In the autumn of 1937, just as the military conflict between China and Japan became more and more intense during the Second Battle of Shanghai, Taiwan’s Governor’s Office organized the Temporary Intelligence Department and began to publish the plain-titled political propaganda magazine "Department News(部報)" It is known that the "Department News" was issued at least until June 1942. Officially, there are more than 10,000 copies issued, and the frequency of issuance has changed from three times a month at first to twice a month. The selling price is five cents per book.
The published reports contained diversified content such as explaining the battle situation, explaining the reasons for the war, and promoting Imperial Japanization(皇民化). However, as the battle situation in mainland China changed, these contents advocated by the "Department News" also changed. For example, during the period from 1937 to 1938, the Japanese army thought that as long as the Battle of Nanking ended, the Chiang Kai-shek government would surrender and the war would end. Therefore, there are many reports on the premise of a short-term decisive battle. The content is obviously inciting the people's hostility towards Chiang Kai-shek and the Chinese. However, when the war clearly entered a long-term battle, reports of encouraging Taiwan residents to save and purchase national debt to raise war expenses gradually increased. After a while, after Wang Jingwei escaped from Chongqing, the report swept away the anti-China atmosphere in the past and began to advocate the three-nation friendship and the concept of a new East Asian order by the governments of Japan, Manchuria, and Wang Jingwei. This thesis will focus on these points and discuss the specific content of the report.
In addition to the content of the report in line with the changes in the war situation, the readers also continue to instill the idea of imperialism. From this point, we can see that Taiwan’s Government House has long hoped to achieve imperialism, and war is more likely to be an excellent opportunity to promote imperialism. Regarding this point, this paper will also be discussed in conjunction with specific reports.
The author manually calculated the frequency of use of the three words "Imperial People(皇民)", "Subjects（臣民）" and "People of the Island（本島人）" in all existing "Department News". This is to understand the views of the government officials on the residents of Taiwan Island. It turns out that the issue that frequently uses the term "Imperial People" also frequently mentions "People of the Island". Because the term "People of the Island" is mostly used in articles that have not yet become emperor citizens, it can be concluded that the term "People of the Island" usually implies a discriminatory meaning, and it is necessary to criticize the Taiwanese Governor's Office for this point.
"Department News" was originally a text-based media, and later gradually became commonly used photos, focusing on the visual expression of readers. For this part, I will use Leni Riefenstahl's film works and the photos reported in the American "LIFE" magazine to discuss. In the theoretical basis of the discussion, Erich Fromm's book "Escape from freedom" will also be mentioned.
This time I wrote my doctoral dissertation based on Benedict Richard O'Gorman Anderson "Imagined Communities", Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak "Can the Subaltern Speak?" and Said "Orientalism". Taiwanese residents are not only forced to imagine that they are the emperor of the Japanese Empire, but also deprived of the freedom to directly express their own will. This is because the Japanese, as the rulers, ignore the reality faced by Taiwanese and continue to project unilateral prejudice.
Taiwan’s Government House continued to demand war cooperation from Taiwanese residents using various persuasive materials. If you read the "Department News", you can clearly see what kind of persuasion was made. Initial requests were mainly psychological, such as worshiping shrines and loyalty to the empire, but as the war situation worsened, economic cooperation such as the purchase of government bonds and donations were required. Such demands were further exaggerated, eventually requiring the sending of Taiwanese soldiers and comfort women to the battlefield. The author discovered through the study of "Department News" that the "Imperial Japanization" carried out by Taiwan’s Government House on Taiwanese residents were a thorough exploitation of spirit, economy, and life.