Taiwan became a Japanese colony in 1895, but it took years for the colonial authorities to pacify the island and consolidate colonial rule. By the early 1930s, however, they had succeeded in suppressing most of the radical social and political groups. Chinese intellectuals on the island therefore turned to literature to express themselves.
In poetry, the realist trend, already popular during the 1920s, continued to evolve during the 1930s, and hsiang-tu—or native-soil —literature made its first appearance. Native-soil writers saw the countryside as the stronghold of traditional Chinese culture and customs. Another small group of poets experimented with international avant-garde trends, especially surrealism, which provided a means to transcend the political restrictions. During this decade, Japanese gradually became the primary literary language on the island. Occupation-period poetry reached its peak during the mid-1930s, but the situation changed rapidly as Japan and China moved closer to war.
After the outbreak of full-scale hostilities in 1937, the Japanese colonial authorities once again tightened control over the island by reinstating military rule. To stimulate support for the Japanese war effort, the authorities sought to eradicate all feelings of Chinese ethnicity and nationalism. They therefore instituted a policy of forced assimilation, or kominka, literally “to make into the emperor's people.” They discouraged the use of Chinese and banned the publication of all Chinese language books, newspapers, and magazines. Bilingual newspapers, which had been allowed to publish for the convenience of older readers, had to stop printing in Chinese. As a result of this policy, the number of publications on the island decreased considerably and, for a brief period, all literary publication ceased.
In addition to expanding police powers and squelching all forms of political dissent, the Japanese government established the Taiwan Development Company. This was done to exploit resources on Taiwan, promote Japanese immigration to the island, and forge stronger economic links with Southeast Asia and southern China. After the war broke out, the local Taiwan companies that had been founded in recent decades were merged with expatriate corporations, effectively putting economic control of all sectors of the island's economy in the hands of the Japanese.
After Japan invaded Southeast Asia in 1941, Taiwan's economy changed further. The Japanese decided that the island could serve as a steppingstone to the South Seas by being not only an important agricultural colony, but also a processor of Southeast Asian raw materials into chemicals, machine tools, textiles, and other goods. Heavy industry was therefore introduced to Taiwan, and the finished products were stockpiled on the island for use in the Pacific Theater.
The colonial authorities also expanded the Japanese-only language policy. In addition to using Japanese at school and in official business, people were encouraged to speak Japanese at home. When families complied, a sign to that effect was posted on their doors, and they were accorded special treatment, such as receiving the same meat and rice ration quotas as Japanese families. The authorities also militarized schools and promoted Japanese customs, dress, and the Shinto religion. Beginning in 1942, Taiwan males were sent to Southeast Asia as soldiers and laborers.
Although local Chinese writers were encouraged to write pro-war poems and stories during the late 1930s and early 1940s, most of the poetry written during the war years was in the realist mode and often dealt with love and daily life. The young writers who emerged during this time received very little Chinese-language education. Moreover, the continuing shortages of paper and ink made publishing very difficult.
Literary publications and activities did not begin to bounce back from the initial proscriptions until 1939. In February, the Taiwan poet Chiu Ping-nan (邱炳南) founded the Japanese-language poetry magazine Tuberose. Only seven issues were published, but works by nearly all of Taiwan's established poets writing in Japanese appeared in the magazine. In August, Nishikawa Mitsuru (西川滿), a Japanese writer born in Taiwan, organized the Association of Taiwan Poets, which was composed largely of Japanese members, although three Chinese were allowed to join. The group published another Japanese-language journal, entitled Gorgeous Island. At the end of the year, the organization changed its name to the Taiwan Writer's Association and the title of its journal to Literary Taiwan. The works of established Chinese poets such as Yang Yun-ping (楊雲萍) and Lin Ching-liu (林精鏐) appeared in the magazine.
The following year, several Chinese members of the Taiwan Writer's Association grew dissatisfied with the ideological stance and editorial policy of the magazine. Under the leadership of Chang Wen-huan (張文環), they broke away from Literary Taiwan and founded Taiwan Literature, also published in Japanese. Both magazines received the approval of the authorities and members of both groups were sent to Japan by the Governor-General's Office to participate in conferences. The magazines were practically the only literary journals of any significance published during the war years.
Contributors to Literary Taiwan were mostly Japanese writers, especially those born in Taiwan; Chinese writers tended to publish in Taiwan Literature. The two magazines were also divided over the theoretical issue of what constituted colonial literature. The editors of Literary Taiwan advocated a literature of the Japanese experience on Taiwan. For them, the literature of Taiwan was a part of Japanese literature, but one that detailed colonial life. The stories and poems published in the magazine tended to focus on the exotic, the romantic, and the theme of homesickness. Their ultimate goal was to have Taiwan literature accepted by literary circles at home in Japan. The editors of Taiwan Literature, on the other hand, advocated the development of a Taiwan literature independent of Japan. Many of the works published in the magazine dealt in a realistic way with the customs and the changing nature of traditional Chinese society. The debate over colonial literature was actually a continuation of the movements for social and political autonomy that had been suppressed by the Japanese government in 1936.
The positions of the two magazines continued to diverge as the war advanced. The writers associated with Literary Taiwan were in favor of the assimilation policy. These feelings became more pronounced in 1942, when the Japanese began conscripting Chinese to serve in the army. The Japanese government also sent a number of well-known Japanese writers to Taiwan to meet with local intellectuals in order to drum up support for the war and solicit pro-war literary works from island writers. The number of writers publishing in the 1940s had declined sharply from the previous decade and, with the intensification of the war effort, more and more authors quit publishing or wrote satirical pieces.
Interestingly, there were a number of Japanese writers who supported the position of the Chinese writers at Taiwan Literature. Some of them wrote theoretical articles while others wrote antiwar poems and stories. However, there were a few Chinese writers who supported the Japanese position and wrote stories which portrayed assimilation in a favorable light.
At the end of 1943, both Literary Taiwan and Taiwan Literature were forced to stop publication because of ink and paper shortages. The following year, the Japanese Committee for the Promotion of Literature brought members of both magazines together to publish a new magazine entitled Taiwan Literary Arts. The same year, the authorities merged the island's six largest newspapers, which severely circumscribed all literary activities since these papers regularly carried literary pages. Nevertheless, established poets continued to write and publish during these trying years. Yang Yun-ping, for example, published Mountains and Rivers, his only collection of Japanese verse, in 1943.
In addition to the many older poets who remained active during the 1940s, a whole new generation of young poets also appeared. One was Chen Chien-wu (陳千武), born in 1922 in central Taiwan. Chen attended Japanese schools and, when a junior in high school, he decided to finish his education in Japan. He ran away from home and boarded a steamer for Japan. Chen was promptly arrested upon landing and sent back to Taiwan. As punishment, he was held back a year in school.
At this time, Chen began reading Taiwan Literary Arts, published by the Taiwan Literary Association. In 1939, his first poems began appearing in magazines and newspapers around the island. In May 1940, Chen was arrested along with a number of other people for inciting fellow students to oppose adopting Japanese surnames, which was part of the forced assimilation policy. He was locked up for one month in a room on campus. Out of the experience came a number of poems, including “Oil Painting”:
I gaze at an oil painting
On the wall of my cell
There floats a bright golden
Landscape
What is it saying?
The silent room
Is filled with the ticking of the clock
A dream of days gone by
Flashes in my brain
A golden mountainous landscape
Home fondly remembered
A beautiful life
What are twenty years of troubles?
Childhood beckons
See, my childlike heart
Knows
My fate
This is a good example of the sort of indirect protest poem written during the 1940s. The only word in the poem that would indicate that it is about something more than viewing an oil painting is the word “cell.” The narrator of the poem looks at the painting and it evokes memories of home. Like his compatriots, the narrator is the victim of a colonial system that is trying to make him a prisoner in his own home. But he has one weapon that his oppressors do not know about and cannot control-his childlike heart and imagination. He can take solace in imagining a time when his enemies will no longer have power over him.
Chen said in a recent interview that the Japanese considered him a troublemaker; after all, he fought with his teachers and encouraged his classmates to oppose the Japanese. The school failed him in physical education and military training, thus making him ineligible to attend college. As a result, Chen was sent to work as a laborer at a hemp cloth factory after graduation. “The Japanese looked down on people from Taiwan and insulted us,” he says. “They liked to imitate the Westerners so they called us ‘coolies.’” During his time at the factory, he wrote a number of poems and stories about the life of laborers. His poem “Coolie” is a good example:
At noon
Their copper-colored backs are exposed
Oil and sweat
Make their heavy muscles shine
Operating an old-style press
The wheels turn making a racket
Coolies
Move slower than an oarsman
And turn slower than a water buffalo
O, they look just like
The slaves in the movie
About the Roman Empire
Their muscular arms and heavy lidded eyes
And their ponderous steps…
I am the shop overseer
Behind my back I carry a whip
Burdened with loneliness
I walk so slowly
Chen says that he was promoted from laborer to an office job after his Japanese manager discovered that he wrote poems and short stories. But the manager soon decided that Chen was unsuited for office work and instead made him an overseer in charge of the factory's workers. This also failed, because Chen was too lenient. He eventually left the factory to work in a rice mill owned by a relative. This poem is written from the perspective of the overseer. The first part describes the physical appearance of the coolies. The overseer has a certain amount of privileges, including being able to see foreign films, thus the comparison to the movie about slaves during the Roman Empire. Like the slaves in the movie, the coolies live without hope; but the overseer also carries a burden of loneliness, because he is ostracized by his countrymen for helping the Japanese oppressors.
In 1942, as part of Japan's policy of “voluntary military service,” Chen was mobilized, received basic training in Taipei, and in December 1943 was sent to Indonesia and then to Timor. After being conscripted, Chen expressed his feelings in a prose poem entitled “Spring”:
Shielding my eyes from the sun, I see the red lines in my palms. I stop and stand. Embrace the spring in a breeze and inhale. Looking through the gauze-like haze over the Strait, I want to reach out and touch. The plains at dawn today shine like a satin hair ribbon.
Water flows slowly through the canal. The calla lilies blossom; yellow and red, they are so beautiful standing by the water. The reeds gently conceal their reflections. The clean, fresh air is as pure as a virgin. Palm fronds sway in my soul.
The fields glow with feelings. The thin leaves in the paddy move in green waves. On the endless highway, treading over the dewy grass, deep in my memory I seem to hear the dripping red boots of the troops marching through the woods at dawn.
Far away, where a colorful pagoda shines, war momentarily suspends a bright rainbow. I face the blazing light of the sun. Clear-headed, I must walk this endless road no matter where it goes.
This poem is one of a very small number of prose poems that Chen wrote during the war. All of them deal with complicated emotional situations. The poem is imbued with a strong sense of place and history. In the first stanza, the narrator, conscious of his own fate and mortality, situates himself in relation to the larger historical context of China. In the second stanza, he focuses on the natural beauty of Taiwan, which in the third stanza is destroyed by the war. The final stanza shows the narrator looking soberly toward an unknown fate.
Chen remained in Indonesia after the Japanese surrender and was taken prisoner by the British during the Indonesian war for independence. In November 1945, he joined the Taiwan Province Association and was allowed to work in Jakarta. In April 1946, he was sent to a prison camp and from there shipped to Singapore with a thousand other troops from Taiwan. In Singapore, he was placed in another prison camp until he could be repatriated to Taiwan. While waiting to be sent home, he worked on the camp newspaper. Chen was finally repatriated in July 1946. Almost forty years later, in 1984, he published a collection of stories based on his experiences in Southeast Asia.
The poetry written during the war years was overwhelmingly realist in orientation. Lyric poetry predominated and, for obvious political reasons, there was a shift away from explicit nationalism and native-soil themes. Instead, poems about the general state of the world and private emotional experience became more common. Wu Ying-tao (吳瀛濤) began writing poetry in 1939 and was thoroughly conditioned by the times; his poems tend to emphasize the minutiae of daily experience and his private emotional life.
Wu was born in 1916 and received both Japanese and Chinese educations. As a young man he studied business and after graduation worked in his family's company. He was a founding member of the Taipei branch of the Taiwan Writer's Association. In 1944, he moved to Hong Kong where he met Tai Wang-shu, one of the most famous modernist poets from mainland China. After the war, he returned to Taiwan to work at the Tobacco & Wine Monopoly Bureau. He died in 1971. His poem “Small Lane” exemplifies his work and is typical of the kind of precious, sentimental poems that were written during the war:
Back in my old hometown,
I walk along the small, old lane
My childhood friend hasn't changed
He's still just as frank, lively, and happy
Walking with him, I can forget this
bustling age
Dusk brings sweet memories
Approaching my home
I recall the name and appearance of
a cute little neighbor girl
The lamp still shines in that
small window
O, my old friends
Do you still remember
How we played all day long
In this small, old lane
Chen Hsiu-hsi (陳秀喜) was born in Hsinchu in 1921 and passed away in 1991. She began writing poetry merely by chance when some of her friends asked her to join their poetry club in 1937, but she gained fame as a poet only in the 1960s. Women did not playa very active role in literary circles during the occupation period, and teenage girls from gentry families were expected to do little more than stay at home and obey their parents. She wrote modern verse in Japanese for the most part, although she later developed an interest in haiku. Reminiscing years later, Chen said that she and her friends wrote sentimental verse, and when they got together, conversation invariably turned to romantic topics. Her poem “On Youth” is the only piece left from that period:
Among God's greatest creations
youth is the most successful season
In transparent, blind eyes
An angel is as lovely as a devil
A pirate is as dear as a prince
The tamest creature
Is willing to jump into the hunter's heart
Thus, through all ages, it offers the
Best chance for making a capture
The only poetry group established during the war years to survive beyond 1945 was the Silver Bell Society, which published Green Grass magazine. The group was formed in 1942 by three students from the Taichung First High School. The three would staple their writings together, pass them around, and then discuss them with their friends. In 1944, after they graduated and went off to college, they still remained in touch. One of the young men went to the Taiwan Teacher's College, where he met other aspiring young poets who were soon contributing to the magazine. By this time it was being circulated in mimeographed copies with a new title, The Tide.
Within a matter of months, there were a couple of dozen contributors to the magazine. According to Lin Heng-tai (林亨泰), one of several contributors from the Taiwan Teacher's College, “All schools were controlled by the military and the magazine was circulated only among classmates and friends. The magazine did not contain any anti-Japanese writing, nor did it attempt to promote any sort of literary program; the poems which appeared were youthful sentimental pieces.” Lin's own work shows him to be a world-weary youth who could take a cold look at reality. “Dream” is such a poem:
A person can go forever on a good dream
Because pitiful humanity can't get along
without dreams
Dreams are painful, dreams are empty
It's because of the pain and emptiness
That a dream can go on forever
Because pitiful humanity can't get along
without dreams
The group managed to stay together and continue publishing even during the difficult days immediately after Taiwan was returned to China. The island's relatively prosperous economy was plundered to supply the war effort on the mainland; entire factories were dismantled and shipped across the Taiwan Straits. Inflation was out of control-prices rose 1,145 percent in 1948 alone. The political situation went from bad to worse: The February 28th Incident (a series of armed clashes between the newly arrived mainlanders and resident Taiwanese) occurred in 1947, martial law was declared on the island two years later, and a political stabilization campaign was initiated to round up allegedly leftist elements.
According to Lin, the group was dissolved after the student movement of April 6, 1949, and the subsequent stabilization campaign. Students from Taipei's three universities marched on the Taipei police station in March to protest police beatings of two students in February. On April 6, the police began an islandwide crackdown on suspected leftists and students who had taken part in anti-government demonstrations. Lin and several other members of the Silver Bell Society were arrested. One disappeared, one was later executed, and Lin was eventually released. Looking back on those days, Lin says: “We were Japanese during Japan's darkest days, and Chinese during China's most hopeless time.” His poem “Torture” gives some hint of the tenor of the times:
Deliberately I turn off the light
And after the room sinks in darkness
I strike a match and under the
Flickering flame
I took at my beloved writing
I remain speechless in the face of this
Unreasonable torture
The young poets who began writing during the war years received the most stringent Japanese education of any generation during the occupation period. Some students could study Chinese as an elective course in high school-Chen Chien-wu is an example. But by the time Lin Heng-tai's generation entered high school, Chinese had been removed from the curriculum. As a result, they became quite fluent in Japanese and could speak their native Southern Fukien dialect, but they could not read or write Chinese. This created problems for them after Taiwan was returned to China in 1945. Because the Nationalist government banned Japanese the following year, they had to make the difficult transition to Chinese if they were going to continue writing. Some writers fell silent, but others struggled to learn the language. Chen Chien-wu, Wu Ying-tao, Chen Hsiu-hsi, and Lin Heng-tai all made the transition. They later became known as “the generation of poets who overcame the language barrier,” a name coined by Lin Heng-tai. Chen Chien-wu also calls them the “lost generation.”
Lin Heng-tai had to learn Chinese while he was a student at the Taiwan Teacher's College, where classes were taught in Chinese, Japanese, and English. Lin was a founding member of the Modernist group in the 1950s and a founder of the Bamboo Hat Society in the 1960s. The latter group of poets wrote realist, hsiang-tu poems. Chen Chien-wu began studying Chinese again after the February 28th Incident. He too would be a founding member of the Bamboo Hat Society.
Chen Hsiu-hsi did not begin studying Chinese until 1957. One day, a Japanese friend complimented her on her Japanese. Instead of feeling proud, she suddenly felt ashamed. She realized that although she was Chinese, she could not write a poem in Chinese. Twenty years later, she and many other writers had mastered the language, but they were still plagued by an identity problem. “A writer understands the world through language,” Lin says. “It is the spirit and the unique way a people represents itself. The language you use in a sense determines your ethnicity and the way you understand and represent reality.” This conundrum also became the theme for poems such as Chen Hsiu-hsi's “Pen”:
Eyebrows are the colony of the eyebrow pencil
Lips are the region of lipstick
I am glad that my pen
Served neither
"Colony," “Region”
Every time I see these words
I feel the old sorrows again
Counting my sighs tonight
I touch my veins
Blood rushes to the tip of my pen
On tear-soaked paper
I write
I am Chinese
I am Chinese
We are all Chinese
Chen Hsiu-hsi once recalled an eye-opening incident that occurred when she published Small Room, a collection of Japanese poems in 1970. Upon receiving copies of the new book from Japan, she was filled with excitement and proudly gave each of her children a copy. They had to remind her that they could not read Japanese. She suddenly realized how much Taiwan had changed. Learning Japanese, which she had come to take for granted, was now foreign to her own children. Much of her writing-in fact, much of Taiwan's modern literary heritage-had been relegated to silence.-John Balcom, formerly an editor of the Free China Review, is writing his Ph.D. dissertation on contemporary Chinese literature. This article is the last of a three-part series.■