For a moment in the early 1930s, Kondo Katsusaburo was a minor celebrity in Japan. His renown came through his account of the Wushe Incident of 1930 (here called the Musha Rebellion) — the last major rebellion against colonial rule in Taiwan and, as the subtitle of this book indicates, the bloodiest uprising by the island’s indigenous peoples.
Serialized in 29 installments between December 1930 and February 1931 in the Japanese-language newspaper Taiwan Daily News, Kondo’s memoir cast light on the events that culminated in the massacre of more than 134 Japanese in the remote mountain outpost of Wushe (in present-day Nantou County) and the subsequent reprisals by the colonial regime, which claimed over 600 indigenous lives.
POLITICAL UPHEAVAL
The revolt and its aftermath caused a media sensation in Japan, which was in the midst of political upheaval. The period of liberal opening known as the Taisho Democracy — traditionally dated to the reign of the Taisho emperor (1912-1926) — was in its death throes, with fascism creeping in.
While historians have retrospectively identified 1930 as a turning point, as Paul D. Barclay observes in this book, there was little to portend the stark rupture with the politically progressive ‘20s at the time. This was not “inflation-racked Weimar Germany or Black Shirt-infested Italy,” where the indicators of “a turn to fascism and self-immolation” were evident.
At the 59th meeting of the national Diet — Japan’s parliament — the opposition Seiyukai Party seized on the rebellion to accuse Taiwan’s governor-general of the mistreatment of indigenous peoples, flat-footedness in anticipating the uprising and incompetence in addressing the aftermath. Kondo’s account supports some of these charges.
“Fact-finding missions were dispatched, while journalists flocked to Taiwan to rake the muck and lambast the colonial administration,” Barclay notes. The fallout included the resignation of governor-general Ishizuka Eizo and other colonial officials.
Following the parliamentary broadsides, aimed at discrediting the sitting Minseito Party, other shocking incidents further “exposed the cracks in the Taisho democracy.” A fortnight after the rebellion began, Japanese Prime Minister Hamaguchi Osachi was shot inside Tokyo Station by a right-wing extremist. (He died from an infection to his wounds nine months later.) The gunman was outraged by Hamaguchi’s purported infringement on military authority in signing a treaty that limited Japan’s naval capacity.
This was the first of several events, including the false flag Mukden Incident of September 1931, which saw the Imperial Japanese Army (IJA) occupying Manchuria; the near-miss attempted assassination of Emperor Hirohito by a Korean nationalist in January 1932; and the January 28 Incident (also known as the Shanghai Incident) several weeks later. This latter occurrence, which took place in Shanghai’s International Settlement and involved the Japanese bombardment of residential districts, ended with the withdrawal of IJA troops in early May, just a week after another Korean patriot had killed both the representative for Japanese residents in Shanghai and the joint head of the Japanese armed forces in the city in a grenade attack.
These anti-imperial actions provoked further backlash from far-right elements in Japan. Just 10 days after the Shanghai armistice, Prime Minister Inukai Tsuyoshi was assassinated. He had been in office less than five months, after replacing Hamaguchi’s successor, who had resigned in frustration at his inability to control the rightists. The emergence of governments of “national unity” signaled the end of pre-war Japan’s flirtation with democracy.
COMPLICITY
The rebellion resurfaced in Japanese newspapers during this period, most notably with the Second Wushe Incident of April 1931, in which 216 members of the Tgdaya peoples were beheaded by Toda and Truku men. As the Tgdaya victims were being held in prisoner camps, their Japanese captors were clearly complicit in the atrocity.
These three ethnic groups spoke mutually intelligible variants of the Seediq tongue, but were mutually antagonistic before the Japanese arrived in Taiwan. However, as Barclay notes, “hostilities were intensified by competition for Japanese patronage and access to trade goods.” Furthermore, because the colonial government “radically altered the political economy of the region” and pursued a strategy of arming the groups with increasingly sophisticated weaponry and pitting them against one another, the internecine violence that Kondo describes “should not be considered atavistic but rather part of a complex response to the newly imposed dispensation.”
Following the massacre of the Tgdaya prisoners, reports of awards to Japanese serviceman involved in the suppression of the revolt made headlines, including the enshrinement of martyred soldiers in the Yasukuni Shrine, alongside those who had fallen at Mukden and Shanghai. Then, as suddenly as it had ignited, the furore fizzled out.
Yet, for that brief moment, Kondo’s memoir captivated the Japanese public. As Barclay demonstrates in his superb exegesis of the text — slightly abridged for readability — this was a “ground-level view” of an exotic and faraway place.
Having lived among the “savages” for decades, Kondo had become a “political in-law” to influential members of two Tgdaya subgroups. His younger brother Gisaburo had married Diwas Rudao, sister of Mona Rudao, the legendary leader of the rebellion. This lent authority to Kondo’s account.
Of course, the unfamiliarity of the location and culture meant that most readers were unequipped to assess the reliability of the descriptions. Not so Kondo’s publisher “who had easy access to reference materials with which to correct the legion of factual errors that riddle the memoir.” Subsequent publications, which borrowed heavily from Kondo, were similarly remiss in performing due diligence.
CONTRIVED INACCURACIES
While some inaccuracies appear to have been innocent oversights, others were probably contrived to fit with Kondo’s narrative. Most dubious is his attempt to insert himself into the tale of a doomed 1897 expedition to cross Taiwan’s central mountains led by explorer Captain Fukahori Yasuichiro. While Fukahori and all 13 of his subordinates perished, Kondo escaped their fate, thanks to a fortuitous case of malaria that left him unable to proceed.
As Kondo’s first common-law wife was one of two surviving indigenous members of the expedition, she likely furnished him with details. Either way, Fukahori pervades the text, taking on an almost religious significance as Kondo seeks to honor the captain’s memory by realizing his goal.
As for his accounts of the indigenous among whom he coexisted for so long, they fluctuate between sympathetic and condescending. Postwar testimonials by those who knew Kondo depict a double-dealing “exploiter of Seediq labor and serial consort of Indigenous women.” While “useful in particular circumstances” to his indigenous acquaintances, he was, Barclay surmises, always an outsider and viewed suspiciously as “a beautiful serpent.”
Embellishments and inaccuracies aside, Kondo’s memoir offers a unique and riveting insight into Taiwan’s colonial frontier. In providing this exemplary translation and analysis, Barclay has achieved his aim of contributing to “ongoing debates about the nature of Japanese colonial rule in Taiwan,” and — more broadly — the plight of Indigenous peoples under early twentieth century colonialism.
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