近代中國國族意識中的「野蠻情結」－以1903年日本大阪人類館事件為核心的探討

Abstract

On the eve of the fifth Industrial Exhibition held in Osaka in 1903, a news report revealed the plans for the ”World's Natives Building,” which was a brainchild of the anthropology professor Tsuboi Shogoro of Tokyo Imperial University. According to the news report, the building would hold a living exhibition of representatives of seven human races, including Taiwanese aboriginals and the Chinese race. This news infuriated many Chinese students in Japan, who saw the exhibit as a conspiracy by the Japanese to portray the Chinese people as barbarians, especially by showing women with bound feet and opium smokers as typical ”barbarian Chinese.” Although the Chinese part of the show was cancelled before its opening due to the protests by both Chinese students and Qing diplomats, the cident had already triggered many reactions from the Chinese news media. It thus became an important part of collective memory in the anti-foot-binding movement and nationalist discourse. Most studies of this incident have uncritically treated the Chinese accusations of the ”World's Natives Building” exhibit as reasonable and objective statements. They have failed to notice that these accusations were in fact products of the students’ subjective and strong emotions. This study carefully examines documents in Chinese and Japanese in order to analyze the Chinese students' discourse in depth and trace back the possible sources for their construction and imagination of the exhibit's content and purpose. For example, I have discovered that the students built up their accusation regarding footbinding and opium smoking in light of their twisted interpretation of Tsuboi's work Ethnographic Album of the World. This important fact has never been noticed and critically investigated by previous scholarship on this issue. Moreover, after clarifying the sources of the Chinese students' discourse, I have embedded them in the context of the modern Chinese intellectual and cultural sense of crisis, investigating the close relationship between these discourses and the ”barbarian complex” of the modern Chinese consciousness. I illustrate that the accusation that Tsuboi planned the exhibit to feature women with bound feet and opium smokers, thus representing the Chinese as ”barbarian” was mostly a straw man. The complexity and historical significance of the students' accusations can only be explicated clearly when they are firmly placed in the context of the modern Chinese ”barbarian complex.”