Taiwan, the island between heaven and hell

“According to legend, the place is hell, but once one sees it, it becomes heaven.” Most people will think this view, expressed about Taiwan by a Japanese painter in 1935, is a little extreme at both ends of the spectrum. Even so, it incorporates well enough the wide range of attitudes found in this new compendium of articles on a perennially interesting subject.

Simultaneously eclectic and comprehensive, Taiwan Under Japanese Colonial Rule doesn't aim to present a smooth historical overview. Despite its publisher's implicit claim that it's more wide-ranging and sophisticated than any book ever before published on the topic, it did originate as a collection of papers read out at a conference (in 2001), and so is essentially experts speaking to experts. No one clearly wanted to make a fool of himself by offering generalizations, however impressive, so instead we have 17 dissertations (eight by Taiwanese writers) on often highly specialized subjects. But there is a wealth of interest here nonetheless.

Ever since the publication of Edward Said's Orientalism in 1978, trend-setting academics have united in agreement that the colonizer's view of the colonized cannot possibly be objective. Instead, it is fashioned by the colonizer's own wishes, needs, dreams and fantasies, most notably that he represents the male — strong, dominant, shaping policy — while the colonized stands for the feminine — acquiescent, passive, exotic, and more than a little happy to be possessed by the charismatic intruder.

This book in many places stands for a newer revisionism, not exactly rejecting Said's position but at least qualifying it. Two examples must suffice to illustrate this. Whereas an objective understanding of a subject territory may be indeed impossible, it still has to be understood that the Japanese made the first ever cartographical survey of Taiwan, conducted the first ever census of its population, made the first ever scientific studies of the aboriginal inhabitants, published the first books attempting to account for Han traditional customs, and published for the first time ever a catalogue of all the plants found on the island. The last, certainly, had no direct value to the government's economic ambitions but was conducted purely in the spirit of scientific investigation. In contrast to all this statistical and explorative frenzy, the authorities in Qing Dynasty China had viewed Taiwan as a barbarous place full of pirates (a view that may not, even now, have entirely vanished from the mainland's consciousness).

The second point to emerge is that European colonial ideas of racial difference — superior whites ruling “lesser breeds” beyond the pale of civilized enlightenment — didn't apply with the Japanese. Their approach was that all Asians were brothers, a view that lasted right up until World War II with the plan, partly carried out, for a Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere. Although in practice Taiwanese going to Japan for study were sometimes advised to pretend they were from Kyushu or Okinawa, the ideal of brotherhood prevailed in official terminology. Nor was it only lip-service — this book contains many examples of Japanese artists traveling to Taiwan in search of a purer, more simple life, in effect looking for values that had been lost in Japan itself through industrialization, urbanization, and the modern in general, seeking, in other words, their own true roots.