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Published in October 1923, “Demon Bird” is a short story written by Haruo Satō after a three-month traveling across Taiwan, Japanese colony since 1895. The journey is the starting point for a disenchanted reading of the Japanese colonialist era at the turn of the twentieth century. Through an effective narrative style, Satō censures the Japanese colonialism, and highlights the relation between civilized colonizers and native aboriginals. Finally, he explores how the socially dominant group progressively isolates and eventually wipes away individuals who are different.
In the second half of the nineteenth century Japan developed from a feudal society into a modern constitutional monarchy (Segal 1). This process had two significant consequences: it promoted colonialism, but it resulted in a society open to foreign influences (Segal 2). While imperialism led to the acquisition of Taiwan and Korea as colonies in 1895 and 1920, the modernization attracted western disciplines into Japan, including anthropology and ethnography (Tierney 126). The repressive methods and the policy of assimilation of indigenous cultures aroused a liberal reformist movement (Tierney 125). In “Demon Bird,” Satō utilizes the narrative style of the ethnographic reports to blame the Japanese imperialism.
In the first part, Satō instructs his audience of a superstitious belief that the fortuitous meeting with a bird, the hafune or demon bird, is the anticipation of sudden death (Satō 111). Only some individuals, called mahafune or bird manipulators, can gaze at the bird safely. The ability to control the demon bird gives mahafune the power of harming others, hence when the inhabitants of a village discover bird manipulators, they kill them and their families (Satō 112). How a bird manipulator is detected, isolated, and eventually eradicated offers the occasion to strike the first blow to the civilized Japanese nation: as the natives destroy those who are different from the majority, the colonizers treat like beasts those who have different cultures. Satō (116) notices how civilized governments imprison, and put to death those who think differently from the mainstream.
The second part reports the destruction of a family of mahafune, reaffirms the censure on the colonial policy, and questions the validity of anthropology (Tierney 132). Satō tells the story of Pira, a girl who avoids the traditional courting rituals to hide a rape by a Japanese soldier. Her fellow villagers look at her suspiciously, thinking she is a mahafune. When the imperial army cages 80 men in a building and burns them alive, suspicion becomes a certainty: the villagers trap Pira’s family in their hut, and set it on fire, mimicking the civilized behavior of the soldiers. Only Pira and her youngest brother escape the massacre (Satō 120). The punitive expedition of the soldiers and the sacrificial scapegoats mirror a scenario where colonization has resulted in a destructive impact on the indigenous society: the coeval literature have reported rampant prostitution, abandonment of aboriginal women, the imposition of an alien culture (Tierney 132).
The ethnographic style of the report focuses on anthropology as a colonialist practice, imprisoned between a genuine scientific purpose and the inevitable enslavement to the political power, utilizing the ethnographic knowledge to subjugate the aboriginals (Tierney 129). The dominant culture manipulated studies to promote racial superiority. After a 1902 official document stated that the savages of Taiwan resembled animals, and the precepts of civilized warfare did not apply to them, a series of systematic photos became the emblem of the recalcitrance of the savages (Barclay 47).
The division of “Demon Bird” in two parts raises further questions on the ethnographic movement. While Satō narrates the belief of the hafune in the first person, the massacre of Pira’s family is a report heard from a conversation between the porters and translated by a police officer. The difference is a stylistic device and it suggests that many information constituting the basis of ethnographic studies found on a dubious premise (Tierney 136). Most of the contacts between ethnographers and aboriginals occurred under the structure of rules of the dominating colonialism, lacking authenticity.
“Demon Bird” offers a critical reading of the Japanese colonialism at the beginning of the twentieth century. The tragic end of the story invites to a broader reflection. Pira dies from the snake’s bite, and her young brother ended decapitated as a sacrificial victim by hunters that did not recognize him as part of their group: superstitions and the idea of the social difference are part of every society, and civilization and barbarism are lenses through which different groups see each other.
Works Cited
Barclay, Paul D. “Playing Race Game Card in Japanese-Governed Taiwan”,The Affect of Difference: Representations of Race in East Asian Empire edited by Hanscom Christopher P. and Dennis Washburn, University of Hawaii Press, 2016, pp. 38-80.
Satō, Haruo. Demon Bird. Translated by Robert Tierney. Reading Colonial Japan: Text, Context, and Critique edited by Michele Mason and Helen Lee, Stanford University Press, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, pp. 111-123.
Segal, Ethan. “Meiji and Taishō Japan: An Introductory Essay”. Becoming Modern: Early 20th-Century Japan through Primary Sources. 2015. Web.
Tierney, Robert. “Violence, Borders, Identity: An Ethnographic Narrative Set in Colonial Taiwan”, Reading Colonial Japan: Text, Context, and Critique edited by Michele Mason and Helen Lee, Stanford University Press, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, pp. 124-140.
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