Short Abstract

This paper examines how Imperial Japan used state honours (orders and medals) in colonial Taiwan. From the 1895 campaign to later imperial events, awards to Taiwanese and Japanese residents shifted, revealing honours as a flexible, low-cost tool of governance.

Long Abstract

This paper reconsiders Japanese colonial rule in Taiwan through the lens of state honours (decorations and medals). Scholarship on colonial Taiwan initially stressed ruler–ruled antagonism but later shifted towards the agency of colonised actors and varied forms of cooperation and resistance. In this trajectory, the Government-General’s Gentry Badge System (Shinshō Seido)—introduced in 1896 to secure the support of local gentry and elites—has been closely examined, including its ties to economic privileges linked to the camphor and opium monopolies. Much less attention has been paid to metropolitan state honours; unlike colonial-specific rewards, these honours signalled direct incorporation into the hierarchy of the Japanese Empire.

This paper examines the conferral of state honours on Taiwanese recipients and Japanese residents in Taiwan across three phases: the early period of “special rule”, the rise of Inner Territory Extensionism (naichi enchō shugi) from the late 1910s, and the wartime turn. I argue that metropolitan honours were deployed in Taiwan from the outset as a flexible, relatively low-cost instrument of colonial governance, and that shifts in award patterns reveal how the colonial state defined loyalty, usefulness, and imperial belonging.

The analysis begins with an exceptional episode during and immediately after the 1895 Taiwan campaign, when 23 Taiwanese civilian collaborators received special decorations—extraordinary given how restricted civilian decorations remained in Japan proper at the time. It then shows that, although rare, medals awarded to Taiwanese already appeared during the period of special rule, prior to the later rhetoric of institutional extension. From 1915 (the Taishō Enthronement), awards associated with imperial events expanded, and honouring practices increasingly accompanied major imperial occasions (for example, the Crown Prince’s visit to Taiwan in 1923).

For Japanese residents, special decorations initially concentrated on bankers but broadened from the late 1920s to include leading businessmen (notably Government-General councillors), a and from the 1940s extended—through both decorations and medals—to educators and actors in social welfare.

The paper draws on Government-General records, politicians’ papers, recipients’ diaries and biographies, and Japanese- and Taiwan-based media, and closes with brief comparisons to British India and colonial Korea.