Japanese Colonial Literature Research Articles

Ying Xiong, Representing Empire: Japanese Colonial Literature in Taiwan and Manchuria

Ying Xiong, Representing Empire: Japanese Colonial Literature in Taiwan and Manchuria

Imperial Romance: Fictions of Colonial Intimacy in Korea, 1905–1945 by Su Yun Kim

Reviewed by: Imperial Romance: Fictions of Colonial Intimacy in Korea, 1905–1945 by Su Yun Kim David Krolikoski Su Yun Kim. Imperial Romance: Fictions of Colonial Intimacy in Korea, 1905–1945. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 2020. Pp. 204. US$49.95 hardcover, US$32.99 ebook. Imperial Romance: Fictions of Colonial Intimacy in Korea, 1905–1945 by Su Yun Kim explores the contentious relationship between Korea and Japan during the colonial period through the lens of intercultural romance. The monograph is primarily a work of literary scholarship that surveys representations of heterosexual relationships between Japanese and Koreans. Readers of colonial fiction will be familiar with this trope, but no English-language studies have tackled the subject in comparable depth. The choice to frame the book around intercultural romance enables Kim to reconsider canonical texts by the likes of Yi In-jik, Yi Kwang-su, Yom Sang-sŏb, and Yi Hyo-sŏk from a fresh perspective, illuminating strands of desire and apprehension related to assimilation through marriage. [End Page 565] As one might imagine, the topic of romance between a Japanese and Korean couple in the early twentieth century is a minefield. The legacy of colonial Korean literature itself has been stained by the history of collaboration. In South Korea, literature that was written in service of the Japanese empire has been labelled ch’inil, a term that innocuously means “intimacy with Japan” but bears the stigma of national betrayal. Decolonization efforts after liberation in 1945 were cut short in the chaos that resulted in the establishment of two separate states on the peninsula. Collaborators were not punished by the new South Korean government, a state that initially relied on largely the same police apparatus that was previously employed by Japan to maintain order. Due to this fraught history, collaboration remains a sensitive subject more than 75 years later. Kim explains that depictions of relationships between Japanese and Koreans in colonial literature have been read schematically through a nationalist framework: “Narratives that end with a successful marriage are considered to be ‘pro-Japanese,’ while those that depict an unsuccessful marriage are deemed ‘resistant-nationalist’” (12). Imperial Romance will be of interest to readers who want to learn more about collaboration and assimilation in the context of colonial Korea and the Japanese empire. In this respect, the monograph serves a useful companion piece to earlier English-language studies such as Intimate Empire by Nayoung Aimee Kwon, Japanese Assimilation Policies in Colonial Korea by Mark Caprio, Primitive Selves by E. Taylor Atkins, and Romance, Family, and Nation in Japanese Colonial Literature by Kimberly K. Kono, among others. Caprio and Atkins both explore the Japanese perspective, analyzing top-down policy in addition to cultural products. Kono’s study, like Kim’s book, analyzes fictional depictions of intercultural relationships, but her focus is on Japanese literature. Meanwhile, Kwon investigates collaboration in the context of Korean literature, arguing for a more nuanced approach to this sensitive issue that rejects the binary of collaboration versus resistance adopted by numerous earlier studies. She too mostly uses Japanese-language sources. In Imperial Romance, Kim combines readings of Korean fiction (and a handful of films) with historical research based on the analysis of periodicals and government-general documents. In comparison to previous studies, her monograph is tighter in focus, allowing for a more thorough investigation of a single issue throughout the colonial period. Romance (yŏnae) is certainly a subject ripe for further discussion. In Korea, the term gained currency in the early 1920s as an import from abroad. As Kwon Boduerae has argued, the emergence of romance coincided with the transformation of gender relations in Korean society. The notion that an individual could choose their own partner signalled the dawn of a new era for women in particular. No longer restricted to the household, some women took on new roles in society: working in bars, studying at foreign universities, etc. The so-called “new women” (sin yŏsŏng) became a symbol of change for progressives, but were also stigmatized by others for their embrace of Western fashion and cultural norms. These women could also fall in love on their own accord, prioritizing their...

Introduction

Introduction Andre Haag (bio) This special literary section of the Review of Japanese Culture and Society presents new English translations of short fiction by two border-crossing writers from the era of the Great Japanese Empire who, by sheer coincidence, shared the same Sinitic characters in their surnames: the acclaimed Nakajima Atsushi (中島敦, 1909–42) and the largely-forgotten Nakashima Naoto (中島直人, 1904–40). Products of a time of imperial expansion and colonial migration who belonged to roughly the same generation, both Nakajima and Nakashima experienced their formative years in spaces outside the confines of the insular Japanese naichi, or home islands. Nakajima Atsushi spent his teens in colonized Korea, then later served with the administration of Japan's South Seas Mandate in Micronesia. Nakashima Naoto was born to a family of settlers in the Territory of Hawaii, and lived on the island of Oahu until about the age of 13. Both men would ultimately make the return trip to the metropole, where they would receive elite higher educations and initiate writing careers that drew on those peripheral experiences as one inspiration for their creative contributions to imperial literary production. In this sense, Nakajima Atsushi and Nakashima Naoto might be regarded as representative practitioners of gaichi no Nihongo bungaku, or the Japanophone literature of the "Outer Lands," a category recently re-envisioned by comparative literature scholar Nishi Masahiko. Given that the term "gaichi," in distinction to the naichi center, generally referred to imperial territories subject to formal or informal Japanese control and often targeted for settlement, the Japanophone literature of the gaichi could be regarded as a euphemism for Japanese colonial literature. Nishi Masahiko, however, proposes understanding it as a Japanophone literature that arises out of "relations of unremitting contact and adjacency between speakers or users of the Japanese language and non-Japanese languages."1 Redefined expansively in this fashion, the category can encompass not only novels and poetry born of Japan's colonial empire in Taiwan, Korea, [End Page 191] and northeast China, but also literary works that inscribed experiences and voices from sites of Japanese overseas migration like Brazil or Hawaii, which while not formally Japanese imperial territories nevertheless served as major destinations for Japanese diasporic movements in the early twentieth century. The creative output of Nakajima Atsushi and Nakashima Naoto collectively captures the multiple directionalities of an expansive body of Japanophone literature embroiled in the dynamics that Eichiirō Azuma christens Japan's "borderless settler colonialism," to underscore the inseparable links between movements within the formal empire and migrations to and from territories dominated by other empires.2 As Azuma has shown, the migratory motions of settlers who shuttled back and forth between locations in the Americas and Hawaii and the naichi, or re-migrated from U.S. territories to Japan's Asia-Pacific spheres of influence and formal colonies, brought back experiences and knowledge that informed and expanded both colonial policies and discourses at the center. The distinctive cases of Nakajima and Nakashima suggest how similar migratory flows shaped imperial cultural production by broadening the horizons of Japanese-language literature in the 1930s and '40s, when the rise of "gaichi" no Nihongo bungaku became particularly pronounced. Of the two border-crossing writers, Nakajima Atsushi is undoubtedly the better known and more extensively studied.3 Despite a very short period of productivity—his major literary debut as a novelist came in 1942, the same year that his life was cut short by illness—Nakajima has secured a place in the canon of modern Japanese literature, thanks in no small part to "The Moon over the Mountain" (Sangetsuki), a celebrated short story often included in postwar Japanese language textbooks. While there is an abundance of scholarship on Nakajima Atsushi in Japanese, a great deal of his fiction has yet to appear in English translation. To remedy that, this section offers two stories by Nakajima that suggest something of the writer's orientation and diversity. "The Curse of Letters" (Mojika, 1942), translated by Nicholas Lambrecht, was one of Nakajima's "ancient tales" (kotan), a body of stories set in the distant past in locales outside of Japan—most often China. "The Curse of Letters" ranges far outside of the scope of modern...

Representing Empire: Japanese Colonial Literature in Taiwan and Man churia by Ying Xiong

Representing Empire: Japanese Colonial Literature in Taiwan and Man churia by Ying Xiong

Representing Empire: Japanese Colonial Literature in Taiwan and Manchuria by Ying Xiong

Representing Empire: Japanese Colonial Literature in Taiwan and Manchuria by Ying Xiong

<일본문학> 연구에서 <일본어 문학> 연구로 식민지 일본어 문학 연구를 통해 본 일본현대문학 연구의 지향점

This study investigated the problems and the future direction of current Japanese literature studies by considering recent 〈Japanese Literature〉, especially Japanese colonial literature. For this discussion, the study examined the 100 th issueoftheJournal of Japanology to obtain an impression of the crisis Japanese studies is currently undergoing in Korea with regard to their purpose. The journal contained a discussion about the topic that is currently the most popular, namely, the reason for changing the designation of the discipline from 〈Japanese Literature〉 studies to 〈Japanese-Language Literature〉 studies, and an examination of the limitations of this discussion. Finally, the direction of Japanese literature studies in Korea was deduced by using the concept of 〈border crossings〉, an alternative way of overcoming the limitation of this study method. However, there are not only different directions but also similarities between the 〈border crossings〉 and 〈line crossings〉, another concept widely used in the existing academic literature. The desire not to be restricted by borders among various spectra which have been established in the modern era, while at the same time accepting the current divided or dismembered position and each locality, is required to overcome them. Thus, the key purpose of the concept of 〈border crossings〉 is the aim of achieving obsession to overcome the current position and establishment’s creation of a space for conversation to surmount it. It was for the accomplishment of this purpose that Border Crossings; The Journal of Japanese?Language Literature Studies was introduced in this study.

Tropics of Savagery: The Culture of Japanese Empire in Comparative Frame (review)

Reviewed by: Tropics of Savagery: The Culture of Japanese Empire in Comparative Frame Emma J. Teng Tropics of Savagery: The Culture of Japanese Empire in Comparative Frame BY Robert Thomas Tierney. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010. Pp. xi + 307. $49.95. In 1984 Marius Jansen lamented that there were no "Japanese Kiplings."1 Now, a new book by Robert Thomas Tierney aims to persuade us to take a fresh look at Japanese colonial literature. In writing Tropics of Savagery: The Culture of Japanese Empire in Comparative Frame, Tierney sets out to rescue the forgotten works of the Japanese colonial literary archive from the dustbin of history, to which earlier scholars had consigned them. His primary objective is not so much to uncover the Japanese equivalent of The Jungle Book, but rather to examine the culture of imperial Japan, which the author calls "the most important non-Western colonizer of modern times" (p. 1) in its own right. The title of the book is borrowed from Hayden White's Tropics of Discourse,2 playing on the dual meaning of the word "tropics," which refers both to the geographic location of many of Japan's colonies and to "tropes"—figures of speech. The particular tropes Tierney examines are the figures of savagery and representations of the tropics in Japanese writings of the colonial period (1895-1945), which he demonstrates are key to understanding the nature of Japanese imperialism. As in all colonial situations, Japanese writers of this era traveled to the colonies and produced a variety of literary works based on their experiences and their imaginations of the colonial Other: travelogues, essays, fictional stories, and a wide array of other texts. The study of [End Page 186] such colonial literature is already well established among Europeanists and postcolonial scholars, and has begun to take root among Asianists as well. Joining Leo Ching's Becoming Japanese: Colonial Taiwan and the Politics of Identity Formation, Faye Yuan Kleeman's Under an Imperial Sun: Japanese Colonial Literature of Taiwan and the South, Karen Thornber's Empire of Texts in Motion: Chinese, Korean, and Taiwanese Transculturations of Japanese Literature, and Matthew Fraleigh's newer work on Japanese colonial reportage,3 Tropics of Savagery will be a welcome addition to the new crop of scholarship on Japanese colonial discourse and imperial literature. It also makes a great contribution to the broader literature on Oriental Orientalism. Tierney approaches his subject from a comparative angle, relating it to Western colonial discourses. His book will thus be of general interest to scholars of colonialism beyond the field of Asian studies. Given that Japanese colonizers, like their European counterparts, produced a colonial literature, why is it that we have yet to hear of a Japanese Kipling? Tierney convincingly argues that the blame lies not with the writers themselves, but rather with literary scholars. He points out that almost all the celebrated authors of modern Japanese literature traveled to or lived in the colonies at one point or other, and wrote about their experiences in a variety of genres. In the 1930s and 1940s, many of Japan's most prestigious literary awards went to works set in the overseas colonies. Yet, this body of literature was virtually ignored by post-World War II literary scholars in both Japan and the West. Asking why this rich vein of literary production was never tapped, Tierney calls for a reassessment of its worth and significance. In doing so, he follows a resurgence of interest in the colonial literary archive among Japanese scholars—a movement that has produced a wealth of multivolume reprints and colonial literary anthologies over the past two decades. As Tierney notes, his work would not have been possible without the pioneering efforts of Japanese scholars and publishers "to preserve this vanished past" (p. 185). [End Page 187] Tierney identifies two reasons for the long-standing neglect of these works: first, Japan was overall reluctant and slow to come to terms with its colonial past in the immediate post-World War II era; second, the implicit Eurocentrism of Anglo-American postcolonial studies has led the field to focus on Western imperialism (especially British) at the expense of non-Western colonial experiences. In...

Under an Imperial Sun: Japanese Colonial Literature of Taiwan and the South. By Faye Yuan Kleeman. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2003. viii, 317 pp. $49.00 (cloth).

Under an Imperial Sun: Japanese Colonial Literature of Taiwan and the South. By Faye Yuan Kleeman. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2003. viii, 317 pp. $49.00 (cloth).

Under an Imperial Sun: Japanese Colonial Literature of Taiwan and the South

Under an Imperial Sun: Japanese Colonial Literature of Taiwan and the South

Under an imperial sun: Japanese colonial literature of Taiwan and the South

Under an imperial sun: Japanese colonial literature of Taiwan and the South