Becoming "Japanese": Colonial Taiwan and the Politics of Identity Formation (review)

Contrary to the marketing label ("Literature/Asian Studies/History") adopted by University of California Press for this book, Leo Ching's Becoming "Japanese" is neither a (literary) history of colonial Taiwan nor an exemplar of Asian studies scholarship. It is an extended mediation on the topic of identity formation in a colonial setting by a scholar partial to the analytical strategies of cultural studies and conversant with postcolonial theory, broadly conceived. In actuality, this monograph is two books in one. On the one hand, it is a critical response to selective postwar histories of Japanese colonialism and recent Japanese and Taiwanese criticism of colonial literature. On the other hand, Becoming "Japanese" represents Leo Ching's own innovative readings of selective colonial texts written by Taiwanese intellectuals, Japanese officials, and metropole journalists. Addressing a broad range of engaging topics and critical issues (e.g., decolonization, Japanese colonial discourses, nationalist memories of the past, and identity politics), Ching's monograph is an important contribution to the growing body of new scholarship that has begun to explore the rich colonial experiences heretofore buried in the dustbin of history.

In the preface, Ching is very clear about the multiple origins of his discussion of colonial identity formation: "This book, in retrospect, is founded on fragments and traces of personal memory, despite its attempt at intellectual and theoretical rigor. They are recollections and images that traverse three places from the late 1960s to the mid-1980s" (p. ix). These personal fragments stem from a political and cultural geography rather unique to the 1960s-1980s, but I suspect that the author wants us to consider, in an analogical fashion, whether early twentieth-century colonial Taiwan was any less complex. His intellectual and theoretical rigor, on the other hand, is focused on the subject of historical Taiwanese consciousness:

At some level, this book is an attempt to understand how historical events have enabled, or disabled certain ways in which people make sense of and come to terms with their belongings, their allegiances, and their situatedness. It is also an attempt to understand how these formations of identity in turn rearticulate and redefine historical events and the way people imagine political possibilities.

(p. x)

Ching's linear book (as opposed to the topical text) takes the reader on a complex and winding journey, a trek that may confuse readers without a solid understanding of Taiwanese history or postwar treatments of Japanese colonialism and Taiwanese nationalism. However, this particular itinerary is essential to Ching's overall argument. Chapter 1 addresses received understandings of Japanese colonialism, attempting to dispel the notion that cultural explanations are more useful than global structural treatments of twentieth-century colonialism. Chapter 2 introduces the 1920s anticolonial movement in Taiwan, primarily through the author's critique of postwar attempts to categorize (and perhaps exploit) this "proto- (or neo-) nationalism" as Taiwanese nativism or, conversely, fundamental Chinese-ness. Chapter 3 explores the colonial setting in a more fundamental manner with a comparative analysis of Japanese colonial discourses—first dôka, "assimilation," then kôminka, "imperialization"—which we commonly associate with interwar and wartime colonial policy, respectively. With this setting in place, Ching introduces the second moment in his narrative of Taiwanese identity formation when he explores the cultural production of wartime Taiwanese writers such as Zhou Jinpo, Chen Huoquan, and Wang Changxiong. Chapter 5 continues this narrative of Taiwanese identity formation, after an intervening chapter 4, which depicts a shift in Japanese representations of aborigines (from "savage" to "civility"), as read in and interpreted from official and anticolonial Japanese texts from the 1910s versus those from the 1930s and 1940s.¹ Overall, this presentation attempts to contextualize Ching's narration of an emergent Taiwanese consciousness within both the colonial (material and discursive) structures that begot it and the postwar debates that reconstituted "Taiwaneseness" in new and different forms.

Ching's major conclusions...