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第二次世界大戦前における「植民地」言説を巡る一考察

From“ Colonies” to“ Oversea Territories” : Discourse on colonization in Imperial Japan

Japanese (日本語)

国際協力論集

28(2)

103-135

神戸大学大学院国際協力研究科

2021-01

2021-02-08

“Japan did not rule Korea and Taiwan as colonies, but treated the area as an extension of the mainland. Different from Western imperial powers, the Japanese Empire was fair and never discriminative. We were all equal under our great emperor.” As a sense of nationalism is reemerging in Japan, older nationalistic discourse is becoming influential on Japanese society once again. This discourse originated during the imperial period and was powerful under the “total war system” the country pursued during World War II. This is a revival of the imperial mindset and shows how tightly today’s Japanese nationalist discourse is linked to that of the past. There is no doubt that the systems for ruling over Korea and Taiwan were products of the Japanese regime’s enthusiastic study of Western powers’ colonial policies. This makes it almost impossible to find major differences between the Japanese and Western empires’ approaches to colonial rule. With this in mind, what prompted the Japanese people to form this understanding of colonial rule, and how was this important for Japanese nationalism? This study aims to identify the development process of Japan’s “nationalistic discourse to deny colonialism.” The terms “colony” and “colonial rule” were not seen as negative ones for Japanese people of the 1890s. Instead, the acquisition of Japan’s first “colony,” Taiwan, was regarded as proof that Japan had finally attained the status of an imperial power on par with those in the West. Hence, the terms were welcomed and met with very positive understandings. Despite the Japanese people’s positive views of colonialism, they still had to face the realities of colonial rule. Around 1920, in the face of condemnation against their discriminatory treatment of local people, colonial rulers in Japan were forced to adopt appeasement policies related to local societies. During this time, those in power started to avoid using the word “colony” to describe these regions, because it had discriminatory connotations. Instead, they used the term “oversea territories” in place of “colonies,” and soon the practice spread throughout Japanese society. In the 1930s, “Pan-Asianism” was used in war-time propaganda to justify the Japanese avoidance of the terms “colony” and “colonial rule” as they related to Korea and Taiwan. Namely, Japanese officials insisted that the Empire of Japan had never treated the areas as colonies, but rather that they were under the divine mercy of the emperor, who saw all people in the empire equally as his “imperial babies.” They maintained that this was a major difference between the Empire of Japan and Western powers, and that it was one of the reasons to be proud of being Japanese. This explains why the nationalist discourse of denying colonialism was influential in Japan, since it was one of the logical attempts to explain the country’s superiority to Western nations

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