Distant Country, Paradise, Wilderness, or Mysterious World: The Changing Image of the South Sea (Nan’yō) Islands in Japanese Science Fiction
Bibliographic record
Abstract
For Japan, “Nan’yō” is a geographical concept as well as a historical and cultural one. Taking the mid-Meiji period, post-World War I and II periods, and the beginning of the 21st century as its nodes, this paper examines various texts and compares the historical background of the South Sea Islands as imagined in Japanese science fiction, with a focus on both literature and films. The works of the four periods, through a distant view, close view, reconstruction and retrospection of the South Sea Islands, respectively, portray “Nan’yō” as a distant country for ambitious expansion; an earthly paradise of colonial ideals; a dangerous and exotic foreign land; and a mysterious world overrun with primitive civilization, with the aborigines are portrayed as ignorant and backward, and sometimes even being cast as unfamiliar and potentially threatening Others. Unlike the typical (anti-)utopian narrative, the Japanese “Nan’yō fantasy” is based on the political discourse model of civilization-backwardness, in which the differing attitudes towards the natural environment and primitive tribes reflect Japan’s ambivalence in defining its self-positioning within the cultural crossroads of the East and the West. This portrayal of Nan’yō is a product of the close interconnection between the mass media and the spirit of the times: a reflection of personal ideals and national destiny, as well as a collective vision interacting with social reality.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".