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.