Formations of Colonial Modernity in East Asia 0822319438, 9780822319436

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FORMATIONS OF COLONIAL

MODERNITY IN EAST ASIA

Tani E. Barlow, Editor

D U K E U N I V E R SIT Y PRE S S

Durham & London

© 1997 Duke University Press

All rights reserved

States of America on acid-free paper

00

Printed in the United

Library of Congress Cataloging-

in-Publication Data appear on the last printed page of this book. These essays originally were published in the following issues of positions: Wang Hui, "The Fate of'Mr. Science' in China: The Concept of Science and Its Application in Modern Chinese Thought;' 3:1 (spring 1995). Lydia H. Liu, "Translingual Practice: The Discourse of Individualism between China and the West:' 1:1 (spring 1993). Alan S. Christy, "The Making of Imperial Subjects in Okinawa:' 1:3 (winter 1993). James A. Fujii, "Writing Out Asia: Modernity, Canon, and Natsume Soseki's Kokoro:' 1:1 (spring 1993). Tomiyama Ichiro, "Colonialism and the Sciences of the Tropical

Zone: The Academic Analysis of Difference in 'the Island Peoples;" 3:2 (fall 1995). Charles Shiro Inouye, "In the Scopic Regime of Discovery: Ishikawa Takuboku's Diary in Roman Script and the Gendered Premise of Self-Identity;' 2:3 (winter 1994). Miriam Silverberg, "Remembering Pearl Harbor, Forgetting Charlie Chaplin, and the Case of the Disappearing Western Woman: A Picture Story;' I:1 (spring 1993). Fred Y. L. Chiu, "Politics and the Body Social in Colonial Hong Kong," 4:2 (fall 1996). Charles K. Armstrong, "Surveillance and Punishment in Postliberation North Korea;' 3:3 (winter 1995). Chung moo Choi, "The Discourse of Decolonialization and Popular Memory: South Korea:' 1:1 (spring 1993). Tani E. Barlow, "C616Hiatlisffi'S Career in Postwar China Studies;' 1:1 (spring 1993). Craig Clunas, "Oriental Antiquities/Far Eastern Art:' 2:2 (fall 1994). James L. Hevia, "Leaving a Brand on China: Missionary Discourse in the Wake of the Boxer Movement:' was previously published in Modern China: An International Quarterly of History and Social Science 18:3 (July 1992), reprinted by permission of Sage Publications, Inc.

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Contents

Tani E. Barlow Introduction: On "Colonial Modernity" Wang Hui The Fate of "Mr. Science" in China: The Concept of Science and Its Application in Modern Chinese Thought 21 Lydia H. Liu Translingual Practice: The Discourse of Individualism between China and the West 83 James L. Hevia Leaving a Brand on China: Missionary Discourse in the Wake of the Boxer Movement 113 Alan S. Christy The Making ofImperial Subjects in Okinawa 141 James A. Fujii Writing Out Asia: Modernity, Canon, and Natsume Soseki's Kokoro 171 Tomiyama Ichiro Colonialism and the Sciences of the Tropical Zone: The Academic Analysis of Difference in "the Island Peoples" 199

VI

Contents

Charles Shiro Inouye In the Scopic Regime of Discovery: Ishikawa Takuboku's Diary in Roman Script and the Gendered Premise of Self-Identity 223 Miriam Silverberg Remembering Pearl Harbor, Forgetting Charlie Chaplin, and the Case of the Disappearing Western Woman: A Picture Story 249 Fred Y. L. Chiu Politics and the Body Social in Colonial Hong Kong 295 Charles K. Armstrong Surveillance and Punishment in Postliberation North Korea 323 Chungmoo Choi The Discourse of Decolonization and Popular Memory: South Korea 349 Tani E. Barlow GeleHialisffi:'s Career in Postwar China Studies 373 Craig Clunas Oriental Antiquities/Far Eastern Art 413

Contributors 447 Index 449

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Modernity" ~ Tani E. Barlow

Colonialism and modernity are indivisible features of the history of industrial capitalism. That much has been clear since Marx pointed out the crucial role colonialism played in the transformations of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, although the ways that Marx's own narratives centered Europe and personified European capitalism's emancipatory potential are not theoretically or empirically viable. Leninist and Maoist analyses of imperialism have expanded thinking on the historical relationship between colonial exploitation and modernity, as have anticolonial wars of national liberation fought in the name of Lenin and Mao and scholarship engaged in the politics of decolonization. All this is only to reestablish three points: The first is that "modernity" must not be mistaken for a thing in itself, for that sleight of hand obliterates the context of political economy. The second is that once modernity is construed to be prior to colonialism, it becomes all too easy to assume, wrongly, the existence of an originary and insurmountable temporal lag separating colonialism from modernity. Thus, the third point is that the modernity of non-European colonies is as indisputable as the colonial core of European modernity. However, not much of this consensus on colonialism and the discourses of modernity was admitted into East Asian area studies until very recently. Looking from the inside out, academic scholarship and popular knowledge about East Asia had remained almost unbearably static, constrained for decades by, among other things, a naturalization of the knowledge field. For years, the dominant wing of East Asian historiography maintained that "China, Japan, and Korea" form one very long lived, very real, historically very homogeneous, social-cultural totality. Knowledge about this naturalized region was transparent and descriptive, analogous to that of the biological sciences, and therefore it enforced the idea that the building blocks

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of social science-culture, society, the individual-have indisputable epistemological authority. What happened to disrupt this confidence? The latest round of global economic restructuring finds the United States dismantling its welfarenational security state system and remobilizing into an entity more adept at operating efficiently in the regime of flexible, global capital. The older social science framework is increasingly less convincing. The rigid ideological apparatus of the Pax Americana is less central to those still willing to underwrite the cost of scholarship in the Pacific Basin, for example, the Boeing Company, Asian American elites, select Asian states, right -wing u.s. think tanks, and so on. By habitually localizing modernity in Europe and the United States, cold war Asian studies kept deferring what might otherwise have been fairly obvious-contemporary Asian modernities. The panic visible in 1980s u.s. popular culture over what appeared to some people to be "traditional" Japan's inexplicable economic ascendancy is symptomatic of this invested misreading. Now, all of a sudden, the evidence seems overwhelming. Clients of the United States, formerly held to be permanently disadvantaged "culturally;' have somehow inexplicably overtaken European allies, at least in economic terms and in terms of the living standard. Regional, capital-rich states are engaging in their own neocolonial adventures. This awakening to the unworkability of vested theoretical and evidentiary categories is, I would argue, part and parcel of the contemporary reworking of geopolitical relations into shapes not yet fully tangible. positions: east asia cultures critique, volume one, number one, titled "Colonial Modernity;' appeared in the fall of 1993. Republished under the same name in this volume are many of the essays from that initial issue, plus additional work culled from subsequent issues. I have retained the title because it sums up, in my view, the journal's first critical project, which was to interrogate received ideas about writing histories of East Asia and to suggest viable critical alternatives. positions entered into an ongoing discussion about colonialism and postcolonialism at a time when the debates were largely associated with the Subaltern School of South Asia Marxist historiography, with projects in international feminism, with scholarship on Africa and the forced immigration of its populations, and with the critique of European Orientalism begun by Edward Said. These already densely argued critiques fueled the desire just surfacing among progressive u.s. scholars working in area studies to pose our work in terms of problematics suggested by Marx, Foucault, and Derrida.

Introduction

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In this introduction, I argue that the category of "colonial modernity" is a useful innovation. Like the expansive and suggestive terms «cultural critique;' "woman-of-color feminism" and "neo-Marxism;' it connotes present deficiencies of criticism while at the same time pointing, albeit vaguely, to ways of thinking in progressive, loosely extranational or multinational ways about regions-all regions-now undergoing remapping. l Left scholarship for the most part simply mourns the depredations of flexible capitalism, a legitimate task but limited in what it can accomplish. The changes underway compel us to keep inventing adequate ways to think about the complex histories of "East Asia:' In this necessary endeavor the frame of colonial modernity may prove useful, and I will make the case for its merits in the second part of this introduction. However, considering the questions associated with colonial modernity in a new, disintegrating scholarly terrain raises questions about reflexively evaluating critical language itself. The cusp where political economy, deconstructive political strategies, and discourse analysis meet is a good place to begin considering the difficulties of critique, where what replaces the extant lexicon must be scrutinized as carefully as that lexicon itself. Modernity exists as a cliche in the rhetoric that anyone trained in East Asian area studies speaks fluently as a condition of entering the profession. In this peculiar language there exist old historiographical stereotypes such as the "premodernity" of Korean folk culture, Japan's «failed modernity;' the "modernization of China and Taiwan;' and the "modernization initiatives" of the benevolent United States. This cryptodisciplinary lexicon is in turn rooted in older historiographic debates. For instance, in narratives about the People's Republic of China, the question of whether the turn toward "modernity" came in the Tang-Song era or in the late Ming has resting on it judgments about the restructuring of the Chinese socius under communism. Or to take another example, narratives about that altogether too discrete object of historiographic desire, Japan, involve questions of stages of history; they hinge on ascertaining whether Japanese feudalism was authentic or derivative and therefore whether the conditions of capitalist modernity were already in place when Admiral Perry arrived or not. On the other hand, in the u.s. context (also commonly referenced as "the West"), lexical terms like colony, colonial, and colonialism are frequently abandoned altogether. But it is worth pointing out that the term "colonial" maintains its highest profile (and thus its ghostly presence in cold war East Asian historiography) for the most part because there really is no other

4 Tani E. Barlow way to describe Japanese policy in Taiwan, Korea, and Manchuria. As the critical wing of Japan studies has repeatedly pointed out, the historiography of Japan in u.s. Asian studies is a mutually enabling tissue of alibis for global dominance. Indeed, to this day, apolegetics still are being published that reinforce the idea that "modern" Japan had no alternative but to "expand;' and thus while the Fifteen Year War may be indisputably an instance of imperialism, it is a wholly explicable, even excusable imperialism. This argument gets absorbed into efforts that would erase u.s. culpability in aggressive post-Pacific War neocolonialism. With the notable exception of the debate on u.s. imperialism that erupted during the Vietnam War era and in specialties such as Southeast Asian studies, neither colonialism nor imperialism has been considered a truly core or legitimate problematic for u.s. Asian studies as a field of knowledge. Moreover, because the lexicon, in use since the cold war founding of Asian studies, is really an offshoot of an explicitly imperialist historiography of the United States, terms such as colonialism and modernity must carefully be examined for their specific local meaning. In context they may end up bearing little relation to local, anti-imperialist nationalist historiographies or the work of critical historians working in the regions in question, and against state-sponsored or crudely nationalist historiographies of their own. A second strictly lexical issue is the one about alternatives. To some scholars, "postcolonialism" offers a prefabricated option to business as usual in East Asian studies. Self-described postcolonial scholars offer ways of thinking about global inequality and tools for distancing scholars from I naturalized categories like nation, tradition, modernity, and so on. Maybe even most importantly, the lexicon appears at first blush to possess a rocklike integrity, since the terms are ethically solvent and comparatively new. Yet for all its virtues, the existing postcolonial language may not prove wholly adequate to the new archive or to the already existing politics of scholarship in those destinations to which it is being exported or to the material conditions where these established terms are being applied. And that is because, as with any code, what gets transported along with new terms are certain assumptions about disciplinarity. In South Asian studies, a general argument that has emerged in recent years and that rests on incompatible views about historicity and colonialism helps explicate this question of portability regarding the postcolonial canon. The general argument goes like this: Anglo-Indian colonialism established regimes of knowledge that were modern and, although jointly if unequally authored by colonizer and colonized, tended to obscure local

Introduction

5

realities. Given that all contemporary disciplinary knowledge is implicated in this situation-since the Enlightenment heritage is by definition a colonial discourse-critical history writing will rest on one or both of two corollary assumptions: First, the critique of colonial discourses leads eventually to a postcolonial, emancipatory, non-European and multipurpose lexicon that can be used equally well in describing contexts in all of the formerly colonized world. Second, when the world that colonial discourses hitherto masked is at last revealed, it will turn out that only natives of those places understand and can write about them, and therefore the conundrum of incommensurability will replace the violence of colonial discourse. One can often see both these contradictory assumptions at work in scholarship that has uncritically borrowed its lexicon from the Subaltern Studies collective. An obvious example is the term "gendered subaltern;' which, after migrating into every conceivable regime of scholarship, has lost both its power as an abstraction and any specificity it might initially have possessed. Perhaps the point at which it becomes unprofitable to proceed with appropriations across disciplinary boundaries of the postcolonial critical lexicon is the point where the historicity oflexicons that seductively offer alternative ways to totalize across locale and specificity is itself ignored. A third question related to poaching from existing lexicons is the deceptively simple issue of defining events. How could a lexicon forged in conditions of binary opposition of colonizer/colonized work in the manically proliferating conditions of difference that operated under the conditions of semicolonialism? If colonialism is said, in a categorical sense, to be best exemplified by the English Raj, and all other forms of colonialism are understood in reference to that historical model, then not only are all other formations derivative but conditions fundamentally unlike that originary design might indeed be inconceivable or unseeable-on precisely the same grounds as the critique of colonial discourse holds European epistemes responsible for overriding the consciousness of the subaltern. My underlying point is very simple: Where in the idiom of current postcolonial studies, itself indelibly marked by the allegedly originary Manicheanism rooted in the colonial construction of the European Self in relation to multifarious others, would a form marked "semi" fit? Perhaps in the end the most valuable part of the colonial critique for projects like the ones raised in this volume will turn out to be not the syllabary per se but rather how the writing of postcolonial histories has complicated history writing in general and forced it in certain directions. His-

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to rio graphic issues raised over the years by the Subaltern Studies historians and particularly the tension the group has negotiated between Marxism and discourse theory are a rich resource, largely because of how they interpret the significance of Foucault. Foucault must be credited with two particularly important innovations for scholarship after the decline of European dominance: The first is the notion that the historical field is itself always open in the sense that it must always be framed by the historian rather than by events unfolding mechanically in the human past. The second is that no notion of History can precede the actual task of writing history because in the absence of a strict logic of representationalism, there is no outside event separable from its own textualization. Both of these overlapped dicta-the use of the notion of the field to complicate Eurocentric versions of Marxism and the willingness to engage recklessly in efforts at writing history nonetheless-are the valuable heritage of South Asian Subaltern Studies pioneering work in the study of colonial modernity. "Colonial modernity" can be grasped as a speculative frame for investigating the infinitely pervasive discursive powers that increasingly connect at key points to the globalizing impulses of capitalism. Because it is a way of posing a historical question about how our mutual present came to take its apparent shape, colonial modernity can also suggest that historical context is not a matter of positively defined, elemental, or discrete unitsnation states, stages of development, or civilizations, for instance-but rather a complex field of relationships or threads of material that connect multiply in space-time and can be surveyed from specific sites. The historiographic formulation "colonial modernity" may prove sufficiently general to encourage ensemble-like historical writing (situated among states, perhaps, or among subnational groups across state boundaries, or among and between subjectivities, and so on) rather than continuing the convention of binding historical knowledge in strictly opposed pairs (self/other, state/nation, colony/metropole). Finally, the term "colonial modernity" may also suggest a desire to experiment with ways of stepping around some well-rehearsed impediments to critical scholarship: the tendency naively to disavow power differentials (simple anticolonialism and the various worn-out third worldist enthusiasms), the othering effect (the use of "the other" as a simple pretext for autocritique), psychological reductionism (reading the historical record from the starting point that we are all equally oedipalized and thus any gesture toward delimiting difference is always a de facto attempt to subdue an other), and the paralyzing double bind of colonial discourse theories where learned speech is precluded (the

Introduction

7

Spivakian culturalist riddle, which finds only the inarticulate speaking for themselves). So what in my view are the common conditions of colonial modernity that the scholarship here exemplifies? First, each essay seems to understand the terrains visited to have been already occupied, and thus highly invested ideologically and intellectually. Second, each presents a view of intellectual fields that stresses complex mutual implication and the unending circulation of key terms. Third, they all focus on a synchronous moment, established for the purposes of critical historiography, when colonial discourses may be accounted for and therefore described. Fourth, these scholars nonetheless accept differential investments and locate themselves openly as nationalists or postnationalists, racialized subjects or migrants, to establish lines of difference. For the most part, and Fred Y. L. Chiu's essayexemplifies my point, the work suggests alternative means of engaging reflexively and critically with historical questions, but never at the "level [of] the idea of history:' and always by crafting historical "tension in the writing itself'2 However, as interesting as the commonalities of the knowledge field are the ways the papers characterize specific modernist projects. Though bound together in complex new ways in a modern spatial-temporal field, semi colonial Chinese and imperialist Japanese discourses connected in a series of inequitable exchanges that figured the common field in radically different ways. The articles by Wang Hui, James Hevia, and Lydia Liu all address the colonial question in Chinese contexts, for instance, and all contend with the question of how to define the terrain of "semicolonialism" in positive terms. Wang Hui's study "The Fate of'Mr. Science' in China: The Concept of Science and Its Application in Modern Chinese Thought" seeks to establish how Chinese thinkers comprehended basic science, what the conditions of that encounter were, and why writing about science, a metonym of the colonial question in Chinese and Japanese intellectual exchange, preoccupied scholars the way it did. According to Wang, educated Chinese shared with educated Japanese a common, formal lexicon and an established circuit for exchanging theory. It felt quite natural to Chinese scholars, therefore, to borrow neologisms from the work of Japanese scholars when translating new ideas. Wang argues that when they turned to familiar circuits of intellectual exchange and conventional scholarly practice, however, Chinese scholars effectively undermined the newness of the problematics because they privileged accommodative logics

8 Tani E. Barlow and similitude. The referential field of Chinese modernist thinking thwarted binary opposition. Obviously, one of the things Wang establishes by implication is why the analogy of India to China fails: among other reasons, China's Japanese colonizers shared a past heritage with China; China was never, in any case, totally occupied; there were actually a lot of other colonizers in China alongside Japan; Japan itself was constantly under the European gun, threatened with treaty-port colonialism on the Chinese model; and the most aggressive occupation of China, by Japanese imperialism, was actually the shortest (particularly in comparison to the British Raj). But it is difficult to leave the analogy behind altogether. While it is certainly true that China was not India just as Japan was not Britain, what might be said descriptively and analytically about Chinese semicolonialism as such? According to Wang, what particularly animated colonial modernist thinking in China was a desire for "essential congruity" that ended up limiting the Chinese scholars' understanding of science on the one hand and "securely confined their understanding within the traditional epistemic mode" on the other. Wang suggests that a more sophisticated model of colonial modernity is needed -one that would focus on the phenomenon he calls the "dual conditioning" of thinkers who refuse to abandon local scholastic practices and who attempt unsuccessfully to graft Japanized, Anglicized, or Americanized social sciences onto them. Yet, scholarship in the semicolonial frame can never be uncomplicatedly national, since the borders of the semicolonized nation are, by definition, compromised. So why not, in that case, consider the multiple conditioning of thinkers? Wang Hui's essay suggests the complexity of the semicolonial terrain as Chinese theorists encountered it: a knowledge field bordered on one side by analogy (this science is just like our ancient philosophy but different from it), on another side by accommodative logic (since science is acceptably similar to what we already know, we can overlook all real differences), on a third side by an ideology of identity (Japanese theory is just like Chinese theory, so we can borrow back and forth across historical contexts uncritically), and so on in a world of multipolarity. Now Wang Hui presents a vision of the complex discursive field of semicolonized Chinese scholarship. The data he scrutinizes are scholarly logic, lines of argument, circuits of international intellectual exchange, ex post facto histories of the present, and so on. However, he pays relatively little attention to a problem of colonial modernity that virtually preoccupies Japanese studies, and that is the agonistic position of the Self. In Japanese discourses of colonial

Introduction

9

modernity, as will be clear shortly, Self teeters between dissipation into the heterogeneous local discourses that preceded capitalist coding and formation of a hypostatized, paranoid, national imperialist entity capable of breathtaking cruelty. In "Translingual Practice: The Discourse of Individualism between China and the West;' Lydia Liu takes on a question only implicit in Wang Hui's work: the difficulties, given the consolidation of the colonial discursive grid, attending the formation of a centered bourgeois subject in conditions of Chinese semicolonialism. Liu suggests that the key to this question of Self lies in translation practices, since translation is the percipient move in colonial encounters. However, because she does not accept the claims of that bourgeois Self, she seeks to connect debate over a translingual Self to the discourse of nation building. Consonant with the emerging portrait of Chinese colonial modernity, Liu suggests that "since the inflected grammar of the modern self is embedded from the first moment in a history of contexted meaning within which the idea of nationhood looms large;' the Self is just one among many elements of modernity in play. The question raised in her presentation, however, is the same one haunting James Hevia's contribution and most other attempts thus far to account positively for Chinese colonial modernity. As these works implicitly suggest, the discursive field of Chinese semicolonialism is so vast, its conditions so complex, that in frustration, one is always tempted simply to read out complexity and refocus attention back on the familiar track of "China and the West:' James Hevia's "Leaving a Brand on China" points to the dilemma facing many who work on the emerging question of how to characterize Chinese colonial modernity, but he approaches it obliquely. The field he proposes is a semicolonial world in which "symbolic warfare" is waged by the armies of the paranoid foreign Powers-Great Britain, France, Germany, Russia, Japan, the United States, Italy, and Austria-against the conspiratorial Boxer rebels and the Qing government. Hevia discovers an exotic cultural dynamic in the camp of the imperialists: the Old Testament narrative logic that turned acts of retribution against Chinese civilians-rapine, looting, beheadings-into apparently appropriate punishment does not explain why the Powers mobilized their avenging armies against city walls, ancestral tablets, and civic centers. Hevia argues that it is important in considering Chinese colonial modernity to take into account the projections raised in the discourses of the colonizers. In his view, the enterprise of punishment concerned not Chinese actualities but rather the

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imperialists' desire to impart to the Chinese nation "secular visions of evolution and progress in a universal pattern of natural historical developmene' The question left unanswered is how to judge the degree to which these exogenous narratives of "moral modernization" were quickly naturalized and whether they had actually merged into Chinese modernist practices by the Republican era (1911-1949). The task of monitoring semiosis as it flows in and around the breached boundaries of Chinese sovereignty is very difficult. Often analysis assumes multiple influences at the same time as it defaults into what are really complex binary models. This is an intractable problem, it would seem, and many excellent questions stem from it. For instance there is the issue of whether sovereignty really is the central concern for history writing in Chinese colonial modernity. Maintaining partial control of its sovereignty, after all, is what distinguished China from the "wholly colonized:' If the semicolony is defined by its residual hold on sovereignty, then it is possible that the Self/Other paradigm is quite simply inappropriate, or at the very least, not up to the task. Studies of the era of colonial modernity grasped from sites in Japanese discourses, on the other hand, do not assume the existence of a field of semicolonial flux. The preoccupation of China-oriented scholars with multiplicity and multiple semiotic processes connecting semi colonialism to multiple poles of power in Europe and Asia seems to disappear, and in its place, contributors focus on a doubled relation: Japanese state builders, threatened by u.s. and European colonialism, turned to consolidation of the nation through the colonial occupation of neighboring territory in East and Southeast Asia. Scholars siting their work in the context ofJapanese discourses begin with this established consensus. Consequently, what propels their work is anxiety over the uneasy relation of a national Self and the many, suborned others that were consumed in the process of national construction. A striking image of Japanese imperialism as pervasively dubious, pervious, off-balance, and therefore punitive emerges in this scholarship. Alan Christy, James Fujii, Tomiyama Ichiro, and Charles Inouye unravel colonial discourses underwriting modern Japanese literary modernism, social science, gendered tropes, and ideologies of national essence, where the most dynamic processes are objectification of the Other and amnesia in relation to the Self. In "The Making of Imperial Subjects in Okinawa:' for example, Alan Christy makes a strong case for characteristically Japanese colonial discourses being most tangible and complete in the peculiar instance of Okinawa. Since Japanese colonial discussion considered ethnicity to be a

Introduction

11

major issue and since Okinawa suffered the same "military invasion and occupation, political annexation, paternalistic enforcement of modernization, and compulsory cultural (especially linguistic) assimilation to Japan that were the hallmarks of Japanese colonial policy throughout Asia;' Christy claims that the historical archive makes it possible to state the core paradigm positively. That is because, as Christy and the others argue, there was a gap between the ideology of ethnic homogeneity that lay at the heart ofJapan's militarist self-image, and the reality of vastly heterogeneous daily practices, languages, and local habits, not just in the empire but in the home country as well. This gap led the Meiji government "to initiate a program of assimilation (daka)" that required both the colonized Okinawans as well as heterogeneous elements at home to "transform their speech, dress, work, and leisure activities ... to those designated 'Japanese.'" Working primarily from documents on social policy, Christy details how each key term he examines shows itself to be mutually implicated in others, and how this mutual constitution of ethnicized minority and modern Japanese placed both partners into unstable reliance on each other. "At the risk of reducing the complexity of the discourses;' he argues, Japanese identity was constructed as a sign of a progressive, nonOkinawan identity, while Okinawan identity was produced as a sign of being antimodern and non-Japanese. Situated within a discourse on economic development, a necessarily modernist discourse, the Okinawan identity was produced, as the nonmodern "thing which must be swept away:' so that modernization could fill the void. The requirement that Okinawan identity be produced as "non-Japanese" was important because only an antagonistic relation of opposition could transport the Okinawan elite out of China's orbit (toward which Okinawa had historically leaned and where the logic of identity operated) and into the orbit of colonial Japan. Furthermore, while the elite bought into the identification of themselves as "struggling to become Japanese:' the ethnicization and racialization of Okinawans encouraged the proletariat, defined as "unable to ever become Japanese:' to migrate into more prosperous corners of the empire like Taiwan. There, the nonmodern, ethnicized, irredeemably Okinawan minority member sojourned as prostitute, laborer, and peddler. I want to make one point explicit before moving on to James Fujii's illustration of how this dynamic got codified in the nationalist literary canon. Christy's study demonstrates the centrality of the minority for the

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consolidation of the nationalized Self. In other words, a binary disciplined the discourses of modernization in Japan because lacking a homogenous "Japanese" self, the heterogeneity that had been the enabling condition of life in the archipelago before would reassert itself, and the project of colonial modernity-the formation of the Japanese nation-state through the colonization of Asia-might have foundered, as state-making ventures foundered in China before 1949. The colonial modernist binary worked both ways, however. It required constant efforts at consolidation to maintain a seamless, unperturbed homogeneous self, but the effort rested on recruiting (or more crudely put, in incorporating) compliant others. Japanese imperialism established the conditions for always complicit othersChristy's example is Okinawan elites-to desire their own ethnicization and embrace their diminished status as "not yet modern" (under Japanese inscription) or as "modernizing" (in the u.s. cold war lexicon). James Fujii's "Writing Out Asia: Modernity, Canon, and Natsume Soseki's Kokoro" develops a thematic that surfaces in most of the papers, including those of Chiu, Barlow, and Clunas-indeed, wherever the question of the colonist's self-positioning is raised-and that is the question of amnesia, or what Fujii calls "writing out:' Why is there so little mention of imperialism in Soseki's literature in spite of the fact that the writer, as a tourist to Manchuria, virtually participated in the colonial occupation of that region? And more compellingly, how did Kokoro end up as the jewel in the national canon? Fujii's literary analysis addresses the machinery of state. To insure the "fusion of existing cultural and social identities to a modern European form of the nation-state;' Fujii argues, Soseki's literature exemplified the modernity of the nation's Self. Crucially, however, because the "term 'modern' almost always erases Japan's own reproduction of imperialist behavior and instead signifies the introduction of Western thought and material goods;' Soseki could not but emplot death and silence into the great modern Japanese novel, thus canonizing what is literally the enabling silence. Tomiyama Ichir6's "Colonialism and the Sciences of the Tropical Zone: The Academic Analysis of Difference in 'the Island Peoples'" and Charles Inouye's "In the Scopic Regime of Discovery: Ishikawa Takuboku's Diary in Roman Script and the Gendered Premise of Self-Identity" directly address the question of the central role of amnesia in Japanese colonial modernist discourses. Tomiyama takes the analysis into the world of social science. He recognizes the role that modern social science played, not just in the gathering of necessary intelligence about the habits of the peoples of

Introduction

13

the colonized Pacific, and he also raises the issue of the refusal of so many Japanese intellectuals to acknowledge the full extent of the epistemic involvement of the disciplines in Japan's adventurism. Tomiyama ties the contingency of the national Self to that very denial, or in his own words, the "complicit relation [of anthropology and colonialism] ... to the denial of practical relations in colonial conditions": [Japanese] colonialist practice was not narrated as an opposition of races and cultures; rather this "cooperativism" reveals the existence of the "Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere" as a discourse connected with such reforms as medicine, hygiene, and education. The scientific observing subject who reads signs from symptoms in a unidirectional fashion and constructs the Other is secured in the denial and affirmation of this practice. In other words, Japanese social science writing on natives in the tropical zone joined colonial practices to an epistemology capable of generating knowledge but only on the condition that economic facts and indices be occluded. The central problem for Tomiyama's essay is what happens when, as occurred from time to time, the categories of "islander" and "Japanese" get confused and the Other collapses into the national Self? Tomiyama notes that when a Japanese social scientist in the tropical zone falls prey to the disorders afflicting the nature of the culture of the tropical zone, the "islanders" classified as Other are not retheorized or resituated in the discursive space but are discovered to be Japanese! The terrible anxiety this essay considers appears to be the fear that in Japanese discourses of colonial modernity the Other is always a too-tremulous, too-provisional, toomakeshift element of the voracious (because imperialist) national Self. The proper borders separating Self and Other are never sufficiently drawn, as Tomiyama implies they are in European orientalism. The national Self can neither maintain distinctions nor conceive of nonexploitative, nonincorporative relations outside its own discursive regimes. And this, Tomiyama suggests, may be the unique and distinguishing quality of Japanese colonial discourses. Charles Inouye's "In the Scopic Regime of Discovery" offers an explanation of the gendered dynamics of Japanese colonial modernism through analysis of a key modern writer's secret, romanized sex-diary. Ishikawa Takuboku identified himself with the aggressors when he used the roman alphabet, which few Japanese were familiar with at the time, in his most

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intimate writing. And he interpolated womanhood and sexual relations with women in a new way: When we contextualize the writer's secretive activity of writing himself into history, we must see that for modern processes-be they the construction of railroads or of national myths- humility vis avis the West was a useful pose to strike. Why? Because to posit a superior example confirms as uncontestable the worth of imitation. It places the learner beyond criticism at the same time it conveniently does away with the need to grant subjectivity to objects of one's own discovery [like the prostitutes that Takuboku "explored" by means of rape]. If the initial agents of a discourse of discovery represent a first order, the "discovered" become a second order, eager to transform themselves into the discoverer of yet a third order of subjects. Inouye's contribution hints that the foundations of colonial modernist discourses in the Japanese imperial order may owe more to unequal, gendered relations than is commonly thought. Perhaps it is not too far a stretch to suggest that Tomiyama's colonial epistemologies might be connected to contemporary codes of gender and sexual relations. This may well be the logic that tacitly justifies the radically cruel institution of well-documented, state-sponsored, militarized prostitution. Miriam Silverberg's illustrated "Remembering Pearl Harbor, Forgetting Charlie Chaplin, and the Case of the Disappearing Western Woman: A Picture Story" also privileges instability, but her version of the story of Japanese colonial modernity stresses how thoroughly popular heterogeneity was and how it persisted in mass culture right down to the bitter end. What she calls the "Japanese culture of modernity" is marked by "identity fluidity, the consumption of images, and a focus on 'play' that ignored the modern rationalization of labor" and by how beholden play was to "the modern within the colonial ... [and] the colonial within the modern:' Working at the very material site of cafe culture, Silverberg analyzes photographs that catch moderns dressed up "in Chinese costume, illustrating the eroticization of the colonial experience in what may be termed a reversal of the 'mimicry' of the colonizer by the colonized ... [since] here of course the colonizer is passing for the colonized:' Silverberg's underlying point is that mass society did not cave in easily. Only under great duress did pleasureloving Japanese moderns give up Charlie Chaplin and Greta Garbo, Ri Koran and the kind of gender and ethnic fluidity that characterized the era before Japanese imperialism was mobilized to its fullest extent.

Introduction

15

With few exceptions the work collected here interests itself primarily in thinking about people rather like the authors of the essays themselvesintellectuals, government functionaries, writers, pornographers, translators, advertising executives, colonial officers, college professors. That is, we have tended to engage with the other theorist, not the Other as an abstraction or in the guise of some mysterious quality hidden from view by virtue of its origin in another class, ethnicity, language group, race, or nation. Epistemology and ontology are not what obstruct our access to each other; time, space, and the presence or absence of training, skill, propinquity, and luck are what permit or constrain a politics and an ethics of empathic connection and informed judgment. Maybe this is why the papers gravitate toward temporalities that allow authors to focus on moments that critic and subject can appear to share. Each paper expresses at some level or another an authorial desire to acknowledge simultaneity of authorship: Soseki is repeated through Fujii and made different, though the two may inhabit one another for all it means to the project of interrupting the ongoing discourse of colonial modernity (aka neocolonialism). Likewise, Lydia Liu may inhabit Lu Xun, while Alan Christy may well figure a complicit Okinawan intellectual; Wang Hui, a Kang Youwei; or Miriam Silverberg, a Ri Ko-ran. The slippages in play are partly the inevitable effect of scholarship, which is by definition always the retextualization of a forever vanished past; and yet, the repetitions are different because the patterns cited unfold in political economies and temporalities that are always in transition. Yet I believe the pervasive presence of slippage suggests the barely submerged desire to acknowledge openly that writer and written are not extricable, and in so doing, to perform the message that the relation of self to others is multiple, unstable, libidinal, agonistic, and constantly subject to repressive impulses. Moreover, the patterns that these compressed or doubled analyses extricate are very like patterns that we encounter in the present because the conditions of colonial modernity are not by any means alleviated. This truism is most thoroughly acknowledged in essays by Charles Armstrong and Fred Y. L. Chiu that directly address the exigencies of critique inhering in the academic project. In his "Politics and the Body Social in Colonial Hong Kong;' Fred Y. L. Chiu works on and from the site of an honest-to-god colony (ending this very year). Chiu's scholarly problem, therefore, is not to locate the conditions of colonial modernity in the past, but rather to demonstrate how it becomes "possible to recover a politics in Hong Kong" from the vise of colonial scholarship that still grips the

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colony's academy. That involves him in the question of why "the colonial ideologue's task was taken up by a colonized intelligentsia:' His eventual conclusion is that the discourse of the colonized intellectual masks the persistence of politics in the colony and should be "read as a refraction of the enunciator's own existential circumstances, as well as part ofhis/her structure of desire:' In other words, the colonial discourse is a projection of the need of the colonial elite to remain in relative power. Not only is this critique located in the present, it operates differently from simple historiographic critique because its object is remediation. The question Chiu poses is how "the political, and hence the social, is made to disappear; [howl to locate the points at which attempts were made to fragment popular mobilizations or co-opt them into the hegemony of the ruling block:' Working backward from knowledge that something very tangible-polities-is being constantly written out of the historiographic record, Chiu asks how it was done and who did it. He locates culprits and processes, or what he calls "the colonial operation:' But his essay seeks therapy; a cure. And that is how he makes the transition from critique of ideology to the evidence supporting his thesis that despite the efforts of colonizers and their local enforcers, "politics as found in the colonial setting -unwanted and unacknowledged by the colonial establishment"-can be recuperated, acted upon, and at the very least, accurately represented in critical, academic writing. Analyzing the genuine politics of the Wong Tai Sin temple as an instance of what he terms "collusion for survival;' Chiu, in the bitter and beautiful rhetoric of the contemporary critic of colonialism, writes that temple politics speaks "neither the language of a discourse on civil society or ... a history of the subaltern:' Rather, to write the history of the politics of the Wong Tai Sin temple is to register the existence of a phenomenon demonstrating "the persistent and continuous everyday struggle for 'Lebenswelt' survival, an anti-'political' resistance against (mal-) administration:' Like Chiu, Charles Armstrong considers why it is so difficult to think about the problem of a postcolonial era in a context where colonization is, spatially and temporally, the ineradicable material of the present. Armstrong's essay "Surveillance and Punishment in Postliberation North Korea" examines the local judicial archives and concludes that when the Korean communists took over the North they could not avoid knitting into their attempted total-control structure social forms that the Japanese colonial occupation had imposed on the people. To some degree, Armstrong is arguing a version of the same point that Miriam Silverberg and

Introduction 17 Fred Chiu both make about the way that popular culture always exceeds discourses of power. There are other important implications to Armstrong's thesis of the embedded ness of the past in the future. First, he also argues that the evidence he uncovers in this new archive is not covered by previous historiographic generalizations and therefore that the case of North Korean surveillance politics is exemplary. Second, he suggests that the cause of a thing and its effects are always separated by unanticipated contingencies, and so the pattern of the present is inevitably composed of inescapable repetition with a difference. Third, and most significant, his work suggests vividly a point that can be raised about all investigations of the conditions of colonial modernity: the postcolony is a riddle not because of the persistence of colonial discourses in the present but rather because colonialism cannot but have contributed to the profile of the present-whether its political effects are terminated or not-and that applies to our own critical academic project as much as to projects of statebuilding, modernization, or political decolonization. There are several ways that the essays by Chungmoo Choi, Tani Barlow, and Craig Clunas exemplify the need to continue the deconstructive impulse that acknowledges the degree to which colonial formations continue to shape the present. Each of these formulates a slightly different approach to the labor of disclosure. In her paper "The Discourse of Decolonization and Popular Memory: South Korea;' Chungmoo Choi uses the term "decolonization" very specifically to characterize the strategy used by the Korean student movement in the 1980s to combat colonial discourses and the colonial habits of self-disregard and self-disparagement. Choi's goal is to scrutinize theoretical strategies of decolonization that are usually unquestioned in postcolonial criticism to disclose what she calls "colonial doubletalk;' or the "discontinued interconnectedness between the metropolitan discourse and the internal(ized) hegemonic discourse" that is usually true of so-called postcolonialism. To show how the colonized are marked by the power of the Other- Japan and the United States-without ever securing the Other's wealth and power or even catching the Other's eye, she turns to a moment of shared temporality in which she, the author of an article about the critique of colonial misidentification, exists in the moment with colonial dominations that continue even after the critique has been played out. That shared temporality becomes the place where renewed critical efforts can be made to interrupt the powerful mechanisms of inequity. "When is postcolonial in South Korea?" she asks rhetorically. "Assuming South Korea to be postcolonial eludes the political,

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social, and economic realities of its people, which lie behind that celebrated sign 'post' of periodization, without considering the substantive specificity of Korean historians" where the "actual landscape of the postcolonial space is a contestatory one:' And she answers the question when with where: "South Korea is a space lying between the empty signifier 'postcolonial' and the reality that it (mis)represents:' In this critique as in most of the others there is the persistent, underlying realization that one is not only curiously synchronous with the subjects of one's own scholarship, but also that criticism is itself always complicitous. We cannot but collude with the historical conditions in which we exist and that we cannot and do not choose. It is in fact precisely in liberationist efforts like the discourses of decolonization that critics should be particularly accountable to the persistence of colonial habits. And here is the point at which the persistent, lurking desire to flatten out the terrain of colonial modernity in the Asian Pacific arena-a desire I have suggested pervades this volume-becomes immediately, obviously useful. It is not because of some modish "postcolonial" impulse that the critics seek to recognize themselves in the other theorist, the other poet, the other bureaucrat, but rather because simultaneity-confronting oneself for better or for worse in the historical counterpart-allows a renewal of engaged critique. Where we are located in the terrain becomes most germane, as pertinent and negotiable as who we are. This is certainly the case in the concluding essays of this volume, which examine the question of powerful continuing discourses of colonial modernity in u.s. and British imperialist discursive formations. In her "CeleHittlisffi's Career in Postwar China Studies;' Barlow explicates how colonial relations got written out of the national record of the United States through the erasure of capitalism, imperialism, and colonialism. Cold war Chinese studies was founded on the occlusion of colonial modernity, and ideological prohibitions against acknowledging u.s. imperialism led to constant efforts to establish speech that would not reveal the imperialist activities actually underway. In the end, the discourse of international relations turned to the natural sciences. (How important the full circle charted in this volume-from the discourses of science in Chinese colonial modernity to the discourses of science in u.s. colonial modernity-proves to be is not the central concern, though it is more than a simple coincidence.) The occlusion of the social-political forces of capitalism, imperialism, and colonialism proved very costly. "Objective" social science theory burdened China studies with an unwieldy, abstract,

Introduction

19

naturalized lexicon that promised a scientism and a universality that was hard to deliver. The arid social science lexicon policed by the cold war wing of the field ended up sanitizing and compartmentalizing research. Finally, Barlow finds a certain hilarious gendering and sexing of narratives about the u.s. orient (for example, the masculinity of the knowing, oedipalized subject, the scripting of reproductive biology into stories about Chinese history, and the transformation of colonial relations into a love story between a Western boy and an Oriental girl) underlying the sophisticated palaver. These gendered patterns are the familiar, comfortable Trojan horses of colonial history-writing that anchor u.s. social science representation in popular common sense. And they must be constantly reviewed. Craig Clunas does so, taking the critique of the critical academic project a step further to its extreme in "Oriental Antiquities/Far Eastern Are' Unlike Barlow, he personalizes his account by inserting a version of himself directly into the narrative about how Clunas, the man, came to curate the British Museum's China collection, and therefore how he himself is inextricably complicit in the project he will undertake to criticize. In the ongoing displacement of "colonialism into culture;' Clunas participated at the elite level. "I knelt down:' he explains of himself as a China-struck teenager, "and put my forehead to the black linoleum in homage" to the "great carved lacquer seat, labeled 'Throne of the Emperor Ch'ien-Iung.''' There in simple prose is the image of the desiring self who occupies an imaginary temporality in which he, a youngster on his way to Oxbridge, might stop by the British Museum and kowtow to the emperor of China. Clunas returns to this moment to reevaluate the place of national museums in promoting imperialist state formations. He does his job by tracking the "social life of the collection" of loot and commodities from semicolonized China through the ministrations of the stream of donors and curators, himself included, who patiently and unintentionally molded things contingent (artifacts) into things real, categorical, and concrete (Chinese Art). The papers in this collected volume are exemplary because they open a frame that I have been calling colonial modernity. As a frame of analysis, colonial modernity particularly emphasizes the fusion between the political economy of globalized Marxism and the discourse theory of Foucault. As I have demonstrated, authors move easily between a lexicon of class and capital and one that allows them to write authoritatively about enunciative sites, discursive effects, and historical events. The individual projects of the

20

Tani E. Barlow

cohort have made it possible for me to argue with lavish illustration how the synchronous architectonic space of "East Asia" in colonial modernity has been deterritorialized and previously localized temporalities interrupted and rerouted into new modalities. Thus, boundaries demarcating older regions and earlier periods have been compromised beyond recognition. Older, cold war categories with their placid, hyperstable binaries (state/civil society, reality/representation, tradition/ modernity, past/ present, factlinterpretation) are, I would argue, no longer central to the project of history writing. Each of these authors (and indeed, many contributors to the project not represented here) can no longer accept social science tropes as legitimate or meaningful categories of knowledge. On the contrary, what the scholarship here performs is quite simply the historicization of the detritus of the past ideology of EslsHial modernization. NOTES I am grateful to Donald M. Lowe for his suggestions, encouragement, proofing, reading, and indexing. Priscilla Wald, Leela Gandhi, Mellie Ivy, John Burge, and Jim Hevia (who also edited Fred Chiu's essay) read and commented on drafts of the introduction. I learned a lot about the "knowledge field" from Marshall Johnson's essay "Making Time: Historic Preservation and the Space of Nationality" (positions 2, no. 2 [fall 1994]). The "Past Postcolonialism" workshop at the University of Melbourne heard a very early version in fa111995; Chungmoo Choi provided editorial advice on that occasion. Jennifer Holberg, positions' editorial assistant, made my life worth living at several key points, which meant that production was far easier than it might otherwise have been. 1 This is even more necessary now that u.s. geopolitical fantasies are erupting into the public domain in a grossly explicit way. In one instance, New York Times editorialists wrote freely and with evident relish about "The New Great Game in Asia;' while on an adjacent page, conservative critics Jacob Heilbrunn and Michael Lind speculated glibly about the benefits that are accruing to "The Third American Empire:' It is also interesting to note the growing habit of reeoding East Asia and "North Asia:' (See "The New Great Game in Asia" and Jacob Heilbrunn and Michael Lind, "The Third American Empire;' New York Times, 2 January 1996 national edition.) 2 Robert Young, Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture, and Race (London and New York: Routledge, 1995), 78, 85·

~ The Fate of "Mr. Science" in China:

The Concept of Science and Its Application in Modern Chinese Thought

~K~ Wang Hui

The wide-ranging application of the concept of science in twentiethcentury China is far more complex than it seems. Chinese thinkers have not been interested in the idealist concept in which science, being an end in itself, is considered knowledge for knowledge's sake. As in Bacon's age,function and progress are the two keywords in the Chinese concept of science. Function takes on more nationalistic coloring among Chinese thinkers (in search of wealth and power), and progress finds itself aligned with the ideology of antitraditionalism. Indeed, from physics and chemistry to astronomy and geography, the theory of evolution to the theory of relativity, human psychology to human behavior, ethics and morals to political convictions, and so on, the concept and methodology of science have been widely applied in every domain of scientific and social endeavors. This extensive application of the concept of science has in fact led some researchers to conclude that in the first half of the twentieth century Chinese thinkers tended to make use of the prestige of science in areas that had hardly any relevance to science itself, a tendency known as scientism.l I doubt that the Western concept of scientism does full justice to the implications of the Chinese application of the concept of science. Indeed, the term scientism may obscure the fact that in the process of its Chinese application in recent [1839-1911] and modern times [1912-1949]' the term science came to imply the pursuit of pure knowledge and the recognition of its independent value. This is an undeniably significant reality. Even more important, the term disregards the relationship between so-called scientistic characteristics and modes of traditional Chinese thought: What language did Chinese thinkers use to grasp the implications of science? In what sense and why did they choose this language? What implications did this language have in the traditional Chinese context, and how did it affect

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WangHui

Chinese application of science? If Chinese thinkers' concept of science and their modes of application had produced characteristics similar to those of Western scientism, to what extent were these characteristics related to modes of traditional Chinese thought? If that relationship really existed, then the Chinese application of the concept of science must be unique. Furthermore, since the application related to the social roles of the appliers, it must also have some connection to their historical situation and to the nature and characteristics of the movements in which they participated. GEZHI AND THE ORIGIN OF THE CONCEPT OF SCIENCE: I

Science is a total concept: derived from the Latin scientia, the word simply means "knowledge:' In its modern usage science refers only to certain quasi knowledge, and scientific knowledge is understood to cover a wide diversity of topics. The scientific methods employed in various scientific researches, ranging from systematic observation, classification, deduction and alteration of laws to further observation, are not entirely uniform. [The Encyclopedia Britannica states it thus:] "The complex adjectival form of the word 'science; namely 'scientific' (that is, 'knowledge-making'), has been steadily displacing simpler, shorter, and more natural formations, such as 'sciential; 'scientic; and their variants, since the beginning of the 17th century. The acceptance of the form 'scientific' follows closely the growing prestige of what has come to be called 'science' (earlier 'natural philosophy'). This correlation of concept and adjective becomes intelligible in the light of the growing awareness that science is the making of knowledge and not knowledge as such, so that it has become more nearly equated with 'research; " signifying at last not a static doctrine, but a process.2 The modern usage of science as a term meaning "process" can be easily seen in recent Chinese thinkers' efforts to translate the word into concepts belonging to lixue (study of principle)-concepts like gezhi (investigation and extension), gewu (to investigate things), and qiongli zhi xue (study of probing thoroughly the principle). The term gewu zhizhi (to investigate things so as to extend knowledge) is a verb-object structure, reflecting a dynamic subject-object relationship. In fact, gezhi as a noun consisting of two verbs ["to investigate and to extend"] can be viewed as a gerund ["investigating-extending"] or a verbal noun. Compared with the later popular concept of "science;' gezhi lays particular stress on the process of the subject's cognition, observation, and experience.

The Fate of "Mr. Science" in China

23

The similarity between the concept of gezhi and the modern usage of "science" does not in fact originate in modern usage, but rather in the particular way that Chinese thought understood the nature and origin of zhi (knowledge). In general, Chinese thinkers' responses to this problem can be grouped into three categories: the first held that zhi originated from sensory organs-in other words, it was admitted that all objects were independent and that knowledge was drawn from sensory impressions. A typical expression of this was Yan Xizhai's [Yan Yuan (1635-1704)] statement that knowledge was inseparable from its object (also Xunzi [ca. 340-ca. 245 B.C.] and Wang Chong [27-ca. A.D. 100ll. A second body of opinion held that zhi originated from both without and outside [the human mind]. Cheng Hao [1032-108S], Cheng Yi [1033-1107], and Zhu Xi [1130-1200], for instance, considered knowledge innate to humans, who must investigate things in order to perfect zhi (also Mozi [ca. 478-ca. 392 B.C.], Zhangzi [Zhang Zai {1020-1O77}]' and Wang Chuanshan [Wang Fuzhi {1619-1692} D. The third school argued that zhi comes from within, not from outside-that is, it comes spontaneously from one's innermost being. (This doctrine is known as the xinxue, or "learning of the heartmind;' of Lu Jiuyuan [1139-1192] and Wang Yangming [Wang Shouren {1472-1S28}].) Although each of the three schools of thought placed emphasis differently, they shared a basic belief that an affinity exists between knowledge and cognitive ability, between knowing and doing. Insofar as lixue was concerned, knowing mainly referred to a mental-philosophical recognition of the self and not to the physical understanding of nature; doing did not mean remaking nature, but rather moral practice aimed at self-realization and self-implementation. Although the domain of knowing and doing was only a medium for realizing the "unification of Heaven and Man" (tianren heyi), and not a method of understanding and remaking nature, since the notion of "knowing" in Chinese thought was closely related to the spiritual practice of the subject, the domain of knowing and doing ended up emphasizing the process by which the subject approaches knowledge and practices knowing. This revealed an interrelationship between the traditional concept of "extending knowledge to the utmost" (zhizhi) and the dynamic process of"science" embodied in the concept of "investigation and extension" (gezhi). The locus classicus of gewu zhizhi is the "Daxue" [Great learning] chapter of the Li ji [Record of rites]. There we find a direct relationship among the text's statements: "The extension of knowledge [zhi] lies in the investigation of things (Wll )," "after things (wu) are investigated, knowledge

24

Wang Hui

(zhi) becomes complete;' and "to illuminate the luminous virtue" (ming mingde). Here wu, or "things;' refers to ethical and moral behavior, zhi to ethical and moral knowledge. Thus, standing side by side with "rectifying the heart-mind" (zhengxin) and "making thoughts sincere" (chengyi), we find that the "investigation of things and extension of knowledge" is a means of "cultivating the self" (xiushen) and "illuminating virtue" (mingde). The purpose of the exercise is to "harmonize the family, order the state, and pacify the world:' Such is the Confucian doctrine of "being an interior sage and an exterior king" (neisheng waiwang). What gave proponents of lixue an avenue for linking gewu zhizhi (the way of self-cultivation) to modern science was their ability to separate the notion from the Li ji, and combine it with another concept, "probing thoroughly the principle and exhausting nature" (qiongli jinxing), taken from the "Yizhuan" (Treatises on the Book of Changes), thus not only making gewu zhizhi into an important category in the methodology of lixue but also endowing it to some extent with implications similar to epistemology. The theory of gewu zhizhi had undergone three basic formulations in the realm of lixue-namely, Cheng-Zhu lixue, Lu-Wang xinxue, and an ideological trend called shixue, or "practical studies;' represented by Wang Fuzhi. Lixue and shixue formulations had shown in different degrees the effort and tendency to achieve knowledge within the subject-object epistemic structure and to bring about, from their debates with the xinxue, the possibility of approaching modern science. Opening this possibility does not m~an that lixue can spontaneously engender modern science, however. Neither Zhu Xi's doctrine of gezhi nor Wang Fuzhi's thought of shixue ever broke away from lixue. Looked at this way, their debates with the school of Wang Yangming were no more than internal strife within lixue. Zhu Xi concluded his teaching on "the investigation of things" in a related supplementary treatise in his Daxue zhangju ["Great learning" in chapter and verse 1:

What is meant by "the extension of knowledge lies in fully apprehending the principle in things" is that, if we wish to extend our knowledge to the utmost, we must probe thoroughly the principle in those things we encounter. It would seem that every man's intellect [in his heart-mind 1is possessed of the capacity for knowing and that every thing in the world is possessed of principle. But, to the extent that principle is not yet thoroughly probed, man's knowledge is not yet fully realized. Hence, the first step of instruction in greater learn-

The Fate of "Mr. Science" in China

25

ing is to teach the student, whenever he encounters anything at all in the world, to build upon what is already known to him of principle and to probe still further, so that he seeks to reach the limit. After exerting himself in this way for a long time, he will one day become enlightened and thoroughly understand (principle); then, the manifest and the hidden, the subtle and the obvious [crude1qualities of all things will all be known, and the heart-mind, in its whole substance and vast operations, will be completely illuminated. This is called "fully apprehending the principle in things:' This is called "the completion ofknowledge:'3 To sum up, to apprehend Zhu Xi's doctrine of "investigation of things and extension of knowledge;' one must attend to the following main points. First, gewu zhizhi is the organic part of the structure of Zhu Xi's lixue. The problem that it seeks to resolve is this: having begot the myriad creatures with the aid of qi (ether), how does Ii, as the origin of the universe and the noumenon of the supreme ethical and moral principle, return to the noumenalli, so that gewu zhizhi is an indispensable link in the self-unification of Ii, the Ii which is "the principle and nature without human body"? Accordingly, though "investigation of things and extension of knowledge" is a direct expression of the process and various ways in which a person recognizes the Ii of each thing, obviously an inclination to knowledge, in the structure of lixue it is only a process of the return of the noumenalli to itself, or of the consummation of self-arrangement, selftransposition, and self-combination. This determines an a priori outcome for the process of subject-object recognition. Second, the phrase "investigation of things" is comprised of three aspects: "to approach the things" (jiwu), "to probe thoroughly the principle" (qiongli), and "to reach the limit" (zhiji), of which the second one is the core notion. Although the ultimate aim of "probing thoroughly the principle" is to grasp the "heavenly principle" (tianli), since Zhu Xi inherited and developed the two Cheng brothers' thought of "differentiation between principle and individuality" (Ii yi fenshu), which suggested that all things on earth are in differential relationship to the general and the particular, hence "the differentiation of the principle under the heaven into myriads;' the direct object of "probing thoroughly the principle" widely involves the nature and rules of concrete things. Thus, "probing thoroughly the principle" must employ "approaching the things" as its prerequisite; otherwise, the principle will have nothing to adhere to.

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Wang Hui

Third, "the labor of investigating things as discussed by Master Zhu is still the labor of the heart-mind, or an extension of the Ii already known into the realm of unknown:'4 The Ii already known includes filial affection and piety, compassion, rites and regulated music, the way of ordering and pacifying, as well as creatures of the universe and other physical phenomena. What is meant by "differentiation between principle and individuality" is also that myriads of principles belong to one single principle, that principle is separable from neither matters nor the heart-mind, and that principle lies in things-all those my heart-mind is able to illuminate. At the end of Daxue zhangju, Zhu Xi insisted that his supplementary treatise on gezhi "is essential for illuminating the virtue:'5 eventually summing up the achievements of gezhi in the moral state, in which "my heart-mind, in its whole substance and vast operation, will be completely illuminated:' Thus, it is clear that gezhi is not only a way of learning but also the fundamental method to rectify the heart-mind, to make thoughts sincere, to illuminate the luminous virtue, and to rest in perfect goodness. In the process of gezhi, epistemology and the theory of human nature, along with the belief in truth and the law of value, are totally united. Fourth, the inborn knowledge of human heart-mind is not equal to the [acquired] knowledge that comes from probing thoroughly the principle. For when "principle is not yet thoroughly probed, and knowledge is not yet fully realized;' one can only achieve true knowledge penetratingly through the conscientious labor of approaching things, probing thoroughly the principle, and reaching the limit. Therefore, in order to achieve the completion of knowledge, one must follow the "sequential construction" of "investigating one piece today, another piece tomorrow, and after longstanding practice, there will automatically be a freely thorough point:'6 Zhu Xi put special emphasis on the accumulation of empirical knowledge, followed by the recognition of "principle and individuality" through practice. In the ethical aspect, this requires ascent from particular specific norms to a general moral principle. So the investigation of things is piecemeal work, while the extension of knowledge aims at achieving totality. After Zhu Xi, gewu zhizhi split into two sects: the introspective took shape in Wang Yangming's doctrine of "extending the innate moral knowledge" (zhi liangzhi); extrovert cognition resulted in Wang Fuzhi's position on "investigation of things and probing thoroughly the principle:' Lu Jiuyuan, Chen Chun [1153-1217]' Xu Heng [1209-1281], Wu Cheng [12491333], Wu Yubi [1391-1469], and Chen Xianzhang [1428-1500] all stressed "extension of knowledge" and "introspection"- that is, self-awareness of

The Fate of "Mr. Science" in China

27

the subjective consciousness-hence, the gradual separation of "investigation of things" from "extension of knowledge:' In Wang Yangming's doctrine of "extension of innate moral knowledge:' innate knowledge is assigned to the consciousness of intellect and to the principle of all things. While Wang did not negate "tempering oneself in matters:' fundamentally speaking, his doctrine of gezhi is an inner practice of self-reflection, a method of self-actualization and self-realization based on moral affection and moral consciousness, needless to "probe thoroughly the principle" in myriads of things. As for methodology, Wang Yangming underscored deduction, intuition, and sudden apprehension, rather than Zhu Xi's empirical induction. In this respect, xinxue had no historical connection with science at all. At most, its significance lay in raising esteem for the very subjectiveness of cognition, thus paving the way for modern thinkers to accept the modern scientific concept of "hypothesis:' It was actually the development toward objectification that finally linked gewu zhizhi with modern science. After Zhu Xi, Huang Zhen [1213-1280] ended up suggesting that two theses-"the principle is inseparable from ether" and "the way is inseparable from concrete things"-were presuppositions of the investigation of things. Insisting that "every thing is possessed of principle, every person is possessed of the capacity for knowing:' Huang regarded gewu to be a process of moving from understanding "the principle of things" (wuli) to illuminating "the principle of nature" (xingli). Liu Yin [1249-1293] and Xu Qian [1199-1266] in the Yuan dynasty [12601368] attached great importance to textual research and the accumulation of empirical knowledge, while Xu's disciple Zhu Zhenheng [1281-1358], guided by the doctrines of Zhou Dunyi [IOlrlO73] and Zhu Xi, took up medical science as a matter of investigating things and extending knowledge in his Gezhi yulun [Complementary discourse on investigation and extension]. Zhu Zhenheng's book is the first instance in which lixue was directly brought to bear on science and technology.? In the Ming dynasty [1368-1644]' Xue Xuan [1389-1464]' Luo Qinshun [1465-1547], and Wang Tingxiang [1474-1544] all made probing thoroughly the principle through external things into the essential path of investigating things and extending knowledge, and further assumed that the integration of mind and objects presupposed thorough inquiry of the principle in things individually. Three aspects of Wang Fuzhi's comprehensive summation of the gewu zhizhi doctrine deserve special attention. First, Wang distinguished the investigation of things and extension of knowledge as two methods and

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two stages of cognition, each representing cognition of objective things neither inwardly demonstrative nor outwardly inferential. This represented a fundamental reform of the formulation that to extend knowledge is to promote intuitive knowledge. Wang Fuzhi's doctrine possessed an epistemic process of summary (huigui), judgment (zhi), and synthesis (liang) based on empirical knowledge, as well as a logical theory made up of naming (ming), proposition (ci), and inference (tui).8 Second, Wang introduced into his commentary of gewu zhizhi the thought of "managing the world by extending practical use" (jingshi zhiyang). On the one hand, he opposed the view that reading books sufficed to probe the principle thoroughly, and he particularly stressed understanding actual matters. On the other, Wang afforded the gezhi doctrine a utilitarian tendency to go beyond moral practice, at least to some extent. 9 Shixue emphasized not only the objective facticity of matters but also the real practicality of human cognitive activities. Third, Wang explicitly introduced experimentation (zhice, or "physical experimentation") in the natural science into his elucidation of gezhi, thus creating the conditions for gewu zhizhi to break away from the bounds of lixue: "In a nutshell, to 'investigate things' is to concentrate on things for the sake of exhausting their principles, and it is physical experimentation that achieves this:'IO Yet despite its features of modern positive science, Wang Fuzhi's theory of the investigation of things was not able, on the whole, to break out of the bounds of tixue. The major indication of this strain in his thought is the fact that he continued to set gewu in the ultimate direction of recognition of the principle of human nature. In his words, "Everything under heaven is functional, whereas the principle in my heart-mind is the substance:'ll "Since my nature is rooted in the universal principle, the principles of all things under heavens are one with that universal principle. If all principles under heavens are thoroughly probed, then the principle in my heart-mind will be completely revealed:'12 The principle of things requires probing thoroughly for the sake of illuminating the principle of human nature, and the principle of human nature is but "Heaven's principle" (tianli), or "Heaven's rule" (tianze). Therefore, gewu zhizhi is in the end no more than a process toward the unification of Heaven and Man. Books on Western science and technology brought into China by Jesuit missionaries at the end of the Ming dynasty require our special attention. In Xu Guangqi's [1562-1633] description, the books were about "teachings on serving Heaven and loving people, discourses on investigating

The Fate of "Mr. Science" in China

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things and thoroughly probing principles, the art of ordering the state and pacifying the world; they also include calendar calculation, medicine, agriculture, irrigation, and so forth."l3 On the one hand, in order to let Christianity gain a foothold in China, the missionaries voluntarily adopted a policy of collaborating with Confucianism, complementing Confucianism, benefiting Confucianism, and surpassing Confucianism; on the other, Chinese thinkers could only interpret Western learning in their own way and through their own language. It was here, finally, that the Confucian term gewu zhizhi established its link with Western science and technology, especially in regard to zhice, that is, the modern scientific method of experimentation. Fang Yizhi's [1611-1671] Tongya [Comprehensive glossary] and Wuli xiaoshi [Notes on the principle of things] included in their province many branches of knowledge: ''Agricultural treatises, medical science, mathematics, and crafts are concrete matters ... to sum up, the principle of things; hence, it should be named Gezhi quanshu [Encyclopedia of investigation and extension],,; "Morality, governance, literature, philology, and minor skills, to put it briefly, are the heavenly way and human affairs. At the end of penetration are the principle of human nature and the principle of things, whereas probe leads to decree (ming). Just concrete things are the way; this is the general principle of things:'14 Fang Yizhi's elucidation of investigating things and extending knowledge is based on the specific methods of gezhi- that is, "physical experimentation" and "minutest comprehension" (tongji).IS As he suggests, "What fills up between heaven and earth are things"16- affairs, concrete things, heart-mind, nature, decree, heaven and earth, even the world and the state are all "things;' or the objects of gewu. He continued: The so-called "minutest comprehension" is to search out exhaustively the spring of the subtlety of stillness and affectionY The so-called "physical experimentation" is to observe and study the reasons of things; be it as large as ten to a hundred millennia,18 or as small as grass, woods, worms, or helminths, to classify its nature and condition, to attest its good and bad, and to infer its convention and variation. "Physical experimentation" is that which contains "minutest comprehension:'19 Here two points deserve attention: first, Fang Yizhi applied the methods of minutest comprehension and physical experimentation on every aspect from nature to society, from things to humankind; second, he tied up the

30

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recognition of general rules (minutest comprehension) with physical experimentation. Now this positive and experimental method, though not yet attaining the level of modern natural science in the eighteenth-century West, did obviously break through the limits and system of lixue, at least to a certain extent. By following the thoughts about physical experimentation and practical extension, the doctrine of gewu zhizhi contradicted Wang Yangming's xinxue and in the end developed into a revolt against Cheng-Zhu lixue as well. Beginning from his concept of "acting-on" (jianlii), Yan Yuan regarded the world of Cheng-Zhu to be a "refined world," as opposed to the "substantial world" he himself sought. Yan's substantial world included civil affairs, armament preparations, classics, and history, as well as skills and craftsmanship, and made lixue and the eight-legged examination essay its antitheses. He criticized proponents of lixue for limiting the method of investigation of things to bookish studies and sudden apprehension. Gewu, he reiterated, means "grappling (ge) with things in order to complete knowledge," wherein "ge refers to grappling (ge) as in the expression 'grappling with a fierce animal,' "20 i.e., firsthand experience. Although Yan Yuan continued to pillage the six arts of Confucian teaching for his technical terms, his epistemological view of "practice" enabled the gezhi doctrine to cast off the bounds of lixue. Yan's disciple Li Gong's [1659-1733] study of statecraft placed special emphasis on the division of labor in society and on specialized knowledge, involving, from the relationship between "learning" (xue) and "application" (yang), the position of special fields of study and people with professional skill in the social system. In effect, then, there are two immediate causes why the concept of gezhi came to be employed in recent times to render "science" and "natural philosophy:' First, in its historical evolution the usage of the concept had gradually been divorced from the scope of lixue. 21 In 1861, Feng Guifen [1809-1874] proposed the adoption of Western learning: "Such as mathematics, mechanics, perspective, optics, chemistry, and so on-all these things should be investigated to the completion of principles:'22 In his memorial to the throne dated December 1866, Yixin [1833-1898], an advocate of the Westernization Movement, suggested that "the way of China's self-improvement" lay in "devotion to proficiency and works on concrete matters, so as to fully appreciate the subtlety" of "the principles for calculation and investigation, the rules for making implements and handling objects, and the methods for mapping the Yellow River and tracing the

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31

River Luo:'23 Admiration for the function of gewu led finally to the establishment of new disciplines in the university system. In 1874 the College of Natural Science (Gezhi shuyuan) was founded in Shanghai; in 1888 the Capital Institute of Foreign Languages set up the Gewu Center, renamed in 1895 the Gezhi Center. Subsequently, natural science subjects were listed in the curriculum of many other schools. Another reason gewu came to be the preferred translation of "science" is that it indicated the way that Western learning had "originated from China, and was spread to the extreme west:'24 The then very fashionable Zou Boqi [1819-1869]' a scholar from Nanhai in Guangdong Province, demonstrated by copious quotations from the classics that "Western learning originates from Mozi:' while Feng Guifen averred that Western learning "did grab our remnants:'25 When requesting imperial sanction to draw up new regulations for the Institute of Foreign Languages in 1867, Yixin and Wenxiang [1818-1876], responding to die-hard censure that they were "abandoning the Chinese model to follow Westerners:' pointed out: "Investigation reveals that the Western method of algebra (jiegen) is actually based on the Chinese method of simple equation (tianyuan);' and "since today's learning is to learn the principles, which is a matter of the Confucian investigation of things and extension of knowledge, but not the skills as to be performed in person by the gentlemen who propagate learning, how can we doubt it [Western learning] ?"26 In fact, renaming the Gewu Center of the Capital Institute of Foreign Languages as the Guzhi Center dovetailed perfectly with the Confucian doctrine that "the extension of knowledge must be based on the investigation of things:'27 In his preface to the missionary W. A. P. Martin's Zhongxi wenjian lu xuanbian [Selected records of my Chinese and Western experience], Guo Songtao [1818-1891] linked Western learning to the Confucian teaching of the Three Dynasties. Song Yuren's [1857-1931] Caifeng lu [Records of folk collection] agreed with Zou Boqi in his belief that Western learning originated from Mozi. Zheng Guanying [1842-19221 asserted that Western learning "is an out-and-out plagiarism of the Chinese model:'28 Similar arguments were shared by reformers including Kang Youwei [1858-1927]' Liang Qichao [1873-1929]' and Tan Sitong [1865-1898], not to mention promoters of Westernization like Zhang Zhidong [1833-1909]. Zhang's disciple Wang Renjun [1866-1913] compiled all those supposed Chinese origins of Western learning into allegedly comprehensive works such as the Gezhi guwei [Ancient occults of investigation and extension] and the Gezhi jinghua III [Records of the cream of investigation and extension], matching item by

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item Western natural science and Chinese learning. If the formulation "Western learning originates from Chinese learning" exhibits a nationalistic complex pivoting around feelings of inferiority and superiority, as well as strategic considerations in the project of disseminating new learning under the guise of traditional terminology, there may be a third possibility to ponder, too-since some areas of similarity do exist between Chinese and Western learning, the Chinese understanding of Western learning must inevitably be limited by its own tradition. The term gezhi in recent times therefore had two senses: narrowly it denoted all natural sciences, particularly physics; in its broad sense it denoted the totality of natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities. The difference stemmed from the criteria used. In his "Gezhixue yange kaoliie" [Historical sketch of the study of investigation and extension] published in 1902, Liang Qichao [1873-1929] classified disciplines like politics, economics, and sociology as "studies of the above form" (xing' ershang xue) and designated natural sciences, including chemistry (zhixue, huaxue), astronomy, and geology, as "studies of the below form" (xing' erxia xue), adding that "all those belonging to the studies of the below form are called gezhi:'29 Significantly, Liang distinguished disciplines according to whether one could "obtain the truth byexperiment:'3o Yan Fu [1853-1921), however, embraced both aspects into "the Western learning of gezhi" in a broader methodological sense: Nevertheless, the way of the Western learning of gezhi is just the opposite [of our learning]. The illumination of a principle, or the establishment of a method, before concluded as unalterable, must be proved effective in every test of things and affairs. Its tests should be numerous, hence universal; its effects must be permanent, hence long-standing; its ultimate inquiry must be a thorough way radiating in all directions, hence brilliant. When pursuing it, one must not cling to prejudice, employ pretext, dare to maintain the slightest subjective assertion, or be allowed to make any arbitrary decision; one must be diligent, patient, impartial, and unprejudiced so as to reach the realm of the highest perfection and to step the way of the most substantial. When applying it to the people's livelihood and daily matters, one should practice one's learning according to principle in order to be sure to succeed and to produce an effect in advance-just like preceding Heaven without opposition [from Heaven], or like a clod crumbles to the ground. 3l

The Fate of "Mr. Science" in China 33 Van Fu developed the experimental and practical thought within the traditional theory of gezhi, but in his latent formula there still existed the order of "approaching the things:' "probing thoroughly the principle:' and "reaching the limit." Moreover, as Van Fu himself pointed out, "all blusterers, bluffers, bouncers, and boasters, and those who have no chance to ply their skills, who find this way, will achieve what the 'Daxue' means by its statement 'only after knowledge is complete do thoughts become sincere.' "32 This latter statement explicitly revealed the traditional source for the concept of "science" as regards gezhi (by this time the two terms were already used side by side). GEZHI AND THE ORIGIN OF THE CONCEPT OF "SCIENCE": II

Despite the fact that between the wuxu year [1898] and the early years of the Republic of China [1912-1949]' "science" and gezhi were used indiscriminately in terms of content, unlike gezhi, which emphasized human behavior and had a distinct coloring of tradition, kexue, or "science;' put more stress on categorizing knowledge, especially curricular categorization, and had no direct traditional precedent in its rhetorical background. The first employment of the term science among Chinese was once attributed by a scholar to Kang Youwei, according to a draft memorial dated the fourth month of the wuxu year [May-June 1898].33 Textual research, however, has shown that Kang published many fake draft memorials in the Wuxu zougao in the fifth month of xinhai, the third year of the Xuantong era [June-July 1911]. This memorial is a draft forged by Kang for some purpose at the time of compilation. 3l Even so, Kang's false memorial is still significant because it linked the concept of "science" to the abolition of imperial examinations and the establishment of new learning, hence indicating a relationship between contemporary uses of the concept of "science" and "institution of curriculum" in the educational system disseminating Western learning. Though Kang had not yet used the term kexue in authentic draft memorials of 1898, whenever it came to the abolition of imperial examinations and the establishment of new learning, he made mention of "mathematics and graphics, astronomy and geography, chemistry, optics, electricity and physics, as well as studies of domestic affairs and diplomacy" and raised the issue of "institution of curriculum."35 Although Chinese did not coin the term kexue, its widespread usage and popularity were directly related to the establishment of the new educational system. It may even have occurred solely for the sake of categorizing

34 Wang Hui knowledge, since there were already many branches of knowledge classified under the total concept of gezhi. The concept of ke, or "subject;' is of course derived from the notion of knowledge categorization or "specialized learning:'36 In remarks he made on his early translation "Guojixue jiabu" [National economy: part I] (incomplete manuscript), Yan Fu discussed the "division oflabor" in knowledge and used kexue in the sense of "causal" relations among things. Little is known about the date of the translation and remarks, but it is believed to have been drafted before Tianyan lun [On evolution (literally: A discourse on the heavenly change)], and if that is true, it is probably the first Chinese writing to employ the concept of science. Tianyan lun, in which gezhi is used while kexue is not found, was translated between 1894 and 1896,37 but in the translation of [Adam Smith's] The Wealth of Nations [YuanjU] begun in 1896,gezhi and kexue were employed together. This was about the same time when the Datong yishu ju published Kang Youwei's compilatory work Riben shumu zhi [A bibliography of Japanese works (1898)], under "vol. I, pt. 2, Works on Lixue:' of which were listed "Kagaku nyCtmon [Introduction to science], translated by Fukyu. sha, and Kagaku no genri [Principles of science], by Motomura Shunkichi:' Textual research suggests that the book was completed before November 1897, because Liang Qichao introduced it in his "Du Riben shumu zhi hou" [On reading "A bibliography of Japanese works"] on the Shiwu bao [Current affairs; official English title: The China Progress] of 15 November 1897. 38 The modern Chinese term kexue originated directly from Japanese thinkers, among whom Nishi Amane (1829-1897) was the first to translate "science" into gaku in the Meiroku zasshi [Journal of the Meiji Six Society] of 1874. 39 As a bureaucratic scholar and enlightening thinker of the Meiji period [1868-1912], Nishi's thought had very complex sources. With regard to his understanding of science, there are three aspects worthy of comment. First, in his early years Nishi received a rigorous Confucian training and studied Zhu Xi's thought, then grew fascinated with the thought of Ogyu Sorai [1666-1728], the famous Japanese Confucian thinker, all of which stamped the brand of lixue into Nishi's translation and thus his introduction of Western learning. In Hyakugaku renkan [Links of a hundred sciences (1870-1871)], the Japanese encyclopedia,4o he classified the "hundred sciences" (hyakugaku) into "common sciences" (futsCtgaku) and "particular sciences" (shubetsugaku), with the latter subdivided into "sciences of the principles of the heart-mind" (shinrijogaku) and "sciences of the principles of things" (butsurijogaku), which includes

The Fate of "Mr. Science" in China 35 physics, or the "gezhi science" (kakubutsugaku), and others. Here the differentiation of "the principles of the heart-mind" from "the principles of things" and terms such as gezhi all bear an obvious connection with the concept of lixue. Second, Nishi attached great importance to the relationship between the hundred sciences and the establishment of consensus, obviously a tendency to adapt science to an orderly and optimistic ideology and life outlook. As he proposed at the very start of his ShOhaku sakki [An unaccomplished man's reading notes (1871-1872) 1: The most vital thing for the hundred sciences is consensus. If scientific consensus can be established, human undertakings will be readied and social order will tend toward stability. When everybody's undertaking is truly readied and social order is maintained, if nothing is disorderly, then the outcome will be health and peace. If we work toward it, our families, the state, and the world will consequently become wealthy and powerful. Once health and peace, wealth and power are effected, the living will have support and the dead a burial place. When people all bustlingly advance to the state of longevity, that is happiness. Happiness is the highest achievement of humanity. Therefore, to attain the highest achievement of happiness, we must first establish a consensus of the hundred sciences before reaching their extreme minuteness individually. In the same work Nishi stated that "to establish consensus is a scholar's task:' yet at the same time he also assigned this responsibility to the non-"experts on all sciences;' that is, to philosophers. 41 For Nishi, philosophy was both science and the "science of sciences." Third, Nishi consciously followed and expounded the positive philosophy of [Auguste] Comte [1798-1857] and [John Stuart] Mill [1806-1873] in each subject and field he touched on. He arranged and organized his Hyakugaku renkan, for instance, according to the Comtian notion of scientific categorization. Also he began to employ the term gaku under the influence of Comte's notion of "subject categorization:'42 A major characteristic of Nishi's positive theory was that it sought to penetrate natural science, metaphysics, and the ethical sphere with the positive method of empirical induction in order to establish, on the basis of "positivism:' consensus of the sciences. In a sense, his high appraisal of Comte and Mill was due primarily to the fact that they provided modern metaphysics with a positive, scientific basis:

36

Wang Hui From Aristotle ... to the present, the sciences of physics (kakubutsugaku or gewuxue) , astronomy, chemistry, organology, geology, paleontology as well as anatomy, physiology, and natural history all reach extreme specialization. Metaphysics, however, continues to follow the old track ... and seems unable to gallop side by side with physical sciences (or, studies of the principles of things) .... Not until recently did Auguste Comte appear and initiate positive philosophy, trying to connect both physical and metaphysical sciences through the positivist principle. His models of the five sciences [astronomy, physics, chemistry, biology, and sociology1are extremely feasible. Meanwhile, Mill extends knowledge through pivots and models. He is the person who demonstrates the way of elaborating the positivist principle and initiates the beginning of a utilitarian science. 43

Nishi rejected deduction, advocating induction and experimentation instead. Using moral philosophy and ethics as examples, he pointed out that Comte's positivism and Mill's logic of induction made possible for these primary "metaphysical" fields to "separate themselves gradually from the realm of 'metaphysics: and advance to the realm of positivist principle"44 so as to complete the great transformation of moral philosophy and morality.45 A close internal connection in fact obtained among the above three different characteristics of Nishi's thinking about science. It is necessary to view scientific methods of experimentation and induction as universally applicable methods in order to provide the consensus for rationalizing both specialized sciences and other cultural spheres like religion, morality, arts and society. A consensus concerns not only problems of specialized sciences but also the real cultural crisis. If cultural crisis is fundamentally a crisis of the values that are so far acceptable and believable, then the matter of consensus requires seeking an ultimate and absolute value as a means of establishing an ideological basis for the order of rationalization. In this context, lixue was not simply an accidental by-product of phraseological appropriation, but a choice of great significance: the social function of lixue was to provide every sphere of social life with a source of order and meaning, hence a consensus on a higher plane than any of those specific cultural spheres. I have analyzed Nishi's thinking here,46 not only because he was the earliest user of the concept of science, but also because in every particular, as well as in its main inclination, his understanding of science appeared to

The Fate of "Mr. Science" in China 37 betoken the usage of the same concept by Chinese thinkers: they too established a consensus by means of scientific method, so as to undo and replace the traditional value system; and this scientific method was closely related to the empirical or positive theory of knowledge, which emphasized observation and factual experiment. YAN FU: THE APPROACH TO THINGS, OBSERVATION FROM FACTS, THE WAY TOWARD WEALTH AND POWER, AND COSMIC ORDER

One of the earliest Chinese to use the concept of "science;' Yan Fu introduced it in a way redolent of Nishi in many aspects. For Yan Fu, science and democracy were synonyms for Western civilization, as well as the "lifeblood" of China's wealth and power. In the "Lun shibian zhi ji" [On the speed of world change], published in February 1895, Yan defined science and democracy as "simply denouncing the false and advocating the true in regard to learning, and subduing the self for the benefit of the public in regard to punishment and law:'47 Thus science was a matter of distinguishing truth from falsehood, but what is "truth"? Yan provided a noteworthy formulation in the "Yuanqiang" [On strength] in March of the same year. In this essay, he traced an analogy between [Herbert] Spencer's [1820-1903] Sociology [Qunxue], which "fully elucidates the matter of human relations;' and Xunzi's saying "what makes Man different from birds and beasts is his sociability:' Yan pointed out that qunxue, or sociology, "happens to coincide with the statement in the 'Daxue' about the matters of sincerity, rectification, cultivation, harmonization, orderliness, and pacification." But whereas the "Daxue" spoke in generalities sans detail, as though drawing a bow without shooting, Spencer, "whenever he is presenting an argument or expounding a matter, must inquire into the roots of the principles of things, cite examples from human affairs, trace beginnings to their uttermost truly origins, and investigate limits to their infallible effects before he is done:' Here are already included the three implications of "approaching the things," "probing thoroughly the principle;' and "reaching the limit:' Moreover, it reveals an internal relation connecting the quest for true knowledge and complete sincerity, or knowledge and virtue. However, "among the tasks of tracing a stream to its source and looking into causality, sociology is the [most] difficult one under heavens,"48 because

38

Wang Hui when the learning of gezhi is not put first, and the narrow and eccentric mind persists, when one is restrained by Confucian teachings and detained in a corner, harming his heart-mind and causing trouble to his government, wherever he goes he will certainly lead his family and state astray. Therefore, if one wants to study sociology, one must first be engaged in various studies. Without mathematics and logic, one's intelligence will be inadequate to scrutinize the infallible principle or inexorable law; without pursuing mechanics and chemistry, one will be unable to know the mutual promotion between cause and effect .... After studying these four sciences of mathematics, logic, mechanics, and chemistry, one's intelligence will be able to grasp simple matters but be dazzled by diversity, or will work in regard to the near but not the distant. Thus without pursuing the three studies of heaven, earth, and man, one will be unable to exhaust the history, extensiveness, and multiformity of principles. And among these three, the study of man is particularly urgent, but why? What is called society (qun) is the result of gathering people .... Thus the study of man is the virtuous beginning of sociology. The study of man can again be divided into two, namely, biology shengxue and psychology xinxue. Biology regards the fundamental law of human growth and breeding. Psychology is about the secret of people's consciousness, behavior, feelings and affections. Since the functioning of a human being lies in the cooperation between body and spirit, the possibility of [founding] a state also depends on the coordination between force and virtue. And all policies of government are related to the trace of its vicissitudes, just like the Buddhist saying of discovery by the karma, or to fix the roots of phenomena (youwei) so as to fit in their skandha (categories). Only after these studies are understood can one be engaged in sociology; after sociology is pursued, one will be capable of cultivating, harmonizing, ordering, and pacifying by applying it to handle the world and care for the people, thus advancing on the zenith of great order and flourish. Hurrah! Marvelous! Perfect!49

Obviously, Yan's process of "seeking the truth" is a process of "probing the principle:' Nature, psychology, and society all have their objective "principles;' and these are interrelated, not independent of each other. The difference that separates them is not qualitative but structural and is determined by the degree of their relation to the ultimate aim of "cultivation, harmony, orderliness, and peacefulness:' Here we still find the presupposition of "dif-

The Fate of "Mr. Science" in China 39 ferentiation between principle and individuality" and the belief that the principles governing nature and humanity are essentially coherent. "Seeking the truth" means "probing the principle;' and the purpose of "probing the principle" lies in human affairs; yet the most fundamental and general "principle" depends on the "principles" of all kinds of natural things. Accordingly, the process of obtaining the "principle" of "society" or the way of cultivation, harmonization, orderliness, and pacification must on all accounts take "probing the principles" of natural things as its prerequisite. 50 Between Western scientific methods and "ordering the state, pacifYing the world" there is internal coherence: "Take investigation, extension, sincerity, and rectification as the roots of orderliness and peacefulness:'sl The link between Yan's understanding of gezhi and the lixue doctrine of investigating things and probing thoroughly the principle was revealed even more explicitly in his "Jiuwang juelun" [On our salvation (1895) 1: "Now, sir, you talk about salvation and consider the gezhi of Western learning unalterable. Why must gezhi be a Western learning? Certainly, it is the very foundation of our way in the 'Daxue,' but there its effect seems too slow, and its task seems too trivial. Zhu Huiweng's [Zhu Xi] 'Buzhuan' [Supplementary treatise] has long been highly praised by later worthies:'52 From the perspective of "usefulness;' Yan affirmed Zhu Xi's intellectual approach to gewu zhizhi, while criticizing the Lu-Wangxinxue as "useless" and "unpractical": "The learning of Lu-Wang, to put it bluntly, is simply self-opinionated.... The disaster that it brings begins in scholarship and ends with the state:'S3 Lixue provided Yan with a theoretical basis for accepting science; at the same time, his understanding of science was also limited by lixue. Noteworthily, lixue was both the very foundation of his argument and the object of his criticism. Yan's initiation of "the Western learning of gezhi" began from the search for wealth and power, and that is why his understanding of science was so strongly colored by utilitarianism. In his discussion of science and its methods Yan applauded the fact that Bacon "scholars advocate their new principles, which practicians observe as methods, resulting in great achievements. So we say: the people's wisdom is the source of wealth and power:'54 Related to this utilitarianism was Yan's "view of science;' which maintained that sense experience was the source of knowledge. In his Mule mingxue [Mill's logic (1905) 1Yan criticized Wang Yangming's "theory of innate moral knowledge" using Locke's [1632-1704] empty-tablet theory, and even suggested that experience was the origin of mathematical axioms.

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Noteworthily, while he stood with Huxley's sensationalism in the latter's belief that "human knowledge rests in the conformance of thought and experience;'55 Yan also accepted Spencer's view that "the noumenon of the myriads of things cannot be known, and all that can be known rests in the sensations:'56 On the one hand, Yan admitted that noumenon was "inconceivable" since it could not be approached through sense experience, but on the other he believed that causality linked noumenon and phenomenon, the latter being precisely the realm open to recognition through sense experience. Therefore, Yan opposed empty talk about noumenon, because "though I am the subject of thoughts and things are the cause of thoughts, to talk about the effect without approaching its cause will only lead my thoughts to insincerity:')? In his remarks on the Mule mingxue, Yan used Mill's view on the "thing-in-itself" or "noumenon" to criticize Bacon's negation of noumenon. He also suggested by adducing Zhu Xi, "the saying of the Great Ultimate and Illimitable Ultimate (taiji wuji) in the Yi [Book of changes] is unknown by Lu Zijing [Lu Jiuyuan], and that is it. Zhu Xi states that without talking about the Illimitable Ultimate there is no way to illuminate the noumenon, and that without talking about the Great Ultimate there is no way to attain its application. Zhu's elucidation sounds better:'58 Thus, Zhu Xi's thought on "the Great Ultimate and Illimitable Ultimate" not only explained the relationship between phenomenon and noumenon but also provided evidence for Yan's inference that" 'being' is indeed synonymous with 'having'; only after having, can there be sensations:'59 In contrast with his adduction of Zhu Xi, Yan criticized Wang Yangming's view "that my heart-mind is the principle, and nothing under the heavens is external to the heart-mind;' adopting the postulate that "cognition is that which is common to every human heart-mind; principle is that which can only be formulated after approaching things. On this account, the sensation of my heart-mind must be verified by the phenomenon of things in order to gain the conformance:'6o It should now be clear that Yan's judgment on lixue and xinxue was rooted in the empirical principle of positivism. Since he emphasized direct sense experience, Yan was bound to think highly of inductive logic. In the Mule mingxue he distinguished "intuition" (yuanzhi) of direct sense experience from the knowledge created by further inferring "intuition;' or "inference" (tuizhi). While primary knowledge is infallible, inferential knowledge is unreliable. 6l Yan's inclination toward induction stemmed from Mill, Bacon, and Locke, but it was in fact also directed against traditional Chinese learning, especially the Lu -Wang xinxue, "whose rules are rooted in fantasies instead of generalizations ob-

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served from facts (shice):'62 As for the relationship between induction and deduction, however, Yan saw it as being similar to the connection Zhu Xi drew between gewu and zhizhi, or between "accumulation" (jilei) and "thorough understanding" (guantong). This is why, in the author's preface to the Tianyan lun, Yan assimilated deduction to "manifestation of the originally hidden" in the Yi and induction to "pushing back from the apparent to the hidden" in the Chunqiu [Spring and autumn annals], and considered these "two to be the most important ways and methods of approaching things and probing thoroughly the principle:'63 Yan clearly understood scientific cognition to mean approaching things and probing thoroughly the principle, which in turn consisted of three steps: "The first, examination, involves collecting and enumerating similar kinds of things, to make their individual truths known. The second, thorough understanding, requires observing different kinds of things with the same view, hence a thorough way connecting aU;' but due to the deductive component in the procedure of thorough understanding, "the general laws and rules brought about are often misleading; which is why scientists (gezhi jia) of recent times remedy it with the third step, namely, experiment. The gist is that the more careful the experiment is, the more reliable its principle will be:'64 From his emphasis on experience to his panegyric on induction, from examination and thorough understanding to repeated experiment, obviously Yan applied the positive view of science to his reinterpretation of the traditional concept of "approaching things and probing thoroughly the principle:' This latter, however, should not be understood as a mere term; on the contrary, this positive view of science was still bound by the Confucian mentality of "cultivation, harmonization, orderliness, and pacification:' In Yan's mind all "specialized learnings;' with "the task of refining the heart-mind" as their ultimate achievement, aim at "cultivation, harmony, orderliness, and peacefulness."6s In his "Xixue menjing gongyong" [The path and use of Western learning] of 1898, Yan classified "the matter of learning" into "specialized use" and "public use" and considered sciences such as mathematics, surveying, chemistry, electricity, and botany to be of great usefulness ... but still not great enough; since the greatest is public use. Public use, to put it briefly, refers to the refinement of the heart-mind and the conduct of state affairs. Thus the way of learning must start from metaphysics .... Since the human heart-mind is the most valuable of all, a person of noble aspirations, who needs it

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The basis and prerequisite of cultivation, harmony, orderliness, and peacefulness are approaching things and probing thoroughly the principle; the goal of approaching things and probing thoroughly the principle lies in cultivation, harmony, orderliness, and peacefulness. Given this basic mode of understanding, Yan found Spencer's A Study of Sociology [1883] very interesting, indeed, because Spencer regarded sociology as "a science in which all other sciences are included:' While each of the sciences contributed from different domains "a certain habit of thought;' sociology, being the "science of sciences;' assigned each of the sciences a niche under a con sentient order. To Yan, the significance of this position lay in the fact that sociology afforded order to various sciences, which enabled them a direct bearing on the urgent task of ordering and pacifying. As Yan stated in his "Yuanqiang;' Spencer "takes the methods of evolution as the model to fully explain matters of human relations and good governance ... and uses the most recent principles and methods of science (gezhi) to illuminate the cause of cultivation, harmonization, ordering, and pacification:' Yan transformed the Spencerian theory as the "science of sciences" into a doctrine of "practical use;' a "consensus" higher than all other sciences. His standpoint was that "in the matter oflearning, sociology is the crux. Only after sociology is understood can one know the reasons for order and disorder, prosperity and decline:' This is very close to Nishi's view about consensus. h7 Yan's enthusiasm for Spencer also lay in the latter's imagination about myriads of things in the universe, which enabled Yan to review the mode of thinking of traditional Chinese cosmology. Yan held not only that the four sciences of Western learning (logic, mathematics, chemistry, and mechanics) had appeared in the Yi long ago, but also that Spencer "explains transformations in terms of natural evolution, writing books and composing treatises to link up heaven, earth, and man under one principle:' Yan's definition of tianyan, or "heavenly change""contraction (xi) for joining matters, and dispersion (pi) for releasing forces, beginning in simplicity and ending in complexity"-used sheer Yi theory to expound Western learning (no wonder in his Jingxue tongzhi [Comprehensive records of the study of Confucian classics 1Qian Jibo places Yan among the Yi scholars).68 If the structure of Spencer's metaphysical ontology did indeed resemble traditional Chinese cosmology and ontology, it appears that both Chinese notions of "myriads of things" and "principle

The Fate of "Mr. Science" in China 43 and individuality" implied no evolutionary concept in the DarwinianSpencerian sense, a content beyond traditional Chinese terminology. It goes without saying that the scientific methodology of "approach to things and observation from facts" related to the concern for the difference among "myriad divergent" (wanshu) matters, but for Yan particular attention to "myriads of things" was also connected to a stress on the universal "one principle;' which was the general rule of tianyan (the term "general rule" appears semantically subtly different from "law;' with a certain implication of norm). To use "heaven" (tian) as the rendition for "nature" is obviously to endow the concept with a teleological and ethical implication. We must give special reference to the central thesis of Huxley's lectures: "Social progress means a checking of the cosmic process at every step and the substitution for it of another, which may be called the ethical process .... The ethical progress of society depends, not on imitating the cosmic process, still less in running away from it, but in combating it:'69 "Evolution and Ethics" sought to protect human ethical concepts against Spencer's "evolutionary ethic;' but Yan's translation omitted "ethics" from the title. Yan was fully conscious of the omission because in his author's preface he explicitly pointed out that it had been Huxley's purpose to refute Spencer's view of "basing the human order in nature" (ren tian wei zhi). But Yan gravitated to Spencer's side and held that evolution was a law or force that could be generally applied to the domains of nature and social ethics. As a result, the concept of tianyan ends up possessing multiple implications of cosmic ontology, general ethical law, historical philosophy, and value source. Since tianyan means "contraction for joining matters, and dispersion for releasing forces, beginning in simplicity and ending in complexity;' it forms the general principle for cosmic process. Accordingly, tianyan is, first of all, the ultimate constancy within the change and diversity of the myriad things, the so-called "way" (dao) in Yan's Zhengzhi jiangyi [Lectures on politics (1906)]: Thus we know that the word "constancy" definitely does not refer to natural revolution (tianyun). The principle that things are perfected over the course of a long time [indicates] rotation in ceaseless movement. ... In spite of the changes in natural revolution, there is something constant acting in it. What is this constancy? It is called tianyan. Second, once the constant way is transformed into myriads of things, each thing will have its own rule of movement, that is, "the struggle for exis-

44 Wang Hui tence" (wujing) and "natural selection" (tianze). The relationship between this phenomenal rule of movement and the constant way is precisely that between substance and function: "When tianyan is taken as the substance, it has two functions, namely, the struggle for existence, and natural selection. None of the myriads of things is exceptional, and is most notable among living things:'7o This also implied that tianyan is indispensable to all matters in nature and society: Those so small to the extreme of creepers and inversions [i.e., plants], or so large to the extent of the sun, stars, heaven, and earth; those as latent as spirit and mind, intelligence and knowledge, by which sageness and folie are effected, or as apparent as politics and customs, regulations and etiquette, by which development and change are effected - the essential way of all those can be summed up in one word, that is: tianyanJI Such being the case, tianyan forms not just the starting point but also the end result of all kinds of scientific research concerning natural, social, and ethical aspects. When it comes to "agriculture, industry, trade, military, language, and literature" or discussing women's rights, democracy, religion, politics, state, social organism, and race, none is unbound, in Yan's view, by the single thread of tianyan. If the word evolution conveys the sense of objective inexorable law, the concept of tianyan adds value and the criterion of action. Actually, in Yan's view, the substance of tianyan and the function of the struggle for existence and natural selection both imply certain instructions. In these two groups of concepts, necessity (biran) and imperative (bixu) are so indistinguishable that Yan Fu himself and his Chinese readers neglected the value of tianyan as a branch of science (necessity) and stressed the contemporary criterion that people should follow given their circumstances (imperative). Consequently, given the two concepts, Yan took special note of the struggle for existence but not natural selection.72 He regarded natural selection to be the outcome of the struggle for existence-that is to say, the will of "Nature" realized through the struggle among "things:' For that reason, the issue of man's subjective initiative became especially important. Evidently, Yan's struggle for existence and natural selection became a source of value and power in the face of national crisis and an inspiration for national rejuvenation and struggle. This in turn conditioned Chinese thinkers to introduce the concept of tianyan into ethics, morality, and other social domains. The concepts of "evolution" and the struggle for existence and

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natural selection were therefore not descriptive concepts but moral law, a source of value. In effect, Yan's comprehension of social Darwinism and its ethics was related to an intrinsic mode of thinking that enabled him, a Chinese thinker, to understand the world. Now let us briefly summarize Yan Fu's view of science. First, science in Yan's eyes was not endless, aimless research; it was the source of tenets, not the theological tenets of a priori proposition, but the tenets that had been examined and have a positive basis. In this sense, what he sought was the doubtless ultimate truth, rather than ceaseless skepticism leveled against all laws and tenets. Science was neither research for the newest explanation nor a search aimed at divining the root of a matter itself; rather, it was a duty to discover the existing order of the world. In other words, gewu was undertaken for the sake of understanding the noumenon of li. Second, the technologies and crafts of science created the fundamental conditions under which nature could be used to enrich the nation and strengthen its military power, while, at the same time, the "order" that science had discovered was in fact the very source and first principle of our intellectual order, and this logically led Yan to place ethics and sociology in the position of "science of sciences," because it was precisely the latter that embodied order, a hierarchic structure of necessary interrelation between nature and society. In the hierarchy, the lower part served as the foundation of the higher part, whereas the higher was the end result of the lower. So, natural knowledge of physics, chemistry, and biology led logically to ethical and social knowledge. Sociology was king of science because it positioned every social phenomenon in a certain way. From this point of view, the positivism of science was twofold, involving technologies and crafts and the establishment of order, with the latter substantially implicated in the traditional concept of orderliness and peacefulness. Third, science was the expression and result of the spirit of positivism, as well as the manifestation of the universal principle and primary driving force known as tianyan. As the universal principle, tianyan not only revealed the pictures and vistas of the changing world but also determined the criterion of action and direction of value for people. Tianyan referred both to natural phenomena and moral commands: it was both an explanation of the world's situation and a summons to humanity and races; it embodied natural elimination and was manifested through the striving and struggles of human beings according to their own subjective will. For Yan, there existed a special link between the concept of science and the manifestation of cosmic prospect.

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On the whole, Yan's ideas about science implied a quest for a total order; therefore, the positive scientific method of approach to things and observation from facts also possessed a corresponding logical direction. The quest to advance technology and craft to "enrich the nation and strengthen its military power" was just the first aspect ofYan's pragmatism. More important, it sought to provide or discover a world order that provided people with a source of value and meaning, as well as criteria for action. It is this latter aspect that enables us to see the inner link between Yan's idea about science and the lixue concept of gezhi. Though it might appear that the methodology of positivism was destroying traditional mysticism, the integrated structure of meaning contained in its scientific view coincided in a way with certain aspirations held by the proponents of lixue. Indeed, Yan expected to resolve ideological confusion and to grasp the principle of existence through the scientific discovery of a world order. Like Nishi's view of consensus, Yan's comprehension of sociology envisaged a branch of science that could delineate in a moment an ultimate and complete picture of all basic rules. More significant was Yan's attempt to apply scientific theorems and methods to reconstruct cosmic ontology, human social order, and ethical norm-in other words, the order and system of meaning of the whole tradition that lixue had undertaken earlier. This would suggest that Yan's understanding of science was related to his skepticism and his desire to reconstruct the whole old order, including the political and ethical orders, as well as their cosmic symbolical system (the latter providing a source of rationality and legitimacy for the former). CHEN DUXIU: FOUNDER OF THE "NEW RELIGION;' AND "SCIENCE" AS ITS PRINCIPLES

The constant change of human epistemic prospects is the direct result of the immediate influence of science on society, morality, and philosophy. Unceasing "scientification" of moral and philosophical thought since the seventeenth century has led, in its most extreme manifestation, to a tide of "scientistic" attempts to break completely with religion, traditional knowledge, and philosophy. This transcends the limits of cognition and impels, on the allegedly scientific basis, the utopian transformation of societyJ3 A similar case has occurred in China in recent times, especially during the May Fourth era in the person of Chen Duxiu [1879-1942] and his [journal] New Youth, or the Xin qingnian.

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Any discussion of the concept of science and its application by Chen Duxiu and the New Youth-centered New Culture Movement must pay particular attention to the relation of their social role and the mode of application. In this period there emerged in China an unprecedented intellectual formation, unknown to traditional society, which coalesced around the contemporary university system (a university may be regarded as a quasi-scientific community). The university system had incurred great change in modern society. On the one hand, in the intelligentsia's view, the university held out the only means of state-organized, institutionally based free intellectual activity; hence, it set a precedent for enjoying the privileges of freedom and democracy in an age-old autocratic society and gave societya distinctly exemplary role. On the other hand, the status and privileges of the university were merely favors bestowed by the military aristocratic ruling class, not a genetic result of free causes, and therefore the status of intellectuals and the university was unstable, based precariously on the promise of the ruler, who regarded the university and its community as a breeding ground for professional men, and only in that regard enabled them to take advantage of the position they found themselves in to pursue pure learning and science. Intellectuals had to act as social prophets, as well as maintain their privilege of freedom in the university; thus, it seemed perfectly appropriate to consider both their ideological activities and social propaganda to be a kind of "scientific" activities, a kind of free search on the basis of scientific principlesJ4 The strife that erupted in this period between the New Culture Movement and Lin Qinnan [1852-1924]' and Cai Yuanpei's [1876-19401 response to it, making use of his privilege at the university, aptly revealed the double position of the university system and the New Culture Movement advocates inside it. Chen Duxiu and his companions were not scientists, but the initiators who attempted to apply science to the domains of society, politics, ethics, and morals. As journal editors and contributors, they actually supplied the impetus to an extensive mass movement in their capacity of ideological prophets and, by making use of science and other Western values, aroused their fellow countrymen, who were lost in the old worldview, to reshape their society. The role of prophet-and-preacher determined the fundamental aspect of their view of science, and it is even more important to grasp this point than to follow their concept of science au pied de la lettre. As chief editor of New Youth and leader of the "antitraditional" ideological movement, Chen Duxiu was more concerned with the ideological force for revolt or revolution that "science" could afford him than he was

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with the characteristics of science itself. Nevertheless, it is still possible to discern from the numerous articles he wrote his simple, clear concept of science. From the first issue of New Youth to Chen's conversion to Marxism and assumption of the earliest leadership of the Chinese Communist Party, the fundamental aspect of his concept of science remained the same, though there, significant changes saw him move from the Comtian, Millean positive view of science to a materialistic one. In his famous article "Jinggao qingnian" [Appeal to youth], the term science was cognate with "material benefits" (shili), "general knowledge" (changshi), "reason" (lixing), and "proof" (shizheng) and antonymous to "empty forms" (xuwen) , "speculation/imagination" (xiangxiang), and "arbitrariness" (wuduan). Importantly, Chen placed J. S. Mill's and Comte's experimental philosophy on a par with R. Eucken and H. L. Bergson, which the metaphysicians held in high esteem during the 1923 debate of "science and the philosophy of life:' Chen argued that though Eucken and Bergson "do not consider the present material civilization marvelous and perfect, both bring to light that the purpose of writing is shenghuo ('life; 'leben: 'la vie'):' Here Chen linked the concept of "life being sacred" (shenghuo shensheng) to the notion of "providing life with abundant means of support" (housheng liyong); that is, he integrated Mill and Comte with Eucken and Bergson in a utilitarian sense. Besides, "life" was not simply teleological but experiential, a sphere in which subjectivity and objectivity are interrelated; that means a view of science must have an empirical tinge: What is science? It is our general conception of matter which, being at one with objective phenomena, is not redundant when examined by subjective reason. What is speculation? It not only overreaches objective phenomena but also banishes subjective reason; it is a superstructure in the air, with hypotheses but no proof; and all the rationality and intelligence in the world cannot understand the reason in it or comprehend its governing laws and principles .... All of these fanciful notions and irrational beliefs can be corrected at their roots by science, because to explain truth by science we must prove everything with fact. Although this is slower than imagination and arbitrary judgment, every progressive step is taken on firm ground. It is different from those flights of fancy which in the end cannot advance one bit. The amount of truth in the universe is boundless, and the scientific realm's productive areas awaiting pioneering are enormous! Youth, to taskF5

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Chen Duxiu understood science to be an integration of subjectivity and objectivity, in which subjective reason actually means acquired empirical knowledge. Accordingly, his concept of science greatly esteemed empirical induction. In "Jindai xiyang jiaoyu" [Western education in recent times l, a speech delivered at Nankai College in Tianjin, Chen quoted Comte on the division of human evolution into the epoch of religious superstition, the epoch of metaphysical speculation, and the epoch of scientific positivism, and expressed his belief that Europe and America had, since the eighteenth century, gradually progressed from the second to the third epoch:76 "The spirit of scientific positivism is found in all their politics, morals, education, and literature without exception:' Chen further advocated a kind of education that inculcated knowledge and skills in daily life and on-the-spot practice as dominant curriculum-obviously a concretion of the dual charge (i.e., practicalness and practice) embodied in the concept of "life" in his article "Jinggao qingnian:'77 Even in 1923, Chen Duxiu was still touting as scientific law the Comtian evolutionary doctrine of three epochs; however being an advocate of historical materialism, he had substituted "material" for "life" as the positive theoretical ground, because a tint of idealist-materialist dualism clouded the concept of "life:' By and large, Chen's historical materialist conception of "science" included the following. First, both humankind and nature are objective material, thus both are subject to the laws of nature, and objective causality is locatable in both: Beyond the existence and movement of matter in the universe, people also believe in spirits which act as judges. That is why religion, long established, has not faded away. On the other hand, according to astronomical research, mutual destruction, mutual combination, attraction, and repulsion between and among the heavenly bodies all follow definite causallaws,?8 Second, since human society and the natural world are both subject to the objective laws of causality, positive scientific methods are not merely appropriate to the realm of sciences, but also universally suit to all domains of social life; scientific method is therefore an all-purpose tool. Chen Duxiu accepted the fact that at its present stage science could not solve all problems, but he firmly believed that eventually its evolutionary potentialities would provide valid answers to all "enigmas in the universe:'79 As early as 1915, Chen termed the spirit of science "realism" (xianshizhuyi):

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"This spirit is boundless and penetrates everywhere-appearing in ethics and morals, it becomes utilitarianism; in politics, democracy; in philosophy, it is known as empiricism, or materialism; in religion, atheism; in [literature and] art, realism (xieshizhuyi), or naturalism:'80 By 1923, he had interpreted this spirit of "realism" more definitively as the "methods of scientific observation, classification, and illustration;' and he considered the natural science method to be entirely applicable to social life since its fundamental proposition was that both natural world and human society were objective, "mechanical reality:' Chen Duxiu thus came to believe that the signal feature of science was the search for the pure objective causality underlying reality and completely negating the subjective role of human beings. 81 Third, in Chen's view historical materialism was a scientific account of all social phenomena and had at its kernel a belief in the determinative role that economics played in the superstructure of system, religion, ideology, politics, morals, culture, and education; on this basis Chen analyzed what Zhang Junmai [Carsun Chang (1886-1969)] called the nine views oflife. One by one Chen pointed out the different objective causalities governing them and ended his analysis by denying the role of individual subjectivity, intuition, and free will. 82 Almost a mere set of interrelated creeds, Chen Duxiu's concept of science was simpler and rougher than those ofYan Fu or Chen's own contemporary, Hu Shi [1891-1962]. Quite revealingly, for Chen science was a quasi-religious, ideological system that, following the destruction of traditional values, could reconstruct a sense of order and the interrelation of the universe, the world and society, and endow these with meanings. Chen not only regarded science and human rights (or democracy as called later) historically as the "two wheels" of the vehicle of modern civilization, he also explicitly favored the "replacement of religion by science" and declared his "faith" that "in the future man's true belief and course of action must be led onto the right track of science, while all religions will be thrown into the discard:'83 In the article "Kelinde bei" [The Von Ketteler Monument], Chen struck the pose of prophet and religious founder: Only two roads are now open to us: first, the bright road to republicanism, science, and atheism; second, the dark road to tyranny, superstition, and theocracy. If we want to avoid another Boxer incident, another humiliating memory such as the Von Ketteler Monument, which road shall we choose?84

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Precisely because Chen focused so intently on the general question of life, he felt himself compelled, methodologically speaking, to gravitate to the other side of the inductive principle that he had affirmed, namely, to deduction, and thus his concept of science manifested certain features resembling Nishi's obsession with consensus and Yan Fu's infatuation with sociology: The English historian Carlyle's theory of hero worship enumerates all schools but the scientists for two major reasons: first, the first half of the last century had not yet escaped the destructive spirit of the eighteenth century, and so there was insufficient leisure to devote to the intricate constructions of science, and hence standards of heroism in the minds of the people then and now differ; second, then science tended toward partiality and induction, which cannot compare with the synthetic doctrine of deduction in its capacity for striking the hearts of the people. The devotion of the scientists and the demands of the times in the twentieth century have an aim different from the past. The branches of science are developing into magnificent depth. Prophetic thinkers who synthesize all branches of learning will certainly emerge as the times require. While social structure is becoming increasingly complex, the truth of life is coming clearer and clearer. As regards all kinds of construction, and all kinds of relief, the need for great scientists is more urgent than any reliance on heroes of a ruined age willing to sacrifice themselves to save others.8s "Dangdai er da kexuejia zhi sixiang" [The thoughts of two great contemporary scientists] introduced the Russian biologist [Elie] Metchnikoff and the formulator of the law of thermodynamics, [Wilhelm] Ostwalt, but Chen was preponderantly concerned with the impact of scientific discoveries on "moral judgment;' "happiness formula;' and human civilization. In the case of Chen Duxiu, the concept of science appears superficially to have been entirely detached from the lixue concept of gezhi, at least at the level of diction. However, the way he applied the concept of science is redolent of the connection once present between the two. If we employ the concept of interrelatedness to articulate the relationship between Chen's concept of science and that of the lixue, then this interrelatedness can be described at different negative and positive levels. Superficially, Chen's concept of science bore an obvious "uninterrelatedness" to Confucianism, especially the lixue- that is, the connotation of his concept of "science" unfolded through its antithetical and negative rela-

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tion with Confucianism. In fact, since his "Jinggao qingnian;' Chen's six principles of life were precisely symmetrical to his understanding of the Confucian spirit, and the prospect of modern civilization and the ideal future that he depicted were symmetrical to the traditional world dominated by Confucianism. The anti-Confucian movement of Chen and Xin qingnian was indeed synonymous with the antitraditional ism of the era and its "idol destruction movement;' since virtually no difference exists conceptually between the terms "Confucian religion" (Kongjiao) and "tradition" or "idol:' The anti-Confucian movement could be said to be a natural development of the original intention that launched the Qingnian zazhi [Youth magazinel. 86 Although the anti-Confucian movement possessed direct political implications and Chen and the others also considered principles of freedom of thought, liberty of conscience, and democracy to be its primary basis, the movement's contents were not solely political, but also involved aspects of morality, ethics individual development, and family and state systems, as well as the future of mankind, among which questions of the rationality of worship, ethics, and morals were of particular importance. In "Bo Kang Youwei zhi zongtong zongli shu" [Refuting Kang Youwei's petition to the president and the premier l, Chen professed that "religious liberty was already a rule of modern politics;' and he regarded the Confucian religion and autocratic monarchy as internally related aspects; however, in the names of science and scientist, he sought to "reprove the vainness and absurdity of religion, let alone its founder! "87 In the article "Xianfa yu Kongjiao" [Constitution and the Confucian religion], Chen conspicuously noted that "in fact the problem of the Confucian religion is not only related to the constitution, but also the fundamental problem of our real life and ethical thought"; "the essence of the Confucian religion is known as the ethical code (lijiao), which is the root of our country's ethics and politics:' Thus Chen diverted the problem of the Confucian religion onto other ethical and social concerns: Therefore what is under discussion now is not a problem whether the Confucian religion is a religion or not, nor a problem whether the Confucian religion can be incorporated into the constitution, but rather a fundamental problem of whether the Confucian religion is suitable for the republican educational spirit. This fundamental problem is the one that runs, deeply and broadly, through the ethics, politics, social system, and daily life of our country, and is hence in need of nothing less than an immediate solution. 88

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Besides the principle of democracy, Chen's other "solution" was the principle of "science": "To promote knowledge about nature is the correct path today for benefiting the world and awakening the people. We dare to pronounce that all religions, detrimental to order and civilization, are nothing but idols:'89 When it came to the relation between Confucian religion and modern life, Chen nimbly applied evolutionism, the law of thermodynamics, and other scientific "laws" such as economics. He explains: The spirit and materials of the universe are constantly in the way of changing or evolving. How could morals and social relationships be an exception? "Those who submit to it will prosper; those who resist it shall perish"-with all the historical precedents available, this cannot be deemed false. It can also be proved by Ostwart's theory. A theory, or a living condition, will lose vigor after a long time of practice and sink low to the horizon; unless its mechanisms are brought forth, improved and renewed, it will certainly lose its effect. Is it not the case that the principle "the way changes with the world" must be exposed through vigorous examination of its existence in ancient and modern times, in China and elsewhere? Modern life has economy as its pulse, and the doctrine of individual independence is the very principle of economic production, whose impact thus penetrates into ethics. Therefore the ethical doctrine of the independence of the individual personality and the economic doctrine of the independence of individual property bear each other out, making the theory unshakable; because of this, social mores and material civilization have made great strides. The Chinese Confucianists established a religion based on the net of relations (gang) and constant virtues (chang) . ... Those are contrary to the spirit of individual independence. 9o When he adopted these "scientific" grounds, Chen extended his concerns into everything from human relations and ordinary matters to family, state, and society-including modern political parties, women's participation in politics; the association between the sexes, the relations between husband and wife or father and son, similarities and differences of etiquette, mourning, and funeral rites, etc.-as a means of expounding the modern value of "equal human rights in the legal sense, independent personality in an ethical sense, as well as the eradication of superstitions and the freedom of thought in the academic sense:'91

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In fact, it was while excoriating the Confucian religion that Chen came to his view that "science" was not just the antithesis of Confucian religion, but actually a substitute for it. In "Zai lun Kongjiao wenti" [Again on the problem of the Confucian religion], published on New Year's Day of 1917, he solemnly declared that science was the modern faith, Confucian religion the traditional heritage, and their common problem to solve was "faith;' despite their sharply contrasting ways: My faith: in the future humanity's true belief and course of action must be led onto the right track of science, and all religions discard . . . . For there are two kinds of laws in the universe: one is known as natural law; the other is man-made law. Natural law, to which science belongs, is universal, permanent, and necessary; those made by humanity, to which belong religion, morals, and legislation, are partial, temporary, and sufficient. ... Humanity's future evolution, keeping pace with today's budding sciences, should advance day by day and amend all man-made laws, so as to have the same effect as natural law, and only then will the universe and life be truly united. Is this not our supreme and ultimate aim? It has been said that the secrets of the universe and life cannot be resolved by science, and that only religion can elucidate doubts and dispel anxieties. I think that there is still a long way for science to progress .... Only science can truly elucidate doubts. Therefore, I insist on replacing religion with science and on opening up our real faith, which is slow but promising .... Our generation's faith in science is that it is the only right track for the awakening of humanity and gainsaving happiness in the future; this is an especially urgent need for our country at present. Thus, it [science] should be promoted and valued over the Confucian religion, the Confucian way, and other religious philosophies. The passage quoted here is verification: although Chen's concept of "science" referred entirely to modern natural science and social science, its scope of application was primarily the domain of ethics, morals, and faith. He applied science here as an effective weapon for setting up a rational principle of life, social order, and faith, which would function as "the root of self-cultivation:' and "self-cultivation" or "ethical awakening" would provide the basic prerequisites for attaining national and state wealth and power. The development of science in modern Western societies drew on the Enlightenment's epistemological inclination to understand the man-

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versus-nature, man-versus-society connection in "subject-object" terms, hence establishing between the two a relationship of recognizing and being recognized, conquering and being conquered, mastering and being mastered: "scientific" cognition was essentially an activity of human subjects toward the objective world, through which humanity's technological and scientific means of conquering nature increasingly advanced, while the social system of humanity's self-control grew more meticulous. For Chen and his colleagues of New Youth, however, the main purpose of applying the concept of science was to remold subjective mentation, or to recognize the mental state of the self through science. In other words, they applied science to mean self-reflection and assumed the progression of human society would be a natural result of self-reflection. Accordingly, though their immediate intention in adopting the concept of science was anti-Confucian, in fact, its function accidentally came close to the Confucian concept of gezhi. The interrelatedness between the modern application of the concept of science and the Confucian concept of gezhi therefore proved to be not negative but positive, and its basic manifestations were the following: first, both concepts were employed in the moral and ethical sphere; second, both embodied an inner logical direction with regard to "investigating, extending, 'sincerizing: rectifying, cultivating, harmonizing, ordering, and pacifying:' even though the objects following the verbs were already radically different in terms of content;92 third, both touched on the relation of humanity and things to varying degrees, but were reduced in the final instance to a relation of humanity and itself; fourth, both tended in a quasi-religious direction, anticipating a world of incomparable perfection. This is an intensely interesting phenomenon: in the course of historical development, the concept of gezhi progressively extricated itself from the limits and system of lixue and finally, in contact with Western learning, transformed itself into an expression of "natural philosophy" or "science;' into a completely new concept. Furthermore, as people's understanding of science deepened, it gradually came to replace the entire notion of gezhi, a notion that preserved the Confucian stamp; yet the new concept, when applied, unwittingly presented certain basic features highly reminiscent of the concept of gezhi in the limits of Confucianism-how forcefully history conditions its rebels! We should never forget: this historical continuation occurred at the very moment the user decided to break with history completely. These characteristics of Chen's concept of science, revealed in the course of its application, are actually typical manifestations of the May Fourth

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enlightenment and thus can be regarded common features of the era's enlightening movement. In a series of articles published shortly after founding New Youth, Chen repeatedly addressed two interrelated questions. The first involved his belief that the problem of Chinese society was also a problem of the Chinese people; therefore, Chinese social reform constituted nothing more nor less than self-reflection and renewal (to reconstituting the nationality) on the part of Chinese people. Social reform, a practical activity between man (subject) and society (object) got expressed as a moral practice between man (subject) and himself (subject); furthermore, the solution to the problem posed by the multileveled structure of family-state-nationsociety would come about as a natural result of humanity's "repentance from the origin, amelioration of error and fresh start" and thus "renovate his heart-mind and blood entirely, in order to renew the moral qualitY:'93 But how to renovate his heart-mind and blood entirely? This posed a second closely related question to the one enumerated previously. The logical response was neither "Western religion and utensils" introduced in the middle of the Ming dynasty nor "firearms and calendar" imported in the early Qing, nor the "arts of weaponry and military drill" of the mid-Qing, nor late-Qing "schemes for wealth and power" and "tactics of political reform;' nor the "democratic republicanism" and "constitutional monarchy" so widely discussed in the early Republican years, but rather [the answer for Chen lay in) "our people's final awakening:' Though the notion of awakening has its object-that is, awakening to something-fundamentally it resides within the limits of humanity's subjective (i.e., pertaining to the heart-mind and human nature) activities. To Chen, awakening included two basic levels: political awakening and ethical awakening. Ethical awakening, as more basic than political awakening, was but "the final awakening of our people's final awakening;' because sociopolitical, economical, and legal changes must presuppose the ethical changes of the individual and family.94 When Chen took science for a means to achieve "understanding of the principle of human nature" (ethical awakening) so to attain the goal of orderliness and peacefulness, his mode of application had become the lixue mentality of gewu zhizhi. In fact, the notion of awakening as such already implied a thorough understanding of the meaning and purpose of life, the interrelation of the world, the state and the people, and their relative positions, the code of human conduct, and so on.

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HU SHI: A HUMANIST POSING AS A SCIENTIST AND THE NATURE OF HIS "SCIENTIFIC METHOD"

Russell's conception of the scientist inspires our analysis of the distance between Chen Duxiu and Hu Shi. "It is not what the man of science believes that distinguishes him;' Russell said, "but how and why he believes it. His beliefs are tentative, not dogmatic; they are based on evidence, not on authority or intuition:'95 Not only did Hu Shi consider scientific theories to be hypotheses but also, when it came to applying scientific concepts to lifeview, he argued that the "scientific conception of life" was "a [huge] hypothesis founded on the generally accepted scientific knowledge of the last two or three hundred years."96 The centrality of "hypothesis" in his thinking suggests that, unlike Chen who posed as a religious founder, Hu used the concept of science in a fashion closer to that of a true scientist. A humanist posing as a scientist, Hu was deeply convinced that the methodology of empirical science suited humanistic objects equally well. The universal applicability of scientific method, in fact, provided the ground of Hu's self-appointed role of "humanistic scientist:' Indeed, Hu Shi's concept of science was approximately the same as the notion of methodology: he termed as science all kinds of studies that embodied the characteristics of modern scientific methods, including positivism, induction, and experimentation, ranging from Darwin's evolutionism to Huxley's positivism, and from Dewey's pragmatism to the Chinese scholarship of Mozi, Cheng-Zhu, and the Qing dynasty. It was precisely because he equated science and scientific method that Hu was able to classify Mozi, Zhu Xi, and the Qing masters of the puxue, or "empirical research school;' as "scientists:' Evidence indicates that long before he received systematic Western training, Hu was acquainted with views on pure mechanistic causality originating in the Chinese tradition (his major sources were Fan Zhen [ca. 450-ca. 510] and Sima Guang [1019-1086]),97 specifically lixue and the medieval [third-ninth century] Daoist view of the Heavenly Way-a naturalistic cosmology of ceaseless movement, infinitude, non-action yet nothing undone-which laid the foundation for his understanding of the concept of "evolution" (tianyan).98 The Cheng-Zhu lixue doctrines of "approaching things and probing thoroughly the principle" and "learning originates in thinking" called Hu's attention to the importance of method, while the "rigorous intellectual approach" of "boldly doubting the antiquity and carefully examining evidence;'99 embodied in the gewu zhizhi doctrine, offered the traditional mooring for the so-called scientific method of "boldly making

58 Wang Hui hypotheses and carefully seeking proofs" when, later, Hu fell under the influence of positivism and pragmatism. This also means that Hu's grasp of scientific method was profoundly bound by traditional Chinese scholarship, especially the methodology of the Song school's gewu zhizhi and the semantics (xungu) and textual criticism (kaoju) of the empirical research school. Therefore, it is appropriate to discuss Hu's scientific method with reference to the dual conditioning of traditional scholarship and Western theories of Huxley and Dewey, and to observe it in that context. Hu Shi's understanding of the Cheng-Zhu doctrine of gewu zhizhi reveals two major characteristics of his own methodology: inductive reason and skepticism of antiquity. "They [the Cheng-Zhu school] interpret the character ge 'investigating' as the character zhi 'arriving'; the character ji 'approaching' used by Master Zhu also has a meaning of dao 'reaching'. Jiwu er qiong qi Ii means to reach out for the things and discover their principles by oneself. Such is the spirit of induction:' 100 What deserves particular attention is that Hu did not treat the methodology of gewu zhizhi in isolation; rather, he regarded the emergence of the Cheng-Zhu lixue as one link in the "modern Chinese Renaissance;' "a category within (the framework of) 'modernity' " - - and Hu's concept of "modern China" referred to resistance against the medieval religion, as well as the skepticism toward Buddhism and all foreign religions. In Hu Shi's view, the inductive methodology of gewu zhizhi that the Song scholars found in the "Daxue" was exactly the new method and new logic of antireligious skepticism, fundamentally equivalent to Bacon's novum organum and Descartes' discourse on method. Since Cheng Yi had extended the scope of wu to include all things in the universe, " 'the extension of knowledge lies in the investigation of things' means to extend your knowledge to the limit, and such is the case with science:' WI Hu held that Master Zhu himself was a scientist because in dealing with ancient books he often employed new methods to elicit fresh ideas and did not necessarily stick to old views, and thus Qing scholarship was not really anti-Zhu Xi or Song learning at all; on the contrary, scholars for the past three hundred years had inherited Master Zhu's scholastic spirit. 102 However, Hu Shi's attitude toward the Cheng-Zhu lixue is complicated, primarily because of his dual understanding of lixue. Lixue formed both a resistance against the medieval religion and a "mixture of the Chan sect, the Daoist school, Daoism, and the Confucian religion;" the former case reflected mainly in the methodological maxim "the advancement of studies lies in the extension of knowledge;' and the latter in the religiosity of the

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view that "the nourishment of virtue needs the practice of reverence:' 103 Since Master Zhu's ideal state of "one day becoming enlightened and thoroughly understanding" and Cheng Yj's view of "leaving things as they are and do not labor knowledge of them" were both passive observations lacking hypotheses, it was impossible for this kind of observation to receive any subjective empirical verification. It was in this sense that Hu on the one hand criticized the antiscientific nature of the Lu-Wang xinxue from a positive stand, 104 while affirmed the activism and independence of the Lu-Wang doctrine of "extending the innate moral knowledge" on the other, and implied to a certain extent that this subjectivistic doctrine was somewhat compatible with the modern scientific method of "boldly making hypotheses": The gewu theory of Cheng and Zhu with its emphasis on "approaching things and probing thoroughly their principle" is highly inductive. Unfortunately, they hold a passive attitude, wishing "not to labor one's knowledge of them [things]" in the search for ultimate enlightenment and thorough understanding. In that respect, the Lu-Wang theory maintains that truth is right in the heart-mind so as to build up the individual's thought, and uses the criterion of the innate moral knowledge to shake off the yoke of "commentary and annotation:' This activism can effectively remedy the passive gewu method of the Cheng-Zhu school. The inductive method of Cheng and Zhu, once emancipated by the Lu-Wang school, is a favorable turn in Chinese intellectual history. lOS Hu Shi suggested that since the Cheng-Zhu school did not have a cognitive procedure or scientific instruments, they could not avoid reducing the scope of wu "from everything within a body to the principles of all things" to the three items of "exhausting the classics, fulfilling one's duties, and proceeding to discuss the ancients:' On the other hand, though averring that "the matter where thoughts lie is wu" and that "to investigate things" is simply "to investigate the heart-mind;' Lu-Wang xinxue expanded the seemingly tiny scope of wu to infinitude, because "nothing is exterior to the heart-mind:' This independent frame of mind-which held that "the Six Classics are my footnotes" and that "even though it is Confucius' own statement, I dare not regard it as infallible"-gave LuWang xinxue the ability to right the Cheng-Zhu doctrine and save it from "fragmentation:' In the interference of Cheng, Zhu, Lu, and Wang lay the "favorable turn" in Chinese intellectual history announced by the positive method of Qing scholars, who used Lu-Wang activism to reshape Master

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Zhu's gewu zhizhi, hence bringing into being a puxue method that included both positivism and hypothesis. If the Song Confucianists' gewu zhizhi lacked cognitive procedure and method, the Qing school was characterized by providing a starting point for recognizing the object. Hu classified puxue into four major categories and translated all into English except xunguxue: 106 wenzixue is rendered into "philology"; jiaokanxue, "textual criticism"; and kaodingxue, "higher criticism." In sum, what Hu called "the scientific methods of Qing scholars" included the following four elements: first, in studying ancient books, whenever a new idea is set forth it must be accompanied by "objective evidence" (this is the positive method); second, what is called "evidence" is sheer "example:' meaning to exemplify; third, exemplification is an inductive method-while giving a few examples yields analogical proof, giving more examples is the proper method of induction (there is no qualitative distinction between the two, but only a variation in degree); fourth, puxue induction is not a passive investigation of things that "do not labor knowledge of them:' but uses hypothesis as premise, since before exemplification there already exists a certain general rule set up by hypothesizing after observation of some individual examples and "then using the examples included in this general rule to prove examples of the same kind." In this sense, the method of proving individual examples by using individual examples is essentially a deduction of the general rule embodied in the individual examples, thus the method of puxue is a scientific method employing both induction and deduction. 107 The above points may be summarized in two sentences: "(1) boldly making hypotheses; (2) carefully seeking proofs. Without bold hypotheses, new invention will be impossible; without sufficient evidence, no one will be convinced:'lo8 Now we can contrast Hu Shi's interpretation of Dewey's five-step method with the method of puxue just sketched. The basic concept of Dewey's philosophy is: "experiencing means living;' 109 living means responding to the environment, and knowledge and thought are instruments of life in response to environment. Accordingly, Dewey divided the process of thinking into five steps: "(1) a state of perplexity; (2) locating that perplexity; (3) supposing every solution to the perplexity; (4) the mental elaboration of the possible consequence of one supposition after another to see which can solve the problem; (5) verifying the solution to make it convincing, or proving the falsehood of the solution to render it unconvincing:'llo The characteristics of Dewey's five-step method are as follows. First, thought originates in the predicament of real life-that is, it originates

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in application and ends in application - since the process of thinking is also a process of accumulating experience and knowledge, or a process of applying past experience. Second, the act of thinking includes both basic methods of induction and deduction: the first to the third steps in the five-step method tend toward induction, while the third to the fifth steps tend toward deduction. Third, the most important step in the fivestep method is setting up hypotheses; it is the hinge joining induction and deduction. Fourth, the concept of hypothesis is closely integrated with the experimental approach, because hypothesis must seek proof from its practical effect. Hu Shi summed up Dewey's five-step method into three steps: "(1) start with concrete facts and circumstances; (2) all theories and ideals, all knowledge are [merely) hypotheses awaiting proof, not unalterable principles; (3) all theories and ideals must be tested in practice; experimentation is the only touchstone of the truth." I II He concluded further that the three steps, like the scholarly methods of Qing dynasty scholars, involved "boldly making hypotheses and carefully seeking proofs:' It is clear now Hu considered the semantics and textual criticism of the empirical research school to be identical with Dewey's five-step method in terms of methodology. By comparing the empirical research school with experimental science, Hu was suggesting that the scientific method of "respect for facts and evidence:' when applied, could also be expressed as "boldly making hypotheses and carefully seeking proofS:'112 Hu Shi's transference of meaning indeed provided the theoretical basis for proving the essential identity of the two. It allowed him to draw the conclusion that both modern Western science and the empirical research school resulted from this method: "The method ofGu Yanwu [1613-1682] and Yan Ruoju [1636-1704) is the same as that of Galileo [1564-1642) and Newton [1642-1727): they are all able to build their theories on evidence. The method of Dai Zhen [1723-1777) and Qian Daxin [1728-1804) is also the same as that of Darwin [1809-1882] and Pasteur [1822-1895): they all boldly make hypotheses and carefully seek proofS:'113 It is in this sense that Hu's interpretation of Dewey's five-step method was "puxue-ized:' However, Hu's "puxue-ized" interpretation of Dewey's five-step method was never able to fully conceal the difference between the two; on the contrary, when he struggled to explain the method of puxue by referring to modern scientific method, the real nature of his own scientific method became manifest. In the comparison of Dewey's five-step method and the method of puxue, the following aspects are noticeable at the very least.

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First, though Hu Shi endowed the method of puxue with the methodological feature of hypothesis, in fact he misinterpreted the real implication of hypothesis here. If positivism or showing evidence was central to Hu's scientific method, then the central concept of Dewey's five-step method should be hypothesis. From Huxley's positivism Hu observed the pounding of evidence at religious belief; it convinced him that the antireligious character of science should require that knowledge be proven with reference to "irrefutable facts" and that the authenticity of science rested on the demand that anything unproven be renounced. With evidence as its central concept, skepticism maintains that any individual proposition demonstrating "irrefutable facts" can falsify a general theory, whereas rigorous logical induction only enables us to infer (to conduct a truth), but not to prove (to form a truth); therefore, emphasis on evidence simply assumes an unconditional trust in "inductive logic:' Nevertheless, the concept of hypothesis actually evades the judgment that knowledge is a factual proposition demonstrating irrefutable facts and regards it as a means to deal with problems, whose criterion for judgment is not evidence, but effectiveness; thus, truth is a useful hypothesis, and since "usefulness" is always under specified conditions, "truth is also subject to change when the occasion arises"1l4-truth is a man-made, effective, refutable, and uncertain hypothesis. The concept of hypothesis contains a doubt about the authenticity of factual proposition. Though in his introduction to the pragmatistic view of truth Hu held a comprehending, assenting attitude and though he continually promoted the view, once arriving at the methodological realm he immediately hewed to the standard of traditional empiricism and considered evidence, but not effectiveness, to be the sole test of truth. Hu Shi's limited consideration of evidence did not lead to the consequent conclusion: "Under very general conditions all theories have zero probability, whatever the evidence; all theories are not only equally unprovable but also

equally improbable." liS Second, when Hu interpreted the essence of inductive method as the giving of examples he greatly simplified the complicated process of induction; his belief that induction is an effect of the general rule implied through the process of proving individual instance by individual instance also indicated his ignorance of scientific abstraction.l l6 As a matter of fact, the method of textual criticism in the empirical research school was to discriminate pronunciations and meanings of ancient writing, as well as to ascertain the authenticity of the authorship and text of ancient books; its function was to emend facts, never to study theory, and to determine the

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authenticity of facts, not to discover their laws of causality; the school's search after facts and generalities, and its proclivity for classification and arrangement were somewhat compatible with modern experimental science, but the school obviously never developed a theoretical system that tested concepts by using concepts. Hu wrote repeatedly in many essays about the importance of induction,l17 but once this method, which originated in Western scientific theory, was restored to a concrete operational sequence, Hu persistently tended to stress the empirio-positivism and induction in the Chinese scholastic tradition from the Zhu Xi school of gewu zhizhi to the scholarly methods of Qing scholars. Third, excessive reliance on positivism and induction constituted the main distinction between the puxue method and Dewey's five-step method, as well as between puxue and modern science; to a certain extent, the distinction stemmed from the different objects to which the two methodological systems applied themselves-in fact, both puxue and Hu's own methodology took the fields of literary and historical semantics as their focus and thus shared the characteristics of historical methodology. Despite his clear analyses of the objects and limitations of the Qing school, Hu never carefully prescribed limits that would govern the sphere of the methodology he himself had designed. That is why certain parts of his criticism of the Qing school can be applied to himself. In the article "Zhixue de fangfa yu cailiao" [The methods and materials of scholarship l, written in September 1928,118 Hu examined studies ranging from Mei Zhuo's [fl. 1513] Guwen Shangshu kaoyi [A critical study of the ancient text Hallowed Documents] to Gu Jiegang's [1893-1980] Gushi bian [Debates on ancient history], from Chen Di's [1541-1617] Mao Shi guyin kao (A study of the ancient pronunciations in the Mao Odes) to Zhang Binglin's [1869-1936] Wenshi [Refined beginning], and he pointed out that their "methods are scientific, but the materials are all literal;' thus showing the totally different roads of Chinese and Western sciences in the past three hundred years. This conclusion was not only directed against puxue, but also related to the National Heritage Systematization (zhengli guogu) Movement since the May Fourth Incident that injected a sense of self-reflection obvious even to Hu himself. Hu regarded experimentation as a "research method that is free to produce materials;' one that could create unprecedented conditions for proving hypotheses. Western scholars built up an industrial civilization by starting with solid objects in the natural world, whereas "our textual research method, no matter how precise it may be, has always kept solid objects at arm's length, and thus never taken the experimental road; because

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of this, our highest achievement of the past three hundred years has been no more than the systematization of a few ancient books:'\19 Undoubtedly, as a criticism of the scientific method he so respected, Hu's esteem for experimentation was concerned with the social effects of academic studies. As for Dewey's five-step method and the method of puxue, "experimentation" was only available in the former; that was probably why in his "Ji ge fan lixue de sixiangjia" [Several anti-lixue thinkers], Hu singled out Yan Yuan, who interpreted the word ge in gewu as "grappling (ge) as in 'grappling with a fierce animal,' "-that is, "using the hands to do something:' In Hu's view, Yan's proposition that "being clear in mind, uttering from the mouth, writing on paper, yet not practicing with the body, are all useless" was exactly "the pragmatism of the Yan-Li [Gong (1659-1733) 1 school:'120 This complementary argument can be regarded as an effort to explain traditional scholarly methods in the light of modernization. The scholarly methods of the Qing dynasty and Dewey's five-step method were both summarized by Hu as the scientific method of "boldly making hypotheses and carefully seeking proofs;' but the comparison just outlined demonstrates subtle and significant distinctions between the two. First, while the Qing scholarship emphasized positivism and authentication, Dewey stressed hypothesis and effectiveness; second, while the former emphasized induction, the latter stressed deduction; third, while the former emphasized research, the latter stressed creation, or experimentation. The respective emphases were not absolute, but were clearly apparent. When Hu Shi approached and understood Western scientific methods through Chinese scholarly methods, he was at the same time "puxue-izing" Western scholarly methods. My understanding of Hu's scientific concept comes not from his direct introduction of the pragmatic theory, but from his exposition of specific scientific methods, and it is based on the following judgment: Hu's Chinese interpretation of Western scientific methods and his modern explanation of the Chinese scholarly methods were what truly revealed the distinctive nature of his scientific method. Scientific method had a fundamental significance for Hu, the experimentalist, who not only looked on experimentalism as "the philosophical application of scientific method" but also considered it to be a methodology or instrumentalism,121 whose function was to determine the meanings of objects, ideas, and truths by effectiveness. 122 In effect, pragmatism as an integrated system includes ontology, ethics, theories of truth and reality, and so on;123 the reason for Hu's calling it simply a methodology is that pragmatism reinterprets the concept of "experience:' Dewey regarded the

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origin of the world as "pure experience" or "primitive experience;' which was "an interactive entity of man and the environment:' This unity of "experience" and "nature" incorporates the natural world into the subjective experience of human beings. Thus, on the one hand, reality becomes that which is in the making and has been remade by human beings,124 as experience becomes the prime source; on the other hand, the object of knowledge is not the starting point of thinking, but the end of it, or the product of its specific searching and testing process. Accordingly, Hu Shi believed that "experience is a 'responsive behavior; and that thought and knowledge are the primary instruments for dealing with the future;'125 echoing Dewey: "Knowing is doing;' but not the passive and intuitive recording of facts; "[ all] notions, theories, systems ... must be regarded as hypotheses .... They are tools .... Their value resides not in themselves but in their capacity to work, shown in the consequences of their use:'126 According to this reasoning, experience is tantamount to responsive behavior, and knowing is also a kind of behavior; thus, knowing and doing are completely unified. Being an epistemic method, the five-step method is a procedure of knowing as well as of doing; one can even say that it reveals the structure of experience. Therefore, Hu's consideration of experimentalism entirely as a methodology or instrumentalism was precisely based on the concept of "experience" that "knowing and doing are united;' while "the unity of knowing and doing" was one of the major subjects of traditional Chinese thought. We can suggest a hypothesis in view of the above: Hu's understanding of experimentalism as a methodology embodied both the inherent grounds of experimental theory and the traditional Chinese mode of thinking as his cognitive "pre-structure." Having discussed the characteristics and nature of Hu Shi's scientific method, let us proceed to study and survey the meaning of this "scientific method" in regard to Hu's multiple social roles. First, Hu was not a scientist in the strictest sense, but a humanist who remolded his behavior according to the models of a scientist. The "scientific" nature of his humane studies was determined by the fact that he saw the essence of science as the application of scientific method and meticulously scrutinized traditional Chinese scholarly methods (mainly the induction of gewu zhizhi and the puxue methods of semantics and textual criticism) as a scientific methodology identical in nature with modern Western scientific method. He regarded humanistic fields such as history, literature, and philology as real learning, and he took philosophical study for a research method of empirio-science. The humanities, by their very

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nature, were not merely tools of esthetics and moral education, but sciences that could even be considered models of empirical studies. Hu repeatedly claimed: "My lecture-essays in recent years seem to range haphazardly, but my purpose is simple: to stress the methods oflearning and thinking. Thus these essays, be they discourses on experimentalism, textual research on fiction, or studies of the grammar of a character, can be said to be essays on methodology."127 In fact, Hu not only considered his work of "systematizing the national heritage" to be the application of the scientific methodology of "boldly making hypotheses and carefully seeking proofs;' aimed at propagating the spirit and law of science, but even regarded his creation of free verse as a scientific experiment: whatever his original motive, there was indeed an interrelation between experimentalism and the title of Hu's poetry anthology, Changshi ji [A collection of experiments (1920) 1, which was regarded by the author as a demonstration of the theoretical hypothesis of "literary experimentalism:'128 As a result, Hu Shi became a scientist in the domains of literary, historical, and philosophical research. To him, identifying a humanist as a scientist had a dual effect. First, he concealed his intention of "antitradition" under the banner of scientific research and experiment so as to sentence "all preconceived ideas" to death and to announce the value of "new thought" in the name of "science:'129 Thereupon, the antitraditional intention to "catch demons" and "fight ghosts" was articulated here as a natural result of "scientific research;' an objective presentation of "historical truth:' Second, he set up an independent criterion of value for scientific research, and this stance of "truth for truth's sake" in turn provided a professional basis for the humanists who chose academic research as their career. In an article in reply to Mao Zishui, dated August 1919, Hu resolutely opposed the idea of regarding "systematizing the national heritage" as "filling the needs of the current situation;' for that "would become the ancients' dream of 'being acquainted with the classics so as to bring about order and peace' "; 130 he proposed "employing scientific research methods to study the national heritage, instead of cherishing the preconceived idea of ' usefulness I uselessness' " because this narrow utilitarian concept has no place in scholarship. Those who engage in scholarship should consider their propensities in choosing what they want to do; once they have decided, they should adopt the attitude of "truth for truth's sake." It is more important for those who study intellectual history to criticize every school oflearn-

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ing by the criterion of "truth for truth's sake:' All researches are equal. Clarifying the ancient meaning of a character and discovering a star are both great contributions. l3I In this statement, we sense the inner pressure of a humanist who, in the university system, assumed a profession similar to that of a natural science researcher: he had to vest his work, which has no immediate impact, with a value similar to that of experimental science. But more important is that he attempted to explain the ultimate meaning of what he did-as [Max] Weber puts it, as far as the real "ultimate problem" is concerned, our goal is not fixed. In an extremely contradictory manner, Hu attempted to take "intellectual value" for the ultimate meaning so as to balance the utilitarian demands of specific historical circumstances upon "science:' The reduction of the motive and objective of science to science per se placed a demand on the honesty of those engaged in science: with reverence, to transform their unrestrained fervor into a bias-free explanation of objects. Second, for a liberal like Hu, who was as interested in social politics as in academic research, empirio-science signified a goal, not yet achieved and subject to constant amendment: to establish a new social order as well as a regulating mechanism for it, so that things could be improved step by step through rational and objective procedures, instead of violent or revolutionary social reconstruction. "Science" and its "research method" thus became the basis for Hu's political philosophy, indicating that the role of a liberal posing as a scientist was based on the belief that to apply an experimental method for specific problems of natural sciences solving specific social problems was absolutely natural, self-evident, and requiring no proof. What deserves special attention is that in the debate over "problems and isms;' the liberal Hu Shi did not argue against "Marxism" or other particular isms via the theory of "liberalism:' but via the polemic weapon of "scientific method:' It was not the conflict between isms, but the opposition between problems and isms that constituted a discussion on social paths. The unreciprocal foci of attention by both polemical sides revealed the nature of Hu's participation in the debate, which was to express his liberal views in the role of a scientist rather than through the identity of a liberal. Hu's social philosophy, in terms of measures and logic, was congruent to what he called the "three-step method" of "boldly making hypotheses and carefully seeking proofs": first, "investigate carefully real social conditions" (that is, "start with concrete facts and circumstances"); second, "all theories and 'isms' are the tools of this investigation" (or, "are [merely) hypo-

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theses awaiting proof, not unalterable principles"); third, "having the theories as references allows us to understand the conditions under investigation, to recognize the significance of a certain condition, and to know what relief methods should be employed" (namely, experimentation and verification). 132 Theoretically, Hu did not negate the function of isms, but saw them as hypotheses relating to specific problems. The divergence between his stance and that of Li Dazhao [1889-1927] and Lan Zhixian was that he held that all hypotheses must begin with specific problems;133 thus the focus of attention must be shifted from the objective to specific methods of operation. He repeatedly likened social problems to pathological phenomena, believing that the treatment of an ailment required the analysis of specific and individual pathogeny before appropriate medication could be prescribed, thus negating any synthetic "fundamental solutions:' Hu summed up his specific-positive method and effect-testing method as the "genetic method": "Always intending to determine the cause and effect of every matter or institution, treating nothing as being isolated and devoid of traces-such is the genetic method. I wish that Chinese scholars would use this genetic method to study all theories and isms:'134 Hu's understanding of history and society was articulated here as a scientist's understanding of his object of study; thus his "scientific method" self-evidently and logically revealed his conception of history: Civilization is not created in a vague and general fashion, it is created bit by bit and drop by drop. Progress is not achieved in an evening, in a vague and general fashion, it is achieved bit by bit and drop by drop .... Liberation means liberation from this or that institution, from this or that belief, for this or that individual-it is liberation bit by bit and drop by drop. Reconstruction means the reconstruction of this or that institution, of this or that idea, of this or that individualit is reconstruction bit by bit and drop by drop. The work which must serve as the first step in the reconstruction of civilization is the study of this or that problem. The progress of such a reconstruction of civilization means simply the solution of this or that problem. 135 Hu employed his "scientific" line of reasoning to negate the significance of "revolution" in the course of history and to establish a reformative concept of social reconstruction. It was "science" and its "method;' not the theoretical principle of liberalism, which formed the cornerstone of Hu's lib-

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eral social view. Such a distinctive application of the concept of science reminds us of the Cheng-Zhu "sequential construction" of "investigating one piece today, another piece tomorrow" until it yields a totality. The debate over problems and isms was a controversy between fragmented labor and fundamental solutions, whose mode of argumentation also reminds us to some extent of the oppositional mode of lixue and xinxue. Lastly, being a humanist posing as a scientist, Hu Shi also fulfilled the same enlightening role as Chen Duxiu. The concept of science was applied to the realm of lifeview, so that science and mass ideology established a firm connection with each other. Insofar as science was concerned, even if the tendency toward popularization was not in complete conflict with the specialization and accuracy of science, that tendency was of no benefit to the development of science per se. Hu's defense of the absolute authority of science in the realm oflifeview demonstrated how he attempted to reconstruct by science a system of order in the universe, the world, society, and the individual, as well as their interrelation, and to afford life a source of value and meaning. It was precisely this intention that made Hu, who consistently advocated concretion and positivism, yearn for a certain "minimum congruity:'136 Hu was thoroughly convinced of the corresponding relation between a philosophy of life and knowledge-experience, and that the popularization of knowledge could cause a relatively congruous philosophy of life among the masses. Therefore, he believed that the acquisition of objective knowledge was the basic prerequisite for achieving "consensus:' What deserves attention is that Hu's way of discussing the "scientific conception of life" showed more of the sterling qualities of a scientist than were evident with Chen Duxiu: he articulated his conception of life by means of a scientific method whose universal applicability was thereby implied. Hu regarded the scientific conception of life as "a large-scale hypothesis" built on known facts, an invincible faith that was subject to unceasing revisions according to new evidences. I 37 When writing an introduction to the 192} collection of "Science and the Philosophy of Life;' he invested his "naturalistic conception of life" with ten credos, making it a virtual cosmogramma comprised of various kinds of knowledge of natural and social sciences, one that offered up a causal interpretation of the movements of the cosmos, society, and life, as well as the essence and meaning oflife.138 Given that Hu connected science with the naturalistic conception oflife, what bearing did this have on lixue? This extremely important point was all but ignored. In Hu's view, "the debate over 'science and metaphysics' is in fact a recurrence of the controversy between lixue and anti-lixue. Mr. Ding

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is a scientist, and the road he travels is that of the pure intellectual investigation of things and extension of knowledge. Mr. Zhang praises 'the inner life: and the road he travels is still of the semi-religious and semimetaphysicallixue."139 Zhang Junmai represented the revival of the NeoSong school, especially of the Lu -Wang school, while Ding Wenjiang [Y. K. Ting (188r1936) 1was a follower of the epistemological tradition from gewu zhizhi to the puxue. If we place this view of Hu within his general view of lixue, the problem becomes more complicated. Hu believed that the rise of the Song-Ming lixue was a result of the Song Confucianists' resistance to the Buddhist and Daoist religious view of renouncing the world, but at the Sanle time there remained in this revolt significant stamps of the two religions- namely, the religious flavors of "being respectful;' "valuing quietness;' and "shunning desire" of the lixue. It resulted in two different trends within the lixue: the religious attitude that "the nourishment of virtue requires the practice of reverence" and the epistemic approach that "the extension of knowledge lies in the investigation of things." But "Chinese thought in recent times tended to gradually separate itself from the medieval religions, and to step on the broad road of investigating things and extending knowledge"-in this sense the puxue could be considered to be a movement with "the mission of anti-lixue."14o Hu's stance can be further interpreted thus: lixue itself had a pattern of and tendency to fissure, as marked by the oppositional state of its cosmic ontology and moral-ethical norms versus its epistemology. The development of Chinese thought in recent times had been "to use Cheng-Zhu to attack Lu-Wang, to use Xu Shen [A.D. 30-124] and Zheng Xuan [12r200] to attack Cheng-Zhu, even to use Yan Yuan and Dai Zhen to attack Cheng-Zhu and Lu-Wang; the chaotic consequences only demanded one to be a 'mediator.' "141 Why was that? The reason was that the epistemology of gewu zhizhi only evolved on its own, but was not employed as a foundation to reconstruct the cosmic ontology and moral-ethical norms or to form an inclusive "consensus" of ontology, philosophy of life, and epistemology-to replace the old lixue with a comprehensive "neo-lixue." This is precisely why Hu praised Wu Zhihui's [1865-1953] "Yige xin xinyang de yuzhouguan ji renshengguan" [A new faith's conception of the universe and the philosophy oflife ).142 Wu pointed out the relationship between science and the new faith, expounded the integrative relationship between the philosophy of life and the conception of the universe, between moral philosophy and the theory of truth, and set up a hypothesis of a complete order of the universe, as well as the rule of its inherent movement, based on modern scientific knowledge. Henceforth, a

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state of fissure would no longer exist between the epistemological trend of

gewu zhizhi and cosmic ontology and the philosophy oflife, and a new harmonywould prevail; thus, regulating moral and ethical relationships, guiding life and behavior, and providing value and meaning became the primary missions of "the scientific conceptions of the universe and life:' In other words, when Hu Shi advocated science and its all-powerful methods, he intended to gain freedom under the control of traditional society and its ideology, but it was only for the sake of bringing people further under the full "governance" of nature: to govern man's faith in nature itself, to ask man to submit to the ideal of nature, as science does. In short, as a way of expressing a thirst for freedom, the "scientific conception oflife" was a quest of the governance by nature on man. In spite of Hu's belief that technological advancement offered explanations of man's freedom, imagination, esthetic perception, and moral responsibility, and the fact that he enhanced his naturalistic conception of life with beauty, poetic quality, and creative intelligence, ((in this naturalistic universe, in this universe of infinite space and time ... where every motion in the heavens has its regular course and every change follows laws of nature, where causality governs man's life and the struggle for existence spurs his activities-in such a universe man has very little freedom indeed."143 Hu Shi had defined science as "a law of thought and knowledge" as well as ((something having to do with a state of mind, a habit of behavior, and a style of life:'144 Perhaps we can add that it also involved a philosophy of politics. The multiple implications of science mentioned in this article obviously correspond to Hu's multiple social roles: a humanist, a liberal, and an enlightened thinker posing as a scientist. Hu's understanding and application of the concept of science and scientific method had a significant relation to the social roles he played, but they were also deeply influenced by Chinese intellectual and scholarly traditions; those characteristics regarded as "scientism" in a general sense bear a close relation to the above two aspects, and thus ought to demand a more complex and Chinese understanding.

NOT A CONCLUSION: FROM GEZHI TO SCIENCE AND FROM SCIENCE TO GEZHI

Chinese thinkers discussed the problem of science hobbled by insufficient systematic learning and inadequate training in Western science per se; their concept of "science" was jointly constituted by the philosophical inter-

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pretations of Comte, Huxley, Spencer, Russell, Dewey, and others on science, as well as traditional Chinese epistemology, moral philosophy, and the conception of the universe. The inherent Chinese concepts formed the prerequisite to understanding modern Western science, while Western scientific thought and its attacks on traditional modes of thinking extended the understanding of science, society, humanity, and the interrelationship of all of them in Chinese thought. When Hu Shi and others consciously sought an essential congruity between Chinese scholarly traditions and modern Western science, they intended to prove that the laws of science were universally applicable to both the West and the East. This fashion of argumentation limited their cognition of science on the one hand, and securely confined their understanding within the traditional epistemic mode on the other-it is the latter case that provides a distinctive means for the human race to understand the relationship between itself and the universe. Generally speaking, Chinese thinkers found the scientific concepts of positivism and pragmatism very interesting, and this interest originated to a large extent in their confidence in empirical induction and a partiality for "the extension of practical use:' As I have shown in my analysis, empirical induction is related to the "accumulative" efforts of "approaching the things and probing thoroughly the principle;' while "the extension of practical use" is the common requirement of historical circumstances and intellectual tradition. Nevertheless, the connection between the concept of science and traditional epistemology means not just an understanding of the operational sequence; more important, when Chinese thinkers understood science as a rational methodology, they also firmly believed that science itself furnished an illustration of the organic connection among the universe, the world, society, and life-this cosmogramma, with the qualities of teleology and moral philosophy, determined the ultimate direction (the true, the good, and the beautiful) of cosmic movement and showed clearly the basic norms (from political to moral) for how people should think and act. Views that nature and society have an essential congruity, that the laws of nature and the norms of human morality are intrinsically linked, and that a logical direction leads epistemology and methodology to the conception of the universe and moral philosophy are all related to the mode of traditional Chinese thinking, especially the Song-Ming lixue. Thus, we see the process from gezhi to "science" manifesting itself as a process in which the concept of gezhi gradually broke away from the limits of lixue along the train of thought of "approaching the things and

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observing the facts" and "managing the world by extending practical use;' with its terminal point lying in the verbal substitution of the concept of gezhi by the concept of "science;' which had nothing to do with lixue; however, after verbally casting off the trammels of lixue, in the process of its application, the concept acquired certain fundamental characteristics of the concept of gezhi within the limits of lixue. It is precisely these characteristics that reveal to what extent the "ideological revolution" in twentieth-century China is an illusion of language. Although the self-contradictory and ambiguous state found in Chinese thinkers' discussion of "science" also derived from Western controversies over and contradictions within the concept, the self-confidence (but not perplexity) of Chinese thinkers, as shown in this ambiguous and contradictory state, perhaps most typically demonstrated their mode of understanding the concept of "science:' Translated by Howard Y. F. Choy NOTES [This essay was first published in Xueren (Scholar) 1 (1991): 49-123. It has been shortened by the author and the editor. I am indebted to Prof. Howard Goldblatt for kindly reading through this translation and for making a number of valuable suggestions. All additional data, corrections, and comments in brackets are mine.- Trans.] 1 See Guo Yingyi, Zhongguo xiandai sixiang zhong de weikexue zhuyi, trans. Lei Yi (Nanjing: Jiangsu renmin chuban she, 1989) [D. W. Y. Kwok, Scientism in Chinese Thought, 1900-1950 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1965)]; Charlotte Furth, Ding Wenjiang: Kexue yu Zhongguo xin wenhua ([ Changsha]: Hunan keji chuban she, 1987) [Ting Wenchiang: Science and China's New Culture, Harvard East Asian Series, no. 42 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1970)]. Furth's work touches on the relationship between certain traits of Chinese thought and Ding Wenjiang's "concept of science;' but it does not fully elaborate on it, due to limitations in the scope of her work. 2 C[harles] Singer [1876-1960], "Kexue;' in Jin Wulun, ed., Ziranguan yu kexueguan [Concepts on nature and science] ([Beijing]: Zhishi chuban she, 1985), 375-376. [From Encyclopaedia Britannica, 14th ed., s.y. "Science, History of' Corrections have been made according to the English original of Singer, since the Chinese author or translator misplaces the words "scientific" and "scientic:'] 3 Qian Mu, Zhuzi xin xuean [A new record of Master Zhu's scholarship] ([5 Yols., Taibei: Sanmin shuju, 1971; rpt. in 3 vols.,] Chengdu: Bashu shushe, 1986-1987), 2:707. [Wang Hui's citation is "the crude and the subtle" (cujing) instead of "the subtle and the crude" (jingcu) as in the Sibu beiyao edition of Zhu Xi's Sishu jizhu (Collected commentaries on the Four Books), 5a. Translation by Daniel K. Gardner, Chu Hsi and the Ta-hsueh: Neo-Confucian Reflection on the Confucian Canon, Harvard East Asian Monographs, no. n8 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986), 104-105.]

74 Wang Hui 4 Qian, Zhuzi xin xuean, 1:93. 5 [A standard reading in the Sibu beiyao edition of the Sishu jizhu, llb, is shan (goodness) instead of de (virtue).1 6 Cheng Hao and Cheng Yi, "Yishu" [Surviving works], in their Er Chengji [Collected works of the two Chengs] (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1981), 180. 7 For details [of Xu Qian and Zhu Zhenheng], see Yuan shi [History of the Yuan dynasty] [(Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1976), 189-4317-320]. Zhu Zhenheng explained in the author's preface to his Gezhi yulun, "Insofar as we Confucists are concerned, the ancients took medical science as a matter of gewu zhizhi, according to which I hereby entitle my book." In addition, both Hu Wenhuan's [fl. 15961 Gezhi congshu [Collectanea on "investigation and extension"] (first published during the Wenli reign years [1573-1620 J of the Ming dynasty), and Chen Yuanlong's [1652-1736] Gezhi jingyuan ["Investigation and extension" mirroring the origins1 (1707-1708) referred gezhi to natural sciences. Siku tiyao [Annotated catalogue of the Siku collection] [(Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1965)], 136 [.1158c]: "The reason it is called Gezhi jingyuan is that ... all [its contents] are natural sciences, hence the title gezhi:' 8 [Wang Fuzhi, annot.,] Zhangzi "Zhengmeng" zhu [Zhangzi's "Correction of youthful ignorance" annotated] (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1975), juan 1 and 4. 9 [See Wang Fuzhi,] "Li ji zhangju" [Record of Rites in chapter and verse], juan 31, in his Chuanshan quarzshu [Complete works of Wang Chuanshan] ([ Changsha]: Yuelu shushe), vol. 4. 10 "Saoshou wen" [Questions of a head-scratcher], in Chuanshan quanshu, vol. 12. [Translation is that of Alison Harley Black, Man and Nature in the Philosophical Thought of Wang Fu-chih (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1989), 167.] 11 "Da xin" [Enlarging the heart-mind], in Zhangzi "Zhengmeng" zhu. 12 [Commentary to] Mengzi [Meneius] 7A, in Du Sishu daquan shuo [Commentary on reading the corpus ofliterature on the Four Books] (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1975),juan 10. 13 "Banxue zhangshu" [Memorials to the throne on education], in Xu Guangqi ji [Collected works of Xu Guangqi] (Shanghai: Shanghai guji chuban she, 1984), 2:434. 14 Tongya [1666], in Fang Yizhi quanshu [Complete works of Fang Yizhi], [2 vols.] (Shanghai: Shanghai guji chuban she, 1988), 1:40-41. [The "minor skills" (fangji) refer mainly to the arts of healing, divination, numerology, astrology, and physiognomy. For a review of Tongya and Wuli xiaoshi (1664) in English, see Willard J. Peterson, Bitter Gourd: Fang I-chih and the Impetus for Intellectual Change (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), 157-158.] 15 [The philosophical term is coined from the "Xici" (The great appendix) of the Yi jing (Book of changes) (Shisanjing zhushu ed.), 7.81b: "Only into the depth can [the sage] comprehend (tong) the will under the heaven; only by the minutest (ji) can [he] complete all matters under the heaven:'] 16 [Yi jing, 9.95C: "What fills up between heaven and earth are just myriads of things:'] 17 [Here again we find Fang Yizhi under the influence of Yi jing, 7.81b: "Still and without movement until being affected, thereupon comprehending all phenomena under the heaven:' Emphasis added.] 18 [Huiyuan is a calendar term: 10,800 years make one hui, twelve of which equal one yuan, or 129,600 years.]

The Fate of "Mr. Science" in China 75 19 Fang Zhongtong [Fang Yizhi's second son], "Wuli xiaoshi bianlu yuanqi" [An account of the beginning of editing "Notes on the principle of things"]' Editor's Preface [to Wuli xiaashi1. 20 "Sishu zhengwu" [Corrections of errors in the Four Books], in Yan Yuan ji [Collected works ofYan Yuan] (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1987), juan 1. 21 The mutual translation between the concept of gezhi and "natural science" during the late Qing period was first seen in the works of missionaries: Ding Weiliang (W. A. P. Martin) [182rI916], Gewu rumen [Elementary natural science] (1868); Wei Lianchen (A. Williamson), GewlI tanyuan [The origin of natural science] (1876); Fu Lanya (T. Fryer) and Xu Shou [1818-84], Gezhi huibian [Collected materials of natural science] (1876). Fryer and Xu also founded the Gezhi shuyuan (College of Natural Science) in Shanghai on 16 October 1874. 22 "Cai xixue yi" [A proposal for Western learning], in Feng, Jiaobinlu kangyi [Memorials of the ]jaobin house1 [1885]. 23 See the Tongzhi period in Chouban yiwu shima [The whole story of managing foreign affairs], 46.3-4. 24 The Kangxi Emperor's [r.1662-1722] imperial order,ji 3, in Kangxi zhengyaa [Important planks in the platform of Kangxi], juan 18. 25 Wuxu bianfa [The Reform Movement of 1898], 1:29. 26 See the Tongzhi period in Chouban yiwu shimo, 46.44-48. 27 [Zhu Youhuan, ed.,1 Zhongguo jiruiai xuezhi shiliao [Historical materials of the school system in recent China], ser. 1, [2 vols.] ([Shanghai]: Huadong shida chuban she, 1983), 1:139· 28 Zheng Guanying ji [Collected works of Zheng Guanying], 2 vols. (Shanghai: Shanghai renmin chuban she, 1982), 1:306. 29 "Wenji" [Collected essays], juarz 11, in Yinbing shi heji [Collected works from the IceDrinker's Studio] (Shanghai: Zhonghua shuju, 1936). 30 Ibid. 31 rYan Fu, "Jiuwangjuelun" (On our salvation), in his] Yan Fu ji l Collected works ofYan Fu], red. Wang Shi,] 5 vols. (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1986), 1:45. [The last sentence of the citation is extracted from Yi jing, 1.17b: "Preceding Heaven and Heaven will not act in opposition;' and Zhuangzi 3/11: "as a clod crumbles to the ground." This rendition of the Zhuangzi is from A. C. Graham, trans., Chuang-tzu: The Inner Chapters (London: Unwin, 1986), 64. By now we may suggest, though Wang Hui does not point this out until the section on Yan Fu, that the concept of gezhi is also derived from the philosophies of the Yi jing and Daoism.] 32 Yan, "Jiuwang juelun;' 1:46. 33 The draft memorial is known as "Qing fei bagu shitie kaifa shishi gaiyong eel un zhe" [Memorial on abolishing the examinations of eight-legged essay, regulated-verse composition, and regular-script calligraphy, replaced by discourse on politics], in Kang Youwei, WlIXU zougao [The draft memorials of 1898]. See Fan Hongye, "Cong 'gezhi' dao 'kexue'" [From "investigation and extension" to "science"]' Ziran bianlllnfa [bianzhengfa J tongxun [Newsletter for dialectics of nature], 1988, no. 3. Fan's article is based on Zhu, Zhongguo jindai xuezhi shiliao, ser. 1, vol. 2, in which the draft memorial is incorrectly dated the sixth month [July-August 1898}. It appears that Zhu's source material is the Wuxu zougao.

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34 Huang Zhangjian, comp., Kang Youwei wuxu zhen zOllyi [Kang Youwei's authcntic mcmorials OfI898J ([TaibeiJ: Taiwan zhongyang yanjiuyuan lishi yuyan yanjiu suo, 1974). 35 See, for examples, "Qing zhengding sishu wenti yi Ii shixue zhe" [Memorial on amending the four-book form (i.e., eight-legged essay) to encourage practical studiesJ and "Qing biantong keju gai bagu wei celun zhe" [Memorial on transforming the imperial examinations from eight-legged essay to discourse on politics J. 36 Yan Fu, for instance, remarked in his translation of Qi Chali's "Guojixue jiabu" [National economy: Part I] (incomplete manuscript): "The reason for disregarding history as a subject is that history is not an independent subject. Be it a study of sociology, or that ofgezhi, [all subjectsJ have their own histories. History ... is not a specialized learning:' [See Yan, Ya/l Fu ji, 4:847.J 37 The book was officially published in 1898, but its earliest [extant J edition is the draft version reprinted by the Weijing shoushu chu in Shaanxi, whose cover is inscribed as the third month of the year yiwei (i.e., 1895). 38 Fan, "Cong 'gezhi' dao 'kexue.' " 39 Shimao Nagayasu, "Hanyu keji cihui de Zhong Ri jiaoliu yu bijiao" [Sino-Japanese exchange and comparison on the Chinese scientific and technical vocabulary J; cited from Fan, "Cong 'gezhi' dao 'kexue.' " 40 The title Hyakugaku renkan is a translation of "Encydopedia" [the English subtitle of the workJ. [Nishi admitted in the introduction to his Hyakugaku renkan, in Nishi Amane zenshu, ed. Okubo Toshiaki (Tokyo: ChU6 k6ron sha, 1945), ll, that one of his source materials was J the twelve volumes of the British Encyclopaedia of Political Science [London, 1840], a compilation of selected subjects that one needs to be acquainted with. [See Thomas R. H. Havens, Nishi Amane and Modern Japanese Thought (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970), 92-93.J 41 Nishi Amane tetsugaku chosakushu [Collected philosophical works of Nishi Amane], [ed. As6 Yoshiteru} ([TokyoJ: Iwanami shoten, [1933]),5. 42 Ibid., 238. 43 Ibid., 276. 44 Ibid., 311. 45 Ibid., 242. 46 For the present analysis of Nishi, I have consulted Zhu Qianzhi, Riben zhcxue shi lA history of Japanese philosophy J ([BeijingJ: Sanlian, 1964); Suzuki Tadashi and Bian Chongdao, Riben jindai da zhexuejia [Japanese great philosophers in recent times J (Shanghai: Shanghai renmin, 1989); and especially Jia Chun, "Shilun Riben jindai zhexuejia Xi Zhou" [On Nishi Amane, the Japanese philosopher in recent times J, Waiguo zhexue [Foreign philosophy], vol. 2. 47 Yan Fu ji, 1:2 [mistaken for 1:4 in the Chinese original}. 48 [The missing word "most" (zui) is resumed according to Yan Pu ji, 1:6.} 49 Ibid., 1:6-7. [The "founding of a state" (yi guo zhi Ii) is mistaken for "ruler of a state" (yi guo zhi zhu). The original word for "flourish" is xinxiang, or "fragrance:' in allusion to Pan Yue's (247-300) "Ji tian fu" (Rhapsody on plowing the royal fields), in Wen xuan (Selections of refined literature) (Shanghai: Shanghai guji chuban she, 1986), 7.343: "The millets are fragrant:' which is a metaphor for a bumper harvest and prosperity. Also notice that in this excerpt Yan Fu borrowed Buddhist terms to elaborate the method of observation.)

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50 In the revised draft of "Yuanqiang:' Yan Fu considered Spencer's sociology, which "uses the most recent principles and methods of science (gezhi) to illumine the cause of cultivating, harmonizing, ordering, and pacifying, profound, delicate, comprehensive and subtle" and further pointed out that "in the matter of learning, sociology is the crux. Only after sociology is understood can one know the cause of order and disorder, prosperity and decline, so as to be able to achieve the effect of cultivation, harmony, orderliness, and peacefulness. Hurrah! This is truly the great man's learning:' [See Yan Fu ji, 1:16, 18.] 51 Ibid., 1:126. 52 [Ibid., 1:43. Here Yan Fu pretended to put to himself the objection of an imaginary interrogator (nanzhe). The question in quotations was actually addressed to Yan I'u himself by this invented alternative voice.] 53 Ibid., i:[44-] 45· 54 Ibid., 1:29. 55 Yan Fu ji, P378. [The citation is from Tianyan lun.J 56 Ibid., 44:1036. 57 Ibid., 4:1037. 58 Ibid., 4:1039-1040. 59 Ibid., 4:1039· 60 Ibid., 2:238. 61 [Ibid., 4:1028-1029. J 62 Ibid., 4:1047. [The term shice, which Benjamin Schwartz renders into "induction of fact" or "inferred from facts" in his In Search afWealth and Power: Yen Fu and the West (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap, 1964), 191-192, is simply "observation:'] 63 Ibid., 5=13[19- J20. [The statements about the Yi and Chunqiu are cited from Sima Qian (145-ca. 86 B.C.), comp., Shi ji [Records of the historian] (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1959),117-30n]

64 rYan Fu, "Xixue menjing gongyong" (The path and use of Western learning), in his] Yan Fu ji, 1:93. 65 ["The works of refining the heart-mind" include studies of politics, law, finance, and history, among others. Ibid., 95.] 66 Ibid., [94-]95. 67 Yan Fu ji, 1:16, 18. 68 Ibid., 5:1320; Qian jibo, Jingxue tongzhi (Beijing: Zhonghua Shuju, 1936), 38. 69 [Thomas H. Huxley, Collected Essays, vol. 9: "Evolution and Ethics" and Other Essays (London: Macmillan, 1895), 81, 83;] quoted from [Schwartz,] Xunqiu fuqiang: Yan Fu yu Xifang [In search of wealth and power: Yen Fu and the West], [trans. Ye Fengmei] ([Nanjing]: Jiangsu renmin chuban she, 1989),94 [original, 101). 70 Yan Fu ji, 5:1324. 71 Ibid., 5:1326. 72 See Wang Jianping and Hu Weixi, Chuanbo yu chaoyuc [Dissemination and transcendenceJ (Shanghai: Xuelin chuban she, 1989), 35-36. 73 See Joseph Ben-David, Kcxuejia zai shehui zhong de jiaose, trans. Zhao Haling (Chengdu: Sichuan renmin chuban she, 1988) [The Scientist's Role in Society: A Comparative Study (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1971)), chaps. 9 and 6. 74 After the celebrated two-man show of Liu Bannong [1891-1934] and Qian Xuantong [1887-1939] (i.e., the letter from Wang Jingxuan [Qian Xuantong) and the reply to itl

78 Wang Hui

75

76

77

78

79

80

81 82

83 84 85 86 87

had evoked social repercussions, Chen Duxiu immediately safeguarded it by claiming that "the freedom of academic discussion is a sacred freedom:' See his reply to "a worshiper of Wang Jingxuan" (chongbai Wang Jingxuan zhe), ["Taolun xueli zhi ziyou quaTI" (The freedom of academic discussion),] Xin qingnian [hereafter XQN] 4.6 (15 June 1918): [628]. In March 1919, Chen wrote another article, "Guanyu Beijing daxue de yaoyan" [On rumors regarding the Peking University], [Meizhou pinglun (Weekly critic), no. 13 (13 April 1919)], in which he also remarked on the special situation of the new cultural figures in the university system. [For an English account of the Liu-Qian two-man show, see Chow Tse-tsung, The May Fourth Movement: Intellectual Revolution in Modern China (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1960; Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1967),66.] XQN 1.1 [(15 September 1915): 5-6. In this volume of the magazine each article has separate pagination. In Wang Hui's original, "rationality and intelligence" (zhiling) is inverted as "intelligence and rationality" (/ingzhi). The excerpt is translated by Kwok in Scientism in Chinese Thought, 64-65.] [For details of the epoque theologique, epoque metaphysique, and epoque positive, see Auguste Comte, Cours de Philosophic positive, 6 vols. (Paris: Bachelier, 1830-42), vol. 5: La partie historique de la philosophie socia/e, and vol. 6, Le complement de la philosophie sociale ct les conclusions gem!rales.] XQN3.5 [(l}ulY 1917)]. "Kexue yu shensheng" [Science and the divine], in Duxiu wencun [Collected essays of Chen Duxiu] ([1922;] Hefei: Anhui renmin chuban she, 1987), 551. Similar arguments can also be seen in "Jinri zhi jiaoyu fangzhen" [Today's educational policy], XQN 1.2 (15 October 1915): [1-6], and "Rensheng zhenyi" [The true meaning oflife], [XQN 4.2] (15 February 1918): [90-93]' in the former of which Chen employed the concept of "reality" to replace that of "life." [Translation adopted from Kwok, Scientism in Chinese Thought, 67.] "Da Ye Ting" [Answering Ye Ting], XQN 2.6 (1 FebruarYl917); "Zai lun Kongjiao wenti" [Another discussion of the problems of the Confucian religion], XQN 2.5 (1 January 1917). "Jinri zhi jiaoyu fangzhen;' [3-4]. [The word "literature" (wenxue) in square brackets is added according to the original in XQN. Here xianshizhuyi and xieshizhuyi were used interchangeably in translating the term "realism:' See Marston Anderson, The Limits of Realism: Chinese Fiction in the Revolutionary Period (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1990), 28.] "Kexue yu renshengguan xu" [Preface to science and the philosophy of life], XQN (quarterly) 2 [December 19231. See ibid. and "Da Shizhi" [Answering Hu Shi] (9 December 1923), in [Zhang Junmai et al.,] Kexue yu renshengguan, [2 vols.] (Shanghai: Yadong tushu guan, [1923]), [1: i-xi of the first preface and xxxiii-xlii of the second preface]. "Zai lun Kongjiao wenti:' XQN 5.5 [(15 October 1918): 458]. "Dangdai er da kexuejia zhi sixiang" [The thouglIts of two great contemporary scientists], XQN 2.1 [(1 Septembefl916)]. [Founded 15 September 1915, Qingnian zazhi was the predecessor of Xin qingnian.] XQN2.2 [(10ctobefl916)].

The Fate of "Mr. Science" in China 79 88 XQN 2.3 (1 November 1916). 89 Ibid.

90 "Kongzi zhi dao yu xiandai shenghuo" [The way of Confucius and modern life]' XQN 2.4 (1 December 1916). [For the second paragraph, the present translator has consulted the renditions in Wm. Theodore de Bary, Wing-tsit Chan, and Burton Watson, comps., Sources of Chinese Tradition (New York: Columbia University Press, 1960), 815-816; and Benjamin I. Schwartz, "Ch'en Tu-Hsiu: Pre-Communist Phase;' in Papers on China 2 (May 1948): 193 and 195.J 91 "Yuan Shikai fuhuo" [The revival of Yuan Shikai (1858-1916) J, XQN 2.4 (1 December 1916). 92 [The order of"sincerizing" (cheng) and "rectifying" (zheng) is misinverted in Wang Hui's Chinese original. Moreover, the nouns, i.e., "things, knowledge, thoughts, heart-mind, self, family, state, and world;' immediately after the verbs are "objects" (binyu) instead of "predicates" (binci), as our author originally suggests.] 93 "Yi jiu yi liu nian" [The year 1916], XQN 1.5 (15 January 1916): [2. Chen's double use of xin (renovate, renew) here suggested a link with the Confucian ideal of xinmin (to renovate the people) in the "Daxue:' For the idea of xinmin, see Cheng Yi, Henan Cheng shi jingshuo [Explanation of the classics by the Chengs of Henan J, in Er Cheng quanshu [Complete works of the two Chengsl (Sibu beiyao ed.), 5.3a; also Gardner, Chu Hsi and the Ta-hsueh, 89n-90n]. 94 "Wuren zuihou zhi juewu" [Our people's final awakening], XQN 1.6 [(15 February 1916): 1-4]. 95 [Bertrand] Russell, Xifang zhexue shi, 2 vots. (Beijing: Shangwu yinshu guan, 1976), 2: 46. A History of Western Philosophy (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1945), 527. [Emphasis in English original, not in Wang's quotation. J 96 "Kexue yu renshengguan xu;' in Kexue yu rCllShengguan, 1: xxvii. [Translation is from Hu Shi's own English version in his "My Credo and Its Evolution;' in Albert Einstein et aI., Living Philosophies (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1931), 261-262. The word "huge" (da) is added according to Hu's Chinese originaL] 97 For details, see the novel by Hu Shi [using the pseudonyms Xiqiang and Tieer], Zhenru dao [Tathata Island], [JingyeJ xunbao ([Struggle] trimonthly), [nos. 3, 6-10, 24, 26-28, 35 and 37] (1906[-8]) [(incomplete)]. 98 "Hu Shi de zizhuan" [The autobiography of Hu Shi] (an oral history [in English]) [(1981), trans. Te-kong Tong, abridged, in Chen Jin'gan, comp.], Hu Shi yanjiu ziliao [Research materials on Hu Shi] ([Beijing]: Beijing shiyue wenyi chuban she, 1989), 325. 99 "Du Liang Souming [xiansheng] de Dong xi wenhua ji qi zhexue" [On reading [Mr.] Liang Souming's "The Eastern and Western cultures and their philosophies"J, in Hu Shi wencun [Collected works of Hu ShiJ [hereafter HSWC], 2nd coli., [4 bks. (Shanghai: Yadong tushu guan, 1924),] 2.[81. Here Wang Hui mistakes kaozheng, "examining evidence;' for qiuzheng, "seeking proofs:'J. 100 ["Qingdai xuezhe de zhixue fangfa" (The scholarly methods of Qing scholars), in] HSWC, [1st coll., 4 bks. (Shanghai: Yadong tushu guan, 1921),]2.208. [The descriptive de in Z/zuzi yong de 'ji' zi ("the character ji 'approaching' used by Master Zhu") is missing in Wang Hui's citation. J 101 "Hu Shi de zizhuan:' 325-326. 102 Ibid., 327.

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WangHui

103 ["Ji ge fan lixue de sixiangjia" (Several anti-lixue thinkers), in] HSWC, 3rd coil., [9 bks. (Shanghai: Yadong tushu guan, 1930 ),] 2.112-113 [mistaken for bk. 1 in the original footnote]. 104 ["Du Liang Souming xiansheng de Dong xi wenhua ji qi zhexue;'] 2.81. [Translation of Cheng Yi's statement is by Wing-tsit Chan, trans. and comp., A Source Book in Chinese Philosophy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963), 552.] 105 ["Qingdai xuezhe de zhixue fangfa;'] 2.215-216. 106 [The term xunguxue was actually rendered as "semantics" by Hu in his later essay, "Ji ge fan lixue de sixiangjia:'] 107 "Qingdai xuezhe de zhixue fangfa;' 2.220-221. 108 Ibid., 2.242. 109 [John Dewey, "The Need for a Recovery of Philosophy;' in Dewey et aI., Creative Intelligence: Essays in the Pragmatic Attitude (New York: Henry Holt, 1917), 8.] 110 ["Shiyan zhuyi" (Experimentalism), in] HSWC, [1st coil.,] 2.120. [See Dewey's "phases of reflective thinking" in his How We Think: A Restatement of the Relation of Reflective Thinking to the Educative Process (Boston: D. C. Heath, 1933), 12, 107-115.] III ["Duwei xiansheng yu Zhongguo" (Mr. Dewey and China), in] HSWC, [1st coiL,] 2.201. [The word zhi ("merely") is left out in Wang's quotation.] 112 ["Zhixue de fangfa yu cailiao" (The methods and materials of scholarship), in] HSWC, 3rd coil., 2.188. 113 Ibid. 114 ["Shiyan zhuyi;'] 2.98-102. 115 Imre Lakatos, Kexue yanjiu gangling fangfa lun, trans. Lan Zheng (Shanghai: Shanghai yiwen chuban she, 1987), 16 [Philosophical Papers, ed. John Worrall and Gregory Currie, vol. 1: The Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 11. Emphasis in English original, not in Wang's citation. Here Lakatos attributes the idea to K. R. Popper.]. 116 ["Qingdai xuezhe de zhixue fangfa;'] 2.230. 117 [See, for example, ibid.,] 2.206. 118 [Here the original reads: "In September 1928, Hu Shi published the article 'Zhixue de fangfa yu cailiao.' .. :' Actually the article was "written" in September 1928 and "published" in Xinyue yuekan (Crescent monthly) 1.9 (10 November 1928): 1-14. Each article in the magazine has separate pagination. J 119 ["Zhixue de fangta yu cailiao;'] 2.201. [The word jinguan, meaning "no matter how;' is mistaken for suiran, "though;' in Wang's citation.] 120 ["Jj ge fan lixue de sixiangjia,"] 2.133. Liang Qichao, in his Zhongguo jin sanbai nian xueshu shi [An intellectual history of China in the past three hundred years] [(Taibei: Huazheng shuju, 1989), 117], also called [the doctrine of] Yan and Li "practical pragmatism" and considered their spirit to be purely "modern:' 121 ["Wushi nian lai zhi shijie zhexue" (World philosophy in the past fifty years), in] HSWC, 2nd coli., 2.257-258. 122 [See John Dewey, "What Pragmatism Means by Practical;' in his Essays in Experimental Logic (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1916), 308-311.] 123 [For pragmatism as a theory of truth and reality, see Dewey's discllssion of William James, ibid., 303.] 124 [The belief that reality is still in the process of being made was suggested by William

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125 126

127 128 129

130 131 132 133

134

135

136 137 138 139 140 141 142 143

144

81

James in his Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking (New York: Longmans, Green, 1907), 257.] ["Wushi nian lai zhi shijie zhexue;'] 2.262. Dewey, Zhexue de gaizao ([Beijing:] Shangwu, 1962), 78, 85 [Reconstruction in Philosophy (New York: Henry Holt, 1920),145,156. The word "all" (suoyou) is added by Dewey's Chinese translator.]. See author's prefaces to HSWC, 1St and 3rd colis. ["Hu Shi de zizhuan;'] 244. [See Hu Shi, "Xin sichao de yiyi" (The meaning of the new trend of thought), in] HSWC, [1st coll.,] 4.162-16}; ["Zhengli guogu yu 'da gui'" (Systematizing the national heritage and "fighting ghosts"), in] HSWC, 3rd coli., 2.211-212. ["Lun guoguxue: da Mao Zishui" (On the study of national heritage: a rejoinder to Mao Zishui), in] HSWC, [1st coiL,] 2.286-287. Ibid. ["Wenti yu zhuyi" (Problems and isms), in] HSWC, [1st coli.,] 2.14rI48. [Li Dazhao and Lan Zhixian (Lan Gongwul were Hu Shi's major opponents in the debate. For their rebuttals of Hu, see Lan, "Wenti yu zhuyi;' Taipingyang (The Pacific Ocean) 2:1 (5 May 1920): 4-10; and Li, "Zai lun wenti yu zhuyi" (Another discussion of problems and isms), ibid., 10-15.] ["Wenti yu zhuyi;'] 2.196-197. [The term "genetic method" was rendered by Hu Shi as lishi de taidu, literally "historical approach:' This is why Wang Hui reads it as "Hu's understanding of history" (emphasis mine) in the following sentence.] ["Xin sichao de yiyi;'] 4.164. [Translation is by Jerome B. Grieder, Hu Shih and the Chinese Renaissance: Liberalism in the Chinese Revolution, 1917-1937 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1970),126.] ["Kexue yu renshengguan xu;' in] HSWC, 2nd coil., 2.23. Ibid., 2.15. Ibid., 2.27-28. [Translation of the phrase "naturalistic conception oflife" (ziranzhuyi de renshengguan) is given in Hu, "My Credo and Its Evolution;' 262. Trans.] ["Ji gc fan lixue de sixiangjia;'] 2.155. [The verb "is" (shi) in the sentence "Mr. Ding is a scientist" is mistaken for the possessive de in Wang's quotation.] Ibid., 2.152-153. Ibid., 2.158. [In Zhou Yunqing, ed., Wu Zhihui xiansheng wencun (Collected works of Mr. Wu Zhihui), 2 vols. (Shanghai: Yixue shuju, 1925), 1:168-308.] ["Kexue yu renshengguan xu;'] 2.28. [Translation of the excerpt is Hu's own, "My Credo and Its Evolution;' p. 262. The expression "regular course" (changdu) is mistaken for "constant change" (changbianl in Wang's citation.] ["Hu Shi de zizhuan;'] 269. [Note that Hu's statement "something to do with a state of mind, a habit of behavior, and a style of life" actually referred to "both science and democracy." ]

~ Translingual Practice: The Discourse

of Individualism between China and the West

~~~

Lydia H. Liu

The meaning of a word is its use in the language.- Wittgenstein The concept of the self, subject, or individual (as well as the slippage between them) has been a main target of criticism in the academic West since the emergence of poststructuralist scholarship. A good deal of that critique is bent on deconstructing the post-Enlightenment European notion of the subject. This move has been greeted with challenge by critics of deconstruction-feminists and others-who try to (re)introduce such concepts as political agency, strategic identity, multiple subjectivities, and so on into the contemporary debate.! As someone who specializes in a non -European language, I find this debate fascinating within the context of Euro-American academia but somewhat unsatisfactory at certain theoreticallevels. For instance, I am often struck by the fact that the terms and ideas contested by contemporary critics in these kinds of debates tend to circulate within the self-referential framework of the discursive/linguistic traditions of the West and often have the effect of reinforcing, rather than disrupting, the system of knowledge that is being brought under critical examination. What I mean is that theories that invest so heavily in selfcontemplation on behalf of metropolitan European languages cannot but replicate Eurocentrism in the act of criticizing it. After all, attacks on European culture from some hallucinatory non-European perspective in the West have always been a dynamic part of the European intellectual tradition since the time of the Enlightenment, if not earlier. My point here is not to seek some authentic non-Euro-American position, which would have to be constructed against its Euro-American opposite, hence forfeiting any claim of authenticity; nor do I wish to concern myself with the need to raise the voice of the Third World - Where is the Third World?

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Who names it? And who represents it anyway? Instead, I would like to raise the possibility of rethinking the condition of contemporary theory in terms of contestation of languages, by which I mean national, ethnic, and regional languages and dialects in a literal sense rather than the Saussurian langue versus parole or Bakhtin's notion of heteroglossia. 2 Inasmuch as theory, like other discursive practices, is linguistically specific as well as context-bound, I see the relationship between languages as one of the central issues that it is incumbent upon comparative scholarship to address. This essay will look at the discourse of individualism in the context of what I call translingual practice between East and West. I will focus on the ways in which this "Western" discourse was deployed by Chinese intellectuals in theories of the modern nation -state during the early decades of the twentieth century. My emphasis on the act of deployment is intended to shift the critique of the post-Enlightenment European concept of the subject to a site where meaning does not belong to European philosophical traditions alone (even though the concept itself might have "originated" there), but "travels" and gets reinvented in the constant flux of historical practices, not the least of which is the encounter between languages through translation and translingual practice. I hope that this line of inquiry will enable me to engage with the contemporary theoretical debate on the subject, difference, culture, and nation at the time when it is becoming increasingly difficult to conduct "cross-culture" studies or theorize about national differences without giving primary attention to the complexities of historical transaction between languages. What happens when a word, category, or discourse "travels" from one language into another? In the nineteenth-century colonial and imperialist discourse, the travel of ideas and theories from Europe to the rest of the world usually evokes notions of expansion, enlightenment, progress, teleology, and so forth, whereas in what has become known as postcolonial theory the word "travel" is anything but innocent and often has to be put in quotation marks. Depending on the perspective one takes with regard to the question above, there is a world of difference from one theoretical position to the other. In The World, the Text, and the Critic, Edward Said proposes the notion of traveling theory precisely to address the migration of ideas across space and time. This notion enables him to depart from previous Marxist theorists, who take capitalist economy as a critical model for literary production, and to introduce a different concept of literary practice that will empha-

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size the element of influence, creative borrowing, appropriation, and the movement of ideas and theories from place to place in an international environment. Apropos of the manner in which theories and ideas travel, Said gives four main stages: First, there is the point of origin, or what seems like one, a set of initial circumstances in which the idea came to birth or entered discourse. Second, there is a distance transversed, a passage through the pressure of various contexts as the idea moves from an earlier point to another time and place where it will come into a new prominence. Third, there is a set of conditions-call them conditions of acceptance or, as an inevitable part of acceptance, resistances-which then confronts the transplanted theory or idea, making possible its introduction or toleration, however alien it might appear to be. Fourth, the now full (or partly) accommodated (or incorporated) idea is to some extent transformed by its new uses, its new position in a new time and place. 3 Having introduced his general framework, Said proceeds to examine the intellectual development of three major Marxist literary critics, Georg Lukacs, Lucien Goldmann, and Raymond Williams, with Foucault thrown in toward the end, in order to measure the individual career of each critic against his historical background. For some inexplicable reason, however, his discussion does not go beyond the usual argument that theory is always a response to changing social and historical circumstances.4 The traveling aspect of his theory is somehow abandoned in the course of his discussion. As I tried to figure out a way to explain why Said's notion of traveling theory got sidetracked so easily and failed to deliver that which it had promised, it occurred to me that perhaps the notion itself lacked the kind of intellectual rigor needed for its own fulfillment. Indeed, who does the traveling? Does theory travel? If so, how? Granted that theory does possess such subjectivity, a further question entails: what is the means of transportation? Is it the aircraft, automobile, rickshaw, train, man-of-war, or space shuttle? Commenting on Said's oversight, James Clifford suggests that "Lukacsian Marxism in his essay seems to travel by immigrant boat; theory nowadays takes the plane, sometimes with round-trip tickets:'5 But I would like to take this point a step further, for not only does the concept of traveling theory tend to affirm the primacy of theory (or Western theory in the context of Said's book) by endowing the latter with full-fledged, mobile subjectivity, but it omits to account for the vehicle of translation. With the suppression of that vehicle, travel becomes such an abstract idea

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that it makes no difference whatsoever in which direction theory travels (from West to East or the other way around) and for what purpose (cultural exchange, imperialism, or colonization), or in which language and for what audience one translates in the first place. 6 In light of the fact that language transaction has always been a contested territory in national and international struggles, its neglect by Said in his formulation of traveling theory is rather peculiar and, shall I say, conducive to the widely held view of theory (read Western theory) as if it were the incarnation of a hero from a European picaresque narrative who initiates the trip, encounters obstacles en route, and always ends up being accommodated one way or the other in the host country. This configuration is extremely problematic to me, because it privileges theory while erasing the agency of translation or glossing it over as a necessary but insignificant medium. Until recently, translation did not present itself as a theoretical problem or even a meaningful historical practice worthy of postcolonial scholarship, although it has been known for a long time that the translator or some other agent in the target language usually initiates the linguistic transaction by taking, selecting, combining, and reorganizing words, categories, and discourses from the source language and reinventing them in the target language, and that the needs of the translator and his/her audience together determine and negotiate the meaning (that is, usefulness) of any theory taken from the source language. Tejaswini Niranjana's book, Siting Translation: History, Post-Structuralism, and the Colonial Context, is probably one of the few attempts to place the problem of translation at the heart of colonial history. Writing about the experience of colonial India, the author sees translation as "part of the colonial discourse of Orientalism" and "British efforts to obtain information about the people ruled by the merchants of the East India Company:'? To the extent that the author points to translation as an important site of colonial control, she offers a most powerful critique, indeed; but to the extent that her discussion privileges European languages as target languages in these linguistic transactions and in her own research (three of her chapters are devoted to discussing Paul de Man, Walter Benjamin, and Derrida), the book leaves the other side of the story untold: what happens when a European language gets translated into a non-European language? Can the power relationship between East and West be reinvented in that case? If so, how? In raising those questions, however, I must take care not to endorse new constructs of binary opposition in place of the old ones, no matter

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whether they take the form of Western theory versus Chinese reality or the more sophisticated one of oppositional discourse. In the case of the former, the theory/reality divide reintroduces the old binary of theory and practice, and thus compounds the historical burden that one is supposed to unpack.s Perhaps, a more meaningful question to ask in this kind of investigation is what type of relationship exists historically between Western theory and Chinese theory rather than, say, whether Western theory is relevant or irrelevant to Chinese reality. On the other hand, the concept of oppositional discourse that prevails in contemporary scholarship on postcoloniality creates a different set of problems, although this idea is far more interesting than the theory/reality opposition mentioned above. My difficulty with the idea of oppositional discourse is that it tends to reduce the complexities surrounding the power relationship between East and West to that of Western domination versus native resistance. 9 There is a certain amount of danger in reifying the patterns of resistance and domination along the East/West divide, since the boundaries between the two are frequently permeable and subject to changing conditions. In my study of translingual practice, therefore, a non-European language does not automatically constitute a site of resistance to European languages. Rather, I see it as a much-neglected area where complex processes of domination and resistance can be observed and interpreted from within the discursive context of that language as well as in connection with other linguistic environments. I am proposing the notion of translingual practice in order to ground my study of an earlier moment of historical transaction between China and the West in language practices. Since the modern intellectual tradition in China began with translation, adaptation, appropriation, and other interlingual practices in relation to the West, it is inevitable that this inquiry should take translation as its point of departure. Yan Fu's interpretative translation of Huxley's Evolution and Ethics (1898) made an enormous impact on China and helped fashion a whole generation of Chinese intelligentsia in his time. In literature, Lin Shu became immensely popular for having rendered over a hundred foreign works into literary Chinese, and his work predated the publication of Lu Xun's first modern short story (1918) by many years. 10 However, I must hasten to add that the focus of my study of translingual practice is not translation in a technical sense, but the condition of translation and discursive practices that ensue from initial interlingual contacts between languages. Broadly defined, I will be looking at the process through which new words, meanings, and dis-

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Lydia H. Liu

courses arise, circulate, and acquire legitimacy within the target language due to, or in spite of, the latter's contact/collision with the source language. Meanings, therefore, are not so much "transformed" when concepts pass from the source language into the target language as (re)invented within the local environment of the latter. In that sense, translation is no longer a neutral event untouched by the contending interests of political and ideological struggles. Instead, it becomes the very site of such struggles where the source language is forced to encounter the target language, where the irreducible differences between them are fought out, authorities evoked or challenged, ambiguities dissolved or created, and so forth, until new words and meanings emerge in the target language itself. I hope the notion of translingual practice will eventually lead to a vocabulary that helps to account for the process of adaptation, translation, introduction, and domestication of words, categories, and discourses from one language to another and, furthermore, to explain the modes of transmission, manipulation, deployment, and domination within the power structure of the target language. ll What is the Chinese equivalent of "self"? This question often rests on the assumption that equivalence of meaning can be readily established across different languages. Does not the existence of bilingual dictionaries testify to this fact? I hear people ask, isn't it true that the category of the "self" has existed all along in the Chinese philosophical tradition? What about the Confucian notion of ji, etc.? In my view, these questions are themselves open to question because they ignore the fact that the trope of equivalence between the English word "self" and the Chinese ji or other such words has been established only recently in the process of translation and fixed by means of modern bilingual dictionaries. 12 Thus, any linkages that exist between the two derive from historical coincidences whose meanings are contingent on the politics of translingual practice. Once such linkages are established, a text becomes "translatable" in the ordinary sense of the word. However, problems arise immediately-and I cannot stress this point enough-when a comparative theory between languages allows itself to be built upon the basis of an essential category, such as that of "self;' whose linguistic identity somehow transcends the history of translation. To give an example, I would like to mention Tu Wei-ming's work on Chinese philosophy in English, as he is the foremost theorist in the u.s. to expound on the differences between the Neo-Confucian ji and the Western notion of the self. Tu Wei-ming's humanist notion of ji is predicated on the idea that

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the former can be readily translated into the English word "self" without the mediation of the modern history of translation. In a number of his works, such as Humanity and Self-Cultivation: Essays in Confucian Thought and Confucian Thought: Selfhood as Creative Transformation, his argument appears tautological: the Neo-Confucian ji differs from (by which he means is superior to) the Western notion of the self, but it remains a notion of "self:' 13 In other words, difference comes to be conceived only at the level of ontological makeup but not that of the constitutive category where the question of linguistic transaction must be brought in. The assumed homogeneity between ji and "self" inevitably blots out the history of each word as well as the history of translation of "self" and related words in modern Chinese. His knowledgeable study of Neo-Confucianism notwithstanding, Tu Wei-ming's comparative approach has the disadvantage of circumventing the question of analytical categories by assuming transparency in translation. In order to open up the equivalence of meanings across different languages that bilingual dictionaries guard so jealously, it is necessary to interrogate the dynamic history of words and related concepts, categories, and discourse beyond the realm of common sense or dictionary definition. For example, it is one thing to know that the English word "self" can be translated as ziwo, wo, ji, and so on, but a different thing to realize that each of these translations commands a discursive field that carries its own history. In modern Chinese, ziwo is probably a neologism imported from Meiji Japan, where a huge number of Chinese characters had been used to translate concepts from European languages. 14 The rest of the translations of "self" are appropriated from classical Chinese philosophy, NeoConfucianism in particular, although with a radical and important shift in meaning. To complicate the situation further, there is also a family of words geren, gewei, geti in modern Chinese-translations of the English word "individual"-that are sometimes used interchangeably with the family of ZiWO. 15 Thus, the slippage of ziwo, wo, geren, gewei, geti, and ji not only inherits the slippage of meaning between "self" and "individual" in the English original but reHects the complex scenario of translingual practices and its politics in the Chinese context. Indeed, the notions of ziwo, wo, gewei, geti, ji, and so on have come down to us as part of the rich legacies of modern Chinese history.16 How do we understand and explain this situation? What kind of knowledge does it bring to light besides a popularized image of Westernization, iconoclasm, and antitraditional ism? Is it possible to pose it as a theoretical problem in

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the context of Chinese modernity rather than foreclose it as an established fact or one of those timeless motifs? The inaugural issue of the journal Xin chao (The renaissance or New tide), published by students of Beijing University at the peak of the New Culture Movement, carries a polemical piece by Chen Jia'ai, entitled "Xin" (The new). This article spells out the rhetoric of modernity in a series of tropes. "The new is singular and the old is plural;' says the author; "The former is singular for being absolutely unique whereas the latter is plural for being open to infinite multiplication:'l7 Armed with the figure of inflective grammar, the author then proceeds to elaborate his point about old and new using the metaphor of genealogy: "It takes two, man and wife, to make a single son at a time (even twins come one after the other). Conversely, parents that give birth to the son were in turn brought into the world by the grandparents, who owed their lives to the great-grandparents ad infinitum" (ibid). Far from being a treatise preaching filial piety, the essay is trying to make the point that "old" ideas, like the older generation, are bound to be replaced by "new" ones, which the author defines in the rest of the essay as singular, unique, modern, and therefore superior. In the context of the New Culture Movement, the loaded terms of old and new set up a binary opposition between tradition and modernity, which typically intersects with the cultural antinomy of East and West that assigns superiority to the latter. This unique intersection characterizes the historical experience of modernity in China as distinct from that of the West, which also had its share of the Querelle des anciens et des modernes. While Europe sought the expansion of its territory in the name of progress, China had to endure the violence of imperialism in order to come to terms with "modernity" (read "the West").l8 As can be seen, such violence is internalized by the author of the essay above, whose argument for the new and the unique is couched, not surprisingly, in the trope of Indo-European grammatical number: danshu (the singular) versus zhongshu (the plural), not available in the Chinese language. Inasmuch as the figure of speech in this passage draws on the resources of the inflective IndoEuropean language, the allegorical thrust of the text may, therefore, be read as privileging the categories of the modern, Western, and individual (symbolized by the son), as opposed to those of the traditional, Chinese, and familial (represented by the older generation). Such rhetoric turns into a driving force behind most of the radical discourses of selfhood, nationhood, and modernity in the May Fourth era.

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Since the inflected grammar of the modern self is embedded from the first moment in a history of contested meanings within which the idea of nationhood looms large, it is difficult, if not impossible, to treat the self as an isolated site of unique personal identity. The sources of this difficulty, as I see it, lie not so much in the ontological, psychoanalytical (such as the Lacanian theory), or linguistic considerations that usually enable our academic deconstruction of the unitary subject, or in the so-called unbroken tradition of holism in Chinese culture, as in the particular kind of history that China and the Chinese were forced to go through since the midnineteenth century. In other words, the violence of China's encounter with the West forces nationhood upon selfuood, and vice versa, under those unique circumstances. Yet the modern self is never quite reducible to national identity. On the contrary, it is the incongruities, tensions, and struggles between the two as well as their mutual implication and complicity that give full meaning to the lived experience of Chinese modernity.

Geren zhuyi (individualism) happened to be one of those concepts that held out great promise to help resolve the problematic of modern selfuood and nationhood, but, as I will demonstrate below, it turned out to complicate the whole situation instead. This neologism, like many others, had been invented earlier by Meiji intellectuals in Japan to translate Western liberal and nationalist theories of "individualism" (kojin shugi). Having been introduced into China at the turn of the century, it soon grew to be a chief signpost on the discursive terrain of the self in modern China. In order to tease out the meaning of individualism in the Chinese context, let me begin by making a brief comparison between two antithetical views about individualism and its relevance to China. The first view is expressed in an article titled "Gewei zhuyi" (Individualism) that was published in Dongfang zazhi (The Eastern miscellany) in 1916. Jia Yi, who signed this essay, says: "Individualism is utterly alien to the Chinese mind. Inasmuch as the clan, local district, state, and society hold absolute dominance, there is no chance for the individual to emerge." 19 A contrary view will be found in Bertrand Russell's The Problem of China (1922), where the author states that "Individualism has perished in the West, but in China it survives, for good as well as for evil:'20 Both authors seem to subscribe to a notion of individualism that predicates a core of fixed values, yet their views are mediated by a profound sense of crisis about the state of their nations, that is, Jia Yi's poverty-stricken China and Russell's post-World War I Europe, and by a desire for the other (although on both sides that desire seems

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embedded a priori in the economy of Western Enlightenment ideology). The contrast provided by their individual positions has major methodological implications for me, because it renders any potential quest for an essential and fixed meaning of the individual and individualism futile and misguided. What really matters here is the discursive practice surrounding the notion of individual, self, individualism, and so on as well as the politics of such practice. The above-mentioned point, however, is not as self-evident as it appears. On the contrary, much of the existing historiography on the theme of Chinese enlightenment in the New Culture Movement treats the concept of individualism as a given value. Li Zehou and Vera Schwarcz, for instance, hold May Fourth nationalism chiefly responsible for bringing the New Culture Movement to an untimely end and consequently jeopardizing the project of enlightenment of which individualism formed an integral part.21 Both scholars seem to take the grand narrative of the European Enlightenment as a fixed, unproblematic site of meaning against which the Chinese enlightenment is to be measured for its degrees of success (or failure) instead of investigating the latter as part of a dynamic historical process capable of generating its own meanings and terms of interpretation. In so doing, they end up reading history according to a set of master codes, while eliding the subtleties, complexities, and contingencies of given meanings and situations that emerged from the twists and turns of events. 22 Among mainland Chinese scholars currently engaged in revisionary historiography, there is a general tendency to dub the May Fourth conception of the individual "inauthentic" on the ground of its incommensurability with the original notion from the West. According to that view, Li Zehou was wrong to grant to the New Culturalists a role-short -lived as it wasin the dissemination of the idea of individual freedom. Supporters of this view argue that the tragedy of Chinese intellectuals in this century is that they tend to place the highest premium on society, nation, people, and the state but never on the individual, and that "it is absurd to believe that the 'May Fourth' conception of the 'liberation of individuality' came anywhere close to sending the true message of 'individual freedom.' "23 While I agree that the May Fourth notion of the individual is always tied up with those of the nation, state, and society, I find it difficult to take the idea that the "original" Western notion of the individual is exempted from those external considerations, nor do I see the Chinese notion as simply a distorted image of the Western idea. Anthony J. Cascardi points out in his book, The Subject of Modernity, that the Enlightenment notion of subjectivity in the

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West is part of the legitimation question in the theory of modernity and that "the culture of modernity is given shape as a divided whole that can only be unified through the powers of an abstract subject, or its political analogue, the autonomous State. Indeed, it can be said that the State gains power and scope precisely insofar as it provides a means through which the divided subjects of modernity can be made whole:'24 In light of Cascardi's analysis of the political theory of Hobbes, Hegel, Heidegger, Weber, and others in that book, one can hardly maintain an essentialist and ahistorical understanding of the individual without upholding a myth of the West. That being the case, the critique of the Chinese concept of the individual as inauthentic is but a recuperation of the reductive rhetoric of Chinese collectivism versus Western individualism and, therefore, fails to provide a historical explanation as to why the Western notion of the individual or individualism, authentic or otherwise, had been introduced into China in the first place. In one of his early essays, "Wenhua pianzhi lun" (On misorientation of culture) (1907), Lu Xun offers an explanation that at least situates the problem of the individual and individualism in the context of the Late Qing reform: In less than three or four years after the word geren [individual] was introduced into China, progressive intellectuals began to shun the idea like leprosy. Whoever had the misfortune of having the label of the individual tagged to his person, he would be regarded as a scoundrel, for it is commonly believed that individualism privileges self-centeredness at the expense of others. The reason that such a misunderstanding is able to thrive is that nobody has ever bothered to look into the true meaning of the word. However, as soon as we investigate the idea in its historical setting, the truth will come to light.2 5 To redeem the authentic meaning of the individual and individualism, Lu Xun draws on diverse European intellectual traditions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Rousseau, Kierkegaard, Hegel, Schopenhauer, and Henrik Ibsen are invoked as the voices of dignified individuals, whereas frictions or incongruities that exist amongst those thinkers pass otherwise unnoticed. Such treatment of post-Enlightenment European thought is no doubt extremely reductive, but its reductionism demands a historical explanation. In the context of this essay and elsewhere, such as in "Moluo shili shuo" (The power of Mara poetry) (1907), Lu Xun's rhetoric of (in)authen-

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ticity with regard to individualism is deployed for the purpose of criticizing the constitutionists for their worship of wealth and military power. In so doing, he challenges their hold on intellectual authority on its own ground (that is, knowledge of the West). Individualism is seized upon as a potential antidote to what he sees as the vice of rampant materialism of his time. For example, he argues that Western civilization has been consistently misrepresented by those Chinese who pursue power, fame, and wealth in the name of progress. In his opinion, the true spirit of the West lies beneath the surface of its nineteenth-century materialism, its essence being the noble ideals of the French Revolution like egalitarianism, freedom, and political rights of the individual. To capture that spirit, one must say "no to materialism" and "yes to the individual" (ibid., p. 185). This view of the individual is interesting less because it anticipates the New Culture Movement by many years than because it provides a contextual basis for the study of the discourse of individualism and, particularly, its subsequent metamorphoses. In a study of the intellectual legacy of Meiji Japan, to which theorists of Chinese modernity including Lu Xun were heavily indebted, Andrew E. Barshay points out that it is important to grasp the meaning of individual and individualism with utmost attentiveness to the rise of modern Japanese nationhood. "We cannot treat individual and state as mutually opposed;' he argues; "We are not dealing with alienated personalities." Barshay's discussion ofUchimura and the latter's influence on Nanbara Shigeru demonstrates that even in the case of spiritual quest "religion did not form an 'exit option' from earthly-read national and organizational-duties. The nation was to be the object of religious action transmuted into expertise:'26 In contrast to Lu Xun above, Nanbara as homo religiosus holds the view that the root of all error, and the cause of all discord and misery in early modern Japan, lies in the "selfishness" of the modern man. Reinterpreting Uchimura, he asserts: "By what sign do we identify this 'modern man' who lurks among us? It is his 'self' [jiko 1, a self sometimes hidden ... from God Himself. Not 'the Other: not 'the Absolute: but the egoistic 'individual' lies at the core of this self. In his self modern man seeks after God. And he proposes to do this by means of 'knowledge' [chishikil. (How long I myself, modern man that I am, clung to this egoistic selfl)"27 Andrew E. Barshay explains in an illuminating commentary that "It was in fact the modern condition-and Japan was modern-that Uchimura, in Nanabara's conception, sought to transform" (ibid.). Indeed, the historical contingency of meanings requires that the notion of the individual be studied as a historical category rather than be assumed

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to be a superior, transcendental value. So, instead of taking up a position to valorize the ideology of individualism on behalf of a localized narrative of progress, my study will try to situate the claims of individualism, such as postulated by the theory of Chinese modernity, within their specific historical contexts and subject them to critical examination. My argument is that, contrary to that which is commonly believed, the discourse of individualism stood in a rather ambivalent relation to the master narrative of the nation-state in the early republican period. Like all other prevalent discourses of the time, it invested in the major process of power reconfiguration in ways that defy simplistic closure (that is, authentic versus inauthentic individualism). As my analysis will show, individualism does not always constitute itself as the counterdiscourse of nationalism nor does enlightenment see itself as the other of national salvation. Tensions between the two discourses seem to derive from the instability of their historical meanings just as much as from their mutual implication and complicity. In this section, I will focus on some of the most interesting debates on individualism in the early republican period as they appeared in the following journals: Dongfang zazhi (The Eastern miscellany), Xin qingnian (New youth), and Xin chao (The renaissance or new tide). My discussion will mainly deal with the period between the mid-191OS and the early 1920S, which, as some of us know, was a relatively short but crucial time that encompassed the New Culture Movement and the May Fourth Movement as well as the founding of the Chinese Communist Party. The reason I choose to focus on the agency of journalistic debates is partly because these journals are seminal historical documents of the time and partly because I wish to avoid treating the concept of individualism as a keyword. 28 On the other hand, I conceive of my study as an investigation of the rhetorical practice of journalistic writing rather than a straightforward account of what was written in these journals. This approach, I hope, will allow me to disengage my study of translingual practice from what is generally known as the history of ideas. To be sure, the above-mentioned journals are not alone in bringing to public awareness the problem of the individual and his/her relationship with the modern nation-state. Nevertheless, they represent some of the most influential voices of the time and, by unraveling the kinds of rhetoric in them, I wish to bring out the stakes of the discourse of individualism in the nation-building proCBSS of early modern China. The Eastern Miscellany, founded in 1904, was one of the oldest and most influential journals published by the Commercial Press. It started out as an

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open forum for the discussion of politics, national economy, foreign policy, education, and other public issues. After Du Yaquan became its new editor-in-chief in 1911, he began to introduce drastic changes in terms of format and content, placing increased emphasis on the issues of self, gender, and psychology. Although the question of the individual long preceded the existence of The Eastern Miscellany as part of the theory of the nation-state in the writings of Huang Zunxian, Yan Fu, Liang Qichao, and others,29 Du Yaquan's article "Geren zhi gaige" (Reforming the individual), published in the June 1914 number of The Eastern Miscellany, represented one of the first major journalistic efforts to bring this question to the attention of the new republic in the aftermath of the 1911 revolution. 3D In this essay, the author points out that the types of social reform implemented in the past few decades have focused exclusively on macro-level politics, educational system, and business economy, whereas proper attention should have been devoted to the reform of geren or the individual (a subtle displacement of Liang Qichao's xinmin or new citizen). As a result, even though the new republic replaced the old imperial order, the reform has not fundamentally changed the old bureaucracy, which continues to do business as usual and, moreover, turns reformers themselves into bureaucrats, who now go by the name of civil servants of the republic. Genuine reform, he emphasizes, must originate at the level of the individual, including those self-appointed reformers. Until the individual begins to face the reality of "his own frail and unhealthy body, his impotent and weak spirit, his shallow and incapable mind, and his disordered and purposeless life, social reform will be no more than a remote dream:'31 The mere fact that Du Yaquan stresses the centrality of the individual in the reform program does not imply that he endorses the Enlightenment notion of individualism. On the contrary, it is the limits of the individual that he sees and addresses here. It is worth noting that the concept of individualism had not yet acquired the kind of ideological and emotional baggage that it would accumulate a few years later when the New Culture Movement got under way. For Du Yaquan, the meaning of individualism is ambivalent and needs redefinition: "We are not individualists;' he says, "but socialism must be imagined on the basis of individualism. Confucius means precisely that when he says that a scholar should study for self-improvement; so does Mencius when he adjures us to cultivate our inner being" (ibid., p. 3). What strikes me most about Du's use of individualism is that he sees it as fully compatible with socialism and Confucianism. To me, that brings out two points. First,

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the concept of individualism is undergoing a semantic conversion that aims to redeem it from the negative image in which it has been cast by Liang Qichao's theory of the nation-state. In Xinmin shuo (The new citizen) and Ziyou shu (On liberty), for example, Liang Qichao had allowed the nation-state to take absolute precedence over the individual and tried to maintain a careful distinction between the liberty of a people and individual freedom while opposing the former to the latter. 32 What Du Yaquan attempts to do in this essay is to reconcile the two. Secondly, individualism had not become radicalized at this particular juncture of history either as the polar opposite of Confucianism or as the other of socialism. The first of such polarizations, as I will explain later, occurred around the New Culture Movement (1917) and went on through the May Fourth Movement, where individualism came to invest heavily in the political indictment against traditional Chinese culture. The next wave of polarization set in during the Communist revolution in the mid- and late twenties, when individualism had acquired the negative status of bourgeois ideology and was opposed to socialism. In Du Yaquan's view, however, individualism is but a modern version of Confucianism that emphasizes the need for selfreform and at the same time articulates a version of socialism that predicates the interest of the average members of society. This peculiar (re)interpretation of Confucianism, socialism, and individualism helps throw light on the reform agenda of Du's own time. Since his text and context were thoroughly embedded in the historical circumstances under which he wrote, it is beside the point to argue whether his particular interpretation of any of these ideas is authentic or not. Insofar as the condition and production of knowledge are concerned, interpretations and misinterpretations (if there are any such things) both obtain and participate in the making of real historical events. As Edward Said points out, calling one work a misreading of another's or relating that misreading to a general theory of interpretation as misinterpretation is "to pay no critical attention to history and to situation:'33 The question that interests me, therefore, is why the author interprets the way he does and what new meanings are produced in this process. Du Yaquan's article is probably one of the first journalistic attempts to bring geren (individual) into public discussion after the founding of the new republic. But the essay does not go beyond constituting the individual as a privileged site of reform, wherein lies his affinity with Liang Qichao. In Min Zhi's article, "Wo" (lor Self), which appeared in the same journal in 1916, the individual begins to evolve into something of an

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absolute value. The author preaches self-reliance with an acute modern historical consciousness, although much of what he says is couched in the language of ancient Chinese philosophy.3 4 Min Zhi situates his argument in the total bankruptcy of the ancient world, pointing out that, at a time when the country disintegrates and poverty, unrest, and catastrophe reign everywhere, the individual is left with no resources. Whereas in the old imperial age a man would take consolation in the thought that he could read the sorrows of the people and bring them to the attention of the emperor, nowadays one can do absolutely nothing. Under these circumstances, the best thing one could do is to fall back on one's own self. Self-reliance thus becomes a necessary means of survival in the modern world. In order to justify his claim that the self is the raison d' etre of existence, Min Zhi draws a distinction between siwo (private self) and gongwo (public self) and elaborates the dialectic of the two on the basis of a worn metaphor. Just as a candle illuminates every corner of the room when it gives out light, he argues, so the pursuit of self-interest will also benefit others. Gongwo and siwo are thus interconnected and mutually reinforced, except that the former is set apart from the latter by a sense of moral commitment in its relentless crusade for individual quanli (rights). But when he claims that gongwo (the public self) "must fight those who block its way until the desired objective is achieved" and thrive injingzheng (competition), this public self sounds more like a social Darwinist than a beneficial candle light (ibid., p. 16).35 The next issue of The Eastern Miscellany (1916) carried the article "Gewei zhuyi" (Individualism) by the author Jia Yi whom I mentioned earlier, who openly championed a Western Enlightenment notion of the individuaP6 Individualism, he argues, is the single most effective medicine to cure China's illness, the root of which lies in her weakness for totalistic thinking. The modern world abhors longtong (totality), and everything under the sun must be subjected to the scientific law of specification, division, and subdivision. To him, the master trope of modernity is fen (to divide, separate, classify, differentiate): "What is modern civilization? By way of illustration, there are branches in science, division oflabor in society, liberated individuals, independent personalities, and whatnot" (ibid., p. 7). The case of individualism is borne out, moreover, by established modern disciplines such as psychology, sociology, and ethics, all of which are designed, in his view, to assist in "the development of the individual" and his "self-realization" (ibid., p. 8). The modern individual is now opposed to social collectives. State, society, community, and family are all supposed to provide for

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the individual and not to hinder his or her growth. This kind of oppositional rhetoric would soon help unleash a tremendous amount of political energy during the New Cultural Movement and the May Fourth period. But the paradox is that, throughout the essay, the author himself remains oblivious to his own totalistic impulse in prescribing individualism as the cure for China's illness. In the next year, Du Yaquan brought out a new article titled "Geren yu guojia zhi jieshuo" (The boundary between the individual and the state), in The Eastern Miscellany, where he set out to specify the relationship between the individual and the stateY Du insists that the line between the individual and the state be scrupulously drawn so that neither will encroach upon the rights or interests of the other. The oppositional rhetoric that we noted in Jia Yi's article is now expressed in an unequivocally conflictual framework. "It is commonly believed that the state represents totality whereas the individual belongs to this totality as a member, who may thus be submerged in the totality:'38 The author then proceeds to criticize such subordination of the individual to the state. In fact, throughout the article one senses a good deal of anxiety about the increasing hold of the state and nationalist discourse on the individual. "Who represents the state?" he asks; "Perhaps it is just a handful of administrators who decide to sacrifice the interest of the majority to their own will" (ibid., p. 4). In a less cynical moment, he points out that the architecture of the state is founded on the building blocks of the individual. Without due respect for the integrity of the latter, there cannot be reliable support for the former. All this dialectic and metaphoric language notwithstanding, what strikes me as extraordinary as I follow the author's argument closely is the implication that modernity is quite capable of placing the average individual in unmediated relation to the nation-state. The author of this essay may well criticize the hegemony of the state on behalf of the individual, but his critique cannot disrupt the state/individual continuum of which he gives such a lucid account. The very act of elaborating a dialectic between the two is to reproduce that continuum. In order for the nation-state to claim the individual in some "unmediated" fashion, the individual must be "liberated" in the first place from the family, clan, or other traditional ties that claim his/her loyalty. The discourse of individualism performed precisely that liberatory role in the early history of modern China. As Tse-tsung Chow points out in a slightly different context, "While the disintegration of the old ethics probably emancipated the individual somewhat from the bond with his family and clan, it also cleared the way for placing the indi-

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vidual in bondage to state, party, or other social and economic organizations:'39 I would also argue that the discourse of individualism has probably accomplished something more than liberating the individual from family to state. It has contributed to the process of inventing geren for the goals of liberation and national revolution. In that sense, despite its apparent clash with the nation-state, the discourse of individualism finds itself in complicity with nationalism. Being a discursive formation of modernity, the unmediated continuum of the individual and the nation-state seeks to contain the conflicts it generates, which explains why the critique of the state's subordination of the individual can be so readily recuperated by the object of that critique. Gao Yihan's 1915 essay "Guojia fei rensheng zhi guisu lun" (The state is not the ultimate goal of human life), in Youth Magazine (later New Youth), criticizes the modern state in a similar view, but he also introduces the notion of renmin (the people), an aggregate of individuals, and treats it as a potential opposite of the state. Like most journalistic writings of the time, this essay contains numerous references to Western philosophy and political science, sometimes via the work ofJapanese scholars. Since the enlightenment theory of the nation -state dictates the terms of his critique, the author remains blind to the fact that renmin (the people) is just as much a product of the modern nation-state as the individual. What I find most peculiar about his argument, however, is not so much the concept of renmin as his translation of the individual as xiaoji-a word appropriated from ancient Chinese philosophy- instead of the usual word geren. Xiaoji evokes daji (greater self), which serves as a trope for guojia (nation-state) and occasionally for shehui (society).4o The author elucidates the relationship of xiaoji and the state in the words of a Japanese scholar as follows: "'The development of xiaoji [individual] is the concern of the state. Without the proper development of the individual there can be no proper development of the state'" (ibid., p. 7). This is reminiscent of the earlier dialectic that we have examined above, but here I also see a subtle slippage of meanings and categories. The word xiao opens the thinking of the individual to the metaphoric realm of substitution, displacement, and analogy in which the word da reigns. In other words, xiao is related to da not only as its antithetical other but as its hierarchical other, or the lesser of the two. The implication of this linguistic mechanism for our understanding of the problematic of the individual versus the state is manifold, particularly in light of the fact that publications in New Youth during this period were chiefly responsible for disseminating the modern idea of xiaoji and daji. 41

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Inasmuch as the individual is named xiao and the state da, the critique of the state on behalf of the individual cannot transcend the hierarchical order of a language that names and determines such a relationship. Furthermore, as the concept of the greater self seems to project full-fledged subjectivity onto the state, it displaces the individual as agency and a site of power on the discursive level. Indeed, never has the individual been so inextricably tied up with the nation-state and so ineluctably claimed by it as when xiaoji and daji began their dialectic career. With the advent of New Youth on the eve of the New Culture Movement, the discourse of individualism began to take a new direction. In "Rensheng weiyi zhi mudi" (The sole purpose of life), for example, Li Yimin accuses traditional Chinese philosophy of sacrificing individual happiness and self-interest for the sake of ritual and social morality. By way of contrast, he extols the virtues of individualism exhibited by the AngloSaxon race and admires their power and wealth, which he attributes to individual-centered Western philosophy. No doubt this is a far cry from Du Yaquan's understanding of Confucianism that I analyzed earlier. The radical polarization of individualism (as a privileged signifier of the West) and Confucianism (as the equivalent of Chinese tradition) that would prevail subsequently in the discourse of the New Culture Movement is already anticipated in this 1915 essay in New Youth. To the author, Confucianism encourages a slave mentality because it ritualizes the dependency of the subject on the ruler, of son on father, and of wife on husband: "Like slaves and beasts of burden, these tragic creatures could not aspire to self-autonomy, to say nothing of self-development. The true law of the universe is weiwo [egoism] and it must be maintained at all cost:'42 He then cites science, sociology, psychology, and nineteenthcentury European ethics in support of his theory of self-aggrandizement. But if the author's argument is to be taken seriously at all, it is not difficult for us to see that his rhetoric derives its power from contradictory sources. Individualism is perceived not only as thoroughly homogeneous with nationalism but anticipating and nurturing it. This observation is not intended as a critique of the author's lack of sophistication, although that is certainly true if we compare him with Gao Yihan, but serves as a reminder that the discourse of individualism, which never had a stable center of meanings, was going through a dramatic process of transformation around the New Culture Movement, out of which new configurations of power would emerge.

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It is in this context that the New Culture Movement, literary revolution, and their shared antagonism toward tradition should be grasped. In 1916, Li Dazhao published an article in Chenzhang baa (Morning bell) titled "Qingchun Zhonghua zhi chuangzao" (Creating a youthful China), in which he maintains that the creation of a new culture falls upon the shoulders of iconoclastic thinkers who have the courage to challenge tradition with original thinking, to assert the authority of their ziwo (self), and to advocate self-awakening. 43 When Hu Shi envisions literary reform in his two seminal essays "Wenxue gailiang chuyi" (Suggestions for literary reform) (1917) and "Jianshe de wenxue geming lun" (Toward a constructive theory ofliterary revolution) (1918), he calls for the genuine voice of the individual to replace the ancient classical canon. 44 Likewise, in Zhou Zuoren's influential essay, "Ren de wenxue" (Literature for humans), the author argues that modern literature must take humanism as its guiding principle, and by humanism he means "subject-centeredgeren zhuyi [individualism 1:'45 The subtext of Zhou's argument is that classical Chinese literature fails to live up to humanistic goals and therefore must be discarded. Indeed, if one were to summarize the remarkable role played by the New Culture Movement in modern history, one might say that this movement successfully constituted Chinese tradition and its classics as the other of individualism and humanism, whereas the nation-state, which used to occupy that antithetical position, was now largely taken for granted. The discussion of individualism during the New Culture Movement was by no means confined to theoretical debates, as such consideration lay at the very heart ofliterary reform. A significant event took place in the stylistics of fiction when May Fourth writers began to translate and introduce modes of psychonarration, free indirect style, lengthy interior monologue, and other narrative strategies from European fiction into their own works. The impact of this stylistic change has yet to be fully grasped in thorough and detailed readings of individual texts and in light of comparative stylistics. As a suggestion, let me just point out that the new stylistics of fiction seems to allow Chinese writers to locate the protagonist in a new symbolic context, one in which the protagonist no longer serves as a mere element within the nexus of patriarchal kinships and/or in a transcendental, divine scheme as in most premodern Chinese fiction, but dominates the text, instead, as the locus of meaning and reality in possession of psychological and moral "truth:' Not surprisingly, the May Fourth period was also a time when huge quantities of first-person fiction and autobiography written in a "Western" form appeared. 46 The modern autobiographical subject-one

Discourse of Individualism 103 that takes itself seriously, asserts its autonomy against traditional society, and possesses an interiority representable in narrative-made its entry into Chinese literature exactly at the time when the individual and tradition were constructed as polar oppositesY To modern writers, this individual self can be immensely empowering, because it enables him/her to devise a dialogic language with which to attack the status quo, as Lu Xun does in "The Diary of a Madman." But it can also be problematic because the individual often turns out to be a misfit in the hostile environment of a rapidly disintegrating society. The Russian "superfluous man:' who figures so prominently in Yu Dafu's works, thus becomes a perfect embodiment of the typical dilemma of modernity. Yet, to conclude that subjectivism and individualism characterize May Fourth literature is to miss the point here. What I am trying to suggest is that the discourse of individualism enabled May Fourth intellectuals to open up a new battlefront in their struggle to claim modernity. It is not as if the individual were valorized at the expense of society or nation. Even as Chinese tradition fell under attack, nationalism and social collectivism were never abandoned. On the contrary, the latter now inhabited the same homogeneous space of modernity as individualism. One need only recall Yu Dafu's protagonist in "Chen lun" (Sinking), where the crisis of modernity is experienced as one of selfhood, manhood, and nationhood simultaneously. Hu Shi's 1919 essay "Bu xiu" (Immortality), in New Youth, bears further witness to the May Fourth conception of the individual, nation, and society. In it Hu Shi names the individual "I" as xiaowo, whose extension or multiplication in society is called dawo (greater self).48 Xiaowo is mortal and incomplete as opposed to dawo, which is immortal and capable of renewing itself. Hu Shi's dialectic of the two selves echoes that of Gao Yihan's xiaoji and daji, except that in the anti-imperialist context of the May Fourth Movement the nation-state is no longer perceived as antithetical to the individual, so dawo here stands for modern organic society, with which the individual must come to terms under the aegis of the nationstate. It should be pointed out, however, that Hu Shi's subordination of xiaowo (individual) to dawo (society) does not indicate regression from individualism and enlightenment on the part of the New Culturalists. I see his position as a logical expression of the theory of modernity which does not seek to liberate individuals so much as to constitute them as citizens of the nation-state and members of a modern society. It is no surprise that the first essay in the initial issue of The Renaissance (1919) is devoted to the question of the place of the individual in modern

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society. Fu Sinian, the author of this article, begins by establishing the superiority of Western scientific and humanist knowledge against several indigenous intellectual traditions- Taoism, Buddhism, Confucianismnone of which, according to him, embodies the truth of human life. In his opinion, one must look for the truth in biology, psychology, sociology, and so forth, because modern scientific knowledge is subject-centered and humanistic. Finally, Fu brings out his favorite slogan in both Chinese and English: "The free development of the individuals for the Common Welfare:'49 In an attached footnote, he confesses that the Chinese language is inimical to his modern way of thinking, so he is compelled to use English. This sounds almost like a burlesque of language reform to a post-May Fourth era. If the author were to follow this logic all the way through, would he perhaps end up finding the free development of the individual inimical to the common welfare of the nation as well? This is precisely the point at which leftist and Marxist intellectuals would enter and stake their claims in the aftermath of the May Fourth Movement. Fu Sinian's liberal-humanist ideal was soon displaced by a leftist ideology that cast grave doubts on individualism and capitalized on the conflictual relationship between individual and society. In 1921, The Renaissance published an article titled "Wu he wo" (Matter and self) by Wang Xinggong, who tried to bring the autonomy of the individual into question. The author begins by rejecting the notions of "physical self" and "spiritual self;' maintaining that this autonomous ''1'' we call self does not really exist: "If the self at the age of twenty were to encounter the self at the age of forty on the street, they would probably not recognize each other. Nor would anyone else imagine that they were one and the same person. If the identity of the 'I' changes constantly as time goes on and is utterly heterogeneous with itself, can we still maintain that it is a fixed, permanent, and unchanging essence?"SO The upshot of his argument is that self is a form of experience, forever changing and forever adapting, whose meaning is solely determined by the material world. Therefore, to emphasize the importance of the individual is to misplace one's priority. It is interesting that the author uses Confucianism as a scapegoat for misplaced priorities. In his view, the idea of self-cultivation in Confucianism means placing exclusive emphasis on the improvement of the individual, with the implication that perfect personality would bring about a perfect society. He dismisses that idea as sheer illusion. In his opinion, no fundamental change in society will occur until the sociopolitical system is tackled. Therefore, the question of society must take absolute precedence over that of the indi-

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vidual. Now, it is not for me to decide which social theory is more desirable for China-Confucianism or socialism-because I am interested only in the ways in which the terms of the debate are set or the uses to which either of these theories is put. In other words, to interpret individualism in terms of Confucianism in the antitraditionalist context of the May Fourth period is to incriminate it and turn it into a negative idea. We have come full circle from Du Yaquan's reconciliation of the two terms, where the opposite effect was intended. Chen Duxiu's criticism of individualism is even more illuminating in that respect. In "Xuwu de geren zhuyi ji ren ziran zhuyi" (Nihilistic individualism and laissez-faire theory), he attacks individualism as a socially irresponsible, nihilist idea. Instead of aligning it with Confucianism as Wang Xinggong does above, he sees it as originating from Taoist philosophy: "The evils that have hindered the development of culture and scholarship in China can be traced back to the nihilist individualism and laissez-faire philosophy of Lao Zi and Zhuang Zi:'51 To be sure, this accusation is anachronistic in the extreme. However, my purpose is not to defend Taoism against ludicrous charges but to call attention to the changing scenario of the discourse of individualism between 1920 and 1921. When one connects individualism with traditional Chinese culture in the May Fourth context, be it Confucianism (Wang Xinggong) or Taoism (Chen Duxiu), one is in fact naming it as the roadblock to social progress and the other of socialism or Communism. Of course, what we witness here is not the suppression of the discourse of individualism but the reinvention of it so that the discourse could serve the desired political end in a changing historical context. One of the earliest sophisticated critiques of individualism as bourgeois ideology, in my view, was offered by Deng Feihuang, in his essay "Geren zhuyi de youlai jiqi yingxiang" (The origin and impact of individualism), which appeared in The Eastern Miscellany in 1922.52 In this lengthy article, the author traces the development of individualism through the rise of the free market and capitalism in the West, and through the Industrial Revolution and the European Enlightenment. He concludes by saying that, as a bourgeois ideology, individualism is passe and should be replaced by socialism. This is, of course, a familiar Marxist critique that shows more respect for the historicity of individualism than Chen Duxiu's view, discussed above. But, as knowledge and power are inextricably linked together, it is not enough to grasp what a discourse says, and one must be attentive to what the discourse does as well. In the context of the national

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politics of the early twenties, the Marxist evolutionist view of history is used to open up a political future whereby new power configurations involving the Communist Party, the Nationalist Party, warlords, and imperialist powers begin to surface and engage in intense local struggles. 53 By the same token, the critique of bourgeois individualism introduces a rhetoric of social collectivism that can be used to advance the politics of the left, much in the same way as did the earlier liberatory discourse of individualism that had first established the individual/state continuum. The founding of the People's Republic in 1949 marked a major turning point in the deployment of the discourse of individualism that I have examined thus far. This is largely because discursive authority was now placed squarely in the hands of the state. Although much of the CCP rhetoric was inherited from the earlier leftist criticism of bourgeois ideology, the state successfully transformed the idea of individualism into a synecdoche standing for a negative West, while the discursive struggle surrounding this meaning began to play an important role in China's reinvention of the power relationship between East and West as well as that between the state and its intelligentsia. Ironically, the official anti-Western rhetoric works most effectively whenever it sends its opponents to rally around individualism in the predictable gesture of pro-Western defiance. What tends to be neglected, forgotten, or suppressed in these endless contentions for or against the West is precisely the history of the discourse of individualism within China itself, a history fraught with political exigencies in the nation-building process. As late as the mid-1980s, there was a major controversy over Liu Zaifu's theory of subjectivity, which brought the century-long debate on individualism up to date. In many ways, that controversy carried some of the familiar overtones from the earlier debates on individualism, but it also took on a character of violence reminiscent of the Cultural Revolution. 54 Yet, there is another type of violence that is not so acutely felt but all the more damaging, which is amnesia, a forgetting of the discursive history of the past; hence, the possible return of the nightmare. NOTES This essay is taken from a chapter of my forthcoming book on translingual practice and literary modernity in China. An earlier draft was presented at the conference on "Self and Social Order: China, Japan, India" at the East-West Center, Honolulu, in August 1991. A later version was given at the conference on "After 'Orientalism': East Asia in Global Cultural Criticism" at the University of California, Berkeley, in April 1992. My thanks to Ben-

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jamin Lee and Jianying Zha for inviting me to the "cross-writing" colloquium at the Center for Psychosocial Studies in Chicago in the summer of 1992, where my work benefited greatly from a group discussion. Special thanks to Li Tuo and my two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments and criticisms. 1 In the opinion of Paul Smith and other critics of deconstruction, Derridean critique of the subject forecloses the possibility of human agency and deprives marginalized social groups of the ground for political action. However, the facile equation between the individual/subject and agency to which these critics subscribe suggests that the subjectcentered philosophy of the West may well persist at one discursive level even as it is being rejected at another. See Paul Smith, Discerning the Subject (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), and Nancy K. Miller, "Changing the Subject;' in Coming to Terms: Feminism, Theory, Politics, ed. Elizabeth Weed (New York and London: Routledge, 1989). Stephen Heath's suggestion of "taking the risk of essence" and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's notion of "strategic essentialism:' on the other hand, articulate an identity politics that aims to empower feminist, ethnic, gay, and other minority communities in North America without sacrificing the contingencies of adopted identities. See Stephen Heath, "Differences;' Screen 19, no. 3 (1978): 50-112, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics (New York: Methuen, 1987). However, as critics have pointed out, one cannot afford to surrender the subject unconditionally to the general hegemony ofIdentity in spite of the political gains promised therein, because new identities could also be problematic and oppressive. There is a great deal of scholarship on this debate in feminist, gay, and postcolonial theory as well as ethnic studies, but it is not my purpose to engage or reiterate them here. The following works merit special attention: Donna Haraway, "A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s," in Coming to Terms: Feminism, Theory, Politics, pp. 173-204; Henry Louis Gates, Jr., ed., "Race," Writing, and Dijference (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1985, 1986); R. Radhakrishnan, "Ethnic Identity and Post-Structuralist Difference;' Cultural Critique 6 (Winter 1987): 199-220; and a group of essays on feminism under the title, "The Essential Difference: Another Look at Essentialism;' differences 1, no. 2 (Summer 1989). To me, whose interest lies in the critique of categories, a different kind of problem arises from the scenario above. I am concerned that the strategic impulse of identity politics might sidestep the question of the self as a historical and analytical category, much less to problematize it in any sustained manner. Hence the impoverishment of our understanding of the whole problem on a theoretical level. 2 In an essay titled "The Concept of Cultural Translation in British Social Anthropology:' Talal Asad poses the question of unequal relationship between the languages of the East and West in the field of social anthropology: To put it crudely, because the languages of Third World societies-including, of course, the societies that social anthropologists have traditionally studied-are "weaker" in relation to Western languages (and today, especially to English), they are more likely to submit to forcible transformation in the translation process than the other way around. The reason for this is, first, that in their political-economic relations with Third World countries, Western nations have the greater ability to manipulate the latter. And, secondly, Western languages produce and deploy desired knowledge more readily than Third World languages do. (The knowledge that Third World languages deploy more easily is not sought by Western societies in quite the same way, or for the same reason.)

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(See Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, ed. James Clifford and George E. Marcus [Berkeley: University of Calitornia Press, 1986], pp. 157-158.) It seems to me that Asad's critique of ethnographic practice applies equally well to the overall linguistic situation of contemporary theory. Edward W. Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983), pp. 226-227. Besides, he only focuses on the European side, as in his earlier book Orientalism, where the bibliography comprises works written exclusively in the metropolitan European languages, English and French. Tames Clifford, "Notes on Travel and Theory," Inscriptions 5 (1899): 185. Said's concept of traveling theory has drawn some serious attention from historians, anthropologists, and literary critics in this country. The journal Inscriptions, for instance, published a special issue on "Traveling Theories and Traveling Theorists" in 1989, which I believe is a major collective effort to apply and revise Said's theory. Nearly all eight fine essays and three commentaries contained in this volume center on the question oflocation. Lata Mani's essay "Multiple Mediations: Feminist Scholarship in the Age of Multinational Reception" illustrates the politics of location by comparing the differing receptions of her own historiography on sati in the United States, Great Britain, and India. Following Chandra Mohanty's definition of the politics oflocation as "the historical, geographic, cultural, psychic and imaginative boundaries which provide the ground for political definition and self definition;' Mani emphasizes that "location" is not a fixed point but a "temporality of struggle" and that its politics is characterized by processes of movement "between cultures, languages, and complex configurations of meaning and power" (Lata Mani, "Multiple Mediations: Feminist Scholarship in the Age of Multinational Reception;' Inscriptions 5 [1989]: 5. The quotes come from Chandra Mohanty, "Feminist Encounters: Locating the Politics of Experience;' Copyright 1 [Fall 1987]: 31, 40, 42). By focusing on the complexity of the self-positioning of the theorist in the postcolonial context, this move helps revise Said's original conception of traveling theory. At the same time, however, traveling theory is here replaced by the postcolonial traveling theorist as the privileged subject in the multiple mediations of different locations. To the extent that the fuzzy notion of location helps cut a discursive space for postcolonial theory and the Third World "diaspora" in the First World, it might work very well, but it is not very clear to me exactly how the postcolonial theorist relates to the "Third World" except that s/he travels in and out of it and points out its difference from that of the "First World:' David Scott's analysis of the postcolonial situation in "Locating the Anthropological Subject: Postcolonial Anthropologists in Other places" in the same issue, suggests that the direction in which the postcolonial travels matters just as must as the difference oflocations as s/he leaves one place for another: The postcolonial is now, in Derek Walcott's felicitously ironic phrase, a "fortunate traveller:' However, even as we recognize this irreversible redistribution of the postcolonial map (one which Louise Bennett has so inimitably satirized in such poems as "Colonization in Reverse"), we should not lose sight of the fact that these movements are rather one way than the other. Colonial and postcolonial peoples were/are going west. (David Scott, "Locating the Anthropological Subject: Postcolonial Anthropologists in Other places;' Inscriptions 5 [1989]: 75) Ironically, as immigrants arrive by large numbers in the West, theory is simultaneously

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penetrating the East. In her essay "Postcolonial Feminists in the Western Intellectual Field: Anthropologists And Native Informants?" Mary E. John points out that "The choice of the term itself is telling-not emigrant, but immigrant" (ibid., p. 57). The linkages between the two phenomena can hardly escape one's notice. In this respect it is doubtful that the postcolonial condition diners that much from that of the old colonial era. But I will defer the subject of immigrant culture to the scholars of diaspora whose excellent work has attracted increased attention in this country, and concentrate instead on the subject of traveling theory between East and West. My question is this: what happens when theory that has been produced in one language gets translated into another? 7 Tejaswini Niranjana, Siting Translation: History, Post-Structuralism, and the Colonial Context (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), p. 11. 8 For instance, such is the view expressed in Zhang Longxi's essay "Western Theory and Chinese Reality" (Critical Inquiry 19 [Autumn 1992J: 105-130). In it Zhang cites Lu Xun's much -quoted phrase of nalai zhuyi (grabism [sic J) to justify the Chinese appropriation of Western ideas. Although [ agree that the meaning of a theory is always determined by the uses it is put to, it is a naive gesture to celebrate Lu Xun's "grabbism" as some kind of a happy solution to the traumatic relationship between East and West in modern history. Precisely because of that history, a reverse formulation of Chinese theory versus Western reality cannot even be conceived. In my view, it is more important to explain the historical condition that gave rise to Lu Xun's "grabbism" than simply endorse it or reinforce the hegemonic relationship between Western theory and reality elsewhere in the world. 9 Among scholars of postcolonial history, Partha Chatterjee is aware of this problem and tries to negotiate it in his book Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse? (Tokyo: Zed Books, Ltd., 1986). 10 See Leo Ou-fan Lee, The Romantic Generation of Modern Chinese Writers (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1973), p. 44. I would like to add that the majority of early modern writers started out as translators, and many remained in that capacity throughout their individual careers. Lu Xun himself translated numtTous Russian and Japanese works into Chinese. !lis very first book, as we know, was a translation series titled Yuw{/i xiaoshuo ji (Anthology of foreign fiction) (1909), a collaboration with his brother Zhou Zuoren during their student days in Japan. It goes without saying that the rise of modern journalism in metropolitan centers such as Shanghai and Beijing played a crucial role in all this. Take Xiaoshuo yuebao (Short story magazine), for example. The importance of this journal is often grasped in terms of its contribution to modern fiction, although I find its role as a broker between Chinese and foreign literatures far more interesting and significant than anything else. Between its reorganization by the Literary Association in 1921 (vol. 12, no. I) and its demise in January 1932, this monthly set up sections and numerous programs the majority of which had to do with the introduction of foreign literature, theory, and criticism. By comparison, the original works of fiction and poetry we now call modern literature took up only a fraction of the total space. Among the regular sections featured by the journal, there is the "Yi Long" or translation series, "literature abroad;' and "criticism," which devote well over half of the essays to the discussion of foreign literature. In addition, there are serialized studies on foreign literature including Russian literature (Supplementary issue, 1921), French literature (Supplementary issue, 1924), and a special number on "Literature of the Damaged Nations" (1921), which con-

no

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14 15

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17 18

19 20 21

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tains translations of the literature of marginal European nations such as Poland, Czechoslovakia, Finland, Greece, and others. A word about my own positioning in this essay. Working simultaneously with two languages, Chinese and English, I find myself occupying a shifting position: moving back and forth between these languages and learning to negotiate irreducible differences. The concept of translingual practice, therefore, applies to my personal situation as an analyst just as much as to the earlier historical encounter between China and the West that I will explore in this essay. I find Douglas Robinson's term "trope of equivalence" useful for describing what happens when languages meet in the process of translation and meaning-making. Robinson employs that concept to criticize the idea of substantial equivalence that prevails in the traditional theory of translation and language. See Douglas Robinson, The Translator's Turn (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991). Tu Wei-ming, Humanity and Self-Cultivation: Essays in Confucian Thought (Berkeley: Asian Humanities Press, 1979), and Confucian Thought: Selfhood as Creative Transformation (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1985). In Meiji Japan, neologisms such as jiga and kojin were used to translate "self" and "individual," respectively. An earlier practice among modern Chinese writers was to have the original and the Chinese translation appear at the same time. For instance, the English word "individual" or "self" would follow the Chinese words geren or ziwo. Of course, the traditional meaning of the word ji continues to exist in connection with Neo-Confucianism and the related scholarship. What interests me here is not its old meaning but the newly established equivalence between ji and the English word "self;' or some other foreign words for that matter, in the process of translingual practice. The complexity of this situation has huge implications for those of us engaged in comparative scholarship. To give an example, Gao Yihan uses xiaoji and daji, respectively, to translate Bernard Bosanquet's notion of "individual" and "greater self" in the latter's Philosophical Theory of the State (chap. 6) in an early essay titled "Zizhi yu ziyou" (Autonomy and freedom), published in New Youth 1, no. 5 (1916). What he does in this essay is to place the Chinese translation side by side with the foreign original (p. 1). Chen Jia'ai, "Xin" (The new),Xin chao 1, no. 1 (1919): 36. All English translations are mine. I wish to stress this historical difference, because to measure the Chinese experience of modernity with the yardstick of the Western Enlightenment is to downplay the history of imperialism. Jia Yi, "Gewei zhuyi:' The Eastern Miscellany (hereafter EM) 13, no. 2 (1916): 9. Bertrand Russell, The Problem of China (New York: The Century Co., 1922), p. 215. See Li Zehou, Zhol1gguo xiamiai sixiang shi lUI1 (A study of the intellectual history in modern China) (Beijing: Dongfang Chuban She, 1987), esp. pp. 7-49: and Vera Schwarcz, The Chinese Enlightenment: Intellectuals (l/ld the Legacy of the May Fourth Movement of 1919 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986). The intellectual tradition of the European Enlightenment is itself fraught with heterogeneous elements and counterdiscourses. for instance, the critique of modernity has always been part of the Enlightenment legacy from the Romantics, Nietzsche, Marx, and Heidegger to Horkheimer, Adorno, Foucault, Derrida, and even Habermas. Gan Yang, "Ziyou de linian: 'wusi' chuantong zhi queshi mian" (The ideal of freedom:

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Negative aspects of the "May Fourth" tradition), in Liu Qingfeng, ed., Lishi de fanxiang (Resonances of history) (Hong Kong: Joint Publishing, Inc., 1990), p. 70. 24 Anthony J. Cascardi, The Subject of Modernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 179. See his chapter on "The Subject and the State:' 25 Lu Xun, "Wenhua pianzhi lun" (On misorientation of culture), in Lu Xun quanji (The complete works of Lu Xun) (Beijing: Renmin Wenxue Chuban She, 1957), vol. 1, pp. 186-187· 26 See Andrew E. Barshay's book State and Intellectual in Imperial Japan: The Public Man in

Crisis (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), pp. 55-56. 27 As quoted in Barshay, ibid., p. 57. 28 I am referring to Raymond Williams's keyword approach to history. See his Keywords

(New York: Harper and Row, 1976). 29 For a study of earlier discussions of individualism, see Benjamin Schwartz, In Search of

30

31 32

33 34 35 36

37 38 39 40 41

42

Wealth and Power: Yan Fu and the West (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1964); Hao Chang, Liang Ch'i-ch'ao and Intellectual Transition in China, 1890-1907 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971); and Zheng Hailing, Huang Zunxian yu jindai zhongguo (Huang Zunxian and modern China) (Beijing: Sanlian Shudian, 1988). For a survey of the political events (warlordism, government corruption, imperialist invasion, etc.) between 1911 and 1919 that underlie Du's attitude toward the Republican Revolution of 1911, see Tse-tsung Chow, The May Fourth Movement: Intellectual Revolution in China (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1960). Also see Benjamin I. Schwartz, ed., Reflections on the May Fourth Movement: A Symposium (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1972). Du Yaquan (pen name Cang Fu), "Geren zhi gaige;' EM 10, no. 12 (1914): 2. See Xinmin shuo (The new citizen), in Yinbing shi heji, zhuanji (Collected works and essays from the Ice-drinker's Studio) (Shanghai, 1936), vol. 3, no. 4, pp. 1-162; Ziyou shu (On liberty), in ibid., vol. 2, no. 2, pp. 1-123. Also see Hao Chang, Liang Ch'i-ch'ao and Intellectual Transition in China, 1890-1907Edward W. Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic, p. 237. "Wo;' EM 13, no. 1 (1916): 13-16. The influence ofYan Fu's translation of Huxley's Evolution and Ethics is clearly discernible in Min Zhi's argument. "Gewei zhuyi;' EM 13, no. 2 (1916): 6-10. Individualism is translated in this article as gewei zhuyi rather than the usual geren zhuyi, probably because it evokes a corresponding sociological (scientific?) term,geren benwei zhuyi (doctrine of the individual unit) (P.7). Gao Lao and Cang Fu were the two pen names that Du frequently used in his essays for EM. "Geren yu guojia zhi jieshuo;' EM 14, no. 3 (1917): 2. Tse-tsung Chow, "The Anti-Confucian Movement in Early Republican China;' in Arthur F. Wright, ed., The Confucian Persuasion (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1960), p. 312. In this article, the author uses the word xiaoji in isolation, implying daji as its opposite. See "Guojia fei rensheng zhi guisu lun;' New Youth 1, no. 4 (1915). Also see note 16 above. Hu Shi discusses xiaoji and daji in his "Bu xiu" (Immortality), but the greater self there stands for shehui (society) rather than the state. His dialectic is basically similar to Gao Yihan's. See "Bu xiu;' New Youth (hereafter NY) 6, no. 2 (1919): 96-105. Li Yimin, "Rensheng weiyi zhi mudi;' NY 1, no. 2 (1915): 5.

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43 Li Dazhao (pen name Shou Chang), "Qingchun Zhonghua zhi chuangzao;' Chenzhong

bao, 15 August 1916. 44 See Hu Shi, "Wenxue gailiang chuyi" and "Jianshe de wenxue geming lun;' in Zhongguo

45 46

47

48 49 50 51 52 53

54

xin wenxue daxi (A compendium to modern Chinese literature), vol. 1 (Shanghai: Liangyou, 1935), pp. 34-43 and 127-140. Zhou Zuoren, "Ren de wenxue;' ibid., p. 195. For a discussion of this literature, see my Ph. D. dissertation, "The Politics of First -Person Narrative in Modern Chinese Fiction" (Department of Comparative Literature, Harvard University, 1990). The "autobiographical subject" is a narratological term here. It refers to the autodiegetic narrator within the text rather than to the author. For a distinction between homodiegetic and autodiegetic narratives in the first-person, see Gerard Genette, Narrative Discourse, trans. Jane E. Lewin (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980), chap. 5. "Bu xiu;' NY 6, no. 2 (1919): 101. "Rensheng wenti faduan" (Introduction to the problem of human life), Xin chao (The renaissance) 1, no. 1 (1919): 4. "Wu he wo;' The Renaissance 3, no. 1 (1921): 2-3. "Xuwu de geren zhuyi ji ren ziran zhuyi;' The Renaissance 2, no. 4 (1920): 4. "Geren zhuyi de youlai jiqi yingxiang;' EM 19, no. 7 (1922): 35-46. For a discussion of this history in English, see Tse-tsung Chow, The May Fourth Movement, and Arif Dirlik, The Origins of Chinese Communism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989). See Liu Zaifu, "Lun wenxue de zhuti xing" (On subjectivity in literature), in Liu Zaifu ji (Works of Liu Zaifu) (Harbin: Heilongjiang Jiaoyu Chuban She, 1988), pp. 72-125. Initially published in WCl1xue pinglun (Literary criticism) (no. 6 of 1985 and no. 1 of 1986), this essay was attacked by an official critic named Chen Yong.

~ Leaving a Brand on China: Missionary Discourse in the Wake of the Boxer Movement ~t~ James L. Hevia

In the aftermath of the historical events commonly known as the "Boxer Uprising" and the "Relief of the Legations;' the armies of the eight Powers and Japan launched another kind of warfare, an assault upon what they understood as important "symbols" of Chinese sovereignty.l In Beijing this "symbolic warfare"2 included a grand march by the allied armies through the "Forbidden City" (a place where it was said no white man had stepped before) and a memorial service for Queen Victoria at the Meridian Gate; bivouacking American and British troops at the Temples of Agriculture and Heaven respectively; photographing diplomats on imperial thrones and removing thrones to Europe; and appropriating Manchu ancestral tablets for delivery to the British Museum. Written accounts of the conflict present these activities as ones which profaned the sacred space of China and humiliated the Chinese emperor. Symbolic warfare was not confined to Beijing; nor was it only directed at Chinese sovereignty. In Baoding and Taiyuan, where missionaries had been killed, Europeans and Americans blew up city walls and gates and destroyed temples. Far from being merely random acts like much of the looting, rape, and murder in which allied forces also engaged,3 retaliation outside of Beijing was designed to negate or overwhelm imputed Chinese beliefs, many of which were seen as directly responsible for what was described by one missionary as the "Yellow Crime" and by another as that "awful catastrophe that cast its shadow over the whole world:'4 The victors aimed, therefore, to do more than merely retaliate; they also wished to teach the Chinese lessons for the future so that such catastrophes would not recur. These two sides of symbolic warfare-the retaliatory and the pedagogical-are important for understanding actions taken by the Powers in and

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outside Beijing. Although certainly designed to punish, they were also intended, at least for some, to incorporate Chinese people into a Christian moral universe of "retributive justice" and to leave a memorable "brand" on the land and its inhabitants. 5 Such action was presumed to be necessary if missions were to be re-established in areas where they had been destroyed. In this article, I consider the processes of symbolic warfare in Baoding and Taiyuan, my focus being on American and British Protestant missionary writers and their representations of events in these two prefectural cities, including their explicit and implicit comparisons with biblical events, their presentation of deceased missionaries as martyrs, and their pronouncements on Chinese character. In addressing missionary representations I follow Anita Levy and a number of other recent critics in arguing that the historical "real" is ultimately inseparable from verbal accounts of "reality:' In rejecting the usual opposition between "word" and "world:' a distinction which lies at the very foundation of representationalism, I argue that missionary discursive practices were intended, and in fact did, shape reality, rather than merely passively reflecting or mirroring it. 6 Let me point out just a few of the implications for an approach that argues for the constitutive nature of representations. Questioning the relationship between representations and reality reminds us that those things considered significant events in our history books come to us precontested, fought over, argued for and against; it is precisely within this process of contestation that events become represented as history. Indeed, one might add that oblivion, rather than the "dustbin of history:' is the fate of uncontested events. Contestation further suggests that there is no such thing as an unmediated or transparent presentation of reality; all documents, texts, and so on are informed by unstated assumptions and have agendas that are more or less opaque.? Such a consideration has important implications for how one reads and interprets Anglo-American missionary writing of post-Boxer events. The narrative structure of this literature provides a good case in point. Almost all accounts begin with references to Chinese atrocities, review the application of Western-style justice directed against the "guilty:' describe the creation of Christian sacred sites where atrocities had been perpetrated, and frequently end with a celebration of the missionary endeavor in China. Just as important as the accounts themselves is the general structural uniformity of these writings. In other words, the literature provides not only descriptions of retaliation, pedagogy, and the physical re-

Leaving a Brand on China 115 insertion of westerners into Chinese communities, but, equally importantly, the assumptions that make sense of these actions. In this instance, the logic is that of suffering, death, and resurrection - New Testament Christianity's metanarrative. Considered from this position, the works of missionary authors, just like those of statesmen and soldiers, are both more and less than sources of fact. They are more because missionary writers were often themselves the authors of actions they describe. They played a crucial role as go-betweens who linked military authorities and the Chinese population. In this position, they functioned as cultural arbiters who defined Chinese "symbols" and the meaning of the Boxer Uprising to Anglo-American audiences. 8 Moreover, seizing this unusual opportunity, Protestant missionaries also actively positioned themselves as advocates. The rhetorical projects to be found in these same writings (not the least of which is embodied in the shared salvation narrative) were designed to shape public sentiments, influence government policy, justify the missionary enterprise in China, and aid fund-raising in the United States and England. They are less than factual because they are so clearly polemical. But it is therein that much of their representational interest lies. Addressing communities of American and British readers, missionary writings embody an ideology about China and Chinese characteristics, a certain "common sense" (seldom conscious, unquestioned, taken-for-granted), fragments of which continue to appear in interpretations of the Boxer movement. 9 Before proceeding further, there is one last methodological consideration. I am not so much concerned with establishing the range of opinion on the events considered here. Nor am I particularly interested in the "truth" or "falsity" of specific pronouncements; I am concerned only with their effects in early twentieth-century discourses. Nor am I anxious to present justifications for, or condemnations of, missionary behavior. George Lynch, a reporter on the scene, certainly came closer than most when he characterized the conflict as a war of civilizations. Provided we do not essentialize that notion as Lynch seems to (by positing a unitary "China" and "the West"), it usefully points to the fact that for those American and British Protestant missionaries who claimed to represent Western civilization, the struggle in and outside Beijing was very much over meanings. Following a poststructuralist lead, then, I will treat missionary writings as part of a discursive history.lo Such a history would concern itself with the historical conditions of missionary statements. Second, it would ex-

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plore the effects of statements in constituting the object they purport to represent,ll and, third, it would investigate the temporal effects of statements or, as Michael Taussig has put it, the effects of the "real" carried through time. 12 In the following sections of this article, I delineate some of the conditions from which various emblems of symbolic struggle draw their coherence, beginning with remembrances of the atrocities perpetrated by Chinese against Western missionaries. THE ATROCITY STORY AND RETRIBUTION In the succeeding narratives, while it has not seemed best to crowd the pages with the heart-sickening details of butchery, neither is there any attempt to conceal the fact that cruelty was rampant. Thank God that lust was not rampant also, that women were spared what they would have suffered at the hands of Turks -Luella Miner 13 There are certain themes of which the interest is all-absorbing, but which are too entirely horrible for the purposes of legitimate fiction. These the mere romanticist must eschew, if he does not wish to offend or to disgust. They are with propriety handled only when the severity and majesty of Truth sanctify and sustain them. We thrill, for example, with the most intense of "pleasurable pain" over the accounts of the passage of Beresina, of the Earthquake at Lisbon, of the Plague at London, of the Massacre of St. Bartholomew, or of the stifling of the hundred and twenty-three prisoners in the Black Hole at Calcutta. But in these accounts it is the fact-it is the reality-it is the history which excites. As inventions, we should regard them with simple abhorrence.- Edgar Allan Poe14

Many of the accounts that would appear in the United States and Europe within a few years of the Boxer movement paralleled closely the statement of Luella Miner cited above. Miner went a bit further than most in alluding to the absence of rape, but like others she emphasizes barbarities, while stating a reluctance to describe them. IS Not everyone felt so constrained. Despite concern over offending the sensibilities of one's audience, many writers provided their readers with "pleasurable pain" by attempting to establish the "Truth" of the physical trials of missionaries in a setting described by the Rev. Gilbert Reid as "a carnival of hell:' 16 All the missionaries and their children had, of course, died the death of martyrs, but martyrdom carried a heavy physical, emotional, and psychological price. It is precisely the price that was paid by the dead that we are repeatedly

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reminded of. The following extract is a typical account of the events in Baoding presented by the Rev. Arthur Brown concerning the ordeal of two American women. The fate of the young women, Miss Morrill and Miss Gould, thus deprived of their only protector, was not long deferred. After the fall of Mr. Pitkin, they were seized, stripped of all their clothing except one upper and one lower garment, and led by the howling crowd along a path leading diagonally from the entrance of the compound to the road just east of it. Miss Gould did not die of fright as she was taken from the chapel, as was first reported, but at the point where the path enters the road, a few hundred yards from the chapel, she fainted. Her ankles were tied together, and another cord lashed her wrists in front of her body. A pole was thrust between legs and arms, and she was carried the rest of the way, while Miss Morrill walked,

characteristically giving to a beggar the little money at her waist, talking to people, and with extraordinary self-possession endeavoring to convince her persecutors of their folly. And so the procession of bloodthirsty men, exulting in the possession of defenseless women, one of them unconscious, wended its way northward to the river bank, westward to the stone bridge, over it and to a temple within the city, not far from the southeast corner of the wallY Throughout the telling of these atrocity stories, certain common elements, or motifs, are repeated: (1) the particular sufferings of each individual; (2) the fact that chief among the victims were defenseless or "delicate woman" and children 18 ; (3) the sequence of deaths; (4) the exact location of each death and how each person died (in almost every case, by beheading); (5) the words that each had spoken during the ordeal; (6) the extraordinary heroism displayed by most of the victims; and (7) the identification, if possible, of the responsible Chinese party. At the same time, a number of curiosities are evident when stitching together these elements. Where deaths occurred, there were seldom any survivors. This meant that native informants had to be relied upon to provide the necessary information, informants who themselves might have been involved in the killing of missionaries. Moreover, since most such interviews were done several months after the fact, informants gave contradictory and often partial accounts of events. The Morrill-Gould case provides a good example of this. Establishing the "Truth" of events appears to have been crucial for the authors of these stories, but, at the same time, multiple versions of events

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circulated. Brown indicates as much when he notes that "Miss Gould did not die of fright ... as was first reported:' But there were other discrepancies as well. Accounts variously record that the two woman were stripped of their clothing and paraded naked through the streets of Baoding, that they were only partially stripped (as Brown has it), or that they were not stripped at all but that their clothing was torn by the hands of an enraged mob as they were taken through the streets. One report has Miss Gould suspended by her hair from the pole on which she was carried, and another claims that Miss Morrill's breasts were cut off before she was beheaded. Each of these accounts was contradicted by other testimony.19 Although the "truth" remained elusive, none of the authors I have cited felt compelled to avoid telling these tales based, as they were, on sketchy evidence. What then, we might ask, are these atrocity stories about? What purpose do they have in the broader narratives of suffering, martyrdom, and resurrection? Poe provides one possible answer, but in the case of these tales, there is more to be said for them than that they simply provide readers with "pleasurable pain:' In the literature, atrocity stories are either immediately followed by or closely linked to accounts of retribution. As such, they prepare the way for the return of light to Chinese darkness and, in so doing, they give legitimacy to what might otherwise be construed as "blood and iron" triumphalism. They have, in other words, an ideological effect-they normalize revenge, transforming it into a reasonable reaction to "Chinese brutality:' Such transformations were, however, not inherent in the structure of the Christian metanarrative noted earlier but were rather appended to that narrative. In this respect, what happened in China, at least for some influential missionary writers, could just as well have happened elsewhere, for the appended tale, of which the narrating of atrocities made up a part, was an "Old Testament" story of the righteous struggle against heathenism and Satanic barbarism. In addition to paving the way for tales of retribution, there is another plausible reason why missionary writers might emphasize atrocities in their writings. By the end of 1900, several members of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions had come under heavy criticism for their activities in China and their seemingly blood-thirsty desire for revenge. 20 Defenses of the missionaries' position, especially after attacks by Mark Twain and various newspapers, did little to improve the situation. 21 Moreover, in some instances, supporters of the missionary effort in China expressed concern over missionary behavior in China. 22 The retelling of

Leaving a Brand on China 119 atrocity stories could, at the very least, help explain why the passions of survivors ran so high after the fate of missionaries in Baoding and Taiyuan were known. JUSTICE IN BAODING AND TAIYUAN

The Punitive Expedition to Baoding Pao Ting Fu ... as the scene of unheard-of atrocities, has been occupied by a joint expedition of British, German, and French; its walls broken down, some of its public buildings destroyed, and some of its highest officials condemned to death. The city has been intentionally subjected to disgrace. It deserves to be sown in salt.

- W. A. P. Martin23

Although there were numerous incidents of violent retribution in the Chinese countryside,24 Baoding Prefecture, where seventeen American and British missionaries had been slain, took on emblematic significance for European and American military leaders and Protestant missionaries. In October 1900, a joint expedition of French, German, British, and Italian forces arrived to punish those responsible for the killings. On reaching Baoding, allied military commanders established a board of inquiry. The Rev. James W. Lowrie, who had been a member of the Baoding mission but was absent when the killings occurred, acted as sole interpreter. According to Arthur Brown, Lowrie advised moderation and encouraged the allied commanders to try only those Chinese officials responsible for the atrocities. Three were singled out: the provincial judge Dingrong, Guiheng, commander of the Manchu garrison, and Wang Zhangui, colonel of the Chinese garrison. 25 The three were found guilty and condemned to death. Soon after the trial, the three officials were taken to a spot near the southwest corner of the city wall, "as near as practicable to the place where the missionaries had been beheaded, and there, in the presence of all the foreign soldiers, they themselves were beheaded:'26 According to a contemporary newspaper account, the executions were a spectacular affair, one which, it must be emphasized, was carried out in a Chinese fashion by Chinese swordsmen.27 Such executions were symbolic warfare on two counts. In the first place, they mimicked the deaths of martyred missionaries. Second, allied authorities were led to modify their preferred form of execution (firing squads) apparently because they believed that the Chinese thought this foreign form a minor punishment.2 8

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Once the "guilty" had been dealt with, however, allied authorities faced a difficult question, one that was repeated throughout the areas of Boxer activity: What would be an appropriate punishment for a local population, members of which, though difficult to identify, were clearly implicated in the actions of their leaders? First in Tianjin and later in Beijing various Westerners reasoned that although they could not directly punish each guilty Chinese person, they could carry out a collective punishment. Their strategy, as indicated earlier, was to strike at symbols that they thought were collectively valued, such as the walls, gates, and towers of the Chinese city. The Powers destroyed all but two of Baoding's gate towers, and a section of the southeast wall near where the missionaries were believed to have been executed was blown up. In addition, they dynamited the Baoding city god temple, as well as temples where the Boxers were said to have held their meetings and examined missionary prisoners.29 The destruction of gates and temples left, according to Arthur Smith, "a brand upon the provincial capital which had witnessed such official crimes:'3o

Retribution in Taiyuan It was almost universally recognized at the entry of the foreign forces into north-

ern China that the honour of the five countries represented among those officially butchered at this time (Great Britain, the United States, France, Italy, and Holland) as well as the safety of all future residents of Shansi, required that an indelible brand be affixed to T'ai Yuan Fu, as was done at Pao Ting Fu, and that the yamen of the Governor ought to be destroyed.-Arthur H. Smith31 If Baoding provided westerners with the physical sites against which symbolic warfare could be directed, Taiyuan gave them a profoundly demonized villain in the person of the Shanxi governor, Yuxian. As the Smith quotation indicates, Yuxian's "crimes" elicited strong responses from missionary writers; he fit well into Arthur Brown's characterization of the Qing official whose hands, rather than "restraining, actually guided and goaded the maddened rioters:'32 Before coming to Shanxi, Yuxian had been governor of Shan dong, where according to most contemporary foreign accounts relied on here, he "officially started the Boxer organization:'33 These accounts stress that after a number of incidents in which the governor was considered to be complicit, the Powers demanded that he be removed from office. In March 1900 he was appointed governor of Shanxi, where Boxers began to appear

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soon afterward. 34 Near the end of June, riots occurred at missions in and around Taiyuan. Protestant and Catholic missionaries were gathered together and on 7 July were taken to the governor's yamen (offices and residence), ostensibly for their protection. Instead, on 9 July Yuxian personally oversaw their executions, many of which were carried out by the governor's own troops. Almost all of the victims were beheaded, and the severed heads displayed outside the governor's yamen.3 5 Among the more spectacular accounts of these executions was one given by an "eyewitness" that appeared in the North China Herald on 17 October 1900. In it, Yuxian himself is condemned as a murderer. When the first batch of missionaries WqS brought to T'ai-yuan-fu ... Yu Hsien ordered them to be brought straight into his yamen and taken to an archery ground in the rear, and then placed standing at a distance of a few feet from each other. The sanguinary Governor then took off his outer official robe and necklace, mounted a horse ready saddled for him, and then taking a long sword from an orderly, cantered to the other end of the ground. As Yu Hsien turned his horse towards the victims, standing some 15 chang (about 200 feet) away, he started at a hard gallop towards them, swinging his long sword as he swept past them, carrying off four or five heads on the onrush. Then his horse balked and would go no further, so Yu Hsien had to get off his horse, and the rest of these unhappy missionaries were then massacred by the Boxers and soldiers who were present. This was Yu Hsien's way of "setting an example" to his myrmidons. 36 Following the executions, Yuxian, missionary writers emphasized, was honored by the people of Shanxi for having rid the province of foreigners. When he left Taiyuan, he was accompanied by thousands of people. Food and drink for his refreshment were evident for miles along his progress, his "boots of honor" were hung in the city gate, and a stone tablet, paid for according to one account by six Taiyuan merchant guilds, was erected to glorify his achievementsY Given these "facts;' it was generally presumed that the punishment of Yuxian and the city of Taiyuan would parallel Baoding. However, in spite of the fact that German forces occupied the passes leading into the province in April 1901,38 no punitive expedition was dispatched. According to Arthur Smith, the failure of the Powers to act as the Chinese expected them to led "later to the unalterable conviction on the part of the population of Shansi that the province was totally inaccessible to foreign

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troopS:'39 These factors eventually led missionary writers to the conclusion that retribution in Taiyuan was far less complete than that it had been in Baoding. Yet, regardless of how missionaries might have measured these matters, a number of actions were taken in Taiyuan to leave the "indelible brand" that the Rev. Smith called for. The governor's yamen was not blown up, but the Qing court was forced to remove all ofYuxian's honors, execute him, and put up a stone monument to the dead martyrs in place of the one for Yuxian. In addition, the Powers razed to the ground the building where some of the missionaries had been imprisoned awaiting their fate, erected a monument, and turned the site into a public garden. 40 Finally, as a result of negotiations in July 1901 between missionaries and officials in Taiyuan, it was arranged that "the funeral ceremonies at T'ai Yuan Fu were to be repeated at every place in Shansi where foreigners had been massacred; cemeteries made and kept in order at public expense, and suitable commemorative tablets erected:'4!

The Meanings of Retribution We might pause here for a moment and consider the significance of the particular forms of symbolic warfare deployed by the Powers in Baoding and Taiyuan. The destruction of temples in Baoding and ofYuxian's monument in Taiyuan appear to be uncomplicated acts of revenge, acts that American and British missionaries more than casually supported at the time. The temples, for example, were the sites of both "pagan rites" and places where missionaries were supposed to have suffered. 42 Yuxian's memorial had to be destroyed because of his unspeakable crimes. But why were walls and gates destroyed? Why did Westerners think that the Chinese put a special value on walls, making their destruction an especially appropriate punishment for Chinese transgressions? According to a number of missionary writers, city walls were for the Chinese both magical symbols and the source of misguided pride on the part of a city's inhabitants.43 Destroying walls was, therefore, interpreted as a singular act of bringing China low, of punishing China for decades of high-walled exclusion and the more recent outrages, as well as a means for striking out against Chinese superstition. 44 The Rev. Arthur Brown, commenting on much more widespread destruction in Tianjin, noted that "the city wall had been razed to the ground and a highway made where it had stoodan unspeakable humiliation to the proud commercial metropolis:'45 It would seem, therefore, that collective punishment on this order simulta-

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neously demonstrated the superior power of the allied forces assembled against China and the ability of those forces to decode a Chinese symbolic order. But why would such decoding be viewed as an effective way of punishing and teaching lessons to the Chinese? Missionaries with lengthy experience in China apparently believed that these acts would be effective because of their own "understanding of Chinese character and conditions:'46 Central to such an understanding appears to have been what missionaries identified as a fundamental behavioral trait among the Chinese-their notion of "face:' The Rev. Arthur H. Smith, at the time one of the most widely read "experts" on Chinese behavior,47 defined face as "an integral part of both Chinese theory and practice;' one in which "realities" were far less important than "appearances:'48 "If the latter can be saved;' he argued, the former may be altogether surrendered. This is the essence of the mysterious "face" of which we are never done hearing in China. The line of Pope might be the Chinese national motto: ''Act well your part, there all the honour lies"; not, be it observed, doing well what is to be done, but consummate acting, contriving to convey the appearance of a thing or a fact, whatever the realities may be. Smith went on to explain that the Chinese were continually caught up in the process of gaining, preserving, or losing face. In so doing, they frequently had to act in an "arbitrary and violent manner;' "fly into a violent rage;' or otherwise use "reviling and perhaps imprecatory language:' Such behavior was essential for indicating to the "spectators" of the "drama," in which the individual was "at the moment acting;' that he was "aware just what ought to be done by a person in his precise situation:' Not to do the proper thing would be to descend from the stage, or "lose face:'49 The language here is important, for in Smith's version of face, the Chinese treated all the world as a stage upon which appearance was all and reality insignificant. Smith presented this "Chinese characteristic" as an accurate representation of Chinese social behavior, and it has come down to us largely unquestioned in that form. The point is not whether face is actually an organizing category in Chinese practices 50 but rather what place it holds in a Western discourse of ritualized destruction and lesson teaching. We must consider, in other words, the role of face in authorizing the destruction of walls, towers, and temples. The China lore of missionaries such as Brown and Smith constituted "face" as a singular attribute of the colonized, while

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denying that representatives of the allied powers were concerned themselves with appearances or that their discursive practices might actually produce "face:' Constructing the Chinese in these terms-making their object, as it were, responsible for the illusions of face-the Powers could then in good conscience act with impunity against symbols they took as significant to a Chinese mind that could mistakenly ascribe magical powers to walls and confuse the apparent and the real. The actions taken in Baoding and Taiyuan can also be understood, therefore, as designed to inflict a loss of face on a people continuously play-acting the game of face.

CONSTRUCTING CHRISTIAN SACRED SITES IN BAODING AND TAIYUAN Clouds lowered as we left Peking, July 6 [1901 J, on the Peking and Hankow Railway for Paoting-fu, that city of sacred and painful interest to every American Christian.-Arthur Brown sl

In early 1901, groups of Protestant missionaries returned to places where their compatriots had been killed and performed rituals of sacred consecration. At Baoding, Taiyuan, and a number of other locations, missionaries, with the cooperation oflocal Chinese officials, held memorial services, dedicated cemeteries, and put up or arranged for the erection of monuments. These services were in turn paralleled by memorial services held, according to Isaac Ketler, "by almost all Christian denominations, and in almost alllands:'52 We might see this process as the constructive phase of retribution, one that put another kind of brand on the Chinese hinterland. For all intents and purposes, the establishment of sacred sites was designed to inscribe on the land and on the minds of the Chinese a perpetual memory of Christian martyrdom. In February 1901, the first group of missionaries, including E. H. Edwards, arrived in Baoding. At the site of a mass grave near the southeast corner of the city wall, Edwards and the others dug up the remains of the dead and placed them in coffins. Given the length of time the bodies had been in the ground and the fact that all had been beheaded, absolute identifications were difficult; some coffins contained only a skull. After the disinterment, the missionaries held a short service. 53 A month later another group of missionaries, accompanied by German and French officers, arrived to carry out formal burial services at a new cemetery that would include the bodies of Chinese converts. 54 On the

Leaving a Brand on China 125 "Crowning Day:' 23 March, services were held in a tent pavilion that had been set up by Chinese officials where the Presbyterian compound had stood. According to the Rev. J. W. Lowrie, the service opened with some rich and plaintive strains from the band which were followed by a reading of Scripture by Rev. C.A. Killie, a singing in English of the beautiful hymn, "Asleep in Jesus, blessed sleep:' which, especially the last verse, never seemed more appropriate, a memorial address by Rev. John Werry, D.D., who spoke of each individual whose death we had gathered to commemorate. The German musicians followed with two stanzas [of] "Ein fest Burg ist unser Gott." Rev. Dr. Sheffield of the American Board led in prayer, Mr. Lowrie followed in some remarks to the Chinese gathered there. The Chinese sang the native rendering of the hymn, ''I'm but a stranger here, heaven is my home." Rev. Dr. Arthur Smith of the American Board pronounced the benediction. The band followed with a soft and gentle air and the service ended. 55 The following day, additional services were held at the site of the American Board, where twenty-six bodies were buried, and at Lowrie's residence that evening. At that time, missionaries discussed the possibility of constructing another burial ground on the site where the Baoding contingent had been executed. 56 Similar services were held in Taiyuan on 18 July 1901.51 Wreaths were presented by Chinese officials, but one account notes that unlike Baoding, neither the local gentry nor merchants' guilds presented any "tangible token" of respect. 58 Services were also held at Xinshou on 29 July, Taigu xian on 9 August, and Shouyang on 29 November 1902.59 All of these services apparently resembled closely those that Lowrie described for Baoding, with Chinese officials present and ceremonies held in a tent pavilion that they provided. From Lowrie's account and from comments made concerning events in Taiyuan, there was more at work in these ceremonies than simply honoring the "martyred" dead. First, the services reconfirmed the "right" of missionaries to proselytize in the Chinese hinterland. The common burial of Chinese converts and Western missionaries and the participation of Chinese converts in the memorial service in the presence of Chinese officials, gentry, and merchants all point to such a conclusion. Second, missionaries wanted from the same Chinese some sort of admission of past errors. This, according to all accounts, is what apparently happened in Baoding.

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But in Taiyuan quite another attitude seems to have emerged. Robert Forsyth, commenting on the memorial service held in Taiyuan, captured succinctly the attitude that missionaries hoped the Chinese population would display: How different the scene then to the sight many bystanders saw about a year before! Then the martyrs stood pale and silent in the presence of their persecutors; now the officials stood silent and abashed in the presence of missionaries. The contrast was striking, and to the thoughtful must have afforded suitable food for reflection. 60 Yet even given this apparent submissiveness on the part of the Taiyuan population, there were signs that unlike Baoding, the people of Taiyuan were not truly remorseful. As was mentioned, one account notes that the gentry and merchants of Taiyuan did not present an appropriate sign of remorse, and the population itself, according to an eyewitness cited by E. H. Edwards, "appeared sullen rather than repentant:' In addition, the new governor did not participate in the services but gave an audience afterwards in which he was said to have "apologized and expressed great regret."61 According to Edwards, the decisive factor leading to official, though limited, remorse was the German occupation of the passes to Shanxi in April. Edwards appeared to be implying here that without the sort of retributive justice that had been applied in Baoding, the Powers could not expect the people of Shanxi to be properly remorseful. The arguments of Edwards and others concerning the application of force appears rather curious, for, after all, what sort of remorse or regret is it that is imposed from the outside? However, such logic is accountable in view of how Westerners constructed Chinese characteristics. As the stern Dr. Ament remarked on more than one occasion, repeating what had become by the end of the nineteenth century a cliche about Chinese character, "If you deal with the Chinese with a soft hand, they will take advantage of it:'62 According to this view, only the application of force could refashion this character in such a way that it could be capable of regret. Finally, there is another element also at work in these memorial services, one having to do with the very notion of martyrdom. Martyrdom has a long history within Christianity, dating back to its very beginning. The word itself means to witness, to testify to the fact that Jesus is the Son of God. It involves the refusal to renounce one's faith in the face of persecu-

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tion and death and has also been characterized as a second baptism or a baptism in blood. In the early church, martyrs were venerated through ceremonies held at their grave sites, usually in extra-urban cemeteries, on the date of their deaths, and miracles were associated with thein. In the Roman Catholic church, martyrdom was one road to sainthood, and cults of saints emerged in which the faithful prayed for martyrs to intercede on their behalf with God. Relics of martyrs- pieces of their bodies or their clothing-sanctified altars. As Catholicism grew and spread globally, martyr relics consecrated new churches, thus incorporating ever larger areas into Christendom. From the third-century C.E. forward, it was also held that "the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church:' a notion repeated by Isaac Ketler in The Tragedy of Paotingfu. 63 However, here we are not dealing with Roman Catholic theology but with Protestantism. As Robert Kolb has pointed out, from its inception, Lutheranism rejected the notion of the intercession between man and god provided by saints and martyrs. 64 At the same time, however, religious persecution of Protestants during the Reformation led to the emergence of new martyrologies. Foremost among the writings devoted to martyrdom, at least in the English-speaking world, was Foxe's Book of Martyrs, a text that continues to be published to this day and apparently enjoyed renewed interest as missionary enterprises expanded globally.65 Martyrologies such as Foxe's argued that martyrs could exist in present. However, rather than working miracles, Protestant martyrs called believers to confess or testifY to their belief, provided models of exemplary actions in the face of persecution or, more humhly, of the virtue of piety, and supported the claim that the Christian god concerned himself with every aspect of his people's daily life. 66 The memorial services discussed above resonate with this Protestant reworking of martyrdom. Certainly, those who died at the hands of the Boxers could, in various Protestant definitions, be considered martyrs. Atrocity stories maintain that they had suffered and borne witness to their belief and had allIed pious and exemplary lives. At the same time, insofar as missionary authors asserted a connection between martyr's blood as "seed" and the growth or extension of Christianity, the memorial services held in China were much like those held centuries before around the graves of the Church's first martyrs. Therefore, we might view the events described by Lowrie and other missionaries as rituals, which, by means of the blood of martyrs, incorporated China into Christendom. 67 If this is

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indeed the case, it may help explain why a number of these authors could find cause for hope and optimism about the missionary enterprise in China. RISING FROM THE ASHES

"Wickedness has overthrown the sinner." What destruction of Jerusalem did in making the old order of Judaism impossible, this cataclysm has in measure done for China ... For the greater freedom and boundless opportunities which we believe in answer to prayer God will give, the Church should arouse herself. - Martin Broomhall The Church in China is also demonstrating before the world, that the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church. Until the latest day in that far away land men will treasure the record of sacrifice and suffering which God's people, in the year 1900,

endured in China, and hand down the story of Paotingfu.- Isaac Ketler

[T]hat which remains is much more than that which perished; China's need of the Gospel is greater and more clearly revealed than ever before; the lessons of history lead us to expect that after these convulsions cease and peace has been secured, a wider door of opportunity than heretofore will greet us in this great Empire.-Missionary Herald 68

As these quotations indicate, missionaries soon interpreted the "cataclysm" of 1900 in a positive way. Couched in millenarian terms, they transformed the disaster into a triumph that served to confirm past success. As that old missionary hand W. A. P. Martin put it, "The fires kindled by Boxers throw light on the success of missions, and prove that Christianity was making no little headwaY:'69 In this revivalist atmosphere, Martin believed that the uprising had opened the way for the total conversion of China to Christianity. Even those who might have been less optimistic than Martin could still argue that the missionary's steadfast "work of love" in China could not be for "naught:'70 The story of the sacrifices made at Baoding served as a reference point from which progress could now be asserted in order to arouse others to the dawn of a new age. The statements quoted at the beginning of this section encourage a view of the disaster as something that would serve to regenerate Christian evangelism in the future. In calling for a revival of missionary efforts in China, Ketler and others cited the last words of the Rev. Pitkin, killed at Baoding, to his wife, words faithfully carried to the world by the Chinese convert, Lao Man and transmitted to Mrs. Pitkin by J. W. Lowrie. Accord-

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ing to these sources, Pitkin asked that his son Horace be told that "his father's last wish is that when he is twenty-five years of age, he may come to China as a missionary:'71 Biblical images of sacrifice and renewal were not the only analogies missionaries employed. Some cited more recent examples of Christian suffering and indicated, in each case, that they also began a new and more successful age of missionary enterprises. Arthur Brown noted that "the faint-hearted said that the India mutiny of 1857 and the Syria massacre of 1860 ended all hope of regenerating those countries, but in both they ushered in the most successful era of missions:'72 Martin, who also compared the Boxer movement to the "Sepoy mutiny:' and Broomhall concurred with Brown. 73 These pronouncements are, of course, consistent with the Christian metanarrative referred to earlier. But something else is also present in these accounts: an assertion that China, and perhaps the world, was on the verge of great change. Arthur Brown, for example, argued that the Boxer Uprising indicated that China was undergoing an "unwelcome" but "inevitable awakening;'74 a situation which led him to ruminate on Asia's long history of "grandeur" and "horror": Has that mighty continent nothing more to contribute to the world than the memories of a mighty past? It is impossible to believe that this is all. The historic review gives a momentum which the mind cannot easily overcome. As we look towards the Far East, we can plainly see that the evolution is incomplete. Whatever purpose the Creator had in mind has certainly not yet been accomplished. More than two-thirds of those innumerable myriads have as yet never heard of those high ideals of life and destiny which God Himself revealed to men. It is incredible that a wise God should have made such a large part of the world only to arrest its development at its present unfinished stage, inconceivable that He should have made and preserved so large a part of the human race for no other and higher purpose than has yet been achievedJ5 "Impossible;' "incredible:' "unfinished:' and "inconceivable;' when coupled with "innumerable myriads;' are the key words here; they help to clarify and justify the missionary enterprise in the aftermath of the Boxer movement. But they do more than this as well; they weld a Christian teleology to secular visions of evolution and progress in a universal pattern of natural historical development/ 6 Like many other missionaries, Brown

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saw part of China's salvation lying in modernization and industrialization, forces of change which China could not resist. But, he also saw these inevitable changes as incomplete without a corresponding Christianization of ChinaP It was Christianity, according to Arthur Smith, that would allow the Chinese to adapt to the impact of Western civilization. The combination of Christianity and Western science would, he asserted, "make the dry bones of Chinese scholarship live by unifying, and for the first time completing, their knowledge of 'Heaven, Earth, and Man.' "78 The Chinese, as it were, would be doubly saved; thanks to the missionary enterprise, they would have bestowed on them a Christianized modernization. Indeed, such moral modernization, aided in no small measure by the application of New Testament principles, soon emerged. In a spirit of forgiveness that was favorably contrasted to the insistence by the Catholic Church on exorbitant indemnities,79 Protestant missionary writers noted a number of farsighted and commendable programs that were soon implemented under the leadership of the Rev. Timothy Richard. Richard negotiated a settlement that among other things provided a fund for the education of the people of Shanxi, so that, as Robert Forsyth explained, "the ignorance and superstition which was the root cause of this terrible tragedy may be removed for ever."80 Provided the Chinese atoned, missionaries appeared willing to extend their charitable pedagogy to the masses who had rebelled against their presence. They would forgive and help to reform and rehabilitate China. There is one final observation to be made about the regenerative theme struck by these authors. As indicated earlier, missionaries consecrated the sites of massacres as sacred ground, ground which now entered a new order of symbolic construction in which it provided material signs of remembrance for Christian sacrifice and Chinese transgression. But such ground could also serve to instill hope for the future by becoming sites for Christian pilgrimage. In a 20 June 1904 letter to one of her sisters, Sarah P. Conger, the wife of the American minister to China, implies as much: We found the missions [in Baoding] rebuilt and all their many lines of work moving on with activity. The Chinese converts who survived the troubles of 1900 and bore their awful test are strong helpers to-day, and there is more interest manifested, far more sympathy offered, and more respect shown the Christian thought than ever before. 81

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CONCLUSION

In this article, I have treated missionary discourse as a product of a historically specific culture rather than as natural or commonsense responses to a transparent situation. This approach to missionary writings follows suggestions outlined by the anthropologist Paul Rabinow, many of which seem particularly significant for historical studies of cross-cultural conflict. According to Rabinow, we need to anthropologize the West: show how exotic its constitution of reality has been; emphasize those domains most taken for granted as universal (this includes epistemology and economics); make them seem as historically peculiar as possible; show how their claims to truth are linked to social practices and have hence become effective forces in the social world. 82 The exotic actions of missionaries include attacking walls and temples, generating martyrdom stories in a conventional mythic form, ritually consecrating Christian sites, and essentializing Chinese characteristics such as face and superstition. For many Anglo-American readers of the time, missionaries succeeded in transforming the Boxer challenge to Western penetration of China into a narrative of Christian sacrifice, suffering, death, and resurrection. Although it is not surprising that such a narrative structure should dominate missionary writing, its significance lies in its familiarity that facilitated truth claims that overrode many of the contradictions inherent in the positions of American and British Protestant missionaries. Although contradictions such as religious universalism versus nationalistic particularism or Old Testament retribution versus New Testament forgiveness were recognizable to critics of post-Boxer missionary behavior, they were seldom directly confronted. This elision may in part be accounted for by the fact that the missionaries who had been attacked during the uprising were consistently represented as innocent victims of Chinese "barbarism:' It may also be accounted for by the very structure of missionary narrative. Recall the figure of Miss Morrill, who Christ-like presented alms to beggars in the face of persecution; recall the monuments to the dead and the services that consecrated them. Perhaps critics were silenced in the face of martyrs who both embodied and transcended the classic contradictions of the Judeo-Christian tradition. The missionary conception of reality was not just "exotic" and "cultural;' however; it was also powerful, becoming an "effective force in the

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social world:' Not the least of the effects, of course, was to materially refashion the Chinese environment, both destructively and constructively, in an effort to make certain that the Chinese would long remember their transgressions against the western presence. But a second important effect of missionary discourse was its long-term influence on Western, particularly American, perceptions of China. Indeed, it is a measure of missionary success that their widely disseminated version of reality served partly to structure discourse on China for the next half-century or more. In the United States, for example, echoes of missionary discourse are discernible in the pious moral tone of American foreign policy toward China, in the American notion of a special relationship between the United States and China, and in the "charitable pedagogy" of the American government's remission of the Boxer indemnity.83 On a more global scale, missionary writings contributed to making the Boxer Uprising a staple in imperial propaganda. Popular versions of events such as this were used by governments to win mass consent for imperial adventures. 84 The effects of missionary discourse, particularly as they were carried through time, raise other kinds of issues as well. For example, what sort of Chinese subject did missionary writers posit? At times, the Chinese subject was represented as a savage, barbarous fanatic only capable of comprehending the use of force, as well as a superstitious idolater and believer in magic. At other times, missionaries saw the Chinese as capable of being civilized, first through discipline, later through education and/or conversion to Christianity. Although these missionary beliefs ran parallel to Victorian-era discourse on children, woman, and "primitive" peoples,85 what makes them especially interesting in the context of the post-Boxer period was that missionaries also acknowledged that China, though stagnant, was an old and great civilization. How then to account for missionary identification of a precivilized Chinese personality? Among the more striking peculiarities of missionary discourse is its insistence on imputing to others a deficient understanding of reality and a corresponding claim that as a result of this deficiency the Chinese ascribed fantastic and questionable value to objects. These claims were, as I argued above, the foundation of symbolic warfare. Such imputed fantasizing was not unique to the Chinese, however, nor was it only noticed by Protestant missionaries writing about China. Whereas Kantians in the nineteenth century wrangled over which representations should be privileged foundations of knowledge,86 politicians, soldiers, businessmen, and the educated elite argued that "lower" races everywhere had not yet learned to dis-

Leaving a Brand on China 133 tinguish illusory appearances from an objectified reality, an argument which at the least served to justify the "civilizing" aspects of colonial adventures. By the end of the century, the claim that the "unenlightened" were symbol-oriented was a generally accepted tenet of anthropological knowledge. 87 In some cases, such "knowledge" was used to facilitate penetration into yet to be exploited lands; in others, it was used to manage subjugated populations. 88 Ignored in these claims and representations was the transformation imposed by the enlightened on the "symbols" of the benighted: the "fetishes" of others became so much loot with a market value or so much bric-a-brac to fill the new institution of the public museum and international expositions. 89 And as if this were not peculiar enough, objects supposedly valued by others could also become surrogates for the others themselves, so that the enlightened could believe that punishing walls and temples was the same as punishing people. The fetishization of symbols is less interesting, however, than the continuation of the appearance-reality divide in our treatments of Chinese history. Such distinctions are maintained by those who, through an implicit or explicit comparison, treat the West as the domain of hard-headed realpolitik and proper historical development, and China as a site where politics remains improperly caught up in culture, drama, or ritual.9 0 Once Western behavior is shifted into the domain of historically-specific cultural practice and the naturalness of the "West" is questioned, the dichotomies upon which much evaluation of Chinese behavior has been built correspondingly weaken. This ought to be liberating, allowing us to re-historicize events such as the Boxer movement in terms of their contingent rather than deterministic or inevitable constitution.

NOTES

1

2

A number of people commented and made suggestions on various drafts of this article. I wish especially to thank Tao Feiya and Liu Tianlu, both of whom aided my research at Shan dong University, Judith Farquhar, Tani Barlow, Paul Cohen, Dan Bays, Don Lopez, and Stephen Shutt. The eight Powers were Great Britain, France, Germany, Russia, Japan, the United States, Italy, and Austria. Although there was general agreement among their representatives on the necessity of striking a blow against Chinese notions of sovereignty, there was occasional disagreement over the appropriateness of certain acts. See James Hevia, "Making China 'Perfectly Equal:" Journal of Historical Sociology 3:4 (1990): 382,396. For additional examples and citations on specific acts of desecration that are discussed in the remainder of this paragraph, see pp. 381-382. Since Chinese people attacked and destroyed Christian missions and cemeteries, one is

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tempted to speak in terms of the symbolic warfare carried out by westerners and Chinese against each other's "sacred" objects. for a number of reasons, however, I would like to limit the use of the term to Western actions. First, I find it necessary to do so because in the absence of clarifying evidence, it is far from clear if Chinese attacks on foreign "sacred" sites held the same meanings for the Chinese as similar actions against Chinese sites held for foreigners. There are also certain problems with the very terms in which "symbolic behavior" is ascribed to others. In anthropology and history of religions, where the notion is most often deployed, there is little consistency in usage or agreement on what constitutes the "symbolic:' Moreover, when accounting for Chinese behavior, Anglo-American historians quite often pit the "symbolic" against the "real;' with Chinese actions demeaned as inconsistent or irrational. See, for example, Mark Mancall, Russia and China (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971), 85. Bertram L. Simpson, Indiscreet Letters from Peking (1907; rpt., New York: Arno Press, 1970); George Lynch, The War of Civilizations (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1901); and Henry Savage Landor, China and the Allies (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1901), vol. 2, provide the fullest accounts of looting. A variety of atrocities were reported at the time. See, for example, Literary Digest 22:4.22, 5-140-141, and 6.168-169; and the sources cited in S. A. Forsythe, An American Missionary Community in China, 1895-1905 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard East Asian Monographs, 1971), 83-84. The former quotation is the subtitle of R. Coltman, Beleaguered in Peking (Philadelphia: F. A. Davis, 1901). The latter quotation is from Gilbert Reid, "The Ethics of the Last War;' Forum, no. 32 (1901-1902): 446-455. I take the idea of a "moral universe" from Derek Sayer, "British Reaction to the Amritsar Massacre 1919-1920;' Past and Present 131:1 (1991): 130-164. The first quotation is from Arthur J. Brown, New Forces in Old China: An Unwelcome But Inevitable Awakening (New York: Fleming H. Revell, 1904), 209; the second is from Arthur H. Smith, China in Convulsion (New York: Fleming H. Revell, 1901), 2:611. Anita Levy, Other Women: The Writing of Class, Race, and Gender, 1832 -1898 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1991), 4. There are now available numerous explorations of the world-constituting nature of representations. See, for example, Donna Haraway, Primate Visions (New York: Routledge, 1989); Donald Lowe, History of Bourgeois Perception (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982); and Steven Woolgar, Science, the Very Idea (New York: Tavistock, 1988). The historical basis of representationalism is discussed by Michel Foucault, The Order of Things (New York: Random House, 1970); Timothy Reiss, The Discourse of Modernism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982); Francis Barker, The Tremulous Private Body (New York: Methuen, 1985); and Dalia Judovitz, Subjectivity and Representation in Descartes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). A devastating philosophical critique of representation as foundation can be found in Rorty in his discussion of "epistemology-centered philosophy" since Descartes. See Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1979), 390. Bruno Latour, following Tolstoy, reminded us of just how complex even the seemingly simple determination of an event is. See The Pasteurization of France, trans. A. Sheridan and J. Law (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988), 3-7. This was especially the case with Rev. James W. Lowrie in Baoding. Missionaries also gave public lectures in Beijing for the allied expeditionary forces. In them they reviewed recent

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10

11

12 13 14 15 16

17 18 19

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events in China including the siege and the rise of the Boxers. See A. S. Daggett, America in the China Relief Expedition (Kansas City: Hudson-Kimberly, 1903), 53. Army chaplain Leslie Grove noted these lectures in a letter to his wife, Gwen, dated 9 September 1900. See the Grove correspondence at the United States Military History Institute, Carlisle, Pennsylvania. The association of ideology with common sense here follows Catherine Belsey, whose use of these terms argues that "ideology is not an optional extra, deliberately adopted by selfconscious individuals, but the very condition of our experience of the world:' See Critical Practice (New York: Methuen, 1980),5. Belsey defines a discourse as "a domain of language use, a particular way of talking (and writing and thinking)" involving "certain shared assumptions which appear in the formulations that characterize it." See Critical Practice,S. The discussion of missionary writings in these terms draws attention to their place within orientaIism, which Edward Said has defined as a body of knowledge about the "Orient" produced by texts and institutional practices. See Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1979). On Orientalism see Ronald Inden, "Orientalist Constructions of India;' Modern Asian Studies 20:3 (1986): 401-446, and Gyan Prakash, "Writing PostOrientalist Histories of the Third World: Perspectives from Indian Historiography:' Comparative Studies ill Society and History 32:2 (1990): 383-408. Each of these authors argue for the historicity and discontinuity rather than the accumulative nature of knowledge. Shamallism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), xiii. Luella Miner, China's Book of Martyrs (Cincinnati: Jennings and Pye, 1903), 23. Edgar Allan Poe, "The Premature Burial," in The Tell-tale Heart and Other Writings by Edgar Allan Poe (New York: Bantam, 1982),168; my emphasis. See also W. A. P. Martin, The Siege in Peking: China against the World (New York: Fleming H. Revell, 19(0), 140. "The Ethics of Loot;' Forum, no. 31 (1901): 582. See also Sarah Pike Conger, Letters from China (Chicago: A. C. McClurg, 19(9), 183; A. Smith, China in Convulsion, 2:619; and Isaac C. Ketler, The Tragedy of Paotingjil (New York: Fleming H. Revell, 1902),389-392. New Forces, 206; my emphasis. Reid, "The Ethics of the Last War;' 453. See also Ketler, The Tragedy, 387 and 390; Lynch, The War of Civilizations, 204-205; A. Smith, China in COllvlllsion, 2:611; and Conger, Letters, 183; Robert C. Forsyth, The China Martyrs of 1900 (London: Religious Tract Society, 19(4), 24-25; and The Boxer Rising: Reprinted from the "Shanghai Mercury" (New York: Paragon Book Reprint, 1967), 83. Forsythe, An American Missionary Commlillity in China, 83-86.

On the exchange between Twain and the missionaries, see Marilyn Young, The Rhetoric of Empire: American China Policy, 1895-1901 (Camhridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1968) and S. C. Miller, "Ends and Means: Missionary Justification of Force in Nineteenth Century China;' in The Missionary enterprise in China and America, ed. J. K. Fairbank (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1974). 22 See Conger, Letters, 175, and Robert Hart, These from the Land of Sinim (London: Chapman & Hall, 19(1),89. In letters to his wife of 13 September and 16 October, Army chaplain Leslie Grove lamented missionary desire for revenge and their involvement in looting, especially among members of the American Board. Once these stories got out, Grove

21

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23 24

25 26 27 28 29 10

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felt that it "will be tough for the cause:' See Grove correspondence, U.S. Army Military History Institute, Carlisle, Pennsylvania. Martin, The Siege of Peking, 139; my emphasis. There are abundant contemporary accounts of the depredations of foreign troops. See Lynch, The War of Civilizations; Simpson, Indiscreet Letters; A. Smith, China in Convulsion; and James H. Wilson, Under the Old Flag (New York: D. Appleton, 1912), vol. 2. Bob Nicholls reproduces some accounts left by Australian soldiers concerning the looting and burning of towns and villages; see Bluejackets and Boxers: Australia's Naval Expedition to the Boxer Uprising (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1986). Many more incidents are recorded in recently published Chinese sources. See Yihetuan shiliao [Historical materials on the Boxers]' ed. Zhongguo shehui kexueyuan jindaishi yanjiusuo "Jindaishi ziIiao" biajizu (Beijing: Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, 1982), 1:104, 118, 122, 148, 150, 196, 205-206, 374, 411, and 2:802, 803. The Yihetuan yundong shishi yaolu [Essential historical records of the Boxer movement], ed. Li Wenhai et al. (Jinan: Jilu shushe, 1986), a chronology of events from 1896-1901, has a number of entries concerning the activities of allied forces in rural areas. See especially those for October 1900. Brown, New Forces, 208. Ibid., 209. Nicholls, Bluejackets and Boxers, 90. Ibid., 106. Brown, New Forces, 210. China in Convulsion, 2:611. Ibid., 2:615-616; my emphasis. Brown, New Forces, 195. Reid, "The Ethics of the Last War;' 451. For a frank assessment ofYuxian's involvement in the Boxer movement based on available evidence, see Joseph W. Esherick, The Origins of the Boxer Uprising (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), especially 190-193 and

255- 2 70 . 34 Forsyth, The China Martyrs, 32. 35 For missionary accounts of Taiyuan atrocities, see E. H. Edwards, Fire and Sword in

36 37 38

39 40 41 42

Shansi: The Story of the Martyrdom of Foreigners and Chinese Christians (1903; rpt., New York: Arno Press, 1970), 64-82; Forsyth, The China Martyrs, 32-41; and A. Smith, China in Convulsion, 2:613-615. The non missionary Stanley Smith also provides accounts of events in Taiyuan, many culled from contemporary newspapers; see China from Within; or, The Story of the Chinese Crisis (London: Marshall Brothers, 1901), 82-88. Cited in S. Smith, China from Within, 87. A. Smith, China in Convulsion, 2:615, and Edwards, Fire and Sword, 139. Edwards, Fire and Sword, 140. China in Convulsion, 2:616. Forsyth, The China Martyrs, 41. Edwards, Fire and Sword, 134. Temples, especially those associated with Buddhism, seemed to have epitomized for many missionaries what they viewed as their major enemy in China, Chinese superstition; see Martin, The Siege of Peking, 61-69. Also see the comments of Henry Savage Lan-

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dar in The Literary Digest 23:5.143, which lays the blame for the Boxer Uprising at the feet of Buddhist monks. 43 Also see Martin, The Siege in Peking, 138, A. Smith, China in Convulsion, 2:S22, and S. Smith, China from Within, 130. 44 See Hevia, "Making China 'Perfectly Equal;" 38l. 45 New Forces, 197. 46 The phrase appears in a letter from the Rev D. Z. Sheffield to Judson Smith, 27 Sept.l9oo,

cited in Young, Rhetoric of Empire, 188, and Miller, "Ends and Means;' 274. 47 Smith was also the author of Chinese Characteristics (1894; rpt., Port Washington, N.Y.:

Kennikat Press, 1970), the first chapter of which is aptly titled "Face:' Charles Hayford argues that Smith's book was widely read through the 1920S; see "Chinese and American Characteristics: Arthur H. Smith and His China Book;' in Christianity in China: Early Protestant Missionary Writings, ed. S. Barnett and J. K. Fairbank (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985), 153. Colin Mackerras notes its continued influence into the 1970S. See Western Images of China (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), S1. The book's postwar demise may in part be accounted for by the discrediting of nineteenth-century scientific racism, elements of which can be found in Smith's writing. For example, Smith's work, rather than being without structure as Hayford claims (161), mimics the anthropology of the time, particularly in its widely disseminated popular form of using imputed physiological traits to establish racial hierarchies. On scientific racism see George Stocking, Race, Culture, and Evolution: Essays in the History of Anthropology (New York: Free Press, 1968); Stephen J. Gould, The Mismeasure of Man (New York: W. W. Norton, 1981); and Robert Miles, Racism (London: Routledge, 1989), 30-38; the last of which provides a brief synopsis with ample citations. On the popular anthropology of the time and its dissemination in American society, see Robert Rydell, All the World's a Fair: Visions of Empire at American International Expositions, 1876-1916 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984). 48 The idea that Chinese either couldn't or would prefer not to distinguish appearance from reality has a long pedigree going back at least to the Macartney embassy of 1793 and continuing into the present day. See Hevia, "Making China 'Perfectly Equal;" 396. 49 The quotation is taken from Brown, New Forces, 37-38, who cites Smith's "Rex Christus;' lOr108.

so For a critical analysis of the notion of face in historical and contemporary China, see Andrew Kipnis, "'Face': An Adaptable Discourse of Social Surfaces;' positions 3:1 (1995): 119-148. SI Brown, New Forces, 200; my emphasis. 52 The Tragedy, 400. 53 Forsyth, China Martyrs, 26. 54 Ketler, The Tragedy, 3901T. 55 Ibid., 394-39S. 56 Ibid., 395. 57 The fullest account of services in Taiyuan can be found in Edwards, Fire and Sword, 132-146. See also Forsyth, China Martyrs, 499-50l. 58. Edwards, Fire and Sword, 139. 59 Ibid., 147-1S4, and Forsyth, China Martyrs, 50l-S02.

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60 Forsyth, China Martyrs, 500. 61 Edwards, Fire and Sword, 139. 62 Cited in Miller, "Ends and Means;' 276. 63 See p. 400. On martyrdom and sainthood, see Mircea Eliade, ed., The Encyclopedia of

Religion (New York: Macmillan, 1987), 11:251ff and 4:172-174; James Hastings, ed., Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1916), 11:53; S. M. Jackson, ed., The SchaJJ-Hersog Encyclopedia of Religious Knowledge (New York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1910), 7=216ff; and Paul Meagher, et aI., Encyclopedic Dictionary of Religion

64 65

66 67

68

(Washington, D.C.: Corpus Publications, 1979), 2:2276ff. See also William Weinrich's characterizations of martyrdom in Spirit and Martyrdom (Washington, D.C.: University Press of America, 1981), 78-79, 205-206. Philippe Aries discusses martyr burials. See Western Attitudes toward Death: From the Middle Ages to the Present (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974), 16-17. See For All the Saints: Changing Perceptions of Martyrdom and Sainthood in the Lutheran Reformation (Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 1987), 148. On the publishing history of Foxe's book see William Haller, Foxe's Book of Martyrs and the Elect Nation (London: Jonathan Cape, 1963), 251-253. An American edition published in 1856 contains an 1813 preface by John Malham, who argues for "disseminating" this text because he does not think popery or persecution are dead; see John Fox, Fox's Book of Martyrs (Philadelphia: Jas. B. Smith, 1856). Kolb, For all the Saints, 148-156. I am indebted to Don Lopez who in private correspondence encouraged me to further explore Christian notions of martyrdom and suggested that having martyrs in China effectively turned China into part of Christendom. Martin Broomhall, Martyred Missionaries of the China Inland Mission: With a Record of the Perils and Sufferings of Some Who Escaped (New York: Fleming H. Revell, 1901), 12; Ketler, The Tragedy, 400; emphasis in the original; and Missionary Herald, January 1901, 8, cited in Forsythe, An American Missionary Community in China, 78, my emphasis.

69 The Siege of Peking, 170. 70 Conger, Letters, 167. 71 Cited in Ketler, The Tragedy, 385-386. A. Smith, China in Convulsion, 2:618, also mentions

Pitkin's message. According to Hastings, Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics, 8:741, the number of missionaries in China increased from 2785 to 4175 during the first decade of the twentieth century. 72 New Forces, 361. 73 See The Siege of Peking, 170, 175-185, and Martyred Missionaries, 13. 74 The quotations are from the subtitle of Brown, New Forces. The notion of a somnambu-

lant and awakening China was prominent in titles and subtitles of Western works on China during this era and was a notion shared by Westerners outside of the missionary community; see Paul Cohen, "Christian Missions and Their Impact to 1900;' in The Cambridge History of China, ed. J. K. Fairbank (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978),10:587. On recent repetitions of this notion, see Paul Cohen, Discovering History in China: American Historical Writing on the Recent Chinese Past (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984). 75 Brown, New Forces, 16-17. 76 Brown, Arthur Smith, and others freely used the contemporary language of evolution,

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adaptation, and race, all seen as natural processes or categories in the development. See Rydell, All the World's a Fair, on the pervasiveness of these ideas in late-nineteenthcentury America. On similarities between missionary and secular reformers in China, see Cohen, "Christian missions;' 585-589. Brown, New Forces, ll6, 127-8. China in COllvulsion, 2:738. Ibid., 2:729. Forsyth, China Martyrs, 42 and Reid, "The Ethics of the Last War;' 450. Conger, Letters, 316. "Representations Are Social Facts: Modernity and Post-Modernity in Anthropology;' in Writing Culture, eds. J. Clifford and G. Marcus (Berkeley: University of California Press,

1986),241. 83 See Harold Isaacs, Scratches on Our Minds (New York: John Day, 1958), 106-107, for a gen-

84

85

86 87

88 89

90

eral discussion of the long term impact in the United States of representations of the Boxers. Isaacs also noted that the next three decades were a "golden age" of missionary enterprise in China (pp. 144-150), a pattern of growth that seems linked to the effects of the constructive phase of symbolic warfare. See John MacKenzie, Propaganda and Empire (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1986), where the Boxer movement is one among other similar examples; and his edited volume Imperialism and Popular Culture (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1986), where the movement is mentioned in several of the collected articles. See, Levy, Other Women, 51-54, 107; V. G. Kiernan, The Lords of Human Kind (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 153-154; and Michael Hunt, Ideology and U.S. Foreign Policy (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1987), 69-77. Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1979), 159-162. On symbols see Eliade, Encyclopedia of Religion, 14:198-208, especially 201-203, and Raymond Firth, Symbols, Public and Private (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1973) provide a history of anthropological thought concerning symbols, a history which Victor Burgin, The End of Art Theory (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Ilumanities Press, 1986) sees caught up in nineteenth century Euro-American conflicts between Romanticism and science. For other examples, see Taussig, Shamanism, 384-387; and Jean and John Comaroff, Of Revelation and Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 234, 259-261. On museums see the essays in George Stocking, Objects and Others (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), and Rydell, All the World's a Fair, 1984. In his treatment of this aspect of colonialism as it relates to American Indians, C. Hinsley argues that museum and exposition representations of Indians worked to dehistoricize and tame them. Much the same could be said for other rebellious populations such as the Chinese. See "Zunis and Brahmins: Cultural Ambivalence in the Gilded Age;' in Romantic Motives, ed. G. Stocking (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 19H9), 170. John K. Fairbank, "Tributary Trade and China's Relations with the West;' The Far Eastern Quarterly, no. I (1942): 129-133; E. H. Pritchard, "The Kowtow in the Macartney Embassy to China in 1793:' Far Eastern Quarterly 2:2 (1943): 196-200; J. L. Cranmer-Byng, "The Chinese Attitude Towards External Relations:' International Journal 21:1 (19651966),68-77; and John E. Wills Jr., Embassies and Illusions (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984), 21-22, 187.

~ The Making of Imperial Subjects

in Okinawa

~

Alan S. Christy

I wonder sometimes whether school inspectors and government functionaries are aware of the role they play in the colonies. For twenty years they poured every effort into programs that would make the Negro a white man. In the end, they dropped him and told him, "You have an indisputable complex of dependence on the white man:'-Frantz Fanon l For the past few centuries, Okinawan efforts to assimilate with "Yamato" have been consistently betrayed.-Oshiro Tatsuhiro 2 Among the displays touting the industrialized progress and future of the nation at the 1903 Fifth Industrial Exhibition in Osaka, visitors were presented with an opportunity to judge just how far Japanese had come in contrast to some of the primitive Asian peoples within the region of the Japanese empire, at an exhibit called "The House of Peoples." Inside a thatched-roof hut, a man with a whip presided over a display of Koreans, Ainu, Taiwanese aborigines, and two Okinawan women. Despite the blandly cosmopolitan name of the exhibit, the absence of "Japanese" (besides the man with the whip) in a display of ethnic groups in the Japanese empire signaled the structure of domination between the colonized/ discriminated representatives on display and the universalized imperial race (tenson minzoku) constituting the Gaze. 3 Okinawan newspapers reacted to the display with rage, claiming that lining up Okinawans with primitives and inferior ethnic groups was a slur against the Okinawans, who were "real Japanese:' Subjected to ethnic discrimination which, in practice, associated them with subjugated peoples, Okinawans tended to insist on their legitimate "Japaneseness:' using a variety of arguments ranging from common archaic origins to their successful absorption of an

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emperor-centered moral education (kominka). These claims seem to have more than a touch of irony and pathos to them today, in light of the institutionalization of Okinawan discrimination in the prewar prefectural government, the savage toll on civilian life in the Battle of Okinawa, and the Sh6wa emperor's seemingly easy renunciation of the islands after the war. Although the use of Okinawans in the exhibit clearly suggested the ethnic difference of Okinawans and their uncomfortable proximity to colonized ethnic groups in the Japanese social imaginary, the case of Okinawa is now routinely ignored in examinations of Japanese colonialism. And yet, ironically, many current analyses of Japanese colonialism work with the basic premise that "the gravest problem in the control of the colonies was the problem of ethnicity, that is, the control of different ethnic groupS:'4 In addition to the question of ethnic difference suggested above, the military invasion and occupation, political annexation, paternalistic enforcement of modernization, and compulsory cultural (especially linguistic) assimilation to Japan that were hallmarks of Japanese colonial policy throughout Asia were also factors in the control of Okinawa from 1879 to the Battle of Okinawa in 1945. Given these common points, what justifies excluding Okinawa from consideration in studies of Japanese colonialism? When addressed at all, the two main arguments used to justify the exclusion of Okinawa are (1) its status as a prefecture, as opposed to the governor-generalships (sOtokufu) which ruled in the colonies, and (2) the assumption that Okinawans did not constitute a significantly different ethnic group from Japanese. There is no question that as a system of control the prefecture represented a significant contrast to the sOtokufu. But looking at the composition and history of the prewar prefectural government in Okinawa suggests a conspicuous political gap between Okinawa and other prefectures. 5 Rather than assign an ontological status to a form of political organization, we need to examine how it functioned within unequal rela-

tions of power. As for the problem of Okinawan ethnic difference, Mark Peattie provides a typical example of the use of cultural affinity in ignoring questions of power when he calls the annexation of the Ryiikyiis by Japan in 1879 "less the initial step toward colonial expansion than it was a reassertion of national authority over territories traditionally within the Japanese cultural sphere" (my emphases).6 Is he referring to the discourse on the common archaic origins of Okinawans and Japanese, or has the coercion in the Satsuma conquest and rule of the islands from 1609 been suppressed as tra-

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dition? In either case, the cultural argument is used to efface the problem of history from the Okinawa-Japan relationship. Either the relationship is permanently fixed in an original state (in which case, why don't the likely common origins of Japanese and Korean cultures render the problem of ethnicity moot in the annexation of Korea in 191O?), or else the annexation of the islands was not an exercise of political power. What is lost in this formulation is the history of an ideological struggle to negate Okinawan difference by establishing Okinawan "culture" as a subset of Japanese. Clearly, if the potential significance of Okinawa for the study of Japanese colonialism (and vice versa) is to be fully explored, the problem of Okinawan ethnic identity must be examined with greater attention to the historicity of culture and ethnicity. The Japanese term for "ethnos" (minzoku) is defined as "a group of people who share a common language and culture:'? Since annexation, Okinawan ethnic identity has been subsumed under Japan in these terms by philological studies which emphasize the common archaic origins of Japanese and Okinawan languages on the one hand, and by cultural anthropological studies which have unrelentingly been concerned with constructing lineages between Japanese and Okinawan cultural practices on the other. It is no accident, however, that these studies were conducted during a time when, in terms of speech and daily cultural practices, "Okinawans" and "Japanese" were considered markedly distinct. The gap between the ideology of ethnic homogeneity and the heterogeneity of daily practices led the Meiji government to initiate a program of assimilation (doka), signifying the imperative that Okinawans transform their speech, dress, work, and leisure activities from those labeled "Okinawan" to those designated "Japanese:' As I hope to show, however, this involved, first, the construction of identities marked as "Okinawan" and "Japanese" in an overdetermined relationship to each other, and then an interiorization of the latter by Okinawans. Although the project of cultural assimilation was carried out in all the colonies, to greater or lesser degrees of intensity, the fact that in Okinawa alone did the targets of the project widely come to identify themselves as "Japanese" has no doubt contributed greatly to the propensity to ignore the possibility of ethnic contradiction in Okinawa. Ironically, as more Okinawans began to identify themselves more frequently and forcefully as "Japanese" from the 1920S, they began to face more trenchant denials, particularly from government officials and potential employers. In other words, the completion of doka was subject to prolonged delay. But what

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made Okinawans take to the program when it tended to raise resistance elsewhere? As I will show below, answering this question highlights the importance of historical factors in the construction of ethnic identity. Apart from clear ideological coercion, we need to examine the uneven distribution of economic and political power, questions of class and gender, and the uses of a discourse on ethnicity in other discourses (on economy, natural history, philology, and so on) in order to see how many Okinawans came to identify not only their interests but also themselves as "Japanese:' In particular, it is essential to disrupt the overdetermined discourse on Okinawan identity, whose only context is Japan, by examining Okinawa in its relations with the other colonies as well. Insofar as the standard against which Okinawan similarity or difference is measured is found simply in some form of Japanese culture, the discourse on Okinawan identity fails to break out of a necessary relationship with Japanese culture. s We cannot deny the importance of Japan for Okinawa, but that does not exhaust the context in which ethnic identity was formed. THE SOTETSU PALM HELL And so the Ryiikyiis, which have never been blessed by nature, have reached the state they are in today, having misfortune piled upon misfortune. But the vanity of the Okinawans is like oil poured upon a fire. The Okinawans have been impatient to reach the level of the other prefectures as quickly as possible. As a result, they have put great emphasis on forms, rather than in simple, steady effort. What is built in this way can only be a castle on the sand.-Matsuoka Masao, "The Naked Truth about the Current State of the Ryiikyiis"9

In contrast to the tropical, bikini-filled paradise presented these days by the airline companies in their summer travel ads for Okinawa, the dominant prewar image of Okinawa Prefecture was of a series of near-barren coral reefs bereft of almost all useful natural endowments. While this image may have many historical antecedents, its diffusion in modern Japan is probably attributable to at least two major episodes. First, the annexation of Taiwan in 1895 led many industrialists and government officials to shift their expectations for the development of the Southern Islands (Nanto) from, what became in comparison, an unpromising Okinawa to a lush Taiwan. A series of famines in parts of the Ryiikyiian chain in the years around the annexation of Taiwan no doubt contributed to that shift. In several islands, starving Okinawans were reduced to boiling the small fruit of the sotetsu

Imperial Subjects in Okinawa 145 palm to extract its poison so that the leached remainder could be eaten. As these incidents continued to occur periodically, Japanese visitors began calling the prefecture a "sotetsu hell:' a term which was meant to evoke pity but whose condescending undertones proved difficult to shake. As the Okinawan economy languished through the years, the productive potential of the subsequent colonies loomed large. Second, in 1920, a sharp drop in worldwide sugar prices devastated the shallow, underdeveloped Okinawan economy. Although the main concern of the early Meiji leaders in establishing control over the Ryiikyiian islands was the defense of the southern borders of the nation, early efforts at developing the Okinawan economy focused on sugar production. Restrictions on the cultivation of sugar were abolished in 1888, and loans were made available to expand production. But with the acquisition of Taiwan, the major sugar processing companies began to shift their refining operations from Okinawa to Taiwan. 10 Yet the dramatic rise in sugar prices in 19191920 raised expectations of increased sugar profits among smaller farmers in Okinawa as well. Unfortunately, sugar prices plummeted in 1920-1921, not bottoming out until 1931, ruining both the farmers and the banks which had financed the expansion of sugar land in the late 191OS. The problems of the sugar-centered Okinawan economy were compounded by lowered production of other foodstuffs (and increased dependence on imports of food), the doubling of Japanese sugar imports from places such as Java (even as other colonial powers were placing tariffs on foreign sugar to protect sugar produced in their own colonies), a net drain of capital to the national treasury, and the lack of supporting labor markets in Okinawa to absorb excess agricultural labor from an expanding population. Total Okinawan sugar production (brown and refined) had continued to stay ahead of Taiwanese up until the price crash, but after 1920 Japanese sugar capital "rationalized" the industry by concentrating itself in Taiwanese plantations, leaving little capital for rebuilding Okinawan sugar production.l 1 With sugar farming on shaky grounds and little other industry in the islands, Okinawans were forced to leave the prefecture to look for work in the major labor markets of Japan, or abroad. Since these problems were compounded by postponed entry into complete participation in Japanese politics, there is little question that the prefecture was faced with dire political-economic problems. What concerns us here, however, is how those economic problems were interpreted and understood by Japanese and Okinawans of the time. Despite the "objective" causes mentioned above, many observers sought "subjective" causes

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in some defect of the "Okinawan character:' since it seemed perfectly clear to most of these critics that Okinawa was "backward:' This claim has frequently been used during the modern Okinawan-Japanese relationship, beginning with the reactions of the hawkish groups in the Japanese Popular Rights Movement (jiyll minken undo) to the dispute between Japan and Qing China over possession of the Ryiikyiis in the 1870S. Some minken writers, such as Takahashi Kiichi, for example, argued that Japanese control of the islands was necessary to save the common Ryiikyiians from the feudalistic governance of their ruling classes.l 2 In Okinawa, the Ryukyu shinpo, a newspaper founded in 1893 by Okinawan minken elites, pushed its editorial support of cultural assimilation with Japan by emphasizing comparisons with the rest ofJapan, in which, of course, Okinawa was usually found lagging behind. Subsequently, despite several decades of Japanese rule of the islands, several writers in the late 1920S, such as Matsuoka Masao, Shimoda Masami, and Serizawa KG, responded to the economic crisis with complaints about the "premodernity" of Okinawa. 13 Meanwhile, in the Osaka-Kobe area, Okinawan support associations were promoting a "Lifestyle Reform Movement" (seikatsu kaizen undo) to encourage their members in the area to reject Okinawan clothing, speech, and leisure activities, in part because of their associations with backwardness. 14 And finally, during the early 1940S, the Okinawan Bureau of Education presented their "Standard Japanese Language Movement" (hyojungo shorei undo) as, in part, an attempt to redress the prefecture's chronic backwardness by linguistically integrating Okinawans into the Japanese mainstream. The communal landholding system (jiwari seido), supposed heavy alcohol consumption, walking barefoot,'5 Ryiikyiian women's clothing, a preponderance of dialects (containing "many ancient Japanese words"), "lazy men and overworked women:' and Okinawan music were all taken together as the image of the "loose Okinawan lifestyle" and visible signs of this backwardness. From these visible signs, many observers claimed to discern a defective "Okinawan character:' For Matsuoka Masao, this defective character was the result of a series of tragic historical decisions (including the attempt to become a maritime trading nation in the fifteenth century at the expense of military matters and the establishment of a "communistic" landholding system) that weakened the national moral fiber over time. For others, the vanity that Matsuoka spoke of was an inappropriate leftover from feudal class distinctions, which were meaningless in the new power arrangements. In addition, the frequent accusation that Okinawan reform efforts

Imperial Subjects in Okinawa 147 were focused more on appearances than on content made it possible to continue to charge Okinawans with backwardness "at heart;' notwithstanding any number of signs of "progress."16 Thus, calls for reform of a variety of political-economic problems were usually accompanied by assertions that without simultaneous reform of the Okinawan character, economic reforms would achieve nothing more than cosmetic changes. Even as we admit that there may have been some elements of daily life in Okinawa that may have been somewhat inimical to what the ruling classes defined as modern, we should also be careful not to mistake cause for effect. Quite often it was the reverse that was taking place. That is, the analysis of a weak, insufficiently modernized Okinawan economy discursively constructed an Okinawan identity, which was correspondingly weak and undeveloped, to serve as the origin of the economic problem. Of course, this analysis also operated simultaneously to suppress the colonialist power differential between Okinawans and Japanese. Significantly, the discourse on the Okinawan character tended to define it in a strictly antithetical relationship to "modern Japanese:' Whether Okinawans were characterized as lacking industriousness, hygiene, education, or "spirit;' the positive term of contrast was defined as being both modern and Japanese. At the risk of reducing the complexity of the discourse, Japanese identity was constructed as the sign of a progressive, nonOkinawan identity, while Okinawan identity was produced as a sign of being antimodern and non-Japanese. Situated within a discourse on economic development, a necessarily modernist discourse, the Okinawan identity was produced, as the nonmodern "thing which must be swept away;' so that modernization could fill the voidY There should be no surprise, then, that perhaps the most common solution to the problem of the economy was a call for more education. The Meiji government had placed an early emphasis on education in an emperor-centered morality as crucial to the production of a unified and loyal population capable of contributing to the industrialization and militarization of the nation. This educational program "for the production of imperial subjects" (kominka) was applied throughout Japan, but it took on a slightly different character as the nation acquired new territories. That is, as the program was applied in Okinawa and the colonies, the core became an education in standardized spoken Japanese, signifying that loyalty to the emperor would be measured, in large part, by an ability to speak the politically determined "standard" language. Although philologists claimed during the prewar years that the Oki-

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nawan languages were of archaic Japanese origin and thus "dialects" (hagen), modern Japanese and Okinawan languages are mutually incomprehensible. 1s Early Japanese officials in the islands were particularly dismayed by their inability to understand or be understood by Okinawans, so they set Japanese language education as the primary objective of prefectural administration.l 9 Language education was not meant merely to facilitate communication, but fundamentally to change thinking processes and identificatory impulses. An official from the Ministry of Home Affairs, sent to Okinawa in 1894, articulated the perceived relationship between language and progressive thought thus: We have no other recourse but education in breaking the stubborn thought of the Okinawans and assimilating them to the civilization (bunmei) of the home islands (Naichi) . ... The students should use "Yamatogo" (Japanese) with the teachers and among themselves while in school, and by the time they graduate from elementary school they should be made to understand most of "Yamato-go:'20 The "stubborn thought" to which the official referred was most likely the indifference, or resistance, of sections of the Okinawan upper classes to the Japanese administration of the islands. In the years immediately before and after the Japanese takeover, Ryiikyiian aristocrats petitioned the Qing government to intercede to prevent a Japanese annexation of the islands. To Japanese military leaders who viewed the islands as an indispensable defense perimeter of the nation, these appeals to foreign powers branded Okinawans as potential traitors. Consequently, an educational mission in Okinawa seeking a total reorientation of Okinawans away from China and toward Japan became a military issue, and top military leaders, including Yamagata Aritorno, came to the islands to inspect school facilities. Memories and fears of an Okinawan inclination toward China were so strong among the military that even in 1940 Governor Fuchigami justified further intensification of the policy of "imperial-subjectification" because "at the time of the SinoJapanese war there were people in this prefecture who hoped to serve the Chinese:'21 Therefore, early official investment in Okinawa was especially weighted toward education, so that by 1902 educational expenditures occupied just over half the prefectural revenue. The size of this investment in education does differentiate Okinawa from colonies such as Taiwan (where educational expenditures in 1902 were one six-thousandth of the revenue ).22 Nevertheless, there was a widespread conviction among Okinawan intellectuals that the content of the education rarely went beyond a lopsided

Imperial Subjects in Okinawa 149 emphasis on language and inculcation in imperial ideology. Perceptions that the education officials in Okinawa (overwhelmingly from other prefectures) were obstructing efforts at raising the level of education led to at least two student strikes and numerous frustrated newspaper editorials. As I have outlined above, the political-economic relationship between Japan and Okinawa was frequently articulated in a discourse on development, with Okinawa occupying the position of regression. The analysis of that regression proceeded in classically colonialist terms, as described by David Spurr, in which writers "perform [ed 1a circular analysis that related the visible to the invisible, its 'deeper cause,' then rose again toward the surface of bodies to identify the signs that confirmed the hidden cause:'23 As a result, any modern, colonialist sources of Okinawan economic distress would be displaced onto the "premodern character" of Okinawan society and culture. Producing a "Japanese" identity for Okinawans thus involved both an imperative ("change or starve") and an inevitability as "Japaneseness" occupied the progressive standard toward which Okinawa would naturally proceed as a part of the nation. But the "impulse toward 'Yamato'" which so many Okinawan writers have analyzed was not simply based on an enlightenment that recognized the superiority of "Japaneseness:' As I will discuss below, it was also driven by fears: fears of the colonies, working classes, and effeminization.

SIBLING RIVALRY

To line up Okinawans with Taiwanese savages (seiban) and HokkaidO Ainu is to view the Okinawans, who are truly Japanese, as one of these. No matter how insensitive Okinawans may be, we can never put up with this kind of hum iliation.-from the Ryukya shinpo in 190324

The image of an unproductive Okinawa discussed above generally drove economic revival efforts outside the prefecture, sending many Okinawans to look for work in Taiwan and Osaka in particular. Once outside their own prefecture, however, Okinawans frequently found themselves in an ambiguous position between "the Japanese" and "the primitives" or colonials. Since Japanese Pan-Asianism articulated "Asian brotherhood" in a hierarchical arrangement with "the Japanese" at the pinnacle, noting Okinawan cultural differences risked placing Okinawans perilously close to the subordinated ethnic groups in other parts of Asia. Thus, the impetus to "become Japanese" was propelled not simply by a desire to catch up to

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a progressive Japan, but also by a desire to gain some distance from the colonies and minority groups. The sight of a developing Taiwan next to a stagnating Okinawa led many Okinawans to look for ways to tie the development of Taiwan to Okinawa, making the island a major labor market for Okinawans from all classes. Ironically, despite Okinawans' reputation for incompetence in standard Japanese, teachers at the Okinawa Normal School were urging students as early as 1896 to take advantage of the opportunities in Taiwan by training as Japanese language teachers. 25 In general, many from the educated elite classes sought participation in the development of Taiwan in administrative or professional positions. Unfortunately, in what became a pattern throughout the empire, many found job listings accompanied by the restriction "Ryiikylians and Taiwanese need not apply." Faced with such exclusionary practices, a significant number of these elites changed their names and attempted to pass as being from other prefectures (particularly Kagoshima) while in Taiwan. 26 Meanwhile, the working classes found themselves filling the bottom rungs of the labor market-as construction workers, fishermen, day laborers, frontier policemen, prostitutes, and servants-often without the benefit of being able to hide their origins. In contrast to the elite strata of Okinawans in Taiwan, working-class Okinawans tended to live in Okinawan ghettos or in Taiwanese neighborhoods. With much of the public works construction-roads, railroads, dams, ports, and military barracks-being carried out by Okinawan and Taiwanese laborers working for large Japanese construction firms in some of the wildest sections of Taiwan, Okinawan laborers were seen by Japanese colonists in Taiwan as hardly distinguishable from the Taiwanese aborigines (seiban or savages)P In particular, Okinawan women were accused by elites in Taiwan of contributing to the decline of the image of Okinawans through two "major problems:' First, much of the early efforts to develop Taiwan as a market for Okinawan goods (especially textiles and lacquer) were carried out by Okinawan women who crisscrossed the island as itinerant peddlers.2 8 Although these women were largely responsible for extending trade into the "wild" interior of the island, they were deemed a "problem" for allegedly taking excessive profits and misrepresenting cheap goods as higher-quality items. But what was perhaps even more worrisome for elite Okinawans in Taiwan was the peddlers' reputation for pushiness ("like annoying mayflies"), and the way Chinese in Taiwan derogatorily called them "Japanese savages" (nihon no seiban) because of their hand tattoos

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(hajichi). In order to salvage the reputation of Okinawans, members of the elite strata pushed for the abolition of tattoos and the regulation of the peddlers. Second, by the 191OS, as the peddlers' markets closed them out, the opportunities for Okinawan women in Taiwan became generally restricted to employment in restaurants, bars, and brothels. 29 With wages in the sex industries in Taiwan several times higher than those in Okinawa, Okinawan women moved to Taiwan in large numbers to work in the officially licensed and black-market sex trades. Again, elite Okinawans protested that "Ryftkyiian bordellos" in Taiwan were damaging the honor and future of Okinawans in the colony. As the opportunity to beat Japanese from other prefectures to the punch in Taiwan began to turn sour with the institutionalization of Okinawan discrimination in the colony, large numbers of young Okinawans sought work in the industrialized cities in Japan, particularly Osaka and Kobe. Confined to ethnic ghettos in the city, and finding entry into the minority of workplaces that accepted them through the mediation of Okinawan acquaintances, Okinawan workers became concentrated in low-wage industries such as textiles, light chemicals, and small manufacturingwhich aggressively hired them, in stark contrast to the industries which pointedly refused them. 30 Low pay, segregated working conditions, and the ghettoization of Okinawans living in Osaka and Kobe combined with the discourse on Okinawan backwardness to produce an image of Okinawan workers as unhygienic, unproductive, unskilled, and undependable. Of course, the construction of this image was necessarily related to the construction of its opposite: the productive Japanese worker)l That is, Okinawans were defined as poor workers not because they actually were, but because the standard of a "good worker" was defined as "a Japanese worker:' In the ethnic diversity of the Osaka labor market under a system of colonial domination, this not only guaranteed a plentiful supply of cheap labor (in Okinawans, Koreans, Taiwanese, etc.), but, in combination with the policy of kominka, it also disciplined Okinawan laborers to the demands of the employers. To be seen as good workers, they had to present themselves as Japanese, which was defined as being obedient and hardworking. The perception (however illusory) among Okinawan workers and their support associations of the possibility of becoming "Japanese;' and thus breaking into a higher-wage market, marks a major distinction between Okinawan workers and Korean workers, who were also restricted to the low-wage labor pools.32 In the 1920S, mutual-support associations formed

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in the Okinawan districts of Osaka-Kobe, and coordinated by an umbrella group, the Kansai Okinawa Kenjinkai, were led by Okinawan leftists, who confronted discrimination in the workplace with attempts to form a class consciousness among Okinawan workers. When this leadership was purged in the antileftist crackdowns of the late '20S, the Kenjinkai collapsed, to be reformed later under the leadership of Okinawan elites who had broken into the professional fields. The tactic of the association, under elite leadership in the 1930S, was to deny a class or ethnic consciousness and to aggressively promote assimilation. Difficulties breaking into the higherwage jobs, and particularly the threat of losing hard-won positions, induced the "elite and pseudo-elite" of these support associations to campaign vigorously for a "Lifestyle Reform Movemene' Okinawan workers were exhorted to police themselves to eradicate the signs of "Okinawaness;' particularly in speech, clothing, and leisure activities. Meanwhile, in the workplace, Okinawan workers strove to prove they were as productive and dependable as Japanese workers.3 3 The examples from both Taiwan and Osaka remind us that Okinawan struggles to deal with discrimination from Japanese and improve their economic lot must be understood within the context of the Japanese empire, in which being Japanese was the only way to access power. It is also apparent - in the elite leadership strategies for the Kenjinkai of the 19305, or in the attempts of Okinawa-born bureaucrats to pass as persons from other prefectures while in Taiwan-that "Okinawan" attempts to assimilate to "Japan" must be understood in a context of class struggle among Okinawans themselves. However, we must be careful not to collapse the distinction between the discrimination faced by Okinawans and that faced by colonial subjects. In particular, we must note the complex layering effects from the coexistence of Pan -Asianist and "family" (or ethnic) state ideologies. Noting the distinction is especially important in understanding Okinawan reactions to the discrimination. With the emperor system being presented as a "family state" (kazoku kokka), and the emperor as the Father, the metaphor of Okinawa as a child of the Japanese state-and of Okinawans as children of the same emperor as everyone else- proved particularly useful (in either decreasing distance between Okinawans and Japanese, or increasing distance from the colonials) in certain formulations. While pleading their legitimate "Japaneseness;' many Okinawans also recognized their position of weakness in relation to the rest of the nation. Some interpreted this condition as nearly inevitable given Okinawa's poor resources and low level of investment. For

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example, in calling for more direct government action on the problem of the Okinawan economic crisis, Kamekawa Tetsuya complained that since Okinawa was "culturally some ten years behind" the rest of the nation, holding Okinawa to the same standards as the other prefectures was "like making a child compete with an adult without handicaps. Everyone knows the child willlose:'34 Meanwhile, Oshiro Kaneyoshi, a member of the House of Peers, complained about Okinawan political immaturity saying, "We Okinawans are like ten-year-old children without knowledge or physical training:'35 However, Wakigami Rojin, prefectural assemblyman and editor of Okinawa kyusai ronshu (1929), noted the opportunistic tone of many of these claims to childhood: There are members of the Okinawan Commercial Bank Relief committee who try to alleviate concerns [about another bank failure] by saying, "The government is the parent and Okinawa prefecture is the child. If the child borrows money from the parent, but is unable to repay it, the loan should be forgiven. It should be as a gift:'36 Thus the image of the child was being raised by Okinawans for a number of effects: for claims of lineage, evasion of responsibility, pleas for special treatment, and so on. Nevertheless, the use of the child image often appears as a recognition of weakness and an acceptance of the ideology of development, which labels Okinawa as incomplete or immature. But one problem with claiming the role of child was that there was no guarantee that they would be the only one. A paternalistic view of the multiethnic makeup of the nation claimed that Japan had three sons: the Okinawans as eldest, the Koreans as middle, and the Taiwanese as youngestY While this family structure was clearly meant to appear beneficent, Okinawan intellectuals constantly struggled to move from the ranks of the sons to equality with the "parent" when faced with this kind of equation with colonials. The problem with being labeled an "offspring" was revealed for Okinawans in the "House of Peoples" exhibit in Osaka that I mentioned above. The indignation with which Okinawan newspapers objected to the display speaks volumes about how the proximity to other, subjugated ethnic groups disciplined Okinawans (particularly upper-class) to the imperatives of assimilation. As if to confirm their worst fears, news of a plan to rescind the prefectural status of Okinawa and place it under the jurisdiction of the Taiwanese governor-generalship was leaked in 1908, causing panic among Okinawan intellectuals and elites. Might part of the shock felt by Okinawan intellectuals from the "House

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of Peoples" exhibit also be a fear of emasculation of Okinawa, in the fact that Okinawan "sons" were represented by Okinawan prostitutes?38 Representing the colonized (territory or people) as feminine is yet another standard trope of colonialist representation, and its employment in prewar Okinawa reveals yet one more colonialist power differential in the relation between Okinawa and Japan. 39 This trope was frequently expressed in the fixation of Japanese observers on the problem of Okinawan prostitution. By the turn of the century, prostitution had become the "number one social problem" in Naha, according to journalists from Japanese newspapers. Although prostitution was considered a major problem throughout the country, the Ryukyu shinpo argued that the dimensions were on a greater scale in Okinawa than elsewhere, claiming in 1902 that the ratio of prostitutes to men in Naha was far higher than in any other city in Japan. As frequently happens, however, the gender/labor issue of the use of women's bodies as objects of exchange40 was elided into a "nationalist" or ethnic issue. In other words, prostitutes came to stand as representative of Okinawa, and the problem of prostitution became the "truth" of Okinawa. One journalist from Japan examining the problem in 1910 reported the snickering condescension of Japanese men sent to Naha on business, informing their friends that "Ryukyuan products aren't just limited to brown sugar, awamori, lacquer, and weaving. There's also a living product that isn't exported"-to which the journalist concluded, "If you want to know the truth (shinsa) of the Ryukyus, just begin by observing the brothelS:'41 This kind of sex tourism "depends on powerful constructions of race and gender;' and especially "on a racial geography of sex that persuades privileged men that women in economically disempowered countries will be more sexually available and pliant:'42 The flip side of the frequent insistence from Okinawan elites that their fellow Okinawans make stronger efforts to "become Japanese;' therefore, was in large part a desire to gain some distance from an Okinawan identity that was discursively linked to the colonies, laborers, and effeminacy. These were the humiliations implied in the exhortative catchphrase "Don't lose out to the other prefectures."43 By the 1930S and early '40S, when the idea of assimilation had achieved hegemony in the discourses on discrimination and modernization, the "Japanese" position, the substance of which was constantly shifting, became the apparently necessary future of Okinawa, and yet also the position from which Okinawans were continually deferred. From the days of the struggles of Ryukyuan aristocrats to maintain some slight Ryukyuan distinctiveness, temporarily permitted by the

Imperial Subjects in Okinawa 155 Meiji government in an initial period of administration known as "the preservation of old customs;' to the twentieth-century push for assimilation, in which Okinawan newspaper editor Ota Chofu would urge that Okinawans carry assimilation to the point where "even our sneezes are the same as those of people from other prefectures;'44 Okinawans had come to adopt the strident calls for integration into the nation. The prefectural authorities, on the other hand, intensified the degree and extent of the assimilative imperative, insisting that the prefecture was not yet qualified for equal participation in national affairs. In this situation, there were a number of Japanese and Okinawan intellectuals who, by arguing that Okinawans were always already Japanese, created an assimilationist critique of the perpetuation of the program of doka.

THE ANTIQUE SHOP OF ETHNOGRAPHY From our perspective, Okinawa is the storehouse of language. Words which have been marked by their age remain from the ancient past when there were no books. What has been lost in the Naichi has been brought to completion in these islands.-Yanagita Kuni0 45 Don't the phenomena and principles which relate to the Ryl1kyus as an island nation also relate, to a certain degree, to our island empire of Japan? But since the Naichi are much bigger islands than the Ryl1kyl1s, these phenomena do not appear as clearly. Nevertheless, the Ryl1kylis are a miniature of the entire Japanese nation. We should observe the pains of the Rylikytis and take care that we do not get those same pains ourselvcs.-Shibusawa Kciz6 4b

As I mentioned above, the second pillar of kominka education was inculcation in the "emperor system" morality, particularly through emperorcentric history education. In the colonies or margins of the nation, it was either the sole content of history education, as in Taiwan and Hokkaido, or it constituted the main stream to which infrequent discussions oflocal history were inextricably tied, as in Okinawa and Korea. For example, in Korea, local history was initially excluded, then included for a brief period, and eventually re-excluded from the curriculum of public schools under the intense assimilative pressure during the warY To the extent that it was included in either Okinawa or Korea, however, local history was disciplined to the demands of the imperial-centered history through binary discourses on the common origins of Japanese and Koreans, and Japanese and Okinawans (Nissen dosoron and Nichiryu dosoron, respectively).

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The impetus for "Okinawan Studies" (Okinawa-gaku) can be traced to dissatisfactions among some Okinawan elites that references to Ryokyoan history and culture were absent from education in the prefecture. In general, studies of Ryokyoan history were viewed suspiciously by prefectural authorities, and scholars of Ryokyoan cultural history, such as Iha Fuyo, Higaonna Kanjun, and Higa Shuncho, frequently found themselves in debate with the authorities over the exclusion of the past from Okinawa. Hence, Okinawan Studies has attempted to act as the cultural memory of the islands, even as that culture was being cast aside. These studies were also meant to serve in the struggle with discrimination against Okinawans by providing evidence of Ryokyoan cultural achievements upon which a sense of local pride could be based. Nevertheless, Okinawan Studies has also been seen as basically assimilationist, both in content and in the institutions from which it has been produced. The anointed founding father of Okinawan Studies, Ifa Fuyu, became the center of a variety of local cultural movements in his capacityas librarian of the Okinawan Prefectural Library (founded in 1910). But current Okinawan historians have criticized the "social education" function which Ifa proclaimed the library would fulfill, arguing that, in the end, it was "nothing more than another aspect of the drive to hasten and broaden the shape of kominka:'48 By examining the content of its holdings, its activities in organizing local observances of military/national commemorations, and the expectations of its donors, Ota Masahide has shown how the library was a key Althusserian Ideological State Apparatus, along with the schools and newspapers, in the dissemination of kominka ideology. The defiant attempt to maintain local memory, even as the prefectural authorities attempted to "reform" local customs, has undoubtedly given much of Okinawan studies its oppositional caste. But the excavation of Ryokyoan cultural achievements to provide for local pride was often accompanied by a framework of interpretation in which that culture was also represented as either authentically Japanese or as comparable. Ifa's studies of the ancient Ryukyflan song collection, the Omorososhi, for example, have been used to demonstrate the Japanese lineage of Okinawan language, as well as to show that Ryukyuans had their own Man'yoshu. Using a discourse on the common cultural origins of Japanese and Okinawan cultures and a yardstick of significance for which the reference was invariably Japanese, assimilationist Okinawan Studies practitioners were able to overcome the obstacles of centuries of political separation and con-

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temporary linguistic differences. Thus, it is no accident that interest in the primitive or archaic has been a principal component of the field. Okinawan Studies exceeded the boundaries oflocal studies in part by its impact on a number of scholars who were producing a discourse on authentic native culture (known as minzokugaku) from the 191OS. Picking up on Ifa's links between archaic Japan and archaic Okinawa, a number of prewar Japanese folk scholars such as Yanagita Kunio, Origuchi Shinobu, and Yanagi Soetsu spent a great deal of time and paper arguing for the importance, even the centrality, of Okinawan culture for Japan. For Yanagita, Okinawa was the key to tracing the migration of ancient people into Japan, and in his final work, Kaijo no michi (1961), he argued that by examining traces of archaic Japanese culture in Okinawa (in place names, remnants of ancient Japanese words in modern Okinawan "dialects;' and religious practices), one could discern the migration of ancient Japanese culture from Micronesia. 49 For Origuchi, the claim that ancient Japanese words existed in modern Okinawan languages, and the centrality of shamanism in Okinawan religious practice, made it possible to do a kind of fieldwork on ancient Japanese language and religion by doing fieldwork in Okinawa. 50 And for Yanagi, Okinawa was a "craft heaven" where "pure Japanese culture" lived on (represented in the way crafts, music, and religion were all integrated in the daily life), unadulterated by the decadent structure of consumption in a capitalist consumer society. We must note, however, that the distribution of the archaic within the discourse was uneven. That is, claims of Okinawa as a storehouse of the Japanese language or as the possible site for fieldwork on archaic Japanese culture constructed Okinawa as presently embodying the Japanese past in contrast to the erasure of the archaic from the main islands themselves. Okinawa's backwardness or lag behind the rest of Japan, which I discussed above, became academically instituted through the assertion that the archaic had survived into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in Okinawa. For example, in a draft for a talk called "The Collateral Descendants of Our Ancient Beliefs Which Exist in Okinawa;' Origuchi claimed: Okinawan religion is, ... as the name "Ryukya shinto" suggests, utterly of the same lineage as our country's particular beliefs. It exists to this day as one branch of Shinto, or rather as containing points of its primitive form (genshi keishiki).51 (my emphasis) The term for "collateral descendants" (zangetsu, literally "remaining children of a mistress") that Origuchi uses in the title subtly evokes both the

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proper lineage that folk scholars were proclaiming and a hint of a discomforting heterogeneity that derives from miscegenation. Whatever lineal image Origuchi was trying to evoke, the text clearly asserts the current existence in Okinawa of what he understood to be ancient, or primitive, Japanese religious practices. Yanagita Kunio's record of his first trip to Okinawa in 1921 reveals a similar construction by transposing a reverse time line on the geographical terrain of his trip. Beginning his journey on the east coast of Kyushu (in Oita Prefecture), Yanagita travels south along the coast, through Amami Oshima, Okinawa, Miyako, and Yaeyama. Less a travel diary than a series of meditations on the past, the chapters on the Kyushu part of the trip display Yanagita's presence at each site more concretely than in any other section. From descriptions of travel conditions, the terrain, and people he met, Yanagita develops an image of Kyushu as an area where the people cannot remember why places are named the way they are, or what uses their ancestors might have had for the small islands off the coast. As the trip continues south, on the other hand, he records fewer descriptions of the present, longer meditations on the ancient past, and imaginings of past common lives and gruesome deaths. In particular, Yanagita's tale of his trip is littered with the narrative bodies of the dead, as if to highlight a potential danger in the trip, as well as to suggest a descent into the past (the land of the dead). By the time he has reached the southern end of his journey, he has not only covered great distance, but also great time. Time itself has collapsed for the people in the Yaeyama islands (in Yanagita's rendition) so that they "are just now beginning to forget what we forgot long ago:'52 Having argued for the assimilative slant of the use of Okinawa by Japanese folk studies, I should note that their idea of assimilation does stand out as distinct from that of prefectural authorities or even of many Okinawan elites. Japanese minzokugaku is permeated by a tension between a tendency to portray regional heterogeneity and another inclination to unify these heterogeneous moments in the production of a discourse on authentic native culture. In many ways, the use of Okinawa in minzokugaku discourse is both extreme and utterly emblematic. The prospect of a culture still living in nearly pristine form in the isolated islands of the Ryukyus presented a breathtaking contrast to the modernizing Naichi. On the other hand, overcoming the sharpest of differences, particularly linguistic, to present the islands as a "pure" instance of Japanese culture represented a preeminent case of the minzokugaku construction of a discourse on the native. 53 At a time when nearly every observer commented on a ten-

Imperial Subjects in Okinawa 159 dency among Japanese to treat Okinawans as "outsiders:' mil1zokugaku scholars constructed Okinawa as quintessentially Japanese. Either statements on Okinawan "backwardness" were made as reprimands to the Okinawans for failing to keep up with the progressive Japanese. But the folk scholars' claims to archaic residues in Okinawa reversed the censure back against Japan for having discarded its authentic cultural base. Nevertheless, although the significatory poles were to be reversed, the chronological schema was not. Indeed, as I noted above, chronology itself tended to be significantly collapsed in the islands. As a moment of cultural purity and also as a contemporary source of heterogeneity to the modern State, Okinawa could become an instrument of the folk scholars' critique of modernity. But while this critique could find sympathetic ears in the Naichi, the use of Okinawa as archaic other to modern Japan, or more specifically as the mirror of Japan's authentic "soul:' might sound less sweet in Okinawa, where the full ideological weight of modernization and "imperialsubjectification" discourses was applied right up to the war. Perhaps some kind of regional pride could be constructed out of the claim that Okinawan languages contained more pure (archaic) Japanese words than any of the Japanese dialects. But it would also be fairly clear to many Okinawans that archaic speech would not help them gain access to the loci of power in the modern State. The primary obstacle to the heterogeneous possibilities of Okinawa was precisely in the increasing importance of homogeneity to conceptions of language, ethnicity, nationality, and the State, as the crisis of war in East Asia intensified. UNSOLICITED FAVORS? What is so perilous, then, in the fact that people speak, and that their speech proliferates? Where is the danger in that?-Michel Foucault 54 Why is it that on the main islands the people may speak their dialects freely, but only in Okinawa is such a movement [to eradicate the dialect 1 necessary? Why can't they speak their soil's native tongue in their own homes? Why is such a thing undesirable? - Yanagi Soetsu 55

Despite the use of Pan-Asian ism to justify Japanese control of other peoples who shared "the East Asian cultural heritage:' and notwithstanding the claims of common written representation in the Chinese system, the profusion of linguistic differences within the Japanese empire was a crucial

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contradiction for Japanese bureaucrats and "emperor system" ideologues. The Okinawan experience of Japanese language acquisition, in particular, illuminates the tight ideological link between a concept of a unified Japanese language and the emperor-centered State. This problem oflanguage in Okinawa revolved around the questions of to what extent ethnic and national identities could tolerate heterogeneity, and to what extent ethnic and national identities were themselves conflated in Imperial Japan. As the statement by the official from the Ministry of Home Affairs above suggests, initial expectations for the dissemination of "standard Japanese" in Okinawa were moderate. It was not necessarily conceived as a complete replacement for Okinawan speech. But we can discern an increasingly absolutist imperative for this language in the different appellations by which it was described through modern Okinawan history: from the early names of "Tokyo-go" or "Yamato-go" (which specify its particular origins) in the first decades of Meiji, through "futsu-go" (normal speech) from late Meiji through Taisho, and finally to "hyojungo" (standard speech) from around 1930 until the end of the war. 56 By 1939, as part of the National Spiritual Mobilization Campaign (kokumin seishin sodoin undo), the Okinawan Bureau of Education instituted the "Standard Language Promotion Movement" with slogans such as "One Nation, One Family, One Language" and "Standard Japanese at All Times and in All Places:' Exclusive use of hyojungo replaced mere competence as the yardstick by which kominka education would be deemed complete. Meanwhile, Governor Fuchigami tied the utter rejection of Okinawan speech to economic development by insisting that "the prefecture will never develop so long as the people do not switch to hyojungo:'57 A number of Japanese intellectuals, led by Yanagi Soetsu, the main spokesman for the Japan Folk Craft Association, attempted to mount a defense of Okinawan "dialects" in 1940 in what became known as the "Debate on Dialects" (hogenronso).58 However, the defense was not posed as strictly Okinawan versus Japanese, but as authentic culture versus the bureaucracy. Bearing the brunt of the prefecture's wrath for daring to criticize the movement publicly, Yanagi took great pains constantly to reiterate that he and his Folk Craft Association actively supported the dissemination of hyojungo in the prefecture, in recognition of the fact of Japanese rule of the islands and as a compensation for the lack of unity among Okinawan "dialects:' His criticisms were reserved for the methods of dissemination, especially the infamous "dialect boards;'59 and the stated goal of the eradication of Okinawan speech. Thus, on the surface, the debate appeared

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to be between pluralist and purist positions. But an examination of the concepts of the nation used in the debate throws doubt upon this easy opposition. For example, Hasegawa Nyozekan's statement in the debate, "On the Refinement of Japanese: The Relationship of Standard Language to Regional Dialects;' struggles with the tension between heterogeneity and homogeneity in a national language. On the one hand, Hasegawa goes to the extreme of homogeneity saying: It goes without saying that it is most desirable that a nation's people all have one language. However, a unified language does not simply mean that when written it takes the same form, but that when spoken it has the same accent, intonation, and quality of sound. 60 On the other hand, by defining the refinement of a language as a condition in which a unified language gives perfect expression to the plurality of a people's experiences and perspectives, he seeks to infuse that unity with a sense of plurivocality. By noting the dissonance between Okinawan "dialects" and the so-called "standard;' Hasegawa gives an ambiguous defense of the necessity of Okinawan speech until a truly refined Japanese is produced. Yanagi echoed Hasegawa and a number of philologists by claiming that the destruction of Okinawan speech would be an irreparable blow to the study and improvement of the Japanese language, since it was widely accepted that the contemporary Okinawan languages retained Heianperiod, "pure" Japanese words. But Yanagi shied away from Hasegawa's perfectly unified national culture. Instead, Yanagi attacked those proponents of hyojungo exclusivism who argued that the replacement of Okinawan with Japanese was necessary for the "clarification of the kokutai (national polity):'61 Taking an ostensibly pluralistic stance, Yanagi claimed that since the nation was composed of many different regions with their own particularities, the kokutai must be able to encompass and accept regional differences. To deny differences would be to deny the kokutai. 62 At the time, the debate was viewed as basically unresolvable, since it appeared to be a struggle between culture and politics, with "no common ground" for a resolution. 63 And yet, we can discern a common ground in the role of "Japan" as a discursive constraint operating in the debate. For example, the Okinawans who supported the "Standard Language Promotion Movement" did so with the conviction that Japan represented the progressive, unified standard toward which Okinawa must move. Similarly, in

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Hasegawa's teleology of the national language, and in Yanagi's rereading of the kokutai, as well as in his recuperation of Okinawan culture as "pure Japanese culture;' Okinawa is formulated as "for Japan:'Yanagi frequently claimed authority to write about Okinawa since it not only was within the boundaries of Japanese culture, but also occupied a privileged position as a storehouse of "pure Japanese culture;' his field of specialty. And while he clearly would have disapproved of the "Lifestyle Reform Movements" in Okinawa and the Osaka area, his response to the problem of Okinawan discrimination shared the assumption that the resolution of the problem of an Okinawan sense of inferiority lay in the assertion that Okinawans were Japanese. Unfortunately, these claims came precisely at the time when Okinawans, particularly in the Osaka-Kobe area, were being stripped of the contents (daily practices) of Okinawan culture in favor of an illusory status as Japanese. For critics ofYanagi today, the tragedy (or crime) of his assertion that Okinawan culture was "pure Japanese culture" was that it deprived Okinawans of the very sense of deprivation which should come from losing the cultural practices that comprised their culture. 64 The fact that both sides of the debate could present their positions as attempts to resolve the problem of Okinawan discrimination demonstrates the extent to which assimilation monopolized the discourse on discrimination. 65 It further suggests a tendency to conflate "the nation" and Japanese ethnicity, in contrast to the Pan-Asianist ideologies employed in the colonies. In effect, those who posed the argument against Okinawan discrimination in terms of their homogeneity with the Japanese (by essence or achievement) left open the possibility that difference could legitimately remain a basis for discrimination. The inability of the defenders of Okinawan "dialects" to break out of a Japan-centered framework reveals the extent to which the Japan-Okinawa relationship had become overdetermined, so that Okinawa could not be imagined outside that binary.

CONCLUSION

In discussing the transformation of Okinawan identities to Japanese, there is a danger of reifying either pole as, in some sense, preexisting or already unified. In fact, the designation of just what constituted a "Japanese" identity was hotly contested in the prewar period. But in discussions of Okinawan identity, which necessarily related Okinawa to Japan, Japanese identity was produced as unified in opposition. To view the "House of Peoples" exhibit in 1903 was equally as constitutive of the idea of Japanese progres-

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sion as it was of Okinawan (or Taiwanese or Korean or Ainu) regression. Likewise, Japanese language education in the prefecture tended to reduce the multiplicity of Okinawan languages to one Okinawan language (or a series of dialects constituting a subset) which could then be corresponded to one Japanese language. That, it seems to me, is the whole point of "cultural assimilation"; it functions to homogenize the culture that is established as the standard as well as the culture which is compelled to change. To proclaim "Japanese culture" as the standard toward which others will or must assimilate is to posit it as homogeneous and potentially universal. The fact that the mainstays of the program of kominka were language education and loyalty to the emperor should sound alarms of recognition for those who recall that these were the very objects of struggle within Japan as well. Clearly, kominka was a program for the Naichi as well as the Gaichi (outer territories). To that extent, the colonial question could be said to be of as much significance for much of rural Japan as it was for Okinawa. However, one would want to examine the particulars of how it was implemented in each area and with which discourses (on ethnicity, modernity, etc.) it intersected. The danger in a general comparison, of course, is in the potential for collapsing the very real distinctions of location within the hierarchy of power established by Japanese imperialism. Charting Okinawa's position in this hierarchy is particularly difficult due to the instability of its intermediate position. For example, in the administrative structure of colonialist power, Okinawa was included within the Naichi (by exclusion from the Bureau of Colonial Affairs). But in the Japanese and Okinawan social imaginaries it was almost always considered outside the Naichi, a distinction which proved especially durable despite the decades of rule. Okinawa was both/neither Naichi and/nor Gaichi; its position within the hierarchy can be discerned only within the particular relations of power. Thus, the case of Okinawa can be especially useful in comparison to studies of both the Naichi and Gaichi, revealing ideological tensions in both situations. To argue, as I have in this essay, that the "progressiveness" of a Japanese identity for Okinawans was largely produced as an effect of an antithetical discourse on Okinawan identity is not to deny the potential progressive uses of the antithesis. In her study of modern Okinawan women's history, for example, Horiba Kiyoko has shown how cultural objects and activities signified as Japanese (distinct from "Okinawan") served the progressive ends of a prewar elite women's movement in the prefecture. 66 Considering

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that by the 1930S claims to full-fledged Japanese identity were used by Okinawans to combat discrimination and claim political equality with Japanese, or that during the American occupation these claims were used to resist submission to military rule, one would be hard put to portray Okinawan assimilation to Japan as strictly coerced. But as Walter Benjamin has noted, "there is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism;'67 To ignore the ideological coercion or discursive overdetermination in the construction of a Japanese imperative to Okinawan identity would be similarly self-deceiving. To understand the conflicting tendencies to progression and coercion in the program of assimilation, we must note that Okinawan claims, or rejections, of Japanese identity have been made in specific historical contexts, shaped by a variety of social discourses and uneven power differentials. Recognition of the specific historical context in which this took place is essential for avoiding both a reification of Okinawan difference and an overemphasis on the constructedness of Okinawan identity. That is, placing a particular formulation of Okinawan versus Japanese identities within a specific historical moment illustrates how that formulation of difference (or essential similarity) is historically contingent. At the same time, we cannot ignore the fact that the relationship has been articulated at other moments in history. Thus, as each epoch (or context) reformulates the significance of the relationship, it draws on prior articulations, making its own formulation appear transhistorical, or natural. This is the trap Mark Peattie fell into when dismissing the annexation of the Ryukyus as a cultural recuperation. Peattie, as well as the folk scholars, appears to use historical precedents in articulating Okinawan identity in its relation to Japan, but the historical precedent is frozen at an originary moment. This process reveals how the de-historicization of historical precedents is indispensable to the naturalization of identity. In this way as well, the prewar defenders of Okinawan culture often inadvertently contributed to the diminution of Okinawan cultural identity even as they loudly proclaimed it. Whether or not Okinawan culture existed of its own right and accord, the "always already Japanese" formulation was essential in transforming utterly incomprehensible Okinawan "languages" into Japanese "dialects;' Other cultural practices also became subsets of Japanese cultural practices, even if they were praised for their "purity." This subset status, however, could be easily manipulated in the crisis rhetoric of the State in the 1930S and '40S into an obstacle to an emergency mobilization. To claim to be both Okinawan and Japanese in light

Imperial Subjects in Okinawa 165 of this contradiction was to be forced either to efface the Okinawan from the visible realm or to claim that Japanese identity was heterogeneous. We could consider the possibility that the attempt of many Okinawans to lay claim to both identities was, at least in part, an attempt to read Japan as heterogeneous. This opens the possibility that a homogeneous ideology such as kominka could be transformed, at the margins, into a promise of plurality. In his defense of Okinawan dialects in 1940, Yanagi Soetsu argued just this point. But of course the danger in this claim is in the potential for mistaking mobilization for acceptance. As the Battle of Okinawa and Okinawa's subsequent submission to the continuing American military presence attests, the heterogeneous promise of kominka was the discomforting promise that those on the margins of the empire could also sacrifice themselves for the survival of the monolithic State. NOTES 1 Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (New York: Grove Press, Inc., 1967), 216. 2 Oshiro Tatsuhiro, Doka to ika no hazamade (Tokyo: Shio Shuppansha, 1972), 19. 3 Exhibits of colonial artifacts and colonized peoples had become standard fare at such expositions throughout the world by this time, suggesting the close link between ostensibly objective natural history and colonial domination. For example, see Robert Rydell, All the World's a Fair (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984); or Yoshimi Shun'ya, Hakurankai no siejigaku: Manazashi no kimiai (Tokyo: Chilo Koronsha, 1992). 4 Yun Kwonjya, "Kindai Nihon no iminzoku shihai: 'Daitoakyoeiken' koz6 ni itaru minzoku seisakuron wo chilshin ni;' in Rekishi kaidoku no shiza, Kanagawa Daigaku hyoron sosho, vol. 2, ed. Kanagawa Daigaku Hyoron Henshil Senmon Iinkai (Tokyo: Ochanomizu Shobo, 1993), 80. 5 A brief time line of Okinawan political postponement reads (Japan/Okinawa): establishment of prefecture (1871-1879); universal military conscription (1873-1898); first prefectural assembly elections (1890-1909); first elections to national assembly (1890-1912). In addition to this, consider the fact that all prewar governors were from outside the prefecture, and that few of the officials in the Okinawan Bureau of Education (one of the most important posts in the prefecture in terms of both budget and ideological power) were Okinawan, to get a sense of the deferral of Okinawans from politics. 6 Mark R. Peattie, "The Japanese Colonial Empire, 1895-1945:' in The Cambridge History of Japan, vol. 6, The Twentieth Century, ed. Peter Duus (New York: Camhridge University Press, 1988), 224. 7 Matumura Akira, cd., Daijirin (Tokyo: Sanseido Co., Ltd., 1988), 2345. 8 This is similar to the way that the insistence on the uniqueness of Japanese culture in much Nihonjinron ultiamtely maintains "the West" as the universal standard against which Japanese difference is supposed to stand out, as Naoki Sakai has shown. See Naoki Sakai, "Modernity and Its Critique: The Problem of Universalism and Particularism;' in Postmodernism and Japan, ed. Masao Miyoshi and H. D. Harootunian (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1989).

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9 Matsuoka Masao, "Sekirara ni mita Ryiikyii no genjo;' in Okinawa kyusai ronshu, ed.

Wakigami Rojin (1929; reprint, Naha: Ryiikyu Shiryo Fukkoku Bunpukai, 1969), lll. 10 Taiwan seemed to have the best potential for expanding sugar production for several rea-

sons: the government support of sugar production was more aggressive there than in Okinawa; more technological innovations were being attempted; and space and Japanese colonial power made the establishment oflarge sugar cane plantations possible. 11 Tomiyama Ichiro, Kindai Nihon shakai to "Okinawajin"-"Nihonjin" ni naru to iu koto (Tokyo: Nihon Keizai Hyoronsha, 1990), 78-82. 12 Hiyane Teruo, fiyu minken shisii to Okinawa (Tokyo: Kenbun Shupp an, 1982). 13 Essays by these three are included in Wakigami's Okinawa kyusai ronshu, with Shimoda's "Ryiikyii yo doko he iku" being an excerpt from his investigatory trip to see economic conditions in Amami, Okinawa, Taiwan, and Korea: Nantii keizaiki (fu Chiisen) (Tokyo: Osakayago Shoten, 1929). 14 The movement is analyzed in chapter 3 of Tomiyama Ichiro's book Kindai Nihon shakai, 195-251. 15 The barefoot complaint is one of the more common complaints, and it is reminiscent,

16

17 18

19

20 21

interestingly enough, of Yanagita Kunio's discussion of the struggle to get Japanese to wear shoes in cities such as Tokyo, as a sign of progress in early Meiji. See Yanagita Kunio, Meiji Taishii-shi sesii-hen, in Yanagita Kunio zenshu, vol. 26 (Tokyo: Chikuma Shobo, 1990), esp. 43-47. The accusation that reforms were focused on forms rather than content comes from both Okinawan intellectuals and outside Japanese observers. Okinawan newspaper editorialists persistently charged that education officials were more interested in making Okinawan students conform to the image of "loyal imperial subjects" than they were in giving them an adequate education. See Ota Masahide, Okinawa no minshii ishiki (Tokyo: Shinsensha, 1976), esp. 331-407. Likewise, outside observers, such as Matsuoka, frequently remarked on an obsession in Okinawa to be placed on an equal footing with the other prefectures (tafuken), an obsession they took to be focused on the form of equality with other prefectures rather than on the qualifications for that equality. Tomiyama, Kindai Nihon shakai. The phrase is used recurrently throughout the book. Okinawan speech was generally called a dialect (hiigen) in the prewar period. However, current linguists not only refer to Okinawan speech as a distinct language, but some argue that within the prefecture there are at least three distinct languages, judged by the extent of mutual incomprehensibility. From a personal conversation with Leon Serafim of the University of Hawaii. Early language classes and textbooks were conducted not as if Okinawan speech were simply a dialect which deviated from the standard langauge, but as if Japanese were a foreign language for Okinawans. That is, the language was not a kokugo (national language), but "Yamato-go" (the language ofYamato), and Okinawan phrases were translated into Yamato in one-to-one correspondence. Ichiki Kitokuro, quoted in Ota, Okinawa no minshu ishiki, 346. From Yanagi Soetsu's notes of a conversation between himself and Governor Fuchigami Fusataro during the summer of 1940. Quoted in Tanaka Toshio, "Mondai saien no keika;' in Waga Okinawa, ed. Tanigawa Ken'ichi (Tokyo: Mokujisha, 1970), 131. These suspicions became brutal policy during the Battle of Okinawa when the Japanese commanders issued orders to treat any Okinawans found speaking "dialect" as spies (i.e., execute

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them). On the other hand, George H. Kerr notes that the Chinese Nationalists made claims after 1942 to "recover" the Ryukyus along with Taiwan and Manchuria after the war, although it is hard to imagine such a claim being welcomed in Okinawa at the time. See George H. Kerr, Okinawa: The History of an Island People (Rutland, Vt.: Charles E. Tuttle Co., 1958), 464. 22 Ota, Okinawa no minshu ishiki, 343. At the same time, Ota notes that the local burden of financial support was also much heavier-four to six times as heavy-than other colonies or prefectures. In addition, while other prefectures saw a basic balance between educational and industrial promotion expenses, Okinawa tilted lopsidedly toward education (ibid., 360). 23 David Spurr, The Rhetoric of Empire: Colonial Discourse in Journalism, Travel Writing, and Imperial Administration (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1993), 63. 24 From an editorial in the RyiikyU shinpo, April 1903. Quoted in Matayoshi Seikiyo, Nihon shokuminchika no Taiwan to Okinawa (Ginowan-shi, Okinawa: Okinawa Aki Shobo, 1990),264. 25 Matayoshi, Nihon shokuminchika, 103. 26 To the extent that these attempts to pass were successful, they are now hard to trace.

27

28

29 30

Matayoshi examines fue cases of five Okinawans in the lower ranks of the Taiwanese colonial bureaucracy and remarks on the significance of "passing" for fueir careers (ibid., 83-93). Ibid., 72. Matayoshi notes that, traditionally, "business transactions in Okinawa were mostly controlled by women;' so the task of developing a market for Okinawan goods in Taiwan fell largely to the women (ibid., 53-58). Ibid., 65-70. As in Taiwan, Okinawan workers in Osaka-Kobe were excluded from certain industries, frequently with job postings marked "... excluding Okinawans and Koreans:' Once hired into a company, Okinawan workers tended to be segregated in the workplace as well as in the company dormitories, even to the extent of having different meals prepared for them (Tomiyama, Kindai Nihon shakai, 110-113).

31 Ibid., 11-14. 32 Ibid., 184. 33 Tomiyama claims that the biggest obstacle to the attempts of the Bolshevik leadership of

the Kenjinkai was its failure to read the "obedience" (jujunsei) of Okinawan workers to factory owners as deriving from the illusory prospect of breaking into fue ranks of the Japanese workers. Thus, the particular efforts of the Bolshevik leadership in two textile firms discouragingly culminated in the Okinawan women serving as strikebreakers (ibid., 169-181). 34 Kamekawa Tetsuya, "Rokujuman no kenmin yo danketsu seyo!" in Wakigami, Okinawa

kyUsai ronshu, 249. 35 Oshiro Kaneyoshi, "Taiwan nanshin shisatsu no kanso to ken kyiisai mondai ni kansuru hiken;' in Okinawa kyUsai ronshU, 254. 36 Wakigami Rojin, "Okinawa kogyo ginko kyusai no shinso to shingin no seiritsu no y6b6;' in Okinawa kyUsai ronshu, 237. 37 Matayoshi, Nihon shokuminchika, 263. The inversion of Koreans and Taiwanese, in terms

of the chronology of annexation, is indicative of the tendency to view Taiwanese as almost inhuman.

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38 Although the presenter claimed that the women on display were Okinawan aristocrats, it was discovered that they were prostitutes hired from the Naha brothel district (Ota Oki-

lJawa IJO milJshu ishiki, 292). 39 See Spurr, The Rhetoric of Empire, esp. 170-183. 40 As Anne McClintock discusses in "Screwing the System: Sexwork, Race, and the Law" (in

Feminism alJd Postmodernism, ed. Margaret Ferguson and Jennifer Wicke, special issue of boundary 2, vol. 19, no. 2 [1992]), female prostitution can represent a challenge to the

41 42 43 44 45 46 47

48 49

50

51

52 53

"property rights" of men over women's bodies if it is the women who are keeping the profits. But one would want to distinguish this challenge from "sexwork that benefits the male state;' that is, sexwork run "by male 'entertainment managers'" (89) in stateapproved institutions such as the licensed brothels in Naha. Ota, OkilJawa IJO minshu ishiki, 280. McClintock, "Screwing the System;' 93. Ota, OkilJawa IJO milJshu ishiki, 348, "tafukelJjilJ lJi makerulJa:' Ibid., 377· Yanagita Kunio, "Kainan shoki;' in YalJagita KUl1io zel1shu, vol. 1 (1924; reprint, Tokyo: Chikuma Shobo, 1989), 370-371. Shibusawa Keizo, "Nanto kenbunroku;' in Shibusawa Keizo chosakushu, vol. 1 (1927; reprint, Tokyo: Heibonsha, 1992), 108. Isoda Kazuo, "Kominka kyoiku to shokuminchi no kokushi kyokasho;' in IwalJami Koza: Kindai NiholJ to shokuminchi, vol. 4, Togo to shihai no rol1ri, ed. Ooe Shinobu et al. (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1993), 114. Ota, Okinawa IJO mil1sizll ishiki, 374. The Micronesian origins theory stands in contrast to a mainland Asian origins theory in which Asian culture came into Japan through Korea. Murai Osamu has recently suggested that Yanagita's turn toward Okinawa in the early 19205 was a deliberate turn away from Korea. Murai claims that, as a bureaucrat in the Ministry of Agriculture, Yanagita was involved in the drafting of colonial laws on agriculture for Korea, but that the 1919 Korean Independence movement broke Yanagita's faith in a rapport between Koreans and Japanese. See Murai Osamu, "Nanto ideorogi-no hassei;' ed. Asada Akira et aI., in Kikal1 sizicho, nos. 7 and 8 (Tokyo: Shichosha, 1990). Origuchi's notebooks from his trips to Okinawa in 1921 and 1923 make frequent reference to ancient Japanese culture in explanation of events and practices he observed there. See Origuchi Shinobu, "Okinawa saihoki" and "Okinawa saiho techo;' in Origuchi Shinobu zenshu, vol. 16 (Tokyo: Chuo Koronsha, 1956), 91-143, 144-199. Origuchi Shinobu, "Okinawa ni sonsuru waga kodai shinko no zangetsu;' in Origuchi Shinobu zenshu, vol. 16, p. 1. The essay published in Origuchi's works is a previously unpublished draft of a talk given by Origuchi at the commemoration of the 350th anniversary of the founding of Toshogu Shrine in Nikko, in 1924. Yanagita, "Kainan shoki;' 402. The most significant problem facing these folk scholars in the construction of Okinawan culture as purely Japanese was the centuries of "Sinification" of Okinawan culture resulting from a close Ryukyuan reliance on the Chinese tribute system and the efforts of the Satsuma domain, after its invasion of the islands in 1609, to display its control of the islands as a subjugation of an alien territory. Yanagita's travelogue, "Kainan shoki," con-

Imperial Subjects in Okinawa 169

54 55

56

57 58

59

60 61

62 63 64

65

66 67

tinually confronts and resolves the problem by representing Chinese elements as a later embellishment over a native, Japanese culture. Michel Foucault, "The Discourse on Language;' in The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Pantheon Books, 1972), 216. Yanagi Soetsu, "Kokugo mondai ni kanshi Okinawaken gakumubu ni kotauru no sho;' in Tanigawa Ken'ichi, Waga Okinawa, 38. This essay was originally published in the three major Okinawan newspapers on 14 January 1940. See Hokama Shuzen, "Okinawa niokeru gengo kyoiku no rekishi;' in Waga Okinawa, 18r216. The centralizing imperative that is apparent in the term "hyojungo" has been softened, through not necessarily removed, in the postwar period by the term "kyi5ts~l-go" (common or shared language). Quoted in Tanaka Toshio, "Mondai saien no keika;' 131. The debate began in January 1940 in Naha, when the Mingei Kyokai (Folk Craft Association), led by Yanagi Soetsu, accused the Bureau of Education of seeking the eradication of all Okinawan dialects in its efforts to disseminate standard Japanese. The debate continued to flare up periodically during the course of the year in both Okinawan newspapers and Tokyo magazines. Some of the major statements of the debate are collected in Waga Okinawa. The "dialect boards" (hagen satsul, the Mingei Kyokai's most heart-wrenching example of the abusive nature of the hyajungo movement, were signs that students who were caught using Okinawan speech, whether on or off school grounds, were forced to wear until they found another student slipping into local speech to whom they could pass on the board. This humiliation was patterned on a form of punishment in the RyukYllan kingdom where criminals were forced to wear signs describing their crimes until they found another criminal committing the same crimes. For critics of the excesses of the movement, it was a potent symbol of the institutionalization of discrimination against Okinawans within the prefectural government itself. Hasegawa Nyozekan, "Nihongo no senrensei nitsuite: Hyojungo to chihogo tono kankei;' in Waga Okinawa, 43. Originally published in Gekkan mingei, March 1940. From an article in the Okinawa Asahi shin/JIm, 11 January 1940, "Daigen shogen;' quoted in Tanaka Toshio, "Mondai no suii;' in Waga Okinawa, 15. See Yanagi Soetsu, "Kokugo mondai" and "Ryiikyu bunka no saininshiki nitsuite;' in Waga Okinawa, 34-41, 134-143. See Shimizu Kitaro, "Okinawa Hyojungo Reiko nikanshite;' and Hagiwara Sakutaro, "Iseisha to Bunka;' both in Waga Okinawa, 70-75 and 62-64. Tomiyama, Kindai Nihon siu,kai, 244-245. Miyata Setsuko and Matayoshi Seikiyo discuss the uses of assimilation as an antidiscrimination policy in Korea and Taiwan, respectively. See Miyata Setsuko, ChOsen minshu to 'kominka' seisaku (Tokyo: Miraisha, 1985); and Matayoshi, Nihon shokuminchika. Horiba Kiyoko, Inaguya rzanabachi: Okinawa joseishi wo saguru (Tokyo: Kabushiki Kaisha Domesu Shuppan, 1990). Walter Benjamin, "Theses on the Philosophy of History;' in Illuminations: Essays and RefiectiollS, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 256.

~ Writing Out Asia: Modernity,

Canon, and Natsume Soseki's Kokoro ~

James A. Fujii

I was invited to present a paper at a symposium held at the National University of Singapore in April of 1991 devoted exclusively to Natsume Soseki's Kokoro (Heart/Mind) (1914). The venue (a land once occupied by Japan) prompted me to consider the meaning of such a conference focused on perhaps the canonical work in modern Japanese literature, with invited scholars from Japan, Singapore, Canada, Australia, Taiwan, South Korea, and the U.S. Mine was the only paper (out of twelve) that addressed these enunciative contingencies, and, not surprisingly, it was to be one of the few that was omitted from the subsequent special conference issue of the journal Mugentai. 1 In this revised version of that paper, I have juxtaposed Soseki's travelogue, Man-Kan tokorodokoro, with Kokoro as a way to intervene in the current, ongoing reproduction of amnesia that underwrites our reception of this shosetsu ("novel") today. As is common when a literature with a substantial critical tradition is studied by critics of another, a finely honed scholastic topography mediates Japanese literature and (Western) Japanologists. Texts chosen for reading and study, issues that are raised, and implicit agendas that are held by Western scholars of Japanese literature are all deeply influenced by native sedimentation, both academic and popular. 2 Such overdetermination is particularly marked in the case of Natsume Soseki (186r1916), who, perhaps with Mori Ogai, towers over the landscape of modern Japanese literature. Today, Soseki's portrait graces the thousand-yen note, every Japanese youngster is made to read from his corpus, and the annual polls of school children continue to confirm his high standing among the "most admired" figures in Japanese history. His range is broad, and he has left us with essays on literary criticism, short stories, travelogues, satirical novels, and social criticism, but his lofty position among the pantheon of greats

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in Japanese literature owes chiefly to his later prose narratives (beginning with Sanshiro, in 1908), which focus on the alienated individual in early twentieth-century urban Japan. And among these works, Kokoro has earned a singular prominence, whether this privilege be assessed by enduring readership, critical attention (well over three hundred studies of varying length in Japan alone),3 or security in the school curriculum. While he is not widely read by the general public on this side of the Pacific, critical acclaim has mirrored the Japanese lead in celebrating his works as native expressions of the Western psychological novel. The reified conception of modernity and its individuated subject, which underwrite such prose narratives, have been reproduced yet again in a recent instance of canonizing in this country. Part of an ambitious series (projected for thirty volumes) called "The Library of Japan;' the volume titled Kokoro and Selected Essays includes a reprint of Edwin McClellan's translation of Kokoro (widely available in paperback) and Soseki's essays "My Individualism" and "The Civilization of Modern-day Japan?'4 Originally presented by Soseki as lectures addressing the pernicious effects of "Western civilization" on Japan, as companion pieces to Kokoro they ostensibly address the question as to why the protagonist in his longer works (such as Kokoro) must suffer SO.5 The imprecise answer, inevitably, is to be found in the disjunction of East meeting West, with its most profound manifestation in the figure of the "modern individual:' Soseki and his texts have been repackaged yet again in the familiar Eurocentric oppositional terms that the writer himself exhorted his lecture audiences to question. Soseki cannot be prized from the issue of modernity, but to avoid the worn formula that is exemplified by the "Library of Japan;' we must ask ourselves what the fixed conceptions of the "modern" and "individual" have effectively valorized and suppressed for almost a century. What the naturalized connection of Soseki to modernity conceals is the focus of the present essay.6 We, as inheritors of and ongoing contributors to a particular discursive production of Soseki, are the subject of this work. While Soseki's Kokoro is one of the most studied shosetsu in modern Japanese literature, to my knowledge it has not been tied to the journalistic account of his travels on the Asian continent, Man-Kan tokorodokoro. The pairing is useful in illustrating what would become a relatively common experience for the modern Japanese writer-to experience firsthand the Japanese occupational presence in Asia, without letting it touch her/his literary production. The global exfoliation of nationalist sentiment today suggests more urgently than even a scant five years ago the value of his-

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toricizing Kokoro, perhaps his most enduringly popular work, in a way that has been avoided to date: to show how its privileged position in the heart of the Japanese literary canon owes much to the fact that it belonged to the discourse of modernism-particularly imperialism-that in modified form continues to order the world that we live in today. No more than we can step "outside" Orientalism of other relations of domination, Soseki's text must be grasped within a nearly century-old practice of appropriation in the discursive identity labeled "Japan:' To this must be added our own position, for "it is no longer a question of judging the past in the name of a truth that only we can possess in the present:'7 The following discussion of Kokoro addresses its canonicity because that is what mediates our relation to a text written almost a century ago, deforming it to its present, familiar dimensions. More significantly, it brings the matter of responsibility for forgetting history to the present moment. Ever since Japan was impelled to admit Western material, cultural, and intellectual practices at the beginning of the Meiji period (1868-1912), a stubborn pair of oppositions has shaped discourse on twentieth-century Japanese literature: in premodern literature it is China and Japan, and in modern literature the West and Japan. This division retlects the unquestioned assumption of Western humanist-realist conventions as the basis for reading modern Japanese texts. Thus, in spite of an apparent diversity of critical approaches to such works as Kokoro, most take as their theme the emergence of a modern, individuated, and hence deeply troubled subject in postfeudal Japan. Dimmed by repetitions of the same theme, this legion of criticism has coalesced as an interpretive template that displaces more politically informed perspectives. While Soseki's later novels have been institutionalized as expressions of the dislocation wrought by the currents oflate Meiji history (with Eto Jun's work serving as a kind of imprimatur to this practice),8 Kokoro continues to be read in ways that ignore the specific conditions of Japanese modernity and nationness that give rise to this text. What must be endeavored is to bring into focus the oft-neglected relationship between Japan and its Asian neighbors as a way of thinking about Japanese modernity and "modern Japanese literature" (which is always marked by the West).9 While Kokoro continues to be read as one of the most sensitive portrayals of a modern Japanese intellectual failing in his attempts to negotiate the complications of Japan's modernization, the very notion of the modern is generally left unexamined, treated as if it were selfevident and fixed. My concern is with the aspects of Japan's experience of

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modernity that remain conspicuously absent in the secondary literature on Kokoro: the vital links between the discourse of nation-building, Japan's colonialist behavior on the Asian continent, and the sense of lost history that deeply colors Japan's particular experience of the modern (and would lead to the fifteen-year war). 10 Partly to rectify the ledger of imbalance-critics continue to invoke Soseki's links to the West, including his sojourn in London, while his trips to Asia receive scant attention-and for reasons given above, let us take a quick look at Man-Kan tokorodokoro ("Here and there in Manchuria and Korea;' hereafter Man-Kan), Soseki's account of a trip he took to the Asian continent in 1909. Always described as a junket commissioned by the Asahi Newspaper, in fact, the impetus for his trip came from his close friendship with Nakamura Zeko, who was president of Japan's South Manchuria Railway Company (SMR). An essay of 117 pages in the Iwanami zenshu ("complete" works) that is typically classified as a kikobun (travelogue), Man-Kan remains generally ignored by readers and critics alike. ll This is a piece meant to entertain more than to edify any curiosity the reader may have had about Japan's activities in Asia. Aside from occasional observations about hard-working kurii (coolies) or an account of a pilgrimage to Port Arthur, where the critical battle in the Russo-Japanese War had taken place, the text is a breezy record of his travels that is concerned far more with the author's many reunions with friends of his school days than with observations about foreign cultures. That, coupled with frequent mention of the stomach ailments that plagued the writer throughout the trip, is probably what prompted one contemporary to quip that this was more aptly titled "Soseki tokorodokoro:' Joshua Fogel argues that "in literary terms, [Soseki] consciously chose a highly objective style of reportage [for Man-Kan] in opposition to the naturalism so prevalent in Japan at the time. The roots of modern Japanese realism, it has been argued, can be found in this reportage style:'12 It is noteworthy that this historian makes the observation to deflect what is clearly embarrassing to confront by giving the piece high marks for prefiguring later literary practices. I might also add parenthetically that, contrary to this historian's characterization, at the level of stylistics, Man- Kan is a chatty, impressionistic piece that resembles Botchan in its tone, language, and use of humor. There is little question that Soseki probed the effects of modernity on Japanese society as no other writer of his time, but like the growing ranks of fellow intellectuals and writers during the first two decades of the twentieth century, he also displayed significant lapses in what might have been

Writing Out Asia 175 a more critical perspective on Japan's presence in continental Asia. The Russo-Japanese War that had concluded just four years before Soseki's trip to Manchuria, China, and Korea had been a popular one, and to the Japanese living in Japan, international tensions that were headlined in the press did not seem so directly threatening to domestic order. Even so, it is hard to ignore Soseki's condescension toward other Asians as he travels through their lands, or the humorous tone of this work, which shows little sensitivity to conditions where one nation is occupying another. In Man-Kan Soseki uses such pejoratives as "chan" (short for "chankoro") when referring to the Chinese, and he shows little self-consciousness in availing himself of the considerable facilities (hotels, tour guides) of the SMR, a government organ that played a key role in Japan's eventual colonization of Asia. Even the celebratory tone of schoolboy camaraderie between Soseki and his close friend who presides over the SMR is excused by the historian Fogel, who says that he was simply "unable to transcend the prejudices of his time:'13 But, this is to reify Soseki the literary figure, ignoring his connections to his own particular moment and, more importantly, to the next eight decades when the collective labor of canonization makes him and his work a part of ongoing, contemporary history. It is not simply a matter of resurrecting Soseki's embarrassing lapses or the difficulty of stepping outside the imperialist horizon that formed quickly in post-Restoration Japan. The concern of this essay is the more "inadvertent" but nonetheless troubling act of forgetting, the role of memory loss-(both individual and collective) in cultural production-and its place in modernist and postmodernist society. If Man-Kan illustrates the forgetting that takes place by those involved in the process of canon formation (all the critics "remember" Soseki in London), Kokoro shows Soseki's proclivity to gesture uneasily without overtly criticizing the larger forms of modernity, choosing instead to focus on problematizing bourgeois individualism. KOKORO, CANON, AND MODERNITY

To understand a work's canonicity is to address the disparate strands of institutionalization such as the conditions of a text's production, its reception over the years, and the extended process that is inherent in the term "canon:' The focus of this essay prevents a proper examination of these areas, compelling me to address canonicity only rather narrowly as an inescapable condition that shapes our reading and interpretation of a text,

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whether we openly acknowledge it or not. I touch upon the question both because the enormity of the investment made in Kokoro over the years cannot be ignored by any contemporary study of this text and, most importantly, because discussion of Kokoro as a canonical text reveals connections between narration and the modern nation-state that have been overlooked in previous studies. The link between textual expression and nation is captured by Fredric Jameson's linking of national allegory to writing, this way: "the telling of the individual story and the individual experience cannot but ultimately involve the whole laborious telling of the collectivity itself'14 Aijaz Ahmad's criticism of Jameson's rigid alignment of "national allegory" to Third World countries notwithstanding, I have appropriated these words to suggest the hegemonic force that binds writing to canon within the framework of national borders. In the context of the twentieth century, the collectivity that canons narrate is the nation. Kokoro, like virtually every other text from the modern Japanese literary canon, refuses or is unable to address the imperialist dimensions of Japanese modernity. The aspect of canonicity that concerns me here is not the production and maintenance of a literature as belles lettres, but the social function or significance of canonization. Frank Kermode notes that "canons are essentially strategic constructs by which societies maintain their own interests, since the canon allows control over the texts that a culture takes seriously and the methods of interpretation that establish the meaning of'serious.' "15 This view of the literary canon resists the common practice of banishing it to the realm of aesthetics set apart from the vital contestation that marks any modern society. While canons are erected from texts of the past, they speak far more to the prevailing values that reign over the selection of this literary corpus. Lost under the assumption of widely assumed consensus is the contest that Charles Altieri puts this way: "[ Canons are 1 simply ideological banners for social groups: social groups propose them as forms of self-definition, and they engage other proponents to test limitations while exposing the contradictions and incapacities of competing groupS."16 At the smallest level of differentiation, the canonization of Soseki's work competes against the similar installation of a literature that today might best be designated shizenshugi-shishosetsu ("naturalist" narrative), an approach to literature that flourished in variant forms particularly from the turn of the century to well into the 1920S; at a higher level, the text is defined by canon drawn against other canons divided by national borders. Kokoro can be designated as a site where issues of canon

Writing Out Asia 177 and nation meet in the particular shape we can discern as Japanese modernity. Put differently, as the canon that is today designated kindai bungaku (modern literature) began to take shape early in the twentieth century, it was closely associated with the forces of modernity that helped construct a modern Japanese society that could accommodate Western ideas, material, and practices. What was sought was the fusion of existing cultural and social identities to a modern European form of the nationstate. The notion of a literary canon is important from the vantage point of reading Kokoro in the late twentieth century because it permits us to discern the text's exclusion of the Japanese state as it increasingly defines its own contours in international terms, or, more explicitly, as an imperialist power. The very idea that a body of literature becomes a canon rests upon a unity constructed from a shared culture and a sense of a social whole inscribed within national boundaries. Thus, viewed paradigmatically in relation to other (national) canons, a particular literary canon will appear unified and even stable. But just as those constituent conditions of canonicity change over time, so does a category like the canon. In a passage reminiscent of Bakhtin's description ofheteroglossia, Richard Ohmann draws our attention to the mutability of categories (be it "the English Novel:' or "American Literature") and the struggle that often attends their change: At any given moment categories embody complex social relations and a continuing historical process. That process deeply invests all terms with value: since not everyone's values are the same, the negotiating of such concepts is, among other things, a struggle for dominancewhether between adults and the young, professors and their students, one class and another, or men and womenY The notion of literary canon, like many of the other terms we use to discuss Japanese literature in the West, is fraught with difficulty.l8 If canon is to designate a privileged mainstream literature in modern Japan, it must arise from such considerations as the literary coterie, the Monbusho and its educational policies, reader reception, publishing firms and their relation to writers, the production of zenshu (collected works) so widespread in Japan, and even popular media attention to literature.l 9 The text called Kokoro as we see it today has been "produced" by the combined effect of these forces; it should be readily apparent that what we assume to be a completed and stable product (this text) is hardly immutable and fixed and will continue to bear the effects of changing times. No one can deny that

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Kokoro has negotiated the various sectors mentioned above in such a way that today it continues to command a privileged place in modern Japanese literature. The process of canonization unfolds over time across a variety of social sectors (publishing, the accumulation of scholarly ratification, and so on), making its representation as a set of stable criteria hazardous, at best. Kokoro shares with other early twentieth-century works an unstated imperative for mainstream acceptance to ignore the aspect of Japanese modernity that shapes the nation's relations with other non-Western (that is, Asian) lands. Stated differently, this work owes its place in the canon for contributing to the installation of what would become the central figure in modern Japanese fiction-the isolated, bourgeois figure who will quickly come to outgrow the confines of "class" to stand for the whole of Japanese society. Such disregard of contention-ridden difference (class) is not fortuitous, and it does not simply reflect the appropriation of values implicit in Western literary practices (Romantic and Realist literature). Modern Japanese narratives that come to occupy what we can only metaphorically call the heart of the canon observe a kind of social contract to occlude the consideration of such differences as class and competing political interests in Japanese society-that is, the serious engagement of alterity, whether it be conceived in domestic or international (but only non-Western) terms. A text like Kokoro does not simply or neatly eliminate traces of social and political differentiation, but the very internal contradictions and differences of that text must be suppressed so that it can be made to belong to, and to construct, a modern Japanese literary canon. Restated in terms that exceed the structures of textuality, we might argue that Kokoro has been accorded a privileged place in the modern Japanese literary canon because the text confronts important issues that grow out of Japan's experience of the modern. But the text's ambivalence in addressing some of the more troubling contradictions ofJapan's modernity-most pointedly the refiguration of the nation's relations to its Asian neighbors in colonialist terms-also tacitly underwrites the venerated status of this particular text. The repeatedly invoked hagiographic image of Soseki spending mornings in his study writing what would become the canonical works of modern Japanese literature while devoting afternoons to penning Chinese-style poetry is telling. It seems to complicate the writer by showing him negotiating otherness from two directions, but it has in fact served neatly to contain Asia as an antiquated aesthetic realm with no relation to the twentieth century. Before we pursue the question of Kokoro's complicity in this

Writing Out Asia 179 silence, let us consider briefly the notion of the modern, a vast topic that defies adequate treatment within the space of this study. The modern subsumes a collective diversity of events, developments, shifts in perception, and altered relations among things and people; the centrality of change makes modernity an extended moment whose nature and limits are difficult to specify. Its defining paradox- foregrounding the juxtaposition of present moment to the past - is captured in David Harvey's identification of Baudelaire as a key European modernist figure: "[Modernity1is the transient, the fleeting, the contingent; it is the one half of art, the other being the eternal and the immutable:'20 The subjective experience of such disjunction is captured by Marshall Berman, who endows the modern with a "paradoxical unity, a unity of disunity: it pours us all into a maelstrom of perpetual disintegration and renewal, of struggle and contradiction, of ambiguity and anguish. To be modern is to be part of a universe in which, as Marx said, 'all that is solid melts into air."'21 In a spirit of passionately committed humanism, Berman sees modernity as universal, cutting "across all boundaries of geography and ethnicity, of class and nationality, of religion and ideologY:'22 While undoubtedly modernism as it has migrated from its European context maintains these characteristics, as many historians have pointed out, it is essential to see the specific inscription of a hegemonic West in the very notion of the modern, in discussing Japan's modernity)3 Berman's attribution of contradiction to the modern may very well characterize all "modernities;' but one of its central expressions in Japan can be located in the conjuncture of the sense of history made inconsequential and the desire to narrate an immediate history that would move beyond the boundaries of Japan's own borders. Demographic upheavals that accompanied rapid urbanization, the quickening rhythms of daily life, the insinuation of new urban culture into the everyday life of virtually everyonethose conspicuous signs of modernity-are all familiar matters in the discussion of Japan's emergence as a modern nation-state. But what has continued to be relegated to later in the century-Japan's encroachment onto the Asian continent in the 1930s-is one of the most striking features ofJapan's modernity that already forms the fabric of the nation-state at the time of Kokoro's appearance in 1914. Used to apprehend early twentieth-century Japan, the term "modern" almost always erases Japan's own reproduction of imperialist behavior and instead signifies the introduction of Western thought and material goods. While forced subjugation of a foreign people is not a practice specific to

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modernity, the modern nation-state has typically engaged in such conduct. Japan actively begins to position itself as an agent of such behavior around the turn of the century, a time when the Japanese are forced to conceptualize their own unity in the context of global imperialist contest. The coincidence of Japan's experience of modernity and the consolidation of a "modern" nation-state is hardly accidental. Like the predecessor forms of modernity in Europe, the experience of the Japanese modern must be closely linked to the establishment of a mass urban population. Rural life promotes a sense of community by differentiating its own small locale from other localities (they can take the form of villages, valleys, towns). A sense of connection will have to come differently in the city, which forces a large number of strangers to share a large, variegated living space, where the conduct of daily life typically requires frequent movement within the city. Sandwiched between the emergence of a vigorous popular culture in the Edo period and the rise of a new mass culture in the twenties and thirties, Soseki's Tokyo is not so much a cluster of disconnected villages, as this city has often been characterized, as it is a population transformed into new dimensions. Benedict Anderson suggests how an even larger space, the nation, achieves wholeness: I propose the following definition of the nation: it is an imagined political community-and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign.... It is imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communication. 24 In his study of nationalism, Anderson goes on to show the importance of "print communities formed around newspapers and novels" in constructing such an imagined community. It is worth noting that during the Meiji period, the print community facilitates the emergence of culture heroes that were discursively created, and such figures were often employed in ways that (sometimes intentionally, at other times unintentionally) served the cause of national consolidation. Thus, the image of the Meiji emperor was given different spins according to the needs of the moment, and the representation of General Nogi Maresuke (1849-1912) quickly shifted from that of an inept strategist responsible for heavy casualties among the Japanese army on the Asian continent to that of a war hero cum educator and guardian of such virtues as selflessness, military valor, and dedication to the nation. 25

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For our discussion, the salient characteristics of Japanese modernity are these: the rise of nationhood given shape by the growth of cities and such manifestations of urban culture as the "development of print-ascommodity[,l ... key to the generation of wholly new ideas of simultaneity:'26 and the exploitation of the means to create and circulate ideas or images (for example, General Nogi) in a short time period to a mass populace. Such are the conditions that give shape to Soseki's Kokoro, which appeared initially as a newspaper "novel" serialized in 110 installments from April 20 to August 11 of 1914. While the tale itself is fictive, it is tied to its moment by the incorporation of the two figures mentioned above, Emperor Meiji and General Nogi; not simply important historical personages, they are figures whose much-Iarger-than-life dimensions had been created by a commodified print culture. Despite the ambivalence that Soseki seems to have shared with his countrymen at the time regarding Nogi's anachronistic suicide, Kokoro ultimately appropriates an image of General Nogi associated with military valor, moral rectitude, and unflinching 10yalty,27 Soseki was well aware that these images were at odds with the history of a soldier who had been suspended from the military on three different occasions, a man who had been dismissed from his post as governor of occupied Taiwan for administrative ineptitude, a general whose outdated strategies and intransigence caused the senseless slaughter of nearly 58,000 of his own men at the battle of Port Arthur, won only after he was replaced by another commanding officer. 28 Despite these facts, the eventual "victory" over the Russians helped elevate Nogi to mythic proportions, and in 1907 he was appointed director of the Peers School "because the government maintained popular respect for Nogi's image as hero of Port Arthur while excluding the failed general from the inner circles of power:'29 In Kokoro, such reversals that link Nogi to the inaugural events of Japanese expansionism are replaced by a "media"creation general whose final image has been imprinted by his suicide. Characteristic of modern fiction, Kokoro treats the everyday life that is also the moment occupied by the text. More importantly, in Kokoro's eschewing of a complicated historical figure at odds with its ideologically motivated image, we confront the text's complicit silence concerning Japanese adventurism on the continent. The process of canonizing a modern Japanese literature directly overlaps with the period of Japanese confrontation with Western culture, which at once provided a model for the Japanese to emulate and an object to resist; but very quickly it became clear that successful resistance to

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Western material and cultural phenomena, that is to say, the maintenance of national sovereignty, would require appropriation of the very things being resisted. Kokoro narrates the experience of modernity transplanted to Japanese soil as at once something radically foreign that was forced upon Japan and a new moment signaling the sudden irrelevance of Japan's own history, which might have helped the Japanese negotiate the present. Perhaps like the modernity that was experienced on its native ground thousands of miles removed, Japan's modernity can only be perceived as confirming one of the irreducible facts of modern life-that it is radically contradictory. And, not unlike the upheavals of nineteenth-century Europe characterized by Nietzsche's declaration of the death of God, the events following the Imperial Restoration of 1868 spelled alternating, sometimes simultaneous, movements of repudiating the past, questioning it, and resurrecting it as the enduring repository of what is essentially Japanese. Kokoro textualizes the irony of its protagonist's inability to speak within a modernity that ostensibly redefines time and space to permit increased occasion to meet and to interact with others. And, in the very transformation of a serialized one-part newspaper narrative into a book in three parts, Kokoro reproduces the attempt to narrativize something called a "modern" Japanese history. Within the next decade, such narrative activity would be depicting an imperialist mapping of Asia rivaling that of the Western powers. SYNOPSIS

Kokoro is narrated in the first person by a student who befriends an older man at a beach where they are both vacationing. The Student is drawn to Sensei by the mystery of the latter's unexplained loneliness, and the gradual revelation of Sensei's life provides a way for the Student to shed his innocence and confront the dangers that lie in following the stirrings of his own heart. The first part, titled "Sensei and r:' tells the circumstances that lead to the friendship between Sensei and the narrating Student. It serves mainly to raise questions that remain unanswered until Sensei's revelations in his letter (part three): whose grave does Sensei dutifully visit alone every month? In spite of the love between Sensei and his wife, why is there no joy in his life? And despite his education, why does Sensei live with no job, almost completely cut off from society?

Writing Out Asia 183 Part two, "My Parents and I;' recounts the Student's return to his home in the country to be with his dying father, a man whose unreflective security in his own conventionality contrasts sharply with the anguished intellectual figure of Sensei. As the Student's vigil lengthens into summer, a long letter arrives from Sensei. The impending death of his father prevents the Student from reading the letter from beginning to end, but in quickly skimming it, he is stung by the line that reads "by the time this letter reaches you, I shall probably have left this world - I shall in all likelihood be dead:' In an act that leaves the door open for the Student to relive the same sense of guilt and despair that consumes Sensei, he immediately leaves his dying father and rushes back to Tokyo. Part three, "Sensei and His Testament;' consists entirely of Sensei's letter written to the Student, a letter which presumably clarifies the mysteries of a man who lives each day tormented by his past. It reveals how, left in the care of his uncle after the death of his parents, the school-age Sensei is subsequently tricked out of his inheritance. With what is left from his inheritance, he comes to study at the University. Sensei falls in love with the daughter of a widow in whose house he takes room and board. In the meantime, Sensei is worried about a classmate whom he identifies solely by the initial "K:' Concerned about this friend, whose ascetic spirituality makes daily living a hazardous ordeal, Sensei persuades K to move in with him. Despite K's puritanical insistence on living a spiritual life, he, too, falls in love with the widow's daughter, Ojosan. Upon hearing K confess his feelings for her, Sensei is seized with panic for having missed the opportunity to declare his own feelings (and presumably, to make prior, more legitimate claims on Ojosan). Fueled by the jealousy he feels on those occasions when he perceives Ojosan to be favoring K, Sensei plays on K's sincerity and ridicules him for straying from his path of the mind and spirit. Whether moved by his own heart, goaded by jealousy toward K, or influenced from some other direction (the text is ambiguous), Sensei quickly asks for Ojosan's hand in marriage, but is unable to tell K about it. When K discovers what has happened, he takes his own life. There is no accusation in his short suicide note, which simply ends with "why did I wait so long to die?" Sensei later marries Ojosan, but he never confesses his part in the drama of K's death, out of fear, he writes in his last letter, that telling her would "taint her whole life with the memory of something that was ugly:' As a result, Ojosan must suffer through living with a man who has renounced any intention to live, never certain how she herself might be the cause of his unexplained misery.

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DEATH, TEXT, AND THE PROBLEM OF LOST HISTORY

Kokoro's use of a mythic General Nogi, together with the cameo appearance of a Westerner in the second chapter that has baffled critics over the years, alerts us to the text's refusal to admit any meaningful consideration of events outside Japan's borders. Only because he is noticed by the Student does the Westerner become visible in the text, but the abruptly truncated appearance only serves to signal an absence from the work. What strikes the narrator-Student about this Caucasian male is the attire that distinguishes him from other foreigners-he is wearing a genuine Japanese yukata (junsui no Nihon no yukata), which he discards to reveal a "white body covered only by a loincloth that we Japanese wear" (kare wa

ware ware no haku sarurnata hitotsu no hoka nanirnono rno hada ni tsukete inakatta).30 A succession of incongruities confront the Student's gaze, from a white man in a crowd of Japanese, to a foreigner unlike other foreigners (the Student notes the contrast between this Westerner [seiyojinl and the others he had seen two days earlier at another beach where they had worn Western-style swimming outfits that covered much more of their bodies). In this passage the Westerner enacts a series of subverted connections between outward appearance and expectations. The suggestive focus on such details that frame the Student's initial encounter with Sensei recalls the detective-mystery story frame that is employed in many of Soseki's works and throughout this one. The association of this Westerner to Sensei plays upon the fact that Kokoro at least appears to maintain narrative interest by revealing more and more of Sensei. But just as the expectations are overturned, this detail, the curious Westerner, turns out to be a false lead that tells us nothing about Sensei. If thematically this apparently dead-end appearance of the Westerner inadvertently reveals an aspect of its time that the text is not prepared to pursue, viewed formalistically the false clue serves to reveal the text's status as fiction. Despite the intrusion of actual historical figures like the Emperor Meiji and General Nogi, Kokoro aspires to a kind of mimesis for mimesis's sake. We can apply Simon During's characterization of Jane Austen's unmotivated novel to Soseki's work: With this lack of motivation comes a new principle of organization and delimitation-organic unity.... It operates a formal requirement of autonomous texts intent on providing a scene adjacent to the nation-state. The text's unity is the unity of culture-a set of overlap-

Writing Out Asia 185 ping, unprogrammable connections and analogies within the strictly delimited frame of the work itselPl What is described here is the realization of textual convention that is affirmed in the modern era, where narrative practice is "accorded" its own status by being relegated to the realm of cultural creation. If realism values the apparent likeness of literature to "the real world;' it also rests on the presumption that the two are finally separate. It is the ambivalence of Soseki's text, the way in which it gestures to historical events and people while affirming mimeticist views of art as autonomous, that distinguishes Kokoro. The relationship of Sensei to the Westerner, particularly as it remains a mystery, raises the suspicion that Sensei is not as isolated and asocial as the Student presents him to be. But insofar as the text rests on the promise of gradual disclosure, it must do what it can to thicken the mystery. For, that sense of mystery is the textual strategy that Kokoro uses to realize its primary task: to interrogate the relationship between Sensei and the Student. 32 Earlier interpretations attribute inconclusiveness or irresolution to this text, largely because Sensei's death is not adequately explained by his testament. In my reading, the problem of indeterminacy is most vividly inscribed in this relationship between "teacher" and "student." It is the absence that marks their relationship-a firm ground for knowledge and knowing (that a teacher ought to impart to students), of a modern history, or of awareness that one's own country seeks nationness through colonial expansion. As the narrator, the Student presents a monologue of a dead father (Sensei) whose words must steadfastly focus on the private (the urban, nuclear family with little contact with the outside world), and whose only links to the social are orchestrated images of the emperor and his former general. The State, its modern history, and knowledge are disavowed or pointedly absent in Sensei's private account, and it is through the Student's relationship to him that we can recognize these "absences:' It is in that sense that the brief appearance of the Westerner in the beach scene makes more sense when viewed as signaling an absence. Kokoro's opening lines inaugurate this process of confronting modernity by problematizing the student -Sensei relationship. I always called him Sensei. I shall therefore refer to him simply as "Sensei;' and not by his real name. It is not because I consider it more discreet, but it is because I find it more natural that I do so. Whenever

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Literally denoting priority by birth (born before), "sensei" is most commonly used by students to refer to their teachers or as a term of direct address that signals the respect one has toward a person who is knowledgeable and wise by virtue of his or her age and experience. Kokoro's opening lines make sense only if the person referred to by this referent does not properly fit the conditions of the appellation and thus requires a disclaimer. The narrator is a college student, and while we are told that Sensei is a graduate of the university and has conducted research, he does not teach or work at all. Sensei's attitude toward scholarship and learning is expressed in his answer as to why he is no longer interested in books: "Perhaps it is because I have decided that no matter how many books I may read, I shall never be a very much better man than I am now" (p. 54).33 The thematics of Kokoro indicate favoring of matters of the heart over learning and knowledge, but it is a text whose narrative quest for deeper understanding ultimately signals the valuation of the latter. If the disjunction between content and form bespeaks the ambiguities of modernity, the split also enacts Soseki's singular ability to straddle what has been a rigid divide in Japanese letters between serious and popular fiction. Soseki represents the erasure of what in later years would become a widely accepted opposition between serious literature (jun bungaku) and popular narratives. It is not surprising that such a writer's work looks critically upon the separation of knowledge and learning set in motion by focusing on the status of the "sensei:' Among the unspoken requirements for inclusion in the canon of serious literature is a text's ability to contribute to the cultivation of a literate and intelligent reading population that is bound together by common discourses of knowledge (and its transmission). In Kokoro, "Sensei" is constructed to overlap the domains of scholarly knowledge and wisdom gained through personal experience. But the very ground upon which both of these are rooted - Japan's past - has been shaken by the incursion of a more recent historical phenomenon called modernity. In large part, the value accrued to knowledge comes from its claims to represent time-tested practices of the distant past. History as the guarantor of knowledge has been undercut by the experience of modernity, leaving in Kokoro, a "sensei" without the traditional roles given to a person with his title. Kokoro's strategic response to this dilemma con-

Writing Out Asia 187 sists of the narrating Student's act of framing Sensei's death note with his own narrative act. There is special meaning, then, in the way the questioning of knowledge and its transmission is linked to muteness and death as responses to the overwhelming contradictions of an era that Soseki's text unsuccessfully attempts to comprehend. Kokoro invokes a narrative of patriarchy for this task, letting family ideology be tested by the new age. Doris Sommer's discussion of Latin American novels can help defamiliarize Kokoro's confrontation with modernity. After acknowledging Anderson's connection of nation-building to print communities, Sommer argues that in order to explain why these novels are so "relentlessly attractive;' we must not overlook in them the romance that "legitimates the nation-family through love:' She continues: I suggest that this natural and familial grounding, along with its rhetoric of productive sexuality, provides a model for apparently nonviolent national consolidation during periods of internecine conflict. To paraphrase another foundational text, after the creation of the new nations, the domestic romance is an exhortation to be fruitful and multiply. 34

Kokoro contrasts sharply with this construction of "nation-family" and a "rhetoric of productive sexuality." Instead, it reduces Ojosan, the sole female who might have played a larger part in the text, to a figure who cannot contribute to the ostensible central objective of this work: to explain Sensei.3 5 While Soseki's text suggests the deterioration of the "traditional" Japanese family (for example, the Student's family living in the countryside), it cannot write out the narrative of patriarchy that the Meiji State institutionalized through the promotion of a "family" modeled on the samurai family. Kokoro displays the effects of a relentless state policy to govern its citizenry by reappropriating filial discourse, the law of the father, in post-Restoration Japan. The narrator-Student interrupts his study to return to the countryside to be with his ailing father, who closely follows the daily newspaper accounts of the dying Meiji emperor. The death of the monarch causes his father to fade rapidly, as if their fates were somehow linked. It is his father who first sees the news of General Nogi's death in the paper. A few days after the emperor's death, Nogi had taken his own life in atonement for the lost banner, resurrecting a practice called junshi (following one's lord to the grave) that had been outlawed since the 1600s. Like the Student's father,

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Sensei himself wi111ink his own impending death by suicide to these two public figures representing the tumultuous years of the Meiji period. Here are Sensei's thoughts on the emperor's death: I felt as though the spirit of the Meiji era had begun with the Emperor and had ended with him. I was overcome with the feeling that I and the others, who had been brought up in that era, were now left behind to live as anachronisms .... I had almost forgotten that there was such a word as junshi ... I did feel that the antiquated word had come to hold a new meaning for me. (p. 245) While Sensei mourns the passing of an age, his suicide is not cast as the recreation of a traditional, public act. Within the line of male figures linked by death-Emperor Meiji, General Nogi, the Student's father, and Sensei-are we to insert the narrator-Student, who appears to ensure himself a future fraught with guilt and torment by leaving his father on the brink of death? Let us remember that the break between Sensei and the Student is anticipated by the questioning of the very notion of "sensei:' a word that signals its own relationship (mentor-student). We must shift registers in the way we view Sensei's death in order to see how its signification escapes a "traditional" meaning of death and also shapes the text as a whole. My students have often been baffled by Sensei's inability to "simply communicate:' whether with Ojosan, his close friend K, or with the Student to whom he finally writes his long epistle. Differences in time, place, and sensibility dearly separate the textualized Sensei from today's inquisitive Western readers of Kokoro, but the question can guide us to matters that bear on the canonization of this work. It is worth noting that the inability to express feeling recurs frequently. In part two, the Student returns to his parents in the countryside, sitting in vigil with his older brother, who has rushed home from western Japan to be with their dying father; the two sit and wait, unable to admit that both of them await their father's death. When K confesses to being in love with Ojosan, Sensei can say nothing in response to the revelation. Instead, he seeks out Ojosan's mother and asks for her daughter's hand without mentioning it to K. Several days after hearing of Sensei's action, K quietly kills himself. To the very end, Sensei shields his wife from the truth about K's suicide, revealing his tale of betrayal solely to the Student as his last testament. The final instance of broken communication is, of course, the death of

Writing Out Asia 189 Sensei. Kokoro explores the relationship between speaking and death, the latter as the precondition for the former. Sensei's death is almost always attributed to such markers of Japanese modernity as the disintegration of the family unit, the ascendance of self-oriented conceptions of society, and the pernicious effects of an industrialized, increasingly materialistic nation. However, Sensei's death must also be seen together with the frustration of speechlessness, the loss of voice, and the erosion of familiar avenues by which the sense of subject could be affirmed that must have assailed many of Sensei's generation. More functionally viewed, death engenders the production of Sensei's letter and, in turn, the Student's act of textualization. Put differently, it is the very possibility of textualizing life, of organizing it in accordance with the laws of writing and narrativizing, that paradoxically gives rise to the impossibility of speech. Sensei's life, which is governed by the inability to speak and communicate with others, is revealed in the form of a last will and testament-a document that reinforces new signifying relations governing narrativizing and death. For a man who remains trapped in his own silence to the end, only the immediate emptiness of death can engender the production of a long letter to break that silence. As if"he were listening to his own death;' Sensei produces a written account tracing the events that lead him to live life as if he were dead, a life punctuated by his own suicide. Foucault's discussion of the function of language in the Odyssey can help us illuminate the status of language in Kokoro. The limit of death opens before language, or rather within language, an infinite space. Before the imminence of death, language rushes forth, but it also starts again, tells of itself, discovers the story of the story and the possibility that this interpretation might never end. Headed toward death, language turns back upon itself; it encounters something like a mirror, and to stop, this death which would stop it, it possesses but a single power: that of giving birth to its own image in a play of mirrors that has no limits.36 The Student to whom the testament is written inserts himself at that very point where a stop might be made of endless interpretation. But he is not positioned as the authoritative interpreting agent or "next" in the chain of filial transmitters of knowledge. Kokoro speaks to the limits of such institutionalized intellectual labors. And, acting much like what Barthes calls a writerly text, Kokoro invites the reader to assume the very position given to the Student, to narrativize and hence to interpret the story of Sensei.

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In a sense, Soseki himself "reinterpreted" the text when he took the serialized newspaper version, which was one continuous narrative subtitled "Sensei and His Testament;' and reissued it in book form after dividing it into three parts (as we know it today)Y The structural division sharpens the sense of contest that defines the relationship between Sensei and the Student. The first two parts provide background information on the Student, the circumstances of his encounter with Sensei, and his abbreviated visit to his dying father in the country. Parts one and two are also replete with hints about Sensei's past, his impending suicide-in short, those matters that await revelation in part three, "Sensei and His Testament:' There, in his own voice, Sensei recounts the process leading to his own death which provides that point from which the past (whether that of Sensei, the Student, or Japan's immediate history) must be narrated or created anew. In Kokoro, death generates such narrative activity in a form that evinces its own status as writing. Note that the Student's narrative is a response not to the death of Sensei, but to the narration of his dying (the testament! letter). And it is not the veracity of Sensei's disclosures that matters, for overwhelmingly the text speaks to the nature of representation and its uses in modern civil society. Thus, the revelation of Sensei's past occupies the thematic center of this text, but the real interest moves outside Sensei's life to the Student who responds to him, first by befriending him, and then by narrating his story. The text "owes" its existence to the Student's "narrative response" to Sensei's death, and the thematic weight of the text falls on the Student-what will be his fate? Kokoro was written during the years when, in spite of the existence of a wide range of writing, literature legitimated by claims of un mediated recording of real life continued to reign as orthodoxy. We must recognize that Soseki's work eschews the designation shizenshugi (naturalist) literature, contributing instead to a body of writing whose" 'truth' or 'falsity' is secondary to the task of representation itself:' I have borrowed During's words used to describe the English literature of the "civil Imaginary;' works that reenact everyday life, typically assuming the form ofletters, memoirs, and other written forms. Such literature, During states, "reproduces representations of manners, taste, behavior, utterances for imitation by individuallives:'38 As in such works, Kokoro's narrator "is explicitly socially located in the writing, the text's occasion being made apparent:'39 Reinforcing the effect produced by introducing a Westerner, which I identified earlier, the narrator-Student serves to highlight fabulation by gesturing to

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the very conditions that engender the text - by a character whose function is limited to that of witness and writer. The central contradiction of Soseki's text, which is narrativized by a character whose participation in the production of text clearly differentiates him from the protagonists of shizenshugi literature, is expressed as a break between Sensei, for whom "truth" is primary, and the Student, whose concern is representation (here, storytelling) . By framing Sensei's confessional testament within the conditions that occasioned the creation of a larger text, the Student has shifted Kokoro from the register of shizenshugi to a text about representation. (The anticipatory hints in the first two sections that are more fully revealed in the testament section might well be read as awkward and at times uncertain duplications of a self-adequate text.) In what formalists would call a motivated text, both the prominence of private confession and the insertion of a perceiving writer to whom the confession is directed affirm the troubled status of the individual in Meiji society and the highly privatized way in which the text must write itself-that is, around suicide. But, just as death is ambivalently associated with both the private (Sensei and his quiet suffering) and the public spheres (the Emperor Meiji and General Nogi) in Kokoro, the status of the individual subject remains in question. When Ojosan is left behind by an overprotective husband who leaves his wife with no explanation for his own death, in what position does that leave the Student? Passing references in the first two parts indicate that he has kept his promise to Sensei and not conveyed to her even the existence of the testament let alone its contents. In effect, Sensei has left the Student with the imperative to remain mute, to reproduce the path of betrayal, selfloathing, and despair. The Student's response to this imperative is the fabulation, the narration of Kokoro beyond the borders of Sensei's own testament. 40 Such transgression, it appears, is the only way by which the Student can avoid becoming yet another figure in the chain of institutionalized patriarchy and death that threatens to persist in modern Japanese society. At the same time, the Student's act comes marked as a "creative destruction" that is a central feature of modernity.41 Concomitant to the destruction that clears away tradition, that reduces human relations to a depersonalized calculus of money and profit, that engenders war as a means of subjecting people to colonial rule, there is a ratification of"creation" that is tightly implicated in moments of "destruction"- the "other" to creation in the dialectic of modernity. Kokoro is written in relation to other texts that constitute the field oflit-

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erature, but that realm does not exist apart from larger "situations:' Japanese naturalist literature-confessional writings that signaled their own veracity by the luridness of the author's revelations-peaked in 1908. Such prose would largely determine the shape of the Japanese canon, resurrected as the I -novel of the 1920S and 1930S. Soseki's Kokoro overtly challenges the naturalist I-novel trend by centering death, which can have no role in such narratives that impart the sense of unmediated depiction of the writer's own ongoing life. Death establishes Kokoro as derisively gesturing in the direction of shizenshugi-shishosetsu literature and its practitioners, who continued to occupy key positions within the Japanese literary establishment. Death also plays a role in situating the work in the world. Kokoro raises questions about a Japanese experience of modernity, the juxtaposition of silence, textuality, and death relating this work not only to the literary currents of its time, but to the sense of nation ness defined in global terms. In the coming decades, Japanese intellectuals would articulate more explicitly their concerns with a "world history" that excluded Japan. 42 Soseki's work can only forecast in oblique gestures (the fleeting appearance of a Westerner), through a text marked by absence (the dead father-Sensei), the complicity of intellectual and military responses to this exclusion that would lead to heightened expansionist activity on the Asian continent. 43 As surely as a helpless silence and death would fuel and encourage narrative activity in Kokoro, confrontation with Japan's own mordant history would lead Japan to emulate the imperialist trajectories of the Western powers and to narrate its own history of coercion onto the map. Here again, Kokoro contests Japanese shizenshugi literature, which displaced historical awareness with the "present;' or contemporaneity as a signifier of modernity. By linking Sensei's suicide with the Meiji emperor's death, Soseki's work attempts to create what is absent from shizenshugishishosetsu literature and from the Meiji era itself-a history of modern Japan. In Kokoro, death urges us to look back at the events leading to that null point, and seek meaning in individual lives from such a frame, thereby memorializing the first epoch of post -Restoration Japan (Meiji). As Soseki's work almost heroically confronts the challenge to find meaning in times when past history has lost its authority, it ends up engaging that moment (modernity) with pointed and troubling blinders. Sharing space in the Asahi Shimbun with the later installments of Kokoro are articles and photographs of European mobilization for war. Photographs of impressive German and British officers and implements of war alternate with images of Japanese men of war in the July and August 1914 editions of

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the Asahi. Soseki's text shared space not only with such visible records of military behavior abroad, but with prominent ads for "Lion" toothpaste for boys and girls, "miruku-meido;' and "Dunlop" tires. 44 Along with the "content" of such coverage of international events and these new products, the Asahi was unmistakably projecting itself as the purveyor of modernity. What Soseki's prose fiction (including Kokoro) demonstrates is a blindness to the connection between Japan's experience of modernity, about which he felt tremendous ambivalence, and to Japan's extraterritorial activities. Thus, what we might observe as one condition of the canonization of works such as Kokoro (appearing as it did on the pages of a mass-circulation daily urging readers to become consumers of new "modern" goods) is a narrowly constricted focus on minute nuances of private perceptions, thoughts, and feelings. At a time when Japan's own search for subjecthood - for proclaiming a place in world history-was so acutely felt, his canonized works would pointedly ignore the grammar of nationness within which Japan sought recognition. Yet the text's engagement with issues of modernity that arise in the narration of silence and death unwittingly reproduce the concurrent narratives of nation and empire and the construction of a "modern" Japanese history-those conditions that governed the simultaneous creation of a new literary canon. Soseki, of course, did not canonize Kokoro. As agents of an ongoing process of canonizing, it is our responsibility to question Soseki's texts as the inaugural moment of literary high modernism in Japanese literature.

NOTES I am grateful to Norma Field, Edward Fowler, William Haver, Komori Yoichi, Masao Miyoshi, Leslie Pincus, Ellen Radovic, Naoki Sakai, Miriam Silverberg, Marilyn Young, and an anonymous reader, who, in varying ways, helped shape this essay. 1 Mugentai 89 (IBM Japan, Winter 1991). Naoki Sakai's intervention led to subsequent publication of that paper in BUlzgaku 3, no. 4 (Iwanami Shoten, Fall 1992). An Englishlanguage version of that paper appears as chapter 5 in my book Complicit Fictions: The Subject in the Modern Japanese Prose Narrative (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), pp. 126-150. 2 The critical literature on Soseki and his works, even limited to Kokoro, is extensive, and he has always attracted attention beyond those working in the field of modern Japanese literature. If literary critics such as Komiya Toyotaka, Ochi Haruo, Ino Kenji, and Eto Jun represent an inchoate "mainstream;' Karatani might be seen as both heir to and critic of such Soseki criticism. Among Karatani's many studies touching on Soseki are his awardwinning essays, "Ishiki to shizen" (Consciousness and nature) and "Uchigawa kara mita

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sei" (Life viewed from within); see "Soseki shiki ron I, II;' in Ifu suru ningen (Tojusha, 1979), and "Soseki no tayo sei-Kokoro 0 megutte;' in Kotoba to higeki (Daisan Bunmei

Sha, 1989), pp. 29-44. A more pointedly historicist meditation on Soseki is found in his

Nihon kindai bungaku no kigen (Kodansha, 1980), esp. pp. 7-22. What might be called a new generation of theoretically sophisticated studies of Soseki's work is represented by Komori Yoichi's "Kokoro ni okeru hanten suru'shuki'-kuhaku to imi no seisei;' in Soseki sakuhin-ron shusei: Kokoro, ed. Tarnai Takayuki and Fujii Hidetada (Ofusha, 1991), pp. 304-315; and Ishihara Chiaki's work, including "Manazashi to shite no tasha: Kokoro ron;' Nihon no bungaku (December 1990), and "Kokoro no Oedeipusu: hanten suru katari;' in Soseki sakuhin-ron shusei, pp. 304-315. 3 Compiled by Ishihara Chiaki in Kindai shosetsu kenkyu hikkei, ed. Yuseido Shuppanbu (Yuseido, 1988), PP.157-168. Karatani claims that Kokoro remains somewhat devalued by virtue of its status as a confessional-epistolary (hence, pre- or proto-novelistic) novel. See "Soseki no tayo sei" (cited note 2 above), pp. 32-33. 4 Edward Fowler launches a carefully documented criticism of the personal politics that underwrite this project. See "Rendering Words, Traversing Cultures: On the Art and Politics of Translating Modern Japanese Fiction;' Journal of Japanese Studies 18, no. I (Winter 1992): 1-44. The unseemliness of the conservative canonizing enterprise married to commercial gain is even more tellingly and unwittingly revealed in Frank Gibney's subsequent reaction to Fowler's study. Gibney's letter and Fowler's impressive response are in the Winter 1993 issue of the same journal. 5 Natsume Soseki, Kokoro: A Novel and Selected Essays, vol. 1 of The Library of Japan (New York: Madison Books, 1992). 6 As Mary Layoun observes, his texts "raise a darkly despairing and contradictory objection, not to modernization and the foreign, not to nationalism ... but to the stultifying social and cultural effects of the specific direction that modernization, nationalism, foreign 'importation; and capitalism took" (from Travels of a Genre: The Modern Novel and Ideology [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990], P.117). 7 The quote is from Michel Foucault, "Nietzsche, Genealogy, History:' in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews by Michel Foucault, ed. Donald F. Bouchard (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), p. 164. 8 For example, see his Soseki to sono jidai, 2 vols. (Shincho Sensho, 1970). Eto's subsequent anti-American books and essays might even be seen as a kind of recantation of his earlier work (his career and reputation were established on Soseki criticism), which, perhaps unwittingly, at once belonged with and contributed to modernization discourse. 9 As Etienne Balibar observes, "every modern nation is a product of colonization: it has always been to some degree colonized or colonizing, and sometimes both at the same time" (from "The Nation Form: History and Ideology;' in Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities [London: Verso, 1991], p. 89). 10 This is not to argue that Soseki's texts refuse to acknowledge Asia. Shumi no iden (The heredity of taste) (1905) celebrates the memory of a close friend made all the more glorious because of his self-sacrificial death for the Imperial cause at Port Arthur. Manchuria appears in several works (including Sanshiro and Higan sugi made) for characters seeking escape from financial troubles in Japan; another figure chooses to flee Japan to Korea to seek work in Meian. My concern in this essay is with the signification we migltt give to these references in the context of a process called canonization.

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13 14

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For a brief discussion of Soseki's literature and Man-Kan, see Izu Toshihiko, "Soseki to Ajia: Man-Kan tokorodokoro sono ta;' in Natsume Soseki to tenno sci (Yuseido, 1989), pp. 228-263. Izu attempts to temper Soseki's prejudicial remarks by observing, for example, that while he may have used pejoratives such as "chan;' Soseki deepened his identification as a fellow Asian during his trip to the Asian continent. Izu further notes that Soseki commends the Chinese for battling the British and praises their unwillingness to embrace willy-nilly all things Western, as the japanese have tended to do. joshua Fogel, "japanese Literary Travel in Pre-War China;' Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 49, no. 2 (December 1989): 575-602. In the afterword to the zenshu volume that includes Man-Kan, Komiya Toyotaka echoes the widespread sentiment that Soseki is a very obtrusive figure in this piece. See Soseki zenshu, vol. 8 (Iwanami Shoten, 1975), p. 529. Fogel, "japanese Literary Travel," P.582. Fredric jameson, "Third World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism;' Social Text (Fall 1986), quoted in Homi Bhabha, "DissemiNation;' in Homi Bhabha, ed., Nation and Narration (New York: Routledge, 1990), p. 292. Frank Kermode, "Institutional Control ofInterpretation;' Salmagundi 43 (Winter 1979): 72-86.

16 Charles Altieri, "An Idea and Ideal of a Literary Canon," Critical Inquiry

10

(December

1983): 39. It must be noted that Altieri's description describes a scenario which he sets up

explicitly to challenge. Positioning himself critically against what he calls a "critical historicism" and a "hermeneutics of suspicion;' he argues that "the past that canons preserve is best understood as a permanent tlreater helping us shape and judge personal and social values, that our self-interest in the present consists primarily in establishing ways of employing tlrat theater to gain distance from our ideological commitments .... " See p. 40. 17 Richard Ohmann, "The Shaping of a Canon: U.S. Fiction, 1960-1975:' Critical Inquiry 10 (September 1983): 199. 18 The term "canon" defies easy translation into japanese society, where relationships governing the reader, writer, publisher, etc., not to mention the social dynamics of differential power, are different from our own. My reference to such matters as japanese currency and school-age children's polls is meant to hint at the "noninstitutional" contours of Japanese canonicity. I employ the term here for its utility in conceiving a public, mediating space, where the private (whether autlror or reader) meets the public sphere. 19 Michael Brownstein discusses the canonization of classical Japanese texts in tire Meiji era by focusing on the institutionalization of literary histories. See "From Kokugaku to Kokubungaku: Canon Formation in the Meiji Period;' Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 47, no. 2 (1987): 435-460. For a thoughtful consideration of canonicity and zenshu, see Miriam Silverberg, Changing Song: The Marxist Manifestos of Nakano Shigeharu, pp. 163-168. 20 Baudelaire, quoted in David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity (Cambridge: Basil

Blackwell, 1990), p. 10. 21 Marshall Berman, All that Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity (New York:

Simon and Schuster, 1982), p. 15. 22 Ibid., p. 15. For a thoughtful critique of Berman's book, see Perry Anderson, "Modernity

and Revolution;' in Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg, eds., Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), pp. 317-333. 23 For example, see Naoki Sakai, "Modernity and Its Critique: The Problem of Universalism

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and Particularism;' in South Atlantic Quarterly 87 (Summer 1988): 475-504, particularly his discussion of Koyama Iwao and Kosaka Masaaki's views on world-historical representation. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983), p. 15. Carol Gluck addresses the changing figuration of the Meiji emperor in Japan's Modern Myths (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), pp. 221-226. Telling confirmation of the prominence of worldly events in late Meiji society is found in the memoirs of Nakano Shigeharu. In her discussion of his Nashi no hana (Pear flowers) (1957-1958), Miriam Silverberg observes that the "expansion of empire, the execution of Kotoku Shusui, and the passing of the Emperor are embedded in the narrative, as Meiji history enters the village through the eyes of a child giving meaning to his immediate surroundings" (from Silverberg, Changing Song, p. 18). For an extended discussion of print culture and political consciousness in Meiji-Taisho Japan, see Silverberg, pp. 16-30. The quote is from Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, p. 41. Gluck surveys the ambivalent reaction to Nogi's junshi in Japan's Modern Myths, pp. 21 9- 2 56.

28 Lifton et al. note that during the Russo-Japanese War, "Nogi was denounced as an inept,

29 30 31 32

33

34 35

36

'no-policy' general who was senselessly murdering the nation's youth" (from Robert J. Lifton, Shuichi Kato, and Michael R. Reich, Six Lives, Six Deaths: Portraits from Modern Japan [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979], p. 51). Ibid., p. 54· Soseki bungaku zenshu 6 (Shueisha, 1983), p. 366. English-language quotations are from Edwin McClellan's translation (Tokyo: Charles E. Tuttle, 1978). Simon During, "Literature-Nationalism's Other? The Case for Revision;' in Homi Bhabha, Nation and Narration, p. 147. While removed from the focus of the present study, the relationships between Sensei and K, the Westerner, and the Student suggest personal affinities that are not entirely asexual. Doi Takeo pursues this matter in The Psychological World of Natsume Soscki (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1976). Over the years, many critics have examined the relationship between the Student and K, some arguing that he signifies a pre-Meiji spirit, others that he is a symbol of a modern orientation to learning and knowledge. For a discussion of the relationship as governed by an "objectifying gaze;' see Ishihara Chiaki, "Manazashi to shite no tasha: Kokoro ron" (cited note 2 above). Doris Sommer, "Irresistible Romance: The Foundational Fictions of Latin America;' in Nation and Narration, p. 76. Several critics rightfully poi!}t to a more significant function given to Ojosan. For example, Komori Yoichi suggests that the Student returns to Tokyo as he reads Sensei's testament in order to enter into a relationship with Ojosan that is more than that between mentor's wife to student. This act of following one's heart, he argues, demonstrated a way to overcome a family-centered patriarchy continuing to order Meiji civil society. See Komori's "Kokoro 0 seisei suru haato;' in Buntai to shite no monogatari (Chikuma Shobo, 1988), esp. pp. 312-317. Michel Foucault, "Language to Infinity;' in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, p. 54.

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37 While there are minor stylistic revisions, the original newspaper version and the Iwanami book edition remain virtually the same. 38 Simon During locates the origins of slIch literature in eighteenth-century England. See Nation and Narration, p. 142. 39 Ibid., p. 143· 40 Ishihara Chiaki focuses on the dissension between the Student and Sensei in his provocative essay, "Kokoro no Oedeipusu: hanten suru katari" (cited note 2 above). 41 See David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, pp. 18-19. 42 Such culturalists of the 1920S and 1930S as Watsuji, Kuki, and Nishida immediately come to mind. 43 While the Sino-Japanese War of 1895 is a convenient milestone to date the beginnings of Japanese adventurism on the Asian continent, we must remember that increasing government presence in Korea can be discerned from the 18805. See Ramon H. Myers and Mark R. Peattie, The Japanese Colonial Empire, 1895-1945 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984). By all accounts it is the Russo- Japanese War of 1904-1905 that clearly marks the early moments of "social acceptance" for colonialist behavior by Japan. 44 See, for example, Asahi Shim bun, n August 1914.

~ Colonialism and the Sciences of the Tropical Zone: The Academic Analysis of Difference in "the Island Peoples" ~ Tomiyama Ichim

"THE SOUTHERN ISLANDS" AND THE SCIENCES OF THE TROPICAL ZONE

The Sciences of the Tropical Zone and the Memory of Empire Many independent nations were born after World War II as a result of the long struggle for freedom from colonialism. The demise of colonialism was also a process of subsuming people everywhere within nationstates as the reverse of a widely trumpeted internationalism. However, as we can see in the rise of multinational corporations and world-class cities, capitalist accumulation is becoming more global. On the other hand, Benedict Anderson's "Long-Distance Nationalism"l suggests the chaotic and violent dissolution of the nation-state, in the movement of immigrants and refugees on a worldwide scale across national borders. In particular, this process is related to the revival of memories of empire among those countries that have had the experience of governing colonies. The postcolonial condition in those countries is a situation in which the notion that the empire disappeared after the war is gradually being exposed by the destabilization of recently developed nation-states. This is probably also a process in which the postwar national consciousness, which was formed as memories of empire were forgotten, ceaselessly reawakens to those memories. From his understanding of the postwar world order as a new continuation of colonialism, Masao Miyoshi questions the ability of academic discourse to inscribe this situation. 2 While this is a problem for the recently popular variety of studies related to cultural difference, it first and foremost calls for another critical examination of the relationship between colonialism and academic discourse. My attempt to deal with academic

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discourse in the Southern Islands (nan'yo gunto) controlled by Japan over the thirty years from their military occupation in 1914 to their "shattering jewel" demises (gyokusai) in World War II, is based on this problematic. What we need to be careful of is that this kind of examination does not end as a mere inquiry into whether scientific research was used in the control of the colonies. This understanding of academics as a tool has the effect of reducing the area of politics related to colonialism while also unconditionally establishing academics as objective and unrelated to colonialism. One may even go so far as to say that it is precisely in such a discursive space, seen as objective and neutral, that the memory of empire is preserved. What needs to be questioned is the academic discourse that analyzes cultural differences included within the empire. As is well known, the history of modern Japan is the history of an expanding empire-from the Ainu/Moshiri territory to the Ryiikyfls, Taiwan, Korea, Micronesia (the Southern Islands), "Manshu" (Manchukuo), and finally "The Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere:' Corresponding to this imperial history, the human sciences in Japan, particularly anthropology, ethnography, geography, and medicine, took the subsumed peoples in these areas, one after the other, as their objects of inquiry. Up to now, the relationship between these disciplines and colonialism has rarely been examined apart from such limited themes as the human experiments carried out by Unit 731.3 In the background to this, we find not only the problem of the above understanding of academics as a tool, but also the particular national consciousness of postwar Japan in which the historical process of the liberation of the colonies and the breakup of the empire-a history that should have been experienced-is already seen as someone else's affair through the reduction of the end of the Japanese empire to the single event of the loss of the war. Similarly, the notion that it was a fanatical nationalism that established the Japanese empire is also related to the failure to critique science in the empire. The beginning of the postwar era and the closure and erasure of the empire are two sides of the same coin. As part of its participation in World War I, Japan occupied the German territories in the Mariana Islands, Palau, the Caroline Islands, and the Marshall Islands in October 1914. The islands, which today are called Micronesia, and were then called the South Sea Islands, came under the Japanese mandate through the Treaty of Versailles. In 1922 the South Seas Agency was established on the island of Koror in the Palau Islands. The significance of the South Sea Islands for Japanese imperialism was more

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in their position as a base for a military invasion of the Philippines, Indonesia, and New Guinea, than in the economic benefit or burden of the islands themselves. After Japan's departure from the League of Nations in 1933, the area came to be called "the Inner Southern Seas" (uchi nan'yo), further emphasizing its military importance. This name shift clearly reveals an expansionist policy from inner to outer territories. However, the significance of the South Sea Islands in the Southern Advance does not end with their military possibilities. For example, a call for papers in the monthly magazine Nan'yo Gunto (The South Sea Islands), published in the islands at the time, reads, "Life in the South Sea Islands is the training ground for the southern development of the Japanese race. The experience of daily life [there 1 is valuable materiaI:'4 The South Sea Islands, as the first tropical territory acquired by Japanese imperialism, were "an integrated testing ground in preparation for a southern advance:'s And the various disciplines of anthropology, ethnography, archaeology, medicine, labor sciences, agricultural sciences, and biology were all developed on the stage of this "testing ground" as sciences of the tropical zone. As institutions supporting these sciences, the Society for the Promotion of Science established the Palau Tropical Biology Research Center in 1934, and the South Seas Agency established the Tropical Industry Research Centers (on Palau in 1922, on Po nape in 1926, and on Saipan in 1930). In addition, there were hospitals established in every part of the South Sea Islands, and the Pacific Association, established in 1938, organized investigations and research in the area. How were the academic discourses of the sciences of the tropical zone that were formed in the South Sea Islands related to the colonial conditions there? To pursue that problem, this paper will look at how the differences between residents of the islands-called "islanders;' "natives;' "kanaka;' or "chamoro"-and "Japanese" were inscribed and analyzed through these disciplines.

Discourse and Practice In discussing the difference between "islanders" and "Japanese;' we naturally come across points at issue related to the "Orientalism" described by Edward Said. 6 For example, the very process of representing the "islanders" as Other is precisely an operation to ascertain the self-identity of "Japanese:' Consequently, I would like to try to show how "Japanese" were presented within colonial conditions in the South Sea Islands. But when dealing with the academic discourse on the "islanders" in colonial conditions,

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I must consider the problem of the enunciative position of observation that forms the discursive space called academics before I can bring out this relatively formalized framework. 7 What kind of process is the description and constitution, through observation, of the "islanders" in a discursive space within academics? Who is the observing subject that drives this process forward? What the human sciences share in their formation of representations of people in academic discourse is that, like clinical medicine which produces the "diseased" by reading the signs of a disease from the various symptoms of the patient, the symptoms that signify the disease before one's eyes are always in excess. S The human sciences are brought into being, and the observer is established as a subject, in the very process of suppressing this excess and confirming the signs through a system and its rules. In other words, the observing subject applies the filter of a system that only she or he has grasped to the observed object and then reads the symptoms as signs. This system that attributes meaning is the monopoly of the observer, so that the meaning of the signs is established as unrelated to the consciousness of the observed object. Consequently, the patient is told the meaning of the symptoms after the fact and the task of an enlightenment that cautions is thus established. As a result, the narrative of the observer who represents human beings within academic discourse is a powerful discourse that constrains the superfluity of symptoms within the sign and thereby opens a path for the task of enlightenment. However, what I am trying to conceive of here is not a generalized theory of the human sciences, but of the observing subject in colonial conditions. What needs to be problematized is the question of what is suppressed and denied when a researcher describes and constitutes the "islanders" within colonial conditions. While making a distinction between epistemological subjectivity (shukan) and the subject in practical relations (shutai), Naoki Sakai points out that in the process of observing and describing cultural differences within academic discourse, the practical relations that bind the observer to the observed object, as well as the temporality that courses through that relation, are both denied. It is the Other that is depicted according to this practical denial that guarantees cultural identity and produces "our time:'9 Furthermore, Sakai sees this expression of the observing subject that produces cultural identity as an "articulation"described by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe as the practice that organizes social relationslO-and therein he locates the terrain of politics. "The articulation of cultural difference can only be expressed as a practical, in

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other words political, mediation of the strained contradiction between the practical subject and epistemological subjectivity:'!! Frantz Fanon's dissension against and transformations to academic discourse brilliantly reveal this political terrain. For example, Fanon criticizes O. Mannoni's location of the primary cause of French colonial control in a psychoanalytical analysis of the inferiority complex of colonized peoples. Fanon notes, "After having sealed the Malagasy into his own customs, after having evolved a unilateral analysis of his view of the world, after having described the Malagasy within a closed circle;' the analysis presents the inferiority complex as preceding colonial control, so that after the beginning of colonial control, "the Malagasy has ceased to exist:'!2 Fanon attempts to reestablish the Other, which had been described by academic discourse, within the practical relations in colonial conditions that were denied in the enunciation of the observing subject. But that was a problem in Fanon himself. Homi Bhabha notes, "As Fanon's texts unfold, the scientific fact comes to be aggressed by the experience of the street; sociological observations are intercut with literary artefacts, and the poetry of liberation is brought up short against the leaden, deadening prose of the colonized world:'13 Bhabha tries to find the possibility of a new articulation in Fanon's heterogeneous narrative that develops in the widening gap between the signs that are confirmed "scientifically" and the symptoms of the street that consume the signs. But, as Fanon attempts to reestablish practical relations within academic discourse, he gradually stops making statements as an observing subject. For Fanon, the practical relations under colonial conditions were not simply an opportunity for finding the possibility of new enunciations, but the real site of necessary struggle.!4 Fanon's development in this direction may be a retreat from the attempt at a new articulation. But at the same time, not only is the enunciated academic discourse revealed as denying practical relations, it is also revealed as aggressively affirming colonial practice. For example, in Fanon's attack on the relation between medical examination and police interrogation, we can read how academic discourse and violence are a series of technologies that together support colonial control.!5 When Fanon ceased observation, took back a denied practice, and turned to face a recognized practice, he changed from being a psychoanalyst to being a revolutionary. What I would like to investigate in the South Sea Islands is the academic discourse under colonial conditions that Fanon moved away from. In that case, it is precisely the political space that Sakai indicated in relation to the enunciation of the observing subject that

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needs to be emphasized. And again, as we know from Fanon's critique of academic discourse, there is also the issue of the observing subject who, denying the practical relations under colonial conditions, also reveals other practices where the observed Other is redefined in a narrative revealing a practice. It is the purposive narrative that asks not "What are they?" but "What do we do to them?" that defines the epistemological object.

THE CLASSIFIED "ISLAND PEOPLES"

Ethnography In 1929, seven years after the publication of Bronislaw Malinowski's Argonauts of the Western Pacific, Hijikata Hisakatsu began his fifteen years of activity in the South Sea Islands, lasting until his collapse from disease in 1944. His anthropological texts, beginning with his investigations of the island of Satawan, off the island of Yap in the Palau archipelago, are still central to anthropology and ethnography even today and are seen as the results of detailed fieldwork. How do his texts describe those whom he met and lived with in the islands? In the first portion of his ethnography Ryuboku (Driftwood), written on the basis of his seven-year stay on the island of Satawan, Hijikata records the following: How the lives of the uncivilized peoples are controlled by the smallest, most difficult regulations, almost as if they were struggling in a net of their own making! However, in this net - their blindly customary emotions that deserted their reason, their mysticism filled with contradictions unconcerned with logic-they have really quite magnificently lived their lives for several thousand years; there are morals and ethics-their whole lives are harmonized within this net.l 6

As in other ethnographies, Hijikata constitutes their morals, their harmony-one might even say the Other-as different from the society he is positioned in through the local narratives he collects with his masterful linguistic powers. I would like to take up these texts by Hijikata in relation to the problem of the fixation of the observing subject and its practical relations in ethnographic writing. The local narratives gathered in fieldwork are formed in the practical relations between the storyteller and the anthropologist who goes to the storyteller. Moreover, it is impossible for this practice in the field to be established without any relation to the control, subjugation, and resistance in colonial conditions. To put it some-

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what roughly, the background to the local narrative is not the harmony of the storyteller's people, but a practice that is never unrelated to the conditions of colonialism. Consequently, the ethnographic operation that observes the local narratives as the sign of the Other-and thus constructs the Other-always returns practical relations, which are never unrelated to colonial conditions, to the epistemological world. This is accompanied by a process that fixes the Other as observed object and the Self as observing subject. Now, what needs to be scrutinized in Hijikata's writing is not how he organizes and reconstructs, according to academic themes, the broad matters of social relations, language, and religion heard from the Satawal, but how he records this along with his own activities. That is, Driftwood is both an ethnography that depicts an Other and a diary that records the activities of Hijikata himself. At the beginning of the text, Hijikata warns the reader, "This text is a record of my stay, but it is not a diary of my private life. It is not a romantic tale about me. It is a diary of the island and of the village; it is the reality of the island?' We should note the discomfort of an expanding narrative of an ethnography that is supposed to depict the people of Satawal but that also ends up inscribing the ethnographer, so that the Self cannot be fixed as the observing subjectY There is also the possibility that the practical relations in colonial conditions that cannot be completely recovered to the epistemological world may come back to the surface. But in Hijikata, this possibility is avoided through a different method than ethnography. Hijikata's activities in the South Sea Islands were not restricted to anthropological fieldwork. Also a sculptor, Hijikata left works through a variety of forms of expression, in paintings, sculpture, poetry, and prose. How are the people he met and lived with in the islands depicted in these works? In his works apart from ethnography, the words "young women;' "children;' and "nature" frequently appear in addition to the discourses on "pre-civilization" and "primitivity." For example, in Hijikata's prose poem "A Dream of Blue Lizards;' submitted to the magazine Nan'yo Gunto (vol. 7, no. 7, published by the South Sea Islands Culture Association in 1941) under the name Hisaki Isao, IS Hijikata regularly uses metaphors like "nature's queen" and "children" for the "archetypal native daughter" of the poem, Geruru. That is, the prose poem represents original, unchanging "islanders" through discourses on "primitivity;' "young women" and "Nature?' The division between Self and Other that could not be achieved in

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the ethnography is completed here. In addition, the Self is confirmed as "civilization:' "man:' and "adult:' The prose poem is concluded thus: When we are alone there will be nothing more we can say with words when our hearts speak together silently under the unbearable weight of an immense happiness we might softly take each other's hands and weep. The destined meeting of these two who, after all, need no words is anticipated in the essential and unchanging division of the Self and the Other. The practical relations that could not be recovered in Hijikata's ethnography are represented in another discursive space as a fortunate meeting with destiny. In other words, the instability of the observing subject in field work and the romantic and destined division, then unification, of the Self and the Other in the poem exist for Hijikata in mutual support. It goes without saying that this kind of design/complicit relation is tied to the denial of practical relations in colonial conditions. Later, Hijikata himself records the following from a meeting with some young men who criticized the suppression of a religious movement in Palau that proclaimed itself anti-Japanese: "I didn't think 1 could talk about difficult things with these garrulous young Palauans. If I did, I would spend some several thousand words on them, and I would probably only tell them whatever was convenient:'19 He astutely acknowledges an area that has been denied, and also recognizes that the moment he enters that area his Self, as an observing subject, will be destroyed and will be unable to write any further. It is as an extension of the denial of this kind of practice that Hijikata redefines their world as an object of the practice of "enlightenment:' Despite the instability of the diary as writing, the practice of "enlightenment" appears rather suddenly. "If we don't untie the knots of the net that have been tied so tightly over many years, then they cannot be civilized quickly. Now is the time when it has become the responsibility of the Japanese to untie those knotS:'20 The Other depicted in the ethnography is redefined as an Other that must be "civilized:' in the affirmation of practical relations that appear suddenly. At the same time, the "Japanese" appear, not as someone to observe, nor as someone to enact a romantic meeting, but as someone to guide and instruct the "islanders:' However, to repeat, Hijikata's ethnography itself develops as an unstable narrative in which the Self and the Other cannot be completely distin-

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guished. This denial and affirmation of practice does not proceed directly from the writing of his ethnography, but is found throughout his unconsolidated, multilayered narrative. Again, this multilayeredness is a problem of the observing subject that cannot completely return practical relations to the epistemological world. I would now like to consider the fixation of the observing subject as academia in the process of integrating the denial and affirmation of a multilayered and ubiquitous practice in Hijikata.

Observation and Classification The anthropologist Sugiura Ken'ichi shared with Hijikata the attempt to depict the world of the people who lived in the South Sea Islands as a closed, anticipatedly harmonious world, different from the society in which he himself was located. Sugiura, who had been an assistant in the anthropology section of the department of science at Tokyo University, was commissioned by the South Seas Agency to undertake an "investigation of old customs among the islanders" throughout the South Sea Islands area from 1938 to 1941. "The unique culture of the islanders" in Sugiura's investigation was composed of such signs as the land system, social organization, religion, fishing tools, fishing methods, hand crafts, and so on, unlike Hijikata's unbounded inscription.2l For example, after investigating the social system in villages on Palau, Sugiura attributed significance to the system in the context of political function. Then, to further reinforce this significance, he invoked "their own consciousness:'22 In the end, the significance attributed to the narratives observed on location came not from the narratives, but from a function discovered by the observer Sugiura, and their narrative was used as reinforcement for the significance attributed by Sugiura. In this way, as long as the final right of determining significance is held solely by the observer, the local narratives which arise out of practical relations can be recorded as signs, and the Other can be constituted. The symptoms can be completely read as signs constituting the Other. We must note how Sugiura, unlike Hijikata, fixed the observing subject that can return to an affirmation of practical relations. Again, Sugiura, a pioneer in functionalist cultural anthropology in Japan, rejected "self-serving prejudice" that viewed the culture of other races as inferior, and instead argued that "the unique cultures of the islanders" must be investigated.23 Sugiura's posture of a cultural relativism that would not attribute a hierarchy to cultures simultaneously saw the "unique culture of the islanders" as a culture of an Other, revealing Hijikata's

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romantic division of the Self and the Other as unnecessary. The stable determination of the observing subject is closely tied to cultural relativism. This monopoly on the right to determine significance is even more striking in the field of natural anthropology called anthropometry. Hasebe Kotondo, an anthropologist and anatomist who occasionally visited the South Sea Islands from 1927, classified the "islanders" by race according to measurements of skulls, faces, and bodies. 24 Apart from Hasebe, there were many others, particularly the doctors at the South Seas Agency Hospitals, who classified races by measuring the blood type, skin color, sweat glands, and fingerprints of the "islanders:'25 In this kind of study, the signs to be measured are determined in advance, and the meaning of the signs is attributed unilaterally, utterly unrelated to local narrative. It is no longer an issue whether the signs measured in racial categorization are cultural or physiological. What is important is that through the complete acquisition of the right to attribute meaning, the observing subject that constitutes the "islanders" is established in a place completely separated from practical relations. Now then, how are the "islanders" classified by this observing subject? In many cases, the "islanders" are classified as existing closer to "Japanese" than to "whites:' The relative racial resemblance between the "islanders" and "Japanese" clearly resonates well with the following kind of claim about the Japanese advance into the South Seas. Takano Rokuro, a doctor and Chief of the Prevention Agency in the Ministry of Health and Welfare described the southern advance of Japanese in 1942 thus: The Japanese race is actually well suited for life in the South Seas as the Europeans clearly are not. Our skin already exhibits a South Sea color, and the content of that color is not so different from the South Sea races of today. A certain biologist has studied Japanese sweat glands and reported that our sweat glands are close to those of the South Sea peoples. In addition, the South Sea sunlight is not too bright for the Japanese eyes, nor do our noses stick out like those of the Northern peoples .... There would be no sense in saying that the Japanese race, which is far more inclined toward and appropriate to the south than the Europeans, cannot be active in the South Sea paradise. Physically and temperamentally, we are a South Sea people. 26 The resemblance of "Japanese" and the "islander peoples" is reread as a statement representing "Japanese" as "South Seas people" advancing into the South Seas. Takano was not the only one to reread things in this way;

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it also comes up frequently in discussions of the "Greater East Asia CoProsperity Sphere:'27 Of particular note is how this resemblance is frequently claimed to be a resemblance of ancient "ancestors:' Thus the advance of the Japanese into the South Seas is, unlike the control of South Sea peoples by "whites:' "a return to the land of our distant ancestors:'28 At that point, the "islanders" are constructed as existing like archaeological remains which have not changed through the ages. They are not seen as having an existence which can produce the same kind of history,29 The practical relations in colonial conditions are recuperated as a relationship between the observer in an archaeological museum and the items on display. Furthermore, the huge remains, such as the Namantaal remains and the Rero castle ruins, discovered in the South Sea Islands by anthropologists and archaeologists, exist as archaeological displays. Strangely enough, these huge remains were discussed as if they were totally unrelated to the people currently living in the South Sea Islands and as if their successors were "the Japanese:'30 What we need to note here is that this discussion of the relations between the racial classification of the "islanders" and colonial control is not to tie colonial control to a racism that views races as superior or inferior. It is not a matter of a value judgment between superior and inferior. The distance measured in the classification of the relative resemblance between "the Japanese" and "the islanders" depicts the colonial advance of Japan as something that was destined. We might even say that at the moment in which a sign is observed and classified, colonialism has already begun. The establishment of an observing subject in academic discourse which denies the relationship with the people before one's eyes should be taken as a problem of colonialism.

"ISLANDERS" AS PATIENTS

Sex and Labor From 1920 to 1937 the population of Yap in the Palau archipelago decreased by 30 percent. The Standing Committee on the League of Nations Mandate protested to the Japanese government twice, in 1930 and 1933, on the suspicion that this decrease was related to problems in the management of local labor in the government-operated phosphorous mines. The Palau Agency had mines on Pelelieu, Rota, Fais, and Tokobai, and the mine on Angaur was continued throughout the period of the mandate. Most of the workers in that mine were brought forcibly

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from the island of Yap, and working conditions in the mines were extremely poor. From 1930 to 1935, an average of 337 workers were employed per year, of whom 31 suffered severe injuries each year, while 1,343 were injured overall.3 1 The doctors at the South Seas Agency Hospital, headed by Fujii Tamotsu, formed the core of a group that undertook an investigation of this population decrease among the Yap islanders. How were the "islanders" constituted in the medical discourse related to this population decrease? Their research reports 32 recorded measurements of birth rates, death rates, and illness rates, and in connection with the population decrease, sought the causes for low birth rates and high death and disease rates in customs and practices related to hygiene and sex. In the case of hygiene, the group investigated diet, funerary customs and the living environment, and found that the "islanders'" "unclean and unsanitary" lifestyle was the cause of the high disease rate. In the case of customs and practices related to sex, the group investigated in great detail birth rituals, the management of menstruation, the frequency and methods of sexual intercourse, methods of masturbation and so on, and concluded that "perversity" in sexual life was tied to the low level of the birth rate. The gaze of the observer here focused in particular on women. This kind of medical discourse was also an anthropological discourse that constructed the "islanders" from a variety of signs. From the signs of an "abnormal" sexuality or an "unclean" diet, the "islanders" were constituted as diseased and the "island customs" were produced as a source of infection. Again, in the same manner as anthropology, the observing subject who formulates the "islanders" from a place utterly untouched by practical relations exists by his acquisition of the right to determine meaning. The romantic "native woman" of Hijikata Hisakatsu no longer appears at this point. All that is left is a thoroughly scrutinized sexual practice seen as "perversity:' viewed by a pathological gaze that attempts to discover the source of infection in the population decrease. The "native daughter" is exposed as a body under the bright sunlight of medical discourse. Apart from the problem of the population decrease, this pathological gaze could also be found in discourses related to labor proficiency, discussed in the terms of colonial administration studies and labor sciences. In these sciences, the native view of work was observed and theorized as the source of the low labor capacity of the people of the South Sea Islands. The peoples' activities, put under observation, were constituted as an "indolent" native culture. For example, Yanaihara Tadao, a professor at

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Tokyo University and a scholar of colonial administration, pointed to the "island peoples'" unique view of labor in such activities as long-distance sea travel and dance, and concluded that the "island peoples" were not suited for "temporal, duty-regulated, continuous labor:'33 It is in this kind of statement by Yanaihara that we must find the establishment of an observing subject who observes signs and unilaterally constitutes the source of infection as the "indolence" of the "islanders:' What we must also take note of is not only how the "island peoples" were constituted as objects for observation but also how they were produced as objects to be reformed, or in other words, as objects of practice. Japanese colonialism constructed a school system in the South Sea Islands centered on medical treatment, hygiene systems, and employment education.34 While the academic discourses of medicine, labor sciences, and colonial administration studies constructed the "islanders" as objects of these systems and apparatuses, these discourses were also technologies which revealed practical methods for medical treatment, hygiene, and education. At that point, the epistemological narrative of "What are they?" and the practical narrative of "What do we do to them?" adhered together, much as they do in the doctor who both observes the source of infection and also considers ways to heal the patient. From here on, let us call the "island peoples" who were constituted by practical narratives the "patient-'islanders;" and the practical methods revealed in the academic discourses of medicine, labor sciences, and colonial administration studies, the "therapy:' As a result of the union of the classified "island peoples" and the "patient'islanders;" the observing subject moves ever closer to the supervising subject who monitors the "therapy" in medicine, hygiene, and education. This union is found not only in medicine and the labor sciences. For example, after the anthropologist Sugiura Ken'ichi constituted "the unique culture of the islanders" from his observation of various signs, he stated that "development is impossible if efforts are made only to preserve" this culture. 35 Instead, "we ought to guide them to reform through a knowledge of their past, and in accordance with their old customs:'36 Observing their "unique culture" was also an act of constituting the source of infection that should be treated. Moreover, Sugiura argued for the importance of employment education, in relation to the problem of "indolence;' stating that "what is first necessary is that we sufficiently manage the natives' labor power:'37 The classified "unique culture of the islanders" is made the source of infection and further redefined as the object of "therapy" through medicine, hygiene, and education.

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The union of epistemology and practice in this kind of academic discourse means that the denial of practical relations under colonial conditions in the establishment of the observing subject is continually reaffirmed in the practice of medicine, hygiene, and education. For example, the forced labor on Angaur island should be noted as the primary factor in the population decrease on Yap island. Therefore, the moment the medical observers attempt to find the source of population decrease within the observed "islanders" themselves, the practical relations under colonial conditions-that is, the fact of forced labor-are denied. Further, the denial of forced labor is continually upheld in the practice of "treating" the customs and manners related to sex and hygiene. What is also important in the issue of forced labor are the issues related to the problem of "lazy islanders;' discussed as separate from the problem of population decrease. As I noted above, these "lazy islanders" existed in colonial administration studies and labor sciences as objects to be treated with employment education. However, Yanaihara argued the following about these unproductive "islanders:' The islanders of the South Seas, like the Moro of the Philippines, the Papua of New Guinea and the uncivilized tribes of inner Borneo, have not yet developed to the level where they would be useful as laborers in the modern sense. In principle, using these uncivilized tribes as laborers for modern industries requires a certain amount of coercion. 38 Yanaihara was not the only one to argue for the necessity of forced labor with regard to their "indolence;' which "indolence;' when defined as untreatable, was placed at the limits of remedy)9 Just as in the case of Mannoni who sought the primary causes of French colonial control in the culture of the natives, we must note the affirmation, not the denial, of practice in this kind of statement. Not only did the medical discourse on the problem of population decrease not recognize the forced labor on Angaur, but the coercion of labor was also inevitably represented as unavoidable violence in the separate discussions of untreatable "indolence" at the limits of remedy. In which case, what was this "indolence" existing at the bounds of treatment? In the Palau Islands, there was a religious movement called the Modekngei. 40 This movement raised the anti-Japanese standard a number of times, resulting in round-ups; at the end of 1938, twenty-six people were arrested en masse. The South Seas Agency reported this as "a major

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incident, unprecedented in the history of the South Seas Agency:'41 The Modekngei was treated as a "heresy" in the South Seas Agency report, and Sugiura Ken'ichi argued that it came about because of changes in the "islanders' unique" religion under the influence of outside religions, and further that it was politically manipulated. 42 In other words, this religious movement was understood as a deviation from the "islanders'" original native culture. According to Shiso gappo [The monthly report on thought], the Modekngei made the following appeals: "Do not rely on the medical treatment of outsiders;" "We aboriginals receive the grace of the heavenly gods so that we might live and play naked. Why should we live painful, unfree lives, doing hard work and wearing Western clothes?" "What good are society and government offices for us primitives?" That is, the anti-Japan stance of the Modekngei was a rejection of Japanese medical treatment and labor for Japan. We may surmise from the Modekngei movement that "indolence" was a form of conscious resistance. It was precisely this resistance that the observing subject denied and for which that subject affirmed the inevitable use of violence in colonial control. Resistance was observed as a source of the infection of "laziness;' subjected to treatment and finally crushed with violence. THE INVADING OTHER-"JAPAN KANAKA"

Japanese imperialism, compared to German, aggressively developed colonial management in the South Sea Islands. Much of the necessary labor power for colonial management, apart from that for phosphorous mining operations, was brought in from Okinawa. The number of Okinawans in the territory especially ballooned during the 1930S, from 10,176 to 45,701. In these circumstances, a debate arose in medicine, labor sciences, and colonial administration studies that problematized the nature of "Japanese" in the South Sea Islands. In many cases, the problem was attributed to the low quality of the character of "Japanese" in the islands. How did this problem of character construct "Japanese" and "islanders"? Kiyono Kenji, a doctor and anthropologist who was commissioned by the Pacific Association to conduct an investigation of the South Sea Islands, referred to this low character in such terms as "bodily strength;' "birth rate;' "work efficiency:' "brain power;' and "spirit of leadership:'43 It is easy to find a gaze similar to the pathological gaze that questions

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labor capacity and birth rates in this approach. In addition, Kiyono also prescribed treating the disposition of "Japanese of poor character" through medical, hygienic, educational, and lifestyle reforms. In other words, he constructed the "Japanese" as patient. In the discourse oflabor sciences concerning this patient-"Japanese;' the classification of "Japanese" and "islanders" becomes confused. For example, as we can see in Kiyono's argument that "Japanese of poor character" have "psychological conditions similar to those of the islanders;'44 the "Japanese" patient is discussed as a problem of "Japanese" and "islanders" becoming the same in the tropical environment. 45 In short, when a character (represented by low labor capacity and birth rate, et cetera) that needs therapy is represented as a sign of common ground with the "islanders;' the "islanders" classified as Other are discovered within the "Japanese" themselves. In addition, this is accompanied by an untreatable "indolence" and is threatened with an inevitable violence. After discussing the "laziness" of the "islanders" in the discourse of the labor sciences, Suzuki Shun'ichi, a labor director, stated the following: It is difficult for the normal person, a person living in a society orga-

nized on the logic of superior and inferior, to understand this psychological condition. Some time ago, I was commissioned by the city of Tokyo to study a mental condition that one might call lethargy among the lumpen proletariat living in Tokyo. One might understand the psychological condition among the natives as being somewhat the same psychology.46 The invasion of the "islanders" did not stop with the "Japanese" in the South Seas. Suzuki views the "islanders" and the people in the slums of Tokyo as the same. What does this confusion of categories in the labor sciences and the invasion of the Other signify? As I stated earlier, the "island peoples;' observed and classified as Other, were, at the same time, the therapeutically treated "islanders:' The unity of the epistemological and practical narratives in this kind of academic discourse shows that the self-identity of those classified as "Japanese" was affirmed through therapeutic practices in medicine, hygiene, and education. This affirmation of self-identity through treatment promoted the redefinition of the Self and Other, which had been divided by the observing subject. That is, to establish an epistemological Other as an object of a purposive therapy is simultaneously to envelop the object of treatment in an otherness. As a result, the object of medical, hygienic, and

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educational treatment is represented as ever more closely adhering to the classified "island peoples;' while the "poor" character that must be treated in "Japanese" appears as an existence wrapped in otherness that has seeped into the interior of the Self. Moreover, the Self-identity of "the Japanese" is affirmed through the practice of a self-referential therapy against the Other that has invaded the interior of the Self. The confusion of categories in the labor sciences is the instability of the observing subject that cannot completely recover in knowledge the self-identity of "Japanese" affirmed in practice. Further, this instability reveals the possibility of manifesting the various existences of those who are both "Japanese" and "islander;' as well as those who cannot be classified as either. Fifty to sixty percent of the "Japanese" in the South Sea Islands were from Okinawa. Okinawa was the first of the territories to be subsumed in the expansion of the modern Japanese empire. The Ryiikyuan kingdom, which had already been invaded by the Satsuma domain at the beginning of the Edo period, was annexed to Japan by the Meiji government's military invasion, from 1872 to 1879, an invasion that came to be known as the Ryiikyuan Measures (Ryukyii shobun). With regard to the movement of people from Okinawa to the South Sea Islands, Okinawan history could be recalled in two forms. One is that the destiny of the "Japanese" southern advance, in which the classification of "islanders" played a role, was told as a tale of Okinawan tradition. Another is that a unique history constituted an otherness in the self-identity known as the "Japanese:' A representative of the former narrative is Asato Noboru's History of the Development of Japan's South (Sanseido, 1941). This book, which had earlier been published as The History of Okinawan Sea-faring Development, deals with the history of the Ryukyuan kingdom's trade with Southeast Asia as a tradition of "Japanese" southern development. Okinawan tradition is produced as the tradition of Japan's southern development. For the latter narrative related to otherness, we must look to the derisive term for people of Okinawan birth living in the South Sea Islands: "Japan Kanaka:'47 For example, Yanaihara Tadao reacted to the appellation of people of Okinawan birth as "Japan Kanaka" as follows: Okinawans do not win the respect of the islanders because their life style is so shabby. Consequently, the reform of Okinawan education and life styles is an urgent matter for the reform of Japanese colonial society in the south. I realized from my observations in the South

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For Yanaihara, the problem of the character of "Japanese" in the South Sea Islands was a problem of "Okinawans" as "Japan Kanaka:' The otherness of the "islanders" that had invaded the interior of "Japanese"-the source of an infection that should be treated-was here divided and removed from "Japanese" once again as "Japan Kanaka Okinawans;' and reclassified as the Other. The derisive "Japan Kanaka" reveals the struggle to reclassify and redivide an otherness that required therapy intruding upon the interior of "Japanese" as an epistemological Other. Furthermore, this struggle over the Other is precisely the process of the "differend" (Lyotard) in the self-identity of "Japanese:' IN CONCLUSION: THE TROPICAL SCIENCES AND THE DREAM OF GREATER EAST ASIA

As I mentioned earlier, it was generally believed in postwar Japan that the Greater Japanese Empire was established on the basis of fanatic nationalism. This was linked to the argument which reappeared in postwar Japan affirming invasion by highlighting the so-called cooperativist aspects of the intellectual system of the "Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere:' This argument held that war is bad, but that the "cooperativist" ideals in the "Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere" can be affirmed. In conclusion, then, I would like to examine historical epistemology in relation to this "cooperative spirit" on the basis of previous debates. Hirano Yoshitaro, a prewar Koza-school Marxist and mem.ber of the Pacific Association, established in 1938 to organize surveys and research in the South Sea Islands, was a central theorist for "cooperativism:' He writes as follows with regard to "cooperativism" in the "Greater East Asia CoProsperity Sphere"49: Because ethnic policies, autonomism and cooperativism under "CoProsperism" respect the traditions of the social lifestyle of aborigines, recognize the fact of their historical existence, and attempt to bring about their development in accordance with their unique direction, these policies, being individualistic and particularistic, oppose the uniformity of assimilation policies. 50 In this quote we can discern both a relativistic epistemology of unique "traditions" and a shared universalistic practice of "development" iI) a

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"unique direction:' This kind of"cooperativism" perfectly matches the cultural relativistic understanding of the "islanders' unique culture" demonstrated by the anthropologist Sugiura Ken'ichi, as discussed in this essay. To reiterate, after Sugiura constructed the "islanders' unique culture" from the various signs he observed, he claimed "development" based on this culture's "uniqueness:' As has been pointed out, "cooperativism" is nothing other than the "Greater East Asia Co- Prosperity Sphere" ideology, which attempts to justify Japanese invasion in contrast to "white" colonial rule. As Peter Duus has pointed out, the "Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere" was a response to the dilemma faced by "imperialism without colonies" of how to maintain colonialism when colonialism lost its validity during the war. 51 However, the resonance between the discourses of Hirano and Sugiura make it possible to understand the meaning of the "cooperativism" in Japanese colonialism in a context slightly different from its intellectual historical significance. The meaning of the "cooperativism" in the "Greater East Asia Co- Prosperity Sphere" lies in the fact that scientific discourse itself, which discerned and represented the Other, appeared as a major player in colonialism in place of outright racism. The classification and treatment of the Other in the tropical sciences dealt with in this essay can be said to have been established precisely under the name of a "cooperativism" which respected unique cultures and asserted the inevitability of "development:' And conversely, the colonialism found in "cooperativism" was simply the denial and affirmation of a practice born in the midst of classifying and reforming the Other, not a naked racism or nationalism. In other words, colonialist practice was not narrated as an opposition of races and cultures; rather, this "cooperativism" reveals the existence of the "Greater East Asia Co- Prosperity Sphere" as a discourse connected with such social reforms as medicine, hygiene, and education. The scientific observing subject who reads signs from symptoms in a unidirectional fashion and constructs the Other is secured in the denial and affirmation of this practice. When examining this observing subject, it is important to think once more about the academic genealogy of to day's multicultural narratives which have appeared in the midst of the unsettling of national polities. "Cooperativism" is by no means a problem of the past. The academic discourse constituted by the tropical sciences which classify, discover, and treat sources of infection has survived together with "cooperativism" up to the present day. What we need now

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is to find a site of resistance within "cooperativism" and multiculturalism where we can create ways of being that confuse categories or that are unclassifiable. This would also be a task of searching for the possibility of new articulations. Translated by Alan Christy NOTES 1 Benedict Anderson, "The New World Disorder;' New Left Review 193 (1992). 2

3

4 5 6

7 8

9

10

Masao Miyoshi, "A Borderless World? From Colonialism to Transnationalism and the Decline of the Nation-State;' Critical Inquiry 19 (summer 1993). For studies of the relationship between Japanese colonialism and science see the essays in the special issue of "Japanese Imperialism and the Sciences;' in Kagakushi kagaku tetsugaku 11 (1993), and Tomiyama Ichiro, "Kokumin no tanjo to 'nihonjinshu'" [The birth of the nation and "The Japanese race"] in Shiso 845 (1994). Unit 731 was the notorious biological warfare research unit that carried out experiments on prisoners of war in Manchuria. Nan'yo Gunto, Nan'yo Gunto Bunka Ky6kai 3-8, 1937. Hirano Yoshitaro, Kiyono Kenji, Taiheiyo no minzoku seijigaku [The political science and ethnography of the Pacific) (Nippon Hy6ronsha, 1942), 258-259. Edward W. Said, Orientalism (Georges Borchardt, 1978). See Sakai Naoki, "Bunkateki Sai no bunsekiron to nihon to iu naibusei" [The analysis of cultural difference and Japan as interiority] in jokyo (December 1992). On the relation of the symptom to the sign I have in mind Michel Foucault's study of the medical gaze (see Foucault, Naissance de la clinique [Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1963]). For discussions of this dual time see the essay noted above by Sakai and also Homi K. Bhabha, "DissemiNation: Time, Narrative, and the Margins of the Modern Nation;' in Nation and Narration, ed. Homi K. Bhabha (London: Routledge, 1990). Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (New York: Verso,

1985). 11 Sakai, "Bunkateki Sai no bunsekiron to nihon to iu naibusei;' 90. 12

Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1968), 94.

13 Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), 41. 14 There is a difference here between Fanon and Bhabha. In particular it is the difference

between their respective attitudes toward psychoanalysis. For more on this point see Robert Young's critique of Bhabha (Young, White Mythologies (London: Routledge, 1990),210. 15 Frantz Fanon, A Dying Colonialism (New York: Grove, 1965),133-139. 16 Hijikata Hisakatsu, Ryuboku [Driftwood] (Tokyo: Oyama Shoten, 1943), included in

Chosakushu, vol. 7, (San'ichi Shobo, 1992), 2. 17 One may call Driftwood a magnificent ethnography because of its unstable narrative. See

Sud6 Ken'ichi, "Minzokushika Hijikata Hisakatsu and Ryuboku;' in Chosakushu, 7. 18 Hijikata Hisakatsu, in Chosakushu, 6. 19 Ibid., 25.

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20 Hijikata, Chosakushu, 7, 3. 21 Sugiura's texts include the following: "Parao tomin no shiikyo" [The religion of the

22 23 24

25

26 27

islanders of palau), in Minzokugaku Nenpo [Ethnography yearly report), vol.I, (1938); "Paraoto niokeru shfuaku no nibun soshiki nitsuite" [On the binary organization of settlements in Palau] in linruigaku Zasshi [Anthropology maga2ine] 53, no. 3 (1938); "Parao niokeru iwayuru totemizumu nitsuite" [On so-called totemism in Palau] linruigaku Zasshi 55, no. 4 (1940); "Minzokugaku to nan'yo gunto toji" [Etlmography and tlte rule of the South Sea Islands], ed. Taiheiyo kyokai, in Tainan'yo [The south seas] (Kawade Shobo, 1941); "Mikuroneshia no yashiba-sei amikago" [Micronesian baskets woven from palm leaves], in linruigaku Zasshi 57, no. 10 (1942); "Masharu gunto niokeru kon'in kankei" [Marriage relations in the Marshall Islands), in linruigaku Zasshi 58, no. 8, (1943); "Mikuroneshia no tochi seido" [The land system in Micronesia), in Minzoku Kenkyiijo Kiyo [Ethnography Research Center reports), vol. 1 (1944). Sugiura, "Paraoto niokeru shfuaku no nibun soshiki nitsuite." Sugiura, "Minzokugaku to nan'yo gunto toji:' 178. Hasebe Kotondo, "Nihonjin to nan'yojin" [Japanese and the people of the soutlt seas], in Nihon Minzoku [Japanese Ethnography ed. Tokyo Jinruigakkai (Iwanami Shoten, 1935); "Nan'yo guntojin" [South sea islanders), in linruigaku, Senshigaku Koza Ikkan [Lectures in anthropology and pre-history), vol. 1 (Oyamakaku, 1938). Matsunaga Teruta and Heito Shoichi, "Waga nan'yo gunto ni okeru 'kanaka'zoku no kesshokuso gan'yliryo narabini ketsuatsu, myakuhaku dosu taion, oyobi akuryoku nado ni kansuru chosa" [Our investigation of the level of skin color elements, blood pressure, pulse, body temperature and grip strength of the "Kanaka" in tlte South Sea Islands), and Takasaki Sataro, "Doshu kekkyii gyoshii hanno yori mitaru waga nan'yo gunto domin no seibutsu kagakuteki jinshu keisii to hinshukata to ni oite" [On the biological racial numbers and types of Soutlt Sea Island natives as seen reflected in the condensation of tlte same type blood globules), both in Nan'yo gunto chiho byochosa: igaku ronbunshu2 [Investigations of diseases in the regions of the South Sea Islands: Medical essays 2] (Nan'yocho keimuka, 1933); Okatani Noboru, "Waga nan'yo gunto saipanto niokeru chamurozoku no ketsuatsu ni tsuite" [On the blood pressure among the chamuro tribe on the island ofSaipan in our South Sea Islands), Minzoku Eisei [Ethno-Hygiene], vol. 4 (1934); Kameshima Muneo, "Masharu gunto genjiimin (mikuroneshiazoku) no shimon kenkyii" [Studies of the fingerprints of the aborigines (Micronesians) in the Marshall Islands), Minzoku Eisei, vol. 6 (1937); Sonoda Kazunari, "Ketsuekigata oyobi zubu tsumuji no sonzai bui yori mitaru nan'yo ponape tomin danji (mikuroneshiajin) no kishitsu oyobi hatsuiku ni tsuite" [On the temperament and upbringing of Ponape Island boys (Micronesian) as seen in blood types and the location of cowlicks), Nan'yo gunto chiho byochosa: igaku ronbunshu 4 [Investigations of diseases in the regions of tlte South Sea Islands: Medical essays 4) (Nan'yo keimuka, 1937); Furuhata Tanemoto, Haneda Yata, and Yoshie Tsuneko, "Parao tomin no ketsuekigara narabini shimon chosa" [An investigation of the blood types and fingerprints of Palau Islanders), Minzoku Eisei, vol. 11 (1943). Takano Rokuro, "Nanpo hatten to jinko mondai" [Southern development and the population problem], in linko mondai [The population problem) 4, no. 4 (1942):22. See, for example, Kiyono Kenji, "Nihon no nanshin to nihonjin no takushoku noryoku"

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28 29

}o

31 32

33 34 35 36

37 38

39

40

41

42 43

Tomiyama Ichiro

[The southern advance of Japan and the pioneering ability of the Japanese], in Taiheiyo minzoku seijigaku [Ethnography and politics of the Pacific races] ed. Hirano Yoshitaro and Kiyono Kenji (Tokyo: Nihon hyoronsha, 1942). Also, Noma Kaizo, "Jinko mondai kara mita nanshinron" [The southern advance seen from the perspective of the population problem] in Jinko mondai 4, no. 4 (1942). Nakayama Eishi, "Nettai ni okeru rodo noritsu" [Labor efficiency in the tropics], in Shakai seisaku jiho [Social policy review], no. 260 (1942):669. J. Fabian calls this control of the time of the other through this kind of anthropological discourse "coevalness" (Fabian, Time and the Other [New York: Columbia University Press, 1983]). Benedict Anderson makes the same point about the gap between the builders of reconstructions of archaeological remains and the residents of the area (Anderson, Imagined Communities, rev. ed. (New York: Verso, 1991), 181. Details on the above figures are available in Suzuki Shun'ichi, Nanpo rodoryoku no kenkyu [Studies in labor power in the south] (Tokyo: Toyo shokan, 1942). From 1933 to 1937 the South Seas Agency's Police Section published four volumes of Nan'yo gunto chiM byoc/ujsa: igaku ronbunshu [Investigations of diseases in the regions of the South Sea Islands: Medical essays]. Volume 3, in particular, is on "Yapputo jinko gensho mondai no igakuteki kenkyu" [Medical studies of the problem of population decrease on the island of Yap ]. Yanaihara Tadao, Nan'yo gunto no kenkyu [Studies of the South Sea Islands] (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1935), 107. Mark R. Peattie, Nanylo: The Rise and Fall of the Japanese in Micronesia, 1885-1945 (Honolulu, University of Hawaii Press, 1988), 86-96. Sugiura Ken'ichi, "Minzokugaku to nan'yo gunto toji;' 45. Ibid., 38. Ibid., 37. Yanaihara Tadao, "Nanpo rodo seisaku no kicho" [The basis of labor policy in the south], in Shakai seisaku jiho [Social policy review], no. 260, (1942): 151. Although Yanaihara argued for the necessity of forced labor, he was fundamentally pessimistic about the use of the "islanders' " labor power. See, for example, Kiyono Kenji, "Nanpo minzoku no shishitsu to shusei-nihonjin no nettai junka noryoku" [The habits and nature of the southern races- the abilities of the Japanese to acclimate to the tropics], in Shakai seisaku jiho, 105. Also, Suzuki, Nanpo rodoryoku no kenkyu. On the issue of the Modekngei, A. Vidich evaluates it as an anti- Japanese movement, while Aoyanagi Machiko examines the question of class within Palau (Vidich, "Political Factionalism in Palau;' Coordinated Investigation of Micronesian Anthropology, no. 23 [1949]); Aoyanagi Machiko, Modekugei [ModekngeiJ (Tokyo: Shinsensha, 1985). Shiso gappo [The monthly report on thought], no. 62 (1939):357. Sugiura Ken'ichi, "Minzokugaku to nan'yo gunto toji", 217-218. Kiyono Kenji, "Nanpo minzoku no shishitsu to shusei-nihonjin no nettai junka noryoku:' Also, Nakayama Eishi, a doctor who was also commissioned by the Pacific Association to investigate the South Sea Islands, saw the low-natured "inferior people" as "people with poor mental capacity, lacking in education, character, being low in qual-

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44 45

46 47

48 49

50 51

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ity and lacking a racial consciousness (concept of the State)" (Nakayama, "Nettai ni okeru rodo noritsu," 677). Ibid. The low labor capacity of "japanese" in the South Sea Islands was occasionally expressed in the phrase "[one's] head becomes a papaya:' This expresses the fear of becoming like the "islanders" in fhe tropical environment. Suzuki, Nanpo rodoryoku no kenkyu, 29. The "Kanaka" are one of the "tribes" among the "islanders." There were other derogatory names for people of Okinawan birth in other places than the South Sea Islands, such as "home island savages" (Taiwan). "Home islands" refers to Japanese and "savages" refers to the minority ethnicities living in the mountain regions of Taiwan. Yanaihara Tadao, "Nanpo rodo seisaku no kicho," 156-157. On the genealogy of "cooperativism" in Japanese colonialism see Okuma Eiji, "Sabetsu soku byodo" [Discrimination in the appearance of equality], in Rekishigaku kenkyu [Historical studies], no. 662 (1994). Hirano and Kiyono, Taiheiyo minzoku scijigaku, 234. Peter Duus, "Imperialism without Colonies," translated as "Shokuminchi naki teikokushgi," in Shiso, no. 814 (1992).

~~ In the Scopic Regime of Discovery: Ishikawa

Takuboku's Diary in Roman Script and the Gendered Premise of Self-Identity

~

Charles Shiro Inouye

This reading begins with the desire to see. Upon reading Ishikawa Takuboku's (1886-1912) A Diary in Roman Script [R6maji nikki], I found myself possessed by the urge to see the author's face. l So intensely did this feeling impress itself upon me that in the end I had to pause and search my library. I located a photograph of Takuboku collected in a volume of poetry. Yet for reasons that I did not immediately grasp, his image left me disappointed. Perhaps I had imagined he would resemble Dazai Osamu (1909-1948), who died for love, or Shiga Naoya (1883-1971), who had written so compellingly of losing and gaining what he termed "animal energy:' Disappointing these expectations, the black-and-white photograph of Takuboku showed insolent eyes, a boyish face, a large head with big ears. Pondering over that image of the famous poet, I found myself wondering why I had been filled with such desire to see him in the first place and why I should have been disappointed when he finally came into view. These were the questions that initiated my exploration of Takuboku's Diary in Roman Script.

My desire and disappointment quickly brought to focus the problem of sight-what sight is and how sight is generated in a modern text. The general importance of the sense of sight to the modern period is a point many have addressed. In his "Scopic Regimes of Modernity;' Martin Jay concedes the prominence of the visual in the "West:' There is little dispute, he argues, that "whether we focus on 'the mirror of nature' metaphor in the philosophy of Richard Rorty or emphasize the prevalence of surveillance with Michel Foucault or bemoan the society of spectacle with Guy Debord, we confront again and again the ubiquity of vision as the master sense of the modern era:'2 Recognizing the importance of the visual in modern culture, Jay still rejects the notion of a single modern "scopic regime:' And it is Jay's sug-

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gestion of the plurality of modern scopic regimes that provides me an opening. For it was the possibility of a scopic regime in modern Japan that might allow me to understand Takuboku and my own desire to see him. I was particularly encouraged in this direction by Jay's characterization of sight as the master sense because the seer is indisputably exalted in A Diary in Roman Script. The visuality of Takuboku's text is not precisely Rorty's mirror, Debord's spectacle, nor the spying eye that Foucault dreads and plots to debilitate. Takuboku has the eye of the discoverer; he searches and finds, and makes what he has seen into his possession. Indeed, it seemed to me upon reflection that far from being an anomaly, Takuboku's eye is situated within just such a scopic configuration, what I will here call the Japanese regime of discovery, a field of signifiers producing and produced by a desire to find. 3 Ishikawa Takuboku was, in other words, one among many who, having been found, are compelled to find others. In a land "opened" to such a scopic encounter by far-reaching nineteenthcentury mercantile expansion, the modern male Japanese author must open yet other territories. By this means he becomes the site of subjectivity that we call the modern self. Considered in this way, discovery appears to be a concatenation. Yet, seeing it as such, I have no wish to characterize the regime of discovery as-in some binary scheme-caused by the "West:' Karatani K6jin tries to avoid this in his Origins of Modern Japanese Literature but ends up doing it regardless. By conflating Westernization and modernization, scholarship on the Meiji period overdetermines certain causes in what might be better termed a chain reaction of discovery.4 To take another instance, when he draws on Karatani's work in his "In the Mirror of Alternate Modernities;' Fredric Jameson presents Japan's modern development as a compression of Western modernity. Certainly, shortening occurred to some degree. But Jameson's emphasis on the West as the source of Japan's modernity obscures the equally germane fact that Japan's modern period stretches back at least to Ihara Saikaku (1642-1692). Nor can we neglect the numerous Meiji-period authors whose discoveries did not affirm what has been held by most scholars of kindai bungaku (modern literature) to be the Eurocentric mainstream of Japan's modernity.s The beginning of Japan's modernity is still a point of debate. We have only to compare Richard Lane's "The Beginnings of the Modern Japanese Novel: Kanazoshi, 1600-1682" with Marleigh Ryan's Japan's First Modern Novel: Ukigumo of Futabatei Shimei to recognize the range of interpretations that exist. 6 From our present perspective, we can see that Ryan's

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model has prevailed. Despite the common element shared by kinsei (earlymodern) and kindai (modern), these two periods ofliterary history denote a difference that has been stressed rather than modified. The prevailing paradigm advances the perception of a rift between early-modern narrative and the modern shosetsu and posits a sudden rather than gradual modernization. As suggested by Karatani in his "One Spirit, Two Nineteenth Centuries;' the desire to propagate such a model follows from a wish to ignore the existence of a Japanese nineteenth century and to argue for a foreign source of modern Japanese culture.? My analysis of Ishikawa Takuboku will support a gradual model of modernization, while also recognizing the trauma caused when the West "opened" Japan. The spread of modernity and the migration of genres and texts, and even of ideas, are tenable notions, but only if we envision influence more like nuclear fission rather than defaulting to the metaphor of the tow chain. We can note patterns of modernity. Just as easily, we can assert that something happened. But can we be so sure when claiming to identify relations of one cause and one effect? In the end, it makes more sense to talk about those conditions of reception that have made the modern pattern relevant than it does to speculate about the "causes" of modernity as they arose within Europe. We can sense the trauma of Japan's modern condition (kindai) in the words bunmei kaika or "civilization and enlightenment:' Advocates of change made bunmei kaika a slogan for discounting a past (kinsei) that hampered reform and therefore imperiled political survival in a world made suddenly smaller and more threatening by European global expansion.s I feel we should accept the Meiji sense of peril while at the same time noting that the modern era preceded the Meiji by two centuries, because naming the Meiji period as the beginning of modernity in this limited way is to affirm the sense this era had of itself as an age of discovery, when the new was good and the old was not. Only if we accept the modern reformer's dismissive attitude toward the established order do we understand why Japanese writers, who embraced the serious social crisis in which they found themselves embroiled, might have sought the authority of the author so aggressively. Takuboku's will to power germinated in the new world of post-Restoration Japan, an era when murderous power became a possibility even for poets. There were times when I wanted to murder all my acquaintances without exception, from my most intimate friends to those I hardly

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Charles Shiro Inouye knew. The closer I was to a person, the more I hated the person. "Everything fresh and new" was the "new" hope that dominated every day of my life. My "new world" was, in other words, a "world of the strong, a world dictated by power:' (6:64; Takuboku's quotation marks)9

Takuboku's violent will to power was at war with itself. The statement quoted above is at the same time self-aggrandizing and self-lacerating. It makes me feel that the person discovered through the writing of the diary could just as easily fall victim to violence as perpetuate it. But whether . lamenting his own poverty or disparaging his failure to act heroically, Takuboku seems to have intensified the possibility for despair under the terms of the new scopic regime. Takuboku expressed self-knowledge through a medium of savage representation. When he wrote down his murderous thoughts, I believe, he undertook to move himself from the position of the discovered to that of the discoverer, from the subjected to the subject. What made this transformation feasible was a new language that allowed him to express the heretofore unspeakable. The consequence of Takuboku's kind of literary operation seems simple in retrospect. He and numerous others wrote into existence a new literary culture predicated on the erasure of the less-than-authoritative gesakusha, the "scribbler" of playful writing, and on the parturition of the author as serious artist. Typically modern in its presumption of improvement, assertion of the serious writer's superiority necessarily denied the possibility that Japan had been a civilized nation before its discovery (by western Europe and white America) in the second half of the nineteenth century. Here I must reiterate the analytic point made earlier about the conditions of reception that obtained prior to the Western incursion. There was no scarcity of artists treating themes of violence prior to the Meiji period. Gesaku (frivolous writing) was constantly castigated for its gratuitous treatment of murder and mayhem throughout the bakumatsu period, or latter years of the Tokugawa Shogunate. Yet the self-conscious relationship of the writer to such violence changed noticeably starting in the last decade of the nineteenth century. In seeking the conditions that account for the difference, close attention must be paid to the language that makes A Diary in Roman Script "new:' Takuboku's Diary covers the period from 7 April to 16 June 1909. It is one section excerpted from the twelve journals that transcribed events in

Scopic Regime of Discovery 227 the life of the poet from October 1902, after Takuboku had quit teaching at Morioka Middle School and was about to go to Tokyo, to December 1911, two months before he succumbed to tuberculosis on 21 February 1912. What is known as A Diary in Roman Script is nothing more than the portion of Takuboku's journals that he wrote in romanized Japanese, or romaji, alphabetic script rather than the usual hiragana (with some katakana) and Chinese characters that composed the contemporary written language. Takuboku's motivation for experimenting with romaji during this three-month period cannot be considered apart from the poet's particular place within larger linguistic trends. In the end, it was romaji that enabled him to negotiate the movement of the writer from the position of an object to the more powerful subjectivity of the writer as discoverer. Romaji was particularly apt as a vehicle for this process because of the cloak of secrecy that Takuboku used to enhance his own authorial power. Not only was he writing a diary, an essentially private text, but he was using a script which few people at the time could read. He chose, in other words, a secret and powerful language that could tell of newly discovered territory. The alphabet allowed Takuboku to write what others could not read and to see what others could not admit to having witnessed. His was a modern lyricism, an abundance of sight that expressed itself as a secreted insight. Some might ask what is cryptic about a script that contemporary Japanese read easily. Today, romaji is ubiquitous and its systematic study is a regular part of the elementary curriculum. In Takuboku's day, however, this was not the case.1O Attempts to transcribe the language began with the earliest interactions between Japanese and Westerners. Indeed, some of Japan's leaders came to believe that the success of their country's modernization effort depended on language reform, i.e., the wholesale use of romaji. Nishi Amane (1829-1897)' for example, argued that Japan's economic and political development was impossible in the absence of more effective ways of disseminating information. This meant improving education, a task that depended in turn on carrying out a thoroughgoing reformation of the language in order to simplify the arduous task of learning how to read and write. Nishi, for instance, thought romaji might simplify Japanese orthography. "If we adopt their [writing] system;' he reasoned, "all things of Europe will be entirely ours. Since to dismantle our current writing system in order to incorporate the strengths of theirs is not a trivial matter, it demonstrates quite well our boast that it is in the character of our people to be guided by what is good:' II

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As early as 1873, the desire of progressives to breach the perceived gap between inferior Japanese and the superior alphabetic languages of Europe reached a fevered pitch. Mori Arinori (184r1889) suggested replacing Japanese entirely: The commercial power of the English-speaking race which now rules the world drives our people to acquire some knowledge of their commercial ways and habits .... Under the circumstances, our meager language, which can never be of any use outside our islands, is doomed to yield to the domination of the English tongue .... Our intelligent race, eager in the pursuit of knowledge, cannot depend upon a weak and uncertain medium of communication in its endeavor to grasp the principal truths from the precious treasury of Western science and art and religion. The laws of state can never be preserved in the language of Japan. All reasons suggest its disuse. 12 For Mori, the link between English and power is dear. English is the language of rulers, who with their treasures of knowledge and their commercial ways gain influence while the Japanese, hindered by an inadequate language, fall behind. His astonishing assumption is that the intelligence of the Japanese "race" (and therefore their right to assume a place among the colonial powers) occurs in spite of the Japanese language. Mori's proposal was never well received, but Nishi's was. The Romaji Society (Romaji Kai), established in 1885, took up the notion of improving Japanese by transcribing it into alphabetic script. The movement floundered because of disagreements about standards of orthography but renewed its momentum in 1905, with the establishment of the Society for the Propagation of Romaji (Romaji Hiromekai). Takuboku's interest in alphabetic script coincided with this second wave of interest. His knowledge of romaji set him apart as a progressive thinker, and he must therefore have been at least vaguely aware of the politics of the new script. Romaji belonged to the larger cultural field of yokomoji or script written horizontally (rather than vertically) across the page. English and other horizontal scripts were associated with the European discoverers of the world, whose spreading influence had rendered Japan's isolationist policy untenable. As an approximation of foreign scripts, romaji certainly held more attractions than simply the orthographic. Takuboku was no doubt drawn to it as the script of the new and empowered. Romaji was a secret by virtue of its newness within the Japanese sphere, an instrument of power because of its currency outside of that same sphere. 13

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Of course, secrecy can be expression by another name. When we compare different sections of the author's journals, it is startling to notice the effect the secret script had on Takuboku's development as a modern writer. When writing in romaji, his prose is noticeably freer, more descriptive, more analytical, more "literary" (bungakuteki) to use Kuwabara Takeo's word. 14 The alphabetic script made his writing magically take on the qualities that Tsubouchi ShOyo (1859-1935) and other reformers ofJapanese letters had in mind as they attempted to engage and absorb the cultural field of yokomoji: his description is more realistic, his analysis of psychological states more penetrating, and his narrative voice is stronger and more stable. Romaji enabled these qualities to develop because it allowed Takuboku to be more freely expressive than he otherwise would have dared to be at other points in the journals. Why he should have felt compelled to be more freely expressive in the first place is, of course, the more fundamental issue. Focusing on this question, I would like to suggest that there is a deeper meaning to this secrecy that determines Takuboku's place within the more general modern regime of discovery that I have termed scopic. Once again, I am arguing that this scopic regime engulfed many writers in turn-of-thecentury Japan. There is a cryptic impulse at the heart of the literature of this era and its modes of representation. Secrecy, or the state of controlled visibility, makes possible the privileged source of third-person narration by establishing the authorial and invisible seer who observes with heightened powers of mimetic accuracy and is able to represent reality with persuasiveness and insight. Itself a secret script, romaji became the vehicle for this new way of seeing without being seen. And because romanized Japanese is essentially phonetic, it was also historically important in the process that eventually disowned or denied the wealth of pictorial expression that had previously characterized the majority of narrative subgenres in the early-modern era. Edo-period literature tended to be ghostly and atemporal, filled with illustration, figures of speech, stock characters codified as much by their clothing as by their thoughts, and personalities presented more in formulaic narrative situations than in unprecedented situations of crisis. In contrast, Meiji-period works were both more analytical and antifigural. Encouraged by the alphabetic simplicity of romaji, a newly, more transparent literary language systematically discouraged the traditional enjoyment of the visual body of language, while also weakening a long held predilection among writers and readers for polysemy and image associa-

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tion. Phonocentric language-such as that written in romaji-thus served the modern desire for analysis and also helped to generate the notion of psychologically complex, "interiorized" characters. This latter concept, I hasten to add, was not entirely new but furthered an idea entertained much earlier by the seventeenth-century author Ihara Saikaku: that human quality, like capital itself, is wholly open to description and is fundamentally definable. Though not exactly new, the need to know the essence of human character contributed importantly to the formation of modern authorial vision during the Meiji period. The emergence of the watakushi shosetsu (or I-novel) documents the pain that was felt when Japan was "opened" at this time. This genre of first person, confessional fiction is often held to be solipsistic and therefore resistant to the clearly configured interior/exterior dyad that was required for the birth of realistic fiction. In truth, the watakushi shosetsu is neither properly a diary nor a novel but an unexpected melding of both. Though most studies of this genre focus on its differences from either the diary or the novel, we must not overlook how this hybridized quality speaks so eloquently of the spirit of discovery that pervaded the modern age. In short, the I-novel is firmly situated on that ground which is common to the diary and the novel. It speaks to the same requirements of secrecy. It documents that weakly fictitious move from the position of discovered to that of the discoverer. Whether we are talking about third or first person narrative, the carefully controlled presentation of information in each is primarily designed to establish the source of that secret knowledge: the modern author. In sum, secrecy discovers the modern writer in the Meiji period. It enhances an analytical, descriptive mode of seeing that is corrosive to the traditional, pictocentric regime with which it competes. Following Noel Burch, Edward Fowler defines the traditional narrative system as being "presentational" in nature, that is, essentially disinterested in "the concealment of the mechanics of representation;' and concerned with "the joyously self-conscious revelation of those mechanics."ls As I have argued elsewhere, one defining characteristic of the presentational text was its lavish use of illustration. More forcefully than the phonocentric text, the iconic and indexical signifiers that were painted and reproduced upon the gesaku page by artists such as Hokusai and Kunisada contributed to both the artificiality and availability of the story. The drastic increase in the ratio of text to illustration that occurred toward the end of the nineteenth century is a rejection of this artificiality and indicates the intensity of the

Scopic Regime of Discovery 231 need for secrecy that was inherent to the spread of the scopic regime of discovery.16 Words, especially those written in a secret script such as the one employed by Takuboku, replaced pictures because their abstract and symbolic qualities readily lent themselves to the project of representation. Being alphabetic (and therefore phonocentric to an extreme), rarnaji reinforced the observational and interpretive authority of the author in a way that illustration did not. Placed within this larger phonocentric shift, Takuboku's diary is like the watakushi shasetsu in that it is a carefully orchestrated performance of self-expression. It is not a total secret, however. The diary must show its author to a privileged few since the writer's power cannot be guaranteed if the secret is absolute. That Takuboku wanted this record to survive and be read is clear. We know that he entrusted all his journals to his close friend Kindaiichi Kyosuke (1882-1971) who shared, albeit hesitantly, in the process of sexual awakening that Takuboku sets down. Shortly before his death, Takuboku instructed Kindaiichi to read his diaries and, if he so decided, to destroy them. Though embarrassing to him - Kindaiichi is described by Takuboku as a "jealous, weak, and effeminate man with petty vanities" (6:59)- he could not bring himself to burn them. After Takuboku's death, Kindaiichi sent the diary to the author's wife Setsuko, who was not meant to be included among its readers. In the diary, Takuboku gave his reasons for wanting to exclude her: So why have I decided to write this diary in Roman script? . . because I love my wife and don't want her to read this. (6:54) It is impossible to say if Setsuko actually read this section of the journals after Takuboku's death. We do know that she was unable to bring herself to discard this record of her husband's life. Shortly after Takuboku died, she passed the journals on to Miyazaki Daishiro before she herself succumbed to tuberculosis.J7 Many years later, in 1954, the romanized section was made public over Kindaiichi's protests; and today it is a familiar work of modern Japanese literature. IS It would appear that many other readers have been as interested as I to see turn-of-the-century Japan through Takuboku's eyes, to enjoy the feel of the text's perspective, and to be privy to the secrets that his various discoveries unearthed. (Perhaps nothing more than my own will to power has impelled me to seek out an image of the author's face, and later to imagine the faces of the prostitutes who occupied so much of Takuboku's time.) In Takuboku's diary the literary process of discovery is still nascent.

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The techniques for controlling what the readers are allowed to witness and appropriate as our own wait to be developed later in the works of such novelists as Tanizaki Jun'ichiro (1886-1965), who learned, by studying the rigorously emplotted mystery novels of Arthur Conan Doyle, the technique of flattering the readers by giving us not only the scene of discovery but the process of adventure, as well. Using means other than the manipulations of plot, however, the lyrical and fragmented space of A Diary in Roman Script still manages to establish visual barriers, areas hidden from the normal eye, and, as Georges Bataille's Eroticism puts it, to generate the new, modern knowledge that comes from transgressing taboo. When Takuboku puts himself in the new position of seer, his range of sight challenges socially objectionable barriers so that both writer and reader can enjoy a special knowledge: they are privileged to see anything they wish. And what Takuboku wished to see with us was a woman's "perfectly white body" (6:66), her "privates without flaw" (6:99). Maneuvering within the regime of discovery, the writing subject moves from the position of discovered to that of discoverer by finding and objectifying the subject of his gaze. As Karatani puts it in his Origins of Modern Japanese Literature, only by holding fiction's represented objects within the field of vision can the writer (and reader) truly develop a sense of the author's self as it emerges by way of the territory he explores. Neither the territory of discovery nor the objects discovered there can be simply said to be present. Territory and object must be discovered in the process of representation, which is the special genius of the mediating seer. Discovery, we might say, presupposes the hidden. And since modern fiction must represent the discovered, hidden, interior truth of the individual self, the process of selfcreation is consequently laden with tension and pain. This is because the discovery of self requires the obscurity of an Other: the foreign, the barbarous, the unrealized, the past, the feminine. In fact, such self-invention also works against a benighted state of premodernity. Japan existed before Perry's visit, just as the isles of the Caribbean did prior to the discoveries of Columbus. Yet the modern attitude, as embraced by Takuboku, assumes itself to be an improvement over what preceded and insists on the obfuscation and even erasure, when necessary, of that which came before it. For Takuboku, the territory of self-invention is the new Japan, and the primary object of his sight is a woman.

Scopic Regime of Discovery 233 I put my fingers to the woman's crotch and roughly fingered her genitals. Finally, I put five fingers in and pushed as vigorously as possible. Even then the woman did not wake up. Perhaps she was so inured to men that her vagina had become totally insensitive. A woman who had slept with thousands of men! I became more and more irritated. And then I pushed my fingers in all the more forcefully. Ultimately my hand entered as far as my wrist. At that moment the woman awoke saying, "Mm, mm." Suddenly she was clinging to me. "Ah ... ah ... ah, that's good. More ... more. Ah ... ah ... ah!" A girl of eighteen no longer able to feel pleasure from the usual stimuli. I wiped my hand on her face. I felt like inserting both hands or even my foot into her vagina and ripping it apart. And I wanted to see, even in a vision, her body covered with blood, lying dead in the darkness. Men have the right to murder women by the cruelest methods. What a terrible, disgusting thought! (6:67) With the discovery of this and other women, Takuboku's subjectivity comes into a written state of being. By expressing his loathing, the construction of consciousness is completed. If Takuboku's process of becoming human -of becoming a thinking being in the Cartesian sense-is fueled by a deep-seated disgust for women, we must add that in this misogyny he is not alone. For the subject/object split that I have been describing in previous pages exists as an already gendered premise: male subject, female object; the sensitive poet, the insensitive whore; the opening male and the opened female. Inasmuch as Takuboku's narrative of discovery establishes its secrets by first creating a world scattered with objects of lower worth-"the bitches" that are available to the seer's eye and to Takuboku's program of self-aggrandizement and self-flagellation-it departs from the parodic familiarity and humor of, for instance, Santo Kyoden's (1761-1816) Playboy Grilled EdoStyle [Edo mumare uwaki no kabayaki (1785)], a short illustrated fiction that mocks the comical figure of the playboy. Kyoden's Master Glitter (Kinkin-sensei), as he is called, is a country bumpkin who comes to the city, fancies himself as a great lover, but awakens to find that his moment of wealth and sexual indulgence was all a dream. By contrast, Takuboku portrays the lover in a decidedly sober way since he, the modern man, is positioned by the regime of discovery to see himself in a serious and even tragic light. The search for modern self-identity shapes him; and in his

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journey of discovery, Takuboku becomes as directed as a colonizer, as businesslike as the nameless customer who pays to enter another's body, as dreary as the selves of the self-centered I-novel. Takuboku's is not the traditional erotic peep-neither kaimami nor nozoki-but rather the "Dutch stare" that empowers him to rape with a grimness of purpose unimaginable to Murasaki Shikibu's Genji or Saikaku's Yonosuke. He does not aspire to the status of a tsu, an expert in the way oflove, but is, rather, a journalist of sex. Play (asobi) and chic (iki) are no longer relevant and their absence does not clear the way for attractive possibilities. Though we might expect the modern seer to be powerful and strong (as I certainly did), in truth he is actually only a boy, prurient and insecure-"a weakling with a sword as good as any man's" (6:65), to use Takuboku's metaphor. His self-consciousness is as youthful in its sexual preoccupation as that of, for instance, John Updike, who on the opposite end of the twentieth century supplies gasps of an exhausted modernity. We must recall that Takuboku, who married at seventeen, was only twenty-three when he wrote the following: "Oh, I'm so happy!" Hanako said, burying her face against my chest. It was a strange night. Until now I had slept with numerous women. But I had always been irritated, as though being urged on by some unknown force. At such moments I always jeered at myself. Never before this night had I experienced such feelings of ecstasy and expansiveness, so much so that my eyes narrowed in delight. I no longer thought about anything. I only felt the rapture of feeling my body warming to its very core by the heat from the girl. Furthermore, the act of copulating, which had done nothing recently but leave me with unpleasant feelings, was performed twice this night with nothing but sheer pleasure. And even afterwards not a trace of disgust remained in me .... An hour passed. An hour's dream. We sat up in bed and smoked. (6.108) Being young, Takuboku is naturally youthful. But, in addition to this, he is also young in a cultural, historical way. He is just another of many young, self-conscious, and hesitant heroes of the modern Japanese tradition. I am thinking of Futabatei's Bunzo (Ukigumo [1886-1889]), Soseki's Daisuke (Sore kara [1909]), Ogai's Jun'ichi (Seinen [1910]) or his Okada (Gan [1911-13)). All try to be manly. But they proceed as if being a man were a new aspiration. They act as if masculinity, like the beginning of civilization, originated with the Meiji era. And each goes about his busi-

Scopic Regime of Discovery 235 ness as though adopting a new sexuality were his inevitable destiny as a would-be explorer. So convinced has the critical establishment become about the privilege of embarking on this fated modern adventure that Japanese scholars such as Kuwabara Takeo can unapologetically declare: "Why is it that people cannot stop loving Takuboku's writing? It is because they find in it pure youth (seishun)."19 In Hijiya Yukihiko's opinion, to give another sampling, Takuboku deserves our attention because he "continues to live as the symbol of eternal youth:'20 It would seem that such positive appraisals of youth are part of the discourse of the modern. They economically transmit its self-important sense of newness and beginning. Yet just as the scopic regime of discovery places itself in tension-the discovered object striving to be the discovering subject through the act of discovering other subjects-made-objects-this faith in modernity's youthfulness similarly inverts itself and creates a reflexive ambivalence. That is to say, the positive valuing of youth is possible only when youth also takes on negative meaning. This dynamic is particularly obvious in turn-of-the-century books about Japan. John R. Black's Young Japan: Yokohama and Yedo, for instance, declares the country to be "young" by virtue of its having been discovered by the West: Then, boasting herself as one of the most ancient empires in the world, with an Imperial Dynasty extending over two thousand five hundred years, she was for the first time born into the family of nations. In the most literal sense may she have been said previously to speak and think and act as a child; but now she is of age she has put away childish things. 21 James Scherer's 1905 text, Young Japan: The Story of the Japanese People, and Especially of Their Educational Development, similarly declares Japan to be young, because though "possessed of an antiquity that loses itself in the mists of primitive tradition;' still "the nation is yet young, because somehow the heart of the people is young:' Indeed, in this view "Japan is the most youthful spot on earth:'22 Carrying through Black's trope of Japan's birth "into the family of nations;' Scherer's book has Japan move steadily and progressively from benighted native to enlightened initiate, for he entitles Book I "Early Culture;' Book II, "Adolescence;' and Book III, "Modern School-days:'

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Charles Shiro Inouye The period of early national culture extends from the first dim traditions of history to the introduction of Chinese civilization in the sixth Christian century, when Japan put off her swaddling-clothes. The period of adolescence traces the growth of the people under the influence of Chinese culture until that was discarded for Western civilization in the middle of the nineteenth century. "School-days" denotes the progress made under this Occidental tutorship. The whole book is built on the theory that Japan stands to-day at the threshold of new national manhood; YOUNG JAPAN. The three sub-titles as applied to individual development hardly need an explanation. 23 (italics are mine)

Both Black and Scherer want to show how life in newly discovered Japan differs from before. But if their ascription of youth is meant to recognize progress, their generally favorable appraisals of Japan are surely backhanded since both writers establish a position external to the object of vision that is relatively more mature and able to see youth for what it is. In short, books such as these pioneering works of "Japanology" indicate Japan's modernity in relation to an already established (and therefore even more advanced) modernity. Positing a time line against which the various cultures of the world can be measured is characteristically modern, too. Modernization theory like that of Black, Scherer, and their later epigones assumes synchronicity because it requires a universal ethical and temporal starting point. It declares a linear chain of causality that provokes a "natural" ranking of nations to form along an axis of "advanced" or "underdeveloped:' Again, I do not mean to say that there is no such thing as influence, or that it is wrong to talk of the Japanese as having patterned their modern institutions (including modern literature itself) after Western models. Rather, when we affirm these influences and note their pattern we can finally come to a general understanding of modernity that does not trace back in time to a single point of origin in the West but to many points of origin. To this end, however, we must change our focus from authorship to reception, from the logically impossible task of positing clearly distinguishable beginnings to the more fruitful endeavor of trying to understand those conditions which allow certain ideas to gain or lose persuasiveness. If we therefore pause to widen our focus, we can see that the prurient interest noted in Takuboku's diary is hardly peculiar to Japan. JeanJacques Rousseau (1712-1778), for one, expressed a similarly "young" per-

Scopic Regime of Discovery 237 spective in his Confessions. (While Rousseau is not usually compared to Takuboku, their juxtapositioning conveys my sense of a horizon of ideas necessary to modernity and the conditions which are favorable to it.) To suggest an answer to Ogai's Jun'ichi, who poses the question "To what does the self open?" we might say that the modern self emerges to and within a restructured awareness of sexuality. It does this by way of a harlot writing (porne + graphein) that teaches sexual (and therefore self) difference, domination, and finally alienation and loathing. Recognizing pornographic representation as a general pattern of the modern might also allow us (without resorting to the tow chain of causality) to make the point that in this process of self-awakening, Japan was a late bloomer. Just as the modernizationists argued, Japan was during Takuboku's time "young" in a way that Europe was not. This, at least, was the perspective of Japan's enlightened leaders, political men such as Nishi Amane, who held, as I mentioned earlier, that the Japanese people were intelligent to the extent that they were willing to admit their inferiority. Takuboku, I believe, shared this attitude. Ostensibly an expression of humility, in reality the admission is not, for hidden in the inferiority is the self-serving notice of the discovered who wishes to become a discoverer. In its essence, writing about the desire for reform is a statement not of inferiority but of aggression. It brings us back to Takuboku's youthful self-loathing and how his attitude promotes selfawareness. When we contextualize the writer's secretive act of writing himself into history, we must see that for modern processes-be they the construction of railroads or of national myths-humility vis-a-vis the West was a particularly useful pose to strike. Why? Because to posit a superior example confirms as uncontestable the worth of imitation. It places the learner beyond criticism and at the same time conveniently does away with the need to grant subjectivity to the objects of one's discovery (in our immediate case the women with whom Takuboku sleeps). If the initial agents of a discourse of discovery represent a first order, then "the discovered" become a second order, eager to transform themselves into the discoverers of yet a third order of subjects. And it is a truth of modernity that third-order subjects are frequently assigned marginal value and are indeed actively discouraged from transforming themselves into discoverers. Their world is not whole but halved, a true demimonde. To those who discover her, force her into the line of vision, and make her participate in a process we might want to call a collaborative inversion of discovery, the harlot can never announce her own presence. She can only

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be represented in the diary of Takuboku, just as his own humble-yetarrogant self is a representation of an old formation.2 4 This complicated position of denying oneself in order to produce oneself, or turning on one's own in order to find one's own, defines those of the second order of discovery. Takuboku belongs among these collaborators. He occupies himself with harlots because he sees himself as a learner of a new type of sexual pose. 25 This is far from being a new strategy, of course, and Kyoden's playboy-grilled-Edo-style provides an earlier example. But notice how in Kyoden's work, the joke is on Master Glitter whose status as a poser is emphasized to comic effect. Takuboku, on the other hand, interiorizes the pose. He conceals (and reveals) sexual desire in a way that brings attention to the seer as author rather than as laughingstock. Consequently, the meaning of the pose has changed significantly. In both Playboy Grilled Edo-Style and A Diary in Roman Script, sexual conquest signifies a dawning to a new and better world. In this sense, both are modern texts. But the Edo-period kibyoshi gives us a humorous dream while the Meiji-period diary presents us with a reality of intense seriousness. The disparity between these two male poses-the laughable playboy and the romantic self seeker-signifies the difference between earlymodern pictocentrism and the modern scopic regime of discovery. The ascendance of word over picture in the Meiji-period text is in essence a replacement of the presence of figures with the represence of description. The anti-figurality of the genbun itchi (the attempt to make written language more colloquial) movement was corrosive not only to the drawn figures that filled the pages of so many forms of gesaku but also to figures of speech, loaded as they were with pre-enlightenment connotations. The new language of fiction was to be a transparent tool that would enable a more serious, penetrating, and accurate look at the real world of turn-ofthe-century Japan, a place that was worthy of vision to the extent that it departed from the benighted obscurities of the past. Between the striking of these two very different masculine poses-Kyoden's fool and Takuboku's hateful weakling-lie the events of Japan's "opening" and the epistemic shift that turned folly into an opportunity for insight. Here we can talk of influence and migrating texts. We have clues about the Western forms of pornographic writing that, once received in Japan, helped create the new, interiorized sexuality we find in Takuboku's work. A year before he began writing A Diary in Roman Script Takuboku made the following journal entry:

Scopic Regime of Discovery 239 May 3,1908: In Hirano Hisayoshi's room. 26 Got up at eight. At ten, the four of us ate breakfast together,27 Hirano brought out a book of Western pornography, True Love, Its First Practice, and plied us with the passages he thought most interesting. (7:200)28 In a letter to Yoshino Shozo, 7 May 1908, Takuboku mentions the incident again: Hirano brought out a book of American pornography (that was banned from publication) and kept talking about it. I took a look at it, but the things written there were graphic and distasteful. Can you appreciate a book like that and still say you abhor the novels of the naturalists? (7:200) Again, a few days later, on 12 May 1908, Takuboku wrote in a letter to Fujita Takeji and Takada Jisaku, friends from a brief stay in Otaru, "In Tokyo it's the fashion these days for everyone to be reading Western pornography (imported secretly, with very detailed descriptions of men and women in sexual union)" (7:203). The book, True Love, seems to have been very much on Takuboku's mind despite his alleged aversion to its graphic nature. A year later, his diary was still reflecting this interest. I almost need not mention that the Japanese possessed their own tradition of pornography, made available to the West primarily through the woodblock prints of Moronobu, Utamaro, Kunisada, and other artists. Additionally, there existed enbon (amorous books), sharebon (guide and fashion books), hyobanki (ratings of actors and prostitutes), and ninjobon (romances), all sub genres of gesaku focusing on the world of the theater and the brothels. Taken together, these represent a large portion of all the books and prints produced during the entire Edo period; yet their formal existence in the modern era waned rapidly when text pulled away from illustration and the prostitute herself was remade into an object of the vision of self-discovery. The correlation between the two phenomenathe diminished role of illustration and the focus placed upon prostitutes-is worth noting since the separation of text and illustration is a result of the role given to language to objectify the modern harlot. If it is true, as Jay and others have argued, that sight predominates in modernity, the formal aspects of modern visuality need to be carefully specified. Scrupulous research will no doubt determine what modes of vision were more modern than others, or perhaps, to put it more clearly, how the

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modernity of the visual is inflected by the various civilizations within which it emerges. I would argue that the anti-figural and therefore secretive bias ofJapanese modernity is clearly evident in Takuboku, who engaged in the curious process of transcribing conventional Japanese pornography into romaji. "The appetite for writing and the sexual appetite;' he wrote, "seem closely related. When the keeper of a lending library came and showed me his strange books, somehow I found myself wanting to read them. I went ahead and borrowed a few. One was The Flowery Night of the Hazy Moon (Hana no oboroyo );29 another was The Secret Way of Love (Nasake no tara no maki).30 I spent three hours copying The Flowery Night of the Hazy Moon into romaji" (6:78). This process of transcribing a native text into a "native-yet-foreign" one reveals the conditions necessary for Takuboku's emergence as a modern writer. First, his construction of himself as a seeing, discovering author required a phonocentric, abstract language-a sign vehicle that had a non-iconic relationship to the signified-with which the concept of self-identity could be articulated. Here, romaji allowed him to recast the figural presence of the illustrated, Japanese text in a way that made it less available to the average reader and, at the same time, more textually alluring and empowering for those who understood the rules of representation. And second, the emergence of selfhood also required the pornographic act. It made necessary, that is, writing about harlots. For Takuboku, "the appetite for writing and the sexual appetite" are closely related because in discovering the need to be a discovering modern male he must sense both his youthfulness as an explorer and, at the same time, the presence of an already existing and painfully meaningful trope of selfawareness: the harlot. What Takuboku seems most anxious to claim through the act of transcription and by his writing of a journal in romaji is the very identity of the prostitute. Her self-awareness coincided with that of the modern male because her discovery and sense of entrapment came by virtue of a set of conditions under which she had been made to live that resembled the discovery of Japan. What was the plight of the harlot? Many were sold into bondage. Many were trapped in a role forced upon them by others. Many were made to live with a new name and, therefore, with a heightened awareness of self-identity. It is her crisis, her privileged-yet-oppressed position within the "floating world;' that provided an important prototype for the modern ego as it emerged within the scopic regime of discovery. The connection between this paradigm of prostitution and the lan-

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guage of self-awareness is equally deep, for the harlot's linguistic situation also provides a modern model. Because the women who populated the urban brothels during the Tokugawa period came from various regions and spoke in a multitude of dialects, they were taught a standard language called arinsu no kotoba, which allowed buyer and seller to communicate with each other within the demimonde. 31 The erasing of regionalism that was a common feature of erotic life in the Yoshiwara brothels can be seen, then, as paradigmatic for the forging of a standard language that, as Nanette Twine and others argue, was a necessary condition of modernization. 32 To return to an earlier point, it was the desire for standardization that motivated such language reforms as those already mentioned. When we consider the prostitute in this way, we understand why captive women became a paradigm for the "liberated" men such as Takuboku. She, as much as any early-modern figure, becomes the harbinger of the twentieth-century modern, though she was, of course, modern from at least the time of Saikaku's awareness of her. Even before the arrival of Commodore Perry's black ships, the prostitute was already the discovered territory of Japan. In the passage below, Takuboku recognizes in the harlot an incipient form of his own identity as a modern male. Reflecting the tension inherent in trying to establish a "new;' liberated identity by appropriating an "old;' captive one, he cannot help but feel sympathy for the prostitute even as he buys access to her body: ''I'm quitting the fifth of next month;' Tamako said, her face sad. "You should. If you're thinking of leaving, then get out of here:' "But I have my debts:' "How much?" "It was forty yen when I got here. Now it's more like one hundred. They didn't even give me one kimono... :' I felt as if I couldn't bear it any longer. It seemed as if there was nothing else for me to do except to cry or make a joke. But I was in no position to tell a joke, and I couldn't cry.... I paid two yen, and went into an adjoining room, where I had sex with a girl named Oen for about five minutes .... I went back into the other room, where I found Kindaiichi lying down, resting. I didn't feel like saying anything, overwhelmed with the feeling that at last I had finally fallen into the abyss .... (6:101-102) Takuboku's abyss is the loneliness of the seer. And his disgust, fascination, and pleasure are commemorated with the newly coined word jiishiki, self-consciousness, as in the passage that leads into the one quoted

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above: "Self consciousness leads my heart to an abyss" (6:101).33 Disappointment and self-loathing plague his search for subjectivity. He has set off on an empowering journey, only to find that the land of his discovery was already a woman, and that the best of these women resembled his sister. In the eyes of the first-order discoverers of Japan, this second-order masculinity might seem compromised and inferior. And yet the modern Japanese text discovers the harlot again and again because she, by virtue of her long history of captivity, is the model for the author's suffering. She is the very form of self-awareness, the stereotype of male self-identity. Not unlike Flaubert's Madame Bovary or Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, Takuboku's diary similarly discovers a new age by writing the harlot into it. That is why the register of purchased women in modern Japanese literature is as long as its list of prurient males: Higuchi Ichiyo's Midori (Takekurabe [1896]), Nagai Kafii's Oito (Sumidagawa [1909]), Iwano Homei's Kichiya (Tandeki [1909]), Mori 0gai's Otama (Gan [1915]), Izumi Kyoka's Osen (Baishoku kamonanban [1920]), and on and on. I might mention, in passing, that Higuchi Ichiyo's position in this list of authors is unique because she was a woman who took other women for her subjects. I am not the first to suggest that she is always included in the usual list of prominent Meiji authors because she wrote about women as men did. Hiratsuka Raicho, a contemporary Japanese woman writer, recently criticized Ichiyo for never breaking with what I have been calling the modern (and therefore pornographic) literary tradition that Saikaku established and men such as Takuboku reestablished. Seemingly understanding the connection between pornography and self, Raicho writes: I understand that Ichiyo's writings are all the more attractive to men now. That is not surprising, for in addition to the appeal of a "feminine" writer, sincerely and intimately depicting the private emotions of women, each additional rendering of some weak woman's sad fate fits into the concept men have of women-or rather the concept itself assuages an egotistical need, inciting masculine pity by awakening in men the pleasant sensation of awareness of their own strength.34 Sata Ineko, another female writer, was more sympathetic, seeing in Ichiyo an author herself trapped in inexpressible sorrow. Sata exonerated Ichiyo with the remark that she could be expected to convey "the constrictions of the society of her time along with the aspirations of human beings:'35 The tension inherent in this statement reinforces my ultimate point.

Scopic Regime of Discovery 243 Ichiyo's literary life under the regime of discovery was compromised by the fact that she wrote inescapably as a woman. The gendered premise of self-discovery rendered her position more naturally self-reflexive than Takuboku's. Whether or not her path of discovery was more thoughtful and profound than his, one point is clear: the writer in Meiji Japan, in search of a territory that permitted the birth of a second-order discovering subject, found the agony of the prostitute (or of the mistress or the unloved wife) a subject too relevant and useful to ignore.36 So great was the potential she offered that writers of both genders felt compelled to make use of her. Once again, when I point to the new discoverers and speak of the epistemic shift that was caused by the anti-figural forces of genbun itchi and, as a part of this wider cultural movement, the use of romaji, I am not claiming that their desire to discover was wholly caused by the West. Certainly, it was intensified and expressed differently because of Japan's "opening:' Yet Takuboku, working in the wake of "civilization and enlightenment;' was repeating what Saikaku did at another, much earlier modern juncture in Japanese history. Saikaku's A Woman Who Loved Love [Koshoku ichidai onna (1686)1 is nothing more nor less than harlotwriting. A voyeuristic treatment of the heroine's damning sexual adventures, it belongs to a particularly ebullient period of mercantile growth and social change, a time when the newly enforced stability of the Tokugawa regime allowed a recently unified nation to begin forming a truly urban, monetary culture. Marked by its intense interest in the details of social role-playing and in the nature of human character, Saikaku's confessional is a significant modern precedent for Takuboku's diary. Whether talking about Matsuo Basho's (1644-1694) self-conscious turn to haibun (poetry prose) or to the flourishing of katagi-mono (character studies) that were written by Saikaku and Ejima Kiseki (1666-1735), we can see that the search for the self had begun long before what Karatani calls the discovery of landscape. Having been given the opportunity to reflect upon the nature of discovery and its scopic regime, I now know that my urgent desire to see Takuboku's face was a response to the pornographic nature of his diary. I was tempted to see Takuboku because of the secretive way that he saw himself, by way of a new empowering language, and in response to the regime of discovery that permitted the already discovered author to reestablish self-identity by rediscovering an objectified female body. The phonocentric script contributed to this search for identity by allowing

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Ishikawa Takuboku

him to explore the sexual territory of Meiji Japan more freely and willfully than would have otherwise been possible. Takuboku's experiments with romaji led him to see himself not just as an individual but rather as an adolescent, a self in sexual emergence. And it is here that the source of my disappointment lies. The story of Japan's modernity is a narrative of prurient males seeking out and appropriating the identity of captured females. That I expected to see a more mature face indicates the extent to which I have become both accustomed to and rendered young by the scopic regime of discovery.

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NOTES 1 An English translation of this diary as well as a brief biographical sketch of Takuboku

can be found in Romaji Diary and Sad Toys, trans. Sanford Goldstein and Seishi Shinoda (Rutland, Vt.: Charles E. Tuttle, 1985). A partial translation is also contained in Modern Japanese Literature, ed. Donald Keene (New York: Grove Press, 1956),211-231. Translations of quoted passages are my own. For a book-length study of the author, see Hijiya Yukihiko, Ishikawa Takuboku (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1979). 2 Martin Jay, "Scopic Regimes of Modernity;' Fision and Visuality, ed. Hal Foster (Seattle: Bay Press, 1988), 3. 3 James A. Fujii, Complicit Fictions: The Subject in the Modern Japanese Prose Narrative (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), helps us understand this seer as an unstable nexus of textual contingencies rather than a "static, given, unproblematic center from which meaning issues" (24). Takuboku is an acting subject whose vision is created by the act of narration, which is in turn determined by social forces more multifarious and powerful than his own individual will to see. 4 Karatani Kojin, Origins of Modem Japanese riterature (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1993). 5 Fredric Jameson, "In the Mirror of Alternate Modernities;' in Kojin, Origins of Modern Japanese Literature, vii-xx. 6 Richard Lane, "The Beginnings of the Modern Japanese Novel: Kanazoshi, 1600-1682;' Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 20 (1957): 644-701; Marleigh Ryan, Japan's First Modern Novel: Ukigumo of Futabatei Shimei (Ann Arbor: Center for Japanese Studies, University of Michigan, 1990). 7 Karatani Kojin, "One Spirit, Two Nineteenth Centuries," in Postmodernism and Japan, ed. Masao Miyoshi and H. D. Harootunian (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1989). 8 Both kindai and kinsei indicate modernity. In its broadest sense, kinsei is the last of a threesome: ancient (kodai), medieval (rhasei), and modern (kinsei). In its narrower sense, kinsei indicates that period prior to kindai, i.e., the Edo-period (1600-1868) and, in some cases, the preceding Azuchi-Momoyama period (1568-1600). Here I am using the term kinsei in this narrower sense. I have translated it as "early-modern" and killdai as "modern:'

9 The numbers in parentheses indicate volume and page of Takuboku's collected works, Ishikawa Takuboku zensha (Tokyo: Chikuma Shobo, 1978-1980). This diary is also readilyavailable as Romazi nikki, ed. Kuwabara Takeo, Iwanami Bunko 54:4 (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1978). The diary was first published in 1954. 10 Kuwabara Takeo suggests that writing in romaji was as difficult for the Japanese of Takuboku's day as writing diaries in French might be to Japanese today. Donald Keene compares writing in romaji with our writing in Esperanto. See Keene's anthology, noted above. For an introduction (in Japanese) to Takuboku's diaries, see Kuwabara Takeo's introduction in Romazi nikki, 24-35. 11 Meirokllsha zasshi no. 1, in Meiji bllllka zellsh ii: Zasshi hen, 18, ed. Yoshino Sakuzo et al. (Tokyo: Kyodo Insatsu, 1928), 53. See also William Reynolds Braisted, Mciroku zasshi (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979), 9. 12 Education in Japan: A Series of Letters Addressed by Promillent Americans to Arinori Mori (New York, 1873), vi. Quoted in Ivan Hall, Mori Arinori (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971), 189.

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13 The allure of riimaji is today evident in its use for commercial purposes, for instance.

Advertisements, product packaging, company logos, and so forth often employ alphabetic script because of its modern associations with consumer culture and its claims to improve life. Riimaji is a marker of worth, serving a similar semiotic function to the multitude of Caucasian faces featured in contemporary Japanese television commercials. 14 Kuwabara, Romazi nikki, 25I. 15 Edward Fowler, The Rhetoric of Confession: Shishiisetsu in Early Twentieth-Century Japanese Fiction (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), xxiv. 16 Charles S. Inouye, "Pictocentrism;' Yearbook of Comparative and General Literature 40 (1992): 23-39· 17 Miyazaki took care of Takuboku's family-his mother, wife, and daughter-in Hako-

18

19 20 21

date, from 24 April until June 1909. Miyazaki and Takuboku met at a society for tanka poets in Hakodate during the summer of 1907. This is, at least, Kuwabara Takeo's appraisal: "Soviet textbooks contain passages from the diary, and in Donald Keene's Modern Japanese Literature (Grove Press, 1956), the most popular piece among American readers is A Diary in Roman Script" (Romazi nikki, 241). As for Japan's reception of this text, "It is not enough to say that A Diary in Roman Script is one of the monuments of Japan's diary-writing tradition. Though it has been unjustifiably neglected, it stands as a high point of the modern Japanese tradition, one of a few great masterpieces:' Kuwabara, "Takuboku no nikki;' in Bungei tokuhon: Ishikawa Takuboku (Tokyo: Kawade Shinsha, 1979), 30. Donald Keene also values this text highly: "It reveals a man of depth, complexity and modernity of thought and emotion that would not have been predicted from earlier literature" (Modern Japanese Literature, 211). The bias in favor of the (Westernized) modern as opposed to the "earlier literature" is shared by Western and Japanese critics alike. Kuwabara. Romazi nikki, 241. Hijiya, Ishikawa Takuboku, 172. John R. Black, Young Japan: Yokohama and Yedo (London: Trubner and Company, 1880),2.

22 James A. B. Scherer, Young Japan: The Story of the Japanese People, and Especially of Their

Educational Development (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1905), 15. 23 Ibid., 6. 24 In his "Writing Out Asia: Modernity, Canon, and Natsume Saseki's Kokoro;' positions 1,

no. 1 (summer 1993): 194-223, James Fujii makes a similar point: "The term 'modern' almost always erases Japan's own reproduction of imperialist behavior" (204). The structure of inequality is the same as in the collaborative inversion. 25 The problem of youth is taken up from a different perspective by the historian Kenneth B. Pyle, The New Generation in Meiji Japan (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1969). To Tokutomi Soha, the focus of Pyle's study, Japan's youth are "the masters of the future;' valued in contrast to the old, who are "relics of yesterday's world" (33). The discourse of youth consumes Tokutomi and Takuboku alike since the cataclysmic changes brought about by the Meiji Restoration and the "opening of Japan" to the West have the effect of erasing history. Consequently, though focused on different aspects of Japan's youth in the Meiji period, Pyle's concerns-problems of identity, the agony of consciousness, the search for moral surety, war and its influence on self-discovery, and so forth-are all relevant to this discussion of Takuboku and his adolescent objectification of the female.

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26 Also known as Hirano Banri (1885-1947). He was a graduate of the First Higher School

27 28

29 30 31 32 33

34

35 36

(Ichiko), earned a degree in applied science from Tokyo University, was an engineer for the Mantetsu Central Testing Laboratory, studied in Europe, and later served as an engineer for the Ministry of Agriculture and Commerce (NiJshiJmusho). He was a haiku poet of the Myojo school. The other two alluded to here are the playwright, novelist, and poet Yoshii Isamu (1886-1960) and the poet Kitahara Hakushii (1885-1942). I learned of this book from Kawanami Hideo, Takuboku hiwa (Tokyo: Tojiisha, 1979), 277. I have not been able to locate True Love or the Japanese translation Obei-koi no shinsa, which appeared in 1908. Kawanami himself has seen only a later edition, Toru rabu, translated in February 1951 by Hara Shoji. Supposedly, the book is about a college graduation party in the United States. Friends gather. Everyone gets drunk. John Brown proposes an end to his friend Eton's virginity. Eton is stripped, bound, and placed on a table. Ida, slender and eighteen, and Vick, well-muscled and twenty-two, disrobe and take a place on either side of the naked Eton. By relating stories about their first sexual conquests-conqueror and conquered-the group tries to titillate him and ultimately to make him a man. By Baitei Kinga (1821-1893). The full title is ShunjiJ hana no oboroyo. This book was not listed in the Kokusho samokuroku [A compendium of Japanese titles J. I thank Sumie Jones for bringing my attention to this language. Nanette Twine, Language and the Modern State: The Reform of Written Japanese (New York: Nissan Institute/Routledge Japanese Studies Series, 1991). Kuwabara speculates that Takuboku was the first to use this word ("Takuboku no nikki;' in Bungei tokuhon, 31). In fact,ji-ishiki occurs earlier, in Oguri Fiiyo's Youth (Seishun, 1905-1906), for example. The point that Takuboku was self-conscious remains. Quoted in Victoria V. Vernon, Daughters of the Moon: Wish, Will, and Social Constraint in Fiction by Modern Japanese Women (Berkeley: Institute of East Asian Studies, University of California, 1988), 39. Vernon's translation. Ibid., 66. Of course, there were other ways to understand this identification. No less trapped than Takuboku in the youthful season of Meiji, Kurata Hyakuzo (1891-1943) attempted to reify the modern merging of man and woman, raising the encounter to the level of love and understanding: "I want to adore my beloved to such a degree that the sweat will pour from me, so much that I could die. I want to know the shame of loving someone so much that I might fear death itself." For a humanistic interpretation of gender appropriation, see J. Thomas Rimer, Culture and Identity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990 ),22-3 6.

~ Remembering Pearl Harbor, Forgetting Charlie

Chaplin, and the Case of the Disappearing Western Woman: A Picture Story

~~

Miriam Silverberg

As soon as he heard that the Germans had invaded Hungary, one Jewish Father did the only thing he felt he could: He took his daughter to the movies. "We won't see one for a long time;' he explained to her.-New York Newsdayl I am extremely despondent for lack of companionship. The Niseis here are not of my age and of an entirely different background and interest .... As you know I sought some place where I might fit into the fight for freedom. This might have been the place were I stronger or more adaptable. As it is I become embittered.-Sculptor Isamu Noguchi, S.7.A. Poston, Arizona, July 27, 1942 (from FBI file)2 I want you to tell me, What does an American look like?-Alice Walker, Possessing the Secret ofJoy At a time in the academy when theorizing related to "identity" is multiplying furiously, it seems to me that it is important to consider how such an issue is indeed of historical/political significance within our areas of study. In the case of modern Japan, questions related to identity are exceedingly meaningful in the context of understanding the making of colonial Japan and the transition (popular acquiescence?) into wartime Japan. Such inquiry can, of course, inform an analysis of the postwar Nihonjinron obsession as part of the making of a depoliticized corporate Japanese culture that in part relies on a politics of identity that essentializes the postwar Japanese citizenry. This essentializing relies, of course, on the concurrent stereotyping of various categories of non-Japanese, who cannot merely be lumped together as undifferentiated by race or class. The fact that Prime Minister Nakasone's speech of September 22, 1986, wherein

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he referred to the high educational level of Japanese society, rendering it an interigento (intelligent) society, in contrast to the extremely low, on average, level of American society, leveled by the relatively large number of "Blacks and Puerto Ricans and Mexicans-those sorts" (a prime example of the collusion of presumptions about Nihonjin with unquestioned presumptions of various types of outsiders), stood out from other news stories within the Japanese media only after it was received with outrage by African Americans in the United States, is an example of the extent to which Japanese commonsense attitudes about national, ethnic, and racialized character are yet to be problematized in contemporary Japan. 3 My story here, however, is about prewar Japan-Japan on the eve of and during the decade preceding Pearl Harbor. It is a picture story about pre-Pacific War fantasies and about the meanings attached to Charlie Chaplin's visit to Japan in 1932, and about the culpability of Japanese "modern" culture as part of the history of the Japanese colonial enterprise. This is a story of U.S.-Japan relations that should not surprise any Japanese citizen who lived through the 1920S or the 1930S in Japan, but which, I suspect, based on such sources as wide-eyed reviews of translations of contemporary Japanese short fiction found in the U.S. media over the past couple of years, will surprise most Americans who still presume that Japan has only fairly recently discovered the media culture emanating from the West. My goal is to recast this history for American citizens through a form of associative or associated history (as opposed to comparative history) that shows how the history of racialized politics in prewar and wartime Japan must be associated with the stories and picture stories we are still hearing and seeing about racial hatred of Europeans against Europeans and of Americans against Tapanese Americans from the 1930S and early 1940s.4

Readers, television viewers, and video renters in postwar Japan have not been asked to make connections between the history of Nazi brutalities and actions of their own leaders and relatives. In the United States, public awareness of the internment of Japanese Americans remains scant (although reparations do exist in the form of forced government payment, one Hollywood movie, and in the literature and drama produced by survivors and their children). But in contemporary, post-"riot," post-"multicultural" Los Angeles, the grandchildren of those interned by Germans, Japanese, and American authority have not yet learned the historical implications of confusing the term "Japanese" with "Japanese American." For example, one student recently identified his mother as "Japanese (born

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in a Japanese internment camp in Arizona during WW II)." In the same essay, the student's father was identified as "the son of Russian and Polish Jewish immigrants!' My guess is that the people of post-Pacific War Japan will not be able to free themselves of prejudices that separate them from Koreans, Korean Japanese, Southeast Asian peoples, or Americans and Europeans (the prewar term was the Japanese equivalent of ''Anglo-Euro,'' but the term "Anglo-Saxon" was sometimes used) until they have come to terms with their still largely untold history as colonizers. I would also like to venture that the contrast between the babble of the commodified print world of contemporary Japan (that has moved on from playing with the notion of the postmodern, but has not yet, to my knowledge, marketed discussions of "identity politics" or variations on the current American academic preoccupations with the "postcolonial") and the vibrant intellectual debate of prewar and immediate postwar Japan is very much related to both the willful forgetting that was institutionalized through government directives in postwar Japan and the inability to recall memories induced both by the legislated forgetting of history and by the associated, less overtly ruthless, but even more powerful psychic forms of denial of responsibility. How will contemporary Japanese commentators reconcile the need to publicize now-popular Western academic concerns with "historical memory," "identity politics," and the "postcolonial" era with the Japanese forgetting of the Pacific War years? Japanese history may not as easily be evaded as it was during the past decade when the presence of a Western-based discourse took such forms of self-denial as the equation of the Tokugawa era with the postmodern. Comparative history leads us away from investigations into distinctiveness, and my own position is that the idea of world history smacks too much of (what many now would call a totalizing) nineteenth-century Hegelian meta-narrative, and/or demands an empiricist adding in of everything that has formerly been left out. An associated history instead demands a respect for difference and a recognition of relationships and the complex workings of what we have too often simplified as "influence." But let me begin my story. I begin with two anecdotes from the era I have chosen to call Japan's "modern moment" that, in their specificity, historicize questions related to the highly political question of the making of identities in modan (the 1920S and 1930S Japanese word for modern) Japan. While I intentionally use the term modan to underscore the specificity of the associated Japanese history, and to distinguish this term from the wide-ranging philo-

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Figure 1. "Shiseido Soap." 1941 poster by Ibuka Akira (A Century of Japanese Photography, Japan Photographers Assn., intra. by J. W. Dower, New York: Pantheon Books, 1980) Figure 2. Fujin Karon

sophical, literary, and historical English-language literature on the variants "modern," "modernist:' and "modernization:' the history of identity during Japan's modern moment shares the characteristic of the modern West referred to by Kobena Mercer, in his discussion of the historical break from "classical to a modern regime of truth" in terms of "representation and signification of race." According to Mercer, during the modern period "the fixity of the primordial racial metaphor was thrown into a state of dialectical flux," in contrast to the "relative stability" of the black/white metaphor at the center of racist ideologies" within the "Eurocentric world-system." A similar relationship of identity to modernity appears in the introduction to the volume Modernity and Identity, wherein the editors Scott Lash and Jonathan Friedman note how, in modernity, the "heteronomous definition of identity persists." The editors' discussion of "another modernity:' a "low modernism ... in the streets" marked by the transience of Baudelaire's Paris, by Simmel's aestheticization of everyday life in turn-of-the-century Berlin, and by an ateleological celebration of experimentation that rejects the high-modern grand recits of history, should also be associated with the

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Japanese madan, as I have indicated elsewhere in my writings about Japanese Modern Marxism and the Japanese ethnography of modernity. 5 Now to the first anecdote, a true story: It takes place in 1937 in the treaty port of Tientsin, at a lavish party attended by the Japanese elite, whose social life Mark Peattie has sketched out and termed as lacking in "grand colonial lifestyle;' which, as Peattie's description reveals, meant lacking in European coloniallifestyle. 6 At this gathering, in this true story, the young Yamaguchi Yoshiko, daughter of a Japanese colonial official, meets Kawashima Yoshiko. Yamaguchi (fig. 1) was to become the noted Japanese film-industry idol Ri Ko-ran within the next two years. Her real name was Yamaguchi Yoshiko and she was, in fact, Japanese; she was born in Manchuria of a Japanese mother who had married a South Manchurian Railway official by arranged marriage in Manchuria. Brought up in Manchuria and Peking, she would be presented to her fans as an exotic Chinese sex idol. Her real Japanese identity was to be a tightly held secret. In 1937 she had not yet begun her film career (she was seventeen years old and was to graduate from a Chinese girls' high school, where she was passing as Chinese in the midst of intensifying antiJapanese sentiment). But she was already famous as the talented young singer on the radio program "New Songs of Manshu," established to entertain the Manchurian audience of the puppet state of Manshu. She had made her singing debut while still a schoolgirl in Beijing in 1933 as, in her own words, "a Chinese person" who, "like the state of Manshu" (two years earlier), "was made by the hands of the Japanese."7 When they met, Kawashima Yoshiko (fig. 2), who was pleased by the fact that she and the teenager shared the same first name, was known as the Mata Hari of the Orient (she was recently sensationalized in the film The Last Emperor). The older cousin of the puppet emperor Pu Yi and the fourteenth princess of the Ching dynasty, she had been adopted by Japanese parents (Shina ron in-Japanese China adventurers) who became involved in political intrigue and indeed spied for Japanese military authorities in Manchuria. By 1933, her story was made famous in a novel first serialized in the leading woman's magazine, Fujirz koran, as the tale of the danso no reijin (the beauty dressed like a man). ~ And indeed, at this banquet, held at a Chinese restaurant managed by Kawashima-where daughters of upper-class Chinese were amusing themselves in the inner garden-the Mata Hari ofJapan appeared, dressed like a man, with her short hair parted on the side. (Her pet monkey was not on her shoulder that night.) The teenaged Yamaguchi was intrigued

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Miriam Silverberg

and bewildered by the spectacle of a woman dressed like a man. She was then introduced to the well-known heroine, who looked at the teenager dressed in Chinese garb and said "Oh, so you were really Japanese!" The Manchurian woman, doubly cross-dressing as a Japanese male, then turned to the younger Japanese woman, who was dressed as a Chinese female. Addressing herself in masculine, familiar terms as "Boku;' this woman, then over thirty, flirtatiously asked Yoshiko to "call me big brother!"9 My second story was published as fiction by Ozaki Midori (chronicler of an essay on Charlie Chaplin's hat) in the March 1929 issue of Nyonin geijutsu. 10 In this story a solitary heroine seeks solace from her buddy Kimichan, who works as a waitress at a dingy cafe. Kimi-chan lights the heroine's cigarette for her, pulls her movie program away, and explains to her why she should not be in love with Charlie Chaplin: Nobody's going to be crazy about a guy who's not a loverman. Even I stopped going to the flicks after Valentino died. This colloquial vignette can be taken in various directions as a means of exploring social relationships and cultural politics during Japan's modern moment. Not only does it bring us into the social space of the cafe that I have discussed elsewhere, in my discussion of how "The Japanese Cafe Waitress Sang the Blues," it also hints at the meaning attached to the eroticized male (the iro otoko) by Japanese women, and moreover suggests one Japanese version of the Valentino cult analyzed in Miriam Hansen's Spectatorship in American Silent Film. Most importantly, Kimichan's adamancy about the appropriate object of female desire in 1929 cafe/working-class culture (along with the heroine's obsession with Charlie Chaplin) tells us that the experience of going to the movies could profoundly shape fantasies and thereby identities in prewar Japan. II These two stories, (1) about Ri Ko-ran and the Mata Hari of the Orient and (2) about Chaplin versus Valentino as heartthrobs in Japan, raise connected issues central to my picture story. The first issue is the fluidity of identity during Japan's modern moment. In my essay on the Japanese modern girll have talked about how in Japan during the 1920S and 1930S people were questioning gender: in other words, asking what was really male and what was really female. Clearly the Mata Hari ofJapan was doing the same, much to Yamaguchi's shock. But national identity could also be played with, as evidenced by the masquerade of Ri Ko-ran ("Li Hsianglan" before transliteration into Japanese, and later to be known as "Shirley") as

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Figure 3. The 1920s in Japan: 1920 Nendai Nihonten (published by Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum, Yamaguchi Prefectural Museum of Art, Hyogo Prefectural Museum of Modern Art, and the Asahi Shimbun, 1988)

Chinese. In other words, in Japan, during the years after the invasion of Manchuria and before the official onset of the Pacific War, between 1931 and early 1942, both gender and national identity were up for grabs. The second issue is about the relationship between movies and fantasies (see fig. 3) during the modan years leading up to the Pacific War in Japan. l2 Ri Ko-ran the movie star shaped her own identity, but the audiences who went to her movies and to the movies of Valentino and Charlie Chaplin shaped their own fantasies and identities as Japanese men, women, boys, and girls. Ozaki's story is one illustration of the power of the visual media to represent and encourage the new cultural practices of Japanese imperial subjects (colonizers and colonized), who consumed images in photographs and advertisements in the mass press, in posters, in movie programs, and in the movies during the 1920S and 1930S. In other words this was a consumer culture of images more than objects. l3 The interwar Japanese culture of modernity, which I have defined as characterized by identity fluidity, the consumption of images, and a focus on "play" that ignored the modern rationalization of labor, has hitherto not been discussed in relation to Japanese colonialism, but in this picture story I want to introduce the idea that they were inseparable. The cultural move of the modan from Japan to the Asian continent is documented by

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Mark Peattie's discussion of the social life of the Japanese colonizer communities including the Japan Club in Tientsin, where issues of such popular magazines as Kingu and Kaiza were available, and by my own preliminary investigations into how a cafe culture infrastructure was created in the colonies-one that used both Japanese and colonial women (including White Russian, Jewish, and Korean women) as sex workers. 14 The mobilization of Chinese and Korean women in madan, Japanesestyle bars, restaurants, and meeting places on the continent is historically related to the horrors experienced by the so-called comfort women, the ianfu who were forced into sexual slavery by the Japanese military, and to the predecessors/precursors of the ianfu, the Korean women restaurant workers first brought to Sapporo, Hokkaido, in the 1920S to serve Korean laborers. In Hokkaido the Korean restaurants were ghettoized behind a gated entrance. By 1935-1936 (the year before the ianfu were first used), there were six Korean restaurants for these workers which were converted and expanded to over one hundred places serving Japanese customers who had expressed a taste for these women workers, who indeed spoke Korean to their Korean customers. IS The eventual attempt to eradicate the "Koreanness" of these colonized night spots by changing such names as "Ariran" to more indigenoussounding titles, and by recostuming the Korean jokyu from Korean to Japanese dress, is part of the cultural history of the relationship of colonial to modern culture within the Naichi, the "interior" of Japan. Gender and ethnic relations in "modern" Japan, which were not easily separated into neat binaries of male/female or NaichilGaichi (interior/exterior), were intertwined with formations of both class and race/ethnicity within the context of Japanese colonialism, as Nishikawa Yuko makes clear in her revelation of how architects engaged in a study of housing policy in Manchuria, in her discussion of the class differences among Japanese (including the many young "continental brides") who populated the Chinese continent, the Korean peninsula, and the countries of Southeast Asia. These Japanese imperial subjects took with them and constructed new modes of living. Her observation that the architects who produced a study on housing policy in Manchuria made the distinction between "Manchurian" (Mankei) and "Japanese" (Nikkei) dwellings, and discussed ethnic or folk practices only in regard to the latter category, indicates how much was left out of popular discourse then and how much history has to be written about the relationship of Japanese culture (madan and otherwise) to the colonial culture of the so-called "exterior." 16

A Picture Story 257 For example, a guide to the "New Korea," published in 1930 was prefaced by such photographs as images of the author in native garb, a young girl in native garb, and a memorial to the Koreans killed after the Kanto earthquake, on the "famed" Mt. Takao in the interior, and of the Taikyu (Taegu) train station sign that "had to be written in four different scripts"-kanji, hiragana, Korean, and romanized. Part of a series on Korean geography and customs, it offers insights into how Japanese Orientalist writers negotiated the contradiction between Korea as "external" and Korea as ostensibly one with JapanY This work, covering such topics as the superior beauty of the Korean schoolgirl as compared to the Japanese schoolgirl, the body language of Korean women, and the practices of the indigenous Korean courtesan, along with discussions of chastity and of the beauty of the Oriental (Korean) woman, should be more closely examined as a chilling harbinger of the ianfu history,18 but in my narrative here I offer it to point out a key contradiction that cannot be resolved: a Korea unified into Japan is a Korea dominated by Japan. A rationale for colonization is offered in one preface, which explains that a folk culture (minshu bunka) did not emerge in Korea and therefore the people are exceedingly childlike. A second preface, which places Korea at the center of the "Oriental Problem;' acknowledges the efforts of the author, who had not at the outset of his labors known the "stark naked" Korea (pp. 36-37). The distinction between the two peoples is made clear in the author's introduction, dated the summer of the year 2590 (1930), wherein he dedicates the "monography" to "those of the interior" and to "the Koreans:' The unity of both Koreans and the "people of the interior" as Japanese imperial subjects is expressed within the context of a return to the spirit of the Orient and the need to "maintain and reform the traditions and customs of the Korean people' (pp. 59-61, 245). Unity is also claimed through the notion of a shared ancestry and through reference "to the spirit of Great Established Japan" (Dai Nippon kenkoku) (p. 94), but quotes from those in the interior are used to tell the reader how Koreans living in Japan (differentiated from Taiwanese and Chinese, who are the sunniest in disposition) are the cause of prejudice that hurts all Koreans, because, for example, "they have no puraido (pride) in being Korean" (p. 71). In places, this travelogue, which reveals a culture of colonial officialdom, reveals quite bluntly the ultimate aim of essentializing the Japanese within a colonial hierarchy, as when the author exclaims that "Japanese are after all Japanese," in response to a Japanese elementary-school teacher's concern for the "spiritual education" of children who do not have a shrine or a torii nearby (pp.

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80,82) and when the author wonders why "Korean children are not as cute as children of the interior" (p. 127). The ideological premise of the work is that a unified Japan/Korea is to be the cornerstone of the Orient, as underscored in the conclusion at the end of this almost six-hundred-page volume: "Korea is the peninsula that links Asia and Japan." Published in 1930, it is a work that clearly looks toward China, and in the course of making known its mission, it belies any notion of a unity informed by Korean/Japanese equality. The author admits that a Japanese person never feels closer to his Japanese identity as when he leaves the interior while at the same time he corrects those in the interior who would call the peninsula "a colony"-explaining that, by that logic, Kyushu and Shikoku would also have to be called colonies. The author encourages those from the interior to take up such daily practices of the peninsula as the preparation of Korean-style pickles, and lauds the Korean family system for maintaining what is being lost as the people in the interior of Japan lose their glorious familistic customs (pp. 154, 184, 361, 471-472,569).

According to the author (in an aside that leaves no room for true Japanese-Korean unity), young Japanese couples in the new Japanese family in the interior attend jazz concerts and the cinema, at a time when sports events take place in a Japanese jazz-music atmosphere, as part of the fundamental addiction to Euro-American culture. Clearly, traditions are not holding in the interior or the writer would not have to cry out, "calling forth the Japanese spirit of tradition that lies at the base of the soul of the nation's people." The extent of modan culture is revealed in the author's conclusion that those in the interior dare not laugh at Korean customs at a time when the hairstyles of young girls look masculine and those of young men are becoming feminized, like the styles of Valentino, Ramon Navarro, and "Marx-heads"-"Marx-boys multiply like maggots:' The diatribes against the "worship of Euro-America" and the "world of white people" reveal that modan culture was not without its effect within the exterior also: there is mention of a Korean "Marx Boy's" parade and the "Honbura" on Honmachi Boulevard in Korea-the equivalent of the "Ginbura;' a promenade down the Ginza in modern Tokyo.19 Now, while my story could be about the modern within the colonial, my focus will be rather on the colonial within the modern-for example, in the cafe culture of the interior, which, according to the author of the guide to New Korea, caught the fancy of so many Korean students (p. 69). Photographs of the space within one cafe in the homeland or "interior" of

A Picture Story 259

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Figure 4. Shukan Asahi,

January 1931 modan Japan show both chinoiserie decoration and waitresses dressed uniformly in Chinese costume, illustrating the eroticization of the colonial experience in what may be termed a reversal of the "mimicry" of the colonizer by the colonized (discussed by Homi Bhabha, in "Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse").2o Here, of course, the colonizer is passing as colonized. (The most sensational and cynical example of such mimicry was provided by Ri Ko-ran, the femme fatale movie idol who passed as Chinese but was in fact Japanese.) Waitresses catered to customers who paid to be seated in the "Salon Manchuria" section on the second floor of the Ginza Palace, which had advertised for three hundred jokyu when it opened. Customers more interested in the reworking of indigenous tradition could confine themselves to the "Salon Momoyama" section, whose waitresses sat on brocade chairs and wore their kimono and their hair in appropriate fashion, or they could drink and visit in a third area, on the same floor, that had wicker and wooden chairs, potted plants, and waitresses in kimono with their hair wrapped in contemporary, but modest buns. 21

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But rather than continue with such detailed description, let me return to the main narrative of my picture story beginning in January of 1931. The photographs in figure 4 illustrate how the Naichi mass media made the modern Japanese reader aware that the modern culture of the interior included a new body language that reformulated popular representations of gender and ethnicity. Under the caption "What signal [is this]?" the reader is asked to guess what wordless statement the woman is signifying in her modan shingo or "modern signal," which, the text explains, is a new form of conversation for 1931. Potential contestants are encouraged to "Think of her silent words" and to mail in their guesses by postcard. Five male winners are to be awarded Boston bags, and five women to receive chapel (?) bags. The modern "signal" in the lower left-hand corner stands for "9:30," because, as the answer explains, the woman's hands take the place of the long and short hands of a clock. Here there is no ambiguity between male and female, but the model is not marked as Japanese. How did the Japanese reader identify with her? This is a tricky but crucial question that has enormous significance for looking at Japanese cultural-political history from 1868 until the present; people studying Japanese popular manga today still have not been able to explain why and how cartooned heroines and heros with blond-appearing hair are read as Japanese by Japanese readers. A third issue in my picture narrative derives from the two short stories and the two problems presented earlier: the fluidity of identity in modan Japan and, secondly, the relationship of movies to Japanese fantasies in modan Japan are based on another central, unanswered question in modern Japanese history. How did the Japanese populace-modern citizens whom I will call consumer-subjects-experience the transition into a wartime? How, in other words, did they get from the modan years, celebrating the consumption of a multiplicity of images (and identities), into the Pacific War years of mobilization for the war effort and acknowledgment of material scarcity and an essentialized, rigidly gendered national identity? Or, to put the problem more bluntly: was there (and if so, how was there) a tenko (a conscious political turning) of the Japanese consumer-citizen, in good faith, away from a belief in Valentino and a desire for Chaplin toward Ri Ko-ran, the supposedly purely Chinese beauty who would interact with purely male, purely Japanese actors? By the 1940s, in the Japanese movies men were men and women were women, and more importantly Japanese were Japanese and Chinese were Chinese (suppos-

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edly)22-as the result of indoctrination and, by the time of the Pacific War, of state policy. How should we as historians understand this? I raise this issue now, at a time not long after the u.s. media has presumed to have documented the history behind the fiftieth anniversary of Pearl Harbor, again making use of Japan experts in both Japan and the United States to tell its stories, just as it did a half century ago, as John Dower has so compellingly documented. This time around we are responsible and complicit through our public statements, through misrepresentation of our work and in our silence, as racism on both sides of the Pacific and across the Atlantic takes all too familiar forms, forms that, as before, ignore the historical record. To give just one example: in Japan there has been the promise by the leader of a new Japanese religion that Japan would subdue China and Korea, even amidst the recent forced revelations regarding the horrors experienced by the Korean "comfort women" for whom the term "prostitute" is an unworthy euphemism. These women, many of whom were forcibly rounded up from girls' schools in Korea, were forcibly placed in barracks near Japanese troops on the Asian continent, where they were subjected to continual rape. In a new twist to U.S.-Japan relations, on the eve of the fiftieth anniversary of Pearl Harbor there was a trumpeting in the U.S. press (see New York Times, 16 October 1991; Los Angeles Times, 25 October 1991; and u.s. News and World Report, 28 October 1991) that the Japanese had coined a "New Word for an Old Feeling" (kenbei), scorned the United States, and in their eagerness to experience World War II as victims had "forgotten Pearl Harbor." As Japan historians Fujita Shozo, Tsurumi Shunsuke, and Thomas Havens have argued, the transition into war was not clear-cut in the Japanese case. But whether we use Fujita's image of "slip-sliding smack into war;' Tsurumi's recognition that media representation of a so-called series of "incidents" beginning in 1931 masked an undeniable historic continuity of military engagement, or Havens's four-stage theory taking us from early mobilization in 1937 into the final stage of "destruction and defeat" beginning in late 1944, we can agree that after Pearl Harbor there was a tenko, a political turning point of the illustrated press, documented in the pioneering history by John Dower, War Without Mercy, and by the institutional histories of Gregory Kasza and Richard Mitchell.23 In the research that I have done for a cultural history of Japan during the 1920S and 1930S, while going through numerous Japanese magazines, the simultaneity of the beginnings of a tenko are clear (fig. 5). While the image of the swastika is more subtle than the photos of Hitler

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Figure 5. Shukan Asagu cover, 20 January 1939

Figure 6. Shukan Asahi, 2 January 1939

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and the photo stories of Hitler's childhood that I have also seen, the message of pro-Nazi sentiment was virtually universal in magazines aimed at men, women, middle- and lower-class readers, and both urban and rural audiences. (For example, the January 1939 Shukan Asahi featured a member of the Hitler Jugend, along with Charles Boyer, Babe Ruth, Anthony Eden, the Duchess of Windsor, Chiang Kai-shek, Al Capone, Mahatma Gandhi, Fred Astaire, and Joe Louis, in its variation on the New Year's card game of karuta [figure 6].) But if we are talking about a transition into Pacific wartime in Japan, pro-Nazi sentiment must be distinguished from and traced separately from the trajectories of both (1) a pro-Colonial discourse of domination in Asia and (2) the radical shift in representation of Americans. A close reading of the popular magazine Eiga no tomo (Friends of the movies)-read by cafe waitress and customer alike-reveals that a discourse about Hollywood and Hollywood stars, characterized by a sense of intimacy and shared history, changed after Pearl Harbor. Contrary to the misreading of John Dower in the Los Angeles Times, contemporary "America bashing" is not "drawn from prewar propaganda" or prewar view of Westerners as devils, and to say it is based on long-held stereotypes of Westerners distorts the history of U.S.-Japan cultural relations, as anyone who has read Dower's book knows and as most Japanese know. Indeed, the powerful draw of American culture as late as 1937 is evident even from a reading of Kokutai no hongi, the 1937 document exhorting the Japanese people to acknowledge their singularity. Readers of Dower and of such recent works as Michael Barnhart's Japan Prepares for Total War should not be surprised by the preponderance of Western faces in the pages of Eiga no tomo.24 What did surprise me was the nature of the transition into the Pacific War. Immediately after Pearl Harbor, in the pages of Eiga no tomo Americans were not demonized-instead they disappeared. The following pictures are for the most part from the pages of Eiga no torno, pages that celebrate Charlie Chaplin in word and image that, without commentary, silently record the disappearance of the Euro-American woman at the outset of the Pacific War. What interests me is the relationship between and among the photographs within the narrative provided by a chronological reading of the photos from 1931 to 1942. In contrast to a hierarchy of fixed place described by Dower to discuss state ideology and wartime propaganda, the mass-media representation of Japanese identity in Friends of the Movies was fluid, compelling the reader to negotiate back and forth between Japanese and Western faces in a complex combination

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Figure 7. Eiga no torno, June 1938

Figure 8. Eigo no torno, June 1932

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Figure 9. Shukan Asahi cover, 16 November 1930

of gendered juxtaposition (figs. 7, 8) while putting into place Japanese, Koreans, and Chinese on the Asian continent through a form of codeswitching. While the notion of code-switching as a visual cultural strategy characterizing prewar Japanese consciousness needs refinement, I employ it in order to differentiate the investigation of Japanese-American cultural relations in the prewar media from the notion of borrowing and from the binary, either/or choices implied by today's media and decidedly absent in the prewar Japanese popular media. By referring to "code-switches" I attempt to call attention to the actively constructed aspect of the syncretism of prewar Japanese culture and to suggest that the Japanese reader did not think in terms of "here versus there." The irony of the term acharaka from within the theater world of post-earthquake Japan-an ironic twisting of the term achirakara (meaning "from over there") analogous to the class-conscious inversions in Cockney-implied that producers and consumers of popular culture knew that more than borrowing was

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Figure 10. Shukan Asahi, May 1932 Figure 11. Tokyo Asahi Shimbun, 15 May 1932

going on as American images were being performed and acted on.2S My transition into the Pacific War begins in the spring of 1932 with accounts of Charlie Chaplin's heralded visit to Japan, an event that took place at the height of the high-modan years of so-called erotic, grotesque nonsense, an era that had begun around 1930 and that was clearly associated with a variety of night-life spectacles (fig. 9) . Note, however, that this visit also coincided with the intensification of developments on the Chinese mainland. The Japanese had invaded Manchuria in 1931; in late January of 1932 they had bombed Shanghai in an event euphemistically termed the "Shanghai Incident;' and in March of 1932 Pu Yi, the young male cousin of the Mata Hari of Japan, was made head of the Manchurian state. Two months later Charlie Chaplin arrived in Japan. How did the Japanese feel about Chaplin (compare, for example, the discussion by other scholars of his reception in Weimar Germany)? What interests me is the way Chaplin was presented in the media in Japan during the early 1930S (fig. 10). A childlike excitement pervaded the countdown in the Shukan Asahi as scenes from The Circus accompanied the announcement that "Uncle Char-

A Picture Story 267 lie" would arrive in Kobe in four days. How would the "Nature and Life" of Far Eastern Japan appear in the eyes of this once-in-a-century genius?26 Chaplin was clearly not Japanese, but he was at the same time kin. "Charlie" arrived on May 14, 1932, met by throngs of fans in Kobe and then in Tokyo, where police could not control crowds on the train platform. (They could bar people from buying platform tickets, but many used their commuter passes.) The next day a large advertisement for a special edition of Morinaga chocolate offered a special chocolate bar to fans of the "great artist." (The wrapper was adorned with Charlie's face and the words "Welcome Charlie Chaplin" in both English and Japanese.) In the same column, a Meiji milk caramel box featured a full-length, stylized figure of Chaplin, painted by a Japanese artist, and bearing the following poem: Happiness-Chaplin has arrived Lots of fun-this caramel 27 On the same page an advertisement for the June issue of the family magazine Kingu (modeled on the Saturday Evening Post) offered an article on the shining bushido (warrior) spirit of the Japanese army. The May 15 issue of the Tokyo Asahi ran a similar full page of photos of Chaplin with captions, along with ink sketches advertising everything from fountain pens to soy sauce and hair pomade (fig. 11). The press followed the star's every step in Japan from the moment "Chaarie" was met by exuberant throngs, cataloging every object of "Chappurin Kun's" ("young Chaplin") consumption in Japan, including two hard-boiled eggs in bed, tempura, and a new straw hat. The media coverage of Chaplin is complex because there is a familiarity and affection for "Uncle Charlie" while at the same time there is the theme of showing him the real Japan (the real Japan being limited to Kabuki, Mt. Fuji, and tempura). His kinship with his readers is illustrated by his filial attitude toward his mother. (The discussion of Chaplin as Jew, apparently an issue in his reception in other countries, is not something I have thus far found in my study of the reception of Chaplin in Japan, although the Japanese mass press of the period contains anti-Semitic references along with its discussions of Anglo-Saxon identity.) What is clear is that Chaplin's appeal crossed class boundaries in modan Japan. The day after Chaplin's arrival in Japan (his stay was from May 14 to June 2), Prime Minister Inukai was assassinated by right-wing extremists, but there is no discussion of how this socially aware Hollywood artist might have been interested in such expressions of political tension or the

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profound urban and rural social change underlying such tensions other than a carefully worded documentation of his visit to the scene of the crime. (One English-language history mentions assassination threats on Chaplin by the same Kokuryukai group that killed Inukai, and whether Chaplin's apparent depression was due to such threats or due to boredom because of his isolation from any interesting or intimate dialogue with Japanese people is hard to say.)28 In any case, the Japanese press did record how Chaplin took refuge in his hotel room for much of his stay, going out only in the evening to eat his daily tempura, and how he in fact decided to leave Japan earlier than intended. 29 The narrative in the Tokyo Mainichi was similar but preceded by a series of features intended to warm up its readership. By the time Charlie was welcomed in a "festive commotion;' the newspaper had run a series on his "view oflife" that warned excited readers to distinguish between Chaplin's private life and his screen presence, likened him to a Shakespearean clown, told the readers to sympathize with his exhaustion (which "stemmed from the Latin nature of his French blood"), and recounted how the poor in the London slums had welcomed his visit. On May 4, a story written in the form of a fictional short story recounted the visit of Chaplin, "a proletarian" (with "Gypsy blood"), to the home of a poor boy in Brooklyn, at the child's invitation. Chaplin's social concerns with the depression and unemployment in the United States were quoted, leading the reporter to conclude that Chaplin was both an idealist and an individualist. The class theme was continued, after Chaplin's arrival, with bold headlines stating "I Am a Friend of the Poor."30 Several years later a journalist for Eiga no tomo, writing from the set of Chaplin's new film Modern Times (Madan taimusu), looked over a shared history of ten years with Charlie Chaplin to muse on the appeal of a hero who moved one to a consciousness of magokoro (true heart) and ningen (true human being), affectionately but not condescendingly referring to the little body of the little hero. By the onset of the Pacific War, Japanese filmgoers were familiar not only with Chaplin but with Japanese Chaplin look-alike comedians in films, a Japanese character named Chaplin in a comedy, and plot lines in Japanese films were based on Chaplin's story lines. During the Pacific War, The Great Dictator was a favorite film of Japanese officers. This can probably be seen much more as expressing an affection for Chaplin than a disdain for Hitler)l A similar sense of intimacy marked the celebration of the seventh birthday of "Mikki Kun" (Mickey Mouse). In the February 1936 issue of Eiga no

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Figure 12. Eiga no torno, February 1936

Figure 13. Eigo no torno, January 1938

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Figure 14. Eiga no torno, January 1939

tomo (fig. 12), Mickey is being congratulated on his longevity by his good friends: Chaplin, Garbo, Cantor, Brown, Keaton, Beery, Groocho (sic), Maurice, Laurel (sic), and Duranto (sic). One aspect of the familiarizing (or should we say family-izing), in addition to the all-knowing tone taken by the movie magazine journalist ("Groocho's" handwashing gag [gyagu] in A Day at the Races [fig. 13] is judged to have had a real "Marx-like" flavor to it), is the imagined positioning of the Westerner into a Japanese cultural context-so that the pleasure of a Marx Brothers movie was likened to the enjoyment of a shrine festival. Elsewhere the term "chambara" is assigned to other Hollywood antics. In variation, the proverbial anger of woman-the author does not distinguish between Japanese or EuroAmerican woman-is invoked: an article titled "Hollywood New Gossip" uses gender categories in order to familiarize, in accounts of Martha Raye's displeasure with Ray Milland and Louise Rainer's annoyance at Douglas Fairbanks, Jr.'s tendency to forget his lines. The images of women (fig. 14) are accompanied by the folksy conclusion: "truly women are mukomizu no kanshakumochi" (a common saying implying quick-temperedness).32 But while Japanese colloquialisms were applied to Westerners, and

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Figure 15. Eiga no torno, March 1939

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Figure 17. Eiga no torno, September 1939

Figure 18. Eiga no torno, November 1939

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Figure 19. Miyako shirnbun, 2 December 1939

Figure 20. Eiga no torno, September 1940

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women were ostensibly seen as universally temperamental creatures, the March 1939 Eiga no tomo feature on the movies of Korea and Manchuria offered a twist in code-switching. It explained that an unprecedented form of Japanese person was emerging in the colonies (fig. IS). The description accompanying one group of photos explained that the term tairikuteki (continental) Japanese was more than a term: anyone who spent any time on the continent would soon know that a new, idealistic type (taipu) of Japanese had escaped from the island mentality to make their home on the continent. The notion of a Toa kyodotai (East Asian communalism) was problematic as "political thought:' the movie critic Iwasaki contended, but it definitely expressed one ideal in "cultural thought" which required a new form of "continental Japanese movie person." The reader was asked to engage with Japanese movies, Manchurian movies, and a new "continental Japanese movie" that would emerge from new relationships between Japanese movies and the movies of Manchuria and China. Korean movies were ostensibly an extension of Japanese movies, but the colonial contradiction of the supposed cultural merging revealed in my analysis of the Guide to Korea is revealed not only in the images that were offered but in the expressed opinion that Korean movies were technically inferior to those of Naichi Japan, although the former held their own as art.3 3 The code shifts implied by the 1939 advertisement for the Adventures of Marco Polo were just as complex (fig. 16). The reader moved from the choice between an actress in kimono or the Japanese woman on the righthand page who expressed the "model modanizumu of the era" to Gary Cooper on the left-hand side of the page; the text advertising Marco Polo's adventures spoke of the lure of an exotic foreign land, promising not just difference between East and West, but the glory of the East seen from the perspective of the Westerner in this tale of the Italian who first told the West of Japan. Moreover, the advertisement previewed a sweep through Persia, India, Java, Sumatra, and into Peking. The September 1939 Eiga no tomo juxtaposed The Texans with three wholesome Japanese maidens (fig. 17). Two months later the advertisement for Fool ofLife (fig. 18) made clear that after the annexation of Austria by Germany, movie personas would not be the same. By December, Mickey and Minnie Mouse were advertising the 2,600th anniversary of the Japanese empire, to be feted in 1940 (fig. 19), and as late as the September 1940 issue of Eiga no torno, Charles Boyer, Irene Dunn, and the starlet Takamine Hideko shared a page (fig. 20). This was in the "Emergency Autumn" of 1940, following the August promulga-

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Figure 21. Eiga no torno, November 1940

Figure 22. Eiga no torno, November 1940

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A Picture Story 277

Figure 25. Eiga no torno, November 1940

tion of the Greater East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere and the September 1940 proclamation of the Imperial Rule Assistance Association and the tripartite alliance. In this state of emergency (fig. 21) Japanese subjects were urged to buy bonds, watch for spies, and engage in new motions replacing the modern movement in the dance accompanying the Kokurnin shingunka (People's Song of the Advancing Military) (fig. 22). The text accompanying the dance picture code-switched as it noted the artistic ease (iijisa) with which the dance could be performed by young and old in Japanese and Western dress. The movie world of cultural performance was being mapped differently as Japanese expansion intensified, necessitating a reworking of colonizing imagery (figs. 23, 24).34 Nonetheless, in the same issue of Eiga no torno-picturing the emergency posters and the stick figures showing the dance steps for each word in the People's Song of the Advancing Military and the photographs of the leading motion picture idols from the major studios actually performing the dance-there is also the Japanese beauty in Western attire (Hara Setsuko?) superimposed on a map of the Asian continent; Bette Davis, Tyrone Power, Henry Fonda (fighting for American independence), and Spencer Tracy (as "the man Edison") spanned the pages devoted to "recent works of the moment in the world of the movie" (fig. 25).

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Figure 26. Eiga no torno, January 1941

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A Picture Story 279

Figure 28. Eiga no torno, March 1941

Figure 29. Eiga no torno, March 1941

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Figure 30. Eiga no torno, April 1941

By January 1941 the movie-viewing populous of East Asia was carved into spheres. Japanese and American movies were at war (fig. 26), and the reader was admonished to recognize that all those in the movie world were warriors on the battlefield of continental cultural movie production, represented throughout the pictorial media by the cultural/sexualized construct of the ostensibly Chinese Ri Ko-ran (fig. 27). Not only did Ri Ko-ran have two identities (Japanese and Chinese), but she had two tasks. She made entertainment movies aimed at pacifying the colonized Manchurians and introducing Japan to them, but she also made very different movies for the Japanese audience, celebrating the Japanese conquest of the continent through the melodramatic symbolism of the romantic conquest of the Chinese maiden by the dashing Japanese hero. According to Yamaguchi's autobiography, the sentiments of her Japanese viewers were made clear when, in 1942, Ri Ko-ran was sent to Takashimaya department store exhibition on the "Establishment of the Manchurian State." Customs officials seeing her passport and her Chinese dress said "Hey, you call yourself Japanese?-Japanese are first-class citizens. You're wearing the dress of a third-class Chink and speaking Chinese.

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Figure 31. Eiga no torno, May 1942

Show some shame!" When she performed, the audience patronizingly called out "your Japanese is good;' and when she went out in public people stared at her Chinese attire, pointing at the "Chink" (chankoro).35 By March 1941, images of Western women and men began to fade out from the page, displaced by fantasies of bare-breasted women of the South Pacific (figs. 28, 29). But the (American) Western woman had not totally disappeared-as evident in the April 1941 advertisement for Destry Rides Again. How did the Japanese reader and viewer code-switch between the German woman, Marlene Dietrich, in Destry Rides Again in April 1941 (fig. 30), and the German woman reenacting the patriotism of the previous world war in Furlough of the Pledge (fig. 31)? To a moviegoing readership sensitive to modern signals, the body language of the two Western couples must have made a difference. Indeed, decoding and interpreting and translating of body language was central to the racial politics of identity of the era, as revealed not only by the comments regarding the Korean schoolgirls in the Orientalist guide to Korea discussed above, but in the experience of the teenaged Yamaguchi Yoshiko in a pre-Ri Ko-ran Chinese incarnation. In her memoirs, Yamaguchi records how she actually took on the man-

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Figure 32. Eiga no torno, July 1941

nerisms of a young Chinese girl by abandoning her feminized Japanese propensity to smile ingratiatingly at as many junctures as possible (an act disdained and questioned by her Chinese female peers) and by abandoning her eagerness to bow deeply to figures of authority or respect, another act considered inappropriate in Chinese girls' (mission) school culture of the 1930S. The historically associated but very different reshaping of a young woman's cultural identity through reconfiguration of the body is also a theme in the novel The Journey, about two bourgeois Polish Jewish girls who receive identity cards and birth certificates as Aryan farm girls and must learn to shape their actions in Nazi Germany accordingly. Like Ri Ko-ran, the two young heroines of this tale change names more than once.36 But by July of 1941 (when, according to Michael Barnhart, the U.S. government was misreading Japanese signals, leading to the inevitability of Pearl Harbor), the reader of the Japanese illustrated press was no longer free to interpret codes in an open-ended contest. The Japanese man and woman were given explicit instructions on how to comport themselves at the movies. The only correct body language was not signalled but framed in no uncertain terms (fig. 32)-as was a portrait of Hitler, in Nazi uni-

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Figure 33. Eiga no torno, September 1941

form, that was presented to the German ambassador to Japan by Shochiku movie company officials and stars to celebrate Japan-German film relations. According to the caption on a photograph taken at the presentation ceremony, the silk portrait was "purely Japanese."37 Japanese movie viewers and magazine readers had to be well aware that Western faces were disappearing from the screen (the severe drop in the number of American movies shown had begun in 1938, and by 1940 Japanese stars with non- Japanese-sounding names had to change to Japanese names: Deikku (Dick) Mine, for example, became Mine Tokuichi. Did readers in September 1941 decide that the grouping to the right in figure 33 was purely Japanese? And the grouping to the left? Did the terms attached to Jimmy Stewart going to Washington as Mr. Smith (fig. 34)"rapturous:' "ecstasy," "trance," "dashing"-terms that were only intensified by the contrasting images on the opposite page, fade from national memory (and if so, how quickly after December 9, Tokyo time, the day that American and British films were banned)?38 As late as December 7, 1941, Japanese imperial subjects, now barely consumers, watched Jimmy Stewart and Jean Arthur. As late as 1942, after Pearl

Harbor and after the disappearance of American faces from the film maga-

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Figure 34. Eiga no torno, September 1941

zines, film students from Tokyo gathered for a decisive assessment of modern movies. They decided to vote for the "best ten" of the previous year, and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington was voted the best foreign film of 1941. 39 What did Japanese moviegoers think when the American woman disappeared: how did they experience the cultural break? The Way of the Subject, published in August of 1941, trumpeted the responsibility of the Japanese nation to raise up an Oriental culture independent of the culture of Europe and the United States and thereby contribute to a new world culture. The state ideology of The Way of the Subject called for "A New Culture" for "A New Order:'40 Yet authorities had less than four years to establish such an order in the illustrated press, from 1942 to 1945, and these four years were preceded by more than two decades of modern Japanese moviegoing and code-switching. Did the Japanese audience immediately abandon their sense of kinship with Hollywood actors and actresses and subscribe to the ideology that placed them apart from the West? Did the first issue that I raised, the issue of cultural fluidity, disappear when any form of gender fluidity was in fact outlawed during the Pacific War?

A Picture Story 285 Let me offer an idea here, one prompted by my research into Ri Ko-ran, including a reading of the autobiography of her husband, noted Japanese American sculptor Isamu Noguchi, and by the recent movie Europa, Europa, a film closely based on the history of a Polish Jewish boy in Nazi Europe who changed identity more than once in order to survive. What I am thinking is that in many ways national-ethnic fluidity continued into wartime Japan, as it did in Nazi Europe, because historical exigencies countered political ideologies of racial identity/purity as even ideologues had to admit-as when Japanese officials created the Ri Ko-ran myth and Nazi officials had to interact with the non-Aryan Japanese. Or as when Jews passed as non-Jews, as evoked brilliantly in the comic-book history Maus, wherein oral historian/chronicler of the Holocaust Art Spiegelman puts pig masks on mouse-Jews who are passing as Polish. 4 ! After adhering to communist principles in a Soviet orphanage, the hero of Europa, Europa is adopted by a Nazi officer and sent to a Hitler Youth training school where he is taught, among other skills, "how to recognize a Jew." Solomon Perel's story is very different from Yamaguchi Yoshiko's life, and yet I was struck by the similarity of the two young people living in a time when racial ideologies had such political and social force. Both changed their names and identities, but, beyond that, they themselves were also changed (they were not merely passing or pretending). According to Ri Ko-ran's autobiography, she began to think of herself as Chinese just as Solomon Pere! "became" German-Nazi (in his identity of Hitler youth; Joseph JuPP hated Jews and cried when the Germans lost the battle of Stalingrad). Prewar fantasies, I suspect, also continued in wartime Japan along with prewar fluidity. Although Japanese schoolchildren who attended elementary school during the Pacific War may indeed have considered Americans to be devils, it is unlikely that their parents, the fans of Charlie Chaplin, did. 42 I end my picture story with two clues regarding fantasies and the Japanese popular response to the case of the disappearing Euro-American woman after the Pearl Harbor fade-out. The first clue comes from a film buff of the 1930S, turned film critic in the 1930S and 1940S and archivist in the 1990S: I asked him for the response of the filmgoing public who had become accustomed to Buster Keaton, Charlie Chaplin, Jimmy Stewart, and Jean Arthur when these faces disappeared. His response: "It was lonely." The second clue is a scene in a Japanese movie made under strict

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Pacific War guidelines: it is a scene of an automatic sushi-making machine gone berserk. 43 The scene suggests that memories of Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times were cherished by some Japanese subjects after Pearl Harbor, during the Pacific War. NOTES Cited in a handbill at the Nuwilshire movie theater in Los Angeles as part of a promotion for Photographs (To Our Children), a Hungarian movie directed by Feny-kepek (1990). The rest of the quote reads: "Private photographs, home movies, newsreel footage, and fascinating personal testimonies such as this one give us glimpses of Jewish life in Budapest before and during the Nazi occupation. What emerges is an intimate portrait of carefree times and the devastation that followed .... 'These photos sweep down on us, and the sad grave of memory starts cracking.'-Andras Suranyi." 2 I am grateful to Karin Higa for sharing Isamu Noguchi's FBI file with me. 3 The translation is mine. As far as I know, no published account in the United States has yet noted the racist implications of the slur, "those sorts." For a text of the complete speech, given at an annual study meeting of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party, and for a chronology of responses in the Japanese and U.S. press as "racially discriminatory:' and of protests from within the United States, including a formal protest from Hispanic and Black Congressional Caucuses, leading to the Prime Minister's apology, see "Zensairoku Nakasone Shusho no Chiteki Suijun Koen." Chuo koran 101, no. 13 (November 1986): 146-162. For a summary and analysis of the remainder of the speech, see Marilyn Ivy, "Critical Texts, Mass Artifacts: The Consumption of Knowledge in Postmodern Japan:' in Masao Miyoshi and H. D. Harootunian, eds., Postmodernism and Japan (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1989), p. 22. 4 Kobena Mercer has historicized the preoccupation of scholars with "identity" by noting that "whatever it is, identity becomes an issue when it is in crisis." He elaborates from within the British context, but in terms of potentially broad application, by explaining that "In political terms, identities are in crisis because traditional structures of membership and belonging inscribed in relations of class, party, and nation-state have been called into question" (Kobena Mercer, "1968: Periodizing Politics and Identity," in Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson, and Paula A. Treichler, eds., Cultural Studies [New York: Routledge, 1992], p. 424). A reading of the Summer 1992 issue of October (vol. 61), titled "The Identity in Question: A Special Issue," resulting from an ostensibly international symposium about "multiculturalism, identity politics, their philosophical and political implications, and also about the nature of the discourse that has grown up around them in this country:' offers an overview of the current academic preoccupations. The list of ten issues given beforehand to participants Joan Scott, Cornel West, Chantal Mouffe, Homi Bhabha, Jacques Ranciere. Andreas Huyssen, Ernesto Laclau, and Judith Butler (who requested that her contribution not be included in the issue), as provided in the volume appendix, in more detail, were (1) Universality, (2) Agency, (3) Liberalism, (4) Plurality, (5) Nationality, (6) the Avant-garde, (7) Alterity, (8) Subjectivity, (9) Methodology, and (10) Theory. The introduction, by John Raichman, acknowledges that "the discussion of this question [of multiculturalism and identity politics I is now inseparable from a whole institutional 1

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complex, from an absence of definition of terms of debate, and from historical discourse that has already long existed in different forms and places where cultural and national identity have been discussed." In conclusion, he associates past discourse with current debate through his concern that "some of the attempts to assert an anti-European, antiEurocentric, or anti-Western identity have in fact reverted to or reproduced some of the worst aspects of the organicist romantic conception of identity that flourished in Europe in the last century and that was to have catastrophic consequences in this one" (pp. 5-7). In this issue, Ernesto Laclau also places contemporary debate into the history of postwar Western academic critical theorizing by noting that "The 'death of the subject: proudly proclaimed everywhere not so long ago, has been succeeded by a new and widespread interest in the multiple identities [social, national, and political] proliferating in our contemporary world:' Laclau asserts his political agenda by denying that the debate related to identities is "a new terrain into which history has thrown us: the multiplication of new (and not so new) identities in the collapse of the places from which universal subjects once spoke-the explosion of ethnic and national identities in Eastern Europe and in the territories of the former Soviet Union, the struggles of immigrant groups in Western Europe, the new forms of multicultural protest and self-assertion in the United States, as well as all the forms of contestation associated with the new social movements." After considering "the historical forms in which the relationship between universalism and particularity have been thought," he concludes his intellectual and political history of the subordination of the particular to the universal and his critique of a concept of "pure identities" by declaring that "If democracy is possible, it is because the universal does not have any necessary body, any necessary content. Instead, different groups compete to give their particular aims a temporary function of universal representation" (pp. 83-90). Pamela Kyle Crossley's sophisticated essay "Thinking about Ethnicity in Early Modern China" articulates both the problem and the relevance of working with current scholarly concerns with identity, race, ethnicity, and nationality. Her summary of the two central concerns of her essay is "First, that there is an irreconcilable incompatibility between sinological concepts (including 'sinicization') and contemporary ethnic studies" and the advocacy of "the importance of diachronic studies of the concepts of 'race: 'ethnicity' and 'nationality' ... both for the study of China and for the study of the study of China." See Late Imperial China 11, no. 1 (June 1990): 1-34. Mercer has been influenced by Cornel West's periodization of the modern age. See Kobena Mercer, "1968: Periodizing Politics and Identity," p. 430. For the discussion of "another modernism," see Scott Lash and Jonathan Priedman, Modernity and Identity (Oxford, England, and Cambridge, Massachusetts: Blackwell, 1992), pp.1-S. I am working from earlier definitions of Japanese modernity in my book Changing Song: The Marxist Manifestos of Nakano Shigeharu (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), in which I term Japanese Marxism "modern" as opposed to "Western" (see my conclusion, "Marxism Addresses the Modern" [pp. 209-229 j), and in the essays "Constructing the Japanese Ethnography of Modernity;' Journal ofAsian Studies 51, no. 1 (February 1992): 30-54, and "The Modern Girl as Militant," in Gail Lee Bernstein, ed., Recreating Japanese Women, 1600-1945 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991). For a comprehensive overview of the Eurocentric literature on modernity, modernism, and cultural modernism as it relates to philosophical and historical definitions within Japanese history and historiography, see my forthcoming essay, "Japanese Modern:' in Stephen

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Vlastos, ed., The Inventioll of Traditional Japan, wherein I insert Tokyo (and Japan) into the history of metropolitan modern(ist) culture as defined by Raymond Williams, Bradbury and McFarlane, and other Western-oriented historians. The Japanese experience of the modern, however, must be qualified in terms of the questions Rey Chow has asked of "modernity" and "modernism" within the context of Chinese literature. Chow points out that the issues of both "modernity" and "modernism" in Chinese literature have to be rethought precisely because they are bound up with imperialism, and thereby questions how the "modern" in China could be "strictly new." See Rey Chow, Woman and Chinese Modernity: The Politics of Reading Between West and East (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), pp. 35-36. Moreover, in the case of Japan the doubled experience of Western cultural imperialism and Japanese colonial expansion, along with the absence of a strong bourgeois cultural social sentiment or sensibility (against which European modern and modernist culture defined itself), must be taken account of in terms of conceptualizing Japanese "modern" cultural forms. For a quick view of how the term modan signified aspects of Japanese material and leisure culture of the 1920S and 1930S, I suggest the reader skim the lushly illustrated photo survey Modan Tokyo, which gives a pictorial inventory of what has constituted Japanese modan, including varieties of chocolate bars, art deco interiors, and facsimiles of "Bringing up Father," with only the language of the words in the cartoon balloons altered. See Ogi Shinzo, Haga Tom, Maeda Ai, eds., Tokyo kukan: 1868-1930, vol. 3, Madan Tokyo (Tokyo: Chikuma Shobo, 1986). For another example of how the theme of "mod an Tokyo" has been shaped within the Japanese publishing world over the past decade, see the tenth volume in the ten-volume series, Madan toshi bUllgaku, ed. Unno Hiroshi. See Unno Hiroshi, Kawamoto Saburo, Suzuki Sadami, eds., Madan Tokyo annai, vol. 1, in Unno Hiroshi, ed., Modan toshi bungaku (Tokyo: Heibonsha, 1St year of Heisei). The second volume of the series is titled Modan gaaru no yuwaku (The seduction of the modern girl). Why and how the discussion of modan Tokyo became important during the 1980s in Japan is a topic for discussion, within the context of shifting publishing and marketing trends in the post-high-growth era of the Japanese print world. 6 Peattie attributes the absence of Japanese equivalents of clusters of bored European expatriates or of "a corps of glamorous courtesans" to the class composition of the Japanese community in the treaty ports, which was predominantly comprised of tradesmen and shopkeepers. He acknowledges the existence of a flourishing, self-ghettoized and ghettoized social life for the upper echelons of the Japanese community institutionalized within the luxurious Japanese Club (Nihonjin kurabu) of Shanghai, The Japan Club and Merchant Marine Club in Tientsin, and the Navy Clubs of Shanghai and Hankow, and a flourishing nightlife culture, undocumented in official Japanese histories, that included dance halls and prostitution among barmaids and at somewhat higher-class ryoriya (restaurants) and teahouses. See Mark Peattie, "Japanese Treaty Port Settlements in China, 1895-1937," in Peter Duus, Ramon H. Myers, Mark R. Peattie, eds., The Japanese Informal Empire in China, 1895-1937 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), pp. 192-196. 7 for a brief biographical narrative of the career o[Yamaguchi Yoshiko (1902-), see Nihon eiga haiyu zenshu, joyu hell (Tokyo: Kinema Junposha, 1980), pp. 714-719. After the Pacific War, Yamaguchi would remake herself into the Hollywood star "Shirley Yamaguchi;' before becoming Yamaguchi Yoshiko, the Japanese LDP parliamentarian in 1973.

A Picture Story 289 As a member of the Diet she traveled to the People's Republic of China as emissary and to North Korea. In between those two incarnations she was Yoshiko, the Japanese wife of the sculptor Isamu Noguchi, who appears to have sought a Japanese female presence in her, and after that marriage, wife of a Japanese diplomat in Burma, and Yamaguchi Yoshiko, television personality. My story is from Yamaguchi's autobiography, Yamaguchi Yoshiko with Fujiwara Sakuya, Ri Ko-ran watashi no hansei (Tokyo: Shinchosha, 1987). For Yamaguchi's account of her singing debut, including her mother's support for performing that "was for the sake of the nation" and the preparation of over ten songs based on Chinese folk and popular songs for this express purpose, see Ri Ko-ran watashi, pp. 55-57. For a brief English-language account of "Shirley Yamaguchi," see Joseph L. Anderson and Donald Richie, eds., The Japanese Film: Art and Industry, expanded edition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982). For an example of how Ri Ko-ran became the model for other actresses of the Pacific War era, see Makino Masahiro jiden: Eiga tose, vol. 1 (Tokyo: Heibonsha, 1977), pp. 140-141. 8 For a recent biography, see Kamisaka Fuyuko, Danso no Reijin: Kawashima ¥oshiko den (Tokyo: Bungei Shunju, 1984). 9 See Yamaguchi Yoshiko with Fujiwara Sakuya, Ri Ko-ran watashi no hansei, pp. 88-90. Yamaguchi's confusion and delight regarding Kawashima's gender identity, illustrated by her response that Kawashima's beauty was that of an "oyama" (a man dressed as woman), gives us suggestive material for exploration into the complex, culturally specific issue of cross-dressing in modern Japanese history that Jennifer Robertson has addressed in "The Politics of Androgyny in Japan: Sexuality and Subversion in the Theater and Beyond," American Ethnologist 19, no. 3 (August 1992): 1-24. See also her forthcoming book, Same Sex Different Gender: The Cultural Politics of Cross-Dressing in Japan (University of California Press). For a discussion of representations of female-male-figures in advertisements of the 1920S and 1930S, see my forthcoming "Advertising Every Body: Images from the Japanese Modern Years;' in Susan Foster, ed., Choreographing History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press). 10 See my translation, "Osman thus;' in Manoa 3, no. 2 (special issue, translations of short stories by modern Japanese women writers, containing an introductory essay by Masao Miyoshi) (Fall 1991): 187-190. 11 See Miriam Silverberg, "The Japanese Cafe Waitress Sang the Blues;' and Miriam Hansen, Babel & Babylon: Spcctatorship in American Silent Film (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 1991), especially part 3, "The Return of Babylon: Rudolph Valentino and Female Spectatorship (1921-1926):' pp. 245-294. 12 This question is similar to concerns raised by Toni Morrison, who is concerned with the "pressure that racialized societies level on the creative process" and on the formation of cultural identity. My research into Japanese cultural history reveals a very different sort of racialized society in Japan and a profound difference within Japanese history before and after early 1942, during the Pacific War. According to Morrison, in American literature "There is no romance free of what Herman Melville called 'the power of blackness: especially not in a country in which there was a resident population, already black, upon which the imagination could play, through which historical, moral, metaphysical, and social fears, problems, and dichotomies could be articulated ...." In the case of Japan there was neither a "black" populace, nor was there a Euro-American (I have transliterated the common term, Obei) community of any size. I am not here concerned with the

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displacement of European racial imaginings regarding Blackness in Japan but with the presence of Euro-American fantasy figures upon which the Japanese imagination played before the Pacific War. See Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, The William E. Massey Sr. Lectures in the History of American Civilization (1990), pp. xiii, 4, 7, 37. 13 Iwamoto Kenji describes his book Nihon eiga to modanizumu 1920-1930 as an undertaking, based on a "collage" method, to examine the problem ofJapanese movies and modernism and their image. This work is evocative in regard to such issues as the relationship between movies (and the role of makeup in constructing facial identity) and indigenous theater and the discourse on movies, although, like other secondary works on Japanese "modanizumu," the relationship of such "modernism" to "modernization" and to Western conceptions of both remains unclear. See Iwamoto Kenji, ed., Nihon eiga to modanizumu 1920-1930 (Riburopoto, 1991). The book comes closest to my own concern with the relationship of fantasy and the movies in the essay by Deguchi Takehito, "Nani ga hakujin conpurekkusu wo umidashitaka?" Nihon eiga, pp. 104-123, although I question the author's notion of a "white person complex." One of the most intriguing aspects of the book is the unannotated series of photographs of Japanese film actors who appear to be made up to resemble African Americans (ibid., pp. 134-135). Also of note is Sasaki Yoriaki's analysis of the role of movies in constructing spatial notions in everyday life, in his discussion of the movie Tonari no Yae-chan (Nihon eiga, pp. 163-177), and the connection that the book's editor makes between machine-age aesthetics and movies. See Iwamoto Kenji, "Kikaijidai no bigaku to eiga," Nihon eiga, pp. 200-213. Missing from these essays is the connection between the modern and the colonial, although the relationship is embedded in films of the era, such as Tonari no Yae-chan, as I investigate in a forthcoming essay, "Everyday Life as Seikatsu in Prewar Japan: The Images of Yae-chan Next Door and the Cartoonist Okamoto Ippei." Primary sources from the era are the best source for analyzing the complex relationship among film, fantasy, and "the modern" in the Japanese case. See, for example, the responses of writers, including Tanizaki Junichiro, regarding their impressions of the automobile, the moving picture, and the car as trends of the times in "'Jidosha' to 'katsudo shashin' to 'kafee' no insho;' Chuo koron (September 1918): 67-96. 14 Peattie, "Treaty Port Settlements," pp. 194-195. See Makino Masahiro's discussion of his romance with a White Russian ''jokyu'' or cafe waitress in Harbin after he is brought over to Manchuria by Amakasu MasalJiko because of his expertise in making entertainment films and his belief that Manchurian women, Chinese women, White Russian women, and Mongolian women need to be understood in order for hit movies to be made (Makino Masahiro jiden: Eiga tose, vol. 1 [Heibonsha, 1977], pp. 21-30). 15 Regarding Korean women brought to Japan as sex workers in the drinking and restaurant trade, in relation to the history of the "comfort women;' see Jugun Ianfu Mondai wo Kangaeru Zainichi Doho Josei no Kai, ed., Watashitachi wa wasurenai: Chosenjin jugun ianfu (1991). For a book-length account of the "ianfu" that preceded the recent acknowledgment by the Japanese government of guilt, see Kimu lrumyon, Tenno no guntai to Chosenjin ianfu (Tokyo: Sanichi Shobo, 1976). For an overview of the history of the "comfort women" and of the revelations and organized efforts in Korea and Japan that forced the Japanese government on July 6, 1992, finally to admit "that its military had recruited and organized tens of thousands of

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women [girls as young as the age of 12] in a vast network of government-run brothels for Japanese soldiers during World War II;' see Sung-Eun Cho's extensive coverage, "Korean 'Military Comfort Women': How the Issue Came to the Forefront;' The Rafu Shimpo (Los Angeles), 21 October 1992, pp. 1-3. Sung-Eun Cho, a graduate student in sociology and history at UCLA who is engaged in a path-breaking historical study of the "ianfu;' has shared her research materials and findings with me. Among the primary documents is an interrogation report of "20 Korean Comfort Girls" captured in Burma in August of 1944. The following "personality" profile by the U.S. government interrogator, who has in his preface defined the "comfort girl" as "nothing more than a prostitute or 'professional camp follower' attached to the Japanese Army for the benefit of the soldiers ... wherever it was necessary for the Japanese army to fight," reveals the associated history of how the American captors denied dignity and a history to these young girls who had already been brutally mistreated by a raci,1t Japanese conquering army: The interrogations show the average Korean "comfort girl" to be about twenty five years old, uneducated, childish, whimsical, and selfish. She is not pretty either by Japanese or Caucasian standards. She is inclined to be egotistical and likes to talk about herself. Her attitude in front of strangers is quiet and demure, but she "knows the wiles of a woman." She claims to dislike her "profession" and would rather not talk about it or her family. Because of the kind treatment she received as a prisoner from American soldiers at Myitkyina and Ledo, she feels that they are more emotional than Japanese soldiers. She is afraid of Chinese and Indian troops. (United States Office of War Information, Psychological Warfare Team Attached to U.S. Army Forces India-Burma Theater APO 689, Japanese Prisoner of War Interrogation Report No. 49, p. 2)

16 17

18

19

For a treatment of the "comfort women" within the context of wartime Korea and postwar Korean capitalist society and patriarchal culture, wherein women in the sex industry surrounding American military bases continue to be called wi'anbu (comfort women), see Chungmoo Choi, "Korean Women in a Culture of Inequality," in Donald N. Clark, ed., Korea Briefing, 1992 (Boulder: Westview Press, 1992). Nishikawa Yuko, "Sumai no hensen to 'katei' no seiritsu;' in Wakita Haruko, ed., Nihon josei seikatsushi, vol. 4 (Kindai) (Joseishi Sogo Kenkyukai, 1990), PP.I-50. Moro Genzo, Shin Chosen fudoki (Tokyo: Banrikaku Shobo, 1930), vol. 25, Kankoku chiri fuzokushi sosho. The remaining 99 volumes in the series appear to focus on the geography and history of specific locales in Korea. For a revealing account of Japan's Orientalist discourse, see Stefan Tanaka, Japan's Orient: Rendering Pasts into History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993). Regarding the kiisan, see Moro, Shin Chosen, pp. lOr109; for the term kiisangaku, p. 111; on chastity, pp. 289-308; and regarding the Korean schoolgirl and the Korean woman's body language, pp. 410, 431. The distance between the worship of the Korean woman and the experience of the teenage and preteenage Korean girls within the decade can be compared to the invocations of woman as national treasure in the interior at a time when women's bodies were being sold for factory and sex work in the interior. For reminiscences about nighdife in Korea that distinguish between Korean and Japanese establishments and the geisha and kiisan working there, see Maruyama Tsurukichi, Shichijunen tokorodokoro (Tokyo: Shichijunen Tokorodokoro Kankosai, 1955), pp. 5r65. Regarding references to the modern in this work, see pp. 86, 182, 201, 232, 247-249, 258.

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20 Homi Bhabha, "Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse:' October 28 (Spring 1984): pp. 125-133. 21 I am working from photographs in Fujimori Terunobu, Hatsuda Toru, and Fujioka Hiroyasu, eds., Ushinawareta-teito: Tokyo, Taisho, Showa jidai no machi to sumai (Tokyo: Kashiwa Shobo, 1991), pp. 76-95. 22 My theme of sexual and cultural cross-dressing is furthered by the anecdote recounted by the filmmaker Makino about how he and colleagues decided to counter Ri Ko-ran's rising stardom. Hearing, on the eve of the Pacific War, that Shochiku was to make a Ri Ko-ran movie, following on the heels of the success of her 1940 hit China Night, Makino and colleagues considered making a blockbuster using a man dressed as woman-an oyama (Makino, Eiga, pp. 83-90). It was worth pointing out that three different endings were produced for China Night, the tale of a nameless Chinese (orphan) maiden rescued by a Japanese sea captain. In other words, in the film shown in Japan the couple marries, the husband is killed in battle by tbe Chinese enemy, and is followed in death by the suicide of Ri Ko-ran. In the Chinese version the couple lives happily ever after in contrast to the Southeast Asian China Night, in which the hero battles Chinese communists and saves Ri Ko-ran from suicide after a false rumor that he has died in battle. For plot summaries and interpretation, see Anderson and Richie, The Japanese Film, pp. 154-155. 23 See Fujita Shozo, "Showa hachinen wo chushin to suru tenko no jokyo," in Tenko, ed. Shiso no Kagaku Kenkyukai, vol. 1 (Tokyo: Heibonsha, 1978), pp. 31-63; Tsurumi Shunsuke, An Intellectual History of Wartime Japan 1931-1945 (London, New York, Sydney, and Henley: KPI, 1982); Thomas Havens, Valley of Darkness: The Japanese People and World War Two (Lanham, New York, London: University Press of America, 1986); John Dower, War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War (New York: Pantheon, 1986); Gregory J. Kasza, The State and the Mass Media in Japan 1918-1945 (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1988); Richard H. Mitchell, Censorship in Imperial Japan (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983). 24 Kokutai no hongi is available in English as Kokutai no hongi: Cardinal Principles of the National Entity of Japan, trans. John Owen Gauntlett, and ed. with an introduction by Robert King Hall (Newton: Crofton Publishing Corporation, 1974). I base my conclusions on the Japanese-language original. See also Michael A. Barnhart, Japan Prepares for Total War: The Search for Economic Security, 1919 -1941 (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press), 1987. 25 For an earlier discussion of code-switching see Miriam Silverberg, "Constructing the Japanese Ethnography of Modernity," Journal of Asian Studies 51 (February 1992): 31. 26 Shukan Asahi, May 1932. 27 Miyako shimbun, 15 May 1932. 28 See David Robinson, Chaplin: His Life and Art (New York: McGraw Hill, 1985), p. 440. 29 See daily coverage in the Miyako shimbun, 14 MaY-2 June 1932. 30 See Mainichi shim bun, 3 April-4 May 1932. On May 5 Chaplin was identified as occupying a unique position in the movie world, along with Rene Claire, maker of A Nous la Liberte Uiyu wo warera nil. In addition to advertisements similar to those in the Miyako shimbun, the Mainichi combined ink caricatures of Chaplin in montage with photographs of women and children in the streets of Tokyo. For an advertisement welcoming Charlie Chaplin with "Welcome Charlie Chaplin Chocolate," see Mainichi shimbun, 15 May 1932. For a cartoon advertisement of an androgynous-looking Chaplin see 16 May

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1932. for another contrast between Miyako shimbun and Mainichi shimbun coverage, see the fictional film scenarios about Chaplin in the 27 May 1932 issue of the Mainichi shimbun. 31 For an account of the impact of Chaplin and of Japanese films using Japanese versions of Chaplin in Japanese settings see Yamamoto Kikuo. Nihon eiga ni okeru gaikoku eiga no eikyo (Tokyo: Waseda Daigaku Shuppanbu, 1983), pp. 302-314. John Dower states that "reports out of Batavia (Djakarta) in 1943 claimed that one of the most popular captured films among Japanese officers was Charlie Chaplin's satire of Hitler, The Great Dictator (Dower, War Without Mercy, p. 207). 32 Cf. Nakano Shigeharu's acerbic pronouncement that Hitler was being identified as the personification ofYamato Damashi (The Japanese Spirit) in Silverberg, Changing Song, p. 201. See Eiga no torno, January 1938, 1939. 33 I wish to thank Michael Baskett for his research assistance regarding the Japanese film industry on the Asian continent. For recent scholarly treatments of the Japanese colonial movie-making enterprise that include discussions of the career of Ri Ko-ran, see Yamaguchi Takeshi, Maboroshi no kincl11a manei (Tokyo: Heibonsha, 1st year of Heisei); Sato Tadao, Kinema to hosei (Tokyo: Riburopoto, 1985); Tsuji Hisakazu, Chuka Deneishiwa (Tokyo: Gaifusha, 1987). See also Michael Baskett's pioneering overview and analysis, "The Development of the Manchurian Film Society (Manei)" (unpublished). 34 For a discussion of mapping or "cartography" as part of an interrelated process of "marking land and marking bodies" as part of colonial culture, see "Colonialism and Culture," the introduction by Nicholas Dirks to Colollialism and Culture (University of Michigan Press, 1992), p. 6. Women's bodies are, of course, central to such ventures, as numerous feminist scholars have discussed. See, for example, Tania Modleski's chapter, "Cinema and the Dark Continent: Race and Gender in Popular Film," in Feminism Without Women: Culture and Criticism in a "Postfeminist" Age (New York and London: Routledge, 1991), pp. 115-134. 35 Yamaguchi, Ri Ko-ran watashi, pp. 117-122. 36 Yamaguchi, Watashi, pp. 74-75. One quotation given in The Journey could easily be applied to the history of Yamaguchi: "We adopted and discarded names, invented and altered biographies, created new characters and had absolute power over them" (p. 218). In one scene the narrator studies her body image in flux: "With each of these tiny changes, the face in the mirror changed completely. I studied it carefully. It belonged to a girl I didn't know, and as I looked at her, smiling, colorfully dressed, I wondered, "Which looks better-bangs down, or pulled back? Which looks more Aryan?" (p. 19). See Ida Fink, The Journey, trans. Joanna Weschler and francine Prose (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1992), especially pp. 83, 84, 158, 223. 37 Eiga no tomo, July 1941. 38 For an excellent institutional history of the Japanese film industry in relation to American film companies in pre-Pacific War Japan, see Donald Kirihara, Patterns of Time: Mizoguchi and the 1930S (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992), pp. 39-57. 39 Yasuoka Shotaro, Katsudogoya no arll fukei (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1990). 40 For an incomplete English-language translation of Shinmin no michi, see appendix to Otto Tolischus, Tokyo Record (New York: Reynal & Hitchcock,1943), pp. 405-427. I am working from the Japanese-language original. 41 The contrast between Isamu Noguchi's search for identity and Yamaguchi Yoshiko's rep-

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resentation of her transfigurations (including her introduction to the recent Japanese TV drama "Farewell Ri Ko-ran" [Fuji Television, 1989, 241 minutes] in which she says the events of the Pacific War are of "long, long ago") and the contrast between her account of their marriage in its relation to Noguchi's articulated search for an identity and his silence on the subject of this marriage are material for at least one other story and do not belong in this history. See Noguchi, lsamu Noguchi: A Sculptor's World, foreword by R. Buckminster Fuller (New York and Evanston: Harper and Row, 1968). The representation of Ri Ko-ran in the recent musical based on her life (which has been running in Tokyo) must be analyzed within such a context. To explain that the book or the musical or a recent two-part series on Japanese television was produced to sell her autobiography does not explain why either appeared at this time in postwar Japan, nor does it explicate how they treat questions of collaboration, collusion, and responsibility within the history of Japanese colonization of other Asian peoples. 42 Makino recounts how young girls hired as dancers to dance with occupation GI's were frightened because they had been taught that Americans were ani (devils). See Makino,

Eiga tose, p. 1-6. 43 Yamamoto, Nihon eiga, p. 320.

~ Politics and the Body Social in

Colonial Hong Kong

~

Fred Y. L. Chiu

PREAMBLE In 1966, a year before riots broke out in Hong Kong protesting British colonial rule, an official government inquiry sought to explain the political behavior of the Hong Kong Chinese. According to the authors of the "Report of the Working Party on Local Administration;' the traditional Chinese view of the ideal relationship between government and people is analogous to that which should exist between parents and children or between a shepherd and his flock. The actions of both parties should be in strict accordance with a moral code, under which the rulers of a society, who should be men of learning, virtue and ability, must ensure that the community enjoys peace, order and security, leaving individuals free to pursue their affairs without undue governmental interference. In return, the people must impose their full trust and confidence in their rulers, and have cause to oppose them only if the regime fails to provide the conditions of peace, order and security to which the community is entitled. Save for such opposition, this traditional concept does not contemplate the direct participation of the population in the organization or processes of government.! What is particularly interesting about this construction is its unoriginality. Its basic propositions can, for example, be found in the writings of generations of treaty-port officials, missionaries, and sinologists, all of whom agreed that acquiescence to authority (i.e., oriental despotism) was, and presumably remains, deeply embedded in the psyche of the Chinese people. Willfully apolitical, countless millions have primarily desired a paternalistic and patriarchal government that would allow them to pursue

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their economic interests. Neither peasant rebellions of the past, the riots that followed upon the heels of this report, nor the subsequent political mobilizations in Hong Kong spanning the last three decades have significantly altered this construction. These are Chinese characteristics with a vengeance, unaltered by time, circumstances, or history. As such, they presumably provide a solid foundation upon which government can gauge its actions. In present-day Hong Kong, conclusions like those drawn in this report have been reinforced by more than the colonial government, the local business community, and the corporate officers of transnational capital. They also find sustenance among Hong Kong intellectuals located within the university community, especially those who practice the social and political sciences. In the latter case, the passage cited above may be understood as foundational-it provides a basis upon which other characterizations of the behavior of Hong Kong Chinese in the postwar era can be built. Following the logic of the passage cited above, political scientists strive to do away with politics, while sociologists deny the very existence of the social. At the same time, economists substitute "management" for economies in a system called "positive noninterventionism"! What the members of each discipline fabricate are waves of neologistic labeling which are then used to frame Hong Kong as a mythical "equilibrium" of developmental manageriallaissez-faire-ism. This "equilibrium" is said to coexist with popular consent devoid of "social mobilization;' ala Karl Deutsch. 2 In the process, Hong Kong becomes a "no party administrative state;' a "colonial city:' an "industrial colony:' and a site of exclusively "bureaucratic politics" created by the "administrative absorption of politics:'3 Its governing ethos is said to be "utilitarianistic familism;' which produces the phenomenon of the "social accommodation of politics" and the popular oxymoron, the "Neo-Confucian entrepreneur spirit:'4 Yet, in spite of these many efforts to contain the social and to convince the people of Hong Kong that politics of any sort was anathema to their nature, things happened. For those outside the circuits of power that produced and utilized these academic constructions, events of the last thirty years look somewhat different. From the position of these subjects, one can assemble counterevidence that calls the academic representation of Hong Kong into question. In so doing, it becomes possible to recover a politics in Hong Kong. The purpose of this paper is to do so- to make politics and the body-social visible. At the same time, it must be acknowledged that it is not enough simply to juxtapose popular politics to the authoritative claim that politics does

Politics and the Body Social 297 not exist. It is also necessary to understand the mechanisms through which the political, and hence the social, is made to disappear; to locate the points at which attempts were made to fragment popular mobilizations or co-opt them into the hegemony of the ruling block. In addressing these issues, it is not my purpose to dispute Hong Kong's "success" story. Rather, my concern is, first, with the theories and explanations deployed by observers to account for the economic and social transformation of Hong Kong over the past four decades; and second, with highlighting where these pronouncements break down or contradict one another. These critical tasks are all the more pressing as 1997 approaches, when one form of colonialism may well be replaced by another in the name of stability and economic order. THE "ACADEMIC" SOCIAL SCIENTIST'S ISLAND

Even at a general level, blatantly opposing viewpoints have been characteristic of the existing literature on Hong Kong development. For instance, Henry Smith has called Hong Kong "John Stuart Mill's Other Island;' while Eugene Cooper preferred to characterize it as "Karl Marx's Other Island:'5 The apparent tension between representations that draw upon classical political economics and its most profound critic is paralleled by discussions of Hong Kong's economic performance. Alvin Rabushka thinks it is a miracle, while Jon Woronoff sees Hong Kong as a "capitalist paradise:'6 In contrast, Keith Hopkins, Joe England and John Rear, and Jon Halliday highlight the bleak "sweat-shop operations" and other nightmarish working conditions reminiscent of "the darkest age of capitalism:'? Yet, regardless of their ideological persuasion, these and other expatriate observers of Hong Kong tend to resolve apparent contradictions by characterizing the colony as a "delicate equilibrium" made up of endogenous and exogenous elements. In this regard, Peter Harris perhaps comes closest to recognizing the existence of seemingly contradictory aspects of Hong Kong society. He suggests five essential "paradoxes": 1) Hong Kong is an open-ended economic entity, yet it is a closed-ended society; 2) Hong Kong is a colony, but it has none of the conventional attributes of a colony; 3) China appears not to want Hong Kong, but it is reluctant to relinquish its claims to sovereignty; 4) Hong Kong produces foreign exchange for China, but China is not in political control of the situation; and 5) Hong Kong has stability, but it also has an uncertain future. 8 These views of Hong Kong persist among a number of "native" schol-

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ars trained primarily in the United States and England. In the 1970S, they began to apply social science analysis to explain the nature of the colony's society and its "political stability:' Ambrose King, for example, developed the concept of the "administrative absorption of politics:' He argued that potential threats to the authority of the government were eliminated by a process of elite co-optation, one that forestalled the rise of counterelites. 9 Following a similar line of reasoning, H. C. Kuan emphasized the near monopoly of political power by Hong Kong's administrative bureaucracy. According to his investigation, the system sets down the rules of the political game and carefully guards against the intrusion of other forces into the polity, the boundary of which is almost coterminous with the bureaucracy's own boundary.lO S. K. Lau and K. F. Ho noted that there was "a complex, finely elaborated and differentiated organizational network at the basic level of (Hong Kong) society:' This network was capable of garnering "enough resources to cater to the needs of the lower strata:' Consequently, the needs of ordinary people were not routed through "the political system for solution:'ll However, having identified this peculiar situation, Lau and Ho failed to address either the political significance or the operational mechanism of such a network at a more concrete, societal level. Instead, somewhat apologetically, they relied upon the "orientalist" stereotype with which our discussion opened: the population of Hong Kong is "antipolitical" or "apolitical"; Chinese society desires to be "left alone"; Hong Kong Chinese have little taste for anticolonialism, especially when it means the extension of Peking's rule to Hong Kong; and, last but not least, so long as their mundane needs are reasonably satisfied, the people of Hong Kong will have little inclination to enter into the political arena. What we see in these sociological representations is a powerful ideological effect wherein knowledges produced by colonizers and their accomplices confirm one another. In the process, authoritative figures construct a common -sense impression of the people of Hong Kong, who, as the tale has it, tend to associate politics and societal associations with terrible things such as wars, chaos, factional strife, conspiracies, etc. Yet even if this were the case, even if such beliefs were shown to be those of the Hong Kong population, they ought to be sociologically explained and discursively deconstructed. To put this another way, even if one could show these "descriptions" to be tangible, it was precisely the political significance of such findings that the above sociological discourse sought to conceal. Instead, "native" scholars, following the lead of their expatriate mentors,

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end analysis precisely at the point where it ought to begin. In so doing, they contribute to the depoliticization of public discourse in Hong Kong. Yet politics and the social stubbornly refuse to disappear. Other social scientists, sometimes in spite of themselves, have "discovered" as much.

THE COLONIAL BACKDROP; OR, THE SOAP OPERA OF A PAX BRITANNICA ACCORDING TO CHUN AND MINERS

In 1984, after having spent nine months as an unwelcome tenant in a remote village in the New Territories, Allen Chun turned his symbolic analysis of the concept of tsung-tsu (clans) into a dissertation. In it, he debunked the myth of colonial administrative efficacy and exposed the ideology of British-styled "indirect rule" promulgated by the colonial authority and its many Hong Kong apologists. What he was forced to face in this Lebenswelt field-situation were a multitude of contested terrains in which "legal reality" and "customary reality" were fought out on the land. With or without making reference to sets of customized laws or legalized customs, such conflicts were constituted and reproduced-and at times reified - by both the colonial authority that claimed to govern and the colonized subjects who pretend to be so "governed:' 12 A decade before Chun completed his dissertation, N. 1. Miners, addressing claims that there was no democracy in Hong Kong, titled a book chapter "Not Democracy, But Politics:'13 In response to Miners, Chun headed one of his subsections "Not Politics, But Government:' In retrospect, either of these constructions of Hong Kong may have been correct, but for rather different reasons. In what follows I want to take them up in turn in order to explore the strengths and weaknesses of each analysis. Elaborating upon his dissertation in an article published in 1990, Chun demonstrated that the colonial authorities had succeeded in literally translating the Chinese nomenclature of taxable land into administrative categories. Yet, in so doing, they rigidified the categories and imputed rules of usage to them in such a way that the administrative law came to be confused for precolonial native practices. 14 Chun's explanation for this outcome was that "under the British colonial rule, custom was subject to the 'moral regulation' of the modern state in a way which proved to be both totalizing (normalizing) and individualizing (objectifying)" (italics added). "Such domination;' he concluded, "could only have as its end the dissolution of forms of authority and community embodied within customary practice" (418).

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As convincing as this construction of a colonial colossus in Hong Kong appears to be, it sits rather uncomfortably alongside other kinds of evidence Chun also mobilized in these works. For example, in his account of the Heung Yee Kuk (New Territories Rural Committee, or HYK), he identified various discourses that provide insight into the historical root of the HYK'S "blow-by-blow" confrontation with the government. In evaluating these struggles, he concluded that the land rights per se had became less of an issue over time. Rather, the confrontation and endless bickering over terms were used as political leverage to get the government to respect HYK opinion-a game of collusion qua collision in an arena of Pax Britannica! Yet, because he placed great emphasis on aspects of colonial experiences mediated by culture and played out in the changing contexts of history, Chun invariably neglected the dynamics of these interactions between the colonial rulers and their colonized subjects. Moreover, his adaptation of a Foucauldian notion of governmentality led him to focus his attention on the conception and practice of British administration in terms of how it affected the relationship of inhabitants to land, custom, and the village community, rather than the other way around. These theoretical and interpretative moves allowed him to demonstrate that despite the guidance of a certain "rational" ethos and the backing of the "legitimate" technology of state power, the colonial government's attempt to bring about an ongoing and undisturbed status quo was a total failure; that is, the effort to maintain customary practices led to their transformation. On the other hand, in order to draw this conclusion, Chun had to (reluctantly) essentialize the "tradition;' "social structure;' and "British colonialism" he set out to deconstruct. As a result, even though he was aware that "overt conflicts and hidden injuries in the system have been neatly covered up in the writing of Hong Kong history''(402), he could not recover this history. His analysis ends precisely with his decomposition of colonial power and knowledge. From the perspective of the present paper I would argue instead that the colonial operation was invariably mediated by local interests and power constellations, as well as by the psychic spaces their constituents occupied. The maintenance and reproduction of such a "system" was, then, constantly contested and modified by the multiple resistances and compromises involved therein. To put it another way, Chun's crisis of culture in history is but the crisis of "high colonialism" and "high sociology;' and, for that matter, "high modernity:' The very model upon which the colonialist tried hard to "play out the same kind of illusion which functionalist the-

Politics and the Body Social 301 ory puts forth as sociological truth" (418) is but an ideational collage made up of patches of the claims made by colonizers through a continual processes of question-begging-colonialism and sociologic truth are "mutually constitutive:' so to speak. Government yes, and a farce! Now, the other side of the coin. In The Government and Politics of Hong Kong, dubbed by the Far Eastern Economic Review the "standard reference in Hong Kong's system of government;' Miners discussed the HYK in a chapter on local government. Designating it a "formalized representative system;' he presented the HYK as "an elaborate system of locally elected elders and councils who maintain a channel of communication between government and their communities"- a part of the colonial governing body, one would suppose. IS However, having carefully combed through all of the book's entries on the HYK, it is evident that Miners was at least of two minds over the meaning of the organization. In making reference to the 1967 "riot;' for example, he wrote that "those who live in cities are notoriously more prone to violence than peasants, yet in Hong Kong there seems to be more active political protest in the rural areas, voiced through the Heung Yee Kuk and the Rural Committees" (41). One hundred fifty pages later, he added that "during the 1967 disturbances the recognition of forty-one representatives was withdrawn because they had engaged in subversive activities:' In order to control these representative "bodies" the Secretary for the New Territories is empowered to withhold or withdraw his approval from any Rural Committee and if this were to happen the Committee would then become an unlawful society under the Societies Ordinance and its Chairman and Vice-Chairman would be disqualified from membership of the Heung Yee Kuk. (197) While claiming that this governmental power had yet to be exercised, Miners contradicted himself by noting that in 1957 "recognition of the Kuk was withdrawn, making it an unlawful society" and "a new ordinance was passed reconstituting the Kuk as a statutory advisory body with a completely new organization" (198).1 6 Be that as it may, he went on to observe that the full council of the new Kuk meets only once every six months. But, "since government needs the public endorsement of its policies by the 'Heung Yee Kuk' in order to administer the New Territories effectively and economically, the Kuk is in a strong bargaining position to put pressure on government for modifications of policy" (199). Yet, in the Civil and Miscellaneous List pub-

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lished by the government in 1978, both the rural committees and the HYK were omitted, according to Miners (116). Nevertheless, it is the decade of the 1970S that marked the peak of the political influence of the HYK. For instance, it has been able to "obtain practically all its demands for modifications in government land policy" (241). The major tactic employed was to threaten to withdraw the cooperation that government needed. In this situation, it would seem that the franchisee took the powerful franchiser as its hostage. Not for long, however. The District Advisory Boards were reformed and strengthened. Hundreds of non-HYK-affiliated "committees;' from Fighting Crime to Mutual Aid units, were set up under the government's auspices. Although the Kuk succeeded in achieving the elevation of their district commissioner to secretary rank and had one of their executive councilors appointed to the Legislative Council, all its appeals for further autonomy were either politely or brutally denied. But, according to Miners, "the Kuk is not discouraged and is threatening to petition Beijing" (200 ).

Such a possibility brings to mind the origin of the Heung Yee Kuk. Established on 23 April 1926 by indigenous villagers to claim representation of the interest of the inhabitants of the New Territories in the councils of an urban-based colonial authority, it signalled a transfiguration of an existing "Coalition for Agriculture, Industry and Commerce" in the leased territory)? This coalition was, in turn, the reincarnation of unions of local militia groups that constituted the backbone of armed resistance that occurred frequently during the early years of a British presence in the New Territories. From all the "evidence"-historical or otherwise-it would seem that there is politics in Hong Kong. In Miners' case, he may also have been right. But what he has identified is politics as found in the colonial setting-unwanted and unacknowledged by the colonial establishment. THE DISCURSIVE OVERKILL OF THE SOCIAL AND THE POLITICAL AS VOLUNTEERED BY SOCIAL SCIENTISTS IN HONG KONG

Even though Miners intended his account to be no more than a description of how Hong Kong was run in the year 1975, he could not help but include bits and pieces of the colonizer's unintended and unwanted politics. As one of the high priests in the colony's civil service cadet training

Politics and the Body Social 303 institute (the Department of Political Science, Hong Kong University), he also dutifully reproduced the ruling ideologies and their various claims. It was, therefore, not surprising that he should have adopted an administrative point of view and dedicated a whole chapter to repeating the dogma of Chinese political apathy.ls Although Miners himself has been in eclipse since the publication of this book, his explanations of "Chinese attitudes" toward British rule proved to be fertile ground for high sociological speculations. His verdict, which he characterized as "what an outsider can pick up while working in Hong Kong for (the past) five years;' 19 was completely absorbed into a whole host of "interpretations:' Once again the body social and politics were made to disappear at a discursive level. For example, S. K. Lau agreed with Miners's argument and sought to identify in greater detail the factors that could be "attributed to the prevalent apathetic political attitudes among the Chinese citizens:'2o These factors were understood as "social facts:' ones that could be sociologically tested and produced through a process of empirical research. The resulting "arguments" or "factors" accorded amazingly-if not in letter, at least in essence-with the colonial authorities' interpretation of the Chinese conception of politics. Before proceeding to the consideration of examples of the remarkable fit between colonial and academic representations of Hong Kong, however, let us pause for a bit of "wishful thinking:' Imagine for a moment that we are the colonizer who has a great stake in and indeed relies upon the "apathy" of the Chinese population of Hong Kong. Yet, in spite of the dogma of Chinese apoliticism, we still have to confront unwanted politics, still have to insure the cohesion of our administrative units after disturbing events like the riots of 1966 and 1967. We worry about maintaining our "ruling legitimacy:' We fret over insuring social "stability:' We see it as our duty to create a positive environment for international business interests. And these are not our only problems. We also have to deal with the fact that the British Empire is crumbling all around us and the colonial administration of Hong Kong has been forced to absorb dislocated cultural bureaucrats from the former colonies. At the same time, we have never allowed a native-born politician to serve in an important administrative position in the territory. What kind of credible voices can we possibly hope to emerge from the Chinese community? And even if any did, what sort of enunciative position could we expect them to voluntarily take up? In the "miraculous" history of postwar Hong Kong, the answers to these

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questions came in the form of the returned overseas-trained scholars. Some of them are the political scientists and sociologists mentioned in the opening section of this paper-the coiners of an ever-growing list of neologisms to characterize an imaginary apolitical Hong Kong. Reading them from a postcolonial perspective invariably makes it evident that their discourses reveal much more than they set out to reveal. Therefore, it is worthwhile to consider more closely the contours of their arguments. In an article on the administrative absorption of politics, Ambrose King asserted that the territory "has been transformed from a British colonial entrepot to a city of world significance:'21 But what made Hong Kong unique was that neither the concept of "Western city" nor Asian urbanization seemed to apply to it. Being "heterogenetic;' it was akin to the "colonial city" described by T. G. McGee, where "citizenship" was unlinked from democracy.22 That disqualified Hong Kong from being "Western:' Yet, at the same time Hong Kong was without the radical movements and mob violence typical oflarge cities in the nonwestern world. It also lacked the forms of "social mobilization" and "participation explosion" syndromes that characterized third-world cities. In other words, Hong Kong was without the attributes Western political scientists have earmarked as the positive functions of third-world cities, all of which are said to contribute to nation-building by undermining primordial sentiments, loyalties, and identification with subnational entities. For King, who saw Hong Kong as "a city-state;' a "total entity unto itself;' it became a special variant of the Asian city/colonial city. Its political stability signalled "a kind of equilibrium in a very intricate political situation:' King argued that this equilibrium resulted from a process he dubbed the "administrative absorption of politics:' What did he mean by this? It was, as he put it, a case by which the government co-opts the political forces, often represented by elite groups, into an administrative decision-making body, thus achieving some level of elite integration; as a consequence, the governing authority is made legitimate, and a loosely integrated political community is established. 23 This process of co-optation, however, was no ordinary one. In order to explain it, King borrowed a concept from the colonial situation found along the China coast a century earlier-synarchy. This is a neologism coined by John K. Fairbank to describe the "joint administration shared by both the British rulers and non-British, predominantly Chinese, leaders:'24 According to King, "the kernel of synarchy is a form of elite consensual

Politics and the Body Social 305 government; it is a grass-tops approach to the problem of political integration:' He concluded that "the British have, consciously or unconsciously, governed the colony on the synarchical principle by allowing, though limiting, non-British participation in the ruling group:'25 At the same time, King acknowledged other features of the political governance of Hong Kong that seemed to undermine his argument. For example, he admitted that synarchy in the crown colony was "lop-sided;' with much Chinese "participation;' but little full-fledged "joint rule" (134). Moreover, although he claimed that his focus was on the political side of city life in Hong Kong, he ended up dealing only with the antipolitical side of it. As an example, in discussing the City District Office scheme-which was launched in mid-1968 as a measure to decentralize the metropolitan government as well as to enhance a post-riot image-building campaignhe observed that it had "a limited function as an administrative absorber of community politics" (145). Although these inconsistencies of observation made the paper fail to live up to King's aim, it did have one significant effect-it succeeded in propagating the neologism "administrative absorption of politics;' a phrase that was frequently used as an official slogan or colonial apologia in occluding politics in Hong Kong. At about the same time as King made these pronouncements, Lau Suikai was of the opinion that both the "political apathy" theory and the "elite support" theory were inadequate to account for the political puzzle of Hong Kong stability. Observing that the elite absorption process was incomplete and that the social participation of "Hong Kong citizens" in voluntary organizations was low, he proposed to test an "ideal-type" concept called "utilitarianistic familism:' Using data generated from a questionnaire survey of 550 Hong Kong Chinese, he claimed that, in contrast to a stereotypical traditional Chinese familism, the Hong Kong variation "can be considered an adaptation of traditional familism to the industrial, urban colonial society of Hong Kong."26 In other words, it can be said to have been a familism of a "modernized" sort. In making this argument, Lau characterized the premodern kind of familism as that associated with dynastic China's scholar-gentry-official class, where family was understood to be "an integral part of society:' As the Confucian classics stipulated, family members were expected to participate in politics and society. Such participation garnered symbolic and cultural rewards, which were "deemed to be of prime importance:' In contrast, utilitarianistic familism, which Lau claimed to be the typical "cultural ethos of the ordinary Chinese"- the overwhelming majority of the Chi-

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nese population of Hong Kong-placed little value on nonmaterial symbolic and cultural rewards. "Rather;' according to Lau, "for them society is to be largely insignificant, and the family is to 'exploit' society for its own utilitarian purposes" (202). Deploying survey data to corroborate these sociological "insights;' Lau concluded that in a society where a majority of the people subscribe to the normative and behavioral patterns associated with what we are calling utilitarianistic familism, social and political stability is maintained neither by coercion nor by consensus between the ruling minority and the subordinate majority.... Thus, the major form of political support rendered to the government by the Chinese majority is not active participation in the formulation and implementation of public policies, but only passive acquiescence in the existing political arrangements .... In a broad sense, this is political integration in a passive manner; it is neither democratic nor autocratic, but it functions. (210-211)

While what has been presented might sound convoluted and tautological (concerned readers should consult the original), it is necessary to know two others of Lau's neologisms to appreciate his overall "theory" of politics in Hong Kong. In 1982, he characterized the crown colony as a "minimally integrated social-political system:' This system, at one and the same times, was said to have been both generative of and generated by "the political stability" of Hong Kong. 27 In a paper of the same year, coauthored with K. F. Ho, Lau finally enlightened us about the meaning of "social" in his discourse. 28 If I understand him correctly, it is the antisocial or nonsocial "ethos" of the general populace of Hong Kong, which he identified, that is responsible for the stability, not merely the administrative absorption of politics. Claiming "not to challenge;' but to supplement King, Lau and Ho achieved a similar ideological effect - the social as well as the political were made to disappear. This sleight of hand was accomplished through the simple and simplistic assertion that between the State (colonizer and its administrative life-support system) and the people (individuals and their families) nothing exists. In this way, the social was made invisible by socialscientific fiat. While this discourse is involved with specific power/knowledge constellations-what one might term the neocolonialism of high political sociology, it la Samuel P. Huntington and Lucien W. Pye-it has its own local

Politics and the Body Social 307 flavor. In the process of a contemporary manufacturing of "positivist" knowledge about Hong Kong, the history of political activity was concealed, preventing or obstructing the development of current political movements. Combining model-fitting post-hoc reasoning, question-begging, and a defensive apologia, researchers who claimed to study "depoliticization" were apparently depoliticized themselves. In the process, their research objects and objects of research were desocialized. And, as a corollary, the research subjects were hardly aware of what alternatives might be open to them, since the sociology of these social scientists proposes none. Yet the complacency generated by this academic magic did not completely hold. In 1990, Joe c. B. Leung addressed the changing relationship between the government and the (newly discovered!) interest groups of the previous decade. During this period, the local dynamics of community politics were said to be "complicated and conflict-ridden:'29 Although he did not radicalize his own enunciative position, Leung did make it amply clear that the local community (unlike the amoeba) changed in response to various sets of internal and external constraints and opportunities. Taking the colonial government as the ultimate external force, Leung tells us that, after suffering repeated setbacks in denying/suppressing the preexisting body social, the authorities actually embarked on manufacturing its own "communities:' In 1976 the governor, Sir Murray MacLehose, initiated a policy of "community building:' According to Leung, the initiative "attempted to maintain the effective functioning of the governmentsponsored consultative structure and at the same time to counteract the activities of pressure groups at the district level. Its overall objective ... is politically conservative" (47). As it turned out, these efforts by the colonial rulers proved inadequate. In 1978 the Standing Committee on Pressure Groups was formed for the purpose of dealing with political activism. In 1980 the committee produced a report that reflected clearly the worries of the government in this respect. The report described pressure-group activities as carrying "the risk of very serious consequences for stability and securitY:'30 Following suggestions made from the committee's policy paper in the 1980s, a series of actions were taken either to discredit the leadership of the "pressure groups" or to selectively co-opt part of them. It is evident that the bureaucrats were not as blind-or, for that matter, as naive-as the social scientists, who in the process of producing a fictitious Hong Kong, became true believers themselves. It was also no surprise that the authorities should be so concerned about suppressing social dynamics, for were they not to do

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so, there may very well have been no "stability" to be demagoguing about. So they denied the existence of the social, and when it erupted they suppressed, co-opted, or produced counterfeits of social movements. Yet, such resistance could not easily be dismissed, nor would it voluntarily "evaporate:' What was surprising was that these various actions on the part of the government, and their limitations, failed to enter into the consciousness of our social scientists. Perhaps this should not surprise us. Ashis Nandy, for example, has recently argued that the modern state machine has developed the technology to "handle" the Cultural (with a capital C) by making it into a thing to be put in reservations and studied by experts. 3 ! Yet, as Ernesto Laclau has suggested, regardless of these statist actions, there are still cultures with small cs, that is, those embodied in the everyday practices of a Lebenswelt, that constantly escape incorporation and the ideological suturing performed by the state's licensed practitioners,32 These cultures reproduce themselves outside of statist manipulations and regimentation. It was precisely this phenomena that made the colonial government uneasy. Moreover, the continued existence of these social entities might be attested to by the fact that there may have been a willingness to be co-opted-one might choose to collude in order to survive and thrive. One interesting case of this sort of "collusion for survival" involved the territory's most prosperous temple, Wong Tai Sin. In order to alleviate government pressure on the temple's activities in the early 1950S, its owner, Sik Sik Yuen, a Chinese-medicine shop, decided to "donate" the major part of its earnings to Tung Wah Groups and turned itself into a public-welfare institution. This maneuver would seem to support King's thesis about the administrative absorption of politics. Yet the action of the medicine shop never showed up on the radar screens of our academic social scientists. The reason it went unnoticed was probably because the "politics" represented by the temple was precisely the kind of contestation our elite political scientists and sociologists despise and are incapable of dealing with. The grass roots involved here were too "subaltern" for their field of vision. 33 Seen from below, however, in either the language of a discourse on civil society or as part of a history of the subaltern, this phenomenon demonstrates the persistent and continuous everyday struggle for Lebenswelt survival, an anti-"political" resistance against (mal- )administration. In this respect, we must recognize the doubling effect of complicity in the theses of "absorption" or "accommodation:' These discourses of the ruling bloc sought simultaneously to empower the ruler and disempower

Politics and the Body Social 309 the ruled. At the same time, however, these discourses had to face the unavoidable consequences-both theoretical and politicallpracticalthat resulted from their overkill of the social. The linguistic slaughter left their promulgators with no position to fall back on. Once their machinations were exposed, their poverty of reference as well as their anti-intellectualism were made understandable. In the process, spaces for popular political action, action that the colonial government more often than not could only speak of as pressure-group activities, opened in the body-social during the 1970S and 1980s. Before considering some of these popular Hong Kong movements, however, we must first explore more fully how dominant discourses undo themselves.

THE POLITICS OF SILENCE AND THE ABSENCE OF A DEBATE ABOUT POLITICS

How did it happen that the colonial ideologue's task was taken up by a colonized intelligentsia? Why should overseas-trained scholars conspire to do away with politics and to disembody the social? To put it another way, what relationship is there between the postwar u.s. hegemonic project of using social science to objectify others and the British project of maintaining the "stability" of the last colony of an almost-expired Victorian empire? Or, being even more specific, what was the politics of this "last generation of literati;' self-exiled in Hong Kong, who proclaimed themselves to be traditional and Confucian-inspired, yet who also engaged repeatedly in legitimizing a regime that had never even acknowledged their existence? How are we to account for a discourse that constantly constituted political "stability" and, in turn, was constantly constituted by it? Why were there no dissenting voices and no public debate? Perhaps these overseas-trained intellectuals fell victim to their own theories. Perhaps they truly believed in the "administrative absorption of politics;' the "social accommodation of politics:' or "utilitarianistic familism:' Perhaps they absorbed the "ethos" that dictated that one had but to gratify one's individual "needs" or "familial interests;' and thus became utterly nonsocial or antisocial. Perhaps they were co-opted into a synarchy system. Or perhaps, as I would like to suggest, the activities of these intellectuals were produced by the sociological theories and methods they deployed. In his 1977 article scrutinizing the formation of the Hong Kong power elite, S. N. G. Davies-the official voice aside-had noted that the advice the government received was heavily distorted toward the Hong Kong

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business community. Moreover, he argued that this elite of managers and professionals spoke with a remarkably homogenous voice. 34 In addition to the fact that the commanding heights of the Hong Kong economy have been controlled by a very few interests, this small group of elite individuals has had a broad and fundamental basis of agreement over the key principles of policy for Hong Kong. 35 These "facts:' even taken at face value, seem to support the "synarchy" argument, which includes taken-for-granted assumptions about "ethnic" behavior. At the same time, Davies's observations reveal the class nature of such a "system" and the various claims as well as apologia involved in explaining and justifying the "system:' However, to avoid falling into the trap of limiting our attention to either a structural functional or a strictly class examination of power relations, something must be added to our analysis. In this respect, Davies is helpful, for he has also observed that Hong Kong is one of the last colonies of Great Britain and perhaps the only one that would still, geo-political conditions permitting, stand a chance of surviving on its own. As the British empire has dwindled, so, as elephants are supposed to do in their declining years, colonial public servants have come to the graveyard of a Victorian empire. The proportion who have had experience in colonies other than Hong Kong is not vast, but neither is it insignificant. Of the top fourteen, 42.9 per cent have come from the home of the elephant to the place where its tusks are skillfully carved into products which enrich local businessmen and the local economy. This feature, it is suggested, adds a dimension to the understanding of the political attitudes of the higher civil servant in Hong Kong. His inbred conservatism, reinforced by colonial experience elsewhere, finds a contented and comfortable resting place in Hong Kong [and] it also reflects the attitude of the major employers who form the other side of Hong Kong's elite group. As Miners and others have observed, it marries well with traditional Chinese attitudes.3 6 If the reader will excuse the sexist overtones, the heuristic image of marriage helps to rid us of the one-sidedness of a theory of co-optation. To be precise, and in the terminology of recently developed theories of the state, Davies's explanation points toward a "strategic alliance of social interests" (class being but one of them) in the forming of the ruling hegemony. In this case, the so-called synarchy of the colonizer and the social scientists could be considered as such an alliance. It was, however, forged not only between the displaced public servants from the crumbling British Empire

Politics and the Body Social 311 and the dispossessed literati from disembodied "traditions" of a deceased "Middle Kingdom;' but also between the bearers of a colonial cultural project (i.e., those who took up "the white man's burden") and the local "intellectual elements" [9;[J~7t 1, who were to enlighten and civilize their own people. In an almost surrealistic historical conjunction, water and oil mixed. Under the auspices of modernization and development, modernists speak in the tongue of the literati, and vice versa; and both of them competed to devote themselves to the maintenance of a colonial and capitalist enterprise. Predicated on this understanding, we might dispel the popular belief that claims that some of the scholars mentioned above have a secret conspiratorial connection with Sir David Acker-Jones, long-time Secretary of the New Territories and one-time Acting Governor, Chairman of the Housing Authority until 1993, and an adviser on Hong Kong affairs to China. Are we to believe that the academician who turns himself into a protege of someone like Acker-Jones has been passively co-opted? On the contrary, it might very well be a crucial strategic move in the achieving of one's own agenda! To understand just how this might be so, we need to confront the "politics of discourse:' For instance, in our case, one might argue that to promulgate the idea of "synarchy" does not mean that it is something already present in Hong Kong. It may be the case that "public opinion" is being formed by the so-called opinion leaders in an effort to create "synarchY:' The reasons for doing so can be multiple. One of them could be to use the occasion to make it clear that one is willing and capable of becoming part of such a system. The discourse itself can, therefore, be read as a refraction of the enunciator's own existential circumstance, as well as part of his/her structure of desires. In a literati/modernist qua nationalist/capitalist world-system made up of many possible subject positions, to be orientalized, to orientalize (the subaltern or the "backward"), and to self-orientalize (to claim one's own uniqueness, etc.) are part and parcel of a complex language game. One has to be both "traditional" (i.e., "paternalistic") and "modern" (i.e., "entrepreneurial") to appeal to more than one possible franchiser. Therefore, in these positional maneuverings, the reference one alludes to must be well hidden and the gesture one makes cannot be overly unambiguous. One must act as if one does not believe in reasoning or cross-referencing, at least not in their potential to disrupt forces of coercion. Given the strategic moves necessary to play this language game, it is difficult to see how the pronouncements of social scientists actually vie

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with one another to produce the most correct interpretation. Compete with whom? Obviously, not with the hegemonizer. Then whom? Judging from the quality of the argument, the social-scientific pretense involved, the lukewarm mode of hemming and hawing, as well as the total absence of debate among holders of different opinions, it is reasonable to conclude that in a practical/political sense what was said wasn't really important. What was important was the act of speaking, at the right time, under the right circumstances, and with the right gesture. To put it another way, the reason why there was no debate was because all the voices were aimed in one direction or at one kind of audience, that is, the powers that be. No "horizontal" communication was necessary, or morally imperative. The "policy" suggestions, which were a component of the analysis offered by social scientists, were certainly not meant for "peer review:' After all, we were told that the goal of the Social Research Centre, where King and Lau carried out their projects and from which they were published, was a site designed, according to C. K. Yang, "to acclimatize a[ n Occidentalized!} social science to the Oriental soil:'37 It was in this Britishoperated Chinese soil of Hong Kong that a domesticating factory was intended by our scholars and was probably agreed to by the colonial authorities. It was under these circumstances that Hong Kong has emerged "as a major industrial metropolis from a sleepy commercial entrepot"; such an alliance between scholars and the colonial government was not only possible, but necessary. Having said all this, what remains intriguing is the fact that the task of denying politics and disembodying the social has seemingly been performed most rigorously by social scientists upon themselves. Yet, I believe a detailed discursive-political deconstruction of their deeds vis-a-vis their words and silences would reveal multiple instances of mocking and camouflaging. Such a "gaming" is precisely what I mean by politics. Serious work to recover these and other forms of politics (to expose, as it were, the politics of our scholars) ought to help subvert their discourses even more efficiently. One way of doing this is to adopt an approach that turns "downward;' toward the much maligned body social at the localleveps

RECOVERING POLITICS AND THE BODY SOCIAL

As should be clear from the above discussion, although the political and the social were suppressed under the colonial system, they never actually died off in Hong Kong. Moreover, the academic effort to make the social

Politics and the Body Social 313 disappear discursively was incomplete. This suggests that it is possible to recover discursively both politics and the body social. One way of doing this is to contextualize the social actions of various civic associations through their institutional matrices and manifestations. As a way of proceeding, I want to focus attention on the articulations between the structural and historical aspects of the colonial experience-to consider, as it were, encounters involving decolonialization, recolonialization, and resistance. We might begin, for example, with I. C. Jarvie's warning after the 1966 riot that a "new generation" with new political agendas had emerged in Hong Kong. 39 In the following decade, this new political awareness fostered a variety of social movements and pressure groups. In addition, welfare service reform of the Labour-Party-Ied Hong Kong government occurred, and the governments of Great Britain and China began negotiations on Hong Kong's future. These events, in turn, gave rise to and shaped the transformation of civic groups in the 1980s. Outside of Hong Kong, perhaps the best -known of these developments has been the recession issue. In this Sino-British "joint venture;' Hong Kong has been fabricated and presented to the world through two pairs of borrowed eyes-one set from Britain; the other, from China. And their design for Hong Kong was couched in two borrowed languages, ones that converged, if they did so anywhere, in the assumption that Hong Kong was working toward "prosperity and stability:' Who can deny that this is a remarkable vision? It is one produced on a double periphery, on the edges of existing socialist and capitalist systems. In this double vision, Hong Kong is seen simultaneously as a future part of a socialist "fatherland" and a capitalist "former colony"! In such a formula, what was made superfluous was the existence of the population of Hong Kong itself. That the borrowed eyes and languages would fail to see the people of Hong Kong was quite predictable. This failure points to the fact that, as in the discussions of earlier generations of colonial agents and the social scientists mentioned above, what was missing from the current discussion was a lexicon for a nonstate social entity like Hong Kong, an entity that seems to fit most closely Max Weber's notion of the "Plebeian City:'40 It also highlights the fact that the "oath-bound" pledge for Hong Kong's autonomy through 2047 was made between its two suzerains, not by the people of Hong Kong! One might add that the guaranteed fifty-year period of a "capitalist system" in Hong Kong would, theoretically at least, carve out a space for inter-

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mediate civic associations to exercise their rights. Moreover, such ironies do not stop at the "theoretical" level; they also exist in terms of realpolitik. After suppressing and co-opting intermediate civic groups for decades, the British attempted to playa "public opinion card" during the Sino-British negotiations. From the other side, the government of the People's Republic of China (PRc)-which has not only wiped out all the existing civic groups in China, substituting for them state-run dummies, but has turned the pro-China groups in Hong Kong into a "unified front" of puppetstried to counter by also busily manufacturing "public opinion:' Less well known, perhaps, is the effect the collusion between these two statist interests has had in Hong Kong. For one thing, it led to the emergence of popular social self-defense groups, which began to experiment with new forms of politics. This time, even our social scientists were aware that the scripts and performances were not being written or directed by the old sovereign or the sovereign to come. Hong Kong "identity" suddenly became a problem to them, and timely "researches" on the ethos of the population appeared. 41 What was actually brewing, however, was a multiplicity of alternative politics, not a newly discovered ethos. At the same time, the politics that has emerged since 1984 is not without its prehistories, archaeologies, and genealogies. Although space prevents a thorough exploration of these issues, I would like to trace one of the many trajectories of political and social development in Hong Kong that have to do with the emergence of the "Democratic Party" in recent years. 42 After the 1966-67 riots, the colony's governor, David Trench, sought to recognize the contribution of existing neighborhood organizations in "fighting crime:' Such a policy not only resulted in an administrative incorporation oflocal self-help forces, but it also empowered their leaders in terms of everyday politics. These "political" forces were to become the backbone of a local faction termed the "Kaifong" (KF) [fijm 1, or "neighborhoods faction:'43 Soon after MacLehose replaced Trench as governor in 1971, the policy pendulum shifted to emphasize social services and welfare provisions instead of social organization and regimentation. In the following decade, political forces on the local level emerged in other forms. These groups were led by newly established public sector unionists, teachers of government-subsidized educational institutions, and social workers of various ranks. They managed to thrive in a capitalist system by playing the "modernizing" roles of "professionals;' either in various state ideological apparatuses or in the state's social-reproduction institutions. Becoming another powerful political force in certain local contexts, the "social work-

Politics and the Body Social 315 ers-teachers-unionists" (STU) were eventually deemed competitors and threats by the KFS. However, the conflictual nature of the relationship between KFS and STUS, far from being primordial-or for that matter, structural-functional-was a product of both changing exogenous conditions and transforming endogenous developments. In 1971, the Hong Kong government released the first Political Consultative Paper, which dealt exclusively with the reform of the Urban Council. Such an act signified a prudent move-away from century-old colonial practices and toward a postwar neocolonialism-on the part of the British colonial government. Moreover, it came after prolonged debate and hesitation under the shadow of objections from China. 44 In the wake of this action, a three-tiered structure was established within the urban districts in 1974, and a policy of community-building was initiated in 1976. However, fearing the growing strength of the KFS and the STUS, the colonial government established a Standing Committee on Pressure Groups in 1978 to provide better surveillance of political activities within the colony, the net effect of which was to alienate KF and STU members from the District Board elections of 1982. In 1984 the close conjunction of two events changed the thinking of the STUS. The first of these was the release by the Hong Kong government of a new White Paper on the development of representative government in Hong Kong. It gave the District Board a political linkage with the Legislative Council; announced that twenty-four legislative councilors should be elected indirectly-twelve by an electoral college and twelve by functional constituencies; and raised the question of whether direct elections should be instituted for the 1988 Legislative Council. This last issue was left open for consideration in a further review in 1987. The second event, occurring one month after the release of the White Paper, was the signing of the SinoBritish Joint Declaration on the future of Hong Kong. It hardly seems to have been a coincidence that, among the two-thirds of District Board seats (237) that were directly elected in 1985, more than half were won by social workers, teachers' unionists, political activists, and even by "Trotskyists" and "pro-Taiwan" elements. In their study of the election, S. K. Lau and H. C. Kuan added that only about twenty members could actually be classified as pro-China!45 According to data collected for an oral history research project of which I was a part, the success of the STUS in these elections can be accounted for on the basis of two considerations that changed their political strategy: First, given that Hong Kong would revert to China in thirteen years, many argued that the only viable way to brace oneself for that return was through democratization [minzhu

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huiguil [~3:. @] ftfl}l. Second, electoral politics provided one means for "joining forces within and without the government body" [~£!! [l$7~ ill; that is, it provided a means for reaching the first goa1. 46 For their part, in subsequent elections, the KFS either failed to join the ticket at all or were beaten by the STU coalition. After successive defeats, the KFS became more conscious of the STU coalition as rivals and began constructing themselves as opposites. However, at this stage the terms of the "othering" of the opposite side had yet to become hyperpoliticized. The axial referents used by both sides remained predicated upon local concerns. Further twists and turns in Hong Kong's constitutional reform altered this situation; they injected bad blood into the local political arena and exacerbated the rivalry. Immediately after the 1985 Legislative Council election results were made known, pressure from the PRe government on the British mounted. There was also pressure within Hong Kong for negotiation over the direction of constitutional development. According to Ian Scott, in January 1986 Great Britain had already "conceded that the constitutional developments in Hong Kong in the transitional period would converge with the Basic Law which was then still to be drafted by China:'47 This seemed to contradict the promise of the 1984 White Paper that there would be a review of constitutional developments in 1987 and a consideration of whether there would be direct elections to the legislature in 1988. Another landslide victory in the Regional Council election of 1986 by the social workers and teachers, and in the Urban Council election by political activist groups again made evident to PRe authorities that the situation in Hong Kong was becoming badly "politicized:' Making matters worse, on 2 December 1986, 190 organizations established "The Joint Committee on the Promotion of Democratic Government:'48 The initiation ceremony of the coalition was held in Kao-shan Amphitheater; over one thousand community organizers were present. Riding the momentum of a year-long campaign that secured more than one million signatures in protest against the Taiya Bay Nuclear Power Plant, the participants at the rally urged speedy democratic reforms and totally direct elections in 1988. The empires soon responded. Led by the pro-China labor confederation, a campaign called "Yes to Rice Coupons, No to the Electoral Ballot" [~~~'j'ff~~~l was waged, with a lot of smoke and little heat. Meanwhile, a commission responsible for ascertaining "public opinion" was officially established; it demonstrated that "public opinion" disapproved of any further democratization. In February 1988, a new White Paper was issued that based itself on the findings of the above commission. It rec-

Politics and the Body Social 317 ommended that direct election of council members be postponed until 1991; that there be an increase in the number of functional constituency seats in 1988; and that the number of directly elected seats in 1991 should

be limited to ten (less than 20 percent of the total number of councillors), one from each of ten district-based constituencies. The report further advised that these ten seats should be substituted for those currently filled by indirect elections from the District Board. As a result of this backlash from both the Chinese and the British authorities, the constituencies of the Kao-shan Rally were forced to consolidate themselves into a discernable political force-they became the precursors of the "Democrats:' What prompted such a transformation, in discursive-strategic terms, were two factors. First, the discourse of a "return but through democratization" [.R.:t: @] fffi 1 lost its anchor because the location of such a "return" proved to be at the site where Sino-British acts of suppression converged. Second, the strategy of "joining forces within and without the government body" proved equally elusive, since the "government" concerned was itself on the brink of moral bankruptcy. To participate in electoral politics and to win as many seats as possible became their major political task. Their all-out campaign yielded impressive results in the September 1995 Legislative Council election: they took sixteen out of twenty directly elected seats. Lo and behold, the "Democrats" were excluded from participation in the SAR preparation Committee. Among the 150 members appointed by PRe, 14 were legislators, but only 2 of them were directly elected. Nevertheless, such a list was hailed by the Chinese as "representation:' For the 21 out of 92 H.K. members appointed were "super rich:' they "controlled" 36 percent of the H.K. stocks, that is, $800 billion worth of the total market asset! The 1988 White Paper was thus instrumental in creating an environment in which Hong Kong was badly divided. The sides were not only grouped into antagonistic "camps;' but these camps were ready to challenge one another relentlessly and violently. It was at that moment that the bloody crackdown of 4 June 1989 occurred in Tiananmen Square. A kind of unity of unprecedented proportions was temporarily fashioned in Hong Kong. Among the most outspoken and disappointed were those who had fed themselves on nationalist sentiments, including almost all the "pro-China" leaders, many of whom found their post-June 4 puppet suits quite constricting. Yet the ones who panicked the most weren't these pro-China leaders in

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Hong Kong. Rather, it was the PRe government. Immediately after the massacre, the committee assigned to draft the basic law for the colony tightened the screws. In no time at all the basic law was watered down and two of the most important drafters were expelled. They became instantaneously the most popular figures in Hong Kong and, later, they became leaders of the "Democrats:' At this point, the metamorphosis of the STUS into a "Democrat Party" was almost complete- they now spoke of "exercising democracy in resisting (communist) suppression" [~3:. treJ:tl. The transformation of the STUS into "Democrats" could, therefore, be seen as the third installment in a trilogy about British colonial "indirect rule" in Hong Kong. In the first act, the colonial rulers pitted themselves against the HYK. In the second act, they pitted themselves against the KFS. In the third and final act, the colonizer took on the STUS. Moreover, in each stage of this development, the present sovereigns of Hong Kong have helped to nourish other forces, ones which hardly fit the stereotype of passive apoliticism fostered by the colony's social scientists. 49 The future sovereign has also made a contribution, particularly insofar as its "united front" tactics have proven to be a hollow sham. CONCLUDING COMMENTS

The task of this essay has been not only to set the record straight, but perhaps more importantly, to open up a discursive space that historically has been made to collapse through acts of suppression, discursive and otherwise, perpetrated by governmental forces and their academic collaborators. SO Throughout, I have attempted to demonstrate that the political/ social situation in Hong Kong has always been more complex than the enunciations the authorities have allowed. This point must be repeated as often and as widely as possible because, as recent publications indicate, there is an overwhelming tendency to radically simplify the agents at work in contemporary Hong Kong. In addressing an unsettled and uncertain future, it is important to bear in mind that the people of Hong Kong anticipate the worst, while at the same time, they are preparing themselves for something better. They do so by making intrinsic to their daily practices a refusal to be stigmatized or to be fit into the categories of colonial governors or those of high sociology. In a small way, this paper bears witness to some of their strivings. It is, however, enabled by everyone of those who strive.

Politics and the Body Social 319 NOTES This essay is the partial product of a three-year research project funded by Hong Kong Baptist University. Some results of this research appear in an unpublished 1991 paper, "The 'Civic-self' and 'Public-image' of Intermediate Associations in a Changing PolityA Research Agenda on Hong Kong's Social Bodies and Public Spheres:' I would like to thank my research assistant Lau Chuen-wai for his hard work. I also enjoyed and benefited from conversations with Law Wing-sang and Cheung Siu-keung. I would also like to express my gratitude to Jim Hevia for his persistent editorial help. As the findings of this project have yet to be fully worked out, I welcome critical comments from any quarter. 1 Report of the Working Party on Local Administration (Hong Kong: Government Printer, 2

1967). A. Y. K. King, "Administrative Absorption of Politics in Hong Kong: Emphasis on the

Grass Root Level;' in Social Life and Development in Hong Kong, ed. A. King and R. Lee (Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 1981), 128. 3 Alvin Rabushka, Value for Money: The Hong Kong Budgetary Process (Stanford, Calif.: Hoover Institute Press, 1976), 1; T. G. McGee, The Southeast Asia City: A Social Geography of the Primate Cities of Southeast Asia (London: G. Bell and Son Ltd., 1967); Keith Hopkins, ed., Hong Kong: The Industrial Colony (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971); Peter Harris, Hong Kong: A Study in Bureaucratic Politics (Hong Kong: Heinemann Asia, 1980); King, "Administrative Absorption of Politics in Hong Kong;' 127-146. 4 S. K. Lau, "Utilitarianistic Familism: The Basis of Political Stability;' in King and Lee, Social Life and Development in Hong KOllg, 195-216; S. K. Lau and K. F. Ho, "Social Accommodation of Politics: The Case of Young Hong Kong Workers;' Social Research Centre Occasional Paper No. 89 (Hong Kong: Chinese University of Hong Kong); A. Y. K. King, "{f{,i% ilffi£!W tiiiS'H£!.m"in« ~alli.li 11 ~ x~» I'lJU;lJ1Il!Ii (Confucian ethics and economic development), 1985. 5 Henry Smith, John Stuart Mill's Other Island: A Study of the Economic Development of Hong Kong (London: Institute of Economic Affairs, 1966); Eugene Cooper, "Karl Marx's Other Island: The Evolution of Peripheral Capitalism in Hong Kong," Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars 14, no. 1 (1982),25-31. 6 Alvin Rabushka, Hong Kong: A Study in Economic Freedom (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979); Jon Woronoff, Hong Kong: Capitalist Paradise (Hong Kong: Heinemann Educational Books (Asia), 1980). 7 Keith Hopkins, ed., Hong Kong: The Industrial Colony (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971); Joe England and John Rear, Chinese Labour under British Rule (Hong Kong: Oxford University Press, 1975); Jon Halliday, "Hong Kong: Britain's Chinese Colony;' New Left Review 87-88 (1974). 8 Peter Harris, Hong Kong: A Study in Bureaucratic Politics (Hong Kong: Heinemann Asia, 1980),13-18. 9 King, "Administrative Absorption of Politics in Hong Kong:' 127-146. 10

H. C. Kuan, "Political Stability and Change in Hong Kong;' in Hong Kong: Economic, Social, and Political Studies in Development, ed. T. B. Lin et al. (New York: M. E. Sharpe,

1979), 145-166. 11 Lau and Ho, "Social Accommodation of Politics;' 184.

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12 Allen Chun, "Land is to Live: A Study of the Concept of Tsu in a Hakka Chinese Village,

New Territories, Hong Kong" (Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 1984), 175-185. 13 See N. J. Miners, The Government and Politics of Hong Kong (Hong Kong: Oxford Univer-

sity Press, 1981). Miners takes issue with Jon Halliday, "Hong Kong: Britain's Chinese Colony;' New Left Review, vol. 87-88; and John Rear, "One Brand of Politics;' in Hong Kong: The Industrial Colony, ed. K. Hopkins (Hong Kong: Oxford University Press, 1971), 55-139. 14 Allen Chun, "Policing Society: The 'Rational' Practice of British Colonial Land Administration in the New Territories of Hong Kong c. 1900;' Journal of Historical Sociology 3, no. 4 (1990): 402. 15 Miners, Government and Politics, 197. 16 The Heung Yee Kuk Ordinance was passed in 1959, i.e., two years after the existing HYK

was announced unlawful. Therefore, in judicial formalist terms, the HYK was legally nonexistent. The new HYK, consequently, cannot help but be a totally different animal, "created" out of administrative expediency. Why the old Kuk was dissolved remains a mystery to this very day. 17 Chun, "Land is to Live;' 210. 18 See "Chinese Attitudes and British Rule;' chap. 3 in Miners, Government and Politics, 39-51. 19 Miners, Government and Politics, vii. 20 S. K. Lau, "Utilitarianistic Familism;' 196. 21 King, "Administrative Absorption of Politics in Hong Kong;' 127. 22

See n. 3.

23 King, ''Administrative Absorption of Politics in Hong Kong;' 129-130. 24 J. K. Fairbank, "Synarchy under the Treaties;' in Chinese Thought and Institutions, ed. J. K.

Fairbank (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957), 204-231. 25 King, "Administrative Absorption of Politics in Hong Kong;' 130. 26 Lau, "Utilitarianistic Familism;' 201. 27 S. K. Lau, Society and Politics in Hong Kong (Hong Kong: The Chinese University Press, 1982). 28 Lau and Ho, "Social Accommodation of Politics:' 29 Joe C. B. Leung, "Problems and Changes in Community Politics;' in Social Issues in Hong

Kong, ed. Benjamin K. P. Leung (Hong Kong: Oxford University Press, 1990), 43. 30 Cited in ibid., 48. 31 Ashis Nandy, "Hong Kong 1997: Decolonization and Recolonization?" Communique 24 (1994). 32 E. Laclau, "The Impossibility of Society;' in New Reflections on the Revolution of Our Time

(London: Verso, 1990),89-92. 33 E. Castell, The City and the Grass Roots (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1983). 34 S. N. G. Davies, "One Brand of Politics Rekindled;' Hong Kong Law Journal 7 (1977): 44-81. 35 Nicholas C. Owen, "Economic Policy;' in Hong Kong: The Industrial Colony, ed. K. Hopkins (Hong Kong: Oxford University Press, 1971), 141-206. 36 Davies, "One Brand of Politics;' 55. 37 C. K. Yang, "Introduction;' in King and Lee, Social Life and Development in Hong Kong, ix, my insertion and emphasis.

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321

38 The effort to recover politics as well as the body social is also my way of intervening into

39 40

41 42

43

the sterile debate on "Public Sphere" /"Civil Society" in China, published in the authoritative journal Modern China 19, no. 2 (1993). Symptomatic ofthe pieces in this issue was the fact that the debate seemed to be about anything but politics. This absence was paralleled by a shortage of empirical evidence. The net effect of this double lack has been to make high-sociology out of the whole issue. 1. C. Jarvie, "A Postscript on Riot and the Future of Hong Kong;' in Hong Kong: A Society in Transition, ed. 1. C. Jarvie (London: Deutsch, 1969), 361-365. See Max Weber, Economy and Society (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1978), 1301-1329. In a curious fashion Hong Kong-unintentionally or perhaps accidentally-secured for itself some political autonomy, "autonomous law;' "autocephaly;' and "taxing autonomy;' as well as market rights and an autonomous urban economic policy. Interestingly, such subtleties appear to be lost on Parsonian or Goldthorpian Weberians among Hong Kong academics. For a critique of these groups, see Ma Kuo-ming, "Why Read Protestant Ethic and Spirit of Capitalism?" Tiananmen Review 1, nos. 2-3 (1991): 233-247. S. K. Lau and H. C. Kuan, The Ethos of the Hong Kong Chinese (Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 1988). Other ways of proceeding might have been to discuss in greater detail the impact of the 4 June 1989 Tiananmen Massacre on politics in Hong Kong. Or one could have discussed the relationship between multinational capitalism and workers' movements in Hong Kong. For a study of the latter that focuses on women workers during the period covered in this section see Fred Y. L. Chiu, "The Moral Politics of Industrial Conflict in Multinational Corporations Located in Hong Kong: An Anthropological Case Study" (Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 1991). Aline Wong, The Kaifong Associations and the Society of Hong Kong (Taiwan: Hwa Kang, 1972).

44 Miners, Government and Politics, 31-38. 45 S. K. Lau and H. C. Kuan, The 1985 District Board Election in Hong Kong: The Limits of

46

47

48 49

50

Political Mobilization in a Dependent Polity (Hong Kong: Centre for Hong Kong Studies, Institute of Social Studies, Chinese University of Hong Kong, 1985). Fred Y. L. Chiu and C. W. Lau, "Organizational Profiles and Mobilizational Dynamics of Voluntary Associations in Hong Kong" (Hong Kong, 1993, unpublished working paper). Ian Scott, "Administrative Growth and Change in the New Territories;' in Hong Kong: Dilemmas of Growth, ed. C. K. Leung et a!. (Hong Kong: Centre for Asian Studies, University of Hong Kong, 1980), 95-113. Ian Scott, Political Change and the Crisis of Legitimacy in Hong Kong (Hong Kong: Oxford University Press), 1989. See Fred Y. L. Chiu and C. W. Lau, "Mobilization Efforts and Organizational Adjustment Involved in Collective Actions Taken by Voluntary Associations in Hong Kong" (Hong Kong, 1995, unpublished working paper), for further discussion. One of the most recent examples of such discursive simplification can be found in an article by Ngai-Ling Sum titled "More Than a 'War of Words': Identity, Politics and the Struggle for Dominance during the Recent 'Political Reform' Period in Hong Kong;' Econ-

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omy and Society 24, nO.1 (1995). In it, Sum finds only two groups of "conscious agents" operating in Hong Kong, the official! semiofficial representatives of Britain and the PRe. These two, together with their respective grand narratives, were said to struggle for hegemony during the transition process (p. 69). Accordingly, two imagined identities are constructed-that of "Democratization" and that of "Pragmatic Nationalism."

~ Surveillance and Punishment in Postliberation

North Korea

~

Charles K. Armstrong

Michel Foucault's archaeology of power and surveillance in the modern West, and in particular his concept of power gradually becoming "capillary" or diffused throughout the social body, does not seem entirely transferable to a postcolonial environment. Partha Chatterjee, addressing Foucault's novel regimes of power in the West, comments that When one looks at regimes of power in the so-called backward countries of the world today, not only does the dominance of the characteristically "modern" modes of power seem limited and qualified by the persistence of older modes, but by the fact of their combination in a particular state and formation, it seems to open up at the same time an entirely new range of possibilities for the ruling classes to exercise their domination. l Chatterjee and other members of the subaltern studies collective have done pathbreaking work in incorporating Gramscian, Foucauldian, and deconstructivist strategies in their critique of bourgeois nationalism in South Asia. 2 Yet strangely absent in this critique, perhaps because the issue is not directly relevant in the South Asian context, is the place of revolutionary nationalism. What are we to make, then, of a postcolonial state that claims to have rejected the western bourgeois model of politics, to have eliminated the ruling classes, to represent the poor and oppressed? What is the relationship of such a state to its colonial predecessor, and to the modern West in general? The Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK), China, and (North) Vietnam are unique as revolutionary nationalist regimes founded in a postcolonial environment in the aftermath of World War II. Of the three, only the DPRK (North Korea) was directly occupied by the Soviet

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Red Army in the formative period of the regime (1945-1948), and ever since North Korea has been consistently misread as a Soviet satellite, rather than as a postcolonial revolutionary nationalist state. 3 More than China or Vietnam, North Korea has fallen squarely under the rubric of "totalitarianism;' an illegitimate and coercive state with complete control over the everyday life of its subjects. 4 On the one hand, totalitarian discourse during the Cold War can be seen as a western ideological construct used to mark off the "East" as a hostile and aggressive Other, justifying a (largely American) project of neocolonial hegemony-a variation, that is, of Orientalism. 5 But on the other hand, totalitarianism was an ideal, not only of the West but of the "totalitarian" state itself. The idea of a society in which the division between state and society are effaced, in which the power of the party/state completely pervades the social space, may indeed reflect the goals, if not the actual practice, of such states. 6 The disciplinary process under "totalitarianism;' as under a postcolonial, Marxist-Leninist state, is linked to the broader development of western regimes of power but has certain distinct characteristics. What seems particularly distinctive about so-called totalitarian societies is the overt and overwhelming concentration of disciplinary apparatuses in the state. The modern state has developed its power to integrate individuals over centuries, not so much through inventing new systems of power but through reinvesting and linking older ones. What is novel, according to Foucault, is the technique of discipline-not by any means confined to the state-which regularizes, normalizes, and makes more efficient these power relationships, "above all making it possible to bring the effects of power to the most minute and distant elements:'7 "Totalitarian" regimes, therefore, "used and extended mechanisms already present in most other societies;' including western political and economic rationality,S but made the state the sole legitimate source of power in society. Similarly, Claude Lefort argues that, in the case of Stalinism, above all else, totalitarian discourse effaces the opposition between the state and civil society; it seeks to make the presence of the state manifest throughout the social space, that is, to convey, through a series of representatives, the principle of power which informs the diversity of activities and incorporates them in the model of a common allegiance. 9 Power is not simple domination. Power relationships in modern societies, according to Foucault, "are rooted deep in the social nexus, not reconsti-

Surveillance and Punishment 325 tuted 'above' society as a supplementary structure:'IO What a "totalitarian" state attempts to do is to monopolize the process of discipline, to replace with itself the network of power relationships contained in the family, religion, culture, voluntary organization, education, employment, and so forth. It is the impossibility of this goal that has made Marxist-Leninist regimes so often coercive, yet ultimately so fragile. Nevertheless, to establish any lasting hegemony, the "totalitarian" state must initially work with the networks of power already existing in society and must subvert and finally dominate them. The principal difference, then, between the distribution and development of disciplinary power in the West on the one hand, and in a "backward" or postcolonial society-especially one within a "totalitarian" stateon the other, lies in the spatial and temporal concentration of power in the latter. There, the state attempts to monopolize the instruments of power in a relatively short period of revolutionary (and/or anticolonial) upheaval and consolidation. Moreover, the explicit purpose of this discipline is not the creation of "bourgeois individual" subjects, but rather of collective subjects-classes, in the case of Marxist-Leninist revolution, but above all the collective subjectivity of the nation itself. Thus, anticolonial and revolutionary discourses themselves redeploy, if in new configurations and combinations, previous techniques of surveillance and control through the medium of the postcolonial state. DISCIPLINING SOCIETY

In the context of North Korea, the subject of surveillance and punishment brings into focus the relationship between the postliberation state and the Japanese colonial state. Such a relationship has been very little explored in the scholarship on postcolonial Korea, in part because it is much easier to point out the direct continuities between the colonial and postcolonial state apparatuses in South Korea, where even some of the most notorious collaborators were retained under the u.s. occupation and beyond.!l The North, on the other hand, claimed to have purged all such "pro-Japanese elements" and "national traitors:' But while it is true that the North Korean regime eliminated many high-ranking colonial personnel, much of the lower ranks seems to have been retained, and the legal system itself remained in place for a time. In the end, the North Korean legal system-as one example of what Althusser called "Repressive State Apparatuses"12-combined features of both Japanese colonial law and Soviet law, with certain elements

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reflecting a particularly Korean revolutionary experience. Perhaps more importantly, the role of the state in policing and surveillance remained much the same as in the colonial period, and even the actual colonial infrastructure (courts, police substations, and so on) were used by the new regime. The North Korean case seems to suggest that a new state, perhaps especiallya revolutionary one, needs to occupy the social space of the previous regime, to penetrate society to at least the same degree, and thus to fill any potentially threatening gaps of power. Therefore, the security structure of the colonial state was ostensibly removed, but what took its place was remarkably similar. In short, the modernity of the colonizer, with its corresponding techniques of social discipline and control, was internalized and transferred to the postcolonial environment. These techniques were to a great extent the Japanese colonial variant of western regimes of power, combined with older modes and other external influences. In Choson dynasty Korea, as in China, Japan, and medieval Europe, law and punishment were used as displays of monarchical power, and punishment was physical, public, and often highly dramatic.!3 This began to change at the end of the nineteenth century, and in a matter of decades Korea moved from "torture as a weapon of the sovereign" to "prison and normalizing surveillance as the embodiment of modern disciplinary power;' a process that Foucault follows over several centuries in Europe. Whereas once, punishment was literally inscribed on the body through beatings with bamboo sticks, in the late nineteenth century, the systematic use of incarceration was introduced by the Japanese. The Victorian traveler Isabella Bird Bishop, visiting Seoul in 1897, remarked favorably on this development, particularly in terms of prison reform. While "much remains to be done" she noted, "the great Seoul prison contrasts most favorably with the prisons of China and other unreformed Oriental countries:'14 What Bishop observed was precisely the move toward the individualized, incarcereal forms of punishment that Foucault traces for Europe: nominal abolition of torture, rational classification of prisoners, well-lit cells for easy observation, elimination of the "spectacle" of punishment (no "severed heads and headless trunks" on display). After the annexation of Korea in 1910, the Japanese colonial authorities brought their police and justice system almost intact from the home country, with all of its accompanying efficiencies, abuses, and idiosyncrasies. As in Japan, the police in colonial Korea had much wider social duties

Surveillance and Punishment 327 than in most contemporary Western countries. They functioned not merely to enforce the law and restrain criminals, but more broadly the police were portrayed as the "moral guide and arbiter of society:' the overseers of "correct" thought and behavior, and the enforcers of state policy in a wide variety of areas.l 5 However, the police system Japan created in Korea was much more authoritarian than in the home islands. Of course, the notion that the police could morally guide a consensual society was one proposition at home, and quite another in a colony that had had these state-directed goals imposed on them by a foreign power. Whether the police themselves were Japanese or Korean, there is little doubt that they were among the most hated aspects of the colonial state by the majority of ordinary Koreans. The initial period of Japanese rule was one of direct military control, in which the gendarmerie was the main instrument of law enforcement. After the introduction of civilian rule in 1919, the gendarmerie was replaced by a civil police force.l 6 As in Japan, the police force in colonial Korea was characterized by both a centralized hierarchy and a wide distribution. The Japanese goal in Korea was "one substation for every township (myon):'17 which they in fact exceeded: while there were 2,504 myon in Korea, by 1936 the Japanese boasted of employing over 20,000 police distributed among 254 police stations and 2,574 substations.l 8 Unlike other colonies, Korea had a high proportion of "natives" in its police force: 57 percent of the total between 1910 and 1919, declining to 40 percent after 1930, far higher than in Manchuria or Taiwan. 19 Moreover, the colonial authorities linked the police forces to traditional self-policing institutions, such as the baojia in China and village elders (ijang) in Korea. 20 This, along with their sheer numbers, allowed the police to penetrate more deeply into society and to enforce state policy more thoroughly than had ever been the case in Choson times. The "rational, paternalistic" efforts of the police as agents of the state more often than not caused considerable resentment among ordinary Koreans. For example, the police enforced land surveys, nearly always in favor oflandlords; in the 1930S and 1940S, they conscripted people into the Japanese war effort; and, from the late 1930S, they enforced the changing of names from Korean to Japanese. After 1937, local police, like their Japanese counterparts, introduced "thought reform" at all levels and formed an "Anti-Communist Association" to dissuade local people from any wayward ideological tendencies. 21 The unpopular mission of the police was not helped by their wide dis-

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cretionary powers, which could result in frequent abuses. Police had, for example, the right to pass "summary judgment" on those arrested, which usually meant flogging. To be arrested meant almost certain punishment, even if one was ultimately found innocent.2 2 By the time of the Japanese surrender in August 1945, the police had become probably the most despised symbol of colonial oppression. Nevertheless, after liberation, law and order continued on the Japanese colonial model much more than the North Korean regime has ever acknowledged-with, of course, a different content and different personnel.

LAW AND (DIS)ORDER

The period immediately after the Japanese surrender was a time of "lawless paradise" (mubop nagwon), as one Korean observer put it,23 or of "judicial anarchy;' in the words of u.s. Army intelligence.2 4 In a matter of months, however, a complex and, apparently, widely enforced legal system was put together, which combined Japanese and Soviet legal structures with a great deal of local input. This stress on legal procedure and the institution of a formal system of justice is particularly striking in the context of the general chaos of liberated Korea. The rapid move toward centralized state control, with law as a major disciplinary technology, was possible because of the unique configuration of historical circumstances in North Korea, of which the colonial legacy was one important element. Between the removal of Japanese colonial authority and the arrival of Soviet and American occupation authorities in September 1945 local order was maintained by self-governing groups known generally as "people's committees" (inmin wiwonhoe).25 One of the first acts of these people's committees was to abrogate all existing Japanese laws and create their own laws and methods of enforcement. But the maintenance of "law and order" took precedence over the fervor for sweeping away colonial vestiges, and in November the newly formed Justice Bureau (sabopguk) decreed that, with certain exceptions, "The laws and regulations which were abrogated 15 August 1945 will continue in effect until new laws are published:'26 Japanese colonial law remained in effect until a new law code was promulgated in the spring of 1946. The result was to a great extent a modified Japanese legal code combined with a Soviet-style judicial system, along with elements reflecting the nationalistic and mass-based policies of the emerging North Korean leadership under Kim II Sung. In the first few months after liberation the regime coalescing in

Surveillance and Punishment 329 Pyongyang attempted to link itself to, and bring under its control, local experiments in setting up laws, courts, and policing systems that involved "popular participation" (minjung ui ch'amga) and a "democratic legal consciousness"(minjujuuijok pobuisik).27 The primary target of this reform was not so much the legal system itself but the way it was enforced: law had often been little more than a tool of the colonial authorities, so that among the first legal reforms undertaken by the local people's committees and their equivalents were the use of the vernacular language in law and the elimination of colonial-era legal personnel. 28 Removal of all colonial civil servants was an expressed goal of the North Korean regime and a popular policy on the ground; members of the legal profession were particularly notable targets. As one contemporary record put it, "Since most current judges, police and lawyers are pro-Japanese national traitors and oppose national construction, a non-Japanese judiciary has been constructed:'29 However, such a sweeping purge of colonial personnel was more problematic than these revolutionary pronouncements revealed. Finding legal specialists who were untainted by collaboration was nearly impossible. North Korean sources warned that "the situation should be recognized in all fields, but especially in the judicial field, that much danger exists due to penetration by the reactionary and pro-Japanese elements:'3o The Justice Bureau initiated a training program to educate "progressive and democratic" personnel from among workers and peasants, but in the first national election of judges in December 1945, over three-quarters were samuwon, or white-collar workers, who by definition must have been trained under the Japanese. 31 In March 1948, Ch'oe Yong-dal admitted that as head of the Justice Bureau he had inadvertently allowed many "pro-Japanese elements" to sneak into the judiciary.32 The centralization of the legal and policing apparatuses took several months. The establishment of the Justice Bureau was first announced on 16 November 1945 at the Five-Province Administration Meeting in Pyongyang. 33 At the end of the meeting, the Five-Province Administration set up ten government bureaus, each with a Korean department head and a Soviet adviser.34 Manchurian guerilla veteran Ch'oe Yong-gon was named head of the Security Bureau (poanguk), and the "Soviet-Korean" Cho Song-p'a headed the Justice Bureau. He was later replaced by Ch'oe Yong-dal. Ch' oe Yong-dal explained the development of the North Korean legal system in the journal Inmin [The people] in November 1946. On 9 February 1946 the Bureau of Investigation, the Police Inspectorate, and the Legal Affairs Bureau were incorporated into a single Bureau of Justice.

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Although provincial judiciaries had arisen beforehand, they were now under the direction of a centralized legal and administrative system, headed by the Supreme Court and the Procuracy. There was a special court for the railroads. In the ninety-eight local organizations, legal structures were being established to replace Japanese imperial law (Japanese law was still being used "selectively"). Tremendous effort and sacrifice had been required, "but we resolved all these difficulties with the skills of the democracy-loving people and the Soviet Red Army's unsparing assistance:' Above all, there was a need to reeducate lawyers, eliminate "individualistic tendencies;' and emphasize public duty and organization. When all this was accomplished, a democratic legal system that served the benefit of the people would be in place.35 A provisional North Korean constitution was published in February 1948. 36 According to a western scholar who has examined the newly opened Soviet archives, "voluminous documentation" attests to the Soviet role in drafting North Korea's constitution and early lawsY Indeed, the 1948 DPRK constitution did draw heavily on the 1936 Stalin constitution, but a close reading of the two shows that the former was not merely a slavish copy of the latter.38 In particular, the first section on "Basic Principles" (which has no equivalent in the Soviet text) gives a very different nuance to the North Korean document, incorporating a broad-based, populist rhetoric rather than Soviet-style references to class struggle. Unlike the USSR, the DPRK does not refer to itself as a "state of workers and peasants" but says instead that "authority is in the people (inmin):' Moreover, its postcolonial concerns are obvious: a major goal is eliminating "remnants of the Japanese state;' and two of the ten basic principles refer to land reform. The DPRK'S legal system was more than the transplantation of Soviet law into Korean soil. But the manner in which such a system could establish itself in North Korean society depended not just upon its construction at the center, but equally on how this law and legal apparatus was applied at the local level.

PEOPLE'S JUSTICE

Following the general pattern in postIiberation North Korea, the legal system began with considerable autonomy on the part oflocal people's committees and gradually became centralized by early 1947. What developed was a dual structure based largely on the Soviet model, with a court system descending from the Justice Bureau through the Supreme Court,

Surveillance and Punishment 331 North Korean People's Committee

____________ 1__________ ,

Supreme Court Provincial Court

Railway Courts

Railway

Procurators

Provincial Procurators City and County Procurators

City and County People's Court Figure 1. Legal System of North Korea. Source: U.S. Army, Intelligence Summary, North Korea no. 43 (15-30 August 1947)

provincial courts, and city and county people's courts (inmin chaep'anso), and a Procuracy (kamch'also) extending from the Procurator General (kOmch'alsojang) to the provincial and local procurator's offices (figure 1). The Pro curacy, responsible for the prosecution of crimes, preliminary investigation, and the supervision of other legal institutions, seems to have originally derived from the Japanese legal system. 39 A decentralized procuracy accountable to local people's committees became centralized along Soviet lines in February 1947.40 A report on judicial reform from January 1946 stated that, while courts and procurator's offices had been established at the provincial level in all provinces, the judicial system at the county (kun) level remained incomplete "due to lack of funds, personnel, transportation, communications, et cetera:' Throughout North Korea, courthouses built by the Japanese were being used and Japanese laws enforced "for the time being:'41 Beginning in mid-December 1945 the Justice Bureau sent officials to "organize and direct" in the districts, where problems of organization, of coordination between the center and the regions and between public safety and judicial organs, and of dereliction of duty were endemic. A few local leaders were removed, including the chief of the Hwanghae Provincial Judicial Department who had "issued serious antidemocratic regulations:' The most serious problem seemed to be that the procurators, whose responsibilities included not only supervising local legal procedures but also overseeing public security organs, public safety, and pris-

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ons, were neglecting their duties and abusing their positions. 42 Until early 1947, if not later, central control was weak, local autonomy considerable, and ideological unity elusive. An April 1946 report to the Justice Bureau from the Kangwon Provincial Procurator's Office gives an illustration of the process of instituting state centralization over the local judiciary. Immediately after liberation, local people's courts sprang up to enforce what at times was a rough justice. In the village of Ch' orwon, ten Japanese and one Korean "national traitor" were put before a public tribunal and condemned to death. In this case the Soviet military directly intervened, freeing the Japanese and putting the Korean in prison. 43 Similar examples of local justice occurred elsewhere in the province, mostly without the Soviet army to playa restraining role. A formal legal apparatus gradually took shape over the following months. In October 1945 the Kangwon Provincial People's Committee established a "People's Procurator's Bureau;' which was reorganized as the Kangwon Provincial Procurator's Office (komch'also) in November. A number oflocal procurator's offices were organized in December. In January 1946, the political center finally made itself felt by sending an officer from the Justice Bureau to be the provincial procurator. 44 The pro curacy and the courts were merged into a single organization, and procurator's offices were set up in most of the remaining counties. Even so, a stable system oflaw and order, much less totalitarian control, had not yet been realized. Relations between the legal and security organs were "relatively unified" but incomplete; the "thought tendencies" (sasang ai tonghyang) of the people had "improved;' but reactionary elements still instigated terrorist acts, opposition to land reform, and anticommunist agitation. Nevertheless, land reform had been widely supported by the peasants, the most notable collaborators had been dealt with, and the children of reactionaries were coming around. The report gives the strong impression that, despite its considerable powers, the procuracy-and by extension the communist party and the state-was still feeling its way, trying to enforce a political order and a legal system that could be supported and engaged in by the bulk of the local population. The primary arena in which the local population encountered the legal system was the people's courts, located in major cities and county seats. The terminology and function of the people's courts was based on the Soviet model, although the tri-level system of people's courts/provincial courts/Supreme Court also paralleled the Japanese system of local

Surveillance and Punishment 333 courts/Court of Appeals/High Court, and indeed the same colonial courthouses were often used. Judges were elected by the local community, as were the "people's assessors" (an office with parallels in both the Soviet and Japanese systems) who assisted them. A number of early people'scourt records exist for Haeju, the largest city in Hwanghae Province, including reports from the outlying county courts. The first response to liberation in the Haeju area was, as elsewhere, the spontaneous organization of a group to maintain local order. In Chaemil county, after 15 August "in every area of the county pro-Japanese were smashed, while those who had committed violence against the workers were driven out by bands of armed students:' A county Committee to Maintain Political Security (ch'ian yujihoe) was formed as the "ruling force" in the area, which "gradually came under the control of the provincial Public Security Bureau (poanbu)" after late September. Local justice was enforced with little direction from Pyongyang for the remainder of 1945. On 7 January 1946 at the "request" of the local People's Committee chairman, organizers from the Justice Bureau were dispatched to Chaemil to set up a people's court and procurator's office. Relations between the legal and security organs were said to be good, and a "cooperative attitude" (hyomnyok jok t'aedo) existed between them. Despite problems with pro-Japanese elements and "terror groups" (t'ero tan), opponents of land reform and other reactionaries had been dealt with in a "legal and democratic" fashion. 45 By 1948, the next available record of Haeju people's court, the legal system seemed well entrenched and functioning. 46 Legal procedure was strictly adhered to, and the constitution and specific laws from the 1948 legal code were regularly invoked in judgments. A record of court judgments lists 194 cases covering a wide range of crimes, from forging money and dealing opium to theft, confiscating state-owned grain, tax evasion, and two mysterious cases of "feudal practices:' By far the most frequently cited crime, however-sixty-two caseswas "assisting (people) across the border" (wOlgyong annae), that is, to South Korea. Does this indicate a flood of discontents "fleeing communism"? In part, yes: Haeju's location near the thirty-eighth parallel made it a logical place for people to attempt escaping from North Korea, and the 1946 record also showed a large number of people (mostly big landlords, entrepreneurs, and "pro-Japanese elements") having fled to the South or preparing to flee. But those (mostly poor peasants) who helped others to flee were apparently willing enough to stay themselves and, moreover,

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were able to benefit from the increasingly solid division between the two halves of Korea. The "guides" were not only paid a handsome sum to help others across the parallel but also profited from a brisk trade in smuggled goods. The severe punishments, usually ten to sixteen years in prison, indicate the seriousness of the problem.

CRIME, POLICE, AND SURVEILLANCE

One point at which totalitarian theory and Foucauldian concepts of modern power seem to converge is the idea of surveillance. Anthony Giddens, hardly a Cold Warrior in his view of the totalitarian state, nevertheless posits at the center of such a system a surveillance network "penetrating the day-to-day activities of most of its subject population:'47 In fact, Foucault argues, all modern societies demand a continuous and efficient system of surveillance. Foucault uses the image of Jeremy Bentham's "Panopticon;' a type of prison design in which prisoners could be observed without ever knowing when and by whom they were being watched, to denote a society in which power is ubiquitous and invisible; subjects, solid and visible. 48 The Panopticon appears to fit almost perfectly the characteristics of so-called totalitarian states, with their networks of spies and informants, secret police, and never-ending surveillance. If the interpretation of all modern societies as "disciplinary" in Foucault's terms is problematic, "genuinely" totalitarian societies might come closest. Yet even in the most extreme of "disciplinary societies;' of which North Korea has often been seen as one example, such a characterization falls short of actual internal practice. The key difference, however, is that for Foucault, surveillance extends far beyond state apparatuses and is ingrained in the social body, expressed in structures of knowledge, institutions, and daily practices. For a "totalitarian" state, on the other hand, despite efforts to the contrary, power remains external, imposed, and above its individual subjects. Unable to re-create a "microphysics of power" as developed in the capitalist West, the revolutionary state is limited to a macrophysics. During the colonial period, as we have seen above, the police force was a frequently brutal instrument of state power. Immediately after liberation the Japanese police and the Koreans who had worked for them were the targets of criticism, removal from power, and sometimes violent attack. 49 Nevertheless, the organs of public security were built upon the existing colonial police structure, with the old leaders eliminated; u.s.

Surveillance and Punishment 335 Department of Public Security

(Poanguk) Provincial Public Security Bureaus (Poanbu) Police Administrative

Figure 2. Organizational Structure of the Public Security Department. Source: U.S. Army, Intelligence Summary, North Korea no. 39 (15-30 June 1947)

Army intelligence reports note that although the colonial police force "was disarmed and higher-ranking officials jailed, the old organization itself was not disbanded:'50 In some areas the Japanese police themselves remained in power briefly after liberation. Giving perhaps too much credit to the Soviet occupation forces, u.s. Army intelligence noted at the time that "the Japanese police maintained order generally until the arrival of the Soviet forces:' after which the Red Army "established contact with Korean Communists and from this original contact a wide variety of local, communist-dominated, police or security detachments evolved:'51 In fact, the actual extent of Soviet responsibility for the creation of local police organizations was quite limited. According to Soviet sources, when the Red Army arrived in Ung'gi on the coast of North Hamgyang Province on 12 August 1945, a "people's police" formed of local workeractivists was created; a similar process took place down the coast in Najin. 52 When the Soviets occupied Wansan on 22 August, they ordered that the local people's police be armed with Japanese weapons. 53 But these were groups already organized by local Koreans who were asking for the Red Army's blessing; they were not Soviet creations. Most of North Korea's security organizations were formed on an ad hoc basis by the local People's Committee or its equivalent. These groups began to expand and consolidate with the arrival of communist and nationalist exile leaders and guerrilla fighters. After a few weeks, the two major security organizations were the Mingyangdae

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(People's Guards), established in the Hamgyong Provinces and Kangwon Province, and the Chogiiidae (Red Guards), dominating South P'yongan Province. A Peace Preservation Corps (Chiandae) was set up to coordinate local militias, but apparently was not very effective. 54 By the end of 1945, a Bureau of Public Safety (poanguk) and corresponding provincial police bureaus (poanbu) had been established, functioning "primarily [to adapt] the former Japanese police system to the demands of a new Korea:'55 A centralized, coordinated police system did not fully come into place until the spring of 1946. It shared many features with both its Japanese colonial predecessor and the Soviet model. An early textbook entitled Social and State Organs of the DPRK states that "the security apparatus ( poan kigwan) is also created by the people:' in contrast to police in capitalist countries and the oppressive Japanese colonialists, while "in the South, the 'National Defense Forces' and police kill patriotic comrades:'56 As described by Ch'oe Yong-dal, the duties of policemen included not just apprehending criminals, but also carrying out government policies such as land reform, labor and gender equality laws, and the nationalization of industriesY In effect, the police force was given broad social duties strikingly similar to that of prewar Japan, not to mention colonial Korea, in which the police force was portrayed as the "moral guide and arbiter of society:' the overseer of "correct" thought and behavior, and the enforcer of state policy in a wide variety of areas. 58 In 1947, public safety was subsumed under the Ministry of Internal Affairs (naemusong), which became by far the largest of the government departments. 59 The Bureau of Public Safety alone was a vast organization with branches in every county. (figure 2) Refugees from the North complained of inexperience, "arrogance:' and abuse by local policemen, but the general impression is that they were an improvement over the colonial period. For their part, the North Korean authorities announced that they would "punish severely" any policemen who abused their position. A Hwanghae Province newspaper reported that "Every morning police officers recite 'Ten Commandments' which they composed themselves, setting up the principle of being good servants to the people:' The commandments included a disciplined social life, improvement through self-reflection, and a "sacrificing spirit:'60 In North Korea as a whole there were, in addition to some twelve thousand regular policemen, a large number of "political thought police" and around five thousand secret police, the latter apparently styled after the Stalin-era NKVD. 61 Communist party recruits and members of the

Surveillance and Punishment 337 Democratic Youth League were used to supplement the security forces: u.s. military intelligence estimated one hundred secret police were active in the city of Hamhiing, where their duties included the detection of any gatherings of more than four or five persons. 62 In a biblical flourish, one defector went so far as to claim that "Wherever there were more than two people gathered, there was sure to be a spy."63 Whatever their actual numbers, spies and informants were ubiquitous. Like Bentham's Panopticon, the "gaze" of the state was, it seems, inescapable. In actual practice, the state was not as all-seeing as it appeared, and the sheer number of informants helped to make spying a clumsy and ill-coordinated venture. Ch'orwon County in Kangwon Province offers a case in point. By 1950, there were nineteen inspectors and nearly two hundred "intelligence agents" (chongbowon) in the county-mostly poor peasants, with a smattering of workers, middle peasants, and samuwon. 64 Much of their spying seems to have been purely gratuitous. Thick files of "suspicious persons" circulated in the inspection offices; they included people released from prison for petty crimes, opium addicts, people who had helped others cross the border, and large numbers of party members who for one reason or another were politically suspect. 65 Yet for all the spying, almost nowhere do we find a person actually apprehended for any "socially dangerous activity" (sahoejok wihomsong); the main purpose of spying seems to have been to give local inspectors and underemployed peasants something to do. Indeed, it seems that the creation of a "regime of surveillance" was a purpose in itself. This system of surveillance, "panoptic" in intent if not in practice, was part of a broader attempt to collapse the state into the society, to make the power of the state "manifest:' From 1947, the center of local political control-the primary "cells" which were to link the political body to the center and enable the state to observe the populace and disseminate its policies-was the above-mentioned Ministry of Internal Affairs and its branches in the provincial, city, and county people's committees. At all levels Internal Affairs was the largest government department; in the counties, the Internal Affairs Office (naemuso) comprised ten sections, covering culture, information, public safety, and other areas. Of the Ch' orwon County People's Committee's 127 members, 45 were in Internal Affairs.66 For all "suspicious persons;' careful maps were drawn showing the whereabouts of their residences in relation to the Internal Affairs Office, a practice apparently drawn directly from Japanese secret police techniques. Rather than power extending downward from an imposing political leadership, the attempt

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was to create a system of control that extended outward from the center of the basic local political units. INTERNAL(IZING) SECURITY

After the creation of the Democratic People's Republic in September 1948, the North Korean documents show an increasing concern with external dangers to the nation, and social discipline appears increasingly militarized. Although references to "reactionary elements" and "national traitors" within North Korea diminished, criticism of reaction and national betrayal was increasingly focused on South Korea, and talk of "defending the Fatherland (choguk powi)" escalated. At the same time, there was a move away from the negative elimination of "bad elements" to the positive creation of "thought unity" within the party and the local people's committees and to the spiritual and physical training of individuals, all linked in turn to the defense of and integration into the state that represented the "national subject;' the Democratic People's Republic of Korea. There was, in short, an unbroken continuum from the internal discipline of the individual to the external defense of the nation, a collective subjectivity that was to be the ultimate goal of the disciplinary process. The police force and the military had never been entirely separate, and in fact the Korean People's Army, founded in February 1948, grew directly out of the public security organizations developed after liberation.67 Local counties and villages were linked to the national security/military complex through the Self-Defense Units (chawidae), supervised by the Procurator's Office, which was in turn part of the Ministry of Internal Affairs. Self-policing institutions were a common feature of traditional Korean villages, but it was the Japanese colonial authorities who first linked these organizations effectively to the centralized police forces and the state. The North Korean state also drew on this system of local self-defense, but the social hierarchy was reversed: rather than being headed by village elders, respected for their age and perhaps a modicum of Confucian education, the local Self-Defense Units were run by local peasants who were generally both poor and young. In the village of Tongmyon in South P'yongan Province, for example, most of the twenty chawidae members employed in the local police substation were in their early thirties, all were poor peasants, and two were women. 68 The responsibilities of the Self-Defense Units were broad, including the dissemination of state policy (including foreign policy), protection

Surveillance and Punishment 339 against "infiltration of reactionary elements;' and security from fire and theft. 69 At the first meeting of the Tongmyon chawidae in October 1949, the members promised to "work for the benefit and productivity of the local people;' to "expose and smash reactionaries and puppets and their helpers:' and above all to "overcome all difficulties and discipline (hullyonhada)" themselves "for obedience to the demands of the state:'70 Most of the institutions that Foucault draws together in his genealogy of the creation of a disciplinary society in the West-the barracks, the clinic, the school, and the factory-are precisely the institutions stressed in social construction in North Korea, and they are used as metaphors for the society as a whole: military ("mobilization"), medical ("purges"), educational, industrial ("the factory is our school"). But the prison, which is of course both the main subject of Foucault's Discipline and Punish and a frequent polemic in the totalitarian critique of communist society ("a giant gulag"), plays a role as well. During the colonial period, prison was the (often final) destination of many a Korean nationalist, and a release of political prisoners took place throughout Korea on 16 August 1945, the day after liberation. Especially in the North, a huge number of postliberation political leaders were "graduates" of colonial prisons: experience in Japanese colonial prison was rated highly in the people's committees.7 1 David Marr observes that for Vietnamese revolutionary leaders, French colonial prisons served as "universities of revolutionary theory and practice" and as quasi-monastic areas of contemplation and forced withdrawal from the worldJ2 The same could be said for Japanese prisons in Korea. For those who survived the experience, prison was the consummate teacher of discipline, self-mastery, and solidarity in the face of adversity.73 Such lessons could be applied to society as a whole, and in this sense there is a certain Foucauldian isomorphism between prison and a highly disciplined society such as North Korea. One can also assume that prison experience had taught a good part of the North Korean leadership the usefulness of prison as an instrument of social controJ.74

DISCIPLINING THE MIND

Above all, discipline was to be internalized through self-examination and reform at the individual level and "thought struggle" leading to "thought unification" at the collective level. North Korean communism shared with its counterparts in China and Vietnam, as well as (with a different ideo-

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logical content) prewar militarist Japan, a peculiar emphasis on drawing the wayward individual into political conformity through reeducation and reform rather than physical coercion and punishment. The most dramatic example of this was the public ritual of "self-criticism" (cha-a pip'an or chagi pip'an). Self-criticism is perhaps a more visible expression than anything Foucault writes about in Western history regarding the "normalization" process in which the subject participates in his own domination; it extends writing about the Other, which was central to the development of surveillance mechanisms, to writing (and speaking) about oneself in a process of internalizing disciplineJ5 Originally a Soviet technique, selfcriticism was used to a much greater degree by the North Koreans and Chinese, becoming particularly notorious in the Chinese Cultural Revolution.7 6 It may be that in cultures deeply influenced by neo-Confucian notions of the innate goodness and spiritual malleability of human beings, all deviants are in theory capable of being reformed through selfreflection and reeducationP Self-criticism was the public expression of this reform, through which the genuinely repentant individual could be reintegrated into the community. Its quasi-religious nature has often been noted, although self-criticism is much more like Evangelical Protestant "testimony" than Catholic confession.78 In a psychological sense, self-criticism is one method by which the community becomes the equivalent of a collective superego, which Freud saw as a kind of "police state of the mind."79

DISCIPLINING THE BODY

One final object of discipline stressed in the North Korean literature was the human body. Immediately following the creation of the DPRK there was a considerable emphasis on hygiene, sports, and physical purity. The individual had a duty to perfect his physical condition to strengthen the society and better serve the state. In particular there was an emphasis on large, coordinated group sporting events, the precursors of North Korea's much publicized "mass games:' Images abounded of parades of young athletes carrying flags, of group calisthenics, and of public drills. This too had a resonance not only with the Soviet Union and other communist societies, but also with prewar Japan and, further afield, Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. The extent to which society was portrayed as an organic unit to which

Surveillance and Punishment 341 the individual contributed his entire physical and spiritual being and in which "all hearts beat as one" (to use a later North Korean phrase) was probably closest to Imperial Japan. But, as John Dower has pointed out, the Japanese government chose to portray such a rigid image of national unity precisely because many feared that the masses did not share in the virtues that the state espoused. 80 The state seemed to be attempting to create a sense of unity and political cohesion in part through the active involvement of the individual in public, through physical displays of bodily conformity. These would not be the "docile bodies" that Foucault refers to,81 but "active bodies" moving in choreographed unity, their sports reflecting the indivisible purpose of the nation in all areas of politics, economics, and culture. The well-trained individual body was a synecdoche of, and a prerequisite for, a well-functioning body politic. Both had to be disciplined, strong, and determined. The inaugural issue of Inmin ch'eyuk (People's physical education) in February 1949 proclaimed that physical training "will help realize complete national unification and democratic development:'82 Physical education was the "firm foundation" (t'unt'unhan kich'o) of the people's economic development and the defense of the fatherland. Although there were already more than 60,000 members of 11,208 athletic groups (ch'eyuk tanch'e) in the North, there was still a need to "permeate physical education more broadly among the people:' to replace the antiquated Japanese physical education system, and to educate all people in the workplace, farm, and school to become good comrades. Everywhere the nation walked in step, both literally and figuratively. CONCLUSION

Within a few years of Korea's liberation from Japan, a formidable state with an extensive policing and surveillance apparatus extended throughout the northern part of the peninsula. That state was neither a Soviet implant nor the spontaneous generation of a revolutionary impulse but was a bricolage constructed from the remnants of Japanese colonialism, the input of the Soviet occupation authorities, the influence of the Chinese and Manchurian revolutionary struggles, and the experiments of ordinary Koreans in local self-government. Despite its overt rejection of the content and practice of the Japanese colonial state, the North Korean regime continued and deepened the process of state-building on the foundations of Japanese colonialism. The state created, the Democratic

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People's Republic, was far more penetrative than anything seen previously in Korean history; it presented itself as indistinguishable from society as a whole, although in practice, this state was not as "total" as either its supporters or its detractors claimed. As the sole legitimate repository of disciplinary technology and knowledge, the totalitarian state would seem to be the crudest and most explicit of Foucault's "total institutions:' the logical outcome of nineteenth-century thought. B3 Yet in actual practice, the collapse of communist regimes in Europe has revealed how little such states were able to penetrate and control the area of everyday life, thoughts, and beliefs. It was in the sphere of everyday life, especially consumption, that socialist societies were most vulnerable, and where the greatest attraction of capitalist society lay. At the level of the ordinary citizen, it is most likely this perceived lack in the area of everyday life that led to the rejection of communist regimes in Eastern Europe, not the desire for liberal democracy, the "free market;' or even economic betterment as such. The crude methods of communist surveillance and punishment pale in comparison to the penetration of capitalism into daily life and the subconscious,84 although the hegemony of capitalist ideology or the bourgeoisie as a class may still be problematic in South Korea. 8S In this regard capitalism is, in Foucault's sense of the term, more "totalitarian:' North Korea's attempt to create and maintain an authentic space away from the very real threat of capitalist imperialism, later expressed in the ideology of juche (autonomy), has become increasingly untenable in the face of deterritorialized late capitalism. As China and Vietnam have clearly shown, even the most staunchly anti-imperialist states in Asia have come to accept, indeed actively pursue, integration into regional and global capitalist formations. Internally, the independent and autonomous nation-state, once the imagined solution to the problem of colonial oppression and renewed imperialist aggression, has ,itself become a source of oppression creating new resistances. Apparatuses of surveillance and control, concentrated in a Marxist-Leninist state formed through a revolutionary process in a postcolonial environment, have little chance of matching the far subtler and more penetrative regimes of power in the modern West. If power is ubiquitous, as Foucault argues, then an effective resistance must be deterritorialized and ubiquitous as well.

Surveillance and Punishment 343 NOTES 1

Partha Chatterjee, "More on Modes of Power and the Peasantry;' in Selected Subaltern Studies, ed. Ranajit Guha and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (New York: Oxford University

Press, 1988), 390. Their influence is beginning to be felt in scholarship on other regions of the world as well, although it has yet to make much of an impact in the East Asia field. A true sign that subaltern studies has hit the mainstream is a recent forum on subaltern studies approaches to South Asia, Africa, and Latin America in the American Historical Review 99, no. 5 (December 1994). 3 See, for example, Robert C. Tucker, "Communist Revolution, National Cultures, and Divided Countries;' Studies in Comparative Communism 7, no. 3 (autumn 1974). In contrast, Bruce Cumings argues for a revolutionary nationalist reading of North Korea in The Origins of the Korean War, vol. 2 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1990), chap. 9. 4 This is clearly the perspective of the most extensive and influential study of North Korea in English, Robert Scalapino and Chong-Sik Lee's two-volume Communism in Korea (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972). 5 William Pietz, "The 'Post -Colonialism' of Cold War Discourse;' Social Text 19120 (spring 2

1988).

6 John Borneman, Belonging in the Two Ber/ins: Kin, State, Nation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 163. 7 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Vintage, 1979),216.

8 Foucault, "Afterword: The Subject and Power;' in Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, ed. Hubert 1. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 209. 9 Claude Lefort, The Political Forms of Modern Society: Bureaucracy, Democracy, Totalitarianism, ed. John B. Thompson (Cambridge: Polity, 1986), 215. 10 Foucault, "Afterword;' 222. 11 Bruce Cumings, The Origins of the Korean War, vol. 1 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1981), esp. chaps. 5-7. 12 Louis Althusser, "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses;' in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays (New York: Monthly Review, 1971), 143. 13 An overview of the Choson legal system may be found in William Shaw, Legal Norms in a Confucian State (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981). For comparisons to China see Law in Imperial China, ed. Derk Bodde and Clarence Morris (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1967); for Japan see Dani V. Botsman, "Punishment and Power in the Tokugawa Period;' East Asian History, no. 3 (June 1992). 14 Isabella Bird Bishop, Korea and Her Neighbors (1898; rpt. Seoul: Yonsei University Press, 1970),441-443. 15 Elise Tipton, The Japanese Police State: The Tokko in Interwar Japan (Honolulu: Univer-

sity of Hawaii Press, 1990),142. 16 Ching-chih Chen, "Police and Community Control Systems in the Empire;' in The

Japanese Colonial Empire, 1895-1945, ed. Ramon H. Myers and Mark R. Peattie (Prince-

ton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1984), 221.

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17 Ibid., 223. 18 /apan-Manchoukuo Yearbook 1940 (Tokyo: Japan-Manchoukuo Year Book Company, 1940),509.

19 Chen, "Police and Community Control Systems;' 224-225. This did not mean that Japanese and Korean policemen were equal: nearly three-quarters of the officers were Japanese, and Koreans were given the harshest and most unpopular duties. See Andrew J. Grajdanzev, Modern Korea (New York: Institute of Pacific Relations, 1944), 63, 256. 20 Chen, "Police and Community Control Systems;' 226. 21 Ibid., 230-234. 22 Grajdanzev, Modern Korea, 47. 23 Han Chae-dok, Kim If-sang ul kobalhanda [I indict Kim II Sung] (Seoul: Naeoe munhwasa, 1965), 51. 24 United States Army, Intelligence (G-2) Library, RG 319, Intelligence Summary, North Korea no. 43 (15-31 August 1947), 25. 25 In the South, the People's Committees were dismantled by the u.s. military government, often by force; in the North, tlte committees were eventually absorbed into the central government in Pyongyang, initially called the Nortlt Korean Provisional People's Committee (see Cumings, Origins, vol. 1, chaps. 3, 8; Kim Yong-bok, "Organization and Activities of North Korean People's Committees after Liberation;' in Haebang chonhusa ui insik [Understanding pre- and postliberation history], vol. 5, North Korea, ed. Kim Namsik [Seoul: Hangilsa, 1989], 180-246). 26 u.s. Army, Intelligence Summary no. 43, 25. 27 Fujii Arata, "The Formation of the Legal System and Government Organs in North Korea;' in Kaiho to Kakumei: Chosen Minshushugi /inmin Kyowakoku 110 Seiritsukatei [Liberation and revolution: The organizing process of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea], ed. Sakurai Hiroshi (Tokyo: Institute of Developing Economies, 1990), 104. 28 In the colonial period most procurators and judges were Japanese and Japanese was the language of the courts, which of course put Koreans at a great disadvantage (see Grajdanzev, Modern Korea, 251-252). 29 Democratic National Front, ChasOn haebang illyonsa [History of the first year of Korean liberation] (Seoul: Minu insogwan, 1946), 119. 30 United States Army, Far East Command. Allied Translator and Interpreter Section (ATIS), box 10, item 69. Pamphlet on tlte reorganization of the North Korean judicial system, January 1 [1946?], 67. 31 Fujii, "Legal System;' 127. In 1946,77.3 percent of judges were samuwOn, and workers and peasants combined made up only ILl percent. By 1948, these ratios were reversed, a situation that created problems of its own in the number of untrained judges who were barely literate, much less knowledgeable of the legal profession. 32 United States Army, Far East Command. Record Group 242, "Records Seized by u.s. Military Forces in Korea;' shipping advice 2008, box 9, item 100. Puk Chason Nodongdang che ich'a chOndang taehoe hoeuirok [Minutes of the second congress of the North Korean Worker's Party], 144-148.ltems from this archive, which consists of an enormous body of North Korean documents captured by the u.s. Army during the Korean War, will be referred to in subsequent notes by an abbreviated form of the record group, shipping advice, box number and item number: e.g., RG 242, SA 2008 91100. 33 Propaganda Section, Democratic National United Front. Haebang sanYOngan ui kung-

Surveillance and Punishment 345 naewae chungyo ilg; [Record of important domestic and international events in the four years since liberation] (Seoul: Minju Chosonsa, 1949), 13. 34 Kim Yong-bok, "Organization and Activities;' 215. 35 Ch'oe Yong-dal, "For the Establishment of a Legal Structure;' Inmin 1, no. 1 (November 1946): 32-39. 36 Kim Tu-bong discusses the drafting of the constitution in Report on the Preparation of a

37

38

39 40

Korean Provisional Constitution (Pyongyang: Pyongyang Special City People's Committee Propaganda Bureau, 1947). Kathryn Weathersby, "Soviet Aims in Korea and the Origins of the Korean War, 1945-1950: New Evidence from the Russian Archives;' in Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, Cold War International History Project Working Paper, no. 8 (November 1993), 17. One of the earliest published versions of the constitution can be found in the DPRK Justice Ministry's Sabiip sibo [Legal times] no. 2 (1948): 1-17. The Stalin constitution is translated and reproduced in William E. Butler, The Soviet Legal System: Selected Contemporary Legislation and Documents (New York: Oceana, 1978), 61-79. For the Procurator's role in Japan see Richard Mitchell, Thought Control in Prewar Japan (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1976). Sung Yoon Cho, "The Judicial System of North Korea;' Asian Survey 11, no. 12 (December

1971): 1172. 41 ATIS, box 10, item 69, 66. 42 Ibid., 72-n 43 RG 242, SA 2010 5/12. Kangwon Provincial Procurator's Office, "Legal Activities in

Kangwon Province;' 20 April 1946. 44 With the judicial reorganization of February 1947, city and county procurators were

appointed by the provincial procurator, who was in turn appointed by the Chief Procurator, who was appointed by the Supreme People's Assembly. The process of top-down centralization was complete. See u.s. Army, Intelligence Summary no. 43, 25. 45 RG 242, SA 2005 6/59. Haeju People's Court, "Local Situation and Activities;' 10 April 1946. 46 RG 242, SA 2005, 6/53. Haeju People's Court, "Record of Cases;' 1948. 47 Anthony Giddens, The Nation-State and Violence (Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press, 1986), 203. 48 Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 195-228. 49 Punishment of colonial police officers was a sure way for the new regime to draw public

support, especially in contrast to South Korea, where many prominent colonial officials remained in power. For example, the first trial held in the Ch' Ongjin People's Court after liberation was that of a policeman who had abused his position in 1944; the local newspaper reported that "thousands crowded eagerly at the entrance to the court" for the trial (Saegil Sinmun, 7 March 1946). 50 u.s. Army, Intelligence Summary, no. 1 (1 December 1945), 2. 51 u.s. Army, Intelligence Summary, no. 39 (15-30 June 1947), 1. 52 Eric Van Ree, Socialism in One Zone: Stalin's Policy in Korea, 1945-1947 (Oxford: Berg, 1989),86. 53 Ibid., 90. 54 u.s. Army, Intelligence Summary, no. 39, 1.

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55 Ibid. 56 RG 242, SA 2006 15/37. Ministry of National Defense, "Social and State Organs of the

Democratic People's Republic of Korea;' February 1949. 57 Ch'oe Yong-dal, "Legal Structure;' 35. 58 Tipton, Japanese Police State,

142.

59 RG 242, SA 2009 9/113. North Korean People's Committee, "Personnel and Duties of

Provincial (Pyongyang Special City), City, and County People's Committees (,extremely secret');' 1.

60 Chayu Hwanghae, 26 February 1946. The authorities seem to have deliberately chosen

this Biblical terminology, perhaps to appeal to the Christian community in the province. 61 Dae-Sook Suh, Kim Il Sung, The North Korean Leader (New York: Columbia University

Press, 1988), 103. 62 U.s. Army, Intelligence Summary, no. 8 (20 March 1946), n. 63 Wilbur Schramm and John W. Riley Jr., "Communication in the Sovietized State, As

Demonstrated in Korea:' American Sociological Review 16, no. 6 (December 1951): 765. 64 RG 242, SA 2012 8/23. "Intelligence Agents, Ch'orwon County, 1950:' 65 RG 242, SA 2012 8/16. Several files of "Suspicious Persons" and "Party Members Under

Surveillance:' Ch' orwon County, 1949-1950. 66 RG 242, SA 2009 9/113. "Personnel and Duties of People's Committees:'

67 Intelligence Summary no. 43; Cumings, Origins, 1:409-414; Suh, Kim Il Sung, 101-105. 68 RG 242, SA 2005 4/36. Tongmyon Police Substation, "Personal History of Each Village Guard, 1949 ('top secret'):' 69 RG 242, SA 2009 8/58. Poster on responsibility and mission of Self-Defense Units, belonging to Cell Section, Kangwon Provincial Procurator's Office, 4 November 1947. 70 RG 242, SA 2005 4/36. Tongmyon Police Substation, "Record of the First Meeting of the Self-Defense Unit;' 12 October 1949. 71 See, for example, RG 242, SA 2006 14/48. Sonch' on County People's Committee, "Personal History of the Staff in Provision Section;' July 1947. 72 David Marr, Vietnamese Tradition on Trial, 1920 -1945 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), 308. 73 For one Korean revolutionary's experience in a Japanese prison see Nym Wales and Kim San, Song of Ariran: A Korean Communist in the Chinese Revolution (San Francisco: Ramparts, 1941), 295-300. 74 The term prison itself was eventually abolished in North Korea, to be replaced by"Special Dictatorship Target Areas:' As in China and the early Soviet Union, the purpose of incarceration was ostensibly reform and reeducation, not punishment (see Human Rights in the Democratic People's Republic of Korea [Minneapolis: Asia Watch/Minnesota Lawyers International Human Rights Committee, 1988], 97). 75 See David Garland, Punishment and Modem Society: A Study in Social Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990),145-146, for an examination of this concept in Foucault. 76 RG 242 contains a "handbook" on self-criticism, a translation of a 1927 Soviet document, which states that "self-criticism (chagi pip'an) is a method of promoting revolutionary consciousness of party members, cadres and ordinary working-class" (RG 242, SA 2009 7/32, Propaganda Section, Ch'innamp'o Korean Communist Party Committee, May 1946). Party members also circulated translations of Chinese articles on "Thought Guid-

Surveillance and Punishment 347 ance" by Mao, Liu Shaoqi, Zhu De, and others, indicating the mix of both Soviet and Chinese influences in postliberation North Korea (see RG 242, SA 2009 6/73). 77 Prewar Japanese tenko (conversion) of "thought criminals" used almost exactly the same techniques as North Korean and Chinese "reeducation" (or what became known through the Korean War as communist "brainwashing") (see Mitchell, Thought Police, 12r147)· 78 For a brief description of self-criticism in North Korea see Schramm and Riley, Communication in the Sovietized State, 764. One might compare self-criticism with Foucault's genealogy of the confessional tradition in History of Sexuality, vol. 1, An Introduction (New York Pantheon, 1978). 79 Marshall Berman paraphrases Freud in such a fashion in All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity (New York: Penguin, 1988), 362 n. 22. 80 John W. Dower, War without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War (New York: Pantheon, 1986),31. For an interpretation of North Korea as a "corporatist" organic state see Bruce Cumings, "Corporatism in North Korea;' Journal of Korean Studies, no. 3 (1983): 269-94·

81 Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 135-169. 82 Inmin Ch'eyuk 1, no. 1 (February 1949). 83 Foucault describes the Panopticon as "a machine in which everyone is caught, those who exercise power just as much as those over whom it is exercised. This seems to me to be the characteristic of the societies installed in the nineteenth century" (Foucault, "The Eye of Power;' in Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-1977 [New York: Pantheon, 1980], 156). 84 For the latter see especially Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1991). 85 Carter Eckert, "The South Korean Bourgeoisie, A Class in Search of Hegemony;' Journal of Korean Studies 7 (1990-91): 115-148.

~ The Discourse of Decolonization and Popular Memory: South Korea ~~ Chungmoo Choi

The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.-Antonio Gramsci 1 I begin this essay by invoking Antonio Gramsci's image of an interregnum, a space of crisis, which is pregnant with morbid grotesquery. This is the space from which I present the problems of "postcolonial" South Korea. I do not purport simply to identify the predicament of South Korea as such, although inevitably this issue will be discussed in order to locate the problems I am planning to address. In this essay, I intend to examine critically the South Korean discourse of discolonization and offer an occasion to rethink its subversive strategies so that the new can be born. WHEN IS POSTCOLONIAL?- THE PERMANENCE OF COLONIALISM IN SOUTH KOREA

When is postcolonial in South Korea? The official history written in South Korea denies the legitimacy of this rhetorical question because the physical absencelremoval of Japanese colonial rule after 1945 defines South Korea as essentially postcolonial. However, assuming South Korea to be postcolonial eludes the political, social, and economic realities of its people, which lie behind that celebrated sign "post" of periodization, without considering the substantive specificity of Korean histories. The actual landscape of the postcolonial space is a contestatory one. This very contestation tests our sensibilities and demands that we rethink the "postcolonial" realities of the (ex- )colonies. As I will attempt to illustrate throughout this essay, "postcolonial" South Korea is a space lying between the empty signifier, "postcolonial;' and the reality that it (mis )represents.

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I do not intend here to echo Anne McClintock's and Ella Shohat's recent critique of postcolonialism, in which they contend that the term "postcolonial;' does not correspond to the social and historical realities of many Third World countries where imperial powers vibrantly exercise colonial and neocolonial practices.2 We may extrapolate from the arguments of McClintock and Shohat that the term "postcolonialism" is impregnated with a universalizing character that privileges the subjective position of the Western imperial powers. That is, the term "postcolonial" does honor the colonial masters' de jure loss of sovereignty over their former colonies, while it disregards the deferred postcoloniality in many of these former colonies. Shohat actually points out that the term "postcolonial" is a diluted replacement of the term "Third World" that once proffered revolutionary possibilities. While insisting that "postcolonial" is a politically vacuous term created in the increasingly depoliticized climate of U.S. academia, Shohat concludes with a rather predictable suggestion that we should consider historical, geopolitical, and cultural contexts. I would like to take this debate further. In essence, what is at issue here is not the matter of rethinking or reinventing a term that may universally represent the realities of the "postcolonial" Third World, but the necessity of the decolonization discourse in the true sense of the word so that the cause of this discomfort with the term itself can be made obsolete. As a contribution to this project I will offer a strategy that revises the old notion of decolonization that emphasizes the restoration of the political and ideological sovereignty of a nation. Locating the decolonization discourse in the arena of national sovereignty alone buries the intractable ambiguities of the postcolonial subject position with split loyalties, allowing a colonization of consciousness. By colonization of consciousness I mean the imposition by the dominant power of its own world view, its own cultural norms and values, on the (colonized) people so that they are compelled to adopt this alien system of thought as their own and therefore disregard or disparage indigenous culture and identity.3 Colonization of consciousness thus perpetuates cultural dependency and colonial subjectivity. I will argue that the strategy of the decolonization discourse in the largely "postcolonial" era requires a self-reflective examination of this ambiguity that deters decolonization from within, beyond the more palpable material conditions and hegemonic forces from without. In this light, the discourse of decolonization cannot safely rely on the self/other formula of the anticolonial discourse, although the two share a certain common property in their casual relationship. I suspect that Jan Mohamed's strategic formula of

Decolonialization and Popular Memory 351 Manichaean struggle,4 for instance, risks significant oversight of the constant slippage in the binary opposition of self/other, which the decolonization discourse attempts to overcome. Homi Bhabha's5 notion of colonial mimicry may be more productive in that it can be extended to that of mutual mimicry, and thus offers an alternative view: the notion of ambivalence, which may ease the rigidity of the binarism. Jan Mohamed criticized Homi Bhabha's notion as the unity of colonial subject that dissolves the conflictual relationship between the colonizer and the colonized. I remain sympathetic to JanMohamed's conviction in the critique of the colonial discourse in that the Manichaean struggle maintains the sharpness of colonial subjectivity to unseat the authority of colonial discourse. However, I find Bhabha's formulation quite accommodating in that it opens up the possibility of self-reflective criticism by suggesting the possibility of mutual mimicry between the colonizer and the colonized beyond the inflexible rigidity of self and other. The self-reflective positionality rescues the colonized subject from the trap of being a victim, which often (and dangerously) slips into self-glorification. Such glorification of victimhood often engenders an effect of Manichaean theology founded on binarism. Moreover, holding the imperial powers responsible for (neo )colonization, one not only minimizes one's own decolonizing potential but may also fail to activate the bottled-up subversive energy. I shall develop this point later in my conclusion. It is against this backdrop that I will address the issues of colonization of consciousness and explore the epistemological landscape of postcoloniality in South Korea. The project to decolonize consciousness will inevitably interrogate the issue of historical consciousness or lack thereot~ which, in complicated alliances with the material forces of imperialism, often causes internal displacement among a colonized people culturally, socially, and psychologically. The point of departure is Korea's official historical narratives: of the liberation, the national partition,6 and the subsequent disenfranchisement of a nongovernmental Korean subjective position from history. The dominant narrative of South Korean history long acknowledged liberation as a gift of the allied forces, especially of the U.S.A., since Koreans were excluded in the liberation process itself. This narrative not only justified Korea's position as restrained by the sovereign power of the former Soviet Union and the U.S. on the issues of Korean partition, but also is responsible for admitting Cold War ideology as the ruling ideology of both Koreas. Such a narrative has delegitimated the Koreans as valid agents of both nation-

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building and the subsequent military and economic dependence on the Cold War superpowers, although to a differing degree in the North than in the South. The transitive verbs "to liberate" and "to partition" presuppose a subject (or subjects), who is external to the action and yet administers it, and a passive receiver (the object) upon which such actions are performed. This differential positionality between subject and object may also extend to the performative consequences of the terms "national liberation" and "independence:' This very breach between the subject -object positions illustrates the historical circumstances of "postcolonial" Korea. Although the debate on this subject shifted to a discourse of the Korean contribution, crediting the relentless Independence Movement of the Koreans for winning U.S. recognition, which in turn granted the liberation of Korea,? it required a tragedy before the Koreans would revise their analytic framework, which had uncritically privileged the centrality of the West in the shaping of their own fate. During the Cold War era, this alienation or exteriorization of the South Koreans from their own history was reinforced and internalized in the name of liberty and protection from the North and demonized by the Cold War discourse of wilderness and of poverty. 8 For more than two decades after the national partition, South Korean schoolchildren visually depicted North Koreans literally to be red-bodied demons with horns and long fingernails on their hairy, grabbing hands, as represented in anti-Communist posters and widely distributed propaganda materials, such as Friends of Liberty, a lavishly printed magazine distributed free to book-hungry Koreans in the war-devastated South. Once the dizzying frenzy of propaganda subsided and the demonic image of the Northern brothers faded, the question that haunted South Koreans was whether their Northern relatives were starving (as they have repeatedly assumed without any verifiable evidence). Understandably, the discourse of poverty has been deployed by both the North and the South as an effective technique of disciplining its people. Korean Americans are now allowed to travel to North Korea. The messages of the North Korean citizens to their kin in the South, conveyed through their relatives from across the Pacific, often express satisfaction with their material comfort. As the discourse of poverty has created a sense of crisis and, proportionally, promoted material fetishism, it has effectively sustained the South Korean military and economic dependence on the u.s. The materials of indoctrination also instilled a false sense of prosperity and a fetishism for what was out of reach, and this in turn engendered a pathology of self-pity occasioned by the lack of material goods. I remem-

Decolonialization and Popular Memory 353 ber once, in my childhood, seeing a picture of a roller-skating Korean couple in ballet outfits featured in one of these magazines. Nothing could have been further from the reality of starving, war-torn South Korea. Yet the picture captured my imagination and kindled my envy. Soon American mass culture towered over Korea's desolate cultural landscape as South Korea became one of the most heavily armed fortresses of the vast American empire. To live in this state of internal displacement and external dependency is to live in a state of colonialism. This "postcolonial" colonialism is not simply an expansion of the borders of the capitalist superpowers into the devastated former colonies. It cannot be confined to the arena of economics that neocolonialism often connotes. It is a colonization of consciousness, which results in a broad range of cultural expression, values, and behavior, and the production of knowledge in an environment of tremendous material and cultural disparity. These symptoms are, in a sense, a product at once of the politics of assimilation and of separatism: the reproduction of the contradictory colonial double discourse. As I will illustrate later, colonial double discourse has created for colonized people an illusion of living in the same social and cultural sphere as that of the metropolis, while it ruthlessly exercises a discriminatory politics of hierarchy. Under these circumstances a (post)colonized people continues to live at the edge of the metropolis. In this borderland, as Vincente Rafael put it, "(a colonized) people constantly recasts, even as it appropriates identities and languages: those of its real or imagined ancestors as well as those imposed on it by the colonial state or imputed to it by other ethnic groups. With these efforts, it seeks a place in social hierarchy, even as it struggles to project alternative conditions for future empowerment:'9 The negotiation that Rafael observes may manifest itself crudely as a collaboration or as a more subtle cultural assimilation. South Koreans have lived on the same edge of both colonial and (post)colonial borderland. As the people of South Korea acquired a detailed sense of distinction according to the property of Western symbolic capital,1O which South Koreans have neither the resources to produce nor the cultural taste to appreciate, they adopted Western cultural ancestry as their very own. This is to adopt the logic of modernization which privileges Western culture. For those who adopt such a world view, the lack of material resources to produce it is tantamount to an admission of one's own cultural inferiority. In this subaltern climate, the "postcolonial" Korean elite distinguish themselves as members of the privileged class by meticulously acquiring Western, that is, American, culture. The educa-

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tional policy of the American military government (1945-1948)11 institutionalized such a cultural dependence. It was based, it should be noted, not on liberalism but on the structure of the Japanese-style educational system, which was originally designed to implement obedience and complacency toward the colonial rulers. Throughout their school years, South Korean children learn that competence in English, the most powerful of the colonial languages, and a knowledge of world history, that is, Western civilization, are not only the signs of enlightenment but also their symbolic capital. In other words, (post)colonial South Koreans have continued to mimic Western hegemonic culture and have reproduced a colonial pathology of self-denigration and self-marginalization, which have long blinded the South Koreans from critically assessing their "liberator-benefactor" as a colonizing hegemon. In the following I will illuminate the workings of colonial double-talk, using three metaphors: Raymond Williams's country and the city, Baudrillard's simulacrum, and Levi-Strauss's critique of totemism. This is a strategy to replace the older monotonic decolonization discourse that failed to predict the tenacity of colonialism in the "postcolonial" era. The shortfalls of the older discourse, I believe, stem partially from its failure to interrogate the truth claim of the colonial discourse and its hidden agenda, and from the broad and deep-seated impact of colonialism upon the social and cultural landscape of the ex-colonies, especially the lasting colonization of consciousness. The metaphor of the country and the city is helpful for understanding the power relationship between the metropolis and the "postcolonial" colony. Raymond Williams, in The Country and the City, 12 maps the relationship between the country-colony and the city-metropolis as a system that perpetuates material disparity by calling attention to the differences of the two locations that are interconnected through the patriarchal power hierarchy. In this relationship, I am attempting to show that the metropolitan discourse lies external to the lives of the indigenous people, and the internal hegemonic discourse not only reproduces the discourse of the former colonial master but also transmits and, moreover, simultaneously reinforces the neocolonial metropolitan superpower. This is what I mean by colonial double-talk. This discontinued interconnectedness between the metropolitan discourse and the internal(ized) hegemonic discourse is what the {post)colonial discourse must interrogate. But before I discuss this postcolonial reproduction of colonialism in the {post)colonies, I would like to consider Baudrillard's notion of simulacrum as another metaphor for colonialism, especially Japan's colonization of

Decolonialization and Popular Memory 355 Korea and the further mimicry of this colonization by the military government of South Korea. Baudrillard explains simulacrum as the generation by models of a real without origin or reality. Baudrillard explains that "the simulacrum is never that [which 1 conceals the truth. Rather it is the truth which conceals that there is none. It is the map that precedes the territory. It is more real than real, hyperreal:' Baudrillard proposes this notion of simulacrum to reveal that the hyperreal is what holds power and dominates modern culture, especially the culture oflate capitalism. According to Baudrillard, the so-called real can easily be produced from "miniaturized units, from matrices, memory banks and command models. It is a form of pastiche that can be reproduced indefinitely and which needs not appear rational, since it is not measured against any idea or 'negative instance.'''13 This pastiche may be interrogated historically, of course, because it left its traces in the genealogy of imperial discourses. As modern history has witnessed, Western colonialism was morally justified by the legitimacy of the "scientific knowledge" on race and the linear evolution of civilization. This "scientific knowledge" stabilizes racial hierarchy and firmly establishes the self/other binary opposition. However, the Enlightenment narrative authorizes "scientific knowledge" as the universal truth. Given the authority of the universal truth claim, scientific knowledge is endowed with the power to "mark off" the Other and to justify colonial conquest in the name of the Enlightenment obligation. When the "scientific" discourse invests the Other in this way, it turns the Other into a totem. As Levi-Strauss's study of totemism attests, totemism never existed as a social institution but as an explanatory principle in defense of the Western moral universe. The "science of man" in the service of the Enlightenment has simply been a scholarly construct to mark off alterity, and thus to reproduce the self/ other binary opposition. This opposition, as Albert Memmi would insist, enables the objectification and even thingification of Other (un)humans, while the colonizers themselves shed the humanity that they inscribed on themselves and over which they had claimed a preemptive monopoly. While the European colonial discourse claimed scientific truth for its views on race and human institutions, and thus legitimized the Enlightenment obligation toward the Other, Japanese imperialism reproduced the fictionality of the European colonial discourse. It was a pastiche of the European Enlightenment. Japanese imperialism simulated and reproduced this grand but empty narrative, in yet another form of colonialism, not with any Enlightenment pretense but through a pastiche of colonization. The Japanese annexation of Korea was unmitigated capitalist expansionism. The

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colonization of Korea bred an archaic sense of subjugation with terrorism and military discipline. This was the real face of colonialism under the thinly disguised mask of European Enlightenment, we must remember. Replacing the Enlightenment project in their discourse of colonization, the Japanese in Korea grafted the language of the political economy of colonialism onto a language of body. The colonial technique of separating while at the same time connecting "the country and the city" was repeated here in the body politic. It was imperial Japan's double discourse of assimilation that constructed an illusion of "one-body" (ittai --f* ), the bodily connection of Korea to metropolitan Japan. However, the assimilation of Korea under the banner of the "one-bodiment of [civilized] inner land [that is, Japan] and [the uncivilized, hinterland] Korea" (Naisen ittai pg.--l* ) was not really a democratic "one-bodiment" but an em-bodying of Korea into the national body of Japan, represented by the heavenly body of the Japanese emperor, the kokutai II -f* (literally, national body).14 This embodying of Korea, however, simultaneously dis-membered the Korean people from the national body of Japan. Korea was embodied as a part of Japan's national body only to extract human and natural resources from the former so that it could satisfy the needs of metropolitan Japan as a capitalistic body-but never be nurtured with the fruits harvested through the body's accumulation of capital. Colonized Korea became the organs without a body, and Japan the body without organs,1s Thus the colony as organs was dismembered from the body, under the schizophrenic reality of colonialism, the capitalistic machine operating in a dismembered yet interconnected relationship. The grotesqueness of this type of interconnectedness is characteristic of imperialism: power flows only in one direction in a vain attempt to satisfy the insatiable desire of capitalism. The imperialist power structure is simulated and reproduced locally in the form of state capitalism, as exemplified in South Korea and its Southeast Asian neighbors. Today the colonial relationship has an added dimension; it represents the double subjugation of the formerly colonized Third World countries. They carry the tenacious legacy of colonial experience and power relationships that govern postcolonial realities, and the commanding presence of neocolonial power. What is remarkable is that, beyond the violence that this empty sign allowed the colonizers to inflict upon the colonized, in the so-called postcolonial era, the political elite of this former Japanese colony have mimicked the same techniques of terror that the colonizers had used to subjugate Korea and reproduced it in the form of an authoritarianism,

Decolonialization and Popular Memory 357 especially under the patronage of the Cold War superpower. In fact, the late President Park Chung Hee and his cohorts had been trained at a Japanese military academy in Manchuria during the colonial period. Interestingly, according to a military source, Park Chung Hee compared himself to the young officers active in the cause of the Showa Restoration (1932), which had helped to accelerate prewar military fascism in Japan. As William Pietz writes in his article "The Post Colonialism of Cold War Discourse;'16 the Cold War discourse itself was a reproduction of colonial discourse, based on the geopolitical binary opposition of East/West, good/evil, civilized/ primitive, in its construction of the Soviet Union as a "mythical;"'oriental;' evil empire. It must be Baudrillard's myopia that kept him from seeing the real political consequences of his light-hearted mockery of modernity. This playfulness is an avoidance of interrogating the pastiche that has permitted the indefinite reproduction of colonialism, and a refusal to measure this pastiche against negative instances. South Koreans did not awaken to the fact of their own subaltern condition until the popular uprising in Kwangju in 1980 led to a massacre of up to two thousand people by the military, allegedly connived or authorized by the U.S. commander, who led the UN forcesY Frantz Fanon had already warned that simply transferring the colonial legacy into the hands of the natives might result in the mimicking of the colonial discourse by local bourgeois nationalists, because "the national bourgeoisie identifies itself with the Western bourgeoisie, from whom it has learnt its lessons:'18 From this we may infer that the people of the former colony might have assumed a false sense of security created by the hegemonized bourgeois nationalists. This is exactly what blinded South Koreans to the reality of their subaltern status. A South Korean "postnational-partition" (pundan sidae)19 writer, Pok K6-il, has been critical of this blindness and its accompanying inertia, which can be seen especially in the comfortable assimilation of the Korean middle class in the colonial realities of present-day Korea. In his novel, In Search of an Inscription: Keijo, Showa 622°-Showa 62 (1987) refers to the reign of Hirohito, the late heavenly emperor of shining peace (showa), and Keijo was the Japanese name given to the city of Seoul during the colonial period-the author criticizes the collective Korean amnesia with regard to their cultural and ethnic identity in the face of a sustained and then suspended colonialism. The novel allegorizes South Korea's present condition by imaginatively stepping outside the official history. In his fictional emer-

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gent history, the author writes that Japan continues to rule Korea today; gone are the history and language of the colonized Handojin, the peninsular people. Handojin was a name the Japanese gave to the Koreans during the colonial period (1910-1945) in order to mark off Korea's distinct hinterland status; it was colonial double-talk for an imperial citizenry set off against the civilized inner land, or Naichi. 21 Ironically, the novel's protagonist, a totally assimilated middle-class poet who aspires to a Japanese readership, falls in love with a Japanese woman who happens to be a direct descendant of the daimyo of Satsuma, who had subjugated Okinawa. The novel's hero admires this woman's (unquestioned) glorious ancestry. However, because of his status, this assimilated peninsular man with a Japanese surname, Kinoshita, has to give her up to an American representative of a multinational corporation. In the novel, the colonized Koreans, denied their history and culture, and doubly subjugated by a colonial master and a neocolonial superpower, are subjected to exploitation and oppression. Through this novel Pok Ko-il urges his readers to rethink radically the current South Korean situation from the perspective of the colonial subject and not to slide into the comfortable misconception that they are "postcolonial:' He attributes South Koreans' confusion between the colonial and the postcolonial to a number of factors, including the elimination of Leftist intellectuals, represented in the novel as critical historians, and the silencing of dissenting voices by the authoritarian political structure. The voiceless people of the novel, the language-deprived Handojin, are today's South Koreans, the author maintains. The novel concludes with a prophetic ending. The protagonist, Kinoshita, who is awakened to Korea's colonial reality, takes a fugitive's journey to Shanghai, where the Korean Provisional Government (1919-1945) is engaged in its sole activity-compiling a Korean-language dictionary. The determination of this colonized subject to recuperate the lost language here is a determination to restore the lost voice, the discourse of decolonization. Interestingly, Pok Ko-il opens a debate on the issue of writing as a political act by critically invoking the writer Yi Kwang-su and the playwright Pak Yong-hi, the infamous nationalists-turned-collaborators under Japanese colonial rule. The author, however, seems to credit revisionist history as the foremost catalyst in the awakening of a people's historical consciousness. The author's depiction of the division of intellectual labor in the novel parallels the scene in the 1970S and 1980s in South Korea, which saw a surging intellectual movement qua social movement.

Decolonialization and Popular Memory 359 COUNTERMEMORY AND THE THEATER OF PROTEST

For the past decade or so, South Korean intellectuals have been actively engaged in-even as they have marveled at-the explosion of critical studies in a wide range of disciplines, the more active ones being history, literary criticism, and the social sciences. Much of this energy has been spent on debating the cause of the national partition and the impact of continuing foreign domination, which has nurtured the monster that is the political culture of South Korea. This activity has led to a shift in the prevailing analytic paradigm from the universalizing Western-master narrative to that of the Third World, especially from the perspective of South Korea, whose decolonization has thus far been denied. While the national literature debate, cast in the framework of Third World literature, paved the way to this critical rethinking in the 1970s, the immediate catalyst for this intellectual movement was the publication in 1979 of the first volume of what was to become a six-volume series, Haebang ch6nhusaui insik (Understanding pre- and postliberation history), at the deathbed of the nearly twenty-year-old Park Chung Hee regime (1961-1979). The 1980 massacre of the citizens of Kwangju who rose up against the subsequent military coup was a watershed event. As noted earlier, at issue was the fact that for the supreme command of the South Korean armed forces to order a military action such as the one that took place in Kwangju, the approval of the u.s. army commander was mandatory. South Koreans began to question the role of the U.S. in the massacre, especially when the American commander had played a key role in anointing the orchestrator of the massacre, Chun Doo Hwan, to the South Korean presidency. To the Korean public, the U.S.'s brusque military interests in South Korea above and beyond humanitarian concerns became all too transparent. Many South Koreans began reassessing the relationship between South Korea and the U.S.A. and concluded that their country was nothing more than an American military fortress. At this dramatic moment of historical clairvoyance, Bruce Cumings's monumental work, The Origins of the Korean War, was published in 1981. It administered a "fresh shock" to South Korean intellectuals, who had been groping for a language to define Korea's deferred postcoloniality, and opened a new door to the critical discourse of discolonization. 22 In The Origins of the Korean War, Cumings courageously challenged the dominant discourse and declared that Korea had been denied its liberation. He

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insisted that the removal of Japanese rule from Korea was an insignificant event that gave way to the American domination of Korea. The "postcolonial" designation, then, is the faded signpost that marks this insignificant event in Korean history. Throughout the 1980s an avalanche of critical studies ensued, many of which adopted Marxist or Neo-Marxist methodologies, recasting the role of South Korea in the totality of the internationalization of capitalism and its complicated domestic manifestations. For instance, in the social sciences, a critique of the dependence of Korean scholarship on Parsonian sociology and its dominant modernization theories ignited a heated Neo-Marxist debate on economic and social formation in the mid-1980s. The critique of these modernization theories is not simply directed to the fact that they have privileged "modernization" and capitalistic accumulation, and thus have set the agenda for many countries that are relegated to underdeveloped status. Critical sociologists argue that the Americandependent social sciences were responsible for the South Korean military government's implementation of its aggressive modernization policy, in the form of state capitalism, at the cost of enormous social problems, including the widening of class gaps and furthering the proletarization of the underprivileged class. However, the sudden torrent of Marxist analyses that arose as a consequence often ran off without seeping into the hardened terrain of a South Korean sterilized against Communism. This may be attributable to the uncritical and indiscriminate application of classic Marxism or to the orthodox state doctrines of some socialist countries, especially North Korea, and this accounts for the diminution of the insurgency's persuasive power in a formidably capitalistic South Korea. These intellectual developments have evolved in tandem with a broadly cast popular movement, known as the minjung movement, which began in the wake of the popular April 19 Revolution in 1960 and developed into an anticolonial national unification movement by the end of the 1980s. Its proponents considered it an extension of Korea's long tradition of popular nationalist movements, from the 1894 Tonghak Peasant War and the 1919 March First Independence Movement to the April 19 Revolution, which toppled the u.S.-sponsored Syngman Rhee regime (1948-1960). For the past three decades this movement has embraced a considerable agenda. The anti-authoritarian democracy movement, the labor movement, and the national unification movement have been some of the more prominent features of this broadly cast movement. Although its leaders

Decolonialization and Popular Memory 361 have included various political dissenters from all walks of life, it is students that have always been at the center as the most active agents. The South Korean government, actively collaborating with its neocolonial masters and their disguised program of hegemony, and with the Cold War militarists, has brutally repressed any sign of the Left, and sweepingly labeled every organized protest as an act of Communist infiltration. Nevertheless, the minjung movement has constituted a site of collective resistance against the politics of terror and the larger hegemonizing forces which have nurtured that terror. The minjung movement has been conducive to a radical rereading and recuperation of histories. Its discourse constantly crosses over the boundaries between politics and culture, and between the present and the imagined past, to suggest an alternative future, while invoking a deep-seated popular sentiment for resistance. Such a blurring of boundaries and issues has misled scholars by permitting them to glimpse only fragmented pictures of the overall movement. Those who have speculated that the popular movement is a form of class struggle between the capitalist state and opposition groups infused with the North Korean version of socialism (known as Chuch'e sasang) find a certain satisfaction. However, a classical Marxist interpretation does not seem to embrace many other aspects of the movement, especially the pervasive conflation of the reputed international goal of socialism 23 and a nationalism which strives to recuperate or imagine anew the Korean identity. As an alternative to the materialistic confines of a Marxist analysis, I offer to recast the minjung movement within the purview of decolonization: the emancipatory struggle from a colonial past and a neocolonial present which denigrates, if it does not abnegate, the Korean identity. The minjung discourse in South Korea has been the major contending voice aspiring to disrupt and subvert the dominant language, the language of the state and, by extension, of the neocolonial forces. In its subversive struggle, the minjung discourse has deployed counter-hegemonic emergent history in its discursive field. The alternative history or radical reinterpretation of history reaudits the silenced history of "the people:' Foucault has suggested that a counter-memory, which may become visible only through the Nietzschean notion of genealogy hidden under the orthodox history, may be an option for an alternative discourse. The hushed-up, erased social memory, he suggests, would contest the validity of the official, canonized memory, the orthodox history. The people of South Korea, deprived of their voice for almost a century, have carefully

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kept their memories alive, in the form of chilling nightmares, hushed personal narratives, or memories invoked through shamanic visions of terror, nursing their han (literally, pent-up resentment) so that one day the spark will be ignited. It is no accident that the metaphor of fire has often found its way into the novels and short stories written in recent times. For instance, the novelist Cho ChOng-nae titled the first part of his multivolume novel T'aebaek Sanmaek (The T'aebaek Mountains), "The Hearth Fire of Han." This novel casts the Korean War and the partisan guerrilla movement in the purview of a peasant protest against the delay in instituting land reform in South Korea. This is an alternative view to the official interpretation that sees the resistance movement as a Communist insurgency. In this light the novel is an attempt to narrate an alternative history as remembered not by the state but by the actual participants in historical events. Through this kind of rememorization, South Koreans have begun to rescue their history and have finally been able to situate South Korea in the context of the postwar capitalist world system. It is during this moment in Korean history that the main focus of the movement has begun to shift from the discussion of domestic issues, contained within the boundaries of an imposing Cold War ideology, to imagining a national unification which could finally transcend ideological differences. The subversive reconstruction of the past has also involved appropriating and even inventing popular culture. The new theater genre called madang guk, the people's theater, has been one of the most effective means to recapture dangerous memories. It is a powerful instrument that is used to politicize and mobilize a large segment of the population in South Korea. The theater is an effective medium for delivering the movement's propaganda messages, but not by way of raw slogans. Rather, it narrates the problematized realities of marginalized people within the framework of folk theater and shamanic ritual, and thus successfully attracts public attention. The term madang refers to a space where communal activities take place. The reinvested meaning of this space, however, invokes a utopian plentitude of the imagined non-periodized prelapsarian past and alludes to the advent of a postcapitalist unity in which the division between production and consumption collapses. Madang guk, then, is seen as a site where this utopia is to materialize through the carnivalesque communal festival and through a collective struggle against the ruling bourgeoisie as the commoners of the pre-rupture period are imagined to have carried it out. In addition to reintroducing this idea of classic utopian socialism, the ideology of madang guk adds an important historical dimension to the

Decolonialization and Popular Memory 363 movement in that it constantly re-members the people's history or social memory as a part of discourse. The dramaturgy and aesthetics of madang guk animate this countermemory. Madang guk reaches beyond the Aristotelian tradition in Western drama, which purports to create an illusion and separates the play from its audience, and even beyond Brechtian theater, in which the spectators are informed of the theater's double yet delegate analytic power to the actors. Madang guk rather posits itself as a rehearsal of revolution, as Augusto Boal has suggested. 24 It appropriates a shamanic ritual format so that ancient time, space, and characters can be freely exchanged with those of the present through the mechanism of ritual ecstasy. This technique not only creates the effects of allusion and allegory, but also reunites them at different moments in history. Here the linear-progressive narrative is disrupted in a manner of "magical realism;' which Homi Bhabha recognizes as the language of the emergent postcolonial world. 25 In this supratemporal theater, the linear progression of the plot loses its illusionary power, and the division between the actors and the spectators disappears. In this framework the theater opens up a discursive field, and the everyday-life stories of the participants are woven into the intended scenario of the play. This assemblage of semifictionallife histories of people, who are disenfranchised at the edge of a "miraculous" economic development, draws the contours of life in the Third World today. The polysemous layers of metaphor invested in madang guk have enriched and elevated the popular movement from the pursuit of a legitimate form of government or legal rights for workers to the pursuit of a romantic revolution as well, and this has fostered in the movement a great staying power. Discourse, as Bakhtin observes,26 presupposes dialogical heteroglossia. By this he implies dialogic interaction in which the prestigious languages, such as the language of the privileged, try to extend their control; and the subordinated languages, such as the language of the deviant subcultures, try to avoid, negotiate, or subvert that control. Discourse, then, is an area of agonistic, linguistic combat to achieve the intention of the word deployed to stratify and to advertise the social positioning of the speakers. Bakhtin's recovery of linguistic heterogeneity extends beyond sociolinguistics into the realm of social dialectics. Dialogism, in this sense, not only relativizes the universal claim of being the norm but also rescues the people whose voice has been silenced due to their nonnormative "low" language, the language of the margin. As such, madang guk is a language which represents the life of the oppressed. Moreover, the theater is at once

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a representation of and a process for narrativizing a people's history. Its precapitalistic, ritual-like open structure, as opposed to a capitalistic, rigid, closed structure, allows constant invocation and adumbration of social memories and realities, a process which rescues silenced histories and offers possibilities for constructing an alternative history. The Hawk of Changsan'got, by Hwang Sag-yong (now living in exile for having "illegally" visited North Korea), is framed as a shamanistic ritual and interrogates the neocolonial penetration of Korea by the capitalist superpowers and the collaboration of the Korean government. In this drama, foreign traders, symbolically described as Westerners and Japanese, are protected by corrupt Korean officials who are in pursuit of their own interests by trading goods that they have extorted from the peasants. The Japanese traders eventually demand as tribute the guardian spirit of the village, the Hawk of Changsan'got. This demand incites a peasant rebellion. In the end, the intruders shoot the Hawk and the rebels are persecuted. As this moment of danger, the villagers dance their communal dance and solidify their will to overcome the tragedy, a will to revolt. The present-day threat of capitalist penetration is allegorically projected into the remembered past, and thus this drama at once invokes and preserves the "dangerous memory" of the people. Furthermore, it seeks to achieve a subversive power for the oppressed. Here madang guk attempts to reaudit the popular memory in order to dedoxify (borrowing Linda Hutcheon's shorthand)27 the orthodox claim of the state, the mere machinery of an invisible Big Brother in the international capitalist patriarchy. This alternative process of historicization makes lucid the acute symptoms of Korea's neocolonial realities, which are shaped by today's world capitalist system, namely, the epic of economic growth which confers sole legitimacy to the power of the incumbent South Korean government. 28 The polyphonic history of the people as constructed in madang guk leads us beyond the ideological fayade that masks human sentiment and behavior, and disturbs the celebrated epic of capitalism. Not quite accidentally one of the most controversial madang guk (controversial because it crosses the line between theater and ritual), The Divination, attempts just that: it recuperates the repressed social memory, challenging the myth of the benevolent American liberators. The Divination reinterprets the American involvement in the national partition, the Korean War, and the Kwangju massacre. It is presented in the form of a shamanic death ritual of the historically marginalized ChOlla Province

Decolonialization and Popular Memory 365 (where the city of Kwangju is located), in which the genealogy of two families is invoked in the shaman's vision. In the drama, the two families-a Northern family, who lost their daughter during the Korean War, when she was raped and killed by an American soldier because of her Northern (Communist) origin, and a Southern mother, who has lost her son in the Kwangju massacre-marry the spirits of the two young people, and in so doing, they overcome not only differences created by more than a fortyyear time span but a spatial and ideological division as well. This spirit marriage not only symbolizes national unification, but attempts to realize it through efficacy of the ritual. The play challenges the vested interests of superpowers which insist on maintaining the status quo of a partitioned nation. The Divination thinks the unthought, not only to counter the hegemonic authority but to rescue the utopian vision of independence from the forces of colonization. It is an attempt to liberate Koreans from the psychology of the colonized, from self-pity and degradation-a condition which JanMohamed might refer to as a Manichaean struggle-to overcome the Korean subaltern reality. What lies in the way of decolonization? The bleeding wound of history that has not been healed and the stories of han that have been stifled. In The Divination, the marriage ceremony is halted due to a violent repulsion between the spirit dolls, and once again the shaman has to divine the cause of this violence. Through the shaman's vision, the long-suppressed tale of a resentful rape victim (a metaphor for a feminized nation dominated by a patriarchal militarism) is narrated, and a silenced history regains its voice. Reauditing the erased history here has a healing power, and the collective sharing of a silenced tragedy strengthens the communal solidarity. At this moment of revelation the present and the past are reconciled. This moment of ecstasy is also a moment of communitas in which the lonely soul of an oppressed individual unites with the subaltern collectivity, that energizes the will for a collective struggle. In this minjung history, past is surrealistically grafted to present. The supratemporality of history, or magical realism in this strategic construction of history, becomes the very fountainhead of the popular imagination that inspires revolution and decolonization. This faculty of popular imagination may be what Walter Benjamin29 envisioned in his thesis on the faculty of mimesis. With his typical utopian appeal, Benjamin attempts to rescue the "nonsensuous similarity;' which may be understood as a "nonsensuous iconicity of the sign:' Benjamin believes that language is far from being a mere system of signs as has been conventionally thought. Drawing

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from the early forms of such occult practices as magic and astrology, Benjamin suggests the possibility of conferring on language the power to "read what was never written:' This capacity of language, or shall we say hermeneutic urge, he calls mimetic faculty. This mimetic faculty may be mobilized to counter the endless reproduction of simulacrum and its hidden violence. The discourse of decolonization, it is increasingly clear, is ever more relevant in the postcolonial era, simply because the pastiche of colonialism continues to be reproduced, especially in the present-day realities of many former colonies. However, and this is my point, in interrogating the minjung movement, those involved have not challenged the universalizing authority of Western discourse with counter-hegemonic "negative instances" of their own in order to reveal the "real-Iessness" of the colonial discourse. Moreover, in the discourse of modernity itself, the moral bankruptcy of the colonizers (that is, the colonizers' self-destructive metamorphosis into, or their mimicry of, the very [un]human that they have dehumanized) has never been called to account. This is because minjung intellectuals have never questioned the absence of the real or the rational in the construction of a racial hierarchy. The truth, which conceals the fact that there is no "real" in the rationale justifying the colonization of the Other, shares the empty property of simulacrum. As the simulacrum reproduces, that is, while the absence of the real remains uninterrogated, the colonial discourse will continue and colonialism will continue to be reproduced. The "postisms"- poststructuralism, deconstructionism, postmodernism -all of which seek to displace self-contained, seamless, transparent, "scientific" knowledge, cannot be completed without interrogating the discourse of colonization, but with the critique of mutual mimicry fully deployed.

THE PROBLEM OF REPRESENTATION

It is in this spirit of self-reflective criticism that I offer a critique of South Korea's minjung movement as a discourse of decolonization. While I totally endorse the minjung movement's critique of the imperialistic hegemony of the capitalist superpowers, I am suspicious of the movement's discourse strategy. I am especially uncomfortable with their mode of representation. In their practice of magical realism, opposition intellectuals emerge as the authorized representatives of the disenfranchised people and as the prophets of utopia. The new society that they envision would advance only

Decolonialization and Popular Memory 367 through the struggles of the people, and this would make the hitherto oppressed people subjects of history. In order to prepare (educate) people to assume a role in revolution, these intellectual representatives of minjung attempt to instill a new epistemology and raise historical consciousness. In other words, the agenda of the representatives of the people is to shape the people they are representing; this implies the process of othering, while simultaneously representing and constructing "the people:' In the alternative histories, whether they take the form of literary narratives or the conventional genre of historiography, peasants are often depicted as people who have risen up and emancipated their fellow sufferers from powerful rulers both within and without. In these heroic epics the people are re-membered into history as larger-than-life tragic heroes. The alternative histories are, then, hagiographies of idealized people inverting and ideologizing the trope, minjung, the people. In this hagiography, what would ordinarily be a negative quality of minjung-because of the association with backwardness according to the rationalizing logic of modernization - is emblematized in the intellectual discourse of resistance. For instance, the characters in the madang guk speak almost exclusively the dialect of Korea's most exploited and marginalized region, the ChOlla Provinces. The ChOlla dialect has long been a stigma that signified a speaker's debased status. In the discursive space of resistance, however, the people of Cholla Province now have become allegorical icons. Bourdieu argues that this emblematization of stigma or idealization of the underprivileged class exalts symbolic power at the cost of promoting class ethnocentrism, and this tends to disguise the effect of domination. Popular language, which, from the point of view of the dominant language, appears as uneducated and vulgar, forces its speakers to fall victim to the logic that leads stigmatized groups to claim the stigma as a sign representing their identity. Bourdieu further asks: "when the dominated quest for distinction leads the dominated to affirm what distinguishes them, is this resistance? Conversely, if the dominated appropriate for the purpose of dissolving what marks them, is this submission?"30 This paradox impasse, which is inscribed in the very logic of symbolic domination and resistance, calls the act of representation into question. To be more specific, how effective is the work of the spokesperson in liberating the subaltern from this contradiction? Or does the discourse, which seems to lie largely external to the people, serve the interest of the people or their representatives? Is not the consecration of the people as the ideal subject of history or the representative's claim on the preemptive ties with

368 Chungmoo Choi the people a way of constructing a metonymic link with the people so that the entire project of representation is in essence a strategy for self-serving self-consecration? In fact, the self-serving end of such representation becomes clearer when we recall that the delegates of the people are inscribing their ideology in the epistemology of the people whom they represent and are therefore constructing the group in the service of certain interests within the movement, granting that the minjung movement is not a single unified movement. Could this be a form of hegemony in the Gramscian sense or even a colonization of consciousness? The workings of hegemony could be disguised in the structure of representation, especially in the act of self-abnegation, to embody the people that it represents. This ostentatious selflessness presupposes the moral superiority of the delegate. This is most often manifested in the institutionalization of religion, as Nietzsche pointed out in his Antichrist with regard to the embodiment of the representative in the Catholic ministry)! As we reexamine the act of representation among opposition intellectuals in this light, we find a certain affinity in Korea's minjung movement. When the newly emerged left-wing journal Sahoe P'yongnon held a symposium in July 1991 to reassess the minjung movement, focusing on the issue of its decline, many concerned critics voiced two seemingly contradictory views. One argument was that the movement needs to establish its power base in real politics. Critics attributed the weakness of the movement to the fact that the leading actors of the movement are students whose transitional status frees them from real social responsibilities. At the same time, the absence of social responsibility is privileged to claim the moral superiority of the movement. The underlying implication is that responsibility-free students are less susceptible to corruption and moral contamination than the older generation. In other words, privileging the representatives relies on appropriating the social valorization of innocence and, by extension, of purity, which confers on them an almost religious claim. This valorization of purity engenders an oracle-like effect on the increasingly monolithic minjung discourse that is replete with stories of superhuman self-victimization, as shown by the series of self-immolations in the streets of South Korea in 1991. The symbolic power of the powerless thus cashes in on this vested social faith to seduce the masses into their romantic venture. In fact, the second line of criticism is directed at the romantic nature of the minjung movement and its failure to embrace a larger populace, a charge of exclusionism. A former student activist and currently a political analyst, Yi Sin-bom, summarized the latter view as follows:

Decolonialization and Popular Memory 369 The student movement in the 60S was couched in a revolutionary romanticism that attracted wide public support. However, the minjung movement, being forged during the struggle against the brutal oppression of the 70S and 80S, has become an exclusive one led by a handful of professional revolutionary groups. A student movement is energized when the older generation subscribes to this romanticism and acknowledges their patriotic motivation. Radical activism loses the supportive masses. 32 Despite a vehement denial of the charges of romanticism or exclusionism by minjung intellectuals, criticism of the minjung movement has confirmed some of its problems, which both the public and scholars have long deferred to express in precise terms. Why the public felt compelled to hold back is the issue here, because the invisible power that silences the critical voice itself shows the symptoms of dominance, a lesson for liberal intellectuals to learn, especially when we think of the intractable colonial nature of romantic Third Worldism and the precarious nature of Western humanism, which Spivak aptly criticized in her influential essay, "Can the Subaltern Speak?"33 There is no glory in suffering. Resistance or struggle has real-life consequences beyond intellectual imagination. How we read what is not written needs to involve these practical considerations. NOTES Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks (New York: International Publishers, 1971), p. 276. 2 Anne McClintock, "The Angel of Progress: Pitfalls of the Term 'Post-Colonialism;" Social Text 31/32 (Summer 1992): 84-98; Ella Shohat, "Notes on the 'Post-Colonial;» Social Text 31/32