The publication and related cultural practices of Folklore Taiwan, a journal published in the 1940s, had a colonial significance for contemporary Taiwanese society at the time when cultural subjectivity was still uncertain and in need of construction. The result of folklore preservation, a movement led by the Japanese in Taiwan, epitomized the kindness and conscience of the colonizers and further contributed to the shaping of a culture based on local knowledge system. In mobilizing Taiwanese cultural signifiers from everyday life and the intimacy between Taiwanese and Japanese people, this practice evades the complicity between Japanese folklore and imperialism in terms of knowledge production and differentiates itself from the construction of a China-oriented national identity. This paper takes Kanaseki Takeo's folklore discourses and novels as an example and the recent deconstruction of Yanagita Kunio's folklore in Japan as methodology to revisit the ideals and practices of folklore preservation movement during the war time and evaluates its significance to the community and personal identity of Japanese people in Taiwan. This paper will point out the dilemma in Kanaseki Takeo's interrogation to Yanagita Kunio's folklore and suggests that the intelligentsia in Taiwan, who identified themselves as the outsiders of imperial knowledge production, had generated a kind of anxiety toward themselves. This anxiety produced at the border of the empire explains the ambiguous portrayals of folklore enthusiasts in Kanaseki Takeo's Nanpu Novel, which foregrounds the crisis of subjectivity that Japanese people in Taiwan were facing as they oscillated between the community and personal choices