Of Civilization and Savages: The Mimetic Imperialism of Japan's 1874 Expedition to Taiwan
Of Civilization and Savages: The Mimetic Imperialism of Japan's 1874 Expedition to Taiwan
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文明与野蛮：1874年日本远征台湾的模仿帝国主义
DOI：
10.1086/ahr/107.2.388
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发表时间：
2002
期刊：
影响因子：
--
通讯作者：
R. Eskildsen
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
R. Eskildsen
1874年春，一支日军远征队从日本长崎港出发，前往台湾南部。根据政府文件，这次探险有两个目的：表面上是为了惩罚一群台湾原住民，他们对1871年底在台湾南部遇难的54名来自Ryi ikyii(今冲绳)的人负有责任；另一个真正目的是在台湾东部建立殖民地，以教化该地区的野蛮居民。日本政府公开否认探险队有任何殖民意图，迫于外国压力，决定推迟探险队，但掌管日本军队的指挥官手持先前发布的皇室命令，先发制人，在军队被召回之前派遣部队到台湾。探险队随后达到了表面上的目的，日本军队在一系列简短的暴力战斗中惩罚了一群台湾原住民。战斗停止近五个月后，在北京进行的一系列乏味的谈判没有达成最终的外交解决方案，一个月后，远征军撤出台湾，回国，但没有实现其公开承认的殖民目的。如果我们只看政府文件，台湾远征的故事似乎就到此为止了。商业出版的来源-报纸、木刻版画和卡瓦拉班，类似于欧洲猛烈抨击的原始单色版画-表明这个故事还有更多内容。特别是，它们揭示了日本帝国主义与日本与西方文明的纠葛之间的密切联系，并揭示了对西方文明的选择性侵占和日本军事力量的海外投射是如何促成日本现代身份的形成的。近年来，欧洲历史学家对殖民帝国对欧洲大都市现代生活的贡献做出了越来越复杂的评价，但日本历史学家几乎还没有开始考虑日本殖民帝国与日本现代性之间的密切关系。事实上，在最近的一篇评论文章中，一位学者批评日本历史领域的历史学家没有注意到日本的殖民地--尤其是朝鲜--对现代社会的贡献
IN THE SPRING OF 1874, a Japanese military expedition departed the Japanese port of Nagasaki bound for southern Taiwan. According to government documents, the expedition had two purposes: an ostensible purpose of punishing a group of Taiwanese aborigines responsible for the murder of fifty-four people from Ryiikyii (present-day Okinawa), who were shipwrecked in southern Taiwan late in 1871, and a real purpose of establishing colonies on eastern Taiwan in order to civilize the savage inhabitants of the region. The government denied in public that the expedition had any colonial intent, and under foreign pressure decided to postpone the expedition, but the commander in charge of the Japanese forces, holding previously issued imperial orders, preempted the government by dispatching his troops to Taiwan before they could be recalled. The expedition subsequently achieved its ostensible purpose, and Japanese forces punished a group of Taiwanese aborigines in a brief series of violent battles. Almost five months after the fighting ceased, a languorous series of negotiations in Beijing produced an inconclusive diplomatic settlement, and a month later the expeditionary force withdrew from Taiwan and returned home, without having achieved its publicly unacknowledged purpose of colonization. If we looked no further than government documents, the story of the Taiwan Expedition would seem to end there. Commercially published sources-newspapers, woodblock prints, and kawaraban, crude monochrome prints similar to European broadsides-show there is more to the story. In particular, they show the intimate connection between Japanese imperialism and Japan's vexed encounter with Western civilization, and they shed light on how the selective appropriation of Western civilization and the projection of Japanese military force abroad contributed to the formation of modern identity in Japan. In recent years, European historians have offered increasingly sophisticated appraisals of the contributions that colonial empires made to modern life in European metropoles, but Japanese historians have barely begun to consider the close relationship between Japan's colonial empire and modernity in Japan. Indeed, in a recent review article, one scholar has criticized historians in the field of Japanese history for failing to pay attention to how Japan's colonies-especially Korea-contributed to modern