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Keywords: Japanese poetry - Colonial Taiwan - Japanese Empire - Postcolonialism
Today we see the mountain taking offits Chinese clothes
and putting on its softJapanese silks
Karagoromo nugite yasashiki Yamato-kinu kitaru sugata no yama o kyo miki - Nobuo (Taiwan Daily News, 17 August 1902)
Examining poems appearing in the Taiwan Daily News in the early colonial period, this paper explores how conventional matrices of associations established through tradition (originally in court poetry) continued to inform the social imaginary projected in Japanese poetic constructs, even as the subject matter broadened into a non-Japanese context. As poetic place names (utamakura, lit. poetic pillows)1 were central to classical Japanese verse, in effect binding it closely to the central Japanese islands, as one will see below, some poets during the early period of colonial rule in Taiwan considered the composition of Japanese verse about Taiwan a potentially impossible task. Despite the challenge, the writing of poetry on Taiwan continued, and a poetically defined Japanese way of thinking in fact began to be put to use in support of a nationalist outlook that would ignore Taiwanese Chinese and aboriginals, treating each as what Homi Bhabha has called a "partial presence," always missing something in comparison to the full presence of the newly dominant Japanese in colonial Taiwan.2 Of course, there is violence inherent in this imposition, and Japanese traditional tanka composition (a 31-syllable Japanese poetic form) - being refined and reliant on a matrix of conventional uses and affective associations - becomes a useful mode of naturalizing not simply mimetic representations of Taiwan and its residents, but rather an anamorphic method of double-imaging Taiwan as both a Japanese and exotic other. Insofar as poetry helped sustain the jouissance of this ambivalence, its usefulness to the Empire derived primarily from its capacity for situating Japanese interests while obfuscating Taiwanese interests for the newspaper poetry readers who were mostly Japanese in this early period. This essay aims to clarify how tanka and other forms of traditional poetry which appeared in newspaper poetry columns during the early period of the occupation of Taiwan helped to naturalize the profit-seeking motives intrinsic to empires in conventional poems on seasonal and social topics.
Like other imperialist powers, Japan used cultural production to justify and...