Michiyo Mori’s “Kunichigai” and “Kikyorai”：The “Dual Nature” and Invisibility of Japanese Imperialism in Its Southward Expansion

Michiyo Mori’s “Kunichigai” and “Kikyora”” are short stories included in Kunichigai (Nihon Bunrinsha, 1942). Although presented as two separate works, they together form a single, complete narrative. Set against the backdrop of rubber cultivation in Southeast Asia, the stories depict a romantic relationship between Sonoko, a Japanese woman, and Ganbo, a Malay man.</br>Previous studies have mainly praised Mori’s sympathy toward the local people, focusing on Sonoko’s subjectivity and her interracial romance. This paper, however, examines how these works show the dual nature of Japan’s situation, embodied in its drive for imperialist expansion and the constraints imposed on it by Western powers. Through this analysis, it shows that Michiyo Mori’s works are essentially in alignment with the propaganda objectives of wartime Japan.</br>Local people like Ganbo, though portrayed as indispensable laborers on Japanese rubber plantations, are consistently positioned as “the Other” who are excluded and discriminated against. This contradiction not only highlights Japan’s sense of superiority through its discrimination against the native population but also reflects the economic restrictions Japan faced from Western countries. However, Mori avoids depicting Europeans in her works and instead emphasizes relationships exclusively between Japanese and natives, thereby rendering invisible Japan’s structural dependence on Western countries and concealing the vulnerabilities of Japanese imperialism. While the author does not openly praise war, she demonstrates a collaborative stance toward it by deliberately obscuring the structural problems of Japanese imperialism.