Written by Catherine Tsai.
Image credit: Cover of A New Illustrated History of Taiwan (2020), published by SMC Publishing Inc.
When I was in the third grade, my paternal grandmother, who was visiting from Taipei, accompanied my mother as she picked up both me and a neighbour’s child from school. My grandmother, upon learning that the neighbour’s child was Japanese-American, proceeded to speak to him in Japanese. I was puzzled because I had never heard my grandmother speak that language, nor had she ever revealed that she could. As a second-generation Taiwanese-American, there were layers of cultural, geographical, and linguistic distance between us. Lacking the knowledge to bridge these divides, I rationalised that she probably learned it at school as an elective subject, in the same way that high school students in the United States learn Spanish or French. It was not until I took a seminar on Japanese colonialism as an undergraduate at the University of California, Davis, that I realised that the story was more complicated.
The work that helped me make sense of the disjuncture between my perception of my family and the colonial history that my grandparents’ generation lived through was Chou Wan-yao’s 1991 dissertation, “The kōminka movement: Taiwan under wartime Japan, 1937-1945.” Written under the supervision of Beatrice Bartlett, Jonathan Spence, and Conrad Totman, the 269-page dissertation was the first English-language examination of assimilation policies in the context of wartime mobilisation. In late 1937, Governor General Kobayashi Seizō implemented a series of programs that became known as kōminka (“imperialisation”). The goals were to erase facets of Taiwanese social and cultural life deemed “un-Japanese,” and to transform colonial subjects into imperial subjects as the empire mobilised for total war. Using colonial newspapers, magazines, bureaucratic documents, and memoirs, the dissertation traces the logic, implementation, and reception of these policies.
While kōminka included religious reforms (jibyō seiri), Chou focused on three campaigns—the national language movement (kokugo undō), the name-changing campaign (kaiseimei), and military recruitment (shiganhei seido)—as they were arguably the most impactful on a particular generation of Taiwanese youth. In quantitative measures, the number of Japanese-language speakers increased from 37% in 1937 to more than 80% in 1945. Seven per cent of the population adopted a Japanese surname, and 425,921 Taiwanese “volunteered” to serve in the military in 1942. While these numbers were likely inflated, as colonial officials used coercive measures and incentive structures to bolster numbers, kōminka nevertheless had a significant impact on the generation that came of age during that period of time. Those aged between 15 and 25 when the Pacific War ended held no memories of Qing imperial rule or Japanese pacification campaigns. They were instead socialised under conditions that emphasised their status as imperial subjects.
The significance of kōminka was not simply that it mobilised the population for war, but that its intense assimilationist rhetoric and policies impacted Taiwanese identity well into the postwar era. In her conclusion, Chou theorised that the wartime generation developed a “split consciousness,” raised in a context where they were to become Japanese. When the Nationalist government attempted to impose a new Chinese national identity, many from this generation mobilised to resist (see notes). Previous public and academic characterisations of the 228 Incident and the subsequent decades of martial law emphasised Nationalist repression as the primary source of tensions between bensheng and waisheng populations. For Chou, however, while softer Nationalist policies could have avoided this conflict, the seeds of divergent identities were already planted during the colonial period. Moreover, although the wartime generation was effectively silenced until democratisation in the late 1980s, they passed down their dissatisfaction with official ideology to their children, who became the generation that advocated for the basis of a “Taiwanese consciousness.”
Although it may seem strange to discuss a dissertation as part of a series of “old books” in Taiwan Studies, there are several reasons why Chou’s work was foundational. First, prior research on Japanese colonialism in Taiwan remained sparse. A small but significant body of work was published in the late 1960s and 1970s, pioneered by scholars such as Edward I-te Chen, Harry J. Lamley, and Patricia Tsurumi. Their studies, however, tended to skim over the wartime period, focusing instead on the structures of colonial law, elite political movements, and early colonial education. By centring the wartime era, Chou filled a major gap in the scholarship. Furthermore, her focus on the impact of wartime assimilation marked a subtle epistemological shift: it moved from studying Taiwan as a small subject within the history of Japanese colonialism toward studying Taiwan in its own right.
The project of creating a Taiwan-centred history was pushed forward within the Sinophone academy. In 1997, Chou published the popular history book An Illustrated History of Taiwan (臺灣歷史圖說). Translated into English in 2015 by Carole Plackitt and Tim Casey, the book departs from the traditional political periodisation of Taiwanese history—as a series of regime transitions from the Dutch, Spanish, Chinese, and Japanese to the Republic of China—toward the construction of a history focused on its people (Han, Hakka, and Indigenous).
After completing this project, the dissertation was transformed into an academic book in 2003, The Era of Umi Yukaba: The Late Japanese Colonial Period in Taiwan’s History (海行兮的年代: 日本殖民統治末期臺灣史論集). At 378 pages, this volume built upon the dissertation’s focus on three kōminka policies to more broadly explore the social history of wartime mobilisation. This included new research on the discourses surrounding “Sayon’s Bell” (Sayon no Kane / サヨンの鐘), the ideologies promoted in school textbooks, and the experiences of Taiwanese soldiers in China, Southeast Asia, and the Pacific Islands.
Conversely, in Anglophone historiography, the work became a chapter in the 1996 edited volume The Japanese Wartime Empire, 1931–1945. Titled “The Kōminka Movement in Taiwan and Korea: Comparisons and Interventions,” the chapter remains the most comprehensive comparative overview of kōminka policies in English-language scholarship. Because this evaluation of kōminka was still situated within a more traditional study of colonialism that prioritised Japanese-language sources, its impact on Taiwan Studies was not immediately apparent in North America. Nevertheless, Chou’s analysis of the relationships between assimilation, identity formation, and wartime mobilisation remains vital. Her dissertation and subsequent book chapter have continued to be cited by multiple generations of Anglophone historians. For example, Leo Ching’s 2001 monograph, Becoming Japanese: Colonial Taiwan and the Politics of Identity Formation, similarly focused on the Japanese colonial period as a significant period for shaping Taiwanese identity, exploring the differences between dōka (assimilation) and kōminka in the third chapter. More recently, Seiji Shirane’s Imperial Gateway (2022) and Fang Yu Hu’s Good Wife, Wise Mother (2024) dedicate portions of their work to the impact of kōminka on both soldiers and civilians.
Ultimately, Chou Wan-yao’s dissertation and its subsequent evolution in both Sinophone and Anglophone spheres function as a foundational pillar of Taiwan Studies. Revisiting her work more than a decade later, I have developed a new appreciation. As an undergraduate, her research provided me with the knowledge to better understand my grandparents’ past. As an early-career academic, I see the dissertation through a different lens, as a testament to the arduous intellectual process of writing a Taiwan-centred history, using multi-lingual sources and engaging with scholarship from both sides of the Pacific. Chou wrote her dissertation during the twilight years of authoritarianism, a time when archives were only beginning to open, and discussions of sensitive topics were becoming possible. Now, as a democratic Taiwan rises in global discourse, we will see where this new wave of Anglophone Taiwan Studies carries the field next.
Notes: Victor Louzon’s 2018 article “From Japanese soldiers to Chinese rebels: Colonial hegemony, war experience, and spontaneous remobilisation during the 1947 Taiwanese rebellion” in the Journal of Asian Studies more clearly articulates the stakes of kōminka policies. Instead of creating a “split consciousness,” Louzon argues that kōminka provided Taiwanese youth the infrastructure and language for military mobilisation, which was used to resist against the Guomindang during the uprisings in 1947.
Catherine Tsai is a historian of modern Japan and Taiwan. She is currently a Postdoctoral Associate with the Council on East Asian Studies at Yale University. She received her B.A. in History and International Relations from the University of California, Davis, and her PhD in History and East Asian Languages from Harvard University. Her book manuscript focuses on the history of labour migration and agrarian development in the Yaeyama Islands under Japanese imperialism (1879-1945) and American Occupation (1945-1972. She is also conducting research on her second project on international student activists in Japan during the Cold War.
This article was published as part of the special issue on ‘Old Books in Taiwan Studies’.