英文摘要 |
Iha Fuyū (1876-1947), the father of modern Okinawa studies , established the existence of the Ryukyu nation intellectually through his studies in historiography, folklore and linguistics, but denied Ryukyu nationalism politically by advocating the Nichiryu Dōsoron (discourse on the common ancestry of the Japanese and the Ryukyuan peoples). Was he arguing for what Julia Kristeva characterized as a nation eithout nationalism? Or was he trying to insert some special project of difference/identity construction on into his seemingly paradoxical discourse on Ryukyuan history? This paper seeks to offer a preliminary answer to this question by analyzing the intellectual structure of Iha's Nichiryu Dōsoron. This paper argues that Iha's Nichiryu Dōsaran was a variant of the nationalism of the oppressed and small nations. In its prototypical stage, the historical proposition of the discourse attempted to elaborate a political line whereby the Ryukyuan people could preserve their national subjectivity with the help of external forces through a strategy of creating commonality out of differences between Ryukyu and Japan. This mode of thinking reminds one of the so-called "motherland faction" (sokokuha) of Taiwanese exiles in wartime China who sought to rely on China for liberating their homeland. The later form of Nichiryu Dōsoron abandoned the false hope of relying on external help, strengthened the otherness of Japan, and further deepened the national imagination of Ryukyu. Intellectually it became a much more radical nationalism, and yet politically it was an impracticable nationalism. The emergence of nationalist thought, however, did not mean the formation of a nationalist movement. There was no Ryukyu nationalist movement before the end of WWII, even though an ideology of Ryukyu nationalism did appear in the form of Iha Fuyū's roundabout thoughts. From the perspective of nation-formation, Iha's discourse only signified an early stage of nation-formation in Ryukyu-Okinawa. In this limited sense, one may well agree that the Ryukyu as nation that Iha portrayed in his Nichiryu Di5soron was indeed an (imagination of the) nation without (the movement of) nationalism. |