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

counter discourses by Japanese writers such as Ikezawa Natsuki and his precursor, Nakajima Atsushi.

Specific postcolonial (anti-colonial/decolonizing) literary undertakings have been launched in the Pacific by two writers versed in both Western and their own traditional cultures—writers who are diasporic but not rootless. In their works, Nakajima Atsushi and Albert Wendt created an incomprehensible Nanyo and a faceless Japan, respectively. Their imagining or creating of “others” was necessary for both of them not only to resist imperialist fixed views of the colonized people but also rediscover their “self” or “center,” which is culturally blending and ever-changing.

Nakajima Atsushi's 1942 short stories, “Nanto tan” (“Tales of the south islands”) and “Kansho” (“Atolls”), although they were not much valued by his critics, can be regarded as landmarks in Japanese colonial (postcolonial) discourse. I intentionally ascribe both properties here—“colonial” because this is a discourse in the colonial time and “postcolonial” because this discourse has decoloniality. He wrote them just after his eight-month stay and travels in Micronesia under the Japanese Empire in 1941–1942 as a civil servant of the Nanyo-cho (South Sea Government) in Koror, Palau. Most of his literary works describe the protagonists’ migration into disparate realms, which amounts to their transformation (e.g., an ancient Chinese poet turning into a tiger deep in the mountains) or death. His novel Tsushitara no shi (Tusitala's death), written in 1941 before his visit to Palau, is based on the letters and documents of the Scottish writer Robert Louis Stevenson that dealt with Stevenson's life and death in Samoa (where he was entitled “Tusitala” or “story-writer”), and it inherits the anti-imperialist tone of these letters and documents. When published in 1942, the novel was given a rather fresh and bright title, Hikari to kaze to yume