All this is seen by several contributors to this book as standing in stark contrast to the later attitudes of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT). They may also have, like the Japanese, had economic development at the center of their agenda, but their attitudes to the local culture were very different. What the Japanese studied, the KMT suppressed. Not only that. Their rule, say these writers, was far harsher. Criticisms of dishonest Japanese administrators were very common in Taiwanese newspapers, albeit increasingly published in Japanese as the period progressed, one writer points out. But when the Tainan novelist Yang Kui called in 1949 for freedom of speech and assembly, together with harmony between locals and new arrivals from the mainland, he was given 12 years imprisonment on Green Island for his pains, even though his article, which he never intended to be published, was only 700 Chinese characters long.
There are some fascinating statistics here too. Taiwan's population was three million in 1905, around six million in 1945 (the Japanese held seven censuses during their 50-year rule). When the Japanese arrived the only railway on the island ran from Taipei to Keelung. By 1908 it ran from Keelung to Kaohsiung. By the 1940s some 57 percent of Taiwanese understood the Japanese language (though another contributor states it was only a third), while in the 1930s literacy as a whole in Taiwan has been estimated as second only to Japan's in the entire Asia region.
Japan was Asia's only colonial power. It had three colonies — Korea, Manchuria and Taiwan. But it held Taiwan for longer than the other two, and arguably cherished it with more continuous affection.
If this book's authors can be said to share any single view, it is that the actuality of colonial enterprises is never a cut and dried matter. It's not just a matter of swings and roundabouts. Different individuals had different priorities, matters changed from decade to decade, and many things had effects unforeseeable by their instigators. Movements in the arts affected attitudes of even the most staid administrators, and the southern paradise (as some artists saw Taiwan as being) was never simply a source for raw materials gathered at the expense of the rights of the local inhabitants. Said may have been right in asserting that no objective view of a colonized territory is possible. But what this fine book shows is that some views, nonetheless remain considerably more objective than others.
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