HIEA 112 Week 4

This week’s main theme is complicity — that is, how did ordinary Japanese people become implicated (consciously or not) in the act of inflicting colonial violence? Consider this question from the readings for lecture 7. Is there a link between someone like Ayako in Mizoguchi’s Osaka Elegy and Koizumi Kikue, who wrote “Manchu Girl” based on her experiences in Manchuria? How might these very different representations of late 1930s femininity in imperial Japan connect to the kinds of imperialist masculinity we see explored in the readings for lecture 8?

The Japanese people saw themselves as superior to others which played a role in the infliction of colonial violence. In seeing others as inferior they created this relationship between them and the others where they would try to inflict their own ideas onto others and would take others as servants. In “Manchu Girl,” Koizumi Kikue describes two experiences she had with Manchurian people. In the first experience she describes her displeasure towards the first Manchurian woman who was supposed to serve her. She notes that the woman’s actions were unsanitary and complains that she never tried to learn about Japanese culture and only spoke Manchurian and never learned Japanese. The author doesn’t try to learn about Manchurian culture to possibly understand why the woman’s actions may have seemed strange and unsanitary to her but instead just complains that the woman didn’t try to adapt to what she wanted. When her husband tries to tell her that he was going to take in another little girl she voices her dislike of that idea and is only okay with it once she learns that the little girl has learned about Japanese culture. After they take in the girl she starts to try to teach her more about Japanese culture and tries to force her to assimilate more into Japanese culture and is upset when the little girl later says that Japan is so small claiming that she was taught anti-Japanese ideas (Koizumi 219). Koizumi sees herself as superior compared to the Manchurian people and sees herself as helping them in trying to get them more immersed in Japanese culture. Osaka Elegy, on the other hand, shows a little girl who has to help her family through financial difficulties and is then forced to sell her body to do this. Both sources show different sides of femininity and the roles that women played.

The ideas mainly voiced in “Manchu Girl” helped promote imperialist masculinity because they saw themselves as superior to others and therefore thought they should spread their own ideas. In the “Adventures of Dankichi” it was evident that the little boy thought he was much smarter and better than the other people living on the island and used them as a ladder and abused the fact that he was smarter than them to get them to do what he wanted and to worship him. These ideas were promoted because of the imperialist masculinity that was present and was an exaggerated view of the main idea expressed in “Manchu Girl.”