s own society. Ethnographic writing is allegorical at the level both of its contents (what it says about other cultures and their histories) and of its form (what is implied by its mode of textualization).⁵ In the individual chapters of this book, I explore these additional meanings and metaphors in specific works of colonial literature, but here I will comment briefly on the significance of the allegorical form in Japanese colonial texts.

The term allegory covers a vast field with a wide array of types: Within the boundaries of literature, we find a kind of sliding scale, ranging from the most explicitly allegorical, consistent with being literature at all, to the most elusive, anti-explicit and anti-allegorical at the other.⁶ Some of the texts studied in this book, such as Nitobe’s essay on Momotar , are straightforward, naïve allegories. In his study of this folktale, Nitobe proposes to interpret Momotar ’s conquest of the island of ogres as an allegory for Japan’s colonial expansion into the South Seas. Developing a multitiered reading of Momotar that leaves little to the reader’s imagination, Nitobe causes this seemingly inconsequential folktale to stagger under the crushing weight of its allegorical significance. By contrast, Sat Haruo subtly weaves an allegory of contemporary history into the very fabric of his Demon Bird, a work published in October 1923, based on a Taiwanese aboriginal legend and offering Sat ’s contemporaries a lens through which to interpret their own recent history. Manifestly a story set in colonial Taiwan, Demon Bird alludes to the massacre of Koreans in the streets of Tokyo during the great Great Kanto Earthquake of September 1, 1923. In Nakajima’s 1942 stories about the South Seas, the narrator views a reflection of his own hybridity and self-colonization in the people he meets in Micronesia. In this case, the reader hesitates between the literal sense of the text and its rich allegorical overtones.⁷

While literary historians since the romantic period disparaged allegory as an inferior form of symbolism, modern critics have done much to restore its critical potential.⁸ Allegory provides a way for writers to juxtapose different levels of meaning within a single text and to comment intertextually on other literary works. I argue that Japanese writers use allegory to bracket their colonial narratives in order to tell their own stories of cultural colonization and hybrid identity. Subtle layerings of meanings that neither fully cohere nor fully merge, these allegories manifest the ambivalences of Japanese imperial culture. In formal terms, these texts are often hybrid products that combine other discourses or comment on other texts in a pastiche.

In his 1935 story The Savage, shika Taku depicts a Japanese hero who goes native in the wilds of Taiwan, effectively inverting Japan’s colonial mission of civilizing savages. In his story Momotar , Akutagawa inverts Japan’s most famous folktale by turning its hero into a villain, parodying this model of imperialist youth held up as a paragon of virtue by Japan’s leading scholar of colonial policy studies. In Demon Bird, Sat Haruo deconstructs the discourse of colonial ethnography and pens a radical critique of Japan’s empire. Although I emphasize the critical potential of allegory, I also point out the limits of allegorical critique. An allegorical text arranges its different levels of meaning in an implicit hierarchy, one that mirrors the power relationships of the colonial relationship itself, thereby raising questions of an ethical and political nature.⁹ The form of the allegory that allows the writer to speak to his or her readers about their own contemporary reality also serves to mask the colonial domination that victimizes the colonized.

If the works of Japanese colonial writers studied in this book are allegorical in form, perhaps my study of Japanese colonial literature is too. Northrop Frye notes, The instant that any critic permits himself to make a comment about a literary text, he has begun to allegorize.¹⁰ If Frye is right, then my book is no less allegorical than the works that it studies. When I began to research Japanese constructions of savagery during the colonial period, I thought I was investigating a somber but—in the final analysis—closed chapter of human history. As I approached the end of my work on this book, I realized that I was also telling my own story as an American in the first decade of the twenty-first century. Certainly, since the 1990s, the discourse of empire has made a dramatic comeback, and with it, the rhetoric of civilizing missions, dehumanizing tropes of savagery, and even the savage wars of peace of which Kipling spoke. The only piece missing from this picture is any historical awareness that we are resurrecting the demons of the past. For the fact of the matter is that there have never been any savages, only tropes of savagery, although these tropes possess their own logic and generate fateful consequences.

When we refer to our present as the postcolonial era, we often assume that we have transcended the age of empire. Indeed, it is true that some empires (the Japanese, for example) have vanished from the face of the earth. In addition, the forms of imperial power have changed markedly since the great decolonization movement of the 1950s and 1960s. However, to speak of our present as postcolonial may be—at least in part—an expression of wishful thinking. Much as the post of postwar does not signify the arrival of a period of peace on earth, I would argue that the post of postcolonialism is perhaps misleading and, if nothing else, premature. In this study, I am guided by the conviction that we can deepen our awareness of history and better understand our present times by examining the rhetoric of a defunct empire.

VIOLENT SAVAGES AND CHILDREN OF PARADISE

But who were the savages of the Japanese empire, what were they called, and where did they live? And why make them the focus of a book on Japanese colonialism? Let me first repeat that I do not believe that there actually were savages. I am concerned in this book only with rhetorical constructions of savages and with their representations in literature and social discourses. I employ savage as a word without a referent or indeed without any basis in reality—a word that functions, nevertheless, as a polyvalent signifier. As a nominal, the word savages refers to fictitious creatures imagined by the Japanese, whose imaginations were shaped by discourses on civilization, race, ideology, and literature. These savages populate the pages of Japan’s colonial writings rather than the spaces of its empire. Though the savage was an imaginary creature, he or she acquired a virtual reality by the body of statements, made by writers who cited and accepted similar claims by their predecessors, attesting to his or her existence. Nevertheless, this figure of discourse was an unstable entity that assumed different forms as the boundaries of empire changed and policies shifted.

How did writers during the colonial period refer to the savages about whom they wrote? In the first place, they often used nonspecific, abstract terms such as yaban (barbaric), genshi (primitive), or mikai (unenlightened) to denote the savage. Of these three terms, yaban is an ancient Sino-Japanese term for those who lie outside the pale of Sinic civilization and control, whereas both mikai and genshi take on their modern meanings in the translated discourse of enlightenment and evolutionary civilization that entered Japan during the Meiji period. If kaika meant the process of evolutionary civilization, then mikai (unenlightened) denoted the state that preceded civilization. Genshi, a term signifying origin or beginning, took on the added meaning of the earliest and most primitive stage of society when theories of evolutionary civilization entered Japan.

One encounters these terms throughout the colonial archive, but the words that writers used most frequently to speak of savages in the Japanese empire tended to have a more limited and concrete specificity. Adopting older Qing terms to refer to Taiwanese aborigines, Japanese spoke of the seiban (raw savage) or jukuban (cooked savage), terms that classified the aborigines in accordance with their acculturation to Chinese norms. In addition, particularly during the first years of Japanese colonial rule, they divided the aborigines geographically into nanban and hokuban, respectively, savages in the south and north of Taiwan. During Japan’s decades-long war of conquest in the Taiwan highlands, the aborigines were often categorized simply as allies (mikata ban) or enemies (tekiban). The kanji for ban, common to all these terms, differed from its homonym in the term yaban, which signified barbarian, and it served as the root for many related terms, whether spatial (banchi, aboriginal land in Taiwan), gendered (banfu, or savage women), abstract (banj , or the condition of the savages), or moral (ky ban, or evil, violent savages who resisted Japanese policies). After the visit of the crown prince to Taiwan in 1924, the government began to replace this deprecatory terminology with the neutral term takasagozoku, based on an ancient Japanese appellation for Taiwan. In the late 1930s, the government general of Taiwan launched a campaign to enforce usage of this term in all official discourse.

The Japanese also divided the Micronesians between the Chamorro (numerous in the Marianas Islands, often racially mixed descendants of Spanish) and the kanaka (the residents of the Caroline and Marshall Islands). The term kanaka was also a general, derogatory term used to describe all South Seas islanders and not specifically Micronesians, a term which derived from the Polynesian word for human being. More commonly, Japanese referred to islanders collectively as dojin, domin, and, most frequently, nan’y dojin, an omnibus term for the indigenous people of the South Seas. The term dojin (a native person) originally had the neutral meaning of a resident of a particular locality, but it acquired the pejorative sense of backward, primitive person during the colonial period. The earliest use of dojin in this new sense was the so-called 1879 law on former natives of Hokkaido (the Ainu). The appellation former native (ky dojin), like the term new commoner (shinheimin), applied to former outcasts, belonged to a lexicon of terms that replaced the status system of the Tokugawa period, which was abolished at the start of the Meiji period. In fact, these terms tended to perpetuate prejudice against minority groups in Japan and to reinforce discriminatory practices against them.

Since savages inhabited only the imaginations of the Japanese, there is no way that one can locate them on the map: they belong to the nonplace of discursive production. Indeed, since the savage is the product of the discourse that names him, the same writer could use the same words to represent other spaces and to refer to other groups than the ones named above. Consequently, the actual usage of tropes for savagery exceeds the delimited spaces of the Japanese imperium and its South Seas colonies, and can be used for writing about the home islands, the Japanese past, or the human condition in general.

Nevertheless, this study will focus predominantly on representations of Taiwan aboriginal society and the South Seas, the richest sites for the production of this discourse, and will cover the years 1895–1945. After Taiwan was ceded to Japan under the Shimonoseki Treaty, which ended the Sino-Japanese War, the Japanese fought a long colonial war to extend their control over the new territory. At first the aboriginal tribes in the mountainous interior of Taiwan were the allies of the Japanese in their struggle to crush Taiwan Chinese who had launched a guerilla war against Japanese colonial rule. After the guerillas were vanquished, the colonial authorities turned their attention to the mountainous interior of Taiwan and to its rich resources. Since the aboriginal population resisted the encroachments of settlers and soldiers, the regime launched a large-scale military offensive that culminated in the genocidal five-year pacification campaigns waged by Governor-General Sakuma Samata (1909–14). While the colonial regime succeeded in extending its control to most of the Taiwan highlands by 1914, the resulting order was periodically broken by aboriginal rebellions that punctuated the subsequent decades of colonial rule. During the Musha Incident of 1930, Sedeq aborigines from six villages attacked a school athletic event and murdered some 134 Japanese, precipitating a major crisis in colonial rule over the aboriginal territories.

The Japanese practiced a distinctive form of colonization in the highlands of Taiwan—what one could refer to as expropriation by dispossession. They subjugated the aboriginal lands primarily in order to exploit their resources, but had little use for the indigenous population. Deprived of their control of vast territories, the aborigines chafed under a colonial system that differed from the one imposed on the Han Chinese in the plains. Indeed, the Japanese drew a clear border that separated aboriginal territories from the rest of Taiwan, and ruled the aborigines under a special administrative system in which the police assumed the leading role; until the 1920s, travelers wishing to visit these lands needed special permits issued by the authorities. Such special treatment both reflected and legitimated the stereotypes of aborigines as fearsome savages, stereotypes that dominated Japanese popular culture and literary works.

By contrast with the brutal subjugation campaigns and the periodic upheavals that characterized colonial rule of Taiwan, the acquisition of Micronesia, Japan’s second tropical colony, was a bloodless affair. Ruled by Germany from the late nineteenth century, Japan seized the islands of Micronesia after a short naval campaign during the First World War. Passing from German to Japanese control, the islands were later entrusted to Japan as a trust territory under a mandate of the League of Nations. Mandated territories were divided into three classifications, A, B, and C, determined by the level of their cultural and political development. Territories classified as A were considered closest to independence, and, as in the case of Iraq (a British mandate that became formally independent in 1932), could receive sovereignty after the required period of tutelage. Mandates given a C designation—such as Japan’s Pacific allotment—were judged to be furthest from sovereignty; they were regarded as being on such a low level of political development as to be suitable for treatment as integral parts of the mandatory Power’s territory, almost, that is, as annexed domains.¹¹ Much like the Taiwanese aborigines, Micronesians were not seen as a labor force to be exploited. Unlike Taiwan, however, the Micronesian territory was exiguous and poor in resources. As a result, the process of expropriation was far less brutal than in the case of Taiwan. On islands such as Saipan, where the Japanese developed a plantation economy requiring an abundant labor force, the most important Japanese enterprises imported their workers from outside, especially from Okinawa. During the three decades that Japanese ruled Micronesia, the Japanese settler population eventually came to outnumber the indigenous islanders, notably in the islands in the Mariana chain. While some Micronesians resisted Japanese rule and colonial policies, the Japanese authorities did not confront widespread and violent opposition, as they did in Korea and Taiwan.

Reflecting these different modalities of conquest and imperial rule, colonial literature set in Taiwan and the South Seas often offers diametrically opposed images of indigenous peoples. In general, the dominant trope for representing the Taiwan aborigines during the colonial period was that of the violent, irrational headhunter. Reflecting the ferocity of the Japanese conquest period, narratives set in Taiwan recount cycles of rebellion and repression that punctuated the period of colonial rule. By contrast, writers about the South Seas often draw on figures of a soft primitivism to idealize the islanders as innocent, happy primitives and to depict their islands as a tropical paradise.¹² As Japanese immigrants came to outnumber South Seas islanders, Japanese writers often evinced imperial nostalgia for the vanishing Micronesians, victims of colonial modernity and of rapid demographic changes, a theme common in ethnographic writings about both Taiwan and Micronesia.

This diptych of contrasting figures of the savage—noble savage and violent head-hunter—constitutes the light and shadow of colonial literature. Scholars of Western colonialism have often noted the ambivalence of the trope of the savage in Western discourse. From the time of the discovery of America by Europeans, the indigenous native has been portrayed as the frightening and violent cannibal but also as the innocent and happy child, the epitome of all that is pure and untainted.¹³ It is no historical accident that a similar dichotomy can be found in the works of Japanese literature. After all, Japan was only one in a series of colonial powers that ruled Taiwan and Micronesia, and it borrowed liberally from its predecessors even as it strove to distinguish its rule from theirs. In addition, Japanese proponents of empire were quick to adapt figures of the savage along with the entire panoply of colonial discourses and tropes that had accumulated during several centuries of Western exploration and colonization of non-Western parts of the world.¹⁴

Why make savages central to study of Japanese colonial culture? In general, historians stress that the Japanese were culturally close to people that they colonized. One scholar writes: [Japan’s] most important territories, Korea and Taiwan, were well populated lands, whose inhabitants were racially akin to their Japanese rulers with whom they shared a common cultural heritage. This sense of cultural affinity with its subject peoples made Japan unique among the colonial powers of modern times.¹⁵ Because of these purported cultural and racial similarities with the colonized, this author points out, the Japanese were less likely to feel an exotic fascination with their colonies than Western colonizers did. While I will not attempt to refute this observation, I will note that the Japanese empire included societies without writing or complex state organization that were culturally remote from the home islands. The aboriginal population of Taiwan and the indigenous population of Micronesia may have made up a tiny fraction of the population of the Japanese empire, but they played a major role in the imagination of Japanese writers and loomed surprisingly large in colonial literature. Japanese writers devoted a disproportionately large number of fictional works to the Taiwanese aborigines, a mere 2 percent of the island’s total population, while they wrote relatively few works about the numerically preponderant Taiwan Chinese. Indeed, Japanese writers wrote no fewer than fifty works that were inspired by the aforementioned 1930 Musha Incident, in which Ataiyal aborigines rebelled against the Japanese colonial regime.¹⁶ Many Japanese writers and artists traveled to Micronesia, after it became a Japanese colony in 1914, in search of inspiration, producing an abundant and varied body of work.¹⁷ Beyond their quantitative importance, such literary works are qualitatively significant because they intersect in manifold and complex ways with the different strands of Japan’s colonial discourse and with the different phases of Japan’s empire.

The Taiwanese aborigines were the targets of Japan’s earliest colonial endeavor, the 1874 Taiwan Expedition, undertaken to chastise savages who had murdered the crew of a ship from the Ry ky kingdom. Later, in encyclopedias of geography, ethics textbooks, travel books, and colonial policy studies, they were often depicted as the headhunters of the Japanese empire. Indeed, the subjugation of headhunters was adduced by Nitobe Inaz , Japan’s first professor of colonial policy studies, who started his career as a colonial official in Taiwan, as the paradigmatic case of Japan’s civilizing mission. These same headhunters captured the imagination of early Japanese ethnographers who went to Taiwan in 1895 to survey the aborigines and to establish a system of classification of their major groups. Pioneers of colonial ethnography wrote primarily for like-minded experts, but they also profoundly influenced writers like Sat Haruo and Nakajima Atsushi, who based their stories on passages from ethnographic studies. Finally, whereas Meiji-era Japanese celebrated the subjugation of savages as an achievement of a modern and civilized Japan, their descendants in the twentieth century fled modern civilization and resettled in the Taiwan highlands to recover their inner savage.

In Japan, the earliest depictions of primitive South Seas islanders appeared in political novels from the 1880s, written by authors who had never traveled to the places they wrote about. These South Seas novels, which sparked great interest in the Pacific region among Meiji youth, often feature young officers of the Japanese navy who explore the South Seas and claim uncharted territory for Japan.¹⁸ In Yano Ry kei’s Ukishiro monogatari (Tale of the Floating Castle), published in 1890, a group of Japanese adventurers take over a British warship, set off to explore the South Seas, and eventually help a small island nation in its independence struggle against the Dutch. In Oshikawa Shunr ’s Kaitei gunkan (Battleship at the Bottom of the Sea), written in 1900, a Japanese naval officer establishes a secret base on a desert island in the South Seas where he develops new weapons and fights Western empires to win respect for his nation.¹⁹

By the turn of the twentieth century, these fantasies started to turn into reality as Japanese established strong commercial ties in the South Seas and eventually acquired their first South Seas colony. Nitobe Inaz saw Japanese expansion to the south as a manifestation of Japan’s national character. He also interpreted the popular folk hero Momotar as a metaphor for the nation’s expansion and as a model for prospective colonizers to emulate, much as Robinson Crusoe had been an inspiration to generations of English schoolboys. In fiction from the first decade of the twentieth century, young Japanese frequently travel to the South Seas in search of adventure or riches. With the vast expansion of Japanese media and economic ties in the South Seas in the 1920s, primitive South Seas islanders begin to enter Japan’s burgeoning popular culture, giving rise to what Kawamura Minato refers to as a "popular [taish ] orientalism. Finally, South Seas islanders occupied the bottom rung of the racial and environmental hierarchies that the Japanese constructed to legitimate their dominant position in an autarchic empire, particularly at the time of the Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere. To use Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s term, they filled the savage slot" in the imperial hierarchy of power and knowledge as the empire came to encompass broad swathes of Southeast Asia and the Pacific Islands.²⁰

JAPAN IN POSTCOLONIAL STUDIES

This book sets out to comprehend Japanese colonial culture by analyzing the tropes of savagery in literary works and exploring links between them and wider social discourses. An ancillary aim of the book is to place the Japanese empire within the comparative context of global imperial discourses and to initiate a dialogue with current postcolonial theory, which is so deeply informed by the study of European empire. Gyan Prakash offers a succinct statement of the aims of postcolonial theory in his essay Postcolonial Criticism and Indian Historiography: One of the distinct effects of the recent emergence of postcolonial criticism has been to force a radical rethinking and reformulation of forms of knowledge authored and authorized by colonialism and Western domination. . . . Recent post-colonial criticism seeks to undo the Euro-centrism produced by the institution of the West’s trajectory, its appropriation of the other as history.²¹ If the condition of the postcolonial world is the legacy of colonialism and of Western domination, then Prakash believes that the central task of postcolonial critique is to undo this legacy and to deconstruct Eurocentrism.

Prakash thus uses the term postcolonial to refer to non-Western parts of the world (the third world) once colonized by the West, a geographical notion that underlies other major postcolonial theoretical statements. In his seminal work on French and British domination of the Middle East, Edward Said calls Orientalism a Western style of dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient.²² Homi Bhabha and Gayatri Spivak honed their theories to explain the British colonization of India, although Spivak frankly cautions her reader against treating India as emblematic of all colonial relationships: The Indian case cannot be taken as representative of all countries, nations, cultures, and the like that may be invoked as the Other of Europe as Self.²³ Notwithstanding this cautionary note, postindependence India has a centrality in the literature of postcolonial studies not inferior to India’s erstwhile position as the jewel in the British crown.²⁴

Even when they go beyond this single case, however, postcolonial theories are generally based on a limited empirical perspective, cover a narrow geographical range, and tend to generalize excessively. As a consequence, their theoretical formulations tend to neglect the historical and linguistic features of colonial empires outside the Anglo-American framework.²⁵ Nevertheless, forms of colonial domination varied greatly depending upon the location of colony (Africa, Asia, Latin America) and the time period (sixteenth, eighteenth, or twentieth century) considered. In addition, there are national differences in the style of imperial domination: England’s way of being imperial was not the same as that of France, Portugal, the United States, or Japan. If the British empire looms especially large in post-colonial studies, Japan is perhaps the most neglected of the world’s major empires.²⁶ Japan controlled the most extensive territorial empire in East Asia, yet it is unmarked as a colonizer in Euro-American, but not in East Asian eyes.²⁷

That Japan, the only non-Western colonial power in the modern period, hardly figures in the annals of postcolonialism reflects the traditional disciplinary division between East Asian studies and studies of Western societies and mirrors a division of labor between their respective practitioners. If postcolonial scholars research the global aftermath of Western empires, East Asian area specialists tend to restrict themselves to their country or region of specialization. The development of East Asian studies in the United States, which came about as a result of the need during the Cold War for specialists with cultural and language training in East Asia, has led to the segregation of this field in area studies programs in American universities. This segregation of East Asian specialists in area studies has had the perverse effect of cutting off East Asian specialists from broader trends of intellectual life, thereby fostering intellectual