This reviewer almost walked out of the theater in disgust after Philosopher King: Lee Teng-hui’s Dialogue spent the first 40 minutes glorifying Japanese colonial rule. It’s beyond tacky to use an imaginary late president Lee Teng-hui (李登輝) to tell a cynical, suicidal Japanese schoolgirl to be proud of her country despite its historic atrocities due to its achievements in Taiwan, and calling them acts of honesty and compassion.
Yes, Japan made great improvements to Taiwan and the life of its people in its quest to create a model colony out of a disease-riddled, poorly managed land. But if that was purely the case, there wouldn’t be countless uprisings and a continuous anti-colonialism movement that persisted until the Japanese forcefully clamped down on dissidents during the last decade of its rule.
None of this is mentioned at all. The only inkling that there was any resistance is regarding the Aborigines, but only under the context that they later changed their hearts and formed the Takasago Volunteer force during World War II, with zero reference to the many bloody revolts and large-scale campaigns the government undertook to “pacify” them.
Photo courtesy of atmovies.com
Part of the local resistance was against government monopoly and tolerance of opium, which got to the point that frustrated Taiwanese activists reached out to the League of Nations about the matter. But in this film, the Japanese allegedly single-handedly eradicated opium use in Taiwan due to their great benevolence. All of this is just sickening.
It then took this reviewer great control to keep watching after “Lee” started sympathizing with Japan during World War II, portraying the nation as a victim and stating that Taiwanese were more than eager to defend their home country. Maybe some did, but this was after decades of colonial rule and years of pro-war propaganda and forced assimilation to Japanese culture and identity through the kominka policy. And there are plenty of reports that indicate that many Taiwanese were tricked or forced to join the war effort.
Perhaps this is how Lee saw things as he always expressed a deep affinity to Japan, and the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) who took over was arguably worse, but the film still presents an extremely distorted and Japan-centric picture of Taiwanese history ostensibly catering to Japanese viewers. It goes on to create a stark contrast between the Japanese and the “honest, hard working and persistent” spirit they bestowed upon the Taiwanese and the purely cruel and authoritarian KMT, but anyone with any basic understanding of history knows that Taiwan’s modern history is far more complicated.
Photo courtesy of Taoyuan Film Festival
The film also places great emphasis on the KMT’s attempt to eradicate Japanese influence among Taiwanese, but barely mentions the KMT’s suppression of Taiwanese culture. It wasn’t just Taiwanese intellectuals and elites who were killed in the 228 anti-government uprising that was brutally suppressed, but it was Taiwanese whom the “Japanese poured their hearts into educating.”
Although the film sympathizes with the plight of the Taiwanese after the war, it almost treats them as just a severed extension of Japan and not their own people with their own culture that the Japanese also went to great lengths to suppress.
This bizarre “documentary” opens with a Japanese schoolgirl who is disillusioned in the state of humanity and the world, and is about to commit suicide when she meets the spirit of Lee, who tells her his life story and philosophy to save her soul. Lee’s rise as a Taiwan-born politician in a Mainlander-dominated government and his relentless push for Taiwanese democracy is indeed admirable and inspiring, but there’s just something strange about this setup as the girl knows nothing about Taiwan and must take everything this version of Lee says at face value, all the while lionizing this so-called “Japanese spirit” and interviewing Japan-sympathetic Taiwanese to boost its grossly one-sided point of view. Of course, when you interview (especially elderly) Taiwanese about KMT rule, they will likely say something that makes Japan look good.
It seems like the point of the film was to explore Lee’s life philosophy and how his role models, Christian faith and internal struggles helped him persevere and succeed. It’s supposed to be inspirational and heartwarming, but the fictitious conversations are somewhat disingenuous and the distorted history just distracting.
The production is quite superb, however, and raises the question as to why a Japanese director made such an effort to create this film? Turns out, Hideto Sonoda’s grandfather worked as an educator in Taiwan until 1945 and his mother was born in Kaohsiung. This explains his ties to the nation and his emphasis on Japanese educating Taiwanese, but also perhaps his view of history.
Also, Lee is apparently quite revered in Japan and when he died last July, many recalled that he often encouraged Japan to be proud of itself, knew more about Japan than Japanese and embodied the Japanese bushido spirit. Under this context, the girl represents modern Japan stuck in the crossroads and Lee is designated to raise the spirits of the nation in troubled times.
That is all fine, but the film’s attempt to whitewash the past, while controversies such as Japan still refusing to apologize over the comfort women issue in Taiwan persist, is distasteful and disappointing.
Philosopher King: Lee Teng-hui’s Dialogue 哲人王：李登輝對話篇
DIRECTED BY:Hideto Sonoda
STARRING:Momoka as Mariya, Masaki Terasoma as Lee Teng-hui (voice)
RUNNING TIME:97 minutes
LANGUAGE:Japanese and Mandarin with Chinese and English subtitles
TAIWAN RELEASE:In theaters
Otto von Bismarck once famously remarked that the “great European war will come out of some damn foolish thing in the Balkans.” We may have inched closer to that damn foolish thing in recent weeks. On Feb. 1, a new law came into effect in China, which codified Beijing’s claim that its well-armed Coast Guard could remove vessels in its waters “illegally” and use force against them if necessary. This is no more or less a “law” than any other law administrated by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), since Beijing could use its Coast Guard to attack vessels from other
Whether or not the Formosan clouded leopard still exists in some hidden mountain fastness somewhere in Taiwan is a question that has fascinated the scientific community for many years. Taiwanese researchers attempted to put the question to rest a decade ago by scouring the Dawushan Nature Reserve (大武山) in Taitung County, but came back empty-handed. The survey ran from 1997-2012 and used over a thousand camera traps, but did not turn up a single cat, and the species was declared extinct in 2013. Renowned Taiwanese conservationists Chiang Po-jen (姜博仁) and Kurtis Pei (裴家騏) conducted the field work and published a
.jpg)
March 01 to March 07 There was only one Taiwanese department head in Taiwan’s first post-World War II provincial government: Sung Fei-ju (宋斐如), who served as deputy director of the department of education. Sung, who lived in China for over two decades, had close ties with the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and was also allowed to start his own newspaper, the People’s News-Leader (人民導報). Aside from Sung, only a handful of Taiwanese held significant positions in the government, almost all of them banshan (半山, half mountain) like him. The term refers to those who moved
Taiwan’s oldest surviving Christian house of worship stands in a village at the base of the Central Mountain Range. Upgraded to a basilica minore by Pope John Paul II in 1984, Wanjin Basilica (萬金聖母聖殿) was established in what’s now Pingtung County’s Wanluan Township (萬巒) in 1863. The church’s founder, Dominican priest Father Fernando Sainz (郭德剛), was one of the first missionaries to enter Taiwan after the signing in mid-1858 of treaties between Qing China (which ruled the island between 1684 and 1895), France, Great Britain, Russia and the US. These agreements, collectively known as the Treaty of Tianjin (天津條約), compelled
RSS