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ABSTRACT
Studies of colonial-era Taiwan’s literary and cultural production have been growing steadily in number since the 1990s but are mostly dedicated to constructing a coherent resistance-centred postcolonial historiography. Such a reading has some validity but is limited and tendentious because it reduces the dynamic interactions between Japanese and Taiwanese to an artificial binary. This article takes the concept “folklore” and related terms such as “locality” as its main point of inquiry, offering a revisionist reading of the diverse nationalist articulations of “folklore” and locality in three case studies: the diverse voices in Minzoku Taiwan, the differences between Shimada Kinji and Huang Deshi’s historiographies of Taiwanese literature, and Lü Heruo’s works on Taiwan’s cultural practices in the heyday of Japan’s imperialisation campaign. Through textual analysis, this article argues that the colonisers’ identity was in constant need of re-forging, whereas the colonial policies and what the colonised writers hoped to achieve were not always incompatible. The colonisers’ call for revitalising local cultures, in all the cases in point, provided a discursive space and highly contested ground for the colonisers and colonised to redraw the imperial boundaries and negotiate their own identities.
Acknowledgments
An earlier version of this article was presented at a workshop held at Harvard in late April 2016, while I was a visiting scholar at the Yenching Institute. I would like to thank the three discussants and moderators, Professor Naoki Sakai, Professor David Der-wei Wang and Professor Catherine Yeh, for their participation and feedback. I would like to thank Professor Peng Hsiao-yen for reminding me that Provençal literature had its own tradition until approximately the 18th century and thus generated tension with French literature as national literature. I am also grateful for the constructive comments from the two anonymous reviewers.
Notes
1. See Yang (1941, p. 3) and Kanaseki (1941, p. 3).
2. Similarly, Wang Shilang (1981) considered Minzoku Taiwan’s leading figure, Ikeda Toshio (1923–1974), to be a man who truly loved Taiwan, and a great contributor to Taiwan’s folklore studies.
3. The journal’s veteran contributor Kokubu Naoichi (1908–2005) rejected Kawamura’s view. See Kokubu (Citation1997) for his response to Kawamura, and Wu Micha (2006) for the debate.
4. Lee criticised Ma’s commemoration of the second Sino–Japanese War for “harassing Japan and pleasing Communist China” (see Li et al., 2015).
5. Tierney detects a “temporary distancing” strategy of the Japanese colonisers who asserted Japan’s superiority over colonial subjects and recovered their presumably pure primordial past at the same time. Xiong examines how Nishikawa Mitsuru and Ōuchi Takao renegotiated their relationship with Japan proper and its greater empire when they ventured out of Japan. Chang Wen-hsun (2017) argued that the Japanese scholars involved in Minzoku Taiwan (such as Kanaseki Takeo) questioned Yanagita Kunio’s folklore studies and identified themselves as the “outsiders” of imperial knowledge production.
6. Kleeman compares the works of expatriate Japanese writers in Taiwan and Taiwan’s native authors. Thornber uses the concept of artistic contact nebulae to explore the intra-East Asian literary exchange, mainly Chinese, Korean and Taiwanese authors’ emulation of Japanese texts.
7. Kanaseki Takeo was an anatomy professor, anthropologist, and, under the penname Rin Yūsei (C: Lin Xiongsheng), author of detective fiction.
8. For the relationship between folklore research and Japan’s co-prosperity ideal, see Wang Shao-chun (2012).
9. For Yanagi’s notions of folk-craft, see Kikuchi (Citation2004) and Brandt (Citation2007).
10. This inferior presentation of colonised subjectivity was perhaps due to a lack of an aesthetic apparatus (see Brink, Citation2011).
11. Chang Hsiu-sheng (2014) considers that Taiwanese intellectuals’ criticism of Taiwan’s bad social practices in Minzoku Taiwan and Japan’s imperialisation campaign are similar.
12. Earlier relevant efforts included the call to collect folk songs in Taiwan xinminbao in 1927, and Lian Heng’s proposal to preserve the Taiwanese language in 1929.
13. Published originally in Wuren bao, 9–11 (16 August–1 September 1930) and compiled in Yijiusanling niandai Taiwan xiangtu wenxue lunzhan ziliao huibian edited by Nakajima Toshio (2003).
14. Guo Qiusheng further elaborated Huang’s idea in 1931. See Guo’s essay “A Proposal for Establishing a ‘Taiwanese Language’” in Nakajima’s edited volume mentioned in fn. 13, pp. 7–52.
15. For example, Hirasawa Teitō (also known as Hirasawa Heishichi), an employee at Taiwan’s Government-General, published Taiwan no kayō to meicho monogatari (Taiwan’s Songs and Famous Tales) in 1917.
16. Shimada planned to write a book, tentatively entitled Kareitō bungakushi (The History of Literature from Taiwan), on the literary activities of Japanese authors who came to Taiwan during the Meiji and Taishō periods, but it was never finished (see Hashimoto, Citation2012).
17. In his 1941 article “Taiwan no bungakuteki kagenmi” (The past, present and future of literature in Taiwan), Shimada compares Nishikawa Mitsuru with Yeats.
18. Various Japanese and Taiwanese critics appropriated Taine’s ideas during that time. Shimada, in his 1933 essay, acknowledged the importance of Taine’s ideas but quoted Auguste Angelier’s criticism of Taine to identify the weakness of Taine’s concept of literature. For the application of Taine’s theory in colonial Taiwan, see Lin (Citation2015).
19. In Huang’s view, the “indigenous” population seems to refer to Taiwan’s Han people, who arrived before the Qing immigrants and Japanese colonisers, instead of Taiwan’s aborigines.
20. Tarumi Chie (2002) points out that Hayashi Fusao used the term “faeces realism” in 1935, after his literary reorientation from Marxism to romanticism, when he criticised Japan’s left-wing writers who contributed to the magazine Jinmin Bunko (People’s Library). Through tracing Hamada Haya’s and Nishikawa Mitsuru’s relationship with Japan’s romanticists, as well as Zhang Wenhuan’s and Lü Heruo’s interactions with the Jinmin Bunko writers or critics, she argues that the 1943 “faeces realism” debate in Taiwan should be seen within this larger context.
21. Some of Nagai’s works were banned during wartime. After 1945, he was known for his anti-war attitude.
22. Ye later denied authorship of this 1943 article (see Peng, Citation2002).
23. Lü wrote very little from June 1937 to February 1942. Tarumi Chie (2012) argues that 1942 marked Lü’s turn to folkway writing. She further points out that this thematic change should be considered together with Lü’s commentaries on the poor acting of “Madame Chin”, his involvement in Taiwan Bungaku, and his relationship with Minzoku Taiwan.
24. Lü’s contributions appeared in Minzoku Taiwan 2.1 (January 1942) and 3.11 (November 1943). The former depicts wedding customs, whereas the latter deals with the issue of child brides.
25. For an analysis of the Life-enriching Drama Research Society’s inheritance of 1930s realism and its expression of (Taiwanese) cultural nationalism, see Shih (Citation2016).
26. Wu Rwei-ren (2016, p. 20) expresses a similar concern. He argues that the construction of Taiwan’s subjectivity discourse must be built simultaneously on Taiwan’s autonomy in relation to both China and Japan.