Written by Yoshitaka Ota.
Image credit: 05.20 總統接見「日本臺灣交流協會理事長谷崎泰明」 by 總統府/ Flickr, license: CC BY 2.0.
My relevance to the subject of Taiwanese peace lies in ocean governance and environmental security, despite having no expertise in regional geopolitics or national security. The impact of climate change will reduce the likelihood of maintaining peace, as they reduce and moves resources in the ocean and potentially promotes competition for harvest. This speculation is based on the idea of ‘tragedy of the commons,’ but it is not necessarily true. It ignores the history of sharing resources among groups of coastal communities in a transboundary context. My argument here follows a similar contestation against the politicised logic of competition, building Taiwan and Japan’s relationship and trust independently from the short-term political upheavals.
Having known the primary role of history and the knowledge of sharing across national boundaries, it was my personal responsibility to call out the need for historical recognition of Japanese colonialism and continuous discourse of keeping peace between Japan and Taiwan. In particular, I wanted to reverse the notion of postcolonial modernisation among both nations that were built upon the symbolic deployment of the contrast between us (Japan and Taiwan) versus China.
The discourse of postcolonial alliance between Taiwan and Japan has been fed with the political omission of China, which Japan paints as the significant other. Ironically, this artificial unity between Japan and Taiwan comfortably covers up the concern of the Japanese with our guilt for racism against the Chinese. Japan forges Taiwan as a likeable, friendly, and modernised China, and conveniently undermines the historical subordination that Japanese imperialism imposed upon the nation. I must apologise for this coloniality perpetuated within today’s Japanese society because I had been part of it by ignorance until I learned the past as well as what coloniality is: a systemic legacy of colonialism often concealed by current political affairs. The coloniality also allows the Japanese public to not fully recognise our ignorance of the past and paint the period with the typical colonisers’ narrative of a mutual benefit for both sides; the Japanese played some role in Taiwanese modernity.
I only realised this mechanism of manipulation, useful for maintaining a friendly relationship, upon receiving the Taiwan Peace Fellowship. More precisely, I learned this premise by reading Dr Lung Yingtai’s book on the postwar turmoil of the Taiwan public in 1949. The book titled “1949” describes the unimaginable suffering of those who lost their family and home, not just by the reoccupation of Taiwan but also the long period of being liminal between the war and resistance.
The book, translated into Japanese, follows the multi-ethnicity of Taiwan by exposing all groups that experienced violence and deceit under the domination of various powers, including Japanese imperialism and, most significantly, describes Taiwan’s transition from the war to the resistance from the perspective of anti-subordination. The real stories were told through the eyes and ears of Dr Yingtai, who presents the tales not to seek justice or to exhibit horror, but as a piece of evidence of the lives of those who were taken by ‘others.’ Anyone who reads the book (I hope someone will translate it into English) would understand one thing clearly: that war, or the lack of peace, would always make ordinary people suffer beyond our imagination, and that holding onto the idea of peace is the only way to protect everyone.
So, what do I know about peace and suffering in Taiwan? Evidently, the Japanese have a limited understanding of Taiwan’s postcolonial struggle and do not reflect upon the implications of undermining the harm of their imperialism. In my opinion, the ignorance has been masked by the creation of China as the other for Japan and Taiwan, pushing the discourse of separating Taiwan from China. The separation is the basis of Japanese understanding of postcolonial Taiwan, and even to the extent that Taiwan can be seen as a parallel to Japan being deployed as a pawn of geopolitics between China and the US. As Taiwan compresses the notion of peace to resist the idea of becoming the next Hong Kong, Japan also resists the idea of being an entanglement in a geopolitical game between the US and China. How can we get out of this multiverse of postcolonial Taiwan and the conundrum of Japan in its struggle to find an Asian political identity?
If postcolonial Taiwan is a process to be shared with Japan, then it is Japan’s responsibility to recognise that Taiwan was composed solely through Taiwan’s agency – selecting, improving, and syncretising colonial materialism and cultural appropriation from various powers that were illegitimately oppressing the community. Like any colonial space, Japanese influence in Taiwan has never been absorbed unfiltered, but Taiwan’s agency has always been serious and has led the navigation and shape of today’s Taiwan. To recognise this, Japan also needs to exercise its agency, and learn from our colonial past, 1949, then we can depart from the permanence of coloniality taking over our minds, which continues to drive the desire to create China as a common enemy rather than looking at ourselves who were once an enemy.
To contribute to Taiwanese peace, therefore, my first step was to stop creating a common enemy and start taking Taiwanese agency seriously (I have appropriated this phrase from Olúfemi Taiwo). This same logic guides my work on shared ocean governance, where the sea between Japan and Taiwan already exists as a common space demanding cooperation rather than competition. Globally, ocean governance has displayed the culture of sharing in any transboundary context; coastal communities know how to negotiate and collaborate unless the political interests of the central government nudge them to compete for resource grabbing. As an archipelagic nation, Japan is eminently urgent to internalise a logic that argues the creation of a common enemy is the opposite of peace, both for Japan and Taiwan. When former Prime Minister Abe declared in 2021 that ‘a Taiwan emergency is a Japanese emergency,’ the statement was received warmly in both countries, but it quietly reinforced exactly this logic, binding Taiwan and Japan together through the figure of the Chinese threat rather than through any honest reckoning with their shared colonial history.
My experience with the fellowship was learning this logic from the landscape of Taiwan. I appreciated the tension between the dual realities of people’s ordinary lives and the notion of defence in the context of controlled political juxtaposition; it is controlled because the contrast between them has not yet divided the reality of ordinary people. Personally, the representation of ordinary life ironically reminded me of the scenes of Hou Hsiao-hsien’s films, which indeed depict Taiwanese agency against coloniality of Japan, so the nostalgia I felt in the Taiwanese landscape is the strength of Taiwanese anti-colonialism. I also felt the same strength in the texture of Taipei streets, from the small barber to the slick bar in the corner, wearing the vivid wisdom of navigating between the narrative of political ‘reality’ and the advantage of a shape-shifter – only those who are in self-control know what their real shape is. If anyone irresponsibly depicts the landscape with a hollow term, it would be described as ‘resilient’, but the irresponsible term misses the character of the decolonial agency bearing the history in Taiwan since 1949; even amid the violence and fear, the protagonists in Yingtai’s book, 1949, never sought to create a common enemy; they sought to protect peace for their family and land, their home decolonized.
As I confessed in the beginning, I work on the marine environment and social justice, and argue that the only way to deliver a shared, respectful ocean is to start building an anti-racist, decolonial future. This logic is parallel to the logic of keeping peace in Taiwan through the decolonial agency. And Japan can learn to initiate the self-reflection of coloniality by resisting the binary of China against us. As Japan and Taiwan share the ocean, I argue that the process of decolonisation, reducing the notion of common enemy, is the responsibility for bringing our history forward, and the reality of shared space – the sea – lies between us.
Yoshitaka Ota is a Professor of Marine Affairs at the University of Rhode Island.