Paper short abstract:

Hayashi Fumiko left numerous travelogues depicting her journey in and beyond the gaichi of the empire in the 1930s. More than representations of the periphery, a cognitive scrutiny of Hayashi's writing showcases that reading travelogues is an embodied experience through which the empire is imagined.

Paper long abstract:

A prolific writer, Hayashi Fumiko (1903-1951) left numerous travelogues depicting her journey as a woman and an artist in the 1930s. Despite their intriguing political ambiguity, this group of writings have not gained serious academic attention, due to both a prejudice against the genre and the conventional historical periodization. Yet Hayashi’s trajectory in the outer or potential territories of the Japanese empire before the official outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War was synchronic with or even anticipated the imperial expansion. Travelogue as a genre blends abstract ideologies into the embodied experience of a traveler and detailed albeit selective descriptions of the destination. As a form of first-person narrative, the perception and enunciation of the author-protagonist throughout the travelogues exemplify an appropriated identification between the personal experience and the imperial scheme. An extension of Hayashi’s signature concerns with the urban space, women, the working class, and the writer in the politically subversive Hōrōki (1928-30), the success of which funded her later journeys, in the travelogues these familiar topics gain unprecedented nuance. Examining Hayashi’s travelogues in Harbin (1930), Hokkaido (1934), Sakhalin (1934), Beijing (1937) and Tianjin (1937) in chronological order, this paper argues that they stage a surging national and imperial subjectivity of the traveling woman writer via the representation of landscape, her fellow women, and the people. On the one hand, mobility and writing grant the author the privilege to report the front of the empire to the metropolitan readership, instantiate the nationalization of women, and instruct the communities she identify with to follow suit. On the other hand, while the author-protagonist endeavors to recruit the unfamiliar into the expanding body of the empire, the transition within the corpus of travelogues from early 1930s to the eve of the full-scale war also reveals the irreconcilable conflict between a multinational community and Japanese superiority inherent to the imperial discourse.