Japanese Anthropologists and Colonial Police on the Taiwanese Aboriginal Frontier

From Fieldwork to Imperial Violence:

Japanese anthropologists and colonial police on the Taiwanese aboriginal frontier

Toulouse-Antonin Roy Department of East Asian Studies McGill University, Montreal, Canada April 2014

A thesis submitted to McGill University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree

of Master of Arts.

Abstract:

From the early 1900s to the mid-1910s, the Japanese colonial regime in Taiwan launched a series of brutal military operations aimed at conquering the island’s aborigines territories. As the Japanese army and police secured their control of aboriginal lands, anthropologists also began traveling to Taiwan. Hoping to develop theories that would link Japan’s ethno-racial ancestry to the South Pacific, these anthropologists constructed various racial taxonomies to divide up the island’s various tribes. These taxonomies helped justify deployment of Japanese police forces across Taiwan’s aboriginal lands during the period of violent military campaigns undertaken by the colonial state from the early 1900s to the mid-1910s. This paper examines the relationship between anthropology and imperial policing in Japanese-occupied Taiwan, with a focus on the ways in which colonial security forces drew from a vast store of anthropological discourses to justify extra-judicial operations of violence.

Résumé :

À partir du début des années 1900 jusqu’au milieu des années 1910, le régime colonial japonais à Taiwan a lancé une série d’opérations militaires ayant pour but la conquête des territoires autochtones de l’île. Une fois que l’armée japonaise et les forces policières ont établi leur contrôle sur ces terres autochtones, plusieurs anthropologues japonais commencèrent à voyager à Taiwan. Dans l’espoir de développer des théories qui pourraient associer l’origine ethno-raciale du Japon au sud du Pacifique, ces anthropologues ont construit différentes taxonomies raciales pour diviser les différentes tribus de l’île. Ces taxonomies ont aidé à justifier le déploiement des forces de l’ordre japonaises dans les terres autochtones pendant la période des campagnes militaires violentes entreprises par l’État colonial à compter du début des années

1900 jusqu’au milieu des années 1910. Ce mémoire examine la relation entre l’anthropologie et le maintien de l’ordre impérial dans l’occupation japonaise à Taiwan avec une focalisation sur la façon à laquelle les forces de sécurité coloniales ont mis en évidence les discours anthropologiques pour justifier différentes opérations de violence extrajudiciaires.

Acknowledgements:

This thesis was made possible by a number of people both in and out of the university.

First I would like thank my supervisor, Prof. Thomas Lamarre, whose mentorship over the past years has been indispensable for the development of my research and ideas. Prof. Lamarre’s insistence that we do away with the disciplinary boundaries separating “theory” from “history” has been central to my intellectual development. I am confident that what he has taught me over the years at the M.A level will continue to inspire my future doctoral work. My colleagues in both the Department of History and Department of East Asian Studies also provided me with a great deal of support and valuable feedback throughout the whole process. Part of this thesis was presented at the 2013 Columbia University and University of Toronto East Asian Studies graduate conferences. I would like to take the time to thank both the organizers and presenters, who all gave me the opportunity to share my work, and receive valuable advice in the process.

On a personal level, I would like to thank my parents, who have supported me every step of the way since the very day I decided to pursue a career in academia. And finally, I would like to offer my deepest thanks to my partner Mary Anne. Your emotional and moral support is the most important thing any aspiring academic could ever ask for. It’s always comforting to know there are people outside the academy who recognize the hard work and long hours that are needed to complete a thesis. On a final note, I would like to dedicate this thesis to the memory of

Lise Hébert and Marcela Domogan Chiu.

Index:

Acknowledgments……………….. 3.

Introduction………………..5-12.

Chapter I – Between Colonial Biopolitics and Necropolitics: Situating anthropology and the police in Meiji Japan………………..13-38.

Chapter II – Anthropology as “Aborigines Control”: Racial taxonomies and the expansion of Japanese control in colonial Taiwan………………..39-60.

Chapter III – “The Special Quality of this Island’s Police”: Taiwan’s Aboriginal lands under Keimukyoku rule………………..61-94.

Conclusion………………..95-97.

Bibliography………………..98-102.

Introduction:

In October of 1930, Japanese colonial authorities launched a violent military suppression campaign against the indigenous Seediq (then known as Atayal) people on the island of Taiwan.1

The campaign was launched in response to an earlier massacre of Japanese civilians during a sports day celebration at a local elementary school in the town of Wushe, where a group of armed Seediq tribesmen descended on the festivities and massacred nearly all Japanese people present. The Japanese counter-offensive was particularly brutal, as the imperial army, kempei and pro-Japanese indigenous militias were deployed to hunt down a small group of some three hundred rebels. Aerial bombing raids were employed, along with tear gas, in what is believed to be the first recorded instance of chemical warfare in East Asia.2

While at first glance it may seem like a simple massacre fuelled by exploitative colonial policies, the Wushe incident is illustrative of a complex history of Japanese violence against indigenous populations in Taiwan. In the late 1890s, Taiwan’s government-general launched a series of punitive expeditions against aborigines in order to secure land, natural resources, and facilitate numerous developmental projects in the budding colony. Unlike other areas of Taiwan, aborigines territories were placed under the control of the colonial police, who imposed on indigenous groups a highly repressive system of almost constant supervision. Across Taiwan’s central and northern plains area, the government-general established a series of military installations, collectively known as the “guard line” (or aiyusen in Japanese), which were used to demarcate Japanese-held territories from the island’s “savage districts”. Having its roots in the late Qing imperial state’s frontier management policies in Taiwan, the guard line system was

1 While the Seediq people are now an officially recognized ethnic minority in Taiwan, during the colonial period, they were classified as belonging to the larger “Atayal” group of mountain-dwelling tribes. 2 Leo Ching, Becoming Japanese: colonial Taiwan and the politics of identity formation, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 138-139. 6 initially designed to keep Han Chinese settlers from entering into aborigines territory and prevent the outbreak of violent disputes over land and control of natural resources.3 While the Japanese colonial state at first maintained this Qing system of frontier security and ethnic administration, its initial “protective” functions were quickly abandoned and the guard line became a highly militarized defensive perimeter and base of operations from which Japanese authorities could expand their control into aborigines land. As the colony’s need for key resources like camphor increased, the “guard line” slowly advanced, unleashing in the process a wave of unprecedented military violence on aborigines communities across the island. By 1915, most of Taiwan’s aboriginal territories were brought under a form of permanent occupation by the Japanese police.

For Taiwan’s colonial managers, this system was seen as the only appropriate system for dealing with aborigines, who by and large were treated by Japanese authorities as violent “savages”

(banjin). For example, the Seediq aborigines, the group which had launched the Wushe uprising, were classified as belonging to a larger population of “unassimilable savages” (seiban) whose

“primitive” modes existence put them far beyond the pale of modern civilization, and therefore, far beyond the reach of Japanese-led cultural assimilation and “enlightenment”. The events at

Wushe, along with the broader history of Japan’s takeover of aboriginal lands, however, beg the following questions: What sorts of mechanisms of power allowed for colonial managers to view

Taiwanese aborigines as “unassimilable savages” in the first place? And why did the colonial police, an institution whose basic functions usually revolve around “law and order” or crime prevention, become the focal point of colonial administration in aborigines territories?

3 In the closing years of Qing rule in Taiwan, the government began taking a more aggressive policy of expansion into aborigines territories to take advantage of the vast camphor and lumber resources situated there. This of course reflected the Qing state’s desire for self-strengthening, as the empire was struggling to keep up with economic competition from Japan and the surrounding western colonial empires. For more on the guard line (or “boundary line”) system in late Qing imperial administration, see John Robert Shepherd, Statecraft and Political Economy on the Taiwan Frontier 1600-1800, (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), 308-362. 7

A possible hint to these questions lies in the very use of terms like seiban (unassimilable savage). This term has its roots in early anthropological classification systems which were used by colonial administrators to map out Taiwan’s indigenous populations. Throughout Taiwan’s colonial history, indigenous populations were ranked by government officials and anthropologists in accordance with their varying degrees of “civilizational” development, with indigenous peoples residing in the plains region (heichi) being considered superior to their lesser developed counterparts, the aborigines tribes of Taiwan’s mountainous regions (sanchi).4 In other words, the term seiban carries with it a broader history of techniques, techniques which were used to identify, describe, and taxonomize the indigenous populations of Taiwan. The violent seizure and enclosure of Taiwan’s aborigines territories is thus inseparable from a larger apparatus of colonial knowledge production and dissemination, one in which Taiwanese aboriginality was made synonymous with a form of irredeemable or “unassimilable” savagery.

Across the Japanese empire, schemas of anthropological classification distinguishing between the primitive and the modern, or the “savage” and the civilized, proliferated as Japan expanded into new territories. From Japan’s acquisition of its first “formal” colony (Taiwan) to the creation of the puppet regime of Manchukuo, the study of indigenous groups and their societies was instrumental in helping Japanese colonial managers create various mechanisms of administrative control. As empire encountered culturally and ethnically diverse population groups, specialists belonging to a vast range of social scientific disciplines were enlisted by the colonial state to study the overall conditions of peoples living under Japanese rule. At the center of these comprehensive efforts to gather local knowledge on the colonies was the discipline of anthropology. More than any of the fledging branches of the “social sciences” in Meiji Japan,

4 Ibid., 135. 8 anthropology was the most active in terms of ideological support for empire. Starting in the late

19th century, anthropologists began developing theories that Japan was a “composite race” made up of multiple ethnic groups from North and Southeast Asia. Using this mixed nation theory, anthropologists linked the formation of the modern Japanese ethnic group with populations as diverse as the Ainu, pastoralist-nomadic groups in Manchuria, and more importantly for our purposes, Taiwan’s aborigines. Through the work of anthropologists and ethnographers, indigenous populations across the Japanese empire were grouped into various systems of racial classification. These ethno-racial taxonomies usually labelled indigenous populations as either distant racial “ancestors” of the Japanese people, or primitive “savages” bound for cultural assimilation or extinction. The production of these classificatory knowledge formations however had far-reaching and destructive effects on colonized population. Armed with anthropological claims about an indigenous population’s supposed “backwardness” or primitive nature, colonial officials could justify various forms of extra-legal violence and military control. This was the case in colonial Taiwan, where at precisely the moment the colony’s aborigines became the object of anthropological fascination, their communities were encircled by the advancing guard line, deprived of their means of subsistence, put under occupation by the colonial police, and then forced to work in the government general’s budding camphor and lumber industries.

In addition to the possibly destructive and exploitative uses of anthropological knowledge in the Japanese empire, anthropology was often directly implicated in the setting up and management of the colonial space itself. This was especially the case for Taiwan under Japanese rule, where a vast range of disciplinary and regulatory bodies were constantly engaged in the study of local populations and “customs” in order to come up with working systems of colonial administration. In Taiwan’s aboriginal lands for example, anthropological research was often 9 linked to the colonial Police Bureau, which often conducted anthropological surveys and ethnographic fieldwork itself. Given the strategic proximity of police stations and sub-stations along the militarized guard line perimeter, police agencies in Taiwan usually conducted research and other reconnaissance-type work to facilitate control over aborigines communities. Research organizations funded by the government-general of Taiwan for example made extensive use of reports compiled by police on the aborigines frontier. During the period of violent Japanese military expansion into the highlands, police agencies were often the only conduit through which anthropological specialists and other researchers could access knowledge about aborigines populations. As for the handful of highly influential anthropologists who did venture into aborigines land, their fieldwork missions were usually made possible by assistance from the colonial police, who accompanied them for security purposes.

The specific case of Taiwan’s aboriginal lands under Japanese occupation thus brings to mind a wide range of questions with regards to not only the specific dynamics of Japan’s period of colonial rule in East Asia, but also broader questions pertaining to the status of anthropological knowledge within the formation and management of empire in general, and also the function of police agencies and police-type activities in the latter context. First, why the discipline of anthropology? Why did Japanese colonial managers turn to an elaborate system of social scientific classification to identify and enumerate the various populations falling under their control? Why did this system of classification ground itself in an inclusive vision of multiethnic empire, one where the conventional colonizer/colonized relationship was replaced by a representational schema where the mother country and its imperial subjects appear as one racially and ethnically contiguous entity? Why were regulatory bodies like colonial police so active in the compiling of local knowledge on aborigines populations? And finally, why was the 10 figure of the policeman, a figure typically associated with crime prevention and protection of the law, become synonymous with the study of “ethnic customs”?

This paper examines how anthropological systems of aborigines classification shaped a wide range of administrative and social techniques of colonial governance in Japanese-occupied

Taiwan. Particular attention will be paid to the elaboration and management of the “guard line”

(aiyusen) system, along with the ways in which anthropological typifications were used to justify this system’s brutal incursions and “mop-up” operations in aborigines territory. In addition, this paper will also examine the crucial role played by the colonial police in not only furthering the expansion of Japanese hostilities against aborigines populations, but also in constructing the very anthropological classification systems and racial categories which helped justify the colonial state’s military subjugation and economic exploitation of indigenous territories. In other words, this paper examines the mutual imbrication of anthropological knowledge production and police power which characterized the regime of Japanese imperial sovereignty in colonial Taiwan.

Although recent scholarly work has begun drawing attention to the function of anthropological systems of knowledge within Japan’s colonial possessions, many have yet to go beyond mere content analysis. In the recent historiography of Japanese colonial anthropology for example, there has been a tendency to examine the work of individual anthropologists as purely academic discourse, with only brief reference to the application of anthropological findings to the techniques of imperial rule.5 While the recent work of Japanese scholars like Sakano Tōru have done much to expand studies of anthropology in the colonies, the focus remains

5 Older and more recent works on Japanese colonial anthropology include Jan van Bremen, Akitoshi Shimizu (eds), Anthropology and Colonialism in Asia and Oceania, (Routledge Curzon, 1999), and Alan Christy, A Discipline on Foot: Inventing Japanese native ethnography, 1910-1945, (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers. 2012). For Japanese -language sources, see Sakano Tōru, Teikoku nihon to jinruigakusha: 1884-1952 [Imperial Japan and Anthropologists: 1884-1952], (Tokyo: Keisō Shobō, 2005). 11 overwhelmingly on ideological forms of “othering”, and does very little to engage with the materiality and violence of empire itself.6 As for the existing English-language literature, there exists a similar tendency. Scholars like Paul Barclay and Robert Tierney for example have looked extensively at the work of anthropologists in colonial Taiwan. Their work, while giving much valuable insight into the discursive formations produced by anthropologists and the ways in which these helped rationalize and justify Japan’s colonial rule in Taiwan, however, is lacking in terms of engagement with analysis of concrete policies and systems of colonial control.7 In combining discursive analysis of anthropological texts with attention to the growth and development of police administration in aborigines territories, this thesis not only hopes to remedy some of these gaps in the existing scholarly literature, but will also attempt to provide greater insight into the interface between knowledge and power within the Japanese empire. This paper however is not trying to construct a binaristic model of analysis, one where colonial anthropology belongs purely to the realm of discourse or knowledge, and police to that of materiality. This paper is interested in the encounter (or overlap) between anthropological research and police work, and also how that encounter was inextricably bound up with a larger social formation of imperial nation-building and colonial conquest. Doing this necessitates that we shed any sort of preconceived notion where “knowledge” and “practice” appear as two separate (or autonomous) fields of inquiry.

This thesis is divided into three parts. Then first part examines the emergence of anthropology as an academic discipline in Meiji Japan, along with the construction of the country’s modern police force. Rather than provide a brief historical account of the emergence of

6 For more see Sakano Tōru’s Teikoku nihon to jinruigakusha: 1884-1952 [Imperial Japan and Anthropologists: 1884-1952], (Tokyo: Keisō Shobō, 2005). 7 For more see Paul D. Barclay, “Contending Centers of Calculation in Colonial Taiwan”, Humanities Research (14), no. 1 (2007), and, Robert Tierney, Tropics of Savagery, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010). 12 these two institutions (along with the ways they came to be linked), this chapter poses the question of anthropology and its ties to imperial policing as a theoretical problem, one that is inseparable from issues of racialization, capitalist modernization, biopower and broader processes of nation-building. In other words, the first chapter examines the broader historical and discursive frame which informed the development of anthropological knowledge production and the concept of modern policing in Meiji Japan, and offers some tentative ways to link these two ideological and institutional domains to one another. Following this broad theoretical reflection, the second chapter will expand on the themes developed in the latter by examining the variety of ethnic classification systems and racial taxonomies anthropologists constructed to assist colonial administrators in dividing up Taiwan’s aborigines territories. Focusing on the work of Torii

Ryūzō, Inō Kanori, and Mori Ushinosuke, three anthropologists considered “pioneers” in their field, this chapter will examine the discursive foundation upon which the government-general of

Taiwan’s regime of police occupation would later be justified. The final chapter brings together the issue of colonial anthropological knowledge production and imperial policing into sharper relief by providing more concrete examination of the expansion and consolidation of the

Japanese police presence across Taiwan aborigines territories. The focus of this final chapter will be on the ways in which the division and segmentation of indigenous populations by anthropological models of classification opened up a space for the violent occupational policies and counter-insurgent campaigns that characterized Japan’s takeover of aboriginal land.

Chapter I – Between Colonial Biopolitics and Necropolitics: Situating anthropology and the police in Meiji Japan

It is no contingency that both the discipline of anthropology and modern forms of policing emerged almost simultaneously in Meiji Japan, during a period spanning roughly the

1870s and 1880s. Following the demise of the Tokugawa bakufu, Japan’s Meiji reformers set out to remake a patchwork of semi-autonomous feudal domains into a modern nation-state. This nation-building project was accompanied by the creation of universities, bureaucratic agencies, security organizations and other institutional formations dedicated to strengthening the control of the new Meiji state, and also safeguarding Japan’s sovereignty from outside imperialist encroachment. For Japan’s system of modern universities, the main concern was not only to train future civil servants and state managers, but also ensure the independence of the knowledge production process from western influence. This was especially the case for the discipline of anthropology, which from its inception set out to distance itself (all while borrowing liberally from) western paradigms of knowledge. Following the growth of anthropology under the guidance of foreign advisors like Edward Morse, who for example sought to link the origins of

Japanese people with a pre-modern cannibalistic tribe, Japan’s academic specialists moved quickly to declare their independence from the latter to ensure that debates over the country’s identity, culture, or ethnicity would serve the nation, and not the research agendas of Euro-

American academia.8 Similarly, for Meiji Japan’s early police force, the overarching goal was not only to meet immediate security objectives of the domestic context, but also provide outside imperialist powers with the impression that Japan had developed a functioning legal system and policing apparatus that could ensure the safety of foreign nationals (who by then were becoming

8 For more, see Morris Low, “Physical Anthropology in Japan: The Ainu and the Search for the Origins of the Japanese”, Current Anthropology, 53 no. 5 (April 2012). 14 a fixture in the wake of treaty port agreements).9 But comparisons between anthropologists and police officers should not stop merely at the fact that these two institutions emerged almost simultaneously during a frenzied rush for political and military modernization. The connections between these two entities go well beyond mere institutional or temporal overlap. So how then do we go about explaining the deeper relations that bind these two historical fields to one another?

A possible starting point in understanding the connections between anthropology and colonial policing perhaps lies in the very Japanese characters used for the word “police”

(keisatsu). While the character for kei translates to “punish” or “admonish”, satsu carries with it a whole series of words, meanings, and connotations associated with actions of “inferring”,

“inspecting”, and also “examining”. In many ways, the act of “policing” (as it is expressed in the

“satsu” of keisatsu) presupposes a certain infrastructure of knowledge production, one that has the identification, classification, and supervision of individuals as its main preoccupation. Of course, I am not suggesting here that Meiji Japan (or the Japanese language for that matter), contains some hidden tendency towards more invasive forms of policing. It is important to remember that when drawing up the blueprints for building its police force, the Japanese Home

Ministry drew inspiration from British, Prussian, and French models of police administration.10

These European police agencies around this time were also experiencing similar shifts towards more “scientific” approaches in their respective legal systems and policing tactics. The emergence of Japan’s modern police force must thus be seen in light of this general re-

9 Umemori Naoyuki, “Modernization through Colonial Mediations: the establishment of the police and prison system in Meiji Japan” (Unpublished Dissertation), University of Chicago (2002), 56-57. 10 For more see D Eleanor Westney “The Emulation of Western Organizations in Meiji Japan” Journal of Japanese Studies Summer, 1982 and L. Craig Parker, The Japanese Police System Today: a comparative study, (NY: M.E. Sharpe, 2001), 12-29. 15 orientation towards more pre-emptive forms of policing within emergent national states.11 In many ways, Meiji Japan’s police officers were early practitioners of what modern-day criminologists and police reformers call “knowledge-based policing” or “community-oriented policing”.12 The idea behind such intelligence-driven forms of policing of course was that by keeping exhaustive records on local citizens, and also engaging in social work outside regular law enforcement, police officers could tackle both future crime and its underlying social causes.

Policing in Meiji Japan was thus more than a mere set of techniques to suppress criminal or anti- state elements; it was a veritable social scientific enterprise in which police officers were expected to function as makeshift statisticians, researchers, and even at times ethnographers.

In order to ensure smooth implementation of security policies, especially within the chaotic nation-building context of the early-to-mid Meiji period, Japanese police agencies built up an effective system of local information-gathering to maintain domestic order. Nowhere was this “knowledge-based” mode of policing more evident than in the construction of the kōban system (or chūzaisho in rural areas). This network of small neighbourhood police boxes was built to expand police supervision across the Japanese islands. Functions of local police officers assigned to kōban usually involved conducting censuses of local households, offering

“counselling” and mediation in local disputes, and patrolling nearby areas for any suspicious activities.13 Outside the confines of the individual kōban, police were also expected to serve the health and welfare needs of the community. As the administrative complexity of the Meiji state

11 For recent works on these concepts in police and crime studies, see Tom Williamson, The Handbook of Knowledge-Based Policing: current conceptions and future directions, (Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons, 2008), and Jake V. Burke, Community-Oriented Policing: Background and issues, (NY: Nova Science Publishers, 2010). 12 For secondary literature on police and legal systems in the early modern/modern European context see Mark Raeff, The Well-Ordered Police State: social and institutional change through law in the Germanies and Russia, 1600- 1800, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983). 13 For an overview of the Kōban and its diverse functions, see L. Craig Parker, The Japanese Police System Today, 38-66. 16 grew in scope, police agencies were assigned a wide range of other regulatory functions by the government and Home Ministry. This of course was directly inspired from the French model of prefectural policing, a model which assigned everything from health and sanitation inspection work to fire-fighting duties to the police force. The work of the early Meiji Japanese police force included for example: the enforcement of health codes, managing licences for prostitution houses, supervising trade and other commercial activities, watching over “public morals”, and also conducting regular “population counts”.14 “Policing” in a Meiji context thus signified not only the maintenance of domestic order; it also signified the process of identifying and managing the various class and occupational groups which made up the social and political space. In other words, “policing” in Meiji Japan was an activity that had far more to do with making “citizens”

(or “imperial subjects”) than it did with eradicating criminal activity.

But the police force which emerged from early Meiji state-building efforts greatly benefitted from a vast existing security infrastructure that had been developed and refined over the course of the Tokugawa bakufu’s existence. From neighbourhood watch groups (gonin-gumi) to intra-domainal networks of government surveillance, the Tokugawa regime provided a rather solid foundation upon which a later more sophisticated modern police state could be built.15 In much of the same way European police regimes were built on the backs of large royal bureaucracies and absolutist-era policing apparatuses, Meiji Japan took advantage of the pre- modern legacy of a highly centralized security infrastructure. Japan’s colonies however

14 Umemori Naoyuki, “Modernization through Colonial Mediations”, 27. 15 The Gonin-gumi system was a collection of five-household groups which acted as a local unit of defense against outside threats and criminal brigands. Members of the group also supervised one another for good conduct or payment of taxes. The system was built on a principle of collective responsibility. For a representative work on Tokugawa-era systems of surveillance and security policies, see Irimoto Masuo, Goningumi to kinsei sonraku:rentai sekininsei no rekishi [The Five-Households Group and the Rural Hamlet in Recent Times: A History of the Collective Responsibility System], (Tokyo: Yūzankaku, 2009). 17 experienced a somewhat different historical trajectory, as security agencies had to find other means to gather local knowledge on subject populations.

While the development of Japanese police agencies in the colonies drew from institutions developed by the mainland Home Ministry, imperial policing in places like Taiwan, Korea, and later Manchuria, often developed in conjunction with the mounting pressures of local guerilla movements, insurgencies, rural uprisings, and other efforts to resist Japan’s military expansion.

Most of Japan’s colonial regimes thus usually adopted a military police-cum-civilian police system of sorts where much of the professional police corps was formed out of an existing occupation army.16 Police officers in the colonies also never had the luxury of a highly- centralized and well-coordinated bureaucratic state order (or network of kōban) to gather local knowledge on the populations falling under its jurisdiction. Often, the only individuals with the expertise and linguistic capacity to conduct field research on colonized peoples were anthropologists, who around this time were increasingly interested as Japan’s status as a living amalgamation of all the different “races” of Asia. While police agencies were less interested in theories of Japanese racial composition, the ethnic labels and highly detailed taxonomies of government-funded colonial anthropologists furnished these security agencies with “raw data” that had significant political or military applicability. In addition to all this, anthropologists often made claims about the inherent “backwardness” or absence of “civilizational” development among indigenous peoples. As we shall see this prevailing view of aboriginal populations as un- evolved “savages” became a convenient justification for various modes of imperial conquest.

This chapter will thus address the following question: How did anthropological scholarship came to be linked with colonial policing in Meiji Japan? Rather than engage with

16 Hui-yu Caroline Tsai, Japanese Colonial Engineering in Taiwan, 1895-1945, (London: Routledge, 2008), 74-75. 18 this problematic from a purely institutional or historical vantage point (looking for example at the twin development of both fields and how their respective strategic considerations came to overlap), this chapter will consider the relationship between anthropology (jinruigaku) and police

(keisatsu) as a theoretical problem, one that is inseparable from the issue of social scientific knowledge production and modern state power. I believe it is simply not enough to merely examine the appropriation of anthropological knowledge by police agencies; one must go further and examine why these systems of knowledge came to overlap with the needs of imperial administrators and colonial security forces in the first place. Drawing from the thought of Michel

Foucault and other recent theoretical work, this chapter will treat the simultaneous emergence of anthropology and colonial policing in Meiji Japan as part of a broader historical configuration, one where various forms of knowledge production and associated techniques of “biopower” became the dominant means by which national states sought to mobilize the military and labour capacities of their citizens. This sort of theorizing move will allow us to further historicize

Japan’s place in the larger nineteenth century imperial world order, and understand why police agencies turned to forms of classification and categories of knowledge rooted in a hierarchic and racialized worldview to manage colonized populations. Rather than reading Meiji Japan’s tendency to fuse “fighting crime” with social scientific efficiency as an expression of some unique Japanese cultural proclivity towards “order”, this chapter will thus examine the symbiotic relationship between anthropology and imperial policing as a manifestation of a larger global moment, a moment where emergent national formations began looking to taxonomic labels of

“ethnicity” (minzoku) or “race” (shuzoku) to manage the increasing social heterogeneity that came with imperial capitalist modernization. 19

Biopower and the formation of the Japanese “Species Body”: Anthropology and the study of indigenous peoples in Meiji Japan

Anthropology’s emergence in Meiji Japan has its roots in a series of debates about the ethnic origins of the Japanese people. At the heart of these anthropological debates was Tokyo

Imperial University professor of zoology Edward Morse, who claimed that the Japanese people descended from a cannibalistic group who lived at some point during the Jōmon period.17 It was a student of Morse, a young scholar by the name of Tsuboi Shōgorō, who led the charge in contesting these claims and went on to establish the modern discipline of anthropology. In 1884,

Tsuboi founded the Tokyo Anthropological Society, anthropology’s first associational body.

Tsuboi then went on to study in Europe, and returned to Tokyo Imperial University to teach anthropology and ethnology courses. Like other social scientific disciplines at the time, researchers became quickly enmeshed in the Meiji state’s nation-building project. For Tsuboi, anthropology’s primary objective was to devise a working theory to explain the emergence of the

Japanese people on the archipelago. Shortly after the Morse controversy, anthropological debates in Japan shifted away from analysis of Jōmon-era archeological finds and began addressing the issue of whether or not the Japanese people were descended from the indigenous Ainu.18 Tsuboi however rejected the Ainu hypothesis and maintained that the Japanese people were an offshoot of the “Koropokuru”, a mythical people said to have lived within the larger Hokkaido area.19

Future researchers took up these claims made by Tsuboi, only to later debunk them. Nevertheless,

Tsuboi’s objective of unearthing the racial origins of the Japanese nation became the main focus of anthropological scholarship throughout the early twentieth century. In opposition to the highly

17 Morris Low, “Physical Anthropology in Japan: The Ainu and the Search for the Origins of the Japanese”, 560. 18 Akitoshi Shimizu, “Colonialism and the development of modern anthropology in Japan” in Jan van Bremen, Akitoshi Shimizu (eds), Colonialism in Anthropology in Asia and Oceania, (Richmond: Curzon, 1999), 122-126. 19 Noah Y. McCormack, Japan’s Outcaste Abolition: the struggle for national inclusion and the making of the modern state, (NY: Routledge, 2013), 101. 20 influential conservative state theorists of his time, who insisted on both the homogeneity of the

Japanese nation and the uniqueness of its imperial polity (or kokutai), Tsuboi pioneered the mixed nation theory of Japanese ethnicity.20 This theory claimed that the Japanese people were descended from two distinct “racial stocks”: one a Northeast Asian Tungusic or Mongol group, the other an Indo-Malayan Southeast Asian group. For example, Tsuboi once described Japanese

“nationality” in the following manner: “As in the case of the Japanese nationality (nihon minzoku)…it is made up of those who resemble Ainu, those who resemble Malayan natives, those who resemble people from continental Asia, and those who mix characteristics of all of these.”21 From its inception, anthropology in Meiji Japan was thus closely linked to the study of colonized peoples, who researchers treated by-and-large as relics of Japan’s “pre-modernity”.

This refashioned the identity of indigenous populations in the colonies as “proto-Japanese”, virtually emptying them in the process of any political or legal status outside the narrow confines of imperial subjecthood. But before launching into an analysis of its broader applicability to the colonial setting, perhaps it is best to start with the very terminology and nomenclature that Meiji- era researchers used to establish the disciplinary identity of early anthropology.

Like most major social scientific concepts imported from the west, Japanese anthropology had to devise completely new compound words to account for the specific object of knowledge it claims to study. The term developed in Meiji Japan to refer to anthropology was jinruigaku, or “humankind studies”. Offshoot disciplines traditionally associated with it include jinshugaku (ethnology), and also minzokugaku (folk studies). The disciplinary boundaries between the three however were not always clear, and a considerable amount of debate took

20 For more on debates surrounding Japanese “national polity” theory and multi-ethnicity, see Oguma Eiji, A Geneaology of Japan’s Self-Images, (Melbourne: Transpacific Press, 2002), 33-52 & 53-63. 21 Susan C. Townsend, Yanaihara Tadao and Japanese Colonial Policy: redeeming empire, (Richmond: Curzon , 2000), 92. 21 place over whether or not to treat the three as distinct academic fields. Torii Ryūzō, one of the most prominent academics in the field of early anthropology, for example wrote at great lengths about the importance of distinguishing between the terms jinruigaku (anthropology) and jinshugaku (ethnology). In an 1890 article entitled “By what method should research on race be done?”, Torii for example stressed the major differences which separated anthropology from ethnology, differences which he believed revolved mostly around the methodological focus of each discipline: “When I look at it, the study of humankind and the study of ethnicity are two completely separate things...As for the study of ethnicity, it is a lifetime’s work consisting of looking at the development of originality, and why there is variety within humanity, or what we also call race. Furthermore, it also consists of things like clans, tribes, family, branch, stock, or stem. I think that the study of such small differences is different from the general study of humanity"22 For Torii, anthropology was centered on things like paleontology, comparative anatomy and other techniques used to trace the growth of the human “species” across evolutionary time. Ethnological research on the other hand had more to do with the study of ethno racial variation or “small differences” (shōbetsu) at the level of the human species. In the same article, Torii for also describes ethnology as existing somewhere between

“Kulturwissenschaft and Naturwissenschaft”, including not only the study of social structure and cultural practice, but also the physical body and its attributes.23 These ideas of course were derived from Torii’s mentor Tsuboi, who believed in the mapping and taxonomizing of human physical and cultural difference on a world scale. For Tsuboi, physical difference within the larger human “race” is the product of numerous variations (sai) unfolding over an extended

22 Torii Ryūzō, Jinshu no kenkyū wa ikanaru hōhō yoru bekya [By what method should research on race be done?] 472. in Torii Ryūzō zenshū daiikken [The Complete works of Torii Ryūzō Volume 1], (Tokyo: Asashi Shinbunsha, 1975), 472. 23 Ibid., 472-473. 22 period of time. Within a global intellectual climate dominated by Spencer’s social Darwinism or

Gobineau’s theories of race inequality, Tsuboi insisted on a monogenetic account of human evolution, and rejected the notion that physical or cultural variations within humanity rested on inborn biological differences.24 But this is not to say that perception of biological traits had nothing to do with Japanese ideas of race/ethnicity. As Frank Dikotter noted in his analysis of

East Asian concepts of “race” for example: “Throughout the twentieth century… the notion of minzu in China and minzoku in Japan has consistently conflated ideas of culture, ethnicity and race in efforts to represent cultural features as secondary to, and derivative of, an imagined biological essence.”25 In many ways, anthropology and offshoot disciplines such as ethnology or folk studies in Japan operated somewhere at the intersection of culture and biology, by presupposing a certain kind of hierarchic relationship between jinrui (humankind) and its subsidiary ethno-cultural “species” units like “races” (jinshu), or “ethnicities” (minzoku). This epistemological foundation would later be used to place Japan at the center of a broader ethnic

“family” of East Asian “races”, with the Japanese constituting a kind of universal node of inter- species mediation or cooperation, and therefore, the “natural” leader for a future “East Asian

Cooperative Community”.26 Anthropology in Meiji Japan thus emerged as a set of techniques for tracing the growth and evolution of the human (jinrui), along with the variety found at the level of individual “species” (shu). This broader epistemic shift towards the reduction and codification of human beings as a “species” or assemblage of “races” (each characterized by immutable

24 Kyōko Matsuda, Teikoku no shisen: hakurankai to ibunka hyōshō, (Tokyo: Yoshikawa Kōbunkan, 2003), 149-150. See also Oguma Eiji, A Genealogy of Japanese Self-Images, (Melbourne: Trans-Pacific Press, 2002), 53-58. 25 Frank Dikotter, “Introduction” in Frank Dikotter (ed), The Construction of Racial Identities in China and Japan, (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 199), 4. 26 For more see Thomas Lamarre, “The biopolitics of companion species: wartime animation and multi-ethnic nationalism” in Richard Calichman, John Namjun Kim, The Politics of Culture: around the work of Naoki Sakai, (London Routledge, 2010). 23 socio-biological properties) however would entail a whole series of power operations and institutional effects which would have lasting impact on the direction of Japanese colonial policy.

In his writings, Michel Foucault has addressed how this crucial shift towards a taxonomic regime of “species” (or biological ideas of “race”) became instrumental in the emergence of what the author has termed “biopower”. Starting in the eighteenth century, Foucault believed that western societies began to see the rise of a new form of regulatory and “life-administering” power. Unlike disciplinary power, which has the scrutinizing of individual bodies and behaviours as its central concern, biopower is centered on the optimization of a population’s biological capacity for reproduction. For Foucault, the new biopower addressed individuals not from the standpoint of “man-as-body”, but rather from the stand point of “man-as-species”: “Unlike discipline, which is addressed to bodies, the new non-disciplinary power is applied not to man- as-body but to the living man, to man-as-living-being; ultimately, if you like, to man-as- species.”27 This new life-administering power discussed by Foucault essentially has two poles.

One of them is centered on the “body as machine” and deals largely with control of the body, along with “the optimization of its capabilities, the extortion of its forces, the parallel increase of its usefulness and its docility, its integration into systems of efficient and economic controls.”28

This is what Foucault called the anatomo-politics of the human body. The second pole relates to the “species body” and the biological functions of human beings, and other domains like health, longevity, mortality and other mechanisms centered on the reproduction of life itself. Power’s hold over these basic biological/reproductive processes is referred to by Foucault as the biopolitics of the population.29 Foucault locates the shift towards biopower in a new

27 Michel Foucault, Society Must be Defended: Lectures at the College de France 1975-1976, (Picador, 2003), 243. 28 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: Volume One, (Vintage Books, 1990), 139-140 29 Ibid. 24 configuration of knowledge, one that addresses “man” not as an individual site of disciplinization, but rather as a “species” or organism with a range of empirically observable and statistically quantifiable socio-biological properties. The crucial component in Foucault’s biopower thus lies not only in the bio which it seeks to safeguard, ameliorate, but also in the discursive shift from

“man-as-body” to “man-as-species” which Foucault believed was needed to move from the anatomo-politics of the human body to the biopolitics of the human race.30 It seems that for

Foucault, the precondition for biopower’s emergence is rooted in the creation of a certain kind of biological subject. This subject can be found in the figure of “man” (anthropos) and its associated notions of universal “humankind”. The emergence of anthropology during the Meiji period, in many ways, recalls this crucial moment in Foucault where the shift towards man-as- species (or humans as biological organisms) generates new techniques through which power can secure its hold over “life”. In colonial Taiwan, these techniques took the form of governmental research bodies and bureaucratic agencies aiming to statistically record and make visible both the island’s Han Chinese and aborigines inhabitants. Using government-funded social scientific bodies like the Rinji Taiwan kyūkan chōsakai (Research Association for the Study of Old

Customs) or the Taiwan banzoku shūkan kenkyū (Research Association for Taiwan’s Aborigines), the Japanese colonial regime in Taiwan promoted a vast range of ethnographic fieldwork and census-taking missions whose aim was to render visible the island’s non-Japanese populations and integrate them into the structures of imperial administration. The reduction of indigenous bodies into jinshu or minzoku however entailed far more than the creation of taxonomic labels to optimize the efficacy of governmental technologies and modes of social control. Especially in the colonies, where the metropole must ensure the almost constant subjugation and docility of an overexploited labour force, anthropology became crucial in helping justify the marking off of

30 Michel Foucault, Society Must be Defended, 243. 25 indigenous populations as groups in need of extra-judicial political and military violence or control.

Recent works on both Foucault and the Japanese empire for example have shown that not all operations of biopower uniquely target populations for optimizing their living environments, or to preserve their overall biological health. Encoded within biopower is a completely antagonistic idea opposed to the notion of “making life” (faire vivir). Foucault in his work described biopower as having the dual possibility of both fostering life or disallowing it to the point of death.”31 Under the regime of biopower, the sovereign’s “ancient right” to take life or let live does not disappear. Instead, it is reconfigured into a right to “de-value” life; a right to determine which populations will have access to power’s life-administering techniques, and which ones will simply be left to die. For Foucault, the exterminatory potential of biopower took on its most concrete form in the idea of race, which for him functioned as a legitimating discourse for power’s ability to sometimes choose death over life. As Foucault outlined in his

Collège de France Lectures, the discourse of race “justifies the death function in the economy of biopower by appealing to the principle that the death of others makes one biologically stronger insofar as one is a member of a race or a population, insofar as one is an element in a unitary living plurality.”32 For Foucault, the emergence of techniques designed to enhance biological health thus have as their underside a kind of “death” function, an inherent tendency towards letting certain populations groups either experience conditions where reproduction of “life” is kept to a strict minimum, or where life itself can be simply exterminated.33 Achilles Mbembe for example has coined the term “necropower” to describe the ways in which “biopower” can shift

31 Ibid., 138. 32 Michel Foucault, Society Must be Defended, 258. 33 Ibid., 253-254. 26 its “life-enhancing” tactics and instead resort to a form of power which works almost purely through death and negativity.34 Marc Driscoll in his Absolute Erotic Absolute Grotesque, has also highlighted the destructive underside of Foucault’s biopower and its tendencies towards

“necropower”, but with specific reference to the Japanese imperial context. For Driscoll, the idea of “letting die” (or laisser mourir in French) in Foucault is inseparable from the liberal doctrine of laissez-faire capitalism, which like Foucault’s notion of laisser mourir implies a certain idea of letting populations fare for themselves: “When we pause to analyze Foucault’s famous sound byte of biopolitics – faire vivir, laisser mourir – the common understanding of biopolitics as the embrace of living populations by medical science and demographic statistics is encoded only in the first clause, improving life (faire vivir). The second clause, letting die off (laisser mourir), doesn’t simply mean killing but something like ‘allowing something to die off if that is its inherent tendency.’”35 In other words, the “laissez-faire(ing)” of life under the regime of modern industrial capitalism implies that certain populations will be selected for health maintenance, while others will be left to fend for themselves. For Driscoll, colonial biopolitics functioned in the same way as the system of uneven capitalism, as Japanese populations were targeted for the optimizing/enhancing of health and hygiene, while the colonized were depleted (or “grotesqued” to use his terminology) of their labour power and life energy, often to the point of death.36 In a similar vein, Takashi Fujitani, in his Race for Empire: Koreans as Japanese and Japanese as

Americans during WWII, has also examined the function of biopower in the economy of Japan’s colonial empire, with specific reference to the wartime mobilization of Korean soldiers. Like

Driscoll, who stressed the dual function of biopolitical control in Japan’s colonial possessions,

34 Fore more see Achilles Mbembe, “Necropolitics”, Public Culture 15 no.1 (2003). 35 Mark Driscoll, Absolute Erotic, Absolute Grotesque: the living, the dead, and the undead in Japan’s imperialism 1895-1945, (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), 14. 36 Ibid., 14-19. 27

Fujitani highlights the destructive effects that seemingly “inclusive” racial discourses of fraternity and solidarity between Koreans and Japanese had in the wartime setting. For Fujitani the very act of marking off Koreans off as “different” (ostensibly in the name of upholding a policy of “cultural rule” and allowing their entry into imperial subjecthood) created a zone of

“undecidability” about their political and legal status.37 In other words, the moment colonial difference was affirmed, Koreans were “exposed” to death and forced into a space where they could be included, but also sacrificed in the name of safeguarding the livelihood of metropolitan

Japanese: “Through most of the colonial period, Japanese colonialism operated primarily through the racialized exclusionary logic of colonial difference; at best, it allowed what might be called

“zones of indifference” or “undecidability” in which Koreans might be allowed to languish, starve, or even die – or conversely, through which a few might pass into the inside.”38

As we shall see, a similar exclusionary logic fuelled the growth of anthropological enterprises in Taiwan, as government agencies like the Taiwan Police Bureau (Keimukyoku) or its “Aborigines Control Section” (Ribanka), subjected indigenous populations to frequent exterminatory raids, all while building schools, providing hygiene or medical care, and “making life” for a selected few. This logic of “making life” and “letting die” was also firmly entrenched in the thinking of early colonial Taiwan’s political rulers. Gotō Shimpei, the first head of

Taiwan’s Civil Affairs Department (or Minseibu), for example, defined Japanese rule in Taiwan as a form of “scientific colonialism”, one in which colonial development was linked to the understanding and application of modern scientific techniques and “biological principles”.39 For

Gotō, only through an exhaustive “scientific” assessment of the island of Taiwan, along with its

37 Takashi Fujitani, Race for Empire: Koreans as Japanese and Japanese as Americans during WWII, (Berkeley, University of California Press, 2011), 38. 38 Ibid. 39 Mark R. Peattie, “Japanese Attitudes towards Colonialism, 1895-1945” in Ramon Myers, Mark R. Peattie (eds), The Japanese Colonial Empire, 1895-1945, (Princeton: Princeton University Press), 83-84. 28 population and the latter’s culture or “customs”, could a working system of colonial rule be achieved. Like animals, who “survive by overcoming heat and cold, and by enduring thirst and hunger”, Gotō believed that the Japanese colonial regime in Taiwan should “adopt suitable measures and try to overcome the various difficulties that confront us.”40 Built into the very foundations of the Japanese colonial regime in Taiwan was thus a notion of harnessing and exploiting the very “life” energies and biological processes of the island’s population. Goto’s suggestion that Taiwan be treated as a living biological organism, to which the techniques of scientific rationality be applied, did not mean however that all forms of life could be selected for preservation and health maintenance. Gotō’s notion of “scientific colonialism” after all was articulated within the framework of uneven capitalist competition, one where Japanese colonists were fighting to maintaining their privileged socio-economic positioning amidst hostile populations.41 More than any other group on the island, Taiwan’s aborigines populations experienced the full weight of Japanese biopoliticians’ uneven application of life-administering techniques. While aboriginal groups were frequently targeted for educational and hygiene campaigns by colonial authorities, they were also the object of forced labour policies (to fuel metropolitan Japan’s demand for timber and camphor), constant military raids, and lived in overall precarious social conditions. From the immediate aftermath of Japan’s takeover of the island to the late 1910s, the Japanese colonial government-general also waged a succession of brutal counter-insurgency wars against aborigines populations. Thus, even amidst systematic efforts to “civilize” indigenous populations through either cultural assimilation policies or exposure to technologies designed to improve their overall hygiene or “welfare”, Taiwan’s

40 Yao Jen-To, “The Japanese Colonial States and its Form of Knowledge in Taiwan” in Liao Pin Wei and David Der-Wei Wong, Taiwan under Japanese Colonial Rule, 1895-1945: History, Memory, Culture, (NY: Columbia University Press, 2006), 45. 41 For a more complete discussion of Gotō Shimpei’s “scientific” philosophy of colonial government, see Mark Driscoll, Absolute Erotic Absolute Grotesque, 32-36. 29 aborigines remained in a state of almost permanent military siege. In other words, aborigines in

Taiwan inhabited a world where biopower’s “death function” often took precedence over its life- preserving impulses. But who administered biopower’s death function in the colonies? Which apparatus was responsible for determining the type of accessibility colonized populations could have to the colonizer’s modernizing infrastructure and policies? For this we must turn to a discussion of imperial policing.

Between Health Preservation and Crime Prevention: Imperial policing as anthropological knowledge production

So far, we’ve looked at how, at the level of knowledge production, a destructive slippage from anthropology to colonial biopolitics occurs once different categories of the human (via taxonomic labels of jinshu or minzoku) create a space where colonized populations can be cordoned off as “different”, and then subjected to various forms of political or military control.

But this of course begs a number of questions relating to the issue of colonial governance itself.

For example, how did systems of anthropological classification affect concrete policy-making decisions? What are the institutional conduits through which knowledge was politicized, militarized, and rendered applicable to the techniques of colonial statecraft? In other words, to return to the central problematic of this chapter, what did the “biopoliticization” of indigenous populations, along with the latter’s transformation into a kind of “species body”, look like at the level of imperial practice?

In his “The Politics of Health in the Eighteenth Century” Foucault noted that when “the biological traits of a population become relevant factors for economic management”, it then

“becomes necessary to organize around them an apparatus which will ensure not only their 30 subjection but the constant increase of their utility.”42 In the same text, Foucault links this need for subjection and constant “increase” of a population’s biopolitical utility to the police: “Down to the end of the ancient régime, the term ‘police’ does not signify, at least not exclusively, the institution of the police in the modern sense; ‘police’ is the ensemble of mechanisms serving to ensure order, the properly channeled growth of wealth and the conditions of preservation of health in general.”43 For Foucault, the police is more than an entity responsible for law and public order; the police is an “ensemble” of institutions, policies, and agencies responsible for a population’s biological health and welfare, along with its labouring capacities or abilities to produce “wealth”. Other works on Foucault has also taken note of not only the latter’s expanded definition of police, but also its particular relevance in helping us examine the relation between knowledge production and the biopolitical control of populations. Pasquale Pasquino in his work also discusses in-depth Foucault’s idea of the “Science of Police” and its concomitant rise with the “Science of Government”.44 Pasquino links the emergence of what we now refer to as “police” to the political economy of late medieval/early modern territorial states. For Pasquino the term police originally had none of the negative connotations that we typically associate with it. In the early modern context, what was referred to as the “science of police” was actually a set of discourses and regulations surrounding the increased amount of contact between human beings in urbanizing market towns. The emergence of territorially-bound state formations for example saw the rise of new centers of political-economic activity like towns, markets, and squares.

These spaces, which saw dramatic increases in human and capital flows over a short period of

42 Michel Foucault, Colin Gordon (ed), Knowledge/Power: selected interviews and other writings 1972-1977, (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980), 171-172. 43 Ibid., 170. 44 Pasquale Pasquino, “Theatricum Politicum: The Genealogy of Capital – Police and the State of Prosperity” in Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon, and Peter Miller (eds), The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 108-109. 31 time, operated outside the direct juridical control of the sovereign, and also posed new challenges to the “health” and “wealth” of the state. In other words, new regulatory mechanisms of power were needed to manage the growing mobility and class/occupational complexity which came with these newly urbanizing societies. These regulations shared a wide domain of intervention, and included legislation for matters as diverse as foodstuffs, highways, beggars, customs, health and other matters pertaining to daily life. According to Pasquino, to police in an early modern context simply meant to bring order to areas that constituted a legal “no man’s land” for sovereign power. Over time, this aggregate of policies, regulations and discourses of “police” were systematized into a more concrete political and juridical body preoccupied not only with public welfare and morals, but also with matters of crime prevention.45 Pasquino for example notes that, from the 19th century onwards, police begin to be defined more in terms of their function as cura advertendi mala future, or helping “avert future dangers”.46 Foucault also addressed this in his Security, Territory, Population, where he noted how in the early modern period, sovereign power became increasingly fixated on deploying mechanisms of security to maintain criminality at “socially acceptable levels”, rather than trying to eliminate crime tout court.47 So what initially began as a set of techniques to manage life flows in spaces outside the direct juridical reach of the sovereign eventually morphed into a full-scale security apparatus to help monitor, and also contain, whatever forces threatening the biopolitical integrity of the social body. Foucault and Pasquino’s discussion allows us to isolate two key concepts that run through the entire edifice of modern policing: visibility and prevention. Seen in this light, policing takes on a whole set of meanings that go beyond the narrow confines of the law or the repressive power of the state. In other words, to police means not only to ensure the health and welfare of

45 Ibid., 108-111. 46 Ibid., 109. 47 Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the College de France (Picador, 2007), 5. 32 the community, but also to establish a regime of visibility to secure the latter against real and hypothetical criminal threats.

Based on the above theoretical reflection we can now see how something like anthropology can be treated as a form of policing, and policing as a form of anthropological work. Policing involves the creation and multiplication of codes, laws, regulations, censuses and other forms of securitization which both assign form and function to space, and also serves to enhance the productive capacities of a given population. This kind of policing, a policing that is highly preoccupied with matters of visibility and prevention, in many ways, recalls Jacques

Ranciere’s distinction between “politics” and “police”: “Politics is generally seen as the set of procedures whereby aggregation and consent of collectivities is achieved, the organization of powers, the distribution of places and roles, and the systems for legitimizing this distribution…[this system] I propose to call it the police.”48 For Rancière, the police constitutes the very material and symbolic mechanisms which assign the functions, roles and tasks to the different individuals and groups which make up a given social formation or community.

Rancière, in a passage that directly echoes Foucault’s theory of biopower, calls the police “an order of bodies that defines the allocation of ways of doing, ways of being, and ways of saying, and sees that those bodies are assigned by name to a particular place and task; it is an order of the visible and the sayable that sees that a particular activity is visible and another is not, that this speech is understood as discourse and another as noise.”49 In other words, police activity in

Rancière refers not only to the coercive tactics or regulatory modes of governmental power (such is the case with Foucault) which ensure the longevity of health or the circulation of wealth; the

48Jacques Ranciere, Disagreement: politics and philosophy, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 28- 29. 49 Ibid., 29. 33

“police regime” constitutes the set of mechanisms and procedures which structure the very coordinates of the social space, and also, determines who is to be counted as a “speaking being” and who will be reduced to mere “noise”. But in assigning ways of speaking and being to bodies, the very act of “policing” requires a pre-existing field of visibility, one where markers of difference are recorded, taxonomized, and deployed to meet political and security objectives. In the specific case of Japanese empire, the distinction between what counted as a “speaking being”, and what counted as mere “noise” (or to return to Foucault, who to “make live” and who to “let die”), was a question often mediated by academic disciplines like anthropology. In the imperial context, anthropology often functioned as the foundation upon which the “order of police” was built. By constructing ethnographic labels and racial categories, anthropologists made colonial spaces politically and culturally legible for government agencies, security forces, civil servants and other institutional bodies. These ethno-cultural markers of difference were then used by regulatory bodies like police to help avert future dangers or manage the “distribution of places and roles” (to borrow Ranciere’s terminology). But in mapping out the ethno-cultural features of entire populations, anthropologists were also ascribing to indigenous populations a whole set of tendencies or proclivities deemed to be immutable or unchangeable. In academic anthropological discourses on Taiwan for example, this took the form of constant references to the inherent

“primitivity” or “unassimilable savagery” of aborigines groups, or the perception that the entire symbolic universe of these peoples revolved around violent headhunting rituals. Police agencies then used these taxonomies to try and predict or anticipate the actions and behaviours of entire tribal groups, should they become the object of specific security operations or policies. This lead to the wholesale racializing or criminalizing of Taiwan’s aborigines populations, making the latter susceptible to a wide range of violent and even exterminatory interventions. These specific 34 dynamics, as we shall see now, were central not only to the specific regime of anthropological policing in colonial Taiwan, but also the formation of Japan’s modern police force itself.

In many ways, the police in Meiji Japan emerged as a mechanism for not only the biopolitical control of population groups, but also as a kind of cura advertendi mala future, or

“an order of bodies” seeking to help prevent threats to a social and political space. Having inherited a patchwork of quasi-autonomous feudal domains as its basic units of political administration, the early Meiji state required a centralized security force to ensure the visibility of its national territory. This coupled with rural uprisings and growing anti-government militancy in peripheral areas formed the backdrop of the modern Japanese police force’s emergence.

Studies of the Japanese police force in the Meiji period however have continuously stressed the highly repressive nature of the latter, pointing to the ways in which it functioned as an instrument of suppression for both the emerging working classes and radical political movements. Early

Japanese Marxist scholarship for example labelled the modern police system as an “excess” of disciplinary power needed to maintain the semi-feudalistic rule of capitalists and merchants over an over-exploited peasantry.50 While more recent studies have distanced themselves from this trope of Japanese police as the strong arm of an absolutist/semi-feudal state order, many continue to define this institution primarily in relation to its repressive and political functions. In her study of the Japanese secret police (or Tokko) during the interwar period, Elise Tipton uses the designation ‘police state’ to stress the central role played by the modern police system in the formation of Japan’s prewar political system.51 For Tipton, prewar Japan was characterized by a strong interventionist state with a high presence of regulatory police agencies, whose broader

50 Umemori Naoyuki, “Modernization through Colonial Mediations”, 7-8. 51 Elise Tipton, The Japanese Police State: the Tokko in interwar Japan, (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1990), 2-6. 35 political and ideological goals were to defend the imperial institution or “national polity”

(kokutai) from revolutionary/anti-state elements.52 While Tipton’s work gestures towards the police as both a regulatory apparatus of biopower and regime of knowledge production, her work presents a model of policing that is largely “top-down” and divorced from the symbolic and discursive mechanisms which made these sort of invasive police interventions possible. Other works by scholars like Umemori Naoyuki and Ken Kawashima however have done much to expand our understanding of the relationship between imperial policing and taxonomic regimes of knowledge production.

Umemori Naoyuki’s “Modernization through colonial mediations: the establishment of the police and prison system in Meiji Japan” for example has addressed the formation of Japan’s police system in relation to Foucault’s ideas. Unlike Tipton, which turns to continental models of

European policing to ground much of her discussion, Umemori locates the origins of modern

Japanese police institutions in the colonies, specifically in the legal practices and codes of the

British in Hong Kong. Rather than replicate the standard narrative which stresses the importation of policing models from continental Europe, Umemori plays up the fact that “colonial factors” were instrumental in the formation of Japan’s modern internal security force.53 In Hong Kong for example, police agencies engaged in a wide range of regulative activities. From public flogging ordinances to hygiene inspection, police officers in British-occupied Hong Kong were seen as

“agents of civilization”, rather than mere agents of colonial law. Japan’s Meiji reformers took their cues from these colonial institutions, as the Metropolitan Police Office in the early 1870s assigned functions to police officers which had far more to do with the maintenance of a population’s “biopolitical utility”, rather than with the repression of anti-state elements. As

52 Ibid., 9-14. 53 Umemori Naoyuki, “Modernization through Colonial Mediations”, 13. 36

Umemori notes: “The Metropolitan Police Office was stipulated to perform a broad range of functions, including the enforcement of public health regulations; the licensing and regulation of prostitution; the supervision of a wide range of commercial activities such as pawnshops, second-hand shops, theaters, inns: the sale of ‘dangerous materials’ such as gunpowder, swords, and firearms; the conducting of regular population counts…the supervision of public morals.”54

In linking Japanese colonial policing with the regulative practices of the police in British- occupied Hong Kong, Umemori puts forth a definition of police which brings into sharp relief the centrality of knowledge production in the very practice of policing itself.

Other studies of police in imperial Japan have also taken note of not only their various regulative functions, but also the instrumental role in segmenting and racializing colonial populations. In his study of Korean day laborers in interwar Japan, Ken Kawashima for example has explored the linkages between policing, racialization and regimes of taxonomic knowledge.

Specifically, Kawashima traces the emergence of what became known as “preventative police” organizations (yōbō keisatsu). For Kawashima, the interwar moment in Japan was marked by the expansion of police duties into the realm of social welfare work. Under the slogan keisatsu no minshuka to keisatsuka no minshu (the mass-ification of the police and the police-ification of the masses), police agencies from the mid-1910s and onwards spearheaded a series of new programs and social initiatives where they sought to involve civic organizations and welfare associations in the policing of the social body.55 This would be achieved through “horizontal” fusion of the juridical police with organizations and groups which have the greater “well-being” of the community as their primary aim. Blurring the lines between state and civil society, these

54 Ibid., 27. 55 For more on preventative police, see Ken Kawashima, The Proletarian Gamble: Korean Workers in Interwar Japan, (Duke University Press, 2009), 134-145. The organization that Kawashima examines in this specific context is the Souaikai, a “mutual aid” association of sorts for Korean laborers in the Japanese metropole. 37

“preventative police agencies”, became key entities in the regimentation and segmentation of the

Korean laboring classes, as they sought to integrate the latter through social work. This meant that the work of the police was now no longer simply a question of stopping crime, but actually pre-empting it (police officials even theorized that such an approach would one day lead to the very “self-policing” of society itself). As we shall see later, these type of preventive police activities were actually pioneered in colonial Taiwan, as police agencies coordinated their regulative and law enforcement work with civic, social relief, or self-help associations linked to either the aborigines or Han Chinese community. Especially in Taiwan’s aborigines territories, the police often lead or help set-up local associations and youth groups. Police reports often justified these preventative policies on the basis of helping aborigines “stabilize their living conditions”, and also helping them “bask in the light of imperial virtue”.56 This logic of pre- emption however would lead to the criminalization of entire aborigines groups or sub-groups, as these could now be identified by police/civic preventative organizations as being “at risk” populations requiring intervention by the state.

Concluding Remarks

In this chapter, I approached the relationship between anthropology and police as a problem of knowledge/power, pointing to the ways in which both share not only a common historical trajectory, but also a common epistemic framework linked to the study of population and the management of the latter’s biopolitical potential. In the case of anthropology, we saw that the shift from “man-as-body” to “man-as-species” opened up a space where bodies can not only be identified and integrated into the “apparatus of production”, but also marked off as

56 The use of such language can be found in the Taiwan Government-General Police Bureau’s Riban kōyō (Outline of Aborigines Control), a report I deal with more in-depth in a later section. For more see Government-General of Taiwan Police Bureau, Riban kōyō [Outline of Aborigines Administration], (Taipei: Taiwan sōtokufu keimukyoku 1940), 5. 38 different. The marking off of populations as being ethno-culturally different can in turn be used to justify the very denial of life itself, or “let die” as Foucault termed it. The apparatus which often oversees the distribution, codification and practice of this regime of racialized knowledge is the police, an institution that ostensibly aims to preserve the “health and wealth” of the social body. But in assigning bodies roles and places within the social space, the police can also revert to tactics that involve the wholesale criminalization of a population, should a specific group pose any sort of “threat” to the biopolitical integrity of the “species” or dominant “race”. In the case of

Japan’s empire, a similar process of marking off of bodies as ethno-culturally “different” lead to the differential allocation of “life”, as imperial ideologues and colonial planners across places like Korea or Taiwan used academic disciplines like anthropology to deny the colonized the status and rights enjoyed by the colonized. As the center of these techniques of dividing and segmenting colonized populations was the institution of the police, who used racial categories and labels derived from anthropological/social scientific paradigms of knowledge to justify a whole series of extra-legal operations of colonial violence. This thesis now turns to the specific setting of colonial Taiwan, where anthropologists constructed a variety of racial taxonomies for the island’s aborigines population in the hopes of understanding Japan’s ethno-racial composition. As we shall see, these taxonomies would become the basis for the government- general’s regime of occupation by colonial police, and also helped justify various forms of brutal counter-insurgent warfare by colonial security forces.

Chapter II – Anthropology as “Aborigines Control”: Racial taxonomies and the expansion of Japanese control in colonial Taiwan:

In a 1926 Tokyo Anthropological Society article entitled “The Ethnicities within our

Territories and Their Geographic Distribution”, anthropologist Miyauchi Etsuzō describes the various ethnic groups inhabiting the Japanese empire. The article lists a total of twenty-one ethnic groups. Beginning with entries like “Japanese”, “Korean”, and “Ainu”, the article goes on to list much smaller and lesser-known ethnicities. In his taxonomy, Miyauchi includes for example each of the major aborigines tribes of Taiwan.57 What is striking about this article is the fact that Taiwan’s aborigines tribes, a group who in the decades preceding the article’s publication had been the object of brutal counter-insurgent military campaigns, were included among the major ethnicities of the empire. For much of the period leading up to the publication of this article, Taiwan’s aborigines tribes were simply referred to by the colonial government as seiban, a term which roughly translates to “unassimilated savage”. This terminology of course was derived from Taiwan’s previous Qing administrators, who had divided the island’s aborigines tribes into two groups: “raw barbarians” (sheng fan) and “cooked barbarians” (shu fan). The designation “raw” typically meant that the tribe in question refused to either pay taxes or submit to Chinese “civilization”.58 Japanese colonial officials borrowed this Qing-era terminology, translating the terms sheng fan (raw barbarian) and shu fan (cooked barbarian) into seiban (unassimilated savage) and jukuban (assimilated savage). But why were Taiwan’s aborigines population labelled in the following manner? Why did they appear as both fellow co- imperials inhabiting what anthropologists like Miyauchi called “our territories”, and also violent

57 Miyauchi Etsuzō, Waga ryōdōnai ni jū suru shuzoku to sono chiriteki bunpu [The Ethnicities within our Territories and their Geographic Distribution], Tokyo jinruigaku zasshi [Journal of the Tokyo Anthropological Society], July 1926. 58 John Robert Shepherd, Statecraft and political economy on the Taiwan frontier: 1600-1800, (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1993), 7. 40

“unassimilated savages” in need of Japan’s “civilizing” influences? For this we must turn to the thought of anthropological specialists who traveled to Taiwan in the early days of Japanese colonial rule to establish classification systems for the island’s aborigines populations. Spurred on by theories claiming the South Pacific racial ancestry of their nation, Japanese anthropologists from the mid-1890s to the early 1910s flocked to the newly-occupied territory of Taiwan with the hopes of establishing a working taxonomy of the island’s aborigines tribes. Under the auspices of state-funded research agencies and assistance from colonial security forces like the police or army, anthropologists received a great deal of material and logistical support from the government-general of Taiwan.59 While anthropologists wished to study aborigines groups to examine Japan’s ethno-racial composition, Taiwan’s policy-makers and colonial planners however saw in such forms of anthropological knowledge production an effective tool for imperial administration.

This chapter will demonstrate how the taxonomies of anthropologists in Taiwan produced a dualistic image of the island’s aborigines population, an image which reduced them to either distant “ancestors” of the Japanese people, or primitive “savages” inherently predisposed to violent behaviour. Focusing on the taxonomies of Torii Ryūzō, Inō Kanori, and

Mori Ushinosuke, three anthropologists considered “pioneers” in the field of Taiwan aborigines studies, this chapter will demonstrate how this dualistic image of aborigines tribes allowed the government-general of Taiwan to determine which tribes were to be selected for “life” (via

59 Some of these research agencies included for example Goto Shinpei’s Rinji Taiwan kyukan chōsakai (Research Association for the Study of Old Customs), an agency which issued regular reports on the aborigines tribes of Taiwan. Anthropologists also needed the protection of the police or military when venturing into aborigines territories. In many cases, police officers participated directly in the gathering of anthropological data, given they worked in close proximity of aborigines communities and compiled regular ethnographic or statistical reports. For more see Shimizu Jun, “Japanese Research on Taiwan Austronesian-speaking Peoples” in David Blundell (ed), Austronesian Taiwan: Linguistics, History, Ethnology, and Prehistory, (Taipei: SMC Publishing, 2001), 183-186. See also Sakano Tōru’s Teikoku nihon to jinruigakusha: 1884-1952 [Imperial Japan and Anthropologists, 1884- 1952], (Tokyo: Keisō Shobō, 2005), 240-248. 41 assimilationist or educational programs), and those which were to be selected for “death” (via military “pacification” campaigns and other forms of extra-legal violence). But before launching into a discussion of anthropological taxonomies in colonial Taiwan, perhaps it is best to look briefly at the history of the island’s aborigines people.

Taiwan’s Aborigines: A Brief Historical Survey

Taiwan’s pre-colonial history is characterized by successive waves of migration from the surrounding territories of Southeast Asia, with two communities eventually forming, one around the western coastal plains area, and the other more to the east in the mountainous regions. For decades many scholars were convinced that the highland aborigines were once a plains-based group which had been displaced and driven off to the mountains by colonial invasion. More recent anthropological work however has discredited this “displacement myth”, pointing instead to the existence of two distinct highland and lowland ethno-cultural complexes.60 The plains aborigines of the west coast have long interacted with the succession of colonial regimes which controlled Taiwan at different stages of the island’s history. With its fertile lands, abundant deer products (a staple in both pharmacology and military technologies at the time), and overall strategic location within East Asia’s maritime trade routes, Taiwan became the focal point of numerous imperialist rivalries which severely impacted coastal aborigines. Initially the focus of

Dutch missionary activities, plains aborigines maintained a strategic position between both

European colonial traders, who sought to use their labour and expert knowledge of the land for commercial gain, and other groups like Chinese or Japanese pirates marauding Taiwan’s coast, who competed for a brief period of time with the Dutch (and also the Spanish). Later under the

60 John Robert Shepherd, Statecraft and political economy on the Taiwan frontier: 1600-1800, (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1993), 2-3. 42

Ming loyalist Koxinga and then the Qing, waves of Han Chinese emigration brought various forms of agriculture (mostly rice and sugar cane) and legal/administrative notions of land ownership to the island, bringing a certain degree of cultural Sinicization to the various tribes inhabiting the western coastal plains region. This push for control over plains indigenous communities and reclamation of the land often sparked violent disputes with Han Chinese settlers who, even with official policies on legal immigration to the island, often wound up illegally settling on aboriginal land.61 The highland aborigines however remained very much outside this larger configuration of power. Under Qing rule, Taiwan’s indigenous populations were divided into two main groups: “raw barbarians” (sheng fan) and “cooked barbarians” (shu fan). The designation “raw” typically meant that the group in question either refused to pay taxes or submit to Chinese “civilization”. In contrast to “raw barbarians”, “cooked barbarians” were presented as having greater potential for cultural assimilability.62 The designation “raw” was used for aborigines still outside the perimeter of Qing control in the highlands, while the term

“cooked” was reserved for the Sinicized plains tribes.63 By the late eighteenth century, plains aborigines communities were surrounded by Han Chinese settlers. An expanding frontier brought

Han settlers into violent conflicts with “raw aborigines” in the mountains, who for most of the island’s period of Qing rule had lived beyond the frontier.64 After the Japanese victory over the

Qing in 1895, Japan inherited this system of frontier administration, along with the larger system of ethno-cultural classification which distinguished between “raw” and “cooked” barbarians.

While anthropologists would challenge this binaristic schema, much of their categories would

61 Ibid., 6-21 62 Ibid., 7. 63 Emma Teng, Taiwan’s Imagined Geography: Chinese colonial travel writing and pictures, 1683-1895, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004), 124-125. 64 For more on late Qing policies regarding reclamation of land and movement of plains aborigines populations beyond the “raw aborigines” boundary, see John Robert Shepherd, Statecraft and political economy on the Taiwan frontier: 1600-1800, 308-362. 43 continue to reflect the dividing up of Taiwan’s tribes into different levels of “civilization”, only this time the Sino-centric language of assimilation into Chinese culture was replaced by evolutionary language of progress or “development”.

The earliest classification schemes by Japanese colonial authorities borrowed these elements from the Qing system of frontier administration by ranking aborigines based on their degree of “barbarity”. Like the Qing, who used categories like “raw barbarians” and “cooked barbarians”, Japanese colonial officials used the term seiban (a term which translates to

“unassimilated savage” or “raw savage”) and shokuban (a term used to designate “cooked savages” or those having undergone some degree of “civilizing” at the hands of the Qing).

Beyond the specificity of terms like seiban/shokuban, the more generalized term banjin (savage) was often the term colonial officials used to label aboriginal populations. Japan’s earliest encounter with aborigines groups in Taiwan dates back to the beginning of its colonial operations there, as guerilla fighting against the Chinese raged on the island’s western plains. Seeking allies to counter growing anti-colonial resistance from Qing supporters, the Japanese government took up a policy of conciliation and cooperation with aboriginal tribes. Around 1896, the fledging government-general of Taiwan also began conducting population surveys and gathering ethnographic and statistical information on the island’s aborigines tribes.65 The early policy of

“conciliation” (buiku in Japanese) however quickly collapsed, and relations deteriorated as anti-

Japanese guerilla fighting diminished and colonial officials turned to the exploitation of the camphor and timber-rich (and also mostly aborigines populated) areas of the island. As part of broader efforts to “pacify” or “tame” Taiwanese aborigines, anthropologists became key figures

65 Nakagawa Kōichi and Tamio Wakamori, Musha jiken: Taiwan no takasagoku no hōki [The Musha Incident: The Revolt of Taiwan’s Aborigines Tribes], (Tokyo: Sanseidō, 1980), 29-30. 44 in the colonial state’s relations with these groups.66 Also, with the government-general’s expansion of Japan’s capitalist enterprises further into the island’s central and northern areas, more opportunities arose for anthropologists to conduct field surveys and compile data on aboriginal groups.

The Search for Japan’s “Ancestors” in Taiwan: Torii Ryūzō and the beginnings of colonial anthropology on the aborigines frontier

One of the first systematic attempts at constructing a typification system for Taiwan’s aborigines tribes was done by Torii Ryūzō, a student of Tsuboi Shōgorō who took multiple trips to the island between 1896-1899. In total, Torii went on four major research expeditions to the island of Taiwan. For Torii, establishing the geographic boundaries of each specific tribal unit was a far more important task than coming up with any kind of systematic typology. With the

Taiwanese colonial state’s process of capitalist accumulation in the camphor and timber-rich areas of the island underway, basic knowledge of each tribe’s geographic emplacement would allow the government-general to better manage or suppress any sort of conflict or potential resistance by the aborigines to their policies. Torii believed in the practical necessity of government anthropology for Japan to manage its newfound territories, and thought that only through a proper understanding of cultural/physical differences among the aborigines tribes of

Taiwan could a working system of colonial rule be achieved there. In addition to all this, Torii rejected the former Qing-era typology, and did not rank the different aborigines tribes based on their degree of civilization.67 As one of few anthropologists who spent the formative years of his

66 Robert Tierney, Tropics of Savagery: the culture of Japanese empire in comparative frame, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010), 39. 67Paul Barclay, Japanese and American colonial projects: anthropological typification in Taiwan and the Phillipines (unpublished dissertation), University of Minnesota, May 1999, 191-193. 45 career on the study of Taiwan’s aborigines, Torii’s writings and numerous research expeditions are worth examining at length.

Under the influence of his mentor, Tsuboi Shōgorō, Torii in the late 1890s decided to take up the study of Taiwan’s aborigines populations. After conducting research both at home and abroad in parts of Korea and China, Torii turned his attention to Taiwan’s aborigines highlands, an area then recently made available to anthropologists through Japan’s takeover of

Taiwan in 1895. Spending much of the late 1890s in and out of Taiwan, Torii work was the first to provide an exhaustive cultural and physical geography of the land. Having no prior knowledge of Taiwan’s “raw aborigines”, Torii initially consulted various western books and Qing-era government sources before starting his research. Among the western texts he read was George

Leslie Mackay’s Far from Formosa, a highly sensationalist account of British missionary activities within Taiwan’s aboriginal lands before the period of Japanese rule.68 He also consulted existing ethnographic materials on the Philippines, Sumatra, Borneo and other southeastern Pacific population groups, and for much of his work on Taiwan’s aborigines would continue to stress their connections with the latter South Pacific Austronesian groups.69 Torii made his way to Taihoku (Taipei) around 1896, where he met with Governor-General Kabayama

Sukenori, who had fought aborigines tribes (the Paiwan tribe more specifically) during Japan’s punitive expedition to Taiwan in 1874. His first expedition focused mostly on the northern and central areas of the highlands. It was on the occasion of this first research trip that Torii first encountered the much-feared Atayal population. He closed off his first trip with a visit to the

Pinan and the Tsalisen tribes, groups located more towards the south. Torii’s second trip had him undertake an extensive survey of the isolated Yami tribe, located on Botel Tobago Island (Orchid

68 Torii, Ryūzō. Aru rōgakuto no shuki, (Tokyo: Asahi Shinbunsha, 1953), 59. See also George Leslie Mackay, Far from Formosa, (New York: F.H. Revell Co., 1896). 69 Torii, Ryūzō. Aru rōgakuto no shuki, 59. 46

Island), south of the Taiwanese mainland.70 The third and fourth expedition to Taiwan had him visit a collection of different tribes along the central-south perimeter of the highlands. His fourth and final expedition also brought him to the base of the highlands, where most of the plains aborigines are located.71

Torii’s taxonomy grouped Taiwan’s aborigines populations into ten categories: Atayal,

Bunun, Niitaka, Tsuō, Tsarisen, Paiwan, Piuma, Ami, Yami, and finally, the Peipo or “Plains”

Aborigines.72 The central aim of Torii’s anthropological research was to demonstrate the larger

Malayo-Indonesian lineage of the island’s different tribes.73 Like many other anthropological researchers of his time, Torii maintained that the Japanese people were made up of two specific ethno-racial groups. In a 1917 article entitled Nihonjin no kigen (The Origins of the Japanese

People), Torii for example identified the two groups which he believed made up the larger

Japanese “race” or ethnicity: one was a “Mongoloid” or Tungusic group, which had long co- existed with the original Ainu population, and the other, an “Indonesian” or “Malayan” group said to have populated Kyūshū after migrating from Southeast Asia.74 In order to achieve his goal of both constructing a working typology of Taiwan’s aborigines population, and also tracing the ethnic ancestry of the Japanese people, Torii drew from the techniques of physical anthropology.

Using a variety of anthropometric measurements and statistical tools, Torii constructed highly detailed taxonomies which described the physical features of each major tribe, pointing to similarities in everything from height and cranial measurements, and also their broader ethno-

70 Ibid., 60-65. For a brief overview of Torii’s expeditions see also Sakano Tōru’s Teikoku nihon to jinruigakusha: 1884-195 [Imperial Japan and Anthropologists, 1884-1952], (Tokyo: Keisō Shobō, 2005), 231-234. 71 Torii, Ryūzō. Aru rōgakuto no shuki, 68. 72 Torii Ryūzō, Jinruigaku kenkyū: Taiwan no genjūmin [Anthropological Research: The Aborigines of Taiwan] in Torii Ryūzō zenshū daigoken [The Complete works of Torii Ryūzō Volume 5], (Tokyo: Asashi Shinbunsha, 1975), 13. 73 Paul Barclay, “A Historian among the Anthropologists: The Inō Kanori revival and the legacy of Japanese colonial ethnography in Taiwan”, Japanese Studies (21), no.2 (2001), 118. 74 Torii Ryūzō, Nihonjin no kigen [The Origins of the Japanese People] in Torii Ryūzō zenshū daigoken [The Complete works of Torii Ryūzō Volume 5], (Tokyo: Asashi Shinbunsha, 1975), 643. 47 cultural lineages to other South Pacific Austronesian tribal groups. A representative work of

Torii’s anthropological model, a model which combined the techniques of physical anthropology with ethnographic analysis, was his work on the Yami people, the aborigines tribe living on

Botel Tobago Island (or Kōtōsho in Japanese). Torii’s findings on the Yami people were first published in a 1902 report entitled Kōtōsho dozoku chōsa hōkoku (Report on the Natives of Botel

Tobago Island). The report provides readers with a highly detailed overview of Yami physical measurements and cultural traditions. It also describes how the Yami people share close ethnic ancestry with groups like the Ivatan people of Batanes Island, and also the Igorot of Northern

Luzon (in other works Torii often added the Negrito people to this list).75 Scores of other works and research reports by Torii used similar forms of anthropometric measurements and comparative ethnographic analysis to catalogue the physical and ethno-cultural characteristics of each one of the different tribes.76 Torii also rejected the “displacement hypothesis”, highlighting how Taiwan’s highland aborigines were not simply plains tribes driven off to the mountains by

Chinese invaders, but rather a group whose migration to the island predates China’s attempts at settlement.77 This interpretation also ran counter to some popular scholarship of the time, which viewed Taiwan’s highland tribes as a group of displaced peoples who, following the arrival of

Chinese immigrants, were said to have begun taking up a violent and secluded lifestyle. In Janet

B. McGovern’s Among the Head-hunters of Formosa, one of the few English-language publications on the subject of Taiwan’s aborigines at the time, the author for example invokes

75 Torii Ryūzō, Kōtōsho dozoku chōsa hōkoku, [Report on the Natives of Botel Tobago Island], (Tokyo University, Jinruigaku Kyoshitsu, 1902), 2-7. Torii also seems to have been particularly fixated on the Negrito people. See Torii Ryūzō, “Waga kuni ni okeru negurito mondai” [The Issue of Negrito in our Country] in Torii Ryūzō zenshū daijūichiken [The Complete works of Torii Ryūzō Volume 11], (Tokyo: Asashi Shinbunsha, 1975), 613-614. 76 For another representative article which does this, see Torii Ryūzō, “Kōtōsho dojin no tōkei” [The Cranial Shape of Botel Tobago’s Natives] in Torii Ryūzō zenshū daijūichiken [The Complete works of Torii Ryūzō Volume 11], (Tokyo: Asashi Shinbunsha, 1975), 584-589. 77 Torii Ryūzō, Nihon shūi minzoku no genshō shūkyō: shinwa shūkyō no jinshugakuteki kenkyū [The Primitive Religions of the Peoples Surrounding Japan: An Ethnographic Study of Religion] in Torii Ryūzō zenshū dainanaken [The Complete works of Torii Ryūzō Volume 7], (Tokyo: Asashi Shinbunsha, 1975), 343. 48 ancient Chinese sources, sources which described Taiwan’s aborigines as a once “gentle and peaceable people” who were eventually driven to the mountains by “fierce marauders”.78 Torii seemed to have distanced himself from these theories, choosing instead to try and elucidate

(using whatever techniques at his disposal) the specific clusters of populations or regions from which Taiwan’s aborigines tribes had emigrated from.

Even though Torii’s work contained an aura of “scientific” analysis, his language, like much of his contemporaries in the field, reflected the prevailing view of Taiwan’s aborigines people as violent “savages” devoid of “civilized” modernity. In the opening segments of his

1910 Jinruigaku kenkyū: Taiwan no genjūmin (Anthropological Research: The Aborigines of

Taiwan) for example, Torii refers to Taiwan’s indigenous tribes as individuals who have

“completely turned their backs on civilization” and “cling stubbornly to the customs of their ancestors.”79 Torii also used official government terms like seiban (unassimilated savages) or banjin (savages) when referring to Taiwan’s aborigines inhabitants. He even at times made comparative judgements about the varying degrees of “civilization” among the different tribes.

Torii for example often singled out the Atayal tribe as the “fiercest” or most dangerous of the all the aborigines groups.80 Paradoxically though, Torii also believed they were the one group which shared the closest racial ancestry to other Malayo-Indonesian tribes. In his postwar memoir for example, Torii calls the Atayal population, the “most Indonesian tribe which has preserved their primitive customs.”81 In his work Torii thus often reinforced the image of Taiwan’s aborigines as primitive human beings trapped in a separate temporality or stage of evolutionary development.

78 Janet B. McGovern, Among the Head-hunters of Formosa, (Boston: Mayard, 1920), 40. 79 Torii Ryūzō, Jinruigaku kenkyū: Taiwan no genjūmin [Anthropological Research: The Aborigines of Taiwan] in Torii Ryūzō zenshū daigoken [The Complete works of Torii Ryūzō Volume 5], (Tokyo: Asashi Shinbunsha, 1975), 4. 80 Paul Barclay, Japanese and American colonial projects: anthropological typification in Taiwan and the Phillipines, 193. 81 Torii Ryūzō, Aru rōgakuto no shuki, 62. 49

Unlike the previous Qing order, which designated unconquered aborigines simply as individuals existing outside the spatial boundaries of the Sino-centric world system, Japanese anthropologists like Torii placed aborigines tribes on the lowest rung of an evolutionary or

“civilizational” scale of linear “development” (which Japan of course represented the pinnacle of). In his Time and the Other, Johannes Fabian has described this sort of logic on the part of modern anthropology as “allochronic discourse”, a means by which the indigenous “other” is placed in a separate time and reduced to an unchanging “primitive” human being by his interlocutor.82 But even in temporalizing aborigines “life” and placing it outside the boundaries of “civilized” modernity, anthropologists also sought to create a link to the present, by tracing the ethnic ancestry of the island’s different tribes and establishing racial continuity between these groups and the Japanese archipelago. These claims were consistent with the larger Japanese imperial ideal of the time. This imperial ideal, which presented Japan as a “mixture” of various continental peoples and traditions, placed the country at the center of a growing multi-ethnic and multi-cultural empire. By putting the boundaries of Japanese ethnicity as far as the mountainous regions of Taiwan, anthropologists like Torii played an instrumental role in propagating this discourse of Japan as a multi-ethnic empire or nation. Torii’s lasting contribution to the taxonomic project of anthropologists in Taiwan however was perhaps his attempts at devising

“scientific” systems of categorization and identification for each one of the different aboriginal tribes. Using techniques derived from the field of physical anthropology and anthropometry,

Torii fixed a whole series of immutable physical (and at times cultural) characteristics to each one of the different tribes, thereby racializing them and marking them off as “primitive” human

82 For more see Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other, (NY: Columbia University Press, 1983), 13. Paul Barclay also refers to Fabian’s Time and the Other in his treatment of Japanese anthropology on Taiwan. For more see Paul Barclay, “Contending Centres of Calculation in Colonial Taiwan: “The Rhetorics of Vindicationism and Privation in Japan’s ‘Aboriginal Policy’”, Humanities Research vol. 14, no. 1 (2007), 68-74. 50 beings existing beyond the pale of “civilized” modernity. Although these forms of racialization were carried out in the service of examining Japan’s ethnic origins, its lasting effects would be the division and segmentation of indigenous populations in Taiwan along bio-cultural lines, a move which opened up a space for the wholesale stigmatization (or criminalization) of aborigines people as violent “savages” constituting a threat to colonial order. Torii also made a number of claims about the inherent “primitivity” or backwardness of certain tribes (the Atayal for example). These sorts of claims, as we shall see in the following section, were very commonplace among the thinking of colonial security forces. But in order to examine more closely the relationship between anthropology, racialization, and the direction of Japanese colonial policy in Taiwan, this chapter must now turn to the taxonomies of the two other major anthropologists who worked on aborigines groups: Inō Kanori and Mori Ushinosuke.

From Anthropology to “Aboriginal Affairs”: Inō Kanori, Mori Ushinosuke and the expansion of

Japanese control across the frontier

The period following Torii’s fieldwork expeditions saw the proliferation of violent struggles for territorial and economic dominance of the highlands by the Japanese police and army. From the early 1900s and onwards, Taiwan’s government-general established a series of military installations, collectively known as the “guard line” (aiyūsen), which were used to demarcate Japanese-held territories from Taiwan’s aborigines districts.83 As the colony’s need for key resources like camphor increased, the “guard line” slowly advanced, unleashing in the process a wave of unprecedented military violence on aborigines communities across the island.

By 1915, most of Taiwan’s aboriginal territories were brought under a form of permanent

83 The expansion of this system reached its height under the governor-general Sakuma Samata, who from 1909-1914 launched a five-year suppression campaign to “Conquer the Northern Savages”. By the close of these operations, all of Taiwan’s aboriginal lands were effectively under Japanese police occupation. 51 occupation by the Japanese police. The expansion of the guard line and the use of force to subjugate Taiwan’s aboriginal lands however often unfolded unevenly, with tribes residing in the north bearing the full weight of the government-general’s suppression campaigns, and those in the south experiencing a mixture of military violence and educational or assimilationist programs.

In some cases, tribes deemed more “friendly” to Japanese interests were enlisted to assist in police or military operations.84 Even the official government literature of time stressed the need for such “divide and conquer” policies based on an imagined north-south geographic and cultural division of aboriginal lands. In the 1911 Report on the Control of the Aborigines in Formosa for example, the government-general’s “Bureau of Aboriginal Affairs” describes how Taiwan’s history of successive colonization by outside powers had created a “difference in the character of civilizing influences upon the various tribes.”85 The northern-based Atayal tribe for example is described by the authors as a group of violent “savages” who “look upon head-hunting as the most glorious thing in their life”, while the other tribes located more to the central and southern areas of the island are described as having a greater “degree of civilization”.86 The report then goes on to describe how the “northern tribes” of Taiwan require a specific “method of control” distinct from the other “southern tribes”: “As a rule suppression is used in dealing with the northern tribes, while the method of development is adopted in controlling the southern tribes”87

This biopolitical calculus of selecting some tribes for “life” (via “gradual development”) and others for death (via “suppression”) by the government-general however begs the following question: Why were “northern tribes” deemed more of a threat to the colonial order than their

84 One particular 1905 incident for example saw Japanese officials convincing members of the Bunun tribe to go out and slaughter over one hundred Atayal men. For more see Paul Barclay, “Contending Centres of Calculation in Colonial Taiwan: “The Rhetorics of Vindicationism and Privation in Japan’s ‘Aboriginal Policy’”, Humanities Research vol. 14, no. 1 (2007), 79. 85 Government-General of Taiwan (Bureau of Aboriginal Affairs), Report on the Control of the Aborigines in Formosa, (Taipei, 1911), 4. 86 Ibid., 2-3. 87 Ibid., 4-5. 52

“southern” counterparts? In order to assess more directly the impact of anthropological studies on Japan’s control over Taiwan’s aborigines territories, one must turn to the work of anthropologists Inō Kanori and Mori Ushinosuke.

While Torii Ryūzō’s writings offered exhaustive empirical “scientific” data to bolster the mixed nation theory of the Japanese people, other taxonomies produced by anthropologists working in Taiwan provided colonial managers with information suited to help strengthen

Japan’s colonial rule over aborigines areas. This was the case with anthropologist Inō Kanori, who from 1895 and onwards was active as both scholar and bureaucrat in colonial Taiwan tasked with coming up with a working system of classification for the island’s highland tribes.

Paradoxically though, while Inō initially set out to undo the moribund Sinological system of categorization of “raw” versus “cooked” barbarians, Inō replicated its hierarchizing logic by breaking up the different tribes into fixed cultural units and discussing their growth and development almost exclusively with reference the history of Han settlement and Qing empire.88

This was also the case with the last of the major three anthropologists who conducted extensive research on Taiwan’s aborigines tribes, Mori Ushinosuke, who although saw firsthand and often critiqued the harsh treatment that the Japanese police and army reserved for aborigines populations, still replicated the hierarchic taxonomy of his predecessors.

Inō also had training in classical Confucian learning and unlike Torii, did not have the same background in anthropological fieldwork. This however also gave him an advantage when dealing with Chinese sources, and explains why, unlike other anthropologists of his time, Inō

88 Paul Barclay, “Contending Centres of Calculation in Colonial Taiwan: “The Rhetorics of Vindicationism and Privation in Japan’s ‘Aboriginal Policy’”, 69-72. 53 relied heavily on Qing documents to conduct his research.89 Considered more of a historian by many, Inō’s reliance on ancient Qing documents, local gazeteers, and other ethnographic fragments written by Chinese observers put him at odds with Torii’s fieldwork-driven approach, and approach which was increasingly predominant by the 1900s and 1910s as the professionalization of anthropology grew in scope. While Torii relied on an array of modern techniques like photography or anthropometry to record and display his findings, Inō’s work was very much rooted in literary paradigms of classical Chinese learning. Although he did supplement his work with physical measurements of the different tribes he surveyed, much of it wound up becoming unreliable (and ultimately would add very little to his analysis, given much of his pre-occupation was with situating the growth of aborigines culture and society within the context of Qing statecraft and frontier policies).90

Inō set out for Taiwan in 1895 with the aim of establishing a classificatory system for labeling Taiwan’s aborigines tribes, and at the same time, overturn the Sino-centric categories of seiban and jukuban which long dominated perceptions of the island’s original inhabitants. Upon his arrival, Inō began establishing institutional linkages between the Tokyo Anthropological

Society and government-general, and formed in late 1895 the Taiwan Anthropological Society with scholar Tashiro Antei. In the period leading up to his major 192-day expedition in 1897, Inō produced a few reports, each of them seeking to deconstruct the various Chinese categories which permeated understanding of aborigines culture and society. These reports laid the groundwork for his later comprehensive taxonomy, and did much to challenge the classical Qing

89 Paul Barclay, “A Historian among the Anthropologists: Inō Kanori and the legacy of Japanese colonial ethnography in Taiwan”, 123-127. 90 Ibid., 126. 54 nomenclature.91 Inō’s major contributions to the Japanese anthropological project in Taiwan however was his Taiwan banjin jijō (Conditions among the Taiwan Aborigines), a report published by the Bureau of Industrial Development, and co-authored with Bureau of Education commissioner Awano Dennojō. The report also made its way to Goto Shimpei in 1899, who drew inspiration from Inō’s findings in his policies for aboriginal administration.92 The end result of the Taiwan banjin jijō was an eight-tribe classification (just two categories less than Torii’s) which ethnically differentiated each group based on shared cultural traits like language, clothing, religion, and folk traditions. Inō’s taxonomy divided the aborigines population of Taiwan into the following groups: Atayal, Vonum, Bunum, Tsalisen, Paiwan, Ami, Piyuma and Peipo (the

Yami of Botel Tobago were added afterwards to this taxonomy).93 The report, being produced in period that saw the beginnings of unrest and violence between Japanese authorities and aborigines groups, did not contain extensive fieldwork data, but rather observations by officials and Qing sources. While the document did much to overturn Sinocentric labels that ranked each tribe in accordance with their assimilation within or proximity to Han culture, Inō still produce a system that internally differentiated the socio-cultural traits of each aborigines group based on the historical interactions with Han settlers. In other words, the more distant a tribe existed from the center of Chinese “civilization” around the western plains region, the less chances a given tribe had of exhibiting the features of organizationally complex and developed societies. The following passage, taken from the report itself, illustrates his taxonomy’s hierarchic logic:

“Taiwan’s most advanced Aborigines are the Peipo tribe, followed by the Parizarizao section of

91 Paul Barclay, “A Historian among the Anthropologists: Inō Kanori and the legacy of Japanese colonial ethnography in Taiwan”, 123-127. 92 Paul Barclay, “Contending Centres of Calculation in Colonial Taiwan: The Rhetorics of Vindicationism and Privation in Japan’s ‘Aboriginal Policy’”, 73-75. 93 Sakano Tōru, Teikoku nihon to jinruigakusha: 1884-1895, 237. Inō’s taxonomy also reappears in his later 1905 work Taiwan banseishi [A History of Aboriginal Policy in Taiwan], (Taipei: Department of Industrial Development of the Government-General of Taiwan, Reprinted 1997, SMC Publishing), 2-3. 55 the Paiwan tribe, the Puyuma tribe, the Amis tribe and others who inhabit the plains. The lowest position is occupied by the Atayal tribe, who all live deep in the valleys…There is no doubt that this state of affairs is directly related to the degree of intercourse with the Chinese.”94 Inō in his work also explored at great lengths the significance of headhunting practices among the different aborigines tribes. Inō however often relativized headhunting practices as mere “social customs” that could be explained purely through the violent historical interactions aborigines tribes shared with Chinese settlers on the frontier.95 After publishing the Taiwan banjin jijō, Inō also published a lengthy history of aborigines in Taiwan entitled Taiwan banseishi (History of Aborigines Policy) in 1905.

This work also took up many of the themes explored in his earlier work, focusing on the centuries of contact between aborigines tribes and outside imperialist forces. In his banseishi, Inō divides up

Taiwan’s history into the following periods: the Dutch/Spanish eras, Koxinga’s rule, the Qing era, and finally the arrival of Japan. The section on Japanese rule for example specifically dealt with questions of aborigines education (the specific term used is “cultivation” or kyōka) and military pacification (tōbatsu).

In many ways, Inō’s framing of “aborigines education” as one of the defining features of Japan’s brief historical presence on the island of Taiwan demonstrates his support for Japan’s “civilizing mission” and colonial project on the aborigines frontier.96

Alongside Inō Kanori, another major scholar in the field of Japanese colonial anthropology was Mori Ushinosuke. Beginning in the late 1890s, Mori started conducting fieldwork and research on Taiwan’s aborigines population. For a period of time he worked as an assistant for Torii Ryūzō, who became his mentor. Mori joined the Survey Section of the

94 Inō Kanori and Awano Dennojō, Taiwan banjin jijō [Conditions among Taiwan’s Aborigines], (Taipei: Ministry of Civil Affairs Division, 1900), 112, quoted in Paul Barclay, “Contending Centres of Calculation in Colonial Taiwan: The Rhetorics of Vindicationism and Privation in Japan’s ‘Aboriginal Policy’”, 72. 95 Paul Barclay, “Contending Centres of Calculation in Colonial Taiwan: The Rhetorics of Vindicationism and Privation in Japan’s ‘Aboriginal Policy”, 71. 96 See Inō Kanori, Taiwan banseishi, 2-3. See also pgs. 510-621 for the specific chapters dealing with aborigines education and “pacification”. 56

“Bureau for the Control of Aborigines” in 1909 and traveled with the colonial army, witnessing in the process the wholesale destruction and atrocities inflicted on aborigines communities by the government-general’s policies of “suppression”.97 Mori however hoped that as an anthropological researcher, his work could serve to foster cultural understanding between the two warring sides.98 By providing exhaustive and systematic knowledge on the socio-cultural and linguistic properties of each tribe, it was Mori’s belief that he would be able to mitigate the devastation indigenous communities were experiencing at the hands of the expanding Japanese colonial state.99 Mori in some instances even directly criticized the government-general’s brutal treatment of the aborigines, warning that if this approach persisted, it would cause irreparable damage to aborigines culture, and could even lead to its complete disappearance: “[Opening up the savage territory] entails very rapid and severe changes in the aborigines’ particular cultures, if not their outright destruction. Furthermore their oral traditions are being forgotten, while their precious heirlooms and material artifacts are destroyed in fires. Hit by waves of civilization, the aborigines may become mere shells of their former selves and lose the lofty and noble qualities that arise from their ethnic character.”100 In his writings, Mori often alluded to the need to

“preserve” the culture of Taiwan’s aborigines inhabitants. In a 1914 article in the Tokyo

Anthropological Society for example, Mori highlighted that Japan, as the “new conqueror of

Taiwan”, had a duty to “protect and preserve” the manners and customs of the island’s aborigines population through careful investigation of the latter.101 Mori’s work was thus more in the style of what some have termed “salvage anthropology”, a form of anthropological writing

97 Robert Tierney, Tropics of Savagery, (Berkeley: University of California Press), 86-87. 98 Ibid,. For an overview of Mori’s expeditions, see also Mori Ushinosuke, Taiwan banzokushi [Ethnography of Taiwan’s Aborigines Tribes], (Taipei: Rinji Taiwan kyukan chōsakai, 1917), 8-35. 99 Robert Tierney, Tropics of Savagery, (Berkeley: University of California Press), 86-87. 100 Ibid., 87. 101 Mori Ushinosuke, “Taiwan seiban ni tsuite” [On the Aborigines of Taiwan], Tokyo jinruigaku zasshi [Journal of the Tokyo Anthropological Society] (February 1914), 55-56. 57 which laments the inevitable destruction of an indigenous population and tries to preserve the latter’s “nearly-extinct” culture and customs.102

Mori’s major work, the 1917 Taiwan banzokushi (Ethnography of Taiwan’s Aborigines

Tribes), reflects Mori’s style of “salvage anthropology” through its highly-detailed and systematic attempts to record and taxonomize almost every possible facet of aborigine’s society and culture. Combining ethnographic analysis with scores of statistical charts and anthropometric data, Mori’s Taiwan banzokushi contains topics ranging from aborigines physical stature and social conditions, to language/dialect and folk customs.103 But while Mori’s intentions in producing a work like the Banzokushi was most likely to help prevent the destruction of aborigines culture, his taxonomy perhaps did much to serve the practical and administrative needs of the colonial state. In many ways, Mori’s project of grouping together various markers of aborigines physical and cultural difference into one integrated system of classificatory knowledge helped further reinforce the existing ethnic categories and patterns of racialization produced by previous anthropological scholarship. Mori’s six-tribe taxonomy (Atayal, Bunun,

Paiwan, Tsuo, Ami, Yami), which appears in his Banzokushi and was most likely developed over the course of his field research with the army, was adopted for example by the colonial state in

1913.104

A good example of the Banzokushi’s racialization of Taiwan’s aborigines peoples is its section on the “observation of aborigines physical traits” (shintai kansatsu). This section of the

Banzokushi makes extensive use of anthropometric tools like the cephalic index. The cephalic

102 Robert Tierney, Tropics of Savagery, 88. 103 While Mori’s banzokushi contains over 350 pages of anthropological data and ethnographic observations, the three sections which take up a great deal of space in his work are: physical traits (shintai kansatsu), social conditions (shakai jōtai), and folk customs (dōzoku). For more see Mori Ushinosuke, Taiwan banzokushi, 113-143, 145-186, and 187-232. 104 Robert Tierney, Tropics of Savagery, 86. Mori’s taxonomy can be found in the opening pages of his Banzokushi. See Mori Ushinosuke, Taiwan banzokushi, 1-3. 58

index usually involved taking the breadth of the skull, multiplying it by one hundred, and then dividing that result by the skull’s length. The measurements were then placed within one of three categories:

“dolichocephalic” (long-headed), mesaticephalic (medium-headed), and “brachycephalic” (short- headed).105 Using tools like the cephalic index, scholars often built racial classification systems where physical traits could be used to measure or compare everything from culture to intellectual aptitudes. Scholars in Europe for example often culled data from cephalic measurements of western European “Aryan” types to make comparative claims about their “less developed” eastern or southern European counterparts.106 While Mori most likely did not share the global racial order envisioned by many European scholars working with tools like the cephalic index, his use of such techniques reveals his fundamental belief in a paradigm of knowledge production where human “life” could be divided and segmented using mere analysis of bio- physical traits. The end result of Mori’s taxonomy was thus an even more exhaustive system of anthropological knowledge production, one which practically recorded every minute detail of aborigines “life”, from local language right down to the average length of each tribes’ cranium.

Mori’s Taiwan banzokushi, as the last major work of anthropology produced amidst the expansion of Japanese military and police control across the highlands, signalled not only the increasingly symbiotic relationship between anthropologists and the colonial state, but also the consolidation of nearly two decades’ worth of anthropological scholarship on Taiwan’s aborigines.

Concluding Remarks

Starting in the late 1890s, Japanese anthropologists began traveling to Taiwan to study the island’s aborigines population. Initially focused around the investigation of Japan’s ethno-

105 Ibid., 114-144. For more on the cephalic index see Bruce Baum, The Rise and Fall of the Caucasian Race: A political history of racial identity, (New York University Press, 2006), 130-132. 106 For more on European racial classifications systems and the cephalic index, see Ibid., 130-152. 59 racial ancestry, anthropological studies in colonial Taiwan quickly became enmeshed in the violent operations of police and military forces seeking to expand the frontier beyond the “guard line” perimeter. Although they looked upon the aborigines people of Taiwan as fellow co- imperials or distant “relatives” of their nation, Japanese anthropologists helped construct a variety of ethnic categories and racial labels which supplied colonial officials with a working framework of knowledge production to plan and carry out the subjugation and division of aboriginal lands. Through their discussions of northern tribes like the Atayal and their supposed propensity towards head-hunting, or their descriptions of southern Han-influenced lowland tribes, the taxonomies of Japanese anthropologists in Taiwan produced hierarchies which ranked the island’s different tribes in accordance with their degree of “civilization”. These classificatory forms of knowledge, with their exhaustive attempts at recording and taxonomizing every possible aspect of aborigines physical and cultural being, in many ways, recalls Foucault’s discussion of race in his Society Must be Defended: “What is in fact racism? It is primarily a way of introducing a break into the domain of life that is under power’s control: the break between what must live and what must die. It is a way of separating out the groups that exist within a population. It is, in short, a way of establishing a biological-type caesura within a population that appears to be a biological domain.”107 Through the production and dissemination of ethnic categories and other “biological-type caesura” that differentiated tribes on the basis of things like physical stature or degree of acculturation by the previous Qing regime, anthropological taxonomies in colonial Taiwan not only allowed government officials to expand the administrative reach of the imperial state; they also helped determine which tribes were to be subject to policies of “gradual development”, and those that were to undergo “suppression”. In

107 Michel Foucault, Society Must be Defended: lectures from the Collège de France 1975-76, 254-255. 60 other words, to borrow Foucault’s turn of the phrase, the taxonomies of Japanese anthropologists allowed colonial planners to decide “what must live and what must die” across the island.

This chapter however has only schematically dealt with the regulative or military roles and functions of Japanese police officers across Taiwan’s aborigines territories. While government publications like the Report on the Control of Aborigines in Formosa hint at the mixture of biopower and necropower which characterized the work of the police in Japanese- occupied Taiwan (along with the close ties these modes of control shared with anthropological knowledge production), a number of concrete historical questions still need to be dealt with. For example, what sort of assistance did police officers provide to anthropological researchers? What sort of anthropological or social scientific work did police officers themselves engage in? How were anthropological paradigms of knowledge integrated into the daily practice of colonial policing? And in terms of assimilatory or exterminatory tactics, what strategies and approaches did the Police Bureau’s “Aborigines Control Section” adopt? In order to address these and other research questions, this thesis now turns to the specific policies of the Japanese police in Taiwan, who from roughly the early 1900s to the mid-1910s, became the sole rulers of the island’s aboriginal lands.

Chapter III – “The Special Quality of this Island’s Police”: Taiwan’s Aboriginal lands under Keimukyoku rule

In a 1925 article entitled “On the Special Quality of this Island’s Police”, the then commander of Taichung Province’s police force, Washinosu Atsuya, describes the “Status of the

Police in the Colony”. Invoking the differences separating the “mother country” (Japan) from what he affectionately calls “this island” (Taiwan), Washinosu describes the function of the police force in the following manner: “Contrasting with the primary duties of the police…(Taiwan’s police force) must conduct research on people’s customs and social conditions. In order to do this, research into everyday matters must be done. Especially on this island, where language and diction differs completely from the mother country, an additional layer of inconvenience is added to this research.”108 Washinosu’s article then goes on to describe the evolution of Taiwan’s police force, pointing to various changes in legal and administrative duties that have taken place since the beginning of Japanese rule in 1895. In addition, Washinosu also points to the integration of local security and self-defense associations like the Han Chinese

Baojia (or Hoko in Japanese) into the larger jurisdictional sphere of the colonial police, pointing of course to the ways in which such initiatives reflect an overall concern for the well-being of the colonized on the part of the Taiwan Police Bureau. And finally, in the closing segments of the article, Washinosu cautions against the rising tide of democratic or national self-determination movements, all while highlighting Taiwan’s relative isolation from the rising tide of these

“disruptive” trends: “On this island there is an issue to which we must pay attention to…after the

Great War in Europe there has been discussion of democracy, and the idea of self-determination, and these ideas have come to gradually penetrate the intellectual landscape of this island. The

108 Washinosu Atsuya, “Honjima keisatsu no tokushitsu o ron zu” [On the Special Quality of this Island’s Police] in Washinosu Atsuya, Washinosu Atsuya chosakushū [The Collected Works of Washinosu Atsuya], (Tōkyō: Ryokuin Shobō, 2000), 8. 62 deepening of these ideas have stirred the people’s hearts and have brought disorder to public opinion, but a single characteristic of this island is that such problems do not exist.”109

Washinosu’s text, although focused on the government-general’s management of Han

Chinese populations, presents us with what I think is great illustration of the central role of social scientific knowledge production in the work of imperial policing. In linking research on local

“social conditions and customs” with police work, Washinosu presents us with a vision of colonial security where study of the indigenous populations becomes a crucial measure for crime prevention. Then, of course, are the myriad regulative functions which Washinosu attaches to the duties of police officers. These include supervision of local or associational security bodies, hygiene maintenance and inspection (something he criticizes the pre-Japanese Qing regime of severely “neglecting”), and keeping watch over the possible influx of anti-colonial ideas into the island of Taiwan.110 In other words police officers have as their main function management of the larger Taiwanese “social body” (to borrow a Foucauldian term). From supervision of the local Hoko (or baojia) system right down to the upper echelons of the government-general’s colonial bureaucracy, the role of the police in Washinosu’s text is not merely that of an administrator or government official; the role of the police involves the very complex tasks of identifying and tracking bodies across a whole range of social and bureaucratic domains, and also ensuring their smooth and harmonious integration within the latter. And finally, there is the problem of “modern thought” which Washinosu alludes to in the closing segments of his text. In invoking the then recent influx of new ideas arising from the Great War, Washinosu most likely believed that the work of the police officer also involved prevention and management of

“disorder” stemming from the spread of “modern” thought like demokurashi or ethnic self-

109 Ibid., 11. 110 Ibid., 8-10. 63 determination (minzoku jiketsu). Here of course the role of the police as both an “order of bodies” for designating and assigning roles in the community, and also a cura advertendi mala future to eliminate criminality before it surfaces, becomes even clearer.

Washinosu’s text thus carries with it the following implications: once equipped with local knowledge of the surrounding territory and population, the police officer will not only be able to ensure smooth management of the individuals falling under his jurisdiction; he will also be able to prevent social disorder and public unrest. But the “anthropologization” of police work in

Taiwan entailed far more than the creation of efficient structures of micropolitical administration and social programs tailored for the needs of the colonized (as Washinosu would like us to believe). If the police officer is using knowledge to “prevent” crimes from occurring, then one has to assume that the population being watched or supervised has been designated by that same officer as having apriori “criminal” or socially deviant tendencies that need some kind of

“preventing” in the first place. In other words, the combination of anthropological knowledge production and imperial policing can lead to a whole series of power operations where, once made “legible” or identifiable by police agencies, colonized populations can be criminalized and integrated into the preventative policies of colonial security forces. In some instances, this process of integration can take the form of education or hygiene-related social welfare programs.

But in other instances, the colonial state can also choose to suspend such “life-enhancing” initiatives and instead opt for brutal suppression, should efforts to prevent or contain anti- colonial disorder fail. This sort of logic of supervision and pre-emption was the driving principle behind the regime of occupation by colonial police that characterized Taiwan’s aborigines territories. 64

Across Taiwan’s aboriginal lands, police agencies engaged in a wide variety of social, political and military functions consistent with what Washinosu Atsuya described as “the special quality of this island’s police”. In aborigines territories, police officers managed schools and other social programs relating to “aborigines education”. They also supervised “native hygiene”, conducted day-to-day administrative affairs on local social matters, and acted as agents of labour management through their (often forcible) mobilization of aborigines communities for work in the camphor industries. In other words, the police not only functioned as the main conduit through which the government-general of Taiwan could ensure the pacification and stabilization of volatile frontier areas; the police also served to ensure the very conditions for colonial capital accumulation, or what Foucault called the “controlled insertion of bodies into the machinery of production and the adjustment of the phenomena of population to economic processes”111 When attempts to manage and supervise aboriginal lands through such regulatory interventions failed, the work of the police quickly reverted to its primary repressive function of eliminating all forms of resistance to the expansion of the Japanese colonial state. In other words, the “special quality” of the police force in Taiwan was positioned somewhere at the interstices of biopower’s twin functions of “making life” (faire vivir) and “letting die” (laissez mourir). This biopolitical calculus of “making life” or “letting die” was not merely the by-product of strategic considerations shaped by the changing fortunes of the colonial army’s advances in indigenous territories. Often, the genesis behind these decisions to select aborigines tribes for “life” or

“death” by police agencies rested on a whole series of assumptions derived from anthropological knowledge production and other related enterprises revolving around what figures like

Washinosu called the study of local “social conditions and customs”.

111 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality Volume One, 140-141. 65

While in the previous chapter I traced the overarching themes and development of anthropological taxonomies and classification systems relating to Taiwan’s aborigines population, in this section I will deal with the ways in which these particular regimes of knowledge manifested themselves within the practices of the Japanese police force. Focusing on the expansion of the heavily militarized “guard line” and the subsequent mobilization of police forces to occupy aboriginal lands, I will showcase how anthropological knowledge provided colonial security forces with a framework to determine which tribes were to be targeted for “life- enhancing” policies of education or hygiene, and which ones were to become the object of violent military suppression. But before launching into a discussion of Japan’s occupation of aborigines territories, it is perhaps best that we begin with a brief historical overview of the development of the Japanese police force in Taiwan itself.

“Police Politics”: Early colonial Taiwan and the construction of the guard line perimeter

As mentioned earlier, the beginning of Japan’s rule over the island of Taiwan was marked by anti-Japanese guerilla fighting in the plains. Even with Japan’s victory over the Qing in 1895, the new occupation regime had not secured control of the whole island. In May of 1895, the former Qing governor of Taiwan Tang Ching-Sung proclaimed the establishment of the

Taiwan Republic (or Republic of Formosa). Efforts by republican forces to create a new government and repel the Japanese advance however failed, as Japan secured its control of

Taiwan in October of 1895. Taiwan however remained under military administration until 1896, when a “return to civilian rule” was decreed.112 The police in Taiwan quickly became a key instrument of colonial state-building and administration, as the new regime continued to be preoccupied with anti-Japanese insurgencies in the countryside. With their functions vacillating

112 Hui-yu Caroline Tsai, Taiwan in Japan’s Empire-building, 1895-1945, 69. 66 between the shifting peacetime and wartime demands of the early colonial landscape, the institution of the police surfaced as a mechanism of colonial rule whose functions lay somewhere between that of military repression and that of civilian or bureaucratic administration.

In his 1903 Formosa under Japanese Rule, parliamentarian Takekoshi Yosaburō provides a brief historical account of the Japanese police in Taiwan. Although hagiographic in nature, the work provides valuable insight into the variety of political and military contingencies which shaped early Japanese policing practices on the island. Takekoshi begins with a discussion of the “Triple Guard” system, a system where the nascent Japanese military administration in

Taiwan assigned the duties of governing the new territory to a mixture of regular police, military gendarmes, and the army.113 This system however lead a series of jurisdictional battles, as security agencies across the colony could not agree on the division of tasks and duties specific to major areas of concern. In his writings Takekoshi for example lamented the inefficiency of this system, pointing to its incapability of linking the police with the needs of the “people”: “The special duty of the police is to protect the people. For that reason, the police force should have the opportunity of coming in contact with the people, but unfortunately, the constant interference of the gendarmes and army made this impossible, and the situation became for the police a most painful one.”114 Police affairs commentators typically depicted the early days of the Japanese police force in Taiwan as a chaotic moment marked by struggles against Chinese “bandits”

(hizoku) and issues of decentralization due to immediate security threats to the new regime.115

One of the major turning points in the transformation of the Japanese police force in Taiwan however came in 1901 with the implementation of administrative reforms put forth by the

113 Takekoshi Yosaburō, George Braithwaite (trans), Japanese Rule in Formosa, (Longsman, Green and Co., 1907), 145. 114 Ibid. 115 Ibid., 146-147. 67 government-general and the Keisatsu honsho (Police Headquarters).116 Like its counterpart in mainland Japan, the early colonial police force in Taiwan faced a series of administrative and legal challenges regarding the definition and jurisdictional scope of its duties. Originally, the police in Meiji Japan had emerged as an instrument to suppress peasant revolts and resistance to the new modernizing government.117 With the suppression of immediate security threats, decisions were made to integrate police forces into local administration. Most of the early metropolitan police force in Meiji Japan for example was staffed by déclassé samurai (a situation not unlike Taiwan where early police agencies were mostly made up of men with a military background). One of the major initiatives which solidified the police presence at the local level for Meiji Japan was the adoption of a “dispersal” system. This policy called for the construction police boxes, stations and sub-stations across the country, and helped further integrate outlying prefectures and rural areas into the new Meiji state order. Taiwan in 1901 officially adopted the dispersal model, a move which not only scattered police forces across the new colony, but most likely helped accelerate pacification and integration of restive anti-Japanese areas. But the 1901 reforms not only expanded the scope of Japanese police jurisdiction. It also helped create the groundwork for what leading civilian officials like Gotō Shinpei would come to label as

Taiwan’s system of “Police Politics”. 118

From the early 1900s and onwards the government-general of Taiwan began putting into place a variety of ordinances regulating the examination and placement of police officers. Entry level positions (hannin) like police inspector (keibuho) were regulated by a written and oral examination system where candidates were expected to demonstrate knowledge of criminal laws,

116 Hui-yu Caroline Tsai, Taiwan in Japan’s Empire-building, 1895-1945, 76. 117 Takekoshi Yosaburō, Japanese Rule in Formosa, 145-147. 118 Hui-yu Caroline Tsai, Taiwan in Japan’s Empire-building, 1895-1945, 77-79. 68

police laws and regulations, and also “native tongues” (dogo). In contrast to this “regular track” system, a special appointment system was also put into place. This “special appointment” system offered police officers the opportunity to take more difficult examinations and make their way up the colony’s bureaucratic administration. Everything from middle-ranking police officials to superintendents were usually expected to take such examinations to advance in rank.

Examinations usually included a written and oral part, with emphasis on diverse subjects like the

Meiji constitution, Japanese history, arithmetic, and also criminal codes and laws.119 In tandem with this system of examination and special appointments there was the branch prefecture system.

This system, which created the basic infrastructure for colonial Japanese administration at the local or prefectural level, was also regulated by a similar set of exams containing both a written and oral component. The overlap between the laws and ordinances governing appointments in the branch prefecture system and those relating to police administration created a whole series of institutional channels for middle-ranking and above officers to become high-ranking civilian officials (a phenomena also observed in the early years of the Meiji state’s police force). This move of course in many ways expanded the duties of the colony’s police force. By 1906 for example, the functions of prefecture branch officials included things like: the collection of national taxes, sugar inspection, the collection of local taxes, measurement of ships, textile consumption taxes, improvement of rice crops and extermination of insect pests, dispatching doctors or medical personnel in times of emergency, and income/expenditure management for public elementary schools.120 From the 1901 reforms and onwards, police agencies were firmly entrenched in the civilian bureaucracy. With the creation of a civil service appointment system that was co-extensive with the police administration and its system of examination, the

119 Ibid., 80-81. 120 Ibid., 79. 69 government-general effectively created a mechanism of colonial rule that made policing synonymous with local governance. This “police-ification” of the bureaucracy and colonial administration was no secret to those in positions of power at the time, and was even seen as a positive sign of the Japanese colonial regime’s “modernity” and efficiency. In his work

Takekoshi described for example how the Japanese police “do almost everything for the people, attending to taxation, to sanitary matters, and to agricultural administration.”121 Washinosu

Atsuya in his article also praised the varied tasks colonial police officers began to carry out as the reforms for bureaucratic state-building in Taiwan grew in scope. In his article, Washinosu for example singled out “hygiene administration” (eisei jigyō) as one of the major contributions resulting from the expansion of police duties following the reforms of the early 1900s.122

Contrasting Japan’s “modern” hygiene policing with the previous policies Qing government

(which he claims did nothing to fight the spread of infectious diseases), Washinosu portrays the

Japanese police as not only a model for efficient bureaucratic administration, but also an entity which over the years had begun successfully tending to the overall health and welfare needs of the community.

The above brief history of police reforms in colonial Taiwan (and also the celebratory narratives found in the writings of commentators at the time) point to a number of trends in the latter’s self-definition during the early days of Japanese rule. The first is the idea that the police would serve as the crucial link between state and colonial society. Police officers were expected to serve as an institutional conduit for integration and administration of prefectural or rural localities within the government-general’s new regime. “Policing” thus meant not only the tasks relating to supervision or repression of the colonized; “policing” also constituted a whole

121 Takekoshi Yosaburō, Japanese Rule in Formosa, 147. 122 Washinosu Atsuya, “Honjima keisatsu no tokushitsu o ron zu”, 10. 70 ensemble of rules, regulations, ordinances and mechanisms of local administration serving to ensure the docility of colonized populations. The second is this question of the professionalization of the police corps. By the early 1900s, colonial authorities began putting in a place administrative measures to reform everything from placement examination system for selection of police officers to the availability of posts in the bureaucracy. These measures made the enterprise of colonial policing reliant on various forms of specialized knowledge. Police officers were not only expected to master the laws and ordinations governing their code of conduct; they were also expected to become amateur statisticians and ethnographers, given their omnipresence in the civilian bureaucracy obliged them to become virtual “experts” in everything from taxation and public sanitation to the local customs of both Taiwan’s Chinese and non-

Chinese “natives”. These two overarching trends in the historical development of the colonial police force in Taiwan shaped the direction of police activities in the aborigines highlands.

With the outbreak of anti-Japanese violence in the countryside around the turn of the twentieth century, aborigines populations became an object of interest for the new colonial government. Seeking to enlist aborigines as a possible ally in the fight against Chinese guerillas, the Government-General of Taiwan took up an official policy of “Benevolent Care” (buiku).

Given centuries of domination at the hands of Han Chinese immigrants, colonial administrators were convinced that the aborigines would look upon the new Japanese regime as a benign alternative to their previous Qing masters. Takekoshi Yosaburō for example described the

“pitiless cruelty” aborigines suffered under Chinese rule, pointing to the ways in which violent aborigines behaviour was the product of Qing-era excesses.123 Like the major anthropologists working in Taiwan (more notably Inō Kanori), commentators routinely invoked Chinese

123 Takekoshi Yosaburō, Taiwan under Japanese Rule, 75. 71 maltreatment and cruelty as one of the main sources of a perceived hostility to outsiders shared amongst the aborigines tribes. In the early days of Japanese rule, it was thus expected that a policy of lenience and “conciliation” would be sufficient enough to get the island’s aborigines population to submit to the new colonial order. Under the governor-generalship of Admiral

Kabayama Sukenori, attempts were made to secure the “goodwill” of Taiwan’s aborigines populations. These attempts usually involved trade, supply of medicine or foodstuffs, along with other social welfare initiatives. Kabayama of course recognized the possible security threats that aborigines posed to the new Japanese regime. Kabayama remarked in August 1895 that if a policy of “attraction and leniency” was not adopted, Taiwan’s indigenous populations would

“certainly become an obstacle to our enterprise”124

This “benevolent” stance towards aborigines however quickly shifted with the collapse of the Taiwan Republican movement and the suppression of successor guerilla movements. Policy- making in aboriginal lands quickly shifted to matters of “pacification” (tōbatsu) and counter- insurgency, as colonial officials began their efforts to conquer Taiwan’s camphor-rich aborigines areas to boost the colonial economy. Camphor, which had been harvested for use as medicine and insect repellent in Taiwan since the seventeenth century, had become a popular raw material for making celluloid. From the mid-nineteenth century and onwards, demand for celluloid skyrocketed, leading to skirmishes between aborigines and Chinese populations seeking to profit from its global demand.125 Following the Japanese takeover, an office was set-up to regulate intercourse between aborigines communities and the assortment of traders, profiteers and other groups seeking to take advantage of the high concentration of camphor in aborigines areas. This

124 Paul Barclay, “’They Have for the Coast Dwellers a Traditional Hatred’: Governing Igorots in Northern Luzon and Central Taiwan”, in Julian Go, Anne L. Foster (eds), The American Colonial State in the Philippines: Global Perspectives, (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 227. 125 Ibid., 229. 72

“Pacification-Reclamation Office” (bukonsho), as it came to be known, decreed in September of

1896 that non-aborigines required a permit to gain access to Taiwan’s strategic camphor forests.

As camphor companies and traders began establishing a presence along the aborigines perimeter, regular skirmishes broke out, leading the Japanese state to dispatch a number of police officers.

When an aborigines village was accused of having killed camphor workers or torched a processing facility, colonial security forces usually subjected these areas to violent punitive operations. The Japanese-Aborigines border area was also manned by Taiwanese Chinese of landed gentry background supervised by colonial police.126 As land surveyors, settlers, engineers and other agents of the colonial state moved into aboriginal lands to begin laying the groundwork for Japanese exploitation of key industries, the border managed by the “Pacification Reclamation

Office” was transformed into a vast network of military outposts and guard stations designed to keep aborigines out of camphor enterprises. This militarized perimeter set up around aborigines communities not yet under Japanese control was known as the “guard line”, or Aiyusen in

Japanese. The units responsible for construction of the perimeter of course were attached to the the Banmu honsho (Bureau of Aboriginal Affairs). This “Advancing Force” was usually lead by a police commander, who oversaw the assembling of men, materials and machinery to begin operations. The force was then further subdivided into patrol, construction, and transport detachments. Patrol detachments were usually tasked with supervision of areas beyond the perimeter susceptible to aborigines attacks, while construction units worked in the rear.

Construction units paved roads, built guard stations, and cleared forests, while transport units would travel to the base of the prefecture or sub-prefecture to procure building materials. Usually, a number of medical personnel and “coolie” laborers were also present.127 Construction of the

126 Ibid., 228-229. 127 Bureau of Aboriginal Affairs, Report on the Control of the Aborigines in Formosa, 24-25. 73

Aiyusen perimeter usually unfolded in one of two ways. Either local police units or exploration parties would secure consent of the surrounding aborigines villages and begin construction, or they would encounter fierce resistance. Those that resisted were usually isolated, cut off from the surrounding areas, and deprived of basic necessities until they cleared a path for the “Advancing

Force”.128

Around 1902-1903, under the direction of Minister of Civil Affairs Mochiji Rokusaburō the policy of “benevolent care” was officially dropped in favour of subjugation. The Aiyusen border thus quickly shifted from a cordon sanitaire meant to monitor any possible threats emanating out of Taiwan’s aborigines communities, to an instrument of territorial expansion and land enclosure serving to bolster the Japanese colonial economy.129 Control of this defensive perimeter, or “guard line”, quickly fell on the colonial police, whose job it was to not only monitor the aboriginal highlands, but also manage things like the permit system which allowed individuals access to these territories. The installations surrounding the guard line were also heavily weaponized, with electrified fences, landmines and armed sentries dotting its perimeter.130 The 1911 report on the “Control of the Aborigines in Formosa” for example describes how the guard line system was not intended to merely keep out aborigines, but to forcibly incorporate them within the colonial order. As the Keimukyoku’s Bureau of Aboriginal

Affairs put it: “The new guard line always acts as a great check to the savage tribes lying beyond the outside line. In other words, the advancement of the guard line is an aggression and progression into the savage territory.”131 The report then adds that this “aggression” is “by no means” for the plundering of aboriginal territories; it is merely to “utilize the vast

128 Ibid., 26-27. 129 Paul Barclay, “’They Have for the Coast Dwellers a Traditional Hatred’: Governing Igorots in Northern Luzon and Central Taiwan”, 231. 130 Bureau of Aboriginal Affairs, Report on the Control of Aborigines in Formosa, 16-17. 131 Ibid., 20. 74 underdeveloped territory now held by the aborigines in the island.”132 Under governor-general

Sakuma Samata, this logic reach its peak with the launching of a violent campaign to subjugate aborigines tribes and “open up” their lands for economic development. From 1909 and 1914, a

“Five-Year Plan to Conquer the Northern Tribes” was put into effect. The main strategy was to expand police-run fortifications along aboriginal frontier lands. During these campaigns, indigenous groups outside this defensive perimeter were subjected to scorched-earth tactics and violent military operations, often involving the use of aerial bombardment and warships.133 Until the end of Japanese colonial rule in Taiwan, aboriginal territories were some of the most heavily policed in all of the empire, with a ratio of one police officer for every 57 aborigines (this is in contrast to the plains region, where the ratio was one office for every 967 inhabitants).134 This police presence was made up of not only police agencies and offices stationed across the aboriginal frontier, but also pro-Japanese indigenous militias and other local “self-defense groups”. Perceived as obstacles to both the integrity of the colonial state and Japan’s broader aims of economically developing its newfound Taiwanese colony, aboriginal communities under the guard-line system were placed in a situation where they could be subject to potentially unlimited brutal military violence.

As the philosopher Giorgio Agamben notes in his Means without Ends: “Whereas the sovereign is the one who, in proclaiming a state of emergency suspending the validity of the law, marks the point of indistinction between violence and law, the police operate in what amounts to a permanent ‘state of emergency’. The principles of ‘public order’ and ‘security’…represent a

132 Ibid. 133 Tierney, Tropics of Savagery, 40-41. 134 Leo Ching, Becoming Japanese, 136. 75 zone of indistinction between violence and law perfectly symmetrical to that of sovereignty.”135

Forged amidst conditions of counter-insurgency and guerilla violence, the institution of the police in colonial Taiwan surfaced as an emergency wartime measure. But even after Japanese control of the island had been fully established, this temporary measure was expanded into a systematic policy of colonial control. As the government-general expanded its jurisdiction over aboriginal territories for example, police officers acquired complete sovereign authority over the lives of aborigines. Under this system of police-based colonial governmentality, Taiwan’s aboriginal communities could exist under Japanese jurisdiction, but due to the nature of the constantly shifting guard line system, could never be afforded any sort of underlying politico- legal protection from the law.

Beyond their immediate security functions however, police in Taiwan also operated within a further “zone of indistinction”, one that made crime prevention and promotion of social welfare almost indistinguishable from one another. As the writings of police commentators like

Washinosu Atsuya attest, the mode of policing preferred by Taiwan’s colonial security agencies was what I labelled earlier as “preventative policing”. This form of “preventative policing” sought to counterbalance possible opposition to Japanese colonial rule through developmental welfare policies and integration of local communal structures within the larger apparatus of colonial administration (such as the case of the baojia or hoko system used for Han Chinese populations). These policies extended the policeman’s sphere of jurisdiction well beyond law and order and into such matters as education, hygiene, local administration, and a host of other domains that reached far into the daily lives of the colonized. Execution of such complex bureaucratic and administrative operations of local control of course required specialized

135 Giorgio Agamben, Means Without Ends: Notes on Politics, (Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press, 2000) 103. 76 knowledge and thorough understanding of local “customs”. While police agencies could draw from a variety of Qing records and reports on customary laws, resources on Taiwan’s aborigines territories were not as voluminous and readily available. In order to expedite the process of colonial statecraft on the frontier, police agencies had to turn to the research of anthropological specialists. But in the absence of a vast army of anthropologists at their disposal, police officers often became anthropologists themselves. From the mid-1900s to the mid-1910s, police agencies across Taiwan’s aborigines territories helped conduct a variety of ethnographic research activities alongside government-funded research bodies and security agencies. These research activities became the foundation of the Japanese police force’s policy-making framework for occupying aboriginal lands. In much of the same way anthropologists ranked and hierarchized

Taiwan’s indigenous populations along “civilizational” lines, police agencies in their research activities produced systems of classification which divided and sub-divided Taiwan’s aborigines groups.

The Anthropological Police: The research activities of the Keimukyoku

In the 1939 Outline of Aborigines Administration (Riban kōyō) the government-general’s

Police Bureau (Keimukyoku) provides a taxonomy of Taiwan’s aborigines tribes. Echoing the writings of Torii and Inō, the author divides up the island’s indigenous populations on the basis of things like “level of education” or their ability to practice rice paddy cultivation: “There are approximately seven of these tribes and are divided as such: Atayal, Bunun, Saiset, Paiwan, Ami, and Yami. Each of these tribes differ in customs and living conditions, they are not uniform…Especially the Ami tribe, they practice agriculture and possess a level of education that, when compared to other tribes, is almost that of the island’s other inhabitants…However, the multiple tribes inhabiting the inaccessible mountainous interior, even in this age of civilization, 77 engage in a basic and primitive way of life.”136 Earlier in the text, the author also supplies readers with a brief description of the government-general’s official policy of Riban (Aborigines administration): “Aborigines administration constitutes the education of savages and the stabilization of their living conditions (seikatsu no antei), with the aim of having them bask in the light of imperial virtue and benevolence.”137 This policy of course was directly linked to the government-general’s strategy of “imperialization” (kōminka), which sought to expand the narrow confines of Japanese imperial subjecthood to all the inhabitants of the island. This idea of

“stabilizing their living conditions” was also linked to aborigines’ possible cultural conversion into loyal subjects of the Japanese imperial polity. The Riban kōyō also has for example a number of references to aborigines as akago (imperial children): “by means of strengthening this stabilization of their living conditions (sono seikatsu no antei wo katamari), we can anticipate that they [Taiwan’s aborigines] will be made into loyal children (akago) of his majesty the emperor.”138

The above excerpts from the Riban kōyō bring to mind a number of issues discussed in the preceding chapters. For example, there is an implied connection here between the role of the policeman

(the central agent of the government-general’s Riban policy) and the maintenance of aborigines “life”

(referred to here as either seikatsu, and in other parts seikatsu jōtai, or “living conditions”). Then there is the status of this term antei (stabilization), which evokes the image of the policeman bringing order to a space that, prior to Japan’s arrival, supposedly consisted only of violent conflicts with local Han Chinese groups, or intra-tribal wars over surrounding land and resources. To borrow Foucault’s language, there is a way here in which we can read “stabilization” here as a form of securitization, a means by which certain tendencies or proclivities within a targeted population can be identified, monitored and prevented from

136 Taiwan Government-General Police Bureau, Riban kōyō [Outline of Aborigines Administration], (Taihoku: Taiwan soutokufu keimukyoku, 1939), 6-7. 137 Ibid., 5. 138 Ibid. 78

surfacing. And finally, there is the dividing up of these tendencies or proclivities along anthropological and ethnographic lines, with the Ami tribe being deemed the most educated and “civilized” of the all the different tribes, and the mountain-dwelling groups falling under the category of lesser-developed or primitive peoples. To “stabilize” the “living conditions” of aborigines thus meant the creation of a milieu, a space where “criminality” and threats to the social body can be contained and reduced to a strict minimum. This particular text however was published in 1939, long after the period of brutal counter-insurgency that marked Sakuma Samata’s general-governorship, and also the later 1930

Wushe uprising. In order to begin piecing together the fundamentals of their “Aborigines administration” policy, Taiwan’s colonial police first had to conduct a number of research activities to determine just what constituted aborigines “life” or “living conditions”.

As mentioned earlier, Japan’s official policy of “benevolent care” towards Taiwan’s aborigines collapsed with the governor-generalship of Kodama Gentarō, who in the name of reinvigorating the island’s sagging colonial economy, turned to the exploitation of camphor-rich aboriginal lands. While anthropologists like Torii, Inō, and Mori supplied a basic framework for the division of aborigines populations along “civilizational” lines, their specific (and often idiosyncratic) research agendas did not entirely mesh with the immediate politico-military needs of the Taiwanese government-general. In other words, while the underlying episteme fuelling the production of anthropological knowledge on aborigines populations may have been derived from a handful of influential scholars, much of the “raw data” was the product of quasi-ethnographic work conducted by an assemblage of police officers and government-general bureaucrats operating within the vicinity of indigenous communities.

In the early 1900s, under the supervision of Gotō Shimpei, the colonial government formed the Rinji taiwan kyūkan chōsakai or “Research Association for the Study of Old 79

Customs”. Initially focused on the study of Han Chinese folkways and customary laws, this research body eventually shifted its focus towards the study of Taiwan’s aborigines population.

Beginning in 1909, the government began putting together the institutional arrangements necessary to carry out such a massive social scientific research undertaking. From 1912 to 1921,

Rinji Taiwan (which was then also known as Taiwan sōtokufu banzoku chōsa kai, or “Taiwan

Government-General Research Association for the Study of Aborigines Tribes) began compiling and issuing research reports on a regular basis, with a total of eight volumes published by 1921.

The eight volumes collectively became known as the Banzoku chō sa hōkokusho, or “Report on the Aborigines Tribes”. While much of the staff responsible for the compiling and editing of this collected work were bureaucrats with no particular anthropological background, much of the data was culled from reports issued by Police Bureau, along with educators and government officials working in tandem with the latter. Personnel from rural chūzaisho, the police boxes scattered within proximity of aborigines villages which also functioned as education centers, were among the grassroots level staff which supplied the Banzoku chōsakai with vital research materials. In conjunction with institutions like the Banmu honsho (Aborigines Department) and the Keisatsu honsho (Police Department), researchers benefitted from an elaborate network of police agencies who issued regular (and highly-detailed) reports.139 While a thorough exploration of all eight volumes is well beyond the scope of this work, a general look at the presentation of the data can provide clues as to what sort of research activities Taiwan’s Japanese police agencies conducted, and how they potentially integrated these findings into daily imperial practice.

139 Shimizu Jun, “Japanese Research on Taiwan Austronesian-speaking Peoples” in 185-186. See also Sakano Tōru’s Teikoku nihon to jinruigakusha: 1884-1952, 246-249.

A cursory overview of the first volume’s content reveals the wide range of ethnographic materials gathered using police and government reports. The first volume of Banzoku chōsa hō kokusho for example can be broken down into the following sections: Social conditions, religion, living space/dwellings, physical stature, and a section that roughly translate to “war and peace- making”.140 The other volumes have a similar organizational structure, with additional subdivisions dealing with everything from religious festivals to lineage systems. Another striking feature of this report is its quasi-census quality. Unlike the work of major anthropologists examined in the preceding chapters, each volume dealt with a specific ensemble of aborigines village (bansha) and seemed to have opted for an ethnographic approach focused more around the political geography of Taiwan’s aborigines areas. The bulk of the report’s ethnographic work also seems to have been initially centered more on South-central Taiwan’s tribes, like the Ami and Piuma tribes. This of course could have merely reflected the already entrenched position that the government-general’s police force enjoyed along South-central Taiwan’s aborigines perimeter during the early 1910s, and thus the ease with which anthropological data could be collected. It must be stressed here that only around the mid-1910s and onwards did the colonial state manage to begin fully occupying the more northern-based Atayalic tribes.

It is interesting for our purposes here to note the recurrence of particular data sets within the Hōkokusho, and the ways in which they point to the police force’s use of ethnographic knowledge as a measure of “stabilizing” (antei) or “securitizing” aborigines living space. First there is the omnipresence of data on the military capabilities of Taiwan’s aborigines tribes. Each volume of the Hōkokusho contains a number of ethnographic entries and descriptions on

140Taiwan Government-General Research Association for the Study of Old Customs, Banzoku chōsa hōkokusho daiichiken [Research Report on the Aborigines Tribes of Taiwan Volume One], (Taihoku: Rinji Taiwan Kyūkan Chōsakai, 1912-1921), 25-32. 81 aborigines traditional headhunting expeditions, the kind of weaponry employed (complete with illustrations), and the unfolding of peace negotiations and reconciliation patterns among warring tribes. As we shall see in the following section, the term “pacification” (tōbatsu) for the Japanese police and army did not merely signify the suppression of hostile aborigines elements; it often times referred to the process whereby the government-general would surround a given tribe, seize its cache of weapons (usually rifles), and neutralize the latter’s resistance capabilities.

While anthropological scholars imparted a great deal of symbolic and cultural value to headhunting raids and associated weapons in their explanatory schemas, it appears that the

Japanese police in their reports were preoccupied more with the potential threats these practices posed to local security. By keeping an ethnographic “inventory” of the particular war and peace- making tactics of the island’s different tribes, it is possible that the government-general sought to use this particular form of data to anticipate possible intra-tribal conflicts (perhaps as a measure of ensuring the co-optation of certain tribes) and keep track of aborigines resistance capabilities.

Beyond its immediate military applicability, the reports found in the Hōkokusho also illustrate the ways in which imperial policing came to function as a kind of prophylactic measure or preventative policy. The obsession with shakai jōtai (social conditions) or seikatsu jōtai

(living conditions) in each volume reveals an almost constant preoccupation on the part of the

Japanese police force with the “health” and “wealth” of the social body. These sections typically described, at the village and individual household level, the daily activities and modes of production/consumption in which aborigines engaged. Recalling our previous discussion of

Pasquino’s early modern “police”, there is a way here in which the research activities of the

Keimukyoku not only enabled the direct supervision of aborigines bodies, but also created a space in which their “capacities” or potentialities could be utilized and mobilized for the good of 82 the local colonial economy. Remembering of course that “policing” (in the early modern sense) originally signaled the act of monitoring human and capital flows falling outside the direct juridical control of the sovereign, police obsession with studying the minutiae of aborigines daily living space reveal the degree to which “policing” was also synonymous with a form of economic management of colonial labor. Then, there is the focus on aborigines markers of ethno- cultural difference. In the “war and peace-making” and “daily life” portions of the report for example, police agencies seem to have kept detailed illustrations of aborigines dress, tools, weapons, dwellings, and other markers of physical and cultural identity.141 In the previous chapter, I stressed the assigning of seemingly “immutable” properties to indigenous tribes by the work of anthropologists like Torii, who employed the techniques of physical anthropology and ethnography to keep detailed record of aborigines’ outward appearances. In keeping with anthropology’s overall pre-occupation with bodily measurements and data of a biometric nature, each of the opening pages of the Hōkokusho for example contain the outline of an aborigines footprint.142 While anthropologists did this in order to stress the lack of cultural uniformity among the different tribes (and thereby reinforce their eight to ten tribe taxonomic schema), or the possible racial commonality the latter shared with “modern” Japanese, police agencies most likely drew from such observations to facilitate their security duties. But the fact that police officers would have kept regular records of aborigines appearances suggests that like their counterparts in the anthropological field, police believed in the need to segment and racialize indigenous peoples along bio-cultural lines, thereby making them more amenable to different forms of colonial control.

141 See for example, Banzoku Chōsa Hōkokusho, 5-10, 11-24, 35-56, 67-77. 142 Ibid., 9. 83

While anthropological scholarship provided an overarching frame of reference for colonial security agencies, much of the “raw data” seemed to have been compiled in and around the aborigines perimeter by police officers. At first glance, this seemingly infinite amount of ethnographic data appears that have almost been “directionless” in nature, with case studies being done on a village-by-village basis and a focus on individual details that belie the generalizing tendencies of metropolitan scholars. But if we return to this question of security, or

“stabilization” (antei) as policy-makers framed it, the overall picture suddenly becomes clearer.

In making tribes visible through a kind of cataloguing of their ethno-physical appearance, police agencies were most likely facilitating the complex task of dividing up territories whose spatial boundaries, from at least the 1900s to the mid-1910s, were in flux due to the shifting nature of the guard line perimeter. The anthropological activities of the Keimukyoku, while facilitating

Japan’s enclosure of aboriginal lands, were also of high strategic and military value. By means of a discursive and material “mapping out” of aborigines “living conditions” (seikatsu jōtai), police agencies could design policies tailored to the perceived ethno-cultural properties of each tribe.

Far from being a gesture aimed at enhancing or preserving aborigines society and culture, this act of identifying and cordoning off entire tribes as “different” was more a preventative measure, one aimed at “stabilizing” or neutralizing the possibility of anti-Japanese violence, or the emergence of possible forms of anti-colonial resistance. These “preventative measures”, as we shall see now, were not only derived from an anthropologized worldview, but also operated on the basis of biopolitical calculus of “making life” and “letting die”.

Between “Benevolent Care” and “Pacification”: The anthropological police and the expansion of the guard line 84

In official government writings, two specific terms were usually employed to refer to

Japan’s treatment of Taiwan’s aborigines: tōbatsu (pacification) and buiku (benevolent care).

Associated with buiku policies was also the term kyōka (“cultivation”), a term which was used to describe the “civilizing” process and associated programs of education or moral instruction aborigines tribes were expected to undergo once under the control of Japanese police officers.

These two approaches made up the larger field of what the government-general of Taiwan called riban, or “Aborigines Administration”. This biopolitical calculus of selecting some tribes for additional extra-judicial violence (tōbatsu) and selecting others for “life-enhancing” initiatives

(buiku), was conditioned by the anthropological division of Taiwan’s aboriginal lands, a division which separated Taiwan’s supposedly more violent and “backwards” northern tribes from more docile or “civilized” southern-based groups. In the previous section, I discussed the variety of anthropological research activities undertaken by the colonial Police Bureau. Specifically I described how police agencies drew inspiration from, and also contributed to, hierarchic anthropological taxonomies which ranked Taiwan’s aborigines tribes in accordance with their degree of “primitivity” or civilizational development to design their occupational policies. This paper now turns to analysis of concrete instances where anthropological knowledge was enlisted to serve colonial expansion on the frontier. Focusing on the construction of the guard line perimeter, this section traces the destructive effects that “anthropologized” police work had on

Taiwan’s aborigines communities.

With the construction and expansion of the aiyusen perimeter across Taiwan’s mountainous districts, colonial security forces were brought into closer proximity with aborigines communities. Seeking to expand the imperial state’s jurisdiction over camphor-rich lands, the police and military agencies resorted to a number of policies and tactics. The primary 85 instrument for Japanese expansion into indigenous lands was of course brute military force. This policy, euphemistically referred to by the government-general and keimukyoku as “pacification”, usually involved dispatching a mixture of police and army units into an unconquered aborigines district, confiscating all rifles and weapons circulating within the latter, and placing the newly- subjugated area under Japanese police administration. The aim of suppression policies was thus twofold: expand Japanese police control and supervision over the highlands, and eliminate all possible forms of resistance to colonial rule through confiscation of firearms (it must be stressed here that firearms for aborigines communities were often vital for hunting purposes).

Suppression campaigns however did not always go as smoothly as planned. In some instances, they took much longer, with both army and police units encircling or blockading a territory and waiting for the targeted aborigines community’s resources and capacity for resistance to be fully depleted. As we shall see, this process could take up to a year or two, and could even involve the use of aerial bombardments and shelling from cruiser warships. This sequestering off of indigenous populations into a permanent “state of siege” recalls Achilles Mbembe’s discussion of colonial occupation in his “Necropolitics”. For Mbembe, modern colonial wars and their associated forms of occupational violence operate on the basis of complete spatial domination over land, sea, and airspace. By cutting off an entire population from the outside world and depriving them of access to resources and means of income, the armies of the colonizer are effectively suspending the distinction between internal and external enemy, and are therefore condemning an entire population to death. Under these necropolitical modes of occupation, extra-judicial forms of violence are the rule rather than the exception, as local military commanders are given full control over the constantly shifting situation on the ground. Under these conditions, the movement of bodies is also severely restricted from one colonized zone to 86 the next.143 This was the case in colonial Taiwan, as Japanese police and military forces were allowed to use unlimited violence to suppress indigenous resistance to enclosure of lands, and also severely restrict aborigines movement via permit systems and security checkpoints dotted along the aiyusen perimeter. These kinds of policies of course were not uniquely linked to strategic considerations and practical military aims. Aborigines communities were first taxonomized, racialized and integrated into various systems of anthropological classification which emptied them of their humanity. As Achilles Mbembe reminds us for example, the complete lawlessness and violence through which these sorts of colonial occupations are justified

“stems from the racial denial of any common bond between the conqueror and the native.”144

The bulk of Japan’s incursions into aboriginal lands took the form of suppression campaigns. From 1896 to roughly 1920, a significant number of aborigines communities across the island of Taiwan experienced some form of military violence and police action at the hands of Japanese authorities. Suppression campaigns began in the late 1890s, just as fighting against

Chinese guerilla in the plains began to dwindle down. Their frequency increased over the next few years however. Suppression operations appeared to have peaked between 1900 and 1907.

From 1902 to 1907 for example, the average number of subjugation campaigns was over ten per year (the highest recorded number being sixteen in 1905). Although the total numbers returned to the single digits from 1908 until the official end of suppression activities in 1920, their scope and ferocity was expanded under governor-general Sakuma Samata’s administration, with the official campaign to subjugate the “Northern Savages” between 1909 and 1914.145 The peaking of suppression operations between 1900-1907 of course may have also reflected the overall process

143 Achilles Mbembe, “Necropolitics”, 30. 144 Ibid., 24. 145 Nakagawa, Kōichi. Tamio Wakamori (eds), Musha jiken: Taiwan takasagozoku no hōki, 47. 87 of extending the guard line. Suppression campaigns also unfolded in a regional fashion, with army and police units gradually making their way closer to Taiwan’s mountainous northern- central interior as the years went by. The focus of initial suppression campaigns was centered on coastal areas, or localities just at the base of the mountains (near Peipo or plains aborigines villages). One the first major suppression campaigns for example took place in 1897, and was aimed at the Taroko tribe, just near the strategic port of Hualien. Assisted by some six hundred plains aborigines, army units engaged Taroko tribe members for a period of about three months.

Japanese warships were even used to shell aborigines villages. Operations were suspended shortly after however due to the high number of casualties (the army would only complete their pacification of Taroko tribe areas between 1906 and 1907).146 The mountainous regions of central Taiwan came next between 1903 and 1909, as the Japanese police presence and aiyusen perimeter was expanded to include communities like the Musha tribe, who live in the Nantō

County area. The pacification of the Musha tribe is also illustrative of the Japanese police and army’s policies of blockade and isolation. Deprived of access to vital goods, the Musha tribe turned to their historic enemies, the Kantaban tribe. With no success in securing any kind of support from surrounding tribes, the Musha surrendered to the Japanese over the course of 1905 and 1906.147 This policy of blockade and isolation where Japanese colonial security forces would encircle a territory and simply wait for its resources to run dry was a common pattern in pacification operations. To return to Mbmembe’s description of the state of siege, this policy allowed for the suspension of the distinction between enemy combatants and civilian populations.

In other words, it condemned entire aborigines populations to death, making all members of the group “complicit” in resisting the Japanese advance, and therefore, a legitimate target for a slow

146 Ibid., 50. 147 Ibid., 50-51 88 death by means of material deprivation or starvation. The final push for conquest of aboriginal lands came between 1910 and 1915, with governor-general Sakuma’s “Five-Year Plan”. This final wave of extra-judicial police and military violence was carried out under the guise of disarming the last remnants of indigenous anti-Japanese resistance, and also stopping the circulation of weapons among northern-dwelling aborigines tribes.148 By 1915, the year governor-general Sakuma proclaimed the end of Japan’s subjugation of aboriginal lands, over nine thousand rifles had been confiscated by colonial authorities.149 While conflicts on the frontier persisted well into the 1920s, Taiwan’s aborigines territories by 1915 were under the control of colonial police forces. Only later in 1930 with the Musha uprising would aborigines communities experience military violence on the scale of the government-general’s tōbatsu campaigns of the 1900s and early 1910s. But as we shall see now, these forms of violent conquest and pacification were selective in nature, with tribes residing in central and northern areas experiencing the bulk of the colonial army’s military operations and tribes to the south experiencing a mix of assimilationist and educational programs.

The Report on the Control of the Aborigines in Formosa for example contains a number of reports highlighting the uneven application of force employed by the colonial army when dealing respectively with the “northern” and “southern” tribes.150 One particular intervention from the report which stands out for its extreme violence is a 1906-07 operation where Japanese army and local police units carried out a brutal military raid against members of the Taroko tribe

(a tribe labelled by the report as the “most powerful savages” of the Atayal tribe).151 In 1906, an attack by Taroko tribe members on a local chief of police and thirty camphor workers in the

148 Ibid., 51. 149 Ibid., 52-53. 150 Bureau of Aboriginal Affairs, Report on the Control of the Aborigines in Formosa, 34-40. 151 Ibid., 39. 89

Karenko district took place. In response to this, Japanese authorities put in place a blockade to isolate their entire territory. One year later, two Japanese cruisers were deployed and opened fire on numerous Taroko villages. The police then descended on these communities with an additional force of some five hundred “tame savages” to complete their mop-up operations.152

Incidentally, the tribe mentioned in the latter context was of Atayal background. As noted earlier tribes like the Atayal had often been singled out in the taxonomies of anthropologists like Torii and Inō for their supposed “backwardness” and use of headhunting rituals. One passage from the report even makes direct reference to the Atayal’s supposed propensity towards “treachery”, a characteristic the authors blame on their historic interactions with the Chinese: “The Taiyal tribes…These are very fierce and powerful tribes, and owing to their long experience with the

Chinese authorities they are adept at chicanery...Shortly after our occupation they were induced to open up their territory for camphor manufacture and agriculture. The place became quite prosperous on this account. But they soon displayed their treachery and in the autumn of 1900 made a raid and sudden attack on the watch houses.”153 The idea that Atayalic tribes were fundamentally violent (or “unassimilable”) human beings because of Chinese “chicanery” finds an echo in Inō, who as we have seen, stressed the centrality of Chinese-Aborigines conflicts in his descriptions of northern tribes and their use of headhunting rituals.

But the management of aboriginal lands in colonial Taiwan did not operate solely on necropolitical principles; some measure of biopolitics and other “life-enhancing” initiatives were needed. In contrast to policies of pacification or “suppression”, colonial authorities at times used what was called “benevolent care” (buiku) when dealing with aborigines populations. These policies were usually taken up after conquering indigenous territories and local tribes had

152 Ibid., 39-40. 153 Ibid., 28. 90 officially “submitted” to Japanese rule and put down their weapons. These policies however did not exclusively occur after suppression campaigns. In some instances, a mixture of aggressive and conciliatory approaches could be used to entice aborigines tribes to submit to Japanese police forces. With regards to work in the camphor industries, aborigines communities were usually coerced into supplying their able-bodied men to work in these industries. As for education, the overarching goal here was to provide what colonial authorities referred to as

“cultivation” (kyōka). Buiku policies of course were thus rooted in an underlying belief that by providing material benefits or incentives to aborigines communities, police officers could ensure the “docility” and collaboration of aborigines populations. In many ways, buiku policies served as an additional measure of “pacification” after brute military force had been applied to secure control by police agencies. Given the strategic proximity of aborigines lands to camphor-rich areas, the government-general needed a significant labour force to prop up the colony’s budding camphor industries. At the same time, colonial authorities also needed minimal infrastructure to ensure reproduction of this labour force’s capacity for work in the camphor fields. Buiku policies thus served to maintain the basic conditions for biopolitical management of Taiwan’s aboriginal lands.

Just what did police agencies mean by the term “benevolent care” (buiku), or

“cultivation”? The term itself carried with it a whole range of implied meanings about a

Japanese-led “civilizing” process, a process often couched in the language of “imperialization” and submission to the emperor, and the need to provide educational and moral “instruction” or

“guidance” (shidō) to Taiwan’s aborigines tribes. In the writings of the government-general’s

Keimukyoku, the police officer was expected to personify imperial virtue itself, and provide both moral guidance and “leadership”. While the term buiku/kyōka was often used to refer to the 91 range of education and social welfare policies used by the government-general to convince aborigines tribes to cease their resistance to Japanese control, its practical application across aboriginal lands was often rooted in pre-existing conceptions of indigenous cultural practices or

“customs”. The Riban kōyō for example describes one of the central tenets of the “cultivation” policy” as the “reform of bad customs” (heishu no kyōsei) in exchange for the cultivation of

“virtuous” ones.154 In other words, pre-existing conceptions of a flawed or morally depraved

“barbaric” aborigines set of “customs” circulated at the level of police officialdom. Police officers saw themselves as civilizing agents who “as a measure of stabilizing the living conditions” of aborigines peoples, would allow aborigines populations to abandon their “corrupt customs” and “bask in imperial virtue”. So what did these policies exactly entail, and how did they mesh with the dominant anthropological taxonomies of the time?

As mentioned previously, police officers took on a number of educational and social welfare duties once dispatched to an aborigines village. Providing both moral education and language instruction was the cornerstone of the government-general’s buiku policies towards aborigines population. From the late 1890s and onwards, educational facilities were set up across conquered aboriginal lands. Police officers usually conducted classes from within the chūzaisho, the rural “police boxes” scattered along the Aiyusen perimeter.155 In the Report on the Control of the Aborigines of Formosa closing pages for example, a chart showcasing the number of schools being built in different tribal areas actually lists the latter under “schools/stations”, meaning police stations effectively functioned as Japanese education and language instruction centers.156

The focus of these social programs was not always ethical or moral education however. Schools

154 Taiwan Government-General Police Bureau, Riban kōyō, 16-17. 155 Nakagawa Kōichi, Wakamori Tamio (eds), Musha jiken: Taiwan takasagozoku no hōki, 54-55. 156 Bureau of Aboriginal Affairs, Report on the Control of Aborigines in Formosa, appendix. 92 typically offered instruction on farming, handicraft work, and other “practical” skill sets the government-general most likely deemed imperative for the “civilizing” process. In addition to this, a number of experimental agricultural training facilities geared towards teaching upland rice cultivation to aborigines also appear to have been built in the early 1900s.157 These policies of course reflect the dominant perception of aborigines as akago, or child-like beings who, through proper “guidance” or education, can be made into loyal imperial subjects. The focus on farming as educational policy also illustrates the predominance of both historical and anthropological paradigms of knowledge production which saw aborigines as “uncivilized” human beings who in refusing any sort of intercourse with the Qing state, maintained a life of violent intra-tribal conflicts and headhunting raids. Based on the relative “success” the Qing had in Sinicizing plains tribes, it was perhaps the hope of the Keimukyoku that providing instruction on rice paddy cultivation would “Japanize” aborigines populations and get them to abandon their “primitive” or ancestral ways. This logic of “civilizing” Taiwan’s aborigines tribes using expanded educational opportunities however was a selective policy, especially at the height of suppression campaigns in the mid-to-late 1900s. In contrast to the suppression policies experienced by northern-based groups like the Taroko, tribes located more to the south for example were often the target of

Japanese educational or social programs. The authors of the report for example describe how, in the aftermath of a revolt led by members of the Bunun tribe, police officers in areas populated by

“southern tribes” were deployed to take on “such onerous duties as to instruct the savage children in an elementary course of Japanese language and manners.”158 Hinting at the greater potential for cultural assimilability among these “southern tribes”, the authors then describe how under the influence of

Japanese educational programs, “portions of the Bunun and Tsarisen tribes” became “more docile” and

157 Kōichi Nakagawa, Tamio Wakamori (eds), Musha jiken: Taiwan takasagozoku no hōki, 55. 158 Bureau of Aboriginal Affairs, Report on the Control of the Aborigines in Formosa, 9. 93

that it was expected that “within a few years they may become elevated from their present primitive state.”159 Instances of Japanese colonial police or army units applying varying degrees of force based on an imagined north-south ethno-cultural divide were commonplace throughout the period of violent interventions in aborigines territories between the 1900s and the early 1910s.

Concluding Remarks:

As the government-general expanded the guard-line system, bringing with it an unprecedented wave of military violence, aboriginal communities were put under the control of a system where the police, standing in for the larger colonial state and bureaucracy, wielded a sovereign-like power over the life and death of these indigenous groups. Often this logic was linked to pre-existing taxonomies of anthropological difference, where depending on the perceived tendencies or proclivities of a given tribe, a biopolitical calculus linked to the

Keimukyoku’s twin policies of tōbatsu or buiku could be initiated. Then there were the myriad research and regulative activities linked to the practice of imperial policing. Once an area would be incorporated into the guard line perimeter, the policeman would turn into everything from an amateur ethnographer or statistician, to an early childhood educator or agricultural training specialist. Meanwhile the writings of police commanders like Washinosu Atsuya sought to portray these functions as one of the imperial

Japanese police’s “special qualities” and overall benevolent concerns for the colonized. The reality however is that what police officials called the “stabilization” of aborigines living space was in fact a form of securitization, one where entire aborigines populations where labelled as potential criminals or anti-colonial rebels by sheer virtue of their ethno-cultural folkways. In times of expansionist frontier wars and counter-insurgent campaigns, this logic dissolved the boundaries between “civilian” groups and

“enemy combatants”. This helped the imperial army and police condemn entire populations to a slow death. Operating in what can be described as a state of permanent wartime emergency, the Keimukyoku

159 Ibid., 10. 94

policed a fragile ideological boundary that divided aborigines peoples into either akago (in need of

“benevolent care”), or seiban (in need of violent “suppression”).

Conclusion: Anthropology and the rethinking of Japan as a space of universal empire

This paper now returns to where it began its analysis: the October 1930 Musha uprising and the brutal military reprisals they engendered. Shortly after the massacres perpetrated against

Atayal and other highland populations, the colonial government of Taiwan shifted towards a more “inclusive” policy of kōminka, where new social opportunities were opened up to aborigines populations and negative references to indigenous groups as seiban were dropped at the level of colonial officialdom (they were now to be known as takasagozoku). At the height of the Asia-Pacific War, Taiwanese aborigines were even given the chance to enroll in an imperial army unit specializing in “jungle warfare”: the Takasago volunteers. This shift from seiban to kōminka however should not be read as a serious response to tackle issues of Japanese colonial violence against aboriginal communities. After all, the very same mechanisms and daily controls over aboriginal communities that began at the turn of the twentieth century remained. In many ways, this policy also did not change the perceived “disposability” of aboriginal bodies. Like other “co-imperials” across Japan’s overseas colonies in the 1930s and early 1940s, aboriginal communities were to be sacrificed in large numbers in the name of pan-Asian empire and total war mobilization. In many ways, this shift from seiban to kōminka, illustrates a continuation of the logic of difference Taiwanese aborigines were subjected to. Given no additional rights or protection by the state, Taiwan’s aboriginal communities could now be “sacrificed” in even greater numbers, as they enrolled in the military to wage “holy war” against Japan’s enemies in the Pacific.

This paper has focused on the discursive and material mechanisms of differentiation aboriginal bodies and communities were integrated within. This paper has also sought to connect specific forms of anthropological knowledge production with the practice of imperial policing. In 96 doing so, this paper hopes to open up new horizons on questions of Japanese empire and its specific modes of territorial aggrandizement and colonial control. By focusing on the aboriginal frontier, rather than the Taiwanese imperial state itself, this paper has illustrated the ways in which extra-judicial moments of colonial violence, rather than being the exception, were the foundation of Japanese imperial sovereignty itself. In addition to this, this paper has traced how the shifting boundaries of Japanese colonial control were inextricably bound to an assortment of individuals and institutions that, at times, made unlikely bedfellows. From academic anthropologists and amateur ethnographers, to low-level police officers and research bureaucrats, the groups which made up the field of colonial policy across Taiwan’s aboriginal lands were not in any shape or form a cohesive unit. This ensemble of social scientific researchers and law enforcement professionals however was not merely some contingent relationship born of the immediate security objectives of local colonial policy-makers in Taiwan. As discussed in the opening chapter, the mutual imbrication of police power and anthropological knowledge production was part of a larger global moment, one where the shift from “man-as-body” to

“man-as-species” occasioned a transformation in how national states manage the “health” and

“wealth” of their citizens, and also mobilize their life energies and labouring capacities. One of these major shifts was the transformation of “policing” as a form of social science production.

With the police-ification of anthropological work, and anthropologization of policing itself, new technologies of governmental power and security apparatuses were deployed to make visible, and therefore governable, imperial Japan’s indigenous minorities. Then of course there is the question of Japan’s self-definition as a multi-ethnic space, which was one of the cornerstones of colonial discourse in Japanese-occupied Taiwan. This issue should also be linked up with other territories of the empire, territories like the puppet state of Manchukuo or portions of occupied 97

China. Across these two areas, a similar logic of multi-ethnic cooperation and pan-Asian solidarity was invoked for the establishment of Japanese imperial tutelage. A focus on this idea, along with the specific policies carried out under its sign, may perhaps offer an interesting vantage point from which to rethink the history of overseas colonization in Japan.

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