SUMMARY
What was Taiwan in the eyes of the Japanese who lived on the island during the Japanese colonial period? This thesis aimed to answer this question by examining the historic accounts made by the colonial Japanese people who resided in Taiwan for half of a century.
What was Taiwan in the eyes of the Japanese who lived on the island during the Japanese colonial period? This thesis aimed to answer this question by examining the historic accounts made by the colonial Japanese people who resided in Taiwan for half of a century. The writing of history in early modern Japan was based on the progressive view of history and “Kokoku Shikan”, in which supporting the government form “Kokutai” of the Japanese blood pedigree was the utmost purpose of history writing. A paradox was created when Japan acquired its first colony, Taiwan in 1895, that there were foreign ethnic groups of people in the country that share no direct kinship with Japan. To successfully incorporating Taiwan into the Empire of Japan, the government must accept the Taiwanese people as Japanese, at least in principle. To do this, the colonists promoted assimilation policies, and used the cultural similarities between Taiwan and Japan (such as the Confucianism and the Chinese language “kanbun”) as means of bringing Taiwan into the Empire. At the same time, the differences between the cultures were hierarchized to distinguish the colony from the Japanese motherland in order to maintain the Japanese superiority.
From the angle of cultural similarities, this study examined the work by Ino Kanori who visited Taiwan for research purposes in the early colonization period. As an intellectual, he was knowledgeable about modern science and the Chinese literacy; therefore, his investigations of Taiwan were mostly done through studying the Chinese documents. This study examined the process of how Ino got to understand and describe the history of Taiwan.
From the angle of cultural difference, we began from “Shiseikinenbi” to analyze how the Japanese government used the civilization hierarchy to define the ranks of Japan, Taiwan, and China. It was clear that the government propagated to promote the idea that the Japanese colonization brought civilization advancement and prosperity to Taiwan. However, such obvious political propaganda was soon heavily criticized by the intellects in Taiwan. And because of this, the Japanese government needed to seek for a more believable version of the Taiwanese history. This was the background of the Ozaki Hotsuma’s studies on Taiwanese history. Lived in Taiwan - his adopted homeland - for more than a decade, Ozaki’s works described Taiwanese history in a novel perspective. And these works actually help the colonial government to redefine the “similarities” and “differences” between Taiwan and Japan. Additionally, his work “The Four Thousand Years of History of Taiwan” extended the lineage of the Taiwanese for thousands of years and revolutionized the relationship among Taiwan, Japan, and China. Taiwan being viewed as the birthplace of culture in the far east Asia truly changed the conventional view of Taiwan as a vassal state of China. However, this Taiwan-centric view of historic perspective was different from the angle taken by the Taiwanese scholars in the 1930s.
During the 1930s, for the localized Japanese who lived in Taiwan for a long time and those who were born in Taiwan (Wansei), the history of Taiwan became more than that of a colonial land but also part of their own lives. During this period, the Taiwanese and the Japanese historians shared the ideas of “Taiwan-centric” and “joint era”, but the contents were not identical. The Taiwanese discussed the idea of “Taiwan-centric” under the premise of separating themselves from China and Japan; while the Japanese derived the idea from their extended time living in Taiwan. The writing of Taiwanese history during this time exhibited the following features: 1) dilution of the Chinese genealogy, 2) transition of the duties history writing from government to the people, and 3) opposition to views of official history. However, the freedom of expressing such views was soon suppressed when the war broke out in the 1940s; as a result, the Taiwan-centric history written by the residents of Taiwan were lumped into the historic accounts of Japanese Empire and its southward expansion. From works such as History of Taiwanese Railways by Nishikawa Mitsuru, Taiwanese Agricultural History by Hamada Hayao, and the magazine articles on Minzoku Taiwan, we can observe such subtle shifts in writing focus. The demand of complete unification during the war in fact created polarizing styles of writing, one focused on the nationalism, the other on lives and responsibilities of the average people.
Due to the differences in ethnicity and history, the link between Taiwan and Japan was made via their separate connections to the Chinese culture. Because of this connection, Japan and Taiwan shared an indirect historic bond through the shared language (even though some researchers tried to identify the common historic figures and legends shared by the two cultures, those contents were not well-known by the average people). Even after five decades of colonization and shared space, time, and lives, the Japanese and the Taiwanese people were still two cultural groups with few things in common. This also reflected the fact that the Japanese colonization government never intended to absorb Taiwan into Japan. The colonial rulers just used the cultural similarities and differences to loosely integrate Taiwan as a part of the Empire, separated from their sacred motherland. Because of this, the Taiwanese historic accounts written by the Taiwanese and the Japanese in Taiwan were never fully assimilated. It is possible that higher degrees of assimilation could have happened, if the educational, cultural, and political freedoms of expression in the 1920s and 30s were allowed to flourish. We seemed to observe a glimpse of this trend in some of the magazine articles in Minzoku Taiwan. But overall, the activities of history writing were still segregated. To put it simply, the historical perspective of the Japanese in Taiwan shifted from regarding Taiwanese history as “foreign and now part of the Empire” to “part of our times and lives that should be incorporated into the history of the Empire”