Abstract
This thesis mainly focuses on the chief editor of Taiwan Nichi Nichi Shimpo, Kinoshita Shinsaburou’s East Asia travels. In 1906, Kinoshita Shinsaburou had been to Taiwan, Korea, Manchuria, and China, and published his traveling experience in both Japanese and Chinese on Taiwan Nichi Nichi Shimpo and Taiwan Nichi Nichi Shimpo (Chinese version). Traveling to Taiwan, Korea, Manchuria and China only one year after Russo-Japanese War, as a journalist, Kinoshita recorded how these places faced the modernization process and the changes of political regime during that tumultuous era in the form of travels. Based on Kinoshita’s accounts of his expedition to these places, I intend to analyze his observation on geography, culture, modernization, political and international status of these four places and to highlight his key points in his observation, depicting contents, and characteristic of narration, which seem to be similar but different in several aspects. In addition to the first chapter as the introduction of my thesis and the fifth chapter as my conclusion, in the second and the third chapter, I would like to discuss Kinoshita’s Taiwan, China, Manchuria and Korea travels. In the fourth chapter, I would compare other Japanese cultural and intellectual icons’ Asia travels with Kinohita’s in order to elaborate the similarity and difference in their East Asia discourse. 1906 marks the period when Korea had gradually become the colony of the Japan Empire; Manchuria had already been controlled by the Japan Empire; China had been facing its internal disorder and external calamities, and also the difficulties of reforming, which made China experience the struggle between the new and the tradition. With the representation of Kinoshita’s travels, it could show how the Japan Empire dealt with the change of the tides in East Asia and how the Empire constructed Korea and Manchuria based on its experience of colonizing Taiwan. Thus, Kinoshita’s travels become witnesses of the Japan Empire’s expending era and also windows for the Taiwanese readers to approach Korea, Manchuria and China.