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In the mid 1930s, as southward advancement thought was on the rise in Japan, there was a rapidly emerging sense shared by the Taiwan Colonial Government, the military authorities, and Japanese residents in Taiwan that colonised Taiwan should play a more positive role in Japan's southward advance. This paper examines the background of the emergence of this advocacy of southward advance in Taiwan during the 1930s and its development during the ten years preceding the Japanese defeat in the Pacific War. In this examination, I draw attention not only to the predilections of the Taiwan Colonial Government, the Taiwan Army, and Japanese residents but also to the mechanism through which the colonised Taiwanese were integrated into the southward advance, and finally I compare the relationships of those three actors and the southern region (nanpo). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]