Momotarō in the South Seas： Folklore, Colonial Policy Studies, and Parody

TY - JOUR

T1 - Momotarō in the South Seas： Folklore, Colonial Policy Studies, and Parody

AU - Tierney, Robert

N1 - Publisher Copyright: © 2020, Global Institute for Japanese Studies, Korea University. All rights reserved.

PY - 2020/12

Y1 - 2020/12

N2 - Momotarō became a fixture in the education of Japanese elementary school pupils during the early Meiji period. In the early 20th century, his journey to the ogre island was often conflated with Japan’s advance toward the South Seas. In this article, I compare two rewritings of the folktale：Nitobe Inazō’s essay “The Folktale Momotarō” (1907) and Akutagawa Ryūnosuke’s story “Momotarō” (1925). Nitobe, Japan’s first professor of colonial policy studies, treated the tale of Momotarō as a pedagogical tool that could fire the imagination of insular Japanese youth, enabling them to look beyond the confines of the Japanese archipelago. By contrast, Akutagawa focalized his retelling of the folktale by adopting the point of view of humanized ogres living peacefully on an island paradise in the South Seas. In this iconoclastic version, Momotarō is portrayed as a cruel invader who plunders the island and reduces its inhabitants to slavery. At the intersection of folklore, propaganda and parody, Momotarō emerges as an embodiment of the defining of self and other in the age of empire.

AB - Momotarō became a fixture in the education of Japanese elementary school pupils during the early Meiji period. In the early 20th century, his journey to the ogre island was often conflated with Japan’s advance toward the South Seas. In this article, I compare two rewritings of the folktale：Nitobe Inazō’s essay “The Folktale Momotarō” (1907) and Akutagawa Ryūnosuke’s story “Momotarō” (1925). Nitobe, Japan’s first professor of colonial policy studies, treated the tale of Momotarō as a pedagogical tool that could fire the imagination of insular Japanese youth, enabling them to look beyond the confines of the Japanese archipelago. By contrast, Akutagawa focalized his retelling of the folktale by adopting the point of view of humanized ogres living peacefully on an island paradise in the South Seas. In this iconoclastic version, Momotarō is portrayed as a cruel invader who plunders the island and reduces its inhabitants to slavery. At the intersection of folklore, propaganda and parody, Momotarō emerges as an embodiment of the defining of self and other in the age of empire.

KW - Colonial Policy Studies

KW - Folklore

KW - Momotarō

KW - Parody

KW - Propaganda

UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85148959376&partnerID=8YFLogxK

UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=85148959376&partnerID=8YFLogxK

U2 - 10.22628/bcjjl.2020.11.1.13

DO - 10.22628/bcjjl.2020.11.1.13

M3 - Article

AN - SCOPUS:85148959376

SN - 2383-5222

VL - 11

SP - 13

EP - 25

JO - Border Crossings

JF - Border Crossings

IS - 1

ER -