Japanese travelogues on southwestern Pacific Islands since the 1960s: encounter and engagement with the islanders and reflection on the Pacific campaigns

Nishino, Ryota (2015) Japanese travelogues on southwestern Pacific Islands since the 1960s: encounter and engagement with the islanders and reflection on the Pacific campaigns. UNSPECIFIED. (Unpublished)

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Abstract

Japanese travel-writers to southwestern Pacific Island battlefields such as Papua New Guinea and Solomon Islands have recorded their interaction with the Islanders in their travelogues. This presentation applies analytical angles of travel-writing scholars such as Mary Louise Pratt and Debbie Lisle. Travel-writing scholarship regard the travelogue as a medium that negotiates and articulates relationship between the metropole and the periphery. Metropolitan travellers’ descriptions tend to buttress metropolitan superiority over periphery, which underpins ideological sustenance for imperial control.
This presentation probes major features and shifts in travel-writers’ interactions with the islanders and how their experiences affected their understanding of the war and relationship between Japan and the Pacific Islands. Japanese travellers occupy an ambiguous position. Postwar economic prosperity afforded them the opportunity to visit sites of defeat. It will be argued that travel-writers have interacted with and regarded the islanders in different lights. Indeed, individual travellers travel with different motives and carry their own political persuasion. Early travel-writers tended to identify the islanders as vital sources of history. The writers were humbled by discovery of wartime history, and integrated historical narratives with reflection on their position vis-à-vis the war, and the relationship between Japan and the islanders. Recent writers are better informed about the war, but tend to regard the islanders as unreliable tour guides and opportunistic traders. As Pratt and Lisle suggest, these different visions underline a shift in the writers’ assumptions about the islanders and Japan’s relationship with Pacific Islands.

Item Type:	Other
Subjects:	D History General and Old World > DS Asia D History General and Old World > DU Oceania (South Seas) H Social Sciences > HN Social history and conditions. Social problems. Social reform P Language and Literature > PI Oriental languages and literatures
Divisions:	Faculty of Arts, Law and Education (FALE) > School of Social Sciences
Depositing User:	Ryota Nishino
Date Deposited:	27 Aug 2015 23:33
Last Modified:	28 Apr 2016 04:03
URI:	https://repository.usp.ac.fj/id/eprint/8384

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