Representing Empire East Asian Comparative Literature and Culture Edited by Zhang Longxi (City University of Hong Kong) Wiebke Denecke (Boston University) Editorial Board Alexander Beecroft (University of South Carolina) Ronald Egan (University of California, Santa Barbara) Joshua Fogel (York University, Canada) Alexa Huang (George Washington University) Peter Kornicki (Cambridge University, UK) Karen Thornber (Harvard University) Rudolf Wagner (Heidelberg University, Germany) VOLUME 3 The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/eacl Representing Empire Japanese Colonial Literature in Taiwan and Manchuria By Ying Xiong LEIDEN | BOSTON Xiong, Ying, Ph.D. Representing empire : Japanese colonial literature in Taiwan and Manchuria / by Ying Xiong. pages cm. — (East Asian comparative literature and culture, ISSN 2212-4772 ; volume 3) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-90-04-27410-5 (hardback : acid-free paper) — ISBN (invalid) 978-90-04-27411-2 (e-book) 1. Japanese literature—Taiwan—History and criticism. 2. Japanese literature—China—Manchuria— History and criticism. 3. National characteristics, Japanese, in literature. 4. Imperialism in literature. 5. Nationalism in literature. 6. Regionalism—East Asia. I. Title. PL889.T282X56 2014 895.6’09951249—dc23 2014009254 This publication has been typeset in the multilingual ‘Brill’ typeface. With over 5,100 characters covering Latin, ipa, Greek, and Cyrillic, this typeface is especially suitable for use in the humanities. For more information, please see brill.com/brill-typeface. issn 2212-4772 isbn 978 90 04 27410 5 (hardback) isbn 978 90 04 27411 2 (e-book) Copyright 2014 by Koninklijke Brill nv, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill nv incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Nijhoff, Global Oriental and Hotei Publishing. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill nv provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, ma 01923, usa. Fees are subject to change. Brill has made all reasonable efforts to trace all rights holders to any copyrighted material used in this work. In cases where these efforts have not been successful the publisher welcomes communications from copyright holders, so that the appropriate acknowledgements can be made in future editions, and to settle other permission matters. This book is printed on acid-free paper. Contents List of Illustrations vi Notes vii Acknowledgements viii Series Editors’ Foreword ix Preface xii Introduction 1 Part I Exoticising the Other, Reinventing the Self 49 1 National Literature and Beyond 51 2 Local Discovered 83 3 National Lineage Reinvented 122 Part II Pan-Asianism Unrealised 143 4 Between Imperialism and Pan-Asianism Imperialial 145 5 Literature in the Name of National Harmony 176 6 Translating Texts, Transforming Identities 198 Part III Re-mapping the Empire: Japan, Taiwan, and Manchukuo 235 7 Imperial Knowledge and Colonial Power 237 8 Romanticising the Empire 265 9 Local Literature in Ambivalence 287 Conclusion: Japanese Nationalism and Its Discontents 319 Bibliography 328 Index 370 List of Illustrations Illustration caption 1 The Headquarters of the South Manchurian Railway Company 21 2 The Railway Network of the South Manchurian Railway Company 22 3 The Central Plaza of Dalian 23 4 The Library of Governor-General’s Office 55 5 Taiping Street of 1934 90 6 The Kōzan Pavilion in the 1920s 95 7 The Bedroom of a Taiwanese Prostitute during the Colonial Period 96 8 Miyata Yatarō’s painting “Fragrant Evening Primrose” 97 9 The Practice of Augury 120 10 Maps of Taiwan Showing its Position as the Center of the Empire 127 11 Chōshun Commercial School 148 12 A Postcard Depicting the Frozen Songhua River 208 13 Caricature of White Russians living in Manchukuo 222 14 The Japanese Emperor and the Emperor of Manchukuo Heading to a Military Review 301 15 Puyi’s visit to the Meiji Shrine 301 Notes The pinyin system of translation is used for Chinese terms and Hepburn romanisation for Japanese terms. In both languages exceptions are made for words, place names and person names that are familiarly used in English, such as Kuomintang, Tokyo and Sun Yat-sen. All translations of Japanese and Chinese materials here are my own, except where otherwise noted. Asian personal names are given with family name first, per- sonal name(s) second. Acknowledgements I first became interested in the area of colonial literature and transcultural studies about ten years ago when Lydia H. Liu offered a course on comparative literature at Tsinghua University. It has been a wonderful journey ever since. I could never have travelled so far without the support of many people and organisations. I would like to thank them all here. In particular, I would like to thank Sebastian Conrad, Mats Karlsson, Yasuko Claremont, Wang Zhongchen, Lin Shaoyang, Lionel Babicz, Tobias Hübinette, Lydia H. Liu, T. Fujitani, Liu Jianhui, Aono Shigeharu, Prasenjit Duara, Shimamura Teru, Iremela Hijiya-Kirschnereit, Klaus Mühlhahn, and Nadin Heé for their comments, insights, suggestions, and feedback, which helped me to strengthen my research in different ways. I cannot thank Okada Hideki who worked at the Chinese Department of Ritsumeikan University enough for his generosity in sharing his pri- mary sources. The writing of this book took place in an intellectually stimulating atmosphere fos- tered by the German Research Association (Deutsche Forschungs—gemeinschaft, DFG). I am grateful to the DFG for financing the research as well as for the publication of this project. I received a Japan Foundation fellowship in 2009, which sponsored my trip to Japan and my work in various Japanese archives and libraries. I also want to thank the University of Tokyo Library, Nichibunken in Kyoto, the Japanese National Diet Library, the Taiwan National University Library, the Institute of History and Philology of Academia Sinica, the Vintage and Formosa Vintage Museum Café, as well as Mr. Fan Rong for their kind support in sources and illustrations. My special gratitude goes to the series editors, Wiebke Denecke and Zhang Longxi, who invited reviewers to read and critique an earlier version of the manuscript. The feedback I have received from the anonymous reviewers has helped me to broaden the vision and reframe some parts of the manuscript. I also want to acknowledge David Kelly from the Japanese Studies journal and Sunanda Vittal for their contribution to the production of this manuscript. Series Editors’ Foreword East Asian Comparative Literature and Culture East Asia is reaching into the world. The number of Chinese students and scholars studying at foreign universities has never been larger, the “Korean wave” washes K-dramas and K-pop ashore all continents, and Japanese manga and anime garner millions of young fans in New Delhi and Cape Town, Oslo and Vladivostok, New York and Rome. Popular culture proves a powerful medium to connect East Asian countries to the world, but also to each other, softening the divisions that the twentieth century has brought to this region. Much of what a good century ago connected the East Asian “Sinographic Sphere” of China, Japan, Korea, and Vietnam—cultures that traditionally relied on the Chinese script and literary language—has disappeared. East Asians around the year 1900 still communicated through the authoritative lingua franca of Literary Chinese. For almost two millennia “Chinese-style writing” had been the language of government, schol- arship, Buddhism, and belles-lettres: Under China’s hegemony many states adopted Chinese culture and its script during the first millennium CE. During the second mil- lennium Japan, Vietnam, and Korea developed phonographic scripts that led to the gradual abandonment of Chinese characters in Korea and Vietnam and the blossom- ing of local vernacular literatures. In the early twentieth century reformers inspired by Western ideas of “nation states” and “national languages” spearheaded vernacular movements that swept Chinese-style writing and the intellectual and literary culture that went with it aside. The death of Literary Chinese as East Asia’s venerable literary language over the past century and its replacement with the English language and Western culture marks an irreversible and little noticed inflection point in the history of humanity: the disappearance of the world’s last cultural sphere where a strongly “logographic” script (recording meaning of “words” rather than “sounds” as “phonographic” alpha- bets do) had enabled distinctive literary cultures to thrive for almost two millennia. The world history of writing starts with strongly logographic writing systems: Egyptian hieroglyphs, Mesopotamian cuneiform, Chinese characters and Mesoamerican glyphs. Phonographic scripts have long since replaced all but Chinese characters. Thanks to the logographic writing system East Asia’s “bi-literacy”—textual production in Literary Chinese and local vernaculars—functioned quite differently from alphabetic lingua francas. Europe’s bilingualism during the Medieval Period was rooted in Latin, both spoken and read. In contrast, Chinese characters allowed East Asians (including speak- ers of Chinese dialects)