Robinsonades in Japan: Colonial Fantasy, Survivalist Narrative and Homo Economicus

Abstract

Yukari Yoshihara’s “Robinsonades in Japan: Colonial Fantasy, Survivalist Narrative and Homo Economicus” explores the multiple appropriations of Defoe’s novel from its first translation from the Dutch translation (1849) through to the present day. Crusoe has functioned as a figure for sakoku, Japan’s isolation policy in its feudal past (1639–1854), for its struggle to become a part of the modern economic world system, for the colonial expansion of its maritime empire over Asia and the Pacific (1895–1945), for its period of neo-colonial economic dominance over Asia (since 1960s), and for its anxiety over its declining economy in recent decades after the burst of its bubble economy (1990–2020). In Japanese marine novels when it was a colonial empire, Robinson Crusoe was made into a Japanese character, as if it were Japan, rather than Britain, that could represent his true spirit, at the time when Japan was claiming that it was a liberator of Asia and the Pacific from Western colonialism. In 1948 Ōoka Shohei quotes the epigraph of Serious Reflections: “it is reasonable to represent one kind of imprisonment by another” in his fictionalized depiction of his experience of imprisonment as a POW in the Philippines during WWII (but also as an analog to the situation Japan was in under GHQ occupation). In 1949 Japanese “holdouts” who returned from the Mariana Islands (Joseph Sternberg filmed The Saga of Anatahan (1953), based on this incident) were much admired as Crusoe figures for their resilience and tenacity. Generally speaking, post-war Robinsonades in Japan for younger readers are cleansed, gentrified, rendered utopian and go without much violence; but Crusoe also features as exemplary homo economicus in discussions of post-war reconstruction and the bubble economy.