英文摘要 |
Tamura Taijirō created the short story, “Construction at Sun Moon Lake,” based on the construction of a water power station at Sun Moon Lake in Taiwan during the Japanese colonial period. This story uses this modern construction project in Taiwan to disclose social problems that resulted from Japan’s imperialist and capitalist development during “Shōwa Jū’nendai” (meaning time around 1935). First, Japan’s approach to Fascism greatly affected contemporary literary circles, which tried to maintain a critical position by expressing humanist concern for the lower classes. Second, newspapers, were an important medium for reporting problems at the Sun Moon Lake construction site. Those journalistic reports for intolerable tribulation in reality overturned colonial ideology of romanticizing tropical islands as paradise. The disclosure of laborers’ affliction allowed Tamura’s story to focus on the lower class’s predicament at the hands of capitalist oppression in Taiwan. In the story, machines are sensualized and tropical mountains are transformed into captives of industrial civilization in order to criticize capitalism and reveal the obstacles faced by the lower classes as well as their criticisms of capitalism. From the perspective of tropical medicine and environmental discourse, this study also examines relationships between a local colonial scar and an overseer’s madness and death to unveil the inner ills of the lower class. In so doing, this essay demonstrates how Japan established colonial knowledge about the tropical islands it colonized, and how restless Japanese society was during Shōwa Jū’nendai. |