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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 March 2025
Overlooked by most scholars of Taiwanese history and almost entirely forgotten in the history of Tokyo, sightseeing tours organized by the Japanese colonial government brought groups of Taiwanese aborigines to the imperial capital twenty-one times between 1897 and 1941. The aim of these tours was to show the aborigines the “light of civilization” and impress upon them Japanese superiority. The aboriginal tourists, however, did not always learn the intended lessons of their visit. The tours made Tokyo the stage for complex cultural encounters that undermined the simple imperial narrative of civilization and savagery.
1 See Paul Barclay, “An Historian Among the Anthropologists: The Inō Kanori Revival and the Legacy of Japanese Colonial Ethnography in Taiwan,” Japanese Studies 21:2 (September 2001): 117-136; “‘Gaining Trust and Friendship’ in Aborigine Country: Diplomacy, Drinking, and Debauchery on Japan's Southern Frontier,” Social Science Japan Journal 6:1 (April 2003): 77-96; “Contending Centers of Calculation in Colonial Taiwan: The Rhetorics of Vindicationism and Privation in Japan's ‘Aborigine Policy’,” Humanities Research 14:1 (2007): 67-84; “Peddling Postcards and Selling Empire: Image-Making in Taiwan under Japanese Colonial Rule,” Japanese Studies 30:1 (May 2010): 81-110; Robert Thomas Tierney, Tropics of Savagery: The Culture of Japanese Empire in Comparative Frame (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010); Leo T.S. Ching, Becoming Japanese: Colonial Taiwan and the Politics of Identity Formation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001). For Qing encounters with and representations of aborigines, see Emma Teng, Taiwan's Imagined Geography: Chinese Colonial Travel Writing and Pictures, 1683-1895 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004). For aboriginal interaction with both Chinese and Japanese authorities, see Henrietta Harrison, “Clothing and Power on the Periphery of Empire: The Costumes of the Indigenous People of Taiwan,” positions: east asia cultures critique 11:2 (2003): 331-360. On indigenous Taiwanese memories of Japanese rule, see Scott Simon, “Formosa's First Nations and the Japanese: From Colonial Rule to Postcolonial Resistance,” The Asia-Pacific Journal. Posted on January 4, 2006. There is much else, including a large body of work in Japanese and Chinese. I am particularly indebted to Paul Barclay for his advice and expertise.
2 This list of dates is based on Matsuda Kyōko, “‘Naichi’ kankō’ to iu tōchi gihō: 1897 nen no Taiwan genjūmin no ‘naichi’ kankō o megutte,” Akademia: Jinbun, shizen kagaku hen dai 5 gō (Nanzan daigaku, January 2013), 87-88. I first learned of these tours in Leo Ching's seminal article, “Savage Construction and Civility Making: Japanese Colonialism and Taiwanese Aboriginal Representation,” positions: east asia cultures critique 8:3 (Winter 2000): 795-818. Forthcoming work by Kirsten Ziomek analyzes the role of interpreters in the tours discussed in this article. South Sea Islanders were also brought to Japan annually from 1915, when Japan claimed German colonies in Micronesia north of the equator, until 1939. See Senjū Hajime, “Nihon tōchika Nan'yō guntō ni okeru naichi kankōdan no seiritsu,” Rekishi hyōron no.661 (May, 2005), 52-68.
3 Herman J. Viola, Diplomats in Buckskins: A History of Indian Delegations in Washington City (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1981), 13-21.
4 Patricia O'Brien, “Ta'isi O.F. Nelson and Sir Maui Pomare: Samoans and Maori Reunited,” forthcoming.
5 Suzuki Sakutarō, Taiwan no banzoku kenkyū (Seishisha, 1977), 374-5. For an earlier case in which Taiwanese aborigines were brought to Japan in different circumstances, see Adam Clulow, “A Fake Embassy, the Lord of Taiwan and Tokugawa Japan,” Japanese Studies (Volume 30 Number 1 May 2010): 23-42.
6 “Dai yon kai naichi kankō banjin kansō hōkoku” (1913). (JACAR Kokuritsu kōbunshokan Ajia shiryō sentaa digital archive) frames 3-4.
7 Coming in the middle of the Taiwanese Government Generals's five-year military campaign against Atayal aborigines, this was also a busy year for metropolitan tours.
8 “Kankō banjin no kansō,” Taiwan nichinichi shinpō, May 16, 1912.
9 Quoted in Katsura Chōhei, “Mukashi no kankō,” part 1, Riban no tomo, July 1936, 8-9. Matsuda Kyōko discusses this incident in greater detail, quoting roughly the same words from the tour report of Fujine Yoshiharu, who accompanied Taimo Miseru and his countrymen in the 1897 tour. Writing in 1905, journalist and politician Takekoshi Yosaburō, who had just completed a tour of Taiwan for the colonial administration, reported that rifles were indispensable for the Ayatal people, among whom it was a source of shame for a man not to possess one, and that by ignoring the entreaties of Ayatal and other aborigines for arms, the government “hopes to reduce them to impotence.” Yosaburo Takekoshi, Japanese Rule in Formosa (1905), 221, 216.
10 “Dai ni kai naichi kankō banjin kansō gaiyō” (Taiwan banjin naichi kankō ni kansuru ken 1, 1912), JACAR (Kokuritsu kōbunshokan Ajia shiryō sentaa digital archive) 823, 826, 832.
11 Gotō sei, “Banjin no me in eijita naichi: kankō banjin ni sono kansō o kiku,” Riban no tomo 4:6 (June, 1935, 8.
12 Yamamoto Yoshimi, Irezumi no sekai (Kawade shobō shinsha, 2005), 244, 250. Scott Simon, “Formosa's first nations” describes the painful recollections of female informants who had their tattoos surgically removed.
13 I have blurred the faces of the dead in deference to the feelings of descendants who might recognize them.
14 Daniel V. Botsman, Punishment and Power in the Making of Modern Japan (Princeton University Press, 2007), 152.
15 Kinoshita Naoyuki, Haribote no machi (Asahi shinbunsha, 1995), 273.
16 A range of translations is possible for the Sino-Japanese term riban (理蕃) and indeed for the character 蕃 itself, which I have here rendered as “savage.” 蕃 (Chinese fan) has a long and complex history as a designation for peoples beyond the pale of Chinese civilization. Riban may also be translated with a more neutral-sounding phrase like “administration of aboriginal affairs,” which might better convey the character of the quotidian activities of Taiwanese colonial administrators during the 1930s, when the journal was published. However, at the time of the journal's founding in 1932, less than one year after the brutal resolution of the Wushe Incident, and perhaps after as well, it seems reasonable to imagine that administrators saw themselves as pacifiers of savages, and saw their mission in the metropolitan tours and other efforts at moral suasion described in the journal as the continuation of a pacification project that prior to 1931 had involved assimilation and annihilation in equal measure.
17 “Banjin no kanshū kubigari,” Riban no tomo 1:1 (January, 1932), 3.
18 “Kankō no hankyō,” Riban no tomo, July 1936, 12.
19 Paul D. Barclay, “Cultural Brokerage and Interethnic Marriage in Colonial Taiwan: Japanese Subalterns and Their Aborigine Wives, 1895-1930,” Journal of Asian Studies 64:2 (May 2005): 323-360. These marriages were discouraged following the Wushe Incident.
20 Matsuda notes that the later tours also included visits to model farm villages as well as to Ise Shrine. She points out that the Taiwanese visitors had been hoping from the very beginning that the visits would introduce them to improved seeds and farming techniques, but this came about only after the late 1920s. Matsuda, 91, 101-2.
21 Despite their idealization of native samurai tradition, these metropolitan terrorists were no more inclined to forego guns for swords than were the Taiwanese guerrillas.
22 “Taitōchō Ami zoku ha kaku kataru!” Riban no tomo, June 1936, 10.
23 Saitō sei, “Takasagozoku kankōdan'in o tsurete,” Riban no tomo, December, 1934, 10.
24 Matsuda, 99-100.
25 On the testimony of Taiwanese aboriginal soldiers, see Chih-Huei Huang, “The Yamatodamashi of the Takasago volunteers of Taiwan: A Reading of the Postcolonial Situation,” in Globalizing Japan: Ethnography of the Japanese Presence in Asia, Europe, and America, ed. Harumi Befu and Sylvie Guichard-Anguis (London: Routledge, 2001), 222-250.
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