Between Ethnicity and Modernity: Taiwanese Medical Students and Doctors under Japan's Kominka Campaign, 1937-1945

In the Absence of the “Color Code”

Although interdisciplinary scholarship on imperialism and colonialism is thriving within the North American academic context, our available theoretical frameworks remain by and large abstractions from the histories of U.S. and European domination. One central feature of this Eurocentrism of colonial studies manifests itself in the inadequate historicization of the “color code.” In recent years, efforts in colonial and ethnic studies have achieved important insights about both the social primacy and the constructedness of color. According to these studies, group differences defined by color are outcomes of historical and social processes, and, ironically, these socially constructed differences were constructed in ways that made them carry fundamentally essentialist appeals that gave rise to intense intergroup violence and hatred.¹ Thus the legacies of European and U.S. colonialism and slavery made race and ethnicity an essential and unavoidable type of identity; accordingly, we can only combat racism by recognizing how race and ethnicity operate in shaping power relations instead of opting to become “color-blind.”² This perspective, described as “race-cognizant” by Ruth Frankenberg,3 articulates the central pattern of hierarchical racial and ethnic formation in U.S. and European colonialism and slavery. By the same token, however, these historically grounded understandings of ethnic and racial formation remain what they are, theories of particular histories. To fully conceptualize the power and limitation of the race-cognizant perspective, we need to understand its historicity. In other words, we need to recognize that this theoretical language is grounded in certain histories and is inadequate in addressing the cases where the dynamics of hierarchical ethnic categories are not constructed along the axis of marked physical differences. We are utterly unprepared to answer the question about how hierarchical ethnic categories are constructed and function in the absence of the color code.

The 1993 special edition of positions titled “Colonial Modernity” and the edited volume that evolved from it subsequently laid the groundwork for the formation of an innovative category, the East Asian colonial modernity, in rescuing our understandings of Japanese colonial legacies from such Western-centered categories.

⁴ This inquiry asks how colonial subjects confronted the tensions and ambiguities of colonial relations within an empire whose legitimacy, as constructed in its official ideology, rested on the shared racial similarities and the cultural past between the colonizers and the colonized. This approach, focused on the identity formation process of Japan's colonial subjects, contributes to the new conceptual terrain that subjects frameworks suggested by studies of European orientalism to critical reappraisal. As Barlow puts it, “[In Japanese colonialism,] the proper borders separating Self and Other are never sufficiently drawn, as Tomiyama implies they are in European orientalism. The national Self can neither maintain distinctions nor conceive of nonexploitative, nonincorporative relations outside its own discursive regimes. And this, Tomiyama suggests, may be the unique and distinguishing quality of Japanese colonial discourse.”5

That Japanese colonial discourses defined an other that appeared surprisingly similar to the self generated many unique ambiguities in Japanese colonial relations.

⁶ Taking this theorization of the ambiguities in the Japanese colonial discourses as my point of departure, I seek to understand how the colonial subjects experienced, interpreted, and potentially altered such colonial ambiguities. Through a case study of Taiwanese doctors in the wartime years under Japanese colonialism, in this article I explore the identity formation processes among the “elite” colonial subjects. This inquiry makes both historical and theoretical contributions. The article contributes to furthering attempts to theorize the ambiguous ethnic boundaries within Japanese colonialism and the mutual embeddedness of colonialism and modernity. My effort joins the recent scholarship that seeks to uncover the power dynamics and cultural legacies in the previously erased histories of some colonial subjects' often frustrated attempts to read Japan as heterogeneous and the colony...