Miyerkules, Hulyo 25, 2012

Suehiro Tetcho's (Storms on the south seas) and the Meiji Period Debate on Expansion in the Philippines


Suehiro Tetcho's novel Nanyo no daiharan (1891) about the Philippines expelling the Spanish and welcoming the Japanese in their place, appeared together with actual expansion activities into the Philippines and a series of intellectual debates about this expansionism. At the time, Japan had just established diplomatic relations with Spain, and was urged to establish a consular office in Manila and a Kobe-Manila shipping route. Japanese immigration was considered as well, but the two sides had very different purposes in mind: Spain wanted to curry favor with Japan as well as to calm matters in the Philippines with "docile" Japanese while the Japanese government was planning economic expansion into Southeast Asia.
Contemporaneously, intellectuals such as Sugiura Jugo, Suganuma Teifu, and Fukumoto Nichinan were also promoting Japanese expansion into the Philippines - Sugiura encouraging colonization while Suganuma and Fukumoto promoted economic expansion. Using keywords such as "entrepreneurial spirit" (shinshu no kisho) Suganuma and Fukumoto reasoned that the Japanese should sweep away the passive characteristics from 200 hundred years of seclusion by adopting a directly active foreign development policy. Either way, at the time Japanese activity in the Philippines was neither economically nor politically feasible, and both the consulate and the shipping line were soon abandoned. Despite this, expansion into the Philippines continued to be advocated, a fact which, especially in retrospect, indicates alternate discursive or social value. Thus, it is possible to argue that this debate was not based on rational economic need, but on a need to stretch the limits of human imagination or to "construct" a political reality. Taken one step further, it is also possible to argue that this allows a rare glimpse into the functions of "narrativity" itself.
With this as a theoretical point of departure, this dissertation investigates two main issues. First, Suehiro Tetcho's Nanyo no daiharan (Storms on the south seas) is analyzed together with political theories and historical data from the same time period in order to demonstrate how literature and politics were both developing "imaginative power" in their focus on expansion into the Philippines. Building on this, the dissertation then explores the connection between the creation of subjectivity for the nation state and the use of "southern expansion" as a popular fictional theme to further question the functions of narrative and its role in the discursive formation of foreign relations.


Repleksyon:
        nalaman ko na ang Suehiro techos ay nakipagkapwa teksto sa Noli Me Tangere ni Rizal dahil parehas sila ng ilang pang yayari at mga naganap sa kwento pero sila ay nag kaiba sa wika,uri ng pag sulat at pormat.Parehas din sila nobela.
         Ang naramdaman ko ay masaya dahil merong nakikipagkapwa teksto kumukuha ng ediya sa gawa ng mga pinoy.

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