This book, the first in a new series from the University of California Press entitled Colonialisms, is about the experience of Taiwanese doctors during the Japanese occupation. The author's grandfather was a Taiwanese engineer who was killed on his way to work in 1947 during the 228 massacre.
Doctors, the author claims, command the most prestige of all professional groups in Taiwan today, and have done since colonial times. So what was their attitude to their Japanese masters between 1895 and 1945? How did they view their position as a profession under foreign, colonial rule?
Predictably, they had divided loyalties. On the one hand, like other professional groupings, they were agents of the state, trained by the colonial power and putting into effect its policies, in this case its health programs. On the other hand, they were intelligent and educated men and women who were all too aware of their subservient status.
In the case of these Taiwanese doctors the key issue was modernization. The Japanese were undoubtedly attempting to modernize Taiwan on many fronts, not least in medicine and health care. All the doctors can be assumed to have been unequivocally in favor of this, and to have seen themselves as agents of an eminently desirable change. Being under Japan signified, among other things, becoming part of the modern world. Moreover, it meant modernizing ahead of China where the situation was far more problematic, and any change was subject to internal disagreements, lack of resources, a huge population, and eventually civil war, plus invasion by -- of all people -- the energetically modernizing Japanese.
And of course modernization meant Westernization, the adoption of Western models in social organization, engineering, education and the relations between the sexes. Even the very act of colonizing other people's lands was copied from the West. It was perceived by many in Japan as being the up-to-date, modern thing to do.
On the other hand, the author argues, Japan considered the burgeoning of its empire as in some way "anti-colonial colonialization." Unlike the situation in the West, where the European powers were colonizing the distant peoples of Africa and Asia, Japan was extending its sway over neighboring Asian populations -- Taiwan, Korea and, later, parts of eastern China.
Moreover, this was, in Tokyo's view, "scientific colonialism," the ordering of its subject territories on rational, scientific principles, in contrast to the corrupt traditional forms previously prevailing. Small wonder the Taiwanese were confused, and their doctors' loyalties tugged in opposing directions.
Yet what actually happened in Taiwan was that these newly empowered medical professionals initially used their newly acquired status to support the freedom movement, in other words Taiwanese independence from Japan. And they did this not least because, once trained, they saw themselves as fully equal to their Japanese masters.
The paradox was that, as the Japanese occupation of Taiwan continued, the medical profession changed its alignment, and identified increasingly with the occupying elite, becoming year by year less and less devoted to the anti-colonial struggle.
Taiwan's importance in the first half of the 20th century becomes very clear from reading this book. For example, when the Japanese first arrived they considered the island unhealthy. Measures were put in place for health checks on ships going from Taiwan to Japan, but not viceversa. In 1911, however, these checks were suspended, and soon afterwards Japan and Taiwan were declared equally healthy. This was in contrast to southern China, India and Southeast Asia, and Taiwanese doctors were soon recruited as "medical missionaries" to these places.
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