Becoming “Japanese”: Colonial Taiwan and the Politics of Identity Formation

Recently I have read the following book. Its main points are:

Book title: Leo Ching.2001. Becoming “Japanese”: Colonial Taiwan and the Politics of Identity Formation. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Main points:

- ch. 3 – the historical significance of kominka was that for the first time in Taiwanese colonial history, the struggle over identity emerged as the dominant discourse for the colonized.  (96)

- the politics of identity in kominka represented the way which  the onus of becoming Japanese had shifted from state to the colonial subject. In doka, the making of colonized  subject into Japanese was predominantly a project of the colonial government.(97)

- “I have argued that doka, with its emphasis on cultural integration, conceals the fundament social and political inequality between the colonizer and the colonized.”(107)

- “it is precisely this ambivalent sameness, rather that racial difference, that Oguma Eiji characterized as the particularity of doka in Japanese colonial discourse. In the conclusion of his comprehensive study of the genealogy of the Japanese, Oguma argued that most sociological analyses of ethnicity and group identification are unable to account or the theory of Japanese doka for one simple reason.” (107)

-these analyses based on the assumption that the relationship between different groups was organized by recognized others as different. But the support for the doka ideology situated the colonized others in ‘blood relationship’ rather then in radical different. Oguma argued that the ‘adopted blood’ system was crucial in rationalized the emperor system in incorporating the colonies into the imperial family. (107-8)

- this incorporation, of courses begged the question as to why Japanese colonialism adopted the discourse of doka when most colonial policy had abandoned it. Oguma offered an explanation of the ambivalent in the Japanese version of doka. He observed that one distinctive character of Japanese imperialism was its near relationship to its colonized:  Korean and Taiwan were racially closer to the Japanese. As a result there was no clear exclusion; there was also no complete equality. (109)

- kominka was a condition of an ‘ambivalent identity’, when the self’s interior was invaded by a sense of ‘otherness’ at the moment of ‘becoming Japanese’ (124) “For if kominka, as I would like to argue, is predominately a cultural rather than a political or economic mode of colonial power, then cultural production themselves do not simply reflect the underlying colonial rule but constitute a kind of colonial policy.”(125) “In this regard, the struggle over identities is not merely a reflection of, or even a response to, the process of imperialization; rather, it is an integral part of the very logic of kominka itself.”(125) (c/f see double use of concept. Kominka generated struggle over identities, and that the colonial modernity generated Japanese or Japanese-ness, Taiwanese or Taiwanese-ness, aborigines or aboriginality, and Chinese or Chinese-ness, as mentioned at the introduction on page11).

- “the postcolonial reading of komin texts … fail to grasp the logic and affectivity of kominka. In short, contrary to the postcolonial critic’s assertion, the identity struggle is not the effect, but the very cause of kominka. Prior to the demise of the Taiwan political movements in the 1930s, and during the so-called rule by doka, ‘culture’ was an important form of political expression and social commentary”. (125)

-“only at this particular historical juncture does struggle over colonial identity emerge as the dominant discourse in colonial Taiwan, where the feeling that one ‘cannot be Japanese’ become an overwhelming existential anxiety and a political desire”.(132)

- ch. 4 – a colonial subject that was recognizably the same, but never quite the same. Is this not the textualization, or the discursive process, of what Homi Bhabhi had called the ‘ambivalence of mimicry?’ For Bhabhi, the ‘mimic man’, by virtue of his or her partial and never complete representation for the colonizer, ‘returned as the displacing gaze of the disciplined.’(134)

[to see foot-note on mimicry: Homi Bhabha, the location of culture (New York: Routledge, 1994), 85-92. Bhabha defines mimicry as “the desire for a reformed, recognizable Other, as a subject of a difference that is almost the same, but not quite. Which is to say, that the discourse of mimicry is constructed around an ambivalence; in order to be effective, mimicry must continually produce its slippage, its excess, its difference.”]

-“as long as the Musha incident is interpreted and debated within the arena of colonial administration and policy making, any attempt at interrogating the fundamental contradiction between the colonizer and the colonized, the Japanese and the aborigines, is necessary disavowed and foreclosed, we must turn to literature in order to catch a glimpse of an attempt to reconcile and reveal the constitute relationship between civility and savagery.”(148)

-“as Kawamura Minato correctly points out, in the earlier historical moment, at the dawn of Japanese imperialism, the ‘discovery’ of ‘savages’ in the exterior substantiated Japan’s ‘identification’ with ‘civilization’ as a modern nation-state.”(148)

-“in the wake of the Musha incident, Japanese colonial attitudes toward the aborigines underwent a conspicuous shift whereby the ideology of imperialization, rather than military subjugation or economic servitude, emerged as the dominant form of colonial control.”(152)

- “I now consider two popular representation of aborigines form the 1910s, and the 1930s, ‘the story of Goho’ and ‘the Bell of Sayon’ that best delineated the shift of  aboriginal representation from ‘natural savages’ to ‘national subjects’”.(153)

- “Goho is the Japanese adaption of a Chinese folktale that tells of the benevolence and self-sacrifice of Goho, a Ching official who supposed convince the aborigines to give up their head hunting practices”.(153-4)

-“in a valiant effort to reveal the Japanese colonial hypocrisy of ‘universal brotherhood’, Kato Kunihiko devoted a chapter in his book to the plight of the aborigines who became ‘volunteers’.” “Kato is especially intrigued by his encounter with Aui and aborigines who despite having lost his father at the hands of the Japanese police during an uprising, enlisted for the Sixth Takasago Volunteer Army.”(168)

- “similar reservation and incredulity at the contradictory position of the aboriginal volunteers is expressed by Hayashi Eidai.” “Hayashi rightly points to ‘imperialization through education’ as responsible for the transformation of aborigines to volunteer.”(170)

-“Kato and Hayashji’s incredulity and frustration can perhaps be interpreted as their inability to escape the working of the ‘regime of nationality’. For them, the identity of the aborigines, hence their difference, is incommensurable with loyalty to the emperor.” (171)

-“what is being played out here is a politics of identity in which the aborigines are perceived perpetually and solely in their ‘difference’ by the Japanese, despite the fact that they ‘were’ Japanese and imperial subjects during the colonial period.”(171)

-“the claim of patriotism and loyalty to the Japanese nation is a present-day strategy of protest against the ‘betrayal’ of the former colonizer…. Positioned at the bottom of the colonial hierarchy and deprived of any political and economic possibility, becoming ‘Japanese soldiers’ was perhaps the only avenue to perceived equality and agency for most of these ‘volunteers’.”(172)

(to be continued)