The Japanese Authority’s Utopia of Aborigine Control: Satoshi Yoshimura’s Taiwan Novel “Mountain Road”

Title

The Japanese Authority’s Utopia of Aborigine Control: Satoshi Yoshimura’s Taiwan Novel “Mountain Road”

Author

Shu-ju LIU

Page

157-212

DOI

10.6163/TJEAS.202212_19(2).0005

Abstract

Tarumi Chie noted that the authors included in the Anthology of Taiwan War Fiction were for the most part representative of the prewar period, but postwar research on the works of Satoshi Yoshimura does not support this assertion. This article begins with a discussion of Yoshimura’s activities and literary work in Taiwan. I show that Yoshimura worked only with official institutions and that most of his writings were closely aligned with national policies. The novel Mountain Road was published on the eve of the Pacific War, when the Kominhokokai (Imperial Subject Service Association), which aimed to establish a high-level national defense system and move toward the construction of a new East Asian order, had just been established in Taiwan. At that time, propaganda about the “Sayun Incident” was sweeping across Taiwan. The Taiwan Governor-General’s Office announced that the Imperial Army Special Volunteer System would be implemented the following year and that the system would apply to aboriginal people. The story of Mountain Road is centered around the funeral of a Japanese police officer’s wife. Through narratives depicting assimilation and the close relationship between Japanese and aboriginal people as well as a writing strategy that erased the individual in the face of a “holy war,” the novel presents an idealized image of colonizer–colonized relations that suited the needs of the regime at that time. Also, the narrative of aboriginal people seeking to assume responsibility for bringing up the children of Japanese police officers reinforces the image that aboriginal people voluntarily assisted the Japanese. The author reveals a humanistic concern for the Japanese, but conceals the plight of the aboriginal people. Instead, the aboriginal quandary is replaced with paeans to the kindness of the Japanese and the “volunteering” narrative. However, the premise which the author uses to impose a sense of “righteousness” on the Japanese and the “repayment of kindness” on the aboriginal people eventually breaks down, inadvertently revealing that the “assimilation of the Taiwanese” was nothing more than a utopian fiction and “volunteering” was not successfully engendered by Japanese indoctrination. In this sense, not only do the humanistic concerns of Mountain Road have their origins in racism, but they also reinforce colonialist brutality. The work can therefore be placed squarely in Yoshimura’s literary genealogy of national policy support.

Keyword

Aborigine Control Policy, Satoshi Yoshimura, “Mountain Road”, Sayun, Imperial Army Special Volunteer System.

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