ABSTRACT
Much has been written about the development of mutlticulturalism in the contexts of EurōAmerican societies and in relation to their overseas colonies, though often to the neglect of East Asian counterparts. In the pages ahead, I propose to look at a case of interlingual discovery and cultural critique from within as exemplified by a Japanese writer and colonizer’s travel narratives in early-twentieth-century Asia. The texts considered here are by Satō Haruo (1892–1964), a distinguished writer in post-Meiji Japan, who visited Taiwan in 1920 on the invitation of a high-school classmate for three months. Over a span of 20 years that followed, Satō produced a series of stories and reissued them in a collection titled Musha, in which he gave expression to exotic and critical stances in relation to Taiwan. 1 He provided nuanced and revealing narrative accounts of what he witnessed in Taiwan as a traveler and a “com-prador” who enjoyed all sorts of privilege on the one hand, while entertaining a split, discrepant cosmopolitanism on the other. He compared the customs and discursive practices between the Japanese and the Taiwanese, in addition to being fascinated by the aborigine’s tall tales. To better comprehend his psycho-social structure of ambivalent identification, I shall examine SatōHaruo’s travelogue and place it in the context of comparative culture and ethnic studies as these disciplines were introduced in the 1920s to help shape the relatively unique national character of Japan and to justify the legitimacy of Japan’s South Advance project in Pacific Asia.
