The most famous novel about the Japanese occupation of Taiwan is The Orphan of Asia, first published in Tokyo in 1946. Even though it didn't appear until a year after the Japanese left Taiwan, this is a book that has long fascinated historians of the occupation period.
This famous novel again dominates this newly published analysis of the psychological effects of Japanese rule on Taiwan's inhabitants. A discussion of it constitutes the book's climax, and an assessment of its significance occupies the closing chapter.
The Orphan of Asia was written in secret between 1943 and 1945, and published in Tokyo under the title Ko Tai-mei, the Japanese version of the protagonist's name. Another Japanese edition in 1956 gave the book its now familiar title for the first time, but this was again altered, in an edition a year later, this time to The Distorted Island. It was then translated into Chinese in 1962, reverting to the title The Orphan of Asia. This has been the name by which it has been known ever since.
The story recounts the conflicting emotions of its hero, Hu Tai-ming, as he travels between Taiwan, Japan and China. (Though written mostly in Japanese, it is apparently laced with classical Chinese poetry as well as material in colloquial Taiwanese dialects). Japanese rule in Taiwan had made him look to Japan as the center of modernity and progress, but when he arrives there he is all too conscious of not being a "real" Japanese. Indeed, a fellow Taiwanese recommends that he pretends his home is the southern Japanese island of Kyushu, rather than admit to being from Taiwan.
When he arrives in China, however, Tai-ming is arrested on suspicion of being a Japanese spy. When it is realized he is from Taiwan, he is referred to as being not a "pure" Chinese. And, in a novel replete with irony, he then secures a place on a boat to Shanghai only after asserting that he is in reality a Japanese national.
Neither in Japan nor in China, in other words, is he seen as a true belonger. Who is he? Which culture does he belong to? At the end of the book he goes mad, unable to resolve the conflicts. He is an orphan, and by implication so are all the inhabitants of Taiwan, never knowing for sure who they truly are, or where they belong.
It is hardly surprising that this book was banned during the period of one party rule by the nation's KMT. For them, Taipei was the interim capital of the whole of China. Manifestations of a specifically Taiwanese identity were prohibited, and only mainstream Chinese literature could be disseminated. Small wonder, then, that a book that presented an archetypal Taiwanese as so confused that he didn't know who on earth he really was found itself banned as well.
The truth, of course, was that overnight the inhabitants of Taiwan had been asked to change from being model, though never fully equal, citizens of the Japanese empire to being unquestioning citizens of a greater China, albeit one for the time being unaccountably failing to show allegiance to its legitimate masters.
Ching notes that The Orphan of Asia is obsessively concerned with geographical movement, and as a result with feelings of displacement, dislocation, alienation and, finally, despair. China and Japan, he points out, were both real and imagined places, and the book's protagonist finds it impossible to locate himself in the images of himself that either of them offer.
That colonialism produces an overwhelming desire in some of the colonized to emulate their masters is one of the themes of this analysis. In his chapter on Taiwan's Aborigines, for instance, the author describes how, a mere decade after the Musha Incident of 1930 (when 132 Japanese were slaughtered, and 215 more injured, in full public view at an aboriginal school sports day), numerous Aborigines nevertheless offered themselves as military volunteers in the service of the emperor.
"Why did you do this?" asked an incredulous postwar Japanese researcher. "Because we had learned the Japanese spirit!" the surviving combatants replied. "As long as we're ordered to go, we will obey." Ching concludes that, in a colonial situation, much more pervasive than the desire to rebel is the desire to become as like your colonial master as possible, even to the extent of losing your former identity entirely.
In attempting to analyze the effects of 50 years of Japanese rule on the people of Taiwan, this new book ought to be of great interest to local readers. Sadly, it is for the most part written in the jargon that will be familiar to anyone who has had any recent contact with humanities departments in English-language universities. As a result large swathes are incomprehensible to even the educated reader.
Had the author opted to research the details of half a century of domination by an occupying culture, instead of balancing one theoretical viewpoint against another while looking at a relatively small selection of examples, the book would have made fascinating reading. But such descriptions as there are occur only intermittently, like patches of sunlight on an otherwise cloudy, not to say oppressive, day.
How interesting it would have been to read about the way what is now the National Taiwan University, then the Taipei Imperial University, was organized, or how the camphor industry influenced relations between the Japanese and Taiwan's Aborigines in the era of the Musha Incident.
Meanwhile, we wait for a translation of The Orphan of Asia into English. There are rumors that one is impending, but all searches have been unable to come up with the identity of the publisher.
Becoming Japanese
By Leo T.S. Ching
251 Pages
University of California Press
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