Taiwan was Japan's first colony, and its most successful one. Although major credit for the nation's stunning post-World War II success belongs to the residents of Taiwan themselves, there can be little doubt that the Japanese era created the substructure that many of these advances were built upon. This would seem to qualify Taiwan for a case study in comparative colonial and post-colonial studies. Regrettably, it continues to be overlooked in this regard. As the authors observe, social scientists have considered Taiwan in a variety of other contexts: as a window on China; a cold war bastion of freedom against communist tyranny; a little dragon of economic accomplishment; a state without nationhood; the first Sinic society to hold a meaningful general election; and a cosmopolitan polity whose ambiguous international status the People's Republic of China hopes to incorporate into a one-state, two-system schematic. This book grew out of a conference held at Columbia University that was sponsored by Taiwan's National Science Council and the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation. With the goal of presenting a comprehensive analysis of the colonial period, the volume's 17 contributors address the era from a variety of perspectives.
It is important to remember that although the words "colonialism" and "imperialism" have taken on negative connotations, they were much respected concepts in the 19th and early 20th centuries. However base and exploitative their actions now seem, and often were, imperial powers saw themselves as spreading enlightenment and bettering the lives of their subjects. As Japan emerged from China's cultural shadow, it determined as well to beat the West as its own game. Taiwan, severed from the casual and corrupt administration of the Qing dynasty (1644-1911) after Japan defeated China in 1895, was its showcase project and template for future colonies.
Knowing relatively little about their country's new possession, Japanese administrators displayed extraordinary zeal in learning about it. As noted by contributor Yao Jen-to, this distinguished them from their European counterparts, who were frequently willfully ignorant of their subjects. The Japanese believed that numbers, facts and good government were strongly correlated. Hence there was scarcely anything that escaped their interest. Among the avalanche of numbers were the times of sunrise and sunset, the number of factory workers, the size of the sheep population, and even the number of packages sent from each post office year by year.
Greater Control
These data were useful for establishing and maintaining control. After clarifying land-ownership--astonishingly, the Qing had never bothered to do so--the colonial government had detailed maps of villages, rivers, mountains, and tribes, as well as lists of who was entitled to live in each place. Bandits and rebels could run, but they could not hide: both the crime rate and resistance to Japanese rule decreased markedly. To be sure, the superior Japanese military was a factor in the island's pacification, but the land survey performed a function that guns alone could not have.
Taipei's Dadaocheng port was a tea-trading hub during the Japanese colonial era. (Courtesy of Taipei City Archives)
Being well informed was also a valuable tool in tax collection, an endeavor in which the Qing had likewise been careless, not even knowing how many residents the island had. Taiwan's first census was conducted in 1905--a full decade before one was conducted in Japan's home islands. Utilitarian motives should not obscure the genuine intellectual curiosity of many of the colonizers; in the early 1900s, anthropologists studied the island's aboriginal peoples, identifying nine main groups. And in 1911, botanists issued a catalogue of Taiwan's plants. An army translator brought to Taiwan his passion for watercolor painting, then a rather new import from the West to Japan.
Wakabayashi Masahiro's chapter cautions against reducing the period to a binary opposition between Japanese imperialism and the colonized people. In fact, interactions of varying degrees were common. While Japanese authorities stripped the old Taiwanese leading stratum of much of its power, they were unable to root out the economic bases of its families. Ironically, the modern legal system and public safety apparatus that the colonizers introduced resulted in actually protecting the interests of this class. The authorities were able to use the social influence of the traditional leaders to smooth Japan's domination of the island. Based on their property, prestige and willingness to cooperate, Taiwanese were assigned to positions such as village head, local district administrative assistant, or leader of the mutual surveillance baojia system, all of which aided the local police. Other honors, such as invitations to official banquets, were available to reward loyal service. At the same time, these privileged individuals had to maintain their influence with those below them in the social hierarchy, meaning that to a certain extent they had to accommodate local interests and sentiments. Under some circumstances, this could lead them to oppose aspects of Japanese rule. A new class of intellectuals created by the educational system established by the colonizers formed a loose coalition with the landed gentry, and began to make demands on the colonial government. For example, they lobbied for the establishment of a Taiwanese middle school that would be on the same level as those of Japan, and for the creation of a Taiwanese parliament. This in turn facilitated the emergence of Taiwanese anti-colonial nationalism.
Cultural Transformation
Fujii Shozo's contribution explores the transfer of cultural inheritance from one foreign occupying power to the next as a factor in the formation of a Taiwanese identity. Echoing Wakabayashi, Fujii rejects the characterization of the colonial experience as oppression and resistance. The more common pattern, he believes, was intentional assimilation to certain characteristics of each. While the author does not press the point, his evidence also shows adaptation to the Taiwan environment. For example, in their ancestral temples, Han immigrants began to venerate not the clan founders from mainland China but rather those who had first established their lineages in Taiwan. The armed clashes that took place among various regional groups of immigrants gradually developed into conflicts between clan groups, indicating that groups from the mainland had formed a Taiwan-based society. And the Minnan dialect that many of the immigrants brought with them changed in a number of ways from that spoken in Fujian province, where it had originated. Fujii's research indicates that by 1860 this nativization was well established. The Japanese government replaced the relatively thin veneer of classical Chinese education with a mass-based educational curriculum; by 1930, the Taiwanese had the second highest literacy rate in Asia, after Japan. The Kuomintang (KMT) government in turn built upon the Japanese educational system, but replaced it with Mandarin. Out of the active assimilation of the cultural policies imported from these successive foreign regimes, the Taiwanese people created a unique identity and a democratic nation-state. Fujii closes with a question: How will this change of consciousness affect the development of an already highly hybrid Taiwanese literature?
Japanese colonizers replaced classical Chinese education in Taiwan with a mass-based curriculum. (Courtesy of Taipei City Archives)
Caroline Tsai Hui-yu painstakingly examines the evolution of Japanese colonial administration, complete with shifts in terminology and the nuances associated with it. Basically, the administrative structure of Taiwan paralleled that of Japan, with major and minor revisions to local conditions. In general, she concludes, this policy of political grafting worked well--so well that it was exported to Korea when that country became a colony of Japan in 1910, to Manchukuo in 1932 and then to other parts of the Greater East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere during World War II. Tsai describes the administrative structure as basically extra-bureaucratic, relying on the mutual surveillance system. This allowed the colonial government to respond promptly to Tokyo's wartime demands with minimal bureaucratic red tape. It may also help to explain why wartime mobilization was carried out earlier and more effectively in the colonies than in Japan proper. The civil bureaucracy functioned as an efficient tool for civil control.
Kawahara Isao explores the controversy surrounding the 1937 decision to abolish the Chinese-language sections in Taiwan's newspapers. His research reinforces the hypothesis that the relationship between colonized and colonizer was not a simple one of oppressed and oppressor. Although the decision to drop the Chinese-language sections was presented as a voluntary decision of the newspapers, its announcement aroused immediate suspicion. Some members of the Japanese legislature, noting that only a third of Taiwan's population was considered proficient in Japanese, suspected that an order from the military, rather than a spontaneous wellspring of similar sentiment among highly competitive newspapers, was behind the decision. Taiwan's governor-general at the time, Admiral Kobayashi Seizo, was himself a military man. The parliamentarians' inquiries were deflected; the Chinese-language sections disappeared, and the military won. As to why the decision had to be characterized as voluntary rather than in response to a decree, Isao believes that the colonial governor did not want to risk carrying out an ordinance that would have been criticized by the international world for trying to impede freedom of speech.
Given the Japanese military's disdain for international public opinion in that era, this is surprising. Also surprising is that a Chinese literary journal, Wind and Moon, and the Chinese-Japanese art journal Taiwan Arts continued to be published, as did novels in Chinese. This, Isao hypothesizes, was because the appearance of these two periodicals lent credence to the authorities' claim that the decision to drop Chinese had been initiated by the newspapers and was not forced on them. After a hiatus of three years, Taiwan's writers began to publish in Japanese. Many of them, including some of the most talented, found themselves unable to publish after the KMT assumed control of Taiwan; they were not sufficiently fluent in Chinese, which had become the new official language. Writing in Japanese was now proscribed.
Modernization
The Japanese were not simply colonizers but modernizers as well. To be sure, the image of modernity they brought was filtered through the prism of Japanese traditions and values. Komagome Takeshi points out that, although the Japanese styled themselves the bearers of civilization, it was obvious to all that they had acquired this civilization rather quickly after the Meiji Restoration of 1868. How to separate the message of modernity, which for the most part Taiwanese eagerly welcomed, from the Japanization of native culture presented intellectuals with a conundrum that individuals worked out, after considerable soul-searching, in different ways. For those who had embraced Christianity, which was part of the Western civilizing message but not of the Japanese, the choices were particularly difficult. Lim Bo-seng, educated at a Presbyterian middle school in his native Tainan, thereafter at Tokyo Imperial University, which was the pinnacle of the Japanese educational system, and finally at Columbia University, is a case in point. Lim regarded cultural assimilation as to some degree the price that had to be paid for the equalization of Taiwanese and Japanese. Although he did not deny the value of Japanese as the official language of education, he believed it important that the native language not be extinguished in the process. Taiwanese was not, as some believed, in a decadent state, but alive, changing, and a vital means for the people of Taiwan to express their thoughts and sentiments. Lim proposed that it be used as a complementary educational language and that separate middle schools be established in major cities for Japanese and Taiwanese. At some point, he concluded that education by the Japanese contradicted the liberating forces of Taiwanese modernity. These were not politically popular views in the assimilative 1930s, and Lim was severed from the teaching staff of the same Tainan middle school from which he had been graduated. Undaunted, he continued to speak out, later becoming a martyr in the February 28, 1947 incident. Apparently, the KMT was less tolerant than the Japanese.
During the Japanese colonial period, two-story shops became part of Taipei's cityscape. (Courtesy of Taipei City Archives)
The lives of two more Tainan natives, born two decades later than Lim but in the same year as each other, are the subject of Peng Hsiao-yen's probe into colonialism and the predicament of identity. Liu Na-ou was a child of privilege whose diary contained entries in Chinese, English, French, Japanese, German and Taiwanese. Living in luxury in Shanghai, Liu consciously styled himself a dandy and took great pride in his ballroom dancing skills. Yang Kuei, however, was the son of a laborer and worked as a gardener. As a 10-year-old, he witnessed Japanese forces en route to suppress a local revolt. Rejecting the explanation that these fighters against colonialism were hooligans and rebels, Yang decided to use literature to establish the truth. Ironically, the place he chose to do this was Tokyo. After demonstrating against colonialism there, he was jailed for three days. Espousing socialist views that gave allegiance to the international proletariat rather than the nation, Yang's views, like Lim Bo-seng's, endeared him to neither the Japanese nor the KMT; he was incarcerated by both, including a 12-year sentence under the KMT. Liu Na-ou, by contrast, quickly tired of the politicized aesthetics of proletarian literature. Liu's vision of modernity valorized the autonomy of art. For Yang, art without social activism was tantamount to vulgar craftsmanship. Paradoxically, Yang endured, dying of natural causes at a venerable age, while Liu was assassinated in 1940, aged 35. Despite Liu's non-political stance, speculation on the motive for this still unsolved case concentrated on political motives. Some believed that the Japanese authorities were behind the act, since they thought Liu was a double agent for the KMT; others held that KMT operatives were responsible, suspecting that Liu was collaborating with the Japanese.
Protest and Reaction
Huang Ying-che's contribution focuses on the Taiwanese reaction to post-World War II KMT charges that they had been enslaved under Japanese rule. The charges were criticized on many fronts. Some said it was fallacious to equate "Japanization" with enslavement. Another argument was that Taiwanese youth were superior to their contemporaries in China with respect to science. Some pointed out that health standards were higher in Taiwan than in China. It was also noted that vestiges of feudal attitudes had been eradicated under Japanese rule and the inability to speak and write Mandarin had nothing to do with enslavement. Huang opines that the KMT's efforts to convince Taiwanese that they had been enslaved deepened tensions rather than helping to integrate the former colony into the Sinic sphere.
Wisely, in this reviewer's opinion, the editors do not attempt to impose a conceptual framework on the book, but allow each chapter to speak for itself. The result is a nuanced picture of a many-faceted colonial experience. Some minor quibbles include a description of policy from 1895 to 1919 as assimilation. In the generally understood meaning of the term assimilation (tonghua), it means "becoming the same." This option was famously rejected by the new colony's first civil administrator, Goto Shimpei, in his statement that "it is impossible to change the eyes of a flatfish [whose eyes are on top of its head] into a sea bream [whose eyes are on either side of its head]." The period from 1895 to 1919 is more accurately characterized as one in which administrative mechanisms were established and resistance was suppressed. Although all things Japanese were clearly regarded as superior, Chinese-language schools continued to exist, as did publications in Chinese, traditional clothing, entertainment and names. This degree of tolerance disappeared about 1937 as part of the war effort, signaled by pronouncements such as that by Governor-General Kobayashi that "only by eradicating Chinese can we achieve true assimilation." Inexplicably, the literary work Chikan Ji is translated "Tale of Fort Orange" on page 297 and as "The Chronicle of the Red Fort" on page 279. Some speculation on why the colonization of Taiwan, meant to be the template for Japan's later colonies, was so much more successful than elsewhere would have been interesting. Hopefully the authors plan a follow-up volume to explore this. Taken as a whole, this volume is a sophisticated treatment of the Japanese colonial era and deserves to be read by anyone with an interest in this crucial period in the formation of a Taiwanese identity.
June Teufel Dreyer is professor of political science at the University of Miami, Florida.
Copyright (c) 2007 by June Teufel Dreyer