Based on the coverage in newspapers and magazines, advertisements, diaries, memoirs, court files, literary works, and other materials focusing on Taipei City, this paper explores the printing, publication and circulation of books in Colonial Taiwan under the influence of Chinese and Japanese cultures.
Since Taiwan was a colony, on the one hand, the Japanese colonizer introduced technology and systems to gain commercial profits and turned Taiwan into the book market for the Empire of Japan. On the other, Japanese officials tried to control and publish books in favor of colonial governance and implemented strict censorship. Facing such colonial modernization, Taiwanese fully took advantage of the benefits of the modernized systems and technology to propagate and preserve their own culture as well as to acquire new knowledge to speak out for Taiwanese. At the same time, Taiwanese had to face the competition of books from Japan and official censorship. The conflicts, interaction and negotiation between Taiwan society, national power and the book market shape the complicated image of the printing, publication and circulation of books in Taiwan.