The first study of colonial Taiwan in English, this volume brings together seventeen essays by leading scholars to construct a comprehensive cultural history of Taiwan under Japanese rule. Contributors from the United States, Japan, and Taiwan explore a number of topics through a variety of theoretical, comparative, and postcolonial perspectives, painting a complex and nuanced portrait of a pivotal time in the formation of Taiwanese national identity. Essays are grouped into four categories: rethinking colonialism and modernity; colonial policy and cultural change; visual culture and literary expressions; and from colonial rule to postcolonial independence. Their unique analysis considers all elements of the Taiwanese colonial experience, concentrating on land surveys and the census; transcolonial coordination; the education and recruitment of the cultural elite; the evolution of print culture and national literature; the effects of subjugation, coercion, discrimination, and governmentality; and the root causes of the ethnic violence that dominated the postcolonial era. The contributors encourage readers to rethink issues concerning history and ethnicity, cultural hegemony and resistance, tradition and modernity, and the romancing of racial identity. Their examination not only provides a singular understanding of Taiwan's colonial past, but also offers insight into Taiwan's relationship with China, Japan, and the United States today. Focusing on a crucial period in which the culture and language of Taiwan, China, and Japan became inextricably linked, Taiwan Under Japanese Colonial Rule effectively broadens the critique of colonialism and modernity in East Asia.

Taiwan’s modern legal system--quite different from those of both traditional China and the People’s Republic--has evolved since the advent of Japanese rule in 1895. Japan has gradually adopted Western law during the 19th-century and when it occupied Taiwan--a frontier society composed of Han Chinese settlers--its codes were instituted for the purpose of rapidly assimilating the Taiwanese people into Japanese society. Tay-sheng Wang’s comprehensive study lays a solid foundation for future analyses of Taiwanese law. It documents how Western traditions influenced the formation of Taiwan’s modern legal structure through the conduit of Japanese colonial rule and demonstrates the extent to which legal concepts diverged from the Chinese legal tradition and moved toward Western law.

Exploring the dynamics of development and dependency, this book traces the experience of Taiwan under Japanese colonial rule. Chih-ming Ka shows how, unlike in other sugar-producing colonies, Taiwan was able to sustain its indigenous family farms and small-scale rice millers, who not only survived but thrived in competition with Japanese sugar capital. Focusing on Taiwan's success, the author reassesses theories of capitalist transformation of colonial agriculture and reconceptualizes the relationship between colonial and indigenous socioeconomic and political forces. Considering the influence of sugar on the evolution of family farms and the contradictory relationship between sugar and rice production, he explores the interplay of class forces to explain the unique experience of colonial Taiwan.

In 1895 Japan acquired Taiwan as its first formal colony after a resounding victory in the Sino-Japanese war. For the next fifty years, Japanese rule devastated and transformed the entire socioeconomic and political fabric of Taiwanese society. In Becoming Japanese, Leo Ching examines the formation of Taiwanese political and cultural identities under the dominant Japanese colonial discourse of assimilation (dôka) and imperialization (kôminka) from the early 1920s to the end of the Japanese Empire in 1945. Becoming Japanese analyzes the ways in which the Taiwanese struggled, negotiated, and collaborated with Japanese colonialism during the cultural practices of assimilation and imperialization. It chronicles a historiography of colonial identity formations that delineates the shift from a collective and heterogeneous political horizon into a personal and inner struggle of "becoming Japanese." Representing Japanese colonialism in Taiwan as a topography of multiple associations and identifications made possible through the triangulation of imperialist Japan, nationalist China, and colonial Taiwan, Ching demonstrates the irreducible tension and contradiction inherent in the formations and transformations of colonial identities. Throughout the colonial period, Taiwanese elites imagined and constructed China as a discursive space where various forms of cultural identification and national affiliation were projected. Successfully bridging history and literary studies, this bold and imaginative book rethinks the history of Japanese rule in Taiwan by radically expanding its approach to colonial discourses.

This study of Japanese colonialism in Japan's first overseas acquisition, Taiwan, approaches these questions through an analysis of a central pillar of Japanese rule there, education, which performed key functions in keeping order, exploiting economic resources, securing the cooperation of the natives, and attempting to assimilate them.

These essays, by thirteen specialists from Japan and the United States, provide a comprehensive view of the Japanese empire from its establishment in 1895 to its liquidation in 1945. They offer a variety of perspectives on subjects previously neglected by historians: the origin and evolution of the formal empire (which comprised Taiwan, Korea, Karafuto. the Kwantung Leased Territory, and the South Seas Mandated Islands), the institutions and policies by which it was governed, and the economic dynamics that impelled it. Seeking neither to justify the empire nor to condemn it, the contributors place it in the framework of Japanese history and in the context of colonialism as a global phenomenon. Contributors are Ching-chih Chen. Edward I-te Chen, Bruce Cumings, Peter Duus, Lewis H. Gann, Samuel Pao-San Ho, Marius B. Jansen, Mizoguchi Toshiyuki, Ramon H. Myers, Mark R. Peattie, Michael E. Robinson, E. Patricia Tsurumi. Yamada Saburō, Yamamoto Yūzoō.

In Imperial Gateway, Seiji Shirane explores the political, social, and economic significance of colonial Taiwan in the southern expansion of Japan's empire from 1895 to the end of World War II. Challenging understandings of empire that focus on bilateral relations between metropole and colonial periphery, Shirane uncovers a half century of dynamic relations between Japan, Taiwan, China, and Western regional powers. Japanese officials in Taiwan did not simply take orders from Tokyo; rather, they often pursued their own expansionist ambitions in South China and Southeast Asia. When outright conquest was not possible, they promoted alternative strategies, including naturalizing resident Chinese as overseas Taiwanese subjects, extending colonial police networks, and deploying tens of thousands of Taiwanese to war. The Taiwanese—merchants, gangsters, policemen, interpreters, nurses, and soldiers—seized new opportunities for socioeconomic advancement that did not always align with Japan's imperial interests. Drawing on multilingual archives in six countries, Imperial Gateway shows how Japanese officials and Taiwanese subjects transformed Taiwan into a regional gateway for expansion in an ever-shifting international order. Thanks to generous funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities Open Book Program and its participation in TOME (Toward an Open Monograph Ecosystem), the ebook editions of this book are available as Open Access volumes from Cornell Open (cornellpress.cornell.edu/cornell-open) and other repositories.