Taiwan Under Japanese Colonial Rule, 1895

TWO HISTORICAL VIEWS: “OPPRESSION AND RESISTANCE” AND “INTENTIONAL ASSIMILATION”

In a dialogue with the Japanese writer Shiba Ryōtarō published in May 1994, Lee Tenghui noted that “up until today, those who have held power over Taiwan were all foreign regimes.” In the same dialogue, he also talked about the sadness of being “born as a Taiwanese who cannot do anything for Taiwan.”¹

A year before this dialogue took place, Japanese political scientist of East Asia Itō Kiyoshi published Taiwan: Four Hundred Years of History and Its Outlook (Chūkō shinsho series). There Itō describes his mother, Liu Zhu, who lives in Taiwan and is part of the generation of Taiwanese that was educated in the Japanese language. Summarizing Taiwanese history since 1624, the author points out that the four hundred years of Taiwanese history, from the Dutch rule during the age of mercantilism () to now, is a chronicle of oppression by foreign regimes and the resistance of its inhabitants. The foreign regimes have included the Dutch (and Spanish), Zheng Chenggong ’s reign, the Qing () dynasty, Japan, and later the KMT.² More specifically, Itō locates the first birth of “Taiwanese consciousness” in the resistance that occurred during the early days of Japanese rule, and its further maturation in the struggle for Taiwanese independence that arose out of the February 28 Incident in the early days of KMT rule.³

There is no doubt that repressive foreign regimes had a great impact on the Taiwanese people. During the fifty years of Japanese rule, the population of Han ethnicity increased 135 percent, from roughly two and a half million people to six million, an indication that even though it was “under a repressive foreign regime,” the society nevertheless transformed significantly. Just as the official languages of these foreign regimes shifted—from the literary Chinese of the Qing dynasty, to Japanese language during the Japanese colonial period, and then to Mandarin Chinese (modern Chinese vernacular)—the dominant ideology and media also changed considerably. Moreover, even the Taiwanese language itself has changed quite a bit under the rule of the Japanese and the KMT, becoming a dialect with distinctive characteristics that differentiate it from Minnan Fujianese (or Fukienese ).

How does a later regime deal with the cultural policies and cultural legacy of the previous regime? What kind of impact did the turmoil in cultural history caused by the frequent shifts of political power have on the identity of the Taiwanese people? In November 1994 the first international conference on Taiwanese literature during the colonial period was held at Tsinghua University in Hsinchu , Taiwan. At the conference I presented a paper entitled “The Establishment and Maturing of the Reading Market in Taiwan During the ‘Great East Asian War’: From the Imperial Subject Movement to Taiwanese Nationalism.” Applying Jürgen Habermas’s theory of the public sphere and Benedict Anderson’s ideas about the “imagined community,” I traced the formation of Taiwanese nationalism. When the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945) and the Pacific War (1941–1945) led to a total mobilization, combining industrialization and the “imperial subject movement,” the Taiwanese were put in the position of collaborating with the war. On the other hand, the enrollment in public schools (kōgakkō , elementary schools for the Taiwanese) and the number of people who were competent in Japanese language increased dramatically, providing a rapidly maturing reading market. This gave birth to numerous literary journals, and for the first time many native writers were able to express their wartime experience, which they shared with the six million Taiwanese.⁴ What developed under Japanese rule was not a simple relationship of oppressive subjugator and the resisting subjugated, but rather a struggle by the Taiwanese people to form a Taiwanese identity while intentionally assimilating the Japanese ideology imposed upon them. What I proposed was a view of history focusing on “intentional assimilation” rather than a simplistic view of “oppression and resistance.”

My paper here examines the process of the formation of Taiwanese identity under Japanese rule; I employ the methodology of social history to examine how it adapted to foreign regimes through the ages. Moreover, through a revision of my previous article on the occupation period, I intend to reconstruct a history of the formation of Taiwanese identity that links all three regimes. In any case, I would like to note that the following hypothesis was formulated within a limited amount of time based on the sources and previous studies available to me in Tokyo.

DUTCH RULE AND ZHENG RULE

Taiwan had been inhabited by Austronesian aborigines since ancient times. Han Chinese migrated from the Fujian and Guangdong provinces beginning in the sixteenth century. In 1624 the Dutch East India Company established organizations to rule and trade in Tainan and ruled the island for thirty-eight years as its first foreign ruler. According to Chen Shaoxin , the population of Han Chinese was about 10,000 when the Dutch first occupied the island; by 1661, it had increased to 34,000.⁵ The Dutch set up churches and missionary schools for the purpose of proselytization. In 1638 there were 400 students from four villages registered in these schools, learning church doctrine via an alphabetically represented indigenous language called Xinkang . Further, in 1657 a seminary was set up to educate thirty indigenous seminarians. They were also taught the Dutch language. In 1656, of 10,109 members of the aboriginal population, 6,078 understood Christian teachings, and 2,784 of them understood more than simple prayers.⁶ The Dutch missionary education and its rule came to an end in 1661 when Zheng Chenggong (also known as Koxinga ) attacked with 25,000 soldiers.

Zheng Chenggong plotted to use Taiwan as a base to eradicate the Qing, a conquest dynasty of Manchurians, and to reestablish the Ming dynasty. He encouraged the immigration of Han Chinese, and it is estimated that by 1680 the population had reached two hundred thousand.⁷ Scholarly opinion on this period is divided, with some claiming that “the educational system was well established through the pyramid structure of shexue , fuxue and xueyuan ,” ⁸ while others maintain that “political and economic stability and military expansion superceded concerns for education.”⁹ In any case, the three generations of Zheng rule lasted twenty-two years, and in 1683 Taiwan was officially incorporated into Qing territory.

Though the missionary educational system and the examination-centered education institutions were instituted under Dutch rule and the Zheng regime, their impact on the formation of Taiwanese identity was less than that of three later foreign rulers, the Qing, Japan, and KMT, because of the short duration of their power.

QING RULE AND THE EXAMINATION CULTURAL APPARATUS

Qing rule ushered in a period of rapid population growth. According to the estimates of Chen Shaoxing, the Han ethnic population increased by 1.8 million, reaching 2 million, during the period from 1680 to 1810. However, during the last eight decades of Qing rule leading up to 1890, there was an increase of only half a million, with the rate of expansion decreasing from 1.8 to 0.3 percent.¹⁰ In response to rebellions in the interior of Taiwan and to the advance of foreign countries into the island during the late nineteenth century, the Qing government expanded administrative institutions, so that by 1885, when it became an independent province, the one prefecture and three districts initially established in southwest Taiwan had grown into a network—of three prefectures, eleven districts, three subprefectures, and one directly administered department—that covered the entire island.

Further, during the nineteenth century Han immigrants began to worship in their ancestral temples not the clan founders from mainland China (tangshanzu ) but rather those who had first established their consanguineous lineages in Taiwan (kaishanzu ). The “armed fights among various regional groups” (fenlei xiedou ) of the early period gradually developed into conflicts between clan groups, an indication that groups from the mainland had reconstituted themselves and matured as a local Han society settled in Taiwan. Chen Chi-nan identifies 1860 as the turning point for the establishment of a governing system and the nativization of the Han immigrants.¹¹

In an article published last year that focused on the local administrator and traditional educational institutions, the Japanese researcher Nakama Kazuhiro discussed the relationship of the formation of the Han elite class to the process of maturation of local Tainan society. He notes: “The economic and social development of the Taiwanese local community was clearly reflected in the establishment of educational institutions, the number of students enrolled, and in the number of local gentry and intellectuals who were produced.”¹² One might venture to say that the examination system and the educational institutions that supported the system were the major cultural policies during the period of Qing rule. Nakama quotes from the Tainan City Gazetteer: “The Qing education system followed that of the Ming dynasty in focusing on the examination system as a way to gather talented individuals and consolidate the foundation for the regime.”¹³ However, Nakama failed to consult the most significant study on the Taiwanese examination system, namely, Yin Chang-yi ’s “Taiwan, Fujian, and the capital: The impact of examination groups (keju shequn ) on the development of Taiwan and on Taiwan’s relationship with the mainland.”¹⁴ I would like to analyze the examination system during the period of Qing rule on the basis of Yin’s article.

According to Yin, from 1686 to 1725 schools were established one after another in the one prefecture and three districts, with a total enrollment of sixty-four. Many groups associated with the examination entered, including individuals who, having residency on the mainland but being unable to get into schools there, counterfeited Taiwanese registration documents and crossed over to Taiwan in hopes of attending the newly founded schools there. Paralleling economic growth, population increase, and the elaboration of the administrative infrastructure, by 1890 there were thirteen prefecture and district schools with an enrollment of 155 students. During the Jiaqing period (late eighteenth century), a reverse phenomenon occurred when some Taiwanese students counterfeited mainland registry to get into schools on the mainland.¹⁵

On the other hand, the central government worked hard to strengthen the relationship between Taiwan and the center by adjusting the quota of students who would pass. Beginning in 1687, Taiwan was allowed one provincial graduate (juren ) among those from the Fujian province examination, on the model of remote regions such as Gansu and Ningxia . The quota for Taiwan gradually expanded. Between 1854 to 1858, when Taiwanese gentry donated a great amount of money toward the military expenses incurred in suppressing the Taiping Rebellion, the number of Taiwanese juren was increased to seven. In 1739 a quota of one in ten Taiwanese examinees was allowed the finalist status of jinshi and, in 1757, the first Taiwanese jinshi was awarded. Later, around 1850, the quota of Taiwanese juren was expanded and as a consequence, from 1823 to 1894, twenty-six Taiwanese jinshi were produced.¹⁶

While the examination system and the immigration of groups involved in examination society advanced the sinicization and confucianization of Taiwan, the nativizing examination-society groups made great contributions to the opening up of agricultural land through contracts with aboriginal people based on the Qing legal system, which had as its goal the preservation of aboriginal land rights. Further, they assisted in providing funds and lodging for Taiwanese students to participate in local and national examinations. The lengthy “pilgrimage” for the examination not only promoted interactions between various elite groups around the island, it also strengthened the ties between the center and the periphery.¹⁷ Finally, Yin Zhangyi finds in the political, social, cultural, and economic conditions that facilitated the examinations the reason why Taiwan developed differently from the Philippines, Indonesia, and Singapore, all areas to which Chinese were immigrating at this time.

Tracing the history of how the prefectural and district schools established at the beginning of Qing rule developed into a vast examination system that formed the backbone of Taiwanese society, Yin estimates that by the Guangxu period (1875–1895), Taiwanese exam-takers numbered around 7,000.¹⁸ However, considering that the Han population had by this time reached two and a half million, and that the examinees ranged from teenagers to men in their sixties, seven thousand examinees cannot be considered numerous; rather, they represented the elite minority of Taiwanese society.

Moreover, as scholars such as Li Yuanhui and Wang Zhiting have pointed out, the prefectural and district schools did not offer classes on a daily basis. They conducted rituals and ceremonies at the Confucian temple and offered poetry instruction once or twice every month.¹⁹ Similar to these schools were the private academies (shuyuan ). Distinct from these, there were also actual educational entities such as yixue (charity schools), minxue (schools for commoners), and shufang (private schools) that taught reading and writing in literary Chinese and the abacus. It was in these schools that students were instructed in the classics in preparation for the examination. The educational language used was not Mandarin Chinese but Taiwanese.

Shufang continued under Japanese rule. In 1898, a few years after the colonization, there were 1,707 shufang schools with an equal number of teachers, and the number of students amounted to 29,876. Numbers decreased for the following three years, and though they rebounded in 1903, they immediately began to decline again. In 1904 the number of students dwindled to 21,000 and was surpassed by the public schools (kōgakkō ) set up by the colonial government; by 1919, 302 schools remained, with less than 11,000 students; by 1941, there were only 7 schools with 254 students.²⁰ From these numerical data, we can surmise that there were about 30,000 students studying in shufang schools and the best of those who graduated constituted the 7,000 examinees.

In 1941, near the end of Japanese colonial rule, the population of Taiwan numbered 5,680,000, of whom 57 percent understood the Japanese language. 744,000 students were enrolled in primary schools for Taiwanese (1942 statistic: see Zhong Qinghan , p. 177). On top of that, there were middle school students (5,895), girls’ high school students (3,354), agricultural and forestry school students (1,854), industrial school students (998), business school students (1,675), vocational school students (9,141), and teachers’ college students (479). The students enrolled in secondary education were 23,354, compared with a late Qing literacy rate of less than 10 percent. Although in late Qing Taiwan there was a cultural circle with the group participating in examination society at its core, individuals who participated in this society were a very small minority.

What sort of media environment, then, was constructed by this small elite group? According to the M.A. thesis of an assistant professor at Cheng Kung University, Taiwan, Li Cheng-chi , even though the technology of woodblock printing was brought into Taiwan during the Zheng’s reign, movable-type printing of Chinese was never introduced into Taiwan, even at the very end of Qing rule. Liu Mingchuan ’s official newspaper Dichao in 1886 was printed by woodblock print. After Taiwan opened its ports in 1860, the commodity economy prospered and there was most likely a hunger for news, yet neither newspapers nor magazines were published.²¹

On mainland China, on the other hand, British missionaries had been publishing Chinese language journals such as Xiaer guanzhen (Hong Kong, 1853) and Liuhe congtan (Shanghai, 1857). In 1872 the British merchant Major funded the first Chinese language newspaper, Shenbao . Protesting Shenbao’s biased editorials, Rong Hong (1828–1912) countered with his own Huibao , which was funded by Chinese capital. Shenbao published only 600 copies initially, but by 1919 the circulation had reached 30,000. In 1909 Xi Yufu bought the newspaper,²² thus returning it to Chinese management. Incidentally, Japan published its first newspaper, the Yokohama Daily , in 1870.

For this period the literacy rate in both Taiwan and the mainland has been estimated as 10 percent. The population of Shanghai in 1865 was already 690,000,²³ the Chinese population of Hong Kong in 1872 was around 100,000,²⁴ but the population of Taipei even in 1896 was only 47,000. We can conclude from all this that the resident population had a great influence on the appearance of newspapers.

The infrastructure for transportation in Taiwan was not well developed. Even by the end of Qing rule, narrow roads only thirty centimeters wide connected the cities with neighboring villages. For travel most people relied on walking or single-wheeled rinrikisha , or sedan chairs. Seaports on the west side of the island traded with Quanzhou and Zhangzhou in Fujian province by boat and modern means of transportation were unheard of. As a consequence, commodity prices varied greatly. For example, in Taipei one koku (bushel) of rice cost 5 yen 36 sen but it would have cost only 3 yen 20 sen in the southern part of the island; in Jiayi one hundred kilograms of coal cost one yen, but in Taipei would have only cost 34 sen.²⁵ Although the island has an area only the size of Massachusetts and Connecticut combined, an island-wide market had not yet been formed.

With its low literacy rate, absence of modern publishing media, and nonexistent public transportation network, Taiwanese society was a long way from Habermas’s idea of a “public sphere.” The cultural apparatus built upon the examination system, though effective during Qing rule, had become an obstacle to the self-determination of the Taiwanese people. I shall now look back at the “Taiwanese Democratic Nation” established at the point when the Qing ceded Taiwan to Japan in 1895.

According to a study done by Huang Zhaotang , when it was decided in the Shimonoseki Treaty of 1895 that Taiwan would be ceded, native elites joined with the bureaucrats appointed by the Qing court to protect their own rights, and to persuade the Three Nations that not only should they focus their attentions on the Liaodong Peninsula, but they should also intervene to overturn Japanese rule in Taiwan.²⁶ As stated in their declaration of independence: “All national affairs should be conducted by officials who were chosen by citizens through public elections,”²⁷ the first evidence of a decisive action being taken toward the concept of treating Taiwan as a national territory. Qiu Fengjia , who became the vice president of the Taiwanese Democratic Nation, said: “Taiwan belongs to us Taiwanese. How can it be given and taken by others? The Qing court abandoned us, but how can we abandon ourselves?” For some intellectuals, a Taiwanese consciousness that took Taiwan as its boundary had already sprouted.²⁸

However, the Qing soldiers who were stationed in Taiwan were Cantonese; they disbanded before ever fighting the Japanese army and eventually turned into a gang of bandits. As a result, city dwellers awaited the arrival of Japanese soldiers to restore order. There was no national army to fight for the newly established democracy. Not only were the soldiers Cantonese, but Tang Jingsong , who was made president over his own protests, was also a Cantonese who probably could not communicate with the Taiwanese inhabitants. He fled back to the mainland only ten days after the proclamation of independence. On the other hand, though the declaration of independence proclaimed loudly the ideal of a democratic nation, there was no movable-type printing to print it, no newspaper to publish it. Several hundred copies were printed through woodblock printing, but the only railway that could distribute them was a hundred-kilometer stretch linking Keelung and Hsinchu , and even if the declaration could be delivered by foot or by boat, only one in ten could have read it.

Local organizations drawn from the inhabitants did fight the Japanese for six months. Huang Zhaotang identifies this resistance as “the genesis of Taiwanese consciousness,”²⁹ but he notes:

Resistance arose spontaneously in response to the Japanese invasion, but in organizational terms, it was mostly immature small groups. Their reasons for joining with the Taiwanese democratic government in opposing them were primarily their traditional contempt toward Japan and their disgust at the behavior of the Japanese soldiers; they were not necessarily fighting under the command of the Democratic Nation. Even though there were those who resisted the Japanese with great gusto, there were also many who did not care about the war and even some who cooperated with Japanese soldiers.³⁰

Qing rule lasted about two hundred and ten years; the intention from the beginning was to set up the cultural institution of the examinations. But it was only during the last thirty years of Qing rule, the Tongzhi (1862–1874) and Guangxu (1875–1895) periods, when twelve presented scholars were graduated, that it resulted in a shared Chinese communal identity and a Taiwanese identity among the literati. In the nineteenth century, the nativized descendants of the early immigrants created their own ruling examination elite groups by actively assimilating the examination culture bestowed by the Qing court. However, this was still a long way from forming a modern Taiwanese identity that could enable the creation of the Taiwanese Democratic Nation when faced with the crisis of cession to Japan.

JAPANESE RULE AND THE JAPANESE NATIONAL LANGUAGE APPARATUS

Under Japanese colonial rule, there were those Taiwanese intellectuals who opposed the colonial system and even some who sympathized with revolutionary movements to create a nation-state after the May Fourth cultural movement that began in the latter half of the 1910s. But the Mandarin that formed the foundation of the continental vernacular movement was clearly differentiated from the Taiwan regional language in terms of both pronunciation and vocabulary. For the Taiwanese, isolated from the continent and its emerging citizen market, assimilation of the mainland’s vernacular culture was impossible.

On the other hand, colonial Taiwan was slowly but surely being incorporated into the Japanese economic sphere. On top of that, the colonial government implemented assimilation policies to popularize Japanese language education. In 1933, 37 percent of children were enrolled in elementary schools and one-quarter of the population understood Japanese. Creative endeavors in Japanese also started formally when Yang Kui ’s (1905–1985) “Newspaper boy” and Long Yingzong ’s (1910–1999) “The town with papaya” were both awarded prizes by Kaizō , the representative general interest journal of that time.

The outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War in 1937 and the Pacific War in 1941 prompted Japan to intensify its advance to the south. To mobilize Taiwanese as the vanguard of its southern advance, the colonial government promoted the “imperial subject movement,” an assimilation campaign that sought to Japanize everyday customs (weddings, funerals, and festivals, etc.) and to draft the natives into the Japanese military forces. As a result, enrollment in the elementary schools and Japanese literacy doubled in less than ten years. The reading market for Japanese language materials increased rapidly to 3.2 million. It was under these circumstances that the colonial government concocted the “Imperial Subject literature” to promote the campaign. Other than the cultural campaign, there was a planned economic campaign called “controlled economy,” with an aim to expand military-related industries. In 1939, industrial output for the first time outpaced agricultural output, thus propelling Taiwan into the industrial age. From 1940 to 1941, various literary journals with circulations totally around 3,000 were created in Taipei and a fierce competition ensued for shares of the cultural marketplace. In other words, “the public sphere”³¹ as conceived by Habermas had finally made its way to the colony.

Zhang Wenhuan (1909–1978), Lu Heruo (1914–1947), Wang Changxiong (1916–2000), and Zhou Jinbo (1920–1996) were all active during this period. The usual critical assessment of Zhou Jinbo as an Imperial Subject writer “toeing the collaborator’s line” (Ye Shitao , Taiwan wenxueshi , Kaohsiung : Wenxue zazhishe ) has been revised recently and he is now seen as someone who “expresses the suffering of an identity that is torn apart.”³²

Taiwan’s Imperial Subject literature can be said to depict the logic and sentiment of a Taiwanese people who, though not Japanese, claimed equality with the Japanese and asserted their superiority toward the inhabitants of Japan’s newly acquired colonies. These sentiments and rationales were mediated through literary journals, which circulated in the reading market, and through a cyclic process of production, consumption, and reproduction entailing reading → critique → new creation → reading, they became the shared cultural experience of the Taiwanese masses. We can say that the Taiwanese masses, through their reading, came to sympathize with this argument and sentiment and to imagine that they belonged to a single community.

In discussing the formation of nationalism, Benedict Anderson maintains that “national citizens are an imagined political community depicted as a mental image.”³³ We are justified in thinking that Taiwanese citizens during the war had formed, or were on the verge of forming, a nationalism, with Imperial Subject literature at its core.

When Japan launched the Great East Asia War, its proclaimed purpose was to construct a Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. In reality, the so-called Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere was not intended to liberate various East Asian ethnic groups but rather to transform the Euro-American colonies into Japanese colonies by invading China. Nevertheless, in Taiwan the masses that emerged together with the ongoing war actively fashioned a Taiwanese nationalism.

Attention must be paid to the recent study of the educational system by Chen Peifeng. In his book Chen points out that:

As for language education under colonial rule, Taiwanese realized the significance of assimilating civilization and enthusiastically pursued the goal of “assimilation leading to civilization” that was embedded in the Japanese language education system. In a sense, their acceptance of the language education because of their desire for modern civilization subverted Gotō Shimpei ’s theory that “assimilation equals discrimination” and functioned to advance the evolution of civilization toward equality. In other words, deconstruction by popularization. It was the Taiwanese position of “acceptance as resistance” that gave rise to this possibility.³⁴

The Japanese language apparatus matured in the mid-1930s, roughly the last third of the colonial period, with 1933’s Japanese literacy rate of 24.5 percent as its turning point. One example is the inaugural edition, in September 1934, of Taiwan bungei , a literary journal published half in Japanese and half in Chinese, though in reality most of the submissions were in Japanese. In the editor’s postface (in Japanese) to the April 1935 issue, he remarks, “We were accused of limiting the number of articles in Mandarin, but nothing could be further from the truth. We were always worrying about the small number of submissions [in Mandarin].”³⁵

The examination system under Qing rule focused on the literary language, or “poetic language” (shiwen ). Literary Chinese was pronounced throughout the island in a variety of local dialects. During the Japanese period the national language system was focused on modern Japanese, a language that took shape through the genbun itchi movement (unity of spoken and written languages) after the Meiji Restoration. Though Japanese, like literary Chinese and Mandarin Chinese, did not accord with the native spoken language, with the advances in literacy it nevertheless was able to function as an official language. A yawning gulf separated the language of the examination cultural system, with its roots in the traditional literary language, and the Japanese national language system, which was based upon the modern colloquial language, but there were also some points of continuity, such as the poetry societies, or shishe , which functioned as a transitional mechanism from the end of the Qing dynasty to the mid-1930s and early 1940s.

Zhang Wojun pointed out in 1924 that “perhaps this was true throughout history, but there is no Taiwanese literature other than poetry.”³⁶ Neither prose fiction nor drama was produced during the period of Qing rule. Perhaps because of the limited literary market and frequent trade with the mainland, all classical popular literature was imported from Fujian province across the straits.

The ideologies of the examination social groups were created amid the poetic exchanges at banquets for government officials and landowners. Gradually this type of poetic exchange was institutionalized in the poetry society. Although it is often said that the first poetry society, the Dongyinshe ,³⁷ was created by Shen Guanwen during Zheng Chenggong’s time, according to Huang Meiling , it was not until the end of Qing rule, when Tang Jingsong and Qiu Fengjia created the Peony Poetry Society (Mudanshe ), that poetry societies appeared.³⁸ They appeared only when the examination system had reached maturity.

Poetry societies were in vogue during the early days of Japanese rule. Lian Yatang wrote in the preface to his Collection of Taiwanese Poems (Taiwan shihui ) in 1924: “After the storm and fire, they first used the joy of chanting poetry to dispel the feelings of depression. When one voice sang lead, a hundred harmonized, and north and south vied to compete in establishing poetry societies so that now there are almost seventy.”³⁹ By 1934 the number of poetry societies had reached 98.⁴⁰ Why did poetry societies, relics of the Qing examination cultural apparatus, prosper under Japanese rule?

The first reason may be the many Japanese language newspapers set up by the Japanese throughout the island. For example, when the Taiwan Daily News (Taiwan nichinichi shinpō ) was founded in 1898, a Chinese section was inaugurated and a column called “The forest of letters and the garden of literature” published poems in Chinese (kanshi ) by both Japanese and Taiwanese authors. It is estimated that at the beginning of the twentieth century Taiwan had two to three hundred readers of literature,⁴¹ and after 1899 representative figures like Lian Yatang often served as editor for the Chinese section.⁴²

The representative modern Japanese writer Satō Haruo visited Taiwan in 1920. Five years later, based on his experiences, he wrote “Jokaisen kidan ” (Strange tale of the fan with women’s precepts), which was not only a representative work of modern Japanese literature at that time, but also became a primary source for the prewar Japanese language literature of Taiwan.⁴³ The protagonist, a Japanese reporter for a newspaper in Tainan, becomes the close friend of a Taiwanese man named Segaimin when he publishes in his newspaper Chinese-style poems opposing the Japanese.

In contrast to the examination cultural system, under which only a small number of wealthy literati had the opportunity to publish a few volumes of poetry, the newspaper, which relied on the new technology of movable-type printing, was able to publish several, or even ten-odd, poems that had been composed only a few days before, presenting them every day to an audience that had numbered several hundred at the beginning of Japanese rule but had grown to several thousand or several tens of thousands of readers by the 1920s. The old examination social groups were pleasantly surprised by this and produced large numbers of poems to express their thoughts and feelings, including anti-Japanese ones. Through the newspaper, they were able to gather many poets from a large area.

Ye Shitao has highlighted the conciliatory approach adopted by the colonial authority: “Many of the Japanese officials and staff members who came to Taiwan were familiar with literary Chinese. Promoting Chinese poetry became part of the policy of administering the island, and poetry societies were encouraged.”⁴⁴ In 1900 Governor-General Kodama Gentarō and his number two man, the governor for civil affairs, Gotō Shimpei, sponsored a poetry group called the Yōbunkai (Gathering to promote literature) and Gotō promoted the idea of “study of the daily new affairs and the virtues of civilization.” 151 invitations were sent out, and 72 people attended. The headquarters was established in Taipei, with branch offices in Taipei, Taichung , Tainan, Yilan , and Penghu . The headquarters held a grand meeting once every three years and the branch offices held a smaller meeting every fall. The governor-general served as the president of the society and was also in charge of setting the poetic theme.⁴⁵

The 151 invitees were no doubt drawn from the poets who had published in the Chinese poetry sections of the newspapers. Almost half of them resided in Taipei; they were able to plan regular grand and branch meetings because of Governor for Civil Affairs Gotō’s plans for a network of roads and a trans-island railway. In the eight years from 1898 to 1906, Gotō built 5,600 kilometers of roads 6 feet wide, 2,900 kilometers of roads wider than 6 feet, 800 kilometers of roads 18 feet wide, and 80 kilometers of roads that were wider that 24 feet. In 1899 he began to repair the old rail lines and build new ones, so that by the time the project was finished in 1908, he had created a 395 kilometer-long trans-island railway connecting Keelung and Kaohsiung.⁴⁶

Yōbunkai almost stopped its activities, but in 1902 the poetry society Rekisha was founded in Taichung, then in 1909 Eisha was founded in Taipei and Nansha in Tainan. In 1921 Eisha held an island-wide gathering attended by more than one hundred poets.⁴⁷ Thus the classical poetry that was a remnant of the Qing examination culture, supported by the Chinese sections in Japanese newspapers all over Taiwan as well as the network of railways and roads, reached its apex during the first half of the Japanese colonial period. With the consolidation of the Japanese national language system, the younger generation abandoned Chinese poetry and began to write in Japanese. After the 1920s Chinese-style poetry declined precipitously.

OLD KMT RULE AND MANDARIN NATIONAL LANGUAGE APPARATUS

As I come to the end of my paper, I would like to end with a brief overview of the period of KMT rule.

Just as there was a major break between the Qing period, with its examination cultural system based on literary Chinese, and the Japanese colonial period, with its national language system based on Japanese, there was also a major shift between the Japanese colonial period and the period of KMT rule, arising from the transition to a system that took Mandarin as the national language.⁴⁸ The KMT fully exploited the Japanese educational system, which had achieved a level of secondary education so high that it almost qualified as compulsory education. They took control of all educational institutions, from primary school through university, and all organs of mass communication, including newspapers, magazines, and broadcasting, in order to move in a short period of time to a system based on Mandarin as the national language.

Whereas forty years after the inception of Japanese rule, literary Chinese was still being used in mass media, the KMT language policy was much stricter: little more than a year after occupying Taiwan, they had prohibited the use of Japanese in newspapers and magazines. This was no doubt because Japanese was six times more widely used as a common language than literary Chinese had been, but the KMT in promoting Mandarin made full use of the educational system and mass communication industry that the previous regime had thought essential to the dissemination of the Japanese language. Here again we see a transfer between foreign powers of a cultural inheritance.

Li Ang , a young amateur Taiwanese writer who had been educated under the new language system, debuted in the 1960s, some fifteen years after the end of the war. In 1982 she published The Butcher’s Wife (Shafu ). At the time of the unveiling of the German translation in 1987, it was also translated into the national languages of America, France, Japan, Sweden, and Holland, and won praise around the world. This was very similar to the early 1930s, when native Japanese-language writers first published in local coterie magazines but soon appeared one after another on Japan’s central literary scene.

In the two hundred and ten years of Qing rule, the last thirty years can be seen as the period when the examination system achieved maturity, and it was during the last ten-odd years of the half-century of Japanese rule that the Japanese national language system reached maturity. The latter half of the three-plus decades of pre-democratic KMT rule saw the maturation of the system taking Mandarin as the national language. By actively assimilating the cultural policies imported by foreign regimes, the Taiwanese people under each regime fostered the development of a Taiwanese identity and in the 1990s finally achieved a democratic nation-state. The question then is: How will the national language transform itself after a citizenry has taken shaped based on a Taiwanese identity and how will this change of linguistic consciousness affect the development of an already highly hybrid Taiwanese literature?

NOTES

*Translated by Faye Yuan Kleeman.

1. Shiba Ryōtarō, Kaidō o yuku 40 Taiwan kikō (Tokyo: Asahi shinbunsha, 1994), 495–498.

2. Itō Kiyoshi, Taiwan: 400 nen no rekishi to tenbō (Tokyo: Chūōkōronsha, 1993), 241–235.

3. Itō, Taiwan, 76 and 160.

4. Fujii Shōzō, “‘Daitōa sensō’ki ni okeru Taiwan kōmin bungaku—dokusho shijō no seijuku to Taiwan nashonarizumu no keisei,” in Taiwan bungaku kono hyakunen (Tokyo: Tōhō shoten, 1998), 25–67.

5. Chen Shaoxing, Tawian de renkou bienqien yu shehui bienqien (Taipei: Liangjing chubanshe, 1979), 18 and 25.

6. Taiwan wenxian weiyuanhui, Chongxiu Taiwansheng tongzhi v.6 wenjiaozhi xuexing jiaoyu pien (Taiwan: Taiwansheng wenxian weiyuanhui, 1993), 3–17.

7. Chen Shaoxing, Tawian de renkou bienqien yu shehui bienqien, 18.

8. Zhiting Wang, Taiwan jiaoyushiliao xinbien (Taipei: Taiwan shangwu yinshuguan, 1978), 8.

9. Yuanhui Li, Nihon tōjika ni okeru Taiwan shotō kyōiku no kenkyū (Taichung: Taiwan shengli Taichung shifan zhuangke xuexiao, 1981), 3.

10. Chen Shaoxing, Tawian de renkou bienqien yu shehui bienqien, 19–20.

11. Chen Qinan, Taiwan de chuantong zhongguo shehui (Taiwan: Yunchen wenhua shiye, 1987), 25.

12. Nakama Kazuhiro, “Shindai Tainan chihō ni okeru kanzoku eriito no keiseikatei ni tsuite,” Shigaku 3.4 (2001): 41.

13. Tainan shizhengfu, Tainanshi zhi v.5 jiaoyuzhi (shang) jiaoyu sheshi pien (Tainan: Tainan shizhenfu, 1979), 3.

14. Yin Zhangyi, “Taiwan ← → Fujien ← → jingshi: ‘Kejushecun’ duiyu Taiwan kaifa yiji Taiwan yu dalu guanxi zhi yingxiang,” in Taiwan kaifashi yenjiu (Taiwan: Liangjing chuban shiye, 1989).

15. Yin Zhangyi, Taiwan kaifashi yenjiu, 535–552.

16. Yin Zhangyi, Taiwan kaifashi yenjiu, 567–573.

17. Yin Zhangyi, Taiwan kaifashi yenjiu, 573–579.

18. Yin Zhangyi, Taiwan kaifashi yenjiu, 552.

19. Li Yuanhui, Nihon tōjika ni okeru Taiwan shotō kyōiku no kenkyū (Taichung: Taiwan shengli Taichung shifan zhuangke xuexiao, 1981): 15. Wang Zhiting, Taiwan jiaoyushiliao xinbien (Taipei: Taiwan shangwu yinshuguan, 1978) 14.

20. Taiwan kyōikukai, ed., Taiwan kyōiku enkakushi (1939) (reprint Tokyo: Seishisha, 1982): 984. Zhong Qinghan, Nihon shokuminchika ni okeru Taiwan kyōikushi (Tokyo: Taga shuppan, 1993), 121.

21. Information derived from Li Chengchi’s unpublished M.A. thesis. I would like to express my thanks to Mr. Li. Also, there were late Qing intellectuals such as Li Chunsheng who advocated creating newspapers. See Huan Junjie, Li Chunsheng de sixiang yu shidai (Taiwan: Zhengzhong shuju, 1995), 154–158.

22. Liu Huiwu, ed., Shanghai jindaishi shang xia (Shanghai: Huadong shifan daxue chubanshe, 1985), 218 and 260.

23. Zou Yiren, Jiu Shanghai renkou biencien de yenjiu (Shanghai: Shanghai renmin chubanshe, 1980), 90.

24. Norman Miners, Hong Kong Under Imperial Rule, 1912–1941 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 191.

25. Tsurumi Yūsuke, Gotō shimpei, 4 vols. (Tokyo: Kinsō shobo, 1965–1967), 338.

26. Huan Zhaotang, Taiwan minshūkoku no kenkyū Taiwan dokuritsu undōshi no ichidanshō (Tokyo: Tokyo University Press, 1970), 3.

27. Huan Zhaotang, Taiwan minshūkoku no kenky, 60.

28. Huan Zhaotang, Taiwan minshūkoku no kenkyū, 125.

29. Huan Zhaotang, Taiwan minshūkoku no kenkyū, 246.

30. Huan Zhaotang, Taiwan minshūkoku no kenkyū, 3.

31. Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry Into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Hosotani Sadao (Tokyo: Miraisha, 1973).

32. Tarumi Chie, Taiwan no nihongo bungaku (Tokyo: Goryū shoin, 1995)67.

33. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, trans. Shiraishi Takashi and Shiraishi Saya (Tokyo: Libroport, 1987), 17.

34. Chen Peifong, Dōka no dōsōyimu: Nihon tōchika Taiwan no kokugo kyōikushi saikō (Tokyo: Sangensha, 2001), 236.

35. Fujii Shōzō, Taiwan bungaku kono hyakunen (Tokyo: Tōhō shoten, 1998), 38.

36. Zhang Wojun, “Zaogao de Taiwan wenxuejie,” in Zhang Wojun pinglunji (Taipei: Taipei xienli wenhua zhongxin, 1993), 6. Also, Huan Meiling, Liang Yatang de wenxue yenjiu (Taipei: Wenjin chuban, 2000), 69.

37. Ye Shitao, Taiwan bungakushi, trans. Nakajima Toshio and Sawai Noriyuki (Tokyo: Genbun shuppan, 2000), 3.

38. Huan Meiling, Liang Yatang de wenxue yenjiu (Taipei: Wenjin chuban, 2000), 70.

39. Huan, Liang Yatang de wenxue yenjiu, 70.

40. Ye Shitao, Taiwan bungakushi, 193 n.

41. Shimada Kinji, “Taiwan no bungakuteki kagenzai,” in Bengei Taiwan 8 (May 1941). Also included in Shimada Kinji, Kareitō bengakushi (Tokyo: Meiji shoin, 1995).

42. Huan, Liang Yatang de wenxue yenjiu, 398–401.

43. For Satō Haruo’s trip to Taiwan, see “Satō Haruo Shokuminchi no tabi no shinsō,” in Kawahara Isao, Taiwan shinbungaku undō no tenkai: Nihonbungaku to no setten (Tokyo: Genbun shuppan, 1997), 3–23. For discussion of “Jokaisen kidan,” see “Taishō bungaku to shokuminchi Taiwan: Satō Haruo ‘Jokaisen kidan,’” in Fujii Shōzō, Taiwan bungaku kono hyakunen, 79–103.

44. Ye Shitao, Taiwan bungakushi, 20.

45. Wenlan, “Cong ‘Yangwenhui’ tandao ‘Shinxue yenjiuhui,’” in Taipei wenwu jikan 28 (January 1960): 40.

46. Kitaoka Shin’ichi, Gotō Shimpei: Gaikō to bijon (Tokyo: Chūōkōronsha, 1988)50.

47. Ye Shitao, Taiwan bungakushi, 193.

48. For details, see Huan Yingche, Taiwan bunka saikōchiku 1945–1947 no hikari to kage (Tokyo: Sōtosha, 1999).