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

this best-selling 1930s work an imaginary “south island” whose tropical forest is home to numerous wild animals and fierce black cannibals. Yano Toru describes the work's effect as “Boken Dankichi syndrome”—most Japanese people shared and still share the set of Boken-Dankichi-like images of the Pacific or Nanyo (South Sea) Islands (“Nanshin” 195). Like the heroic boy Dankichi on a south island in the comic, the Nanyo-cho (South Seas Government of Japan, set up in Koror in 1922) modernized and Japanized Micronesia, establishing schools, hospitals, railways, post offices, and so on. Japanese policemen, having been granted extensive powers, ruled the villages like kings (Dankichi, for example). Micronesian constables supported Japanese policemen, much like Dankichi's black guardsmen. The traditional power of tribal chiefs was co-opted into the machinery of colonial government. At kogakko (public schools for native children), Micronesian children were uniformly educated and indoctrinated into the Japanese language and morals (Peattie 91–95). Reflecting, simplifying, and miniaturizing the most important and most sensitive issue in Japan's overseas empire, Dankichi Island is depicted as an aesthetically and politically ideal colony to remold islanders into “loyal, law-abiding subjects who could become almost, but not quite, Japanese” (Peattie 104). Moreover, the south island had a healing function for colonizers, which enabled the powerful folklorist Yanagita Kunio to dedicate himself to working on the south islands in order to dismiss his guilty feelings about his involvement with Japan's colonial policy in Korea (Murai 25–26). The south island is not only an ideal and convenient setting in which to represent colonial projects, but also to escape from the larger-scale continental anxiety and to conceal such desires.

These idealized images of the south island were set up through Japan's involvement in Micronesia combined with Western