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t h e a d v e n t u r e s o f d a n k i c h i 

Popular Orientalism and Japanese Views of Asia

k a w a m u r a m i n a t o

t r a n s l a t i o n b y k o t a i n o u e & h e l e n j . s . l e e

I. Barbarity and Civilization

1 . a d v e n t u r e s o f d a n k i c h i ’ s g l o b e

Billed as a “delightful comic tale,” Shimada Keizō’s Adventures of Dankichi was serialized in the magazine Boys’ Club for six years, from 1933 to 1939. While fishing in a boat, the young protagonist Dankichi falls asleep and drifts away to a tropical island thickly forested with palm trees—an “is­ land of barbarians.” The story develops around Dankichi’s adventures as he, helped by the quick wit and wisdom of Karikō the black mouse, who serves as his judicious consultant, becomes king of the island. The Adven- tures of Dankichi was a very popular comic that mesmerized Japanese chil­ dren at the time.

Adventures embodies possibly the best expression of images held by Japa­ nese—in a general sense—of the “tropics,” “blackies,” “the South Seas,” “the uncivilized,” and “barbarians” during the 1930s (although adventure and expedition stories for boys set in the South Seas, such as Nan’yō Ichirō’s The Green Desert Island and The Roaring Jungle, had been serialized in Boys’ Club and other magazines since the late 1920s and were enthusiastically received). Adventures’ frequent use of discriminatory terms that would be avoided in contemporary society, such as “cannibals,” “blackies,” “savages,” “natives,” and “cannibal­savages,” only indicates the shallowness of social consciousness regarding racial discrimination in this period, and the use of those words should not be regarded as a sign of the text’s particularly blatant prejudice. As the author himself admits, he had a preconceived idea that “the tropical region in the South Seas was a place where dangerous beasts and wild birds roamed in the jungle and where dark­skinned headhunters lived.”1 Reflecting this image, the story consists of a mishmash of animals from all over the world that would generate the image of the “tropics” and “uncivilized lands”—not only do African animals such as lions, elephants, giraffes, and crocodiles appear in the story, but so do animals such as orang­ utans, sea turtles, and camels from the Southeast Asian tropics, Arabian desert, South America, New Guinea, and India.

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The story conveys a sense of what can be called Japanese “Orientalism” toward “the southern region,” “the South Seas,” and the “tropics,” collec­ tively.2 The author creates a tale of an imaginary and fantastical “tropical re­ gion in the South Seas” that is markedly different from the reality in Africa and Southeast Asia. Such a lack of national specificity was, of course, not deemed problematic by the general public because the story was merely a type of comic, a form of children’s amusement. Comics were granted the privilege of ignoring the geographical restriction of a story, be it Africa, Sumatra, Borneo, New Guinea, Samoa, or the Marshall Islands. The mode of expression called children’s comics was at the bottom rung of pop cul­ ture, and one can say that its status as a marginalized genre helped justify its preposterous content.

However, Adventures’ Orientalism toward “the tropical region in the south” has a clear origin in its political and social context. The author, Shimada Keizō, states that the idea of Adventures was “an extension of the dream I’ve always had since my boyhood.” He continues: “Back then, all boys seemed to share the same dream of becoming a cabinet minister or a general, but for some unknown reason, an absurd dream sprouted in my little head.” Shimada further explains his “irrepressible wishes, which were growing like mushrooming clouds”: “The dream was to go somewhere in the south where the climate was mild . . . and become a king on a deserted island . . . where I’d be accompanied by animals as retainers . . . with no worries about money . . . and no homework.” Shimada comments, “At that time, the South Seas Islands were under Japan’s colonial mandate, and the political idea of southward national expansion was on the rise in the name of development projects. All eyes were on the southern region, so I figured that a southern island would be the best setting for my Dankichi story.”3 He suggests that his original idea to set the story in a “tropical region in the south” was because he envisioned the Micronesian Islands, which were Japan’s colony at the time. Mori Koben, a Japanese pioneer of South Seas development, who was active in the Truk Islands (present­day Chuuk in the Eastern Caroline Islands of Micronesia), is often said to be the model for Dankichi, and this is perhaps because it is highly likely that Dankichi would have fetched up on one of the Micronesian Islands.4 As an aside, it should be noted that Yamanaka Minetarō’s 300 Miles across the Enemy Ter- ritory, published by Kodansha in 1931, includes a novella called “The Boy King in the South Seas.” It is a fiction set in the actual South Seas, in which a boy named Ōtaki Kenkichi becomes king of an island in the Solomon

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archipelago by conquering the people in the island using “tools of civiliza­ tion,” such as mirrors, fertilizer, and pistols. It appears that Adventures was directly inspired by the boy king of this “Kingdom of Daiken,” which was named after the protagonist.5

Of course, in the South Seas, with the exception of Palau (Belau), which has crocodiles (which were likely brought in from the outside), there are no wild beasts such as lions, gorillas, or panthers, let alone primitive peoples who could be described by a discriminatory term such as “cannibals.” On Dankichi’s globe, the tropical region in the South Seas included the “dark continent” of Africa, remote Borneo and Sumatra, the dense forests of New Guinea, and the Amazonian jungles. All together, this was the world of “primitives,” “barbarians,” and “natives.”

Viewing Adventures in this light, it is hardly meaningful to discuss what the actual setting of the barbarian island was, or who the model for the pro­ tagonist was. It is true that the South Seas Islands provided inspiration for the creation of Dankichi’s island, but the tale was mostly created by the au­ thor’s wild imagination. Or to put it in a critical light, the “delightful comic tale” continued to be produced by his Orientalist images of the South Seas, which were shaped by ignorance and popular misconceptions.

. . .

It is possible to view Adventures as a propaganda text endorsing Japan’s ex­ pansionism and colonial domination, or as a text that underscores Japanese superiority grounded in racial prejudices. Given the limited level of public consciousness in the 1930s, however, it is hard to pass judgment by conclud­ ing that the content of Adventures was particularly expansionist, colonialist, or racist. The frequently used racist expressions mentioned earlier were part of commonly used everyday language, and they do not suggest that Shi­ mada had stronger racist inclinations than others.

However, what Adventures introduced into the underlying mentality of the culture—literally, underground culture, rather than subculture—of the late 1920s and early 1930s Japan was the very theme of “barbarity” discov­ ered by “civilization.” In other words, a Japanese boy, Dankichi, who dons only a grass skirt, appearing practically identical with the naked “savages,” symbolizes “civilization” in contrast to the “barbarity” of the “blackies” by the very fact that he wears a wristwatch and shoes. The watch and shoes are evidence of his civilized self. And it is the small accessory—a wristwatch— that functions as the symbolic device that decidedly separates the characters

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into a hierarchal culture: Dankichi as the king, on the one hand, and the “barbarian retainers” on the other (Shimada never forgot to draw Dankichi’s watch on his left wrist, even in the smallest frame; this has already been pointed out in Yano Akira’s Japanese Views of the History of the South Seas).

Dankichi is the one who rules “time” on the barbarian island, and it is his unitary control and rule over “time” that becomes the source of his power on the throne. Dankichi introduces to the uncivilized island—now his is­ land—schools, hospitals, a military, a postal system, and money, and tries to civilize his “barbarian retainers.” But what lies at the root of this “civi­ lization” is none other than the watch, a sophisticated device that controls “time.” Perhaps the watch also indicates that his superiority comes from his familiarity with numbers and letters, which allows Dankichi to become king among the “natives” (Dankichi does not want to be bothered by the names of his “blackie” retainers, such as Banana, Pineapple, and Betel Nut, so he writes numbers on their chests, calling them “Number One,” “Num­ ber Two,” and so forth).

Wearing a watch (or wearing shoes), as Dankichi does, however, was a relatively new phenomenon in modern Japanese history. In Meiji (1868– 1912) and Taisho (1912–1926) Japan, it was almost inconceivable for children to wear watches, and even in 1933 (the first year of Adventures’ publication) it was probably very rare to see a child with one. If a watch is a reflection of civilization, it should be noted that Japan’s own civilization and enlight­ enment did not have such a long history for Dankichi to boast of to his “barbarian retainers.” Conversely, only by discovering the “barbarian retain­ ers,” as well as other “savages” on the “barbarian island” such as the “Kūroi” tribe, “Burakku” tribe, “Kankara” tribe, and “Yami” tribe,6 could Dankichi, as a Japanese, become a “civilized individual.” By discovering the external “barbaric Other,” one can find “civilization” within. In other words, it is fair to say that by acquiring the “barbarous” colony that was the South Seas Is­ lands—or, by incorporating “uncivilized” savages and barbarian islands into its own territories—Japan, for the first time, came to have an awareness of itself as a first­class, “civilized nation.”

2 . d i s c o v e r i n g t h e “ n a t i v e ”

In Lesson Two of the ninth volume of the state­approved grade school Japa­ nese language textbook (of the third edition, which ran from 1918 to 1932) is a reading entitled “A Letter from the Truk Islands.” It reads as follows:

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April 10

Dear Shōtarō,

. . . It’s been three months since I came to the Truk Islands, and I now have a good grasp of the lay of the land here. Both winter and spring are close to summer in the Japanese mainland. I’ve heard that it’s as warm as it is now throughout the year, and contrary to my initial worries, this seems to be a pleasant place to live. Also, the islands in this area are governed by our country, and many Japanese people have moved here, so I don’t feel lonely in the least bit. The first thing you would notice upon arrival here is the plants. Especially rare among them are the coconut palm trees and breadfruit trees. Among the palm trees, the tall ones can reach as much as ninety feet. Leaves that look like the wings of birds are clustered at the top of the trunk, where bunches of fruit grow the size of an adult’s head. [ . . . ]

The natives are not very civilized yet, but they are meek and easily take to us. Because our country has built many schools in recent years, the native chil­ dren have learned to speak very good Japanese. I saw a girl about ten years old singing the Japanese anthem Kimigayo the other day.

I will write again soon. Please give my best regards to your father and mother.

Your Uncle

The mandate of Micronesia was handed over to Japan from Germany in 1920, and it did not take long for the islands to be used as a topic in Japanese textbooks. (Volume nine of the textbook was edited in 1920.) Takagi Ichi­ nosuke, the author of this “letter,” was a scholar of Japanese literature who worked as the editor of school textbooks for the Ministry of Education. He later recounted that he composed the piece “without any direct knowledge of the Truk Islands” and wrote it “solely relying on guidebooks of the islands.”7 Remarking, “It bothers me after all that the letter introduces a story about the ‘natives’ at the end in an awkward manner,” he went on to offer self­crit­ icism saying, “Especially the line, ‘I saw a girl about ten years old singing the Japanese anthem Kimigayo the other day,’ is very much an abstract expres­ sion. You can write these conceptual things with flare if you’re writing from a dogmatic standpoint, but they have nothing to do with reality.”

Setting aside Takagi’s self­criticism, it is undeniable that these colonialist materials were used in elementary school education and that they planted in the minds of young subjects of the Japanese empire images of the “natives” and the colony: unusual vegetation—such as palm and breadfruit trees— and “yet­to­be­civilized” “natives” in a strange and unfamiliar landscape. It is not far­fetched to say that the natives that appeared in grade school text­

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books prepared the way for “barbarian retainers” in Adventures and “violent savages” in The Green Desert Island. And just as Dankichi ruled the “barbar­ ian world” in the name of “civilization,” it was the Japanese language in schools and the nation­state system of the “Japanese empire,” symbolized in the Japanese anthem, that governed the uncivilized.

The Micronesian “natives” under Japan’s mandate were not the first group of “natives,” “uncivilized people,” or “barbarians” that modern Japan discovered. In fact, they were the last. Over the course of Japan’s moderniza­ tion (that is, on its way to the national goal of “Civilization and Enlighten­ ment”), the barbarous and uncivilized “natives” that stood in stark contrast to the “civilized” Japanese were constructed one after another. They were the Ainu, who were perfectly preserved as “former natives” in the law entitled “The Hokkaido Former Natives Protection Law,” the “natives” who lived in Otasu Forest near present­day Poronaisk in Sakhalin (that is, the northern ethnic minorities such as the present­day Uiltas, Nivkhi, Yakuts), and the “natives” who were called the “Takasago tribe” or “native savages” in Taiwan, which became Japan’s colony soon after the Sino­Japanese War (1894–1895).

. . .

The natives of the Truk Islands described in the textbook were “meek” and “easily took to [Japanese].” Needless to say, these expressions conversely presume that there were natives who were “not meek” and did not “easily take to [Japanese].” For example, they point to the existence of ferocious and vicious “savages” like the “natives” in the Marshall Islands depicted by Suzuki Tsunenori in his True Record of the South Seas Expedition.8 Suzuki and others headed out to the Marshall Islands to investigate a group of shipwrecked Japanese fishermen and, as suggested by information passed on by an English ship, concluded that the shipwreck was indeed caused by an attack from “natives.” He describes so­called Marshallese “natives” in the following terms:

The natives are very idle in nature, and more docile characters are hardly ever found. However, they are unable to discern right from wrong and have no sense of honor or judgment at all. They still exhibit a friendly and sociable manner with each other, as though they were relatives, and very rarely fight each other. Their deference to the king of the island is comparable to that of a god, and the way in which people look up to him is more akin to worship than paying respect. If a foreigner pays a visit and brings rare gifts or food, they share it with their neighbors and friends. However, the custom from

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the barbaric era persists in the way in which men oppress women. Men treat women no differently from the way in which slaves were treated during the Roman empire—quite close to the handling of furniture or property.

On the islands of Manowa9 and Arno in the archipelago, the atmosphere is quite brutal, and the residents have not given up the custom of cannibal­ ism. Some of the inhabitants on other islands are also vicious and evil, hav­ ing a particular taste for human flesh. When they discover starving drifters on their islands, they feed them food and make them believe that they have been rescued. However, the islanders secretly slaughter the drifters later, bury the dead bodies in the sand, wait until the middle of the night when there is no one around, and dig up the bodies and eat them. This is what I have heard. When I asked how they ate human flesh, I was told that they tear off small pieces, wrap them with pandan leaves, and grill them on a strong fire until the surface is roasted and turns the color of charcoal. Then they take the grilled flesh out of the fire, peel off the roasted leaves, and eat the human flesh inside that has turned white and become like tofu. The taste of human flesh is said to be marvelously delicious.

The “barbaric customs,” characterized by cannibalism, idleness, adultery, superstition, and tattooing, are definitive images of the “natives.” “South Seas natives” has conjured these images of an uncivilized world, such as “barbarians” and “savages,” ever since Suzuki’s time. Even when Japan later took possession of the whole Micronesian region—including the Marshall Islands—as a colony, the generalized image of the “natives” as uncivilized and barbaric was handed down largely unaltered.

Taiwan’s “Takasago tribe,” which staged the Wushe Incident, left even more grave and alarming marks of barbarism in the Japanese psyche than the Marshallese “natives.”10 As a result of the Sino­Japanese and Russo­ Japanese wars, two wars of colonial expansion, Japan acquired colonies such as Taiwan and Korea, but it also met with large­scale resistance from the indigenous peoples in the process of colonization. By the fact that those resistance movements have been trivialized as disturbances and riots and have not been understood as a part of the larger anti­Japanese, anticolo­ nial struggle, we can see the tendency to disregard accountability for Japan’s modern colonial policies.

The Wushe Incident refers to the uprising of the “Takasago tribe” in Oc­ tober 1930, in the indigenous village of Wushe, located in the mid­region of Taiwan. On October 27, about two hundred Takasago people from six hamlets stormed into the playground of the Wushe local school on Sports Day, killing Japanese and attacking police and governmental offices. One hundred thirty­four Japanese were killed. It appears that the incident was

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understood on the Japanese mainland as a case of revolt by “the barbaric” against “the civilized,” rather than an outcome of the anti­Japanese move­ ment in the colonies. The Takasago were generally known as “savages” who practiced headhunting, adorned their bodies with tattoos, fought among their clans, and continued to live in strife and conflict. Images of the Taka­ sago swinging their machetes at the Japanese overlap with the scenes fre­ quently seen in comics or films in which “cannibalistic natives” attack explorers and travelers. Collectively delineated in these scenes are the re­ actionary attacks of the “savages” on “civilization” through which Japanese soberly recognized the presence of “barbarians” within the borders of their own nation.

In his book, The Governor-General Office of Taiwan, Huang Zhaotang explains that “the cause [of the Wushe Incident] was an eruption of re­ sentment that had built up over the years against the military expeditions and punishments meted out by the Governor­General’s Office, in addition to forced labor, insults against Takasago women, and dissatisfaction with the arrogant local police.”11 However, the majority of Japanese at the time, including intellectuals, saw the incident as a manifestation of “barbarity” caused by the innate bestiality, infantile emotions, and truncated thought processes of the “barbarians.” In her travelogue entitled Korea, Taiwan, and South Seas Harbors, for instance, Nogami Yaeko, who had visited the site of the uprising in Wushe, wrote the following about the cause of the incident as told by a Japanese who was a policeman at the time.

Hōbo is one of the native hamlets located near Meishi at the foot of the mountains. A man named Piposappo was an adoptee.12 His wife was an exceptionally licentious woman and even ventured out to Puli in search of young Japanese men from the mainland. Piposappo could not blame or punish his wife. Instead, he was captivated by a strange heroism uniquely inherent in the Taiwanese savages. He thought he could regain her love if he demonstrated his manliness by hunting the heads of despicable mainland Japanese men.

In the meantime, Chief Mona Rudao of the Mahebo clan had a new problem, besides the one with his younger sister, who had just been divorced by a Japanese police officer. A group of people led by his two sons insulted two Japanese policemen as they happened upon them while deer hunting. It was an explosion of frustrations that young people in general harbored. The Japanese authorities had planned to quietly quash this incident, but not knowing this, Mona Rudao worried about the possible punishment that might befall his sons. Piposappo seized on his fear. His idea was to convince the chief, who was respected by all native villages, to back his plan to rise up

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against the Japanese authorities before Mona Rudao’s sons were humiliat­ ingly punished, and, utilizing the opportunity, to engage in headhunting and earn his wife’s praise.13

Needless to say, this was an account completely in line with the official documentation of the incident. What is illuminated most forcefully in this passage, however, is Nogami’s preconceived notion that the real cause of the incident was the “barbarism” of the Takasago, characterized by their brutal­ ity and infantilism, by heroism that only strikes the civilized as “odd,” by cowardice and suspicion, sexual promiscuity, inferiority, and a hasty, self­ centered thought process. She writes, “Even though the Japanese authorities had planned to quietly quash this incident,” the Taiwanese savages rose up, propelled by their own mysterious, infantile, and foolish heroism and cow­ ardice. The responsibility of Japanese police authorities is not addressed. It is assumed that the entire incident was a product of the imagination of the “barbarian natives,” and was, in essence, rooted in their barbaric brutality and lewdness.

One of the fictional depictions of the Wushe Incident is Nakamura Chi­ hei’s “Foggy Native Village,” included in his Collected Taiwan Fictions.14 This story offers a more detailed depiction of the process leading up to the “barbarian” uprising than Nogami Yaeko’s text, and it offers as the remote cause of the incident the broken marriage between a native woman and a Japanese police officer, who suffers torment over his interracial marriage. Nakamura takes a rather sympathetic view of the Takasago by emphasiz­ ing the obstacles that emerge from the lack of understanding between two ethnic groups. In essence, however, he sees the Wushe Incident as desperate resistance against “civilization” by the cornered “barbarians.”

Japan’s policies toward the Taiwanese natives are gradually achieving success, and the natives’ unadorned wild nature is now being tamed in the face of what we call culture. And their ethnic brutality and primitive lifestyle are al­ ready beginning to deteriorate, just like the vitality of a menopausal woman who is finally losing her biological female functions. [ . . . ] It was the case that the Taiwanese savages galvanized what little wild or violent nature they had left in them in order to recklessly attempt to fight, for the very last time, the lifestyle incompatible with their character; that is, civilization.

Nogami and Nakamura observe the “barbarians” (yabanjin) from the po­ sition of the “civilized.” Their over­determined assumption—that they are on the side of “civilization” and the Taiwanese natives are on the side of “barbar­

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ity” (yaban)—naturally never wavers.15 Even for Nakamura, who dramatized the Wushe Incident as a tragedy between two ethnic groups, the solution was for the civilized nation of Japan, which now included such “barbarians,” to “civilize” and “enlighten” them faster, if only by a little, and to demonstrate to an even greater extent the depths of Japan’s good intentions. In other words, there was no other way to educate the “barbarians” than to treat them with paternalistic sympathy, compassion, and protection in the same fashion as the policy of segregation and protection suggested by the legal framework in the Hokkaido Former Natives Protection Law for the Ainu.

3 . t h e m o d e o f t h o u g h t t h a t f r a m e s “ b a r b a r i s m ”

In terms of the Wushe Incident’s impact on the cultural psyche of the Japa­ nese “mainlanders,” however, one must point out the awakening of the Jap­ anese—who had undergone civilization and enlightenment themselves—to their “inner barbarity.” One fine example is Ōshika Taku’s anthology en­ titled The Savage, which includes short stories centering on the themes of the native settings and peoples of Taiwan.16 The stories include “Tattaka Zoo,” “Savage Women,” “Zhang’s Desire,” “In the Forest,” “The People of the Inlands,” and “The Savage,” among others. “Tattaka Zoo” was published in 1931, “Savage Women” in 1933, and “Zhang’s Desire” and “The Savage” in 1935. Ōshika began writing his “Takasago Tribe” stories one year after the Wushe Incident, and this stream of “savage literature” was produced around the same time that the heroic stories of Dankichi and his barbarian retainers were published in Adventures.

In the collection, the title piece, “The Savage,” best exemplifies Ōshika’s predilection for the concept of “barbarity.” The young Japanese protagonist Tazawa joins a labor dispute in a Chikuho coal mine in Japan that his father owns and engages in a fierce protest, even instigating the miners to flood a portion of the mine. Practically disowned by his family, he is forced to relocate himself to the “native land” of Taiwan. Tazawa, who is betrayed by his trusted friend during the labor struggle, “feels as though he has lost the foundation of his spirit,” and “almost as an act of self­abandonment,” comes to work at the police station that guards the Taiwanese savages. He then meets the native girl Taimorikaru, who possesses wild and unadorned charm. She is looking for a Japanese husband from the mainland, and he ends up reciprocating her simple, passionate advances.

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A riot among the Taiwanese natives erupts in a nearby community. Tazawa joins in the “punitive expedition forces,” and in the heat of the mo­ ment, with a machete, ends up beheading a native who attacks him. This marks the surfacing of the barbarity that was latent in Tazawa, the petit bourgeois intellectual and highly educated idler. Now, Tazawa has to recog­ nize the wild, primitive nature and the barbaric essence inside him. How­ ever, he is forced to admit that these traits are nevertheless restrained when compared to the real “barbarity” displayed by Taimonamo, the younger sis­ ter of Taimorikaru, who puts a curse on the severed head of the enemy that Tazawa had brought back by saying, “Bring here the heads of your parents and siblings. I’ll let them live with you here.” This passage follows:

Witnessing this attitude of Taimonamo, who was only 15, Tazawa was un­ equivocally made aware of his weakness. He couldn’t simply believe that this was all because the rough customs of this place affected her mind. He felt as though he had caught the choking smell of barbarism handed down through the blood. “No, it’s not just barbarism. That barbarism is like the solemn pulse that throbs into the indomitable spirit of a giant tree—a colossal tree that spreads its chest while suffering from merciless Mother Nature, yet sus­ tained by its acerbic compassion. The sap continues to run throughout the tree, and it gushes out from the tip of even a small branch. Compared to this, I am only a feeble sapling, just transplanted.

It can be said that this passage depicts the catalyst for the transforma­ tion from “civilization” to “barbarity.” While Tazawa is a young man who “dropped out of school in Tokyo,” there is no question that he is a fellow traveler, would­be intellectual who shows sympathy for labor organizing. But the same Tazawa, the “civilized man” who possesses a higher intellectual ability than most people, engages in an instinctive fight and carries out an act of “headhunting” just like the Taiwanese natives. It proves that the regres­ sion into barbarism from civilization can happen among Japanese, or those from the mainland. However, such barbarity is still tinged with a delicate shade compared to even Taimonamo, the native girl. If her wild, barbaric na­ ture is something that has put down its roots deep into the ground, Tazawa’s awakening to a “wild nature” is merely that of a transplanted sapling. And of course, all this means nothing but the rediscovery of modern Japan’s “civi­ lization and enlightenment” as a “transplanted civilization,” as well as an awakening to the true, wild barbarity that existed before Japan’s modernity.

. . .

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In the early Showa period (1926–1989), the Japanese could confirm their own “civilized self ” by finding “barbarity” and “untamed nature” in the “natives” and “savages” of the colony. But, within themselves, who were supposed to be thoroughly civilized, they also were to discover a “barbarity” as their hidden and secret passion. Tazawa chops off a man’s head with a Taiwanese native’s sword and triumphantly comes home with it, and Dan­ kichi subdues powerful enemy natives, pirates, and rascals with his military power. In other words, this is a calling from an “untamed instinct” within and an awakening of “barbarism.”

That such an awakening of “wild nature” and “barbarity” was the other side of contempt and fear toward the native and savage is apparent without being examined in the context of modern Japanese history. The awareness of the tenuousness of transplanted Western civilization in Japan, on the one hand, and the discovery of the “barbaric nature” of Japanese themselves, which they had ostensibly expunged by introducing modern, systematic ideas, on the other, were one and the same thing. The problem inherent to modern Japan was that its own appropriation of a foreign culture and civilization and its project to modernize and civilize native cultures—that is, the “Orientalization” of the surrounding Asian and Pacific cultures and the de­Orientalization of Japan’s own traditional/Asia­Pacific culture, which was rooted in the Asia­Pacific region—had to occur simultaneously.

This is to say that the discovery of “barbarity,” as in the case of Ōshika, did not open a path to critique and overcome the “civilization” of the West by uncovering Japan’s own uncivilized nature. Instead, it only valorized barbarism as defined within the existing framework of civilization itself (Ōshika himself regretted that his work was regarded as explorations of “mere barbarism”). The ultimate goal of modern Japan, “Leaving Asia, En­ tering Europe,” could not be achieved only by modernizing, civilizing, and Westernizing Japan. It was also deeply implicated in treating other Asian and Pacific ethnic groups and countries as uncivilized and in regarding them as primitive and barbaric. In other words, Japan’s enlightenment and civilization meant the transformation of other Asian­Pacific ethnicities and countries, which historically had much in common with Japanese culture, into a primitive and barbarous existence.

It is widely accepted in the study of world history that the divide be­ tween the imperial master and the colony never occurred where there was no gap in stages of civilization. Countries and ethnic groups that were on a similar level in their cultures could never develop imperial­power­and­

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colony relationships with each other. Japan’s colonial acquisitions followed the Western model—examples include England and India, France and North Africa, Holland and Indonesia, etc.—and were always accompanied by cultural invasion and deprivation in which other ethnicities and coun­ tries were thoroughly despised, looked down upon, and regarded as “bar­ barous,” while their customs, cultures, and conventions were degraded as uncivilized. In some ways, the fanatic inculcation of Japanese spirit and emperor ideology in the colony was an expression of the inferiority complex felt by the Japanese themselves toward the transplanted Western civilization. Such inculcation, functioning as a hot house for arrogant cultural chauvin­ ism and narrow­minded cultural nationalism, prepared for the absurd, yet calamitous, situations in the regions under Japan’s colonial rule.

II. “Natives” in Asia

1 . c o o l i e s , b e g g a r s , a n d o p i u m a d d i c t s

The steamer came alongside a stone wharf that reminded me of the one at Iida.17 It did so with such precision that I should never have believed I was at sea. On the pier, there were crowds of people; most of the people there, how­ ever, were Chinese coolies. Looking at any one of them, I had the immediate impression of dirt. Any two together were an even more unpleasant sight. That so many of them had gathered together struck me as most unwelcome indeed. Standing on the deck, I contemplated this mob from my distant observation point and thought to myself: “Goodness! What a strange place I’ve come to!” [ . . . ]

I looked along the pier and noticed the horse carriages drawn up on the landing place. There were also a large number of rickshaws. However, they were pulled by the same crowd of bellowing men, so business did not ap­ pear, compared with Japan at least, to be particularly good; most of the horse carriages also seemed to be operated by the same people. Consequently, all that was there was a load of dirty vehicles clanking away. Of the horse car­ riages in particular, it had been rumored, at the time when the Russkies had evacuated Dalian during the Russo­Japanese War, that the Russkies had very carefully dug holes and buried the vehicles in order to prevent their falling into Japanese hands. Afterward, the Chinks walked about everywhere sniff­ ing the ground; when they found the right smell, they nosily disinterred one carriage, then another, in the same manner. Very soon, Dalian was teeming with growling, muttering diggers of holes. These, of course, were just rumours, and I do not know what really happened. In any event, of all the rumours circulating from that time, this seems one of the cleverest, and

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anybody could see with his own eyes that these carriages were indeed covered in mud.18

Invited by Nakamura Korekimi (often known as Zekō), his friend and then­president of the South Manchurian Railway Company, Natsume Sōseki visited Korea and Manchuria for a month and a half, from Septem­ ber to October 1909, and serialized his travel essay Travels in Manchuria and Korea in a newspaper. The quotation above is the scene in which O.S.K.’s Tetsureimaru, with Sōseki on board, sails into the port of Dalian, the entry point to Manchuria. There are some who argue, based on this scene, that Sōseki harbored disdain toward Asia and a discriminating sentiment toward the Chinese, but here I simply want to point out that the colony “Man­ churia” was first recognized as a very dirty place in the eyes of a representa­ tive intellectual and writer from Japan. In this context, coolies are equated with crowds of bellowing men, which are equated with “Chinks”; therefore the whole of “Chinks” is represented by the “filthy,” “unsightly” coolies. Sōseki’s first impression during his Manchuria­Korea trip was griminess and strangeness, and from here, it would not have taken much to reach the gen­ eralization of “dirty Chinese” and “filthy China.”

If the text simply stated that there were many grubby coolies in China, it could be an objective statement, although tinged with a sense of disdain for poor hygiene and filthiness. But one cannot help feeling in Sōseki’s rhetoric a dehumanization of coolies, or, frankly, a gaze that treats them as animals rather than as humans. One has to assume an unconscious intention to rep­ resent the coolies as subhuman animal­like creatures in sentences like, “The steamer passed alongside the shore in a calm and dignified manner, skim­ ming close by that curious throng of coolies, and finally coming to a halt. As soon as we had docked, the crowd of coolies started buzzing and swarm­ ing like angry wasps,”19 the frequent use of the phrase “crowd of bellowing men,” or the expression “the Chinks walked about everywhere sniffing the ground; when they found the right smell . . .” in the above passage.

In the interest of comparison, let us turn to Unbeaten Tracks in Japan, written by the British woman Isabella Bird, who visited Japan in 1878. The following is a scene in which her ship enters the port of Yokohama.

The first thing that impressed me on landing was that there were no loafers, and that all the small, ugly, kindly­looking, shriveled, bandy­legged, round­ shouldered, concave­chested, poor­looking beings in the streets had some affairs of their own to mind. At the top of the landing­steps there was a

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portable restaurant, a neat and most compact thing, with charcoal stove, cooking and eating utensils complete; but it looked as if it were made by and for dolls, and the mannikin who kept it was not five feet high.20

It is not easy to say whether the Japan of 1878, when Isabella Bird arrived at Yokohama, was more “civilized” than the Manchuria (China) of 1909, when Natsume Sōseki entered Dalian. But one has to conclude that in the area of racial and ethnic prejudices, Sōseki scores higher. Of course, this is not to say that Bird was completely free from racial prejudices. Upon meeting Ainu in Hokkaido, she wrote, “They are uncivilisable and altogether irreclaim­ able savages.” The words “uncivilised” and “savages” appear frequently in her travel writing to describe the Ainu people. But she expresses disapproval of her interpreter Ito’s extremely discriminatory words, “Treat Ainos [i.e., Ai­ nus] politely! . . . They’re just dogs, not men.”21 She also writes the following immediately after the earlier quote about the “irreclaimable savages”:

. . . yet they are attractive, and in some ways fascinating, and I hope I shall never forget the music of their low, sweet voices, the soft light of their mild, brown eyes, and the wonderful sweetness of their smile.22

Although the Japanese regard the Ainu as subhuman (dogs, indeed!), this British woman with a great deal of curiosity writes about the attraction of the Ainu as humans, all the while suffering from “filthiness,” such as swarms of fleas and an unbearable stench. It is possible, of course, to identify here the mental tendency toward the worship of the wild state and the natu­ ral—as exemplified by the notion of the “noble savage”—in post­Rousseau Europe. But even considering that, it is perhaps justified to say that Bird’s gaze fairly captures the Ainu as “humans.” This British woman attempted to overcome the gap between the civilized and the primitive by the concept of universal humanity, but the Japanese (who were supposed to be only mar­ ginally civilized themselves) tried to paint the “uncivilized” peoples with the images of “dogs” and animals that were sniffing around the ground.

. . .

Let us consider another example. Imaeda Setsuo’s Strange Stories from Man- churia was an astonishing best seller as a Manchurian guide book, reprinted twenty­four times in five years after first being published in 1935 by Gekkan Manshūsha. Unlike official guides to Manchurian immigration or textbook­ like introductions to Manchuria, it reports on the hidden side of each Man­

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churian city—prostitutes, opium addicts, thieves’ markets, and so on— while underscoring the bizarreness of it all. It is an interesting book that depicts the underbelly and unknown side of Manchuria, which was strongly associated with official slogans such as “Cooperation of Five Peoples” and “Asian Paradise by Moral Rule.” The book is written in the form of a con­ versation between a host and a guest. The following is an exchange in the book’s section on Dalian, the entry port to Manchuria.

“Look at the main square. All kinds of cripples are clinging there like scabs. Now, a Western lady might come out of the hotel and be pleased by the flowers and the smell of the acacia along the boulevard. But she wouldn’t find it easy to go out often if a cripple keeps pestering her the whole block, would she?”

“In the olden days, they used to do a ‘beggar sweep’—shipping all those picked up to Shandong peninsula in a boat and dumping them there.”

“All sent back to where they came from, you mean?” “They were all kept on deck, of course, but one year, the boat was hit by

a storm. It tipped 45 degrees. Crashing waves were washing the deck. . . . Do I need to say the rest? These guests on the boat were missing hands or legs, you see. By the time the storm passed and calm clouds finally floated in the sky, the deck was sparkling clean, just like when VIPs come aboard, I hear.”

“Geez! It must have been a screeching hell, literally!”

This is the tone of the conversation throughout. What is depicted is the hidden side of the Japanese colony Manchukuo and its dark, social aspects, valued entirely for its sensationalism. The content of the book was originally serialized in the magazine Manchuria Monthly under the title Guide to the Manchurian Special Scenic Zones, and it is nothing more than popular read­ ing material that largely relies on exposé realism. However, compared to the empty formalistic reports and travelogues written by mainland writers and journalists who visited Manchukuo on junkets sponsored by the South Manchurian Railway Company or newspaper companies, perhaps the book’s value should be recognized, if only paradoxically, just for its mockery of the official state slogans, such as “Cooperation of Five Peoples,” “Asian Paradise by Moral Rule,” and “The Whole World under the Emperor.”

Of course, this is not to say that the book offers any fundamental criti­ cism or negative perspective of the puppet state Manchukuo. The only thing that can be found in the book is a gaze of the curious and the bizarre that seeks things exotic, ugly, vulgar, peculiar, and rare; and it is nothing but a gaze that fully intends to de­familiarize Manchuria, Manchukuo, and

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Manchurians. Thieves’ markets, brothels, opium dens, underground scenes, etc. fill the pages. Along with the “Manchurian sunset” and warlords, these were the images of Manchuria shared among the Japanese masses, and they often came from popular travelogues and travel essays of this kind.

. . .

Let us examine other material, a book called Dissection of Taikan’en. No colophon, author’s name, or publisher’s name can be found in the book. The front cover bears the two characters for “Top Secret,” and the title page states, “Social Field Work on the Han People, Volume One.” This is a re­ port on the building and facilities called Taikan’en in Fujiaden, the so­called “Manchurian residential zone” in Harbin. The book declares that here can be found every kind of vice and misery imaginable.

From under the carved letters “Taikan’en” a cave­like pathway opens up heading north. Once you pass this gate, you will find yourself led into a dark world filled with foul smells, profanity, and terror. Two­story buildings that house flophouses, fortune­tellers, morphine dealers, and miscellaneous stores occupy both sides of the pathway. The conspicuous staircase in the middle of the path leads to the flophouse upstairs. Naked corpses are often found behind the staircase, but we see none today. The women, who are standing, as if dazed, in small groups in front of the flophouse and near the staircase, are the prostitutes who live in the hotel. Due to syphilis, their eyes are clouded white, and their faces are blue­black and emaciated because of excessive sex and drugs. The noisy crowds that surround them are those who are haggling down the already miserable price of 40 sen apiece.23

The author depicts the world of the “foul smells, profanity, and terror” of Taikan’en with the calmness of a surgeon and thoroughly objective investi­ gation and analysis: morphine addicts, sex workers, gambling, vagabonds, opium dens, morphine dealers, beggars, thieves, and corpses. Fujiaden, the representative of the largest criminal underground of Manchukuo, and Taikan’en, the symbol of its vice, immorality, filth, and degeneracy, were nothing but the exact opposite of the ideal of “Asian Paradise by Moral Rule.”

But what we need to be aware of is that the author connects the existence of Taikan’en and Fujiaden with the ethnic character of the Han. Any coun­ try or ethnic group, to a varying degree, has a criminal underground, as well as a dark side, such as brothels and slums. Its degree corresponds to the level of political and economic development of the country, and it is now common sense that it has nothing to do with ethnic or national character.

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But this author discusses the issue as a problem of ethnic culture. Thus we find a passage like this one: “Contrary to the state and culture of the Japa­ nese race, which always attempts to keep individual character pure, the Han race’s society and culture are thoroughly instinct­based. They always seek to live in wild abandon, as they are led by their instinct. Therefore, there is a bad tendency in the social structure of Han society from the beginning that tends to ignore national policies. The only decisive element in Han society is the deep­seated instinct that ignores human will and sneers at normal ef­ forts by human beings.”24

In other words, the discriminatory gaze toward the Han race, that is the Chinese, is dressed up in the attire of cultural comparison and is offered as an observation of cultural difference between Japan, which seeks “pure char­ acter,” and China, which is “thoroughly instinct­based.” Needless to say, the discriminatory gaze toward China, disguised in this type of seemingly objective cultural argument, intentionally conceals the grossly inhumane and perversely immoral criminal acts committed on a national scale by Jap­ anese who conspired to obtain large sums of money by taking advantage of the vice, corruption, fear, and immorality in China: as exposed by Eguchi Keiichi’s 1988 book Sino-Japan Opium War, the Japanese military and mer­ chants were actually behind those Koreans and Chinese who participated in the morphine and opium dealings. The opinion of Dissection of Taikan’en’s author, that the result of “seek[ing] to live in wild abandon as they are led by their instinct” is embodied in the opium addicts and sex workers, and that such is the instinct of the Han people, can amply prove how much narrow­minded chauvinism and racism may be hidden in the objectivity of cultural theory and cultural comparison.

These three writings on the Manchurians—a travel essay by a literary author, a popular travel guide, and social research—are unlike each other in their genres and periods. But what they have in common is the uncon­ scious/conscious sense of discrimination that seeks to place the Manchurian or Chinese people in a position inferior to the Japanese by emphasizing their “dirtiness,” “misery,” “filth,” “foul smell,” “immorality,” and “instinct.” It is nothing other than a gaze that regards all peoples other than its own as subhuman and as animalistic, instinct­driven “natives.”

Of course, Japan has a long history of fondly regarding China as a de­ veloped, civilized country, and of respecting it as if it were an older brother. During the modern period, the reversal of the relationship of the “civilized” to the “uncivilized” made it possible for Japan to colonize China. China was

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the source of the powerful Chinese culture. Japan was influenced by the overwhelming Chinese culture in all aspects of life, such as Chinese char­ acters, Confucianism, Buddhism, codes of etiquette, cultural artifacts, arts, clothing, city planning, and social institutions. And that is precisely why Japan had to treat modern Chinese, the Han race, as “native.” Historical, cultural inferiority could not be overcome without proving Japan’s cultural superiority. Therefore, finding “Chinese” culture in coolies, beggars, and opium addicts was necessary for the sake of maintaining the fiction and vanity of the civilized nation of Japan.

2 . c u l t u r e a n d d i s c r i m i n a t i o n

The tendency to dismiss non­Japanese Asians as “native,” especially to treat indigenous peoples in colonies or occupied lands discriminatorily, gradu­ ally intensified as Japan accelerated imperial indoctrination based on an emperor­centered historical view. Shibusawa Keizō lists the Ainu, Pacific is­ landers, and Taiwanese natives as the “three major primitive peoples” within official Japanese boundaries.25 Needless to say, the term “native” was origi­ nally used in referring to these groups generally—they were also called “for­ mer natives of Hokkaido,” “South Seas natives,” and “Taiwanese natives,” respectively—with contempt.

An 1878 notice by the Hokkaido Development Commissioner officially renamed the Ainu “former natives”—they were earlier also called “Ezo na­ tives,” “Sakhalin natives,” and “Kurile natives.” The notice reads as follows: “While the former Ezo people should be treated in the same way the general population is treated for family registry and other matters, when a distinc­ tion needs to be made in certain situations, ‘old subject,’ ‘native,’ or ‘former native’ have been used for them, which was confusing. Therefore, from now on, they should be called ‘former natives.’”26 The Ainu were, in effect, “el­ evated” from “native” to “former native” at this point, but it actually meant the transformation of the Ainu, who were “native,” into “common people.” As Murai Osamu has pointed out, the concept of “former natives” emerged in modern Japanese history in tandem with that of “new common people,” the term the Meiji government gave exclusively to former outcastes, in ef­ fect giving a new name to the old discrimination.27

The notice from the commissioner reveals that “native” was not a neu­ tral term, but much later, in 1922, a literary work was published in which the Koreans under Japanese colonial rule were called “native.” The novel, Nakanishi Inosuke’s New Buds in the Red Soil, receives ambiguous reception

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today.28 Written by an author who was well known as an early proletarian writer, it is a serious, socially conscious novel that depicts a Japanese news reporter’s anguish and Korean farmers’ suffering in a multilayered fashion. One could highly praise it as a rare work by a Japanese writer who realisti­ cally depicts Koreans as large as life, but at the same time one could identify the author’s unconscious ethnocentrism and methodological error in his use of the term “native.” Here is an example.

It was winter in Colony C. It was [censored] of the powerful country N in the east. About 100 houses of the natives stood in the small settlement. A stormy wind with yellowish sand blew from the west of the continent and without restraint threatened the lives of the inhabitants, who had lived a life of inertia and lethargy on this peninsula since ancient times. The natives lived in small houses made of coarse mud—they were like sturdy caves—in order to protect themselves from the storms. The houses seemed like shelter that had progressed very little since the prehistoric age. Their roofs were thatched with an abundant amount of straw and sorghum stalks. On those roofs, or near the entrance of each house, blotchy snow covered the lids of the large clay pots for pickles. Under the eaves hung chili pep­ pers that were redder than nandina berries, as well as dried gourds the size of human heads. The chili peppers were the only spice the natives possessed to fend off the unbearable cold, and the gourds were used to scoop water to wash the white robes that the natives regularly wore.

It would be difficult to defend the use of the term “native” here by saying that it only refers to indigenous people or aborigines. The sentence, “The houses seemed like shelter that had progressed very little since the prehis­ toric age,” clearly equates “native” with “primitive” by association, and in this case the term “native,” it can be said, is full of negative value judgment. The attempt to turn the setting of the story into an abstract one through such expressions as “Colony C” and “the powerful country N” can be at­ tributed to the author’s intention to lessen the scrutiny of the censor, but such consideration cannot be detected in references such as the one that introduces the protagonist, “the native Kim Ki­ho.”

Furthermore, in these descriptions in which the term “native” and, specif­ ically, Korean culture are linked, there is naturally the danger that a cultural gap and cultural comparison lead to a culturalist hierarchy. Words such as “large pots for pickles,” “chili pepper,” “gourds,” and “white robes” are all expressions referring to Korean culture in the realm of clothing, food, and shelter, but they end up leaving a strange and bizarre impression of the “na­ tives’ customs.”

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We may point out the sense of contempt for and ethnic superiority over the local people and indigenous Koreans among the Japanese immigrants in colonial Korea after the annexation of Korea in 1910. Discrimination against the indigenous people of Korea (they were called “peninsula peo­ ple” or “those from the peninsula,” but not Koreans) existed officially and unofficially, with differing degrees of bluntness, in contrast to such slogans as “Same Love for All” and “Japan­Korea, United Body.” At the root of this treatment festered a perverted ethnic sentiment of the Japanese that sought a sense of superiority over those of the same nationality but of dif­ ferent ethnicity, even though they had been “annexed” to Japan. The Japa­ nese who tried to shut out the bad friends of Asia and the modern Japan that attempted to achieve “Leaving Asia, Entering Europe” created a men­ tal structure that allowed them to regard non­Japanese Asians as “native” in an attempt to negate their own origins and to adopt Western modernity.

Hey, even the police are all Korean constables, I’m telling you. They’re all in cahoots with each other and mocking us Japanese. When we came here from Japan for the first time, it wasn’t like this at all. Koreans were so afraid just to pass in front of us. That all changed since the war. “Koreans are Japanese, too,” I keep hearing. We are too nice to them, so they are getting cheeky these days and think it’s OK to jump a bill at a Japanese restaurant. They won’t learn a lesson unless we beat them up real good. Heck, it’s OK if we kill ’em.29

This is a passage from Tanaka Hidemitsu’s Drunken Ship (1949), in which a Japanese restaurant owner is hitting a Korean boy who tried to eat and run at his oden stew restaurant. This is probably one expression of honesty among ordinary Japanese immigrants in Korea about official slogans such as “Same Love for All” and “Japan­Korea, United Body.” “Koreans should feel afraid just to pass in front of a Japanese,” and “It’s OK to kill those bastards who disobey or mock Japanese.” These are merciless utterances of ethnic discrimination. However, we should see them as quite candid ex­ pressions of some of the Japanese immigrants in Korea, rather than regard them as exceptions. It is true, of course, that there were some Japanese in Korea, such as Asakawa Takumi and Abe Yoshishige, who consistently treated Korea, Koreans, and Korean culture with love and respect. But it cannot be denied that many Japanese harbored ethnic prejudice against Koreans in one way or another.

We must recognize that the function of journalism then was to discuss cultural differences between Japan and Korea (or China)—not to end the

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prejudice and discrimination but rather to promote it—and moreover, to provide arguments for a hierarchical cultural comparison or a cultural gap between the civilized and the uncivilized. Just to mention one instance, the book entitled Complete Collection of Strange Customs in the World has a sec­ tion on “Bizarre Marriage Customs,” where there is an entry on “Strange Taiwanese Ways” after sections on India and China.30 It states, “There are natives and aborigines in Taiwan, but the barbaric way of the aborigines is truly awful. Readers will probably have heard of some examples, but I’ll begin with the natives’ customs.” It proceeds to describe unusual marriage proposals and engagement presents, as well as marriages for sale. The “Tai­ wanese natives” in this case are actually the Han people, known as mainland Chinese. It then introduces as “barbaric customs of the aborigines” the com­ ing of age ceremony, the adoption system, and then the “extremely barbaric” custom in which headhunting is assigned to the prospective son­in­law as a condition for a marriage. After this section comes another, on “Strange Korean Ways.” It first remarks, “Since Korea is Japan’s territory today, per­ haps all things small and large may become Japanese style in ten years, but the old ways cannot be dispensed with today or tomorrow. Therefore, there are still some exceptionally strange practices intact, and marriage customs are especially peculiar.” It goes on to describe the unusual custom of “son­in­law hazing” and the practice of marrying older wives.

These unusual, strange, peculiar, and immoral customs are introduced based solely on sensationalism. They are none other than “world customs” that are viewed through curiosity, prejudice, a discriminatory consciousness, and titillation­seeking sensibilities. Here, cultural differences are turned into an order of superiority, and we can detect cultural chauvinism that unques­ tioningly presupposes the superiority of the author’s own culture. Obvi­ ously, the differences in marriage customs should be discussed as cultural divergence without value attached. But the book clearly depicts Taiwanese natives’ headhunting customs and the Korean custom of “son­in­law haz­ ing” as “primitive” practices, and inevitably discusses cultural differences in folkways, customs, and traditional rituals in a discriminatory manner. (In addition, these types of marriage customs can be observed in rural Japan; and as for headhunting, the book intentionally overlooks the fact that sam­ urai regularly competed for the head of the enemy for rewards.) The intro­ duction of the customs of various Asian ethnic groups and regions, such as India, China, Taiwan, and Korea, was not done in order to bridge the cultural gaps among ethnicities. We should understand that such moves

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were intended to exaggerate and underscore savagery, bizarreness, strange­ ness, and peculiarity in order to somehow prove the cultural superiority of the Japanese.

It should be acknowledged that academic disciplines such as anthro­ pology, ethnography, and folklore have contributed to interpreting these cultural differences within a comparative hierarchy, assuming the existence of superior and inferior cultures or differing achievements of progress. We have already seen how Dissection of Taikan’en, which claims to be a field survey of Han society, actually argues for a fixed, fatalistic cultural gap from an ethnocentric viewpoint, and that it “enlightened” the Japanese about the Han ethnic group. In this sense, it cannot be denied that modern Japan’s views of Asia, in various fields including literature, was distorted by the persistent impetus to “leave Asia.”

. . .

The Japanese discovered the “native” in the South Pacific, Taiwan, and Sakhalin. And at the same time, they also discovered the “native” in China, Korea, Manchuria, and Southeast Asian regions. Needless to say, however, there was no acknowledgment that the Japanese themselves were “Japanese natives” living in the Japanese archipelago (although Kita Ikki and others cynically called Japan a “country of natives”). Bunching together those who are culturally inferior, backward, strange, or bizarre, as primitive, barbaric, and “native­like” people certainly helps foster a sense of pride that “we” are civilized.

In that moment, the commonsensical notion that there were various cul­ tures, and that one cannot easily establish the superiority or inferiority of any ethnic culture, custom, or language, is thrown away. And the historical perspective that Indian and Chinese civilizations, as well as Korean culture, have greatly influenced Japan is also abandoned. Though the advantage they enjoyed in military and economic matters was only temporary, the great error of wartime Japanese lay in their belief that this advantage was the sign of their cultural or ethnic superiority. And the belief was not limited to military officers, merchants, or immigrants. Those who were called writ­ ers, too, were not completely immune to the groundless idea of ethnic and cultural superiority.

(What an attitude! He’s sitting with his legs wide open while I’m squeezing myself into this narrow space. Why can’t he be more considerate?)

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That would have been the sentiment if I verbalized it. Then it gradually changed into this. (What an attitude, you native! Sitting with your legs wide open, you lowly native! Know your place as a native and be considerate of Japanese!)31

The protagonist in a story thus silently curses a Javanese, who is inso­ lently occupying extra space in a bus with his outstretched legs. This is a scene from Takami Jun’s novel Ethnic Peoples. After experiencing ideologi­ cal conversion from the proletarian movement, Takami traveled to Indone­ sia (occupied by the Dutch at the time), and began his career as a profes­ sional writer with On a Fine Day, Ethnic Peoples, and other works that were based on that trip. In other words, one might say that Takami attempted to recover his encounters with people living at the forgotten bottom of society, the experience he had during his proletarian activist days, in the form of another encounter with a foreign culture and the foreign people living in the area called the South Seas and the Southern Region. Perhaps one can say that he began a new life as a writer by writing about those regions and people. It would be reasonable to assume that this trajectory had some influence on his later work as a novelist, but we cannot ignore the fact that his experiences in encountering foreign ethnic groups, and of interacting with foreign cultures, were for him something that could be expressed in the inner voice that curses, “What an attitude, you native! Know your place!”

Of course, I do not quote a passage from Takami’s work in order to de­ nounce him for ethnic discrimination. I do so because I think the curse “native,” which remains unvoiced by the protagonist, probably existed as a word that resonated inside Takami, an ideologically converted writer. This abusive language illustrates how common it was for those Japanese who went to Asia during the war to mistreat Asians as “natives”—whether as an actual practice or as a sentiment. At the same time, it precisely describes the unfortunate encounter between the Japanese and other Asians. Hopefully it is now obvious that the invective is more than an emotional word of explo­ sive anger against a few impertinent Asians: it actually has a deep, cultural and historical background. Takeda Taijun was mobilized to the Chinese front as a soldier of the Japanese Army. He wrote a short essay called “The Faces of the Dirt Peasants,” describing the faces of the Chinese he met there, and printed it in 1938 in the literary journal Chinese Literature that he and his friends were publishing.

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No matter how gently the Japanese army approaches, the Chinese people on the warfront won’t open their hearts so easily to us. Even when they come close to us armed soldiers, we must assume that they have mentally prepared themselves. We saw many farmers who did not seem perturbed at all in spite of their extreme facial expressions. Even when they were crying or joyful, their eyes would be fixed at something unspecific in the air. The faces of the dirt peasants are deeply tanned and appear uncomplicated, but their hearts seem lost in a deep, blue­black chasm. Even the children hide their quick minds! The Chinese we soldiers interact with are all these poverty­stricken dirt peasants who have minds like these.32

Chinese history and culture form a layered “deep chasm” in the tanned, simple faces of the “dirt peasants” whom Takeda met as a soldier of an “in­ vading army.” He saw in those faces the culture of “dirt peasants,” that is, “people who live with the earth.” The “poverty­stricken dirt peasants” may appear similar to those “natives” without culture that the Japanese encoun­ tered as invaders and colonialists, but, needless to say, they are not. Between “natives” and “dirt peasants” it becomes necessary to recognize a gap and divergence between two different views of Asia by the Japanese upon their encounter with other Asians.

The Japanese called Europeans and Americans “demon­beasts” and de­ scribed Asians in the colonies and occupied territories as “natives.” These names were derived from the overbearing pride of the Japanese, who de­ fined themselves as “humans” and “civilized people.” However, it is obvious that their pride was tied to narrow­minded chauvinism. Furthermore, it is clear that those appellations were the result of their intentional attempt to forget the fact that Japanese had made extracting themselves from the “na­ tive kingdom” in the backwaters of Asia and achieving the goal of “Leaving Asia, Entering Europe” their ardent goal. The “Japanese” versus “native.” Now, half a century after the 1930s, when the perspective exemplified by Dankichi’s globe dominated, the Japanese are being questioned seriously by wider Asia about the responsibility for their own barbaric and primitive “native”­like behavior.

Notes

[Translator’s Note] The Adventures of Dankichi was a reading I, Helen J. S. Lee, taught in an advanced reading class at the University of Florida during spring 2006, and I would like to give credit where it is due—many thanks to David Elam, Eyal Maidan, Kathleen Owens, and Simon Yu.

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Two versions of Kawamura’s essay exist. It first appeared as “Popular Oriental­ ism and Japanese Views of Asia” (Taishū orientarizumu to Ajia ninshiki ) in Ōe Shinobu et al., eds., Iwanami Seminar, Modern Japan and the Colonies (Iwanami kōza kindai Nihon to shokuminchi ), 8 vols. (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1993), vol. 7: 107–36. A slightly modified version with a new title, “Colonialism and Oriental­ ism: Adventurer Dankichi’s Globe” (Koroniarizumu to orientarizumu: “Bōken” Dan- kichi no chikyūgi ), was included in Kawamura Minato, Japanese Literature of the South Seas and Sakhalin (Nan’yō, Karafuto no Nihon bungaku) (Tokyo: Chikuma shobō, 1994), 21–58. Our translation is based on the original version, but we have incorporated most of the changes made in the second. All ellipses in the essay are in Kawamura’s original text and have not been added by translators or editors. We would like to thank Leslie Winston and Dustin Leavitt for carefully reading the drafts in different stages, sometimes in spite of rather ungodly time constraints due to the time difference between the translators. The translation has greatly benefited from their discerning eyes.

1. Shimada Keizō, The Complete Collection of the Adventurer Dankichi Comic (Bōken Dankichi manga zenshū) (Tokyo: Kodansha, 1967). See preface.

2. Instead of narrowly signifying aesthetic Oriental taste or a study of the Orient (tōyōgaku), the term “Orientalism” refers to the concept Edward W. Said developed in his Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1979). For instance, “The Orient is an integral part of European material civilization and culture. Orientalism expresses and represents that part culturally and even ideologically as a mode of discourse with supporting institutions, vocabulary, scholarship, imagery, doctrines, even co­ lonial bureaucracies and colonial styles” (2). Reconceptualizing this Orient into the larger non­Western world, including the South Seas, I define modern Japan’s col­ lective expressions and representations about Asia and the South Seas regions as Japanese “Orientalism.”

3. Shimada, The Complete Collection. See preface. 4. Kobayashi Izumi, The Small Nations of Micronesia (Mikuroneshia no chīsana

kuniguni) (Tokyo: Chūō kōron sha, 1982), 5. Yano Akira has described the con­ nection between Dankichi and the image of the “South Seas natives” as “the Ad­ venturer Dankichi Syndrome.” See Yano Akira, Japanese Views of the History of the South Seas (Nihon no nan’yōshikan) (Tokyo: Chūō kōron sha, 1979), 154.

5. [Translators’ Note] Abbreviated, the boy’s name would be pronounced “ Daiken,” following Japanese phonetic rules.

6. [Translators’ Note] These tribal names Kawamura cites from Adventures ap­ pear to be Shimada’s creation. “Kūroi” (black), “Burakku” (black), and “Yami” (darkness) all refer to dark shades of color.

7. Takagi Ichinosuke, Japanese Language Reader for Normal Grade School (Jinjō shōgakkō kokugo tokuhon) (Tokyo: Chūō kōron sha, 1976), 87–90.

8. Suzuki Tsunenori, The True Record of the South Seas Expedition (Nan’yō tan- ken jikki) (Tokyo: Heibonsha, 1980), 78, 88. The original publication was by Hakubunkan in 1892.

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9. [Translators’ Note] Manowa is the transliteration of the word as it appears in the text, but we can find no evidence of the existence of an island with this name.

10. [Translators’ Note] The Wushe Incident is also known as the Musha Inci­ dent. Wushe is the Mandarin pronunciation and the latter the Japanese rendering of the name of the area in which the rebellion took place.

11. Huang Zhaotang, The Governor-General Office of Taiwan (Taiwan sōtokufu) (Tokyo: Kyōikusha, 1981), 128.

12. [Translators’ Note] Hōbo and Piposappo are transliterations of the Japanese words as they appear in the text. Given that they are rendered in katakana, we are unable to confirm the accurate spelling in the original language.

13. Nogami Toyoichirō and Nogami Yaeko, Korea, Taiwan, and the South Seas Harbors (Chōsen, Taiwan, kainan shokō) (Tokyo: Takunansha, 1942), 222.

14. Nakamura Chihei, Collected Taiwan Fictions (Tokyo: Bokusui shobō, 1941), 39. 15. [This note was originally embedded in the main text.] The character for ban

in banjin is different from the ban in yaban, and, consequently, the first ban sig­ nifies something different from the second. The first ban means a place covered with thick grass, and should not be confused with the second ban, which denotes barbarity.

16. Ōshika Taku, The Savage (Yabanjin) (Tokyo: Sōrin shobō, 1936). A separate volume with the same title was published by Hakuōshoin in 1949, but its content differs from the earlier collection. The original book includes “The Savage” (Yaban- jin), “Savage Women” (Banfu), “Tattaka Zoo” (Tattaka dōbutsuen), and “Zhang’s Desire” (Sō no yokubō). The later edition does not have “Zhang’s Desire,” but in­ cludes “In the Forest” (Shinrin no naka) and “People of the Inlands” (Okuchi no hitobito) instead. The quotation in this section is from pp. 32–33 of the Hakuhō shoin edition.

17. [Translators’ Note] An embankment on the Kanda River in Tokyo. 18. [Translators’ Note] The translation of this passage comes from Natsume

Sōseki, Rediscovering Natsume Sōseki, intro. and trans. Inger Sigrun Brodey and Sammy I. Tsunematsu (Folkstone, Kent, UK: Global Oriental, 2000), 38–40.

19. [Translators’ Note] Ibid., 39. 20. [Translators’ Note] Isabella Lucy Bird, Unbeaten Tracks in Japan (London:

John Murray, 1881), vol. 1: 17. 21. [Translators’ Note] Ibid., vol. 2: 47. 22. [Translators’ Note] Ibid., 74. 23. As mentioned in the text, no colophon is provided in the book, and author’s

name, publisher’s name, and the publishing date are unknown. It is widely believed that the book was edited by the Security Bureau of the Police Agency in Manchu­ kuo in the 1930s.

24. Dissection of Taikan’en, 3, and preface, 1. 25. Shibusawa Keizō, Collected Works of Shibusawa Keizō (Shibusawa Keizō

chosakushū) (Tokyo: Heibonsha, 1992), vol. 1: 63. 26. Yamakawa Chikara, Politics and the Ainu (Seiji to Ainu minzoku) (Tokyo:

Miraisha, 1989), 77.

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27. Yamaguchi Masao, Karatani Kōjin, Murai Osamu, and Kawamura Minato, “Collective Discussion: Colonialism and Modern Japan” (Kyōdō tōgi: shokuminchi shugi to kindai Nihon), Critical Space (Hihyō kūkan) 7 (Oct. 1992): 37.

28. Nakanishi Inosuke, New Buds in the Red Soil (Shakudo ni megumu mono) (Tokyo: Kaizōsha, 1922), 2.

29. Tanaka Hidemitsu, Drunken Ship (Yoidore bune) (Tokyo: Koyamasha, 1949), 125.

30. Katō Rissen, Complete Collection of Strange Customs of the World (Sekai fūzoku kibun zenshū) (Tokyo: Kōbunsha shuppanbu, date unknown), 10–16.

31. Takami Jun, Ethnic Peoples (Shominzoku) (Tokyo: Shinchōsha, 1942), 70–71. Takami, On a Fine Day (Aru hareta hi ni) (Tokyo: Kawade shobō, 1941).

32. Takeda Taijun, The Banks of the Yangzi River: China and Its Human Wisdom (Yōsukō no hotori: Chūgoku to sono ningengaku) (Tokyo: Haga shoten, 1971), 59.