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182 Conclusion Cannibalism in Postwar Literature FORGETTING EMPIRE In this book, I have brought to light several works on the theme of savagery from early twentieth-century Japanese literature, works which have generally been neglectedinpreviousscholarship .Bycloselyattendingtothistheme,Ihavedemonstrated that Japanese writers during the colonial period created elaborate figurations of the savage and of the South, which changed over time in tandem with changes in the empire itself. I have also highlighted the tendency of Japanese writers to use these figures to talk, allegorically, about themselves and their identity as colonizers. Furthermore , I have shown that these texts exemplify Japanese imperial culture in general , which both imitated Western imperialism and differed greatly from its model. Intheirfictionalworks,thesewritersvoicefeelingsofambivalenceandanxietyabout their place as colonizers, a constellation of feelings that derives from the triangular nature of Japanese empire and its positioning between the West and the colonized peoples. In addition, they often claim to identify with the colonized, often employingtherhetoricofsameness ,akeyfeatureofJapaneseimperialdiscoursesingeneral. Finally, rather than study literature in a vacuum, I have shown that literary works are tied by numerous threads to the circulation of tropes and stereotypes of savagery in Japanese popular media and in social discourses generally. In my study I have paid particular attention to the creation of new paradigms for understanding savages and the South that developed during the colonial period. Nitobe Inazō, who saw Momotarō and his conquest of ogres as an allegory for Japanese imperialism in the South Seas, incorporated elements of this folktale in his lectures on colonial policy at Tokyo Imperial University, to such an extent that later historians refer to his theories as Momotarōism. Furthermore, ethnography and anthropology became the “sciences of savagery” par excellence, as I have shown through my studies of Mori Ushinosuke and Hijikata Hisakatsu, who both spent most of their careers in the colonies. Besides carrying out important fieldwork for decades in Taiwan and Micronesia respectively, these men profoundly influenced Nakajima Atsushi and Satō Haruo, two writers who engaged with ethnography as a perspective on cultural otherness and as a form of writing in their creative works. While I can hardly claim to have exhausted the theme of savagery in Japanese colonial literature, I have shown that there exists a rich vein of works on this theme that merits further study. Looking beyond the limits of my own research, I would add that prospective researchers of Japanese colonial period literature encounter a plethora of works, mostly little studied or wholly unknown. Almost all the most celebrated names of modern Japanese literature—from Yosano Akiko to Abe Kōbō—traveled to or lived in the colonies and wrote about their experiences in essays, travel journals, and stories .1 In the 1930s and 1940s, many of the recipients of the Naoki and Akutagawa prizes, Japan’s most prestigious literary awards, set their works in the gaichi, that is, in overseas colonies under Japanese rule.2 Nevertheless, literary scholars have, by and large, neglected these colonial-period works during most of the postwar period. Even in the case of canonical writers such as Akutagawa and Satō, scholars haveoverlookedtheir fictiondealingwiththecolonies. Therearenofull-length studies of many lesser known writers such as Ōshika Taku, who wrote a significant body of fiction set in Taiwan. Why have scholars ignored these writers and neglected to study this rich vein of literature? In 1984, Marius Jansen wrote an essay that sums up four decades of research about the Japanese empire: “Imperialism never became a very important part of the [Japanese] national consciousness. There were no Japanese Kiplings, there was little popular mystique about Japanese overlordship and relatively little national selfcongratulation . . . . The passing of empire in Japan evoked little trauma and few regrets . It has in fact scarcely been discussed at all.”3 When Jansen notes that there were no Japanese Kiplings, he offers one reason why scholars have overlooked Japanese colonial literature, treating it as deservedly forgotten. In this view, literary works from the period simply lack literary merit and are inevitably mimetic or derivative— secondhand Kipling, as it were—in nature.4 Indeed, Jansen implies that Japanese have justly consigned, not merely works of colonial period literature but their imperial period as a whole, to the dustbin of history.5 One reason why this plethoric Japanese literature has been consigned to oblivion has to do with the modalities of “decolonization” in the Japanese case, which greatly differed from that of French and British colonies. The Japanese empire “simply vanished” after August 1945. From this moment, Koreans, Taiwanese, and Micronesians were liberated...

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