Tropics of Savagery by Robert Thomas Tierney

Author:Robert Thomas Tierney
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780520947665

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The Colonial Eyeglasses of Nakajima Atsushi

It seemed that there were many strange creatures dwelling together within me in total disorder, including miserable and revolting creatures.

NAKAJIMA ATSUSHI

In Shokuminchi gens (Colonial Fantasy), Masaki Tsuneo uses the metaphor of “Western-tinted eyeglasses” to describe the mimetic and hierarchical gaze the Japanese directed at the lands and the peoples in their colonies.

Before their nation began to invade Asia, the Japanese learned to look at Asia anew through Western-tinted eyeglasses. Almost four hundred years after the Europeans, Japan attempted to create a new “world” in Asia. It was called the Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere. Needless to say, it was the political and economic culmination of Japan’s modernization. In tandem with this process, there developed a view that the different people of the world formed a pyramid with the Japanese at the top and the natives of the South Seas at the bottom. Japan just rearranged the ranking of values that it inherited from Europe and applied them to the new world it formed. . . . Japan’s invasion of Asia was not a result of its failed modernization or of its clinging to traditional culture, but of its exceptionally rapid and thorough modernization (compared with other Asian countries), for modernization is the Euopeanization of the world, and at the heart of Western modernity is the ethos of colonization.1

The metaphor of “Western-tinted eyeglasses” highlights an important element in Japan’s mimicry of Western colonialism. Japan’s modernization was not simply the mimesis of Western sociopolitical, economic, or cultural models but also the appropriation of Western ways of viewing the world. These ways of viewing, which in the West date back to the “discovery” of America by European explorers, were several centuries in the making. In the early twentieth century, Japan domesticated this Western gaze that was trained on “others,” notably those who lay beyond the borders of civilization and modernity. For that reason, Japan’s views of the people it ruled can be described as refracted through and distorted by a Western lens or filter, which is why the metaphor of eyeglasses is so compelling. At the same time that Japan donned these “Western-tinted eyeglasses,” it rearranged the Western “pyramid” of peoples to buttress its own rival claims as an imperial power when it fashioned its empire of overseas colonies.

Until the Manchurian Incident of 1931, the Japanese empire existed within a framework of international legality that had been established by the Western powers and was incorporated into a global system of imperialism. In 1895, Western powers failed to come to the aid of the Taiwanese Chinese who established a “Republic of Taiwan” on the island and appealed to the West to intervene in their behalf. A decade later, Japan and the United States signed the Taft-Katsura agreement, in which Japan recognized the U.S. rule of the Philippines in exchange for U.S. recognition of Japanese rule of the Korean peninsula. And, of course, Japan ruled Micronesia under a mandate of the League of Nations. With the Kwantung army’s seizure of

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