Daiwa Japan Forum Prize Lecture - Ethnography and Literature: the Colonial Journey of Satō Haruo

This lecture, based on Dr Robert Tierney’s article in Japan Forum, examined the early development of Japanese anthropology and its influence on colonial literature. It related the experience of the writer, Satō Haruo, who travelled to Taiwan in 1920 and became acquainted with the ethnographer, Mori Ushinosuke. Satō went on to write ‘Macho’ (‘Demon Bird’), based on a passage in Mori’s work. The ethnographer-narrator of Demon Bird describes an episode of persecution in an unnamed barbarian village which allegorically references links between colony and metropolis. In so doing, Satō’s writing exemplifies both the scope and the limits of Japan’s anti-imperial critique during the Taisho period (1912-1926).

 

Dr Robert Tierney is Assistant Professor, Department of East Asian Languages & Cultures at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, USA. He obtained his PhD from Stanford University in 2005. Dr Tierney is currently Visiting Researcher at the University of Tsukuba. He specialises in modern Japanese literature, film and popular culture, colonial and post-colonial studies, gender and sexuality, the practice and theory of translation, nationalism and transnational culture. In 1999, he was awarded Grand Prize at the Second Shizuoka International Translation Competition.

 

His winning article, ‘Ethnography, borders and violence: reading between the lines in Sato Haruo’s Demon Bird’, appeared in Japan Forum Vol 19. No.1 (2007), pp89-110.

 

The Daiwa Japan Forum Prize was inaugurated in 2001 and is awarded for the best article submitted to Japan Forum in the last year by a junior scholar. The official journal of the British Association for Japanese Studies, Japan Forum provides a comprehensive source of analytical articles in the field of Japanese Studies, and makes scholarship on Japan available to an international readership of specialists and non-specialists. It is published by Routledge.