Savage Construction and Civility Making: Japanese Colonialism and Taiwanese Aboriginal Representation

In 1911 Japanese colonial officials led forty-three selected aboriginal leaders from Taiwan on one of the seven “tours to Japan proper” (naichi kanko). The tours were organized in conjunction with the initial stage of military subjugation of the natives after the pacification of the Taiwanese-Chinese islanders. Four such tours took place between 1911 and 1912 at the height of the military campaign under the directives of the fifth governor-general, Sakuma Samata. Previously, the colonial government had only sponsored one tour in 1897 and, since 1912, only two tours, in 1918 and 1925, respectively. These tours presented a calculated structure of visibility. The visuality of Japanese metropolitan grandeur was to complement the brutality of Japanese colonial force in the larger colonial “enterprise of governing the savages” (rihan jigyo).¹ The visiting savages (banjin) were directed to and shown various industrial and military facilities, the imperial palace, and Shinto shrines. These carefully orchestrated itineraries were intended to impress upon the aborigines Japanese military dominance and cultural superiority. Thus, despite being the “subjects of seeing,” the aborigines, unable to initiate the action of seeing spontaneously under the technological and discursive arrangements of colonial power, remained deprived of the ability of “seeing as subjects.” To a large extent the tours succeeded in constructing a field of vision in which the aborigines succumbed to the sights/sites of power.² However, the seemingly indestructible colonial relationship was at least momentarily disrupted nineteen years later when Monarudao, one of the young tribal leaders on the 1911 tour, led a violent and bloody rebellion against the colonial authority in what came to be known as the Musha Incident.

The uprising and its subsequent merciless quelling by the authorities effected a necessary rearticulation of Japanese colonial governmentality whereby acculturation, in the form of imperialization (kominka), emerged as the privileged sphere in which colonial power was exercised and consolidated. The incident was hotly debated in the Japanese Diet, and criticism of the colonial government was voiced from both within Japan and abroad. As a result, rather than the crude political operations that had thus far characterized the colonial relationship between the ruling Japanese and the ruled natives, in the post-Musha period the Japanese attempted to maintain their legitimacy through a discourse of incorporation and assimilation. I argue in this essay that after the Musha Incident, we encounter a visible shift in aborigine representations in the circulation of the culture of colonialism. The aborigines are no longer the savage heathen waiting to be civilized through colonial benevolence; they are imperial subjects assimilated into the Japanese national polity through the expressions of their loyalty to the emperor. This shift in representations, I argue, does not constitute a real or radical transformation. Despite colonialist intention and authorization, it is instead a transfiguration that remains trapped and inscribed within the relationality and dichotomy of savagery and civility. The problematic that I address here is akin to what Etienne Balibar has questioned regarding the notion of a “neo-racism.”³ On one hand, are we seeing a new historical upsurge in representations and policies toward the Taiwanese aborigines that can be explained by a crisis conjuncture or by other causes? On the other hand, in its themes and its social significance, is what we are seeing only a new colonial discourse, irreducible to earlier models, or is it a mere tactical adaptation?

I will consider two popular representations of aborigines from the 1910s and the 1930s, “The Story of Goho” and “The Bell of Sayon,” respectively, that best delineate this shift from natural savages to national subjects.⁴ “Goho” is the Japanese adaptation of a Chinese folktale that narrates the benevolence and self-sacrifice of Goho, a Ch'ing official who supposedly convinced the aborigines to give up their head-hunting practices. “Sayon” is a colonial dramatization and commemoration of an aboriginal...