Atelier Aterui: "United States of Asia" (VI.B.3.073): A Postcolonial Reception of James Joyce and Japan

“United States of Asia” (VI.B.3.073)
A Postcolonial Reception of James Joyce and Japan

Eishiro Ito

Abstract

     This article aims to introduce the general attitude regarding Japan/world affairs in Joyce’s time, and to argue on Joyce’s reception of Japan in his works and the Japanese reception of Joyce from a postcolonial perspective.
In a letter to his brother Stanislaus on November 6, 1906 James Joyce showed his interest in Japan’s military power at that time: “Japan, the first naval power in the world, I presume, in point of efficiency, spends three million pounds per annum on her fleet” (L II,188). His comment reflects Japanese victories of the First Sino-Japanese War (1894-1895) and the Russo-Japanese War (1904-1905).
     Joyce found it rather naïve to heap insults on England for her misdeeds in Ireland: “A conqueror cannot be casual, and for so many centuries the Englishman has done in Ireland only what the Belgian is doing today in the Congo Free State, and what the Nipponease dwarf will do tomorrow in other lands” (CW 166).
   Joyce directly or directly referred to the three Asian wars; the First and Second Sino-Japanese Wars and the Russo-Japanese War in his texts. The casus belli of those wars was desire for colonies, Manchuria and Korea. It seems that Joyce regarded Korea as an equivalent to his native country Ireland. Joyce’s angle on the Japanese Empire seems rather ironic. At first Joyce and other Irish people thought it good that a minor Asian country like Japan defeated one of the Great Powers. However, as Japan began to devote itself to imperialism, they were deceived in their expectation.
     Joyce did not stand for imperialism nor colonialism. Joyce would also have found it rather naïve to heap insults on Japan for her misdeeds in Korea and China. It will depend on us Asians as to whether Joyce’s idea of the “United States of Asia” or Sun Yat-sen’s Pan-Asianism will come true in the twenty-first century.

■    Key Words: imperialism, (post-)colonialism, First & Second Sino-Japanese
       Wars, Russo-Japanese War, Japan, China, Korea, Pan-Asianism

*The full version is available in James Joyce Journal, vol. 12, no.2. The James Joyce Society of Korea, Winter 2006, 103-127.