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MISSING LINK FOUND, 1880: THE RHETORIC OF COLONIAL PROGRESS IN ISABELLA BIRD’S UNBEATEN TRACKS IN JAPAN

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 February 2015

Joohyun Jade Park
Joohyun Jade Park*
Affiliation:
Purdue University
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Extract

In Unbeaten Tracks in Japan (1880), Isabella Bird, one of the most celebrated travel writers of her time and the first female member of the Royal Geographical Society, asserts that she has found “the ‘MISSING LINK’” in the deep interior of Japan, on the island of Hokkaido (270). According to Bird, a wizened individual barely resembling man sits “crouched” in front of a disheveled hut, showing no “signs of intelligence” (270). In fact, this “missing link” Bird purports to have discovered was one of the Ainu, the native people of Hokkaido, who suffered the consequences of Japanese developmental schemes. Bird's identification of the forlorn figure as the “missing link,” an anachronistic being that lacks history and culture, is puzzling, as she encounters this haggard man after having already spent several days with the Ainu in Biratory, a small village in Hokkaido. During her stay, the Ainu villagers constantly speak of the strained relationship between themselves and the Japanese, as well as their discontent at Japanese prohibitions on Ainu traditions. In other words, they divulge the oppressiveness of Japan's so-called “modernizing” regulations and policies, and they attempt to inform their visitor of the history between the two conflicting peoples. However, their efforts seem to be lost on Bird. Rather than interpret the Ainu individual's ruined body as a corporeal text on which the history of colonial violence and exclusion is imprinted, Bird judges the man's beastly existence to be the evidence of his people's inferiority.

Type
Research Article
Information
Victorian Literature and Culture , Volume 43 , Issue 2: EDITORS' TOPIC: The Nineteenth-Century Pacific Rim , June 2015 , pp. 371 - 388
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Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2015 

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