City, Empire, and Flow: Osaka and the Philippines in Oda Sakunosuke's Waga machi

Writing during Japan’s imperialist expansion, Oda Sakunosuke imagined his hometown, Japan’s “merchant capital” Osaka, as an eccentric urban space, an off-center to the imperial capital, Tokyo. In the 1942 novella Waga machi (Our town), his protagonist, Satogashima Takichi, maps the city as he pulls a rickshaw through its streets.  That local Osaka is overlaid with the map of another place, the Philippines, where the story opens, at the turn of the century. The first two chapters describe, with documentary realism, key events and figures in Japan’s involvement in the Philippines, including the building of the Benguet Road by an international crew under US colonial supervision, to open access to the post station, Baguio; and the development of Davao, where Japanese settlers established abaca plantations and mining facilities that would become strategic resources in the approaching war.  The “town” of Oda’s title therefore refers not only to the provincial city, Osaka, but as well to the colonial city-to-be, Baguio, and the “Japan-town” of Davao. Streets and roads lace these urban spaces, and the flow of the South Sea links them. Oda uses the image of traffic and flow to describe a geographical and political relationship, not simply between colonizing and colonized nations, but between provincial and colonial cities as local points in a network of subsistence-level labor. In this paper, I explore the continuities between ‘provincial’ and ‘colonial’ locales in relation to the nation, as they are linked by the toiling body and hybrid figure of the protagonist. This figure is produced in the “pronounced parallax” between the local city and the would-be universal of the Great East Asian Co-Prosperity Zone, into which the Philippines are being absorbed at the end of the story. Embodying an eccentric and vernacular cosmopolitanism, Takichi betrays the workings of the imperial nation.