Doka, Kominka, and Colonial Identity The year 1919 witnessed a turning point in the Japanese colonial policies on its formal colonies, Korea and Taiwan. It was at the apex of Woodrow Wilson’s call for national self-determination that several national independence movements were seen in colonies around the world, among which the March 1 Independent movement in Korea was one of the most fierce and brutal. Although the nature of colonialism in Korea remained the same, the propaganda was indeed changed, if only superficially, by calling for the unity of the Japan metropole and Korea colony as naisei ittai. In the case of Taiwan, the colonial policy also became assimilation-oriented, seen in the abolition of segregated educational system and
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Fong’s binary perspective in asserting the intellectuals’ embracing Japanese identity and their unaffected underclass counterparts in kominka literature suffers the oversight of reducing literature to a mere medium of political or moral judgment “according to the manner in which certain identities are either confirmed or refuted.” On the other hand, in interpreting Wu Zhuoliu’s The Orphan of Asia, which Fong curiously leaves out from his discussion of literature of the 1930s colonial Taiwan, Ching refuses to make a dichotomous interpretation and regards “identity struggle as a historically colonial condition.” The identity struggle of the protagonist, Hu Taiming, actually implies the formation of consciousness against the backdrop of the kominka movement that conditioned colonial subjectivities and …show more content…
As elaborated in depth by the authors reviewed, it is revealed that the discussion of such identity cannot be separated from how Japanese colonialism worked and how the continuity and discontinuity of today is conditioned by the history that formed the identity. By combining the institutional and ideological perspectives in colonial administration, identity of the colonial subjects is seen unstable and requires constant negotiation because of the macro-politics of the empire. The emergence of Taiwanese identity and its tension with Chinese identity is complicated and circumscribed by the colonial condition in the 1920s and 1930s. Colonial legacy is detected in today’s Taiwanese identity in various discourses of nationalism and its content as well as history have been reinvented and redefined for different purposes. On the issue of colonial legacy, it would be interesting to complement the discussion by a more systematic study that historicizes the transformation in the post-war period, for example, through a study that combines both hard facts and literary representations. By doing so, hopefully, the conundrum of Taiwanese identity could be solved in the near future.
Fong’s binary perspective in asserting the intellectuals’ embracing Japanese identity and their unaffected underclass counterparts in kominka literature suffers the oversight of reducing literature to a mere medium of political or moral judgment “according to the manner in which certain identities are either confirmed or refuted.” On the other hand, in interpreting Wu Zhuoliu’s The Orphan of Asia, which Fong curiously leaves out from his discussion of literature of the 1930s colonial Taiwan, Ching refuses to make a dichotomous interpretation and regards “identity struggle as a historically colonial condition.” The identity struggle of the protagonist, Hu Taiming, actually implies the formation of consciousness against the backdrop of the kominka movement that conditioned colonial subjectivities and …show more content…
As elaborated in depth by the authors reviewed, it is revealed that the discussion of such identity cannot be separated from how Japanese colonialism worked and how the continuity and discontinuity of today is conditioned by the history that formed the identity. By combining the institutional and ideological perspectives in colonial administration, identity of the colonial subjects is seen unstable and requires constant negotiation because of the macro-politics of the empire. The emergence of Taiwanese identity and its tension with Chinese identity is complicated and circumscribed by the colonial condition in the 1920s and 1930s. Colonial legacy is detected in today’s Taiwanese identity in various discourses of nationalism and its content as well as history have been reinvented and redefined for different purposes. On the issue of colonial legacy, it would be interesting to complement the discussion by a more systematic study that historicizes the transformation in the post-war period, for example, through a study that combines both hard facts and literary representations. By doing so, hopefully, the conundrum of Taiwanese identity could be solved in the near future.