Japanese Imperialism in Contemporary English Fiction From Dejima to Malaya Ching-chih Wang Japanese Imperialism in Contemporary English Fiction Ching-chih Wang Japanese Imperialism in Contemporary English Fiction From Dejima to Malaya Ching-chih Wang National Taipei University New Taipei City, Taiwan ISBN 978-981-15-0461-7 ISBN 978-981-15-0462-4 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-0462-4 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2019 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. 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The registered company address is: 152 Beach Road, #21-01/04 Gateway East, Singapore 189721, Singapore A cknowledgements Many people have supported me during the course of this study, which is the result of several research projects conducted over the past five years. My utmost gratitude goes to Professor Yucheng Lee for his guidance and knowledge of contemporary English literature. His constant support and his comments on my rough ideas have made this book possible. As a scholar of Contemporary English Literature studying Japanese Imperialism in Taiwan, I am particularly indebted to Mr. Hideyuki Yamamoto, full professor at National Kobe University and president of the AALA (Asian American Literature Association), for his generosity and kindness in hosting me as a visiting scholar at the Graduate School of Humanities in the summer of 2012. I was privileged to have some thought-provoking discussions with him and other prestigious members of the AALA in Japan, particularly the honorable first president of the AALA, Ms. Teruyo Ueki, who is currently professor emeritus at Kobe Women’s University. Research grants from the MOST (Ministry of Science and Technology) in Taiwan enabled me to launch this project, while timely financial support from the USTP (University System of Taipei Joint Research Program) helped me finalize the manuscript. Chapter 2, “Riches and Realities: The Uncommon Wealth in David Mitchell’s The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet” is the closing report of my MOST project from 2013 to 2015, “In the Name of Gaijin: Writing Alien- nation in The Thousand of Autumns of Jacob de Zoet” (102-2410-H- 305-069). My study of David Mitchell’s Dejima story was inspired by v vi ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS an invitation from Nagasaki University, where I presented some prelim- inary findings at the “Eighth International Symposium for Port Cities Studies: Historical Experience of Port Cities/Conceptions of Socio- Cultural Coexistence in East Asia” held in 2012. Chapter 3 is also the closing report of my 2017 USTP project, “Cultural Trauma and Civil Repair in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Stories of Shanghai” (USTP-NTPU- TMU-106-01), an extension of the conference paper presented in the special session, “Kazuo Ishiguro and Trans-Bordering Asian British/ American Literature,” for the AALA annual meeting chaired by Professor Hideyuki Yamamoto at Kobe University in 2018. The other two essays, “A Network of Deceptions: Re-membering Violence in The Garden of Evening Mists,” published in the Soochow Journal of Foreign Languages and Cultures 45 (2018), and “The Imperial Garden’s Monogatari: Politics of Forgetting in Tan Twan Eng’s The Garden of Evening Mists,” written in Chinese and published in the Review of English and American Literature 33 (2018), were also the closing reports of my 2016 USTP project (USTP-NTPU-TMU-105-01) and have been incorporated into Chapter 4. In both of these journal papers, I benefited greatly from the reviews of anonymous readers; their insights into the representation of traumatic memory and their knowledge of Japanese imperialism helped sharpen my argument about the politics of remembering and forgetting. Finally, I would like to express my deepest gratitude to my husband, Chun Fu, for his patience and companionship at different stages of my academic career. As a perceptive colleague, he has provided constant, attentive feedback, and sustained my study during many periods of doubt and fatigue. As a caring and loving spouse, he shared both my excite- ment and my frustration in writing this book, while also sharing the responsibility for raising our adorable ten-year-old daughter, Ying Fu. It is to him and my daughter that this book is dedicated. Taipei Ching-chih Wang 2019 c ontents 1 Introduction: Japanese Empire as an Excrescence of Imperialism 1 2 Riches and Realities: The Uncommon Wealth in David Mitchell’s The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet 13 3 The “Broader Canvas” in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Pacific War Stories 31 4 Inscribing the Legacy of Japanese Imperialism in The Garden of Evening Mists 55 5 Conclusion: Borrowing Scenes from Japan’s Colonial Empire 79 Works Cited 83 Index 89 vii CHAPTER1 Introduction: Japanese Empire as an Excrescence of Imperialism Abstract After acquiring the lucrative colonies of Taiwan and Korea in 1895 and winning the Russo-Japanese War in 1905, Japan developed an imperial system that was distinctly different from those of Western coun- tries. Those two military accomplishments exemplified the success of the Meiji Restoration, and, as Japan’s concerns shifted from national security to national assertiveness in its colonial endeavors, they also showed how the regional dominance in East Asia had shifted from China to Japan. In this introductory chapter, the reasons for Japan’s imperialist policies and itsstrategiesforterritorialexpansionarecomparedwiththoseoftheEuro- pean powers, to account for the ways in which the Japanese Empire was inmanywayspeculiaramongtheotherempiresofthelatenineteenthand earlytwentiethcenturies. Keywords Japaneseimperialism·MeijiRestoration· Europeancolonialism·Pan-Asianism The Japanese pursuit of an empire in East Asia embodied the hopes and anxieties of Meiji Japan following the two-and-a-half-century period of national isolation imposed by the Tokugawa government. As the only non-Western colonial regime at the turn of the twentieth century, Japan instituted an imperial system that was distinctly different, and peculiarly Japanese, after it acquired the lucrative colonies of Taiwan and Korea ©TheAuthor(s)2019 1 C.Wang,JapaneseImperialisminContemporaryEnglishFiction, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-0462-4_1 2 C.WANG in 1895 and won the Russo-Japanese War in 1905. Those two military accomplishments exemplified the success of the Meiji Restoration; they also proved that regional dominance in East Asia had shifted from China to Japan and that Japan’s concern with national security had shifted to national assertiveness and its endeavors in colonial expansion. With their success in acquiring territories and power, the Meiji statesmen had fully realized their dreams of colonialism. This self-assertion encouraged them tofashionacolonialsystemwithimplacableandunyieldinglogic,onethat neverfailedforlackofdeterminationoreffortbecausetheycouldnotafford togamblewiththeirnation’sfuture. Arestrainedsocietyandlimitedresourcesweretwotremendousobsta- cles Japan had to tackle before it, as an underdeveloped country, could designaprogramofmodernizationtoinsureitssurvivalandnationalinde- pendence.Inthisregard,Japancouldscarcelyrestsecureinthebeliefthat it would be exempt from Western imperialist aggression. Being an Asian state,itwasthereforemandatorythatitexpanditsperimeterforpolitical, military,andeconomicdevelopmenttonearbyareasessentialtothedefense andsecurityoftheislandcountry.Inthisintroductorychapter,thereasons that Japan undertook imperialist policies, and the strategies it devised to expand its territories to tropical islands in South East Asia, are compared withthoseoftheEuropeanpowers.Thishelpsaccountforthemanyways inwhichtheJapaneseEmpirewasuniqueamongtheotherempiresofthe latenineteenthandearlytwentiethcenturies. In his pioneering article, “The Evolution of Japanese Colonialism,” HymanKublinexplainsthemostnotabledifferencebetweentheWestern andJapanesecolonialregimes: Whatdistinguished[theJapaneseEmpire]primarilywasneitheritssizenor location, neither the composition of its peoples nor the manner of its cre- ation,whichwasdecidedlyconventionalinanageoframpantimperialism. OfparamountsignificancewasperhapstheAsianprovenanceofthisempire. For,althoughimperialregimeshadrisenandfallenintheEastforseveralmil- lennia, the phenomenon of an expanding Asian empire in an era when the westernpowerswereengagedintheobliterationofnationalindependence inAsiawasclearlyextraordinary.Andwhatevermotivesanddrives,aimsand purposes, that may be ascribed to the western nations in their imperialist activities, it is most likely that none are to the same degree attributable to Japan.(82) 1 INTRODUCTION:JAPANESEEMPIREASANEXCRESCENCE… 3 The settlement colonies established in the era of the mercantilist impe- rialism of maritime powers such as Spain and Portugal in the sixteenth century, and Holland, Britain, and France in the seventeenth and eigh- teenthcenturies,were“remarkablydiverseinformandcharacter,”reflect- ing“thecontrastsinEuropeancivilization”(Peattie3).However,accord- ingtoMarkR.Peattie,inthelatenineteenthcentury,astheindustrialWest was engaged in all sorts of colonial activities, there came a “new imperi- alism,” with modern colonial systems that were “notable for the rapidity withwhichtheywereassembledandthedegreetowhichtheyweresimilar inarrangement,structure,andevolution”(3).Inlightofthis,themodern Western empires were mostly settled in tropical territories “composed of broad expanses of jungle, great stretches of desert, or scattered islands in the torrid zones” (3). Scattered around the globe at great distances from theirEuropeanmothercountries,thesetropicalempireswereforcedopen by explorers, traders, or missionaries, acting for their own benefit even while bearing in mind a minimal sense of national pride and the interests ofthemothercountry.Mercantilismwasthebackboneofthosesettlement colonies, which were eventually fortified with the full political or military support of their home government. A modern tropical colony, therefore, couldbeseenas“acolonyofoccupation,”whereaEuropeaneliteminor- ity governed an indigenous majority whose “racial origins” and “cultural traditions” bear no distinct relevance to those of the colonialists (Peat- tie 4). Furthermore, those tropical territories had not yet undergone the industrial revolution that would make them modern states, which aptly demonstratedwhytheadministrativestructuresandsocio-politicalsystems ofthoseoccupiedareaswerestrikinglydifferentfromthoseoftheEuropean governmentsandcouncils. WiththedominantpowerconcentratedinthehandsofEuropeanelite, theterritorieswithinmoderncolonialsystems,despitetheirindividualdif- ferencesinsizeanddegreeoftheirinvolvementincolonialexpansions,were governed“autocratically”andtherefore,withoutanymeasureof“demon- strable public support” (Peattie 4). Such elite-based administrations, in the eye of Peattie, led to the “common defect of overly cautious conser- vatism,” which, aside from some attempts to implement radical programs to educate and transform the colonized peoples in the European image, contributedtostagnantindigenoussocialandeconomicsystemsandconse- quentlypreventedthetropicalcoloniesfromdevelopingintoindustrialized countries(4).Succinctlyput,Europeanexpansionintoorcolonizationof