Nanyo-Orientalism: Japanese Representations of the Pacific 2010039282, 9781604977318

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JAPANESE REPRESENTATIONS OF THE PACIFIC

Copyright 2010 Naoto Sudo All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior permission of the publisher. Requests for permission should be directed to: [email protected], or mailed to: Cambria Press 20 Northpointe Parkway, Suite 188 Amherst, NY 14228 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Naoto, Sudo. Nanyo-orientalism : Japanese representations of the Pacific / Naoto Sudo. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-60497-731-8 (alk. paper) 1. Japanese literature—History and criticism. 2. Postcolonialism— Japan. 3. Literature and society—Japan. 4. National characteristics, Japanese, in literature. I. Title. PL720.S83 2010 895.6’093581—dc22 2010039282

TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction: “Our Sea of Islands”: Intermingling with Japan

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Chapter 1: Japanese Colonial Representations of the “South Island”: Textual Hybridity, Transracial Love Plots, and Postcolonial Consciousness

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Chapter 2: Nanyo-Orientalism in Postwar Japanese Texts on the Pacific: From Dankichi and Godzilla to Macias Gilly

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Chapter 3: A Postcolonial Dialogue: “Incomprehensible Nanyo” (Nakajima Atsushi) / “Faceless Japan” (Albert Wendt)

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Chapter 4: “Japanese Diaspora” and Hawaiian Literature: Japanese Imperialism and “Local” Japanese Postcolonial Consciousness

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Chapter 5: Colonial Mirror Images of Micronesia and Japan: Beyond the Tug of War between “Americanization” and “Japanization”

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Works Cited

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Index

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INTRODUCTION

“OUR SEA OF ISLANDS” INTERMINGLING WITH JAPAN NANYO-ORIENTALISM Tongan writer Epeli Hau‘ofa wrote in his influential essay “Our Sea of Islands” (1993): I saw such scenes of grandeur as I had not seen before: the eerie blackness of regions covered by recent volcanic eruptions … Under the aegis of Pele, and before my very eyes, the Big Island was growing, rising from the depths of a mighty sea. The world of Oceania is not small; it is huge and growing bigger every day. (30)

The image of the “Big Island,” the largest volcanic island in the Hawaiian chain, “growing, rising from the depths of a mighty sea” is reminiscent of the images found in a dominant Japanese view of the Pacific. It evokes thoughts of the habitat of Godzilla

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and other huge monsters that have appeared in Japanese cinemas ever since the aftermath of US occupation. Yet most contemporary Japanese literary texts, despite their criticism of US and Japanese military and economic exploitation as reflected in such monster movies, portray the Pacific Islands as the most backward part of the world. Such Japanese attitudes toward the Pacific Islands are characterized by a lack of dialogue with the islanders and unfamiliarity with their views of Oceania. Discussion in Pacific literature invariably focuses on Anglophone (and sometimes Francophone) writing and on efforts to assert local cultures against Western influence. However, the Pacific has also been a site used in Japanese writing to dramatize the fears and desires that arose from Japan’s imperialist expansion and its concern over the activities of other powers in the Pacific region. Japanese colonial, military, economic, and tourist involvement in the Pacific has also been a target for criticism on the part of writers from Oceania. The Japanese word Nanyo (South Seas) vaguely refers to the tropical sphere of seas and islands to the “south” of the Japanese mainland. Nanyo can also refer more specifically to Micronesia, a region just north of the equator which was under Japan’s rule from 1914 to 1945. This narrower definition was in general use during the late nineteenth century and the early decades of the twentieth (Peattie xviii). For most of the Western world, however, since the early sixteenth century the “South Sea” has referred to the Pacific Ocean, with the appellation “south” indicating south of the Isthmus of Panama (Kiste 3). The term “South Pacific” replaced “South Seas” after World War II (Hau‘ofa 45). “South Pacific,” though it does not generally include Micronesia, occasionally encompasses “island groups where American military and naval forces were stationed or involved in combat from 1942 to 1944,

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which would include islands from Samoa to Saipan” (Peattie xviii). For the Japanese, however, it “can only include territories in the Pacific that lie south of the equator” (Peattie xviii). The difference in the scope of the terms, as previously suggested, stems from the different relationships amongst the Japanese and Westerners (such as the Europeans and Americans) in the tropical Pacific. This book primarily deals with twentiethcentury discourses on such colonial relationships as have been produced and transformed through the world powers’ colonial domination and influence over the islands and surrounding waters of the tropical Pacific, focusing especially on the relationship between the Japanese and Pacific Islanders. It also examines Japanese images or representations of the area, especially of Micronesia (on which the term “Nanyo” focused upon, as mentioned prior), and it considers responses from Pacific Island writers in English. Japanese representations of the Pacific can be thought of as “Nanyo-Orientalism.” In his influential book Orientalism (1978), Edward Said defined his concept of Orientalism as the sum of the Western representations of the Orient that construct binary divisions between the Orient and the Occident (the West) and create stereotypes of the “strange,” “degenerate,” and “timeless” East. It is a useful analytic framework within and against which Japanese representations of the Pacific can be considered. Based on Said’s arguments, the Korean-Japanese scholar Kang Sang-jung pointed out that “Japanese Orientalism” can be characterized as the simultaneous operation of double desires: the desire to avoid Western territorial ambition directed at Japan and the desire to use Orientalism’s hegemonic power over other Asian/Pacific regions (86). This ambivalence of Japanese Orientalism is seen at work in Japanese texts on the Pacific (which focus specifically on

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Micronesia). These texts not only dramatize Said’s model of colonial representation, claiming that it produces distinct categories of Self and Other, but they also illustrate Homi Bhabha’s theories of textual contradictions whereby the colonialists do not always feel superior to the colonized (as outlined in his book The Location of Culture, published in 1994). According to Bhabha, both ambivalence and anxious repetition are intrinsic qualities of colonial representations; therefore, it is not possible to completely separate the subjectivities at either end of the Self/Other polarity. Bhabha’s “ambivalence” and threat of “mimicry” (“almost the same but not quite;” Bhabha 89) can effectively complement Said’s “Orientalism.” The ambivalence of Nanyo-Orientalism has implications in both “Westernization” (or Japanese self-colonization) and “Japanization” (or assimilationism, the colonial imposition of a Japanese Self on a Pacific Other). Orientalism, as it applied to Japan’s neighboring region, made it possible for Japanese colonialists to be insensible of their selfcolonization as second-hand Westerners. Between the Japanese castaway writings about the Pacific and the fully fledged fictional romance writing of the 1930s, there was a period of modernization, or self-colonization, that exposed readers and potential writers to Euro-American literature. Both cleaving to and breaking from Western influences, this national process was not to be completed. Cultural nationalism—calling for Orientalism to represent neighboring peoples such as Ainus, Ryukyuans, Taiwanese, Koreans, and Micronesians—was appropriated from the West. The Japanese people’s ethnic consciousness of kinship (or togetherness) as non-Westerners along with the colonized peoples, as well as their perception of Nanyo as their own ethnic origin (or matrix), made it possible for them to avoid suffering remorse for colonization. In Japan (as with any other non-Western

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country or area), cultural modernization did not take place as a direct copy of Western models; rather, it produced “NanyoOrientalism” as an “excuse” for Japan’s inability to assimilate perfectly into the West or to absorb perfectly Japan’s neighboring areas into itself. Nanyo-Orientalism depicts Nanyo as primordial chaos to be reclaimed or liberated from Western rules by the Japanese. Yano Ryukei’s fictional work Ukishiro monogatari (The story of the floating-castle, 1890) can be taken as one of the earliest examples. The allegorical story represents both traditional and modern worldviews in justification of Japan’s incomplete selfcolonization. The protagonist, Kamii Seitaro, joins a battleship called the Ukishiro that is bound for Madagascar, which has yet to be colonized. (The protagonist’s given name “Seitaro” indicates “pure Japanese man,” and the story suggests that his surname is related to the fabulous first Japanese emperor, Jinmu.) Kamii, a poor young man, comes to life again as a samurai-like hero through his contact with the ship’s captain, or “his lord.” The captain and crew members, including Kamii, annihilate cannibals, drive away a Dutch fleet, and domesticate meek Nanyo islanders. Often labeled a “political novel,” this work can also be described as a fictional version of books called nanshin ron (the discourse of southward advance), which were written around 1890 by samurai descendants like Yano who no longer held significant political power. Such nanshin ron advocates include Shiga Shigetaka, Taguchi Ukichi, Suganuma Teifu, and Suzuki Tsunenori. These books highlight uninhabited, or uncivilized, islands in Micronesia and Southeast Asia as places that remain to be colonized and cultivated by the Japanese. Emigration to Nanyo, preceding Ezo (renamed Hokkaido), was regarded as an important way for samurai descendants to get out of financial trouble and as a solution to the Japanese population problem.

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Authors of the nanshin ron accepted social Darwinism, and some of them made a point of affirming a blood relationship between the Japanese and the islanders. These writings, whether fictional or not, contain long romantic prose/essays written in traditional style under the influence of both eighteenth-century European stories (such as Robinson Crusoe and Gulliver’s Travels) and contemporary anthropological knowledge. This genre of writing came to be sidelined by “modern literature,” or shosetsu (novel), that had newly emerged as an ethnocentric “technology” for the epigonic nation state/empire to reclaim its peripheries (Yano Toru, Nihon 50–78). Japanese adventure stories—which first appeared in the 1900s in the new written language developed by Oshikawa Shunro— served to raise the morale of the samurais. They were the main writings used to describe Japanese heroes’ encounters with the Pacific—such as conquests they made, management techniques they implemented, and friendships they forged—emphasizing modern scientific technologies introduced in the twentieth century and traditional chivalrous ethics. Such tales of Japanese heroic exploits were eagerly accepted among the common people during the period of time in which Japan joined the Western imperial powers. This was the time of Japan’s victory over Russia, its colonization of the Korean Peninsula, and its complete abolition of the unequal treaties with Western powers that had been concluded in the last days of the Tokugawa shogunate. At that time, especially when Japanese troops occupied German-controlled Micronesia during the First World War and acquired it as a mandated territory, Nanyo-Orientalism began to function as a modern imperialist device to reclaim the colonized people in imaginative as well as practical terms. Micronesia and its peoples were transformed—the region was given the new standardized name (or body) of Nanyo gunto (the South

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Sea Islands), and its people were dubbed Nanyo dojin (South Sea natives) or tomin (islanders). Officially, the natives were seen and made to think of themselves as beings that should attempt to identify with the Japanese (though they never could). Here, Japan’s colonial power transformed representations of the “remote” Other into the “close” Other—the colonized as “different but similar” subjects (of Tenno, or the Emperor of Japan) in a space “different but continuous” (with the mainland of the Japanese Empire). This view of the colonized as the “potential Japanese” was to be projected into Japan’s colonial policy: native children experienced “corporal reform” through the teaching of “standard Japanese,” Japan’s national anthem, and marching at school, separated from the children of Japanese immigrants (Peattie 91–95). On the basis of such national assimilation policy, in the 1920s and 1930s, popular romantic representations of Nanyo spread through primary education and popular entertainment. Such a new program emerged against the background of the mass society based on the standardized large-scale compulsory education. As Japan came to regard itself as a full-fledged empire in the 1910s and 1920s, its cosmopolitan consciousness was raised, and there was a decline in its hostility toward the West and its sense of solidarity with Asia. For the Japanese, Micronesia under Japanese colonial rule should then have been just a place where they could enjoy greater comfort and profit. Murai Osamu pointed out that the creation of Japanese folklore as an area of study was initiated during this period by Yanagita Kunio, who had been previously involved in Japan’s colonial policy in Korea. According to Murai, Yanagita attempted to obliterate his involvement in the imposition of an agricultural policy on Korea by seeking national roots in Okinawan customs and lore. The “south islands” therefore served a political function within an

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economics of representation that can be understood as NanyoOrientalism. Murai called it “south island ideology.” Nanyo became popular with the opening of the South Sea shipping lanes, the publication of guidebooks, a wave of migrants, and a climate of “self-determination.” Because imperialist drumbeating (i.e., the open affirmation of imperialism) could no longer be done openly, there was a shift toward an affectionate regard for the indigenous people and a vision of relationships with them as reciprocal. In this anticonquest discourse, islanders were represented as lovable beings, usually either docile, loyal children or erotic dancing girls. The most influential texts disseminating the popular version of Nanyo-Orientalism included a book called Torakku-to dayori (A letter from Truk) that was used for teaching schoolchildren, a popular song entitled “Shucho no musume” (The chief’s daughter), and a cartoon story called “Boken Dankichi” (Dankichi the adventurous). In the colonialist fancies of being on good terms with the colonized people in which help and love are reciprocated, elastic images of brown maidens play important roles. Torakku-to dayori, written by a scholar of Japanese literature named Takagi Ichinosuke, was composed for one of the government-designated textbooks used at elementary schools from 1918–1932. This work depicts a beautiful and romantic tropical environment, presenting it courteously rather than heroically. The book also mentions a native girl who has received formal Japanese schooling and who can sing Japan’s national anthem. The textbooks attempted to introduce schoolchildren within the empire to Japan’s extended colonies of Seoul, Dairen, Taiwan, and Micronesia—the last location imagined to be the most primitive, paradisal, and nonhistorical of the colonies, possessing mild-tempered people who did not harbor any bad feelings toward the Japanese.

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In “Shucho no musume,” which is generally said to have been composed by Ishida Ichimatsu in 1926, a dancing Marshallese girl referred to as “my sweetheart” intends to marry the Japanese singer if he can perform a dance at a tribal headhunting feast. To the singer, the girl is both a source of sexual comfort and a cause of anxiety, since the interracial marriage might cause him to assimilate to the native culture more so than she will undergo Japanization. In the song, the girl is called “rabasan” (sweetheart)—“raba” deriving from the English word “lover”—which became a vogue word at the time, linking the exotic/erotic image of the primitive Pacific maiden to that of the modern free woman. This image of the chief’s daughter reflected a famous character in a 1932 American cartoon, Betty Boop’s Bamboo Isle. It was screened in Japan under the title of Shucho no musume, named after the popular song. Betty Boop, the protean “flapper” heroine, appears in this cartoon as a darkskinned Pacific Islander (Samoan) who dances the hula wearing only a lei and a grass skirt. As shown later, Betty Boop’s Bamboo Isle and another 1932 Betty Boop cartoon called I’ll Be Glad When You’re Dead You Rascal You (screened under the Japanese title of Betty no banchi tanken, or Betty’s exploration of the bush) can be considered to have influenced the 1933–1939 serial comic strip by Shimada Keizo entitled “Dankichi the adventurous.” Its south island is analogous to the African scene in I’ll Be Glad as well as the Pacific island in Bamboo Isle. With the deep crisis of the Great Depression and international tensions with the West, imperialism reappeared more clearly in Japanese colonial representations. This can be said of “Dankichi”: the natives in “Dankichi” first appear as horrible cannibals (just like the Africans in I’ll Be Glad) before becoming Dankichi’s loyal child-like disciples.

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“OUR SEA OF ISLANDS” EXTENDING MICRONESIA, AND POLYNESIA

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JAPAN,

This popular Nanyo-Orientalism has persisted to the present day, and it is transformed and opposed in Japanese postcolonial discourses. It is possible to read some Japanese texts in a postcolonial framework. In this book, the term “postcolonialism”— distinguished from “post-colonialism” (after colonialism)—refers to the cultural attempts to intervene in powerful colonial views. As mentioned previously, Japanese colonialists were able to dismiss their obligatory but uncompleted self-colonization— usually called modernization or Westernization—by focusing on assimilating other Asian and Pacific peoples into greater Japan. Such an ideology of sameness masks domination with affection, whereas the Japanese postcolonial discourse stresses self-criticism, depicting the Japanese as imperialists and islanders as the victims of militarism. The postcolonial model of Nanyo-Orientalism is illustrated by the Godzilla movie series (1954–2004). The original version of Godzilla can be interpreted as a reflection of Japanese sentiments after the Second World War and the ensuing US occupation in 1945–1952 that opposed atomic testing in the trust territory of Micronesia, which had been under the US control since the end of Japan’s rule. The monster is an atomic bomb victim (hibakusha) like those in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Godzilla originally stood for the oppressed natives from the tropical Pacific. In this redirection of attention, however, Nanyo is neglected. The monster changes roles, transforming from a vandal destroyer to a heroic champion. In its attempt to criticize Nanyo-Orientalism from the Pacific Islanders’ viewpoints, Ikezawa Natsuki’s 1993 novel, Mashiasu Giri no shikkyaku (Macias Gilly’s downfall), can be seen as

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postcolonial. In this case, the postcolonial mode conforms to the general worldwide postmodern intellectual movement. (Ikezawa applies Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s “magic realism” to the framework of the novel.) Since the 1980s, Western and (ex-)colonized non-Western worlds have substituted for “liberal humanist readings by critics of Commonwealth literature, the (newly re-christened) ‘postcolonial literatures’ [which] were at a stroke regarded as politically radical and locally situated, rather than universally relevant” (McLeod 25). In keeping with this movement, some contemporary Japanese writers challenge conventional modes of Pacific representations and critique the US military and cultural hegemonic presence along with Japan’s colonial history and postwar economic/tourist (neo-colonialist) boom. Set in an imaginary Micronesian state, Macias Gilly’s downfall utilizes and reworks stereotypes. It depicts the postcolonial syncretism of metropolitan/traditional socio-cultural systems with the material, political, individual, urban, visible realm on one hand and the spiritual, religious, collective, rural, invisible realm on the other. The novel shows the latter’s latent force through the downfall of the state’s autocratic president, who represents the visible—but not the invisible—realm. In addition to this stereotyped depiction of Nanyo as a marvelous, mysterious, and formidable place, female characters in the text appear (true to form) as maidens, soul mates, and maidservants—both a comfort and menace to the male (though islander) protagonist. However, the text avoids depicting the syncretism of the two realms as idealistically reconciliatory or normally conflicting but rather as isolated from each other. Unlike most texts’ Pacific maidens or monsters, used as vehicles for the Japanese ideas of colonial/postcolonial Nanyo, Ikezawa’s Pacific maiden is not so much a symbol as a medium of the latter abstract realm.

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She becomes a mother who, though she is raped (colonized), gives birth to a “possibility” that will help her survive modernization and capitalism. In contemporary times, writers from the Pacific Islands region address Western and colonial art, literature, and education as well as their own oral traditions. During the decolonization of the Pacific from the 1960s onward, literature from the Islands arose in opposition to Western imperial powers. According to Albert Wendt, a leading writer and scholar of Samoan origin, their literature emerged as part of the process of decolonization and the cultural revival that was taking place in our region, inspired by and learning from the anti-colonial struggles in Ireland, Africa, the Caribbean, and India, the civil rights movement in the United States, the international student protest movement and the opposition to the Vietnam War. (Introduction 4)

In Ola (1991), a text that was ground breaking in the Pacific for its stylistic experiment, Wendt incorporates references to the culture and history of the Japanese as significant elements in his vision. Wendt finds a critical position in contemporary Japan that is different from, and has been marginalized by, political and cultural mainstream discourses. The following chapters look at the postcolonial cultural project of Island writing as it is involved with Japan and examine the position of ethnic Japanese authors settled in the Pacific who wrote within a postcolonial framework, but not as indigenous activists. In doing so, this book suggests that some of the remarkable postcolonial counter discourses by those Island writers against local agencies conspiring with (or emulating) Euro-American and Japanese colonial and neo-colonial hegemonies are, in a sense, in resonance with the postcolonial

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counter discourses by Japanese writers such as Ikezawa Natsuki and his precursor, Nakajima Atsushi. Specific postcolonial (anti-colonial/decolonizing) literary undertakings have been launched in the Pacific by two writers versed in both Western and their own traditional cultures—writers who are diasporic but not rootless. In their works, Nakajima Atsushi and Albert Wendt created an incomprehensible Nanyo and a faceless Japan, respectively. Their imagining or creating of “others” was necessary for both of them not only to resist imperialist fixed views of the colonized people but also rediscover their “self” or “center,” which is culturally blending and ever-changing. Nakajima Atsushi’s 1942 short stories, “Nanto tan” (“Tales of the south islands”) and “Kansho” (“Atolls”), although they were not much valued by his critics, can be regarded as landmarks in Japanese colonial (postcolonial) discourse. I intentionally ascribe both properties here—“colonial” because this is a discourse in the colonial time and “postcolonial” because this discourse has decoloniality. He wrote them just after his eight-month stay and travels in Micronesia under the Japanese Empire in 1941–1942 as a civil servant of the Nanyo-cho (South Sea Government) in Koror, Palau. Most of his literary works describe the protagonists’ migration into disparate realms, which amounts to their transformation (e.g., an ancient Chinese poet turning into a tiger deep in the mountains) or death. His novel Tsushitara no shi (Tusitala’s death), written in 1941 before his visit to Palau, is based on the letters and documents of the Scottish writer Robert Louis Stevenson that dealt with Stevenson’s life and death in Samoa (where he was entitled “Tusitala” or “story-writer”), and it inherits the anti-imperialist tone of these letters and documents. When published in 1942, the novel was given a rather fresh and bright title, Hikari to kaze to yume

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(Light, wind, and dream), in accordance with exotic imagery of Nanyo and the atmosphere of wartime. Despite the alteration, the novel (as well as some of his other works) suggests that once a literate or “civilized” person migrates and settles into a nonliterate sphere, he or she is never allowed to return; a writer is to die or go native (forget writing). However, the focus of Nakajima’s macabre depiction of colonial exotics (accompanied by the colonized places’ deadly counterattacks) shifts from indigenization (escape from modern/imperial centers) into civilization (the reformative forces to which hybridized/colonized subjects react differently). This shift can be seen in his works written during the months between his return to Tokyo in March 1942 and his death of chronic asthma in December 1942 (aged thirty three). “Tales of the south islands” and “Atolls,” as well as Nakajima’s other texts that were written after his homecoming, draw attention to the crucial effects of colonial encounters on both sides. “Tales” and “Atolls” appropriate his own experiences in Micronesia, especially his encounters with female islanders and Palauan picture stories carved on bai (village meeting houses), as well as materials from his companion informant in Palau—an artist and ethnologist named Hijikata Hisakatsu who had a longer stay in Micronesia (1929–1942). Despite the accepted image of the obedient, simple-minded, and tamed islanders—different (uncivilized, savage, Other) but similar (tamed, moderately Japanized)—which suited the ambitious official assimilation policy, the texts by Nakajima depict the islanders as similar but different. In the texts, they are partly Japanized or civilized (similar); yet they are also incomprehensible (different) to the first-person narrator. In “Atolls,” a young native mother (modeled after a woman he met in Palau) is educated in Japanese culture. She is so civilized as to disapprove

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of Pierre Loti’s romantic ideal of the simple, unspoiled Pacific maiden (Nakajima 1: 286). The figure of the educated native appears again in the work of later Island writers, such as Albert Wendt. The returnee perspective, as well as a strategic identification with Stevenson as “Tusitala,” is seen in both Nakajima’s and Wendt’s texts. The perspective can be attributed to their colonial experiences: Nakajima’s six-year school days in Japanese-owned Korea, his trip to Ogasawara and Manchuria, and decisively, his stay in Micronesia, and Albert Wendt’s secondary and tertiary education in New Zealand. The perspective of a returnee like the native woman in “Atolls,” through which one might attempt to unlearn Orientalism, can also be found in Wendt’s Sons for the Return Home (1973), and later, Ola. However, unlike his earlier writing, Ola presents an enlarged perception of “Oceania” that ranges from Samoa and New Zealand to the United States and Japan, following the author’s world trip in 1980 (after the publication of his saga novel, Leaves of the Banyan Tree, in 1979) and a sixteen-day tour of Japan in 1981. The protagonist of Ola is an intelligent young Samoan mother who is also taking a world trip that ends with a tour of Japan. As mentioned previously, the returnee perspective is paradoxically reified in Nakajima’s texts as “incomprehensible Nanyo,” finding both his and the islanders’ points of view to be postcolonial interventions in the dominant colonial representation network. Wendt’s depiction of a “faceless Japan” in Ola runs against international fixed images of Japan such as a world economic power and is concerned with the enlarged perception of Oceania expressed in Epeli Hau‘ofa’s view of “our sea of islands.” Wendt shows Japan as a nation sharing the sea, the waves of modernization or Westernization, and the postcolonial body with Pacific Island states. The text shows compassion for Japan’s local cultures, which are marginalized,

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suppressed, and consumed through the nation-wide political and cultural centralization, industrialization, and urbanization. The “faceless” image comes from Wendt’s interest in Noh and Kabuki—traditional Japanese drama with highly stylized song, mime, and dance—for the aristocracy and commonality respectively, and also in a contemporary Japanese literary issue of “ambiguous self,” which he finds common in the postcolonial Pacific “selves.” Before Wendt’s work, postcolonial literary representations of Japanese subjects in the Pacific could be recognized in contemporary writing from Hawai‘i dating back as far the late 1970s. They have been created through representations of various colonial relationships in Hawai‘i—the relationships of Japanese plantation laborers with their white masters, Japanese businesspeople and tourists with native Hawaiians, Japanese laborers with other local peoples (specifically Koreans and Filipinos), Japanese immigrants with local Japanese-Americans and half-Japanese half-white people, local Japanese-American men with Japanese women, and so forth. These diverse Japanese subjects in Hawai‘i contribute to the complexity and dynamics of postcolonial literary discourses not only from Hawai‘i or Oceania, but also from the enlarged Oceania that includes Japan. The common and frequent use of Pidgin English mixed with Asian lexicons in ethnic Hawaiian texts defies easy accessibility to English readerships and translation into other national or imperial languages. This prevents the texts from being readily commoditized into circum-Pacific markets (at the expense of their readership). Despite the cultural and political significance of Hawaiian writers of Asian descent, the native Hawaiian writer Haunani-Kay Trask has argued that even these local texts are not authentic or representative vehicles for the voices of Hawaiians; in other words, they are “not counter-hegemonic”

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(“Decolonizing” 169–170). I suggest that the lukewarm, halfway, or inconsistent postcolonialism, which Milton Murayama, Lois-Ann Yamanaka, Juliet Kono, Jessica Saiki, and others show in their literary texts can also be found in some Japanese texts on the Pacific, like Nakajima’s and Ikezawa’s works. All of these texts reveal some degree of awareness of the Japanese texts’ historical relations to (or complicity with) Japanese imperialism and make a strategic use of Orientalist representations to oppose Nanyo-Orientalism’s process of erasing or disguising such relations. One can hear the voices from the area of Micronesia that was—or currently is—under the rule of Japan and the United States, and which has therefore been colonized militarily, culturally, and economically by both of these powers. Since the 1980s especially, literary texts from Guam have focused critically on Japan and the United States. Some contemporary Japanese texts also critique the impacts of Japanese and American rule on Micronesia. Micronesian texts resist conventional colonial historiography and are resonant with other Pacific and Japanese texts in that they decline to adopt a postcolonial mode of radical protest. Indeed, it is still difficult to find a dialogue between Japanese and Micronesian works that shows a mutual reassessment of colonizer and colonized roles. As Mark Skinner pointed out, “the development and promotion of creative writing in Micronesia is growing but still in its infancy” (4). According to Skinner’s categorization of Micronesian works, there is only one single work than can be categorized as a novel. This first Micronesian novel, Chris Perez Howard’s Mariquita (1982), turns out to be an important text in its articulation of Micronesian postcolonial subjectivity. The representations of a Guamanian Chamorro “self” and its relations to American and Japanese imperialism in Mariquita are noteworthy: Mariquita (the author Perez Howard’s mother)

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becomes a great comfort to a lonesome American soldier (his father), falls in love with him, gets torn away from her husband and children, and then is ultimately killed by Japanese troops. Therefore, she is close to the Western prototype of the “good native” (like Pocahontas), or the “tragic Pacific maiden” (as she appears in Pierre Loti’s and Paul Gauguin’s Polynesia and James Michener’s Melanesia), although the Chamorro-American text invests her with a measure of independent spirit and colonial critique. The text itself suggests that postcolonial representations in Guam remain to be decolonized; in other words, the past of the Japanese occupation in 1941–1944 should be related by Guamanian Chamorros themselves and how Guam has been under the aegis of the United States since 1898 should be demystified. Such views of the islanders as victims of the US and Japanese intrusions are also seen in Japanese literary works coeval with Mariquita; the works show the persistence of an imperialist view that, for the Micronesian islanders under the Japanese control in 1914–1945, the Japanese (as non-Western colonizers) were more tolerable than Americans. Both Micronesian and Japanese literary texts from the 1990s rework the representation of Micronesians as “victims” involved with US and Japanese colonialism and neocolonialism. The texts place greater emphasis on cultural survival by way of Pacific mothers who have never been eradicated despite being the ones who are most affected by the powerful effects of colonization and hybridization. Palauan poet Cite Morei’s “Belau Be Brave” is a counter discourse to US and domestic pressures to amend the antinuclear constitution of Palau: For goodness sake, is not Bikini enough? Mururoa, Hiroshima? Nagasaki? Is Three Mile Island still without life? (4)

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The poem is contained in Te Rau Maire (the fern leaf), an anthology of contemporary Pacific literature sponsored by the 1992 Rarotonga Festival of Pacific Arts. It argues cultural survival: Disasters, diseases and deaths, come and gone; we were not alone, Family and friends bound us as one. We survived. ... your dignity, your pride will take in its stride with your sons and daughters yet to come. We must survive. (4)

In terms of such a counter discourse from islanders’ viewpoints, her work synchronizes postcolonial consciousness with other Island writings dealing with the same topic, such as Teresia Teaiwa’s “bikinis and other s/pacific n/oceans.” On the other hand, the poem praises Lee Boo as a “nobleman” whose creed contemporary Palauans have lost. It borrows the image of the noble-savage from the West to portray the Palauan Ibedul’s (a chief of Koror) son, who accompanied Captain Henry Wilson and his men to London in 1784. Compared with Ikezawa’s 1993 work rewriting the image of Lee Boo (see chapter 2), Morei’s poem (as with Mariquita) remains to be decolonized/demystified, even though Ikezawa and the Micronesian characters in his novels cannot be such agents of the islanders as Morei, Teaiwa, and Mariquita. My aim in making such comparisons of Japanese and Pacific Islander texts is to connect postcolonial representations of the Pacific from Japan with those from the Pacific Islands in order to examine trans-Pacific cultural movements involved with Japan. In doing so, this book illuminates the Pacific as a locale of diverse subjects striving together under imperialist regimes.

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As Stuart Hall argued, identity should be considered “a ‘production’ which is never complete, always in process, and always constituted within, not outside, representation” (“Cultural Identity” 21). The literary and non-literary texts on the Pacific that are used in this book can be regarded as the spaces where identities were constantly produced and reproduced through colonial and postcolonial negotiations of creolizations, assimilations, and syncretisms. Furthermore, in such identities-in-process where “self” and “other” are “[n]either all the same nor entirely different,” both the imperialist clichés (or Orientalisms) and the resistive attempts against them are intermingled (Hall, “Ethnicity” 349). The following chapters present incomplete, unstable, and fluid—“oceanic”—decolonizations produced from vantage points of the colonizer colonized, diasporic returnees, emigrants, and hybrids. This book’s attempt is not isolated. One of the most impressive attempts at geographical, historical, and cultural reflection of Japan by turning southwards (or to the Pacific Islands) is Japanese novelist Shimao Toshio’s view of Japan as “Yaponeshia” (Japonesia), or the Japanese Archipelago consisting of three island arcs— the Kurils, the mainland (four main islands), and the Ryukyus (upon which his work focuses). Recently, cultural anthropologist Imafuku Ryuta incorporated and developed this idea into his vision of “Archipel-Monde” (the world as archipelagoes), mainly reviewing Euro-American, South American, and Caribbean literatures. The following chapters examine Japanese representations of the south island (i.e., abstract images instead of specific islands) in the colonial period between the First and Second World Wars (chapter 1) and their postwar and postmodern phase, especially by envisaging Godzilla movies and Ikezawa Natsuki’s novels on Micronesia (chapter 2); Nakajima Atsushi’s and Albert

“Our Sea of Islands”

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Wendt’s postcolonial modes (chapter 3); and the diverse Japanese involvement in postcolonial interventions depicted in literary works from Hawai‘i (chapter 4) and Guam (chapter 5). By connecting and intermingling the nodes of representations in these chapters, Epeli Hau‘ofa’s “sea of islands” re-emerges as a palimpsestic communal space (i.e., a space that has many different layers of meaning for cultural groups) concerned with wa: harmony, unity, peace, mildness, pacific, and Japanese. The Japanese word wa has all these meanings—in Japanese, “harmony” is cho-wa, “unity” is wa-go, “peace” is hei-wa, “mildness” is on-wa. Wa means taihei (“pacific”). The Pacific Ocean is taihei yo, which means “peaceful ocean.” Wa also means “Japanese.” Japanese food is wa-shoku, Japanese way is wa-fu, Japanese people is wa-jin, etc. Wa connects these words, and this connection is symbolic (wa connects the “Pacific” and “Japan”). George Keate’s late-eighteenth-century noble-savage narrative of Palauan Lee Boo is appropriated and reworked in Ikezawa Natsuki’s novel, where Lee Boo asserts, “In this world an individual is not so individual as you think” (Mashiasu Giri 470). This comment from Ikezawa’s Lee Boo is in unison with Albert Wendt’s argument about va (relationships), that “important to the Samoan view of reality is the concept of va or wa in Maori and Japanese” (“Tatauing” 402). Gary Pak depicted, together with a critique of imperial dominant culture of Japan, a greater affinity for local oppressed Japanese as non-haole (white people), whereas girls in Lois-Ann Yamanaka’s works have ambivalent feelings toward both Japanese and haole cultures. Nakajima Atsushi, an official of the colonial administration in Koror, depicted his skeptical view of Japan’s colonization and his duties in his literary texts as noncommittal and confidential as the bai’s (or community house’s) storyboard pictographs that he was well informed of by Hijikata Hisakatsu. Owing to the

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influence of Hijikata, these painted relief stories on the interior house beams were transferred to portable boards (itabori) for sale to tourists. Storyboards are not only Palau’s national art form, but also have a regional function: named after that, Storyboard is the only regular local literary journal, based in Guam, established in 1991 as a forum for nurturing indigenous writers in Micronesia. Relating and encompassing imperial and anti-imperial cultures, and drawing their fangs, the wa space produces oceanic decolonization.

CHAPTER 1

JAPANESE COLONIAL REPRESENTATIONS OF THE “SOUTH ISLAND” TEXTUAL HYBRIDITY, TRANSRACIAL LOVE PLOTS, AND POSTCOLONIAL CONSCIOUSNESS THE “SOUTH ISLAND”

IN

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For the Japanese, the south island has been a place to project their colonial anxiety and desires—a space secluded from political strife, civilization, and history. The comic story “Boken Dankichi” (“Dankichi the adventurous”) is a case-in-point of such representations. The author, Shimada Keizo, depicts in

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this best-selling 1930s work an imaginary “south island” whose tropical forest is home to numerous wild animals and fierce black cannibals. Yano Toru describes the work’s effect as “Boken Dankichi syndrome”—most Japanese people shared and still share the set of Boken-Dankichi-like images of the Pacific or Nanyo (South Sea) Islands (“Nanshin” 195). Like the heroic boy Dankichi on a south island in the comic, the Nanyo-cho (South Seas Government of Japan, set up in Koror in 1922) modernized and Japanized Micronesia, establishing schools, hospitals, railways, post offices, and so on. Japanese policemen, having been granted extensive powers, ruled the villages like kings (Dankichi, for example). Micronesian constables supported Japanese policemen, much like Dankichi’s black guardsmen. The traditional power of tribal chiefs was co-opted into the machinery of colonial government. At kogakko (public schools for native children), Micronesian children were uniformly educated and indoctrinated into the Japanese language and morals (Peattie 91–95). Reflecting, simplifying, and miniaturizing the most important and most sensitive issue in Japan’s overseas empire, Dankichi Island is depicted as an aesthetically and politically ideal colony to remold islanders into “loyal, law-abiding subjects who could become almost, but not quite, Japanese” (Peattie 104). Moreover, the south island had a healing function for colonizers, which enabled the powerful folklorist Yanagita Kunio to dedicate himself to working on the south islands in order to dismiss his guilty feelings about his involvement with Japan’s colonial policy in Korea (Murai 25–26). The south island is not only an ideal and convenient setting in which to represent colonial projects, but also to escape from the larger-scale continental anxiety and to conceal such desires. These idealized images of the south island were set up through Japan’s involvement in Micronesia combined with Western

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concepts of colonial islands. Micronesians, as Mark Peattie pointed out, “because they were outside the cultural as well as the geographic limits of East Asia, were always viewed by Japanese colonial administrators as lesser peoples in an empire that, ethnically, was sharply hierarchical” (111). No Micronesian could acquire the status of an imperial subject other than by naturalization or marriage, and it was difficult to do so by either means (Peattie 112). In Japanese perceptions, Micronesia was at the margins of the Japanese Empire, and its abject status stemmed from “the superior attitudes generally typical of a technologically advanced society toward a (non)industrial one, as well as from the particular ethnocentrism of East Asia” (Peattie 113). Moreover, Japanese disregard for Micronesians had a particular background. Peattie argued that “what made Japanese attitudes toward Micronesians different from those Western perceptions of most other colonial peoples, was that they were formed against the background of a growing movement of emigrants from the mandatory power into the mandated territory” (114). In Western colonial discourses, representing the widespreading colonies as merely an island creates the concept of a “laboratory”—which is ideal for the male colonizers’ adventure and performance of management and civilizing mission (Loxley 117). The island, as Joseph Bristow asserted, can represent colonialist dreams and fears in miniature: “Civilization, it would seem, has not had enough room to grow in such a constricted space. It follows then, that white children are superior in strength of body and mind to grown-up islanders” (94). In addition to this manageability, islands are difficult to grasp. The island was “the site of a double-identity—closed and open—and this doubleness perfectly conveys the ambivalences of creole identity” (Bongie 18). As a laboratory to represent the desirable manageability and fearful intangibility of colonized and creole subjects, the island

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performs important metonymic functions in colonial discourse. Rod Edmond and Vanessa Smith argued about Western colonial recognition of islands: [W]ithin theories of colonial discourse whose continental bias declares itself in a focus on nation-states and border politics, islands are regarded merely as metonyms of imperialism, rather than as specific locations generating their own potentially self-reflective colonial metaphors. (6)

As outlined by Elizabeth DeLoughrey, colonial island narratives generally have the following tropes: accidental arrival, lack of inhabitants, domestication, empirical observation, fear of the arrival of cannibal islanders, fear of regression, display of force, uncomplicated assimilation of the islander, the hero’s abandoning of island servants, mistress, or wife, and his return to the metropolis (13–14). Since Japanese troops occupied German-controlled Micronesia during the First World War, and Japan acquired the region as a mandated territory, the concept of the south island has been a space of literary production for Japanese writers, both non-visitors and visitors to the colonized Nanyo. Early twentieth-century Japanese colonial island narratives draw on the island’s metonymic function along with the previously mentioned narrative patterns of William Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, and the subsequent Robinsonades (Robinson Crusoe was the first Western novel to be translated into Japanese in the mid-nineteenth century). This contained space of adventure and experiment, presumably not as formidable as the Asian Continent, was a fiction that comprised the Japanese colonial activity in the Pacific Islands. In the early 1920s, rewriting a well-known ancient “south island” tale about a noble man who goes into exile and dies on the island, Kikuchi Kan depicted a

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Japanese settler who cultivates the island (a contained space or “prison”) in cooperation with his islander wife, and Akutagawa Ryunosuke described the island as a place where Japanese colonizers and the islanders were compatible. Both of these Japanese island narratives have transracial love plots, which Mary Louise Pratt explained as imaginings in which colonizers’ supremacy is “guaranteed by affective and social bonding…romantic love rather than filial servitude or force guarantees the willful submission of the colonized” (97). Transracial love plots are appropriated differently in each of the texts —while Kikuchi’s work replaces a dismal penal colony (colonial anxiety) with a hopeful settler colony (colonial desire), Akutagawa’s shakes the colonial desire, “the willful submission” of “good natives.” From the late 1920s to early 1930s, transracial love on the south island was familiarized through a popular song, which (along with its music) invoked a strong image of the “brown maiden” on the south island. The erotic and comical image of this song is embodied by its coalescing into a tropical island version of an influential US cartoon, Betty Boop, which has a transracial love plot, and this American animation in turn influenced the comic “Dankichi.” In the early 1930s, when (under the pressure of national and international crises) Japan’s effort to assimilate the islanders of its mandate toward Japanese values and institutions drew attention and became “a rigid orthodoxy” (Peattie 104), hegemonic views of the south island were formed by absorbing US colonial representations. Following the typical island narrative, the empire boy Dankichi arrives by accident, domesticates the island, assimilates the islanders, and returns home in the end. The comic reflects the Japanese colonial desire to civilize indigenous peoples and maintain them as inferiors and simultaneously to lay stress on Dankichi’s difference from the white colonizer and on his cooperation with the colonized.

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The double desire results in obscuring the border between the colonizer and the colonized. In the comic, island tropes from the West are mingled with Japanese colonial discourse to form the Japanese concept of the “south island.” If the island oscillates between manageability and lack of interpretability, it can be regarded as a metonym not only of imperialism but also of postcolonial consciousness. One can see such postcolonial aspects in Japanese writing—aspects which intervene in or mitigate the colonial space of the south island. By drawing on the concept of the south island as a fragment resisting interpretation, Akutagawa Ryunosuke and Nakajima Atsushi attempted to rework conventional representations of the south island as a colonial space. As David Spurr suggested, all writing is always in some sense “colonizing the landscape” (27). However, Nakajima’s literary text on Palau at least attempts to resist this cognitive colonization by questioning the colonial hybridization of the island and his own self. Edmond and Smith insisted: If the island has often been simplified and mythologized by continental cultures nostalgic for some aboriginal condition, the island itself refuses to satisfy this continental need or desire. This refusal of islands to perform as required suggests ways in which they can be turned back against continents, reminding them of their own creolisation and offering a model of how to live complexly rather than through the simplifications and essentialisms that have characteristically been projected on to islands. (12)

Nakajima’s wartime works draw on both indigenous Micronesian and Western representations of the Pacific Islands and depict contesting and creolizing Japanese, Western, and Micronesian subjects. This way of using textual hybridization to depict islands as metonyms of both imperialism and resistance makes

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his works “decolonizing” in the sense that the hybrid texts attempt to reveal the islands’ refusal of complete “assimilation” or “Japanization.”

SHUNKAN AS COLONIAL AGENT AND P OSTCOLONIAL E NIGMA To think about early textual hybridization of Japanese colonial island discourses, it is important to review three literary texts (each entitled “Shunkan”) written by Kurata Hyakuzo, Kikuchi Kan, and Akutagawa Ryunosuke. The works, published in 1920, 1921, and 1922 respectively, all rework a famous traditional tale of Shunkan, a twelfth-century Buddhist monk of noble blood, who was exiled to a tropical south island (or an island penal colony) for high treason and died there. There have been many revisions of this story, such as Noh plays, ningyo-joruri (puppet plays), kabuki, and so on. However, his involuntary arrival and forced settlement have not been changed in the revisions. These conditions are made possible by the island setting and render Shunkan’s story into a representative colonial trope. Shunkan’s story first appeared in a thirteenth-century historical tale, The Tale of the Heike. In the tale, Shunkan’s island has been imagined as a marginal place, a place characterized by dismal nature with a smoking volcano, perpetual thunderstorms, and racialized islanders, as well as by his doom. According to the tale, Shunkan and two of his accomplices are exiled from the capital Kyoto in 1177 and sent to Kikaigashima Island, south of Kyushu. Although his two fellows receive amnesty in about a year, he is forced to spend two more years alone on the island, and as a result he starves to death. His valet, Ario, comes to the island to meet Shunkan just before Shunkan’s master’s death and to inform Shunkan about Shunkan’s wife’s death. Although the

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island is represented as a distant land, it is also notable for having been on the trade route of ships to the south (Southeast Asia) and for being the location where Kyushu traders would call for sulfur. Early in the twentieth century, the double image of Kikaigashima island held good the South Sea Islands (Micronesia)—a representation as both a marginal, uncivilized space in Japan’s territory and the route for Japan’s imperial expansion toward Southeast Asia. Importantly, when Japan began to colonize the Pacific Islands with the opening of the South Sea shipping lanes, Kurata wrote his drama “Shunkan,” published in part in 1918 and completely in 1920. The three early-1920s works set in the south island can therefore be said to show how Japanese people would or should behave in the island colonies newly incorporated into the Japanese Empire. In these modern colonial texts, Shunkan is an antihero, contrary to feudal times’ heroic and warmhearted Shunkan (as seen in Chikamatsu Monzaemon’s book for ningyo-joruri and kabuki, first performed in 1719 and 1720 respectively). Chikamatsu rewrites his previous texts “Shunkan”: in his book, Shunkan, though given amnesty, decides to remain alone on the island so that his fellow’s wife (Chikamatsu’s original character, a woman from Kyushu) can board the small herald ship with her husband in place of Shunkan. Reworking Chikamatsu’s book, Kurata’s drama “Shunkan” almost follows the historical tale in plot, but especially emphasizes Shunkan’s weakness and loneliness, as well as his nostalgia for the urban life and his family, by creating a tragic ending with Shunkan’s and Ario’s cruel suicides. In Kurata’s version, the south island is associated with resentment against the north mainland authority. On the other hand, Kikuchi’s and Akutagawa’s versions succeed to Chikamatsu’s narrative and absorb Western colonial island narratives. Both Kikuchi and Akutagawa, just like

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Chikamatsu, depict Shunkans who are not in agony on the island. As in the historical tales, these Shunkans are not given amnesty and are forced to remain alone on the island. However, Kikuchi’s Shunkan attempts to overcome nostalgia through his struggles for survival and his marriage to a “native” girl. This Shunkan echoes white island figures represented by Prospero and Robinson Crusoe, prototypical images of Western colonialism, who enslave native islanders, Caliban and Friday respectively. In Kikuchi’s text, as in classical and Kurata’s versions, an infernal island that is associated with agony, fear, envy and hatred, changes into a comfortable island. Kikuchi mixes Western colonial island narratives with the traditional Japanese setting in order to change the latter’s images. He rewrites Shunkan’s desolate penal colony to be a hopeful Japanese settlement, waiting to be opened up by Japanese immigrants with the assistance of good natives. Having his faithful island wife and children as good natives, the hopeless exile Shunkan becomes a diligent settler. In Akutagawa’s work, Shunkan has little nostalgia even after his two pardoned fellows have left because of his dislike for the urban life and people (including his wife) in Kyoto and his fondness for the unexpectedly comfortable rural life on the island with its pleasant islanders. Akutagawa mentions Tahiti in his comments on his own “Shunkan” (“Chokodo zakki” 99) and invokes Paul Gauguin, who lived in Tahiti in the 1890s. Akutagawa’s Shunkan has a sober relativist view of political and cultural hegemony, questioning the overdetermined view of the south island and its people. Kikuchi employs the influential colonial discourse of good vs. bad natives and the civilizing mission, and on the south island the mission is easily accomplished. In Kikuchi’s text, an island girl falls in love with Shunkan, marries him, and learns handwriting and the language of Kyoto from him, just as Friday

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learns the English language and handwriting from Crusoe. Like the colonial myths of Pocahontas and John Smith or Inkle and Yarico, the girl protects Shunkan from an attack by the chief (her father) and his men. The distinctively good native among the bad ones gives the colonizer a convenient excuse to perform his civilizing mission. As Pratt explained, dominant transracial romance usually ends with the breakdown of love: “the lovers are separated, the European is reabsorbed by Europe, and the non-European dies an early death” (97). However, Kikuchi avoids choosing such a tragic ending of interracial romance, which is “offering a critique of European behavior” (Hulme 254). His Shunkan decides to live with his faithful island wife on the island, declining the offer of Ario, his valet from Kyoto who has come to the island, to go home together. In terms of the colonizer who remains on the island with his encouraging island wife, Western literary discourse also has such white inhabitants in the Pacific Islands, such as Wiltshire in Robert Louis Stevenson’s “The Beach of Falesá” (1892) and Edward Barnard in Somerset Maugham’s “The Fall of Edward Barnard” (1921), who marry Polynesian women and do not return home. Like these Western texts, Kikuchi’s text conjures up the colonizers’ desire and fear, or the ambivalent colonial mimicry of both facile civilization of the colonized and indigenization of colonizers, as some critics argues regarding Western literary texts (Bhabha 86; Weaver-Hightower xxvi–xxvii). Influenced by Paul Gauguin’s representations of Tahiti, Akutagawa depicts Shunkan’s south island as neither a dystopia nor a place for the protagonist to cultivate, as Kurata and Kikuchi did respectively. Akutagawa’s “Shunkan” is a de-romanticized island narrative. In the de-romanticization, Akutagawa accentuates and reworks the prevailing island discourse of transracial love. In the text, when all the exiles except Shunkan are allowed

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to return to Kyoto, Shunkan (though always self-possessed) vents his anger only when his fellow exile is leaving his own island wife in her grief. Renowned non-white heroines such as Loti’s Rarahu (Tahitian) and Puccini’s Madame Butterfly (Japanese) end up husbandless and die an early death. The text shuns falling into such a sentimental melodrama as Le Mariage de Loti and Madame Butterfly: after they leave, Shunkan feels deeply for her in her distress and reaches out to her, but to his embarrassment, the island woman gives him a slap on the cheek. As soon as the ship is out of sight, she walks away as if nothing had happened. In colonial discourse, as David Spurr argued, the sympathetic humanitarian attitude is no less produced from colonialist views than the authoritative attitude (20). Akutagawa’s island narrative demystifies the sympathetic humanitarian attitude and mocks the allegory of romantic love which “mystifies exploitation out of the picture” (Pratt 97). Such intervening attitudes of the text toward colonial discourses can be seen as an intellectual mode of postcolonial criticism. Akutagawa’s Shunkan is immune to anxiety in part because he does not adhere to anything, and in part because his island is originally so comfortable that its domestication is unnecessary. Moreover, the islander is incomprehensible to him and behaves as if she mocked colonial romance, but Shunkan is not disappointed in her as Loti’s French protagonist is at his unromantic Japanese mistress in Madame Chrysantheme. However, the text’s decolonizing aspects fall short of undercutting the basic colonialist premise: the text puts aside the fact that the protagonist settles down without the indigenous people’s approval—as with Crusoe’s case, for example—because Shunkan’s advent and presence on the island is against his own will. The text typically shows the island’s metonymic function of both colonial space and postcolonial fragment.

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THE POLYNESIAN BODY AND AMERICAN PACIFICISM IN THE JAPANESE “SOUTH ISLAND” When Japan held a mandate in the Nanyo Islands, the south island was described in a blend of Western and Japanese island discourses as a colonial living place in which the Japanese could take root. In terms of reflecting and popularizing the south island discourse, a popular 1926 song entitled “Shucho no musume” (“The chief’s daughter”) and a 1930s comic “Dankichi the adventurous” (mentioned earlier) were the most powerful texts (Peattie 216). In such Japanese colonial discourse, the south island also became a gendered space, connected to a “brown maiden.” The allegorization of colonized places as the female figure in both bodily and rhetorical terms has been a cliché of colonial discourse (Spurr 171). The brown maiden on the south island connotes a conflict between colonialist desire and fear. She symbolizes an ideal colonized subject showing cheerful obedience to the male colonizer. Popular images of the South Sea maiden frequently provide “an idealized antidote to Western women’s self-assertion” (Sturma 8). Otherwise, she is symbolic of irreclaimable indigenousness or nature, a menace to the colonial assimilation. According to Michael Sturma, the equation could mirror Western insecurities: “the association between women and nature, even at a symbolic level, made women a powerful force” (7). This ambivalent image of the brown maiden is inscribed within the lyrics of “The chief’s daughter.” The popularity of this song in the 1930s, along with the comic “Dankichi,” which depicts a schoolboy’s fear of cannibalism and his assimilation and Japanization of many grown-up islanders, reflects Japan’s national and international crises, the increase of Japanese immigration into Micronesia, and its encompassing assimilation policy toward Micronesians at the time.

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In “The chief’s daughter” (words and music by Ishida Ichimatsu, recorded on Polydor records in 1930),“my raba-san” (sweetheart; “raba” derived from “lover”) is a Nanyo beauty, the daughter of a village chief of the headhunting tribe in the Marshall Islands; she amuses herself with dancing and drinking, pushing the Japanese singer to dance as a condition of their marriage. It is said that Ishida wrote the lyrics in 1926 and later arranged it for the popular song, but it seems that instead, he may have adapted the song from “Daku daku odori (dance)” written by Yoden Tsuruhiko as a song for Kochi High School (Kochi Shinbun Sha 190–191). Ishida makes Yoden’s song comical and familiarizes the images of Nanyo’s erotic girls by adding the word “my raba-san,” which became a vogue word at the time. Ishida’s eroticized version builds up the stereotype of the exotic Nanyo dancer, and the music conjures up the sensual Nanyo as a place for interracial love and romance. The south island represents both sexual promise (marriage) and sexual danger (indigenization), presenting a nature that is both “seductive” and “destructive” (Spurr 177). The discourse of the brown maiden in the Japanese song was associated with a popular US animation. Betty Boop’s Bamboo Isle, a 1932 Betty Boop cartoon set on a Pacific island with the protean “flapper” as its heroine, was soon screened in Japan under the Japanese title Shucho no musume (The chief’s daughter)— the same title as the popular song. In this cartoon, Betty Boop is a dark-skinned islander who wears only a grass skirt and a lei that barely covers her breasts and performs the dancing of Miri, rotoscoped over the figure of the Samoan dancer from the Royal Samoans (Cabarga 77). The association of the Japanese song with the US cartoon shows the fusion of gendered and eroticized tropes of Japan’s Marshall Islands (Nanyo or Micronesia) and the United States’ Samoa (Pacific or Polynesia).

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As Teresia Teaiwa suggested, the Polynesian body is not only gendered but also “given the privilege of representing the Pacific as a whole” (“Reading” 254), and by coalescing into the Polynesian body, the song’s images of the Micronesian girl could consolidate the privilege of representing Nanyo in Japanese south island discourse. The works also have in common the colonial discourse of transracial love: in the cartoon, Betty and Bimbo (a white male dog who speaks English and has come to Bamboo Isle as a tourist by a small motorboat) run away from the indigenous men together in the motorboat, and the cartoon ends with them kissing behind an umbrella. With this happy ending, the colonial interracial romance avoids criticism leveled at the male traveler who often abandons his island wife. The plots of loving and leaving, Mary Louise Pratt explained, “respond to late eighteenth-century crises in European imperialism” found on both new and old fronts (97). The fear/friendship fantasy of the US animation corresponds to what Paul Lyons called “American Pacificism,” in which “[t]he US body politic breathes out acts of imperial violence and inhales professions of an idealism about a non-aggressive, care-based, non-colonial, fraternity-seeking relation to Islanders” (39), and which coalesces into Japanese south island discourse. Betty Boop influenced the famous Japanese cartoon character, Dankichi. Shimada Keizo’s comic story “Dankichi the adventurous” had a box office status in a popular boys’ magazine of those days, Shonen kurabu (Boys’ club), serialized from 1933 to 1939, and Dankichi was a representative Nanyo settler who could be regarded as a popular and juvenile version of Shunkan. Dankichi’s south island models itself after Boop’s Pacific island in Betty Boop’s Bamboo Isle and the jungle of Africa from another 1932 Betty Boop cartoon, I’ll be Glad When You’re Dead, You Rascal, You. In Betty Boop’s Bamboo Isle, terrified by the

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natives, Bimbo daubs mud on his white cheeks to disguise himself. The natives entertain him, but when a sudden squall washes the dirt off his face, they are angry to find that he is a white dog. In I’ll be Glad, Africans attack and kidnap a dark-skinned Betty Boop, whom Bimbo and Koko have been carrying on a stretcher through the jungle. She is tied to a tree, surrounded by dancing cannibals. An African with a spear chases Bimbo and Koko and floats up into the sky, rotoscoped into live footage of the famous jazz musician Louis Armstrong’s head. Similar scenes appear in the early stages of “Dankichi the adventurous” when the Japanese schoolboy Dankichi comes across black cannibals on a south island. He disguises himself in vain, just as Bimbo does in Betty Boop’s Bamboo Isle, and like Bimbo and Koko and Betty Boop in I’ll be Glad, he is chased by a native man with a spear and then hung by a rope from a tree surrounded by dancing islanders. In “Dankichi,” Africa and the Pacific Islands are mixed up with each other as having the same primitive, savage, and tropical images. African animals such as elephants and giraffes live on Dankichi’s Island. Thus, US conceptions of Pacific islands are intermingled with the Japanese south island representation: in the US imagination, Pacific Islanders— “unfamiliar natives”—are “compared for a variety of purposes to African and Native Americans” (Lyons 24). As I suggested previously, the islanders are associated with Native Americans (such as Pocahontas) in Kikuchi’s “Shunkan” and with Africans in “Dankichi.” Paul Lyons’ definition of “American Pacificism” involving “the double logic that the islands are imagined at once as places to be civilized and as escapes from civilization” (27) is incorporated into Japanese conceptions of the Pacific islands or the south island. The seductive and destructive Pacific brown maidens (“my raba-san” and Betty Boop) are translated into the

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seductive and destructive island space (Dankichi Island). Sexual adventures in the popular Japanese song and US animations are transformed into political adventures in the boys’ comic. Shimada, the author of “Dankichi the adventurous,” wrote in 1967 that the comic depicted his fanciful childhood dream, set in a fantastic imaginary south island filled with all sorts of things evocative of the idea of the tropics, on which Dankichi becomes a king and goes on thrilling expeditions, followed by a number of native people and wild animals (Shimada “Preface”). On the other hand, this quest story represents the colonial trepidation and anxiety of indigenization (which could include cannibalization).Patrick Brantlinger suggested throughout his work, Rule of Darkness, that British writing from the late Victorian and Edwardian periods contains anxieties about the setback into savagery. British writing sways between the idealized self and debased others. This adventure story about a valiant and tenderhearted boy’s attempt to assimilate the Other turns out to be a horror story about his resistance to being assimilated by them. Robert Dixon asserted that in the adventure novel, the emphases “involved in narrating the national and imperial identity are reflected in the increasingly fragmented form of the adventure novel itself” (201). This argument is applicable to the text of “Dankichi” that attempts to overcome the precariousness of the Japanese colonial project by repeating and emphasizing his being Japanese (Loxley can be examined for further reading on this subject). Misgivings about Japanese indigenization in Micronesia can be seen deeply ingrained in travel writings of that time. For example, in his 1935 travel writing, Nonaka Fumio wrote in anger and with grief of Okinawan migrants living below the floor of a native house, despised as “Japanese Kanakas” by “Kanakas,” whom the colonizers regarded as an inferior race

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to Chamorros (18). “I hope they [Okinawans],” he deplored, “keep up self-respect and appearances as Japanese” (59). He also reported that the tropical climate made Japanese people “as empty-headed as Kanakas” and that some Japanese had become entirely indigenized, “looking no better than the dead in terms of human value” (97). The text of “Dankichi” attempts to hold Dankichi’s indigenization in check: although he is as naked as the islanders, he is the only civilized person on the island, having the white skin (the narrator dubs him “shironbo,” white boy), a wristwatch on his left hand, shoes, and a crown. However, all these signs are ambivalent: the white skin suggests vulnerability, the watch is superfluous on an island unregulated by Western time, the shoes indicate his fragility, and the crown is a native crown (in Western style). Furthermore, these signs are all associated with Western values. Dankichi’s outward differences, acquired by likening him to a white person and through partial, advantageous Westernization and indigenization, prove to be borrowed plumes that are unable to perpetuate the difference between him and his colonized servants, which is the major premise in Japanese colonial discourse. Unlike Kikuchi and Akutagawa’s Shunkans, who go into exile and make a permanent home in the south island, the empire boy Dankichi has to return to his homeland. “Dankichi” has an abrupt ending in which the boy goes home, entrusting the island government to his native followers who sincerely admire him. Thus, in terms of colonial love stories, Dankichi plays the role of the white colonizer who is enthusiastic in civilizing the non-white lover at the risk of being indigenized. The colonial desire and fear of interracial love affairs represented in the popular Japanese song and the US animation are de-eroticized in the form of the boys’ cartoon story. In terms of the colonizer’s loving and leaving his domesticated island and its islanders,

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this story has much the same structure as the colonial interracial marriage narratives, “a romantic transformation of a particular form of colonial sexual exploitation” (Pratt 95). Like Betty Boop cartoons, “Dankichi” avoids a critique of colonialist behavior. The protagonist arrives on the island by accident, lives in harmony with the island servants, and is reabsorbed by Japan without making the harmony break down as the colonial love stories always do, reflecting eighteenth-century crises of European imperialism (Pratt 97). Although differing from US non-territorial economic-military imperialism, Japanese imperialism conflates US conceptions of the island—“coterminous, contradictory, synergetic”—which creates such a happy ending to this best-selling island story (Lyons 24). As Mark Peattie asserted, “it is hard to escape the conclusion that Japanese policy in the islands [i.e., Micronesia], in nearly every instance, was framed to suit the interests of its own nationals” (117), but “Dankichi” reiterates a colonial cliché: Dankichi works in favor of the islanders. While reflecting and justifying Japan’s largescale assimilation policy or civilizing mission, the comic dismisses the limitless emigration of its citizens to Micronesia that the Japanese government encouraged, which is impossible to justify in terms of the author’s “childhood fanciful dream” of a “fantastic south island” (Shimada “Preface”). The most influential Japanese representation of the south island consists of a partial reflection of US imperial discourse of the Pacific Islands and Japanese colonial activity in Micronesia.

PALAUAN PROTEST “SOUTH ISLAND”

IN

NAKAJIMA ATSUSHI’S

Although in the 1930s “assimilation under force became the guideline for all Japanese colonial policy, an attempt to inculcate

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41

aggressive Japanese patriotism” (Peattie 104), most of the relatively small number of Japanese writers who visited Micronesia in the 1930s and early 1940s—such as Nakagawa Yoichi, Ando Sakae, Wada Den, Maruyama Yoshiji, Kubo Takashi, Ishikawa Tatsuzo, and Nakajima Atsushi—complained of or problematized its Japanization proceeding through education and immigration. In its postcolonial mode of rewriting south island representations, Nakajima Atsushi’s wartime literary text, “Fufu” (“A married couple,” 1942), is exceptional in that it does not approve of siding with national policy and raising Japanese morale (as many other colonial works did at the time) as the sense of national crisis deepened. The text of Nakajima simultaneously re-imagines indigenous cultures independent of imperial hegemony and intervenes in this hegemony’s influences over islanders. Decolonizing consciousness should be regarded as a resistance to the serializing formulas of colonial discourse which “reflect a loss of subjective freedom—a freedom that the colonizer, by virtue of his position as colonizer, has given up” (Spurr 176). “A married couple,” written after returning to Tokyo from his eight-month stay in Micronesia from 1941–1942 and based on a picture story carved on the bai (Palauan meeting hall), avoids valorizing colonialist discourses. Nakajima—a diasporic writer who had lived and traveled in Japan’s inner and overseas colonies (such as Korea, Ogasawara, Dairen, Manchuria, and Micronesia) since his childhood and was well informed about Chinese classics (the “canon” of intellectuals before Japan’s Westernization or self-colonization) and interested in Western diasporic writers (such as Pierre Loti, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Lafcadio Hearn)—was sensitive to the issue of Japan’s colonialism, making an effective use of island viewpoints in order to rework the dominant Western and Japanese colonial representations of the south island.

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After his return from Micronesia, Nakajima’s focal point in his literary texts changed from indigenization to civilization. Nakajima’s works written before his visit to Micronesia pay attention to marginal beings that transgress from the civilized to the uncivilized, from reason to insanity, from literacy to illiteracy, and from the learned to the spiritual (set in the ancient Orient, ancient China, Stevenson’s Samoa, etc.). For example, Nakajima’s other work on the south island, “Hikari to kaze to yume” (“Light, wind, and dream”), is based on Robert Louis Stevenson’s letters from Samoa where the Scottish writer settled and died. These are Shunkan-type texts in which the protagonists (the intellectuals) die in the uncivilized spheres, never coming back to their civilized motherland. Like the white woman in colonial interracial romance (who—unlike the white man who signifies the colonial desires to rule the colonized people— signifies the colonialist fears of being indigenized), the protagonists symbolize the colonial fears of miscegenation, going native, or cannibalism. By visiting Japanese colonized Micronesia, Nakajima made himself such a marginal being going from the civilized to the uncivilized. Nakajima’s texts (which were written after he lived as a Nanyo-cho civil servant in Koror, Palau, and toured other main Nanyo Islands) focus on marginal beings that cross the border in the opposite direction, from uncivilized to civilized spheres. In Micronesia, Nakajima saw with his own eyes such marginal beings under Japan’s most encompassing, self-serving colonial education system. Nakajima’s wartime texts (under strict censorship) criticized colonial desires indirectly or allegorically by appropriating the perspective of the colonized and depicting the protagonists being “civilized.” Among such texts, “A married couple” uses as its foundation a Palauan picture story. Kanai Shinkichi’s research article about picture stories on the bai (1940)

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explains the fable briefly as follows: a man from Babeldaob, the main island (honto) of Palau, goes across the sea by canoe to a bai girl (a sort of prostitute) to marry her, leaving his wife who is longing for his return (29–30). Hijikata Hisakatsu, a sculptor and folklorist who stayed in Micronesia as an art teacher from 1929–1942, also mentioned this picture story carved on the bai meeting house in his 1942 book on Palauan mythology. Going into a little more detail than Kanai’s article, Hijikata wrote of how the man attempts to coax his wife out of her jealousy and how he decides to marry the girl (Hijikata 3: 232–233; on this pictograph of “Ngirchosisang,” which is on one of the first level beams inside the Belau National Museum bai, see Telmetang 28–29). Nakajima, who had good contacts with Hijikata in Koror and probably read the book in manuscript form, added humor to the original (Hijikata’s account). Hijikata’s account relied on a Palauan interpreter, and this account is the intended alternative to the fable. In “A married couple,” the wife is both jealous and unfaithful, remarkable for having so fierce a temper as to provoke a fight with the beautiful bai girl over the man. The powerful woman loses, but she soon remarries the second richest old man in the village. The epilogue explains that such violence still frequently erupts between women over a man, although the German administration (the former colonizer) had stopped the bai girl practice, and that among the audience at the women’s fight some young men could be found playing the harmonica with the modern appearance of blue shirts and pomaded hair. Nakajima’s hybridized island, although looking all the easier to grasp because of its limited and uncivilized space, neither objects to colonial desires—stereotypes are used such as the beautiful, erotic brown maiden and the witless couple—nor plays as expected—conventional island tropes are avoided; the prostitute defeats the powerful wife in both chasteness and violence.

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By closing and juxtaposing the traditional island fable with the description of his contemporary colonized conditions of the island, Nakajima’s version insinuates its anti-colonial attitude just as contemporary Palauans adopt the bai’s pictographs as a medium to express something dangerous to say directly (Nero 259). It argues that although influenced by colonial administration, Palauan traditional practices are not extirpated. In addition, Nakajima avoided depicting the colonizers’ harmony with the colonized, which serves to romanticize colonial exploitation in hegemonic island discourses. The text insists that Palauans could gain happiness without being placed under the aegis of colonial powers. This enables the reader to focus on a central colonial issue, which these love stories avoid addressing. In another colonial context, Peter Hulme explained that “[r]eception of visitors was friendly, hospitality was ample, trade was welcomed; but a line was drawn when it became apparent that the visitors were here to stay” (164). Nakajima’s text shows that although Japanese colonizers stayed in Palau in order to modernize the islanders’ lifestyles or to escape from civilization—the double logic of American Pacificism which Paul Lyons pointed out, and which is adopted in “Dankichi”—the modernization and escapism are impossible to carry out completely. Nakajima’s island is a space of islanders rather than outsiders, which is creolized and enigmatic to the latter. In Japanese literary and cultural texts, the south island has acted as an experimental theater in which colonial/male desires and fears from the north mainland are imposed. The influential south island discourse of a marooned high priest, Shunkan, is reworked against the backdrop of Japan’s colonization of Micronesia. The south island as a prison which produced tragic or heroic Shunkan tales is transformed into a tropical settler colony which remains for the antiheroic man to cultivate (Kikuchi) and

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inhabit peacefully (Akutagawa) through Western island tropes, including transracial love plots. The most powerful south island representations—a popular song (sexual adventure) and a boys’ comic (political adventure)—are linked to US conceptions of the Pacific islands, appropriating the structure of the transracial love plot to romanticize Japan’s large-scale assimilation policy. On the south island, limitless colonial desires and fears (sexual or political) are offset by its apparent limitedness and the Japanese views of Micronesia as being culturally and geographically marginal. The south island is not only the miniature and simplified imagining of colonial systems, which seems easy for colonial administration to absorb. Because of such imagining, it also proves to be all the more complex, a starting point of postcolonial discourses which resist, even in part, colonial representations of nature, primitivism, and sexuality. Such postcolonial consciousness is seen in Nakajima’s south island text, which draws on island viewpoints to rework the powerful colonial discourse of interracial love romance and to dismantle the selfdeceiving colonial discourse of assimilation and escape.

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ENDNOTE

1. This chapter originally appeared under the same title in New Literatures Review 45/46 (2010). It has been revised and is used with permission.

CHAPTER 2

NANYO-ORIENTALISM IN POSTWAR JAPANESE TEXTS ON THE PACIFIC FROM DANKICHI AND GODZILLA TO MACIAS GILLY 1

THE BIRTH

AND

METAMORPHOSES OF GODZILLA

From 1946 to 1958, the United States carried out atomic and hydrogen bomb tests 67 times on the Bikini and Eniwetok atolls in the Marshall Islands of Micronesia. This was possible because a US trusteeship had replaced Japan’s rule between 1914 and 1945. After the 23 crewmembers of a Japanese fishing boat named the Daigo Fukuryu Maru suffered exposure to radiation and Kuboyama Aikichi died in the 1954 Bikini test, an

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image of Micronesia as a nuclear-test site became implanted into Japanese minds. Despite this, most Japanese people disregarded Micronesian fallout victims; for the Japanese, their country was “the only atomic-bombed nation” (Kobayashi Izumi 168). This attitude is conspicuous in “Collected poems on dead ash (Gendai Shijin Kaigi, 1954), an anthology of 121 works by Japanese poets collected published just after the Bikini incident as part of a campaign for the abolition of nuclear weapons. US nuclear tests also became the historical background for the production of the first films (both in the United States and Japan) dealing with nuclear testing: The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953) and Godzilla (1954). In Beast, a nuclear explosion in the Arctic melts an iceberg, waking up a dinosaur frozen within. The dinosaur assails New York and is slain by the military with a nuclear missile. “The message is clear,” suggested Chon A. Noriega: “Nuclear weapons can solve the problems and anxieties they create” (59). The film, whose plot was to be used in other American radioactive-monster films since the 1950s, supported US pro-bomb and cold war attitudes. Godzilla, on the other hand, shows sympathy with the eponymous monster. Aroused by US nuclear testing, Godzilla attacks Tokyo in retaliation for the destruction of its South Pacific home. The military cannot curb the monster in the film. For the Japanese, “Gojira,” in which the physical images (as well as the sounds) of gorilla (gorira) and whale (kujira) are united, symbolizes Nanyo (the South Seas), the realm often associated with ape, jungle, and ocean. Godzilla and other monsters, such as Gappa (a monstrous kappa, a legendary water sprite), are the embodiment of a counter-attack by oppressed natives from the tropical Pacific. It is possible to read these Japanese texts in a postcolonial framework, wherein action plots reveal the play of imperialist power and symptoms of resistance against it. Godzilla can be

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interpreted as a reflection of Japanese feelings after the war. Atomic testing stirred up resentment amongst a nation plunged into passive dejection during the Occupation period (1945– 1952). Just as Japanese colonialism made use of Western colonialism in order to justify Japan’s expansion in the Pacific, so too did Japanese postcolonialism utilize the Pacific to reproach the West. (This is a reversal of US imperialism’s demonizing of Japanese brutality in such works as the Broadway musical and the Hollywood movie South Pacific.) Japanese colonialism asserts its distinction from Western colonialism by representing its own colonizers as being closer to the colonized Asian/Pacific people, whereas postcolonialism stresses self-criticism so masochistically that the Japanese imagine that they, rather than Asian/ Pacific people, are victims—Godzilla attacks Tokyo instead of a US metropolis. Japanese colonialism preached affection toward the colonized, looking on them as potential Japanese. Karatani Kojin made a point that such an ideology of “sameness,” masking domination with affection, induces an even more unintelligible animosity in the ruled and makes the ex-rulers forget the past (“Nihon” 5). Godzilla’s postcolonialism is also unable to break out of this ideological spell. This is made clear by contrasting Godzilla with King Kong, another gigantic beast from a tropical island. The American film opened in New York in 1933 and was released again in 1952. Its strong influence on Godzilla was noted at the time of the latter release (Noriega 56). Yet compared in the self/ other model of postcolonial analysis, King Kong is basically similar to but quite different (a remote relative) from Euro-Americans, whereas Godzilla is basically different from but quite similar (a close other) to the Japanese. King Kong is, as Harvey Roy Greenberg pointed out, “a symbol of Natural Man, seeking his lost freedom amidst urban blight and economic oppression,” wooing the

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heroine, Anne, like “a fumbling adolescent” (341, 347). King Kong is a “noble savage” with “the inherent beauty of his fallen spirit,” forming a striking contrast to Anne’s fiancé, Denham, a greedy entrepreneur—“the real beast of King Kong” (Greenberg 350). From a Christian humanist view, King Kong is more human than the white character, but the audience laments his fall while supporting the rescue of white society. Also, in terms of Darwinian theory, gorillas are relatives of human beings, whereas Godzilla is shown as a reptile. However, King Kong equally emphasizes the monster’s otherness. The point of the tale, as Greenberg’s article points out, is that “You can’t marry that girl. You’re a gorilla.” The Japanese movie, as mentioned, emphatically extends its compassion to Godzilla as a nuclear bomb victim similar to the Japanese. Furthermore, when identifying modes of practice (i.e., how the monsters act) in American and Japanese cinema, this difference becomes clear. “The predigital mechanics of fantasy in American cinema,” Philip Brophy suggested, “lean toward the human-as-engineer, with Willis O’Brien (King Kong, 1933) and Ray Harryhausen (Jason and the Argonauts, 1963) exemplifying and perfecting the stop-motion animation technique of articulated figurines. The engineer in this process is the unseen God, operating beyond the frame and between the edit; invisible in the act of animation yet perceivable through the product of motion” (40). By contrast, “concurrent Japanese fantasy privileges the human-as-agent, building upon the parallel crafts of Bunraku and Kabuki…[t]he use of a human-in-a-suit is crucial to one’s identification with [the monster’s] act” (Brophy 40, 41). In the late 1950s (after the US occupation), some intellectuals broke with the established norm of one-sidedly disparaging Japan’s past by taking a position of historical relativism (Aoki 64–80). Such awareness cast its shadow on depiction of

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the Pacific. For instance, Miura Shumon’s story “Shoko” (“The lagoon,” 1957) describes the tragedy of a Japanese family in Palau during the war, but their hardships are attributed to the modern “total war.” “The lagoon” circumvents the discourses of “glorious death in action” or “miraculous survival from battlefield” that appear in grand Japanese narratives about the Pacific from after the war, and it differs markedly from prewar representations of southward advance. The Japanese protagonist, who has come to Micronesia with his family to work for a rock phosphate company in Palau, is obliged to join the army and coerced into living apart from his wife and three young daughters, who are evacuated to a jungle. His human relations in the company and on the islands collapse, and people are dehumanized in the extreme situation of starvation. His family members seem wild animals to him (“[his] eyes might have looked like those of a butcher looking at livestock”) (130). It is even difficult for him to feel grief when informed by his wife that his three daughters have died from malnutrition. However, “The lagoon” (as well as most of the other postwar works) does not refer to indigenous victims, who were evacuated by force or killed in action. The native people are alluded to only indirectly through a comment by one of the daughters that “[t]he islanders will give us some octopuses or fish in return for these cigarettes” (128). The islanders in the text serve to emphasize his family’s poor, animalistic life in a jungle where a paper bag of the cigarettes he has brought with him appears to be “graceful” as “a product of civilization” (128), but is to be surrendered for a brute survival in which the natives are superior. The author, Miura, focuses on the islanders in his other story entitled “Ponape-to” (“Ponape,” 1957), which is set in Ponape under the rule of Spain, the colonizer of this Micronesian island

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before Germany and Japan. The text suspends its judgment on self-colonization or mimicry (Westernization), which is never to be fulfilled. The protagonist is a young indigenous man who lives for almost a decade under the protection of a colonizer (a Spanish missionary) who had saved his life as a child, even though all the protagonist’s villagers have died due to another colonizer (smallpox). Estranged from the other indigenous people because of his traces of smallpox, the native protagonist is incapable of identifying himself with the indigenous community, but he is not ready to renounce local manners and customs completely. On the contrary, despite learning Western values and feeling a sense of security in his life with the missionary, he does not have a sense of belonging to the Spanish colonizing society. He acquires not only Christian morality (by way of the missionary), but also racism (through the governor-general, his wife, and one of his Manila men). The protagonist suffers from self-contradiction: he is both an object and a subject of racial prejudice, caught between his awe and derision of the indigenous tradition on the one hand and his suspicion of and dependence on the missionary and longing for European material civilization on the other. He is viewed as “an accursed human” by the villagers and “a subhuman, or not a human” by the Spanish (Miura 247). The death of both the missionary and the tribal chief as a result of the revolt of the indigenous people against the tyrannical colonial government brings the protagonist freedom. Nevertheless, he can only accept freedom as helplessness, even after making a stouthearted indigenous girl his girlfriend (who is also tabooed as she ate tabooed fish) he thinks, “before long others will decide my future” (273). It can be said that this text rewrites a dichotomized historiography about Spanish-owned Ponape, featuring the villainous Spanish oppressor and the pitiable or defiant indigenous

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oppressed. The Ponapeans raise a riot because the Spanish deny them glittering coins, force them to wear clothes, and forbid their dancing; not simply because the Ponapeans are simpleminded or ferocious, or the Spanish cruel. For the indigenous protagonist, it makes little difference which side might win the battle. The missionary, as a means of centralizing the discourse on benign paternalism in the text, simple-mindedly attempts to enlighten the indigenous people and is not aware that he does not understand what the protagonist feels. The governorgeneral’s wife, who has come to the savage island reluctantly with an antipathy against her husband—a “baddie” as a displacement of critique onto the Spanish—both disdains and fears the protagonist. He is ravished by his dominance over her in his imagination. The Manila servant is obsequious to his Spanish ruler but imperious to the protagonist. The latter is worried that he might be like the servant in the future; he is neither a noble savage nor a simple follower. Importantly, the protagonist is also a vehicle for questioning the product of Japanese colonialism—the colonized subject not making a palpable stand against the colonizer.2 Further, the text can be viewed as an allegory of modern Japanese history. The protagonist is to the Spanish and Ponapean people what the Japanese are to the Western and Asia-Pacific people. Japan attempted to Orientalize Asian and Pacific peoples (although each differently) and differentiate itself from them by Westernizing itself, although the West continued to regard it as an Asian nation and Japan located itself as a non-Western nation. Therefore, the text’s conclusion indirectly echoes the fate of Japan under occupation through such a displacement. While accusing Western colonialism, the text also criticizes the colonized—the Japanese—for their deficiency of shutaisei (individuality), which was a main subject in postwar Japan’s journalism and which the

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Japanese considered every Western intellectual discourse contained (Miyoshi 97–98).3 Long-standing state collectivism— now in the form of self-criticism, relativism, and euphemism—is reaffirmed in the text, where the Pacific Islanders are basically different (they are uncivilized) but partly similar (some of them are moderately civilized, short of shutaisei) to the Japanese. Both the text’s islanders and Godzilla are depicted in the same post-occupation Japanese postcolonial mode, which revived the dominant colonial representation of the Pacific Islanders under Japan’s rule as its close others. The United States also featured a South Pacific revival in 1958 based on popular memories of war context (a movie version of love stories from James Michener’s successful book, Tales of the South Pacific [1946], which had been made into a musical play in 1949). The rise of world support for decolonization spread to the Pacific Islands in the 1960s after the successive births of the emergent countries in Africa. At the request of the US government, in 1963 US scholars drew up the Solomon Report—a plan to continue to make military use of Micronesia without going against this current. It advanced the proposal to provide funds unsparingly to win the goodwill of the inhabitants. As proposed, the US government invested money for the welfare and education of Micronesians increasingly from 1965 onward, sending functionaries, medical doctors, and Peace Corps youths, without industrializing Micronesia (Kiste and Marshall 39–40; Kobayashi Izumi 172–175). The net effect of this in cultural terms was to erase Japanese influences and substitute English institution and American values. The internal Japanese drive to remember the Pacific may also have served an external function of aligning Japan with the United States through shared scholarly work on the Pacific. At this time of political transition from noninterference into appeasement,

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the Nanyo Gunto Kyokai (South Sea Islands Society) published Omoide no Nanyo Gunto (Recollections of the South Sea Islands, 1965), the reminiscences of its members repatriated from “the tragic South Sea Islands” (Nanyo Gunto Kyokai 234). The reminiscences in Recollections of the South Sea Islands emphasize the members’ senses of affinity for Micronesia. The contributors consist of functionaries, teachers, scientists, medical doctors, traders, and farmers. Most talk of their yearning for the paradisiacal old days—misgivings about living in uncivilized society, dreams of visiting tropical nature, relief to witness stores and houses and factories on streets, and efforts for development—rather than of their deplorable situations during the wartime. However, some speak for the Micronesians, inferring the islanders’ longing for the period of Japan’s rule and their attachment to Japanese people, whereas others go so far as to maintain the necessity of extending Japanese enterprises to Micronesia and aiding its development. The issue of reparation to the Micronesians is told from the point of view that Japanese people should feel compassion for the sacrifices of obedient, cooperative islanders, not from that of an apology (Nanyo Gunto Kyokai 206–207). For the contributors, Micronesian people are still viewed as Japanized islanders or “different but similar” natives. What they reconfirmed and rediscovered twenty years after the Second World War (the Pacific War) was an earthly paradise, pitiable islanders, and the bonds of affection between the Japanese and Micronesia and its people. The ideas of “Oriental,” Japanese Micronesians,4 the Japanese language, dietary culture such as rice and soy sauce, remains of the war dead, and forthcoming aid established such bonds. Since the late 1950s, Japanese popular cinema had also “shifted its axis away from regret and atonement to rebuilding and rejuvenation” (Brophy 41). Accordingly, Godzilla turned

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from a monstrous destroyer and innocent bomb victim into a reliable protector of human beings. After playing the role of an evil monster confronted with a good monster, Mothra (Mothra vs. Godzilla, 1964), Godzilla returned to combat King Ghidrah, a heinous three-headed dragon monster from space (Monster of the Monsters, Ghidrah, 1964). Again, such a positive representation can be related to social history. The period of the late 1960s to the 1970s, or of the eve of Japan’s unprecedented economic growth, is marked with the rethinking of its history. The period of “affirmative recognition of Japan’s peculiarity” (Aoki 81–125) began in a new wave of nationalism, traditionalism, and romanticism, in which Japan’s history through the period of the war came to be regarded as a “past.” Japanese “uniqueness” (meaning the difference from the modern Western civilizations) was no longer what must be criticized thoroughly but what should be inspected and affirmed as a main cause of the unparalleled economic growth. This growth, however, did not necessarily lead to a general sense of wellbeing. In the film Parade of Monsters (1968), a Pacific island is presented as a holiday resort as well as a high-tech penal colony where hidden cameras monitor Godzilla, Mothra, King Ghidrah, and so on, who have been deported together to the island. The film is “[t]he wildest and most fantastic attempt to create a coherent fictional realm for the cohabitation of Godzilla and Japan” (Brophy 41). In the 1970s versions, Godzilla appears as heroic champion: Godzilla as “a symbol of Japan’s super-industrial strength” displaces Godzilla as “a threat to super-industrialisation” (Brophy 41). The films oscillate between these poles in subsequent versions. Godzilla and other tamed monsters team up against new, stronger intruders, such as Mechagodzilla. These changes in cinematic monster stories are closely similar to the development of Shimada Keizo’s cartoon story, “Dankichi

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the adventurous” (1933–1939). In this very popular prewar story set on a tropical island, the Japanese boy Dankichi, cast ashore on the island, turns cannibals (evil savages or “distant others”) into loveable subjects known as kuronbo (good natives or “close others”) to guard him from wild animals, white pirates, and other black tribes. Dankichi (like the Japanese scientists and technicians in Godzilla films), with the aid of the docile and robust kuronbo (Godzilla and Mothra), can recruit those hostile animals and invaders (King Ghidrah, etc.) into his military to fight against further invaders (Mechagodzilla, etc.). The monsters and the kuronbo are both ambivalent natives—once ferocious but now moderately reliable—distinguished from bad savages but feared for their potential to turn traitor. “Dankichi” and Godzilla are both mirrors and amplifiers of a Japanese view of the Pacific as a horrible yet enchanting primeval world. “Dankichi” was republished with the complete works in 1967, then prefaced with the author’s reminiscences and issued in paperback in 1976. (The original version’s racist terms and descriptions are modified or lessened in the paperback version.) It was revived as a classic to inter Japan’s colonization, imperialism and racism as bygones. In 1976, Takagi Ichinosuke (a scholar of Japanese literature) also published his reminiscences about an influential teaching article, “A letter from Truk,” which he had written in Japan’s state elementary school textbook in the aftermath of Japan’s seizure of Micronesia as its territory. In their reminiscences, however, Shimada and Takagi reproduced the Nanyo-Orientalism that had permeated their original works. According to Shimada, he could “clear his conscience as a writer,” convinced through his almost one-year stay on southern islands that the dream world of Dankichi was “not quite different [from the real southern islands] in people’s nature and customs” (“Preface”). Needless to say, the qualms of conscience he

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felt were not directed toward the indigenous people. He could come up with the romantic, lighthearted idea of Dankichi only by neglecting indigenous people and claiming his text’s realism as justification for the colonizing Japanese readers. In his reminiscences, Takagi mentions other early teaching material about Korea, “From a friend in Seoul.” Even though both his articles—“Truk” and “Seoul”—are bitter memories, the reasons are different. Regarding “Seoul,” Takagi regrets to say that “the real error of the essay I wrote without so much as seeing practical Korea” consists in “much more depth” than the “lack of graphic realism,” in that he is “unable to avoid his responsibility for being an accomplice in a colonial policy” (86). When it comes to “Truk,” however, his remorse is only for its unrealistic account. This difference shows the obstinacy of the ideological function of Nanyo-Orientalism (singularity, benightedness, and beauty) to obscure the real colonial rule and to alleviate the colonialist’s sense of being guiltily complicit. These neo-colonialist revisions of Japanese texts from the late 1960s–1970s were interrelated with Japan’s economic activities in Micronesia. In 1974, the US trusteeship government decided to change its exclusive industrial policy into a policy of introducing foreign capital, having Japan in mind. It executed a subrogation policy to set up the Micronesian economy through Japan’s capital and curtail its own burden. As a result, Japanese tourists to Micronesia increased in number rapidly, although other industries fell short of expectations (Kobayashi Izumi 226–227). Japan’s neo-colonialist advance, its trade and cultural friction with the United States, the discord between Japan’s non-nuclear principles and Reagan’s “Star Wars,” and power politics over Micronesia’s independence reanimated Japanese engagement with postcolonialism in the 1980s.5 Godzilla re-emerged as a victim/destroyer after a nine-year interval (Godzilla, 1984). As Japanese colonialism

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sat back-to-back with anti-Western colonialism, Japanese postcolonialism worked in close cooperation with neo-colonialism. The prewar “Dankichi syndrome” (imagining Nanyo as an uncivilized sphere of wild animals and black cannibals yet to be reclaimed) (Yano Toru, “Nanshin” 195) and the postwar “Godzilla syndrome” (conceiving Nanyo as a nuclear testing spot filled with a deep-seated grudge against modern civilization) spread again simultaneously.

POSTCOLONIAL MICRONESIA JAPANESE NOVELS

IN

CONTEMPORARY

In the 1910s–1920s (almost corresponding to the Taisho era), some Japanese writers began to seek non-everyday settings (uncivilized foreign areas, pre-modern Japanese scenes, magical illusions, etc.) under a cosmopolitan atmosphere formed as a result of the forty-year modernization (or Westernization) since the Meiji Restoration (see Kawamoto). Such cosmopolitanism, supported by Japan’s sense of its own greatness, can also be seen in the 1980s following forty years of industrialization and Americanization after the postwar reforms (Suzuki 2–3). In its wholehearted concentration on mass production and consumerism, Japan no longer found itself isolated or affirmatively unique (Aoki 126–155). The West had been naturalized (metamorphosed) to the extent that Japan itself was alien and exotic to the rising generation. The shosetsu (novel) produced under such conditions, as Masao Miyoshi pointed out, “is no longer characterized by the perfect/imperfect aspects and ‘I-ness.’ As a consumer, the ‘I’ is even less distinguished from the others, while the sense of time, too, is robbed of its experiential discreteness” (25). The immediate postwar postcolonial mode seen in the original

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version of Godzilla was replaced by neo-colonial—industrial and tourist—desires in the 1960s–1970s but appeared again during the 1980s, both in film and in writing. The shosetsu for adults began to deal with the Pacific, which had been mainly a setting of didactic juvenile fiction, films, travel writing, war literature, short stories, and poetry. Under such rarefaction of “I-ness” (a sense of national/individual uniqueness), shosetsu on contemporary Micronesia—such as Tanaka Koji’s The small divine islands (1981), Ikezawa Natsuki’s The stratosphere on a summer morning (1984), Arai Man’s “The Sunset Beach Hotel” (1986), and Kobayashi Nobuhiko’s The hottest island in the world (1991)— attempted to create new representations of self and other. In Ikezawa Natsuki’s The stratosphere on a summer morning, the Japanese protagonist, Kimura Yasushi, lives in contemporary Micronesia and writes of his experiences since falling carelessly out of a tuna fishing boat. The text uses a typical plot of South Sea romance, but at the same time the story is also modeled after the course of postwar Japanese history—drifting and survival on a desert island (equivalent to Japan thrown into confusion immediately after World War Two), relief by a white American movie star, Myron (Japan’s rehabilitation with the aid of the United States), and transracial love with a young American white woman named Miranda (prosperity under high growth of the economy fretting the United States). Yet the text challenges stereotyped adventure stories by putting the matter of writing an adventure story in question, depicting the Japanese protagonist’s personality and identity not as fixed but as ever changing. Unlike most of the protagonists in Western and Japanese South Sea writings, Kimura is not misanthropic nor in a slump of business or artistic production, neither hating urban civilization nor admiring Nanyo especially, though he tends somewhat toward escapism. The text sets four modes

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of the protagonist: that is, the narrator, a first-person character, a writer of his experience in Micronesia, and a third-person character in the memoirs. He uses “he” instead of “I” in his memoirs because he has “a fear of writing of [him]self. What has been written is irreparable. Writing is delivering judgment and executing a sentence” (Ikezawa, Natsu 236). The title of this text, The stratosphere on a summer morning, expresses Kimura’s impression of his life in the Marshalls, but because the book relativizes writing in terms of the protagonist who writes within the book, the text resists monolithic representation. This thirtysomething journalist—a Crusoe-like,6 featureless, average Japanese man—represents the postwar Japanese, who have lost and are seeking “self,” looking back at their national history with a sense of estrangement from the prewar Japan. The Japanese protagonist is emblematic of Japanese ambivalence to America. No member of the boat’s crew notices Kimura’s fall in the midst of the Pacific, and he drifts to an uninhabited island in the Marshall Islands, where he is obliged to live a food-gathering life for seventy-five days with no expectation that he might be rescued. However, one day he swims to a neighboring island and runs across Myron, who has been living there in an attempt to overcome his morbid dependence on alcohol. Then, he meets Myron’s friends (including Miranda), who have gone there to bring the actor back home. Through his contact with them, Kimura returns gradually to a civilized life. In the end, Kimura remains on the island alone even after Myron and Myron’s friends go back to the United States, but he promises to record his experience and contact Myron using a radiotelegraph which Myron has left if he makes up his mind to leave the island. On the whole, it can be said that American characters play a role of reliever and instructor in the book. What Kimura as a contemporary castaway fears is not encountering cannibals

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(as with Crusoe), but contamination with radioactivity. The discovery of Myron’s hut allows him to remove this anxiety. It is not until he meets the American that he gives his name in the text, and he can learn from Myron exactly where they are on world maps. The encounter with the American means that the Japanese castaway has developed the ability to leave the island and makes him aware of changes in his identity. He is gradually re-civilized by using Myron’s utensils, reading books the American has brought, and explaining to Miron what Kimura has been and is, culminating in re-identifying himself as “Kimura,” a person on the side of civilization. Kimura reads in particular an anthropological book on a Marshallese island, which for him does “not take him out of the island” and “tempts him deeper and deeper into life on the island” (Ikezawa, Natsu 80). He rejects romantic books such as mysteries and classics because “the reality of the island seized his mind far more strongly and dazzlingly than faded representations in those books” (80). This rejection is a contrast to the conventional attitudes of white characters in Western colonial romances that prefer to read those kinds of books during their island lives, such as Ropati in Robert Dean Frisbie’s The Book of Puka-Puka. It is also resonant, to some extent, with the ruin of white well-read characters in colonial realist stories (such as Maugham’s “Mackintosh”) and the mortification of the Japanese protagonist of Nakajima Atsushi’s “Mahiru [Noontime],” who deplores his inability to dismiss romantic Pacific images represented by Western artists and writers. Nevertheless, despite this realism or nativism, Kimura’s preference of the anthropological book indicates that the Japanese islander is not immune to Orientalism. The more he reads the book, the less he can look at the island from the viewpoint of the islanders. He shifts from an inhabitant on the island to an observer.

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Ikezawa’s book represents the Japanese character’s resistance to the civilizing power of the well-meaning American characters, although this resistance cannot also avoid being imperfect. The book shows a refusal to accept all-out Americanization. Kimura attempts not to be too close to Myron, an American Hollywood star—a symbol of American cultural imperialism—claiming that he is more indigenized than Myron, who has some provisions and utensils from his country. Kimura gives himself a nickname, Yashi, which is not only an abbreviation for his first name, “Yasushi,” but also means “coconut palm” in English. However, such resistance is not backed up through a deep-seated sense of self involved positively with here and now. He is inclined to continue his primitive life, in which he finds true happiness: The situation in which we have so many things to do and we must move about under the pressure of momentary necessity, and the time that is filled with so many actions that we cannot find time to hesitate or stop—this might be the way to happiness. Now I think so, though I could not afford to do so at the time. (106)

Only after gaining a foothold for survival can Kimura long for his hard times, regarding it as his past, like some Japanese intellectuals worrying about their current overmature civilization. He does not live in Myron’s hut, but in a former islander’s shack. Kimura is also still on the island at the end of the story, unable to make up his mind despite his promise with Myron to leave the island after writing up his experience. The text does not say whether he will stay or leave. In addition, the text depicts the American characters’ anxieties and American colonialist fears from the viewpoint of the colonized Japanese. Myron can succeed in overcoming his alcoholism and trauma caused by his daughter’s suicide—he represents

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both glory and darkness of US civilization—only by watching Kimura’s solitary primitive life on the island before Kimura notices his presence. (This corresponds to the actual interdependence of Japan’s pacifism and economic advance and the United States’ military power and maintenance of it in the Far East and Pacific.) To Miranda (the same name of The Tempest’s heroine), Yashi is an indigenous islander, like Caliban. Miranda confides in this native, confessing her secret to him—a chronic nightmare of intestines coming out of her inside—and having sexual relations with him (which Prospero, Miranda’s father and Caliban’s master, was most afraid of in Shakespeare’s play). Ikezawa’s work does not have any truly indigenous characters. This enables Kimura to be a native in the text. However, his island is still a testing ground for the moral improvement, and he feels the existence of spirits of the former islanders. On the island, he oscillates between being Japanese and Micronesian. The island, on which he has to single-mindedly collect food (coconuts and bananas) in despair, is far from “a South Sea paradise with various kinds of much fresh fruit” (Ikezawa, Natsu 50). “The tropical harsh magic” rebuilds his personality (56). As he becomes used to the environment, he feels anxious about “intruding into the others’ place” (66). Yet he names the island and its neighboring islands, and he comes to feel happy with his metamorphosis into an islander and with his seemingly permanent life on the islands, even though he hopes to return to Japan some day. Kimura acquires a moderate sense of release from the society and system that he has depended on—the sense which Western and Japanese colonial romantic writers might have almost always been craving for—going almost native without completely losing his national identity. Unlike such Western and Japanese romanticist writers, however, the protagonist is compelled to adopt a native mode of living against his will, and

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he is so honest as to perceive his innocent activities as being aggressive despite feeling little sense of responsibility because this came about as an inevitable accident. The book portrays the Japanese character as being awestruck by Micronesia. In doing so, it circumvents a conventional Japanese colonialist trope of Micronesia as a familiarized other. Yashi fears invisible spirits of the islands, which he can ambiguously perceive as “beings more akin to the islands than human beings” (Ikezawa, Natsu 85). He learns from Myron that the US administration has forced the islanders to evacuate from the island so that the military can perform a test-firing of missiles. According to Myron, as the result, most of them became accustomed to the money economy and urban life and renounced their home island, and the four islanders who attempted to go back home mysteriously disappeared. When Kimura knows how the native islanders were gone, he unites within himself the awful, respectable spirits and the real wretched natives. Kimura feels that the spirits complain to him about the islanders’ disappearance, and he believes that the spirits do not speak to Myron. Though he once defined himself as similar to the islanders, he now sees himself as different, although not so different as the American. What critically distinguishes this text from other island writings is not only its depiction of more active resistance to Japanese deep political and cultural dependence on new American imperial power, but also its attempt to take local views into consideration; although, problematically, local views are not represented themselves. In The stratosphere on a summer morning, it is not so much the American characters and culture as the Pacific Islands that cause the Japanese protagonist to feel incongruous to the social and cultural systems which he has been familiar with before. Kimura fails to be an islander but considers that Myron does not experience his intense, illogical feeling for the

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island (just as the native heathen Williams objects to Ropati’s rational interpretation of local fables in Frisbie’s Puka-Puka). To the Japanese islander, Myron appears to be “unable to go a step further from the commonplace urban and civilization theories” (Ikezawa, Natsu 164), with which Myron explains the islanders’ renunciation of their island, not ascribing their disappearance to the US military and monetary power. Kimura is not only cleaving to/from American culture, but is also conscious of the doubleness by (mis)appropriating islanders’ views, objectifying this fact and consciousness through the act of writing the thirdperson narrative in the text (on this doubleness of anti-imperial cultural nationalism, see Boehmer 104–105). Therefore, the text depicts a new type of decoloniality. Arai Man’s novel, “The Sunset Beach Hotel,” depicts the death of the last Paradise—a theme with a longtime tradition in the writing of Western colonial fantasies. The text is a postmodern Japanese version of Melville’s criticism of modern civilization, including a Maugham-style anti-romantic plot. Again, there is a move toward postcolonial critique: the centrality of the visiting ex-colonial self shackled by an Orientalist discourse typical of earlier writing. A thirty-five-year-old video writer named Sakuragi, who is fonder of nature than of people, visits the atoll of Majuro in the Marshall Islands, commissioned to make a film of beautiful nature by a travel agency. The text is marked with the change of this typical South Sea visitor’s formulaic Pacific views through his negotiations with Micronesian characters rather than with Americans or invisible Micronesian spirits. It juxtaposes the images of run-down space (the car lacking a door sent to meet him at the airport from the Sunset Beach Hotel, a log cabin on the verge of ruin; indolent and spiritless islanders) and paradise (a beautiful uninhabited island on which he makes a film

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entitled Robinson Crusoe’s Island ).7 Both an idyllic prewar picture (a good little Japanese-speaking islander girl reminding the Japanese of the prewar textbook article “Trakku-to dayori” [“A letter from Truk”]) and a miserable postwar portrait (her mother, afflicted with radiation sickness with her days numbered, suggesting the 1954 incident of the Daigo Fukuryu Maru to Sakuragi) are represented. His growth in awareness—his realization of the realities of the last Paradise as a US nuclear test site and a garbage dump for space waste disposal—gives an ironic point to the story’s ending. While filming an uninhabited island, he and his Marshallese assistant are killed by the fall of an artificial satellite. Here again, one can see a continuation of the concerns fueling Godzilla. The ironic fate of Sakuragi indicates a radical change in dismissing the dream of the perfect Robinsonian retreat. Sakuragi is also a postcolonial colonizer colonized. He is the same victim of falling space waste (an agent of civilization, so to speak) as the young Marshallese man who only speaks Marshallese, playing a nonspeaking part in the story—neither Japanized nor deeply Americanized. Yet the text depicts the way the two are killed in the accident differently: where the Marshallese man dies a miserable, ugly, and instant death, the Japanese man is submerged while keeping his wits about him, as if deriding his own death. The latter’s death is of his own making, as it were, whereas the former is an innocent pawn in the game of modern history. An interesting point is that Sakuragi’s new understanding allows him to see the islands not just as a Robinsonian escape to the end of the world, but also in terms of indigenous culture. The text adopts the traditional local way of viewing Majuro as “the navel of the world” (Arai, “Sansetto” 46), which counters the Japanese view of it as the end of the Pacific.

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Kobayashi Nobuhiko’s novel, The hottest island in the world, has the orthodox narrative framework of Pacific romance— captivity and evasion, adventure and love—articulating some colonial ambivalence. However, having been written under the conditions of reorganization of the world system and globalization of American culture in the wake of the closing cold war the story no longer focuses on criticism of US military and cultural imperialism. Instead, it lays emphasis on self-criticism, reconsidering contemporary views of modern Japanese colonial and postcolonial history. The text does so by setting its stage on Kolonia, a fictitious Micronesian microstate (modeled on Palau), where the protagonist, a Japanese man in his forties named Noguchi, has lived for over seven years. So, like Louis Becke’s and Jack London’s South Sea stories, The hottest island in the world depicts a state of syncretic (postcolonial) affairs, not stressing colonial encounters as with the aforementioned 1980s Japanese texts. American culture, far more than traditional Japanese culture, permeates and enriches the “body and soul” of Noguchi, who was born and raised in Roppongi, Tokyo (“a base town”), where he received American democratic education (Kobayashi Nobuhiko, Sekai 94). To this deeply Americanized Japanese citizen, the actual world of postwar Japan seems to remain unchanged and too oppressive. Noguchi is not an anti-imperial nationalist asserting more modernization or seeking to preserve and restore indigenity. Although regarding himself as a “mental refugee” from Japan’s traditional social system (117), Noguchi is aware that his escapist living made by managing a resort hotel depends on ill-mannered Japanese tourists backed by Japan’s economic power. His “mental exile” is not understandable either to his American friend, Pearson, or to the Kolonians. The former only can imagine political and economic exile. The latter

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can only simple-mindedly conclude that Japanese people are not fond of the United States because of its former occupation and their present economic conflicts. The text suggests that no matter how far he may escape from present-day Japan, he is inevitably identified with it. The Japanese protagonist cannot separate himself from past Japan either. He is brought back to it through the Japanese visitor Kakizaki, a survivor of the Pacific War. To Noguchi, Kakizaki (who boasts of his war memories) is a representative of the detestable patriarchal Japan. Moreover, the old Japanese man gets Noguchi reluctantly involved in Kolonia’s political disturbance, which forces him to squarely face the fact that it is deeply related to both Japan’s new and old imperial power. The mental friction that Noguchi experienced in Japan parallels the social and political friction in Kolonia, both of which compel him to flee these countries. The text draws attention to both Japan and Kolonia as former US-occupied nations and colonial mimics, though the latter as still in the process of Americanization whereas the former as already mis-Americanized (i.e., Japan’s Americanization was imperfect and this was sometimes considered negative for the United States). Entering Kolonia with a forged passport, Kakizaki approaches the President of Kolonia with an irresponsible offer for a tourist project. Kakizaki’s strategy—living on tourism, Japan’s new imperial power, which he abhors—is common with Noguchi and Kolonian people. Kolonia is in a dangerous situation, caught in the conflict between the reformers (the terrorist government) and defenders (the people) of its anti-nuclear constitution modeled after that of Japan. The situation is caused by its political change ignited by the assassination of the Vice-President (a Japanese-Kolonian), a defender of the constitution. The people reject doing the United States’ bidding because of their national

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pride, yet they know that the US financial aid in the form of a recompense for their offering a military base is indispensable to maintaining their political independence. Lopez—the VicePresident for the next term—uses the Secret Police, who attempt to murder Noguchi for giving shelter to Kakizaki—an illegal entrant and Nanyo broker under suspicion of the assassination. America plays a role of enlightening and protecting the Japanese protagonist in this text, as in other texts like Ikezawa’s. Pearson informs him of the economic crisis of Soviet Russia, which Noguchi is unable to believe because the Japanese were certain that Soviet Russia led the world, together with the United States. In short, Pearson shakes Noguchi’s world outlook. He saves Noguchi’s life when the Kolonian secret police are about to kill him and helps him escape from Kolonia. In the end, Noguchi re-emigrates to Honolulu where he can live a safe life—appointed the manager of another resort hotel—though in slight despair after losing his paradise in Kolonia. The United States itself is not always given a positive image in this text. Yet for the mediocre dropped-out Japanese, there is no alternative but to reside in the Pacific, the place both farthest from metropolitan centers and in the shadow of the (American and Japanese) double imperial powers. Noguchi is different from Stevenson, Gauguin, and Frisbie in that these Western escapists did not need to be confronted with such double contradictions. He is also unlike Nakajima, who challenged both Western and Japanese colonial representations consciously. However, Noguchi—who is marginalized in Japan—himself marginalizes uncivilized Japanese and Kolonian subjects. In the text, it is these people instead of the protagonist who counterattack the “centers”—the local political authority and the protagonist, both of them despising or exploiting them differently—by adopting Japanese ex- and neo-colonialist spirits alike. Noguchi

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“loves” Kolonia, but he is aware that (like Kakizaki whom he regards as an “enigmatic clown” [272]) he also “discriminates” against Kolonian people “somewhere in his mind” (Kobayashi Nobuhiko, Sekai 109). (This is a reverse pattern of Maugham’s “Mackintosh,” in which a new, young, well-educated colonial administrator derides and hates his veteran, uncivilized boss who acknowledges himself to “love” natives.) Noguchi gives Kolonian people essentialist definitions such as “cunning,” “argumentative,” “hot-blooded,” “having no definite opinion of their own,” and “playing their cards right to live” (Kobayashi Nobuhiko, Sekai 63, 129). He is having an affair with the Kolonian President’s Japanese wife, Kyoko, who does not respect her husband, the head of state. He also plays the stereotyped colonialist part of delivering a beautiful Japanese girl, Imai (a schoolteacher in Kolonia, like a good native), from native robbers (bad savages) and having transient relations with her. Kobayashi’s book also shows that in the complex mixture of decolonizing society, all is not what it seems. Kakizaki treats Noguchi’s native men tenderly and overbearingly, which reminds Noguchi of the wartime Japanese colonizer’s treatment of Micronesians. Noguchi, though bored with Kakizaki’s bragging about his war memories, finds that the former returned soldier deals with the islanders on equal terms whereas Noguchi himself has regarded the native employees as mere tools for hotel work. Kakizaki is respected by them (including Alfonso, the most able, self-possessed of them) and teaches them tokon (Japanese warriors’ fighting spirit)—as does even Alfonso, the most able, self-possessed of them—because he desires that his nation be a democratic country thriving economically “like Japan” (275–276). That such Japanese colonialist spirits, taking on the character of anti-Western colonialism, are acceptable to those politically decolonized people shows a contradiction of

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postcolonial projects in Micronesia and a nostalgic expression of longing for defiant Japanese common people, who now are no longer defiant. Noguchi has a statue of Imai’s torso made by Sunohara, an old Japanese sculptor who calls himself the second apprentice of Hijikata Hisakatsu. Although (unlike Kakizaki) Sunohara is reliable to Noguchi, he is also an agency of old colonialist Japan for the protagonist. The statue of Imai’s torso (the emblem of the paradisiacal Pacific for Noguchi—his partiality for the statue without the upper and the lower parts of the body is depicted as an attribute of his quaint “self” under an identity crisis) is demolished and miniaturized by more outlying people and absorbed by imperial centers. The statue is broken in the bustle of the coup, and Sunohara reproduces its smaller-sized images as souvenir goods for his livelihood to meet Japanese tourists’ exoticism—ironically, the Japanese female body is used for Japanese Orientalism. Kyoko, the President’s wife and Noguchi’s lover, is a postcolonial Japanese woman making use of (but independent of) political, economic, and patriarchal authorities. When the uprising fails but destabilizes such authorities, she has another affair with a native survivor, Alfonso. She makes Noguchi and his discreet servant, Alfonso, equals as her lovers. Fernando, one of Noguchi’s native subordinates who had seemed to be imbecile to him, proves to be even more competent than Alfonso when Fernando takes the leadership of the guerrilla band with the aid of Kakizaki. Discovering through Kakizaki that Fernando has pretended not to be able to speak Japanese well, Noguchi supposes that it may unexpectedly have been Fernando, instead of Lopez, that assassinated the Japanese-Kolonian Vice-President, receiving strong public support to carry out the coup. Fernando is significant to the plot of this story, but he is neglected in the

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text until Kakizaki discovers his ability. Fernando dies, without speaking a word in the story, together with Kakizaki. In the text, it is this native Fernando (a mixture of Nakajima’s native characters—“inscrutable others”) who is really enigmatic and who outwits imperial metonymic power—the Kolonian government, the Japanese protagonist, and the Japanese readership. These contemporary texts criticize economic, cultural, and technological imperialism of the United States and Japan by using the formulaic tropes of the fear of war and nuclear bombs, dead soldiers’ souls, tourism, business, and the problematic Micronesian issue of political independence and economic dependence. The writers focus on Micronesia’s retaliation against Japanese characters. Nanyo’s retaliation against Western and Japanese modernity had been depicted since wartime in Nakajima Atsushi’s and Kubo Takashi’s stories and in postwar movies like Godzilla. However, except for Nakajima’s texts that attempt to make the close (Japanized) others afresh into distant others by designating natives as incomprehensible South Sea people, those texts re-domesticate indigenes (monsters) in the end. The recent works criticize the Japanese colonialist ideology of sameness, representing Micronesia(ns) as rejecting thorough assimilation. Yet Micronesia remains a space for adventure and love and a place connected with the Japanese historically, culturally, genealogically, and genetically.8 The texts unwittingly show Japanese writers’ difficulties in depicting the (distant) other as resisting conventional colonialist depictions. Kobayashi Nobuhiko’s text has enigmatic characters—a young Micronesian man (a coup leader) and his respectable old Japanese man— despised by the Japanese protagonist. Their violent resistance is frustrated (like Godzilla) by the local government’s stronger violence. Likewise, the text’s opposition to colonialist

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romance is incomplete. The narrative framework remains imbued with Nanyo-Orientalism—showing a double ambiguity of reliance on (and opposition to) the West on the one hand and of feelings of fear and pity toward Micronesia on the other.

IKEZAWA NATSUKI’S ISLAND/TEXT OF “P ERIPHERAL ” V OICES Such a limitation is ameliorated in Ikezawa Natsuki’s Macias Gilly’s downfall (1993). The novel depicts the prosperity and downfall of the eponymous Micronesian protagonist, the President of the Republic of Navidad—a fictitious microstate in contemporary Micronesia. Gilly is establishing a dictatorship through his diplomatic skills and his manipulation of the minds of the people. The Japanese desires and fears expressed through Godzilla are transposed in the text’s depiction of the head of a Pacific community as an adroit, powerful leader. This kind of chieftain was hardly to be seen in Western and Japanese South Sea fiction since the noble savage Mehevi in Herman Melville’s Typee and the cannibal chief Tararo in Robert Michael Ballantyne’s The Coral Island. Macias Gilly’s downfall rewrites conventional colonial plots and discourses with humor and irony by using both enigmatic elements and stereotypes. Gilly sarcastically represents the conventional Japanese colonialist view of Micronesians as different but similar to the Japanese, from a Micronesian viewpoint. Born an orphan in Japanese-owned Navidad, Gilly learned from his Japanese patron that the islanders and the Japanese are all equal before the Emperor. He has studied in Japan, and still lives his private life in Japanese style. Despite loving Japanese traditional spirit and culture, Gilly looks at Japan with a critical eye. He thinks Japan is “ashamed of its own big power” and

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is “anxious to believe itself to be a compact little country with unity, ignoring all its outsiders” (Ikezawa, Mashiasu Giri 58). The text thus engages with constructions of “an exclusivist myth of Japanese culture, changeless and pure” (Miyoshi 88) and goes on to subvert (rather than invert) colonialist discourses by representing Pacific cultural blending. As opposed to the wartime pieces depicting hybridity as pitiable, Macias Gilly’s downfall positively valorizes colonial hybridity, asserting that “the blending of different cultures makes the culture more dense and powerful” (Ikezawa, Mashiasu Giri 92). A group of old Japanese men, arriving in Navidad immediately after somebody has destroyed a torii (a gateway at the entrance to a Shinto shrine), is a parody of the former Japanese colonialist. Native girls sing Kimigayo (the Japanese national anthem) in front of them, their song not bearing the slightest resemblance to the original anthem. This episode serves as a satire of “A letter from Truk,” the previously mentioned prewar teaching piece, which describes a little native girl as a good singer of Kimigayo. A former captain of the group delivers a speech that looks back to Japan’s occupation of Micronesia since World War I. His nostalgia is described by the text as “an appalling affair” reflecting his mind “unaffected by the change of the times” (35). During the long speech in the burning sun, the old men break down one after another, and a Rising-Sun flag suddenly goes up in flames. After that, the bus that the group is on disappears. These consecutive strange incidents, the cause of which is not disclosed in the text, injure Gilly’s prestige. However, the Japanese do not escape criticism. Suzuki—an able, “bureaucratic” Japanese businessman (Ikezawa, Mashiasu Giri 40)—is defeated by Gilly—a more competent debater. Katsumata is another Japanese stereotype: a yakuza (gangster), the commander of the regiment of military policeman that Gilly has

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established. However, Katsumata always wears sunglasses to conceal his downward slanting eyes which “provoke the laughter of whoever sees them” (20). When Gilly falls from power, Katsumata also loses his position, and old native women hit the former gangster on the head, scolding him in Japanese, the language they say, “you [the Japanese] forced us as children to learn” (456). Melchor, one of the three main islands composing Navidad, is the last paradise (a traditional theme of Western stories on the Pacific) compared to the other two civilized islands of Baltasar and Gaspar (the political and economic centers), and it is Navidad’s spiritual center, having little connection with the outside world. It is so mysterious as not to be drawn on a map contained in the text, only saying that it is about three hundred kilometers south of the two islands. With regard to the idea of Pacific spirituality, Robert Louis Stevenson and Somerset Maugham depict savage superstitions in their stories “The Beach at Falesá” and “Honolulu” respectively, and Jack London portrays it as hostility to European missions in “The Whale Tooth.” Characteristically, Ikezawa uses not only the idea of spirituality in the Pacific but also Christianity as a point from which to critique established Japanese values. (Those islands’ names are Christian, coming from Three Wise Men, Balthazar, Caspar, and Melchior.) However, unlike Bali-ha’i from South Pacific, for example, Melchor is not passive or powerless but exerts a great influence on and threat to urban political authority. When senior conference members of Melchor decide that they no longer respect President Gilly (because they find out that he has employed two European homosexuals to assassinate the pro-American former President), he loses his dignity as president. The agent in this process is a mystic Melchorean girl. She is a spirit medium with “an archetypal face of woman” and is typical of the island girl

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found in paintings wearing a hibiscus in her wavy hair (Ikezawa, Mashiasu Giri 215). Her real name is not revealed in the text: “Emeliana” is the name of Gilly’s dead mother, which he gives to the young prophetess (like Gauguin in Tahiti). This prototypic South Sea beauty is, however, an agent whom senior conference members of Melchor have sent to find out the truth of Gilly’s assassination of the former President. The text depicts an interracial couple as is often seen in colonial fantasy, but it is an exceptional couple in colonialist and Orientalist discourses. It is the reverse pattern of traditional colonial romance (transracial love of male colonizer and female colonized). Such reverse female colonizer/male colonized relationships were rare in Japanese-owned Micronesia (Peattie 219). Tsuneko is a plain, middle-aged woman of firm character, far from a typical miserable Oriental beauty such as in Madame Butterfly. The non-European men (like Gilly) from poverty-stricken regions are not like the foreign men in Japan, who looked upon Japanese women as “erotic Orientals” (Kelsky 177). Her devotion to her lover, Gilly, (he has a liking for but does not love her) reminds the reader of colonialist fear of degrading hybridization, which has often been expressed in colonial discourses (Loomba 164). However, her confession that he is a man with a low sperm count positions him as inferior. Such a seesaw game of male and female, colonizer and colonized, continues even after they part. Tsuneko’s younger sister, Itsuko, comes to Navidad with Gilly and serves him as a faithful maid. She helps Emeliana find the documentary evidence of his assassination hidden under a tatami mat. In this main story of the text, the oppressed strike back against the oppressors through intellect. In Ikezawa’s text, the oppressed do not seek any power to subvert the oppressors, except for Gilly—an ex-colonized person—who uses violence to acquire

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political power and culminates in failure. Such a central narrative of the decolonized Micronesia in the text includes commentary on the geography, history, and ethnicity of Navidad: commentary which assists the central story’s intellectual resistance. To cite a few instances: The Spanish informed [the native people] of the existence of Heaven, and Germans showed them how large the world was (and of course it was the Japanese and US Forces that let them know what a hell on earth was like). (70) Those who attend this festival [of Melchor] by taking an interpretative—flimsily pragmatic—attitude [as anthropologists do] would be embarrassed to lose sight of the sense in people’s gathering here, of the absolute authority of great spiritualistic mediums. . . . [Melchor] has holiness far beyond the level of interpretation, or a unified collective will transcending interpretative abilities of individual minds. (336–337) [I]n such a kind of praise [as thinking highly of the art of navigation of Micronesian people] there is something subtly scornful that the uncivilized savages once did what people do today. (445)

The critical and ironic qualities of these quotations position the story as a postcolonially aware text and reveal some of its own colonialist romance as consciously ironic play. Moreover, at the end of the story, the text overthrows the centrality of omniscient patriarchal narrative by showing that two characters—European homosexuals—are the narrators. The text also challenges its own centralization by fragmenting its plot. Besides the central narrative, the text includes four other key narratives. The dialogical narrative of the people at the public square satirically shows the political and social situations

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of Navidad from the popular viewpoints. As soon as the people meet at the public square in front of a cooperative store market, the usually “benighted” and “obedient” islanders (81) change into “first-class critics who are capable of collecting extensive information and making a close analysis and a synthetic judgment” (73). Their collective wisdom is a potential menace to President Gilly, of which he is unaware. In another narrative about the aforementioned bus that disappears with the old Japanese on board (“Bus Report”), the bus is elusive, appearing and disappearing in a phantasmagorical manner. It runs on the surface of the water, flies in the sky, and dives into the water; it becomes smaller than a banana and still shrinks so small that it can only be examined with a microscope; the bus also hears mass in a church, does shopping at a grocery shop, and quarrels on a road with a driver of another bus; it embarrasses Japanese people involved in shooting a commercial for woman’s swimsuit, by appearing on the film without being noticed by anyone; the bus also pretends to be a nova, getting islander astronomers’ hopes up only to disappoint them. (The bus seems to parallel Mengidabrudkoel, a spider demi-god in Palauan legend.) When the bus finally reappears at the public square, the old men are “restored to youth” and line up in “a South-Sea-like, developing-country-like, unmilitary, relaxed way,” seeming to “completely get used to the atmosphere in this country” (461). Furthermore, the text includes a local fable of Melchor, which deals with “real intelligence,” unlike American films with “repetitive, only stimulative, and coarse contents” (Ikezawa, Mashiasu Giri 167). It functions in the text quite differently from the interpolated island stories in Stevenson’s “Falesá” or Frisbie’s The Book of Puka-Puka, in which the exotic texts slightly influence the white protagonists’ views. In the fable of

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Ikezawa’s text, a wise native girl and her seven younger brothers kill a covetous monstrous fish nibbling at their island. (The tale seems to combine Palau’s two well-known creation myths of Milad and Chuab.) The tale allegorizes not only anti-colonial resistance but also the central plot in which Emiliana ruins Gilly with the assistance of her three younger brothers and four cousins. The giant fish dies with gratitude to the “wise girl” for killing it without giving it a fright. Likewise, Gilly dies in peace after being informed by Emeliana that she has had his baby girl. The monstrous fish repeats the image of Godzilla, both dreadful destroyers who nevertheless evoke sympathy. Lastly, the text contains dialogues between Gilly and his advisor, the spirit of the dead Lee Boo. Lee Boo—a Palauan nobleman—left for England in 1783 with Captain Henry Wilson and the crew of the Antelope, which had been stranded off the Palau Islands, and died young in England in the following year (Peacock can be examined for further reading on Lee Boo). The difference of their opinions points out clearly the difference between English and Japanese colonialist discourses: although both British and Japanese colonialists looked on their own colonized subjects ambiguously, the latter emphasized the similarity between the colonizers and the colonized, whereas the former emphasized their difference. Ikezawa’s Lee Boo thinks of his experience in England as “a rise to a higher level of culture,” remarking: “Of course, since culture is peculiar to its land and history, it may be wrong to rank cultures hierarchically. But some cultures are good at making us believe by overpowering us first that they are superior to us” (300). He also recalls that intellectuals in London treated him like a “pet” (301). Gilly responds: “I did not experience so thoroughly different a culture as you had done, because [Japan or

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its culture] was not so elegant as [England or its culture, which has] salons” (303). The ghost of Lee Boo knows “from the beginning that death only means transferring to this side” (306) and suggests to Gilly after his downfall and before his suicide an idea which shapes the texture of the story: In this world an individual is not so individual as you think. . . . The thoughts and desires of many people, the dead or alive, pile up and sometimes function as if they were one. (470)

Ikezawa’s Lee Boo, a little cynical and seemingly unscientific, differs from the image of the prince as a noble savage, Palau’s ambassador of goodwill to England and its first true scholar. This idealized image of colonial and national symbol, disseminated through George Keate’s An Account of the Pelew Islands (1788) and accepted and supported in Palau as well as England, is dismantled and reconstructed as a decolonizing agent in Ikezawa’s text (Nero and Thomas can be examined for further reading on Keate’s book for Palau and Britain). In Te Rau Maire (which means “the fern leaf”), a collection of Pacific writers’ poems and stories contributed to the 6th Festival of Pacific Arts held in Rarotonga in 1992, Palauan Cite Morei’s poem “Belau Be Brave” refers to the national historical icon of Palau: Belau be brave … thy nobleman’s creed is in the grave, decaying by greed, their loyal deeds once engraved, at Ulong in Wilson’s log, are gone, lost in history books, dusty, buried in Leeboo’s grave. (4; ll. 1–7)

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Despite the two texts’ commonality of decolonizing movement in the postcolonial Pacific island discourse network, Ikezawa’s text writes back to colonial views of Palauan history; Morei’s poem invokes the colonial noble image of Lee Boo as a national identity symbol, though mystified, to demand “Belau be brave”—to keep to the antinuclear constitution of Palau, despite US and domestic pressures to amend it. In other words, while Ikezawa wrote back to colonial views, Morei accepted a colonial romantic view of noble savage. Thus, Macias Gilly’s downfall teasingly depicts the homosexuals, the common people, the bus, the local fable, and the boy spirit—all originally powerless fragments in the text—as if they were powerful: an omniscient narrator, critical experts, a protean vehicle, universal wisdom, and a great philosopher. In doing so, the text produces collective thoughts and desires not as a transcendental or communal identity, but as the Other that might disrupt a discursive space—colonialist historiography and scholarship, local political power, and the imperial authority of culture, militarism, and patriarchy. Dankichi and Godzilla’s relations with Nanyo are influential prewar, postwar, colonial, and postcolonial Japanese tropes, though they turn in opposite directions. Despite ostensible differences, the stories are both based on a view of islanders as similar others. In the neo-colonial phase, they have been incorporated into ambiguous embodiments of colonialist desires and fears. Ikezawa’s representation of postcolonialism is marked with such circulation, appropriating the realistic maneuvers in short stories of twisting typical romantic plots with stereotyped characters (Stevenson and Maugham) and of baffling colonialist romance with non-stereotypic characters (Nakajima). South Sea writers’ criticism of imperial centers through their own and their characters’ escape still has difficulties in overthrowing

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the binarism of center/periphery, civilization/savage, and colonizer/colonized that comprises the nucleus of Orientalism. The repeated circulation between centers and peripheries in Ikezawa’s text moves their boundaries not only to articulate but to undermine the persistence of Nanyo-Orientalism.

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ENDNOTES

1. This chapter originally appeared under the same title in New Literatures Review 41 (2004): 105–119. It has been expanded and revised, and is used with permission. 2. Micronesians came to be “strangers in their own land” under foreigners’ military, political, economic, cultural, and educational control (see Hezel). Under the Japanese administration, Micronesians were not Japanese citizens or subjects of the Japanese emperor. By the end of the Pacific War, or “a typhoon” from Micronesian perspectives, they were “neither the victors, nor the vanquished, nor the liberated”; they were “the bystanders—in their view, the ‘suffering’ bystanders” (Falgout et al. 220–221). 3. Miyoshi also makes a point that lacking in an English equivalent, shutaisei is a native invention, meaning “inclusively the agent of action, the subject of speculation or speech act, the identity of existence, and the rule of individualism” (98). 4. The Mori Family in the Truk Islands is frequently mentioned. This family was comprised of the offspring of Mori Koben, called “Boken Dankichi in the Meiji era,” who visited Micronesia in 1892. 5. Because of interregional conflicts of interests resulting from its diversity and US military bases in Micronesia, the Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands was disunited and reorganized into the Federated States of Micronesia, the Marshall Islands, Palau, and the Northern Mariana Islands. The former three shifted to the free association states, entrusting security to the United States and receiving its financial aid, and they became independent as the Federated States of Micronesia and the Republic of the Marshall Islands in 1986 and as the Republic of Palau in 1994, respectively. The Northern Mariana Islands became the Commonwealth of the United States in 1986. 6. Daniel Defoe’s character Robinson Crusoe, though often imagined as typical South Sea adventurer—valiant, indomitable, sagacious hero—is actually antipodal to the image. Such a heroic image of Crusoe was forged in keeping with imperialist expansion both

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in the West and Japan through early Victorian and early Showa adventure stories like Robinson Crusoe. 7. Sakuragi acquires peace of mind by “discover[ing] an uninhabited island that Robinson Crusoe would like” (Arai 67). The change in public view of Crusoe should be noted: in the original, Robinson Crusoe did not like his island. 8. For example, in Oda Ifuna’s novel Yume no Mikuroneshia: Ponape no koi (Dreamlike Micronesia: A love in Ponape, 1993), a young Japanese man, burning with high hopes to develop Micronesian sanitary conditions, falls in love with a Kanaka girl and settles in Ponape together with her as his wife. The text repeatedly stresses Japanese bonds with Micronesians from time immemorial.

CHAPTER 3

A POSTCOLONIAL DIALOGUE “INCOMPREHENSIBLE NANYO” (NAKAJIMA ATSUSHI) / “FACELESS JAPAN” (ALBERT WENDT)

1

UNLEARNING NANYO-ORIENTALISM Nakajima Atsushi’s Nanyo stories—“Nanto tan” (“Tales of the south islands”) and “Kansho” (“Atolls”)—simultaneously embody and challenge colonialist Nanyo discourses. (“Tales of the south islands” and “Atolls” consist of three and six novellas respectively: “Kofuku” [“Happiness”], “Fufu” [“A married couple”], and “Niwatori” [“Hens”]; “Sabishii shima” [“A desert island”], “Kyochikuto no ie no onna” [“A woman in a house with

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oleander trees”], “Naporeon” [“Napoleon”], “Mahiru” [“Noontime”], “Mariyan,” and “Fubutsu sho” [“An abridgement of things South Sea”]. They were, together with his other stories, published as Tales of the south islands in 1942.) Nakajima stayed as a functionary at the Nanyo-cho (South Seas Government) in Koror, Palau, for about eight months from 1941–1942, making fact-finding tours throughout Micronesia under Japan’s rule. In Palau, Nakajima made friends with Hijikata Hisakatsu, an artist and folklorist. From him, Nakajima learned native folktales and customs, and used these along with Hijikata’s experiences as material for his stories. These stories share a largely autobiographical first-person narrator. As explored later, they express a Japanese colonialist and Orientalist eye for exotic nature and human affairs in which the viewpoints of a colonial functionary, tourist, literary enthusiast, artist, and folklorist are interwoven. His Nanyo stories attempt to resist an effect of NanyoOrientalism by admitting to colonialist anxieties and showing the colonizer’s indifference to the indigenous people. Nakajima represents both the islanders’ resistance against Japanese assimilationism and the narrator’s (or his own) sense of ambivalence both toward Japan’s colonial policy and Western colonialist romance, and he does so subtly enough to pass strict wartime censorship. In the first two stories of “Tales of the south islands”— “Happiness” and “A married couple”—the narrator describes Palauan legends. In the two stories, the narrator appears only as a narrator. He is not a neutral or transparent narrator (his vantage point remains on the outside of Micronesia), but he does not make his presence felt as a character as in Nakajima’s other Nanyo stories. In the stories, Nakajima ironically depicts the liberation of miserable, servile savages. The colonial discourse of liberation—

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dehistoricized by the use of the stereotyped Pacific—is reallegorized, destabilized, and transformed in these two pieces. The tale in “Happiness” reverses the positions of a pitiable and timid manservant and his spiteful master, the richest elder in his village.2 The manservant, accepting his miserable life as his fate, comes to have a dream night after night where he exchanges his condition with that of his master. His master also comes to have the same dream every night. Before long, the manservant becomes more and more animated while the master grows more and more emaciated. In the end, both of them come to believe that the world in their dreams is more realistic than the one they live in during the daytime. In this way, the text suggests that fiction is closely related to reality and attempts a textual critique of the actual exploitation. In “A married couple,” the narrator introduces the Palauan customs of women fighting over a man in public and of unmarried women servicing men. A meek, pitiful, and servile islander is under the rule of his despotic, jealous wife, who often seeks and always wins such scuffles. He is too accustomed to her tyranny to escape from her, but a beautiful woman who has served him is strong enough to defeat his wife, and he finally runs away with the girl. His wife soon finds herself a new rich partner. In this tale, it is not outsiders but an islander—the bai girl—who delivers a man from the tyrant—his wife. A comedy of exotic gender relations serves as an allegory for dependency and liberation (see chapter 1). In “Hens,” the narrator/protagonist reports his own experience in Koror. The narrator asserts that for him, native people’s feelings are totally incomprehensible. It is odd, it seems to him, that those from naichi (the main islands of Japan) firmly believe that they can understand the islanders only in a few years’ stay in Nanyo. In the text, a native old man—a pitiable stupid-looking

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hunchback who happens to be a swindler—dies, leaving three hens for the narrator as a token of his gratitude. Well aware of how valuable the islanders find hens, the narrator asks himself about these bequests, concluding this story as follows: Did the old man intend to repay my kindness (if only it could be said “kindness”) to mediate between the [hospital] director and him? Or did he mean to apologize for stealing my watch? …how should I harmonize his cunningness left in my image through the incident on the watch with this gift of hens? … [The old man’s hens] deepened my feeling that the South Sea people were still inexplicable to me. (1: 250–251)

Hijikata wrote in his diary (the source text of “Hens”) of a “fierce-looking” but “tender-hearted” old native—a “good sculptor” to Hijikata—who requested him to intercede with a Japanese hospital director on his behalf (Hijikata 6: 73). The old man had hoped to take medical advice from a German missionary. Afterwards, the old man died, leaving three roosters to Hijikata. Touched by thoughtfulness of the old man, who was once a headhunter in his youth, Hijikata wondered: “is it possible to do without a clash of such a soft heart and such an atrocity?” (Hijikata 6: 75). Here, unlike Nakajima’s detached, well-advised description, Hijikata presents native cunning—though often a derogatory image in colonialist writing—in tones of respect. “Hens” does not portray the colonizers as completely self-assured against the colonized. A new teacher is concerned about his native pupils’ disobedience. The native attempts to resist against the narrator’s intellectual exploitation of trying to collect the people’s traditions by bringing him fake wood-carved charms and demanding higher wages. Contrary to the narrator’s expectation that the islanders would be unsophisticated and lack a sense of

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economy, the old man seems to him to be shrewd. However, when the narrator starts to think that the natives are becoming a little more sophisticated, the old man in turn appears as a timid, artless invalid. The colonized man confuses the narrator and escapes representation by the colonizing folklorist, who (in Orientalism) ought to know about the native people better than they themselves and be able to speak for them. In addition, Nakajima’s conclusion that the indigenous colonized people are inexplicable (absolutely different) intervenes in the predominant colonial discourse of Japan’s assimilation policy, in which the colonized are seen as originally different but potentially similar to the Japanese colonizer under the benevolent rule of the Japanese Empire. These three stories from “Tales of the south islands” show the death, dilution, and persistence of indigenous manners and customs under the successive colonial regimes of Spain, Germany, and Japan. “Tales” asserts that despite such changes through natural calamities, colonization, exploitation, Christianization, and Japanization, Nanyo is invariably incomprehensible to colonizers. In the colonial period, Micronesian people were usually represented as truculent and resistant to the iron-handed Spanish and German colonial governments, and then still idle and uncivilized, but made meek through Christianity, and more and more reclaimed by the Japanese government’s education of them. “Atolls” uses a documentary style. Importantly, the text shows Nakajima’s strategic positioning as critical of colonial official power (as with Robert Louis Stevenson) but representing it unofficially by retailing general colonial attitudes. In its first story, “A desert island,” the narrator tells about a “beautiful but lonely”—desirable but not quite—island in Micronesia, on which no one has had a baby for over ten years (Nakajima 1: 255). As some other writings of those days claimed, sterility was not unusual in Micronesia. The narrator denies scientific

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theories and concludes: “Probably the god [of their primitive religion] will have decided to put the people on this island out of existence. Even if I am laughed to scorn as unscientific, there is no other way of thinking” (1: 257). Then he goes to see the last girl of the island, anticipating that she “might be a marvelously beautiful and clever girl (though it is, of course, by the islanders’ standards)” (1: 257). This anticipation is reminiscent of the popular song Shucho no musume (The chief’s daughter; lyrics and music by Ishida Ichimatsu; recorded in 1930): “My sweetheart is the daughter of a village chief / She’s dark, but in the South Seas, she’s a beauty”—exotic/erotic but not quite (Peattie 216). However, he is disappointed by the “dirty, stupidlooking, undistinguished child islander,” lamenting, “Nature is not a romanticist as I am” (1: 257). Thus, he critiques his own investment in stereotypes while leaving intact a negative image of the native. The second story, “A woman in a house with oleander trees” (set in Palau), creates and transforms a space with a typical theme of colonial romance. The narrator, utterly exhausted, drops in at a native’s house to take a rest and finds a native woman—beautiful, young, and naked from the waist up—sitting with her eyes fixed on him. She has no tattoo because she has been educated at a kogakko (public school for Micronesians) where tattoos (a native tradition) are forbidden, but her left elbow is crooked in the way peculiar to Palauan women: she is depicted as Japanized but not quite. As in Western colonial sexual fantasies, her stare at him arouses his “erotic interest” in her and he can “clearly figure out what her stare means” (1: 263). However, the romance is transformed: he is unable to move due to his bodily weakening and “the spell of torrid magic” is suddenly broken (1: 263). A sudden shower washes the island and “[brings] people, animals, and plants back to life at last” (1: 265). The narrator

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thinks of “ginchiku” (silver bamboo), a word meaning “shower” that was used by Chinese poets of former days. After the rain, he runs across that same woman. She does “not turn her gaze on [him],” looking “emotionless, with an indifferent air, as if she does not recognize him” (1: 265). Her absence of expression challenges imperial eyes by ignoring them.3 The third story, “Napoleon,” is based on one of Hijikata’s notes. He wrote about a native delinquent—Napoleon, a thirteen or fourteen years old Palauan boy exiled for nearly two years for habitual theft—whom he met on an isolated island with a sparse population (Hijikata 6: 276–277). Napoleon was insolent and audacious, seeming not to repent of his sinful life at all. Hijikata noted that the very thought of Napoleon’s future made him feel as if he “met with the darkest side of the world” (6: 278). For such anger and despair, Nakajima’s story substitutes perplexity: the narrator is completely at a loss to understand Napoleon. The text represents the native boy not as “the darkest side of the world” but (with sarcasm) as a bad apple in the colonial world, appending some episodes to what Hijikata writes. From the viewpoint of the Japanese colonial authority, the boy Napoleon is eccentric, abnormal, and deviant. His delinquency is so uncontrollable to both the native adults and the colonial police that he is exiled from Koror to a remote island. He is socially marginalized and rejects colonial power: discipline, knowledge, and representation of the colonized subject. He also seems to be typical of the educated native or in-between type—cunning, with tastes awakened by colonialism that colonialism would not satisfy. In the text, the narrator contrasts himself with a Japanese policeman. Whereas the policeman devotes himself to capturing Napoleon literally, the narrator attempts to depict the boy as impossible to capture. Napoleon causes anxieties in the policeman, who ought to have firm authority over the islanders.

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The narrator closes the story with an impressive scene in which the always obstinate, sulky delinquent Napoleon is waving farewell to him. He feels embarrassed, incapable of understanding why he has been given this attention. Napoleon is kept inscrutable to the colonizing subjects. The narrator in the fourth story, “Noontime,” professes that Nanyo ought to be a locale to refashion his consciousness of himself and the world. He confesses, however, that he is unable to grasp the land or people of Micronesia which lie right before his eyes (as he cannot catch little hermit crabs running away as soon as they sense a sign of him), pondering as follows: You are not even looking at the islanders. You are only looking at Gauguin’s replica. You are not beholding Micronesia, either. You are just envisaging faded copies of the Polynesians which Loti and Melville depicted. What can I say about the eternity that you have found through your eyes with such pallid shells? How pitiable you are! (1: 278–279)

His pursuit of eternity is itself taken from Arthur Rimbaud’s Une Saison en Enfer, even as he challenges the “artificial/European/modern specter” (Nakajima 1: 278). As he lies down on a pandanus mat in a native shed roofed with palm thatch, a strange thing flashes into his mind: the gaudy souvenir stores of a kabuki theatre in Tokyo and the surging crowd gaily dressed in front of them. This “flimsy section of senseless, insubstantial life in Tokyo” also prevents him from “beholding” Micronesia and its people with “unborrowed” eyes (1: 280). The fifth story, “Mariyan,” addresses the issue of colonial syncretism—cultural blending and marriage of colonizing man and colonized woman—a conventional subject of Western colonial romances. The text, however, attempts to rewrite

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such stereotyped discourse by focusing on the narrator and the eponymous young native woman. She belongs to the most distinguished family in Palau and is very intelligent (she has been educated at a girls’ school in Tokyo); because of her unique position as a distinguished, intelligent woman, Mariyan (a widowed mother) cannot find a remarriage partner. Both the narrator and Mariyan feel alienated in their Japanese colonizing and indigenous colonized communities respectively. In Mariyan’s house, the narrator finds two Japanese books on the table: Eishi senjaku (An English anthology, 1922) by Kuriyagawa Hakuson and Loti no kekkon (The marriage of Loti, 1880) by Loti, who was famous in Japan as the author of Okiku-san (Madame Chrysanthème, 1887). To Mariyan, the narrator is one of colonial rulers, but the anglophone and francophone cultures are, as it were, the colonizer of them both. The narrator complains about cultural blending in Koror—the cultural and political center of the South Sea Islands—saying: Neither the tropical nor the temperate looks beautiful here. To be more precise, the beauty—whether the tropical or the temperate—does not exist at all. (1: 283)

For the narrator, Mariyan is the only being who represents the “ample Kanaka,” although she is not pleased about it because of the education she has acquired. For him, the Japanese books in her coarse native house and Mariyan dressed up in pure white are somewhat comical and heartrending. However, while he is reading a book, she is contributing her physical labor to work imposed on the island women by Japanese colonial authority. Despite this difference, Mariyan calls the narrator “Ton-chan,” his (and also Nakajima’s) nickname. For all his desire to see Nanyo, he feels embarrassed by this familiarity, or colonial mimicry, which disturbs the colonial order (see Bhabha 85–92).

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Unlike the narrator, who professes himself in thrall to European romances, Mariyan disapproves of the romance by Loti. She complains that it does not depict the “real South Seas,” saying “I’m not well certain of the past Polynesia, but that can’t be true!” (1: 286). In Loti’s novel, Rarahu waits anxiously until her death for her French husband who has returned home. Unlike Rarahu, Mariyan does not expect naichi men (including the narrator) to return. She avoids looking for a remarriage partner among naichi men, or going the way of Rarahu, and thus Nakajima’s text evades “a definite sense of doom” which controls Loti’s novel and Gauguin’s paintings (Nicole 107). “An abridgement of things South Sea,” the last of the six pieces in “Atolls,” is a patchwork of Nakajima’s diary and his letters to his wife and elder son during his fact-finding tours in Micronesia. Asserting that the view of Kusaie Island from the ship is like Oriental drawing rather than Gauguin’s painting, the text substitutes Japanese or Chinese traditional art for European stereotypes of Polynesia or the South Seas (1: 291). (Nakajima’s letter dated September 28, 1941, to his wife, Taka, said that the island looked like a “mountain in naichi” [3: 601].) The narrator comes across scenes that remind him of a desolate setting of a Japanese Noh play and an eleventh-century Chinese quatrain. The text avoids replicating the popular stereotype of the glittering South Sea Paradise and instead creates gloomy, lonesome images. This is, however, merely the flip-side of colonial Pacific romance. Nevertheless, when a native woman refuses to discount a basket woven from pandanus for the narrator, but does so on seeing his companion in a colonial helmet, the story exposes local politics. It also ridicules the helmut—this symbol of colonial power—as “worn-out, already formless, stained, besides, badsmelling and common” (1: 300).

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Nakajima’s diary dated September 29, 1941, succinctly stated that the Marshallese chief Kapua was a gentle young man around thirty, able to speak English well (3: 470). In Nakajima’s letter to his wife (October 1, 1941), it is written that the chief could speak both Japanese and English (3: 605). However, “Abridgement” describes Kapua in some detail as “dark but looking like an intellectual a little,” “always seeming nervous,” “appearing to barely understand [the narrator’s] speeches,” and too “reticent” to look like a great chief (1: 297–298). The great chief, who ought to be typical of the intrepid and talented natives, seems tamed; he is presented as being poor at Japanese and as having recently raised a disturbance by making his sister-in-law pregnant. He looks domesticated, but is actually not quite so. Colonial rule, as Nicholas Thomas suggested, usually carries with it a sense of anxiety about the intractability of indigenous societies (Colonialism’s 15). Except for Ishikawa Tatsuzo’s text leaving the problem as it is, in other writers’ Nanyo texts, the anxiety is transmuted into exoticism (Nakagawa Yoichi), replaced by a taste for the bizarre (Ando Sakae) or compassion for the natives (Wada Den; Maruyama Yoshiji), or attempted to be removed through enlightening the people and adapting to living in their society (Kubo Takashi).4 Uncommonly, Nakajima’s texts foreground the underlying unease of colonial control. Hijikata insists that instead of romance or fantasy, an honest report available for anthropology is necessary (8: 4). As Edward Said maintained, the task of anthropology was “no less aggressive”; it was “political, not simply scholarly” in order to reduce “incomprehensible others” into understandable knowledge (84, 294). Nevertheless, Nakajima’s representation of Nanyo as becoming all the more incomprehensible despite direct experiences of it and as not quite similar escapes anthropological knowledge. So, his texts

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can be said to resist more radically authoritative and popular Nanyo-Orientalism. In Nakajima’s texts, there doesn’t appear to be any happy relationship between the Japanese and natives, nor is there any sense of the mission to make native people happy; although, of course, this does not necessarily mean that he was free from the ideology of the colonial great cause. Indigenous people are created as unique beings in Nakajima’s texts, as new models of identity challenging normative discourses. In Japanese literary texts on Micronesia of the period, these beings living inbetween are depicted as suffering, threatening, or marginalized alien elements disrupting the tidy binary of “civilized Japanese” and “barbarous Kanaka” (e.g., Ando 105; Kubo 157–158).5 His texts do not reject but rather appropriate and deconstruct this European colonial fantasy of the South Seas.

DE-ROMANTICIZING COLONIAL PACIFIC LITERATURE FROM WITHIN Japanese colonial discourse reinforced itself as a diverse but normative entity by absorbing even skeptical ideas, such as Nakajima’s against Japan’s colonial activities. It should be noted that Nakajima’s Nanyo stories, like the works of his contemporaries, were limited by the traditional function of their monogatari (tale) form to mediating between the center and peripheries of the Japanese Empire. The ability of modern European colonial discourse to similarly contain a contest between obedience and disobedience can be seen in the general approval of the two South Sea novels of quite different kinds, Melville’s Typee and Ballantyne’s The Coral Island. This flexible dominance can further be found in works engaging with modern literary reform in Europe as well

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as debates over how the South Seas should be written about.6 From the 1890s to the early 1920s—during and after the brief period of the Western nations’ struggles with one another to capture Pacific island colonies in the late nineteenth century and the reorganization of worlds systems around World War I—romantic representation of the Pacific Islands on the basis of the binarism of civilized Westerners and savage islanders was challenged. This challenge can be seen in short stories put together in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Island Nights’ Entertainments (1893), Louis Becke’s By Reef and Palm (1894), Jack London’s South Sea Tales (1909), and William Somerset Maugham’s The Trembling of a Leaf (1921).7 These works never moved beyond a modern European perspective, but could be regarded as offering tentative objections to it. Contrasting these Western colonial writings with such Japanese ones by the previously mentioned writers helps to reveal nuances of ambivalence in both Western and Japanese colonial representations of the Pacific. Characteristically in those English and Japanese texts, barbarism and civilization are intermingled: unlike conventional South Sea romances, the texts focus on unrecoverable influences upon the colonizers (rather than the colonized) that colonial encounters cause, genealogical and cultural creolization resulting from such encounters, and islanders’ viewpoints toward incursive foreign cultures. The texts stress the differences, instead of the similarities, between the colonizers and colonized, representing islanders as “same but different.” In this respect, these works—now canonical South Sea/Nanyo writings—seem close to the long-standing Orientalist descriptions of exotic natives as “(same but) different.” However, this sameness in their works derives from the Pacific cultural blending rather than from a Christian humanitarian or scientific fixed view of the same human beings, or Homo sapiens. Such representations of the

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South Sea/Nanyo ought to be helpful when intervening in those colonialist similarity discourses—especially by Protestant missionaries and Japanese officials who implied that colonialists’ ways are no less favorable to the natives than to themselves— that justified imperial rules. Additionally, those texts’ depictions of heterogeneity in the subjects of Europeans, Japanese, and islanders partly oppose Orientalism’s binary of civilization and savage. The Pacific is no longer depicted as a locale for heroic adventures. In these texts, it is a living space for traders, sailors, missionaries, medical doctors, scholars, administrators, policemen, and schoolteachers—Western and Japanese people—and indigenes, islander migrants, half-castes, and Asian laborers (including the Japanese). The Western writers’ anti-romanticist strategies produced representations of ever-changing beings, instead of immutable beings who remained ideally innocent and uncivilized. They found a new possible depiction for the islanders in cultural mixtures, especially linguistic ones. At the same time, however, this realism leaves European imperialism and racism as faits accomplis in the texts. Despite the anti-romantic Western writers’ explicit denunciation of colonialist agencies, their recognition of the hybrid Pacific as the Other does not clearly lead to impeaching the existing colonial systems. The narrator’s (a white trader) closing racist remarks in Stevenson’s “The Beach of Falesá” can be given as an example: But what bothers me is the girls [the narrator’s daughters]. They’re only half-castes, of course; I know that as well as you do, and there’s nobody thinks less of halfcastes than I do; but they’re mine, and about all I’ve got. I can’t reconcile my mind to their taking up with Kanakas, and I’d like to know where I’m to find the whites? (71)

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In addition, London’s “The Inevitable White Man” (the author’s “raw statement of his lifelong belief in the overwhelming vigor and enterprise of his own breed of humanity” [Day, “London’s” xxvii]), which consists of a dialogue of three white men, is a case in point. It begins with Captain Woodward’s assertion to Charley Roberts, a bar manager in Apia, that “The black will never understand the white, nor the white the black, as long as black is black and white is white” (235). When Roberts’ adds, “[i]n proportion to the white man’s stupidity is his success in farming the world,” Captain Woodward replies: Perhaps you’re right, Roberts. Perhaps it’s his stupidity that makes him succeed, and surely one phase of his stupidity is his inability to understand the niggers. But there’s one thing sure, the white has to run the niggers whether he understands them or not. It’s inevitable. It’s fate. (239)

Roberts agrees to this view, which is the point of Captain Woodward’s tale following the dialogue. The narrator, representing the rest of participants in the dialogue, utters a question that is unanswerable to the three of them but important nonetheless: “I wonder what the black man must think of the—the inevitableness” (240). Notwithstanding Stevenson and London’s ironic criticism of Caucasian racial prejudices, it can at least be said that the writers could not imagine islanders who are not subordinated to European civilization. As for Japanese writers, they do not even express a palpable criticism of Japanese colonialist agents in their works, let alone comment on Japan’s rule over Micronesia. The writers do not tell a story in which Japanese colonial elites are overthrown, despite the centralizing of inconceivability of poor

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islanders (Nakajima), sympathy for poor Japanese immigrants in Micronesia such as peasants and young engineers (Maruyama/ Ishikawa), and native people’s protest against Japanese tourists and schoolteachers (Wada/Kubo) alongside cutting remarks at those authorities. Their restraint contrasts sharply with white characters’ tragic fall and death in the previously mentioned Western writers’ tales. This difference, it seems, had a background in the distinctive colonial governmental styles and national concerns in the Pacific colonies between the Western imperial powers in the period of the end of the nineteenth century to World War I and the Japanese imperial power in the 1930s to the early 1940s. Within Western colonial empires, the Pacific entities assumed only a modest place, generally regarded as small, poor, distant, and mostly insignificant. (This is true of the Japanese empire to some degree.) Britain, not wanting further expansion in the region mainly because of financial difficulties, had such little ambition as to initially refuse the petition of Australia and New Zealand for its annexing almost every island and reef in the Pacific. The Dutch had no more colonial ambitions in the area. French, German, and the US interests of trade and plantations grew, which threatened the colonists of Australia and New Zealand. However, this situation led to the extensive partitioning of interests among the colonialist powers in the Pacific—the partitioning “proceeded from no lust for empire on the part of the chancelleries of Europe, but from that chain reaction of fear that annexation by the other power would disrupt commercial interests, along with the pressure to annex or be annexed from insecure settler groups in the Pacific” (Hempenstall 34). In any case, Europeans in the Pacific were minority groups involved with conflicts of governmental, commercial, religious, and cultural interests depending on national, racial, vocational, and

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class differences, which were far from being monolithic. Overall, European imperialism in the Pacific consisted of “politicians in European capitals oscillating between enthusiasm and hostility, similar but unsynchronised waves of public fervour and indifference, a consistent resistance by state treasuries, and an irregular pattern of crises between islanders and European settlers” (Hempenstall 37–38). In Japan’s rule over Micronesia, too, there were fissures stemming from racial, class, and sexual issues (Okinawans, peasants, prostitutes, etc.). Nevertheless, the Japanese government’s effort to integrate colonial Micronesian territories more extensively and more quickly into a larger imperial economy produced a united bureaucratic system in the region, sustaining private investments in agriculture and industry as well as commerce and the flow of Japanese immigrants into the islands. Before the outbreak of the Pacific War, the population of the Japanese in Micronesia was almost double that of the Micronesians, with most of them residing in Saipan and Koror (Peattie 157–161). Compared with the Western authorities in the Pacific colonies, the Japanese colonial totalitarian system put more pressure on Japanese writers to uphold it and to refrain from accusing Japanese colonial representatives. On the other hand, the system provided the writers with more convenience and, at the same time, more despair at the unexpectedly diminished rarity of novelty (although this did not necessarily apply to the islands with a small number of the Japanese). With reference to this despair, the attitudes toward hybridity in the Pacific Islands feature a prominent difference between the Japanese and Western writers. In “Mariyan,” Nakajima describes a feeling of pity toward both the civilized islands and Japanized islanders and the civilizations transplanted into the islands. Nakagawa, Ando, Wada, Maruyama, Ishikawa, and Kubo have all kept

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their eyes on Micronesian uncivilized aspects (otherness), treating half-castes and highly educated natives merely as unnatural misfortunes in their works. The Western texts are, to some degree, in accordance with Nicholas Thomas’s assertion that “[c]ultural differences must . . . be acknowledged and interpreted, but should not occasion a kind of writing in which tribal people inhabit a domain completely separate from our own” (Entangled 8). As shown thus far, English and Japanese colonialist discourses usually insist on both similarity and difference, although the emphasized traits differ: by and large, colonizer/colonized relations are presented in terms of difference in English and similarity in Japanese. The intervention by the Western writers such as Stevenson into conventional colonialist fantasies is made possible through the idea that “this world is not only in the same time and dimension as our own, but has been partly constituted through transactions between societies, through our mutual entanglements” (Thomas, Entangled 9). This idea derives from within Europe’s perspectival representation or, in Mary Louise Pratt’s words, “planetary consciousness,” which is “marked by an orientation toward interior exploration and the construction of global-scale meaning through the descriptive apparatuses of natural history” (15). (Western artists’ and writers’ attempts, mainly since the late nineteenth century, to withstand this perspective turn out to be within this consciousness.) Although Japanese elites accepted the idea in the process of Japan’s modernization (Westernization), it did not eradicate the concept that the Japanese were distinct from foreigners not merely culturally or historically, but absolutely. This concept can be seen across the board in Japanese colonial discourses, even official ones, and the previously mentioned Japanese writers’ stress of difference proves to arise from their senses of incongruity in cultural and biological syncretism

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caused by the Japanese government’s assimilation policy in Micronesia. Inversely, based on such a view of absolute Other preventing Self/Other border collapse, Japanese colonialism can be said to emphasize similarity as a result of Japanization. Robert Louis Stevenson’s “The Beach of Falesá,” the selfstyled “first-realistic South Sea story,” made a decisive turning point in Pacific romance (Stevenson to Sidney Colvin, September 28, 1891, Booth and Mehew 7: 161).8 Despite a touch of racism and sexism, the text, with its formulaic framework (the white protagonist’s arrival on a beautiful island without any particular purpose, transracial love, exploration, and duel with the villain), leads the narrative into an unconventional conclusion.9 This story begins with the protagonist (who has been living for years in the Pacific) coming to his new island posting and encountering its native people. This occurs without the writer spending numerous pages on depicting adventures, fears, and expectations before natives ever appear in front of white characters. Furthermore, the story ends neither with his return home nor with his launch into a further adventure, but instead with his anticipation of life on the island with his half-caste wife and children. The protagonist and narrator, an English trader named Wiltshire, relies on the powerful local European trader, Case, who has a Samoan wife and who seems adroit and courageous. He is reminiscent of young British heroes in The Coral Island (in particular, Jack, showing strength and good leadership) and its Samoan girl, Avatea. The beach of a Pacific island colony symbolizes its European (mainly trading) community in the Pacific, which is closely related to European imperial power.10 At the stage of his coming to the island, it is fantastic (like “the Coral Island”) to Wiltshire, and Case is a hero (like the boys).

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Case’s power has permeated not only the beach but also the island’s bush interior. Falesá is virtually his empire, which he has established by destroying other European traders and taking advantage of the local taboos and animistic beliefs of the natives. Case targets Wiltshire: he marries the newcomer to Uma, who is the half-caste child of a native woman from another island and a white beachcomber, and whom the powerful white trader has put a taboo on. The reason why Wiltshire wishes to overthrow his rival is hardly a heroic, romantic one; he wants to protect his economic stronghold on the island, but he is also driven by jealous rage at Case having laid hands on Uma before their marriage. Although Case turns out to be an obstacle for Wiltshire, whether the powerful European trader should be also eliminated as desired by the natives (who, indeed, are in awe of him) is not clear in the text. Seen from islanders’ points of view, Case might not be absolutely evil. Likewise, Wiltshire is ambiguous in the story. As Roslyn Jolly asserted, “Wiltshire’s lack of selfawareness and his refusal to modify his preconceptions in the light of his experience make his narrative an unconscious satire on the assumptions of racial and cultural superiority held by most of Stevenson’s European contemporaries” (xv). Wiltshire’s obstinate and bloody murder of Case could be associated with the horrible scenes of native cannibalism in The Coral Island, for example. In this ironic way, the text makes a point that white men have now became savages too. Uma attempts to prevent Wiltshire from harming Case. Neither Wiltshire’s overthrowing of Case nor the savage means by which Wiltshire achieves it is necessarily what the islanders wish. Fear of European oppressors, along with resistance or subjection to them as well as the oppressors’ violence are well depicted in works by Becke, London, and Maugham as well.

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Louis Becke presented “not the imaginings of a fevered escapist but merely the everyday materials of South Sea life, related not for romantic titillation but only something recalled over a pipe on verandah by the lagoon” (Day, Louis Becke 59–60). According to A. Grove Day, Becke’s first published work, By Reef and Palm, “revealed for the first time the drama and pathos that might be found in the overlooked lives of South Sea traders, sailors, beachcombers, refugees from civilization, domineering white invaders, castaways, and wanderers of the archipelagoes, and their relations with the chiefs, warriors, ‘half-castes,’ and maidens of isles flung like small planets across the ocean from the Carolines to Easter Island” (Louis Becke 63). The story “Revenge of Macy O’Shea,” set in the Marquesas, describes a convict Englishman who in the end cruelly murders his halfcaste wife (who in turn has killed his half-caste sweetheart). The islanders either assist in or tolerate the barbarous execution, against their real intention. The somber atmosphere and simple drama is told without sensationalism or moralizing, in almost blunt style, as in other stories in By Reef and Palm and his following thirty-four books.11 Collecting material for South Sea Tales in his Pacific adventures, Jack London filled his raw yarns with “rough-hewn characters acting amid scenes of hardship and violence” (Day, “London’s” i). “Yah! Yah! Yah!” (a short story included in Jack London’s South Sea Tales) represents fear of white men from a native character’s standpoint. The white narrator translates the account of the Melanesian named Oti from Bêche-de-mer into proper English. White men are hell. I have watched them much, and I am an old man now, and I understand at last why the white men have taken to themselves all the islands in the sea. It is because they are hell. . . . What are you good for,

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Oti refers to a Scotchman trader—McAllister, the only white man on Oolong Atoll—who singlehandedly destroyed native people and now serves as a despotic ruler, mistreating the natives. “No one loved him, not even germs, while he loved only whisky, and still he lived” (125). In the tale, McAllister’s only words are several utterances of “Yah! Yah! Yah!” as if he were a beast. He is an embodiment of the “inevitable white man.” The natives do not attempt to resist, expel, or kill him. On the other hand, in London’s “Mauki,” the black servant Mauki requites like for like. Born the son of a chief, he is kidnapped and recruited into the Melanesian plantation laborers. The white master, a German trader named Bunster, applies force to his servants (including Mauki) arbitrarily every day, but he falls ill and killed by the young native. Mauki’s retaliation, however, is not merely a defiant response to Bunster’s tyranny. Bunster is displeased with the fact that the servant gives priority to observing taboos put on him since his childhood (never shake hands with a woman, never eat clams, and never touch a crocodile) over obeying his master’s order. He kills the “inevitable white man” so that he can keep the taboos, not for freedom or pure anti-colonialist motives. On the contrary, the trader’s head—a relic of the fear of colonialism—gives great authority to Mauki. He takes advantage of it to maintain his dignity as the chief of his home village in the Solomon Islands, and he acquires a reward for his long-standing labor from his plantation recruiter.12 “Mauki” is a typical tale of noble exile in the

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Melanesian setting: Mauki’s revenge is not vitally for the sake of the common islanders. In Somerset Maugham’s “Mackintosh,” Walker, an Irish veteran administrator of Talua in Samoa, is murdered by a native youth who has never defied the administrator until going to Apia (the colonial capital) and realizing how despotic Walker is. Walker seems tyrannical, selfish, arrogant, vulgar, simple, and instinctive to the protagonist, Mackintosh—his new Scottish assistant. Mackintosh has a furtive hatred for his boss, thinking that Walker should be eliminated for the sake of the natives and Mackintosh himself, and timidly connives at the young native man taking away his own gun to kill his boss. Walker, who is irreligious, illiterate, and fond of narrating legends of his past, is totally divorced from the sexual morality, racial consciousness, rejection to the intensity of the island’s nature, and thirst for reading that the pious, well-educated assistant possesses. His enthusiasm for nature was but the driveling sensibility of the drunkard. Nor had Mackintosh any sympathy for his chief’s feelings towards the natives. He loved them because they were in his power, as a selfish man loves his dog, and his mentality was on a level with theirs. Their humour was obscene and he was never at a loss for the lewd remark. He understood them and they understood him. He was proud of his influence over them. He looked upon them as his children and he mixed himself in all their affairs. (16)

Although he oppresses the natives, Walker resists administrators, traders, and missionaries in Apia who treat them with racial prejudice. Therefore, Walker’s death and Mackintosh’s succession to him is not necessarily desirable to the people. After seeing the old man die, entrusting the native people to him, and hearing the natives lamenting aloud, Mackintosh shoots himself dead.

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Unlike Wiltshire, fighting with Case almost to work off his personal grudge on him, Mackintosh has the righteous aim of bringing peace to the natives. However, the text reveals that the white protagonist’s sense of justice and mission is not accepted within the island community of the almost-indigenized white settler and the natives. In this respect, the text is quite different from The Coral Island, which depicts Jack’s enthusiastic sense of mission to deliver Avatea from cannibals as unquestionably righteous. In those texts—Stevenson’s “The Beach of Falesá,” Becke’s “Revenge of Macy O’Shea,” London’s “Yah! Yah! Yah!” and “Mauki,” and Maugham’s “Mackintosh”—fear and violence of white characters do not directly induce vengeful thoughts or actions in the colonized masses. It is for white newcomers rather than islanders to challenge existing colonialist power. For the islander characters, European colonizers’ violence is only terrible, not something to be fought against. Their fear of Europeans cannot be abated even though they are excluded. Although Mauki defies European authority when it tramples the islanders’ regulations, he does not deny the power itself and is shrewd enough to turn it to his own advantage. There, the problem is not the colonialist activity itself but the way of rule, which should not be removed but changed. This applies to Japanese literary texts about Micronesia from the early 1940s. Nakajima (or to be precise, the narrator of his reportorial pieces) suspected that the unquestioningly coercive way of education did not always take effect on islanders, who were incomprehensible to him. His and other writers’ comments on schooling show that there was a well-developed education program under Japan that is evident nowhere in the freebooting world of white colonization. Maruyama had an unpleasant feeling about seeing native children show too much respect to

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Japanese visitors like him (68–69). Ishikawa claimed that giving the Japanese-style education to native youths was nonsensical because they had no nationalism or familiarity with the Emperor, culture, or history of Japan (408). Kubo related that neither rigorous nor affectionate education proved to be effective in civilizing natives unless Japanese teachers made every effort to blend in with the community’s normal routine. Each of these writers posed a question about the ways of educating young islanders, but not about education or domestication itself. The relative lack of education for natives in white fiction is accompanied by an evident concern for interracial marriage based on the stress on racial difference. The argument that white colonial relations stressed difference over assimilation can be seen in fictional attitudes toward transracial marriage. In “The Beach of Falesá,” Wiltshire’s love with Uma is not completely romantic, as mentioned previously. Transracial love of the white protagonists for native girls in Typee and Le Mariage de Loti is depicted as fantastic and dramatic, indispensable in relating the stories of the earthly paradise but improbable in the real world. In The Coral Island, it seems impossible—Avatea appears as childish to even the English teenagers as Uma does to Wiltshire. “Falesá” counters these stories: transracial love can be realized in the Pacific, but it is not very romantic. Becke depicts various kinds of interracial love of white men and brown women in the Pacific (“but perhaps ‘love’ is too strong a word for these attachments, which are often casual encounters” [Day, Louis Becke 60]). These loves disillusion both the colonizers and the colonized who share a dream of peaceful married life between a white man and a colored woman. “Challis the Doubter” (Louis Becke’s short story included in By Reef and Palms) is an antithesis of “Falesá.” The white Australian Challis leaves his white wife, who he suspects is having an affair, and

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takes a local wife named Nalia on a Polynesian island. Regretting his love for the white lady, he hesitates to fall in love with his new wife. In the end, Challis leaves the island alone when he makes sure of the native wife’s true love of him and knows that she has conceived their child. In “Revenge of Macy O’Shea,” an Englishman, Macy O’Shea, brutally kills his local wife after she murders his mistress. His Portuguese-Tahitian half-caste wife, Sera, hates her violent husband but is too proud to overlook his relationship to Malia, a half-caste daughter of a powerful trader. O’Shea wants to divorce Sera to marry Malia, but Sera murders Malia and he then kills Sera in revenge. In “Brantley of Vahitahi,” an English seaman named Brantley cherishes his native wife, Luita, and their child. However, when his younger sister, Doris (whom he has left in Auckland), visits his island in the Paumotu Group to see him before she dies of consumption, Luita kills her child and herself, mistaking Doris for her husband’s white wife. At the deathbeds of his wife and younger sister, Brantley takes his own life. In Becke’s texts, “no effort is made to pump up pathos. Somebody kills somebody, and that is that. No effects of horror or regret remain; people died like this in the nineteenth-century Pacific” (Day, Louis Becke 76). Not all of Becke’s transracial couples attain such a tragic end. In his “A Truly Great Man,” a local white trader is praised by a tribal chief as a great man for his being straightforward, sympathetic toward native people, and devoted to his native wife and five-year-old child. This trader, Probyn, has been roving in the Pacific with his wife, Niabong, because of a murder he previously committed. Probyn answered all requirements. He was generally a rough character—a runaway from some Australian or American whaler, or a wandering Ishmael who, for reasons of his own, preferred living among the intractable, bawling,

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and poverty-stricken people of the equatorial Pacific to dreaming away his days in the monotonously happy valleys of the Society and Marquesas Groups. (118)

Probyn provides a picture of what Melville’s characters might have become had they stayed on in Typee and Omoo. This tale seems to suggest that a European husband would abandon his idea of residing in an earthly paradise if he were to avoid the catastrophes that Becke’s other tales come to. In Becke’s Pacific tales, the Christian ethos of love and jealousy—love romance—is out of place. A nomadic life is suitable for an interracial couple. Furthermore, these tales respond to Wiltshire’s concern about his half-caste daughters: even if they could marry white men, it would not be necessarily good for them. It is through literature (in the broad sense) that European illness of love was diffused.13 Maugham’s tales suggest this, describing through interracial love the contrast of literates and illiterates and highlighting tragedies of the former having such a concept of romance. The tragic white protagonists—Neilson in “Red” and Lawson in “The Pool,” as well as Mackintosh in “Mackintosh”—are men of wide reading. Neilson and Lawson’s distresses begin with their marriages to native girls. Neilson, a Swede who has been on an island of Samoa for decades, has a surprise visit from a white stranger. Calling himself a sentimentalist, Neilson came to the island in order to console himself with natural beauty after developing tuberculosis, married a native woman, and studied the local language—he is the stuff that Orientalists are made of. On the other hand, the white trader is so illiterate that a large number of books in the Swedish man’s room give him a feeling of something incomprehensible and hostile, and he is indifferent to his sentimentalism. Neilson tells him a local story of romantic love between a white man and a native

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woman, both of them young, pure, beautiful, and fresh enough to satisfy his Orientalist dreams. Bored with their monotonous life, however, this young man—Red—leaves the girl—Sally. In fact, this Rarahu-like pitiful girl is Neilson’s wife, who received his persistent courtship to fulfill her parents’ wish after Red had disappeared. For Neilson, with no confidence in his health and appearance, the romance of Red and Sally is his long-cherished desire—it is the reality for him even after she grows fat. While talking, Neilson suddenly finds that the ugly, obese trader in front of him is Red. In spite of their first reunion in decades, the old trader leaves with no account of Sally, and she does not recognize him. Facing such a harsh reality, Neilson determines to leave the island alone. In “The Pool,” Lawson—an Englishman who leaves for his new post as a bank clerk in Samoa—is as educated and has as much taste for romantic South Sea poems and myths as Neilson. He marries a half-caste girl, Ethel, who is like a heavenly maiden (but a former blackbirder’s daughter). He returns to Scotland with Ethel and their black-skinned child (its black skin gives him a shock). For Ethel, however, Britain and civilization hold no attraction—the memories of her life in Samoa are indelible. She leaves for Samoa with her child and her husband follows them to live on the island once again. But she, an illiterate islander, is not such a sentimentalist as he is. The more kindly he treats her, the colder she becomes. Steeped in liquor, Lawson commits suicide when he becomes convinced that she is having an affair. The romantic love that Neilson and Lawson feel toward the beautiful islander women is only familiar to Western-educated Europeans and such non-Europeans. Marriage based on such love is absurd and unnatural to Red (an illiterate European) and Ethel (an illiterate half-caste). This discrepancy in views of marriage shatters the expectations of both sides.

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Japanese people’s ambivalent response toward Western colonialist transracial love romances set in Japan, such as Pierre Loti’s novel Madame Chrysanthème (1887) and Giacomo Puccini’s opera Madame Butterfly (1904), shows their paradoxical preference for Orientalism and Occidentalism. Such obscurity echoes in how love with Micronesian women is dealt with in Japanese discourses. The Japanese colonial government favored marriages of Japanese men and Micronesian women in the noble cause of Japanization (Peattie 219). Although confessing their curiosity for love with islander women, the Japanese journalist Nonaka Fumio and the novelist Ando Sakae dissented from the government policy in their travel books. They asserted that such hybridization only produces tragic heretics unable to identify themselves either with the Japanese or with Micronesians (Nonaka 85; Ando 105). Marriages or liaisons of colonizing women and colonized men, more sharply arousing the colonialist fear of indigenization, were rarely mentioned.14 In Japanese texts, transracial love is portrayed less passionately: not very aesthetic (Ishida Ichimatsu’s song “Shucho no musume” [“The chief’s daughter”]), negative (Kubo), or realistic (Nakajima). The European image of “a porno-tropics” (McClintock 22) is restrained. Love with a Marshallese girl became a cliché by way of Ishida’s very popular song. This girl is depicted as exotic, but not very beautiful to a Japanese sense of beauty. In Kubo’s story “Public school,” the protagonist, a young Japanese teacher, falls in love with a native girl and, concerned about their child who would be born after their marriage, severs relations with her. He pulls himself together after a brief distress. As for the native, she does not care even a bit. (It is as if the text avoided negatively Wiltshire’s misgivings about his half-caste daughters or tragedies of Becke’s and Maugham’s white characters.) In Nakajima’s “Mariyan,” the native woman

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Mariyan denies Loti’s romance of Rarahu as unrealistic and rejects marriage to the Japanese because men from the mainland of Japan do not come back to Micronesia once they return home. (This realism is a point in common between the texts by Nakajima and those Western writers.) In these Japanese texts, either Japanese or Micronesian characters do not burn with or deeply suffer from love (although the difference of their views of love is presupposed). Colonial fears are more emphatic, with colonial desires repressed under them. Those models of non-European women who make little of predicaments are used in the European stories on the Pacific to invert traditional colonialist romance. Maugham’s Sally and Ethel succeed to Stevenson’s Uma in that after marriage to European men, they become sturdier rather than dying in obscurity as Loti’s native heroines do. Wiltshire narrates that this is natural: She’s turned a powerful big woman now, and could throw a London bobby over her shoulder. But that’s natural in Kanakas too, and there’s no manner of doubt that she’s an A1 wife. (Stevenson 70–71)

Whereas Maugham’s texts criticize romanticism by describing how the realities of life in the Pacific destruct white characters’ persistent “another realities” (Orientalism), “Falesá” does so by showing how Wiltshire can relinquish (not completely now but in the future) his Orientalism through his life with Uma. He is able to do that after a fashion not in the least because (unlike Maugham’s white characters) he is impious, harboring ill feeling toward missionaries, who usually despise traders. His defiant attitude toward the missionary authority that struggles to domesticate islanders helps him, to some extent, avoid projecting European ideals onto the islanders and accept them as they are.

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However, he takes advantage of the missionary power to cancel the marriage that Case has maneuvered and to marry Uma again properly on the basis of their mutual love. Wiltshire’s inability to discard the idea of marriage for love, which looks strange from the usual prewar Japanese viewpoint, shows the strength of Christianity even for an impious person like him. Missionaries’ power in the Pacific, although the Protestants and the Catholics had different strategies of mission work (Kiste 23), was political as well as religious.15 Melville described them critically as demolishers in Typee and Omoo, and Ballantyne approvingly called them saviors in The Coral Island. Whereas the missionary in these texts is, for better or worse, the imperial British (European) subject itself, in “The Beach of Falesá” he is only a model among some European subjects (though still powerful). However, in London’s “The Whale Tooth,” set in Fiji, the protagonist—Starhurst, a white missionary—is popular among some islanders, but is eaten by cannibals because he ignores their custom in the name of God. In Maugham’s “Rain,” a missionary named Davidson who is engaging in mission work with his wife in Samoa attempts to expel or reform a prostitute, Thompson, but instead has an affair with her and kills himself. The South Sea rain makes him go wrong. He is so rigorous as to be detestable not only to Thompson but also to Macphail, a medical doctor similar to the author. This story “no doubt has had a damaging effect on the popular image of the foreign missionary, for many thousands of readers and theatre- and cinema-goers think of a missionary only in terms of Mr Davidson” (Cordell 150). In Japanese-owned Micronesia, where some native people had already been reclaimed through Spanish and German missionary work, Japanese civil servants—mainly schoolteachers— played the role of missionary to Japanize the natives.16 Those

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Christian missionaries in the Western stories are self-assertive in the name of God, enthusiastic about propagation and education, and considerate toward islanders, blending in with their routine. Japanese schoolteachers in Japanese works are more or less authoritative in the name of the empire, or Tenno, terrifying native children into compliance (depicted in Maruyama, Ishikawa, and Nakajima) and are more concerned about engaging in power struggles with Japanese policemen than educating the schoolchildren. Kubo’s “Public school” depicts almost exceptionally dedicated teachers (like the white missionary characters in the Western texts) and their difficulties with islanders. In all cases, the teachers are not eliminated or thoroughly criticized in the texts because writing such a story would have meant treason against state power.17 The negative attitudes in the Western writers’ works toward missionaries Christianizing or Europeanizing the natives, along with their preferences for the South Seas’ superstitious or supernatural tales and native points of view, are two sides of the same coin. In “Falesá,” Wiltshire narrates Uma’s tales of witches and a boar, which haunt him despite his attempt to neglect them. In Maugham’s “Honolulu,” which contains Captain Butler’s strange tale about a young native man and woman, he wrote: It is the meeting-place of East and West. The very new rubs shoulders with the immeasurably old. And if you have not found the romance you expected you have come upon something singularly intriguing. . . . If I have dwelt on the incongruity of Honolulu, it is because just this, to my mind, gives its point to the story I want to tell. It is a story of primitive superstition, and it startles me that anything of the sort should survive in a civilisation which, if not very distinguished, is certainly very elaborate. I cannot get over the fact that such incredible things

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should happen, right in the middle, so to speak, of telephones, tram-cars, and daily papers. (200–201)

This taste for local mysteries seems typical of Orientalists, who often sought astonishment as well as romance. Maugham himself wrote in the preface to the collection: “I had always had a romantic notion of the South Seas, I had read of those magic islands in the books of Herman Melville, Pierre Loti and Robert Louis Stevenson, but what I saw was very different from what I had read. It was not nearly so romantic, but it was wonderful all the same” (xiii). Even so, Maugham’s stories alter such an Orientalist interest in local superstitious viewpoints or supernatural phenomena as a mere romantic desire for amazement into a dialogical anti-romantic behavior. Such viewpoints or phenomena ruin agents of colonial power. In a dispute over a native girl in “Honolulu,” a native Hawaiian mate’s (called “Banana” by Captain Butler) curse makes Butler critically ill. Such an enigmatic retaliation by islanders against Europeans can be seen, as already mentioned, in Maugham’s “Mackintosh” and “The Pool.” The natives of “Mackintosh” are grieved at the death of their white tyrants, and Ethel of “The Pool” feels all the more aversion to, rather than being moved by, her English husband returning to Samoa from Scotland for her. Those islanders’ unexpected responses bring the European protagonists to ruin. In Maugham’s tales, moreover, European visitors’ feeling of incongruity toward Europeans living permanently in the Pacific is expressed acutely. Walker of “Mackintosh” and a trader called Red of “Red” are depicted as enigmatic Europeans in the area. Furthermore, in “The Fall of Edward Barnard,” the young Chicagoan named Bateman is unable to understand his friend, Edward, who resolves to break up with Isabel—his beautiful, intelligent, fashionable fiancée at home—so that he can pursue

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a relationship with a Tahitian woman (with whom Bateman is secretly in love). This story, told in a Chicago framework, paradoxically represents an idyllic Pacific to which “[t]ravel agencies and steamship companies were, possibly still are, indebted” (Cordell 146). For Bateman, life in the South Seas is abrasive, and Edward’s deed is no doubt a “fall.” This fall, however, leads Bateman and Isabel to manage things as they wish, as does Edward in Samoa. Bateman proposes marriage to Isabel, and she confesses her long-standing love to him. Maugham’s stories (unlike Becke’s and London’s) focus mainly on some crucial effects of the colonial encounters of Europeans and islanders on the former rather than the latter, and syncretic cultural situations in the Pacific influencing Europeans through Europeans. Importantly, these stories by Maugham, although describing some impacts of the Pacific on powerful Europeans, do not allow the islanders to usurp or escape colonial power by force. In “Falesá” too, Uma, who becomes an atypically strong woman by the story’s end, is not in an equal place with white men. She is still in a position of the weak. Likewise, as the local storyteller Oti of London’s “Yah! Yah! Yah!” relates, the natives are resigned to their European rulers’ outrageous deeds because European colonizers are inherently “hell.” Uma and Oti cannot retaliate against colonialist powers by force as Wiltshire can. Those stories, however, indicate that these colonized subjects can affect the oppressors through their storytelling with their standpoints of the oppressed, not taking over European authority. This is significant because it seems to be important for decolonizing schemes to circumvent both being undermined by stronger colonial power and participating in the circulation of violence. Becke’s “Pallou’s Tâloi” and “The Doctor’s Wife” and London’s “The House of Mapuhi” and “The Heathen” also contain

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this perspective. In “Pallou’s Tâloi,” the half-Paumotuan Pallou guards his wife, Tâloi, against Frenchmen’s sexual desires and shoots himself dead when she dies of illness. Tâloi, a young islander brought up and educated in Sydney, could choose to part with her husband—a middle-aged uncouth trader—and marry a Frenchman if she wishes, but she does not do so. This couple gives a strong impression to the white narrator. In “The Doctor’s Wife,” the old native woman Lâgisiva ironically speaks of European customs of consanguineous marriage as “the beasts of the forest—the wild goat and pig—without reason and without shame” (125): Even in our heathen days we pointed the finger at one who looked with the eye of love on the daughter of his father’s brother or sister—for such did we let his blood out upon the sand. (125–126)

Appropriating a European viewpoint of heathens, Lâgisiva (a poor widow) ridicules a rich white doctor and his wife who is his cousin as more savage than the islanders in their heathen days. “The House of Mapuhi” is “the writer’s classic depiction of a South Sea hurricane,” in which a Paumotua family is released from the debts and exploitation caused by European colonialism (Day, “London’s” xxiv). A hurricane wipes out traders who have attempted to benefit from Mapuhi’s pearl by buying it at a bargain rate and transferring it in rotation up to France. Mapuhi’s mother, Nauri, finds a trader’s corpse during her drifting in the sea in the wake of the hurricane: It was Levy, the German Jew, the man who had bought the pearl and carried it away on the Hira. Well, one thing was evident: the Hira had been lost. The pearl-buyer’s god of fishermen and thieves [which “Hira” means] had gone back on him. (43)

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The text shows the native people’s belief that it is the local god who removes this agent of colonialist exploiters. Nauri, despite being an old woman, regains the pearl from the corpse, survives starvation and a shark’s attack, and returns home. Mapuhi, his wife, and his daughter also survive the calamity. In “The Heathen,” Otoo—a native and the only heathen of Bora Bora—is critical because he inspires the narrator—Charley, a white trader—to “[live] a straighter and better man” (172). He was no fighter. He was all sweetness and gentleness, a love-creature, though he stood nearly six feet tall and was muscled like a gladiator. He was no fighter, but he was also no coward. He had the heart of lion; and in the years that followed I have seen him run risks that I would never dream of taking. (169)

Otoo saves Charley’s life many times and dies in the end to rescue him from a shark. The native rejects conversion and waste of money in his life. Thus, not seeking for power or resorting to violence, the islanders of Becke’s and London’s tales affect white colonialist agencies in different ways. The texts make this kind of counterattack feasible through local standpoints, which are depicted as being hybridized to some extent but still different from the imperialists’ point of view. Stevenson’s “The Bottle Imp” and “The Isle of Voices” precede the aforementioned stories, such as Becke’s “Pallou’s Tâloi” and London’s “Mauki,” in that they have islander protagonists. In the two stories, which are both supernatural tales set in Hawai‘i just before the overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy by an 1893 revolt led by an American businessman and missionary descendants, Stevenson gives colonialist power to the native Hawaiians. Keawe, the protagonist of “The Bottle Imp,”

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buys a magic bottle containing a devil from a white man in San Francisco. The bottle is reputed to grant any request from its possessor, but it threatens to lead him to the inferno if he dies before selling it to someone cheaper than when he bought it. The bottle, its price already low to the nearly utmost limit, has been changing hands since Prester John through Captain Cook and Napoleon, functioning as a tool for imperial rules. In “The Isle of Voices,” the protagonist Keola’s father-in-law, Kalamake, is a sorcerer who works him hard and exploits an uncivilized island called “the isle of voices” where the cannibal islanders cannot see, but only hear, their foreign exploiters—Europeans and Asians, including Kalamake. Keola has the benefit of his father-in-law’s sorcery. These stories question whether obtaining or benefiting from colonialist power is really good for the native islanders. The native protagonists’ attitudes toward such power are vague, however. They rely on it and reject it at the same time. Soon after realizing his hope of building himself a mansion on the island of Hawai‘i by dint of the bottle, Keawe transfers it. However, he has to regain it for his fiancée—Kokua, a young islander girl— when he learns that he has contracted leprosy. Although they succeed in curing his disease with the bottle, they suffer from their need to sell it because the next time it is sold, the buyer can no longer sell it—it cannot be any cheaper even in Tahiti, where the value of money is low compared with Hawai‘i. In the end, a white whaler buys it from Keawe, not believing his warning that he would go to hell. Keola, although delighted with Kalamake’s praise of him for his hard work and enduring his exploitation for his wife, the sorcerer’s daughter Lehua, resolves to escape from Kalamake and leave Lehua and heads for the isle of voices. Just like Tom in Melville’s Typee, Keola receives every imaginable service from

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the islanders and takes a local wife, living in fear of being eaten. He escapes from the isle with the help of Lehua, who has tracked him, while the cannibals are struggling against an axe floating in the air, whose wielder is invisible and is likely to be Kalamake. The tale concludes with the couple’s liberation from the sorcerer, although they lose a fortune that they appropriated from Kalamake as a result of following a white missionary’s advice to subscribe it to funds for lepers and missionaries, which were both brought by European civilization. Stevenson’s Hawaiian protagonists live almost European-style lives, being men of European education, and play European-like roles in the tales. They receive strong support from their native wives just as Wiltshire, an English trader, does from Uma in “Falesá.” Both of the native protagonists visit geopolitically subordinate Pacific islands less civilized than Hawai‘i—Tahiti and “the isle of voices”—to follow their own convenience. The protagonists are, in a sense, intruders for the people of these islands. On the other hand, the texts emphasize their difference from Europeans. “Haole” (white) characters are inert, wretched, or drunken. Like Oti in London’s “Yah! Yah! Yah!” Keola knows “white men are like children and only believe their own stories” (Stevenson 112). As discussed, Nakajima also wrote stories with Pacific Islanders as main characters. All those islanders have no means by which to eliminate their oppressors, but they deliver some blows, albeit non-violent ones. In “Happiness” and “A married couple,” Nakajima enables the feeble islander protagonists to escape from oppression not by giving them power to overthrow the rules by force but by putting oppressing power (not the oppressors) out of existence through the enigmas of Nanyo. Therefore, it can be said that Nakajima’s tales headlined by natives show how power could be erased, whereas Stevenson’s counterparts indicate power’s shift and intertwist between the strong and the weak,

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although both obfuscate the boundary between the oppressors and the oppressed. Importantly, Nakajima creates a Pacific in which Western or Japanese characters do not appear. Whereas Western writers and other Japanese writers criticize ways of colonization, Nakajima’s target is colonialism itself.

RE-DISCOVERING A PACIFIC POSTCOLONIAL BODY THROUGH JAPAN Compared with the Japanese colonizer’s perception of colonized Pacific Islanders as inferior or lovable close others, they are depicted rather as inferior or lovable remote relatives in EuroAmerican representations, which most Pacific Island writers attempt to appropriate and subvert (see Simms 39–46; Subramani 75–94; Sharrad 3–7; Keown 107–184). Albert Wendt asserted in his influential essay “Towards a New Oceania” (1976): Up to a few years ago nearly all the literature about Oceania was written by papalagi [whites] and other outsiders. . . . The Oceania found in this literature is largely papalagi fictions, more revealing of papalagi fantasies and hang-ups . . . than of our actual islands. I am not saying we should reject such a literature, or that papalagi should not write about us, and vice versa. But the imagination must explore with love / honesty / wisdom / and compassion; writers must write with aroha / aloha / alofa / loloma, respecting the people they are writing about, people who may view the Void differently and who, like all other human beings, live through the pores of their flesh and mind and bone, who suffer, laugh, cry, copulate, and die. (17–18)

Western attitudes split between the Christian regard for all people as human beings worthy of salvation and the racist denigration

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of others as irredeemably savage and animalistic. Pacific Islanders, while critiquing these views in relation to colonial representations of themselves, are also heirs to Western thought and can transfer such discourse to other foreigners (Wendt, “Pacific Maps” 26; Hereniko 161). Works on the Pacific by such outsiders (colonial writers), even anti-romantic ones, are not acceptable to some Pacific Island writers. What is important for Pacific writers is not so much abrogating Western modernity as seizing the means of representing their world and people for themselves. Wendt wrote: Even serious artists such as Gauguin, Melville, Stevenson, and Maugham played a crucial role in establishing the sad myth of South Seas paradises. . . . As a writer I have so many literary straitjackets and myths about the South Seas to break out of in order to see my own people, honestly, truthfully. Still so much crap to unlearn! To some extent, I am still a stereotyped tourist wandering through stereotyped tropical paradises, a cliché viewing the South Seas through a screen of clichés. (“In a Stone Castle” 28) Our artists are borrowing Western art forms and materials and adapting them to explore their own visions and peoples. The novel is a Western form but we can now talk of a distinctively Pacific novel written by Pacific Islanders. . . . Our Pacific novelists put us at centre stage: they try to restore to us our dignity and selfrespect. (“Novelists” 89)

Wendt and Nakajima have important points in common as non-Western writers depicting the Pacific. As mentioned prior, Nakajima (like Wendt) was disappointed in Palau and realized (to borrow Wendt’s words) that he too had “so much crap to unlearn” if he was to stop “viewing the South Seas through a

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screen of clichés” by artists such as Melville, Loti, and Gauguin (“In a Stone Castle” 28). Wendt argued that outsiders “must not pretend they can write from inside us” (“Novelists” 89), and Nakajima did not pretend he could do so: he represented islanders as becoming more and more incomprehensible to him during his stay in Japanized Micronesia. The target of Nakajima’s critique is not only the Western colonial fantasy of the Pacific but also the Japanese colonialist discourse in which Micronesians are regarded as the lowestgrade Japanese. Toward the written word, Nakajima and Pacific Island writers have similar attitudes. According to Epeli Hau‘ofa, the written word (which was given through European missions and education) is “still strange to most islanders, even to those who are highly literate” (108). His writing is not something only for quiet reading in bed or in a library. It is meant to be read out aloud so that some of the beautiful and not so beautiful sounds of the voices of the Pacific may be heard and appreciated. (109)

Nakajima also made use of the rhythms and meters of classical Chinese and Japanese verse in his prose writing, which asks to be read out aloud. In doing so, he resisted writing in the unrhythmic, artificial style which had become accepted practice for Japanese people who had acquired it by virtue of translating Western literatures since the late nineteenth century. Such modern works from these writers, along with local traditional rhythm, was and is changing and connecting the national or local selves. In Ola, Wendt depicted kaleidoscopic changes in readers’ ( Pacific islanders and beyond) recognition of self and other through the Samoan protagonist’s world-wide pilgrimage and return. Wendt attempted to present an unknown “self” to

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Pacific Islanders that challenges and subverts comfortable and parochial conventions: The art of writing keeps leading me through and out of my accepted self into new areas of freedom and self. Now I know why such art is considered dangerous by many people and societies. It threatens, it challenges, it subverts who and what we are at any given time; it takes us into heresy, the new, the unexplored—and who wants to be challenged, subverted? (Ola 114)

This “art of writing” by Wendt is consistent with Hau‘ofa’s “oceanic identity,” which aims at moving away from fixed oppositional identities: “As the sea is an open and ever-flowing reality, so should our oceanic identity transcend all forms of insularity, to become one that is openly searching, inventive, and welcoming” (55). Wendt and Hau‘ofa’s proposal of a new regional identity as “something that should serve to enrich our other selves” was set against the backdrop of the rising tide of regional disunity of the 1980s (Hau‘ofa 42). The 1987 rightwing military coups in Fiji especially caused great damage to the ideologies that transcended cultural diversity such as the Pacific Way (43–44). Wendt had suggested “a pelagic Pacific regionalism” that “allows for modern ideas of movement and dislocation while retaining a flexible sense of regional locatedness” (Sharrad 250). Such recursive, ever-changing recognition of self and other is described by both the Pacific Island writers, who are seeking a Pacific self that transcends diversity, and Nakajima, who was engaged in dismantling a Japanese self that created an illusion of unity. Whereas Nakajima attempted to re-estrange the close others into distant others with anti-colonialist potentiality, Wendt more clearly articulated a new self.

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In Ola, Wendt’s depiction of contemporary Japan parodies stereotyped images. However, the sections on Israel are presented in a more serious mode, contrasting deep-rooted biblical illusions with obvious facts, especially the conflict between Jews and Palestinians. Europeans and Americans (the most familiar others to Samoans) are also severely criticized, especially in the description of the white settler New Zealand that “continues to run away from its true history, that is rooted in blood and piracy and plunder and racism” (67). Ola goes further to critique the expansion of white colonialism into a general global imperialist culture, accusing Manhattan—“[y]ou devour us, you feed us, you poison us, you will not free us” (112)—and a British woman “using art and a façade of respectability as a cover” to perpetuate a “[t]ypically colonial” outlook (209). So where does Wendt’s representation of Japan fit in this context? The Japanese, as non-Samoans, non-papalagis, and nonChristians, should be absolutely remote others—“very efficient and discreet arrangers of everything” (Ola 265). To visit Japan with a Samoan lover is Ola’s long-cherished desire, so that she can have an affair and rediscover “the feel/shape/sound/smell/ taste/flow and magic of a man’s body” (265). She says, “you’re different from them, more conspicuous because you’re larger than them—you’ll always feel a giant among the Japanese, a big-footed, clumsy meat-eating giant” (267). Such romantic, exotic experiences are much the same as what Western Orientalists have been imagining in the case of Japan. For Ola, before her actual visit, Japan is the “Land of Kabuke / Noh / Toyota / Kurosawa / and Kenzaburo Oe, one of my favourite novelists” (262). Wendt mentions Noh plays and Oe in other places. “When I went to Japan,” Wendt replied in an interview, “I really liked Noh plays, even though I don’t understand Japanese at all. It’s very ritualized, and very stylized. . . . Noh theater

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is very different from Western theater in that the actors all wear masks, which cancel out the individual facial expressions of the actors” (Hereniko and Hanlon 102). In Wendt (Ola), such traditional facelessness of Noh plays is closely associated with contemporary Japan’s tenuous and ambiguous I-ness (or Japanese self) or the indistinguishable self/other, which is an important theme for Oe Kenzaburo (see Oe). In his “Three Poems for Kenzaburo Oe,” Wendt wrote: In Samoan your name means ‘You’. When I tell you this you chuckle and say, No wonder I have always considered myself an alienated man—it is never ‘I’ but always ‘You’. (Shaman 10)

This concept of ambiguous, alienated self is also a significant theme for Wendt, “both indigenous and one of newcomers” (“Pacific Maps” 18). For Wendt, therefore, Japan is not merely a country in which contemporary tourist myths of the South Seas are “duty free, electronic, and manufactured” (“In a Stone Castle” 28). Ola’s Orientalism is disoriented by an unexpected Samoanlike scene of Tokyo: “[O]ver lawns under rows and rows of cypresses and pines that have been trimmed to look alike,” you begin to sense—and you’re frightened at first—that the trees are reading your every thought, and you try and shrug it off but can’t. It grips you tighter and you run faster, but the trees seem endless, their rows pulling you into their slender sadness—that’s the only way you can describe it, a sadness as deep as you’ve experienced in the mountains of Upolu and the lava fields of Savai‘i, the sadness that lies behind everything, waiting because it knows it is the end (and the beginning) of everything. (267)

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In Ola, this new image of the lava fields (“the essence of Samoanness” for Wendt) is estranged by a Japanese version in the “faceless” rows of trees (“Pacific Maps” 32). Wendt also wrote in one of his essays: “Reality is not fixed and permanent for everyone. . . . We live in what the Japanese describe as the ‘Floating World’ [ukiyo], an ever-changing approximation of what is” (“Novelists” 82). The lava fields (self) and rows of trees (other) are integrated under the Japanese concept of the transitory nature of things. The discourse of facelessness and putting a face to the unfamiliar offers a way into considering a Japanese postcolonial discourse of self and other. In Ola, Tamura-san, who (not mispronouncing his “l”s and “r”s) dispels Ola’s stereotype of the Japanese (“businessman—inscrutable, annoyingly polite and reticent, and a teetotaller”), ironically says, “all of us humble Japanese never give up hope of converting barbarians to our civilized diet” (268). Such assimilationism of outsiders is applicable to the standardization of insiders. He also says to Ola: Our Sun God has always been too far away for an ignorant peasant like me. Emperor-worship was for our noble classes, who enriched themselves in the Emperor’s service and in his golden name imposed a mass culture throughout our country, a culture centered on the Emperor and the aristocracy. Smaller cultures, like mine, were swept away. Now the Sun God has become faceless technology, money, television—all the ills of the societies we borrowed them from. (270)

Wendt not only criticizes Japanese imperialism; he also sees how Japan (like Samoa) has become prey to inequality and materialism, through this eccentric Japanese man. Tamura-san, captured and imprisoned in a British prison camp in Malaya during wartime, did not want to escape because in that camp

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he was “safe from patriotism, self-sacrifice and possible death,” and “he found a language he loved (apart from Japanese, that is)—English” (270). In Tamura-san’s words: One can love a people’s literature but not the people. Our British wardens were arrogant and ignorant, they hid the latter under a humourless inscrutability and pretence at learning and civilization…. And to think that our own aristocracy aped the English aristocracy! It wasn’t just technology we borrowed from the West . . . To the Queen of England! (270)

Such sympathy of Wendt toward the postcolonial Japanese or the Japanese as the colonized corresponds to that of Nakajima toward colonized Micronesians. Wendt’s text further stresses the Japanese ideology of sameness, using a cliché of the myth of homogeneity and uniqueness, wa: “we Japanese are united.” Unlike Nakajima’s texts that attempt to re-create the alterity of Micronesia against such ideology, however, Ola undertakes to destabilize stereotypes of Japan as the other. For Wendt, the wa is akin to the Samoan concept of va: “Our va with others define us. / We can only be ourselves linked to everyone and everything / else in the Va, the Unity-that-is-All and now” (307). Japan is no longer the exotic, ultra-modern-faced other to Ola. Wendt mentioned va in more details in his essay “Tatauing the Post-Colonial Body” (1996): Important to the Samoan view of reality is the concept of Va or Wa in Maori and Japanese. Va is the space between, the betweenness, not empty space, not space that separates, but space that relates, that holds separate entities and things together in the Unity-that-is-All, the space that is context, giving meaning to things. The meanings

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change as the relationships and the contexts change…. A well-known Samoan expression is “Ia teu le va”— cherish, nurse, care for the va, the relationships. (402)

In Ola, Japan is used not as a colonial other but as a point of connection in which differences can help the traveler discover aspects of her selfhood. This re-discovered selfhood is still her center, but no longer the uniquely essentialist “holy center” of her world (Sharrad 180). If Nakajima is engaged in unshackling Pacific Islanders from Japanization, Wendt’s Ola aims to Pacificize its outsiders. In his texts, Nakajima cracks fixed images of the Pacific and shows colonial contradictions. Attempting to go beyond (rather than settle) such conflicts, Wendt mingles Japanese and Pacific Island postcolonial elements, creating syncretic identities in his new globalized world.

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ENDNOTES

1. This chapter originally appeared under the same title in Hikaku Bungaku [Journal of Comparative Literature] 47 (2005): 239–260. It has been expanded and revised, and is used with permission. 2. Sasaki Mitsuru pointed out that “Happiness” is based on a Chinese classic in its plot (271–282). 3. Nakajima’s diary, dated January 19, 1942, only says that he and Hijikata dropped by at a native house to find an old man, two girls, and a young wife suckling a baby, her face having something suggestive (Nakajima 3: 491). Hijikata’s diary makes no mention of it. 4. Ishikawa Tatsuzo, Akamushijima nisshi (A journal of red insect island, 1943); Nakagawa Yoichi, Nettai kiko (An account of a tropical journey, 1934); Ando Sakae, Nanyo ki (An account of the South Seas, 1936); Wada Den, Sonraku raki (An account of the bare truth of villages, 1937); Maruyama Yoshiji, Nanyo kiko (An account of a journey in the South Seas, 1940); and Kubo Takashi, “Kogakko” (“Public school,” 1945). 5. Ania Loomba pointed out that scientific discussions of race fixed and developed stereotypical notions of civilization and savagery, realizing that all constructions of racial difference are political ones based upon human invention and not biological fact (104–123). 6. Bill Ashcroft et al. pointed out: The “respect” paid to cultures such as India and China … was also a way of asserting the ability of the superior European civilization which was “on the side of history” to absorb and surpass their achievements. African cultures … offered a much more challenge. This challenge could only be absorbed into the European frame as a mirror image, or more appropriately, the negative of the positive concept of the civilized, the black Other to the white norm, the demonic opposite to the angels of reason and culture. (159) [T]he disruption of [the canon of “classical texts”] by new, “exotic” texts can be easily countered by a strategy of incorporation from the centre. (196)

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7. After two years of voyaging throughout the Pacific Islands since 1888, the Scottish writer Stevenson became a resident in Samoa in 1889 at the age of 39 and spent the rest of his life there. Becke, an Australian, was an itinerant since 1869 at age 14 as an island trader, beachcomber, whaler, pearler, gold prospector, bank clerk, blackbirder, and supercargo. London, born in San Francisco in 1876, voyaged in the Pacific for two years in 1907–1909, visiting Hawai‘i, the Marquesas, the Society group, Samoa, Fiji, the Solomons, and other islands. The English author Maugham, born in 1874, spent several months in 1916 visiting the islands of Polynesia. 8. Roslyn Jolly suggested: What was new about his Pacific writing was its movement towards the realistic depiction of contemporary life. Although he also wrote children’s stories, travel works, and fantasy literature, Stevenson’s name had been particularly associated with historical romance; the new interest in contemporary realism was therefore a significant shift in focus. Stevenson was aware that his fiction was changing…. The real turning-point was “The Beach of Falesá,” which Stevenson saw as a groundbreaking work, in terms both of the fiction of the Pacific and of his own stylistic development. (xxvi–xxvii) 9. The text’s exoticism attained applause on the one hand, whereas its realism incurred its bowdlerization on the other. Barry Menikoff argued: Set in the Western Pacific, using the pidgin and rough slang of the region, and told by a white trader who sleeps with and later marries a stunning native girl, Falesá undermined the ethos of imperial England. It took for its subjects miscegenation, colonialism, the exploitation of brown people, and, indeed, the very idea of the white man’s presence in the Pacific. (4–5) 10. Judith Bennett wrote: “[Entrepreneurs] needed a colonial government to guarantee their possession and facilitate the procurement of labour; the government needed them to create revenues” (41). 11. Becke “in a sense started at the top of his bent, and maintained his standards, with some exceptions, through a decade and a half”

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(Day, Louis Becke 17). On Becke’s themes, characters, and style, Day argued as follows: “Becke’s themes are usually simple but avoid moralizing. His characters are also rather simple, as befits the setting in the South Pacific…Becke’s style is unchangingly straightforward, limited, and abrupt, although now and again his evocation of an island scene verges on the poetic” (Louis Becke 75, 77). 12. For plantations in the Pacific (except Hawai‘i and Fiji), labourers were recruited in Melanesia, mainly from the Solomons and the New Hebrides. The recruiters, known in the early days as blackbirders, introduced a system of indenture whereby islanders obligated their labour for a few years in exchange for subsistence, a small wage, and a bonus of cash or goods on their return home. In practice, islanders were often tricked or kidnapped. Some of them were reasonably well treated, but many were not, and their rewards were not always as promised. Sometimes by choice, a minority never saw their homeland again. At its worst, the labour trade—blackbirding—was akin to slavery, and towards the end of the nineteenth century public outcry forced the colonial powers to end the practice and institute controls over the recruiting and return of labourers. (Kiste 24–25) 13. Karatani Kojin suggested that Western European “passionate love” is an “illness” breaking out only in Christianity no matter how anti-Christian it might be. In Japan, those who were influenced by Western literature began to imitate Western love at the end of the nineteenth century. “Love” (renai, different from conventional koi) spread through “modern literature” (Nihon 106–107). 14. Ania Loomba pointed out: “If colonial power is repeatedly expressed as a white man’s possession of black women and men, colonial fears centre around the rape of white women by black men” (164). 15. According to Judith Bennett, “[a]t times [Christian missionaries] co-operated with colonial governments; at others they opposed them. Some missionaries shared the racial prejudices of their con-

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temporaries in government and business, but most tried to protect their converts from the excessive demands of these parties” (40). 16. In Micronesia under Japan’s control, it was public schools rather than Shinto shrines that functioned equivalently to Christian churches. “Officially dedicated in February, 1940, the shrine physically represented the power and authority of the Japanese nation in Micronesia” (Hanlon 96). “This most prominent Shinto structure, like all others in the islands, was never intended as a place of worship for Japan’s Micronesian subjects; rather, it served as a focus for their assumed awe and respect” (Hanlon 96). As for relations between foreign missionaries and the Japanese colonial government, except during the period of World War I when the Japanese navy restricted missions and mission activities, the Japanese government viewed Christianity affirmatively as instrumental in improving the natives’ literacy, health, and sanitation standards, appreciation of productive economic activities, and check against sexual license, until the approach of World War II (Hanlon 100–101). 17. On education in European-colonized Pacific Islands, Kiste wrote: In keeping with their objectives, Protestants and Catholics alike developed orthographies for some of the more widely used Pacific languages. To read the Scriptures it was necessary to be literate, and the art of reading was taught with great vigour” (23–24). Regarding education under Spanish and German colonial rule in Micronesia, Hanlon suggested: “In the early years of formal colonial rule, missionaries carried the burden of educating as well as proselytising; they were not without governmental support and assistance, however…. In general, mission schools placed particular emphasis on basic literacy and ‘practical’ skills, with advanced study for those students chosen to serve as missionaries to other islands or as local mission assistants” (102). However, “[t]he most encompassing, self-serving colonial education system belonged to the Japanese” (Hanlon 102). “What learning occurred generally consisted of rote memorisation and group recitation, with heavy doses of corporal punishment for incorrect answers or apparent laziness. (Hanlon 103)

CHAPTER 4

“JAPANESE DIASPORA” AND HAWAIIAN LITERATURE JAPANESE IMPERIALISM AND “LOCAL” JAPANESE POSTCOLONIAL CONSCIOUSNESS

JAPANESE AMERICAN CULTURES

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This chapter discusses the representations and re-creations of Japanese diaspora identities by contemporary writers from Hawai‘i, mainly in the 1980s and 1990s. To what extent are Japanese colonialism and neo-colonialism reflected in their works? How different or identical are those writers’ works and contemporary Japanese texts on the Pacific?

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Japanese postcolonial consciousness (see chapter 2) is also represented in literary texts from Hawai‘i, into which the tendency toward political and cultural decolonization in the Pacific, racial conflicts, and cultural blending in Hawai‘i are woven together. Sympathetic to Polynesian indigenous writers, local writers (descendants of foreign immigrants) in Hawai‘i appropriated and transformed the non-local vision of the South Seas, or South Pacific, held by outsiders such as settlers, tourists, and explorers. Among those writers who grew up in Hawai‘i, writers of Asian ethnicity have been taking the initiative in decolonizing representations of Hawai‘i by outsiders. Rob Wilson pointed out: Until the rise of decolonizing literature in the Pacific during the late 1960s in Papua New Guinea and Maori New Zealand, and in the 1970s as centered around the University of the South Pacific in Fiji and writers like Albert Wendt, Subramani, Patricia Grace and Vilsoni Hereniko, various genres of Western discourse coordinated, fantasized, and measured the cultures of the Pacific…. a literature of the Asian Pacific community of Hawaii did not emerge until the late 1970s and is still coming into selfconscious expression. (182)

Using vernacular words like haole (white folk) and pidgin in their works, the local writers of Asian descent are tied to each other as non-haole. In Darrell Lum’s words, “[t]he literature of local writers has a distinct sensitivity to ethnicity, the environment (in particular that valuable commodity, the land), a sense of personal lineage and family history, and use of the sound, the languages, and the vocabulary of island people” (4). This unity also rests on a shared plantation past which their ancestors experienced. Lois-Ann Yamanaka, a Japanese writer from Hawai‘i, said, “I write in the pidgin of the contract workers to

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the sugar plantations here in Hawaii, a voice of eighteenth-century Hawaii passed down to now third- and fourth-generation descendants of various ethnic groups. Our language has been labeled the language of ignorant people, substandard, and inappropriate in any form of expression—written or oral…. I was encouraged to write in the voice of my place without shame or fear” (Yamanaka, “Empty Heart” 544n, as cited in Hagedorn). Eric Chock encapsulated “modern Hawaiian literature” into the words “a shared sense of belonging and identity” expressed by Hawaiian people (7). He claimed “pidgin” to be authentic local speech: It is no secret that language has always been a crucial factor in Hawaii’s history. It is no secret that the so-called “blending of cultures” often manifested itself in a clash of languages, sometimes in a competition for sovereignty. It’s no secret that our own government, through its various organs, has attempted to suppress varying forms of languages in favor of one common language. And that ain’t pidgin they talking about. (7)

It is asserted that “the very success and strength of pidgin in literature should lead to the development of heroic works in pidgin,” although the use of pidgin in literatures from Hawai‘i is criticized on the grounds that it “badly limits and weakens the literature’s appeal to wider audiences” (Sumida 101). As Stephen Sumida suggested, the situation of Asian Americans in Hawai‘i, who “may seem to still lack deep historical roots in the islands,” is paradoxical: While people outside the Asian American groups tend to venerate the antiquity of what is presumed to be these people’s Asian cultural heritage, this same veneration tends to ignore or belittle contemporary Asian American

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NANYO-ORIENTALISM cultures. It thus contributes to a denial that such cultures, quite distinct from Asian ones, have been developing for more than four generations in Hawai‘i and elsewhere in America. (91)

In Hawai‘i, assertion of ethnicity is not necessarily a decolonizing movement. Rather, this could be an insertion into the mainstream at the expense of decolonization. In other words, in Hawai‘i, the claim of decolonization may be put in the shade by much more salient assertion of ethnicity against the US mainstream culture. In the complex dynamics of Hawai‘i, its local Asian writers attempt to highlight, animate, and re-create such contemporary Asian American cultures (as discussed specifically by Sumida), which are based on plantations. Scarcely any writers from Hawai‘i today “turn frequently and directly to ‘the traditions and languages’ of ‘Asia rather than to those of America and Europe’ in order to work ‘within their own environment’ and ‘to tell the story of their homeland’ ” (Sumida 107). On the other hand, Asians, as well as haole people, are “others” to native Hawaiians, although Susan Najita suggested that the distinctions between local and native have proven to be an obstacle to the decolonizing project (132). In fighting a radical assertion of Island identity as being different from US mainland and mainstream culture, Hawaiians of Japanese and Chinese extraction have often worked themselves into the AsianAmerican context (and indeed largely supported Statehood). In other words, their claim of island identity is concerned with their Asian ethnicity and supports Statehood rather than decolonization or independence. Thus, although they have usefully asserted local identity and developed pidgin as a viable literary language, they have not always had the general effect of supporting the expression and political rights of native Hawaiians. There is now a genre of native Hawaiian literature as opposed

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to the “local” (hybrid islander) one. The native Hawaiian writer Haunani-Kay Trask asserted: Contemporary writers who claim, through generational residence in Hawai‘i, that they are Hawaiian or representative of what would be a unique national literature of Hawai‘i, if we were an independent country, confuse the development and identification of our indigenous literature. Asian writers who grew up in Hawai‘i and claim their work as representative of Hawaiian literature or of our islands are the most obvious example…. Despite their denials and confusions, Asians in Hawai‘i are immigrants whose ancestors came from Asia. They represent an amalgam of immigrant cultures, sometimes called “local” in our islands. Obviously, they are not Hawaiian, nor can our culture suddenly become theirs through the use of Hawaiian words, expressions of Hawaiian spiritual values, or participation in nāmea Hawai‘i (“things Hawaiian,” such as hula, purification rituals, etc.). Neither length of residency nor occasional use of our language transforms non-Natives into Hawaiians. (“Decolonizing” 169)

Because of Hawai‘in Asian writers’ “identity theft” or “falsification of place and culture,” Trask insisted, “contrary to most contemporary Hawaiian work, Asian writing is not counterhegemonic; it is not particularly critical of the dominant literary culture or canon” (“Decolonizing” 170). She also asserted that in any local Asian writers’ works, the “celebration of pidgin English becomes a gloss for the absence of authentic sounds and authentic voices” (“Decolonizing” 170). As seen later, the local immigrant identities of the Japanese in Hawai‘i—negotiating with those of the Japanese, mainland Japanese-Americans, mainland Americans, local haoles, and Native Hawaiians— are marked by self-division or even self-abhorrence and split

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between the colonizer and colonized. Trask described the Japanese as imperialists equal to Americans, rather than the same partly Americanized “non-haoles” as other Pacific peoples, in her poem “Dispossessions of Empire”: Aku boats lazing on the aqua horizon; waves of morning, a seawind sun, salt hanging in the steamy Kona glare, lava black shore rippling along rocky outcrops, porous with loli. Slow-footed Hawaiians amidst flaunting foreigners: rich Americans, richer Japanese, smelling of greasy perfume, tanning with the stench of empire. (“Writing” 20–21)

Trask’s perception of the Japanese as neo-colonialists ranking with Americans can also be seen in the contemporary postcolonial self-awareness of both Japanese and Asian Hawaiian writers. However, the way these writers intervene in neo-colonialist and imperialist cultural hegemonies differs: native and local writers focus on their traditional indigenous cultures and contemporary hybrid cultures respectively, whereas Japanese writers concentrate on the perceived “other cultures” of the Pacific Islanders. The decolonization of Hawaiian literature rests on a foundation of native resistance, which can be dated to the planters’ revolt of 1893, but which gathered political and cultural force in the 1970s. Trask suggested that the national political and

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cultural movement’s growth “was preceded by a fundamental transformation in Hawai‘i’s economy” and pointed out the shift before and after Pearl Harbor: From dependence on cash crops of sugar and pineapple, and on military expenditures in the first half of the 20th century, Hawai‘i’s economy shifted to an increasing dependence on tourism and land speculation with rising investment by multi-national corporations in the second half of the century. (“Hawai‘i” 163)

This economic shift has lead to nostalgia for the old plantation days of heroic labor, influencing the formation of the local identity of the plantation peasant, seen in contemporary Asian writers’ works from Hawai‘i. These works depict the Japanese not so much as oppressors of native Hawaiians and other Asians (as in Trask’s poem) as a people oppressed by the white or Western culture. The early works in which the representation of Japanese identities in Hawai‘i is condensed are Milton Murayama’s All I Asking for Is My Body (published as a complete novel in 1975) and O. A. Bushnell’s The Stone of Kannon (1979). In these works, the Japanese immigrants are portrayed as wretched under the plantation system and its haole colonists’ rule. However, these works do not choose to depict the Japanese as oppressors of other Asian or Pacific people or rebels against American white oppressors. Rather than denouncing various Japanese and American authorities, the texts lay more stress on building a new worker community that still preserves ethnic cultural values. They also emphasize those people’s ties between and beyond generations despite their conflicts. Stephen Sumida pointed out that All I Asking for Is My Body

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NANYO-ORIENTALISM rests finally on a moral truth that evidently is not commonplace when applied to the ethnic groups and their situations in this novel. The usual misreading of the novel lies in a stereotypical, shallow—and racist—assumption that the American son must triumph over his immigrant parents in a war between their respective cultures, especially when these cultures are supposedly as incompatible as the Japanese and the American, and especially when the Japanese bomb Pearl Harbor near the novel’s end. This misreading is based on notions about “assimilation,” whereas to the contrary the novel’s local-boy protagonist Kiyo mocks those nisei who try to be “haolefied,” to imitate white people. The novel’s true import rests not on such generalizations about cultures and nationalities but in a radically different, humane way of viewing relationships between its issei and nisei generations and envisioning the Japanese American culture they share. (115–116)

Bushnell was a Hawai‘i-born, third-generation descendant of a mix of European immigrants (including Portuguese and Norwegians) to Hawai‘i. He attempted in The Stone of Kannon to tell the story of the Gannen Mono (the First-year Men), the first Japanese to arrive in Hawai‘i in 1868 (the first year of the Emperor Meiji) to work on the sugar plantations. He wrote in the preface: “If you are wondering why a writer who cannot claim a Japanese ancestor is telling this story, the answer is both simple and saddening: no novelist of Japanese ancestry has yet done so” (vii). From this standpoint of the other, Bushnell assumed and valued what the Japanese immigrants and their American descendants shared instead of emphasizing the conflicts between the two: Even though few Gannen Mono could read or write, all had been taught the virtues that count in the shaping of a man. Those important virtues of on, giri, and gimu—in

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other words, the values of loyalty, gratitude, obligation, honor, courtesy, and industry—have enriched the lives of all of us who have grown up in the Hawaii the settlers from Japan and their descendants have helped to make. (ix)

Such local non-native consciousness in Japanese American cultures is not based on postcolonial critique of the Japanese as colonizers. It is more concerned with filling the gaps in the national “melting pot”—racist and assimilationist—story.

PORTRAYING JAPANESE OPPRESSORS/OPPRESSED IN H AWAI ‘ I Despite these early influential works, there was a shift in representations of Japanese diaspora identities in Hawaiian works from the 1980s and 1990s. The rest of this chapter uses those Hawaiian novels and collected stories and poems published since the 1980s, which mainly focus on resistance against and reconciliation with American and Japanese authorities. Investigated first are works by Gary Pak and Chris McKinney, which emphasize the involvement of Japanese imperialism on Asian and Pacific subjects as well as local and metropolitan haole subjects. Next, works by Japanese writers from Hawai‘i (Jessica Saiki, Marie Hara, Juliet Kono, Lois-Ann Yamanaka, and Milton Murayama), in which local Japanese postcolonial consciousness is concerned, are examined. The previously mentioned doubleness of Japanese oppressors and oppressed is more clearly seen in Gary Pak’s The Watcher of Waipuna and Other Stories (1992). In the stories with native Hawaiian, Japanese, and haole characters, he expressed the postcolonial complexities in Hawai‘i. The Japanese as the colonizer, opposing and conspiring with haole, and the Japanese immigrants (and their descendants) as the colonized, struggling

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alongside native Hawaiians against haole, play important roles in the stories. In “The Watcher of Waipuna,” a mentally challenged Hawaiian named Gilbert Sanchez takes over the role of “the watcher of Waipuna” from a “half-crazy” Japanese old man, Nakakura (Pak, Watcher 21). The latter has been vigilant against “the frogmen who had come to Waipuna from the ocean during the War and were now hiding in the dense mangrove forest along the coast, some forty-plus years after the Big Surrender” (21). In addition to these vestiges of Japanese military colonialism, this story also depicts envoys of new economic colonialism of Japan. Japanese businessmen furnish funds for their haole counterparts, who attempt to buy Sanchez’s property in order to turn a quick profit. The marginalized Japanese immigrant and native Hawaiian (Nakakura and Sanchez, respectively) form a united front against those old and new colonial inroads. “The Trial of Goro Fukushima” depicts a Japanese boy named Goro who works as a gardener and is wrongly executed for the murder of the plantation manager’s wife. Unable to speak English, this Japanese boy is enigmatic for haole people, who think that “behind Goro’s always courteous smile a dark evil had been hidden” (98). This story describes the highhanded white and wretched colored castes, using a Japanese boy to represent the latter. People of mixed blood (hapa) show their sympathy for Goro, yet they do not try to save his life. They form a non-haole minority, together with the Japanese, serving the local haole hegemony while being suspicious of it. In “The Garden of Jiro Tanaka,” a retired Japanese park keeper named Tanaka finds a beautiful plant, with a ripened fruit which is “soft and cool” and has “the smell of the ocean” (175), playing music in his garden. Long hoping for grandchildren, this “tired old man near the end of a comfortable yet uneventful and

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meaningless life” (168) can dream of playing with children every night because of the fruit, which epitomizes the tropical Pacific, or Hawai‘i. Tanaka, having lived under haole control, dependent on handouts from white economy, finds himself deeply connected to the plant (or the Hawaiian land) and unable to do without it. When it wilts, he is troubled by a nightmare of a tempest, during which the plant recovers, not because of any artificial means like the use of manure or fertilizer, but as a result of the natural rainfall. This nisei’s experience of transition from a routinely Japanese-like life to a new phase of unshackled native modes is the process of obtaining a Japanese Hawaiian identity. These erratic Japanese identities, created in Japanese relationships with people (natives, hapas, and haoles) and nature in Hawai‘i, are re-viewed from a Korean immigrant perspective in Pak’s novel A Ricepaper Airplane (1998). An old Korean man named Uncle Sung Wha, who dreams of returning to Korea, tells a Korean youth called Yong Gil, who grew up in Hawai‘i, about history through an account of his own experiences in Japaneseruled Korea, Manchuria, Japan, China, and Hawai‘i. This story also comprises Sung Wha’s dying words. He says: No forget what I telling you, Yong Gil. Dis is history. Dis is what happen in da past. . . . No make forget, like how da haoles trying make us forget everything what was like befo’. Dey trying brainwash everybody, tell us how lucky live here, lucky come Hawai‘i, lucky live in America, all dat bullshit. Dose buggahs, dem stay changing what really wen happen every time dem write and rewrite one history book…. Dose Indians, dem should let them Pilgrims starve. (25)

For the Korean, who had been oppressed both in Korea and on a plantation in Hawai‘i, there is not “any difference between the American and the Japanese way of enslavement” (218), which

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parallels the message conveyed in Trask’s poem. American and Japanese imperialism is the target of resistance not with bullets but with words: I tell you, Yong Gil, nobody can tell one story like da people from our village. And das one truth. Yo’ harabagi— my uncle, my ajisi—he da spokeperson fo’ da entire village. Da Japanee come into da village and yo’ harabagi go make da kine fantastic-kine stories, he tell dem. And dem Japanee believe! Dem believe everything what yo’ harabagi tell dem, no matter haw fantastic da story. …He can fool anybody. If he living today, dey call him one good actor. Like Gary Cooper. Or Charlie Chaplin. Maybe even mo’ bettah dan dem. (240–241)

This text’s postcolonial intervention is based on the idea of “cleaving to colonial power in order to cleave from it” (to borrow Elleke Boehmer’s term “cleaving” [104–111]) as in any other anti-colonial nationalist text. Yet Pak’s text shows that Korean nationalism’s peculiarity stems from Japanese modernization and imperialism: Japan modernized itself not by directly absorbing Western languages and cultures, but by translating these into Japanese and by assimilating Japan’s colonized people, viewing them as the potential Japanese. Pak wrote: “Though we hate the Japanese, a good many things come from Japan that are helping our movement…These books are important. They are written by the Great Russian revolutionaries. Until the time comes when they can be translated into Korean, we’ll have to read these Japanese translations” (Pak, Ricepaper 139). In the eyes of Korean immigrants, Japanese workers were not accepted simply as their equals, the same plantation laborers ruled by haoles: “All da Koreans in da plantation wen get all worked up dey hear dis. Dey break dey hoe handles and attack

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da Japanee workers. Was one big, big fight. Korean … dey nevah da Japanee, even dey come same-same boat ovah heah” (Pak, Ricepaper 178). Criticism was also leveled at Korean elders, teachers, and yangban (the upper privileged classes), who were considered “just as bad and cruel as the Japanese, perhaps even worse” (66)—and “ourselves,” [w]e’re a colony of Japan, do you understand that? We Koreans still have our faces and our souls now, but soon, if this is to continue, we’ll be Koreans in face only. Our insides will be Japanese. Then, instead of rebelling against the Japanese, our insides will rebel against our outside. We’ll be rebelling against ourselves. Do you understand what I’m saying? And for some Koreans that’s what’s happening right now! (123)

However, just as in Korea, certain benefits of Japanese invasion are admitted in Hawai‘i, and individual differences begin to break up collective ones: But dis guy, dis schoolteacher—I think his name Watasomething, Watanabe, or something li’dat, I forget—but anyway, dis schoolteacher, somehow I feel he okay. He no look like beat you up, treat you bad, da kine dey had all ovah Korea. Later on, on da plantation, I meet plenny Japanee, but almost everyone, dey jus’ come from Japan: dey young, dey really no like what dey government doing in Korea. But was real strange find one guy like da schoolteacher dat time ’cause I thinking all Japanee, no matter what, dey all da same, dey all lousy and all like boss you ’round, steal yo’ things. (Pak, Ricepaper 174–175)

Shared politics can also overcome racial/cultural differences: And how’s my old friend Yamamura, that anarchist? One of a few Japanese whom I trust. I owe my life to him.

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A Ricepaper Airplane deals with the anguish and survival of Korean culture and morale (symbolized as a tiger) under imperial authorities and their cultural hegemonies and assimilationism. Such strong assertion of national identities is not seen in Pacific representations by Japanese writers from either Japan or Hawai‘i. Yet Pak’s works are akin to those Japanese works in that they represent the Pacific Islands as a locale of anti-imperialist resistance and depict the ambiguous Japanese self as both the oppressor and the oppressed. This oscillating self or self-critical aspect makes the postcolonial consciousness of Pak’s works and of those Japanese works seem, in Trask’s words, “not counter-hegemonic” (“Decolonizing” 170). The Tattoo (1999) by Chris McKinney—who is of Korean, Japanese, and Scottish descent—operates in the same manner. The Japanese protagonist, Ken, killed his father to protect his half-Korean and half-haole wife, Claudia, and he tells his life story in prison while his mute haole cellmate tattoos him with a Chinese character which means “the void” or “emptiness.” This tattoo artist says to himself: Sure, if you take all the pidgin out, exchange Ken with some white guy from West Virginia, then there’d be an audience. But Ken was Japanese and brought up in “paradise.” Paradise was never the compelling setting unless it was falling or lost. (80; italics original)

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Here, the text paradoxically distinguishes itself from normal English texts by its language, setting, and ethnically marked characters. The text first establishes a ludicrous and grotesque stereotyped Japan associated with the protagonist: first of all, there is the title “tattoo,” which is often associated with Japanese gangsters (yakuza), crime, and violence, as well as uncivilized Japanese people in the Edo period. The protagonist’s name is Kenji “Ken” Hideyoshi (Ken means “sword” in Japanese); Hideyoshi was the first [not last] name of the most powerful feudal lord of Japan in the late sixteenth century). His ultra-nationalist grandfather idealizes the Edo period as the time in which Western people and cultures were expelled from Japan (a conception based on the wrong understanding of the period). Ken has a samurai-like rigorous father and a musume-like beautiful mother. The text also refers to Momotaro (one of the most popular figures in Japanese folktales), Abarenbo Shogun (a popular Japanese TV drama about shogun Yoshimune, not Yoshitsune, another popular historic figure, as said in the text), and Miyamoto Musashi (one of the greatest swordsmen in Japanese history). The text also has characters typically identified with American and Japanese imperialism: a native Hawaiian plays the role of mediator for Ken who is an outsider in order to help him be somebody respected in Hawai‘i, not “just a Jap” as in the US mainland (133). This native Hawaiian hates haoles, who have “taken his land” and “killed his culture” or “his humanity” (63). Another character that appears in the text is a Korean immigrant—Ken’s mother-in-law, who is also the proprietor of a strip bar and a former “comfort woman” of the Japanese Army. The text attempts to do away with the stereotyped image of the samurai from Japanese imperialism and nationalism. Ken,

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a modern samurai whose hero is Musashi, has violent Japanese looks, which remind old Koreans of the Japanese occupation of Korea. He kills the three Koreans sent by Claudia’s mother to hamper his marriage to Claudia, one of whom was Claudia’s cousin, the namesake of her great-grandfather, symbolizing for her the Korean survival of Japan’s occupation. After coping with the suicide of his Hawaiian friend, Ken also kills his father, who (hating both haoles and Koreans) always waged a race war with Claudia. Through the eradication of those pure, authentic nationalist Korean, Hawaiian, and Japanese figures, and in Ken’s parting with his wife and baby, the text renews and beautifies the image of the samurai as an anti-authoritarian subject emblematized by the tattoo of a Chinese ideogram on his back, which epitomizes Musashi’s mystique of swordsmanship. By virtue of being Hawaiian, Ken delivers this traditional mystique from its modern image of imperial Japan’s morale. This heroic persona also represents a void left by historical, cultural, and ethnic conflicts in Hawai‘i—the void is formed as a new local identity that is produced by and separated from such conflicts. The texts of Pak and McKinney, as well as Japanese texts, treat the Pacific as a setting for dreams, adventures, homicide, flight, or unusual incidents registered amongst a group of people who are themselves unusual for being a migrant minority. However these two author’s texts do not portray islanders’ everyday lives as extensively as the works by Japanese writers from Hawai‘i, which are examined next.

POSTCOLONIAL JAPANESE

IN

HAWAI‘I

Works written during the 1980s–1990s by Japanese writers from Hawai‘i—including Jessica Saiki, Marie Hara, Juliet Kono, Lois-Ann Yamanaka, and Milton Murayama—focus on

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ordinary people’s everyday (though not uneventful) lives. Nevertheless, those works share some traits of Japanese postcolonial consciousness with contemporary Japanese writings on the Pacific—such traits include critique of both Western (United States) and Japanese neo-colonialism and racism, realization of not belonging to the Islands and of the difficulty in being indigenized, as well as recognition of the incongruence between local Japanese identity and a traditional Japan associated with militarism, patriarchy, and ultra-nationalism. The double ambivalence to the West and Asia/Pacific in Japanese postcolonialism is lasting and depicted in the contemporary works from Japan and Hawai‘i. Since the 1970s, gender consciousness has appeared in migrant, or local, writing. Jessica Saiki’s collections of short stories—Once, a Lotus Garden (1987) and From the Lanai and Other Hawaii Stories (1991)—and Marie Hara’s Bananaheart & Other Stories (1994) specify problems of the Japanese in Hawai‘i from the viewpoint of ordinary Japanese women from Hawai‘i. Hara’s “Honeymoon Hotel, 1895” depicts what were called “picture brides,” young Japanese women who were sent to Hawai‘i by command of their parents in order to marry plantation workers who had emigrated from the same province—men who these young brides know only by photos. Resigning herself to the situation, Sono tasted her disappointment without self-pity…. Luck was not to be Sono’s domain, and untested expectations were always a mistake…. If there was enough food to eat, enough clothing to wear, enough fuel for warmth and enough family to gather around in enjoyment of a pleasant evening, that was enough for her lot in life…. She could hear the voices of the women in her clan reminding her to be thankful that her widowed mother had one less mouth to feed. (Hara 13)

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Jessica Saiki and Marie Hara sarcastically showed in their stories how obedient, persevering, resigned women—as defined by the Orientalist image of musume—changed in Hawai‘i, how different their descendants were from them, and how intricate their relationships between these immigrants and their descendants were. In Saiki’s “The Old Ways,” aged Japanese women long for “the ways of their parents in Japan” (Once 22), feeling out of place and regretting the American ways of their children and grandchildren in their love of coiffures, cars, English names, dancing, and so on. On the other hand, the old women are also aware of other Japanese immigrants who attempted to live again the old ways in Japan but return to the islands after a while: “they were too used to things here…. True what people say, ‘Lucky come Hawaii’ ” (Once 25). In the end, old country thoughts, like re-touched studio photographs represented only the best, Sunday clothes. Distance of time and place made them appear more beautiful than they were. (Once 26)

Despite such differences due to generation and place, racism toward and by the Japanese remains invariable. In Saiki’s “Windows,” a white child invites her Japanese friend to her home, saying to her: “if anyone should ask you tomorrow, say you’re only half-Japanese, okay?” (Once 28). For the white girl’s grandmother, “half-haole and half-Japanese” (hapa) children are “altogether different” from “squinty eyed” children (28), who she does not want her granddaughter to play with. Conversely, in Saiki’s “Hapa Hapa/Half and Half,” to a hapa girl and her Japanese mother, who was born and raised in Hawai‘i and lives in the American mainland, Hawai‘i seems to be “the tropical Eden” (85). The girl can actually make some friends in her Hawaiian school, but her neighbors—Japanese

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sisters who giggle to her “the dreadful word ‘hapa’ ” (89) and throw stones at a crippled mutt—are cold devils spoiling the paradise for her. Hara exposes such unjust bias in a humorous way in “The Gift”: I wondered idly what you would have to do to get such fierce wrinkles. O-Baban, almost ninety, didn’t seem to have so many of them. Did you have to be haole to shrivel so much? Would half of me shrivel while the other half stayed tight? Would I wrinkle from head to waist or feet to waist? Or would it be the right half or the left half? They said I was hapa. Which half would turn haole? (86–87)

Such Japanese racism is aimed not only at hapa but also at “gaijin,” or foreign people. Saiki’s “Once, a Lotus Garden” also indicates that it is directed toward Okinawans. In From the Lanai and Other Hawaii Stories, Saiki draws attention to relations between haole men and Japanese women and the difference between the consciousness of the mainland and local haoles toward the Japanese; she also illustrates a relationship between a Japanese local man and a Japanese national woman. In “Oribu,” set in Hawai‘i in 1946, a Japanese couple and their daughter serve a haole couple. The haole husband, Oliver Finch, has a great liking for Japanese-style gardens and baths (ofuro). His Japanism is not confined to only gardens and baths: the Japanese daughter has a red-haired, white-skinned little boy called “Oribu”—whose actual name is Olive, but “Japanese people can’t pronounce ‘l,’ ‘v’ and ‘r’s’ too good” From 6). Saiki wrote, “I don’t think this is the first time such a thing happened in the islands” (From 6). In “Portraits,” which is set in Hawai‘i in 1938, Japanese fears of the haoles and biases about them are such that Japanese parents

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keep their daughter away from a white man although they are only friends. The white men’s taste for musume is depicted in a more contemporary version in “Specter.” In it, a haole man who found the traditional Japanese lifestyle the salvation of his nervous breakdown, seems to be “indeed Japanese”— “Clad in a dark brown yukata, Stillwaite himself, except for his white skin and Nordic features, embodied the oriental man lounging at home in a cotton kimono…. His eyes are slanted! Delicate in build, he moved his arms and legs as a man doing Chinese calisthenics” (From 88). This Orientalist does not begrudge what he has to pay for a local Japanese girl, who is usually “Miss Teeny Bopper” but plays the role for him of a typical musume—“the adorable Japanese woman, composed and uncomplaining, courteous, quiet and pliable as putty”— dressed up like a geisha (From 90). In addition to such tragic yet comical empty, interdependent relationships between haoles as colonizers and Japanese as the colonized, complicated interrelationships in Hawai‘i are described in terms of local and mainland gender conflicts. “From the Lanai” tells of a white couple who employ Japanese plantation laborers. The wife (a mainlander) finds herself a stranger to those Japanese workers, feeling “like a rich British colonist in India or Africa with a bevy of servants catering to every whim” (From 42), whereas the husband (who grew up in Hawai‘i) feels comfortable with them. “Tada’s Wife” depicts a Japanese couple: the wife is an extensive reader from Tokyo whereas the husband is an illiterate from Lunalilo in the Hawaiian countryside. To the husband, she is exotic, like “an umber-hued tundra bird transplanted to Hawaii” (From 45), whereas he is “a diamond in the rough” and she has visions of “molding” him into “her idea of a cultivated person” (48). This story of a colonial marriage trope concludes three years after their marriage, when, as

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everyone around them had warned, she returns to Japan with their daughter, leaving him despairing in Hawai‘i. To this discourse on Japanese identities from Hawai‘i compiled in Saiki’s and Hara’s stories, Juliet Kono, Lois-Ann Yamanaka, and Milton Murayama add different representations. In “Ojichan,” (Juliet Kono Hilo Rains), Kono writes her grandfather’s unique story, mingling a Japanese folktale Urashima Taro and his experience of a huge tsunami in Hawai‘i. The hybrid story is very impressive to her, related to the complexity of her world: I imagined myself on the back of Urashima Taro’s turtle transporting me deeper and deeper into the depths of the high-towered, pot-bellied building where the priest sat meditating in front of the Buddha. (Hilo 56) Suddenly, the cane turned into a swaying green sea. The rice birds flew up and swirled around like a fish. And I was riding Urashima Taro’s turtle once more—driving deeper and deeper into the green. (58)

This old Japanese tale adapted for local Hawai‘i is a vehicle for depiction of Japanese Hawaiian diaspora identities. As to intergenerational conflict, Kono expresses it from an “upstart and wayward” sansei-daughter’s viewpoint in “Reconciliation”: You’re forgiving of the small imperfections you find in your drawings as you have long forgiven those found in me. Mother, I have a confession. I, too, have long forgiven you for never having finished school

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Such discontent of an American daughter toward Japanese parents is depicted in Kono’s later work as criticism of both them and herself. The tone is both sarcastic and humorous. In “Before Time,” she enumerates every thinkable unorthodox being, discrimination traditionally made in terms of race, class, vocation, corporal characteristics, creed, family, language, accent, and so on: They said to marry only Japanese, and only some of our own kind; not zuzuben, batten, kotonk, hibakusha, eta, Uchinanchu— night-soil carrier, big-rope people. Before time, they said not to marry keto, gaijin, haole—hair people, foreigner, white; saila boy, Chinee, club foot, one thumb, chimba, mahu, glass eye, harelip, bolinki, pigeon-toe, Pologee, Uncle Joe’s friend, Kanaka, cane cutter, mandolin player, night diver, Puerto Rican, tree climber, nose picker, Filipino, thief, bartender, jintan sucker, Korean, paniolo, farmer, bearded, mustachioed, Teruko’s brother, daikon leg, cane hauler, lefthanded, right-handed, smartaleck, Christian, poor speller, commie, Indian, leper, Hakka, cripple, drunk, flat nose, old, Jew Pake, chicken fighter, pig hunter, moke, ice cruncher, opium smoker, one-side-eyebrow raiser, fat, olopop, skinny, Punti, thick lip, albino, kurombo. (Tsunami 123)

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On the other hand, “A Scolding from My Father” describes a warning against her: What kind Japanese you? Nothing more worse in this world than one Japanee who like be something he not. No matter how much you like— no can! No can be haole. … No can be Chinee. … And no can be Hawaiian. … Why you like be something you not? You no more shame or what? Eh, you no figa too, that maybe these guys they no like you suck around them? (Tsunami 124–125)

These works are penetrated by a theme of rejecting both disdain and longing for what one is not. This is a significant theme for creating a new identity to overcome generational, ethnic, and gender conflicts, which political authorities always take advantage of to justify their control. Kono represents this theme by depicting Japanese women who attempt to be as they are. Such attempts are presented in “The Elizabeth Poems” in Tsunami Years (1995) with the struggles of a Japanese wife nursing her haole mother-inlaw with Alzheimer’s disease, and they are also developed in the short story “Rock Fever” (2001), published in Bamboo Ridge. Lois-Ann Yamanaka, by contrast, depicts a warped sense of self-hatred and inferiority complex in relation to haoles

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in “Tita: Japs,” a poem in her Saturday Night at the Pahala Theatre (1993). I like see your strawberry musk. ... I ain’t one fuckin’ Jap like them. Their eyes mo slant than mine and yeah, I one Jap, but not that kine, the kine all good and smart and perfect ... That kine Jap is what I ain’t ... Oh yeah, he told me he go surf down Honoli‘i. I wish he would ask me for go with him. Gimme that strawberry musk. (31)

In her three novels following this impressive poetry, a different perspective on Japanese diaspora identities is offered by describing Japanese girl protagonists. Wild Meat and the Bully Burgers (1996) insists on taking the protagonist’s self as it is, illustrating her struggle with her feelings of shame toward her own Japanese heritage and her longing for a haole identity. It similarly shows the urge to conform to dominant images. Yet the text also shows the drive to escape conformity within the migrant enclave. The protagonist is scolded by her father for the first time in her life as a result of her deep-seated desire for a different cultural identity: “You always make like we something we not, I tell you. When you going open your eyes and learn, hah? You ain’t rich, you ain’t haole, and you ain’t strong inside. You just one little girl” (260). She hates her Japanese classmates, who all have “the same Japan pencils in Japan pencil cases” and “the same bubble-gum-smelling erasers,” “the same scent on the same day,” and the same “straight, long black hair with long bangs behind the ears” (190). Against this pressure of

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sameness, which penetrates Japanese colonialism, the protagonist has no word but “Oh yeah?” (191). However, Yamanaka asserted the necessity to object to such oppression: “Say something. / Say something. / Say anything but ‘Oh yeah?’ ” (195). Similar to her grandfather (a plantation laborer who came to Hawai‘i from Japan in 1907), who had great sentimental value for a package containing soil from Japan, the protagonist, who puts some soil from Haupu Mountain in a package, cherishes her adopted homeland of Hawai‘i. The American girl’s package of soil is comparable to her Japanese ancestor’s in appearance. Yet their contents are different: hers is not Japanese but Hawaiian. However, Yamanaka expresses attachment to Japanese identities through the protagonist’s sense of distance from her uncle who, living in Guam, has a “real nice haole accent” but does not know about Japanese shows that she watches on TV (264–265). With this ambiguity as the underlying tone of her work, Yamanaka in turn described protests against haole teachers in Blu’s Hanging (1997) and reconciliation with a haole boy in Heads by Harry (1999). In Blu’s Hanging, the protagonist girl becomes conscious of her own value through her Japanese teacher’s anger with her haole colleagues: “You are so condescending, Tammy, it’s pathetic. I’m a Jap to you. And my friends are all brownies. It’s written all over your face every minute of every day. I’ve had to put up with your judgment of us and your snide remarks for months now. I’m no dummy, so don’t you ever talk down to me, you undastand”—Miss Ito’s pidgin English comes out. I’ve never heard her use it. “ ‘Cause you keep acting stupid, Tammy, you keep on lifting your haole nose in the air at me and my friends, you going hear worse things than ‘haole’ come out of this Jap’s mout’.” (128)

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Miss Ito’s pidgin English—local hybrid culture “cleaving to/ from” hegemonic power—functions as a medium to represent Japanese Hawaiian identities, like a new version of Urashima Taro in Juliet Kono’s story. At the same time, it is an indignant voice of a local woman that breaks local non-haole people’s silence. This silence, as Stephen Sumida suggested, “has been forced upon these people of Hawai‘i by authority and circumstance, in punishment, perhaps, for someone’s having spoken out in insubordination,” and is no longer a virtue (227). In Heads by Harry, a Japanese family takes charge of a haole boy, holding a sense in common that they are local non-natives who cannot belong to their place completely. I still don’t know who was happier—Billy or Mommy. Billy, who needed somebody like Mommy, unconditional with her biting, blunt, local kind of love, or Mommy, who needed someone to mold into another teacher’s success story of which Aunty Mildred had none. Billy was part of our family, the kind of haole that wasn’t a condescending mainland haole. He was a local haole who took no offense to the word, and laid-back with his body. (95–96)

As the protagonist’s brother makes clear, ethnic pride and selfhatred are both dead ends: “Us Japanese even think we’re better than Okinawans and Ainu and they’re Japanese too. All us damn locals crumbing around the floor for the same crumbs. . . . I mean, everybody hate the Japs. Excuse me for living. Even we hate us, and we Japs. That’s why we all rather have hapa kids, so the blood mix—we no like be pure Jap no more” (221). Nevertheless, the protagonist attempts to remain friends with the haole boy forever—rather than being lovers—despite his love for her (and probably vice versa).

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Yamanaka’s representation of the Pacific is said to be more “mysterious and exotic” than most outsiders’ (such as Stevenson, Maugham, and Michener) perceptions of the Pacific (a comment by Atlantic Monthly presented on the cover of Heads by Harry). Her main characters, local youngsters, are involved in such issues as homosexuality and autism as well as having two biological fathers. Yet it is not Hawai‘i people but outsiders who judged Yamanaka’s representations “mysterious and exotic.” As mentioned earlier, Milton Murayama’s representation of the Pacific also tends to be misread by complacent metropolitan perspectives. However, as with Kono’s and Yamanaka’s works, the aim of Murayama’s texts is not to celebrate younger American generations’ triumph over older Japanese migrants. Murayama’s works attempt to present new trans-Pacific diaspora culture and standpoints by depicting resistance and reconciliation, although his Hawai‘i is not very mysterious. Following his influential novel All I Asking for Is My Body, Murayama’s two other 1990s novels focused on Japanese plantation identities in Hawai‘i. In All I Asking for Is My Body, the story is told from Kiyoshi’s perspective, who can see in proper perspective the conflict between Toshio (Tosh)—his elder brother and the first-born son (chonan)—and their parents. In Five Years on a Rock (1994) and Plantation Boy (1998), the focus is on their mother, Sawa, and Toshio respectively. Despite their confrontation, Sawa and Toshio both vainly attempt to renounce their plantation life, unlike Kiyoshi who can break with this identity by settling on the US mainland. It may be said that changing the focus from Kiyoshi to Sawa and Toshio in his works makes it clear that Murayama’s interest is not in depicting Japanese people’s escape from plantation colonialism but in creating new Japanese identities from Hawai‘i that are inseparable from such colonialism.

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In All I Asking for Is My Body, pidgin symbolizes the way for the Japanese in Hawai‘i to resist both haoles and the older-generation Japanese. Murayama wrote, “we spoke four languages: good English in school, pidgin English among ourselves, good or pidgin Japanese to our parents and the other old folks” (5). This suggests that the resistance against the educational (US official) authority is more intense but seems invisible to the authority and that the resistance against the older-generation Japanese is reconciliatory. On plantations (“which is likened to “organized toilets” in the text), “Mr. Nelson was top shit on the highest slope, then there were the Portuguese, Spanish, and nisei lunas with their indoor toilets which flushed into the same ditches, then Japanese Camp, and Filipino Camp” (96). Freedom was freedom from other people’s shit, and shit was shit no matter how lovingly it was dished, how high or low it came from. Shit was the glue which held a group together, and I was going to have no part of any shit or any group. (96) Everybody in Kahana was dying to get out of this icky shit-hole . . . . Besides, once you fought, you earned the right to complain and participate, you earned a right to a future. (98)

However, in Murayama’s texts, such a fight is not only against oppressors but also against oneself: freedom from plantations meant overcoming plantation mentality rather than escaping from them or eliminating autocratic authorities. “Gaman” (perseverance, endurance, or patience) is a key concept of Five Years on a Rock, the title exaggerating a proverb “Three years on a rock,” which means that perseverance will win in the end. Sawa, coming to Hawai‘i as a picture bride, endures physical and mental suffering inflicted by her husband, mother-in-law, sister-in-law, and

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unbreakable poverty caused by the plantation system (9, 43, 54, and passim). “We’re taught from infancy to gaman and gambaru. Patience and perseverance are second nature” (49). “We gaman too much … it’s a Japanese disease” (144). It is not so much a virtue as how to manage to survive. Such a persevering Japanese woman can be regarded as a postcolonial agent against her husband and sons, who attempt to flee from plantation labor, and also against characters in contemporary Japanese texts who escape from reality in Japan into the Pacific Islands. Sawa persuades her husband, who sticks to his trade of fishing only to reduce his family to more poverty, to return to the plantation in order to pay debts that his father left them (150). Her patience brings them back to the plantation system to surmount plantation mentality, which fetters her husband even though he escapes from the plantation. In this sense, her gaman challenges both plantation colonialism and feudal patriarchy. For Toshio, clearing off their debts, which is actualized through Kiyoshi’s gambling in his army life (this is depicted in All I Asking for Is My Body as an unexpected twist at the end of the story), does not lead to overcoming his plantation mentality. In Plantation Boy, Toshio keeps making strenuous efforts to become an architect and obtains a license in the end. Yet he realizes that “the same old plantation plot” is everywhere, especially after statehood, “the final nail in the coffin” (143). However, he wishes to choose to “strike out on [his] own” rather than to “keep working for [their] colonial paymaster” (178). The key concept of this story is anger, Toshio’s rage toward haoles and his parents. Shit! The plantations wen bring our parents to work the canefields! We born here! We fought the Japs and the Nazis! We only thirty-five percent of the population, but

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Murayama wrote: “You can pretend to be anything in Hawaii” (162). Peasants act like samurais, Japanese people like haoles, and colonized like colonizers. Such pretence or self-colonization (Westernization or modernization) is the essence of Japanese colonialism, and challenging toward it is the point of Japanese postcolonial discourse, as suggested earlier. Not pretending to be anything, Sawa and Toshio are tenacious but forceless, nonviolent resisters armed with perseverance and anger respectively, both against American and Japanese colonialism and authoritarianism. Contemporary writings both from Japan and Hawai‘i show postcolonial consciousness, that is, (self-)critical attitudes toward Japanese colonial and military invasions, tourism, economic enterprises, and racial and gender consciousness. These writings criticize the Japanese people’s self-colonization and their colonized self by depicting their relationships to both Pacific Islands and people and the US/haole political, economic, and cultural hegemonies in the regions. Such postcolonial representations indicate complicated textual negotiations in the Pacific and create Japanese diaspora identities being hybridized and migrating. Despite the similarity of contemporary works from Japan and Hawai‘i, their postcolonial modes are different in that the

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Japanese writings deal with retaliations of the Pacific Islanders against the Japanese, even if noncommittal or lukewarm, whereas Hawai‘i’s recent works accentuate the creation of new identities, which are provisional and local, based on self-criticism, and both challenging and reconciliatory.

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ENDNOTE

1. This chapter originally appeared as “Postcolonial Negotiations in the Pacific: ‘Japanese Identities’ in Literary Texts from Hawai‘i” in Ritsumeikan Gengo Bunka Kenkyu [Ritsumeikan Studies in Language and Culture] 19.4 (2008): 293–313. It has been revised and is used with permission.

CHAPTER 5

COLONIAL MIRROR IMAGES OF MICRONESIA AND JAPAN BEYOND THE TUG OF WAR BETWEEN “AMERICANIZATION” AND “JAPANIZATION” 1

POSTCOLONIALISM

FROM

GUAM

Mariquita is a landmark work in Micronesian literary history: it was first published in 1982 by PPH & Co. in Agana, Guam (the principal center for creating and publishing literary work in Micronesia), as Mariquita: A Guam Story; it was then republished in 1986 by the Institute of Pacific Studies of the University of the

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South Pacific, in Suva, Fiji (the hub of Pacific island literature publishing), as Mariquita: A Tragedy of Guam. In Micronesia, where Americanization had permeated the islands under the pressure of US military and political power, the postcolonial writing’s target ought to have been the US hegemony or the modern Western literary world, as with writing from former colonies in Polynesia and Melanesia. Yet Mariquita highlights Japan’s wartime occupation of Guam as well as US rule. The author, Chris Perez Howard, was born in Guam in 1940 of an American father and a Guamanian Chamorro mother, and he was raised in the United States. Mariquita is a story about his mother’s life: her happy girlhood, love and marriage with his father, and her suffering and mysterious death during Japan’s invasion in World War II. However, Mariquita is not a simple biography. The author wrote in the preface: “I never realized that the history of Guam was so confusing and so often contradictory. To try and decipher the truth from conversation so richly embroidered with imagination was also difficult. But the most difficult was trying to remain emotionally uninvolved when the story was about my mother” (vi). Therefore, he wrote this story both as history and as literature. He actually wove photographs, letters, diaries, newspaper clippings, and other items from those days into the text along with archival research and oral family testimony about Guam and his mother. Mariquita’s postcolonial intervention can be seen in its critical representation of Japanese imperialism. Japanese imperialism emphasizes sameness as a result of its policy of assimilation, with which explicit social and economic segregation is regarded as compatible. Mark Peattie examined how the assimilation and segregation were compatible in Japan’s mandated territory of Micronesia: while the watchword of the “merciful, philanthropic Japan Empire” was cast over Japan’s colonies,

Colonial Mirror Images of Micronesia and Japan 173 the Micronesians were fixed at the lowest strata of the subjects in the Empire, discriminated socially and economically (219–220). However, Mariquita shows that, unlike the situation in Japan’s mandated territory of Micronesia, Japanization was superficial in Guam because of prior Americanization and also because the natives were treated more harshly (oppressed rather than assimilated) as they were seen to be allied to and tainted by America: The “Japanization” of Guam peaked during the summer of 1942. The island and all of the towns had been given Japanese names. The schools were re-opened to teach Japanese language and traditions. All American books were burned. The young children were required to attend classes each morning, and instead of pledging allegiance to the American flag, they now bowed to the emperor of Japan. If they were late for school, they were slapped or struck with sticks. People between the ages of thirteen and sixty attended evening classes twice a week. Gradually, as more people began living in semi-seclusion in rural areas and others found excuses for not attending, few adults were left in the educational program. (Howard 64)

The Japanese Imperial Forces destroy the peace and harmony of Guam as well as the newlywed life of Mariquita (the protagonist of Mariquita and the author’s mother). The people run about trying to escape the ravages of the war. Her husband is imprisoned and taken away to Japan. Mariquita thinks “how much she hate[s] the barbarians who [disrupted] their happy life” (Howard 62, my emphasis). The cruelties of Japanese soldiers and the fear and hardship of Guamanians during the Japanese naval rule from March 1942 to March 1944 are depicted in some detail. Mariquita exposes from the viewpoint of the colonized how

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empty the Japanization of Guam was and the illusory nature of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. Mariquita’s postcolonial criticism also turns against the US military action in Guam, although not as acutely as it does against Japan’s invasion. Despite the author’s emotional investment in the drama of his mother’s death, he attempted an objective, factual treatment of history. The epilogue steps out of the pro-American position (based on emotional links to the mother’s persona) and assumes an even-handed Chamorro position which substitutes for the mother. There he wrote, for instance: The sadness I feel for those who suffered injustice at the hands of the Japanese is deep, but I do not hate. The wanton bombing of the island by the Americans, especially the city of Agana, which had to be bulldozed to restore any semblance of order, to the extent that the old Spanish bridge now only points to where a river once existed, is to me equally unjust. (Howard 88)

Mariquita suggests that “a tragedy of Guam” consists not only of Japan’s outrage upon Mariquita (Guam) but also of the fact that Mariquita could not avoid the tragedy despite her trust in the protection provided by the United States. Although the Guamanians are “confident that the Americans soon would liberate them” (Howard 63), the “evil deeds” of Japanese soldiers make a victim of Mariquita: she is attached to their army as a comfort woman. One day, she is tortured for disobeying the head taicho and is led away to the woods by a Japanese official. It seems that she is killed there, but her body is never found despite a thorough search conducted by her relatives, friends, and American troops after “the Americans had liberated the island of Guam” (Howard 86). Mariquita’s body symbolizes

Colonial Mirror Images of Micronesia and Japan 175 an immortal postcolonial body rejecting Japanese soldiers’ rape and avoiding American troops’ identification of its death. Thus, Mariquita is a representation of the matrix of Guam’s national identity as well as the parent of the author. At the same time, with her symbolic immortality, Guam’s national identity is indomitable on the one hand but fixed on the other. The depiction of Guam’s cultural hybridity, although having some postcolonial validity in its criticism of imperial powers, lacks postcolonial diversity and provisionality to intervene in the traditional frameworks of colonialist fantasy. With respect to its emphasis on cultural hybridity in Pacific Islands, Mariquita is akin to contemporary works from other Pacific areas and anti-colonialist works by Western writers such as Robert Louis Stevenson, Louis Becke, and Somerset Maugham. Indeed, Guam as it is depicted in Mariquita is neither an immaculate paradise as in Herman Melville’s Typee nor a contaminated paradise lost as in his Omoo, which are both long-standing colonial tropes on the Pacific (see Pearson). In Mariquita, however, Guam is a “modern syncretic paradise,” although inequalities are alluded to: “Life on Guam was peaceful and harmonious…. The relationship between the Americans and Guamanians was overtly one of friendship and mutual respect. Racial prejudice, if any existed, was hidden” (Howard 23). The paradise is grounded in essentialist views of Guamanians’ “propensity for harmony” and the American soldiers’ “exemplary character” (Howard 23). The text juxtaposes the paradisiacal image of the South Seas with the infernal image of a savage world, another stereotypical view of the Pacific, which the text depicts as a battlefield instead of an island of cannibals. Such juxtaposition conforms to the South Sea representation in the film South Pacific. Mariquita paradoxically valorizes the powerful Pacific images, about which Rob Wilson

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argued: “Hollywood … operated with the Department of Defense to install a ‘concrete fantasy’ and images of the American Pacific as South Pacific” (166–167). Mariquita does not address the racial and gender discourses of colonialist fantasy in a conventional manner. Mariquita is not a stereotypical “pure” Pacific girl. Her Americanized lifestyle and sense of values disappoint Eddie, her American husband, so much that he reprimands her for her lack of “pride in her own culture” (Howard 38), saying: “Tippy, when I fell in love and married you, I also loved and married your culture and I don’t want to lose it. It certainly is confusing and mixed up, but it’s still your culture. You don’t have to give up your identity to become true Americans.” (Howard 40)

This episode suggests that indigeneity of the colonized (Chamorro-ness) is appreciated by the colonizers (Americans). In EuroAmerican archives, “Chamorro” implies voluntarily domesticated natives, compared with uncivilized natives called “Kanaka”; such dichotomies of natives as good Indian and bad Indian (e.g., available female and hostile male) form the keynote of European colonial myths to justify their colonization (see Hulme). In this sense, Mariquita is analogous to Pocahontas. For the American husband, Mariquita ought to be a comprehensible other, both assimilated and differentiated—something the colonizer can find to be both exotic and accessible; someone he can be proud to possess. His reprimand implies that despite its assimilation policy, US imperialism emphasizes differences rather than similarities. Guamanians, despite however deeply Americanized (as Mariquita was), have never been regarded as Americans even though the US military captured Guam from Spain in 1898. That is “a fact which upset Mariquita because she considered herself

Colonial Mirror Images of Micronesia and Japan 177 to be an American” (Howard 36). However, the text pushes such criticism into the background, unable to avoid developing variations of colonialist illusions: the colonized (Guamanians) admire the domination and assimilation by the colonizer (Americans), and Western civilization (the United States) delivers good natives (Guam) from evil savages (Japan). The liberation theology discourse of Spanish Catholicism is taken over and transformed by that of US militarism. The transracial love of the colonizing man and the colonized woman is also typical of European colonialist love romances. Mary Louise Pratt argued that the marriage plot in colonial texts is a “romantic transformation of a particular form of colonial sexual exploitation” (95). Mariquita reproduces the typical colonial trope—a happy marriage between a white man and an indigenous woman, their reluctant painful separation, and her tragic death—a pattern depicted in popular colonial fiction on the Pacific such as Le Mariage de Loti, Pierre Loti’s influential work which, according to Robert Nicole, presented “a romantic escape for the millions locked in the web of the industrial revolution” (106). In this work set in Tahiti, fantastic dreams of interracial marriage—the image of the devoted Polynesian wife whose marriage to a white husband allows her to rise in social status and economic security—are undermined by the male colonizer. Indeed, Mariquita transforms this colonial tragedy of transracial marriage into a postcolonial form to such an extent that it creates Guam’s national identity. In colonialist as well as nationalist writing, Ania Loomba pointed out, “racial and sexual violence are yoked together by images of rape, which in different forms, becomes an abiding and recurrent metaphor for colonial relations” (164). Whereas Mariquita’s postcolonial challenge refers to the colonialist possession by Japanese rapists, it does not fully extend to the other colonialist

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possession by Americans, which made the challenge possible. As the result, Mariquita resembles recurrent icons of miserable women of color. Unlike Mariquita, Jesus Naputi’s novel Nightmare Near the Kiosk (1983) is a work which, in the Guamanian author’s words, “attempts to bring to surface some points where historians disagree” (Author’s Note). The story is set in Guam during the initial landing of the Imperial Forces of Japan—near a kiosk, which is “still standing after surviving the rampant Japanese Occupation” and is “situated in Plaza de Espana serving many different functions of both government and private activities” (Author’s Note). The depiction of Guam in Nightmare, as in Mariquita, is based on opinions of ordinary people interviewed who annually commemorate the liberation with their gratitude, which is “taken as an irrefutable sign of American patriotism” (Diaz 152). Nevertheless, the two works are different in description of Guamanians’ American patriotism. In Naputi’s work, Pedro, a Guamanian Chamorro, is reluctantly convinced that he gave “his body and soul” to the US Navy for “the foolishness of sitting in the truck doing nothing except waiting for something to happen,” when the Japanese Forces launch their attack on his home island (4). The narrative expresses distrust of US rule through criticism against the Chief, a “myrmidon” who, in Pedro’s words, is “afraid to fire at those planes in fear of giving them the exact location of the Governor’s Palace” (7): Too bad the Chamorros have to suffer because the Americans and the Japanese have invented a war. See, the Chamorros have fled because the Americans failed to adequately train and properly arm them in order to counter the Japanese offense. I don’t blame them, really. They have put up with the Insular Guard. Well, it failed, and now they have to search for their displaced families. (49)

Colonial Mirror Images of Micronesia and Japan 179 Pedro professes himself to be a Chamorro, disagreeing with his Chamorro colleague’s popularly accepted pro-American opinion that “I’m an American by my belief”—“[When Americans come back] I’ll be fighting side by side with them against the Japanese” (12). As compared with Mariquita, Nightmare Near the Kiosk more explicitly describes suspicion against the United States: the latter clearly attributes Chamorros’ suffering and fear during the war to the indifferent and inappropriate control of the United States as well as to Japan’s cruel invasion. Yet the significant postcolonial voice also turns out to be a demonstration of Guam’s tragedy.

AMERICANIZATION/JAPANIZATION IN R E - IMAGINED M ICRONESIA Despite the postcoloniality that Nakajima Atsushi presents in wartime, contemporary Japanese literary texts on Micronesia are still under the influence of Japanese imperialist discourse. Moreover, the discourse has also been affecting Micronesians. Just as for Guamanians, the Japanese are newly arrived destroyers of more than forty years’ of secure US rule (as seen in Mariquita and Nightmare Near the Kiosk), so for Palauans, Americans are newcome rulers that demolish what the Japanese built up for about thirty years. In Guam and the Marianas, which “have been ‘Americanized’ and have adapted culturally to American values and models,” the United States has been “less oppressive than its administrative predecessors,” who “did little to take the cultural and social values of the natives into consideration during their colonial rules” (Torres 27). Palauans disapproved of the discourse of Americanization, which treated them as less than equal, despite the apparent principle of equality before God—in contrast, Japanization emphasized their equality before the Tenno

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(Emperor of Japan). Although neither Japanese nor American paradigms treated the Palauans as equal to their colonizers, comparatively speaking, the former highlights similarity, and the latter, otherness. Palau, once the center of Japanese-owned Micronesia at the time the Nanyo-cho (South Seas Government) was established in Koror in 1922, is still mostly influenced by prewar Japanization in the area despite its postwar Americanization. Dirk Ballendorf asserted that “[w]hile Micronesia is politically under the sphere of the United States, it is undoubtedly under the economic sphere of Japan” (“Colonial Experience” 13). He also insisted: “[T]he Japanese provided very sound models of industry and hard work to Palauans which … stood Palauans in good stead today in a more competitive world. The Japanese presence was the reason … why the Palauans today are considered to be among the most vigorous and determined of the ‘new’ Micronesians” (“Micronesian Views” 9). With respect to Micronesian views of the Japanese, Ballendorf and Higuchi Wakako pointed out that Micronesians—and especially Palauans—have tended to maintain positive views of the Japanese ever since the period of Japan’s mandatory administration (though some Micronesians express their complaints about the incomplete war damage compensation payments) (Ballendorf, “Micronesian Views” 9–11; Higuchi, “Islander’s Japanese Assimilation” 1). The positive views of the Japanese by Micronesians are closely related to their discontent with the US administration: “It is fashionable in Micronesia today to chide the Americans about the prosperous times under Japanese rule, while at the same time pointing to American economic neglect. Micronesians can see that economic activity in the islands can achieve some degree of viability, but wonder at the worth and relevance of American freedom and opportunity for all as a way of securing it” (Ballendorf, “Colonial

Colonial Mirror Images of Micronesia and Japan 181 Experience” 9). As Ballendorf wrote, “Micronesians who are in the midst of formulating criticism of the US presence are fond of saying that they were ‘better off’ in the Japanese times when at least everyone could work for money, rather than it is nowadays when unemployment and underemployment is rife, returning college graduates cannot find jobs, and various social ills abound” (“Micronesian Views” 11). Similarly, Higuchi contended that “[v]iewed from an island angle, there is a saying which symbolized Japanese policy toward islanders and related their fundamental attitude toward both the Japanese and American administrative period—‘Japan had kindness to do many things for the islanders but American did nothing except give some money’ ” (“Micronesia” 189). The typical idealized image of pre- and postwar Micronesians, according to these scholars, suggests that the elderly long for the past of Japanese rule, while the young reveal their interest in learning Japanese culture and language. Micronesians regard the Japanese as “very competent businessmen and serious developers,” and they enjoy “the Japanese life style of eating rice and miso soup” (Ballendorf, “Colonial Experience” 13; Higuchi, “Islander’s Japanese Assimilation” 12, 19). Similar views of Micronesia are also evident in Japanese postwar literature. At the same time, however, the abiding colonialist views are intermingled with postcolonial aspects in contemporary texts. Japanese postcolonial critical modes typically converge on the popular monster film Godzilla, first released in 1954, two years after the end of the United States’ seven-year occupation of Japan and immediately after the exposure to radiation of a Japanese fishing boat and a crewmember’s death in US nuclear testing in Bikini (see chapter 2). The film criticizes modern civilization and the cold war, identifying the Pacific monster and the Japanese as the same US bomb victims. The postcolonial

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modes emerge and are appropriated in 1980s texts such as Ikezawa Natsuki’s Natsu no asa no seisoken (The stratosphere on a summer morning, 1984) and Arai Man’s Sansetto Bichi Hoteru (The Sunset Beach Hotel, 1987). As shown in chapter 2, these texts harshly criticize US and Japanese military and economic colonialism, challenging the ideology of sameness—or the view of Micronesians as a less-evolved potential Self— which Godzilla takes over from Japanese colonial discourses. In the texts, however, Micronesia is both a victim and counterattacker, similar to the monster Godzilla itself. The images of the Japanese as assailants and of Micronesians as victims also resonate in Chris Perez Howard’s and Jesus Naputi’s texts in the 1980s. The Japanese works depict self-division, or even self-hatred, reproducing Japanese imperialism’s doubling in a new mode: both Japanese people’s criticism and admiration for the West (especially the United States) and their disdain and affection for the Pacific end up in self-destruction. How can the faceless self-image of the schizophrenic colonized Japanese colonizer, as well as the Guamanian selfrepresentation of colonized victims, be undermined to make a further step toward more decolonized representations of Self and Other? To answer this question, the key is to dismantle the discourse on the tug-of-war between Americanization and Japanization—or, in other words, to answer a question which Mariquita’s postcolonial scheme cannot overcome: which colonizer is better or, at least, less evil—the Japanese or Americans? Polynesian indigenous writings do not ask such a question. The writers acknowledge that the dominant experience is different— there is only one generic Western colonizer to focus on. In the “new South Pacific society,” as Epeli Hau‘ofa pointed out,

Colonial Mirror Images of Micronesia and Japan 183 the local elite and the colonial Anglo-Saxon elite from and in New Zealand, Australia, Canada, the United States, and Britain form one general privileged group in “a single regional economy” sharing “a single dominant culture with increasingly marginalized local sub-cultures shared by the poorer classes” (11). Japanese colonial and neo-colonial discourses have argued that the Japanese were and are better and closer patrons to Micronesians than the white rulers from Spain, Germany, and the United States. Ikezawa Natsuki showed the futility and self-deception of this argument in The stratosphere on a summer morning. The Japanese protagonist, Kimura, who is cast away and living on a desert island in the Marshall Islands, thinks himself to be more acceptable to island spirits than the American man, Myron, who is the only other habitant on the island. In contrast with Kimura, who has to survive his primordial life by hunting and gathering, Myron is dependent on modern conveniences that he has brought to the island. Yet Kimura culminates in depending on them, no longer closer to the spirits than Myron (see chapter 2). In the 1990s, efforts not only to problematize but also to go beyond the tug-of-war discourse emerge both from Micronesia and Japan.

A POSTCOLONIAL SHIFT IN 1990S TEXTS FROM M ICRONESIA AND J APAN Such refusal or appropriation of the colonialist argument in Micronesian and Japanese literary scenes results in transformation of Micronesian images of colonized victims both in Micronesian and Japanese texts. This transformation of images from victims to survivors is set amidst changing political circumstances, with the Federated States of Micronesia and the Republic of the Marshall Islands being granted independence in 1986

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and the Republic of Palau achieving autonomy in 1994. Vincente Diaz, a Pohnpeian/Filipino born and raised in Guam, pointed out that the United States “had already abandoned Guam to an imminent Japanese invasion” in his article “Simply Chamorro: Telling Tales of Demise and Survival in Guam”: … indeed, the supposed “liberation” of the Chamorros three years later was only America’s return with a vengeance. This vengeful act was directed at Japan, but it was also aimed at establishing a huge forward base and depot from which to carry out America’s military operations in the Far East. The massive destruction of Guam by American bombardment and immediate postwar base construction would profoundly alter not only the remaining topography and cartography of Chamorro culture as it withstood three centuries of Spanish colonization; it would also radically transform the culture of the topography and the cartography of the land itself. (157)

In contrast to Mariquita, which underscores “tragic Guam” and “miserable Chamorros,” Diaz presented tales of Chamorro in which there is “no image of war-torn refugees liberated by American freedom fighters” (151). Defying colonialist embedded perceptions of Chamorro people and culture as shattered, dying, or immutable, Diaz asserted as follows: … Guam’s history does not have to be understood as the definitive Euro-Americanization of the Chamorro people at the tragic expense of indigenous culture. Nor does Chamorro culture need to be understood in terms of an immutably bounded, neatly contained thing that was once upon a time characterized by essential qualities, pure and untainted, as Chamorro culture has (a)historically been conceived and represented. (143)

Colonial Mirror Images of Micronesia and Japan 185 Diaz’s intention to establish epistemologically decolonized Chamorro identities (that go beyond Mariquita’s self-representation) is resonant in the local literary journal Storyboard: A Journal of Pacific Imagery. Storyboard, which first appeared in print in 1991, challenges definitive fixed images of Guam, Micronesia, and Japan. Published annually, this journal is a joint venture of the Guam Writers’ Guild and the Division of English and Applied Linguistics at the University of Guam and is named after the pictographs painted on the Palauan traditional meetinghouse, bai, which are said to have been transferred to portable boards and sold to tourists under the influence of Hijikata Hisakatsu, and which produce a critical influence on Nakajima Atsushi’s literary text (see chapter 1 and chapter 3). The editorial statement of the first volume states: “To the present, there has been no outlet in Micronesia for the kind of writing which might earn a permanent place in Pacific literature. The rationale behind Storyboard, therefore, is to provide a vehicle for publication not only in English, but also in indigenous languages and the languages of the diverse immigrants who make their homes here…. We recognize that the imaginations of writers in the region are not bounded by geography, and we interpret our subtitle to include imagery from the Pacific as well as of the Pacific” (Lobban 9). The publication of the journal, a collection of miscellaneous local voices, is modeled after the movement of Polynesian and Melanesian postcolonial writing. As the fourth volume editor, Jeannine Talley, wrote: One does not have to dig too deeply to discover why there is an accumulated body of literature produced by Polynesians and Melanesians, but a dire lack of representative works from Micronesia. Support and encouragement. For at least three decades the University of the

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NANYO-ORIENTALISM South Pacific in Fiji and the University of Papua New Guinea have encouraged the development of indigenous writers in the South Pacific through workshops, special training and emphasis on creative writing and finally by publishing the efforts of a number of writers. Unfortunately there has not been this kind of nurturing of indigenous writers in Micronesia. In an effort to end this kind of inequity Storyboard was created, publishing its first volume in 1991. (5)

Through the emulative effort of Storyboard, Micronesia is producing regional postcolonial representations that not only emphasize both its hybridities and localities but appropriate colonial discourses by making positive use of its own colonial experiences. As an example of such decolonizing writing activities by Storyboard writers, four poems by Anne Perez Hattori (“Fanoghe Chamoru,” “Forefathers,” “Halom Tano’,” and “Thieves”) object to conventional (negative) images and historiography of Guam, which have been upheld by colonial and patriarchal authorities. “Fanoghe Chamoru,” the Chamorro title meaning “Stand Chamorros,” which is also the title of Guam’s national anthem, presents a lofty national image of “sunshine”—“Celestial crimson, / Sublime scarlet, / Religious rays of ruby REDness, / Arouse my alienated allegiance”—with “fresh-found fortitude” to withstand “sleep,” “exhaustion” and “fatigue” (40–41). Thus Hattori takes over Mariquita’s indomitable spirit and at the same time rejects her miserable image. In “Forefathers,” Hattori presented postcolonial gender consciousness deficient in Mariquita. The second poem objects to Guamanian historiography filled with sexual and colonial suppression, rendering “our foreFathers” “everything / or something / or even anything / to us, / Chamorro natives” (42, l. 14; 43, ll. 4–8). Hattori’s poem goes on

Colonial Mirror Images of Micronesia and Japan 187 to say that forefathers (“like washington and jefferson and franklin lincoln”) are “our historical superHEroes,” “gentleMEN,” “or so We’ve been educated, / again and again” (42, ll. 15–16; 42, l. 11; 42, l. 17; 42, ll. 12–13). Yet Hattori refuted the accepted idea, saying that it is “us, / Chamorro natives” that “work the soil, / ride the sea, / inhale our exhalations, / and inherit the land / immortally” (43, ll. 7–8; 43, ll. 9–13): did they plant suni [taro] and pick lemmai [breadfruit] and beseech the blessings of guelas yan guelus [female and male ancestral spirits] under the sweltering sun of latitude 14? (42–43)

The emphatic depiction of native animals, plants, and spirits as Guam’s anti-colonialist symbols is quite different from Mariquita’s admiration of Guam as a hybrid paradise. The significant difference in their postcolonial schemes can also be found in “Halom Tano’.” Hattori described halom tano’ (the jungle) as the locale and symbol of Chamorro culture’s survival, which is also the main theme of Diaz’s article (and Palauan Cite Morei’s poem, mentioned in the Introduction): years have passed and the jungle’s still there ... despite the military’s invasion of our land, the pigs still play and the binadu [deer] still bark . . . and all the jungle’s still there, forever filled with sheltering spirits forever calling me home. (44–45)

Unlike Mariquita—highlighting Guam’s tragedy caused by imperialists’ military action—the poem focuses on the indigenous people being still there despite such invasions. Lastly, in

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“Thieves,” an enumeration of colonialist stereotypes and clichés regarding colonized peoples—using terms such as “thieves,” “immoral,” “half-caste,” “infantile,” “illiteracy,” and “laziness” (“UNeducated, UNdeveloped, UNcivilized”) (46)—is concluded by denunciation of colonialist opportunism: Now they tell us we are simply, sadly, contemptibly OVER-developed OVER-modernized OVER-theologized OVER-Americanized. UNDER-Chamoricized (46)

This poem speaks for Mariquita the words she cannot retort against her American husband’s reprimand (quoted earlier). Hattori’s postcolonial intervention produces a Chamorro identity, resisting accepted images and dismantling colonial shackles, from which Mariquita’s self-representation is not free. As a new Pacific writing journal, the Micronesian journal Storyboard is distinguished by its close relation to and focus on Japanese elements. The thematic focus for the third volume is “the invasion of Guam and Saipan by US military forces to oust the Japanese occupiers of the islands at the close of World War II,” which is associated with the invasion’s fiftieth anniversary (Martin 7). The journal’s general editor, James Martin, maintained that “[t]he destinies of Japan and of many of the Pacific islands are intertwined historically, economically, and culturally” (8). Notably, the new Micronesian journal perceives the expulsion of the Japanese Forces from Guam and Saipan by the United States not as liberation but as another invasion. The volume does not depict stereotypical images of the Japanese from war literature as bloodthirsty invaders, daredevil suicide

Colonial Mirror Images of Micronesia and Japan 189 attackers, and rapists as do Mariquita and Nightmare Near the Kiosk. For example, Zan Bockes’s poem “Banzai Cliff, Saipan” portrays the mass suicide by Japanese civilians and military in 1944, during the Pacific War.: To give your life for the freedom of death, for a pride no American can understand—this was your gift. Your descendents have left prayers in these bushes where your feet stumbled, left hope that you or I would never bloody this shore again. (9)

It is important to keep in mind significant differences among Micronesian texts. On the wave of postcolonial literatures, the postcolonial voices from Micronesia have some characteristics common to Pacific literature—including protest against racial discrimination, assertion of a viable local culture, critiques of globalization and continued economic and cultural independence, and the tensions and crossings between tradition and modernity (Sharrad 3–7). Micronesia’s diversity has been the major source of regional conflicts of interests, which US military and Japanese economic powers have taken advantage of. However, the differences derived from the area’s particular colonial and post-colonial interactions with imperial powers can be regarded as an asset to create new postcolonial discourses. Motherhood functions as a source of such creativity in Micronesia. Diaz thought highly of Chamorro women as responsible for indigenous survival and revival: Local Chamorro women—patronized and stereotyped as “pretty Chamorro girls”—marry non-Chamorro

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This upholding of local Chamorro women is not only a feature of colonialist discourse but also a source of postcolonial intervention, as indicated by Mariquita (Chris’s mother). Local women’s Spanish, American, Chinese, or Japanese surnames “do not mark the limits of Chamorro cultural survival” (Diaz 163). The Pacific image of motherhood is also a powerful tradition in Japanese colonial literature (Kawamura 98). In pre- and postwar literature, Micronesia has been a locale of migration, war, love, conspiracy, and adventure, where its motherhood heals mental fatigue and wounds. However, representations of the Pacific as a producing center of postcolonial intervention can be seen in Japanese literary works from the 1990s. In works such as Ikezawa Natsuki’s “Mariko/Marikita” (“Mariko/Mariquita,” 1990), Minami no shima no Tio (Tio on a south island, 1992), and Mashiasu Giri no shikkyaku (Macias Gilly’s downfall, 1993), as well as in Kobayashi Nobuhiko’s Sekai de ichiban atsui shima (The hottest island in the world, 1991), Micronesia is no longer a wretched victim of Americanization and Japanization (although it is still a locale of tourism, fieldwork, dictatorship, and coup). The texts depict it as a postcolonial space which metamorphoses, or “Pacificizes,” Japanese stereotypes of pretty Oriental girls and rigorous old worriers into evasive multifaceted characters, who together with indigenous Micronesians, outwit Japanese and local authorities. In “Mariko/Mariquita,” for example, an indigenized Japanese girl named Mariko is called “Mariquita,” the name of Micronesia’s postcolonial icon.

Colonial Mirror Images of Micronesia and Japan 191 These Japanese texts represent motherhood as not only being responsible for the survival of the indigenous Micronesian self but also affecting the transformation of the Japanese “self.” In Macias Gilly’s downfall, Ikezawa’s depiction of decolonized Micronesia as an unknown other defies colonial fantasy through circulative, ever-lasting locations and dislocations of self and other, without resorting to a “Godzilla attack” (see chapter 2). The eponymous Micronesian protagonist, a man named Gilly who is the president of a fictional Micronesian state, is heroic and adroit enough to sustain its independence without its being a puppet of its ex-colonizing powers, Japan and the United States. However, one of the principal resources of his power is derived from his experiences in Japan—Gilly is more Japanized than the Japanese, though not necessarily pro-Japanese. Japanization and Americanization also play a tug-of-war in this Japanese text. Micronesians are often depicted as so inured to being under missionary patronage and colonial rule that they cannot live without depending on such control. Such a habit of dependence among Micronesians, who have more than four hundred years’ history of colonization—much more than that of Melanesians or Polynesians—is what Gilly strives to overcome. Yet when it is revealed that Gilly usurped the presidency by assassinating the former pro-American president in order to prevent the nation from becoming degraded into a US puppet, Gilly falls from power. Against the despotic leader of the material world of the Micronesian nation, Gilly’s close adviser, Emeliana—a young spiritualistic medium—becomes an agent sent by senior conference members of the Island of Melchor (the state’s spiritual center) to find out the truth of the affair of Gilly’s assassination of the former President in order to set him on the path to his downfall. Melchor is Gilly’s birth and death place; Emeliana resembles his mother at her younger age and conceives his child.

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In the text, motherhood with spirituality curbs dictatorship conspiring with neo-colonialist power, for the purpose of survival and revival of indigenous culture. Micronesians are depicted as formidable figures to counterattack colonial and local authorities without employing violence. Indeed, the Japanese works’ depiction of the tropical Pacific as a remedy for the identity crisis may be an expression of abiding colonialist exoticism. Japanese postcolonialism is still closely related to the colonialist aspect. Nevertheless, the shift in the representation of Micronesians from pitiable colonial victims to enigmatic postcolonial agents, as well as the political decolonization in Micronesia and postcolonial cultural movements from Guam, are relevant. The contemporary Japanese writers such as Ikezawa find a cure for Japanese identity crisis in Micronesian nationalisms and regionalism, which are based on syncretism and anti-imperialism. Despite pro-Japanese views from Micronesia, Micronesia’s animosity and Japanese colonialist fears of Micronesia (stemming from Japanese colonialist ideology of sameness, taking domination for affection) have been the major driving forces that have led to the production of postcolonial works in Guam and Japan respectively, with self-criticism for following US imperialism.

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ENDNOTE

1. This chapter originally appeared under the same title in Postcolonial Text 1.1 (2004) . It has been devised and is used with permission.

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INDEX adventure, 6, 25–26, 38, 45, 60, 68, 73, 84n6, 100, 105, 107, 154, 190 Africa, 9, 12, 36–37, 54, 134n6, 158 African American, 37 Agana, 171, 174 Ainu, 4, 164 Akutagawa, Ryunosuke, 27–33, 39, 45 allegory, 5, 33–34, 42, 53, 80, 89 ambivalence, 3–4, 25, 61, 68, 88, 99, 155 American Pacificism, 36–37, 44 Americanization, 59, 63, 67–69, 144, 172–173, 176, 179–180, 182, 184, 188, 190–191 Ando, Sakae, 41, 97–98, 103, 115, 134n4 anthropological knowledge, 6, 62, 78, 97 anti-colonialism, 12–13, 44, 80, 108, 128, 150, 175, 187 Aoki, Tamotsu, 50, 56, 59 Apia, 101, 109 Arai, Man, 60, 66–67, 85n7, 182 Armstrong, Louis, 37 Ashcroft, Bill, 134n6 Asian American, 141–142 assimilation, 4, 7, 14, 20, 26, 29, 34, 40, 45, 73, 88, 91, 105,

assimilation (continued ) 111, 131, 146–147, 152, 172, 176–177 atomic bomb, 10, 47– 49 Australia, 102, 111–112, 135n7, 183 bai (community house), 14, 21, 41– 44, 89, 185 Ballantyne, Robert Michael, 74, 98, 117 Ballendorf, Dirk, 180–181 Bamboo Ridge, 161 beachcomber, 106–107, 135n7 Becke, Louis, 68, 99, 106–107, 110–113, 115, 120–122, 135n7, 135n11, 175 Belau National Museum, 43 Bennett, Judith, 135n10, 136n15 Betty Boop, 9, 27, 35–37, 40 Bhabha, Homi, 4, 32, 95 Bikini, 18–19, 47–48, 181 blackbirder, 114, 135n7, 136n12 Bockes, Zan, 189 Boehmer, Elleke, 66, 150 “Boken Dankichi” (“Dankichi the adventurous”), 8–9, 23–24, 27, 34, 36–40, 44, 56–59, 82, 84n4 Bongie, Chris, 25 Booth, Bradford, 105 Brantlinger, Patrick, 38

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Bristow, Joseph, 25 Britain, 81, 102, 114, 117, 131–132, 183 Brophy, Philip, 50, 55–56 brown maiden. See Pacific maiden bunraku, 50 Bushnell, O. A., 145–146

colonial anxiety, 23, 27 desire 23, 27–28, 32, 34, 39, 42–45, 82, 116 fear, 25, 32, 34, 42, 44–45, 82, 116, 136n14 Cooper, Gary, 150 Cordell, Richard, 117, 120

Cabarga, Leslie, 35 Caliban, 31, 64 Canada, 183 cannibalism, 5, 9, 24, 26, 34, 37–38, 42, 57, 59, 61, 74, 106, 110, 117, 123–124, 175 Caribbean, 12, 20 Chamorro, 17–18, 39, 172, 174, 176, 178–179, 184–190 Charlie Chaplin, 150 Chicago, 119–120 Chikamatsu, Monzaemon, 30–31 China, 13, 41–42, 93, 96, 127, 134n2, 134n6, 142, 149, 160–161, 190 Chock, Eric, 141 Christianity, 50, 52, 76, 91, 99, 113, 117–118, 125, 129, 136n13, 136n15, 137n16, 160 civilization, 14, 23, 25, 27, 31–32, 37, 39–40, 42, 44, 51–52, 54, 56, 59, 60–64, 66–67, 76, 83, 98–101, 103, 107, 111, 114, 124, 131–132, 134n5, 134n6, 177, 181 cold war, 48, 68, 181

Daigo Fukuryu Maru, 47, 67 Dairen, 8, 41 Day, A. Grove, 101, 107, 111–112, 121, 136n11 decolonization, 12–13, 18–20, 22, 29, 33, 41, 54, 71, 76, 78, 81–82, 120, 140, 142, 144, 182, 185–186, 191–192 Defoe, Daniel, 26, 84n6 DeLoughrey, Elizabeth, 26 diaspora, 13, 20, 41, 139, 147, 159, 162, 165, 168 Diaz, Vincente, 178, 184–185, 187, 189–190 discourse of southward advance. See nanshin ron Dixon, Robert, 38 Edmond, Rod, 26, 28 Eniwetok, 47 escape, 14, 24, 37, 44–45, 67, 69–70, 82, 89, 91, 97, 120, 123–124, 131, 162, 165, 167, 187 ethnicity, 4, 25, 78, 140–142, 145–146, 153–154, 161, 164 Ezo. See Hokkaido

Index Falgout, Suzanne, 84n2 Federated States of Micronesia, 84n5, 183 Fiji, 117, 128, 135n7, 136n12, 140, 172, 186 Filipino, 16, 160, 166, 184 First World War, 6, 20, 26 France, 33, 96, 102, 121 Friday, 31 Frisbie, Robert Dean, 62, 66, 70, 79 functionary, 54–55, 88 Gannen Mono, 156 Gappa, 48 Garcia Marquez, Gabriel, 11 Gauguin, Paul, 18, 31–32, 70, 77, 94, 96, 126–127 Gendai Shijin Kaigi, 48 Germany, 6, 26, 43, 52, 78, 90–91, 102, 108, 117, 137n17, 183 Godzilla, 1, 10, 20, 48–50, 54–60, 67, 73–74, 80, 82, 181–182, 191 good native, 18, 27, 31–32, 57, 71, 176–177 Grace, Patricia, 140 Great Depression, 9 Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, 174 Greenberg, Harvey Roy, 49–50 Guam, 17–18, 21–22, 163, 171–192 Gulliver’s Travels, 6 Hagedorn, Jessica, 141 Hall, Stuart, 20

215

Hanlon, David, 130, 137n16, 137n17 haole (white people), 21, 124, 140, 142–150, 152–154, 156–158, 160–164, 166–168 hapa (people of mixed blood), 148–149, 156–157, 164 Hara, Marie, 147, 154–157, 159 Harryhausen, Ray, 50 Hattori, Anne Perez, 186–188 Hau‘ofa, Epeli, 1–2, 15, 21, 127–128, 182 Hawai‘i, 1, 16, 21, 119, 122–124, 135n7, 136n12, 139–169 Hearn, Lafcadio, 41 Heike monogatari (The tale of the Heike), 29 Hempenstall, Peter, 102–103 Hereniko, Vilsoni, 126, 130, 140 Hezel, Francis, 84n2 Higuchi, Wakako, 180–181 Hijikata, Hisakatsu, 14, 21–22, 43, 72, 88, 90, 93, 97, 134n3, 185 Hiroshima, 10, 18 Hokkaido, 5 Holland, 5, 102 Hollywood, 49, 63, 176 Howard, Chris Perez, 17, 172–177, 182 Hulme, Peter, 32, 44, 176 hybridization, 14, 18, 28–29, 43, 75, 77, 100, 103, 115, 122, 143–144, 159, 164, 168, 175, 186–187

216

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Ikezawa, Natsuki, 10–11, 13, 17, 19–21, 60–66, 70, 74–83, 182–183, 190–192 Imafuku, Ryuta, 20 immigrant, 7, 16, 31, 102–103, 140, 143, 145–150, 153, 156, 185 India, 12, 134n6, 158 indigenization, 14, 32, 35, 38–39, 42, 63, 110, 115, 155, 190 Inkle and Yarico, 32 interracial love/marriage, 9, 32, 35–36, 39–40, 42, 45, 77, 111, 113, 177. See also miscegenation; transracial love/marriage Ireland, 12 Ishida, Ichimatsu, 9, 35, 92, 115 Ishikawa, Tatsuzo, 41, 97, 102–103, 111, 118, 134n4 island in colonial discourses, 25–29 Israel, 129 Japanese Archipelago, 20 education, 7, 14–15, 24, 41–42, 54, 91–93, 95, 104, 110–111, 118, 137n17, 173 emperor, 5, 7, 74, 84n2, 111, 131, 146, 173, 180. See also tenno occupation of Guam, 18, 178 Orientalism, 3, 72 postcolonialism, 49, 59, 155, 192

Japanization, 4, 9, 14, 24, 29, 34, 41, 55, 67, 73, 91–92, 103, 105, 115, 117, 127, 133, 173–174, 179–180, 182, 190–191 Japan’s mandated territory, 6, 25–26, 172–173. See also Micronesia Jolly, Roslyn, 106, 135n8 kabuki, 16, 29–30, 50, 94, 129 Kanai, Shinkichi, 42–43 Kanaka, 38–39, 85n8, 95, 98, 100, 116, 160, 176 Kang, Sang-jung, 3 Karatani, Kojin, 49, 136n13 Kawamoto, Saburo, 59 Kawamura, Minato, 190 Keate, Geoge, 21, 81 Kelsky, Karen, 77 Keown, Michelle, 125 Kikaigashima, 29–30 Kikuchi, Kan, 26–27, 29–32, 37, 39, 44 King Ghidrah, 56–57 King Kong, 49–50 Kiste, Robert, 2, 54, 117, 136n12, 137n17 Kobayashi, Izumi, 48, 54, 58 Kobayashi, Nobuhiko, 60, 68–73, 190 Kochi High School, 35 Kochi Shinbun Sha, 35 kogakko (public school for native children), 24, 92 Kono, Juliet, 17, 147, 154, 159–161, 164–165

Index Korea, 4, 6–7, 15, 24, 41, 58, 149–154, 160 Koror, 13, 19, 21, 24, 42–43, 88–89, 93, 95, 103, 180 Kubo, Takashi, 41, 73, 97–98, 102–103, 111, 115, 118, 134n4 Kuboyama, Aikichi, 47 Kurata, Hyakuzo, 29–32 Kurils, 20 Kuriyagawa, Hakuson, 95 Kurosawa, Akira, 129 Kusaie Island, 96 Kyoto, 29, 31–33 Kyushu, 29–30 Lee Boo, 19, 21, 80–82 Lobban, Christopher, 185 London, 80, 116 London, Jack, 68, 76, 99, 101, 106–108, 110, 117, 120–122, 124, 135n7 Loomba, Ania, 77, 134n5, 136n14, 177 Loti, Pierre, 15, 18, 33, 41, 94–96, 111, 115–116, 119, 127, 177 Loxley, Diana, 25, 38 Lum, Darrell, 140 Lyons, Paul, 36–37, 40, 44 Madame Butterfly, 33, 77, 115 magic realism, 11 Manchuria, 15, 41, 149 Manhattan, 129 Manila, 52–53 Maori, 21, 132, 140

217

Mariquita, 17–19, 171–190 Marshall Islands, 9, 35, 47, 61–62, 66–67, 84n5, 97, 115, 183 Marshall, Mac, 54 Martin, James, 188 Maruyama, Yoshiji, 41, 97, 102–103, 110, 118, 134n4 Maugham, Somerset, 32, 62, 66, 71, 76, 82, 99, 106, 109–110, 113–120, 126, 135n7, 165, 175 McClintock, Ann, 115 McKinney, Chris, 147, 152–154 McLeod, John, 11 Mechagodzilla, 56–57 medical doctor, 54–55, 100, 117, 121 Mehew, Ernest, 105 Melanesia, 18, 107–109, 136n12, 172, 185, 191 Melville, Herman, 66, 74, 94, 98, 113, 117, 119, 123, 126–127, 175 Menikoff, Barry, 135n9 Michener, James, 18, 54, 165 Micronesia, 2–8, 10–11, 13–15, 17–20, 22, 24–26, 28, 30, 34–36, 38, 40–45, 47–48, 51, 54–55, 57–61, 64–66, 68, 71–75, 77–78, 84n2, 84n4, 84n5, 85n8, 88, 91–92, 94, 96, 98, 101–105, 110, 115–117, 127, 132, 137n16, 137n17, 171–192 military coups in Fiji, 128 mimicry, 4, 32, 52, 95

218

NANYO-ORIENTALISM

Miranda, 74 Miri, 35 miscegenation, 42, 135n9 missionary, 52–53, 90, 100, 109, 116–118, 122, 124, 136n15, 137n16, 137n17, 191 Miura, Shumon, 51–53 Miyoshi, Masao, 54, 59, 75, 84n3 modernization, 4–5, 10, 12, 15, 24, 44, 59, 68, 104, 150, 168, 188 monster movie, 2, 10–12, 48–50, 55–57, 73, 181–182 Morei, Cite, 18–19, 81–82, 187 Mori, Koben, 84n4 Mothra, 56–57 Murai, Osamu, 7–8, 24 Murayama, Milton, 17, 145, 147, 154, 159, 165–168 musume, 153, 156, 158 Nagasaki, 10, 18 naichi (the main islands of Japan), 89, 96 Najita, Susan, 142 Nakagawa, Yoichi, 41, 97, 103, 134n4 Nakajima, Atsushi, 13–15, 17, 20–21, 28, 41–45, 62, 70, 73, 82, 87–88, 90–98, 102–103, 110, 115–116, 118, 124–128, 132–133, 134n3, 179, 185 Nanyo, 2–3 Nanyo-cho (South Seas Government), 13, 24, 42, 88, 180

Nanyo dojin (South Sea natives), 7 Nanyo gunto (the South Sea Islands), 6 Nanyo Gunto Kyokai (South Sea Island Society), 55 Nanyo-Orientalism, 3–6, 8, 10, 17, 57–58, 74, 83, 88, 98 nanshin ron, 5–6 Naputi, Jesus, 178–179, 182 nationalism, 4, 56, 66, 111, 150, 153, 155, 192 Native American, 37 neo-colonialism, 11–12, 18, 58–60, 70, 82, 139, 144, 155, 183, 192 Nero, Karen, 44, 81 New Hebrides (Vanuatu), 136n12 New Zealand, 15, 102, 129, 140, 183 Nicole, Robert, 96, 177 ningyo-joruri, 29–30 noble savage, 19, 21, 50, 53, 74, 81–82 Noh, 16, 29, 96, 129–130 Nonaka, Fumio, 38, 115 Noriega, Chon, 48–49 Northern Mariana Islands, 84n5 O’Brien, Willis, 50 Occidentalism, 115 Oda, Ifuna, 85n8 Oe, Kenzaburo, 129–130 Ogasawara, 15, 41 Okinawa, 7, 38–39, 103, 157, 164

Index orality, 12, 141, 172 Orientalism, 3–4, 15, 20, 62, 83, 91, 100, 115–116, 130 Oshikawa, Shunro, 6 Pacific maiden, 8–9, 11, 15, 18, 27, 34–35, 37, 43, 114 motherhood, 18, 189–192 War, 55, 69, 84n2, 103, 189 Way, 128 Pak, Gary, 21, 147–154 Palau, 13–14, 18–19, 21–22, 28, 41–44, 51, 68, 79–82, 84n5, 88–89, 92–95, 126, 179–180, 184–185, 187 papalagi (white people), 125, 129 Papua New Guinea, 140, 186 Peace Corps, 54 Peacock, Daniel, 80 Pearl Harbor, 145–146 Pearson, Bill, 175 Peattie, Mark, 2–3, 7, 24–25, 27, 34, 40–41, 77, 92, 103, 115, 172 penal colony, 27, 29, 31, 56 picture bride, 155, 166 pidgin, 16, 135n9, 140–143, 152, 163–164, 166 plantation, 16, 102, 108, 136n12, 140–142, 145–146, 148–151, 155, 158, 163, 165–167 Pocahontas, 18, 32, 37, 176 policeman, 24, 75, 93, 100, 118

219

Polynesia, 18, 32, 35–36, 94, 96, 112, 135n7, 140, 172, 177, 182, 185, 191 Ponape, 51–53, 85n8 postcolonialism, 10–13, 15–21, 28, 33, 41, 45, 48–49, 54, 58–59, 66–68, 72, 78, 82, 131–133, 140, 144, 147, 150, 152, 155, 167–168, 172, 174–175, 177, 179, 181–182, 185–190, 192 Pratt, Mary Louise, 27, 32–33, 36, 40, 104, 177 Prospero, 31, 64 Puccini, Giacomo, 33, 115 Rarahu, 33, 96, 114, 116 reconciliation, 147, 159, 163, 165–166, 169 regionalism, 128, 192 returnee, 15, 20 Rimbaud, Arthur, 94 Robinson Crusoe, 6, 26, 31–33, 61–62, 67, 84n6, 85n7 Robinsonade, 26 Russia, 6, 70, 150 Ryukyu, 4, 20. See also Okinawa Said, Edward, 3–4, 97 Saiki, Jessica, 17, 147, 154–159 sailor, 100, 107 Saipan, 3, 103, 188–189 Samoa, 3, 9, 12–13, 15, 21, 35, 42, 105, 109, 113–114, 117, 119–120, 127, 129–133, 135n7

220

NANYO-ORIENTALISM

samurai, 5–6, 153–154, 168 San Francisco, 123, 135 Sasaki, Mitsuru, 134n2 schoolteacher, 71, 100, 102, 115, 117–118, 151 sea of islands, 1, 15, 21 Second World War, 10, 20, 55. See also Pacific War self-colonization, 4, 10, 41, 52, 168 self-determination, 8 settler colony, 27, 44 Shakespeare, William, 26 Sharrad, Paul, 125, 128, 133, 189 Shiga, Shigetaka, 5 Shimada, Keizo, 9, 23, 36, 38, 40, 56–57 Shimao, Toshio, 20 Shinto, 75, 137n16 Shonen kurabu (Boys’ club), 36 shosetsu (novel), 6, 59–60 “Shucho no musume” (“The chief’s daughter”), 8–9, 34–35, 92, 115 Shunkan, 29–33, 36–37, 39, 42, 44 Simms, Norman, 125 Skinner, Mark, 17 slavery, 136n12 Smith, John, 32 Smith, Vanessa, 26, 28 social Darwinism, 6 Solomon Islands, 108, 135n7, 136n12 Solomon Report, 54 south island, 7, 9, 20, 23–24, 26–32, 34–42, 44–45

south island ideology, 8 South Pacific, 2, 48, 140, 182 South Pacific, 49, 54, 76, 175–176 South Sea shipping lane, 8, 30 South Seas, 2, 84n6, 98–99, 105, 107, 114, 117–121, 126, 130, 140, 175 Southeast Asia, 5, 30 Spain, 51–53, 78, 91, 117, 137n17, 166, 174, 176–177, 183–184 Spurr, David, 28, 33–35, 41 Stevenson, Robert Louis, 13, 15, 32, 41–42, 70, 76, 79, 82, 91, 99–101, 104–106, 110, 116, 119, 122, 124, 126, 135n7, 135n8, 165, 175 Storyboard, 22, 185–188 storyboard (itabori), 21–22 Sturma, Michael, 34 Subramani, 125, 140 Suganuma, Teifu, 5 Sumida, Stephen, 141–142, 145, 164 Suzuki, Sadami, 59 Suzuki, Tsunenori, 5 Sydney, 121 taboo, 52, 106, 108 Taguchi, Ukichi, 5 Tahiti, 31–33, 77, 112, 119, 123–124, 177 Taiwan, 4, 8 Takagi, Ichinosuke, 8, 57–58 Talley, Jeannine, 185 Tanaka, Koji, 60

Index tattoo, 92, 152–154 Te Rau Maire, 19, 81 Teaiwa, Teresia, 19, 36 Telmetang, Marciana, 43 The Tempest, 26, 64. See also Caliban; Miranda; Prospero tenno, 7, 118, 179 Thomas, Nicholas, 97, 104 Tokugawa shogunate, 6 Tokyo, 14, 41, 48–49, 68, 94–95, 130, 158 tomin (islanders), 7 “Torakku-to dayori” (“A letter from Truk”), 8, 57–58, 67, 75 Torres, Robert Tenorio, 179 tourist, 2, 11, 16, 22, 36, 58, 60, 68–69, 72–73, 88, 102, 126, 130, 140, 145, 168, 185, 190 Toyota, 129 trader, 30, 55, 100, 105–109, 112–114, 116, 119, 121–122, 124, 135n7, 135n9 transracial love/marriage, 27, 32, 36, 45, 60, 77, 105, 111–112, 115, 177 Trask, Haunani-Kay, 16, 143–145, 150, 152 Truk Islands, 84n4 trust territory of Micronesia, 10, 47, 58, 84n5 uncivilized, 5, 14, 30, 42–43, 54–55, 59, 70–71, 78, 91, 100, 104, 123, 153, 176, 188 University of Guam, 185

221

University of Papua New Guinea, 186 University of the South Pacific, 140, 171, 185 Upolu, 130 Urashima Taro, 159, 164 US nuclear test, 48, 67, 181 US occupation of Japan, 2, 10, 49–50, 53, 69, 181 va, 21, 132–133 Vietnam War, 12 wa, 21–22, 132 Wada, Den, 41, 97, 102–103, 134n4 Weaver-Hightower, Rebecca, 32 Wendt, Albert, 12–13, 15–16, 21, 125–133, 140 Westernization, 4, 10, 15, 39, 41, 52–53, 59, 104, 168 Wilson, Henry, 19, 80–81 Wilson, Rob, 140, 175 yakuza (Japanese gangster), 85, 153 Yamanaka, Lois-Ann, 17, 21, 140–141, 147, 154, 159, 161–165 Yanagita, Kunio, 7, 24 Yano, Ryukei, 5 Yano, Toru, 6, 24, 59 Yaponeshia (Japonesia), 20 Yoden, Tsuruhiko, 35