Japanese Taiwan: Colonial Rule and its Contested Legacy

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Description

Colonial agents worked for fifty years to make a Japanese Taiwan, using technology, culture, statistics, trade, and modern ideologies to remake their new territory according to evolving ideas of Japanese empire. Since the end of the Pacific War, this project has been remembered, imagined, nostalgized, erased, commodified, manipulated, idealized and condemned by different sectors of Taiwans population. The volume covers a range of topics, including colonial-era photography, exploration, postwar deportation, sport, film, media, economic planning, contemporary Japanese influences on Taiwanese popular culture, and recent nostalgia for and misunderstandings about the colonial era. Japanese Taiwan provides an interdisciplinary perspective on these related processes of colonization and decolonization, explaining how the memories, scars and traumas of the colonial era have been utilized during the postwar period. It provides a unique critique of the Japaneseness of the erstwhile Chinese Taiwan, thus bringing new scholarship to bear on problems in contemporary East Asian politics.

Reviews

This is a sophisticated and groundbreaking collection of essays that positions Taiwan in the context of colonial and postcolonial studies. Anyone with an interest in modern East Asian politics and history will benefit from it. * Jordan Sand, Professor of Japanese History, Georgetown University, USA *

Author Bio

Andrew D. Morris is Professor of History at California Polytechnic State University, USA. He is author of Colonial Project, National Game: A History of Baseball in Taiwan (2010) and Marrow of the Nation: A History of Sport and Physical Culture in Republican China (2004).