Ambivalence of the Empire in H. G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds and Acculturation of the Japanese Imperialism : Focus on Comparison with Kaseijin to no Sensō translated by Tsuchiya Kōji

조예라

doi:10.22901/trans.2018.11.2.39

This paper looks at how the text was written in the late Victorian period, how it was then translated into the Japanese Empire during the 1940’s and how its original message was transformed by comparing H. G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds to the Japanese translation, Kasejin to no Sensō (War with the Martians, 1941). In The War of the Worlds, we can read the ambivalence in Wells’ critique of imperialism and colonialism. The text encourages patriotic anxiety by imagining Britain invaded by Martians. It advocates that the Martians are driven by an incessant struggle for existence and cannot help invading the earth. It thus criticizes western imperialism and colonialism by comparing the relationship between the Martians and Earthlings to that of the animals and indigenous people, whose civilizations have gone extinct. However, the Japanese translation weakens this ambivalence and turns it into a text promoting imperialist aggression. The death of the Martians in The War of the Worlds means a defeat to the history of the struggle for survival on Earth. Thus, the death of the Martians is inevitable. The deletion of this evolutionary context in Kaseijin to no Sensō turns the Martians’ death into a coincidence with the help of allies, not something inevitable. As the death of the Martians changes from inevitable to accidental the patriotic anxiety of the original text is further emphasized and the message of the imperialist criticism of the original text weakened.

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