4 - Borders in Blood, Water, and Ink

Summary

Chapter 4 explores the textual mappings of the South China Sea produced by Andō Sakan (1893–1938), whose “adventuristic” reportages and fictional accounts of overseas prostitutes, Japanese medicine men, and Chinese pirates appeared in everything from pulp magazines to highbrow journals, thus making this mobile space legible to diverse metropolitan audiences. Andō fashioned himself through repeated transgression of physical borders, using the ambiguities of this process to further his career. Yet as an ideologue of ethno-nationality and empire, Andō focused on the fragility of the borders of Japanese identity, and depicted China as a primordial entity that threatened to overwhelm Japanese who became too intimate with it. Nonetheless, Andō’s writings, framed as a series of romances in liminal space, demonstrate that the construction of borders and boundaries could entail as much a desire for that which lay on the other side as a sense of menace from what it portended. Together with the preceding chapter, Chapter 4 also contributes to our understanding of the location of pirates, quintessential borderland actors, in the physical and conceptual spaces of Japanese imperialism.