Under an Imperial Sun: Japanese Colonial Literature of Taiwan and the South

2. Taming the Barbaric

17 2 Taming the Barbaric After the initial burst of excitement in the late nineteenth century , interest in the South Seas seems to have waned. It rebounded dramatically in the 1930s, however, when the comic strip The Adventurous Dankichi (Bôken Dankichi 冒険ダン吉) gained popularity. This narrative by Shimada Keizô was serialized in the popular youth magazine Shônen kurabu 少年倶楽部 from 1933 to 1939. The comical young man Dankichi dozes off one day while ¤shing and awakes to ¤nd himself marooned on a lush tropical jungle island full of coconut trees and savages. With his wisdom and bravery, he soon rules over the various tribes as their chief. To remind us that he came from a civilized society, the cartoonist was careful to draw the perky Dankichi always wearing shoes and a wristwatch. Dankichi’s resourcefulness and the advantages of civilization (clothes, shoes, wristwatch) soon gain him the loyalty of the natives, who are referred to as kuronbô 黒ん坊, or “blackies.” Initially , Dankichi gives his native followers names such as Banana, Pine, and Betelnut, but when this system becomes too complicated, he just writes numbers on their chests and refers to them as “Number 1,” “Number 2,” and so on. Besides bringing this numerical order to the native population, Dankichi also introduces to the primitive society institutions like schools, hospitals, a military force, a postal service, and the concept of money.1 Shimada Keizô spoke of his creation, Dankichi, ful¤lling a dream 18 Writing the Empire he had harbored since he was a young boy—a dream of traveling to “a warm southern island . . . to become the chief of the uninhabited island , where animals are my subjects and there are neither money worries nor homework.” The tropical island of the barbarians was clearly modeled after the South Paci¤c islands entrusted to Japan by the League of Nations. Shimada later reminisced: “At that time, the South Paci¤c islands were under Japanese rule. The ideology of a southward advance (nanshin 南進 ) had been realized in the development of the South. All the attention in Japan was on the South, so I thought that would be an ideal setting for Dankichi’s adventure.”2 The Dankichi story fed the public’s interest in the exotic South Paci¤c. The phenomenon has much in common with the West’s fascination with tropical islands represented in popular works such as Stevenson’s Treasure Island or the jungle tales of Burroughs’ Tarzan series and Kipling’s Jungle Book. This “Dankichi syndrome,” as Yano Tôru calls it, provided a lighthearted, entertaining depiction that reinforced the stereotypical conceptualization of the South in Japan as backward and primitive, full of fearsome headhunters and cannibals. Kawamura Minato points out the inaccuracies that grew out of a lack of¤rsthand knowledge of the region—re¶ected in the diverse range of fauna among Dankichi’s animal followers, including creatures native to Africa or the desert such as lions, elephants, giraffes, and camels. Kawamura believes that one function of the Dankichi stories was to portray the mature Japanese state, by contrast, as a modern, civilized nation. The uneducated, backward barbarians in the stories highlighted the civilized nature of the Japanese and reaf¤rmed their cultural superiority. In other words, the Dankichi syndrome was a Japanese version of orientalism by proxy.3 Another example culled from the popular consciousness of the same period is the hit song by Ishida Hitomatsu 石田一松, “The Chief’s Daughter” (“Shûchô no musume” 酋長の娘).4 Lyrics include: “My lover is the daughter of the chief. Even though her skin is dark, she is considered a beauty in the South Seas. . . . Just south of the Equator, on the Marshall Islands / She dances alluringly, under the shady coconut trees.” Through the new media of radio and record albums, the song spread throughout Japan in the 1930s and fed into the frenzy of interest in the remote, exotic tropics. These popular representations of the South Seas share certain features common to representations of the foreign and exotic. The location is far away; the inhabitants are often seen as only partially human; Taming the Barbaric 19 and the social structures and taboos that characterize civilization are absent. Given the pressures in Japanese society to conform to accepted norms and live a conventional life, the world of the South Seas seemed an ideal escape from civilization. In the next chapter we will discuss a person who did just that, Nakajima Atsushi...