Nanyo-Orientalism: Japanese Representations of the Pacific By Nao ...

concepts of colonial islands. Micronesians, as Mark Peattie pointed out, “because they were outside the cultural as well as the geographic limits of East Asia, were always viewed by Japanese colonial administrators as lesser peoples in an empire that, ethnically, was sharply hierarchical” (111). No Micronesian could acquire the status of an imperial subject other than by naturalization or marriage, and it was difficult to do so by either means (Peattie 112). In Japanese perceptions, Micronesia was at the margins of the Japanese Empire, and its abject status stemmed from “the superior attitudes generally typical of a technologically advanced society toward a (non)industrial one, as well as from the particular ethnocentrism of East Asia” (Peattie 113). Moreover, Japanese disregard for Micronesians had a particular background. Peattie argued that “what made Japanese attitudes toward Micronesians different from those Western perceptions of most other colonial peoples, was that they were formed against the background of a growing movement of emigrants from the mandatory power into the mandated territory” (114).

In Western colonial discourses, representing the wide-spreading colonies as merely an island creates the concept of a “laboratory”—which is ideal for the male colonizers’ adventure and performance of management and civilizing mission (Loxley 117). The island, as Joseph Bristow asserted, can represent colonialist dreams and fears in miniature: “Civilization, it would seem, has not had enough room to grow in such a constricted space. It follows then, that white children are superior in strength of body and mind to grown-up islanders” (94). In addition to this manageability, islands are difficult to grasp. The island was “the site of a double-identity—closed and open—and this doubleness perfectly conveys the ambivalences of creole identity” (Bongie 18). As a laboratory to represent the desirable manageability and fearful intangibility of colonized and creole subjects, the island