The Japanese, who occupied Taiwan for fifty years, influenced
many aspects of modern Taiwan, from agricultural practices and
industrial development to the school system. But scholars have
shied away from taking on the important period, though a rich
history awaits their attention.
In bookstores across Taiwan, children sit pouring through Japanese comic novels. Japanese programs are popular on television. And Japanese musicians not only provide pop for Taiwanese teens, but also influence their hairstyles, clothing, and slang. This is the hajihfeng--the Japanese craze that has swept over Taiwan like a tsunami. The craze for things Japanese arises partly as a result of globalization and partly because Japan has become a model for imitation as the richest country in Asia. But go to the history corner of the bookstore, and you will find records of an older connection with Japan, an invasion of the literal sort and the fifty-year occupation that followed. To the devotees of the hajihfeng , it is ancient history, but to historians the Japanese colonial period is still one of the most controversial periods of Taiwan's history, and it has just begun to be explored.
The Japanese occupation of Taiwan began in 1895 with the signing of the Treaty of Shimonoseki, which formally ended the Sino-Japanese War and ceded Taiwan to the Japanese. When the treaty was signed, some Taiwanese residents attempted to convince the Ching court to get Taiwan back from the Japanese. Other residents tried to proclaim independence and establish a republic, hoping that this would earn sympathy internationally and prevent the Japanese from taking up residence on the island. These attempts failed, however, and the Japanese military arrived to take hold of its new possession.
Japanese colonization can be roughly divided into three periods: the initial stages of the occupation from about 1895 to 1918; the attempts at forced assimilation from about 1919 to 1937; and finally the war years, which lasted until Japan's defeat in 1945. During the first phase, the Japanese military was busy suppressing armed resistance by local residents including indigenous peoples, and establishing colonial administrative mechanisms. Large-scale armed resistance first broke out when Japanese troops entered Taiwan in June 1895 but did not last long since the resisting soldiers were outnumbered and short on arms and ammunition. Nevertheless, about seven thousand Taiwanese soldiers were killed and civilian casualties were also in the thousands. In 1915, twenty years after the Japanese first took possession of Taiwan, another major revolt, known as the Tapani Incident and led by hardcore resisters, erupted in present-day Tainan County, resulting in the deaths of thousands of Taiwanese. This was the last major uprising against the Japanese occupiers, although resistance broke out sporadically afterwards, especially in more remote parts of the island.
Despite the resistance, the Japanese established a formal government, and implemented strict police controls to prevent lawlessness. During the early phase of Japanese rule, the occupiers also set out to survey and catalog their new colony. The Japanese conducted thorough land and domicile surveys, monopolized important products such as salt and sugar, began collecting census data, and made an ethnologic study of the island's indigenous peoples.
In ruling the people of Taiwan, especially in areas farther from their administrative centers, the Japanese often abided by local customs and sometimes employed Taiwanese to fill local government bodies. "Basically, the Japanese adopted a very flexible policy," says Wu Wen-hsing, professor of history at National Taiwan Normal University. "They responded and made adjustments according to local situations."
Some scholars believe that this flexibility was the result of Japanese aspirations to incorporate Taiwan permanently into the Japanese empire. Moreover, Asians countries--China, Japan, and Korea, for example--shared similar cultural heritage and thus it was easier for one to "accept" another, asserts Chung Shu-min, assistant research fellow at Academia Sinica's Preparatory Office of the Taiwan History Institute. "Taiwan was a special district ruled under different laws, and Taiwanese were treated differently from the Japanese in Taiwan, but it was supposed to be a transitional period," she says. "Eventually, Japan wanted to turn the Taiwanese into Japanese, and make Taiwan an extension of Japanese territory that would be ruled by the same constitution as the motherland."
During the second major period of Japanese colonization, from 1919 to the Japanese invasion of China in 1937, the Japanese attempted to culturally assimilate the Taiwanese into the Japanese empire. The Japanese instituted Japanese laws, put into place compulsory Japanese education, and discouraged local languages and dialects in favor of Japanese. The Taiwanese were encouraged to deny their heritage by adopting Japanese names, wearing Japanese-style clothing, eating Japanese food, and observing Japanese religious rites.
During this period, the Japanese also promoted the rapid development of Taiwan's economy. As a colony, Taiwan was supposed to be profitable, and to encourage economic development, the Japanese built up the infrastructure of Taiwan--spreading the use of electricity, extending railway lines, building bridges, and modernizing harbors. Japanese engineers, for example, built more than five thousand miles of railroad lines and highways, and constructed concrete dams and reservoirs to facilitate irrigation and harness hydroelectric power. They also conducted extensive research into agricultural development, which led to increased farm production.
The Japanese also made improvements in public-health services, banking, and education. Their efforts reduced illiteracy, though students during the Japanese occupation were often literate in Japanese, not their native dialects.
True to the colonial model, the Japanese government also hoped that Taiwan would become a market for finished products made in Japan and a place that would provide living space for emigrants from an increasingly overpopulated home country. More ominously, Japan viewed Taiwan as a steppingstone for southward aggression. To prepare the island for a role in Japan's military expansion, the Japanese introduced an industrialization program that concentrated on the development of strategic industries, such as chemicals, metals, and shipbuilding.
The outbreak of war in 1937 signaled the beginning of the third and final phase of the Japanese occupation, which lasted until the defeat of Japan in 1945. While heavy industry, agricultural production, and other goods from Taiwan were used to supply the Japanese war machine, new efforts were made to secure the allegiance of the Taiwanese to the Japanese and their war aims. "The Japanese needed more soldiers to fight the war, so they recruited from the colony," says Academia Sinica's Chung Shu-min. "The Taiwanese were told that if they wanted to be treated as equals of the Japanese, they should first pledge allegiance to the Japanese emperor and be willing to sacrifice for him." Taiwan itself was largely spared from the ravages of World War II, except for some Allied bombing toward the end of the war, but about two-hundred thousand Taiwanese men joined the Japanese military, and a number of Taiwanese women were forced to serve as "comfort women," or sexual slaves, for the Japanese military. Many of them never returned home.
After the defeat of Japan and the complete withdrawal of the Japanese from Taiwan, the Taiwanese were left to come to grips with the changes that their society had undergone during Japanese rule. From an economic point of view, the Japanese had succeeded in transforming Taiwan into a society that was economically rather modern compared with its neighbors.
Many of the Japanese infrastructure projects, in fact, started before their rule, but it was the colonial government that systematically carried them out. Over a period of thirty years, from 1905 to 1935, the area planted with sugar cane, for example, increased 500 percent and output skyrocketed. By 1939, Taiwan was the world's seventh largest sugar producer. Wu Wen-hsing explains that colonial economic development was intended primarily to benefit Japan, but it gave Taiwan a solid foundation for future development. "Admitting this doesn't mean that we give all credit to the Japanese, because they were simply a medium for the passing to Taiwan of the modernization that Japan learned from the West," he explains. "It was the flexible and broad-minded people that enabled Taiwan to absorb what was good while rejecting what was not."
Economic success, however, came at a high cost to the Taiwanese. During the fifty years of Japanese colonization, Taiwanese were denied self-government and were kept out of high positions at all levels of society. The Taiwanese also struggled to keep their own identity under the weight of the imposed Japanese culture. Native dialects and customs were discouraged and Chinese-language schools closed. People were taught to see themselves as Japanese instead of Taiwanese. While some have praised the education system that the Japanese created, others are highly resentful of the entire episode. "The purpose of the colonial education was to idiotize the Taiwanese people about their own heritage and make them Japanese," says Wang Hsiao-po, professor in National Taiwan University's Department of Philosophy. "The fifty years of Japanese rule failed to turn Taiwanese into Japanese, but it successfully turned many Taiwanese into non-Chinese."
The difficult question of identity aside, many Taiwanese believe that the Japanese influenced Taiwanese society in some positive ways as well. Some believe, for example, that the strict laws imposed by the Japanese colonial government are responsible for turning Taiwan into a law-abiding place with a comparatively low crime rate. "Out of fear or whatever, it made the Taiwanese law-abiding people, because they couldn't afford the consequences if they broke the law," says Chung Shu-min.
The Japanese also demanded punctuality, and some argue that this trait is still found in Taiwan. "A train is 'slow in minutes' in Taiwanese but 'behind by hours' in Mandarin," notes Wu Wen-hsing. "That pretty much captures the different perceptions about punctuality in China and in Taiwan."
After the defeat of Japan in 1945, Taiwan came under the control of the Nationalist government. The principal policy of the Chinese government was to de-Japanize and re-Sinicize the island by emphasizing Chinese identity, culture, language, and history. The policy intensified after the arrival of the Nationalist administration in 1949.
The Kuomintang (KMT) administration's primary goal at the time was to retrench and establish a base from which to return to the mainland and unite China, and this policy was reflected in the Chinese-centered orientation of academia. History textbooks used from primary school to university, for example, dealt primarily with Chinese history and skimmed over Taiwan because its history was considered brief and peripheral compared with the millennia-old civilization of China.
Under the KMT government, Japan was also vilified, and academics often tailored their research topics to suit the politics of the time and to avoid a run-in with the censorship laws. For example, it was politically acceptable to write about Taiwanese resisting the Japanese, but not about the economic successes Taiwan achieved under the guidance of the Japanese colonial ruler. "It was understandable that the regime from the mainland was not too crazy about anything Japanese after eight years of war," Wu says. "But such ideology made it difficult for the government to be sympathetic about encouraging an academically balanced interpretation of Japanese rule in Taiwan."
It was not until the late 1970s, when social and political liberalization was sweeping Taiwan, that scholars were encouraged to look into the formally discouraged periods of history. Fortunately, the KMT government preserved most of the historical documents left by the Japanese, and many of them are now kept in Academia Historica and other academic institutions. The Japanese period, however, has still not generated a great deal of attention from young academics. According to a survey by Wu Wen-hsing on theses for master's degrees relating to the politics, economics, society, education, or culture of the Japanese colonial period, only ninety-nine were written between 1945 and 2000.
One of the major reasons for the unpopularity of studying the Japanese period is that many of the documents left were handwritten in classical Japanese with a particularly difficult calligraphic style, thus it takes good language skills and considerable training to be able to interpret the materials. Not many historians have those abilities, and few students nowadays are willing to go through the trouble of learning them. But despite this practical obstacle of reading Japanese, a rich trove of historical information awaits scholars, who may eventually present a better understanding of the Japanese period and its significance for Taiwan.
"There's still a lot about Japanese colonization we don't know and a lot materials waiting to be interpreted," Chung Shu-min says. "Sure, some can interpret a historical incident by applying theories and without understanding any Japanese, but the facts of history can only be ascertained through concrete evidence--historical materials, that is, not theories and inferences."