ABSTRACT
This chapter examines Sato Haruo's travelogue and place it in the context of comparative culture and ethnic studies as these disciplines were introduced to help shape the relatively unique national character of Japan and to justify the legitimacy of Japan's South Advance project in Pacific Asia. Taiwan's landscape, climate, and ecology were important subjects for Japanese human geographers, a period of exhaustive land survey and colonial cartography. A number of Japanese writers came to the island under the auspices of the 'South Advance' project, so as to commemorate the fortieth anniversary and to salute the accomplishments of the colonial government in Taiwan. Sato associates the poem with Baudelaire's Fluers du mal, suggesting that the Taiwanese writer deploys the Chinese language in such innovative fashion that it sounded very French and modern. Yanagita was instrumental in introducing 'Greater East Asian ethnology" in the hope of integrating prewar anthropological field works by the Japanese into Korea, Taiwan, the South Pacific, and Manchuria.
