Disappearing Anger: Fujisawa Shigeru’s Psychological Experiments on Aborigines in the Late Colonial Period

This article provides a historical analysis of a psychological experiment on anger conducted on Taiwanese aborigines in the late colonial period by a Japanese psychologist. Viewed within its immediate and historical colonial contexts, the experiment was predicated on and in fact was an extension of actual colonial relations; the anger of the aboriginal subjects against the colonizer-psychologist, which had been disguised from the latter, led to the failure of the experiment to prove its hypothesis. With the analysis, the article discusses the socially embedded nature of psychological experiments and knowledge and the multifaceted social and personal functions served by emotions.