Tropics of Savagery (4) 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

===

CONCLUSION 183

Conclusion

Cannibalism in Postwar Literature

FORGETTING EMPIRE

In this book, I have brought to light several works on the theme of savagery from early twentieth-century Japanese literature, works which have generally been neg­lected in previous scholarship. By closely attending to this theme, I have demonstrated that Japanese writers during the colonial period created elaborate figurations of the savage and of the South, which changed over time in tandem with changes in the empire itself. I have also highlighted the tendency of Japanese writers to use these figures to talk, allegorically, about themselves and their identity as colonizers. Fur­thermore, I have shown that these texts exemplify Japanese imperial culture in gen­eral, which both imitated Western imperialism and differed greatly from its model. In their fictional works, these writers voice feelings of ambivalence and anxiety about their place as colonizers, a constellation of feelings that derives from the triangular nature of Japanese empire and its positioning between the West and the colonized peoples. In addition, they often claim to identify with the colonized, often employ­ing the rhetoric of sameness, a key feature of Japanese imperial discourses in general.

Finally, rather than study literature in a vacuum, I have shown that literary works are tied by numerous threads to the circulation of tropes and stereotypes of sav­agery in Japanese popular media and in social discourses generally. In my study I have paid particular attention to the creation of new paradigms for understanding savages and the South that developed during the colonial period. Nitobe InazO, who saw MomotarO and his conquest of ogres as an allegory for Japanese imperialism in the South Seas, incorporated elements of this folktale in his lectures on colonial policy at Tokyo Imperial University, to such an extent that later historians refer to his theories as MomotarOism. Furthermore, ethnography and anthropology became the "sciences of savagery" par excellence, as I have shown through my studies of Mori Ushinosuke and Hijikata Hisakatsu, who both spent most of their careers in

the colonies. Besides carrying out important fieldwork for decades in Taiwan and Micronesia respectively, these men profoundly influenced Nakajima Atsushi and SatO Haruo, two writers who engaged with ethnography as a perspective on cul­tural otherness and as a form of writing in their creative works. While I can hardly claim to have exhausted the theme of savagery in Japanese colonial literature, I have shown that there exists a rich vein of works on this theme that merits further study.

Looking beyond the limits of my own research, I would add that prospective re­searchers of Japanese colonial period literature encounter a plethora of works, mostly little studied or wholly unknown. Almost all the most celebrated names of modern Japanese literature—from Yosano Akiko to Abe KObO—traveled to or lived in the colonies and wrote about their experiences in essays, travel journals, and sto­ries.' In the 1930S and 1940s, many of the recipients of the Naoki and Akutagawa prizes, Japan's most prestigious literary awards, set their works in the gaichi, that is, in overseas colonies under Japanese rule.2 Nevertheless, literary scholars have, by and large, neglected these colonial-period works during most of the postwar period. Even in the case of canonical writers such as Akutagawa and SatO, scholars have overlooked their fiction dealing with the colonies. There are no full-length stud­ies of many lesser known writers such as Oshika Taku, who wrote a significant body of fiction set in Taiwan. Why have scholars ignored these writers and neglected to study this rich vein of literature?

In 1984, Marius Jansen wrote an essay that sums up four decades of research about the Japanese empire: "Imperialism never became a very important part of the [Japanese] national consciousness. There were no Japanese Kiplings, there was little popular mystique about Japanese overlordship and relatively little national self-congratulation. . . . The passing of empire in Japan evoked little trauma and few re­grets. It has in fact scarcely been discussed at a11'3 When Jansen notes that there were no Japanese Kiplings, he offers one reason why scholars have overlooked Japa­nese colonial literature, treating it as deservedly forgotten. In this view, literary works from the period simply lack literary merit and are inevitably mimetic or derivative—secondhand Kipling, as it were—in nature.4 Indeed, Jansen' implies that Japanese have justly consigned, not merely works of colonial period literature but their im­perial period as a whole, to the dustbin of history.'

One reason why this plethoric Japanese literature has been consigned to obliv­ion has to do with the modalities of "decolonization" in the Japanese case, which greatly differed from that of French and British colonies. The Japanese empire "sim­ply vanished" after August 1945. From this moment, Koreans, Taiwanese, and Mi­cronesians were liberated from Japanese rule, even though they had neither defeated Japan on the battlefield nor persuaded it to grant them independence at the nego­tiating table. By the same token, Japan was "liberated" from the burdens of dealing

182

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with its former colonies. At the close of the war, two million "former" Japanese—residents from the colony of Korea living in Japan—were summarily stripped of their Japanese citizenship.' At the same time, millions of Japanese who had lived in the colonies were repatriated to a homeland that many saw for the first time. Yuasa Katsuei, a Japanese writer who had spent most of his life prior to 1945 in Korea, wrote an essay called "KokyO ni tsuite" (About My Hometown), in which he de­scribes the strange experience of returning to a "hometown" he did not know.' With the liquidation of Japan's colonial enterprise, its former colonies of Taiwan, Korea, and Manchuria became the setting for fratricidal civil wars and its territories in Southeast Asia became embroiled in anticolonial wars. In general, these civil wars and anticolonial struggles became the "problem of other nations"8 This cataclysmic end to the Japanese empire facilitated the subsequent amnesia about the empire and a refusal to confront the ghosts of the past, which continued to shape perceptions of Japan's imperial culture long after 1945.

Furthermore, well-known writers in the postwar period had their colonial-themed writings removed from their collected works or otherwise disowned them. In addition, literary scholars in the postwar period omitted to study works tainted by association with a shameful past, perhaps because they were reluctant to cast a blot on the careers of highly respected writers. Beyond the individual choices of Japanese writers and of scholars who study their works, the disciplinary bound­aries of Japanese national literature were redrawn after the war in ways that effec­tively marginalized colonial literature and prevented it from becoming the object of study. Mirroring the shrinking borders of the nation, national literature (koku‑

⦁ bungaku) became an insular affair that no longer welcomed works set in Japan's ex-colonies, whether these happened to be written by Japanese authors or by colonized writers literate in Japanese. The latter were foreigners excluded from the Japanese ethnic nation, while the former spoke of places that were no longer located on the map of Japan. Rather than being forgotten, it would be more accurate to say that these works were repressed, in the sense Foucault gives to this word in his History of Sexuality: "Repression functions well as a sentence to disappear, but also an in­junction to silence, affirmation of non-existence; and consequently states that of all this there is nothing to say, to see, to know. '39 Referring to the state of the colonial archive in 1994, Kawamura Minato, Japan's preeminent scholar of colonial-period literature, writes: "The reason that I thought I must research colonial-period liter­ature is that colonial literature as a part of Japan's modern literature would simply disappear if I did not trace its history, and in fifty or a hundred years, it would be as though it had never existed"1°

Last, the end of the Showa period in 1.988 and the cessation of the Cold War have clearly ushered in a "return of the colonial repressed" In the past two decades, scholars and publishers have excavated many works from the colonial literary archive and debunked the assumption that it contains "nothing to say, to see, to know:' Each year, publishers reissue multivolume sets from the period, colonial lit­erary anthologies have appeared in print, and more and more scholars in Japan and overseas publish studies of Japan's culture of empire. This book would not have been possible without the pioneering works of these scholars and the efforts of Japanese publishers to preserve this vanished past.

CANNIBALS IN THE ENDGAME OF EMPIRE

While I have focused my attention in this book on elucidating figures of the savage in Japanese literature from the colonial period proper, I conclude by considering what happened to this body of tropes and representations after the liquidation of the Japanese empire. Did writers continue to write works on savages, and if so, do these works show continuities or discontinuities with prewar literature in the tropes they employ? Here I restrict my focus to the first decade after the Second World War and to novels that feature memorable figures of savagery. During the colonial period, the headhunter was the dominant trope for prewar works on Taiwan and the happy primitive a stock figure for natives of the South Seas. By contrast, three major novels written in the immediate postwar period feature cannibals and acts of cannibalism as the main trope for savagery.

In this book, I have said little about cannibals or cannibalism. Indeed, by com­parison with the headhunter, the cannibal is certainly not an important figure in Japanese representations of savagery. One reason is, of course, that cannibalism was not practiced in any of the territories making up the Japanese empire. To be sure, the fact that cannibals did not exist in the Japanese colonies does not mean that they were totally absent from Japan's colonial discourse. Media reports at the time of the Taiwan expedition of 1874 frequently refer to cannibalistic Taiwanese "raw savages:' notwithstanding the fact that none of the groups in question practiced can­nibalism. Dispatched by the Meiji government to investigate a massacre of Japa­nese sailors in the Marshall Islands in 1884, the explorer Suzuki Keikun wrote a de­tailed account of his voyage, Nan)iö tankenjikki (A True Record of My Explorations of the South Seas), in which he gives detailed description of cannibalistic practices he witnessed there. In a recent study of this book, however; Takayama Jun debunks the notion that Suzuki actually reached the Marshall Islands at all and argues that he probably pillaged his description from Western works on the South Seas.1' In later Japanese reports from Taiwan and Micronesia, one finds only scattered refer­ences to acts of cannibalism among the natives. For example, cannibalistic islanders also figure in Böken Dankichi (The Adventures of Dankichi), the most famous manga on the theme of the South Seas, and in popular adventure tales in boys' magazines as well. Notwithstanding these traces scattered throughout Japan's colonial archive, the cannibal never became a familiar or prevalent figure of the savage in Japanese colonial discourse.

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CONCLUSION 187

By contrast, the cannibal was the figure of savagery par excellence in the West. From the journal of Christopher Columbus to Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, the can­nibal was the emblem of the monstrous other in Western colonial discourse, a figure which inspired terror, revulsion, and fascination. In addition, the taboo against can­nibalism has, in conjunction with that against incest, provided anthropologists and psychoanalysts with. a schema of intelligibility to interpret primitive man. Indeed, the prohibition of cannibalism and the taboo against incest constitute the dividing line that separates the state of nature and culture in thinkers as diverse as Durkheim, Lévy-Bruhl, and Freud.'2

Why then did the cannibal, the dominant trope for savagery in the West, come to play an important part in early postwar Japanese literature? One reason may be that there were actual incidents of cannibalism involving Japanese soldiers during the final days of the Pacific war, notably in the battlefields of the South Seas. Sol­diers who survived the horrors of war wrote about episodes of cannibalism in the jungles of the Philippines and New Guinea, sometimes involving the consumption of dead Japanese soldiers. In oral histories of the war, cannibalism figures regularly alongside atrocities such as Unit 731, the Nanking massacre, and the government system of sexual slavery ("comfort women"). As a rule, the narrators of such ac­counts write about incidents that they witnessed or simply heard about rather than acts in which they participated. For example, Ogawa Masatsugu writes as follows: "I once saw a soldier's body with the thigh flesh gouged out, lying by the path. The stories I heard made me shiver and left me chilled to the bone. Not all the men in New Guinea were cannibals but it wasn't just once or twice. 1113 That such acts oc­curred during the last days of the Pacific War is also corroborated by the postwar trial records of war criminals. 14 And acts of cannibalism are central to Hara Kazuo's shocking documentary about Okumura KenzO ( Yukiyukite shingun [The Emperor's Naked Army Marches On; 1987]), in which Okumura, a war veteran from the New Guinea campaign, tracks down and confronts the officers of his military unit guilty of killing and eating two fellow soldiers.

However, the Japanese are not the only source of information about cannibal­ism within the Japanese army in the final days of the war. In recent years, the Tai­wanese aborigines, Japans former savages, have stepped forward with their own eye­witness reports from the jungles of the southern theater of war. After 1942, several thousand aborigines, organized into the so-called Takasago giyUtai (Takasago Vol­unteers), fought alongside the Japanese in the front lines of Philippines, Burma, New

Guinea, the Solomon Islands, Rabaul, and other battlefields of the Pacific War.15 The long silence surrounding these so-called volunteers was broken when a "Japa‑

nese" soldier surfaced on the island of Morotai in Indonesia in 1974, where he had lived alone for nearly thirty years, beginning each day with worship of the Japanese emperor. Ignorant that the war had ended, this valiant survivor of the imperial army returned not to Japan but to his home in Hualien, Taiwan. 16

Since 1992, Japanese journalists have interviewed both former Japanese officers and aboriginal ex-soldiers and published at least five books about this forgotten his­tory. In these accounts, the former Japanese officers are often effusive in their praise and expressions of gratitude for the Takasago Volunteers. Naoto Yahaneda men­tions "some of the Takasago personnel had tattoos on their foreheads. Previously I would have thought this a sign of savagery, but I came to discover that they were braver than Japanese soldiers"" Another officer recalls their spirit of self-sacrifice: "They took turns carrying the sick. They accomplished their jobs under circum­stances of extreme food shortage. Seeing such all-out and selfless efforts, I had to bow to them in respect, even though they were my subordinates'

"8 By contrast with the Japanese officers, none of whom mentions cannibalism, the Takasago Volun­teers speak of cannibalism as their most distressing memory of the war. Buyan Nawi writes: "When I was moving alone in the jungle, I witnessed many incidents in which Japanese soldiers killed their comrades and ate their flesh. Even though they were the emperor's soldiers, they would still lose their senses when no food was avail­able. Even the high-ranking officers partook of the corpses of their own comrades"i9 Other aborigines make pained confessions of their participation in these horrors and of the deep remorse they continue to feel. "As a human being, this is the most painful thing I have ever done. We ate the flesh of an Australian soldier... . This is the regret of my life. In retrospect it was extremely cruel but a man has no choice if he wants to guarantee his own survival. If I had been alone, perhaps I would not have done such a thing, but there was a sense of security committing such a crime in a group."2°

These postcolonial memoirs show that the exsavages of the Japanese empire wit­nessed incidents of cannibalism involving Japanese soldiers. What is at stake in these writings is not simply the addition of the cannibal to the panoply of colonial tropes for savagery, but rather the inversion of the colonial relationship in postcolonial reminiscence. In the retrospective views of the Japanese officers, the aborigines em­body the ideals of patriotism, fighting spirit, courage, and self-sacrifice that had been the guiding ideals of the Japanese army. By contrast, the aborigines are stunned to see their former colonizers descend to cannibalism as a result of military defeat, material deprivation, illness, and the ruthless competition for survival. These mem­oirs of the Takasago Volunteers offer an interesting case of mutual viewing of col­onizer and colonized in a postcolonial situation, in which the former "civilized" mas­ters become the new savages in the endgame of empire.

CANNIBALS, THE EMPEROR, AND THE JAPANESE

Besides appearing in postwar memoirs and oral histories, cannibals are featured in three renowned antiwar and humanistic novels from the postwar period: Takeyama Michio's Biruma no tategoto (Harp of Burma), Ooka ShOhei's Nobi (Fires on the

188 CONCLUSION CONCLUSION 189

Plain), and Takeda Taijun's Hikarigoke (Luminous Moss).2' In the first of these three works, the cannibal is the cruel and violent other that threatens the Japanese pro­tagonist. In the other two, he is the Japanese soldier reduced to savagery in order to survive in the extremities of war. In different ways, these writers employ the figure of the cannibal to explore the identity of postimperial Japan and to reflect on their wartime experiences. Though they attribute different meanings to savagery, they show that the trope of savagery both continued to flourish and assumed a radically new form in literature of the postwar period.

Written in 1946, Takeyama's best-selling Harp of Burma is the earliest of these works, and perhaps, for that reason, the work displays the greatest degree of con­tinuity with Japan's prewar discourses on savagery. Takeyama's novel has been com­pared to a requiem mass for the souls of the Japanese war dead through its depic­tion of the life of Private Mizushima, a Japanese soldier who disguises himself as a Burmese monk and stays behind in Burma to bury the mortal remains of his for­mer comrades and pray for the repose of their souls. In a chapter from the third part of this novel, titled "SO no tegami" (The Monk's Letter), the hero sends a let­ter to his former commander and fellow soldiers, in which he recounts his adven­tures since the war ended. Cannibals appear in one of these episodes. Wounded by a stray bullet, Mizushima falls unconscious and is rescued by the members of a sav­age tribe in the Burmese highlands.22 They feed him and take care of him in order to offer him up as a human sacrifice.

At the crack of dawn the following morning, I was stripped of my clothes and pinned down on a rock in the middle of the river where my body was so thoroughly scrubbed clean that it ached everywhere. The natives were purifying my body. Afterwards, I was put in a decorated cage. I sat inside the cage holding my harp in my hands. The na­tive lifted up the cage and carried it to the front of a shrine in the center of the village. There they set it down. 23

In the end, though, he is not eaten: Mizushima is freed thanks to the intercession of the shy, sweet daughter of the chieftain (shüchO no musume),24 who falls in love with him: "But his daughter threw her arms around her father and pleaded for my life. That was how the festival ended. Afterward the tribe released me. 1125

The Burmese highlanders in Takeyama's novel, a tribe of cannibals "said to num­ber 25o,000' live in straw-thatched houses, tattoo themselves, are practically naked, and practice headhunting. When he describes them as headhunters, Takeyama fol­lows the well-worn path of Japanese writers on the Taiwanese aborigines, who were often represented as headhunters. While Takeyama never traveled to Burma, he made a brief trip to Taiwan in the 192os and apparently based his descriptions of the Burmese tribe partly on his experience of Taiwanese "raw Savages." However, neither the Taiwanese aborigines nor the Burmese minorities practiced cannibal­ism. While Takeyama drew on his travel experiences to describe the village in this scene, he ultimately fashioned them into a narrative by reworking a very widely dis­seminated story from the seventeenth century. The template for Takeyama—and for countless other colonial romances in world literature—was, of course, the fa­mous story of Pocahontas and her friendship with the English settler John Smith during the early days of the Virginia colony. By appropriating the narrative frame of Pocahontas in his novel, Takeyama displays an extraordinary continuity with four hundred years of Western colonial discourse, in which the colonizer justifies his superiority over the native cultures by labeling them as cannibals.26 In that respect, his novel shares with Japanese colonial literature a tendency toward mimesis of the West, in which Japanese relations with savage others are mediated and refracted by Western narratives. Indeed, Takeyama stands closer to his Western model than the writers I have considered in this study precisely because he was not constrained by any actual interaction with the colonized at the time he wrote this book.

Writing at a time that the Japanese empire no longer existed, Takeyama exhibits none of the ambivalences that make for the complexity of Sato's stories on Taiwan or Nakajima's South Seas works. In the Harp of Burma, the Japanese hero has no tension-filled relationship with the West, nor does he surreptitiously identify him­self with the colonized. Notwithstanding the fact that chieftain's daughter saves his life out of love, the hero expresses no gratitude to her for the rescue and does not initiate a colonial romance with her. Indeed, the work has a totally different de-noument and atmosphere from the late-colonial narrative in Oshika's "The Savage." With the disappearance of the empire as a geopolitical reality, the complexities of Japanese triangulated imperial culture also lost their raison d'être.

Mizushima escapes from the village without redeeming the cannibals who had held him prisoner and without discovering the underlying brotherhood that tied him to them. As a result, this episode strikes the reader as a detour from the main story and an arbitrary addition to the narrative. Leaving the cannibals to their fate, the hero eventually discovers his true mission: to bury and mourn the Japanese sol­diers left behind on the battlefield of Japan's defunct empire. Nevertheless, the in­sertion of this seemingly gratuitous scene in the novel is not without a function in the economy of this postcolonial novel. In Harp of Burma, Takeyama appears to lay the foundation for Japan's subsequent reconciliation with its wartime enemies and its reintegration into the club of the civilized nations. In one of the most famous scenes of the Harp of Burma, the soldiers of a beleaguered and cornered Japanese unit sing "HanyU no yado" and the enemy British soldiers chime in with a chorus of "Home Sweet Home." Though they are singing in mutually unintelligible lan­guages, this melody becomes a great unifier across enemy lines. If music represents a positive symbol of the unifying forces of civilization that unite nations divided by war and language, the cannibalistic tribe offers a negative image of the other of civ­ilization, to which the forces of civilization stand opposed.

If Takeyama treats cannibalism as the identifying mark of the savage other, Ooka

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and Takeda use the same trope to write about the Japanese self and to explore the theme of war memory. Cannibalism is a major theme of Fires on the Plain, a cele­brated antiwar novel that Ooka's ShOhei began to write in 1948 and published in its present form in 1952. The novel Fires on the Plain is told in the first person by Pri­vate First Class Tamura, who recounts his experiences in the Philippines after the war. At the time that he was writing, Tamura was recovering from-amnesia in a men­tal institution into which he voluntarily committed himself after suffering a men­tal breakdown. Writing as the Korean War (1950-53) is being fought, he denounces Japan's postwar leaders, "experts in mass psychology" and media propagandists who are manipulating the war-weary Japanese people to support another useless war. 27 We learn in the course of the novel that protagonist had a mental collapse after he broke the taboo against cannibalism.

At the start of the novel Tamura is expelled from his unit and left to his own fate because he is sick and has no food supply; he is treated as the detritus of an impe­rial army which is itself on the verge of terminal collapse. Reduced to extreme hunger during his wanderings through thelandscape of war-torn Philippines, he discov­ers within himself a "desire to eat human flesh' notwithstanding "the shadow of a long history and ancient custom we could not think, without an access of abhor­rence, of ourselves fornicating with our mothers or eating human flesh. "28 After he collapses from exhaustion and hunger, he is rescued by Nagamatsu, a former com­panion at arms who has been hunting down stragglers from the Japanese army. Nagamatsu saves Tamura and offers him a "black rice cracker [senbeij" that has the "flavor of dried cardboard." "Although it was dry and hard, the fatty flavor that spread through my mouth was one that I had not tasted for any number of months since I had left my unit." Nagamatsu explains that the proffered food was "monkey meat," but Tamura is skeptical and asks him: "You didn't by any chance mistake me for a monkey, did you?1129 Several days later, when Nagamatsu disappears in the woods to hunt for monkeys, Tamura's suspicions aroused, Tamura secretly follows him and sees the fleeing figure of a Japanese soldier after he hears the sound of Nagarnatsu's rifle shot. Tamura's memory breaks off (and he begins his descent into madness) from the moment that he kills Nagamatsu. Subject to messianic delusions, he feels that he is being watched by an outside observer, whom he identifies with God and whose instrument he becomes. "If as a result of starvation men are forced to eat one another, then this world is nothing more than the result of God's wrath.... I must be an angel, an instrument of God's wrath. 1130

Besides being the trigger for Tamura's descent to madness, cannibalism serves as a metaphor for the autopredation of the Japanese imperial army, whose starving members, after plundering the food resources of the indigenous population, were literally reduced to devouring one another. It represents the ultimate collapse of eth­ical values and discipline in the Japanese army that occurred with its defeat in the Second World War. Shaped by his experience of defeat, Ooka deploys the trope of savagery to different ends from that of colonial period authors. In colonial-period narratives, the writer not infrequently inverts the hierarchy of civilization and sav­agery in an allegorical critique of Japanese empire. The hero of Oshika Taku's "The Savage" becomes an aboriginal headhunter in the wilds of Taiwan. While the Japa­nese soldiers in Fires on the Plain become cannibals in the jungles of the Philip­pines, they neither identify themselves with savages nor situate themselves within a colonial relationship. In an earlier scene of Fires on the Plain, Tamura kills a Philip­pine woman in an abandoned church where he finds a hiding place, but he does so "without regret"; he is not troubled by guilt for his cold-blooded murder. When the soldiers commit acts of cannibalism, their actions refer allegorically to an army that has been forced to cannibalize itself in order to prosecute the war. In addition, the protagonist's intense sense of culpability for his descent to cannibalism reflects a strong preoccupation—noteworthy in the years after Japan's defeat—with collec­tive guilt over the war.

Although the protagonist of Fires on the Plain describes his consumption of hu­man flesh (black rice crackers) in quite graphic terms, he later expunges all recol­lection of his cannibalism from his memory. Thus, by the final chapter of the book, he writes, "I killed them [Yasuda, Nagamatsu, the Philippine woman] but I did not eat them. I killed them because of war, God, chance—forces outside myself; but it was assuredly because of my own will that I did not eat them. This is why I can now gaze, along with them, at the black sun in this country of the dead ."31 When he de-flies that he ever ate human flesh, he draws a clear line between himself and the cannibal "other' that is, the debased Japanese soldiers such as Nagamatsu, just as Takeyama separates his protagonist from the cannibalistic savages living in the jun­gles of Burma. Suffering from amnesia and a self-professed madman, Tamura is the epitome of the unreliable narrator, and so we should not necessarily lend much cre­dence to his words. Interestingly, however, Ooka ShOhei, his creator, in an essay called "Nobi no ito" (The Intention of Fires on the Plain), which appeared one year after the novel was published, denied that his fictional hero was a cannibal: "Al­though the protagonist wants to eat human flesh, he is unable to do so and spits it out instead"32 Curiously, most later critics of the novel as well as Kon Ichikawa, who made a film based on the work in 1959, have tended to follow Ooka's disavowal of the protagonist's cannibalism in his 1953 essay rather than be guided by the text of the novel. This change in views about the protagonist's culpability reflects a broader shift in postwar discourse from an early preoccupation with national war guilt to a later emphasis on Japan as war victfm symbolized by the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Ooka wrote his article after "the end of the American Oc­cupation of Japan, an increase in American nuclear testing in the Pacific, and a rise in the prominence and breadth of Japan's discourse of victimhood."33 His retro­spective interpretation of the novel offers a clear index of this changing political environment.

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By contrast with Ooka's war novel, Takeda Taijun uses the theme of cannibal­ism to pen a radical indictment of the emperor's war responsibility and his canni‑

balistic relationship to the Japanese people in Luminous Moss, published in 1954. Unlike the two works considered above, Takedas novel is set in northern Japan rather than in the southern colonies. In addition, it effectively criticizes the colonial dis­course of savagery that, in quite different ways, Takeyama and Ooka simply repro­duce in an unreflective fashion. Though critics have generally read Luminous Moss, as areligious or existential parable about man's loss of values in extreme situations, I interpret this work in relation to the immediate circumstances of its production and to the long-standing rhetoric of savagery that both grew out of Japanese im­perialism and survived its demise.

Luminous Moss has a complex narrative structure: the first half of the work re­counts the narrator's trip to Japan's new northern borderland of Hokkaido,34 where

he learns about the so-called Pekin Promontory incident, and the second is a two‑

act play, which the narrator describes as a "play for reading" that would "be im­possible to stage." In the first part, the first-person narrator visits the Makkaushi

caves in northern Hokkaido, learns about an incident of cannibalism from his guide,

the principal of a junior high school, and eventually reads an account of the inci­dent from the character S, portions of which are inserted into the narration. Ac‑

cording to the different sources that he pieces together in his narration, a Japanese

war vessel in 1944 capsized near the Pekin Promontory in northern Hokkaido, and the four survivors—the ship captain and three soldiers—sought refuge in a cave

where they eventually devoured each other, the lone survivor being the ship's cap­tain. The first act of the ensuing two-part play reenacts this wartime incident of can­nibalism in a cave in Hokkaido, while the second consists of a military trial of the ship captain taking place later the same year.

In the first part of his novel, the narrator deliberately situates his work in the context of postwar literary works on cannibalism, including Ooká's novel, or rather,

to be precise, to Ooka's interpretation of his novel in his later essay "The Inten‑

tion of Fires on the Plain." He notes somewhat caustically that Tamura "is given a piece of human flesh by his comrades and puts it into his mouth but he ultimately

does not get it down any further than his throat. . . . This soldier shoots and kills a

native woman for no reason, but he is also capable of moral reflection: 'I killed but

I did not eat." Takedas narrator taunts this protagonist who is puffed up with

his civilized status [bunmeijin butteiru]" that he takes himself for a civilized hero. In his view, Tamura suffers from the "delusion" that he belongs to "a superior na­tion and an advanced race [yüshü minzoku senshinjinshu}' and, ipso facto, cannot be guilty of cannibalism.35

Far from exalting his ethical heroism, Tamura's rationalizations epitomize his complacency and moral blindness. The narrator goes on to assail the very binary of civilization and savagery that underlies Tamura's "delusion" He notes that "mur‑

derers" are "commonplace" among civilized men in the twentieth century. Among the recent "crimes" of the civilized, he singles out "the mass murder on the Korean peninsula." Civilized states commit mass murder using the most advanced and mod­ern weapons, which are "proud manifestations of the power of civilization." Indeed, wars occur with such frequency that we are inured to them and they no longer in­spire us with "nausea." By contrast with "civilized murderers." cannibals and other "savage barbarian" still have the power to "fill us with hatred and to make us shud­der." Indeed, precisely because we have no "relationship" with cannibals, we think that the murderer belongs to a "higher class" of man but place the cannibal in an extremely "low class" or treat him as a special case. For that reason, "civilized men" commit murder but they would never eat human flesh because it would destroy their "reputation "36

Writing after the collapse of the Japanese empire, the narrator exposes the hol­lowness of the rhetoric of civilization and savagery by turning this famous binary into a bitter caricature of itself. First, he ridicules Tamura's postwar complacency by having him mouth terms that belong to wartime rhetoric on the "superior na­tion and an advanced race" at a time when they have lost all credibility. Next, he ironically identifies civilization with "murder" and "war" rather than with peace and progress. Indeed, he argues that the civilized man bases his moral ascendancy over the savage only on the technical superiority of his weapons of destruction and his heightened concern for his reputation. When he refers to the Korean War, a war fought over the spoils of the Japanese empire, he implicitly criticizes the cannibal­istic stance adopted by Japan, which was battening itself at the expense of its ru­ined excolony during the so-called Korean War boom, which one Japanese leader called "a gift from the gods.

Second, when he set this story on Hokkaido, Japan's first colony, Takeda places his work in counterpoint with the discourse of savagery developed by Japanese ethnographers from the early Meiji period. I have already noted that Japanese ethno­graphers, stimulated by Morse's speculation that the earliest inhabitants of Japan were cannibals, directed their attention first to the Ainu population, seen as the sav­ages of Japan. Before he narrates the story of wartime cannibalism, the narrator meets M, who has just attended a scholarly conference on the Ainu held in Sap­poro. An old friend and an expert on Ainu cultures, M expresses his annoyance with Japanese scholarship on the Ainu and attacks one scholar in particular, who asserted in his presentation that the members of one Ainu "tribe" practiced canni­balism "in the distant past." The narrator of Luminous Moss is moved to sympathy "by the look of suffocation, a mixture of disdain, loneliness, and pain" that he finds on the face of this "highest intellectual of Ainu descent." He adds that if M had known the incident of wartime cannibalism that he is about to tell, M could have pointed out to the scholars at the conference that cannibals existed "among the Japanese people under the glorious reign of the emperor" and suggested that these contem‑

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porary Japanese cannibals be "questioned from every angle of ethnology, ethics, medicine, psychology; economics, and politics. "18 Like the learned M, many of the scholars at. the conference mentioned in Takedas novel work were "of Ainu ex­traction:' Besides placing his story in the context of Japan's science of savagery, he inverts the focus of colonial ethnography when he proposes that a group made up of Ainu scholars turn their attention to Japanese cannibals, rather than to Ainu "from the ancient past.

Yet perhaps the most radical critique that the author makes of cannibalism in this novella occurs during the trial scene. Though the trial is set in 1944, only months after the incident of cannibalism occurred, Takeda published this work in 1954, years after the Tokyo War trials that juridically settled the matter of war responsibility. The narrator does not refer to the Tokyo trials in Luminous Moss, but he implicitly criticizes the judges in these trials for granting immunity from prosecution to the emperor, the supreme wartime commander of the Japanese military forces, and al­lowing him to remain on the throne in the postwar period .40 More radically, he ac­cuses the emperor of cannibalism by pointing to the equivalences between the ship captain and the emperor. Consider the following exchange during the court scene:

Prosecutor: Now I've got you! You probably want to say that no one in this court has the right to judge you. Just because you say that we are as much human being as you are, you think that you should be able to escape punishment for your crime. No I won't stand for that! Now, let me remind you of the crime you committed. When you ate HachizO, did you start by eating his fingers or his ears? Did you start to peel Nishikawa's skin from his belly or his back? When you tore off the nails, what sound did they make? When you nibbled at their flesh, how did it feel in your mouth?

Captain: Mr. Prosecutor, perhaps you ought not to let your imagination run wild on things you haven* experienced.

Prosecutor: You- are totally without shame, I tell you.

Captain: I am simply enduring [gaman shite iru].4'

Prosecutor: What you've done is bound to blemish the dignity of all the Japanese people! It is bound to degrade the dignity of the nation. Have you no sorrow for the emperor that you've done such things?

Captain: It seems to me that there is not such a great difference between that per­son [ano kata] and me.

Prosecutor: What are you saying! You!

Captain: Isn't that person not also merely enduring [gaman shite irareru]?

(The court is thrown into an uproar. The judge furiously bangs his gavel.)

Judge: The defendant's words are forbidden.42

In this scene, the captain states clearly what all people present (and, implicitly, his readers) know perfectly well but are forbidden to say: that there is no great dif­ ference between the emperor and a war criminal like the captain. By breaking the taboo of silence surrounding the emperor, he provokes "an uproar" in the court and is censored by the judge. By their swift reaction to his words, the prosecutor and judge show that they recognize the paradoxical equivalence between the emperor's "endurance" and that of the captain. Like the captain, the emperor is guilty of atroc­ities, but, unlike him, he is not held to account for his crimes.43

This court scene takes on its full significance when it is read against the back­ground of earlier snatches of conversation among the men in the previous scene, the scene of cannibalism. As the hungry men realize that they have become predators and prey for one another, they become aware that their bodies, strictly speaking, are no longer theirs to dispose of as they wish. Nishikawa notes that they are "soldiers in the service of the imperial majesty [tennO heika nogunzoku}," rather than simply soldiers in the squadron where they serve, since they are prosecuting a "holy war" in the name of the emperor.44 Not only do the soldiers belong to the emperor, but they also carry a spark of the emperor within their bodies. For that reason, they are not permitted to let their bodies perish from hunger since that would represent a vi­olation to his majesty's authority over them. As the ship captain orders one of his men, "Your bodies are not yours. They are the emperor's. If the emperor orders you to kill an American, you have to kill him. If you are ordered to stay alive, you have to stay alive. If you are ordered to eat Gosuke in order to stay alive, you have to eat him"45 In order not to kill the portion of the emperor that he carries within his body and to serve the nation, the soldiers are forced to eat one another.

In addition, the relationship of the emperor to the Japanese empire is treated as analogous to that of the men toward one another. After Gosuke suggests that they summon the hungry emperor to appear in the cave ("Why not just bring the em­peror right here to this goddamn hole then?"), the men discuss a newspaper arti­cle which reports that the emperor ate tokkari (seal meat), that is to say, the same foodstuff which the men initially lived on after their shipwreck in northern Hokkaido. HachizO says: "Didn't you read the menu in the paper for the New Year's ceremony at the Imperial Palace? Filet of tokkari from Hokkaido and a raw coconut from the South Pacific. By eating such stuff, the emperor paid his respects to the pains of the soldiers at the front .1346

In this New Year banquet, the emperor feasts on foodstuffs representing the en­tire geographical extent of the Japanese empire in order to commune with the sol­diers defending the empire's frontiers. When Gosuke describes the preparation of tokkari—"you chop up the seal's guts—bowels, lungs, liver—into tiny pieces and dump in the moustache and the brains too"—with the delectation of a starving man, he associates the emperor's banquet with a cannibal's feast. Indeed, the emperor's relation to the empire—both to the products that he consumes and the soldiers he sends to death—serves as a metaphor for the relationship of the cannibal to the hu­man being that he devours.

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Tropics of Savagery has been a study about the figure of the savage in literature of the Japanese colonial period. A second book remains to be written on the evo­lution of this figure in the postwar period. This second book would study the later transformations of the savage in relation to Japan's loss of empire and efforts by writ­ers to come to terms with this new historical situation. In recent years, scholars have noted the relation between the loss of Japan'sSouth Seas empire and the develop­ment of the Japanese monster movie. ma study of Godzilla (19 5 4), Yomota Inuhiko notes that this surviving dinosaur has its origins in a remote island of the South Seas and is worshipped by the primitive islanders living there.47 In his article "Mothra's Gigantic Egg: Igarashi Yoshikuni also notes that monsters in Japanese postwar films come from the South Seas, but he shows how these monsters are trans­formed from horrifying entities to loveable creatures during the 19605 high growth period. He argues that the South Seas and their inhabitants in the postwar period were reconfigured in the Japanese imagination as a pristine space free from the evils of consumerism and commercial greed at the very time that Japan was rapidly be­coming a consumer society. Ironically, this reconfiguration of the South was me­diated in the form of consumer products, at first tropical fruits such as the pineap­ple or banana, but later a wide array of products including toys, clothing, songs, and, of course, the films themselves. While the South was associated with real prod­ucts that offered exotic pleasures to Japanese consumers, it was also a lost paradise peopled by noble savages that could be used, allegorically, to criticize Japan's con­sumer society. The fact that Japan once controlled a vast empire in the South is never evoked in these films, but the South as an imaginary locus is repackaged for con­sumption whether in the form of specific goods or as an allegory criticizing con­sumerism. Just as prewar writers wrote stories set in the South Seas to talk about themselves, the South Seas in these films acquire their sense as allegories in the con­text of Japan's domestic dramas. 48 To be sure, this commodification of South Seas is not an entirely new phenomenon. Indeed, commodification is already evident in the popular culture of the colonial period, in manga such as The Adventures of Dan-kichi and in the hit songs of the Taisho and early Showa periods. During the colo­nial period, however the commodification of "savagery" went hand in hand with the imperial expansion. By contrast, in the postwar, it served as a substitute for and form of forgetting about empire.

Though I find this topic fascinating, a full study of commodification would take me beyond the frame of this book. Nevertheless, a brief examination of three post­war works shows that the figure of the savage flourished in the antiwar and hu­manistic literature of the early postwar period. I have shown that Takeyama and Ooka manifest continuity with the colonial-period discourse on savagery. In the cannibal episode of Takeyamd's Harp of Burma, the savage is the abject other and the Japanese protagonist is his civilized and innocent victim. Besides being a gra­tuitous digression from the main plot of the work, this episode offers a striking il­ lustration of an imitation of Western colonial tropes of savagery at a time after Japan no longer ruled over savages and therefore had no real engagement with them. By contrast, the cannibal in Ooka's Fires on the Plain is a trope for the Japanese mili­tary, reduced to the extremities of autopredation in the jungles of war. However, Ooka's protagonist still defines himself as a civilized victim by his denial of his own participation in cannibalism, which directly contradicts the evidence of the text. In addition, through his paratextual comments published after the novel, Ooka rein­terprets his book to accord with the rewriting of history in which Japan is, above all, a victim of the war.

By contrast with both these writers, Takeda Taijun seeks less to probe the secrets Of the cannibal than to analyze the discourse on cannibalism. He signals his reflex­ive intention to the reader by the way he narrates the story and by his acerbic and intertextual commentary on Ooka's Fires on the Plain. Throughout Luminous Moss, he finds subtle ways to undermine the discourse on cannibalism and to overturn the binary of civilization and savagery on which it is based. Takeda also deploys the trope of the cannibal to demand a reconsideration of this past, notably when he turns the emperor, exonerated from all war responsibility by the Tokyo Trial, into the supreme cannibal.