Paper short abstract

The struggle between the political and the military element in Taiwan and the prevalence of the latter over the former constituted the fundamental weaknesses of Japan's colonial system. The examination of Judge Takano's and pedagogue Isawa's cases are characteristic of Japan's colonial brutality.

Paper long abstract

Despite the declaration of civil rule Taiwan in March 1896, its administration remained preponderantly military oriented for years to come (Kublin 1973, 319). The colony was practically under constant martial law. Until 1898, when competent colonial magistrates took over, no sound administrative base or long-term civil policies were formed and even then, the military's role was prevalent. Despite the implementation of more reasonable approaches to governing Taiwan, Japan's rule remained militaristic and tyrannic. Tōkyō was still faced with the stubborn rebels (the last pacification campaign took place in the 1910s), financial limitations and the unsettling watchful eye of the westerners and struggled to retain control after 1895 as well. After years of continuous insurrection, scandals, and rapid turnover of incompetent Governor-Generals, Japan's immature colonial experiment in Taiwan seemed destined to fail.

The cases of Takano Takenori (1854-1919) and Isawa Shūji (1851-1917) are the more illustrative of Japan's (early) rule in its first gaichi (外地, "outer colony"). Both hailing from the civil administration sector in naichi (内地, "mainland Japan"), they experienced the ruthlessness and irrationality of the colonial regime's methods first-hand. Their testimonials and views hold relatively more value than the usual biased eulogies as recorded by the supporters and members of Japan's military establishment. They can also provide an objective and unprecedented glimpse on Taiwan's actual conditions. The eternal struggle between the political and the military element in the colony and the prevalence of the latter over the former would prove the fundamental weaknesses of Japan's colonial system. The establishment tried and succeeded in silencing their voices. The examination of judge Takano's and pedagogue Isawa's cases may appear as local histories, but they touch upon broader debates on colonial capitalism, settler colonialism, exploitation, and oppression.

Paper short abstract

This paper examines texts and images about two Japanese colonial-era industrial sites in Taiwan to develop an interpretation of industrial heritage as anti-nostalgic 'imperial debris'.

Paper long abstract

In recent years, scholars have noted that a great deal of nostalgia surrounds contemporary discourse within Taiwan about Japan’s period of colonization of the territory from 1895-1945. Particularly amid surging Taiwanese nationalism since the 1990s, Japan’s colonial presence has been re-cast as a sort of “golden age” for Taiwanese social and industrial development. This broadly “Japanophilic” interpretation of the colonial era contrasts sharply with the “Japanophobic” stance maintained by the Kuomintang government throughout the long period of Martial Law (1947-1987). Re-imagining the Japanese colonial era in Taiwan has relied upon erasures of colonial violence, on the one hand, and the creation of a growing list of officially designated colonial heritage artifacts and sites in urban and rural spaces, including colonial residences, monumental buildings, statues, and so forth. Drawing on Ann Stoler's notion of 'imperial debris', this paper focuses on overlooked colonial-era industrial sites, where a sanitized colonial or post-colonial history is difficult to script. More specifically, I explore the coal-mining sites of Pinglin and the Shuinandong copper smelting facility, both located in the northeast of Taiwan, and the contemporary textual and visual materials used to explain these sites to contemporary audiences. These facilities operated under Japanese colonial administration and were transferred to Republic of China ownership following the end of the war in 1945, whereupon they were further expanded. Each was a site of forced labor during and after the war and exploitative work conditions thereafter. Both fell into disuse and dilapidation starting in the 1970s and were left to crumble until recently, when each has been opened as heritage sites. As industrial heritage, I argue, the sites present an aporia through which violence, exploitation, and plunder are not exclusively colonial phenomena but are integral to industrial growth during and after the colonial period. Both sites, as ambiguous ruins, resist nostalgic narrations of either the Japanese colonial era and the post-1945 developmentalist era under KMT rule and thus offer the possibility of re-narrating Taiwan's 20th century colonial and post-colonial periods by centering Taiwan as a site of capitalist-industrial expansion.

Paper short abstract

This paper examines the changing political roles Japanese entomology played in colonial Taiwan as the Government General juggled agricultural and industrial developments, and the empire expanded to the South seas. It seeks to complicate the mantra, "Industrial metropole and agricultural Taiwan."

Paper long abstract

The 1895 Japanese acquisition of Taiwan led to a dash by the new colonizers, albeit amidst decades of armed resistance from the residents, to exploit the island's natural resources including its rich soil. Starting with the most visibly lucrative camphor and sugar industries, and extending to tea, rice, cinchona, and other agricultural and silvicultural products, the Japanese sought to maximize extraction quickly, first to make this early colony sustainable and later to make profits. Multiple studies have examined how actors from the metropole and the newly established Government General of Taiwan (GGT), sometimes in tandem and at other times in competition, introduced to these ends violence, technology, capital, infrastructure, policies, and more. Fewer studies scrutinize the use of science for the same purpose, especially in the field of zoology.

Tokyo Imperial University sent zoologists to Taiwan as early as 1896 to assess their natural resources. Despite the initial lukewarm interest in the island's insects, GGT's early enthusiasm for plant resources quickly catapulted entomology to be a major field of study with special focus on botanical pests. By the 1920s, entomological articles dominated Taiwan's premier Natural History journal that began publication in 1911, and upon the 1928 establishment of Taipei Imperial University, the majority of zoologists holding professorial positions studied insects. Although popular understanding suggests that the GGT policies shifted in the 1930s from agricultural to industrial Taiwan, entomology was at its height in this decade with the island's researchers earning world-acclaim; in addition to the foremost figure Shiraki Tokuichi acting on the board of the International Entomological Congress, insect research shifted to accommodate new agricultural interests. This paper examines the details of the field's development with focus on entomology's political contributions to the building of colonial Taiwan as well as to Japan's 1930s- southern advance as the South seas (nan'yō) became another agricultural destination.