Clothing the Body, Dressing the Identity: The Case of the Japanese in Taiwan during the Colonial Period

In 1895, as soon as the Japanese arrived in Taiwan, their looser mores in terms of public nudity threatened to discredit Japan’s “civilizing” mission in the colony. By domesticating the bare body of the colonizing Japanese through regulations, the Government-General sought to maintain its authority under the gaze of its colonized subjects. This article investigates the complexity of the Japanese identity in the colonial encounter by examining the process of the self-domestication of the body of the colonizer and revealing its connections to previous Japanese bodily experiences during the early Meiji period.