Japanese Poetry and Its Publics: From Colonial Taiwan to Fukushima 9781138304024, 9780203730447

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Japanese poetry and its publics
Typological intertextuality and ontologies of postcolonial affiliation in Japanese poetry
1 Japanese imperialism and poetic matrices: Conventional and autopoietic projections of “nature,” place, and labor in early colonial Taiwan
Posthuman autopoiesis and the poetics of traditional Japanese form poetry in colonial contexts
Autopoietic inspiration: Love of virtual nature and the colonial economy
New poetic place names and the imperial naming of Nїtakayama
Japanese poetry on Nїtakayama
Japanese poetic place names
Jade Mountain in the “Song of Taiwanese Self-rule”
The poetic matrix and its codifications in saijiki
Infusing an imperial aura: “chrysanthemums in the shrine” and “wild chrysanthemums”
Aestheticizing labor of the colonized: “evening in a fishing village” and “buying flowers”
2 Transculturation and typological intertextuality: Taiwanese poets in the New Year’s Day poetry pages of colonial Taiwan
Questions of mimicry and transculturation for colonial subjects writing poetry
Japanese commentary on tanka by Taiwanese—The tendency toward exclusion
Keeping the invasion of China within a Japanese perspective in Taiwan: “times of emergency”
“Lakeshore cranes” and “the Pacific Ocean”
The fall of Nanjing in newspaper poetry
Conclusion
3 Nativist legacies of desinicization and nationalist sentiment in poetry during the second Sino-Japanese War
The familiar lie: Liberation by a superior power
The Nativist legacy in imperialist poetry
Poems by Yamakawa Hiroshi
4 The long view of colonial regimes: The Taiwan Tanka Association’s poetry of witness
Historical origins: The Taipei kadan in Cold War Taiwan
The contemporary Taiwan Tanka Association
Joining the Taiwan Tanka Association
From submission to publication in the Taiwan Tanka Association
Sunflower Movement tanka
Cheng Lang-yao and others
Tsai Kun-tsan—current representative
Scooters and motorcycles
Huang Min-Hui’s scooter sequence
5 Postcolonial affiliation after 3.11: Hyperobjects and inter-evental entanglement in the Taiwan Tanka Association
From Blanchot to Badiou: Disaster as indiscernible multiple
From colonial hyperobjects to inter-evental affiliation: Affective intensities in the triple disaster and imperial childhoods
Poems on nuclear fears in Taiwan from the same volume
Conclusion
6 Poetry blogs and posthuman archives in postcolonial Taiwan
Blog assemblages in postcolonial Taiwan
Chiau-Shin Ngo and the posthuman in postcolonial haiku
Kuei-shien Lee and the political topographies of transnational posthuman networks
Conclusion
Appendix
Index

Citation preview

Japanese Poetry and Its Publics

This book aims to explore precisely how modern Japanese poetry has remained central to public life in both Japan and its former colony of Taiwan. Though classical Japanese poetry has captivated the imagination of Asian studies scholars, little research has been conducted to explore its role in public life as a discourse influential in defining both the modern Japanese empire and contemporary postcolonial negotiations of identity. This book shows how highly visible poetry in regular newspaper columns and blogs have in various historical situations in Japan and Taiwan contested as well as promoted diverse colonial imaginaries. This poetry reflects both contemporary life and traditional poetics with few counterpoints in Western media. Methodologically, this book offers a defense of the public influence of poetry, each chapter enlisting a wide range of social and media theorists from Japan, Europe, and North America to explore specific historical moments in an original recasting of intertextuality as a vital feature of active inter-evental material engagements. In this book, rather than recite a standard survey of literary movements and key poets, the approach taken is to examine uses of poetry shown not only to support colonialism and imperialism, emerging objectionable forms of exploitation as well as the destruction of ecologies (including old-growth forests in Taiwan and the Fukushima Disaster), but also to present a medium of resistance, a minor literature for registering protest, forming transnational affiliations, and promoting grass-roots democracy. The book is based on years of research and fieldwork partially in conjunction with the production of a documentary film, Horizons of the Rising Sun: Postcolonial Nostalgia and Politics in the Taiwan Tanka Association Today. Dean Anthony Brink, Associate Professor, Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures, National Chiao Tung University.

Postcolonial Politics Edited by Pal Ahluwalia University of South Australia

Michael Dutton, Goldsmiths University of London

Leela Gandhi University of Chicago

Sanjay Seth, Goldsmiths University of London For a full list of titles please see: https://www.routledge.com/Postcolonial-Politics/book-series/PP ‘Postcolonial Politics’ is a series that publishes books that lie at the intersection of politics and postcolonial theory. That point of intersection once barely existed; its recent emergence is enabled, first, because a new form of ‘politics’ is beginning to make its appearance. Intellectual concerns that began life as a (yet unnamed) set of theoretical interventions from scholars largely working within the ‘New Humanities’ have now begun to migrate into the realm of politics. The result is politics with a difference, with a concern for the everyday, the ephemeral, the serendipitous and the unworldly. Second, postcolonial theory has raised a new set of concerns in relation to understandings of the non-West. At first these concerns and these questions found their home in literary studies, but they were also, always, political. Edward Said’s binary of ‘Europe and its other’ introduced us to a ‘style of thought’ that was as much political as it was cultural as much about the politics of knowledge as the production of knowledge, and as much about life on the street as about a philosophy of being, A new, broader and more reflexive understanding of politics, and a new style of thinking about the non-Western world, make it possible to ‘think’ politics through postcolonial theory, and to ‘do’ postcolonial theory in a fashion which picks up on its political implications. Postcolonial Politics attempts to pick up on these myriad trails and disruptive practices. The series aims to help us read culture politically, read ‘difference’ concretely, and to problematise our ideas of the modern, the rational and the scientific by working at the margins of a knowledge system that is still logocentric and Eurocentric. This is where a postcolonial politics hopes to offer new and fresh visions of both the postcolonial and the political.

Subseries: Writing Past Colonialism

The Institute of Postcolonial Studies (IPCS)

Edited by Phillip Darby University of Melbourne

Writing Past Colonialism is the signature series of the Institute of Postcolonial Studies, based in Melbourne, Australia.  By postcolonialism we understand modes of writing and artistic production that critically engage with the ideological legacy and continuing practices of colonialism, and provoke debate about the processes of globalisation.  The series is committed to publishing works that break fresh ground in postcolonial studies and seek to make a difference both in the academy and outside it.  By way of illustration, our schedule includes books that address: • • •

grounded issues such as nature and the environment, activist politics and indigenous peoples’ struggles cultural writing that pays attention to the politics of literary forms experimental approaches that produce new postcolonial imaginaries by bringing together different forms of documentation or combinations of theory, performance and practice

6 Reconciliation and Pedagogy Edited by Pal Ahluwalia, Stephen Atkinson, Peter Bishop, Pam Christie, Robert Hattam and Julie Matthews 7 From International Relations to Relations International (IPCS) Postcolonial Essays Phillip Darby 8 Gender, Orientalism, and the ‘War on Terror’ Representation, Discourse, and Intervention in Global Politics Maryam Khalid 9 Multicultural politics of recognition and postcolonial citizenship Rethinking the nation Rachel Busbridge 10 Japanese Poetry and Its Publics From Colonial Taiwan to Fukushima Dean Anthony Brink

This page intentionally left blank

Japanese Poetry and Its Publics From Colonial Taiwan to Fukushima

Dean Anthony Brink

First published 2018 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2018 Dean Anthony Brink The right of Dean Anthony Brink to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data Names: Brink, Dean Anthony, author. Title: Japanese poetry and Its publics: from colonial Taiwan to Fukushima / Dean Anthony Brink. Description: Abingdon, Oxon; New York, NY: Routledge, 2018. | Series: Postcolonial politics; 10 | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2017026358 Subjects: LCSH: Japanese poetry—History and criticism. | Literature and society—Japan. | Public art—Japan. | Mass media and literature—Japan. | National characteristics, Japanese, in literature. Classification: LCC PL727.65.S62 B75 2018 | DDC 895.61009—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017026358 ISBN: 978-1-138-30402-4 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-203-73044-7 (ebk) Typeset in Times New Roman by codeMantra

This book is dedicated to the memory of my mother, Antje Elizabeth Kaiser, born into war, teaching me its folly.

This page intentionally left blank

Contents

Acknowledgments Introduction: Japanese poetry and its publics Typological intertextuality and ontologies of postcolonial affiliation in Japanese poetry 5 1 Japanese imperialism and poetic matrices: Conventional and autopoietic projections of “nature,” place, and labor in early colonial Taiwan Posthuman autopoiesis and the poetics of traditional Japanese form poetry in colonial contexts 17 Autopoietic inspiration: Love of virtual nature and the colonial economy 19 New poetic place names and the imperial naming of Nītakayama 26 Japanese poetry on Nītakayama 30 Japanese poetic place names 32 Jade Mountain in the “Song of Taiwanese Self-rule” 35 The poetic matrix and its codifications in saijiki  37 Infusing an imperial aura: “chrysanthemums in the shrine” and “wild chrysanthemums” 40 Aestheticizing labor of the colonized: “evening in a fishing village” and “buying flowers” 44 2 Transculturation and typological intertextuality: Taiwanese poets in the New Year’s Day poetry pages of colonial Taiwan Questions of mimicry and transculturation for colonial subjects writing poetry 60 Japanese commentary on tanka by Taiwanese—The tendency toward exclusion 66 Keeping the invasion of China within a Japanese perspective in Taiwan: “times of emergency” 69

xi 1

15

56

x Contents “Lakeshore cranes” and “the Pacific Ocean” 72 The fall of Nanjing in newspaper poetry 73 Conclusion 77 3 Nativist legacies of desinicization and nationalist sentiment in poetry during the second Sino-Japanese War The familiar lie: Liberation by a superior power 90 The Nativist legacy in imperialist poetry 96 Poems by Yamakawa Hiroshi 101 4 The long view of colonial regimes: The Taiwan Tanka Association’s poetry of witness Historical origins: The Taipei kadan in Cold War Taiwan 110 The contemporary Taiwan Tanka Association 114 Joining the Taiwan Tanka Association 116 From submission to publication in the Taiwan Tanka Association 117 Sunflower Movement tanka  118 Cheng Lang-yao and others 121 Tsai Kun-tsan—current representative 128 Scooters and motorcycles 130 Huang Min-Hui’s scooter sequence 131 5 Postcolonial affiliation after 3.11: Hyperobjects and inter-evental entanglement in the Taiwan Tanka Association From Blanchot to Badiou: Disaster as indiscernible multiple 143 From colonial hyperobjects to inter-evental affiliation: Affective intensities in the triple disaster and imperial childhoods 145 Poems on nuclear fears in Taiwan from the same volume 150 Conclusion 151 6 Poetry blogs and posthuman archives in postcolonial Taiwan Blog assemblages in postcolonial Taiwan 158 Chiau-Shin Ngo and the posthuman in postcolonial haiku 160 Kuei-shien Lee and the political topographies of transnational posthuman networks 167 Conclusion 171

84

109

137

155

Appendix

179

Index

185

Acknowledgments

I wish to thank colleagues in various departments at Tamkang University, where I wrote much of this research, including: in the Japanese department, Horikoshi Kazuo for occasional but crucial advice on difficult puns in senryū and tanka; in the English department, Ozawa Shizen for help with some Japanese tanka; and in the French department I benefitted from dialogues with Sinologist Gilles Boileau. I also wish to thank graduate students in various courses who with me explored a variety of readings in postcolonial poetry and critical theory. I also wish to thank my current colleagues Kien Ket Lim, Ying-Hsiung Chou, Ivy I-Chu Chang, Ping-Chia Feng, Chung-Hao Ku, Joyce C.H. Liu, Yu-Chung Tsung, C. David Tseng, Lap Kwan Kam, and Earl Jackson, Jr. for making National Chiao Tung University a stimulating and productive campus for research. I want to thank Huei-chu Chu for encouraging my work on Badiou and Fukushima by translating some of it into Chinese. I wish to especially thank my excellent research assistant, Simon Fang, who also helped in conducting interviews and in producing the related film, Horizons of the Rising Sun: Postcolonial Nostalgia and Politics in the Taiwan Tanka Association Today (2017). Most importantly, I wish to thank Philip Darby, Writing Past Colonialism series editor; without his unflagging support and warm encouragement, this book would never have seen the light of day. My deepest appreciation goes to Miyake Noriko, who facilitates the Taiwan Tanka Association (Taiwan kadan), for generously sharing her knowledge of the history of the Association in interviews and by email. She not only provided back issues from the journal archives but also encouraged and tutored me on how to compose tanka, helping me (as well as many members of the Association) to grow as poets writing in Japanese. Thanks also goes to Kitajima Takeshi, who holds tanka study groups that have allowed me to better understand the range of acceptable registers and classical grammatical devices used in contemporary tanka. In addition, I want to express my gratitude to the Seattle-Tacoma Hokubei Senryū Ginsha Association for allowing me to participate as a member and struggling senryū poet in the early 2000s; though at the time I did not know I would be embarking on this related research, I learned much about how poetry in Japanese traditional

xii Acknowledgments forms is written and could better situate the experience of writing groups in postcolonial Taiwan, including common editing practices and the dynamics within this format, and how it differs from those newspaper poetry columns which solicit poems on announced topics. I also want to thank the library and librarians at Tamkang University for help obtaining materials. More than anyone, I wish to thank my spouse, Dr. Huang, and daughter, Annabel, for their patience as I pursued field work on weekends. Appreciation is extended to the following journals and publishers in which earlier versions of selections of a few of the chapters first appeared and to the anonymous referees of articles for their immensely helpful comments which cumulatively made this book possible. About half of chapter one originally appeared as “Japanese Imperialism and Poetic Matrices: Conventional Projections of Nature and Labor in Early Colonial Taiwan” in Archiv Orientalni / Oriental Archive: Quarterly Journal of African and Asian Studies, 79.3, 2011: 331-355. Chapter three originally appeared in an earlier form as “Nativist Legacies of Desinicization and Nationalist Sentiment in Poetry during the Second Sino-Japanese War,” Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 12.1, March 2011: 43–61. Chapter six is an expanded version of “Poetry Blogs and the Posthuman in Postcolonial Taiwan,” Tamkang Review 46.2, June 2016: 135-59. Many sections of chapters were presented at conferences and lectures from Kaohsiung to Tamsui in Taiwan, at the “Taiwan: The View from the South” hosted by Australian National University, Canberra; as well as at the 2015 ACLA meeting at the University of Washington and the 2016 MLA meeting in Austin. My sincere gratitude is extended to those attendees who shared questions and comments. All poems by Taiwan kadan members, Ngo Chiau-Shin, and Lee Kuei-shien are cited and translated by permission. The research for this book was made possible by several grants, including three from the Ministry of Science and Technology in Taiwan: “Ideological Uses of Traditional Poetic Forms in Japanese-language Newspapers during the Occupation of Taiwan” (96WFD2700088), “A People’s History of Natural Disasters in Senryū: From the Great Fire of Meiwa (1772) to the Great East Japan Earthquake (2011)” (101-2410-H-032-086), and “The Postcolonial Poetics of the Taiwan Man’yōshū: Diverging Voices and Intertexts” (102-2410-H-032-052-MY2). I sincerely thank the Ministry for their generous support. Appreciation is extended to Tamkang University for funding a small study on the topic of “Competing Modes of Subjectivization: Situating Contemporary Historical Conflicts in Japanese Verse during the Occupation of Taiwan,” which also proved extremely helpful. The rendering of Japanese texts attempts to preserve the use of obsolete orthography and kana usage where possible, though simplified Japanese characters are also used. Romaji versions, on the contrary, aim to reflect pronunciation. Furigana and other glosses are usually evident only in Romaji versions. Except where noted otherwise, all translations of poetry and prose from Japanese and Chinese sources are my own, and I shoulder all responsibility for infelicities.

Introduction Japanese poetry and its publics

This book gathers and explores poetry actively involved in historical conflicts and turning points, shying away from the usual recitations of canonical poets and movements. Focusing on poetry in traditional forms such as tanka (短歌) and haiku (俳句) published in colonial and postcolonial Taiwan as well as satirical poetry such as “current events senryū” (時事川柳 jiji senryū), it traces how poetry not only reflects but participates in the formation of the modern affects—intensities of sensations and emotional orientations—in colonial public discourse and subject formations from colonization to the present. Poetry itself situates discourses that are shown in various ways and capacities to have shaped public affects with respect to events and both promoted and contested state policies or existing practices in society. Although accounts of Japanese poetry in colonial Taiwan tend to focus on work by native Japanese, this study foregrounds Taiwanese poets, thus emphasizing less colonial hubris than ambivalence. If anything, I hope readers will discover in Japanese poetry diverse instances in which Japanese and Taiwanese poets register affective and rationally formulated literary as well as sometimes satirical perspectives on national, imperial, and international affairs, and thus contribute to renegotiations of concepts of race, class, and national identity within Japan and Taiwan. As such, poetry is presented as offering an ideological record of affective responses to events, an archive by which one can explore ranges of subject-position possibilities in Taiwan and Japan. In this book, primarily centered on Japanese poetry in Taiwan, the focus on current events in poetry intends to draw together studies from a broad spectrum of postcolonial disciplines, including rhetoric and literary theory, studies of nationalism and colonialism, imperialism and neoliberalism, cultural studies and ecological studies. The role of Japanese poetry is shown to have been important in public newspapers, modeling exemplar affective intensities and responses as a form of supplement or aesthetic accompaniment to colonial expansion and control in Taiwan. At times, poetry also displays the biopolitical limits of subjugation and the assertion of formative Taiwanese identities or the exposure of imperialist hubris; at other times it reflects support for

2  Introduction imperial acts of naming mountains in the young Japanese colony, or the formation of unique subjects and a “minor literature” in post-Martial Law era Taiwan, or a postcolonial archive. Since many of the poems discussed originally appeared in newspaper poetry columns, this work may also be of interest to scholars in media studies, communications, and rhetoric as well as inter-Asian studies, postcolonial studies, history, political science, and poetics. One of the major general discoveries made in researching this work is that Japanese poetry is more interesting, not less when written outside Japan proper. Such poetry becomes imbricated in unexpected historical contexts, and colonial and postcolonial publications provide opportunities for a realization of writing that otherwise might be tempted by literary aspirations of the most formally superb yet generic and detached from contemporary events. Instead of performing Japanese linguistic competency and poetic skill per se, begging the question of being Japanese, poetry written by non-Japanese and Japanese alike in Taiwan tends to be framed both in relation to its conventions and with refreshing indifference to them. As such, quite innovative verse can be found in both literary and satirical compositions. Approaching Japanese verse in traditional forms in terms of English poetic expectations presents difficulties. There are differences between how poetry is read. Though there are many ways of approaching verse, we can say that at least as a form in Japanese it does not build upon a strong internal structuring, but rather relies on commonly understood associations, a matrix of associations, and coded language that is recognized as both poetic and emotionally charged. Traditionalists especially hold to the use of season words in haiku, so as to sustain this reliance on a matrix of expectations—functioning as an implied dialogic other (in Bakhtin’s sense) raised to a communal concern—to construct a context within a range of poetic associations or an acceptable lexicon as developed by the poet or affiliated (usually local) poetry circle. As time passes and the material world of modern conveniences and social relations continue to change over the decades, this lexicon is always expanding, and other intertextually invoked discourses draw new associations into the writing. In Japanese, haiku and other poetry in traditional forms are on the whole produced for the writing groups to which one belongs, and the topics for the weekly or monthly meeting may be set, the range of typical and acceptable materials generally understood within the group context (whether virtual, online, or a meeting at a room in a library or temple). In my understanding, based on participation, members key into various registers that invoke certain shared contexts through a collaging of indices to implied matrices (such as the seasonal matrix) with established associations, which often include conventional emotional responses. Ultimately, as anyone who has participated in a Japanese writing circle will know, members police each others’ decorous or provocative usages.1

Introduction  3 The methods I developed for reading Japanese poetry derive from an understanding that Japanese poetry, as it passed through modernization, continued—at least in its traditional forms—to entertain a dynamic that is entirely different from that found in other poetries I have encountered. Although it would be easier to see Japanese poetry movements as ­simply mirroring Western ones, the gap between the very modes of textuality in traditional Japanese poetries and Western poetry still needs to be adequately accounted for before one can seriously even begin to frame a critical account of modern poetry—including poetry in traditional forms— in Japanese.2 Hagiwara Sakutarō’s later work in his “Return to Japan” Romantic (nationalist) phase, represented by his collection The Iceland, embraces a more classical poetic idiom that is often treated as a step backward stylistically as well as politically by advocates of modern free-verse poetry. I wish to see beyond this simple opposition and attempt to trace more ­specifically how some kind of dialectic of traditional and modern poetics had taken shape in Japan, one which would not depend on reductive associations of Western as cosmopolitan, and Japanese as provincial. On the contrary, I find poetry in traditional forms (haiku, tanka, senryū) to be subtle (or at least intricate) and varied, not to mention engaged across the political spectrum. In fact, as a form tanka remains far, far more dense, sophisticated and flexible than modern free verse, which has yet to match it in compression and evocative power. This line of investigating the political and public uses of poetry not only helps one understand extremely complicated hybrid intertextualities in Meiji discourses in which the diversity of references and styles abound and obfuscate the underlying diversity of intertextual modus operandi in poetry, but also helps one situate poetry in traditional forms in diverse subsequent contexts, from colonial Taiwan and wartime Japan to contemporary poetry.3 By thus focusing not on the usual litany of detailed overviews of poetic circles, magazines, and authors, which would suggest the study of poetry may conform to a fixed, linear development (sometimes presented as shadowing a Western canon of literary movements) to be deductively applied from the perspective of tested generalizations with the aim of producing encyclopedic knowledge, I instead tend to treat the most visible poetry—especially poetry in the newspapers—bringing literary studies closer to media studies, historiography, or comparative thought. I analyze uses of poetry that engage political and economic issues of the day, whether by supporting the ascendant government or using poetry as a means of critique or intervention. As this book explores the relation of poetry, economic exploitation, and social justice under capitalism, it is a study of certain historical conflicts in colonial and postcolonial Taiwan and Japan. It examines the substantial roles poetry has played in shaping public policy and affective responses to contemporary events situated both intertextually and inter-­ discursively. Focusing on colonial Taiwan and wartime Japan, the first three chapters explore the impact of Japan’s embrace of capitalism, imperialism,

4  Introduction and its inherent drive toward rationalization and the reduction of life to the abstractions of exchangeable value that capitalism demands, and the importance of poetry in mediating and resisting this movement from bodily life to life characterized by “immaterial semiotic flows.”4 Chapter 1 shows the use of poetry in justifying the colonial rule of ­Taiwan, which Japan took possession of in 1895 in the wake of the First Sino-­Japanese War. It focuses on how poetry was used to justify the exploitation of labor and nature, and how chrysanthemums and other vegetation were used as well as idealized images of labor as recurring poetic “human events.” It also extends this line of analysis to discourse in cultural geography and Alain Badiou’s work on naming so as to outline not only the use of poetic categories as codified in poetic matrices and adapted to colonial Taiwan but the new places themselves in the nascent Empire: the use of poetry to lend acceptance to and garner cultural capital through the renaming of Yushan (Jade Mountain) as Nītakayama (New High Mountain), a mountain problematically higher than Mt. Fuji, so that it would function as a poetic place name in poetry and beyond. Chapter 2 documents the many poems appearing on New Year’s Day in poetry columns of the Taiwan nichinichi shimbun (Taiwan Daily News), focusing primarily on Taiwanese poets and how they were, in turn, marginalized or used for public relations according to government and business expedient needs and interests. Chapter 3 explores how this imperialist poetry and its depictions of China reflect an underlying ambivalence about a Japanese cultural identity. Following examples of poetry and song reflecting the slogans, symbols, affects, and ideology of the Japanese Empire and its aim to create a Great East Asian Sphere of Co-prosperity, it turns to a specific problem: the precarious yet overblown articulations of national identity in the writings of Yamakawa Hiroshi (1916–1945), whose work foregrounds antiquated Nativist issues of national cultural autonomy and desinicization. Thus, the desinicization Nativist fantasy of the eighteenth century comes full circle in the Second Sino-Japanese War itself, adding to our understanding of the contradictions in Japan’s Great East Asian Sphere of Co-­ prosperity and furthering our understanding of the historical antagonisms within Japan that led to the period of expansionism and fascism. Reflecting fieldwork conducted by joining the Taiwan Tanka Association (Taiwan kadan), Chapters 4 and 5 are comprised of an introduction to the group, its history, and its poetry, members and political significance. The focus of Chapter 4 ranges from situating things in daily life to contemporary politics, with special attention paid to the Sunflower Movement in Taiwan. Chapter 5 is more speculative, focusing on poetry composed by the Taiwan Tanka Association in sympathy for the victims of the 3.11 earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear disasters. It further develops situations in which intertextuality becomes politicized, extending these to hyperobjects linked by a Badiouian reinterpretation of intertextuality and object-relations as bound by parallel evental traces that form a common discourse by way of what I call

Introduction  5 inter-eventality. The sequence of 51 tanka is included in the Appendix. Chapter 6 explores poetry blogs in Taiwan, including blog poetry in Chinese and English as well as Japanese, and the applicability of critical metaphors and technologies associated with posthumanism to postcolonial issues of aging, postcolonial archives, and national identity. Most of the examples are taken from newspapers, or poets and critics writing at critical colonial and wartime junctures or addressing the Martial Law era (1949–1987), democratizing Taiwan, the 3.11 disaster, and the Sunflower Movement. As Noam Chomsky recently remarked, “It’s harder to extricate yourself from a system of unstated presuppositions than it is from explicitly stated doctrine. That’s the way a good propaganda system will operate.”5 Poetry is somewhere between critical aesthetic engagement and reflection of epistemological situations captivating Japanese and colonial subjects. Positions taken in published poetry range widely from mainstream support to critical satire, as chapters and sections below show.

Typological intertextuality and ontologies of postcolonial affiliation in Japanese poetry The conventions of intertextuality in Japanese poetry exist both as a ­poetics of allusion, expressed as a linear referential intertextuality, and as a typological intertextuality6 that does not rely on specific allusions per se but rather on categories and topics with affective associations, ­forming a shared matrix that becomes codified in poetic lexicons of season words with examples (saijiki) and various handbooks. Rather than an “ever-­expanding network of [the canon’s] constituent texts”7—a formulation that does not quite account for the recycling of similar phrases and imagery—one may consider intertextuality in classical Japanese poetics as building affective associations around words, places, flora, fauna, human and astronomical events, annual observances, and so forth so as to construct a virtual matrix that began with the Kokinshū.8 The more ­c ontemporary waka (Japanese poetry) included in the Kokinshū reflect a poetics entrenched in both the conventions and language drawn from other waka forms (including tanka-length waka and longer chōka or nagauta), as well as from Chinese poetry; however, the allusive methods themselves are not simply intertextual in the citational sense, but also in a typological one. Without explicitly alluding to a particular precedent text, phrases are recycled in poems so that nearly any poem can be found to allude to any number of poems (or range of poems) building on connotations found in earlier examples. The examples themselves are forgotten, while the associations remain so as to form a conventional matrix of affective associations throughout the imperial anthologies of waka thereafter—until modernization. Then, intertexuality becomes much more complicated, as this typological mode comes to co-exist with modes inspired by Western literature, rhetoric, and poetics.

6  Introduction Western ideas about textuality enter Japan in translations of literature, literary theory, philosophy, and poetry. While intertextuality may in general be understood as bound up both in the very choice of words and implied intertexts in light of readerly conventions in the context of writing, concomitantly conveying intertextual modes that are being engaged, in the modern era the intertexts and associations must situate new things and words that have few connotations or associations: the modern intertexts offer means of indexing and registering affiliations within some affective commons that includes the new and modern. Intertextuality as such invokes both referential and typological modes of the intertextuality being implemented.9 Yet rather than pursue a reader-focused study (as intertextual studies often do), I would like to focus on how texts as publicly presented compositions have been constructed within the texture of society at different times and in relation to other texts—poetic or otherwise—and events variously reflecting the impact of capitalism and imperialism at different stages of engaging the revaluation, commoditization, and rationalization of society. Texts, following Badiou, present responses to unfolding events by resituating the world in terms of new ontological possibilities rendered visible in light of such events. To understand this non-hermeneutic tradition one may turn to terms used to discuss waka poetics (karon), in which literal, “direct language” (chokugo) and “metaphorical language” do not form the all-encompassing contrasting pair one finds in premodern Western poetics. “Direct language” in classical Japanese poetry contrasts with koji (古事, waka-specific conventional diction, literally “ancient matters”), which Amagasaki Akira describes as beginning with “pillow words [makurakotoba] in a broad sense,” but also “the calling up of certain specific phrases that have important functions.” These koji appear as if italicized and linked not necessarily referentially to prior uses in other waka (and chōka), but rather to the typological and matrixial uses in classical poetry in general (as defined within a poet’s contemporary circle of affiliations).10 Thus in reading waka, it is not the degree of covertness that makes a text engaging in terms of allusions,11 but rather the very intertextual engagement with the typology and associational matrix, or at best an “activation of multiple texts.”12 The intertexts are generally to be understood as multiple and not hermeneutic in the sense of eliciting a potentially unified reading by way of intertexts.13 The available range of intertexts, arranged by topics, form a matrix of potential allusions that diffuse the opposition of covert and overt allusion. In the end, assuming a text has an autonomous inner system is not a feasible method of reading waka at all. In its modern form, tanka, this typological textuality allows for very interesting results. Giving weight to the intertextual affiliations and vectors of reference drawn in the creation of haiku, the importance of season words in haiku is not limited to what Haruo Shirane translates as a “poetic essence” (hon’i 本意), associations clustering around a seasonal topic that poets were in the premodern era expected to master either strictly or satirically. It

Introduction  7 “formed the heart of the cultural landscape, provided the horizon of expectations against which haikai established its newness or implied difference.”14 Yet, the intertextuality in haiku, as in tanka, may be seen as interfacing with other matrices and modes of discourse in our contemporary society, with the pressure of various discourses intertextually shaping haiku today. The conventional orientation established through season words, (poetic) place names and similar associations formed the typological groundwork for an expansive and inter-discursive intertextual poetics to be developed throughout the twentieth century. Shirane recognizes that the popular poetry of haikai, usually taking the form of linked poetry composed in groups, “implied the interaction of diverse languages and subcultures”15 even in Matsuo Bashō’s (1644–1694) day; however, the formalist approach he takes cannot adequately account for colonial and postcolonial uses of poetry, as it fails to account for ethical, political, and other positioning. It has not situated decision-making in the poetics of allusion. By developing a more politicized account of intertextually, this book thus moves away from the functionalism inherent to mappings of Jakobson’s “combination and equivalence”16 onto various forms linking in and association in haikai. Thus, methodologically this book focuses on why addressing questions of intertextuality in a politicized manner again matters. Words within worlds presented in poetic configurations renegotiate forms in colonial contexts. The relation of the colonizer’s home world and the colonized fractured home world become inevitably at odds in terms of languages and customs. How poems appear in the world of the colonized becomes ontologically significant. As Alain Badiou writes in his work from the period of Logics of Worlds, “The poem is not the guardian of being, as Heidegger thought, but the exposure to language of the resources of appearing.”17 In light of this work by Badiou, intertextuality may be reclaimed from its dated (postmodern) role as a marker of the processing of endless chains of deferred and displaced signification, while it may still be understood as more than simple references or allusions to specific intertexts. This very formulation of “the exposure to language of the resources of appearing” places the burden of appearing on the presentation by the poet using language. That it mentions Heidegger as such suggests a refusal of poetry as an “unconcealing” per se, as well as the dasein (being-there) model of culture as a tree implanted in a dwelling place; instead, Badiou models an alternative form of emplacement, one which entails a Platonic division of what is known to be and what appears to exist, which provides a means of recognizing what is rendered in-existent as well as existent in colonial contexts. Intertextuality tends to refer either to the tracing of how earlier texts inform later texts—notably in Latin and biblical studies—or to the idea of a process to which all instances of language submit, so that the term risks becoming trivialized as both a marker of genealogical explorations and the banal sine qua non of postmodern displacement and deferral of meaning. Intertextuality after Badiou may be seen as neither open in the postmodern

8  Introduction sense nor closed in the biblical sense of limited references; rather, the indexicality of words points not to things but indeed does point to engagements with discourse by which the world, historicized at a given site in time, is formulated and figured. Both word and more than word—not a textual supplement but a material worlding—the human subject itself is decentered as focus turns to human artifacts. The proof is not in the intentions (for a better world), but the actions in the present. The burden of engagement remains, and is measured in the poetic artifact, especially by questions concerning the reach of intertextual affiliation: where does the poem go, what, where, and who are entertained and recognized? In Adolphe Haberer’s overview of early uses of intertextuality, beginning with Julia Kristeva’s elaboration of Bakhtin’s dialogic understanding of the novel in Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, one may be struck by the absence of the original political impulse in Kristeva’s formulation, namely, to clarify “polyphony, or heteroglossia—the coexistence and interplay of several types of discourse reflecting the social or class dialects and the different generations and age groups of society.”18 By returning to Kristeva’s earlier orientation, one may resituate intertextuality as fundamentally relevant to the formation of affiliations and the emplacement of subjects in poetic configurations. In Badiou’s sense, indexing sites, I argue, suggests a means of re-conceptualizing intertextuality as bound up in fundamental creative (not passive or incidental) practices of inclusion, exclusion and subtraction from the (assumed) non-differentiated whole of a state. For Badiou a “subject” is neither produced out of class ressentiment nor born entrenched within a coordinated system of privilege, but rather is an objectified appearance that refuses the gap between the protest against current conditions and correction within a possible future; it is present and non-utopian. Moreover, as fidelity to an event alone—a recurring theme in Badiou’s work—may seem programmatic, focus on intertextual affiliations becomes a creative theme more closely oriented to the end of forming alliances for the purpose of realizing recognition of an event. The poem itself (as the form of “truth condition” by which the subject appears) presents from available intertexts and evental traces a configuration of elements into an appearance that shapes not only understanding of the world but a world ontology. Thus “intertexts” becomes synonymous with “words” or “phrases”—the material of poetry that borrows and relates to ranges of implied affiliates and readers or “others.” Badiou relates elements of a multiple in an indexing that very much resembles an intertextual relation: Take any situation whatsoever. A multiple that is an object of this situation – whose elements are indexed by the transcendental of this situation – is a site if it happens to count itself within the referential field of its own indexation. Or again: a site is a multiple that happens to behave in the situation with regard to itself as with the regard to its elements, in such a way as to support the being of its own appearing.19

Introduction  9 While this theoretical fiction of clear indexing may be understood as compensating for postmodernism’s rhetoric of infinite flux, it is not a reactionary compensation so much as a refiguring: from passive indifference within an infinite network to ethically finite engagements with the presentation of an ontological possibility in a given situation. As postmodernity has lost its hegemonic status, it is precisely this originally socially situated clarity that suits the development of a rehabilitation of the study of intertextuality. In fact, in light of Haberer’s genealogy, one cannot help but wonder what a post-postmodern approach to intertextuality would look like today specifically in light of the writings of Badiou. What is omitted then begins to elude attention. In colonial contexts, there is much that must be forgotten (inequalities, the brutal murder of anyone challenging the rulers, devaluation of one’s own cultures, etc.) in order for a colony to function. Poetry shapes through language what appears to exist. As the text at hand becomes objectified as what is counted as a subject presentation, whether framed as conscious or unconscious makes no difference. The choice of intertextual discursive affiliation may be framed in light of Badiou’s modeling of poetic configurations. Thus a poem situates choices and suggests a subject model for assessing poetry based not on discerning infinite play of signification within a poem but rather on situating the poetic materials presented in a finite poem sculpted out of the wide range of possible intertextual relations and inter-discursive affiliations, available technical modes, and rhythms of syntax and lineation. One has moved far beyond formalism but may not notice the need for this nuanced range until encountering colonial difference. The primary contribution of a Badiouian approach to intertextuality is found in the clarity it brings by way of its capacity to overcome the postmodern hermeneutics of so-called “endless chains of signification” (hopelessness of the endless stasis of the unredeemed present) within a textually indeterminate world (typified in Derrida) of simulacra (typified by Baudrillard). Badiou situates events not as peripheral supplements to the status quo, but rather as inciting ethical obligations; as such, they are capable of redeeming literature and language use in general. By insisting that a poetic configuration must step beyond the assumed consistency and monistic univocity of a given historical site and situation of possibilities and include inconsistencies that split the configuration, it is for Badiou the underappreciated event— whether political or aesthetic innovation of poetic form (or both)—that provides the model for points of reference that fill the patent emptiness demanded by the postmodern sublime or unspecified longing. Such an event (like the object in Foucault’s definition of discourse around an object in Archaeology of Knowledge) provokes not a simple (dictatorial) fidelity, but rather a call to situate relations, which may be understood in social terms as determinates of interpersonal ties in Glissant’s20 sense of a fecundity of peoples, languages and communities in the Caribbean as well Guattari’s21 sense of transversality. In this way, we may recognize and account for the

10  Introduction poem as a poem in a historical moment in which poetry appears within a certain spectrum of possibilities, and to situate the poem beyond the text in relation to discourses on events. It is in this intertextual and inter-discursive orientation that change is situated. Adam S. Miller paraphrases Badiou’s dependence on set theory, writing “set theory renders the infinite banal” because the “claim of the infinite ruins every pretension to totality” as “every consistent unity is haunted by an original inconsistency that it fails to order without paradox.”22 Badiou’s wager is, in Miller’s words, that “set theory revolutionizes our understanding of infinity in two ways: (1) it makes possible the thought of an actual infinity, and (2) it abolishes the singular and ineffable homogeneity of the infinite by articulating an infinity of orderable infinities.”23 This key move allows truth claims to be framed within the localized set(s) of multiples so that infinity becomes “actual and articulable rather than potential and unintelligible” so that “infinity is nothing special, infinity is all there is” and “the work of thought is no longer to distinguish the finite from the infinite, but to distinguish one order of infinity from another. The articulation of truth will depend on a distinction within infinity itself” so that his frame preserves “a difference between truth and being within the infinity of the purely multiple.”24 It is here that one is able to map a post-postmodern form of intertextuality out of Badiou’s framing of localized truth procedures. Building on Miller, who writes “belonging is set theory’s fundamental relation because it is what designates a set as a set,” it simply and abstractly distinguishes what belongs to a set from what does not. In making this distinction, belonging both joins and disjoins being and truth. That which is discernible as belonging to a given set is what is sayable in that situation.25 It is precisely here that belonging converges with the forms of affiliation manifest in intertextual relations between compositions and its others (other texts, material situations, histories, knowledge, etc.). This attention to intertextually evident affiliations (as belongings forming multiples or, in Badiou’s later jargon, “poetic configurations”) suggests a method for reading poetry in an age of neoliberalism (not to mention the wake of postmodernism). As Dewsbury notes, the question of Badiou’s helpfulness hinges on how we situate the political in his philosophical frame in the context of the competing claims of Marxists after Foucault regarding the integrity of active subjects and the “death of Man” which problematizes such subjects.26 Dewsbury argues that we should be asking how the multiplicity of the world is made consistent, and how such consistencies, which need not be so, hold power relations that have a time-space, a timing-spacing, geography to them which are both of long-term duration and ephemerally event-like in their effect.27

Introduction  11 Examining the “body” of how poems may enter into relationships of affiliation and belonging—whether based on political, romantic, scientific or artistic concerns—provides a means of measured appreciation and simple recognition of the political and economic dimensions of life in a colonial or postcolonial context. Thus within Badiou’s riposte to postmodernism, intertextuality may be understood as a field of elements—any texts—that overcomes norms of the day and resituates at least one element amid existing elements so as to immediately and effectively implement change. The direction this takes need not be progressive or responsible, but it provides a means of recovering from an understanding of poetry as acquiescing to a fiction of unassailably groundless and meaningless textual worlds of endlessly floating signifiers. Resituated as an intertextual field of measurable degrees of inclusion and exclusion, this view may be coherently challenged. Though it is easy to engage in attacks on obvious targets when it is in the news (say environmental destruction), the approach outlined by Badiou would make it possible to highlight inaction when ethical engagement would seem to be called for in light of much murkier developing events within the ambivalences of postcolonial contexts. Thus whereas intertextuality in Japanese haikai (俳諧) may have formed a crossroads by which parody of the classics would flourish in structured play, following Badiou, a poem would have the potential to index any number of points or intertexts, and integrate them into the poetic configuration as presenting simultaneously both the logic of the poetic form (including such structured play) and the ontological set posited in light of the very affiliations integrated in it or excluded from it. What is excluded may be the core assumptions of a world seemingly impossible, yet ethically needed in a given context. The intertextual range of discourses, established groups, positioning among groups, and the ethical situation of the poet all converge in a post-postmodern repossession of positions in poetry. Thus, a poet may be recognized as taking a position in the language of intertextual engagement, or as merely conforming to the established order and remaining without newness (that is, without inconsistency, with respect to the established sense of what is taken for granted as being in the world). The intertextual texture of a poetic configuration bears its affiliations, and the worse one could do, is to recuperate the existing order without altering it (to expropriate Eliot’s phrasing). Moreover, Jonathan Sell28 has touched on this point in the context of fiction, when he writes that far from leaving readers with so many parcels of sophisticated textuality on their hands …, intertextuality bridges the experiential and cognitive gaps that separate disparate subjects and thus enables fictions to achieve their goal of building empathy between reader and character. It is here that issues of colonial mimicry and satire overlap with the sort of Badiouian intertextual positioning put forth here. Thus the publics of

12  Introduction the title of this book is explored through the examination of intertextual affiliations and ethical acts of naming in poetry presented in highly public media, primarily newspapers, blogs, social media, and poetry journals.

Notes 1 The above two paragraphs are adapted from Dean Brink, “John Ashbery’s ‘37 Haiku’ and the American Haiku Orthodoxy,” in Globalization and Cultural Identity/Translation, ed. Pengxiang Chen and Terence Russell (Jiaoxi, Taiwan: Fo Guang University and University of Manitoba, 2010), 157–59. 2 Dean Brink, “Intertexts for a National Poetry: The Ideological Origins of Shintaishi” (PhD diss., University of Chicago, 2003), first breeched such issues. 3 In addition to the chapters focusing on Taiwan in this volume, my related works on Japanese poetry in Japan include: “Globalization and the Portable Poetic Matrix in Tawara Machi’s Travelogues,” Critical Practice 28 (2011): 1–10; “Cheerful Dissensus: Almighty Satirical Poetry Columns in Neoliberalist Japan,” Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies 27, no. 2 (2013): 228–41; and “Sustaining Jouissance: Commercial and Heian Intertexts in Tawara Machi’s Tanka,” Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique 16, no. 3 (2008): 629–59. 4 For an exploration of this emptying effect and increased abstraction in relation to poetry, see Franco Berrardi, The Uprising: On Poetry and Finance (Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e), 2012), esp. 26. 5 Noam Chomsky and David Barsamian. Power Systems: Conversations on Global Democratic Uprisings and the New Challenges to U.S. Empire (New York: Metropolitan Books, Henry Holt and Company, 2013), 102. 6 See Susanne Holthuis, “Intertextuality and Meaning Constitution: An Approach to the Comprehension of Intertextual Poetry,” in Approaches to Poetry: Some Aspects of Textuality, Intertextuality and Intermediality, ed. János S. Petöfi and Terry Olivi (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1994), esp. 79. 7 Edward Kamens, Utamakura, Allusion and Intertextuality in Traditional Japanese Poetry (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997), 34. 8 For a literal rendering of this matrix with a glaring absence of recognition of its political implications and range of reification in modern verse, see Shirane, Japan and the Culture of the Four Seasons: Nature, Literature, and the Arts (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012). 9 See Holthius, “Intertextuality and Meaning Constitution,” esp. 78–79. 10 See Akira Amagasaki, En no bigaku—Uta no michi no shigaku, II (Tokyo: Keikō Shobō, 1995), 22. He also points out that Fujiwara no Hamanari (724–90) had situated this distinction as one of three aspects of a waka, along with “fresh meaning” (shin-i, also understandable as “new intention or sense”) that presents the image (butsuzō,物像), and kekku (結句), concluding verse, which was for him the delivery, the singing the “the thoughts of the author.” 11 Waka, being of a non-logocentric tradition, can in part be understood in contemporary terms in light of a distinction made by Udo Hebel, who approaches allusion (out of the context of waka) as a tension between readers and writers, rather than the initiation of an encyclopedic task of investigating references, whereby the more obscure generates more interpretive work in elucidating texts. Udo J. Hebel, “Towards a Descriptive Poetics of Allusion,” in Intertextuality, ed. Heinrich F. Plett (New York: de Gruyter, 1991), 135–64. Hebel also cites Harold Bloom in Maps of Misreading, writing that “Bloom’s conclusive dichotomy draws attention to a significant point of controversy among scholars of allusion as it foregrounds the definitional opposition ‘covert’ vs. ‘overt’,” in Hebel, Intertextuality, 136.

Introduction  13 12 I am paraphrasing Ziva Ben-Porat, cited in Hebel, Intertextuality, 136. 13 Citing Riffaterre, Hebel writes, “any allusion acts as a ‘stumbling block’, drawing the reader’s attention to the text’s intertextual relationships. From this perspective, the allusive system of a text becomes the verifiable cross section where text and intertext meet, and where the intertextual background of the text becomes tangible for the reader. In terms of intertextual theory, allusions are manifestations of the text’s idéologème that marks the text’s historical and social coordinates.” See Hebel, Intertextuality, 139. In waka, the allusions are as likely to be points of dispersion in a chain of intertexts as to be references that ground the waka at hand in a specific literary scene in a specific earlier work. 14 Haruo Shirane, Traces of Dreams: Landscape, Cultural Memory, and the Poetry of Basho (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), 187. 15 Shirane, Traces of Dreams, 7. 16 Ibid., 88. 17 Alain Badiou, Second Manifesto for Philosophy, 29. 18 Adolphe Haberer, “Intertextuality in Theory and Practice,” Literatūra 49, no. 5 (2007): 57. 19 Badiou, The Communist Hypothesis (London and New York: Verso, 2010), 200. Emphasis in original. 20 Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, trans. Betsy Wing (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997). 21 Félix Guattari, Chaosmosis: An Ethico-aesthetic Paradigm (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995); and Molecular Revolution: Psychiatry and Politics (New York: Penguin, 1984). 22 Adam S. Miller, “Re-Thinking Infinity: Alain Badiou’s Being & Event,” Review, Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory 8, no. 1 (Winter 2006): 123. 23 Miller, “Re-Thinking Infinity,” 124. 24 Ibid. 25 Ibid., 125. Emphasis added. 26 J.D. Dewsbury, “Unthinking Subjects: Alain Badiou and the Event of Thought in Thinking Politics,” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 32, no. 4 (2007): 447. 27 Ibid. 28 Jonathan Sell, “Intertextuality as Mimesis and Metaphor: The Deviant Phraseology of Caryl Phillips’s Othello,” Odisea 9 (2008): 202.

Bibliography Amagasaki, Akira. En no bigaku—Uta no michi no shigaku, II. Tokyo: Keikō Shobō, 1995. Badiou, Alain. Second Manifesto for Philosophy. Cambridge and Malden, MA: Polity, 2011. ———. The Communist Hypothesis. London and New York: Verso, 2010. Berrardi, Franco. The Uprising: On Poetry and Finance. Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e), 2012. Brink, Dean. “Cheerful Dissensus: Almighty Satirical Poetry Columns in Neoliberalist Japan.” Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies 27, no. 2 (2013): 228–41. ———. “Globalization and the Portable Poetic Matrix in Tawara Machi’s Travelogues.” Critical Practice 28 (2011): 1–10. ———. “Intertexts for a National Poetry: The Ideological Origins of Shintaishi.” PhD diss., University of Chicago, 2003.

14  Introduction ———. “John Ashbery’s ‘37 Haiku’ and the American Haiku Orthodoxy.” In Globalization and Cultural Identity/Translation, edited by Pengxiang Chen and Terence Russell, 157–65. Jiaoxi, Taiwan: Fo Guang University and University of Manitoba, 2010. ———. “Sustaining Jouissance: Commercial and Heian Intertexts in Tawara Machi’s Tanka.” Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique 16, no. 3 (2008): 629–59. Chomsky, Noam, and David Barsamian. Power Systems: Conversations on Global Democratic Uprisings and the New Challenges to U.S. Empire. New York: Metropolitan Books, Henry Holt and Company, 2013. Dewsbury, J.D. “Unthinking Subjects: Alain Badiou and the Event of Thought in Thinking Politics.” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 32, no. 4 (2007): 443–59. Glissant, Édouard. Poetics of Relation. Translated by Betsy Wing. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997. Guattari, Félix. Chaosmosis: An Ethico-aesthetic Paradigm. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995. ———. Molecular Revolution: Psychiatry and Politics. New York: Penguin, 1984. Haberer, Adolphe. “Intertextuality in Theory and Practice.” Literatūra 49, no. 5 (2007): 54–67. Hebel, Udo J. “Towards a Descriptive Poetics of Allusion.” In Intertextuality, edited by Heinrich F. Plett, 135–64. New York: de Gruyter, 1991. Holthuis, Susanne. “Intertextuality and Meaning Constitution: An Approach to the Comprehension of Intertextual Poetry.” In Approaches to Poetry: Some Aspects of Textuality, Intertextuality and Intermediality, edited by János S. Petöfi and Terry Olivi, 77–93. Berlin: de Gruyter, 1994. Kamens, Edward. Utamakura, Allusion and Intertextuality in Traditional Japanese Poetry. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997. Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich. Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism. Vol. 1 of Selected Works. Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1963. Miller, Adam S. “Re-Thinking Infinity: Alain Badiou’s Being & Event.” Review. Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory 8, no. 1 (Winter 2006): 121–127. Robbins, Richard H. Global Problems and the Culture of Capitalism. Boston, MA: Pearson Allyn and Bacon, 2002. Sell, Jonathan. “Intertextuality as Mimesis and Metaphor: The Deviant Phraseology of Caryl Phillips’s Othello.” Odisea 9 (2008): 201–11. Shirane, Haruo. Japan and the Culture of the Four Seasons: Nature, Literature, and the Arts. New York: Columbia University Press, 2012. ———. Traces of Dreams: Landscape, Cultural Memory, and the Poetry of Basho. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998. Yanaihara, Tadao. Teikokushugika/Diguozhuyixia no Taiwan (Taiwan under imperialism) Taipei City: Nantian shuju, 1997 [1929].

1 Japanese imperialism and poetic matrices Conventional and autopoietic projections of “nature,” place, and labor in early colonial Taiwan1 Today we see the mountain taking off its Chinese clothes and putting on its soft Japanese silks からころも脱ぎてやさしき大和きぬ着たる姿の山をけふ見き Karagoromo nugite yasashiki Yamato-kinu kitaru sugata no yama o kyo miki —Nobuo 信夫, Taiwan nichinichi shimbun, 17 August 1902

As the Japanese nation modernized its navy and army as a result of the First Sino-Japanese War (1894–1895), the Qing Dynasty handed them Taiwan, their first colony beyond Hokkaido and Okinawa. Referencing samples of poems (such as epigraph) appearing in the largest of the Japanese newspapers, the Taiwan nichinichi shimbun (Taiwan Daily News), this chapter explores how poetry both reflected colonial needs and issues facing the Japanese during the early colonial period and how poetry publication itself adapted to the new colonial situation.2 Japanese poetry in traditional forms relies on typologically ordered (around seasonal words and referents) and highly conventionalized matrices of association that assumes a setting in Japan, inclusive of place names as well as climate. Adapting poetry to the new associative and common intertextual horizons for use in Taiwan by Japanese poets was not easy. As tanka and modern haiku in Japan reflect established practices that have roots in the constellation of flora and fauna of a more northern climate, Japan continued to frame the social imaginary as projected in established Japanese poetic configurations of what could seriously be considered as poetry or poetic. Even as the subject matter broadened into modern and more cosmopolitan references and contexts, place names—also a cornerstone of Japanese poetry—initially carried no cultural capital. Since poetic place names (utamakura, lit. poetic pillows)3 are central to Japanese verse, in effect binding it closely to the geography of the Japanese archipelago, some poets present during the early period of colonial rule in Taiwan even argued that the composition of Japanese verse set in Taiwan would be impossible. 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

16  Japanese imperialism and poetic matrices support of a nationalist outlook. Poetic matrices of association provided an apparatus capable of ignoring Taiwanese Chinese, and aboriginal interests, treating each group as what Homi Bhabha has called a “partial presence,” one which always misses something in comparison to the full presence of the newly dominant Japanese in colonial Taiwan.4 Moreover, local place names could be beautified and codified just as names had in Japan, as will be shown below. Of course, there is violence inherent in this imposition, and Japanese traditional tanka composition (a 31-mora Japanese poetic form)—elegantly reflecting a matrix of conventional uses and affective associations—­becomes a useful apparatus for naturalizing not simply mimetic representations of Taiwan and its residents, but rather an anamorphic method of double-­ imaging Taiwan as both Japanese and exotic other. Insofar as poetry helped sustain the jouissance of this colonial ambivalence, its usefulness to the Empire derived primarily from its capacity for situating Japanese interests while obfuscating Taiwanese interests for the readers, who would be mostly Japanese in this early period. Thus, this chapter aims to clarify how tanka and other traditional poetry which appeared in newspaper poetry columns during the early period of the occupation of Taiwan helped to naturalize such profit-seeking motives intrinsic to capitalist empires in conventional poems on seasonal and social topics. Like other imperialist powers, Japan used cultural production to justify and aestheticize wars and colonization. When situating Japanese imperialism, it may be helpful to recognize it as the natural by-product of the world capitalist system. Modeled after Western imperialists, the dependency on clearly demarcated hierarchies was (and remains in capitalism) a structural necessity if profits are to be taken. At very least, forced “volunteering”—to extract labor—denies any need to pay, yet avoid having to resort to slavery. Such fictions are needed for a new colony to be shaped into a profitable enterprise, a frame for entrepreneurs and state monopolies to flourish. The differentiation of Japanese and Taiwanese, often distinguished as homelanders (naichijin 内地人) and islanders (hontōjin 本島人) become names within a subtler formation of gendered tracks for people, work, and education paths that naturalize conditions within which the deployment of racial distinctions and hierarchies would seem to be the cause and not the consequence. As colonial corporations invested capital into colonial Taiwan, in my account, poetry formed a supporting discursive system grounded in poetic matrices, its poetics helping to extend its clever capacity for aestheticization to the exoneration of imperialist efforts; in fact, it is precisely here in the discourse of poetry working for the empire that the relationship between colonized and colonizer comes to the fore, as the racial markers in the poetry exhibit not only policy but affective ideological intensities or orientations. This historically naturalized disregard for the equal footing of all subjects, necessary for the economic success of the colony as a profit-­ making enterprise for Japanese, stands in contradiction to the fact that

Japanese imperialism and poetic matrices  17 Japanese sought equality themselves in international forums and relations. As such, poetry expresses the contradictions of imperialism in Japan as it sought racial equality for its citizens while at the same time manufacturing inferiority in its colonies. Even today, a collection of Japanese verse from the occupation era, co-translated by a Taiwanese poet, treats the Taiwan poets as partial presences to be omitted as unworthy of consideration,5 suggesting how easily colonial racial hierarchies have crept into the realm of commonsense even for those with the best of intentions. As will be explored at length in later chapters, these legacies of Taiwanese-Japanese cooperation are quite complicated, heterogeneous, and long-lived.

Posthuman autopoiesis and the poetics of traditional Japanese form poetry in colonial contexts In contrast to the critical attention paid to hermeneutics in Western readings of poetry, in situating Japanese traditional forms of poetry, one may foreground a typological intertextuality: shared phraseology or typology that sets these forms of poetry apart from standard language.6 In the modern era they exhibit various degrees of broadened intertextual affiliations; no longer simply confined to a poetic lexicon or matrix of associations, its range of diction and registers may extend to any variety of discourse. It should be recognized as a poetic mode just as powerful as Western lyricism, but entirely different, difficult to discern, and one which should be situated without resorting to Orientalist obfuscation or the reduction to a subset of Western lyricism, as if it could be understood and contained within this frame of reference. The conventional staid classical compositional competency well known in the late Tokugawa Period (most famously in the Keien School of Kagawa Kageki [1768–1843]) gave way in modern poetry to a robust modern intertextuality manifested in Japanese poetics, including discourses prominent during the nation- and colony-building late Meiji period, from which most of the traditional form poems in this chapter are taken. The terms poetic matrix—of associations between places, situations, times within seasons, and emotional colorings—and extreme intertextuality, by which intertextual referentiality becomes more important than the intratextual, together in effect establish an alternative to conventional subject-­c entered expressive modes of situating Japanese poetry and poetics. Instead of focusing on the subject as articulating an enunciation that bears the imprint of a lyrical mind, the approach used here is designed to treat the poetic fusion as voiced by way of a nonexpressive7 mode, a shared matrix of poetic associations—images often of natural phenomena—and emotional states of becoming or of being moved (affective intensities bound up with words and affiliations). On the one hand, it blurs subject assemblage as individual articulations within a larger assemblage, so as to reveal ideological positioning and associations developing within a context (situation); on the other hand, it focuses on choices of intertexts (consciously or not) as a

18  Japanese imperialism and poetic matrices measure of individual responsibility for the articulations, individually, and in terms of chosen affiliations. The matrix is formed and sustained not only by the poetic lexicon (saijiki) but by a highly intertextual processing of a pastiche of words into pleasant phonetic strings with regulated affective expressions deriving from these combinations and implied correspondences (based on precedents for appropriate use within a genre, as well as variant preferences according to each writing group or newspaper column editor). Because the language used is borrowed from a shared body of words, topics, and conventions, it reflects an extreme intertextuality—certainly in comparison with Western conventional poetry—a poet-subject given over to the emotional opportunities opened by highly conventional and intertextual language as well as the possibility of newly introducing other discourses. The poem depends on triggered associations rather than on an expressive discursive linear communicative act. Using Deleuze’s Spinozan language, the poem-articulation constructed by the poet is given over to the affects of the assemblage and enters the virtuality made possible by the poetic matrix (whether implied or formally outlined in a poetic lexicon with examples). The term poetic matrix is used not to suggest a seamless, functionalist totality, but rather the base discourse on which the poetic practice of deploying extreme intertextuality is made possible, and by which other discourses are fused to the foundational matrix so as to be naturalized within the resulting virtuality. As Ania Loomba writes, summarizing Foucault, “power … extends itself laterally in a capillary fashion—it is part of daily action, speech and everyday life.”8 The matrix and intertextual proclivity does not (as in prevalent understandings of intertextuality) displace a writing (or reading) subject’s responsibility or decision-­making, but focuses on the positioning in terms of affiliations and alliances in addition to obvious positivist or empiricist pronouncements. This model in effect describes the literary form and associated standard writing practices, which are in themselves largely uncontroversial (taken broadly), and then develops a critical language that also accounts for modern permutations of these poetic mechanisms— namely, how the poetics of allusion in traditional poetry became altered into what may be called extreme intertextuality (as opposed to intratextuality) in the modern period, forming relations with diverse discourses (not merely literary ones). The intertexts chosen (relata) now are more varied, creating in modern poetry a complex articulation of the subject positioning of poets not based simply on surface statements. In this mode of writing and reading poetry, the positioning of poets becomes especially traceable when the intertexts can be shown to suggest social affiliations, and, variously, satire, and resistance. One sees the importance of the role of intertextual discursive choices (conscious or unconscious) to lie in realizing how in the writing of poems a colonial double consciousness or orthodoxy is constructed. Though many poems (not cited in this study) were indeed mundane descriptions of nature (often assuming entirely northern, Japanese conventions of representation

Japanese imperialism and poetic matrices  19 in subtropical Taiwan), there remain many which reflect this ideological imposition, often suggested by the editor’s very choice of topic in announced calls for poems in the Taiwan nichinichi shimbun, the primary Japanese newspaper publisher during the Japanese occupation. The intertextual approach thus outlined focuses not on the selection and combination of Jakobson’s textual approach, 9 but rather on the interaction with others as bodily presences employing conventionalized language to suggest emotional (ideological) investments or affective engagements. Cary Wolfe’s work exploring how both Derrida and Luhmann approach such (on the surface) subject-weak processes of articulation helps shed light on how extreme intertextuality in Japanese poetry functioned in Taiwan ideologically. Reliance on a Japanese poetic matrix supports a “consensual domain,” a self-referential autopoietic domain, but one which becomes in Taiwan a domain that is also an extension of Japanese space in general, and a “virtuality” that in its autopoieticity engenders walls (membranes). In Wolfe’s language: “it is both what one does in embodied enaction”—­exploiting Taiwan for profits—and the virtuality evident in “what the self-reference of that enaction excludes” by merely aestheticizing Taiwan. Thus applying this approach to poetry in Taiwan, “the selectivity of a self-referential selectivity or code” itself comes to define how poets situate themselves (whether within a group or alone); we avoid a simple Jakobsonian subject-centered selection and combination as axes within an assumed Cartesian coordinate grid (that engenders functionalist limitations leading to self-referential paradoxes). Wolfe cites Luhmann’s statement, “Reality is what one does not perceive when one perceives it” so that there is “openness from closure.”10 In posthumanist discourse, this blind-spot function marks the displacement of judgment, the ascendency of market functions, and the core colonial violence of refusing the other, the local cultures, for the sake of establishing racial and ethnic differences and creating classes so as to facilitate exploitative practices and control the colorful quest for profits. Poetry—­being open to any number of possible configurations—may or may not contribute to “colonial compartmentalization”11 in the discursive overlay of the colonizer matrices onto the lives of the colonized, who are deemed lesser and even are dehumanized within the civilizing rhetoric, here, manifest in the virtual prosthesis of poetic discourse to everyday colonial life.

Autopoietic inspiration: Love of virtual nature and the colonial economy It is hard to imagine a better ideology (naturalized commonsense) for disguising and legitimating capitalist exploitation in Taiwan than the Japanese one of loving nature—expressed nowhere more intensely than in poetry itself. While poetry representing nature would seem to be innocuous— especially in Japanese poetry, which suggests (not only in the popular Western imagination) a nation enamored by nature12—it involves complex

20  Japanese imperialism and poetic matrices mechanisms of disavowal and virtualization with the help of established poetic matrices. In its most general sense, the adoration of natural phenomena simply shifts attention so as to disavow exploitative practices in Taiwan. By examining select ideologically telling examples taken from the Taiwan nichinichi shimbun, the poetic discourse will be shown to reinforce and naturalize colonial policy. From the Governor-General’s office to the local appointed village head, the aim of colonization was to insure smooth cooperation as Japanese companies competed to procure human and natural resources through various projects which required government assistance: securing land and workers fending off competition from other companies. Japan’s wealth and growing empire were funded in part by the riches freely taken from Taiwan itself: already in the second decade of Japanese rule, “local revenues plus unpaid local ‘volunteer’ labor provided more than enough to meet ordinary administrative costs.”13 In order to clearly define the application of this poetic culture to Taiwan, one may schematically call this a cultural prosthesis whereby poetry transposes the language of nature as used in traditional poetry into a virtual edifice. The reliance on a cultivated poetic matrix of conventional associations suggests we need to abandon the assumption of simple individual expressivity and foreground responsibility of relations to chosen ethical others and communal modes of poetic encoding, which can be ascertained in the choice of intertexts and affiliations written into the poems. Use of the term “prosthetic” follows Wolfe’s sense in defining posthumanism: it names the embodiment and embeddedness of the human being in not just its biological but also its technological world, the prosthetic coevolution of the human animal with the technicity of tools and external archival mechanisms (such as language and culture).14 The poetic matrix constitutes such a cultural prosthetic function implemented in colonial Taiwan. Moreover, with a broader sense of history, Katherine Hayles, in her groundbreaking exploration of posthumanism, suggests tensions between literary subject-centered poets and technology, which converge in the twentieth century, so that the fiction of liberal autonomy approaches the automation of a “rational subject who is always already constituted by the forces of capitalist markets.”15 The poetry applied by the Japanese to help justify colonization of Taiwan can be understood as such a convergence, even though presented as the product of individuals. The rendering of the traditional practices of writing tanka, haiku, and to a lesser extent senryū (like haiku, 17 syllables, but typically satirical and not requiring a season word) as modern practices of writing poetry cannot but call one’s attention to the legacy of the heavily intertextual orientation in both modern and colonial contexts. Through the modern convergence of multiple discourses grounded in the foundational traditional poetic discourse reproducing a reified poetic matrix that developed with reference

Japanese imperialism and poetic matrices  21 to places and climates within Japan, its introduction into writings about Taiwan becomes problematic. In the context of Taiwan, the overdetermined form comes to aggressively assert an alien culture and stylized consciousness of climate and land. The poets often reveal (intentionally or not) understanding through the use of words with vectors of reference intersecting with other discourses and suggesting a variety of positions, including alliances, satire, and the refusal of common Japanese forms of knowledge (doxa). At the same time, the poetry usually continues to promote an underlying capitalist ethos and frame, including a view of nature and the social (labor) situation clearly in terms of what can be gleaned from Taiwan and how discourses can be used to support such interests: to usher compliance from all involved, especially in securing property rights and the cooperation of a constructed laboring class of “islanders.” The fixation on development that is inherent to capitalist viewing mechanisms—searching for profit from among what is visible—is underwritten by the aestheticization of the language and Taiwanese cultures in Japanese poetry’s prosthetic insinuation in Taiwan.16 Taiwan was “developed by the colonial authorities more or less explicitly to provide rice and sugar to the homeland” and following the general imperialist model of utilizing cheaper foreign labor, a land of richer resources than the homeland, and with the potential for higher profits.17 To this end poetry plays an important role in sustaining favorable sentiment toward imperialism and exploitation, and forms part of the discourse celebrating the greatness of the conquerors; however, because of its traditional appearance, this role of poetry has gone unnoticed by historians and literary critics. This poetry articulates a virtual nature as a prosthetic culture that supplements nature’s gradual subordination to human needs, which capitalists, of course, call “development” or “progress.” Japanese traditional poetry proves especially helpful in diverting attention from having to face the sacrifice of nature and local cultures during modernization. The virtual overlay produced in these poems creates an ideological bubble—a language of affective exceptionality—existing in tension with an underlying hybridity of place (Japan and Taiwan), as Japanese poetry was until then always expected to be written in Japan; the poetic matrix demanded it. More specifically related to the poetry in and about Taiwan, the regulatory jouissance of composition, articulation, and assemblage—produced in the modern intertextual ­condensation within a poem—becomes a field of converging ­discourses overdetermined by imperial interests. As will be shown, many of the poems here suggest hidden agendas, if only by way of the simple subordination of the colonized or the plotted joy of the capitalist driven toward exploitation, and a constant wait for profits to stabilize, and yields to increase. The prosthesis of poetry in colonial Taiwan may also be understood as a complex form of distanciation—a use of language which sustains a deferred ethical moment of engaging nature—as well as a virtualization of nature through a matrix of (transcendental) categories that compels a poet to

22  Japanese imperialism and poetic matrices entertain conventional qualities that coincide not only with established poetic language but with the technologies of capital enterprises which they reflect and justify. The following tanka by Iki Kikuko of Taidong appeared in a column in the Taiwan nichinichi shimbun on the topic “New Year’s Snow”: Sign of a fruitful year, the first white snow falls on the newfound gemstone 豊年のしるしにやあらんあら玉の 年の初に降れる白雪18 Hōnen no shirushi ni ya aran aratama no / toshi no hajime ni fureru shirayuki Emphasizing “fruitful year,” an autumn season word, in this New Year’s tanka suggests a willful attempt to introduce and aestheticize questions about the productivity statistics of the colony. The “rough/new gemstone” (aratama) of Taiwan, not only conveys a conventional reminder that Taiwan is a work of Japanese colonialism in progress, but that Taiwan is conventionally—­as if permanently—“rough.” Even if it were to be recognized as equal to Japan in some aspect of development or cultural achievement, it is codified as a place romantically severed from the modern metropolitan center (Tokyo) and rendered always inferior by being new to the Empire. Renewing Taiwan’s newness, its membership is codified as always “new” and lagging with respect to the Japanese standard—not due to physical deficits, but formally and epistemologically, as inscribed in the poetic word “rough/new gemstone.” Ironically, it is here emphasized at New Year’s: the newness set in the poetic language for Taiwan as a colony marked by difference and as an object subject to Japan’s designs. Although one might read this poem as descriptively reproducing a realist impression of the landscape (reading “rough gem” as a metaphor for Yushan, then called Nītakayama) to mark the New Year, a dynamic chiasmic tension exists between the economic discourse of empire and the poetic, projected image of falling snow, rare in Taiwan with the exception of such higher peaks. The base traditional poetic matrix naturalizes, and even renders cheery the glib generalizations, about how the colony is faring so that discourse on production and profits becomes part of the larger vision of what is good for the Empire. In this nationalist imperialism driven by a capitalist ethos—called development, empowerment, and expansion (all initially to meet Western imperialist threats)—the closed poetic world of “nature” breaks its innocuous mirroring within the confines of a Japanese mainland (naichi) landscape proper and over-reaches the usual inward nationalist self-defining statements (within a less controversial reproduction of the poetic matrix); suddenly, when applied to colonies like Taiwan, the poetics becomes an inefficacious ruse, an ideological imposition, and gamble in ways that are inherent to the future-looking structure of a capitalist redemption (often a depletion) of the land and ecosystems in profitability. An extended example of this ruse is explored by a Japanese poet committed to the controversial possibility of writing Japanese poetry in Taiwan. The

Japanese imperialism and poetic matrices  23 New Year’s Day Taiwan nichinichi shimbun of 1907 contains a long article by Uno Akitaka, “First Wine, Then Sweet Wine,” which sets down the premise that Japanese poetry must attain a superior position in Taiwan: “Though Taiwan indeed is home only to Chinese poetry (shi), it is not this poetry that we should be aiming to make glorious, but rather Japanese poetry (uta), which has neither in the past nor today ever wavered.”19 He acknowledges the difficulties in writing Japanese poetry in Taiwan: Certainly Taiwan’s customs and names of flora, fauna and places as used in Chinese poetry work against its fitting in with Japanese poetry, and make it difficult to smoothly integrate into the world of Japanese poetry and Japanize it; it would seem our efforts to promote and develop the world of Japanese poetry must begin here. Since Japanese poetry already presents itself on these terms, the unwavering quality of the poetry gatherings diminishes any abnormalities.20 The article frames Japanese poetry as having been originally cultivated by the court poetry bureau, and only with the advent of the modern state put into the hands of the common people. His point is that as part of the colonization of Taiwan, poetry must begin with the variously formed poetry associations in the tradition of group writing. He lists names of various poetry associations around Taiwan, such as the Two-Leaf Association, the Tamsui Association, the Keelung Association, the Green Association, and a few others. He explains, “Among them there are associations limited only to males, or only to wives, as well as ones where men and women mix.” He divides schools in Taiwan as elsewhere into two schools: new and old. But he writes we can dismiss ninety percent of printed poetry as lacking depth or kokoro (proper literary disposition) and reflecting only a superficial training in the outward form of words (kotoba).21 This sort of perceived depth is subjective, based on group-specific criteria, and would be used to discriminate against Taiwanese poets later in the period of colonial rule. The next section title can be translated using a Kantian aesthetic term, taste, as “Poetry of Taiwanese Tastes,” or more generally, using things of interest, as simply “Poetry on Things of Interest in Taiwan.”22 The ambiguity of this word taste or things of interest (shumi) highlights how affective response and percept (the thing aestheticized) are interdependent: subjective taste is the flip side of the objective things which hold one’s interest (pastimes and traditional practices): Though everyone should know that while one is in Taiwan one should do more than just write poetry about Taiwan, in Taiwan there are tastes characteristic of Taiwan. To include these things of interest in poetry is somewhat of a duty one has as a poet living in Taiwan. I have considered Taiwan my terrain for just ten years, but I have yet to be thoroughly acquainted with the fabric of the national studies…. In other words, presenting things of interest in Taiwan as well as the mysteries, which

24  Japanese imperialism and poetic matrices have yet to be clarified, is a task that [Japanese] poets in Taiwan should naturally promise to undertake.23 He focuses primarily on the ideological framing and conceptual lines of technical composition (taste) rather than the problem of how to gather specifically Taiwanese elements (local things of interest) into the established matrix of season images. Instead, he develops a Japanese linguistic performance-­based nationalist view to criticize Taiwanese poetry and the potential for non-Japanese to write poetry in Taiwan, providing a textbook case of how colonial ideological situating of prescribed affects can be used to shape the objective mapping of the empire while also excluding local writers by establishing certain criteria. The essay is very specific as to how poets should be deployed: “The challenge for us is to use poets based in Taiwan to in this way amply express the characteristic beauty [Das Charakterististische] of Taiwan’s special tastes.”24 He adds that it will not be easy to “Japanize [the beauty based on the special characteristics of Taiwan] using the poetic materials of Taiwan.” It is at this point that he introduces the mark of difference often used in nationalist discourse: “I am a human being born in a country prospering under the spirit of language [kotodama]; it is not difficult for me to seize anything in sight and turn it into a poem.”25 This assertion of being fortunate or prospering because of being Japanese reflects an ideologically naturalized revisionist understanding that the Japanese race and language are somehow linked,26 naturally possessing the kotodama, the mystical spirit of the Japanese language that is bound up in race27 and which the Taiwanese lack. It was an important foundation for (and a detriment to) Japanese colonial rule, as it relied on the imposition of their language and culture to establish the illusion of superiority (but also making full Taiwanese membership in the Empire impossible).28 Japanese authorities experienced a challenge in attempting to convince the Chinese population in Taiwan that Japanese culture was to be adopted and Chinese culture abandoned or rendered secondary, since Chinese culture indeed is one of the founding civilizations of the world, and Japan had, at least from the Nara Period (710–794) until the first Sino-Japanese War (1894–1895), lived in the shadow of China, borrowing virtually all we now call Japanese (though altered over hundreds of years of implementation) until the decade preceding the Meiji period. Trauma for modern Japan not only stems from its meeting with the West, the unequal treaties, and other Western slights such as the Tripartite Intervention, and America’s racist immigration policies, but also from Japan’s long-standing, and insurmountable debt to Chinese culture (so visible in the use of Chinese characters), religion, administrative conventions, music, drama, dance, and so forth.29 In light of this debt, the nationalist ideological stance taken in this essay by Uno Akitaka appears to be somewhat of a bluff, presenting Japanese culture as superior to Chinese, and the “Taiwanese poetic materials” as rough and unsuited to the refined people of the kotodama.30 After all, to write Chinese

Japanese imperialism and poetic matrices  25 verse (Kanshi) was in the Meiji period still for many an honorable pastime (even for the likes of the great novelist Natsume Sōseki), and in Taiwan, the Chinese composed far more sophisticated Chinese verse. The jouissance of Japanese poets in early colonial Taiwan can be understood as having derived from tinkering with the imagery of the Japanese poetic matrix (which itself need not be dependent on the supplement of the kotodama, but is made to appear so by Uno and others) so as to define Taiwanese places, flora, fauna, and festivals within a hybrid matrix. The soundness of this project, as climate and nature in Japan are vastly different from subtropical Taiwan, necessarily creates doubts. The question in terms of the poetics considered as an aesthetic discourse would be how to emotionally associate words and imagery specific to Taiwan within this Japanese homeland-centered poetic matrix. The question put in ideological terms of the aims of supporting a discourse on Japanese superiority, a Japanese way of life, and so forth, can be located in what Slavoj Žižek (citing Sergei Eisenstein) calls the “‘unhistorical’ neutrality” of jouissance, which can be located in the ecstasy of being Japanese in the presence of a schematic of poetic images associated with Japan and especially the imperial land in which the poetic matrix was established through writing poetry. Poetry (re-)produces, ultimately, an “‘objectless’ ecstasy” which is then “attached to some historically determined representation” which seems insufficient, impossible to understand,31 never enough to fulfill the expectations of a true believer in Japan and the endless struggle of maintaining an expanding Empire. Poetic practices and ideological aims thus become bound up in an impossible process of converting Taiwan—by way of an autonomous discourse dependent on this foundational hybrid matrix. In fact, Uno describes exactly this situation, continuing, To display in poetry these things of interest in Taiwan is not merely a matter of producing the results of hard work in Japanizing the poetic materials, as the ubiquitous constructs in the poetry produced will still be different; there remains a sort of ineffable strangeness.32 The word for strangeness in Uno’s text means wonderful beyond words. Here we see the author’s recognition and production of an exotic uncanny difference; it is not born of a simple exoticizing difference, as in Said’s Orientalism, which describes Europeans affirming themselves in the difference from exoticized others; rather, here the framing of the jouissance of the Japanese confronting an other from which their civilization hails (China), ultimately, if only genealogically (yet irrevocably) requires that they—as they were indeed imperialists, which necessitates claims of superiority over their Taiwanese subjects—asserted ideologically violent impositions to compensate for the gap between rhetoric (elevating and developing Taiwan) and action (subjugating and profiting from Taiwan). Uno, concluding this section on developing a taste for things Taiwanese, dared readers to push

26  Japanese imperialism and poetic matrices forward regardless of what other Japanese may think: “At the very least, in writing letters back to Japan, I would like to see poems composed on items of interest in Taiwan. Whatever their thoughts may be, so be it.”33

New poetic place names and the imperial naming of Nītakayama Poetry was deployed following various requests made by the Governor General’s office in colonial Taiwan (1895–1945) in order to manage the broad affective acceptance of the new name given to Yushan (玉山 Jade Mountain): Nītakayama (新高山 Mt. Nītaka). Literally meaning “new high mountain,” it underscores how it was measured and ranked not merely as a geographical feature within the nascent Japanese Empire but one that rose higher than Mt. Fuji, which is, of course, a prominent symbol of Japan. In order to appreciate the power of merely naming here, imagine if you will an alternate history in which the mountain would have retained its Chinese name of Yushan, infused with associations forged in Chinese poetry and travelogues; in such a scenario the Japanese hold on the geographical imagination of the tallest mountain in Taiwan—and potentially of Taiwan in general—would have been weakened as its symbolic capital would have remained within a Chinese or Taiwanese cultural context that might even impress the Japanese colonists with associated images, stories, and affective depth. It might even be read—when uprisings and setbacks would present themselves—as intimating that Chinese culture is superior to the shorter and less rugged Mt. Fuji. By rendering the embarrassing fact of Jade Mountain’s height visible in the name Nītakayama, it was absorbed into a larger imperial space in the literal meaning “new-high mountain,” especially as the name was bestowed by imperial decree (a fact recited in countless poems). In the history of Taiwanese geopolitics and poetry, the mountain becomes the subject of competing acts of naming—in Alain Badiou’s sense in Conditions of a “strong singularity”—an ascendency of its name as an affective force and putative norm that comes to be accepted as a commonplace given, though the naming remains a contested event. Not only was Yushan renamed Nītakayama but also hundreds of poems attest to it, exhibit fidelity to the event of naming, and not only with imperial hubris but also with colonial ambivalence and hybridity that will be examined in terms of both Japanese and Chinese poetry by both Han-Taiwanese and Japanese. Though most Japanese poets asserted narrative and lyrical imagery, ensconcing Nītakayama as a symbol of their Empire’s greatness, their Empire would be dismantled and is now merely an object of study. Of course, after the retrocession of Taiwan following WWII the name Yushan was restored. By analyzing how the new name of Nītakayama was situated in poetic diction—founded in poetry indexing the Japanese homeland geography— intertexts used in poetry are seen to reflect ethical choices. Building on Badiou’s work on poetic configurations, one may see a poem as including

Japanese imperialism and poetic matrices  27 or omitting words and webs of meaning so as to form interdiscursive affiliations that are allowed to stand or be denied as a poem exhibits fidelities to various events that hail one to take a position on them. The status of Taiwan becomes complicated for poets asked or inspired to write about Yushan/Nītakayama. Thus, the poetic configuration indexes the world of the colonizer so as to direct the poet’s aesthetic and political inclinations and affiliations. Poetry thus reflects ethico-aesthetic decisions, what Badiou calls exhibited “fidelities” drawn within always developing politically situations, which although appearing placid and contained, may be asserting terms of subjection and expanding imperial space. Badiou sees “disaster” in any experience of the “ecstasy of the site, the sacredness of the name and terror” when together fixed as an “un-founded nature comes to be localized in the eternal, and established and concentrated in the supreme beauty of the site, in which the light links up with the heavens.”34 In just such a manner, the Japanese imperialized poetics was applied to Yushan in particular35 in Taiwan, a place which from early on figured prominently in early Japanese plans for further southern expansion.36 In forming an alliance between poets and poetic discourse (discussed in multiple examples below) with other ideological investments made in the renaming as Nītakayama, given the “obligation of ecstasy” they impose, it is understandable that Tsai Peihuo (蔡培火 1889–1983) would situate Yushan in his attack on Japanese for denying Taiwanese political representation in their own land and, implicitly, their expropriation of Yushan. The Japanese poetry on Nītakayama sought, through the reiteration of similar language and imagery, to elicit conventional sentimental or powerful (depending on how you read the poems) affective responses to the mountain as a sacred site that by extension renders all of Taiwan an undisputable part of a grand imperial monad. In this manner, one may explore both specific examples of intertextual orientations evident in both Japanese and Taiwanese Chinese (Minnan閩南, a Fujian dialect) poetry and song on the topic of Yushan/Nītakayama as variant configurations of an “ecstasy of the site.” In Badiouian terms, as “Mt. Nītaka” replaced the name “Jade Mountain,” it not only resonated in the contested name,37 but the mountain itself became a symbol for Taiwan as conquered and within the dominant Japanese culture inexistent in contrast with the perspective of indigene as well as Chinese settlers who before the arrival of the Japanese had divided sovereignty over the island. In fact, prior disputes with Japan, the island had been only half-claimed by the Qing Dynasty, who argued it had no authority over the indigenous population living in roughly half the island, including the mountainous central area and most of the east coast.38 After the Japanese had colonized Taiwan, countless poems in both Japanese and Chinese extolled the anecdote of the imperial Japanese name bestowed on the mountain (and later on others) and reiterated in hundreds of examples lending conventionality as precedent intertexts assuming hegemonic status.39 As “Badiou sees the situation in terms

28  Japanese imperialism and poetic matrices of different ‘decisions of thought’ concerning what exists,”40 the colonial situation, characterized by hybridity and contested cultural dominance, sustains this tension in the very attempt to render affective responses to the mountain in Japanese poetry. Moreover, the decision to deny Japanese the ahistorical jouissance of the Taiwanese place of the mountain as the site par excellence in Taiwan is borne out in the prominent role given to Jade Mountain in poetry, later turned into a song, composed by the Taiwanese self-rule activist Tsai Peihuo within the context of seeking Taiwanese selfrule in the 1920s. While his “transcendental indexing”41 of the activist petitioning for Taiwanese self-rule was ultimately unsuccessful in the face of Japanese colonial apparatus, he is considered an important figure in the history or genealogy of Taiwanese consciousness. The violence of the reiterated poetic phrases (discussed below) and overdetermined affective responses are met by the revolutionary poetic violence of an imprisoned Taiwanese. Tsai demonstrates Badiouian fidelity to the mountain, the island, and the people who have been violated by the imperialist rhetoric used to justify capitalist expansion and keenly felt racist exclusion from self-rule. Tsai’s song and its intertextual reorientation which indicates an alliance with other Taiwanese against Japanese hubris, and subordination of Taiwanese—a topic on which he wrote a book making clear the extent of inequities and the resentment felt by many educated Taiwanese42 —stands, at this time, true to the Self-rule Movement. But in the larger picture, what exactly does focusing on Jade Mountain achieve? It is a geographical feature of Taiwan that has historically marked the contested island’s symbolic status, particularly during the period of Japanese rule when its actual height (3952 m), being higher than Mt. Fuji (3776 m), threatened the symbolic role of Japan as great Empire rising above all Chinese culture to which it remains indebted to for nearly all its cultural production (language, arts, religion, philosophy). Is it any surprise, then, that “Nītakayama” was chosen as the code word signaling the attack on Pearl Harbor? It already served as an imperial supplement used to give shape to Taiwan and to justify exploitative excesses and visions of conquest as is reflected in the following “crazy poem” (kyōka) by Teni Namimaru on the topic of “warships,” which in the word “nihon,” rendered in katakana and with emphasis, puns “Japan” and counter for “two cylindrical objects”: “The country a ship, Mt. Nītaka and Mt. Fuji are the two masts of Japan” (Kuni ha fune Nītakasan to Fuji no yama kore zo nihon no masuto narikeru).43 To appreciate the continued relevance of Jade Mountain today, one may also recall some political incidents occurring since the retrocession of Taiwan from Japanese rule: the placement in 1966 of a statue of a “retake the Mainland” Chinese nationalist, Yu Youren (于右任), a few years after his death; the destruction of the statue by pro-independence activists in 1996; the subsequent placement of a plaque simply naming the mountain Yushan;44 and its appearance on the 1000 New Taiwan Dollar note from 2005, when a pro-independence party was in power. Omitted from the narrative today is

Japanese imperialism and poetic matrices  29 the fact that both of these placements took the place of a small Shinto shrine constructed there in 1925 as part of the long battle to deploy pictures of such “famous scenes in Taiwan” on sets of postcards45 and in the Japanese Taiwan nichinichi shimbun in addition to poetry and song to win the hearts of colonists and tourists, and redefine what it is to live in Taiwan for Han and indigenous Taiwanese. The Japanese conventional form poetry (tanka, haiku, and satirical variations), being rooted in associations geographically situated within a Japanese mainland-based poetics, rendered poetic production in Taiwan always somewhat foreign and unable to avoid the ironic compromises Homi Bhabha describes between colonizer and colonized.46 The resulting hybridity is spatially defined within this poetic discourse as bound to Japan, and it is precisely at the nexus of artistic practice and territorial expansion that the inevitable issue of cultural and ethnic spaces enters discourse on how Taiwan is registered ontologically. The colonial policy of renaming and asking poets and even military officers to write poetry in support of the renaming is an obvious example of ideological distortion to benefit the colonial class of government, and corporate affiliates at the expense of the marginalization of Taiwanese (Han and indigene alike) from economic and political power. It recalls Michel de Certeau’s sense of the “imposition of power through the disciplining and organization of space,” so that presenting “place as a fixed position and space as a realm of practices” allows “counterposing the fixity of the map” to practices.47 By examining the renaming of Yushan and how the mountain was situated in various politically, and geographically significant poems, one may add to the discourse within cultural geography on the process of naming “as a conduit for challenging dominant ideologies as well as a means of introducing alternative cultural meanings and narrations of identity.”48 Attention to poetry shows how in addition to place-naming events, which in Badiou leaves evental traces that test one’s ethical engagement as they make possible heretofore unthought-of configurations—poems not only using the name but also indexing and intimating ontologies that overwrite previous “states” based on prior names. The advent of colonial rule (from 1895), the renaming of Yushan to Nītakayama (in 1897), and the advent of a Taiwanese Home Rule Movement in the 1920s are all such Badiouian events. Among shifting ontological island definitions, Jade Mountain becomes the object of complicated ethical situations, presented in poetic configurations within ­political sequences rendering possible a sense of Taiwanese space complicated by both colonial imposition and resistance. Examining Jade Mountain demonstrates the ephemeral quality of spaces of imperial, ethnic or national identity in relation to how places in Taiwan are culturally informed, which even now exists problematically as a nation that is not universally recognized globally, and which before Japanese rule was not simply part of China, but, as mentioned, divided roughly in half, shared with the indigenous tribes. The intertextual affiliations engaged in

30  Japanese imperialism and poetic matrices samples of poems on the topic of Jade Mountain are shown to indicate ethical “fidelities” to events the poet foregrounds or excludes. The inexistent trace of the earlier name of “Yushan,” the suppressed naming event, “the trace (the name), in the place, of a having-taken-place (of an event),” as Badiou writes on Mallarmé,49 renders the mountain a place to turn to by way of its recovered name (trace) when a Taiwanese strikes out against the Japanese colonial hegemony in poetry and daily life. Japanese poetry on Nītakayama In July of 1897 the predecessor to the Taiwan nichinichi shimbun printed an article titled “Bestowing the Name Mt. Nītaka,” not only indicating imperial origination of the decree but in omitting any mention of the Chinese name, Yushan. It simply asserts that no one today recognizes the earlier name, Mt. Morrison, and as “it is the highest in Japan, higher than Mt. Fuji,” it is beautiful and the subject of poetry. The first paragraph ends with an emphasis on the name being such that “in so far as spirit [is bestowed in the name], it should truly deeply move [people] to tears.”50 The relationship with poetry is implied at the end, and is explicit earlier in the paragraph, which together underscore poetry’s importance and responsibility in conjunction with naming: producing an affective response, inculcating emotional dispositions through the composition of modal propensities of the new name in poetry to be composed on the new topic of Mt. Nītaka. Two weeks later, as if concerned that the name change had not been sufficiently publicized, another article appeared: “Record of the Edict Naming Mt. Nītaka.” It includes the official text announcing the name change and presents the name as a reflection of the virtue of the emperor leading Japan, adding this high mountain to his territories, and emphasizes “bestowing on the island of Taiwan the spirit of the emperor.”51 It again foregrounds the name known to Westerners, Mt. Morrison, with no mention of the name known to Han Taiwanese, Yushan, so that the name being replaced suggests in expropriation an alignment of the imperial Western gaze with the Japanese gaze.52 From the point of view of Japanese poets who supported government policies, it was a challenge to write poetry in Taiwan in a poetic mode originally developed in accordance with a conventional associative and affective matrix—including seasonally codified flora, fauna, and other categories of observable phenomena, not to mention poetic place names—all located within Japan proper. Especially in the early colonial period, poetry played an important role as a supporting discourse for colonization and to bolster Japanese morale when uprisings would seem never to end. Poetry helped to shape affective dispositions in response to unexpected as well as planned events, and it gave Japanese assurance of their colonial presence and sense of ideological mission. Whereas within Japan proper, poetry would serve as a highly complex “realized signifying system,”53 in Taiwan, because of climatic differences as well as simply a lack of established Japanese poems written on new poetic places on the island, poetry suddenly became an

Japanese imperialism and poetic matrices  31 unrealized signifying system. Not only did poets themselves hesitate, lacking confidence in using Japanese conventions in the new climate and alien culture, but the uses made of this poetry were bound up in justifications for the Japanese presence itself, entering a reflexive circle of realizing an overdetermined hegemony simultaneously, though, social, spatial, economic, and poetic measures and cultivated practices in composition and publishing. An early example of how Nītakayama is used, here, as a topic for composing short conventional verse such as the 31-mora tanka, is found published in the major Japanese newspaper just months after the christening of the mountain under the pen name Yoshio (義雄): Even the uncouth mountains begin to quake 　　　　　　　　gazing up higher than ever before! こゝろなき山も御陵威に動るき出て 　いよいよ高く仰かれにけり54 Kokoro naki yama mo goryōi ni yurugi ide / iyoiyo takaku aogarenikeri Written for Emperor’s Day, it suggests an imperial presence radiating from the highest mountain (Nītakayama is the topic) as renamed so as to form a poetic presence that will eventually edify the “unpoetic mountains” through its sovereign influence. Another way of translating “uncouth mountain” (kokoronaki yama) is as “tasteless” or “unpoetic mountains,” especially since in poetry it indicates a lack of poetic sensibility or training. Thus, this verse presents the elements of colonial Taiwan as one of colonial master to rough underclass of natives and long-established Chinese. Ethical choices made in this composition present an emerging ontological site, by depicting measurable aspects such as manifest affect and the relation to the past situated within a matrix of interdiscursive elements and intertexts. This verse displays how the most benign paean of praise on Emperor Day could be used to foment ubiquitous condescension toward Taiwanese who, like the lower mountains, are expected to “look up higher than ever before.” Another example from a newspaper poetry column plainly reveals the use of poetry as a geographically situating colonial instrument. Part of a short sequence of poems on the topic of “Celebrating the Twentieth Anniversary of the Beginning of [Japanese] Rule,” by Hanaki Yasukoji, it reads: The riches prospering in the imperial reign were on Mt. Ali long ago burgeoning plains of cedar and cypress 君が代の榮行く富はあり山のむかしに増さる檜原杉原55 Kimi ga yo no sakayuku tomi wa Alisan no mukashi ni masaru hibara sugihara This tanka illustrates colonial economics in poetic and geographic terms, implying aboriginal and Han Taiwanese did not realize the market value of these prized trees, not to remain a wasted resource under the modern

32  Japanese imperialism and poetic matrices Japanese imperial apparatus. The poem suggests the self-serving logic that the trees were undiscovered as if modern capitalist man’s discovery would correct this oversight of an area once seen as terra nullius, now begging to be harvested for profit. The very act of seeing resources within a leveling equivalence under capitalism here extends to an inverted romantic, poetic nostalgia: here the ignorance of not seeing value is applied to an eternal imperial reign so as to justify cutting them down—as if they were waiting for Japanese to possess them when they were seedlings (hundreds of years ago). The poem begins with the phrase “imperial reign,” which is also a common classical phrase (as well as the name of the Japanese national anthem) that as such helps to naturalize the poem’s economic message within a classical verse genre. The only element that stands out as odd is the place name of the mountain itself, which is not only outside of Japan proper but is simply unfamiliar to the intertextual matrix of precedents. Thus, it might come across as forced, unintentionally revealing the colonial imposition on many levels, yet part of a project to naturalize Alishan as a poetic place. That Alishan is not rendered in the more usual characters (阿里山) suggests a pun on ali as “there are,” so that the poem becomes almost taunting: “There are riches prospering in the imperial era, and long ago on the mountain were plains burgeoning with cedar and cypress.” Throughout their occupation, which began in 1895, Japanese would officially change the names of places to suit the necessity of mapping the island as a Japanese possession. The importance of poetic place names in Japanese form poetry cannot be overemphasized. While the engagement with matrices of association rooted in ceremonies, seasons, and flora and fauna are key processes in the writing of Japanese poetry in tradition forms, in practice, as a counterbalance to this extreme matrixial intertextuality borne out of such a poetics, place names played a key role in grounding the poetry in the virtual illusion of context within it. Poetry and prose were written in coordination with intertexts and associations, not only built into the words in relation to other words but referencing the local places and place names located nearly exclusively in Japan proper. Japanese poetic place names Poetic places have historically been embedded in the classical poetic language through various elaborate conventions, including the use of pillow words (makurakotoba) which form poetic epithets usually for places but other objects or people too; poetic pillows (utamakura), though encompassing many categories of poetic language, prominently include famous place names (meisho), themselves defined by their simple inclusion in classical poetry and codification in various lists;56 and one cannot leave out the puns including place names in various pivot-words (kakekotoba) or conventional puns built into (often overlapping syntactically and semantically) words which function in conventional coordination with associated words (engo)

Japanese imperialism and poetic matrices  33 elsewhere in a poem (creating a conventional anamorphism not limited to two possible coherent strings). Though many of these techniques are difficult to sustain in a modernizing climate within which any puns—­following emulation of the Western prejudice against them in literature—were frowned upon, Japanese poets in Taiwan boldly asserted newly conventionalized puns reiterated in poetry throughout Japanese rule. Some of the most prominent puns included toponyms, suggesting the use of such classical rhetorical techniques to naturalize Taiwanese names in the Japanese poetic language (which extends to travelogues, also numerous in the Taiwan nichinichi shimbun, though not treated here). The poetic resonance in a place name (or any word in poetry) usually emerged out of an accumulation of intertexts, use in phrases in public discourse such as remain recorded in newspaper articles, and in poems, which are often designed to reflect precise relations of chosen words and their orchestrated associations and emotional hues. Many of the poems of the early period of Japanese rule were not-so-subtly propagandistic in the sense of attempting both to apply the Japanese poetic matrix to Taiwan and to situate places in Taiwan within the existing realm of poetic place names so as to insinuate an assumed overdetermined imperial space. Here is a typical example: New Year’s Snow, by Hira Asanobu In celebration of prosperity in the renewed world (of His Reign) a light snow falls upon Mt. Nītaka. あらたまる御世の栄をことほきて 　　新高山にるれる淡雪57 Aratamaru miyo no sakae o kotohogite / Nītakasan ni fureru awayuki This tanka attempts to apply the legacy of Japanese poetry and its imperial praises of the emperor, and the long-lived lineage to the land and people of Taiwan. It insinuates that Taiwan is not only reforming into a people under an umbrella Japanese empire but that it is returning to the fold, implied in the choice of the archaically applied “aratamaru,” which means not only “becoming new,” but also “returning to (what were) better conditions.” Thus it suggests Taiwan is part of a larger Japanese archipelago and destiny. This word also contains a pivot-word, aratama, which appears in many of the tanka on this page, and might be translated either as “rough gem” or “newly discovered gem,” both paternalistically referring to Yushan (yu being written with the same character for “gem”), which is a synecdoche for Taiwan. Similar examples abound. As mentioned, hundreds of such verses on Nītakayama were gathered in anthologies in the 1920s.58 Moreover, the tama in aratama (here in hiragana) may refer to the Yu (玉, tama in Japanese kunyomi reading) of Yushan in Chinese, so that the renewal sublates—­ contains and eliminates—­the Chinese name of the mountain. The following poem foregrounds these gems or yu/tama, envisioning a snowy baptism

34  Japanese imperialism and poetic matrices of the new Japanese colony by refashioning how Yushan is mapped as Nītakayama as if it were a blessing for all Japanese: New Year’s Snow, by Kazuji Anju This year especially blesses us with its light— on Nītaka snow glitters like gems. この年は別きて光を添へてけり 　玉と見まこふ新高の雪59 Kono toshi wa wakite hikari wo soetekeri / tama to mimakou Nītaka no yuki Here the mountain’s former name is incorporated as a simile, “like gems,” as if the poem itself were underscoring the new Japanese name’s bravado in overwriting the old name. The light, by convention in classical verse, is the imperial light of the Shinto emperor/gods. In putting new place names into poetry, one finds a collective effort to naturalize the physical height of the peak as a Japanese poetic place name, a part of the poetic lexicon. The naming by one poet means little; the naming by a whole group of colonists has force and indeed led to its codification (as such usage was sustained for decades). Miscellaneous song on drifting by oxcart, by Saitō Kazuyoshi 齋藤參吉 Celebrating the reign of the emperor, mountains from the dawn of time look up to the peak of Mt. Nītaka 大君の御代を祝ひて萬歳の山より仰く新高の峯60 Ōkimi no miyo o iwaite manzai no yama yori aogu Nītaka no mine In the following two tanka, written on the Southern Wind Association’s topic of “Mt. Nītaka,” developments of the ideological uses of the mountain’s new name appear obvious: Mt. Nītaka, by Terashima Inuta This mountain of mountains with no peer lined up above the clouds shoulders the wise name of Mt. Nītaka 新高と負ふ名かしこし雲の上にならぶ山なき山はこの山 Nītaka to ou na kashikoshi kumo no ue ni narabu yama naki yama wa kono yama Mt. Nītaka, by Nagai Eitarō Islanders too have grown accustomed to singing out the glorious name of Mt. Nītaka and indeed sing it out 島人も新高山の大御名をうたひならしてうたふなりけり61 Shimabito mo Nītakasan no ōmi-na wo utahinarashite utafunarikeri The first emphasizes the naming itself as being “wise” (or “discriminating”) and auspicious, flattering the imperial house which officially bestowed the

Japanese imperialism and poetic matrices  35 name. The second fantasizes the “islanders” rejoicing in the “glorious” new name and embodying the practice of spontaneously singing it out. Jade Mountain in the “Song of Taiwanese Self-rule” Exposure to radical democratic thought in the 1910s and 1920s inspired Taiwanese who studied abroad (especially in Japan) to envision equality between Taiwanese and Japanese. When this pursuit was frustrated by Japanese inflexibility, Taiwanese activists (including farmers as well as intellectuals) became divided, with factions taking positions ranging from revolutionary communism to peaceful coexistence of the Chinese and Japanese races and cultures. However, with the rise of Japanese militarism in the 1930s and increased social control in Taiwan, such associations were disbanded and, fearing disloyalty, Japanese decided in the last ten years of rule, after all, to assimilate Taiwanese, though only as second-class citizens.62 As a Self-rule Movement activist, Tsai Peihuo in 1925—before turning to a more assimilative agenda reflecting deep ambivalence as a colonial subject63 —­ prominently situated Yushan in his song, “Song of Taiwanese Self-rule” (Taiwan zizhi ge 台灣自治歌), in effect challenging one of the high symbols as constructed by the Japanese Empire in Taiwan. Truly beautiful, Formosa, lovely island where our ancestors planted roots, farming, we plant trees, generation after generation toiling, we are indeed the pioneers of Taiwan, not some dumb slaves. We will rule all the island ourselves, now decide things for ourselves. Lofty Jade Mountain rises higher than all of Japan and we have high spirits—in our bodies flows the blood of our native homes. How can we slough off our power when no one can stop us, no one. Our independence is here for the taking together, in one voice to drive home our obligations to fulfill to enjoy our rights, our independence.64 Note how the image of planting trees blurs with the focus on toiling so that the trees become symbols of both determination and connection to this island, but the assertion of long-lived sovereignty is clinched by the image of objectively greater height in “Lofty Jade Mountain … above all of Japan.” This song is written in a folk song style which does not concern itself with intricate rhyme and formal elements of parallelism as in classical Chinese poetry. It is written in Taiwanese dialect so that some words can only be

36  Japanese imperialism and poetic matrices understood when read in this dialect. Though the melody was not added until 1931, these lyrics were composed in 1925 in response to his imprisonment as a member and leader in pro-democracy and Self-rule Movement organization, called the Taiwanese Parliamentary Alliance and for pro-­Taiwanese independence publications.65 The crackdown is known as the “Formosa Political Incident” (lit. “Governance Police Incident” Zhijing shijian).66 It is a defining moment altering the sequence of the politically possible—it takes Yushan as the most prominent element in its poetic configuration and situates it as a source of confidence linked to the phrase “no one can stop us,” so as to establish in a poem an ethical decision founded in the act of naming the unnamable Yushan, and setting forth as fact a demand for what seemed the impossible: Taiwanese rule of the Japanese colony of Taiwan. By claiming Yushan, Tsai asserts Taiwanese sovereignty and renders all the violence of Japanese poetry, that had in very polite language built Nītakayama up into an imperial icon, moot within the ontology indexed in his poem. While not reviving the Qing intertexts, Tsai diverts the political sequence co-opted by the Japanese poets; he indexes Yushan (not Nītakayama) as a world-delineating “point,” so as—like the Japanese poetry had before—to assert associations that consciously displace those dominant since the Japanese reinvention of Yushan’s place as Nītakayama. Tsai’s poem rallies around Yushan so as to assert a counter-­ hegemonic poetic configuration and demonstrate fidelity to the political event of the Self-rule Movement, including the ideals of “independence,” having “one voice,” upholding “obligations”—­suggesting ongoing perseverance and sacrifice for both ancestors and the ideal of sovereignty itself—and “native homes” established by “generation after generation toiling.” Moreover, the pejorative “dumb slaves” applied in the poem by Japanese to Taiwanese is supplanted by the name “pioneers.” Thus the site of Taiwan, with its determining place of Yushan by which to reference the control of space, is redefined in a burst of creative and political outrage. The case of Yushan/Nītakayama exemplifies how the relations of geographical and poetic discourse can be traced by examining how poets treated discourses and the values evident to them by way of the mountain—­including not only poetic conventions but also various state-sponsored spiritual investments, class-forming exploitative aims, and of course political control of the island—as represented in relation to the mountain. The point of this investigation is perhaps best summarized as affirming that poetry is more intensely appreciated when intertextual affiliations are situated in a Badiouian sense of ethical and political spatial overdeterminations (in verse) that in light of events (such as the Self-rule Movement) make possible new fidelities to new sequences of political change, which in the case of Taiwanese did not come until the end of the Second Sino-Japanese War and the Pacific War. This chapter suggests that studies of poetry, places and place names may be analyzed not only for their hermeneutic yield intratextually, but their

Japanese imperialism and poetic matrices  37 intertextual affiliations within an active ethical and political orientation in shifting geo-political and historical situations and sequences.

The poetic matrix and its codifications in saijiki The poetic matrix is not only the result of conventional practices sustained by schools of traditional Japanese poetry (usually gathered around a poet) but also has been codified in elaborately categorized poetic lexicons with examples (called saijiki). These handbooks suggest conventional expectations that relieve poets of the burden of managing a given poetic articulation entirely ex nihilo. Images are built not within one poem but with a sense of reference to countless poems (not only the most famous ones) so as to manage a broad range of acceptable emotional hues and associational limits through recycled words and phrases; the specifics of nature become abstract and conventionalized. Tanka, senryū, and haiku all use an idiom originally built on nature—specifically the Chinese distinction of emotions (情) and landscape (景)—and share (with variation within each genre) the general form of matrices of associations founded in the classic imperial waka anthologies, reified and recodified in updated poetry writing practices and guides expanded to encompass modern life. This genealogy forms the basis for the rise of a typological intertextuality rather than an intratextual locus on a text that alludes literally to other texts. When maintaining the usual saijiki format, which presents a word or phrase followed by examples of use—with little other explanation—such guides in the Meiji period often, as one might expect, include Western intertexts and various ranges of modern phenomena. An early example of such a modern hybrid saijiki of sorts is Ishida Michizaburo’s 1905 Dictionary for the Composition of Beautiful Prose and Verse. Yet an early actual saijiki, written for use in composing verse in Taiwan, is Kobayashi Rihei’s Lexicon of Seasonal Words for Taiwan.67 Though a meager attempt—as it lacks examples based on the very intertexts that indicate appropriate affect and associations—it was produced just fifteen years after the Japanese took possession of Taiwan. In his introduction to the work, Kawahigashi Hekigotō (1873–1937), a prominent haiku poet of the time, wrote about the importance of such a book in beginning to establish an associative matrix (though he did not use this phrase): Considerable work must have gone into this first attempt not only to introduce Taiwanese specialties to Japanese of the homeland who lack such a unified resource, but also to provide haiku poets residing in Taiwan with a kind of reference work to answer questions concerning seasonal topics appropriate to Taiwan. Henceforth, it goes without saying that this book will prove helpful on those occasions when a haiku on something characteristic of Taiwan is to be handled in terms of the particular region’s specialties. We have now entered an age in which

38  Japanese imperialism and poetic matrices we may embrace a comparable universality of all things Taiwanese. In the succeeding years one can expect to see a grand castle built on this foundation.68 Hekigotō underscores the importance of a conventionalized matrix for Taiwan, how it will provide the scaffolding for a naturalized aesthetic, and describes the difference between Japan and Taiwan within the empire in terms of “the comparable universality of all things Taiwanese” that must be accepted as such. In this period, decades before the imperialization movement of the late 1930s, Taiwan presented a specific Orientalist “other” for Japanese poets to situate themselves; in Taiwan, Japanese writers in part discovered that their own culture was indeed not universal and in part that in Taiwan they could shape from the different foundational season topics a new “castle” in the image of Japan—a “little Japan” as a spinoff of the original (and in poetry, virtual) Japan—so that Japan remains the universal model. The “introductory remarks” situated between the introduction and the table of contents repeatedly makes the point that any Japanese flora, fauna or social events are omitted in the Lexicon of Seasonal Words for Taiwan, as they are assumed to function in Taiwan a priori. Only that which is new for Japanese in Taiwan is included; thus, a dynamic line and jouissance is played out between maintenance of the normal Japanese and the exotic Taiwanese. Again, in this early period of colonization, Taiwan was treated as a semi-­ independent culture, whereas in the period of the Second Sino-Japanese War assimilation became an aim. However, quite unlike Japanese saijiki, the entries within this volume compiled by Kobayashi contain a mix of available guides to flora and fauna and cultural references (including quotes from Chinese poetry) with descriptive detail more appropriate perhaps to an encyclopedia of Taiwan than to a poetic codification of seasonal topics suggested to elicit certain ranges of associated emotional responses. Moreover, lexicons of season words and similarly arranged writing guides for poets usually include a minimal explanation and often simply present examples of use that tacitly demonstrate the conventional emotion range of associations acceptable for a specific entry. Thus, the Taiwan Lexicon of Season Words is rather naïve in that it does not even attempt to include examples—which by 1910 were plentiful—as part of this first step in the direction of what should become an intertextually rich “castle,” not bound to the empirical per se. In tanka, season words are not an obligatory element per se, as in haiku, but are an element to master so as to avoid making unintended associations or confusing the suggested season by mixing incompatible season words. As professor and haiku poet Miyasaka Shizuo points out in his study, The Birth of Season Words, When we open our season-word lexicons (saijiki) and look for a season word, upon comparing the explanation of the season word with what we

Japanese imperialism and poetic matrices  39 actually have seen, if there is a difference, we defer to the explanation rather than the actual landscape, and gather it altogether in one verse.69 This emphasis on conventional association rather than “actual landscape” is indeed the standard attitude and process taken when working with haiku, haikai no renga or renku, tanka, and literary senryū. Whether a season word is included in a season word manual and how it is conventionally used may determine a verse’s suitability for inclusion in a publication. Miyasaka describes a “closed world of the season word lexicon.”70 Moreover, as he points out, it was in the imperial waka anthologies that courtiers “crystallized in season words an aesthetic consciousness as the occasional will of the emperor demanded.”71 The ties to state-ideological roles could not be clearer, and in the reinvention of the modern emperor and imperial Japan, the role of poetry as ideologically charged discourse played a rationalizing and aestheticizing role which was extended as Japan expanded into its first major colony, Taiwan. A poem on a topic such as a given bird or flower more often than not would in classical poetry also be about some stage in the cycle of a romantic relationship (from the first glimpse of the loved one to the final wave farewell, trailing memories and so forth). A vivid example of how this nexus of season and love cycles and season words as it is relevant to early colonial Taiwan can be found in the following tanka, which also served to encode Keelung as a poetic place associated with rain: Tears in meeting, tears in parting, a harbor said to have rain everyday: the rains of Keelung 逢ふに泣き別るゝに泣くみなとゝてふらぬ日はなし基隆の雨72 Au ni naki wakaruru ni naku minato to tefu ranu hi wa nashi Kīrun no ame Though in terms of surface meaning it is an exceedingly simple poem, if we read it outside the usual expressive mode (such as Jakobson’s selective and combinatory axes) and instead foreground the associative matrices engaged by the poet within the context of the solicited topic and location, the poem becomes quite interesting. It becomes an example of a place name being codified in split, anamorphic terms: situating the rain humorously as an exception to Japanese poetics’ putatively universal coordination of affective associations with climate, place, time of year, and cycles in serial romantic love. Here Keelung is presented, in elegant light play (not given over entirely to satire), as having rain befitting love in all stages, not just that of parting. The Taiwanese weather in this city is presented as nullifying the entanglement of emotions with the weather in Japan, but the constant rain, far from making love impossible, suggests a playfully exoticized reinvention of love itself: the verse codifies the Keelung rains as a place famous for both rain and the extremes of joy and sorrow in love: constant rain (tears).

40  Japanese imperialism and poetic matrices The emphasis on doubled, anamorphic imagery in these poems simply provides a means of maintaining a critical distance from the seductive, poetic matrix itself. By noting the ideological uses of poetry to justify colonization one foregrounds differences between the ideal of aesthetically pleasing matrixially situated poetry as part of the imposition of Japanese culture in general, and poetry presenting justifications for rendering the Taiwanese islands Japanese. Following the Lacanian approach to anamorphosis developed by Žižek, this poetry may be seen as a form of cultural production which shifts the focus from the play of signification or purely text-oriented literature to material relations in colonial Taiwan. Anamorphosis is used as a metaphor that allows one to focus analysis on the double-vision and divide between the colonized and the colonizer, and in the case of Japanese poetry, how the colonizer has exported a literary technology in the form of these polite matrices that assist in the assertion of the colonist’s difference based not simply on ambiguity in the language, but rather on intertextual associations which suggest ranges of conventional emotional responses that reinforce a Japanese way of seeing. As such, poetry becomes capable of predisposing the implied subject (Japanese or Taiwanese) who read the poetry to a favorable view of Japanese colonialism as one entertains and is enclosed by its framing matrices.73

Infusing an imperial aura: “chrysanthemums in the shrine” and “wild chrysanthemums” While chrysanthemums are a common symbol of the Japanese emperor and imperial family, they appear in poetry in Taiwan during the period of Japanese rule with a wide range of ideologically affective nuances and functions. The poems now to be introduced are waka (Japanese traditional poetry, here tanka) on the topic “chrysanthemums in the shrine” (shatō kiku). The topic image is used to assert a combination of national and religious symbolism in poems explicitly referencing Taiwan, such as these two: By Sugiyama Ryokudō　杉山綠堂 After praying for calm on the island of Formosa the shrine girl breathes in the scent of the white chrysanthemum flowers 高砂のしまのしつめといつきまつるみかきに匂ふ白菊の花 Takasago no shima no shidume to ituki maturu migaki ni niou shiragiku no hana By Iki Yoshitarō (Keelung)　　壹岐休太郎 (基隆) To bring calm to the island of Formosa the shrine chrysanthemums contain the color of a thousand years 高砂のしましつめますみやしろの菊の千歳の色をこめたる74 Takasago no shima shidume-masu miyashiro no kiku no chitose no iro o kometaru

Japanese imperialism and poetic matrices  41 Both of these verses reference “bringing calm” (shidume) to Taiwan, which at the time still had uprisings led by Taiwanese who refused to accept Japanese rule. Without going into details of the various uprisings of the time, it should be pointed out that “to bring calm” carries a sense of calming the people’s hearts (or the anger of the gods) on the one hand, but an explicitly political sense on the other hand, one best translated as “subduing” (the island of Taiwan). Thus, fundamentally military and ideological battles for the appeasement of Taiwanese resisting Japanese rule was cast in ambiguous religious language found in traditional poetic topics, allowing poetry to draw quite naturally on this discourse available within the poetic matrix. The first suggests an ultimate innocence in making the main actor in the poem in a traditionally virginal shrine attendant, while the main action, too, is a receptive, passive act of smelling the symbolic flowers, together underscoring an aura of virtue and self-sacrifice in the form of devotion to the emperor. The second verse simply amplifies the image of the chrysanthemums, as embodying “the color of a thousand years,” which is a reference to the ageless institution of the imperial family at the center of the state Shinto, while “color” has a broad range of meanings in classical Japanese and in general is used by poets of a nationalist inclination to connect items in Taiwan to Japan, as in the following: New Year’s Snow, by Katayama Yoshihira As long as the rough, new gem prospers under the imperial reign, look, the color of the snow is the same! あら玉のさかゆる御代のかきりには 　変らぬ雪の色そ見へける75 Aratama no sakayuru miyo no kagiri ni wa / kawaranu yuki no iro zo miekeru The snow, or perception of it, remains identical to that found in Japan as long as the Japanese cult of the emperor continues to function and be both a sign and a cause of the pending promise of prosperity to the colonists. This poem reflects discourse presenting Taiwan as a “model colony,” as well as the use of the familiarity of color as a sign of success—making Taiwan seem as good a home as Japan. Though not mentioning color, in the following example rain is rendered in this religious mode, transformed into a sign of unity among all in very early colonial Taiwan: New Year’s Morning, by Ōba Sadako Below the great Emperor’s blessings in the rain touching all court and common folk alike grow calm 大君のめくみあまねきあめの下は 　　みやこもひなものとかなりけり76 Ōkimi no megumi amaneki ame no shita wa miyako mo hina mo nodoka narikeri

42  Japanese imperialism and poetic matrices Note how this tanka incorporates the idea propagated in the most influential poetic preface in Japan—the “Kana Preface” of the Kokinshū, the first imperial waka collection—that poetry soothes even the most unrefined.77 Of course, this becomes part of the ideal of cooperating in one great, happy group—regardless of the race-defined division of labor and the humiliation of the Taiwanese in their own land—having the effect of asking the common folk to accept the ruler’s superior ideology as aestheticized. Returning to the main topic of flowers, one perhaps cannot find more telling examples of a poetic topic being used to tame nature and prepare it for colonial extraction than in some haiku solicited on the topic of “wild chrysanthemums,” an autumn season word. As developed in the context of Taiwan, chrysanthemum indicates the emperor or imperial family, while wild suggests a perfect topic for the wilds of the empire, Taiwan (as well as Okinawa and Hokkaido). Japanese poets, while complying with the obviously chauvinistic topic, often self-consciously satirically indicated ambivalence, perhaps taking such propagandistic ploys lightly as in the following haiku: By Sakura Gai 櫻涯 Even with holes of thieving rats in the rice, wild chrysanthemums blossom 穂を盗む鼠の穴や野菊咲く78　　　　　　 Ho wo nusumu nezumi no ana ya nogiku saku The haiku satirically intimates an image of Taiwan as a wild backwater island, yet the image of wild chrysanthemums is used to emphasize that the imperial presence of the Japanese, under the guidance of their emperor, will figuratively fill the hole dug by rats stealing the rice. Ironically, as any capitalist occupation requires, the Japanese who came to Taiwan must institute an order—their order—to insure their rights and opportunities to legally exploit the Taiwanese. By adopting this posture of “cleaning up Taiwan,” they implied that previous laws and customs were ill-conceived or insufficient, discrediting Chinese and Aboriginal ways, and offering order for their ends. As Christianity functioned in European colonialism, as a means of dubbing the local order “heathen,” the imperial symbols placed in the landscape here in poetic discourse mark Taiwan as the “Japanese man’s burden”—to raise Taiwan from its imposed imaginary chaos into an imperial light of reason. As historian George H. Kerr writes, throughout the period of the occupation of Taiwan, Questions of national pride or face modified all Japanese programs in Formosa, dictating an intense effort to show the world that a capacity to colonize and modernize was not a monopoly reserved to Caucasian Christian nations. Many proud Japanese resented … the arrogant idea of the ‘White Man’s Burden.’

Japanese imperialism and poetic matrices  43 This lead, as Kerr points out, to the attempt to spread in Asia a pax Nipponica, a “Japanese way of life.”79 The above verse was by no means the first in Taiwan to develop the imperial image of wild chrysanthemums. Nearly a year earlier the “Daily Haiku Column” included these verses inferring a general argument for colonial rule in the imagery itself: By Etsuko Wild chrysanthemums can be found blooming by chance even in lawns and sandy fields 砂原や芝生たまたま野菊咲く Sunabara ya shibafu tamatama nogiku saku By Soratori In newly developed rocky fields the wild chrysanthemums blossom 新開の石ころ畑や野菊咲く80 Shinkai no ishikoro hatake ya nogiku saku These haiku present an image of the Japanese empire spreading organically throughout the wild by way of natural flowers that grow even in inhospitable locales. They seem to symbolize the imperial family as representative of Japan, and general obedience to the central state authorities, which seem ubiquitous via the flowers. The affect is borne in the virtual overlay invested as elements circulated in the poetic matrix, irrespective of actual nature. The image of the tenacity of the flowers—as symbols of the emperor—is compellingly abstracted, so that the reader cannot resist the well-grounded imagery embedded in the intertextual folds of the poem. The following has an almost religious allegorical sense of self-sacrifice and suffering under too great a passion for one’s cause, despite the lack of understanding or acceptance of the Taiwanese, in the first haiku, who can be read into the role of compliant children, and in the second as those unbelievers who will lose in the long run, as resistance to the imperial ideology would be in vain: By Joryū In the child’s little basket: wild chrysanthemums 幼児か持つ手籠の中の野菊哉 Yōji ga motsu tekago no naka no nogiku kana By Shian Even stepped upon, the wild chrysanthemums gladly bloom 踏まれたるまゝに野菊の咲く嬉し81 Fumaretaru mama ni nogiku no saku ureshi Moreover, the second verse may suggest the victimization of the Japanese— carrying the Japanese man’s burden and not appreciated by Taiwanese. The

44  Japanese imperialism and poetic matrices following verse transposes the tenacity attributed to “pines on boulders” (appearing as a topic for other verses)82 to the wild chrysanthemums: By Chikamura The wild chrysanthemums grow thin but pure with roots on boulders 岩の根に清く痩せたる野菊哉83 Iwa no ne ni kiyoku yasetaru nogiku kana This verse reminds us of the process of recombining and reworking the materials of the poetic matrix. Just a few years earlier, haiku, Chinese poetry, and tanka were all solicited on the topic of “pines on boulders.” Some of these poetry columns were even selected by Uno Akitaka, the author of the 1907 essay discussed above. Though many of the tanka printed are of scant interest, being general praises of the emperor at the New Year with no specific reference to Taiwan, the following tanka by Kuroda Haruko 黑田晴女 is explicitly set in Taiwan: In the changing light of the New Year in the Rough New Gem, pines on boulders are celebrated in the era of His Reign あら玉の年の光に色ろへていはほの松に御代いはふなり84 Aratama no toshi no hikari ni iroete iwao no matsu ni miyo iwau nari The word pine (matsu) is based on the homophone with to wait (matsu), here repeatedly used in Taiwan to ground the imperial ideology in the sense of the folk etymology “the tree before which one awaits the gods in heaven to descend.”85 The image of the rough/new gem (aratama) of Taiwan, discussed above, is combined with the pine (emperor) so that the pines or chrysanthemums on a boulder (Taiwan) become a sign of Japanese determination and long-term commitment to occupying Taiwan. Thus, as in countless other verses, this one uses the symbol of the emperor as a stable point of reference around which any number of events may be situated. The image of pines on boulders in concert with any activity involving development, reaction (crisis), or change could be invoked to attempt to gain the understanding and cooperation of Japanese subjects who were educated in this ideology (especially if attending school after the 1890 Imperial Rescript on Education had been promulgated).

Aestheticizing labor of the colonized: “evening in a fishing village” and “buying flowers” The focus on naturalizing a Japanese poetics in Taiwan is found in the August 1902 call for tanka on the topic “miscellaneous poems on Taiwan,” of which the epigraph to this chapter is one example. While such topics are often attempts to codify Taiwan in Japanese poetic terms, individual poets indeed vary in their degree of intentionally or naively insinuating their colonial

Japanese imperialism and poetic matrices  45 position in terms of the application of the poetic apparatus to Taiwan at a particular juncture of historical forces. A verse by a poet known as Sogaku demonstrates the double vision of the colonist, whose work received third place, praised by the editor for writing on “unfamiliar customs”: While in tattered clothes indeed she is in disarray, not a strand of hair out of place—is she an island girl? つヽれこそ身にはまとへれ髪の毛の一絲亂れぬ島つをなこか86 Tsudure koso mi niwa madoere kami no ke no isshi-midarenu shima tsu onako ka The expectation assumed is suggested (by way of the interrogative) that the “island girl” should be messy, as “not out of place” (midarenu) suggests with its evocations in countless waka of losing oneself to love’s passions, becoming excited and perturbed that the woman is calm and unavailable to the Japanese man. A particular phrase embedded in the verse, “in disarray” (madoere), chauvinistically plays on the saying “People in disarray are as common as the hair on a cow, but wise people are as rare as the horn of a mythical giraffe.”87 Thus the verse shows how even an apparent compliment—­suggesting the Taiwanese might almost pass as Japanese— reflects an essentializing insult elevating the ruling class of Japanese and creating an inherent inferiority in the Taiwanese, no matter how beautiful or elegant a part such as the hair may seem.88 For September 1902, the following call for submissions appeared: “Topics (A) Evening in the fishing village, and (B) Buying flowers (due September 5). Topic B should be focused on Taiwan.”89 Many of the tanka on the topic of buying flowers borrow a classical motif of confusion—over what flower one sees (or if it is snow, a butterfly, etc.) and what its name is—to highlight being in a place which is new to the Empire. A typical example is the following verse by Makoto Sunako (pen name) of Beigang: Though I bought a flower to show my hometown friend I don’t even know the name of the flowering grass ふるさとの友に見せん一かふ買ひしも名さへ知らぬ草花90 Furusato no tomo ni misen ikka fu-gai hishi mo mei-sa e shiranu kusabana The “flowering grass” suggests both “some flower” and “weed flower,” diction belittling the unknown local flora, focusing on the perceived absence of a word and “poetic” confusion in a new climate: as if for a Japanese colonist, of course, such confusion is to be expected, being from an advanced northern metropolis. The verse plays up the exotic difference and pleasant alienation while also playing the role of the consumer of culture lost among the fresh array of choices. Note also how the attachment to the comfort of home and friends seems proportional to indifference to the place visited.

46  Japanese imperialism and poetic matrices In the following tanka by Naga Kitsuko of Tamsui there is an odd mix of humility in investigating the proper word for a flower and arrogance in the excitement over discovering it was really something Japanese in the first place: I asked the Taiwanese the name of the flower I bought and held—something familiar about their scent—Yamato pinks 買ひとりてたかさこひとに名を周へはかをり床しき大和撫子91 Kai torite Takasago hito ni na o toeba kaori yukashiki Yamato-nadeshiko This scene presents an innate, already present Japaneseness surprisingly surfacing—as if it were there all along—and the Japanese language itself providing the evidence, as if the name were universal. The poem implies relief: thank goodness an unknown flower does have a name; while here is not Japan, it is adapting to Japanese consciousness. The flip side, of course, is that the Taiwanese selling flowers tells the name in Japanese and with the name “Yamato pinks” so as to flatter the Japanese and play on their nostalgia for home and perhaps homesickness. Still, for the Japanese, the jouissance here suggests joy in the tension of Taiwan no longer seeming to be just an occupied territory, but part of the Empire: as if the name of the flower tells one so by its undeniable scent. “Taiwanese” here is literally “Takasago person,” as takasago is one of the many ways to refer to Taiwan and which sounds poetic since it echoes homonyms used in classical poetry. Many of the tanka on the topic of “evening in the fishing village” suggest that the very justification for labor—presumed to be primarily Taiwanese labor92—was underwritten in part by aestheticizing seasonal matrices. A colonist with the pen name Tanabe Tsuru Onna (roughly translatable as “Tanabe Fishing Woman”) wrote: Where the fisherman’s child waits to greet his father the evening moon shines down on the rocky shore あまの子か父のかへりを磯ちかくむかへは出つる夕月のかけ93 Ama no ko ga chichi no kaeri o iso chikaku mukae wa izuru yūzuki no kake This verse suggests the sublimely beautiful danger of the sea—the moonlit rocky shore which might prevent his father’s return. Many of these verses naturalize the division of labor by aestheticizing family life and rhythms of the fishing village. The following, by Koi Hashi (lit. Carp Bridge), is more optimistic: The fishermen’s boys see off the boat rowed over waves sparkling in the evening sunlight 夕日かけきらめく浪を漕きわけて蜑のをのこら船出する見ゆ94 Yūhi kake kirameku nami o koki wakete ama no onokora funade suru miyu

Japanese imperialism and poetic matrices  47 While such poems on “evening in the fishing village” can be read as merely typical examples of pastoral tanka no different from similar poems written in the context of Japan itself, where the fishermen would be Japanese, here indeed is the colony of Taiwan. It is precisely in the context of Taiwan that these conventional Japanese poems romanticize Taiwanese labor and an image of organic, local community, and family life led in premodern simplicity in Taiwan—as if alienated labor did not yet exist here; as if they were not part of a colonial experiment within which they were treated as inferior to the Japanese; and as if Japanese capitalists and government administrators were not eying their every activity and resource for potential economic implications.95 While in Japan the emphasis in a poem might be on “another Japanese, like me, is out fishing,” these poems depict categorically subordinate Taiwanese fishermen. The double vision here is based on the production of a colonial pathos of distance with respect to the local community it romanticizes, and an idea of community that is deployed to reduce the upward mobility of the local population—that is, to naturalize denial of their own ambitions, and to create stable socio-economic conditions which make it easier to find ways by which to systematically profit. As is common in modern capitalist societies, the colonists themselves have all left their homes to develop or support various Japanese enterprises abroad. What is most interesting is not the context, in which the colonial division of labor is rationalized, but the deployment of conventional pastoral images originating in a Japanese fishing village in depictions of Taiwan. Contrasting two tanka depicting fisherfolk pulling in their nets may illustrate the power of this form to shape how one would see labor then. One verse by Shimozawa Hahaan (lit. Swamp Wave Hermitage), reads: At dusk, gazing up into the sky it starts to rain—the fisherfolk folding their dry nets make a clamor 雨となる空をなかめてたそかれに干網たヽむ漁夫かしましき96 Ame to naru sora o nagamete tasogare ni hoshi ami tatamu gyofu kashimashiki In contrast to the Japanese poet “gazing up into the sky,” the fisherfolk are presented as noisy, as if unaware of the beauty surrounding them, they “make a clamor.” Thus, in such small gestures in verse, the presumed superiority of educated Japanese over working class Taiwanese can be applied to aestheticize the colonial economy’s racial distributions within the division of labor. Sympathizing with the fisherfolk even more, Mongaikan (lit. Amateur) from Datōtei wrote: Their voices die down as they pull in the fishing nets, the evening moon gently climbs to the tops of shore pines あひきするこゑしつまりて濱松のこすゑのとかに夕月のぼる97 Ahiki-suru koe shizumarite hamamatsu no kozue no toka ni yūzuki noboru

48  Japanese imperialism and poetic matrices This verse is more complicated in how it situates the poet’s gaze as well as in how the action of the fishermen (pulling in nets) and the moon (rising) is presented in parallel structuring. The verse vaguely suggests rewards for labor, but in the sense of Linda Hutcheon’s transideological irony, it can be read in two quite different and ironic, complementary ways. First, echoing a popular slogan of the early Meiji period and a staple of eager proponents of capitalism, it can be read as supporting the idea that anyone can “make something of oneself” or literally “raise oneself up into the world” (risshin shusse). In this reading, the poem can rather directly be seen as being used to constitute a poetic depiction of a capitalist mythology. As it is essential to maintain an imperial difference in class—a line between the planners and the workers—this poem imagines conveying hope: work hard, do not be boisterous and waste energy (“voices die down as they” work), and the workers too may enter a capitalist utopian frame. As the very ideology established as such is naturally written to favor the masters and maintain their place, it may not be easy to become like the masters. Second, building on this ambiguity, the poem can be interpreted as meaning that the day’s profits produced by the fisherfolk for the poet-capitalist watching are expressed in the moon rising at the end of the day. In either reading, what is important is the image of something rising after the labor is completed. The prosthesis of nature through poetry as seen in colonial Taiwan may take the form of an expropriation of the poetic matrix to serve the desires of the capitalist. The following verse demonstrates this use of poetry, which is not always as obvious as it is here: Yoshishiki Yōsuke 吉敷 要助 Cloudy, from the factories trouble-free under heaven smoke also can be seen in the first sky of the year 雲はれて天にくもなす工場の 煙もみゆす年の初空98 Kumo harete ame ni kumo nasu kōjō no / kemuri mo miyusu toshi no hatsusora Here we see a candid sign of the colonial use of local labor in factories with the auspicious naturalized representation by way of an anamorphic shift in how one is to view the clouds. The local landscape and people are treated as unconscious of the rising smoke of factories insinuated into the landscape by the capitalist developers, who in viewing, from a distance, distinguish the smoke from factories as an auspicious sign for production and profits, in contrast to the natural cloudiness, which in blocking the sun on New Year’s would not be a favorable omen. This shift is more than an irony; it is a shifting of alliances affirmed in the poem and perhaps only intelligible with reference to the base poetic matrix. That it all occurs under heaven underscores the divine mandate—analogous to the application of Christianity by Western imperialists—emphasizing that production and profits are part of the larger vision of what is good for the Empire. Thus, the ideological role of poetic language may even be linked to factory productivity.

Japanese imperialism and poetic matrices  49 I hope to have shown how the language of empire as developed in early colonial poetry not only ideologically naturalized colonial rule and its necessary hierarchies through repetition, but also through acts of naming and often situating violent assertions that may go unchallenged and unnoticed while exerting tremendous influence as the matrices of association are expanded by such poetry. As particular poems and groups of poems on particular topics are marshaled to introduce and reinforce distinctions of class, and gender, and simplify the idea that Taiwan belonged to the Japanese Empire, the associations become structured into the poetic matrix, as if ahistorical. Examining this poetry allows us to witness the entrenchment of hierarchically charged words and emotional associations that may still haunt the Japanese poetic language and its poetic matrices in postcolonial Japan and Taiwan.

Notes 1 About half of this chapter originally appeared as Dean Brink, “Japanese Imperialism and Poetic Matrices: Conventional Projections of Nature and Labor in Early Colonial Taiwan,” Archiv Orientalni/Oriental Archive: Quarterly Journal of African and Asian Studies 79, no. 3 (2011): 331–55. 2 For Chapters 1 and 2, hundreds (if not thousands) of poems were examined, with selections being representative of far more available examples. 3 For an introduction to pillow words, please see E. Miner, H. Odagiri and R.E. Morrell, eds., The Princeton Companion to Classical Japanese Literature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985), 433–41. Miner et al. write: The appeal of specific places is a characteristic of Japanese literature in all periods, including the present, and the effect of skillful handling of such names is more readily felt than explained. … Because waka [classical Japanese poetry in general] so often involves places praised for seasonal beauty or used to convey experience of travel or love, or for figurative purposes, almost every place name is a potential utamakura. (433) 4 Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), 88. 5 See Li Chen and Tetsuji Ueda, Taiwan siji: Rijushiqi Taiwan duangexuan (Taiwan’s Four Seasons: Tanka Selection from Taiwan during the Period of Japanese Rule) (Taipei: Eryu Wenhua, 2008). 6 On “automatization and foregrounding” see Jan Mukarovsky, “Standard Language and Poetic Language,” in A Prague School Reader on Esthetics, Literary Structure, and Style, ed. and trans. Paul L. Garvin (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 1964), 20. 7 Cf. Chapter 5. 8 Ania Loomba, Colonialism/Postcolonialism (New York: Routledge, 2005), 47. 9 This approach to Japanese poetics attempts to find alternatives to the expressive poetic mode which Roman Jakobson codifies in linguistic terms and upon which major scholars writing in English rely. See, for instance, Haruo Shirane, Traces of Dreams: Landscape, Cultural Memory, and the Poetry of Basho (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), 88. 10 Cary Wolfe, What Is Posthumanism? (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), xxiv. 11 Bhabha, “Foreword,” in The Wretched of the Earth, ed. Frantz Fanon (New York: Grove Press, 2004), xiv.

50  Japanese imperialism and poetic matrices 12 See Peter Ackermann, “The Four Seasons: One of Japanese Culture’s Most Central Concepts,” in Japanese Images of Nature: Cultural Perspectives (Richmond, VI: Curzon Press, 1997), 37. 13 See George H. Kerr, Formosa: Licensed Revolution and the Home Rule Movement 1895–1945 (Honolulu: The University Press of Hawaii, 1974), 97. 14 Wolfe, What Is Posthumanism?, xv. 15 Katherine N. Hayles, How We Became Posthuman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 87. 16 The association of the visible and capitalist viewing mechanisms builds on Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible, trans. and with an introduction by Gabriel Rockhill (London: Continuum, 2004.) 17 Jeffry A. Frieden, Global Capitalism: Its Fall and Rise in the Twentieth Century (New York: W. W. Norton, 2006), 8, 25, 75. 18 Taiwan nichinichi shimbun (Taiwan Daily News), National Central Library, Taiwan Branch Reproduction; filmed by Wang Ai-Zhu and Cai Zhong-Qing (Taipei City: National Central Library, Taiwan Branch, 1991), 5 January 1898, 4. 19 Taiwan nichinichi shimbun, 1 January 1907, 19. 20 Ibid. 21 Ibid. 22 Ibid. 23 Ibid. 24 Ibid. 25 Ibid. 26 Kōjin Karatani discusses how Tokieda Motoki (1900–1967) in his Kokugogaku shi [The History of Japanese Linguistics] saw the Japanese language as coextensive with its colonies in Taiwan, Korea, over Ainu, and Okinama, and how “he had intended to create a situation in which the Japanese language was spread as the prevailing standard in greater East Asia.” See Kōjin Karatani, Nihon seishin bunseki (Tōkyo: Kōdansha, 2002), 33. 27 Roy Andrew Miller, Japan’s Modern Myth: The Language and Beyond (New York and Tokyo: Weatherhill, 1982), 127–64. 28 As Komagome and Mangan point out, it is likely that officials such as Gotō Shinpei (1857–1929) suggested that the larger the gap between ‘civilized’ and ‘uncivilized’, the easier it was to control a colony, and that because a wide gap between the ‘civilized’ and ‘uncivilized’ did not exist between Japanese and Chinese, the Japanese had to make strenuous efforts to establish political distance as rulers by imposing their own language and culture on the colonized. See Takeshi Komagome and J.A. Mangan “Japanese Colonial Education in Taiwan 1895–1922: Precepts and Practices of Control,” History of Education 26, no. 3 (1997): 316. 29 On this trauma, see Chapter 3. 30 Taiwan nichinichi shimbun, 1 January 1907, 19. 31 See Slavoj Žižek, The Plague of Fantasies (London and New York: Verso, 1997), 50. 32 Taiwan nichinichi shimbun, 1 January 1907, 19. 33 Ibid. 34 Ibid., 157–58. 35 Poems, travelogues and postcards highlighted the geography of Taiwan’s other famous places and scenic vistas, including Alishan, Sun Moon Lake, the Tamsui sunset, Beitou Hotsprings, and even an entire other volume, similar to the volume of poems devoted to Nītakayama, but to Tsugitakayama (literally

Japanese imperialism and poetic matrices  51 “second highest mountain”). See Sutesaburō Ōhashi, ed., Nītakayama no kashi: Waka, kanshi no bu (Taipei: Nichinichi shimbun insatsu, 1927); and Sutesaburō Ōhashi, ed., Tsugitakayama (Taipei: Nichinichi shimbun insatsu, 1924). 36 See J. Charles Schencking, “The Imperial Japanese Navy and the Constructed Consciousness of a South Seas Destiny, 1872–1921,” Modern Asian Studies 33, no. 4 (1999): 769–96. 37 Naftali Kadmon, “Toponymy and Geopolitics: The Political Use—and Misuse—­of Geographical Names,” Cartographic Journal 41, no. 2 (2004): 85–87. 38 Robert Eskildsen, “Of Civilization and Savages: The Mimetic Imperialism of Japan’s 1874 Expedition to Taiwan,” The American Historical Review 107, no. 2 (2002): 388–418. 39 See Ōhashi Nītakayama. 40 Arkady Plotnitsky, “Badiou’s Equations—and Inequalities: A Response to Robert Hugh’s ‘Riven,’” Postmodern Culture 17, no. 3 (2007): 6, doi: 10.1353/pmc.2008.0004. 41 Alain Badiou, Logics of Worlds: Being and Event, 2 (London and New York: Continuum, 2009), 417–19, 593–97. 42 Peihuo Tsai, Nihon honkokumin ni ataeu (To Japanese compatriots) (Tokyo: Iwanami), 1928. 43 Taiwan nichinichi shimbun, 3 November 1903, 7. 44 Wei Yu, Concerning History, Yao Jui-Chung’s Examination of the Remains, trans. Eric Chang (Chang Chih-Wei, 2011), accessed July 2, 2012, http://weiyuonline. blogspot.tw/2011/03/recovering-mainland-and-liberating.html. 45 See caption for the photo titled “(Taiwan) Nītaka jinja,” Taiwan Central Library, accessed June 21, 2012, http://memory.ncl.edu.tw. 46 Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 86. 47 Mike Crang, “Relics, Places and Unwritten Geographies in the Work of Michel de Certeau (1925–86),” in Thinking Space, ed. Mike Crang and Nigel Thrift (New York: Routledge, 2000), 137–38. 48 R. Rose-Redwood, D. Alderman, and M. Azaryahu, “Geographies of Toponymic Inscription: New Directions in Critical Place-Name Studies,” Progress in Human Geography 34, no. 4 (2010): 463. 49 Badiou, Conditions (London and New York: Continuum, 2008), 51. 50 Taiwan nichinichi shimbun 14 July 1897, 2. 51 Taiwan nichinichi shimbun 31 July 1897, 3. 52 See Governor General Office, Moriso-yama o Nītakayama o shōsubeki (Mt. Morrison should be called Mt. Nītaka), Taiwan Governor General Office Documents, 1896, accessed July 4, 2012, http://db1n.th.gov.tw/sotokufu/, 1. 53 Raymond Williams, qtd. in J.S. Duncan, The City as Text: The Politics of Landscape Interpretation in the Kandyan Kingdom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 15. 54 Taiwan nichinichi shimbun, 3 November 1897, 3. 55 Taiwan nichinichi shimbun, 17 June 1915, 33. 56 See E.R. Miner, H. Odagiri, and R.E. Morrell, The Princeton Companion to Classical Japanese Literature, 433–41. 57 Taiwan nichinichi shimbun, 5 January 1898, 4. 58 Ōhashi, Nītakayama. 59 Taiwan nichinichi shimbun, 5 January 1898, 4. 60 Taiwan nichinichi shimbun, 31 March 1908, 1. 61 Taiwan nichinichi shimbun, 19 October 1907, 1. 62 Kerr, Formosa. 63 Tsai, Nihon honkokumin ni ataeu; S.-C. Fong, “Hegemony and Identity in the Colonial Experience of Taiwan, 1895–1945,” in Taiwan under Japanese Colonial Rule, 1895–1945: History, Culture, Memory, ed. B. Liao and D. Wang (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), 172.

52  Japanese imperialism and poetic matrices 64 C.-Y. Lai, Tsai Peihuo de shi qu ji bi ge shidai (The poetry and songs of Tsai Peihuo and his era) (Taipei: Wu San-lien Foundation, 1999), 33; Taiwanese Chinese in original; translated by the author with Huang Shih-Yi, and is the first translation of this work into English; earlier printings of the original proved difficult to obtain in reliable form. 65 Lai, Tsai Peihuo de shi, 31. 66 T. Chen, “Formosa Political Incident,” in Encyclopedia of Taiwan, 2011, accessed June 20, 2012, http://taiwanpedia.culture.tw/en/content?ID=3735. 67 See Michizaburo Ishida, ed. Sakubun jisho: Bibun inbun (Dictionary for the Composition of Beautiful Prose and Verse) (Tokyo: Ikubunsha, 1905); and Rihei Kobayashi, Taiwan Saijiki (Lexicon of Seasonal Words for Taiwan) (Tokyo: Seikyosha, 1910) and poetry handbooks today are too numerous to list, with one even prepared for contemporary haiku in Taiwan, and some even included in new electronic dictionaries emphasizing either “literary studies” or “life activities.” 68 Kobayashi, Taiwan saijiki, 2. 69 Shizuo Miyasaka, Kigo no tanjō, (The Birth of Season Words) (Tokyo: Iwanami, 2009), ii. 70 Ibid. 71 Ibid., vi. 72 Taiwan nichinichi shimbun, 15 August 1902, 4. 73 For a more detailed account of anamorphosis in Žižek’s Marxist-Lacanian adaptation, see Slavoj Žižek, The Plague of Fantasies, ch. 2; and Sarah Kay, Žižek: A Critical Introduction (Cambridge: Polity, 2003), 48–58. 74 Taiwan nichinichi shimbun, 28 October 1902, 9. 75 Taiwan nichinichi shimbun, 5 January 1898, 4. 76 Ibid. 77 See Laurel Rodd et al., Kokinshū (Boston, MA: Cheng & Tsui Co., 1996.) 35. 78 Taiwan nichinichi shimbun, 23 September 1908, 1. 79 Kerr, Formosa, 18–19. 80 Taiwan nichinichi shimbun, 6 November 1907, 3. 81 Ibid. 82 See “pines on boulders,” for instance, in the following tanka by Kuroda Haruko: “In the changing light of the New Year in the Rough New Gem, / pines on boulders are celebrated in the era of His Reign” (Aratama no toshi no hikari ni iroete / iwao no matsu ni miyo iwau nari). Taiwan nichinichi shimbun, 1 January 1904, 17. 83 Taiwan nichinichi shimbun, 6 November 1907, 3. 84 Taiwan nichinichi shimbun, 1 January 1904, 17. 85 Kōjien (The Wide Garden of Words) (Tokyo: Iwanami, 2008), s.v. “Matsu.” 86 Taiwan nichinichi shimbun, 28 August 1902, 4. 87 Nihon daijiten senkōkai (Japanese Language Dictionary Publication Committee), ed. “Madou,” in Nihon daijiten (Japanese Language Dictionary), vol. 9 (Tōkyo: Shōgakkan, 1981), 1122. 88 On how Taiwanese women were later pressured into becoming more Japanese, see my article “Pygmalion Colonialism: How to Become a Japanese Woman in Late Occupied Taiwan,” The Sungkyun Journal of East Asian Studies 12, no. 1 (2012): 41–63. 89 Taiwan nichinichi shimbun, 31 August 1902, 7. 90 Taiwan nichinichi shimbun, 23 September 1902, 4. 91 Ibid. 92 According to “Colonial Demography: Formosa,” The Japanese have always occupied the professional, administrative, supervisory, and technical positions in Formosa, leaving to the Islanders the

Japanese imperialism and poetic matrices  53 positions as agricultural or industrial labor. In 1930, … Japanese, who constituted slightly less than 5 per cent of the total population, furnished 0.4 per cent in industry, 10 per cent in trade, and 17 per cent in communications, but 42 per cent of those in the professions and public service. … The Islanders were the labor supply of a primarily agrarian economy in which the Japanese occupied practically all positions involving supervisory or administrative responsibility. See Office of Population Research, “Colonial Demography: Formosa,” Population Index 10, no. 3 (1994): 153. 93 Taiwan nichinichi shimbun, 21 September 1902, 4. Compare one more of the many similar verses to be found in this solicited topic: “At dinnertime the fishermen’s children and all hurry to greet the returning fishing boat, the happiness” (Tsuribune no kaeri ureshimi ama no ko ra mukaete isogu yūge toki kana). Taiwan nichinichi shimbun, 19 September 1902, 4. 94 Ibid. 95 See Han-Yu Chang and Ramon H. Myers, “Japanese Colonial Development Policy in Taiwan, 1895–1906: A Case of Bureaucratic Entrepreneurship,” The Journal of Asian Studies 22, no. 4 (1963): 433–49. 96 Taiwan nichinichi shimbun, 27 September 1902, 4. 97 2 October 1902, 4. 98 Taiwan nichinichi shimbun, 17 January 1902, 2.

Bibliography Ackermann, Peter. “The Four Seasons: One of Japanese Culture’s Most Central Concepts.” In Japanese Images of Nature: Cultural Perspectives, 36–53. Richmond, VI: Curzon Press, 1997. Badiou, Alain. Logics of Worlds: Being and Event, 2. London and New York: Continuum, 2009. Bhabha, Homi. “Foreword.” In The Wretched of the Earth, edited by Frantz Fanon, vii–xli. New York: Grove Press, 2004. ———. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 1994. Brink, Dean. “Japanese Imperialism and Poetic Matrices: Conventional Projections of Nature and Labor in Early Colonial Taiwan.” Archiv Orientalni/Oriental Archive: Quarterly Journal of African and Asian Studies 79, no. 3 (2011): 331–55 ———. “Nativist Legacies of Desinicization and Nationalist Sentiment in Poetry During the Second Sino-Japanese War.” Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 12, no. 1 (2011): 43–61. ———. “Pygmalion Colonialism: How to Become a Japanese Woman in Late Occupied Taiwan.” The Sungkyun Journal of East Asian Studies 12, no. 1 (2012): 41–63. Chang, Han-Yu, and Ramon H. Myers. “Japanese Colonial Development Policy in Taiwan, 1895–1906: A Case of Bureaucratic Entrepreneurship.” The Journal of Asian Studies 22, no. 4 (1963): 433–49. Chen, Li, and Tetsuji Ueda. Taiwan siji: Rijushiqi Taiwan duangexuan (Taiwan’s Four Seasons: Tanka Selection from Taiwan during the Period of Japanese Rule). Taipei: Eryu Wenhua, 2008. Chen, T. “Formosa Political Incident.” Encyclopedia of Taiwan, 2011. Accessed June 20, 2012. http://taiwanpedia.culture.tw/en/content?ID=3735. Crang, Mike. “Relics, Places and Unwritten Geographies in the Work of Michel de Certeau (1925–86).” In Thinking Space, edited by Mike Crang and Nigel Thrift, 136–53. New York: Routledge, 2000.

54  Japanese imperialism and poetic matrices Duncan, J.S. The City as Text: The Politics of Landscape Interpretation in the Kandyan Kingdom. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Eskildsen, Robert. “Of Civilization and Savages: The Mimetic Imperialism of Japan’s 1874 Expedition to Taiwan.” The American Historical Review 107, no. 2 (2002): 388–418. Fong, S.-C. “Hegemony and Identity in the Colonial Experience of Taiwan, 1895–1945.” In Taiwan under Japanese Colonial Rule, 1895–1945: History, Culture, Memory, edited by B. Liao and D. Wang, 168–83. New York: Columbia University Press, 2006. Frieden, Jeffry A. Global Capitalism: Its Fall and Rise in the Twentieth Century. New York: W. W. Norton, 2006. Governor General Office. “Moriso-yama o Nītakayama o shōsubeki” (Mt. Morrison should be called Mt. Nītaka). Taiwan Governor General Office Documents, 1896. Accessed July 4, 2012. http://db1n.th.gov.tw/sotokufu/. Haruo, Shirane. Traces of Dreams: Landscape, Cultural Memory, and the Poetry of Basho. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998. Hayles, Katherine N. How We Became Posthuman. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999. Ishida, Michizaburo, ed. Sakubun jisho: Bibun inbun (Dictionary for the Composition of Beautiful Prose and Verse). Tokyo: Ikubunsha, 1905. Kadmon, Naftali. “Toponymy and Geopolitics: The Political Use—and Misuse— of Geographical Names.” Cartographic Journal 41, no. 2 (2004): 85–87. Karatani, Kōjin. Nihon seishimbunseki. Tōkyo: Kōdansha, 2002. Kay, Sarah. Žižek: A Critical Introduction. Cambridge: Polity, 2003. Kerr, George H. Formosa: Licensed Revolution and the Home Rule Movement 1895–1945. Honolulu: The University Press of Hawaii, 1974. Kobayashi, Rihei, Taiwan saijiki (Lexicon of Seasonal Words for Taiwan). Tokyo: Seikyosha, 1910. Kōjien (The Wide Garden of Words). Tokyo: Iwanami, 2008. Komagome, Takeshi, and J.A. Mangan. “Japanese Colonial Education in Taiwan 1895–1922: Precepts and Practices of Control.” History of Education 26, no. 3 (1997): 307–22. Lai, C.-Y. Tsai Peihuo de shi qu ji bi ge shidai (The Poetry and Songs of Tsai Peihuo and His Era). Taipei: Wu San-lien Foundation, 1999. Loomba, Ania. Colonialism/Postcolonialism. New York: Routledge, 2005. Miller, Roy Andrew. Japan’s Modern Myth: The Language and Beyond. New York and Tokyo: Weatherhill, 1982. Miner, E.R., H. Odagiri and Morrell, R.E. The Princeton Companion to Classical Japanese Literature. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985. Miyasaka, Shizuo. Kigo no tanjō (The Birth of Season Words). Tokyo: Iwanami, 2009. Mukarovsky, Jan. “Standard Language and Poetic Language.” In A Prague School Reader on Esthetics, Literary Structure, and Style, edited and translated by Paul L. Garvin. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 1964. Nihon daijiten senkōkai (Japanese Language Dictionary Publication Committee), ed. “Madou.” In Nihon daijiten (Japanese Language Dictionary), vol. 9. Tōkyo: Shōgakkan, 1981. Office of Population Research. “Colonial Demography: Formosa.” Population Index 10, no. 3 (1994): 147–57.

Japanese imperialism and poetic matrices  55 Ōhashi, Sutesaburō. ed. Nītakayama no kashi: Waka, kanshi no bu. Taipei: Nichinichi shimbun insatsu, 1927. ———. Tsugitakayama. Taipei: Nichinichi shimbun insatsu, 1924. Plotnitsky, Arkady. “Badiou’s Equations—and Inequalities: A Response to Robert Hugh’s ‘Riven’.” Postmodern Culture 17, no. 3 (2007). doi: 10.1353/pmc.2008.0004. Rancière, Jacques. The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible. Translated and with an introduction by Gabriel Rockhill. London: Continuum, 2004. Rodd, Laurel et al. Kokinshū. Boston, MA: Cheng & Tsui Co, 1996. Rose-Redwood, R., D. Alderman and M. Azaryahu. “Geographies of Toponymic Inscription: New Directions in Critical Place-Name Studies.” Progress in Human Geography 34, no. 4 (2010): 453–70. Schencking, J. Charles. “The Imperial Japanese Navy and the Constructed Consciousness of a South Seas Destiny, 1872–1921.” Modern Asian Studies 33, no. 4 (1999): 769–96. Taiwan nichinichi shimbun or Taiwan riri xinbao (Taiwan Daily News). National Central Library, Taiwan Branch Reproduction; filmed by Wang Ai-Zhu and Cai Zhong-Qing. Taipei City: National Central Library, Taiwan Branch, 1991. “(Taiwan) Nītaka jinja.” Taiwan Central Library. Accessed June 21, 2012. http:// memory.ncl.edu.tw. Tsai, Peihuo. Nihon honkokumin ni ataeu (To Japanese Compatriots). Tokyo: Iwanami, 1928. Wolfe, Cary. What Is Posthumanism? Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010. Yu, Wei. Concerning history, Yao Jui-Chung’s Examination of the Remains. Translated by Eric Chang (Chang Chih-Wei), 2011. Accessed July 2, 2012. http:// weiyuonline.blogspot.tw/2011/03/recovering-mainland-and-liberating.html. Žižek, Slavoj. The Plague of Fantasies. London and New York: Verso, 1997.

2 Transculturation and typological intertextuality Taiwanese poets in the New Year’s Day poetry pages of colonial Taiwan This chapter focuses on how Taiwanese writing Japanese poetry situated themselves in relation to others—other Taiwanese, aboriginals, and Japanese—­and justified their lives, practices, and positions within the colonial context of modernization and the rise of Japanese militarism. In writing Japanese poetry, these Taiwanese both mimicked Japanese poetic practices and to various degrees situated themselves as “others” to their colonial masters, as well as outsiders with respect to a colonial metropolitan perspective that placed its center in Tokyo. The poems explored show a truly broad spectrum of positions by which Taiwanese found meaning by engaging a working symbolic register and poetic practices that consistently reiterated the production of pleasure ( jouissance) that writing poetry afforded, particularly in the context of their role-playing in society at large: participating in practices associated with being like a Japanese, which at New Year’s are particularly conspicuous. This chapter also explores the social-­symbolic-ideological mechanisms manifest in the poetry as practiced in various forms, specifically in terms of what may be explored as modes of typological intertextuality (discussed in the introduction) in conjunction with interdiscursive (modern, open) matrices of association in contemporary Japanese poetry in traditional forms in the colonial period. These poetic assemblages are predominantly predicated on phrases borrowed from a vast matrix of affective clichés, each appropriate for a given range of situations and conventional responses basically evoking a sympathetic emotional response through skilled pastiche. During the colonization of Taiwan, newspapers served as a primary means of conveying to the population of Taiwanese as well as Japanese colonists the centrality of a Japanese way of life, thus presented a challenge to Chinese and Aboriginal living practices. Taiwanese themselves would find in poetry a discourse to aspire towards emulation to raise their status to that of the privileged race and sometimes find opportunities for acceptable critical expression. In effect a line was drawn in poetry, between those in Taiwan who in various ways conformed to Japanese demands and those who were less cooperative; merely composing Japanese poetry implied some degree of submission to Japanese rule. Japanese objectives changed from

Transculturation and typological intertextuality  57 the early days of development and economic solvency to the last decade’s desperate attempt to assimilate Taiwanese during the Second Sino-Japanese War and Pacific War.1 This essay explores the degree of conformance evident in modes of mimicry found in Japanese poetry written by Taiwanese: primarily tanka (短歌), haiku (俳句) and senryū (川柳). As Homi Bhabha delineated in his seminal essay “Of Mimicry and Man,” in The Location of Culture, how the colonized subject embraces the literary productive forms of the colonizer as “an ironic compromise” (emphasis in original) is “the sign of a double articulation” as it exhibits the colonizer’s practices as carried out by the colonized who never embodies the full presence of the colonizing race. A Taiwanese poet, as “a ‘partial’ presence,” exhibits “the metonymy of presence,” so that participating in writing and publishing poetry may, for instance, work against his or her own interests in the larger picture of capitalist exploitation of Taiwan, while Japanese would not necessarily be compromised by publishing such poetry; even when critical, such poetry would display a conformance to the frame: writing in the language of the colonizer. More interestingly, Bhabha writes, “In mimicry, the representation of identity and meaning is rearticulated along the axis of metonymy,” so that the metonymic function in mimicry overlaps with the Taiwanese poet’s engagement with the poetic matrix operative in Japanese poetry’s extreme intertextuality; this matrix has prepared a conventionally organized spacing of images endowed with discrete affective associations, variously interpreted in different poetry groups and affiliations.2 Within any given circle, they are indeed difficult to achieve competency in, even for those raised memorizing Japanese poetry in school. Such a matrix by which to measure mimicry complicates how one would usually understand the universalizing discourse in terms of Western colonialism. Though never called a poetic matrix per se, in practice conventional poetic associations form one of the primary affective embodiments of the national polity and discourse affiliated with the cult of the emperor, which was by design to form from the Meiji period a Christian-like imperial supplement in Japanese colonial ideologies. Taiwanese writing poetry in Japanese then engaged in mimicry of the matrix—poets wrote themselves into the poetic matrix, already being scrutinized for their handicap of writing without the endowment of the racially endowed “spirit of the Japanese language” (the Kotodama). Since poetry itself is a discourse closely associated with this spirit which renders poetry, according to this race-specific discourse, extremely difficult to imagine non-Japanese writing, poetic discourse had been intrinsically seen as a discourse by and for the racially Japanese.3 This inherent ambivalence also precedes the practice of becoming in Taiwan more or less either “Japanese” or “Han Taiwanese” or “aboriginal Taiwanese,” though complicated in different periods by changing needs and prejudices of Japanese as well as Taiwanese demands for equality; poetic discourse itself already contained proscriptions against the Other’s participation in this discourse.4 Thus the racial barrier to Taiwanese poets living

58  Transculturation and typological intertextuality lives subsumed by transculturation provides a context perhaps unique to the Japanese Empire.5 Ideological influence extended from mundane solicitations to participate in conforming practices, as in newspaper articles and columns in the Taiwan nichinichi shimbun addressing topics such as how to conduct daily life in a Japanese manner, to the later imperialization movement which saw heavyhanded attempts to dissuade islanders, as they were called, from entertaining any concern for the victims of Japanese aggression in Manchuria and China, and even to garner support for recruiting Taiwanese to fight for the Japanese Empire. Within the domain of Japanese ideologues’ vision, poetry in the newspapers served the Empire’s needs by attempting to make Taiwanese daily practices and thought conform to Japanese preferences by extending a symbolic mapping in poetic words and place references that presented Taiwan as within the sphere of a Japanese motherland which now was branching out into Taiwan and beyond, and to apply the poetic matrix and writing practices to color events in emotional tones appropriate to the interests of the Empire. At this point doubts concerning agency may arise: does free will prevail, or is the subject bound to writing processes that are best described as automated? Japanese poetry can seem overly bound to convention and even repetitious at times, but, as an occasional writer of senryū and former member of a Japanese American Poetry Association and a current member of the Taiwan kadan (Taiwan Tanka Association), I appreciate and defend traditional forms and writing practices wholeheartedly, and understand their subversive potential. From a critical vantage one can also see that when in a colonial context this complexity itself necessarily shifts the subject-­production-angle of mediation from a simple exercise in reproducing a Japanese subject in poetry (itself of course already controversial and contested) to a much more problematic level; the event of enunciation and subject-­production (in its vertiginous dialogic mediation) reflects the colonial context in conjunction with the intertextual vectors of focus in a given poem or set of poems in a newspaper column, often composed on an announced topic. To a greater degree than Japanese poets in Taiwan, who may and did6 rely on their racial association with spirit of the language (kotodama) as well as a native speaker advantage, Taiwanese poets who made non-­conventional slips or intuitive leaps in their writing would be chided by Japanese (as will be seen below) for their irredeemable shortcomings, said to reveal their indelible Taiwaneseness (as if these were to Japanese nationals undesirable traits); yet they also reveal the colonial spectrum of transculturation in intimate detail, as examples below will show. As Faye Yuan Kleeman points out in her study of colonial fiction by Taiwanese, “we see the full gamut of positions ranging from complete rejection of the colonizing culture to willing acceptance and assimilation.”7 In many of the poems, one can only measure resistance to Japanese colonial authority in a pun or echo of a Chinese saying that suggests a subversive relationship to the Japanese rulers. Even though one might object,

Transculturation and typological intertextuality  59 arguing that such a poet has already capitulated to the very practice of writing poetry in Japanese (the way contemporary writers in Indonesia may have used Dutch), by examining vectors of reference as intimating alliances with various discursively identifiable positions, one can develop a more coherent and nuanced reading of degrees of subversion in these short poems. Though senryū are less dependent on the poetic matrix and more historically grounded, haiku, and tanka are especially at home in a subject-weak mode of articulation, which still allows one to sound out the historical intertextual choices that are embedded genealogically in practices (as when new names and images specific to Taiwan were introduced into the poetic lexicon) as well as immediate historical situations that are inserted in the intertextual matrix (by an individual poet or as a group, for instance, when a novel topic is assigned for propagandistic purposes, whether or not it is reiterated later). In this approach one is forced to see the contextualization in terms of the intertextual choices; the allusive back matter or inventory8 is necessarily foregrounded in these forms. In this way in this highly intertextual pastiche of Japanese poetry one can (1) situate the subject as writing as an interpellated, contested subject, rather than a mindlessly reiterating one; and (2) make the subject responsible for actions made in alliance with others—not simply the reflection of existing, embedded systems, however dynamically analyzed. The very degree of embeddedness clouds the act in the present. Thus the unrecognized gift of Japanese poetry is not in its diminutive poetic forms, but rather in the example it offers, and what one can learn from it in a comparative perspective as well as a colonial one. Here one finds an alternative model and approach to reading, one based on intertextual matrixial alliances, whether based on inherited, reified convention or entirely novel choices of discourse and community in modern contexts. Recall Bhabha’s placement of Frederic Jameson’s “situated consciousness” along with Edward Said’s “concept of ‘wordliness’ where ‘sensuous particularity as well as historical contingency … exist at the same level of surface particularity as the textual object itself’.”9 In Japanese poetry, the association-laden poetic language transposes experience and “sensory particularity” within a highly codified matrix that forces emotional ranges upon the constructed (matrixial) and invoked (experiential) personal and historical elements of the writing situation. The poetic matrix as used by Japanese subjects, whether Japanese or Taiwanese, could naturalize any statement within the context of colonial Japanese Taiwan. Subjects writing tanka, folk ditties (riyō), and haiku poetry, three forms which especially depended on this matrix, tend to exhibit little resistance to the exploitative basis of colonial rule, what the contemporary and critical Japanese colonial researcher Tadao Yanaihara described as the “capitalization of Taiwan,” candidly delineating Taiwan’s primarily economic importance to the Empire in terms of Japanese capitalism and imperialism: Taiwan offered a place to export capital for investment, to export goods, and to acquire raw materials and foodstuffs, as well as to make use of

60  Transculturation and typological intertextuality the productive value of local labor. He even writes, backing his statements with elaborate tables of statistics (based on data from 1925), that though Taiwan was only 15 percent the land area of Korea and had only 31 percent of its population, Taiwan’s factory production and social capital were greater than Korea even in raw figures on the level of capitalist enterprising. Part of the Japanese strategy was to construct class relations befitting not only a colony necessarily rendering the local “islanders” systematically and habitually inferior according to the Japanese, but also redefining and redrawing class relations among Taiwanese.10 In this sense, poetry affirms what Edward Said in Culture and Imperialism identified as a tyrannical use of narrative history in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, though under Japanese imperialism not by asserting a narrative of entering the jungles of Africa to follow a European narrator’s account of another European’s heroic mission and fall into madness11; rather, in short intertextual irruptions, poetry summons the suturing of established matrixial associations to fill in the missing material and so becomes a defining source of imperial affect and confidence. Poetry in the newspapers becomes a public record of propagandistic uses of language and the changing depiction of Taiwanese as a mixture of miraculous and improbable “Japanese” poets (as the cases of poets with editor’s comments suggest below).

Questions of mimicry and transculturation for colonial subjects writing poetry The publication of the New Year’s Day poetry page—sometimes half a page or merely randomly placed poetry columns—varies from year to year in surviving copies of the Taiwan nichinichi shimbun. In the 1910 New Year’s Day edition, for instance, nearly every other page has some poetry in Japanese, but the verse is scattered within part of what appears to be a general effort to propagate Japanese culture. There is no one page on which it is consistently concentrated at New Year’s Day until 1923, and then not regularly until 1932. Examining the introduction of Japanese poetry at New Year’s began as a convenience for structuring a study of various uses of poetry within the half century of Japanese administration of the islands of Taiwan. Such an approach indeed allows one to see the importance of poetry in the dissemination of the emperor-centered ideology and as a means—through examples and introductions to poetry writing and in the framing of certain topics in calls for poems—for both Taiwanese and Japanese living in Taiwan to make at least gestures of emotional investment or affective stakes in the Japanese Empire. It afforded opportunities for a sort of public confession of one’s compliance with the conventional poetic associations as expanded and adapted to foreground an aesthetics built around the cult of the emperor, of one’s willingness to become subjects of the emperor following the model introduced in the Rescript on Education (1890) as the central feature in the promotion of obedience and national unity. Moreover, to reinforce

Transculturation and typological intertextuality  61 reverence, the emperor’s own New Year’s poems would be published prominently in newspapers, thus linking the poems attributed to emperors from the earliest collection, the Man’yōshū (萬葉集 c. late 8th c.), through later imperial waka anthologies, to contemporary colonial Taiwan.12 Examining the publishing activities surrounding New Year’s poetry pages and columns allows one to understand what Japanese colonizers thought important to promote in various poetic forms (primarily tanka, haiku, and senryū) in their choices of solicited topics as well as direct comments on Taiwanese poets. The Taiwanese expressed their positions not simply in enunciations stating them, but indirectly and ambivalently, situating their often difficult position between cultures in the intertextual orientation presented and affiliations accepted and rejected in their verses. While Taiwanese were relegated to inferior positions with respect to Japanese, in being subordinated while writing in the very language and cultural forms of their masters, they could engage in what Fernando Ortiz called “transculturation,” which highlights “inter-cultural negotiation” and how the conquered still “selectively appropriate materials transmitted to them.”13 Paying attention to intertexts chosen in the context of these poetic forms, which are written in coordination with an instantiated (malleable, not permanent) poetic matrix, suddenly becomes meaningful not only in secondary explication relegated to footnotes but in the analysis of writing practices, contexts, and the range of nuanced choices available to colonial subjects in Taiwan. Among the few New Year’s Day poems penned by Taiwanese during the early decades of Japanese rule are two haiku from 1917, presented simply under the topic of New Year’s haiku. One by Su Qin-Xiang 蘇欽鑲 of Sanjiaoyong 三角湧 reads: Rich in bamboo, the island of Formosa’s first sunlight 竹に富みフホルモサの島初日影14 Take ni tomi fuhorumosa no shima hatsuhikage A traditional image of a sunrise seen through a dense forest of bamboo is suggested, but it is presented as if the “first sunlight” of the year were a conquest and exploitation of this resource in Taiwan, called in hiragana Formosa so as to accentuate its place in the foreign, modern, global market for raw materials, as it is “rich in bamboo.” Taking the point of view of the imperial conqueror, these ironic gestures may go unseen by maintaining an anamorphically distorting comprehension (in Žižek’s Lacanian sense), deploying the illusion of fixity in a traditional symbolic network to form a “present deadlock” which hides the cause of trauma (the unbearable fact of colonial subordination) within a modern and capitalistic normative reduction of meaning to functionality and profitability.15 In short, the poem can be read from both sides of a colonial antagonism, as Linda Hutcheon suggests in her term transideological irony.16 The word translated as sunlight

62  Transculturation and typological intertextuality also suggests (especially in haiku) the long shadow cast by the sun or the solemnity of a forest. In general usage, though only a faint echo here, this word (hikage[mono]) suggests something “shady” (in the English sense of this word). But the sunlight penetrating the dense abundance of bamboo creates an eerie sense of taking the bamboo both illuminated by and blocking the sun, symbolic of the Japanese and their empire. Is this vague, cryptic subversion or covert satire? All we can say with certainty is that “Formosa” and “rich in bamboo” together take a capitalist (imperialist) point of view, perhaps ironically, seeing the land in terms of its available yield of resources, and is softened by the poetic New Year’s seasonal word, “first sunlight.” Thus colonial ambivalence is marked in the intertexts interposed in this haiku. A more direct haiku from this year is one by Li Zhong-Sheng 李鐘生: Islanders, well why not celebrate the 10, 000 reins to come 島人よいざや祝はむ萬代を17 Shimabito yo iza ya iwamu bandai wo This haiku marks the reluctance of other Taiwanese, if not the poet, to partake in the cult of the emperor. The idea of Japan’s touted “longest continuous reign” as justifying Japanese actions as a leader in Asia is also evident here, suggesting an argument for compliance. More specifically, the haiku claims to promote clichés of the reinvented institution of the emperor as a foundation of the modern state’s fiction of ideological unity by virtue of pride in its (partially mythical) long line. An irony that might go unnoticed in this ideological ploy—made so important in official expressions of nationalist sentiment in justifying modern Japanese superiority—is that Chinese culture idealizes a revolutionary model that inherently undercuts praise for such a virtue18; Japanese officials initially in charge of education policy were aware of this and banned writers who made a virtue of revolutionary morality, such as Mencius, from the Taiwanese school curriculum.19 But even China’s traditional founding political myth of the loss of the ideal kingdoms of the reigns of the early sage kings due to revolution is utterly different from the Japanese positioning and frames a subject interpellation that develops out of the ambivalence of revolution and a lost founding utopic state. The Japanese use this motif of sameness and homogeneity, symbolized by the emperor as a Christ-like man-god linked to mythological kings and gods, as self-evident proof of the superiority of the Japanese.20 Indeed, as an ideological tool, demand for respect of the modern emperor made for a unified polity, and as such constitutes modern technological development by state and media; but is it worth sacrificing vigorous public debate for the sake of preserving the unity of the national polity when the ends are simply capitalist development and imperialism? Many poems ask related questions. This verse appeals to all to jump on the bandwagon of praising the Japanese race, ultimately, for having the

Transculturation and typological intertextuality  63 longest reign. It asks, ironically to be sure, for even islanders (Taiwanese) to join in the celebration, which is most obvious at New Year’s as well as the emperor’s birthday and public events featuring the imperial family. It reflects the common colonial motif of the colonized taking the point of view of the colonizers and seeking other locals to join him—as other native forms of power-expression have been transmuted and usually attenuated by the Japanese ideological frame itself. Here the silent intertext is formed from the ironic flip side of the call to praise the emperor: why should islanders bother at all? Another haiku in this New Year’s column combines elements of both of the above 1917 examples and positions the Taiwanese poet, Li Zan-Sheng 李贊生, it would seem, as an honorary Japanese, even having the right to exhibit contempt for other Taiwanese: Let us congratulate the islanders receiving the year’s first sunlight めでたしや島人受ける初日かげ21 Medetashi ya shimabito ukeru shonichi-kage Of course, the poem can be read ironically so that the verse suggests sarcasm; the poem can be translated as “How splendid, the islanders receiving the year’s first sun.” But the idea here is that the Taiwanese are receiving the blessings of the imperial light by being colonized by Japan. Negative connotations of “kage” have been de-emphasized by the avoidance of the kanji and simple use of the hiragana. The poem shows how such imperial imagery was used by Taiwanese even before the subsequent rise of heightened militarism or the assimilation movement. In 1922, Su Qin-Xiang, the same poet who wrote of Taiwan being “rich in bamboo,” projects an image of peace: The first eastern breeze—the call of the dove celebrates peace 初東風や平和を祝ふ鳩の聲22 Hatsukochi ya heiwa o iwau hato no koe This haiku refers to the Four Power Treaty on Insular Possessions signed just two weeks earlier by the major powers with possessions in the Pacific. It called for working out problems that might arise between any two parties within the frame of the four: America, the British Empire, France, and Japan.23 In terms of converging intertexts, the poem can be read as reflecting the liberalism of the Taishō period and standing objectively as one celebrating the promise of peace, with the alternative—ongoing skirmishes common to this period of competing empires—being unwelcome. In 1923, New Year’s Day poetry pages began to be published in the Taiwan nichinichi shimbun in more or less full pages, a practice continuing until 1940, when only a half page appeared, after which they disappeared altogether (presumably because of rationing during the Pacific War).24 Other

64  Transculturation and typological intertextuality variations of note include the presence of commentary on tanka in some years, such as 1927 and 1934, though generally speaking it is sparse in the period treated. Only in the 1920s does one begin to find not only Japanese poets—mostly residents of Taiwan, sometimes with listed locations indicating cities in Japan (such as Osaka or Nagoya)—but also more than one or two Taiwanese poets appearing. Though they tended to play servant to the master, as we have already begun to see, readers can sometimes discern sarcasm and resistance, and in these moments one may trace the limits of the Japanese ideological influence in Taiwan as well as some tolerance for dissent. From 1932 to 1938, a full page (usually page 17 or 15) was dedicated to various forms of poetry, including tanka, senryū, haiku, and folk ditties. This stabilization of the New Year’s Day poetry page roughly coincides with the rise of Japanese militarism on the Asian continent and a growing interest in assimilating Taiwanese Chinese who Japanese feared might rebel in solidarity with the Chinese they were attacking. The sudden increase in the number of Taiwanese contributors likely reflects this shift in policy, which is first most obvious in the 1934 newspaper focusing on “the troubling times,” a euphemism recasting the Empire’s expansion in China as a defensive move (as if the Chinese they invaded had started the war by simply offering resistance). Still, as a literary debate between a Japanese and a Taiwanese poet suggests, Taiwanese were routinely looked down upon, however well their poetry be written.25 Sadly, this prejudice has recently been reiterated in a book of translations of colonial tanka into Chinese.26 Taiwanese interested in composing Japanese verse in these forms would need to learn to situate their poetic writing objectively, as the Japanese did: to write in terms of a body of topics and season words, to follow various genre-­specific conventions, and to demonstrate an overarching skill of accessing and synthesizing poems according to an implied matrix of associations: a poet must follow the conventional associations of certain phrases with certain emotional colorings. Japanese coming to Taiwan, at least in poetry, generally could not, due to its very structure, learn from Taiwanese; local knowledge gave way to the universalizing practice of this writing according to poetic diction and its modern reifications in contemporary uses of these classical forms. The authority of the modern, science-based discourses gave Japanese their reasoning for asserting the supremacy of their culture in toto in Asia at the time; but poetic discourse was just one of many public control mechanisms put into practice to serve the promulgation of their ethnocentric perspective, which itself was essential to attaining their material objectives: maintaining Taiwanese and aboriginals as a relatively uneducated underclass supplying cheap or forced labor. To know poetic forms and the associations and emotional responses associated with poetic words demonstrated one’s cultivation and status. Moreover, classical poetic imagery and language were (and remains) woven into many other forms of Japanese cultural production, including the theater, the visual arts, flower

Transculturation and typological intertextuality  65 arranging, advertising, film and animation, other literary forms, and even letter writing. A good example of this dynamic use of classical and contemporary intertexts is found in a late colonial period tanka by a Taiwanese poet, Liao Yu-Zhi (廖裕智), and the editor’s commentary on New Year’s Day in 1938, in the wake of the Nanjing Massacre: Flying high in the streets this morning the flag of a great nation prays for the New Year in the holy war 聖戦の春ことほぐ大国旗街空高く今朝は靡けり27 Seisen no haru kotohogu dai-kokki-gai sora takaku kesa wa nabikeri Here the flag prays for one, radiating objectifying relations according to which the poet exhibits a distant emotional understanding that inhibits criticism in the very tanka imbrication within its discourse-invoking matrix of associations that renders even the non-conventional parts of the tanka as unquestionable givens. Thus the Taiwanese poet here praises the “holy war” not only by praying through the symbols “flying high in the streets” of Nanjing, but by entering the intertextual matrices that naturalize and emotionally charge the language presented in the medium of poetry. It is framed through commentary by the editing judge, Yasunari Jirō (安成二郎), as follows: As a New Year’s Day poem this year, this one exhibits depth of consciousness. The meaning is clear so that anyone can understand it, the language full of vitality—conveying the spirit of a citizen victorious in war—and the music too is rich and majestic. Though I believe the author to be an islander, he grasps the essence of tanka well, and he has a good command of Japanese (Kokugo); there are no shortcomings. I am pleased to select this song for first place.28 Although here we have nothing but high praise—even though the poem be propagandistic and verging on doggerel—it seems the race barrier has been lowered in the interest of serving the higher purpose of fostering support for the war on China. Yet Ansei does mention matter-of-factly, reflecting commonsense likely to go unchallenged by any well-indoctrinated Japanese subject in this age of the Cardinal Principles of the National Polity (Kokutai no hongi, published the year before this poem): even “though an islander,” he still “grasps the essence of tanka well.” The judge praised the Taiwanese for the appropriate emotional demeanor as a citizen in the Japanese empire, which had just overrun Nanjing, yet the apparent compliment that a Taiwanese poet would understand “tanka well” is also a way of maintaining difference through the implied gradation (even though a Taiwanese), reminding readers of a recurrent motif of Taiwanese being represented as approaching but never able to reach a racially defined Japanese identity (as in Zeno’s Paradox of Achilles and the Tortoise).29

66  Transculturation and typological intertextuality This limited embrace of a Taiwanese poet situates his poem so as to maximize the appearance of an ethical high point agreed upon by all, while in fact carefully manipulating appearances. The object of the editor’s comments is to clearly assert the behavioral and emotional response model found in poetry—which in the end is dependent on group acceptance, not objective markers—as a benchmark for performing appropriately in “times of trouble” in society in general, to show respect for the Japanese plans and policy decisions, but also to understand the “natural” exclusion from equality as citizens and poets, as Taiwanese would always be racially not Japanese within Japanese discourses on race as a facet of national identity.30 As one can see beginning with this example, poetry exploited expanding matrices of conventional association ultimately grounded in classical associations but making possible the integration of contemporary elements into its method of relating words and ideologically disarming functions, such as accepting assigned roles—being an “islander,” not Chinese, but approaching while never becoming Japanese—and conventionalized supporting affective responses.

Japanese commentary on tanka by Taiwanese—The tendency toward exclusion The judge or editor for the 1927 New Year’s tanka is unnamed, yet he speaks about the selection and submissions of the current year being superior to those of the previous year, so we can assume he is the same person, Hirai Jirō (平井二郎). Interestingly, he notes that the one shortcoming this year is the lack of some familiar topics such as the first sun, Mt. Nītaka, the rising sun flag, and early spring. His remarks underscore a candid promotion of Japanese-centered propagandistic uses of poetry to redefine Taiwan in the renaming of places and introducing other Japanese items to make Taiwan seem more indelibly Japanese. Such remarks often serve to remind Japanese colonists of their duty to write nationalistic verse and to put pressure on Taiwanese to conform to their inevitable and eternal domination by Japanese (for another 18 years). His remarks on Japanese poets’ works on this day range from high praise to harsh pickiness, but he engages the poets with empathy, seeing through their eyes. Yet he reflects what would seem an overdetermined, standard view of a poet perceived to be a Taiwanese writing in Japanese, writing, “Mr. Pu’s poem is no more than a first step toward writing, and very run of the mill.”31 Taiwanese would seem to be accustomed to receiving a permanent, habitual hazing. Examining the object of this criticism, the poem below by Pu Fang-Lang (浦芳浪), we can see that there is indeed a reason for the editor to take offense and decline to engage this poem with more than offhand dismissal, as the substance of the verse radiates controversy: Repapering the sliding door, so relaxing to the spirit in the bright room it is really high noon!

Transculturation and typological intertextuality  67 張り替えし障子明るき部屋に居て心くづろぐ真昼なるかも32 Harikaeshi shōji akaruki heya ni ite kokoro kudurogu mahiru naru kamo He uses various key words vaguely associated with Japanese national identity (revering really anything Japanese), such as the “(Japanese) sliding door” (障子) or even a particular word for spirit or mind, “kokoro,” which is translated with “kudurogu” as “relaxing to the spirit” here. The ambivalence suggests Judith Butler’s observation in The Psychic Life of Power, how it is hard to tell whether such a poem is pure compliance or tinged with resistance and irony.33 The final suffix, kamo, suggests exaggeration in its exclamatory function, underscoring that the bright light that “relaxes” appears when the Japanese paper used on these Japanese sliding doors is removed, in the process of being repapered. Thus, one reading suggests that when the most Japanese feature of the room is removed, the room is wonderfully bright and pleasant to the spirit, marking a subversive ambivalence towards Japanese rule and things Japanese. Another reading would claim that the new white paper makes the room brighter by reflecting more light within the room. The word for “high noon,” literally “true noon” (真昼), suggests the truth for the poet is the revelation of doubts. The subtle implication is that the poet seems hesitant to continue the process of repapering the door and thus blocking the light, or would affirm that doubts are unjustified, that the Japanese paper is glorious. The anamorphic ambiguity allows colonists to be flattered as well as mildly subversive expression. The non-conventional affective soup, not surprisingly, miffed the editor. On the New Year’s Day poetry page of 1934, a tanka by Li Yu-Shu (李玉樹) of Shinchuang Street (新莊街) received third place and commentary by the editor, Ansei Jirō (安成二郎): Awakened, the first sun of the year shines on white clods of earth glittering in the rice fields おこされし稲田の白き土くれに初日は映えて輝き居るも Okosareshi inada no shiroki tsuchikure ni hatsuhi wa haete kagayaki iru mo This verse exhibits warmth and open-heartedness, clarity and harmony, and what is passed down through the ages in famous poems such as Shōha’s (召波, 1727–1771) “New Year’s Day—the grass from the barley fields push in the door” (元日や草の戸ごしの麦畑) is here somehow exhibited in the appearance of overflowing peacefulness, symbolizing a New Year’s Day atmosphere. What the author of this verse saw was indeed there, and the grasp of phenomenon in a southern country such as … the fields around the time of New Year’s Day is also well done.34 The verse is on first reading simple enough, offering a vision of light playing between the sun and clods of earth. If read as an optimistic expression of the joy of viewing the fields and the Japanese sun, the poem can be read as

68  Transculturation and typological intertextuality expressing thanks for being born and awakening within a Japanese cultural horizon. However, if one reads it as weaving in the ambivalence of a colonial subject, the awakening of the soil of Taiwan suggests that all the work of tilling the soil—developing Taiwan—is not in the name of the pale clods but in that of the awakeners, the Japanese, symbolized by the sun. “Awakening” can itself be a dangerous word, for it involves not only the first sunrise, but new knowledge, recognition, or unconscious thoughts surfacing. The editor, though full of praise, emphasizes that “what the author … saw was indeed there,” suggesting a naïve literalism that is quite exceptional for many poets working in this medium characterized by careful pastiche. In 1936, Ansei Jirō wrote about one of the most prolific Taiwanese tanka poets, Cheng Ling-chiu (鄭嶺秋) of Hsinchu (新竹), a member of the Aratama (あらたま) poetry circle who was awarded third place for the following poem: The path of my boat is toward the distant churning clouds— when you see them begin to glimmer, you know the sun has risen. 我が船の行手はるかに雲湧きて光ると見れば日の昇りきぬ35 Waga fune no yukute haruka ni kumo wakite hikaru to mireba hi no noborikinu Ansei added this comment: There is ‘movement’ in the third-place poem. Among all the motionless clouds, suns, and seas in the other poems, this one stands out, and thus I included it among the winning verses after touching it up just a bit. Since the fifth segment originally read ‘dyed a dark red,’ which is too ornate and suggests immaturity, I decided simply ‘the sun has risen’ would be better. This practice of a senior poet helping to rewrite is common and would be welcomed, especially from a poet as established as Ansei was in Taiwan.36 Still, the comments suggest not only smugness of a master who has thought of a perhaps better segment to replace another, but condescension in the label “immature” and the sense of charity in including it among the best at all, only after the master’s hand has blessed it. However, by replacing “dyed a dark red,” which suggests the imperial light of the sun leads to death and destruction, with the rising sun, the safety of ideological clichés replaces ambivalence. As revised, the poem tends to fold neatly within the accustomed horizon defined immanently by the typological intertextuality and matrices of association specific to his jouissance as a highly assimilated Taiwanese, effacing any traces of colonial doubt. Indeed, Cheng Ling-chiu was surely not likely subversive, as many of his verses suggest a state of being so happily subjected by the Japanese colony as to speak for them and as them. For instance, he wrote the following

Transculturation and typological intertextuality  69 senryū (川柳), the first one from a year before the above tanka, the second one from two years later: Yamamoto is in charge of swallowing the Pacific Ocean 山本は太平洋を吞んでかかり37 Yamamoto wa Taiheiyō wo nonde gakari Japan, Germany and Italy all hold hands at the New Year 日獨伊お手々つないてお正月38 Nichi-Doku-I o-tete tsunaite oshōgatsu Yamamoto Isoroku (山本五十六, 1884–1943) was then a Vice Admiral in the Japanese navy; while known to oppose ongoing Japanese aggression against China, he would later be one of the minds behind the preemptive strikes against America. Both verses embody and exemplify imperial jouissance in a Taiwanese subject, and both are rather self-explanatory in their allusion to the Axis alliance, and, though years before Pearl Harbor, the conquest of the Pacific.

Keeping the invasion of China within a Japanese perspective in Taiwan: “times of emergency” In 1934 “In times of emergency” (非常時) was the topic of many of the solicited poems and the theme of the poetry page itself. In the years to follow, during the militarization of Japan and strategic shift to an assimilation policy in Taiwan, the most politically contentious topics would continue to be introduced not only in poetry, but in incidental propagandistic feature articles both on “how to be Japanese” and on the virtues of patriotism and self-sacrifice in imperial wars. In 1934, the New Year’s Day poetry page included very short statements by writers appearing regularly in the newspaper on the topic of “in times of emergency,” further blurring the distinction between what is poetry and what is a propagandistic slogan or blurb. Thus the 1934 New Year’s Day poetry page demonstrates a turning point in the use of poetry to instill pro-Japanese, patriotic thoughts on topics; newspapers now would introduce the poetry under the grand topic already spreading throughout the empire: “in times of emergency,” with its sense of “extreme times” or “times of trouble” and implication of times when your country (or landed empire) needs you to cooperate to vanquish any external threat, however contrived it may be. Even in Taiwan, the corporate and national-imperialist presence in the newspapers dominated, framing the world entirely from the point of view of capitalists securing markets, advertising, bellicose militarism, and boastful pride in Japanese cultural production—all topics introduced in many feature articles throughout the colonial period; in the 1930s such articles become more heavy-handed. The irony of such oppressive cultural imperialism in poetry is that it undercuts the aesthetic expectation of it serving

70  Transculturation and typological intertextuality as a reflection of heartfelt sentiment (or the disclosure of truth); rather, it capitulates to service as state propaganda. These most political poems still rely on a nexus of variations in implied series of topics and typology—­ derived ultimately from variations on topics in classical poetry—­and the practices of sustaining its concomitant poetics of allusion and the resulting dynamic poetic matrix of associations specific to a time and place. Ideological positions could thus at least suggest claims of being naturalized through the matrix of conventional associations accessed in an intertextual continuum with other poems and the implicit (or explicit, when handbooks are available) common sense, not allusions to specific works but to many works which have made certain images, phrases, words, and even places call up certain emotional responses and associations within a conventionalized mode. For the “times of emergency” New Year’s poetry page, there were many issues raised in titled introductory statements by writers working for the newspaper. Each presented a short testimonial of the importance of submissive cooperation with the authorities, often by building up fears of worstcase scenarios in readers. The first blurb is by Katō Tatsuo 加藤武雄, titled “[Toward] National Security,” and is very short and to the point, as if to be sure readers who do not understand poetry (as it is at the top of the poetry page) at least understand that the nation is to be more important than the self or family: “Believing it is not a time to show deep concern for matters of oneself or family, I earnestly pray for national security.” It frames cooperation with Japanese authorities within a spectrum of self-effacing imposed choices: not only must one care about national security, but one must also display self-sacrifice, and even put the state ahead of the family. The next entry is by Nagata Mikihiko長田幹彥, a novelist who had published in Tokyo Saikaku’s Talks on Love 西鶴情話 in 1922 and serialized Black Tower 黑い塔 in the Taiwan nichinichi shimbun between June 15, 1924 and January 2, 1925. He wrote more verbosely: Given the current situation in the country, though we have overcome countless hardships in our settlement, we still must persevere so as to achieve a revival of the good Japanese spirit, a new vitality instilled in the new Japan and which can serve as a fountainhead of vitality providing a deep-rooted groundwork. These are my heartfelt wishes. The mixed metaphors are left intact in the translation to show how this novelist gave into clichés in this piece, titled “Cooperation for a Revival of the Japanese Spirit.” The other statements represent a wide range of perspectives on “times of emergency,” suggesting that the topic itself—even in being satirized and regarded as rather idiotic by some of the writers— sets an agenda or base paradigm by which to frame contemporary Japan and Taiwan. For instance, one is titled “Anxieties over Sensing No Times of Trouble” while another is serious, called “Grasping the Japanese Spirit,” and

Transculturation and typological intertextuality  71 begins: “I believe the first thing we must do is to again realize the supreme position of our national polity in the world.”39 These blurbs and poems provide an ideological snapshot of a spectrum of positions, reflecting some degree of tolerance by censors for satire, while in merely conforming to the theme centering on support for a crisis mentality necessary to an empire bent on expansion, the theme itself became functional, forming an indelible frame and setting the tone for the period, arguably the remaining years of Japanese rule and beyond (in Japan). Among both Taiwanese and Japanese poets, some took the propaganda more seriously, some half-heartedly, and some as an object of which to make light, as there are slips, ambiguities, and subversive suggestions. But taken together, such poets all openly or tacitly supported the imperial jouissance of the period: the sense of being framed by the anxieties of living within an Empire engaged in further imperial aggression against fellow Chinese. The following haiku by the prolific Taiwanese poet Wu A-Quan 吳阿泉 reflects both his degree of acceptance of Japanese colonial rule and his sense of place within a perceived hierarchy of development: from aboriginal “barbarian children” to Chinese residents, to the Japanese ruling race in Taiwan: This New Year’s morning savage children dress up in Japanese clothes 蕃童の和服姿や今朝の春40 Bandō no wafuku sugata ya kesa no haru The verse celebrates the integration of the least likely to be integrated. Of course the verse itself, being ironic, can be read as satirizing this “integration for a day,” especially given one of the other haiku he wrote for this year’s New Year’s Day poetry page: Playing badminton, they became Nippo-Taiwanese-Savages! 羽子ついて內臺蕃となかりけり41 Hago tsuite Nai-Tai-Ban to nakarikeri This verse echoes others which used badminton as a class-leveling device. We learn from this ironic verse how strong the divisions were, especially when these two examples are situated in light of Badiou’s naming of multiples (assemblages)—selected existents which implicate degrees of a negation of the inexistents, here the race-based exclusion of Han and indigenous Taiwanese as inferior to Japanese. “Nippo-Taiwanese-Savages” (Nai-­TaiBan) both fuses the three primary groups (if taking the various tribes as one group) and lays bare the hierarchy, beginning with Japanese. As Faye Yuan Kleeman points out, Japanese would depict aborigines in fiction, songs and films as “primitive and the mission of Japanese colonialism to civilize and ultimately assimilate these ‘savages’.”42

72  Transculturation and typological intertextuality “Lakeshore cranes” and “the Pacific Ocean” Though less conspicuously than the “emergency” topic in 1934, the 1935 New Year’s Day edition of the Taiwan nichinichi shimbun carried two topics: “lakeshore cranes” and “the Pacific Ocean.” The cranes are symbolic of Japan and the ocean is presented as captive to Japan’s imperial ambitions. The Pacific is a place in the imperial imagination, an arena where competition with other empires awaits and the rays of the rising sun radiate. The 1935 page included large quantities of tanka, folk ditties (riyō 俚謡), haiku, and senryū, in that order from top to bottom of the page. Each genre is presented with eight or so in larger type, and many more following in smaller type. The tanka are presented with the fullest treatment, with the top three poems of their contest given paragraph-length elucidations. At first glance, they would seem to be across all genres echoing propaganda in support of not only Japan, but the platitudes which derive from Japanese poetry, especially from the Man’yōshū, associated with a martial tradition of masculine verse (typically appropriated by rightwing nationalists). Japanese tanka and haiku poets must conform to emerging conventional nationalist associations, which form a contemporary political subset apart from or a skewed version of the broader matrix of the classical poetic lexicon. Taiwanese had to engage in this training as well and situate themselves politically. In contrast, poets writing senryū on current events ( jiji senryū 時事川柳), composed to reflect contemporary history, are laxer with respect to the proper diction, being less dependent on conventional intertexts and associations. On the contrary, they often only make sense in context and can more readily be used to gauge Taiwanese responses to contemporary events, as in the following senryū by Wu Kun-Cheng 呉坤成 of Tu-Ku 土庫: The world unanimously points its cannons to the Pacific Ocean 太平洋へ世界こぞって砲を向け43 Taiheiyō e sekai kozotte hō o muke This senryū suggests an outsider’s perspective, distancing the poet from the impending madness of war, or, as a cynical description of the reason for going to war: everyone is doing it. Jiang Xia-Hong 江夏紅 of Taipei wrote two senryū also on the topic of the Pacific Ocean: The Pacific is too far away to enter into the fray 遠すぎて喧嘩にならぬ太平洋 Tōsugite kenka ni naranu Taiheiyō These days, enemy waves also rise from the Pacific 此の頃は仇波も立つ太平洋44 Kono koro wa adanami mo tatsu Taiheiyō The first senryū personifies a distant and diffident “pacific” ocean, suggesting pacifism, while his second verse satirizes the paranoid projection of

Transculturation and typological intertextuality  73 enemies even in the ocean waves, again resisting the warmongering propaganda of the day. Yet as one of many examples of military-themed poems on the page this year, it still conforms to the frame of the set topic.45 Among the tanka by Taiwanese in 1935’s New Year’s poems, Wu A-Quan wrote: The snow clears over the deep sea of the Pacific, the first sunrise burning violently 雪霽るる太平洋の海原をはげしく燃やす初日の出かな46 Yuki haruru Taiheiyō no unabara o hageshiku moyasu hatsuhinode ka na This poem presents the first sunrise as the rise of Japan, the initiation of an unstoppable transformation, suggested in the martial “burning violently” to be a dare to ignite war against American and European competitors for colonial control of the Pacific. Though one may wonder how a member of the colonized could have to this degree absorbed the symbolic register of the ruling master, the conventional poetic imagery itself provides a clue, as it objectifies, constructs, and displays a scene out of a pastiche of expressions made possible through the neo-classical language. Similarly, the following tanka by Ding You-Shan 丁酉山 of Lu Gang is written on the other topic this year, “lakeshore cranes,” once again exemplifying a variation on the use of this matrix in subjectification: The morning sun shining, cranes walk quietly along the lake—spring in a southern land 朝日さす池のほとりを靜かにも鶴步み居り南國の春47 Asahi sasu chi no hotori o shizuka ni mo tsuru ayumi ori nankoku no haru What is striking about this verse is that the Taiwanese poet represents Taiwan from a Japanese point of view, as a variation of the Japanese norm: spring elsewhere, “in a southern land,” as if the poet were a Japanese tourist. The use of standard poetic expressions can make almost any enunciation seem natural. The poet embraces, in the “ironic compromise” of mimicry, the poetic matrix as a marker of partial poetic competence for a Taiwanese and a partial presence, in Bhabha’s sense. The fall of Nanjing in newspaper poetry After the fall of Nanjing to Japanese troops on December 13, 1937, as is now well know and documented, the Nanjing Massacre (南京大屠殺) saw the murder of hundreds of thousands of people and rape of tens of thousands of women in a modern experiment in “shock and awe.”48 Putting aside questions of how much poets in Taiwan knew about the massacre following the invasion, we can still assess the affective framing used in such writing. New Year Day 1938, being contemporaneous with the Massacre, by no

74  Transculturation and typological intertextuality coincidence included many senryū, folk ditties, and tanka of related interest on the poetry page. Especially standing out in the senryū column edited by Datun Bou (大屯坊) are verses such as the following, awarded first place, by Jasmine 茉莉花 (a pen name which could indicate Japanese or Taiwanese) of Rueifang (瑞芳): Drunk on a big victory is like a million cups of New Year’s saké. 大捷に一億万の屠蘇の酸ひ49 Taishō ni ichi-oku man no toso no suhi Here “big victory” (大捷) is short for “big victory in Nanjing” (南京大徒). While the first place senryū focuses on a sense of reveling in victory, the following verse, placing second, suggests dutiful actions modeling proper responses to the Japanese invasion of China. It is attributed to a Taiwanese, Feng Xinbo (馮欣伯) of the Tenth Mountaintop in Fengshan County (鳳山 郡山十頂): Also for the boy on the battlefield a cup of New Year’s saké is set aside 屠蘇の杯戦地の子にも一つ置き50 Toso no hata senchi no ko ni mo hitotsuoki The sentiment of concern for a soldier is used to ensure support for the Japanese imperialist war against China. Whether ghost-written or actually written by a Taiwanese with a son in China, the intention in placing this so visibly, as the second-place senryū, is to create the appearance of Taiwanese support for Japanese exploits—even when Taiwanese are pitted by Japanese against other Chinese “on the battlefield.” Following Wan-Yao Chou, who argues that the imperialization (kōminka 皇民化) movement itself was “a wartime product,”51 the phrases reflecting the cultural matrix of poetic associations (“a cup of New Year’s sake … set aside”) give the appearance of what the Japanese planners sought: compliance with military support and conscription. The same column includes a senryū under the pen name of Saraie Kinoko (更家紀の子) of Reifang, who likely is Japanese but may be Taiwanese, and is of interest in either case: The sounds of explosions are the seeds of security this spring on the island. 爆音も安心の種子島の春52 Bakuon mo anshin no tanegashima no haru It mixes the seasonal matrix with the contemporary imperialist military context, so as to make bombing itself part of a seasonal and agricultural cycle. The distant war on China is presented as the cause of the comfortable

Transculturation and typological intertextuality  75 turning of seasons and of putting food on the table in Taiwan. It can be interpreted as a variation of the imperialist-capitalist dictum of betterment at the expense of others: “we Japanese are bombing China to better our lives in Taiwan.” The third-place senryū of New Year’s Day 1938, by an apparently Taiwanese poet named Sohō (素芳)53 of Taipei, reads: Even pine decorations are stood up to face the flag of the rising sun on the Nanjing Wall 南京城日の丸に松も立ててあり54 Nankin-jō hinomaru ni matsu mo tatete ari This verse displays the inherent arrogant humor in naming anything as performing an imagined fantasy: here of controlling a city through “shock and awe” violence with the intention of bringing all of China to its knees as subordinates to the Japanese. Pine, in the New Year, is a season word indicating cut pine decorations (kadomatsu 門松) which are placed on both sides of a gate at New Years, with the flag inserted in the middle of any enframement over the gate or nearby. The pines are also, in traditional poetic diction, a conventional pivot-word (kakekotoba 掛け詞) for “waiting/pining” in love scenes, but here they are used chauvinistically to assert the superiority of both the Japanese flag and culture. Also echoed in the diction is the phallic connotations of “are stood” (立ててあり), which suggests sexual excitement by the pines—if not all of Nanjing—for the flag, as if the poet imagined pine cuttings standing vertically rather than hanging flaccid and made a joke about it. The pine decorations thus take on an eerie presence in this poem, reflecting both the arrogance embodied even by a Taiwanese and the unmentionable transgressions of the violence. Here the poetic image of “pine decorations” within their associative matrix marks a relative degree of transcendence and control of appearance and representation in Badiou’s sense, presenting the image of actual embodiment of not only the poet but the Chinese and Japanese alike in Nanjing partaking of the ideologically charged practice of placing pine decorations at their gate—a sign of mimicry, a degree of capitulation—but in this poem, as if it were an action celebrating liberation. The innocent custom becomes a sign of the looming fear or complicit vision of Chinese culture being eclipsed by the Japanese— something the poet would know firsthand (whether Japanese or Taiwanese). Wu Yuan-Chun 吳淵春 of Taipei situates Taiwan’s stake in the ongoing battles and victories in China as follows: Overwhelmed by the hurrahs of victory the year begins in the new gem (of Taiwan) promising a fine tomorrow かちときの聲もよじりて新玉の年たつあしたことにめでたし55 Kachidoki no koe mo yojirite shintama no toshi tatsu ashita kotoni medetashi

76  Transculturation and typological intertextuality It should be mentioned that aratama (new gem) is by this time a conventional poetic epithet (makurakotoba) modifying year here, as well as a season word for the New Year. The mention of aratama is simultaneously homophonous for the name of a leading tanka association in Taiwan and a metaphorical name for Taiwan used especially during the early years of the Japanese occupation and often written with the character for rough instead of new, suggesting undeveloped rather than modern, respectively. As written here, the new gem implies that Taiwan has been improved by the Japanese occupation. But the poem is not that simple. In it, while the surface claims an auspicious future foretold by the cheers of victory, the Taiwanese poet also reveals ambivalence, as the cheers, according to the context, are for the conquest of the Chinese capital. The argument that Taiwanese should support Japan because it promises a “fine tomorrow” is not only because of military momentum but because of the economic improvement of Taiwan; in using “new gem” the poet implies in the context of Taiwan not “old/rough gem,” and thus essentially shifts the vectors of reference and causal chain of clauses from victory over China being good for Taiwan to improvement of Taiwan is good for Taiwan. This difference implies that Taiwanese merely tolerated the Japanese and their egalitarianism, and used them as agents of modernization rather than simply being used by them. Moreover, combining these two implications, the poem can be read as a back-handed threat used to justify the unthinkable: not to cooperate with Japan in the war effort, which would be, in this fiction, bad for Taiwan’s development. In short, the poet displays capitulation to an early form of globalization, whereby perceived economic benefits trump ethical concerns. While appearing to be merely descriptive, the following tanka by Chen Mu-Cun (Kimura) 陳木村 of Suao 蘇澳, a Taiwanese, conveys ideological investments by way of material conditions and practices linked to sensuous affects: How nice the sound of walking in the gravel carefree in new shoes to gather my New Years cards 砂利ふめば鳴る音のよし新しき靴輕々と年賀に行くと56 Jari fumeba naru oto no yoshi atarashiki kutsu karugaru to nenga ni iku to Here the pleasure stems partially from self-conscious participation in Japanese-­style New Year’s practices. The sound of walking in the gravel creates a rhythm depicting the jouissance of having a body with Japanese organs (seamless social compliance). The shoes are walked in a carefree manner, pairing the material joy of new shoes—wearing new clothing being a distinctly Chinese custom for New Year’s Day in the lunar calendar—with the joy in receiving New Year’s postcards, a custom associated with assimilating to common Japanese practices.57 Of course, even Japanese can never be Japanese enough, and the pronouncement of joy taken in this custom is

Transculturation and typological intertextuality  77 measured hyperbole, compromise with Chinese customs. The poem begs the question: when would the embodiment of Japanese practices render the Taiwanese a full presence with social parity? It would seem from this verse that the poet enjoyed a mix of cultures in a milieu of colonial hybridity and difference, leaving no answer or resolution. The poem seems to reflect both an appreciation of refreshing new cultural practices subtle forms of humiliation and forced compliance, so that receiving one’s New Year’s cards itself loses its innocence.

Conclusion Focusing on poetry in the newspaper provides a means of examining colonial mimicry so as to render visible the complex affective position of Taiwanese writing Japanese poetry during the period of colonial rule. One can see in retrospect how New Year’s Day poetry pages served to present Taiwanese as appearing to think within established parameters of the poetic language—the transcendental or virtual norms of expression which naturalized colonial rule and the violence of imperial expansion abroad—and perform as subjects following the jouissance of being Japanese and engaging in various practices and customs. Initially writing poetry meant using poetic diction and following basic formal seasonal requirements, but more advanced Taiwanese poets, like Japanese, would learn the emotional and situational tenor of phrases within a poem pastiche. Following pressure of the Imperial Subject movement initiated as the war on China heated up, Japan’s colonial aims shifted toward assimilation and more inclusive indoctrination, which was itself designed to build stability and support for Japanese military adventures on the continent and elsewhere. Some Taiwanese poets not only reveled in Japanese nationalism, but even joined Japanese in belittling Chinese who were being invaded by Japanese. This can be understood within the poetic discursive frame which metonymically but systematically isolates subjects within the distancing and alienating poetic mechanisms of imperial discourse. The categories and acts of naming seem to propagate a desire to “mimic” not only writing practices, but many other practices associated with a Japanese lifestyle. In other words, the Taiwanese poets studied here demonstrate how colonial subjects do not position themselves necessarily only for direct personal gain or pleasure, but rather adapt the prosthesis of the poetic language and categories as virtual matrices by which to situate their public articulations, and to transform themselves into subjected beings, though simultaneously also often expressing various degrees of ambivalence if not subversive satire and resistance. The very contestation of the possibility of writing Japanese poetry in colonial Taiwan became, as demonstrated above, an opportunity for intermeshing Taiwanese observable and conventional phenomenon with colonial economic and political requirements.

78  Transculturation and typological intertextuality

Notes 1 For a more detailed overview of use of media to maintain desired appearances and affective responses in this period, focusing on the example of how Taiwanese women were encouraged to conform to colonial and imperial policies through representations of women in the same newspaper, see Dean Brink, “Pygmalion Colonialism: How to Become a Japanese Woman in Late Occupied Taiwan,” The Sungkyun Journal of East Asian Studies 12, no. 1 (2012): 41–63. 2 See Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), 86, 89, 90. 3 See Roy Andrew Miller, Japan’s Modern Myth (New York: Weatherhill, 1982), esp. 127–64. 4 The impact of this race-based thinking should not be underestimated in the period of this study. In 1907 a Taiwan-based poet and a poetry editor for the Taiwan nichinichi shimbun made this a subject of a long essay. See Akitaka Uno (宇野秋皋), Shuzenreikō 酒前醴後 (“First Wine, Then Sweet Wine”), Taiwan nichinichi shimbun (Taiwan Daily News) (Taipei, National Library), January 1, 1907, 19, which is discussed in detail in this chapter above. 5 One must note how even Japanese liberals could not lean as comfortably in colonial Taiwan on a putative universal status, as Western colonies could by way of their civilizing claims under a Christian universalizing frame. Japanese had, in establishing a modern national and imperial ideology in the early and mid Meiji period, model the basis of universal sovereignty resting in a racially specific (not universal) emperor and state Shinto reified on the Christian model so as to unify Japan, which had been a conglomerate of discrete domains ruled by bonds of loyalty, not universal ideals. The emperor, like a Christian god, was constructed in the modern period to meet the immediate goal of unifying Japan; leaders apparently had no idea that the Japanese empire would indeed expand—not only in rhetoric, but in actual global territories—causing a contradiction: Taiwan would eventually on the whole embrace Japanese rule as an agent of modernization and yet maintain classic colonial ambivalence toward Japanese cultural production, as can be seen in these poems. Yet as George Kerr points out, if an educated Taiwanese youth wanted to experience a greater sense of equality among Japanese he or she had to go to Japan, where a modern liberal society existed; ironically, Taiwanese would always be structurally rendered part of an underclass in Taiwan itself. See George H. Kerr, Formosa: Licensed Revolution and the Home Rule Movement 1895–1945 (Honolulu: The University Press of Hawaii, 1974), 180–86. In poetry, the discourse on the spirit of words (kotodama) explicitly linked poetry to the race and race-centered emperor system (see Miller, Japan’s Modern Myth). 6 Dean Brink, “Japanese Imperialism and Poetic Matrices: Conventional Projections of Nature and Labor in Early Colonial Taiwan,” Archív Orientální 79, no. 3 (2011): 339. 7 See Faye Yuan Kleeman, Under an Imperial Sun: Japanese Colonial Literature of Taiwan and the South (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2003), 119. 8 I follow Renate Eigenrod’s use this term, following Said and Gramsci, in Renate Eigenbrod, Travelling Knowledges: Positioning the Im/migrant Reader of Aboriginal Literatures in Canada (Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 2005), 44. 9 Bhabha, Location, 140. 10 Tadao Yanaihara, Teikokushugi-ka no Taiwan (Taiwan Under Imperialism) (Tokyo: Iwanami, 1929), 140–41, 149–50, 117. 11 Said writes, “Most readings rightly call attention to Conrad’s skepticism about the colonial enterprise, but they rarely remark that in telling the story of his African journey Marlow repeats and confirms Kurtz’s action: restoring Africa to European hegemony by historicizing and narrating its strangeness.” See Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993), 164.

Transculturation and typological intertextuality  79 12 The importance of the emperor to tanka writing is evident in the annual “New Year’s Tanka Gathering” (utakaihajime 歌会始) which has been an official court rite since 1869, taking place sometime in January. In correspondence with this ritual which brought the emperor closer to his subjects each year in this way, it is not inconceivable that poetry written for the Taiwan nichinichi shimbun New Year’s Day poetry page columns took on an imperial tenor. Yet the specific poems suggest that it was merely one more part of a larger overdetermined ideological apparatus designed to insure cooperation with the Empire, and, most importantly, the capitalist entrepreneurs behind it. See Mitsuko Uchino, Tanka to Tennōsei (Nagoya: Fūbaisha, 1988). 13 Ania Loomba, Colonialism/Postcolonialism (New York: Routledge, 2005), 62. 14 Taiwan nichinichi shinpō/Taiwan riri xinbao (Taiwan Daily News) (Taipei City: Hanzhen Digital, 2005), January 1, 1917, 59. When pages were unclear or missing, the following microfilm edition was also extremely helpful: Taiwan nichinichi shinpun/Taiwan riri xinbao (Taiwan Daily News), National Central Library, Taiwan Branch Reproduction; filmed by Wang Ai-Zhu and Cai ZhongQing (Taipei City: National Central Library, Taiwan Branch, 1991). 15 See Slavoj Žižek, The Metastases of Enjoyment: Six Essays on Women and Causality (London New York: Verso, 2005), 31. He also writes here: “The trauma is the Cause which perturbs the smooth engine of symbolization and throws it off balance; it gives rise to an indelible inconsistency in the symbolic field; but for all that, the trauma has no existence of its own prior to symbolization; it remains an anamorphic entity that gains its consistency only in retrospect, viewed from within the symbolic horizon—it acquires its consistency from the structural necessity of the inconsistency of the symbolic filed.” 16 Linda Hutcheon, Irony’s Edge: The Theory and Politics of Irony (London: Routledge, 1994), 28. 17 Taiwan nichinichi shimbun, January 1, 1917, 59. 18 Hiroaki Yokoyama, Chūka shisō to gendai chūgoku (Chinese thought and contemporary China) (Tōkyō: Shūeisha, 2002). 19 Takeshi Komagome and J. A. Mangan, “Japanese Colonial Education in Taiwan 1895–1919; Precepts and Practices of Control,” History of Education 26, no. 3 (1997): 307–22. 20 For further elaboration of this issue, see the section “The nativist legacy in imperialist poetry” in Dean Brink, “Nativist Legacies of Desinicization and Nationalist Sentiment in Poetry During the Second Sino-Japanese War,” Inter-­ Asia Cultural Studies 12, no. 1 (2011): 52–56. 21 Taiwan nichinichi shimbun, January 1, 1917, 59. 22 Taiwan nichinichi shimbun, January 1, 1922, 51. 23 “Foreign Relations of the United States: Treaty Between the United States of America, the British Empire, France, and Japan, Signed at Washington December 13, 1921,” The Avalon Project (New Haven: Lillian Goldman Law Library, 2008 [1938]), accessed October 7, 2010, http://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_ century/tr1921.asp. 24 One year, 1932, contains a third less poetry than usual, as the page included a long article. 25 One attack on the prolific and talented Taiwanese poet Wu A-Quan (吳阿泉), who regularly appeared in the Taiwan nichinichi shimbun, took place in the pages of Taiwan Education (台灣教育 Taiwan kyōiku. It can be seen as a case of apparent discriminatory treatment by a Taiwan-based Japanese critic, Agawa Enjō, and subsequently published rebuttals and exchanges between him and Wu A-Quan. Agawa arrogantly dubbed Wu A-Quan “good” but “merely skilful,” “nothing more,” then adding: “Haiku are not simply a matter of wordplay,” implying an insult, given the common distinction in traditional Japanese poetics between verses merely playing with words and those which are more refined and “have the spirit”

80  Transculturation and typological intertextuality (yūshin), that is, those reflecting the standards of whatever select group of poets is exerting hegemony over poetic taste. He cites one haiku, dismissing it as “certainly not a proper haiku,” but reveals in the attack itself—as perhaps anyone who goes out of their way to belittle another—a sense of being threatened by Wu A-Quan’s witty and colorful poems. See Agawa Enjō, “Taiwan haidan tanpyō” (Notes on the haiku world in Taiwan), Taiwan kyōiku 385, August 1 (1934): esp. 109–10. Wu A-Quan responded by defending the poem that was attacked and sharing others, saying that, unlike Agawa, his own life does not revolve around haiku, and that he merely can jot down poetry in various forms “in his diary when he has a chance between work, reading books, travelling, and the like.” He suggests that too much concern over aesthetic issues strays from the meaning of writing poetry. The mention of “work” can be read as a jab against the Japanese, who had advantages in education and official language competency, as well as making rules to keep Taiwanese second-class to them. See A-Quan Wu, “Agawa Enjō-shi ni atau” (Responding to Agawa Enjō) Taiwan kyōiku 394, n.d., 73. 26 This prejudice continues even today, in fact, and has been promoted in a work co-produced by one of Taiwan’s more prominent poets, Chen Li (陳黎), working with a Japanese researcher, Ueda Tetsuji (上田哲二), whose afterword presents the poems he holds in high esteem as having naturally been produced only by Japanese. In this volume of translations they almost completely ignore Taiwanese poets participating in these poetry circles as well as others in this period; indeed, Cheng Ling-chiu (鄭嶺秋), who appears in this chapter repeatedly, is even mentioned in the afterword of the book as a member, though none of his poems are included. Not only are Taiwanese excluded, but the title of the volume implies a representation of the form as written in Taiwan during the occupation—­Taiwan’s Four Seasons: Tanka Selection from Taiwan during the Period of Japanese Rule (台灣四季:日據時期台灣短歌選), and Ueda’s afterword uncannily repeats the imperialist rhetoric of Japanese poets of the 1920s and 1930s, asserting the difference between the way Japanese colonists and Taiwanese write, and omitting the latter as inferior, only representing the Japanese point of view, and glorifying it as naturally superior. See Chen Li and Ueda Tetsuji, Taiwan siji: Ri ju shiqi Taiwan duange xuan (Taiwan’s Four Seasons: Tanka Selection from Taiwan during the Period of Japanese Rule) (Taipei City: Eryu Wenhua Press, 2008), 197. It would seem from this brief view of the Japanese aestheticization of Taiwan today, that the real work that went into producing poetry during the occupation—the exclusion and line-drawing—is indeed forgotten, while the line itself continues to provide pleasure for the Japanese visitor, and at least one local host today. 27 What is translated here as “New Year” is literally “spring,” and the word for “pray” is kotohogu, an archaic word suggesting Shinto rites and the language of the Kojiki and Man’yōshū. Taiwan nichinichi shimbun, January 1, 1938, 15. 28 Taiwan nichinichi shimbun, January 1, 1938, 15. 29 See Slavoj Žižek, Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), 4. For a fascinating debate on colonial difference and “Taiwan consciousness,” see Kleeman, Under an Imperial Sun, esp. 79ff. 30 Pei-feng Chen, who traces in great detail the various Japanese governor-­generals’ stances toward assimilation over the course of Japanese rule, argues that only in the last decade of rule, when wars on multiple fronts demanded certainty of Taiwanese loyalty and cooperation with the Japanese military and corporate interests, did officials even accept aggressive assimilation measures so as to in effect revise theories on the Japanese polity (kokutai-ron) to include non-­ Japanese in Taiwan, a part of the Empire. But Chen suggests that the Japanese moves from a racial ideology to a more universal, cosmopolitanism are merely made to compensate for the fundamental rupture in the polity theory caused by the very colonization of foreign races itself. See Pei-feng Chen, “Tonghua”

Transculturation and typological intertextuality  81 no tongchuangyimeng: Rizhi shiqi Taiwan de yuyan zhengce, jindaihua yu rentong (The different intentions behind the semblance of “Dōka”: The language policy, modernization and identity in Taiwan during the Japan-ruling period) (Taipei City: Maitian, 2006), 459–69. 31 Taiwan nichinichi shimbun, January 1, 1927, 39. 32 Ibid. 33 Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 1–18. 34 Taiwan nichinichi shimbun, January 1, 1934, 17. 35 Taiwan nichinichi shimbun, January 1, 1936, 15. 36 I learned of this common practice in the senryū group I attended in Seattle, and learned to appreciate the help, even when the entire poem would be recast into what to me seemed utter clichés. It is this extreme intertextual reliance that defines this mode of writing which takes on a collective character with conventional associations that are appropriate to the occasion. 37 Taiwan nichinichi shimbun, January 1, 1935, 17. 38 Taiwan nichinichi shimbun, January 1, 1938, 15. 39 Taiwan nichinichi shimbun, January 1, 1934, 17. 40 Ibid. 41 Ibid. 42 Kleeman, Under an Imperial Sun, 11. Moreover, Kleeman introduces the common distinction and naming, between “‘untamed barbarians’ (literally raw, uncooked barbarians, seiban 生蕃) and ‘tamed barbarians’ (literally ripe, cooked barbarians, jukuhan 熟蕃) in accordance with the degree of their civilization.” See 20. 43 Taiwan nichinichi shimbun, January 1, 1935, 17. 44 Ibid. 45 The military themes abound in poems by Japanese too, including the first prize in senryû, which went to Kajiyama Masao 梶山正男 (of Changhua 彰化) who wrote: “The Pacific Ocean becomes a wrestling ring for black and blue eyes太平洋黒眼碧 眼の土俵なり” and Taipei’s Yuki Yama 雪山, who with braggadocio writes: “Make the Pacific Ocean a pool for Japanese use 太平洋日本用のプールにし.” Keelung’s Ichi Ryō 一喨 writes: “The name changes from Pacific Ocean to Retreating America Ocean 太平洋退米洋と名が変わり,” which sounds better in Japanese, where Taiheiyō and Taibeiyō rhyme humorously. See Taiwan nichinichi shimbun, January 1, 1935, 17. 46 Taiwan nichinichi shimbun, January 1, 1935, 17. 47 Ibid. 48 See Herbert P. Bix, “From Nanjing 1937 to Fallujah 2004: War Crimes in Perspective,” The Asia-Pacific Journal Vol. 2, issue 5, no. 2, last modified May 1, 2004, http://apjjf.org/-Herbert-P.-Bix/1854/article.html. 49 Taiwan nichinichi shimbun, January 1, 1938, 15. 50 Ibid. 51 See Wan-yao Chou, “The Kominka Movement: Taiwan under Wartime Japan, 1937–1945” (Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 1991). 52 Taiwan nichinichi shimbun, January 1, 1938, 15. 53 Sohō seems to have been Japanese as a haiku in another column on the same page is attributed to a Hirokawa Sohō (広川 素芳) also of Taipei. 54 Taiwan nichinichi shimbun, January 1, 1938, 15. 55 Ibid. 56 Ibid. 57 An even clearer example of this embodiment of the desiring mode of the Japanese other is found in a tanka by Wang Bi-Jiao王碧蕉of Beimen: “Born and raised in this land/I am simply thankful for the joy of placing the pine decoration on the gate この國に生き來てここに門松を立つよろこびよただ有難し,” Taiwan nichinichi shimbun, January 1, 1940, 13.

82  Transculturation and typological intertextuality

Bibliography Ball, Jared A. I Mix What I Like!: A Mixtape Manifesto. Oakland: AK Press, 2011. Bhabha, Homi. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 1994. Bix, Herbert P. “From Nanjing 1937 to Fallujah 2004: War Crimes in Perspective.” The Asia-Pacific Journal Vol. 2, issue 5, no. 2. Last modified May 1, 2004. http:// apjjf.org/-Herbert-P.-Bix/1854/article.html. Brink, Dean. “Japanese Imperialism and Poetic Matrices: Conventional Projections of Nature and Labor in Early Colonial Taiwan.” Archív Orientální 79, no. 3 (2011): 331–355. ———. “Nativist Legacies of Desinicization and Nationalist Sentiment in Poetry During the Second Sino-Japanese War.” Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 12, no. 1 (2011): 43–61. ———. “Pygmalion Colonialism: How to Become a Japanese Woman in Late Occupied Taiwan.” The Sungkyun Journal of East Asian Studies 12, no. 1 (2012): 41–63. Chen, Pei-feng. ‘Tonghua’ no tongchuangyimeng: Rizhi shiqi Taiwan de yuyan zhengce, jindaihua yu rentong (The different intentions behind the semblance of “Dōka”: The language policy, modernization and identity in Taiwan during the Japan-­ruling period). Taipei City: Maitian, 2006. Chou, Wan-yao. The Kominka Movement: Taiwan under Wartime Japan, 1937–1945. PhD. diss., Yale University, 1991. Eigenbrod, Renate. Travelling Knowledges: Positioning the Im/migrant Reader of Aboriginal Literatures in Canada. Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 2005. Enjō, Agawa. “Taiwan haidan tanpyō” (Notes on the haiku world in Taiwan), Taiwan kyōiku 385, August 1 (1934). “Foreign Relations of the United States: Treaty Between the United States of America, the British Empire, France, and Japan, Signed at Washington December 13, 1921.” The Avalon Project. New Haven: Lillian Goldman Law Library, 2008 [1938]. Accessed October 7, 2010. http://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_ century/tr1921.asp. Hutcheon, Linda. Irony’s Edge: The Theory and Politics of Irony. London: Routledge, 1994. Butler, Judith. The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997. Kerr, George H. Formosa: Licensed Revolution and the Home Rule Movement 1895–1945. Honolulu: The University Press of Hawaii, 1974. Kleeman, Faye Yuan. Under an Imperial Sun: Japanese Colonial Literature of Taiwan and the South. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2003. Komagome, Takeshi and J. A. Mangan. “Japanese Colonial Education in Taiwan 1895–1919; Precepts and Practices of Control.” History of Education 26, no. 3 (1997): 307–22. Li, Chen, and Ueda, Tetsuji. Taiwan siji: Rijushiqi Taiwan duangexuan (Taiwan’s Four Seasons: Tanka Selection from Taiwan during the Period of Japanese Rule). Taipei: Eryu Wenhua, 2008. Loomba, Ania. Colonialism/Postcolonialism. New York: Routledge, 2005. Miller, Roy Andrew. Japan’s Modern Myth: The Language and Beyond. New York and Tokyo: Weatherhill, 1982. Said, Edward. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993. Taiwan nichinichi shimbun or Taiwan riri xinbao (Taiwan Daily News). National Central Library, Taiwan Branch Reproduction; filmed by Wang Ai-Zhu and Cai Zhong-Qing. Taipei City: National Central Library, Taiwan Branch, 1991.

Transculturation and typological intertextuality  83 Uchino, Mitsuko. Tanka to Yennōsei. Nagoya: Fūbaisha, 1988. Uno, Akitaka (宇野秋皋). Shuzenreikō 酒前醴後(“First Wine, Then Sweet Wine”). Taiwan nichinichi shimbun (Taiwan Daily News) (Taipei, National Library). January 1, 1907, 19. Wu, A-Quan. “Agawa Enjō-shi ni atau” (Responding to Agawa Enjō). In Taiwan kyōiku 394, n.d. Yanaihara, Tadao. Teikokushugi-ka no Taiwan (Taiwan Under Imperialism). Tokyo: Iwanami, 1929. Yokoyama, Hiroaki. Chūka shisō to gendai chūgoku (Chinese thought and contemporary China). Tōkyō: Shūeisha, 2002. Žižek, Slavoj. Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992. ———. The Metastases of Enjoyment: Six Essays on Women and Causality. London New York: Verso, 2005. ———. The Plague of Fantasies. London and New York: Verso, 1997.

3 Nativist legacies of desinicization and nationalist sentiment in poetry during the second Sino-Japanese War1

This chapter explores roles poetry played in creating a discourse of Japanese imperialism through both its inherited formal poetics of allusion and its highlighting of Nativist concerns as it aestheticized and naturalized Japanese colonial and imperial interests. Through the 1930s build-up to full-scale war with China to the end of the War, both traditional and modern Japanese poets routinely relied on images from classical poetry— extolling the emperor, aestheticizing self-sacrifice by young men falling in battle beautifully as the transitory cherry blossoms, and countless other images. This essay explores how this imperialist poetry and its depictions of China reflect an underlying ambivalence about a Japanese cultural identity. In analyzing the tortured thought that forms such ideologies of aggression, the example of Yamakawa Hiroshi (山川弘至 1916–1945) highlights a complicated genealogy of Nativism which was rooted in studies of poetry by Keichu (契沖 1640–1701), Kamo-no-Mabuchi (賀茂真淵 1697–1769), and Motoori Norinaga (本居宣長 1730–1801), themselves already developing in the Neo-Confucian context of Tokugawa Japan complicated relationships with Chinese thought and literature, moving toward desinicization, which forms an important underlying pattern in articulations of Japanese nationalism and recurs in the modern state as de-Westernization or “returning to Japan,” which is often, ironically, a return to Chinese Confucianism, as in the 1890s, to bolster the monarchical system. Following Anthony Giddens’ discussion in The Consequences of Modernity, we may frame poetry as one part of many modernist processes that transform a society such as Japan into a nation subordinate to the processes of capitalization. As a capitalist empire, Japan in the 1930s and early 1940s was future-and risk-oriented: it was interested in modern forms of social control, including the use of all forms of cultural production as propaganda. While poetry can preserve an illusion of humanity and deeply felt emotions, through its promotion of such symbolic-ideological cultural production, it can also distance people from the uncomfortable facts of Japan’s violent imperial expansion. The gap between the future promise of an East Asian Sphere of Co-prosperity and the present of violent invasions in the name of the emperor and empire was a central contradiction that the Japanese never

Nativist legacies of desinicization and nationalist sentiment  85 overcame in their wars; as we read in a song below, they were attempting to be the saviors of the people they attacked. Capitalist risks in assuming control of markets and labor into the future become one dimension of the imperial jouissance (in Žižek’s Marxian Lacanian usage) that is sustained in part through poetry, which bridges a gap between the now and the future in its aestheticizations. Japan in the 1930s was a modern “future-oriented” society based on “counterfactual thought as a mode of connecting past and present,” forming the historical moment in which Yamakawa’s interest in Nativism seemed almost natural. Moreover, we can say it was a society that both honored the appearance of deeply felt expressions of patriotism, and formed these expressions through impersonal, autonomous processes that co-opt human agency, in effect subordinating themselves to the interest of capital flows, including the “industrialization of war.”2 Where did these modern ideologically potent—pacifying—tanka and haiku fit into this counterfactual reflexivity? One should note that within Japan and in its colonial diaspora, poetry was not only written and judged in local poetry circles which may or may not have produced journals but appeared in poetry columns in newspapers which reached a wider audience. It was here that poetry had the potential to influence larger populations of readers in their affective framing of events. Somewhat resembling political cartoons, poetry did not simply innocently reflect flowers and nature. It provided a distance from actions— the symbolic from the real—and situating the imaginary entanglements of the subject and its purposes along with its actions: the dare of imperial (national and corporate) risk and its pleasure (jouissance) produced and sustained in these displacements and expectancies. In the constant confusion, what could have, upon careful reflection by Japanese, been seen as a disastrous invasion of China, would be framed as the building of a future Asia under Japan—­ liberation from Western exploitation only to establish Japanese puppet governments and control over resources. The poetry written and published in this situation, including free verse laden with classical language, enjoins such autonomous processes as solidarity with the emperor (as a reification of pre-modern localized bonds) and subjection to the militarization of Japan in poetry, which, while ostensibly rich in nature imagery, mixes in and ideologically naturalizes contemporary issues of interest to the corporate-oriented government and ambitious military men. Though in this chapter I do not venture to estimate the demographics of its impact on readers, the propagandistic intentions and methods are explored in the hope of clarifying the historically participatory role poetry played in this period. Such uses of poetry may be called autopoietic, as poetry discussed in the context of Taiwan, above, but here particularly with regard to its role in justifying huge economic market penetration and framing military fronts and the “theaters” of war around the Pacific. Poetry forms a system of systems with inputs and outputs, containment, transformation, and continued interaction. As such, in exerting control (ways of seeing), if only in assuaging doubts over whether dying in battle for Japan were a waste of life or a form of apotheosis, as the propaganda would have it.

86  Nativist legacies of desinicization and nationalist sentiment In traditional forms of Japanese poetry there are, with variations in different contexts and times, certain ways to express certain emotions— certain seasons and flowers that suggest love’s first summoning, and others that suggest waning affection. But among the wide range of choices, there is a sense of an intertextual interchangeability of parts that may be felt within this poetics of allusion. The subject-production depends upon the recognition of associations evoked within a collage of allusive variations rather than from a hermeneutically and semantically oriented affective-expressive poetics found in modern verse in Japan as elsewhere. Japanese traditional poetry, with its extreme intertextuality, was at the time still lyrically decentered enough to displace various discourses evident in verses as intertextual variations; even news from the Japanese front in China or anywhere could be dressed in either imperial clichés or simply in classical language and imagery that would impose an imperial reverence not only for the emperor but for the Japanese soldiers and everyday people (as seen in Chapter 2). In poetry, reverence for flowers or a mountain could be turned into praise for the modern Japanese empire (as seen in Chapter 1). Anything woven into a dominant classical framing of a verse could easily be tilted to an anamorphic angle3 that imbues poetry, ostensibly about rivers and flowers, with a sinister imperial taint or glory. This interchangability of one phrase for another in the classical poetics of allusion, as it extends into modern free verse, supports the autonomous modes of representation which Marx associated with ideological distortion.4 It is not only a matter of repeating certain symbolically weighted images.5 The intertextual associations suggested by words in the growing common poetic lexical pool are supported by dynamic displacement. It is here, in this poetics developed in a poetry of one or two lines, that the processing of subjectivity is routinely opened to fragmentation and awe, the poetic lines of reference leading out of the poem, summoning attention to peripheral intertexts in the form of these established poetic phrases and articulations. The power of the other in this mode of writing and the lyrical relinquishing of agency to this established collective associative matrix is twofold: both image-based and processual. The same phrases are repeated with variations in the combinations and specific contexts (battles, visits by royalty, seasonal change) that occasion a poem (whether classical verse forms or modern verse cast in a classical, sometimes longer form of chōka or nagauta 長歌 as well as the shorter waka 和歌 or modern tanka 短歌, haiku 俳句, senryū 川柳, and folk ditties 俚謡), and thus may naturalize even military aggression as part of a glorious literary scheme of things. The process is intentional but depends on the intuitive placement of non-intentional mechanisms that may be termed proto-autopoietic, or simply autopoietic. This classical poetic foundation provides a basis for what Žižek in The Plague of Fantasies calls interpassivity, a means of “symbolic registration” of representation in conformance with the authoritative Other (Autre), being a good citizen of the Empire.6 Thus in the modern state of Japan during the

Nativist legacies of desinicization and nationalist sentiment  87 1930s and Pacific War period, published poetry upheld the state ideology by affirming the traditional intertextual poetics of allusion, which contributed to the production of a symbolic distance from events with all emotional response purposely evoking nationalist sentiment. In its traditional form and mode of production, poetry is analogous to commodity fetishism in its treatment of words and phrases as interchangeable, exchangeable, and sustaining jouissance in a suspension of relations of people to each other through the fog of emotionally intense language—a traditional poetic naturalizing any intertext insinuated into it. The contradiction of the Great East Asian Sphere of Co-prosperity depended on poetry to sustain its appearance of meaningfulness though it was nonsense. Tanka, as well as free verse employing classical language, leaves poets and readers in awe, subordinated to words as if words were magical, with the aura of commodities, but with a social function of producing an appearance of imperial crisis and national unity. Such ahistorical uses of language immobilize any impulse to resist the glorification of the status quo as it stands: aggressive imperialism and colonization. The Japanese militarist culture was also rationalized by economic statistics of empire: profits, gathered raw materials, production gathered in Japanese publications often translated into English to demonstrate to the world the rising power of the Empire.7 In Japanese, Japanese poetry became a template for national identity, nationalism, and so forth because of the malleability of the poetic language and the opportunities it offered for grafting and expanding nationalist discourse. Much of this capacity for affectively powerful inter-discursive borrowing can be attributed to the precedent of the seasonal divisions and the matrix of conventional associations linked with emotional responses in poetry, but extended to other discourses as well as the visual and dramatic arts (which themselves build on and often include poetry). Just by including an associated part (metonym) such as the sound of cicadas or scattering plum blossoms in advertisements, film, and anime (commonly observable today), conventionalized emotional responses are reinforced by metonymical suggestions of a flexible but indelibly Japanese mise en scène, so that they become pleasurable exhibitions of routine, as well as objectified, overdetermined associations that inhibit critical response as they appear as givens. Direct, practiced emotional responses are a major facet of reading and writing poetry as such: it is not optional, but more or less demanded, for instance, by choices of topics for writing tanka, senryū, riyō, or haiku in groups or to be mailed to newspaper columnists. Still, there are infinite variations, within the limits; yet as anyone who has participated in such a group knows, members usually judge each other’s work, creating a self-censoring, second-guessing of others’ tastes so as to limit deviation. Such poetry and other media, in employing this associative matrix of extreme intertextuality, articulate a tightly woven semiotic matrix. One may elucidate this process by making an analogy with Brecht’s critique of Western theatre: as the audience in a traditional Western drama

88  Nativist legacies of desinicization and nationalist sentiment (or Hollywood film today) loses itself in empathizing with a main character, to the detriment of any objective critique of the social conditions that created the antagonisms within the drama, in Japanese poetry the emotional responses elicited by the seemingly incidental imagery is so dominant that language from the poetic lexicon (more precisely from an associational matrix) itself has the power to trigger emotional responses that move readers (if only in sentimental, clichés ways) and distance social conflict from any critical consideration. In short, such poetry supports the status quo emotional response and fantasy built up in the poetry, even as the physical country falls ruined by war. Some typical examples reflecting the imperial ideology include poems by Butō Hōshū (武藤包州), graduate of Kokugakuin University, who died at the age of 25 in Central China, in fighting in Longcheng (龍成), Yunnan Province (雲南省), April 1945. A few of his tanka in the “record of valor/ determination” category read: Green as I am, I am determined: a boy willing to stand before the cannons いたらざる身にしあれども男の子われ火筒の前に立たむと思ふ Itarazaru mi ni shiaredomo otoko no ko ware hodutsu no mae ni tatamu to omou Though my life be broken and scattered in the wind the people of my country will shine anew このいのちくだけ散るとも御民国改めのほのほとならん Kono inochi kudake chiru tomo o-mingoku aratame no honoo to naran One after another, boys’ lives going up in flames rise up within flames awesomely scattering づぎづぎにいのち燃え立ち男の子が火中に立ちてあはれ散りしか8 Dugidugi ni inochi moetachi otoko no ko ga honaka ni tachite aware chirishika Relying on the intertextual echoes—practically any phrase that is used in classical poetry or common in modern tanka—to naturalize these enunciations, these poems suggest a perfect embodiment of the socio-political-­ poetic assemblage with the soldier. For instance, in the first verse we find that while “cannon” might not be common within the established associational matrix, being woven into the verse with ordinary poetic language and classical grammatical markers, it rings more true and natural as a poem. Similarly, in the second verse, while “the people of my country” is rather jarringly modern in diction, framed by vaguely Buddhist language echoing the impermanence of life and the standard nationalist cliché of “scattered” (like cherry blossoms), it reads as poetry, if not great poetry. The young man seems to find meaning in the ubiquitous clichés of the war: “scattering,” “shining,” “going up in flames”, and being “just a boy,” young as the “scattering” cherry blossoms. For a soldier, Christopher Coker writes, “what was an ‘authentic’ death other than one that conformed to the

Nativist legacies of desinicization and nationalist sentiment  89 belief that death threw life into relief, war as a transcending moment, even if a short-lived one.”9 The young man can be understood as attempting to justify the pending sacrifice of his own life in terms of images of transcending death not in anger, which might leave the soldier haunting the world as a ghost, but dying willingly—scattered at the point of engaging in some violent act. Such poetry sustains an associational matrix within which any phenomena may be nested and naturalized, imbuing it with an expected, conventionalized nationalist affective response in the wartime context. The associational matrix within this poetics of allusion functions ideologically in two distinct senses: as a habituated structurally more or less assumed and ubiquitous extreme intertextuality which naturalizes any detail in its semiotic web or frame generally, and through specific allusions, symbolic associations or identifications (such as chrysanthemums with the emperor). It provides emotional triggers to justify the sacrificial vision of these young and older men. In contrast, Suzuki Akira (鈴木 明), a sergeant in the military police, died May 6, 1947, in Guangdong (廣東), likely wrote the following as a prisoner of war: Though fallen into some sort of sin in the realm, having nothing to be ashamed of I can go on! お

あめつち

如何ならむ罪に墜つとも天 地 に恥づるものなき我が歩みかも10 Ika naramu tumi ni otsu tomo ametuchi ni haduru mono naki waga ayumi kamo In addition to the generally classical diction and grammar, this verse more specifically uses the word “realm” (ametsuchi), ideologically charged simply through its repeated use in classical poetry anthologies, in its sense of “empire” so as to justify any actions in terms of the limited context of war under the auspices of Japanese gods, but also in its sense of “universe” to proclaim unlimited applicability of this moral territory; the poem extends the conceit of Japanese imperial infallibility and authority through the language of a politico-religious cosmology. In merely denying shame, the poem suggests doubt, the embarrassment of confronting the other, and ultimately the failure of this imperial ideology. One tanka by a Japanese imprisoned in Guangdong and executed in August of 1947, Ichikawa Masa (市川正), 42 years old, expresses in ambivalent language a sense of being subject to the power of the gods or paper, the official imperial religious authority associated with the emperor or the bureaucracy. Sardonically punning the phonemes kami, he describes receiving notice of his execution in a musical verse which, as such, evokes classical elegance, drawing the o vowel into a nearly sustained drone: Like a soldier of the god on paper I receive with a smile the notice of my impending death.

90  Nativist legacies of desinicization and nationalist sentiment そのかみのもののふの如く我がもまた死の宣告を微笑みて受く11 Sono kami no mononofu no gotoku waga mo mata shi no senkoku o hohoemite uku This poem—in leaving kami in kana, not affirming the meaning as “God” (神) or “paper” (紙)—clearly suggests his smile is not an arrogant smile of dying with pleasure for one’s country, but rather a smile affirming the excuse of only doing one’s duty—a smile as if outside the situation at hand, which can be understood in terms of the ideological rhetoric of the soldier following the will of the gods (invested in the emperor for whom the Japanese military acts) or the functioning of the bureaucracy of paper, which not only was behind Japanese imperialism (in the procurement of raw materials and wealth), but took the same form as the death notice. Adding to the irony is the allusion to the Shinto fortunes distributed by a shrine or wishes written by worshippers on paper subsequently tied to a tree limb. So the smile is ironic in the realization that the counterpart of the ­Japanese bureaucracy that brought him to China is the bureaucracy of the war crimes judiciary, which finishes him. He has been led into his war crimes (presumably) by the Japanese imperial ideology, but hemmed in by bureaucracies, suggesting a subject losing itself to an ironic smile in realizing its determination within the order, just following orders, “like a soldier,” as an embodiment of socio-­e conomic antagonisms. He had desperately tried, in this ironic pun of gods and paper, borrowing from Coker, “to authenticate his existence on the battlefield by digging deeper … ­b eyond the machine and the ethos of industrialized warfare.”12 The smile is the smile of Nietzsche’s “last man”: an act of recognition that his will is not simply empowered through a shared will or vision, part of a monstrous ideological reproduction of empire, but the smile of being no one—a lost, expendable functionary of larger processes. The will is experienced by the poet as alien and irrelevant. It is not simply an articulation of irony. Lurking in the smile in this poem is the person, though a person ascribed functionality as a soldier within imperial and bureaucratic and religious institutions. ­Ishikawa’s tanka recognizes this status, as a part of a larger machine, and he desperately tries to regain his humanity by way of an ironic pun, a gesture enabling the poet to comprehend in the sense of containing the lies which define the war and subordinated him. He has used the elegance of classical diction to naturalize the appearance of the one modern word that marks him: “pronouncement” (宣告) translated as “The notice of my impending death.”

The familiar lie: Liberation by a superior power The Japanese government and media led the population to believe that the Mukden and other incidents in the 1930s were attacks on Japan, not acts of Japanese aggression. Japanese thus saw themselves as being on the defensive

Nativist legacies of desinicization and nationalist sentiment  91 and saw Chinese as stubbornly refusing to bow to the new leader of Asia, imperial Japan. Just like Americans who recently could not understand why Iraqis would refuse to submit to military power, Japanese naturally believed the censored news penned by “embedded” reporters observing the official framing of events in art and poetry.13 This framing propped excuses for war and resulted in few citizens publicly questioning the assumptions that informed the subject-construction that initially made the war possible: whatever the intentions, they were assumed to be good. Their populace employed the “we” of an ambitious nation that would have its empire stand as right and good as its weapons, technology and misperceived cultural superiority will take them. The government’s successful use of mass media, linking the rulers’ intentions to secure empires and obtain raw materials and the will of the people to participate in the fantasies of rulers, created a failure in people to resist going along with the lies and embracing the hubris of empire. From the study of poetry used to naturalize and aestheticize policies such as the persistent attacks on China, we can learn how populations in Japan and its diaspora imagined self and other in light of the complex cultural relations between Japan and China. Japanese poetry has been put forward as a means of distinguishing the Japanese from the other, preserving a Japanese identity in a culture so indebted to China. During the Meiji period, as I have previously tried to show in attempting to understand the importance—for government-­backing poets and translators of the Shintaishisho (新体詩抄 Selection of New-style Poems, 1882)—of suppressing traditional Japanese waka poetics so as to introduce a Western-style poetics based on “continuity of thought,” the malleable nature of waka and its intertextual openness to new as well as ­established intertexts led to some amazing attempts to steer more traditional poetry to various emotional and ideological ends. Notably, the poet Kitamura Tōkoku (北村透谷) would in his dramatic poems Soshu no shi (楚囚之詩 Faraway Prisoner, 1887) and other poems emulating Byron in effect rescue classical language and imagery so as to reconfigure it into a leftist nationalism.14 The Nativist background formed an influential model for both traditional (especially waka) poetry in general and poetry of the 1930s and early 1940s promoting Japanese militarism. Though the autonomy of representation evident in poetry supporting militarism would be written off to the vagaries of poets, in fact a clear genealogical link is present in this most passionate of “born again” Nativists, Yamakawa Hiroshi, who as a student of Orikuchi Shinobu (折口信夫), focused on Nativist writers and even believed in applying their ideas during the War. In his poetry (free verse) and prose essays, we see both a specific role of the Nativist legacy in modern Japanese imperialism as a poetico-historical legacy of linking poetry to imperialist intentions, willfully imposed on others, including Japanese themselves as well as victims of imperial colonization. Because Yamakawa had studied Nativist thought and attempted to put into practice ideals suggested by ­Motoori Norinaga and others, his poetry and essays are more than blind

92  Nativist legacies of desinicization and nationalist sentiment reflections of a standard imperial education but have extended it in an extreme articulation that allows us to examine a clear expression of a modern reactionary poetics. It is reactionary in its elevation of ancient Japanese texts, in a way one may compare to Ezra Pound’s reading of Latin and Confucian texts into his poems critiquing contemporary life. Yamakawa presents an obsessive aestheticization of contemporary problems of military control and capitalist empire-building in poetry and essays on poetry. I agree with Honda Katsuichi, who argues that while Japan’s war on China was a brutish opportunistic war of an imperialist against a country weakened by civil war and a horde of imperialists, the war with ­A merica in the Pacific War was a war between aggressors, since Britain and the U.S. set up an embargo and blockade against Japan, forcing it either to become an obedient client state (Noam Chomsky’s term for nations under the American influence today), or to resist them.15 Thus I will focus primarily on poems by Japanese who either wrote about China at the time, were stationed there as soldiers and happened to have written poetry, or were otherwise related to China. Aggression in the war can be broken down into four facets for Japan: “Firstly, it was an imperialist war as a war with America, England, Holland, and France. Secondly, Japan’s imperialist war of the imperialist colonialism and occupation of Korea, Taiwan, China, and occupied territories in Southeast Asia was for each of these peoples a war of liberation from the Japanese” (and usually extending to postwar liberation movements against former Western colonial powers attempting to retake them). “Thirdly, it was a Russo-Japanese war, and fourthly it was an alliance with Germany and Italy putting fascism at its core.”16 Truth in this situation is easy to manufacture, as the referents can be justified in one context and applied in another. Japan in its colonizing period sought to present itself as liberating the parts of the world it invaded, while in fact it only participated in the competition for material resources by military means and assuming a superior, controlling position. The case of Japan is complicated in that it championed repulsion of the non-Asians from Asia—on the surface a compelling position since the great Western powers were racist and condescending themselves. Japan’s racism—visible in poems published in colonies as well as Japan in this period—provided an ideological logic and template for repeating the same racist positioning vis-à-vis non-Japanese Asians. Japanese writers of the period routinely treated Chinese with dehumanizing disdain and chauvinism and saw themselves as “the true heir of ancient Chinese glories.”17 They simply followed the Western colonial model that underwrote its global colonialism and rhetoric of superiority based on Christianity (attacking local religions as inferior and pagan), superior science and technology, arms manufacturing, a modern fashion sense, and so on. Though ideologically many Japanese believed they were liberating Asia, the Chinese did not buy it. It should be pointed out that following the so-called OpenDoor Policy demanded by colonial powers satisfied with enclaves in China, it was Japan alone who openly disregarded these limitations, removed itself

Nativist legacies of desinicization and nationalist sentiment  93 from the League of Nations and dropped any pretense of respecting the ­ hinese republic. They sought to conquer China.18 The Japanese did not C intend to liberate Asia to be Asian, but more specifically to remake Asia on the model of Japan and to Japanize Asia. They merely substituted Shinto for Christianity and puppet governments under a different imperial flag, and were met everywhere with banners: “Down with Japanese imperialism!”19 Because Japanese themselves were obviously self-interested in profiting from countries around Asia and did not hesitate to massacre Chinese in their own mistaken “shock and awe” techniques, most famously in the Nanking Massacre, akin to the U.S. at Fallujah,20 Japanese propaganda was not sufficient in convincing victims of Japan’s moral superiority. Its claim of saving Asia from Western exploitation in the Japanese emperor’s name meant saving all of Asia for itself. The war on China was hypocritical both in terms of the true objective, being the securing of a monopoly on raw materials and, if lucky, creating a Pax Nipponica throughout Asia. It failed miserably, not before killing millions of Asians in Southeast Asia as well as China. Poetry supporting aggression in China was abundant. Even the famous poet and humanist-turned-propagandist Takamura Kōtarō (高村光太郎 1883–1956) reflects the official rhetoric that Japanese “are standing for justice and life, / While they [the Western colonizers] are standing for profits. / We are defending justice, … They raise their heads in arrogance, / While we are constructing the Great East Asia Family.”21 In his book-length study, Kōji Eizawa explores “the contradictions” between “the Great East Asian Sphere of Co-prosperity thought put forth by the establishment as a ‘holy war ideology’ aestheticizing and justifying the Pacific War.”22 “In the 1930s, democracy, pacifism, internationalism, socialism, anti-­i mperialism, and discourse critical of the emperor system were all attacked as thought against the country,” and with such progressive thought sidelined, the “social climate became increasingly one of a time of emergency.”23 “The basic assertion in Great East Asian Sphere of Co-prosperity thought is that the Great East Asian War was a war of the Japanese worldview, that ‘the world was one family’ [lit. under the same roof] against the Anglo-­A merican individualistic liberalist worldview.” The War was presented as “a holy war to establish a Great East Asian Sphere of Co-prosperity on principles of co-­existence and cooperation based on principles of a vertical family-state order which put Japan into the role of commander.”24 Far from forming a Sphere of Co-prosperity, Japanese imperialism formed its own egoism around ­Japanese supremacy, and the one-family under the Japanese emperor, extended to Asia, could only be used to oppress and subjugate.25 While recognizing these policies were formed in response to European and American policies, which used Christianity and civilizing as an excuse for exploitation and colonization, Eizawa sees the results of Japan’s liberation of Asia to be a “Subjection and Manchurianization (満州国化) of Asia.”26 Though hypocrisy became unavoidable in such pan-Asianist rhetoric in the 1930s, between the premodern attachment to China as chūgoku (中國) to the

94  Nativist legacies of desinicization and nationalist sentiment belittling treatment of China as shina (支那) during modernization,27 there have been Japanese writers and intellectuals who have continued to write Chinese poetry (kanshi), such as Natsume Soseki and Nagai Kafu, or who were active supporters of the Republican revolution in China, most notably Miyazaki Toten. However, in this period Takamura struck a threatening, boastful tone in poems such as “Mr. Chiang, Reflect on This!” which was published the year before Pearl Harbor. Here he claims “My country, Japan, is not destroying yours, sir,” “only destroying anti-Japanese thought.” He seems to have believed that China’s allies would be doomed once Japan attacked them, and that “American and England have been rejected by the Heaven and Earth of East Asia” so that the situation would not “bode well” for Chiang.28 The recognition of destroying China while arrogantly demanding Chiang accept Japan makes Takamura seem rude if not deluded in his “resistance is futile” nationalism, yet this self-consciously propagandistic poem reflects the official line, distortions and contradictions used to support continued aggression against China. To his credit, after the war, embarrassed, he wrote, “Apology in Shame to Mr. Chiang.”29 We may characterize the prevailing imperial attitudes and assumptions by turning to a work by Soma Gyofu (1883–1950), a songwriter and poet who wrote many official school songs for high schools around Japan and universities, including Waseda. His song in support of the Japanese heightened military actions of September 1937 appeared in the Tokyo Asahi Shimbun during the period of the Battle of Xinkou (忻口會戰). Translating three of the seven verses will sufficiently capture the ideological positioning: General Mobilization of Citizens March (国民總動員行進譜) 1 Japan has awakened and holds the key to peace For all shores of the Great Eastern Sea, Resolved never to retreat an inch, Japan has awakened, savior of Asia. 3 Japan has awakened, come to cleanse the earth Of enemies aggressing against true peace, For all shores of the Great Eastern Sea Japan has awakened, savior of Asia. 7 Shout out, citizens, while the world watches us Resolute and righteous, we guard the flag, Citizens, rising up with all our might, Imperial Land of Japan, savior of Asia.30 This song is designed to foment support for aggression against China, emphasizing that Japan’s “awakening” from isolation to take its self-proclaimed

Nativist legacies of desinicization and nationalist sentiment  95 (and in retrospect farcical in this song) historical position as an empire of cultural and technological superiority to encompass all of Asia, eclipsing traces of former Chinese hegemony. In this vision of a Pax Nipponica, Soma articulates in a condensed fashion a sense of historical opportunism ­expressed in converting poetic images into articulations of imperial chauvinism. Its determination to fight for its domination called “peace,” and closes each stanza with the biblical refrain claiming Japan to be the “savior of Asia.” The last, seventh incarnation of the refrain makes clear, altering the line to read: “Imperial Land of Japan, savior of Asia” (皇国日本、東亜の 救主). In the international context of war and imperialism, here the intertexts are religious—mixing Christian and high-toned moral determination with love of peace—so as to interpellate subjects acquiescing to the violent aggression contained under the rubric of “Japan awakens.” Within weeks of the Nanjing Massacre, installment 91 of the “Elementary School Student Haiku” column of January 4, 1938, was also filled with propaganda for the New Year. Whether written by students with teacher’s guidance or independently, a few examples suffice to demonstrate how enrolling innocent civilians, provided a means of reflecting back to the general reader a sense of devotion and determination, an example that they too should follow: They say pine decorations are in place on the gates for New Years in China しな 正月の支那に門松立てにけり　 Shōgatsu no shina ni kadomatsu tatenikeri This First Day clouds are clearing in the skies over Northern China ほくし

雲晴れて北 支の空にこの初日 Kumo harete hokushi no sora ni kono hatsuhi In Northern China the embattled praise the First Day On New Year’s Day the flag of the rising sun rises within the walls of Nanjing ょ う はつひ で ナンキンじ

みはた 初 日の出南 京 城 に日の御 旗 31

Hatsuhi no de Nankin-jō ni hi no mihata Moreover, note how the season words indicating New Year’s Day—“pine decorations” or naming the “First Day”—insinuate an associative matrix within these children’s haiku so as to bring gloating over ironies of military victories into a poetic discourse. Though just one word, it too indicates the ideological efficiency of this typological intertextuality, which is simply taken for granted while it brings subjects around to a certain frame of reference. Since the early 1930s, there had been very little resistance in poetry to the imperial militarization. Although a number of Japanese poets opposed war in principle in the 1920s, even most of them joined ranks in publishing propagandistic poems in support of war in the 1930s and early 1940s. By 1933

96  Nativist legacies of desinicization and nationalist sentiment nearly all poets recanted (転向 tenkō) their previously popular socialist and progressive ideals under government pressure.32 Though there is almost no antiwar poetry written after 1933, Kaneko Mitsuharu (1895–1975) has justifiably been held up as an exception.33 Japanese Romantic School34 poet Tanaka Katsumi’s (1911–1992) Gazing at the Distant Mainland (大陸遠望 Tairiku enbou, 1940), a title suggesting control of the gazed within a long process of conquering and assimilating, includes a poem first published in the January 1940 Bungei seiji, “On the Morning of 2600, Year of Our Empire” (Nōki nisen-roppyaku-nen no asa 皇紀二千六百年の朝). It illustrates applications of the imperial ideology, not to mention the mythical calendar, in poetry of the day, later with specific reference to China. It begins: When the earliest rays of the sun shimmer across the peaks of Shumu Island at 156 degrees and 32 minutes east in the Japanese expanse of 1000 islands morning begins what will be a great year. The purity of light makes its way west to an archipelago of flowers, it dyes the peak of Fuji red, and nearby foot soldiers of the first regiment awake, their trumpets resounding, and in my home my child’s eyes open....35 In this example, one gets a clear picture of the imperial ideology as promoted in song and modern verse, which here also reflects the poetics of allusion. The “earliest rays” suggests the longest reign of the Japanese imperial line, symbolized by the sun (as one of the primary gods is a sun goddess, Amaterasu). It is written in the voice of a New Year’s poem optimistically greeting the dawn of the New Year, associating the sun with Mt. Fuji and soldiers. Focusing on innocent children is always a good way to magnify an illusion of threat in a war. The poem later names nearly a dozen cities in China, echoing the diction from navigation and mapping discourse used in the opening lines. The poem uses a mix of objectifying description and literary language with imperial insinuations to articulate a threat, and reveal anxieties that form the jouissance of empire in suspense and excitement.

The Nativist legacy in imperialist poetry Other modern verse of the militarism period, such as that by poet, essayist, and soldier Yamakawa Hiroshi, draws on classical language and figures so that anything articulated using the ancient language, characterized by this interchangeability, is subordinated to the imperialist dogma to which he subscribes. While Hagiwara Sakutarō (萩原 朔太郎 1886–1942), along with many other poets and writers, famously turned to nationalism, employing classical language in their works as part of a “returning to Japan” from what

Nativist legacies of desinicization and nationalist sentiment  97 was then seen as over-modernization (then thought of as Westernization), this pattern of “returning to Japan” was, following Nativists, originally a return from Chinese thought to Japanese emotional engagement, as Yamakawa or anyone familiar with Tokugawa period thought would have known. It should be clarified that the Meiji slogan “leaving Asia, entering Europe” was really a taking leave of a Chinese cultural frame and a statement of intention to join the capitalist-imperialist Great Powers as an outsider to Asia, and one ready to exploit it. Yamakawa conflated the most famous of earlier templates for recovering Japaneseness, Nativism (Kokugaku, lit. National Studies 国学), and literary support for imperialism that took a literal ­approach to the Nativist idea of “returning to Japan.” Whereas one gets the impression with other writers and poets that it is mean-spirited propaganda, with him, he seems to have really believed he had found a way of justifying the propaganda in a sincere though misplaced poetics. In another age, perhaps he would have been called insane, but as his interest in Nativist poetics coincided with the Second Sino-­Japanese War and Pacific War he just seemed eccentric in his patriotic excesses, as is suggested by remarks made by those writing prefatory material for his book of poetry.36 The imperial jouissance was sustained in symbolic-ideological forms such as poetry: the dynamic gaps between the words and the reality made imperialism possible as a practice, for Japanese and collaborators, while condemning it too, since the Nativist fantasy of recovering the lost Real—an authentic “ancient Japan” preceding Sinification—was simply impossible. Of course, this is just one dimension of Japanese nationalist and imperialist discourse, but the Nativists were the writers who invented many issues that framed modern nationalism and its endemic national identity crisis, and the original arguments indeed placed central importance on ancient poetry and myth. The “Return to Japan” literary trend asserted a classically oriented poetic style in the 1930s, focusing on the supposedly lost Japan, was a Japan lost to Chinese language and culture. Poetry thus becomes for Yamakawa, as for the Tokugawa Nativists he studied, both an archival project and a contemporary writing project attempting to recover, through a classically oriented idiom and praise of the past, a lost culture and its referents. The contradictions are enormous since the entire intellectual apparatus within Japan is built on Chinese and Western arts and sciences—including the written language and poetry itself. Though the official explanations of incursions escalating into an invasion of China from multiple fronts were based on lies, poetry functioned as one cornerstone of the imperial ideology or assemblage by which support for aggression in China was built in Japan and its diaspora. Among the poetry and statements by soldiers and pro-war poets collected in Tanaka Katsumi’s Greater East Asian War Poetry Collection (Daitōasensō shibunshū, 2006), Yamakawa Hiroshi’s prose and poetry stand out for anyone interested in understanding the role of poetry in Japan’s imperialist ideology.

98  Nativist legacies of desinicization and nationalist sentiment He was born in Gifu Prefecture, Japan, and died August 11, 1945, during the Allied bombing of Pingtung Airport in Taiwan near the very end of the war. His “On the Duty of the Poet” (Shijin no sekimu ni tsuite) reflects an association of the emperor and the Japanese classics in Japanese ideology that can be traced back to Tokugawa Nativists, especially Motoori Norinaga, who emphasized the importance of Japanese poetry and its embodiment of truth for Japanese. Though Norinaga himself was unavoidably influenced by Neo-Confucian studies, the dominant culture and official ideology of the Tokugawa Bakufu, he sought to escape Chinese thought and define a culturally de-sinicized Japanese persona. In seeking to rediscover an authentic Japan in the language of the Man’yōshū as well as early Heian texts, he linked poetry and sincerity or truth (makoto 真) as a formal method of producing Japaneseness by reviving ancient language most resembling the illiterate native Japanese language predating Sinographic Japanese language and literature. Patriot scholars, poets, and Men of High Purpose (shishi 志士) such as Yoshida Shōin (吉田松陰 1830–1859) emphasized the restoration of the emperor in a mix of Confucian and Nativist thought. In short, poetry of truthfulness is in this lineage of thought, which was revived in modern Japan by Ochiai Naobumi (落合直文 1861–1903), Hagino Yoshiyuki (萩野由之 1860–1924), and others, influenced their students— some of whom became poets as prominent as Yosano Tekkan (与謝野鉄幹 1873–1935), who sometimes adopted a masarao (manly warrior) style and sustained the connection between serving the emperor, writing poetry, and self-sacrifice for the modern nation.37 Reflecting this background, Yamakawa wrote in “On the Duty of the Poet”: In times when we find ourselves facing dire circumstances, we turn to poetry for its timelessness and its sense of offering truth (makoto) in poetic sentiment. Though in an age of empires it may go unnoticed in peacetime, in times of great difficulty in our world we recollect the spirit of truth and come to live truthful lives. Today we may say Japan is confronted by precisely this sort of period. Thus the truly righteous bloodlines and classics of the imperial country become determinations of truth, just as in prayer in the days of generations of distant ancestors, so now again in the blood of our race (民族 minzoku), in recalling our history we rise again.38 This passage, expanded upon in later paragraphs, argues for a link between action on behalf of warring Japan and the preservation of a national polity based on the national religious fantasy cultivated by leaders in the modern Japanese state39 to create a national ideology based on a static model of an unchanging society, and the idea of the Japanese being the people of a long line of living gods, an imperial family. Literature becomes a primary source of evidence for this connection, and the passage links the royal bloodline with Japanese classical literature, which in combination with the ascendant

Nativist legacies of desinicization and nationalist sentiment  99 position of the imperial family grounds his “determinations of truth.” It also reflects the idea in Nativism that Japanese poetry would bring harmony to people through its recovery of a period of truth in the past—as active writing in the present. Thus the association of poetry and truth in this passage reflects the idea that truth in poetry can recover the natural Japanese order in life from studying and emulating the past. This ideological position, derived from Nativism, also assumes that because the Japanese imperial line was ancient and continuous and the Chinese series of dynasties discontinuous, the Chinese tradition of revolution was inferior to the Japanese emperor system, and that the natural state of being Japanese was harmonious. In attacking China and demanding submission to Japan, as the new and improved China to lead Asia, poets held close to them and gained confidence from this image of Japanese rule in a long-held bond between imperial family and people (as children in a family-state, kazoku-kokka). It also echoes the influence of Christianity in its model of creating obedient subjects in a vertical relationship between God and people (as lambs of the emperor). What is ironic is that the very structure of this narrative of redemption for Japanese is a variation of a theme basic to Confucianism in Chinese thought, which was dominant in the period the Nativists articulated their positions (often in opposition to Chinese thought): the Japanese see turning to the truth of the past in poetry as modeled after the Confucian ideal of recovering the ideal state before the revolution against the legendary ancient sage-kings (Yao, Shun and Yu); yet the Japanese model is robbed of the mediating philosophy of ruling between administrators and the people, and instead turns to philology and hereditary bonds, and emperor-worship, thus creating an ideology significantly grounded in the realm of poetry and uncritically mediated emotions. The static model is built not only on the negation of revolutionary possibility but on a sublimated anti-­Chinesebased Japanese nationalism—the “leaving Asia, entering Europe” aspect of early Meiji nation-formation, which was more specifically a desinicization process, though in the 1930s some Japanese still produced Chinese poetry (Kanshi), relied on Chinese literary language, Confucian thought, Chinese schools of Buddhism, and continued Chinese medicinal practices, and metaphors associated with these various discourses in order to understand the West which it studied as a model to emulate in modern Japan. Thus “Westernization,” given all the sinocentric metaphors found, seems too simplistic; the intertextual complexity leaves a Chinese legacy even after modernization.40 We recall Norinaga sought not to envision a limited Way, but rather to account existentially for a way of situating the self in relation to the everyday world as well as a continuous, ever-present world (of the Age of the Gods) that manifests itself for him most potently in the ancient Japanese texts. By so doing, he had displaced the dominant Confucian philology and historiography in favor of an engaged, desiring subject as the model reader. By preferring a faith in ancestral gods and the texts in which this earlier,

100  Nativist legacies of desinicization and nationalist sentiment putatively purer, pre-Sinified Japan was imagined as visible, and he developed a perspective in which epistemology itself is no longer prioritized, but is situated with respect to cultural recovery. For Mabuchi and Norinaga it was not the “system” or narrative of the texts (such as Genji monogatari 源氏物語 or the Kojiki 古事記) that were to be read and abstracted for their moral guidelines, but rather it was the aesthetic sensitivity evident in these works from ancient Japan that was to be understood and emulated. They saw texts as products of an age reflecting a truer way of living, one found before the dualistic Confucian issues that had been imported from the Chinese had had their effect on the intellectual and cultural lives of Japanese. It was a romantic endeavor, in that it is a search for a supposed purity in a prior, more indigenous culture. Norinaga displaced the basic Confucian binaries of Ideal/Substance (理 ri and 気 ki, Ch. li and qi) in favor of an affective understanding of “meaning” as predicated on the organic metaphor of heart (seeds) and words (leaves of a tree), so that words are taken as reflections of the poet’s mind-spirit (心 kokoro, Ch. xin), but also for the Nativists evidence of a recovered lost culture.41 The affective longing for a restored Japanese primitive pre-Sinified world, in being impossible, is a cornerstone of the production of the subject of the Japanese empire as articulated by Yamakawa. The impossibility deepens the longing into a project defining his life and forming his frame of jouissance, and revealing one dimension of the jouissance of Japanese imperialism in general: a longing for national identity and stability by pursuing what is impossible to attain—an archaic renaissance of ancient, pre-Sinicized Japan. Mabuchi argued that the Japanese sociopolitical and cultural world had itself never really “fallen” into a state of chaos, but had mistakenly adopted a worldview that is predicated on such an irrevocable fall. Pointing to a semi-mythical lineage of an unbroken Japanese dynasty as evidence of such an unrecognized unfallen world, he calls for a return to a Heian and preHeian sense of decorum and elegance that disarms any vulgar attempts to exert brute force or enter into trite, useless, misleading debate. In short, he dreamt of a perfect, seamless ideology, with all acting in accord with each other. In developing Mabuchi’s approach, Norinaga prized poetry as something extramoral, or at least in the context of his anti-Chinese posturing, unamenable to being tied to absolutes and dictums of accepted rationality and ethics.42 He argued that in Japan there should be a community founded on the recognition that the “human intelligence is limited and puny while the acts of the gods are illimitable and wondrous.”43 Norinaga refuses to demystify the world by formulating it into a phrase. When people were more innocent, less taken by rhetorical explanations, he argued, they were also less culpable, more engaged with a wider range of phenomena, uninhibited by a classificatory mode of thinking attributed to Chinese studies. He argued that while Chinese poetry is “edited, ornamented, and [reveals only] outward appearance,”44 Japanese poetry eludes such issues: “Its aim is merely to express a sensitivity to human existence, and its method is to

Nativist legacies of desinicization and nationalist sentiment  101 give expression to the overflowing sentiments of the heart.”45 In his alternative epistemology, he proposed not the exterior categories of good and bad, which for him were simply imported from Chinese culture, but rather a sympathy with objects engaged from inside, emotionally entangled.46 “Truth” was not bound up in one’s nature (sei 性) or virtuous role in the realm, but rather in the true emotional engagement of the heart (magokoro 真心) that he argued was common to all Japanese, who, Norinaga emphasized, were all “good,” being descendants of gods. For Norinaga, literature was important to Japan not in terms of human ideals, but rather the depth of cognition in sensorial terms within an unalienated sensibility.47 Though it is, in brief, a simplistic ideology founded on an assertion of emotive primacy, as if historical conflict never arose, it is not hard to imagine how the young Yamakawa became enamored by this idyllic Nativist narrative of Japanese redemption as the country was staking claim to all of Asia and the Pacific.

Poems by Yamakawa Hiroshi In terms of the influence of Nativism on the Second Sino-Japanese and Pacific War, Yamakawa’s poetry and essays form a convergence of the attempt to realize Motoori Norinaga’s dream of using poetry to recreate the illusion of a Manyō era Japanese society (which Norinaga himself declined to attempt in his poetry, which remained modern for the period) and the simplification and streamlining of a Japanese Nationalist ideology based on anti-Chinese positions. Furukuni (ancient country), his 1943 poetry collection, embodies this position of reviving the “ancient country” of the period of the Man’yōshū and Kojiki. “Yamato Road” reads in translation: For you the secret burning in my heart spring blossoms scattering blue skies of summer filling the heavens your silver radiance pours down on this road I travel while I silently gaze up to the image of truth in sunbeams shielding the far mountain borderlands of Japan even now my lone steps sinking into the dusty earth of the road walked by the distant people of ancient Japan I trace your image while walking follow your spirit walking the old capital traversing old temple gardens my heart roundly burning for you wherever it goes, spring blossoms scattering blue filling the summer sky to the brim this road of Japan is deep and wide the line between the Yoshino rapids and the riverside in the old capital

102  Nativist legacies of desinicization and nationalist sentiment You are hidden away in the depths of my heart after all even now silently strongly burning on.48 The image in “silver radiance pours down” is one of shining light flowing down to bless the actions of Japanese enthusiastically expanding the empire, and is a variation of the common divine light image.49 The “image of truth in sunbeams” is literally a “painting of truth,” a neologism Yamakawa uses to substitute “truth” for the usual “painting of the heart” (mind, intentions), thus demonstrating his determination not only to glorify the empire, but to shift the very terms used by the Nativists scholars such as Norinaga even further into the service of a unified state subject by objectifying truth, and thereby objectifying the suffering made possible by this ideology so as to avoid responsibility. We can situate this shifting of attention in the sense Žižek describes in On Violence, in which, resembling Nietzsche, he shows how illusions of systems and focused action disguise more distributed and complex machinations. As he writes in the introduction to the same volume, We need to perceive the contours of the background which generates such outbursts … subjective violence is just the most visible portion of a triumvirate that also includes two objective kinds of violence. First, there is a ‘symbolic’ violence embodied in language and its forms, what Heidegger would call ‘our house of being.’ … Second, there is … ‘systemic’ violence, or the often catastrophic consequences of the smooth functioning of our economic and political systems.50 In enlisting the symbolic language of poetry and its systemic justification by the needs of Japanese industrial expansion (itself rationalized in the symbolic language of discourse on the Great East Asian Sphere of Co-­ prosperity), Japanese aggression in China was transformed into an objective violence. As Žižek continues, objective violence “is seen as a perturbation of the ‘normal,’ peaceful state of things” and “sustains the very zero-level standard against which we perceive something as subjectively violent.”51 Thus Japanese would routinely blame Chinese—as is even reflected in the examples of poetry—for resisting Japanese violence. “Yamato Road” links the imperial vision with the Nativist vision now not only implying a recovery of ancient Japanese literature and lost customs, but of aggressive military and industrial raids into China by Japanese through occupied territories in Korea and Manchuria, under the protecting light of the shining goddess Amaterasu (天照), “the image of truth in sunbeams / shielding the far mountain borderlands of Japan.” The nationalist-­i mperialist sentiment is personalized in the lines “my lone steps sinking into the dusty earth / of the road walked by the distant people of ancient Japan / I trace your image / while walking follow your spirit.” What I translate as “the line between” (kiwami) vaguely suggests a precarious

Nativist legacies of desinicization and nationalist sentiment  103 division between ancient and modern Japan, a situation in which the connection he models in this poem may be lost. It is resolved in the ending, which affirms that the ancient spirit of Japan is already or still in his heart. This perceived cultural endangerment, a common Nativist theme, would in other poems be projected by Yamakawa into the patriotic military expansion of empire, repeating the common ploy of aggressor nations—to present one’s country as being in some form of imminent danger. Such manufactured endangerment engenders no shortage of ironies that inform the imperial jouissance—the framing of anxieties and indefinitely postponed fulfillment of pleasures—for Japanese subjects. Note how “shielding” is used to suggest an outwardly thrusting empire attempting to sustain a complex frame of anxieties and jouissance—asserting Japan (above China) and yet invading to destroy the big Other of all that Japan has depended upon directly in inherited discourses and practices: taking over the Other’s pleasures so as to destroy them within Japan while taking on the Other’s ways (of deriving pleasure) which have been incorporated into Japanese culture, so as to extirpate them without as within. Such a Japanese nationalism itself, insofar as it had been formed in opposition to Chinese culture, is thus bound up with it. It would seem the jouissance in being Japanese in the empire is in sustaining the opposition to the Chinese and Western elements integrated in Japan in the preceding centuries and years. Yamakawa was not averse to stooping to clichés, as in the lines opening “If I Die” (Watashi ga shindara): “If I die / bury me in the green grass / surrounded by small pebbles grown mossy.”52 Pebbles turning to mossy boulders is, of course, a common reference to the long reign of an emperor, known from the national anthem, itself an ancient tanka. A contemporary famous cultural critic, Yasuda Yojūrō (1910–1981), wrote in his preface (dated Nov. 1942) to Furukuni that Yamakawa’s poetry is in touch with the historical present and built on his studies of Nativism at Kokugakuin University, and that he takes a leadership role even though he is a young man whose: thought is both grounded in history and forms its own system of thought. On this account, I dare say he should be thought of as preserving a will to play the role of bridge-builder between the new world and the ancient world. In fact Yamakawa seems to have studied Nativism at Kokugakuin University because he understood the importance of reading the contemporary spirit of our Nativist scholars into the current situation. Thus he seems to be one to promote a certain realization or inheritance of earlier thought to the situation of our country today.53 The book is dedicated to Yamakawa’s teacher, the important ethnologist Orikuchi Shinobu, who also wrote a genial introduction for the book. The sentiment projected in his poems seems to have been sincerely presented and supported by his community.

104  Nativist legacies of desinicization and nationalist sentiment To demonstrate his understanding of his debt to Nativists and how he puts their ideas into action, we can turn to his short prose poem “Reading the Kojiki” (Kojiki o yomu): Deep in the night I open the Kojiki and read my way into the ancient ways of distant ancestors. From there voices of deities of distant ancestors call out. From there sorrows of remote forefathers beckon. The days of old long ago are never ending, still appear in our day. As all was, all is. The task set long ago by the Great God of the Sun still lives. As all was, all is. The great words of the Kashihara Shrine in the days of the Emperor … moves us today as in the days of old. Ah distant ancient ancestors in Awakigahara, through the little gate of sunshine, our bodies cleansed, we set out to create a new history no longer a distant long ago. Now in battle to the death again let us take back our unsullied lives from the darkness of today’s world. Again let us steal back the clear light of the heavenly sun.54 This translation reflects Yamakawa’s expansion of literal meanings of key words such as “ancient ways” (koji) and “days of the Emperor” (Kojiki). It also captures the application of Nativist vision to an expansionist imperialism in referring to “Now in battle to the death,” which makes little sense in the context of the ongoing wars except in terms of overcompensating for a debt to China and the West as part of a grand rediscovery of a Japan already irretrievably hemmed in by foreign symbolic constructs. Note how for the restoration-minded ultraconservative the word distant (tōi), sometimes translated as remote or long ago, plays an important role in framing the conflict as one between d ­ ifference within Japanese culture then and now. By emphasizing difference, it also assumes an abandoned sameness, insinuating blame on Japanese who do not patriotically adhere to the call of the ancients. According to the poet’s afterword to Furukuni, he believed he was speaking not only for himself or Japan, but specifically for several generations of his family.55 Note how the last lines play into two nationalist appeals: “let us take back our unsullied lives from the darkness of today’s world” appeals to Japanese experiencing hardship and who might find meaning in any national mission, while “let us steal back the clear light of the heavenly sun” expresses rather directly the Nativist vision of reclaiming the jouissance of the Other as one’s own. Poetry in this period of Japanese imperialism provides a deeper understanding of how literary and sometimes religious expression could be marshaled so passionately to defend the economic and cultural determinations of capitalist profiteers in a semi-autonomous drive to expand markets and profits while securing territories and raw materials. Yamakawa seems to have believed in his poetic ideology of building on the Nativist ideas of applying the poetic language of the past to return modern Japan to a Japanese culture defined by ancient texts. In so pursuing his poetry and poetics, he exposes the historical layers of crisis and ambivalence defining Japanese national

Nativist legacies of desinicization and nationalist sentiment  105 identity—in turning from Asia in the early Meiji period to the West, then turning back to Japan and Chinese Confucianism in the 1890s and Japan in the 1930s—reasserting the centrality of classical diction and its concomitant modular mode, what appears as some degree of allusive variation within a spectrum capable of approaching extreme intertextuality. Through the use of the inherently allusive words in Japanese verse in any form opting for a classical register, the process of composition and reading themselves entail engagements that depend on this possibility of extreme intertextuality even when a particular poem may appear quite mundane and descriptive, often triggered by one classical word placed in an otherwise modern mise en scène. Though one might say the waka and subsequent forms of classical Japanese poetry and their modern variants evolved autonomously and just are as they are, they should be viewed as subject to historical forces and, as established genres within the modern state, as subject to conscious exploitation. Lyric poetry depends on some form of an illusion of displaced, shared or ambiguous agency. Like the Japanese Great East Asian Sphere of Co-prosperity, itself designed to camouflage Japanese imperial ambitions roots in racial and cultural supremacism, Japanese poetry was a source of internal support for Japanese and a cause of blinding ambition, as the rhetoric of Japanese greatness and a vision of imperial light and grandeur subjected citizens emotionally. The aggression made possible by this emotional ideology of Japanese superiority depended on the media’s close censorship and shaping of reality, but also on poetry’s important role in providing a malleable cultural medium, a means of aestheticizing war not simply by describing nature, but by offering a further mechanism of interchangeable parts, further alienating Japanese subjects from forming points of resistance, to reverse the imperialist road to doom. The cultural gamble inherent to the extreme intertextuality and symbolic-ideological insularity created by the dominant classical poetics revived in the “Returning to Japan” movement in support of Japanism and war, created a symbolic transcendence into a “Japanese” realm of meaning-production. One can even say the problem with Japanese imperialism was that the nationalism on which it was based required too much background reading; to appreciate a waka one really must have read at least several hundred to get a feel for the form and the various poetic phrases, associations, and figurative devices. The malleability exists, and after the war, just as easily, poetry in traditional forms was written in the name of peace, but they still stand ready to aestheticize and emotionally move, if not nationalize, the populace.

Notes 1 This chapter originally appeared in an earlier form as “Nativist Legacies of Desinicization and Nationalist Sentiment in Poetry during the Second Sino-­ Japanese War,” Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 12 no. 1, (March 2011): 43–61. 2 Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990), 102.

106  Nativist legacies of desinicization and nationalist sentiment 3 See Slavoj Žižek, The Plague of Fantasies (London and New York: Verso, 1997), 75–81. 4 David Hawkes, Ideology (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), 97. 5 Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney, Kamikaze, Cherry Blossoms, and Nationalisms: The Militarization of Aesthetics in Japanese History (Chicago: University Of Chicago Press, 2002). 6 Žižek, The Plague of Fantasies, 111–13. 7 Hideo Naitou, Taiwan: A Unique Colonial Record (Tokyo: Kokusai Nippon Kyokai, 1937–1938). 8 Katsumi Tanaka, Daitōasensō shibun-shū (Great East Asian War Poetry Collection) (Kyoto: Shingakusha, 2006), 86–87. All translations from this and other Japanese sources are mine. 9 Christopher Coker, The Future of War: The Re-enchantment of War in the Twenty-­first Century (London: Blackwell, 2004), 66. 10 Tanaka, Daitōasensō shibun-shū, 136. 11 Ibid., 140. 12 Coker, The Future of War, 65. 13 See Dean Brink, “Resisting Imperial Jouissance: The Transideological Line in Recent American Antiwar Poetry,” Canadian Review of American Studies 43, no. 1 (2013): 1–22. 14 See Dean Brink, “Intertexts for a National Poetry: The Ideological Origins of Shintaishi” (PhD diss., University of Chicago, 2003), 160–193, 304–348. 15 Katsuichi Honda, “From the Nanjing Massacre to American Global Expansion: Reflections on Japanese and American Amnesia,” The Asia-Pacific Journal Vol. 7, issue 5, no. 5, last modified January 28, 2009, www.japanfocus. org/-Honda-Katsuichi/3036. 16 Junichiro Kisaka, sum. in Kōji Eizawa, “Daitōakyōeiken” no shisō (“Great East Asian Sphere of Co-prosperity” Thought) (Tokyo: Kōdansha, 1995), 211–12. 17 Zelijko Cipris, “Introduction,” in Tasuzō Ishikawa, Soldiers Alive (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2003), 4–6. 18 Ibid., 6–7. 19 Ibid., 10. 20 Herbert P. Bix, “From Nanjing 1937 to Fallujah 2004: War Crimes in Perspective,” The Asia-Pacific Journal Vol. 2, issue 5, no. 2, last modified May 1, 2004, http://apjjf.org/-Herbert-P.-Bix/1854/article.html. 21 Transl. by Ben-Ami Shillony, qtd. in Steve Rabson, Righteous Cause or Tragic Folly: Changing Views of War in Modern Japanese Poetry (Ann Arbor: Center for Japanese Studies, University of Michigan, 1998), 296. 22 Eizawa, “Daitōakyōeiken” no shisō, 10. 23 Ibid., 22–23. 24 Ibid., 207. 25 Ibid., 210. 26 Ibid., 207. 27 Tanaka, Daitōasensō shibun-shū, 4–7. 28 Rabson, Righteous Cause or Tragic Folly, 195–96. 29 Ibid., 261. 30 Gyofu Soma, “Kokumin satoshi dōin kōshin fu” (General mobilization of citizens march), Tokyo Asahi shinbun, no. 18478, September 19, 1937. 31 “Elementary school student haiku” (column installment no. 91), Tokyo Asahi shinbun, January 4, 1938. 32 Rabson, Righteous Cause or Tragic Folly, 7; Cipris, “Introduction,” 11, 18. 33 Rabson, Righteous Cause or Tragic Folly, 215–17. 34 For an introduction to this school, see: Kevin M. Doak, Dreams of Difference: The Japan Romantic School and the Crisis of Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994).

Nativist legacies of desinicization and nationalist sentiment  107 35 Tanaka, Daitōasensō shibun-shū, 278. Available here: http://cogito.jp.net/tanaka/ tairikuenbo/tairikuenbo-0020.JPG. 36 Hiroshi Yamakawa, Shishū: Furukuni (Poetry Collection: The Ancient Country) (Tokyo: Mahoroba Monographs, 1943), accessed July 20, 2009, http://libwww. gijodai.ac.jp/cogito/library/ya/yamakawahiroshi-Furukuni.html. 37 Hisao Honma, Nihon bungaku zenshi maki 11, Meiji bungaku-shi. Gekan (Complete history of Japanese literature, vol. 11: History of Meiji literature, vol. 2) (Tokyo: Tokyodo, 1949), 28, 168–184; Rabson, Righteous Cause or Tragic Folly, 48, 78. 38 Tanaka, Daitōasensō shibun-shū, 346–47. 39 Helen Hardacre, Shinto and the State, 1868–1988 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989). 40 See Chapter 1. 41 Brink, “Intertexts,” 25–29. 42 Ryusaku Tsunoda, et al., Sources of Japanese Tradition, Vol. 2 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1958), 34. 43 Ibid., 22. 44 Ibid., 33. 45 Ibid., 34. 46 Akira Arai, Nihon inbun-shi (History of Japanese Versification) (Tokyo: Ōfūsha, 1979), 135–36. 47 Ibid., 137. 48 Yamakawa, Shishū: Furukuni, 137–39. 49 Cipris, “Introduction,” 26–30. 50 Slavoj Žižek, On Violence: Six Sideways Reflections (New York: Picador, 2008), 1–2. 51 Ibid., 2. 52 Tanaka, Daitōasensō shibun-shū, 336. 53 Yamakawa, Shishū: Furukuni, 7. 54 Ibid., 44. 55 Yamakawa, Shishū: Furukuni, 162.

Bibliography Arai, Akira. Nihon inbun-shi (History of Japanese Versification). Tokyo: Ōfūsha, 1979. Bix, Herbert P. “From Nanjing 1937 to Fallujah 2004: War Crimes in Perspective.” The Asia-Pacific Journal Vol. 2, issue 5, no. 2. Last modified May 1, 2004. http:// apjjf.org/-Herbert-P.-Bix/1854/article.html. Brink, Dean. “Intertexts for a National Poetry: The Ideological Origins of Shintaishi.” PhD diss., University of Chicago, 2003. ———. “Resisting Imperial Jouissance: The Transideological Line in Recent American Antiwar Poetry.” Canadian Review of American Studies 43, no. 1 (2013): 1–22. Cipris, Zelijko. “Introduction.” In Tasuzō Ishikawa, Soldiers Alive. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2003. Coker, Christopher. The Future of War: The Re-enchantment of War in the Twenty-­ first Century. London: Blackwell, 2004. Doak, Kevin M. Dreams of Difference: The Japan Romantic School and the Crisis of Modernity. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994. “Elementary school student haiku” (column installment no. 91), Tokyo Asahi shinbun, January 4, 1938. Eizawa, Kōji. “Daitōakyōeiken” no shisō (“Great East Asian Sphere of Co-prosperity” Thought). Tokyo: Kōdansha, 1995. Giddens, Anthony. The Consequences of Modernity. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990.

108  Nativist legacies of desinicization and nationalist sentiment Gyofu Soma, “Kokumin satoshi dōin kōshin fu” (General mobilization of citizens march), Tokyo Asahi shinbun, no. 18478, September 19, 1937. Hardacre, Helen. Shinto and the State, 1868–1988. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989. Hawkes, David. Ideology. London and New York: Routledge, 1996. Honda, Katsuichi. “From the Nanjing Massacre to American Global Expansion: Reflections on Japanese and American Amnesia.” The Asia-Pacific Journal Vol. 7, issue 5, no. 5. Last modified January 28, 2009. www.japanfocus. org/-Honda-Katsuichi/3036. Honma, Hisao. Nihon bungaku zenshi maki 11, Meiji bungaku-shi. Gekan. Tokyo: Tokyodo, 1949. Naitou, Hideo. Taiwan: A Unique Colonial Record. Tokyo: Kokusai Nippon Kyokai, 1937–1938. Ohnuki-Tierney, Emiko. Kamikaze, Cherry Blossoms, and Nationalisms: The Militarization of Aesthetics in Japanese History. Chicago: University Of Chicago Press, 2002. Rabson, Steve. Righteous Cause or Tragic Folly: Changing Views of War in Modern Japanese Poetry. Ann Arbor: Center for Japanese Studies, University of Michigan, 1998. Tanaka, Katsumi. Daitōasensō shibun-shū (Great East Asian War Poetry Collection). Kyoto: Shingakusha, 2006. Tsunoda, Ryusaku, et al. Sources of Japanese Tradition. Vol. 2. New York: Columbia University Press, 1958. Yamakawa, Hiroshi. Shishū: Furukuni (Poetry Collection: The Ancient Country). Tokyo: Mahoroba Monographs, 1943. Accessed July 20, 2009. cogito.jp.net/ library/ya/yamakawahiroshi-Furukuni.html. Žižek, Slavoj. On Violence: Six Sideways Reflections. New York: Picador, 2008. ———. The Plague of Fantasies. London and New York: Verso, 1997.

4 The long view of colonial regimes The Taiwan Tanka Association’s poetry of witness

Based on years of fieldwork, this chapter introduces the Taiwan Tanka Association (Taiwan kadan 台湾歌壇), a group of mostly elderly Taiwanese (born in the 1920–1930s), some younger Taiwanese and Japanese, and currently one indigenous Taiwanese as well as myself, who through a research grant found an excuse for joining the group (as I had a senryū association made up of Japanese Americans in Seattle). The Association meets once a month to share, critique, and study 31-mora Japanese-language tanka poems in a luncheon setting. Each month members email or send one tanka to the organizer, who then compiles an anonymized and numbered list from which participants will select two poems (a form is provided). At the luncheon, members read and discuss why they choose the poems they did (usually mostly praise), and occasionally offer constructive criticism. Out of these meetings, attended by nearly a hundred members of the Taipei branch (fewer in the Tainan meetings), a biannual journal called Taiwan kadan is published in colorful perfect-bound issues, including all tanka submitted each month, poems selected by members (some with commentary), and optional additional 12-poem sequences composed by each member. This format has the effect of gauging members’ tastes and political orientations, leading to the convergence of presentations of similar experiences, styles, and political orientations that nevertheless remain distinct (to the extent that one may second-guess whose poem was written by whom). Comments are then turned in through these forms (whether handwritten or typed), and they are in turn sent to the poets in a monthly roundup packet that contains a newsletter and the same list, now with names visible as well as which poet chose which poems, any publicity of general interest, and publications in which one’s selected poems may appear in a local Japanese newspaper. During the luncheon, some commentators may talk for 2 minutes or less while some for 10 or more—and can be quite entertaining in both the intonation and diction. There is a performative element present as these mostly native speakers—having grown up in Japanese Taiwan—in effect show off their mother tongue, or co-mother tongue along with Taiwanese. From entering the luncheon to leaving, everyone speaks primarily in Japanese, with occasional asides at tables between neighboring participants extending to Taiwanese, Mandarin, and English.

110  The long view of colonial regimes As elderly constitute the majority, members pay witness to a common understanding of a life of shifting geopolitical horizons with respect to the place of Taiwan in the world and changing governments. Tanka poetry exhibits an inclination for giving expression to social complications and subtle ironies in daily life. What immediately strikes one in this group is how many of the poets and poems include political and historical events and issues—not only reflecting colonial nostalgia vis-à-vis Taiwan’s special relationship with Japan, but referencing China, the United States (US), and travels around the world. Underpinning this political and global orientation is the way Taiwan became during martial law (1949–1987) a place from which many advocates of democracy dovetailed with the needs for relief for Japanese-era educated elites who would welcome escape, often to Europe or North America following overseas studies. Following a logic of dashed expectations after Taiwan was liberated from colonial rule, in short, the era of martial law (known also as the White Terror) sought to suppress both democracy-advocates (often arbitrarily labeled communists) and Japanese era-educated Taiwanese in general, and in the Taiwan Tanka Association one sees an overlap of pro-Japanese language, pro-democracy in Taiwan, and pro-Japan sentiments. Thus, it is natural to find many of the poets turn to tanka as a form of ideological redemption against the background of this history, which includes not only (if at all) the scars of Japanese colonialism, but rather residual ambivalence. More prominent are pro-democracy sorts of critiques of the excesses of the Kuomintang (KMT) in its 38 years of martial law and ongoing attempts to reify dominance in Taiwan (in many complicated forms that include various intrigue with China). Poetry in Japanese becomes in this context a “minor literature” in Deleuze and Guattari’s sense of collective political enunciation that deterritorializes (devalues and displaces) the apparatus of the White Terror and its resurfacing in KMT activities, including undemocratic covert arrangements with China even when it has become the opposition party. While articulating complicated postcolonial voices characterized by hybridity, the autopoietic element in this poetry functions to preserve the rationality of a group of elderly who recall a time before the KMT abuses, though also the past Japanese racial hierarchy, an unfortunate feature of all colonial contexts, which most seem to prefer to see beyond through the haze of familiarity with the colonial era.

Historical origins: The Taipei kadan in Cold War Taiwan The first issue of the Taipei kadan journal, published in January 1968, was edited by the founder, Chien-t’ang Wu 呉建堂 (1926–1998) (Japanese pen name Kohō Banri 孤蓬萬里). The original name, Taiwan kadan, was rejected by censors (though it is now used). The cover of the first volume features an anonymous tanka, surely aimed to appease censors during the period of

The long view of colonial regimes  111 martial law and the Cold War that saw political dissidents arrested, sent to political prisons and simply disappearing. The cover poem is: The first dream of the year is to chase away red bandits on the Mainland the national flag raising its color of a brighter day 初夢は / 共匪逐ひ出す / 大陸に / あがる國旗の / 白日の色1 Hatsuyume wa / kyōhi oidasu / tairiku ni / agaru kokki no/ hakujitsu no iro The phrase translated as “red bandits” (or “communist bandits,” Ch. gongfei; Jpn. kyōhi), is glossed aka (red) in furigana so as to firmly place red as a color to be suppressed politically. “Color of a brighter day” (or “color of the white sun”) refers to the canton of the Republic of China flag, which symbolizes a blue sky with a white sun (while the rest of the flag symbolizes red earth). The tanka both attacks communism and expresses an obligatory Republic of China expression of Sinocentric patriotism. Being written in Japanese, it implicitly transposes the “rising sun” of Japan’s red circle to a white sun of the Republic; however, most of the poems within this first volume are less obsequious and exhibit postcolonial irony and ambivalence. The issue opens with eight tanka on the topic of New Year’s card (年賀状) by Hsiao Ch’ing-Hsien (蕭慶賢). The opening tanka reads: Looking forward to the New Year approaching my daughters pester me to buy New Year’s cards 楽しみに待ちたる正月近づきて吾嫁々ネねだり年賀状を買ふ2 Tanoshimi ni machitaru shōgatsu chikaduite waga yomeyome ne nedari nengajō o kau It can be read as simply how the daughters want the cards themselves; however, as cards are primarily sent to other households by post, the poem’s underlying import is to express joy that even a daughter growing up in postcolonial Taiwan (in the 1960s) would embody a tradition that the poet enjoys: wanting to prepare and send out the cards. It is a very mild way of objectifying adherence to Japanese tradition and, in the context of martial law, an understated act of mild resistance (as would merely being a member of a Japanese poetry association). Hsiao’s second tanka builds on this scene, displaying the receipt of many New Year’s cards: When I open the letterbox by the gate New Year’s cards in all colors appear 門口のレターボツクスをわれ開けば色とりどりの年賀状出づ3 Kadoguchi no retābokkusu wo ware hirakeba irotoridori no nengajō idu

112  The long view of colonial regimes This situation implies continuity with Japanese and others in Taiwan who still—more than twenty years after Japanese rule—exchange New Year’s postcards. The Japanese New Year is a modern construct, reflecting the adoption of the solar calendar during the early Meiji period of intense Westernization, while the Chinese New Year now celebrated in Taiwan follows the lunar calendar. Still, the Japanese poetic tradition is built upon the temporal unfolding under the Chinese calendar and culture so that traces remain. For instance, in solar terms, New Years occurs near the winter solstice, the dead of winter; however, in lunar terms, it occurs as the harbinger of spring, with entirely different implications. Moreover, it is not a Chinese custom in Taiwan to exchange New Year’s cards of the Japanese variety. Rather, relationships are based on complicated exchanges (situated in the time scale of decades and lifetimes) of favors and especially cash placed in red envelopes. The amount reflects how close one is to a parent (or how generous a parent had been to the child) and school friends with whom one stays in touch, carefully keeping track of amounts received at weddings so as to repay a roughly equal amount in the course of a lifetime. By comparison, the Japanese New Year’s cards serve more as purely symbolic gestures or cultures of filiation (much as greeting cards in the US) and are outside of this core economic exchange among extended Chinese Taiwanese families and close friends. Thus the final tanka underscores a Chinese sense of measuring the relationship in the quality of the card: The thin card sent by a friend surely does not mean our friendship has grown thin わが友のうすきカードに寄せられし厚き友情とはに變らじ4 Waga tomo no usuki kādo ni yoserareshi atsuki yūjō to wa ni kawaraji Moreover, merely by exchanging a card, the friendship affirms a sort of ­alternative and shared culture—i.e. colonial nostalgia. In the following poem, Chen Tsai-Li (陳彩瓈) sees himself as the “Basho of Formosa”: For as long as I live I will be the Basho flower of Formosa blossoming crimson わがいのちあらむ限りは蓬莱の芭蕉の花ともくれなゐに咲く5 Waga inochi aramu kagiri wa hōrai no bashō no hanatomo kurenai ni saku While crimson (kurenai) in classical waka suggests a high rank in the court, it is also used in phrases in the Utsuhomonogatari (cited in the Kōjien entry) as a synonym for “tears of blood,” thus paralleling its use in Western literature where crimson is associated with blood as well as royalty. Thus this tanka clearly registers the possibility—even likelihood—of blossoming in blood or being subject to capital punishment or imprisonment for his passion for Japanese poetry. Interestingly, no less than half of his ten tanka

The long view of colonial regimes  113 refer to friends, suggesting solidarity. As such, it suggests an awareness of the risks and a willingness to accept self-sacrifice in this first issue printed. The following tanka by Chien-t’ang Wu, however, exhibits a colonial ambivalence less evident in the generation coming of age in the last decade of colonial rule: Being scolded for peeing on the New Year’s pine decorations that memory is from 30 years ago 門松にいばりを垂れて叱られしあの思ひ出も三十年昔6 Kadomatsu ni ibari wo tarete shikarareshi ano omoide mo misotose mukashi This tanka suggests both the sense of boyish playfulness (peeing on things) and rules of an era that no longer is maintained even materiality evident in Taiwan, so that the cultural value and the practice itself is alien to the poet today. The memory becomes a small incident—a sweet, perhaps slightly unsettling (being scolded) one—situated in the long view of history. Similarly, Wu also develops a sense of living a double life, with one foot in a bygone era: Even grilled until the round New Year’s rice cake puffs up it is a scene in a dream from the period of Japanese rule かがみ餅ふくらむまでに焼きたるも日據時代の夢のひとこま7 Kagami mochi fukuramu made ni yakitaru mo Nikkyo jidai no yume no hitokoma Here attention shifts from the slow-motion temporality of watching rice cakes expand to the sense of historical shifts much larger. This complex postcolonial temporality involved both isolated examples of practices suggesting continuity with the previous era and an almost fetishistic rediscovery of the moments of paying attention to them, to the point that they may both preserve and mask the postcolonial realpolitik, retreating into nostalgia while maintaining hope. The following is a rather daunting image woven into a New Year’s landscape and suggests an extremely sad, ironic, yet thorough grasp of loss and suppression under a violent dictatorship presented in the Cold War rhetoric of a “free China.” In the coded language of the color of madder, which is dark red, another year begins with the cross on the church serving implicitly as a symbol of the postponement of justice as well as hope during the New Year. Hanging over the cross decorating the church roof glaring dark red the first sunrise of the New Year 教会の屋根の上飾る十字架にかかる初日の茜まぶし8 Kyōkai no yane no he kazaru jūjika ni kakaru hatsuhi no akane mabushi

114  The long view of colonial regimes Dark red, the color of blood, filtered through this crucifix, can be seen as serving as a symbol of both 2.28 and ongoing violent suppression (death or imprisonment of dissidents) or a symbol the overplayed communist threat. “Decoration” (kazaru), applied to the cross perhaps devalues it as a symbol and in so doing foregrounds the sun, which can refer to Japan or Taiwan. This closing poem is the most satirical and daring among Wu’s twelve tanka. Though ironically burying criticism in playful language, Wu here apparently mocks the demagoguery of a great general who kills people testing artillery, obviously referring to Chiang Kai-shek. As the edge of a wave of people falls Mr. Artillery (a pseudonym) says “Wow, Wonderful!” 9 人波の一角崩れ現はれし大砲君（綽名）の「やあ！お目出度う」 Hitonami no ikkaku kuzure arawareshi taihō-kun (adana) no `yā! Omedetou’ More serious, unambiguous political poems will appear in his retrospective introduction to the Taiwan Man’yōshū 25 years later. Also appearing in the first edition’s monthly “draft” of poems from the group for the month of December 1967 is the following poem in which Wu delineates an in group (the poetry group) and an out group (unspecified) while claiming there to be no enemies. Though there are no enemies among the lot of us composing waka our fighting spirit is from the Man’yō Period 和歌を詠む輩に敵はなけれども競ふ心は萬葉の代より10 Waka wo yomu yakara ni teki wa nakeredomo kisou kokoro wa Man’yō no yo yori The poem, given its disavowal of enemies, underscores the postcolonial divide and takes sides at least within the poetry circle ethos with a “fighting spirit” associated with the Japanese Man’yōshū. This poem and others establish the group’s direction as a minoritarian voice protesting the injustices of the dictatorship. It also (anamorphically) can be read as contributing to the “fighting spirit” in the Cold War era cross-strait conflict and appeasing the government ideological demands made on the people of Taiwan. Even after official recognition of China shifted to the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in the 1970s, this ethos continues to influence members today when political incidents or natural disasters occur, as is explored in the following section and subsequent chapter.

The contemporary Taiwan Tanka Association Even beyond a postcolonial interpretative frame that too often may easily reduce complex situations to abstract ironies of colonial hybridity, one

The long view of colonial regimes  115 finds a lived postcolonial ambiguity in Taiwanese—as well as Japanese or anyone attending—who take comfort and pleasure in composing poems in Japanese in the context of life in Taiwan. The elder Taiwanese majority are especially inclined to mediate current events or experiences with an eye on historical precedents, and younger poets of all national backgrounds seem influenced and inspired by this ethos, reinforced in the group through the leadership, implied common historical orientation, and the example set by the older generations. Poets present their own poem anonymously in a monthly numbered list sent out by email or mail. They then meet to judge each other’s work by choosing two poems to discuss as the mic is passed around after eating at monthly Sunday luncheons. The luncheons are in effect poetry contests with no announced topics for composition, and small prizes are awarded at the end for the poets whose poem received mention by fellow poets the most number of times. Things written into these tanka may be taken very broadly to mean ­v irtual constructs, indexed material objects, as well as actual events, which may date from colonial times to the recent student Sunflower Movement occupation of the legislature in Taiwan. The range of personal life-experiences of the mostly elderly members is shaped by a long view of history, while the things which trigger poetry and appear in it include both everyday objects as well as recurring political abstractions such as “democracy,” “colonialism,” “dictatorship,” “white terror,” “2.28” and “3.11.” All of these things reflect a shared inter-subjective matrix developed through individual participation in the writing group (as well as guidebooks and saijiki members may refer to independently), and for the majority, born in colonial Taiwan, a shared sense of history that is quite different from that of younger generations. As a formal conventional platform for presenting one’s ideas in the form of a dignified linguistic artifice, tanka may as such empower the personal message, whether it be a sense of being haunted by historical circumstances or praising the joy of life with spouses and grandchildren. One may call this a mastery of intertextual associations not to specific poems but rather to a typology of associations forged over time with immanent renderings of known associations rather than trans-textual affiliations with specific intertexts. Moreover, within the group a common ethos appears to affirm each poet’s personal historical orientation, a humanism that allows for diversity but which in practice may be understood as a collective affirmation of the traumatic conditions the older generation of members (still the majority) experienced as citizens first of the Japanese Empire and later of the Republic of China as banished from the mainland to gather its last vestiges in Taiwan. In retreating to Taiwan, it treated what was a nascent member of modern China not as a province but as an occupied island devoted to the task of “retaking the mainland.” It nationalized the island. Notably, both Japanese and Republic of China (ROC) regimes variously excluded Taiwanese from positions of power until after the longstanding challenges to oneparty rule finally led to the lifting of martial law (1987). By then, many of

116  The long view of colonial regimes the members of the Taiwan Tanka Association were already of retirement age. While Japanese excluded Taiwanese of the colonial generation from the most lucrative educational tracks which favored Japanese (privileged profiteers within the colonial hierarchy), the KMT excluded them because they were Japanese-­educated. Thus the group functions in part so as to reaffirm their shared sense of reality, albeit it perhaps be one of a minority of Taiwanese today: a group of often highly successful and dynamic members of Taiwanese society who today discover in each other a common ethos and solidarity that may be outside the realm of common understanding for many younger Taiwanese, but which for members is their lived historical reality. Within the historiographical procedure of writing poetry, not a few poets stand out for their recurring poems on political topics, and a majority of poets touch on political themes that assert historical memories and confront what may seem for them a contemporary suppression of historical conditions as they knew them. While the ideological positions taken in effect tend to whitewash Japanese injustices of the colonial period, some of the poems will touch on or even be focused on these ironies, going against the grain. With each choice of word, the poems take sides, stake positions, and assert a minoritarian reality and ethos associated with values for democracy and a refurbished Taiwan-Japanese intercultural exchange that forms an important locus for international relations. Such relations are evidenced by regular attendance by the Japanese representative office, the Japan Foundation, the Sankei shimbun, as well as many members’ affiliation with the Taiwan-Japan Friendship Association. Many other activities are documented in photos appearing appended in many issues of the Association journal, Taiwan kadan. Tanka presented in the Taiwan Tanka Association are usually written in a classical mode, that is, using classical (obsolete) kana orthography and conjugation of verbs and adjectives, as well as particle usage. It should be noted that the use of Tōyō Chinese characters, no longer taught in Japan but used everyday in Taiwan, makes it quite natural for elderly Taiwanese and long-term Japanese residents to use the complicated, older characters if they wish. Tanka here embody a capacity for presenting delicate affective responses to any situation and, like classical Japanese poetry, reflecting human affectivity in the external (often natural) world in an indirect, symbolic language. The established poetic matrix of associations is embodied in a vast corpus of tanka, extending from the Man’yōshū to contemporary poetry in Japan and especially Taiwan, for writing in Taiwan, represented in postwar times most prominently by the Taiwan kadan journal, which records poetry and commentary from both the Taipei main group meetings and the Tainan branch meetings. Joining the Taiwan Tanka Association When I first heard of the Taiwan Tanka Association I thought: amazing: a group made up mostly of Taiwanese is still writing poetry in Japanese. It was

The long view of colonial regimes  117 fairly easy to visit the Taiwan kadan on a Sunday luncheon, as there are always visitors, usually from Japan. They very early on even invited me to be a participating regular member; yet, I noticed that the representative of the group would always—when available—be sure to give a copy of his book in Japanese to Japanese visitors but, even after agreeing to be interviewed by me, he never though of offering me a copy.11 I took this as a sign of the special relationship he held with Japan, and Japanese and the dialogue with Japanese his book indeed embodied. In the interview, I also learned that he felt, according to his interpretation of history, betrayed by General Douglas MacArthur, who he said gave Taiwan to China without asking the Taiwanese. At the time simply an American citizen (now applying for dual citizenship), I explained that during the war the only relatives involved in the war were German, a pilot, and that my mother had herself been traumatized by Allied (American) bombers. This sort of admission had the effect of rendering my nationality more complicated and myself opaque, as I was an American citizen with an Axis family genealogy in ways parallel to Taiwanese born as citizens of the Japanese Empire but who now are Taiwanese. Taiwanese are subject to an ambiguous status, being both of autonomous Taiwan, known as the Republic of China, and claimed by China. In any case, most members who idealize Japan-Taiwan affiliations (some of whose write poems with “samurai” used in non-ironic ways) declined to be interviewed for the documentary film that would be titled Horizons of the Rising Sun: Postcolonial Nostalgia and Politics in the Taiwan Tanka Association Today (Dir. Brink, 2017). Whether it was due to shyness at having their views put up for display in a documentary film or due to the interviewer being an American, I may never know; however, my aim of understanding the varied experiences of Taiwanese in the group—­ especially those who had lived under so many different forms of rule and law in Taiwan (many born before 1930)—was reached. From submission to publication in the Taiwan Tanka Association To better understand the intersection of media with the Taiwan Tanka Association, I will briefly illustrate how the editing process within the context of the Association intersects with the publication of a biannual journal and the appearance of selected poems in Japanese newspapers (mostly in Taiwan) for the Japanese diaspora here and tourists. In general, the Association as a group and through individual cross-membership is indeed involved in Japan-Taiwan friendship associations and relations with governmental and media representatives both in Taiwan and Japan. A representative of the Taipei office that serves as a pseudo-consulate for Japan (parallel to the American Institute in Taiwan) and a reporter from the Sankei shimbun attend most luncheons each fourth Sunday and are treated as honored guests. I noticed that one of the poems I submitted was accidentally treated as a perfect example of a Japanese sensibility simply because I had used “stepping stones” to intimate a longing for my late mother, whose home had

118  The long view of colonial regimes had such stones. The process of submitting it, Miyake Noriko’s editing, and Kitajima Takeshi’s commentary together illustrate how Japanese poetry writing in groups may function in general—how building language competence goes hand in hand with the aestheticization of daily life as well as politics. In practice, it is as varied as each contributor. After trial and error, attempting to express a complicated feeling related to my late mother, I submitted my tanka for the July 2014 luncheon by email to Miyake Noriko: “母が踏み石の濃き苔刮げ後好きと教へも再び見えず” (After I scraped clean the thick moss off the stepping stones, my mom told me she liked it, and would never see it again). She asked me to explain what I meant, and I then replied with a clarification and a new version that reflected a new sense of the poem based on Miyake’s questions: “なき母が踏み石の苔好き知らず刮たり後再び見え ず” (I did not know my late mom liked the moss on the stepping stones I scraped clean and would never see it again). Miyake then replied with a detailed explanation of why a ga would be better served by a no (reflecting classical grammar) and the “suki” (like) replaced by a more literary “medeshi” (adore), where “the shi indicates a memory from the distant past,” Miyake emphasized. The final version, thanks to Miyake’s questions and suggestions became: “亡き母の愛でし踏み石の苔なるを知らず刮りて再びを見ず” (I did not know my late mom loved the moss grown on the stepping stones when I scraped them clean, never seen again). Then, to my surprise at the time, since my tankas are rarely chosen, it was selected by the teacher who offers comments at the end of each luncheon, Kitajima Takeshi (who also holds supplementary post-luncheon tanka lessons that I benefitted from greatly). His comments were printed in the journal, and the poem itself appeared in the local Japanese language newspaper. Thus I learned not only how to arrange modifiers in a tanka but how kind Miyake is to me and others, dedicating much time to the cultivation of tanka in Taiwan, and how poems are developed through the peer review process of the luncheons, and some going on to publication and wider distribution. All poems submitted also appear in the biannual journal, divided into Taipei and Tainan group sections.

Sunflower Movement tanka The Sunflower Student Movement (太陽花學運) is the name applied to the student-led occupation of the two legislative Yuans between March 18 and April 10, 2014, in protest against the absence of transparency and debate over the Cross-Strait Service Trade Agreement that was signed by President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九). After the student movement raised awareness of this subterfuge—which would if passed allow unfettered access by Chinese businesses to Taiwanese markets and land, affecting everyone—the real issue and demands focused not simply on opposing the agreement but on due process, which in simple terms means democratic openness and involvement of citizens with Taiwanese interests, whether or not Taiwanese would in such open debates choose unification or the status quo. However, it should be pointed out that student activists have been very active in recent years defending ­Taiwanese

The long view of colonial regimes  119 interests against land deals and expropriations made in the interest of profits for the wealthy (the Dapu 大埔 Incident), against the consolidation of media (which might create a depoliticized populace along the lines one finds in the post-­media monopoly US), and against nuclear power industry complex in Taiwan. Moreover, the Sunflower Movement indeed single-­handedly renewed faith in participatory government. Although citizens during the Ma Presidency were busy adjusting to skyrocketing real estate costs and inured by the constant onslaught of policies capitulating to Chinese interests and big money interests over those of the common majority in Taiwan, after the Movement, people’s support for President Ma sunk to new lows and opposition politicians trounced the Kuomintang in subsequent elections late in November 2014, which culminated in the election of Democratic Progressive Party (DPP 民進黨) candidate Tsai Ing-wen 蔡英文 as president in 2016. Poems from the July 2014 issue of the Taiwan kadan contain many allusions to the Sunflower Movement, such as these four tanka by Huang Po-chao (黄伯超 Kō Hakucho, b. 1926), which offer a general introduction to how poetry is used in this form in Taiwan today to speak to political events: The students and all displaying the sunflower symbol of freedom and democracy are the hope of Taiwan サン・フラワー自由民主のシンボルとかかげし学徒ら台湾の希望 San furawā jiyū minshu no shinboru to kakageshi gakuto-ra Taiwan no kibō The cries of the students seizing a victory for freedom and democracy in Taiwan moves many people 台湾の自由民主を勝ちとらむ学徒らの叫び諸人動かす Taiwan no jiyū minshu wo kachitoramu gakuto-ra no sakebi sho hito ugokasu Anxious over where the country is heading students wave sunflowers and shout for reform 台湾の行く先憂ふる学徒らはひまはり振りて改革叫ぶ Taiwan no yukusaki ureuru gakuto-ra wa himawari furite kaikaku sakebu Obstinately abandoning the will of the people we live with a government turning to the communist mainland かたくなに民意しりぞけ共産の大陸たよる政府にくらし12 Katakuna ni min’i shirizoke kyōsan no tairiku tayoru seifu ni kurashi A younger poet in the group, He Jiao-dong (Nan Chō-tō 何朝棟), maintains dramatic tension in a 12-poem sequence in support of the students, illustrating various aspects and sides in the Sunflower Movement scenario that played out in the legislature building. In the first poem, he writes: Like lost children they drive the runaway horse driver where light does not reach an island of darkness

120  The long view of colonial regimes 闇のしま光入らず暴れ馬人を駆り立て迷子の如く13 Yami no shima hikari hairazu abare-uma-bito wo karitate maigo no gotoku This dense, playful tanka layers puns on children (the students) driving the “runaway horse driver” (abare-uma-bito), as abare-uma means “runaway horse” and uma-bito means “driver.” The horse (馬) of course is a reference to President Ma Ying-jeou. The students are depicted as living in a Taiwan of darkness in which they are unable to find their parents (maigo) and ­attempt to “drive” (which can also mean “hunt down”) the driver. As in other verses in this sequence, light is used to refer to enlightening the lawmaking body and awakening the public in a period when democracy has taken on the neoliberal model of lawmakers first pleasing corporations and engaging in backroom deals while ignoring the interests of ordinary voting constituencies. The protests themselves, and subsequent elections results ousting the KMT, are a sign that a more vibrant democracy remains alive in Taiwan. He Jiao-dong (何朝棟 Nan Chō-tō) How enchanting the lively spirits occupying the legislature like falcons 隼のように国会を占拠するいきな心に魅了されたり14 Hayabusa no yō ni kokkai wo senkyo suru ikina kokoro ni miryō-saretari The violent police scatter young blood sitting in protest having forced themselves into the legislature 総理府へ突っ込み入り座り込む若き血散らす暴力警官15 Sōrifu e tsukkomi iri suwarikomu wakaki chi chirasu bōryoku keikan Although it seems to suggest an ambivalent critique of the students, the point of the students was to demand open debate and public discussion instead of allowing the government to make a major decision concerning a free trade agreement behind closed doors. The occupation can be seen both in the sense of the lineage of World Trade Organization (WTO) protests against similar neoliberal state-to-state primarily economic agreements that impact all citizens but are treated as corporate interests and in the sense of cross-strait issue as a measure of Taiwanese sovereignty in relation to China. Thus both “like falcons” and “having forced themselves into the legislature” suggest the students’ courage and justified righteousness. In the second verse, an idiomatic usage of verb translated as “forced themselves” may have suggestions of sexual intercourse, so that by extension the word translated as “violent” used in the expression “domestic violence” vaguely places the police in the role of the violent husband catching the students having an affair with the legislature. He Jiao-dong 何朝棟 Nan Chō-tō Even surrounded by police without abandoning modesty

The long view of colonial regimes  121 the student leader is resolute 警察に囲まれつつも慎みを忘れず学生リーダー毅然と16 Keisatsu ni kakomaretsutsu mo tsutsushimi wo wasurezu gakusei rīdā kizen to This poem implicitly defends the ethical position of the student leaders against calls in previous widely-publicized events where college students dared to speak their mind to officials and were scolded like children rather than responded to as adults.17 One editorial, commenting on the counter-­ demonstrations by KMT officials, wrote: “the KMT rally became a mass campaign for former Taipei EasyCard Corp chairman Sean Lien (連勝文), the KMT’s candidate for the Taipei mayoral election, with Lien urging supporters to use their votes to ‘teach those who attempted to challenge ‘the system’ a lesson’ in the year-end elections.”18 Lien lost the election in a backlash against the KMT for losing touch with the needs of the people in its rush both toward an American model of neoliberalist plutocracy and crossstrait economic unification. These poems on the Sunflower Student Movement and many more reflect the sentiment of the majority of Taiwanese, who were disillusioned by the Ma Administration’s push for drastic changes in cross-strait relations without any public dialogue. Like the World Trade Organization (WTO) meetings that circumvent democratic debate by creating neoliberal coalitions only at the level of political and corporate leaders, a similar agreement was being pushed through that would alter the lives of everyday Taiwanese by changing the status quo. The students were the only ones to stand up. This movement awakened the nation to a new hope for a return to a more democratic path inclusive of public debate, so that it may be reflected in policymaking. More generally, in Taiwan people typically use “blue” to refer to pro-­ unification parties and “green” to pro-independence parties. This symbolism is latent in Kuo Ching-lai’s (Kaku Seirai 郭清来, b. 1931) poem from 2015: Green fills the blue sky on the island of palm trees waiting for the day in which the time comes that we are waiting for 藍空に緑あまねく椰子の島待ちに待ちたる時来たる日ぞ19 Aisora ni midori amaneku yashi no shima-machi ni machitaru toki kitaru hi zo Kuo told me at the December luncheon that “island of palm trees” (yashi no shima) refers to Taiwan and “time” (toki) here does not refer solely to the November 2014 elections, in which the “green” parties won in a landslide, but rather to a long-term future time of independence.

Cheng Lang-yao and others Cheng Lang-yao (鄭埌耀 or Tei Ryōyō) has been part of the Association since 1980 and includes poems reflecting a broad spectrum of political

122  The long view of colonial regimes topics, sometimes drawing on his experience coming of age under Japanese rule. He served as the official Representative of the group prior to the current one. The following tanka appeared in the original Taiwan Man’yōshū 台湾万葉集 (1994) and underscored the complexity of postcolonial life for Taiwanese of his generation: Cheng Lang-yao (Tei Ryōyō 鄭埌耀) Even Taiwanese were made to sing “We, Your Faithful Subjects” while driven around the training grounds as armed junior high students みたみ

「皇 民われ」と台湾人も歌はされ武装の中学生演習場駆くる20 “Mitami ware” to Taiwan-jin mo utawasare busō no chūgakusei enshū-­ba kakuru This tanka speaks to the age of indoctrination in Taiwan when it was part of the Japanese Empire. Although elementary school songs would have played an even earlier role, here the poet recalls training drills in junior high while carrying rifles and singing military songs (gunka). “We, Your Faithful Subjects” (“Mitami ware”) is one of many propagandistic songs sung to romanticize and glorify Japanese imperialism and instill in subjects bodily intensities and ahistorical jouissance that would sustain the ongoing battles incited by colonial expansionism and within Taiwan to inhibit the formation of any opposition to it on the part of Taiwanese. Here Cheng perfectly captures the sense of how propaganda is embodied first as song preparing one’s body for the naturalization of marching armed and then as one who is mindlessly ready to serve in the name of the emperor for any aim at all. His tanka then becomes a form of decolonizing and clarifying the mind. Cheng wields his philosophical acumen to disentangle the colonial steps in engendering subjects and thus comes to oversee the colonial apparatus like no other poet currently in the group. As Chen Pei-feng demonstrates in an extensive study of changing assimilation policies during the period of Japanese rule, the emphasis on cultural assimilation coupled with discrimination policies (especially Japanese language-learning) while carefully limiting educational opportunities for Taiwanese in terms of numbers allowed advanced education and the quality of education in comparison with colonists led to resentment from the 1920s on, since this policy reduced access to the one aspect of Japanese rule that many favored: modernization.21 Resentment also arose toward the elevation of Japanese culture over Han culture22, creating the contradictions that in the period of Taisho Democracy led to Taiwanese activism by petitioning for representation in politics and even self-rule. Such groups were disbanded as Japan entered into the Second Sino-Japanese War, yet in these confrontations with Japan and the colonial administration (sometimes at odds with one another) one finds the origins of modern Taiwanese consciousness: at

The long view of colonial regimes  123 the nexus of identities and practices including the imagery and material life of modernity (cafés, films, trains, advanced agriculture), Japanese language and culture, Han Taiwanese language and cultures. Thus Chen argues that this pattern from the Taishō period maintained and in effect was fine-tuned in the wartime period of intense imperialization and cultural assimilation while always limiting access to equality in education and thus job opportunities (especially in lucrative fields), regardless of the purely rhetorical language of racial assimilation. Chen argues that assimilation policy continued to discriminate and degrade Taiwanese as the ruled 23 and attributes the confusion of Taiwanese identity to this assimilation policy implementation. He implies that Taiwanese lost their Chinese identities due to this saturated media propaganda that filled organizations and clubs as well as schools and civic spaces.24 Finally, Chen argues that assimilation in Taiwan reflected deceptive tactics to appease Taiwanese while maintaining a racial hierarchy, itself a product of the National Polity discourse (Kokutairon) with colonial policy being a creative adaptation of it (ch. 8). In light of this work by Chen Pei-feng, from the standpoint of internal Taiwanese politics, in contrast to the imperial policies at the level of the Empire as explored in Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney’s Kamikaze, Cherry Blossoms, and Nationalisms, one can see that the analysis of the call for Taiwanese to make sacrifices and be given “the equal right to death”25 does not reflect the complexity of the awareness of being excluded as colonial subjects by Taiwanese, regardless of such slogans. Although “Prime Minister Konoe Fumimaro’s infamous declaration of July 23, 1940” of “‘one hundred million, one soul’ became the slogan encouraging all and every ‘Japanese’ to ‘truly dedicate themselves to the emperor,’”26 the poetry of the Taiwan Poetry Association speaks to the success of language learning but the lingering resentment or complex, ambivalent feelings. For instance, a poem by Ouyang Kaidai (Ōyan Kaidai 欧陽開代 b. 1935) reads: Heroic souls of the chrysanthemum to the west and eagle to the east all sink to the Palace of the Dragon King at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean 西の菊東の鷲の英霊の沈める太平洋の竜宮永遠に27 Nishi no kiku higashi no washi no eirei no shizumeru Taiheiyō no ryūgū eien ni This tanka (bordering on satire) declines to partake in the solemnity of a Yasukuni Shrine or Arlington Cemetery, and instead foregrounds a Japanese mythic tale of an underwater palace made famous in the folk story Urashima Tarō, who returns from the undersea palace (300 years in the future) to find all he knew gone. Ouyang imagines all the dead congregating there, with “sinking” here implying the war was a waste. It may be read as an understated antiwar poem.

124  The long view of colonial regimes Chen Siou-Fong (Chin Shōfū 陳秀鳳) reflects the role of music in colonial nostalgia and her ambivalence toward long-distance nationalist sentiment and the importance of questioning it. Chen Siou-Fong (Chin Shōfū 陳秀鳳) At Yasukuni Shrine at the top of their lungs the young singing “If I Go to Sea” I recollect dark days 靖国で声高らかに「海行かば」唄ふ若人に偲ぶ杳き日28 Yasukuni de koe takaraka ni “Umiyukaba” utau wakōdo ni shinobu kuraki hi “Dark[er]” (kuraki 杳き) suggests not only darkness but depth or distance underscored by “recollect.” The song “If I go to Sea” invokes kamikaze pilots going to sea to die and thus a sad occasion. Yet the sadness in this beautiful verse is more complicated and embodies a fear of history repeating the mistakes of militarism, and dying for vague ideals asserted in this ­pseudo-syllogistic song’s lyrics: If I go to sea my body will wash ashore. If I go to the hills my body will grow in the grass. But if I die by the Emperor I would not think twice.

海行かば 水漬く屍 山行かば 草生す屍 大君の辺にこそ死なめ かえりみはせじ29

As Taiwan historian Zhou Wanyao writes, “Japanese war language is a special phenomenon. During wartime Taiwan this vocabulary became ubiquitous, part of everyday life.”30 Moreover, Zhou writes: As war involves death and injury, it is not something beautiful; however, during that time, we can see colonial administrators and news media apply a particular language coating military service and war in a romantic, splendid and even transcendental coloring.31 Indeed, the importance of music in Japanese indoctrination cannot be overemphasized. At the year-end celebration for the Taiwan Tanka Association (ushering in 2015), when the song “Battleship March” (軍艦 行進曲) was summoned by one poet from the karaoke machine, nearly all of the older generation sang along with the song—though this was not the case with popular love songs of the time. This indicates the degree to which they were indeed thoroughly saturated by such martial music during the war.

The long view of colonial regimes  125 Reflecting on colonial life, here is another tanka by Cheng Lang-yao 鄭埌耀: I thought the emperor was a god and do not believe that his days were empty 天皇を神と思ひし彼の日びを空虚なりしとわれは思はず32 Ten’nō wo kami to omoishi kare no hibi wo kūkyo nari shi to ware wa omowazu That the poet speaks of the emperor in such casual terms, dictating who and what he is, and referring to him as “kare” (informal “he”) as opposed to the polite “konata” or using honorifics, not to mention speaking of his days using the very ordinary word “hibi,” has the effect of undermining the surface statement that “I … do not believe that his days/were empty” Moreover, using kare (he) and ware (I) in a parallel relation, emphasized by the “rhyme” at the beginning of the last verse of the upper part (kamiku) and the lower part (shimoku) of the poem, respectively, suggests equality as men. Thus this poem reflects the devaluation of the Showa Emperor at the end of the war from God to man, while at the same time expressing postcolonial ambivalence and a pro-democratic ethos. It is playful and takes back in a light (almost humorous) way the sense of not having been fooled by a Japanese emperor as a god, but still not against the emperor as a person. Moreover, to state he was a god yet did not live empty days plays on the paradox of some definitions of gods as being omnipresent entities that do not hold stable form in a particular place and time. Thus the negative (“do not believe”) maintains the possibility of absence, not merely negation of an absence, so that “I … do not believe … empty” still conjures the possibility of emptiness, if only because it is couched as one’s thoughts and subject to doubt and debate. Cheng Lang-yao, who wrote the poem opening this section (published in 1994) on armed training exercises as a junior high student during the colonial period (“Even Taiwanese were made to sing ‘We the Imperial Subjects’”), more recently (in 2007) composed a tanka again referring to rifles, suggesting it is a recurring motif in his poetic explorations: Having butchered people on the battlefield the government now disposes of the Arisaka Type 38 Bolt-Action Infantry Rifles their gleam gone いくさば

戦 場 に人殺めしや払ひ下げの三八歩兵銃光返さず33

Ikusaba ni hito ayameshi ya haraisage no san hachi hohei jū hikari kaesazu What is translated as “their gleam gone” is more literally “the light does not return,” which for the peer commentator Lin Jhen-Huei (Lin Teikei 林禎慧) suggests stories in its “dull light.”34 The ambivalence toward the rifle—the main one used by the Japanese army from 1905 through the end of World War Two (WWII)—foregrounds a historical technocratic orientation that

126  The long view of colonial regimes is bound up in the very elaborate name of the rifle and its liquidation from Taiwanese storage (used as late as the 1970s in high school military training classes around Taiwan).35 In 2011, Cheng Lang-yao (Tei Ryōyō 鄭埌耀) also devoted five poems to the uncomfortable topic of the 2.28 massacre in a selection title “More thoughts on 2.28” (“二二八にまた思ふ”), which also serves as a symbol for nearly 40 years of martial law. Cheng Lang-yao (Tei Ryōyō 鄭埌耀) It is a sign vividly standing stained in blood, the dreadful site at Yutoku Akira Park 標識は鮮やかに立ち血の染みし跡地凄愴 湯徳章公園36 Hyōshiki wa azayaka ni tachi chi no shimishi atochi seisō Yutoku Akira kōen This tanka expresses anger toward the KMT as embodied in the symbol of a statue of Sun Yat-sen not in any park but in the Yutoku Akira Park that is situated at the center of a rather large roundabout surrounded in part by colonial architecture, including the National Museum of Taiwan Literature. The park, officially called People’s Livelihood Green Park (民生緑園), is named after one of Sun Yat-sen’s three principles of democracy. Though he was not personally to blame for the murderous events of 2.28, that his figure and thought was used by the same party that executed Taiwanese after 2.28 and that this park was used as an execution ground makes the statue particularly unwelcome. That a pro-independence group on February 22, 2014, actually brought the statue down suggests the sentiments presented in this poem were shared by others, who spray-painted various words in bright red and “ROC OUT” in white over red.37 One of the common beliefs expressed by Association members was that the Japanese rulers were at least better at preserving public order—and they extend this comparison with the KMT to the present, as in this 2011 tanka, also by Cheng Lang-yao: Used to order when a Japanese territory, the statesman believing he is protecting the people does not have a clue 日領時の秩序に馴れて為政者は民護るものと思ひし迂闊38 Nichi-ryō-ji no chitsujo ni narete iseisha wa min moru mono to omohishi ukatsu The above verse suggests in the context of the sequence theme of 2.28 that order during the period of Japanese rule was more far-reaching and the people’s interests better served. It also suggests a divide between Taiwanese who lived under Japanese rule and the newcomers who arrived after the civil war (regardless of Taiwanese having been second-class citizens and other problems of living under colonial rule). The following tanka is more general,

The long view of colonial regimes  127 implying a myriad of cultural differences, not only this very important one involving families and relationships between people. Cheng Lang-yao (Tei Ryōyō 鄭埌耀) Being swept up by the red envelop culture of the continent flusters those of us bred Japanese 大陸の紅包文化に席捲されて日本育ちの周章狼狽39 Tairiku no kōhō bunka ni sekken-sarete Nihon sodachi no shūshō rōbai The first poem below suggests that the KMT does not really care about Taiwan or “martial law reparations,” but uses it to manipulate a favorable outcome for it through cross-strait relations. It suggests that democracy at home is thus being weakened. Cheng Lang-yao (Tei Ryōyō 鄭埌耀) In the ongoing struggle between the KMT and the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) martial law reparations in Taiwan are just KMT sophistry 国共の闘争の続き戒厳令賠償は台湾がと国民党の詭弁40 Kokkyō no tōsō no tsuduki kaigenrei baishō wa Taiwan ga to kokumintō no kiben Taking pleasure in scoffing at human life Chiang Kai-shek constantly retouched prose to include execute execute 人命を弄する快感蒋介石は死刑死刑としきり加筆する41 Jinmei o rōsuru kaikan Shōkaiseki wa shikei shikei to shikiri kahitsu suru Also writing on the topic of the period of White Terror is Huang Hua-yi (Kō Kayū 黃華浥), who records others’ experiences: For only just taking part in a student demonstration penal servitude for those twenty-three years ただただに学生デモに参加のみで有期懲役をあな二十三年42 Tadatada ni gakusei demo ni sanka nomi de yūki chōeki wo ana nijūsan-nen Marx, you should know, thousands of youths were killed reading your Das Kapital な

な

マルクスよ汝は知るや汝の「資本論」読みし若者幾千殺さるを43 Marukusu yo na wa shiru ya na no “Shihon-ron” yomi shi wakamono ikusen korosaru wo

128  The long view of colonial regimes Each month, depending on current events, such political poems will appear in the Association meetings as well as in the biannual journal. Cheng Langyao also composed the following poem for the victims of the 3.11 disaster: have the Gods abandoned all reason in allowing such suffering after so long ceasing hostilities and wishing only for peace 44

Kotowari wo wasureshi kami ka ya isakawazu heiwa nomi negau wo kaku mo itamuru

Tsai Kun-tsan—current representative Tsai Kun-tsan (Sai Konsan 蔡焜燦) is the current official Representative of the Taiwan Tanka Association and an enthusiastic supporter of all things Japanese. He is by far the most famous member, at least to Japanese, for he wrote a book in Japanese that is still in print: Taiwanese People and リップンチェンシン the Japanese Spirit—Japanese! Please Be Proud 『台湾人と日 本 精 神 — 日本人よ胸を張りなさい』.45 The ironic tone of this title is indeed shared by many of the members of the Tanka Association, especially those members who are particularly close to Tsai. The irony, simply put, is that, for Tsai, the Japanese of today no longer are strong, no longer play a leadership role they should. This is not only in terms of symbolic power and national pride but military strength as well. The Taiwanese point of view suggested by the Taiwanese pronunciation gloss on “Japanese spirit” (Rippun Jenshin) in the title of his book reflects, he said, that he wanted both Taiwanese and Japanese to be proud of their countries. He also believes that Japan, beyond and in its alliance with the US, should play more of a leadership role in Asia. He also has served as the president of the Taiwan Lee Teng-hui Democratic Association (台湾李登輝民主協会の会長), and like Lee, has visited the Yasukuni Shrine, famous for memorializing not only soldiers but war criminals, and causing great controversy in Asia. In order to remain focused on the Association, we will not go into some of his controversial statements regarding the Comfort Woman issue. It appeared in the abovementioned book and later essays that merely reflect his personal interpretations based on following limited first-hand experiences and rightwing Japanese positions on such issues. Yet he was even quoted in an extremely rightwing Japanese comics that was known for distorting Taiwanese history, namely Neo Gōmanism Manifesto Special—On Taiwan (新・ゴーマニズム宣言SPECIAL 台湾論). If you examine the quote and argument, however, Tsai presents a generalization based on his assumptions made after having conversations with a few Taiwanese women, and he is by no means any authority on the issue. Thus what is of concern is how he, more than most (if not all) of the Taiwan Tanka Association members, can efface all colonial ambiguities and complexities and take such extreme positions at

The long view of colonial regimes  129 all, and allow their words to be treated as authoritative. It is a case of putting a particular experience of colonial nostalgia across time—akin to what Benedict Anderson calls “long-distant nationalism”—before the testimony of the women victimized by such wartime-fostered nationalism. As such, it exposes the way women’s lives continue to be devalued by abstract nationalist positions and those who would quote and reproduce them in various media. Turning to Tsai in his capacity as current official representative of the group, one must first note that his Japanese language skills are indeed amazing. When I interviewed him, he talked about liking to write haiku and senryū too. He writes in different forms for different thoughts and occasions. He said in Japanese, “I am a lover of Japan (愛日家), but also a lover of the Japanese language.” When asked about the colonial era, he felt slightly offended, explaining that one “didn’t come to one’s mind that one lived in a colony,” underscoring his defensiveness against anything possibly critical of Japan. “When I was born, I was born as a Japanese,” he said, merely stating a fact of being born and raised in a Japanese environment—but a fact that the KMT did not want to hear uttered during the period of martial law (1949–1987), the White Terror. Being suppressed so long, it now has surprising shock value. When I asked him about his experiences during and after the war, he said, “I was a Japanese soldier. After Japan lost, I was a little sad.” Later, Taiwan was returned to China, then ruled by the KMT, and, he said that they were told they were Chinese; however, he said he still feels awkward after 70 years, still “suffering.” He also sees Taiwan not as simply returned to China so much as General MacArthur having ordered the KMT army to occupy Taiwan. Tsai also talked about how he loves Japan and the Emperor, and how there were likely many like him in Taiwan. But, Stalin, Churchill, Roosevelt, and Chiang Kai-shek signed the Cairo Declaration and so stole Taiwan from Japan by forcing the return of Taiwan to China. “It wasn’t based on rule of law,” he said. He talked about how Taiwan was given to Japan in 1895 as a result of the Sino-Japanese War. “Taiwan was not taken by force,” he said. Thus he does not see the acquirement of Taiwan as a problem of Japanese aggression against China and Korea in the long view of history. He sees history, on this point, from the point of view of the Japanese Empire and its interests. But, as our conversation continued into the era of 2.28 and martial law, his reasons for siding with Japanese over Chinese become clearer. Asked about whether he knew anyone affected by the 2.28 or the White Terror, he said, “My brother was imprisoned for ten years at Green Island.” Miyake Noriko (三宅教子) helped to explain that it was simply for participating in a Japanese reading group. The following poem refers to the poet’s younger brother being sent, during the period of martial law, to prison for 10 years just for joining a Japanese reading group: Tsai Kun-tsan (Sai Konsan 蔡焜燦) Little brother when you talked about where the country was heading

130  The long view of colonial regimes it was because of your keen insight 弟よ国の行く末語る時汝が眼光の炯炯たりしを46 Otōto yo kuni no yukusue kataru toki na ga gankō no keikei-tari shi wo It should be pointed out that political topics in Japanese poetry in Taiwan are quite common. “2.28” is even a season word (kigo 季語) listed in the Taiwan Haiku Saijiki.47 One more poem from the selection presented by the poet during our interview: Tsai Kun-tsan (Sai Konsan 蔡焜燦) The blood of my ancestors flows in me not from China but as the blood of Taiwan! 御祖より流れ継ぎ来しわが血潮漢にあらずフォルモサの血ぞ 48 Mioya yori nagare-tsugi kishi waga chishio Kan ni arazu Forumosa no chi zo The poem includes a pun on 熱血漢 (“hot-blooded man”), as 熱血, “hotblooded (or passionate), but takes the Kan or Han 漢 character for its meaning of ‘Chinese’ or ‘Han [race]’.” It also may vaguely allude to the sentiment that it was the Chinese settlers who broke the land and pioneered life in Western Taiwan. The thrust of the statement is to affirm a separateness of Taiwan from China, part of a larger debate on the status of Taiwan (to put it very simply, whether it should be the nation or a province of a larger China). Tsai said “I love my country, Taiwan, where I will die. And I love Japan.” There is a clear sense in Tsai—not representative of others in the Taiwan Tanka Association—of clearly breaking all ties, even of family origins, with China. In the US, for instance, this would be considered a typical immigrant attempt at assimilation. However, in Taiwan, many Taiwanese—even pro-independence ones—can remember their ancestral addresses in China. Thus his statement of cutting ties with his Chinese heritage suggests a political posturing, saying “I am Taiwanese, not Chinese” to side with hopes of independence without any contradictions. The very need to write this poem suggests the postcolonial complexity of affective orientations.

Scooters and motorcycles Scooters are a ubiquitous part of Taiwanese life. Poets often use them as a measure of health, imagination, energy, and one’s body’s relation to the world, as in these two examples: 黄華浥 Huang Hua-yi Under blue skies an eighty year old man riding a scooter says with joy “this is living” 「生きている」とふ喜びに八十才爺のバイク走らす秋空の下49 ‘Ikite iru’ tou yorokobi ni hachijū-sai jī no baiku hashirasu akizora no shita

The long view of colonial regimes  131 荘進源 Chuang Chin-yuan Bragging about how responsive my hand, feet, and eyes are an eighty-year-old man rides around on a scooter 目手足の反応良しと自負をして八十路の爺バイク乗り回す50 Me teashi no han’nō yoshi to jifu wo shite yasoji no jī baiku norimawasu Riding a scooter, despite one’s advanced age, each poet sees the vehicle as a measure of one’s body’s place and efficacy in the world. The first finds self-affirmation and his jouissance in life. The second one is more understated, indicating surprise at the efficiency of one’s reflexes at eighty. Together, the poems suggest the fragility of our bodies and joy of adventure, and risk, within limits. The following tanka sees scooter-riding as an index of the weather and season, here combined with imperial waka collection organization around the seasons: 顔雲鴻 Yen Yün-Hung When flying off on your scooter into the piercing morning breeze you feel a chill and know autumn has come 朝風を切り行き飛ばすオートバイの涼しげなるに秋来ぬと知る51 Asakaze wo kiri-yuki tobasu ōtobai no suzushige naru ni akikinu to shiru This poem is certainly more classical, situating the event of “feeling a chill” as how you “know autumn has come,” a phrase often found in various forms in classical waka and modern tanka. Huang Min-Hui’s scooter sequence Huang Min-Hui (黃敏慧, or Kō Binkei, b. 1969) is of a younger generation of Taiwanese interested in Japanese, which in her case she studied mostly on her own. Huang composed an entire sequence of twelve tanka in a classical Japanese idiom while devoting her attention to one of the most mundane of contemporary topics in Taiwan: scooters.52 The scooter becomes a relatum forming ties to class differentiation, national identity, and politics, love, immigration, health, and aging, friendship, and even religion. As such, her sequence illustrates how daily life can be rendered into art in tanka by integrating diverse intertexts and discourses. The first verse indicates the scooter’s class identification as “the pal of ordinary people.” Huang is a president of a media company and, like many of us in Taiwan, rides a scooter for the convenience it provides in parking, commuting, and getting around. Working itself to the bone the lovely scooter is the pal of ordinary people

132  The long view of colonial regimes 身を粉にし我らを乗せて働くは庶民の相棒愛しいバイク53 Mi wo ko ni shi warera wo nosete hataraku wa shomin no aibō itoshī baiku Though the first verse is serious in tone, despite its personification, suggesting the scooter resembles a friend or a dog, the second intensifies the comic element through exaggeration of the real danger and practical knowledge for all scooter riders: beware of buses and taxis: Taking precautions left, right, back and front out of nowhere buses and taxis are the great enemy 前後左右警戒すれど突進するバスとタクシーは最大の敵54 Zengo sayū keikai suredo tosshin suru basu to takushī wa saidai no teki The following verse intensifies reader sympathy by further exaggerating the plight of scooter riders: It is our fate to endure the ordeal of getting wet rainy days and riding against cold winds 雨に濡れ日や寒風に晒さるる試練に耐ふるは我らの宿命55 Ame ni nure-bi ya samukazeni ni sarasaruru shiren ni taeuru wa warera no sadame Thus the first-person account in the second and third verse situates the poet in light of being the underdog in relation to buses and taxis, and next in terms of the weather. The remaining poems focus more on the object-relation between a citizen and her scooter, which in Taiwan is something between a national icon and a common convenience. Taiwan has more scooters per capita than any place on earth and is also rather densely populated so that at rush hour one rides in swarms of scooters. Like the early autumn scooter poem, this one sees seasonal change as close to scooter riders: One thing I take solace in is my skin sensing the change of seasons 唯ひとつ吾がの癒しとなりうるは肌で感ずる四季の移ろひ56 Tada hitotsu waga no iyashi to nari uru wa hada de kanzuru shiki no utsuroi Of course, by emphasizing season-sensitivity itself, the poem reflects a nod to Japanese culture’s self-conscious matrix of definition as a people more sensitive to seasons than non-Japanese. The next poem, however, is quintessentially Taiwanese, flying in the face of Japanese obsessions with safety and social control. Seeing families on scooters is a reality of daily scooter culture. The whole family riding on the scooter though cramped, infinite happiness

The long view of colonial regimes  133 詰め合ひて一家を乗せるバイクでは窮屈なれど幸せ無限57 Tsume aite ikka wo noseru baikude wa kyūkutsu naredo shiawase mugen Interpersonal relations also take on this other-worldly coloring as the family crowded on a scooter out of necessity becomes an embodiment of “infinite happiness” (modeled after “a world in a grain of sand”), as do the poems highlighting otherworldliness in the following two tankas below. The following suggests empathy with the baby carried against a red light: A baby held by a parent through the red light smiles to me having no idea of the danger 赤信号親に抱かるる赤ちゃんは身の危険知らず吾に微笑む58 Akashingō oya ni dakaruru akachan wa mi no kiken-shirazu ware ni hohoemu Then, a comic tanka distances the poet from a not uncommon scene of snuggling and kissing on scooters: A love scene unfolds on a scooter though I cry out “a breach of traffic etiquette!” バイクにて繰り広げらるるラブシーン交通マナー違反と叫べど59 Baiku nite kurihiroge-ra ruru rabushīn kōtsū manā ihan to sakebedo The following tanka refers to worrying about a foreigner adjusting to Taiwan and riding a scooter suggests a core irony: scooter-driving is a world unto its own. This aspect impacts her worry about her friend in light of wondering if the friend can master the unwritten rules of traffic in Taiwan (and adapt to variations in different cities, neighborhoods, and situations). Thus this tanka suggests the happiness the poet feels in that a non-Taiwanese friend is embracing a part of Taiwanese life and culture: Though I still worry about my friend getting used to life in Taiwan and riding a scooter I’m glad too 台湾に慣れし友人バイク乗る心配しづづもやはり嬉しく60 Taiwan ni nareshi yūjin baiku noru shinpai shizuzu mo yahari ureshiku Then, the ethos of the Taiwan Tanka Association, seeking to build an independent Taiwan, appears as the romantic image of the common person on a scooter, adding a sense of grass roots glory to going to a demonstration, perhaps borrowing imagery from films such as Easy Rider, rendered cute by the relatively modest scooter. After the demonstration flying the flag of Taiwan heading toward the founding of the country on a scooter full speed ahead デモ終はり台湾の旗なびかせて建国目指しバイク全速61 Demo owari Taiwan no hata nabikasete kenkoku mezashi baiku zensoku

134  The long view of colonial regimes The following two turn from politics back to being thankful for what one has, with Daoist religious connotations sustaining a Taiwanese-centeredness. Grateful all thanks to the protection of the gods two accidents and not a scratch 事故二回遭ふも無事でゐらるるは神仏の加護のお蔭と感謝す Jikoniau mo buji de wi-raruru wa shinbutsu no kago no okage to kansha su On the handlebar I tie a talisman taking to heart my mother’s words slow down ハンドルに御守りつけし母の願ふスピード落とせの言葉を胸に62 Handoru ni omori tsukeshi haha no negau supīdo otose no kotoba wo mune ni The other-worldliness surrounding the materiality of scooters and cultural implications is reflected in the spiritual language of “protection of the gods” and “on the handlebar I tie a talisman,” while the preceding verse, “flying the flag of Taiwan / heading toward the founding of the country on a scooter full speed ahead,” suggests a political vision for Taiwan that, being a utopian hope in the current context, also carries a sense of an other-worldly dimension. The materiality of the scooter itself is highlighted in the closing verse: “not sure to ride you or scrap you” (the poet assured me that she now has a new scooter), with its sense of affinity between the old scooter and rider. I worry about my old and rusted pal these days not sure to ride you or scrap you 老い朽ちし相棒の身を案じつつ乗るも廃棄も迷ひ乗る日々63 Oikuchishi aibō no mi wo anjitsutsu noru mo haiki mo mayoi noru hibi Thus, by focusing on rendering the description of various relations in a lightly ironic tone, these verses capture how the poet presents her scooter within a spectrum of divisions and personal as well as political aspirations. The sequence demonstrates how the Taiwan Tanka Association includes talented young Taiwanese inspired by the Japanese tanka form and the support of poets such as Miyake Noriko to explore how daily life continues to reflect its complicated relationship with politics and the postcoloniality shared by Taiwanese, Japanese, and others. The next chapter will focus on how after 3.11 disaster this relationship is deepened in the Association.

Notes 1 Taiwan Kadan Committee, Taipei kadan 1 (January 1968): cover. 2 Taiwan Kadan Committee, Taipei kadan 1, 1. 3 Ibid. 4 Ibid. 5 Ibid., 4. 6 Ibid., 13.

The long view of colonial regimes  135 7 Ibid. 8 Ibid. 9 Ibid., 14. 10 Ibid., 15. 11 Kun-tsan Tsai, (Kuncan Cai) 蔡焜燦. Taiwanjin to Nihon seishin (Rippunchenshin)― Nihonjin yo mune o harinasai (Taiwan and the Japanese Spirit: Be Proud, Japanese!台 リップンチェンシン

湾人と日 本 精 神 ―日本人よ胸をはりなさい) (Tōkyo: Shoḡakkan, 2001). 12 Taiwan Kadan Committee, Taiwan kadan 21 (July 2014), 24. 13 Ibid., 9. (Taiwan kadan 21, July 2014, p. 9). 14 Ibid. 15 Ibid. 16 Ibid. 17 Chris Wang, “DPP Lawmakers Defend Students’ Rights,” Taipei Times, December 5, 2012, p. 1. 18 “Editorial: Sunday’s Rallies Missed the Point,” Taipei Times, May 6, 2014, p. 8. 19 Taiwan Kadan Committee, Taiwan kadan 23, 144. 20 Wu, Chien-t’ang 呉建堂 (Kohō Banri 孤蓬萬里), ed., Taiwan Man’yōshū (台湾万 葉集) (Tokyo: Shueisha, 1994), 105. 21 Pei-feng Chen, “Tonghua” no tongchuangyimeng: Rizhi shiqi Taiwan de yuyan zhengce, jindaihua yu rentong (The Different Intentions behind the Semblance of “Dōka”: The Language Policy, Modernization, and Identity in Taiwan during the Japan-Ruling Period) (Taipei City: Maitian, 2006), 244–45; 249–53, 269, 303). 22 Ibid., 305–6. 23 Ibid., 431–36. 24 Ibid., 437–47. 25 Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney, Kamikaze, Cherry Blossoms, and Nationalisms: The Militarization of Aesthetics in Japanese History (Chicago: University Of Chicago Press, 2002), 254, emph. orig. 26 Ibid., 252. 27 Taiwan Kadan Committee, Taiwan kadan 14 (January 2011), 4. 28 Taiwan Kadan Committee, Taiwan kadan 13 (July 2013), 45. 29 Nobarasha Editing Section, Uta wa jidai to tomoni: Meiji, Taishō, Shōwa 20-nen made (Songs for each Era: Through Meiji, Taisho, and the Showa 20s) (Tōkyo: Nobarasha, 2007), 204; my trans. 30 Ibid., 187; my trans. 31 Ibid., 188; my trans. 32 Wu, Taiwan Man’yōshū, 105. 33 Taiwan Kadan Committee, Taiwan kadan 8 (December 2007), 108. 34 Ibid. 35 See “三八式步槍” (Type 38 Infantry Rifles), Chinesefirearms.com, accessed December 30, 2014. http://www.chinesefirearms.com/110108/guns/T38.htm. 36 Taiwan Kadan Committee, Taiwan kadan 15, 51. 37 See “黃文博、林文煌、拉倒國父銅像 台南獨派生事端,” Chinatimes.com (中國電子報), last modified February 2, 2014, www.chinatimes.com/realtimenews/20140222002 558-260407. 38 Taiwan Kadan Committee, Taiwan kadan 15, 51. 39 Ibid. 40 Ibid. 41 Ibid. 42 Taiwan Kadan Committee, Taiwan kadan 8 (December 2007), 18. 43 Ibid. 44 Taiwan Kadan Committee, Taiwan kadan 15, 6. 45 Kun-tsan Tsai, Taiwanjin to Nihon seishin. 46 Document presented by the poet.

136  The long view of colonial regimes 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63

Reiji Kō, Taiwan haiku saijiki (Tōkyo: Gensōsha, 2003), 74. Document presented by the poet. Taiwan Kadan Committee, Taiwan kadan 14, 16. Ibid., 38. Ibid., 7. Taiwan Kadan Committee, Taiwan kadan 18 (January 2013), 19. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid.

Bibliography “三八式步槍” (Type 38 Infantry Rifles). Chinesefirearms.com. Accessed December 30, 2014. www.chinesefirearms.com/110108/guns/T38.htm. “黃文博、林文煌、拉倒國父銅像 台南獨派生事端.” Chinatimes.com (中國電子報). Last modified February 2, 2014. www.chinatimes.com/realtimenews/2014022200 2558-260407. Chen, Pei-feng. `Tonghua’ no tongchuangyimeng: Rizhi shiqi Taiwan de yuyan zhengce, jindaihua yu rentong (The Different Intentions Behind the Semblance of “Dōka”: The Language Policy, Modernization and Identity in Taiwan during the Japan-ruling Period). Taipei City: Maitian, 2006. “Editorial: Sunday’s Rallies Missed the Point.” Taipei Times. May 6, 2014. Kō, Reiji. Taiwan haiku saijiki. Tōkyo: Gensōsha, 2003. Ohnuki-Tierney, Emiko. Kamikaze, Cherry Blossoms, and Nationalisms: The Militarization of Aesthetics in Japanese History. Chicago: University Of Chicago Press, 2002. Taiwan Kadan Committee. Taipei kadan 1 (January 1968). ———. Taipei kadan 8 (December 2007). ———. Taipei kadan 13 (July 2013). ———. Taipei kadan 14 (January 2011). ———. Taipei kadan 15 (July 2011). ———. Taipei kadan 18 (January 2013). ———. Taipei kadan 21 (July 2014). ———. Taipei kadan 23 (July 2015). Nobarasha Editing Section. Uta wa jidai to tomoni: Meiji, Taishō, Shōwa 20-nen made (Songs for each Era: Through Meiji, Taisho, and the Showa 20s). Tōkyo: Nobarasha, 2007. Wang, Chris. “DPP (Democratic Progressive Party) Lawmakers Defend Students’ Rights.” Taipei Times. December 5, 2012. Wu, Chien-t’ang 呉建堂 (Kohō Banri 孤蓬萬里), ed. Taiwan Man’yōshū (台湾万葉集). Tokyo: Shueisha, 1994.

5 Postcolonial affiliation after 3.11 Hyperobjects and inter-evental entanglement in the Taiwan Tanka Association This chapter continues to document the poetry writing, publication and related activities of the Taiwan Tanka Association (Taiwan kadan 台灣歌壇), focusing on their responses to the Great Northeast Japan Disaster, hereafter referred to as 3.11. The group of well over 100 active members (with meetings in Taipei and Tainan) composed and collected poems in compassionate outreach to the victims of 3.11, and Japan in general, for their web page as well as for the July 2011 edition of the Association’s journal (entirely in Japanese): Taiwan kadan. In addition, many individual poets, who each contribute a sequence of 12 poems to the biannual journal, included more poems speaking to the 3.11 triple disaster. This chapter explores how the postcolonial “long-­distance” (after Benedict Anderson)1 residual sense of affinity for Japan and Japanese people within the Taiwanese poetry circle, which has close Japanese affiliations as well as members, exhibits what may be called long-distance postcolonial entanglement. The poems are shown both to assert a common field of experience and empathetic emotional response, building on shared associations within tanka diction as understood within the group and to provide hope and encouragement to victims of the natural disaster (earthquake and tsunami) and human-made disaster (the Fukushima nuclear meltdowns and ongoing contamination). While most poems to the victims in Japan avoid the rather embarrassing topic of the delicate ecological precipice to which the nuclear power village has led Japan, poems presented for the Association audience itself address the nuclear disaster in relation to how Taiwan is at risk with active nuclear power plants so close to Taipei and other populated regions. In terms of style and diction, the Taiwan kadan members tend to write tanka mostly in classical Japanese, including the use of grammatical particles, adverbial phrases, and verb conjugation, while also permitting modern Japanese diction. Chinese characters are mostly written in simplified Japanese characters, though as traditional Chinese characters ( fantizi 繁體字) are still used in standard Mandarin in Taiwan, they often appear in the poetry. Obsolete kana (for example wiゐ for i い) and usage (for instance ki-endings for what are i-adjectives in modern Japanese, and hi verb ending for some rentaikei forms of verbs ending in i in modern Japanese) are

138  Postcolonial affiliation after 3.11 preferred. As the group is largely made up of members educated in Japanese in the 1930s and early half of the 1940s, they are more or less cut off from subsequent development of the Japanese language in Japan both in general and in tanka. This situation suggests that we develop an appreciation of the linguistic as well as aesthetic relativism in this tanka group (by far the largest in Taiwan) so as to highlight the hybrid amalgam of classical, modern, and sometimes Taiwanese-Chinese uses of Chinese characters as well as other loan words into Taiwanese Japanese. However, members do have visits and exchanges with poets from Japan, Okinawa, and other diasporic groups of Japanese or writers of Japanese poetry, for instance, in Hawaii. This chapter analyzes the Taiwan kadan (Taiwan Tanka Association) “offering” of a 51-verse sequence of tanka online to the victims of the 3.11, translated in full in the appendix. Building on Benedict Anderson’s work on “long-distance nationalism,” which questions the face-value relation between nationalist sentiment and claims made from overseas by noncitizens with no permanent material stake in a place, I explore complex transnational identities and affective attachments in contemporary Taiwan. Though most members are Taiwanese, some of the poets discussed are Japanese nationals who are permanent residents of Taiwan and also reflect complicated transnational poetic expression and identities entangled in multiple places far away from each other. This chapter explores eco-material, geological, and geographical aspects as well as human-made aspects of the disaster. As the focus here is on long-distance postcolonial entanglement, questions concerning how sympathy and empathy manifest themselves in the poetry can be analyzed in light of a combination of critical discourse analysis and Alain Badiou’s later work on “multiples of multiples,” which allows for a cross-indexing of material relations of the possible and unimaginable. Although these poems are an offering for the victims, analysis of the postcolonial dimension does contribute to our understanding of affective dimensions and ultimately reflects the ideologically complicated world of this tanka group by virtue of the long view of history the elderly members (the majority) bring to the group. This study also expands our knowledge of how hyperobjects—entities or events larger than human comprehension an accessible from different localities—help us understand distances involved in postcolonial relationships between former colonizer and colony. I borrow critical discourse analysis’ method of quantifying the number of words to discern what Alain Badiou calls multiples—sets of items drawn together within a poem or sequence so as to generate a field of attention—­which he later refines into poetic configurations that present degrees of appearing of what is rendered. It accounts for what is rendered inexistent or suppressed from media intimations of what constitutes normal or acceptable responses to various aspects of the 3.11 triple disaster, as well as allowing for the discernment of various themes. I examine how poets track in depicting their own emotional responses to various aspects of the 3.11 disaster in terms of conjunctions of overlapping concerns. Given the convergence of themes in

Postcolonial affiliation after 3.11  139 these short poems composed on a common topic, this initial quantification merely helps clarify and visualize what can then be examined more closely in situated readings of examples. Counting the number of poems containing recurring keywords in this offering of 51 tankas, unsurprisingly, 12 poems mention a disaster (unspecified), 13 the earthquake, 12 the tsunami, and only 4 mention the word nuclear, nuclear plant, or Fukushima. Such tallying of emergent categories makes possible an analysis of the combinations of additional recurring themes that yields observations of interest and trends within the group. By way of an introduction to the tone of the “offering,” note the following poem that combines many of the more prominently recurring words: only tears to stand up to the earthquake Japanese friend pull yourself together recovery is near Pi-kung Lin 林碧宮 涙のみ震災に挑む日本の友よしつかり頑張れ復興近し2 Namida nomi shinsai ni idomu Nihon no tomo yoshi tsukari ganbare fukkō chikashi This is one of four poems mentioning tears (of the poet); one of 17 dramatizing the heart-wrenching entanglement and empathy with the victims; one of 14 that include words of being challenged and then surviving, beating or being strengthened by the disaster; one of 6 poems mentioning (Japanese) friends in Japan; one of 6 mentioning “recovery” (復興); and one of 11 mentioning “Japan” (日本) distinct from the 7 that used “land of the rising sun” (日の本). As such it is an exceedingly typical example, reflecting many of the motifs used by other poets. The focus is on depicting empathy and strength in the face of adversity. It is not ecophobic per se but dramatically identifies with the Japanese friend “challenged” by the disaster. As such, larger questions and details of the disaster are obviated. Another example that combines various writing strategies is the following: they say when winter comes spring is not far behind and you my friend in Japan have esprit de corps ­ Chen-hui Lin 林禎慧 冬されば春遠からじと人の言ふ日本の友よいざ団結のあれ3 Fuyu sareba haru tōkaraji to hito no iu Nihon no tomoyo iza danketsu no are This tanka, also suggesting a connection to a friend and a small degree of entanglement in their affairs, expresses hope that recovery will come with spring, yet ends with an abstraction that is problematic. Although “unity” (esprit de corps) is not inherently bad, when it becomes a point of national pride it can lead to the end of the critical debate, a situation in which criticisms may be only thought, and in the interest of national unity, public passivity prevails. In the case of contemporary Japan, pride in this unity

140  Postcolonial affiliation after 3.11 may interfere with debates on nuclear power in an age when the national government works to protect the nuclear power interests to the extent that the appearance of unity can work against the interests of Japanese citizens. Thus, clichés can be anti-democratic or even effectively (and unintentionally) pronuclear when wielded indiscriminately. This question of stereotypes suggests an example of naming in Badiou’s sense. The poem certainly intends to affirm comradery with Japanese friends and Japan as a whole by praising Japan; unintentionally, by allowing the ethnic stereotype that Japanese love nature to play into the poem, it unwittingly does a disservice to Japanese fighting for rights to accurate information about radiation levels. Although the leap from “unity” to Fukushima may seem farfetched, it is exactly this breadth of indexing intertextual and intermedial references that illustrates how poetry engages in ethically situating naming—even despite itself. The intertextual choices or renderings of affiliations (others) and concerns (discourses) in each tanka and collectively suggest attempts to articulate the ineffable which (as emphasized by Blanchot) emerges concomitant with a disaster. The sense of horror and dread following events as well as anxiety over the future of those displaced by the earthquake, tsunami, or radioactive contamination, not to mention future threats on many levels (extending even to politics and the separation between what Japanese experience and what is named as “safe” as it changes as standards are lowered to accommodate high radiation levels and lack of centralized monitoring systems). These poems rarely touch on such lack of assistance by the government in this new post-Koizumi age of independent Japanese forced to fend for themselves under new neoliberal socio-economic models. They reflect disaster in Blanchot’s sense when writing: “May words cease to be arms; means of action, means of salvation. Let us count, rather, on disarray.”4 Similarly, the opening poem of the offering by Tsai Kun-tsan, the current representative of the Association, mixes military metaphors and nationalist sentiment while describing youth in such a way as to suggest they are carrying the fire of old (wartime) Japan into a bright new future. the nation imperiled youth urge all to safeguard the homeland fallen to quakes and tsunami Kun-tsan Tsai 蔡焜燦 国難の地震と津波に襲はるる祖国護れと若人励ます5 Kokunan no nawi to tsunami ni kasane wa ruru sokoku mamore to wakōdo hagemasu Here the long-distant nationalism is latent, appearing as a flashback, for Taiwanese raised during the “assimilation” (dōka 同化) and imperialization (皇民化) of the late 1930s and early 1940s Taiwan (and who remember the military marches on the radio the way later generations remember songs by the Beatles). The disaster is “national” and the enemies are the “quakes and tsunami” which have “attacked” “the homeland” or “ancestral land.” The poem alludes not only to the point of view of youth but to the fact that the

Postcolonial affiliation after 3.11  141 poet indeed was (albeit second class) a member of the Japanese Empire as a youth himself. The poem reflects the poet’s experiences, both as a youth and later under the neo-imperialist Kuomintang (KMT), which retreated to Taiwan and took over as outsiders—Chinese of other provinces” ( )—causing resentment and further complicating questions of identity in T ­ aiwan. It should be noted that Tsai Kun-tsan has received imperial awards for his long-distance Japanese nationalism in part for organizing this offering of poetry as well as for writing his book, Taiwan and リップン ンシン the Japanese Spirit: Be Proud, Japanese! (台湾人と 本 チェ 精 神 ―日本人よ胸 をはりなさい).6 While no mention of the exploitative and profit-fixated practices of Tepco appear in this offering, such suspicions are leveled against the Taiwanese nuclear programs of Taiwan Power and the national government in other poems outside of the “Offering.” Within the offering, the following two poems refer to “samurai” or “brave warriors” in describing the dangerous and indeed heroic work of nuclear power plant employees and hired part-time workers: samurai standing up to the nuclear reactor however you do it please do come through safely Tzu-ching Chen 陳姿菁 原発にいざ立ち向かう武士たちよどうかご無事に生きてくだされ Genpatsu ni iza tachimukau bushi-tachi yo dō ka go-buji ni ikite kudasare is this the divine wind reborn? may the brave warriors guarding the nuclear plant have the merciful protection of the Gods Jui-ching Chen 陳瑞卿 神風の生れ代りか原発を護る勇士らに神の加護あれ7 Kamikaze no umare kawari ka genpatsu o mamoru yūshi-ra ni kami no kago are The second example is the only poem to mention “the divine wind” (kamikaze), though it would make more sense if applied to the area surrounding the plants (and then only if radiation had not blown inland but to sea) rather than to the workers there. However, unspecified “god(s)” and “prayers” appear in 9 tankas, Japanese gods in 4, and wishing well in 6. Variations of ganbare appear in 5 tankas. The following example contains both well-wishing and unspecified gods:

if there is a God may the disaster in the homeland of my heart soon receive relief and happiness    Chen-hui Lin 林禎慧 神あらば心の祖国の災難をとくとく鎮め幸ぞ賜はれ8 Kami araba kokoro no sokoku no sainan wo tokutoku shizume sachi zo tamahare

142  Postcolonial affiliation after 3.11 Here the phrase “homeland of my heart” appears as it does in a variation in one other poem: as days long ago the land then called “my country” this catastrophe cuts deep in me  Lang-yao Cheng 鄭埌耀 曾ての日「吾が国」と呼びし土地なれば此の災害の身に沁みていたし9 Katsute no hi “waga kuni” to yobishi tochi nareba kono saigai no mi ni shimite itashi Cheng Lang-yao is known as the leader of the southern branch of the Taiwan kadan and has many interesting tanka spanning decades. His work appears in the original Taiwan Man’yōshū anthologies (see also Chapter 4). This poem sheds light on the controversy in August 2015 over Lee Deng-hui’s stating of the fact that when he was young Taiwan was part of the Japanese Empire and all were educated as Japanese. Here, Cheng Lang-yao affirmed this fact—which has become controversial to utter since contemporary Taiwanese history was for decades written solely from the point of view of newcomers to the island. Knowing it is controversial, it becomes a form of symbolic stake-taking or sacrifice in order show solidarity with the victims of martial law. It suggests, I still am entangled in Japan and feel the disaster of what came after deeply. The poem shows how complicated Taiwanese history is, and how bound up in each other are the histories and affective engagements within the triangle of China, Japan and Taiwan. Both Lin and Cheng’s tanka connect postcolonial affirmation of severed ties to the past homeland of Japan so as to dramatize emotional entanglements and deep concern for 3.11 victims. Four of the five poems alluding to media coverage of the disaster make reference to tears or heart-wrenching sympathy. Two of them refer to personal discomfort or crying:

watching television in agony all day just moved to tears hoping the country recovers soon Pao-hsueh Kao 高寶雪 テレビ見て心痛みただ涙ぐむ一日も早く復国あれかし　　　　　 Terebi mite kokoro itami tada namidagumu tsuitachi mo hayaku ochi kuni arekashi

I cry watching the television news on the great northeast earthquake and tsunami Pai-yun Hsieh 謝白雲 東北の大地震津波の情報をテレビで見つつ我涙する10 Tōhoku no daijishin tsunami no jōhō o terebi de mitsutsu waga namida suru Such tanka present sympathy for the helplessness of victims and entanglement through tears, yet they do not position the poet as intimately as the

Postcolonial affiliation after 3.11  143 examples by Lin and Cheng above, who drew on confessions of a common experience of once being Japanese to the extent Taiwan was Japanese.11

From Blanchot to Badiou: Disaster as indiscernible multiple In Maurice Blanchot well-known work The Writing of the Disaster (L’Ecriture du désaster) he emphasizes disaster, as the unknown name for that in thought itself which dissuades us from thinking of it, leaving us … alone … and thus exposed to the thought of the disaster which disrupts solitude and overflows every variety of thought, as the intense, silent and disastrous affirmation of the outside.12 The object—nature—dissolves us within its overwhelming momentous destructive act that for Blanchot blocks thought: “It is not you who will speak; let the disaster speak in you, even if it be by your forgetfulness or silence.”13 It is precisely this sense of solemn affiliation with the victims that Taiwanese poets resort to commonplaces—common phrases and thoughts—to convey their good wishes of hope, with few details of the triple disaster. In light of Badiou’s work situating how the unnameable needs not remain mystified as such, the Taiwan Tanka Association poetry presents the 3.11 disaster in new postcolonial configurations forming relations—affirmations of—evental traces (traces of the disaster). In Badiou’s essay “Politics as a Nonexpressive Dialectics,” he explores the power of naming and how the inheritances of names may limit our scope of thought. Clear names provide convenience; when heterogeneous mixes of things enter, a given sphere of presentation of existence, what counts as existing becomes limited and unseen remainders persist. The multiple(s) of a given presentation may be simple and clear, “accept[ing] only those parts with a clear name” and reflecting the law [that] always determines not only what is permitted and forbidden, but in fact what exists under a clear name, which is normal, and what is unnameable and so does not really exist, which means that it is an abnormal part of the practical totality.14 For instance, when political desire is projected onto the entire world, and the law of liberal democracies become a universal law, Badiou writes, the supposition “that representative democracy is the normal desire of all the people in the world” raises problems of naming and how meaning is applied to other sites. Badiou challenges the blind acceptance of the power of names to limit what is visible in liberal democracies. He explores a “nonexpressive dialectics” as a sort of post-Althusserian sensitivity to the power of naming that plays out in political movements and media and society in general. Here I introduce his nonexpressive dialectics to read poetry as

144  Postcolonial affiliation after 3.11 “presentations”—in Badiou’s sense of forming “subjects” that as multiples (containing multiple multiples or assemblage-dimensions)—so as to cast each word as acts of naming presented so that the indiscernible may form the horizon of discourse and action. After 3.11, the indiscernible—what Badiou links with the generic, in the sense of desire which has not yet acquired a name and as such does not exist for most people. By situating desire as “the affirmation of pure singularity across and beyond normality,”15 he politicizes Lacan by way of the example of exceptional “nonconstructible sets” as examples of objects “without a clear description, without name, without place in the classification.”16 Thus, with reference to set theory, he develops a challenge to what he refers to as “a constructible conception of political desire: only one type of political figure is admitted as a constructible subset of all political possibilities.”17 Badiou recasts Lacan’s imaginary/real/symbolic separations as follows: the imaginary ego becomes the subject-embodiment in an objective presentation (for our purposes a poem), truth-operations in relation to events replace the psychoanalytically situated real (built around the traumatic core of “little object a”), and the symbolic is recast from a Derridean reading of Lacan (and Freud) in light of Saussurean differentiation of semiotic traces into multiples (in any multiples discerned or named, such as a pattern of attention or meaning evident in a poem). In my reading of Badiou, words engage intertextual affiliations as well as differentiations as poems present words indexing (in Badiou’s sense) parallax relations with other words, events, discourses in a revitalized approach to intertextuality that is inherently object-oriented and intermedial, situated in terms of ethical, political, and aesthetic decisions. Coordinated namings form multiples as poems or within and across sequences. So what brings the group of poets in Taiwan to care about the victims of the disaster in Japan can be analyzed in terms of the subject-presentations of these multiples of indexable affiliations and differentiations, whether affective, economic, personal or public (though poetry always has a public dimension). In this way, if a name is to have efficacy in embodying the desires of a group, it responds to an event (in Badiou’s sense) that is initially unnamed, seems unnamable and indiscernible—the “generic” (unknown word-­category, especially ones intuited from heretofore incomprehensible events) in Badiou’s language (which builds on set theory, which I will not explore in detail, what is “on the side of nonconstructibility”)18—so as to reconfigure existence. In short, following Badiou, every poem, or group of poems, in this case, offers a presentation that delimits and aligns itself with configurations of existence. Each poetic configuration, with its formal choices but especially its word choices, presents and indexes the world that is not merely textually contained in the given poem(s), but intertextually affiliated and inter-­medially engaged with other dimensions of material existence. In the case of the poetic offering to Japanese victims of the triple 3.11 disasters, what becomes indiscernible and difficult to name is what cannot

Postcolonial affiliation after 3.11  145 be expressed in the strongest of words for misery, destruction, loss, fear or dread. A sharing of these feelings—empathy—is not easy to convey; after all, Taiwan, like southern Japan, is relatively safe from radiation contamination or related earthquakes and tsunami from northeast Japan. If sharing victims’ immediate worries and trauma is not enough, one may mention the exposed revelation that the government is now unreliable, untrustworthy for data concerning dangers such as radiation levels19 and Japanese citizens are on their own, exposed, precarious.20 The realization of the impact of neoliberal policies and a reversal of the Japanese corporate model does not seem to be reflected in the poems of this offering, which speak to the disaster in the aftermath without the benefit of subsequent discourses and reflections. What distinguishes these poems is not how they engage in the complexities of a changing Japan over the past six decades, but in how they maintain many of the stereotypes and clichés that suggest the poets are out of touch with contemporary Japan and yet affectively bound up with it in a language that reflects intimacy as well as multifaceted postcolonial entanglements between Taiwan(ese) and Japan(ese). The poets—mostly Taiwanese, but including some Japanese expatriates—reflect the difficulties of naming, questions of authentic expression and clichés, heartfelt sympathy, and the indiscernibility between how to respond to the disaster and its unnameability. In terms of Badiouian political sequences, poets sometimes refer to an idealized Japan, reflecting Taiwan’s complicated colonial as well as postcolonial experience which includes neo-colonial experience. In addition to wartime experiences, the older members of the group lived through 38 years of martial law, the Democracy Movement as well as witnessing from a distance the current focal event of 3.11.

From colonial hyperobjects to inter-evental affiliation: Affective intensities in the triple disaster and imperial childhoods as Japan overcame losing the war after the earthquake will not be long in waiting

recovery

Shu-shen Kao 高淑慎 敗戦を乗り越えて来し日本なり震災復興遠くにあらず21 Haisen o norikoete kitashi Nihon nari shinsai fukkō tōku ni arazu Why, one might ask after reading these poems for the victims, have so many Taiwanese focused on this motif of suffering leads to strength? While suffering may indeed be said to be the cause for resilience or growth as a person, historically, colonial Taiwanese were forced in various ways to contribute to Japan’s “war effort.”22 Here is where history gets complicated today. ­Somewhat paradoxically the larger containing objects of the sort Timothy ­Morton calls hyperobjects are not simply subject to “nonlocality,” which “implies that the notion of being located at all is only epiphenomenal to

146  Postcolonial affiliation after 3.11 a deeper, atemporal implicate order,”23 but, on the contrary, that human practices remain stubbornly blind to their own inadequate consideration of hyperobjects. Hyperobjects might also become a concept conducive to providing measure and scale, ethical and Marxian critiques so that in poetry, presentations may address human and nonhuman events without abandoning objectivity but indeed abandoning extremes of object-­oriented ontologists. Might the criticism Ursula Heise levels against Morton for the imprecision and unresolved (and unproductive) contradictions of his conception of a hyperobject as bound to object-oriented ontologies be somewhat ameliorated by simply removing the mystifying Object-oriented ontology (OOO) position and focusing on what the concept can offer more positivist understandings of objects? If scaled to human and nonhuman concerns and fields of action24 without privileging the nonhuman in accordance with his corrective sensibility, might one would find in the colonial apparatus and in traces of human actions a hyperobject event of a distant and local time and space, yet requiring an enlarged sense of scale to comprehend? In fact, the event of colonial Taiwan within Greater Imperial Japan might present a coherent assemblage necessary if one is to understand the lives of elderly members of the Taiwan Tanka Association today and how they relate themselves to Japanese today. If one considers colonial situations as hyperobjects in their own right, might not the Association members’ pasts have prepared Taiwanese by strengthening them in the same way as they see Japanese as strengthened by the 3.11 disaster? What is one to make of this crossing of references? Are these merely empty references? Is colonialism for Taiwanese a hyperobject, that is, an object exceeding human scales of comprehension, and as such part of what has been called postcolonialism, or is postcolonialism the hyperobject built on the colonial apparatus and the evental traces it made possible? Colonial Taiwan remains a hyperobject for them by way of memories, personal archives, and intertexts drawn from and reflecting these sources, but it is the postcolonial relationship between Taiwan and Japan today that forms the evident hyperobject. Hyperobjects of a colonial variety provide a means of recognizing events, realizing inexistent (suppressed) truths so as to suggest that the intertextual affiliations drawn in their poetry access a shared form of affiliation only knowable through hyperobjects summoned through what might be called inter-evental nodes or simply some form of inter-eventality. If “hyperobjects disclose interobjectivity” and “the phenomenon we call intersubjectivity is just a local, anthropocentric instance of a much more widespread phenomenon, namely interobjectivity,”25 as Morton argues, human privilege becomes bracketed from any ontological construct. If there is no scaling of human presence, how can one measure change or recognize events? For Badiou, an event is really a marker for ethical response to events, and whether the time is paid to one event or another in a given situation. Truth conditions limit not events—or the matter—but are focused on human responses to objective conditions through objective forms of

Postcolonial affiliation after 3.11  147 presentation. Thus, Badiou is Nietzschean in the way presentation diminishes the future-looking cultures of postponing action in favor of a more realist presentation of facts arranged in the present. Morton’s inter-­objectivity is a ruse; it simply takes Saussurean and Derridean fields of semiotic differentiation and returns to the abandoned referent, sheering the sign as excess while claiming materiality as the inner truth of postmodernist poststructuralism. Morton excludes Badiou’s ontology as antithetical to the nonhuman. He champions objects yet maintain postmodern indifference to systems of pure difference, which does not help clarify global warming (his stated concern) or how entities of all sorts have been impacted after 3.11. For humans, Badiou’s truth conditions are a strategy while OOO remains a useful tactic for highlighting object-bound problems such as the mass of planets and suns. Inter-eventality would substitute the unknowability of an object with object relations, the onus to present in one’s situation positions on events through their appearances and relative statuses as (in)existents. Morton has in effect supported the postmodern status quo cynicism undermining democratic action, while Badiou has outlined a blueprint for tracking change. In situating 3.11 and the ongoing Fukushima disaster as hyperobjects, known unknowns appear due to surveillance itself being impeded at affected reactors and storage facilities by radiation levels even intolerable for robots; radiation seepage into underground streams (difficult to monitor) and the ocean; contaminants appearing unexpectedly in diverse parts of Japan and even across the Pacific. One might try harder to overcome the language of unknowability that is central to the object-oriented ontological attempt in Morton’s work: namely to defer to things as having a point of view, yet also remaining unknowable. Instead, a Badiouian approach not to interobjectivity26 but intertextuality might return attention to relations and releta (object populating relations) and the ethical situating of events ranging from coloniality to disaster so as to form a shared postcolonial affiliation. What emerges is a new appreciation of complex (and global) forms of inter-­eventality. Although Morton’s distinction of interobjectivity and intersubjectivity provides a neat divide across which impossibilities of formal rapprochement ushers in the affirmation of object-centered ontological production, an evental cross-referencing by way of an inter-evental orientation provides a less mystifying framework for situating multiple non-local points of access to hyperobjects, avoiding the capitulation to ignorance. It would include people (as it must to include accountability). One can consider intertextual or inter-discursive affiliations as extending not simply to objects, as an inter-material reorientation might proffer, but rather to consider a more dynamical orientation to events and responses as inter-evental action—a focus on inter-eventality across a field of possible events. This approach would take Badiou’s ontology of (in) existence in the context of 3.11 and expand it from frames of an abyss of hyperobjects to what humans can do and do in relation to knowable scales of events; it refuses mystification, a tendency found in proponents

148  Postcolonial affiliation after 3.11 of hyper-objects.27 If writing engages events, poetic configurations present measured relative foregrounding of events that may go unnoticed—events and not simply objects, relations in time and space, not simply points of being in the world. What Badiou calls exhibiting fidelity to evental traces may furthermore be mapped onto intertextual—text to text—borrowings in support of underappreciated events. Intertexts provide not only a means of support by way of cross-referencing and affiliating diverse discourses, but the resulting combinations also allow for the production of specific agential dynamics. When Japan modernized, and submitted to capitalist practices and networks, it naturally became a world contender among competing colonial powers. Taiwan naturally became a prize to be developed as a colony. Thus it should come as no surprise that some Taiwan kadan Taiwanese members express in at least six poems their traumatic experience of being caught up in the Japanese war effort as a Japanese subject, though later they would be rejoined with the ethnically similar motherland of China which had also been the former enemy of Japan for decades. Using words such as “attack” and “samurai,” these poems certainly reflect not only a long-distance ecological entanglement but nationalism—Japanese nationalism. Many more poems (at least fourteen) express empathy and entanglement through the “suffering leads to strength” motif, including the following: it must be cold and upsetting nights in the shelter but you have beaten the great earthquake Shu-shen Kao 高淑慎 避難所の夜は寒からう不安だらう大震災を凌ぐ人らよ28 Hinansho no ya wa samukarau fuan darō daishinsai wo shinogu hito-ra yo This verse highlights human strength against adversity with no nationalist sentiment mentioned and leaves the “you” (lit. “persons”) universal. Thus, the sense of victory over an enemy is clear in the setting of the earthquake aftermath, yet for the poet (an elderly Taiwanese woman), shelters would likely have been an experience recollected from wartime. The question remains: is this imaging of a “suffering leads to strength” motif merely common wisdom, or does it reflect a conjunction of multiple objects (or a hyperobject) that together enrich the poetry and attempt to express the ineffable disaster? From the sampling of the fourteen examples, the answer will be both. In the following verse, for instance, the sense of hyperobjects of shared sadness recedes to near nil as it presents the sense of a ratio borne of a personal experience or folk wisdom: Japanese don’t give up as this sadness will one day return as joy Tzu-ching Chen 陳姿菁 日本人よくじけないで悲しみの倍の喜び返ってくるまで　　　　 Nihonjin yo kujikenaide kanashimi no bai no yorokobi kaette kuru made

Postcolonial affiliation after 3.11  149 a great quake then tsunami one after the other but “hardship makes the man” so hang in there! Japan Sui-sheng Lin 林燧生 大地震相次ぐ津波「艱難汝を玉にす」頑張れ！日本29 Dai-jishin aitsugu tsunami “kan’nan nanji wo tama ni su” ganbare! Nihon This second example borrows a clichéd saying so as also to reduce the disasters to a learning experience from which to benefit. Many of the other “suffering leads to strength” poems indeed index colonial wartime experience, as here:

such beauty in people silently enduring while striving to recover from a natural disaster of such destruction Ying-mao Li 李英茂 黙々と天災地変に耐へ抜きて復興に励む人ぞ美はし30 Mokumoku to tensai chihen ni tae-nukite fukkō ni hagemu hito zo uruwashi Here the overlay of colonial ambivalence expressed in long-distance affiliation in the phrase “silently enduring” suggests the suffering faced by Taiwanese who lived through both Japanese and KMT colonial periods. This poem provides a good example of how Badiou’s multiples are helpful in lieu of postmodernism that relinquishes meaning to mere ambiguities organized by differences at abstract levels of concepts, words, or virtual constructs. The multiples in Badiou are based on grouping in parallax indexing with other groupings, situated not only intratextually with respect to the meaning of a poem but also intertextually in terms of what Badiou calls indexing. Here “silently enduring” and “striving” suggests both contemporary Japan after 3.11 and colonial Taiwan’s experience of war. Thus, then and now overlay each other, while “rare” (disaster) and “silently” suggest a wartime-­i nvention of self-sacrifice as essentialized “Japanese” characteristics brought out under exceptional circumstances. But the key is in this “striving” being “beautiful,” which suggests a multiple of intertexts conjoining suffering of working Japanese and Taiwanese in the past, due to Japan’s war ambitions within the hyperobject of the colonial embodiment of capitalism, with the contemporary hyperobject of the 3.11 disasters. One final, less complex example of “suffering leads to strength” reads:

set your mind on recovery indomitable spirit in the splendid land of the rising sun Ching-po Chen 陳清波 志して励めよ復興美しの日の本の国不屈の魂31 Kokorozashite hageme yo fukkō utsukushi no hinomoto no kuni fukutsu no tamashī

150  Postcolonial affiliation after 3.11 Note how it similarly conflates Japan’s postwar recovery with the aftermath and challenges of 3.11.

Poems on nuclear fears in Taiwan from the same volume As one can see from poems addressing the issue of nuclear power proliferation in Taiwan after Fukushima, poets become unrestrained in their criticism: Why have despicable connivers forced nuclear power on Taiwan? Kaidai Ouyang 欧陽開代 疏ましきどぶ鼠たる原発を何故に台湾推し進めをる32 Utomashiki dobu-nezumi-taru genpatsu wo naze ni Taiwan oshisusume oru The terms “connivers” (lit. “gutter rats”) refers to minor business leaders who forced nuclear industry interests on Taiwan implicitly with no concern for the whole of Taiwan. Many of the tanka relating the Fukushima disaster (including its earthquake and tsunami elements) to Taiwan play on the scale of such a disaster explicitly in relation to the size of the island of Taiwan. Invoking the potential for disaster in Taiwan as hyperobject-god(s) appealed to in desperation and hopelessness, Ts’ao Yong-yi 曹永一 writes: If an accident such as Fukushima happened in Taiwan where would we flee but into God’s pity 台湾に福島の如き事故あらば何処に逃れん神憐れみ給へ33 Taiwan ni Fukushima no gotoki jiko araba doko ni nogaren kami awaremi-tamae Here again the colonial hyperobject and nuclear hyperobject—joined by a common capitalist hyperobjectivity (in the sense of having no one location yet implicating both in its assemblage or functionality)—links Taiwan and Japan to forces of always imminent disaster. Five tanka by Pan Tajen 潘達仁, among the dozen he chose for the July 2011 volume of Taiwan kadan, also situate the nuclear disaster in relation to Taiwan as an island with limited area and resources in the case of a nuclear accident. Though somewhat direct, they express an awakening through the Fukushima disaster to the danger of dependency on nuclear power in earthquake-prone Taiwan: Fearing the nuclear accident at Fukushima let’s not let it be the model for electricity in Taiwan 福島の原発事故の恐ろしさ台湾電力は鑑にせずや Fukushima no genpatsu jiko no osoroshi-sa Taiwan denryoku wa kagami ni sezuya Playing up the pursuit of cheap electricity governments and foundations do not consider the safety of the people 従らに安電力を追ひ民の危険観りみぬ政府と財団よ

Postcolonial affiliation after 3.11  151 Shitagaera ni yasu-denryoku wo tsui min no kiken miriminu seifu to zaidan yo If a nuclear accident happened in Taiwan fallout would cover the island 台湾に原発事故の起こりなば放射塵が全島を覆ふ Taiwan ni genpatsu jiko no okorinaba hōsha chiri ga zentō wo ōu If a nuclear accident happened in Taiwan it would wipe out the fishing industry and the economy would collapse 台湾に原発事故の起こりなば漁業壊滅経済崩壊 Taiwan ni genpatsu jiko no okorinaba gyogyō kaimetsu keizai hōkai At last awakening, the people cannot but march in antinuke protests 漸くに目覚めし人らのデモ行進反原発の起動ならぬや34 Yōyaku ni mezameshi hito-ra no demo kōshin han-genpatsu no kidō naranu ya Over the next few years, thousands of citizens would participate in public protests and eventually win concessions, including the ceasing of construction on a fourth nuclear plant and the phasing out of existing plants in Taiwan. Lin Zhaoji 林肇基 expresses guarded optimism, hopeful that clearheaded thinking will eventually prevail even if it takes a generation, writing: Children tell us their worries about going ahead willy-nilly with nuclear power and one wholesome day the country will be nuclear-free 先見えぬ原発憂ひ子ら諭すすこやかな日を無核の国にて35 Saki mienu genpatsu urei ko-ra satosu sukoyakana hi wo naikaku no kuni nite

Conclusion What this “offering” of tanka for 3.11 victims and subsequent turn to Taiwanese nuclear issues—a longstanding issue in Taiwan, now, as in Germany, resulting in a intensification of anti-nuclear activism—means in terms of the “eco-­ entanglement” (superficially similar to Ursula Heise’s eco-cosmopolitanism), especially the entanglements of a “long-distance nationalist” sort found in Taiwan, is that Japan remains a distant place of ideals, which the writing of tanka itself may be said to reproduce. The attachment to Japan through the poetic language would seem to sustain stereotypes and mystical generalities on the one hand and intense personal expressions of empathy on the other. The irony is that the degree of abstractness and generality, though surely borne of the same intention of sharing sympathy and concern for victims, is commensurate with a support of Japanese nationalistic apparatuses reproduced by some (certainly not all) Japanese in a lineage extending to the period when the elderly

152  Postcolonial affiliation after 3.11 members of the Taiwan kadan were during times of war within the Empire in Taiwan. The range of positions and forms of expression of sympathy taken by poets reflects the palimpsest of experiences that form one complicated model of Taiwanese identity. Side by side the exaltation of Japan as an ideal is the gentle, heartfelt concern of peers sharing a linguistic and cultural touchstone in tanka. The very writing of tanka in Japanese by non-Japanese suggests a compliment in that it reflects a degree of the embodiment of this foreign culture (I too became a member of the Hokubei senryū kai in Seattle in the early 2000s and now compose tanka with the Taiwan kadan). Yet the overwhelming power of these tanka in the “offering” may be found in the thirteen poems mentioning prayers and fourteen associating the disaster with a strengthening process, suggesting not clichés of essentializing identity so much as moral wisdom or simply pointing out that good may be found even in the worst of disasters. How nature has been inflected by Taiwanese in their response to the triple disasters in Japan is rather interesting. Taiwanese reserve their active ecologically-­oriented criticism for Taiwan, not Japan. An offering of poems in sympathy is hardly the place for criticism of Japan, although later as events surrounding the Fukushima disaster became known along with the government’s withholding of information from citizens, the critical lines necessary would force those poets in both Taiwan and Japan to take sides in Badiou’s sense: maintain the façade of unity while the people are in effect sacrificed for the sake of continued health of the nuclear industry in Japan, or to side with the people, stirring a thread of Japanese national critical consciousness. Yet the most surprising revelation in this study has been how the colonial hyperobject and 3.11 or nuclear hyperobject create complex postcolonial possibilities for long-distance entanglement—at least on the part of postcolonial Taiwanese (and Japanese in Taiwan)—that do not relinquish authority to former colonizer or colonized, but acknowledge larger forces that allow a sort of equalization and resolution of past injustices, a new appreciation of residual commonality borne of the colonial apparatus but shaped by recent disasters. By detailing this relationship, perhaps other postcolonial situations may also be better understood by addressing responses to events in presentations that focus less on identity and homogeneity than on inter-eventality and the meaningful redemption of disasters such as colonial exploitation and unequal treatment as well as nuclear ones through a sympathy made possible by the impossibly large forces and affective intensities of transhuman hyperobjects that are neither reducible to human institutions nor to natural forces and systems, and leave room for new ethical positioning.

Notes 1 Benedict Anderson, Long-Distance Nationalism: World Capitalism and the Rise of Identity Politics (Amsterdam: Centre for Asian Studies Amsterdam, 1992). 2 “An Offering,” Taiwan Kadan, accessed March 6, 2016, www.taiwankadan.org/ nippon-touhoku-kantoudaishinsai-no-hisai-sha-he-no-messeji. 3 Ibid.

Postcolonial affiliation after 3.11  153 4 Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, trans. Ann Smock. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995), 11. On the effects of neoliberalism on Japanese society as reflected in Japanese newspaper poetry, see Dean Brink, “Cheerful Dissensus: Almighty Satirical Poetry Columns in Neoliberalist Japan,” Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies 27, no. 2 (2013): 229–30. 5 “An Offering,” Taiwan Kadan. 6 Kun-tsan Tsai, (Kuncan Cai,) 蔡焜燦. Taiwanjin to Nihon seishin (Rippunchenshin)― Nihonjin yo mune o harinasai (Taiwan and the Japanese Spirit: Be Proud, Japanese! リップンチェンシン

台湾人と日 本 精 神 ―日本人よ胸をはりなさい) (Tōkyo: Shoḡakkan, 2001). Please also refer to Chapter 4 above. 7 “An Offering,” Taiwan Kadan. 8 Ibid. 9 Ibid. 10 Ibid. 11 Other examples of distance and tears while watching 3.11-related broadcasts, include these two: Ying-mao Li 李英茂 “I waver between tears of sadness and tears of gratitude/seeing victims barely surviving the disaster” (わが涙悲涙と感涙こもごもに被災に めげず生き抜く人ら Waga namida hirui to kanrui komogomo ni hisai ni megezu ikinuku hito-ra); Chin-shang Li 李錦上, “seeing all the cars and homes drifting away/on the TV news tears cover my face” (持ち家もカーもことごと流れゆくテレビニュースに瞼がに じむ Mochiie mo kā mo kotogoto nagare-yuku terebi nyūsu ni mabuta ga nijimu). Ibid. Compare contemporary Japanese senryū on Fukushima in Dean Brink, “Nuclear Hegemony and Material Indices: The Satirical Verse Boom in Daily Newspapers after Fukushima,” Mosaic: an interdisciplinary critical journal (forthcoming). 12 Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, 5. 13 Ibid., 4. 14 Alain Badiou, Philosophy for Militants, trans. Bruno Bosteels (London New York: Verso, 2012), 66. 15 Ibid., 67. 16 Ibid., 71. 17 Ibid., 74–75. 18 Ibid., 72. 19 See Jeff Kingston, “Japan’s Nuclear Village,” The Asia-Pacific Journal 10, issue 37, no. 1, last modified, September 9, 2012, http://japanfocus.org/-Jeff-­ Kingston/3822; Richard J. Samuels, 3.11: Disaster and Change in Japan (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2013). 20 Anne Allison, Precarious Japan (Durham: Duke University Press, 2013). 21 “An Offering,” Taiwan Kadan. 22 Dean Brink “Pygmalion Colonialism: How to Become a Japanese Woman in Late Occupied Taiwan,” The Sungkyun Journal of East Asian Studies 12, no.1 (2012): 41–63, I show how even women’s clothing was politicized during the war. 23 Timothy Morton. Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013), 47. 24 See Ursula Heise, “Review of Timothy Morton’s Hyperobjects,” Critical Inquiry 41, no. 2 (2015): 460–61. 25 Morton, Hyperobjects 81. 26 Morton, Hyperobjects 81ff. 27 Heise, “Review of Timothy Morton’s Hyperobjects.” 28 “An Offering,” Taiwan Kadan. 29 Ibid. 30 Ibid. 31 Ibid. 32 Taiwan Kadan Committee, Taiwan Kadan 15 (July 2011): 10.

154  Postcolonial affiliation after 3.11 33 Ibid., 38. 34 Ibid., 54. 35 Ibid., 70.

Bibliography Allison, Anne. Precarious Japan. Durham: Duke University Press, 2013. Anderson, Benedict. Long-distance Nationalism: World Capitalism and the Rise of Identity politics. Amsterdam: Centre for Asian Studies Amsterdam, 1992. “An Offering.” Taiwan Kadan. Accessed March 6, 2016. www.taiwankadan.org/ nippon-touhoku-kantoudaishinsai-no-hisai-sha-he-no-messeji. Badiou, Alain, and Bruno Bosteels. Philosophy for Militants. London New York: Verso, 2012. Print. Blanchot, Maurice. The Writing of the Disaster. Translated by Ann Smock. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995. Blanchot, Maurice, and Ann Smock. The Writing of the Disaster = L’écriture du désastre. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995. Print. Brink, Dean. “Cheerful Dissensus: Almighty Satirical Poetry Columns in Neoliberalist Japan.” Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies 27, no. 2 (2013): 228–241. ———. “Nuclear Hegemony and Material Indices: The Satirical Verse Boom in Daily Newspapers after Fukushima.” Mosaic: an interdisciplinary critical journal (forthcoming). ———. “Pygmalion Colonialism: How to Become a Japanese Woman in Late Occupied Taiwan.” The Sungkyun Journal of East Asian Studies 12, no. 1 (2012): 41–63. Heise, Ursula. “Review of Timothy Morton’s Hyperobjects.” Critical Inquiry 41, no. 2 (2015): 460–61. Hudson, Mark. “JCA Book Reviews: Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World. By Timothy Morton.” Archeology Blog. 18 March 2015 www. equinoxpub.com/home/category/reviews/jca-reviews/. Web. Iovino, Serenella, and Serpil Oppermann, eds., Material Ecocriticism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014. Print. Kingston, Jeff. “Japan’s Nuclear Village.” The Asia-Pacific Journal 10, issue 37, no. 1. Last modified, September 9, 2012. http://japanfocus.org/-Jeff-Kingston/3822. Latour, Bruno. Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004. Print. Morton, Timothy. Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2013. Odagiri, Takushi. “The End of Literature and the Beginning of Praxis: Wago Ryoichi’s Pebbles of Poetry.” Japan Forum 26, no. 3 (2014): 361–82. Samuels, Richard J. 3.11: Disaster and Change in Japan. Ithaca, N.Y: Cornell University Press, 2013. Saitō, Tamaki. 『被災した時間: 3.11が問いかけているもの』(Disaster Time: Things to Ask about 3.11). Tokyo: Chūō Kōron Shinsha, 2012. Taiwan Kadan Committee, Taiwan Kadan 15 (July 2011). Tsai, Kun-tsan (Cai, Kuncan) 蔡焜燦. Taiwanjin to Nihon seishin (Rippunchenshin)― Nihonjin yo mune o harinasai (Taiwan and the Japanese Spirit: Be Proud, Japanese! 台湾人と日本精神 (リップンチェンシン)―日本人よ胸をはりなさい). Tōkyo: Shōgakkan, 2001.

6 Poetry blogs and posthuman archives in postcolonial Taiwan1

This chapter explores the use of blogs and social media by two elderly Taiwanese poets who post poems and prose in Mandarin, Taiwanese, Japanese, and sometimes English translations that often include reflections on local and international politics. By using new media to reach out to audiences around the world, they seek sympathetic understanding for the visions they assert for Taiwan, as well as readers for their poetry. As their positioning depends on the prosthetic and networking possibilities blogs afford, this text situates their poetry in light of the work of Jodi Dean, Alain Badiou, and various posthuman theorists. Though postwar generations were educated to be citizens of the Republic of China, time continues to flow for these poets from a longer view of history in Taiwan, a view distinct from that of mainland China, which indeed existed apart from Taiwan during the period of Japanese rule. For these poets, time flows from a colonial past, with all its ambiguities, uncomfortable ironies, and inherent inequities still visible to them in a complicated postcolonial present. Both Ngo Chiau-Shin (吳昭新) (Wu Jau-Shin in Mandarin), who also uses the Japanese pen name O ̄bō Shingo (オーボー真悟) (b. 1930), and Lee Kuei-shien (李魁賢) (b. 1937) depend on international affiliations as poets to broaden their audience, influence, and support received for their poetry and political positions. Each poet to varying degrees includes historically contested and politically controversial commentary in their poetry, often circumspectly engaging core questions regarding the unresolved status of Taiwan as both de facto an independent nation and an alternative China (ROC, not PRC). In short, both poets are patriotic Taiwanese reaching out to international others to embody a richer diversity of possibilities than the binary Cross-Strait relationship would seem to allow. The blogs are shown to continue to reorient the legacies of colonialism, including not only Japanese rule but also the takeover of Taiwan by “Chinese of other provinces” (外省人) after the KMT army retreated to Taiwan in 1949. Both occupying regimes together had the effect of excluding Taiwanese from sitting in positions of power until the late 1980s, and both poets lived through these eras, so that attendant events remain part of their lives (not historical abstractions).

156  Poetry blogs and posthuman archives in postcolonial Taiwan One may recall that within years of being liberated from Japanese rule in what is known as the Retrocession of Taiwan (台灣光復), Taiwan was occupied by the national government of the Republic of China. After generalissimo and leader of the Kuomintang (KMT), Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石), lost the Chinese Civil War, over half a million mainland Chinese fled to Taiwan and with no consideration for local sovereignty ruled it. Though the ROC promoted the memorization of the writings of Sun Yat-sen (孫逸仙), notably the “Three Principles of the People” (三民主義), Taiwanese obtained no democratic rights until 1987, when 38 years of martial law was finally lifted. Both Ngo and Lee had been born into a colony of the Japanese Empire as it aggressively expanded in Asia, a time when Taiwan had become saturated with the sounds of military marches, banners, and newspapers filled with war propaganda. Then living under Chinese martial law, the poets would live within yet another regime that suppressed democratic movements and parties. Today both poets proudly write about their hopes for Taiwanese sovereignty as well as recall past historical events that would have at various times been subject to censorship and official distortions of history, especially regarding the national and exemplary affective status of the period of White Terror itself in representations in art and media, as well as in official speeches, documentation, and textbooks. Both poets refer to and resituate historical events while reflecting on contemporary Taiwan and its international relations—sometimes based on experiences while traveling abroad—and mediating modalities of Taiwanese consciousness.2 Their work thus may be situated as playing the role of recording living memory in digital postcolonial archives that blogs inevitably become: open historical records taking stakes in Taiwan’s futures.3 As such, blogs present both a redefinition of postcolonial Taiwan within a narrative of liberation and democratic progress towards sovereign self-rule and a posthuman overcoming of centralized disciplinary rule by the KMT. The blog form itself reiterates the difference of the country—where Taiwanese are rooted in the land of Taiwan—and the metropole of Taipei, where the KMT ruling apparatus has been ensconced. It is the blog form that allows the connection with others. As Jodi Dean writes, “Blogging responds to the problem of finding what one wants by offering something like a relationship, a connection.”4 Both Ngo and Lee were educated under first Japanese and then ROC systems—­national entities once at war with one another. Ironically, in both regimes, they would have been politically reduced to muted sovereignty and subservience until Vice President Lee Teng-hui (李登輝) took office as Taiwan’s first Taiwanese president in 1988. Adding to the confusion, the non-Taiwanese “Chinese of other provinces” were at least in part to see themselves not as Taiwanese but rather as privileged “guests” preparing to “retake the Mainland.” Yet, for the KMT today, mere rapprochement with the Mainland may be understood as a desperate measure to maintain the pseudocolonial privilege of one-party rule of the past by transforming Taiwan into a dependent (or even puppet) of the PRC rather than have a

Poetry blogs and posthuman archives in postcolonial Taiwan  157 Taiwanese majority assume power as opposition parties gain sophistication and win the trust of voters. For older Taiwanese with families going back before WWII and others identifying as Taiwanese, unification is a betrayal of Taiwan and ideals of hard-fought democratic struggles that continue today in the Sunflower Student Movement. Thus, the form of governance in the PRC is often perceived as an objectionable barrier to serious negotiations. Though complications surrounding both the history of who has ruled Taiwan and who should rule it are beyond the scope of this paper, it would be fair to say that the subject-positions and predispositions of elderly Taiwanese with some experience of Japanese rule suggest other possibilities for Taiwan, future scenarios that remain in circulation in Taiwan by way of their memories (not, as Chinese propagandists claim, through Japanese instigations and propaganda). When contemporary members of this aging generation turn to Japan with a favorable bias, it is based not at all on current Japanese propaganda but rather on several primary factors I will briefly enumerate. First, upon comparing life under KMT rule and Japanese rule, some elderly Taiwanese would prefer the colonial masters to the pseudo-colonial ones, even though Taiwanese are at least culturally Chinese. (Taiwanese may be differentiated from Mainland Chinese due to the fact that only Chinese men were originally permitted to immigrate to Taiwan so that Taiwanese integrated with the lower plains tribes that now have been completely assimilated.) ­Second, members of this generation also engage in attacks on the KMT ruling apparatus in its former and present incarnations due to the inexcusable actions of not only routine exclusion from positions of power, but the exercise of state terror, imprisonment, and summary execution of anyone perceived of holding dissenting views simply by virtue of being Japanese-educated. Third, their views may also derive from their pro-independence convictions and love of the status quo in Taiwan. Such sentiment engenders a will to enlist Japan (as well as the US) as allies in a common cause. Fourth, they were indoctrinated by ­Japanese in their impressionable youth and raised as Japanese during the ­Second ­Sino-Japanese and Pacific Wars, a period of intense war propaganda that may bequeath residual Japanese nationalist sentiment. This otherness of memory provided a different standard of comparison that later generations—born into martial law or after—may find difficult to appreciate in detail; however, a vague affinity with Japan through projections of shared colonial nostalgia has recently manifested itself in the extreme popularity of films predicated on such themes.5 These poets’ markedly different range of historical experiences as subjects under multiple regimes provides an impetus for wanting to share, transmit, and disseminate a vision of Taiwan borne of a larger view of its place over time. Their vision for Taiwan is not limited to political sovereignty of Taiwan as a nation per se, but also includes an important place for contemporary cultural production rooted in place as defined by emphasis on “the public” (公眾) and containment of corruption, two ideals associated by this generation with the period of Japanese rule in contrast with perceptions of the era of KMT rule.

158  Poetry blogs and posthuman archives in postcolonial Taiwan One can situate this process of cultivating affiliations by way of Internet blogs, Facebook, YouTube readings of poetry and political speeches as a posthumanist extension of the fragile aging bodies preserving their wealth of creative and affective energies over many decades in the present and into the future. To all of us coming of age before the popularization of personal computers and the Internet, this technology is more obviously prosthetic and takes on a digital life of its own. It forms a dynamic archive ticking with blog counters and new posts of poems, prose, and photos of the poets’ social activities. The medium of the web affords a sense of self-projecting functionality in web page assemblages that provide the means for potentially influencing others—producing new affect based on an understanding from the point of view of one born in the 1930s—so that the conveyed disposition may alter the public understanding of Taiwan within and beyond its borders.

Blog assemblages in postcolonial Taiwan One may recall that poetry in journals such as Li Poetry Magazine 笠詩刊 (1964–)6 (in Mandarin and Taiwanese) and The Taipei Tanka Association 台北歌壇 (1966–) (in Japanese), now called The Taiwan Tanka Association 台灣歌壇, both assert a Taiwanese identity in resistance to the imposition of pseudo-­colonial rule by the Chiang dictatorships (1949–1988). The blog medium provides an extension of such uses of poetry as tools of decolonization and the renegotiation of alternative affiliations. These blogs become measures of influence with respect to relations with mainland China, Japan, Europe, and the Americas, and explore how recognition of Taiwan is articulated in terms of diplomacy, threats of military force, historical precedents, local and international cultural events, and news and opinion concerning the future of Taiwan. The data these poets integrate in their works form what Alain Badiou calls the objective appearance of artistic or “cultural configurations”7 presenting elements that alter both aesthetic and political assumptions: they write not only in Mandarin and Taiwanese, but also Japanese (in the case of Ngo) and occasionally in English (usually translations from Mandarin or Japanese). They assume that political sequences should follow a narrative of Taiwan’s long struggle for democracy, not a Hong Kong trajectory. Their long view of the history of Taiwan’s struggle for democracy now includes expectations of a right to self-­determination through a public referendum to decide the future of Taiwan. Thus they reflect what Elizabeth Povinelli calls “the dream … that... the postcolonial archive will create new forms of storage and preservation and new archival spaces and time, in which a social otherwise can endure and thus change existing social formations of power.”8 Approaching blogs from a broader perspective of questions concerning their politically enabling effects, Jodi Dean writes: “What’s in a post? ­Anything. Blogging subjectivity isn’t narrativized. It’s posted. It’s not told

Poetry blogs and posthuman archives in postcolonial Taiwan  159 as a story but presented in moments as an image, reaction, feeling, or event. The post is a form that expresses mediality as such.”9 Indeed, Ngo and Lee exhibit a focus on humanistic poetic production of Romantic subjectivities—political passions—that in the posthuman context of the Internet form what Dean sees as “media capture [of] their users in intensive and extensive networks of enjoyment, production, and surveillance” within what she calls “communicative capitalism.”10 Through this “capture” affective intensities find both expression and containment within corporate-based networking services and industries. The drives in the production and consumption of blogs feed the multifariousness of multi-media posts and supplement the creative imagery and ironies of the poems themselves so as to form unique mappings of postcolonial nostalgia, long-standing complaints over past injustices and how they are memorialized or forgotten, and longings for Taiwanese sovereignty personalized in the poets’ historical perspectives. Dean, however, also explores “how communicative capitalism fragments thought into ever smaller bits, bits that can be distributed and sampled, even ingested and enjoyed, but that in the glut of multiple, circulating contributions tend to resist recombination into longer, more demanding theories,”11 suggesting that communication gives way to the sort of uncertainty that makes the distinction between truth and lies vanish—“a collapse of symbolic efficiency.”12 Nevertheless, these poets’ blogs present living memories of postcolonial Taiwan, projecting from the past into a contemporary network as well as an archiving process that can perhaps best be understood as posthuman both in its prosthetic and networking relationality. Their works, blogs and networks form “bodies” in Badiou’s sense in Logics of Worlds, when he writes that we “can define the body: the set of elements of a site... which entertain with the resurrection of the inexistent... a relationship of maximal proximity.”13 A blog post of poems treated as a body may convey a strong sense of an ontological refiguring and rescaling of the importance of various events and values that have been felt or, as in the case of Taiwan, anticipated (democracy, sovereignty), and projected into the future while criticizing the past and unfolding continuities with authoritarian styles of decision-making behind closed doors (which sparked the Sunflower Student Movement). The blog assemblages attempt to overcome the Ma-era attempts both to direct Taiwan into closer ties with the PRC and to render hopes of sovereignty “inexistent.” This fusion of postcolonial—with respect to the KMT apparatus—and the posthuman as a radicalized reconfiguration of intentionality and subject-control form a distributed network of affiliations linked by interfaces. That most of the Taiwanese society necessarily lives once-removed from these elderly poets’ lived experiences suggests that their poetry and blogs form a posthuman digital repository of their affective sensibilities and struggles as well as existing in a live network that may provide support and hope to younger activists. Moreover, their blogs might encourage others to emulate such work that either serves as a record of struggles or a nexus of

160  Poetry blogs and posthuman archives in postcolonial Taiwan political antagonisms present amid contemporary historical tensions. Who knows if such poets wil not become the heroic materials of films and may gradually reach a wider audience, nationally and internationally? Judith Butler argues that “grievability is a condition of a life’s emergence and sustenance” and that “the future anterior”—recognition, regarding a given life, that it “will be a life that will have been lived”—“is the presupposition of a grievable life, which means that this will be a life that can be regarded as a life, and be sustained by that regard.”14 These poets engage in such tactical presentations of past events that demand not only visibility but grievability of the lives of Taiwanese marginalized by the KMT apparatus, as well as of reconfigurations of “Taiwan” and its local and international politics in the unfolding present.

Chiau-Shin Ngo and the posthuman in postcolonial haiku Chiau-Shin Ngo is not only active in haiku composition, criticism and education, but also in the promotion of the use of a Taiwanese phonetic script (resembling the bo-po-mo-fo used in Mandarin education). By profession, he is a medical doctor with a PhD and has blog pages on liver diseases and other medical issues. As many Taiwanese born during the period of Japanese rule, Ngo exhibits a degree of melancholic nostalgia for Japanese rule, no doubt in part due to the White Terror that followed “liberation from the Japanese.” Having received a Japanese education, it was not until the age of fifteen that he began to study Mandarin. Illustrative of his dry wit, he thus dubs himself one “of a generation of ‘mother-tongue-less people’ in Taiwan” (台湾 の「無 母語人」の世代).15 In terms of politics, Japanese haiku does not serve to any great degree as a maternal connection to Japan so much as a means of connecting Taiwan to the world through the inclusion of political haiku in the process of sharing haiku internationally. Ngo regularly updates his blog with impassioned critical appreciations of haiku composed in Japanese. Many of his haiku and tanka reflect his keen wit, observations that are not particularly political, yet exhibit his consciousness of social conditions, conventions, history, and local legends associated with names. Yet, in other verses, his passion for Taiwan and political issues comes through in such provocative examples as these: There are countries where they say there are no countries where there are countries 国あって国で無いてふ国のあり(10.04.05) Kuni atte kuni de naite fu kuni no ari The nightmare began the day the war ended and our country was gone 国失くし悪夢始まる終戦日 (10.08.15) Kuni nakushi akumu hajimaru shūsen-bi With slogans of virtuous one-man rule the good citizens fell into a trap, a nation

Poetry blogs and posthuman archives in postcolonial Taiwan  161 清廉やワンマン政府のスローガン国家の罠にはまる良民 Seiren ya wanman seifu no surōgan kokka no wana ni hamaru ryōmin16 The first poem, a haiku (without a season word, so that one may be tempted to call it a senryū, if the poet had not already categorized it a haiku), mocks those who would deny Taiwan exists—at least de facto—as a country, albeit one not recognized by many international organizations or states. It particularly points to the People’s Republic of China, which has expended great energy on convincing other countries that it is in their best business interests to follow their demand that Taiwan be seen as a “Province of China.” The second poem, also a haiku, bears a bold reversal of the entire idea of the Retrocession (or ceding back) of Taiwan as an event (and holiday) to celebrate the liberation from Japanese colonial rule. This sentiment reflects bitterness toward the human rights abuses under the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and their rule by martial law, which made even the Japanese colonial masters, for all their racial hierarchies and exclusions, seem more benign. The third example, a tanka (31-mora modern version of a foundational classical form), argues in two-steps that Chiang Kai-shek in official media for decades was presented as a benevolent, upstanding pillar of goodness and fighter of corruption; however, with the support of “good citizens” (or simply “good people”) who followed such party propaganda out of fear and intimidation, the “nation” itself materialized against their best interests. Along these lines, one often hears today how Chiang’s biggest strategic error, as official international recognition shifted to the PRC in the 1970s, was maintaining the imaginary of the ROC when it would have been the best moment—at least in retrospect—to declare the independence of Taiwan. In effect, Ngo suggests that in preserving the ego of the authoritarian father figure, the “good people” gave up their hopes of sovereign rule. Ngo, like Lee (born seven years later), suggests similar longings for a future Taiwan that would embody native rule as a sovereign, separate land and political body. For all Ngo’s humor and humanist ideals, he exhibits a reified poetics of allusion also rooted in a poetic “matrix of words and consumer items that replaces the classical matrix of limited poetic words (situated by conventions of seasons, poetic places, love cycles, etc).”17 This formalized typological intertextuality functions by way of substitutions and transformations that allow for dense poetic figurations, which may indeed displace the heroic poet-actor as conscious performer; his language forms discursive affiliations suggesting historical perspective for readers to appreciate and sympathize with politically as he dramatizes his grasp of postcolonial ironies in Taiwanese history. Reaching out by way of haiku blogging thus sustains a dramatic tension in that it invokes systems beyond its control, both of a political variety as well as the typological intertextuality of haiku—with its requisite seasonal words as well as general associative matrix of the classic poetic words, and modeling of such classical intertextuality to engage

162  Poetry blogs and posthuman archives in postcolonial Taiwan contemporary interests of any discourse.18 The drama of Ngo’s haiku suggests relational entanglements that simply could not exist before the age of the Internet. As Katherine Hayles points out, in addition to memory ordering, “mastery through the exercise of autonomous will is merely the story consciousness tells itself to explain results that actually come about through chaotic dynamics and emergent structures.”19 She gives the example of Edwin Hutchins’ examination of the posthuman “interactions within an environment that includes both human and nonhuman actors”20 in maintaining and navigating a ship. It is precisely such a multiplicity of functionality and messaging that helps us appreciate how these politically-oriented poetry blogs form complex relations in networks and interdependencies: Performance is embedded in real human relationships. Every action is not only a piece of the computation [of ship navigation and functions], a bit of the task completed; it is also a social message. Building and maintaining good social relationships becomes an important motive for competent performance. In order to do the computation, the members of the team must interact.21 Ngo and Lee present their blogs in just such a vulnerable yet robust way: they rely on others to read and respond with comments and upticks on their blog and Facebook posts, while readers rely on them for aesthetic inspiration and political direction and support. This situation points to more intersections of poetry and Badiou, blog theory and posthumanism. In a way it echoes Badiou’s own claims for impersonal artistic configurations, namely that they index worlds in poems by presenting objective measures of existents and inexistents (generally unknown or unrecognized elements) in light of unfolding events; however, as Cary Wolfe emphasizes, the presence of a multiplicity of environments and autopoietic systems exist in “a shared environment, sometimes converging in a consensual domain, sometimes not, by autopoietic entities that have their own temporalities, chronicities, perceptual modalities.”22 Badiou’s concept of poetic configuration entails a degree of intentionality and suggests fidelities to events (such as the historical memory of 2.28) and discourses (such as narratives of the progress of democracy in Taiwan), while Wolfe’s “autopoietic entities” are situated to allow recognition of human subjects and decision-making processes as distributed, decentered processes relegated to media and affective networks linking humans. Ngo also maintains—with the help of Anthony Wu—an additional haiku and tanka blog in English where the political takes obvious forms. In a post titled “TANKA-4” (a fourth installment of tanka), Ngo includes the following two verses in which the first is clearly referring to Taiwanese history and the second is politically evocative in light of the context created by the first poem as well as a photo of a sculpture in Nagasaki composed of

Poetry blogs and posthuman archives in postcolonial Taiwan  163 swirling human bodies, together invoking the power of the atom and atomic destruction: TANKA-4 1 2

The 228: thousands of elites suffered massacre without the remains the assailants try to wipe out the history the students stand up to preserve the facts of the history * The 228 Incident: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/228_Incident [link in orig.] Look at the road I have walked on the cloud as I have gone nothing remain[s]23

The first poem recites some historical facts concerning the 2.28 Incident, characterized by mass arrests and disappearances of intellectuals and anyone viewed as too Japanese, often with the excuse of trumped charges of communist affiliations. The 2.28 events blur into the period of martial law or White Terror (which lasted 38 years). Ngo’s poem emphasizes that it was the elite Taiwanese educated under Japanese rule who “suffered massacre” and who were rendered invisible, with their bodies never returned to families, or left dumped off a cliff in the mountains (one elderly Taiwanese man and his wife told me during an interview concerning the fate of his teacher during the 2.28 period).24 The supporter of the perpetrators of this massacre—­the KMT—would downplay it and even erase it from history, yet students and activists continue to stand up and not forget the senseless murder of intellectuals and others. Ngo lends his voice of support, extended by way of the popularity of haiku in English, to an international audience. The second poem is more aesthetically ambiguous, not reducible to a purpose or function or even a clear political referent. Yet it repeats the word “remains” of the first poem in the blog entry (referring to 2.28 victims) so as to suggest either that he, like most everyone in Taiwan, not only suffered the terror of the martial law for nearly forty years but even suggests that he had to suppress his own memories and world of the colonial period and talk the talk (having “walked / on the cloud”), conforming to survive. At the same time, through the image of the monument, it invokes the suffering of Japanese at the end of the Pacific War, emphasizing the victimhood following two unconscionable nuclear attacks. This common suffering suggests a bond between Japan and Taiwan as both suffered unjust losses at or following the end of the war. Japanese suffered atomic devices while Taiwanese suffered the pseudocolonial invasion of a defeated army—the

164  Poetry blogs and posthuman archives in postcolonial Taiwan KMT government—as they retreated from the Chinese Civil War to an island never intended to serve as the capital: an island in fact abandoned by China in the Ching Dynasty (upon loss of the First Sino-Japanese War, often attributed to the incompetence of leadership unable to modernize its defenses). What is fascinating here is how Ngo adopted the point of view that both Japanese and Taiwanese were victims of WWII. One must also note in passing that like many Japanese, he in effect is using victimhood to efface responsibility in Japanese wars of aggression against China, Asia and across the Pacific and Taiwan’s assistance to these imperial ends.25 The following tanka from 2015 turn attention to contemporary politics in ways yet tied to his long view of Taiwanese history and his longing for a world in which voting would be based on informed decisions: TANKA-3 1

A dictator’s fraud and deception burst forth at last holding back their tears people could not weep with grief

2

Dreaming to be held by the handsome man in his arms voted on paper for him only to become unemployed26

The first tanka seems to allude to the death of Chiang Kai-shek but is certainly about the fall of Ma’s regime—evidenced not only in low ratings but in student demonstrations that challenged him as he kept selling out Taiwanese autonomy to PRC business and political interests. Here, increased CrossStrait economic dependency of Taiwan on the PRC takes nearly identical form as neoliberal mechanisms of “free trade” serving the interests of large corporations and at the expense of Taiwanese workers and smaller companies. Ngo conveys a sense of betrayal of Taiwanese interests on many levels. He achieves this through innovative syntax and semantics pivoting on two senses of “burst[ing] forth”—the sense of both something exposed (“fraud and deception”) and pent-up emotions. The object of evidence of betrayal incites complicated feelings of anger, it would seem, at themselves for having voted for Ma. The second tanka is complex and satirical. It is often said that women voted for Ma because of his looks, so that implicitly women are “dreaming to be / held by the handsome man / in his arms” out of romantic fantasies. The closing lines add to the irony by suggesting that voting for Ma while “in his arms” was to sign away one’s own gainful employment. By opening to free trade to China, much larger of course than Taiwan, and allowing investment in Taiwan, the Taiwanese economy has suffered: most notably, real estate prices have skyrocketed due to opening the market to Chinese

Poetry blogs and posthuman archives in postcolonial Taiwan  165 speculators, and jobs were lost, while prices of daily expenses have also risen. The image adds to the irony, as the arm imagery in the poem now maps onto the landmark Nagasaki statue (The Statue of Peace Prayer [和平 祈念像]), which is located on the site of the historical atomic explosion. One arm points to the explosion overhead and another gestures to stop, as in “no more.” Perhaps the juxtaposition forms a protest against Ma’s statecraft, suggesting that it resembles a nuclear explosion, and must end. To better understand Ngo’s own thoughts on the role of the Internet in his devotion to haiku and its relation to politics or simply the possibilities of thought, consider this blog post, an abridged translation by the author and Anthony Wu of a book-length essay originally composed in Japanese. The English title is “A foreigner’s thought on ‘HAIKU’ and ‘Japanese haiku’.” Since the internet, convenient but dissolute media has come to daily use for 16 or 17 years, and “HAIKU” and “Japanese haiku” have become the objects of being able to express anyone’s own opinion freely without stopping, regulation, censorship, and complaint, irrespective of age, gender, social standing, occupation, party, and education. Nowadays, we can observe and hear various kinds of thoughts which one can not think of solely by oneself, and begin to... consider the future of the haiku.27 The essay argues not only that haiku is conducive to self-expression, but stimulates emulation of, in his words, other “thoughts which one can not think of solely by oneself.” This need for the other can be conceived as double-­edged. On the one hand, it implies a sort of Bahktinian heteroglossia typical of postcolonial situations in which one may encounter and participate in heterogeneous languages and dialects.28 In postcolonial Taiwan— especially for someone born during the period of Japanese rule—which language one chooses to use implicates one socio-linguistically and politically. This choice carries over into poetry, shaping aesthetic predilections and preferred affiliations. On the other hand, it also invokes how one chooses at a given time one language at least as the frame for a more minute mixing of other languages. As such, it thus suggests an intertextual form amenable to haiku, which requires relations with other texts, whether of a more conventional matrixial form, as with season words and their complex abstract associations, or with particular echoes of themes found in other haiku (famous or of one’s local haiku association, old or new).29 Thus, one is reminded of de Certeau’s definition of a tactic as “a calculated action determined by the absence of a proper locus.”30 With the exception of Richard Wright’s haiku,31 the haiku form is not often associated in English criticism with political issues; nevertheless, the form has the potential for both political and avant-guarde productivity as intertextually-oriented, networked poetry that inherently stands apart from bourgeois literary models of the autonomous lyric.32 Haiku force its improvised configuration to serve as a provisional locus. It serves not as the final word, but rather as a rupture that functions by means of its entanglements within an open typology of

166  Poetry blogs and posthuman archives in postcolonial Taiwan intertextual possibilities. The very discourses intertextually invoked suggest political, ethical, and affective orientations in the poetic configurations. It should be mentioned that Ngo’s treatment of haiku is rooted in an under-­standing of both Japanese haiku and world haiku in other languages. The scope of issues raised—given that he writes in Japanese himself—far exceeds most treatments of haiku available in English (simply because they usually, almost by convention, fail to bridge an adequate understanding of world haiku in relation to Japanese haiku).33 Thus Ngo’s account (especially the more fluent original Japanese version) can be read as a compelling albeit brief guide for haiku enthusiasts. When writing “HAIKU” in capitals letters, he means non-Japanese haiku: “haiku composed in [a] foreign language.” “Haiku,” in his usage, means “the commonly known Japanese short poems of fixed-form [5–7-5–mora phrases] which should include a seasonal word” composed in Japanese. He conveys his appreciation of the rich variety of types of haiku available to Japanese haiku poets, including: “free style haiku” and “no seasonal word haiku,” or according to its content, feature, character, social back ground as: “new trend haiku,” “social haiku,” “avant-garde haiku,” “proletarian haiku,” “war haiku,” “human being search haiku,” “root haiku,” “popular haiku,” “molding haiku,” “art haiku,” “international haiku,” and “world haiku” etc.34 He also asks why haiku—not tanka (with classical origins, being poems of 5-7-5-7-7–mora phrases without an obligatory season-word) or senryū (satirical haiku)—has spread worldwide. His answer is that foreign haiku— whether in Chinese or English or Spanish—is inherently short and imposes incompletion (what he calls “uncompleted integrity”), and leaves “blanks to be appreciated by the reader according to his/her own experience.” Thus “the appreciation of the haiku is left free to the reader’s own thinking. With all these conditions, it is natural and certain that the HAIKU will be welcome and accepted worldwide” (Ngo, “A foreigner’s thought”). Moreover, he very reasonably advises that haiku in each language not necessarily conform to the 5-7-5–mora phrasing (often lineated unnecessarily in three lines in English). Rather, he writes that “it is good enough just to be suitable to the musicality of each language.” That Ngo and Anthony Wu thought it good to translate parts of this essay itself speaks to their interest in promoting haiku not from a Japanese perspective per se, but from a self-reflexive interest in exploring how international haiku arose and what it means. This incompleteness—being a well-known feature of “mountain-­water” (山水) Chinese landscape painting as well as haiku—suggests not a return to an orthodox world of literati, whereby haiku would serve as a means to display one’s comprehension of a vast typology of associated words and conventional affective responses (a matrix of associations) (see Chapter 1). Rather, a more open intertextuality and inter-­discursive typology suggest haiku mediate and navigate complex postcolonial conditions that are also posthuman: they position themselves as nodes of jointly accessed intertexts

Poetry blogs and posthuman archives in postcolonial Taiwan  167 forming assemblages in Badiou’s sense of configurations and Wolfe’s sense of autopoietic entities. As such, haiku extend their shifting boundaries and relations to indicate affiliations and historical issues not directly presented intratextually, but rather by way of their relation to intertextual and interdiscursive supplements that inform them. In terms of actual influence and interest, this English-language blog— which includes both the above-quoted political poems and the essay—has a much smaller audience than his Japanese and Chinese blogs. If we examine blog visit counters (given that stats are unreliable, often including automated spam-program figures), visits to Ngo’s main blog homepage, which is multilingual (English, Japanese, and Mandarin and Taiwanese) and contains links to most of his sub-blogs, are tallied at 3,540,526 (since 1 January 2008, as of October 2015). Not all are haiku visits, since Ngo also has many subblogs related to medicine and other issues. Dr. Ngo’s Haiku Note in English had received 2,216 hits, while his Japanese-language haiku blog, (オーボー 真悟のブログ) (虹ノ松原-唐津), received 13,576 hits, with an additional “Flag Counter” visit counter lists 1,329 Japanese, 1,032 Taiwanese, and 793 US visitors (as of October 2015). If one measures influence of these blogs and re-postings by conducting Google searches of the blog titles (placed in double-­quotes), one derives the following figures (inclusive of links to the blogs themselves) as of January 14, 2016: “オーボー真悟のブロク” (439 search results); “Dr. Ngo’s Haiku Note” (666); “瞈望 (Shingo)”35 (95); and for “瞈望” alone (1,310, though this figure includes many non-related results). A search of Ngo’s name, (吳昭新), yields 4,980 search results. These estimates, based on selected websites, give an idea of the reach of his blogs.

Kuei-shien Lee and the political topographies of transnational posthuman networks In Kuei-shien Lee too, a longing for international recognition and sovereignty of Taiwan prominently appears in his poems, even to the extent that these affective orientations or predispositions seem to provide one impetus for his poetry, blog activities, and transnational networking in general. In terms of Lee’s own perception of the relationship between his blog, politics, and poetry, he emphasizes that he started to type on a computer after retirement, and now uses one blog, 名流書房 (lit. Celebrity Library, which as of October 2015 had received 34,861 hits).36 In a Google search, it yielded 3,710 results (as of January 14, 2016). He also uses other social media and web sites (including 李魁賢檔案 [Lee Kuei-shien Files], 6,635 hits as of October 2015)37 to share poetry as an alternative to book publication or reprinting. On his blog and his Facebook presence, one finds announcements of events such as international poetry festivals and conferences, including one he organized in 2015. Concerning poetry and politics, he writes, I always use poetry to convey my political consciousness, ideals, or attitudes. Actually politics is a basic part of one’s life; a poet does not

168  Poetry blogs and posthuman archives in postcolonial Taiwan just exhibit linguistic skill, but should also express opinions, as long as it takes the form of poetry. He added that as Movimiento Poetas del Mundo Vice Chairman for Asia, and Taiwan Ambassador to the association, he is pleased that members come from “125 different countries.” He emphasized that the organization is based on principles of “equality, liberty and fraternity” so as not to be prejudiced by nationality, the color of skin, the language used or the religion, and “not to be swayed by world hegemonic powers, but rather by the poets who exhibit the best poetic temperament.”38 Indeed, in several lines the poet’s longing for a proper, universally accepted nationhood for Taiwan forms an emotional dimension in these poems extolling the unique characteristics of various nations in Latin America as he experienced them in his travels and friendships made there. I will examine two poems in his series Twenty Love Poems to Chile (給智 利的情詩20首),39 presented on his blog in both Taiwanese and Mandarin, which itself is an affirmation of Taiwanese culture. I will read only the Mandarin versions presented here in my translations. The second poem in this series is explicit in its political implications, titled: “I Should Have My National Flag” (我應該有一面國旗). The first stanza establishes the Chilean space as being for Lee utopian simply in having national flags flying everywhere: National flags in red, white and blue with the silvery morning star wave here and there with the wind high up on roofs of schools, homes and offices wave to the people in a language everyday alive with a sovereign spirit without a sound, moving.40 That they present “a sovereign spirit” is an indication that the reason for his accolades for the mere presence of a national flag relate to what they symbolize: self-rule. That they “wave to the people in a language... / alive... / without a sound, moving” suggests a hegemonic, spontaneously (in Gramsci’s sense) inculcated embodiment by subjects. The intimation of Taiwan’s ambiguous status and compromised sovereignty becomes explicit in the second stanza: I should have my National Flag to mark my true love in a domain we rule, but I am too timid to speak my mind, only draw fictitious maps on the sly.41

Poetry blogs and posthuman archives in postcolonial Taiwan  169 Added to the identification of Taiwan are rather school-bookish definitions of sovereignty taught in political science: the flag would “mark” something “in a domain we rule.” Yet the use of “true love” here rings exaggerated in an almost campy way; would not “love” be sufficient? So it might seem; however, indeed the overblown language of self-parody is necessary in combination with the closing three lines of this stanza, which paint a poet afraid to speak out, only fantasizing, “draw[ing] fictitious maps on the sly.” The third and final stanza indeed imagines a resolution to this Prufrock-like hesitancy, a dialectic of inaction and love, the spatial reduction of territory to a flag: I envy the Brazilian poet who can wrap himself in a scarf of his national flag showing it off around his warm neck. If I had my own national flag or would I myself become the national flag I would surround your entire body to mark the coordinates of the Island of Formosa proclaiming my sovereignty forever a part of me.42 By establishing the image of a Brazilian poet—counterpart—“who can / wrap himself in a... flag,” Lee steps into an absurd, surrealist impossibility of himself becoming the national flag that would cover all of Taiwan, “mark the coordinates” and “proclaiming my sovereignty.” It reads like an inversion of Barthes’ Pleasure of the Text,43 which depicts reading as a self-involuted Oedipal orientation toward an unknown surprising pleasure (analogous to a Lacanian petit objet a). In Lee, rather than a dream of a strip-tease or linear resolution, one finds instead the fantasy of putting on the garment symbolizing a nation and embodying a topographical indexing. Ending with “forever a part of me” underscores the seriousness of his desire, which is based on other countries with flags that symbolize for the persona a utopian convergence of democratic spirit and actuated national subjectivity. The persona then turns to an implicit image of self-sacrifice, giving all (one’s life, implied by “forever”) and becoming one with the topography of Taiwan. In a way, the image may be read as so absurd that it slips again into self-parody or simply mocks oneself for holding such national aspirations. Such a reading, I believe, would not undercut the poem’s intent but rather underscore the degree of desperation, how it leads to a tinge of bitter dark humor. It is a patriotic gesture on the order of dolce decorum est, pro patri mori—in this case idealizing dying for a nation’s full-fledged birth. It is a position that Lee carries in poetry, yet one undercut by his semi-self-parodic persona. In Lee, the posthuman dimension of engagement with postcolonial ironies and unresolved issues (such as the status of Taiwan) is expressed not

170  Poetry blogs and posthuman archives in postcolonial Taiwan in the rupturing intertextual nodes of haiku (as found in Ngo’s hands) but rather in the self-effacing gestures of international comparisons and projected aspirations and in networking through Facebook and international poetry associations, readings, publications, and festivals. Structurally, his poetry is less dependent on intertextual linkages than on intratextual discursivity: his poems present lyrical narratives of longing for an independent Taiwan. Yet his longing relies on a mapping of abstract comparative topographies of national normativity in Chile and Brazil onto Taiwan; Taiwan and Lee himself become virtual and schematic in his poetry, literally disembodying himself for the sake of engendering a vision of a body for Taiwan, and “draw[ing] fictitious maps on the sly.” As such, his blogs and poetry form posthuman networks that also function as creative political configurations with the characteristics of diffuse yet tenacious autopoietic entities. Another poem, “Poetry Recital in the Park” (在公園念詩), idolizes Manuel Rodríguez Erdoíza (1785–1818), who was, as Lee emphasizes in a note to the poem, “a Chilean lawyer and guerrilla leader, considered one of the founders of independent Chile.” That the poem ends with a stanza connecting (like the flag, above) a statue of an independence fighter and the founder of Chilean independence suggests aspirations for Taiwan. The first two stanzas read: Where sunshine warms the park a bronze statue of Manuel Rodríguez has been erected under the blue sky, spring at its springiest and all the emerald leaves shine before my eyes. The rider dances in forceful steps la cueca Chilena with a shy girl. All around birds sing, flowers applaud. I stumble across my chivalric dreams already lost, no idea where, while dreams of a homeland yet to awaken, no idea where comrades have gone.44 The key point to be noted is that Lee “stumbles across” his own grand vision for Taiwan in the image of the anti-colonial revolutionary Manuel Rodríguez. That he has lost touch with his “comrades” suggests a lost cause, in that no affective support network is felt that might put into action such a vision. This hopelessness reflects the increasingly dominant atmosphere during much of the Ma presidency. This sense of a lack of support at home—even if rhetorical excess—reflects the need to turn abroad both for poetic inspiration and sympathetic readers in a posthuman realm of blogs

Poetry blogs and posthuman archives in postcolonial Taiwan  171 that make possible transnational affiliations and support. The last stanza is even more explicit in terms of its relation to Taiwanese politics: My island country Taiwan, so near and faraway, frustrates me to all ends. My poetry on island Taiwan awakens me to sounds of nature, like songs of angels above the statue of Manuel Rodríguez. Heaven blesses my island country Taiwan. Let me stay by you in my lovely dream from across the Pacific, if but a brief time while I feel the overarching power of poetry and beautiful, unforgettable voices.45 This stanza differs from the more active and self-sacrificial closing stanza of Lee’s poem about longing for a national flag. Here, we have a sense of other pro-independence Taiwanese who found it hard in the early 2010s to imagine the sovereign rule of Taiwan: they turn to Taiwanese culture in lieu of politics. Here, nature is also presented as a relief in and of Taiwan (in ways familiar to anyone who has read classical Japanese poetry or the American poetry that extols national beauty in its west). The phrase “my dreams of a homeland” in stanza two is referenced in this final stanza as “Taiwan... / frustrates me to all ends.” The action is again contained in the horizon of poetry itself. The question appears: is poetry itself an adequate form of action, or of knowledge, or merely frivolous avoidance of issues such as that of political status? One is tempted to say that for all of Lee’s political framing of himself in Chile in relation to Taiwan (seen “from across the Pacific”), despite the spatial complications of hope and affective proclamations of “the overarching power of poetry,” Taiwan remains “faraway” both politically and topographically.

Conclusion Ngo relies on the inherent abstract matrices that make possible haiku’s presentation as unfinished as well as its dependence on a shared posthuman supplement and interactivity. Lee, by contrast, depends on a mapping of a patriotic Taiwanese subject (himself) on “normative” nations, relating subjects and lands as contemporaries on a common topographical plane. Poetry becomes for both a refuge from years of being at odds with undemocratic and unfair government practices and a means of reaching out to others. “Poetry Recital in the Park” suggests that fate is allowed to play out in proximity to this ideal model of revolutionary will and success found in the Chilean Erdoíza—a provisional hope, despite apparent impending

172  Poetry blogs and posthuman archives in postcolonial Taiwan worries to the contrary in Taiwan. The poem affirms an affective role for poetry and blogs as media that engender empathy for the complicated position Taiwan finds itself in today, whatever the political predilections of readers (in Taiwan or abroad). The Internet may be seen for Ngo and Lee as not simply a diversion to explore in retirement, but also as a means of keeping available dozens of printed volumes of poetry over the decades. It is also a forum for presenting and promoting new works, whether haiku or the poems to Chile discussed above. It appears for Ngo to be a long-term hobby showcased within a larger blog including medical research as well as haiku and haiku criticism. For both poets, as I hope to have shown, Internet blogs and social media provide means of reaching out to others to expand and share a sense of history that they—­children of the 1930s, now advanced in years—carry with them: a living memory of their generation. Set apart from younger Taiwanese, their blogs form a testimony of the last generation to experience life under Japanese colonial rule, even if not mentioned. Their blogs provide a legacy for anyone interested in understanding their particular perspective on Taiwanese politics, a view that is reified in later democracy movement and Democratic Progressive Party (民主進步黨) platforms. Though in an age that not only values youth culture, but a youth that in Taiwan has stood up against overwhelming odds and reshaped the momentum of Taiwanese politics (climaxing in the Sunflower Student Movement), one can better understand the history of Taiwanese democracy and activism by seeing through the eyes of those who have seen the passing of regimes and a long-view of the progress of democracy in Taiwan. As the power and influence of the dwindling population of the elderly of their generation wanes, their unique place in Taiwanese history may be lost too. Their blogs and poetry suggest a history not to be overlooked and form a prosthesis that already extends beyond them and will continue to exist as an archive and memory of Taiwan as a shared production. As Jodi Dean notes, blog posts take on a life of their own: Even if the entire blog is deleted, the fact that posts can be copied, pasted, and repeated, that they can drift and circulate throughout the information networks of communicative capitalism, gives them a kind of haunting permanence. Posts are blogs’ immortal remainders, revenants that once released can never be fully contained.46 What one finds remarkable in both Ngo and Lee is the underlying touchstone of commitment to Taiwan, including the longing for nationhood and an international orientation—reaching out to people from other countries and involvement in international poetry associations and poetic forms. Lee has been especially active lately in exchanges, conferences, and writing with Latin American and Southeast Asian poets and contexts in mind. Ngo is a haiku expert who engages the haiku not as a lover of Japan per se, but rather as an actively engaged haiku critic who reviews its history and antecedents

Poetry blogs and posthuman archives in postcolonial Taiwan  173 of past generations, its theory and practice in Japan and elsewhere, whether in Japanese or other languages such as English and Mandarin. One may situate the humor and satire with which a proto-nationalist impulse is shared by these poets as being neither simply cynical (giving up on any serious possibility for Taiwanese independence) nor humorous self-­ parody, but rather as being of a sort that gives way to posthuman configurations: their blogs engender affiliations that we may consider to be functioning within a postnational affective and cultural order. The language and schematics of military force and political posturing give way to a more amiable poetics of affiliation and tacit mutual recognition in a situation that otherwise inhibits national sovereignty. As Jodi Dean argues, new media tend to inhibit clarity and united action: as communicative capitalism incites a continuous search for information, it renders information perpetually out of reach. Outraged, engaged, desperate to do something, we look for evidence, ask questions, and make demands, again contributing to the circuits of drive.47 In relation to mass media, Lauren Berlant argues that a similar state pertains, one in which “there is witnessing, testimony, and yelling [presented in the news]. But there is not yet a consensual rubric that would shape these matters into an event.”48 If the PRC threatens to become an overpowering force that would with self-authoring impunity exact a “state of exception”49 —relegating Taiwan and Taiwanese as expendable—these poets form postnational configurations that are borne of a postcolonial sense of time and posthuman distributed agencies and dependencies manifest in blogs, networks, and transnational affiliations that support alternative ontologies. Their archive, as Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) has just been elected, will again attain a status of an affective cultural and political record supportive not of oppositional activities but also of formative cultures and revaluations of history under homegrown parties and leaders in the complex postcolonial shadow of the former one-party state.

Notes 1 Chapter 6 is an expanded version of “Poetry Blogs and the Posthuman in Postcolonial Taiwan,” Tamkang Review 46.2, June 2016: 135–59. 2 See Leo T. Ching, Becoming “Japanese”: Colonial Taiwan and the Politics of Identity Formation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), especially Chapter 3, for an introduction to Taiwanese colonial and postcolonial cultures and their relationship to consciousness in the postwar era. 3 My approach to colonial archives intends to emphasize not the point of view of the colonizer, whether Japanese or the pseudo-colonial KMT regime, but rather a collective memory produced at least since the 1960s through the present by Taiwanese, especially those who identify primarily as Taiwanese. Thus my use of “archive” should not be conflated with works on the archive in postcolonial studies of India. See Pramod K. Nayar, Colonial Voices the Discourses of Empire

174  Poetry blogs and posthuman archives in postcolonial Taiwan (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012). Rather, it resonates with the approach to an open archive of and by the oppressed. See Elizabeth A. Povinelli, “The Woman on the Other Side of the Wall: Archiving the Other-wise in Postcolonial Digital Archives,” Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 22, no. 1 (2011): 146–71. 4 Jodi Dean, Blog Theory: Feedback and Capture in the Circuits of Drive (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2010), 44. 5 Such films include Cape No. 7 海角七號(2008) and Kano (2014). See Ivy I-chu Chang, “Colonial Reminiscence, Japanophilia Trend, and Taiwanese Grassroots Imagination in Cape No. 7,” Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies 36, no. 1 (2010): 79–117. 6 See A-chin Hsiau, Contemporary Taiwanese Cultural Nationalism (London: Routledge, 2000), esp. 82–7. 7 Alain Badiou, Logics of Worlds: Being and Event II (London: Continuum, 2009), 29, 589. 8 Povinelli, “The Woman on the Other Side of the Wall,” 153. 9 Dean, Blog Theory, 47. 10 Ibid., 3–4. 11 Ibid., 2 12 Ibid., 112. 13 Badiou, Logics of Worlds, 446. 14 Judith Butler, Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? (London: Verso, 2009), 15. 15 Chiau-Shin Ngo (吳昭新), ōbō Shingo’s Collection of Short Poems (オーボー 真悟の短詩集) (Taipei: Ngo Chiau-Shin, 2013), www.olddoc.net/oobooshingopoem.pdf. 16 My trans. Ibid. 17 Dean Brink, “Sustaining Jouissance: Commercial and Heian Intertexts in Tawara Machi’s Tanka,” Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique 16, no. 3 (2008): 648. 18 Dean Brink, “Cheerful Dissensus: Almighty Satirical Poetry Columns in Neoliberalist Japan,” Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies 27, no. 2 (2013): 229–30. 19 Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 288. 20 Ibid. 21 Edwin Hutchins, Cognition in the Wild (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995), 224. 22 Cary Wolfe, What is Posthumanism? (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), xxiv. 23 Engl. In orig.; note in orig. Ngo, “TANKA,” Dr. NGO’s HAIKU Note, last modified June 9, 2015, http://ngbangngo.blogspot.tw/2015/06/tanka-4.html. 24 This interview appears in Horizons of the Rising Sun: Postcolonial Nostalgia and Politics in the Taiwan Tanka Association Today, “Chapter 8: A couple recalls colonial life and 2.28,” directed by Dean Brink, produced and ed. by Simon Fang (Taipei: Interpoetics Productions, 2016), DVD. 25 See Philip A. Seaton, Japan’s Contested War Memories: The “Memory Rifts” in Historical Consciousness of World War II, (New York: Routledge, 2007), esp. 30–31 and Yuki Tanaka, “Crime and Responsibility: War, the State, and Japanese Society,” The Asia-Pacific Journal 4. no. 8 (2006), last modified August 20, 2006, http://apjjf.org/-Yuki-Tanaka/2200/article.html. 26 Engl. in orig. Ngo, “TANKA,” Dr. NGO’s HAIKU Note. 27 Ngo, “A Foreigner’s Thought on ‘HAIKU’ and ‘Japanese Haiku,’” Dr. NGO’s HAIKU Note, trans. by Chiau-Shin Ngo and Anthony Wu from the Japanese version, last modified November 3, 2012, http://ngbangngo.blogspot.tw/2012_10_ 01_archive.html.

Poetry blogs and posthuman archives in postcolonial Taiwan  175 28 Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin, “Discourse of the Novel,” The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981). 29 See Dean Brink, “Japanese Imperialism and Poetic Matrices: Conventional Projections of Nature and Labor in Early Colonial Taiwan,” Archiv Orientalni/ Oriental Archive: Journal of African and Asian Studies 79, no. 3 (2011): 341–43. 30 Michel De Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 37. 31 Dean Brink, “Richard Wright’s Search for a Counter-Hegemonic Genre: The Anamorphic and Matrixial Potential of Haiku,” Textual Practice 28, no. 6 (2014): 1077–1102. 32 Dean Brink, “John Ashbery’s ‘37 Haiku’ and the American Haiku Orthodoxy,” in Globalization and Cultural Identity/Translation, eds. Pengxiang Chen and Terence Russell, (Taipei: Fo Guang University and University of Manitoba, 2010), 157–65. 33 Western haiku criticism tends to reduce haiku to a Buddhist metaphysics. See Brink, “John Ashbery’s ‘37 Haiku’” as well as “Richard Wright’s Search” for details and references. 34 Ngo, “A Foreigner’s Thought.” 35 Ngo, “World Haiku (6) (5 Haiku)” (“世界俳句 (六) (5句)),”瞈望(Shingo), last modified July 14, 2011, http://chiaungo.blogspot.tw/2011/07/5.html. 36 Kuei-shien Lee (李魁賢), Celebrity Library (名流書房), accessed October 2, 2015, http://kslee-poet.blogspot.tw/. 37 Kuei-shien Lee, Lee Kuei-shien Files (李魁賢檔案), accessed October 2, 2015, http://kslee-poetinfo.blogspot.tw/. 38 My trans. Kuei-shien Lee, interview by Dean Brink, September 13, 2015. 39 My trans. Kuei-shien Lee, Twenty Poems for Chile (給智利的情詩20首), last modified November 2, 2014, https://goo.gl/2Cs2FM. 40 Ibid. 41 Ibid. 42 Ibid. 43 Roland Barthes, Richard Miller, and Richard Howard, The Pleasure of the Text (New York: Hill and Wang, 1975). 44 My trans. Lee, Twenty Poems for Chile. 45 Ibid. 46 Dean, Blog Theory, 47. 47 Ibid. 48 Lauren G. Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011), 225. 49 Chapter 1 from Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005).

Bibliography Agamben, Giorgio. State of Exception. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005. Badiou, Alain. Logics of Worlds Being and Event, 2. London: Continuum, 2009. Bakhtin, Mikhail Mikhailovich. “Discourse of the Novel.” In The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Edited by Michael Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981. Barthes, Roland, Richard Miller, and Richard Howard. The Pleasure of the Text. New York: Hill and Wang, 1975. Berlant, Lauren G. Cruel Optimism. Durham: Duke University Press, 2011. Brink, Dean. “Cheerful Dissensus: Almighty Satirical Poetry Columns in Neoliberalist Japan.” Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies 27, no. 2 (2013): 228–241.

176  Poetry blogs and posthuman archives in postcolonial Taiwan ———. “Japanese Imperialism and Poetic Matrices: Conventional Projections of Nature and Labor in Early Colonial Taiwan.” Archiv Orientalni/Oriental Archive: Journal of African and Asian Studies 79, no. 3 (2011): 331–355. ———. “John Ashbery’s ‘37 Haiku’ and the American Haiku Orthodoxy.” Globalization and Cultural Identity/Translation. Edited by Pengxiang Chen and Terence Russell. Taipei: Fo Guang University and University of Manitoba, 2010, 157–165. ———. “Richard Wright’s Search for a Counter-Hegemonic Genre: The Anamorphic and Matrixial Potential of Haiku.” Textual Practice 28, no. 6 (2014): 1077–1102. ———. “Sustaining Jouissance: Commercial and Heian Intertexts in Tawara Machi’s Tanka.” Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique 16, no. 3 (2008): 629–659. Butler, Judith. Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? London: Verso, 2009. Chang, Ivy I-chu. “Colonial Reminiscence, Japanophilia Trend, and Taiwanese Grassroots Imagination in Cape No. 7.” Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies 36, no. 1 (2010): 79–117. Ching, Leo T. Becoming “Japanese”: Colonial Taiwan and the Politics of Identity Formation. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001. De Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984. Dean, Jodi. Blog Theory: Feedback and Capture in the Circuits of Drive. Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2010. Hayles, Katherine. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1999. Horizons of the Rising Sun: Postcolonial Nostalgia and Politics in the Taiwan Tanka Association Today. Directed by Dean Brink. Produced and edited by Simon Fang. Taipei: Interpoetics Productions, 2016. DVD. Hsiau, A-chin. Contemporary Taiwanese Cultural Nationalism. London: Routledge, 2000. Hutchins, Edwin. Cognition in the Wild. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995. Lee, Kuei-shien (李魁賢). Celebrity Library (名流書房). Accessed October 2, 2015. http://kslee-poet.blogspot.tw/. ———. Interview by Dean Brink. 9 November 2015. ———. Lee Kuei-shien Files (李魁賢檔案). Accessed October 2, 2015. http:// kslee-poetinfo.blogspot.tw/. ———. Twenty Poems for Chile (給智利的情詩20首). Last modified November 2, 2014. https://goo.gl/2Cs2FM. Nayar, Pramod K. Colonial Voices the Discourses of Empire. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012. Ngo, Chiau-Shin (吳昭新). “A Foreigner’s thought on “HAIKU” and “Japanese Haiku.” Dr. NGO’s HAIKU Note. Translated by Chiau-Shin Ngo and Anthony Wu from Japanese version. Last modified November 3, 2012. http://ngbangngo. blogspot.tw/2012_10_01_archive.html. ———. O ̄ bō Shingo’s Collection of Short Poems (オーボー真悟の短詩集). Taipei: Ngo Chiau-Shin, 2013. www.olddoc.net/oobooshingo-poem.pdf. ———. “TANKA.” Dr. NGO’s HAIKU Note. Last modified June 9, 2015. http:// ngbangngo.blogspot.tw/2015/06/tanka-4.html. ———. “World Haiku (6) (5 Haiku)” (“世界俳句 (六) (5句)),” 瞈望 (Shingo). Last modified July 14, 2011, http://chiaungo.blogspot.tw/2011/07/5.html.

Poetry blogs and posthuman archives in postcolonial Taiwan  177 Povinelli, Elizabeth A. “The Woman on the Other Side of the Wall: Archiving the Other-wise in Postcolonial Digital Archives.” Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 22, no. 1 (2011): 146–171. Seaton, Philip A. Japan’s Contested War Memories: The “Memory Rifts” in Historical Consciousness of World War II. New York: Routledge, 2007. Tanaka, Yuki. “Crime and Responsibility: War, the State, and Japanese Society.” The Asia-Pacific Journal 4, no. 8 (2006). Last modified August 20, 2006. http:// apjjf.org/-Yuki-Tanaka/2200/article.html. Wolfe, Cary. What is Posthumanism? Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2010.

This page intentionally left blank

Appendix

An Offering of Poems for All the Victims of the Northeast Kanto, Great Earthquake Disaster 献詠 東北関東大震災の被災者の皆様へ All of us in the Taiwan Tanka Association reverently pray for the souls of the people who lost their lives in the Great East Japan Earthquake. We also express our heartfelt prayers for all victims of the disaster, that their lives, now so troubled, may be able to pull through as soon as possible and that Japan may one day soon recover and prosper. 　謹んで東日本大震災でお亡くなりになられた方々のご冥福をお祈り申しあげま す。そして被災された方々がご不自由な生活から一日も早く抜け出られますように、日 本の一日も早き復興と繁栄を台湾歌壇一同、心よりお祈り申しております。 the nation imperiled youth urge all to safeguard the homeland fallen to quakes and tsunami

Kun-tsan Tsai

国難の地震と津波に襲はるる祖国護れと若人励ます

蔡焜燦

survivors of the northeast great quake and tsunami attack I wish you all the best

Po-chao Huang

大地揺れ大津波襲ふ 難さけし東北の人に幸あれかしと

黄伯超

it must be cold and upsetting nights in the shelters but you have beaten the great earthquake

Shu-shen Kao

避難所の夜は寒からう不安だらう大震災を凌ぐ人らよ

高淑慎

even with a calamity of such scale sweeping the land I believe in the Yamato people

Keiko Takai

国被ふ災厄かくも大なれど我信じゐる大和の民を

高井敬子

without a second thought for themselves engineers heading to Fukushima surely have wives too

Kayū Hanashiro

なゐ

福島の身を顧みず原発に去りし技師には妻もあるらん

花城可裕

longing to express my sadness shut away warm and well fed watching ongoing reports of who lives and dies in the disaster area

Yu-chiao Liu

被災地の生と死の報道見続くる身の暖衣飽食詫びたき思ひに

劉玉嬌 (Continued)

180  Appendix samurai standing up to the nuclear reactor however you do it may you come through safely

Tzu-ching Chen

原発にいざ立ち向かう武士たちよどうかご無事に生きてくだされ

陳姿菁

Japanese don’t give up as this sadness will one day return as joy

(same as above)

日本人よくじけないで悲しみの倍の喜び返ってくるまで

（同上）

writing to grandpa “how’s Japan?” wanting to squeeze his hand biting my lip

Tachiko Kan

筆談で「日本どうか」と聴く爺の手を取りぎゅっと唇噛み締む

舘量子

thinking about what I could do for the disaster area and feeling helpless I give a donation and conserve electricity

Takahiro Sakaguchi

被災地に何かをすべきと思へども非力な我は寄付と節電

坂口隆裕

the lovely home of my heart crumbling away I can only pray in silence as if playing dice

Chang Cheng

美しき心のふるさとくずれ落つサイコロのよう只黙祷を

鄭　昌

if there is a God may the disaster in the homeland of my heart soon receive relief and happiness

Chen-hui Lin

神あらば心の祖国の災難をとくとく鎮め幸ぞ賜はれ

林禎慧

defeated neither by tsunami nor great quake my brave friends in Japan will soon be back on their feet

(same as above)

大なゐに津波にも負けぬ日の本の雄雄しき友どち立ち直れかし

（同上）

meeting one disaster after another spring becomes that much closer

(same as above)

my friend

再三の国難に遭ひし我が友よ春はそこまで近づきしものを

（同上）

they say and you

(same as above)

when winter comes my friend in Japan

spring is not far behind have esprit de corps

冬されば春遠からじと人の言ふ日本の友よいざ団結のあれ

（同上）

is this the divine wind reborn? may the brave warriors guarding the nuclear plant have the merciful protection of the Gods

Jui-ching Chen

神風の生れ代りか原発を護る勇士らに神の加護あれ

陳瑞卿

bringing hands together I pray no harm comes to our ally attacked by the great earthquake and tsunami

Huai-tsun Chiang

大地震津波襲へる友邦に両手を合はせ無事を祈らん

江槐邨

facing unheard-of disaster yet all in proper order the Japanese people are a model for the world

(same as above)

未曾有なる大災難に秩序正し日本民族は世界の典範

（同上）

in a single moment the shadows vanished with the village from a distance observing I offer silent prayers

Pei-ken Huang

一瞬にて村諸共に影消ゆる遥かより謹みて黙祷捧げむ

黄培根

watching television in agony all day just moved to tears hoping the country recovers soon

Pao-hsueh Kao

Appendix  181 テレビ見て心痛みただ涙ぐむ一日も早く復国あれかし

高寶雪

I cry watching the television news on the great northeast earthquake and tsunami

Pai-yun Hsieh

東北の大地震津波の情報をテレビで見つつ我涙する

謝白雲

I keep calling my good old friend in Japan to make sure all is okay

Pai-ke Lin

幾度も電話にて無事確かむる昔なつかしき日の本の友へ

林百合

hit by a level nine earthquake and tsunami I pray my friends in Japan are alive and in good cheer

Chu-chang Chen

九度地震津波襲ひし日の本の友ら明るく生くるを祈る

陳珠璋

such beauty in people silently enduring while striving to recover from a natural disaster of such destruction

Ying-mao Li

黙々と天災地変に耐へ抜きて復興に励む人ぞ美はし

李英茂

I waver between tears of sadness and tears of gratitude seeing victims barely surviving the disaster

(same as above)

わが涙悲涙と感涙こもごもに被災にめげず生き抜く人ら

（同上）

ninety years old teacher and mother living alone in Ishinomaki* during the great earthquake and tsunami how to contact you?

Su-mien Lin

石巻の大地震と津波独り居の卒寿の師母は如何にぞと聞く

林蘇綿

set your mind on recovery indomitable spirit in the splendid land of the rising sun

Ching-po Chen

志して励めよ復興美しの日の本の国不屈の魂

陳清波

facing the national crisis of a great quake and nuclear disaster Japan remains calm and composed

Chin-yuan Chuang

大地震原発事故の国難に従容として立ち向かふ日本

荘進源

one can only pay one’s respects in prayer for the souls of lives taken by the giant earthquake

Shu-chen Chuang

巨大なる地震に命取られたる御霊の冥福只ただ祈る

荘淑貞

autumn for the imperiled Japanese spirit a nation en masse copes with an extraordinary national crisis

Wang-lin Yao

国挙げて未曾有の国難対処する大和魂存亡の秋

姚望林

a great quake then tsunami one after the other but “hardship makes the man” so hang in there!

Japan

Sui-sheng Lin

大地震相次ぐ津波「艱難汝を玉にす」頑張れ！日本

林燧生

though a tragic disaster my Japanese friend fear not and go do what you can

Pi-kung Lin

悲惨なる災害なれど日本の友よ畏れず出せ底力 only tears to stand up to the earthquake pull yourself together recovery is near

Japanese friend

涙のみ震災に挑む日本の友よしつかり頑張れ復興近し

林碧宮 (same as above) （同上） (Continued)

182  Appendix with so many gathered offering consolation in stricken areas all stay high in spirit

Pei-Hsiang Tsai

被災地の皆さまよ気を落さずに諸人こぞりて慰問を捧ぐ

蔡佩香

I earnestly pray the saving grace of the Gods helps the people suffering in the land of the rising sun

Shun-chiang Wu

日の本の被災の民に神々の御加護あれかしとひたすら祈る

呉順江

seeing all the cars and homes drifting away on the TV news tears cover my face

Chin-shang Li

持ち家もカーもことごと流れゆくテレビニュースに瞼がにじむ

李錦上

not even ruins remain after the earthquake and tsunami only prayers and words of piteous comfort

(same as above)

地震津波跡形も無く痛ましき慰めの言只祈るのみ

（同上）

the sterling courage of Yamato women announcing evacuations from the raging tsunami

(same as above)

荒れ狂ふ津波に退避報道す大和女の勲雄雄しき

（同上）

people of the rising sun hang in there! the days of recovery of your lovely villages faraway

shall not be

さと

Chen-sheng Huang

日の本の民よ頑張れ麗しき故郷復興の日ぞ遠からじ

黄振聲

for those losing everything and standing up tall and brave I have only great praise

(same as above)

何もかも失はれても勇ましく立ち上がる人に賛歌惜しまず

（同上）

somehow with evacuees spending the snowy night cowering in school buildings I too cannot sleep

(same as above)

雪の夜は如何に過すや校舎にて竦む避難者よ我も眠れず

（同上）

as Japan overcame losing the war recovery after the earthquake will not be long in waiting

Shu-shen Kao

敗戦を乗り越えて来し日本なり震災復興遠くにあらず

高淑慎

with oneness and righteousness in the celebrated land of the rising sun the protection of the Gods will be everlasting

Yu-hsiu Lin

団結と正義名高き日の本に神の御加護の永遠に絶えざり

林聿修

after a winter of unimaginable misery spring draws near and I pray the days of recovery come soon

(same as above)

未曾有なる苦難の冬過ぎ春近し復興の日の早きを祈りて

（同上）

cherries make haste and blossom early bringing good fortune to the disaster area in my mother country Japan of days now so long ago

(same as above)

遠き日の母国日本の被災地に桜早よ咲け幸ともなひて

（同上）

swallowing the coasts of my beautiful homeland the great tsunami washes everything away

Noriko Huang

Appendix  183 美しき祖国の沿海呑みこみて大津波すべてを攫ひ尽くしぬ

黄教子

I want to tell the evacuees the world and cheering you on is watching

(same as above)

世界中が見てゐる応援してゐると伝へてあげたき避難所の

（同上）

enduring fear instability cold yet how happy to hear of orderly Japan

(same as above)

is very sad

恐怖不安寒さに耐へて秩序ある日本と言はれ悲しくもうれし

（同上）

from here on in on the roadside of this drawn-out misery may flowers of all seasons gently blossom

(same as above)

この先の長き苦難の道の辺に咲く四季の花やさしくあれかし

（同上）

as days long ago the land then called “my country” this catastrophe cuts deep in me

Lang-yao Cheng

曾ての日「吾が国」と呼びし土地なれば此の災害の身に沁みていたし

鄭埌耀

have the Gods abandoned all reason in allowing such suffering after so long ceasing hostilities and wishing only for peace

(same as above)

ことわり

理 を忘れし神かや諍はず平和のみ願ふをかくも痛むる

（同上）

* Ishinomaki was the city in Miyagi Prefecture most affected by the 3.11 tsunami disaster.

This page intentionally left blank

Index

2.28 Incident (二二八事件) 114–15, 126, 129–30, 162–3 3.11 Disaster 4, 5, 115, 128, 137, 138, 142–7, 149–52, 153n11; see also Fukushima Disaster affect 1, 3–6, 16–19, 21–4, 26–8, 30–1, 37, 39, 40, 43, 56–7, 60, 66–7, 73, 76–7, 78n1, 85–9, 100, 116, 130, 138, 142, 144–5, 152, 156, 158–9, 162, 166–7, 170–3 Alishan (阿里山) 32, 50n35 Amagasaki, Akira 6, 12n10 anamorphosis 16, 33, 39–40, 48, 61, 67, 79n15, 86, 114 assimilation (同化) 38, 58, 63, 69, 77, 80n30, 122–3, 130, 140 autopoiesis 17, 19, 85–6, 110, 162, 167, 170 Badiou, Alain 6–11, 75, 143–9, 152, 155, 158–9, 162, 167; and critical discourse analysis 138–40; on the multiple 8, 10, 138, 143–4, 149; on naming 4, 26–30, 36, 71, 140, 143, 145; on poetic configurations 7, 9–10, 15, 26, 29, 148, 166 Bakhtin, M. M. 2, 8 Bhabha, Homi 16, 29, 57, 59, 73 Blanchot, Maurice blogs xii, 5, 12, 155–6, 158–63, 165, 167–8, 170, 172–3 bodies: in Badiou 159 Butler, Judith 67, 160 Chen, Pei-feng (陳培豐) 80n30, 122–3 Cheng, Lang-yao (鄭埌耀) 121–2, 125–8, 142, 183

cherry blossoms 84, 88, 123 Chiang, Kai-shek (蔣介石) 94, 114, 127, 129, 156, 158, 161, 164 China: representations of 4, 24–5, 29, 57, 62, 64–5, 68–9, 74–7, 84–6, 88–97, 99, 102, 110–11, 113–15, 117, 120, 129, 130, 142, 148, 155–6, 158, 161, 164; see also Nanjing Massacre Chinese Nationalist Party see Kuomintang (國民黨 KMT) “Chinese of other provinces” (外省人) 141, 155–6 Chinese poetry 23, 26, 35, 38, 44, 94, 99–100, 155, 167–72 Cold War 110–11, 113–14 communism 35, 110–11, 114, 119, 127, 163, 173 configuration: cultural 158; see also poetic configuration Confucian 84, 92, 98–100 critical discourse analysis 138–9 cultural production 16, 40, 64, 69, 78n5, 84, 157 de Certeau, Michel 29, 165 Deleuze, Gilles 18, 110 democracy 36, 93, 110, 115–16, 119–20, 122, 126–7, 143, 145, 158–9, 162, 172 Democratic Progressive Party (DPP 民進黨) 28, 119, 172 Derrida, Jacques 9, 19, 144, 147 desinicization xii, 4, 84, 99 Eizawa, Kōji 93 emperor: Japanese 30–4, 39–44, 57, 60–3, 78n5, 79n12, 84–6, 89–90, 93, 98–9, 103–4, 122–5, 129

186 Index engo (縁語 associated words) 32 events 36, 58, 131, 159, 161, 173; for Badiou 8–10, 26, 30, 144–7; fidelity to 8–9, 26, 36

intratextuality 17–18, 36–7, 149, 167, 170 islander (本島人) 16, 21, 34–5, 52n92, 58, 60, 62–3, 65–6

Fukushima Disaster 137, 139–40, 147, 150, 152, 153n11, 179

Jade Mountain 4, 16, 26–30, 35–6; see also Yushan; see also Nītakayama Japanese identity 65, 84, 87, 91, 97, 100, 105 Japanese poetics: conventionality 2; in traditional forms 2, 6–7; and modernization 3; versus Western poetics 1–3; see also matrices of association; see also poetic matrix; see also intertextuality Japanese spirit see Yamatodamashī jouissance 16, 21, 25, 28, 38, 46, 56, 68–9, 71, 76–7, 85, 87, 96–7, 100, 103–4, 122, 131

geography: cultural and literary 4, 10, 15, 26–37, 50n35, 169 Glissant, Édouard 9 Great East Asian Sphere of Co-prosperity (大東亜共栄圏) 4, 84, 87, 93, 102, 105 Guattari, Félix 9, 110 Hagiwara Sakutarō (萩原 朔太郎) 3, 96 haikai (俳諧) 7, 11 haiku (俳句) 1–3, 6–7, 15, 20, 29, 37–9, 42–4, 52n67, 57, 59, 61–4, 71–2, 79n25, 85–7, 95, 130, 160–3, 165–7, 170–2 Hayles, Katherine 20, 162 He, Jiao-dong (何朝棟) 119–21 Heidegger, Martin 7, 102 Home Rule see Taiwan self-rule Huang, Po-chao (黄伯超) 119, 179 Huang, Min-Hui (黃敏慧) 131–4 Huang, Noriko (黄教子) see Miyake, Noriko hyperobjects 4, 137–8, 145–50, 152 ideology xii, 1, 4, 13, 16–17, 19–22, 24–5, 27, 29–30, 34, 39, 40–4, 48–9, 56–64, 66, 68, 70–1, 75–6, 78n5, 79n12, 80n30, 84–102, 104–5, 110, 114, 116, 138 imperialization (皇民化) 38, 58, 74, 123, 140 imperialism xii, 1–6, 15–17, 21–2, 25–34, 36–44, 48, 57–63, 68–9, 71–2, 74–5, 77, 78n1, 78n5, 79n12, 80n26, 84–100, 102–5, 122–3, 125, 131, 140–1, 145–6, 164 inter-eventality 5, 137, 145–8, 152 intertextuality: hybrid 3, 37; and Japanese poetry 2–6, 11, 15, 17–21, 27–9, 32, 36–8, 40, 56–7, 59–61, 68, 86–9, 91, 95, 99, 105, 115, 140, 144, 146, 148, 161, 165–6; typological 5–12, 15, 17, 37, 56, 95, 161; politicized versus functionalist 7

kakekotoba (掛詞 pivot words; conventional homophones) 32, 44, 75 kamikaze 123–4, 141 karon (歌論 waka poetics) 6 Kerr, George H. 42–3, 78n5 Kleeman, Faye Yuan 58, 71, 80n29, 81n42 KMT see Kuomindang Kohō, Banri (孤蓬萬里) see Wu, Chien-t’ang Kojiki (古事記) 100–1, 104 Kokinshū (古今集) 5, 42 kokutai-ron (国体論 theories on the Japanese polity) 30, 128 kotodama (言霊) 24–5, 57–8, 78n5 Kristeva, Julia 8 Kuomintang (國民黨 KMT) 110, 116, 120–1, 126–7, 129, 141, 149, 155–7, 159–61, 163–4, 173n3 kyōka (狂歌 crazy poems) 28, 113 labor xii, 4, 15–16, 20–1, 32, 37, 42, 44, 46–8, 53n92, 60, 64, 85 Lee, Teng-hui (李登輝) 128, 156 Loomba, Ania 18 Lee, Kuei-shien (李魁賢) 155–6, 158–9, 161–2, 167–72 Ma, Ying-jeou (馬英九) 118–21, 159, 164, 170 makurakotoba (枕詞 pillow words) 6, 32, 76

Index  187 Man’yōshū (萬葉集) xii, 61, 72, 98, 101, 114, 116, 122, 142 matrices of association 15–16, 49, 56, 68; see also poetic matrix “a minor literature” 2, 110, 114, 116 Miyake, Noriko xi, 118, 129, 134, 182–3 Motoori, Norinaga (本居宣長) 84, 91, 98–102 naming: as imperial acts 2, 4, 12, 26–30, 34, 36, 49, 71, 75, 77, 81n42, 95; in Badiou 4, 26, 29–30, 140, 143–5; see also Jade Mountain Nanjing Massacre (南京大屠殺) 65, 73, 95 Nativism 4, 84–5, 97–104 New Year’s Day 4, 23, 56, 60–1, 63–5, 67, 69, 71–2, 75–7, 79n12, 95 Ngo, Chiau-Shin (吳昭新) 155–67, 171–2 Nietzsche, Friedrich 90, 102, 147 Nītakayama (新高山) 4, 22, 26–31, 33–34, 36, 50n35 ontology 5–10, 29–31, 36, 146–7, 159 Ouyang, Kaidai (欧陽開代) 123, 150 Pan, Tajen (潘達仁) 150–1 Pax Nipponica 43, 93, 95 poetic configuration 11, 27, 36, 144, 162 poetic matrix 12n3, 17–22, 25, 33, 37, 40–1, 43–4, 48–9, 57–9, 61, 70, 73, 116 poetic place names 4, 15, 30, 34–4, 39; see also utamakura; see also Nītakayama postcoloniality: in Taiwan 1–3, 5, 7, 49, 110–11, 113–15, 117, 122, 125, 130, 134, 137, 138, 142–3, 145–7, 152, 155, 158–61, 165–6, 169, 173, 173n1–3 posthumanism xii, 5, 17, 19–20, 155–6, 158–60, 162, 166–7, 169–71, 173 propaganda 5, 70–3, 84–5, 93, 95, 97, 122–3, 156–7, 161 prosthesis: cultural 19–21, 48, 77, 172 race 16–17, 19, 24, 28, 42, 45, 47, 56–8, 62, 65–6, 71, 78n4–5, 80n30, 92, 98, 104–5, 110, 123, 161 Retrocession of Taiwan (臺灣光復) 26, 28, 156, 161 riyo (folk ditties 俚謡) 59, 64, 72, 74, 87

saijiki (歳時記 poetic lexicons) 5, 18, 37–8, 52n67, 115, 130 samurai 98, 117, 141, 148, 180 senryū (川柳): current events senryū 1, 3, 20, 37, 57–9, 61, 64, 69, 72, 74–5, 81n36, 81n45, 86–7, 109, 129, 152, 153n11, 161, 166; literary senryū 39 Shirane, Haruo 6–7, 12n8, 49n9 “shock and awe” 73, 75, 93 subject 1–2, 5, 8, 9–11, 15–20, 22, 25–6, 35, 40, 44, 57–62, 65, 68–9, 77, 78n1, 79n12, 85–6, 90–1, 95, 99–100, 102–3, 105, 122–3, 125, 144, 148, 157, 159, 162, 168, 171; Badiouian 8–11, 26–7, 144–8 Sun, Yat-sen (孫逸仙) 126, 156 Sunflower Student Movement (太陽花學運) 4–5, 115, 118–21, 157, 159, 172 Taiwan kadan (台湾歌壇) (Taiwan Tanka Association) xi–xii, 4, 58, 109–10, 114, 116–17, 119, 124, 128, 130, 133–4, 137–8, 142–3, 146, 148, 150–2, 158, 179 Taiwanese identity 4–5, 29, 57, 65–6, 123, 131, 141, 152, 158 Taiwanese independence: in postwar Taiwan 35–6, 121, 126, 130, 157, 161, 170–1, 173 Taiwan nichinichi shimbun (台湾日日新聞 Taiwan Daily News) 4, 15, 19–20, 22–3, 29–30, 33, 58, 60, 63, 70, 72, 79n12, 79n25 Taiwanese self-rule (台灣自治): during period of Japanese rule 28, 35–6, 122; in postwar period 156, 168 Takamura, Kōtarō (高村光太郎) 93–4 Tanaka, Katsumi (田中克己) 96–7 tanka (短歌) xi, 1, 3–7, 15–16, 29, 37–8, 64, 72, 79n12, 80n26, 85–7, 109–10, 115–18, 137–43, 152, 162; with examples 22, 31, 33–4, 39–48, 52n82, 57–9, 65–8, 73, 76, 81n57, 88–90, 111–14, 119–34, 139–42, 150–1, 161, 163–5, 179–83 “times of trouble/crisis/emergency” (非常時) 64, 66, 69–70 Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) 119, 173 Tsai, Kun-tsan (蔡焜燦) 128–30, 140–1, 179 Tsai, Peihuo (蔡培火 1889–1983) 27–8, 35–6

188 Index Uno, Akitaka (宇野秋皋) 23–5, 44, 78n4 utamakura (歌枕) 15, 49n3 waka (和歌) 1, 5–6, 12n10, 13n13, 37, 39–40, 42, 45, 49n3, 86, 91, 105, 114, 131; also see karon (waka poetics) war 15, 24, 36, 38, 57, 63–6, 72–4, 76–7, 84–5, 87–98, 101–5, 111, 113–14, 117, 122–6, 128–9, 145, 148–9, 153n22, 156–7, 160, 163–4, 182; opportunistic versus between aggressors 92; see also Cold War Wolfe, Cary 19–20, 162, 167 Wu, A-Quan (吳阿泉) 71, 73, 79n25

Wu, Chien-t’ang (吳建堂) 110, 113–14 Wu, Jau-Shin (吳昭新) see Ngo, Chiau-Shin Yamakawa, Hiroshi (山川弘至) 4, 84–5, 91–2, 96–8, 100–4 Yamatodamashī (大和魂 Japanese spirit) 70, 128, 141 181 Yushan (玉山) 4, 16, 22, 26–30, 33–6; see also Nītakayama; see also Jade Mountain Žižek, Slavoj 25, 40, 61, 79n15, 85–6, 102