OUTCASTS OF EMPIRE: Japan’s Rule on Taiwan’s “Savage Border,” 1874–1945 | By Paul D. Barclay | Pacific Affairs

OUTCASTS OF EMPIRE: Japan’s Rule on Taiwan’s “Savage Border,” 1874–1945 | By Paul D. Barclay | Pacific Affairs



OOK REVIEWS, NORTHEAST ASIA


VOLUME 91 – NO. 3




OUTCASTS OF EMPIRE: Japan’s Rule on Taiwan’s “Savage Border,” 1874–1945 | By Paul D. Barclay


Asia Pacific Modern, no. 16. Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2018. xvii, 307 pp. (Tables, maps, B&W photos, coloured photos.) US$34.95, paper. ISBN 978-0-520-29621-3.

The nation-state, imagined as sovereign and in exclusive control of territory, has become the universal norm for governing human lives and managing capitalist accumulation. The historical expansion of this system, although it has benefitted local elites everywhere, has also been resisted by peoples who see it as a threat to their lifeworlds, territories, and sacred entanglements with other living creatures. These indigenous peoples, analyzed by Paul Barclay as “the other side of the coin of the birth of the modern nation-state system” (11), are central actors in the story of state sovereignty in Asia as well as in the Americas. In this innovative book, Barclay presents the perspectives of those indigenous societies who fiercely resisted the expansion of capitalism on the margins of Japanese empire.

Outcasts of Empire is organized around an introduction and two parts, with two chapters each. The introduction, heavily indebted to Foucault, presents the book’s theoretical framework. Whereas the Japanese transformed the Han population of Taiwan into modern subjects through familiar instruments of governmentality, the island’s indigenous peoples remained beyond the pale and were subjected to more violent forms of discipline. The result was that, as Japan and other states took form as independent geobodies in the new world system, indigenous peoples became second-order geobodies encapsulated within larger states (33). The unceded sovereignty of these peoples was initially perceived as an obstacle by Japanese officials. Since the mountain peoples of Taiwan had never submitted to the Qing, they and their territories (over 50 percent of the island) were not effectively covered in the 1895 Treaty of Shimonoseki that transferred Taiwan to Japan (28), and had to be conquered militarily. Japan’s inability to fully incorporate them into regimes of governmentality led to the creation of a bifurcated sovereignty that “is here to stay” (18).

Part 1, “Anatomy of a Rebellion,” explores the situation from Japan’s first forays into Taiwan’s indigenous territories in 1874 to the 1930 Wushe Rebellion. Barclay meticulously examines documentation by Japanese anthropologists, colonial officials, and police officers as well as American diplomat Charles LeGendre, who advised Japan on how to deal with frontier natives. Through a “wet diplomacy” of feasting, drinking, gifting, and intermarriage, the Japanese were able to gain only provisional access to Taiwan’s interior and such valued resources as camphor. The Japanese military under Governor-General Sakuma Samata thus turned to “scorched earth” campaigns that culminated in the subjugation of indigenous peoples after the 1914 Truku War. In subsequent years, Japan administered Taiwan as ethnically separate entities. Whereas the Japanese regime provided the Han with land tenure, formal education, and ultimately citizenship, indigenous people saw their land come under state control and were subjected to corvée labour. The result in the 1920s was nonviolent civil-society activism among the Han, but violent uprisings from the indigenous peoples, especially the Wushe Incident of October 27, 1930 (158).

Part 2, “Indigenous Modernity,” is about how the Japanese administration dispossessed indigenous peoples of their land through trading posts, the promotion of farming, and ethnic tourism. In a “science of race,” newly delineated tribal groupings became imagined and portrayed to the world through postcard photography and ethnic maps. Even as the Japanese integrated indigenous people into the Empire as indigenous police and youth corps members, they also separated them from the Han Taiwanese and encouraged them to embrace Japanese rather than Chinese language. In what amounted to a massive land grab, Japanese administrators zoned most indigenous land as state land while confining indigenous people to small reserves. Even after the Republic of China took Taiwan after 1945, the new rulers maintained nationalized territory as state land and continued a policy of ethnic bifurcation. As Taiwan’s indigenous peoples now lay claim to a return of traditional territory and the creation of self-governing autonomous zones, their imagined spaces are based on none less than the maps created by Japanese ethnologists. As Barclay concludes, the Japanese colonial project set the “terms of engagement” (249) for state-indigenous relations that continue into the twenty-first century.

Outcasts of Empire demonstrates that contemporary Taiwan is at least as much a product of Japanese history as it is of Chinese culture. The Meiji Japan project brought the modern nation-state and modes of capitalist accumulation first to the main islands of Japan, and then spread outwards to Hokkaido and Taiwan, facing resistance both close to home in Satsuma (Kyushu) and in the colonies. Barclay shows that Taiwan’s indigenous peoples are very similar to the peoples of “Zomia” (James Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009). Retreating to shatterzones on the fringes of Indic and Chinese civilizations, indigenous peoples have long resisted incorporation into those states. On Taiwan, the indigenous peoples have likewise struggled to maintain autonomy faced with the encroachment of Manchurian, Japanese, and Chinese states over four centuries.

Barclay makes an important argument in political philosophy. Whereas the Hobbesian imagination portrayed state sovereignty as the solution to savage lives imagined as nasty, brutish, and short; people on the margins of capitalist accumulation continue to nourish memories of life before the imposition of the state. They see the state as a violent imposition that deprives them of freedom, destroys the land, and sacrifices human and non-human lives on the altars of capitalist profit. Based as it is on written sources rather than on oral indigenous traditions, Barclay’s book does not explicitly address the indigenous political philosophy that the Atayal call Gaga and the Seediq call Gaya, but it does resonate with those worldviews. The yearnings of Taiwan’s indigenous peoples echo clearly with those of indigenous people around the world who resist by calling attention to the destructive nature of capitalist accumulation. Barclay does them a great service by clearly analyzing the political structures that encapsulate them in a part of the world where indigenous perspectives are often omitted from history. This book is relevant, not only as a history of Japan and Taiwan, but as a reflection on political philosophy that will interest scholars in many fields.

Scott Simon

National Museum of Ethnology, Suita, Japan and University of Ottawa, Ottawa, Canada

Last Revised: November 29, 2018