The Musha Incident: A Reader on the Indigenous Uprising in Colonial Taiwan 9780231552189

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T H E MU S H A I N C I D E N T

Gl ob al C hi n e s e Cul ture

G L O B A L C H I N E S E C U LT U R E David Der-wei Wang, Editor Michael Berry, Speaking in Images: Interviews with Contemporary Chinese Filmmakers Sylvia Li-chun Lin, Representing Atrocity in Taiwan: The 2/28 Incident and White Terror in Fiction and Film Michael Berry, A History of Pain: Literary and Cinematic Mappings of Violence in Modern China Alexa Huang, Chinese Shakespeares: A Century of Cultural Exchange Shu-mei Shih, Chien-hsin Tsai, and Brian Bernards, editors, Sinophone Studies: A Critical Reader Andrea Bachner, Beyond Sinology: Chinese Writing and the Scripts of Culture Jie Li, Shanghai Homes: Palimpsests of Private Life Michel Hockx, Internet Literature in China Lily Wong, Transpacific Attachments: Sex Work, Media Networks, and Affective Histories of Chineseness Sebastian Veg, Minjian: The Rise of China’s Grassroots Intellectuals Shengqing Wu, Photo Poetics: Chinese Lyricism and Modern Media Calvin Hui, The Art of Useless: Fashion, Media, and Consumer Culture in Contemporary China A-Chin Hsiau, Politics and Cultural Nativism in 1970s Taiwan: Youth, Narrative, Nationalism

The Musha Incident

A Reader on the Indigenous Uprising in Colonial Taiwan

Edited by

Michael Berry

Columbia University Press  New York

Columbia University Press wishes to express its appreciation for assistance given by the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation for International Scholarly Exchange and the Council for Cultural Affairs in the publication of this series.

Columbia University Press Publishers Since 1893 New York  Chichester, West Sussex cup.columbia.edu Copyright © 2022 Columbia University Press All rights reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Berry, Michael, 1974– editor. Title: The Musha Incident : a reader on the indigenous uprising in colonial Taiwan / edited by Michael Berry. Description: New York : Columbia University Press, [2022] | Series: Global Chinese culture | Includes index. | Includes bibliographical references. Identifiers: LCCN 2021035693 (print) | LCCN 2021035694 (ebook) | ISBN 9780231552189 (ebook) | ISBN 9780231197465 (hardback) | ISBN 9780231197472 (trade paperback) Subjects: LCSH: Musha Rebellion, 1930. | Musha Rebellion, 1930—Historiography. | History in popular culture—Taiwan. Classification: LCC DS799.7 (ebook) | LCC DS799.7 .M87 2022 (print) | DDC 951.249/04—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021035693

Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent and durable acid-free paper. Printed in the United States of America Cover design: Chang Jae Lee Cover image: Courtesy of the East Asia Image Collection, Special Collections & College Archives, Skillman Library, Lafayette College

We have so so few opportunities to speak out; and the fact that so many of our elders are now gone makes it even more difficult. Moreover the elders only spoke our native tribal language so in the past it was extremely difficult to find anyone to translate what they said. If we continue using the perspective of “the Great China” or “the Great Taiwan” to look at indigenous people, I’m afraid you will never see our real history, humanity and culture. It really doesn’t matter what methods you use to present the history of the Musha Incident that our ancestors experienced—it doesn’t matter if it is an essay, a graphic novel, a speech, a book or a critical study—as far as we are concerned, our wounds have already formed a thick scab; and yet each time someone scratches at that wound, it is certain that we will sometimes still feel the pain. As far as I am concerned, I can take the pain, but what I really hope—even though I do sometimes try to resist the pain—we must let people know about the history that transpired here. —Dakis Pawan

Quoted from Tang Xiangzhu (湯湘竹), “Documenting the Musha Incident: Creative Thoughts on the Documentary Film Pusu-Qhuni (記錄霧社事件：紀錄片《餘生》 創作談, “Jilu Wusheshijian: Jilupian Yusheng chuangzuotan”), in Bai Ruiwen (白睿文; Michael Berry), The Musha Incident: A Reader in Taiwan History and Culture (霧 社事件：台灣歷史和文化讀本, Wusheshijian: Taiwan lishi he wenhua duben) (Rye Field: Taiwan, 2020), 538.

Contents

A Note on Romanization Acknowledgments

INTRODUCTION

Approaching Musha Michael Berry

xi xiii

1

PA RT I   Historical Memories of Musha CH APTER ONE

The Discourse and Practice of Colonial “Suppression” in the Making of the Musha Rebellion and Its Aftermath Toulouse-Antonin Roy CH APTER T WO

17

The Musha Incident and the History of Tgdaya-Japanese Relations45 Paul D. Barclay

CH APTER THREE

Relistening to Her and His Stories: On Approaching “The Musha Incident from an Indigenous Perspective” Kae Kitamura

75

PA RT I I   Literary Memories of Musha CH APTER FOUR

Bodies and Violence in the Musha Incident Robert Tierney

101

CH APTER FIVE

Musha Incident, Incidentally: Tsushima Yūko’s Exceedingly Barbaric122 Leo Ching CH APTER SIX

Satō Haruo on the Musha Incident Ping-hui Liao

135

C H A P T E R S EV E N

Untimely Meditations: The Contemporary, the Philosophy of Walking, and Related Ethical Matters in Remains of Life149 Chien-heng Wu

PA RT I I I   Visual and Digital Memories of Musha CH APTER EIGHT

The Face of the Inbetweener: The Image of Indigenous History Researchers as Reflected in Seediq Bale179 Nakao Eki Pacidal

viii  C on t e n t s

CH APTER NINE

Quest for Roots: Trauma and Heroism in Wu He’s Yusheng and Tang Shiang-Chu’s Yusheng: Seediq Bale200 Darryl Sterk CH APTER TEN

Historical Representation in an Age of Wiki Writing and Digital Curation: The Musha Incident on Digital Platforms Kuei-fen Chiu

218

PA RT I V   Musha in Cultural Dialogue C H A P T E R E L EV E N

Fiction and Fieldwork: In Conversation with Wu He on Remains of Life243 Michael Berry C H A P T E R T W E LV E

Heavy Metal Headhunt: An Interview with Chthonic’s Freddy Lim Michael Berry

253

C H A P T E R T H I RT E E N

Televising the Musha Incident: Wan Jen on the Miniseries Dana Sakura262 Michael Berry C H A P T E R F O U RT E E N

No Good Guys or Bad Guys: An Interview with Wei Te-sheng Tony Rayns (translated by Christa Chen)

272

Contributors Index

277 283

C on ten t s   ix

A Note on Romanization

In a book that engages with source material spanning ninety years and written in multiple languages (Chinese, Japanese, Seediq, and others), the issue of romanization for personal and place names presents challenges. Not only have the names of places and individuals changed during this period (for instance, one historical figure discussed was alternately known by her Seediq name, Obing Tadao 娥賓 塔達歐; two Japanese names, Hanaoka Hatsuko 花岡初子, and Nakayama Hatsuko 中山初子; and her Chinese name, Gao Caiyun 高彩雲) but the standard romanization for many of these languages has also changed over time (for instance, during the entire second half of the twentieth century, Gao Caiyun would have likely been formally rendered as Kao Tsai-yun). In this volume, Chinese characters/kanji are provided in parentheses after most proper names, followed in some cases by romanization in pinyin (Chinese) or the Hepburn system (Japanese). For individuals who employ a nonstandard spelling for their names, such as Deng Shian-yang 鄧相揚 (which would be Deng Xiangyang in standard pinyin), we employ the spelling preferred by the individual. There are also numerous terms that appear in a romanized form of the Seediq dialect. Some deviations remain in terms of how the Seediq language has been rendered; Mona Rudao, the leader of the Musha uprising, offers an illustrative example. Variant romanizations of his name

include Mona Ludao, Mouna Rudao, and Mona Rudo. The spelling of Mona Rudao’s name is based on the romanization of the most commonly employed transliteration: 莫那魯道 Mònà Lŭdào [mɔna lutau]. In the original Seediq, the name is pronounced in different ways depending on the dialect and time period. Today, in the Tgdaya dialect, it is Mona Rudo [ˈmona ˈɹudo], while in the Toda dialect, it is Mona Rudaw [ˈmona ˈɹudau]. Tgdaya and Toda once shared the diphthong [au]. In Tgdaya, [au] has gradually monophthongized into [o] since 1930. In other words, Mona Rudao is a reasonable approximation of the man’s name as he would have pronounced it in 1930. (Our knowledge of pronunciation in 1930 is based on pronunciations recorded in the International Phonetic Alphabet [IPA] by Asai Erin in the late 1920s.) For most Seediq terms, we use the most commonly employed versions. Michael Berry and Darryl Sterk

xii  A Not e o n Ro m ani z at io n

Acknowledgments

The editorial journey leading up to this book has been a long and complicated road; special thanks to all of the contributors for their support, patience, and cooperation. Thanks to Wan Jen, Freddy Lim, Wu He, and Wei Te-sheng for sharing their thoughts on the creative process behind their work. Besides contributing chapters, Darryl Sterk, Paul Barclay, and Kuei-fen Chiu all provided assistance in other ways related to this book: Darryl Sterk, who has studied the Tgdaya dialect of the Seediq language, provided input on the introduction and several languagerelated inquiries; Paul Barclay was instrumental in helping secure Kae Kitamura’s chapter and helping with editorial and translation issues ­related to that chapter; he also helped secure rights to the cover image; and it was Kuei-fen Chiu who recommended Nakao Eki Pacidal’s chapter on Seediq Bale. As the initial inspiration for this book was linked to a conference at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), I would like to thank all the organizations that sponsored “Musha 1930: History, Memory, Culture”: the UCLA Asia Pacific Center, the Terasaki Center for Japanese Studies, the Center for Chinese Studies, the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures, the UCLA Taiwan Studies Lectureship, the UCLA Humanities Division, the Taipei Economic and Cultural Office in Los Angeles, and the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation for International

Scholarly Exchange. Over the course of the conference, Professor Min Zhou, Elizabeth Leicester, Aaron Miller, and Meimei Zhang provided expert support. Thanks also to the conference participants, Professors Shu-mei Shih, Darryl Sterk, Katsuya Hirano, Ping-hui Liao, and Robert Chi; and Yiyang Hou, Jiajun Liang, Faye Qiyu Lu, Lin Du, and Yongli Li, who provided interpretation during the conference. Thanks also go to those contributors whose work was not able to be included in this English-language volume: Dakis Pawan, Bakan Pawan, Deng Shianyang, and Kumu Tapas. I would also like to express my appreciation to David Schaberg, dean of the humanities at UCLA, and David Der-wei Wang, director of the CCK Foundation for International Scholarly ­Exchange, for their support of this project. At Columbia University Press, I am grateful for the support of Jennifer Crewe, Christine Dunbar, and the rest of the editorial, production, and design team. Special thanks to Ben Kolstad, for managing the project, to Sue McClung for her expert copyediting, and to the generous comments of the two external readers, whose insightful comments helped sharpen and improve this book.

xiv  Ack n owl e dg m e n t s

T H E MU S H A I N C I D E N T

Introduction Approaching Musha Michael Berry

For more than nine decades, the historical memory of the Musha Incident (霧社事件) has been stained by not only the traumatic legacy of the original insurrection and subsequent crackdown, but also the myriad ways in which that memory has been twisted and appropriated by subsequent political regimes. The incident occurred deep in the mountains of central Taiwan, in a region traditionally occupied by Taiwanese indigenous groups like the Seediq (賽德克族) and the Atayal (泰雅族). Located in what is referred to today as Ren’ai Township (仁愛鄉) in Nantou County (南投縣), the area of Musha (霧社), had come to be regarded by the Japanese as a “model colonial village” by 1930. But on October 27, 1930, the day of an annual fall track meet and sporting competition at the local Musha Elementary School, a group of approximately 300 people from six Seediq village communities—Mhebu (馬赫 坡社), Truwan (塔羅灣社), Boarung (波阿崙社), Suku (斯庫社), Gungu (荷戈社), and Drodux (羅多夫社)—launched an assault on the local Japanese population. Also targeted were a group of visiting dignitaries like high-ranking Japanese officials from Taichūshū (臺中洲) and Nōkō (能高), who were present for the festivities. The uprising resulted in the deaths of 134 Japanese, which amounted to nearly the entire Japanese colonial presence in Musha.

The factors leading up to the Musha Incident are complex and often contested, but the violence that erupted that October morning was indubitably tied to years of abuse, prejudice, and exploitation that the Seediq people had suffered under the rule of the Japanese. These factors include the exploitation of Seediq labor for the Japanese lumber industry;1 policies that encouraged intermarriage between Seediq women and Japanese officers (which in many cases resulted in Seediq women being abused and abandoned, including Mona Rudao’s own sister, Tiwas); the emasculation of Seediq men by forcing them to give up their guns and abandon traditional rites like facial tattooing, hunting, and headhunting and instead forcing them to fully embrace an agricultural lifestyle;2 and a general disregard for traditional Seediq culture, which was being rapidly suppressed under the weight of “civilized” Japanese education and social norms. These general tensions, combined with specific flashpoint incidents (like a conflict between a Japanese patrolman and the son of Mona Rudao at a wedding), would eventually explode in the violent act of resistance on October 27. The Musha Incident, however, was also the prelude to an even greater display of bloodshed and slaughter. The insurrection shocked the Japanese government to its core, and they quickly responded with a multipronged, armed response, employing 1,303 troops and state-ofthe-art weaponry, including modern artillery and planes spraying an internationally banned blistering agent. The Japanese also enacted a policy of divide et impera (以蕃制蕃, or “divide and conquer”), recruiting warriors from the Truku (德路固) and Toda (道澤群) villages to help them navigate the unfamiliar mountain terrain, track down the Tgdaya rebels behind the uprising, and, ultimately, headhunt the headhunters. The total population of the six tribes that participated in the original attack on the elementary was over 1,200, but by the end of the first wave of Japan’s campaign against them, 644 were dead. Approximately half of the victims, including the leader of the insurrection, Mona Rudao (莫那·魯道), took their own lives by either hanging or shooting themselves. Many of the survivors were incarcerated in a pair of detention centers, but on April 24, 1931, six months after the massacre, a Second Musha Incident (第二次霧社事件) occurred. During this second incident, Toda warriors armed with guns attacked the Tgdaya s­ urvivors— all unarmed men, women, and children—in the detention centers 2  Int ro du c t io n

where they were being held. Viewed by most historians as an attack orchestrated by the Japanese, the Second Musha Incident brought the six Seediq villages responsible for the original Musha Incident to the brink of genocide. During the raid, 216 detainees were slaughtered; 101 of them were decapitated, their heads piled on the ground for Japanese officers to take “ceremonial” photographs with. In the end, the 293 survivors were forcibly exiled from their ancestral homes east of Musha and sent to Kawanakajima (川中島, Chuanzhongdao), where they would live the rest of their lives as farmers, detached from the land of their ancestors. Then, in a stunning change of fate less than a decade later, when Japan launched its military expeditions in the Pacific, these same young indigenous men would be among the first to volunteer for the Takasago Army (高砂義勇隊伍), giving their lives for the empire that had nearly extinguished their people—yet another ironically tragic footnote to the history of the Musha Incident. My earliest encounter with the Musha Incident came via the world of fiction. It was the year 2000, and I was a PhD student at Columbia University when I bought the first printing of Wu He’s (舞鶴) novel Remains of Life (餘生 Yusheng). The book was included in a book series entitled “Contemporary Novelists,” which happened to be edited by my then-advisor, Professor David Der-wei Wang; I purchased every book in the series, and Remains of Life was no different. What was different, however, was the fact that after I started reading it, I was instantaneously transported into the fantastical world of the novel. Part of that had to do with its experimental style and unorthodox structure and prose, but another facet that drew me in was the setting of Chuanzhongdao, where much of the story takes place, and the history that the novel attempted to approach—namely, the Musha Incident. It was reading that work that beckoned me to dig deeper and try to understand the history and culture of the Seediq people and the Musha Incident. Thus began a long journey of research and reflection. It began with me collecting various historical documents and books related to the Musha Incident. I started with the Taiwanese historian Deng Shian-yang’s (鄧相揚 Deng Xiangyang) trilogy of books: The Musha Incident (霧社事件 Wushe shijian), Layers of Mist and Thick Clouds (霧重雲深 Wuchong yunshen), and Dana Sakura (風中緋櫻 Fengzhong feiying). Later, I turned to Qiu Ruolong’s (邱若龍) influential graphic In tr o du ction   3

novel adaptation The Musha Incident and the colonial-era Gazette of the Taiwan Savages’ Customs (台灣番人風俗誌 Taiwan fanren fengsu zhi), which Wu He had referenced in his novel. Two years later, accompanied by Wu He, I made my first trip to Musha, where I visited Mona Rudao’s tomb and the memorial erected in his honor, strolled down mountain paths, and spent a long time at the Musha Elementary School, where Wu He and I silently walked through the sports field behind the school. Later, we visited the village of Qingliu (清流部落), formerly known as Chuanzhongdao, the site where the survivors of the Second Musha Incident were exiled and where Wu He wrote his novel. There, I met some of the people who had inspired characters in Wu He’s book, like “Drifter” (飄人) and “Girl” (姑娘); I even gave my sole, marked-up copy of Remains of Life to Girl after I learned that she didn’t even have a copy of the book written about her. Wu He showed me the places he visited while living there, we walked along the paths that he described numerous times in the novel, and we strolled through the cemetery, where I saw piles of bricks painted to look like books placed beside the tombs of the deceased. We looked for the “Memorial to the Remains of Life” (餘生紀念碑), a small makeshift memorial tablet made of wood that inspired the title of the novel—but it was gone. Instead, a fancy, new cement memorial tablet surrounded by a fountain, still under construction, had taken its place. We asked local residents if they knew what happened to the original tablet, and we scoured the wooded area behind the construction site searching for it. But, like so much of the history of what had occurred here, it had vanished. We found the site of the apartment that Wu He had rented when he lived in Qingliu, but it too had been torn down. Over the course of the next fifteen years, I would visit Musha and Qingliu many more times, and each time I would be struck by the radical transformations taking place. On one visit, a large “Musha Incident Remains of Life Memorial Hall,” a two-story museumlike building, had suddenly appeared beside the original “Memorial to the Remains of Life”—meanwhile, the cement fountain and tablet, which had previously been under construction, had been completely removed. A massive, two-story mosaic portrait of Seediq people and Mona Rudao was erected at the village entrance; and on the top of the hill, behind 4  Int ro du c t io n

Mona Rudao’s tomb, was a new, Japanese-style coffee shop called Old Mo’s House (老莫の家). The irony of seeing Japanese words on the sign was both biting and heartbreaking.3 Over the years, the Musha Incident gradually became an increasingly important part of my research: I went on to write a chapter on representations of the Musha Incident in my book A History of Pain: Trauma in Modern Chinese Literature and Film, and I translated Wu He’s Remains of Life, a challenging project that would take more than a decade to complete. Those books aside, I was struck by a deep sense that what I could do was still extremely limited. While I had focused primarily upon the Han Chinese attempts to construct cultural narratives of the Musha Incident, I knew that was but one facet of the incredibly complex legacy of this history. The Musha Incident involved many groups, chiefly the Seediq people, which included different village alliances like the Tgdaya (德克達雅), Truku (德路固), and Toda, each of which had very different views on the uprising; and also the Japanese. Although the local Han Chinese played the smallest role during the actual events of 1930, they have played a crucial role in how those events were framed and shaped over the course of the ensuing decades after the end of Japanese colonial rule. Since the 1980s, there has been a steady increase in Chinese-language publications by Taiwanese indigenous authors who have attempted to document the Musha Incident through oral history projects like Yabu Syat, who in collaboration with the Taiwanese scholars Xu Shijie and Shi Zhengfeng, published The Musha Incident: The Collective Memory of the Taiwanese People (霧社事件：台灣人的集 體記憶 Wushe shijian: Taiwanren de jiti jiyi), Awi Hepah’s Testimony About the Musha Incident (阿威赫拔哈的霧社事件證言 Aweihebaha de Wusheshijian zhengyan) and Kumu Tapas’s two-volume Memories of an Indigenous Village: An Oral History of the Musha Incident (部落記憶： 霧社事件的口述歷史 Buluo jiyi: Wusheshijian de koushu lishi). These records provide vital firsthand historical accounts of the incident from an indigenous perspective, but even here, oral accounts face the challenges of time (most of these accounts were not recorded until more than five decades after the events took place) and, in some cases, religious ideology (many of the works were produced by people active in the Presbyterian or Christian church, who viewed the incident through a religious lens).4 It was clear that a cross-disciplinary, multifaceted In tr o du ction   5

approach was essential for coming to a more comprehensive and inclusive understanding of how the cultural and historical legacy of the Musha Incident has played out. This led to a 2017 international conference, “Musha 1930: History, Memory, and Culture,” in which scholars from around the world came together to approach the Musha Incident from a variety of perspectives and disciplines, including anthropology, linguistics, translation studies, film studies, cultural studies, and history. That conference, the first of its kind, provided the basis for this collection. This volume attempts to approach the place of the Musha Incident in contemporary Taiwan history from a variety of different perspectives. Over the course of the past ninety years, the historical meaning of the incident has been repeatedly defined and redefined by various political groups. During the colonial period, the Japanese government used the uprising to attest to the “primitive” and “savage” nature of the Taiwan indigenous population and the imperative to “civilize” them with modern Japanese culture and education; during the Nationalist period, the Musha Incident was regarded as a model example of the “anti-Japanese spirit”; and under the Democratic Progressive Party, the incident, along with many other aspects of Seediq culture, has been used to emphasize Taiwan’s unique “local consciousness” and “cultural identity,” which stand apart from that of mainland China. In this context, indigenous culture is often wielded as an ideological tool to help legitimize a pro-Taiwan independence political stance; but from a broad perspective, it is yet another chapter in the long history of nonindigenous political groups using indigenous culture to serve their own political agendas. Another factor that has affected the ways in which the history of the Musha Incident has been shaped and remembered is tied to the aforementioned influence of the Christian church on Taiwanese indigenous communities. Many of the publications on the Musha Incident have been written by ordained priests or pastors, and the events of 1930 are interpreted in line with theological beliefs. Along the way, many Chinese and Japanese writers and artists have attempted to portray the Musha Incident in a variety of forms, including documentaries, feature films, children’s books, graphic novels, poems, and music. This has led to the Musha Incident repeatedly being placed in a position in which it has been colonized, portrayed, and mythologized to serve contending 6  Int ro du c t io n

national narratives and allegories; this process has also resulted in its special place in Taiwanese history, which has been riddled with appropriation, contradiction, and misunderstanding. Part of the challenge related to telling the story of the events of 1930 can be seen in the ways that the event has been referred to over the past ninety years. Most English-language scholarship calls the events the “Musha Incident,” a translation of Musha jiken (むしゃじけん) in Japanese or Wushe shijian (霧社事件) in Chinese. While Musha jiken dominated the discourse surrounding the incident during the Japanese colonial period and Wushe shijian took over as the de facto way in which the Nationalist regime framed this period, neither reflects the indigenous perspective. Just as the incident has been appropriated by various political regimes and reframed by Taiwanese and Japanese writers, artists, and filmmakers, so too the very vocabulary with which we commonly use to speak of it has been largely framed the voices and perspectives of the colonizers. In approaching the Musha Incident, it is therefore essential that we constantly remind ourselves of the extent to which the cultural and historical memory surrounding the Musha Incident has been shaped by these nonindigenous interventions. Describing how the incident has been referred to by Seediq elders, Dakis Pawan (郭明正) cites the phrase Wada mkuni rudan ta cbeyo mesa, or “the time long ago when our elders went mad.” The key term is mkuni, meaning “losing one’s mind” or “going crazy,” which according to Dakis Pawan refers to “being driven to such anger than one can no longer control one’s emotions and have no recourse but to strike back.”5 Other terms sometimes used to refer to the incident include mspa(y)is Mona (“Mona fought the enemy”) and pccbu Seediq ka d’Tanax Tunux chiyaw (“when the Seediq fought the Redheads”). However, Dakis Pawan and other indigenous scholars have noted that it is only when speaking with tribal elders that terms like mkuni and mrrudu (meaning “to mess up”) are used, and that most other Seediq simply use the Japanese (Musha jiken) or Chinese (Wushe shijian) terminology. This shows how the deeply constructed colonial and settler discourse on the incident has also shaped indigenous perspectives among subsequent generations of the Seediq people. A similar layer of complexity can be seen not only in the name “Musha Incident,” but in virtually every other personal and place name In tr o du ction   7

associated with the incident. For instance, Chuanzhongdao (川中島), the site of exile for the surviving members of the Seediq, was known as Kawanakajima in Japanese, named for the site of a series of battles fought in Japan between 1553 and 1564, thus inscribing Japanese history onto the very geography of “virgin colonial territory.” In the process of naming the region Kawanakajima, local indigenous history was erased. Later, the site was renamed again as Qingliu (清流部落), where Han Chinese tourists know the region not for its painful colonial history but for its nearby hot spring resorts. Meanwhile, in Seediq the area is referred to as Alang Gluban, but that remains the least-known and least referred to name for the region. Again, these partially obscured palimpsests speak powerfully to the weight of the nomenclature and narratives inscribed over the Seediq people’s historical experience and illustrates the challenges we must confront when attempting to navigate the cultural history of the Musha Incident. Dakis Pawan and other Seediq scholars have also written about the importance of central Seediq concepts like gaya in understanding the root causes of the Musha Incident, concepts that are often misunderstood or overlooked by Japanese and Chinese scholars. As Deng Shianyang has described: The word gaya is actually extremely difficult to explain, which has led to many Atayal6 to gravitate towards practical explanations like: “the lessons our ancestors have left us with,” “those collective rules that all tribal people collectively live by,” “the social rules and moral standards we live by,” “that thing tied to our people’s fate,” “our rites and culture,” “a group that practices collective rituals, hunting, labor, and meals while also observing the same collective taboos and punishments,” etc.7

According to Deng, when it came to the Musha Incident, the concept of gaya fostered a collective belief amongst the Seediq that this was a blood ritual, a means to get right with their ancestors and cement their loyalty to their tribe. As Deng explains: On the field of the elementary school, those tribe members slaughtered every Japanese they laid their eyes on. These strong young 8  Int ro du c t io n

men taking part in the insurrection had actually grown up receiving a standard Japanese education. They were all graduates of the schools that the Japanese had established around Musha, but in order to obey gaya, upon returning to the field of their old school they resolved not to let a single Japanese go, regardless of age and regardless of whether that person may have been their former teacher or principal. All of the Japanese fell to the blade and were decapitated amid the slaughter. This is how the fundamental principle of gaya was applied to the battlefield during the Musha Incident; here the culture of headhunting was employed against outside occupiers as a form of “reciprocal violence.”8

In revisiting the Musha Incident, it is important to remind ourselves of how indigenous knowledge and concepts like gaya and the “spirit bridge” (hako utux), a Seediq pathway to the afterlife, the Seediq notion of what it means to be a “true person” (Seediq bale), and how traditional indigenous rites like headhunting and facial tattooing remain central to our understanding of the conflict that erupted. Over the years, cultural historians have often attempted to box the Musha Incident into black-and-white dichotomies like traditional versus modern, primitive versus civilized, or savage versus cultured, but these one-dimensional approaches have proved to be extremely limiting (not to mention racist), most often overlooking the importance of the indigenous perspective. Through its interdisciplinary approach, this book attempts to examine those layers of appropriation, contradiction, and misunderstanding. It is only through a multilayered approach, one that brings together a diverse series of perspectives, that we can begin to reveal the complexities at play behind the historical and cultural construction of the Musha narrative. The contributors come from the United States, Canada, Hong Kong, Taiwan, the United Kingdom, and Japan and discuss the Musha Incident from a variety of disciplines and perspectives, including the work of indigenous scholars. The Musha Incident is divided into four parts. It opens with Part I, “Historical Memories of Musha,” which features three chapters by historians that place the incident in its proper historical context. In chapter 1, Toulouse-Antonin Roy begins with a discussion of Japanese-Seediq relations, unveiling the diversity of weapons, both ideological and military, In tr o du ction   9

used to suppress the indigenous population in Taiwan. As Roy observes in his discussion of the Japanese campaigns against Taiwanese indigenous groups from the 1900s through the early 1910s, although they “did not match Musha in terms of the total mobilized fighting force or the number of dead, these smaller confrontations set important precedents for the vicious government reprisal following the October 1930 rebellion. The use of overwhelming military force and modern weaponry to bring down a poorly armed insurgent group directly parallels the strategies of the earlier period of suppression campaigns, where the notion of making Aborigines ‘submit’ through swift and rapid destruction of their communities was commonplace.” Paul Barclay’s contribution, in chapter 2, brings a macro-historical perspective to exploring the metamorphosis of Tgdaya-Japanese relations from 1895 through the 1930s. He reveals the shortcomings of the Japanese media’s coverage of the Musha Incident and demonstrates how various cultural conflicts percolated under the surface between the Japanese and local residents in Musha in the years leading up to 1930. While many scholars and historians have discussed the “shock” unleashed by the “suddenness” of the 1930 uprising, both Roy and Barclay help provide a more nuanced understanding of the historical antecedents and longstanding ethnic tensions that contributed to the Musha Incident. Finally, in chapter 3, Kae Kitamura interrogates the history of the incident from an indigenous perspective, pondering how the events of 1930 and 1931 affected indigenous groups who did not participate in the uprising and yet continued to be covered by its historical shadow. In the process, Kitamura prods us to reconsider and reexamine historical narrative in light of the perspective of those who have been traditionally marginalized and written out of that history. Part II, “Literary Memories of Musha,” includes four chapters exploring literary attempts by Japanese and Chinese writers to document and reflect upon the Musha Incident. In chapter 4, Robert Tierney explores the “rhetoric of blood and biological destiny” in Japanese works inspired by the 1930 Musha Incident. From Nakamura Chihei’s (中島地平) 1939 novella Savage Village in the Mist (霧の蕃社 Kiri no bansha) to Yoshiya Nobuko’s (吉屋信子) 1960 short story “Setting Sun over the Savage Village” (蕃社の落日 Bansha no Rakujitsu), Tierney unpacks the impact of Japanese colonial discourse on Japanese fiction writers who 10  In t ro du c t io n

attempted to depict the uprising. In the next chapter, Leo Ching takes on Tsushima Yūko’s (津島佑子) 2008 novel Exceedingly Barbaric (あま りに野蛮な Amari ni yaban na), which ultimately offered a critique of the colonial legacy through a dual-layer narrative tracing two generations of Japanese women living in the shadow of the Musha Incident. Then, in chapter 6, Ping-hui Liao continues the discussion of Japanese writers’ attempts to position the Musha Incident in Japanese-language literature. Liao turns his attention to the work of Satō Haruo (佐藤春夫), who published a series of literary works in 1925, 1937, and 1943, all under the title Musha (霧社); these literary travelogues offer a unique vantage point from which to prefigure the massacre (1925), reflect upon its aftermath (1937, 1943), and explore larger issues like ethnic violence and ethnic reawakening. This part concludes with chapter 7, by Chien-heng Wu, who offers an extended discussion of Wu He’s 1999 novel Remains of Life within the context of the author’s use of “the contemporary,” exploring what he describes as an “ethical deadlock,” while raising broader questions about how we approach historical trauma through writing. Part III, “Visual and Digital Memories of Musha,” extends the discussion of cultural texts addressing the Musha Incident to documentary, film, and the Internet. One of the true touchstone texts in the history of representation of the Musha Incident was Wei Te-sheng’s (魏德聖) 2011 film Seediq Bale (賽德克·巴萊 Saideke balai), which brought an unprecedented amount of attention to the Musha Incident and introduced this crucial page in Taiwan history to a new generation of Taiwanese and global audiences. In chapter 8, Nakao Eki Pacidal analyzes Seediq Bale, which she also uses to reflect upon her own position as an indigenous scholar; next, Darryl Sterk pairs Wu He’s Remains of Life with Tang Shiang-Chu’s (湯湘竹) Pusu Qhuni, both of which share the Chinese title of Yusheng (餘生), and discusses the notion of heroism, not of the rebels but of the survivors who have to work through their historical trauma. Finally, Kuei-fen Chiu tracks the digital footprint of the Musha Incident on various online and digital platforms, including Wikipedia, a virtual exhibition, and a Historypin website. Chiu’s questions about “how collective history is produced not only through the interactions between humans and humans, but also between humans and machines” raises questions that go beyond the context of the Musha Incident. Through her research, Chiu interrogates the meaning of a In tr o du ction   11

“historical text” in the digital age and asks how our current understanding of bygone historical events like the Musha Incident is shaped by new online platforms. The final part of this book, “Musha in Cultural Dialogue” features transcripts of four conversations with influential cultural figures in Taiwan who have attempted to tell the story of the Musha Incident across different platforms—literature, music, television, and film. In chapter 11, the novelist Wu He speaks at length about the creative process behind his award-winning novel Remains of Life. Next, in chapter 12, the musician and member of the Taiwan Legislative Yuan, Freddy Lim (林昶佐), discusses his band’s ChthoniC’s (閃靈) landmark concept album Seediq Bale (賽德克·巴萊 Saideke balai), which used Seediq myths to retell the story of the Musha Incident. Then, in chapter 13, the film and television director Wan Jen (萬仁), one of the key figures of the New ­Taiwan Cinema movement, reveals the challenges behind the production of Dana Sakura (風中緋櫻 Fengzhong feiying), Taiwan’s first television miniseries about the incident. Finally, in chapter 14, Wei Te-sheng speaks with film critic Tony Rayns about the making of Seediq Bale, which has arguably become the single most influential popular iteration of the Musha story. These interviews not only provide insights into the creative process, but also reveal deep reflections about issues of language, positioning, and cultural appropriation (all four of the individuals featured are non-Seediq), as well as the challenges we all face in coming to a nuanced understanding of the Musha Incident. Over the past twenty years, there has been an inundation of new books about the Musha Incident published in Taiwan, from Deng Shianyang’s trilogy and Qiu Ruolong’s landmark graphic novel to a two-­ volume collection of historical documents translated from the Japanese that appeared in 2010. We have also witnessed a rise in indigenous oral history projects, which have attempted to preserve the memories of both those who witnessed and those who participated in the uprising. In English-language scholarship, Paul Barclay, Michael Berry, Leo Ching, Darryl Sterk, and Robert Tierney have all published books or chapters on the incident in history or representation, but The Musha Incident is the first volume to bring together perspectives from scholars from multiple regions representing a variety of disciplines.9 It is the goal of this volume to open up new avenues for approaching this touchstone 12  Int ro du c t io n

moment in Taiwan history and culture—the 1930 Musha Incident—and, in the process, offer new trajectories for how to approach colonial history, historical trauma, and challenges of representation. At the same time, this book attempts to place the Musha Incident in a global context, opening up new perspectives for reflection on the possible pitfalls of narrating traumas in the shadow of colonial memory. N OT E S 1. Much of this lumber was actually used to build infrastructure in Musha and neighboring areas. 2. A compounding factor was that, even after transitioning from hunting to agriculture, the Seediq were still prohibited from selling their produce themselves on the open market; instead, they were forced to go through monopoly middlemen appointed by the Japanese. 3. After the commercial success of Wei Te-sheng’s film Seediq Bale, one of the actors, Pawan Nawi, who portrayed Rudo Luhe, also opened a café in Musha called Rudo Luhe’s Home (Ruho Luhe 的家). 4. For instance, Kumu Tapas has several degrees in theology and is an ordained Presbyterian minister; Yabu Syat is the chair of the Taiwan Presbyterian Church; and many of the other indigenous writers who have written about the Musha Incident, like Pusin Tali, Sivac Nabu, Walis Ukan, and Kumu Iyung, all have deep ties to the Taiwan Presbyterian Church. This speaks also to the gap that the church filled for Taiwan’s indigenous communities during the postwar years, where Presbyterian churches became a major hub not only for religion but also literacy, education, and activism. In addition, this resulted in many members of the Seediq cultural elite having church affiliations. 5. This appeared in the expanded Chinese edition of this volume, Wushe Shijian: Taiwan lishi yu wenhua duben 霧社事件：台灣歷史與文化讀本 (Musha Incident: A Reader in Taiwan History and Culture) (Taipei: Rye Field, 2020), 16. 6. At the time Deng published this, the Seediq were officially considered part of the Atayal; it wasn’t until April 23, 2008, that the Seediq were officially recognized as Taiwan’s fourteenth indigenous group. Before that time, “Atayal” and “Seediq” were often used interchangeably when referring to the Seediq people. 7. Deng Shian-yang (鄧相揚), “Gaya yu Wushe Shijian” (Gaya 與霧社事件, “Gaya and the Musha Incident”), in Wushe Shijian: Taiwanren de jiti jiyi 霧社事件： 台灣人的集體記憶 (The Musha Incident: The Collective Memory of the Taiwan People) ed. Yabu Syat et al. (Taipei: Qianwei, 2001), 108. 8. Deng, “Gaya yu Wushe Shijian,” 120.

In tr o du ction   13

9. See Paul Barclay, Outcasts of Empire: Japan’s Rule on Taiwan’s “Savage Border,” 1874–1945 (Oakland: University of California Press, 2018); Michael Berry, A History of Pain: Trauma in Modern Chinese Literature and Film (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008); Darryl Sterk, Indigenous Cultural Translation: A Thick Description of Seediq Bale (Abingdon, UK, and New York: Routledge, 2020); and Robert Tierney, Tropics of Savagery: The Culture of Japanese Empire in Comparative Frame (Oakland: University of California Press, 2010).

14  Int ro du c t io n

PA RT I

Historical Memories of Musha

CH APTER ONE

The Discourse and Practice of Colonial “Suppression” in the Making of the Musha Rebellion and Its Aftermath Toulouse-Antonin Roy

In the last few decades, the Musha (or Wushe) Incident has received considerable attention from scholars. Analysis of this watershed moment in Japanese colonial history is not limited to the postwar era, though; it dates to the period of the uprising itself. In the days and weeks after the Taiwan government-general brutally put down a rebellion by Seediq warriors who attacked Japanese government complexes on October 27, 1930, colonial bureaucrats, army central command staff, journalists, and others in the metropolis scrambled to figure out how a group of supposedly “assimilated” Indigenes had managed to launch the most significant anti-imperial uprising since the March First 1919 demonstrations in Korea.1 The overarching consensus was that the leadership of the rebellion had acted upon a series of grievances (police brutality, forced labor, assimilation efforts) that crystallized into a violent eruption of anti-Japanese hatred. “Insubordination” or “rebelliousness” (反抗心 hankōshin) was the watchword of the day, as the government-general blamed the lion’s share of the incident on a minority of “wicked savages” (兇蕃 kyōban) who had grown resentful of Japanese authorities.2 In the decades that followed the end of the war, scholars in Japan and Taiwan pored over these governmental and journalistic accounts, publishing monographs that linked the prewar Musha “postmortem” with broader structural analysis of policies harkening to the formative years

of Japanese colonial rule in the highlands.3 Seething beneath the immediate frustrations of rebellion leaders like Mona Rudao—they claimed— was a generalized anger directed at the decades of “administration of savages” (理蕃 riban) in the highlands, which brought socioeconomic ruin and destruction of Indigenous forms to many communities. Further depth has been added to this scholarly enterprise in recent years with the proliferation of oral histories, which have added much-needed testimonies from survivors of the rebellion itself. Contained in this volume are also new insights into the history of Seediq-Japanese relations, as well as memories of Musha that shed new light on Indigenous perceptions of the rebellion and its underlying causes.4 At first glance, there is virtually no angle of the Musha Incident that has not received exhaustive treatment. To put it differently, Musha tends to appear as a complete field of historical inquiry, to which we could add only further granularity or previously neglected perspectives. However, behind the outbreak of the Musha Incident, especially the bloody government reprisal that followed it, lies one of the central motifs of colonial governance in Indigenous Taiwan—that of Japan engaging in the “suppression” (討伐 tōbatsu) of its unruly subjects.5 That motif has deep roots in the long history of armed confrontations between Taiwan’s various ethnic groups and Japanese colonizers. As early as the 1874 expedition against the Qing, the language of “subjugating” (征 sei) or “punishing” (征討 seitō) the island’s natives could be found in the rhetoric used to justify the deployment of Japanese troops to southeastern Taiwan.6 Even non-Indigenous Taiwanese at one point were suppressed as part of the empire’s drive to establish its control over Taiwan. During the opening years of colonial rule, the government-general organized counterinsurgent operations against Han Chinese militias, which officials characterized as “suppression campaigns” against “bandits” or “brigands.”7 “Suppression” then became the preferred label used by security forces to refer to any operation involving the use of military or police violence against Aborigines for all transgressions (real or perceived) against the colonial state and its extractive industries. Sometimes referred to as “chastisement” (膺懲 yōchō), “advance” (前進 zenshin), or more specifically in the case of Musha, a “mop-up operation” (掃蕩 sōtō), these campaigns recast Japan’s expansion into Aboriginal land as a form of necessary “defensive conquest” to extend a police 18  Hi s t or i c al Me m o r ie s o f   Mu sh a

cordon around rebellious elements who refused to swear allegiance to the empire.8 This strategy of expansion in the guise of preemption was honed by police and military personnel between 1895 and 1914 as the colonial state engaged in a succession of suppression campaigns to protect logging operations for its lucrative camphor monopoly and to expand frontier outposts. From their remote garrisons dotting Taiwan’s eastern foothills and mountain ranges, scores of police, imperial army troops, and paramilitary auxiliaries routinely descended upon Indigenous strongholds, subjecting them to invasion, usually by way of incendiary attacks and long-range shelling. Targeted communities were then typically relocated9 to government-supervised enclaves or simply placed under heavy police control, under which they experienced forced schooling in Japanese and prohibitions on foundational cultural practices (facial tattooing, ritual head-taking, and so on). The act of suppression was repetitive in nature; the relations between the ruler and the ruled needed to be consecrated on a regular basis through violent displays of military dominance. Individual groups could be subject to mountain cannon fire for an extended period before being brought to heel. When surrender proved to be too difficult to obtain, trade embargoes that starved communities and depleted food stocks were used to undermine Aborigines’ willingness to resist. Long before Mona Rudao and his group found themselves in the crosshairs of the colonial police and army, the Seediq people in and around Musha, along with the bulk of other northeastern Taiwan Indigenes, experienced these tactics in some shape or form. Rather than treat Musha as a late colonial rebellion, confined to its proximal circumstances or individual personalities, this chapter will take a historical detour, seeing it not as the infamous thunderclap that shook the colonial public, but as the continuation of a discourse and practice of suppression cultivated over two decades of colonial encounters between Japanese and Taiwan Indigenous peoples. No doubt, the Musha uprising constitutes a watershed moment for anticolonial rebellions in the Japanese empire. Its outbreak and exterminatory outcomes, though, have deeper roots in a procedural brand of violence and routinized destruction whose development exceeds the narrow scope of Japanese-Seediq relations.10 This chapter serves as an attempt to trace T he D i s c o ur s e an d P rac t ic e o f C oloni al “ Suppr e ssion”   19

a genealogy of the ideas, practices, and instruments of repression that made the Musha Incident and its tragic aftermath possible. E A R LY PAT TE R N S OF C OLON I A L SU PPR E SSI O N, 1895–189 9

The foundation of Japan’s suppressive policies in the highlands was set by the island’s early colonial administration. During the early period of Japanese rule, remnants of the Qing had regrouped under the “Taiwan Republic Movement.” With guerilla armies keeping Japanese forces preoccupied across Taiwan’s western plains, the government needed to draft a plan to avoid the outbreak of hostilities in the highlands, which the Qing had never conquered. In August 1895, Kabayama Sukenori, while on his way to take up his post as Taiwan’s first governor-general, warned of the potential threats that Indigenous populations posed to the construction of a new Japanese colony. Noting that the island’s original inhabitants “have looked upon the Chinese as sworn enemies for over two hundred years,” Kabayama believed that the task of his new regime would be to “teach them to submit” (馴服 junpuku).11 Precisely what this process of submission entailed at this stage is unclear, but early Japanese discourses on Taiwan Aborigines tended to emphasize centuries of victimization by outsiders as a source of bitter resentment, one that—in the long run—could translate into a dangerous anti-Japanese hatred. Ignoring the centuries of peaceful commercial and political contact between highland and lowland communities,12 Kabayama saw revanchist violence as the primary mode through which Indigenes approached social intercourse with outsiders. For Kabayama, avoiding the past mistakes of the Qing was imperative. With an active insurgency in the plains area, the young colonial state needed to manage the transition to power in the borderlands properly to avoid a two-front war. In the spring of 1896, the government began building the rudiments of an Indigenous suppression state. That task fell largely into the hands of Kabayama’s right-hand man, Mizuno Jun, who drafted the Taiwan government-general’s official policy for Aborigines.13 Ironically, Mizuno modeled his approach on the Qing-era Pacification-Reclamation Bureau (撫墾局 fukenju), an abortive frontier agency whose mission had been to “Sinicize” Indigenes via Confucian education and acculturation of Han ways. During the late Qing period, Taiwan’s first provincial governor, 20  Hi s t or i c al Me m o r ie s o f   Mu sh a

Liu Mingchuan, had put together this agency as part of his drive to develop highland infrastructure and shore up coastal defenses. The agency had limited success, as the bulk of the late Qing years in Taiwan saw the outbreak of multiple Indigenous rebellions and the launching of expedition campaigns to suppress them.14 Taking his cues from Liu’s fukenju, Mizuno put together a vision of Indigene governance that prioritized cultural transformation over armed confrontation: The future of Taiwan and its enterprises is in reality to be found within the savage territories. The promotion of these enterprises involves making the savages submit to our government, having them acquire proper living conditions, and have them emerge from their barbaric state. In order to conquer the savages force as well as benevolent care must be practiced at the same time . . . Like the previous government, we must establish offices of pacification and reclamation, assemble the savage chiefs to give them wine, cloth, and other products all while striving to educate them, we will then secure their good intentions. The felling of camphor trees, manufacture of camphor, management of forests, development of land, etc. should then proceed harmoniously.15

According to Mizuno’s plan, the central government would first supply gifts of liquor and cloth to elders who were willing to cooperate with colonial officers. Aboriginal communities would then receive government assistance in the form of education and access to land for farming. Meanwhile, Indigenous compliance with Japanese dictates would allow camphor companies to move in to open up forestland for commercial exploitation. Although on the surface, Mizuno’s plan seemed like a practical approach to minimize frontier disruptions and help establish camphor refineries, his policy masked a destructive undercurrent of assumptions about Indigeneity. In the opening lines of his proposal, Mizuno remarked, “Savages have no understanding of reason; there is no need to mention their lack of worldly knowledge. Sometimes they engage in agriculture, but mainly they roam the mountains and hunt for a living, killing and slaughter is a custom of theirs.”16 In it, he also echoed Kabayama’s earlier point about Aboriginal animus toward Han settlers, T he D i s c o ur s e an d P rac t ic e o f C oloni al “ Suppr e ssion”   21

noting that Indigenes possessed feelings of “vengefulness” toward the island’s previous occupiers.17 By the late 1890s, the discourse and practice of suppression had evolved to embody the two poles of “benevolent care” and “force” outlined in the previous passage. In the summer of 1896, Mizuno put his plan into action, establishing eleven bukonsho stations where the Qing had once established similar offices. Although promised an extensive budget and police force, the bukonsho never received any more than a handful of officers and interpreters. From there, the government’s policy of benevolence evolved into a whole range of social programs: banquets to feast and cajole prominent elders, ambitious programs to teach sedentary agriculture, specially mandated trade stations to monitor the influx of guns and supplies into the highlands, and surveys to learn Indigenous languages.18 In keeping with its belief in the need for punitive policies, the Pacification-Reclamation Bureau also set important precedents that criminalized key aspects of Indigenous life in the highlands and sanctioned the indiscriminate targeting of entire native settlements during government reprisals. Among the more important bukonsho policies were its firearms regulations, passed in the spring of 1897, which restricted all sales of guns and ammunition to government-approved posts.19 Although a largely symbolic measure at this point, the government’s criminalizing of all firearms acquisition outside the state’s narrow licensing framework laid the groundwork for later, more systematic weapons confiscations.20 That same year, guidelines issued following complaints by local camphor producers in Xinzhu instructed Pacification-Reclamation heads to tell “local chiefs” (土目 domoku) that they were responsible for letting their communities know that killing was a “severely immoral act.” In addition, should a community fail to abide by these standards, or even worse, conceal any Aborigine “criminal” responsible for an act of violence, the “entire village” (zenbansha) would be “punished” for this individual transgression.21 Punishment at this stage, however, rarely entailed full-scale military or police actions, but rather cessation of trade and distribution of gifts to Indigenes.22 This legal doctrine of collective responsibility would become one of the core principles behind later Japanese military strategy, as pacification troops would use the actions of a single group member as a justification

22  Hi s t or i c al Me m o r ie s o f   Mu sh a

to invade, shell, or set fire to an entire village. With few resources to carry out its mission, as well as high turnover rates within its personnel, the Pacification-Reclamation Bureau was ultimately scrapped in June 1898.23 Nevertheless, its template for Indigene suppression would prove to be enduring, as many of the strategies listed here would become key aspects of the Indigene suppression playbook. The Musha-area Indigenes were an early target of the governmentgeneral’s expanding Aboriginal suppression state. In 1897, a punitive embargo was imposed on Musha-area groups following the killing of a survey team dispatched to plan a railway that would link Puli with Hualien’s harbor. The mission was planned by Captain Fukahori Yasuichirō, who departed in January 1897 and disappeared with fourteen men in March around Nenggao mountain, northeast of Puli. A search party was organized, and a garrison chief began negotiating with local Tgdaya (Seediq) headmen to recover the remains of the survey team. The headmen were supposedly uncooperative with the investigation, and even worse, a camphor worker was killed by locals just a short time after Captain Fukahori’s disappearance.24 Official descriptions of this initial Seediq-Japanese encounter place the blame squarely on the former, who exhibited no desire to negotiate with their Japanese interlocutors. According to government historian and bureaucrat Fujisaki Seinosuke, following the Fukahori incident, the Seediq continued to “exert their fierce might over the surrounding areas” by terrorizing the locals.25 Seediq interactions with the Fukahori survey team was only one of countless Indigenous responses to colonial encroachment. The figures of total deaths across the island caused by Aborigines during these early years correspond with this trend. While the year 1896 had 63 dead and 16 injured due to attacks by Indigenes, the following year saw an uptick, to 151 dead and 15 injured. Then, in 1898, that number rose sharply, to 557 individuals killed and 134 injured, in what estimates suggest were 303 individual assaults.26 With deteriorating relations, both in Musha and elsewhere, Japanese rulers began making structural changes to their overall handling of the “Indigenous question.” This uptick in violence directed at camphor production sites and highland infrastructure prompted the colonial state to further militarize its instruments of frontier governance. The decline of the Pacification

T h e D i s c o ur s e an d P rac t ic e o f C oloni al “ Suppr e ssion”   23

Bureau coincided with the overhauling of the island’s weak regulatory and taxation regimes for camphor. In June 1899, under the pretext of stabilizing prices and improving quality controls, the government established a monopoly for camphor. By then, camphor had grown into a globally significant commodity with various industrial and household applications. Hoping to cash in on its privileged connections with the colonial bureaucracy, Japanese camphor capitalists moved to Taiwan, setting up camphor companies. Many of the large production quotas set aside for Japanese capitalists were clustered in the northeast, which was the home of groups like the Atayal, Seediq, and Truku.27 The creation of the monopoly placed further pressure on the already embattled Indigenes, as the growing volume of production would lead to significant increases of armed guards on, or within close proximity of, native lands and hunting grounds. It was at this juncture that the government began to revitalize the guardline, a weaponized north-south perimeter that cut the island in half, separating Japanese-controlled areas from unconquered Indigenous territories in the highlands to the east. Established under the Qing as the “savage boundary” (番界 fanjie), the guardline had fallen into irrelevance and disrepair during the early Japanese period. With the monopoly now operational, the government began allocating regular funds and personnel to this weaponized demarcation line. In 1899, paramilitaries along the Japanese-Indigene border numbered at about 774.28 The following year, total troops stood at 1,593.29 By 1904, that number jumped to 3,355, and at the close of the decade, there were 4,502 of these forces.30 Housed in small frontier structures linked by telegraph wiring and barbed wire fencing, the guardline set the tone for JapaneseAboriginal relations for the remainder of the conquest period. Sentries had discretionary powers to shoot anyone who came within close range of this perimeter. At its peak, the guardline also boasted electrified barbed wire fencing, land mines, and other lethal arsenals that impeded Indigenous abilities to move around their lands without the fear of being assaulted. As the first point of contact between Aborigines and Japan’s expanding highland infrastructure, the guardline put their already tense ethnic relations in a permanent state of siege, creating further grounds for confrontations, which Japanese always used as a pretext for further advancement. 24  Hi s t or i c al Me m o r ie s o f   Mu sh a

T H E E X PA N S I O N O F T H E G UA R D L I N E A N D T H E C O N Q U E S T Y E A R S , 19 0 0 – 1914

The tactics used by suppression armies to put down Taiwan Indigenes were forged in the crucible of violent confrontations over control of camphor forests and missions to expand guardline fortifications. Especially in the opening years of the 1900s, the Japanese state faced high-profile challenges to its rule in the highlands, which prompted the drafting of new and even more vicious strategies to quash resistance. While sporadic attacks on camphor workers and Japanese personnel remained steady for much of the late 1890s, they reached a critical mass in the early 1900s, particularly at Dakekan (大嵙崁), a strategic, camphor-rich area populated by Atayal Indigenes. The Dakekan conflict of August–September 1900 is worth briefly delving into, as it showcases the experimentation with long-range indiscriminate firing and man-made starvation that would come to define suppression policies for both the Seediq and other Indigenous groups. Traversed by the Dahan River, Dakekan had rich camphor forests linked to waterways, which made it an ideal zone to produce large quantities of raw camphor and have it shipped to the port of Danshui, where the monopoly exported it to the rest of the globe.31 In June 1900, a string of attacks by Atayal warriors resulting in the cessation of production and withdrawal of workers took place, prompting the government to assemble a pacification force and attempt an invasion of Atayal lands. The official government account describes how this occurred: “In August of 1900, a suppression campaign was launched against the Atayal of Dakekan  .  .  . in June of 1900, a rebellion was hatched up by the local Atayal. They burned and plundered camphor sites and government outposts, resulting in the deaths of several dozens, while the remaining men were expelled.”32 Predictably, the government blamed the Dakekan conflagration on insurgent native elements, whom it accused of hatching a plot to destroy the region’s camphor distilleries. Combat operations at Dakekan officially began on August 30, 1900. The pacification force comprised two platoons from the Dakekan garrison led by Captain Fujioka, along with his first and second lieutenants. In addition, a police captain led a separate force of 10 officers, 40 guardline troops, and a group of 50 Japanese and 154 “locals” serving T he D i s c o ur s e an d P rac t ic e o f C oloni al “ Suppr e ssion”   25

as laborers. The force, however, was quickly repelled as it approached Kaujiyo village, an Atayal community at the heart of Dakekan, and was caught in a pincer attack. Captain Fujioka suffered a major injury and was forced to pull back his troops. The colonial state knew that it was now facing a foe whose tactics defied the conventional methods that it had honed in previous wars like those against the Qing a few years earlier.33 Taiwan’s major colonial daily, the Taiwan nichi nichi shinpō, took stock of this, giving a grim preview of how security forces would later approach Indigenous suppression, both at Dakekan and for the wars to come: “Essentially, if one wants to control the savages one cannot do so by conventional rules . . . when we catch sight of a savage, we must fire upon him, burn his dwellings, confiscate his provisions. Suppose goods cannot be confiscated, then this property must be doused with oil and set on fire. The savages can no longer inhabit in the area which we wish to control.”34 In the coming days after Captain Fujioka’s failed expedition into the Dakekan heartland, colonial officials reinforced troops along the line and began preparing the installation of mortars that had Aboriginal settlements in their crosshairs. On September 12, shelling commenced using high-explosive shells. Multiple rounds were fired at various intervals throughout the coming days until September 14. With a 3,000meter gap separating the mountain guns from the Aboriginal dwellings, it is hard to get a clear sense of the scale of destruction, although one chilling passage from the Taiwan nichi nichi shinpō reveals glimpses of how Japanese firepower brought indiscriminate destruction to Indigenous homes and support structures. According to one article dated September 18, “on three occasions from the start of shelling, you could hear piercing screams from the direction of Kaujiyo village.”35 Additional details from Taiwan’s major colonial daily report that long-range assaults created a bonfire that was visible from Kaujiyo to other adjacent settlements, engulfing the homes of multiple Dakekan Atayal. Knowing that Indigenes could often easily outmaneuver colonial troops using their guerilla-style tactics, colonial armies used long-distance guns mounted atop strategic peaks to obliterate Indigenous defenses, weaken support systems, and terrorize the people into submission.36 Security forces then used the effects of the artillery fire to move in and occupy their designated targets, though on this occasion, the conflict resulted in a 26  Hi s t or i c al Me m o r ie s o f   Mu sh a

stalemate, as the Dakekan Atayal would be conquered only years later. The suppression of Mona Rudao’s forces and the larger Seediq Tgdaya people has deep roots in the tactics honed at Dakekan and countless other instances where the indiscriminate targeting of civilian populations was used to expedite the surrender of enemy forces. Perhaps the most important precedent set at Dakekan was the blockade (fūsa) imposed on the region following the government-general’s retreat. While blockades had been implemented as early as the Fukahori mission, this marked the first instance in which the government put forth systematic guidelines to ensure the effectiveness of this policy.37 Issued by the Taipei prefect, the embargo set forth a number of important guidelines on the ban of weapons, trade goods, salt, and foodstuffs for all the wicked savages caught perpetrating attacks along the line. As the prefect himself put it in his guidelines to frontier personnel: “There will be strict enforcement of a complete shutdown, meaning savages are forbidden from moving about, as well as receiving armaments, munitions, food, salt, and naturally everything else. This will result in the destruction of their vitality, to the point of life or death.”38 Once reduced to a state of desperation due to material privations, Aborigines would be given the option to “come down to appeal to authorities and supplicate that trade be resumed.”39 Officials would then conduct surveys of the intentions of the subjugated population to ensure that their submission to imperial rule was sincere and no “falsehoods” were at play. The prefect did foresee some issues with this policy, realizing, for example, that groups around embargoed zones were “good savages” who had not participated in the assault on Japanese outposts. Villages, he added, should not receive more than their allotted share of supplies, as any stockpiles of goods could be redirected to villages subject to the blockade. The prefect insisted that the blockade be uniformly enforced to avoid the formation of smuggling networks that would funnel food and weapons into the hands of Dakekan Atayal.40 With the Dakekan blockade and its more fleshed-out guidelines, the Japanese suppression state was now in a better position to enforce its punitive provisions. Embargoed Indigenes from Musha, for example, began feeling the effects of the 1897 blockade that had been imposed following the Fukahori mission. Indigenous groups often circumvented bans on foodstuffs and weapons by trading among themselves.41 By 1903, T he D i s c o ur s e an d P rac t ic e o f C oloni al “ Suppr e ssion”   27

depleted stocks of salt, rifles, and other vital supplies affected the livelihoods of Hogo and Paalan villages to the extent that it prompted them to seek outside help from neighboring groups. For this purpose, the two villages turned to the Gantaban of the Bunun, with whom they had long-standing hostilities. According to reports, Gantaban Bunun lured Seediq men from Hogo and Paalan on October 5 with a peace offering to settle long-standing animosities. The meeting was held at Shimaigahara (姉妹ヶ原), a plain just south of the Musha area.42 During this meeting, Bunun warriors cornered their Seediq “guests” in a surprise assault. The incident led to the killing of one hundred men, severely undermining the Musha groups’ “willingness to resist.” The loss of close to one hundred adult men left a mark on the Musha community, whose foundation for social reproduction relied on hunting and labor-intensive slash-andburn cultivation. According to scholars, the incident “threw the biological-sexual order into disarray.”43 They then formally requested surrender to the government. Following the surrender, construction of new defensive infrastructure was completed without incident approximately three years later.44 Limited evidence suggests that local Japanese authorities in Puli may have played a role in orchestrating this plot. The Gantaban Incident marked one of the early successful moments of penetration of Seediq territory by government forces. Exploiting the weaknesses generated by its control over highland-lowland economic flows, the government-­ general was able to secure a foothold for future expansive maneuvers. Also of import here was the tactical use of Seediq-Bunun rivalries—a policy later honed and perfected by security forces, who would recruit local Indigenes to assist in suppression operations.45 While artificially induced starvation proved to be a potent weapon, Japanese forces continued to invade Indigenous settlements using a mixture of long-range cannon fire and invasion by police, paramilitary, and military units. Another major opportunity to test these methods came in July 1902, when the colonial state faced another major rebellion, this time in Nanzhuang, in modern-day Miaoli County. In the summer of that year, the Saisiyat elder Ri Aguai led an uprising against local Japanese authorities and camphor monopolists, whom he accused of failing to pay the customary fees that camphor companies typically were paying for logging rights.46 Ri initially took governmental forces 28  Hi s t or i c al Me m o r ie s o f   Mu sh a

by surprise, attacking administrative complexes and torching guardline stations. His small band of partisans were soon outgunned and on the run in the mountains. As artillery troops incinerated his defenses and supply lines from a distance, Ri was encircled, eventually succumbing to disease. The rest of his force was then quickly routed. In the ensuing months, the government used the presence of Nanzhuang runaways to target other adjacent settlements, resulting in additional territorial gains.47 Ri’s uprising marked a turning point in the evolution of the suppression state. With growing pressure to cash in on highland forests and their rich stores of camphor, as well as two major anticolonial risings in its past, the government felt it was now time to draft a comprehensive plan for further advance into problem areas. It was at this juncture that the government-general decided to standardize many of the horrors it had inflicted on Indigenous populations up to that point during previous suppression campaigns. In early 1903, Councilor Mochiji Rokusaburō (持地六三郎), a high-ranking colonial bureaucrat, added his voice to the chorus of senior officials who had addressed the “savage question.” While the likes of Kabayama or Mizuno had merely hinted at the use of violence, Mochiji gave a clear road map, outlining specific portions of the northeast that would be targeted by the full weight of the colonial war machine. Mochiji also provided an elaborate legal and ideological rationale for shelling campaigns and unconventional tactics, invoking, for example, the inapplicability of existing norms for warfare in the highlands. In the opening pages of his report, Mochiji highlighted that “the suppression of raw savages from the standpoint of international law cannot be called a war. As a result, although from a sociological point of view the savages are human, from the point of view of international law, they are much closer to animals.”48 Mochiji, citing the legal opinion of the scholar Okamatsu Santarō, believed that unincorporated Indigenes could not be counted as shinmin (臣民 imperial subjects), given that they had been outside the scope of the Shimonoseki Treaty when Taiwan was ceded to Japan.49 Given the “insurrectionary conditions” (hangyaku no jōtai) affecting the borderlands, though, the state was still within its rights to use its monopoly on force and suppress those who resisted. Only conquest and absorption of these territories would bring the structures that governed other subjects on the island to the highlands. T h e D i s c o ur s e an d P rac t ic e o f C oloni al “ Suppr e ssion”   29

Violence, therefore, became the only means by which Indigenes would gain acceptance and recognition by Japan’s imperial polity. Islandwide suppression, however, could prove to be a costly and unrealistic endeavor.50 Therefore, Mochiji recommended surgical strikes on only the most recalcitrant of groups obstructing camphor production and expansion of the guardline. The resulting policy of “benevolence in the south, suppression in the north” (南撫北伐 nanbu beibatsu) was proposed.51 In terms of military procedures, Mochiji reaffirmed many of the practices seen in the last few years of fighting. Although police and guardline troops would serve as the advance guard for suppression operations, Mochiji stressed that the military could be called in for additional support and cover, but only for the most severe of cases. The councilor also proposed the idea of “also using the savages to control the savages” (蕃を以て蕃を征するも ban wo motte ban wo sei suru mo), which meant recruiting Indigene “friendlies” to assist in battle. Mochiji and military planners knew they could exploit long-standing feuds between Aboriginal groups to pit them against one another. Especially with the flow of trade goods constricted due to embargoed areas, northeastern Indigenes saw participation in Japanese expeditions as opportunities to procure rifles, munitions, and other vital supplies.52 Repeating the precedent set by the Taipei prefect in the fall of 1900, Mochiji also emphasized the need for continued embargoes.53 Mochiji, however, did envision the resumption of assimilation efforts in targeted areas. Following the suppression of northeastern groups, the councilor recommended implementation of religious and practical education to eradicate ancestral customs and ensure the “salvation” (解脱 gedatsu) of Indigenes. Mochiji’s vision of “brutal landscaping”54 followed by assimilation would unfold over the next decade, producing scores of campaigns involving a broad range of Indigenous groups, spanning from those living north in the mountains of Dakekan or Yilan on the east coast to groups affiliated with the Paiwan or Amis peoples in the south. Between 1909 and 1914, the fighting reached a crescendo with Governor-General Sakuma Samata’s “Five-Year Plan to Pacify the Northern Savages.” This five-year military campaign, which aimed to suppress the last remnants of unincorporated Aborigines (primarily the Truku in Hualien), saw the use of more destructive military tactics. Warships stationed off 30  Hi s t or i c al Me m o r ie s o f   Mu sh a

the eastern Taiwanese coast using long-distance artillery guns shelled Aboriginal villages for months at a time, while an unprecedented number of police and imperial army ground troops isolated, encircled, and eventually subjugated restive groups. Ironically, the last strongholds of resistance to Japanese forces were devoid of proper camphor forests, as the tree does not grow at elevations over 4,000 feet.55 Paul Barclay puts the total number of confrontations between 1896 and 1909 at 2,767, with a total body count of 5,917 (including only Japanese and Taiwanese deaths).56 Meanwhile, one figure from the Sakuma years (1909–1914 only) puts the Aboriginal death toll at over 10,000.57 The Seediq heartland was targeted a number of times throughout the decade of conquest. From their base in the walled city of Puli, security forces used shelling campaigns against the various Tgdaya, Toda, and Truku groups that inhabited the Musha area in order to expand the guardline into the highlands of Nantou. One of the last major campaigns that completed the government’s takeover took place in late October and early November 1910. Here, we see different applications of the doctrines elaborated by the likes of Mochiji and other senior-­ ranking officials. That year, following a string of attacks on lowlanders in and around Musha, the Nantō prefect assembled a large force of over a thousand police officers, with a small number of artillery divisions as well. The targeted groups included the Maninu (萬犬), Shiroinu (白狗), Tolokku, and Tautua. According to official accounts, this collection of groups, which totaled twenty-six villages and 1,050 households, “as of late, had been in a constant state of disobedience, and engaged in killings of the locals.”58 Just like the framing of the Fukahori Mission, official accounts pinned the responsibility squarely on the Seediq, whom we are led to believe acted in a bellicose fashion and refused to cease their murderous attacks. According to the report, security personnel from the Musha area had been temporarily moved earlier in the year to assist in combat operations against the Gaogan people (Atayal) in Yilan. This provided a window of opportunity for Musha-area warriors to attack installations within the Japanese perimeter. In response, the Nantō prefect requested that additional defensive provisions be made and that the fighting force in Yilan be brought back to this region. Shortly thereafter, the prefect ordered the local police T he D i s c o ur s e an d P rac t ic e o f C oloni al “ Suppr e ssion”   31

superintendent to suppress the perpetrators. After assembling its suppression forces, the government moved ahead with its “chastisement” operation.59 On December 15, long-range guns were moved onto Triangle Peak Mountain (三角峰 Sanjiao feng) overlooking Tolokku village. An emissary was sent, but according to the Japanese version of events, the elders did nothing but hurl insults, and they refused to engage in face-to-face meetings or cease their hostilities. On the morning of December 17, government forces fired on the Tolokku, causing considerable damage to three of their villages. The effects of the shelling were visible from a distance, as reports detailed how “amidst the panic and consternation, the wicked savages could be seen taking refuge within the surrounding valleys.”60 On December 21 at noon, a member of the Tolokku, brandishing a white flag, made his way into the police cordon and asked to surrender. The government demanded that the Tolokku lay down their arms, and so they did, with the promise that the shelling would stop. Nearby villages that refused to obey this order were attacked in succession, and in due time also agreed to the same terms. The operation ended with the mass confiscation of some 1,200 rifles. This time, the scale of destruction would usher in a longer peace, of sorts. Clashes, however, did continue until the following year. This asymmetric display of military force, like the ones seen at Dakekan, Nanzhuang, and countless other locales, resulted in surrender, as well as further privations for local Aborigines (chiefly the mass confiscation of rifles). By the end of the conquest period, the Japanese suppression state had completely transformed the relations of war between the two sides. With scores of armed sentries and mountain guns aimed at their villages, Aborigines were in no position to mount elaborate resistance campaigns like those seen in earlier rebellions from the turn of the twentieth century. With the Seediq people “pacified” and under government control, conquest gave way to assimilation as Japanese officials established a more lasting presence through the construction of schools and administrative complexes—a grueling and logistically difficult task that local men would be forced to take up. Although permanent police patrols and schooling in Japanese replaced mountain guns and advancing armies, the willingness to employ these tactics was never shelved, only postponed for the next instance of native insubordination. 32  Hi s t or i c al Me m o r ie s o f   Mu sh a

M U S H A : T H E L A S T S U P P R E S S I O N C A M PA I G N ?

By the afternoon of October 27, 1930, just as the dust settled over the bloody sports day celebration in Musha, the stage was already set for the government counterassault. In many ways, 1930 looked no different from many of the campaigns mentioned in the previous section, though with the added horror of chemical agents, aerial bombings, and more effective armies. In many respects, Musha could be read as the last tōbatsu, a final brutal reenactment of the Taiwan government-general’s belief in the absolute necessity of force when dealing with its native subjects. While the previous campaigns from the 1900s and early 1910s did not match Musha in terms of the total mobilized fighting force or the number of dead, these smaller confrontations set important precedents for the vicious government reprisal following the October 1930 rebellion. The use of overwhelming military force and modern weaponry to bring down a poorly armed insurgent group directly parallels the strategies of the earlier period of suppression campaigns, where the notion of making Aborigines “submit” through swift and rapid destruction of their communities was commonplace. The framing of the incident as the work of wicked savages who lusted for the killing of Japanese civilians easily could have been borrowed from the previous Aboriginal affairs playbook, which as we have seen, cast virtually all forms of Indigene resistance as unjustified killings (though in this case, the scale was great enough to warrant some investigation of the more underlying causes in the aftermath). The result was the same as that of previous encounters. In the case of Musha, the slaughter of Japanese (in the eyes of colonial officialdom) warranted greater loss of life among the Seediq, as indiscriminate ground and aerial assaults pounded insurgents and innocent civilians alike, leaving the uprising’s leadership with little choice but to commit mass suicide with their families as security forces closed in on them. Beyond the direct parallels with previous campaigns, official explanations of Musha also invoked the old trope of the resentful or spiteful “savage,” but this time, the hatred was not directed at Qing or Chinese abusers, but rather Japanese frontier personnel. Of course, the Seediq villages that participated in the rebellion had every reason to resent their oppressors on the eve of the incident. Forced labor, beatings, and quarrels between police officers and Aborigines had become daily T he D i s c o ur s e an d P rac t ic e o f C oloni al “ Suppr e ssion”   33

occurrences, as the local men were forced to perform corvée labor to procure lumber for large construction projects within the vicinity of the Musha annex.61 Adding insult to injury was rampant corruption by the police, who cheated Indigenous laborers out of their already meager wages by taking kickbacks through the payment system. Then there was the Yoshimura beat-down incident, where a young officer stationed within the vicinity of Mhebu village, while doing his rounds of logging sites, stumbled upon a wedding party where the rebellion leader Mona Rudao and his sons were in attendance, and was then severely beaten for slighting the latter. One of the standard interpretations by colonial officials was that Mona Rudao and his sons, fearing that the government would eventually come after them for this altercation, concluded that it would be an opportune moment to launch an uprising.62 Although accurate in many respects, these postwar studies often repeat, albeit with higher degrees of analytical sophistication and depth of sources, standard accounts found in government tracts.63 The literature published in the wake of the incident also tried to personalize the rebellion by linking it to the specific grievances of its leading participants. For example, in their post-Incident report, Taiwan’s Central Military Headquarters listed the “feelings of rebelliousness among the Mhebu chiefs” as one of the leading causes of the uprising.64 The Police Bureau’s “Gazetteer of the Musha Incident,” similarly, contains an important section dedicated to explaining “Mhebu Chief Mona Rudao’s rebelliousness.”65 As if to show the inevitability of the massacre, as well as the reprisal that would avenge it, the government-general insisted that a desire to exact revenge ran deep among Seediq elders. Coincidentally, this explanation dovetails rather nicely with the earlier policy prescriptions of Kabayama and Mizuno, who reduced Indigenous resistance to the incoming Japanese colonizers to mere vengefulness due to centuries of Qing mismanagement. Regardless of the underlying Japanese perceptions of Seediq grievances on the day of the massacre, the reprisal was swift and brutal, just as it had been in the prior decades. After news of the incident made its way to the authorities via a series of panicked telegraphs, ­Governor-General Ishizuka Eizō ordered the formation of a battalion of 178 police officers in Taizhong. Orders were then quickly sent out to Taipei, Tainan, and Jilong to put together assistance units. The situation regarding the 34  Hi s t or i c al Me m o r ie s o f   Mu sh a

insurgents was not entirely clear, and their exact whereabouts were unknown. Further compounding the sense of urgency and panic were groundless rumors circulating that an attack by Mona Rudao and his men on Puli was imminent. Requests for military, artillery, and aerial support came on the heels of the orders for police detachments. By the afternoon of October 27, the main fighting force and reinforcements from outlying provinces were inching toward Musha annex from multiple directions. The goal here was to converge on the Musha complex, secure the wreckage of looted facilities and dead civilians, and then prepare an all-out assault on surrounding villages who participated in the rebellion.66 Encountering little resistance en route to Musha, the forces retook the area on the morning of October 29 with no difficulty. About 155 Aboriginal “friendlies” assembled from the ranks of Paalan and Inago village, as well as the Gantaban, also assisted police forces in the recapture operation.67 Following the fall of Musha, the operation “shifted gears to a mop-up operation through police and military cooperation.”68 From there, rapid village-by-village sweeps ensued that targeted not just the attackers, but entire communities. On October 29–31, pacification forces moved northward in the direction of Shiroinu, as well as west from Jilong, to set up attack positions. Finally, with preparations out of the way, on October 31 at 7:30 a.m., mountain guns began firing and all units advanced toward the main Seediq villages. Two hours later, the villages of Rodofu, Hogo, and Suku were captured. Shortly thereafter, Tarowan fell, as did Boalun at around noon.69 Under the cover of mountain gun and mortar fire, pacification troops destroyed many of these villages along the way, targeting food stores and dwellings to completely deprive the fleeing rebel forces of supply lines.70 Mona Rudao’s group at this point had no choice but to retreat to Mhebu, which government forces then retook on November  2. With their strategic base lost, all the Seediq warriors could do was flee to the surrounding forests to take shelter among the natural fortifications offered by the Taiwan central mountain ranges. Citing the presence of “precipitous cliffs, with dense forests no ordinary person can access,” government reports describe how, “to gain supremacy, [the army and police] would have to rely on the power of cannon fire and aerial attacks.”71 With much of the Musha area groups subdued, the counterassault would shift to the air, where a combination of explosive T h e D i s c o ur s e an d P rac t ic e o f C oloni al “ Suppr e ssion”   35

shells and poisonous gases would deal a final death blow to the rebellion leadership, as well as their families who accompanied them.72 Although Musha represented one of the first uses of military airplanes in East Asia, this new strategy of air raids was really an extension of previous land-based scorched-earth assaults. Overwhelming force, regardless of the preferred method of delivery, was nonnegotiable as a way of inducing Aborigines to surrender unconditionally. Here, the old strategic calculus of suppression applied, but newer (and less precise) weapons had been added to the arsenal. Initially, the government-­ general’s warplanes were used for reconnaissance purposes, although within a few days, these quickly shifted gears to offensive maneuvers. As the “Gazetteer of the Musha Incident” describes: “Until the 20th of November, an airbase was placed in an old army barracks in Puli, and from Pintung airfield, planes were mobilized daily, conducting air raids incessantly on enemy sites. Showering them with bombs. With the assistance of mountain guns, enemy fortifications were obliterated mercilessly.”73 One particularly gruesome raid took place on October 30, when a projectile was dropped on Mhebu village, leaving a “pile of corpses” in its wake.74 Bombing continued in small enclaves around Mhebu in the days that followed in order to root out the remainder of Mona Rudao’s army.75 During this period of intense aerial bombardments, leaflets demanding a peaceful surrender were scattered by air.76 As for the specific impact of these impersonal air raids, we now know that what fell on Seediq villages during this near-monthlong period were a combination of incendiary shells and biological weapons like mustard gas (yperite), and other poisonous substances. Although such munitions were banned by international law at the time, evidence from the highest echelons of the colonial bureaucracy reveals that military planners were perfectly willing to experiment with outlawed weapons. For example, in the days following the outbreak of the rebellion, the prefect of Taizhong, in a letter to then-governor-general Ishizuka, discussed the inefficacy of conventional bombing methods when dealing with Taiwan’s mountainous terrain. Based on the topography, he stressed the potential suitability of “chemical attack methods” (科学的 攻撃法 kagakuteki kōgekihō) to deal more effectively with the enemy.77 With the suicide of Mona Rudao and the end of hostilities, ­Governor-General Ishizuka returned to the familiar refrain of colonial 36  Hi s t or i c al Me m o r ie s o f   Mu sh a

“benevolence.” In his address to mark the suppression of the rebellion, the governor explained: “The root of our savage administration policy is to carry out the imperial command of treating all with fairness and impartiality. To strive to bring enlightenment is to bring about loyalty. The savages are his majesty’s children.”78 The image of Ishizuka’s calls for more enlightened policies, just days after Musha villages had been reduced to smoldering ashes, should force us to pause and consider the deeper mechanisms of thought and action that made such contradictory positions perfectly coherent for Japanese officialdom. Just as the previous generation of leaders and policymakers emphasized the “civilizing” of “savages,” all while rationally explicating the need to obliterate and displace them, Musha marked yet another instance where humanitarian appeals for benevolent compassion happily coexisted alongside brute military force. This was simply the old logic of dispatching armed troops for punitive reasons elevated to more destructive heights. Far from a localized rebellion, Musha represented the final converging of discursive, material, and institutional forces set in motion during the opening years of Japan’s colonial rule, and also over the course of thousands of violent confrontations spanning the multiple decades of war with Indigenes in the highlands. C O N C LU D I N G R E M A R K S

In moving Musha beyond the historiographical confines of Japanese-Seediq relations, this chapter attempts to offer a new framework for rehistoricizing the rebellion and its underlying causes. By taking a longer view, we see that both the uprising and its suppression have roots in a deeper architecture of violence whose development exceeds the specific grievances of Mona Rudao and the warriors who banded with him. Concealed beneath the government’s land and aerial assaults was a logic of Indigene suppression, cultivated over the course of countless wars to secure camphor forests or build guardline installations from the late 1890s to the early 1910s. Through these years of conquest and resource exploitation, the colonial state authorized the indiscriminate targeting of civilians and belligerents, as well as sanctioned punitive measures to diminish resistance or the basic reproductive abilities of the targeted villages. At once subject T he D i s c o ur s e an d P rac t ic e o f C oloni al “ Suppr e ssion”   37

to the empire’s “benevolent” compassion, yet at the same time treated as a subhuman element not subject to the regular rules of war, Taiwan Indigenes were placed in a dangerous political and legal no man’s land that rendered them susceptible to the full weight of the colonial state and its arsenals. While the causes of the rebellion continue to be mined exhaustively, scholars should not lose sight of the larger infrastructure and repressive instruments that not only served as its preconditions but also directly shaped the brutality of its tragic aftermath. N OT E S 1. The publications detailing the outbreak and aftermath of the Musha rebellion range from short journalistic accounts to lengthy government reports detailing the lead-up to the rebellion, the histories of the Seediq groups involved, troop movements, and day-by-day accounts of all the events between late October and November 1930. Most of these have been reprinted in primary-source collections. See, for example, Dai Guohui, ed., Taiwan Musha hōki jiken kenkyū to shiryō (The Musha Rebellion Incident: Research and Historical Materials) (Tokyo: Shakai Shisōsha, 1981). For a more military-centric overview of primary sources, as well as diaries and handwritten materials, see Meitetsu Haruyama, ed., Taiwan Musha jiken gunji kankei shiryō (Military Materials Pertaining to the Musha Incident) (Tokyo: Fuji Shuppan, 1992). Summaries of the incident, like the “Musha jiken no tenmatsu” (The Full Story of the Musha Incident), can also be found in Fujisaki Seinosuke’s Taiwan no banzoku (The Savage Groups of Taiwan) (Tokyo: Kokushi kankōkai, 1930). A final, representative work of this “fact-finding” genre of Musha history is Hashimoto Shiraishi, Musha jiken no ichi kōsatsu (An Inquiry Into the Musha Incident) (Tokyo: Taiwan seiji kenkyūkai, 1930). 2. The term “rebelliousness” as an explanation for the incident can be found in the 1930 report “Musha jiken shi” (A History of the Musha Incident) from the Taiwan Central Military Headquarters, as well as the Police Bureau’s Musha jiken shi (A Gazetteer of the Musha Incident). As for the term “wicked savages,” this terminology is found in texts like the “Musha jiken no tenmatsu.” See “Musha jiken shi,” in Haruyama,, Musha jiken gunji kankei shiryō, 18; Musha jiken shi in Dai Guohui, ed., Musha hōki jiken: kenkyū to shiryō, 370. See also “Musha jiken no tenmatsu,” reprinted in Fujisaki, Taiwan no banzoku, 895–923. 3. This structural brand of historical analysis can be found in Reiitsu Kojima, “Nihon teikokushugi no Taiwan sanchi shihai: Musha Hōki Jiken made” (Japanese Imperialism’s Rule in the Taiwan Highlands: The Lead-up to the Musha Rebellion), in Guohui, Taiwan Musha hōki jiken kenkyū to shiryō, 47–83. 38  Hi s t or i c al Me m o r ie s o f   Mu sh a

4. See Hayashi Eidai, Musha no hanran—minshūgawa no shōgen (The Disturbance at Musha—Recollections from the Perspective of the People) (Tokyo: Shin hyoron, 2002). 5. I use the direct translation of the term tōbatsu (討伐 suppression), given how it perfectly captures how Japanese colonizers used the dispatching of armed troops or police to inflict violence on Indigenous peoples as a punitive measure for refusing to submit. In contrast to the term “suppression,” Japanese often used the compound buiku (撫育), which I translate to “benevolence” or “benevolent care,” to describe their strategy of “peaceful” acculturation. Buiku was the central strategy of Japanese-run trade posts managed by the “Pacification-Reclamation Bureau” (撫墾署) during the first few years of Japanese conquests in the mountains. Over time, it evolved to simply refer to the variety of assimilatory programs aimed at “Japanizing” Indigenes. While the character bu (撫) is also translated as “pacification” in the term “Pacification-Reclamation Bureau,” I translate it here as “benevolence” or “benevolent care,” given that it better highlights the Confucian paternalist and culturalist nonmilitary approach to managing Indigenous populations that Japan inherited from the Qing, who experimented with similar approaches during their final years on the island. 6. See chapter 6 of this book, by Ping-Liao Hui, for more on the 1874 expedition. 7. In her work on the Japanese occupation of Taiwan Indigenous peoples, Matsuda Kyōko discusses this overlap with early Japanese counterinsurgent operations against plains militias. See Matsuda Kyōko, Teikoku no shikō: Nihon no “teikoku” to Taiwan genjūmin (Imperial Thinking: Japan’s “Empire” and Taiwan’s Indigenous Peoples) (Tokyo: Yūshisha, 2014). 8. The term “defensive conquest” is taken from the historian Philip J. Deloria’s book Indians in Unexpected Places, in which he described how images of violent Indians helped sustain the myth that white settlers in the United States were acting on defensive grounds when conquering Indigenous land. For more, see Philip J. Deloria, Indians in Unexpected Places (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2004), 20. 9. An estimated 7,318 families representing 43,112 individuals (nearly half the Indigenous population) were relocated to lower-elevation areas between 1903 and 1941. See Shu-Min Huang and Shao-Hua Liu, “Discrimination and Incorporation of Taiwanese Indigenous Austronesian People,” Asian Ethnicity 17, no. 2 (2016): 294–312. 10. Before we proceed, a brief note on Indigenous names and place names. The official government “Musha jiken shi” lists eleven villages as belonging to the Musha area: Boalun, Suuku, Mahebo, Talowan, Hogo, Lodofu, Takanan, Kattuku, Paalan, Togan, and Shibau. Other sources mention additional villages, like Maninu, Shiroinu, Tolokku, and Tautua. It is important to note that colonial documents routinely refer to the Indigenous peoples who resided in Musha (or T he D i s c o ur s e an d P rac t ic e o f C oloni al “ Suppr e ssion”   39

Wushe, modern-day Ren’ai Taiwan) as the mushaban, which translates to the “Musha savages.” Beneath this place-name marker, specific village names (sha) like Mahebo, Hogo, and Paalan were used to refer to the area’s diverse groups. Although larger ethnonyms such as “Seediq” appear during the colonial period, these populations were lumped into the Atayal group for much of the Japanese, Kuomintang, and post–martial law period. Today, Seediq is an officially recognized group that encompasses multiple communities (or gaya) that can be roughly subdivided into three language groups: Tgdaya, Toda, and Truku. For our purposes, the terms “Musha” and “Musha groups,” which I often use throughout this chapter, refer to the cluster of Indigenous populations who then inhabited the stretch of mountainous terrain east of the walled city of Puli that made up the administrative unit of Musha, Nantou Province (now Nantou County). Any terminology that does not correspond to current political or Indigenous nomenclature reflects my attempt to stay as close as possible to the sources; in no way is it meant to deny the historical existence of a distinct Seediq history and identity. See “Musha jiken shi,” in Guohui, Taiwan Musha hōki jiken kenkyū to shiryō, 362–363. 11. Inō Kanori, ed., Riban shikō dai ichi-ni hen [A Record of Aborigines Administration Volume One-Two], (Taihoku: Taiwan keimukyoku, 1918), 2–3. 12. For centuries, Han settlers living on the edges of Qing control in the borderlands traded and often intermarried with local Indigenous populations. Those who married into Aboriginal families became commercial and political brokers, known as “interpreters.” Although the Qing sought to “quarantine” its frontier to prevent or limit interethnic exchanges, a hybrid multiethnic society developed. Mountain Aborigines took advantage of these networks, procuring firearms, salt, and other goods in exchange for forest products and animal parts. For more, see Paul Barclay, “Cultural Brokerage and Interethnic Marriage in Colonial Taiwan: Japanese Subalterns and Their Aborigine Wives, 1895–1930,” Journal of Asian Studies 64 (2005), no. 2: 326–337. 13. Both Mizuno and Kabayama had prior experience in Taiwan before taking up their posts. During the Taiwan expedition, Kabayama led campaigns against Paiwan warriors, while Mizuno functioned as his advisor. As a result, both men were equipped with awareness of not only the island’s strategic potential but also the possible challenges that involved governing the decentralized societies that made up the Taiwan highlands. For more, see Paul Barclay, “Tangled up in Red: Textiles, Trading Posts, and the Emergence of Indigenous Modernity in Japanese Taiwan,” in Japanese Taiwan: Colonial Rule and Its Contested Legacy, ed. Andrew D. Morris (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), 24–31, 58–59. For more on Mizuno’s travel to Taiwan in the mid-1870s see Hideyoshi Yagashiro, ed., Dairo mizuno jun sensei (Tokyo: Yumani Shobō, 2008), 24–31. 40  Hi s t or i c al Me m o r ie s o f   Mu sh a

14. William Miller Speidel, “Liu Min Chu’an in Taiwan, 1884–1891” (PhD diss., Yale University, 1967), 284–287. 15. Inō Kanori, ed., Riban shikō, 3–4. This translation (emphasis mine) is from Antonio Tavares, “Crystals from the Savage Forest,” 181. 16. Inō Kanori, Riban shikō, 181. 17. Inō Kanori, Riban shikō, 4. 18. For an official breakdown of the bukonsho’s various areas of jurisdiction, see Inō Kanori, Riban shikō, 13–21. For a more detailed overview of the agency’s beginnings and budgetary issues, see Kitamura, Kae, Nihon shokuminchika no Taiwan Genjūmin kyōiku shi (A History of Taiwan Indigenous Education Under Japanese Colonial Rule) (Sapporo, Japan: Hokkaidō Daigaku shuppankai), 34–47. 19. Inō Kanori, Riban shikō, 41–42. 20. There are various estimates of weapons seizures, although gun ownership figures reveal that officials may have had difficulties in confiscating firearms. For example, figures from 1908 reveal that out of a total population of 29,149, the Atayal owned 10,841 guns—a clear indication that Indigenes were still able to stockpile weapons, even amid a strict ban on them. Figures from the late colonial period (1939) puts the total number of confiscated guns at 32,412. In her thesis on Indigenous uses of firearms, though, Pei Hsi-Lin points out that confiscation numbers throughout the Japanese period may have been inflated. See Pei Hsi-Lin, “Firearms, Technology, and Culture: Resistance of Taiwanese Indigenes to European, Chinese, and Japanese Encroachment in a Global Context Circa 1860–1914,” (PhD diss., Nottingham Trent University, March 2016), 240. See also Taiwan Government-General Police Bureau, Riban gaikyō (Taipei: Taiwan sōtokufu keimukyoku ribanka), 70. 21. Inō Kanori, Riban shikō, 41–42. 22. Inō Kanori, Riban shikō, 56–57. 23. Outside observers also noticed the multiple issues affecting the agency. Lack of coordination with colonial police, for example, was invoked as one of the key reasons why its efforts to pacify the highlands never bore fruit. In The Island of Formosa, James Wheeler Davidson, then U.S. Consul at Formosa, wrote that “the officers in Formosa were also under great disadvantage in not having the police under their command, the result being that, when occasion arose for police assistance, a second authority entered the district clashing with bu-kon-kok [sic] and causing confusion and dissatisfaction.” See James Wheeler Davidson, The Island of Formosa (New York: Macmillan and Co., 1903), 429. 24. Paul Barclay, Outcasts of Empire: Japan’s Rule on Taiwan’s “Savage” Border, 1874– 1945 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2017), 95–96. 25. Fujisaki, Taiwan no banzoku, 679. I draw upon Fujisaki’s account extensively in the following sections. His 1930 Taiwan no banzoku functions as a sort of digest T he D i s c o ur s e an d P rac t ic e o f C oloni al “ Suppr e ssion”   41

of various government sources published in previous years. Some of the entries in his book seem directly copied from Kanori’s Riban shikō. Though not a definitive account of the events both leading up to and during the Musha Incident, his language and framing of the events are telling indications of a variety of assumptions that colonial officials shared when dealing with the question of military or police violence toward Indigenes. 26. Zhijinzhi Tengjing, Li fan: riben zhili Taiwan de jice [Savage Administration: Japan’s Policy of Governing Taiwan] (Taipei: Wenying tang chubanshe, 2001), 97. Davidson cites 635 casualties for 1898, with 303 individually reported assaults, in The Island of Formosa, 428. 27. For more on the relations between camphor production and Indigenous suppression, see my piece in Critical Historical Studies: Toulouse-Antonin Roy, “ ‘The Camphor Question Is in Reality the Savage Question’: Indigenous Pacification and the Transition to Capitalism in the Taiwan Borderlands, 1895–1915,” Critical Historical Studies 6, no. 1: 125–158. 28. Matsushita Yosaburō, Taiwan shōnō senbaishi (Gazetteer of the Taiwan Camphor Monopoly) (Taipei: Sōtokufu shiryō hensan iinkai, 1924), 162. 29. Kanori, Riban shikō, 237–238. 30. Taiwan Government-General, Taiwan tōkei yōran (Handbook of Taiwan Statistics) (Taipei: Taiwan Government-General, 1916), 185. 31. Charles Archibald Mitchell, Camphor in Japan and Formosa (London: Chiswick Press, 1900), 43. 32. Inō Kanori, Riban shikō, 160. 33. Taiwan nichi nichi shinpō, September 1, 1900. 34. Taiwan nichi nichi shinpō, August 29, 1900. 35. Taiwan nichi nichi shinpō, September 18, 1900. 36. Taiwan nichi nichi shinpō, September 18, 1900. 37. Paul Barclay provides a more exhaustive account of the Fukahori mission in chapter 2 of this volume. 38. Inō Kanori, Riban shikō, 163. 39. Inō Kanori, Riban shikō, 164. 40. Inō Kanori, Riban shikō, 170. 41. Inō Kanori, Riban shikō, 161–62. 42. See chapter 3, by Kae Kitamura, for an in-depth account of this incident, as well as detailed explanation of Japanese and Indigenous oral historical sources. 43. See also Kōichi Nakagawa et al., Musha jiken: Taiwan no Takasagoku no hōki (The Musha Incident: The Revolt of Taiwan’s Aborigines) (Tokyo: Sanseidō, 1980), 97–98. 44. This overview is taken from Fujisaki, Taiwan no banzoku, 679. See also Nakagawa et al., Musha jiken: Taiwan no Takasagoku no hōki, 97–98. 42  Hi s t or i c al Me m o r ie s o f   Mu sh a

45. During the Musha Incident, both Seediq and Gantaban (Bunun) were recruited to partake in the suppression of Mona’s forces. The following year, the Tgdaya Seediq who had participated in the rebellion were herded into a village settlement and subsequently attacked by a force of rival Toda and Truku (Seediq) men. A large group of Tgdaya men were massacred, in what is known as the “Second Musha Incident.” 46. The history of the camphor industry and the motivations behind Ri’s uprising are well beyond the scope of this chapter. For more on this specific rebellion and its roots in the late Qing and early Japanese political economy of camphor, see Antonio Tavares, “The Japanese Colonial State and the Dissolution of the Late Imperial Frontier Economy in Taiwan, 1886–1909,” Journal of Asian Studies 64, no. 2 (May 2005): 361–386. 47. One notable example of a group suppressed due to the presence of runaway Nanzhuang forces in their midst is the Manada, an Atayal settlement from the Miaoli area. The Manada group, who are listed in the official report as belonging to the Atayal, lived in Byōritsu Prefecture (Miaoli). Official accounts state that following the July uprising, “leftover bandits” (yohidō bansha) who had taken part in the Nansho Incident moved to Byōritsu Prefecture and married local savage women (banjin banpu wo metori). See Kanori, Riban shikō, 178. 48. Mochiji Rokusaburō, Bansei mondai ni kansuru torishirabe sho (Report Concerning the Problem of Governing Savages) (Taiwan Government-General, 1903), 4–5. 49. Mochiji Rokusaburō, Bansei mondai ni kansuru torishirabe sho, 10–11. 50. Mochiji Rokusaburō, Bansei mondai ni kansuru torishirabe sho, 12. 51. Mochiji Rokusaburō, Bansei mondai ni kansuru torishirabe sho, 48–49. 52. Mochiji Rokusaburō, Bansei mondai ni kansuru torishirabe sho, 48–49. 53. Mochiji Rokusaburō, Bansei mondai ni kansuru torishirabe sho, 48–49. 54. Paul Barclay uses this term with reference to shelling campaigns in his Outcasts of Empire, 17. 55. Robert L. Jarman, ed., British Economic and Cultural Reports, Volume 6: 1900–1923 (Slough, UK: Archive Editions, 1997), 538. 56. Barclay, Outcasts of Empire, 100. 57. This figure is mentioned in Robert Tierney’s Tropics of Savagery: The Culture of Japanese Empire in Comparative Frame (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010), 41. The figure comes from a United Nations working group on Aboriginal affairs in Taiwan. 58. Fujisaki, Taiwan no banzoku, 705. 59. Fujisaki, Taiwan no banzoku, 705. 60. Fujisaki, Taiwan no banzoku, 706. 61. Nakagawa et al., Musha jiken: Taiwan no Takasagoku no hōki, 88–89. T h e D i s c o ur s e an d P rac t ic e o f C oloni al “ Suppr e ssion”   43

62. Leo Ching, Becoming Japanese: Colonial Taiwan and the Politics of Identity Formation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 141. 63. Paul Barclay makes this point in chapter 2. 64. “Musha jiken shi,” in Meitetsu, Taiwan Musha jiken gunji kankei shiryō, 11. 65. “Musha jiken shi,” in Guohui, Taiwan Musha hōki jiken kenkyū to shiryō, 370. 66. “Musha jiken no tenmatsu,” in Fujisaki, Taiwan no banzoku, 916. 67. “Musha jiken shi,” in Guohui, Taiwan Musha hōki jiken kenkyū to shiryō, 421–422. 68. “Musha jiken shi,” in Guohui, Taiwan Musha hōki jiken kenkyū to shiryō, 424. 69. “Musha jiken no tenmatsu,” in Fujisaki, Taiwan no banzoku, 919. 70. This was the case for Boalun, when forces moving in from Jilong attacked the village on October 31 following the recapture of Musha. According to the report, “at noon, [the troops] pushed their way in Boalun, and the area was cleared of wicked savages. With the village fully occupied, their savage huts and food stores were incinerated, inflicting great damage upon the enemy.” See “Musha jiken shi,” in Guohui, Taiwan Musha hōki jiken kenkyū to shiryō, 425–426. 71. “Musha jiken no tenmatsu,” in Fujisaki, Taiwan no banzoku, 919. 72. For a visual account of troop movements, as well as suppression attacks by land and air, see Hayashi Eidai, Taiwan shokuminchi tōji shi: sanchi genjūmin to musha jiken takasago giyūtai (The History of Taiwan Colonial Rule: The Indigenous Peoples of the Highlands, the Musha Incident, and the Aboriginal Volunteer Corps) (Tōkyō : Azusa Shoin, Heisei 7 [1981]), 60–77. 73. “Musha jiken shi,” in Guohui, Taiwan Musha hōki jiken kenkyū to shiryō, 424. 74. Musha jiken shi,” in Guohui, Taiwan Musha hōki jiken kenkyū to shiryō, 424. 75. “Musha jiken no tenmatsu,” in Fujisaki, Taiwan no banzoku, 919. 76. “Musha jiken shi,” in Guohui, Taiwan Musha hōki jiken kenkyū to shiryō. 77. Hayashi, Musha no hanran—minshūgawa no shōgen, 18–19. Hayashi thinks that 科学 (science) might have been a typo, and what the prefect meant to say was 化学 (chemistry). 78. “Musha jiken no tenmatsu,” in Fujisaki, Taiwan no banzoku, 921.

44  Hi s t or i c al Me m o r ie s o f   Mu sh a

CH APTER T WO

The Musha Incident and the History of Tgdaya-Japanese Relations Paul D. Barclay

T H E T H R E E FAC E S O F M U S H A

First, they targeted Paalan (パーラン·巴蘭) for suppression. Concentrating firepower in a headquarters built on the Meixi riverbank (梅渓河畔), they advanced a path to . . . [a] mountain between Paalan and Wanda (萬大). [The Japanese] then occupied and fortified [this position] to control Paalan’s rear. Thereafter, headquarters was moved about a kilometer past Hitodome Pass (人止関) on the Meixi riverbank; six mountain guns were brought up. Next they extended their fortified perimeter from . . . Shouchengda (守城大) mountain to the rear of Paalan. After losing these expansive territories in the foothills, we Musha Seediq (霧社賽徳克族) had finally become, in name and actuality, residents of Musha (霧社住民) [see figure 2.1].1

In May 1931, as police were rounding up and imprisoning the last surviving participants in the so-called Musha Incident (霧社事件) on October 27, 1930, in far-off Taiwan, a Tokyo publisher was already repackaging the bloody rebellion—which resulted in over a thousand deaths, mass deportations, and a shake-up of colonial administration—as a minor disruption in an otherwise bucolic setting. Echoing a broad swath of

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Mt. Xalut Malepa tribes

10,539 ft. Xalut tribes

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Xalut

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Sanjiaofeng 7,792 ft.

Mt. Dongyan

Tattaka 7,273 ft.

Maibaala

6,957 ft. Mt. Shouchengda 7,982 ft.

Puli 1,450 ft.

r

11,695 ft.

trib sha Mu 0 ft. 377

Hitodome Meixi

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Mt. Qilai

Truku tribes

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Mt. Neng’gao Wanda tribes Wa nd a ri ver

Walled city Police/guard station “Tribes” as represented on 1911 police map Mountain peaks w/elevation

11,200 ft.

Approximate location of place named in text Road in 1911 “Savage border 1911” Guardline

figure 2.1  Map of Meixi River corridor, March 1911,from the Japanese “Bureau of Aborigine Affairs.” Source: Banmu Honsho, ed., Report on the Control of the Aborigines in Formosa (Tokyo: Taiwan Sōtokufu Minseibu Banmu Honsho, 1911), n.p.

Japanese public opinion, the Taiwan volume of Outline of Japanese Cultural Geography characterized the Musha Incident as a tale of “childlike natives” turning against their benevolent masters. According to the entry titled “Musha: A Savage-Border Scenic Spot” (蕃界の名所霧社), the formerly “headstrong” (頑強) “Musha tribes” (霧社蕃) of the “Musha stronghold” (霧社蕃の本拠地) were at last brought to heel by Japanese forces in 1910. Thereafter, in the pacified Musha (帰順した霧社内), members of the Musha tribes attended school, spoke Japanese, sang the Japanese national anthem, and rubbed elbows with Han-Taiwanese and 46  Hi s t or i c al Me m o r ie s o f   Mu sh a

Japanese immigrants. By 1930, the formerly recalcitrant Musha tribes had been transformed into the peaceful denizens of Musha (平和の 霧社). In fact, according to Cultural Geography, Musha was a model of successful colonial administration among Taiwan’s indigenous peoples. For Japanese with firsthand experience in Musha, it concluded, the October 1930 revolt was “shocking beyond imagination.”2 The sense of shock expressed in this encyclopedia entry was premised on the dubious assumption that visible signs of the state’s footprint among the Musha tribes, along with the region’s easy access for tourists, provided evidence for local acceptance of Japanese rule. This chapter suggests that such a fatal misreading of the situation can be attributed, in part, to the widespread and profound terminological confusion regarding the term “Musha” itself. This confusion was not the product of perfidy or a failure of imagination. Rather, it commands attention because it is symptomatic of a structural quandary facing nation-states that launch occupations in distant lands among unfamiliar peoples. The entry in question was one of thousands in a seventeen-volume atlas of imperial Japan. The massive compendium, whose authors and editors included respected university professors and journalists, functioned as a synecdoche of Japan’s far-flung empire. That is to say, Cultural Geography, while written for a popular audience, had much in common with the rafts of “executive summaries” that informed decision-makers in imperial nerve centers like Taipei and Tokyo. Modern states gather, disseminate, and collate information throughout their governed space to facilitate planning, budgeting, and unity of command. The information is relayed up and down bureaucratic chains of command and routed through a looping and nested hierarchy of outposts, stations, prefectures, provinces, and ministries. At each ascending level of the bureaucracy, the information is reduced in volume and granularity to prevent overload and paralysis at the apex. Under such conditions, people with the largest budgets and weightiest responsibilities are, in many respects, the least well informed.3 In other words, the view of Musha gleaned by the average encyclopedia reader in 1930 wasn’t that different from that of Japan’s prime minister in Tokyo, or even the governor-general in Taipei. Awareness of these institutional forces in knowledge production (and destruction) helps to explain why Japanese officials were caught off T h e Mu sh a In c id e n t an d t h e Hi s t o r y o f Tg d aya- Jap an e se Rel ation s   47

guard by the rebellion itself, as well as why so many others were shocked that the Tgdaya peoples could kill so many Japanese citizens with such apparent gusto. Both groups—officialdom and the Japanese citizenry— applied the term “Musha” rather loosely to a variety of referents that were anything but synonymous. In state documents, journalism, and travel literature, “Musha” could indicate the site of the rebellion, the living space of the so-called Musha tribes, the Tgdaya ethnolinguistic group, or the jurisdiction of the police in the Musha substation in Nenggao County, Taiwan. Given the complexity of the rebellion’s battlefield geography and cast of characters, the use of the term “Musha” as shorthand for disparate phenomena by officials, journalists, and Cultural Atlas authors is understandable, but it was nonetheless misleading. For starters, “Musha” (Chinese: Wushe 霧社) the toponym and “Musha” the ethnonym have distinct derivations. The toponym “Musha” is based on a Chinese-language term for “the place covered each morning by misty clouds (雲霧) in all four seasons.” Qing officials paired wu (霧), the character for “mist/fog,” with she (社), their term for an Indigenous settlement, to identify an assemblage of villages in the plateaus and valleys along the Meixi River.4 The ethnonym “Musha tribes” (霧社蕃), in contrast, identified peoples, not topography, and had a strong emic component. Chinese speakers adopted the term “Wushe-fan (霧社番)” as a substitute for the local Seediq-language word “Tgdaya.” The term “Tgdaya,” or “Wushe-fan,” refers to a group of proximal settlements that participated in a common ritual life, also known as gaya, or “ancestral law.” For outsiders and insiders, the appellation “Musha-ban” distinguished the Tgdaya people from the neighboring Toda- and Truku-dialect speakers. The Tgdaya (Musha), Toda, and Truku peoples referred to themselves as “Seediq,” a term that also refers to the language spoken by all three groups. The term “Musha” was originally used by Japanese administrators to refer to a collection of villages—it did not refer to the place where the rebellion occurred in 1930. In fact, the location of Musha’s constituent settlements was unclear to Japanese administrators. When first recorded, the term “Musha” was a toponym lacking geographic specificity. In 1890s documentation, the Tgdaya (Musha), Toda, and Truku peoples were known as “large settlements” (daisha 大社), whose members lived in many “small settlements” (小社) equivalent to “villages” 48  Hi s t or i c al Me m o r ie s o f   Mu sh a

(部落). Wanda (萬大), a “large settlement” inhabited by Atayal-speaking people, was linked by Qing officials to Musha, Toda, and Truku. The Japanese followed suit, classifying the Seediq peoples and their Atayalic neighbors in Wanda under the rubric “four large settlements” (四大社).5 In the epigraph, a local survivor of the rebellion, Awi Heppaha, illustrates the importance, at least for historical analysis, of distinguishing Musha the ethnonym from Musha the toponym. In a 1980s memoir, Awi averred that the territories claimed by Tgdaya speakers reached all the way to the outskirts of Puli in the late nineteenth century. It was only after 1905, he states, that Tgdaya living space was reduced to the mountain valleys that clustered around Paalan and other hamlets at the headwaters of the Meixi River (see figure 2.1).6 In his telling, “Musha” became the residence (住) of the Tgdaya ethnos (族) after cumulative applications of Japanese force in the early twentieth century. In Awi’s account, which jibes with contemporary documents, the term “resident” (住民) suggests confinement. In other words, while 1920s and 1930s metropolitan sketches of the region described “Musha” as a scenic spot, Indigenous stronghold, and site of the exercise of Japanese mobility, Awi’s memoir suggests that “Musha” was a place of refuge and containment for the Tgdaya people. Musha-town, the site of the actual rebellion, was an even more recent historical arrival than “Musha the Tgdaya stronghold.” Mushatown’s origins can be traced to the establishment of the Musha Aborigine Affairs Control Station (霧社蕃務官吏駐在所) in December 1908. This control station was one of several armed stockades linked by trenches, electrical wire, and communication lines. These stations were collectively known as the “guardline.” As a command post on the guardline, the Musha Aborigine Affairs Control Station was built for the purpose of isolating and coercing the Tgdaya, Toda, Wanda, and Truku peoples into complying with government directives. After repeated guardline movements and the final surrender of Indigenous peoples’ weaponry to the Japanese police in 1910, Musha was promoted to the status of subprefecture (霧社支庁) in April 1914 (see figure 2.2). That same year, the Musha Public School for Indigenous Youth (霧社蕃人公学校) opened its doors.7 After the Taiwan government-general’s administrative overhaul of 1920, the office with jurisdiction over the Musha subprefecture was T h e Mu sh a In c id e n t an d t h e Hi s t o r y o f Tg d aya- Jap an e se Rel ation s   49

figure 2.2  Musha subprefecture office and nearby Sakura Hot Springs, circa 1918. Source: “Musha Nantou Prefecture District Office and Sakura Onsen,” Record #ip1497, East Asia Image Collection (Easton, PA: Lafayette College Libraries, 2008–2019); http://digital .lafayette.edu/collections/eastasia/imperial-postcards/ip1497, accessed January 12, 2020.

reorganized as a branch unit (霧社分室) of the Nenggao County Police Section (能高郡警察課). A police inspector (警部) stationed in the Musha Branch Unit oversaw a staff of twenty-four police dispatch stations (駐在所) placed throughout Nenggao County in the Tgdaya, Toda, Truku, and Atayal villages. The inspector stationed in the Musha Branch Unit supervised roughly 180 police officers in the late 1920s. The population register kept there arrayed the “Musha-ban” (Tgdaya) residents into twelve different sha (villages).8 “Musha village” is not listed among them because Musha, the site of the rebellion, was not a Tgdaya place of residence—it was a Japanese town. In July 1927, as its nascent tourism industry gained momentum, Musha earned membership in a select group of “Taiwan’s Twelve Scenic Vistas (台湾十二勝)” by garnering over six million votes in a Taiwan Daily News reader survey.9 The reasons for Musha’s growing popularity were captured by the folklorist-ethnologist Koizumi Tetsu, who visited

50  Hi s t or i c al Me m o r ie s o f   Mu sh a

in January 1928. Upon his arrival in Musha, Koizumi bumped into an old university colleague. They enjoyed tea while viewing the Zhuoshui River directly below all of northern Taiwan’s major mountain peaks, from the wide veranda in a Japanese Inn. Koizumi’s “Musha” was hardly a “Tgdaya stronghold.” He wrote: Musha is the lowest-elevation plain in the rolling hills where the Meixi Valley meets the Zhuoshui River head-waters (in the basin between Mt. Nenggao and Mt. Qilai 奇萊主山). Musha is 110 meters (一町) from east to west, and several hundred meters from north to south; it is a small locale measuring several blocks (数町の小地域). The Musha Branch Station of Nenggao County Office is at the northern end. Running south from its main gate is a large road several meters wide. This is Musha-town (霧社の町). It has a Post Office, an Inn, and several shops. The Indigenous settlements (蕃社) are to the south of this road in a low-lying depression. Going uphill on the road is the Musha Public School. To its side are rolling hills on a gentle slope. The bottom of this hillside divides into four villages (部落) called Funnatsu, Chekka, Ruttsao, and Tentana; this is an Indigenous settlement (蕃社).10

In 1928, Musha-town consisted of a Japanese road built on a northsouth axis. Its row of Japanese shops was bookended by a Japanese public school and a police branch office. Although rudimentary by world standards, Musha-town’s facilities attracted tourists and made life more comfortable for the Japanese stationed in Nenggao County. During the 1920s, a post office, a public infirmary, and a trading post were added to the branch station, along with a Japanese-operated inn, a dry-goods store, and a camphor-manufacturer’s association. By 1930, Musha-town domiciled thirty-six Japanese households (157 people) and twenty-three Han Taiwanese households (111 people) (see figure 2.3).11 As Koizumi himself related, the four villages down the slope from Musha-town’s hilltop public school were indeed Indigenous settlements. Categorized as subunits of “Paalan-sha,” these four villages were administratively and geographically sequestered from Musha-town. Although

T h e Mu sh a In c id e n t an d t h e Hi s t o r y o f Tg d aya- Jap an e se Rel ation s   51

figure 2.3  Musha-town c. 1921, at the beginning of its development into a hill station and tourist site. Source: “The Whole View of Musha Village,” Record #nf0034, East Asia Image Collection, (Easton, PA: Lafayette College Libraries, 2008—2019), http://digital.lafayette.edu/collections /eastasia/cpw-nofuko/nf0034, accessed January 12, 2020.

Musha-town was the symbol and namesake of Tgdaya country for Japanese observers, it existed on the periphery of everyday life for a great majority of the Tgdaya people, who dwelled in the twelve settlements located beyond its gates and fences. The Musha-town that was attacked on October 27, 1930, was not a “pacified stronghold of the Tgdaya peoples,” as it was known in the 1930 Cultural Geography, but was more akin to the Green Zone that U.S. military and civilian forces built in Baghdad, Iraq, in the early twenty-first century. In 1930, Musha-town was a foreigner-dominated enclave that isolated Japanese residents and tourists from a local population whose quiescence and loyalty was questionable at best. Looked at from the vantage of 1895 going forward (instead of 1930 looking backward), we can see that Musha-town was built on a

52  Hi s t or i c al Me m o r ie s o f   Mu sh a

palimpsest of state-directed violence that preceded its emergence as a model of Aborigine Management (理蕃政策) in the 1920s. Through this lens, the construction of a Japanese-inhabited tourist, administrative, and commercial center in the heart of Tgdaya country, which had only recently been shelled and embargoed into grudging submission, can be viewed as a provocation, if not a dare. A L L R OA D S TO “ M U S H A” G O T H R O U G H W U G O N G LU N

On November 3, 1930, Tainan prefecture interior section chief (台南 内州務部長) Utsumi Chūji (内海忠司) alighted from Puli on a pushcart railway for Musha. Utsumi accompanied Taizhong police bureau chief Ishii Tamotsu (石井保) and Taizhong prefect Mizukoshi Kōichi (水越幸一), both of whom would later be sacked during the scandal that the rebellion produced in Tokyo. The trio left Puli station at 9 a.m. and arrived in the Meixi guard station, the pushcart train’s terminus, at 11:30 a.m. From Meixi Station, they proceeded by road, passing through Hitodome Pass without incident. Utsumi and company reached the Musha Branch Station by 3 p.m. the same day, six hours after departing Puli. The Musha station, built in 1908 as a small outpost, now acted as headquarters for the Japanese punitive expeditions against the six Tgdaya villages that had risen up against the Japanese a week earlier. The next day, November 4, Utsumi, Ishii, and Mizukoshi traveled eastward under escort to the Baorun suspension bridge, which had been destroyed in the rebellion. The party inspected the damage and returned to Musha by 5 p.m. that same evening. They were back in Puli by 7:40  a.m. on November 5.12 Two features of Utsumi’s November 1930 battlefield tour stand out. The first is the rapidity with which Utsumi traveled from Puli to Musha and back—it required less than forty-eight hours, with plenty of stopovers. In November 1895, when Japanese civilian officials first met with Tgdaya leaders, push-cart rails and vehicle-bearing roads between the Puli and Musha were nonexistent. But more striking is the fact of Utsumi’s journey itself. For the first decade of Japanese colonial rule, Japanese leaders did not visit Paalan, Baorun, Mehebu, or any other Tgdaya settlements at all—and rarely did Tgdaya leaders visit administrative centers

T h e Mu sh a Inc id e n t an d t h e Hi s t o r y o f Tg d aya- Jap an e se Rel ation s   53

figure 2.4  Map of the Puli basin with major Pingpuzu settlements Source: “[Taiwan] Gomanbun no ichi chikeizu,” Gaihōzu: Japanese Imperial Maps (Stanford Digital Library), https://purl.stanford.edu/qk200tw3602, accessed January 12, 2020.

such as Puli. Instead, communication between Japanese government officials and the Tgdaya people was carried out through intermediaries, who arranged face-to-face meetings in a specially designated installation on the outskirts of the Puli walled city, in the Plains Aborigine (平埔族, Pingpuzu) settlement of Wugonglun (蜈蚣崙) (see figures 2.1 and 2.4). Beyond Wugonglun, traveling northeast inland from Puli, the limits of Japanese jurisdiction ended, or at least rapidly diminished. Since Seediq conceptions of sovereignty were different from those imported to Taiwan by Japanese officials, it is difficult to say with certainty to whom the areas beyond Wugonglun “belonged” in the late 1890s and early 1900s. Contemporary descriptions of Tgdaya-Japanese diplomacy paint this territory as a no-man’s land that buffered Tgdaya people from flatlanders. Tgdaya people certainly conducted trade, diplomacy, and warfare with other Indigenous peoples, Pingpuzu, Han, and Japanese outsiders during these years. Nonetheless, Tgdaya people appear to have been politically autonomous; they were at least a decade away from being at the daily beck and call of Japanese constables and petty officials. 54  Hi s t or i c al Me m o r ie s o f   Mu sh a

T H E F I R S T O F F I C I A L C O N TAC T: P I XO S A P P O ’S M I S S I O N TO W U G O N G LU N

The Taiwan government general (TGG) made its first overtures to the peoples called “Musha-ban” in November 1895. The contact was initiated by the Puli subprefect, Hiyama Tetsusaburō. Hiyama’s first informants, the Han residents (“dojin” 土人) of the Puli walled city, reported that they had suffered many deaths and injuries due to attacks from “northern tribes (北蕃).” They painted a picture of farmers in fields with spears for self-defense and a population under siege in the wake of the Qing dynasty’s departure. The old guard posts defending the Puli plain had been set on fire by “savages (生蕃),” they claimed. On the other hand, the Pingpuzu who lived in the villages near Puli had served as the shock-troops on the Han-Indigenous frontier during the Qing period, and they were well armed.13 The trading-post operator and Seediq-Japanese interpreter Kondō Katsusaburō recalled in 1930 that residents of the Puli basin were far from defenseless. He testified that “the Plains Aborigines (陸蕃 rikuban) also practiced head-taking. This was different from the way Mountain Aborigines (高山蕃 kōzanban) took heads; Plains Aborigines took heads only for profit. When they took a Mountain Aborigine head, eighteen liters of palay were distributed to each household among the four Plains Aborigine villages of Puli, as a gratuity.”14 As Awi Heppaha related in his memoir, “We Seediq people were no friends of the Pingpuzu; they hunted our heads; but then again, we hunted theirs.”15 Despite numerous reports of endemic violence on the Han-Indigenous frontier, Hiyama’s superior in Taipei, Governor-General Kabayama Sukenori, ordered Japanese officials not to antagonize Taiwan Indigenous peoples, for fear of provoking resistance to Japan’s developmental agenda in Taiwan’s forests. Kabayama and his second-in-command, Mizuno Jun, expected Hiyama and other prefects to conduct surveys and initiate diplomacy among Indigenous peoples to advance the camphor industry, but to do so without opening a second front in Japan’s ongoing war against Taiwanese rebels in the plains. To comply with this tricky directive, Hiyama followed in the footsteps of his Qing predecessors in Puli, as well as Japanese officials in other parts of Taiwan, by dispatching an “indigenous woman resident T h e Mu sh a Inc id e n t an d t h e Hi s t o r y o f Tg d aya- Jap an e se Rel ation s   55

in a Pingpuzu village” to the “northern tribes” in order to invite Tgdaya leaders to Puli for a parley.16 The aforementioned Wugonglun was the obvious place to start. With a population of about fifty-seven households and 271 souls,17 Wugonglun was strategically located on the Meixi River between Puli walled city and the Tgdaya, Truku, Toda, and Atayal settlements behind the mountains to the northeast of Puli (see figure 2.4). Wugonglun was formerly a branch station of the Qing dynasty’s Puli fukenju 撫墾局 (pacification office), a bureau established in the late 1880s to manage Qing relations with Indigenous peoples. From this period into the early 1900s, the female interpreters of Wugonglun and other towns shuttled between their hometowns in Seediq country and Puli’s environs to arrange meetings between Tgdaya, Toda, and Truku leaders and Japanese government officials. Four other Pingpuzu settlements besides Wugonglun were home to these female Seediq interpreters: Niumianshan (牛眠山), Shouchengfen (守城份), Wuniulan (烏牛欄), and Dananzhuang (大湳庄) (see figure 2.4). The unnamed Seediq female interpreter sent upland by Hiyama in November 1895 secured a visit from five “small village heads (小社長)” after days of effort. According to Hiyama, the Tgdaya leaders were hesitant to make a journey to Puli. They were persuaded to bring a larger deputation to Wugonglun only after one Lieutenant Ishihara showed up from the garrison to supply liquor and take photographs with the five minor chiefs on December 24, 1895. The larger deputation, which included the “paramount chief,” Pixo Sappo, arrived in Wugonglun on December 31. Pixo Sappo brought the five minor chiefs and a retinue of three hundred people. They were provisioned and quartered in Wugonglun after a brief greeting from Hiyama, who met them outside Puli’s city gates. On January 1, 1896, Hiyama waited in vain for the Tgdaya throng to descend upon the compound for a New Year’s Day feast. Hiyama then went out to find Pixo Sappo. Finally, at noon, on the grounds of the old Qing fukenju in Wugonglun, whence the Tgdaya contingent had refused to budge, Hiyama read the news of Japan’s takeover of Taiwan through interpreters. Hiyama used hortatory language, adopting a tone of command despite what must have felt like supplicant behavior to his aloof guests. Finally, the meeting concluded after a stone-burying ceremony was duly conducted to seal the deal via a Tgdaya idiom.18 56  Hi s t or i c al Me m o r ie s o f   Mu sh a

In a letter to Civil Governor Mizuno Jun dated January 3, 1896, Hiyama referred to his first Indigenous political interlocutor as the “paramount headman (総頭目) of the Northern Tribes (北蕃), and the village head (社長) of Musha (霧社), one of the four big settlements (四大社).” In this rendering, Pixo Sappo was a village head, but not the village head, of Great Musha. In late 1896, the popular monthly Fūzoku gahō published Pixo Sappo’s name in connection to his daughter Chiwas Pixo’s marriage to Hiyama. According to the report, the wedding involved a lavish feast, for which two cattle and several hogs were slaughtered. Post-wedding altercations with a party of Toda and Truku wedding-crashers over the proper distribution of gifts indicates that Pixo considered the marriage to give him an advantage with the new Japanese inhabitants of Puli walled city. The fact that Hiyama took pains to distribute jars of liquor and cattle to the assaulted wedding-crashers in order to prevent their ire suggests the precarious position of Japanese officialdom in Puli in 1896.19 T H E L I M I T S O F “ H I YA M A D I P L O M AC Y ”: T H E F U K A H O R I M I S S I O N A N D W U G O N G LU N ’S I WA N R O B AO

The TGG was officially put on a civilian footing on April 1, 1896, which required it to create a bureaucracy that covered the surface of the governed territory. For the areas that were largely inhabited by Indigenous peoples, known as the “Aborigine District 蕃地,” the TGG revived the Qing-era fukenju as the Japanese Bukunsho, or “Office of Reclamation and Pacification.” Prefect Hiyama Tetsusaburō was appointed as Japan’s first Bukonsho (撫墾署), head for the Puli station, on May 25, 1896.20 However, the Puli Bukonsho did not open until July 23, 1896, because Puli was swept up in the rebellions that radiated out from Jiayi in June and July, forcing Puli administrators to retreat to Taizhong. Japanese forces finally reoccupied Puli on July 17.21 As late as September 1896, the walled town of Puli was still desolate, reeking of death, and filled with residents sleeping in makeshift quarters.22 Amid Puli’s suffering, according to court proceedings filed in May 1897, Hiyama ordered his staffers to employ Pingpuzu from Wuniulan to raze Han dwellings near Puli’s south gate to increase the size of his own residence. Hiyama was also charged with using the Bukonsho’s T h e Mu sh a In c id e n t an d t h e Hi s t o r y o f Tg d aya- Jap an e se Rel ation s   57

licensing system as a cover for theft. In September 1896 through March 1897, Hiyama looked the other way while his underlings threatened the residents of Wugonglun and Shouchengfen with arrest for conducting unlicensed trade with Indigenous peoples.23 The evidence of the abuse of power by Hiyama and his accomplices was compelling enough to force them all to be fired, imprisoned, and fined on June 23, 1897. During this turbulent period of Hiyama’s tenure, as Puli’s population was recovering from the ravages of war and regime change and Japanese officials were milking their sinecures, the infamous mission of Captain Fukahori Yasuichirō passed through in January 1897. They came to Puli seeking provisions, guides, porters, and interpreters for an overland journey to Hualian Harbor to complete a survey for railway routes. All fourteen members died of exposure, committed suicide, or were killed in skirmishes with Seediq, Atayal, and Truku men within two weeks of their departure from Puli. The expedition left Taipei on January 11, 1897, and arrived in Puli on January 15, 1897. Their prescribed route would take them into Seediq territory, so they hired a Wugonglun resident named Iwan Robao as an auxiliary interpreter (複通訳), along with an Indigenous-language interpreter (蕃語通事) named Pan Laolong, a Pingpuzu resident of Niumianshan who was also a merchant specializing in the “aborigine trade (蕃産物交換業者).”24 A February 1899 manuscript report of the Puli District Affairs Office (benmusho) describes Pan Laolong as a forty-seven-year old veteran, a holdover from Qing times. This report also said that he was the only interpreter fluent in the languages and customs (習慣 shūkan) of the “four big settlements” under Puli’s jurisdiction (Tgdaya, Toda, Truku, and Wanda). The report complained that “interpreters who speak Wanda and Tgdaya cannot speak Truku and Toda, and those who can speak Truku and Toda cannot speak Wanda and Tgdaya,” except for Pan Laolong.25 The range of Pan’s bureaucratic niche and the high value placed upon it by the administrators strongly suggest that the “four large settlements” comprised the most salient subdivision of the “northern tribes” for Puli-based administrators in the 1890s. Pan Laolong and Iwan Robao accompanied the mission to Middle Paalan (チョンパーラン社), the home of Iwan’s father. However, during its prolonged stay in the Truku settlement of Sadu a few days later, both of the Puli-based interpreters abandoned the mission on January 28, 58  Hi s t or i c al Me m o r ie s o f   Mu sh a

1897. It appears that Pan and Iwan objected to the planned route to Hualian, which ran through territories either unknown or dangerous.26 The important point here is that the “indigenous interpreter” and the “auxiliary interpreter” could not be commanded to stay with the mission, leaving only the Mandarin-speaking Japanese interpreter behind. Thereafter, the frigid weather that awaited near Hehuan and Nenggao peaks scared off other potential interpreters from the mission. Another problem was the shabby treatment afforded to Fukahori’s men in Truku territory (see figure 2.1). While Fukahori’s team was engaged in mapmaking, they scolded and beat curious Truku men for impeding their work, thereby forfeiting the goodwill of their hosts and guides. Then things got worse. To avoid their sworn enemies among the Taroko people near Hualian, the Truku guides steered Fukahori to Malepa. The Xalut people in Malepa, based on their experience with Qing-period explorers, feared that Fukahori was an advance team for a punitive expedition. To prevent an attack, the Malepa men killed some of Fukahori’s team. Thereafter, the Truku men finished some of or all Fukahori’s men off; some may have committed suicide or froze to death.27 Commander Kaku Kurata’s acerbic 1908 digest echoes many of the postmortems in emphasizing the lack of Japanese control or presence in the corridor beyond Wugonglun: Of the eighteen surveyors and engineers and officers of the Fukahori mission, there was one translator, but he could only speak Mandarin, and could say nothing in Taiwanese nor an indigenous language. They were heading north, to where no man had traveled, and they had poor maps; they had to face powerful tribes, and therefore were required to negotiate; a sub-section of the Musha tribe was invited to Puli’s Pacification Office and asked to guide the mission, to which they assented.  .  .  . But the non-Musha villages refused entry, and the Musha guides would not lead, so they only made it to the next town; their big enterprise was frustrated; it was reported that Fukahori committed suicide after coming to extreme grief . . . It is still not clear where the troops actually died.28

As Kurata’s report intimated, Japanese parties in search of Fukahori’s remains met staunch resistance and foot-dragging. In 1900, most T h e Mu sh a Inc id e n t an d t h e Hi s t o r y o f Tg d aya- Jap an e se Rel ation s   59

of the skulls and remaining effects were finally recovered, but the disaster and its painfully slow resolution reminded Japanese officials how far beyond the reach of the officials in Puli the four big settlements of Tgdaya (Musha), Wanda, Truku, and Toda were. T H E L O N G A N D W I N D I N G R OA D B E T W E E N P U L I A N D “ M U S H A”

Soon after the Fukahori debacle, Hiyama Tetsusaburō was discharged as prefect and Bukonsho head on May 23, 1897. His successor, Yokoyama Shōjirō, dismissed all Japanese trading-post operatives associated with the disgraced Hiyama. On the other hand, Yokoyama held no grudge against the Wugonglun interpreter Iwan Robao, who supposedly had left the Fukahori mission high and dry in Sadu. On August 25, 1897, Yokoyama arranged for the legendary ethnologist, historian, and author Inō Kanori to visit Paalan and other settlements. Yokoyama provided Inō with the services of an unnamed Japanese interpreter. With the intercession of Wugonglun’s headman Wei Moqi 未莫杞 (probably 味 莫巳),29 four Seediq women assistants (three of them interpreters) were also employed—Iwan Robao, Kumo, and Taime from Middle Paalan, and Rawa of Toda (see figure 2.5). On August 26, after a challenging hike that included rest stops leavened by the women’s lewd jokes, Iwan Robao led Inō Kanori to meet her father, Tsitsȯk, in Middle Paalan, where Fukahori’s expedition lodged on January 18, 1897. The next day, they visited Pixo Sappo in Upper Paalan. Pixo was the paramount chief who visited Wugonglun in January 1896 to parley with Hiyama Tetsusaburō. Inō referred to the Upper Paalan leader (Pixo Sappo) as a “touren 頭人,” recording his name as “Piosapo.”30 Pixo later appeared in Japanese manuscript records as Piho Sappo (ピホサッポ), Piyosapo (ピヨ サポ), Pihosapo (ピホサポ), Pihosabo (ピホサボ), and Piho Sahho (ピホ サッホ); in print, it appeared as Biyausabō (ビヤウサボウ).31 The appellation “touren,” a Chinese term rarely used by Japanese officials, and Pixo’s eagerness to be the point of contact between Japanese and Seediq peoples indicate that he was probably recognized as a local leader by Qing officials before 1895. At the time of Inō’s visit, Paalan itself was a complex of villages that rivaled the Pingpuzu towns of the Puli Basin in size, if not wealth. Although official and scholarly reports written after 60  Hi s t or i c al Me m o r ie s o f   Mu sh a

figure 2.5  A photograph from Inō Kanori’s photo album taken in 1898 or earlier. The note labels the sitter as an “Atayal-tribe Girl; Middle Paalan in the Puli Vicinity.” This is probably Iwan Robao, or possibly one of Inō’s other Seediq interpreters hired by Inō in Wugonglun in August 1897. The inset is from a composition created for the inaugural meeting of the Taipei Association for Research on Indigenous Peoples. It clearly shows the facial tattoos of the interpreter, who is also wearing a Han-style upper garment. Source: Photograph Album, volume 6, “The Inō Kanori Manuscript Collection (寫真帳第 六冊、 伊能嘉矩手稿),” Record # J127_06_0001_0023. National Taiwan University Digital Taiwan-Related Archives. http://dtrap.lib.ntu.edu.tw/DTRAP/index.htm, accessed January 12, 2020. Inset: Close-up of the illustration “Taiwan Banzoku shōzō 1898 Taihoku Banjō kenkyūkai seiritsu taikei.” Images courtesy of the Taiwan National University Library.

the early 1900s refer to “Paalan” as a single entity, they recorded three distinct villages in 1897: Upper (上Ten) Paalan, Middle (中Tyon) Paalan, and Lower (下Yē) Paalan. These Chinese-language designations for the three hamlets were based on elevation, not degrees of influence, according to Inō Kanori.32 A June 1897 Pacification Office report listed the three settlements (Upper テンパーラン, Middle チョンパーラン, and Lower ヱパーラン Paalan) as having forty, thirty, and eighty households, respectively.33 The ease with which Inō found three Indigenous-language interpreters also suggests that Seediq peoples were not isolated from Han, Pingpuzu, or Qing officials, even though they kept flatlanders at arm’s length. The Puli Bukonsho chief Yokoyama Shōjirō praised three salaried Pingpuzu “Aborigine interpreters” (seiban tsūji) in a mid-1897 report. These three men were all married to “Northern Tribes women down from the mountains.” Yokoyama judged the women as fluent in Taiwanese (dogo) and their native languages (bango). He considered them integral to their husbands’ proficiency.34 My analysis of 101 trips taken by Indigenous women between the Puli basin and Seediq country from April 1899 to April 1900 confirms that dozens of female Seediq interpreters worked with the Japanese government in the late 1890s. Female interpreters and emissaries (通事蕃婦 tsūji banpu, and 蕃婦 banpu)— including Iwan Robao—regularly brokered commercial and diplomatic errands between Japanese and Tgdaya politicians and fighting men. They constituted a group of forty female Seediq women domiciled in the Pingpuzu settlements of Wugonglun, Shouchengfen, Wuniulan, and Dananzhuang. These emissaries returned to their second homes in the Puli basin after two- to five-day furloughs. To “enter the borderlands (入蕃 nyūban),” they obtained permits with explicit time limits and their reasons for traveling. Their stays in Seediq country were always brief; their recorded destinations often stated that they were visiting relatives. The specificity of their missions, linked to particular towns or “tribes,” suggests that their competence did not extend much beyond circumscribed networks of kin and dialect groups.35 In summary, Japanese officials in Puli communicated with Seediq political leaders indirectly, and infrequently, through the intercession of interpreters domiciled in the outer precincts of Puli from late 1895 62  Hi s t or i c al Me m o r ie s o f   Mu sh a

through 1898. By mid-1898, however, Japanese-staffed trading posts had become magnets for trade, which supplemented the gifts distributed to the visiting Seediq, Bunun, and Atayal headmen and chiefs by Japanese Bukonsho officials. Whether it was due to the TGG’s restriction on Han residence beyond the so-called savage border or the quality of the Japanese-brokered gifts and trade goods, growing control over the flow of commodities gave Japanese officials leverage to command Tgdaya headmen to appear in Wugonglun, and later to enforce Japan’s writ beyond the confines of the Puli basin. T R A D E A S A W E A P O N I N J A PA N E S E -TG DAYA R E L AT I O N S

District Office manuscript records relate that a man named Chiri Wadai from Katsukku, one of the twelve Tgdaya settlements (sha), killed a Japanese man named Nakajima Taikichi (中島泰吉) on July 30, 1898. Thereafter, the Puli District Office threatened trade sanctions against Katsukku and Hogo (another Tgdaya settlement) in retaliation. Nakajima was killed in the foothills of Mount Wugonglun. When the body was discovered, a Tgdaya female interpreter (banpu tsūji) was sent to each of the Musha headmen to make inquiries. At last, on February 19, 1899, over six months after the discovery of Nakajima’s body, the district officer sent a message requesting the Hogo headman Pawa Nokan and the Katsukku headman Chiri Tomau to bring a retinue limited to three Tgdaya men and fifteen Tgdaya women to Wugonglun for discussions.36 On February 20, all twenty arrived; upon questioning, they gave up Chiri Wadai as the killer. The Japanese district officer demanded Chiri Wadai’s head as the price of maintaining trade relations. The two Tgdaya headmen assented after much back and forth.37 On May 21, four Tgdaya chiefs and eighty-one Tgdaya men and women arrived in Puli— they were probably put up in the old Qing fukenju building in Wugonglun. The following day, they brought Chiri Wadai’s head into the large plaza in the District Office. The ranking Japanese officer engaged in a stone-burying ceremony with the four chiefs, thereby wiping the slate clean, and reopened trade.38 All told, it required ten months to dispatch scouts, interpreters, and emissaries to Paalan, Hogo, and Katsukku to arrange for an initial conference with twenty Tgdaya people in Wugonglun, and a second T h e Mu sh a In c id e n t an d t h e Hi s t o r y o f Tg d aya- Jap an e se Rel ation s   63

conference with eighty-five Tgdaya visitors in Puli. The “lesson” taught here was that killing a Japanese man would require a Tgdaya settlement to murder one of its own and redeem the head at a government post. This workaround underscored the fact that Japanese police and officials were still utterly dependent on cooperation with Tgdaya headmen and chiefs to find their way around beyond the pass guarded by Wugonglun. At the same time, it demonstrated the method by which the Japanese state would gain a strategic toehold in Tgdaya country—the threat of withholding access to trade goods. T H E TA I WA N G O V E R N M E N T- G E N E R A L B R E A K S O U T O F THE PULI BASIN

In 1897, as far as the Tgdaya people were concerned, Japan’s administration was not in Puli, but specifically in Wugonglun (Yakanron), “a suburb of Puli and Japan’s forward line of advance in the Musha territory.” The Seediq people were able to keep the Japanese police bottled up in Wugonglun because of their success in rebuffing direct contact with officials. Awi Heppaha considered the aforementioned Fukahori expedition of 1897 a gang of “spies gathering information about the enemy.”39 After repelling Fukahori, the next great stand against Japanese forces attempting to break out of Wugonglun was the 1902 battle of “Hitodome Pass (人止関).” To set the stage for the 1902 battle, Awi identifies the Japanese invaders by their Seediq nicknames: policemen are bukkun (after the Bukonsho) and soldiers are tanaha tonfun (“redhats,” after their distinctive military caps). The adoption of these terms to describe all Japanese actors with homogenizing labels has the eerie effect of reversing a similar practice deployed in Japanese accounts, which usually refer to Tgdaya people as “banjin/fanren (savages).” This mutually recriminating terminology hints at the ruthlessness of the ensuing battles. On both sides, combatants killed nameless “redhats” or “savages” without compunction. The Battle of Hitodome Pass was fought by combined forces of Tgdaya settlements from on high. Their command of the terrain allowed the defenders to drop boulders, fell trees, and skirmish from invisible redoubts, sending over two hundred “redhats” (Japanese) fleeing for 64  Hi s t or i c al Me m o r ie s o f   Mu sh a

their lives, staining the Meixi River red with blood. Awi’s editor, Xu Chieh-lin, attaches the name “Captain Nakamura” to this battle; he dates it “1902.” In contemporary sources, the date May 1, 1902, is recorded. On that day, the 37th Combined Brigade Commander wired the Tokyo Asahi Shinbun to communicate that eighteen Japanese casualties were absorbed in a battle near Wugonglun, with twenty “savage” (seibanjin) casualties.40 This battle also made it into the annals of the semiofficial “Big Taiwan Timeline,” with Captain Nakamura’s name added but with a count of seventeen Japanese casualties.41 These scattered references reveal that the Battle of Hitodome Pass was of little moment to Japanese journalists and official historians, although Awi commemorated it as the “first battle between the Japanese and the Seediq people.” In Awi’s account, Japanese forces established a military headquarters farther east from Wugonglun at Meixi (see figure 2.1) in response to the drubbing at Hitodome Pass.42 The Meixi outpost would later be the terminus of the Japanese push-cart rail system connecting Musha to Puli, where Koizumi Tetsu and Utsumi Chūji disembarked in 1928 and 1930, respectively, after short, uneventful rides of about three hours. But in 1904, Meixi was a newly built advance post of the Japanese guardline. Instead of taking three hours to reach from Puli, it took about six years for the Japanese to reach Meixi in the early twentieth century. The guardline would later be extended from the base Meixi post into a noose-shaped string of barriers, mountain-gun batteries, and manned stockades (see figure 2.1). These installations completely surrounded and cut off the Tgdaya, Truku, and Toda peoples of Neng’gao County by 1909.43 Since the terrain favored the Tgdaya so decisively at the Battle of Hitodome Pass in 1902, in the era before air support could give the Japanese an advantage, we must ask how the Japanese extended their presence beyond Wugonglun to establish a beachhead at Meixi in 1904. According to Awi Heppaha, the manuscript records of the Puli District Office, a memoir by a Japanese interpreter and trade-post operator, and Minister Ikoma Takatsune’s Musha Incident postmortem, a combination of Tgdaya trade dependency, local political rivalries, and the Japanese state’s willingness to employ subterfuge and dirty tricks converged to tip the balance. If one could pick a pivotal moment that turned the tide against the Tgdaya people, it would be October 5, 1903, a day that T h e Mu sh a In c id e n t an d t h e Hi s t o r y o f Tg d aya- Jap an e se Rel ation s   65

has lived in infamy in Tgdaya memory and is known in Japanese as the Shimaigahara (姉妹ヶ原) Incident. There, Bunun men from Gantaban held out the promise of helping the Tgdaya settlements of Paalan and Hogo break a Japanese salt and iron embargo, but then they double-crossed their Tgdaya guests after plying them with drink. The Bunun men, in cahoots with the Japanese officers, took dozens of Tgdaya heads and later posed in front of a government outpost with their trophies. The Japanese confiscated hundreds of firearms in the event. After this rapid attenuation of Tgdaya fighting power, the Musha tribes became amenable to negotiations with the Japanese police forces.44 Two Seediq men who wrote memoirs of the rebellion, Piho Walis and Awi Heppaha, pinpointed Iwan Robao as an accessory to the events at Shimaigahara in October 1903. According to Awi, the treacherous Iwan was a smooth-talking femme fatale who lured unsuspecting Paalan and Hogo men into the Bununs’ trap with promises of trade goods.45 Iwan is a common Seediq name, one that appears frequently in TGG records. Whether the Iwan Robao who guided Fukahori Yasuichirō and Inō Kanori to Middle Paalan in 1897 is the same Iwan who brokered the fateful Seediq-Bunun meeting of 1903 is difficult to discern. The Taiwan Minpō reported in December 1902 that an Indigenous female interpreter named Iwan was dispatched to Paalan from Puli, where she was warmly welcomed by the toumu Sappo. Her purpose was to ascertain the willingness of Paalan to cooperate in Japanese maneuvers against other Seediq and Atayal villages. We can surmise that Pixo Sappo of Upper Paalan was the recipient of this visit, and it is likely that Iwan Robao was the messenger (see figure 2.5). According to the newspaper, Sappo related that the Paalan people were willing to atone for past headhunting “sins/crimes” (tsumi) if such a show of submission would allow them to obtain salt and other necessities and be treated like the Pingpuzu. Sappo thus offered to bring his men to Mount Wugonglun and light a signal fire to await a Japanese deputation. Sappo added that his people were at war with the Toda people, who had recently speared an unarmed Tgdaya man while decapitating two others.46 Sappo’s reported speech captures the Tgdaya dilemma. If they surrendered their arms, per Japanese entreaties, they would be left defenseless against their neighbors. If they did not disarm, 66  Hi s t or i c al Me m o r ie s o f   Mu sh a

they would be blocked from obtaining ammunition, powder, and metal goods that were important not only for self-defense, but also for hunting game. This particular negotiation did not bear fruit, but there would be many more like it to come. Three months later, in February 1903, the Hogo headman Pawa Nokan brought more than ten Tgdaya men to the Wugonglun guardline station to parley with police Inspector Fujita. He was also feeling the bite of the trade embargo. Japanese conditions stipulated for the resumption of trade were that (1) the Tgdaya people send their children to be educated by Japanese officers; (2) the guardline be extended another four or five miles beyond Wugonglun, upstream along the Meixi River; (3) metal wares, foodstuffs, and ammunition would no longer be freely traded at the posts, but they would be doled out as gifts on meritorious occasions; and finally, (4) the Tgdaya people would stop the “superstitious custom of believing that ‘other races’ bring bad luck, thereby barring them from entry.” In short, Tgdaya should let Japanese “freely enter the mountain territories.”47 Again, this negotiation does not appear to have produced a result, but Fujita’s terms illustrate that, on the eve of the Shimaigahara Incident, the Japanese had their sights set on Meixi and beyond. Kondō Katsusaburō, the common-law husband of Iwan Robao, looking back from 1930, described Japan’s advance of the guideline during the critical 1902–1905 period as the result of ruses and acts of subterfuge similar to those attributed to Iwan Robao by Awi Heppaha in connection with the 1903 Shimaigahara Incident. According to several Japanese officials and experts on the conditions in Taiwan’s Indigenous territories, Kondō was fluent in Seediq. He was also an able tracker, interpreter, and auxiliary on Japanese guardline movements. Kondō’s own memoir is an admixture of fact and fiction, but it does provide a unique viewpoint on the micropolitics of Tgdaya-Japanese relations. Kondō enters the written record in late 1898 as a known trading-post operator (物品交換人 buppin kōkanjin) and “husband” (夫 otto) of Iwan Robao,48 and as a Toda/Truku interpreter employed by the government in 1900.49 In 1906, Kondō earned a hefty seventy-yen bonus for helping the government put weapons on Mount Shoucheng, facing Musha.50 This last accolade is connected to the campaign that Awi Heppaha identifies as the turning point when Tgdaya Seediq became “residents of Musha.” T h e Mu sh a Inc id e n t an d t h e Hi s t o r y o f Tg d aya- Jap an e se Rel ation s   67

According to Kondō, the Japanese were able to place guns in a position to threaten Wanda, one of the four big settlements traditionally within Puli’s jurisdiction, because Kondō’s Tgdaya in-laws and dependents led the way as shock troops. In his version, the Tgdaya fought with Kondō to avenge a Wanda headhunting party’s assault upon the Japanese interpreter. While it is difficult to believe that Tgdaya men would risk so much to aid a man who was so closely associated with the Truku people and the Japanese government, it is certain that Kondō’s associates provided guidance and labor power to help extend the guardline. Through Kondō’s offices, then, the government placed their guns on a mountain overlooking Wanda in 1905. From towering heights, the Japanese forces indiscriminately shelled Wanda into submission with tactics that resembled carpet bombing from aircraft.51 If the Tgdaya people thought that helping Japan subdue Wanda was in their own interest, they were sorely mistaken, as the line from Mount Shouchengda to Wanda’s environs just south of Paalan presaged the first Tgdaya “surrender” in 1906. However, this so-called surrender was apparently short-lived. According to Minister Ikoma Takatsune’s post–Musha Incident account, a murder in Kirigaseki (霧ヶ関), near Puli, took place on July 8, 1908, followed by another at Sancha (三叉) on September 24. Tgdaya emissaries, according to Ikoma’s report, pinned the murders on Toda men and offered their services as laborers in a punitive expedition against Toda. The government in fact suspected the Tgdaya men of committing the murders; they believed that the Tgdaya delegates were attempting to use the Japanese to settle local scores. But the Tgdayas’ desire for revenge dovetailed with the government’s plans to extend a guardline. Therefore, the government accepted the offer and prosecuted the movements, finally placing guns at the commanding heights of Tattaka, overlooking Toda, Truku, and Musha, in late February 1909 (see figure 2.1).52 In Kondō Katsusaburō’s version of the same events, the Tgdaya people were tricked into helping Japan, at Kondō’s urging, by being made to understand that the government was exacting revenge upon Truku and Toda for Fukahori’s murder back in 1897. To broker cooperation, Kondō divorced his wife of ten years, Iwan Robao, in order to wed Obin Nokan of Hogo. Having secured the alliance of Hogo with the aid of government-supplied livestock and booze for a large wedding festival, Kondō 68  Hi s t or i c al Me m o r ie s o f   Mu sh a

subsequently led over six hundred Tgdaya men as the support troops for a guardline movement into Truku and Toda. In Kondō’s telling, the intelligence that he gathered regarding Truku arms holdings and defensive positions, enabled by the trust earned from Bassau Bōran in the late 1890s as an “adopted son,” paid off during the negotiations for a Truku surrender. Kondō made light of his betrayal of Bassau in his memoir, thus justifying the manifestations of Seediq suspicion of outsiders that Japanese officials so often condemned.53 M U S H A B E C O M E S A J A PA N E S E S T R O N G H O L D

Concurrent with operations involving the mobilization of Tgdaya personnel in the extension of the guardlines in 1908–1909, the Japanese established the Musha Aborigine Affairs Control Station, and it was staffed in December 1908. During the same guardline campaign, a branch dispatch station (駐在所) was opened in Hogo in May 1909. Signaling a new type of Japanese engagement with the Tgdaya people, a small, twoyear Japanese-language institute for Indigenous children was attached to the Mehebu branch police station in 1911, near another Tgdaya village. Thereafter, Musha’s first four-year Japanese Aborigine Common School was opened in 1914. A branch station of civil administration for Musha was also established in 1914; both were structures on the plateau that became known as “Musha-town.”54 In this 1909–1914 span, then, the term “Musha” went from denoting Tgdaya peoples whose paramount leaders resided in Paalan-sha and eleven other villages to naming a geographically specific junction-town on Japanese maps of transportation grids, military installations, and tourist guidebooks. From 1914 onward, “Musha” became a place where Tgdaya and Japanese people met face-to face on a regular basis without the interposition of shuttling bicultural intermediaries and elaborate procedures for protecting Tgdaya interlocutors from the Pingpuzu of the Puli Basin. This new space, “Mushatown,” was dominated by Japanese officers, policemen, and students, for whose convenience it was built. After the establishment of mountain-gun nests overlooking Paalan and Wanda in 1905, wrote Awi Heppaha, Japanese police began to search Seediq residences in the outlying villages for firearms with impunity, and they even executed people on the spot who hid weapons. The police T h e Mu sh a Inc id e n t an d t h e Hi s t o r y o f Tg d aya- Jap an e se Rel ation s   69

burned down houses to create a “demonstration effect.” When the next submission ceremony came in 1908, according to Awi, two decades of oppression set in: surveillance, obnoxious requests to greet visiting dignitaries, confiscation of farm animals, and cavalier treatment of Indigenous wives by policemen. All these impositions added to the grudges instantiated by the Shimaigahara incident of 1903. In Awi’s view, the mountain guns emplaced on Tattaka in 1909 destroyed a way of life.55 C O N C LU S I O N

It is paradoxical that Japanese documents referring to the Tgdaya, Toda, and Truku peoples are richer in information about individual people, particular transactions, and the complex topography of Indigenous settlements during the period when Japanese officials had infrequent face-to-face contact with the Seediq peoples. In the manuscript records of the TGG, but also in the pages of the newspapers Asashi Shinbun and Taiwan Nichinichi Shinpō, it is not uncommon to read detailed accounts of Japanese-Tgdaya encounters that feature the actual names and places of residence of Tgdaya historical actors, with long quotes of their reported speech, at least before 1905. During that first decade of Japanese colonial rule, information regarding people like Pixo Sappo, Bassau Bōran, and Iwan Robao was treated by Japanese as vital intelligence. Winning these people over, or figuring out how to undermine their authority, was viewed as a key to successfully governing the colony of Taiwan. With the end of the major guardline movements in 1914, the same year that Musha became a subprefecture, Japanese officers presided over Tgdaya peoples who appeared to be, on the surface, defeated. They could use firearms and ammunition only with police permission, and their comings and goings were monitored. School attendance in makeshift classrooms staffed by off-duty police officers was expected of children, as was corvée labor on road-building and timber-collecting projects for the government. Under such conditions, the “residents of Musha,” from a governmental perspective, had become subjects—­ people whose demography, health, and locations were important to know in a general way through the use of censuses and records of vital statistics. For the Japanese men and women who rotated into the new, 70  Hi s t or i c al Me m o r ie s o f   Mu sh a

post-guardline Musha-town, the Tgdaya people who made occasional visits or who were on display for tourists at the Aborigine Trading Post or the Youth School blended into Musha’s “local color”56 as part of the scenery, which was more famous for its cherry blossoms and natural hot springs. However, as Awi Heppaha’s testimony indicates and contemporary documents verify, this peaceful, scenic hill station was built among people who had been bombed, barricaded, and terrorized into submission. Musha-town was populated, from a Tgdaya perspective, by “redhats” whose entreaties for parleys could be rebuffed from a safe distance in recent memory, but who now had the temerity to bring women, children, and unarmed citizens within striking distance of Tgdaya warriors. This chapter has suggested how novel, and provocative, this new dispensation must have appeared to the Tgdaya men and women of the 1920s. While such background information does not explain why the uprising took the shape it did on October 27, 1930, it does explain why it should not have come as a “shock beyond imagination” to Japanese citizens. The specific motivations of Mona Rudao for leading the uprising, and others for refusing to join, remain important to the telling of this story. Nonetheless, it is also worth remembering that over three hundred people actively joined the revolt, with many more in support. A history of Tgdaya-Japanese relations that begins in 1895 indicates that the conditions in and around Musha in the late 1920s were ripe for Mona Rudao’s mobilizing so many combatants in such a short time. N OT E S 1. Awi Heppaha, Shōgen Musha jiken: Taiwan sanchijin no kōnichi hōki, ed. Xu Jielin (Tokyo: Sōfūkan, 1985), 22–23; Xu Jielin, ed., Awi Heppaha de Wushe shi jian zheng yan, trans. Lin Daosheng (Taipei: Taiyuan chuban she, 2000), 21 [emphasis added]. 2. This volume was printed on May 31, 1931; two weeks prior, on May 16, Japanese officers officiated at a peace ceremony for 624 gathered Indigenous people under a 145-man police guard at the Musha Branch Station in Nenggao, publicly ending the hostilities. As late as October 1931, however, these same police officers were still conducting investigations to ferret out the Musha Incident participants for arrest and detention. On October 15, 1931, 23 alleged participants were apprehended under the pretense of another peace ceremony and incarcerated. See Nakama Teruhisa, ed., Nihon chiri fūzoku taikei dai jūgo kan (Tokyo: Shinkōsha, T h e Mu sh a In c id e n t an d t h e Hi s t o r y o f Tg d aya- Jap an e se Rel ation s   71

1931), 304; Deng Xiangyang, Kōnichi Musha jiken no rekishi: Nihonjin no tairyō satsugai wa naze okottaka, trans. Shimomura Sakujirō and Uozumi Etsuko (Osaka, Japan: Nihon Kikanshi Shuppan Sentā, 2000), 132–33. The Cultural Atlas entry was not an isolated example; rather, it appears to be a cut-and-pasted boilerplate. For nearly identical descriptions of “pacified Musha” published just before the rebellion, see Taiwan sōtokufu kōtsū kyoku tetsudō-bu, Taiwan tetsudō ryokō annai (July 1930), in Kurimoto Jun, ed., ­Kindai Taiwan toshi annai shūsei. dai 4 kan (Tokyo: Yumani Shobō, 2013), 261; and Yamamoto Sansei, ed., Nihon chiri taikei vol. 11: Taiwan (Tokyo: Kaizōsha, 1930), 114. 3. Bruno Latour, Science in Action (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987); James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, Yale Agrarian Studies (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998). 4. Abe Akiyoshi, Taiwan chimei kenkyū (Taipei: Bango kenkyūkai, 1937), 203. 5. Inō Kanori and Awanno Dennosuke, Taiwan Banjin jijō (Taipei: Taiwan sōtokufu minseibu bunsho-ka, 1900), 5; Taiwan zongdufu linshi Taiwan jiuguan diaochahui, Fanzu diaocha baogao shu di si ce, Saideke-zu yu Tailuge-zu, ed. Zhongyang yanjiu-yuan minzuxue yansuo (Taipei: Academia Sinica Institute for Ethnology, 2011), 13–14; Inō Kanori, “Juntai nichijō,” in Inō Kanori no Taiwan tōsa nikki, ed. Kazunari Moriguchi (Taipei: Taiwan fūbutsu zasshisha, 1992), 71; Abe, Taiwan chimei kenkyū, 203; Mori Ushinosuke, Taiwan banzokushi dai ikkan (Taipei: Rinji Taiwan kyūkan chōsakai, 1917), 30–31. 6. Awi, Shōgen Musha jiken, 17–21. 7. Uno Toshiharu, “Taiwan ni okeru ‘banjin’ no kyōiku,” in Taiwan Musha hōki jiken kenkyū to shiryō, ed. Tai Kuo-hui (Tokyo: Shakai shisōsha, 1981), 96–98. 8. Ikoma Takatsune, “Musha ban sōjō jiken chōsa fukumeisho,” in Taiwan Musha jiken hōki jiken: kenkyū to shiryō, ed. Tai Kuo-hui (Tokyo: Shakai shisōsha, 1981), 264. 9. Soyama Takeshi, Shokuminchi Taiwan to kindai tsūrizumu (Tokyo: Seikyūsha, 2003), 204–5. 10. Koizumi Tetsu, Bankyō fūbutsuki (Tokyo: Kensetsusha, 1932), 213–14. 11. Deng Shian-yang (Deng Xiangyang), Kōnichi Musha jiken no rekishi: Nihonjin no tairyō satsugai wa naze okottaka, trans. Shimomura Sakujirō and Uozumi Etsuko (Osaka, Japan: Nihon Kikanshi Shuppan Sentā, 2000), 48. 12. Utsumi Chūji, Utsumi Chūji Nikki, 1928–1939: Teikoku Nihon no kanryō to shokuminchi Taiwan, ed. Kondō Masami, Kitamura Kae, and Komagome Takeshi (Kyoto, Japan: Kyōto Daigaku Gakujutsu Shuppankai, 2012), 330–32. 13. Wang Xuexin, ed., Puli-sha taijo nisshi (Nantou, China: Taiwan National Archives Preparatory Office, 2004), 306. 14. Watanabe Sei, “Musha sōjō no shinsō o aku hitotsu no kagi! ‘Seiban Kondō’ shi no hansei o monogataru (shi),” Taiwan nichinichi shinpō, January 12, 1931, 5. 72  Hi s t or i c al Me m o r ie s o f   Mu sh a

15. Awi, Shōgen, 20. 16. Wang, Puli-sha, 305. 17. Wang, Puli-sha, 308. 18. Hiyama to Mizuno, January 3, 1896, in “Banjin kaiken Puli-she shutchōjo hōkoku,” 35/18, Records of the Taiwan Sōtokufu, Digital Edition, Academia Sinica Institute for Taiwan History (hereafter Sōtokufu); Wang Jiasheng, “Taiwan tsūshin (nigatsu jūninichi): seiban hōmonki,” Yomiuri shinbun, February 24, 1896. 19. Irie Takeshi and Hashimoto Shigeru, “Taiwan banchi zatsuzoku,” Fūzoku gahō 130 (1896): 29. Hiyama’s wedding must have occurred just after the January 1, 1896, meeting recounted here, because an April issue of the Hōchi Shinbun reported that Hiyama and his beautiful wife had ended their marriage by then, supposedly leaving Hiyama broken-hearted. Araki Masayasu, ed., Shinbun ga kataru meijishi 2 (Tokyo: Hara shobō, 1979), 79. 20. Inō Kanori, ed., Riban shikō dai ikkan (Taipei: Southern Materials Center, 1995 [1918]), 125. 21. Taiwan keisei shinpōsha, ed., Taiwan dainenpyō: Meiji nijū hachi-nen Shōwa— jūsan-nen (Taipei: Southern Materials Center, 2001[Taiwan keisei shinpōsha, 1938]), 19. 22. “Puli-sha kinshin,” Taiwan Shinpō, September 17, 1896, 2. 23. Wang, Puli-sha, 250–54; “Formosan News,” Japan Times, June 25, 1897, 3. 24. Mori Ushinosuke, “Fukahori no taki: ni,” Taiwan nichinichi shinpō, September 24, 1910, 5; Fujisaki Seinosuke, Taiwan no Banzoku (Tokyo: Kokushi Kankōkai, 1930), 606. 25. “Sanjū-ichi nen jūnigatsu-chū Taichū-ken Banjin banchi ni kansuru jimu oyobi jōkyō hōkoku,” Sōtokufu, 4595/8. 26. Watanabe Sei, “Musha sōjō no shinsō o aku hitotsu no kagi! ‘Seiban Kondō’ shi no hansei o monogataru (nijū-yon),” Taiwan nichinichi shinpō, February 5, 1931, 5; Mori, “Fukahori no taki: ni,” 5; Fujisaki, Taiwan no banzoku, 616. 27. Watanabe Sei, “Musha sōjō no shinsō o aku hitotsu no kagi! ‘Seiban Kondō’ shi no hansei o monogataru (san),” December 25, 1930, 5; Yamabe Kentarō, ed., Taiwan (II). vol. 22, Gendaishi shiryō (Tokyo: Misuzu Shobō, 1971), 509; Tominaga Tōhei, “Aa Fukahori Tai,” Riban no tomo (January 1, 1936), 2–3. 28. Kaku Kurata, “Chūō sanmyaku ōdan, ichi,” Taiwan nichinichi shinpō, January 24, 1908, n.p. 29. Wang, Puli-sha, 265. 30. Inō Kanori, “Juntai nichijō,” 73. 31. Inō Kanori, “Juntai nichijō,” 70–79. 32. Inō Kanori, “Juntai nichijō,” 71. 33. “Meiji sanjū-nen gogatsu-chū Hori-sha Bukonsho jimu hōkoku,” Sōtokufu, 164/13. T h e Mu sh a In c id e n t an d t h e Hi s t o r y o f Tg d aya- Jap an e se Rel ation s   73

34. “Meiji sanjū-nen gogatsu-chū”; “Meiji sanjū-nen shichigatsu-chū Hori-sha Bukonsho jimu hōkoku,” Sōtokufu, 164/14. 35. Paul D. Barclay, Diguo qimin Riben zai Taiwan “fanjie” nei de tongshi (1874–1945) (Taipei: National Taiwan University Press, 2020), 190–99. 36. The language of these orders is ambiguous; on the one hand, it specified the number of men under arms that would be allowed to accompany a headman to Puli as a “permit,” but on the other hand, since such offers were routinely rejected, one might think of such forms as “requests.” 37. “Sanjū-ni-nen ichigatsu-chū Taichū-ken Banjin banchi ni kansuru jimu oyobi jōkyō hōkoku,” Sōtokufu, 4595/9. 38. “Sanjūni-nen nigatsu chū Taichū-ken Banjin banchi ni kansuru jimu oyobi jōkyō hōkoku,” Sōtokufu, 4595/10. 39. Awi, Shōgen, 18. Kondō himself, in two accounts, mentions in passing that the Truku people, as they watched Fukahori’s men making charts, began to doubt him and think of his actions as the prelude to a punitive expedition; Fujisaki Seinsuke, Taiwan tsūzoku rekishi zenshū daigokan: Fukahori taii (Taipei: Taiwan tsūzoku rekishi zenshū kankōsha, 1931), 36–37. 40. “Taiwan shubi hei seiban to tatakau,” Tokyo Asahi Shinbun, May 2, 1902, 1. 41. Taiwan keisei shinpōsha, Taiwan dainenpyō, 46. 42. Awi, Shōgen, 20. 43. Zheng Anxi, Rizhi shiqi fandi aiyongxian de tuijin yu bianqian (1895–1920) (PhD diss., Ethnology Department of National Chengchi University, Taipei, 2011), 268–80. 44. Paul D. Barclay, Outcasts of Empire: Japanese Rule on Taiwan’s “Savage Border,” 1874–1895 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2018), 96–97. 45. Awi, Shōgen, 17–21. 46. “Puli-sha fukin no banjo,” Taiwan minpō, December 19, 1902, 2. 47. “Musha ban no kijun shutsugan,” Taiwan nichi nichi shinpō, February 14, 1903, 2. 48. “Sanjū-ichi-nen jūni-gatsu chū Taichū-ken Banjin banchi ni kansuru jimu oyobi jōkyō hōkoku,” Sōtokufu, 4595/8. 49. “Sanjū-san-nen hachigatsu-gatsu chū Taichū-ken Banjin banchi ni kansuru jimu oyobi jōkyō hōkoku,” Sōtokufu, 4623/3. 50. Barclay, Outcasts of Empire, 136. 51. Watanabe, “Musha sōjō no shinsō (shi),” January 12, 1931, 5. 52. Ikoma, “Musha ban,” 262. 53. Barclay, Outcasts of Empire, 137–38. 54. Ikoma, “Musha ban,” 264; Uno, “Taiwan ni okeru,” 96–98. 55. Awi, Shōgen, 22–28. 56. This phrase is taken from Kate McDonald’s excellent study of tourism and identity formation, Placing Empire: Travel and the Social Imagination in Imperial Japan (Oakland: University of California Press, 2017). 74  Hi s t or i c al Me m o r ie s o f   Mu sh a

CH APTER THREE

Relistening to Her and His Stories On Approaching “The Musha Incident from an Indigenous Perspective” Kae Kitamura

This chapter begins with an introduction to the framework “the Musha Incident from an Indigenous perspective” before reviewing earlier descriptions of the incident to examine how we have taken part in (re) constructing stories and memories regarding this historical experience, as well as the kind of occurrences or issues that we have ignored through this process. I then go on to search for clues to help address the current problematic situation we face regarding the Musha Incident, which is done by further illuminating the historical context with a host of illustrative documents. TENSIONS SURROUNDING THE ISSUE OF AN “INDIGENOUS PERSPECTIVE”

Focusing on the Musha Incident According to a bibliography of the Musha Incident compiled by Kawahara Isao (河原功), 293 works have been published in Taiwan and Japan throughout about fifty years, from November 1930, when the Musha uprising occurred, to February 1981, when the bibliography was created.1 Of these works, 75 were published in Japan after August 1945. According to another bibliography relevant to historical studies of modern Taiwan,

also published in 1981, 636 works were published in Japan after August 1945.2 There is a slight difference between the range of each collection, and therefore a simple quantitative comparison has its limits. However, the volume of works concerning the Musha Incident in postwar Japan is roughly comparable to more than 10 percent of all works relevant to Taiwan history in the same period. Those works pertaining to the Musha Incident have continued to be produced since then. According to my own survey in 2010, around 300 such works have been published in postwar Japan.3 Why do so many narratives about the Musha Incident continue to be produced? Why do writers and scholars continue to revisit it again and again, despite the fact that a rich body of work about the event is already available? Given these circumstances, one must ask if there is a necessity for critical reconsideration. The Musha Incident has been the focus of discussions relevant to Taiwanese Indigenous people, and it has occupied a particular place in descriptions and memories about colonial Taiwan. Kobayashi Gakuji (小林岳二) has already explored this issue,4 and I also discussed this phenomenon as a problem within historical studies in postwar Japan in a 2008 book.5 However, there is room for further discussion about what problems this situation poses. On the other hand, some works that attempt to trace the histories of families, villages, and ethnic groups by focusing on survivors of the Musha Incident and the period after that have been published recently by Deng Shian-yang (鄧相揚), Chien Hong Mo (簡鴻模), Iwan Pelin (依婉·貝林), Dakis Pawan (郭明正, Kuo Min-cheng), and Kumu Tapas (姑目·荅芭糸).6 In these works, several fragments of experiences and memories that diverge from the previous image of the Musha Incident are presented, which reveal many tensions between the various narratives. This new wave of publications has not merely added some new facts but, more crucially, questions how we depict the history, culture, and society of Taiwanese Indigenous peoples.

Questioning “the Indigenous Perspective” Nakagawa Shizuko (中川静子) described what first drove her to visit Musha with her friend Ōta Kimie in May 1962 as follows: “We expected 76  Hi s t or i c al Me m o r ie s o f   Mu sh a

to hear directly from the local people about the incident, even though, over thirty years after the incident, people who joined the uprising might no longer be alive. However, we wondered, ‘how do their children understand the incident now?’ That was what we wanted to know.”7 Their writing, which mainly consisted of the oral histories of the survivors who sided with the uprising, is the earliest postwar reportage that attempted to describe the Musha Incident from the viewpoint of Taiwanese Indigenous peoples. The words of Awi Heppah (Tanaka Aiji 田中愛二, or Gao Ai-de 高愛徳),8 as reported in this work, related that “the Musha Incident was certainly a revolution which was deliberate and had an ideological background.” This viewpoint indicated a new direction for Musha Incident studies in a postwar milieu in which the Musha Incident was associated with such concepts as “savage,” “unexpected,” “rebellion,” and “headhunting,” which had been reproduced by several recollections of former Taiwan residents who returned to Japan, as well as of others. As Tai Kuo-hui (戴國煇) and others recounted later, Nakagawa’s visit and reportage provided new momentum for the beginning of a collaborative research project on the Musha Incident, which resulted in The Taiwan Musha Incident: Research Materials (台灣霧社蜂起事件: 研究と資料 Taiwan Musha hōki jiken: kenkyū to shiryō, 1981).9 Since then, up to the present, quite a few Japanese have visited Musha. They have been trying to listen to local people about the incident and have attempted to express their own experiences or emotions related to Musha. It could be argued that postwar memories or oral histories of the Musha Incident have been shaped by those Japanese people’s behavior of trying to listen to the voices of the local people. For this reason, I focus on tensions over the framework “the Musha Incident from an Indigenous perspective” as a means of exploring the meaning of the Musha Incident to Taiwanese Indigenous individuals, and then generating new historical descriptions of their experiences. The challenge now is to rethink our interest in searching for the “Musha Incident from an Indigenous perspective” as well. The aim of this chapter is rooted in such concerns. The next section explores the possibility of deepening the description of the Musha Incident itself, while it also discusses what issues arise when the Musha Incident is understood as a historical conjuncture. Re li s t e ning to Her an d Hi s S tor ie s   77

LIVING THROUGH THE “MUSHA INCIDEN T”

Where to Focus? The Musha Incident has captured people’s attention as “a milestone in what has been portrayed as the ‘long and glorious’ history of resistance among Kōzanzoku (Mountain People)” in postwar Japan.10 As Nakagawa’s reportage shows clearly, whenever someone expresses the desire to understand the Musha Incident from the side of “Indigenous People” or “the people,” there is an assumption that these people are the ones who joined the uprising and their children. However, can we understand the existence of the Seediq people who did not join the uprising but were involved in the incident, while we argue that the Musha uprising was about the Seediqs’ fight for human dignity? We might overlook something if we approach the incident and its memories unquestioningly within the “kōnichi ban (抗日蕃, savages who resisted the Japanese) versus mikata ban (味方蕃/ 友蕃, savages who allied with the Japanese) framework.” Pointing out the government’s brutal treatment by quoting the phrase “conquest of the savages by the savages” (以蕃制蕃), which has been cited repeatedly, is rather simple, and it might pose an obstacle to understanding the reality that people faced at that time.

The Musha Incident and the “Shimaigahara Incident” There are several works that have stimulated me to explore such questions. One of these is a scene in the graphic novel The Musha Incident (霧社事件 Wushe Shijian) by Qiu Ruo-long (邱若龍) (see figure 3.1). After Mona Rudao, a chief of Mahebo village, makes the decision to revolt, looking ahead to their future, he visits neighboring villages to induce them to join in the uprising too. Faced with Mona Rudao’s attempts at persuasion, Walis Buni, a chief of Paalan village, expresses his rejection of Mona Rudao by stating that “almost all of our young men are dead and gone.  .  .  .”11 The one question that this brief phrase poses is: what was the process that led him to the decision not to join the uprising?

78  Hi s t or i c al Me m o r ie s o f   Mu sh a

figure 3.1 (a) Mona Rudao, with the strong encouragement of other leaders, decides to stand up for the sake of their entire people; (b) Walis Buni makes a different decision in order to avoid further damage to his people. In these depictions, Mona and others appear quite brave, while Walis looks disheartened and even lacking in courage. Source: Qiu Ruo-long, Wushe shijian (Taipei: Shibao wenhua, 1980), (a) 120, (b) 125.

figure 3.1  (continued)

An annotation in the margin of this scene reads, “Most of those who were killed by the Bunun people, being trapped by the Japanese, were Paalan’s young men.” What Qiu recalls here is a tragedy that struck the Seediq Tgdaya people nearly thirty years before the Musha Incident. In October 1903, on a plain called Shimaigahara (姉妹ヶ原), about 20 kilometers south of Musha village along the Dakusui River (濁水溪), a group of Seediq Tgdaya who went to trade at the Bunun Kantaban’s invitation were ambushed, and over one hundred men were killed.12 Among the governor-general’s documents, a record indicating that the Holi-shichō (local government) played a role in the event can be found, stating that “there was Holi-shichō’s instigation in order to retaliate for the savage [the Seediq Tgdaya]’s outrage in the previous year.”13 Although there are few documents that examine the historical facts of this tragedy, which is also called “a deceptive attack at Shimaigahara” or “the Shimaigahara Incident” (姐妹原的偷襲/姐妹原事件);14 however, with a more recent and deeper understanding of the Musha Incident, our grasp of the subtleties surrounding the Shimaigahara Incident has also expanded. Until recently, the Shimaigahara Incident has been described as a fuse for the Musha uprising in 1930. The focus in this context is on a confrontation between the Japanese, who were trying to establish order by sordid means, and the Seediq, who were dealing with the psychological weight of ever-increasing resentment after suffering an unprecedented series of injustices and tragedies.15 And then the Musha Incident was regarded as the pinnacle of those conflicts. In contrast, Chien Hong Mo raises the question, “why did only six villages [which belonged to the Seediq Tgdaya] join the uprising, while another six villages did not?” From this point, Chien develops an argument focusing on the impacts that the Shimaigahara Incident had within the same ethnic group, while simultaneously keeping the ever-increasing rift between the Japanese and the Seediq people in mind.16 Chien points out that “genealogical research tracing the family trees of participants conducted 100 years after the Shimaigahara Incident made it evident that tracing back the roots of Zhongyuan village’s families17 is almost impossible. The period dating back in that village is two generations shorter than the one of Meixi village, where most people are the descendants of Togan.”18 These facts that emerged from intensive Re li s t e ning to Her an d Hi s S tor ie s   81

research into village life-histories shed light on historical details that were dropped from the former framework of the Japanese versus the Seediq, while also resonating with oral history accounts from local villagers, as illustrated next.

The Shimaigahara Incident, Related in Memories and Oral Histories Dakis Pawan, who was born in Qingliu village and has continued to engage in interviews and documentary research relevant to his own history and culture while teaching high school in Puli, describes his elders’ memories of the Shimaigahara Incident as follows: If an entire group of over 100 men was totally destroyed, what did the situation mean for our village at that time? How did women survive after all of the men in their family had been wiped out? This became an extremely serious social crisis. The elders told me that, “When the survivors came back, the women recognized that something had happened and burst into loud sobs (mlingis palu balay sa). They wailed as if they had gone mad, blaming fate and other people for being beaten to that degree.” Those women brought pigs to the road, above the bridge near to Hitodome Pass (人止関), where the men would have passed through. It was in order to hold a ceremony of calling spirits of the deceased, calling their husbands’ spirits and mourning for them (lmawa utux). Because the situation of their death was unnatural (mqdunoq), therefore their spirits had to be called back. Kari ta naq Seediq u, hay lmawa utux niya, pruway balay (which in the Seediq language means to comfort the decedents’ spirits through a summoning ceremony). . . . Such a ceremony is in order to bring peace in the aftermath of disaster and prevent it from affecting the next generation. Therefore, as the elders spoke, the women wailed for several days and nights at that place. I suppose it must have been for well over a month; it could have been nearly a year, anyway, it should be a certain period of time after the incident, when they came back to the village, having finished the Dmahul ceremony. Now, how did the women, who lost the pillars of their families, live through it? 82  Hi s t or i c al Me m o r ie s o f   Mu sh a

Pdaan ta kari Seediq da u kiya ka pgluk Snaw kana ka dhiya desa (They therefore began to fight with each other over the remaining men). Fighting over a man, because they lost the pillar of their family, they brought back all the unmarried men for their husbands, regardless of the men’s age, and regardless of her own age either. The situation became one in which women were seeking men. It was not the situation of proposing marriage, but was pgluk snaw kana ka dhiya (an action of a woman snatching a man). Why do I use the word “pgluk”? . . . Where does one go to find 100 men? That is what led to the circumstances behind “pgluk snaw” (snatching men). During that period, in the Paalan area, if the chief failed to manage the situation, there would have been chaos. Why would such chaos have ensured? It could have resulted in a moral crisis within our society. There was such anxiety, because gaya distinctly prescribes which generations are permitted to get married. Nevertheless, there was no way during that period, so the women went around neighbouring villages in the Paalan, Droduh and Gungu areas to seek men.19

Thus began the struggle of those women who had survived. Unfortunately, quite a few of these women, grieving over their deceased husbands, ultimately commited suicide. According to the Japanese records in 1897, there were 168 households and about 770 people in Paalan, which was the largest village in the Musha area.20 On the other hand, the population of the whole Tgdaya group (Paalan included) numbered 537 households and about 2,400 people (see table 3.1). This means that the sudden deaths of over 100 adult men directly affected hundreds of women and children who were left behind, and they contributed to a sense of crisis in maintaining the gaya (rule or norm) for the entire society at that time. The following is a dictation from Tapas Nawi (Lin Yue-qiu 林月秋), who was born in Zhongyuan in 1952:21 Since I born during the 41st year of the Republic (1952), I have no memory of ever meeting my grandparents—I don’t have any impressions of them, nor any photographs. So I know nothing about them. The one thing I remember is what my mother told me; Re li s t e ning to Her an d Hi s S tor ie s   83

Female

Male Female Male Female Male Female Male Female Male Female Male Female Male Female Male Female Male Female Male

Boarung

Bukasan Bkasan Suku

Qacuq

Kattsuku

Hogo Gungu Rodoh Drodux Kawanakajima Chuanzhongdao Paalan Paran Takanan

Tarowan Truwan

Female

Male

Boalum

Mahebo Mehebu

Sex

Settlement

300

410+

770+

–

110+

200+

270+

300

#

–

–

1897

79

68 60 76 79 91 88 16 12 98 113 84 86 – – 211 205 31 25 57

27

40

1912

47

20 15 99 93 92 104 17 21 102 114 110 103 – – 222 226 34 23 46

85

76

1922

62

10 10 121 110 103 108 13 15 138 131 147 138 – – 280 265 43 31 53

95

97

1929

62

– – 62 63 40 33 10 13 33 30 68 78 – – 270 247 42 28 53

65

73

1930

56

– – – – – – – – – – – – 146 129 273 269 40 30 53

–

–

1931

TABLE 3.1 Population figures for Seediq people (賽德克族) Tgdaya group (德克塔雅群) settlements (社)

54

– – – – – – – – – – – – 115 117 258 260 28 22 44

–

–

1932

–

– – – – – – – – – – – – 112 140 – – – – –

–

–

1942

(Zhongyuan)

Qingliu

(Qingliu)

Current village

Male Female

Subtotal for the Musha uprising participant settlements

~2,600

200+

#

–

473 465

– – 53 51 15 17 840 842 516 535

– – 62 82 10 19 890 932 619 597

– – 77 81 22 28 1,104 1,074 286 282

– – 84 79 23 26 758 724 146 127

– – 83 83 24 26 619 593 115 117

– – 84 82 23 29 552 564 112 140

324 318 96 98 35 37 567 593 Meixi

Zhongyuan

Sources: For 1897, Uozumi Etsuko, and Deng Shian-yang, trans., “Nihon tōchi jidai no Musha-gun (Tgdaya) no buraku no hensen,” Tenri Taiwan gakkaihō 17 (June 2008): 19–41. The data are taken from “Fukahori Taii no shōseki tanken hōkoku,” housed at the the Asia-Africa Language and Culture Institute Archives, Tokyo University of Foreign Studies. For 1912, Mori Ushinosuke, Taiwan banzokushi dai ikkan (Taipei: Rinji Taiwan kyūkan chōsakai, 1917). For 1922–1944, Taiwan sōtokufu Keimukyoku, Bansha kokō (1923–1943).

The occasions that brought about changes in Tgdaya settlement-classifications and residence patterns under Japanese colonial rule are as follows: (1) Boalum and Bukasan once belonged to Seediq-Tawsay but entered the Seediq-Tgdaya sphere (gaya) around 1908; (2) Bukasan residents, from around 1928 to the beginning of 1930, gradually emigrated to Boalum—these two settlements were thus amalgamated as Boalum; (3) in May 1931, the government-general forcibly relocated the settlements that participated in the Musha rebellion, and the survivors in Boalum (including Bukasan), Suku, Mehebu, Truwan, Hogo, and Rodoh were all moved to Chuanzhongdao (Kawanakajima); and (4) in 1939–1940, the Taiwan sōtokufu forcibly relocated Paalan, Takanan, and Katsuku residents to Nakahara (Zhongyuan) to make room for the Musha (Wushe) Dam project upstream on the Dakusui (Zhuoshui) River.

The “Current Village” column lists villages (部落) within today’s Taiwanese administrative townships (村). Today, Qingliu and Zhongyuan belong to Taizhong prefecture, Airen municipality, and Huzhu village; and Meixi belongs to Taizhong prefecture, Airen municipality, and Nanfeng village.

The row “Subtotal for the Musha uprising participant settlements” denotes the total for the first seven settlements listed on this table. In 1930, these were reclassified as six settlements because Boalum and Bukasan merged. For convenience, I included figures for both Boalum and Bukasan for the years before the merger.

Settlements are marked with a dash (–) if they were nonextant in a column-year; settlements not surveyed in a column-year are marked with a number sign (#).

Note: The figures represent population totals at year’s end.

Togan Tongan Shibao Sipo Tgdaya branch total

Male Female Male Female Male Female Male Female

Nakahara Zhongyuan

my grandmother was not able to weave clothes but was very good at setting traps. She used to go to the foothill area to set traps for mice, and captured a good many, sometimes she caught so many that she was even unable to carry them all home on her back and had to come back to the village to get my father to help her.

The scene illustrated here is Paalan village after the Shimaigahara Incident. Many families lost their husbands, fathers, and sons. Particularly in those families who no longer had a man in the house to carry out the hunting duties, nothing was left for the women and children to supplement the protein in their diets; all they could do was resort to trapping mice in the fields and beside their homes. As Chien Hong Mo has suggested, Tapas Nawi was probably uninformed about the Shimaigahara Incident. Still, not as a memory of the incident but as an episode of the grandmother who was good at trapping mice, the people’s postincident history has been deeply engraved into their oral histories. What those oral histories indicate goes far beyond the significance of the Shimaigahara Incident. The women we see in these oral histories, mourning the loss of their husbands according to Seediq tradition, seeking new spouses as means of battling their way out of a desperate situation, and struggling to secure enough food, illuminate what was taking place as the Japanese increasingly expanded their reach into Seediq society, expanding the aiyūsen (guardline), spreading mortars, setting up cannon-equipped fortifications, increasing the number of police stations, and recruiting Seediq men in the suppression campaign against the Slamao. In addition, that situation was not only specific to Paalan. As table 3.2 shows, the population of the Mabaala, the Slamao, and other groups was reduced by half between the 1910s and the beginning of the 1920s; also, the impact of the Spanish flu pandemic in 1918 and 1919 on the Taiwan Indigenous population should not be ignored. The fact that the population of these Indigenous groups was cut in half between the 1910s and the 1940s indicates the calamitous history that each of these groups experienced. The accumulation of such experiences presumably had a deep impact on each Indigenous social group, as well as on the historical recognition of each individual person. 86  Hi s t or i c al Me m o r ie s o f   Mu sh a

Seediq

Paalan, Hogo, others

Tgdaya

840 842

327 324

890 932

397 401

477 451

114

99

246

239

117

90

149

105

233

210

334 367

1922

1,104 1,074

418 398

496 480

127

110

274

254

137

123

111

98

274

233

385 417

1929

758 724

394 399

467 480

135

115

258

250

137

126

100

100

275

234

383 401

1930

552 564

438 445

488 491

124

110

267

246

139

137

100

95

281

265

399 412

1932

Sources: For 1912, Mori Ushinosuke, Taiwan banzokushi dai ikkan (Taihoku: Rinji Taiwan kyūkan chōsakai, 1917). For 1922–1944, Taiwan sōtokufu Keimukyoku, Bansha kokō (1923–1943).

Male Female

Male Female

Luku-Daya, Lutsau, others

Toda

Female

395 404

161 215

Male

Tarowan, Bulaya, Male others Female

Mabaala

Mabaala

279 276

Male

99

Female Female

90

198

Female Male

215

235

214

460 456

1912

Male

Female

Male

Male Female

Sex

Truku

Perugawan

Skayau

Skayau Perugawan

Slamao, Kayo

Slamao

Note: The figures represent population totals at year’s end.

Seediq

Tseole

Masitoboan Tepilum, others

Xakut Hakul

Mek-Bubul, Mek-Lixen, others

Malepa

Atayal

Seqoleq

Major settlements

Ethnic group Dialect group Group of (民族) (亜族) settlements (群)

TABLE 3.2 Population figures for the major subgroups of Atayal and Seediq near Musha

567 593

491 507

532 525

122

104

283

276

163

185

95

102

278

257

415 431

1942

Returning to the depiction of the Musha Incident in Qiu Ruo-long’s graphic novel, in one of the illustrations, Walis Buni looks disheartened; in contrast, Mona Rudao and others, who made the decision to revolt, appear brave. Although this controversial depiction leaves room for debate, an aspect of their historical experience accumulated over many years is vividly presented. Through the experience of continuous military conflict, serious dilemmas regarding survival must have repeatedly arisen. Therefore, their respective stances toward the plan to revolt in 1930 also must be understood as a decision within that context.

Views on the “Mikata-ban (Savages Allied with the Japanese)” In October 1930, just after the Seediq Tgdaya uprising led by Mona Rudao, Chief Walis Buni dispatched Ivan Pilin and others in Paalan to Holi.22 It was in order to notify the police about the uprising, while declaring that the Paalan people did not join it. It is written that the police officers who initially received their report did not immediately regard the information as true.23 As the outlines of the uprising became clearer, the Taiwan government general (TGG; 總督府 sōtokufu) and the Taiwanese army (i.e., the Imperial Japanese Army in Taiwan) forced five Seediq Tgdaya villages, including Paalan, Takanan, Kattsuku, Shipao, and Togan (which declared their nonparticipation in the uprising), to take a major role in the suppression. On the one hand, they were dispatched to spy on the rebels and persuade them to surrender, while simultaneously being ordered to burn food warehouses and trample the crop fields of the seven villages who took part in the uprising. Although there was “some dissent” within the sōtokufu about mobilizing the Indigenous people to suppress the revolt,24 the government knew that if it wanted to keep casualties of the imperial army and police to a minimum and settle the situation as quickly as possible, they would need to mobilize other Indigenous groups to help them carry out their plan. Among the voluminous number of police and military documents related to the process of suppression, there are several records that provide insight into some of the Indigenous people who declared that they had not joined the uprising. The following document from November 14, 1930, was recorded by a police squad:25

88  Hi s t or i c al Me m o r ie s o f   Mu sh a

Although Paalan savages have been serving under us, they continued to protect and shelter other savages (who participated in the uprising), which makes it difficult to believe that they have true sincerity when it comes to their loyalty (to Japan). Therefore, the chief officer Miwa gathered them to the front yard of the police branch station to give them a strict admonition. When they were leaving for work today, a Hogo savage who had been hiding out amongst them was discovered. While being taken to the front of the branch station, he escaped and committed suicide. As the current situation amongst the Paalan is like what is described above, we are keeping a strict eye on their behavior.

This document clearly shows how the colonial rulers viewed the people whom they referred to as “allied savages” (味方蕃) or “friendly savages” (友蕃), and that under the shroud of collaboration, distrust and wariness ran deep. The governor knew that more than a few women and children from villages that had participated in the uprising had moved to Paalan to seek refuge with their relatives. They also received intelligence about nonagitators who were actively involved in harboring individuals who had taken part in the uprising by sneaking them into the labor line. Furthermore, the sōtokufu had intelligence that some Paalan men were also involved in attacking the Japanese. Despite numerous attempts by the government to discern the “enemy savages” from the “allied savages,” the relationships among Indigenous peoples were quite complicated and often difficult for the Japanese to navigate. This led to the Japanese demanding that Indigenous peoples explicitly declare their loyalty to them in a visible and public manner. It also meant that the Indigenous people were all under constant scrutiny as the Japanese authorities attempted to distinguish who among them were their allies and who were their enemies. Without considering this situation, it is difficult to understand the horrific experience of being divided into categories like “enemy” and “ally” and then, based on which grouping you fell into, being recruited and forced to kill friends, acquaintances, relatives, and even members of your own family.

Re li s t e ning to Her an d Hi s S tor ie s   89

S U RV I V I N G W I T H I N A N D A M O N G T H E S TAT E S

The Interrogation Record of Losin Watan Soon after receiving the first reports of the Musha uprising, the Taiwan sōtokufu and Japanese government spared no effort to control information about the incident. The colonial government was nervous about the ramifications of the Musha Incident, both within Taiwan and beyond. The spread of news about the rebellion was in and of itself a serious issue for the government, which were concerned that news about the uprising could lead to a sense of solidarity with other rebellions and insurrections, both domestically and internationally. The following is a record from an intelligence collection by the sōtokufu—namely, an extract from an interrogation record of Losin Watan (Japanese name:日野[渡井]三郎 Hino [Watarai] Saburō; Chinese name: 林瑞昌, Lin Rui-chang; 1899–1954), an Atayal man born in Kappanzan of Shinchiku Province:26 Although I have no means to know about Hanaoka Ichirō’s behavior, if he had no choice but to join the horrible action, I cannot but deplore his lack of courage and weakness of will. In light of Hanaoka’s actions, what I am most concerned about is whether the governing powers might reconsider the current programs for savage education, which are currently quite proactive.

Hanaoka Ichirō (花岡一郎; Dakis Nobin) attended the “savage public school” (霧社蕃人公學校 Musha banjin kōgakko), the Holi elementary school (埔里尋常高等小學校), and the training course at the Taichū normal school (台中師範學校講習科), and then became a class B police officer in the Musha district. At the time of the interrogation given here, Hanaoka Ichirō, who committed suicide with his wife and child just after the rebellion, was identified as one of the incident’s key plotters by the Japanese authorities. Hino Saburō (日野三郎; Losin Watan, 樂信．瓦旦) entered the Savage Educational Institute (角板山蕃童教育所 Kappanzan bandō kyōikusho), attended Tōen elementary school (桃園尋常高等小 學校), and eventually went to the National Taiwan Medical School (later Medical College) and engaged in official work including medical activities within the Atayal resident area in the Shinchiku district. At the time 90  Hi s t or i c al Me m o r ie s o f   Mu sh a

of the uprising, he had just had a baby, Shigenori (茂紀; Lin Maocheng 林茂成), with Hino Sagano (日野サガノ), whom he had married the previous year. Both Hino and Hanaoka were considered “savage” elites, born under Japanese rule and regarded as “high-achieving” and “well-behaved” by the authorities, so they received advanced education at the government’s expense and later took up official duties for the Japanese colonial government. Hino, without expressing any assertion or presumption about Hanaoka’s commitment to the uprising, faced the situation with keen anxiety. It was a sort of allegiance test for Hino. How, then, do we read and understand these words recorded by the Japanese authorities as a document of the interrogation? It seems to be a crucial problem when reconsidering the Musha Incident from an Indigenous perspective.

A Viewpoint from Postwar Japanese Academia Yamabe Kentarō (山辺健太郎), who reprinted several of the official documents on the Musha Incident, contrasts Hino with the Taiwan People’s Party, which expressed “sympathy” for the uprising,27 stating that “an aboriginal man, who was educated by the Japanese and working as a doctor, did not only withhold his sympathy, but even criticized the uprising.”28 Uno Toshiharu (宇野利玄), who attempted to understand the historical process leading to the Musha uprising by focusing on education for Indigenous peoples, regarded Hino and other elites as “collaborators” of the colonial rulers due to their “volition” and “endurance.” Uno’s expectation of Hino (and other Indigenous elites) was that they should have chosen “another way” instead of the way they followed.29 Both views well reflect postwar Japanese academia’s main interest in the Musha Incident. From the viewpoint that regards the Musha Incident as “a milestone in the long glorious resistance history of Kōzanzoku (Mountain People),” words such as Hino’s were to be condemned or overcome. However, we might ask: if we were to find ourselves in 1930, how could it have been possible to make another choice? What would this other choice, which postwar academics were expecting, have meant for Hino and other Indigenous peoples during that period? Re li s t e ning to Her an d Hi s S tor ie s   91

The Indigenous Peoples and States It was not until the 1990s, when the movements for the redress of historical injustice during the White Terror period (in a broader sense, from 1948 to 1987, when martial law was in effect) rose in Taiwan, that a new understanding about Losin Watan’s life, which had been neglected for a long period, developed.30 Just after Losin Watan was appointed as the first Takasagozoku (高砂族, aboriginal person) to be a member of the sōtokufu council in April 1945, Japan was defeated in World War II and a new governor arrived on the island. Under the new rule of the Kuomintang (KMT), Losin Watan was elected to several positions, such as prefecture chief and as a member of the Taiwan Provincial Assembly. Soon after he started to commit to political affairs as a leader of the Indigenous people, he was labeled a Chinese communist spy by the KMT and shot in 1954. It was Losin Watan’s son, Lin Mao-cheng, who preserved his father’s documents and photographs and made them public, an act that was regarded as taboo during the martial law period. Lin Mao-cheng describes his father’s behavior regarding the Musha Incident as follows:31 It would have been disastrous if the Japanese police had decided to take severe reprisal measures. Therefore, my father exerted every effort between the Taiwan sōtokufu and Taichūshū, requesting the Japanese authorities not to impose heavy sanctions in order to avoid exacerbating the incident and ensuring that things didn’t end up at a place where the damage would be irreparable. As a result, the Japanese government exercised great restraint, the sanctions implemented were kept to a minimum and they showed leniency in order to assure that most of our people’s lives and property would be protected.

Using the terms “minimum” and “leniency” for the suppression of the sōtokufu, which reduced the population of Seediq Tgdaya by half, could be a reflection of the attitude of his father, who faced up to the reality penetratingly, as well as Lin Mao-cheng’s own historical recognition, as a person who survived the White Terror under KMT rule. 92  Hi s t or i c al Me m o r ie s o f   Mu sh a

Which sovereign, the Taiwan sōtokufu or the KMT, was “less terrible” is not the issue here. Rather, it is to be argued that such a question is vacuous, and even oppressive. Regarding this point, the works of Wu Rwei-ren (呉叡人) and Fan Yen-chiou (范燕秋) are helpful for furthering the discussion. Using the numerous recently released official documents on the February 28 incident and the White Terror, they ask about the meaning of “postwar” for Indigenous elites, including Losin Watan. They also raise questions for Japanese academics, whose interest in Taiwanese Indigenous peoples has concentrated on the Japanese colonial period. Wu Rwei-ren, viewing the shooting of Indigenous leaders by the KMT as the “Murder of Formosan High Mountain Tribes,” reconstructed the event by identifying the respective trajectories of actions by the communist People’s Republic of China (PRC), the nationalist Republic of China (ROC), and three Indigenous leaders. Through an elaborate and bold analysis of intelligence materials and trial documents, which were limited to the hearing, adjudication, and execution (in other words, lacking the documents related to the detection, arrest, inquiry, and prosecution), what he makes clear is that the structural position of Indigenous elites, who were educated by the state of Japan, thrust them between two opposing states (the PRC and ROC). The Indigenous elites thereby faced double the expectations and distrust from these respective states, and they were eventually destroyed violently. Wu points out that Lin Rui-chang (Losin Watan) reported information to the Secrets Department of the defense ministry of the KMT, when he met Jian Ji, a secretary for the Committee for Mountain Affairs, twice between 1948 and 1949. Furthermore, Wu also surmises that Lin Rui-chang, in spite of that that, maintained secret contact with Jian Ji to ascertain the development of the political situation, while the tensions over Taiwan politics were mounting. With regard to those behaviors, which appear to be “double-crossing self-preservationist” or “opportunist,” Wu asserts that they were based on firm convictions, on an attempt to save his people from being damaged in the conflicts with the Plains People (平地人, Pingdiren). Wu states the following:32 It was a predicament of a minority people seeking ways to survive in a quandary: Lin Rui-chang was forced to choose (the KMT) on Re li s t e ning to Her an d Hi s S tor ie s   93

the one hand, and to find another way to survive at the same time. The reason he was later killed could be due to this momentary vacillation and indecision.

His argument seems to be clear and persuasive enough to illustrate the reality facing Indigenous leaders during this period of political transition. As Fan Yen-chiou also pointed out, for Losin Watan, seeking a way within the framework of a state was already inevitable at the point of the Musha Incident.33 In these terms, the interrogation document quoted here also illuminates Losin Watan’s struggle to survive as a member of a minority ethnic group within the framework of the state. Furthermore, his trajectory reveals the reality that the struggle to regain sovereignty from the state and the attempt to choose a state to belong to were both directly linked to destruction by state violence. Although Wu and Fan have expressed differences on several points, both scholars paved the way for how we think about these significant issues: how have Taiwanese Indigenous peoples, both as individuals and as ethnic groups, tried to find their way? What kind of constraints and requirements have they faced, whether within a state or among states? It becomes apparent that Wu’s and Fan’s interventions require us to consider the continuity and discontinuity of the prewar and postwar eras as well. EPILOGUE

Rethinking the “Indigenous perspective” is, as discussed in this chapter, inseparable from the problem of deciding what one can or cannot ignore. What is to be focused upon as an “event”? Whose experiences and which frameworks are highlighted through the reconstruction of that event? What memories are to be recalled in order to reflect upon the event? Those questions are crucial for critical work the lies ahead. This chapter has attempted to illuminate the experiences of those who did not join the Musha uprising in 1930 and yet were not immune from the sequence of events surrounding it. This approach not only opens up a new view of the Musha Incident, but also sheds light on the historical experiences of Indigenous peoples, who have continually 94  Hi s t or i c al Me m o r ie s o f   Mu sh a

struggled to survive within the framework of a state or among states. It also requires an unceasing reexamination of our own historical recognition, particularly because there are still vast numbers of occurrences and experiences that have never been given shape as historical phenomena; therefore, we need to constantly reconsider how we recognize individual records or memories as a kind of historical reality.

N OT E S Special thanks to Paul Barclay for his suggestions and editorial contributions to the English version of this chapter. 1. See Kawahara Isao, ed., “Musha hōki jiken kankei bunken mokuroku,” in Taiwan Musha hōki jiken: kenkyū to shiryō, ed. Dai Guo-hui (Tokyo: Shakai shisō sha, 1981), 581–98. The works listed in this bibliography include books, journal articles, and manuscripts (but not newspaper articles) relating to the Musha Incident. Although several bibliographies relating to the incident have been published since, this one is remarkably exhaustive. 2. Taiwan kingendaishi kenkyūkai, ed., “Sengo nihon ni okeru Taiwan kingendaishi kenkyū mokuroku,” Taiwan kingendaishi kenkyū 3 (1981): 152–204. The works listed in this bibliography were published from August 1945 to December 1979. In addition, there is a supplementary article, “Sengo nihon ni okeru Taiwan kingendaishi kenkyū mokuroku II,” Taiwan kingendaishi kenkyū 6 (1987): 235–70. 3. Kitamura Kae, “Musha jiken kanren bunken mokuroku,” Kyōikushi hikaku kyōiku ronkō 20 (2010):74-107, http://hdl.handle.net/2115/43759. 4. Kobayashi Gakuji, “ ‘Taiwan genjū minzoku’, mosaku shiteiku minzokuzō,” PRIME 6 (1997): 54. 5. Kitamura Kae, Nihon shokuminchika no Tiawan senjūmin kyōikushi (Sapporo, Japan: Hokkaido daigaku shuppankai, 2008), 6. 6. Deng Xiang-yang, Wu zhong yun shen: wushe shijian hou, yige Taiya jiating de gushi (Taipei: Yushan she, 1998); Deng Xiang-yang, Shokuminchi Taiwan no genjūmin to Nihon keisatsukan no kazokutachi (Tokyo: Nihon kikanshi shuppan sentā, 2000); Jian Hong-mo, Walis Pelin, and Guo Ming-zheng, eds., Qingliu buluo shengmingshi: Ltlutuc Knkingan Sapah Alang Gluban (Taipei: Yongwan wenhua shiye, 2002); Kumu Tapas, Buluo jiyi: Wushe shijian de koushu lishi I, II (Taipei: Hanlu tushu chuban, 2004). 7. Ōta Kimie and Nakagawa Shizuko, “Musha o tazunete,” Chūgoku 69 (1969): 2–40. 8. Born in Hogo village, Awi was fourteen years old at the time of the Musha Incident. He did not join the fighting himself; rather, he ran away to the mountains Re li s t e ning to Her an d Hi s S tor ie s   95

and surrendered later. He had occasions to hear statements of the Seediq Tgdaya people as a translator of the interrogation that took place after the surrender. 9. Dai Guo-hui, ed., Taiwan Musha hōki jiken (Tokyo: Shakai shisō sha, 1981). 10. Dai Guo-hui, “Musha hōki jiken no gaiyō to kenkyū no konnichiteki imi: Taiwan shōsū minzoku ga toikakeru mono,” in Taiwan Musha hōki jiken: kenkyū to shiryō, ed. Dai Guo-hui (Tokyo: Shakai shisō sha, 1981), 17. 11. Qiu Ruo-long, The Musha Incident (Taipei:Shibao wenhua, 1990), 120. 12. Although there are several discrepancies among documents concerning historical facts of the Shimaigahara Incident, most of them basically correspond at the point that Paalan village suffered very heavily. According to Musha jiken shi (n.d.), edited by Taiwan sōtokufu Keimukyoku, the death toll was “over 100 savage men of Hogo and Paalan villages” (cited in Dai, Taiwan Musha hōki jiken, 363). An article of Taiwan nichinichi shinpō (December 24, 1903) says, “Killed chiefs were Sappo Chiq of upper Paalan village, Telim Amin of Hogo village and How Nokan, the eldest son of a general chief, and others, while killed savage men were over 100.” According to “testimony” from Awi Hepah, “150 men of influence and others, led by Ukan Pawan, the second son of the Musha general chief Pawan Nokan, went to Shimaigahara from Palaan, Rodoh and Hogo villages,” and “over 130 Seediq people were killed” (in Kyo Kailin, ed., Shōgen Musha jiken, Tokyo: Sōfūkan, 1985), 21–22. According to oral histories investigated by Jian Hong-mo in Meixi village, in addition to 105 men killed in Shimaigahara, there were those who died after fleeing to their villages, and most of them were of Paalan. Besides, three of four died in Shipaw village, while there were no deaths in Togan because the village’s men were prevented from leaving for Shimaigahara by their oneiromancer. See Jain Hong-mo, “Tgdaya de qiyuan, qiantu yu zhongda lishi shijian,” in Jian Hong-mo and Iwan Pelin, eds., Zhongyuan buluo shengmingshi, Patis Ltlutuc Rudan Knkingan Sapah Alang Nakahala (Taipei: Yongwang wenhua chuban, 2003), 28–29. And according to interviews conducted by Guo Ming-zheng, the highest fatalities were in Paalan, the second-highest were in Togan, and there were others in Togan and Rodoh, while there were none in Mahebo (Kumu Tapas, Buluo jiyi II, 101.) 13. Taiwan sōtokufu, “Hi [Confidential], Zentō riban ni kansuru chōsa,” in Ishizuka Eizō shi kankei shorui: Musha jiken sankō shorui 1, part of the collection of the Historiographical Institute, University of Tokyo. Part of this document is contained in “17 Banjin no dōyō oyobi tōbatsu no gairyaku,” in Gendaishi shiryō 22 Taiwan 2, ed. Yamabe Kentarō (Tokyo: Misuzu shobō, 1971), 507–23. 14. There are several documents regarding this incident, as well as those cited in notes 11 and 12: Takumushō Kanrikyokuchō and Ikoma Takatsune, “Musha ban sōjō jiken chōsa fukumeisyo,” November 28, 1930 (cited in Dai, Taiwan Musha hōki jiken); “Nanboku ban no daitōsō” (Taiwan nichinichi sinpō, October 8, 96  Hi s t or i c al Me m o r ie s o f   Mu sh a

1903); “Nanboku ryōban daitōsō gohō” (Taiwan nichinichi sinpō, October 9, 1903); “Nanboku ryōban daitōsō no shōhō: mizou no dekigoto” (Taiwan nichinichi sinpō, October 21, 1903); “Musha ban no kijun shutsugan” (Taiwan nichinichi sinpō, December 24, 1903). 15. See Awi, Shōgen Musha jiken, Deng Xiang-yang, Konichi Musha jiken no rekishi, (Tokyo: Nihon kikanshi shuppan sentā, 2000), and others. 16. Jian, “Tgdaya de qiyuan, qiantu yu zhongda lishi shijian,” 28–29. 17. Most families of Zhongyuan village are the descendants of Paalan. 18. Jian, “Tgdaya de qiyuan, qiantu yu zhongda lishi Shijian,” 29. 19. Kumu, Buluo jiyi II, 102–103. 20. Deng Xiang-yang, “Nihon tōchi jidai no Musha gun (Tgdaya) no buraku no hensen,” Tenri Taiwan Gakkaihō 17 (June 2008): 19–41. 21. Jian Hong-mo et al., eds., Zhongyuan buluo shengming shi, 765–769. Interviews with those who had moved from the village for reasons such as marriage were conducted by phone as much as possible. According to this work, Tapas Nawi’s father, Awi Nawe (Kitagawa Hatsuo or Lin Guo-hui), was born in Paalan and raised in Zhongyuan (1926–1972). Her mother, Bakan Nawi (Nagayama Fusako or Lin Xiumei), was born in Tawaron and raised in Qingliu (1925–2001). Tapas Nawi’s family tree on her paternal side can trace just to her great-grandmother’s generation, whereas the name of her great-grandfather, who was a victim of the Shimaigahara Incident, is unknown. On her maternal side, it also can trace just to her great-grandparent’s generation. Her grandfather, Awi Papu, joined the Musha uprising and died, while her grandmother, Ape Pawan, survived with her two children, and then, less than one year after having been relocated to Kawanakajima, passed away. 22. Jian et al., Zhongyuan buluo shengming shi, 346. 23. Jian et al., Zhongyuan buluo shengming shi, 346. 24. Taiwangun Sanbōbu, “Musha jiken jinchu nisshi: ji Syōwa gonen jūgatsu nijūshichinichi / shi dōnen jūnigatsu futsuka,” in Musha jiken gunji kankei shiryō, ed. Haruyama Meitetsu (Tokyo: Fuji shuppan, 1992), 93–94. 25. “Musha sōjō jiken sōsakutai kōdō narabini banjō,” dated November 14, 1930, in Ishizuka Eizō shi kankei syorui: Musha jiken kankei syorui, in the collection of the Historiographical Institute, University of Tokyo. 26. “Utsushi [duplicate], Hi [confidential], Musha banjin sōjō jiken ni tomonau minjō ni kansuru ken (dai ni hō),” dated November 11, 1930, in Ishizuka Eizō shi kankei shorui: Musha Jiken kankei shorui, part of the collection of the Historiographical Institute, University of Tokyo. 27. For a further discussion on this document, see Kitamura Kae, “Taiwan senjūminzoku no rekishi keiken to shokuminchi sensō: Losin Watan ni okeru ‘taiki’,” Shisō 1119, July 2017, and the afterword of Kitamura, Nihon shokuminchika no Taiwan senjūmin kyōikushi. Re li s t e ning to Her an d Hi s S tor ie s   97

28. Yamabe Kentarō, “Kaisetsu,” in Gendaishi shiryō 22, xxxv. 29. Uno Toshiharu, “Taiwan ni okeru ‘banjin’ kyōiku,” in Taiwan Musha hōki jiken: kenkyū to shiryō, ed. Dai Guo-hui (Tokyo: Shakai shisō sha, 1981), 105. 30. One pioneering work is Fan Yen-chiou, “Lunwang yu 2–28 de yuanzhumin yingling,” Ziyou shibao, February 26–28, 1992. 31. Jinian Taiwan-sheng diyijie yuanzhumin shengyiyuan Lin gong Jui-chang (Losin Watan) tongxiang luocheng jiemu dianli weiyuanhui, ed., Zhuisi Taiyazu yingling qian shengyiyuan Losin Watan (Ling Jui-chang), 1993, 27. 32. Wu Rwei-ren, “ ‘Taiwan gaoshanzu sharen shijian’: Kao Yi-sheng, Tang Shou-jen, and Lin Jui-chang shijian zhi zhengzhishi de chubu chongjian,” in 2–28 shijian 60 zhounian jinian lunwenji, ed. Hsu Hsueh-chi (Taipei: Taipei shizhengfu wenhuaju, Taipei 2–28 jinianguan, 2008), 338 (parentheses in original). 33. Fan Yen-chiou, “Losin Watan yu 2–28 shijian zhong Taiyazu de dongtai: tanxun zhanhou chuqi Taiwan yuanzhumin qingying de zhengzhi shijian,” in 2–28 shijian 60 zhounian jinian lunwenji.

98  Hi s t or i c al Me m o r ie s o f   Mu sh a

PA RT I I

Literary Memories of Musha

CH APTER FOUR

Bodies and Violence in the Musha Incident Robert Tierney

The Musha Incident was widely viewed as an event that epitomized the impossibility of civilizing so-called savages and the bankruptcy of Japanese colonial policies. In literary works depicting this event, Japanese writers often treat the aboriginal rebels not as bloodthirsty “savages,” but rather as innocent primitives. In his 1939 novella Savage Village in the Mist (霧の蕃社 Kiri no bansha), Nakamura Chihei (中島地平) provides a historical account of the Musha Incident that examines both the immediate triggers of the event and the deep-seated grievances of the aborigines with the colonial state. He concludes that the aborigines were driven to “savagery” by a physiological imbalance that made them reject a civilization that was forced upon them by the Japanese. Ōshika Taku (大鹿卓, 1898–1959) offers a more poetical engagement with the violence of the Musha Incident in his 1935 The Savage (野蠻人 Yabanjin). The “savage” of the title refers to a young Japanese man, a rebel against civilization assigned to the colonial police, who seek to unleash his inner desires through acts of sexual transgression and violence. While he plays at being a “savage,” he refuses to let his aboriginal wife assimilate to the Japanese lifestyle that attracts her, thereby reaffirming colonial and gender boundaries. In 1960, Yoshiya Nobuko (吉屋信子) wrote a short story called “Setting Sun Over the Savage Village” (蕃社の落日 Bansha no Rakujitsu), which offers an account of the Musha Incident from the

perspective of a young female missionary in the aboriginal lands. She is fascinated by the body of a young aboriginal man, who eventually warns her to avoid the village of Musha on the day of the sports event but himself perishes in the rebellion. In this chapter, I examine the rhetoric of blood and biological destiny in Japanese works inspired by the 1930 Musha Incident. Paradoxically, writers who embraced this rhetoric also expressed skepticism toward the notion of biology as destiny in their work, most notably when they focused on clothing and skin as the loci of primitiveness. In these writings, the rhetoric of blood is countered by a competing rhetoric of facade and clothing, suggesting that primitiveness is merely a disguise or veneer covering a lack of substance. T H E F I G U R E S O F T H E “ P R I M I T I V E OT H E R ” I N J A PA N E S E COLONIAL DISCOURSE

In Primitive Passion, Marianna Torgovnick notes: “In the early decades of the twentieth century, when a man of means felt anxious about his manhood or health, or maladjusted to the modern world, one prescription dominated. Go to Africa or the South Pacific, he was advised, or to some other exotic site identified with ‘the primitive.’ ”1 What Torgovnick says about the Western “man of means” applies equally to Japanese bourgeois writers, who voiced similar sentiments. They often viewed primitiveness as a feature that inhered to colonized bodies rather than to their cultures. Primitive bodies possessed a dynamism, health, and vitality that contrasted sharply with the neurasthenic colonizers, whose bodies were enervated by civilization. Primitives were driven by strong and often violent drives and instincts that could not be contained by the intellect and will. And lastly, they could not be managed by colonial assimilation policies or transformed by civilization; they were literally imprisoned in bodies that could neither change nor adapt—biology was fate. The rhetoric of primitive bodies finds its way into the many literary works inspired by the Musha Incident of 1930, in which an alliance of Atayal aborigines indiscriminately attacked Japanese men, women, and children. This uprising took place in the model outpost of Musha, an emblem of Japanese civilization, and the rebels belonged to what was widely believed to be the most assimilated of the tribes. The bloodiest 102  Li t e rar y Me m o r ie s o f Mu sh a

rebellion against the colonial order during the fifty years that Japan ruled Taiwan, the Musha Incident led to a heated debate in Japan’s National Diet and the resignation of the top two colonial officials in Taipei. The Japanese military spent the next few months crushing the rebels and their community by air power, modern weaponry, and poison gas. Whereas the colonial government viewed the rebels as enemies to be eradicated by force, many Japanese saw them as paragons of innocent health and simple virtue. In her study, Torgovnick notes that Western discourse on the primitive included both a rhetoric of desire, “which implicates “us” in the them we try to conceive as the Other,” and a rhetoric of control, through which colonizers sought to civilize the colonized.2 One may also speak of a similar duality and ambivalence in representations of Taiwanese aborigines in Japanese discourse at the time. The three important figures that embodied the “otherness” of the “savage” were the child, the woman, and the warrior. To each, there corresponded a self that served as its counterpart and complement: the mature adult in relation to the “savage” child, the husband in relation to the aboriginal wife, and the modern national subject vis-à-vis the traditional warrior. The Japanese adult recovered his childhood by nostalgically imagining the aborigines in a kind of time travel to a stage he had long outgrown, one that left a lingering memory still dormant in his body. The Japanese male found in his aboriginal wife a subordinate partner who reaffirmed his masculinity and complemented him in the relationship of romance. And the modern Japanese citizen discovered the samurai past of Japan in the physical courage of aboriginal warriors. In short, the modern body was distanced temporally and psychologically from the savages by processes of personal maturation and the vicissitudes of history. In 1931, after the Musha Incident, the Bureau of Aboriginal Affairs established Friends of Savage Management (理蕃の友 Riban no Tomo) to promote colonial policy reform. In the columns of this journal, police officials, who patrolled the “savage” frontier, often described the aborigines as “innocent and pure” children and “truly loveable creatures” inhabiting a primitive paradise. One officer wrote of the Atayal: “The evil influences of the world have passed them by. They lived without deceit or trickery and were brought up to be simple and innocent. I couldn’t help but feel that we were the ones who were hateful and pitiable. They did not play tricks and were brought up strictly.”3 This utopian B o die s an d Vio l e n c e in the Mu sha In ciden t   103

view of the highlands contrasted with that of previous administrators, who described the aborigines as ignorant and unruly and in need of stern Japanese tutelage. The new assessment of the aborigines reflected a revaluation of childhood in metropolitan Japan, but it also extended this notion metaphorically to apply to “primitives,” to the childhood of humanity. Whereas Japanese policemen had, in the early period of the colonization of Taiwan, contracted strategic marriages with daughters of tribal chiefs to acquire antennae that reached deep into the life of the villages, later writers were drawn toward aboriginal women as a source of healing and emotional refuge in aboriginal Taiwan. In the short story “Women of the Savage Frontier” (蕃界の女 “Bankai no Onna”), Nakamura Chihei depicts a neurasthenic artist from Tokyo who travels to the aboriginal lands in search of spiritual and artistic rebirth. There, he is attracted to an aboriginal girl because she is “a beauty overflowing with suppleness and force, an almost animal vitality in every extremity of her body.”4 In the story, savagery is associated with abundant health, whereas civilization is connected to neurasthenia. Other writers extolled the manly valor of the tribes, their spirit of bushidō. For instance, Mori Ushinosuke (森丑之助), an ethnographer active in Taiwan from 1895 to the 1920s, praised the spirit of bushidō among the tribes: Not only do they bravely confront and resist the enemy who seeks to conquer them, but they continue to fight with all their forces even when they are well aware that they will be destroyed or defeated, that they have run out of weapons and face defeat, and that their resistance is futile. The land where the aborigines are living was preserved for them by the fighting spirit of their ancestors and they are duty bound to defend it with all their forces, and even to the death, when they are persecuted or attacked by other aboriginal tribes or by other races.5

The determination of many aborigines to commit suicide rather than to live dishonored elicited respect among the Japanese, even when they took up arms against the Japanese colonial state. At the same time, by treating the aboriginal warriors as samurai, the Japanese detached them 104  Li t e rar y Me m o r ie s o f Mu sh a

from their own history and resituated them within Japanese history, as earlier stages of Japanese modernity. N A K A M U R A C H I H E I ’S A N ATO M Y O F THE MUSHA INCIDEN T

Writers in the 1930s often borrowed tropes from these hegemonic discourses when they wrote about the Musha Incident. Nakamura Chihei attended high school in Taiwan and returned to live there later in his life. He was a member of the Japanese romantic school (日本浪漫派, Nihon rōmanha), and he contributed transcriptions of aboriginal legends to the Governor General Survey of Aboriginal Societies (總督府蠻族調查 報告書傳說編 Sōtokufu banzoku chōsa hōkokusho densetsuhen).6 When he returned to Taiwan in the late 1930s, the aborigines had long since been “pacified,” and the “savage frontier” was now a place of relaxation and tourism, in which visitors could bathe in hot springs and hike in newly designated national parks. In 1939, Nakamura set several stories in aboriginal Taiwan, including “The Mist-Enshrouded Barbarian Village” (霧の蕃社 Kiri no bansha), which was about the Musha Incident. The work foreshadows his 1940 novel Tale of Castaways in the Land of Long-Eared People (長耳國漂 流記 Chōjikoku Hyōryūki), based on the Botan Incident (牡丹社事件),7 in that the author wavers between the style of a chronicle that uncovers a historical truth and the narrative style and psychological analysis of a novel. Told in the third person, the story lacks a protagonist and a definite narrative perspective, but it does include explanations and speculations on causes that are common in a historical record. In general, the narrator hews closely to the official line on the Musha Incident, but he differs from these government accounts in the tone of sympathy he adopted toward the aborigines. For example, he explores the psychological state and motivations of the individual leaders of the rebellion. Mona Rudao (莫那·魯道), the reputed leader of the rebellion, turned against the colonizers after a Japanese policeman abandoned his sister decades earlier. Faye Yuan Kleeman writes that the author succeeds in putting a “human face on the uprising” by explaining the life incidents that spurred the leaders of the aborigines to take up arms against the Japanese.8 However, by seeking a psychological explanation for the uprising, he also B o die s an d Vio l e n c e in the Mu sha In ciden t   105

obscures the structural and symbolic violence, notably discrimination, corvée labor, and the desertion of aboriginal wives by their Japanese husbands, that were mentioned in official reports as the deeper causes of the rebellion. By contrast, the narrator of “The Mist-Enshrouded Barbarian Village” overlooks the collective grievances and political motives for the rebellion, concentrating instead on the bodies of the rebels. For the narrator, the Musha Incident was a physical and mental regression to “the childhood of humanity.” In effect, the violence of the incident represented the explosion of pent-up energy and the drives within a people that had been dammed up by Japanese assimilation policies. Ordinarily, in such a scenario, the aborigines might be expected to grow younger, but this process is described as one of aging and decline: In all likelihood, the simple nature (of these people) had been weakened and subdued by the so-called culture that the authorities introduced successfully with their assimilation policies. Much like a middle-aged woman who is on the verge of losing her biological functions as a woman, the ferocity and primitiveness of these people had already passed its peak . . . Sometimes a woman, facing old age, is driven to unexpected action by her yearning and attachment to youth, aggravated by her physiological impatience and trouble. Similarly, these savages were driven by their lingering savagery and violent nature to undertake one last, desperate battle with civilization, a form of life that did not suit their natures.9

While the rebels were commonly regarded as fierce warriors, they are paradoxically feminized in this account, and their rebellion is compared to menopause. In effect, the rebellion, stripped of its political and historical significance, is treated as a perverse eruption of instinct, a catharsis of affect. Nevertheless, such an explanation fails to account for the fact that the rebellion occurred in the model village of Musha and was led by the Atayal, one of the most assimilated aboriginal groups. Indeed, the narrator acknowledges that the aborigines showed “incredible ability in cooperation, detailed planning and keeping secrets” in carrying out this complicated military operation, adding that “the Japanese cannot help but lament this ironic consequence of bestowing upon them 106  Li t e rar y Me m o r ie s o f Mu sh a

civilization.”10 Rather than the simple explosion of pent-up “instincts,” the rebellion was the indirect result and product of Japan’s colonial policies. This line of reasoning is developed when he narrates the demise by suicide of Hanaoka Ichirō (花崗一郎) and Hanaoka Jirō (花岡二郎), two Atayal youths who were models of assimilation to the Japanese colonial order. The Hanaokas were not biologically related, but they were both “sons” of the Japanese colonial order, educated by the Japanese and employed in the colonial police. After the Musha Incident, Japanese wondered what role these “brothers” had played in the uprising. Were they traitors who had masterminded the plot, or had they remained loyal subjects and killed themselves from shame at their inability to restrain or dissuade their fellow aborigines? The narrator carefully negotiates between these contradictory theories in his story. He depicts the Hanaokas as pulled in opposing directions by their love of their own people (人情 ninjō) and the social obligation (義理 giri) they felt toward the Japanese. They give expression to this division both by the clothing they wear and by the manner in which they commit suicide. Both Hanaokas shed their aboriginal clothing and don Japanese clothes right before killing themselves. They also choose contrasting methods of suicide that enact the duality of their identity—Ichirō commits seppuku in Japanese ceremonial dress, while Jirō hangs himself from a tree, in accordance with aboriginal tradition. Ichirō’s death signifies his attainment of civilization: as one character notes, “Isn’t the way Ichirō died committing seppuku a result of education?” However, seppuku is a rite that belongs to an earlier stage of Japan’s history: Wearing a single layer garment of meisen silk, a hachimaki about his head, Ichirō first cut off his children’s heads with a Japanese sword with a blade measuring one and a half feet. Then, he cut his belly open and died. His wife, who also wore Japanese clothing to enter death in style, slit her own throat and died with the children placed between herself and her husband.11

The mise-en-scène of the death of the Hanaokas downplays their pragmatic motives for taking part in the Musha Incident. Although they graduated from the Taizhong Normal School, a teacher-training college, B o die s an d Vio l e n c e in the Mu sha In ciden t   107

the Hanaokas were passed over for promotion because they were not Japanese by birth. They therefore had a motive to betray the Japanese colonial state because it discriminated against them in employment. In “The Mist-Enshrouded Barbarian Village,” Ichirō is transformed not into a modern Japanese subject, but rather into a noble savage who follows Japan’s older warrior culture. In this story, we find a rhetoric of blood, instinct, and irresistible biological destiny mobilized to explain the Musha Incident. Nevertheless, the narrator evinces some skepticism toward this rhetoric when he acknowledges the planning that preceded this military operation. Alongside the notion of biology as destiny, he focuses on clothing as the mark or emblem of primitive identity, notably in his account of the death of the Hanaokas. A J A PA N E S E H E A RT O F D A R K N E S S

In 1935, Ōshika Taku wrote The Savage, a novella about a Japanese man who “goes native” in aboriginal Taiwan. Selected as the best work over 1,218 other entries, it was published in the February issue of Chūō Kōron (中央公論). The younger brother of the renowned poet Kaneko Mitsuharu (金子光晴), Ōshika was born into a prosperous family of sake brewers in Aichi prefecture in 1898 and spent part of his childhood in Taiwan. Through his connection with his older brother, he participated in various poetic circles and published an anthology called Soldier (兵隊 Heitai), but Ōshika is best known for a series of stories set in Taiwan. In The Savage, his most famous work, Ōshika makes no effort to explain the political causes of the aboriginal rebellion, although he does implicitly criticize Japan’s policies toward the aborigines. He sets the work during the Saramao rebellion, which occurred in 1920, although the novella is clearly also a reaction to the 1930 Musha Incident. Furthermore, the “savage” of the title is not the aboriginal “other,” but rather a Japanese hero in search of his inner savage. Ōshika’s hero has obvious affinities with Western writers who sought physical and spiritual renewal in Africa, the South Seas, and South America. Kawamura Minato astutely notes that Japanese sought “savagery” within themselves after the incorporation of “savages” into the Japanese empire.12 Yamaguchi Masao refers to Ōshika Taku’s The Savage as the “Japanese Heart of Darkness.”13 Since Ōshika most likely had not read Joseph 108  Li t e rar y Me m o r ie s o f Mu sh a

Conrad’s novella, one cannot say that he set out to create a Japanese version of Conrad’s work, an ironical and highly critical view of imperialism. Indeed, the work lacks the complex layering of narration and storytelling that makes Conrad’s work ambiguous. If the phrase “Japanese ‘Heart of Darkness’ ” still rings true, this is less because of the author’s intentions than because of the discursive environment in which he wrote. In effect, in Japanese discourse, Japan’s civilizing mission toward these “savages” was conflated with the Western civilizing mission in Africa. In 1904, the ethnographer Inō Kanori (伊能嘉矩) spoke of the Taiwan interior as “darkest Taiwan” (闇黒台灣 ankoku Taiwan), thereby aligning himself with Europeans such as Henry Morton Stanley and linking the Taiwanese aborigines with the “savages” of black Africa. By the time that Ōshika wrote his novella, he could draw on this well-established contrast of “darkness” with “light,” of civilization with savagery, which had entered everyday discourse. Instead, this work reflects a growing disenchantment with both the Japanese project of savage management (理蕃 riban) and with Japanese civilization itself. The year that he wrote The Savage, Ōshika published a short article titled “Taiyaru no seikatsu” (The Life of the Ataiyal Tribe) in the journal Kōdō (Action). Like the aforementioned colonial police in the highlands, he described the Ataiyal (Atayal) as a people who continue to live lives in accordance with their original nature . . . and have a purity of heart and simplicity which knows no dishonesty . . . the presence of these people who live in the same country as we do yet retain their primitive lifestyle, was truly a precious boon for those of us who have had our hearts corroded by civilization . . . we civilized people should not feel ashamed of the presence of these barbarians. Nor do we have any reason to educate them to be ashamed of themselves. As far as this basic spiritual attitude is concerned, have the colonial authorities not perpetrated a fatal mistake in their policies toward the aborigines, notwithstanding the sacrifice of so many precious lives?

Following this line of reasoning, the Musha Incident resulted primarily from Japan’s mistaken policies that taught the Atayal people to feel ashamed of themselves and to abandon their customs.14 B o die s an d Vio l e n c e in the Mu sha In ciden t   109

In The Savage, the protagonist, Tazawa, drops out of college, returns to his father’s home in northeast Japan, and becomes involved in a labor dispute at the coal mine owned by his father. Without consulting with Omiya, a labor organizer, he incites a group of miners to flood one of the coal mines, whereupon Omiya betrays him to his father. Enraged at his son’s sabotage, the father banishes Tazawa to Taiwan. Tazawa is a rebel who seeks to destroy his capitalist father, but when he arrives in Taiwan, he works as a frontier policeman at the White Dog police station in the Taiwan highlands. His rebellion undergoes a strange displacement on the colonial frontier, where he finds himself in a paradoxical situation: as a policeman, he occupies a position of paramount authority, but as a rebel, he feels instinctively drawn to the “primitive” lifestyle of those whom he is charged to discipline. As the action is displaced from metropolis to colony, Tazawa’s rebellion against the rule of his father is transformed into a more general revolt against civilization and a search for a new morality of blood and manliness. Shortly after reaching White Dog village, Tazawa is admonished by the friendly police chief Inō: “It becomes surprisingly easy to live here and put up with this savage place when you get used to the savagery around you or you yourself become a savage.”15 Here, Inō virtually hands the hero the formula for his self-transformation: Tazawa will “become a savage.” The protagonist’s descent to savagery involves a spatial displacement from the home islands to the colonial periphery. In Taiwan, the protagonist is free to indulge in behaviors that would not be countenanced in the Metropole. However, this displacement is also a temporal regression from the modern present to an archaic past. When he crosses into Taiwan, the protagonist discovers archaic savages living in the Japanese empire. At the same time, he discovers that the blood of his ancestors continues to course through his own body. Weeks after his arrival, he takes part in a punitive mission that the Japanese authorities launch against a rebellious tribe. In this scene, he cuts off the head of an enemy warrior. When he crosses the line into “savagery,” he imagines that he has rediscovered the blood of his prehistoric ancestors within his own body: “He was thrilled that he would be able to temper himself in the midst of this primitive human struggle and amid the living wildness of this vast nature. The blood of his ancestors was still coursing through his veins. As he skipped over many generations, the violent blood of his 110  Li t e rar y Me m o r ie s o f Mu sh a

ancestors came back to life within him. His eyes shone when he confided to himself that he would not allow himself to be mentally bested by these savages when the time came.”16 In this passage, taking a head is a rite of passage through which the protagonist both joins the savages of Taiwan and time-travels to the ancient past and his racial ancestors. Tazawa’s journey to his own “heart of darkness” is punctuated by two scenes of extreme, transgressive violence: the taking of an aboriginal man’s head and the rape of an aboriginal woman. The first major transformation of the hero’s identity occurs when he cuts off the head of the aboriginal enemy. At first, he is ashamed and tosses his victim’s head into the bushes, but an aboriginal man recovers his “trophy” and brings it back to the village. Later, he is stunned when he witnesses a young aboriginal girl praying to this very same head: Facing the skull shelf where the enemy’s head had been washed and placed, she whispered: “I will summon the heads of your parents and brothers and sisters so that you can live together with them.” Before the 15-year old Taimonamo, he was overwhelmed by a sense of his own spiritual debility . . . “Compared to that I am nothing more than a weak sapling that has been transplanted.”17

If Taimonamo’s savagery is a “great tree infused with an indomitable spirit,” Tazawa is a weak graft, a transplant. Ultimately, he is constrained by his individual self-consciousness in his attempt to return to the primitive; his savagery is merely a form of make-believe or playacting. In discovering his inferiority to the authentic savagery of the aboriginal girl, Tazawa realizes that his own attempts are halfhearted and inauthentic. “Tazawa discovered the rationalization. ‘I am afraid of her because my savagery is still half-hearted (chūtohanpa) . . .’ Then, all at once, it stopped being a rationalization and became a whip by which he spurred himself on. He rolled over on the floor, crying: ‘Become a savage! Become a savage!’ ” To fulfill this goal, Tazawa must forsake his Japanese identity, become a member of the tribe, and take an aboriginal woman as his wife. From the start of the story, he is attracted to a young aboriginal woman named Taimorikaru, in whom he discovers “something animal-like and simple which sets her apart from the women of Japan,” but also a “purity of B o die s an d Vio l e n c e in the Mu sha In ciden t   111

heart” that he had never experienced before. Taimorikaru is the younger sister of Inō’s wife and the daughter of the tribal chief in the aboriginal village. While Tazawa feels that an unbridgeable gap separates him from Taimorikaru, he eventually completes his transformation into a savage by raping her. The next day, he moves to her village, puts on aboriginal clothes, daubs his face with ash, and dreams of taking part in a hunting expedition with the aboriginal men. At the end of the story, he proclaims to the aborigines of the village: “I am also a savage. I won’t be outdone by anyone.” Tazawa has gone completely “native” and prides himself on becoming a “savage.” Yet, in the end, his quest leads him to new forms of confinement rather than to liberation: The savages clapped their hands and shouted when they recognized him. In the end, they barked out orders to him: “Turn on your side.” “Show us your back.” “See what it’s like walking.” He did as he was told, impressed that the passions of the conquered people had been suppressed to this point . . . Overcome by their power, he collapsed onto the grass; the aborigines gradually formed a ring around him. Bathing in the pale light of dawn, Tazawa rose to his feet inside this human fence. And then he began to pace restlessly like a wild animal imprisoned in a cage.18

In this scene, aboriginal men form a hedge around him, making him feel like a “wild animal imprisoned in a cage.” This scene offers an inverted image of the aboriginal village itself, a gigantic cage in which the aborigines are surrounded by Japanese guard lines and placed under the surveillance of the colonial police. In effect, Tazawa becomes a subjugated savage in the midst of a conquered people, a fitting ending to the story because it is the specific form that savagery took in the Japanese empire. In effect, the protagonist who seeks to liberate his savage self ends by becoming another prisoner in the jail that colonialism created. THE POLITICS OF CROSS -DRESSING

One might consider The Savage to be a transgressive work because it celebrates the hero’s flight from civilization and his embrace of violence 112  Li t e rar y Me m o r ie s o f Mu sh a

and sexuality. As evidence to buttress this interpretation, one could mention that the colonial authorities banned the work in Taiwan, and the metropolitan police ensured that it was heavily censored when it was published in Japan. In accordance with censorship policies, the editors of Chūō Kōron blackened out the offending passages with fuseji, making certain portions of the work difficult to decipher, and they also deleted any reference to the role of the Japanese army in crushing aboriginal rebellions. In addition, one could point to Ōshika’s implicit criticism of colonial policies and his frank depiction of the military suppression of the aborigines. By the same token, however, when Tazawa romanticizes the savagery of the aborigines, he joins his own voice to a general chorus of colonial administrators, ethnologists, journalists, and artists. For instance, the police chief of White Dog encourages Tazawa’s primitivist proclivities from the start. Indeed, such primitivism actually reinforces the official policies toward the aborigines by instilling colonial administrators with the indispensable sentimental disposition that enables them to willingly carry out the rational and clearheaded imperatives of the colonial administration. When Tazawa woos Taimorikaru, he accedes to an arranged marriage promoted by the authorities. Brokered by the head of the police unit, Tazawa’s marriage unites him to a close relative of the aboriginal chief. Inō and his wife (herself an aboriginal woman) arrange for the first meeting between the two partners, encourage their budding affection, and even resort to manipulation to broker a strategic marriage. In addition, the colonial authorities encouraged “friendly tribes” (友蕃 mikata ban) to fight under their command against rebellious tribes. While they officially prohibited headhunting, they sometimes encouraged members of the friendly tribes to take the heads of their enemies and offered bounties for them.19 When Tazawa returns from the battlefield having taken an enemy’s head, Inō does not reproach him for his savagery; rather, he lauds him and promises him a reward: “That’s quite a prize on your first experience of combat. Now you can go back to White Dog with pride!”20 Tazawa may have thought that he was rebelling against civilization, but he actually was turning himself into a docile instrument in the hands of the Japanese authorities. While I have stressed the prevalence of the biological rhetoric of bodies and blood in this story, I would add that the primary marker B o die s an d Vio l e n c e in the Mu sha In ciden t   113

separating civilization and savagery is paper-thin. By donning the outfit of the savage, Tazawa becomes a savage, just as he makes himself a colonialist by putting on a policeman’s uniform when he arrives in Taiwan. One might say that he takes on a new identity merely by changing his clothes—that is, by purely external, superficial changes. The politics of cross-dressing in The Savage is pregnant with meaning. Indeed, it tells us more about the politics of this narrative than the manifest theme of the recovery of the hero’s inner savage by transgressive violence. Tazawa’s cross-dressing calls into question his own stable identity as a colonizer, but it does not abolish the distinction between the colonizer and the colonized. In the first place, such cross-dressing is the privilege of the colonizer, and his alone. Tazawa arrogates to himself a right to multiple identities. He widens the borders of his own identity by incorporating otherness into himself, just as Japan is growing by incorporating other lands into its expanding empire. To understand Tazawa’s manipulation of this power, it is instructive to consider his reaction to his wife’s own attempts at cross-dressing. Following her marriage to Tazawa, Taimorikaru wears a kimono and powders her face, partly because she thinks her husband expects her to do so, and partly because she hopes to signify her ascension to civility by adopting the external appearance of the colonizer. Far from welcoming these changes, Tazawa is appalled by her behavior: An odor of Japanese femininity assailed his nose. “But you shouldn’t powder your face,” and he thrust out his hand at her cheeks on which she had applied powder. “But now that I am your wife,” she trembled with fear as she looked at his angry face. “Throw it away.” But Taimorikaru could not understand why he had become so angry. As his wife looked at him perplexed, he shouted at her wildly, “Take off that kimono and go back to the aboriginal village and change into aboriginal dress.”21

When he insists that Taimorikaru remain her unchanged self, Tazawa vetoes her social ascension. In doing so, he asserts a dual authority as colonizer and husband: as colonizer, he is able to define 114  Li t e rar y Me m o r ie s o f Mu sh a

her as colonized; and as Taimorikaru’s husband, he has the power to specify her gender role. If Tazawa’s right to cross-dress is an expression of his gendered and ethnic power as a male Japanese colonial subject, his denial of any such right to his wife expresses his power to define her identity: she must conform to the fixed model that he alone has the right to determine—be a “savage wife” (蕃婦 banfu) and nothing more.22 Tazawa rationalizes his action by saying that he is freeing her to become her true self. In his view, his wife’s efforts to become Japanese represent a loss of her authentic identity. By refusing her the right to dress differently, he insists that he is “returning” her to her original, savage self. Both Nakamura and Ōshika depict savagery as a characteristic of aboriginal bodies in their works. The former diagnoses the Musha Incident as a physiological reaction of the aboriginal bodies to the pressures of Japanese assimilation policies. In the case of the latter, the situation is complicated by the fact that the savage protagonist is a Japanese colonizer, not an aboriginal native. Tazawa, who chooses to become a savage, believes that he is thereby recovering the blood of his ancestors. In contrast with his free choice, the “savagery” of the aborigines is seen as biological destiny, an immutable, indelible property affixed to their bodies. When he first encounters Taimorikaru, she is wearing “a dark blue cotton dress fastened with a red Satsuma obi, but it did not cover at all the animal gloss of her skin and rather made it even more apparent that she was an aboriginal woman.” The animal gloss of Taimorikaru’s skin rejects the disguise that she wears and highlights the skin that it masks, “which makes one think of the bearing of the trees of the forests or the wild beasts.”23 The politics of primitivism in both writers starts from the same premise, that savagery is a biological property of bodies, but it assumes different forms in their texts. Nakamura described the Musha Incident as a final eruption of savage bodies before they capitulate to the superiority of Japan’s civilization, a triumph already manifested in the complex planning that the Musha Incident demonstrated. When Hanaoka Ichirō dresses up in Japanese clothing and performs seppuku, he affirms his capitulation to Japanese culture. At the same time, he is identified not with contemporary Japanese, but with their ancestors, when he emulates the samurai warrior of Japan’s past. In his essay on the Atayal, Ōshika regarded the assimilation to Japanese norms by the aborigines as B o die s an d Vio l e n c e in the Mu sha In ciden t   115

a betrayal of their identity. He apparently hoped to institute a reformed, discreet colonial rule that would “return them to their original wild nature.” While Tazawa frees his inner savage, he permits his wife only one identity: that of an unchanging savage, as filtered through the lens of her husband’s nostalgic primitivism. A P O S TC O L O N I A L P R I M I T I V I S M ?

In 1960, Yoshiya Nobuko wrote a short story entitled “Setting Sun Over the Savage Village.” In her choice of title, she evokes the catastrophic end of the Japanese empire that took place fifteen years before the story was published. In “Setting Sun,” she offers an account of the Musha Incident from the perspective of a disillusioned single woman in Tokyo recollecting her early life moving between the vast spaces of the Japanese empire, thanks to her father’s career with the colonial railroad. Told in the first person, “Setting Sun” describes the protagonist’s spiritual development (精神形成 seishin keisei) as a young girl growing up in Manchuria, and later as a Christian missionary in the Musha region in the late 1920s.24 In Manchuria, she is first drawn to Christianity by a story that she reads in a magazine about an English missionary doctor named Jackson, who died in 1911 treating patients during a plague in Manchuria. Later moving to Taiwan, she attends a mission school, in which the vast majority of students are Han Taiwanese (本島人 hontōjin). While a student, she conceives the idea of working in the banchi: the villages deep in the mountainous region where the seiban, the natives of Taiwan, lived their primitive lives. She says, “I had for a long time cherished the dream of spreading the good tidings of the Gospels there, an aspiration that resembled my longing for the young Jackson.” Implicit in her dream of spreading the Gospels among the seiban is a desire for martyrdom and self-sacrifice: “Serving them, I would serve God. When they suffered from malaria, I hoped to devote myself body and soul to taking care of them until I myself was infected and collapsed. This was my ideal.”25 While her father initially opposed her plan because “the seiban are violent head hunters,” he agreed on the condition that she serve in Musha, a model town where tourists were free to go and the natives were acculturated (kyōka). According to one of his father’s friends, “while most seiban are violent by nature and still practice headhunting, 116  Li t e rar y Me m o r ie s o f Mu sh a

they are changing these days because of the imperial subject movement.26 They are said to be quick to anger and to bear grudges, but that just shows that their feelings are deep and they cherish close ties to their friends and family. One might say that in case of a national emergency, they would be quick to take up their swords and march off to battle even to offer up their lives.”27 From the outset, Musha is depicted as a safe and pacified space in the aboriginal lands, close to civilization and a popular travel destination. Writing with hindsight more than a decade after the collapse of the Japanese empire, the narrator takes pains to situate the events she tells within their larger historical context. In the first few pages, she draws attention to the numerous intersections of the personal with the political that shape her life—such as the collapse of the Taiwan Bank that took place on the day of her baptism or her entering the mission school at the time of the murder by Japanese soldiers of Zhang Zuolin, (張作霖), the Chinese warlord who dominated Manchuria and northeast China from 1916 to 1928 —noting that “rumors that he was killed in a plot by the Japanese army reached Taiwan.”28 Throughout the story, she also distances herself from the prewar imperialism, as well as from its supporters: “that was the time when we Japanese were arrogant (ibatte iru).” On the ship to Taiwan, she casts a disillusioned gaze upon a group of women with powdered faces who were traveling to Taiwan to work in brothels and restaurants to entertain high officials traveling without their families to take up positions in the colonial government: “This island that I was travelling to was a land where smug Japanese officials ruled in the Government General, of women in the fancy restaurants, and soldiers. How depressing!!”29 Besides their colonial arrogance, she criticizes the Japanese for their lack of religious belief. Jackson had devoted himself to saving the people of Manchuria from the plague because of his belief in God. By contrast, the Japanese who fought in the Sino-Japanese and Russo-Japanese wars sacrificed their lives for the delusion that their emperor was a god. By this invidious comparison, the narrator establishes her own innocence and isolation within the Japanese settler community in Taiwan. Her position in “Setting Sun Over the Savage Village” parallels the “anti-conquest narratives” that Mary Louise Pratt finds in nineteenth-century European travel writings. These writers employ “strategies of representation B o die s an d Vio l e n c e in the Mu sha In ciden t   117

whereby European bourgeois subjects secure their innocence in the same moment as they assert European hegemony.”30 Like the detached naturalist traveler and the vulnerable narrator of sentimental novels that Pratt focuses on, the young Japanese missionary establishes her innocence in this colonial narrative by situating herself outside the binary of colonizer and colonized, even as she asserts the superiority of Christianity. Indeed, through her missionary work, the narrator discovers a kind of third space that allows her to escape identification as a colonizer, or any direct relationship to the Japanese empire. Rather than a colonizer, she is a Christian missionary and teacher, as the aborigines acknowledge when they bow to her as she walks along the path to Musha singing Christian hymns.31 Within that third space, she encounters an aboriginal man named Hayun. Hayun, fluent in Japanese and fond of Japanese popular songs, befriends her, serves as her interpreter, and becomes her informant about aboriginal beliefs and customs. She is fascinated by the body of this bishōnen (美少年 handsome young man), who “has the features of someone from the Filipino race.” Climbing down a steep mountain path, the muscular Hayun lifts the tree trunks that obstruct the way and throws them into the valley, reminding the narrator of the “adventures of Tarzan that she had seen in a crowded movie theater in Taipei.”32 In a scene where the two are climbing a steep mountain path, Hayun lifts the narrator up “with his strong arms, as though I was light as a feather, and carried me to the level path. . . . Through my thin onepiece dress, I felt my body grow numb, overcome by the warm body and sweaty odor of this young man.”33 While these descriptions express a physical desire for the young Hayun, the work differs from colonial period stories by men seeking to regenerate their civilized bodies in the arms of aboriginal women. “Setting Sun” depicts a more equal relationship between the Japanese woman and the aboriginal man, in which the latter serves more as a protector and guide than as a lover. Hayun also distinguishes the narrator from the other Japanese when he confides to her his dissatisfaction with the discriminatory treatment visited on aborigines by the Japanese. In a foreshadowing of what is to come, we learn early in the story that Hayun is from the same Hōgō village as Hanaoka Ichirō, an employee of the colonial police. When the narrator naively asks why the latter did not become a teacher after 118  Li t e rar y Me m o r ie s o f Mu sh a

attending a teacher-training school in Taichung, he mutters: “We are treated differently from people from Japan (naichi).”34 In addition to speaking frankly to her, Hayun protects the narrator from the violence of the Musha Incident. When she expresses an interest in prolonging her stay to attend the sports festival the following morning, he warns her against staying in Musha: “this is not something for you to see (sensei wa miru kotonai yo).”35 After the massacre, the narrator falls into a state of shock, but when she recovers, she makes inquiries among prisoners of war to find out what happened to Hayun, and visits Musha to investigate the fate of its Christian converts. In the end, she learns that Hayun was wounded while fighting in a unit led by Mona Rudao’s son and perished in the conflagration of an aboriginal village. Her father, fearing further riots in Musha, forces her to return to Taipei. Years later, in Tokyo, she notes that just as Taiwan had vanished from the territorial map of Japan, so also had “her dream of being a missionary in the banchi vanished in Musha.” Nevertheless, the ghost of Hayun remains by her side: “As a young girl, I had been drawn to the missionary path by the self-sacrifice of the mission doctor Jackson, but all that I gained in the end was limitless reminiscences of the young aboriginal Hayun and the prospect of growing old.”36 Just as the narrator remains troubled by the spirit of the young aboriginal man, Yoshiya Nobuko’s text is also haunted by the specter of colonial discourse on the primitive. N OT E S 1. Marianna Togorvnick, Gone Primitive: Savage Intellects, Modern Lives (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 23. 2. Togorvnick, Gone Primitive, 245. 3. Yamaji Katsuhiko, Taiwan no shokumin tōji: Mushu no yabanjin to iu gensetsu no tenkai (Colonial rule of Taiwan: the development of the discourse of savages without sovereignty) (Tokyo: Nihon Tosho, 2004), 100–1. 4. Nakamura Chihei, “Bankai no Onna” (Women of the savage frontier), in Taiwan Shōsetsushū (Collection of Taiwan Stories) (Tokyo: Yumani Shobō, 2000), 213–14. 5. Mori Ushinosuke, Taiwan Banzokushi (An ethnography of the Taiwan aborigines) (Taipei: Rinji Taiwan Kyūkan Chōsakai, 1917), 24–25. 6. “Jinrui zōsei” (The creation of the human race) and “Taiyō seibatsu” (Conquest of the sun) were both reprinted in Nakamura’s Taiwan Shōsetsushū. Influenced B o die s an d Vio l e n c e in the Mu sha In ciden t   119

by the German Romantics, the author believed that myth was the highest form of literature because it best reflected the ethnic and regional identities of a given culture. Okabayashi Minoru, “Atogaki” (Afterword), in Nakamura, Taiwan shōsetsushū, 4. 7. In the Botan (Mudan, Chinese) Incident, an Okinawa vessel with seventy-two crew members capsized off the eastern coast of Taiwan, and fifty-four of the survivors were massacred by the aborigines. In 1874, the Meiji regime dispatched warships in a punitive mission to chastise the “savages” who had murdered the crew and to reaffirm Japan’s sovereignty over the Ryūkyū kingdom. 8. Faye Yuan Kleeman, Under an Imperial Sun: Japanese Colonial Literature of Taiwan and the South (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2003), 30. 9. Nakamura Chihei, “Kiri no Bansha” (The mist-enshrouded barbarian village), in Nakamura, Taiwan shōsetsushū, 39. 10. Nakamura, “Kiri no Bansha,” 42–43. 11. Nakamura, “Kiri no Bansha,” 60. 12. Kawamura Minato, Nan’yō to Karafuto no Bungaku (The literature of Nan’yō and Karafuto) (Tokyo: Chikuma Shobō 1994), 35. 13. The cultural anthropologist Yamaguchi Masao makes this comparison in a dialogue with Kawamura Minato and Karatani Kōjin in “Teikokushugi to kindai Nihon” (Imperialism and modern Japan), in Shinpojiumu I (Tokyo: Ōda Shuppan, 1994), 21. 14. Ōshika Taku, “Taiyaru no seikatsu” (The life of the Ataiyal tribe), Kōdō (Action) 8, no. 35 (1935): 60–63. 15. Ōshika Taku, “Yabanjin (The savage)”, in Yabanjin, ed. Kawahara Isao (Tokyo: Yumani Shuppan, 2000/orig. 1935), 5. 16. Ōshika, Yabanjin, 35–36. 17. Ōshika, Yabanjin, 29–30. 18. Ōshika, Yabanjin, 58. 19. During the Saramao rebellion of 1920, the Japanese authorities mobilized friendly tribes to defeat the rebels and encouraged them to take the heads of their enemies to whip up their martial spirit. After the Musha Incident, the authorities offered friendly tribes bounties for taking the heads of their enemy. Nakagawa Kōichi and Wakamori Tamio, Musha Jiken: Taiwan Takasagozoku no Hōki (The Musha Incident: Uprising of the Takasagozoku in Taiwan) (Tokyo: Sanseidō, 1980), 131–32. 2 0. Ōshika, Yabanjin, 27. 21. Ōshika, Yabanjin, 53. 22. Anne McClintock coins the term “ethnic cross-dressing” in Imperial Leather, her study of race, gender, and class in British imperialism. Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Context (New York: Routledge, 1995), 69–70. 120  Li t e rar y Me m o r ie s o f Mu sh a

23. Ōshika, Yabanjin, 6. 24. Bansha no Rakujitsu first appeared in the journal Bungeishunjū, in March 1960. That this narrator has little in common with Yoshiya is attested to when she says, “I had little interest in literature and had never received any deep impression from reading a novel.” Yoshiya Nobuko, “Bansha no Rakujitsu” (Setting sun over the savage village), in Yoshiya Nobuko zenshū, vol. 10 (Tokyo: Asahi Shinbunsha 1975), 329–42. 25. Yoshiya, “Bansha no Rakujitsu,” 332–33. 26. This reference to imperialization is anachronistic, though, because these policies were not imposed until the late 1930s, long after the Musha Incident. 27. Yoshiya, “Bansha no Rakujitsu,” 333. 28. Yoshiya, “Bansha no Rakujitsu,” 331. 29. Yoshiya, “Bansha no Rakujitsu,” 328. 30. Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writings and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1992), 7, 38–85. 31. Yoshiya, “Bansha no Rakujitsu,” 334. 32. Yoshiya, “Bansha no Rakujitsu,” 337. 33. Yoshiya, “Bansha no Rakujitsu,” 337. 34. Yoshiya, “Bansha no Rakujitsu,” 335. 35. Yoshiya, “Bansha no Rakujitsu,” 338. 36. Yoshiya, “Bansha no Rakujitsu,” 342.

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CH APTER FIVE

Musha Incident, Incidentally Tsushima Yūko’s Exceedingly Barbaric Leo Ching

Why does the Musha Incident continue to fascinate more than nine decades after its occurrence? How do we understand the desire for the repeated investigations, explications, and dramatizations of it in both popular culture and scholarly research? If repetition signals the periodic eruption of a collective trauma, what lies in the kernel of its repression? If each reiteration represents a progressing, sociohistorically circumscribed, and competing point of view, have we moved beyond imperialist and nationalist appropriation toward provisional redemption? In short, between the political unconscious and historical rectification, can the Musha Incident, or rather its afterlife, help us imagine a politics of reconciliation beyond the binarism of colonizer/colonized, state/victims, civility/savagery, and other dichotomies? Chou Wan-yao (周婉窈) suggests that there is a significant shift in the interpretations of the Musha Incident in postwar Taiwan since the lifting of martial law in 1987. She argues that instead of a linear narrative of analysis, mostly from nonaboriginal perspectives, networklike analyses are now crisscrossing and interacting without a predetermined trajectory. It is more open and multiple, and it emerges from the inside moving out instead of from the outside looking in, as did the prevalent and dominant models in the postwar era by both Japanese and Han-­ Taiwanese writers. Chou credits the work of aboriginal researchers

such as Kumu Tapas and other activists for raising the complexity and multiplicity of the incident and its consequences from Indigenous perspectives. The emergence of the Indigenous voice, she argues, not only expands the heretofore Han-Taiwanese- and Japanese-dominated interpretations, but also exposes the limits of the very notion of historical archive. Oral accounts and Indigenous customs and regulations, or gaya, are no longer marginalized trivialities to be dismissed, but legitimate “archives” for the understanding of the incident from the “cultural makeup” of the Seediq peoples.1 I take Chou’s observation as a serious challenge to knowledge production that privileges rationality and historicity over affectivity and mythology.2 Chou’s paper was written right before the release of Wei Te-Sheng’s (魏德聖) 2011 film Seediq Bale (賽德克·巴萊 Saideke balai), and she expressed great excitement about it. Her optimism is based on her perception that the director has taken an insider’s point of view, deploying Seediq (賽德克) culture in order to understand Mona Rudao (莫那· 魯道), the alleged leader of the uprising, as well as his people’s bloody resistance against the Japanese. I don’t know Chou’s reaction to the actual film, and it is not my intention to discuss the film in this chapter. I will only say that despite its cinematic brilliance, I find Seediq Bale to be long-winded and uninspiring as it recounts faithfully the accepted narrative of the incident, albeit from the point of view of the Seediq people. Perhaps I am not the target audience, since the film did very well at the box office and rekindled wide-ranging interest in the event. If I may characterize Wei’s Seediq Bale as a masculinist and historicist representation of the Musha Incident, I would argue that the Japanese author Tsushima Yūko’s (津島佑子) 2008 novel Exceedingly Barbaric (あまりに野蛮な Amari ni yaban na) intersperses Musha incidentally through its narrative of the plight of a Japanese woman in colonial Taiwan in the 1930s, along with a parallel story of her niece traveling to Taiwan’s central mountains in 2005. Whereas Wei’s film aims for historic accuracy and realism, Tsushima’s novel crosses time and space, incorporating history, mythology, and legend without privileging one over the other. If Seediq Bale presents a mostly masculinist struggle against colonialism, Exceedingly Barbaric interrogates the oppressiveness of colonial domesticity through the experiences of a Japanese settler woman. If the film looks backward to reenact the Musha Incident, Mu sh a In ciden t , In ciden t ally   123

the novel engages with Musha incidentally to construct a narrative that imagines a futurity beyond the present struggle over recognition and redemption. Tsushima’s work, I argue, not only excoriates intimacy in a settler colonial domesticity, but also articulates a fictive intergenerational intimacy through an Indigenous knowledge of myth-making that displaces historical colonialism as the primary site where an alternative and nonstatist reconciliation can take place. The notion of engaging with the Musha Incident incidentally is not meant to diminish the historical event’s significance and contested aftermaths. A historical investigation such as Wei’s film, despite its dramatization, forecloses any possibility of imagining alternative narratives through which one can contemplate different futures and world-making. Despite writing from the perspective of a Japanese, albeit a colonial woman, Tsushima’s novel decenters the incident as a primary site of Japanese colonial trauma and Taiwanese/Chinese/aboriginal resistance, instead articulating incidentally and partially connected worlds and peoples based on Indigenous mythologies and fictional characters. To approach the Musha Incident incidentally is to displace the discourse of colonialism and nationalism, which has been the dominant point of reference, to that of marginalized subjectivities—colonial women, Taiwanese women, and aborigines—and to forge an intimacy regardless of nation and race. To approach the Musha Incident incidentally is to shift the geopolitics of knowledge toward what Bernd Reiter and others have called, following the Zapatista, the “pluriverse,” a world in which many worlds can coexist.3 Recent scholarship in critical colonial studies has argued for the complexity, contradiction, ambivalence, and incompleteness of colonial rule. Moving away from the Manichean division of the colonial world, these analyses pay close attention to the colonial subject formation for both colonized and colonizer, as well as their internalization and mutuality, despite the very real violence and subjugation. One of the more fecund areas of research is the connection between the broad-scale dynamics (or macropolitics) of colonial rule and the intimate sites of implementation, or what Ann Stoler has called, following Michel Foucault, the “microphysics of colonial rule” and “the affective grid of colonial politics.”4 Stoler defines intimacy in this way: “The notion of the ‘intimate’ 124  Li t e rar y Me m o r ie s o f Mu sh a

is a descriptive marker of the familiar and the essential and of relations grounded in sex. It is ‘sexual relations’ and ‘familiarity’ taken as an ‘indirect sign’ of what is racially ‘innermost’ that locates intimacy so strategically in imperial politics and why colonial administrations worried over its consequence and course.”5 However, as Lisa Lowe has shown, the concept of “intimacy” can be expanded to larger historical and continental connectivities.6 Beyond domesticity, in both bourgeois and colonial contexts, her “multivalence of intimacy” also includes “spatial proximity or adjacent connection,” where not only did slave societies engender profits that gave rise to bourgeois republican states in Europe and North America, but the colonial labor relations on the plantations in the Americas also became “the conditions of possibility for European philosophy to think the universality of human freedom, however much freedom for colonized peoples were precisely foreclosed within that philosophy.” Intimacies under colonial rule also were “embodied in the variety of contacts among slaves, indentured persons, and mixed-blood free peoples,” which were eschewed by the colonial management for fear of possible rebellion against the ­plantation structure itself.7 It is this notion of prohibited intimacies among the colonized and the disenfranchised, as I hope to demonstrate, that Tsushima’s novel attempts to articulate based on their respective experiences of loss. In the context of East Asia, the notion of intimacy has formed the basis of Japan’s colonial desire and informed its postcolonial entanglement. From the notion of “naisen ittai” (内鮮一体, Japan and Korea share one body) and “naitai yūwa” (内台融和, harmony between Japan and Taiwan) to the contentious category of “shin nichi” (親日, being pro-Japan or intimate with Japan) and the Greater East Asia Co-­ Prosperity Sphere, the emphasis on the affective union between colonizer and colonized has been part and parcel of the Japanese colonial ideology of assimilation and imperialization. In Taiwan’s case, the intermarriage between Japanese policemen and the daughters of aboriginal tribal leaders are examples of colonialism’s “sexual diplomacy.” Shōji Sōichi’s (庄司聰一) 1940 novel Madame Chen (陳夫人 Chin fujin) depicts the marriage of a Japanese woman into a prominent Taiwanese extended family, whereby the Japanese woman, enduring hardship and prejudice by the Taiwanese, succeeds in transforming the Chen family Mu sh a In ciden t , In ciden t ally   125

into an emperor-worshipping, empire-dedicated household.8 In postcolonial times, those who were “pro-Japan or intimate with Japan” were labeled as “collaborators” and “traitors,” as opposed to the postindependent nationalist discourse of “resistance” and “patriots.” In this regard, the “enslaved mentality” of the Taiwanese under Japanese rule entailed the forced “re-Sinicization” of them by the takeover Kuomintang (KMT) regime, which reproduced the colonial binaries of “Taiwan” and “China,” “benshengren” (本省人) and “waishengren” (外省人), with the former deemed inauthentic, perverted, foreign, and hence potentially subversive. The postwar, postcolonial Chinese authoritarian rule has propelled many Taiwanese to feel nostalgic for Japanese rule, lamenting the decline of Japan and being distressed about the ascent of Chinese power.9 Very few works, however, have probed the issue of colonial domesticity from the perspective of Japanese women settlers. Not unlike their European counterparts, they “experienced the cleavages of racial dominance and internal social distinctions very differently than men precisely because of their ambiguous position, as both subordinates in colonial hierarchies and as agents of empire in their own right.”10 Tsushima’s novel not only remarks on the violence of contracted intimacy (marriage and sex) within a colonial household, but also imagines a utopian intimacy among the bereaved, free of the violence of the state and colonial rule. Tsushima is a well-known writer whose concern has always been about women’s desire, the experience of losing a child, and patriarchal oppression within Japanese society. Since the mid-1990s, she has been writing novels that address Japan’s imperial past and war trauma, often dealing with marginal characters and suppressed events.11 This encounter with history is noted by the lists of citations and references appended to the end of her novels. Unlike researchers, it is rare that novelists acknowledge the use of secondary materials in their fiction, although it is expected that they have conducted research on the topic. Exceedingly Barbaric is narrated from the perspectives of two Japanese women, and more precisely, of a colonial settler and her niece, whose alternating timelines reveal the asphyxiation of colonial domesticity and the openness of Indigenous landscapes. The novel tells about the lives of two women—Miicha, a colonial housewife in 1930s Taiwan, and Lily, her niece, who travels to Taiwan in the summer of 2005 to trace 126  Li t e rar y Me m o r ie s o f Mu sh a

Miicha’s footsteps and alleviate her own sorrow of losing a child as her aunt had done. Alternating between Miicha’s letters to Akihiko, her husband, her diaries, and Lily’s travelogue, it traverses two temporalities— the early 1930s and 2005—in order to narrate Miicha’s life in the colony, with Lily often supplementing her aunt’s story with her own reflections. The two temporalities are mediated by aboriginal folklore, beliefs, and customs, and more important, the 1930 Musha Incident. The notion of barbarity or savagery in the title not only refers to the violent aborigine uprising, the colonial administration’s policy, and its massive retaliation against the Seediq people, but also serves as a metaphor for human sexuality and its accompanying love and marriage, and human existence itself. What makes Exceedingly Barbaric an interesting critique of colonialism is its attentiveness to both the macropolitics and microphysics of colonial life. From governmentality to domesticity, from patriarchy to sexuality, the novel crafts the entangled stories of colonial expansion, with all its sensibilities, sentiments, and states of distress that haunt and hover over the descriptive fringes of colonial histories and its postcolonial legacies. It is during her travel on a ship to Taiwan in the summer of 1931 that Miicha recalls how she and her siblings in their Nirasaki home in central Japan heard the news about the Musha Incident, and, like the stunned public, followed the developments closely. For the Japanese, as the novel recounts through their conversations, the massacre was horrifying for several reasons. First, they were surprised at the fact that many of their devoted compatriots lived and worked in the uncivilized mountainous regions. People were mortified by the killing of those dutiful Japanese at the hands of irrational “savages.” “Savages will always be savages,” some Japanese lamented. Second, when the indiscriminate massacre of the Japanese was reported in the media, people couldn’t help but wonder why women and children were killed as well. “Too brutal,” many thought. Finally, the group suicide of the aborigines, notably the families of Hanaoka Ichirō (花崗一郎) and Hanaoka Jirō (花岡二郎) (who were unrelated), impressed the Japanese. “Even the savages have a sense of loyalty,” the Japanese were surprised to learn. The siblings ask Miicha if she isn’t afraid of going to Taiwan because there are still many “savages” there, and the leader of the uprising, Mona Rudao, is still on the Mu sh a In ciden t , In ciden t ally   127

run. They also teasingly wonder if Miicha will venture into the mountains to search for Mona! The joking proves to be prescient and ironic, as Miicha’s mobility is restricted in the colony, so she is never able to explore anywhere beyond the Japanese town where she lives. It would take her niece’s postcolonial travel to imagine what Miicha could have seen in the mountains. Miicha’s sense of metropolitan detachment will also be transformed once she experiences the oppressiveness of colonial domesticity. Miicha arrives in Taiwan as “a Madame from the interior” (“naichi fujin”). Despite the opposition by her future mother-in-law and her husband’s economic reliance on his mother, Miicha holds great optimism about her future life in the colony. Taihoku/Taipei, “the Paris of Asia,” represents a “new beginning for life and learning,” where a “sweet home” can be built.12 This typical romanticized and colonialist imaginary is soon dissipated by the constriction of the colonial city and the illusion of married life. In Taihoku, Miicha must keep herself within the Japanese community, although she longs to venture out to “the land of the natives.”13 One of the motivations for Lily, who resembles her aunt in appearance, is to visit the mountain areas where Miicha wanted to go but could not as a colonial housewife. Lily writes: “for Miicha, Niitakayama (Yushan) and Tainan seemed farther than Tokyo; they seem like phantom places.”14 Eventually, Miicha concludes that for the colonists, it is impossible for the colony to become Japan, or for Japan to become the colony, hence the impossibility of mutuality or harmony within the empire.15 The restricted mobility within the colony relegates Miicha to the home to help and serve Akihiko, her husband, who is an aspiring sociologist and translator of Émile Durkheim’s work. Miicha’s “job” is to edit and index Akihiko’s translations, but she receives neither money nor recognition for her labor. After a miscarriage, Miicha finds herself pregnant again. But with Akihiko traveling more often to Japan, and eventually to the rest of the Japanese empire (Manchuria and Korea), for his academic work, Miicha finds herself further isolated in her colonial domicile. She eventually gives birth to a son, Fumihiko. Prior to his second birthday, Fumihiko dies suddenly, and Miicha returns to her parents’ home in Nirasaki. Through this tragic passing, and while recovering, Miicha comes to 128  Li t e rar y Me m o r ie s o f Mu sh a

recognize Akihiko’s casual and callous attitude toward her loss and her sexuality. When she menstruates again, and as Akihiko expresses his pleasure, Miicha says to herself, “My period is not yours. Do not get happy for your own convenience!” and holds on to the condoms as she receives him inside her.16 Miicha eventually returns to Taihoku with mixed emotions and in an unstable mental state. She develops a persecution complex and barely manages to live in the house that reminds her so much of her dead son. After a devastating earthquake hits central Taiwan, Miicha begins to call Akihiko “Akihiko no. 2” as he jokes about leaving Taiwan for Keijō (Seoul) or Harbin. Miicha’s distress grows, and she begins to shoplift in local stores. She is apprehended for her petty crime, and she is suspected by the authorities of belonging to an underground spy network. She is then sent back to Japan and dies of complications from malaria a few months later, at the age of thirty, four years after she first set foot in colonial Taiwan. Miicha’s narrative is interspersed with news of the Musha Incident and aborigine folklore, such as stories about the “cloud leopard” and “yellow butterflies” that foretell the power of the legendary animal and the omnipresence of the spirits of the dead, respectively. As the Musha Incident and its aftermath unfold, Miicha not only finds the retaliating Japanese colonial administration equally (if not more) barbaric in their bribing of rival aboriginal groups to massacre the Seediq and sequester them in camps, but she also develops an affinity with Mona Rudao, the Seediq leader, often juxtaposing him with her dead father. This filial identification is also prompted by the common consequence of “losing their domains.”17 Mona Rudao lost his territory and authority as Miicha lost her role in the domestic space, one through colonial subjugation and the other through patriarchal conjugation. Miicha’s sense of affinity with Mona Rudao is not merely affective; it also entails a critique of a statistical calculus of sociology represented by Akihiko (hence Akihiko no. 2). As Okamura Tomoko has argued, several key texts on sociology were published in the 1930s as Akihiko’s scholarly reputation began to rise. Translations of works from Germany, France, and the United States became mainstream in the field of Japanese sociology. From the 1940s on, works such as Matsumoto Jun’ichirō’s (松本 治 一郎) Wartime Society (senji shakai) and Okamura Tsuneo’s Wartime Mu sh a In ciden t , In ciden t ally   129

Sociology (sensō shakaigaku kenkyū) linked the thought of the Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere and sociology and affirmed the Japanese invasion of Asia.18 In the novel, Akihiko represents the neutral value of conservatism in sociology at the time. Rejecting the dialectic of change as dangerous, this conservatism is fundamentally at odds with Miicha’s strife in the colony. When she feels her domain is increasingly being invaded by Akihiko’s mother, who sends a housemaid from Tokyo to take care of them, Miicha thinks that she is being driven away from not only her husband, but also her newborn. It is during this time of distress that Miicha hears the news that Mona Rudao’s body has been discovered, three years after the insurgence. Tsushima writes: After losing her domain, Miicha can’t help but to be drawn to Mona Rudao. More accurately, to the corpse of Mona. There is a world of Miicha’s where Akihiko’s mother can never see or reach. Neither can Kame-san (the helper) nor the coughing Akihiko. Sadly, Miicha is not a member of Mona’s clan, but just a Japanese. Although it was difficult for Miicha to ignore that reality, she selfishly thought a whitened and mummified Mona would accept Miicha without care.

Miicha begins to superimpose her plight with that of Mona Rudao’s, whose own domain has been pushed to the mountains by the Han people from the mainland and then invaded by the Japanese. In “history,” Miicha, the Japanese woman, and Mona Rudao, the aboriginal chieftain, are repeatedly placed in an antagonistic position between the roles of victimizer and victim, respectively. From the moment that both lose their “domains,” the novel begins to explore a different world, unburdened by the modern notion of “possession” and “territory.”19 What Miicha inherits from Mona Rudao is the “spirit” (魂, tamashii) of the dead who have lost their “domain” to the living, who are experiencing a similar loss. For Miicha, the loss is of her two-year-old son, Fumihiko. As much as Miicha wants to understand the spirit of the dead as having a universality that transcends the nation, she tells herself that this desire is nothing but a “theory of convenience.” Just as the colony can never become the metropolis, and vice versa, Miicha’s identification with Mona Rudao cannot help but be provisional, 130  Li t e rar y Me m o r ie s o f Mu sh a

if not entirely fantastic. Unless the contradiction and antagonism created by the system and the community of “nation” and “race” subsist, it is impossible for those interested parties to share the spirits of the dead who fell victim to the conflicts. However, Miicha experiences a different possibility and sensibility with her local helper, Bunran-san, which momentarily transcends the logic of colonialism. Not only does Bunran-san lament the passing of her son Fumihiko, but it is only in the bosom of the Taiwanese woman that Miicha is able to cry and mourn her loss for the first time. The spirits cannot be freed from their previous nationality or race-makeup; however, for the mourners, it is possible to overcome that wall of rationality in “a world where a contradiction does not become a contradiction.” If “history” has forbade Miicha’s desire for subaltern affinity, it is in “mythology” that such a possibility, at least momentarily, can be imagined. If the Foucault of The Archaeology of Knowledge gives us a theory of the archive as a system that determines all forms of enunciations, the Foucault of “The Lives of Infamous Men” describes an actual archive that evades enunciation. The piece is a meditation on how to represent obscured lives in a way that preserves their affective force; in the process, he arrives at the genre of the legend. According to Foucault, legends are defined by “a certain equivocation of the fictitious and the real.”20 The archive thus becomes a space from which legends might emerge alongside histories. It is precisely in Tsushima’s attentiveness to both historiography and mythography that Exceedingly Barbaric imagines nonnation and nonracial affinities beyond colonialism. Much of Miicha’s life and thoughts are narrated through her niece, Lily, who travels to central Taiwan some seventy years after Miicha’s death, in the form of dreams, personal reflections, and speculations. Soon we find that Lily not only resembles her aunt, she has lost her eleven-year-old son during a traffic accident, just as Miicha lost her infant in colonial Taiwan. The purpose of her trip to Taiwan, besides wanting to find out how her aunt lived during the colonial period, is to alleviate the pain of her loss (or, as she puts it, to “wait it out”). In fact, it is through Lily’s voyage to the mountains and her encounters with an elderly aborigine woman and Mr. Yang, a Taiwanese man who accompanies Lily on her travels, that we learn much Mu sh a In ciden t , In ciden t ally   131

about Indigenous legends and customs such as the “cloud leopard” and “the yellow butterflies,” which construct an alternate world of spirituality and mythology. Toward the end of the novel, the two temporalities merge as Miicha’s and Lily’s worlds converge in a dream sequence: “Is this Lily’s dream or Miicha’s dream? They’re the same. It is impossible to divide Lily’s dream from that of Miicha’s. There is no reason to separate them.”21 Lily and Miicha are joined by Mr. Yang, who could be Mona Rudao, his sister Tewas, and Meimei, the young Taiwanese helper who died at the age of fifteen. What they share is the intimate loss of a young life. Each of them carries a baby on his or her back. They are accompanied by a black dog with a shadow of the “cloud leopard” for their journey to “fix the world,” burning with three suns. The “three suns” story refers to the popular Indigenous myth of the human effort to eliminate an extra sun (as told earlier in the novel). Since the two suns are far from the human realm, the Indigenous myth has each member of the entourage being accompanied by a baby on the long journey to where the suns rest. By the time the group of strong young men reaches the suns, they are old and feeble. However, the babies have now grown into young men who are capable of striking down the extra sun. Once the extra sun has been eliminated and the world returns to its normal order, the young men begin their journey back home. By the time they arrive home, they have become old themselves. Lily and her group will repeat this journey, but with three suns instead of two. Intimacy here is bound by the living, the dead, and those yet to come. The entourage does not have to be people from the same nation, tribe, or race, and the babies they carry do not have to be blood-related. They resemble what Lowe has called “the volatile contacts of colonized peoples.”22 What they share is a sense of loss and a task to forge forward to “fix this world.” More important, to accomplish or right the world requires an intergenerational effort that links the young and transcends divisions between colonizers and colonized, naichi and gaichi, and the dead and the living. My attempt to read the Musha Incident incidentally through the work of Tsushima is obviously aspirational, if not utopian. It is a small attempt at what Walter Mignolo and Catherine Walsh have called “decolonial 132  Li t e rar y Me m o r ie s o f Mu sh a

thinking.”23 Unlike the political project of decolonization, which has the goal of forming sovereign nation-states in the wake of colonialism, decoloniality aims at delinking from the colonial matrix of power (which the decolonized nation-state reproduces) for liberation beyond state designs and corporate and financial desires. In the specific context of the “multivalent intimacy” among the colonized and oppressed in the Indigenous myth articulated by Tsushima, the interest is not direct “resistance” to colonial power, but “re-existence,” understood as “the redefining and re-signifying of life in conditions of dignity.”24 To put it simply, Tsushima’s appropriation of Indigenous mythology with her multigenerational effort to shoot down the extra suns can be read as an allegory to climate change, one that requires us to think about existence beyond our present moment of political exigencies and profit-making and toward a future that is ethically responsible to the younger generation and the yet-to-be-born. To read the Musha Incident incidentally is to imagine a post-Musha horizon toward the path to liberation and a conviviality that is decolonial, pluriversal, and necessarily intergenerational. N OT E S 1. Wan-yao Chou, “Tentative Interpretations of the Musha Incident in Postwar Taiwan,” Taiwan Fengwu (台灣風物) 60, no. 3 (September 2010): 43–52. 2. Similar objections to the discourses of universalism and modernization propounded by the colonial nation-states are being waged by Indigenous intellectuals such as Leanne Betasamosake Simpson and Glen Sean Coulthard. See Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Dancing on Our Turtle’s Back: Stories of Nishnaabeg Recreation, Resurgence and a New Emergence (Winnipeg, Canada: ARP, 2011), and Glen Sean Coulthard, Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014). 3. Bernd Reiter, ed., Constructing the Pluriverse: The Geopolitics of Knowledge (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018). 4. Ann Laura Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002): 7. 5. Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power, 9. 6. Lisa Lowe, “The Intimacies of Four Continents,” in Haunted by Empire: Geographies of Intimacy in North American History, ed. Ann Laura Stoler (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006): 193. Mu sh a In ciden t , In ciden t ally   133

7. Lowe, “The Intimacies of Four Continents,” 203. 8. For a detailed analysis of Shôji’s novel, see Eika Tai, “Intermarriage and Imperial Subject Formation in Colonial Taiwan: Shôji Sôichi’s Chin-fujin,” Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 15, no. 4 (2014): 513–31. 9. Leo T. S. Ching, Anti-Japan: The Politics of Sentiments in Postcolonial East Asia (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019), 80–97. 10. Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power, 41. 11. For a concise summary of Tsushima’s later works, see Peichen Wu, “The Remains of the Japanese Empire: Tsushima Yūko’s All Too Barbarian; Reed Boat, Flying; and Wild Cat Dome, trans. Michael Bourdaghs, The Asia-Pacific Journal/Japan Focus 16, 12, no. 2 (June 2018): 1–9. 12. Tsushima Yūko (津島佑子), Exceedingly Barbaric (あまりに野蛮な, Amari ni yaban na) vol. 1 (Tokyo: Kodansha, 2008), 58. 13. Tsushima, Exceedingly Barbaric, 61. 14. Tsushima, Exceedingly Barbaric, 189. 15. Tsushima Yūko’s (津島佑子) Exceedingly Barbaric (あまりに野蛮な, Amari ni yaban na), vol. 2 (Tokyo: Kodansha, 2008), 203. 16. Tsushima, Exceedingly Barbaric, vol. 2, 197. 17. Tsushima, Exceedingly Barbaric, vol. 2, 342. 18. Tomoko Okamura (岡村知子) , “Tsushima Yūko’s Exceedingly Barbaric: The Rondo of Life and Death” (津島祐子「あまりに野蛮な」論：生と死の円舞 (ロンド)), Modern Japanese Literature (日本近代文学) 89 (2013): 142. 19. Tomoko, “Tsushima YÛko’s Exceedingly Barbaric: The Rondo of Life and Death,” 143. 20. Michel Foucault, “The Lives of Infamous Men,” in Michel Foucault: Power, Truth, Strategy, eds. Meaghan Morris and Paul Patton (Sydney: Feral Publications, 1979), 80. 21. Tsushima, Exceedingly Barbaric, vol. 2, 334. 22. Lowe, “The Intimacies of Four Continents,” 203. 23. Walter D. Mignolo and Catherine E. Walsh, On Decoloniality: Concepts, Analytics, Praxis (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018), Kindle location 207 of 7946. 24. Mignolo and Walsh, On Decoloniality, Kindle location 171 of 7946.

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CH APTER SIX

Satō Haruo on the Musha Incident Ping-hui Liao

Over the years, scholars have tended to focus their attention on the 1930 Musa Incident, a most horrendous and traumatizing crackdown on Indigenous groups in Taiwan during the Japanese colonial period. However, we can raise questions regarding agency, and even gain foreknowledge, by drawing on a nuanced, interpretive account of a minor Musha crime scene provided by Satō Haruo (佐藤 春夫, 1892–1964), which he wrote during his visit to the colony in the summer of 1920. The tale of Satō, a major Japanese novelist and the fourth winner of the prestigious Yomiuri Prize, is an alternative (albeit brief ) story and a much earlier colonial encounter that serves to index and implicate something larger around such crucial issues as ethnic violence and ethical reawakening. Looked at closely, we might well trace later developments in light of moral agency and ethnographic authority to better place the Musha Incident in relation to the numerous monstrosities done to Indigenous groups in Taiwan. Satō Haruo was considered “one of the most promising new writers in the Taisho period,” and throughout his lifetime—in 1925, 1937, and 1943—the renowned novelist issued selections of his tales on Taiwan, always under the title of Musha (霧社), revisiting the site of trauma and memory as if attempting to repeatedly exorcise specters from the past. Not only well read by his contemporaries, Satō’s accounts of his journey

to Taiwan have increasingly caught the attention of academics, particularly in Japan, Taiwan, and the United States.1 It is, therefore, not totally irrelevant for us to consider Satō’s prehistorical reflections on another tragic incident that occurred in Musha, ten years before the primordial scenes of mass slaughter. Indeed, critics have meticulously documented the Musha tragedy and reconstructed the spectacle of colonial brutality, largely using it as a crucial case study to switch from mild, so-called wet diplomacy of reciprocity to brutal suppression and domestication of the primitive, to point the way toward formal Indigenous autonomy, or to track the remains of life and to celebrate the art of survival (as can be seen in the work of scholars like Paul Barclay, Deng Shian-yang, Dakis Pawan, and Scott Simon). But we shouldn’t just highlight the event to the neglect of other equally important witness accounts of what transpired. Here, I propose a comparative and ethnographic approach to considering the Musha Incident in light of the employment of historical narratives, of the constituent sequencing of small events to a major catastrophe like the 1930 Musha Incident. Hopefully, this chapter may supplement and offer a long-duration perspective, with many other contributors to this book mostly considering the causes and effects of the Musha Incident in more exacting historical detail, follow-up reportage (Barclay), and visual representations done locally (Kuei-fen Chiu) or transregionally (Leo Ching). Of course, this is not to belittle the significance of the Musha Incident. As Michael Berry, Leo Ching, Dakis Pawan, and Deng Shian-yang have demonstrated, the incident has served as a scaffold to punish and discipline the locals, as a change in governmentality, and as an enduring process of painful recollection and mourning, in spite of popular attempts to “simplify” or distort history in fiction or film. Politicians and intellectuals in the colony and in the metropolis at the time were reported to have been shocked by the unprecedented violent suppression carried out by the Japanese colonial regime, with the Japanese military and police (numbering up to 1,303 military troops and 1,305 police officers), supported by 1,048 Han Taiwanese and 331 other aboriginal people, hunting down Mona Rudao and his followers.2 They even resorted to aerial bombings and used types of chemical gas that had been banned in international agreements.3 The massive warfare 136  Li t e rar y Me m o r ie s o f Mu sh a

saw 87 members of Mona Rudao’s tribe decapitated, with an additional 85 shot, 171 killed in bombings, and 296 hanging themselves to avoid humiliation. Wei Te-sheng’s (魏德聖) film Seediq Bale (賽德克·巴萊 Saideke balai) overwhelms us in reliving the battle and its spectacle. The consequences and meanings didn’t go uncontested, as the survivors got relocated and the Indigenous peoples were renamed (as Takasago 高砂族, High Sand Tribes, in honor of their bravery and dignity), while acculturation and assimilation policies began to take effect in the discordant communities. Scott Simon observes that the Japanese colonial regime was preoccupied with the camphor economy in Taiwan, and from 1914 on, it introduced new forms of capitalist productivity. As a result, “Taiwan’s Indigenous Peoples endured the same measures taken in colonial situations worldwide: population transfers and the creation of reserves, the transformation of traditional laws, struggles over natural resources . . . Colonialism transformed them from a kin-based mode of producing through hunting and swidden agriculture for subsistence needs to a market-based mode of producing industrial goods for capital accumulation.”4 He sorts through varied historical reasons for the attack on twelve police stations led by Mona Rudao with three hundred Seediq warriors on October 27, 1930, highlighting the people’s resentment of colonial control and the imposition of new modes of production rather than Mona Rudao’s personal grudge against a Japanese policeman.5 He considers the relocation of survivors afterward as part of the Japanese colonial regime’s project to “reduce indigenous industry and land grab territory, while limiting their movement and submitting them to state authority.”6 He sides with Antonio Tavares, arguing that the Indigenous peoples in Taiwan had enjoyed relative autonomy under the Qing dynasty until Japan took over the island and started to implant capitalism and new forms of property rights, especially land reclamation for the camphor industry. In the final analysis, it was “the lack of clarity and consistent practice on indigenous property rights” that “led to conflict in the camphor areas and to violent resistance.”7 Simon is partly right about the conflicts of interest that might have framed the violence. He shows that Musha was one of several important intersecting points for the Japanese geopolitical projects of relocating, consolidating, displacing, and replacing Indigenous peoples in Taiwan. S at ō Har u o on the Mu sha In ciden t   137

To him, the Japanese “had to launch military campaigns to subordinate the mountain tribes and access mountain resources.”8 Even before the 1930 Musha Incident, the Japanese colonial regime had declared war against the so-called savages, with the Taroko Battle (also referred to as the Truku War) of 1914 being one of the longest and most furious conflicts. In May 1914, Japanese troops arrived both from Musha in the west and from Karenko (Hualian) in the east. The scale of the fighting was much larger than in the Musha Incident, with 6,000 soldiers, twentynine artillery units, nineteen tanks, and even battleships used for reinforcement.9 Although there were fewer casualties than in 1930, the death toll was relatively appalling. However, the official records failed to document the Indigenous losses. However, are the battles between the Japanese colonizers and the tribal people mainly about land grabs and the camphor monopoly? What if such battles could be traced to various maritime rivalries and competitions across East Asia dating much earlier, which involved quite a few transregional institutions—commercial, diplomatic, religious, and so on? Might we draw from these incidents a disparate picture of the world, in which Japan was just one of the key players? Especially when these Japanese colonial officers were themselves travelers who moved across regions and developed contingent political stances and strategies in response to the biopolitical conditions immediately at hand, but also became enmeshed in much larger networks of agency and resistance, as they were concerned that failure to suppress riots in China, Korea, or Manchuria might jeopardize their careers back home in Tokyo? A recent collection of essays put together by Tonio Andrade and Xing Hang, around such figures as sea rovers and samurai in relation to the early modern maritime East Asian trade, may be illuminating. Andrade and Hang suggest that Zheng Chenggong’s (Koxinga) transregional ties across Asia during the seventeenth century helped secure his regime’s economic policies and swift economic growth, very much like what the “Four Little Dragons of East Asia” would accomplish hundreds of years later. But not only did the envoys and escorts, collaborations and networks, maps, and intercultural diplomatic ties play a crucial role, but the competitions, rivalries, secret agencies, and resistances also helped make seaways more dynamic and fascinating. 138  Li t e rar y Me m o r ie s o f Mu sh a

In another essay on the Musha Incident, I consider the Sinevaudjan (Peony Tribe at Pindong) Incident in 1871, which occurred almost six decades before the Musha events of 1930, as an important point of rupture that involved many of the transregional forces at the time. I pointed out that the American diplomat Charles W. Le Gendre is among many foreign travelers and imperial officers to have helped to switch the historical trajectories of Taiwan in relation to its Pacific Asian neighbors. His personal experiences in dealing with the “savages” in Taiwan might have always already prefigured a series of incidents involving violent suppression and retaliation in 1914 (Tarako) and 1930 (Musha). His travel route and its impacts deserve to be examined transregionally, as he is not alone in moving from his hometown to Xiamen, Pingdong, Tokyo, and beyond. In many ways, the routes of travel and translation by people like Le Gendre in fact charted and changed the course of modern Asia. Gotō Shinpei, for example, was instrumental in modernizing Taiwan as minister of civil affairs from 1898 to 1906, and he later became a major participant in the construction of the Manchurian railway from 1934 onward. During his eight-month exile in Taiwan, Zhang Taiyan (章太炎) published a number of poems and essays in the Chinese columns of Nichinichi shinpō, which he edited, about Japanese friends coming to or leaving Taiwan for “better futures.” On December 16, 1898, for instance, he wrote a short commentary in response to a Japanese friend’s thoughtful reflection on the eve of departure from the small colony to return home, suggesting that drifting lonely souls on the misty island in the “barbaric south,” “with seagulls filling the sky,” quickly acquaint themselves with colleagues in similar diasporic predicaments: “They eagerly shake hands but soon sail on to a distant metropolis to fulfill their ambitions.”10 It is through the eye of such travelers that we may understand better how small incidents should constitute histories, as recounted by Satō Haruo. S ATŌ H A RU O ’S MU S H A , 1920

“Subversions in small scales happen practically every other day, while uprisings are on the street at least once a week,” as the rumor went in Taiwan during the Japanese colonial period. Not only did rebels, S at ō Har u o o n the Mu sha In ciden t   139

intellectuals, and tribal chieftains lead all sorts of protests, but Buddhist and moral societies had constantly clashed with the colonial government in Taiwan since 1895. The Musha Incident of 1930 is among the largest in scale of such events, but it was not the first. In fact, the Taroko Battle that took place between May and August of 1914 proved more massive and destructive. But for the natives, and even for the Japanese colonizers, many incidents around Musha seem to have been more traumatic. This is most evident in the work of a Japanese writer who traveled to Taiwan in 1920 for three months and gave a witness account of what he saw in Musha after another reported riot against the Japanese. Satō Haruo, a distinguished writer in post-Meiji Japan, consistently wrote about Taiwan, revealing alternative perspectives about the island and its peoples. In the summer of 1920, Satō was distraught and in pain when he got rejected by a friend’s wife. While in distress, a high-school classmate showed up and invited him to visit Taiwan for three months. The one-time classmate appeared to have prospered and come to know quite a few top colonial officers in Taiwan—among them the interior minister, who went on to arrange trips for Satō in order to make his stay on the island as comfortable as possible. Over a span of twenty years that followed, Satō produced a series of stories and reissued them in a collection titled Musha (published in 1925, 1937, and 1943), in which he gave expression to exotic and critical stances in relation to Taiwan. He provided nuanced and revealing narratives of what he witnessed in Taiwan as a traveler and as a “comprador,” who enjoyed all sorts of privilege on the one hand while entertaining a split, discrepant cosmopolitanism on the other. He compared the customs and discursive practices of the Japanese and the Taiwanese, in addition to being fascinated by the aborigines’ tall tales—with the gothic romance “Fantasy of the Fan” (女誡扇奇譚, “nü jie shan qi tan”) likely the best known. In many ways, Satō’s travelogue is not unlike other accounts of colonial encounters in which motifs of exotic memory, the imperial eye, racial discrimination and even castration, gender prejudices, exhaustive inventories, tropical neurasthenia, a sense of dislocation, a cultural criticism from within, and notions of anticonquest abound. Even though Satō visited Taiwan as a civilian, he was quite happy that the colonial government in Taiwan provided him with generous support, enabling him to live in luxurious hotels and putting him in contact with local 140  Li t e rar y Me m o r ie s o f Mu sh a

intellectuals who were normally unavailable to visitors. A telling example is when he checked into a hotel after spending a few days in Taiwan’s central mountain area. As recounted in “Travels in the Colony,” Satō at first was poorly treated by the hotel receptionist in Taichung, who stared at him “with suspicion,” and then put him “in a shabby room that didn’t even have curtains to block the scorching sun.” He had to ring the bell a few times to urge the waitress to bring him cold drinks. When he complained about the unbearable heat and wished to move to another room, the waitress sarcastically commented: “all the rooms would be equally warm to someone like you who just came down from the high mountains.”11 The situation changed after Satō notified the local district magistrate of his presence in town. He appeared to have been pleasantly surprised when the hotel owner gave him a more comfortable room upon realizing that he was the colonial governor’s guest of honor. Not only did he get a special tour guide and an invitation to an official banquet, but he was upgraded to a huge suite with a porch, tea table, and cigarette and wine set. In celebrating the favorable conditions and utilizing the colonial network to his own advantage so as to obtain firsthand information, Satō might well appear to be no better than his Japanese colleagues. But because of his travel experience in Taiwan during the severe weather, he developed a disparate identity stance favoring Taiwan over Japan, thinking the former to be more pragmatic and dynamic. He observed that Taiwan’s extreme weather made its residents better equipped for unexpected challenging situations: people sweat and survive in a more sustainable manner. Satō’s stay in Taichung from September 27 to October 1, 1920, was only a few days after his visit to Musha. There, he was treated like a noble grandee, greeted by a children’s choir and escorted to a teahouse on the mountaintop. He was told a gruesome story firsthand by the hostess about a recent tragedy in which seven Japanese policemen and their families were slaughtered and decapitated. The Indigenous killers brutally cut open the belly of the police chief ’s pregnant wife to take out the dead baby inside. What kind of frenzied hatred and madness, Satō asked, should drive the Indigenous people to commit such a heinous crime? His narrative nevertheless reveals a complex mix of curiosity and anxiety, marveling at the ways that the Indigenous children refined S at ō Har u o on the Mu sha In ciden t   141

and elevated themselves beyond the confines of colonial education to achieve emancipation, and even to redeem the colonizers, but at the same time constantly feeling unsafe and trapped. Satō depicts the locals as crude, cheap, and rustic, but he also finds himself wondering why the Indigenous peoples would perform certain rituals such as food sharing and beheading. The story ends with the narrator and implied author in Taipei listening to expert, anthropological accounts of the Indigenous tribes in light of their belief systems. The natives were said to have problems with colonial hierarchy and especially dismayed by the colonial practice of imposing somebody from outside the clan over their chieftains. They would return gifts if they found them offensive or not useful. The partial local knowledge generated through such informal seminars enabled Satō to experience ethical awakening. He concluded his story by commenting on the insensible practice of aerial bombings, using fighter jets to wipe out the Indigenous populations. He cites an officer as saying, “after a short glimpse of the aborigines at Musha from the Japanese perspective, I feel they are like an adorable piece of poetry, enigmatic and troublesome.”12 As for the incident in which seven Japanese were killed, he learned that it needed to be traced to monstrosities done by the Japanese to the Indigenous peoples at least ten years earlier, saying: “It is customary for the indigenous peoples to pack clothes and gifts they had received from the enemies before declaring war, just to show a good sense of integrity and sincerity that they are not pleased. They would leave them at the frontier of the battlefield, to make their will known. However, the Japanese tend to ignore this indigenous practice, failing to take in their meanings. That’s why the aborigines respond in frustration and anger.”13 So what brought about the brutal slaughter of the Japanese woman and her unborn infant, as witnessed in Musha? Satō’s answer was “neo-barbarism,” done in response to the empire for its barbaric behavior. W H O S P E A K S F O R T H E S U B A LT E R N ? W H O S E J U S T I C E ?

It would be too convenient to regard Satō’s view as neoprimitivism or ethnocentrism. In fact, he set out to marvel at Indigenous culture in Taiwan and was shocked to find that the “rainbow” people could do something so horrendous and completely inhuman to innocent people 142  Li t e rar y Me m o r ie s o f Mu sh a

like a pregnant woman and her unborn baby. He raised the issues of evil and social norms while discussing the question of agency in light of the Indigenous people who took their enemy’s lives but remained silent about the inexcusable acts of violence against the Other. He deliberated with his Japanese anthropologist friend (Mr. M) about ways that one might comprehend, and maybe even empathize with, the violent and monstrous ethnic Other, an Indigenous person who seemed to have gone mad and out of control. The anthropologist suggested that “it would be impossible to reveal what actually happened at Musha now unless one relates it to a series of brutal crackdowns across the island against the aborigines ten years ago launched by the Japanese colonial government.”14 That is, military and political suppressions only served to deepen the grudges and increase the tensions between the Indigenous people and the colonizers. The Indigenous people in Taiwan, according to M, had enjoyed autonomy, with chieftains as their leaders in the First Nations; as a result, they found “the idea of imposing colonial administrators as their superiors to be incomprehensible.”15 Several crucial points emerge in Satō’s intercultural observations after the conversation with M. The first is that the aborigines were well known for their generosity and respect for life. According to Satō, to kill an unborn infant in the inhuman act of murdering a pregnant Japanese woman had been never heard of before. If such an evil and violent deed was committed, it constituted an extreme case of retaliation, most likely for the purpose of venting extreme anger. The causes for such violence are not immediately clear. The mystery of incentive and motivation only renders the case more intriguing and intricate. Second, M advocates depth hermeneutics to explain what lay behind the Musha killings, not only in light of the Indigenous peoples’ customs and belief system, but also in terms of further emplotment that events in the past (such as Takaro and numerous crackdowns of the aborigines) help generate new monstrosities and complicate our interpretation as to who should be held responsible. He told Satō that the tragedy had more to do with what had been done earlier to Indigenous groups in the 1910s, when the colonial governor introduced a number of major suppressions against the tribal people and thus complicated the ways in which the colonized and the colonizers understood the past. The accumulative effects of historical contingencies and political persecutions took their S at ō Har u o o n the Mu sha In ciden t   143

toll during the ensuing clashes. To comprehend the 1930 Musha Incident, therefore, we would need to relate it to what happened before and even afterward, in the form of constructing plots and building tensions. But perhaps the most significant factor is that Satō and M appear to have been caught up in a psychic structure of moral ambivalence and conflict. On the one hand, they realized that there was a sense of mixed blessings, as the Indigenous people were “emancipated” under the auspice of colonial modernity while being deprived of their access to land and tradition. The Indigenous were said to be able to cultivate an agency of resistance and to enjoy relative autonomy, but they had continually been hunted down relentlessly by the Japanese, who had been using modern weaponry and even fighter jets to do so since the 1910s. The unstable mixture of emancipation and deprivation, of benevolence and grudges, of attraction and repulsion, and so forth, render moral judgment difficult. M said that over the years, he had protested against the colonial government’s policy to resort to military force, arguing that it only made things worse: “when the situation became unstable and the government decided to use extreme force against the indigenous people, I knew that there would be a major catastrophe coming our way.”16 It is evident that M and Satō take the side of the Indigenous peoples by blaming the colonial government for remaining indifferent and continuing to ignore local codes, customs, and rituals, all while failing to heed the signals and symptoms that might have prevented the tragedy from the start. A major issue is the colonizer’s lack of respect for the Indigenous habitus and for local knowledge. Such lack or inadequacy puts both parties on the path toward conflict, rendering a small incident into another crisis or riot too divisive and large to be contained—the 1930 Musha Incident, for example. There are questions surrounding justice and rearticulation for the dead. The deceased have no voices, but who has the right and legitimacy to speak for them? This is a question often raised in relation to Holocaust studies and in response to other historical atrocities. Lyotard, Derrida, Badiou, Levinas, Morrison, Rorty, Spivak, and Agamben, among many others, have considered the complexities of such justice claims. In Satō’s narrative, he calls for hearing from multiple voices—those of the Indigenous peoples, the hostess, and the anthropologist. The spectral and eerie presence of the killers and the dead infant are also in the 144  Li t e rar y Me m o r ie s o f Mu sh a

background, raising the question of who can speak for the dead, in addition to what had happened in the first place? All these render suspect the authority of ethnographic writing and of the crime investigation. Instead of supplying an answer, Satō leads us to a critical and ghostly path of hermeneutics of suspicion and a kind of hauntology: Who knows what happened? The dead still linger. Lastly, Satō referred to the newsreel footage of a fighter jet pilot getting decapitated and castrated to indicate that as the tension built up, the Indigenous people became more “barbaric” and merciless in response to new developments. The jet was employed to raid the targeted tribe, but it ended up crashing. The pilot was found and then dismembered, to the horror of the colonial regime. To Satō, this incident seemed to point to another era of neo-barbarism or newly acquired mode of retaliation that was not native or inherent in local practice.17 It is revealing that Satō should say that the Indigenous people in Taiwan turned to foreign customs to acquire such neobarbarism in order to adjust to a demanding new environment. Although not explicitly, he hinted that the Japanese themselves in fact helped constitute this neobarbarism in Taiwan. Satō’s cultural critique from within can be contrasted with those of other Japanese travelers to the colony at the time. Yanagita Kunio (柳田國男, 1875–1962), for one, visited Taiwan for a brief time under the invitation of his uncle, but he was more interested in reinventing the Japanese folklore tradition in order to claim its authenticity. According to the Taiwanese historian Wu Micha (吳密察), “Yanagita Kunio held a wartime symposium at his Tokyo home in 1943 with the aim of creating, in the Greater East Asian region, a ‘discipline of ethnology’ that employs the Japanese language to collect, categorize, and analyze [phenomena], which shall become the analytical target for comparison and contrast with ‘Japanese ethnology.’ ”18 From this example, one can clearly see the Japan-centric view to which all other cultures are compared. In this regard, Satō is more ambivalent, and even on the side of empathizing with the Indigenous peoples in Taiwan. Thus, in many ways his narrative account of 1920 Musha prefigured the 1930 Musha Incident and became a benchmark text in our consideration of the major tragedy that would come a decade later. Through him, we can better understand why the Musha victims’ descendants, such as Dakis Pawan, would venture to say that they sympathize and tend to forgive the criminals who S at ō Har u o o n the Mu sha In ciden t   145

almost wiped out their forefathers completely. In Leo Ching’s work, we also find the complexities of anti-Japanese sentiments at play, especially in Taiwan in the form of displacing colonialism and rearticulating the empathetic connections.19 RETHINKING MUSHA

Satō’s ambivalent stance and his reinstatement of what he experienced in the colony, especially the Musha witness account, can be revealing about Taiwan’s postcolonial conditions. Even before Wei Te-sheng’s film on the Musha Incident, Seediq Bale, visualized the primary scenes of massacre and retaliation, scholars had examined the incident as a topos to advocate for ethnonationalism and multiculturalism. Scott Simon, for example, discusses the aftermath of the Musha Incident in relation to Taiwan’s nationalist imagination in the form of commemoration, and especially to the Indigenous autonomy movement that has existed since the 1990s. Melissa Brown and many other scholars have over the years written on the new ethnographic projects to build new Taiwanese hybrid identities. However, even years after 1987, a pivotal point that supposedly marks the beginning of Taiwan’s postcolonial era, aboriginal writers like Walis Norgan (瓦歷斯諾幹) still sarcastically comment: “This is 1996, but it’s like being back in the days when the island belonged to the Japanese emperor.”20 In his stories and essays, Walis would often place his confused narrator, a stranger in his own homeland, at a crossroads where Democratic Progressive Party demonstrators are violently fighting the Kuomintang (KMT) police force, like two bulls racing toward mutual destruction. All the while, the Indigenous peoples are left in the dark as to where the country is heading. To Walis, who has spent time researching the Musha and Taroko archives, and many other aboriginal scholars in Taiwan, the Musha Incident is part of a continuous process of discrimination and displacement that the Indigenous peoples have had to deal with, often in the form of getting their “barbarians’ ” knives ready for another fight. With their eyes fixed on the ever-changing and often receding horizon, they have to stand firm in defense of their ancestors’ land and dignity, even though they are continually undercut by market forces and internal strife. That may be the reason why Walis has more recently written on global disparities and warfare that affect 146  Li t e rar y Me m o r ie s o f Mu sh a

the livelihood of minorities and immigrants in Taiwan and in many parts of the world today. On the topic of the Musha Incident, Walis and Yu have put together historical documents regarding the ways in which the Japanese tried to relocate and destroy the Atayal and other aborigines in Nantou. In spite of efforts to establish Indigenous autonomous territories and to reinvent their traditions, Indigenous homelands continue to lose ground to colonial and neocolonial regimes, not to mention earthquakes, typhoons, mudslides, and human catastrophes. However, rainbow imagery is constantly brought in to symbolize hope over fear, and much Indigenous literature zooms in on the legendary “Hunter Goddess” or “Mother” figures—in work by Liglave A-wu, for example. In fact, Satō Haruo was quite amazed to find the perseverance of the Indigenous people when he traveled far into the mountains, and he would often draw on rainbow imagery to retell Indigenous stories of the mythic home to return to. In cracking open the riddle of modernity and governmentality, Indigenous peoples are left with one choice, as Monaneng writes: “the only thing you can: / Fight with your back to the mountain.”21 Their voices echo in the mountains and rivers, and increasingly on the streets of the metropolis. This may be the true legacy of Musha. N OT E S 1. Yuko Kikuchi, ed., Refracted Modernity: Visual Culture and Identity in Colonial Taiwan (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2007), 26. Also see Haruo Satō, Zhimindi zhi lü, trans. Qiu Ruoshan, 2nd ed. (Taipei: Qianwei, 2016). In a new foreword to the second edition, Shimomura Sakujirō lists an impressive number of monographs and theses on Satō’s journey to Taiwan. Satō refers to Musha as a tourist site and a small town in which a riot occurred, rather than the locale for the 1930 Musha Incident, in which the Atayal chief Mona Rudao led a group of Indigenous men in an attack on a Japanese garrison where a girl was raped, and the Japanese army used excessive force in retaliation to slaughter them. Throughout this chapter, I quote from Chiu Ruosan’s new and complete Chinese translation of Satō’s travelogues. 2. Deng Xiangyang, Wushe shijian (Taipei: Yushanshe, 1998), 72–86. 3. Chou Wan-yao (周婉窈) (2011) “Mountains, Ocean, and Plains”: A Keynote Speech at the International Conference on the Origins, Transformation, and S at ō Har u o o n the Mu sha In ciden t   147

Development of Taiwan’s Maritime Cultures, National Chiao-tung University, May 27–28, 2011, p. 18. 4. Scott Simon, “Making Natives: Japan and the Creation of Indigenous Formosa,” in Japanese Taiwan: Colonial Rule and Its Contested Legacy, ed. Andrew D. Morris (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), 75–92. 5. Simon, “Making Natives,” 88; also see Paul Barclay, Outcasts of Empire: Japan’s Rule on Taiwan’s “Savage Border,” 1874–1945 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 43–44. 6. Simon, “Making Natives,” 89. 7. Simon, “Making Natives,” 82. 8. Simon, “Making Natives,” 84. 9. Walis Norgan and G. Yu, Taiwanyuanzhumin shi (Nantou, China: Taiwan wenxianguan, 2002), 154. 10. Liao Ping-hui, “Travels in Modern China,” in Oxford Handbook of Modern Chinese Literature, ed. Carlos Rojas and Andreas Bachner (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 40. 11. Satō, Zhimindi zhi lü, 288. 12. Satō, Zhimindi zhi lü, 202. 13. Satō, Zhimindi zhi lü, 204. 14. Satō, Zhimindi zhi lü, 202. 15. Satō, Zhimindi zhi lü, 202. 16. Satō, Zhimindi zhi lü, 203. 17. Satō, Zhimindi zhi lü, 203. 18. Wu Micha, “The Nature of Minzoku Taiwan and the Context in Which It Was Published,” in Taiwan Under Japanese Colonial Rule, 1895–1945, ed. Ping-hui Liao and David Der-wei Wang (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), 359. 19. Leo T. S. Ching, Anti-Japan: The Politics of Sentiment in Postcolonial East Asia (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019). 20. John Balcom and Yingtsih Balcom, eds., Indigenous Writers of Taiwan: An Anthology of Stories, Essays, and Poems, trans. John Balcom (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 167. 21. Monaneng, “If You Are Aborigine,” trans. John Balcom, in Balcom and Balcom, Indigenous Writers of Taiwan, 160.

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C H A P T E R S EV E N

Untimely Meditations The Contemporary, the Philosophy of Walking, and Related Ethical Matters in Remains of Life Chien-heng Wu

Ever since its publication in 1999, Wu He’s Remains of Life (餘生 Yusheng) has gained a good number of fans, but it has also drawn a fair amount of criticism for its controversial portrayal of the Musha Incident (霧社 事件 wushe shijian), its problematic representation of the Indigenous people and their suffering, its undue amount of sex and violence, and its difficult style. In an attempt to respond to these charges, I begin with Theodor Adorno’s famous saying, “To write a poem after Auschwitz is barbaric.” This dictum raises a number of questions about the ethics of writing about trauma. First and foremost, it asks how literature can avoid participating in the structure of oppression when writing about the pain of others. In Adorno’s formulation, literature as a cultural artifact, when “confined to self-satisfied contemplation,” is doomed to reproduce and perpetuate the culture that makes possible the barbarism of National Socialism.1 The question to be posed, then, is whether thinking or writing can transcend its own condition of possibility and effectively criticize the very culture from which it emerges—the same culture that has committed the unthinkable in the first place. If Adorno remained pessimistic in his initial judgment, he would later revise his position, acknowledging that “perennial suffering has as much right to expression as the tortured have to scream,”2 and further affirming the

capacity of literature to give expression to such suffering.3 Shoshana Felman has noted that Adorno’s revised attitude institutes a much more “aporetic” relation between writing and trauma.4 Unlike the negative relation expressed in Adorno’s initial response, literature in the second formulation finds itself in an ethical double bind, in which it cannot but write that which cannot be written, or cannot but bear witness to the impossibility of bearing witness. Still, if it has become imperative to write, how can one write a literature of pain and suffering without participating in the process of reification that forecloses the fundamental criticism of that barbaric culture? If literature is to be up to the task, it cannot continue to exist in a torpid state; it has to reinvent itself, less it indulge in sentimentality or become reified into mere stylization that “drown[s] out the screams of its victims.” Therefore, Adorno writes, “[i]f thinking is to be true . . . it must be thinking against itself.”5 To think against thinking does not grant a passage to nonthinking; it rather designates a mode of thinking that thinks the unthought of the present state of things. Thus, for literature to think and write against itself, it has to dispense with the comfort of received wisdom, including linguistic and literary conventions, and abandon the whole excavation effort to find an absolutely determinable meaning. That is why genuine thinking is always out of joint with regard to the present and signals the possibility of an immanent transcendence from the condition of possibility that gives birth to it. To complicate the issue further, another interesting point in Felman’s explication is that in identifying the theoretical double bind in trauma writing, she also characterizes the reflexive movement of thinking as “the task of contemporary thinking.”6 What, then, does it mean to be contemporary? The question of the contemporary has long been an important subject in philosophical discourse. For example, it constitutes the backbone of Walter Benjamin’s philosophy of history, and it appears as the untimely in Friedrich Nietzsche and as writing in Jacques Derrida.7 All these theoretical discussions, despite their vastly different approaches and individual subtleties, tend to situate the contemporary on the ontological level to index a dimension of time that is in the present but not of the present. For the sake of economy, we use Giorgio Agamben’s succinct definition as our guide to the philosophical investigation of the contemporary: 150  Li t e rar y Me m o r ie s o f Mu sh a

Those who are truly contemporary, who truly belong to their time, are those who neither perfectly coincide with it nor adjust themselves to its demands. They are thus in this sense irrelevant. But precisely because of this condition, precisely through this disconnection and this anachronism, they are more capable than others of perceiving and grasping their own time. . . . [the contemporary] is that relationship with time that adheres to it through a disjunction and an anachronism.8

Perhaps we can say that the contemporary is the unconscious of the present, which exposes the certainty of an era to an abyssal void. The contemporary is, therefore, in time more than time and should not be opposed to time in any strictly oppositional fashion; the contemporary creates its own temporality by suspending the givenness of the present, including all its biases and assumptions; shocks them anew; and casts them into an ever-changing configuration. As such, the contemporary has a timeless quality, for people who partake in this singular movement of thought can claim to be contemporaries of each other, even when they belong to different worlds and different eras. Being contemporary, then, is not the description of a status but rather a mode of thinking in constant resistance to the reification of thought. To be contemporary, in short, is to be an event in thinking, and one of the ways to read Remains of Life is to see it as composed of a mosaic of thoughtscapes that form a series of untimely meditations on what it means to be contemporary. T H I S C O N T E M P O R A RY W H I C H I S N OT O N E

This discussion of the ethics of trauma writing and the contemporary is important not just because it provides a framework through which we can better appreciate Wu He’s radical approach to trauma writing; more important, it allows us to make a few crucial distinctions that will prove helpful in highlighting certain ethical issues in Remains of Life. Some of the most innovative scholarship on this novel tends to obscure these distinctions and reads into the novel’s figure of the Contemporary (當代 dangdai) or the Contemporary Perspective (當代觀點 dangdai guandian) all the ontological implications, which, in my view, do not necessarily reside there.9 The misunderstanding arises from the conflation of Un timely Me dit ation s   151

two levels of analysis, which is quite understandable because novelistic devices often get so entangled that they constantly fold into each other, leaving readers with only a thin trace of distinction; another reason is that “contemporaneity” is one of several possible ways of translating tongshi xing (同時性)—a key clue provided by the author in the afterword to comprehend the structure of the novel as a whole—and can be readily associated with the figure of the Contemporary in the novel.10 However, the purpose of this chapter is to argue to the contrary: that a crucial distinction exists between the Contemporary in the novel and the contemporary in its philosophical sense. Without this distinction, we are likely to miss important ethical issues brought up by the interplay between these two orders. My contention is that Remains of Life puts forward two types of discursive subversion—one through the figure of the Contemporary and the other, on a more fundamental level, by way of aesthetic appreciation of nature through a communion known as “the meeting of hearts” (以心會心 yi xin hui xin). And it is in the aesthetic appreciation of the natural order of things alone that we approximate the locus of the contemporary as discussed in the philosophical discourse by Agamben and others. Its so-called Contemporary Perspective gives the novel its renowned critical thrust by rendering questionable what has been taken for granted in the previous historiography of the Musha Incident; the second—in the form of aesthetic appreciation, scattered throughout the novel and often presented in confessional form—serves as an affective supplement to the former’s critical voice and can be amalgamated under the heading of “the philosophy of walking.” The employment of the figure of the Contemporary has been widely noted and praised for rendering explicit the ideological undertones in the successive colonial, nationalist, and nativist discourses of the Musha Incident. By raising questions concerning the selection, intention, and interpretation of the writing of history, the Contemporary forces the reader to ponder whether the succession of various regimes, from the colonial up to the semicolonial and postcolonial, amounts only to a changing of the guard rather than a radical transformation of colonial ideology, as the Indigenous population continues to be included out of the nation’s polity (i.e., venerated only on special days for special events) and lives a life in which the same colonial script is written over and again in different ideological ink. 152  Li t e rar y Me m o r ie s o f Mu sh a

Be that as it may, the Contemporary is far from the only voice of conscience in matters related to a traumatic event. In fact, the narrator evokes the authority of the Contemporary, only to undermine it with an even higher authority. The Contemporary constitutes the horizon of understanding in the narrator’s investigation into the Musha Incident, but it gradually morphs into a sinister presence and eventually gives way to an aesthetic appreciation of nature, or what Frédéric Gros calls the state of “the suspensive freedom that comes by walking.”11 The philosophy of walking affords a prereflective and prediscursive inner experience of being at one with nature, unconcerned with such worldly matters as dignity and resentment, and it comes to be envisioned as a viable ethics for those living out the remains of their lives. Although the philosophy of walking is never systematically elaborated, its radicalism can be properly appraised when situated in relation to Lacanian psychoanalysis or in the lineage of Martin Heidegger’s Gelassenheit. An ethical ambiguity emerges precisely at the juncture between these two orders: the appeal to nature gives out a pronounced sense of transcendence over the history in which the Contemporary is grounded. As a result, questions of important ethicopolitical import raised by the Contemporary now have only tangential relevance in light of the philosophy of walking. This unresolved tension persists toward the end as the narrator, on his way out of Riverisle (川中島 Chuanzhongdao/Kawanakajima), is greeted by the Old Man, who exemplifies an ethics of living befitting yusheng (or “remains of life”), but nonetheless issues a warning: “Outside our mountain valleys there was an even more powerful force trying to control us.”12 T H E C O N T E M P O R A RY I N Q U E S T I O N

The Musha Incident took place on October 27, 1930. According to the official historiography, the incident was the last of the Indigenous uprisings and constituted one of the bloodiest episodes of anticolonial resistance in the recorded history of Japanese colonialism. The event has been inscribed in the official historiography as anticolonial resistance, and the rebel leader, Mona Rudao (莫那魯道), is mythologized into the paradigmatic hero of that resistance. This instrumentalization of anticolonial resistance into political propaganda by successive regimes is Un timely Me dit ation s   153

subject to critical scrutiny in Remains of Life, as the novel’s narrator assumes the Contemporary Perspective and deconstructs the coherence of the state-sanctioned ideology by raising questions about the “legitimacy” and “appropriateness” of the incident.13 Informed by the Contemporary Perspective, the narrator moves past the grandiose official account, viewing the historical event from the perspective of the survivors who bear witness to the incident, as well as by the weight of its legacy in a culture that has been gradually deracinated. In the novel, the undercutting of the official historiography is achieved by staging a series of confrontations between competing viewpoints (e.g., dignity of resistance versus the ritual of the headhunt); other rhetorical devices are employed as well, to dismantle the ideological edifice of the official narrative. Among the most effective is the narrator’s repeated juxtaposition of “Memorial to the Remains of Life” (餘生紀念 碑 yusheng jinian bei) with the official memorial to the Musha Incident (霧社紀念碑 Wushe jinian bei). With the former serving as a “countermemory” to the official discourse concerning the Musha Incident,14 it becomes clear that “the status of Mona Rudao that stands beside the official memorial may be a historical hero but he is also a contemporary puppet.”15 Remains of Life can thus be read as a critical exposure of the pathology of recognition behind the celebratory rhetoric at the state-sanctioned memorial ceremony.16 Unlike the traditional historiographical narrative, Remains of Life consciously foregrounds the rhetorical element in the writing of history. For Wu He, history is not a restorative enterprise aimed at uncovering truth; the historical eye with which the subject observes the object is always already conditioned by subjective involvement as well as contextual contingencies—from the modes of research procedure available in a given historical moment, the social relations determined by ethnicity, gender, class, and age, to the subject’s own affective investment—such that the neutrality of a research position is always already tinged, however slightly, by the researcher’s own presence in the situation and that person’s transferential relationship with the object of study. As such, truth claims made in the name of objectivity become unsustainable. What is revealed is never an excavation of hard facts and objective reality; readers instead move at the narrator’s pace, curiously questioning, ruminatively digesting, and tentatively concluding, all in the name of an 154  Li t e rar y Me m o r ie s o f Mu sh a

“imaginary reality.”17 It is this stance of radical questioning, as well as the hyperawareness of the situatedness of one’s enunciative position, that make Remains of Life an exemplary work that renders conspicuous the fictive structure shared by both literature and history. Notwithstanding the critical thrust embodied in the figure of the Contemporary, I argue that the Contemporary is also a performative staging of its own deconstruction—not just in the sense of self-revision (through the proliferation of points of view), but also in a much more radical sense of self-dissolution. The Contemporary, as Berry correctly observes, “refers to the narrator’s perspective that there can be no true history independent of our own current historical positioning, which fundamentally shapes our perspectives and interpretations of the past.”18 Unlike the ontological framing of the Contemporary by other commentators, Berry’s succinct definition actually makes much more textual sense. This, however, is not an argument against the ontological reading of the novel, but rather an argument against the locus upon which the ontological dimension is to be situated. In Remains of Life, the Contemporary presents itself both as a particular frame of reference, in which the values, assumptions, and biases of an era are built into its own historical discourse, and as a reflexive awareness of its own historical positioning. Thus, in questioning the “legitimacy” and “appropriateness” of the two predominant interpretations of the Musha Incident—the political and the ritualistic—the Contemporary, as the product of its own era, should be subject to the same process of questioning.19 That is, if nothing should be left unquestioned “under the sunlight of the Contemporary,” this very principle should also be applied to the Contemporary itself; if the Contemporary forbids anything from reifying into the past tense, then “the first principle of being” (存有第一義, cunyou diyi yi) upheld by the Contemporary as an a priori principle should also be subject to the same critical examination.20 Since the Contemporary designates a horizon of a situated intelligibility, its own historicity jeopardizes the validity of the very principle— the principle of the sanctity of life—that it uses to dismantle the political interpretation of the Musha Incident. According to this first principle, “the inherent nature of what a ‘massacre’ entails is always the same, regardless of the respective process or final death toll, for a massacre Un timely Me dit ation s   155

involves a fundamental betrayal of life by life itself . . . therefore, our contemporary history cannot but condemn ‘the Mona Rudao of the Musha Incident.’ ”21 In other words, the first principle of being is firmly rooted in the preservation of the physicality of life. This foundational principle, however, is challenged by Walter Benjamin in “Critique of Violence.” It is worth quoting in full Benjamin’s defense of the totality of human existence beyond its mere physicality: The proposition that existence stands higher than a just existence is false and ignominious, if existence is to mean nothing other than mere life.  .  .  . It contains a mighty truth, however, if “existence,” or, better, “life”  .  .  . means the irreducible, total condition that is “man”. . . . Man cannot, at any price, be said to coincide with the mere life in him, any more than it can be said to coincide with any other of his conditions and qualities, including even the uniqueness of his bodily person. . . . It might be well worthwhile to track down the origin of the dogma of the sacredness of life. Perhaps, indeed probably, it is relatively recent, the last mistaken attempt of the weakened Western tradition to seek the saint it has lost in cosmological impenetrability. (The antiquity of all religious commandments against murder is no counterargument, because these are based on ideas other than the modern theorem). Finally, this idea of man’s sacredness gives grounds for reflection that what is here pronounced sacred was, according to ancient mythic thought, the marked bearer of guilt: life.22

Two things stand out in this remarkable passage. The first is the fundamental distinction that Benjamin makes between life in its total condition and “mere life.” What is presented in the first principle of being is a notion of life construed in its bare and animalistic capacity. This is precisely the problem with the doctrine of the sanctity of life: its reduction of humanity to the function of its bodily survival, which not only nullifies the considerations of dignity that went through Mona Rudao’s mind before he reached his decision to act, but also renders the human being as an object vulnerable to the exercise of violence—as the bearer of guilt in ancient mythical thought or as the target of genocide in Nazi Germany. 156  Li t e rar y Me m o r ie s o f Mu sh a

Second, Benjamin speculates that the sanctity of life is probably a relatively recent phenomenon, a modern humanist discourse that differs in nature from the pacifist argument in ancient times. If Benjamin is right, the Contemporary cannot avoid being affected by the ethos of its time—namely, the collective anxiety over the crime against humanity in the twentieth century. On this view, the supposedly a priori principle of being is exposed as a product of a specific historical consciousness. Dominick LaCapra, along the same line, has suggested that the absolutization of the sanctity of life that sees violence as uniformly barbaric succumbs to metaphysical reductionism, disregarding the forms it takes and the uses to which it is put. Furthermore, “[o]ne might speculate that the notion of the sanctity of life has been tenacious both because the horrors related to the Nazi notion of ‘life unworthy of life’ and because of the more general relativization of values in ‘modernity,’ which seems to leave life as the residual repository of absolute value and ‘sanctity.’ ”23 LaCapra’s speculation (and Benjamin’s too) about the doctrine of the sanctity of life being a recent phenomenon are borne out in the novel’s reference to the crime against humanity which, in its twentieth-century guise, takes the form of oppressive collectivism and is cited by the narrator as the source of both personal trauma (the symbolic castration under the Kuomintang regime) and world-historical trauma (fascism and communism in the twentieth century).24 Thus considered, what appears to be an a priori principle ends up being closer to what Foucault refers to as “historical a priori.”25 The principle of the sanctity of life is further called into question when its internal tension and contradiction start to emerge in the course of reasoning. In the first approach, the narrator asserts that “being precedes all forms of existence,”26 a proposition that one-ups the existential maxim that “existence precedes essence.” The Contemporary posits that the foremost principle in life is being, and any decision that puts being in harm’s way is to be suspect. From this point of view, the legitimacy of the Musha Incident in the name of dignity cannot be sustained, for dignity is asserted at the cost of hundreds of people’s lives. The relationship between being and existence gets even more complicated as the narrator proceeds to deal with the ritualistic justification of the Musha Incident by expanding the doctrine of the sanctity of life in terms of individual autonomy. Un timely Me dit ation s   157

Here, it is important to bear in mind that the political and ritualistic interpretations of the Musha Incident are dismissed on two different grounds. In disputing the political interpretation, the Contemporary resorts to the sanctity of life as the first principle. Later, when the Contemporary tackles the challenge of the ritualistic interpretation, somehow this principle alone is not sufficient to dispute the legitimacy and appropriateness of the incident as a primitive custom. We will consider in depth this explanatory inconsistency in a moment. But first, the shift would not have been possible without the narrator’s construction of a speculative genealogy that traces the development of the headhunting practice from the hunter’s instinctual aggression to the collective orgy that culminates in a spectacular discharge of the primordial and inhuman drive—hence the metaphorical abundance of sex, violence, collective ecstasy, and a Dionysian merging with nature, all of which are suggestive of individuality being engulfed by the collective frenzy.27 There are two significant functions of adding a speculative history of the headhunting custom. Its first function is not unlike the Freudian myth of the primal horde or the instinct for cruelty in Nietzsche’s ­genealogy—that is, as a heuristic device to help understand the development of and fascination with the headhunting practice. More significantly, it also provides an image of “the real” (真實 zhen shi), to be contrasted with and later modulated by the philosophy of walking, which will serve as “an alternative primal ritual” (另類型原始儀式 linglei xing yuanshi yishi) for those living out the remains of their lives. Now, another crack in the edifice of the Contemporary pops up. The idea of individual autonomy, although evoked to enhance the argument, in fact significantly undermines the first principle of being. Consider the following passage: [T]he Contemporary era in which I live has also attempted to use “individual’s subjectivity” to call the “normalcy of headhunting” into question, I refer to this academic jargon “individual’s subjectivity” simply as “individual autonomy,” individual autonomy is manifested when one acts as his/her own master in existence, thus existing as an autonomous individual becomes the first priority for being. Anything that overlooks or threatens to destroy “individual 158  Li t e rar y Me m o r ie s o f Mu sh a

autonomy” reduces being to a state of empty meaninglessness, and with that all possibilities for one’s being are likewise destroyed.28

In this passage, individual autonomy is firmly situated on the level of existence (個體自主便是人存在同時自己做自己的主人 geti zizhu bianshi ren cunzai tongshi ziji zuo ziji de zhuren) and deemed as “the first priority for being” (如是自主的個體是存有的第一優先 ru shi zizhu de geti shi cunyou de diyi youxian), which I take to mean being’s most conspicuous manifestation in the world. Two questions immediately impose themselves: 1. Is not Mona Rudao’s decision precisely an affirmation of individual autonomy? Then why is his decision first negated by the first principle and then surreptitiously validated by the principle of individual autonomy? Does this not suggest an inherent contradiction of the Contemporary? 2. Is the idea of individual autonomy derivative from the first principle, and hence secondary and nonessential? Or, rather, is it something that the first principle cannot do without? With all signs pointing to an inextricable entanglement between the two, it then gives rise to a logic of contamination in accordance with which being is always already in the world as existence. Therefore, one cannot speak of being as such without at the same time speaking of its being there, an existence caught in the field of various historical and political forces, or, as Benjamin puts it, an existence in the sense of the “irreducible, total condition that is ‘man.’ ” This, again, leads to an internal contradiction of the Contemporary since the hierarchy of being over existence espoused by the first principle actually relies on what Derrida calls a logic of supplementarity, according to which what appears to be secondary or derivative turns out to be an indispensable condition of possibility; as a result, the principle used to refute the assertion of dignity contains the justification for such an assertion. Still, the puzzle remains: why does the Contemporary need to resort to the idea of individual autonomy to refute the ritualistic claim? No clear explanation is given, but we can make an educated guess that the narrator is compelled to reason on the ground of individual autonomy Un timely Me dit ation s   159

because, unlike the political decision made by Mona Rudao, headhunting as a primitive custom has existed for centuries and contributed to the enrichment of the society’s cultural life; this cultural heritage and the experience of the real that it offers even cast a fascinating spell on the narrator: [E]ven a quiet observer would be moved by the sight of that kind of ‘inhuman involvement,’ as the carnival reached its climax it was not the human heart racing but rather the pulsation of the earth itself.  .  .  . these carnivals are important for what they inherently represent, they not only wipe away the shackles of “a fledgling process of societalization,” returning everyone to the bosom of primitive nature, they are like a volcano erupting, releasing hot lava to freely flow.29

This experience of the real signals a return to nature, and the primal passion it ignites renders ambivalent the narrator’s attitude toward decapitation. On the one hand, the practice repulses him for its violation of the sacredness of life. On the other, he cannot help being drawn to the intensity of the primal passion afforded by headhunting. That is why the narrator claims that he would have had no qualms about wielding the blade in the primitive age: “back in the primitive age I would have swung my ‘headhunting’ blade without the slightest hesitation, but in our civilized contemporary world I struggle to ponder the legitimacy of swinging that blade to commit a ‘massacre.’ ”30 That is also why the narrator feels impelled to not just conduct an interview with a Toda headhunter who participated in the Second Musha Incident, but also bear secondary witness to “the real” that the headhunter had once experienced: “I needed to leave home and go deep into the mountains to see for myself a real live ‘head-hunter’ sitting in the sun and humming a headhunt song, I shook the hand that he had once used to sever heads, I felt the blood pulsating through his wrist, only by doing that can my writing surpass ‘research’ and surge forward.”31 The first principle of being, had it been used to refute the ritualistic interpretation, would not have been effective for a simple reason: the ecstasy afforded by headhunting is far greater and more intense than anything humanly possible; life itself would have paled in the face of the 160  Li t e rar y Me m o r ie s o f Mu sh a

cosmic substance that animates the whole Earth; if “being precedes existence,” as the first principle dictates, then headhunting offers an instinctual immersion into being on a cosmic scale, immediately dwarfing the first principle, whose vision of life remains limited to humanity and the preservation of mere life. The narrator would later come to the conclusion that although this experience of the real is something he wishes to hold onto, the form that it has taken and developed through the centuries is something he is willing to leave behind: “ ‘Headhunting’ has enriched the inner meaning of this island nation, this is a historical fact that cannot be altered, but if ‘headhunting’ was a wrong choice that led us down a blind path, then it perhaps will give rise to an alternative ‘primal ritual’ that will enrich the inner meaning of this island nation in a similar fashion, this is part of a historical imagination that need not be suppressed.”32 We will dwell on what this alternative primal ritual consists of in a moment. Right now, it is important to note that a recourse to the discourse of individual autonomy allows the narrator to displace the critique onto oppressive collectivism, thereby simultaneously acknowledging the cultural enrichment that the headhunting ritual has contributed to the island nation and leaving room for an alternative primal ritual that could provide a different way of getting in touch with the real without tampering with individual autonomy. Also noteworthy is a subtle but noticeable shift in attitude in the narrator’s persistent invocation of the Contemporary. At first, the narrator unapologetically assumes the Contemporary as a totalizing horizon of understanding, as well as a critical tool to deconstruct the sovereign regulation of meaning. As he proclaims, “there is no ‘history as such,’ and reality exists only in ‘contemporary history.’ ”33 But this triumphant tone becomes more subdued in the course of the novel and is eventually replaced by an attitude of passive resignation: “I was born into the Contemporary, raised in the Contemporary, educated in the Contemporary, I have spent my entire life in the Contemporary, and I cannot but speak from the perspective of the Contemporary.”34 Put differently, if previously the narrator assumes the Contemporary, it is now the Contemporary that assumes him. This perspectival shift is most evident in the Musha Incident’s changed status in relation to yusheng: the investigation that starts as “a necessary spin-off ”35 of the narrator’s chance Un timely Me dit ation s   161

encounter with yusheng in Riverisle now becomes externalized into a nagging “task” imposed by the Contemporary—something that the narrator is willing to put aside for the pleasure of a simple stroll.36 The dissolution of the Contemporary is at its most pronounced when the narrator starts distinguishing the experience of yusheng from the investigation informed by the Contemporary. Yusheng is never rigorously defined, but it is vastly associated with a cluster of inner conditions and a number of people, objects, and phenomena. For example, yusheng includes the attainment of peace of mind, untroubled by worldly concerns; it is passive in the most radical sense, which goes beyond the simple opposition of activity and passivity; it is vastly associated with deer eyes, rooster crows, the image of playing children, the statue of an elementary school student next to “Memorial to the Remains of Life,” the stream, the trek, the moonlight, the cold mountain air, and the stroll taken through the surrounding natural environment—all of which outline the psychological and affective coordinates of a communion known as “the meeting of hearts”; most important, it is said to be an instinctual way of living, devoid of thought and contemplation. This division, to put in extremely simple terms, is between yusheng and the incident; between that which need not be thought about and that which demands to be thought about/investigated: [T]here is no need to meditate or reflect on yusheng, for it is alive right there before the eyes, in the laughter of school children and their games every afternoon after they are let loose, the object of my reflection is “the Incident,” it has gradually ossified into a fossil, I take the fossil out from the scars of history and place it on the windowsill where I can examine it carefully, even though such contemplation in a place where people live out their remains of life bears no practical meaning, yet “thinking” has its immanent force, intuition is an inborn ability, after that comes accumulation and intensification, thinking is of the same kind of accumulation and intensification following on the heels of the instinct, it might get modified on account of external factors, but it will not cease to think, it matters not whether the object of reflection has no meaning and value, “thinking” will cease to be only when its inner force becomes extinguished.37 162  Li t e rar y Me m o r ie s o f Mu sh a

In this dense passage, a nonoppositional division is placed between yusheng and thinking/investigation. The novel seems to suggest that yusheng as intuition is that which need not or even cannot be thought, and yet it is precisely the nonthought of yusheng that serves as the condition of the (im)possibility of thinking. Two relevant passages can be cited in support of this view: The reason I commit this rather emotional passage to paper is simply to use “the Incident” to make a sincere attempt to reflect in this novel on my life’s wandering over the years, and verify something that very well may never be verifiable—before the final “emptying of thoughts” I want to put everything I have into thinking.38

Notice that here, the emphasis is put on the initiation of thinking on the condition that the nonthought of yusheng (“the final ‘emptying of thoughts’ ”) is momentarily held back. The second passage continues: I either gaze at an indistinct whole from afar or pore over a fragmented part in-between things, does my work [investigation] consist of a combination of these two operations, I hope I can walk inside this island nation, gazing deeply without any intent to record, criticize, or conclude, but is such a walk possible? Our culture and education proscribes people from engaging in “purposeless and permanent stroll,” purposelessness is the preparation for purposefulness, or perhaps purposefulness arises from purposelessness. . . . I must bring “the Incident” to an end.39

In both passages, an aporetic structure defines the relationship between yusheng and thinking. In the first passage, thinking makes one last effort to think about the traumatic event before the advent of nonthought. In the second passage, readers are given a general impression that yusheng can be fully experienced only with the cessation of thought (“gazing deeply without any intent to record, criticize, or conclude”). Although the passage expresses the same aporetic structure between the investigation and yusheng, thinking and nonthinking (“purposelessness is the preparation for purposefulness, or perhaps purposefulness arises from purposelessness”), the emphasis Un timely Me dit ation s   163

is now placed on the limit of the Contemporary and ultimately on its cessation or dissolution. This change of emphasis occurs at a very precise moment—that is, when the Contemporary gradually morphs into a sinister presence, dictating to the narrator the most appropriate modes of reasoning and thereby abusing the freedom of thought and transforming itself into an oppressive thinking machine that revels in endless problematization. At this point, the investigation is no longer anchored to an aporetic relation with yusheng as its necessary spin-off ); rather, it becomes an end in itself. Perhaps it is at this moment that thinking exhausts its inner dynamics and ceases to be (“  ‘thinking’ will cease to be only when its inner force becomes extinguished”); perhaps it is also at this moment that the narrator rushes to wrap up the investigation (“I must bring ‘the Incident’ to an end”), not because there is nothing left for examination, but rather because the futility of the whole enterprise has dawned on him—he can never get to the heart of the matter with the Contemporary: “History only records ‘the factual details of the Incident’ but fails to touch the real.”40 If history cannot touch the real, what alternative is offered in the wake of the dissolution of the Contemporary? The answer to this question is the key to unpacking the ethical and political implications in Remains of Life. In the next section, I will argue that the narrator’s role as a walker or stroller, more than any other, is most intimately tied to the idea of yusheng, which provides the foundation for reimagining an “alternative primal ritual.” T H E P H I L O S O P H Y O F WA L K I N G

“do you believe in that kind of sublime experience?” Girl looked down for a while, “no, never once, but I believe it feels like surging flood and exploding volcano, only then is life worth living”. . . . the question is does such a state where one reaches ecstasy to the point that one feels like a “surging flood or an exploding volcano” even exist, I have my doubt over the existence of such a state in my life, during the time of my own remaining life I still don’t know what kind of “real” this question points to, perhaps it doesn’t need to be 164  Li t e rar y Me m o r ie s o f Mu sh a

answered, hoping that life reveals the real and doesn’t waste away, gradually one comes to a point where that voice deep inside asks you to let go of expectations, and when it comes, experience it with your heart, that’s it. . . . doesn’t the fact that the raw sexual desire of the primordial real can only be experienced through “the meeting of hearts” suggests the absurdity and sadness of life. —W U H E , R E M A I N S O F L I F E 4 1

We have previously mentioned that the Contemporary adopts a strategy that favors the multiplication of meanings, using cross-comparison and cross-verification to navigate through a wide array of possible interpretative paths (made up of dialogues, interviews, observations, and memoranda that contain both truthful and fictional reflections of the daytime materials). What I wish to emphasize here is that the experience of yusheng constitutes yet another level of discussion in the novel, a level that remains deeply undertheorized. To be sure, the investigation of the Musha Incident and the experience of yusheng are closely related, and the meaning of each can be elucidated only by the other. But the varying degree of importance of these two dimensions begins to surface as the novel progresses, and it becomes clear that the latter experience is making a push to take over the center stage of the narrative as the former is gradually receding into the background the more that its limits and impotence are revealed. To unpack the inner meaning of yusheng, we should start by demarcating the contour of what the narrator calls “the real.” First, the real is neither objective reality nor historical truth. In fact, the narrator’s understanding of the real shows a striking resemblance to the psychoanalytic formulations of the real—so much so that the idea of the real in the novel follows a similar trajectory as the shift from early to later Lacanian teaching. There are two conceptualizations of the real in Lacanian psychoanalysis. In the 1950s, Jacques Lacan defined the real as that which resists symbolization; during this period, the real was conceived of as an enormous substance (Freud’s das Ding, or “Thing-in-itself ”), upon which symbolization stumbles. According to this view, the real is not only prior to language, civilization, and societalization; it is also posited as their opposite (i.e., their stumbling block). As such, a return to the Un timely Me dit ation s   165

real signals liberation from the alienating effects of language and society. Later, however, Lacan resists the temptation of positing a primordial substance that thwarts subsequent attempts at its symbolization; instead, the real is conceived of as a gap, or “a minimal difference which divides one and the same object from itself,” and the materialization of this gap is called “objet petit a,” or “the little piece of the real.”42 The shift from das Ding to objet a, however, does not indicate that jouissance (full enjoyment) is normalized into bits and pieces as if they were miserable copies of the lost Thing. Lacan’s gesture is more radical: in the relation between das Ding and object a, it is limitation that precedes transcendence. The standard reading is to conceive of the real as an enormous substance and the small object as its leftover, its phenomenal stand‐in. Therefore, the gap separating objet a from the Thing is irreparable because they belong to two different domains: the phenomenal and the noumenal. As a consequence, one can settle only for a weakened and gentrified form of enjoyment while simultaneously postulating the existence of jouissance), which in turn serves as the yardstick against which the enjoyment attained in the phenomenonal world appears as “gentrified” or “watered-down.” This, according to Žižek, misses the paradox of the Lacanian real: [W]hat we must avoid at any price is conceiving of this left-over as simply secondary, as if we have first the substantial fullness of the Real and then the process of symbolization which “evacuates” jouissance, yet not entirely, leaving behind isolated remainders, islands of enjoyment, objets petit a. If we succumb to this notion, we lose the paradox of the Lacanian Real: there is no substance of enjoyment without, prior to, the surplus of enjoyment. The substance is a mirage retroactively invoked by the surplus.43

These two psychoanalytic conceptualizations of the real roughly correspond to the two ways of imagining the real in Remains of Life. The first has already been outlined in the narrator’s speculative genealogy of the headhunting ritual. The primitive ritual in the narrator’s account gestures toward an ecstatic experience in which the real is presented in the splendor of its substantial fullness. By this account, the real is characterized by elemental passions, instinctual urges, unbounded 166  Li t e rar y Me m o r ie s o f Mu sh a

sexual gratification, and other like experiences, all of which suggest an undifferentiated merging with nature. This understanding of the real as a primal and substantial experience also informs Girl’s desperation that she has yet to experience the most intense sexual pleasure, the kind of orgasmic frenzy expressed through metaphors of volcanic eruptions and raging torrents (see the section epigraph). Again, the logic of the early Lacanian real is operative here. As the narrator notes, behind Girl’s frustration is a postulation that somewhere deep inside the mountain lies the black hole of sexuality, which remains concealed or suppressed by the din of civilization.44 One can hear in Girl’s discontent the same desire for inhuman jouissance afforded by the act of headhunting. But in the end, the narrator laments that direct access to this kind of primordial real is impossible; it can, nevertheless, be approached obliquely, through “the meeting of hearts.” Interestingly, immediately before the passage on the impossibility of attaining the ultimate sexual gratification (or the real as jouissance), the narrator reflects on the difference between perfection and refinement, which puts forth another understanding of the real and significantly undermines the first conception of it as a primordial substance: [A]fter all it is impossible to achieve perfection, perfection is nothing but a fantasy constructed by human consciousness, but refinement is a possibility and humans adore refinement however the human heart cannot tolerate too much refinement, refinement must occasionally take a break from itself with a contrast of crudeness, or create a space of emptiness, only then can refinement sustain itself and become the leading force of civilization, which had originally been the “will” or “non-will” of nature.45

It is hard to miss in this passage the psychoanalytic insight that the original plentitude (or aesthetic perfection in this case) is a fantasy posited retroactively, or that the real, by this account, is conceived simultaneously as both “the leading force of civilization” and the “non-)will of nature,” and therefore no longer univocally defined as that which resists symbolization. And yet what the narrator does here is not to settle for mere refinement after realizing the impossibility of reaching absolute perfection. The gist of this passage lies, rather, in locating nature’s will Un timely Me dit ation s   167

(or rather nonwill) in “the minimal difference” that fractures refinement from within itself. The same psychoanalytic insight is brought up again when the narrator speaks of the importance of the gap interrupting the acts of speaking (about the past) and listening (for the purpose of research). This gap, I argue, is the space of yusheng, the remains of life—a gap of pure suspension: “sometimes you need a comma between talking and listening, a comma is an empty interstice, a pure suspension from reflecting on the past and preparing for the future.”46 Two related theoretical points can be made here. First, if nature’s will is no longer identified with the primordial plentitude, but rather with a desubstantialized void, the cultural substance that will serve as the substitute for the primitive headhunt can be built only on a groundless ground—that is, on the recognition that freedom and dignity do not reside in their assertion, but rather in their suspension (from identitarian fixity and other types of sovereign determination); that ecstasy is attained not through experiencing life or sex to its fullness but in displacing the self from its proper place and becoming other than the self; or that the kind of enrichment that it brings to culture does not fill up its inner meaning, but rather withdraws from any such claim to meaning. In the final analysis, this alternative cultural substance, paradoxically, can be affirmed only in nonsubstantive terms, as a gap, void, pause, or silence. Second, this description of nature’s will, also referred to as the “non-will,” makes it a kindred notion to Heidegger’s idea of Gelassenheit, translated as “releasement” or “letting be.” Gelassenheit is understood as “the releasing of oneself from transcendental representation” or “a refraining from the willing of a horizon.”47 In other words, Gelassenheit is a kind of willing that wills its own dissolution, or willing in the manner of nonwilling. In Remains of Life, similar fundamental insights into the nature of being are attained when the narrator goes for a stroll or gazes with calm composure in an appreciation of nature’s serenity, which not only releases him from the Contemporary’s obsessive questioning, but also renders insignificant all the worldly troubles and nullifies every trace of sadness: “I gazed out upon the reservation that had experienced so many days just like this, perhaps this is what it really means to experience the remains of life, at the very least this is its backbone, with all the sadness, unrest, fear, and confusion 168  Li t e rar y Me m o r ie s o f Mu sh a

becoming nil.”48 Walking along the mountain paths, the narrator comports himself to a region beyond thought and history, sadness and unrest, and becomes truly contemporary, as he is endowed with the power to transcend the horizon of his own era and gaze right into the void of his own time. ETHIC AL DE ADLO CK IN RE M AINS OF LIFE

The radicalism of Remains of Life lies in opening up the process of signification, which is achieved on two entirely different fronts: the Contemporary and the philosophy of walking. Unlike the Contemporary, which multiplies perspectives to the point of irresolution, the discursive subversion enacted by the philosophy of walking is of a different order; the philosophy of walking points to a prediscursive and noncognitive ontological domain, installing that which is nonhistorical (i.e., yusheng) into the heart of the historical. Put otherwise, from the Contemporary to the philosophy of walking, we witness a transition from an epistemological pluralism to an ontological impasse. While this transition must not be understood as the substitution of one for the other, there is nonetheless a radical disjunction between these two main threads. That is, from the Contemporary to the philosophy of walking, we also witness a turning away from a socially oriented and contextually based criticism in favor of a more sweeping and generalizing renunciation of metaphysical certainty. As a result, the specific sociopolitical problems unearthed by the Contemporary become overshadowed by an ethics that is as universal as it is solipsistic. This part of the novel, moreover, seems to give way to a disguised form of theology established on the ground of sacred communion between individual and nature. This communion is neither discursive nor communicative; it can be approached only through “the meeting of hearts,” or an inner experience verging on the mystical—­immediately bringing to mind Wittgenstein’s last proposition in Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus: “What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.”49 Indeed, silence and solitude are two defining features of the philosophy of walking. The shift toward an ineffable experience demands not words, but inarticulate silence that alone is capable of bearing witness to the remains of life. Bearing witness, as Felman notes, is “a radically Un timely Me dit ation s   169

unique, noninterchangeable, and solitary burden.”50 In one of the concluding reflections, the narrator acknowledges the solitary burden of bearing witness to the remains of life and admits that those penetrating insights and the inner state of mind attained during the walk cannot be shared, nor are they shareable: “there are some things that only you yourself can know.”51 This becomes especially evident and, to a certain extent, disturbing when we take into account that Deformo is said to be “the only person on the reservation who understood the art of going for walks.”52 In the narrator’s interaction with him, they definitely have some kind of rapport. Nevertheless, it is highly dubious how the rapport on such a minimally interpersonal level can be expanded into the realm of sociality. Most of the time, their interaction either leads to incomprehension or ends in confusion; their only meaningful exchange, if any, is their engagement in a silence competition that lasts for six hours.53 Whatever rapport they might have developed, it is far too minimalist to provide an adequate sense of being-in-common. Consequently, the implicit reference to the quintessential minimal figure in the novel only reinforces the idea that ethical disarticulation comes at the expense of the transformative possibility of establishing a new kind of sociality.54 Readers are therefore entitled to question the extent to which ethical disengagement can lend itself to imagining an alternative to the posttraumatic conditions that have afflicted those living out the remains of their lives; or whether the ethical disengagement leaves the marginalized to live a mortified existence and descend further into paralyzing despondency in the remains of their lives. Although Remains of Life leaves these difficulties unresolved, it is by no means inattentive to these issues. The novel actually maintains a productive ambiguity that advances the position of ethical disengagement, all the while pointing to its own limits. At one point in the novel, the narrator claims that he has also experienced the gaze of the deer eyes that penetrates the soul and reaches deep into a region beyond history: “After spending almost two years deep in the mountains of the Atayal, I too had seen those children’s innocent deer eyes, at first I simply felt that those beautiful deer eyes had a ‘singular quality,’ then realized that the soul embodied in those deer eyes didn’t care about history.”55 But at the same time, he is also well aware that notwithstanding their innocence and nonchalance, 170  Li t e rar y Me m o r ie s o f Mu sh a

history always catches up with them, for the conditions of their existence are inevitably traversed by historical forces: That is why deep down I feel such pity and affection for Girl, Little Daya, Black V, and the young deer eyes, I would like to give them all an economically stable family, with a good learning environment, with their natural gifts and good looks they would most likely surpass the achievements of young city kids down in the plains. . . . for decades, the half-baked political society of this island nation intentionally overlooked or discriminated against their potentials and rights, by the time the privileged class began self-reflection, cursing themselves or others as “male chauvinist Chinese pigs,” indigenous groups had already sunk to the very bottom of the social ladder for so long that it was virtually impossible for them to get back on their feet.56

Another example can be found in the brief exchange between the narrator and the Old Man that brings the novel to its conclusion. In recounting his plan to lead a carefree existence devoid of thought and contemplation, the Old Man also inadvertently gives clues about the fragility of living his remaining life in a manner befitting yusheng. The Old Man’s description of the reconciliation of the tribal feud is at odds with the account given by the tribal elders, who claim that the Seediq understand each other, and therefore, there is no blood feud to speak of in the first place. The feud, in fact, is never as inconsequential as the tribal elders would like it to be. According to the Old Man, the marriage proposal was stalled for three days. And it is problematic to even regard the marriage as a sign of genuine reconciliation because the rationale behind the agreement is based on the dubious logic that the enemy’s enemy is my friend. In this view, the marriage arrangement is eventually accepted, but not because they have come to full reconciliation; they are united rather in a negative manner—that is, on account of a common enemy: “the age of blood feuds had passed, outside our mountain valleys there was an even more powerful force trying to control us.”57 All these textual undercurrents suggest that the Old Man who intends on spending the remains of his life “in bed with [his] mind devoid of all thoughts and contemplation” and “drunkenly staring Un timely Me dit ation s   171

at the mountain scenery” would most likely sleep uneasily for fear of disturbances from outside.58 Again, the tension between ethical disengagement and practical engagement is simmering beneath the surface, and readers are reminded of the fact that living one’s remains of life informed by the philosophy of walking without corresponding changes on both the symbolic and institutional levels would amount to living in a fragile and quarantined space which, as Cuz-Hub once notes, will be constantly under threat of being “disturbed” (read: invaded) by those who have no right and no business to do so.59 C O N C LU S I O N

Back to the initial question posed by Adorno: how can writing transcend its own condition of possibility and effectively criticize the very culture from which it emerges? And how does Remain of Life measure up to this challenge? I think Wu He’s writing measures up well—perhaps too well for its own good. To be sure, it is necessary to expose the underlying mechanism of the structure of domination, and then disengage oneself from participating in the oppressive structure. But the kind of ethical disengagement presented in the novel also cuts itself off from any possibility of engaging in the transformation of both the material conditions and the institutional framework that have continually contributed to the precarity of those living out the remains of their lives. If the objective conditions that render possible the marginalization and exploitation of the Indigenous people continue to exist, how could subjective enlightenment suffice to rectify the situation? Is not the gaze of those deer eyes that goes straight to the soul also the gaze that cries out for help? What is missing in the ethical universe of the novel, therefore, is the possibility of envisioning a new sociality that would be less discriminatory and exploitative. This is the point that Wu He seems to make, even with his persistent penchant for the philosophy of walking. I would say that the novel contains an element of self-criticism, even though it is done in an oblique and circuitous fashion. And if there is any misgiving about the way that ethical matters are broached in Remains of Life, it lies not in the author’s ignorance of issues at hand, but rather in his reluctance to take responsibility and sociality as intrinsic elements of ethics. But without responsibility, ethics risks becoming self-serving; without sociality, ethics is inarticulate, even mute. 172  Li t e rar y Me m o r ie s o f Mu sh a

N OT E S 1. Theodor W. Adorno, Prisms, trans. Samuel Weber and Shierry Weber (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1983), 34. 2. Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (New York: Routledge, 1973), 362. 3. Theodor W. Adorno, “Commitment,” in Aesthetics and Politics, trans. Francis McDonagh (London: Verso), 188. 4. Shoshana Felman, “Education and Crisis, or the Vicissitudes of Teaching,” in Trauma: Explorations in Memory, ed. Cathy Caruth (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 40. 5. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 365. 6. Felman, “Education and Crisis,” 40 (italics added). 7. Alexander García Düttmann, “For and Against the Contemporary: An Examination,” in Art and Contemporaneity, ed. Frank Ruda and Jan Yoelker (Zürich: Diaphanes, 2015), 12–15. 8. Giorgio Agamben, “What Is the Contemporary?” in What Is an Apparatus? and Other Essays, trans. David Kishik and Stefan Pedatella (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009), 40–41. 9. See Chen Chun-yen, “Being-in-Common in Postcolonial Taiwan: Wuhe’s Remains of Life and the Limits of Identity Politics,” Interventions 14, no. 3 (2012): 443–61, https://doi.org/10.1080/1369801X.2012.704501. Chen’s piece, in my view, is the most systematic theoretical treatment of Remains of Life to date. The problem with her strong reading—or rather its merit, if we accept the primary task that her critical inquiry assigns itself (i.e., finding a way out of identity politics in postcolonial Taiwan)—is that her analysis makes more Nancean sense than textual sense. That is, her reading zeroes in on those specifically Nancean moments and downplays other moments that might fly in the face of a wholly ontological reading; in the end, it comes dangerously close to rendering Wu He, stricto sensu, a reader of Jean-Luc Nancy, a fact of which Chen is both aware and wary. 10. Other possible translations include “simultaneity” and “synchronicity.” 11. Frédéric Gros, A Philosophy of Walking, trans. John Howe (London: Verso, 2014), 3. 12. Wu He, Remains of Life, trans. Michael Berry (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017), 321/249. The first page citation refers to Berry’s translation, the second to the original (Yusheng; Taipei: Maitian, 1999). This format will be applied to all the references to Remains of Life in this chapter. 13. See Michael Berry, A History of Pain (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), chap. 1. In his analysis of the cultural representations of the Musha Incident, Berry demonstrates how the Musha Incident is unilaterally endowed with modern revolutionary meaning by Han writers of various ideological stripes. On Un timely Me dit ation s   173

the level of cultural representation, the nationalist and nativist representations of the Musha Incident have not really changed the colonial stereotypes about the Indigenous peoples. The Indigenous rebels are cast as noble savages, politically immature and therefore desperately in need of guidance (from a Han character). Wu’s Remains of Life, in contrast, “is a long voice questioning this set of interpretations” (76). 14. See Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” in Language, CounterMemory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon, ed. Donald F. Bouchard (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977), 139–64. For a more elaborate account of the Nietzschean concepts of “countermemory” and “effective history” in Wu’s Remains of Life, see Yu-lin Lee, “The History of Chuangchungdao: Time and Immanent Ethics in Wu He’s Remains of Life.” Router: A Journal of Cultural Studies 16 (2013): 7–46, http://routerjcs .nctu.edu.tw/router/word/37235242016.pdf. 15. Wu, Remains of Life, 113/117. 16. On the pathology of recognition, see Kelly Oliver, Witnessing: Beyond Recognition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001). 17. Wu, Remains of Life, 151/141. 18. Berry, A History of Pain, 73. 19. See Paul Hamilton, Historicism (New York: Routledge, 2003). As Hamilton suggests, “this [historicist] reinterpretation of the past creates the means to embarrass present understanding, dismantling any objective vantage-point to which it may have pretended, putting it in need of the same reassessment it set out to visit upon the past” (113). 20. Wu, Remains of Life, 113/117 (translation modified). 21. Wu, Remains of Life, 18/55. 22. Walter Benjamin, “Critique of Violence,” in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Vol. 1: 1913–1926, trans. Edmund Jephcott, ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 251. 23. Dominick LaCapra, History and Its Limits (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009), 94n11. 24. For the references to oppressive collectivism, see Wu, Remains of Life, 1/43, 283/225. 25. Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (London: Routledge, 2002), 142–48. 26. Wu, Remains of Life, 89/102. The translation here has been modified: Berry’s translation does not consistently distinguish between cunyou (存有) and cun zai (存在); the former is customarily translated as “being” and, later, “existence.” For example, Berry renders “cunyou zai suoyou cunzai zhi xian” (存有在所有存在

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之先) as “before all forms of existence everything must first come into being” (89/102) and “dangdai yi ‘cun you’ wei diyi yi” (當代以『存有』為第一義) as “ ‘coming into existence’ is the foremost meaning of the contemporary” (113/117). My translation adheres to the disciplinary convention with regard to the use of “being” and “existence.” 27. For the narrator’s construction of the speculative genealogy of the headhunting ritual, see Wu, Remains of Life, 152–55/142–43. 28. Wu, Remains of Life, 261/212 (translation modified). 29. Wu, Remains of Life, 154–55/143 (emphasis added). 30. Wu, Remains of Life, 32/64. 31. Wu, Remains of Life, 177/157. 32. Wu, Remains of Life, 282/225 (translation modified; emphasis added). 33. Wu, Remains of Life, 15/52 (translation modified). 34. Wu, Remains of Life, 112/116. 35. Wu, Remains of Life, 219/185 (translation modified). 36. Wu, Remains of Life, 152/141. 37. Wu, Remains of Life, 261–62/212 (translation modified). 38. Wu, Remains of Life, 32/64 (translation modified). 39. Wu, Remains of Life, 316/246 (translation modified). 40. Wu, Remains of Life, 293/232 (translation modified). 41. Wu, Remains of Life, 190–93/166–69 (translation modified). 42. Slavoj Žižek, The Parallax View (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 18. 43. Slavoj Žižek, Tarrying with the Negative (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), 37. 44. Wu, Remains of Life, 193/168. 45. Wu, Remains of Life, 187/165 (translation modified). 4 6. Wu, Remains of Life, 222–23/187 (translation modified). 47. Martin Heidegger, Country Path Conversations, trans. Bret Davis (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010), 92. 48. Wu, Remains of Life, 201/173 (translation modified). 49. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. D. F. Pears and B. F. McGuinness (London: Routledge, 2001), 89. 50. Felman, “Education and Crisis,” 15. 51. Wu. Remains of Life, 260–61/211. 52. Wu, Remains of Life, 72/91. Berry translates Jiren (畸人) as “Deformo” and Qiren (奇人) as “Weirdo.” The use of Qiren occurs on only one occasion (in the narrator’s greeting that introduces the character); Jiren is the name employed on a consistent basis after the initial greeting. 53. Wu, Remains of Life, 73–75/92–94.

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54. Other minimal figures that the narrator nods with approval in this regard include Mr. Miyamoto and crazy great-uncle. What they share in common that they are all cut off from community and relationship, either by default or by design. 55. Wu, Remains of Life, 99/108 (translation modified). 56. Wu, Remains of Life, 167–66 (translation modified). 57. Wu, Remains of Life, 321/249. 58. Wu, Remains of Life, 323/250. 59. Wu, Remains of Life, 124–25/124–25.

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PA RT I I I

Visual and Digital Memories of Musha

CH APTER EIGHT

The Face of the Inbetweener The Image of Indigenous History Researchers as R ­ eflected in Seediq Bale Nakao Eki Pacidal

It was December 2011. Taipei was as gray and rainy as always. I was paid a visit by a friend from afar, a Dutch archivist who knew hardly anything about Taiwan. We spent a few hours in a cinema watching Seediq Bale (賽德克·巴萊 Saideke balai), “the biggest Taiwan film ever,” as Darryl Sterk calls it,1 which had been playing for a few months. The film, a US$25 million production, a cost unprecedented in Taiwan’s film history,2 was divided into two parts, accounting for 4.5 hours altogether. Most of the dialogue was in Seediq and accompanied by Chinese ­subtitles—and Chinese subtitles only. No English subtitles. Even worse is that before seeing the film, he was told only the minimal facts about it: It is based on a real historical event, the Musha Incident, and tells a story about the resistance of the Seediq against the modern civilization forced into their traditional ways by the Japanese. The Musha Incident was a revolt against the Japanese denial of the Seediq culture and prohibition of their traditional practices, among which headhunting and tattooing were the most significant. According to the film’s interpretation, only men who were able to hunt the enemy’s heads and women who were able to weave the most beautiful Seediq cloth were eligible for receiving tattoos on their faces; and after death, only those with tattooed faces could cross the rainbow bridge to meet their ancestors in heaven. My friend followed both parts of the film with great concentration, and later he told me that

he perfectly understood why the film was so positively received by the Taiwanese audience. Without knowing much of the details, he understood it as a representation of human tragedy, for the magnitude of torment and physical violence throughout the film said it all. The Dutch archivist was deeply moved, even without knowing the exact plot details; meanwhile, some Taiwanese anthropologists reacted to the film in a very different way. It was this disparity in reception to the film that inspired me to write this chapter—not so much about the film itself, but about the worldviews and mindsets of the viewers. As the title suggests, this chapter is about the “inbetweeners.” A further clarification of the term “inbetweeners” would be appropriate here. For the moment, however, I will provide only an abbreviated definition of “inbetweeners” as a term referring to Indigenous peoples in the modern world in general, and add that they are not a homogenous group. This chapter, eventually, focuses on one specific type of “inbetweener”—that is, Indigenous history researchers, of which I am a member. The first two sections of this chapter pave the way toward the final discussion of their situatedness within the modern academic world. The first, “Naivete and Sentimentalität,” tries to clarify the extent to which our modern academic thinking and representation of the past are influenced by the European historical tradition. The second, “Jenseits von Gut und Böse,” focuses on the blurred interrelatedness between ethnic concerns and big ideas such as historicity and objectivity. The third section, “Prisoners of History,” is a reflection on “history” and the situatedness of Indigenous history researchers as “inbetweeners”—as well as the reason that their situatedness needs to be made known. N A I V E T E A N D S E N T I M E N TA L I TÄT

The whole filmic narrative is about reconstructing, within a framework of an omniscient viewpoint of history, what the scenarist-­ director considers as the “local” perspective in order to justify a massacre that perhaps neither can nor should be justified.3

So writes anthropologist Lin Kai-shih (林開世) in his “Afterthoughts on Seediq Bale” (賽德克·巴萊觀後感), a penetrating remark on the film 180  Vi su al an d D ig it al Me m o r ie s o f Mu sha

which, on the one hand, seems to have said nothing, but, on the other, raises a noteworthy question for those who are concerned with how Seediq Bale can be understood. The rather vain part of Lin’s remark has to do with the fact that Seediq Bale is a filmic “narrative.” For this very reason, the director, Wei Te-sheng (魏德聖), must have attained what Louis O. Mink calls the “configurational comprehension” of the story before he could set out to create the film and present it to the audience. Mink considers the configurational mode of comprehension—different from the theoretical comprehension that is the hallmark of the natural sciences and categoreal comprehension characteristics of philosophy— as typical of, though not unique to, historical understanding: although historical events sequence each other temporally, “[t]o comprehend temporal succession means to think of it in both directions at once, and then time is no longer the river which bears us along but the river in aerial view, upstream and downstream seen in a single survey.”4 As the creator of the film, Wei is thus indubitably in a position that resembles the one of God as described by Boethius: his knowledge of the story is just like “God’s knowledge of the world as a totum simul, in which the successive moments of all time are copresent in a single perception, as of a landscape of events.”5 It is, therefore, a corollary of choosing narrative through which to convey certain ideas about how individual events may be interrelated in “a single complex whole.”6 This is true for both historical and fictional narratives, as well as for what is at work in the mind of the drama producer and the audience. That is to say, Lin himself must also have comprehended the story of Seediq Bale “configurationally,” for it is the condition of providing the interpretation of the film that we can read in his “Afterthoughts on Seediq Bale.” If Hayden White is right in stating that “every historical narrative has as its latent or manifest purpose the desire to moralize the events of which it treats,”7 Lin Kai-Shih’s description of Seediq Bale as merely another “domesticated interpretative version of the Musha Incident” cannot be more accurate. And “moralizing the reality” often results in “justifying the past,” something abhorrent to Lin. Here comes the really interesting issue implicated in Lin’s remarks—one that is closely linked to what has been discussed by some contemporary Western philosophers of history regarding the disciplinization of history, which per se is a historical event. White, for example, calls this process the T h e Face of the In b et w e en er   181

“political domestication” of historical studies had taken place since the early nineteenth century, “the period of the consolidation of the (bourgeois) nation-state.”8 As White rightfully observes, history, which until the eighteenth century remained “a branch of belles-lettres, a calling suitable for gentleman-scholars for whom ‘taste’ serves as a guide of comprehension, and ‘style’ as an index of achievement,” has a rhetoric nature.9 But in the nineteenth century, as history had to appear plausibly neutral so as to legitimate and sustain the rationale of the nation-state, it had to, above all, be derhetoricized. The derhetoricization of history, apparently, is merely superficial. The rhetoric feature of history was not removed, only changed. What has altered ever since, as White makes explicit, was the allowed topoi (the content of historical study) and the authorized proper style (the form of historical writing).10 In other words, the “nature of a disciplined historical style” is an aesthetic issue of taste and imagination, lying in what late-Enlightenment intellectuals such as Edmund Burke, Friedrich von Schiller, and others debated in terms of the sublime and the beautiful.11 In White’s observation, “in the disciplinization of historical sensibility . . . [there has been a] progressive demotion of the sublime in favor of the beautiful as a solution to the problems of taste and imagination.”12 In answering the question of whether there is “a possibility  .  .  . that history may be as meaningless ‘in itself ’ as the theorists of the historical sublime thought it to be,”13 the historian must choose between the beautiful and the sublime. So considered, disciplined history is indeed a practice that aims at rendering the unreasonable and incomprehensible reality into one that can be digested by the human mind. And this is exactly Lin’s “gaze” of history: “We endow the past an interpretative framework. In rendering events that are hardly understandable into something that can be historically evaluated and judged, we construct a worldview that excludes what is not ‘reasonable,’ which leads us only farther and farther away from the reality.”14 This is a gaze that, seemingly following White’s suggestion, turns away from the beautiful and that looks anew to the sublime. And in a certain sense, we can say that it is the different choices they make between the beautiful and the sublime that distinguish Wei Te-sheng, the movie director, from Lin Kai-shih, the anthropologist. 182  Vi su al an d D ig it al Me m o r ie s o f Mu sha

In my view, Seediq Bale as a creative artwork very much resembles late-nineteenth-century European opera. It reminds me of the documentary in which the Italian director Franco Zeffirelli introduces his 1985 production of Giacomo Puccini’s Tosca for the Metropolitan Opera in New York. In the film, he leads the audience into the breathtaking Sant’Andrea della Valle. Standing under the majestic dome, he emphasizes that the tragedy of Tosca is built upon and sustained by the perceived “magnitude”: Puccini tells you exactly in the beginning of the opera: this is Rome; the first stroke of the orchestra that tells you where we are: this is the magnitude of Rome! And you cannot give them, after those strokes, the intimate, little scenery sets. You have to open up on something awesome, breathtaking. . . . The characters of Tosca and Rome is this grandiosità. Everything is larger than life.15

The epic characteristic of Seediq Bale speaks for itself. The movie deals with a specific historical event, yet it conveys to the audience not so much an idea of history as a certain aesthetic preference. The mental pictures preoccupying the director’s mind are given shape in the product: formidable precipices stretching beyond the Pass of Human Boundary (人止關);16 a gloomy, dank atmosphere that permeates the high mountains; soundless Seediq steps in the dense forest where sunlight can hardly penetrate; red cherry blossoms hang over the dying Japanese soldiers, and white snowflakes fall upon the Seediq fighters as they go to their appointment with death  .  .  . All of this starts with the Sino-­ Japanese Treaty of Shimonoseki, signed in 1895—the grand opening of the whole story, which is the result of a tremendous collision of two East Asian political entities. The Japanese, with a sense of victory for finally having the Qing Empire under their feet, proudly insist on the value of civilization (in fact a mixture of Western industrial civilization and Japanese civilization), a value that is thought to transcend individual lives, a belief that there is nothing grander than the time being. Correspondingly magnified are the main characters, their emotion and volition in the face of something far beyond life: What defines a real Seediq choice between life and death? How should dignity and survival be weighted once they are forcefully juxtaposed? Should a mind T h e Face of the In b et w e en er   183

tormented by identity conflict find peace only in death? How can a survivor of death now survive life? These are all dilemmas, each exhibiting the same quality with which Zeffirelli interprets Tosca: “Everything is larger than life.” For our understanding of the psychology behind this specific aesthetic stance taken by Wei, Zefferelli’s remark on what shapes the operatic art and the singer’s stage performance is quite inspirational: “They [opera singers] want to know the basic things, around which they build their own interpretation is sometimes very complicated, but they have to know the essence of the feeling. Because opera is essential. Opera cannot be sophisticated.”17 Thus, it is little wonder that Lin Kai-shih, who thinks along the sublime, makes this comment: In watching the movie, my major complaint goes to the director’s taste that is close to a high-school art admirer, showing off, repeatedly, the “symbolic” indications, such as blood-red cherry blossoms and the rainbow bridge leading to the ancestors, as if he worries so much about the audience’s inability to understand the “deep implication” he has constructed.18

What may have eluded Lin is that the “deep implication” is exactly grandiosità itself—even the most intricate beauty is essential. It simply cannot be as sophisticated and incomprehensible as the sublime. It can be said that, aesthetically, Lin’s historical perspective inclines toward the sublime, with a postmodern rendition. In contrast to this is Wei Te-sheng’s filmic narrative, which is prone to a notion of romanticist beauty. Although Wei is clearly aware of the distinction between the fictional and the historical, the difference is effectively blurred once it comes to the actual filmic representation. This is exactly where Lin takes issue with Wei. Obviously, Lin agrees that there is something we can fairly call “facts.” Whether facts are authentically knowable, whether they can be presented as reality, is something else again. The film Seediq Bale, which presents a story as a heartfelt understanding of a past reality, as tragic beauty, is therefore evaluated by Lin as “utilizing an alien cultural legend to create an imagined moral space that is consumable.”19 Yet I wonder, if we proceed along Lin’s train of thought, which seemingly strives to go beyond beauty and reach out for sublimity, isn’t Lin’s refusal to “interpretatively contextualize and motivationalize” practices 184  Vi su al an d D ig it al Me m o r ie s o f Mu sha

of an alien culture not so much to “continuously justify, step by step, those evil and brutal deeds”20 as to deliver a moral verdict upon an alien culture? His opposition to “utilizing an alien cultural legend to create an imagined moral space that is consumable” exhibits the moral abstinence of the culture he lives (i.e., “modernity”). But is it not this self-crowned morality that exempts this very culture itself from moral examination? In my observation, the highly reflective image of Lin Kai-shih that can be seen in his “Afterthoughts” approximates that of Friedrich Schiller under the pen of the Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk, who considers Schiller’s famous essay “On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry”21 as one that has gone beyond a discussion of poetics but “a philosophical text on human types”: When Schiller says, “There are two different types of humanity,” he also wants to say, according to German literary historians, “Those that are naive like Goethe and those that are sentimental like me!” Schiller envied Goethe not only for his poetic gifts, but also for . . . his ability to be himself; for his simplicity, modesty, and genius; and for his unawareness of all this, precisely in the manner of a child. In contrast, Schiller himself was far more reflective and intellectual, more complex and tormented by his literary activity, far more aware of his literary methods, full of questions and uncertainties regarding them—and felt that these attitudes and traits were more “modern.”22

Just like Lin Kai-shih, most of us live in a culture that may be best termed as “modernity.” And naiveté, so much yearned for by Schiller, is not highly evaluated in our time. It is Sentimentalität, or self-reflection, that earns more respect. Are we aware of the influence of the European aesthetic tradition while watching Seediq Bale, which itself is deeply influenced by European romanticism? Are we aware that we are tormented by our own academic activity in a very similar way to that? J E N S E I T S V O N GU T U N D B Ö S E

After watching Seediq Bale, the anthropologist Chiu Yun-fang (邱韻芳) wrote in the “Guavanthropology” group blog about a discussion of the T h e Face of the In b et w e en er   185

film with her students. She expressed her dissatisfaction with some specific plot points and, more or less as Lin Kai-shih did, she worried about the possible side effects of the film’s success. Chiu describes her experience as follows: There are five graduate students at that seminar . . . among them three are Seediq: one is the descendent of the survivors of the Tkdaya group who [after the Musha Incident] were moved [by the Japanese] to Chingliu [Qingliu]; another is also Tkdaya, whose ancestor from the village of Chongyuan did not participate in the Musha Incident; and the other is a Toda from the village of ­Pingjing, . . . but that Toda student remained silent throughout our discussion.23

By noting the silence of this Toda Seediq student, Chiu intended to show that a film like Seediq Bale might disinter an old grudge between the Tkdaya and the Toda groups, for some of the latter also took part in the Musha Incident—fighting the Tkdaya instead of the Japanese. Therefore, in the interpretation of the Chinese Nationalist government, the Toda Seediq have long been depicted as despicable, “pro-Japanese savages.” Dakis Pawan, the Seediq consultant on the film, himself a descendent of Musha Incident survivors, mentions in his book Truth Bale (真相·巴萊 Zhenxiang balai) that as soon as he accepted the position of cultural consultant and tackled the challenge of translating the screenplay (written originally in Chinese) into Seediq, he told the director that some plot elements were problematic from the Seediq point of view.24 In the tenth scene, for example, a group of Toda and a group of Tkdaya led by Mona Rudao unexpectedly meet in an exchange post run by a Han elder. Temu Walis, later the chief of Tnbarah of the Toda group, but then still a juvenile, says to Mona Rudao, who by that time has become famous among all Seediq for his bravery, “Mona Rudao! My name is Temu Walis! Once grown up, I will hunt your head, too!” And Mona Rudao replies: “Temu Walis, should such an impolite lad as you have the chance to grow up?” Another similar example appears in a later part of the film (in scene 52), as Mona Rudao’s son, Tado Mona, shouts to Temu Walis: “Temu, there must be a day when I kill all of you!”25 186  Vi su al an d D ig it al Me m o r ie s o f Mu sha

In Dakis Pawan’s opinion, such conversations are hardly realistic because they go against the Seediq notion of gaya: Maybe it’s because I grew up in the time in which headhunting gaya had disappeared, as far as I can recall from my tribal experience since my childhood, I had never heard anyone saying anything like “under so or so circumstances, I will hunt your head.” But even when headhunting gaya still existed, “I want/will hunt your head” would not be the kind of threatening words that people would easily utter, just like roaring in a sharp voice at the very moment when the enemy’s head is chopped off is strictly forbidden on any other occasions—not to mention saying something like “I will kill all of you!” Because the Seediq always try to avoid to use the word “kill,” except those who are out of their mind or insane.26

For Dakis Pawan, Seediq gaya is the frame of reference to how things ought to be understood and evaluated. For example, he does not deny the historical fact that Temu Walis, along with some other Toda Seediq, helped the Japanese and fought the Tkdaya rebels, but he nevertheless strongly opposes the conventional interpretation of Toda Seediq as the “pro-Japanese savage”: Today I want to say: “What grudge did we Tgdaya have with the Toda?” All the discussions today state that Tgdaya and Toda are “historical rivals.” What does “historical rivals” mean? Who can explain this to me? Was the relationship between the two of our groups really like that before the Incident? People say that “Toda Seediq are pro-Japanese savage, while I say, “What is promised is promised, the Seediq have to do it to the end.” This is the spirit of “Seediq Bale.”27

From Dakis Pawan’s perspective, the interpretation of historical “facts” is as important as the facts themselves, if not more so. And it is the gaya that determines what are facts and the interpretation/­evaluation of them (which is actually regarded as part of the facts). Because those Toda Seediq have made the promise to the Japanese to headhunt the Tkdaya rebels, their very deed of “doing it to the end” qualifies them as T h e Face of the In b et w e en er   187

“Seediq bale,” although in many people’s understanding, that might (or even should) mean a serious betrayal of one’s own fellow people. In Seediq Bale, the Tkdaya-Toda relationship is presented by highlighting the tension between Temu Walis and Mona Rudao. Even though Dakis Pawan, on the basis of his understanding of gaya, disagrees with the abovementioned arrangements, he does not seem to care as much how the character Temu Walis is depicted. This, on the contrary, is a big issue for both Wei Te-sheng and Chiu Yun-fang. Wei openly says that he wishes to replace Temu Walis’s image as a “pro-Japanese savage” with the one presented in the film. His attitude and the actual decision are explained in the book Movie Bale (電影·巴萊 Dianying balai): Initially, Ma Chi-hsiang [馬志翔 Seediq name: Umin Boya] was very resistant when he learned that he was to play the role of Temu Walis. Due to the interpretation of the rulers [i.e., the Chinese Nationalist government] in later decades, the “pro-Japanese” label has been firmly attached to Temu Walis. Even Ma Chi-hsiang, the son of a Toda Seediq, could not identify himself with this ancestor. “I invite you to play the role because I want to make use of your positive image to change the negative one of Temu Walis,” so explained the director to Ma Chi-hsiang. “Should Temu Walis be seen as a bad person because he was the so-called mikatahan (味方蕃 namely the natives who were forced by the Japanese to attack their fellow people)? This movie is about the different decisions made by people who were in different positions.28

For this reason, Wei pays great attention to the final engagement between the Toda and the Tkdaya, which takes place in a stream and, historically, is called the Battle of Tbyawan River (Ruru Tbyawan).29 In this scene, Temu Walis appears to be an invincible fighter—a man of great courage, with remarkable physical strength and willpower—who eventually suffers a violent death. In his Director Bale (導演·巴萊 Daoyan balai), Wei mentions his wish that “the audience would, in the process of watching the mutual killing [between the Tado and the Tkdaya], realize that both parties stand on a common ground, although they are headhunting each other.”30 He believes that “the arrangement of a heroic death of Temu Walis has changed his negative image in 188  Vi su al an d D ig it al Me m o r ie s o f Mu sha

history.”31 This apparently is a romanticist idea corresponding to his aesthetic preference, as discussed earlier. In Wei’s view, the presented image itself is a moral evaluation that Temu Walis is a respectful man, and he does not deserve to go down in history as a traitor. This is where Chiu Yung-fang and Wei Te-sheng miss each other. “Can the negative image of Temu Walis be transformed simply by engaging Ma Chi-hsiang to play the role?”32 asks Chiu, for whom aesthetic representation is naturally irrelevant to historical interpretation. Her historical perspective appears to be much simpler than that of Lin Kai-shih, as well as that of Dakis Pawan. Her “historical gaze” is guided by a simple belief in historical objectivity. But her “gaze” is somewhat insecure. For example, she wrote: I can accept the fabricated character of the youth Pawan Nawi and that, seen from the perspective of Mehebu, Mona Rudao is indeed a hero. But I cannot understand why [the director] at his will falsifies historical facts and makes Mona Rudao appear in the “Battle at the Pass of Human Boundary” and the “Incident of Sisters’ Plains,” in which Mona Rudao actually [historically] never participated.33

What invites my curiosity about this statement—that historical facts cannot be altered—is the inconsistency of her attitude, which is apparent in the statement itself. If even a fabricated character, a total forgery of the past, can be tolerated, why should not something historically “partly true” be tolerated as well? If historicity matters, should it not matter in all cases, under all circumstances? If it does not matter at some point, should that not imply that it actually does not matter at all? Aside from contesting the effectiveness of utilizing the image of a celebrity to replace (or at least to affect) that of a historical figure, she also questions the emplotment of the film regarding the relationship between Mona Rudao and Temu Walis. She cannot agree that the actual treatment of these two characters ever comes close to Wei’s wish—that is, to make explicit to the audience that Temu Walis, “at that time, must have had his own reasons [to fight the Tkdaya Seediq].”34 Nor can she agree with Wei’s foreshadowing of the personal grudge between Mona Rudao and Temu Walis throughout their life at the onset of the story (the abovementioned tenth scene), or tolerate the arrangement that, toward T h e Face of the In b et w e en er   189

the end of the second part of the film, “Mona Rudao’s threatening words still haunt [Temu Walis’s] mind until shortly before his death.”35 Chiu does have good reason to raise all these questions. As Dakis Pawan mentions in his book, after he informed the director about the problematic plot, Wei met with delegates from all three Seediq subgroups.36 According to Dakis Pawan’s summary, the major concerns of the Seediq expressed to the director that day involved two basic issues: the interpretation of intergroup relations and the historicity of the plotlines: Should the reason for the deterioration of Tgdaya-Toda relations be explained in the film? What would be the role, or their positions, of the Tado and Truku people? Can all this be presented in the movie? Besides, minister Watan Jiro asked particularly: “At the end of the movie, the Tgdaya will go over to the other side of the ‘bridge of the ancestors.’ I wonder whether we Toda also walk over it as well?”37

Since what concerned the Seediq people the most, Chiu emphasizes, was that the film had to deal with the intergroup relationship properly and could not go against the Seediq notion of gaya, the arrangement, which at a very early stage had been told to the director by Dakis Pawan as violating Seediq gaya, was in no way justifiable. How, Chiu questions, can Wei maintain such plots, consequently leaving the audience with the impression that “Temu Walis makes the decision to cooperate with the Japanese primarily owing to his own personal rationale? Does all this aim at further consolidating the heroic image of Mona Rudao? For people who see Mona Rudao in a different light, it suddenly became very difficult to explain these historical events to their children once Seediq Bale became a nation-wide sensation.”38 Although Chiu makes it very clear in her post that she knows full well that Seediq Bale is a drama, not a presentation of historical facts, she sometimes shifts her view and severely criticizes the director. But, as revealed in her previous quotation, her criticisms do not stem from her concerns over issues of historicity, but rather from her concerns for members of the Toda Seediq, such as the student who remained silent in her class. In other words, it is an issue of anthropological ethics, not 190  Vi su al an d D ig it al Me m o r ie s o f Mu sha

of history. This problem, unfortunately, is unsolvable. Even supposing that Wei had figured out another way to explain the deeds carried out by Temu Walis, the historical fact that he and some other Toda fought the Tkdaya rebels—the fact that upset Chiu so—would still not change. Of course, it is possible to depict Temu Walis as a hero and Mona Rudao as a madman who initiates a suicidal rebellion that cost hundreds of lives. Yet this creates a similar problem, with the finger now pointing in the opposite direction, which still would not solve the problem that so much troubles Chiu. Here, we see that the interpretation of intergroup relationships and historicity (two major concerns with the movie shared by all three Seediq subgroups) is thought of and expressed in various ways by people who have different points of departure. For Dakis Pawan, Seediq gaya defines everything. There is no room for “plain facts” as such—one thing and its place in the gaya reference system are dissociable. For Wei Te-sheng, historical facts are subject to interpretation determined by personal aesthetic preference. In contrast to Dakis Pawan and Wei, both standing firmly on their respective grounds, Chiu is somewhat bewildered by her own vague idea of historicity and a possible, supposedly proper way of presenting or representing historical facts. What greatly troubles Chiu is exactly what another anthropologist, Lin Hsiu-hsing (林秀幸), indicates in her posting in the same group blog: the standpoint of a speaker would eventually define whether expressed words are to constitute a dialogue or to create an opposition.39 Or, put in a different way, it is not historicity but personal feelings and intentions that matter when the past under consideration is linked to the present, and real life. In her preface to the book Truth Bale, “Hero, Hero Worship and its Antithesis,” the historian Chou Wan-yao (周婉窈) easily sees Seediq Bale as a film, and she does not seem to be bothered by the conformity of the plot to “historical facts.” Her emphasis is on perspectives that are passed unnoticed and the “real image of affairs” (真相, zhēnxiàng)40 that are yet to be discovered, for, to use her own words, “the ‘real image of affairs’ may be the first step of reaching justice in the human world.”41 Seediq Bale, as a film based on a historical event, does not portray what she defines as the “real image of affairs.” Her positive response to the film does not come from its observance of the real image of affairs, but T h e Face of the In b et w e en er   191

from the desired effect of its success—namely, that more people may be drawn to learn more about Indigenous cultures. In the end of the preface, Chou writes, “Taiwan’s indigenous peoples lost their home on their ancestral lands. Asking them to sing and dance for you, to praise your self-designated impressiveness—what can it be, shall I inquire, if not the masked soft violence of civilization?”42 Such “self-designated impressiveness” is everywhere—from the 1970s, when the aboriginal singer Wan Sha-lang (萬沙浪), in his traditional Puyuma attire, performed the pseudo-aboriginal “Naruwan Love Song” in front of a Han audience,43 to the present, when there is finally a widely recognized “Taiwanese epic.” And the “masked soft violence of civilization” can refer to almost anything and everything. Seediq Bale, for example, can be regarded as an impressive film. Lin Kai-shih’s advocacy of “keeping distance out of respect, resisting the temptation of providing an in-depth interpretation” can be thought of as “the masked soft violence of civilization.” Chiu’s concerns—and yes, even some of the opinions of Chou Wan-yao herself, such as “the Musha Incident deserves many good movies” or “maybe the unaltered simple tragedy is even more moving”44—can be seen as the “masked soft violence of civilization.” I will come back to the issue of the “masked soft violence of civilization” shortly. Yet before that, and before moving to the next act, we may take a moment to ponder the ironic question with which Friedrich Nietzsche opens his thrilling trip Beyond Good and Evil (Jenseits von Gut und Böse) in 1866: Supposing that Truth is a woman—what then? Is there not ground for suspecting that all philosophers, in so far as they have been dogmatists, have failed to understand women—that the terrible seriousness and clumsy importunity with which they have usually paid their address to Truth, have been unskilled and unseemly methods for winning a woman?45

Nietzsche’s theme is not women, but the association between truth and philosophical attitude. Dogmatism is not the path to truth, because, as the title of the book indicates, good and evil lie on the same side, and truth lies on the opposing side. Whoever contemplates the nature of 192  Vi su al an d D ig it al Me m o r ie s o f Mu sha

truth is going to reach nowhere if they cannot escape the labyrinth of good and evil. In this different light, we may rethink Chiu’s ethnical concerns and Chou’s moral implications: do they not lead to a dim forest in which good and evil are interwoven? P R I S O N E R S O F H I S TO RY

Unlike Lin Kai-shih, I do not attribute the great success of Seediq Bale to the violence shown in the film. Such attention, I suppose, comes from the psychological nonpreparation of the Taiwanese population for facing up to Taiwan’s past. The Musha Incident appears to have almost nothing to do with the Han people, the majority of Taiwan’s population today, and yet this is true only in terms of “historical facts.” The highlighted cultural and identity conflict in Seediq Bale indicates what is considered by its director as important to “our past.” At a press conference held at the Venezia, in response to a question raised by Wall Street Journal correspondent Dean Napolitano, Wei Te-sheng put it this way: “In order to bring reconciliation to hatred, I have to go back to the origin of hatred.”46 He believes that Seediq Bale can “function as a kind of psychotherapy,” which may offer “a base upon which Taiwanese people can reconcile themselves to their emotions.”47 What Wei calls “psychotherapy,” I believe, is not confined to a “historical rehabilitation” of the Taiwan-Japan relationship. It is more about certain issues that the Taiwanese people, for a variety of reasons, have been trying to evade, of which the intricacy of cultural and political identity undoubtedly occupies the most prominent place. Seediq Bale exposes all these issues, leaving no room for elusion, exactly as Robert Rosenston aptly remarks on the power of visually mediated historical film: “In the movie theater we are, for a time, prisoners of history.”48 We, as prisoners of history, would not have missed the scene considered by Darryl Sterk as Wei’s original creation: in it, the Japanese police expropriate all the hunted heads and order them to be thrown into a pit. Mona Rudao, driven beyond his forbearance, knocks a policeman right down into the pit of skulls and jumps on the man. When eventually he is quelled by a group of Japanese policemen, he is forced to lie on his back atop the skulls. Being compelled to turn his back to everything that is attained through the practice of gaya, Mona shouts his most tormenting T h e Face of the In b et w e en er   193

outcry. Sterk writes, “The Japanese . . . [were] more savage than savage, that there’s savagery in the iron heart of industrial modernity.”49 Today, as we have all become “modern,” the problem we now confront may no longer be the collision of civilization and savagery, but the hypocrisy that might have occupied the same place when physical conflicts appear to be long gone. We may all agree and claim that the oppression of another Mona Rudao cannot and will not be tolerated anymore, and that anyone in a similar position is entitled to define his past and, in a way that is his own, weave himself into a web in which past and present are inseparable. But who, today, are the people in that position? From here, we turn to discuss what I mentioned in the beginning of this ­chapter—the “inbetweeners” (i.e., Indigenous history researchers). The word “research,” writes Maori researcher Linda Tuhiwai Smith, is “probably one of the dirtiest words in the indigenous world’s vocabulary.”50 Discussing the relationship between “research” and Indigenous peoples in the context of Pacific decolonization, she indicates the acute fact that research itself is the extension of imperialism; research methodology, therefore, also needs to be decolonized. The case of Taiwan is a bit more complicated than this. One of the biggest problems concerning Taiwan, as Emma Jinhua Teng points out, is that the islanders, mainly Han Taiwanese, are not aware of the experience of being colonized by what she calls “Chinese imperialism.” Such unawareness of being at the same time the colonized (by China) and colonizers (of the Indigenous peoples) contributes to “the impossibility of a postcolonial theory of Taiwan.”51 In other words, Taiwan’s colonial experience is very different from that of the Pacific Islanders. But they do have something in common—the Pacific Islanders continue to experience Western imperialism in scientific research, which was brought to Taiwan’s Indigenous peoples via the hand of Japanese colonization in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. For the Indigenous peoples, “research” is by nature colonial. Therefore, being a researcher involves much more than merely learning some terminology and techniques. For any Indigenous researcher, the academic life remains highly oppressive. And it may be worse for history researchers. An Indigenous history researcher is constantly confronted by a scientific historical perspective that is distinctly European. Every step taken is underlain by a question: should I accept 194  Vi su al an d D ig it al Me m o r ie s o f Mu sha

and observe the European idea of history? Or should I try to remain inbetween? Like most Indigenous researchers, I choose the latter path. The Cree/Saulteaux researcher Margaret Kovach considers herself a “facilitator” instead of a keeper of Indigenous knowledge, having “a responsibility to help create entry points for Indigenous knowledges to come through.”52 Similarly, I am aware of my responsibility to make visible the situatedness of the inbetweeners. Such situatedness is best exemplified by two Seediq policemen, Dakis Nobing and Dakis Nawi. They received a Japanese education; they were referred to by their Japanese names (Hanaoka Ichirō and Hanaoka Jirō, respectively); and they were rejected as “real Japanese” by the Japanese, just as they were not accepted by other Seediq as “real Seediq.” When the rebellion became a fait accompli, they were forced to take sides. As Darryl Sterk puts it, “[c]onflict catalyzes identity because it forces a person to choose, as if who you are is which side you’re on.”53 Unable to claim both Seediq and Japanese identities, they eventually choose death by suicide, the only side they could possibly take. Their life as inbetweeners is a tragedy. Yet the most tragic part of their inbetweenness does not lie in its eventual death, but in its total transparency in other people’s eyes. Death is just the consequence of the invisibility of their inbetweenness. For an inbetweener like me, what shocks me to the core is not the physical violence of the massacre or mass suicide, but a line uttered quietly by one of the Hanaokas after they practiced Japanese kendo: “However hard we try to dress ourselves, we can never change our face that is denied by civilization.”54 This lamentation resonates with what I pointed out earlier—that academically practiced history, for any Indigenous history researcher, is an everlasting cultural shock. And it is to remain so, so long as the situatedness of Indigenous researchers as inbetweeners is transparent to other historians who embrace the idea, or ideal, of scienticity and authenticity in dealing with the past. Indigenous history researchers, therefore, unavoidably must live with internal, psychological conflict, much as the two Hanaokas had to suffer in their vain hope to claim both Japanese and Seediq identities. The imperative that academic research has to observe the grand idea of Science, in my view, is not essentially different from the boundary T h e Face of the In b et w e en er   195

between civilization and savagery drawn by the Japanese some ninety years ago. Perhaps, inside the academic walls, somewhere in the scholarly mind, there still exists a psychological Pass of Human Boundary. For the inbetweeners, it functions in a subtle way, very similar to g­ ravity— however weak a force, it keeps us firmly on the ground and, abiding by the rules of scientific law, denies us the possibility of flying into the sky when we try to weave ourselves into a web in which past and present are inseparable. In other words, ninety years after the outbreak of the Musha Incident, in such a different arena, the transparency of the inbetweeners is still a lived reality; the face of the inbetweener is still denied by civilization. And—if I may ask—are those powers that continue to maintain such a situation not an even more delicate “masked soft violence of civilization”? N OT E S 1. Darryl Sterk, “Seediq Bale as a Primitive Film,” Savage Mind: Notes and Queries in Anthropology: A Group Blog, December 29, 2019, accessed October 15, 2019, https://savageminds.org/2011/12/29/seediq-bale-as-a-primitivist-film/. 2. Taiwan Revealed—Cinema Formosa (台灣無比精彩：電影大復興), Discovery Channel, https://vimeo.com/31945282. 3. Lin Kai-shih (林開世), “Afterthoughts on Seediq Bale” (賽德克·巴萊觀後感), Anthropology Vision (人類學視界) 7 (October 2011), 40 (translation mine). 4. Louis O. Mink, “History and Fiction as Modes of Comprehension,” in New Literary History 1, no. 3 (Spring 1970), 554–55. 5. Mink, “History and Fiction as Modes of Comprehension,” 549. 6. Mink, “History and Fiction as Modes of Comprehension,” 548. 7. Hayden White, “The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality,” in Hayden White, Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representaiton (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), 14. 8. Hayden White, “The Politics of Historical Interpretation,” in White, Content of the Form, 61. 9. White, “The Politics of Historical Interpretation,” 71. 10. White, “The Politics of Historical Interpretation,” 71. 11. It has to be noted here that the level on which White speaks of the beautiful and the sublime is not the same as that of the eighteenth-century literati. In that century, people such as Burke talk about human experience (obtained through the senses and the mind) in terms of the sublime and the beautiful, while White’s treatment of the beautiful and the sublime is more an ontological, metaphysical one. 196  Vi su al an d D ig it al Me m o r ie s o f Mu sha

12. White, “The Politics of Historical Interpretation,” 71. 13. White, “The Politics of Historical Interpretation,” 81. 14. Lin, “Afterthoughts on Seediq Bale,” 40. 15. Franco Zeffirelli, “Tosca, Zeffirelli & Rome,” YouTube.com, February 25, 2008, accessed October 25, 2019, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UXlHKzqsHjg. 16. The place name literally means a pass at which human beings hold back their steps. The idea behind this notion is that beyond the pass is the nonhuman territory of savagery. 17. Zeffirelli, “Tosca, Zeffirelli & Rome.” 18. Lin, “Afterthoughts on Seediq Bale,” 40. 19. Lin, “Afterthoughts on Seediq Bale,” 39. 20. Lin, “Afterthoughts on Seediq Bale,” 40. 21. Friedrich Schiller, “Über naïve und sentimentalische Dichtung” (1879). Projekt Gutenburg—De. Der Spiegel. Accessed October 15, 2019. 22. Orhan Pamuk, The Naive and Sentimental Novelist, trans. Nazim Dikbas (London: Faber and Faber, 2011), 17–18. 23. Chiu Yun-fang (邱韻芳), “Contemplation Among Many ‘Bales’ ” (在眾「巴萊」之間 沈思), Guavanthropology.tw (芭樂人類學共筆部落格) (November 7, 2011), accessed October 15, 2019 (translation mine), https://guavanthropology.tw/article/2150. 24. Dakis Pawan (郭明正), Truth Bale: Historical Facts and Notes on the Filming of Seediq Bale (真相·巴萊：《賽德克·巴萊》的歷史真相與隨拍札記) (Taipei: YLib, 2001), 18 (translation mine). 25. Dakis Pawan, Truth Bale, 18. 26. Dakis Pawan, Truth Bale, 156–57. 27. Dakis Pawan, Truth Bale, 222. 28. Huang Yi-chuan and Yiu Wen-hsing (黃一娟, 游文興), Complete Notes of Seediq Bale: On the Scenes and Behind (電影·巴萊：《賽德克·巴萊》幕前幕後全 記錄) (Taipei: YLib, 2011), 70 (translation mine). 29. Dakis Pawan, Truth Bale, 234–38. 30. Wei Te-sheng and Yiu Wen-hsing (魏德聖, 游文興), Director Bale: Wei Te-sheng’s Notes on Seediq Bale (導演·巴萊：特有種魏德聖的《賽德克·巴萊》手記) (Taipei: YLib, 2011), 248 (translation mine). 31. Wei and Yiu, Director Bale, 248. 32. Chiu, “Contemplation Among Many ‘Bales.’ ” 33. Chiu, “Contemplation Among Many ‘Bales.’ ” 34. Wei and Yiu, Director Bale, 248. 35. Chiu, “Contemplation Among Many ‘Bales.’ ” 36. Dakis Pawan, Truth Bale, 86–90. 37. Dakis Pawan, Truth Bale, 89. 38. Chiu, “Contemplation Among Many ‘Bales.’ ” T h e Face of the In b et w e en er   197

39. Lin Hsiu-hsing (林秀幸), “Seediq Bale: Between Two Realities” (賽德克·巴 萊：在兩種「真實」之間), Guavanthropology.tw (芭樂人類學共筆部落格) (December 5, 2011), accessed January 31, 2019 (translation mine), https://guavan -thropology.tw/article/2266. 40. The Chinese term zhenxiang (真相), which Chou employs here, if translated verbatim, means “the real/true (zhçn) image/phenomenon (xiàng).” This word is often translated into English as “truth”; however, read in context, I consider “the real image of affairs” a translation closer to what Chou has in mind. The so-called real image of affairs is obviously very much the Rankean idea of presenting the past wie es eigentlich gewesen. In other words, Chou’s historical gaze is as naive and plain as Chiu’s. It appears to be different from Chiu’s simply because Chou, as a historian, is not burdened by anthropological ethics. She can, therefore, easily dismiss the filmic narrative as fictional, as many historians would, and justifiably push it out of the historical realm defined by professional historians. 41. Chou Wan-yao (周婉窈), “Hero, Hero Worship and Its Antithesis” (英雄、英雄 崇拜及其反命題), in Truth Bale, 5. 42. Chou, “Hero, Hero Worship and Its Antithesis,” 8. 43. Wan Sha-lang, “Naruwan Love Song” (那奴娃情歌——萬沙浪), YouTube.com (February 20, 2010), accessed October 15, 2019 (translation mine), https://www.youtube .com/watch?v=X0hSySF6Iu0&ab_channel=CCTV%E6%98%A5%E6%99%9A. Performance at CCTV Spring Festival Gala 1988, in Beijing, China. 44. Chou, “Hero, Hero Worship and Its Antithesis,” 7, 8. 45. Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil (1866). Project Gutenberg Ebook. December 7, 2009. 46. “VENEZIA 68—Conferenza stampa di Seediq Bale” (September 1, 2011). YouTube .com, September 5, 2011, accessed October 15, 2019, https://www.youtube.com /watch?v=1IYF3hLoW5w. 47. “VENEZIA 68.” 48. Robert A. Rosenstone, Visions of the Past: The Challenge of Film on Our Idea of History (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 1995), 27. 49. Sterk, “Seediq Bale as a Primitive Film.” 50. Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples (London and New York: Zed Books, 2001), 1. 51. Emma Jinhua Teng, Taiwan’s Imagined Geography: Chinese Colonial Travel Writing and Pictures, 1683–1895 (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press Asia Center, 2004), 249–58. 52. Margaret Kovach, Indigenous Methodologies: Characteristics, Conversations, and Contexts (Toronto, Buffalo, London: University of Toronto Press, 2010), 7.

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53. Darryl Sterk, “Mona Rudao’s Scars: Epic Identity in Seediq Bale,” Savage Mind: Notes and Queries in Anthropology: A Group Blog, January 1, 2012, accessed October 15, 2019. 54. In the released DVD of Seediq Bale, the English subtitle of this line does not mention “face” at all. Yet, considering the fact that the original screenplay was written in Chinese and only later translated into Seediq, English, and other languages, I find it more appropriate to discuss the Chinese version when we come to consider the idea that the director Wei wants to convey to his audience. De-sheng Wei (director), Warriors of the Rainbow (Seediq Bale Complete DVD Boxset, Deltamac Taiwan, 2011).

T h e Face of the In b et w e en er   199

CH APTER NINE

Quest for Roots Trauma and Heroism in Wu He’s Yusheng and Tang Shiang-Chu’s Yusheng: Seediq Bale Darryl Sterk

C O M PA R I N G V E R S I O N S O F T H E M U S H A I N C I D E N T

“Musha 1930,” a chapter in Michael Berry’s monograph A History of Pain: Trauma in Modern Chinese Literature and Film, details how Taiwanese and Chinese nationalists have appropriated the pain of the Musha Incident, including both Mona Rudao’s rebellion and the Japanese reprisal, for nation-building or profit.1 Numbers can give some sense of the magnitude of the pain. Of the 1,236 people living in the six rebellious Tgdaya villages before the attack that Mona Rudao led on an assembly of Japanese officials on October 27, 1930, only 298 survived the Japanese reprisal.2 The pain lingers, particularly in memories of the forced relocation to a new village called Chuanzhongdao/Kawanakajima (川中島), which was renamed Qingliu (清流) after the war and is known as “Alang Gluban” to the Seediq people; in the concentration camp– like conditions that the survivors from the rebellious villagers endured there; and in the bad blood between the Tgdaya and the Toda as a result of the Toda collaboration during the reprisal, particularly during the Second Musha Incident, when Toda warriors were allowed to attack the defenseless Tgdaya rebels in two shelters. Whether or not Mona Rudao was a hero for leading the attack, surely some of the people who fought for and died with him were. Perhaps numbers can also give some sense of their heroism. A total of

85 Tgdaya warriors died in battle, and 296 men, women, and children hanged themselves rather than surrender.3 Their heroism, as well as Mona’s putative heroism, lives on in nationalist and capitalist appropriations of it. Of the many works that Berry discusses, only Deng Shianyang’s works of reportage and Wu He’s novel Yusheng (餘生), which Berry later translated with the title Remains of Life, approach the pain and the heroism of the incident without nationalizing it or commercializing it. Yet Deng and Wu took very different approaches to Seediq heroism: Deng affirms it, while Wu deconstructs it. Since Berry’s chapter appeared, three major audiovisual representations of Musha (Wushe in Mandarin) have been released: a historical epic, Seediq Bale (directed by Wei Te-sheng, 2011), and two documentaries, Musha Kawanakajima (霧社川中島 Wushe chuanzhongdao, directed by Pilin Yapu, 比令亞布, 2013) and Yusheng: Seediq Bale (餘生 賽德克巴萊 Yusheng Saideke balai, known as Pusu Qhuni in English, directed by Tang Shiang-Chu, 楊湘竹, 2014). Each has received at least some critical attention. There is a collection in English about Wei’s oeuvre, particularly this epic film;4 there is a monograph about the Seediq translation of Wei’s Mandarin-language screenplay for Seediq Bale, a commercial film and Taiwanese national allegory;5 and there is a master’s thesis in Mandarin on Pilin Yapu, particularly Musha Kawanakajima.6 But so far, Tang’s documentary has attracted only an enthusiastic film review in Mandarin.7 Yusheng deserves more attention. Originally scheduled to appear a few months after Wei Te-sheng’s film, Tang’s documentary has been described as a micro version of Wei’s macro vision of the Musha Incident.8 It is clearly designed to complement Seediq Bale, the former epic, the latter realistic; the former relating what happened up to 1931, the latter what happened since. However, its release was delayed until 2014, by which time the Atayal filmmaker and educator Pilin Yapu had released Musha Kawanakajima in 2013, thus preempting Tang. In Musha Kawanakajima, Pilin Yapu critiques Wei’s film, particularly Wei’s decision to film a scene in which Mona Rudao shoots his wife, Bakan Walis, to spare her suffering at the hands of the Japanese.9 Generally, Pilin questions Wei’s portrayal of Mona Rudao as heroic, considering that Mona was probably a collaborator in the campaign against an Atayal village called Slamaw in 1920.10 Pilin also critiques Q u e st f or Ro ot s   201

Wei’s portrayal of the Toda chief Teymu Walis’s collaboration, considering that the Tgdaya-Toda antagonism of 1930 and 1931 remains a source of friction in the Seediq community today. According to Pilin, Wei’s celebration of Mona’s heroism makes the pain of history more excruciating by forcing the Tgdaya and Toda peoples to relive the trauma of internecine strife. Hence, Pilin focuses on the public ceremonies of dmahun, “reconciliation,” between Toda and Tgdaya in 2010 and 2011; the voiceover narrator tells the audience that although the atrocities of 1930 and 1931 will not be forgotten, the descendants of the historical actors have reconciled. In response to Pilin, much can be said in Wei’s defense: the Teymu Walis portrayed in Wei’s epic film is also heroic, as much a seediq bale, a true human being (in other words, a hero) as Mona Rudao; moreover, Wei opted not to represent the Second Musha Incident. But my goal in this chapter is to discuss Tang’s documentary, not to defend Wei’s film. Like Pilin Yapu, Tang thematizes reconciliation between Tgdaya and Toda, although he does not dwell on the public reconciliation ceremonies. There is only a pan past a flag advertising the ceremony held on the eightieth anniversary of the incident (at 1:19:39 of the documentary). He dwells instead on informal, private instances of reconciliation. Here are four examples. First, Pawan Nawi, who played Mona Rudao’s father, Rudao Luhe, in Wei’s epic film and who grew up in Alang Gluban, reminds his two sons that his people originally “came from Toda,” and that Toda and Tgdaya are two branches of the same tree, both descendants of the Pusu Qhuni. Second, Dakis Pawan, who also grew up in Alang Gluban, accepts that villages like Bwarung, which were Tgdaya until 1931, are now home to Toda (or Truku) people. One of the most charming scenes features a song by Tanah Nawi, Dakis’s Truku guide, about his home village: A forest breeze is blowing by, The sun is shining in the sky. So gentle, the water in the stream, So tuneful, the bird that sings its theme, So tuneful, the bird that sings its song. Alang Bwarung is where I belong.

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Dakis needs a Truku guide because he simply does not know his way around the hills around Bwarung, which therefore rightly belong to Tanah Nawi. Third, Dakis puts in a good word for the Toda in another scene. The reason so many survived the Second Musha Incident is because the Toda showed the Tgdaya mercy. Finally, the Toda singer Bakan Nawi sings an invocation to Mona Rudao’s spirit at the Musha Memorial as Dakis looks on. Yusheng testifies to various instances of intraethnic reconciliation. Nevertheless, the lingering tension between the Tgdaya and the Toda is not the only trauma of the Musha Incident, and Tang Shiang-Chu is more interested in how Seediq people have worked though, if not resolved, this trauma. Tang shares an interest in the historical trauma of the Musha Incident with Wu He. Wu’s experimental novel Yusheng was in part a meditation on the pain that the Seediq people still felt nearly seven decades after Mona Rudao’s attack. Tang’s Yusheng is hardly experimental— indeed, it may seem disappointingly conventional—but he invites comparison to Wu’s work by his choice of title. In comparing Tang’s Yusheng to Wu’s Yusheng, I argue the following thesis: Although Tang’s documentary, like Wu He’s novel, is about the contemporary Seediq community living in the long shadow of the Musha Incident, Tang, unlike Wu, portrays members of this community as heroic, taking up the Seediq hero’s task of upholding a cultural tradition that has sustained the people through the pain of the past century. Wu He declares the current era to be antiheroic, while Tang Shiang-Chu sees heroism in the story of Seediq survival from 1931 to the present. This heroism, in turn, is the means by which contemporary Seediq people might work through their historical trauma. This contrast between Wu’s and Tang’s works justifies the two different translations of Yusheng. Berry’s title for Wu He’s novel, Remains of Life, is a good translation. It is a literal, morpheme-by-morpheme translation: yu can be translated as “remains,” and sheng as “life.” But yusheng as a word refers to the survivors of a disaster, and Tang’s documentary might be translated more affirmatively as The Survivors. However, Tang chose a different title for his documentary in English: Pusu Qhuni, literally root (pusu) tree (qhuni). The Pusu Qhuni is the Seediq tree of life, from whose roots Seediq people continue to derive sustenance. The

Q u e st f or Ro ot s   203

quest for the Pusu Qhuni that serves as the climax of Tang’s documentary is a heroic act that resolves trauma, unlike the anticlimactic quest at the end of Wu’s novel. H E R O I S M D E C O N S T RU C T E D : W U H E ’S Y U S H E N G (RE M AINS OF LIFE)

Wu He moved to Kawanakajima in late 1997 and lived there for nine months split over two stays, first in the winter of 1997 and second in the fall and winter of 1998. He published Yusheng, a novel about his experiences, in 1999. The narrator of the novel appears to be Wu He’s avatar. He regards himself as a victim of modern civilization, so he emphasizes his own traumas, his own desires for transcendence. At least initially, the Seediq people he meets seem only accessories to his own concerns. That said, he finds consolation in concerning himself with people who appear even more unfortunate than him. The book is about the Seediq people, insofar as it is about the narrator’s engagement with the people he meets. The person who makes the biggest impact on him is Girl, who claims to be the granddaughter of Mona Rudao. But she could not have been. Mona Rudao had a daughter, Mahung Mona (馬紅·莫那), but no granddaughter besides the girl whom Mahung adopted after she moved to Kawanakajima, and Girl is not this person. Michael Berry has suggested (by email) that Girl must mean that she is Mona’s granddaughter in a symbolic sense, burdened with the pain of history. I agree. She is also burdened with the pain of her personal history. She is a former prostitute who does not get along with her fellow villagers, especially the men. She therefore conducts a sexual ritual of reconciliation with the men of the village, a ritual intended to absolve her of the shame of prostitution and to heal the men of the pain of the failure of Mona’s rebellion and of their many failures since. Once her ritual is complete, she takes the narrator on a quest to the source of her appropriated family’s trauma, to the woods around Alang Mhebu, Mona Rudao’s home village, where Seediq men, women, and children hanged themselves during the Japanese reprisal in late 1930. On the way, the narrator indulges in a fantasy of sex with Girl; while in Kawanakajima, he indulges in speculation with Girl upon how intense 204  Li t e rar y Me m o r ie s o f Mu sh a

the sex must have been for headhunters after a successful expedition. It makes him sound like a primitivist, someone who finds the “primitive” erotically charged, emotionally compelling, and intellectually useful as a means of critiquing modernity. But Wu He is actually equally critical of the heroic ethos that might have inspired Mona Rudao. Indeed, the novel attempts a deconstruction of all heroism, primitive or modern. To the extent that the novel has a thesis, it is that “ ‘the contemporary’ no longer embraces heroes, only grassroots activists like Pihu, brimming with energy and life, they allow the contemporary to come into being and persist.”11 If Pihu embraces heroes, it is unclear how he allows a contemporary that does not embrace heroes to exist. At any rate, contemporary intellectuals like Wu He’s narrator no longer embrace heroes. In the narrator’s view, “the contemporary” requires a researcher like himself to “treat life with dignity” and to “respect life,” no matter whose life it is.12 As a result, he cannot accept what Mona Rudao did, even if Mona carried out a Seediq cultural practice (a headhunting ritual). Remains of Life dispels the mystique of “primitive” heroes like Mona Rudao, whom Chinese and Taiwanese nationalists, along with leaders of the Indigenous movement, had appropriated.13 To Wu He, any such appropriation is illegitimate because the notion that Mona Rudao was rebelling on behalf of the Chinese nation, the Taiwanese nation, the Indigenous movement, or even the Seediq people at the time is anachronistic. Moreover, what Mona did, as understandable as it might be in a colonial context, is hardly to be lauded in a liberal democracy. Taiwan had carried out its first presidential election in 1996, and Mona Rudao is hardly the kind of hero that a liberal democrat would embrace. One can understand why Wu He might say that we live in an antiheroic age, and why he would want to live in such an age, because in undermining Mona Rudao, he was also undermining the legitimacy of the state that had appropriated Mona and other putative heroes— the very same state that did violence to Wu He himself by forcing him through the school system and mandatory military service, trying to get him to conform and serve, in some small way, the nation in their mold. But in rejecting heroism, what is the narrator offering as a replacement? In his own words, nothing. Girl’s ritual of reconciliation comes to naught, as does the quest to Mhebu. At the end of the novel, the narrator leaves Girl alone at the bridge to Kawanakajima. In the last scene, he Q u e st f or Ro ot s   205

leaves lying in bed, doing nothing, an Old Man who survived the Musha Incident and served as a Takasago Volunteer during the war. According to the narrator, the Old Man says that “at least I’ve had a good couple decades drunkenly staring at the mountain scenery here, I don’t give much thought to the past destroying the present or the present destroying the future, that’s how I will spend my Remains of Life—in bed with my mind devoid of all thoughts and contemplation.”14 It seems unlikely that this is a faithful transcript of what the Old Man said, as this is Wu He’s own sentiment and idiom. For Wu He to express himself via a putative quotation from a survivor of the Musha Incident makes him seem self-indulgent, and he is. But his novel is also a masterpiece, one of the most important works of modern Sinophone literature. Its experimental style spurns traditional narrative and discursive norms. There are only six full stops in the entire novel. But the style has a point—to inscribe the flow of thought in an ongoing philosophical and emotional struggle with unsettling, unsettled materials. The philosophizing is deeply felt. If the quest with Girl to Mhebu achieves anything at all, it is a psychological transformation within the narrator. The freedom-loving cold fish manages to make himself feel something on the quest he takes with Girl: Girl would stop and wait for me and when I caught up she would help pull me up, I didn’t say thank you but the smile Girl had in her eyes was that of someone “taking care of a child,” a few times I needed to sit down to rest, each time Girl would wait for me and help me up when I was ready to continue, I didn’t feel embarrassed and that smile in her eyes actually warmed my heart, during this half-lifetime of mine devoid of struggle I never needed anyone’s help and I certainly never needed anyone to warm my heart, I lived a self-satisfied life of lonely isolation, but at this moment when a woman extended her warm helping hand it felt so urgent and real, I sensed a faint melancholy tinged with a touch of joy.15

Perhaps Wu He needs consolation for the pain of life more than Girl, who has the Ancestral Spirits to keep her company as she plays Chopin on the stereo. But to the extent that Seediq characters like Girl suffer, Wu He allows the reader to feel for them. 206  Li t e rar y Me m o r ie s o f Mu sh a

The novel made a big impression on many people, including Tang Shiang-Chu, who at the screening of Yusheng I attended in 2014 described Wu He’s novel as his favorite work of fiction. Next, I investigate Tang’s very different take on the yusheng, the remains of life or the survival of the Seediq people. H E R O I S M R E A F F I R M E D : TA N G S H I A N G - C H U ’S Y U S H E N G ( T H E SU RV I V O R S )

In Tang’s Yusheng, the grandchildren of the survivors of the Musha Incident relate how their grandparents found the will to carry on. The survivors thought they were going to die on the way to Alang Gluban, where they were moved in 1931. When they reached the town of Hori (Puli) and saw the sugar refinery belching sparks, they thought they had arrived at the maw of hell. But they made it to Kawanakajima. In Kawanakajima, what else could people do but carry on? The director, Tang, focuses on the struggles of Mona Rudao’s daughter, Mahung Mona. Mahung’s marriage, arranged by the Japanese, to the son of the chief of Boarung (the Tgdaya spelling of Bwarung), left her childless, so she adopted a girl. When her adoptive daughter married, Mahung enlisted her new sonin-law in her mission to find Mona Rudao’s remains and clear his good name. She was so relieved when a historian pointed out that it was her father who had led the rebellion, not the Hanaokas, as was reported in the media. But she never lived to see her father reburied in the family tomb. Instead, the government buried him in Wushe, enshrining him as a martyr to the nation. Before she died, Mahung told her family to continue trying to make her dying wish for this reburial come true: they would continue doing her will on Earth, and she would help them from Heaven. One might get the impression that Mahung was obsessed by the trauma of Musha, and that her family was hag-ridden. In her analysis of Why Don’t We Sing? (我們為什麼不歌唱？Women weishenme bu gechang?), a documentary about the White Terror—the Kuomintang’s crackdown on leftists real or imagined from the late 1940s to the 1980s—Sylvia Lin describes the film as Janus-faced, “simultaneously backward- and forward-looking.”16 As Lin notes, this is an issue of the audience: if a documentary is too backward-looking, the audience might not see the contemporary significance of the past. They Q u e st f or Ro ot s   207

figure 9.1  Mahung Mona, from the film Pusu Qhuni dir. Tang Shiang-Chu

might not share what they perceive as the filmmaker’s obsession, or the documentary subjects’ obsession, with the past. Is Tang’s Yusheng so backward-looking that it makes its subjects appear obsessed with the past? No, his documentary is not backward-looking at the expense of what Wu He would call the contemporary. The living are not so much haunted by the dead as they are kept company. In his use of candlelit celluloid prints of historical pictures, Tang makes Mahung Mona, Mona Rudao, and all the other ancestral spirits seem like warm, beneficent presences. The question is, how did the living carry on? Problematically for my thesis that the source of their strength was a heroic cultural tradition, Hanaoka Jirō (Dakis Nawi)’s widow, Takayama Hatsuko, appears to found strength in a mission of colonial modernity. Along with her husband, Takayama (Obing Tadao, the daughter of Tadao Nokan, the chief of Gungu Village, later renamed Gao Caiyun) was part of a “model savage” experiment that initially seemed to have failed. The Japanese educated them to serve as schoolteachers or police officers so that they could take over the governmental responsibilities that previously “savage” chiefs like Tadao Nokan and Mona Rudao had performed. When Hanaoka Jirō and his “brother,” Hanaoka Ichirō (Dakis Nomin), witnessed the attack that Mona Rudao led, they decided to commit suicide.17 Takayama was sent to the noncombatant Tgdaya village of Paran on the assumption 208  Li t e rar y Me m o r ie s o f Mu sh a

that the Japanese would not harm a pregnant woman. Just over six months later, she would trudge through the rain, eight months pregnant, on her way to Kawanakajima. Reflecting on her experience, her nephew comments, “When I think about it now, I realize how tough the women had to be” (1:10:40). In Kawanakajima, she married Nakayama Kiyoshi (Pihu Walis, later renamed Gao Yongqing); together, the couple opened a clinic and treated their fellow villagers with modern medical knowledge, taking up the mission of colonial modernity. Her daughterin-law recalls that she always spoke Japanese at home in later life and led a Japanese way of life. However, this does not mean that she had forgotten where she came from. After the two Hanaokas committed suicide with their family members, Hatsuko was taken to identify the bodies. She observed that while Hanaoka Ichirō had committed seppuku, her own husband had hung himself from a tree bough. In an autobiographical essay she wrote six decades after the fact, which is read by her daughter-in-law in the documentary, she wrote that her first husband had died a “beautiful” death. It was beautiful because he chose the traditional Seediq form of suicide, a symbolic return to the Pusu Qhuni, the root tree. Tang’s documentary Yusheng: Pusu Qhuni shows how the grandchildren of the survivors of the Musha Incident have returned to the Pusu Qhuni, their cultural roots, in their own ways, to define the meaning of their lives. Here are three examples. First, Hatsuko’s grandson, Tadao Nawi, appears in Tang’s documentary as the tour guide at the memorial to Mona Rudao. Detailing the role of Seediq culture in the incident, he delivers his narration with a rehearsed polish. His mission parallels the documentary’s mission. He is speaking to an audience who does not know much about the Musha Incident, the audience at the memorial, and the audience hearing him in a documentary whose purpose is partly to show us where the memorial came from and what it stands for. Second, Mahung Pawan, Mahung Mona’s granddaughter by adoption, initially resisted shouldering the burden not only of her “nation,” but also of her given name. But she was encouraged by her adviser in graduate school to compare her nation, the Seediq, to Indigenous peoples elsewhere in East Asia. Instead of living her grandmother’s dream, she sets off on her own cultural quest. Third, when Dakis Pawan went to see the popular historian Deng Shian-yang for tests for his liver condition in Q u e st f or Ro ot s   209

the 1980s, he too was sent on a cultural quest to understand himself.18 Dakis realized that he had forgotten himself after he left Gluban to find success in another world, by that other world’s standards. The new quest that Dakis embarked on in a sense culminated in the rectification of names in 2008, when the Seediq were officially recognized as separate from the Atayal, as indicated in the title of a book that can be seen on Dakis’s shelf at 43:15. Elsewhere in the documentary, Dakis remembers how driven every parent was to prepare their kids for the new society. There was a kind of ongoing academic competition in which the parents urged their children on. And ultimately, when the children had gone out into the world to make something of themselves, they started to ask: Who am I? The answer they have ultimately given is that they are the real people, the seediq bale. Unlike in Wei’s epic film Seediq Bale, in which a seediq (people) bale (real) seems like a fossilized ideal, the idea of a seediq bale in Yusheng, which is subtitled Seediq Bale, is evolutionary, based on a contemporary reinterpretation of cultural tradition. Cultural tradition here takes a narrative form. And the various narratives in the documentary share a master narrative—that of a quest for roots. This quest for roots is literalized in Pawan Nawi’s mountain pilgrimage with his two sons to the Pusu Qhuni, the root tree out of which everything, every plant and animal and all the Seediq people, sprung. On the way, he guides his sons to make ritual offerings of rice wine to the ancestors, who manifest at night in the form of sambar deer attracted to the light of the fire. “We were visited by the ghost of Mona Rudao last night,” he tells them the next morning. He also tells them the myths of the people, which they can reinterpret for contemporary purposes. The first story he tells, starting right at the beginning of the documentary, is about the people’s heroism at a time when there were two suns shining in the sky: Once, in the time when two suns squeezed the sky, and it was too hot for the elders to work in the field, the people found a strong young man and, knowing how long the journey would be, a little boy for him to carry, a little boy who would carry on the mission. All along the way, they planted seeds of flowering trees to mark the way they had come, until the strong young man was old and

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figure 9.2  The Sun-Shooting Hero, from the film Pusu Qhuni, dir. Tang Shiang-Chu

could go no further, and the boy, now a man, had to continue alone. When he reached the mountain heights, as near to the suns as he could get, he shot one of them down. Its blood splattered the sky, forming the stars, and the wounded sun became the moon, bringing relief to all the nations by dividing day from night. On the way back he ate the fruit that the flowering trees now bore, all the way to his home village. So it has been since the elders attacked the Japanese. We were almost wiped out, but in Gluban we rebuilt, and carried on. We must never forget, or lose heart.

It is the heroic story of the multigenerational task of carrying on a cultural tradition. This story, and the stories related next, are narrated to woodcuts by the hand of Qiu Ruolong—the best work he has ever done19—that are presented in the same way as thephotographs, printed on translucent celluloid, and illuminated from behind by candlelight, producing warmth and presence. When they approach the Pusu Qhuni, Pawan Nawi sings a song: M-eyah        =ku                dehuk,      rudan      rudan. af-come        =1s.nom        arrive        elder        elder I’m almost there, O men of long ago.

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Ima          =ku                yaku?             P-kla-i                            ku.20 who          =1s.nom        1s.nom          cause-know-pf.imp        1s.nom Who am I? I’d like to know.

The answer is seediq bale, but it is an open-ended answer because while the sound of seediq bale has remained relatively stable in the decades since 1930, its sense has not. Tang’s documentary concludes when the pilgrims make it through the forest to stand at the base of the Pusu Qhuni. In the subtitles, Dakis Pawan translates Pusu Qhuni into shengshi 聖石 (2:29:52), “sacred rock” because it is actually a rock, standing straight and massively erect on the side of the mountain slope, supposedly with a cave at the base—a rocky womb that gave birth to all creation.21 At the base of this rock, Pawan Nawi tells the story of the origin of the Seediq people: Long, long ago, there was a great tree on the slope of Mt. Bnuhun, beside which stood a stone. The tree wrapped around the stone, and they grew together; and from their embrace was born a man and a woman, which is why we call it the Root Tree, for it is our origin. The children of the tree coupled to produce progeny, who in turn coupled to produce great numbers of descendants, and down through the generations.

All the B-roll shots of banyan, yumberry, and tung oil trees, some flowering and others bearing fruit, some leafy and others with bare branches, that Tang intercuts with shots of the talking heads throughout the documentary, are symbolic of the continuity of the Seediq tradition and the continued flourishing of the Seediq people. Pawan Nawi ends the story with a meditation that leaves his two sons, and all Seediq viewers, looking forward: Do you know who the land here belongs to? To us, the Seediq people, who belong to the land, and all the Toda and Truku are the same as the Tgdaya.22 The land belongs not to the Taiwanese, not to the Mainlanders, do you understand? We must never yield the land to anyone else. Do you hear? Never let us forget where we come from. We are so few, and we cannot overcome the many, but let all 212  Li t e rar y Me m o r ie s o f Mu sh a

know of our good deeds so that none would dare laugh at us. Let them know that we are seediq bale.

This is the task that Pawan Nawi sets for the survivors of Musha: to uphold the dignity of the seediq bale, whatever they take that to mean. In a way, the story that Tang Shiang-Chu tells in Yusheng is the same one he tells in How Deep the Ocean? (還有多深 Haiyou duoshen? 2001), a documentary about a working-class man from Orchid Island who tries to succeed in Taiwan, but after suffering a stroke, he has to go back to Orchid Island an ignominious failure. But then he puts his life together, builds himself a new house with his friends, and fishes. The scene of him floating in the sea is a vision of corporeal pleasure and freedom. His is a story of small-time heroism, of the kind of resilience to which we can all aspire. In telling his story of resilience, unlike Wu He, Tang draws no attention to himself. Although he appeared at promotional events for the movie, the director does not appear in Yusheng, not even as an off-camera narrator. He is the hidden cause of the documentary, as a Yusheng binder, full of his research notes about the Musha Incident at the Real Guts restaurant, the Ars Films eatery in downtown Taipei, attests. Unlike Wu He, Tang steeped himself in the historical literature on Musha. Without Wu He’s irony, he has told a story about the descendants of Musha striving to achieve their various goals in life, including radical political aims like asserting Seediq sovereignty over the mountains of central Taiwan. This may be the difference between the late 1990s and the early 2010s, or it may be a difference in temperament between Wu He and Tang Shiang-Chu. Whatever the reason, these two Yusheng, about the remains of life and the survivors, are two versions of the ongoing saga of the Seediq people. C O N C LU S I O N : T R A N S C E N D I N G T R AU M A

It seems to go without saying that a representation of the long-term aftermath of the Musha Incident should be somehow about trauma, and if Freud is to be believed, trauma involves a repetition compulsion, an irresistible urge to revisit repressed images. While there may be some truth to this, it seems inadequate, especially for the two works entitled Q u e st f or Ro ot s   213

Yusheng that I have discussed in this chapter. Too much time, which proverbially heals all wounds, has passed for repetition compulsion to be a persuasive explanation of why people keep talking about Musha. Not to mention that the trauma that people are trying to work through is secondhand. As several interviews in Tang’s documentary make clear, survivors of the Musha Incident did not want to talk about what had happened for most of the postwar period, and their descendants, people like Dakis Pawan, did not even know until the 1970s of their grandparents’ participation in the events that were being commemorated in television and newspaper reports. People like Dakis, who were not personally traumatized, started probing the pain by investigating the incident. On his visit with his Truku guide, Tanah Nawi, upriver to the caves above Mhebu, in which Tgdaya villagers took shelter during the reprisal, Dakis insists that he would prefer not to talk about it because it is too painful, and yet he does end up talking about it, at great frequency and length. Why? I do not think he does so out of a compulsion to repeat, or what Sylvia Lin has called an “obligation to remember.”23 Dakis often says that he wants to set the historical record straight from a Seediq perspective. He also gets something out of talking about it—namely, answers to the question he has asked himself for three decades: Who am I? Anyone like Dakis who talks about Musha runs another risk, that of repeating himself until what he has to say becomes a spiel, like Tadao Nawi’s at the memorial. But somehow the testimonies of Dakis, Tadao, and the others never seem repetitive. The footage that Tang captured works; the talking heads are not just going through the motions. For them, talking about Musha is a necessary and productive part of a project of self-understanding because the key to understanding Musha for them is Seediq culture. As part of this project, they revisit Musha in the context of Seediq culture with such regularity that remembering Musha could be described as a ritual. Rituals also relate them to the people of the past. Over and over in Tang’s documentary, the living conduct rituals to pay their respect to their ancestors by sprinkling the land with wine, which in the language is referred to as dmahun in the active voice or mddahun in the reciprocal, both of which can mean either “reconciliation” or “sharing.” They do

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not conduct the ritual just for reconciliation, as if they are hag-ridden, haunted. In mddahun, they are sharing the land with their ancestors, and vice versa. The living and the dead are keeping each other company. It seems that a “sense of absence” has been filled.24 When they conduct their rituals to the dead, a sense of presence is conveyed through a kind of ritual repetition that never feels repetitive or traumatic. The contemporary Seediq hero apparently is never alone. It is in his affirmation of Seediq heroism that Tang clearly distinguishes his take on the yusheng of the Seediq people from Wu’s. In attaching seediq bale, which is arguably a Seediq translation of yīngxióng (英雄, “hero”), to Yusheng to produce the title of his documentary, he suggests that becoming heroes is the task that Seediq people have to perform to ensure their survival, both cultural and personal.25 While they may need to deconstruct heroism to understand the past, they reconstruct it to bear the present, wherever they are on their quests from unalterable past to uncertain future. Judging from Tang’s documentary, the point of a contemporary Seediq hero’s quest is to redefine what a seediq bale is—with reference to traditional Seediq culture, to be sure, but also to the contemporary situation. Although for Pawan Nawi, at the conclusion of his pilgrimage with his sons to the Pusu Qhuni, the issue seems very similar—a colonial regime’s refusal to respect Seediq sovereignty—the context has changed; not every colonial regime is the same. In 1930, the Japanese thought they had a right to forcibly civilize the “savages,” but in 2020, in the wake of the United Nations Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples in 2007, settler states like Taiwan have to be, and are more inclined to be, sympathetic to Indigenous sovereignty claims. Given that the Seediq people now live in a liberal democracy that values pluralism, there can be no orthodoxy about what Seediq sovereignty means or how to be a seediq bale, a true man or woman—in other words, a hero. Nor does Pawan Nawi try to lay down the law. My reading of the final scene is that each Seediq hero, or heroine, on his or her personal quest, has the right to define seediq bale in his or her own way, so long as he or she hearkens to his exhortation: shoulder the burden of the transmission of tradition by remembering where you came from, for you are the seediq bale!

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N OT E S 1. The spelling of Mona Rudao’s name is based on the romanization of the most common Mandarin transliteration: 莫那·魯道 Mònà Lŭdào [mɔna lutau]. In the original Seediq, the name is pronounced differently depending on dialect and time period. Today, in the Tgdaya dialect, it is pronounced Mona Rudo [‘mona ‘ɹudo], while in the Toda dialect, it is Mona Rudaw [‘mona ‘ɹudau]. Tgdaya and Toda once shared the diphthong [au]. In Tgdaya, [au] has been monophthongized into [o] since 1930. In other words, Mona Rudao is a reasonable approximation of the man’s name as he would have pronounced it in 1930. Mona is his given name, Rudao a patronym, his father’s given name. 2. Deng Shian-yang (Deng Xiangyang), Fengzhong Feiying: Wushe Shijian Zhenxiang ji Huagang Chuzi de Gushi (Mountain Cherry Blossom in the Wind: The Truth of the Musha Incident and the Story of Hanaoka Hatsuko) (Taipei: Yushan, 2000), 107. 3. Deng, Fengzhong Feiying, 107. 4. Chiu Kuei-fang, Ming-yeh Rawnsley, and Gary Rawnsley, eds., Taiwan Cinema: International Reception and Social Change (New York: Routledge, 2017). 5. Darryl Sterk, Indigenous Cultural Translation: A Thick Description of Seediq Bale (New York: Routledge, 2020). 6. Zheng Shengyi, Research on Perspective in Aboriginal Images: Pilin Yapu’s Documentaries (master’s thesis, Graduate Institute of Taiwan Literature and Transnational Cultural Studies, Zhongxing University, 2013). 7. Qiu Yunfang, “Yusheng: Seediq Bale zhi hou,” Guavanthropology blog, November 3, 2014, https://guavanthropology.tw/article/6194. 8. Qiu, “Yusheng.” 9. Darryl Cameron Sterk, “Critical Women in Seediq Bale: A Response to Professor Chin-Ju Lin concerning Seediq Cultural Politics,” Taiwan Insight (September 4, 2019), https://taiwaninsight.org/2019/09/04/critical-women-in-seediq-bale-a -response-to-professor-chin-ju-lin-concerning-seediq-cultural-politic/. 10. Paul Barclay, Outcasts of Empire: Japan’s Rule on Taiwan’s “Savage Border,” 1874–1945 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2017), 112. 11. Wu He, Remains of Life, trans. Michael Berry (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017), 113. 12. Wu, Remains of Life, 116. 13. A few years before Wu He arrived in Kawanakajima, Indigenous intellectuals had declared that “the Mona Rudo spirit is undying” (莫那魯道精神不死 Mònà Lŭdào jīngshén bùsĭ) (Deng, Fengzhong Feiying, 157). They turned Mona’s rebellion against colonial rule into a call for the return of Indigenous sovereignty. Published on the twenty-seventh of the month to commemorate Mona’s attack,

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the radical journal Hunter Culture (獵人文化 lièrén wénhuà) called regularly in the early 1990s for a return to acephalous (headless) Indigenous self-rule. 14. Wu, Remains of Life, 323. 15. Wu, Remains of Life, 306. 16. Sylvia Lin, “Recreating the White Terror on the Screen,” in Documenting Taiwan on Film: Issues and Methods in New Documentaries, ed. Sylvia Lin and Tze-lan D. Sang (New York: Routledge, 2011), 39. 17. Despite sharing a Japanese surname, the Hanaokas were not brothers. They were born in the Tgdaya village of Gungu as Dakis Nomin and Dakis Nawi, where “Nomin” means “(son) of Umin” and “Nawi” “(son) of Awi.” 18. When Dakis Pawan fell ill in the 1980s, Deng Shian-yang was running a medical testing lab to fund his research into the Musha Incident and its aftermath. 19. Qiu published a comic book version of the Musha Incident in 1990, which was one of Wei Te-sheng’s main sources when he wrote his screenplay. Wei Te-sheng, Seediq Bale (Taipei: Government Information Office, 2000). Qiu has continued to represent Seediq heroism and Japanese cruelty in the same style for thirty years. 20. Pklai ku, the last line in Pawan Nawi’s song, is pklai, a causative (p-) patient focus imperative (-i) based on kela, “to know,” and ku, the first-person singular nominative clitic pronoun. Literally, pklai ku is “make it so that I know.” 21. The cave at the base of the Pusu Qhuni is not mentioned in Tang’s documentary. Compare Wu He’s treatment of the half-wood, half-fossil, semen-producing tree (Wu, Remains of Life, 118–19), where the cave was formed by “dripping semen.” 22. In Seediq, tndheran means both the person to whom the land (dheran) belongs and a state of belonging (tn-) to the land. 23. Sylvia Lin, Representing Atrocity: The 2/28 Incident and White Terror in Fiction and Film (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 46. 24. Lin, Representing Atrocity, 43. 25. Comparing Chinese and Seediq sun-shooting myths, the historian Zhou Wanyao argues that the ideal of heroism in the Chinese myth is individualistic, while the Seediq ideal is collective. See Zhou Wanyao, “Yingxiong, Yingxiong Chongbai ji qi Fanmingti (Heroes, Hero-Worship and Its Antithesis), in Guo Mingzheng (Dakis Pawan), Zhenxiang Balai: Saideke Balai de Lishi Zhenxiang yu Suipai Zhaji (Truth Bale: The Historical Truth and a Production Diary of Seediq Bale) (Taipei: Yuanliu), 2–8.

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CH APTER TEN

Historical Representation in an Age of Wiki Writing and Digital Curation The Musha Incident on Digital Platforms Kuei-fen Chiu

This chapter identifies some key issues of historical representation in terms of the impact of Wikipedia writing and digital representation. Michael Berry’s A History of Pain: Trauma in Modern Chinese Literature and Film covers genres spanning from screenplays, history books, reportage literature, novels, poetry, fiction films, photos, documentary films, manga, to heavy metal opera to show the complex history of the cultural representations of the Musha Incident. This chapter adds three digital representations to Berry’s impressive list: the Chinese Wikipedia article of the Musha Incident (created in 2005), a virtual exhibition of the Musha Incident (launched in 2011), and a Historypin website (launched in 2014) . It compares these digital representations to tackle the following questions: What constitutes a “historical text” in a digital environment? What forms can “historical narrative” assume in digital representations? How does digital representation affect the configuration of a historical event like the Musha Incident? Does it reinvent the concept of “collective history” and change the stakeholders of the historical memory project? What are the strength and limits of digital representation as a new form of historical representation? Ultimately, how can historical memory be collected, preserved, and represented collectively in an age of technological transcience and ever-changing mutability?

H I S TO R I O G R A P H Y I N A D I G I TA L AG E O F H I S TO R I C A L R E P R E S E N TAT I O N

“Histories gain part of their explanatory effect by their success in making stories out of otmere chronicles; and stories in turn are made out of chronicles by an operation which I have elsewhere called ‘emplotment.’ ”1 Thus remarks Hayden White in his groundbreaking essay “The Historical Text as Literary Artifact,” which defines “narrativity” as the central activity of “historical writing.” The historical text is understood as a narrative with a particular story form chosen by the historian. As a storyteller, the historian’s main task is to configure historical material into a particular story type so that the unfamiliar is rendered familiar and history appears comprehensible.2 “Emplotment,” the key activity in story-making, lies at the core of historiography.3 Published in 1974, White’s theory of historiography was formulated in a cultural context in which historical representations were dominated by print publications and films. Historiographical practices in the twenty-first century are certainly conducted in a quite different environment as online resources are becoming more and more important for the generation and dissemination of historical knowledge. Rather than turning to history books, people tend to “google” first when trying to access historical information. There is no denying that Wikipedia and a variety of digitally mediated historical representations are playing an increasingly significant role in our understanding of history. As has been noted, Internet and digital technologies are creating new kinds of histories and affecting our relationship with the past.4 New questions about historiography are emerging. For example, digital platforms of historical representation tend to rely on collective writing and cross-disciplinary collaboration. If emplotment is fundamental to the sense-making of history-writing and reading, how does the practice of collective writing affect the activity of emplotment in the construction of a historical text? Moreover, as digital representation is characterized by what Bertrans Gervais calls “hyperextension,”5 a “historical text” may no longer appear as a coherently structured narrative based on temporal unfolding. It now tends to present itself as “spatialized grids,” suggesting “multi-focal, multi-causal, and non-narrative modes of historical representation.”6 Situated within Historical Representation in an Age of Wiki Writing and Digital Curation  219

the context of a rich history of cultural representations and critical discussion of the historiography about the Musha Incident, this chapter examines how digital representation raises urgent questions of historiographical practices in the construction of the historical past. As Michael Berry remarks, “The Musha Incident (including the Japanese response) has become one of the most contested sites in modern Taiwan history, repeatedly reinterpreted and reframed over time.”7 The question as to how to reclaim the memory of the Musha Incident in a proper form of historical representation has been an important issue for Taiwan studies. Cultural representations of this historical event provide rich material for exploring the relationship between medium and historical representation. Many studies of these cultural representations are concerned with the questions of historiographical practice. The most remarkable recent example is certainly the debate about Seediq Bale (賽德克·巴萊 Saideke balai), a feature film by the Taiwanese director Wei Te-sheng. The heatedly debated questions, such as the relationship between fiction and fact, the merits and drawbacks of gaining historical knowledge through films, and the so-called Indigenous perspective in the film’s narration of the Musha Incident,8 are without doubt relevant historiographical questions. The great interest in this film and the surrounding publications9 testify to the extent that the Musha Incident remains alive and vital. So far, most studies of the Musha Incident deal with print publications and cinematic products. Representations of the Musha Incident and the historiographical issues generated by this digital turn have received little critical attention. It is noteworthy that the Musha Incident appears as an independent article in the English, Chinese, and Japanese Wikipedias. Another two digital representations of the Musha Incident are available online—one is a digital exhibition included in the large-scale national digital project “Taiwan e-Learning and Digital Archives Program” (TELDAP, http://culture.teldap.tw/culture/), and the other is an experiment with the Historypin digital tool. The discussion here will focus on these three digital platforms. Of the English scholarship on the subject, particularly relevant to this study are Leo Ching’s “Savage Construction and Civility Making: The Musha Incident and Aboriginal Representations in Colonial Taiwan”10 and Michael Berry’s “Musha 1930,” in A History of Pain: Trauma in Modern Chinese Literature and Film.11 Ching’s analysis unravels the 220  Literary Memories of Musha

intriguing political implications of the evolving story of the Qing official Wu Feng (呉鳳 Gohō in Japanese) in different historical contexts and the production of the feature film The Bell of Sayon (サヨンの鐘 Sayon no Kane). Berry’s succinct survey of the history of the cultural representations of the Musha Incident in various genres and historical contexts also sheds light on the constructed nature of historical narrative. It shows the intertwining of historical representation with political, cultural, and historical agendas. Both are concerned with the ideological implications of the differences in character portrayal and the role of emplotment in historical representation. When Ching’s and Berry’s essays were being written, digital historical representations of the Musha Incident were not available yet or were just beginning to appear. The revision history statistics of Wikipedia show that the first edit of the Musha Incident articles in English, Chinese, and Japanese took place in 2004, 2005, and 2003, respectively. The Musha Incident piece on the “Knowledge Web of Taiwan’s Diversity” appeared in 2011, while the Incident item on Historypin was constructed in 2014. Focusing on these three online historical representations of the Musha Incident, this chapter addresses a lacuna in current literature on the historical representation of the Musha Incident. It investigates the transformation of historiographical practice under the impact of digital technologies. W R I T I N G H I S TO RY I N W I K I P E D I A

The impact of Wikipedia on our relationship with the historical past cannot be overestimated. In spite of all the skepticism about Wikipedia as a reliable source of historical information, the site is more often than not the first stop for people who want to learn about any topic. Incoherent argument as a result of the collective character of authorship,12 amateurism and unreliability,13 and biased exclusion and marginalization14 are often named as some of the deficiencies of Wikipedia. However, there are also positive opinions of the site. For example, the historian Roy Rosenzweig contends that the open and democratic production model of Wikipedia “fosters an appreciation of the very skills that historians try to teach.”15 Todd Presner sees the site as “a truly innovative, global multilingual, collaborative, knowledge-generating community Historical Representation in an Age of Wiki Writing and Digital Curation  221

and platform for authoring, editing, distributing, and versioning knowledge.”16 No matter how much the two camps disagree, both do agree that the profound implications for Wikipedia as a powerful, pervasive platform for knowledge generation should not be overlooked. The Digital Humanities Manifesto defines Wikipedia as “the most significant Web 2.0 creation to harness a mass audience and engage a mass audience in knowledge production and dissemination.”17 Of the three digital representations, Wikipedia writing seems to come closest to traditional history-writing in appearance because of its heavy reliance on words, emphasis on historical narrative, and the inclusion of references. The “Musha Incident” articles on the English, Chinese, and Japanese Wikipedias follow basically the same format: background information, narration of the Musha Incident itself, the consequences of the event, cultural representations of the incident, references, and external links. The main body is a historical narrative constructed mainly in written words. Just as in print culture, visual images play a secondary, complementary role. However, this appearance is deceiving. Wikipedia writing is in fact a radical historiographical practice. The crowdsourcing practice, coupled with computing applications that archive the whole editing process and produce useful statistics, challenges many of our fundamental assumptions about history-writing. The revision history statistics on the Chinese Wikipedia platform shows that there have been a total of 1,167 edits since this particular entry was established on July 8, 2005, and 447 unique editors have contributed to the making of the entry. Compared with the 4,634 unique editors for the “Holocaust” entry in English Wikipedia, 870 editors for the February 28 “Musha Incident” article in Chinese Wikipedia, and nearly 4,000 editors for the “Tiananmen Square Massacre” article in English Wikipedia as of July 2017, 447 is a relatively modest number (figure 10.1). Nevertheless, the collaborative engagement of more than 400 people in the production of the historical narrative embodies “collective history” at work, par excellence. To make it possible for these more than 400 people of different ethnic identities and ideological positions to work together in the composition of the Musha Incident narrative, Wikipedia provides clear policies and guidelines for the mass participants to follow. The core principles are neutral point of view (NPOV), 222  Literary Memories of Musha

figure 10.1  Statistics of edits of the “Musha Incident” Chinese Wikipedia page

no original research, and verifiability. Accepted knowledge rather than original research, a reasonable size for the article, and verifiable sources and sourced statements are the rules of the game. Edits failing to conform to these rules are likely to be removed by the Wikipedia administrators, who have the right to delete edits or not. A click on the “discussion” index at the top-left corner of the Musha Incident article opens a detailed page showing the whole process of the participants’ discussion and editing at various stages in the evolution of the narrative. Issues under debate include “whether the Musha Incident should be understood as an indigenous ‘uprising’ against Japanese colonial oppression” or “whether it should be regarded as a kind of ‘terrorist attack,’  ” “how we should interpret the killing of women and children by Indigenous warriors in the Incident,” and the exact number of casualties. These are, without doubt, important historiographical questions. The discussion page also shows that the article was listed as a “good article” in 2007, but it was delisted in 2012 (figure 10.2). Reasons for the delisting include unverifiable statements and formatting problems. If Wikipedia is often faulted for misinformation and inaccuracy, the mechanisms of compiling the Musha Incident narrative reveal that the production of a Wikipedia article is subject to a process of peer review, just as print publications are. As Roy Rosenzweig points out, Wikipedia’s Historical Representation in an Age of Wiki Writing and Digital Curation  223

figure 10.2 Reevaluation of the article as a “good Wikipedia article” on the ­Chinese site

epistemological approach, exemplified by the NPOV, follows the methods adopted by most historians.18 Wikipedia also has a well-­designed form of peer review for granting an article the status of “featured article” or “good article.”19 In fact, bias, inaccurate information, and unverified statements can also be found in traditional history-writing. Arguably, the open, democratic production model of Wikipedia should not be regarded as an inferior model, but rather an alternative model of producing and disseminating history knowledge instead. With collective edits, corrections, and discussion, the constantly mutating narrative challenges “emplotment” as the essential activity of history-writing. It throws into sharp relief the problem of “fiction-­ making” in the construction of a historical narrative. The Musha Incident article on Wikipedia departs from traditional history-writing in its insistent preservation of the traces of differently positioned contributions in the making of the historical narrative. History is not configured as a good story told by a single author who imposes a coherent plot structure on a mass of incoherent material. Rather, Wikipedia historywriting is deliberately intended to be a work in progress, fraught with conflicting views and information that will be subject to further revision. In short, it exposes how the complex mechanisms in historical representation work to produce a historical narrative. 224  Literary Memories of Musha

One may argue that the deconstruction of traditional views and narrations of the Musha Incident is actually nothing new. It can also be found in more traditional forms of cultural representation. The Taiwanese novelist Wu He’s (舞鶴) experiment with disjunctive narrative in Remains of Life (餘生 Yusheng), the carefully designed gap between the visual images and the soundtrack in the presentation of the massacre scene in the blockbuster film Seediq Bale, and the conflictual recollections of the incident by different tribal people in the Indigenous documentary maker Pilin Yapu’s (比令亞布) Wushe, Chuanzhong Island (霧社•川中島 Wushe, Chuanzhongdao) are just some examples. They all employ ingenious formal devices to problematize a fixed, coherent, linear historical account of the complex Musha Incident. However, in these printed and filmic forms of historical representation, the narrative is taken to be the historical text. Printed and filmic narratives cannot but be fixed products, with a beginning and an end. The “Musha Incident” article on Wikipedia is different. “Historical text” and “historical narrative” are no longer synonyms. A Wikipedia “historical text” is presented as an unstable structure of ceaseless editing, hyperlinks, and statistics. Historical narrative is only part of this spatialized structure. Rather than being presented simply in terms of a narrative unfolding through time, a Wikipedia historical text participates in what Gervais calls the culture of hyperextension and it can be read on a computer screen only with all the material support of computing.20 Such a historical text cannot properly function and be read without hyperlinks. It forces us to recognize that, in the words of Gervais, “the material support is an essential part of the text’s status and definition.”21 More significant, the crowdsourcing participation of Wikipedia writing provides a model of mass collaboration in the construction of “collective history.” The Wikipedia historical text of the Musha Incident becomes a public domain, in which the selectivity of the human impulse of narrativity negotiates with the inclusivity of databases in the endeavor to make meaning out of the ever-shifting, ever-expanding pool of information. History is not owned, controlled, or managed by any privileged individual, but is collected and re-membered through collaborative efforts with the assistance of computation. In “Digital Humanities 2.0: A Report on Knowledge,” Todd Presner defines Wikipedia as “a dynamic, flexible, and open-ended network for Historical Representation in an Age of Wiki Writing and Digital Curation  225

knowledge creation and distribution that underscores process, collaboration, access, interactivity, and creativity with an editing model and versioning system that documents every contingent decision made by every contributing author.”22 This crowdsourcing character of a historical text, as the discussion of the “Musha Incident” article on Wikipedia shows, has changed the way in which we conduct history studies. Because a historical text is no longer understood simply in terms of a historical narrative composed by a single author, the critique of the ideological implications of the historical narrative or the position of the narrator may no longer be the predominant focus in historical analysis. Instead, how a historical text takes shape in a new cultural environment of collective editorship comes to the fore. That is, given that history is a collective enterprise rather than the work of a single author, the analysis of the position of the historian or the “emplotment” of the narrative is no longer possible. The central historiographical question becomes, instead, how collective history is produced not only through the interactions between humans and humans, but also between humans and machines. This new culture of collective history-writing raises the question of the so-called digital divide, for the access to digital technology is not evenly distributed.23 This question is particularly acute in a case like the Musha Incident, with Indigenous people as key historical agents. Compared with other forms of digital representation that will be discussed next, Wikipedia provides arguably a more democratic, participatory form of cultural presentation that people of limited resources can use to intervene in the collaborative shaping of cultural memory. Because we have seen Indigenous writers such as Walis Norgan (瓦歷斯諾幹), of Atayal descent, and Salizan Takisvilainan (沙力浪), of Bunun descent, voice themselves powerfully on the Internet, there seems no reason to think that Indigenous people will have no role to play in the new economy of historical knowledge production and dissemination. T H E M U S H A I N C I D E N T A S A V I RT UA L E X H I B I T I O N

“The Musha Incident” article on “Knowledge Web on Taiwan’s Diversity” is one of the subprojects of the National Digital Archives Program under the aegis of Academia Sinica in Taiwan.24 Launched in 2011, it participated in the first wave of the Taiwanese government’s attempts to 226  Literary Memories of Musha

figure 10.3  Online exhibition of the Musha Incident from “Knowledge Web on Taiwan’s Diversity”

catch up with the global digital revolution. The home page of the program’s website states clearly that the purpose of the project is to “bring to light the cultural heritage and knowledge that had been locked away in academic institutions in the past and make them available and accessible to more people.”25 The Musha Incident presented here is basically exhibition-oriented (figure 10.3). It consists of seven parts: (1) a general introduction, (2) Seediq mythologies, (3) an introduction to Seediq tribes, (4) a description of Japanese colonial government’s policies of controlling Indigenous tribes in the Musha area in the early phase of the colonial rule, (5) the background of the Musha Incident, (6) the event itself, and finally, (7) a conclusion with references. Because the purpose of this virtual exhibition is to bring normally inaccessible cultural goods to light, the displayed items include digitalized photos and maps from the collections of a number of national libraries. Every displayed item in the exhibition is carefully kept in order, and information regarding the production time, producer, type of the archived item, and ownership are provided in detail. Copyright protection is strictly executed, and all the files cannot be downloaded. The copyright statement on the digital project’s website reveals an attitude toward content building, which is in sharp contrast to Wikipedia’s emphasis on open access and creative commons (figure 10.4). In terms Historical Representation in an Age of Wiki Writing and Digital Curation  227

figure 10.4  Copyrighted historical materials in the virtual exhibition “Knowledge Web on Taiwan’s Diversity”

of knowledge production, the curator takes up the position usually assumed by the traditional historian—that is, selecting, interpreting, and controlling the archives. The historical representation of the Musha Incident in this exhibition is thus quite different from the crowdsourcing, participatory culture of Wikipedia. The dichotomy between the curator-historian, as the transmitter of historical knowledge, and the users, as the receivers of the knowledge, is maintained. Featuring the digitalization of cultural heritages, this online exhibition marks the early phase of Taiwanese academics starting to grapple with the impact of digital revolution. In spite of its seemingly conventional historiographical practice, in comparison with the radical implications of the open, democratic, participatory, and collaborative character of Wikipedia writing, this exhibition draws our attention to the strengths and limitations of Wikipedia’s method of historical representation. We focus on three issues here: the question of copyright, the role of aesthetics in historical representation, and the material support of sustainable, participatory digital projects. In contrast to Wikipedia’s encouragement of creative commons, the Musha Incident virtual exhibition underscores the notion of copyright. It seems to run counter to the open, expansive, and wall-less democratization of digital revolution, which, as the proponents of “The Digital 228  Literary Memories of Musha

Manifesto 2.0” point out, is genealogically connected to the utopian counterculture-cyberculture of the 1960s. However, the stress on copyright invites a critical scrutiny of the underlying assumptions of free culture. Astra Taylor, a creative artist and activist, argues that free culture does not necessarily mean fair culture.26 She points out that free culture advocators tend to overlook the material reality of digital commons, which requires fair compensation for the producers of the commons so that their creativity can be sustained economically.27 Taylor urges for the recognition of “sustainability” as a key word for thinking about the so-called free culture.28 Without the respect for labor and the willingness to address the problem of “hyper-devaluation of work online,” a free culture would not be sustainable. Thus, copyright should not be understood in purely negative terms, for it “provides some incentive for people to take on the risk of creating new work by allowing for the possibility of some economic benefit.”29 Without mutual respect and mutual support between the users and the producers of cultural commons, free culture would not bring social justice. If the production of the commons is just as urgent an issue as the problem of access, then the issue of copyright deserves more careful attention.30 In a sense, this online exhibition of the Musha Incident and the Wikipedia treatment can be seen as complementary to each other. Wikipedia’s emphasis on creative commons inevitably excludes copyrighted but informative cultural products. However, these works should be made public to shed light on the Musha Incident as a complex historical event. Seen in this light, the copyright principle adopted by the virtual exhibition of the Musha Incident may address a lacuna in the economy of free culture. It opens up a space for works still under copyright protection to be part of contemporary networked production and dissemination of knowledge. Following this logic of thinking, many cultural representations mentioned in Michael Berry’s essay, including print works and films, do not have to wait for fifty years for copyright protection period to expire before they can appear on a digital platform to contribute to the pervasive networked communication of historical knowledge. Government funding for copyright digital content plays a crucial role here. Another issue that the virtual exhibition throws into relief is the role of multimedia in the shaping of a historical text. The historical representation of the Musha Incident in Wikipedia articles is text-based. The Historical Representation in an Age of Wiki Writing and Digital Curation  229

small photos accompanying the text indicate their secondary role to the words in print. The layout of the narrative also underscores the primacy of the word in the construction of the historical narrative. The images stand apart from the narrative text; they are not integral to the flow of the narrative itself. In contrast, the virtual exhibition of the Musha Incident is more multimedia in its presentation, interweaving photos and maps with words to construct a historical narrative. Most of the displayed visual images in the virtual exhibition were produced in 1930 or 1931, right after the incident took place (figure 10.5). It is apparent that they are meant to function as eyewitnesses to the historical event. The attraction of these photos lies in their highly documentary value. Although the naive belief in the ontological relationship between photos and historical truth should be questioned, the interplay between the verbal narrative produced in the present and the images from the historical past suggests a way of reconstructing history that is not quite like a word-based narrative. The section on the incident itself is particularly illustrative. Visual images occupy the prominent position, while words take up the secondary role. Arguably, words function to provide an explanation of the images from the past.

figure 10.5  Photos playing the major role in the historical account of the incident in the virtual exhibition 230  Literary Memories of Musha

This foregrounding of multimedia in the virtual exhibition, in contrast to the word-based narrative on Wikipedia, draws attention to the increasing importance of what Scott McQuire calls “photomnemonics” in historical representation.31 The camera has been associated with truth, and its ability to assert that “this has been” has granted photographic images a sense of certainty that few other material forms of memory can compete with.32 Taken as “evidence of the real,” photographic images are often employed in the attempt to claim empirical truth. Although critics have remarked on the semantic indeterminacy of photographic images and the myth of photographic objectivity,33 the inclusion of photographic images nevertheless affects the way that we approach a historical narrative. But a more urgent question about digital representation is raised by the now-delinked “Knowledge Map of the Musha Incident” (霧社事件知識地圖), which was originally inserted into the section “General Introduction to the Exhibition.” It indicates the place of an important piece of “born digital” information, now probably irretrievable due to the obsolescence of digital software (figure 10.6). We have here a good example of what Matthew G. Kirschenbaum calls the “.textual condition.”34 As the exhibition demonstrates, digital historical representation involves born-digital archives and physical

figure 10.6  The problem of transient digital software: a now irretrievable image from the now-delinked “Knowledge Map of the Musha Incident” Historical Representation in an Age of Wiki Writing and Digital Curation  231

relics from the past. The hybrid nature of historical archives is certainly nothing new, for historians have long faced the problem of dealing with a large variety of historical records of miscellaneous formats and materiality. However, the “.textual condition” generates new challenges and new questions of representation. The most daunting one is probably the rapid development of technology that renders new digital tools obsolete in a few years.35 Indeed, the once-popular animation tool Flash, which Kirschenbaum praises highly and sees as “rapidly colonizing large segments of the Web” in 2004,36 now has been superseded by other newly invented digital tools. As a result, the display of many Flash-constructed digital objects and websites becomes unstable or irretrievable. Preservation is “a channel of communication with the future,” as Arjun Sabharwal phrases it.37 Granted that digital preservation plays a crucial role in communicating the collective memory of a traumatic historical event like the Musha Incident to the future, the issue of the “temporal interoperability, which ensures that current systems would be able to interoperate with future systems,”38 should be placed squarely on the table. Unfortunately, as Daniel J. Cohen and Roy Rosenzweig frankly admit, historians are not the prime workers in this critical task; computer scientists, librarians, and archivists are.39 Two recommendations to ensure the sustainability of digital archives are proposed by Miguel Escobar Varela: one is “opening up the source code and sharing the collection,” and the other is using “Version Control Systems.”40 The missing part of the virtual exhibition reminds us of the important issue of interoperability when considering the sustainability of digital historical representation. T H E M U S H A I N C I D E N T O N H I S TO RY P I N

Finally, the discussion addresses the historiographical questions raised by the historical representation of the Musha Incident on Historypin.41 Compared with the virtual exhibition, the Musha Incident on Historypin (hereafter referred to as MIH) takes a step further in the visual turn. MIH displays one “tour” and nine “collections,” with more than sixty uploaded “pins.” The tour has a gallery of twelve photos related to the Musha Incident. Most of them are of historical sites, such as the place of the massacre on October 27, 1930; villages of the three tribes 232  Literary Memories of Musha

(Tgdaya, Toda, and Trugu) involved in the incident; the place where the dead body of the Tgdaya leader Mona Rudao was found; and key spots where the fighting between Indigenous warriors and Japanese soldiers took place. Photos of these historical locations appear on the right side of the screen, while the locations of these sites are “pinned” to the Google map on the left. Thus, MIH exemplifies the “cartographic imagination” in the recent paradigm shift in the production of historical knowledge, as discussed by N. Katherine Hayles.42 While cultural representations highlighting a historical narrative tend to emphasize linear temporality, cartographic imagination gestures toward a nonnarrative mode of historical representation.43 Rather than seeking to attract the users to the historical past through immersion in an appealing narrative, MIH introduces them to places associated with the incident. Users can zoom in to the map to identify the places in the gallery and compare old photos of the places with new photos to get a sense of their transformation (figure 10.7). In addition to the tour, MIH presents nine collections that provide information about Seediq culture, literary and filmic works on the incident, and short clips of oral-history documentaries. Particularly interesting are the short clips of oral history with Indigenous elders explaining key issues that affect the historical interpretation of the incident, such

figure 10.7  The depiction of the Musha Incident on Historypin Historical Representation in an Age of Wiki Writing and Digital Curation  233

as the meaning of gaya, the importance of headhunting and facial tattooing in Seediq culture. The Indigenous voices, offering interpretations of their culture in their own words, activate a powerful intervention in historical representation. In addition to these filmed oral histories, the collection “Seediq Culture” gives us a glimpse of several important aspects of Seediq cultural tradition, such as the so-called mouth harp, traditional weaving, and facial tattoos. The emphasis on “sound” in this particular collection, whether in the voices of Seediq people giving eyewitness accounts in their own language or the performance of dying traditional Seediq music, reminds us of the importance of sound in Indigenous culture and social experience. This aural aspect of culture and social experience tends to be left unaddressed not only in scholarship on print culture but also in digital humanities in general.44 As remarked by Jacques Derrida, “the technical structure of the archiving archive also determines the structure of the archivable content even in its very coming into existence and in its relationship to the future.”45 Archival technoscience determines to a large extent what is archivable. Sound, in particular, falls outside the domain of the archivable and the narratable in traditional history-writing in print. It now has a role to play in the reconstruction of the Musha Incident as a historical event. The ethicopolitical dimension of the reassertion of Indigenous oral tradition in digital archivization should be registered. It generates what Derrida calls an “opening” on the future,46 resurrecting the past and the lost voices of Indigenous societies so as to herald the “future-to-come” for Indigenous people. It is in this Derridean sense that the question of digital archivization should be conceptualized not simply as a question of the past, but as a question of the future. This question of digital archivization, as a question of the future, cannot be considered without addressing the issue of materiality in historical representation. It does make a difference when history is accessed on screen instead of being read on printed pages. As a digital representation, MIH collects a hybrid corpus of Musha Incident–related historical material. Its method of cultural mapping suggests a move from a textbased historical representation toward one that emphasizes the aural and visual dimensions of history reconstruction. As William J. Turkel, Kevin Kee, and Spencer Roberts remark, digital history is shifting focus 234  Literary Memories of Musha

“from text to more integrated means of conveying information.”47 The change in the material support of historical representation demands not only new ways of understanding the historical past, but also new methodological questions. It is noteworthy that, as more of an archive than a narrative, MIH aims less to provide a historical explanation of the Musha Incident as to make the historical archives of this traumatic event in a variety of material forms accessible to the general public. The tasks of interpretation and narrative formation, which are taken to be essential to humans’ search for meaning,48 fall to the users to perform. If MIH houses the archives of the Musha Incident, the users are asked to act as the “archons” to take up the task of interpreting these accessible archival documents. MIH testifies, in the words of N. Katherine Hayles, to “the transformative power that digital technologies can exert on a traditionally print-based field.”49 In its current shape, MIH remains relatively “simple.” How it will take advantage of the digital technology and evolve into a more sophisticated historical representation remains to be seen. C O DA

This chapter explored the new possibilities of making the Musha Incident accessible to the general public on the web and the historiographical questions that they generate. It examined the Chinese Wikipedia article of the Musha Incident, the virtual exhibition of the incident by Academia Sinica in Taiwan, and the Musha Incident on Historypin. These three websites exemplify new forms of generating and disseminating historical knowledge about the Musha Incident in the web age. We contend that the crowdsourcing character of the Musha Incident on Wikipedia dislocates the central question of “emplotment” in history studies. Because a historical narrative is forever mutating and assuming only temporary shapes through the negotiations of various editor-­ participants from often conflicting positions, the historical narrative no longer expresses the specific historical view of a historian who selects and “emplots” the selected material into a coherent narrative. Thus, rather than focusing on plot and characterization as we used to do with print and filmic historical narrative, we have a new set of historiographical questions: How does the Musha Incident as a collective Historical Representation in an Age of Wiki Writing and Digital Curation  235

history take shape through the negotiations among human editors? What mechanisms are at work, which make such a collective enterprise of historical representation possible? As the answers to these crucial questions cannot be found simply by reading the narrative text itself, the phrases “historical text” and “historical narrative” cease to be synonyms. A Wikipedia historical text of the Musha Incident is the combination of the historical narrative of the incident and all the statistics related to the compilation of the article. Participatory and open to the general public, it embodies collective history writing at work. The virtual exhibition of the Musha Incident constructed by Academia Sinica in Taiwan is a modest attempt to grapple with the potentials of digital representation. Basically modeled on traditional museum exhibition style, this digital exhibition highlights more than Wikipedia employing the hybrid nature of historical documents. The narrative of the incident itself interweaves visual images with verbal narration, thus underscoring the importance of “photomnemonics” in the construction of the historical past. History is not simply history “writing.” While calling attention to the role of multimedia in historical representation, the exhibition’s emphasis on copyrights reveals an attitude that runs counter to the open culture of Wikipedia. It calls attention to the sustainability of free culture. Sustainable creative commons can develop only through the mutual respect and mutual support between the users and producers of cultural commons. Another problem the exhibition exposes is the interoperability of the current systems and future systems. As digital historical representations become more and more prevalent in the new age, the question of how to tackle the irretrievable loss of these websites of cultural memory and heritages is an urgent issue. Finally, the Musha Incident on Historypin demonstrates a nonnarrative mode of historical representation as the selected digital tool features “collections” based on categorized archival documents and a “tour” operating with the Google map. In this case, “digital archivization,” rather than “historical narrative,” powers the historical representation. With the new archiving technology creating a space for sound in historical representation, Indigenous voices and oral tradition become archivable. This departure from historical representation in visual forms, including word- and image-based texts, is particularly significant for the reconstruction of a historical event such as the Musha Incident, 236  Literary Memories of Musha

which involves Indigenous people as key historical agents. The relationship between a digital archivization like MIH and the future of Indigenous culture and history deserves further study. Moreover, now that archives are made accessible online and open to the public, Indigenous people can assume the position of the archon to tell stories about their past with these open historical resources in order to herald the future of Indigenous culture. It is in this sense that digital archivization can be understood as an opening to the future. A study of these historical representations of the Musha Incident on the web indicates that new historiographical questions are emerging as a result of the change in archival technoscience. We need to find ways to reconfigure our relationship with history. In fact, the format of this chapter already reflects to some extent the impact of the new direction. To illustrate the point better, this chapter includes screenshots in the development of the argument. These screenshots function like quotes in print discussions. However, due to the material constraints of essay writing in print, it cannot take advantage of hyperextensions to make full-fledged demonstrations. If the kinetic experience of multimedia experience and navigating the historical sites on the Google map are crucial to the new experience of history, studies of this experience need to address the newness of historical representation with new tools. Logically, the material constraints of publishing in print should be an issue in studies of this kind. N OT E S 1. Hayden White, “The Historical Text as Literary Artifact,” in Critical Theory Since 1965, ed. Hazard Adams and Leroy Searle (Tallahassee: Florida State University Press, 1986), 397. 2. White, “The Historical Text as Literary Artifact,” 399–400. 3. White, “The Historical Text as Literary Artifact,” 398. 4. Claudio Fogu, “Digitalizing Historical Consciousness,” History and Theory, Theme 47 (May 2009): 107; Luke Tredinnick, “The Making of History: Remediating Historicized Experience,” in History in the Digital Age, ed. Toni Weller (New York and London: Routledge, 2013), 43. 5. Bertrans Gervais, “Is There a Text on This Screen? Reading in an Era of Hypertextuality,” in A Companion to Digital Literary Studies, ed. Ray Siemens and Susan Schreibman (West Sussex, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013), 191. Historical Representation in an Age of Wiki Writing and Digital Curation  237

6. N. Katherine Hayles, “How We Think: Transforming Power and Digital Technologies,” in Understanding Digital Humanities, ed. David M. Berry (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 50. 7. Michael Berry, A History of Pain: Trauma in Modern Chinese Literature and Film (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), 56. 8. For discussions on the issue of the Indigenous perspective in Seediq Bale, see Guo Mingzheng (郭明正), Truth, Bale: The Historical Truth and Journal About the Film Production of Seediq Bale (真相·巴萊：《賽德克·巴萊》的歷史真相與 隨拍札記) (Taipei: Yuanliou, 台北：遠流, 2011); Nakao Eki Pacidal, “The Face of the In-betweener: The Image of Indigenous History Researcher as Reflected in Seediq Bale (中間者之臉：《賽德克·巴萊》的原住民歷史研究者映像), NTU Humanitas Taiwanica (台大文史哲學報) 77 (2012): 183–85; Kuei-fen Chiu, “Violence and Indigenous Visual History: Interventional Historiography in Seediq Bale and Wushe, Chuanzhong Island,” in Taiwan Cinema, International Reception, and Social Change, ed. Kuei-fen Chiu, Ming-yeh T. Rawnsley, and Gary Rawnsley (London and New York: Routledge, 2017), 146–58. 9. See Guo, Truth, Bale; Iwan Nawi, Movie Script of Seediq Bale in the Seediq Toda Language (Kari Toda patas eyga Sediq balay, 賽德克巴萊賽德克語劇本書) (Taipei: Yushan publisher, 2014); Chiu, “Violence and Indigenous Visual History.” 10. Leo Ching, “Savage Construction and Civility Making: The Musha Incident and Aboriginal Representations in Colonial Taiwan,” Positions 8, no. 3 (2000): 795–818. 11. Michael Berry, “Musha 1930,” in A History of Pain: Trauma in Modern Chinese Literature and Film (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), 53–107. 12. Amanda Seligman, “Teaching Wikipedia Without Apologies,” in Writing History in the Digital Age, ed. Jack Dougherty and Kristen Nawrotzki (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2013), 127. 13. Shawn Graham, “The Wikiblitz: A Wikipedia Editing Assignment in a First-Year Undergraduate Class,” in Writing History in the Digital Age, 82. 14. See, for example, Roy Rosenzweig, Clio Wired: The Future of the Past in the Digital Age (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 61–62; Martha Saxton, “Wikipedia and Women’s History: A Classroom Experience,” in Writing History in the Digital Age, 89. 15. Rosenzweig, Clio Wired, 73. 16. Todd Presner, “Digital Humanities 2.0: A Report on Knowledge” (2010), https://cnx .org/contents/J0K7N3xH@6/Digital-Humanities-20-A-Report (accessed August 30, 2017), 11. 17. The full version of the manifesto is available at http://www.humanitiesblast.com/ manifesto/Manifesto_V2.pdf. 18. Rosenzweig, Clio Wired, 73. 238  Literary Memories of Musha

19. Rosenzweig, Clio Wired, 73–74. 2 0. Gervais, “Is There a Text on This Screen?” 190–91. 21. Gervais, “Is There a Text on This Screen?” 190. 22. Presner, “Digital Humanities 2.0,” 11. 23. Charlotte Lydia Riley, “Beyond Ctrl-C, Ctrl-V: Teaching and Learning History in the Digital Age,” in History in the Digital Age, 150. 24. The virtual exhibition of the Musha Incident is available at the url address: http:// knowledge.teldap.tw/focus/001005/ws1.htm 25. For the purpose of this large-scale national digital project, please visit http:// teldap.tw/en/index.html. 2 6. Astra Taylor, The People’s Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age (London: Fourth Estate, 2014), 146–73. 27. Taylor, The People’s Platform, 174. 28. Taylor, The People’s Platform, 169. 29. Taylor, The People’s Platform, 171. 3 0. Taylor, The People’s Platform, 174. 31. Scott McQuire, Visions of Modernity: Representation, Memory, Time and Space in the Age of the Camera (London: Sage, 1998), 108–12. 32. McQuire, Visions of Modernity, 110. 33. Scott McQuire, Visions of Modernity, 44; Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright, Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 16–19. 34. Matthew G Kirschenbaum, “The .textual Condition,” in Comparative Textual Media: Transforming the Humanities in the Postprint Era, ed. N. Katherine Hayles and Jessica Pressman (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2013), 53–70. 35. David Thomas and Valerie Johnson, “New Universes or Black Holes: Does Digital Change Anything?” in History in the Digital Age, 172–76. 36. Matthew G Kirschenbaum, “  ‘So the Colors Cover the Wires’: Interface, Aesthetics, and Usability.” in A Companion to Digital Humanities, ed. Susan Schreibman, Ray Siemens, and John Unsworth (Wiley Online Library, 2004), http:// onlinelibrary.wiley.com.ap.lib.nchu.edu.tw:2048/doi/10.1002/9780470999875 .ch34/pdf (accessed August 23, 2017). 37. Arjun Sabharwal, Digital Curation in the Digital Humanities: Preserving and Promoting Archival and Special Collections (Waltham, MA: Chandos Publishing, 2015), 15. 38. Sabharwal, Digital Curation in the Digital Humanities, 15. 39. Daniel J. Cohen and Roy Rosenzweig, Digital History: A Guide to Gathering, Preserving, and Presenting the Past in the Web (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), 245. Historical Representation in an Age of Wiki Writing and Digital Curation  239

40. Miquel Escobar Varela, “The Archive as Repertoire: Transience and Sustainability in Digital Archives,” Digital Humanities Quarterly 10, no. 4, 2016, http://www .digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/10/4/000269/000269.html# (accessed August 21, 2017). 41. To view this site, visit http://wushe-incident.blogspot.com/. 42. N. Katherine Hayles, How We Think: Digital Media and Contemporary Technogenesis (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2012), 33. 43. Hayles, How We Think, 33. 44. John F. Barber, “Sound and Digital Humanities: Reflecting on a DHSI Course,” Digital Humanities Quarterly 10, no. 1 (2016), http://www.digitalhumanities .org/dhq/vol/10/1/000239/000239.html (accessed August 23, 2017). 45. Jacques Derrida, “Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression,” Diacritics 25, no. 2 (summer 1995): 17. 46. Derrida, “Archive Fever,” 27. 47. William J. Turkel, Kevin Kee, and Spencer Roberts, “A Method for Navigating the Infinite Archive,” in History in the Digital Age, 64. 48. Hayles, How We Think, 180. 49. Hayles, How We Think, 197.

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PA RT I V

Musha in Cultural Dialogue

C H A P T E R E L EV E N

Fiction and Fieldwork In Conversation with Wu He on Remains of Life Michael Berry

The Musha Incident (霧社事件) of 1930 has been the subject of numerous stories by writers like Zhang Shenqie (張深切) and Zhong Zhaozheng (鍾肇政) and filmmakers like Wei Te-sheng (魏德聖), and it was even the subject of a heavy metal concept album by Chthonic (閃靈), but no one has provided as unique a portrayal of the event as Wu He’s (舞鶴) 1999 novel Remains of Life (餘生 Yusheng). Written in the first person, the novel chronicles the narrator’s observations and encounters in the village of Riverisle (川中島 Chuanzhongdao/Kawanakajima), where survivors of a massacre that occurred in the wake of the 1930 Musha Incident had been exiled more than seventy years earlier. Throughout the novel, the narrator juxtaposes his experience in Riverisle with musings about the Musha Incident, explorations of historical memory, and his unbridled imagination. While the history of the Musha Incident has long been marginalized, Wu He’s novel takes an uncompromising stance in its narrative, employing a stream-of-consciousness form, radical experiments with punctuation and the Chinese language, and a remarkable three-part structure for the purpose of creating a new literary space for imagining historical trauma. Remains of Life won numerous prizes in Taiwan, including the Wu Zhuoliu Literature Prize (吳濁流文學獎), the Lai He Prize (賴和文 學獎), and the China Times Literature Award (中國時報文學獎), and it

has been translated into several languages. My translation of Remains of Life into English was published by Columbia University Press in 2017, and in the following conversation, I discuss the writing process with Wu He, who also shares his views on the Musha Incident. When was the first time you learned about the Musha Incident? I first read about the Musha Incident in my high school textbook. I grew up during the 1960s, which was a dark time under an authoritarian regime, so “imagination” became a tool I used to escape from reality. When I thought about that bloody battle that occurred deep in the mountains of central Taiwan all those years ago, I was deeply moved— especially since it was an incident in which Taiwanese Indigenous groups were standing up to a colonial power, even though they knew that there would be no going back and they would be facing certain death. Later, during my college years, I became very interested in the Tapani Incident (西來庵事件 Xilai’an shijian) of 1915, which occurred in Tainan. Since I lived in Tainan at the time, besides reading up on the incident, I also did some fieldwork. Over the course of this incident, the Japanese had slaughtered many Chinese in particularly brutal ways, and in its aftermath, they sentenced many people to death or heavy prison terms. During that time, the Chinese in Taiwan had already learned the difficult lesson that using violence to resist the Japanese was a futile effort. Instead, the Chinese gradually began to push their political agenda forward using nonviolent methods, like lobbying the parliament and establishing a “Cultural Association.” But no one anticipated that fifteen years later, there would be a large-scale, armed, anti-Japanese resistance movement that would take place among the Indigenous community in the mountains of Taiwan. The fighting that ensued was extremely brutal, making the Musha Incident not only the final act of resistance, but one of the most archetypal attempts to fight the occupation of an unjust political power. As I adjusted my perspective from the Tapani Incident and looked up to the mountains of Musha, what I was seeing was no longer a fantasy of my youth, but a living and breathing historical reality. During your time serving in the military, you were stationed near Musha. You once told me about how you would often climb up the small hill behind Mona Rudao’s tomb and reflect on the uprising 244  Mu sh a in Cul t ural D i al o g u e

that he led. Could you talk about that period and why Mona Rudao’s story had such a strong impact on you? During my time in the military, I spent one year stationed at the base of a mountain just outside of Puli (埔里). While there, I got in the habit of going for long walks along the riverbed, and on Sunday afternoons after lunch, I would follow the river until I got to the Musha Highway. On the highway, there was a bus stop near Danan Bridge where you could catch a bus to Musha. I would usually arrive in Musha before 3:30; I would walk along the highway to the Musha Elementary School and walk around the sports field [where the 1930 massacre took place]. At the time, I was almost thirty years old and had been studying the history of Taiwan’s political and social movements for several years. As I strolled around the school grounds, I would think about all of those historical facts I had studied. That really had quite an impact on me, and I could really sense how we in contemporary Taiwan were still walking amid the bloody shadow of what happened in 1930. Then, after visiting the elementary school, I would turn around and go up the steps and, after crossing a small highway, I would be facing the traditional-style memorial gate carved with the words Bixue yingfeng (碧血英風), or “The Great Hero Who Shed His Blood for a Just Cause.” During that time, in the late 1970s, Taiwan’s economy had only just begun to take off, and the area surrounding Mona Rudao’s tomb was completely deserted; not only were there no tourists, but that was also before those big corporations began donating money to erect those iron statues which now stand. Surrounding his grave, there were only tall trees and the yellow earth of the hill. I would stand still before his grave before circling around in deep thought, occasionally stopping to read the narrative about the incident that was carved on the memorial tablet. I would stay there until dusk, sitting on a large stone to the right of his grave; I would sit there gazing at his tomb, the memorial tablet, and, further down in the distance, the memorial gate, the highway, the lake, and the sports field at the elementary school. I would be wearing my military uniform, and there was usually no one around. I just sat there thinking about the incident and Mona Rudao, the massacre, and the sadness and loneliness left behind in its wake. Once it got dark, I would climb down the hill, stroll past the gate, turn left onto the highway, and walk over to the market near the bus stop Fiction an d Fieldw or k   245

and order a bowl of noodles from one of the stalls there before getting a bus back to Puli. I can’t say for sure if this was a kind of “Sunday ritual” for me, just as I can’t be certain in what ways my life has been tied to this incident, and I would never say that Mona Rudao and I have any type of strange connection. But there was one year in the middle of winter when, just as I was walking up the steps from the elementary school, I saw a flurry of cherry blossoms spraying down like snowflakes. Years later, when I was writing Remains of Life, I wrote: “Many years ago the Japanese planted cherry blossoms here and now they shed their flowers for Mona Rudao and he alone to see . . .” From the time you served in the military near Puli to your later visits to Riverisle to conduct fieldwork for your novel, there was an interval of more than twenty years. What was it that brought you back to Musha twenty years later? After I completed my military service, I spent ten years in isolation, where I cut myself off from society to read, write, and take walks. I didn’t start publishing again until 1991. Then, in 1997, I was out traveling around when I somehow came across an Indigenous reservation; when I got to the back of the village, I noticed a small “Memorial to the Remains of Life” (餘生紀念碑), and I suddenly realized that I was in Riverisle. Before that time, I had never considered writing about the Musha Incident. I simply didn’t feel I had the ability to turn what very limited historical documents I had access to into a piece of literature. Anyway, by the time I came across that memorial tablet, it was already dusk, and I stood there staring at the words “Remains of Life”; it’s not like there was a sudden flash of light, but at that moment, I realized I now had an angle from which to approach the Musha Incident. I could do so from the perspective of the survivors, the “remains of life.” In September of 1998, I returned to Riverisle to live there; I would get to bed early each day and get up early every morning, then I would go for long walks into the afternoon. Those ten years of isolation taught me how to ponder things on a deeper level, so the following day, I would write down all of my thoughts, feelings, and observations in a notebook. A few years before that, I had spent three years living among the Rukai (魯凱族) tribe at Kucapungane (好茶部落), so I was able to borrow from 246  Mu sh a in Cul t ural D i al o g u e

what I learned there and apply it to Riverisle. As a novelist, I didn’t have a “fieldwork agenda,” I didn’t conduct any investigations or interviews; instead I just lived my life there in Riverisle like everyone else who lived there. I tried to conduct myself in such a low-key manner that most of the people who lived there didn’t even realize what I was doing renting a room in their village, but seeing what I did every day, they must have all assumed I was harmless. Before you started living in Riverisle, did you do any special research or collect any materials related to the Musha Incident? A week after I first came across that “Memorial to the Remains of Life” in 1997, I rented a room there; it was a small, Western-style apartment with a large living room and a spacious kitchen. I didn’t do any preparation; I just brought along a couple of books, two of which were research materials related to the Musha Incident; then there was an illustrated biography of Georgia O’Keefe, and I had one copy of my 1996 novel Meditations on Ahbang Kalusi (思索阿邦 卡魯斯 Sisuo Abang Kalusi). At the time, there were very little materials about the Musha Incident that were available; it was only later that several people from Riverisle began to publish oral histories and memoirs about the incident, which I never read. But that didn’t bother me because I had three years of “fieldwork experience” from my time in Kucapungane with the Rukai to draw from. You could call that “creative fiction fieldwork”; it allowed me to produce Sisuo Abang Kalusi even though I had no plans to write a novel before going there. My time in Kucapungane allowed me to realize that the amount of research materials you have at your disposal is just for one’s background understanding; once you are out in the field, many of the holes in the research and points that lead to lingering confusion are quickly resolved by life itself. But unlike my time in Kucapungane, when I decided to rent an apartment in Riverisle, I knew that I was going to write a novel about the Musha Incident, and I knew it was going to be called Remains of Life. When you went to Riverisle, you were essentially an outsider, and in Remains of Life, you very self-consciously confront your identity as an outsider. As you were trying to enter the everyday life of the people there, what challenges did your identity as a Han Chinese present? Fiction an d Fieldw or k   247

I grew up in a city in western Taiwan, so as far as those Indigenous people living in Riverisle and other central mountain regions are concerned, I am naturally an “outsider.” If one tries too hard to fit in, it will only be viewed as a superficial gesture; but as a novelist, I am not in a hurry. I would go to sleep just after dusk and rise at dawn, taking one walk each morning and another each afternoon; I gradually blended into the landscape of Riverisle, I breathed the air there, and over time began to strike up conversations with the locals during my walks. They felt comfortable around me and never felt as if they were “being interviewed,” so it was easy to communicate with them and share deep feelings. So blending in as an “outsider” was never really a challenge for me; it was simply an extension of my daily life. For instance, there was one afternoon when a strong, middle-aged man from the village knocked on my door, we sat down together in the living room and ended up talking from the early afternoon all the way up until dusk; he told me his entire life story. You lived in Riverisle on and off for around two years. Did you write Remains of Life while you were living there? Or did you do most of the writing after you left? What was the writing process like? I lived in Riverisle during the autumn and winter months for two years. I ended my eight years in Tainan in September 1998, packed some simple things, and moved to Riverisle. I tried to maintain the same kind of lifestyle I had before, but there are a lot of things from life that gradually creep into your inner world, and the details of how my thought process works gradually became clearer. Sitting there at the big dinner table in the kitchen, I put all of those ideas on paper, highlighting each section with a different title in red. When I left Riverisle in the winter of 1998, I knew that Remains of Life was already complete inside me; it had already permeated me body and mind. In April of 1999, I began to write Remains of Life in Tainan. I would begin writing each afternoon at 4:00 and continue until 11:00  p.m.— that’s seven hours of nonstop writing every day. I completed the manuscript on May 25, 1999. Remains of Life is the only work of fiction that I never revised; I was writing in such a focused state that even if I wrote a character or date wrong, I didn’t want to go back to change it.

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In what other ways was your writing process for Remains of Life different from your other work? I was more focused writing Remains of Life than any other novel I ever wrote; it was also written more quickly than any of my other novels. In August of the same year, I wrote another novel entitled Ghost and Goblin (鬼兒與阿妖 Gui’er yu Ayao), where I tried to continue the same writing pattern as Remains of Life. It was also a fairly smooth process, but it was a book that dealt with smaller themes, and by 9:00 each night, I would already complete my work for the day. I would write between 2,000 and 3,000 Chinese characters a day, saving the rest for the following day. In 1991, I bid farewell to my days of isolation in Danshui (淡水) and returned to Tainan. The new works I wrote, such as the short stories “Digging for Bones” (拾骨 “Shigu”), “Sadness” (悲傷 “Beishang”), and Remains of Life, weren’t like those stories I wrote when I was younger, which were filled with inner struggle and a process of meticulous craftsmanship; instead it seemed as if during those ten years, I had learned how to temper my pen. My psychological state and understanding had undergone a huge transformation; writing was now something that emerged from my life; everything seemed to naturally align itself. The form and structure of Remains of Life are quite unique: there are no paragraph breaks, your employment of grammatical marks is quite unorthodox, and you weave the book’s three main themes together in a truly remarkable way. Can you talk about the book’s structure and your experiments with grammar? How did the three themes emerge? Did these elements emerge over the course of writing? Or were all of these features designed in advance? There were three topics that I decided were essential for me to cover in Remains of Life when I first went to Riverisle to conduct my fieldwork: (1) the “Musha Incident” and the “Second Musha Incident,” (2) the quest of my neighbor Girl (姑娘), and (3) the remains of life that I witnessed and encountered. I didn’t break these three themes up with paragraph or chapter breaks because they all exist contemporaneously within the continuum of the “remains of life.” It is a one, two, three, one two, three, one, two, three structure that keeps repeating, but I use periods to indicate when one theme ends and another begins. During my ten years in

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Danshui, I would write each morning, and because none of that was for publication purposes, those writings tended to be extremely experimental. It was only in 1991, when I began to publish my work again, that I discovered the value of “experimental form,” which somehow became a signature aspect of my style. This continued all the way up until Remains of Life, and starting with my novel Chaos and Confusion (亂迷 Luanmi), it became something I was consciously pursuing. Experimentalism brought a “liberation to my writing,” but the relationship between each section in Remains of Life is entirely dependent upon the relationship between the “cadence of sounds (聲韻).” Every Chinese character has a sound and a phonic rhyme scheme to it; a string of characters creates a series of sounds and rhymes that combine together; this “literary soundscape (小說之韻)” is something that I first discovered when I wrote my first short story in the 1990s, entitled “Digging for Bones.” Later I was able to verify what I was trying to do and take it further with the short story “Sadness.” By the time I was writing Remains of Life, I had a very clear understanding of this river of sounds that was flowing through my writing; it was like a never-ending stream, trickling through my words. But this isn’t something I intentionally hone through my literary form; it is just something that naturally exists in literary prose. When I was young, I used to write poetry; back then I thought that only poetry had this kind of rhyme and sound, it was only after I was in my forties and left Danshui that I became conscious of the rhyme and sound present in fiction. A novel like Remains of Life is inundated with this “literary soundscape,” which I find to be the aspect of the novel’s form most worth paying attention to. How did living in Riverisle and writing Remains of Life transform your view of the Musha Incident? Everyday life in Riverisle and living amongst the “remains of life” led me to ponder Mona Rudao’s intentions when he launched the Musha Incident; was it a just and appropriate action? This is something I pondered repeatedly during my fieldwork and continued to investigate, even though it came with many difficulties. Of course, I had my initial thoughts on the matter, but those needed to be fleshed out and authenticated over the dialectical process of fieldwork and writing. Eventually,

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my writing pushed me to my final conclusion: I don’t deny that it was “just” (正當性 zhengdang xing), but I don’t believe it was “appropriate” (適切性 shiqie xing). But this is not the conclusion I initially anticipated because it goes against how most historians have appraised the incident. Historians tend to completely embrace the meaning and impact the Musha Incident has had in history, but they completely overlook the dark cloud of the “Second Musha Incident,” which brings a much more ambiguous meaning to what happened. If we can go back in time and replay history; if Mona Rudao could predict Japan’s defeat fifteen years after what happened in 1930, I don’t think he would have ever launched the Musha Incident. And so when I think about those warriors who were pushed to the brink with nowhere to retreat, and those Seediq women and children running desperately through the forest on their way to their death, I still feel an unspeakable pain. It has been twenty years since Remains of Life was initially published. During this time, Taiwan has implemented policy changes that have changed the circumstances for many Indigenous people, and thanks to your book and several other books and films, the Musha Incident has become a major keyword of public debate. During these twenty years, do you find yourself still pondering the Musha Incident? Has your view changed in the wake of all the new materials that have recently come to light? Once Remains of Life was published, it entered into society, and as to whether or not that book affected the public’s understanding and grasp of the Musha Incident, I think the impact is quite limited. After all, there are not a lot of readers that read this type of highbrow literature. The intrinsic quality of a literary work almost always determines everything that happens to the work. A writer who goes out of his way to push his work can lead to a form of overmarketing that misleads readers into thinking it is a “must-read novel,” but in the end it is just another overblown, mediocre book. I suspect that most readers only remember that Remains of Life has something to do with the Musha Incident, but otherwise in their constantly moving, fast-paced, economically dominated lives, a book like this is quickly forgotten. I’m sure they

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don’t even remember what happened during the Musha Incident or any of the details; in the end, all most people know is that Musha is a place somewhere between Puli and Qingjing Farm. But over the past decade, thanks to Wei Te-sheng’s film Warriors of the Rainbow: Seediq Bale (賽德克·巴萊 Saideke balai), and other policy changes, it really does feel as if the Musha Incident has become a “hot topic” in contemporary Taiwan society. What do you think is the biggest misunderstanding about the incident today? I’m not convinced it has become a “hot topic”; it is just like the 1947 February 28 Incident [another historical trauma that has also been largely politicized]; over the course of a few short decades, it has been reduced to an empty shell used to annual commemoration ceremonies. The Musha Incident lived on in the heart of Mona Rudao’s daughter Mahong, staying with her throughout her life, but, as time slips by, Mahong’s descendants gradually grow further and further away from what happened; in the end, all that is left is a vague impression. What does writing leave behind? What does art leave behind? I’m afraid it is just a portrait of the contemporary moment when that work of art was created, but that is not something that one can rely upon in the future because the future forever remains outside our grasp. N OT E An earlier version of this interview was published in Chinese Literature Today 9, no. 1 (2020): 98-102.

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C H A P T E R T W E LV E

Heavy Metal Headhunt An Interview with Chthonic’s Freddy Lim Michael Berry

Formed in 1995, Chthonic (閃靈) is a Taiwanese heavy metal band made up of the core members Freddy Lim (林昶佐), Doris Yeh (葉湘怡), and Jessie Liu (劉苼匯). Beginning in the late 1990s, Chthonic released a series of albums—from 1999’s Where the Ancestors’ Souls Gathered (祖 靈之流 Zuling zhi liu) to 2018’s Battlefields of Asura (政治 Zhengzhi)— which established them as one of the most successful and influential heavy metal bands from Asia. In 2005, Chthonic released the concept album Seediq Bale (賽德克·巴萊 Saideke balai)，which explored the Musha Incident within the context of Seediq myths and legends. The album was one of Taiwan’s most successful musical exports; an English-language version was released in 2006, and the following year Chthonic joined Ozzfest, a large scale, multiact heavy metal tour where they performed music from Seediq Bale throughout the United States. Through their heavy metal intervention, Chthonic introduced the Musha Incident to a new global audience. In solidarity with Wei Te-sheng’s attempts to fund what would turn into the blockbuster film Seediq Bale, Chthonic employed early footage that Wei shot in their music videos from the concept album. This interview with Freddy Lim took place on March 18, 2018, while he was on a tour of the United States, not as the lead vocalist and chief lyricist of Chthonic, but as a member of the Taiwan Legislative Yuan.

Just before delivering a presentation of Taiwan politics, Lim took some time to reflect on Seediq Bale. Starting in the 1970s, we started to see a series of Western rock and metal bands produce bold concept albums: over the years, we have seen many works in this genre, from Pink Floyd’s The Wall to Iron Maiden’s Powerslave and Queensrÿche’s Operation Mindcrime. However, in Chinese and Taiwanese rock music, there are very few examples of bands exploring the concept album format. Can you talk about what inspired you to start experimenting with the format of a uniquely Taiwanese concept album? I had actually been listening to international metal bands for a long time, especially those European-based bands, and they tend to put out a lot of concept albums. Some of the bands that share a similar style with us include the British band Cradle of Filth and the Norwegian band Dimmu Borgir, both of which have released several concept albums. When I was in college, I started listening to a lot of extreme metal, where they employ a lot of screaming. I gradually got into the European metal bands and started listening to all of those concept albums. Some of them are characterized as Viking metal, which usually are focused on Scandinavian myths and legends. I always gravitated to those stories, which tend to have expansive narratives that require you to listen through the entire album. In some ways, it is a very cinematic experience. Of course, music doesn’t have as many details as film, but it is also a similarly pleasurable experience. So after I formed my own band, I started to use this same concept album format to write songs. I don’t know of any other Taiwanese bands that explored the concept album format before Chthonic. I don’t think anyone else ever did that. When was the first time you heard about the Musha Incident? I must have been in elementary school; they had something about it in our history textbook. But I wasn’t a very good student back then, so whatever was written in those textbooks didn’t leave much of an impression on me. I didn’t care about those kinds of things back then.

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Can you talk about how the album Seediq Bale came to be? What were the factors that led you to take the Musha Incident as the backdrop for this album? Since I didn’t pay too much attention to what the schoolbooks said when I was a kid, I only had a vague understanding about what had happened. But I knew that the Nationalist Party used these stories as examples of the anti-Japanese spirit. But by the time I went to college, I began to read a lot of books about local Taiwanese history and learn about the myths and legends of Taiwan’s Indigenous communities. Back when I was a kid, I always loved the Ming dynasty fantasy novel Investiture of the Gods (封神榜 Fengshen bang) and all kinds of other myths and ghost stories from China and Japan. So later, when I began to read more about Taiwanese local culture, I discovered that I also had a strong interest in Indigenous myths. I read all kinds of stories from various Taiwanese Indigenous groups. Gradually, I started to understand the details behind all of those stories, like the legend of how the Tsou and Bunon fought over Jade Mountain. All of those stories were extremely appealing to me because they were stories and myths that were all born here in this land. I found them very fascinating. That is what led me to rediscover the Musha Incident and start to look at what happened from the perspective of how the Indigenous people in Taiwan understood the story. When you look at it from their perspective, it is a very different sentiment that you come away with. That’s because I was now hearing the story from the Seediq perspective and not the Nationalists. The meaning was completely different, and it really struck me on many different levels. It led me to discover the trauma and pain that had played out here on this land. It also made me realize that we never really understood the true history of what once occurred here on this land. That is one of the reasons that led me to start thinking about turning this history into a concept album. But when I started out, I wasn’t set on writing about the Musha because there were actually quite a few different concepts I was exploring at that time. What put me on the path to commit to writing about Musha was in 2003 or 2004, when I met Wei Te-sheng. We became friends, and after I saw the short film he had produced [about the Musha Incident],

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I decided to move up my plan to make an album about the incident in order to help him promote his film. That was when he had just completed his trailer, which he was using as an online fundraiser to generate interest in and support for what would become Seediq Bale. Right. He was still in the fundraising phase back them. We also hoped that we could help bring his project to the attention of more young people in Taiwan. You mentioned using footage from Wei’s Seediq Bale trailer in your music video, and the title of the album obviously shares the name with the film. Could you talk a bit more about the relationship between the album and film? There must have been a lot of interchange at play? That’s right; there was quite a lot of interplay going on. But later, Wei became quite busy with the film, and we had less interaction as the project moved forward. But we would often discuss things with him. Just before the [2012 presidential] election, he was quite busy. But when he would go to those various symposiums and conferences to talk about his film, he would always wear a Chthonic T-shirt! (laughs) Later, we all became consumed in our own projects, but at least at that early stage, we spent a lot of time together. And I have continued to support his later films over the years. What kind of research on the Musha Incident did you do in preparation for this project? I read quite a lot of materials about the Musha Incident, including Deng Shian-yang’s books and Qiu Ruolong’s graphic novel. But the most important things I learned came from a friend of mine who worked with the Committee for the Advancement of Indigenous Peoples’ Rights. We first met when I was in college, because even back then I had an interest in Indigenous culture and had a few friends from that community. That friend of mine was a Seediq, and he really helped when it came to allowing me to understand his community’s stories and perspective on things.

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You actually employed a lot of the Seediq language on the album; what was that process like? It was actually that Seediq friend I just mentioned who helped me write all of the Seediq lyrics. He went home and got some help from his mother and grandmother, and they helped me realize this concept. I jotted down my ideas in Chinese and explained to my friend that this was the main gist of what I was trying to express, which was filled with angry emotions. Then I put it to music. Using Chinese would have been strange, which is why I asked my friend to translate those sections into Seediq. Besides translating those Seediq lyrics, he also recorded them for me, so I could learn them. Since the Musha Incident was a tragedy that befell the Seediq people, as someone coming from a non-Indigenous background, did you have any reservations when it came to approaching this subject matter? It was really a learning process for me. It was also a fairly slow process. But whenever I approach subject matter that touches on Indigenous culture, I am always extremely careful. This is not something relegated to the example of Seediq Bale; whether it be in Taiwan or anywhere in the world, whenever you touch on Indigenous subject matter, you need to always proceed with care and respect. You need to be extra careful. So throughout the process of working on the album, I stayed in close touch with my Seediq friends because they are the ones being repressed by Taiwan society. It has been like this for them for hundreds of years; so you need to proceed in a way that tells their story while also winning the trust and respect of Indigenous communities. This is of fundamental importance. For so many years, the Musha Incident has been used as a political tool: during the Japanese colonial period, it was used to prove just how “barbaric” and “uncivilized” Indigenous people were; the Nationalists used the incident to promote the Chinese people’s “anti-Japanese spirit,” and the People’s Progressive Party used it to emphasize Taiwan’s “local consciousness.” That’s right; and no one ever brings the focus back to the Indigenous communities themselves. That’s why we have to always be extremely

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careful when approaching this subject matter—not just for this album. That is also the case when I am interacting with my Indigenous friends; I often think about how I can help them. As a legislator, I am always thinking of ways to advocate for them. Whenever they request I push something forward on their behalf in the Legislative Yuan, I always make sure to keep their interests at the core. This is essential. It is very different from the sentiment of “I want to help them as an outsider”; they need to be at the center. So when I worked on Seediq Bale, I was in a process of moving forward, continually learning and pondering how to play a role that was the most productive so I could make the right choices. One of the major differences between your narrative of the Musha Incident in Seediq Bale and that of other artists who have attempted to portray that period of history is your emphasis on traditional Seediq culture and myth. Can you talk about your decision to root your album in traditional myths and legends? This just goes back to my original interest in myth. This is also tied to the aesthetic beauty of metal. That’s why so many heavy metal and extreme metal albums emphasize stories about myth, fantasy, and the spiritual. While on some level, your album is completely removed from the actual historical events that occurred, because Indigenous culture is not based on text but on storytelling, myth, and legends to convey history, the narrative strategy employed in Seediq Bale is in some way closer to the Seediq people’s storytelling traditions. That’s right; and it leaves a lot more room for the imagination. You simply can’t approach it the same way they do in school textbooks. How did your Seediq friends respond to the album after they heard it? My friend [who translated the lyrics] thought it was OK, but he isn’t really into that kind of metal music. (laughs) Most of my Indigenous friends know that I was utilizing the aesthetic techniques of metal to approach this incident. But the younger generation seems to really like it; they are more open to metal as a genre. Those from the older 258  Mu sh a in C ul t ural D i al o g u e

generations never heard anything like this in their life; but they know what I was trying to do, so they are OK with it. But they will never be metal fans. When the album was released, international fans of your music had never even heard of the “Musha Incident,” yet because of this album’s success and you touring behind the album on Ozzfest, there were suddenly hordes of global metal fans around the world who entered the world of the Musha Incident through Seediq Bale. Do you ever have any concerns that introducing this sensitive page in Taiwanese history to so many people around the world through the platform of metal will leave them with a twisted or warped impression of that history? What they are primarily interested in is the genre of heavy metal. So what is most important is how you write your songs and realize your concept. Most Taiwanese, and especially those Seediq that I have spoken to, all feel that their voices have a right to be heard globally. Is what we express as precise as what they have written in the history textbooks? I don’t think my friends require me to be held up to that kind of a level. They all know that this is a metal show. They know what we are dealing with. But before I got started on this, I made sure to communicate very clearly with everyone, so the whole process was quite transparent and open. Taiwan later passed a new law entitled “The Act on Taiwan Indigenous Traditional Intellectual Creations” (原住民族傳統智慧創作專 用權), which basically states that if you want to use some aspect of Indigenous culture for a creative work, you need to seek approval from the relevant Indigenous group. Although that law wasn’t in place when we made Seediq Bale, we actually retroactively went through that process. Owing to this newly enacted provision, I needed to get representatives from the Seediq National Assembly to sign a rights release form. Even before that law had been enacted, I had tried hard to maintain a positive relationship with the Seediq people; whenever they raised any suggestions, I always did my best to accommodate them. In fact, I even changed the lyrics to one of the songs on the album based on their feedback. There was one song entitled “Indigenous Laceration” or 「黥面卸」 which uses a term that is used to refer to facial branding in premodern China; He av y Met al He adhun t   259

from the perspective of heavy metal, the term worked; it sounded cool and conveyed an aggressive feeling. However, the Seediq National Assembly objected to its use; they found it offensive to their culture. Instead, they suggested I change the lyrics and song title to「紋面卸」 which is a more typical way to refer to facial tattooing. From that point forward, I changed the lyrics to「紋面卸」. Whenever we rerelease that album, I will certainly change it. That is something I publicly committed to, and everyone is aware of it. So now when I sing that song, I always use the revised lyrics. But the most important thing for us is to maintain an open and friendly line of communication to understand one another. As you perform songs from Seediq Bale internationally over the years, have you found that global audiences have gradually begun to show interest and curiosity about what happened in Musha all those years ago? (laughs) Not necessarily! (laughs) That’s just how the genre of heavy metal is. It is like when I was a kid in Taiwan listening to Viking metal—I never really cared about what most of the lyrics were about. It was only because I had a personal fascination with the mythological elements that I would sometimes go to the library to do research into Scandinavian mythology. Although I was certainly in the minority [in exploring the deeper meanings of the lyrics], I’m sure that there are also some people abroad doing that with our lyrics. I sometimes even get texts from fans asking me about that era of Taiwan history. But most of our audience members are just there to hear the music; they want to experience the power of the music but don’t necessarily go deeper into the lyrics. Seediq Bale was released in both Taiwanese and English-language versions. Were these recorded simultaneously? Besides the different languages and lyrics, was the rest of the mix the same? We recorded the English version later; that came almost two years after the initial recording was completed. We had actually done an English edition of our second album before that. We had discussed the issues of language with our foreign record label at the very beginning; we talked about whether to use English, Taiwanese, or Chinese for the

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songs. In principle, most international record companies want you to have an English-language edition for the global market. So that was our main consideration. How long was the entire creative process for Seediq Bale, from the initial research and writing stage through recording and production? The whole thing took at least two years; from 2003 through 2005, I was fully concentrated on this project. And what were the biggest challenges you encountered during the creative process? Actually the biggest challenge had to do with changes that occurred in our band lineup during that time. Our original drummer and keyboard player both left the band during that period. But the actual creative process was relatively smooth; as long as I can get into my creative mode, I am able to write quite quickly. But the biggest challenges had to do with the lineup changes. I noticed that several of your music videos were directed by Cheng Wen-tang (鄭文堂), who has also directed numerous documentary and feature films that highlight the plight of Taiwanese Indigenous groups. Did he play a role in your vision or understanding of the Musha Incident? He is a close friend, but he didn’t really impact things on that level. We didn’t really discuss the Musha Incident with him much.

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C H A P T E R T H I RT E E N

Televising the Musha Incident Wan Jen on the Miniseries Dana Sakura Michael Berry

Wan Jen (萬仁) burst onto the scene in 1983 as part of the New Taiwan Cinema movement; his short film The Taste of Apples (蘋果的 滋味 Pingguo de ziwei) was part of the omnibus project The Sandwich Man (兒子的大玩偶 Erzi de da wan’ou), which helped redefine cinema in Taiwan. Over the ensuing decades, Wan directed a series of provocative and politically engaged films that has established him as one of the most vital cinematic voices in Taiwan. From classic works of the New Taiwan Cinema period like Ah Fei (油麻菜籽 Youma caizi, 1984) to Super Citizen Ko (超級大國民 Chaoji da guomin, 1995), his films would often broach the subject of sensitive historical traumas like the White Terror. In 2004, for the first time in his career, Wan directed a television miniseries—a twenty-episode exploration of the Musha Incident entitled Dana Sakura (風中緋櫻 Fengzhong feiying), which was adapted from a nonfiction book by the historian Deng Shian-yang. The following public discussion with Wan Jen took place in October 2017, during a conference at UCLA; here, we explore the adaptation process and Wan’s interpretation of the Musha Incident. Let’s start by having you talk about the journey that led you to Dana Sakura, from your early understanding of the Musha Incident to the adaptation process and production.

I was born in 1950, and ever since I was a little boy, all of my textbooks would discuss the Musha Incident. But besides the basic points, like Mona Rudao was an anti-Japanese hero, there weren’t many other details included. The Nationalist government had basically transformed the entire incident into a patriotic war against the Japanese. To get a sense of how the Nationalists framed him, all you have to do is go to the Anti-Japanese Monument dedicated to Mona Rudao in Musha and take one look at the Chinese-style gate they erected, which is inscribed with the words “The Hero Who Shed His Blood for a Just Cause” (碧血英雄). Ever since childhood, we were taught that the Musha Incident was an anti-Japanese action connected with the War of Resistance against Japan during World War II. In reality, the Musha Incident had absolutely nothing to do with Han Chinese; it was an incident in which the Indigenous Seediq people struggled against the Japanese occupying forces. The Musha Incident is the single most important act of resistance led by Indigenous people during Japan’s fifty years of colonization of Taiwan. This incident was so important because it occurred in 1930, thirty-five years after Japan had successfully occupied Taiwan; the Japanese thought that the entire Indigenous population had already been tamed—even the most difficult group to bring under their control, the Seediq people, had been designated a “model tribe.” The reservation there had become a model tourist destination for Japanese tourists visiting Taiwan, and yet that is precisely where this insurrection occurred. I felt like this was something that was both dramatic and extremely important historically. What was it that most attracted you to the project? I think the primary thing that drew me in was the issue of cultural differences that were at play. I had actually always wanted to make a film about the Musha Incident. In 1996, not long after Super Citizen Ko was theatrically released, I actually started planning for a film entitled The Musha Incident. I remember once going to Hehuan Mountain (合歡山) to shoot a commercial and, on the way there, stopped by Puli and Musha. A friend from Taipei introduced me to Qiu Ruolong and Deng Shian-yang, and they spent a lot of time with me explaining the historical background; I realized just how much in-depth research they had conducted into that history. I was especially impressed by Deng Te l e v i sing the Mu sha In ciden t   263

Shian-yang’s book Dana Sakura (風中緋櫻 Fengzhong feiying); while I was staying at his house, he also showed me some of the research materials he had collected; he had piles and piles of photographs and written accounts. I also read Qiu Ruolong’s graphic novel and was able to hear his moving stories, which were quite exhilarating but also left me utterly speechless. That night marked the beginning of my process of trying to listen, learn, and understand. I took many trips from Taipei down to Puli and Musha. I also had numerous meetings with film investors and producers about this project, but they kept coming to the same conclusion: according to the moviegoing conditions at that time, mainstream Taiwanese audiences would not be interested in an Indigenous-themed film; moreover, the battle sequences alone would dramatically increase the production costs. In the end, all of the investors thought the box office potential was not very good, and it would be extremely difficult for them to get their investment back. I was left with no option but to abandon my plans. Instead, I turned to other projects, like Connection by Fate (超級公民Chaoji gongmin, 1998) and Puppet Angel (傀儡天使 Kuilei tianshi, 2001), which also dealt with nonmainstream political subject matter, but at least the budget for those films was more manageable. So what were the conditions that brought you back to Dana Sakura and the Musha Incident? And how did you decide to use a television miniseries format instead of a feature film format? I received a phone call in 2002 from Taiwan Public Television; they invited me to shoot a twenty-episode television miniseries adaptation of Deng Shian-yang’s Dana Sakura. Throughout my entire career, I have been a film director, and I never considered television one of my specialties. Although [Dana Sakura] was a television production, Taiwan Public Television brings a much higher level of production values to its dramas than other networks; the quality they are able to achieve is actually quite close to that of a feature film. They are also less commercial and give filmmakers a lot of creative space. I also felt that with fifty-five minutes per episode—nearly twenty hours—I would be able to cover a lot more narrative ground than a two-hour feature film; I would be able to tell the entire story of the Musha Incident in great detail. After weighing the pros and cons, I decided to take it on. 264  Mu sh a in Cul t ural D i al o g u e

The subtitle of Deng Shian-yang’s original book, Dana Sakura, was “The Truth Behind the Musha Incident and the Story of Hanaoka Hatsuko” (霧社事件真相及花岡初子的故事). Hanaoka Hatsuko’s Seediq name was Obing Tadao (娥賓 塔達歐), but after receiving a Japanese education and becoming a “model savage child,” her name was changed to Takayama Hatsuko. Before the Musha Incident, she was married to Hanaoka Jirō (花岡二郎) and changed her name to Hanaoka Hatsuko; but after her husband committed suicide in the wake of the Musha Incident, she, pregnant with Jirō’s unborn son, remarried. Her second husband was named Nakayama Kiyoshi (中山清), and she again changed her name to Nakayama Hatsuko (中山初子). Then after the second world war and the arrival of the Nationalists, her name was changed to Gao Caiyun (高彩雲). She experienced so many dramatic changes throughout her life, and I was deeply drawn in by her story. I also felt that using this woman’s perspective would bring a uniquely sensitive perspective to this incident and historical age. Besides this issue of “identity,” many of your previous films explored stories from a woman’s perspective, which seems to have prepared you for approaching a work like this with a distinctly feminist angle. In my film Ah Fei, I approached historical change in Taiwan through the perspective of a woman. That film also dealt with issues of identity because the main character was navigating three different identities. Later, I made a film entitled It Takes Two to Tango (車拼, Chepin, 2013), which was about my grandfather’s generation in Taiwan under the Japanese occupation. During that era, many Taiwanese served as soldiers on behalf of the Japanese government in World War II; then, after the war, the Nationalist Party took over Taiwan, and many of these same people became Nationalist soldiers and were sent to mainland China to fight the communists during the Chinese Civil War. After being captured, they ended up being recruited into the People’s Liberation Army, so there are people from that generation with three nationalities, three identities. Hatsuko was in this same category; throughout her life, her fate was always being colonized and controlled. It was that notion of a “hybrid identity” that drew me in. Actually, this concept of hybrid identity didn’t just apply to Hatsuko; you can also see it in the lives of Hanako, Hanaoka Ichirō, and Hanaoka Te l e v i sing the Mu sha In ciden t   265

Jirō. Back in 2003, when we were shooting Dana Sakura at the Taoyuan Martyrs’ Shrine, we discovered memorial tablets designating Mona Rudao and Hanaoka Ichirō as martyred heroes in the struggle against Japan. I don’t think there is a problem putting Mona Rudao in that category, but I think Hanaoka Ichirō is a much more controversial case. When the 1930 uprising occurred, he was actually wearing his Japanese police uniform; but immediately after [the uprising], he took it off and put on traditional Seediq clothing. While Hanaoka Jirō took his own life after the uprising using the traditional Seediq method of hanging from a tree, Hanaoka Ichirō committed suicide using the Japanese practice of seppuku and left a death note indicating that he had no other choice. This internal crisis between loyalty and betrayal leaves us with a lot to ponder and discuss. I remember one of the posters we designed for Dana Sakura featured a Seediq woman with traditional facial tattoos, but she was wearing a white, Japanese-style wedding dress, which created a dramatic contrast. Some of the causes that led to the uprising were the colonial rule and the impact of this cultural hybridity. People like Hanaoka Ichirō, Hanaoka Jirō, and Hanaoka Hatsuko were all “model savages,” as the rulers had shaped them to be; just as Mona Rudao and others around him were labeled “bad savages,” which, again, created a powerful contrast. Before and after the uprising, Hanaoka Hatsuko was a witness to history; after the incident, she had escaped into the forest with Hanaoka Ichirō, Hanaoka Jirō, and Hanako—all three of them eventually killed themselves—it was only because Hanaoka Hatsuko was pregnant at the time that she decided not to take her own life, for the sake of her unborn child. After the death of Mona Rudao’s family and her own family, she then witnessed the massacre of the Second Musha Incident; but she survived. She was exiled to Chuanzhongdao, where she witnessed her little brother, one of the only surviving members of her family, willingly sign up to serve in the Takasago Volunteer Army (高砂義勇隊). His loyalty to Japan would result in him sacrificing himself for the empire in southeast Asia during World War II. She lived until the age of eighty-two, living the last decades of her life under the Nationalist regime. I felt that by using her story as the main narrative thread, combined with main signposts from the life of Mona Rudao and the Japanese occupation, I could design a strong story about the Musha Incident. 266  Mu sh a in C ul t ural D i al o g u e

Besides Hanaoka Hatsuko, Dana Sakura features quite a rich assortment of characters. Did you primarily rely upon the historical figures featured in Deng Shian-yang’s book, or did you also add a lot of fictional characters to flesh out the story? Since you were dealing with historical subject matter, what were your principles in terms of storytelling and characterization? Since we are utilizing a dramatic structure, we needed to create some fictional characters, but we tried to keep them rooted in reality. So we created characters like Bihe Walisi (比荷 瓦利斯, portrayed by Wang Hongen, 王宏恩), but even that character was based on stories we had heard. It was said that he had been viewed as a “bad savage” ever since childhood, even though he grew up playing with Ichirō and Hatsuko. But he was different from them; he never had access to a formal education and later on would have a rather tumultuous relationship with Ichirō, who went on to become a police officer. He and Ichirō would go through periods of friendship and conflict. He eventually joined Mona Rudao in the uprising, and he is also a tragic character. Then there is the owner of the general store, Mr. Wu (portrayed by Tsai Chen-nan 蔡振南), who is a good-hearted Chinese man; on the other side is the Chinese couple who run the local hotel, who routinely insult the Indigenous people there. The same thing goes for the Japanese police officers portrayed in the miniseries. When Japan colonized Taiwan, the type of people they sent to places like Musha to serve as police officers varied greatly. Many of them were just looking for a stable job; some of them even brought their painting and cementing tools so they would have a practical job to fall back on if their appointment didn’t work out. Those applicants with facial hair actually got priority; once they assumed their posts, many of them treated the Indigenous population with great prejudice and cruelty. They also had a policy that encouraged Japanese police officers to marry local Indigenous women, who they often abandoned at will. Beating the local Indigenous population was a common occurrence. But in Dana Sakura, we also created a character named Murata (村田; Yoshitaka Ishizuka 石塚義高) who is a kind-hearted police officer that cares about human rights. We felt he could provide a little bit of balance with the majority of other Japanese officers, who tended to be filled with violence and arrogance. I didn’t want the miniseries to be a black-and-white Te l e v i sing the Mu sha In ciden t   267

indictment of all Japanese for the sake of dramatic effect; we need to provide a more even approach. Within modern historiography, the Second Musha Incident has always been the source of much controversy; could you talk about how decided to approach and portray the Second Musha Incident? People rarely pay much attention to the Second Musha Incident, but the nature of the Japanese at that time was to carry out their revenge to the greatest extreme. All of the Seediq people who weren’t killed in battle or committed suicide in the wake of the uprising ended up either arrested or surrendering. But the Japanese still suspected that there were people among these Seediq survivors who had taken part in the initial uprising; that is why the Japanese launched the Second Musha Incident, which employed the strategy of “using the savages to control the savages”; they manipulated pro-Japanese “savages” to slaughter “savage resisters.” There were another 216 Seediq killed in the Second Musha Incident, and the survivors were relocated to Chuanzhongdao; I always felt this act of revenge was particularly heartless and brutal; it resulted in the massacre of two groups and unleashed a deep level of hatred which has perpetuated itself all the way up until today. I think this is the most painful aspect of the Second Musha Incident. I even feel that the Second Musha Incident is in some ways even more horrific than the initial uprising. Of course, even more horrific is the fact that, by the time the children of these victims grew up in the 1940s, they all signed up to join the Takasago Volunteer Army—there, they would fight on the side of the very people who had murdered their fathers. I have struggled to understand how this could have ever happened, and the best I can come up with is that it was some manifestation of the Stockholm syndrome. This too was a great tragedy of that era. Just before Hatsuko died, she told an interviewer that her greatest fear was meeting her first husband, Hanaoka Jirō, on the Rainbow Bridge in the afterlife. What would she call herself in that moment? Would it be Obing Tadao? Hanaoka Hatsuko? Nakayama Hatsuko? In the end, she hoped to be known as Obing. I think that every ethnic group has their own unique cultural background which can be quite difficult to understand. I had many conversations with Qiu Ruolong about gaya; he used to say that if you want to understand the Musha Incident, you 268  Mu sh a in C ul t ural D i al o g u e

must first understand the concept of gaya. At first, I of course had no conception of what this concept really meant; but gradually I started to understand that every aspect of traditional Seediq culture is intricately tied to the notion of gaya—and so too, the Musha Incident is a question of gaya. The other important concept is that of the Rainbow Bridge; which is central to the Seediq people’s view of the world. All of their beliefs are projected onto their ancestral spirits. All of the central cultural practices, like face tattoos and headhunting, are carried out so that after death, they can ascend the Rainbow Bridge and be reunited with their deceased family members and ancestors. So at the end of Dana Sakura, I arranged for all of her family members to be there waiting to greet Hanaoka Hatsuko; they were there for Obing. As the director, I wanted to make sure that after all of those brutal experiences she had been through, at the end of the day, she would be received with love and warmth. This is one of the functions of drama. How was the production process? How did Dana Sakura compare to your feature-length film experience? We just screened a fifty-six-minute “Behind the Scenes Featurette” about the making of the series, which was shot fourteen years ago. I don’t even have a copy of that footage; I had to borrow it from Taiwan Public Television. But after seeing it again after all these years, I can’t help but feel a bit sad. Since we were working on a limited budget, the shooting and production process was extremely difficult. Besides the numerous costumes, prop weapons, and sets, I devoted the vast majority of the budget to our actual shooting days; we shot for an incredibly long time. The whole shoot lasted six months—normally a twenty-­episode television miniseries would be shot in three or four months. The majority of the shoot took place in Hualian; our primary location was in Fenglin, where we built two Seediq-style set villages on top of Lintian Mountain. We also turned the Japanese-style building there into the downtown area of Musha; the interior shots of the Japanese police headquarters were all done at the old Japanese Railway Office in Hualian. Meanwhile, we did exterior location shoots all over the place, with the primary locations being the forests and streams around Tongmen Mountain. By the end of the shoot, we were overbudget. Our budget was probably only around 5 percent of the budget for Wei Te-sheng’s film Seediq Te l e v i sing the Mu sha In ciden t   269

Bale, so there were a lot of limitations we faced. For instance, those battle sequences are extremely expensive to shoot. But for me, one of the areas where we really fell short had to do with the issue of language. Had Mona Rudao been using the Seediq language in those scenes where he speaks to the ancestral spirits, it would have been so moving. But at the very beginning Taiwan Public Television made the decision that in order to ensure that average Taiwan viewers could fully understand the content and improve the ratings, the entire series should be in Mandarin Chinese; they did not want Seediq dialogue. Another challenge that impeded our ability to record the dialogue in Seediq was the fact that the miniseries was twenty episodes total, nearly twenty hours of content—that is ten times the length of a feature-length film. Moreover, there is a lot more dialogue employed in miniseries [than in feature film]; there is no way to make it as concise and sharp as film dialogue. We were recording the sound on set, and the actors would never have been able to memorize and properly deliver all of that dialogue in Seediq. We proposed the idea of dubbing the dialogue in Seediq during postproduction, but that idea also got shot down. Ultimately, we made the decision to use as many songs as we could throughout the series—we could use those songs to highlight the Seediq language. But for me, I have always felt that the language issue was the single greatest weakness of Dana Sakura. But Taiwan Public Television had this policy, so there wasn’t much I could do. Had it been a feature film, as the director I could have pushed harder, but it is much more difficult in the world of television. So that remains my biggest regret. Earlier, I mentioned the conflict between different Seediq groups. I actually originally planned for the series to open in 2004 in Musha. The idea was to have a Tkdaya boy who wanted to marry a Toda girl, but their parents all objected to the idea. The young lovers couldn’t understand why, and none of their parents mentioned the history informing their decision. Gradually, as the story unfolds, they come to understand that owing to the Japanese pitting them against one another in the aftermath of the Musha Incident, their tribes developed a deep mutual hatred that has persisted up until this day. But Qiu Ruolong warned me, “If you shoot it like that, you’ll end up starting the Third Musha Incident!” In the end, I naturally decided to heed his advice and revised the teleplay. Instead, the opening sequence takes place in Musha at a 270  Mu sh a in C ul t ural D i al o g u e

ceremony commemorating Mona Rudao in front of his statue. Several reporters from Taipei keep asking the locals about the importance of Mona Rudao, which makes the locals very awkward. The reporters don’t realize that it was the parents and grandparents of these locals that were used by the Japanese to massacre Mona Rudao and the other “rebellious savages;” and, as a reward, they were given the ancestral land of Mona Rudao and his people. The Nationalist government decided to situate Mona Rudao’s tomb and memorial tablet in Musha instead of his home in Mahebo, which today is the site of the Lushan Hot Springs. As to whether or not the scars of history are able to completely heal, that is something that will ultimately be up to those directly involved in what happened. But if I were to ever make a film about the Musha Incident, I would hope to explore the hatred between the Toda and Tkdaya as a means of addressing the past history; I think that is the only way to express something deeper.

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C H A P T E R F O U RT E E N

No Good Guys or Bad Guys An Interview with Wei Te-sheng Tony Rayns (translated by Christa Chen)

Over the course of the ninety years since the Musha Incident occurred and has been repeatedly revisited in popular culture, no work has had more impact and influence than Wei Te-sheng’s landmark film Seediq Bale. After a wave of landmark war films in the 1970s, including Eight Hundred Heroes (八百壯士 Babai zhuangshi, 1976) and Victory (梅花 Meihua, 1976), big-budget historical war films had largely disappeared from the Taiwan film market. When Seediq Bale was released in 2011, it not only broke new box office records in Taiwan but also inspired a new generation of local audiences to rediscover the Musha Incident. Seediq Bale was produced over an extended period, with the screenplay predating Wei Te-sheng’s breakout success Cape No. 7 (海角七號 Haijiao qihao, 2008). Later, after a successful public fundraising campaign and production support from veteran filmmakers like John Woo (吳宇森), who joined the project as a producer, Seediq Bale would make history as the most expensive Taiwan film ever made. In July 2011, just before the official release of Seediq Bale, Wei Te-sheng sat down with the veteran film critic, programmer, and filmmaker Tony Rayns to discuss how he approached the film production and the historical details that went into constructing this new cinematic world. —Michael Berry

When did you first become aware of the Musha Incident—the rebellion by Seediq tribesmen against their Japanese colonial rulers? I think it was in 1996, and I finished a first-draft script about it that same year. I’d happened to see a news broadcast on TV reporting on a protest by aboriginal tribespeople against the Taiwan government’s requisition of their land to build factories. I was particularly struck by the images of the protestors: strong, muscular bodies wearing little more than raincoats. I immediately found myself wanting to know more about them. Then the next item on the newscast was a discussion of Hong Kong’s future. Should it return to China’s sovereignty, as it was scheduled to do the following year? Or should it form some kind of alliance with Taiwan? As I listened, I realized that this, too, was fundamentally about the issue of landownership. Land is a tangible thing, and losing it has a tangible meaning. But I found myself reflecting that intangible things can be lost too . . . Next day, in a bookstore, I found a comic-strip account of the Musha Incident by Qiu Ruolong. I found it very interesting, and contacted the author. [Qiu, who is married to an Indigenous woman, ended up working as an art consultant on the film.] He had learned about the Musha Incident some thirty years earlier. The thing about it that gripped him was also the aspect I found most intriguing: the fact that the hero was not fighting for his freedom but for the freedom of his soul after death. As I said, I wrote a first-draft script very quickly. Was the Musha Incident covered up at the time? Was it ever properly researched and documented? The information was never suppressed, but when I undertook this project, I found out very soon that aboriginal people themselves have preferred not to talk about it. They think it’s too complicated for them to deal with. Once I realized that, I felt real pressure to get it right in the film. Not just the rights and wrongs of the uprising itself; I was also very conscious of the risk of exacerbating the dormant tensions that exist between the surviving tribes, despite the “phony peace” which prevails at the moment. I had to reassure many of the people I talked to. I stressed that I didn’t want to cause problems between them. I told them that my aim was to take an overview of the incident: to see how good people can make wrong choices, and vice versa. I wasn’t interested in stereotypical good guys and bad guys.

No G o o d Guy s or B ad Guy s   273

So you never saw the Japanese as villains? I certainly didn’t set out to attack the Japanese. My two main Japanese characters are polar opposites, and both of them go through a transition. Kojima (played by Ando Masanobu) is initially very pro-­ aboriginal, but turns after his wife has been killed. The general starts out extremely hostile to the rebels but ultimately allows them a kind of grudging respect. I also gave plenty of thought to the characterizations of the other Japanese. The policeman who behaves with such cruelty, for instance, is clearly a guy who’s compensating for his own shortness; you can sense that he’s been picked on by other Japanese all his life. It’s an historical fact, though, that the Japanese policemen assigned to the aboriginal areas were the worst men in the force. It was not considered an easy posting, and the better policemen preferred to stay in the cities and in Chinese communities. Speaking of which, the Chinese population of Taiwan is hardly seen in the film . . . Very few Chinese ever settled in the mountain areas of Taiwan, and the Chinese who were there mostly served as mediators between the aboriginal tribes and the Japanese. You know, the real-life son of the film’s Chinese grocery-shop owner is right now my son’s teacher! You put a lot of effort into research? Yes, and it was hard. Back in 1996–97, there was very little published documentation about the Musha Incident. So I followed the lead of Mr. Chiu. At the time, he was working on a documentary about it, following up his comic-strip version of the history. The more we looked, the more documents we found. But the more I wrote, the more I came to feel that my angle of approach was too conventional. So I stopped writing. I thought I needed to research more to arrive at a more personal take on what happened. I knew the sequence of events, the key figures and so on, but I needed to know more about the international context and about social conditions in the 1930s. I started looking back to the 1910s and forward to the 1940s, in the interests of building more rounded and credible characters. One thing that helped is that some of the cultural and lifestyle traits of the Seediq tribes still survive in today’s Seediq communities. 274  Mu sh a in Cul t ural D i al o g u e

How did you set about casting the film? That was in some respects the toughest thing of all. We issued a casting call—and absolutely nobody showed up. So I asked my casting people to go out looking for potential actors, and they eventually had to go door to door, looking for people. I told them to look for people with the right eyes: hunters’ eyes. They asked a lot of old people to show them their family photographs. Where could we find their sons? Of course, most of the younger people from the aboriginal tribes have migrated to Taiwan’s cities. It’s easiest to find them at weddings, funerals, sports meetings, and church gatherings. We took many hundreds of photos at events like that, sounded out who might be interested, gave them some basic training in acting . . . and then made our choices. The man I cast as Mona Rudao is actually working in a church. He has the right eyes for the role and seems like a natural leader—which is to say, he’s bossy. What clinched it for me was the fact that he’s a difficult man, not at all easygoing. If he’d moved to a city, he would have been the leader of a gang. Your previous features About July and Cape No. 7 were both smallscale movies, although the second one was shot all over Taiwan and became a big success. How was it to jump from those small-scale projects to this huge production? The reason I wanted to make this film is simple: it’s a great story. Once it became possible to finance it, thanks to the success of Cape No. 7, I just plunged in, learning what I needed to learn as I went along. You can’t make a film like this nowadays without using CGI, so that was one of the many technical aspects I had to grapple with. The film will be released in Taiwan in two parts, the second released three weeks after the first, but the rest of the world will see a streamlined version, with the two parts condensed into one. How do you feel about having two different versions? Frankly, I regret it. But my producers have convinced me that foreign audiences will want something a bit different from the film than the Taiwanese audience: something more straightforward and easier to grasp. So I completely accept the need for the “international cut.” The trade-off is that I get to release my original cut in two parts in Taiwan. No G o o d Guy s or B ad Guy s   275

Contributors

Michael Berry is professor of Contemporary Chinese Cultural Studies and director of the Center for Chinese Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). He is the author of several books on Chinese cinema and literature, including Speaking in Images: Interviews with Contemporary Chinese Filmmakers (Columbia University Press, 2006), A History of Pain: Trauma in Modern Chinese Literature and Film (Columbia University Press, 2008), Jia Zhangke’s Hometown Trilogy (British Film Institute, 2011), Boiling the Sea: Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Memories of Shadows and Light (INK, 2014), and Jia Zhangke on Jia Zhangke (Duke University Press, 2022). He is the coeditor of Modernism Revisited (Rye Field, 2016) and Divided Lenses (University of Hawai‘i Press, 2016). He is also the translator of several books, including Remains of Life (Columbia University Press, 2017) and Wuhan Diary (HarperVia, 2020). He has served as a film consultant and a juror for numerous film festivals, including the Golden Horse (Taiwan) and the Fresh Wave (Hong Kong). Paul D. Barclay is professor and head of the History Department at Lafayette College in Easton, Pennsylvania. He is the author of Outcasts of Empire: Japanese Rule on Taiwan’s “Savage Border,” 1874–1945 (University of California Press, 2018) and general editor of the East Asia Image Collection, an open-access digital archive of visual historical

sources. He is currently researching Japanese military/police campaigns in Korea, China, Taiwan, and the Soviet Union from 1894 to 1934 for a project called “Imperial Japan’s Forever Wars.” Barclay’s research has received support from the National Endowment from the Humanities, the Social Science Research Council, the Japanese Council for the Promotion of Science, and the Taiwan Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Leo Ching is professor of Asian and Middle Eastern studies at Duke University. His research revolves around two major themes: Japanese empire studies and popular culture studies. His book Becoming Japanese: The Politics of Identity Formation in Colonial Taiwan argues that Taiwanese consciousness emerged during the Japanese colonial period as a response to the failure of mainland China as a viable political alternative. The emphasis is on the fractured identity that triangulates among China, Japan, and Taiwan. His most recent book, Anti-Japanism: The Politics of Sentimentality in Postcolonial East Asia, argues that anti-Japan sentiment in the region today should be grasped in the context of the larger shift from a Japan-centric to a Sinocentric system. Anti-Japan sentiment embodies the contradictions and unresolved issues of this transition. Kuei-fen Chiu is Distinguished Professor of Taiwan Literature and Transnational Cultural Studies at National Chung Hsing University, Taiwan. Her recent publications include New Chinese-Language Documentaries (coauthored with Yingjin Zhang) and Taiwan Cinema, International Reception, and Social Change (coedited with Ming-yeh Rawnsley and Gary Rawnsley). She co-guest-edited with Yingjin Zhang, a special issue of “Chinese Literature as World Literature” for Modern Chinese Literature and Culture and is in charge of the “Taiwan Digital Literary History” project under the aegis of National Taiwan Literature Museum in Taiwan. Kae Kitamura is an associate professor in the Faculty of Education at Hokkaido University. She is a historian of East Asia in the modern period, focusing on Taiwan Indigenous peoples, settlers in Taiwan, and women involved in and with the Japanese empire. Her first book, A History of Education for the Taiwan Indigenous Under Japanese Colonial Rule (Hokkaido University Press, 2008), reexamines why and how the special system for governing Indigenous peoples 278  C on t r ibu t o r s

and areas was constructed. Her recent publications include “The Life History of a Woman in Tainan, Yang Wang,” Journal of National Museum of Taiwan History (17), May 2019; “The Historical Experiences of Indigenous Peoples and the Colonial War in Taiwan,” Shisō (1119), July 2017; and Diary of Utsumi Chuji, 1940–45, edited with Kondo Masami (Kyoto University Press, 2014). Ping-hui Liao is professor of literature at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD). He is an internationally recognized authority in Taiwan studies, specializing in Taiwan cultural history (from the Japanese colonial period to the current era of globalization), EastWest comparative literature, interarts studies (fiction, film, poetry, painting, and opera), popular culture, and critical theory (poststructuralism, postmodernism, and postcolonialism). He has won numerous awards such as the May Fourth Prize for the Best Literary Critic of the Year in 2004 and the Wu Yung-fu Prize for the Best Literary Critic of the Year in 2007. His books include Texts Across Borders (in Japanese), edited with Yingche Huang et al. (Tokyo: Yenwen, 2008), Taiwan Under Japanese Colonial Rule, edited with David Wang (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), Internationalizing Cultural Studies, edited with Ackbar Abbas et al. (London: Blackwell, 2004), and Keywords 200 in Literary and Critical Studies (in Chinese) (Taipei: Ryefield, 2003). Freddy Lim is a Taiwan-based politician, activist, and musician. He is the founder and lead singer of the heavy metal group Chthonic, which has explored Taiwan’s history through several concept albums, including Seediq Bale, Takasago Army, Bu-Tik, Mirror of Retribution, and Timeless Sentence. He is a founding member of the New Power Party, and in 2016, he was elected to the Legislative Yuan. Nakao Eki Pacidal is an Amis novelist, translator, and painter. Fluent in Amis, Dutch, English, French, German, and Latin, she has translated several books and published a novel titled Curse of the Island: Contemporary Taiwan Aboriginal Legend I. As an Amis from the Pangcah village of Tafalong, Nakao is mainly devoted to researching Taiwan history from an Indigenous perspective after obtaining degrees in law and science history from the National Taiwan University and Harvard University. She is now based in the Netherlands as a PhD candidate in history at Leiden University. C on tr ibu tor s  279

Tony Rayns is a prominent film critic, film programmer, screenwriter, and documentary filmmaker. He has published numerous articles, essays, and books on East Asian cinema. He is a frequent contributor to Sight & Sound and has provided commentary tracks for dozens of films. Toulouse-Antonin Roy holds a PhD in history from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). His research examines the intersection of imperialism and capitalism in Taiwan, with a focus on the development of the camphor industry and its effects on the island’s aboriginal population during the Japanese period. Darryl Sterk has worked on the representation of Taiwan’s Indigenous peoples in film and fiction and is now working on translations between Mandarin and Taiwan’s Indigenous languages, particularly Seediq, as in Indigenous Cultural Translation: A Thick Description of Seediq Bale (Routledge, 2020). In addition to research, he is a translator specializing in Taiwan literature, such as The Man with the Compound Eyes (Vintage, 2015) and The Stolen Bicycle (Text, 2020) by Wu Ming-Yi. He teaches translation at Lingnan University in Hong Kong. Robert Tierney is professor in the Comparative and World Literature Program and the East Asian Literature and Culture Department at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His major publications include Monster of the Twentieth Century: Kōtoku Shūsui and Japan’s First Anti-Imperialist Movement (University of California Press, 2015); “Othello in Tokyo: Performing Race and Empire in Early Twentieth-Century Japan,” Shakespeare Quarterly 62(4), December 2011; and Tropics of Savagery: The Culture of Japanese Empire in Comparative Frame (University of California Press, 2010). He is currently working on a study of Nakae Chōmin and a monograph on death writings in the Meiji period. You may reach him at [email protected]. Wan Jen is one of the representative film directors of the Taiwan New Wave movement, with his works focusing on several aspects of Taiwan polities and society. His films as a director include The Taste of Apples (1983), Ah Fei (1984), Super Citizen (1985), Farewell to the Channel (1987), The Story of Taipei Women (1991), Super Citizen Ko (1995), Connection by Fate (1998), Puppet Angel (2002), and It Takes 280  C ont r ibu t o r s

Two to Tango (2014). He is also the director of two television miniseries, including Dana Sakura (2004), which depicted the Musha Incident. Wei Te-sheng is an award-winning producer, director, and screenwriter whose films include Cape No. 7, Seediq Bale, and 52Hz, I Love You. Cape No. 7 and Seediq Bale are among the highest-grossing films in Taiwan cinema history, and his work has helped to singlehandedly revitalize film production in Taiwan. Chien-heng Wu is assistant professor in the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures at National Tsing Hua University in Taiwan. He has contributed to Comparatizing Taiwan and the journal Concentric. Wu He is a native of Tainan, Taiwan, and came to prominence in 1974 with the publication of his award-winning short story, “Peony Autumn.” He spent much of the 1980s and 1990s in seclusion before returning to the literary world with a string of powerful and challenging books, including Digging for Bones (1995), The Sea at Seventeen (1997), Remains of Life (1999), Wu He Danshui (2001), Ghost and Goblin (2005), and Chaos and Confusion (2007). Wu He has won nearly every major national literary award in Taiwan.

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Index

Aborigines. See Indigenous people About July, 275 abuse, of power, 57–58 academics, 228 “Act on Taiwan Indigenous Traditional Intellectual Creations, The,” 259–60 Adorno, Theodor, 149–50, 172 aesthetic: historical representation and, 189, 228; Lim on, 258; of nature, 152–53; Wei T. prioritizing, 183– 84, 191 Africa, 109 “Afterthoughts on Seediq Bale” (S. Lin), 180–81 Agamben, Giorgio, 150–51 agency, 135, 138, 143 Ah Fei, 261, 265 air raids, 36 ancestral law. See gaya Andrade, Tonio, 138 Ape Pawan, 97n21 appropriation, 133, 205

Archaeology of Knowledge, The (Foucault), 131 archive, 123, 131, 222, 234–36 Asai Erin, xiin1 assimilation: of Atayal, 106–7; brutal landscaping followed by, 30–31; intimacy and, 125–26; Japan forcing, 115, 125; primitivism and, 102; violence of, 106 assumption, 21–22, 41n25 Atayal, 25–27; assimilation of, 106–7; population of, 87; primitivism of, 109; weapons owned by, 41n20. See also Seediq autonomy: the Contemporary contrasted with, 158–59; on Indigenous people, 136–37, 143, 146; Mona R. and, 159; ritual refuting, 159–61 awareness, 47–48 Awi Hepah, 5, 96n12 Awi Heppaha, 49, 55, 64–66, 71, 77, 95n8

Awi Nawe, 97n21 Awi Papu, 97n21 Bai Ruiwen. See Berry, Michael Bakan Nawi, 97n21 Bakan Walis, 201 Barclay, Paul, 31, 95 Bassau Bōran, 69 Battle of Hitodome Pass, 64–65 Battle of Tbyawan River, 188 belief, 117 Bell of Sayon, The, 221 benevolence, 21–22, 37–38, 39n5 Benjamin, Walter, 150, 156–57, 159 Berry, Michael, 200, 218, 229, 272; Ching contrasted with, 220–21; the Contemporary observed by, 155; translation by, 174n26, 175n52 Beyond Good and Evil (Nietzsche), 185–92 biology, 102, 113–16 blockade (fūsa), 27–28 blood, 110 body, 101–22 Botan Incident, 105, 120n7 Brown, Melissa, 146 brutal landscaping, 30–31 budget, 269–70 bukonsho station, 22, 41n18, 57 Bunun, 28, 66, 81 Burke, Edmund, 182, 196n11 bushidō (moral code), 104 camphor: capitalists monopolizing, 24; Japan preoccupied with, 137; Ri’s uprising influenced by, 43n46; suppression for, 19, 29, 42n27; violence directed at, 23–24 Cape No. 7, 272, 275 capitalists, 24 cartographic imagination, 233 284  Ind e x

casting, 275 censorship, 113 Chaos and Confusion (Wu H.), 250 characters, 4, 130–31, 204–5, 267 Chen Chun-yen, 173n9 Cheng Wen-tang, 261 Chien Hong Mo, 81–82 childhood, 106 China, 5, 11, 217n25, 274. See also Qing Ching, Leo, 146, 220–21 Chiri Tomau, 63 Chiri Wadai, 63 Chiu Ruosan, 147n1 Chiu Yun-fang, 192–93; Lin H. compared with, 191; on Seediq Bale (film), 185–86; translation of, 198n40; Wei T. contrasted with, 189–91 Chou Wan-yao, 122–23, 191–93, 198n40 Christianity, 6–7, 13n4, 116–18 Chthonic, 12, 243, 253–61 Chuanzhongdao. See Qingliu civilization: colonialism transforming, 102; heroism conflicted by, 112; savagery contrasted with, 101, 104, 106–7, 109, 113–14; violence of, 192, 196 climate change, 133 Cohen, Daniel J., 232 collaboration, 219 colonialism: China framing, 5; Christianity contrasted with, 118; civilization transformed by, 102; culture and, 137, 144; Indigenous people stereotyped by, 173n13; language shaped by, 7; mobility restricted by, 128; myth beyond, 131–32; rebellion cultivated by, 19–20; research as, 194–95; Satō privileged by, 140–41;

suppression under, 17–18; Taiwan confronting, 18; violence authorized by, 37–38 Committee for the Advancement of Indigenous Peoples’ Rights, 256 concept album, 254–55 configurational comprehension, 181 Connection by Fate, 264 Conrad, Joseph, 108–12 Contemporary, the, 153–54, 157, 160, 163, 169; autonomy contrasted with, 158–59; Berry observing, 155; contemporary distinguished from, 152; Contemporary Perspective contrasted with, 151–52; intelligibility designated by, 155–56; with narrator, 161–62; the real and, 164; as sinister, 164; yusheng distinguished from, 161 Contemporary Perspective, 151–52, 154 copyright, 227–29, 228, 229 Coulthard, Glen Sean, 133n2 “Critique of Violence” (Benjamin), 156 cross-dressing, 112–16, 120n22 crowdsourcing, 222, 225–26 Cultural Atlas, 48, 71n2 Cultural Geography, 47 culture: colonialism and, 137, 144; headhunting substituted by, 168; of Indigenous people, 6; Japan and, 2, 115; Lim considering, 257; Lin K. and, 184–85; MIH representing, 233–34; Mizuno prioritizing, 21; Mona contextualized by, 123; of Seediq, 258; Wan J. attracted to, 263–64 Cuz-Hub, 172 Dakekan conflict, 25, 27 Dakis Nawi. See Hanaoka Jirō

Dakis Nobing. See Hanaoka Ichirō Dakis Pawan, v, 7–8, 145–46, 186–87, 214; with Deng, 209–10, 216n18; gaya prioritized by, 191; on Shimaigahara Incident, 82–83 Dana Sakura (Deng), 3, 261, 263–64 Dana Sakura (miniseries), 12; budget limiting, 269–70; characters added to, 267; posters for, 266; Taiwan Public Television limiting, 270; Wan J. on, 262–71 death, 42n26, 128–29; of Aborigines, 23, 137; at Battle of Hitodome Pass, 65; inbetweeners and, 195; justice and, 144–45; in Paalan, 83; of police, 141, 145; population reflecting, 84–85; from Second Musha Incident, 2–3, 43n45; of Seediq, 268; from Shimaigahara Incident, 96n12; by suicide, 104, 107, 208; of Tgdaya, 83 Deloria, Philip J., 39n8 Democratic Progressive Party, 146 Deng Shian-yang, 8–9, 201, 209–10, 216n18, 256, 263–64 Derrida, Jacques, 150, 234 “Digging for Bones” (Wu H.), 249, 250 “Digital Humanities 2.0” (Presner), 225–26 digital platforms, 231; academics struggling with, 228; archive on, 236; collaboration on, 219; historical representation compared with, 236; historiography and, 218–21; Indigenous people impacted by, 226; Musha Incident on, 218–37; virtual exhibition grappling, 236 discourse, 7, 20, 29–30 discrimination, 118–19, 146–47 In de x  285

Dmahul ceremony, 82 “Documenting the Musha Incident” (Tang X.), v education, 49, 69, 245; of Hanaoka H., 265; of Hanaoka I., 90–91, 107, 195; of Hanaoka J., 195; of Hino, 90–91; Japan forcing, 2, 6, 30; Uno focusing on, 91 Eight Hundred Heroes, 272 emplotment, 219, 224, 235 ethics, 149, 151, 169–72 Europe, 194–95 Exceedingly Barbaric (Tsushima), 11, 122–33 exile, 3–4, 8, 200 experimentalism, 250 exploitation, 37–38 Fan Yen-chiou, 93, 94 February 28 Incident, 252 Felman, Shoshana, 150, 169–70 feminization, 106 feuds, 28, 30, 171 “Five-Year Plan to Pacify the Northern Savages,” 30–31 folklore, 129 force, 21–22, 25–26, 35 Foucault, Michel, 124, 131, 157 free culture, 229, 236 Freud, Sigmund, 158, 213–14 Fujioka, 25–26 Fujisaki Seinosuke, 23, 41n25 Fujita, 67 Fukahori expedition, 59, 74n39 Fukahori Yasuichirō, 23, 57–60 fukenju. See Pacification-Reclamation Bureau fūsa. See blockade future, 232 Fūzokugahō, 57 286  Ind e x

Gantaban Incident, 28 Gao Caiyun. See Hanaoka Hatsuko gaya (ancestral law), 48; Dakis P. prioritizing, 191; Deng on, 8–9; with headhunting, 187; Mona demonstrating, 193–94; Qiu on, 268–69; in Seediq Bale (film), 190; Seediq prioritizing, 8–9; women ignoring, 83 “Gazetteer of the Musha Incident,” 34, 36 Gazette of the Taiwan Savages’ Customs, 4 Gelassenheit, 153, 168 Gervais, Bertrans, 219, 225 Ghost and Goblin (Wu H.), 249 Girl (fictional character), 4, 204–5 Gotō Shinpei, 139 government, 103 Gros, Frédéric, 153 guardline, 25–32, 46, 49, 65–66, 112 Hamilton, Paul, 174n19 Hanaoka Hatsuko, 208–9, 265–66, 268–69 Hanaoka Ichirō, 127, 216n17; education of, 90–91, 107, 195; heroism of, 266; suicide of, 208–9 Hanaoka Jirō, 127, 195, 208–9, 216n17 Hang, Xing, 138 Hayles, N. Katherine, 233, 235 headhunting, 55, 120n19, 158, 161, 168, 187 Heart of Darkness (Conrad), 108–12 Heidegger, Martin, 153, 168 heroism: civilization conflicting with, 112; of Hanaoka I., 266; of Mona, 200–1; in myth, 217n25; primitivism contrasted with, 205; in Pusu Qhuni, 207–13; in Remains of Life, 204–7;

resilience as, 213; Tang S. on, 200–16; of Temu, 188–89; in tradition, 210–11, 211; trauma and, 200–16; Wu H. on, 200–16 Hino Saburō, 90–91 historical representation: aesthetic and, 189, 228; archive compared with, 236; digital platforms compared with, 236; Europe centered by, 194–95; materiality in, 234–35; multimedia shaping, 229–30 “Historical Text as Literary Artifact, The” (White), 219 historiography, 154, 218–21, 268 history, 193–96; in concept album, 255; crowdsourcing constructing, 225–26; emplotment explaining, 219; Indigenous people telling, 5–6; legend with, 131; memorial compared with, 4, 154, 209, 245; memory and, 95; Musha Incident within, 37, 76; narrative questioning, 76; oral, 5, 12, 18, 42n42, 82–88; pain within, v; reality digested into, 182; rhetoric within, 182; of Taiwan, 193, 220; trauma in, 12–13; Wei T. reflecting, 179–96; Wikipedia representing, 218, 221–26, 223, 224. See also historical representation History of Pain, A (Berry), 5, 200, 218, 220 Historypin (MIH), 218, 220; as archive, 235; culture represented by, 233–34; Musha Incident on, 232–37, 233; Seediq represented by, 233–34; Wikipedia contrasted with, 221 Hitodome Pass, 45, 46, 53, 64, 65, 82, 183 Hiyama Tetsusaburō: Aborigines meeting with, 56–57; abuse by,

57–58; interpreters aiding, 55–57; limits of, 57–60; with Pixo, 56–57 How Deep the Ocean? (Tang S.), 213 identity: of Aborigines, 112; Brown on, 146; cross-dressing expressing, 114; hybrid, 265–66; as outsider, 247–48; Sterk on, 195; of women, 265 Ikoma Takatsune, 65, 68 imperialism, 194 inbetweeners, 180, 194, 195 Indians in Unexpected Places (Deloria), 39n8 Indigenous people, v; autonomy on, 136–37, 143, 146; blockades circumvented by, 27; Christianity influencing, 6–7; colonialism stereotyping, 173n13; culture of, 6; death of, 23, 137; digital platforms impacting, 226; discrimination against, 118–19, 146–47; elites within, 93–94; guardline isolating, 65; history told by, 5–6; Hiyama meeting with, 56–57; identity of, 112; in interethnic exchanges, 40n12; Japan with, 70, 142; life respected by, 142; in Musha Incident, 257–58; Musha-town sequestering, 51–52; myth of, 255; nature of, 6, 106, 109, 116; perspective of, 75–78; relocation of, 137; savagery characterizing, 115; state and, 92–94 violence abstained from by, 81. See also Atayal information, 47–48 Inō Kanori, 41n25, 60, 61, 66 instinct. See yusheng interethnic exchanges, 40n12 International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), xiin1 In de x  287

interpreters, 55–60 intimacy, 124–26 Investiture of the Gods, 255 IPA. See International Phonetic Alphabet Ishii Tamotsu, 53 Ishizuka Eizō, 34, 37 isolation, 246, 249 It Takes Two to Tango, 265 Iwan Robao, 57, 60, 61, 62, 66–68 Japan: Aborigines with, 70, 142; assimilation forced by, 115, 125; belief lacked by, 117; camphor preoccupying, 137; control lacked by, 59–60; culture and, 2, 115; education forced by, 2, 6, 30; government of, 103; headhunting encouraged by, 120n19; interpreters with, 62–63; Mona against, 2, 18, 105, 147n1; Musha Incident recalled by, 127; in Musha-town, 52–53; as police, 274; postwar academia of, 91; Qing compared with, 137; savagery and, 108, 113; Seediq with, 2, 13n2, 263; suicide contrasted with, 107; Taiwan compared with, 141; terminology for, 64; Tgdaya with, 54, 63–64, 67–68, 70–71; Toda with, 187–88; vengefulness misinterpreted by, 24; weapons placed by, 68 Japanese Aborigine Common School, 69 Jian Ji, 93 Kabayama Sukenori, 20–22, 40n13, 55 Kaku Kurata, 59 Kaneko Mitsuharu, 108 Karatani Kōjin, 120n13 288  Ind e x

Kaujiyo, 26 Kawahara Isao, 75–76 Kawamura Minato, 120n13 Kee, Kevin, 234–35 Kirschenbaum, Matthew G., 231–32 Kleeman, Faye Yuan, 105–6 “Knowledge Map of the Musha Incident,” 231 “Knowledge Web on Taiwan’s Diversity,” 226–27, 227 Kobayashi Gakuji, 76 Koizumi Tetsu, 50–51 Kondō Katsusaburō, 67–69, 74n39 Kovach, Margaret, 195 Kumu Tapas, 5, 13n4, 123 Lacan, Jacques, 153, 165–67 LaCapra, Dominick, 157 language, v, 44n77; as ambiguous, 74n36; colonialism shaping, 7; names impacted by, xi–xii; Paalan in, 61–62; romanization of, xi–xii; of Seediq, 270 Layers of Mist and Thick Clouds (Deng), 3 Le Gendre, Charles W., 138 legends, 131, 147 life: Aborigines respecting, 142; contemporary prioritizing, 156; of Hanaoka H., 266; “mere life” contrasted with, 156; sanctity of, 157; yusheng and, 171 Liglave A-wu, 147 Lim, Freddy, 12; “The Act on Taiwan Indigenous Traditional Intellectual Creations” respected by, 259–60; on aesthetics, 258; of Chthonic, 253–61; culture considered by, 257 Lin, Sylvia, 207–8, 214 Lin Hsiu-hsing, 191

Lin Kai-shih, 180–81, 192–93; culture and, 182–85; Schiller compared with, 185; Wei T. contrasted with, 182–85 Lin Mao-cheng, 92 Lin Rui-chang. See Losin Watan literature, 34 Liu, Jessie, 253 “Lives of Infamous Men, The” (Foucault), 131 Losin Watan, 90, 92–94 Lowe, Lisa, 125, 132 Lui Mingchuan, 20–21 lumber industry, 2, 13n1 Ma Chi-hsiang, 188 Madame Chen (Shōji), 125–26 Mahung Mona, 207, 208 Mahung Pawan, 209 materiality, 234–35 Matsuda Kyōko, 39n7 Matsumoto Jun’ichirō, 129 McClintock, Anne, 120n22 McQuire, Scott, 231 Meditations on Ahbang Kalusi (Wu H.), 247 Meixi River, 45, 46, 48–49, 56, 90 memorial, 4, 154, 209, 245–47 “Memorial to the Remains of Life,” 154, 246–47 Memories of an Indigenous Village (Kumu), 5 memory, 82–88, 95 men, snatching of. See pgluk snaw Mignolo, Walter, 132–33 Miicha (fictional character), 130–31 military, 28, 30, 36 Mink, Louis O., 181 “Mist-Enshrouded Barbarian Village, The “ (Nakamura), 105–6, 108 Mizukoshi Kōichi, 53

Mizuno Jun, 20–22, 40n13, 55 mobility, 128 Mochiji Rokusaburō, 29, 31 modernity, 208–9 Monaneng, 147 Mona Rudao, xi–xii, 71, 78–81, 79–80, 127–29, 153–56; appropriation of, 205; autonomy and, 159; burial of, 207; culture contextualizing, 123; gaya demonstrated by, 193–94; heroism of, 200–1; against Japan, 2, 18, 105, 147n1; memorial to, 4–5, 245–46; Miicha superimposing, 130–31; nationalism framing, 263; rebellion of, 216n13; romanization of, 216n1; Temu with, 186–88; Walis B. contrasted with, 88; in Yoshimura beat-down incident, 34 moral code. See bushidō Mori Ushinosuke, 104 multiculturalism, 146 multimedia, 229–31 Musha, 39n10, 50; as ethnonym, 49; as model, 47; police in, 267; Puli and, 60–63; within terminology, 47, 69; as toponym, 48–49; translation influencing, 48–49; Wugonglun and, 53–54, 54 Musha (Satō), 11, 135, 139–42 “Musha” (Koizumi), 51 Musha Aborigine Affairs Control Station, 49, 69 Musha Elementary School, 245 Musha Incident: childhood represented by, 106; on digital platforms, 218–37; Exceedingly Barbaric decentering, 124; within history, 37, 76; Indigenous people in, 257–58; Japan recalling, 127; Kawahara depicting, 75–76; In de x  289

Musha Incident (continued) on MIH, 232–37, 233; multiculturalism exemplified by, 146; narrative of, 225; Outline of Japanese Cultural Geography misrepresenting, 46–47; politics redefining, 6; Qiu depicting, 79–80, 88; Remains of Life reflecting, 251–52; reprisal for, 34–35; research on, 247, 256, 274; resentment rationalizing, 33–34; revolution represented by, 173n13; Satō on, 135–47; Seediq Bale (album) exploring, 253, 255; Seediq Bale (film) interpreting, 179–80; Seediq in, 78; Shimaigahara Incident and, 78–82, 79–80; sources on, 38n1; suppression and, 143–44; survivors of, 246; Taiwan misunderstanding, 252; Tapani Incident contrasted with, 244; Taroko Battle compared with, 138; violence following, 2; as virtual exhibition, 226–32; War of Resistance connected with, 263; Wikipedia on, 220, 223, 224; yusheng contrasted with, 162–63, 165. See also Second Musha Incident Musha Incident, The (Bai), v Musha Incident, The (Deng), 3 Musha Incident, The (Qiu), 3–4, 78 Musha Incident, The (Yabu), 5 Musha Kawanakajima, 201 Musha Public School for Indigenous Youth, 49 Musha-town, 52; Indigenous people sequestered from, 51–52; Japan in, 52–53, 69; Musha Aborigine Affairs Control Station originating, 49; submission contrasted with, 71 290  In d e x

myth, 129, 147; climate change contrasted with, 133; beyond colonialism, 131–32; heroism in, 217n25; of Indigenous peoples, 255; of Rainbow Bridge, 268–69; Seediq Bale (album) emphasizing, 258 naivete, 180–85 Nakagawa Shizuko, 76–77 Nakajima Taikichi, 63 Nakamura Chihei, 10, 101, 104–8 Nakayama Hatsuko. See Hanaoka Hatsuko names, 197n16; complexity within, 7–8; of Hanaoka H., 265; language impacting, xi–xii; pronunciation of, 216n1; terminology and, 39n10 Nancy, Jean-Luc, 173n9 Nanzhuang, 28–29, 43n47 narrative: emplotment challenged by, 224; with folklore, 129; history questioned by, 76; of Musha Incident, 225; nature of, 221; tradition in, 210; Wei T. choosing, 181; Wikipedia challenging, 224–25 narrator, 154, 161–62, 176n54, 204–5 nationalism: discourse framed by, 7; Mona framed by, 263; pain appropriated by, 200; Seediq contrasted with, 255; Simon discussing, 146 nature: aesthetic of, 152–53; of Indigenous people, 6, 106, 109, 116; of narrative, 221; the real merging with, 166–67; in Remains of Life, 168–69 Nazis, 156–57 neobarbarism, 145 neutral point of view (NPOV), 222–24

Nietzsche, Friedrich, 150, 158, 174n14, 192 NPOV. See neutral point of view Obing Tadao. See Hanaoka Hatsuko Obin Nokan, 68–69 October 1930 rebellion, 10 Office of Reclamation and Pacification. See bukonsho Okamatsu Santarō, 29 Okamura Tomoko, 129 Okamura Tsuneo, 129–30 O’Keefe, Georgia, 247 “On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry” (Schiller), 185 ontology, 155, 173n9 Ōshika Taku, 101, 108–12 Ōta Kimie, 76–77 other, the, 103 Outline of Japanese Cultural Geography, 46–47 Ozzfest, 253, 259 Paalan, 46; death in, 83; in language, 61–62; following Shimaigahara Incident, 86; suppression in, 45 Pacification-Reclamation Bureau (fukenju), 20–21, 22–23, 39n5 pain, v, 200, 204 Pamuk, Orhan, 185 Pan Laolong, 58 Pawan Nawi, 13n3, 211–12, 216n20 Pawa Nokan, 63, 67 peace ceremony, 71n2 peer review, 223–24 Pei Hsi-Lin, 41 People’s Republic of China (PRC), 93 perfection, 167 perspective, 75–78, 151–52, 154 pgluk snaw (snatching men), 83 philosophy of walking, 152–153, 158, 164–70

Piho Walis, 66, 147 Pilin Yapu, 201–2, 225 Pingpuzu, 54, 55 Pixo Sappo: first contact initiated by, 55–57; Hiyama with, 56–57; submission by, 66–67; translation of, 60 police, 50, 92, 126, 146; coordination lacked by, 41n23; death of, 141, 145; force by, 35; innocence described by, 103–4; of Japan, 274; in Musha, 267; peace ceremony officiated by, 71n2; primitivism contrasted with, 110; submission by, 69–70; violence by, 35 policy, 113, 138 politics, 6, 112–16 population, 84–85, 86, 87 Pratt, Mary Louise, 117–18 PRC. See People’s Republic of China preservation, 232 Presner, Todd, 221, 225–26 Primitive Passion (Torgovnick), 102 primitivism: assimilation and, 102; of Atayal, 109; heroism contrasted with, 205; police contrasted with, 110; policy reinforced by, 113; politics of, 115–16; postcolonial, 116–19; Yoshiya haunted by, 119 principle of being, 160–61 privilege, 114–15 pronunciation, 216n1 publisher, 45–46 Puccini, Giacomo, 183–84 Puli, 54, 57, 60–68 Puppet Angel, 264 Pusu Qhuni, 11, 200–2, 205–6, 208, 214–16; heroism in, 207–13; roots literalized in, 210; survivors in, 203–4, 209; translation of, 212 In de x  291

Qing (dynasty), 20–21, 33–34, 48, 137, 221 Qingliu, 4, 8, 84, 200 Qiu Ruo-long, 3–4, 78, 216n19, 263–64, 270–71, 273; on gaya, 268–69; Musha Incident depicted by, 79–80, 88; translation of, 12; Wei T. inspired by, 217n19 radicalism, 166, 169, 222 Rayns, Tony, 12, 272 real, the, 164–67 reality, 92, 182 rebellion: colonialism cultivating, 19–20; feminization of, 106; literature personalizing, 34; of Mona, 216n13; publisher repackaging, 45–46; in Puli, 57 reconciliation, 202, 214–15 reductionism, 157 refinement, 167 Reiter, Bernd, 124 relocation, 39n9, 137, 268 Remains of Life (Wu H.), 3–5, 149–50, 152–53, 156–67, 208–16; Chen analyzed by, 173n9; as contemporary, 11, 151; ethics in, 169–72; heroism in, 204–7; historiography undercut by, 154; Musha Incident reflected in, 251–52; nature in, 168–69; prizes for, 243; radicalism in, 169; rhetoric foregrounded in, 154–55; Seediq Bale (film) compared with, 200–4, 225; themes of, 249–50; translation of, 244; writing of, 248–49; Wu on, 243–52 remembrance, 214 renzhiguan. See Hitodome Pass Republic of China (ROC), 93 research, 194–95, 247, 256, 274 292  Ind e x

resentment, 20, 33–34 resilience, 213 revolution, 173n13 rhetoric: of biology, 102, 113–14; of body, 102–3; within history, 182; Remains of Life foregrounding, 154–55; White on, 181 Riban shiko (Inō), 41n25 Ri’s uprising, 43n46 ritual: autonomy refuted by, 159–61; principle of being discrediting, 160–61; reconciliation as, 214–15; remembrance as, 214 Riverisle, 153, 162, 243, 246–50 Roberts, Spencer, 234–35 ROC. See Republic of China romanization, xi–xii, 216n1 roots, 210 Rosenston, Robert, 193 Rosenzweig, Roy, 221, 223–24, 232 Rukai tribe, 246 Sabharwal, Arjun, 232 “Sadness” (Wu H.), 249, 250 Sakuma Samata, 30–31 Sakura Hot Springs, 50 Salizan Takisvilainan, 226 Sandwich Man, The, 261 Saramao rebellion, 108, 120n19 Satō Haruo, 11, 147n1; agency questioned by, 135, 143; colonialism privileging, 140–41; on Musha Incident, 135–47; on neobarbarism, 145 Savage, The (Ōshika), 101, 108–13 “Savage Construction and Civility Making” (Ching), 220 savagery: Aborigines characterized by, 115; as biology, 115–16; blood connecting, 110; civilization contrasted with, 101, 104, 106–7,

109, 113–14; of guardline, 112; Japan and, 108, 113; sexuality and, 127; Sterk on, 193–94; violence catalyzing, 111 Savage Village in the Mist (Nakamura), 10, 101 Schiller, Friedrich von, 182, 185 Second Musha Incident, 251, 266; death from, 2–3, 43n45; exile following, 4; in historiography, 268; survivors and, 2–3, 203; Toda in, 200 Seediq, 39n10; archive expanded with, 123; Boalum in, 84–85; Bukasan in, 84–85; Bunun assaulting, 28; China compared with, 217n25; culture of, 258; death of, 268; gaya prioritized by, 8–9; Japan with, 2, 13n2, 263; language of, 270; MIH representing, 233–34; in Musha Incident, 78; nationalism contrasted with, 255; origin of, 212; Pakan on, 212–213; population of, 84–85, 87; romanization of, xi–xii; shelling of, 31; sound personifying, 234; translation of, 256; Wei T. met with by, 190; Wu H. empathizing with, 205. See also Tgdaya; Toda; Truku Seediq Bale (album), 12; as concept album, 254; Musha Incident explored by, 253, 255; myth emphasized by, 258; translation of, 260–61; Wei T. with, 256 Seediq Bale (film), 11–12, 13n3, 137, 220, 225, 272–73; casting of, 275; China in, 274; Chiu Y. on, 185–186; Exceedingly Barbaric compared with, 123; gaya in, 190; international cut of, 275; Musha Incident interpreted in, 179–80; Remains of Life compared with, 200–4; research reflected by, 179–96; translation of, 199n54

seediq bale (true person), 212, 215 Seediq National Assembly, 259–60 sentimentality (sentimentalität), 180–85 “Setting Sun Over the Savage Village” (Yoshiya), 10, 101–2 sexuality, 127, 129, 164–65, 167 shelling, 26, 31, 32 Shimaigahara Incident, 65–66, 70; Dakis P. on, 82–83; death from, 96n12; memory of, 82–88; Musha Incident and, 78–82, 79–80; Paalan following, 86; survivors of, 82 Shimomura Sakujirō, 147n1 Shimonoseki Treaty, 29 Shi Zhengfeng, 5 shock, 47, 48, 71, 136 Shōji Sōichi, 125–26 Simon, Scott, 137–38, 146 Simpson, Leanne Betasamosake, 133n2 Sinevaudjan Incident, 138 Sino-Japanese Treaty of Shimonoseki, 183 Smith, Linda Tuhiwai, 194 Soldier (Ōshika), 108 sound, 234, 250 Spanish flu, 86 spatial displacement, 110 Stanley, Henry Morton, 109 state, 92–94 Sterk, Darryl, 179, 193–195 Stoler, Ann, 124–125 submission: Musha-town contrasted with, 71; by Pixo, 66–67; by police, 69–70; violence forcing, 26 suicide, 104, 107, 208 Super Citizen Ko, 261 suppression, 33–37, 39n5, 44n72; blockade aiding, 27–28; for camphor, 19, 29, 42n27; under colonialism, 17–18; Dakekan conflict defining, 25; early patterns of, 20–24; Le Gendre and, 138; In de x  293

suppression (continued) Musha Incident and, 143–44; in Paalan, 45; reality of, 92; Tgdaya in, 88; translation of, 39n5; violence forged by, 25 survivors: exile of, 3–4; of Musha Incident, 246; in Pusu Qhuni, 203–4, 209; relocation of, 268; Second Musha Incident and, 2–3, 203; of Shimaigahara Incident, 82; writing documenting, 77, 149 sustainability, 229, 236 symbolization, 166 Tadao Nawi, 209 Tai Kuo-hui, 77 Taipei Association for Research on Indigenous Peoples, 61 Taiwan: Africa compared with, 109; colonialism confronted in, 18; history of, 193, 220; Japan compared with, 141; Legislative Yuan to, 253; Musha Incident misunderstood in, 252 Taiwan Bank, 117 “Taiwan e-Learning and Digital Archives Program,” 220 Taiwan government general (TGG), 55, 57, 64–68 Taiwan People’s Party, 91 Taiwan Public Television, 264, 270 Taiwan Republic Movement, 20 Taizhong, 36, 107 Takasago Volunteer Army, 3, 206, 266, 268 Takayama Hatsuko. See Hanaoka Hatsuko Tale of Castaways in the Land of LongEared People (Nakamura), 105 Tanah Nawi, 202–3, 214 Tang Shiang-Chu: on heroism, 200–16; heroism distinguished by, 215; Mahung focused on by, 207; 294  Ind e x

reconciliation emphasized by, 202; Wu H. with, 11–12, 203, 207, 213, 217n21 Tang Xiangzhu, v Tapani Incident, 244 Tapas Nawi, 83, 86, 97n21 Taroko Battle, 138, 140 Taste of Apples, The, 261 Tavares, Antonio, 137 Taylor, Astra, 229 technoscience, 234, 237 temporal regression, 110 Temu Walis, 186–89 Teng, Emma Jinhua, 194 terminology, 38n2, 39n8, 39n10; Cultural Atlas misled by, 48; for Japan, 64; Musha within, 47, 69. See also names Testimony About the Musha Incident (Awi Hepah), 5 .textual condition, 231–32 Tgdaya, 48; with Bunun, 66, 81; death of, 83; with Japan, 54, 63–64, 67–68, 70–71; population of, 84–85; in suppression, 88; Toda and, 202–3 TGG. See Taiwan government general thinking, 163–64, 180 Tkdaya, 186, 188, 270 Toda: with Japan, 187–88; in Second Musha Incident, 200; Tgdaya and, 202–3; Tkdaya and, 186, 188, 270–71 Tolokku, 32 Torgovnick, Marianna, 102–3 tourism, 50–51 Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (Wittgenstein), 169 trade, 63–64 tradition: heroism in, 210–11, 211; in narrative, 210; suicide and, 209; thinking influenced by, 180

translation: of benevolence, 39n5; by Berry, 174n26, 175n52; of Chiu Y., 198n40; of Chou, 198n40; of Dakis, 216n20; Musha influenced by, 48–49; of Pixo, 60; of Pusu Qhuni, 212; of Qiu, 12; of Remains of Life, 244; of Seediq, 256; of Seediq Bale (album), 260–61; of Seediq Bale (film), 199n54; of suppression, 39n5; travel and, 139; on Wikipedia, 220, 222; of yusheng, 203–4 trauma: ethics of, 149, 151, 170–71; Freud on, 213–14; heroism and, 200–16; in history, 12–13; narrator emphasizing, 204; Tang S. on, 200–16; transcending, 213–16; writing on, 149–51; Wu H. on, 200–16 travel, 139 “Travels in the Colony” (Satō), 141 true person. See seediq bale Truku, 46, 59 Truth Bale (Dakis), 186–87, 191 Tsushima Yūko, 11, 122–33 Turkel, William J., 234–35 Ukan Pawan, 96n12 United Nations, 43n57 Uno Toshiharu, 91 Utsumi Chūji, 53–54 Varela, Miguel Escobar, 232 vengefulness, 24 Victory, 272 violence, 44n70; Aborigines abstaining from, 81; of assimilation, 106; assumption and, 41n25; benevolence coexisting with, 37; body and, 101–22; camphor directing, 23–24; of civilization,

192, 196; colonialism authorizing, 37–38; discourse accepting, 29–30; intimacy and, 126; Musha Incident followed by, 2; by police, 35; savagery catalyzed by, 111; shock at, 136; Simon on, 137–38; submission forced with, 26; suppression forging, 25; Wei T. displaying, 137 virtual exhibition, 230, 230; copyright in, 227–29, 228; digital platforms grappled with by, 236; multimedia in, 231; Musha Incident as, 226–32; Wikipedia contrasted with, 227–28 Walis Buni, 78–81, 79–80, 88 Walis Norgan, 146, 226 Walsh, Catherine, 132–33 Wang, David Der-wei, 3 Wan Jen, 12, 262–71 Wan Sha-lang, 192 War of Resistance, 263 Wartime Society (Matsumoto), 129 Wartime Sociology (Okamura Tsuneo), 129–30 weapons: Atayal owning, 41n20; confiscation of, 22, 32, 41n20, 66; Japan placing, 68; military experimenting with, 36; mountainguns as, 69–70; outlawed, 36; trade and, 63–64 Wei Moqi, 60 Wei Te-sheng, 11, 13n3, 220, 255, 272, 274–75; aesthetic prioritized by, 183–84, 191; Chiu Y. contrasted with, 189–91; configurational comprehension attained by, 181; history reflected by, 179–96; Lin K. contrasted with, 182–85; narrative chose by, 181; Qiu inspiring, 216n19, 217n19, 273; In de x  295

Wei Te-sheng (continued) with Seediq Bale (album), 256; Seediq meeting with, 190; violence displayed by, 137 White, Hayden, 181, 196n11, 219 White Terror, 92–93, 207, 262 Why Don’t We Sing?, 207–8 Wikipedia, 11; crowdsourcing revising, 222; emplotment dislocated by, 235; history represented on, 218, 221–26, 223, 224; MIH contrasted with, 221; on Musha Incident, 220, 223, 224; narrative challenged by, 224–225; NPOV of, 222–24; peer review on, 223–24; Presner defining, 225–26; radicalism of, 222; translation on, 220, 222; virtual exhibition contrasted with, 227–28 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 169 women, 104; in Exceedingly Barbaric, 126–27; gaya ignored by, 83; identity of, 265; in pgluk snaw, 83; Tsushima concerned with, 126 “Women of the Savage Frontier” (Nakamura), 104 Woo, John, 272 writing: Christianity influencing, 13n4; ethics of, 149, 151; of Remains of Life, 248–49; survivors documented with, 77, 149; on trauma, 149–51 Wu Feng, 221 Wugonglun, 53–54, 54, 56 Wu He, 3–4, 149–72; Deng compared with, 201; on heroism, 200–16; in isolation, 246; Pilin critiquing, 201–2; on

296  Ind e x

Remains of Life, 243–52; Seediq empathized with by, 205; as selfindulgent, 205; Tang S. with, 11–12, 203, 207, 213, 217n21; on trauma, 200–16, 225 Wu Micha, 145 Wu Rwei-ren, 93–94 Xu Chieh-lin, 65 Xu Shijie, 5 Yabu Syat, 5, 13n4 Yamabe Kentaro, 91 Yamaguchi Masao, 108–9, 120n13 Yanagita Kunio, 145 Yeh, Doris, 253 Yokoyama Shōjirō, 60, 62 Yoshimura beat-down incident, 34 Yoshiya Nobuko, 10, 101–2, 116–17, 119, 121n24 Yu, G., 147 yusheng (instinct): the Contemporary distinguished from, 161; life and, 171; Musha Incident contrasted with, 162–63, 165; the real contextualizing, 165; thinking compared with, 163–64; translation of, 203–4. See also Pusu Qhuni; Remains of Life Zeffirel, Franco, 183–84 Zhang Shenqie, 243 Zhang Taiyan, 139 Zhang Zuolin, 117 Zheng Chenggong, 138 Zhong Zhaozheng, 243 Zhou Wanyao, 217n25 Žižek, Slavoj, 166