Japan's First Colony And

Chapter Two Japan’s First Colony and the “Culture of Resistance” How wretched have been the last four decades of Tōhoku’s history! Ah, is this the fault of heaven, or of man? —Hangai Seiju, 1906 A central element of war responsibility and war victimhood . was the desire to identify with Asian victimhood rather than deny it. —James Orr Introduction Observing his country’s defeat by Japan in the first Sino-Japanese War, Liang Qichao, perhaps the most important Chinese intellec- tual active at the end of the nineteenth century, diagnosed the Qing dynasty as the “Sick Man of Asia.” This lament, which paralleled a popular description of the Ottoman Empire as the “Sick Man of Europe,” stuck. To contemporary observers, it perfectly encapsu- lated the precarious position of an ineffectual and obsolete system— what we might call today a failed state—collapsing under the weight of foreign invasion, natural disasters, famines, domestic unrest and uprisings, and the plague of opium. The phrase was used equally by reform-minded Chinese like Liang and by foreign critics watching five thousand years of civilization dissolve; Liang had introduced the term into Chinese as a translation from an English-language article in the North China Daily News.1 As Zheng Wang, David japan’s first colony 65 Scott, and numerous others have shown, in more recent years it has become part of the lexicon of China’s “century of humiliation” and the concerted effort of the People’s Republic to manufacture and mobilize humiliation as a motivator for restoring Chinese national dignity and pride of place in the international order.2 The idea of the “Sick Man” and its afterlife as a rallying cry is useful in understanding the ways in which the early postwar Tōhoku scholars perceived Tōhoku and conceptualized—explicitly or not—their project. The metaphor of sickness is a thought- provoking one, suggesting a temporary aberration. Illness can be cured, restoring the “natural” order. Sickness is a mandate, in this sense, to get well. More generally, national histories are often based around the theme of victimhood, “sickness,” or other traumas. Régimes of collective national representation are often based on what Vamik D. Volkan has labeled “chosen traumas” and “chosen glories.”3 Volkan’s claim that the glories of the past are less effica- cious motivators than are traumas because traumas are inherently unfinished tasks demanding completion echoes Ernest Renan’s observation that, when it comes to national memory, “bereave- ments matter more than triumphs because they impose duties and command a shared effort” of the collective.4 Both triumphs and traumas are transmitted intergenerationally through education, ritual, and the quotidian apparatuses of what Michael Billig calls banal nationalism.5 Trauma has a dual function in enforcing positive group identity. First, the wrongs of the past against the collective must be righted by the collective. In practice, this is rare, and even in those unusual cases where redemption is found, the satis- faction of this new “chosen glory” also bolsters a sense of positive group identity and cohesion. Second, the survival of the nation despite victimization can “build a group’s self-esteem as the group members begin to see themselves as the progeny of a long line of survivors.”6 In either case, “chosen traumas,” once chosen, are divorced from history and take on an extrafactual life of their own; as Richard White has written, “facts are rarely at the heart of historical disputes,” and though they are by no means absent from national history and historical memory, they are not its substance.7 .

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