Tropics of Savagery (3) by Robert Thomas Tierney

Tropics of Savagery The Culture of Japanese Empire in Comparative Frame

Robert Thomas Tierney

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments ix

Introduction 1

1. From Taming Savages to Going Native: Self and Other on the Taiwan Aboriginal Frontier 38

1. Ethnography and Literature: SatO Haruo's Colonial Journey to Taiwan 78

3. The Adventures of MomotarO in the South Seas: Folklore, Colonial Policy, Parody 110

4. The Colonial Eyeglasses of Nakajima Atsushi 147

Conclusion: Cannibalism in Postwar Literature 182

Notes 199

===

ETHNOGRAPHY AND LITERATURE 79

2

Ethnography and Literature

SatO Haruo's Colonial Journey to Taiwan

Of all learned discourse, the ethnological seems to come closest to fiction.

ROLAND BARTHES

Whether you call us "raw barbarians" or "mountain citizens,"

we have always been pushed to the margins of Taiwan.

Oh the destiny of our people, oh our destiny,

whether we inhabit mountains or plains

we have received sympathy and polite treatment

only in the research reports of anthropologists.

MONANON, "GIVE US BACK OUR NAMES!"

FROM NATIONAL TO COLONIAL ETHNOGRAPHY

Along with steamships and conscript armies, anthropology arrived in Japan dur­ing the late nineteenth century. Western expatriates (oyatoi gaikokujin), an elite, multinational group hired by the Meiji regime to teach in the nation's new educa­tional institutions and to advise the government, first introduced this science of"sav-ages" to the Japanese. Just as Japanese scholars would later study the racial origins of colonized peoples in the Japanese empire, these Western academics initiated re­search into the origins of the Japanese. Applying to the Japanese islands the model of colonial settler societies in North America and Australia, they hypothesized that a proto-Japanese "race" in a prehistoric era had conquered a less "advanced," in­digenous "race," often identified with the contemporary Ainu population, which thereafter rapidly dwindled in the Darwinian struggle for survival. In addition, they often remarked that the Japanese people contained a bewildering variety of physi­cal types, a hybridity they attributed to extensive racial mixing on the Japanese ar­chipelago. Comparing the Japanese with the people of individual European coun­tries, Lev Mechnikov, a Russian anarchist who lived in Japan in the early Meiji period, wrote: "The Japanese type represents much greater variation and fluctua‑

tion than the population of any European country, and this alone is sufficient to suggest that today's Japanese nation originated from multiple tribal elements" In 1875, Wilhelm Doenitz (1838-1912) proposed a theory that the Japanese people were a mixture of two major racial strains: the Mongoloid and the Malaysian. In 1883 Erwin von Baelz (1849-1913) argued that the predominance of one or the other of these two strains throughout the archipelago led to pronounced regional differences in the appearance and color of the inhabitants of Japan. He referred to the Mongoloid as the ChOshU type and to the Malay as the Satsuma type.2

In 1877, Edward Sylvester Morse (1838-1925), professor of zoology and phys­iology at Tokyo Imperial University, noticed shell deposits near Omori station while he was riding the train from the foreign settlement in Yokohama to Tokyo. He sur­mised correctly that they were remnants of an ancient site of habitation and de­cided to excavate them. In 1879, he published an article titled "Traces of an Early Race in Japan," followed by a report called "The Shell Mounds of Omori, Japan." Based on the evidence of bone fragments, iron tools, and shards of pottery, he argued that Japan's prehistoric inhabitants were a savage people who practiced cannibal­ism. In later years, these savages—Morse claimed they were a pre-Ainu people—were conquered by more "advanced" invaders from the Asian continent. In addi­tion, he described the pottery of this prehistoric people as "cord-marked," after its decorative pattern; today the Japanese term jomon, written with the characters rope and writing, refers both to this style of pottery and to the Neolithic period when it was produced (ca. 12,000 B.C.E. to ca. 350 B.C.E.). Morse's pathbreaking excava­tions opened up a new dimension of time to Japanese scholars. Not only did they offer a new vision of Japan's prehistory (that is, a history prior to the one recounted in Japan's oldest written histories, the Nihon shoki and Kojiki), but they offered a privileged form of access to that history in the form of material remnants of the past .3 Stimulated by these bold speculations, a group of intellectuals led by Tsuboi ShOgoro (1868-1913) began to use the methods and conceptual apparatus of West­ern anthropology to explore the racial origins of the Japanese people.

Tsuboi ShogorO was himself from a family of rangakusha (scholars of Dutch learning), and viewed his own activities as renewing a long-standing Japanese in­terest in the collection of ancient stoneware and earthenware objects.4 He mentions Edward Morse's article as the primary impetus for his later inquiries into Japanese racial origins, but he characteristically adds that he found it "mortifying to hear that I am adisciple of Morse and that Morse. is the father of Japanese anthropology."' Indeed, Tsuboi had a rather complicated relationship to this so-called father. He denied that he was influenced by Morse's theories, but he could hardly help but ac­knowledge that Morse was the first to adopt a scientific approach to the question of Japanese racial origins.6 In an article on the history of Japanese anthropology, Toni RyuzO notes that Tsuboi ordered that the collection that Morse had donated of Omori shell mounds be removed from the store boards at Tokyo University and

78

80 ETHNOGRAPHY AND LITERATURE ETHNOGRAPHY AND LITERATURE 81

be replaced by the "far more valuable specimens" that later Japanese investigators had collected.7

After founding the Tokyo Anthropological Society in 1884, Tsuboi was sent by the Ministry of Education to study anthropology in London for three years and was appointed professor at University of Tokyo and chair of its Anthropological Insti­tute upon his return to Japan at the age of twenty-nine. The Tokyo Anthropologi­cal Society began as a small group of scholars who shared interests in the investi­gation of the racial origins of Japanese prehistoric antiquity and folk customs and published their findings in the Tokyo Jinruigaku Zasshi (Journal of the Tokyo An­thropological Society). A cursory glance at the early articles of this publication sug­gests that Japanese anthropology at this stage was a heterogeneous discipline that subsumed the later divergent fields of archaeology, physical anthropology, ethnol­ogy, folklore studies, ethnography, and linguistics.8

If Morse was the "father of Japanese anthropology:' Tsuboi was the first of his "sons" to turn it into a thoroughly Japanese science. In contrast to Western scien­tists who tended to investigate "primitive" others living in colonies, Tsuboi and his associates began to study the origins of the nation to which they belonged. In addi­tion, in the course of searching for the origins of the Japanese, they came to pay close attention to the Ainu people living on the northern frontier of the nation, who were incorporated into the Japanese nation in 1869. These "domestic" foreigners or in­ternal others were thought to hold important clues to a mystery that truly baffled early anthropologists: who were the first inhabitants of Japan? This question gener­ated the first major controversy that divided early Japanese anthropologists. On one side, Koganei Yoshikiyo (1858-1944), the father of physical anthropology in Japan, held that the early Japanese were related to the Ainu; on the other, Tsuboi claimed that the ancestors of the Japanese belonged to a pre-Ainu group called the Koro-pokgru, a term which derived from Ainu folk legends.9 If Western scholars were the first to speculate on the origins of the Japanese, Japanese scholars completely dom­inated this Ainu-Koropokgru debate, which lasted until Tsuboi's death in 1913.10

In the formative years of this new discipline, Japanese anthropologists pursued research topics within the framework of the Japanese nation, a limited geographic focus that reflected the semicolonized position of Japan in the international order. Tsuboi ShogorO identified this domain as lying within the new borders of the na­tion: "Our research materials are placed in our immediate vicinity. On the hills by the sea there are many shell mounds.... If you travel north to Hokkaido, there are the Ainu, famous for their hairy bodies. If you go south to the RyUkyU Islands, there are the Okinawans, who treasure the magatama. We can say that we are living in an anthropological museum:" The science of anthropology enabled researchers to conceive of Japan as a museum that housed a succession of different historical pe­riods. In addition, as Tsuboi indicates, an important object of study for these an­thropologists was the different "races" that clustered near the nation's borders. Even after the domain of Japanese anthropology had expanded to encompass the wider spaces of Japan's colonial empire, the origins of the Japanese people and the iden­tity of the people on the nation's periphery remained central concerns to anthro­pologists. Yanagita Kunio (1875-1962), the founder of Japanese folklore studies, shared with early Meiji anthropologists an interest in the origins of the Japanese, but he tended to look for these origins in Okinawa, which he viewed as a museum of ancient Japanese culture.12

I have already noted that Tsuboi sought above all to create a fully independent Japanese branch of anthropology, even to the point of denying the indisputable con­tributions made by Western scholars. In general, early Japanese anthropologists shared a strongly "nationalist" agenda to liberate anthropology from Western dom­ination and to establish their own autonomy as scientists.13 Just as Meiji statesmen negotiated with Western governments to restore Japanese sovereignty and elimi­nate the "unequal treaties:' these early anthropologists wanted to establish a Japa­nese branch of anthropology that would be free from Western influence. In par­ticular, they sought to reclaim from Westerners the task of searching for the roots of Japan and to establish themselves as modern scientific investigators.

The conceptions about the racial origins of the Japanese that were being devel­oped at this time anticipate later conceptions in Japan's colonial ethnography. Just as Morse had described. Japan's earliest inhabitants as "cannibals" conquered by a more advanced people from the Asian continent, these early scientists believed that Japan's autochthons formed a primitive society that the more virile Japanese com­ing from the continent eventually conquered. 14 From this time, the Ainu, as the orig­inal population of Japan, came to embody a racial "otherness" in relation to which the Japanese defined their racial and national identity. A "dying" race that would be superseded by the Japanese, the Ainu were also seen as throwbacks to an earlier stage of evolution: as atavisms that had been preserved for eons, the contemporary Ainu promised to open a window onto the prehistory of the Japanese race. 15

After defeating the Qing empire in the Sino-Japanese War (1894-95), Japan emerged as an imperialist power in East Asia and acquired the island of Taiwan as a colony. While Japanese anthropologists had not previously ventured overseas to conduct fieldwork, they now turned to Taiwan to study their primitive others. These scholars did not necessarily give up their search for the racial origins of the Japa­nese: in some cases, they merely displaced this quest onto the colonies. The ances­tors of the Japanese race, they argued, were a seafaring people who had migrated to Japan from the South Seas and had conquered an indigenous people.. Proponents of such theories would later deploy them in support of Japanese expansionist claims to territories from which these adventurers had purportedly come. Similarly,, if Japanese scholars had written of hypothetical, prehistorical racial conquests on the Japanese archipelago, they were now witnessing the very much present conquest of Taiwanese savages.

82 ETHNOGRAPHY AND LITERATURE ETHNOGRAPHY AND LITERATURE 83

Aboriginal Taiwan and its population, which made up a mere 2 percent of the island's total population, became the first overseas "field" in which Japan's anthro­pologists could exercise their intellectual virtuosity. By contrast with the anthro­pologists, officials in the colonial government were primarily concerned with the majority Chinese population that resided mainly in the western plains of Taiwan. Under Civil Administrator GotO Shinpei, the. Government-General of Taiwan in 1900 launched a major research project to study the "old customs" of the Chinese, whereas it did not establish a similar research bureau to study aboriginal societies until 1909.16 Nevertheless, within one year of the incorporation of Taiwan into the Japanese empire, three ethnographer-pioneers traveled to Taiwan to inform their countrymen about the exotic aborigines newly placed under the authority of the emperor: Toni RyUzO (1870-1953), a student of Tsuboi Sh6gor6;17 mO Kanori (1867-1925), a Taiwan Government-General official during the first ten years, of Japanese rule; and Mori Ushinosuke (1877-1926), an interpreter who assisted Toni in his early surveys and lived in Taiwan for most of the next three decades.

The colonization of Taiwan not only provided ethnographic pioneers with a new field in which to work, but it also gave them a new object of study: the Taiwan abo­rigines became Japan's very own "savages." Toni RyuzO, who conducted four re­search trips to Taiwan from 1896 to 1899 under the auspices of Tokyo University, speaks of this new object of ethnographic science with the excitement of a latter-day Columbus who has stumbled, as if by accident, onto a new and hitherto un­known continent.

In the rich, beautiful Japanese colony of Taiwan. . . several savage tribes can be found who have completely turned their backs on civilization. They adhere to their ances­tors' primitive customs and are cut off from all external contact. They are a matter of astonishment to all voyagers. From the point of view of civilization and human soli­darity, they are in an unhappy state that merits our pity; but for the anthropologist they constitute a marvelous field of studies. To what race of the human species do these populations belong? What are their customs, their diet, their way of life, their social institutions, and so on? For science, all these matters are of the highest interest. It is for this reason that after the Japanese troops occupied Taiwan, the Tokyo Imperial University sent the author of these lines on a survey mission to learn more about these inhabitants. 18

Like Western anthropologists, Toni believed that the primitives he studied were not only, exotic populations geographically distant from his home country. They also lived at a vast temporal remove, in close proximity to 'the primitive origins of man, from the modern era of the researcher who visited their society. Toni viewed his task as that of defining the distinctive traits of these self-enclosed and primitive societies and cataloging the physical and cultural attributes of their inhabitants. In his view, the value of an anthropological investigation varied in inverse proportion with the level of civilization of those who were its object. Toni held that the Yami of Botel-Tobago were likely to yield "the most precious" truths to the assiduous scholar precisely because they were "the most barbarous and savage of all the tribes of Formosa."19

Besides gaining an object of study 'of the highest interest: Toni also staked out a privileged epistemological position for himself within this new field. As a scien­tific observer, the ethnographer was separated from his object of study by a sharp epistemological boundary that overlapped with other boundaries: the one divid­ing the civilized and savage, the colonizer and colonized. At the same time, how­ever, the ethnographer distinguished himself from his civilized countrymen by his intellectual detachment and his freedom from "prejudices." While the colonial ethnographer was beholden to the Japanese empire for his very existence, he also retained a margin of independence from the colonial state and enjoyed a degree of autonomy due to his position as scientific investigator. Indeed, he exercised a specific, scientific power from his vantage point of objectivity toward the people he studied. In principle, he left behind the value-laden preconceptions of his own cul­ture when he stepped into the society of the aborigines. For him, aboriginal soci­ety could be objectified and rendered intelligible: his job was to decipher this "text" and to translate it into terms comprehensible to the layman.

Ethnographers had two major objectives in deciphering the aboriginal societies delivered to them by Japan's conquest of Taiwan. On the one hand, they attempted to offer cultural or religious explanations for customs and practices of the aborig­ines that had previously indicated aboriginal irrationality. On the other hand, they sought to provide a definitive taxonomy of the aborigines and to make clear dis­tinctions between the different groups.

We have seen that the violent, irrational "headhunter" was the dominant Japa­nese stereotype for the Taiwan aborigines. Ethnographers contested this stereotype by claiming that the aborigines were neither "irrational" nor especiallyviolent.2° Like any other cultural practice, headhunting was a meaningful custom susceptible to analysis and classification. In Taiwan banzokushi (An Ethnography of the Taiwan Aborigines), Mori Ushinosuke classified six different cultural meanings that the Ataiyal group attributed to the practice. According to his analysis, the taking of heads in Ataiyal society served (1) to signify a young man's coming-of-age, (2) to settle disputes or resolve conflicts, () to avenge the deaths of relatives or respond to at­tacks of enemies of the tribal chief, () to demonstrate that a young man was ready to get married, () to exorcise epidemics and threats to the tribe, and (6) to demon­strate a warrior's bravery and win him fame.2' In his analysis of the custom, Mon abstracted the practice of headhunting from the context of Japan's colonization and analyzed it solely as a cultural phenomenon. Indeed, he made it an object of scien­tific observation precisely by abstracting it from the messy context of imperial con­quest and from the institutions of colonial rule.22 To be sure, Mori was not unaware that Japan's conquest had deeply affected all aboriginal customs, including head‑

84 ETHNOGRAPHY AND LITERATURE ETHNOGRAPHY AND LITERATURE 85

hunting. However, this context itself did not fall within the frame of his analysis. As previously noted, Takekoshi YosaburO, a nonspecialist on the tribes, viewed head­hunting as a response on the part of the aborigines to foreign intrusion and as a means of self defense; that is, he attempted to understand this practice within a po­litical context of ongoing conflict. By contrast, Mon's ethnographic analysis substi­tuted a cultural explanation for a political one. The clepoliticization of headhunting concealed the power relations in the colonial order from the investigator, but it also enabled him to discover the "objective" cultural laws that ruled aboriginal society But Mori not only bracketed out the power relations of "colonization" when he iso­lated a cultural practice for ethnographic analysis; he also bracketed his own status as an observer located within the society he studied. Both maneuvers were facili­tated by the authoritative epistemological form of ethnography and its writing.

If Mori established a system of classification for the different types of headhunt­ing, early ethnographers all believed their initial task was to classify the race to which the aborigines belonged. First, ethnographers defined the entire collectivity of abo­rigines as members of the Malay race, that is, one of the world's five major races ac­cording to the science of that time, thereby distinguishing them from the majority Chinese population. 21 Second, they sought to reduce the messy and confusing plu­rality of the aboriginal groups to a neat and rational system of classification. In this endeavor, they proposed new taxonomic systems based on empirical surveys to re­place previous Sino-centric categories. From the late seventeenth century, Chinese writers had divided all the aborigines between raw (shengfan or seiban) and cooked barbarians (shufan or jukuban), according to their proximity to Chinese cultural norms and their submission to government control.24 To Japanese anthropologists, this nomenclature was "nothing more than the ancient Chinese tradition.. . com­pletely lacking in any scholarly value. In line with global scientific norms, they devised systems of classification that grouped aborigines into several distinct cate­gories according to physical or cultural markers of differences. The tribes in these classifications were constructed as internally homogeneous entities that occupied externally distinct and bounded territories. Based on the evidence from the British empire, Norman Thomas calls this type of enterprise "anthropological typification" and views it as emblematic of modernity itself.26 Conceiving of these aboriginal sub­groups as static, coherent entities, they developed "colorful images of the interior of Taiwan that aggregated the myriad villages into geographically contiguous but dis­tinct "culture areas" or "tribes" according to perceived similarities in village social organization, architectural styles, religion, forms of personal adornment, language, physique and economic life. '27

While the Japanese colonial state did not recognize the aborigines as nations with bounded territories in a juridical sense, ethnographers treated them as miniature nations and worked to draw clear borders among the different tribes. 21 In this en­deavor, they offered a model to the officials of the colonial state, whom they pre­ ceded into the savage frontier. Prior to Sakuma's campaign, Taiwan's aboriginal lands were terra incognita for the colonial government. After it militarily subjugated the aborigines, the government dispatched surveyors to make accurate maps of the abo­riginal territories, the sine qua non to unlocking their riches. At the same time, p0-lice assigned to keep order in these territories compiled household registers in the villages and conducted annual population censuses. Years before the surveyors and the police charted the aboriginal lands and counted their inhabitants, ethnographers had already established sharply demarcated borders among the different groups.29 Much as physical maps made the countryside intelligible to the colonial adminis­tration, ethnographic mappings provided the ethnographer with a schema that made these societies legible and clear. Geographies of the mind rather than of space, these maps also manifested the subordination of the tribes to Japanese intellectual power, a colonization through anthropological knowledge.3° Indeed, the mapping of the aboriginal lands and tribes did not reproduce a preexisting reality but rather pro­jected onto a land that was still unknown a figment of the ethnographer's imagi­nation. To start with, bounded territories and ethnic borders existed in the mind of the ethnographer alone. Just as new states in the postcolonial period came to rule over the same lands that imperial powers had previously carved out as colonial pos­sessions, the categories invented by colonial ethnographers later provided the ba­sis upon which aboriginal groups identified themselves as members of larger com­munities. In the future, the ethnic categories elaborated by Japanese ethnographers, slightly modified, would continue to shape both ethnographic surveys of the Tai­wan aborigines and the process of aboriginal self-identification.

A MEETING OF ETHNOGRAPHER

AND WRITER IN COLONIAL TAIWAN

One of the most fascinating early anthropologists in Taiwan is Mori Ushinosuke (1877-1926). Unlike Toni and mo, Mori is a neglected figure in studies by Japa­nese scholars, perhaps because he spent most of his career in the relative backwa­ter of Taiwan and because he lacked the academic credentials that matter so much in education-minded Japan. While he remains largely unknown in Japan, Taiwanese scholars have recently devoted considerable research to his contributions in the nat­ural sciences, especially botany, and to his ethnographic studies. Yang Nanjun, who recently published a biography of Mori and a selection of his writings in Chinese translation, notes, for example, that Mori gave his name to several plants indige­nous to Taiwan.3'

Mori first came to Taiwan in 1.895 during the Sino-Japanese War as a Chinese language interpreter attached to the Japanese army. In his later memoirs, he recalls that he had been motivated to travel to Taiwan by his long-standing fascination with the savages of the South Seas: "As a child I remembered having heard tales of trop‑

86 ETHNOGRAPHY AND LITERATURE ETHNOGRAPHY AND LITERATURE 87

ical islands and of ogrelike savages living in Taiwan. Now that Taiwan had become part of our territory and we Japanese could travel there, I suddenly felt a strong urge to go there and see it for myself:'32 Trained by Toni RyUzO in ethnographic research, he participated in Toni's 1.899 expedition and joined the Tokyo Anthropological Society. Like other early anthropologists, Mori notes that he desired to contribute to the development of Japanese science and to uphold the "honor of Japanese schol­arship.... If we Japanese, as usual, did not involve ourselves in the research of the Taiwanese savages, smart foreign researchers would arrive, study them, and pub­lish their findings. I hoped that the Japanese would maintain the honor of Japanese scholarship by conducting research of the Taiwanese savages. This may sound a bit presumptuous on my part, but it was my honest feeling when I heard that Taiwan had been ceded to Japan during the Sino-Japanese War and that primitive savages lived there:333

A self-described adventurer who studied the aborigines primarily "for his own amusement and pleasure," Mori soon began to compile handbooks of their languages and acquired a reputation as an expert on aboriginal societies. During the first two decades of the twentieth century, he conducted fieldwork throughout Taiwan, pub­lished over a hundred articles on the aborigines in the aforementioned Journal of the Tokyo Anthropological Society and the Taiwan Jiho, and he proposed his own taxonomy of the tribes, later adopted by the colonial state in 1913.34

Significantly, Mori was the only ethnographer of note to remain active on the "savage frontier" during the Sakuma period as the Japanese colonial regime em­ployed military force to take control of all aboriginal lands and to crush any resist­ance to Japanese rule. To continue with his research, in 1909 he reluctantly joined the paramilitary BanmuhonchO chOsaka (Survey Section of the Bureau for the Con­trol of Aborigines) and remained until the bureau was disbanded in 1913. In a speech given at the Taiwan Museum on the eve of his departure from Taiwan in 1913, he argued that the ethnographer could serve the colonial state by increasing under­standing of the ethnic nature of the tribes. "I was confident that by promoting mu­tual understanding and smooth communication between us and them, I would be able to reduce (even slightly) the sacrifices needed to reach the goals of extending the guard-line, building roads, using the aboriginal lands, and confiscating weapons. The way to do this was to survey and thoroughly research their customs and their ethnic mentality, their feelings and thoughts."35Mori believed that the ethnogra­pher could help the government to develop "scientific" policies toward the aborig­ines based on a proper understanding of their society. 36 However, he frankly ac­knowledged that this was knowledge of the enemy, a necessity in any war: "If we are to subjugate the aborigines, we must of course first understand them:' Mon hoped to use his knowledge to promote cultural understanding, but he faced a prob­lem encountered by any anthropologist who puts his cultural expertise at the dis­posal of one of the parties to a war: that is, he risks becoming a mere accomplice to the military strategist, his knowledge simply another weapon with which to de­stroy the enemy. Indeed, Mori harbored serious misgivings about the governments policies and in the same speech he strongly criticized Sakuma and the subjugation policies of the Government-General of Taiwan.37

In Mon's view, the ethnographer needed to be an intermediary who would pro­mote "mutual understanding and smooth communication" between indigenous societies and the Japanese state. As an ethnographer, he believed that his role tran­scended his actual position as a salaried employee of the Survey Section of the Bu­reau for the Control of Aborigines. Relying on his ethnographic expertise, he tried to speak for the aborigines at a time when, for obvious reasons, they could not speak for themselves .31 However, Mori attempted to mediate when the space for medi­ation had been virtually eliminated by the government's policies of military con­quest. Indeed, his statement betrays regret that officials neither took him up on his offer to put his knowledge at the disposal of the state nor accepted his good offices as go-between. Indeed, Japanese officials made little use of the expertise of the ethno­graphers when they crafted policies toward the aborigines, relying instead on the time-tested policies of "savage control" implemented by the police, who continued to rule the savage lands as "special administrative zones" during most of the colo­nial period.

In his later years, Mori excoriated the colonial policies of the Japanese state. The colonization of Taiwan may have provided Japanese ethnographers with a rich field Of research, but at the same time it was eliminating the very object the ethnogra­pher wished to study.

[Opening up the savage territory] entails very rapid and severe changes in the abo­rigines' particular cultures, if not their outright destruction. Furthermore, their oral traditions are being forgotten, while their precious heirlooms and material artifacts are destroyed in fires. Hit by the waves of civilization, the aborigines may become mere shells of their former selves and lose the lofty and noble qualities that arise from their ethnic character. If present trends continue, they will experience such changes in their customs, social structures, and lifestyle that their cultural distinctiveness will be com­pletely destroyed. When people start to notice these changes and raise calls to protect and preserve [indigenous cultures], it will be already too late. It will be like the prover­bial child wanting to show filial piety to his parents after they have passed away. How many times has one heard of material remains disappearing before the investigators arrived in time to conduct their surveys ?39

As "waves of civilization" rolled over them, the savages risked becoming "mere shells of their former selves:' Mori valorized these "former" selves as noble and lofty, comparing the "civilized" Japanese unfavorably with them:

If we really understood the reasoning of the aborigines and the meaning of what they said, we would already he rid of the term "savage:' 'lhey are not savages, but rather

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people whom we have not put enough effort into understanding. . . . Like any other human being, they are creatures of feeling. In truth, savages and civilized have much in common. The amount of hypocrisy, adultery, and vanity in their society is much less than in our complicated civilized societies. These so called savages have a nobil­ity of character which puts to shame those who pride themselves on their civilization.40

Mon's attitude toward the aborigines resembles the "imperial nostalgia" that Re­nato Rosaldo has found in the discourses of Western colonial administrators. "Cu­riously enough, agents of colonialism often display nostalgia for the colonized cul­ture as it was 'traditionally' (that is, when they first encountered it). The peculiarity of their longing, of course, is that agents of colonialism long for the very forms of life they intentionally altered and destroyed. Nostalgia is a particularly appropriate emotion to invoke in attempting to establish one's innocence and at the same time talk about what one has destroyed:' Imperial nostalgia helps these agents to estab­lish their innocence and to deny their complicity in the destruction of the lost cul­tures whose passing they mourn.4' In Mon's case, one can hardly overlook the fact that his appearance among the aborigines was made possible by the colonial con­quest and that he served the very state that intentionally "altered" the culture for which he nostalgically yearned. Indeed, conquest was the condition for the dis­coveries of aboriginal cultures and the classification of aboriginal societies pioneered by Japanese anthropologists. At the same time, these ethnographers did not inter­vene on behalf of the threatened aborigines to prevent their cultural extinction, but rather sought to record their cultures in the short period remaining before they dis­appeared for good.

Whereas Toni RyUzO saw the aborigines as living creatures who were distanced from the Japanese in time, Mori viewed them as the bearers of a dying culture. Since the objects of his study were vanishing before his very eyes, he not surprisingly saw his role as that of a "salvage" ethnographer. Mori could not actually "save" the abo­riginal groups as such, but he could at least salvage the things which they left behind that were destined to outlive the people who made them. As an ethnographer, his principal mission was to gather vestiges of this past, inventory and classify them, record them and hand them down to posterity. In the preface to Taiwan banzokushi, he writes: "We must investigate and record their social customs and traditions to­day, since in the future there will be no way to study their history:'42 The things that survived from aboriginal culture no longer belonged to the men or women who cre­ated them but became the inheritance of those who knew how to conserve them. In a sense, Mori merely extended to the cultural realm the expropriation that the Japa­nese had initially carried out toward the aboriginal lands, but he did so in the name of knowledge and in his capacity as a scientist. To the end of his life, Mori perse­vered in this salvage mission both through his writings and through his collections of aboriginal artifacts. He donated most of the latter to the Taiwan Museum, laying the foundations for that museum's aboriginal collection.43 By organizing the frag­ments of a vanishing culture, the ethnographer-curator could call this past back to life and offer it to spectators as an object of mourning and commemoration.

SatO Haruo (1892-1964), a respected figure in the Japanese literary establish­ment, traveled throughout Taiwan during the summer of 1920. In Taipei he met Mori, then deputy director of the Taipei Museum and curator of the institution's collection of aboriginal artifacts. Mori drew up a travel plan for him and introduced him to Taiwan colonial officials, including Shimomura Hiroshi, the chief of the Civil Administration of Taiwan. Shimomura, a liberal bureaucrat and amateur of litera­ture, made arrangements for the writer to obtain the necessary permits to venture into aboriginal lands .44 Since the aboriginal lands were ruled as special adminis­trative zones, a traveler wishing to enter them needed to obtain a special permit from the police administration, and this permit was often revoked at the discretion of the authorities. "If not for the directive of this high official, I would not have ob­tained permission to travel to the aboriginal lands so quickly, and even if it had been granted, it may have been canceled from one minute to the next"45 His trip was widely reported in the both Japanese and local Taiwan newspapers, 46 and he was treated as a VIP by the colonial government throughout his stay. Traveling under police escort, he set out for the aboriginal areas shortly after an aboriginal rebel­lion broke out in the village of Slamao; he reached Musha, the principal adminis­trative town in the highlands, just as the colonial authorities were organizing a puni­tive expedition to put down the uprising. After visiting Musha, he returned to Taipei, where he was a guest at Mon's house for two weeks. He consulted with Mori about aboriginal societies and about government policies of military suppression. Indeed, SatO remained in contact with Mori long after he returned to Japan, frequently re­ferred to him in his memoirs and correspondence, and hosted him in Tokyo in 1926, shortly before Mon's death.

SatO cites Mon's views at length (Mori is referred to as M) in the final chapter of his travel memoir Musha, a detailed account of his travel to the aboriginal lands that is profoundly informed by Mon's work. He describes him as a scholar who has "a deep knowledge of aboriginal societies" and as an adventurous fieldworker who never "carried a sidearm to defend himself during his fieldwOrk." In a passage on government policies toward the aborigines, M interprets the Slamao uprising as a desperate form of resistance to Japan's colonial intrusions: "The banjin have been provoked to anger by the fact that Japanese authorities have completely disregarded the customs of their society:' He also laments the destruction that the Japanese have inflicted on the aborigines' culture: "Handicrafts are in danger of disappearing be­fore long because their traditional methods are completely disregarded by the au­thorities and receive no official encouragement ."47 These citations of M are broadly congruent with the opinions that the ethnographer expressed in his publications and public lectures.

90 ETHNOGRAPHY AND LITERATURE

Indeed, SatO Haruo clearly identifies with the primitivist ethos informing Mon's ethnography when he argues that the Japanese are infecting the Taiwan aborigines with their civilized diseases (or rather, to be precise, the "disease of civilization"), leaving behind nothing but ruins. Encountering a group of aboriginal porters on the road to Musha, he describes an aboriginal man suffering from venereal disease: "All were dressed in aboriginal clothes and had long hair except for one who wore a cap on his head. It was a military cap that resembled the kind porters wear in Japan. He had his hair cut short. But it was not just in his taste in appearance and costume that he seemed to have caught the disease of civilization. The bridge Of his nose had fallen and his ugly nostrils sprawled in the center of his face. In this savage land, and among these savage people, I was shocked to find a man ravaged by shilis'48 Promoted by the Japanese state as the cure for backwardness of the savages, civi­lization is here depicted as "syphilization" Indeed in his travelogue, it is not only the aboriginal man's face that has been corroded by the disease of civilization; abo­riginal society as a whole has been infected by the same illness. SatO finds the symp­toms of the disease wherever he looks: in the trading posts the Japanese set up in the villages, "where there was almost nothing for sale except the most inferior goods from Japan"; in the spread of prostitution and the abandonment of aboriginal women by the Japanese who marry them; and in the schools that teach students "concepts they can scarcely imagine in their own world :'49 In general, for the nar­rator, the Japanese are the carriers of the "disease of civilization" in aboriginal Tai­wan and the aborigines are their passive victims.

SatO's 1920 voyage to Taiwan and China proved extremely fruitful in terms of his later literary production. Based on his experiences there, he went on to write a series of short stories, children's tales, and travel memoirs over the next decade, in­cluding "Mach OF (Demon Bird), a short story based on an aboriginallegend which first appeared in the October 1923 issue of the journal ChflO K6ran.50

DECONSTRUCTING THE TEXT

OF COLONIAL ETHNOGRAPHY

Editors of SatO Haruo's complete works point out that the author referred to Mon's ethnography of the Ataiyal aborigines (Taiwan banzokushi) when he wrote "De­mon Bird" Of particular importance is the following passage that appears in Mon's ethnography, in a chapter titled "ShinkO oyobi seishinteki jOtai" (Beliefs and Spir­itual States).

According to aboriginal legend, there is a magical bird called the hafune. It looks like a dove, with white feathers and red feet. The savages believe the bird has magical pow­ers and that anyone who sees it is certain to die. Certain savages called the mahafune have the ability to manipulate this bird. If a man is suspected of being a mahafune, he

ETHNOGRAPHY AND LITERATURE 91

and all the members of his family will be massacred. In addition, if a village is ru­mored to harbor a man who is a mahafune, other villages will be terrified and avoid all contact with it. 51

The narrator of "Demon Bird" does more than simply refer to this passage of Mon's ethnography. This aboriginal "legend" provides the kernel for the entire plot of "Demon Bird" and inspires the narrator to propose his own ethnographic theo­ries about aboriginal culture. Along the way, he fleshes out his narrative by para­phrasing Mon's interpretations of aboriginal beliefs and by invoking his commen­tary on aboriginal customs. 51 Indeed, Mon's study informs Sato-'s descriptions of the fine points of aboriginal culture and the entire narrative frame of "Demon Bird:'

More important, the narrator appropriates the standpoint of an ethnographer toward the society he describes. He begins: "The story I am about to tell you is about

⦁ a superstition of a certain savage society:' The narrator first draws a boundary be­tween the civilized (which includes his audience) and the savages whose supersti­tions are the ostensible object of his report. Then he establishes his own authority as an ethnographer by creating a distance between him and his "civilized" audience. The narrator demonstrates his freedom from prejudice by observing that the civi­lized are really no different from the savages: "Just as civilized people tend to think that there are many superstitions in the manners and customs of savages, savages would discover many superstitions in the constraints of social existence among the civilized. Indeed for the savages it is possible that what we take to be justice and morality is nothing but superstition. "I' The narrator not only simulates the ethno-grapher's detachment from his own culture and his cool objectivity, he also imi­tates his position as a fieldworker interrogating his "native informants" on their in­terpretations of their own practices: "When I was traveling throughout the land of the savages, I often asked the natives the question why someone would choose to become a mahafune."'

Even though the narrator of "Demon Bird" impersonates an ethnographer, he is, of course, not literally an ethnographer but rather a pseudo-ethnographer. I use this latter term advisedly because the narrator occasionally undercuts his own po­sition, denies his expertise, and drops his mask: for example, "In reality, I am far from being an expert on the meaning of this word and since it has no bearing on

the tale. . . In effect, the narrator both imitates and distances himself from the

ethnographer. From this ambiguous position, he is able to create a pastiche of colo­nial ethnographic discourse and to deconstruct it at the same time. SatO has an enor­mous regard for Mori, but in "Demon Bird" he treats the language and the praxis of colonial ethnography in a highly critical manner.56

Besides simulating the ethnographer's attitude of cool detachment, the narrator also reproduces the hybrid form of the modern ethnographic text. Just like an ethno­grapher making a report, he mixes speculation about another culture with tran‑

92 ETHNOGRAPHY AND LITERATURE ETHNOGRAPHY AND LITERATURE 93

scriptions of indigenous oral legend, and blends the voiceover of the ethnographer with the recorded voice of the "other" culture. In the first half of the story, the nar­rator is conspicuously present when he advances his theories about "savage soci­eties." Besides being intrusive, he adopts a playful tone toward his subject matter and his audience, mingling sarcasm with self-deprecation. By contrast, he effaces himself in the second half and restricts himself to setting down 1 the legend that he heard during his travels. The light, playful tone of the first part gives way to a somber account of aboriginal society at the time of the Japanese conquest.

In the first part of "Demon Bird." the narrator sets forth a theory about a savage custom and in the second he transcribes a legend as if to illustrate his theory. Speak­ing to an imaginary civilized audience, the narrator in the first part proceeds by isolating a single custom—defined as traditional and timeless—from its social and historical context and then interprets this custom to illuminate the construction of social borders by members of a primitive community. A part is used to represent the whole (metonymy). Like the ethnographers who defined the borders between aboriginal groups, the narrator of "Demon Bird" is concerned with boundaries. In particular, he wants to determine how primitive communities define their bound­aries and establish their group identity. The savages, we learn, believe that certain individuals in the community—those called the mahafune—possess supernatural powers to manipulate an imaginary bird, a harbinger of death. When the commu­nity is struck by an epidemic, famine, or natural catastrophe, members of the group blame their misfortunes on this individual and put him (or her) and indeed his (or her) entire family to death. After asking the savages how they are able to identify the nefarious mahafune, the narrator notes that they invariably "destroy a person who has a different facial expression from the majority of the group." That is to say, the members of the group "fabricate" the mahafune or, from their point of view, they "recognize" this individual by certain telltale signs: The mahafune "inspires anx­iety in others and acts abnormally. Neighbors begin to pay attention to him. Even­tually people start to make comments such as 'This guy has an evil eye' 57 Although villagers and mahafune occupy the same space, they are divided by an impalpable and invisible boundary. The villagers invest the liminal mahafune with terrifying powers: an ability to look at the demon bird without suffering harm and a capac­ity to wreak catastrophe on his or her fellows. By recognizing the mahafune, his or her fellow villagers exercise a social power to police community borders and de­termine group membership. The narrator suggests that communities constitute themselves as such not by what they share in common but by what they exclude. The narrator concludes that primitives need scapegoats in order to establish and guard their own tenuous borders.58

If the narrator first explains the scapegoat mechanism, he next tells a legend which gives a concrete example of this mechanism in action. While he had hith­erto addressed the reader from an undisclosed location, he now situates himself in a specific place, namely aboriginal Taiwan. In chapter 7, the narrator writes: "The greater part of this big island was referred to as banchi."59 Whereas he has hitherto employed a general graph for savage (ban), here he uses a graph that refers specifi­cally to aboriginal Taiwan. In addition to being set in Taiwan's aboriginal interior, the legend contains other new elements that, paradoxically, complicate rather than confirm the narrator's speculations about the mahafune in the first part of the story. Unlike the expert on "savage superstitions" who addresses us authoritatively in the first part, the narrator here undermines his own theory by his insinuations and rev­elations. First, he puts colonial violence, which the ethnographer eliminates from his speculations by positing a traditional and pure aboriginal culture, at the very center of the legend. Second, he places his ethnographer right in the middle of a colonial apparatus when he tells how he happened to hear the legend. The legend thus forces the reader to rethink his theory of the mahafune and to reconsider the position of the ethnographer toward the object of his knowledge.

The legend recounts the destruction of the family of a young woman called Pira. Villagers mistake the members of Pira's family for bird manipulators because Pira refuses to tattoo herself and because her father averts the gaze of others when he walks about the village. Rumors about the family start to fly when villagers witness the young Pira wandering around after the soldiers of a "civilized country" who have recently invaded their village. However; villagers do not act on these rumors until a "great misfortune befalls the people of the village'60

A large detachment of soldiers from a civilized country suddenly invaded their lands. .. and ordered them to surrender unconditionally. As a sign of their surren­der, the village men were told to assemble inside a building and were promised gifts.

The men were confused how to respond to this incomprehensible order, but in the end they realized they had no choice but to comply. 'Ihey gathered in the designated building, about eighty men in all. The doors were securely shut and then flames shot up from outside the building. All eighty men were burned to death. The army later spread the word that 'the savages in this village were violent and evil creatures.'... The savages believed that the disaster that had befallen their village must have been caused by the mahafune. 61

If the narrator of the first part interprets the custom of the mahafune in isolation from any external factor and describes it as a tradition internal to the aboriginal com­munity, the story of Pira shows that external factors—namely, foreign invasion and colonial violence—play a key role in triggering the hunt for a scapegoat. Indeed, as we learn later, Pira "is said to have been the start of the trouble" because she refuses to tattoo herself even though she had reached the age of eighteen. Pira's refusal to be tattooed attracts the suspicion of the other villagers. The reason for Pira's refusal, we later learn, is that a soldier from the "civilized" army has raped her. By raping Pira, the soldiers of a "civilized army" plant the seeds of suspicion and terror, which

94 ETHNOGRAPHY AND LITERATURE ETHNOGRAPHY AND LITERATURE 95

will eventually destroy Pira and her family, since rape already violated the distinc­tion between self and other in the community. The rape of Pira also foreshadows the violence of the colonial army and prefigures in graphic form the violation of the boundaries of the aboriginal community by Japanese invasion.

Not only do Pira and her family come to be seen as mahafune after the colonial army invades their lands, but crucially their persecution is depicted as a response to this invasion, and specifically, as an effort to reconstitute the borders of their own community violated by the colonial army. Unable to strike back against the invad­ing army, the villagers target Pita and her family by a process of displacement and substitution. The villagers vent their frustrations onto a vulnerable and proximate member of their own community rather than confront a powerful military foe. Pira and her family thus become scapegoats for a colonial military beyond reach of reprisal.

This cycle of displacement and substitution of violence does not end with the persecution of Pira's family as mahafune, but is significantly reenacted by the very victims of the villagers' persecution in a later episode of the legend. Pita and her brother manage to escape from the burning hut and return to the village a few days later. When Pita confesses to having been raped by a Japanese soldier, she is ban­ished from the village for the crime of concealing her "impurity" for such a long time and for having caused "a disturbance" in the community.62 Banished and stripped of their membership in the village community Pira and her brother build a hut in the forest and spend their lives in exile. One day Pita tells her brother: "A great misfortune has befallen us and I do not know who brought this misfortune upon us. Yet we must avenge ourselves. KOre, when the new moon rises in the west, you must fire an arrow at it. 1163 Unable to strike back at the villagers who massacred their family or the soldiers who invaded their village, Pira has her brother shoot an arrow at the moon. This ritual reenactment resembles in structure the displacement-substitution mechanism described above, but it is also an. act of play and an inno­cent gesture that does not produce any fresh victims. Furthermore, firing an arrow at the moon can be thought of as an exorcism that effectively closes the cycle of vi­olence opened by colonial conquest.64

Moreover, the persecution of the mahafune is. not only a response to colonial vi­olence; it is also an imitation of colonial violence. When the villagers massacre mem­bers of Pira's family, they employ the same tactics the colonial army used against the male villagers: like the colonial army, the villagers round up all members of Pira's family, lock them in a hut, and set it on fire. The custom of the mahafune may pre­date the Japanese intrusion into aboriginal society, but in this scene it is funda­mentally inflected by and repeats the colonial conquest.

Curiously, in a passage of Musha, SatO cites the ethnographer M's explanation of new aboriginal customs that originated with imitations of "foreign invaders"

One day it was reported in the newspaper that the corpse of a pilot (whose plane crashed in the aboriginal mountains) was recovered but the man's head and penis had been cut off. That time, M's gentle face clouded over. He said: "Generally when abo­rigines kill a man, they do not kill simply for killing's sake. They only do so to take the person's head in accordance with a type of religious superstition. If it were possi­ble to take a person's head without killing him, they would doubtless spare his life. 'Ihe fact of the matter is that one can find no trace in their traditional customs of re­ligiously meaningless and sadistic actions, such as cutting open the womb of a preg­nant woman or cutting off a man's penis. Probably these actions are not traditions passed on by their ancestors but new barbaric customs that they learned from foreign invaders "65

While M explains the taking of heads as a "traditional" practice that can be ra­tionally interpreted within the basic framework of aboriginal religious beliefs, he treats the emasculation of the Japanese pilot as a new custom that departs from abo­riginal tradition. In an ironic displacement of colonial narratives of civilization, he suggests that aborigines develop new and hybrid "savage" customs by imitating not the civilization but rather the savagery of their foreign invaders. Similarly, in the legend of Pira, the custom of the mahafune is not merely a traditional custom handed down by the village ancestors. Transformed by the influence of "foreign invaders," it takes on a new shape as the aborigines reconstruct the borders of their commu­nity after foreign troops invade their lands. The legend of Pira thus complicates the ethnographic explanation of the mahafune by treating it as a reenactment of colo­nial violence.

Besides complicating the theory of the scapegoat, the narrator also discloses the colonial conditions under which the ethnographer comes into contact with the story of Pira.

Two armed police officers protected me on my right and left. . . . Two completely as­similated savages served as our guides and porters.. . . The tale I am going to tell was told in turns by these two porters as they were walking and then translated for me by one of the policemen in our party. I believe it is the most recent case of the destruc­tion of an entire family of demon-bird manipulators. However, there is a touch of the legendary about this tale that passed through so many different lips before it reached my ear. The narrative style is crude and unpolished but the story holds together. In­deed this tale recounts an event that I can scarcely conceive of and am not in a posi­tion to verify. These barbarians have a real talent for tying up a story's loose ends in a suggestive way and may have invented the entire tale. 66

If the narrator in part i addresses his readers from the privacy of his study, he is in this scene located squarely in a very charged contact zone: "social spaces where different cultures meet, clash and grapple with each other often in highly asym­metrical relations of domination and subordination.1367 Peopled by a variety of colo­nial actors—guards, porters, police escorts, and a translator—occupying clearly

96 ETHNOGRAPHY AND LITERATURE ETHNOGRAPHY AND LITERATURE 97

asymmetrical positions, the contact zone mediates the encounter between ethno­grapher and indigenous legend.68 In the first place, the ethnographer is beholden to "assimilated savages" who are removed from their native village and employed by the police; these "native informants" are associated with the network of routes crisscrossing the aboriginal lands and provide indispensable services to the colo­nial state as porters and guides. But the ethnographer also depends on armed Japa­nese police to traverse a forbidding terrain peopled by hostile groups. In calling at­tention to the circumstances surrounding the transmission of the tale, the narrator offers us a mise-en-scène of the ethnographic encounter and shows us that this en­counter is deeply indebted to colonial structures of domination.

By the same token, he also calls into question the status of the legend as a trans­parent sign of a traditional or primitive culture. The legend had to "[pass] through... many different lips" before it reached the narrator's ear. The porters carry the leg­end through the countryside just as they transport the narrator's baggage—their status as "assimilated savages" makes them the ideal intermediaries. A policeman who protects the ethnographer-narrator overhears this conversation by accident and translates it into Japanese for the narrator. After passing through the voices of the porters and the translation of the policeman, the legend reaches us—the readers—only after the ethnographer records it in writing, leaving some margin for the tricks of ethnographic memory. Filtered through these different mediations, the legend becomes an opaque, enigmatic cultural artifact with an indeterminate meaning. Be­sides allowing for errors in transmission, the narrator acknowledges the agency of the porter narrators who are the first in the line of messengers who transmit it. The "contact zone" described in this work is not merely a zone of domination but also one of unequal exchange, in which subordinated groups rework the materials trans-miffed to them by the dominant culture by a process of autoethnography. Besides criticizing the violent intrusion of the Japanese military on aboriginal society; the porter narrators fashion the tale of Pira into a story, "tie up the loose ends of the story in a suggestive way" and perhaps "invent the entire tale to amuse themselves:' The ethnographer thus stands at the end of a long and involved process of violence, oral transmission, fabrication, and translation. He never comes into contact with the isolated "primitive" society evoked in his theory of the scapegoat, but only with a society as it has been transformed by the imposition of colonial rule and the re­sponse of local subjects to that rule.

And what purpose does the porters' telling of the legend serve? If colonial vio­lence facilitates the ethnographic project by transforming aboriginal societies into objects of knowledge, then the telling of the legend may be read as an effort to mas­ter colonial violence. The porters do not tell their story from the point of view of either the persecutors, the villagers who survived the massacre, or the persecuted, Pira and her brother. Detached and displaced from the original scene of the leg­end, they are perhaps the first real "ethnographers" who fashion the episode into a narrative (and by so doing, interpret its significance) long before the Japanese come into contact with it. The Japanese are not addressed directly by these speakers; they come to overhear the legend by chance. If the villagers' persecution of Pira and her family can be seen' as a repetition or displacement of the shock caused by colonial violence, the porter-narrators may be attempting to absorb the trauma of conquest by turning the entire episode into a story or narrative. Trauma is not simply a dis­ease of a wounded psyche: it is always the "story of a wound that cries out, that ad­dresses us in the attempt to tell us of a reality or truth that is not otherwise avail­able. 1169 The narrator of "Demon Bird" repeats the gesture of these first narrators by using the aboriginal legend he hears as an allegory to master the shock of another catastrophe: that of the Great Kanto Earthquake.

"DEMON BIRD" AS ALLEGORY

The narrator of "Demon Bird" uses the custom of the mahafune as a metonym to propose a theory of persecution in a culturally alien society, much like the ethno­graphers whose writing style he imitates. When he recounts the legend of Pira, how­ever, he paradoxically undermines his theory by showing how the persecution is also a reaction to colonial violence and by highlighting the ethnographer's depen­dence on a colonial apparatus. Yet, there is a gap between what the text says and what it means, between its ethnographic content and its narrative strategy. Osten­sibly about persecution in a primitive society, "Demon Bird" also has a subtext. Be­sides serving as a metonym for primitive society, the mahafune is also a metaphor used by the narrator to throw light on Japan's recent history. Following an opposite trajectory from that of Japanese anthropology, SatO begins by writing about a for­eign society only to return in the end to matters closer to home. Allegory is the me­diator and the point of passage between the manifest and latent meanings of the text—it serves as a bridge connecting the "here and now" of this text with the "there and then" of the aboriginal legend.70

On September i, 1923, an earthquake registering 7.9 on the Richter scale struck the densely populated and heavily industrialized Kanto region and killed or injured at least i 50,000 people. A second disaster—caused by man rather than by the blind forces of nature—followed fast on the heels of the first. After rumors began to spread that Korean residents were setting fires, poisoning wells, and starting riots, Japa­nese military, police, and vigilante groups made up of ordinary citizens targeted the entire Korean resident population as scapegoats and killed an estimated six thou­sand Koreans. Historians have since brought to light compelling evidence that the Japanese state played an instrumental part in propagating rumors, in setting up the vigilante groups that carried out most of the killings, and in censoring news of

the massacre in the months that followed. 71 '

On the day of the Great Kanto Earthquake, SatO Haruo was staying in a hotel in

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Omori; he spent the next several days wandering around the ruined capital city Ushigawa Yuriko, editor of the complete works of SatO Haruo, supplies the follow­ing information on the whereabouts of the writer at the time of the earthquake: "At

the time of earthquake on September 1, SatO was with Horiguchi Daigaku (1892­1.981) at the BOsuiro Hotel. On the second he set out for Tokyo in search of his

younger brother and other acquaintances:' Ushigawa also notes that on Septem‑

ber 10, SatO paid a visit to MurO Saisei before returning to his hometown of ShingU. Between September 2 and io, SatO thus had ample opportunity to witness or hear

about the activities of the vigilante groups and the lynching of Koreans.72 He com‑

pleted "Demon Bird" by September 20, undoubtedly in a great hurry or perhaps he chose this moment to submit a manuscript that he had started to work on previ‑

ously. Whatever the case may be, "Demon Bird" was first published in the special

October 1923 issue of ChüO KOron, an issue titled Grieving for this Unprecedented Catastrophe. The October issue consists mainly of two large feature sections: the

first, called "Rebuilding the Imperial Capital," consists of a series of essays, while

the second, titled "Record of the Unprecedented Earthquake and Conflagration," comprises memoirs by major literary figures. By contrast, "Demon Bird" appears

under the separate rubric of fictional works. The placement of "Demon Bird" within an issue devoted to the Kanto earthquake, side by side with narratives evoking the massive destruction caused by the quake and the ensuing massacres, invites the reader to search for links between Sat O's story and the contents of the publication in which it first appeared.

I have already referred to Clifford's observation that an ethnography about another culture is also "an allegory" or "an extended metaphor" that contains "addi‑

tional meanings" about the ethnographer's own society.73 In what way is Satö's ethno­graphic pastiche also allegorical and metaphorical? What "additional meanings" did this legend have for readers in 1923? To answer these questions, I will consider three types of evidence about "Demon Bird": the circumstances of textual production, reader reaction, and the text itself.

A few of the writers of memoirs in ChüO KOron refer to the massacre of thou­sands of Koreans residing in the capital. Without exception, however, these refer‑

ences are excised from their accounts and replaced byfuseji, or hidden characters,

making these passages all but illegible to the reader. This massacre, in many ways the defining moment of the Japanese colonial period, was literally "unspeakable:'

covered over with a heavy veil of silence. By contrast, Sat O's "Demon Bird: a story about an aboriginal legend, passed under the radar of the censor and was published intact. In short, the form of allegory gave Satö Haruo a medium for saying what everyone already knew but which nobody could explicitly declare.

Besides the author, the editors of Chüö KOron and the censor also played cen­tral roles in the textual production of this work. The editors of the Chüö Köron—the first readers of "Demon Bird"—made a positive contribution to the allegorical significance of the work by choosing to publish it in a special edition devoted to the Kanto earthquake.74 A third party involved in the publication, the state censors, played a passive role: by not cutting the text or removing offending characters, they also signaled that the text fell within the parameters of acceptable discourse .75 Once the text appeared in print, it escaped from the specific "intentions" of the author and acquired a life of its own. All later readers—including me—contribute to this afterlife of the text by adding successive and multiple layers of interpretations to the text by the endless process of reading. In the case of "Demon Bird:' one might argue that the earliest readers of the ChüO Köron text were more likely to recognize the allegorical possibilities of the text based on their experience and the venue of its publication. By contrast, a reader who first encounters the text in SatO's complete works, published in the 1990S, is likely to overlook this allegorical dimension and to read the work as a simple fable. In this final canonized product, the traces of al­legory have been, if not erased, then at least forgotten. In short, "Demon Bird" takes on an allegorical significance partly because of the historical moment in which it was read and the specific venue in which it was published.

In his memoirs, entitled Shi bun hanseiki (Fifty Years of Poetry and Prose), SatO Haruo offers a clue as to how readers in 1923 interpreted the work: "When a re­porter received the manuscript of 'Demon Bird: a work based on a barbarian leg­end which I wrote shortly after the Great Kanto Earthquake, he suggested that I ought to name the work 'a novel of rumors [ryugen]' I remember thinking he might well be right'76 As is well known, the spread of rumors (ryugen higo) that Koreans were poisoning wells played a central part in instigating the massacre of Koreans. Encouraged by the authorities, these rumors took on a life of their own and spread with amazing speed throughout the Tokyo-Yokohama area and beyond. In the same way, in "Demon Bird" rumors about Pira traveled throughout the village, fore­shadowing the destruction of her family. As the social anthropologist SatO Kenji points out in his study of the role of rumors in modern Japanese history, "Is it not likely that the very term ryugen higo is a product of the experience of the Great Kanto Earthquake?" He also notes that the Great Kanto Earthquake is the starting point for all consideration of the role of rumor in modern Japanese history and points out that "the military and interior ministry officials became strongly aware of the importance of the management of rumors after this experience'77 A search of Yomiuri Shinbun articles during the Taisho period confirms that the expression ryügen higo began to appear with great frequency after the earthquake and referred in most cases to rumors about nefarious deeds of Korean residents in the capital area. The jour­nalist who described "Demon Bird" as a novel of rumors doubtless expressed a view­point shared by other early readers of this text: the term ryugen is a code word that links the mahafune in the aboriginal village with the massacre of Koreans.

By considering the circumstances of textual production and reader reaction, I have uncovered a few clues about the allegorical meaning of "Demon Bird" While

100 ETHNOGRAPHY AND LITERATURE ETHNOGRAPHY AND LITERATURE 101

these clues are suggestive, they do nothing more than help us to clarify the text's historical milieu. Yet to make sense of "Demon Bird:' it is not enough to under­stand its historical context. In fact, I would rather argue the reverse: to understand the context of this work, we need first to make sense of the text itself. If an allegor­ical text is "a representation that 'interprets' itself:' the question becomes how does this text elucidate the historical moment of its own production?78 How does it en­able its readers to interpret and read their own experience of history?

The text of "Demon Bird" gives us the clearest signals of the work's allegorical significance. Among other textual features, I would mention the geographical vague­ness of the text, the use of coded language, and the narrator's- rhetorical strategy. In the first place, the narrator maintains a geographical vagueness about the location of the savage society he is describing, and dispenses with all place names. Rather than speaking of Japan and Taiwan, he refers to a certain "civilized" power and to "savage" societies. In this case, one can say allegory conflicts with the ethnographic character of the text: allegories gain by this vagueness while ethnographies are nec­essarily specific and localized.

Another technique would be the narrator's use of hidden language and code in the work. Whereas the narrator announces in the first chapter that he will "dispense with all proper nouns in this tale: he later breaks this self-imposed rule by assign­ing names to the three main aboriginal characters: Satsusan, Pira, KOre. Or does he? There is some evidence that the narrator chose these names primarily because they possess some allegorical resonance. Just as he relied on Mori in his depiction of the custom of the mahafune, he likely learned these names from Mori, one of the first to create manuals on aboriginal languages. According to Yamaji Hiroaki, edi­tor of a handbook of the Ataiyal language, the word sasan (Satsusan) means morn­ing, qoleh (KOre) fish, and pila (Pira) silver.79 In an analysis of this story, Morizaki notes that if the narrator had assigned the Ataiyal word for "sheep" to Pira, these three names would have joined together to form the cipher ChOsen, the name of colonial Korea. Morizaki speculates that SatO Haruo may have been motivated by aesthetic reasons to name his heroine Pira rather than Shin ("buttocks in Japa­nese). "Demon Bird" contains a mutilated cipher, buried in the text and probably unnoticed by most readers.80 This cipher would not have been legible to his contem­porary reader—only a reader acquainted with Mon's ethnography or conversant with the Ataiyal language would have been able to decipher it—but nevertheless it offers us a possible clue to the allegorical meaning of the text.

Most important, the narrator repeatedly insists on the parallelism between "civ­ilized" and "savage" society. After describing how the aboriginal villagers persecute the mahafune, he goes on to write:

During the same voyage, I witnessed the colony of a certain civilized country. The people of that civilized country did not go so far as to kill the local people, who pos‑

sessed a high level of civilization, but they treated them as beasts for the simple rea­son that they had different customs and mores.... In addition, I have also seen the government of a civilized country arrest, imprison, and sometimes even put to death those with slightly different views than the common run of men—thinkers who be­lieve that it is possible to increase the sum of human happiness.

At this point the narrator draws back and says: "The civilized resemble savages since they arbitrarily deem evil everything they do not understand and strive to exter­minate people who wear an incomprehensible facial expression. There are many among us civilized folk who are identified  as manipulators of birds. However I am not here to talk about civilized peop1e"8'

He issues this tactical disclaimer (I am not here to talk about. .. ) only after mak­ing political statements that essentially deny any difference between the "civilized" and the "savage:' Furthermore, he cites two specific cases in which the civilized, like the savages, exterminate those who are identified as mahafune; one case refers ex­plicitly to the violence of colonialism. The narrator's claim that he is "not here to talk about civilized people" is an example of paralipsis, that is, a way of stating a view while simultaneously denying that one is doing so. By his strategy of denial, the narrator quite pointedly invites the reader not to accept what he says at face value and to read his text against the grain.

The allegorical significance of this text may be thought of as a series of concen­tric circles. In the outer ring, the narrator of "Demon Bird" manifestly speaks of a recent episode of the persecution of a mahafune in an unnamed society. At one re­move inside this outer ring, he evokes state violence against intellectuals and per­secution of the colonized as two instances that resemble the persecution of the ma-hafune but take place in the setting of civilized society. At its deepest level, unspoken -and latent, the text evokes the Great Kanto Earthquake for readers still reeling from its aftershocks as the most recent episode of scapegoating in their society.

When the narrator says he witnessed governments that "arrest, imprison, and put [thinkers] to death:' he refers in a veiled fashion to the infamous 1910 Great Treason trial. Twenty-six socialists were tried by a secret tribunal on trumped up

⦁ charges of plotting the assassination of the Meiji emperor; twelve of the accused, most famously KOtoku ShUsui, were condemned and put to death. By alluding to the Great Treason trial, SatO Haruo also returns to his own starting point as a writer. The son of a medical doctor, SatO grew up in the town of ShingU in Wakayama Pre-fecture.82 Seven of those tried in the Great Treason trial were also from ShingU, no­tably Oishi Seinosuke, a doctor and close friend of the SatO family. After learning of Oishi's execution, the young SatO published one of his first poems, "Gusha no shi" (The Death of a Fool), in the journal Subaru.

On January 23, 1911, Oishi Seinosuke was killed.

102 ETHNOGRAPHY AND LITERATURE ETHNOGRAPHY AND LITERATURE 103

Indeed, do not those who betray the sacred rules of the majority deserve

to be killed?

Playing at the risk of his life,

a fool was killed.

He, who was not Japanese,

knew nothing of the people's history.

Truth springs from falsehood he said 83

This phrase from the executioner's platform is the height of folly.

Our hometown is Shingu in KishU

His hometown was also our town.

Listen: 'They say our

town of Shingti in KishU, his hometown,

trembles in fear.

How the prosperous merchants of the town lament.

Townsmen, be calm.

Teachers, preach us our nation's history.84

If the narrator of "Demon Bird" announces his allegory by denegation, the poet stigmatizes by antiphrasis the very things that he seems to praise. To understand what the poem means, the reader must interpret the poem as signifying the oppo­site of what it actually says (the "fool" is a wise man, truth is falsehood). Oishi, the "fool" of the title, is not just physically eliminated, he is also expelled from the na­tional community and his name is presumably expunged from national memory—he is not "Japanese" because he knows "nothing of the people's history?' Although he is excluded from the nation by state persecution, he remains a man of Shingu, which, "trembl[ing], in fear:' partakes of the fate of its fellow countryman. When he speaks of the "sacred rules of the majority" and of teachers "preaching" the official version of history, he also pokes fun at the acquiescence or collusion of the citizens in the exercise of state terror. If the construction of the imperial family state requires the execution of dangerous thinkers, it also requires the colonization of peripheral regions such as ShingU, the falsification of national memory, and a passive, fearful citizenry.85

When the narrator of "Demon Bird" links the state persecution of intellectuals with violence against the colonized, he emphasizes the connections between im­perial expansion and political repression within Japan. Indeed, the Great Treason trial coincided with the formal incorporation of Korea within the Japanese empire in 1910 and with the start of the five-year pacification of the Taiwan Highlands un­der Governor General Sakuma Samata (1910-14). The reference to violence against the colonized could also be an allusion to the brutal repression of the March i, 1919, independence movement in Korea. In addition, SatO also stresses a key similarity between colonial violence at home and abroad. Both are treated as examples of the mahafune mechanism, the construction of social borders and group identity by the violent elimination of carefully selected scapegoats.

Indeed, SatO might have had a specific incident in mind when he evoked vio­lence against the colonized. The Japanese army's massacre of aboriginal villagers described in "Demon Bird"—and the villagers' massacre of the members of Pira's family—recall a real atrocity that took place in Korea. The Japanese army and po­lice killed thousands of demonstrators to put down the nationwide March First In­dependence Movement that spread throughout Korea in 1919 and burned down villages that offered resistance. In one famous incident, the colonial police in the village of Jeam-ri, Suwon County, Kyonggi Province ordered dozens of villagers to assemble in a Christian church, locked the doors, and then set the building on fire, killing all of them.

While the narrator mentions the violence of colonialism and of the repressive state, he pointedly neglects to mention a case of persecution that fits his theory per­fectly: the massacre of Koreans in the 1923 Great Kanto Earthquake. Even more than the legend of Pira itself, the massacre of the Koreans corresponds to the schema of the scapegoat developed in "Demon Bird" All of the elements are present: a nat­ural disaster of unprecedented scale, the role of rumors in spreading panic, the fabrication-recognition of an invisible enemy, and the reaffirmation of the bound­aries of the community by the massacre of a designated scapegoat. To be sure, the massacre of the mahafune in "Demon Bird" is not equivalent to the massacre of Ko­reans in Japan. In the former case, the villagers displace their rage against a powerful army onto a vulnerable member of their own community. In the latter, the Japanese urban dwellers turn their panic after a natural catastrophe onto a perceived "foreign body" in their society. The relationship between the two is one of homology rather .than of equivalence or resemblance. By hinting at their underlying structural simi­larities, Satö's allegory connects two different and ostensibly unrelated events.

What links the aboriginal village and 1923 Tokyo—the two scenes of the text—is colonial violence. The violence of colonialism is not something confined to the colonies.86 By a kind of boomerang effect, this violence—and the fears and hatreds it expressed—overflows the boundaries of the colony and strikes at the very heart of the metropolis itself. Just as with the superstition about the mahafune, the vio­lence results from the construction of social borders; in this case, the borders in question are those of Japan's multiethnic empire. Japan's national borders were defined in a complex process of negotiation with the borderlands of empire, con­tracting or expanding over time as policies toward these border regions oscillated between assimilation and exclusion.87 On September i, 1923, the borders of the na­tional community were suddenly redrawn within the very streets of devastated Tokyo, to terrifying effect for the thousands of Koreans who had settled there after Korea became a colony of Japan, and especially during the rapid economic expan‑

104 ETHNOGRAPHY AND LITERATURE ETHNOGRAPHY AND LITERATURE 105

sion during the years of the First World War.88 As in the legend of the magical bird, these borders separated those who might live from those who must die, those who must be punished from those who must be protected. In aboriginal Taiwan and met­ropolitan Tokyo alike, the persecutors projected onto their hapless scapegoats an array of extraordinary powers and capabilities. In the ease of the Japanese after the earthquake, these included the ability to foresee natural disasters and to organize seditious actions in the midst of chaos. Both persecuting groups also saw them­selves as victims of their victims and justified their persecutions as a response to prior violence against themselves by the very ones they were persecuting.

In the aboriginal village, people could at least rely on some visible sign to dis­tinguish the terrifying mahafune from ordinary villagers: a look of anxiety, Pira's refusal to tattoo herself. In earthquake-stricken Tokyo, there was no foolproof vis­ible sign that set apart the Japanese from the Koreans.89 As Nakayama Satoru rec­ollected in 1924, "At the time of the Great Kanto Earthquake last year, it was not possible to distinguish Koreans from Japanese by their facial features. There is no difference between the facial or physical features of the Japanese and the Koreans"9° The "sameness" of Koreans and Japanese, which made Koreans invisible in Japa­nese society, at times provided them with a protective covering and a degree of in­visibility. In the chaotic aftermath of the Great Kanto Earthquake, this invisibility made them the targets of a general racial panic.

In the absence of visible markers that clearly distinguished the Koreans, vigi­lantes accosted Koreans in the streets of the capital and tried to get them to talk. Rather than race, the national language (kokugo) was the main criterion used to distinguish the Japanese from the Koreans; it was the functional equivalent of the demon bird in the aboriginal village. The ideology of kokugo as the national lan­guage of Japan developed concurrently with the formation of the Japanese empire as an instrument for instilling a national consciousness among the Japanese and as a tool to assimilate subjects in the colonies. From the outset, it had a double, con­tradictory status. On the one hand, it was promoted as a universal language that should be spread throughout Asia (anyone who learned it could, in principle, be­come Japanese). On the other hand, it was intimately tied to an essentialist notion of national identity, to the Japanese spirit, and to the family state ideology, and it ensured that the colonized could never become Japanese. In response to nationalist movements in the colonies, colonial regimes in both Taiwan and Korea began to. adopt an assimilationist approach toward the colonies and to promote the use of the national language through the. education system. In practice, contrary to the propaganda of the Japanese government, this policy "brought about neither the improvement of education for Taiwanese nor equal opportunity,"9'

While education of the colonized in Japanese allegedly aimed to eradicate dif­ferences between colonizer and colonized, at the time of the Great Kanto Earth­quake the national language became the de facto border marker between members of the national community and nonmembers. The vigilante groups responsible for the massacres used the national language as a blunt but serviceable tool to identify the Koreans in their midst (or at least those Koreans who did not speak Japanese fluently) and to select them for elimination, in a sense making open and explicit the violence implicit in the very notion of a "national language. "91 Accosting pedes­trians in the city, they forced them to recite phrases in Japanese, identifying Kore­ans (but not only Koreans) by their imperfect mastery of the national language or their nonstandard pronunciation. In KantO daishinsai (The Great Kanto Earth­quake), Kan Tokusan describes how vigilante groups "recognized" Koreans in the earthquake-devastated capital: "To spot Koreans, passers-by were forced to say fif­teen yen fifty-five sen [ jugoen gojugosen], to recite lyrics of the 'Kimigayo' [the Japa­nese national anthem], the 'Iroha dodoitsu' [a popular song from the Edo period], or the Imperial Rescript of Education as ways of distinguishing difference "91 As these examples show, the point of this questioning was not simply to see whether passersby had an ability to speak Japanese. Rather, speaking Japanese was inextri­cably linked with the imperial ideology and myth dispensed by the schools. In "De­mon Bird:' the members of the aboriginal village reconstructed the borders of their community after colonial invasion by a displacement of violence onto the maha-fune. Similarly, the residents of Tokyo reaffirmed national borders by displacing their violence onto the Koreans through the circulation of rumor and by the institution of these strange language examinations.94

Japanese colonial discourse differed from that of Western nations in that the dif­ference between colonizer and colonized in the West was signified by the visible marker of race.95 In a sense, the outbreak of violence against the Koreans reflected the absence of visible differences between the colonizer and the colonized in the same way that the persecution of the mahafune reflected a loss of readily discernable dif­ferences among the members of the aboriginal community. In Tokyo, this ambigu­ity led to racial panic and a fear of loss of identity—specifically, the fear of being un­able to distinguish between the Japanese and the Koreans. The fact that Koreans and the Japanese were not so different raised the frightening possibility that Koreans might pass themselves off as Japanese, an uncanny and disturbing prospect that per­haps was exacerbated by the uncontrolled spread of rumors. Yet, as "Demon Bird" shows, where visible markers were lacking, other forms of difference could easily be invented and brought into play. In the aboriginal village and in Tokyo, on Septem­ber i, 1923, these differences were established through sacrifice and mass murder in order to justify, organize, and manage community boundaries.

SATOHARUO AND LIBERALIST IMPERIALISM

In this chapter, I have excavated a forgotten text of the writer SatO Haruo. "Demon Bird" is an exception both within this writer's oeuvre and within colonial literature

io6 ETHNOGRAPHY AND LITERATURE ETHNOGRAPHY AND LITERATURE 107

generally; it is "a road not taken" in the literary history of the period. Recently, schol­ars of Japanese colonial literature have singled out SatO Haruo's stories about the Tai­wan aborigines as among the few prewar literary works that are highly critical of Japanese colonial policies and discourses. In the epilogue to Musha, a reprint of the author's Taiwan stories that first appeared in 1936, Fujii ShOzO writes that "Satö hints at the unhappiness of the aborigines assimilated into the Japanese empire and indi­rectly criticizes the repressive policies of the colonial government by his cool, clear­headed observations,"96 a view shared by ShU EikO in her article on Musha.97 Con­cerning "Demon Bird:' Faye Yuan Kleeman notes that SatO uses an aboriginal legend as a metaphor to fashion "a critical discourse on Japan's internal and external colo­nial conditions during the 192os798 Kimura Kazuaki and Kurokawa SO have both argued that the implied target of Sato-'s criticism in "Demon Bird" is the violence di­rected toward leftists and Korean residents after the Great Kanto Earthquake.99

When these scholars praise Sat 0-'s works, they employ a vocabulary that is not ordinarily used to describe literary writers or to characterize purely literary works. Indeed, these words are more commonly employed to depict an ideal ethnographer conducting his fieldwork, this "cool, clear-headed observer" of another society who nevertheless feels great empathy toward those he studies. Curiously, however, these scholars have overlooked the author's engagement with the point of view of the ethnographer and with ethnographic discourse. Yet this engagement is central to his Taiwan works and to his critique of Japan's colonialism, particularly in "Demon Bird' The narrator of this story impersonates a colonial ethnographer and writes a pastiche of the ethnographic report. Like the colonial ethnographers who first clas­sified the aborigines into distinct groups, SatO is concerned with the definition of social boundaries and the construction of cultural identities. The colonial ethnog­raphers mapped the aboriginal lands and drew ethnic borders between the differ­ent tribes, but SatO is concerned with the way that human groups exclude elements they perceive as threatening their communal borders in their quest for identity. Just as the actual colonial border making in Taiwan was accompanied by state-initiated violence against recalcitrant tribes, the bordering in the aboriginal village depicted in the story involves the mobilization of cruelty and terror. In "Demon Bird," SatO discloses the terrible destruction that the establishment of group borders entails in an aboriginal village of Taiwan.

In addition, this story subtly displaces a second border: that which divides colony from metropolis. From the first few lines, the reader of "Demon Bird" finds him­self or herself in a new topography of imperial Japan in the early 192os, with its well-defined boundaries between colony and metropolis and its stable hierarchical relationship of "civilized" Japan and "primitive" Taiwan. Yet these boundaries blur in the course of the story and eventually disappear entirely. SatO published "Demon Bird" in 1923 shortly after the Great Kanto Earthquake—one of the greatest natu­ral disasters in history—and the massacres of Koreans that followed in its wake. By giving an ethnographic account of persecution in a far-off, primitive village, he sug­gests the inexorable link between colonial "other" and imperial Japan, between cul­tural identity and colonial violence. In both colony and metropolis, he explores the liminal spaces where boundaries break down, social differences lose their clarity, and hierarchies fall apart. Besides showing the atrocities that the establishment of colonial borders entailed in aboriginal Taiwan, he hints at the terrible price exacted by colonial borders on the streets of the Japanese metropolis itself. This deconstruc­tion of colonial ethnography turns out to be a cool-headed ethnographic critique of Japan's empire.

Sat O's concern with the topography of empire is also closely related to the histo­rical moment in which he wrote. He traveled to Taiwan in 1920, that is, at the mid­point of Japan's rule of Taiwan (1895-1945) and of the Japanese colonial empire tout court. This was the period of "imperial democracy," when colonial policies were un­der attack by both liberal and reformist intellectuals and by the people whom Japan had colonized.'00 "Demon Bird" epitomizes the strengths and limitations of this lib­eral, reformist critique of imperialism. As far as its strengths are concerned, the critique of Japanese imperialism in "Demon Bird" is grounded on the narrator's engagement with ethnographic writing and formally on his recourse to allegory. The ethnographic narrator of "Demon Bird" implicitly invites his readers to adopt his cool, detached point of view toward their own society and to take a close look at the fault lines of colonial violence that underlay Japanese society—fault lines that the Great Kanto Earthquake laid bare. Through his recourse to allegory, he decon­structs the civilizing mission of the metropolis by elucidating the equivalences be­tween the "uncivilized savages" of the colony and the "civilized Japanese'

Although "Demon Bird" exposes the connections between colonial violence at home and abroad, the text also manifests the weaknesses of the liberal critique of colonialism. In part, this failure results from the form in which the narrator chooses to couch his critique. Indeed, as we have seen, when the narrator refuses to desig­nate the "place" of the legend, he also limits the critical impact of this radical work. Yet the studied ambiguity of the work—its refusal to name the "place" of the events it describes—is at the same time the condition that rendered the text publishable in October 1923. A second weakness of "Demon Bird" has more to do with the specific literary genre to which the work belongs: its nature as allegory. In this mul­tivalent text, the aboriginal legend is merely a pretext for a more essential truth: that barbarous superstitions and the scapegoating of minorities flourish even in the most civilized societies. As in any allegory, the relationship between these two lev­els of the text is skewed and hierarchical. Once the reader has seized this deeper truth, he or she can safely dismiss the envelope of legend in which it is wrapped. The very form of the allegory that allows the narrator to speak to his readers also serves to belittle the tragedy of the aborigines and to downplay the violence that victimizes them.

108 ETHNOGRAPHY AND LITERATURE ETHNOGRAPHY AND LITERATURE 109

Yet the deeper reasons for the text's "failure" have less to do what the text leaves out than with what it says. In the end, "Demon Bird" does not exceed the limits of a narrow self-critique. In that respect, the work suffers from the same fatal flaws that vitiate the ethnographer's text. Just as Mori Ushinosuke wrote mainly for like-minded ethnographers, SatO addressed himself exclusively to a restricted audience of metropolitan readers. He gives voice to the unhappy consciousness of Japanese colonialism, but he does so only in the form of a monologue addressed to other Japanese people. Writing at a time when colonial borders were already coming un­der attack by the colonized throughout the Japanese empire, he neither speaks to the victims of Japan's imperialism nor records what they have to say to him. It was not that they had nothing to say; rather they were refused a space in discourse that would have provided a forum for their voices. This refusal to address the colonial other in dialogue also marks the discursive limits of Taisho liberal critique generally.

Like the colonial ethnographer whose viewpoint he adopts, partly because of a failure of imagination, the fictional narrator cannot escape the limits of a solipsis­tic self-critique: for the liberal imperialism of this period, liberation from empire is ultimately unthinkable. While the narrator of "Demon Bird" lucidly exposes the connections between violence in the metropolis and violence in the colonies, he shares with the ethnographer a blind spot toward the violent expropriation thatun-denies his own perspective. Colonial violence is not simply an object that one can safely observe from the outside and then talk about; rather it is inscribed in the very place from which colonial agents take up their stance and transform the colonized into objects of their discourse. It would be a mistake to impute the writer's (or ethno-grapher's) impotence to change these conditions to a lack of courage or effort: the real problem was that he was speaking from within a colonial structure and, indeed, was authorized to speak by the very violence he denounced. Just as the silences of the narrator of "Demon Bird" are eloquent, so too is the speech of the ethnogra­pher defined as much by what he never mentions as by what he says. Mon's ethnog­raphy was a monologue about the aborigines rather than a dialogue with them: he enjoyed a monopoly on definitions of aboriginal identities that he exercised in the name of science and under conditions of colonial rule. To hear the voices Of the ob­jects of this ethnographic discourse, one would first have to recognize their right of response and to listen to their voices, as the Ami poet MOnanon demanded of the post-colonial Taiwan state in the poem opening this chapter.

If the ethnographer depends on the imposition of colonial control over the abo­rigines for his position as privileged scientific observer, SatO Haruo owes his stance as pampered tourist to his status as a celebrated guest of the colonial government. I have already called attention to the author's humanism and his unprejudiced at­titude toward aboriginal culture. Yet while the writer of this text rejects the notion that the values and beliefs of one culture are inherently superior to those of another, he does not thereby conclude that no nation should colonize another. In fact, the existence of multiple cultures is not incompatible with imperial rule at all: these two realms are absolutely separate. While I have tried to elucidate the humanistic liberalism in his "Demon Bird' I would note that he never treats the colonized as anything more than interesting objects to be elaborated in his later stories. In his Taiwan-themed works, SatO merely treats the aborigines as an "object of observa­tion" "He never deviates from this basic posture in all of his works. Though he al­ways stands in the position of ruler, he occasionally 'descends' to the level of the 'ruled' and expresses his sympathy for them '1101 The aborigines are the topics of other people's discourse, not speech subjects with points of view on Japanese rule and a right of response. Those critics who have praised the author for his humanistic crit­icism of the harshness of Japanese colonial rule have tended to overlook the ex­treme narrowness and patronizing nature of his "empathy" toward the aborigines. Yet the limits of his humanism become flagrantly apparent in a passage from his travel memoir Musha, where he describes an aboriginal maid (who calls herself Ohanachan) who serves him dinner at an inn. "Pointing to a spot on my own fore­head, I tried to indicate the shape of the tattoo on her face. She laughed and hid it with the flat of her hand. I couldn't help but feel affection for this gesture and the expression that accompanied it. However, to speak plainly, it resembled the affec­tion a master would feel for his pet dog '1102 Satö's master-pet metaphor reveals the assumption of innate superiority that results from his hierarchical relationship to the colonized.

The reader captures a glimpse of his fundamental stance in a revealing passage of his memoir "Ka no ichinatsu no ki" (A Record of That Summer), in which he discusses the circumstances of his visit to Musha. SatO mentions that he came to view the "real situation of the aborigines" not by design but rather by accident. When he learned of the outbreak of the Slamao uprising, he had to cancel a planned visit to Mount Ari that Mori Ushinosuke had highly recommended to him. He goes on to write: "Though it may seem odd 'to express myself in this way, I came to witness the uprising in Musha as a replacement and substitute (for the majestic and breath­taking views from Mount Ari of the Taiwan highlands). 11103 For Satö, then the trip to Musha and Mount NOkO was, ultimately, nothing more than a consolation prize for his failure to reach Mount Ar If he had been able to carry out his original plan, he would doubtless have discovered new "material" and written other works for his metropolitan reader.

146 THE ADVENTURES OF MOMOTARO

A latter-day MomotarO, 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.

The Colonial Eyeglasses

of Nakajima Atsushi

It seemed that there were many strange creatures dwelling together within me in total disorder, including miserable and revolting creatures.

NAKAJIMA ATSUSHI

In Shokuminchi gensO (Colonial Fantasy), Masaki Tsuneo uses the metaphor of "Western-tinted eyeglasses" to describe the mimetic and hierarchical gaze the Japa­nese directed at the lands and the peoples in their colonies.

Before their nation began to invade Asia, the Japanese learned to look at Asia anew through Western-tinted eyeglasses. Almost four hundred years after the Europeans, Japan attempted to create a new "world" in Asia. It was called the Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere. Needless to say, it was the political and economic culmination of Japan's modernization. In tandem with this process, there developed a view that the different people of the world formed a pyramid with the Japanese at the top and the natives of the South Seas at the bottom. Japan just rearranged the ranking of val­ues that it inherited from Europe and applied them to the new world it formed. Japan's invasion of Asia was not a result of its failed modernization or of its clinging to traditional culture, but of its exceptionally rapid and thorough modernization (com­pared with other Asian countries), for modernization is the Euopeanization of the world, and at the heart of Western modernity is the ethos of colonization.1

The metaphor of "Western-tinted eyeglasses" highlights an important element in Japan's mimicry of Western colonialism. Japan's modernization was not simply the mimesis of Western sociopolitical, economic, or cultural models but also the appropriation of Western ways of viewing the world. These ways of viewing, which in the West date back to the "discovery" of America by European explorers, were several centuries in the making. In the early twentieth century, Japan domesticated this Western gaze that was trained on "others," notably those who lay beyond the borders of civilization and modernity. For that reason, Japan's views of the people it ruled can be described as refracted through and distorted by a Western lens or

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filter, which is why the metaphor of eyeglasses is so compelling. At the same time that Japan donned these "Western-tinted eyeglasses:' it rearranged the Western "pyramid" of peoples to buttress its own rival claims as an imperial power when it fashioned its empire of overseas colonies.

Until the Manchurian Incident of 1931, the Japanese empire existed within a framework of international legality that had been established by the Western pow­ers and was incorporated into a global system of imperialism. In 1895, Western pow­ers failed to come to the aid of the Taiwanese Chinese who established a "Repub­lic of Taiwan" on the island and appealed to the West to intervene in their behalf. A decade later, Japan and the United States signed the Taft-Katsura agreement, in which Japan recognized the U.S. rule of the Philippines in exchange for U.S. recog­nition of Japanese rule of the Korean peninsula. And, of course, Japan ruled Micro­nesia under a mandate of the League of Nations. With the Kwantung army's seizure of northeast China, Japan abandoned this framework and attempted to carve out an exclusive and autarchic sphere in East Asia no longer subject to Western sur­veillance and no longer needing Western recognition. Eventually, Western powers responded to Japan's aggressions on the Asian continent with trade sanctions and stern criticisms. Whereas the Japanese had earlier viewed their empire as analo­gous to Western empires, they now sought to distinguish their empire from others and to expel Western powers from Asia. By expelling the West, Japan proposed to liberate Asia from imperialism and to lead Asians in a new world order. Rather than follow a preexisting model, Japan proposed itself as the new model of modern civ­ilization and progress and defended this model with a new rhetoric of vociferous anti-imperialism. We find the clearest ideological expression of this period in the rhetoric and iconography of the Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere, a time of unprecedented imperial overstretch and the climax of Japan's colonial trajectory.

As Masaki notes, however, the "Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere" was paradoxically the pivotal moment in the Japanese appropriation of a Eurocentric viewpoint toward the people it colonized. In a famous wartime poster from the early 1940s, the rising sun (the Greater East Asian CoTProsperity Sphere) beams down on the Dutch East Indies as the Japanese drive out the Dutch colonizer, who is por­trayed as a woman shod in wooden clogs. This woman flees in disarray and carries a small lantern whose light is already sputtering out. As she runs toward the edge of the poster, the white hand of a Japanese man in a Western business suit reaches down from the top and clasps the hand of a dark and half-naked Indonesian la­borer. In this poster, the West continues to exist in the spectral form of an essen­tially Euro-centrist hierarchy, but the actual West (Holland) is represented as "fem­inine:' feeble, old-fashioned, and all but vanquished. By contrast, the Japanese exemplify the new standard of modernity, progress, and manliness .2 Under the ban­ner of "liberating" Asians—depicted as the dark-skinned and half-naked Indone­sian laborer—from Western imperialism, Japan essentially fills the position Ho!- land had formerly occupied toward its colony. At the same time, it dons Western eyeglasses to gaze down from above upon these new colonial subjects. In accor­dance with European criteria, other Asian and Pacific peoples were situated several rungs lower on the racial ladder than the Japanese.

What was it like for Japanese writers to wear these "Western-tinted eyeglasses:' viewing the world through their Western filter? To probe the complexities of the Japanese colonial gaze during the late colonial period, I consider the South Seas fic­tion of Nakajima Atsushi (1909-42). Nakajima, a writer who lived in Palau from July 1941 to March 1942, published two volumes of stories based on his experiences in Palau during the period of the Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere. In these works, he orchestrates a variety of discourses on savagery and civilization, race and climate, gender and culture, to defiuie his position toward Micronesians and toward the West. Writing at a moment when Japan was ostensibly the "leading race" of Asia and was freeing the continent from the clutches of Western imperialism, he also expresses an anxiety about his own position as colonizer and attempts to differen­tiate himself as such vis-à-vis the West. While Nakajima is first and foremost a writer of Japan's late imperial period, he is also in some ways a forerunner of the post-colonial period that ensued not long after he died.

Although he is little known in the English-speaking world, Nakajima is a cele­brated writer of early twentieth-century Japan. Almost every graduate of high school in postwar Japan has read his "Sangetsuki" (Record of the Mountain and the Moon) or his novella RiryO (Li Ling) in Japanese national language textbooks. These two works are based closely on Chinese language sources—the first on a fictional work from the Tang period and the second on historical records from the Han period—and have been extensively studied by Japanese literary scholars. By contrast, these scholars generally neglect the author's South Seas fiction, dismissing it as of negli­gible literary value. However, I argue that this writer's South Seas fiction not only paints a compelling picture of late imperial rule, but that it also opens a valuable window onto Japan's literature of the colonial period generally and of Nakajima in particular. Through these works, Nakajima engages in a sustained reflection on the lens or filter through which he, a Japanese subject, regarded the people Japan col­onized. He was acutely aware of his own ambivalent position as a mimetic colo­nizer as well as of the complicated literary debts he had contracted with earlier Euro­pean writers. For all of these reasons, I find the works of this late colonial writer to be a particularly rich field to probe the peculiarities of the Japanese imperial gaze.

When Masaki speaks of "Western-tinted eyeglasses:' he rightly highlights the fictional, fantastic, and constructed character of the Japanese colonial gaze.3 If the Japanese colonial gaze was fictional in nature, then it stands to reason that works of fiction may be the best place to discover its essence. At the same time, there are problems with this metaphor of eyeglasses. In the first place, when Masaki places the blame for Japan's imperialism on its adoption of a Western standpoint, he im‑

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plicitly denies Japanese agency and exonerates the Japanese from responsibility for their colonialist past. Second, Masaki's assertion that Japanese were blinded by West­ern ways of viewing is, at best, a speculative hypothesis that needs to be tested. In my study of Nakajima Atsushi, I argue that this writer appropriated "Western-tinted eyeglasses:' and used them quite deliberately and self-consciously to situate him­self within a Japanese empire. Far from being blind, he was quite aware that he was wearing "eyeglasses," and even expressed anxiety and doubts about his views of the South Seas and his position as colonizer. In the end, the reader is struck by the in­ability of this writer to view the world through "Western-tinted eyeglasses:'

To be sure, Nakajima was not necessarily a representative figure of the Japanese people as a whole, but neither was he an entirely isolated or exceptional individual. By looking at his colonial fiction, we discover that he was complex, a writer who had ambivalent feelings about his own place, about Europe and the South Seas, and about the Japanese empire he both faithfully served and grew disillusioned with. By looking closely at the narrator's perspective in Nakajima's fiction, I shed light on the ambivalences and aporia that characterized the Japanese colonial gaze at the end of the colonial period.

NAKAJIMA ATSUSHI'S SOUTH SEAS ADVENTURE

Nakajima Atsushi was truly a child of empire. Born to a family of kangaku (Chi­nese studies) scholars, his paternal uncles were active in the colonial adminis­tration of Manchuria while his father was a teacher of kanbun (Chinese literature) in high schools in Korea and Manchuria. Because of his family background, Naka-jima spent several years of his adolescence in Keijö (Seoul), capital of Japanese-controlled Korea, where he graduated from the elite KeijO Middle School in 1926. He passed his school holidays traveling in Manchuria. Nakajima lived his brief life as a citizen of a, large colonial power and never once traveled beyond the borders of the Japanese empire.

As a writer, too, he created an imaginary world that delimited the colonial space of his time. Nakajima's literary universe "embraces the northern and southern ge­ographical limits of the Japanese empire during the early Showa years"4 He set his earliest sketches and stories (published in Koyukai Zasshi, the magazine of the Tokyo First Higher School) in the colonial Korea and Manchuria that he had known dur­ing his childhood and adolescence.5 From 1933 to 1935, he worked sporadically on an unfinished novel titled 1-loppOkO (Heading North), set in contemporary Beijing, which he traveled to after becoming a teacher at the Yokohama Girls' School. As for works set in the south, Nakajima wrote a full-length novel in 1940 about the final years of Robert Louis Stevenson in Samoa, and subsequently wrote two collections of stories based on his own experiences as a colonial official in Micronesia.

This is not to say that Nakajima primarily wrote fiction that is set in the con­ temporary Japanese empire. While he explored the exotic spaces of the empire, he was also fascinated by remote periods of history and by the customs of primitive societies—by what Victor Segalen refers to as the exotic in time. Indeed, Segalen expands the notion of exoticism beyond a geographical association with far-away places to embrace all realms of human experience: an exoticism of time, of nature, of the senses (visual, aural, olfactory, tactile), of sex and an exoticism of art. Per­haps no prewar Japanese writer was more fascinated with the different incarna­tions of the exotic, or approaches Segalen's ideal of the exote, more than Nakajima Atsushi.6 In 1940, he wrote a series of stories called Kotan (Old Tales), which are set variously in ancient Egypt, Assyria, and Scythia; his most famous works are stories are set in ancient China. By contrast, he set almost none of his works in con­temporary Japanese society.

In July 1941, the young Nakajima resigned from his position as English and Japa­nese teacher at the Yokohama Girls' School and set sail for Koror, then the admin­istrative capital of the Japanese colony in Micronesia. When he arrived in Palau, he worked in the Regional Section of the Nan'yOchO (South Seas Agency), the gov­ernment agency responsible for administering Micronesia. While Japan had seized these Micronesian territories (mainly, the three archipelagoes of the Marianas, the Carolines, and the Marshalls) from Germany in 1914, it ruled them from 1921 to 1933 under a League of Nations mandate; after it withdrew from the League in 1933, Japan continued to insist on the legality of its status as a mandatory power in Mi­cronesia and to make annual reports to the Permanent Mandatory Commission.'

The Regional Section of the South Seas Agency was the nerve center of Japan's new kOminka (imperialization) policies then being promoted in fields such as edu­cation, language, and culture in order to foster among the indigenous populations a sense of identification with the Japanese empire. In line with the increasing stress the authorities placed on the inculcation of the Japanese language, the South Seas Agency established a permanent position in 1941 for a language textbook editor responsible for investigating the current situation of Japanese language education in the archipelago and editing textbooks that would meet the requirements of ed­ucators in Micronesia for new teaching materials.' Nakajima was offered this po­sition through the good offices of an old friend from his days in the University of Tokyo, Kugimoto Hisaharu, a senior official at the Ministry of Education in charge of Japanese language education in overseas colonies. As a postwar bureaucrat with the same ministry, Kugimoto later played a central role in promoting the reputa­tion of his college friend, championing the canonization of his works in Japanese school textbooks. Unlike the ethnographer Hijikata Hisakatsu, his closest friend when he was in Palau, Nakajima was hired as a bureaucrat to serve the assimilating project of making the Micronesians "imperial subjects" of the Japanese empire.

But Nakajima was not simply taking part in a national experiment to change the natives of Micronesia into replicas of the Japanese: he clearly viewed his travel to

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the south as a personal experiment in self-transformation. Besides hoping to find a cure for his chronic asthma in the tropics, he wanted "to throw [himself] into this new and unknown environment and take a chance at discovering powers within [himself] of which [he] was not even aware" In many respects, this life experiment was an unmitigated disaster. Nakajima discovered that the tropical climate exacer­bated his chronic asthma and that he was by nature unsuited for bureaucratic work. After a mere eight months in Micronesia, most of which he spent touring outlying islands to visit schools, he returned to Japan on a business trip in March 1942 and resigned his charge with the agency. In letters from his period of residence in Palau, Nakajima expressed disillusionment with Japan's colonial education policy gener­ally and with his job as textbook reviser in particular. In a diary entry of Novem­ber 28, 1941, he describes in unflattering terms the ultranationalistic and militaristic education being dispensed by the

I am shocked by the harsh treatment meted out to pupils by principal and teacher alike. Several students, who are unable to pronounce Okuninushi no mikoto are forced to stand up and practice saying it over and over for hours." A young boy in a pink shirt (evidently the classroom leader) angrily reprimands the other students by bran­dishing a short stick in his hand. Generally, this class leader walks around the class­room during the lesson and is ordered to administer a beating to students who are loafing off. What kind of school insists that students must have military orders barked out at them—one! two!—just in order to take off their caps! 12

In a letter to his wife dated November 9,. 1941, Nakajima writes of his job in the following terms:

Now after the tour [of inspection to the schools of eastern Micronesia], I have come to see the utter meaningless of this job of editing textbooks for the natives. To make the natives happy, there are many things of far greater importance than textbooks, which are a triviality; the last thing they really need. In the present conditions in nan'yö, we have more and more trouble providing them with adequate food and shelter. At such a time what good would it do even if I were to produce a slightly improved text­book? Providing the natives with a half-baked education may only deepen their mis­fortune. I no longer feel the least zeal for my job as editor. It is not because  hate the natives.'It is because I love them. 13

In another letter to his father dated November 6, he notes the drastic worsen­ing of exploitation of the islanders as the Japanese military launched a large-scale plan to fortify the islands in preparation for the Pacific War. In his study of the his­tory of the nan)iö, Mark Peattie describes the effect these war preparations had on the ordinary lives of the Micronesians: "The confiscations, conscription of labor, and preemptions of Micronesian land and property were common to all the islands where there were substantial Japanese garrisons and worked to corrode whatever sympathies the Islanders may have had toward the Japanese" 4 As Nakajima real­ ized that the government's priorities had shifted to war mobilization, he grew even more disillusioned with his bureaucratic job. "In the present emergency situation, education of the natives is hardly a priority. It seems that the policy of the author­ities is to treat the natives as an expendable labor force to be exploited at will. In these circumstances I have totally lost even the little enthusiasm for my job that I had before""

Nevertheless, Nakajima was not simply a disgruntled and disillusioned colonial official. After returning to Japan, he wrote two collections of stories based on his experiences in Palau, NantOtan (Tales of the Southern Islands) and KanshO (Atolls). Both of these collections were published for the first time in November 1942 in a book titled NantOtan, one of two volumes of the author's works published during his lifetime, which also included a series of works set in ancient China and two semi-autobiographical works. The editors of the latest complete edition of Nakajima's works speculate that most of these nan)iO stories were written in August or Sep­tember of 1942.16

LEARNING TO SEE THROUGH WESTERN EYEGLASSES

In order to bring to light the literary sources ofNakajima's vision of the South Seas, before I turn to the above works based on the author's experiences in Micronesia, I would like to briefly consider the representation of the South Seas in his works before he traveled to Palau. As I hope to show, Nakajima encountered the textual "South Seas" long before he set foot in its geographical counterpart. In fact, he jour­neyed to the real South Seas partly to behold with his own eyes images that he had first discovered in literary texts. For example, Nakajima reveals in his diaries and letters from his time in Palau that he was happiest when the nature of the South Seas imitated art: that is, when real places approximated the fantasy of a "primi­tive" paradise, he sought. During a 'tour of the Marshall Islands, he writes to his wife Taka: "I like Jaluit best of all the islands I have visited because it is. the most uncivilized and the closest.to the South Seas of [Robert Louis] Stevenson:' In an entry to his diary dated September 29, 1941, he notes: "After daylong preparations for the banquet were completed, the young girls came to the banquet hail in the evening, singing and carrying garlands of flowers in their hands, which they placed on the head and shoulders of each of the guests. The bonfire, the oven of hot stones, the many tasty dishes, etc. It was exactly like the world of Stevenson and (Pierre) Loti"7 In these statements, Stevenson and Loti supply the standard against which reality is to be measured—a standard that is tantamount to the standard of civ­ilization itself. By contrast, the authentic South Seas is, almost by definition, cc uncivilized

In noting that Nakajima discovers the South Seas through the texts that he reads, I do not mean to say that he was passively "influenced" by Western writers and sim‑

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ply reproduced their vision of the South Seas. On the contrary, he actively adopted these writers as models and appropriated their stance in order to establish his own

position as a writer. One can find an early example of this process of emulation and appropriation in a tanka sequence called "Henreki" (Pilgrimages), written in 1937 but first published after the author's death. This sequence mirrors traditional Japa­nese aesthetics in which the poet masters his craft by aligning himself with former masters. As the final tanka in the sequence indicates; the poet creates his own "soul" or identity through this imaginary pilgrimage and transmigration through the souls of those writers with whom he chooses to identify. "How my soul has traveled afar now that I approach the age of thirty- 1, In addition to showing how a writer seeks to master his craft by seeing the world through the eyes of his consciously chosen predecessors, I would argue that these poems are meaningful in the context of Naka-Jima's apprenticeship to a colonial view of the world. Let us consider the following lines from two poems in "Henreki": "At times I wish I could feel the power of life in the raw like Gauguin.... At times, I want to plunge into Stevenson's beautiful dreams and be intoxicated :"9 Here the young Nakajima wishes to experience the South Seas by replicating the emotions and dreams of two artists that epitomize South Seas exoticism. By adopting the point of view of these Western artists, he experiences the South Seas as a dream of primitive and "raw" life—that is, the con­trary of the urban, industrial society—and is "intoxicated" with his dream.

At the time he wrote "Henreki Nakajima was a young dilettante content to for­mulate imaginary projects without actually realizing them. However, a few years later, he carried out one of these projects—one with clear South Seas connotations. In 1940, a year before he departed for Palau, Nakajima entrusted a manuscript about Robert Louis Stevenson entitled Tsusitara no shi (The Death of Tsusitala) to the edi­tor Fukuda KyUya. Fukuda later arranged for the work to be published in the May 1942 issue of the literary periodical Bungakukai (Literary World) under the title Hikari to kaze to yume (Light, Wind, and Dreams). The editor apparently renamed the book because the word death in the original manuscript was thought inauspi­cious after the outbreak of the Pacific War. This novel, a fictional autobiography based on Stevenson's last years in Samoa, was nominated by members of the Japa­nese literary establishment as a candidate for the fifteenth Akutagawa Prize, Japan's most prestigious literary award, but it failed to win. Nor, however, did any of the Other five nominees; for the second time since the establishment of the Akutagawa Prize in 1935, the jury chose not to make an award that year. Yasuoka ShotarO, who was on the Akutagawa prize jury, remembers his own first impressions after read­ing the manuscript: "It did not appear to be a rebellious work that was out of line with national policy of the time. However, I felt there was something in the work that journalism of the time might shy away from, for fear of what the military au­thorities might say. At the same time, I am not sure where in the work this concern came from. 1120

This "fictional autobiography" is an odd hybrid that defies easy classification, combining as it does imaginary scenes with translated passages from Stevenson's writings, especially his Vailima Letters but also from many other works, including Footnote to History, In the South Seas, Essays, Memories and Portraits, and Steven-son's poems. Formally, the text alternates between entries in the diary of the puta­tive narrator, "Stevenson:' written in the first person, and a biography of Steven-son's years in Samoa (1890-94) told by an omniscient narrator.2' This narrative instability produces a jarring effect on the reader, a fact that may account for the somewhat ambivalent and strained reception the work received when it was first published. Under the guise of writing Stevenson's diary, Nakajima regularly and anachronistically inserts his own opinions on the contemporary literary scene of Japan into Stevenson's mouth, a fact that tends to blur the boundaries between char­acter and narrator. For that reason, most critics who have read this work are in agree­ment that "Nakajima has infused much of his own beliefs into the portrait. '22

In addition, Light, Wind, and Dreams is a critique of late nineteenth-century Western meddling in Samoa—a critique that is voiced by Stevenson. At the same time, however, the work can be read as an allegory about the Japanese colonization of the South Seas and the figure of Stevenson can be seen as a stand-in for the nar­rator. The author of Light, Wind, and Dreams invites such an interpretation by his oscillation between first- and third-person modes of narration style and by his ten­dency to use Stevenson as a spokesman for his own views. In Japan, with its tradi­tion of writing highly subjective first-person novels, readers and critics alike are ac­customed to read first-person narratives as confessions. When Nakajima's book first appeared in print, critics were quick to observe that the author had left for the South Seas shortly after completing the manuscript, perhaps contributing toa blurring of writer and character. Accordingly, when Stevenson expresses critical views of West­ern imperialism in Samoa, the reader can also construe his remarks as expressing the author's negative opinions about Western empire, and indirectly, criticism of Japanese colonial policies .23 Perhaps a second reason for the book's ambivalent re­ception is that the protagonist, Stevenson, is especially critical of Germany's role in Samoa at a time when Germany was an ally of Japan.

Nakajima clearly identified strongly with Stevenson in this "diary' particularly with his protagonist's critical attitude toward European imperialism and his at­traction to the "primitive" islanders. From the opening passage, Samoa is refracted through the vision of a European artist who seeks spiritual renewal through con­tact with a "primitive" people: "Love the sun, the land and all living creatures, scorn wealth, give alms to the one that asks, and consider the white's man's civilization as nothing but a great prejudice. Stride side by side with uneducated but Strong people, feel the pleasant sensation of blood pulsing under your skin wet from labor in the wind and the bright light.. . . Say only what you truly think and do only what you really want to do. This was his new life. 1121

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The novel ends the story with the death of "Tsusitara," a Samoan word meaning a "storyteller," which had become Stevenson's title among the Samoans. "Just as the people of South Seas are inebriated with the joy of life, they are overcome with despair and grief in the face of death. As tears streamed down his bronzed and wrin­kled face, the old chief whispered in a low voice. Tofa [sleep]! Tsusitara"25 Tsusitara thus ends his life surrounded by the islanders who loved him and accepted him as the teller of their story.

In a study of Nakajima, Wada Hirobumi poses an intriguing question about this odd literary work: why did Nakajima choose to entrust (takusO) to himself the writer Robert Louis Stevenson?26 Wada points to the many obvious affinities Nakajima had with the Scottish writer: both men were writers of "tales:' both were physically frail, and both were fascinated by the exoticism of the South Seas.27 However, this reasoning is based partly on a retrospective illusion: that is, it compares the Steven­son in Samoa with Nakajima as canonized by his postwar critics rather than with Nakajima at the time he wrote this novel. ,Unlike Robert Louis Stevenson, an au­thor with an international reputation by the time he moved to Samoa, Nakajima was a virtually unknown writer who was working as a teacher of English and Japa­nese in the Yokohama Girls' School at the time he wrote Light, Wind, and Dreams. I would argue that, on the contrary, Nakajima discovers the exoticism of the South Seas precisely by putting himself in Stevenson's position: that is, by writing this book, he assumes Stevenson's position and the South. Seas becomes the South Seas of Robert Louis Stevenson. For Nakajima, Stevenson was not a mirror in which he could see a reflection of himself but a model he sought to emulate, vicariously, by writing.

If we compare the geopolitical position of these two men, we will discover a similarity of perhaps greater significance than the superficial connections that one can point to between the two authors' biographies. As a creative writer living at the peak of the Japanese empire, Nakajima stood in a position toward the South Seas in 1940 analogous to that of Stevenson to Samoa in the 189os. By telling the story of Stevenson in Samoa as a "fictional autobiography:' Nakajima both fused himself with Stevenson and mastered his perspective on the South Seas. To un­derstand the true significance and the novelty of this geopolitical similarity, it will be fruitful to compare the perspective of Stevenson in Nakajima's novel (written half a century after Stevenson's death) with that of a Japanese contemporary of Stevenson, Shiga Shigetaka.

The young Shiga wrote Nan'yö jiji (Conditions of the South Seas) in 1887, a year after spending ten months cruising the South Seas on the Navy training vessel Tsukuba. In a chapter titled "Tangaroa shinrei no yume monogotari" (Dream Story of the God Tangaloa), Shiga offers an account of Samoa's loss of independence, which overlaps with the plot of Light, Wind, and Dreams. Both works stress the devastat­ ing effects of Western colonization upon Samoa and denounce the destructive med­dling in Samoan affairs by England, America, and Germany. The chief difference between these two accounts lies not in the events they narrate but rather in the po­sition of the narrator toward these events. Shiga implicitly identifies not with the white settlers who came to Samoa but rather with the Samoan victims of Western imperialism. In Shiga's account, a Samoan god appears to him in a dream and ad­dresses him as follows: "Are you not a man of the yellow race? I will set before you the grievances that fill my breast:' That is, Shiga is addressed precisely because he is not white and because he can empathize with the grievances of the Samoans. The god then explains how the Germans have used trickery and force to seize control of his country at a time when all of Europe is in a "colonial fever:' scurrying to grab .the last remaining lands of the South Seas. In his closing words, he issues the fol­lowing warning to Shiga: "In the end, Samoa will probably not be able to secure its independence because of a combination of domestic unrest and foreign interfer­ence. If you make it back to Japan safely, I want you to let your countrymen know about recent events in Samoa and to take them as a warning for your future. In the future you should strive to avoid mistakes such as defying the laws of biological evolution and worshipping all Western things and intoxicating yourself with West­ern ways. 1128 When Shiga sets down this god's account of how Samoa lost its inde­pendence, he offers us a Samoan perspective on the South Seas as well as on Eu­rope. Addressed by the god, Shiga is invited to think of Samoa as an example of the dangers presented by the Western imperialist threat from which japan—as a col­ored nation—can learn a valuable lesson.

Recounting the same series of events fifty years later in Light, Wind, and Dreams, Nakajima completely reverses Shiga's perspective. Rather than offer a Samoan point. of view on Europe, he tells us about Samoa as seen by a European: Stevenson. Samoa is no longer the example from which Japan can learn a useful lesson, nor is it a "warn­ing" for its future. Rather, Stevenson, the romanticist, becomes the figure to emu­late. In adopting Stevenson's—that is a Westerner's—perspective, Nakajima depicts the South Seas both as an antidote to the ills of civilization and as a tropical para­dise under threat from the same civilization. Perhaps the political significance of Light, Wind, and Dreams lies in this fusion not only of writer and character, of Naka-jima and Stevenson, but also of the British empire in 1890 and the Japanese empire in 1940, of Stevenson's criticism of Western imperialism and of the rhetoric of the Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere. 29 As we have seen, even the Samoans in the novel view Stevenson as their benefactor and choose him as their storyteller. As I hope to show, the works Nakajima wrote after traveling to Micronesia are writ­ten from a similar point of view, but with some significant changes: a Japanese nar­rator substitutes himself for Stevenson and he writes about a Japanese colony rather than a European one.

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DECOLONIZING NAKAJIMA ATSUSHI

Did Nakajima realize that he was looking for a South Seas that he had first discov­ered in Western fiction? And was he conscious that he was copying Stevenson's ro­manticist vision of the South Seas? At first glance, Nakajima would seem to be a writer blinded by his "western eyeglasses" (to use Masaki Tsuneo's term). However, if we examine the South Seas stories he wrote after his experiences in Palau, he seems to anticipate (rather than illustrate) the theories of Masaki Tsuneo precisely by his very conscious endeavor to situate himself within the Japanese empire.

In 1942, Nakajima wrote a short story called "Mahiru" (High Noon), which is included in his anthology Atolls. In this story, a Japanese narrator chides himself for his stereotyped images of the South Seas.30 Appropriately, the story begins with the narrator "opening his eyes" onto a scene resembling some of the picture post­cards of Micronesia that Nakajima regularly sent to his family back in Japan. "When I went to look out at the offing, a bright scarlet triangular sail slicing the mackerel blue waters made my eyes open wide. The sailboat was just about to reach the limit where the reef turns into the open sea. Judging by the sunlight, it must have been about noon"" Reflecting on the reasons that drove him to come to the South Seas, the narrator recalls the frigid mists of the north and the thoughts that had tormented him the year before:32 CCj could: no longer deliberately summon up from my mem­ory the vivid sensation of the winter cold penetrating my flesh. At the same time, the many cares I had once been tormented with in the north were now nothing but memories of indifferent matters which remained as vague shadows that now hov­ered on the other side of a membrane of happy oblivion. 1333

The narrator finds himself enveloped by a "membrane of happy oblivion" al­though it is not clear whether this "membrane" is a product of his own conscious­ness. or a property of his external environment .34 This membrane filters out what he would prefer to not to see, particularly the memories that "h6ver like vague shad­ows" on its other side. As soon as the narrator refers to this "membrane" of forget­fulness that covers his consciousness in the south, a second "person within him" interrupts his monologue to ask him some embarrassing questions about his true motives for traveling to the South Seas: did he not travel to the south "to throw him­self into this new and unknown environment and take a chance on discovering pow­ers within himself of which he was not even aware"? This second, "nasty" self then rips apart the membrane of "happy oblivion" which protected him.

Then this nasty fellow inside me addressed me: I don't mind if you sought only idle­ness and inaction. Provided, that is, that you are truly without regrets—but are you truly freed from the ghost of modernity, of Europe, of the artificial world? The fact

⦁ remains that wherever you happen to be, you are always yourself. You are always the same whether you are walking in the slightly chilly Jingu Park where the gingko leaves are falling or whether you are stuffing yourself with the breadfruit roasted on hot stones

with the other islanders. You are not the slightest bit different. The bright light and the hot wind only cover your consciousness for a short time with a thick veil. Perhaps you think that you are gazing out at the glittering sea and sky at this moment. Or maybe you flatter yourself that you are looking at them with the same gaze as the islanders. What an absurd idea! In reality you are not even trying to look at the sea and sky. You have your eyes turned toward the space that lies beyond them but in your heart you keep reciting over and over again, as though it were a kind of magic incantation, the words, "Elleest retrouvée!—Quoi ?—Céternité. C'est la mer melee au soleil' [Rim­baud: It is found again. What? Eternity. It is the sea mixed with the sun.] You're not even trying to look at the islanders. All you can see are reproductions of Gauguin paint­ings. And you are not looking at Micronesia either. All that you see are pale copies of the Polynesia depicted by Loti and Melville. How can you discover eternity with those pale (shells) blinders you wear on your eyes. You pathetic creature! 35

How does this nasty second self diagnose the narrator's optical problem? First, when he claims that the narrator is haunted by the "ghost of modernity' he implies that his distorted view of the south is a hallucination. Next, he traces this distorted vision to a veil covering the narrator's consciousness, caused by the "bright light and hot wind:' that is, an external obstacle that might easily be removed. Finally, he chal­lenges the narrator—now addressed deprecatingly as "you pathetic creature"—with the diagnosis that he cannot see the reality before his eyes because he wears "shells" on them, which filter any external stimulus before it reaches his consciousness.

But how did the narrator allow these shells to usurp the place of his living eyes? Here this second voice tells him that he is not even trying to look at the sky and seas with "the same gaze as the islanders" because he has his eyes "turned toward the space that lies beyond them." And this "space that lies beyond" is nothing other than the position of Europe from which the narrator turns his gaze on the people of the South Seas. At that point, a third voice enters what had hitherto been a dia­logue: "But you had better take care. Primitive is not the same thing as health, nor is idleness. There is nothing more dangerous than a mistaken flight from civiliza‑

tion'

36 Here Nakajima has penetrated to the crux of the matter—for the narrator who can only see "reproductions of Gauguin paintings" and "pale copies of the Poly­nesia depicted by Loti and Melville" uncovers his own mimicry of a European tra­dition of "flight from civilization" and of pursuit of primitive health. The Japanese colonizer, who has internalized the vision of the European artists,, sees copies that are twice removed from the realities of the South Seas, which have therefore be­come "pale" and lost their hue.

In a study of Western representations of Tahiti, Robert Nicole has argued that the stereotype of the South Seas as primitive paradise was invented by Western artists and writers seeking to escape from their own urban, industrial civilization: it was imagined as the "other" of Europe, unspoiled nature as opposed to civilized artifice, primitive physicality as opposed to the "ghost of modernity."" These writers pro‑

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duced texts that "created the very reality they appear to describe: As a result of con­stant repetition and outright plagiarism, their texts formed "a tradition, or what Michel Foucault calls a discourse, whose material presence and weight, not the orig­inality of a given author, is really responsible for the texts produced out of it.

"38 The narrator of "High Noon" tries to intoxicate himself with this textual South Seas when he repeats the words ofRimbauds poem like a magic incantation but the formula has clearly lost its magic all that remains are stereotypes and pale copies Instead he is prodded by his inner voices to become aware of his hidden "self-colonization" as the first step in a process of decolonization. In the end, the narrator apparently acknowledges that these "eyeglasses" can never really belong to him: "People who do not fear to look at the world with their own eyes, rather than with borrowed eyes, are always healthy no matter what their surroundings. 1139

This narrator who confesses that he sees only a pale, stereotypical copy of the South Seas goes on to describe himself as a cultural hybrid, a multiplicity of frag­mentary and partial selves, none of which is pure: "In any case, it seemed that there were many strange creatures dwelling together within me in total disorder, includ­ing miserable and revolting creatures. 1140' Long before he set off for Palau, Naka-jima had explored the theme of mimicry and cultural hybridity in his short story "Kamereon nikki" (The Chameleon Diary). Like the narrator of "High Noon," the first-person narrator of this diary is fascinated with the tropics. A teacher of natu­ral history, he finds that his craving for tropical exoticism is satisfied when he is asked to look after a chameleon presented to his school: "The exoticism that had lain dormant for so long came alive again with the unexpected appearance of this rare, little animal" Yet at the end of the story, the narrator finds an image of him­self in the mirror offered by this animal, famous for its ability to change its body color at will. Like the chameleon, the narrator's identity is multiple and mixed: "In the final analysis, to what extent is my way of looking at things really my own? Like the jackdaw in Aesop's tales, I have a few feathers of Leopardi, a few of Schopen-hauer, a few more of Lucretius, some from Zhuang-zi and Lie-zi, and a few from Montaigne: what an ugly bird!" Just as the narrator in Nakajimá's early "Chameleon Diary" depicts himself as a bird of manyfeathers,4' the narrator of "High Noon" describes himself as "a clown who craftily wears the mask of Voltaire or a fake gen­tleman-scholar decked out in the trappings of ancient China? 1141 The copy is treated as parody (the clown) and counterfeit (the fake gentleman-scholar). In these ex­amples, the narrator expresses a sense of inauthenticity because of his mimicry of ancient China and the modern West, the two ancestors from which so much of Japa­nese culture is the hybrid descendant. Japanese literature, in particular, descends from the kanji culture of East Asia and Western cultures introduced after the Meiji Restoration. Nakajima Atsushi is here expressing a sense of cultural colonization from which no Japanese writer could have been totally free.43

In "High Noon:' the narrator realizes that the concepts of identity that he had taken for granted—that he had a unitary self and belonged to a pure culture—are perhaps only fantasies with which he was deluding himself. Unlike Homi Bhabha, who celebrates postcolonial hybridity and diaspora, the narrator does not experi­ence this condition as a form of emancipation, but rather as a painful awakening from a bout of intoxication. One could imagine that, after having discovered his own self-colonization, the narrator would react by embracing the "authentic" Japa­nese identity that preexisted the nation's self-colonization. Like many writers of this period, the narrator both yearns nostalgically for the cultural wholeness associated with tradition and realizes that there is no turning back to Japan's premodern past.44 Near the end of the story, he recounts a dream from the night before in which he found himself at a kabuki theater. Curiously, he was not there to watch a play, but was rather looking at the goods on display in a souvenir shop: Japanese sweets, por­traits of kabuki actors, and so on. "I don't particularly care for the kabuki theater. Naturally I have even less interest in souvenir shops. Why did I suddenly recall this superficial fragment of my life in Tokyo—so totally without meaning and content—when I was listening to the sound of coconuts falling from the trees near the na­tive's house thatched with palm leaves on this tiny island surrounded by the vast Pacific Ocean? 1141 This meaningless fragment of his life has occurred unbidden to another part of his divided self, another one of the "strange creatures" that live within him, alongside "a clown who craftily wears the mask of Voltaire or the fake gentle­men decked out in the trappings of ancient China:' By stressing that he does not even enjoy kabuki, Nakajima's protagonist refuses to privilege his sense of belong­ing to a Japanese culture above his "Western" or "Chinese" identities: the wardrobe of masks, costumes, and other trappings that make up his composite self. In addi­tion, the narrator encounters not the kabuki stage but the kabuki souvenir shop in which the dramatic art has already been reduced to commercialized cliché. To the extent that he attempts to return to a fixed cultural identity as a Japanese, he is likely to do nothing more than embrace commodified stereotypes as in his dream. "High Noon" offers no easy solutions to the problem of identity: homelessness and cosmopolitanism are the ineluctable conditions of the postcolonial self.

"MARIYAN": WRITER, ETHNOGRAPHER,

- AND NATIVE INFORMANT

In the same collection in which "High Noon" was published, Nakajima wrote a short story called "Mariyan" (Mariyan), the portrait of an indigenous woman of the South Seas. In an essay on postcolonialism in the Japanese context, Nakamura Kazue refers to "Mariyan" as the start of postcolonial literature in Japanese.46 I will treat this story as a Janus-faced work, which simultaneously looks back at the colonial period and forward to our postcolonial present.

"Mariyan" is an episodic work in which nothing really happens. The narrator

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meets Mariyan at the house of his friend H, a Japanese ethnographer and long-term resident in Micronesia. H tells the narrator of Mariyan's past, her education, and her family background. The narrator describes Mariyan, tries to explain her, and occasionally cites her opinions. He also hints that Mariyan may enter into a romantic involvement with him or perhaps with H; in the end, this romance fails to occur. At the end of the story both Japanese men suddenly return to Japan, ostensibly on a temporary trip. Writing from Japan (naichi) a few months later, the narrator rem­inisces and wonders what Mariyan is thinking. Although he ends his story in Japan, he continues to be haunted by this Micronesian woman.

The narrator of "Mariyan" works for the colonial government but he is hardly a "typical" bureaucrat. He says of himself: "I have a rather odd character, so I was completely unable to be myself in my dealings with all of my colleagues in the Palau government office; aside from Mr. H, I had no other person that I could really call my friend. Due to his "odd character:' the narrator neither fits into his govern­ment office nor gets along with his colleagues. By emphasizing the peripheral po­sition he occupies in the bureaucracy and the eccentricity of his character, this nar­rator appears to disavow his authority as a colonial bureaucrat.48 Thus, at least in his own eyes, the narrator of "Mariyan" occupies a dual position: officially, he is an agent of authority but unofficially he is a nonconformist who keeps his distance from institutional authority. 49From this dual position, he simultaneously expounds colonial discourse on South Seas and subverts it by exposing its incoherence and contradictions.

If the narrator is a reluctant colonizer, H is an expert on Micronesia culture. H is modeled after Hijikata Hisakatsu (1900-1977), a Japanese ethnographer who lived in Micronesia for thirteen years and befriended Nakajima during his stay in Palau. Born into an aristocratic family, he studied sculpture at Tokyo University of the Fine Arts but set off for Japanese-ruled Micronesia in 1929 and remained there until 1942. In an essay entitled Waga seishun no toki (The Days of My Youth), he explained why he chose to go to the South Seas rather than to Paris—then the international capi­tal of the art world—after graduating from art school. After the First World War, he notes, major European artists often drew their inspiration from the art forms of "primitive" and "undeveloped" people of Africa. Rather than go to Paris to study "primitive" art, he reasoned that he should experience "primitive" art directly. For­tunately, at this time, the Japanese empire included one territory inhabited by bona fide "primitives" "If it was just a matter of going to Paris to bring back France & Africa primitivism, would it not be more splendid to create a Japan & Primitive in the South Seas? 1150 For Hijikata, Micronesia was plainly an analogue to French colonies in Africa. Consequently, he did not need to take the long detour of study­ing "primitive" art by going to Paris but should rather follow the example of French artists who went directly to Africa. Hijikata saw his own artistic project in impe­rial, indeed in geopolitical terms at a time when Japan had become a great empire.

Hijikata, who wrote this essay in 1968, adds with a touch of sarcasm: "Such were the distorted (views) of those like me who did not go to Europe: Though he com­pared his own trajectory to that of the European modernists, he differed from them in one important respect: Picasso, for example, actually encountered African art in ethnographic museums in Paris. In fact, Hijijkata more closely resembled Gauguin, the paradigmatic artist fleeing to the primitive South Seas,. and for that reason he is referred to sometimes as the "Japanese Gauguin "51 In his long untitled farewell poem to Tokyo, included in his Days of My Youth, he writes of his desire to be reborn amid the primitive sun and scenery of the tropics: "I crossed to a small South Seas island and spent fifteen years living and playing with the naked natives.. . . There I ripped away the extra baggage which had accumulated and stuck to me from the time of my birth and upbringing: these did not even serve as good. accessories. "52 For this writer, civilization is nothing but useless baggage from which he desires to be free.

However, it would be hasty to dismiss Hijikata as a "wannabe Gauguin:' much as it would be to shelve Nakajima as a "would-be Stevenson:' In Palau, Hijikata started as a teacher of sculpture in island schools, but he later devoted himself single-mindedly to ethnographic research.53 In 1931 he moved to Sawatal, a tiny island in the eastern end of the Yap archipelago, inhabited by only 280 people, and he spent the next seven years living according to the customs of the islanders and studying their culture. Afterward, he published an ethnographic diary based on the notes he kept during his first year in Sawatal, called Rynboku (Driftwood). Returning to Palau in 1939, he worked part-time for the South Seas Agency, organized ethnographic surveys, and published a series of ethnographic studies. An acknowledged author­ity on Micronesian culture, he befriended writers and artists who visited Microne­sia, including Nakajima Atsushi.54

In the story "Mariyan," H serves as mediator between the narrator and Mariyan, and, more generally, between the narrator and Palauan society and culture. He plays a role not unlike that which Hijikata Hisakatsu performed with respect to the writer Nakajima in real life. As an intimate friend, Nakajima enjoyed free and untram­meled access to Hijikata's notebooks and diaries and reworked material he found there when he wrote his stories. In Aotokage no yume (Dream of the Blue Lizard), Hijikata notes that Nakajima cobbled together two separate entries from Hijikata's journal to create the plot of the story "Niwatori" (Hens). He modestly concludes: "A real writer will end up writing a well-structured short tale using only these sim­ple raw materials."55 Yet, Nakajima's borrowings were not restricted to using "raw materials" from the ethnographer's writings. The narrator of "Hens," who collects religious artifacts in Palau, bears more than a passing resemblance to the real Hi-jikata.56 In the December 19, 1941, entry of his diary, Nakajima mentions that he based his story "Naporeon" (Napoleon) on two different anecdotes taken from Hi-jikata's draft manuscript "Nanp6 ritOki" (An Account of the Outlying Southern Is­lands). As these two examples suggest, Nakajima actively used Hijikata's jottings

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and ethnographic notes to write his own South Seas fiction.57 In addition, Hijikata served as a filter for the writer to interpret the realities of Micronesia. In "Mariyan' Nakajima provides the reader with a candid portrait of his friend and intellectual mentor during his time in Micronesia.

If the narrator is a somewhat reluctant colonialist and Hijikata an ethnographic expert, Mariyan is an exemplary product of the policies of assimilation that the nar­rator half-heartedly implements. Nakajima probably had a real model in mind when he composed "Mariyan" In diary entries dating from his stay in the South Seas, he refers to two encounters with a young Palauan woman named Maria, and both en­tries bear a striking resemblance to corresponding episodes of "Mariyan" In the first entry, dated December 21, 1941, he describes an evening spent at the home of Hijikata Hisakatsu, where he samples a variety of local foods for the first time. He adds, "Maria treated us to a feast today:' In the second, dated December 31, he men­tions going out for a stroll late at night with Hijikata and a few other men. Maria "is invited" to join them on a walk to the Koror pier where they relax by the side of a pooi.58 The corresponding passages from the story "Mariyan" are as follows: "Sometimes, Mariyan would bring some Palauan dishes that she cooked to H's place and entertain us. Whenever that happened, I would always partake of the feast. It is thanks, to Mariyan that I had my first taste of such delicacies as binllumm, a dumpling made of tapioca wrapped in bamboo leaves and a sweet dessert called titini." And: "There was a bright moon on the evening of December 31 last year; we—that is, H, Mariyan, and myself—were taking a stroll and enjoying the cool evening breeze that brushed against our skin. 1159

Rather than explore whether his depiction of Mariyan bears any resemblance to the real model on which he based his portrait, I examine the coherence of Mariyan as a discursive creation. The character Mariyan attended a girls' high school (jogakkO) in Japan, is a voracious reader, and is a polyglot intellectual in her own right. She is introduced to the narrator as H's Palauan language teacher: she stops by regularly to help him transcribe ancient Palauan narrative poems and translate them into Japa­nese. Related on her mother's side to the most distinguished family in Palau, Mariyan is also the foster child of a character named William Gibbon, who once served as interpreter to the German ethnographer Augustin Kramer (1865-1941), when the Germans ruled Micronesia.6° Accordingly, Mariyan is second in a line of culturally hybrid native mediators-informants between Palau and its successive colonial ethno­graphers. The mention of Kramer is the first appearance of a recurring motif in this story. H and Mariyan are represented here as reenacting an earlier colonial rela­tionship first performed by the pair Kramer and Gibbon during the period when Micronesia was ruled by Germany. But the narrator takes this theme of replication one step further: hearing H mention William Gibbon, the narrator immediately as­sociates his name with the famous Edward Gibbon, author of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, treating William Gibbon not as a recurrence but rather as a colonial double or ironic parody of the renowned English historian.

"Mariyan" begins with the narrator's declaration, "Mariyan is the name of a woman whom I got to know quite well in the southern islands:' As a general rule, the narrator relies on two sources for the knowledge he conveys to us about Mariyan: the first is the secondhand information he obtains from the ethnographer H, and the second is his firsthand and personal knowledge. For example, it is largely through H's mediation that the narrator comes to hear about Mariyan's family back­ground, her education, her marriage, and divorce. The narrator introduces H as an authoritative expert on Palau, qualified to represent its people and to speak on their behalf. An early exchange exemplifies the narrator's reliance on H as privileged com­mentator on the Micronesian environment. In her presence, the narrator asks H whether Mariyan speaks English. "Laughing, Mr. H looked at Mariyan and said, 'Does she know English? Why, English is her forte. She attended an upper school for girls in Japan [naichi]." Mariyan looked slightly embarrassed, but her thick lips broke into a smile and she made no attempt to deny what H had said ."61

Rather than questioning Mariyan directly, the narrator prefers to have his in­formation filtered through H's expertise. Mariyan is the topic of their conversation but does not take part in it; at most, she assents to what is said about her or, to be precise, makes "no attempt to deny" it.

As a spectator who observes Mariyan from a distance and records the effect that she makes on him, the narrator also relies on his own direct observation to form his opinions. His position in the scene where he first meets Mariyan typifies his per­spective as an interested bystander: he is introduced to her in H's room and then left to observe as H and Mariyan proceed with their language lesson. It is worth­while to reflect on the structure of this narrative gaze, particularly on its nonreci-procity While the narrator is free to react to Mariyan at his leisure, Mariyan does not return his gaze or scrutinize him. She is exposed and vulnerable, whereas the narrator is insulated by his privilege. Indeed, one could characterize his point of view as a form of voyeuristic surveillance Mariyan is primarily apprehended as an object placed under surveillance. This voyeurism is not simply a psychological peculiarity of the narrator but a fundamental narrative structure of "Mariyan"

Peeping out of my window, I saw Mariyan cutting weeds in a nearby banana field. She must have been performing the labor service that was imposed on the women of the island from time to time. Besides Mariyan, there were several other women bending over among the grasses and holding sickles in their hands. She was probably not whistling to get my attention—Mariyan frequently visited H's room, but she proba­bly did not know where I lived. She was cutting diligently, oblivious to the fact that she was being watched by me.. . . After her big basket was stuffed full of weeds, she straightened her bent back and turned in my direction. She smiled wryly on recog‑

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nizing me, but she did not come over to talk to me. To conceal her embarrassment, she deliberately called out loudly, "Heave-ho," lifted the basket on top of her head, and walked away without saying good-bye.62

In this scene, the reader is shown in miniature the basic structure of the narra­tor's position with regard to Mariyan. First we catch a glimpse of the narrator peep­ing out at Mariyan from a protected and hidden position (she does not know where the narrator lives). In addition, the narrator observes her precisely at the moment when she performs a forced labor duty in .the company of other island women; un­der his surveillance she is transformed into a docile object of colonial rule as well as a passive object of his surveillance (her passivity is underscored by the narrator's use of the passive voice in his recounting of the scene). Lastly, when Mariyan real­izes that she is the unwitting object of the narrator's surveillance, she reacts with a "wry smile" and "embarrassment:' thereby offering the narrator a mirror reflecting his authority over her. In addition to presenting the narrator as a voyeur exercising his "right" of surveillance over Mariyan, this scene throws into relief the wider con­text in which narrator and Mariyan meet: a context of colonial disciplinary power over the bodies of the colonized.63

We have seen the method by which the narrator comes to know Mariyan; but what does he actually know about her? And how does he justify his own position toward her? First, the narrator uses the tropes and terminology of a racialist dis­course to construct her as a member of a backward race. Mariyan is called a kanaka, a derogatory term Japanese applied especially to the indigenous people of the Car-olines and Marshalls, and her ethnicity entails a variety of physical and mental lim­itations. After mentioning that Mariyan is "very much the intellectual:' he adds that "the contents of her brain have practically nothing kanaka about them," plainly im­plying that being kanaka and being an intellectual are mutually exclusive proposi­tions. In his description of Mariyan's face, he writes: "There is nothing you can do about the limitations of her race, but if you keep these limitations in mind. . . she has a truly natural and rich face." Mariyan's "truly natural and rich face" is all the more unexpected since Mariyan has not the "slightest admixture of Japanese or Western features:' even though people in the South Seas assume that "anyone with good looks must be of mixed blood."64 When he assigns Mariyan to membership in an inferior race, the narrator himself assumes the perspective of a member of a superior race, that is to say, those Japanese or Western races that are free of the afore­mentioned "limitations."

What social backdrop lies behind this rhetoric about "the limitations of race"? In the first place, one can point to the institutionalized racism of colonial society in which one's social rank was determined by one's race and ethnicity. "Microne­sians were always viewed by Japanese colonial administrators as lesser peoples in an empire that, ethnically, was sharply hierarchical." By the time that Nakajima lived in Palau, the population of nan'yO was a multiethnic mix that included mainland Japanese, Koreans, Taiwanese, and Okinawans, as well as the indigenous popula­tion. Whereas the Japanese stood at the top of the pyramid, followed by Koreans and Okinawans, the indigenous islanders were designated a third-class people (san-tOkokumin) and relegated to the bottom.65 Within this category of "third-class people:' colonial administrators distinguished between Chamorros of the Marianas, a group considered advanced and adaptable, and the kanakas, viewed as incorrigi­bly backward and lazy.66 While some scholars have described the colonial society of Micronesia as a stable and well-defined hierarchy, others have noted that the boundary between the second tier (Koreans and Okinawans) and the third (in­digenous islanders) was fluid and unsettled. For example, a comic verse popular at the time reversed the respective positions of the Koreans and the natives:

IttO kokumin Nihonjin First-class citizens, the Japanese;

NitO kokumin Okinawajin Second-class citizens, the Okinawans;

SantO kokumin buta: Third-class citizens, the national pigs:

Kanakas, Chamorro kanakas and Chamorros;

YontO kokumin ChOsenjin Fourth-class citizens, the Koreans.67

Besides the institutionalized racism of colonial society, one cannot overlook the powerful influence that media images denigrating the "backward" South Seas is­landers had on all Japanese during the interwar years. In the 19205 and 1930s, pop­ular novels, children's comic strips, and films disseminated to the masses a "popu­lar Orientalism' in which images of colonial and backward groups in the South Seas are contrasted with Japanese modernity. I have already noted that BOken Dan-kichi (The Adventures of Dankichi) epitomizes this popular orientalism.68 The pop­ular song "ShUchO no musume" (The Chief's Daughter), composed by Ishida Ishi-matsu, is another work that offers a compendium of Japanese stereotypes about the South Seas. The lyrics of this song describe a native island woman as seen by her Japanese boyfriend: "My lover [raabaa] is the daughter of the chief. She is pretty dark but in nan'yö she's considered a beauty.69 She sways and dances beneath the palm trees in the Marshalls, south of the equator [sic] dancing as she swigs down muddy liquor. Tomorrow is the happy festival of the severed heads. The chief's daughter I saw yesterday is sleeping today beneath the banana tree. How can a girl who does not dance make a good wife?"70

As the daughter of a Palauan chieftain, Mariyan must also be seen in counter­point with the offhand images of savagery, headhunting, and innocent playfulness evoked by this popular song. In addition to manga and popular song, I would men­tion as well the powerful influence of film on Japan's tropical Orientalism. Inter­estingly, Nakajima begins his early story "Roshituski" (Record of a Strange Illness) with a scene in which the protagonist, SanzO, is watching a film of the natives of the South Seas. We learn that the film is a documentary made by "whites" about an ex‑

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ploration of "savage lands" As a spectator, he adopts the exotic point of view of the Western cameraman toward the savage people being filmed. "On the screen you could see images of the lifestyle of the natives [dojin] of the South Seas" The first scene of the film depicts a group of native women with "thick lips" and "snub noses" who wear only straw skirts around their waists and eat with their fingers. The next scene shows a group of natives dancing to the loud beat of a drum during a village festival. "A man who looked like the tribal chief was sitting cross-legged among a group of elders off to the side of the dance stage. Thin and with prominent cheek­bones, the old man wore several strings of beads around his neck. Conscious that he was being photographed, he seemed strangely agitated and looked on at the per­formance with a gaze that showed that he had completely lost his self-confidence as a savage:' As he watches the movie, SanzO sets off on a series of metaphysical reflections on the "uncertainties of existence:' "Whenever he read accounts of the primitive lives of savages or saw pictures of them, he could hardly help thinking how it might have been if he had been born among them.... Under the dazzling light of the tropical sun, would he not have passed his entire life ignorant of the structure of the solar system, the history of the human species, of materialism, Vi-malakirti, and the categorical imperative?" SanzO thus experiences the South Seas as constituting the contrary of a civilized modernity defined as an amalgam of East­ern and Western science and philosophy and that is objectified and offered to him by the modern technology of film."

When the narrator speaks about "mixed blood" and racial improvement by in­termarriage, he is drawing on a different register of discourse, namely, that of eu-genics.72 Eugenics, oryuseigaku (literally, the science of superior birth), entered Japa­nese discourse in the late nineteenth century, along with social-Darwinist notions of a hierarchy among the races of men. Takahashi Yoshio, a disciple of Fukuzawa, introduced eugenics to the Japanese in Nihon jinshu kairyOron (Theory on the Im­provement of the Japanese Race; 1884). Believing that the Japanese are physically and mentally "inferior" to the white race, Takahashi advocated intermarriage of white and yellow races (kOhaku zakkon) as a scientific means to improve the racial stock of the Japanese. According to his theory, the birth of mixed-blood children (konketsuji) would eventually bring an influx of "superior" Western blood into Japan since the blood of the superior race would predominate over that of the inferior race as a result of such unions .71 Accordingly, Takahashi was an early proponent of the "mixed-blood" position of Japanese eugenics, one of two opposing positions concerning blood. KatO Hiroyuki, a proponent of the opposing "pure-blood' posi­tion, published a scathing rebuttal of Takahashi's theory in 1886, in which he ar­gued that interracial marriage would produce "a completely new hybrid category of persons whose political and social status would be unclear and perplexing."74 Most Japanese eugenicists at this time supported the pure-blood position, but the advo­cates of the opposing side continued to promote intermarriage as a means of racial improvement throughout the prewar period. Unlike Takahashi, these writers ar­gued that the "inferior" races colonized by the Japanese would most benefit from mixing their blood with the superior Japanese. For example, in 1939, Ijichi Susumu advocated intermarriage between Japanese and carefully selected Manchurian fe­males on the grounds that "mixing superior Japanese blood with inferior Manchu­rian blood would stimulate the development and civilization of inferior peoples:' Unlike Takahashi, Ijichi identifies the Japanese as a superior race who can improve inferior races by this "racial blood transfusion."75 While Ijichi's position may not have been common among eugenicists, Japan's colonial governments actively fa­vored intermarriage between Japanese and the colonized as a means to promote the assimilation of the colonized within the Japanese empire.

The narrator elliptically refers to such theories of "racial improvement" to present his own solution to the conundrum posed by Mariyan—for, as an intellec­tual kanaka, Mariyan does constitute a challenge to the narrator's racial categories and his preconceptions about "backward" races. She may belong to a race of igno­rant and inferior savages, but the narrator has to draw a distinction between her racial identity as a kanaka and her individual story. In fact, he relates her individ­ual story as a narrative of progress and enlightenment: Mariyan, who attended up­per school in Japan, was able to rise above the limitations of her race and become "enlightened:" "the number one reader in Koror, even if we include all the Japanese residents." If "the contents of her brain have practically nothing kanaka about them," then the narrator is tempted to think of this woman, whom he praises as so "en­lightened" and exceptional, as konketsu. Of course, the narrator does not assert that Mariyan is of mixed blood: in fact he assures us that Mariyan, unlike her foster father William Gibbon, is a "pure" Micronesian. Rather, he attempts to understand and explain her in terms of the category of mixed blood: his construction of Mariyan as a child of mixed blood is a purely rhetorical exercise. Among eugenicists, it was a truism at the time that the kanaka—as an inferior race—would benefit most from intermarrying with members of superior races, whether Japanese or Western; one finds similar comments in other stories by Nakajima from this period. The later al­lusions in the story to Mariyan's possible marriage with a Japanese need to be un­derstood in the same context.76 In constructing Mariyan as a child of mixed blood, he makes tactical adjustments in racial categories to accommodate an "exception" without calling into question the racial hierarchy per se. 77

PARADISE LOST AND THE

CORRUPTION OF THE PRIMITIVE

In contrast to this racialized description of Mariyan, the narrator elsewhere uses the terminology of a climate-centered discourse to depict Mariyan as a noble sav­age corrupted by an imposed civilization. In this discourse, the narrator divides the

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world into temperate and tropical zones, assigning Japan to the former and the South Seas to the latter. Although terms such as "temperate" and "tropical" are ordinarily employed to designate geographical regions, the narrator uses them to denote op­posing aesthetic standards and values .71 Effectively, he sets up a binary opposition between tropical and temperate standards of beauty in order to demonstrate that the two are mutually incompatible and must not be. mixed. For example, he offers the following explanation about the administrative capital of Koror.

Mariyan herself seems to be a bit ashamed of her own Kanaka looks.. . [because] she lives in Koror City [the cultural center of the nan)'ô archipelago], where standards of civilized beauty exert a great influence even among the indigenous islanders. In real­ity; it seems to me that this Koror—and the fact is that I have lived longest in this place—is in a state of chaos brought on by the intrusion of values belonging to the temper­ate zones in a city that lies in the tropics. I was not so struck by this fact when I first came to Koror, but now, whenever I return to the city after making a circuit of islands where there are no Japanese residents, I have come to feel it quite clearly. In this place, neither tropical nor temperate things seem very beautiful. Or it would be more ac­curate to write that what we call beauty—whether tropical or temperate—does not exist here at all. Things that you would expect to have tropical beauty wither after suf­fering castration at the hands of temperate civilization, while things that ought to pos­sess a temperate beauty become feeble and lose their poise in this tropical landscape, particularly under the relentless light of the sun. ihe city reeks of decadence and a strange poverty; everyone is obviously. obsessed with keeping up appearances, but that only adds to the sense that the place is a colonial backwater. 79

If the narrator sees race as a vertical hierarchy, he describes these climate zones as flat and nonhierarchical (literally bands, tai or obi). However, these "tropical" and "temperate" zones stand in a clear power relationship: the narrator uses the terms "temperate" and "civilized" interchangeably and implicitly treats "tropical" as syn­onymous with uncivilized. At the same time, the narrator tries to be evenhanded: he recognizes that both tropical and civilized forms of beauty—in their pure, au­thentic forms—are worthy of admiration. By contrast, he condemns mixing as a form of adulteration or pollution. This "adulteration" happens especially when natives of the tropics give up their own standards of beauty and adopt those of civilized peoples.

The power relationship between temperate and tropical standards is made explicit by the narrator's metaphors. Tropical beauty suffers "castration at the hands of tem­perate civilization, while things that ought to possess a temperate beauty become feeble and lose their poise in this tropical landscape" Tropical beauty is a wild ani­mal rendered impotent after being operated on by a castrating "civilization:' By con­trast, civilized beauty is like an overdressed woman in the tropics who loses her poise in the blazing sun: the harm is limited and results merely from circumstance rather than from competing standards. While the power differential in the narrator's use of metaphor is easy to unravel, the same cannot be said of the complicated gender politics in this passage. Most colonial narratives tend to depict the South Seas as fem­inine and the colonizer as masculine. By contrast, the narrator of "Mariyan" implicitly treats the tropics as a male when he speaks of castration, but then goes on to attrib­ute the "feminine" predicate of beauty to the tropics. Civilization is also depicted in feminine terms as wilting under the sun and lacking in "poise"

The harm caused by civilized standards does not end with the destruction of primitive beauty. Unlike the residents of "islands where there are no Japanese' in­digenous islanders in Koror tend to internalize civilized standards. Mariyan "seems to be a bit ashamed of her own kanakan looks: Corrupted by civilized standards, Mariyan cannot appreciate her own beauty. The beauty Mariyan represents exists only outside herself—as a lost object, an object of longing and nostalgia for this nar­rator from the temperate zone. Only he is able to "discover" this beauty, turn it into an object of aesthetic contemplation, appropriate it for his own enjoyment, and res­cue it from destruction. The narrator both laments and savors the tragic disap­pearance of tropical beauty under the castrating influence of civilization.

Whereas the ignorant savage is redeemed in the racist narrative of progress and civilization, the primitive innocent is an endangered species in this nostalgic account of civilization and corruption. Or rather, the primitive can retain its identity and beauty only by remaining isolated from outside interaction, whereas any changes it makes to adapt to external influences are seen as degrading, alienating, and identity-erasing. The narrator despises the half-civilized colonial backwater of Koror, which "reeks of decadence:" Koror is ugly because it belongs neither to the civilized nor to the uncivilized world: it is in between, an impure mixture and an epigone of civi­lized culture. The obverse of this horror is the nostalgia the narrator expresses for the beauty that continues in its pure state only in "islands where there are no Japa­nese residents:' 'The narrator longs for the primitive beauty of islands that he alters by his very presence and condemns the chaos of colonial cities where the Japanese have imposed their civilized standards. In this narrative of the vanishing primitive, Mariyan, the cultural hybrid, figures as a primitive corrupted by civilization.

In Mariyan, the narrator refers to discourses of race and environment to con­struct two contradictory figures of this Micronesian woman: she is a child of an in­ferior race as well as an innocent primitive—familiar figures to any student of West­ern colonial narratives. But the narrator does not merely force Mariyan into these Western colonial stereotypes: he also interposes himself as a spokesman for an am­bivalent Western perspective on Mariyan. To construct this point of view as quasi-Western, Nakajima conflates the conventional colonial rhetoric of Japan with that of the West to produce a broad, inclusive category of "the civilized" that can be con­trasted with the tropics: for example, he writes of the superior looks of islanders with "Western or Japanese" blood, stressing his identification with Europeans as a superior race. He also speaks of the Japanese and Europeans as inhabitants of the temperate zones.

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By comparing the published text of "Mariyan" with an early draft of this story, we discover that Nakajima made significant deletions and revisions to the final copy in order to make his construct of "the civilized" more cosmopolitan—indeed to sug­gest that it is universal. The statement "the contents of her brain have practically nothing kanaka about them: originally read, "the contents of her brain were like those of a civilized person, more than half Japanese, and had almost nothing kanakan about them." Or consider his description of the colonial contradictions of Koror: the final manuscript reads, "where standards of civilized beauty exert a great influence even among the indigenous islanders"; but an earlier draft reads, "where the standards of Japanese civilized beauty exert a great influence even among the islanders'8° Without speculating on the reasons behind the author's decision to cross out "Japanese" twice, I would suggest that the effect of these changes is to endow the narrator with a universal point of view rather than a view limited to Japanese national identity. By deleting any reference to Japan in the final published edition, the narrator apparently stresses a seamless identification with the West and rhetor­ically constructs the South as a place of backwardness. But was Nakajima's iden­tification with the West that seamless and unproblematical?

THE AMBIVALENCE OF. JAPANESE COLONIALISM

As we have seen, the narrator constructs Mariyan as a primitive and a savage, si­multaneously incorporating her into long-standing Western colonial narratives and introducing himself as a quasi-Western observer of her. These two narratives, those of race or climate, offer conflicting images of the primitive, always an ambivalent figure in Western history. The narrator treats Mariyan as problematic not because she is "primitive" but rather because she is culturally hybrid, at once a native Mi­cronesian and a product of Japan's assimilation policy. While Mariyan is not de­picted as internally troubled about her split identity, she is depicted as a problem for the narrator who reacts to her with distress and even pain. To the narrator, Mariyan fits into neither her environment nor the clothes she wears; for him she is a dissonant chord, an incongruous juxtaposition.

Consider two brief scenes in which the narrator discusses his ambivalent reac­tion to Mariyan.

One time, Mr. H and I paid a visit to Mariyans house, which we happened to be pass­ing by. As in almost all houses of the islanders, the flooring was largely made of bam­boo planks lined up alongside each other, and only partly of wood. I walked in with­out ceremony and noticed a small table set on the wooden floor with two books lying on it. I picked them up to see what they were. One was a selection of English poetry edited by Kuriyagawa Hakuson and the other was the Iwanami edition of The Mar­riage of Loti.81 Several baskets made of palm leaves were lined up on shelves hanging from the ceiling and light summer wear was hanging in disorder from a rope strung

across the room (the islanders do not put their clothing away but hang them out on a clothesline). The cries of chickens could be heard from under the bamboo flooring. A woman, probably a relative of Mariyan, was sleeping in a slovenly posture in a cor­ner of the room; when we came in, she cast a suspicious glance in our direction and then turned over and fell right back to sleep. I thought there was something odd in coming across Kuriyagawa Hakuson and Pierre Loti in such an environment. I would even say that the place caused me a vague sort of distress, but I cannot say for sure whether it was the books or if it was Mariyan herself that pained me. 82

The narrator is distressed when he discovers Japanese translations of European literature on Mariyan's desk. Mariyan does not read Pierre Loti in the original but rather in a Japanese translation, the Iwanami edition of The Marriage of Loti. Here he shows that Japanese translators were not merely mediators between Western ideas and the Japanese people; in this scene, they serve to introduce Western civilization to the colonial subjects over which Japan ruled. Mariyan, a colonized woman, reads Loti's classical colonial novel of the South Seas but she does so in the language of the new colonizers of the South Seas.

In the second scene, he writes:

Once I saw Mariyan all dressed up. She was decked out in a pure white dress with high heels and carried a short parasol in her hand. As usual her face was bright, or rather it beamed with a brownish sheen; her thick, bronze arms, so powerful that they could crush a demon to death, stuck out from her short sleeves; it looked like the narrow shoes with their high heels at the base of her column-like legs would bend and give way. Even as I tried my best to thrust aside the bias with which a person of weak physique regards someone who is physically superior, I could hardly help but be amused at the spectacle she offered. At the same time, it is true that I felt the same distress [itamashisa] that I had earlier experienced when I discovered the Selected En­glish Poems in her room. Just as before, this time too I was not sure whether I was dis­turbed by her white dress or by the person who was wearing it.83

Here again, the narrator uses the term itamashisa to express his emotion, although he also stresses the comical effect that Mariyan in her Sunday best makes on him.

Yet why does the narrator insist, not once, but two times in the story that he feels "distress?"84 When he records that he is distressed by Mariyan, he is displaying a patronizing arrogance toward Mariyan but at the same time he confesses to a kind of identification he feels with her. The question of the narrator's distress takes us to the heart of his confusion over how he should define his own position toward her. Only by analyzing the specific structures of Japanese colonialism can we understand why the narrator sees himself in Mariyan.

When the narrator tells us that he is distressed to discover a novel by Pierre Loti in Mariyan's home, he is not simply reacting to the juxtaposition of objects. Loti's novels or Mariyan's high heels are emblems of civilization. It is Mariyan's appro­priation of these emblems, of this cultural capital, that gives rise to the narrator's

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complex reaction. Homi Bhabha writes that for "mimicry to be effective, it must continually produce its slippage, its excess, its difference. 785 It is not Mariyan who produces this slippage or excess, but rather the narrator who produces Mariyan as "difference" Mariyan is ontologically different from a Japanese reader of the Twa-nami edition of Loti. She is ontologically deficient because she is a copy—and in this particular case, the copy of a copy. In the final analysis, Mariyan's ontological deficiency is of course an optical illusion it has nothing to do with her and every­thing to do with the gaze of the viewer.

If the narrator insists on viewing Mariyan as a "copy" who deserves pity, the ques­tion then becomes: what is the "original" on which she is modeling herself? By choos­ing Western artifacts as the standards of civilization, the narrator adopts a Euro­pean perspective from which to look down on Mariyan. But the narrator of "Mariyan" does not stand in relation to Mariyan as original to copy with respect to the Western cultural standards he invokes. In this case, both colonizer and colo­nized are culturally hybrid products of mimicry.

In this situation one can imagine that the narrator would have two ways to rep­resent his relationship to Mariyan. Instead of presuming to be the "original: the narrator would base his sense of superiority on a distinction between different types of copies. We have already noted that Nakajima closely identified with Stevenson before he left for Palau and apprenticed himself to his perspective of the South Seas in his novel Light, Wind, and Dreams. In a similar way, Japan, as a modern but non-Western country, also identified with the Western powers and studied in the West­ern school of imperialism. Not only was Japan a" good"  copy of Western imperial­ism, but it was eventually an "authorized" copy. The narrator of "Mariyan" is an agent of imperialism authorized by the very language of the League of Nations mandate under which Japan ruled Micronesia. As a member of an "advanced nation,' he ex­ercises colonial authority as "a sacred trust of civilization:' while the Micronesians are a primitive people incapable of exercising rule over themselves "under the stren­uous conditions of the modern world ."86 However, this official involved in assimi­lation policies suffers from conflicted feelings: he feels a sense of superiority to Mariyan and "imperial nostalgia" for her tropical beauty—beauty that is endangered by the very policies that the narrator is called upon to implement.

However, since both Mariyan and the narrator are equally "copies:' the narrator also finds a touch of Mariyan in himself and is tempted to make common cause with her rather than to exaggerate the differences between them.87 If we recall that Japanese imperialism was also an example of mimicry, we can understand why: this mimetic colonizer cannot help but find an image of himself in the cultural mimicry he finds in her. He identifies with the colonized Micronesian woman not because she resembles him but insofar as he considers her to be a mimic. While the narra­tor only occasionally cites Mariyan's words in this short story, he allows her to wax quite eloquent about the Pierre Loti novel, The Marriage of Loti, which he discov­ ers in her room. This novel tells the story of an English naval officer who travels to Tahiti, has a brief affair with a Tahitian girl, and then abandons her to return to En­gland. Mariyan questions whether Loti's representations bear any resemblance to the realities of the South Seas. "Mariyan aired her dissatisfaction about the Marriage of

Loti and criticized its author for misrepresenting the reality of the SOuth Seas. She argued, 'Naturally, I don't know anything about what went on long ago and in Poly‑

nesia, but even so, it is hard to believe that such things could really have happened" Here Mariyan is not only criticizing Western misrepresentations of the South Seas: she is pointing out a blind spot in the narrator's perspective of her.

In this passage—and this is the originality of "Mariyan"—the narrator has Mari-yan talk back to Loti, telling him what an educated Micronesian thinks of his fan­tasies of the South Seas. Her comment also complicates the narrator's relationship with her, since Loti is also the author of Madame Chrysanthème, which might be described as the Japanese variant of The Marriage of Loti and a blueprint for many other Orientalist fantasies about Japan. Translated as Kikusan byNogarni Toyoichiro in 1915, Madame Chrysanthème was reprinted many times and was much better known in Japan than The Marriage of Loti. Though the narrator does not explicitly mention Kikusan, the specter of this work seems to haunt Nakajima's text as its dark shadow and its parodic double. The reference to Loti destabilizes his view of her and institutes a triangular relationship among Loti, Mariyan, and the narrator.88

How do the three sides of this triangle interact with one another? A contempo­rary of Stevenson and Shiga, Loti treats Japan and the South Seas indifferently as exotic decors against which his protagonists pursue their colonial and erotic con­quests. Here I do not mean that the Japanese and South Seas islanders in his works resemble each other but rather that both are apprehended as objects of a hierar­chical gaze. Offended by Loti's novel, Mariyan directly criticizes the French writer for "misrepresenting" the reality of the South Seas. Indirectly, she points to the blind spot in the narrator's perspective toward her, refracted through these same West­ern "misrepresentations" and no less hierarchical than that of Loti. When he men­tions Loti, the narrator sets up an implicit equation in which Loti stands in the same relation to Mme. Chrysanthème (or Rarahu) as the narrator does to Mariyan. Just as the narrator speaks of Mariyan as being a deficient kanaka, Loti had earlier writ­ten of the Japanese as "a race of slit-eyed people without a brain" and goes on to say: "More than ever I feel that their souls belong to a different species than mine. I feel that my thoughts are as far from theirs as the changing conceptions of birds or the dreams of apes "89 Just as the narrator mocks Mariyan's mimicking of the ways of civilization, Loti had written of the Japanese as perfect imitators who make them­selves ridiculous by copying European ways. 90

Loti's criticism of Japanese mimicry of the West provides a model for the narra­tor's own attitude toward Mariyan, but the narrator's "distress" suggests the difference between the position that he occupies and that of Loti. By citing Mariyan's critique

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of Loti approvingly, the narrator expresses his solidarity with her: both reject be­coming the objectified "other" for a citizen of a European imperialist power. By the same token, he seems to allude to his own dissatisfaction with his "Western-tinted eyeglasses: The narrator is torn between his identification with Mariyan and his sense of superiority over her, between being observer and observed, colonizer and colo­nized Ultimately, this triangular relationship among Loti Mariyan and the narra­tor shows that the narrator cannot view Mariyan through Western-tinted eyeglasses.

The Marriage of Loti is a formula story that later became "the blueprint for hun­dreds of other such stories" Later writers recycled Loti's formula in their books; con­stant repetition in turn contributed to the formation of enduring myths about the South Seas. Here I will call attention to two key motifs of Loti's novel which figure in the tradition of South Seas novels he inaugurated: the island wife and the tragic desertion of the woman by the hero. In The Marriage of Loti, Loti turns his emo­tional and sexual relationships with. Tahitian women into a famous love story, conflated into a single character, a young girl, whitewashing its exploitative nature and ignoring the women's point of view: I will refer to this as the "island wife" mo­tif. At the end of the novel, he sails back to Europe while she is left behind on the shore to agonize and eventually die: this is the tragic desertion motif.

We have remarked that the author of "Mariyan" encountered a textual South Seas long before he actually set foot in Micronesia. Is "Mariyan" simply a Japanese ver­sion of Loti's novel that reproduces the same formulas, or does Nakajima rework the inherited motifs and differentiate his story from Loti's? The open-ended con­clusion of "Mariyan' I will argue, proves the latter: Nakajima's achievement is to take these familiar motifs and produce an anticonquest narrative.

If Loti's novel is centered on his erotic conquest of Rarahu, "Mariyan" could be subtitled "Mariyan's (re)marriage." Early in the story, we learn that Mariyan broke up with her former husband because he "was too prone to jealousy:' and that she lives alone with her five-year-old daughter. "H used to wonder whether Mariyan would finally be able to marry again—her high lineage ruling out almost every pos­sible match and her excessive 'enlightenment' making it all but impossible to find a match among the islanders:' Mariyan's "remarriage" is a constant preoccupation for these two Japanese males. Indeed, remarriage to a Japanese is presented as a form of salvation for Mariyan and a solution to the problem of being an enlightened hy­brid in primitive Micronesia.

Toward the end of the story, the narrator, H, and Mariyan take a stroll out to a wharf in Koror during which the drunken H suggests to Mariyan that she ought to take a Japanese husband if she ever remarries. Mariyan does not reply to H at first, but eventually answers after a long pause: "But you know.. . as far as Japanese men are concerned. . . you know... "Hearing Mariyan's reply and realizing that she has given some thought to the issue of remarriage, the narrator bursts out laughing when he realizes Mariyan has been thinking about her future remarriage. "And continu­ing to laugh, I asked, 'So how about a Japanese man? What do you think?' "9i

Mariyan's situation in this scene is shown to be radically different from that of Loti's heroine, the fourteen-year- old. Rarahu. Unlike Rarahu, she enjoys a consid­erable degree of autonomy and a greater sphere of power. Rather than being sim­ply a woman-object who is married off, she is portrayed as the agent of action. The two Japanese men plainly solicit Mariyan's views on marriage with a naichijin. Mariyan appears to have considered the possibility of remarriage to a Japanese, but she leaves the reader wondering what she really means by her deferred and broken answer to their questions.92

While Mariyan is represented as possessing agency, this representation is set in a larger narrative framework that undercuts her agency. H may solicit Mariyan's opin­ion but he is drunk; the narrator responds to Mariyan's words with laughter. Framed between H's drunkenness and the narrator's mockery, Mariyan's voice is effectively reduced to silence. Just as the narrator's perspective on Mariyan is constituted in a triangular relationship with Loti and Mariyan, Mariyan's agency is inscribed in a similar triangle with the two male characters. Despite the appearance of agency, Mariyan is treated as an object of exchange between the two men, who use her to establish their own relationship. The subtext of this scene is that H is proposing Mariyan as a possible "wife" for the narrator, who rejects the proposal. In this re­spect, the scene illustrates the function of marriage in patriarchal societies as de­scribed by the anthropologist Levi-Strauss: "The total relationship of exchange which constitutes marriage is not established between a man and a woman but between two groups of men, and the woman figures only as one of the objects in the exchange, not as one of the partners."93

In the scene when the narrator discovers Loti's book, he allows the fluent Mari-yan to speak back to Loti, the Western imperialist, in well-formulated and thought­ful terms. In this scene, by contrast, she is deprived of her fluency in Japanese and she is censored. Mariyan's halting and broken utterance—"But you know. . . as far as Japanese men are concerned. . . you know... "—could be construed to mean anything at all: rejection, resigned acceptance, or indecision. When Mariyan re­minds the two men twice that they "know" about Japanese men, she may be re­ferring to the well-known fact that many Japanese settlers took "island wives" dur­ing their stay in Micronesia and that the Micronesian women they married hardly ever acquired Japanese citizenship.94 Mariyan differs from Rarahu in that she pos­sesses much more agency than Loti's heroine; yet she resembles her in being an object of exchange between two men in the patriarchal structures of Japanese colo­nial power.

Since the narrator never "consummates" his relationship with Mariyan, his de­parture at the end of the story is not a tragic occasion, unlike many South Seas nar‑

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ratives, in which the abandoned woman falls into despair or even dies, as did Ra-rahu.95 Rather the narrator's departure is treated as a highly ironic episode.

As chance would have it, H and I both ended up leaving for Japan that spring for what we imagined was a temporary trip. Mariyan killed a chicken and treated us to ourlast feast of Palau cooking. Since neither of us had had so much as a bite of meat since the first of the year, we were eating with gusto and promising Mariyan, "At any rate, we will probably be coming back around autumn" (in fact, both of us were expecting to return at that time). Mariyan said with a smile on her face, "Since Uncle is already more than half Palauan anyway, I bet you will probably be back before long, but as for Toñ'chan.. . " To my annoyance she had taken to calling me by this name, copying the way H used to refer to me. At first I was a little irritated with her but in the end I was silenced and could do nothing but give a strained laugh.

I said, "So you mean to say that I am not to be relied on then?"

"No matter how close you become to Japanese from the home islands, when they return to their home, they never come back here a second time:" she retorted in an unusually wistful tone of voice. 16

Though Mariyan speaks in an "unusually" wistful tone of voice, she actually cel­ebrates the departure of the narrator and H, and offers them their final feast in Palau. Clearheaded, she "smiles" at their promises to come back in the midst of the Pacific War (although not mentioned, the war is the cause of growing food shortages on the island). Mariyan also makes a clearheaded evaluation of the likelihood of their eventual return.

To what end does the narrator rework these motifs of Loti's South Seas narra­tive? In my view, the narrator of "Mariyan" adopts a strategy to absolve the narra­tor of any colonial guilt, particularly with respect to sexual relations based on colo­nial power, a staple of most South Seas novels, notably that by Pierre Loti. In his first encounter with Mariyan, the narrator hints that there might be an interracial romantic plot involving Mariyan and H, the ethnographer, who meets Mariyan by chance when she visits H's apartment unexpectedly: "I could hear a young woman's voice from a narrow opening in the window saying, 'Is it all right to come in?'... I was a bit shocked and thought to myself, 'Boy, I had better keep an eye on this ethnographer friend of mine, but was shocked again when the person who opened the door and walked into the room turned out not to be a Japanese, but rather an island girl with an imposing physique. 1197 In the scene at the wharf, H proposes that Mariyan remarry a Japanese, implying that the narrator might make a suitable mate. While Nakajima sprinkles his story with these suggestions, in the end the roman­tic plot fails to materialize. In fact, the author seems to deliberately tantalize read­ers with the possibility of sexual relationships based on colonial power in order then to frustrate their expectation; by the same token he portrays the narrator as an emas­culated man (for example, in the passage on civilization and castration) as if to fore­close this very possibility. 98 He depicts Mariyan in masculine terms (Mariyan is seen as strong, independent, and fully autonomous) but describes himself as a "femi­nized" man (the narrator is not only physically weak, but also dependent and imma­ture). Nakajima has him voice an introspective observation that penetrates the psy­chology of the corporeally disadvantaged: "I tried my best to thrust aside the bias with which a person of weak physique regards someone who is physically superior" By deliberately foregrounding his weakness and inferiority, the narrator seeks to exculpate himself from his complicity in a colonial power relationship, if only by reason of incapacity.

Nakajima's emasculated narrator goes to great lengths to establish his own inno­cence: for example, by behaving like a child and even allowing Mariyan to treat him as one. When he bursts into laughter in response to Mariyan's reply to H's question about remarrying a Japanese man, it is clear that by his mocking he is disqualify­ing himself as a possible marriage partner. Further, when Mariyan imitates the pa­triarchal H in calling the narrator by the diminutive "Ton'chan" (ton being the Sino-Japanese reading of the character for Atsushi, chan a diminutive used after the name of a child or someone not regarded as fully adult), she switches positions with him and challenges his authority. Here, Mariyan's copying (of H) has all the subversive potential that Bhabha discovers in colonial mimicry. As Bhabha writes, "The men­ace of mimicry is its double vision which in disclosing the ambivalence of colonial discourse also disrupts its authority. '99 Up till this moment, the narrator has occu­pied the position of observing subject, describing the impression that Mariyan makes on him but neglecting to take account of the effect he produces on her. Sud­denly, the viewpoint is reversed. Mariyan appropriates the position of the subject and the narrator, much to.his consternation, becomes the object. While the narra­tor is bothered ("To my annoyance she had taken to calling me by 'Ton'chan,' copy­ing the way H used to refer to me"), he implicitly accepts this reversal perhaps be­cause it allows him to disavow his authority.

Finally, it is noteworthy that the narrator ends the story by leaving the last word to Mariyan. In contrast to the Loti novel, it is not the abandoned South Seas islander but the "superior" narrator who falls ill after his return to Japan. Ultimately, he has "little hope" of ever returning to his government job, and for his part, H unexpect­edly gets married and settles down in Tokyo. The narrator concludes, "What will Mariyan say when she hears this news?"100 Naturally, he does not answer his ques­tion, nor can he know what Mariyan's reaction will be. In concluding his story with an open-ended question of what Mariyan would say, he is suggesting that Mariyan might have a right of reply. Writing from Japan, the narrator continues to be haunted by the absent Mariyan and by her mute voice. The story may come to an end but it reaches no conclusion.

What Nakajima has created here parallels the "anticonquest narratives" that Mary Louise Pratt finds in nineteenth-century European travel writings. Nineteenth-century writers employ "strategies of representation whereby European bourgeois

180 COLONIAL EYEGLASSES OF NAKAJIMA ATSUSHI COLONIAL EYEGLASSES OF NAKAJIMA ATSUSHI 181

subjects secure their innocence in the same moment as they assert European hege-mony01 Pratt focuses on two new antiheroes that appear in travel writings from this period: the detached naturalist traveler who asserts his authority by cataloging, naming, and collecting all the fauna and flora of the natural world, and the vul­nerable narrator of sentimental novels who depicts himself as the lonely suffering victim of his demanding journey. The emasculated narrator of "Mariyan" is another antihero who attempts to establish his innocence in this colonial narrative

"Mariyan" was written in the early 1940s, a time of intensified Japanese imperial­ism. In some respects, the narrator's anticonquest narrative resembles the ideolog­ical constructions of late Japanese colonialism. The narrator seeks to differentiate his narrative from that of Loti in the same way that ideologues of the Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere sought to distinguish Japanese colonialism from that of "white" colonial powers. He achieves this aim by stressing his own affinities with Mariyan just as these ideologues stressed the racial and cultural interconnectedness between Japan and its Asian neighbors to justify their own colonial endeavors.

THE SOUTH AND IMPERIAL NOSTALGIA

What then is the relation between Nakajima's confessional "High Noon" and "Mariyan," a portrait of a Micronesian woman? I would argue that the narrator of "Mariyan" who went to Micronesia in search of his primitive opposite also found a way to tell his own story as ajapanese colonial official sent to assimilate the in­digenous people of Micronesia. He portrays the Micronesian woman Mariyan, who fascinates him, as a cultural hybrid but also as a colonial mimic. At the same time, he unwittingly reveals his own identification with Mariyan when he writes of the pained ambivalence she arouses in him. But he has trouble recognizing this re­semblance in the mirror that Mariyan so graciously holds up to him. Instead, like the author Nakajima, he prefers to identify with Stevenson and to view the South Seas vicariously through Stevenson's eyeglasses even as he accepts Mariyan's criti­cism of Loti's orientalizing views. In this welter of contradictions, we find the apo-na of Japanese imperial mimicry.

Perhaps because of these contradictions, the narrator's encounter with Mariyan—much like the romantic entanglement that is hinted at—is never consummated. It is perhaps for this reason that the absent Mariyan continues to haunt the narrator at the end of the story. The narrator of "Mariyan" could not help but misinterpret the significance of their meeting so long as he applied the categories of colonial dis­course to her and conveniently ignored the colonial context that structured their encounter.

For decades, Japan had been the model pupil of the West, and Japanese colo­nizers had thoroughly appropriated the "tropical" imperialism pioneered by France and England. However, the Japanese continued to feel culturally colonized by the

West even after they became colonizers in their own right, a feeling that Nakajima expresses in "High Noon." The pain the narrator feels toward Mariyan is also a kind of displaced nostalgia. The narrator of "Mariyan" displaces his own sense of loss onto the colonized subject Mariyan in this ethnographic allegory, but the pain that she inspires in him is induced by his own loss of cultural identity. The nostalgia ex­pressed by Nakajima for the primitive paradise of the South Seas resembles the nos­talgia that Japanese ethnographers such as Yanagita Kunio discovered in Japan's ru­ral villages, which were seen as the repository of an authentic Japanese cultural identity. For Yanagita, as Harry Harootunian notes, "the problem was the ruination of the countryside, seen increasingly as the locus of authentic identity, and the sac­rifices it was forced to make for an entirely new kind of social order based on ur­banization and massive industrialization"°2 Much as the Japanese countryside was a spatial refuge from the capitalist modernity that ethnographers constructed within Japan, the beautiful islands of Micronesia promised a refuge that Nakajima yearned for outside the borders of the nation. This repository of authentic identity was all the more precious and poignant since it was threatened with imminent de­struction and was on the verge of being lost forever. Transfigured into imaginary, utopian, and timeless spaces, such refuges offered writers a glimpse of cultural wholeness and an escape from capitalist modernity through a process of nostalgic recapturing.