Introduction
The Japanese state of Manchukuo was established in 1932 in northeast China in the form of a constitutional monarchy. Historians often call Manchukuo a ‘puppet state’ and question its legitimacy as a nation-state because it was created and controlled by the Japanese empire. Only a handful of countries, including Japan, El Salvador, and the former Soviet Union, recognized Manchukuo as a nation, while both China and the League of Nations refused to recognize its legitimacy. In order to project an image of independence from Japan, the Manchukuo regime produced its own national flag, national anthem, national bank, and national currency. The last emperor of the Qing dynasty Pu Yi was appointed head of state and later became the emperor of Manchukuo. Zheng Xiaoxu became the first prime minister and other Chinese officials occupied all the seats in the cabinet of the General Affairs State Council. Since the Japanese constituted only one to two per cent of a population that was over 90 per cent Chinese, the regime needed to demonstrate equality in the distribution of power between the Japanese and Chinese by appointing Chinese individuals to government posts. In practice, however, most major decisions for governing the state were made by Japan's Kwantung Army and by the vice-ministers of the Manchukuo cabinet, all of whom were Japanese. Thus, although the regime went to great lengths to project an image of political autonomy, the Manchukuo state remained under Japanese control and social relations within the country took on a clearly colonial character. Manchukuo also experienced rapid economic growth and modernization during Japan's occupation, mostly due to the presence of the South Manchurian Railway Company. Cultural production, including the establishment of the Manchukuo Film Association and several literary associations, also began to flourish in the late 1930s and early 1940s. Manchukuo finally collapsed with the defeat of Japan at the end of the Second World War in 1945.
In the past 20 years most studies of Manchukuo have focused on the economic and political aspects of this state, though more recently there have been important contributions to the study of the cultural production of Manchukuo. For instance, in Sovereignty and Authenticity: Manchukuo and the East Asian Modern, Prasenjit Duara demonstrates how the Manchukuo regime tried to use the concept of the ‘East Asian Modern’—the fusion of a global form of civilization (West/universal) and a traditional form of civilization (Asia/local)—to construct an authenticity for the newly established Manchukuo. Mariko Tamanoi's edited volume Crossed Histories: Manchuria in the Age of Empire also devotes some chapters to delineating the nature of the media industry, including films and newspapers, in order to provide a more comprehensive picture of Manchukuo. Norman Smith's book Resisting Manchukuo introduces marginalized Manchukuo female writers and illuminates their struggles with both patriarchal society and Japanese imperialism.Footnote 1
As these studies all suggest, the construction of a cultural and national identity for Manchukuo was one of the most urgent projects of this newly established state. The issue of language occupied a significant place in this project. Although scholars of Manchukuo recognize the important role of language in the construction of Manchukuo culture, this subject has not yet been widely explored in Western scholarship. In an attempt to address this gap, this article examines the language politics of Manchukuo and illuminates the unique role that language played in the colonialism of East Asia. In the scholarship on Western imperialism, the imposition of colonial languages becomes a symbol of colonial oppression.Footnote 2 While the Japanese and Chinese in Manchukuo also shared this perception of a colonial language, this article questions the simple equation between the imposition of the colonizer's language and linguistic hegemony. By analysing the language issue within the colonial context of East Asia, this article attempts to provide an alternative way of looking at the politics of language. Because the Japanese adopted the Chinese script around the fifth century, and because classical Chinese was the primary means of communication between Japanese and Chinese elites until the late nineteenth century, Japanese was greatly influenced by the Chinese language and continued to share certain characters in their writing system. Japanese imperialists often used this linguistic similarity between Japanese and Chinese to appeal to their shared history and culture, and thereby suggest that the two countries should cooperate with each other in building a new nation in opposition to the West. Some Chinese supported this idea and perceived the ‘Japanization’ of the Chinese language to be an inevitable aspect of reform in the nationalist project of modernization.
In order to illuminate this point, I will look at two literary pieces: ‘The Eighth Switching Point’ (‘Daihachigō Tentetsuki’) by the Japanese writer Hinata Nobuo and ‘The Wilds’ (‘Yuanye’) by the Chinese writer Gu Ding.Footnote 3 ‘The Eighth Switching Point’ was first published in the journal, Sakubun (Writing) in 1939. This short story is about a Chinese worker at the South Manchurian Railway Company who lives in fear of losing his job due to his lack of Japanese language skills. Gu Ding's ‘The Wilds’, which appeared in 1937, highlights the unreliable nature of language through a story about a dysfunctional Chinese family.
Through the comparison of a Japanese and a Chinese literary text I will make two primary points. First, I will demonstrate how these stories reflect the similarity of the two authors’ reactions towards the implementation of new language policies in 1937. The stories of Hinata and Gu Ding both feature communication failures, such as lexical misunderstandings, linguistic barriers, lies, and rumours. These miscommunications in the stories suggest that the authors’ understanding of power relations was embedded in dialogue as well as the mutable nature of language. As writers in Manchukuo who were alive to the changes taking place in language policies, Hinata and Gu Ding were both aware of the unreliable nature of language, particularly how its usage and social value transformed as the political structure of the state changed. Second, I will argue that even though the authors’ view of language in general was similar, they had quite different understandings of the relationship between language and colonialism. For Hinata, language was strongly tied to nation and nationalism. Hinata saw the Japanese language as a symbol of colonial power and Chinese as the language of the oppressed. The miscommunication caused by the language barrier between the Japanese and Chinese characters in his story, therefore, suggests his criticism of the ethnic hierarchy that existed in Manchukuo. Gu Ding's treatment of language in ‘The Wilds’, on the other hand, makes no direct reference to Manchukuo's language policy. This is because his primary concern was not ethnic friction in Manchukuo but the modernization of his native place (dongbei) and his native language.
Although it is clear that Gu Ding was aware of the language issues in Manchukuo as well as the tension between Japan and China, he did not seem to conceive of language as a defining element in the culture of a nation. He did not see the ‘Japanization’ of the Chinese language as an indication of a defeat but rather as an opportunity to modernize his native language. Like many of the May Fourth period writers who advocated abandoning Chinese tradition and practices, including the use of classical Chinese, Gu Ding was seeking a means to reform the Chinese language.Footnote 4 Thus, instead of despairing over the changes brought on by imperialism, Gu Ding welcomed them and tried to construct a new type of language and community that would not be restricted by the discursive notions of Chinese and Japanese nationalism. Therefore, the focus of his story is on revealing the emptiness and the unreliable nature of language as well as the artificiality of the connections between signifier and signified. For Gu Ding, if language is mutable and arbitrary, linguistic colonization can be read as a modernization of his native language, thus painting linguistic nationalism as not only unnecessary but also as a hindrance.
The linguistic politics of Manchukuo
Both Hinata and Gu Ding were writing in the colonial context of the Manchukuo regime, in a literary environment that could not but be shaped by the linguistic policies of the state where Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Mongolian, and Russian were the major languages.Footnote 5 There are two relevant aspects to Manchukuo's linguistic politics. First, there existed a real intellectual dissonance in Manchukuo engendered by the disparity between the idealistic state slogans and the often-brutal colonial reality. Second, after the implementation of the new language policy in 1937, the relationship between language and political power was made explicit.
The ideology of Manchukuo revolved around the two concepts of ‘the Kingly Way’ (wangdao 王道) and ‘Harmony of Five Ethnicities’ (wuzu xiehe 五族协和). The idea of ‘the Kingly Way’ was appropriated from a Chinese traditional political philosophy based on the principles of righteousness (yi 义) and humaneness (ren 仁).Footnote 6 The slogan ‘Harmony of Five Ethnicities’ referred to the idealized relations between the Japanese, Han, Manchus, Mongols, and Koreans. These state concepts were widely publicized and discussed in the Manchukuo media and literature. The Japanese historian Yamamuro Shinichi explains that these state ideals, rooted in the Chinese concept of humaneness, were meant to stand in opposition to the militaristic and undemocratic Nanjing regime. These slogans were also meant to draw on the cultural similarities of Japanese and Chinese traditions to appeal to both Chinese and Western audiences.Footnote 7
These slogans were more strongly advocated after Japan's full-scale invasion of China in 1937. This is evident in the article ‘The Examination of Publicity’ (‘Senden no kenkyū 宣伝の研究’)that was issued by the public relations department of Manchukuo in 1937:
Our Manchukuo state is a new state that is built upon the consensus of its thirty million residents. It was established in order to implement the ‘Governance of the Kingly Way’ (wangdao zhengzhi 王道政治) that is based on the idea of ‘Follow the way of Heaven and the people will be in peace’ (Shuntian anmin 顺天安民) as well as to realize the harmony among the five ethnicities and to promote the eternal welfare of all mankind.Footnote 8
The reality of Japanese rule in Manchukuo was quite contrary to the ideals expressed in this statement. Large numbers of innocent civilians were killed, for example in the Pingdingshan massacre (Pingdingshan nuesha shijian 平頂山虐殺事件) in 1932,Footnote 9 and elsewhere in Manchukuo, Chinese lands were plundered, women were raped, opium was popularized, the Shinto religion was imposed, and racial discrimination was evident at all levels of the state. In 1932, the ‘Interim Provision for Controlling Thieves and Bandits’ (zankōchōtōhihō 暫行懲盗匪法) was issued. This law included a provision called ‘Killing on the Spot’ (rinjin kakusatsu 臨陣格殺) which authorized the military and police to kill those who resisted the Manchukuo regime.Footnote 10 This article alone demonstrates the inhumanity of the government's policies towards its citizens.
Political and economic hierarchies were racially structured, such that important positions in government offices, organizations, and companies were occupied by the Japanese, and Chinese always earned lower salaries than Japanese personnel of the same rank.Footnote 11 In every level of society, the gap between the claims of state ideology and the reality was so great that many of the state's public proclamations had little credibility. It is to this dissonance between text and reality that the stories of Gu Ding and Hirata call attention.
The intellectual dissonance created by this gap between the Manchukuo state's idealistic propaganda and reality was accentuated by the language politics of the 1930s. Shi Gang's study on languages in Manchukuo indicates that it was around 1937 that Japanese became the major language in Manchukuo. According to a document issued by the Bureau of Education in Manchukuo, up until at least 1934 the Chinese language was regarded as the national language (guowen 国文) and the Japanese language was treated as a foreign language in the higher normal schools. In public schools, Japanese was not even a required subject.Footnote 12 In May 1937, however, new orders on education and schooling were issued. An article in ‘Outline of the Educational System (gakuseiyōmō 学制要網)’ states that ‘Japanese should be respected as one of [the] national languages based on the spirit of “united virtue, united heart” (ittoku isshin no seishin 一徳一心の精神) among Japanese and Chinese’.Footnote 13 After this order was issued, either Japanese and Chinese or Japanese and Mongolian were included in school textbooks, depending on the majority ethnic group in the area. In either case, Japanese was promoted as the most important language to study, whereas Chinese and Mongolian were downgraded to the status of secondary languages. Consequently, the number of hours devoted to studying Japanese at school was extended while the hours for studying Chinese or other ethnic languages were shortened.Footnote 14
Shi Gang suggests these changes in the education system were spurred by new policies in other colonies such as Korea and Taiwan. Policies including kōmin-ka 公民化 (Imperialization) and naisen kekkon 内鮮結婚 (Marriage between Japanese and Korean) attempted to assimilate Korean people into Japanese culture. Many Shinto shrines were built in Korea and Taiwan and residents there were required to pay homage at these shrines.Footnote 15 A new educational order was issued in 1938 that changed the Korean language from a required to an elective subject, and all Korean language classes were banned the following year.Footnote 16
In Manchukuo, new regulations for the Department of State were issued in 1937 which resulted in an increase in the authority of Japanese officials. As the number of Japanese government officials increased, Chinese elites who were fluent in Japanese were given preference for higher-rank positions.Footnote 17 With these changes in language policies, people became more keenly aware of the everyday use of language.Footnote 18 In an environment where one's language ability determined one's social status and where the choice of language explicitly indicated one's political position, consciousness of the meaning and power of language became ever more acute. Under these conditions, language provided social influence, and therefore was conceived of as a symbol of power.
Hinata Nobuo and a synopsis of ‘The Eighth Switching Point’
As a participant in the Japanese imperial project, Hinata was conscious of the ethnic hierarchy that existed in Manchukuo. His 1939 short story ‘The Eighth Switching Point’ confronts the way in which the linguistic politics of Manchukuo reinforced this ethnic hierarchy in the Manchukuo state. In this section I will argue that while Hinata understood the arbitrary nature of language in a way similar to Gu Ding, he differed in his recognition of the connection between language and Japanese colonial power. In order to understand Hinata's position in the colonial politics of Manchukuo, and also because his works are not widely known, I begin here by providing a brief biography of the author and a summary of his story ‘The Eighth Switching Point’.
Hinata Nobuo, the pen name of Takahashi Sadao, was born in Kyoto, Japan, in 1913 and migrated to Manchukuo in 1936. He worked in Harbin as a South Manchuria Railway Company (Mantetsu) employee while writing stories for journals. He worked especially closely with the journal Sakubun (Writing), and became part of its coterie. In order to concentrate more on writing, he arranged a transfer to Mantetsu's Tokyo branch. Hinata's ‘The Eighth Switching Point’ won the Manchukuo Literary Prize in 1940 and was also nominated for the Akutagawa Prize in 1941. Hinata was later conscripted and died in Okinawa shortly before the end of war in 1945.
In Japanese scholarship, Hinata is categorized as a ‘Manjinmono writer’ (writer who writes about locals in Manchukuo). The main characters in his earlier pieces, including ‘Ichijiki’ (‘A Certain Period’), ‘Kino medachi’ (‘The Buds of Trees’), and ‘Shunen koto’ (‘Chunyuan hutong’), are all Korean and Chinese people. ‘The Eighth Switching Point’, which appeared in Sakubun (Writing) in February 1939, also centres around a Chinese man. The narrator begins the story by explaining how the Manchukuo regime started imposing Japanese on local people and how this placed many Chinese workers at the railway company at a disadvantage. The Chinese protagonist Zhang Youde had a relatively good life when the railway company he works for was under Russian management. Although illiterate in Chinese, he is literate and fluent in Russian since he grew up in a Russian-speaking environment and is married to a Russian woman. His sole job at the railway company is to switch the lines once a day and for this he is paid an adequate amount of money. After the Japanese take over the management of the company, however, everything changes. Not only do trains run more often but they also have to do so on a strictly accurate schedule. Instructions and orders are all in Japanese, with the result that the younger Chinese workers who have been educated in Japanese are promoted, while those like Zhang are threatened with a possible layoff. When Zhang hears the rumour that the company will be firing some workers from his station at the end of the month, he thinks he must be one of them. Contrary to his expectations, however, at the end of the story the company announces that no one will be laid off from his station this time. Zhang is relieved at this news but he soon starts worrying about the possibility of losing his job in the future.
Power relations and language
Language and miscommunication in ‘The Eighth Switching Point’ clearly confronts the tension between China and Japan, and Hinata's criticism of language is framed explicitly within the context of Manchukuo's language politics.
A few days after the company celebrates a ‘hundred days without an accident’, Zhang causes a derailment as a result of his miscommunication with a Japanese worker. The Japanese workers in the main office and the Chinese workers at the rail switching points communicate with each other through an interphone. A Japanese worker forgets to inform Zhang of a sudden rail change and calls him to switch the rail at the last minute, but because the worker speaks hurriedly in Japanese, Zhang cannot understand what he is saying. Since Zhang knows that he will be shouted at if he asks the Japanese worker to repeat what he has said, Zhang replies ‘All right’ as usual. Due to this miscommunication, the train is derailed, and Zhang has to kneel down and apologize to everyone at the morning meeting on the following day. He wants to explain the situation, but instead persuades himself that the incident is his fault since he cannot understand Japanese. Resignedly he concludes, ‘There is nothing I can do about it.’Footnote 19
This miscommunication between Zhang and the Japanese worker is not simply an example of language failure but rather one of the explicit depiction of power relations between the colonizer and the colonized mediated through language. Zhang's inability to converse in Japanese combined with the Japanese worker's authoritarian and overbearing attitude creates the possibility for miscommunication to arise. The Japanese worker is arrogant and refuses to speak slowly to ensure that Zhang understands his instructions. Implicit in his attitude towards Zhang is the assumption that final responsibility for errors and accidents would rest on the Chinese employee. It is the Japanese employee's political and ethnic superiority, inherent in the structure of the Manchukuo state, that gives him little incentive to ensure successful communication.
Even dialogues between Chinese and Japanese that are not explicitly hostile are embedded with assumptions reflective of colonial power relations. One of the switching operators in the story—Akita—is pleasant and supportive to Chinese workers like Zhang. Since he is fluent in Chinese, Akita and Zhang engage in conversation without any obstacles. Zhang is sceptical about Akita's kindness at first, but he gradually comes to share with him his concerns about the railroad company. Superficially the dialogic relations seem to contrast with those of the other Japanese who almost cost Zhang his job, as the mutual trust and respect between Akita and Zhang are readily apparent. Yet a close examination of their conversation reveals a similar dynamic of social inequality and miscommunication. For example, when Zhang is feeling down, Akita wrongly assumes that it is because of the derailment that he had caused and tries to comfort him. When Zhang complains about the working conditions, which were better under Russian management, Akita defends the present conditions by arguing that the railroad service has greatly improved under Japanese management and the customers appreciate the convenience of having lower fares and more frequent service. Akita concludes: ‘You will feel angry if you only think about the reduced salary and the hard labour they impose on you but if you can think that you are helping others through your job you will be more content with your work.’Footnote 20 Rather than providing advice to improve Zhang's working conditions, Akita tries to comfort Zhang by stressing the contribution the company makes to their workers and to the community. When Zhang brings up the topic of losing his job, Akita laughs off the possibility, saying that as long as Zhang works diligently, his hard work will be rewarded.
Akita, although portrayed as a friendly, open, and thoughtful, maintains a similar distance and reproduces many of the assumptions of the colonizer discoursing with the colonized. Akita's explanation that Zhang should be content with his work because the railway company has improved its service to the customers is not a logical one. If the company is making more profit through their improved service, Zhang's salary should be raised. The narrator mentions that Zhang himself could not quite understand Akita's logic. Akita's claim that Zhang would not be laid off and that his hard work would be rewarded, lacks a concrete assurance. Despite his good intentions, Akita's advice reveals his unspoken assumptions and how little he understands of the colonial power dynamics affecting Chinese workers. Even though Akita is also an employee of the railroad company, his ethnic status creates a clear division between himself and his Chinese co-workers which leads him to take the side of management and defend the railroad company. Like other Japanese characters in the story, Akita's conversation betrays a lack of concern over the consequences of his conversations. His advice to his Chinese co-worker can be given freely, in part because the accuracy (or inaccuracy) of his predictions is of no personal consequence to his own future. Whether it is explicit or implied, the dialogues between the Japanese worker and Zhang and that between Akita and Zhang both reveal the reality of the ethnic hierarchy in Manchukuo and the role of language in sustaining this hierarchy.
The translingual character of Hinata's story takes on added salience given the twentieth-century history of northeast Asia. Zhang's fluency in Russian no longer secures him a steady position with the railway company now that it is under new management. Zhang's experiences at the company inform us of the arbitrary nature of language, which recalls in part the particular political history of twentieth-century Manchukuo: Manchus, Russians, Nationalists, warlords, and Japanese all struggled for control over the population of northeast China. Chinese residents in this region had to accommodate recurrent changes in their rulers and in their ideological and cultural agenda.
Zhang's mantra, ‘There is nothing I can do about it’, represents the sense of renunciation and helplessness shared by many locals who were oppressed by different rulers in the course of this region's history. Hinata uses rumour, a groundless hearsay, as well as miscommunications in his story to expresses his humanitarian position, his criticism of ethnic hierarchy, and his scepticism of the immutable value of language.
Gu Ding's life and a synopsis of the ‘The Wilds’
Reflecting the implementation of the language policy, the works of Gu Ding also insinuate that the authors were aware of the colonial coercion embedded in language. Like Hinata, Gu Ding reveals the unreliable nature of language through dialogic miscommunication, but, unlike Hinata, who saw the imposition of Japanese language as an element of colonial oppression, Gu Ding seems to perceive the ‘Japanization’ of Chinese language in a more positive light. The reason for his acquiescent attitude towards the imposition of a colonial language can be explained by his commitment to colonial modernization, which was facilitated by the similarities and historical connections between the Japanese and Chinese languages. Before probing this point in detail through the examination of his story, I will provide a brief background of Gu Ding in order to contextualize his activities and political position in Manchukuo.
Gu Ding 古丁, the pen name of Xu Changji 徐长吉, was born in Jilin Province in 1916. He studied literature at Beijing University and after graduation served as a director of the Organization of the Northern Leftist Federation (Beifang zuolian zushi 北方左联组识). It has been suspected that Gu Ding reported a leftist meeting to the Nationalist police in Beijing which resulted in the arrest of some of his friends after a crackdown. Gu Ding returned to northeast China from Beijing right after this incident took place.Footnote 21 In Manchukuo, Gu Ding worked for the Bureau of Statistics in the Department of State.
From the beginning of Gu Ding's literary career in 1935 his work was closely tied to the literary networks of Japan and the Manchukuo state. When his Japanese friend asked him to edit a journal, he agreed and published the Chinese-language journal Mingming 明明 (Brightness) in 1937, which later became the literary journal Yiwenji 艺文志 (Journal of Arts and Literature) in 1938. His essays and short stories that appeared in Mingming were compiled together into books entitled Yizhibanjieji 一知半解集 (Scanty Knowledge) and Fenfei 奋飞 (Fly Strenuously).Footnote 22 His works were also translated into Japanese and were included in collections such as Genya 原野 (The Wilds) and Manshūkoku kakuminzoku sōsaku senshū 満州各国民族創作選集 (Selected Works of Each Ethnicity of Manchukuo).Footnote 23 He was also involved in various administrative functions for the cultural development of Manchukuo. He served on a committee in the literature department of the Literature Discussion Association (bunwakai文話会) and attended the Greater East Asia Literary Conference (Daitōa bungakusha taikai大東亜文学者大会) every year from 1942 as a representative of Manchukuo writers. His work ‘Yuanye 原野’ (‘The Wilds’) received the Shengjing literary award in 1938 and ‘Ping Sha 平沙’ (‘Sand Flats’) received the literary award from the minister of the Welfare Department of Manchukuo in 1940.Footnote 24 Gu Ding left his job at the State Department to start a bookshop/publishing company called Yiwen shufang 艺文书房 in Changchun in 1941.Footnote 25 Gu Ding was arrested and imprisoned by the Chinese Communist Party after the war and died from sickness in prison in 1964 at the age of 48.
‘The Wilds’ is told from the perspective of Qian Jingbang, the son of a wealthy family, who returns to northeast China after graduating in law from a Japanese university. He loathes everything he encounters in his hometown, from the train station to the bathrooms, and he curses everyone he sees, from street beggars to his own maid.
The characters in the story are depicted as foolish and flawed, and are the objects of the protagonist's continuous ridicule and derision. Jingbang's grandfather Qian Caishen, an old man with a young concubine, is initially portrayed as a strict advocate of traditional values and family hierarchy, but falls apart to become an alcoholic and gambler. Jingbang's father has a Master's degree in law from the University of Buffalo in New York but neglects his business to indulge his opium addiction. Jingbang's boss, Bureau head Qian, is obsessed with finding a potion for immortality and dies through taking a poisonous medicine by mistake. By the end of the story the obsessions of the characters have led to their deaths, prompting the narrator to conclude, ‘These people are not useful for the development of humanity.’Footnote 26
Failures of language and communication
Just as Hinata revealed the mutable nature of language in his work, Gu Ding's scepticism about the reliability of language is also evident in the way in which his dialogue is replete with communicative failures. These manifest in the characters’ repetitious use of nonsensical phrases and in the mutual incomprehensibility of dialogic communication.
Throughout ‘The Wilds’ words and phrases that have no relevance to the flow of conversations are used frequently and repetitively. For instance, the grandfather has a habit of blurting out ‘It's nonsense! (qi you ci li 岂有此理)’. When the grandfather fails to understand Jingbang's words, he says ‘It's nonsense!’ When his maid doesn't show up right away, he shouts ‘It's nonsense!’ and when she fails to provide a towel, he again exclaims ‘It's nonsense!’ Jingbang also has similar habit. He calls everything ‘feudalistic’ without examining the significance of the word. For Jingbang, the beggar on the street, his wife, and even the Chinese-style toilet are all ‘feudalistic’. Chief Wei also repeats the words ‘you know’ and ‘good’. The narrator of the story explains:
He cannot object to anyone. When is it good, he says ‘good, good’ and even if it is bad he still says ‘good, good’. When he says ‘good’ too much he changes it to ‘perfect, perfect!’ If you don't believe me tell him that ‘Chief Wei, the sun comes out from west’, he would say ‘That's good, that's good.’ This is simply because he is not listening to what you are saying at all.Footnote 27
Because Chief Wei has no intention of listening to or understanding what other people are saying, he is unresponsive to questions or comments. These habits of repeating the same words with no meaning make the speaker look silly and it is the narrator who ridicules these instances for comic effect. The irony is that, although the narrator mocks the way in which the characters use repetitive and nonsensical phrases, he does exactly the same thing.
For instance, when the narrator explains new ideas or unfamiliar practices in the story, he often concludes that these new ideas or practices come from Ethiopia. When the narrator mentions the poem that Chief Wei's daughter composes, he explains that this type of poem is influenced by the new wave poems. He says, ‘Whose influence did so called “new wave poets” receive? I heard that it was imported from Ethiopia with opium. A poet secretly told me that.’Footnote 28 The narrator does not explain the relationship between Ethiopia and opium nor that between China and Ethiopia, but continues to randomly and repeatedly mention Ethiopia.
Not only is the mention of Ethiopia irrelevant to the flow of the story, the incident he inserts and the question he raises also lack significance. In the text, by mocking their silliness, the narrator presents himself as a superior and more intelligent man than the characters in the story. He also frequently states, ‘This is what such [a] person told me’ or ‘This is what I heard’ as if he is trying to give the reader the impression that he himself does not know the characters very well. He does so in order to keep a certain distance from the characters and distinguish himself from them. Yet because he participates in the same silly repetition of words as the characters, his intelligence and superiority over the characters is called into question. The more the absurdity of the characters and the narrator are stressed in the story, the more the communicative function of their words becomes questionable.
Another example of miscommunication is the dialogue between Jingbang and Chief Wei. One day Jingbang's grandfather orders Jingbang to visit the Wei residence in order to borrow money from Chief Wei. Wei assumes that Jingbang has come to talk about the grandfather's concubine, who has run away with Chief Wei's subordinate, Mr Fan. Chief Wei begins the conversation:
‘Have you heard from the third madam since then?’ Wei chief first brought up the topic.
‘No. It is really embarrassing that we made such ado,’ Jingbang replied.
‘That man, Mr Fan. From the beginning I was. . . you know, you know. . .’
‘Yes.’
‘You know, you know, for a human being, keeping in good health is. . . life is you know immortal. [. . .] Your grandfather and I are good friends. I have to help him regardless of what.’
‘Yes, Chief. My grandfather sent me precisely for that reason. It is not about the third madam,’ Jingbang rubs his hands.
‘I know your grandfather well, you know, you know, humans need justice and humanity. . .’
‘Wei chief, it is not about the third madam.’
‘I know! Mr Fan, that man is really. . . you know, it is as if a rat licked a cat's nose.’
‘Chief Wei, my visit has nothing to do with the third madam and Mr Fan.’
‘? ? ?’Footnote 29
Because Chief Wei assumes from the beginning of the visit that the purpose of Jingbang's visit is to seek assistance in searching for the third madam, he does not listen to what Jingbang is explaining. Thus, Jingbang has to tell Chief Wei three times that the purpose of his visit has nothing to do with the third madam before Wei finally listens. The initial purpose of Jingbang's visit is to borrow money, and therefore their conversation is directed towards this goal but when his attempts are misunderstood or ignored by his intended audience, it shows that the dialogue itself has no value as a communicative tool. As a result, the achievement of the characters’ goals is either delayed or unfulfilled.
What is revealed in this dialogue involving Jingbang and Chief Wei are the power relations that structured social interaction. The unequal social positions of the participants in the dialogues disturb the reciprocity of communication. It is their social status and the context of the dialogue that determine who gets to talk and who has to listen, as well as whose words are important and whose are not. Because language is the materialization of social communication, to examine a dialogue is to examine the power structure as well as the social system that enables this power structure to be maintained.
The hierarchy of the social status embedded in the dialogues of the story is also evident in Gu Ding's interactions with his Japanese intellectual peers. Here we have an excerpt from a published interview between Hayashi Fusao 林房雄 (1903–1975)Footnote 30 and Gu Ding which appeared in the Japanese-language journal Geibun in 1942:
Hayashi: The main people who were involved in [the Manchurian Incident] clearly stated that after the defeat of the Western powers—especially the US who is their anchorman—their goal is to liberate Asia. They would establish Manchukuo as a part of the preparation for the war with the US. Now the Greater East Asian War started as we expected. Manchukuo is both the first objective and our last resort. Nonetheless, there are few Japanese who know about this, and much less the Chinese. We have to do our best to publicize this. If they knew from the beginning [the purpose of Manchukuo], what would happen?
Gu Ding: If [the Chinese] knew, I think that Chinese officials in Manchukuo would have worked harder than they have been because the objective would have been clearly indicated and the goal that they should aim at would have been more obvious.Footnote 31
There is no way for us to know whether Hayashi and Gu Ding truly believed what they were saying. But regardless of what they believed, the historical evidence provides a context to interpret this conversation. The liberation of Asia from Western powers was a convenient grand cause to mask the underlying driving forces of the Japanese invasion, which were primarily economic and strategic. Hayashi's words conflict with this reality, hence it was neither convincing nor significant to the local people whose land, labour, and women were all exploited by the Japanese.
The interview also demonstrates the power relations between Hayashi and Gu Ding. Throughout the interview, Hayashi takes the active role in driving the conversation forward and Gu Ding mostly confines himself to passive responses. Whereas Hayashi clearly expresses his opinions about Manchukuo, Japanese literature, Chinese people, and so on in his discussion, Gu Ding's contributions are limited to explanations about those aspects of Chinese lifestyles, literature, and culture about which Hayashi is curious. Gu Ding never opposes Hayashi's opinions even when Hayashi talks about Japanese superiority over Chinese. Gu Ding's words and opinions are not treated as important in their conversation but his utterances are made to look important because the objective of publishing this interview in a Japanese-language magazine was to provide textual support for the ideals of the Greater East Asian Co-prosperity Sphere for its Japanese audience and to demonstrate the extent of Chinese support for these policies. This is precisely why the interview between a Japanese writer and a Chinese writer took place in Manchukuo. Thus, the interview between Gu Ding and Hayashi reads almost like a role-playing exercise where the script was written in advance. All that the Japanese needed was Gu Ding's presence as a representative of the Chinese population in Manchukuo and his compliant agreement with Hayashi's opinions. In this respect, Gu Ding was just as much an instrument as his words. Their dialogue reveals the distorting power of unequal social relations on the structure of dialogic communication specific to the social context of Manchukuo.
Gu Ding, who often served the Japanese as a ‘representative’ Chinese writer in Manchukuo, was frequently placed in similar situations at literary meetings, interviews, and conferences. As he participated in conversations that did not address the brutal reality of Japanese colonialism, it is understandable that he grew sceptical about the significance of words, including his own. The comical tone of ‘The Wilds’ seems to ridicule the uselessness of Chinese people, but also, by implication, ridicules his own uselessness to society. When his words held no significance and when his own future as well as that of the state were uncertain, all Gu Ding could do was to laugh at his own pathetic existence.
Linguistic oppression or a tool for modernization?
The miscommunications in ‘The Wilds’ demonstrate Gu Ding's understanding of the implicit power relations in dialogues. Although Gu Ding and Hinata share this understanding, their perceptions of the relationship between language and colonialism are different. In ‘The Eighth Switching Point’ Hinata constantly treats the Japanese language as the more politically powerful. The story suggests that Zhang's misery is caused by the way in which the Japanese language is embedded in the structure of the colonial regime. Of course, Gu Ding also recognized this dynamic, but his attitude toward this reality is a more positive one. In his essays he sometimes expresses his admiration for the Japanese language for having both phonetic symbols (kana) and characters (kanji) in the writing system, while expressing his regret that Chinese only has characters. For Gu Ding, language is something mutable, meaning that antiquated and inferior languages have to adapt or perish, just like the useless characters in ‘The Wilds’. This position is evident in another example of miscommunication in his story. Gu Ding, who was fluent in both Japanese and Chinese, toyed with the similarities between the Japanese and Chinese languages to express his understanding of the political and social implications ingrained in language.
On the day that Jingbang comes home from Japan, he goes to his grandfather's room to pay his respects. When Jingbang says to Caishen, ‘Grandfather, you look very healthy’, Caishen replies, ‘Cheap candy?’ (Jiantang 贱糖).Footnote 32 It becomes evident that Caishen does not know the word ‘healthy’ (jiankang 健康) and in his embarrassment he scolds Jingbang, saying, ‘These days those who studied abroad often use strange words. It doesn't make sense! I really don't understand. They don't use words that already exist and they can't even write a letter properly!’Footnote 33 The miscommunication between Jingbang and his grandfather occurs because the grandfather does not know the word ‘jiankang’. He cannot associate the sound ‘jiankang’ with any concept that he knows, and therefore this word is meaningless to him.
In semiotic terms, when the process of linking a signifier and a signified fails (as in the case of the word ‘jiankang’ in the above extract), not only does it reveal the emptiness of the signifier but it also degrades the value of the word as a communicative tool. In Ferdinand de Saussure's discussion of the sign system, he treats the ‘value’ of a word as equivalent to the ‘meaning’ of a word and argues that this value/meaning is arbitrary in nature and is always determined through contact with other words or languages.Footnote 34 For Saussure, one of the important values of a word is ‘its property of standing for an idea’Footnote 35 and thus his discussion of a word is limited within the scope of semiotic value. Besides semiotic value, however, words also have a communicative value. Just as the meaning of a word is determined through its interaction with other words, the communicative value of a word is also determined through its contact with other communications. When a word in a dialogue fails in its communicative function, as in the case of ‘jiankang’, the word also loses its value as a communicative tool.
The word ‘jiankang’ loses its communicative value and becomes meaningless to the grandfather in the story, but this does not necessarily mean that the word is also meaningless to the reader. On the contrary, the particular word ‘jiankang’ in the text has significant meanings for the reader who would be aware of the political implications of this vocabulary. ‘Jiankang’ is a Chinese reading of the Japanese word ‘kenkō’ (healthy 健康). It seems reasonable that Jingbang, who studied in Japan, would use a word borrowed from Japanese in his speech. The word itself would not call attention to Jingbang's educational background had the grandfather simply understood the word—not until the grandfather indicates his ignorance of the word does ‘jiankang’ take on a special meaning.
In the 1920s and the 1930s many Western words were introduced to China through Japanese translation, and Chinese people often employed Japanese words such as ‘science’ (kagaku 科学) or ‘culture’ (bunka 文化) with Chinese pronunciation.Footnote 36 ‘Jiankang’ is another such example.Footnote 37 The miscommunication between Jingbang and his grandfather also suggests this ambiguity and illustrates the generational conflicts that emerged from the rapid changes that took place as well as the impact of the ‘Japanization’ of China and its language. The grandfather's defensive response to his ignorance of the word ‘jiankang’ indicates his desire to maintain his authority by imposing his values as standard, proper, and traditional. At the same time, the hint of embarrassment in his response betrays his own insecurity.
Despite the authoritative tone of the grandfather's speech and his harsh criticism of Jingbang's generation, in the political context of Manchukuo in the late 1930s, this episode also suggests the grandfather's loss of power. The more he boasts about his knowledge, the more pathetic he looks, and the comical tone of the story exploits the humour in the situation. The grandfather's justification of his ignorance would not be funny if his values were still highly respected elements of the dominant culture. In the story, the grandfather's response is comical because the modernity that Jingbang represents is depicted as superior and more powerful than the Chinese tradition that the grandfather defends. The comical value of the grandfather's response to the word ‘jiankang’ is thus wholly dependent on the social and cultural context of the Manchukuo state. The word ‘jiankang’ was meaningless to the grandfather in the story, but the historical context of Manchukuo gives it a significant meaning to the reader outside the text.
According to Roland Barthes, who developed Saussure's linguistic theory of sign to understand the realm of culture and politics, the process through which the sign acquires a certain meaning, especially a political one, is called ‘mythification’. For example, the word ‘green’ has its signifier (sound image of ‘green’) and signified (meaning: a type of colour). It becomes myth as soon as the word ‘green’ itself becomes a signifier and obtains a special meaning—in this case, for example, ‘green’ has become mythologized to signify environmental consciousness. In this case, the word ‘green’ not only refers to a type of colour but also carries political and ideological implications. Barthes is critical of the fact that the process of mythification is often seen as ‘natural’, such that people do not question the link between the signifier and the signified.
The instance of miscommunication over the word ‘jiankang’ in ‘The Wilds’ is best understood as an instance of mythification. Gu Ding takes the word ‘jiankang’ as a signifier and creates a context from which one infers political and ideological implications. While ‘jiankang’ signifies the concept of healthy, the use of the word in the story constructs ‘jiankang’ as a form of mythical speech with more profound meanings. Within the text, no one alludes to the word's political implications, but outside the text, the word ‘jiankang/kenkō’ suggests an ideological and cultural context embedded in the political conflicts between China and Japan as well as the discursive tensions between Chinese tradition and Western modernity.
The political implications of language evidenced in the text can be further elaborated when they are placed in the context of Pan-Asian discourse. The idea of miscommunication as an embodiment of a failed link between words and political ideology is applicable to political situations in many contexts, but the miscommunication between Jingbang and his grandfather over the word ‘jiankang’ has a particular significance in the East Asian context.
Both Saussure's and Barthes's theory of signifier and signified share assumptions that emerge from their shared roots in European languages. Owing to the use of shared alphabetical systems, they focus more exclusively on sound over the writing system. Although the sound of a word alone can stand as a signifier in European languages, this is not the case in the Chinese language. There are so many homonyms in Chinese that without a context it is difficult to determine the meaning of a single word based solely on its sound. For instance, the sound ‘jian’ (fourth tone) alone has more than 20 possible meanings. The grandfather's confusion of the word ‘jiankang’ (健康 healthy) with ‘jiantang’ (贱糖 cheap candy) exemplifies this difficulty, although he also misheard the sound ‘kang 康’ as ‘tang 糖’.
Even though the grandfather does not recognize the word ‘jiankang’ aurally, the reader can at least speculate as to the meaning of the word by looking at the text because Chinese characters are ideographic. The grandfather's mistaking ‘jiankang’ with ‘jiantang’ is funny to the Chinese reader because, even though they sound similar, their meanings are completely different. This humour is not easily conveyed in the English translation. Thus, the grandfather who tries to understand the word by its sound and the reader who understands the words through visual images experience the meaning differently.
This ‘ability’ to link a signifier and a signified based on an ideograph that is neither phonogram nor visual sign (e.g. the stop sign) is significant because it symbolizes the ‘similarity’ in East Asian cultures. The Chinese, Japanese, and Koreans all used ideographs in their writing systems. The Japanese government and the Manchukuo regime took advantage of this ‘similarity’ in the Chinese, Japanese, and Korean languages and used it to construct an East Asian identity.
As discussed earlier, the word ‘jiankang’ meaning ‘healthy’ is a word of Japanese origin. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, many Western concepts were disseminated through Japanese translation. The Japanese scholar Miwa Kimitada explains: ‘By the mid-twentieth century, the written Chinese language had become as much Japanese, especially in the field of modern scientific literature, as the Japanese had been Chinese.’Footnote 38 Thus, when Jingbang used the word ‘jiankang’, it was both Japanese and Chinese, even as it was neither. This ambiguity between the two languages was useful in Japan's effort to legitimize their colonization of northeast China. Their shared culture could serve as the basis of appeals to unite together against the West, and some Chinese, including Gu Ding, supported this idea.
The similarities between the Japanese and Chinese languages were also considered beneficial for creating a national language of Manchukuo. There was a movement to create a language that would work for the Japanese, Chinese as well as other minorities in Manchukuo. They were called kyōwa-go (協和語) and Manshū-kana (満州カナ). Kyōwa-go was a pidgin between Japanese and Chinese that was created in Manchukuo and Manshū-kana refers to the Japanese phonetic alphabet for Chinese characters which is similar to today's pinyin.Footnote 39 While Kyōwa-go developed from the daily interaction between Japanese and Chinese, Manshū-kana was invented and standardized by the regime.Footnote 40
The Manchukuo Chinese linguist He Yunxiang advocates the development of Manshū-kana in his article ‘Manyu kana ji qi chuangzhi zhi yiyi’ (‘Mango-kana: Its Creation and Significance’). After explaining the close relationship between Japan and China, he states that in order to develop a new language, it is best to employ the language of a country that ‘has a close relationship with Manchukuo in terms of their culture, history, current politics, economics, and everyday life. For various reasons, creating our (Manchukuo’s) national language by employing their (Japanese) language is easy and convenient.’Footnote 41 Language reform, especially the issue of the high illiteracy rate and the unification of speech and writing, had been a primary concern of the May Fourth Movement. Chinese scholars in Manchukuo also felt that the reason for the high illiteracy rate among the Chinese in Manchukuo was the difficulty of writing classical and modern Chinese characters. In order to reduce the burden of learning these complex characters, they needed to reform their language. Some extremists suggested that they abolish all the characters but many conservatives did not want to give up their writing heritage.Footnote 42 Chinese intellectuals like He Yinxiang felt that a good solution for this problem would be to create a new language such as Manchu-kana by combining Chinese and Japanese languages. He Yinxiang claimed that since Manyu kana developed from Japanese kanji, which were themselves similar to Chinese characters, developing this new kana was a good compromise to preserve their writing heritage.Footnote 43
Gu Ding shared this view. In some essays he expresses a regretful nostalgia for his language: ‘Because of my profession, I speak very little Chinese at work. Because I want to gain more knowledge, I read very little Chinese after work. I feel like Chinese is gradually leaving my mouth and my eyes.’Footnote 44 Yet while Gu Ding expresses his love for Chinese language, he also sees in it inherent flaws. After listing all the negative aspects of the Chinese language, such as the lack of both a phonetic alphabet and extensive vocabulary, Gu Ding states, ‘It has been already obvious that Chinese characters are insufficient for our literary expressions.’Footnote 45 He especially stresses the inferiority of the Chinese language in comparison to the Japanese language with its three types of writing systems. Thus, for Gu Ding the Japanese-influenced transformation of Chinese was a necessary step towards the improvement of the language. He states in his essay:
Nonetheless, my love for Chinese language does not mean that I want it to be isolated from the world nor do I want the path between Chinese and other languages to be cut off. It is better to let my beloved Chinese language to be richer, finer and more beautiful. I would rather want it to open its door and welcome other languages as much and widely as possible. Not only absorbing their vocabulary but also absorbing their grammar and sentence structures.Footnote 46
While he loves the Chinese language, he does not try to protect it from foreign influence. As a colonized intellectual, he understood the process of Japanese overpowering Chinese to be an inevitable aspect of colonial modernity. For Gu Ding, the linguistic hegemony of Japanese in Manchukuo was not likely to cause the extinction of Chinese but was a chance for the language to transform itself into something new and better.
While Hinata saw the Japanese language as a mere symbol of colonial power and Chinese as an oppressed language, Gu Ding sees language as mutable and not so clearly associated with colonial oppression. It does not perish with the presence of other powerful languages but rather perpetually adapts in response to them. Just as new ideas emerge from a dialogic relationship, so a new language can be born from a dialogue between different languages. Gu Ding advocates the renewal of Chinese, saying: ‘Those [foreign languages] that blended into the Chinese language are no longer foreign languages but became our beloved Chinese.’Footnote 47 The miscommunications and the treatment of language in ‘The Wilds’ suggest that language is neither a ‘fixed’ nor ‘permanent’ element of a culture but is arbitrary and mutable. If there is no ‘pure Chinese language’ from the outset, then the language that undergoes all the changes and influences of other languages remains Chinese.
Conclusion
Hinata Nobuo's ‘The Eighth Switching Point’ and Gu Ding's ‘The Wilds’ both feature dialogic miscommunications that demonstrate the authors’ shared scepticism about the reliability of language, yet their understanding of the role of language in Japanese colonialism differs significantly. Hinata's treatment of language in ‘The Eighth Switching Point’ is framed specifically within the context of Manchukuo's language politics. Although Hinata was aware of the mutable nature of language he, unlike Gu Ding, still conceived of language as a defining element of national culture. Thus the miscommunication between the Japanese worker and Zhang highlights the language hierarchy between the Japanese and Chinese in Manchukuo with this example suggesting Hinata's criticism of such hierarchy.
The primary theme of Gu Ding's piece is his critique of the old values that need to perish in order to bring modernity to his native place and language. These old values include the notion that language is an immutable element of the cultural identity of a nation. Language changes over the time and so does culture. Thus, the miscommunication in his story functions to remind the reader of the artificiality of the link between the signifier and signified which is often engendered by changing social and political ideology.
A common topic in the literary debate of the 1930s was the appropriate direction for Manchukuo literature. Many writers thought that the depiction of local people would contribute to the creation of a separate identity for Manchukuo literature.Footnote 48 Gu Ding stood opposed to these writers and rejected any ‘isms’, including realism. Instead he advocated that writers should increase production of their literary texts. He believed that, as writers, they should produce literature freely without any constraints, and that this would eventually come to define Manchukuo literature.Footnote 49 Gu Ding's flexible attitude toward literature was also consistent with his perception of language. Instead of considering the disappearance of the Chinese language as a sign of defeat, Gu Ding welcomed the influence of Japanese as a source of modernization. While Zhang's strategy for survival in ‘The Eight Switching Point’ was passivity and resignation, symbolized in the phrase ‘There is nothing I can do about it’, Gu Ding's strategy for survival seemed to be his flexibility and openness to colonial projects. Writers in the European colonies might have had a similar attitude towards the colonization of their language, but as the example of ‘The Wilds’, as well as Chinese support for the Manshū-kana movement suggest, the similarities between Japanese and Chinese was the articulated reason for the willingness of the Chinese to accept the language of the colonizer. Language always changes. When Japan incorporated the Chinese language into theirs in the fifth century, it was considered a gain and the recipient language, which went through drastic changes, is still called Japanese today. For some the imposition of language represented defeat and cultural loss, but for Gu Ding it was a means to a nationalistic end.
