UC San Diego UC San Diego Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title The Yellow Man's Burden : : The Politics of Settler Colonialism in Hokkaidō and Taiwan Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/07c7b5f6 Author Sugimoto, Tomonori Publication Date 2013 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, SAN DIEGO The Yellow Man's Burden: The Politics of Settler Colonialism in Hokkaidō and Taiwan A thesis submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree Master of Arts in Anthropology by Tomonori Sugimoto Committee in charge: Professor Joseph D. Hankins, Chair Professor Susanne A. Brenner Professor David E. Pedersen 2013 Copyright Tomonori Sugimoto, 2013 All rights Reserved The thesis of Tomonori Sugimoto is approved, and it is acceptable in quality and form for publication on microfilm and electronically: ____________________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________________ Chair University of California, San Diego 2013 iii TABLE OF CONTENTS Signature Page............................................................................................................ iii Table of Contents........................................................................................................ iv Acknowledgments…………………………………………………………………... v Abstract....................................................................................................................... vi Introduction................................................................................................................. 1 Chapter 1..................................................................................................................... 14 Chapter 2..................................................................................................................... 41 Chapter 3..................................................................................................................... 58 Conclusion.................................................................................................................. 74 References................................................................................................................... 78 iv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS First and foremost, I would like to thank my MA committee chair, Joseph Hankins, for his constructive criticism on various drafts of this thesis. His feedback made the writing process both rewarding and enjoyable. Thanks also go to David Pedersen, Todd Henry, and Michael Berman, who provided helpful comments and suggestions. I would also like to thank my friends at UCSD and beyond, especially Laura Reizman, June Ting, Raquel Pacheco, Michael Berman, and Bryan Beaudoin, for their emotional support. Research for this thesis was partially funded by the Heiwa Nakajima Foundation and the Taiwan Economic and Cultural Office. Finally, I thank my family for always being there for me. v ABSTRACT OF THE THESIS The Yellow Man's Burden: The Politics of Settler Colonialism in Hokkaidō and Taiwan by Tomonori Sugimoto Master of Arts in Anthropology University of California, San Diego, 2013 Professor Joseph D. Hankins, Chair This thesis examines the politics of settler colonialism and indigeneity in Taiwan and Hokkaidō, Japan in the last one hundred and fifty years. I argue that the histories of these two settler colonial formations are inextricably linked due to their shared experience of Japanese colonial rule. By analyzing a wide range of archival materials such as newspaper accounts, legal texts, and government documents, I first trace the emergence of what I term "settler colonial biopower" in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and its mutations in the immediate postwar period on both islands. This mode of settler colonial power, however, has undergone a significant transformation vi with the rise of multiculturalism over the last few decades. The second part of this thesis is thus devoted to examining recent shifts in the meanings of indigeneity and the changing contours of settler colonial governance in contemporary Hokkaidō and Taiwan. vii Introduction Indigeneity—Indigenous difference—is fundamentally the condition of "before," of cultural, philosophical, and political life that connect to specific territories and of the political exigencies of this relatedness in the present. This present is defined by the political projects of dispossession and settlement, and the difference that is Indigeneity is the maintenance of culture, treaty, history, and self within the historical and ongoing context of settlement. This settlement was wrought through violence and bloody dispossession and now maintains itself through the threat of military force and the force of law. — Audra Simpson, "Settlement's Secret" (208) Attention here is on to ruin as an active process, and a vibrantly violent verb. In this forum, we turn with intention not to the immediate violence of Iraq and declared war zones, but to the enduring quality of imperial remains and what they render in impaired states. This is not a turn to ruins as memorialized and large-scale monumental “leftovers” or relics—although these come into our purview as well—but rather to what people are “left with”: to what remains, to the aftershocks of empire, to the material and social afterlife of structures, sensibilities, and things. Such effects reside in the corroded hollows of landscapes, in the gutted infrastructures of segregated cityscapes and in the microecologies of matter and mind. The focus then is not on inert remains but on their vital refiguration. The question is pointed: How do imperial formations persist in their material debris, in ruined landscapes and through the social ruination of people’s lives? — Ann Laura Stoler, "Imperial Debris: Reflections on Ruins and Ruination" (194) Settler colonialism is a structure, not an event. It is impervious to regime change. It is a colonialism that never ends. Patrick Wolfe (2008) thus argues. Whereas franchise colonialism is a project centered on the exploitation of native labor, the primary concern of settler colonialism is territorial, in that its “priority is replacing natives on their land rather than extracting an economic surplus from mixing their labor with it” (Wolfe 2008:103). Therefore, settler colonialism is double-edged: “Negatively, it strives for the dissolution of native societies. Positively, it erects a new colonial society on the expropriated land base” (103). However, native people persist in this new society and resist settlement through their persistence. Settler colonialism then tries to undermine this native resistance by assimilating them. Such assimilation strategies inherit rather than discontinue settler colonialism enacted in the earlier phase of settler colonialism. Wolfe continues: 1 2 Indeed, depending on the historical conjuncture, assimilation can be a more effective mode of elimination than outright killing, since it does not involve such a disruptive affront to the rule of law that is ideologically central to the cohesion of settler society. When invasion is recognized as a structure rather than an event, its history does not stop (or, more to the point, become relatively trivial) when it moves on from the era of frontier homicide. Rather, narrating that history involves charting the continuities, discontinuities, adjustments, and departures whereby a logic that initially informed frontier killing transmutes into different modalities, discourses, and institutional formations as it undergirds the historical development and complexification of settler society (120-121). Therefore, settler colonialism is a structure, not an event. Wolfe is not employing the term "structure" to characterize settler colonialism as an unchanging edifice. I rather understand Wolfe's evocation of "strucutre" here as a refusal to accept settler colonial temporality, which is divided into the past, understood as the period of massacre and settlement, and the present/future, understood as the period of post-settlement and possibly reconciliation. In this sense, we need to focus on settler colonial formations1, understood as processes of becoming, in order "to register the ongoing quality of processes of decimation, displacement, and reclamation" (Stoler 2008:193). As Ann Stoler provocatively notes in the epigraph, we need to pay attention to “ruin” as a verb rather than a noun, to "the political life of imperial debris, the longevity of structures of dominance, and the uneven pace with which people can extricate themselves from the colonial order of things" (193). 1 Here I am invoking Ann Stoler's term "imperial formations," or "states of becoming rather than being, macropolities in constant formation" (Stoler 2006:135-136). 3 A flourishing field of settler colonialism studies2 represented by Wolfe forcefully unsettles and troubles settler-centric histories and narratives that naturalize the subjugation of indigenous people and the invasion of their lands. This critique so far, however, has tended to "whiten" settler colonial projects by depicting them as always white European projects. For example, in A Companion to Postcolonial Studies, Johnson and Lawson (2000) bases their definition of settler colonialism “on the presence of long- term, majority white racial communities, where indigenous peoples have been outnumbered and removed