抄録
本稿は、1879年に琉球王国を「沖縄県」として日本国家に併合した所謂「琉球処分」の政治過程とそれをめぐる同時代の様々な「語り」の検討によって、近代西洋との遭遇以降もナショナリズムの発生を抑制してきた東アジア世界の歴史的諸条件を明らかにしつつ、同時に現地住民の「民族性」を領土問題の正当化に動員するような政治体制の、東アジアにおける起源について再考することを目的とする。人類学における民族論の展開は、民族とは「差異の政治学」を通じて不断に構築されるプロセス-たとえばある社会問題が「A民族対B民族」の「民族間対立」として問題構成され続けることによって、「A民族」「B民族」が相互に排他的な実体的集団として人々に意識されるようになるという過程-であることを明らかにしている。そうであれば、国境画定作業において現地住民の集団的アイデンティティが政治的に資源化されるような議論の「場」が出現する時期を見定めることは、例えば当該地域におけるナショナリズムの発生を考察する上で肝要となる。従来、「琉球処分」において日本政府は日本住民と琉球住民との人種的・民族的同一性を併合の根拠にしたとされてきたが、一次史料から見るとそのようなイメージは必ずしも事実でなく、日本内地や中国の新聞記事からも琉球の一般住民の性格によって領土帰属を論じた議論は観察されない。さらに注目されるのは、同時代の欧米系メディア(米国人の著作や横浜居留地の英国系新聞など)には「日琉同祖論」に通ずる民族誌的知識や、生物学的純粋性・混淆性に立脚して人種間の優劣を議論する言説が見られるにも関わらず、日本・琉球・中国という東アジアのアクター諸国はそれを政治的な道具として動員していないことであり、その背景には国民形成以前の状態にあった東アジアの表象システム-「民族問題」を構成しないような論理と世界観の体系-が存在した。本稿はその歴史的実態を明らかにするとともに、そのような作業を通じて、研究領域として自己完結しがちな民族論や国民国家論をより普遍的な視野へと開くことを目指すものである。
This paper deals with the political process of and contemporary discourses about the Ryukyu Annexation, the integration (or colonization) of the Ryukyu kingdom into Japan in 1879 as Okinawa Prefecture (Okinawa-ken). It aims to rethink the "myth" that the annexation was an ethnic reunion of the Japanese nation, or that Meiji government justified its invasion by that kind of logic. Those narratives have been disseminated widely through the works of postwar historians. In contrast, this paper shows an alternative, almost totally different, vision of the annexation. First, the people of neither Meiji Japan nor Qing China adopted ethnological theories to back up their political moves for or against the annexation. Secondly, although contemporary American and English media discussed the biological origin and purity of the Ryukyu people, both governments still ignored those discourses. Put differently, the failure of nationalism to emerge during the annexation shows that the existence of Western discourses about ethnicity is not enough to bring about the self-organizing dynamics of nationalism. In the early modern, so-called "Chinese" world order of East Asia, the concept of nationality had far less importance than it does in the modern world. Unlike a nation-state whose legitimacy originates from its people's will, the authorities of pre-modern Asian states were represented by their emperors or kings only. In addition to that historical condition, the modern world system of the 19th century was still not based on the norm of nationalism. Henry WHEATON, in his popular book, Elements of International Law (6th edition), declared that the concept of a nation had nothing to do with that of a state. Therefore, it was no wonder that Meiji government, attempting the jurisdiction of the Ryukyu Annexation, did not take the logic of ethnic identity into consideration. The Japanese foreign minister at the time, TERASHIMA Munenori, told the Chinese minister Ho Ju-chang that the islands should belong to the state they were paying taxes to. Throughout the diplomatic conversation between the Japan and China, neither the concept of Ryukyu ethnicity nor the ideology of a nation-state played any role at all. What is more interesting, however, is the fact that English-speaking people at the time conducted a discussion about the racial and ethnic characteristics of the Ryukyu people. Chars F. FAHS, an assistant surgeon in the fleet of Matthew C. PERRY, had already reported that the inhabitants of Ryukyu were descended from the ancient Japanese; the Japanese scholar OTSUKI Fumihiko published a translation of his paper in 1873. In the summer of 1879, ex-U.S. president Ulysses S. GRANT, serving as the mediator to the Ryukyu problem, mistook the Japanese point of view as a justification based on "the ethnological affinities" between the Japanese and Ryukyu people. Because that misunderstood vision was widely reported through the U.S. media The New York Herald and the Meiji government's puppet newspaper, The Tokio Times, the anti-Japanese English paper in Yokohama, The Japan Gazette, even tried to demonstrate how raising the issue of ethnology would actually hurt the Japanese case, since the inhabitants of the Ryukyu islands seemed to be more racially pure and homogeneous than those of Japan. In the end, ethnological discussions were limited strictly to the American and English contexts: the Japanese and Chinese governments never appropriated such logic to support their political claims over the islands. That means that the lack of ethnographical knowledge cannot explain why neither state used the discourse of nationality. There was knowledge, of course, but several structural reasons prevented it from becoming politicized. A look at the Chinese newspaper Shenbao, published in Shanghai since 1872, shows us that the reasons given by both sides stemmed from the contemporary East Asian world order. First, the traditional Chinese world order tended to make light of ethnicities, and placed more importance on the king's (not the people's) historical origins. Second, both the Japanese and Chinese regarded themselves as being of the same race and having the same culture. Third, the Japanese racial concept of "jinshu" did not yet carry a biological implication in that period. Those elements of the East Asian world order kept any Western ethnological discourse from being used in the Ryukyu problem. This paper attempts to contribute to the study of ethnic problems and modern nationalism from three aspects, as follows. First, it sheds light on the conditions of early colonization in East Asia, when the ethnicities of the local people were yet to be politicized. Second, the fact that Western ethnographic knowledge had not been utilized for a long time implies that a gap lay between politics and the discourses -a fact so often carelessly ignored in the method of cultural studies. Last, far from the popular assumption that regards modernization simply as "Westernization," the concept of modernity was redefined as a reflexively constructed institution. Through a rethinking of numerous historical narratives related to the Ryukyu annexation, this paper outlines the possibility of and need for the construction of a foundation for comparative studies of various local modernities within the global modern world system.
