Kokugo and Colonial Education in Taiwan

Problematizing “Teaching Japanese”

Under Japanese colonial rule, the Taiwanese were compelled to study and to speak Kokugo, the national language of Japan. ¹ Yet when Japan acquired Taiwan in 1895 as a result of the Sino-Japanese War, the concept of Kokugo had only begun to emerge into Japanese political discourse and had yet to reach public consciousness. Japanese leaders and intellectuals were still struggling to establish a common language that would both standardize language practice and consolidate the numerous (local) vernaculars, as a means to establishing a common consciousness among a populace yet to be unified into a nation. Only gradually did the concept of Kokugo develop amid contentious political and pedagogical debate. In this process, Lee Yeounsuk contends, the Sino-Japanese War played the role of an “initial explosive,” linking the language problem that shook Meiji Japan to national and imperialist consciousness. Central to this emerging discourse was Ueda Kazutoshi’s version of Kokugo. ² In an important 1894 speech, this educational theorist who had come under the influence of European linguistics established Kokugo as the national language of Japan. Soon he was envisioning the spread of Japanese to the rest of Asia. In other words, even before its particular structures were completely set forth, the new Japanese national language took on a “double status: ‘universal-imperial’ and ‘particular-national.’” ³

Sometimes referred to as an ideology (ideorogi), Kokugo provided a scheme for the linguistic assimilation of subjugated people into the Japanese nation. It reached people in the home islands of Japan through the nascent public school system, as it was concurrently being applied to Japan’s first formal colony. ⁴

As an institutionally sanctioned doctrine of colonial education, Kokugo ideology implied universalism in the sense of its potential application; it suggested that any person who mastered Kokugo could become Japanese. Its actual implementation, however, was particularistic, since the colonized could never become Japanese regardless of their level of competence in the Japanese language. The distinction between the colonizers and the colonized was strictly maintained through the family-registry (koseki) system. Further, the discriminatory legal system in general ultimately ensured that the cultural assimilation of the colonized would fail despite the efforts of scholars and teachers to put the doctrine of Kokugo into practice. Their fruitless struggle suggests not simply a limit to the effects of language in making imperial subjects; it also underlines the tension at work between colonization and assimilation. The imposition of the Kokugo ideology ultimately failed because of these legal bars. Other reasons include the extremely qualified success of the long effort to transform the Taiwanese into speakers of Japanese and the resistance of the colonized to the Kokugo ideology.

In what follows, I look at how the concept of Kokugo emerged, migrated to Taiwan, and was, for political and economic reasons, applied to colonial education. I then turn to the debates in the 1940s over the reconceptualization of Kokugo in relation to the emergence of the concept of Nihongo (Japanese language) ⁵ and discuss how language teachers applied the doctrine of Kokugo. Finally I suggest how ordinary people living in Taiwan under Japanese rule received Kokugo, in light of the fact that it is now part of the present-day, postcolonial cognitive framework of the majority of Japanese people. In examining the ways in which Kokugo ideology was applied to the project of assimilating the colonized, I want to shed light on what I see as a contradiction between colonization and assimilation, as I inquire into the role that colonial education ultimately played in the process of Japan’s linguistic unification.

I am personally motivated to tackle this topic because I carry the legacy of colonial education. My father learned Japanese by fiat in Taiwan. He met my Japanese mother when he moved to mainland Japan for the college education he could not get at home. My interest in the topic also derives from my current occupation as a teacher of Japanese to nonnative speakers of the language, many of whom are of Asian descent. Since the 1980s the spread of Japanese overseas has been underwritten by the...