Short Abstract

This paper deploys the concepts of rubble and ruin in two case study heritage sites - Shengli New Village and Mingde New Village - to critically asses contentious contemporary debates in Taiwan around representations of the Japanese colonial era and subsequent single-party ROC rule.

Long Abstract

At the end of the Second World War, the Republic of China’s armed forces took over Japanese military installations across Taiwan. In the ensuring years, especially after the exodus of the ROC regime to Taiwan in 1949, greater numbers of soldiers and officers’ accompanying families settled in old Japanese garrisons. In recent years, a small number of remaining Japanese-era military settlements that were later inhabited for decades by ROC military personnel have been restored as heritage sites. Through the contrasting lenses of rubble and ruins (Gordillo 2014), this paper explores the reconfiguration of these historical sites as heritage spaces now open to the public. Two sites are of special interest in this paper and serve as anchoring case studies: Shengli New Village in Pingtung County and Mingde New Village in Kaohsiung City. The latter site was a former Japanese navy communications post, while the former was a Japanese air force base, both with adjoining officer residences. Intended as residences for high-rank officers, the homes were luxurious and are widely regarded as exemplars of early 20th-century Japanese colonial modernist design. As spaces connected to both the Japanese colonial era and the ROC’s period of single-party rule, the military residences have given rise to multiple, often contradictory perspectives on the meaning of these spaces and have fueled struggles over how to show these layered histories in and through the built environments of these now-public sites. Considering these heritage spaces as imperial ruins, this paper situates the production of military heritage within contentious debates in Taiwan around history, memory, and heritage and explores how these have turned on the appropriate means of representing the Japanese colonial era as a persistent presence, or what Soler (2013) calls an “imperial effect.”