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. © Toulouse-Antonin Roy, 2014 1 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. 2 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. 3 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. 4 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. 5 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).

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