Written by Anne Sokolsky.
Image credit: Huang Fengzi in Taiwan no shōjo / public domain.
Taiwan no shōjo (臺灣の少女 A Young Girl of Taiwan), written by Huang Fengzi 黃鳳姿(1928-?), was published in 1944 by the Taipei branch of the Japanese publishing house Taihoku tōto shoseki. The 236-page book is a collection of essays Huang wrote when she was 14. The significance of this work is that although Huang Fengzi was Taiwanese, she wrote in Japanese, which became the mandatory language of education during Japan’s rule of Taiwan from 1895 to 1945. Although on the surface her essays, which are mainly about Taiwanese folk customs and her family life, might seem simple, the importance of Huang’s words is that she provides insight into what it was like to live as a young Taiwanese girl in the colonised space of Taiwan, which by the 1940s was being used as the home front for Japan’s imperial war.
Not only does Huang Fengzi write about her house, her family, and her neighbourhood in Manka (艋舺), but she also writes about the impact on Taiwanese daily life of Japan’s war with other nations and her impressions of Japan when she visits the country on a school trip. The vocabulary she uses to situate her point of view is a colonial one. She refers to Japan as the naichi (内地, metropole) and to Taiwanese as hontōjin (本島人). She sees herself as part of the Japanese imperial orbit. Her national allegiance is to Japan. Yet interspersed among this colonial language is her pride in her local identity as a person from Manka, one of the oldest neighbourhoods in Taipei.
My house has been in Manka since way back when, it is very rundown, however, in the past it was one of the three major cities of Taiwan and was very prosperous…I am proud [ほこりに思つてゐます hokori ni omotte imasu] to have been born in Manka. I love Manka (艋舺がすきですManka ga suki desu). Now, through our strength (私たちの力で watashitachi no chikara de), I would like to make Manka an even more splendid place than it was in the past.
What is revealed in the above quote is that although Huang Fengzi is proud of her ties to this historic part of Taipei that predates Japan’s arrival in the country, she also acknowledges that the neighbourhood has become run-down. What is not clear is what she means by “our strength.” Is this an identification of the strength of “Taiwanese” only or the strength of “Taiwanese” under the leadership of the Japanese colonial government? What is the source of this strength? A Taiwanese essence or the influence of colonial administration?
This is just one example of the complex voice of Huang Fengzi, framed by the voices of two colonial men. The preface was written by Satō Haruo 佐藤春夫 (1892-1964), an influential man of letters at the time whose only visit to Taiwan in 1920 was documented in several essays he wrote later. The afterword was written by Ikeda Toshio 池田敏雄 (1916-1981), who was raised in Taiwan and later became the founder of Minzoku Taiwan 民族台湾 (1941-1945), a magazine whose aim was to document Taiwanese folk customs (for more about this journal, see Monuments of Culture: Minzoku Taiwan and the Search for Colonial History in Taiwan).
In my chapter published in Feeling Taiwan: Emotions in Everyday Politics, Social Movements, and Research Practices, I analyse the emotional words used by these three writers in Taiwan no shōjo. The theoretical framework for my analysis is Sara Ahmed’s idea that emotions can be political. In The Cultural Politics of Emotion, she examines not what emotions are but rather what they do. Specifically, she looks at “how emotions circulate between bodies”. She examines how such emotions ‘“stick” as well as move’ to form ‘surfaces of individual and collective bodies’ through the process of impressions, a word she notes has the root of ‘press’ in it (p. 1-6).
“We need to remember the ‘press’ in an impression. It allows us to associate the experience of having an emotion with the very affect of one surface upon another, an affect that leaves its mark or trace.” (p. 6) While her analysis focuses on the emotional language used in contemporary Britain to create an “Us” vs. “Them” narrative of British nationalism, in my chapter I apply her ideas to the way in which two Japanese men, Satō Haruo and Ikeda Toshio, and one young Taiwanese girl, Huang Fengzi, used their emotional impressions to navigate their relationship with each other through the text Taiwan no shōjo.
Emotionality, Ahmed argues, is a “claim about a subject or a collective” that is “clearly dependent on relations of power, which endow ‘others’ with meaning and value.” (p. 4) A similar scenario occurs in Taiwan no shōjo. The relations of power here are racial and gendered. Two Japanese men endow a young Taiwanese girl’s words with meaning and value, resulting in the text’s publication and circulation in the colonised space of Taiwan. In Taiwan no shōjo, there are two levels of impressions: the impressions by two men who are representatives of Japan’s colonial government and gatekeepers of colonial Taiwanese literature and the impressions of a young Taiwanese girl about her life in Taiwan and her visit to Japan (or the naichi).
While Satō Haruo and Ikeda Toshio express pleasure and surprise at Huang Fengzi’s beautiful use of Japanese, the emotions she presents range from pride in her Taiwanese culture, discomfort with adopting certain Japanese ways, to awe at staring at the Imperial Palace in Japan. By analysing the emotive words of these three people, I try to show the colonial complexity of this seemingly simple text that is one of the only records in Japanese of a young Taiwanese girl’s life in Japanese-ruled Taiwan in the 1940s.
Anne Sokolsky is a faculty member at Denison University where she teaches courses for the East Asian Studies, International Studies, and Women and Gender Studies programs. She is the author of From New Woman Writer to Socialist: The Life and Selected Writings of Tamura Toshiko from 1936–1938 (Brill, 2015) and Bold Breaks: Japanese Women and Literary Narratives of Divorce (University of Hawai’i Press, 2025). Sokolsky’s scholarship on colonial Japanese literature has been published in the U.S. Japan Women’s Journal and the Japan Studies Association Journal. Sokolsky is also the literature editor for the Journal of Japanese Language and Literature.
This article was published as part of the special issue on ‘Feeling Taiwan’.