Contemporary Japanese Thought

Now one is all the more conscious of one’s own vulnerability as a second-class citizen of the United States who could potentially be deprived of United States’ nationality or the right to legal residence by official decree. What is expediently promoted in American politics and mass media today is an anxiety that America, as the last superpower of an imperial nature, has turned into the symbolic target of anticolonial vengeance.¹ This assessment, in turn, justifies the federal administration’s insatiable search across the globe for signs attesting to imminent attacks by “terrorists.” As long as the public buys this paranoid formula, a state of emergency can easily be linked to a global colonial war and spread throughout an entire civil population.

In reference to the campos de concentraciones of the Spanish in Cuba and the “concentration camps” of the English in South Africa, Giorgio Agamben gives an historical account of how the concentration camps were inaugurated around the beginning of the last century:

[The camps were] born not out of ordinary law (even less, as one might have supposed, from a transformation and development of criminal law) but out of a state of exception and martial law. This is even clearer in the Nazi Lager, concerning whose origin and juridical regime we are well informed. It has been noted that the juridical basis for internment was not common law but Schutzhaft (literally, protective custody), a juridical institution of Prussian origin that the Nazi jurors sometimes classified as a preventative police measure insofar as it allowed individuals to be “taken into custody” independently of any criminal behavior, solely to avoid danger to the security of the state.²

The concentration camp itself was a preemptive measure taken by the State to prevent threats to the security of the State from actualizing.

As Hannah Arendt assessed a half century ago, the decline of nation-state sovereignty was accompanied by the decline of the rights of man. It seems that this formula is being ascertained once again. We have to deal with more and more organizations that are neither national nor international, as class struggles and the classes themselves can no longer be integrated into or confined by the nation-form.³ Hence sovereignty is increasingly removed from nation-states to a new kind of “super-stateness” that has neither a central republican body nor the antagonisms of class or national interests resisting the unilateral logic of the market.⁴ Driven by a transnational, private, commercial understanding (as opposed to law, which must refer to a social body), this super-stateness assumes that it is in the process of producing a global civil society that represents a reign of law without the State. Since, however, there is no articulation of inter-individual to central contractuality, the reality is actually quite the opposite: a State without law. In this global State-without-law, the nature of sovereignty in its relation to the movements of the stateless multitudes follows the logic of the police. Consequently, the systemic struggle between the center and the periphery itself is aligned, or shall we say, complicitous, with the emergence of a super-state, or, quite simply, the identification of humanity in general with stateness. While asserting itself time and time again as representative of a particular national will, the United States super-state assumes the responsibility of global police for protecting all those subjected to stateness. Indeed, today’s wars, launched in the name of humanity, signal the coming of an age in which the meaning of humanity itself is starting to gradually coincide with stateness.

The Gulf War set the precedent for global complicity with the new order of sovereign police, now consolidated by the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, in which the two figures of modern central order, imperialist and statist, converged. Although the United Nations arrogated to itself the ultimate right of war and legitimate violence, which had formerly exclusively defined the power of each sovereign state, it immediately divested itself of this power by granting the conduct of the war to a private force, that of the United States and its allies. By placing itself beyond jurisdiction, this private force appropriated the power of the police, and thereby constituted itself as a state without law.

Today the top officials of the U.S. federal administration have declared themselves the most authentic representatives of humanity and the embodiment of this ultimate sovereign power. They claim the right to arrogate ultimate lawfulness to the U.S. federal authority. In other words, it is increasingly difficult to differentiate the military that protects and promotes national interests outside U.S. territory from the police that serve to regulate violence and maintain the State’s jurisdiction within its territory. This is to say that the embodiment of lawfulness is in fact beyond any existent law. Therefore, these top officials have repeatedly asserted a state of exception, invoked by the state of emergency—which allows the suspension of political rights concerning personal liberty, freedom of expression, informational privacy, etc.—as an indefinite and unending condition under which we must live from this point on. They want to deliberately confuse this condition with juridical rule itself.

In such a situation as, Agamben tells us, was once referred to as the “state of willed exception,”⁵ if one is of an “alien origin” and potentially a second-class citizen, how can one survive such a condition without committing oneself to that condition voluntarily? This is a question that I could not resist posing to myself and on which I would like to concentrate in this presentation with a view to the general problem of the poiesis of the subject.

I will read three texts; the first two form a pair, which were published almost simultaneously. These two texts are short stories written in Japanese: “Michi” [Road], which appeared in the journal Bungei Taiwan [Literary arts Taiwan], and “Honryū” [Torrent], which appeared in Taiwan Bungaku [Taiwan literature]—both published in July 1943 in the midst of what was customarily referred to as hijōjitai or hijōji (the state of exception)—by the Taiwanese writers Chin Kasen (Chen Houquan) and Ō Shōyū (Wang Changxiong). The third text is No-No Boy by John Okada, a fictional piece about the experience of a Japanese-American draft resister, published initially in 1957, more than a decade after the end of the Asia Pacific War.

No doubt, what I am going to present is a comparative project. Yet it is necessary to issue a disclaimer at the outset. My comparison is guided by the analysis of schematism in the regime of translation,⁶ according to which the representation of the comparable unities between which comparison is conducted is posterior to the act of translation. Translation is often represented as a transfer of “something” from one language unity to another, between two organic unities of languages that are supposedly not implicated in one another. But it is important to note that comparison cannot be reduced to one between the presumed unities of two organic entities or—in this case—two societies postulated as organic unities. Above all, it is a matter of how comparison is represented, a matter of an assumed scheme that is rendered self-evident as a consequence of the repeated use of such representation. What I want to presage here is that my reading of these texts will not conform to this scheme or view them as representing in one way or another the societies in which they were produced. Undoubtedly it is necessary to refer to the specific social and historical conditions that enable us to make sense out of these texts. The historical and social specificities of the texts cannot be overlooked. Yet comparison is not regulated to produce some judgment about the similarities or differences between Japanese society—or Taiwanese/Chinese society?—of the early 1940s and American society of the 1950s. I refuse to equate the historical and social specificity of a text to the subsumption of it under the generalized organicity that is more often than not superimposed upon the putative spatiotemporal unity of a nation-state. Accordingly, whereas I do not deny that these were produced in the particular loci marked by the specificities of place and time, I do not regard either “Michi” or “Honryū” primarily as expressions of “Japanese reality,” or No-No Boy as an expression of “American reality.” These texts will be read under a comparative directive toward an uncovering of the general technology of imperial nationalism, a technology by means of which a subject of the imperial nation is manufactured out of so-called minority individuals.

In the first half of the twentieth century, many of the industrialized nations underwent some transformation in response to the sense of crisis in capitalism. The United States and Japan were no exceptions. Although chronologically and geopolitically the nationalisms of the two countries should be approached from different viewpoints and in separate historical contexts, they have much in common when we examine them from the perspective of imperial nationalism. My inquiry, therefore, adopts the formula of comparative imperial nationalism. (I hope that this essay will eventually be couched in a larger treatise on the formation of imperial nationalism). Since I have neither time nor space to talk about other aspects of imperial nationalism, I would like to focus on the problem of the manufacture of the subject or, to use the philosophical idiom of the 1930s, the poiesis of the subject, with a view to minorities, those people of “alien origins” who could be stripped of their citizenship and fundamental political rights preemptively in imperial nationalisms.

In considering how histories of East Asia prior to the end of the Asian-Pacific War had been remembered and written about in the postwar period, we cannot overlook two moments: the collapse of the Japanese empire and the colonization of Japan by the United States. Generally speaking, as far as countries under the U.S. postwar domination are concerned, histories of East Asia have been written in large measure for the sake of legitimizing the American military and political reign in the Asia-Pacific region. Let us not forget that the histories were also filed to absolve Japanese imperialism. As became glaringly obvious at the International Tribunal on War Crimes against Women, in Tokyo in December 2000, the absolution of Japanese colonial and war responsibilities constituted an essential component of American hegemony. Deliberately avoided in those histories, which apparently celebrate Japan’s defeat and the democratic objectives behind U.S. policies and strategies, were questions indispensable to peoples who had suffered from the multilayered imposition of colonial domination and violence: How could colonial rule damage the colonized physically as well as psychologically? How did colonialism give rise to not only national liberation movements but also racial hierarchy? Why does nationalism exist in complicity with racism? What measures have to be taken in order to liberate the ex-colonized from colonial legacies? In addition, those histories were designed to obfuscate and disperse the issues of colonial and war responsibilities of the institutions, colonial administrators, military personnel, and cultures that required and propagated colonial violence and oppression.

These histories were not promoted by the conservative historians of the United States alone. Japanese historians and intellectuals were also instrumental in their invention, propagation, and endorsement. Unlike previous colonial rules, the American occupation administration did not rebuff Japanese nationalism; rather it put up anticolonial banners and pretended to take sides with national liberation causes; it protected and even nurtured Japanese ethnic exceptionalism. Japanese intellectuals, who could hardly endorse the military and political policies of the United States toward East Asia, were exonerated from the task of investigating the mutually reinforcing relationship between their nationalistic sentiments, which propelled their anti-Americanism emotively, and American hegemony.⁷ It is in the disavowal of the two countries’ colonial pasts that Japanese and U.S. nationalisms were in complicity with one another, as if intimating today’s complicitous mutuality of the center and periphery under the domination of the global super-state. Furthermore, despite extremely violent encounters and interactions among many different ethnic, racial, gender, and national groups, the past was narrated only within the framework of national history, so that neither American nor Japanese historians dared to undertake the elementary examination of comparing the two imperial nationalisms in the same analytical field, using the same set of criteria. Therefore, Japanese society and its colonial strategies in the 1930s and early 1940s were frequently objects of denunciation, but scarcely studied in detail for fear that the results of such a study would reflect on America’s home problems. From the outset, Japanese nationalism was by definition assumed to be an exceptionalist, ethnic particularism exclusive of other ethnicities, while American nationalism always manifests itself in its universalistic orientation toward multiethnic integration. Perhaps this is a case of collective transference, as it is brilliantly allegorized in the film M. Butterfly.⁸

It is a most common feature of the imperialist complex to justify the imperialism of one’s own country by insisting on its exceptional traits and superiority over other imperialisms. Every nationalism, imperial nationalism in particular, presents itself as an exception. Exceptionalism is inherent in any imperial nationalism. But we cannot succumb to the temptation of exceptionalism, regardless of whether its claim is clothed in the uniqueness of an ethnicity, of the West, or of some religious tradition. This is why a comparative analysis of imperial nationalisms, together with an appropriate analysis of the psychic mechanism of denial of colonial guilt, is indispensable in view of our urgent need to find the ways to deal with the reality, in the progressive present, of a new imperialism and its effects.

In the early 1940s, systematic campaigns to mobilize local students and youths to join the military were under way, not only in Japan proper but also in the annexed territories of the Japanese empire, such as Taiwan and Korea.⁹ Undoubtedly these were a response to the chronic shortage of labor in Japan, which also gave rise to a variety of social measures, including the lifelong employment system, the higher social status of women, and the forced relocation of laborers from the annexed territories to industrial centers in Japan proper and other parts of the empire. Just as the civil rights movement on the U.S. mainland could not be separated from the war going on in Indochina during the 1960s and early 1970s, integration policies—generally referred to as “kōmin-ka seisaku” ¹⁰—and the integration of minorities into the nation were closely connected to the prolonged war in China.

Perhaps the most salient feature of government rhetoric can be found in its emphasis on voluntarism. The local recruits in Taiwan, the hontōjin—bendaoren in Beijinghua—(i.e., the islanders as opposed to the naichijin—or neidiren—meaning the Japanese from Japan proper) were supposed to have decided of their own free will to join the Imperial Forces, and to have found an anticipatory resolution to their own deaths as Japanese subjects loyal to the emperor. Publicly propagated was the fantastic scenario that these islanders wanted to be “Japanese,” and therefore volunteered to die as “Japanese.” It is important to note that the islanders’ voluntarism was premised upon their subjectivity. Their anticipatory resolution to their own deaths for the country was appealed to as testimony of the fact that they were just as capable of patriotic action as the Japanese from Japan proper, that they were as authentically “Japanese” as the naichijin in respect to their subjectivity.

Citing passages from Miyata Setsuko’s Chōsen minshū to kōminka-seisaku [The Korean masses and imperialization policies], Komagome Takeshi refers to some cases concerning imperialization policies in Korea. He notes that the Korean youths often boasted of “their being Japanese” in the 1930s and early 1940s.¹¹ While the governor-general’s office and the Japanese army in Korea worked hard to manufacture loyal imperial subjects of the colonized population, as Miyata and Komagome both argue, they implemented a number of social reforms, but never in the direction of abolishing existing institutionalized forms of discrimination. Yet some Koreans wished to go beyond the existing discriminatory barriers by becoming “more Japanese than the Japanese from Japan proper themselves,” says Komagome.¹² There was no way to conceal the obvious contradiction between what the rhetoric of national integration and imperialization claimed and the reality of institutional discrimination against the Korean population. “It would be an impossible demand: you ought to behave as loyal subjects of the emperor even though you must be aware you can never be Japanese.”¹³ But precisely because of this contradiction inherent in the colonial reign, it was necessary to invent a technology whereby that contradiction could be mediated for the manufacture of the subject. What was at issue was how to render it a productive moment in the poiesis of the imperial subject. Such desire for Japanese identity would otherwise be blocked in the subject because of the contradiction inherent in colonial reign, and yet in fantasy it could be fulfilled. This is why the management of fantasy was absolutely essential in the kōminka-seisaku (imperialization policies) for, in certain fantastic works, colonial discrimination could be appealed to so as to produce an insatiable desire for Japanese identity in the colonized. Thus the contradiction could be internalized in the colonized as the source that propels them toward Japanese identity.¹⁴ Accordingly, we regard literature in Japanese in colonial Taiwan as a technology for the poiesis of the subject.

Nevertheless, let us not overlook the fact that the setting of a fantastic staging as background to the discriminatory distinction between the islanders (hontōjin) and the Japanese from Japan proper (naichijin) was sublated into the indiscriminate “Japanese.” This scenario was played out effectively only insofar as a certain division of fantastic labor was assumed: it was to be staged with the islanders as actors and the Japanese proper as audience. The islanders were expected to act before and for the audience from Japan proper. However, it is not the islanders but the Japanese from Japan proper who were the protagonists in this fantasy.

During the period of kōmin-ka seisaku, Taiwanese novelists wrote such short stories about volunteer soldiers as “Shiganhei” [The volunteer soldier], by Shū Kinha (Chou Jingbo); “Michi,” by Chin Kasen; and “Honryū,” by Ō Shōyū. It is to be noted that the editors of the literary journal Bungei Taiwan, who were Japanese from Japan proper,¹⁵ commented upon “Road,” which depicts the anguish an islander intellectual experiences in the process of reaching a decision to join the military. As one editor wrote,

In respect to their literary techniques and linguistic competency, islander writers are inferior to writers from Japan proper; but in terms of their patriotic ardor, as the journal’s editors insisted, they can surpass the Japanese from Japan proper. On the one hand, the Japanese from Japan proper are vastly superior to the islanders with regard to their industrial development and degree of civilization, so their civilizing positionality remains unwavering. On the other hand, they have to learn from the islanders about those virtues of honesty and sincerity that they used to possess but have now lost. The naichijin overwhelm the hontōjin with their economic and political superiority. But the hontōjin are more authentically “Japanese” in respect to their patriotic ardor than the naichijin. Summarily, this is the lesson that the editors of Literary Arts Taiwan wanted to discover in Chin Kasen’s autobiographical short story “Road.” What was wished for in this fantastic staging was that the islanders themselves should confess the desire, the fulfillment of which the Japanese from Japan proper wished the islanders to achieve. Basically, what the editors recognized in “Road” was a scenario in which the Taiwanese misrecognized the desire of the naichijin editors as their own, and thereby wanted to be “Japanese” by acting out the roles expected of them by the naichijin.

In “Road,” the hontōjin intellectual, whose pen name is Sei Nan (Qing Nan),¹⁸ works as an engineer in a national camphor-refinery factory in Taiwan and hopes to be promoted to the rank of full engineer, but his wishes are dashed because of the ethnic glass ceiling within the company. The protagonist, who is personally committed to the principle of equality in the Japanese nation, is portrayed as follows:

He regarded himself as a proper Japanese. He disliked not only the word naichijin, but also its opposite, hontōjin. The texture of these words and their connotations made him feel ill at ease. He believed it foolish to regard oneself either as naichijin or hontōjin. In the first place, the self-deprecating attitude of regarding oneself as hontōjin was repulsive to him. He wanted to believe that he was simply a good Japanese. He did not want this belief to be called into question. He should not be forced to doubt what he wants to believe, and people must let him hold on to that belief [which should protect him from envy and self-deprecation]. It would be, he believed, stupid to cause a tragic incident out of a sense of envy or self-deprecation.¹⁹

Obviously, to be Japanese does not mean to be naichijin here. Taiwanese islanders are equally as Japanese as those from Japan proper, and to claim to be Japanese is to obtain the right to overcome the various forms of discrimination that distinguish hontōjin from naichijin. Nonetheless, Japanese nationality is not an abstract quality totally free of the past. The narrator of the novel acknowledges the weight of tradition:

Certainly, “to be a good Japanese” is not a property monopolized by the Japanese from Japan proper. As Sei Nan admits, however, it is necessary for the islanders to emulate the naichijin as the ideal in order to be good Japanese. Therefore, among “the hontōjin, the Koreans, and the Manchus,” there should be many who are equipped with the Japanese spirit. They “hold onto the Japanese spirit firmly.”²¹ As it is not innate in them, however, they must learn it from those who have grown up with it.

Thus, the scenario outlined in “Road” accommodated two contradictory demands at the same time. On the one hand, the Japanese from Japan proper were inherently superior to the islanders. On the other, as Japanese, they were equal, regardless of their ethnicity. A similar scenario, which fulfils the wishes of one group to be recognized as superior to the other in the midst of the rhetoric of equality, might be found in humanistic ideology in general. And no doubt it is this humanistic scenario that moved the editors of Literary Arts Taiwan to tears.

It goes without saying that the celebration of the Japanese spirit in “Road” cannot immediately be taken as an expression of the author’s conviction. Literary production was apparently conceived of as an essential part of total war mobilization, and the marks of censorship and integration policies are evident in this work, too. As the traces of censored characters indicate, this work was published only after the approval of government censors. However, this does not mean that the Japanese-language literature by hontōjin writers can be viewed merely as a consequence of their collaboration with the Japanese colonial authorities. For, as in “Road,” we now can recognize the features of an imaginary relationship between the individual and the State there, and this imaginary relationship between minority individuals under colonial rule and the State was the very theme that the State logic of integration (whose most elaborate expression can be found in the Logic of Species)²² pursued as its problematic. In other words, a reading of this literature might well illustrate to us how the multiethnic State’s logic of integration could weave the desires of minority intellectuals and persuade them toward the policies of the empire.

Throughout “Road,” however, although speaking the Japanese language and behaving like Japanese from Japan proper was not thematically problematized, the multilingual nature of Taiwanese society was hinted at here and there. It is presumed that a Taiwanese intellectual could transform himself and thereby modernize his environment by speaking Japanese and behaving like those from Japan proper.

For those who could not easily convince themselves of their Japanese nationality, the concern for national belonging inevitably oscillated between two polarities: the facticity of their immediate ethnic origin and the belonging to a national community through their commitment to ideas. Accordingly, Sei Nan is portrayed as a protagonist who tries to go beyond his fixation with ethnic origin in order to belong to the nation through his commitment to ideas. This must have been exemplary behavior among well-educated local intellectuals in Taiwan then. But at the same time, as Chen Wanyi observed about the ambiguous relationship between the Japanese nation and those elite hontōjin (such as former Taiwan president Lee Denghui) returning from the large cities in Japan proper,²³ the story of Sei Nan seems to vividly illustrate the ideological setting of national belonging for minorities.

Since he is not from Japan proper, Sei Nan is denied promotion to the rank of full engineer at the factory. He is betrayed by the very Japanese spirit in whose universalism he has invested so much, and as a result he is now caught in a self-destructive neurosis. He was flatly told that he did not belong in the Japanese nation. Censorship was exercised to prevent the negative images of those from Japan proper from spreading widely in the colonies, and yet how could such a description of naichijin’s outright hypocrisy be allowed? The colonial authority could not disallow the symbolic expression of colonial violence precisely because literary production was a technology for the poiesis of the subject, a technology by which to manufacture the colonized as a subject who would identify with the Japanese nation. It was meant to produce an effective scenario in which, at the level of fantasy, the colonized would overcome many obstacles imposed by the reality of colonialism to evolve into a full-fledged Japanese. Only through a vivid description of these obstacles—naichijin’s discriminatory attitude, their haughtiness, hontōjin’s backwardness and sense of inferiority, legal discrimination, etc.—could hontōjin characters such as Sei Nan serve as the point of attachment for the colonized. Otherwise, the story would never succeed in offering the sense of reality against which the colonized could recognize the protagonist as an embodiment of their own fantasy. Engaging in the integrationist strategies of kōmin-ka, the colonial authority could not afford to remove the description of harsh colonial reality from Japanese-language literature.

Just as the humiliation of the colonized is directly represented in the sexually impotent figure of Ayuh in Chō Bunkan’s (Zhang Wenhuan) “Iyatumu ge,”²⁴ Sei Nan’s breakdown is no doubt a trope for Taiwanese humiliation throughout the colonial reign. In due course, his self-respect that was premised so much upon his membership in the nation is fatally crushed. Then he is forced to learn that, while promoting the ideal of the Japanese nation beyond ethnic particularity, the Japanese from Japan proper do not believe in it at all. Evoking a sense of guilt in the naichijin readership, the depiction of his anguish may well turn his patriotism into rebellion. Chin Kasen’s narration seems to lead the reader to a fantasized argument that Sei Nan loves the country so much that, as a proper Japanese, he is fully entitled to denounce injustice in Japanese society and protest against the colonial administration. Implicitly it discloses the fundamental hypocrisy of the integrationist rhetoric of imperial nationalism and the miserable situation of minorities in which, in the final analysis, they can only demand recognition from the nation as a whole, seeking love from the pastoral power, just as a lost sheep begs for the merciful gaze of the shepherd. Let us recall that, from the establishment of the modern state at the beginning of the Meiji period until the loss of the empire in August 1945, the emotive sense of Japanese nationality was often displayed in the imperial slogan isshi dōjin—which implies “since everyone in the nation is embraced in the gaze of the emperor, he never ceases to care about you.”²⁵

In spite of the universalistic rhetoric of integration, what confronts Sei Nan is the reality of Japanese proprietarism, of a naichi-shugi that the Japanese nation consists solely of Japanese from Japan proper. Yet it is misleading to argue that the rhetoric of imperial nationalism, such as the Logic of Species, primarily serves to disguise the presence of ethnic and racial discrimination within the empire. For, perhaps more important, it was a response to colonial anxiety and had to be invented in order to prevent the mutiny of minorities. It was a reaction to those social antagonisms which racial and ethnic discrimination could provoke. The empire had to displace potential civil strife by appealing to the logic of national integration.

Realizing that the glass ceiling that prevented his promotion to the rank of full engineer could neither be removed nor publicly criticized, Sei Nan decides to volunteer for military service. He makes an anticipatory resolution to his own death only when he has seen that the universalistic rhetoric of national integration has unambiguously failed him. For he believes that the only way to recover his self-respect is to renegotiate his belonging to the nation, which, for the Taiwanese at that time, meant embracing the State’s call for self-sacrifice and, implicitly, Japanese supremacy. But, as Avishai Margalit tells us, self-respect is not self-esteem.²⁶

Instead of appealing to the option of rebellion, however, Sei Nan chooses to postulate his enemy not inside the empire but outside it. His real antagonism is displaced by an external and fantastic one between Japan and its external enemy. Among the works of Japanese literature by islander writers, Chin Kasen’s “Road” is said to be one of the most accommodating with regard to the kōmin-ka, or imperialization, policies. Yet even “Road” does not fail to question the pertinence of such patriotic articulations as, for example, the following: “We must act to make the State accord with the way of God, and thereby prevent it from deviating from truth and justice,” and “We are called upon to destroy deception, untruthfulness, and injustice within the State because these drive the nation to be alienated from the State and give rise to a separation between the two.”²⁷ Chin Kasen shows us implicitly that when one is not allowed to “destroy deception, untruthfulness, and injustice within the State,” the Taiwanese islander volunteers to be a “Japanese soldier” not because of his freedom but rather because of coercion or desperation.

What is outlined in “Road” is a fantastic mechanism in which the domestic colonial violence against minorities within the nation is displaced onto the aggressivity of nationalism and externalized into military violence against the enemies of the nation as a whole. Therefore, it is not because the rhetoric of national integration failed to actualize equality beyond ethnic and racial differences that we must denounce imperial nationalism, as exemplified in the Logic of Species. Rather, it is because those humiliated minorities regain their honor and self-esteem by displacing and externalizing the aggressivity of the nation as a whole onto outside victims. The rhetoric of national integration thereby succeeds in integrating minorities without actualizing equality for them or allowing them to fully regain not only their self-esteem (which could only be granted through recognition by their victimizers), but also their self-respect, which endows the victims with an agency capable of extending solidarity to the oppressed of another place and ethnicity. What must be called into question here is the technology of national subjectivity, in which one’s belonging to the nation can be guaranteed through the anticipatory resolution to one’s own death, through one’s voluntary will to die for the country.

It is in this historical connection that we might appraise the political significance of Ō Shōyū’s “Torrent.” For “Road” and “Torrent” seem to have engaged in a severe struggle with one another, indicating different ways for minority intellectuals under Japanese colonial rule to act in response to the State’s call for their voluntarism.

Whereas “Road” is written as a narrative depicting the protagonist Sei Nan’s anguish through internal monologue, Ō Shōyū succeeded in giving expression to those fears and contradictions that a colonial intellectual had to live through in the form of three main characters and their conflicts with each other. The three characters are the narrator, seemingly a Taiwanese medical doctor who, having lived in Tokyo for a long time to receive his university education, returned to Taiwan to inherit his father’s clinic; Itō Haruo (Zhu Chunsheng), a high school teacher of Japanese literature; and Itō’s nephew, Rin Hakunen (Lin Bainian), a student at the high school where Itō teaches. Itō Haruo is portrayed as a native intellectual who is most successful in modernizing himself, receiving a Japanese education, speaking impeccable Japanese, and working tirelessly to build the Japanese spirit among native Taiwanese children. While the narrator remains unbelievably loyal to the colonial authorities’ propagandistic stereotyping of Japanese culture and the naichijin, Ō Shōyū did not fail to include a few remarks indicating the oddity of Itō’s presence. In the narrator’s second encounter with Itō, a peculiar exchange takes place:

What is remarkable about this story is the fact that, having chosen Japanese literature over his medical career, Itō Haruo is not depicted as a typical seeker of upward mobility who would collaborate with the colonial authorities simply in order to acquire whatever economic and political gains that might trickle down from the colonial government structure. He is married to a woman from Japan proper and attempts to totally render every aspect of his life as Japanese. Beyond his personal life, he believes that the entire native population in Taiwan must be fundamentally Japanized; consequently he devotes himself to the task of educating the young Taiwanese. Most hostile to this character is his nephew, Rin Hakunen, who sees in Itō the very betrayal of the Taiwanese native community. He cannot forgive Itō for being ashamed of his native language, his own family, and, particularly, his mother, in whose figure his ethnic identity is symbolically represented.

What the intense animosity between Itō and his nephew invariably discloses is a competition between two contrasting visions of modernization. The vision that unproblematically endorsed the figure of Itō authorizes the historical scheme of the colonial civilizing mission, by which the cultural quality associated with the colonizing power is immediately equated with a sign of progress, a defeat of the primitive, and the transformation of the uncivilized. The social reality of Taiwan is constantly viewed as essentially primitive, as that which must be radically transformed. But in this view of the primitive, the chronological order of modernization is invariably identified with the colonial order of a civilizing mission. Consequently, the time of modernization is totally usurped by the dichotomy between colonizer (developed) and colonized (underdeveloped). Civilizing time is, as a result, expected to run from the developed to the underdeveloped. There are many who uphold this scheme in both the colonizing and colonized societies. Itō Haruo is typically a fictional native character whose entire existence confirms the historical scheme of the colonial civilizing mission from the viewpoint of the colonized. As Japan has also been modernized in this manner, Itō is a generalizable figure who could be found anywhere in the empire, either in Japan proper or in the annexed territories.

Rin Hakunen, Itō’s nephew, offers a different vision of modernization. The trope of the native mother plays an exceptionally important role here, just as in many contemporary Japanese novels centering on the theme of tenkō, i.e., the leftist’s conversion to nationalism under state oppression. In a letter Rin writes to the narrator from Tokyo, where he has decided to pursue his college education, he argues against his uncle’s modernization scheme:

In the process of modernization, according to this vision, local social formations must be transformed. But this does not necessarily mean that the reality of local sites such as the old port town of Tanshui—which is implicitly referred to in “Torrent”—must be made identical with that of Japanese metropolises. The cultural quality of Japaneseness cannot be determined unilaterally by the Japanese from Japan proper. Rather than the predetermined archetype of the past, the Japaneseness of Japanese nationality must suggest this indeterminacy of the future in subject formation, an open-endedness that allows every ethnic group in the empire to participate in the process of self-fashioning and self-transformation. Undoubtedly such a State integrationist logic as the Logic of Species is a response to the logic of minzokushugi, or ethnic nationalism, as symbolically represented in the figure of Rin Hakunen. The imperial nation cannot survive unless it has a persuasive logic with which to undermine the political legitimacy of ethnic nationalism. The Logic of Species is such an attempt, but it also tries to appropriate the issues of ethnicity and cultural difference for the constitution of the imperial nation.

The Taiwanese intellectuals’ authentic Japanese nationality, which was to be endorsed by their patriotism, was supposed to serve as a warranty that they were fully qualified to criticize the discriminatory attitudes of the Japanese from Japan proper against the islanders and other minorities, and to destroy the various forms of injustice in the Japanese nation-state, so as to transform the given social formation. As Tanabe Hajime conceptualized in philosophic terms, Japanese nationality should transcend ethnicity and racial differences because one’s ethnic and racial identity come into being only within the movement of transcending such identity toward the actualization of the national community, as premised upon universal values. Ethnicity and race do not exist in and of themselves. They are not fully objective categories; they remain indeterminate unless they are determined subjectively. They are always moments of mediation of and in the subject. The subject here is this agent of self-transformation or self-fashioning. But because it transforms and changes itself, it exists only in self-differentiation and in the ecstatic movement of becoming other than itself.

Therefore, Tanabe introduced the distinction between subject and substratum, according to which the subject gives rise to or discloses its substratum as the original environment of itself that is being transformed in the formation of the subject. For example, a person who was born and brought up in Taiwan faces his ethnic background and manages to assert his identity of ethnic Taiwanese as his “substratum.” But he can assert his ethnicity only insofar as he is a modern subject who continually refashions himself anew and reconstitutes himself as a “subject” overcoming his “substratum.” Being of an ethnic origin is no hindrance to being “modern. The term “subject” meant the individual agent who participates in the active transformation of social reality, in which the subject’s old self was nurtured. In this sense, the figure of Rin Hakunen exemplifies those to whom the introduction of such a universalistic rhetoric as the Logic of Species was a response. In order to mobilize a large population of varying ethnic and historical backgrounds, it was absolutely necessary for the Japanese state to invent a philosophy of the multiethnic empire, which could weave the desires of minority intellectuals and persuade them toward the policies of the empire.

Although the islanders may be less Japanese in terms of their substratum, they are fully “Japanese” as subjects in their freedom to choose to be “Japanese,” to live and die according to the universal laws of the Japanese state. The scenario that had been outlined in theoretical vocabulary in the Logic of Species was now used repeatedly. Of course I am not arguing that the Logic of Species texts were cited verbatim by the government agencies in their propaganda.³⁰ Nonetheless, one can see how the Logic of Species could endow intellectuals of minority backgrounds with very elaborate meanings and interpretations for the anxiety and suffering which they had to undergo under colonial conditions, and encourage them toward a particular direction of historical action.

Since it was written and published after the war, it evaded wartime censorship. In addition to the many historical and social conditions that demand our attention in reading No-No Boy together with “Road” and “Torrent,” we can discern a number of underlying problematics that all three texts address:

1. The ambivalent and unstable relationship between the narrator and his language of writing. Perhaps this is an attribute shared by all three texts, which allows me to treat them as works by those of “alien origins.”

2. National belonging and the fear of losing one’s nationality. How and whether one belongs to a national community presented itself primarily as an anxiety-invoking query. All these texts were written to deal with this anxiety.

3. All three refer to the historical conditions of the state of exception, or hijō jitai, in the early 1940s, when minority populations were systematically mobilized in the total war in both the Japanese empire and the United States.

4. Although this point was not explicitly spelled out in the cases of “Road” and “Torrent,” the voluntary soldiers were potentially recruited to fight against an enemy who could well include people ethnically similar or even familially related to the soldiers themselves.³¹ Voluntarism was a choice forced upon minority individuals between the two contrasting forms of collective identification: nationality and kinship.

As in “Road” and “Torrent,” what is pursued throughout No-No Boy is the omnipresence of the State in the life of the protagonist, Ichiro. Yet at issue is not whether or not some substantive authority called the State objectively exists to regulate every aspect of life for the entire civil population. Instead, its omnipresence is meant to draw attention, above all else, to the fact that the novel’s narrative is organized from such a particular point of view that, as soon as any word is uttered, every character in this novel inevitably has to engage in some dialogue with the State. When every character’s utterance is already an implicit address to the State, then the State must be present everywhere in the imaginary space of this novel. This is what is meant by the omnipresence of the State.

Born in the United States and brought up by first-generation Japanese parents, Ichiro was transferred along with his family to a concentration camp. After two years there, he and other Japanese-American male prisoners of the appropriate age were drafted for military service. But Ichiro refused to to serve in the U.S. military. Consequently, he was sentenced to imprisonment and forced to spend two years as a convict.

A draft resister is a criminal, that is, one who has committed a crime against the State. Since in modern societies crime is primarily defined as a transgression of the State’s law, draft resistance constitutes a criminal offence against the State just like tax evasion, extortion, and drunk driving. Unlike other criminal acts, however, to refuse the State’s call for military service is a felony of exceptional gravity. It is not only a violation of the State’s law but also an infringement of the very emotive bond tying the State with the totality of the national community.

Readers are expected to gradually reconstruct Ichiro’s story from fragments of memories about his past and to shape a background against which his anecdotes are narrated. Like a hidden center of gravity, Ichiro’s draft resistance overshadows every aspect of his life and, in due course, predetermines the horizon of these anecdotes. In other words, in this novel the reality of his “draft resistance” works as a general atmosphere within which the narration must proceed.

After serving two years in prison, Ichiro comes home to Seattle, where his parents now live. He returns from the punishment for his act of saying “no,” and also from a specific history that is irredeemably engraved in the lives of his family. Yet unlike many soldiers coming home from war, Ichiro cannot expect to return to his normal life, for the past is for him something he cannot pay for in only two years. It may even appear that Ichiro does not believe he has paid for his crime. Ichiro’s struggle is presented as though it were a tormenting process of personal redemption and a search for forgiveness. Thus the narrator refers to the pointless resistance of Freddie Akimoto, Ichiro’s friend, who also refused to be drafted:

In these passages, where the narrative voice oscillates between the narrator and Ichiro, this allusion to Ichiro’s and the other draft resistors’ past act as a crime and their hope for redemption cannot be sufficiently comprehended as either a description of their situation or as an analysis of their inner strife. Here the narration itself is a speech act that we may call “confession.”

Confession presumes a specific power relationship between the addresser and the addressee. The addresser refers to himself, thereby erecting a boundary between his interiority, to which the others have no access, and his exterior, which is exposed to the scrutiny of others. In this instance, it is not necessary for us to preempt the interiority of the addresser prior to the performance of confession. What is at stake is that the interiority of the addresser enters the scene as a correlate of the addressee. The addressee is posited by the addresser as a special persona to whom his interiority—which would not be unveiled to others—is exclusively disclosed and in whom his wish for redemption is invested. In confession, the penitent discloses his or her secret, and yet confession is not a general disclosure of some secret. It must be addressed to this special person or one who occupies the position of the confessor: the addresser must solicit the attention of this person by unveiling what cannot be seen by others. In addition, there must be an asymmetry between the addresser and the addressee, for while one is urged to disclose his interiority, the other is exempt from risking such disclosure.

It may appear that the narrator of No-No Boy wants to assign Ichiro the position of the penitent in confession. When Ichiro is made to occupy this position, you, as reader of this narration, would then be solicited to occupy the position of confessor. You would be listening to Ichiro and, in this narrative configuration, you would be expected to play the role of one who is capable of forgiving his sin.

Here it is necessary to bear in mind that the crime Ichiro committed was neither injury nor larceny, but draft resistance. Judicially speaking, injury and larceny are both crimes against the State, but in these criminal categories it is possible to identify particular victims. And it is from these victims that the criminal must solicit forgiveness in the first place. The intelligibility of the term “forgiving” depends upon whom one can identify as authorized to forgive and, in the cases of injury and larceny, we tend to assume no serious dispute about the identity or identifiability of the one to whom debt in some form must be paid back.

However, in the case of draft resistance, from whom can a criminal expect forgiveness? By refusing the State’s call for military service, whom did Ichiro offend in the first place? One cannot find any particular victim for his felony. Or the victim from whom he has to obtain redemption is the very notion of the people of the United States of America as a whole, which the State is supposed to represent.

If what is deployed in No-No Boy is nothing but the performance of confession, with Ichiro as addresser and the reader as addressee, that is, if Ichiro is demanding forgiveness from “you,” the one who listens to this would then be put in the position of the State as such. In other words, it may appear that “you” as readers would be an embodiment of the people of the United States of America to the extent that “you” understand Ichiro as a penitent searching for your forgiveness. What is meant by the omnipresence of the State in this novel is not so much the thesis that everybody is under surveillance by the State’s apparatuses. Rather it is the presence of “you” as the readers of this novelistic narrative, who receive Ichiro’s address in such a manner that he is never allowed to speak unapologetically.

The narrative that is deployed along with such an asymmetrical interpersonal relationship is inevitably laced with many honorifics. Ichiro would speak to “you” from a lower position, in subordination, as if admitting your qualification as someone capable of forgiving him. Given such a power relationship, he would speak to satisfy your expectations and not offend your sensitivities. Therefore, from the outset, the narrator presents Ichiro’s circumstances as if Ichiro has admitted his decision to refuse the draft to be one of utter conceit.

But for such a narrative tactic, how could he possibly talk about his refusal to serve in the military and his and his family’s internment in the camp at the same time? The words of Ichiro, the narrator, and the novelistic text are enunciated in a network of censorship. In addition to the censorship practiced by government agencies such as those we have observed in the cases of “Road” and “Torrent,” the network includes the one imposed by people upon themselves; people who build their national solidarity on a blind endorsement of the patriotic imperative that one must devote one’s life to one’s country, and who believe this endorsement to be the only communal ground upon which the narrator and reader can communicate. Under such conditions, neither Ichiro nor the narrator can evade the frequent use of honorific language, just as Scheherazade could not do so in A Thousand and One Nights, simply for the sake of postponing your philanthropic attention without which you would instantly withdraw from conversation. Let us not forget that this is the potential speaking positionality of the minority, one which minority intellectuals might appeal to under certain social and political conditions. Not only John Okada, the author of No-No Boy, but also Chin Kasen and Ō Shōyū had to occupy this speaking position. Like Sei Nan in “Road,” must Ichiro renegotiate his belonging to the nation in order to regain his self-esteem, which means embracing the State’s call for self-sacrifice and, implicitly, the white supremacy inherent in American imperialism? Or, to put it differently, one of the crucial differences between No-No Boy and “Road” and “Torrent” is precisely this: while Okada was allowed to make Ichiro refuse, Chin Kasen was not allowed to let Sei Nan refuse to renegotiate his belonging to the nation in order to regain his crushed self-esteem.

Consequently, a certain ambiguity is implanted in these uses of honorific language in No-No Boy. In the first paragraph that touches upon the notion of Ichiro’s sin, it is already detectable: “The legs of his accuser were in front of him. God in a pair of green fatigues, U.S. Army style. They were the legs of the jury that had passed sentence upon him. Beseech me, they seemed to say, throw your arms about me and bury your head between my knees and seek pardon for your great sin.”³⁴

This is an observation filled with the reminiscence ascribed to Ichiro in his encounter with Eto, another Japanese-American. Eto believed that he had become an authentic American because he had volunteered for military service and, for that reason, was entitled to despise Ichiro. He believed that he had regained his self-esteem, and that his affinity to national authenticity granted him the excuse to ostracize Ichiro.

What is in question in this peculiar use of the honorific? It is to tell Ichiro himself that one does not regain self-respect by increasing self-esteem. And it is to turn the form of confession into one in which the penitent interrogates the confessor. Thus the story has to begin with the negation that Ichiro uttered against the judge who condemned him to imprisonment; it has to begin with Ichiro’s “no” to the representative of the State.

Is this a confession in disguise, and manipulated by John Okada in order to lure you into a trap where it is not Ichiro’s sin at stake but “yours” for interning the innocent American citizens of Japanese ancestry? If not a trap, would it be then an invitation—somewhat hinted at in the kindness of Mr. Carrick, a character who is sympathetic enough to give Ichiro a job in the story—to conciliation between the American nation at large and Japanese-Americans, a conciliation in which, professing their own righteousness as well as admitting their own mistakes, each side forgives the other?

But before trying to answer these questions, let us explore Okada’s attempt to incorporate the actual conditions of Ichiro’s linguistic situation. The Taiwanese situation in the early 1940s was drastically different from that of the United States, but in the constant if implicit appeal to “national language” in the three texts, we can manage to remain attentive to the problematic of the dominant language in the two imperial nations.

Ichiro’s parents are first-generation Japanese-Americans who cannot speak English adequately. Within his family the common language is still Japanese, but since the novel itself is written in English, the family’s conversation is expressed in English, just as conversation in Minnanhua (Taiwanese) was expressed in Japanese in “Road” and “Torrent.” It is feasible that Ichiro’s parents’ words are translated in order to be integrated into this novelistic narrative. This means that at least some part of No-No Boy was originally meant to be a translation, and yet, given that this work is fiction, in this translation there was no original.

The question that emerges, then, is this: can we assume that the rest of the novel is not translation? Is it possible to draw a distinction between translation and the original in the case of this novel? Of course I am not proposing an inquiry into John Okada’s biography and family genealogy. Rather, what is in question is whether or not it is possible to determine the mother tongue of Ichiro or the narrator, the very issue of determinability as to his mother tongue. (After Taiwan’s liberation from Japanese colonial rule, Ō Shōyū worked to recover the original of “Torrent” from its Chinese translation.³⁵ In this case, too, the relationship between the published version and its original is highly ambiguous, to say the least). In “Torrent,” let us recall, Rin Hakunen is depicted as a character who believed in his mother tongue while expressing his love for his mother in a language that was not his mother’s.³⁶ But his uncle, Itō Haruo, may not have actually believed in his mother’s tongue or his mother tongue. This issue was carefully left unresolved in “Torrent.” It could have been a generational dispute between a generation for whom one’s linguistic identity was given and another who need not take its “native language” as a source of collective pride. As a gongsheng, i.e., a successful candidate for the Qing Dynasty’s government examination, did not Itō’s father learn literary Chinese and write in this medium in which the determinability of his mother tongue could not be meaningfully raised?³⁷ This is precisely the reason why the destruction of literary styles and the genbun itchi movement were absolutely necessary for the determinability of one’s mother tongue to be addressed as an essential issue of ethnic nationalism.

Now let me shift our focus trans-Pacifically from the western shore of the Pacific to its eastern shore. In light of the problematic of ethnolinguistic identity as a historical construct, we cannot evade a new question: how can translation be distinguished from the original in No-No Boy? This distinction can be drawn only when a character is explicitly portrayed as having a particular national or ethnic language as her or his mother tongue. In modern literature, this character’s and narrator’s belonging to a national language is usually taken for granted. However, let me note the fact that this general assumption does not apply to No-No Boy.

Nearly all of the paragraphs in this novel are supposedly written in English. Except for scattered pockets of explicit translation, however, what is dominant in this text is the language of those who cannot have an exclusive relationship with a particular national or ethnic language. Their relationship to English is fundamentally unstable. Unlike the writings of such writers as James Joyce, Chinua Achebe, or Teresa Cha, Okada’s writing does not manifest apparent multilingual features. Nevertheless, this novelistic text cannot reproduce a clear-cut distinction between English and Japanese, between one enclosed ethnolinguistic identity and another. There is no symmetrical scheme between the two language unities here. Instead, the dialogue continues between those who dream of ultimately belonging to a language and those who cannot do so. The words most clearly marked as translation are those of Ichiro’s mother.

In which language is this conversation conducted? If in English, then the peculiarity of his mother’s syntax should reflect her lack of fluency in the language. But Ichiro was brought up by her who “opened [his] mouth and made [his] lips move to sound the words.”³⁹ The setting of this conversation sounds rather incongruous, in the same sense that Itō Haruo’s utterances with the narrator’s mother do. It is his uneasy relationship to his mother’s language rather than her stilted rapport with English that is tacitly indicated by the grammatical irregularity of Ichiro’s mother’s utterances. What we perceive in her syntax is the distance that separates Ichiro from the language to which his mother believes she belongs, namely, from his mother’s tongue—which is not his mother tongue.

Ichiro thinks that his dependence upon his mother’s language “got [him] two years in prison.”⁴⁰ For him, his mother’s language is not primarily a technical problem concerning language acquisition; her stifling syntax suggests her attitude toward other languages, and particularly the manner in which she figures out her relation to the image of American society as a whole. One already discerns in this suffocating attitude a hint of her stubbornness and fixation, which eventually lead her to suicide. It is an obsession with the naturalness of national/ethnic belonging and ethnolinguistic identity, as well as the total denial of her life in the United States. Though it long preceded the age of the photo-telegraphic facsimile, it was a sort of long-distance nationalism based upon the schema of cofiguration. To the extent that she denies her American-ness, she has to idealize Japan as a negative of America. As a matter of fact, the content of her Japan is supplied with the inverted images of the Japanese stereotypes as imposed upon Japanese-Americans by mainstream America. The racial hierarchy of the United States and Japan is reproduced inversely in her national belonging.

The figure of Ichiro’s mother forms the polar opposite of people like Eto, who dreams of maintaining his ethnic pride by becoming “a good and loyal American.” This opposition is then mapped onto the negation/affirmation axis. In this configuration, Ichiro’s refusal to be drafted could easily be explained away in terms of the no/yes binary, as a rejection of assimilation and a gesture of loyalty to his mother and her country. If his “no” is accommodated in this configuration, his confession, which adds another “no,” would then mean nothing more than a reversal, a conversion to affirmation through a double negation. The “no-no boy” would then be nothing but a yes-man. He would be nothing more than a humiliated slave trying to regain his self-esteem by desperately seeking the master’s recognition.

Ichiro refuses to endorse his mother’s persistent denial of American life; he says “no” to her. Nevertheless, this negation of a return to Japan does not result in his return to America either.

By now it is evident that the ambiguity implanted in his confession prevents him from professing a coherent position with regard to his nationality and national belonging. It is not a trap, nor is it a disguise. The pursuit of national belonging cannot elude discriminatory violence in the direction of either his mother or Eto. His mother acquires a sense of national belonging at the cost of totally disavowing Japan’s defeat and the death of her loved ones. Similarly, it is by deliberately overlooking the white supremacist bias inherent in American policies toward people of “alien origins” that Eto believes he will someday be an authentic American. Moreover, his blind faith in American nationalism, which reminds us of Itō Haruo’s obsessive involvement in the Japanese national spirit, is sustained by public discrimination against unpatriotic Japanese-Americans like Ichiro. By displacing the discriminatory and humiliating stare of the public fixed upon him onto a publicly marked outcast like Ichiro, Eto barely manages to uphold his sense of national belonging. What I notice here is an economy of discriminatory identification with the nation, once referred to as “the transfer of oppression.”

An individual is able to feel fully embraced in a nation only as long as he is confident that he is distinct from those who are unable to belong there. Yet the definition of those who are unable to belong there is historically fluid and almost contingent. Discrimination against foreigners or those of “alien origins” is, therefore, a prerequisite for the sense of certainty in national belonging. Knowing that he would face his own death sooner or later, Kenji, a Japanese-American character who once attempted to become a “good and loyal American” by risking his own life, cannot conceal his sympathy with Ichiro. No doubt this is because Ichiro is free, even if not completely, of the obsessive desire for national identification. As Kenji says to Ichiro,

Risking one’s own life for the country does not amount to a secure seat within it. One’s desperate wish to be a fully integrated member of the nation will remain frustrated. As Ichiro says to himself,

And what about the poor niggers on Jackson Street who can’t find anything better to do than spit on the sidewalk and show me the way to Tokyo? They’re on the outside looking in, just like that kid and just like me and just like everybody else I’ve ever seen or known. Even Mr. Carrick. Why isn’t he in? Why is he on the outside squandering his goodness on outcasts like me? Maybe the answer is that there is no in. Maybe the whole damned country is pushing and shoving and screaming to get into someplace that doesn’t exist, because they don’t know that the outside could be the inside if only they would stop all this pushing and shoving and screaming, and they haven’t got enough sense to realize that.⁴⁴

Nobody absolutely belongs to the nation; nobody is on the inside. Potentially, everyone is a minority member. What is certain is that everyone tries to be in by expelling someone else.

As goes without saying, the transfer of oppression operates differently in the various social settings described in “Road,” “Torrent,” and No-No Boy. Yet in spite of the different viewpoints from which personal animosity is described, one can observe in all these cases a certain mechanism by means of which the national whole maintains its equilibrium. “By exercising arbitrary power on those who are below, people manage to transfer in a downward direction the sense of oppression that comes from above, thus preserving the balance of the whole.”⁴⁵ Maruyama Masao, the renowned political scientist of wartime and postwar Japan, believed that the transfer of oppression was a trait particular to Japanese ultranationalism, and so he did not inquire into how this discriminatory mechanism operated together with the policies of integration promoted by the logic of the multiethnic state. Further, he deliberately evaded the question of colonialism with which the formation of the national subject was closely connected.⁴⁶ In other words, he failed to recognize the propinquity between the transfer of oppression and national belonging, the displacement of humiliation, and the manufacture of the subject. In fact, Maruyama’s analysis represented a typical response by the naichijin (i.e., the Japanese of Japan proper) to the question of war responsibility after Japan’s defeat. Whereas the naichijin had required the colonized people in the annexed territories in the empire to become “good and loyal Japanese” until just a few years earlier, Maruyama deliberately overlooked the fact that, soon after the collapse of the empire, the Japanese of “alien origins” were deprived of their nationality and fundamental political rights by official decrees.

In this respect, a much more politically savvy and theoretically insightful explanation than Maruyama’s is given by Luke Gibbons about what often accompanies the coerced accommodation of the minority to the prevailing dominant ideology. In trying to provide some coherent elucidation as to why there have been so many instances where “the humiliated of one culture become the shock troops of another, the ignominy of the slave prompting a need to retrieve dignity and self-respect by identifying with the master’s voice and the very forces that gave rise to domination in the first place,”⁴⁷ Gibbons argues that the insidious logic of humiliation inherent in the process of colonization is that “it is only at the discretion of the perpetrator that the victim regains honour and pride.” Therefore, the minority, or the humiliated in these processes, has no other option but “the alienation of one’s self-image to another ‘superior’ or more powerful adversary.”

What was acted out by Sei Nan in “Road,” Itō Haruo in “Torrent,” and Eto in No-No Boy is this scenario of heroic self-immolation: the humiliated desperately perform the expected role of patriotic subject in order to recover their self-respect by gaining recognition from their masters. In the British Empire, there thus emerged “the fearless (and fearsome) reputation of colonial cannon-fodder—the Scots, the Iroquois, the Irish, the Sikhs, the Gurkhas—in the heat of battle.”⁴⁹ The United States has its own versions, with Unit 442 of the Japanese shock troops in the U.S. Army as probably the most renowned case. What enchants the minority most in their frantic endeavor to redeem their sense of honor from humiliation is often an insatiable desire to display their self-destruction beyond the pleasure principle. This explains why the colonial foot soldier so often ended up “doing the dirty work of empire, including his own self-destruction.” It also explains “the tragic paradox whereby the Irish or the Scots reserved their greatest rage and bloodlust for each other, or for those who resembled them most in battle.”⁵⁰

Not surprisingly, what these three texts unwittingly disclose is that, under the threat of ostracism, minority individuals engage in various processes of negotiation about how to be accommodated in the prevailing dominant nationalism. (One thinks here of the particularly egregious case of negotiation whereby “the Irish ‘became white’ in the United States, compensating for their own indignities by buying into the very white supremacist attitudes which discriminated against them”).⁵¹ In reading these three texts, the following remark by Gibbons is remarkably apt:

Accommodation with the prevailing dominant ideology—hybridity under hierarchical rule—is often akin to the ressentiment of the humiliated in Nietzsche’s terms, forced into outward shows of servility towards the humiliator who strikes them, but inwardly seething with resentment and the thirst for revenge. What is lacking in these circumstances is not the desire but the opportunity and weapons of resistance. But it is precisely this last line of defence—the domain of self-respect rather than the achievement ethic of self-esteem—which cultural humiliation extinguishes, aiming for fully internalized loyalty to the dominant order so that the subject, literally, has no shame.⁵²

What is striking about “Torrent” and No-No Boy is that the authors describe the struggles of the humiliated as their “last line of defence,” and that, perhaps in spite of themselves, they seek to find some social space for “self-respect” rather than “the achievement ethic of self-esteem,” a space which could be sustained neither by identifying with “the master’s voice” nor by seeking recognition of those who humiliated them in the first place. By refusing an imaginary solution to the problem of the historical conditions in which they were caught, they tried to remain in shame. They refused to be shameless.

Here let me briefly ponder over the conceptual distinction between self-respect and self-esteem, for which Luke Gibbons relies upon Avishai Margalit. With respect to a decent society where, in principle, people are to live without humiliation, a fundamental difference must be drawn between the concepts of self-respect and self-esteem, even though both originally derive from the affirmation and respect entrusted to one by others. While self-respect demands that one be treated as an equal human being by another person, self-esteem is based upon the evaluation of one’s achievement by others. My achievement is compared with others’ and recognized as valuable by them, and thus I gain self-esteem. Since self-respect is rooted in self-confidence and not based upon the evaluation of my achievements, my self-respect cannot be shaken in my competition with others. On the one hand, I must earn, so to speak, my self-esteem by displaying my achievements to those who evaluate me, so that I cannot evade being in competition. When I hold myself high in esteem, somebody else must be held low in esteem. If I am suffering from low self-esteem, some other person must be enjoying high self-esteem. Self-esteem is impossible in the system in which one does not compete with others. On the other hand, self-respect does not derive from any observable or meritorious trait such as qualification and achievement, but rather from an unfounded—and anti-foundational—confidence that I will treat others as equal human beings and that others will treat me likewise. Inherently, self-respect is a matter of my attitude concerning the future. As Margalit says, “The attitude of others is built into the very concept of the value of humans which the bearer of self-respect is supposed to adopt with regard to herself.”⁵³ Therefore, “any traits that might be used to justify respect are parasitic on our attitude toward human beings as human.”⁵⁴ An empirically unfounded respect of others toward me serves as the support for my self-respect and self-confidence, and gives me the courage to endlessly open myself toward others or to expose myself to others. What is called self-respect is this courageous action, or what the seventeenth-century Confucian scholar Itō Jinsai called ai (love, affection).

It is by destroying the very source of courage, or ai, that the experience of humiliation most deeply hurts a person. Precisely because self-respect is damaged, the victim of humiliation mistakes the recovery of self-esteem for the recovery of self-respect. Although self-respect derives from the existence of another, I cannot recover my self-respect from others’ immediate commendation or recognition. It might enhance my self-esteem, but I will continue to suffer from the loss of self-respect. Yet in order to recover their self-respect, the logic of integration in imperial nationalism solicits minorities, who carry the burden of historical humiliation, to identify themselves with the colonial nation and commit themselves to their anticipatory deaths. According to national humanism, a human being is first of all a member of the nation-state. Judicially, a non-national cannot be treated as a human being, so that only those who are qualified as members of the nation are capable of recovering self-respect as a “human being.” But minorities are those who are potentially people of “alien origins” who could be deprived of their nationality, just as the colonized from the annexed territories of the Japanese empire actually were so deprived. The logic of national integration of minorities in hierarchical hybridity may well promote the recovery of self-esteem. Yet in order to regain self-esteem, minority individuals would have to continue to parade their achievements and patriotic loyalty to the majority audience. This is why national integration in imperial nationalism requires a scenario whereby the minorities act out their expected roles to fulfill the desires of the majority.

Now what is allegorically invested in the figure of Ichiro, the protagonist of No-No Boy, should be evident: against all the odds of imperial nationalism, it is to wager a counter-scenario that a minority individual can hold onto her or his self-respect. Instead of accumulating patriotic allegiance to the nation, one could recover one’s self-respect by refusing to yield to the majority’s self-justification. For this refusal, of course, Ichiro is exposed to the humiliating violence of the State and denied belonging to the nation. Nevertheless, he does not relinquish his self-respect, thereby pointing out the possibility that a minority individual can evade “fully internaliz[ing] loyalty to the dominant order.”

No-No Boy was published twelve years after Japan’s defeat, and retrospectively offered a critical alternative to the dominant scenario of national integration as put forth by imperial nationalisms during the Asian-Pacific and Second World Wars. Unlike Chin Kasen’s “Road” and Ō Shōyū’s “Torrent,” it was not written under tight censorship during a wartime state of emergency. In No-No Boy, the fictive nature of the narrative consists in the retrospective alternative hypothesis: what would I have done if I had been able to respond to the historical conditions otherwise than I actually did? Understandably, most of the Japanese-American community in the United States were hostile to the novel’s publication. They accordingly ignored it, perceiving in this fiction an insult to their loyalty and national belonging, which they had managed to internalize according to the scenario of national integration by imperial nationalism.

Finally, No-No Boy speaks of an irreparable history, it adheres to the historical experiences of the people of Japanese ancestry in the United States during the war. It is part of a singular history that cannot be generalized. But what was disclosed through John Okada’s obsession to repeat this past experience of the concentration camp in a fictional narrative was an event of encounter, in which a minority individual struggles to survive tremendous humiliation without giving up his own self-respect. The story tells us that some minorities do refuse to give up their self-respect, even if they are deprived of national belonging. Whether or not it effectively undermines the logic of subjective poiesis on the part of minority people according to such universalisms as the Logic of Species, however, remains to be examined.

In writing this essay, I have adopted much from two previously published articles: “Hutatsu no hitei: No-No Boy wo yomu” [Two negations: A reading of No-No Boy], in Shisō no kagaku [The science of thought], 125 (1990), 114–126, reprinted in Shisan sareru Nihongo-Nihonjin [The stillbirth of the Japanese language and Japanese people] (Tokyo: Shinyōsha, 1996), pp. 99–126; and “Nihonjin dearu koto: taminzoku kokka ni okeru kokumin shutai no kōchiku no mondai to Tanabe Hajime no ‘shu no ronri’” [Being Japanese: The problem of the construction of the national subject in the multi-ethnic state and Tanabe Hajime’s “Logic of Species”], in Shisō [Thought], 882 (1997), 5–48, translated into English as “Subject and Substratum: On Japanese Imperial Nationalism,” in Cultural Studies 14:3:4 (2000), 462–530.

5. Agamben, Homo Sacer, p. 168. As Agamben writes, “The state of exception thus ceases to be referred to as an external and provisional state of factual danger and comes to be confused with juridical rule itself. National Socialist jurists were so aware of the particularity of the situation that they defined it by the paradoxical expression ‘state of willed exception’ (einen gewollten Ausnahmezustand). ‘Through the suspension of fundamental rights,’ writes Werner Spohr, a jurist close to the regime, ‘the decree brings into being a state of willed exception for the sake of the establishment of the National Socialist State.’”

10. A number of policies were implemented in order to assimilate the population in the annexed territories into the Japanese nation during the late 1930s and early 1940s. The banning of the use of local languages in mass media and on public occasions in Korea and Taiwan as well as the practice of sōshi kaimei (creation of the modern family and change of family names) are well known as such policies. Cf. Miyata Setsuko, Chōsen minshū to kōminka-seisaku [The Korean masses and imperialization policies] (Tokyo: Miraisha, 1985).

14. This is exactly the state of affairs that Leo Ching points out in “Give Me Japan and Nothing Else!” “Unlike dōka [assimilation], which remained an unrealizable ideal of colonial integration, kōminka necessitated an objectification of Japanization by demanding the colonized to act, live, and die for the emperor in defending the Japanese Empire. What kōminka entailed for the colonized, then, as exemplified in the subject construction of a good and loyal Japanese and the so-called kōmin literature, is the interiorization of an objective colonial antagonism into a subjective struggle within, not between, colonial identities. In other words, cultural representations under kōminka displaced the concrete problematic of the social and replaced it with the ontology of the personal.” In The South Atlantic Quarterly, ed. Tomiko Yoda and Harry Harootunian, (Fall 2000), p. 780.

35. As Chen Wanyi notes in Yomigaeru Taiwan bungaku, three versions of “Torrent” currently exist in Chinese: a translation by Lin Zhonglong, in Guangfuqian Taiwan wenxue quanji [Complete works of pre-liberation Taiwanese literature] (Taipei: Yuanjing Chuban, 1979), vol. 8; a version edited by Ō Shōyū himself, in Taiwan zuojia quanji: Weng Nao, Wu Yongfu, Wang Changxiong [Complete works of Taiwanese authors: Weng Nao, Wu Yongfu, Wang Changxiong] (Taipei: Qianwei Chubanshe, 1991); and finally a new translation by Zhong Zhaozheng, in Riju shidai Taiwan xiaoshuoxuan [Selected Taiwanese novels from the Japanese occupation period] (Taipei: Qianwei Chubanshe, 1992).

46. This issue is closely related to the problematic of Japan’s postwar responsibility. The Japanese government has refused to acknowledge that many in the annexed territories, who were Japanese subjects until the loss of the Empire, were recruited or drafted to serve in the Imperial Forces. A number of lawsuits have thus been filed by former soldiers from Taiwan. Cf. Lim Kingbing, Taiwan no kōminka kyōiku [Nationalization education in Taiwan] (Tokyo: Kobunken, 1997). On Japan’s postcolonial legacy and leftist politics toward Taiwan, see Mori Yoshio, Taiwan, Nihon: rensa suru koroniarizumu [Taiwan, Japan: The reactionary chain of colonialism] (Tokyo: Inpakuto Shuppankai, 2001).