Japanese Imperialism in Contemporary English Fiction: From Dejima to Malaya

96 Pages·2019·1.44 MB·English

by  Ching-chih Wang

Japanese Imperialism in
Contemporary English
Fiction
From Dejima to Malaya
Ching-chih Wang
Japanese Imperialism in Contemporary English
Fiction
Ching-chih Wang
Japanese Imperialism
in Contemporary
English Fiction
From Dejima to Malaya
Ching-chih Wang
National Taipei University
New Taipei City, Taiwan
ISBN 978-981-15-0461-7 ISBN 978-981-15-0462-4 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-0462-4
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A
cknowledgements
Many people have supported me during the course of this study, which is
the result of several research projects conducted over the past five years.
My utmost gratitude goes to Professor Yucheng Lee for his guidance and
knowledge of contemporary English literature. His constant support and
his comments on my rough ideas have made this book possible.
As a scholar of Contemporary English Literature studying Japanese
Imperialism in Taiwan, I am particularly indebted to Mr. Hideyuki
Yamamoto, full professor at National Kobe University and president of
the AALA (Asian American Literature Association), for his generosity
and kindness in hosting me as a visiting scholar at the Graduate School
of Humanities in the summer of 2012. I was privileged to have some
thought-provoking discussions with him and other prestigious members
of the AALA in Japan, particularly the honorable first president of the
AALA, Ms. Teruyo Ueki, who is currently professor emeritus at Kobe
Women’s University.
Research grants from the MOST (Ministry of Science and
Technology) in Taiwan enabled me to launch this project, while timely
financial support from the USTP (University System of Taipei Joint
Research Program) helped me finalize the manuscript. Chapter 2,
“Riches and Realities: The Uncommon Wealth in David Mitchell’s The
Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet” is the closing report of my MOST
project from 2013 to 2015, “In the Name of Gaijin: Writing Alien-
nation in The Thousand of Autumns of Jacob de Zoet” (102-2410-H-
305-069). My study of David Mitchell’s Dejima story was inspired by
v
vi ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
an invitation from Nagasaki University, where I presented some prelim-
inary findings at the “Eighth International Symposium for Port Cities
Studies: Historical Experience of Port Cities/Conceptions of Socio-
Cultural Coexistence in East Asia” held in 2012. Chapter 3 is also the
closing report of my 2017 USTP project, “Cultural Trauma and Civil
Repair in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Stories of Shanghai” (USTP-NTPU-
TMU-106-01), an extension of the conference paper presented in the
special session, “Kazuo Ishiguro and Trans-Bordering Asian British/
American Literature,” for the AALA annual meeting chaired by Professor
Hideyuki Yamamoto at Kobe University in 2018. The other two essays,
“A Network of Deceptions: Re-membering Violence in The Garden of
Evening Mists,” published in the Soochow Journal of Foreign Languages
and Cultures 45 (2018), and “The Imperial Garden’s Monogatari:
Politics of Forgetting in Tan Twan Eng’s The Garden of Evening Mists,”
written in Chinese and published in the Review of English and American
Literature 33 (2018), were also the closing reports of my 2016 USTP
project (USTP-NTPU-TMU-105-01) and have been incorporated into
Chapter 4. In both of these journal papers, I benefited greatly from the
reviews of anonymous readers; their insights into the representation of
traumatic memory and their knowledge of Japanese imperialism helped
sharpen my argument about the politics of remembering and forgetting.
Finally, I would like to express my deepest gratitude to my husband,
Chun Fu, for his patience and companionship at different stages of my
academic career. As a perceptive colleague, he has provided constant,
attentive feedback, and sustained my study during many periods of doubt
and fatigue. As a caring and loving spouse, he shared both my excite-
ment and my frustration in writing this book, while also sharing the
responsibility for raising our adorable ten-year-old daughter, Ying Fu. It
is to him and my daughter that this book is dedicated.
Taipei Ching-chih Wang
2019
c
ontents
1 Introduction: Japanese Empire as an Excrescence
of Imperialism 1
2 Riches and Realities: The Uncommon Wealth in David
Mitchell’s The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet 13
3 The “Broader Canvas” in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Pacific
War Stories 31
4 Inscribing the Legacy of Japanese Imperialism
in The Garden of Evening Mists 55
5 Conclusion: Borrowing Scenes from Japan’s
Colonial Empire 79
Works Cited 83
Index 89
vii
CHAPTER1
Introduction: Japanese Empire
as an Excrescence of Imperialism
Abstract After acquiring the lucrative colonies of Taiwan and Korea in
1895 and winning the Russo-Japanese War in 1905, Japan developed an
imperial system that was distinctly different from those of Western coun-
tries. Those two military accomplishments exemplified the success of the
Meiji Restoration, and, as Japan’s concerns shifted from national security
to national assertiveness in its colonial endeavors, they also showed how
the regional dominance in East Asia had shifted from China to Japan. In
this introductory chapter, the reasons for Japan’s imperialist policies and
itsstrategiesforterritorialexpansionarecomparedwiththoseoftheEuro-
pean powers, to account for the ways in which the Japanese Empire was
inmanywayspeculiaramongtheotherempiresofthelatenineteenthand
earlytwentiethcenturies.
Keywords Japaneseimperialism·MeijiRestoration·
Europeancolonialism·Pan-Asianism
The Japanese pursuit of an empire in East Asia embodied the hopes and
anxieties of Meiji Japan following the two-and-a-half-century period of
national isolation imposed by the Tokugawa government. As the only
non-Western colonial regime at the turn of the twentieth century, Japan
instituted an imperial system that was distinctly different, and peculiarly
Japanese, after it acquired the lucrative colonies of Taiwan and Korea
©TheAuthor(s)2019 1
C.Wang,JapaneseImperialisminContemporaryEnglishFiction,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-0462-4_1
2 C.WANG
in 1895 and won the Russo-Japanese War in 1905. Those two military
accomplishments exemplified the success of the Meiji Restoration; they
also proved that regional dominance in East Asia had shifted from China
to Japan and that Japan’s concern with national security had shifted to
national assertiveness and its endeavors in colonial expansion. With their
success in acquiring territories and power, the Meiji statesmen had fully
realized their dreams of colonialism. This self-assertion encouraged them
tofashionacolonialsystemwithimplacableandunyieldinglogic,onethat
neverfailedforlackofdeterminationoreffortbecausetheycouldnotafford
togamblewiththeirnation’sfuture.
Arestrainedsocietyandlimitedresourcesweretwotremendousobsta-
cles Japan had to tackle before it, as an underdeveloped country, could
designaprogramofmodernizationtoinsureitssurvivalandnationalinde-
pendence.Inthisregard,Japancouldscarcelyrestsecureinthebeliefthat
it would be exempt from Western imperialist aggression. Being an Asian
state,itwasthereforemandatorythatitexpanditsperimeterforpolitical,
military,andeconomicdevelopmenttonearbyareasessentialtothedefense
andsecurityoftheislandcountry.Inthisintroductorychapter,thereasons
that Japan undertook imperialist policies, and the strategies it devised to
expand its territories to tropical islands in South East Asia, are compared
withthoseoftheEuropeanpowers.Thishelpsaccountforthemanyways
inwhichtheJapaneseEmpirewasuniqueamongtheotherempiresofthe
latenineteenthandearlytwentiethcenturies.
In his pioneering article, “The Evolution of Japanese Colonialism,”
HymanKublinexplainsthemostnotabledifferencebetweentheWestern
andJapanesecolonialregimes:
Whatdistinguished[theJapaneseEmpire]primarilywasneitheritssizenor
location, neither the composition of its peoples nor the manner of its cre-
ation,whichwasdecidedlyconventionalinanageoframpantimperialism.
OfparamountsignificancewasperhapstheAsianprovenanceofthisempire.
For,althoughimperialregimeshadrisenandfallenintheEastforseveralmil-
lennia, the phenomenon of an expanding Asian empire in an era when the
westernpowerswereengagedintheobliterationofnationalindependence
inAsiawasclearlyextraordinary.Andwhatevermotivesanddrives,aimsand
purposes, that may be ascribed to the western nations in their imperialist
activities, it is most likely that none are to the same degree attributable to
Japan.(82)
1 INTRODUCTION:JAPANESEEMPIREASANEXCRESCENCE… 3
The settlement colonies established in the era of the mercantilist impe-
rialism of maritime powers such as Spain and Portugal in the sixteenth
century, and Holland, Britain, and France in the seventeenth and eigh-
teenthcenturies,were“remarkablydiverseinformandcharacter,”reflect-
ing“thecontrastsinEuropeancivilization”(Peattie3).However,accord-
ingtoMarkR.Peattie,inthelatenineteenthcentury,astheindustrialWest
was engaged in all sorts of colonial activities, there came a “new imperi-
alism,” with modern colonial systems that were “notable for the rapidity
withwhichtheywereassembledandthedegreetowhichtheyweresimilar
inarrangement,structure,andevolution”(3).Inlightofthis,themodern
Western empires were mostly settled in tropical territories “composed of
broad expanses of jungle, great stretches of desert, or scattered islands in
the torrid zones” (3). Scattered around the globe at great distances from
theirEuropeanmothercountries,thesetropicalempireswereforcedopen
by explorers, traders, or missionaries, acting for their own benefit even
while bearing in mind a minimal sense of national pride and the interests
ofthemothercountry.Mercantilismwasthebackboneofthosesettlement
colonies, which were eventually fortified with the full political or military
support of their home government. A modern tropical colony, therefore,
couldbeseenas“acolonyofoccupation,”whereaEuropeaneliteminor-
ity governed an indigenous majority whose “racial origins” and “cultural
traditions” bear no distinct relevance to those of the colonialists (Peat-
tie 4). Furthermore, those tropical territories had not yet undergone the
industrial revolution that would make them modern states, which aptly
demonstratedwhytheadministrativestructuresandsocio-politicalsystems
ofthoseoccupiedareaswerestrikinglydifferentfromthoseoftheEuropean
governmentsandcouncils.
WiththedominantpowerconcentratedinthehandsofEuropeanelite,
theterritorieswithinmoderncolonialsystems,despitetheirindividualdif-
ferencesinsizeanddegreeoftheirinvolvementincolonialexpansions,were
governed“autocratically”andtherefore,withoutanymeasureof“demon-
strable public support” (Peattie 4). Such elite-based administrations, in
the eye of Peattie, led to the “common defect of overly cautious conser-
vatism,” which, aside from some attempts to implement radical programs
to educate and transform the colonized peoples in the European image,
contributedtostagnantindigenoussocialandeconomicsystemsandconse-
quentlypreventedthetropicalcoloniesfromdevelopingintoindustrialized
countries(4).Succinctlyput,Europeanexpansionintoorcolonizationof