Written by Yu-Han Huang.
Image credit: Cover of Becoming Japanese, published by the University of California Press.
When I looked back over my experience of learning history, I found the fall of 2007 a decisive period for my academic life. I was then just beginning my third year as an undergraduate history major at National Taiwan University, wondering whether I should pursue an academic career and, if I did, which field might excite me most. I knew I admired academic research as a profession and vaguely felt that there were some keywords particularly attractive for me, such as transnationality, empire, and nationalism. I just finished my required Taiwan History course: it was an enlightening experience, but the history of Taiwan as a field of study was not exceptionally interesting for me.
With these feelings in mind, two things shaped my knowledge structure and guided my future academic path that year. The first thing is that I took a seminar course titled “Topics of Colonial Taiwan under Japanese Rules” taught by Professor Wan-yao Chou (周婉窈), one of the pioneers in the history of Japanese colonial Taiwan. Thanks to the seminar, I was able to read representative primary and secondary sources on colonial Taiwan systematically. This experience guided me to dive into the research of Japanese colonialism and imperialism and would essentially result in an MA thesis on the cultural and political formation of Manchukuo under Professor Chou’s supervision.
It was also during this period that I first heard of and read Leo T. S. Ching’s Becoming “Japanese”: Colonial Taiwan and the Politics of Identity Formation. Since its initial publication in 2001, Becoming “Japanese” has remained a must-read for (English-speaking) students and researchers of the history and culture of Taiwan under Japanese colonial rule. In 2006, Li-hsuan Cheng (鄭力軒), a then PhD student in sociology at Duke University, contributed a carefully crafted Chinese translation (which was the version I read). I was soon fascinated by the ways Ching analysed multiple types of texts and how he portrayed the complicated origins of “Taiwan identity” as an extension of Japanese colonialism. Professor Chou did not assign this book for her seminar, but reading Becoming “Japanese” was still a pivotal episode for me as a beginning learner of colonialism and its history in Taiwan.
Becoming “Japanese” aims to answer a question that was traditionally neglected in Western academics: “Why must Japan’s colonial discourse and practice take the form of interpellating its subjects into becoming Japanese?” (5). Ching began this book with a dramatic yet traumatising scene: a group of “Japanised” indigenous Taiwanese visited the Yasukuni-jinja Shrine in Tokyo in 1979, vainly attempting to reclaim the souls of their loved ones sacrificed in the Japanese Empire’s “holy war.” This story indicated the long-lasting influence of a colonial structure of identity-based inequality. Ching argued that the Japanese colonial state’s culture formation program—under the name of either assimilation (dōka同化) or imperialisation (kōminka 皇民化)—produced a conceptualised “Japanese” identity. Ching correctly pointed out that this conceptualised identity promised colonised subjects a pathway to “become Japanese” in a cultural sense. Yet, such a promise obscured the institutional discrimination and political inequality against colonised subjects. Furthermore, he argued that it was the institutionalisation of this conceptualised “Japanese” identity, conversely defined colonised identities of “Korean,” “Taiwanese,” and even “aboriginals.” Addressing the instability of a “Taiwan identity” under colonial culture formation, Ching’s other major argument is that the “presence and spectre of China” played a critical role in shaping Taiwan’s self-consciousness and its relations to Japan, during and beyond the colonial period (7-8).
Except for the introduction, the book is composed of five chapters. Chapter 1 analyses the origin and development of Japanese discourses of colonialism and its unwilling legacies. Ching argued that it is the lack of a decolonisation process, rather than post-colonialism, that contributed to the persistence of colonial relationships between Taiwan and Japan. Chapter 2 focuses on the origin of “Taiwanese consciousness” and “Chinese consciousness” in the 1920s and debates surrounding them in postwar Taiwan. Chapter 3 theorises the discourses of dōka and kōminka with a specific concentration on the latter; Ching argues that kōminka represented the emergence of identity as a dominant discourse for the colonised. Extended from this analysis, Chapter 4 analyses the effect of kōminka on indigenous Taiwanese through case studies on the Musha Incident (霧社事件) and indigenous youths’ military services during the Pacific War. Chapter 5 provides a careful reading of Wu Chuo-liu’s (吳濁流) famous The Orphan of Asia (亞細亞的孤兒). Ching argues that although this work demonstrates the emergence of a vague “Taiwan” identity during the Pacific War, this “Taiwan” had not yet established a stable and constituted identity.
The book is, of course, far from flawless. As many critics had already pointed out, Ching’s analysis of colonial history heavily relied on secondary sources and literary works. To some degree, Ching paid more attention to debates happening in the latter half of the twentieth century to explain how Taiwan’s colonial history was diversely read. However, for some Taiwanese historians, Ching’s handling of historical contexts was somehow careless and made his criticism of Japanese colonialism sometimes more like an expression of “disciplinarian anti-imperialist ideology.” Meanwhile, some critics also pointed out that Ching rarely cited already fruitful scholarship of Taiwan’s colonial history and post-colonialism. This problem became particularly true in the mid 2000s, when a number of representative studies by Taiwanese historians—many of which were initially English- or Japanese-written PhD dissertations—got formally published. For today’s Chinese-language readers, many other works are providing more careful examination and insightful analysis of Taiwan’s early identity formation and the influence of colonial legacies—including but not limited to books and articles by Pei-feng Chen (陳培豐), Rwei-ren Wu (吳叡人), Wan-yao Chou, and more (see notes). For English-language readers interested in this topic, works by Sayaka Chatani and Evan Dawley might be more up-to-date pieces to get started.
These concerns might be partly comprehended through Ching’s scholarly interest. In a 2006 interview, Ching admitted that he “did not actively converse with Taiwanese scholars” in Becoming “Japanese” because his main purpose was to criticise Japan’s colonial discourses. Ching found the Western paradigm of colonialism studies questionable: post-colonialism scholarship in the 1990s was “obsessed” with colonial questions of the West, yet tended to specialise in the Japanese case, neglecting the collusion of the Japanese and Western empires. This paradox, he argued, corresponded to postwar Japan’s obliviousness to its past as a colonial empire: when Japan was divested of its colonies and rebuilt as a US Cold War frontline, it was also reimagined as other than the West and thus exempted from decolonisation. By deconstructing colonial discourses acting on Taiwan, Becoming “Japanese” provided a convincing explanation for Japan’s struggle to deal with its embarrassing colonial heritage.
Reading Becoming “Japanese” was a remarkable experience in my early years as a historian. I first read this book in the mid-2000s when Taiwanisation (本土化) formally emerged as a political and cultural agenda. In the annual NCCU tracked survey of identity in 2008, for the first time, more respondents identified themselves as exclusively Taiwanese than those who self-identified as both Chinese and Taiwanese. It was during this period that becoming “Japanese” offered a window to complicate my understanding of Taiwan’s past and present, helping me rethink how the long-lasting colonial legacies situated in the formation of “Taiwan” and eventually making Taiwanese “Taiwanese.”
Notes: Wan-yao Chou’s 1991 dissertation “The Kōminka Movement: Taiwan under Wartime Japan, 1937-1945” (Yale University, 1991) is still regarded as an important literature for entering the topic of kōminka movement and Japanese colonialism in Taiwan; in another book chapter, she also discusses the kōminka movement from a Taiwan-Korea comparative perspective. See “The Kōminka Movement in Taiwan and Korea: Comparison and Interpretations” in The Japanese Wartime Empire, 1931-1945 (Princeton, 1996), 40-70, eds. Peter Duus, Raymon H. Myers, and Mark R. Peattie. Some of her studies on this topic were published in Chinese around the 2000s; these pieces can be seen in 周婉窈, 《臺灣史論集二：海行兮的年代》 (聯經, 2024).
Yu-Han Huang is currently a PhD candidate of history at the University of Toronto. His dissertation research focuses on the Cold War period in Taiwan and South Korea, with a specific concentration on the history of building materials, urbanity, and housing. He also studied the history of Japanese colonialism across Asia.
This article was published as part of the special issue on ‘Old Books in Taiwan Studies’.