| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立政治大學 === 台灣史研究所 === 102 === This thesis explores the forging of Japanese impression toward the southern otherness since the late 19th century during the rise of the Japanese empire. At the end of Edo period, Japan was forced to confront the Western power, opened their country, and widened its imagination of people abroad. Since Meiji period, Japan started to occupy islands and islets in the Pacific Ocean. It was also the period for the Japanese people to start to acknowledge, discuss, sort, and pile up their understanding of the southern natural and cultural scenery. By advancing to the further south, they continued to shape, reform the discourse of the southern otherness. In the early 20th century, colonizing Taiwan offered the Japanese people a chance to contact with the indigenous, which deepened the discourse of otherness, built discriminative ethnic stereotypes, and reassured the binary opposition of civilization and savagery.
By parsing the historical materials, mainly Japanese Shimbun media, this thesis focuses on 1870s to 1920s, illustrates how the Japanese empire forged their impression of southern otherness, how it divided civilization and savagery by using the media-twisted southern imagination, and how it ranked its own civilization at the same time.
The development of journalism in modern Japan was deeply in tandem with the rise of the Japanese empire. Also, mass media played an important role with the process of forming impression of otherness, which becomes the key point of research. In conclusion, despite the gradual control of the journalism by the government, mass media still showed its publicness and provided an open platform to develop multiple discourses of otherness.
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