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:

-  introduction – on February 24, 1979 some Taiwanese aborigines representing the Takasago people  visit Yasuguni jinja. They demanded compensation from Japan, and to have the spirits of Takasago people who had died as Japanese soldiers and being offered in the jinja be returned to them. (1-2) “This episode describes a telling encounter between the (ex)colonizer and the (ex)colonized in the so-called postcolonial conditions. It is a condition marred by the former imperial nation’s refusals to come to terms with its colonial passes.”(4)

- “becoming ‘Japanese’ conceals the inequality between the ‘natural’ Japanese, whose political and economic privilege as citizen are guaranteed, and those ‘naturalized’ Japanese whose cultural identities as Japanese are required, but whose political and economic rights as citizen are continuously denied.” (6)

-“the triangulation between colonial Taiwan, imperial Japan, and nationalist China formed the terrain where contradictory, conflicting and complicitous desire and identities were projected, negotiated, and vanquished.” (8)

-“colonialism, however, is never only about the external process and pressure of economic development or political annexation. It is also about the ways in which the colonized internally colluded with or resisted the objectification of the self that was produced by the colonizer, as Frantz Fanon has remarkably documented in Black Skin, White Masks.”(10)

-“to insist on the predicament of Japanese colonialism, this book puts forward a series of arguments on Japanese colonialism in Taiwan coalescing around the problematic identity formations and the positions and politics of such analysis in the so-called postcolonial conditions. Its premise rests on the assumption that cultural and political identify, be they metropolitan or colonial, do not exist prior to the process of colonialism.”(11)

“I argue that Japanese or Japanese-ness, Taiwanese or Taiwanese-ness, aborigines or aboriginality, and Chinese or Chinese-ness – as embodied in compartmentalized national, racial, or cultural categories – do not exist outside the temporality and spatiality of colonial modernity, but are instead enabled by it.”(11) (i.e. they were generated by the colonial modernity)

-“chapter 1 argues that decolonization, as opposed to post colonialism … offers a better understanding of Japan’s continuous disavowal of it war crimes and coloniality”.(12)

(c/f decolonization was an abrupt and sudden process happened in 1945)

-“ch. 2 analyzes the formation of a debate over Taiwanese conscious and Chinese consciousness, their respective political movements since the 1920s”.(12)(c/f the debate centered around of ‘Taiwan factions’ and ‘China factions’)

- ch. 3 attempts a theoretical analysis of the Japanese colonial discourse of doka and kominka. Ch. 4 extends the analysis of kominka to the Taiwanese aborigines in relation to the Musha rebellion of 1930. Ch. 5 returns to the triangulation between colonial Taiwan, imperialist Japan, and nationalist Chinese. Through a reading of The Orphan of Asia, the book argued that the work was an allegory of Taiwan’s gradual ‘coming into being’ with the intensification of colonial rule and it disillusion with Chinese nationalism. The Pacific war precluded any voluntary or reformist corrective to Japanese colonialism and Chinese nationalism no longer provided a clear and viable alternative to Taiwan’s emancipation. (12-13)

(to be continued)