Thu, Jan 17, 2002 page3

• At heart of Taiwan lies an ethnic divide

  FESTERING WOUNDS The recent uproar over a Japanese sex-tour guidebook to Taiwan shows China and Japan are still open sores on the nation's consciousness

  • By Lindy Yeh / STAFF REPORTER
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  China and Japan are undoubtedly the most sensitive and emotional subjects in Taiwan and are at the core of the nation's ethnic feud.

  Any time that a Japanese or Chinese person makes public remarks on Taiwan, the comments immediately become fodder for ethnic debate. The uproars over the controversial comic book On Taiwan (台灣論), by Japanese author Yoshinori Kobayashi, and the recently released Japanese sex-tour guidebook Paradise in Taiwan were no exception.

  The reason is simple: The nation's indigenous Taiwanese and its ethnic mainlanders do not share a common, collective historical memory.

  Indigenous Taiwanese see China as the biggest threat to the survival of Taiwan, while mainlanders and their descendants, who fled to Taiwan with Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石) in 1949, still harbor painful memories about Japanese aggression during World War II.

  In the 1970s, a well-regarded Taiwanese writer, Huang Chun-ming (黃春明) wrote a short story entitled Sayonara, Tzai-jen! (莎喲哪啦，再見！), in which he depicts a group of Japanese businessmen coming to Taiwan for sexual exploits.

  The members of the group in the story -- dubbed the "club aiming to conquer a thousand women" (千人斬俱樂部) -- collect one pubic hair from each woman they have sex with to keep as souvenirs of their conquests. They also employ the use of a virility drug they call "Indian magic ointment."

  The story was well received by readers at the time and has since come to be considered a masterpiece of Taiwanese literature.

  Thirty years later, after a dramatic increase in the nation's standard of living, Taiwanese businessmen are playing out the same scenario as their Japanese counterparts in the story. Taiwanese businessmen in recent years have gained a reputation as being frequent sex buyers in Southeast Asia and China. Even some rich Taiwanese women have also reportedly gone on sex-adventure trips to China to cavort with Chinese gigolos.

  The last three decades illustrate that under the irresistible trend of globalization, the sex trade has simply become another international transaction. The international sex trade is not a nationalistic or gender issue, but instead is simply a business transaction -- the wealthy pay for pleasure and the poor sell themselves for money.

  In an open society, news that a sex-tour guidebook such as Paradise in Taiwan had been published should have been laughable or dismissible. After all, perverts exist everywhere.

  But in Taiwan, news of the book once again became a nationalistic issue. Because of historical Sino-Japanese antagonism, some ethnic mainlanders regarded the mentality behind the book as a variant of Japanese jingoism and called the book an insult to Taiwan.

  As irrational as those nationalistic-minded people might seem to be, some Taiwanese are always quick to side with the Japanese in such disputes, simply out of anti-Chinese sentiment.

  The message revealed by such disputes is that the ethnic mainlander community is crying out for indigenous Taiwanese sympathy and support for what Chinese people suffered during World War II.

  Many Taiwanese, not sensitive enough to understand ethnic mainlanders' bitter feelings toward Japanese, frequently play the Japanese against the Chinese.

  Rather than rationally debate the issue, such disputes just deteriorate into a power struggle.

  This explains why DPP city councilor Wang Shih-chien (王世堅) used the sex-tour guidebook to embarrass Taipei City Mayor Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九), who recently launched a campaign vowing to expel the sex industry from Taipei.

  It also sheds light on why Ma protested the book to the outgoing Japanese representative to Taiwan, Yamashinta Shindaro, when the representative paid him a farewell visit last week.

  Why do Taiwanese people always fight over such matters? Why should the mayor of the nation's capital city be furious about a mere trifle of a book to the extent that he pledged to arrest any Japanese person caught buying sex?

  Political quarrels of this sort might sound absurd to someone outside Taiwan. But they reveal ethnic mainlanders' suspicion that indigenous Taiwanese have betrayed the nation's Chinese roots, since Taiwan was ruled by the Japanese from 1895 to 1945.

  At the same time, these ethnic feuds also show indigenous Taiwanese people's indifference to ethnic mainlanders' feelings and a lack of sympathy for Chinese people's tribulations in recent history.
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