著者

ティアニー ロバート 大﨑 晴美 Tierney Robert Osaki Harumi

出版者

名古屋大学大学院文学研究科附属「アジアの中の日本文化」研究センター

雑誌

JunCture : 超域的日本文化研究 (ISSN:18844766)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.6, pp.28-41, 2015-03-27

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In the early 20th century, Japanese writers, publicists, and politicians evinced a great deal of interest in Japan’s expansion toward the South Seas. In Nan’yō Yūki, Tsurumi Yusuke, a prominent advocate of expansion to the South, championed the mobilization of folklore to spark the interest of Japanese youth in the acquisition of overseas territories. Introduced to all school children from 1888 in elementary school readers, Momotarō was seen as a folk tale with particular relevance to the colonization of the South Seas. Nitobe Inazō thought of Momotarō as a pedagogical tool that could fire the imagination of Japan’s youth and spur them on to participate in colonial projects. In “Momotarō no mukashibanashi,” an essay published in 1907, he argued that the folktale expressed in allegorical form the irrepressible drive of the Japanese people to expand continuously toward the South. He placed particular stress on the geographical specificity of the folktale when he argued that the island of the ogres lay in the South Seas and that the treasures Momotarō brought back to Japan were the products of the tropics. Nearly twenty years after Nitobe’s essay was published, Akutagawa Ryūnosuke depicted Momotarō as a villain in a parody “Momotarō” that was published in the Sunday Mainichi in 1924. In this satire, Momotarō is a cruel invader who brutally attacks a group of humanized ogres living peacefully on an island paradise in the South Seas. At the end of this story, young ogres counterattack and fight to win the independence of their homeland. At the intersection of folklore, propaganda and parody, Momotarō emerges as a contested site for debating the Japanese imperial project in the South Seas and for defining self and other in the age of empire.