Please submit a 2-page response paper about "Competing U.S.-Japan Colonial Imaginaries in the Pacific"

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The Adventures of Momotar in the South Seas

Folklore, Colonial Policy, Parody

The foundation of the expansion of the Japanese race must be laid while our youth are still in their cradles. Imperialism must spark their desire for exotic lands and fire their dreams.

TSURUMI Y SUKE

Certain essential aspects of the world are accessible only to laughter.

MIKHAIL BAKHTIN

GO SOUTH, YOUNG MAN!

Between 1880 and 1945, Japanese journalists, writers, politicians, and patriots often promoted Japan’s expansion into the South Seas (nan’y ), an area long dominated by Western powers. The early twentieth century was the key turning point in the development of this expansionist discourse. From this time on, the goal shifted from the development of trade ties with the Pacific region to a more aggressive drive to increase the territory of the nation by conquest and foreign settlement. During the Taisho period (1912–26), an “untiring spate of publications, stereotypes, and slogans exerted considerable influence on the emergence of a South Seas fever, an unmistakable mood for southern expansion.”1 These “publications, stereotypes, and slogans” accompanied an important historical expansion of the Japanese empire toward the South Seas. At the start of the First World War, Japan seized the islands of German-controlled Micronesia and later ruled them in the interwar period under the mandate system of the League of Nations. During the war, Japanese business firms took advantage of trade disruption between Western powers and their colonies in Southeast Asia and vastly expanded their commercial ties and economic presence in the region.2 The growing Japanese business stake in Southeast Asia led to a shift in the meaning of the

term nan’y , or the South Seas in Japanese parlance. After Japan acquired German possessions of Micronesia in 1915, this new colony was referred to as the inner South Seas (uchi nan’y ), to be distinguished from the much vaster and richer outer South Seas (soto nan’y ), which designated areas not colonized by Japan. Moreover, the contours of nan’y shifted over this time, sometimes including the Indian Ocean as well as Oceania and littoral Southeast Asia. In a 1915 article called “Waga nan’y dojin no kish ” (The Strange Customs of Our South Seas Natives), Torii Ry z wrote: “What we Japanese call the South Seas [nan’y ] is practically a meaningless term. The scope of the term differs according to who is using it, and it is a nonscientific term; an equivalent term for what we call the South Seas does not exist in

Tierney, Robert Thomas. Tropics of Savagery : The Culture of Japanese Empire in Comparative Frame, University of California Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ucsc/detail.action?docID=672390. Created from ucsc on 2019-12-21 08:12:38.

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Western countries.”3 In the home islands, the 1914 Tokyo Taisho Exhibition boosted public awareness of Japan’s

present footholds and future prospects in this vaguely defined region. The Taisho Exhibition included colonial pavilions displaying Korea, Taiwan, Hokkaido, Karafuto, and, for the first time, a South Seas pavilion, complete with tropical products and human showcases of South Seas islanders. A columnist in the Jitsugy no Nihon (Business Japan) periodical in 1914 wrote: “When you enter the South Seas Pavilion, you feel as if surrounded by the atmosphere of the South Seas. Against a backdrop of South Seas scenery, various tropical plants grow luxuriantly while dolls representing the natives are hunting for gorillas and boa constrictors. . . . The biggest novelty is a live display in which one can experience native islanders (twenty- five in all) living in realistically constructed huts.”4 These “native islanders” included representatives of the wild Sakai tribe, reputed to be cannibals. The journalist notes that, notwithstanding their fearsome reputation, these natives were extremely “mild and well- behaved when one actually met them” and that their cannibalism was “a thing of the past.”5 Nevertheless, the exhibit of live, albeit tamed, “cannibals” not only drew many curious Japanese spectators to the pavilion but also served to confirm their own standpoint as civilized spectators from an advanced country. Such media events in metropolitan Japan served to reinforce stereotypes of the South Seas as a land inhabited by primitive peoples and wild animals. Aside from human showcases and imperial exhibitions, one can catch a glimpse of this

fascination with the South Seas in early twentieth-century Japanese fiction. Takenaka Tokio, the protagonist of Tayama Katai’s 1907 story “The Quilt,” fantasizes about “cast[ing] himself away in some colony in the South Seas” to escape from his infatuation with the aspiring female writer Yoshiko who is placed under his charge.6 Tagawa Keitar , the hero of Natsume S seki’s 1912 Higan sugi made (To the Spring Equinox and Beyond), avidly reads Kodama Onmatsu’s account of his exploration of Borneo and is especially fascinated by passages “describing Onmatsu’s fight with an octopus monster that had escaped from its den.”7 While hunting octopuses is “too fanciful an adventure to be contemplated,” Keitar imagines himself as the superintendent of a rubber plantation, “his bungalow in the midst of a limitless plain filled with millions of well-kept rubber trees.”8 If S seki shows how Japanese southern expansion shapes the fantasy life of his young protagonist, in Anya k ro (A Dark Night’s Passing), published between 1921 and 1937 in Kaiz , Shiga Naoya depicts the South Seas as a public, everyday spectacle within urban Japan. Miyamoto, a young friend of the protagonist, Tokito Kensaku, visits the aforementioned South Seas Pavilion several times to watch the dances of native peoples.9 Finally, the young Tanizaki Jun’ichir publishes a one-act play called Z (The Elephant) in 1910 about the reactions of ordinary Edo townsmen to a procession including an elephant sent to Japan from an unnamed Southeast Asian kingdom located between India and China. Though the work is set in the early Tokugawa period (1600–1867), it is also a spoof of early twentieth-century expansionist discourse.10 Most writings about the South Seas were not works of literature but rather nonfiction

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writings by advocates of Japan’s expansion toward the South (nanshinron).11 In his 1910 bestseller Nangokuki (An Account of the Southern Countries), the liberal politician Takekoshi Yosabur coins the slogan “Go south, young man!” thereby inaugurating this outbreak of South Seas fever.12 He also sets forth pell-mell several themes that become the stock-in-trade of later works on the same subject: the Japanese are, by nature, a southern people and are racially related to the Malays; the South Seas constitute a treasure trove of resources without which “civilized” nations could not maintain their “present-day civilization and lifestyle”; for that reason, “he who controls the resources of the tropics will control the markets of the world”; finally, the future of Japan lies in the South Seas and its people should turn their attention to the great task of “making the Pacific Ocean a Japanese lake.”13 Takekoshi devotes the last chapter of his work to the topic of literature, which in his view separates the civilized Japanese from the underdeveloped peoples of the South Seas and aligns them with the Western colonial powers. He urges Japanese writers to emulate their Western counterparts and to establish a “colonial literature that will stimulate the flagging energies of our youth by narrating the stories and exploits of colonial pioneers.”14 Several years later, Tsurumi Y suke returns to the theme of “literature” in the preface to his

massive and lavishly illustrated travel book Nan’y y ki (Travel Sketches of the South Seas), a summum of southern expansionist writing. For Tsurumi, the very word nan’y conjures up visions of exotic tropical lands and a mood of nostalgic longing: “Rather than pondering the political and economic question of developing the lands and ruling the people, I am more deeply moved by the image of moonlight shining through the leaves of a palm tree or a human figure wearing a sarong in the shadow of a mango tree.” He confesses that his own longing for the South Seas was first piqued not by actual experience of travel but rather by his encounters with the exotic stories of European writers:

“I first caught a glimpse of that island when it was neither night nor morning . . . ” Wearing a dark blue suit, Professor Natsume S seki strode into our third year English class at the First Higher School and read to us in his casual and fluent English. It was the opening passage to Robert Louis Stevenson’s Island Night’s Entertainment. At the time, S seki was a rising star in literary world and had already published London Tower and I Am a Cat. With the innocent longings of youth, we eagerly awaited being taught by this celebrity in the new school year. . . . Subsequently, I devoured many works by Stevenson but none of them made as deep an impression on me as this Island Night’s Entertainment. The deep blue waters of the South Pacific, a solitary island surrounded by the vast ocean, the gentle winds that bore the salty air and the fragrance of various tropical plants, the natives with their childish thoughts who lived in the midst of this scenery, their minor cares and troubles: I felt as if the atmosphere of the South Seas impregnated the entire volume and each page brought a fresh delight. I imagined the life of the author who spent his final years amid these surroundings and with these people. Afterward, the South Seas were always in my head.

Later, he confides to the reader: “I am deeply convinced that our literary and poetic interests have far deeper roots than our thirst for knowledge and intellectual interests.”15 In his reminiscences of his encounter with the works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Tsurumi illustrates the marriage of imperial strategy with imagination, of romance with realpolitik, which is an essential part of all modern empires. Interestingly, he was himself first inspired not by Japanese novels but by the romantic visions that Western writers had created during an earlier phase of the colonization of the South Seas. Based on his own experience, he goes on to argue

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that literature, and particularly children’s literature, must play an important part in fostering the emotional disposition that underlies any successful imperial project.

Recently, more and more writers have raised their voices to call for our nation to expand . . . to the rich and fertile lands of the south. I welcome this trend, but cannot believe that a southern expansion policy that promotes only expanded production or emigration is enough. People will not easily summon the will to leave the land of their ancestors unless they also are stimulated to feel fascination and longing for the South Seas. This longing arises most easily during boyhood and youth when our imaginations are most active and our perceptions sharpest. The foundation of the expansion of the Japanese race must be laid while our youth are still in their cradles: imperialism must spark their desire for exotic lands and fire their dreams.16

The “opening” of Japan meant not only that foreigners could travel to Japan but also that Japanese people would overcome their inertia, go overseas, and settle there. Just as the Meiji state required that citizens become active participants in national institutions such as the armed forces and the public schools, it also encouraged them to seize new opportunities and transplant themselves abroad. Accordingly, Tsurumi concludes that the success or failure of Japan’s empire will depend “on the subjective attitude of the Japanese people.”17 He concedes, however, that ordinary Japanese are often reluctant to forsake “the land of their ancestors” and that intellectual arguments will not overcome their resistance. If people are to transplant themselves overseas, an appetite for exotic lands must be artificially stimulated in them. Conversely, to induce this “longing for exotic countries,” writers should appeal to their readers’ imaginations. Last but not least, the best time to touch the imagination of these readers was when they were still in their cradles.

CREATING FOLK IMPERIALISM

Japan’s modern imperialism is unthinkable without taking into account the mid-nineteenth- century intrusion of Western imperialism into East Asia, the mimetic imperialism of the Meiji period, and the appropriation of Western discourses of “civilization” and “racial hierarchy” by Japanese intellectuals. When Tsurumi mentions Stevenson’s Island Night’s Entertainment, he calls attention to another piece in the gestalt of Japan’s imperialism: namely, the fashioning of an imperialist sensibility among the Japanese elite formed by reading the Western literature of empire. Tsurumi was a member in good standing of the elite, having attended the exclusive First Higher School and studied under Natsume S seki. However, he voiced his deepest concerns not about the elite but rather about the Japanese people in general, who also needed to develop the proper “subjective attitudes” if the nation’s imperial projects were not to miscarry. He argued that it is imperative to reach young Japanese at the period of their lives when they are most impressionable. One serious obstacle, however, stood in the way of fostering a popular imperialist sensibility among Japanese youth: the relative paucity of colonial prototypes and heroes in Japanese culture and history. Tsurumi was hardly the first modern writer to express this concern. In his 1900 “Umi to

Nihon bungaku” (The Sea and Japanese Literature), K da Rohan lamented that the Japanese, unlike the seafaring and adventurous Anglo-Saxons, had failed to create a maritime literature worthy of the name, even though Japan was no less an island nation than Great Britain. He

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assigned the blame for this failure squarely on Japan’s rulers during the Tokugawa period, who had prohibited Japanese from leaving the archipelago under the policy of national seclusion. Besides fostering an insular attitude toward the outside world, this long period of seclusion had deprived the Japanese of valuable historical experience and reduced their store of practical wisdom regarding colonialism. In 1894, Kume Kunitake wrote a series of articles on the insular mentality of the Japanese that appeared in Kokumin no Tomo, on the eve of the Sino-Japanese War. He argued that in the ancient period, the Japanese people had demonstrated an enterprising and belligerent attitude toward the outside world, but that this spirit had disappeared with the closing of the country. After this long interruption, Japanese had recovered the enterprising attitude they had shown in the past. With the progress in trade and the building of a naval forces, Japan could play in the Pacific region the role that England played in the Atlantic.18 In light of these historical constraints, ideologues of empire sought for models of colonial

heroes, not in the annals of Japanese history and literature, but rather in myth and folklore. Unlike the exotic literature of the West, folklore was a domestic resource, not a foreign product. In addition, folktales were simple, easy to understand, and suitable for dissemination to the masses through the national system of elementary education. Just as narratives like Robinson Crusoe and the story of Pocahontas had shaped the imaginations of generations of English-speaking boys and girls, Japanese myths and folktales were the proper vehicle to instill in the nation’s youth an urge to empire. Beyond their use in the training of young Japanese, the mobilization of folktales on behalf of imperialism suggested that the Japanese empire had a cultural basis in the Japanese past and traditional culture. I have already argued that Japan established the legitimacy of its empire in the transnational idiom that Western powers used to justify their own empires. At the same time, Japan’s embrace of this Western idiom implied an estrangement from its own past, a repudiation of its history, and an alienation from its own culture. Yet even as Japan eagerly absorbed Western influences, it also sought to assert its own cultural identity and to reclaim its own heritage, notably through embrace of folk culture said to embody the primordial spirit of the nation. While the rise of folklore studies in the late Meiji and Taisho periods reflects a growing dissatisfaction with modernity and a nostalgia for lost traditions, the mobilization of folklore for empire served to show that Japanese imperialism was not simply an imitation of Western empires but an inalienable part of its cultural heritage. Traditional tales not only enabled people to discover their roots in the past but they also helped them to chart their own future in a modern world. If myths and folktales were to be rendered useful in political propaganda, they first had to be

substantially revised to accord with the needs of the early twentieth century. The Meiji regime had mobilized ancient myths from the eighth-century Kojiki to trace the imperial line back to the sun goddess Amaterasu, but the myths also helped to legitimate a modern monarchy which had no precedent in the past. In a similar way, ancient myths were invoked to justify Japan’s modern expansion overseas, but they were also substantially transformed in the process of rewriting. Borrowing from the national studies scholar Motoori Norinaga, the historian Hoshino Hisashi (1839–1917) claimed that Susan no mikoto, brother to the sun goddess

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Amaterasu, had ruled ancient Shilla Korea and traveled back and forth between the peninsula and the Japanese islands until he quarreled with his illustrious sister. Thereafter, the two kingdoms remained estranged for ages, until another mythical figure, the empress Jing , invaded the peninsula and reestablished Japanese rule there. The continental exploits of Susan and the empress Jing became standard fixtures of history textbooks during the colonial period; these stories suggested to their readers that the annexation of Korea by Japan was simply the restoration of a status quo ante and showed that the Japanese possessed a long-standing capacity for assimilating foreigners.19 As late as 1942, the governor-general of Korea, Koiso Kuniaki, stated that all twenty-two million Koreans were the offspring of Susan .20 In a similar vein, Minamoto no Yoshitsune (1159–89), perhaps Japan’s most brilliant

military strategist and certainly its most beloved warrior-hero, was pressed into service to promote Japan’s later push onto the Asian continent. Yoshitsune led the Minamoto clan in the decisive battles against the Taira during the twelfth-century Genpei Wars, but he was later pursued by his half-brother Minamoto no Yoritomo, who feared him as a rival, and became a fugitive with Fujiwara no Hidehira, the powerful feudal leader of northern Japan. When Yasuhira succeeded his father Hidehira in 1187, he succumbed to pressures from Yoritomo and sent an expeditionary force against Yoshitsune, who took his own life after killing his wife and daughter.21 Writers during the Edo period, who were not content to let such an illustrious hero die in such pitiful circumstances, developed bizarre theories of Yoshitsune’s survival and circulated stories of his posthumous exploits.22 According to one theory, Yoshitsune crossed from Hokkaido to the island of Sakhalin and eventually reached Mongolia, where he reappeared as Genghis Khan, unified the tribes of Mongolia, and led his armies to their glorious conquests in Asia and Europe.23 In 1879, while he was a student in England, the young Suematsu Kench published a work in English titled The Identity of the Great Conqueror Genghis Khan with the Japanese Hero Yoshitsune, in which he cites a variety of written sources to prove his central thesis. In the final chapter, he clinches his argument on the hero’s identity by asserting that “a wild and uncivilized region [Mongolia] could never have produced a man of such discipline and experience [Genghis Khan], whom even the heroes of the civilized world have scarcely equaled.”24 Since he could not possibly have been a Mongol, Suematsu concludes he must have been Japanese. Basing his hypothesis on Western notions of “civilization and progress” that had only recently been introduced to Japan, Suematsu sought to lift Japan’s reputation in the West by showing that the nation had produced a hero who could hold his own against Western conquerors such as Alexander the Great or Napoleon.25 In 1924, Oyabe Zenichir (1868–1941), published a Jingisu-kan wa Minamoto no

Yoshitsune nari (Genghis Khan Was Indeed Yoshitsune),26 a work that reflects the growing influence of Pan-Asianism. Pan-Asian propagandists such as Amakasu Masahiko (best known as the military police lieutenant who ordered the murder of It Noe, sugi Sakae, and his nephew after the Great Kanto Earthquake), and Okawa Sh mei praised the book and members of the imperial family honored it by “inspecting” it, but prominent Japanese historians, linguists, and anthropologists dismissed it as an absurd hoax. Despite the unanimous condemnation of the experts, Oyabe’s book became a best seller. Whereas Suematsu had sought

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to convince Europeans that Japan had produced a world-class hero, Oyabe used Japanese claims of kinship with Asia to justify its further expansion on the continent. After the creation of Manchukuo in 1932, articles in Mansh Nichinichi (Manchuria Daily) newspaper regularly reported discoveries of traces of Yoshitsune on the Asian continent while the theme of Yoshitsune as Genghis Khan influenced artworks, including a Noh play performed in 1941.27 As these two examples show, academic and amateur historians alike re-created a variety of

mythical characters and semihistorical figures to justify Japan’s expansion onto the Asian continent.28 Yoshitsune and Susan were well-known heroes, but the expansionist legends that accreted around their names probably failed to leave a profound mark on the imagination of Japanese youth. In contrast, Momotar proved a much more durable model and a more compelling figure. Whether he actually “fired the imagination” of young Japanese for imperial conquest lies beyond the scope of this study, but it can be safely affirmed that Momotar was a ubiquitous presence in prewar Japan. Momotar is the quintessential Japanese folktale.29 In the standard, schoolbook version, the

tiny boy Momotar , floating down a river inside a peach, is discovered by an elderly couple who decide to bring him up as their own son. When he grows up, he sets off to conquer the island of the ogres and recruits three animal retainers to accompany him: a dog, a monkey, and a pheasant. Overcoming the powerful ogres, Momotar seizes their treasures and returns to his village in triumph. It would be unfair to single out Momotar —among all Japanese folk heroes —for being uniquely expansionist. Nevertheless, educators and political propagandists alike found in this seemingly innocuous tale a wonderful tool to inculcate imperial awareness in Japanese youth. “Momotar ” came into existence in oral form during the late Muromachi period (1333–

1568) and appeared in written versions during the Genroku period (1688–1704).30 There are more than eighty versions of Momotar ’s legend extant in kusaz shi (printed works combining picture and text), particularly in the well-illustrated akabon, a book form specifically directed at an audience of children. The story was also performed on the kabuki stage during the late Tokugawa period.31 In addition, Takizawa (Kyokutei) Bakin (1767–1848), a contemporary of the Grimm brothers, studied the origins and main motifs of Momotar and provided variants of the legend in an essay published in his 1810 Enseki zasshi (Swallow Stone Miscellany).32 In the modern period, Momotar was rediscovered as a national folktale and classified as

one of five great Japanese folktales (godai mukashibanashi).33 Like the term mukashibanashi itself, this canonization of five national folktales appears to be a product of the educational system, especially of elementary-school readers. “Momotar ” was among the first folktales to be included in these readers at a time of growing nationalism and increasing government control over textbooks.34 In 1888, the Ministry of Education established a formal screening system for textbooks. These new national textbooks became a vehicle to instill in the Japanese people a sense of national culture and a means to promote a standardized national language. In the case of Momotar , this meant replacing local versions of the folktale with a single standardized version authorized by the Ministry of Education—essentially nationalizing “Momotar .” This nationalized “Momotar ,” a creation of the mid–Meiji period, was a fixture

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of Japanese textbooks until 1945, and it came to be closely associated with emperor-centered ideology.35 But Momotar was also a contested figure that was continually reinvented throughout the

modern period. Appearing in almost six hundred versions, this folk hero inspired generations of Japanese artists, writers, and educators and proved to be among the most protean creations of twentieth-century Japan.36 During the Sino-Japanese and Russo-Japanese Wars, Momotar was depicted as a standard-bearer of military valor and an emblem of the imperial state.37 In Iwaya Sazanami’s “Momotar ” (1894), he is sent to an “island where ogres live, located to the northeast of Japan far across the seas. These ogres, evil by nature, not only refused to obey the commands of our sacred emperor, but became the enemies of our reed land and stole our treasures and grains.”38 Given the historical context of this work, it is clear that Iwaya identified the ogres with Qing China. In picture books at the time of the Russo-Japanese War (1904–5), Momotar , dressed in a Japanese military uniform, led his animal retainers in military battle with Russia. In contrast with these wartime versions, writers of children’s literature in the Taisho period

often depicted Momotar as the archetype of childhood innocence.39 These versions of Momotar downplay the aggressive implications of the hero’s conquest of the ogres. In the aptly named “Inu ni au made: Momotar san no hanashi” (Until the Meeting with the Dog: The Tale of Momotar ), Kitagawa Chiyo narrates the adventures of Momotar only up to the point when he meets the first of his three animal retainers.40 Rather than omitting the conquest of ogre island altogether, Soma Taiz , in her Momotar no im to (Momotar ’s Younger Sister), reduces it to a plot device that serves to bring about the happy reunion of brother and sister at the close of the story. In the climactic scene of this tale, Omomo, Momotar ’s sister, is awarded a “sword of peace” by the king of a prosperous society and told that the sword will protect its bearer from any danger as long it is not employed to shed blood. The “sword of peace” thus serves as a metaphor to criticize adult society and Japanese militarism. In still other versions, Momotar does not seize the treasures of the ogres: the ogres give them to him voluntarily after they promise not to cause any more harm and he “forgives” them. With the eclipse of children’s literature in the late 1920s, writers associated with

proletarian literature offered new images of Momotar as an allegorical figure in the class struggles of Japanese society. In Oniseibatsu no Momotar (Momotar , Conqueror of the Ogres), Momotar is a revolutionary leader who liberates his animal retainers, who stand for exploited peasants and workers, from evil factory and land owners, who represent the ogres. However, in “Sono ato no Momotar ” (The Later Days of Momotar ), Momotar himself is a profiteering capitalist who hoards all of the ogres’ treasures and ruthlessly exploits his retainers until they go on strike and demand that Momotar stop initiating war with other countries and fairly compensate those he employs.41 In World War II propaganda, the figure of Momotar is ubiquitous in cartoons, Takarazuka

revues, posters, songs, picture books, and animation. John Dower speaks of a Momotar paradigm in World War II propaganda, according to which a “pure Japanese self” (often identified with the self-sacrificing pilots of the Special Attack Forces) liberates the childlike

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peoples of Southeast Asia from the clutches of the Allied powers, represented as oppressive demons (American and English beasts and devils). Among other examples, he cites two early, feature-length animated films starring the peach boy, both directed by Seo Mitsuyo. In Momotar no umiwashi (Momotar ’s Sea Eagles; 1942), Momotar is a Japanese military commander who leads his animal retainers in the attack on Pearl Harbor; in Momotar : Umi no shinpei (Momotar ’s Divine Ocean Warriors; 1945), he leads an army made up of rabbits, dogs, and other domesticated animals (the Japanese) as they train wild animals like elephants and crocodiles (South Seas islanders) to destroy a devilish enemy (the British) in a battle representing the fall of Singapore.42 These early cartoons, in addition to being early examples of the technological development of Japanese anime, use the Momotar story as an allegory for interpreting contemporary history. Besides animation, Momotar was adapted in Takarazuka productions as well as in local theaters throughout occupied lands during the Pacific War, including one called Taiy no kodomotachi (Children of the Sun). In this wartime Takarazuka production, Momotar recruits followers from Indonesia, China, and the Philippines to free Asia from American and European ogres.43 Partly because of his association with wartime propaganda, Momotar was “purged” from

school textbooks by the U.S.-occupation authorities. Postwar scholars attempted to retrieve Momotar as a hero of postwar democratic and peace-loving Japan and to exonerate him from the taint of war crimes. While Momotar continued to be an important national hero into the postwar period, he also embarked on a new career as a symbol of regional cultural identities, particularly in Okayama Prefecture, where he is used to this day to promote tourism and town revitalization (machi okoshi).44 Yet the association of Momotar with aggressive Japanese imperialism long predates the

battles of the Second World War. Before Momotar became a hero in the battles of Hawaii or Singapore, he had long been associated with imperialism in the South Seas. For example, the author of the 1893 “Momotar no hanashi no g i” (The Allegorical Sense of Momotar ) advises his readers to emulate Momotar and “to cross the equator to the islands near Australia, attack and seize better places than ogres’ island, subjugate the blacks who look like ogres, and bring back the many treasures of the South such as copra and pearls.”45 Ky no Warabei’s “Ima Momotar ” (Momotar Today), which appeared in the boys’ publication Sh nen Sekai (Boys’ World) in 1895, concerns a contemporary Momotar whom an elderly couple discover inside a peach-shaped Japanese confectionary containing a surprise toy.46 When Momotar later becomes a Japanese general, the island of the ogres is the recently won colony of Taiwan, and the ogres’ treasure is Taiwan’s sugar-cane industry.47 Nevertheless it is in first two decades of the twentieth century—at the time of the South Seas fever—that prominent writers developed theories showing a connection between this folktale and the expansion of the Japanese empire. From this time, Momotar became a role model for youth to emulate.48 His expedition to the island of ogres came to be seen as a parable for Japanese expansion overseas, and especially toward the South Seas.

NITOBE INAZO, MOMOTARO, AND COLONIAL POLICY STUDIES Tierney, Robert Thomas. Tropics of Savagery : The Culture of Japanese Empire in Comparative Frame, University of California Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ucsc/detail.action?docID=672390. Created from ucsc on 2019-12-21 08:12:38.

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In 1907, Nitobe Inaz (1862–1933) gave a lecture titled “Momotar no enseidan” (Momotar ’s Conquest), which he later published in essay form under the title of “Monotar no mukashibanashi” (The Tale of Momotar ). Rather than retell the story, he teases out moral lessons for contemporary Japanese youth from the standard version. This essay stands at the intersection of two major currents of Nitobe’s thought: his concern with moral development of youth and his interest in the study of folklore. He pursued his moralizing aims through biographies of great men and character-building tracts.49 Just as in one of his early works he champions William Penn, the early American colonist and Quaker, as a model to be emulated, he upholds Momotar as a culture hero who can help to inculcate desirable character traits among the Japanese. To be sure, the Momotar lecture differs from Nitobe’s other pedagogical works. As a teacher in Japan’s most prestigious educational establishments, Nitobe was responsible for training cosmopolitan leaders able to deal on equal terms with their counterparts in other “civilized” powers. By contrast, in this lecture, he is concerned with the education of the subalterns of Japan’s modernization, whom he sought to transform into active agents of the nation’s expansion. Momotar offered an all-Japanese model of overseas expansionism for the masses that fostered a sense of national grandeur and perhaps turned them away from pressing demands for social change within Japan. Besides reflecting his didactic concerns, the Momotar essay indicates Nitobe’s new interest

in the study of folklore to promote a nationalist and imperial consciousness. In 1910, the year that Japan annexed Korea,50 he joined with Yanagita Kunio and Kindaichi Ky suke to inaugurate the Ky dokai (Home Customs Association). Besides serving to nationalize folk traditions, this study group strove to make the Japanese more receptive to the rationale for imperialism and to promote the integration of overseas colonies (or, in the case of the Hokkaido, of domestic frontiers) into the nation. It sought to achieve these goals by mapping out zones of cultural affinity that transcended the borders of the nation.51 Though Nitobe’s lecture on Momotar antedates his involvement in this association, it offers a concrete and compelling example of the mobilization of folklore to foster a sense of linkage between the Japanese and the people of the South Seas. Nitobe begins his lecture by noting that educators must transmit “the abilities of our

ancestors and the lessons they have handed down in tales from ancient times.” In particular, they should not overlook folklore traditions that “can increase national vigor.” Such traditions constitute a “genetic inheritance” that has sustained the Japanese people for millennia and “give the Japanese a spiritual motive” for their actions. Among these folktales tied to the nation and handed down by the ancient ancestors of the Japanese, Nitobe argues, Momotar occupies a privileged place. Often the first folktale that children are told, it “leaves an indelible impression on their young minds.” While most Japanese folktales are restricted to a particular region or a period of time, the story of Momotar is both timeless and national in scope. Finally, it has a “simple, well-crafted plot, a beautiful construction, and a fresh and manly character.”52 Even though all Japanese are familiar with the story of Momotar , Nitobe laments that adults

and children fail to grasp its broader implications. When he states that folklore is part of the Tierney, Robert Thomas. Tropics of Savagery : The Culture of Japanese Empire in Comparative Frame, University of California Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ucsc/detail.action?docID=672390. Created from ucsc on 2019-12-21 08:12:38.

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Japanese people’s “genetic inheritance,” Nitobe implies that Momotar emerged from the folk culture and belongs to the people. When he goes on to claim that Japanese have failed to grasp the broader implications of this folktale, he implies that the people need to be reeducated to take possession of their “genetic inheritance.” One might say that the goal of his lecture is to remake the folklore hero to fit a national ideal and to remake the people in the image of their folk hero. To accomplish both tasks, Nitobe stresses the multiple levels of meaning in the story —historical, moral, and economic—and seeks to show how this timeless tale has a special relevance to twentieth-century Japan. In his analysis of Momotar ’s historical meaning, Nitobe mentions Takizawa Bakin’s theory that the character of Momotar is based on the hero of the medieval chronicle H gen monogatari (The Tale of H gen), Minamoto no Tametomo, and his banishment to the Izu Islands.53 In the same breath, however, he argues that a historical reading cannot exhaust the latent importance of a folktale. History, he writes, is “concrete and objective” while folktales are “archetypical and subjective.”54 Like many of his contemporaries, Nitobe deplored the fact that Japanese history featured

few overseas adventurers. As an adventurer willing to confront a fearsome enemy overseas, Momotar was merely the exception that proves the rule. Besides the absence of historical figures to draw on, Nitobe might have seen real advantages in using folk heroes as role models for youth. The very lack of reality of the peach boy conferred upon the person retelling his story full license to interpret his adventures without interference from historical facts. Availing himself of this license, Nitobe reads Momotar as an allegory for his fellow countrymen, places the ogres on the map, and fixes this timeless tale in historical time. His version of Momotar serves a precise educational purpose: to help ordinary Japanese overcome their insularity (shimaguni konj ) and acquire a broader outlook on the world, one more in tune with Japan’s position as a great power. Nitobe treats Momotar as a folktale or fiction rather than as a legend based on the historical

Tametomo. This fiction is a prism through which he claims to discover, not the history, but rather the prehistory of the Japanese race. Whereas Momotar is the quintessentially Japanese folk hero, Nitobe paradoxically emphasizes his foreign origins. Just as the peach (momo) from which he takes his name is not native to Japan, Momotar is the personification of the Malay adventurers who reached Japan in large numbers (momo also means multitudes or great quantities) in ancient times. Momotar ’s three animal retainers, for their part, stand for archaic indigenous societies that he conquered and recruited to join his campaign.55 Momotar ’s foreign origin and his capacity to absorb other racial groups both prefigure the multiracial and assimilating prowess of the Japanese race in modern times. In this interpretation, Nitobe concurs with many prewar writers who assumed that the Japanese people were racially hybrid and possessed a talent for absorbing foreign races. Such theories were often invoked to justify Japan’s pursuit of empire in the modern period.56 Just as the Japanese had long ago assimilated many different peoples from different racial backgrounds, they were confident that they could repeat this success as a colonial power. If Nitobe discovers a prehistorical basis for expansion in the mixed racial origins of the

Japanese, he finds a model for contemporary Japan to emulate in Great Britain. In his English- Tierney, Robert Thomas. Tropics of Savagery : The Culture of Japanese Empire in Comparative Frame, University of California Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ucsc/detail.action?docID=672390. Created from ucsc on 2019-12-21 08:12:38.

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language works, Nitobe often stressed the resemblances between the culture and history of Japan and those of Western nations. In this essay, he refers especially to Great Britain as a future model that Japan should emulate, an island nation that is not “insular” or inward- looking. While “insularity” is synonymous with timidity and small-mindedness, Great Britain, ruler of the world’s largest empire, proves that geography does not determine historical destiny. By positing an analogy between Japan and Great Britain, Nitobe shows that Japan’s historical development is comparable with that of the most advanced nation of the West and he distinguishes Japan from an Asian continent characterized as stagnant and backward.57 If Nitobe makes use of the “historical” meaning of Momotar to define a racial talent for

colonization, he turns next to the “ethical” dimension of the tale. He notes approvingly that there is nothing even remotely erotic in the tale: “I believe that the old man and women were selected precisely to eliminate ‘eros’ from the tale and to reinforce its moral message.”58 If the “manly” Momotar is a perfect role model for young boys, then manliness is an important colonial trope in Nitobe’s writings.59 Nitobe often characterizes imperialism in explicitly gendered terms, in which the Japanese colonizers are male and the colony is a female who offers herself to the male. In his essay “Bunmei kokumin nanka no taisei” (The Tendency of Civilized Nations to Go South), Nitobe writes, “Just as a young girl desires a red belt when she comes of age, a nation that has developed wants to acquire territory near the equator.”60 In Japanese, the terms “red belt” (akai obi) and “equator” (sekid ) are written with the same characters; traditionally, a young woman wore a red belt when she was pregnant. While Nitobe compares the young girl with a red belt to Japan, he also suggests that Japanese colonization impregnates the fertile lands of the tropics that Japan wants to “acquire” now that it is “developed.” If the colonized refused to submit to the advances of the masculine colonizer, she might be taken by force. In the 1920 essay called “Japanese Colonization” he writes: “The merciless law of the survival of the fittest . . . has only justified the expansion of virile nations,” which follow the law of organic growth and become conquering or colonial powers. In contrast, “those [such as Korea] who, like the Foolish Virgins of the parable, were not ready to act at the call of the century were bereft of their independence.”61 Nitobe suggests that colonization is an act of metaphorical “rape” that is ordained by the very “laws” of nature. If Momotar embodies manliness and valor, his three animal retainers stand for the

Confucian virtues of wisdom (the monkey), benevolence (the loyal dog), and courage (the pheasant). The virile hero can defeat the ogres because he is endowed with these virtues. Nitobe directs the attention of religious leaders, moralists, and educators to this “moral” aspect of the tale and compares Momotar ’s heroic subjugation of the ogres to the missionary endeavors of “soldiers” of the Salvation Army in the evil slums of the modern cities.62 In this construction, Momotar does not undertake his expedition to retaliate for previous attacks by the ogres; rather he is driven by a missionary zeal to right the moral failings represented by the very fact that “ogres” exist. In late nineteenth-century discourse, the urban slum was “represented in contemporary newspapers and journals as the symbolic opposite of civilization [bunmei] . . . its inhabitants were depicted as the descendants of ‘remote foreign races’ on whom images of both savagery [yaban] and barbarism [ikai] were projected.”63

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Matsubara Iwagor significantly titled his 1893 report on the slums of Tokyo Saiankoku no Tokyo (In Darkest Tokyo), a clear reference to Henry Morton Stanley’s famous account of his 1887–88 exploration of Africa (In Darkest Africa; 1890). Like Stanley, Matsubara saw the urban slum as a jungle inhabited by savages. Such reports on city slums horrified his educated audience and galvanized action by Home Ministry officials and nongovernmental organizations alike, who viewed the slums as breeding grounds for disease and social disorder.64 Just as Christian social reformers in Japan viewed the lower classes in the urban slums as savages in need of taming, Nitobe’s colonizer considers the “ogres” on Japan’s periphery as barbarians that must be domesticated. After the Japanese successfully contained savagery within the delimited space of the slum, they imagined that it continued to exist outside the spatial boundaries of civilized Japan. In Nitobe’s formulation, colonization is a form of missionary social work that finds its field of exercise outside the boundaries of the nation and is justified as the onward march of a superior civilization. Indeed, one could argue that conquering domestic savages demonstrated the nation’s self-mastery and thus proved its competence to rule others in an imperialist world system.65 Nevertheless, for Nitobe, the main allegorical lesson of Momotar ’s mission to subdue the

island of the ogres is “economic.” By spelling out this economic meaning, he offers a solution to one of the greatest mysteries surrounding the folktale: Momotar ’s motives for setting out to conquer the island of ogres in the first place.66

I believe that the tale of Momotar ’s overseas expedition undoubtedly expresses the interest the Japanese people feel toward the outside world and their expansionist drive. As for the island of the ogres, it is a general term for the islands of the South Seas. In the time of Tametomo, the boundaries of Japan did not extend beyond the eight provinces, and Hachiojima was the island of the ogres. But when Japanese settled in Hachiojima, its ogres disappeared. . . . Thereafter, people called the Ry ky the island of the ogres. Now, however, the Ry ky has become part of Japanese territory and the Ry ky people have begun to learn Japanese. . . . With each step we take southward, Onigashima is displaced even further south. . . . Until 1895, Taiwan was the island of the ogres. Now, more than a decade after we have occupied the island, many Japanese still regard it as the island of the ogres . . . because of our differences in language and customs. The Momotar of today will expand and conquer islands of ogres much further south. As for the treasures of the islands, they are naturally the products of the tropical zone, the treasures of the earth [takara]. The war booty that Momotar brings back to Japan—the magical cloak, the cape of invisibility, and the lucky hammer [kakure mino, kakurekasa, and uchide no kozuchi]—are the tropical products that he supplies to his home country.67

In this long passage, Nitobe construes the Momotar story as a metaphor for Japan’s manifest destiny, its irrepressible drive to expand. This drive expresses itself in the conquest of southern islands and the seizure of tropical products to be exported to Japan. Indeed, Nitobe’s view of the South Seas as a treasure chest of natural resources is a staple of most writings about nan’y from the days of the Iwakura Mission of 1871–73. Writing about his return from the mission to Japan by way of Africa and Asia, Kume Kunitake noted that the prosperity of the Western countries was based on their historical rule of colonial territories in the south. “Most of the raw materials used to manufacture the European products [hakuraihin] that Japan imports actually originate in the South Seas. These raw materials are processed in Europe, fashioned into manufactured goods, and then sold to Japan for a profit. Only when this geography of production becomes widely known will we see the fruit of Japan’s national

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strengthening ripen.”68 In 1887, Shiga Shigetaka published his Nan’y jiji (Conditions of the South Seas), in which he advocated expansion to the South Seas through trade. Despite these thematic continuities, Nitobe’s views of Japan’s expansion to the south differ

greatly from the promotion of commercial exchange associated with writers such as Shiga or Kume. They are also unlike the ideologies of the Co-Prosperity Sphere that stressed the material benefits that Japan’s expansion brought to the southern territories. As an economic parable, the Momotar story justifies Japan’s expansion as a form of primitive accumulation. Momotar conquers the islands of the tropics, seizes their treasures, and brings them back to the home country as “war booty.” In effect, he dispossesses the original owners of their wealth, without offering any compensation in return or engaging in any commercial exchange. In 1871, the liberal thinker Fukuzawa Yukichi singled out this precise aspect of the folktale for unequivocal condemnation in his Hibi no oshie (Everyday Teaching): “Momotar is said to have gone to the island of the ogres in order to steal treasures. Isn’t this an unforgivable act? The ogres were the rightful owners of these treasures, which they valued and stowed away. We should regard Momotar as a thief and villain [warumono] because, for no good reason, he went to steal a treasure that was someone else’s property.”69 If Fukuzawa treated the folk hero as a thief and condemned his behavior, Nitobe holds him up as a model to be emulated since his seizure of the “treasures of the tropics” enriches the Japanese nation. Nitobe’s economic interpretation of the tale suggests that primitive accumulation is the indispensable precondition for the imagining of empire. As the ogres flee from the previous encroachments of the Japanese, the location of their

island changes over time. As Nitobe was telling the story, Japan had already conquered the Ry ky s (1879) and Taiwan (1895) and was setting its sights on territories further to the south. The year 1895, in some respects, marks a crucial turning point in this progression. From this moment, pressure grows within Japan to accelerate the assimilation of the Ry ky an population and to rename the Ry ky s as Okinawa.70 If the Okinawans are henceforth to be rapidly assimilated, the Taiwanese are depicted as savages as a pretext for conquering them. Momotar ’s conquest of Onigashima becomes an allegory for the Japanese empire that advances continuously to the south, eventually assimilating the ogres it captures. Thomas Burkman describes Nitobe’s Momotar doctrine as a theory of irresistible

expansion, a Japanese version of manifest destiny.71 Referring to Nitobe’s essay, Kamishima Jir argues that Momotar -ism was an unstable compound composed of a spontaneous, natural desire for expansion—shizen yokub —and militarism.72 Outside this essay, Nitobe stresses the applicability of the Momotar model to Japanese colonialism also in his scholarly lectures and his articles in mass-circulation periodicals.73 In these works, he reinterprets the figure and makes some interesting additions to his tale. Nitobe’s distinguished career as Japan’s premier internationalist was closely intertwined

with Japanese imperialism. As a young man, he studied agricultural science at the Sapporo Agricultural College (today’s University of Hokkaido) and took part in the nation’s first colonial project: the colonization of Hokkaido and of its indigenous people.74 In 1901, he was recruited by Got Shinpei to work in the colonial government of Taiwan, which was, in Got ’s

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words, Japan’s first “colonial university.”75 After receiving his first degree in colonial studies from that “university,” Nitobe completed formal academic training in international political science at Johns Hopkins in the United States, at Halle University in Germany, and at Kyoto University. From 1908, his former sponsor in Taiwan, Got Shinpei, then president of the Southern Manchurian Railway Company, was instrumental in creating a chair in colonial policies at Tokyo Imperial University and in appointing Nitobe as the first to occupy it. If Tokyo University was established to train officials to serve the government, then the chair in colonial policy studies served to educate a corps of officials to administer the colonies. At Tokyo Imperial University and Takushoku (Colonial) University (an institution whose name evokes the imbrication of knowledge and empire), Nitobe created the basic curriculum for this new field of study and trained the next generation of specialists who were to play important roles in the Japanese empire. He continued to teach until he was named undersecretary general of the League of Nations (1920–26), at which time Yanaihara Tadao replaced him. As Japan’s first professor of colonial policy studies, Nitobe standardized the terminology

for “colony” in later Japanese discourse and set forth the fundamental concepts of this field. In a 1911 article, “Shokumin naru meiji ni tsukite” (On the Word Colony), Nitobe noted that Taiwan was not referred to as a “colony” in official Japanese discourse as late as 1910. He observed that the term shokumin in colloquial usage signified both colonization and emigration, two closely related modalities of national expansion. In addition, it could be written with two different but phonetically identical characters: the first signified to “plant people” and the second to “increase people.” Reflecting this linguistic usage, the journal Shokumin Sekai (Colonial World; published in 1908, written with the second of these two characters) carried stories about Japanese emigrants to Hawaii and South America side by side with articles on career prospects in Korea and Taiwan. To eliminate such semantic and graphic ambiguities, Nitobe argued that the government should adopt the former character since it was closer in meaning to what “colony” signified in European languages, which derived from the Latin colonus, or “planting of people.” Noting that the “Chinese language lacks any meaningful term for colony,” Nitobe went on to write: “Whenever names of places like Korea, Taiwan, and Karafuto are mentioned . . . they are referred to as ‘new additions to the empire.’ Does it suffice to name these newly occupied territories with old expressions? Wouldn’t it be better to use the new term for colony [shokuminchi]?”76 Besides coining a new term for “colony,” Nitobe also spearheaded the creation of colonial

policy studies in Japan. He undertook a systematic and comparative study of colonial institutions around the globe and placed Japanese colonial policies within this global framework. The creation of this new field played an important part both in legitimizing Japan’s growing empire and in showing that it was based on knowledge. Not only did it demonstrate that the empire was built in accordance with international norms, but it “gave authoritative, academic explanations to the international terms that defined Japan’s empire.”77 In Nitobe’s later colonial policy writings, he often pointed to the limitations and

imperfections of Momotar as an allegory of empire. Momotar conquers the ogres, but he returns later to his rural village and leaves them alone. Nitobe wanted to amend the figure of

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Momotar and to refashion him as a long-term settler who remains in the colony and develops its resources, rather than being simply an invader who annexes new territory and incorporates it into the home country. To have Momotar approximate this ideal, he supplements what is missing in the tale by adding new elements to the plot and substantially reworking the legend. In 1916, he writes: “I love Momotar and have frequently had occasion to refer to his story. Nevertheless, I believe that we need to revise this folktale to make it fit the new Japan. In this new version, Momotar goes to the island of ogres, settles down, and does not return to his home country. Rather than bringing the treasures of the island back to Japan, he invites the old man and old woman to join him and plans to build a happy home in this new land.”78 If Momotar later became a long-term settler in the land, he began his career as a conqueror

with a boundless urge to expand. The island of the ogres in both versions was the frontier where Momotar steeled his will and became a “man”:79 “The frontier rejuvenates the human nature which we are apt to forget and lose. For human life there must always be a frontier. If it were not for it, man would be reduced to a trifling existence under the pressure of the customs and traditions of society.” A fascination with the frontier is a constant throughout Nitobe’s life and career, from his early education in Sapporo to his final days spent justifying Japan’s expansion into Manchuria to skeptical Americans. On an observation tour of Manchuria in 1932, he wrote, “If only I were still in my twenties, I would like to go and settle in Manchuria. . . . Man’s timeless hope is to be part of the first generation of nation builders, cultivating barren lands, opening roads through the impenetrable forests, developing natural resources that people had never given a thought to, building a base there and making it one’s home.”80 Though he refers to the territories into which imperial Japan expands as a “frontier,” this

frontier is more a vector of expansion than a bounded space. Indeed, the frontier in Nitobe’s theories serves as the functional equivalent of Turner’s frontier in his thesis on U.S. history. Turner had argued that the American character had been formed by the nation’s experience on the Western frontier, where civilization and barbarism met. Like the West in Turner’s thesis, the South Seas for Nitobe was the crucible where Japanese national character must be forged.81 However, Nitobe’s Momotar doctrine differs from Turner’s frontier thesis in that it is oriented toward the future, while Turner sought to account for America’s past at a time when the western frontier had closed. Indeed, notwithstanding his argument that the folktale expressed the southern origins of the Japanese, the vector of Momotar ’s expansion did not necessarily point south. After the annexation of Korea in 1910, Nitobe saw Japan’s expansion moving in the opposite direction: the outer perimeter of the nation now spread northward in concentric circles to embrace southern Manchuria, Karafuto, and northern Manchuria. He wrote:

If one were to draw a circle with a radius of 180 ri [a ri = 3.9273 kilometers] centered on the Noto peninsula at Hokutan point and include Hokkaido, Kyushu, and Korea inside the circle, it would extend right to the Tumen River. If the circle’s radius were increased to 320 ri and its center were shifted to 40 degrees north latitude and 135 degrees east longitude, southern Manchuria and the Liaoting peninsula would fit inside, and the circle would extend right to 50 degrees north latitude in Karafuto. And if the circle’s radius were increased to 380 ri and its center moved just a little, naturally Harbin would fit inside as would Chichihar in northern Manchuria.

Noting the new dimensions of the nation after the annexation of Korea, he went on to write, Tierney, Robert Thomas. Tropics of Savagery : The Culture of Japanese Empire in Comparative Frame, University of California Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ucsc/detail.action?docID=672390. Created from ucsc on 2019-12-21 08:12:38.

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“The first circle is already a reality.”82 In this way, the Momotar “doctrine” became a flexible paradigm that could be adapted to the vicissitudes and changes of direction in Japan’s imperial trajectory. In Shokuminchi no sh kyoku mokuteki (The Ultimate Goal of Colonization), Nitobe wrote

that the final aim of colonialism is the expansion of the oikoumene, a Greek word he defines as “the land in which humans can dwell [ningen no sumieru tochi].”83 In his view, man, as steward of the earth’s riches, has a responsibility to exploit the resources of the earth and, in particular, to develop land that is neglected by its feckless inhabitants. Viewing undeveloped land as a patient in a “state of illness,” he argued that the patient would never recover if left only to his own devices; only by following the medical prescriptions of colonial policy could the land regain its “health.” In “Igaku no shinpo to shokumin hatten” (Medical Progress and Colonial Development), Nitobe identifies endemic tropical illness as the “ogres” that must be expelled if the resources of the tropics are to be developed: The “red and blue ogres” are the “bacteria and protozoa that cause the endemic diseases of the tropics.”84 In this disease model of colonialism, the colony is infected by malignant “ogres” that frighten away would-be colonists and impede development. In order to take control of the “treasures they desire,” the Japanese must first expel the ogres that block access to the land. Starting from the premise that “the one who made best use of the land, or in other words,

loved the land most, ought by rights to be the true owner of the land,” he concluded that the original inhabitants should hand the land over to the colonist best able to realize its potential. He saw colonization primarily as the provision of a proper infrastructure of empire,85 consisting of courts of law, public hygiene, new industries, and schools. Ultimately, colonization was merely “the spread of civilization itself,”86 a beneficial process in which advanced peoples offered their knowledge, technologies, and capital to contribute to the development of undeveloped land. If, however, the colonized refuse the civilization offered by the colonizer, they are doomed to regress to their original state as “ogres.” Such was the fate of the former French colony of Haiti, a flourishing plantation economy under French rule, which became a place of disease and stagnation—in a word, “the island of the ogres”—after it achieved independence.87 Like earlier and later writers of southern expansionism, Nitobe believed that the greatest

treasure trove of the earth’s natural resources was to be found in the tropical south. The tropics were the place where the human race was born, but humanity had progressed and developed in more temperate climates. Whereas the tropics contained “raw and unfinished material,” the temperate zone acquires this raw material, polishes it, and purifies it,”88 and in the end turns it into finished products that can be traded. The people of the South Seas also represented an early, raw stage in the evolution of humanity, which stronger nations needed to mold and “develop” by introducing civilization. “When we consider the condition of barbarians who still inhabit the world today, we see that these people rarely stir themselves to make progress because, having no shortage of the basic necessities of life, they lack any motivation to do so. Only where the heavens bestowed cold weather, does it appear that people have been made to feel the necessity of working to satisfy their basic needs of food, clothing, and shelter.”89 Since

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human beings develop only where they meet resistance and are forced to overcome obstacles, the inhabitants of the tropics are unable to progress on their own. Rather, the tropics are for those “who have conquered the north and developed the power to shape their external environment as they desire” to exercise their will most efficiently. As a descendant of Malay adventurers, Momotar —and the Japanese race—are ones who, originally coming from the south, have “conquered the north” and thus are uniquely qualified to promote the “southern expansion of civilization.” If Nitobe lays stress on the development of resources of the south, he says relatively little

about policies toward the colonized. As the peach boy advances to the south, he demonizes the inhabitants there. However, the term oni or “ogre” does not denote a malevolent, unchanging nature. A devout Quaker, Nitobe argues that the Japanese will discern the humanity of the colonized “other” when the latter learns to speak Japanese and adopts Japanese customs. However, this discovery of a common humanity does not lead Nitobe to favor equality between colonizer and colonized. The ogres are no longer “demonic others,” but they are not equals either. If the “ogres” accept colonization by the superior civilization, they will eventually progress to the level of human beings, thanks to the effort of their colonizers, although complete assimilation might take centuries. Gradualism was the watchword for Nitobe’s ideas about the assimilation of the colonized. Nitobe believed that Japanese law and institutions should be gradually extended to the colony according to the level of development of the colonized. Got Shinpei famously remarked that it would take at least eighty years before the Taiwanese could be elevated to the level of the Japanese, but Nitobe multiplied this figure by ten in his lectures on colonial policy. In addition, he was opposed to any attempts to hurry this slow process along by interfering with and aggressively changing the culture of the colonized. Since each society had its own cultural peculiarities, he argued that assimilation policies that aimed to destroy the culture of the colonized were doomed to fail.90 This gradualist view of assimilation coexists in uneasy equilibrium with a completely

different narrative. Nitobe had long believed that the racial origins of the Japanese were in the South Seas: “I believe that the Japanese people belong to the Malay race. We are probably a race that was first born in the South Seas. Of course, there are also many of us that came from the north as well. Even though there are many (of our ancestors) who came from China and Korea, I still believe that most of the blood flowing in our veins is from the south.”91 In a 1915 article titled “Bunmei no nanshin” (The Southern Expansion of Civilization), he goes a step further and claims that the “ogres” of the Momotar tale are proto-Japanese. Since the ancestors of the Japanese originally migrated from the South Seas, present-day ogres presumably descend from the same ancestors as the Japanese. Unlike their illustrious cousins, they languish in a stagnant primitive culture that has stood still for centuries as history has moved on and Japan has become a great empire. As a result, the encounter between the Japanese and the ogres occurs not only through a displacement in space but also by means of time travel to this distant past. Nitobe’s Momotar retraces the path that the ancient Japanese took when they traveled to Japan long ago. Consistent with this reasoning, Nitobe reinterprets the metaphor of Momotar ’s homecoming, a central motif of the tale; since the “ancestors of the

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Japanese probably came from the South Seas, our southern expansion today can be thought of as the homecoming of one, crowned with laurels, who long ago left his hometown, traveled to the north, and carried out great deeds.” Momotar ’s homecoming, the happy ending of his success story, takes place not when he returns to the village of the old man and woman—who have no blood relation to him—but rather when he arrives in the island of ogres in the first place. If the ogres show Momotar his past, he in turn points them in the direction of their future. He also offers them the possibility of their acceptance as Japanese, at the cost of submission to Japanese cultural, social, and political norms.92 In this interpretation of Momotar ’s quest as a homecoming to the land of his ancestors,

Nitobe calls attention to an important aspect of Japanese colonial rhetoric: the notion that the Japanese were blood relatives of the people they colonized. Like Nitobe, many prewar Japanese speculated that the ancestors of the Japanese came from the south, while others argued that they were from the north, and others still proposed that they were a mixture of northern and southern peoples. Torii Ry z (1870–1953), a towering figure in prewar Japanese anthropology, synthesized these different views and argued that the Japanese were a mixture of Ainu, continental peoples, and southern peoples (Indonesians and Indo-Chinese).93 While I have already mentioned the theory that Japanese and Koreans had common ancestors

(nissen d soron), a theory that many Japanese writers subscribed to during the colonial period, I will add that similar theories were advanced with regard to the Japanese and the people of the South Seas. If historians and social scientists could point to a long recorded history of interactions between Japan and Korea, they stood on shakier ground when they asserted that the Japanese were related to South Seas islanders. Nevertheless, anthropologists, historians, linguists, and folklore specialists concocted similar theories to demonstrate that Japanese shared common ancestry with southern peoples as well. Torii Ry z , who undertook extensive anthropometric surveys of the Yami aborigines on Lantal Island in Taiwan, argued that they were related to the Negritos, one of several racial strains he believed made up the Japanese race. If Torii investigated physical similarities between the Japanese and Taiwanese aborigines, Tsuboi Sh gor , the founder of Japanese anthropology, concentrated on cultural ties between the Japanese and the Malay races, arguing that “Japanese ancient copper swords excavated from sites in Kyushu resembled in shape the dagger [kris] used by contemporary Malay.”94 Besides these two prominent anthropologists, numerous linguists, mythologists, and historians also offered other theories linking the Japanese with Malay, Polynesian, or Austronesian peoples.95 Later, Yanagita Kunio, the founder of Japanese folklore studies, advanced the theory that the Japanese had migrated to their present home from the South Seas in the distant past; he viewed Okinawa—which was a kind of relay station between Japan and its origins—as the key to understanding the nation’s prehistoric past. In his Kaij no michi (The Way of the Sea; 1961), he attempts to recover Japan’s ancient history by examining traces of archaic Japanese culture in contemporary Okinawa. Such speculations circulated widely in popular books and periodicals, particularly during

the boom periods of southern expansionism. Like Nitobe in his 1915 essay, Takekoshi Yosabur believed that the original “Japanese” were of Malayan origin and hence related to both the

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Taiwanese aborigines and the South Seas islanders. Of the former, he wrote: “I entertain a firm conviction that our Japanese ancestors and these savages are in some way blood relations.” Indeed, he recommended that specialists undertake a historical study to compare the Taiwan savages with “the Kumaso family in Kyushu . . . or with the ferocious chieftain Nagasunehiko,” the leader of a clan that resisted Emperor Jinmu in his subjugation of the eastern territories of Japan in the ancient past.96 Since the Taiwanese had once been “cousins” of the “Japanese,” they could once again become Japanese under Japan’s assimilation policies. In his later book Nangokuki, Takekoshi claimed that the Japanese were racially related to the Malay population of Southeast Asia and he cited both physical similarities and cultural resemblances to support his claim. Inoue Masaji, another proponent of southern expansionism, claimed that the Japanese, by advancing into the South Seas, were returning to their place of origin: “For Japanese to advance into nan’y is to return to the ancient time before Emperor Jinmu.”97 In 1942, Niimura Ide (better known as the editor of Kojien dictionary) treated the early military victories in the Pacific War as a kind of homing instinct of the Japanese race, when he wrote, “The advancement of the Japanese to the southern regions is perhaps based on the longing that each of us unwittingly harbors for the place of birth of our people.”98 While the Japanese claimed that they were linked to those they colonized and shared

common ancestors with them, they distanced themselves from the colonized by interpreting their present condition as Japan’s ancient—indeed primordial—past. In Time a;nd the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Objects, Johannes Fabian refers to this form of temporal distancing as the “denial of coevalness,” arguing that it is a key way of constituting others as primitive or backward in relation to the modernity of Western civilization. This “denial of coevalness” lends intellectual support, not only to the discourse of anthropologists and colonial policy scholars, but more generally to relations of domination between observer and observed.99 When Nitobe spoke of Momotar ’s homecoming and Takekoshi compared Taiwanese savages with the tribal leaders of Japan’s mythical past, they were both engaged in this temporal distancing. The Japanese found traces of their origins, their early history, and a primitive version of their culture in the South Seas. Imagining themselves the evolutionary fulfillment of their putative ancestors, the Japanese assigned themselves the mission of bringing their backward racial brothers forward in time. By reinterpreting his arrival as homecoming, Nitobe naturalizes Momotar ’s conquest and

sets it on a genetic foundation. To begin with, he construes Momotar ’s desire to conquer the island of the ogres as an obscure racial instinct to return to the home of his ancestors. Nitobe compares the Momotar tale to Mignon’s song in Goethe’s famous bildungsroman Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship. While still an infant, Mignon was kidnapped by an evil spirit, whereupon she lost all memory of her parents and her native land. Asked one day where her home is, she replies with a song containing the celebrated verse: “Kennst du das Land, wo die Zitronen blumen?” (Do you not know the land where the lemon trees grow?). This song, familiar to all Germans, expresses “the longing felt by the German people for the warmer lands of the south and their ethnic destiny of southern expansion.” Nitobe concludes: “Since even the Germans, a northern race par excellence, feel such longing, how much more natural it must be

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that a southern race like the Japanese feel an instinctual yearning for the south?” Besides naturalizing the yearning that the Japanese feel for the south, Nitobe claims that the Japanese are best suited to introduce progress and civilization to the tropics because of their racial origins. Nitobe concludes this essay by writing that “nothing will rival [Momotar ’s] great power of influence over the expansion of the Japanese nation.”100

THE METAMORPHOSES OF MOMOTAR IN LATER COLONIAL POLICY DISCOURSE

If, in Nitobe’s view, Momotar provides an ideal model for Japan’s imperial mission, he becomes a far more problematic figure for later writers on Japanese colonial policy. T g Minoru (1881–1959), a student of Nitobe, vigorously disputes the latter’s claim that this folk hero is a useful model for the Japanese of his time; T g thinks of him as the negative model of the bad Japanese colonist. While the two writers took diametrically opposed attitudes toward Momotar , they agreed in treating him as an allegorical figure of Japanese imperialism, particularly toward the South Seas. This difference in evaluation is clearly related to the different periods in which these two scholars of colonial policy studies were writing. Whereas Nitobe’s writings on colonial policy epitomize the early twentieth-century period of Japanese colonization, T g ’s reflect new concerns with governance of the colonies that emerged in the post–World War I period. Facing growing political movements in the colonies demanding self- determination, Japanese colonial authorities implemented new cultural policies to co-opt colonial elites, policies often referred to as cultural rule (bunka seiji). A staunch advocate of Japanese expansion, T g attempted to reconcile continued Japanese rule with postwar internationalism and the rise of ethnic nationalism in the colonies. In his view, Momotar constituted an inappropriate model at this new historical conjuncture. T g agreed with Nitobe that fairy tales offer insight into Japanese historical experience and

folk wisdom regarding overseas expansion. One can “discover flashes of the national character of a people” if one pays attention to “a nation’s myths,101 legends, proverbs, literature, and fine arts.”102 In Momotar , he claims to discover not lessons to be learned but rather “the basis for mistakes in the Japanese colonial enterprise,”103 and indeed the “shortcomings” of Japanese colonizers.104 In particular, Momotar epitomizes the aggressive and plundering nature of Japanese colonization and the lack of patience and perseverance of Japanese colonists.105 T g also follows Nitobe in situating Momotar ’s adventures in the South Seas. From the

perspective of colonial studies, he is a youth endowed with the virtues of wisdom, benevolence, and courage, who sets off to conquer an undeveloped island in the south, conquers the barbarians (banjin) living there, seizes a plethora of treasures, and returns to Japan to please his parents.106 This simple tale “expresses the sense of the Japanese race’s overseas expansion in the distant past,” but in T g ’s view, therein lies its problem:

Applying to Momotar ’s conquest of the isle of the ogres the categories of colonial policy studies, one would describe it as an invaded colony. It differs from the agricultural colony in which the colonizer develops the undeveloped plains by tilling the soil with his labor and establishing new companies and launching new enterprises. All Momotar does is to use the power of the sword to seize every treasure possessed by the natives of the land, whether it be gold and silver, coral, flax, or cotton. This is so-called despoiling colonial policy or plundering policy and has nothing to do with permanent-settlement

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colonizing. Momotar ’s conquest of the isle of the ogres faithfully expresses the national character of the Japanese race that seeks to “return to their hometown bedecked in brocade.”107

Rejecting the indigenous Momotar as model, T g instead calls on the Japanese to study a fable of the Ataiyal, an aboriginal group in north Taiwan, in order to remedy the deficiencies of the Japanese colonial model.108 This fable, “Taiy no seibatsu” (Conquest of the Sun), offers a mythical explanation of the alternation of night and day. In the ancient past, two suns shone in the sky, bathing the earth in such constant sunlight that the rivers evaporated, living creatures were roasted, and the forests withered. The members of one village decided to launch an expedition to remove one of the suns from the sky; over the course of generations it took to reach the sun, a “savage [seiban] Momotar ” finally appeared and slew the second sun by firing a supernatural arrow. T g draws the following moral lesson from this fable: “There is no greater enterprise than an effort such as this, carried out over not one but two or three generations, to relieve the suffering of all living things and usher in an age of global peace.”109 Learning from the colonized, T g argues that the Ataiyal myth is a better paradigm for long- term colonization than the tale of Momotar , and one more suited to realities of ruling a multicultural empire in the 1920s. Later writers continued to treat Momotar as an allegorical figure for the Japanese empire,

notably Japanese settlers in the colonies. Miyagawa Jir , the editor of a Taiwan Jitsugy kai (Taiwan Business World), published a scenario titled “Otogigeki seibatsu sareru Momotar ” (Fairy Tale Drama: Momotar Conquered) in 1934, which was recently reprinted by Takehisa Yasutaka. In this fairy tale drama, Momotar is neither a metaphor for Japanese colonialism per se nor a model to be followed or shunned; rather he represents the colonial government of Taiwan as seen from the perspective of the Japanese settler community in Taiwan.110 Though he had formerly worked in the Taiwan Government-General, Miyagawa became the

self-appointed spokesman of the Japanese settler community when he assumed the position of editor of the Taiwan Jitsugy kai in 1929. The settlers, a small, privileged minority living among an alien majority, sometimes felt as though they were under siege. On the one hand, they feared the specter of resurgent Taiwanese nationalism. On the other, they opposed policies promoting the “assimilation” of the Taiwanese, which, in their view, would result in Japanese being treated no differently from the Taiwanese. Miyagawa excoriated Japanese colonial officials in the columns of his journal and fulminated against their neglect of the interests of Japanese residents. As deep economic crisis struck the home islands in the early 1930s, thousands of unemployed Japanese fled to Taiwan in search of work, while long-term Japanese residents of Taiwan faced stiff competition from Chinese business rivals on the island. Increasingly, settlers demanded that the governor-general offer economic relief for lower strata of Japanese migrating to the colonies and protective legislation for members of the long- standing Japanese business community. Above all, they wanted the government to uphold the elite status of each and every Japanese settler vis-à-vis the Taiwanese, since they—the settlers —constituted the very “foundation of colonial rule” and were an extension of the Japanese homeland. Detailing settler complaints, reporters in Taiwan Jitsugy kai noted that the colonial government was damaging the vital interests of its own people under the slogan of fostering the

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union of Japan and its colony.111 In his view, the Japanese (naichijin) faced the danger of “being overwhelmed economically” by the “Taiwanese people” and forced to live a “pitiful life.”112 Notwithstanding the economic hardships of the settlers, journalists claimed that Japanese officials listened sympathetically to Taiwanese complaints about the unfairness of colonial rule and gave in to their “insatiable” demands, thereby undermining the very basis for colonial rule. According to Miyagawa, “foolish officials,” in the name of “fairness and equality,” favored Taiwanese business interest in order to protect their own position with respect to the local (Chinese) population. At the same time, the Chinese, who lacked any sense of “national consciousness,” were insatiable and would never be content with the crumbs being thrown to them.113 Ultimately, concessions would embolden rather than placate the colonized, inciting them to demand complete independence. This is exactly what occurs in Miyagawa’s “Otogigeki seibatsu sareru Momotar ” (Fairy

Drama: Momotar Conquered), a short work that tells of the latter days of Momotar . While Momotar stands for the Japanese colonial regime, his animal retainers are Japanese settlers in the colony, while the descendants of the ogres, also identified as different species of animals, are the indigenous population of Taiwan. In the opening scene, Momotar , the governor-general of Taiwan, proclaims: “Since the island has been freed from ogres, I will distribute equally to all inhabitants and their children the millet dumplings that the old couple made.” When one of his animal retainers complains that Momotar is spoiling the indigenous people out of misguided good will, the governor-general dismisses him and resolves to carry out his policy of fairness and equal treatment to all. Afterward, a monkey and a raccoon (representing the colonized) complain to Momotar that his retainers abuse their power and torment the local population. In reply, the governor-general vows to end such abuses.114 In the second scene, the islanders complain that the millet dumplings they are given are “too

small” and “all but inedible.” Rather than dumplings, what they really want is Momotar ’s sword and uniform. In the final scene, the monkey, fox, and badger (animals associated with trickery and disguises) ply Momotar with drinks, tricking him into giving up his sword and uniform, the symbols of his authority in Taiwan. Taking advantage of Momotar ’s guilelessness, the ogres disarm him and reverse the colonial conquest, leaving Momotar “conquered.”115 While Momotar begins by offering to share the millet dumplings (economic prosperity) supplied from the home country with his colonial subjects, the colonized are primarily interested in acquiring the trappings of political power. From Nitobe to Miyagawa, Momotar has served as a trope for colonialism and his name

has been invoked in debates on colonial policy. Indeed, the tale of Momotar as conqueror survived, nearly intact, the demise of the Japanese empire in postcolonial Taiwan. I have already noted that the figure of Momotar was extensively transfigured in postwar Japan. On the one hand, Japanese writers sought to free Momotar from the taint of war crimes and made him a symbol of a peaceful and democratic nation, a fitting metaphor for postwar Japan. On the other hand, Japanese regions enlisted him as a symbol of local identity and mobilized his image to promote regional revitalization and tourism. Paradoxically, he maintained his martial qualities in a Taiwan ruled by the Kuomintang (KMT) and placed under martial law until the

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late 1980s. While the Taiwan regime was acutely aware of the wartime manipulation of Momotar as a symbol of Japan, they also countenanced the refashioning of this familiar and malleable figure into an icon of Taiwan popular culture. In 1961, the Taiwanese film director Shao Luo Hui directed Momotar ’s Great War with the Island of the Ogres. Takehisa Yasutaka studies this film, of which no print survives, by examining surviving posters and newspaper articles about the film that appeared in the Chinese-language press. He argues that the KMT regime decided to make use of the folktale as a vehicle for its own anti-communist ideology, much as it had also recuperated the Go H legend to support its civilizing mission toward the Taiwanese aborigines. The film was renamed The Record of Old Peach’s Great Conquest of the Bandits, incorporating Momotar as a Chinese figure (Old Peach) and assimilating his enemies with bandits. The “bandits” that the hero conquers were identified with the Chinese communists that ruled the mainland. In this new guise, Momotar became a KMT hero who liberates the mainland from the communists (bandits).116 This postcolonial Momotar illustrates the continuity between colonial ideologies and postwar nationalism but also exemplifies the radical change in the uses to which such a popular figure can be put.

MOMOTARO AS VILLAIN AND THE DISCOVERY OF TROPICAL PARADISE

If Miyagawa caricatures Momotar as a feckless colonial governor of Taiwan, Akutagawa Ry nosuke debunks him as a repellent symbol of Japanese imperialism in his short story “Momotar .” First appearing in the Sunday Mainichi on July 1, 1924, this story is an entertaining parody of the folktale and belongs to a rich tradition of sequels, parodies, and rewritings of Momotar , which began in the seventeenth-century period. While Akutagawa inherits and carries on this long-standing tradition, he directs his satiric barbs at contemporary Japanese imperialism and, in particular, at the “South Seas fever,” to use Shimizu’s term. Akutakawa was perhaps the first writer to satirize this ideal Japanese boy as an aggressive

invader and to cast the ogres as peace-loving islanders.117 Consequently, his Momotar is a parody of the model hero proposed by Nitobe. Though I have no evidence that Akutagawa had read Nitobe’s essay on Momotar , he was a student at the First Higher School when Nitobe was headmaster and later caricatured him as a poseur in his story “Hankechi” (The Handkerchief). Professor Kinji Hasegawa, the protagonist of this story, is “a professor of colonial studies” and a strong proponent of Bushid , that is to say an unmistakable stand-in for Nitobe. “The Handkerchief” not only caricatures Nitobe but also lampoons contemporary imperial rhetoric.118 “Momotar ” also expresses Akutagawa’s disgust with Japanese military aggression on the

Asian mainland and his flirtation with proletarian literature. While Akutagawa is best known today as an apolitical and self-absorbed writer, he wrote a number of works in the early 1920s that are strongly critical of Japan’s imperialism, militarism, and its distortions of national history. An interesting example of these anti-imperialist works is the story “Kin Sh gun” (General Kim), which was published the same year that “Momotar ” appeared. Relying on the Korean accounts of Hideyoshi’s invasion of Korea, the narrator of “General Kim” recounts the exploits of Kim zui, a Korean national hero whose exploits are recounted in the Jinshinroku

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(A Record of Jinshin, 1592), a book banned during the Japanese colonization of Korea.119 Endowed with supernatural powers from birth, Kim assassinates Konishi Yukinaga, one of Hideyoshi’s top generals, and kills a kisaeng (female Korean entertainer) who is bearing Konishi’s child. The work concludes as follows: “And that was the end of Konishi Yukinaga as it has been handed down in Korean legend. To be sure, Yukinaga did not lose his life on the battlefield during the invasion of Korea. But the Koreans are not the only ones to embellish their history. In Japan, too, the history that is taught to children—or to youth who are not so different from children—is filled to the brim with such legends.” In support of his point, the narrator cites a passage from the Nihon shoki (an ancient history of Japan) describing a Japanese military defeat on the Asian continent that is absent from Japanese history textbooks, and concludes: “Every national history is the history of that nation’s glorious deeds. The legend of General Kim is far from being the only one that deserves our laughter.”120 We must understand these works in light of the writer’s personal experience as

correspondent for the Osaka Mainichi in China in 1920. Akutagawa traveled in China within one year of the May Fourth Movement, met with several Chinese intellectuals and revolutionaries, and carefully recorded in his travel journals the anti-Japanese graffiti he saw there.121 In Shanghai, Akutagawa met Chang Ping Lin, a leading political figure at the time of the first Chinese revolution;122 he later described their meeting in an essay titled “Hekiken” (Distorted Views):

When I visited Mr. Chang Ping Lin in the French settlement of Shanghai, we discussed Sino-Japanese relations in the study room, which had a stuffed alligator mounted on the wall. Even today, his words continue to echo in my ears.

“The Japanese I most detest is the Momotar , who conquered the land of the ogres. I can’t suppress a feeling of antipathy for Japanese who love Momotar .”

Mr. Chang is a true sage. I have heard many foreigners who are knowledgeable about Japan hold Prince Yamagata up to ridicule, praise Katsushika Hokusai to the skies, or shower abuse on Viscount Shibusawa. . . . However, up to now, I have never heard any of these so-called Japan experts utter a word of criticism about Momotar , who was born from a peach. What’s more, Chang’s words contained more truth than all the eloquence of these experts.123

More perspicacious than other foreign “experts” on Japan, Chang unmasks the relation between a folktale hero and Japanese imperialist ideology. In an analysis of this passage, the critic Sekiguchi Yasuyoshi proposes a simple allegorical grid for reading Akutagawa’s “Momotar ”: the island of the ogres is China, the ogres are the pacifistic Chinese, Momotar and his followers are aggressive Japanese imperialists.124 Yet Sekiguchi has little to say on the nature of this text or on its allusions to southern expansionism. A close reading of the work will help us to situate Akutagawa’s “Momotar ” more precisely within Japanese colonial discourse. Whereas Nitobe bases his didactic interpretation on the standardized Momotar of the

national school reader, Akutagawa recasts the story as a satire by mixing stylistic features of the fairy tale (for example, the formulaic “long, long ago,” mukashi, mukashi mukashi) with realistic details and pointed criticism. Writing for an adult reader whose familiarity with the standard versions of the folktale is assumed, Akutagawa dispenses with recapitulating whole sections of the story. “After the fruit bearing a baby inside left the deep mountain fastness, what

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sort of human being first retrieved him from the river? There is hardly any need for me to mention that there was an old woman at the lower end of the valley, since every child in Japan knows that she was washing clothes while her husband was out cutting firewood.”125 In addition, he plays with earlier literary versions of Momotar , notably the works of

celebrated writers such as Iwaya Sazanami and Ozaki K y . Like Iwaya’s Momotar , Akutagawa’s hero is adorned with the symbols of the nation (he has a fan with the hinomaru) and is linked to the emperor ideology (he traces the origins of Momotar back to the creation myths of the Kojiki). Like Ozaki, Akutagawa reverses the perspective of the standard tale and attempts to tell the story from the point of view of the ogres. In the end, his chief narrative innovations consist in his iconoclastic attitude toward Momotar and his portrayal of the ogres’ community as peaceful and fun-loving. Since Momotar is identified with the Japanese nation, the writer encourages the reader to take a critical look at Japanese imperialism and to reconsider it from the perspective of the colonized. Akutagawa overturns the standard version mainly by inverting the basic elements of the tale.

Rather than a hero, Momotar is a villain driven only by his lust for power and a drive to get rich quick. If the old man and woman in the story are ordinary hard-working peasants in rural Japan, Momotar himself is a lazy good-for-nothing, who sets off to conquer the island of the ogres simply to escape from the drudgery of farm labor: “He had an aversion for the kind of life the old man and women led, going out to labor in the fields and streams.”126 By portraying Momotar as lazy, Akutagawa reverses the conventional Japanese rhetoric about the people of the South Seas. As noted, Nitobe associated the trait of laziness with the heedless South Seas islanders (nan’y dojin) and contrasted them with the hard-working and diligent Japanese. Far from discouraging him from leaving, the old man and woman were anxious to be rid of him since they were “at their wits end in dealing with this spoiled brat.” To send him on his way, “they willingly acquiesced to his every demand, whether it was a flag, a sword, or a battle coat. At Momotar ’s request, they also made millet dumplings as provisions for his trip.”127 For the old man and woman, Momotar ’s overseas expedition is viewed as a serendipitous solution to their problem of dealing with their headstrong and mischievous offspring. If the parents represent a metropolitan view of colonial space, they view it as a dumping ground for Japan’s social misfits. On his way to the island of ogres, Momotar encounters three animals that he entices to join

him. In these scenes, he is a manipulative leader who wins others to his cause with deception and cunning. He “naturally had no idea whether the dumplings were really the best in Japan,” but he advertises them as such.128 He is also a shrewd businessman who pulls out his abacus when the animal retainers offer to work for him. Taking full advantage of his monopolistic position, he slashes their salaries from one millet dumpling to half a dumpling per retainer.129 Rather than earning their trust and loyalty, he gains power over them by preying upon their gullibility and hunger. Instead of paragons of Confucian virtue, these three animals are perhaps allegorical figures

for the three poisons (sandoku) that, according to Buddhist teaching, cause all of our misfortunes: anger, greed, and delusion. The stray dog stands not for benevolence but for anger,

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the clever monkey for greed, and the pheasant for delusion rather than courage. These three animals openly hate one other and fight constantly. The dog threatens the cowardly monkey with his huge fangs, the monkey with his commercial acumen feels nothing but contempt for the impractical pheasant, while the pheasant “with his expertise in seismology,”130 despises the stupid dog. Nevertheless, when the exasperated dog attacks the monkey, the pheasant interposes itself as referee and “preaches to both the ethics of loyalty and obedience.”131 Ultimately, Momotar enforces order in the ranks of his unruly followers not by spouting the platitudes of emperor ideology but by promising them a share in the war booty. When the monkey threatens to walk out on the whole venture, he warns: “You can leave if you want. But in return, you won’t get a share of the treasures when we take over the island.”132 If the animals are a quarrelsome crew on their way to the island, they become veritable

monsters when they arrive. Holding a plum banner in one hand and shaking his hinomaru fan in the other, Momotar sets his followers free to plunder and pillage: “Attack! Attack! If you spot an ogre, kill him. Kill every last one of them!” Malnourished and brainwashed, his retainers prove brutal, not an unexpected outcome since “no one can be such a paragon of military courage as a starving animal.” The dog bites the ogre youth in half with his fangs, the pheasant pecks out the eyes of the children, and the monkey, perhaps because of his “close resemblance to man,” strangles the young ogre women to death “only after ravishing them to his heart’s delight.”133 Nitobe had treated colonization as a metaphorical rape in his essay, but there is nothing metaphorical about the rape in Akutagawa’s story. Indeed, according to one critic, Momotar ’s cruel invasion anticipates prophetically the rape of Nanjing.134 In this story, the villainous ogres are plainly Momotar and his three animal helpers. By contrast, in the topsy-turvy world of this story, the ogres are humanized. Before Momotar

’s invasion, they are portrayed as living happy lives in peace and harmony. Just as humans are taught to fear ogres, ogre children are warned about the evils of the mythical human realm. A white-haired nurse admonishes her charges: “You had better behave yourselves or I will have to send you off to the island of human beings. You will be killed just like the kidnapper Shutend ji of ancient legend who was sent away to the human island. What are these beings like, you ask? Well, they lack horns, have pale faces, pale arms and legs. They are quite repulsive creatures . . . they are greedy, jealous and conceited liars. They like to burn things down and steal. They love to kill. There is no way to control them. They are beastly creatures.”135 Here the projection of colonial stereotypes is reversed by a change of perspective: if colonial narratives dehumanize the colonized other, Akutagawa shows how the colonized view colonizers as savage beasts. Nevertheless, Akutagawa’s “Momotar ” is not merely an allegory about universal human

failings. Just as Nitobe and T g discover layers of meaning in the folktale that relate to contemporary Japan, Akutagawa adds details that make his story a pointed satire on the Japanese imperialism of his time. If the peach boy symbolizes Japanese imperialism, his retainers stand for different social groups that backed and encouraged it: the war-mongering military is represented by the violent dog, Japanese capitalists by the profit-minded monkey, and deluded intellectuals by the pheasant.136 In Akutagawas satire, these different groups are

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unmasked as a criminal band whose words, stripped of any ideological finery, are simple justifications for pillage. However, there is a second way in which Akutagawa’s tale parodies contemporary

imperialism: the setting of the story. Whereas the ogres in standard accounts are fierce fighters protected by an impregnable fortress on a craggy island, Akutagawa’s ogres live on a distant tropical island and lack any means of self-defense besides their isolation.

The ogres lived on a solitary island in the far-off sea. It was not a craggy, hilly place as people tend to think. In fact, it was a beautiful natural paradise in which palm trees soared and birds of paradise chirped. The so-called ogres seemed to be a much more pleasure-loving race than we humans. The ogres in the story “How an Old Man Lost His Wen” danced the night away while the hero of “The One-Inch Boy” totally forgot the personal danger he faced when he became infatuated with the young princess he spotted at the temple. . . . In the midst of this tropical scenery, the ogres lived in peace and passed their time strumming the strings of the koto, dancing, and singing the verses of the ancient poets. The daughters and wives of the ogres wove cloth, brewed sake, made bouquets of orchids, and lived lives that were not in the least different from those of our human wives and daughters.137

Writing at a time of South Seas fever, Akutagawa sets his story not on the Asian continent but rather on a tropical island in the South Seas. Just as Nitobe has recourse to stereotypes of tropical islanders as backward savages, Akutagawa deploys the conventional tropical images (palm trees, birds of paradise, orchids, lovely moonlight, bananas, and coconuts) to depict his southern island as a tropical paradise and to cast the ogres as carefree, happy creatures, fond of drink and given to sensuality and childlike pleasures.138 Akutagawa’s ogres stand at the crossroads of at least three discourses on primitivism. In accordance with a cultural primitivism that believes that the savage is superior to the civilized, they are children who spend their time at play while civilized adults slave away at work. Second, they know nothing of warfare or sin, while their civilized counterparts are brutalized and corrupted by civilization; this is a form of spiritual primitivism associated with the biblical myth of Eden.139 Finally, the islanders are compared to ancient Japanese who play the koto and recite old narrative poems. In this allochronic primitivism, the ogres embody values associated with a more virtuous and simple past from which present-day Japanese have grown estranged. Like his novella Kappa, Akutagawa’s “Momotar ” is an allegory in which the idealized ogres are defined by reference to the humans, and are employed to criticize human society.140 Unlike the ogres in Nitobe’s essay who are defined in terms of lack (development, civilization), these islanders know contentment—it is rather Momotar and his followers who are lacking in contentment and therefore rapacious and insatiable. Accordingly, Akutagawa employs two devices to make his critique of colonialism: he debunks the figure of the mythical Japanese hero (Momotar ) and idealizes the society of the ogres as a utopia. The idealized others serve as a foil which is contrasted with the flaws of the Japanese. I should add here that Akutagawa never traveled to the South Seas but was familiar with the clichés and stereotypes that circulated in Japan during the Taisho period. One of his earliest stories—“Zett no kaiji” (Strange Event on a Desert Island)—is set on a South Seas island with palms and banana trees.141 If colonialism is portrayed as naked violence, this violence is unredeemed by any civilizing

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project that might justify it as a necessary means to a legitimate end. After the chief of the ogres surrenders and hands over to Momotar the island’s treasures, he says:

“I believe that we become the target of your military might because we have in the past been guilty of disrespect toward you. Nevertheless, none of us can recall the offense of which we are guilty. Could you not clarify the nature of this infraction.”

“I, the greatest man in Japan, summoned the dog, monkey, and pheasant as my three faithful retainers and set forth to conquer the island of the ogres.”

“In that case, what is the reason that you summoned those three individuals?” “Since I had already made up my mind to conquer the island of the ogres, I engaged the services of my retainers by

giving them millet dumplings. That is enough. If you still do not understand my reasons, I will kill all of you.”142

We have seen that Nitobe characterizes colonization as the spread of civilization and as the return of the Japanese to their ancestral home. For Akutagawa, colonization is an exercise in futility. Ultimately, the conquest of the southern island brings few rewards to Momotar and even fewer benefits to the islanders. Momotar makes a triumphal return to his hometown with a treasure-laden cart drawn by ogre children, but he does not spend the rest of his life in the happy retirement that a conquering hero expects as his due. When the captive children grow up, they kill the pheasant, Momotar ’s personal bodyguard, and flee back to the safety of their island. Other survivors, in search of revenge, sail across the ocean to attack Momotar ’s palace, set it on fire, and kill the monkey. Troubled by nightmares, the hero confides to his loyal dog:

“I am distressed that the ogres have remained so vindictive.’ ‘It is beyond comprehension,’ the dog acknowledged, ‘how the ogres can disregard the generosity their veritable master has bestowed upon them.’ “143

In the end, Momotar is the fatally deluded colonizer who misunderstands how his own actions galvanize and unite the colonized against him. Expecting his victims to welcome his conquest as an expression of his disinterested “generosity,” he is distressed to discover their “ingratitude” and “vindictiveness.” But as Akutagawa suggests, the peace-loving hedonistic ogres only become “revenge-seeking ogres” after their island utopia has been destroyed by Momotar ’s pillaging troops. Akutagawas satire also suggests that Momotar has unwittingly set in motion a cycle of

violence that leads to defeat of the conqueror and the decolonization of the island. Colonial conquest arouses “national” consciousness of the conquered people, awakens their desire for independence, and prods them to resist the power that enslaves them. Learning lessons from Momotar ’s tactics, the young ogres use materials readily available to build their own weapons and fight for the “independence” of their island. “On the shores of the lonely island, under the beautiful light of the tropical moon, a group of young ogres were stuffing the coconuts with explosive materials in order to carry out their plan to win independence for their island. Their eyeballs the size of tea saucers grew bright with happiness as they worked in silence, so committed to their cause that not even the charms of the lovely ogre girls could distract them.”144 The final image of this narrative—island men stuffing explosives into the hollowed-out

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shells of coconuts and immune to the charms of the young girls—is the poisoned fruit of colonial conquest. Colonial conquest makes any return to the former tropical paradise all but impossible. As a result of Momotar ’s conquest, the young men have forsaken their carefree lives and become ascetic militants, who are no longer distracted by “the charms of the lovely ogre girls.” In short, Akutagawa turns the propaganda figure of Momotar on its head. Momotar ’s benign expansion toward the south is unmasked as brutal conquest and exploitation, while the gradual assimilation of the “ogres” is replaced by a story of resistance and liberation. In the end, Akutagawa’s satire shows that a folktale can be a double-edged sword: serving as a weapon for the political propagandist of Japanese imperialism and for those who wish to lampoon his arguments.

MOMOTARO’S PROGENY AND “SOUTH SEAS” ORIENTALISM

Akutagawa does not end his story with this scene of ogres assembling their coconut explosives. Rather, he returns to the opening of the story where he describes a mythical peach tree that gives birth to a “genius” like Momotar only once every ten thousand years. He speculates about the other peaches ripening on the branches of the same tree. “In these mountain fastnesses unknown to human beings . . . countless other fruits are still ripening and we have no idea how many future geniuses are still sleeping within them.”145 These “future geniuses” did not take thousands or even hundreds of years to be born. They were released in the next two decades after Akutagawa’s story appeared in print in a torrent of wartime picture books, cartoons, Takarazuka plays, posters, songs, and animation. However, even before these avatars of Momotar were enrolled to promote war and

invasion, popular writers associated with the children’s literature and manga wrote about boy- heroes who set off to conquer the South Seas. Unlike Momotar , these boy-heroes were not of supernatural birth and possessed neither extraordinary powers nor mythical helpers. Nevertheless, they succeeded in setting themselves up as rulers over the tropical islanders using only tricks or weapons they improvised or invented on the spot. In 1929, Yamanaka Minetar published a short story titled “Nan’y no Sh nen ” (The Boy-King of the South Seas) in the widely read Sh nen Kurabu. Kenkichi, the boy-king of the title, accompanies his uncle on a trading trip to the South Seas and persuades his uncle to let him stay behind on a small island in the Pacific “because he enjoys having naked natives bow and scrape before him.” Entrusted with a revolver and a mirror from his uncle, Kenkichi gradually learns to speak the indigenous language and “feels as if he had become a native [dojin] boy.” When his uncle returns to the island a few weeks later, Kenkichi announces that he has no desire to return to Japan since he “wants to make these islands a part of Japan . . . expand the territory and eventually take over a bigger island.”146 Though he is still a boy, Kenkichi “is much smarter than the natives” and teaches them to build wooden houses, to cook and season their food, and to use fertilizer to grow their “banana, rubber, and coconut trees.” When he discovers that the islanders worship the sun god, Kenkichi tricks the islanders into believing that he is the son of the sun god by holding up the mirror given by his uncle in the palm of his hand to refract the sunlight in their direction and dazzle them. When the inhabitants of a neighboring island attack,

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Kenkichi drives off the invaders by firing his revolver at them and manipulating his mirror. Son of a god and protector of the island, Kenkichi becomes king of the island, names the island daiken koku, using the characters of his own name, creates a national flag (a white circle on a red ground, an inversion of the colors of the Japanese flag), composes a national anthem, promulgates a constitution, establishes an army, and expands the national territory by invading and conquering neighboring territories, carrying out a mini–Meiji restoration complete with colonial expansion. He wears a “strange crown made of leaves and ivy” on his head and is borne about by his subjects on a portable throne. Two years after this story first appeared, it was reissued in book form with eight other stories and became a best seller, selling more than a hundred thousand copies.147 Perhaps the most famous of these boy-heroes was Dankichi, the hero of a popular manga

that appeared in the Sh nen Kurabu from 1933 to 1939.148 Indeed, Kawamura Minato singles out the popular series B ken Dankichi (The Adventures of Dankichi) as the epitome of a “popular Orientalism” that denigrates backward South Seas natives and contrasts them with modern Japanese. The manga recounts the adventures of a young Dankichi who drifts to Barbarian Island in the South Seas after falling asleep in his fishing boat. Shimada Keiz , the creator of Dankichi, peoples his imaginary island with fauna not ordinarily associated with Micronesia (lions, elephants, giraffes, rhinoceroses, camels, etc.). With the assistance of Karik , a clever mouse, Dankichi establishes a private colony on the island, crowns himself king, and domesticates the wild animals and the cannibals who live there (referred to as “barbarians” and kuronb , or “darkies”). In a sense, The Adventures of Dankichi, which was read by millions of young readers, realized on a massive scale what Nitobe had earlier proposed to a much more limited audience in his Momotar lecture: it holds up an appealing model of Japanese imperialism to Japanese youth. In evolutionary narratives of civilization, savages were conceived of as the first stage of

human development, the first rung of a ladder leading step by step to civilization; by analogy to the psychosocial development of the human individual, they were often thought of as immature and undeveloped, as living in the childhood of humanity in general. A boy hero who conquers adult savages, Dankichi represents the reductio ad absurdum of this evolutionary paradigm. Smaller and younger than the natives, Dankichi is more than their match in terms of civilization thanks to the edge provided by his primary school education and the few tokens of civilization he carries with him such as his wristwatch and shoes. These infantilized natives submit without a fight when confronted by the evidence of Dankichi’s irrefutable superiority. After crowning himself king, Dankichi proceeds to tame and educate the natives and the wild animals on the island. He introduces schools, postal services, banking, and other aspects of modern civilization to the benighted inhabitants of the island, mimicking the civilizing mission of his home country. Since he cannot pronounce their names, he assigns them numbers that are written on the front of their bodies, effectively treating the natives as a tabula rasa without a past of their own. Dankichi’s superiority over the islanders is based, not only on his membership in an

advanced nation, but also on his racial difference from the natives: he is drawn with white skin Tierney, Robert Thomas. Tropics of Savagery : The Culture of Japanese Empire in Comparative Frame, University of California Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ucsc/detail.action?docID=672390. Created from ucsc on 2019-12-21 08:12:38.

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while the natives are dark-skinned and called “blacks” (kuronb ). 149 The racial difference between Dankichi and the natives is the source of a good part of the visual humor in the comic series. In an early episode, Dankichi daubs himself with mud to pass as black and escape detection by the natives, but he is exposed as a white when a sudden rainstorm washes off his disguise. In a later episode, the natives paint themselves white and impersonate the parents of Dankichi in order to cure the boy of his homesickness. Whether he is superior because of his race, nationality, or cultural identity, Dankichi illustrates one of the key ideas underlying colonial discourse precisely because he is portrayed as an average and unremarkable boy: that every Japanese colonizer, no matter how mediocre, is superior to any member of the conquered people, no matter how outstanding, simply by virtue of being from a conquering country. Thanks to this idea, even Dankichi, the lowest of emperor’s subjects, is immensely empowered by colonialism and the obverse side, indeed the very condition of his empowerment, is the denigration of the racially and culturally other natives. A latter-day Momotar , Dankichi offers his readers an outlet for the projection of colonial

fantasies onto tropical islands, which are envisioned as places marked out in advance and waiting for Japan to colonize them. His adventures suggest that colonialism is simple, fun, and, above all, within the capacity of even the most ordinary and callow Japanese. While entertaining his young readers, Dankichi also contributed to the formation of later generations of imperial subjects, empowered and disciplined by the wish-fulfilling fantasies that he enacts in their place.

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