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

Authors of the nanshin ron accepted social Darwinism, and some of them made a point of affirming a blood relationship between the Japanese and the islanders. These writings, whether fictional or not, contain long romantic prose/essays written in traditional style under the influence of both eighteenth-century European stories (such as Robinson Crusoe and Gulliver's Travels) and contemporary anthropological knowledge. This genre of writing came to be sidelined by “modern literature,” or shosetsu (novel), that had newly emerged as an ethnocentric “technology” for the epigonic nation state/empire to reclaim its peripheries (Yano Toru, Nihon 50–78).

Japanese adventure stories—which first appeared in the 1900s in the new written language developed by Oshikawa Shunro—served to raise the morale of the samurais. They were the main writings used to describe Japanese heroes’ encounters with the Pacific—such as conquests they made, management techniques they implemented, and friendships they forged—emphasizing modern scientific technologies introduced in the twentieth century and traditional chivalrous ethics. Such tales of Japanese heroic exploits were eagerly accepted among the common people during the period of time in which Japan joined the Western imperial powers. This was the time of Japan's victory over Russia, its colonization of the Korean Peninsula, and its complete abolition of the unequal treaties with Western powers that had been concluded in the last days of the Tokugawa shogunate.

At that time, especially when Japanese troops occupied German-controlled Micronesia during the First World War and acquired it as a mandated territory, Nanyo-Orientalism began to function as a modern imperialist device to reclaim the colonized people in imaginative as well as practical terms. Micronesia and its peoples were transformed—the region was given the new standardized name (or body) of Nanyo gunto (the South