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Reviewed by:
  • Taiwan under Japanese Colonial Rule, 1895–1945: History, Culture, Memory
  • Evan Dawley
Taiwan under Japanese Colonial Rule, 1895–1945: History, Culture, Memory. Liao Ping-hui and David Der-wei Wang eds. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006)

This volume is both the single most important survey to date of Japanese colonial rule in Taiwan and its immediate aftermath, and a signal attempt to bring the study of Taiwan into the broader fields of colonial and postcolonial history. The editors, Liao Ping-hui and David Der-wei Wang, have assembled an impressive list of international scholars from Taiwan, Japan, and the United States in creating this anthology, which is the product of a conference held at Columbia University in 2001. The volume begins from two premises. One, as Liao suggests in his helpful introduction, Taiwan is relatively unique both because of its history of successive colonization (with Dutch, Qing Chinese, Japanese, and Nationalist Chinese rulers) and because in the modern period it lacked the type of racial difference that characterized Western colonization. Two, in spite of this uniqueness, Japanese colonizers employed many of the same tactics as their Western counterparts, and Taiwanese experienced colonization in ways similar to other colonized populations. These two premises suggest that scholars of colonialism and colonial history should pay attention to Taiwan’s history.

The 17 essays are divided into four sections—“Rethinking Colonialism and Modernity,” “Colonial Policy and Cultural Change,” “Visual Culture and Literary Expressions,” and “From Colonial to Postcolonial”—but one theme unites them all: colonization and modernization wrought dramatic changes on the culture, society, and identities of both Taiwanese and Japanese residents. In fact, Taiwanese and Japanese actively participated in these transformations as they addressed Chinese, Japanese, and Western cultural and political influences and repeatedly redefined their senses of self. Nevertheless, the historical impetus for change came from a mixture of colonial policies and global modernization. Several essays discuss how official policies for land ownership, education, and literature helped confer elite status upon particular segments of the Taiwanese population. Others show that Japanese officials and settlers used the police force, local administration, and a range of information-gathering techniques—such as censuses, land surveys, and ethnographic studies—to classify and control the colonized population. However, the modernizing effects of print media and mass literature created a public sphere that became a source of resistance to the colonial state. Clear parallels can be drawn between these examples and other colonies, highlighting the comparative utility of the volume.

Several authors examine literary and artistic production to show the participation of both Taiwanese and Japanese in the cultural transformations of this period. Taiwanese writers, faced with the arrival of new literary trends such as modernism and social realism, both redefined their literary canon to make it more relevant to the needs of modern society and expressed new class identities in an effort to resist the imposition of Japanese culture and identity. Japanese settlers, in an effort to both assert dominance over the Taiwanese and retain their Japaneseness, created artistic and literary discourses about Taiwan’s geography, history, and ethnography. Metropolitan trends influenced these discourses, but the colonial context added a particular gendered quality. Cultural transformation also resulted from the sometimes cooperative, sometimes conflictual interactions between Taiwanese and Japanese intellectuals. Their engagement emerged in wartime efforts to study, define, and/or preserve local traditions that all observers believed were on the verge of disappearing; for some this ethnographic trend was triumphant, for others it was an act of resistance. The chapters on culture are valuable because they both provide new perspectives on colonial Taiwan’s cultural milieu and explore the complex relations between colonizers and colonized, something that is rightly gaining more attention from scholars of colonial history.

As a whole, the volume suggests that the transformations in cultural production were indicative of concurrent changes in identity. Individual authors draw upon the concept of colonial modernity that Gi-wook Shin and Michael Robinson, in their volume on colonial Korea, defined as a sense of global cosmopolitanism lacking the political emancipation characteristic of metropolitan societies. In the absence of serious political participation, Taiwanese became polarized between some intellectuals who adopted Japanese national identity and the majority...

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