Japan – Taiwan Insight

Two Bird’s-Eye Views: The Historical Interstices of WWII in Contemporary Taiwanese and Japanese Art

7 September 2026 Chee-Hann Wu

Written by Tsai Min-Ying. This article puts Taiwanese artist Li Li-chung and Japanese artist Kota Takeuchi in dialogue through their representations of WWII aerial warfare. The author reads their two video works side by side, revealing how artists from Taiwan and Japan each remember and reflect on war, contrasting a colonial view with an imperial view in their differing concerns about aerial warfare and challenging dominant historical narratives. Their nonhuman perspectives expose war’s perceptual violence while demonstrating art’s power to preserve memory and resist future violence.

Evading the Eye in the Sky: Beginning from the Window of a Wartime Photo Studio

4 September 2026 Chee-Hann Wu

Written by Tsai Min-Ying. This article examines how wartime air defence shaped Taiwan’s visual culture through a logic of self-concealment. The author traces works by Peng Ruey-lin, Chiu Tzu-Yen, and Huang Tonghong. She argues that colonial practices of hiding from aerial surveillance persist in contemporary art as a collective memory of war, survival, and identity.

An Old Book of Taiwan Studies: On Leo T.S. Ching, Becoming Japanese: Colonial Taiwan and the Politics of Identity Formation

19 May 2026 Chee-Hann Wu

Written by Yu-Han Huang. Reflecting on formative undergraduate experiences, the author traces how studying Japanese colonial Taiwan and reading Leo Ching’s Becoming “Japanese” shaped his academic path. Ching’s analysis of colonial identity formation, despite criticisms, offered a framework to understand Taiwan’s complex identity and revealed how colonial legacies continue to influence Taiwanese self-consciousness.

Old Books in Taiwan Studies: Chou Wanyao’s “The kōminka movement: Taiwan under wartime Japan, 1937-1945”

18 May 2026 Chee-Hann Wu

Written by Catherine Tsai. This article examines Chou Wan-yao’s study of kōminka policies in colonial Taiwan. The author argues that Chou’s work on the relationships between assimilation, identity formation, and wartime mobilisation has served as foundational to Taiwan-centred historiography in both Sinophone and Anglophone contexts.

Taiwanese Peace as a crucial engagement to advance decolonisation for Japan

15 April 2026 Adrian Chiu

Written by Yoshitaka Ota. This article argues that the first step toward contributing to Taiwanese peace is to stop creating a common enemy between Taiwan and Japan and to start taking Taiwanese agency seriously. Japan should also exercise its agency to recognise and depart from the permanence of coloniality, which continues to create China as a common enemy, rather than looking at itself as the enemy once.

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