Sun, Mar 23, 2003 page18

• Searching through the dilemmas of colonialism

  `Doctors within Borders' explores Taiwan's complex relationship with Japan as the bringer of modern medical science to the island

  • By Bradley Winterton / CONTRIBUTING REPORTER
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  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?

  

  Doctors Within Borders By Ming-Cheng M. Lo 236 pages University of California Press

  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.

  At the heart of this book lies the essential ambiguity of the colonial experience. On the one hand there is a desire to be rid of the foreign master. But on the other is a profound desire to emulate him, and in the final analysis become the same as him. In the European colonies, differences of skin color make this all but impossible. But with Japanese colonizing Taiwanese it always remained a perpetual and alluring possibility.

  In pursuing this study the author interviewed 10 surviving doctors from the colonial era, eight in Taiwan and two in Japan. All, interestingly, chose to speak to him in Taiwanese rather than Mandarin, though often reverting to Japanese from time to time to explain particular issues. And all, when pressed, expressed their dislike or suspicion of the KMT, though disagreeing on their preferred alternative.

  There is an interesting chapter on Japanese doctors in occupied eastern China during the 1930s. There, too, modern medicine was introduced as a legitimizing procedure. Because we bring you effective cures for your ailments, the argument went, our presence in your country must be a good thing. Another way of looking at it would be to call it compulsory modernization by force of arms.

  Back in Taiwan, relationships between individuals routinely formed exceptions to more general attitudes. After watching his former mentor depart for Japan in 1945, one Dr. Chen wrote in a centennial publication of Taipei's National Taiwan University Hospital: "Seeing Professor Kurosawa board the truck and leave us, I thought to myself: `Mountains and oceans are being placed between us, but the physical distance will never weaken this teacher-student relationship that we've shared.'"

  Chen's colleagues had the same affection for their former professor, and as a result they arranged for him to revisit them in Taipei in 1966.

  This book is in essence an academic work, rather than one aimed at the general reader. Nevertheless, it throws interesting light on a specific historical situation. And the author also raises an important general question: What are we to think of real improvements that come about as a result of an undesirable political situation? As he succinctly puts it, "Does it matter by whom science is delivered to a local community, so long as it is delivered?"

  His answer is complex, but one thing is clear. This is exactly the question that faced those Taiwanese doctors of 60 years ago and more. And in practice their answer was "No." They believed in science, and as a result they simply went ahead and delivered it anyway.
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