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

which would include islands from Samoa to Saipan” (Peattie xviii). For the Japanese, however, it “can only include territories in the Pacific that lie south of the equator” (Peattie xviii).

The difference in the scope of the terms, as previously suggested, stems from the different relationships amongst the Japanese and Westerners (such as the Europeans and Americans) in the tropical Pacific. This book primarily deals with twentieth-century discourses on such colonial relationships as have been produced and transformed through the world powers’ colonial domination and influence over the islands and surrounding waters of the tropical Pacific, focusing especially on the relationship between the Japanese and Pacific Islanders. It also examines Japanese images or representations of the area, especially of Micronesia (on which the term “Nanyo” focused upon, as mentioned prior), and it considers responses from Pacific Island writers in English.

Japanese representations of the Pacific can be thought of as “Nanyo-Orientalism.” In his influential book Orientalism (1978), Edward Said defined his concept of Orientalism as the sum of the Western representations of the Orient that construct binary divisions between the Orient and the Occident (the West) and create stereotypes of the “strange,” “degenerate,” and “timeless” East. It is a useful analytic framework within and against which Japanese representations of the Pacific can be considered. Based on Said's arguments, the Korean-Japanese scholar Kang Sang-jung pointed out that “Japanese Orientalism” can be characterized as the simultaneous operation of double desires: the desire to avoid Western territorial ambition directed at Japan and the desire to use Orientalism's hegemonic power over other Asian/Pacific regions (86).

This ambivalence of Japanese Orientalism is seen at work in Japanese texts on the Pacific (which focus specifically on