Becoming “Japanese”: Colonial Taiwan and the Politics of Identity Formation

Recently I have read the following book. Its main points are:

Book title: Leo Ching.2001. Becoming “Japanese”: Colonial Taiwan and the Politics of Identity Formation. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Main points:

- ch. 1 – in this chapter, the book argues first of all, against the particularization of Japanese imperialism and colonialism as somehow different and unique. (19) Second, it argues that the lack of the decolonization process in the breakup of Japanese empire had prevented both Japan and Taiwan from addressing and confronting their particular colonial relation and legacy. The abrupt dissolution enabled Japan to circumvent and disavow its colonial question. (20)

- in Japan, a new postwar national identity based on singularity and exclusivity was construed by the effacement of memoirs of war and empire, instead of a vast imperial landscape , Japan is now enclosed and delimited within the border of an ‘island country’.(33)

- ch. 2 – there were two primary yet divergent tendencies of anticolonial struggle in Taiwan form the early 1920s to the late 1930s. It was a period marked by coalescing and conflicting political ideas that entailed the ‘official’ inauguration of doka, or assimilation policy. It also led to the emergence of what could be called ‘neo-nationalist’, or a ‘proto-nationlist’ thought.(51)

-it was important to note here that these political movements were short-lived. With the exception of the more moderate journals and newspaper, the political movement left only scant documentation of their activities. (53) “Liberalism and Marxism were the two dominant tendencies that intersected with Taiwanese anticolonial movement of this period.”(53)

- “the historian Wang Hsiao-po has argued that although, historically, Taiwan consists of several ‘secondary communities’, the ‘Taiwanese consciousness’ of the various immigrants from the mainland took on the ‘consciousness of the Han people’.”(62)

- “as an example of the Taiwan faction’s repress China-consciousness under the colonial rule, Wang describes in great length the life work and attitude of … Lin Hsien-tang. Wang cites Lin’s political pragmatism, his refusal to speak Japanese or wear Japanese clothes.”(63)

-“the debate over whether the so-called ‘Taiwanese consciousness’ should be regarded either as an appendage to a larger Han Chinese ethnonational consciousness or as an autonomous historical product of Japanese colonialism is a distinctively postwar and postcolonial attempt at negotiating the cumbersome problem of Taiwanese/Chinese identity that has its roots in the colonial period.”(76)

- “through this contradicting between class interest and colonial oppression, we can see that the notions of ‘Taiwan factions’ and ‘China factions’ in political and cultural discourse were not opposing forms of ethno-national or cultural identification. Rather, they represent the diverging tenets of political imagination and practical feasibly within a class.”(88)

-“similarly, the formal split of Taiwanese neo-nationalist movement into the reform-oriented liberal faction and the radical-mined Marxist faction in the late 1920s should not be regarded as simply the manifestation of ‘foreign’ political influence.”(88)

-“various discourse and policies under the rubric of doka, or assimilation, and later kominka, or imperialization, were implemented and constructed as the dominant Japanese colonial ideology in countering the growing demands of the Taiwanese neo-nationalist movements.”(88)

(to be continued)