A Research on Yoichi Funado's Manshukoku Engi: How Japan as a Colonial Empire Has Been Rediscovered in Hardboiled Detective Novels

SAKAMOTO, Saori

doi:2018.6.1.63

The Journal of Japanese Language Literature Studies > Volume 6(1); 2018 > Article

Article

Border Crossings: The Journal of Japanese-Language Literature Studies 2018;6(1): 63-81.
doi: https://doi.org/10.22628/bcjjl.2018.6.1.63

A Research on Yoichi Funado's Manshukoku Engi: How Japan as a Colonial Empire Has Been Rediscovered in Hardboiled Detective Novels

Saori SAKAMOTO

天主教輔仁大学日本語文学系副教授

船戸与一

Correspondence Saori SAKAMOTO ,Email: 049296@mail.fju.edu.tw

Published online: 30 June 2018.

This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License ( http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

ABSTRACT

Historian Shinichi Yamamuro, an expert in the history of political philosophy, claimed that he had dedicated himself to his book, Manchuria Under Japanese Dominion (Enlarged Edition), trying hard to respond to Yoshimi Takeuchi, who in 1963 said, “Japan as a nation hadn’t held a funeral for Manchukuo yet.” He asserted one unforgettable fact that “in China, the thirteen-and-half-year-long existence of Manchukuo had been recognized as the fourteen-year-long tragic history starting from the date northeast China was invaded and occupied by imperial Japan.” He then continued to indicate that future studies on imperial Japan shall never regard Taiwan, Korea or any member of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, as “an individual subject,” but shall perceive and understand “how Japan as a colonial empire gradually formed a system to integrate Asia as a whole” in advance so as to reexamine “the significance of Manchukuo’s position and status.” This research carefully investigates the hardboiled novelist Yoichi Funado’s posthumous Manshukoku Engi (9 Volumes, 2007-2015), which attempted to make a comprehensive response in a form of a novel to the questions raised by Yamamuro in Manchuria Under Japanese Dominion. Meanwhile, Manshukoku Engi depicted large-scale and tremendous changes under the context in which “Japan as a colonial empire” had been correlated to “Taiwan, Korea and the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere” as well as “Manchukuo.” Manshukoku Engi has employed abundant critical and judgmental elements, which are believed in this research to be profoundly related to the technique of hardboiled detective novels manipulated by Funado.

Keywords: Yoichi Funado, Manshukoku Engi, Hardboiled detective novels, Japan as a colonial empire, History of East Asia

キ―ワ―ド: 船戸与一, 満州国演義, ハードボイルド․ミステリ, 植民帝国としての日本, 東アジアの歴史