Taiwan Under Japanese Colonial Rule, 1895

TAIWAN UNDER JAPANESE COLONIAL RULE, 1895–1945: HISTORY, CULTURE, MEMORY

This volume represents a first attempt to discuss colonialism and modernity in East Asia from the perspective of subjects very different from those that continue to occupy the attention of postcolonial scholars—with the probable exceptions of Gayatri Spivak and of Prasenjit Duara, who have recently begun to map territories that did not attract European imperial forces.¹ For many reasons Taiwan should regularly be featured in comparative colonial and postcolonial studies, but, regrettably, it has managed only to catch the eye of social scientists, who have considered Taiwan alternately as a window on China, a cold war bastion of freedom and modernization against communism, a minidragon of an economic miracle, a “state without nationhood,” the first Asian country to hold a general election, and a cosmopolitan albeit marginal Chinese polity whose “renegade province” status has been renegotiated in terms of “one state, two systems” since the handover of Hong Kong in 1997.

Occasionally there are book chapters and even entire books in English or other Western languages devoted to contemporary Taiwan arts and literature, but they are written in a third-world context or try to respond to global-local cultural dialectics within the framework of modernism, nativism, and Asian popular or visual culture. They tend to bypass the historical period most consequential to the formation of the complex identity of the island: Taiwan under Japanese rule, from 1895 to 1945.

Together with Pescadores, Taiwan was ceded to Japan in perpetuity on May 8, 1895, by the Qing in the Treaty of Shimonoseki , which marked the defeat of the Manchu empire in the first Sino-Japanese War. For the fifty years that followed, Taiwan was considered a second son and a younger brother of Okinawa, thus holding a special place in the heart of the emperor in Tokyo.

As a Japanese colony Taiwan is arguably distinct in several ways. First of all, Taiwan was the first and also the last of Japan’s colonies. It underwent at least four stages of colonialism under Japanese rule: assimilation as the main policy from 1895 to 1919, integration from 1919 to 1930, differential incorporation and coercion from 1930 to 1937, and the subjugation (kōminka , literally meaning “Japanization” or “imperial subjectification”) and mobilization of “imperial subjects” to participate in the “holy” war in Asia from 1937 to 1945.²

Taiwan was considered an extension of Japan, and shared a common script and race. Taiwan may not have been unlike other colonies when viewed at the turn of the last century from the comparative perspective adapted by Benedict Anderson.³ However, the destinies of individuals and collectives rendered Japanese colonialism in Taiwan relatively unique. It is to address the complexities of this colonial experience and legacy that essays by leading scholars in Taiwan, Japan, and the United States have been collected here.

Between 1895 and 1945 China was in the hands of warlords, while Japan was beginning its modernization processes and launching its Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere colonial project. When Taiwan was cut away from China and handed over to Japan, Taiwanese intellectuals formed a strategic identity to forge strong ties with China, developing cultural as well as economic relationships that resisted Japanese domination. This dual structure of affiliating with both China and Japan, an imaginary fatherland and a new colonial power, was made more complex by the fact that Japan had been influenced by Chinese culture since the Tang dynasty. Unlike the French in Indochina or the Dutch or British in south Asia, who discriminated against the natives because of race, color, religion, and so on, Japanese colonizers in Taiwan often invoked their common cultural roots, highlighting the fact that the Japanese and the Taiwanese shared the same language and ethnicity. As a result, not only did Taiwanese identities—cultural, ethnic, and national—waver between Chinese and Japanese (and in so doing continue to puzzle scholars like Leo Ching and Melissa Brown, among others),⁴ but the mixed reactions to the Japanese colonial legacy continue to be evident in local politics as well as in cultural production, with opinions ranging from former president Lee Tenghui ’s open hailing of Japan as a benevolent “motherland” to the totally different views of Taiwan’s colonial and postcolonial histories expressed by filmmakers such as Hou Hsiao-hsien or Wu Nien-chen .

A few critics have examined the Japanese colonial empire in comparison to its Western counterparts. Lewis H. Gann, for example, noted that Japan resembled Wilhelmian Germany in its modernization strategies and the recruitment of military and civil officers from among colonial elites, but lacked the evangelical or romantic inspirations that informed British and French missionaries.⁵

Over the years several books have appeared that address the economic development, educational system, and social movements that characterized Japanese colonialism in East Asia. While seminally revealing, they have seldom discussed colonialism and modernity in the region from a transnational perspective and have focused instead on Japan’s southward advance or on Taiwan as the site in which Japan forged its colonial and orientalist scholarship. In fact, Taiwan presents an interesting if not unique case in the comparative study of colonial modernity, especially when juxtaposed with the situations of Korea, Manchuria, Hong Kong, and Shanghai.

Taiwan was a Japanese colony for fifty (or in some accounts fifty-one) years, while Korea was a Japanese colony for only thirty-five—1910–1945 (or 1905–1945, if we take into consideration the fact that Korea was made a protectorate of Japan in 1905). The major difference between the typical Taiwanese and Korean reactions to the Japanese colonizers has been succinctly summed up by E. Patricia Tsurumi: “By the end of the Japanese period, Taiwanese of all classes had become enthusiasts for the sports and games introduced along with Japanese education,” whereas in Korea “to be educated was to be anti-Japanese.”⁶ To this day, the Korean intellectual scene remains dominated by the attempted purge of Japanese influences.

In the case of Manchuria , the Japanese occupation was ultimately the result of prior international control of the territory gained through negotiations with China over the transfer of Russian rights and through entanglements with diplomatic ties with United States and other European countries. Manchuria’s primal role in the Qing empire as a sacred place of origin and its transnational borderline stance were issues that Japanese rulers tried to appropriate, while Taiwan, in contrast, had been a Qing settlement frontier and an island populated by a “barbaric” race and illiterate fishermen. The ways in which Japanese colonial officers promoted “aboriginality” functioned in different directions in the two colonies: in Manchuria, aboriginality was associated with authority and authenticity (see the work of Prasenjit Duara mentioned above), while in Taiwan it was related to backwardness and mobility. In the case of Shanghai, Japan was one of a dozen foreign forces occupying parts of the city, making it a semi-colony and a contested site for a transnational capital with hybrid albeit cosmopolitan lifestyles being imported.

TAIWAN AT THE EDGE OF EMPIRES

The differences between the experience of Taiwan and that of other Japanese colonies owe a great deal to place, history, and material culture; to elucidate them let us briefly review the history of the island. Traditionally, the Han Chinese considered Taiwan to be a barren island in the east occupied by savages and pirates.⁷ One origin for the term Taiwan is reported to be the derogatory dongfan (“eastern barbarians”); an earlier and more reliable literary source indicates that it might have been derived from dai-yuan (“big circle” or “big shelter”).

When Taiwan was taken by the Qing dynasty from the hand of Koxinga ’s grandson in 1683, Emperor Kangxi was at first quite opposed to making Taiwan a part of his empire, because neither gain nor loss was at issue. Some two hundred years later, the Qing government finally recognized the crucial role of Taiwan in its battles with British and French forces.

Between 1885 and 1892, under the leadership of Liu Ming-chuan , who followed Shen Bao-jen as governor, the island underwent its initial modernization. In those seven years, public education systems and light industries were introduced, a railroad was constructed on the west coast between Keelung and Hsinchu, and telegram and postal services were established. During the Japanese occupation (1895–1945), the infrastructure was further developed, and political stability and economic growth accelerated the modernization processes.

Before the name Ilha Formosa was suggested by the Portuguese sailors in 1544, Taiwan had received practically no geographical recognition in the region except for being occasionally misidentified as the Ryukyus or labeled Little Ryukyus This geographic marginality, however, has proven both disabling and enabling in the formation of Taiwan’s modernity and identity. Kept separate by the Taiwan Strait and physically detached from the mainland, Taiwan has on the one hand been capable of maintaining its own cultural autonomy, while on the other hand it started its modernization process relatively late, and partly as a response to European and Japanese imperialisms. In fact, Taiwan has gone through several colonial stages—Dutch conquest (1622–1661), Chinese settlement (1661–1895), Japanese occupation (1895–1945), and Nationalist “recovery” (after 1945).

Various ethnic groups came to the island at different times and brought with them diverse racial and cultural heritages. Taiwan’s different communities and their historical experiences have been made more complex by this hybrid ethnic and genealogical mixture. The predominantly Malayo-Polynesian aboriginal population, for instance, suffered the most: they were first forced to change religious beliefs, then pushed into the mountains, made to serve the Japanese as soldiers, compelled to adopt and use the official language, Mandarin, and finally driven by poverty to come down from the mountains to eke out a living through cheap labor or prostitution. Other groups, among them the southern Fukienese, Hakka, and mainlanders, underwent differing experiences of subjectification, depending largely on the relative dates of their immigration to the island. These differences complicated the accessibility or applicability of symbolic or cultural capitals, since some were more informed and powerful than others, while in terms of the fluidity or multiplicity of layers of everyday life, each group seemed to have its own distinctive ways of achieving maximum instrumentality and efficacy when exposed to possible entanglements with the practices of others.

When negotiating from the margin and with multiple heritages, Taiwanese intellectuals under Japanese rule often became bricoleurs in mixing transnational codes and forces to their own advantage, especially in the case of overseas students in Tokyo between 1915 and 1935, who seemed to have no difficulty in accepting both the Chinese and the Japanese modernization experiences. From the late 1910s onward, hundreds of students went to study in Japan each year. According to Taiwan Sōtokufu gakuji nenpō , these overseas students came from three major counties: for 1926 (see vol. 25: 50–51), Taipei 129, Taichung 326, Tainan 184; and for 1928 (see vol. 28: 46), Taipei 184, Taichung 499, and Tainan 371.

Inspired by the 1911 revolution in China and the liberal spirit of the 1912–1925 Taishō era, Taiwanese students in Tokyo formed the Qifahui (“the Society of Enlightenment”) in 1918 and began to publish the first Chinese-language journal, Shin minpō , in 1920, at which time the society was renamed the New People’s. In addition to inviting important Chinese intellectuals, among them Dr. Sun Yat-sen and Liang Qichao , to visit Taiwan and to speak on the subject of a new China, members of the society tried to appropriate what they had learned from Japan about the social constructs of its emerging alternative modernity, such as the concept of tōyōshi (Oriental history), new science, cultural difference, socialism, and so on.

In many ways, Chinese and Japanese modernity projects were able to leave their semantic traces on modern Taiwanese public culture, particularly in the print media, art movements, lifestyles, social thought, and political institutions. Taiwanese intellectuals of the period often used Japanese as a means to acquire skills and knowledge for modernization, while at the same time cultivating their Chinese identities in order to resist Japanese influences. Sometimes the partial hybridization of the two modernity projects ended up producing morally ambivalent sentiments in the colonizers as well as in the colonized, as in the cases of many artists discussed in this volume.

In order to highlight the complexity of using material culture in considering the colonial or transnational agencies of art education and exhibition, we can consider some specific incidents that might have contributed to the shifting of public and private lives in terms of historical contingency, irony, and moral luck. Rather than highlighting “hybridity,” “catachresis,” “conviviality,” etc., with the focus on critical acts of cultural appropriation on the part of postcolonial subjects, we may be better off looking at the ways in which individuals, as moral and political agents, are affected by their experiences traveling across national borders, and are constituted by and constitutive of the cultural institution of a specific historical moment. The dynamics of travel and cultural translation is not necessarily played out in the form of an ambivalent chronotopical lag between metropole and colony, of tensions between the often polarized discursive positions of dwelling and traveling (or, to follow Edward W. Said’s terminology, of the “potentate” and the “traveler”). A useful example of such individual experience involves the life and work of Ishikawa Kinichirō (1871–1945) in the Japanese period.

COMPARATIVE STUDY IN NATURE AND CULTURE: TAIWAN VERSUS JAPAN

According to legend, the place is hell, but once one sees it, it becomes heaven. This was my first impression of Taiwan. It is an island of very beautiful forms and colors, and it is pleasing.

Thus wrote Ishikawa Kinichirō in a piece for Taiwan jihō .⁸ Ishikawa was at the time back in Tokyo, recalling fondly (though on many other occasions quite ambivalently) his encounter with the island and his experiences there as a colonial officer and, later, as an art teacher at the Taipei Middle School.

Within months of his arrival in Taipei, Ishikawa published an essay in a leading newspaper, Taiwan nichinichi shinpō (January 23–24, 1908), entitled “Watercolor painting and Taiwan landscape,” in which he commented:

Some twelve years after the Occupation, most Japanese still have very vague ideas of Taiwan. I wish I could at least let these unfortunate folks know a little bit about Taiwan landscape which is to be rated Japan’s No. 1. Perhaps people may regard my view of Taiwan as Japan’s No. 1 landscape to be an overstatement, but I deeply believe so and I am sure my friends and colleagues in Tokyo would come to the same opinion if they should have the chance to see the landscape here. If we compare Taipei with any Japanese city, Kyōto seems to bear the closest resemblance. Tamshui River is equivalent to the Kamogawa, while Mounts Datun and Guan-yin surrounding Taipei city are very commensurable to Mounts Hiei and Atago. Yuanshan evokes an image of Yoshida and Shirakawa. Luchou is very much like the neighborhood of Sagano. The Gutin district of southern Taipei reminds me of Fushimi of southern Kyōto. So many similarities are revealed that it is difficult not to form analogues and allusions. However, Taipei’s colors appear more beautiful, with red roofs, orange walls, and green bamboos, contrasting strongly against the viridescent tree leaves. Can we imagine such serene and solemn scenery of sublimity in Japan? Under the blue sky Taiwan shines even more brightly.⁹

In 1926, eighteen years later, however, Ishikawa said this of the same subject: “Bright as it is, the Taiwan landscape lacks nuances and doesn’t present subtle details to a second look.”¹⁰

Though much touched by Taiwan’s sublime landscape, he felt somehow discontented with its insufficient mystery, its melancholic beauty: its lights and colors were simply too focused and sharp, with little shade, tone, spirit, enigma, or puzzling detail. In sum, it was too boisterous and exorbitant to be generic or profound.¹¹ By no means systemic or even serious, Ishikawa’s comments on the landscape varied over the years of his Taiwan sojourn, as detailed by Yen Chuanying ’s comprehensive and nuanced account in this volume. During his life there, from 1907 to 1933, Ishikawa witnessed changes in the history of colonial policy as well as in cultural identity and memory in relation to the Japanese colonial legacy, and his personal experiences here encapsulate Taiwan’s historical changes, cultural identity formations, personal emotions, and memory under Japanese rule.

Ishikawa Kinichirō was a teacher of Japanese at the Taipei Middle School (part-time from 1907 to 1916,) and Taipei Normal School (full-time from 1923 to 1933). Self-taught and dedicated to Japanese nationalism, Ishikawa was at an early stage strongly influenced by modernism, particularly English impressionistic and realistic landscape watercolors. In his home country he was not very active and was thought to be a conservative artist belonging to the rather popular school of naturalism of the Meiji period of the 1910s. In the Japanese imperial army, however, Ishikawa was better known as an officer and an interpreter who bravely engaged the Chinese (1900) and the Russian armies (1904–1905) in battles for the Japanese rule of Manchuria.

In October 1907 Ishikawa was made an interpreter for the colonial governor-general in Taiwan. He moved to the island and became a part-time art and language teacher at Taipei Middle School. During those nine years in Taiwan, he was in many ways an ambivalent teacher and colonizer. In some of the watercolors done in the period, he glorified the conquest of the native in colonial encounters. He toured the island widely, in order to be able to recall in realistic detail his exotic memories of aborigine peoples and objects, but he was also involved in the founding of the Lan-tin Tea Klatch to promote cultural exchange and to get other Japanese artists and officers interested in Chinese and Taiwanese art and literature. He even organized a 1914 public exhibition of his artworks, one of the first in Taiwan art history.

Despite his accomplishments as an artist who made use of impressive local knowledge, Ishikawa was still primarily an officer and a colonizer, as manifested not only by his watercolors but by the appearance of the colonial governor-general at the exhibit. Of course, for Ishikawa, a product of—and participant in—the Japanese imperial era, art was an ideal agency of domination and redemption. In those days, the governor-generals and their staff were mostly high-ranking military officers who supported the policy of suppressing and of eventually assimilating local people.

The situation had changed, however, when Ishikawa made his second visit to Taiwan. In September 1923 Ishikawa’s Tokyo home was destroyed by a major earthquake. A one-time colleague, then principal of the Taipei Normal School, sent him a telegram saying that he would be welcome to return to Taipei to undertake a full-time teaching position. Now without a family, Ishikawa decided to accept and thereafter spent another nine years in Taiwan.

The intellectual milieu in 1923 was different from that of the previous decade. The colonial policy had changed when civilians—rather than admirals or generals—like Hara Kei and Den Kenjirō assumed power as prime minister or cabinet members. In fact, the death of the seventh governor-general, Lieutenant-General Akashi Motojirō , in October 1919 gave Prime Minister Hara Kei the opportunity to make the reforms in both Taiwan’s and Korea’s governing structures that he had long favored. The reforms were easier to carry out after the administration of Gotō Shimpei , who had directed colonial policy toward localization and incorporation. Hara Kei was then able to appoint Den Kenjirō as Taiwan’s first civilian governor-general (1919–1923) to implant his reform programs in the colony.¹² These men managed to survive political struggles first by doing remarkably well in the colonies—particularly in Taiwan—and then by overcoming their domestic opponents when the latter made mistakes in their responses to riots in the colonies. Under the edict of integration and equality designed to make the colonized useful subjects to the Japanese emperor, the arts and humanities were increasingly emphasized as a means to tame the Taiwanese. Prince Hirohito of Japan visited Taiwan in 1923 and openly expressed his satisfaction with the relatively localized art education.

Just before the earthquake that destroyed his former home, Ishikawa had returned from a tour to Europe, where he had been deeply impressed by the salons, art exhibits, and art institutions of Paris. When he returned to Taipei in 1923, Ishikawa found himself in a different ambiance; his approach to art education switched from British and Japanese ways to a more French orientation and greater emphasis was put on outdoor interactions with the environment. To facilitate his teaching, he translated Japanese art textbooks into Chinese and supplied local equivalents wherever necessary.

As Taipei Normal School was a major college for future teachers, Ishikawa’s influence on local artists was strong, even though his ties with Japanese politicians were undercut by his work as a civilian and a teacher. Like other Japanese artists—Shiotzuki Tōhō , for example—Ishikawa tried to protect his Taiwanese friends and students from political persecution. His students often depicted him as participating in, if not leading the way for, a collective effort to improve the quality of modern Taiwan art. Together with Taiwanese and Japanese friends, he founded various art associations, among them the “Taiwan Watercolors” (1927), the “Graduate Institute of Western Painting” (1929), and “Studies in Taiwan Art” (1930). Several students—such as Lan Yin-ting (1903–1979) and Hung Rui-lin (1912–1997)—later became outstanding watercolorists.

Ishikawa might not have been as active or even have had a significant impact on modern Japanese art—especially the so-called local-color souvenir painting—if he had stayed in his home country. However, because of his early-twentieth-century travels and translations, he was able to be part of an alternative modernism that was being developed in a transnational pan-Asian and global-local cultural dialectics. The timing of his return to Taipei was crucial. If he had returned earlier, he would still have been a colonizer and a painter in the naturalist tradition, instead of an advocate of the new French art and a friend to local artists. Several transnational factors contributed to Ishikawa’s ambivalent and benevolent roles in those years. The unexpected earthquake that shook his house and his livelihood; his recent tour around Europe and his exposure to contemporary French painting; the warm welcome he received from his friends in Taiwan and his position as a civilian and an art teacher; the emergence of Taiwanese artists and a cultural elite that began to win recognition in Japan; new developments in Korea and Manchuria that forced Japan to readjust its colonial policies—all these factors helped shape his new identity.

Since 1910, the landed gentry, especially those from Taichung county in Taiwan, had eagerly sent their children to Japan to acquire modernization skills and knowledge. In 1915 they helped establish in Taichung the first middle school for Taiwanese. One year before Ishikawa returned to Taipei, the “Association for Culture” was founded in Taichung to introduce ideas that would blend both Japanese and Chinese modernity projects. Each season in the cities and countryside, members of the association gave a variety of lectures, seminars, concerts, and plays before huge audiences. At first the association represented a moderate political and cultural opposition by the elite against the colonial regime. Gradually, with an increasing number of students returning from Japan, new trends in socialism and democracy were vigorously advocated and embraced by farmers and the working class, until the association was forced to go underground in 1930.

Unfortunately, 1930 also saw the disastrous Musha aboriginal uprising and the unprecedented violent suppression carried out by the Japanese colonial government, with the Japanese military and police—numbering up to 1,306—supported by 1,048 Han Taiwanese and 331 other aborigines in cracking down on the “rebel” Mona Rudao and his followers. It was reported that during the battles 87 aborigines were decapitated, while 85 were shot, 171 died in bombings, and 296 hanged themselves to avoid humiliation. The tragic incident and its outcome shocked politicians and intellectuals in both the colony and in Japan. Harsh criticism in the local newspapers pushed the colonial government to reinstate coercive administrative measures that forced the alternative media to go underground, thereby replacing its prior peaceful albeit differential incorporation policy with that of strategic suppression and relocation.¹³

The material culture that Ishikawa consequently confronted in 1923 and thereafter was different from that of 1907. Even Ishikawa himself was a different person after the earthquake and his grand tour of Europe. We can see this in several of his paintings—for instance, his portrait of the famous tower built by Koxinga after he had defeated the Dutch. Whereas had he earlier tended to be a distant observer, he was now more engaged. He picked particular settings and asked his students to accompany him in portraying the landscape as if it were part of the self. As a result, he left behind numerous pictures of local subjects and some scholars claimed he had become an integral part of modern Taiwan art.

TAIWAN UNDER JAPANESE RULE

Ishikawa’s diaspora experience in Taiwan transformed in many ways his art career and his cultural affiliation. With many people like Ishikawa traveling back and forth between the metropolis and the colony during this formative period, the relationships of Taiwan with Japan and China became more complicated. As Wu Chuo-liu has noted in his novel Asia’s Orphan, the Taiwanese were having difficulty developing a distinctive sense of cultural belonging, of defining themselves as either Chinese or Japanese. The ambivalent cultural as well as ethnic identification thus fractured Taiwanese imaginations of comradeship and citizenship in relation to Japan and China, and was made worse by the disastrous tragedy of the February 28 Incident in 1947 when the KMT government used force against the local people after taking over the island.

The lingering effect of the Japanese colonial legacy, among other complications, has left a great number of Taiwanese unwilling to come to terms with the “one nation, two systems” proposed by the PRC, and Taiwan has become, in the words of Melissa Brown, “a global hot pot” of transnational conflicts and a divisive issue involving China, the United States, Japan, and indeed many other Asian countries.¹⁴ It is imperative, therefore, to consider the construction of Taiwan’s national and ethnic identity from a trans-Asian perspective, and to reexamine Taiwan’s most consequential period under Japanese rule.

This volume is divided into four sections: historical and theoretical case studies on colonialism and modernity; colonial policies and cultural change; visual culture and literary expressions; and postcolonial reflections and their aftermath.

On the problems of rethinking postwar Asian political and intellectual history, Wakabayashi Masahiro leads us expertly through the minefield of Taiwan studies in contemporary Japan. He opens with the comment that until recently “the Japanese colonial period received relatively little academic attention,” while Yao Jen-to then follows him by elaborating on the Taiwanese colonial period as a unique case that complicates our understanding of postcolonial theory. Wakabayashi singles out the structures of limitation in postwar-East Asian historiography and suggests ways to bridge national historical approaches and new area studies in considering Japanese imperialism/colonialism in Taiwan and the modern history of Taiwan. He challenges traditional conceptions of political institutions and of class structure by pointing out ways in which a Taiwanese cultural elite composed of landlords and educated gentry helped advance the Japanese colonial project while the impact of modernization on the local majority was limited.

Employing a Foucauldian conceptual framework, Yao then directs attention to land surveys and census issues. In contradistinction to the dominant postcolonial practice, which emphasizes discursive struggle and resistance, he highlights the roles of numerology in Japanese colonial policy in terms of land measurement and management. According to Yao, statistics, census, and numbers in fact constituted the core of Japanese governmentality over the Taiwanese subjects and lands.

Fujii Shōzō gives an overview of the long history of colonialism in Taiwan, with missionaries, settlers, and occupants ranging from the Dutch to the Japanese. Against the background of a wide variety of colonial experience, Taiwanese intellectuals and writers managed to find their cultural expressions and to voice their internal strife. Fujii thus deepens our understanding of such critical notions as “domination” and “resistance” by examining the assimilative policies of the Japanese colonial government and their impact on the formation of Taiwanese identity. Drawing on work by Benedict Anderson and Jürgen Habermas, Fujii argues that because of the Japanese national language system during Japanese rule, the percentages of school attendance and knowledge of the Japanese language reached a high level in the colony. By the 1930s, literacy in colonial Taiwan had been achieved by three million two hundred thousand people, thereby paving the way for Taiwanese cultural nationalism.

Liao Ping-hui also refers to Anderson’s seminal work on print capitalism in tracing the development of media culture in Taiwan after the Japanese colonial government decided to introduce newspapers and periodicals in 1896. For Liao, what started as official colonial policy could have become, in the process of reception and reproduction, a politically useful tool for local cultural criticism and resistance against the regime. His essay singles out the transnational, anamorphic, and cosmopolitan character of the news media in the constitution of a public sphere from 1896 to 1945.

In part 2, Ts’ai Hui-yu Caroline discusses the issue of modernity and colonial subjectivity by employing Foucault’s notion of governmentality to ask: How did the Japanese manage their administrative work? Tsai points out that the number of bureaucrats in colonial Taiwan at any one time was relatively small. The Japanese colonial administration was made possible by turning the civil bureaucracy into a disciplinary and modernizing institution.

Kawahara Isao examines the effect of censorship on Taiwan literature by discussing the material in Taiwan Shuppan keisatsuhō considered the most reliable source available regarding permission to publish books in the colony. When social movements in Taiwan reached a peak in 1930, the Japanese authorities built up vigilant defenses not only against literary and nonliterary activities in the colony but also against proletarian literature in Japan. As a consequence, bookstores in Taiwan learned to avoid stocking books that were likely to be banned, and they imported only the cheapest, salable books; they maintained their monopoly on imported books by signing special contracts with schools, and shunning competition with rivals. Censorship thus distorted and misled the literary movements of the period.

Fong Shiaw-Chian presents a distinctive picture of Japanese colonial administration and of censorship, with the interesting observation that the Japanese rulers achieved a weak hegemony by polarizing ordinary Taiwanese as “Chinese” and Taiwanese elites as “moderns.” As a result, the subaltern Taiwanese had a residual folk culture that helped keep them from being totally assimilated, while cultural elites were preoccupied with “Japanization.” Drawing on valuable documents and information of the period, Fong complicates our understanding of the ways in which hegemony operated in Taiwan’s colonial experience. He challenges conventional notions of censorship and domination by drawing attention to the nuanced processes of identity and modernity formation.

Four papers on literature and the arts are found in the third section. Using a framework of repressed modernity, Huang Mei-er argues that Taiwanese traditional writers managed to develop canonical revision and cultural criticism at a time when the old literature was supposedly in decline and being replaced by modern expressive cultures. But “old” literature was still very influential and debates between the old and the new modes of expression lasted for two decades—from the 1920s to the 1940s. In 1937, for example, when the Japanese colonial government banned the use of Chinese in newspapers, traditional writers still had no difficulty exercising their rights of expression. Even writers who normally thought of themselves as representatives of new literary movements, among them Lai Ho and Yang Shouyu , chose to organize poetry clubs to compose classical poems to articulate their ideas and thoughts.

Of writers belonging to the so-called new literary movements, Peng Hsiao-yen singles out Yang Kui and Liu Na’ou as a contrastive pair who produced critical responses to colonialism and the predicament of identity. Both writers were born in Tainan in 1905—and that might be the only thing they had in common. They came from two distinct classes—one a laborer’s son and the other the son of a rich landlord—and they eventually moved in different paths: the former became a proleterianist and the latter a neo-sensationist. Both writers were indebted to the realist movement of the time, but it was their junior colleague Lu Heruo who became involved in the famous “kuso-realism debate” with the Japanese author Nishikawa Mitsuru . Chie Tarumi reads these two authors against each other to reveal differences in their conceptual framework, literary style, and impact. Interestingly, both writers used fūsui (fengshui) as a general theme, and it was a subject with which such landscape painters as Ishikawa Kinichirō were preoccupied.

Yen Chuan-ying describes the transformation of landscape aesthetics by this important art educator and traces his indebtedness to both contemporary Japanese art theory and comparative geography.

In the final section, five scholars trace the transition from the colonial to the postcolonial period; they raise questions concerning the politics of cultural representation, the demands of redeeming the Other, and reinventing tradition. The playwright Wu Man-sha is discussed in the first essay by Shimomura Sakujirō the subject is the production, edification, and circulation of different versions involving a Taiwanese aboriginal girl’s tragic story. Shimomura studies the formation and reception of the tale that arose during the kōminka movement, first told by the Japanese writer Murakami Genzō , and later elaborated by the Chinese artist Wu Man-sha. The tale then traveled back and forth between the metropolis and the colony along a circuitous route. Nishikawa Mitsuru’s quasi-ethnographic discourse is a most revealing case in mapping the two-way traffic between Japan and Taiwan.

Faye Yuan Kleeman closely reads Nishikawa’s work to identify the ways in which colonial encounters generated the need to produce and possess the knowledge of others. In Kleeman’s view, Nishikawa interwove authentic cultural information with more personal observations that are focused on Taiwanese women and are colored by the author’s background as a Romantic poet. In the final analysis, the resulting eroticization of the exotic served the interests of colonial ideology: it feminized the colonized culture.

Three essays in this final section examine the recovery of Taiwan by the ROC Nationalist government in 1945. It was commonly held that the Taiwanese were to be re-sinicized after fifty years of Japanization. Huang Ying-che gives a nuanced and sensible account of the relocation of culture, while Douglas Fix details the difficult transition in terms of rebels and riots. When Taiwan was handed over to the ROC, Chen Yi took on the responsibility for decolonizing the minds of the Taiwanese people. The re-sinification process, however, had begun much earlier with the emergence of Chinese columns in popular newspapers like Fenggyuebao (Wind and moon news). They were administered by an intermediate figure and a disciple of Lu Xun Xu Shoushang who had been better known as a Lu Xun expert in Japan and who later worked in the KMT regime to promote literacy in modern Chinese. Even Governor Chen Yi himself had been trained in Japan in his early years. The relocation of cultural identity was thus more complex than usually assumed, and the bias against the Taiwanese as the colonized inferior Other was constantly challenged not only by local people but by those who came from China to take over the island.

According to Fix, some three hundred incidents of assault and theft were reported by the colonial police bureau between the announcement of Japan’s surrender to the Allied Forces and the formal takeover of Taiwan in the fall of 1945. Fix rigorously analyzes the quantitative and qualitative data, and reevaluates demands for various kinds of restitution and reimbursement as partial responses to Japanese colonial rule and, soon, to Chen Yi and his government made up mostly by the newcomers from China.

Finally, Wu Micha singles out two instances of colonial and postcolonial Japanese ethnology to discuss the construction of Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere discourse as associated with the journal Minzoku Taiwan · Wu raises the question of the local perspectives in such a presumably autonomous and comparative study in pan-Asian societies and cultures.

Between 1945 and 1947, Taiwanese intellectuals openly criticized corruption in the KMT government, and tensions finally exploded in the February 28 Incident of 1947, which marked a turning point in the historical transformation of Taiwan’s national and ethnic identity. Since then, the Japanese colonial legacy has been ambivalently reevaluated in postcolonial revisions, and it is within this complex psycho-social structure of identification that a political leader such as Lee Tenghui has questioned whether Taiwan should be considered to be Chinese. The essays collected here offer nuanced and sensible accounts that reveal intricate intertwined histories and tortured memories. They certainly shed new light on postcolonial and transcultural studies.

NOTES

1. Gayatri Spivak highlights the complexity of East Asian colonial modernity and postcolonial histories in her book Other Asias (Blackwell, 2003), while Prasenjit Duara examines the transnational trajectories of Manchukuo and the East Asian modern in Sovereignty and Authenticity: Manchukuo and the East Asian Modern (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2004).

2. Kōminka refers to the Japanization or imperial subjectification project launched in the 1930s to turn Taiwanese into colonial subjects loyal to the Japanese emperor; throughout the book the term is rendered in different ways to reflect its significance and impacts.

3. Benedict Anderson, “Empire/Taiwan,” paper presented at the international conference “Reimagining Taiwan: Nation, Ethnicity, Narrative,” Taipei, December 20–21, 2003.

4. See Leo T. S. Ching, Becoming Japanese: Colonial Taiwan and the Politics of Identity Formation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001); Melissa Brown, Is Taiwan Chinese? (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004).

5. Lewis H. Gann, “Western and Japanese Colonialism: Some Preliminary Comparisons,” in The Japanese Colonial Empire, 1895–1945, ed. Ramon H. Myers and Mark R. Peattie (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), 497–525.

6. E. Patricia Tsurumi, “Colonial Education in Korea and Taiwan,” in The Japanese Colonial Empire, 1895–1945, ed. Ramon H. Myers and Mark R. Peattie (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), 293–294.

7. See Emma Jinhua Teng, Taiwan’s Imagined Geography: Chinese Colonial Travel Writing and Pictures, 1683–1895 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004), 60–68.

8. Ishikawa Kinichirō, “Taiwan fengguang de huixiang [Reflections on Taiwan’s landscape],” Taiwan shibao [Taiwan Times] (June 1935), 53; translated in Chuen-yin Yen, ed., Landscape and Inscape: Anthology of Modern Taiwan Art Documents (Fengjing xinjing: Taiwan xiandai meishu wenxian daodu), 2 vols. (Taipei: Xiongshi, 2001), 1:54–56.

9. Translated in Yen, Landscape and Inscape, 1:30.

10. Translated in Yen, Landscape and Inscape, 1:34.

11. Yen, Landscape and Inscape, 1:41.

12. Peter Duus et al., The Japanese Wartime Empire, 1931–1945 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996); and especially in Tsurumi, “Colonial Education,” 289.

13. Leo Ching, “The Musha Rebellion As Unthinkable,” paper presented at Japan’s Fifth Annual Taiwan Studies Conference, Kansei University, Japan, May 10, 2003.

14. Brown, Is Taiwan Chinese?, 1–2. Also see my review essay entitled “Envisioning a Nation,” Tsinghua Journal of Chinese Studies (summer 2005).