ロティがみた中国人と日本人

――タヒチから日本へ――

抄録

　The French writer Pierre Loti (1850-1923) wrote more than 40 books and several other articles during his career as a naval officer which gave him the opportunity of travelling all around the world. Loti's works also comprise a few pieces of writing about people of China and Japan.

　This paper aims to analyze Loti's descriptions of Japanese and Chinese people. The main keyword to perform this analysis will be the “Yellow Race”.

　I will start with the analysis of the Chinese merchants and laborers described in Le Mariage de Loti (1880), which shows us how Loti was nervous about Chinese population resided in The French Polynesia. In this process, the study will reveal how the commercial activities of Chinese in Tahiti is imagined as potential sexual aggression to Tahitian women in Loti's discourse.

　Next, I will discuss Loti's depiction of Chinese embassy invited to Rokumeikan . Here, Loti perceives that there was a racial, cultural and political closeness between Chinese and Japanese, which made him anxious and fearful.

　Pierre Loti's works on Japan, such as Madame Chrysanthème (1887) and Un Bal à Yeddo (1889) have been criticized how Loti portrays Japan and Japanese people as a childish or uncivilized. Until now, his discriminatory gaze was the main focus of the researches.

　In Les Femmes Japonaises (1891), however, Loti seems to be fearful of Japanese-Chinese imperial alliance rather than simply despise them as “savage” people. The notion of Yellow Peril became popular around 1894. This paper is going to explore a new aspect of Loti's works that shows his fear for modernizing “Yellow races,” and suggest that his anxiety is connected with the Yellow Peril in embryonic phase.