Review: Becoming "Japanese"
Mar. 1st, 2014 11:07![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ahorbinskiBibliographic Data: Ching, Leo T. S. Becoming “Japanese”: Colonial Taiwan and the Politics of Identity Formation. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001.
Main Argument:
Introduction: Argument, Sources, Examples Ching wants to look at the cultural legacy of colonialism, arguing that "colonialism is part and parcel of modernity itself" (11). He also argues that not situating Japanese colonialism in Taiwan with respect to China misses out on the fact that "the triangulation between colonial Taiwan, imperial Japan, and nationalist China formed the terrain where contradictory, conflicting, and complicitous desires and identities were projected, negotiated, and vanquished" (8). Moreover, he also argues that "it was to conceal the fundamental problem of the citizenship [sic] of the non-Japanese within the empire that the categories of 'Japanese' (in dôka) and 'imperial subjects' (in kôminka) were constructed and mobilized" (6).
Chapter 1: Argument, Sources, Examples Ching argues, "first of all, against the particularization of Japanese imperialism and colonialism as somehow different and unique" (19). For Ching, focusing on salient differences "masks the homogenizing force and the collaborative alliance among the various colonizers at different historical moments under shifting geopolitical configurations" (ibid). For Ching, what is important is "the interrelationship and interdependency of the specific Japanese case with, and within, the generality of global capitalist colonialism" (20). Second, he argues that "the lack of the decolonization process in the breakup of the Japanese Empire has prevented both Japan and Taiwan from addressing and confronting their particular colonial relationship and the overall Japanese colonial legacy" (ibid). NB: Although this chapter is entitled "Colonizing Taiwan," there is very little in it about actually colonizing Taiwan.
Chapter 2: Argument, Sources, Examples Ching discusses the emergence of anticolonial political movements in Taiwan, arguing that their importance "lies in their formal awareness and articulation of 'Taiwanese' as a distinctive and (semi)autonomous 'ethnos' (minzoku), either within the larger rubric of the Japanese empire or the Han Chinese ethnology" (53). Ching calls this form of Taiwanese identity "neonationalist" because it was "dependent and relational" and suggests that the organization of these discourses "ponies less to the 'internal dynamic' of the colonial subject than to the larger geopolitical changes and exigencies associated with Japanese imperialism and Chinese nationalism in the 1920s and 1930s" (ibid). Neonationalist thought remained situated within two axes, Japan-China and liberalism-Marxism. Thus, for Ching, "the enclosed discursive space of Taiwanese political movements in this tumultuous period paradoxically enabled the proliferation of political and neonationalist identity formations and associations" (56). For Ching, "the ideological bifurcation [in these movements] underscores the inability of the indigenous landowning class to continue to mediate between its own class interest within the colonial economy and the growing impoverished classes of peasants and proletariat" (88).
Chapter 3: Argument, Sources, Examples Ching argues that "the interrogation into the ideology of kôminka necessarily exposes the colonial myth of dôka, or 'assimilation,' that allegedly preceded and made possible the arrival of kôminka in the first place" (90). For Ching, "dôka represented a generalized field of the colonial project that defied a coherent philosophy or systematic policy. …'Japanization' was largely articulated as a problematic of the colonizer, as a failed, or yet to be realized, colonial ideal. … Kôminka therefore, was neither a logical extension nor an abrupt intensification of dôka in the general tendency of Japanese colonialism. Rather, it was a colonial ideology that, by concealing and erasing the inherent contradiction of dôka, radically transformed and circumscribed the manner in which colonial subjectivity and identity were allowed to be articulated and represented" (91). Kôminka, by contrast, was not project but a practice, an objectification, and as a consequence, "for the first time in Taiwanese colonial history, the struggle over identity emerges as the dominant discourse for the colonized" (96). Dôka, by contrast, "served to conceal the gap between the reality of political and economic inequality and the call for cultural assimilation inherent in Japanese colonial practices in Taiwan," and it became dominant in Taiwan precisely as a consequence of growing demands for political autonomy in the 1920s and in the context of growing tension among the imperial powers (104).
Chapter 4: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter looks at "the most impoverished and marginalized population in the Japanese colonial hierarchy: the Taiwanese aborigines" (135). Two implications: one, "the irreducibly uneven development in colonial society," and two, "the particular modes of production (and thus differing possibilities for exploitation) of the aborigines required the Japanese colonial authority to employ a more authoritarian rule with the aborigine population than with the Chinese-Taiwanese population in the plains" (135, 136). After the failed Musha (Wushe) uprising of 1930, "the aborigines were no longer the savage heathen waiting to be civilized through colonial benevolence, but were now imperial subjects assimilated into the Japanese national polity through the expressions of their loyalty to the Emperor" (137). This shift "must be understood as an ideological strategy of containment in the post-Musha era, during which the aborigines were incorporated into the Japanese national body politic when the previous dichotomy between savagery and civility was perceived as no longer useful" (167).
Chapter 5: Argument, Sources, Examples Ching looks at the wartime novel The Orphan of Asia and argues that it is "indicative of a historical moment when the intensifying Pacific war had precluded any revolutionary or reformist corrective to Japanese colonialism and when China and Chinese nationalism no longer provided a clear and viable alternative to Taiwan's emancipation" (176). Ching sees in the novel an "emergent" Taiwan that "must be apprehended and articulated at the same time in relation to the 'residual' Chinese culturalism and the 'dominant' Japanese colonialism--a contradictory and irreducible triple consciousness that is the embodiment of a colonial Taiwanese identity formation" (177). Ching criticizes the marginalization of Taiwan within the academy as well as within geopolitics, and also argues that many recent studies of Taiwan(ese literature) "remain trapped in the kind of politics of identity, that, despite their good intentions, are unable to grasp identity struggles as a historically induced colonial condition" (185-86). For Ching,
Critical assessment: This was not the book I wanted or was entirely expecting, which leads me to conclude that there is still at least one book to be written about the Japanese colonization of Taiwan. It's not that I think Ching is wrong about anything that he says; it's just that I actually wanted a book about the actual process of colonizing Taiwan, and this isn't it.
Main Argument:
…the problem of Japanese colonialism lies not only in political and economic exploitation, but also in its imposition of Japanese culture and customs onto the Taiwanese and the aborigines. … By formulating the problem of Japanese colonialism solely in terms of of the violent imposition of Japaneseness onto the colonized, it remains oblivious to the gap between cultural identification and political discrimination, between becoming Japanese and not having the rights of a Japanese citizen. … I argue that Japanese or Japaneseness, Taiwanese or Taiwaneseness, aborigines or aboriginally, and Chinese or Chineseness--as embodied in compartmentalized national, racial, or cultural categories--do not exist outside the temporality and spatiality of colonial modernity, but are instead enabled by it. (7, 11)Historiographical Engagement: This book is more about theory than it is about actual historiography or history.
Introduction: Argument, Sources, Examples Ching wants to look at the cultural legacy of colonialism, arguing that "colonialism is part and parcel of modernity itself" (11). He also argues that not situating Japanese colonialism in Taiwan with respect to China misses out on the fact that "the triangulation between colonial Taiwan, imperial Japan, and nationalist China formed the terrain where contradictory, conflicting, and complicitous desires and identities were projected, negotiated, and vanquished" (8). Moreover, he also argues that "it was to conceal the fundamental problem of the citizenship [sic] of the non-Japanese within the empire that the categories of 'Japanese' (in dôka) and 'imperial subjects' (in kôminka) were constructed and mobilized" (6).
Chapter 1: Argument, Sources, Examples Ching argues, "first of all, against the particularization of Japanese imperialism and colonialism as somehow different and unique" (19). For Ching, focusing on salient differences "masks the homogenizing force and the collaborative alliance among the various colonizers at different historical moments under shifting geopolitical configurations" (ibid). For Ching, what is important is "the interrelationship and interdependency of the specific Japanese case with, and within, the generality of global capitalist colonialism" (20). Second, he argues that "the lack of the decolonization process in the breakup of the Japanese Empire has prevented both Japan and Taiwan from addressing and confronting their particular colonial relationship and the overall Japanese colonial legacy" (ibid). NB: Although this chapter is entitled "Colonizing Taiwan," there is very little in it about actually colonizing Taiwan.
Chapter 2: Argument, Sources, Examples Ching discusses the emergence of anticolonial political movements in Taiwan, arguing that their importance "lies in their formal awareness and articulation of 'Taiwanese' as a distinctive and (semi)autonomous 'ethnos' (minzoku), either within the larger rubric of the Japanese empire or the Han Chinese ethnology" (53). Ching calls this form of Taiwanese identity "neonationalist" because it was "dependent and relational" and suggests that the organization of these discourses "ponies less to the 'internal dynamic' of the colonial subject than to the larger geopolitical changes and exigencies associated with Japanese imperialism and Chinese nationalism in the 1920s and 1930s" (ibid). Neonationalist thought remained situated within two axes, Japan-China and liberalism-Marxism. Thus, for Ching, "the enclosed discursive space of Taiwanese political movements in this tumultuous period paradoxically enabled the proliferation of political and neonationalist identity formations and associations" (56). For Ching, "the ideological bifurcation [in these movements] underscores the inability of the indigenous landowning class to continue to mediate between its own class interest within the colonial economy and the growing impoverished classes of peasants and proletariat" (88).
Chapter 3: Argument, Sources, Examples Ching argues that "the interrogation into the ideology of kôminka necessarily exposes the colonial myth of dôka, or 'assimilation,' that allegedly preceded and made possible the arrival of kôminka in the first place" (90). For Ching, "dôka represented a generalized field of the colonial project that defied a coherent philosophy or systematic policy. …'Japanization' was largely articulated as a problematic of the colonizer, as a failed, or yet to be realized, colonial ideal. … Kôminka therefore, was neither a logical extension nor an abrupt intensification of dôka in the general tendency of Japanese colonialism. Rather, it was a colonial ideology that, by concealing and erasing the inherent contradiction of dôka, radically transformed and circumscribed the manner in which colonial subjectivity and identity were allowed to be articulated and represented" (91). Kôminka, by contrast, was not project but a practice, an objectification, and as a consequence, "for the first time in Taiwanese colonial history, the struggle over identity emerges as the dominant discourse for the colonized" (96). Dôka, by contrast, "served to conceal the gap between the reality of political and economic inequality and the call for cultural assimilation inherent in Japanese colonial practices in Taiwan," and it became dominant in Taiwan precisely as a consequence of growing demands for political autonomy in the 1920s and in the context of growing tension among the imperial powers (104).
Chapter 4: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter looks at "the most impoverished and marginalized population in the Japanese colonial hierarchy: the Taiwanese aborigines" (135). Two implications: one, "the irreducibly uneven development in colonial society," and two, "the particular modes of production (and thus differing possibilities for exploitation) of the aborigines required the Japanese colonial authority to employ a more authoritarian rule with the aborigine population than with the Chinese-Taiwanese population in the plains" (135, 136). After the failed Musha (Wushe) uprising of 1930, "the aborigines were no longer the savage heathen waiting to be civilized through colonial benevolence, but were now imperial subjects assimilated into the Japanese national polity through the expressions of their loyalty to the Emperor" (137). This shift "must be understood as an ideological strategy of containment in the post-Musha era, during which the aborigines were incorporated into the Japanese national body politic when the previous dichotomy between savagery and civility was perceived as no longer useful" (167).
Chapter 5: Argument, Sources, Examples Ching looks at the wartime novel The Orphan of Asia and argues that it is "indicative of a historical moment when the intensifying Pacific war had precluded any revolutionary or reformist corrective to Japanese colonialism and when China and Chinese nationalism no longer provided a clear and viable alternative to Taiwan's emancipation" (176). Ching sees in the novel an "emergent" Taiwan that "must be apprehended and articulated at the same time in relation to the 'residual' Chinese culturalism and the 'dominant' Japanese colonialism--a contradictory and irreducible triple consciousness that is the embodiment of a colonial Taiwanese identity formation" (177). Ching criticizes the marginalization of Taiwan within the academy as well as within geopolitics, and also argues that many recent studies of Taiwan(ese literature) "remain trapped in the kind of politics of identity, that, despite their good intentions, are unable to grasp identity struggles as a historically induced colonial condition" (185-86). For Ching,
The process of colonial identity formation presented in The Orphan of Asia is instructive in conceptualizing a radical consciousness that insists on the contradiction and multiplicity of identity formation and refuses a finalized and holistic affirmation of 'Japaneseness,' 'Chineseness,' or 'Taiwaneseness. … What I call 'radical consciousness' is the dialectic strife attending the realization of the colonized's presence without essence in the larger matrix of colonial modernity. … The struggle for a radical consciousness is the struggle to occupy a space of hope--a liminal space, an intimation of the anti structure,of what lives in the in-between zone of the personal and the historical--in which one can work toward a praxis of redemption. (209-10)
Critical assessment: This was not the book I wanted or was entirely expecting, which leads me to conclude that there is still at least one book to be written about the Japanese colonization of Taiwan. It's not that I think Ching is wrong about anything that he says; it's just that I actually wanted a book about the actual process of colonizing Taiwan, and this isn't it.