Primitivism and Imperial Literature of Taiwan and the South Seas

Japan's colonial literature of Taiwan and the South Seas offers opposed images of indigenous people best summed up by the contrast of the violent headhunter and the happy primitive. Japanese imperialists were quick to adopt the panoply of colonial discourses that had accumulated during five centuries of Western exploration and colonization of non-Western parts of the world. This chapter discusses the cases of Sato Haruo and Nakajima Atsushi, Japanese writers were stimulated by the speculations of anthropologists and by translations of Western writers. Sato wrote a dozen literary works based on his Taiwan experiences, including the travel journal Musha and a short story Demon Bird, both set in aboriginal Taiwan. Nakajima Atsushi writes allegories of the South Seas in the early 1940s. Nakajima was aware that his own views of the South Seas had been shaped by his encounter with Western writers. In the story Mahiru, the narrator takes himself to task for the inauthenticity of his views of Micronesia.