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Studies of colonial-era Taiwan's literary and cultural production have been growing steadily in number since the 1990s but are mostly dedicated to constructing a coherent resistance-centred postcolonial historiography. Such a reading has some validity but is limited and tendentious because it reduces the dynamic interactions between Japanese and Taiwanese to an artificial binary. This article takes the concept "folklore" and related terms such as "locality" as its main point of inquiry, offering a revisionist reading of the diverse nationalist articulations of "folklore" and locality in three case studies: the diverse voices in Minzoku Taiwan, the differences between Shimada Kinji and Huang Deshi's historiographies of Taiwanese literature, and Lü Heruo's works on Taiwan's cultural practices in the heyday of Japan's imperialisation campaign. Through textual analysis, this article argues that the colonisers' identity was in constant need of re-forging, whereas the colonial policies and what the colonised writers hoped to achieve were not always incompatible. The colonisers' call for revitalising local cultures, in all the cases in point, provided a discursive space and highly contested ground for the colonisers and colonised to redraw the imperial boundaries and negotiate their own identities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study argues the state power and social efforts shaped and reshaped the contour of the 'imagined community' of post-war Taiwan from mainland China to the island with a focus on how the history of Japanese rule has been represented. By conducting a content analysis of officially published junior high school history textbooks (1949–2015) and interviewing history teachers, this study discusses how they present national past. The transformative presentation of the 'Japanese era in Taiwan' suggested the self-reinventing of the statehood of the Republic of China; the bottom-up forces even went beyond the demands of the state and facilitated nation-building. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the history of radio and, how the consumption of radio might have transformed urban rhythms in colonial Taiwan. Being assisted by well-developed cultural industries, including magazines, newspapers, films and popular music, the influences of modernity had penetrated everyday life in Japan by the mid-1920s. The enthusiasm towards modernity reached the Japanese colonies in the 1930s. Until the outbreak of the Second Sino–Japanese War in 1937, Taiwanese society underwent a decade-long proliferation period of consumption, influenced by the convergence of urbanism, colonialism and modernism. The ‘modern’ experiences in 1930s Taiwan were largely influenced by media technologies. By conducting an examination through the story ‘Inviolable Destiny’ and other historical materials, this article shows how the consumption of radio signified multiple distinctions among ethnicities, classes, genders, generations and spaces in colonial Taiwan. The combination of radio and print media constituted an intertwined network that shaped the tempos of urban life. A constructed standard national time converged with rational institutions and generated a massive scale of coordination between Taiwan and the rest of the world. Radio did not only broadcast the content, which transferred public affairs into the private space, but also formulated a hidden rhythm of structured punctuality in daily life. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This study examines localisation endeavours in contemporary Taiwan to explore the history of the Taiwanese localisation movement as a way of reimagining meanings of Taiwaneseness constructed under different historical circumstances. It focuses on the xiāngtǔ (nativist) literature movement in colonial Taiwan in the early 1930s that was initiated by Taiwanese intellectuals to create real Taiwanese literature on Taiwan and for the Taiwanese masses. Besides being a social education initiative to improve Taiwanese mass literacy, the xiāngtǔ literature movement was a localisation effort to reform Taiwanese language and preserve Taiwanese culture under Japanese occupation. The reform discourse made a turn towards specifically Taiwanese linguistic and cultural traditions, instead of pursuing modern Japanese and Chinese language and culture, which were the then available cultural impulses in colonial Taiwan. Local Taiwanese language and folk culture were essential curricular materials in the social education agenda that created particular meanings of Taiwaneseness for colonial Taiwan. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1895, following the defeat of Qing forces in the Sino–Japanese War, Taiwan was ceded to Japan, ending more than 200 years of Qing imperial governance of the island. As Taiwan became Japan’s first colony, its economy not only moved out of the orbit of the Qing Empire into that of Imperial Japan, but its customs system underwent significant change. Since the 1860s, a Western-style customs had been used on the island, but now it switched to the model (itself Westernized) adopted by Japan as part of the Meiji Restoration. In December 1943, in response to the unification of the marine transit system under wartime conditions, the Taiwan Governor-General abolished the customs and replaced it with the new Harbour Bureau. Two years later, in the wake of Japan’s defeat in the Second World War, Taiwan returned to Chinese rule. In December 1945, the late Qing customs institution was reinstated in Taiwan, while the Harbour Bureau, which had operated for less than two years during wartime, was also retained. These two systems were merged into a new mechanism to control Taiwan’s window onto the world; it has remained in use until today. In contrast to the liberalization that marked the administration of the Taiwan coast in the late Qing, the customs during the Japanese occupation was a device used to control the people, goods and ships that flowed into and out of Taiwan. The development of Taiwan’s customs system illustrates the ways in which continuity and breakdown characterize administrative mechanisms in line with the rise and fall of regimes. This article explores the formation of the Japanese customs system from the end of the shogunate to the Meiji Restoration, how it was transplanted to Taiwan, and the nature and significance of that shift. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This historical study reflects on history curriculum debates over the last 20 years in Taiwan. To open up possibilities for contemporary Taiwanese to rethink themselves in terms of national culture and subjectivity, this paper explores the construction of Taiwanese subjectivity in the past. It focuses on the history of Taiwan under Japanese occupation as a key issue in history curriculum debates. Particularly, it examines language issues in the 1920s, an important theme in the histories of the formation of Taiwanese consciousness, ideology, and cultural nationalism during the Japanese colonial period. Rather than addressing issues of identity (national or cultural), identifying who Taiwanese really were, or looking for Chinese or Taiwanese consciousness, this study explores how meanings of “Taiwanese” in the 1920s under Japanese occupation were constructed in the discourse of language reform for civilisation. The analysis of the New Culture Movement discourse suggests that the classical Chinese language ofHànwénas a valuable cultural resource and flexible linguistic instrument played an essential role in constituting Taiwanese subjectivities that shaped Taiwanese practices of the self for distinctive civilisation. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article explores youth in the countryside of Colonial Taiwan, which was ruled under Japan from 1895 to 1945. Particular focus is given to how this relates to the history of fascist, totalitarian and communist regimes. Additional topics discussed include the recruitment of Taiwanese soldiers for Japan during World War II, colonial village youth associations in the Japanese countryside and the training of young women, which began in July 1939 and involved learning the feminine attributes of Japanese culture, including cooking, sewing, music, archery and dancing.

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This article charts the impact of Chinese and Taiwanese identities on popular songs in Taiwan in three major historical periods: the Japanese colonization between 1895 and 1945; the Kuomintang (KMT) rule between 1945 and 1987; and the cultivation of Taiwanese identity since the 1980s. By exploring the historical processes of nation-building on both sides of the Taiwan Strait, this article demonstrates how socio-political transformations have produced, reproduced and mediated both Chinese nationalism and Taiwanese identity, and the role of popular songs in that process. It shows how, since 1895, the themes of popular songs have developed through processes of ‘de-Japanizing’ to ‘de-Sinolizing’ to ‘Taiwanizing’. The political and cultural forces which have affected both Mainland Chinese and Taiwanese identities are evident in the changing market for Taiwan’s popular songs. At a period when questions of political and cultural identity are still hotly debated in Taiwan, popular songs now seek to integrate its multiple identities. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Copyright of Humanitas Taiwanica is the property of National Taiwan University, Humanitas Taiwanica and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This article examines whether writing histories of colonial subjects is possible. Traditional colonial histories subsume the colonial subject's individual history under a larger narrative of subjugation, which often does not allow room for people to exist outside the dichotomized role of collaborator/resister. This approach has left a gap in the scholarship for histories of colonial subjects whose lives do not easily fit either category. This article addresses this gap by detailing the life of Yayutz Bleyh, an Atayal woman who became one of the most important participants in the Japanese colonial administration of Aboriginal Affairs in Taiwan. For over six years, the author gathered fragmented pieces of information regarding Yayutz from a multitude of sources – visuals, as well as oral and written materials from inside and outside the colonial archive – in order to sketch the contours of an extraordinary woman and her life. Through the process of filtering these disparate sources, it was the silences regarding certain issues and the discrepancies that emerged among sources that proved to be the most revealing about Yayutz as someone who straddled both the world of the colonizer and the colonized. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This essay investigates the conditions of portrait photography in Taiwan during Japanese colonization. After a brief introduction to the theoretical issues concerning the indexical nature of the photograph, I consider the Japanese colonial photographic industry and its products (portraits) in three contexts: the state of photographic technology in the world at that time, the ideological machinery of colonization in Taiwan, and the wider phenomenon of colonial mimicry. In this consideration, I offer a diachronic analysis of photo albums and commercial directories that contain formal portraits of politically and economically influential (almost exclusively) men. Bringing these considerations together suggests an aspect of the colonial ideological machinery that has been underrepresented in other studies: the colonial portrait as a mask in several forms. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This study utilizes the Taiwan colonial household registration data to study the cause of uxorilocal marriage in Taiwan during the period of Japanese colonial rule and, simultaneously, to compare the prevalence of uxorilocal marriage in urban (Taipei) and rural (XinChu) communities. The socioeconomic status of the bride and groom’s family, and ethnic and urban–rural differences are the main issues in this research. In addition, the viewpoints of Wolf and Huang and Pasternak will be rechecked vis-à-vis regional differences. The results of this study will be presented by statistic analysis and geographic information system. In Taiwan, compared to major and minor marriage, uxorilocal marriage had a higher ratio in Taipei and XinChu. In uxorilocal marriage, the age of brides and grooms is older in Taipei than in XinChu. In addition, our research indicates either daughters or adopted daughters, if they had fewer siblings or no brothers, had a higher probability of entering into uxorilocal marriages. Moreover, uxorilocal marriages were found to be less prevalent in later birth cohorts while ethnic groups and parent’s marriage types had no direct effect on uxorilocal marriage. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper examines the Taiwanese writer Lü Ho-jo's (1914-1951) 1942 short story, "Neighbors" (Rinkyo), as a powerful critique of Japan's colonial tropes of familial intimacy and neighborly kinship. Beginning in the 1910s imperial Japan deployed the trope of the family in order to contain the otherness of the colonized within the multi-ethnic Japanese empire. As the new colonial ideology of imperialization was implemented in place of that of assimilation in the late 1930s, several literary works appeared that dealt with amiable relationships between the colonizer and the colonized. The publication of Lü's "Neighbors" in 1942 is particularly important in this context. After critically evaluating the extant literature on the piece, the paper analyzes the previously overlooked effect of the narrative emphasis on the contagious power of maternal love, and demonstrates how "Neighbors" exposes the deceit inherent in a colonial ideology that operates behind the alibi of spontaneous affection and familial affinity to avoid scrutiny. The paper also highlights the interrelated questions of the family and identity as it examines the import of the first-person narrator, "I," as a character devoid of any concrete familial ties or evident identity, and shows the powerful effect of his ambivalence as it culminates in the final and most disenchanting scene. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Liu Na'ou (1905-1940) was born in Taiwan during the Japanese occupation period. Pursuing his high school education in Japan, he proceeded to learn French at Aurora University in Shanghai after graduation. These experiences added to his colonial background and "multi-modem" perspective, which embraced the linguistic and cultural features of Europe, Japan, Taiwan, and China. Through extensive exposure to a broad range of modernist works as well as his translation of modernist novels by Japanese authors and Paul Morand (1888-1976), Liu Na'ou adopted the two approaches of gaze. This, in turn, inspired him to emerge as a hybrid-cultural middleman. Based on this foundation, he continued to write novels that reflected various degrees of colonialism, showing a different gendered gaze than that found in the West and Japan. This paper examines the development of Liu Na'ou's translations, particularly with regard to the manifestation of gendered gaze and colonial gaze. In addition, the paper discusses the significance and impact of Liu Na'ou as a hybrid-cultural translator. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Under imperial Japanese rule, Taiwan experienced a relatively high rate of economic growth, and this growth is often attributed to well‐planned development policies. This paper argues that Taiwan's success was primarily due to the glut of money that flowed into the Japanese Empire during World War One. Taiwanese had suffered from limited access to credit, but, during the war, the Japanese‐controlled Bank of Taiwan had to find an outlet for the huge inflow of funds and greatly expanded lending to native Taiwanese. This unscripted experiment was a success, and continued access to formal capital markets allowed Taiwanese agriculture to takeoff. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]