A Cultur Al Perspective Based On Fūdo—In Connection To The Fūdo Of Taiwan

I

With the rapid and prosperous growth of Taiwan's literary movement, interest in and reflections on Taiwan's history and social particularities have gradually become the focus of much criticism, which may be seen as the lifeline of Taiwanese literature. We have to say that this is a heartening development for the progress of Taiwan's literary movement. Anyone will notice that as long as the Taiwanese literary movement uses Taiwan's history and social particularities—in other words uses Taiwan's species-like substratum—as a basis to present a factual reality, then this will always be a pressing question of extreme importance that must be faced. However, the theories that this movement should be based upon have not been fully established yet and might therefore be merely at a stage where it is similar to fumbling in the dark. But what is the cause for this particular situation?

There may be a large number of reasons for the aforementioned situation, but the most prominent reason may be the fortuitous location that Taiwan happens to occupy. But how can the climate of a certain area become closely entwined with its culture? I intend to elaborate on this at a later point. Since Taiwan has long been under the domination of uncivilized outsiders, it has always been seen as a wild and untamed location, and so has been placed outside the circles of cultural engagement. As such, the entry of Taiwan into cultural engagements has been a recent development, and as we all know, the real Taiwanese history and society only began at this point. At the same time, we should not overlook the particularity woven into Taiwan's history and society by its cultural engagement for its survival (especially as a colony).

Even more worth noting is that the majority of Taiwan's inhabitants are composed of ethnically Han groups who migrated to this island. When the origin of a culture is seen as a problem, the basis for a resolution then returns to that of land and lineage. Much like the area of Taiwan itself, the importance of lineage also presents many facets that require consideration. While tracing the origins of a lineage, we should remember that the groups that migrated to Taiwan came from an ethnicity with thousands of years of history, and that the Han in particular have held certain types or patterns in their long history of human engagement. However, these ethnic life patterns have deviated from their original form after the Han people migrated, settled, and lived in Taiwan. How have these deviations grown and continued in practice? For the explanation of Taiwan's particularity, this is a necessary and indispensable issue that requires answering. But how did Taiwan—as a geographical area with new methods of engagement in certain social circles—cause the changes to common behavioral patterns, not to mention retain and develop these so-called patterns to the current level? This should be an extremely interesting topic for a historical study.

In the early May issue of the Shin-min Newspaper (新民報紙) last year [translator's note: 1935], I made the following suggestions under the title of "Hermeneutic Methods of Taiwanese Cultural Data Compilation." Due to the rather short history of Taiwan and its majority of Han inhabitants, Taiwan's culture has been seen as a continuation of the Chinese mainland's system, and so there are doubts as to the particularity and originality of Taiwan's culture. And yet, concurrently I believe that the political and economic relations of any specific area can have a deep influence on its people, and that an area's climate will also greatly affect its culture. Taiwanese culture might just be a crude offshoot of Chinese mainland culture, and so establishing the claim of originality for Taiwanese academics will inevitably be questioned. Compared to the climate classifications of southern China, this may just be a small extension. But if this location contains divergent cultural conventions brought about by climate differences, then a coherent study on Taiwanese...