"Give Me Japan and Nothing Else!": Postcoloniality, Identity, and the Traces of Colonialism

At a postgraduation reception, I was chatting with a student from Taiwan who had just received her degrees in mathematics and Japanese. Her younger sister, who is studying in a university on the West Coast, was standing nearby. My student asked me about my book manuscript, so I casually explained to her how I was writing on Japanese assimilationism in Taiwan during the colonial period. ¹ Only halfheartedly interested in our conversation to begin with, the younger sister, with her bleached hair and pearly pink lipstick that exuded a distinctively contemporary Japanese look, suddenly interrupted us. “You mean, how we are becoming Japanese?” she asked earnestly.

In 1995, on the one-hundredth anniversary of the Treaty of Shimonoseki that ceded Taiwan to Japan, a number of commemorations took place in Taiwan. On June 1, Shih-lin elementary school celebrated its centennial. Shih-lin elementary is what used to be known as Shizangangakudo, the birthplace of Japanese colonial education founded by Izawa Shuji, the first director of the Colonial Education Bureau. For the celebration, the children sang in Japanese the school song from the colonial period, just prior to their singing of the national anthem. A month later Lu Xiu-lian, the newly elected vice president and then a legislator of the Democratic Progressive Party, led a one-hundred-member pilgrimage to Shimonoseki, where the treaty was signed, and gave thanks to the Japanese for leading the Taiwanese out of China.

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The two episodes succinctly capture two interrelated and yet distinct desires for “Japan” in the so-called postcolonial Taiwan. ² On one hand, there is a desire for Japanese commodity-image-sound in the circulation of mass culture. (In early April 1999, for instance, six of the top ten music singles in Taiwan were by Japanese artists. Over 80 percent of comics sold in Taiwan today are Japanese.) Much like the United States in the 1980s, the current economic downturn of Japan does not signal the decline but rather the increasing dominance of its mass cultural representations and commodities, especially in East and Southeast Asia. On the other hand, there is the desire for Japanese colonialism in the formation of an oppositional political identity. (Japanese colonialism has induced, the argument goes, a historical rupture that enabled the dis-identification from Mainland China and the construction of a uniquely Taiwanese subjectivity.) We should not collapse or subsume too hastily these two modes of desire for Japan into a singular psychology of colonial dependency or nostalgia. The growing presence of Japanese-produced mass culture in Taiwan and in other parts of Asia, as I have argued elsewhere, has more to do with the differentiating logic of late-capitalist modernity than with the workings of the same Japanese colonialism. ³ It is also important not to reduce and confuse the desires for Japan for an unmediated process of identification with the (ex)colonizer. The desires manifested in these situations are not goals in themselves—to actually become Japanese or to relive Japanese colonialism. Rather, they constitute the domain of the subject’s impossible relation to the object-cause of its desire; they point to the dimension of fantasy that gives and coordinates the subject’s desire, to specify its object and to locate the position the subject assumes in it. In this case, these are the fantasy to participate in the globalization of consumerist culture and the fantasy to create an independent Taiwanese nation.

It is not surprising that “Japan” has constituted the object of desire in the cultural politics of contemporary Taiwan, given its half-century of colonial rule and postwar economic dominance. Although today few Japanese are aware of the dissemination and pervasiveness of its mass cultural forms in Asia and elsewhere, even fewer can imagine Japan’s colonial history as embroiled in the internal political struggle of its ex-colony. Nonetheless it would...