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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]

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.

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]

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]

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]

The 'group relocation' policy imposed during the Japanese colonial period in Taiwan is arguably one of the most notorious policies to be imposed upon indigenes. As a result of this project, almost half of Taiwanese indigenes were resettled from the high mountain areas to the lowlands. Relocated populations needed to adjust themselves to new circumstances, and relocation became a traumatic memory for many. What is interesting is that relocating villages is not, historically, an uncommon occurrence for most Taiwanese indigenous groups. This suggests that 'relocating villages', in and of itself, might not be overly problematic for indigenous populations. Why then did the Japanese relocation policy come to be regarded as such a traumatic event? In this paper, I will present a sketch of how the Japanese relocation policy became regarded as such a traumatic event for many indigenous groups, and explore the reason the Thao people, living by Sun Moon Lake of central Taiwan, had a very different experience of relocation. Moreover, I also describe the relationship between the mapping project of Traditional Territories of Indigenous Peoples that began in 2002 and the collection of oral histories of indigenous relocation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the relationship between opium and science in Japanese-occupied Taiwan during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Particular focus is given to the researching and development of opium pastes by colonial officers. Details on investigations into the taste of various opium pastes by the Japanese Opium Production Office and on the Office's attempts to manufacture its own opium pastes are presented. Power and imperialism are discussed.

This article examines how Japanese policymakers and intellectuals approached national classification in colonial Taiwan by looking into the policy and discourse of intermarriage between Japanese and Han Taiwanese. Despite its rarity in practice, intermarriage as an idea frequently appeared in political debates on the integration of Taiwan into the Japanese empire. Narratives on intermarriage shed light on how ethno-national consciousness was formed and how citizenship was distributed in the empire, revealing tensions between imperial expansion and nation building. In the process of colonial control, racial nationalism emerged to play a role in opposition to intermarriage, which was officially encouraged. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this article is to explore the connection between household composition and infant mortality in the first half of the twentieth century in Taiwan. The research results claim that illegitimate infants have higher death risk than legitimate infants; that contrary to expectation female infants have mortality rates as high as boys; and that same sex sibling order effects are approximately same among boys and girls. The significance for infant mortality of the sex of household head is the other major finding of this article: female-headed families have higher rates of infant mortality. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Historical memory fiction has flourished ever since the lifting of martial law in Taiwan. Some of these fictions excavate multi-ethnic, transnational experiences in relation to colonialisms, exploring ethnic experiences beyond stereotypes and debunking monolithic national imagination, thereby opening up possibilities for an alternative historical imagination. This article deals with the alternative historical imagination in Shih Shu-ching's Dust before the Wind, with a special focus on its representation of issues that had rarely been dealt with before in Taiwanese literature, such as the “enterprise of governing the savages,” the Taroko Battle, the ethnic relationships in Hualien under Japanese rule, Japanese immigrant villages, and postwar Japanese legacy. I argue that the novel presents an intricate re-vision of Japanese colonialism and Taiwan's postcoloniality by contrapuntally portraying three ethnic groups in eastern Taiwan under Japanese colonial rule and depicting post-war Japanese legacy, as well as by re-exploring the identity problems triggered by assimilation, imperialization, decolonization, and indigenization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper tackles the question of the rise and the use of the tánghào , a mythological placename, on Taiwan's tombstones. This type of placename started to be used during the Japanese colonisation of Taiwan (1895-1945) and replaced placenames, that referred to regions where migration to Taiwan had started generations ago. The questions raised by the tánghào concern its function and meaning in a constantly renegotiated and redefined society. Why was a mythological placename adopted and how could this placename survive changes in regimes and burial practices? The framework we adopt for our analysis is that of Digital Anthropology (DA), using an archive of approximately 35.000 digitised tombstones plus digitised segments of statal discourse. The first puzzle parts of this investigation hint to an extremely diversified, non-orchestrated onset of the new practice. Later, the tánghào was instrumented for nationalist ROC ideologies and fully implemented into burial practices by new professionals, who sell the tánghào as the 'right way to do'. The involvement of the ROC state in this propagation of the tánghào can be traced back through character variants that spilled over from official documents onto tombstone inscriptions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author focuses on how China viewed Taiwan and the people of Taiwan between 1931, the year Japan invaded Manchuria, and 1941, the year the U.S. entered World War II. Some of the subjects considered include nationalism, Chinese identity, Chinese political thought, and the ideology of nation-building and cultural identity. An overview of the historiography of competing Chinese and Taiwanese national identity exemplified in the writings of historians Emma Jinhua Teng, Alan M. Wachman, and Steven E. Phillips, is presented.

Picture postcards were an important element of Japanese imperial propaganda, though they have yet to receive the scholarly attention they deserve. This paper argues that the Taiwan Government-General played an active role in the production and dissemination of picture postcards to propagate a particular view of life in the 'Aborigine Territory'. To promote ethnic tourism in the wake of the bloody 1930 Wushe Uprising, and to construct Taiwan's majority Han population as 'inauthentic' as part of a wider ideological offensive against China, Japanese colonial postcards portrayed Taiwan Indigenous Peoples as isolated, culturally intact, and indebted to a benevolent state. The most widely circulated picture-postcard images of Taiwan Indigenous Peoples were produced by a coterie that included photographer Segawa Kōkichi, publisher Katsuyama Yoshisaku, watercolorist Lan Yinding and Aborigine Affairs Chief Suzuki Hideo. The documentary traces they left behind reveal a series of cross-cutting social and professional ties that bound them together as an 'interpretive community'. Their location in centers of colonial culture, commerce, and government, along with the internal consistency of their vision, well positioned them to not only peddle postcards, but to sell an empire. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Taiwan was a colony of Japan from 1895 to 1945. The Japanese colonial government implemented policies to make Taiwan a part of Japan's Imperial government. The result was a generation of Taiwanese who spoke and wrote in Japanese. Where the literary production of these writers gets placed in histories of"Taiwanese" literature is the source of much scholarly debate. Most attention focuses on the literary output of male Taiwanese writers. The voices of women writers living in colonial Taiwan exist, but have yet to be translated, much less discussed in any significant length. This paper will look at two Taiwanese women who wrote in the 1940s under Japan's rule of the country. They are Yang Qianhe (1921 -) and Huang Fengzi (1928-). Yang Qianhe was Taiwan's first female journalist. I will discuss her only work of fiction "Hana saku kisetsu" (The Season When Flowers Bloom, 1942) and her memoir Jinsei nopurizumu (The Prism of Life, 1993). Huang Fengzi is noteable because she had two essays and a memoir published when she was only a high school student. Her memoir Taiwan no shôjo (A Young Girl of Taiwan, 1944), discussed in this paper, is one of the few extant sources that sheds light on what it was like to be a young Taiwanese girl living in Taiwan during the war years. I will show how these women reveal varying degrees of comfort with being part of the colonial empire as upper class Taiwanese women. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay discusses what I define as the psyche politics employed in the discourse of identity and of subjectivity in Taiwan during the Japanese colonial period (1895--1945), and how the use of such politics of psyche recurred in postcolonial Taiwan, especially in the discourse of the nativized Taiwanese subject of the recent decades under the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) government (1990s to 2008). I use psyche politics to refer to the discursive operations of molding, shaping, fashioning, policing, and governing of the interior essence of life. Through analyzing the discursive event triggered by Yoshinori Kobayashi's graphic history On Taiwan, (Shin G manism Sengen Supesharu --Taiwan Ron) which appeared in 2001, and the discourse of self-effacement and self-abjection present in many literary texts, cultural policies, and public opinions during the Japanese colonial period, I point out that the discursive self-abjection, or the will to cleanse the uncleanliness of one's heart, maneuvered and coerced through cultural regime, is indispensable for the formation of a non-I subject. More significantly, the discourse of the gong, the reverse side of the self-abjection, sets the frame of the spiritual totality to be shared by the individuals as parts of the whole. The two symbiotic states, self-abjection and the participation within the gong, constructed a particular mode of discourse of the psyche in East Asia during the Pacific War and paved the way for the frame of consciousness of the modern nation-state as well as the ground for subjectivation. Through such a discursive mode of psyche politics, a certain sense of community is engineered. We observe that the function of abjection operates in double directions: the internal effacement and the external exclusion. The locus of the gong, defined variously according to different contexts, which is often erected in the name of love in order to uphold the sense of community, paradoxically also serves the cause for cruelty and abjection against difference, both outside and inside the community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Examines Taiwan in the Japanese period, focusing on an uprising in 1915 known as the Ta-pa-ni Incident and how the encroachments of the colonial state met with resistance. Relationship of the colonial state and the local society; Condition of the local society at the time of the Ta-pa-ni Incident; Impact of the Japanese colonial government; Effect of the Ta-pa-ni Incident on Local Society.

Explores the changes in camphor production with the coming of Japanese colonialism and the changes that celluloid brought to the world demand of camphor from 1886 to 1909 in Taiwan. Details of the commodity and tribe at the center of the late imperial frontier economy; Information on the customary forest rights and the system of mountain fees; Introduction of capitalist property relations to the forests.

Deals with interethnic marriage and cultural brokers in Taiwan under Japanese rule from 1895 to 1945. Details of the variety of ways in which Aboriginal women married to Japanese men played crucial intermediary roles; Exploration of the role of family systems and racialized ideologies in these formations; Information on marriage, concubinage and brokerage in the North.