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

Micronesia). These texts not only dramatize Said's model of colonial representation, claiming that it produces distinct categories of Self and Other, but they also illustrate Homi Bhabha's theories of textual contradictions whereby the colonialists do not always feel superior to the colonized (as outlined in his book The Location of Culture, published in 1994). According to Bhabha, both ambivalence and anxious repetition are intrinsic qualities of colonial representations; therefore, it is not possible to completely separate the subjectivities at either end of the Self/Other polarity. Bhabha's “ambivalence” and threat of “mimicry” (“almost the same but not quite;” Bhabha 89) can effectively complement Said's “Orientalism.” The ambivalence of Nanyo-Orientalism has implications in both “Westernization” (or Japanese self-colonization) and “Japanization” (or assimilationism, the colonial imposition of a Japanese Self on a Pacific Other).

Orientalism, as it applied to Japan's neighboring region, made it possible for Japanese colonialists to be insensible of their self-colonization as second-hand Westerners. Between the Japanese castaway writings about the Pacific and the fully fledged fictional romance writing of the 1930s, there was a period of modernization, or self-colonization, that exposed readers and potential writers to Euro-American literature. Both cleaving to and breaking from Western influences, this national process was not to be completed. Cultural nationalism—calling for Orientalism to represent neighboring peoples such as Ainus, Ryukyuans, Taiwanese, Koreans, and Micronesians—was appropriated from the West. The Japanese people's ethnic consciousness of kinship (or togetherness) as non-Westerners along with the colonized peoples, as well as their perception of Nanyo as their own ethnic origin (or matrix), made it possible for them to avoid suffering remorse for colonization. In Japan (as with any other non-Western