c h a p t e r e i g h tt e x t The Adventures of Dank.docx

c h a p t e r e i g h t
t e x t
The Adventures of Dankichi
s h i m a d a k e i z ō
c o n t e x t
The South Seas/Micronesia, Taiwan,
China, Korea
c r i t i q u e
Popular Orientalism and
Japanese Views of Asia
k a w a m u r a m i n a t o
M a n g a a r t i s t Shimada Keizō (1900–1973) began his
career as a political satirist, but turned to children’s manga in
the early 1930s,
continuing to work in that field after World War II. Together
with Tagawa
Suihō’s The Soldier Dog (Norakuro, 1931–1941), The
Adventures of Dankichi,
Shimada’s bestknown work, is generally recognized as the
most popular
manga before the appearance of those by Tezuka Osamu (1928–
1989) in the
postwar era.

Reflecting the diversity of manga art at the time, The
Adventures of Dan-
kichi, serialized in the Boys’ Club (Shōnen Kurabu) magazine
from 1933 to
1939, is written in the picture-story format in which each page
is split into
narrative and illustration sections. The story depicts the
adventures of Dan-
kichi and his mouse friend, Mister Kari, on a tropical island.
Dankichi and
Mister Kari fall asleep while fishing, drift to the island of
darkskinned “bar
barians,” and find themselves on the run. However, with his
own quick
wit and Mister Kari’s resourcefulness, Dankichi beats back the
natives and
becomes their king.
<i>Reading Colonial Japan : Text, Context, and Critique</i>,
edited by Michele Mason, and Helen Lee, Stanford University
Press, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central,
http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ucsc/detail.action?docID=8
44030.
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Regularly calling himself a cultural critic (bungei hyōronka)
rather than
a scholar, Kawamura Minato writes on various genres of texts,
including
manga, and on a wide variety of subjects, often those that
complicate con-
ventional notions of Japanese culture. He is well-known for his
pioneer-
ing works that examine the relationship between colonialism
and modern
Japanese literature, but this important contribution should be
understood
as only one expression of his consistent interest in
defamiliarizing the famil-
iar. His numerous publications include Showa Literature as
Literature of the
Other (Ikyō no Shōwa bungaku, 1990), Japanese Literature of
the South Seas
and Sakhalin (Nan’yō/Karafuto no Nihon bungaku, 1994), and
The Collapse of
Manchukuo (Manshū hōkai, 1997).
Kawamura’s essay “Popular Orientalism and Japanese Views of
Asia”
(Taishū orientarizumu to Ajia ninshiki, 1993) offers a helpful
synthesis of a
number of crucial issues covered in this volume and reflects his
ability to
deftly navigate diverse genres and contexts.
Note Regarding Discriminatory Language and Imagery

The manga that follows, The Adventures of Dankichi, is
included in this vol-
ume as a historical document. Its discriminatory language and
imagery were
typical of the time it was created and do not reflect the views
and opinions
of the editors or Stanford University Press.
Given that an overarching aim of this anthology is to consider
the perva-
siveness of imperial ideology, the visuals and wording of this
manga, while
disturbing and offensive to a modern audience, manifestly
reveal the extent
to which such ideas were naturalized at every level of Japanese
society.
Permission to translate and publish this text was graciously
granted on
the condition it appear with Kawamura Minato’s essay “Popular
Oriental-
ism and Japanese Views of Asia,” which properly contextualizes
its moment
of production. We strongly advise against any unlawful
reproduction of
this work.
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It was a bright, clear day.
Until now, Dankichi had
been fishing in his boat.
Not catching a single fish,
Dankichi became sleepy.
“Oh my gosh! Dan-chan,
have you fallen asleep?”1
Before long, the eyes of
Dankichi’s good friend, the
black mouse Mister Kari
also glazed over.2 So the boat
began drifting along with the
waves and the breeze.

1. Chan is a diminutive suffix, which is attached to the end of
names and indicates friend-
liness and closeness. Thus, Dankichi and Dan-chan are the
same character.
2. In Japanese the mouse is called Karikō, kō meaning “Sir” or
“Mister.”
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Suddenly Mister Kari
awoke, and, looking around,
he saw that the boat had
drifted to a strange land;

the scenery was unfamiliar.
What’s more, the boat was
teetering atop a large rock.
“Oh no! We’re in quite a
pickle here! The boat was
pulled by the tide, and now
it’s stuck on top of this
rock. Oh man, this is bad,”
exclaimed Kari.
Surprised, the ever-
responsible Mister Kari
looked at Dankichi, but
the boy was still pleasantly
snoring away. “Jeez, what a sleepyhead!”
Just then a strange wind
started to blow from behind
them. “Yikes!” When
Mister Kari turned around,
there was a strange and
mysterious bird swooping
down at Dankichi. “Holy
smokes! Dan-chan, look
out!”
Dankichi opened his eyes
at the sound of Mister Kari’s
absurd outburst, exclaiming,
“What’s the matter with
you? You’re so loud.”
“I’m not loud! Look!”
When Dankichi looked,
he saw a frightening and
mysterious bird with its
beak wide open, flying straight at him. “Oh my goodness! Th-
this is
so terrible!”

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The boat was stuck on
top of a narrow rock, so
it shook with every move
they made. “Aah! Oh
gods, please help me!”
Dankichi pleaded. Isn’t
it funny how people only
ask the gods for help
when they’re in a pinch?
In a panic Dankichi
and Mister Kari tried
to hide in a corner. The

boat, along with the two
friends, fell from atop the
high rock with a banging
and rattling noise.
“Just as I thought,
the gods are good for
something,” said Dankichi.
The boat had completely
turned upside down during
the fall, saving Dankichi
from the sharp beak of the
mysterious bird.
“In such a close
call, it’s amazing you
remembered the gods,”
said Mister Kari with his
heart still pounding and
the overturned boat still
covering Dankichi. “Dan-
chan, the mysterious bird is
not here. Come on out!”
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Finally crawling out from
under the boat, Dankichi
carefully surveyed his
surroundings. Dankichi
said, “Hey, this is a tropical
land. That’s one big palm
tree.” While looking around
restlessly at the surrounding
area for strange things, Kari
suddenly plunged into the
forest and brought back a
handy-looking branch and a
piece of strong-looking vine.
“Now Dankichi please make
a bow with this. Nothing
worries me more than being
in a place like this without a
weapon.”
“I bet you’re hungry,
I’m pretty hungry myself.
I wonder if there’s any
food around here,” said
Dankichi.
“The tropics are full of

food! There are coconuts,
bread fruit, pineapples,
bananas, and various other
things. Hey look, there’re
some coconuts. Let’s eat
’em.”
“But I’m not very good
at climbing trees.”
“Why not shoot it down
with the bow we just
made.”
“Wow Kari, you really
are smart!”
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He took aim, released
the arrow, and scored
a splendid hit on the
coconut. The coconut fell.
“Ouch! Who’s there?
What’s the big idea hitting
me with this in the middle
of my nap?” came a roar
from the jungle. Neither
Dankichi nor Mister Kari
could have known there
were lions living on the
island. Unaware of this,
they had carelessly shot
down the coconut.
“Oh no, Kari, this is bad.
It’s a lion!!”
Wild animals such as
lions will usually run away
from people, but when
attacked they will fight
back. The offended lion
was angry. If you could
understand lion-language,
this is what you would
have heard: “Wait ’til I
get my paws on you, you
rascal.” The lion chased
them.
“Aah. It’s dangerous!
Run! Run!” Dankichi
turned to shout, already
ten yards ahead.

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Dankichi had the strong
legs of a marathon runner,
something that can’t just
be bought in a department
store. Running around the
mountains in confusion,
they saw signs of people.
“Kari, there are people!
There are people! There are
a lot of houses.” They were
ecstatic that this time they
would be saved by people
not gods. “Hey! Help us!”

shouted Dankichi, making
the biggest mistake of his
life. Sure they were people,
but they weren’t helpful
people. They were people
who ate people.
“Aah, cannibals!” Even
the athletic Dankichi felt
his legs shake. “Kari, what
should we do?”
“What should we do??
Stop talking already and
run!”
“So... it’s more running?”
“What choice do we
have?”
Since they didn’t have
any weapons there wasn’t
much else they could do.
Behind them, the lion! In
front, the cannibals! They
dashed to the right.
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“Phew, we’re finally in the
clear,” gasped Dankichi.
“What a shock! But we
aren’t out of the woods yet,
Dan-chan; the natives know
this area really well. They’ll
find us for sure. Hey! Why
don’t you use mud from this
river to disguise yourself?”
said Mister Kari.
“Disguise? But how?”
“Just dissolve some of it
in the water and plaster it
on your skin. Then you’ll
become a blackie!”
“Jeepers! Great idea Mister
Kari!” Dankichi said as he set
about applying his blackie camouflage.
“Oh wow, you did it!”
cried Mister Kari.
“You think this’ll be good
enough to fool them? I bet
I look like an honest to god
blackie.”

“For sure, you did a super
job!”
“Well then, I think it’s
time to make an appearance
over at the camp.”
“You think it’ll be ok?”
“Don’t fret, it’ll be fine.”
Dankichi is a Japanese
man, and on top of that, the
“Dan” in his name stands for
“danger,” so he fears nothing.
“Duuum, a little blackie is heading this way. Hey, little black
boy,
where are you going?” said a guard at the gate of the natives’
camp.
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“Do you know who I
am? I’m the Chief ’s aunt’s
father’s son. You lot are
clearly inferior to me, so
show me to the Chief,”
Dankichi proclaimed.
“Huh? Oh really…that’s
kind of weird, but okay,” the
guard said and proceeded to
guide Dankichi to the Chief.
He was able to hoodwink
the Chief as well and a
massive feast was brought
out. Dankichi and Mister
Kari proceeded to stuff
themselves. As they feasted,
the sky suddenly clouded
over and it started to pour.
“Yikes! It’s raining,”
said Mister Kari as he
suddenly realized that
they were completely
wet. Dankichi’s disguise
had washed off, and
he had returned to his
original white appearance.
Unaware, Dankichi
continued to happily
munch on his banana.
The Chief ’s suspicious
face quickly melted into an

expression of great anger.
“Dummm. That’s a white
boy. He really fooled me,”
said the Chief.
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t h e a d v e n t u r e s o f d a n k
Previously, Dankichi had
disguised himself as a
blackie and snuck into
the natives’ camp to have
a feast. However, his
identity was revealed when

his disguise washed away
in the rain. The Chief,
realizing he’d been fooled,
was so furious he looked
like steam was going to
shoot out of his ears.
“You rat! How dare you
deceive me, the King!”
“Jeepers Creepers!”
yelped Dankichi as he had
only just now realized he
had turned back into a
white boy. But it was too
late; the Chief was charging at them with a spear in hand. The
two
friends dodged the spear and ran off into the dense jungle
foliage.
Mister Kari began to scramble around for something to use and
found a strong vine.
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“Kari, we’re in a quite a
hurry here. What’re you
doing, picking that thing
up?” asked Dankichi, a
little worried.
“With this we’ll capture
the Chief. Now I’m going
to make a loop, so please
hold this over there.”
As they hid in the
shadows of the trees, the
Chief ran up with puffs of
steam shooting from his
head. At that instant, his
foot was caught perfectly in
the loop the two had made
and, like a football, he
tumbled head over heels with a great thud!
It is true that savages are
simply lacking in wisdom.
After all, the Chief was
caught alive.
“Hey Mr. Barbarian, you
can’t match the wisdom
of the white man. If you
promise you won’t eat us
from now on, I’ll forgive

you.”
“Yes! We most certainly
will not eat the white
master. We’ve had quite
enough.” Tears like great
lumps of charcoal flowed
from the Chief ’s eyes as he
apologized. At this, Little
Dankichi unfastened the vine, seizing the crown and spear.
“As usual, Dan-chan never fails to amaze.”
“Kari, you yourself are quite amazing as well.”
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The crown Dankichi

captured was the symbol
of the king. With this
crown he could rule over
the savages. “Yahoo! From
now on I am the King of
this island, you know!”
Lost in his happiness,
Dankichi sang, “Yay!
Yippee!” and celebrated
with a native’s dance.
At that moment, a roar
loud enough to topple
a mountain came from
behind them. Startled, Kari
turned around only to see...
trouble! It was an elephant!
A most enormous elephant!
Of course the elephants
found in zoos, circuses,
and the like are quiet and
rather tame, but as for the
elephants of the wild, they
are bad-tempered beyond
belief. One will trample
and crush anything that
is in its path. Swinging a
trunk the size of a chimney,
it bounded closer, and
the startled Dankichi was
horrified. With a “Yikes!!”
he suddenly made as if to
run into the field, but Kari
hastily shouted out, “Dan-
chan, it’s dangerous to run
that way, escape this way

between these thick trees!”
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Following Kari’s
command, Dankichi dove
between the two trees.
“Heyyy stupid Elephant.
Hey! Over here.” Kari, with
the wisdom of a seasoned
general, stood between the
two trees and ridiculed the
giant elephant thousands of
times bigger than himself.
In a rage, the elephant flew

towards him. This was
Kari’s plan. The elephant
was sandwiched between
the two trees and was
unable to move.
“Long live Dankichi…
even the elephant was caught alive!”
Once again saved from a jam by the quick thinking of Kari,
Dankichi returned to where
he’d disguised himself as a
blackie since he needed to
get his clothes.
“Kari, it was just around
here, wasn’t it?”
“Yeah it was just by the
stream over there.”
When Dankichi looked
forward, he was surprised by
what he saw. It seemed that
earlier, someone up in a tree
had seen Dankichi in his
clothes. Wobbling around
and looking very odd was a
monkey, wearing Dankichi’s
clothes and swinging
around a pair of pants.
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“What the heck!? What
should we do, Kari?”
Unfortunately, because
the monkey was quick, it
was able to escape. “Hey,
it’s going over there!”
squeaked Kari. Then the
monkey stopped, not
sure where to go.
“Alright! Let’s catch
him, Kari!” Dankichi
jumped across with
great concentration. The
monkey was surprised.
He had never seen a
white person wearing the
Chief ’s crown. He was
bewildered and climbed
up a tree to hop across the river.

“That darn monkey! But
I can jump over that river
no problem!” exclaimed
Dankichi.
“Are you sure that’s a
good idea?” asked Mister
Kari.
“Don’t worry about it.
Watch this!” Dankichi got
on his mark. He started
running. He made a
splendid jump!
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Usually Dankichi
wouldn’t have any problems
with a jump like this.
However, sometimes things
don’t go quite as planned.
The spear sank into the
muddy river bottom, and
Dankichi was stuck hanging
over the middle of the river.
“Dang!” cursed Dankichi,
but saying that wouldn’t
be any help to him now.
Hanging from the spear
like a piece of laundry on
a clothes- line, Dankichi
looked down and saw that
this time the danger was
very real.
Below him was a huge
alligator with its mouth
open wide, waiting for
Dankichi to fall. Surely if
he had known there were
alligators in this river, he
might have reconsidered
this plan. “Kari! I’m in real
trouble now!”
Kari, observing the
events, thought, “Hmm,
what can I do?” Soon
enough, the wise Kari had
something in mind. He
quickly ran up a tree, stick
in hand, and threw it at
the alligator.

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Kari’s aim was true and
the stick landed on target
in the alligator’s gaping
mouth. They had escaped
that deadly situation by a
hairsbreadth.
Dankichi’s weight pulled
him down towards the
alligator’s mouth at the
same time as the branch
landed. Naturally, the
alligator, unable to close

its mouth with the stick
there, was frantic. In that
instant, Dankichi and Kari
crossed the river.
“Thanks, Kari, you
saved me.”
As the two friends
searched here and there for
the mischievous monkey, it
started to get dark.
“Kari, it’s getting dark,
what should we do?”
“We don’t have any
choice but to sleep here
tonight; but we’re in the
wilderness, so wild animals
will probably come out
during the night. We
should make a fire to
frighten them off.”
Kari truly is a loyal
friend. He gathered some
branches together and
made a fire.
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Gradually, the sun sank
below the horizon of this
untamed land. The awful
shriek of a strange bird
searching for prey and the
howls of the wild beasts
wandering through the
jungle made Dankichi
feel very uneasy.
“Kari, that was a
horrible sound, wasn’t
it? I wonder if we’ll be
okay...”
“As long as we keep the
fire going, we’ll be fine.
It’ll scare away the beasts
of this island.”
These two had fought
off danger all afternoon, so they were completely worn out, and
they went straight to sleep.
As night fell, the

crackling fire slowly
burned down to embers,
to the peril of Dankichi
and Kari. You see, this
is an island crawling
with hungry wild beasts.
When the fire went out
all of the beasts that had
been waiting gathered
in close as a pack. Our
heroes were awakened
by a loud noise in the
surrounding bush. They
rubbed the sleep from
their eyes only to see....
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Our adventurer Dankichi, who had drifted ashore a barbaric
tropical island and had
gone on to have many
exciting adventures, was
now celebrating the New
Year. You see, this land
was so hot that all the
people had been burnt
black, so even when the
New Year came they could
still walk around naked.
“Ah, is everyone here?”
In the early morning on
New Year’s Day, Dankichi
gathered all his men in
the field in front of the
palace.
“Today, I’m going to tell
you about an interesting
plan I’ve made.”
44030.
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NYU Press
Chapter Title: Overture: The Good News of Empire
Book Title: Strange Fruit of the Black Pacific
Book Subtitle: Imperialism’s Racial Justice and Its Fugitives
Book Author(s): Vince Schleitwiler
Published by: NYU Press. (2017)
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1bj4rqz.4
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Fruit of the Black Pacific
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2019 08:18:14 UTC
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1
Overture
Th e Good News of Empire
Diversity is America’s manifest destiny.
— Ronald T. Takaki
cipher
Th ey built a wall so they could keep him on the inside.
(Justice.)
From time to time they try to get him to come out. (Love.)
When they see him they want to kill him. (Justice.)
Instead they give him a woman, so they can imagine
what he does to her. (Love.)
Some of them think a blonde one is worth six
of the black ones. (Race.)
Some of them think that’s a poor trade. (Gender.)
Now they want him on fi lm. (Love.)
Now they want him on stage. (Justice.)
Now they want him in the air. (Freedom.)
Now he is in the air.
What happened to the women? What happened to the monkey?
What
happened to the cook?

Somewhere on the island, the women all live together. Th ere
are caves
and a hidden beach. Before they came here, they used to work
as extras.
“Where have they taken him?” asks one.
“To their own home,” says another.
“Will he come back?” asks the one.
“I think they have killed him,” says another.
2019 08:18:14 UTC
2 | Ov e rt u re : T h e G o o d N ews o f E m pi re
“Should we fi nd a new one?” asks the one.
“Th ey will make a new one,” says another.
“Will we protect him?” asks the one.
“He will fi nd care,” says another.
“Where will he fi nd it?” asks the one.
in want of a map
Th e best- loved celebration of lynching in U.S. popular culture
locates
the origins of its savage victim- hero on a fi ctional island in
Southeast
Asia. If you read this character as black, as the logic of white
terror has
commonly been understood to imply, then King Kong must be
the most
famous black fi gure to hail from the Asia/Pacifi c region until
the rise

of a Hawai‘i- born, Jakarta- and Honolulu- raised law
professor, orga-
nizer, and memoirist named Barack Obama. Of course, the
election of
the fi rst African American commander in chief surely signifi es
hope in
the unfolding promise of racial justice— in the teeth of a
national history
of not only slavery and Jim Crow but also ongoing imperial
warfare in
Asia. By contrast, admitting the presence of race in Kong’s
story privi-
leges a history of sexualized violence, white supremacy, and
conquest
that appears as the very antithesis of racial justice. Between
these oddly
paired icons and the seemingly incompatible forces they
represent lies
a terrain of forgotten and forgetful desires, of vivid and
resonant shad-
ows, out of which is inscribed a hundred years or more of the
history of
race— that epoch heralded in 1899 by W. E. B. Du Bois as the
century of
the color line. It is a space and a time that this book asks you to
enter.
Tempting as it may be, the “black Pacifi c” is not the
appropriate name
for this terrain. Th at term I will reserve for a specifi c lure
within it, the en-
gendering chaos of the object or essence posited by the erotic
violence of
imperial race- making. Call it a historical nonentity, for it never
actually ex-
isted except as speculative fantasy, yet its material

consequences persist— a
paradoxical condition, to be sure, but one that should hardly be
unfamiliar
to scholars of race. Th e black Pacifi c, you might say, is the
indispensable
blank or blind spot on the map; the empirically observable
terrain, within
which it makes its absence felt, is a transpacifi c fi eld, charted
by imperial
competition and by the black and Asian movements and
migrations shad-
owing the imperial powers. Within this fi eld, the fi ctive lure
calls forth
2019 08:18:14 UTC
Ov e rt u re : T h e G o o d N ews o f E m pi re | 3
contradictory processes of conquest that endlessly pursue it—
so attend-
ing to this black Pacifi c may allow you to apprehend the bonds
between
the unfolding promise of racial justice and the overwhelming
sexualized
violence heralding the expansion of justice’s domain.
In describing this book’s geographic reach as transpacifi c, I
refer less
to a fi xed oceanic unit than to a kind of tilting of space and
time, a dizzy-
ing pivotal shift in the centrifugal and centripetal forces
moving empires

and their shadows. Its measure might be taken from Georgia to
Luzon
via Hong Kong, or, just as surely, between two towns in the
Mississippi
Delta. Th e transpacifi c is not a place, but an orientation— if at
times, as
you will see, a disorientingly occidented one. Similarly, the
historical set-
ting, between the rise of the United States and Japan as Pacifi c
imperial
powers in the 1890s and the aft ermath of the latter’s defeat in
World War
II, is periodized less in the sense of termination or punctuation
than of
a course of movement whose roiling currents might toss an
observer’s
vessel to and fro, or of the calculation of an orbit based on the
shift ing
relations of bodies and vantages across vast distances. Put diff
erently, this
book conceptualizes its fi eld of inquiry, not through a singular
racial, na-
tional, imperial, or even oceanic formation,1 but through the
interrelation
of competing fi gures of movement— multiple circuits of black
and Asian
migrations cutting across Du Bois’s meandering, world- belting
color line.
Because the comparison necessary to this approach is also the
method
every imperialism seeks to monopolize, this book reads
comparison
against a horizon of imperial competition, in the period
culminating in
U.S. ascendancy as heir to Western global power, even as its
foregrounded

objects of analysis remain territorially bounded within U.S.
rule.
Intersectional and contrapuntal readings in African American,
Japa-
nese American, and Filipino literatures provide the book’s
material and
method, tracing how each group’s collective yearnings, internal
con-
fl icts, and speculative destinies were unevenly bound together
along
the color line. Th eir interactions— matters of misapprehension
and fric-
tion, as well as correspondence and coordination— at times
gave rise to
captivating visions of freedom binding metropolitan antiracisms
with
globalizing anti- imperialisms. Yet the links were fi rst forged
by the para-
doxical processes of race- making in an aspiring empire: on one
hand,
benevolent uplift through tutelage in civilization, and on the
other, an
overwhelming sexualized violence. Imperialism’s racial justice
is my term
2019 08:18:14 UTC
for these conjoined processes, a contradiction whose historical
legacy

constitutes the tangled genealogies of racism, antiracism,
imperialism,
and anti- imperialism. Because uplift and violence were
logically incom-
mensurable but regularly indistinguishable in practice,
imperialism’s
racial justice could be sustained only through an ongoing
training of
perception in an aesthetics of racial terror. Th is book takes up
the task of
reading, or learning how to read, the literatures that take form
and fl ight
within the fi ssures of imperialism’s racial justice, while
straining to hear
what the latter excludes, or what eludes it.
Th e method of this interdisciplinary book is ultimately literary,
less
in the choice of its objects than the mode of its articulation,
marshalling
the capacities of a peculiar tradition of reading destined to
never stop
overreaching its own grasp. By glossing “reading” as “learning
how to
read,” I invoke the characteristic linking of literature, in
African Ameri-
can cultural traditions, with a knot of questions around literacy,
wherein
the task of learning how to read is always problematized,
critical, and
unfi nished, never reducible to formal processes of education. It
troubles
the privileging of either print or oral media, the visual or the
aural; it is
associated with mobility, as both dislocation and fl ight; it
signifi es both

the possibility of freedom and the threat of its foreclosure. Put
diff er-
ently, I emphasize that the task of learning how to read the
literatures
of black and Asian migrations is not subsidiary to social and
historical
analysis. It is not simply to use literary texts as evidence for a
critique
of dominant histories, to mine them for traces of forgotten
historical
formations, nor to locate their work within proper historical
contexts. It
is also, and more importantly, to recognize that the work of
these texts is
not fi nished, not limited to the past, and to activate them in the
present,
undertaking one’s historical and theoretical preparations so that
their
unpredictable agency might be called forth in the process of
reading.
Th is book’s method, fi nally, is the expression of a political
desire. It
is staked on the chance that the practice of reading as learning
to read
could open social reality to imagination’s radically
transformative power,
even as it pursues this chance by dwelling in moments of
subjunctive ne-
gation and foreclosure, fi ngering their jagged grain. While I
participate
in a broader aspiration to recuperate the antiracist and anti-
imperialist
visions of twentieth- century black and Asian movements, what
I will
term their third- conditional worlds, I do not presume that my

hind-
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sight suffi ces to liberate those visions from the racist and
imperialist
discourses of their emergence, for to do so would be to posit a
freedom
my present- day politics has not itself achieved. Instead, this
book seeks
to read them as they take form and fl ight within structures of
thought
whose presumptions I fi nd objectionable, on the chance that
they might
diagnose a predicament of unfreedom I share.
Th e book is divided into three parts. Chapter 1 provides a
histori-
cal overview, theoretical framework, and methodology of
reading for
studying race across U.S. transpacifi c domains. It turns to the
fi gure of
W. E. B. Du Bois on the threshold of the century he gave over
to the
problem of the color line, recovering the transpacifi c
geopolitical context
of that prophetic formulation, and the radical poetics of his
response to
racial terror. Stepping back, it surveys two major aspects of an
Asian/

Pacifi c interest within African American culture, exemplifi ed
by impe-
rial Japan and the colonized Philippines, as well as
corresponding black
presences in Filipino and Japanese American culture. Th e
second part,
in two linked chapters, considers the ambivalent participation of
African
Americans in the colonization of the Philippines, as soldiers,
colonial of-
fi cials, intellectuals, and artists, alongside the development of
an Anglo-
phone Filipino intelligentsia from the colony to the metropole.
Pressing
the limits of the diaspora concept, it asks how these movements
shaped
emerging gendered forms of Negro and Filipino collectivity
over against
their confl ation by sexualized imperial violence, and how they
bore the
echoes of alternative realms of belonging- across- diff erence
that did not
come into being. Th e third part, also in two chapters, reads the
history
of black urbanization alongside Japanese American
incarceration and
resettlement, complicating the canonical modernizing narratives
of
the Great Migration and the Internment. It explores how these
forms
of nonwhite diff erence provided each other with aesthetic
resources to
meditate on the distinction between freedom and graduated
privilege,
and to recall and release the unspeakable violence by which this
distinc-

tion is elided. Finally, a brief Aft erthought refl ects on the
“passing” of
multiculturalism, inquiring into the ongoing transformations of
impe-
rialism’s racial justice in the aft ermath of the Cold War and the
election
of an African American president.
Th e remainder of this Overture introduces the book’s central
themes,
in an extended refl ection on the glinting opacity of the
epigraph, which
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the late Ron Takaki cheerily sprinkled through his lectures,
interviews,
and writings. In turn, each section provides a gloss on a
keyword from
the book’s title: imperialism’s racial justice, black Pacifi c,
strange fruit, and
fugitives.
spreading gospel
Over the past fi ft een years, scholarship across ethnic studies,
Ameri-
can studies, and postcolonial studies has critiqued the
appropriation of
the grammar and lexicon of antiracism by U.S. imperialism,

from the
consolidation of an offi cial multiculturalism in the fi rst Iraq
war and its
deployments in the so- called War on Terror, to its historical
precedents
in Cold War racial liberalism. With the post– Cold War
dissolution of a
Th ird Worldist idea predicated on the continuity of antiracism
and anti-
imperialism, it became necessary to rethink the relation between
impe-
rialism and racial justice, within a broader account of the
dramatic shift s
and mundane continuities of national and global racial orders
aft er the
disavowal of segregation and colonialism.
Yet imperialism’s reliance on a language of racial justice is
nothing
new. If you aim to identify what is distinctive or peculiar to a
post–
World War II or post– civil rights racial regime, you should
know that
the phenomenon of an imperialism enunciated as the expansion
of ra-
cial justice, in word and deed, is no recent innovation. In this
book, I
trace these concerns to a period when terms of racial justice are
close
enough to seem familiar, even as the more genteel forms of
white su-
premacism were hegemonic, and American exceptionalism
found tri-
umphal expression in overseas territorial colonialism. Because
the
post– World War II U.S. racial order claims the formal equality

of races
(against white supremacism) and the formal independence of
nations
(against colonialism) as the foundation of its disavowal of
racism, which
it thereby represents as the very exemplar of injustice, it seems
odd that
the language of racial uplift that once motivated an entire
spectrum of
black political movements was deployed, in the name of Anglo-
Saxon
superiority, to justify the conquest of the Philippines.
While lingering in this sense of historical disorientation might
be
instructive, a few brief hypotheses on race, imperialism, and
justice
should suffi ce to proceed. First, if the term “racism” refers at
once to
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structured relations of inequality and to patterns of attitude,
thought,
and representation, then the latter must serve to uphold and
extend the
former— which is to say, racism must be understood as always
a justi-
fi cation of its own material conditions. Th is means, curiously
enough,

that racism must always present itself as the proper form of
racial justice,
its culmination or terminal phase, beyond which lies chaos or
decay.
So if some of the more insidious recent forms of racist ideology
claim
the legacy of civil rights, in the name of “color- blindness,” this
is noth-
ing new, but a feature common to previous racisms— only the
historical
terms of what is promised as racial justice have changed.
Second, imperialisms are always in competition, a claim that
holds at
least on contingent empirical grounds in recent eras, if not defi
nition-
ally. Th e late nineteenth- century rise of U.S. global power
involved the
incitement of animosity toward Spanish decadence and
cultivation of
racial fraternity with England, even as it aimed fi nally to
supplant its
European predecessors. Such competition is never entirely
friendly, but
neither is it entirely unfriendly— it served both U.S. and
Spanish purposes
to stage the conclusion of the 1898 war in the Philippines as an
exchange
between equals, with Filipinos excluded. Ultimately,
imperialisms seek to
be universal and to fully and fi nally monopolize the very terms
of uni-
versality— an impossible task. Yet because their power cannot
be total,
because their dominion cannot be coextensive with the universe,
impe-

rialisms must always pursue expansion— preemptively
countering the
threat of encroachment by some other expansionist force, real or
imag-
ined, out to universalize dominion on alien grounds.
Imperialisms can-
not be satisfi ed with any victory because their aspiration to
total power is
insatiable; as such, they will invent an enemy if none can be
found.
Th ird, imperialism, in its various manifestations, is necessarily
a
multiracial, multiracialist project. Imperialism is, among other
things,
the desire to rule over diff erence. It seeks to extend its
dominion across
peoples and territories thereby defi ned as other, a process
necessarily
grounded in coercion rather than consent; yet it must always
seek to
legitimize that extension, however violent, as the arrival of
justice. Put
diff erently, racial justice is imperialism’s gospel, the good
news it is com-
pelled to express in and as violence. Th e claim to do justice to
diff erence
provides imperialism with its moral authority, political
legitimacy, and
ideological engine. Writing amid the din of war in 2003,
Edward Said
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asserted, “Every single empire in its offi cial discourse has said
that it
is not like all the others, that its circumstances are special, that
it has
a mission to enlighten, civilize, bring order and democracy, and
that it
uses force only as a last resort” (xxi). Exceptionalism, in other
words, is
a formal characteristic of every imperialism’s claim to justice, a
kind of
hallmark, in what is merely one of the phenomenon’s lesser
paradoxes.
Th at the racialized population imperialism would rule must be
con-
structed as incapable, or not yet capable, of giving their consent
does
not cancel this requirement for justifi cation. Rather, justice
emerges,
fi rst and foremost, as a terrain of struggle between competing
imperial-
isms, and between the imperial subjects who constitute, at least
in prin-
ciple, a transimperial community of judgment. Th is fi gurative
gathering
is positioned above and before the possible engineering of a
colonized
subject capable— again, in principle— of provisional
membership in that
hierarchical community. On such terms, it may be easier to
understand
how an annihilating violence may be one form of this justice.

Yet even
then, the imperative of expansion guides violence in the
direction of
inclusion. Just as those racializing processes typically
understood as in-
clusion’s opposite actually prove to be modes of
incorporation— for ex-
ample, Jim Crow segregation and Oriental exclusion, in
practice, bound
unfree subjects within heavily restricted and regulated
socioeconomic
locations— so, too, should processes of inclusion be understood
as ne-
cessitating a diff erentiating and refi ning violence.
Readers who seek to refashion and reactivate the allied projects
of an-
tiracism and anti- imperialism, rather than merely perform their
critical
autopsy, may fi nd these propositions disabling. To think of
contempo-
rary U.S. imperialism’s deployment of diversity- talk as an
appropriation
requires imagining a chain of appropriations and
counterappropriations
stretching back to the onset of European imperialism and the
trans-
atlantic slave trade, and positing that the conception of racial
justice
properly originates with the agents of conquest. Such a model
may it-
self be too simplistic, in seeking to secure a transhistorical
autonomy
of legitimate and illegitimate conceptions of justice— even if,
in local
practice, it makes sense to oppose the pragmatic compromises

of a lib-
eratory movement to the disingenuous propagandizing of an
oppressive
regime. Nonetheless, I contend that imperialism’s racial justice
should
be approached as an animating contradiction, logically
necessary but
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unpredictably volatile. No mere alibi, it must be taken seriously
even—
especially— if you hope to reject it.
What readers of any political inclination may fi nd most diffi
cult to
accept is that imperialism’s claims to justice are not
immediately and
unambiguously debarred by its reliance on forms of excessive,
repetitive,
and spectacular violence. Even so, it may be acknowledged that
civiliz-
ing missions past and present have at times been
indistinguishable in
practice from overwhelming violence. If such violence proceeds
from
intentions and premises refl exively represented as benevolent,
innocent,
and idealistic, this paradox may be explained away as betrayal,
corrup-

tion, or human frailty, or dismissed as deception or bad faith.
Across a
political spectrum, histories of imperial violence become
separable from
theories of racial justice. Against this common sense, I contend
that vio-
lence is the vehicle of imperialism’s racial justice, the very
means of its
actualization, and that the practical identity between the two is
experi-
enced as a quotidian reality. How, then, does their separation
come to
be taken for granted?
To approach this question as a problem of ideology or
epistemology
may not suffi ciently express how deeply the operations of race
pervade
social experience. What manages the contradictions of race and
justice is
also a matter of aesthetics: a set of enabling constraints on the
senses that
conditions perception. Students of black literature and culture
will be
familiar with its paradox of invisibility and hypervisibility, and
scholars
of race will recall the duplicitous language of color- blindness,
two exam-
ples of a larger dynamic not reducible to the visual or to any
single sense.
Angela Davis captures it succinctly in asking why older forms
of racism
are called “overt,” as if racism is somehow “hidden” in the
post– civil rights
era (“Civil Rights”). Similarly, Patricia Williams describes the
success-

ful police defense in the Rodney King case as less a
rationalization than
a painstaking lesson in an “aesthetics of rationality” (54). An
elaborate
system of looking, charged with fear and desire, which
intuitively ap-
prehends a prone black body as a threat demanding
overwhelming pre-
emptive force; or again, the socialized habits of perception that
instruct
you to perceive mass incarceration as a natural function of
government,
and that evoke the specter of the prisoner to teach you to see
yourself
as free— such are the broader set of phenomena I conceptualize
as an aes-
thetics of racial terror, a training of attention that allows its
subjects to
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distinguish between forms of freedom and unfreedom, between
diff er-
ently racialized and gendered bodies, and between the gospel of
imperi-
alism’s racial justice and its expression as overwhelming
violence.
Th e violence’s tendency toward repetition and excess points to
its

intrinsic inability to fully and fi nally achieve its ends,
revealing an anxi-
ety over the limits of domination and the nonidentity of
coercion and
consent. By the same token, its corresponding tendency toward
spec-
tacle and ritualization suggests how that anxiety demands a
periodic
renewal of its lessons. Th ese must be compulsively reenacted
in an in-
creasingly formalized manner, whose slightly disjunctive
relation to
any given situation both extends their temporal reach and
invites their
eventual collapse. Because the violent operation of
imperialism’s ra-
cial justice is unable to fi x its terms, they are shown to be
historically
contingent. What passes for racial justice under imperialism in
one
period— expulsion, wholesale slaughter, engineered extinction,
religious
conversion, cultural erasure— might provide the very defi
nition of racial
injustice in another, even as the extent to which imperialism
dominates
the terms of what can be imagined as racial justice in the
present is dif-
fi cult to properly perceive.
Th is is why I do not turn to the past to recover an exemplary
politics.
Such an impulse rests on unacknowledged presumptions
regarding his-
tory as progressive enlightenment, upholding images of
freedom’s betrayal

in an unfree past to train its optics to mistake the privileging of
hindsight
for freedom of judgment in the present. By contrast, this book
seeks to
dwell within the strangeness of the past as a means of
defamiliarizing
the present, casting its lot within the predicaments of the past in
order to
read a shared condition of unfreedom in the desire to become
estranged
to it. Th is task of reading, or learning how to read, draws on
the aesthetic
resources of black radical traditions that improvise a
countertraining of
perception, whose appearance may be anticipated within the
ritual sites
of training in the aesthetics of racial terror— in its very forms,
practices,
and protocols. It pursues the chance that what imperial
inclusion in the
violence of its embrace must exclude bears the clues to what yet
eludes it.
* * *
Th e predominant form of imperialism’s racial justice discussed
in this
book, recent enough to seem at once familiar and foreign, is
racial uplift .
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At the twentieth century’s dawn, uplift encompassed both the
range of
projects to improve the social conditions of African Americans
and the
guiding rationale for U.S. colonialism in the Philippines.
Looking back
through a perspective shaped by post– World War II
conjunctions of
formal racial equality and formal national independence, on one
hand,
and Th ird Worldist antiracism and anti- imperialism, on the
other, these
two senses appear incommensurable. Examples of Negro uplift ,
as col-
lective protest or moralizing conservativism, are regularly
represented
as antecedents of various contemporary strains of African
American
politics. By contrast, the attitudes and expressions of Anglo-
Saxon uplift ,
when not ignored or discarded, are recognized as outmoded or
racist.
Whether the racial politics of U.S. colonialism are seen as
aberrations
or vestiges in an essentially benevolent tradition, or as alibis or
pater-
nalistic delusions exposing the immorality of power, their
discontinu-
ity from traditions of racial justice is taken for granted. Yet at
the time,
black intellectuals regularly presumed the coherence and
continuity of an
overarching category of uplift , upholding it most strongly when
they
subjected its Anglo- Saxon variant to criticism. On what terms

can this
continuity be understood?
In his infl uential work on uplift , Kevin Gaines argues that an
older
sense of the term rooted in “antislavery folk religion” (Uplift
ing the
Race, 1) largely gave way, aft er Reconstruction, to an ideology
stressing
“self- help, racial solidarity, temperance, thrift , chastity,
social purity, pa-
triarchal authority, and the accumulation of wealth.” While
“espousing a
vision of racial solidarity uniting black elites with the masses,”
Gaines ar-
gues, uplift ideology …
3
The Adventures of Momotar in the South Seas
Folklore, Colonial Policy, Parody
The foundation of the expansion of the Japanese
race must be laid while our youth are still in
their cradles.
Imperialism must spark their desire for exotic
lands and fire their dreams.
TSURUMI Y SUKE
Certain essential aspects of the world are
accessible only to laughter.

MIKHAILBAKHTIN
GO SOUTH, YOUNG MAN!
Between 1880 and 1945, Japanese journalists, writers,
politicians, and patriots oftenpromoted
Japan’s expansion into the South Seas (nan’y ), an
area long dominated by Western powers.
The earlytwentieth century was the key turning pointin
the development of this expansionist
discourse. From this time on, the goal shifted from
the development of trade ties with the
Pacific region to a more aggressive driveto
increase the territory of the nation by
conquest and
foreign settlement. During the Taisho period
(1912–26), an “untiring spate of publications,
stereotypes, and slogans exerted considerable
influence on the emergence of a South Seas
fever, an unmistakable mood for southern
expansion.”1 These “publications, stereotypes,
and
slogans” accompanied an important historical expansion of
the Japanese empire toward the
South Seas. At the start of the First World
War, Japan seized the islands of German-
controlled
Micronesia and later ruledthem in the interwar period
under the mandate system of the League
of Nations. During the war, Japanese business firms
took advantage of trade disruption
between Western powers and their colonies in
Southeast Asia and vastly expanded their
commercial ties and economic presence in the
region.2

The growing Japanese business stakein Southeast Asia
led to a shift in the meaning of the
term nan’y , or the South Seas in Japanese
parlance. After Japan acquired German
possessions
of Micronesia in 1915, this new colony was
referred to as the innerSouth Seas (uchinan’y ),
to be distinguished from the much vaster and
richer outerSouth Seas (sotonan’y ), which
designated areasnot colonized by Japan. Moreover,
the contours of nan’y shifted over this
time,sometimes including the Indian Ocean as
well as Oceania and littoral Southeast Asia. In
a
1915 article called “Waga nan’y dojinno kish ”
(The Strange Customs of Our South Seas
Natives), ToriiRy z wrote: “What we Japanese
call the South Seas [nan’y ] is practically a
meaningless term. The scope of the term
differs according to who is using it, and it
is a
nonscientific term; an equivalent term for
what we call the South Seas does not exist
in
Tierney, Robert Thomas. Tropics of Savagery : The Culture of
Japanese Empire in Comparative Frame, University of
California Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
72390.
C
o

re
ss
.
A
ll
ri
g
h
ts
r
e
se
rv
e
d
.
Western countries.”3
In the home islands, the 1914 Tokyo Taisho
Exhibition boosted public awareness of Japan’s
present footholds and future prospects in this vaguely
defined region. The Taisho Exhibition
included colonial pavilions displaying Korea,
Taiwan, Hokkaido,Karafuto, and, for the first
time,a South Seas pavilion, complete with tropical
products and human showcases of South
Seas islanders.A columnist in the Jitsugy no Nihon
(Business Japan) periodical in 1914
wrote: “When you enterthe South Seas Pavilion,

you feel as if surrounded by the atmosphere
of the South Seas. Against a backdrop of
South Seas scenery, various tropical plants
grow
luxuriantly while dolls representing the natives
are hunting for gorillas and boa constrictors.
. . . The biggest novelty is a live display
in which one can experience native
islanders (twenty-
five in all) living in realistically constructed
huts.”4 These “native islanders” included
representatives of the wild Sakai tribe, reputed to
be cannibals. The journalist notes that,
notwithstanding their fearsome reputation, these
natives were extremely “mild and well-
behaved when one actually met them” and that
their cannibalism was “a thingof the past.”5
Nevertheless, the exhibit of live, albeit tamed,
“cannibals” not only drew many curious
Japanese spectators to the pavilion but also served to
confirm their own standpoint as civilized
spectators from an advanced country. Such media
events in metropolitan Japan served to
reinforce stereotypes of the South Seas as a
land inhabited by primitive peoples and wild
animals.
Aside from human showcases and imperial
exhibitions, one can catch a glimpse of this
fascination with the South Seas in earlytwentieth-
century Japanese fiction. Takenaka Tokio,
the protagonist of Tayama Katai’s 1907 story“The
Quilt,” fantasizes about “cast[ing] himself
awayin somecolony in the South Seas” to
escape from his infatuation with the aspiring
female

writer Yoshiko who is placed under his
charge.6 Tagawa Keitar , the hero of Natsume S
seki’s
1912 Higan sugi made (To the Spring Equinox
and Beyond), avidly reads Kodama Onmatsu’s
account of his exploration of Borneo and is
especially fascinated by passages “describing
Onmatsu’s fight with an octopus monster that
had escaped from its den.”7 While hunting
octopuses is “too fanciful an adventure to be
contemplated,” Keitar imagines himself as the
superintendent of a rubber plantation, “his
bungalow in the midst of a limitless plain
filled with
millions of well-kept rubber trees.”8 If S seki
shows how Japanese southern expansion shapes
the fantasy life of his young protagonist, in
Anya k ro (A Dark Night’s Passing), published
between 1921 and 1937 in Kaiz , Shiga Naoya
depicts the South Seas as a public,
everyday
spectacle within urban Japan. Miyamoto, a
young friend of the protagonist, Tokito
Kensaku,
visits the aforementioned South Seas
Pavilion several times to watch the dances of
native
peoples.9 Finally, the young Tanizaki Jun’ichir
publishes a one-act play called Z (The
Elephant) in 1910 about the reactions of ordinary
Edo townsmen to a procession including an
elephant sent to Japan from an unnamed Southeast
Asian kingdom located between Indiaand
China. Though the work is set in the early
Tokugawaperiod (1600–1867), it is also a
spoof of

earlytwentieth-century expansionist discourse.10
Most writings about the South Seas were
not works of literature but rather nonfiction
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writings by advocates of Japan’s expansion
toward the South (nanshinron).11 In his 1910
bestseller Nangokuki (An Account of the Southern
Countries), the liberal politician Takekoshi
Yosabur coins the slogan “Go south, young
man!” thereby inaugurating this outbreak of
South
Seas fever.12 He also sets forth pell-mell several themes
that become the stock-in-trade of later
works on the same subject: the Japanese are, by
nature, a southern people and are racially
related to the Malays; the South Seas constitute a
treasure troveof resources without which
“civilized” nations could not maintain their
“present-day civilization and lifestyle”; for that
reason, “he who controls the resources of the tropics
will control the markets of the world”;
finally, the future of Japan lies in the South
Seas and its people should turn their attention to
the
greattask of “making the Pacific Ocean a
Japanese lake.”13 Takekoshidevotes the last chapter
of his work to the topicof literature, which in
his view separates the civilized Japanese from
the underdeveloped peoples of the South Seas
and aligns them with the Western colonial
powers. He urges Japanese writers to emulate
their Western counterparts and to establish a
“colonial literature that will stimulate the flagging
energies of our youth by narrating the stories
and exploits of colonial pioneers.”14
Several years later, Tsurumi Y suke returns to
the theme of “literature” in the preface to
his

massive and lavishly illustrated travel book Nan’y y
ki (Travel Sketches of the South Seas), a
summum of southern expansionist writing. For
Tsurumi, the very word nan’y conjures up
visions of exotic tropical lands and a mood
of nostalgic longing: “Rather than pondering the
political and economic question of developing the
lands and ruling the people, I am more
deeply moved by the image of moonlight shining
through the leaves of a palm tree or a
human
figure wearing a sarong in the shadow of a
mango tree.” He confesses that his own longing
for
the South Seas was first piqued not by actual
experience of travel but rather by his
encounters
with the exotic stories of European writers:
“I first caught a glimpse of that island when
it was neither nightnor morning . . . ”
Wearing a dark blue suit, Professor
Natsume S seki strode into our third year English
class at the First Higher School and read to us
in his casual and fluent
English. It was the opening passage to Robert
Louis Stevenson’s Island Night’s
Entertainment. At the time,S seki was a
rising star in literary world and had already
published London Tower and I Am a Cat.
With the innocent longings of youth,
we eagerly awaited being taught by this
celebrity in the new school year. . . .
Subsequently, I devoured many works by
Stevenson but none of them made as deep an
impression on me as this Island Night’s

Entertainment. The deep blue
waters of the South Pacific, a solitary island
surrounded by the vast ocean, the gentle
winds that bore the salty air and the
fragrance of various tropical plants, the natives
with their childish thoughts who livedin the midst
of this scenery, their
minor caresand troubles: I felt as if the
atmosphere of the South Seas impregnated
the entire volume and each page
brought a freshdelight. I imagined the life of
the author who spent his final years amid
thesesurroundings and with these
people. Afterward, the South Seas were always in
my head.
Later, he confides to the reader: “I am deeply
convinced that our literary and poetic interests
have far deeper roots than our thirst for
knowledge and intellectual interests.”15 In his
reminiscences of his encounter with the works of
Robert Louis Stevenson, Tsurumi illustrates
the marriage of imperial strategy with imagination, of
romance with realpolitik, which is an
essential part of all modern empires. Interestingly,
he was himself first inspired not by
Japanese novels but by the romantic visions that
Western writers had created during an earlier
phase of the colonization of the South Seas.
Based on his own experience, he goes on to
argue

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that literature, and particularly children’s literature, must
play an important part in fostering the
emotional disposition that underlies any successful
imperial project.
Recently, more and more writers have raised their voices
to call for our nation to expand . . .

to the rich and fertile lands of
the south. I welcome this trend, but cannot
believe that a southern expansion policy that
promotes only expanded
production or emigration is enough. People
will not easily summon the will to leave
the land of their ancestors unless they
also are stimulated to feel fascination and longing
for the South Seas. This longing arises
most easily during boyhood and
youth when our imaginations are most active
and our perceptions sharpest. The foundation of
the expansion of the
Japanese race must be laid while our youth are
still in their cradles: imperialism must spark
their desire for exotic lands and
fire their dreams.16
The “opening” of Japan meant not only that
foreigners could travel to Japan but also
that
Japanese people would overcome their inertia, go
overseas, and settle there. Just as the Meiji
state required that citizens become active participants
in national institutions such as the armed
forces and the public schools, it also encouraged
them to seize new opportunities and
transplant themselves abroad. Accordingly, Tsurumi
concludes that the success or failure of
Japan’s empire will depend “on the subjective
attitude of the Japanese people.”17 He
concedes, however, that ordinary Japanese are often
reluctant to forsake “the land of their
ancestors” and that intellectual argumentswill not
overcome their resistance. If people are to
transplant themselves overseas, an appetite for exotic

lands must be artificially stimulated in
them. Conversely, to induce this “longing for
exotic countries,” writers should appeal to
their
readers’ imaginations. Last but not least, the best
time to touch the imagination of thesereaders
was when they were still in their cradles.
CREATING FOLK IMPERIALISM
Japan’s modern imperialism is unthinkable
without taking into account the mid-nineteenth-
century intrusion of Western imperialism into East
Asia, the mimetic imperialism of the Meiji
period, and the appropriation of Western discourses
of “civilization” and “racial hierarchy” by
Japanese intellectuals. When Tsurumi mentions
Stevenson’s Island Night’s Entertainment, he
calls attention to another piece in the gestalt of
Japan’s imperialism: namely, the fashioning of
an imperialist sensibility among the Japanese
elite formed by reading the Western literature of
empire. Tsurumi was a member in good standing of
the elite,having attended the exclusive
First Higher School and studied under Natsume S
seki. However, he voiced his deepest
concerns not about the elite but rather about
the Japanese people in general, who also needed
to develop the proper “subjective attitudes” if
the nation’s imperial projects were not to
miscarry. He argued that it is imperative to
reach young Japanese at the period of
their lives
when they are most impressionable. One serious
obstacle, however, stood in the way of
fostering a popular imperialist sensibility among

Japanese youth: the relative paucity of
colonial prototypes and heroes in Japanese culture
and history.
Tsurumi was hardly the first modern writer to
express this concern. In his 1900 “Umi to
Nihon bungaku” (The Sea and Japanese Literature), K
da Rohan lamented that the Japanese,
unlike the seafaring and adventurous Anglo-Saxons,
had failed to create a maritime literature
worthy of the name, even though Japan was no
less an island nation than Great Britain.
He
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assigned the blame for this failure squarely on
Japan’s rulers during the Tokugawaperiod,
who
had prohibitedJapanese from leaving the archipelago
under the policy of national seclusion.
Besides fostering an insular attitude toward the
outside world, this long period of seclusion
had deprived the Japanese of valuable historical
experience and reduced their store of
practical wisdom regarding colonialism. In 1894,
Kume Kunitake wrote a series of articles
on
the insular mentality of the Japanese that appeared in
Kokumin no Tomo, on the eve of the
Sino-Japanese War. He argued that in the ancient
period, the Japanese people had
demonstrated an enterprising and belligerent attitude
toward the outside world, but that this
spirit had disappeared with the closing of the
country. After this long interruption, Japanese
had recovered the enterprising attitude they had shown
in the past. With the progress in trade
and the building of a naval forces, Japan
could play in the Pacific region the role
that England

played in the Atlantic.18
In light of thesehistorical constraints, ideologues of
empire sought for models of colonial
heroes, not in the annals of Japanese history
and literature, but rather in myth and folklore.
Unlike the exotic literature of the West,
folklore was a domestic resource, not a foreign
product. In addition, folktales were simple, easy to
understand, and suitable for dissemination
to the masses through the national system of
elementary education. Just as narratives like
Robinson Crusoe and the storyof Pocahontas had
shaped the imaginations of generations of
English-speaking boys and girls, Japanese myths
and folktales were the proper vehicle to
instill in the nation’s youth an urge to
empire. Beyond their use in the training of
young
Japanese, the mobilization of folktales on behalf of
imperialism suggested that the Japanese
empire had a cultural basisin the Japanese past
and traditional culture. I have already argued
that Japan established the legitimacy of its
empire in the transnational idiom that Western
powers used to justify their own empires. At the
same time,Japan’s embrace of this Western
idiom implied an estrangement from its own past, a
repudiation of its history, and an alienation
from its own culture. Yet even as Japan eagerly
absorbed Western influences, it also sought to
assert its own cultural identity and to reclaim its
own heritage, notably through embrace of folk
culture said to embody the primordial spirit of
the nation. While the rise of folklore studies
in

the late Meiji and Taisho periods reflects a
growing dissatisfaction with modernity and a
nostalgia for lost traditions, the mobilization of
folklore for empire served to show that
Japanese imperialism was not simply an imitation of
Western empires but an inalienable part
of its cultural heritage. Traditional tales not only
enabled people to discover their rootsin the
past but they also helped them to charttheir own future
in a modern world.
If myths and folktales were to be rendered useful
in political propaganda, they first had to be
substantially revised to accord with the needs of
the earlytwentieth century. The Meiji regime
had mobilized ancient myths from the eighth-century
Kojiki to trace the imperial line back to
the sun goddess Amaterasu, but the myths also
helped to legitimate a modern monarchy which
had no precedent in the past. In a similar way,
ancient myths were invoked to justify Japan’s
modern expansion overseas, but they were also substantially
transformed in the process of
rewriting. Borrowing from the national studies
scholar Motoori Norinaga, the historian
Hoshino Hisashi (1839–1917) claimed that Susan
no mikoto, brother to the sun goddess
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Amaterasu, had ruledancient Shilla Korea and
traveled back and forth between the peninsula
and the Japanese islands until he quarreled with
his illustrious sister. Thereafter, the two
kingdoms remained estranged for ages, until
another mythical figure, the empress Jing ,
invaded the peninsula and reestablished Japanese rule
there. The continental exploits of Susan
and the empress Jing became standard fixtures of
history textbooks during the colonial period;
thesestories suggested to their readers that the

annexation of Korea by Japan was simply
the
restoration of a status quo ante and showed
that the Japanese possessed a long-standing
capacity for assimilating foreigners.19 As late as
1942, the governor-general of Korea, Koiso
Kuniaki, stated that all twenty-two million
Koreans were the offspring of Susan .20
In a similar vein, Minamoto no Yoshitsune
(1159–89), perhaps Japan’s most brilliant
military strategist and certainly its most beloved
warrior-hero, was pressed into service to
promote Japan’s later push onto the Asian continent.
Yoshitsune led the Minamoto clan in the
decisive battles against the Taira during the
twelfth-centuryGenpei Wars, but he was later
pursued by his half-brother Minamoto no Yoritomo,
who feared him as a rival, and became a
fugitive with Fujiwara no Hidehira, the powerful feudal
leader of northern Japan. When
Yasuhira succeeded his father Hidehira in 1187, he
succumbed to pressures from Yoritomo and
sent an expeditionary forceagainst Yoshitsune, who
took his own life after killing his wife and
daughter.21 Writers during the Edo period, who
were not content to let such an illustrioushero
die in such pitiful circumstances, developed
bizarre theories of Yoshitsune’s survival and
circulated stories of his posthumous exploits.22
According to one theory, Yoshitsune crossed
from Hokkaido to the island of Sakhalin and
eventually reached Mongolia, where he
reappeared as Genghis Khan, unified the tribes
of Mongolia, and led his armies to their
glorious conquests in Asia and Europe.23In 1879,

while he was a student in England, the
young
Suematsu Kench published a work in
English titled The Identity of the Great
Conqueror
Genghis Khan with the Japanese Hero Yoshitsune, in
which he cites a variety of written
sources to prove his central thesis. In the
final chapter, he clinches his argument on the
hero’s
identity by asserting that “a wild and uncivilized
region [Mongolia] could never have
produced a man of such discipline and experience
[Genghis Khan], whom even the heroes of
the civilized world have scarcely equaled.”24 Since
he could not possibly have been a Mongol,
Suematsu concludes he must have been Japanese. Basing
his hypothesis on Western notions of
“civilization and progress” that had only recently been
introduced to Japan, Suematsu sought to
lift Japan’s reputation in the West by showing that
the nation had produced a hero who could
hold his own against Western conquerors such as
Alexanderthe Great or Napoleon.25
In 1924, Oyabe Zenichir (1868–1941), published
a Jingisu-kan wa Minamoto no
Yoshitsune nari (Genghis Khan Was Indeed
Yoshitsune),26 a work that reflects the growing
influence of Pan-Asianism. Pan-Asianpropagandists such as
Amakasu Masahiko (best known
as the military police lieutenant who ordered
the murder of It Noe, sugi Sakae, and his
nephew after the Great Kanto Earthquake), and
Okawa Sh mei praised the book and members
of the imperial family honored it by

“inspecting” it, but prominent Japanese historians,
linguists, and anthropologists dismissed it as
an absurd hoax. Despite the unanimous
condemnation of the experts, Oyabe’s book became a
best seller. Whereas Suematsu had sought
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to convince Europeans that Japan had produced a
world-class hero, Oyabe used Japanese
claims of kinship with Asia to justify its further
expansion on the continent. After the creation
of Manchukuo in 1932, articles in Mansh
Nichinichi (Manchuria Daily) newspaper
regularly
reported discoveries of traces of Yoshitsune
on the Asian continent while the theme of
Yoshitsune as Genghis Khan influenced
artworks, including a Noh play performedin
1941.27
As thesetwo examples show, academic and amateur
historians alike re-created a variety of
mythical characters and semihistorical figures to
justify Japan’s expansion onto the Asian
continent.28 Yoshitsune and Susan were well-known
heroes, but the expansionist legends that
accreted around their names probably failed to
leave a profound mark on the imagination of
Japanese youth. In contrast, Momotar proved a
much more durable model and a more
compelling figure. Whether he actually “fired
the imagination” of young Japanese for
imperial
conquest lies beyond the scope of this study,
but it can be safely affirmed that Momotar
was a
ubiquitous presence in prewar Japan.
Momotar is the quintessential Japanese folktale.29 In
the standard, schoolbook version, the

tiny boy Momotar , floating down a river inside
a peach, is discovered by an elderly
couple
who decide to bring him up as their own son.
When he grows up, he sets off to
conquer the
island of the ogres and recruits threeanimal
retainers to accompany him: a dog, a
monkey, and
a pheasant. Overcoming the powerful ogres,
Momotar seizes their treasures and returns to
his
village in triumph. It would be unfair to
single out Momotar —among all Japanese folk
heroes
—for being uniquely expansionist. Nevertheless,
educators and political propagandists alike
found in this seemingly innocuous tale a wonderful
tool to inculcate imperial awareness in
Japanese youth.
“Momotar ” came into existence in oral form
during the late Muromachi period (1333–
1568) and appeared in written versions during
the Genroku period (1688–1704).30 There
are
more than eighty versions of Momotar ’s legend
extant in kusaz shi (printed works combining
picture and text), particularly in the well-
illustratedakabon, a book form specifically directed
at an audience of children. The storywas also
performedon the kabuki stageduring the late
Tokugawaperiod.31 In addition, Takizawa (Kyokutei)
Bakin (1767–1848), a contemporary of
the Grimm brothers, studied the origins and main
motifs of Momotar and provided variants of

the legend in an essay published in his 1810
Enseki zasshi (Swallow Stone Miscellany).32
In the modern period, Momotar was rediscovered as
a national folktale and classified as
one of five greatJapanese folktales (godai
mukashibanashi).33 Like the term mukashibanashi
itself, this canonization of five national folktales
appears to be a product of the educational
system, especially of elementary-school readers.
“Momotar ” was among the first folktales to
be included in these readers at a time of
growing nationalism and increasing government
control over textbooks.34 In 1888, the Ministry of
Education established a formal screening
system for textbooks. These new national
textbooks became a vehicle to instill in
the Japanese
people a sense of national culture and a
means to promote a standardized national
language. In
the case of Momotar , this meant replacing local
versions of the folktale with a single
standardized version authorized by the Ministry of
Education—essentially nationalizing
“Momotar .” This nationalized “Momotar ,” a
creation of the mid–Meiji period, was a
fixture
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of Japanese textbooks until 1945, and it cameto be
closely associatedwith emperor-centered
ideology.35
But Momotar was also a contested figure that was
continually reinvented throughout the
…

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