Taiwan Under Japanese Colonial Rule, 1895

Colonial enterprises and colonial encounters generate the need to produce and possess the knowledge of other(s). There is an urgent need for the colonizing subject to acquire information on the colonized people, in order to aid in the management of its newly acquired territory, and it is equally pressing for the colonized to gain knowledge of their overlord. This transculturation, or the exchange of colonial knowledge, is nevertheless a reluctant liaison fraught with asymmetrical, nonreciprocal, and at times dangerous misreadings. As Said so clearly demonstrated in his Orientalism, the production of the Orient created a writing subject and a narrated object that was often translated into a relationship characterized by a dominant, omnipotent image of imperial masculinity (i.e., the West) on the one hand, and a subservient, silenced, and often feminized East on the other.

In Orientalism Said does not examine gender as a category constitutive of colonialism; sexuality appears almost as if it were just a metaphor for other. In a sense, he sees the sexualization of the Orient mainly as a symptom of empire’s hermeneutical difficulties. As Revathi Krishnaswamy and many others have pointed out, Said’s emphasis on the metaphor of gender tends to “dehistoricize the semantics of sexuality, disconnecting it from the varied yet specific contexts in which Orientalism developed and deployed a whole array of sexual stereotypes.”¹

As the only Asian colonial power during the period from the late nineteenth century until the end of the World War II, Japan could not avoid casting its own oriental gaze toward its colonial subjects and landscapes. Fujimori Kiyoshi ’s study of tourism and its impact on the formation of a modern identity for Japanese intellectuals around the turn of the nineteenth century illustrates two fundamental shifts in Japanese perceptions of their own environment.² The nascent practice of tourism (a privilege reserved for high-level bureaucrats and the elite), which mirrored the British “grand tour” tradition of (re)discovering Greece and Italy, was a nostalgic awakening for the Japanese, leading them to look at their own geographical and cultural landscape anew from the point of view of a foreigner, much like the very successful “Discover Japan” campaign of the 1970s, which mobilized the mass consumption of the leisure time that was being afforded to the middle class for the first time in Japan’s history. Fujimori’s discussion focuses primarily on domestic travel, but he does mention frequent organized group tours to the colonies (Manchuria, Korea, and Taiwan) and their implications for the formation of a modern national consciousness. Fujimori effectively demonstrates, through literary works by Tayama Katai and Nagai Kafū, how tourism at the turn of the century fostered various cultural dichotomies, such as urban/rural, nature/human, and most of all, center/periphery.³

This process of internal self-exoticization was later extended outward to the colonies, especially by people such as the art historian and theorist Yanagi Muneyoshi (1889–1961), who, through his “discovery” of the simple, austere everyday folk objects of Korean peasant culture, sought to reclaim the authentic cultural and aesthetic prototype that he deemed lost in Japan due to the onslaught of modernization and urbanization. Yanagi and his predecessor, the father of Japanese folklore study, Yanagita Kunio (1875–1962), have come under fire recently in regard to their brand of Orientalism and constructed authenticity. Their naïve celebration of a constructed past has been subject to new scrutiny inspired by recent discourses in postcolonialism and cultural studies. These critics seek to free the object/subject (op)positions from a single, unified, predetermined trajectory and transform it into a multidirectional process of transculturational interchange that sheds light on issues such as appropriation and agency, as well as intercultural subject positioning.⁴

This essay examines the interstices of colonial cultural production and various discursive spaces (such as historiography, ethnography, and gender) in the Japanese writer Nishikawa Mitsuru ’s discourse on Taiwan. Yanagi Muneyoshi was fascinated with locating the origin of the Japanese past in the rustic colonized Korean countryside; Nishikawa Mitsuru’s passionate search for authenticity in Taiwanese folk art and popular belief is the southern counterpart of this same impulse. In many ways, this southbound imagination complemented the northbound imaginaries fashioned by Yanagi and completed the full cycle of Japanese Orientalism.⁵ By far the most prolific and outspoken colonial intellectual on the subject of Taiwanese culture, Nishikawa spent the first half of his life navigating through multiple cultural influences and repeated identity crises. In this paper I will first trace the journey of this colonial intellectual, examining his identity politics and the many twists and turns in his literary affiliations and aesthetic alignments. Specifically, I hope to bring back a material reality grounded in a colonial context to avoid the Foucauldian-Saidian model of treating colonialism as a predominantly discursive phenomenon that is autonomous and dehistoricized. I will also examine the role of the colonial collector and the amateur ethnographer in the context of Nishikawa’s project on Taiwanese folk arts. Finally, I will provide a close reading of one of the fruits of this project, Taiwan kenpūroku (The prominent folk customs of Taiwan, 1998), and pay special attention to Nishikawa’s appropriation of gender as the main trope of the text.

A STRANGER AT HOME: NISHIKAWA MITSURU (1908–1999)

To understand the fascination with native Taiwanese cultural artifacts and practices that constitutes the core of Nishikawa’s literary production, one needs to understand the personal journey he had traversed, culturally and geographically, between his motherland Japan and the only place he knew as home, colonial Taiwan. Nishikawa Mitsuru was one of the most prominent members of the cultural elite in Taiwan at the time. His first name, Mitsuru or Man , was said to have been given him by his father to commemorate his own adventurous youth in Manchuria. With his birth in 1908 and death in 1999, Nishikawa’s life parallels the tumultuous course of twentieth-century Japan, moving from modernization and imperial expansion to retreat in the postwar era.

His family moved to Taiwan when he was two to run a coal mine in the northern part of the island. Other than the five years (from 1928 to 1933) he spent at Waseda University in Tokyo for his college education, Nishikawa spent the first four decades of his life in colonial Taiwan, relentlessly writing about its cultural and natural topographies. Throughout his prewar career, the ever-prolific Nishikawa published ten poetry collections, funded and edited eighteen different poetry and literary magazines,⁶ penned numerous critical essays, and published several novels and many short stories.⁷ As editor for the cultural section of the Taiwan nichinichi shinpō (Taiwan daily news), publisher at several publishing houses, and creator and editor of the influential journal Bungei Taiwan (Literary Taiwan), Nishikawa was put in an authoritative position that allowed him to mediate the native and colonial cultural discourses. Bungei Taiwan and its rival journal Taiwan bungaku (Taiwanese literture), edited by Zhang Wenhuan (1909–1978), are considered the two catalysts that fostered a literary golden age in colonial Taiwan during the early forties.⁸

Starting out as a poet and a student of French romanticism, Nishikawa nevertheless transformed himself into a cultural and historical arbiter for colonial Taiwan. He wrote an epic-length novel on the trans-island railway, detailing the technological advances accomplished through the multiple colonizations of this tiny island since the fifteenth century by the Spanish, the Portuguese, the Dutch, the remnants of Ming rule by Zheng Chenggong , the continental Qing dynasty, and finally the Japanese colonial government.⁹ His (self-appointed) charge as a historian of Taiwan prompted him to write the short story “Tale of Fort Orange (),” a fictionalized rekishi shōsetsu (historical tale) centering on Zheng Chenggong (or Koxinga , as the Japanese refer to him) and the history of managing and cultivating Taiwan. The turning point in his development from a Romantic poet to a journalist and amateur historian, in my opinion, came after his return from an extended stay in the metropolis. While pondering whether to stay on in Japan for his writing career or to return to the colony, he took his mentor Yoshie Takamatsu’s advice to return. Later, Nishikawa recalled that Yoshie had encouraged him to “devote my whole life to [creating] a regional literature that rivals French provincial literature”; advice which “convinced me to return to Taiwan.”¹⁰ Yoshie composed a poem for Nishikawa upon his return to the island:

The South,
Source of the light.
Gives us order, joy, and splendor.	¹¹

The mission assigned him by his teacher was certainly daunting, yet Nishikawa was determined to live up to this ambitious role. Taking his teacher’s words to heart, he sought to cultivate the island’s barren cultural scene and to establish a distinct brand of nanpō bungaku (Southern literature) as part of the greater genre of gaichi bungaku (colonial literature) that might counter the naichi bungaku (metropolitan literature).¹² Part of his mission involved rediscovering Taiwan, the island he had inhabited since age two but had never really gotten to know. Taiwanese history, poetic and oral traditions, folk art, and customs all became subjects for this eager student to study.

In his now-famous essay “Rekishi no aru Taiwan ” (“The Taiwan with a history”),¹³ written not long after his return to the colony, he lamented the failure of a colonial education in which native history was not taught at all, and he talked about a new “awareness” and “conversion” to Taiwanese history that had seized him upon his return.

I was fifteen when I first set foot in Japan (naichi ) and was embraced by its mountains and rivers. It was then, for the first time, that I was able to understand the indescribable sadness I have always felt toward the place called Taiwan. That is a sadness that came from—perhaps I am using the wrong words—not having had a history. … For several years after I came back to Taiwan, I was obsessed with discovering the history of Taiwan. … I came to understand the absurdity of my childlike opinion that Taiwan has no history; I could not help but be angry with myself. But then on further reflection, I realized that the situation is not my fault alone. When we were young, how much were we taught about the history of Taiwan before it came into our possession? Only about Hamada Yahei, Zheng Chenggong, and Wu Feng. After that, it was nothing but Japanese history.¹⁴

What is the significance of Nishikawa’s conversion experience and his subsequent obsession with recovering Taiwan’s history? Why does he turn his eyes to “the Taiwan with no history” after being “embraced by the mountains and rivers of Japan?” The years in Tokyo were the first time since infancy that Nishikawa had experienced Japan. Having realized that he had no part in the history of Japan, where his roots were supposedly located, he returned to Taiwan, only to discover that he was ignorant of the history of the island where he had been raised. The subsequent impulse to learn about Taiwan—to recapture, to represent, and to record it in words and images—was a reaction, either conscious or unconscious, to compensate for his lost Japaneseness.

It is ironic that Nishikawa’s rediscovery of Taiwan had to be mediated by the alienation he experienced while living in Japan. The estrangement he felt in the “motherland,” and his realization that he did not really know the place where he had grown up underscored his “in-betweenness.” Unfulfilled desire for the lost (or that which is about to be lost) is at the core of romanticism. Nishikawa’s constant longing for the lost (both Japanese and Taiwanese) formed the basis of his writing and gave shape to a brand of colonial romanticism that is uniquely his own. The young man who started out as a modernist poet turned to the ruined buildings of the past, the artless folk objects and paintings of Taiwanese peasants, and the native history ignored by the colonial educational institution. The anxiety of loosing his grip on a metropolitan identity, to which Nishikawa had heretofore clung, was being mapped onto the angst of the colony with its old (precolonial) past that was about to lost to the onslaught of modernization.

Much as Yanagi Muneyoshi’s excursions into colonial folk art were grounded in his involvement with the humanist literary group White Birch School (Shirakaba-ha ) and most of his early expositions on folk crafts were published in literary journals such as Kaizō and Humanism, Nishikawa Mitsuru’s work on Taiwanese folk traditions also had its literary base.¹⁵ His newspaper columns, his own literary journal, and his own publishing houses provided Nishikawa with venues through which to espouse his views on poetics, French literature, and aestheticism in general. Though Literary Taiwan started out as a purely literary journal, it evolved into a general cultural magazine (sōgo bunkashi ) that served as a nexus for productive dialogues between culture, art, and literary and ethnographic writings. Articles on European, Japanese, and the local art scene regularly shared pages with reproductions of woodblock prints, etchings, sketches, and paintings that featured local and foreign artists of the past and present.¹⁶

Nishikawa’s romanticist tendency reached its peak with the collective effort of Bungei Taiwan. In his reading of Nishikawa’s historical tale “The Chronicle of the Red Fort” (Sekikan ki ), Fujii Shōzō, cautioning against an overemphasis on Nishikawa’s romantic bent, points out the collusive nature of Nishikawa’s romanticism and political ideology.¹⁷ The fact that by the very end of Bungei Taiwan’s lifespan, when the Pacific War had intensified considerably, the magazine promoted the war effort and the imperial subject literature (kōmin bungaku ) should always be kept in mind when reading works written by Nishikawa during this period.¹⁸ However, I would like to present a slightly different interpretation of Nishikawa’s romanticization of Taiwan. That is, Nishikawa’s oriental gaze was not necessarily directed to the objectified code of “Taiwan” but rather to the Japanese homeland.

Having taken his mentor Yoshie Takamatsu’s proposal to heart, Nishikawa devoted himself to cultivating the “barren cultural scene on the island” with the goal of establishing “a distinct brand of Southern literature.” Though this proceeded well locally, it garnered no notice from Japan. Nishikawa’s conception of this “Southern literature” is best defined in his article “Prospects for the Taiwanese Literary Scene” (Taiwan bungeikai no tenbō).¹⁹ In this article Nishikawa outlines the literary developments, significant poets, and new native writers worthy of note since the early occupation period. He concludes:

When I examined these accomplishments, I came to realize that Taiwanese literature is now blossoming and it should be left to develop in its own way. It should never become a sub-trend of metropolitan literature, nor should it be relegated to a secondary position. Frédéric Mistral, from an impoverished village in the south of France, produced exquisite poems written in Provencal dialect to counter the metropolitan literature of Paris. Eventually he built up his glorious palace of Provencal. At the same time that we raise our voices in praise of his extraordinary determination, we shall push for a literature that lives up to the name of our beautiful island in the South Seas and that occupies a unique place in Japanese literary history. …

South is south and north is north. What good will it do to yearn for the endlessly gloomy snowy sky while one is under the forever clear, bright blue sky? Taiwan will soon become the center for Japan’s southern advancement. For those of us engaging in literary endeavors, how are we to face our offspring if we do not have a deep awareness of our duty? It is our mandate to create a Taiwanese literature that stands tall like the highest mountain in the South Sea.

Nishikawa’s conceptualization of an independent Taiwanese literature distinct from Japanese literature did not gain much notice in Japan, however. His ambitions frustrated, Nishikawa sought a different strategy to gain the attention of readers back in the Japanese homeland, as seen in many of his later essays. For example, in an article titled “Colonial Literature Under the New System” (Shintaiseika no gaichi bungaku )²⁰ he compared the difference in scale of supported cultural activities in Taiwan and Manchuria, and expressed his hope that the newly appointed minister of culture, Kiahida Kunio, would right the imbalance in the central government’s treatment of the two colonies.

Nishikawa was careful to cultivate his connections with metropolitan writers. He regularly sent them publications, including his own artfully produced books and magazines, and was proud of the fact that his reputation for bookmaking had spread to Japan. His magazine Bungei Taiwan actively solicited endorsements and contributions from well-known Japanese writers.²¹ Nishikawa himself became known as a local intellectual leader in Taiwan, to whom most Japanese writers visiting the island paid courtesy calls. However, his view of the metropolitan literary establishment and writers in Japan was often contradictory and ambivalent. In “Encouraging Colonial Literature” he defended the unique and difficult conditions of the newly emerging Taiwanese literature to the metropolitan writers visiting Taiwan:²²

Here in this far-flung place, we have the utmost yearning for the central literary establishment. We have been through a lot of hardship in pioneering [the local literature] with only a very limited number of literary magazines sent here monthly as our sole consolation. Now we are on the threshold of the blossoming of colonial literature. … In order to know the colonies as well as those who live there, one needs at least to spend a significant amount of time there. It is dangerous to assume one knows the true colonies only by what one sees on a short trip to the area. We have seen more than a few cases of this kind. In this sense, even if metropolitan writers write about the colonies on the basis of an actual information-gathering trip, their works still cannot be called “colonial literature,” and certainly should not be given awards for colonial literature. … Colonial literary awards should be given only to unknown writers who live in the colonies.

Nishikawa’s conflicting attitudes toward the metropolitan literary establishment are evident here. While his admiration for their accomplishments was great, he also felt threatened by the impromptu visitors from the Japanese homeland. Positioning himself as the authoritative connoisseur of authentic Taiwanese aesthetics, he revealed his displeasure with the tourist/writer who wrote about Taiwan from a limited experience. His exoticization objectifies the other while simultaneously reaffirming one’s own subjectivity. Nishikawa’s long-time obsession with Taiwan can thus also be read as an active attempt on his part to distinguish himself from Taiwan and to reinforce his Japaneseness. While his exotic, Orientalist gaze may have been directed toward the objects of Taiwan, it was also a signal of his authentic knowledge of the other that would merit his acceptance back into the Japanese fold.

Herein lies the precariousness of this balancing act for Nishikawa. On the one hand, he promoted the ideology of “Japanese homeland extensionism” (naichi enchō shugi ), as advocated by the central government in Japan; this viewed the Taiwan colony as a mere extension of the Japanese homeland and emphasized the continuity of its literary affiliation. On the other hand, Nishikawa jealously guarded the territorial boundaries of his authority from writers based in Japan. It is within this constant tension, the tension that would attract the gaze of the Japanese homeland and yet keep sufficient distance to maintain an aura of authenticity, that Nishikawa’s brand of exoticism is situated.

There is a similar balance evident in Nishikawa’s divided loyalties to Taiwan and Japan. Some interpret Nishikawa’s passion for Taiwan as a colonizing desire on his part to merge with the native culture, but there is little evidence to that effect. Others accuse him of perpetuating the controlling mechanism of imperial authority. Although Nishikawa’s role in the colonial enterprise is ambiguous, in his own way he attempted to distinguish himself from the totalizing imperial discourse. Nishikawa’s lineage was from Aizu, which often saw itself in an antagonistic relationship with the Tokyo government. Through his advocacy of an aesthetic he considered unique to Taiwan, he sought to deal with the dominance of the metropolitan discourse on his own terms. The Taiwanese aesthetics he carved out is the evidence of this aesthetic and identity distinction. The passionate images of Taiwanese culture that are captured frozen on page after page of his books and periodicals became a part of the standard lexicon employed in discourse on the landscape and material culture of the colony well into the postcolonial era.²³

DOMESTICATING AND GENDERIZING THE EXOTIC

Nishikawa’s generic turn from poetry to journalism and narrative, like his transformation from romanticism to historicism, was influenced by one of the dominant intellectual trends of the time, the birth of folklore studies (minzokugaku ). Promoted by scholars like Yanagita Kunio and Origuchi Shinobu in Japan, and Gu Jiegang in China, folklore studies was capturing the imagination of both intellectuals and the public.

Yanagita had dabbled in romantic new-style poetry in his youth, and was known for his participation, along with Tayama Katai and Shimazaki Tōson, in the preeminent romantic literary journal Bungakkai . While Tayama and Shimazaki later became major writers of the naturalist school, Yanagita pursued a career in agriculture and became a top bureaucrat, heavily involved in land reform policy in colonial Korea.²⁴ Yanagita turned to folklore studies after resigning from a prestigious position as chief secretary of the House of Peers (Kizokuin shoki kanchō ) in 1919. Through tireless fieldwork, collecting folktales and recording local customs, editing journals, and founding research groups and associations devoted to local history, Yanagita was able to establish minzokugaku as a legitimate academic discipline and even to suggest that the discipline might one day achieve the status of a “new national learning” (shinkokugaku ).²⁵ Despite his close ties to Korea (he participated in the annexation of Korea and served as a colonial bureaucrat involved in agrarian policy) and his involvement with the south in both a personal and an official capacity (as Japanese representative to the League of Nations, he served as a commissioner to the Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands Committee stationed in Geneva, the headquarters of the League of Nations), his research rarely extended to either of these regions. For Yanagita, the southern frontier of Japan stopped at Okinawa. He resolutely resisted a comparative approach, arguing that it was still premature.

This inward-looking tendency prompted scholars to label Yanagita’s brand of minzokugaku a “one-nation ethnology” (ikkoku minzokuron ) or sometimes an “insular-nation ethnology” (shimaguni minzokuron ). Despite Yanagita’s reluctance to reach beyond the boundaries of the Japanese archipelago in his own research, ethnological research and fieldwork were flourishing in many parts of the colonies, often carried on by Yanagita’s own disciples and followers. In an interview (taidan) in Minzoku Taiwan entitled “The Establishment of a Great East Asia Ethnology and the mission of Minzoku Taiwan” (“Daitōa minzokugaku no kensetsu to Minzoku Taiwan no shimei ”), Yanagita pointed out that Taiwan was an ideal laboratory (keikōba ) for the development of a Greater East Asian ethnology that would encompass Japan’s colonial empire:

In Korea we have Akiba-kun (Akiba Takashi ), and I think he will agree with the idea. In Manchuria, Ōmachi-kun (Ōmachi Tokuzō ) is there, and I am sure he most likely would wish the same thing.²⁶

The construction of a Greater East Asian ethnology, a concept that paralleled the political ideology of that time, was thus conceptualized and carried out with the tacit encouragement, albeit without any direct involvement, of the father of Japanese native ethnology.²⁷

Taiwan was an inviting object of study for the Japanese ethnographers. Geographically situated at the eastern edge of East Asia and at northern end (excluding the “Japanese” Ryūkyū Islands) of an archipelago stretching through the Philippines to Southeast Asia, it was the gateway to Japan’s new ambitions in the South Pacific. Culturally, it was a mixture of continental Han culture and the primitive aboriginal inhabitants, who were, despite significant internal cultural and linguistic differences, collectively referred to as “Takasago-zoku ” by the Japanese ethnographers. The Han culture of Taiwan shared with Korea and traditional Japan a settled, rice-based agriculture and a continental culture defined by the use of Chinese characters and the canonical status of the Chinese classics. The aboriginal culture of Taiwan was predominantly Austronesian, sharing characteristics with the native cultures of the Philippines, the South Pacific, and the Malaysian-Indonesian archipelago. This was the closest example to Japan of the Southern culture that Yanagita came to see as the ultimate origin of the Japanese people.

The confluence of the continental culture and imaginations of the South, coupled with a multilayered colonial past, made the island fertile ground for exploration and anthropological fieldwork. This is attested by the fact that two of the most famous prewar Japanese anthropologists, Inō Kanori (1867–1925) and Torii Ryūzō (1870–1953),²⁸ for example, arrived in Taiwan the first year the colony had been acquired by Japan. Paul Barclay notes that Inō’s classical education predisposed him to work in areas of Taiwan that had come under Qing administrative control while Torii, on the other hand, investigated a more “authentic” Malayan Taiwan, a Taiwan “unspoiled” by Chinese contact.²⁹ These two distinct “master narratives,” as Barclay called them, produced the discursive space on Taiwan.

Nishikawa’s ethnographic work is not in any way comparable to that of Inō and Torii’s. Inō and Torii were academically trained anthropologists with institutional backing who employed the tropes and methods then current in Victorian colonial ethnography.³⁰ Nishikawa remained an avid amateur armchair enthusiast and a colonial collector who practiced a brand of orientalized romantic ethnography that is somewhat closer to the spirit of Inō than Torii. His Taiwan project must be placed within the context of the Greater East Asian ethnology that was being promoted in Japan and throughout the colonies. Perhaps Nishikawa understood his personal mission to be, in part, to write against the rigidly evolutionary scientific discourse espoused by the two experts in an attempt to recapture a certain ephemeral aesthetic essence that had been lost in the austere language of academia.

Unlike most Japanese visitors to the colony at the time, who were fascinated with the exotic savages and wrote numerous accounts of them, Nishikawa showed very little interest in the aboriginal populations and their culture. He was more interested in the folk arts and crafts of the island’s Chinese cultural milieu rather than the high culture of the continental Chinese culture. He was, for example, not particularly interested in kanshi (Chinese poems), which had delighted many of his predecessors of the previous generation, but opted instead for freestyle modern poetry and the artifacts of a rustic, artless, South China regional culture. Unlike other expatriate Japanese writers in the colony, Nishikawa rarely wrote about the Japanese community, nostalgia for the metropolis, or the exotic barbarism of the indigenous Takasago-zoku; his gaze and obsession were directed solely toward the native Taiwanese culture. As an amateur art critic, colonial collector, and a fine bookbinder who created elaborate and artistic special editions of books, using mundane everyday materials to record mundane, everyday practices, Nishikawa’s passion yielded voluminous records of local daily life, religious practice, customs, folk art, and architecture.

Nishikawa’s discourse on Taiwan, as manifested in works such as Masosai (The Mazu festival, 1935), Ahen (Opium, 1938), Ressenden (Biographies of immortals, 1939), Taiwan fudoki (A Record of Taiwanese customs and lands, 1940), Kareitō shōka (A paean to the beautiful isle, 1940), Kareitō minwashū (Folktales of the beautiful isle, 1942), Kareitō kenpūroku (A record of prominent customs of the beautiful isle, 1935–1936, 1981) and Taiwan ehon (Taiwan pictorial, 1943) were part of a colonial ethnographical intervention being carried out at that time throughout the colonies. Nishikawa’s engagement in cultural production can be roughly categorized into three overlapping areas: landscape and material culture; ethnographical accounts; and historical reappropriations.

Taiwan Pictorial (Taiwan ehon ) is a collection of images of the subtropical island accompanied by short essays that explain each image. One assumes that the book is intended not merely as a tourist guide but as an informational work directed to both natives and a metropolitan audience. This collage of images of the flora, fauna, material cultural, architecture, and customs of Taiwan fostered the formation of a visualized consciousness of the colony and provide a codified vocabulary for a discourse on Taiwan. Moreover, this discourse of otherness became transfigured, reproduced, and productively fused with postcolonial discourses of selfhood, local identity, and self-determinism.

While the images of Taiwan Pictorial appear benign and neutral, Nishikawa’s interpretative intervention in the more ethnographically specific works is somewhat problematic and therefore warrants closer scrutiny. How does gender intersect with Nishikawa’s ethnographical and cultural production in the Taiwan kenpūroku ? Taiwan kenpūroku, (literally, “distinctive customs of Taiwan”) was a series of essays serialized in Taiwan jihō from 1935 to 1936. They covered topics such as local religious sites (“Jōkōbyō ,” “Masobyō ”), Taoist ritual (“Kaka ,” “Tōya ,” “Fuhōshi ”), festivals (“Fudo ”, “Sōshin ,” “Jinen ,” “Shichijōmasei ,” “Chūshūsetsu ”), folk practices, customs, rites of passage (“Saika kandō ,” “Dōhō kasoku ,” “Mangetsu ,” “Dosai ”), and local attractions (“Hanayome ,” “Kōzanrō fukin ,” “Rin Hongen teien ”).

At first look, the collection seems to constitute an objective ethnographical account of the native cultural life. The texts are accompanied by photographs, drawings, precise quotations of native texts (songs, ditties etc), and painstakingly meticulous and detailed notes. But on closer scrutiny, one notes that the texts are framed in a fictionalized poetic (at times even fantastic) prose with a third-person narrative voice often set in the pleasure quarters. Take, for example, the chapter on Pudu , the Rite of Universal Salvation. The photography and annotation lends an authoritative air to the piece, but the highly ornate text is interspersed with decidedly genderized, if not erotic, descriptive passages. The essay supposedly documents the Middle Prime Festival at the Mazu Temple in Jilong . Following intense, colorful descriptions of the sights and sounds, the smells of the food and the rituals performed by Daoist priests, the following passage takes the reader by surprise:

The silver paper (), robe (), sand money () for the dead began to flame and drift upward in a spiral. The decorative flowers sewn with golden thread shone brightly, bathed in the sparks of the fire. Some sexy geidua , with incense sticks in hand, narrowed their eyes, praying for the bliss of their lovers and shaking the full breasts that swelled up out of their cheongsam. (Nakajima and Kawahara 1998:56)

Another example is in the entry on the Temple of the City God . Nishikawa created a persona to carry the narrative movement along, a sixteen-year-old girl (called Xiaomei ) who had been sold to a famous establishment in the entertainment quarter (Hall of Rivers and Mountains ) and had come to the temple to divine the future of her love affair with a young man (Nakajima and Kawahara 1998:92–96). Examples like this, where representatives of the female gender have been placed in the center of the discursive space of the “folk,” occur throughout the work. Female goddesses, in particular Mazu, the patron goddess of the seafarers, assume a prominent position within Nishikawa’s pantheon of deities, surpassing such male deities as Guandi (Lord Guan) and Baosheng dadi (the Great Lord who Preserves Life) who were at least as important in the daily religious practice of the Taiwan natives.

Although such essays are peppered with highly charged romantic imagery, one also finds interspersed throughout the text ethnographically precise native terms for rituals, food, material cultures, and the life of prostitutes. Nishikawa’s modus operandi was to create a highly poetic narrative context while entrusting the burden of the ethnographic information to the notes and photographs. He was thus able to transmit colonial knowledge with scholastic accuracy while remaining true to the romantic poetic tradition in which he was immersed.

Nishikawa’s injection of eroticism into the depiction of somber rituals has its counterpart on the macrotextual level of the collection as a whole in its sexualization of religious practice. Nishikawa’s interest in local deities seems limited to female goddesses. The collection devotes the most space to two regional female deities popular not only in Taiwan but also in the southeastern coastal area: namely Mazu (j. Maso; Nakajima and Kawahara 1998:119–124),³¹ the most wide-spread cult on the island and the patron goddess of all seafarers, and the Seventh Mother (c. Qiniang masheng, j. Shichijō masei ; 97–101), the patron deity of feminine beauty and talents. Other chapters depict highly genderized practices by women, but as incantations for changing the sex of fetuses in the womb (“Saika kandō ”; 86–91) or initiating conjugal bliss (“Dōhō kasoku ”; 79–85).

How should we, as readers-in-decolonization, interpret the gender implication of Nishikawa’s discourse on Taiwan? What does this intersection of the exotic and the erotic reveal about the economy of colonial desire? This conflation of exotic knowledge concerning ethnological space into a feminized discursive space operates at various levels. Such texts fulfilled the artist/writer Nishikawa’s personal aesthetic aspirations at the same time that they countered realism, the dominant literary discourse of the day. The representation of cultural encounters was, and still is, a tricky business. Nishikawa’s obsessive recording, inscribing, and appropriating of the ethnic attested to his extraordinary appetite for knowledge of the native culture but, at the same time, exposed its limited ability to grapple with the true cultural significance of folk practices. The erasure of the colonial male presence or the effeminization of the colonial subject inevitably transformed the subject into the ultimate object of desire and pleasure.

CONCLUSION (EPILOGUE)

The interface of the visual and narrative texts and the interplay of the exotic and the erotic, as shown in the images in his book, demonstrate Nishikawa’s agility in moving into different phases of his interest. He is shedding his sensibility as a romantic poet of the French impressionist school and gradually tilting toward a more objective historical and ethnographical representation of the colony. The literary inscription of colonial femininity and masculine desire as presented in Kareitō kenpūroku (A record of prominent customs of the beautiful isle) sheds light on Nishikawa Mitsuru’s interpretation of the erotic, ethnographic, and historic.

By embedding Nishikawa’s orientalist enterprise within concrete contexts—texts (lived experience and literary texts) and visual texts—I hope I have helped in explicating the specific and particular ways in which colonial power operates. The Japanese colonial empire was not founded upon the subjugation of one race by another, and the rhetoric of the Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere highlighted the common racial bonds that linked the people of the region; for this reason, the sexualized view of race relations delineated in recent research on European colonialism is not strictly applicable. Nevertheless, we see in Nishikawa’s writings a decided sexualization of the colonized by the colonizer that affirms the significance of a genderized asymmetry in the colonial environment. As Fredric Jameson proposed, “the aesthetic act is itself ideological, and the production of aesthetic or narrative form is to be seen as an ideological act in its own right, with the function of inventing imaginary or formal ‘solution’ to irresolvable social contradictions” (Jameson 1981:79).

My purpose here is not to reproduce Said’s monolithic, omnipotent image of imperial masculinity. Instead, as my reading of Nishikawa Mitsuru’s cultural production suggests, the eroticization of the exotic, or the exoticization of the erotic, came at the expense of yielding the real power of representation to ideologies.

As an interesting final note, in 1999 both the Kareitō minwashū (1942, 1999) and the Kareitō kenpūroku (1935–1936, 1981, 1999) were translated into Chinese and recirculated among a new reading public. Translated by a group of college students who were studying the Japanese language, the project had as its goal, as stated in the preface by the editor Chen Zaoxiang, the recovery of the long-forgotten customs of their ancestors, which had been concealed by the Japanese colonial government and crushed by the Nationalist regime. Nishikawa’s texts are thus transfigured into practical pedagogical tools that can both aid in acquiring Japanese language skills (the Japanese original is provided on the facing page with a vocabulary list for self-study) and promote the younger generation’s knowledge of their own (lost) cultural and material history. One must point out the irony of reclaiming a collective agency and one’s own past through the mediation of colonialism.

NOTES

1. Krishnaswamy 1998:2.

2. Fujimori 1998.

3. Fujimori 1998:53–68.

4. See Oguma 1995:205–234, 1997, 1998. Also, Murai 1992 and Takenaka 1999.

5. For the difference in the development of southbound imagination and northbound imagination in modern Japanese poetics, see Sugawara 2002:86, 94–99. Sugawara argues that the southbound imagination of Japanese expatriate poets, such as Irako Seihaku and Nishikawa Mitsuru, who wrote about exotic Taiwan drew its inspiration directly from both the romanticized nanban southern barbarian tradition that had existed in Japan since the late sixteenth century and the early Meiji translation of European-style poems (shintaishi), and is not necessarily a direct result of Japanese colonialism. Nevertheless, I contend that both Irako’s and Nishikawa’s poetry on Taiwan could not have existed but for the Japanese acquisition of the colony of Taiwan.

6. See appendix 1, “List of magazines edited by Nishikawa Mitsuru” (Nishikawa Mitsuru henshū zasshirui ichiran) in Nakajima and Kawahara 1998.2:485–490.

7. Eight novels, including Madame Rika (Rika fujin), The Chronicle of the Red Fort (Sekikan ki) and Taiwan Cross-Island Railway (Taiwan sōkan tetsudō), were published when Nishikawa was in Taiwan. Most of his short stories appeared in Bungei Taiwan. Some of these works were reissued after the war by the publisher Nigen no hoshi sha.

8. Fujii 1998:25–67.

9. Nishikawa’s treatment of the railway, both a real life and metaphoric representation of technological triumph of modernity and coloniality, can be seen in the novel Cross-Island Railway (Taiwan sōkan tetsudō ) and in short stories such as “Trains in Taiwan” (“Taiwan no kasha ”), “Two German Technicians” (“Futari no doitsujin gishi ”), and “Story of the Dragon Mountain” (“Ryūmyakuki ”). See Nakajima and Kawahara 1997.2:25–384.

10. See “The Abridged Biography of Nishikawa Mitsuru” (Nishikawa Mitsuru ryakureki) in appendix 3 of Nakajima and Kawahara 1998.2:509–512.

11. Fujii 1998:105.

12. However, Nishikawa’s attitude regarding whether Taiwanese literature should be part of the metropolitan literature—as an extension of the naichi, the so-called naichi enchōshugi —remained ambiguous at times. On the one hand, he saw the urgent need for Japan to have access to and to develop appreciation for literature produced locally; on the other hand, he was concerned that the naichi writers might get too close to the colony and chip away at his authoritative hold on Taiwan. These conflicting positions can be seen in articles such as “Shitaiseika no gaichi bunka ” (Taiwan jihō 258 (December 1, 1940): 112–113), in which he compared the discrepancy in cultural support from the central government between Manchuria and Taiwan, and called for more understanding and material support from naichi. In “Gaichi bungaku no shōrei ” (Shinchō, July 1942, 46–48), he complained bitterly that the gaichi (colonial) literary awards should not be given to tourist-writers from Japan but should be awarded only to those who lived and wrote in the colonies.

13. Taiwan jihō (February 1938), 65–67, reprinted in Nakajima and Kawahara 1998.1:449–451.

14. Nakajima and Kawahara 1998.1:449–451.

15. For Nishikawa Mitsuru’s Taiwan project within the context of prewar and postwar Japanese folklore studies, see Kleeman 2001a.

16. Artists such as Ikeda Yasaburō and Tatsuishi Tesshin were frequent contributors, providing illustrations and other works of art for the journal. On the art scene and salons in colonial Taiwan, see Wang Shujin 1996 and 1997.

17. Fujii 1998:104–126.

18. For example, see Nishikawa Mitsuru’s poetry collection One Determination (Hitotsu no ketsui [Taipei: Bungei Taiwan sha, 1943]).

19. Taiwan jihō (January 1939), 78–85; reprinted in Nakajima and Kawahara 1998.1:461–468.

20. Nakajima and Kawahara 1998.1:469–470.

21. Bungei Taiwan periodically featured a column called “Belle Lettres from Various Famous Writers” (Shoka hīshin), which published letters from famous Japanese poets and writers of the day, such as Fukao Sumako, Irako Seihaku, Horiguchi Daigaku, and Kawamori Kōzō. See Bungei Taiwan for March 1941 and Ito 1993:54–56.

22. Nakajima and Kawahara 1998.2:471–473.

23. For Nishikawa’s colonial appropriation of Taiwanese culture and its postcolonial implication, see Kleeman 2001b.

24. For the relationship between colonialism and Yanagita’s brand of Japanese folklore studies, see Kawamura 1996, 1997; Oguma 1997.

25. Koyasu 1996:51–52.

26. Minzoku Taiwan (December 1943).

27. For a discussion of other aspects of wartime Japanese ethnology and figures such as Takata Yasuma, see Kevin Doak’s recent article (2002), which discusses the conceptual foundation and institutionalization of ethnology in and after wartime. Also, see Barclay 2001.

28. For Torii’s work on Taiwan, see for example Torii 1996.

29. Barclay 2001:117.

30. Barclay 2001:117.

31. Though Nishikawa’s interest in Mazu can be traced back to the poetic journal of this title that he edited in the 1930s, Japanese fascination with the goddess did not begin with him—for instance, the poet Irako Seihaku (1877–1946) composed on this subject; see Sugawara Katsuya 2002 on the connection between Irako Seihaku and Nishikawa Mitsuru’s poems on Mazu and their connections to the Japanese nanban (southern barbarian) poetic tradition. Also see Lin 2002 on Japanese poets’ appropriation of Mazu cult during the colonial period. For Nishikawa, however, the interest was impassioned and long-lasting, from his first published poetry collection titled Masosai (A festival to Mazu) to his many essays and poems on the subject, which spanned the entire course of his life, culminating in his establishment of a Mazu temple in Tokyo. For a complete list of Nishikawa’s writings on Mazu, see Chen 2002:33–36.

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