KOMAGOME Takeshi is one of the few prominent Japanese historians who actively engage in a global dialogue on theoretical concepts and issues in the study of modern empires and colonialism. In his latest 900-page work Colonial Rule of Taiwan in a Global Context: Perspectives from Tainan Presbyterian Middle School (Iwanami, 2015), Komagome explores four notions that he takes as fundamental to the study of imperial Japan from a global perspective: colonialism, assimilation, totalitarianism, and the self-ruling space (jichiteki kūkan). This article is a critical review of Komagome’s theorization of these notions. Firstly, the most important characteristic of Komagome’s elaboration of colonialism is his attempt to theorize it from the perspective of the colonized or in their own terms. This is a hermeneutics of “colonized experiences” in which colonialism is examined as a dynamics of exclusion. A major point of debate here is that Komagome nonetheless discusses aspects of inclusion where he touches upon the workings of imperialism and civilization that are both characterized by overreaching expansion. Secondly, the notion of assimilation was the main focus in his previous 1996 book, in which Komagome analyzed the ideological contradiction between equality and integration on the one hand and discrimination and exclusion on the other, concluding that the political realities of Japanese assimilation policies gravitated toward the latter. Retaining such a view, his latest book shifts its focus to the hermeneutic question of how assimilation was actually “lived” by colonized peoples in everyday terms. What troubles readers, then, is that his vivid description of what he calls “assimilative pressure” (dōka atsuryoku) offers a somewhat contradictory picture in which colonialism appears as an assimilating ― rather than exclusionary ― practice. Thirdly, by analyzing the cases of violent attacks (haigeki) against Christian mission schools in the 1930s, Komagome reads prewar Japan as a totalitarian empire. His discussion is largely based on Hannah Arendt’s theoretical elaboration in which the use of terror for eliminating the Other, or “total domination,” is highlighted, while resituating this line of thought in the context of “total mobilization” in wartime Japan. Komagome’s thoughtful appropriation notwithstanding, it would work against a major objective of his book to articulate a “trans-critique” (kushizashi no hihan) of empires in global history since the notion of totalitarianism invites problematic typologies in which “liberal” types of empires are typically exempted from critical scrutiny. Lastly, Komagome’s concept of the “self-ruling space” is built on various theoretical resources including the Habermasian notion of the public sphere, Tessa Morris-Suzuki’s elaboration of self-determination by small peoples rather than legitimate nations, and Wu Rwei-Ren’s discussion of an emergent national community in colonial Taiwan. This concept is employed to articulate a historical narrative in which some Taiwanese secured self-ruling spaces under and against the conditions of assimilative pressure in the 1920s, only to be deprived of them by the accelerated violence of the totalitarian movements in the 1930s. A major point of dispute is that while Komagome presents this concept as a social space constructed by the “structurally weak” to embrace diverse possibilities of collectivities and subjectivities, his main example at stake ― Tainan Presbyterian Middle School, particularly its steering board ― is in effect depicted as inhabited by a relatively coherent group of people, namely the Han Chinese male elite, indicating that this space was not free from power relationships based on ethnicity, class, and gender within Taiwanese society.
雑誌名
東洋文化研究所紀要 = The memoirs of Institute for Advanced Studies on Asia
巻
177
ページ
90 - 50
発行年
2020-03-31
ISSN
05638089
書誌レコードID
AN00170926
著者版フラグ
publisher
出版者
東京大学東洋文化研究所
出版者別名
Institute for Advanced Studies on Asia, The University of Tokyo
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帝国・植民地研究の基軸概念と争点 : 駒込武の理論構成を手がかりに（後編）
ioc177002.pdf
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