History

On April 1, 1938, the photo journalist and travelogue writer Harrison Forman began a short tour of Taiwan. Only a few photographs from Forman’s excursion were published, as part of his 1940 Horizon Hunter: The Adventures of a Modern Marco Polo. Recently, however, over sixty additional photo negatives from this 1938 visit have been made available to researchers. Like the published photos, a great majority of Forman’s unpublished photographs were of Taiwan Indigenous Peoples. By 1938, wrote Forman, Taiwan had become a police state ruled by suspicion, secrecy, and fear. Nonetheless, the intrusive colonial state encouraged the production and dissemination of photographs of a certain type. This paper analyzes Forman’s unpublished travel notes and photographs, along with those of contemporary Western visitors to Taiwan, to ask why the Indigenous Territories, which had symbolized Japan’s shortcomings as a colonizer from the 1900s through the 1920s, had become the Government General’s preferred window upon the colony in the late 1930s.

Where are the mass-circulation photographs of floggings and cangues from colonial Taiwan? Since Taiwan's colonial subjects were actually flogged proportionately to Korea’s (where such imagery flourished), this discrepancy requires explanation. This essay brings a visual studies approach to debates about judicial flogging in the Japanese empire. It also tackles the thorny issue of Japanese imperialism considered as a "mimetic" enterprise.

The 1874 Japanese expedition to Taiwan generated a great deal of media excitement in early Meiji-period Japan. Woodblock prints, kawaraban [tile-block prints], war correspondence, editorials, and maps of Taiwan, its inhabitants, and the Japanese troops circulated throughout Japan at this time. These texts and images set the tone for popular conceptions of Japan’s relationship to Taiwan as well as the young empire’s place in the world at a crucial historical juncture. In addition to these paper-based media, stone monuments, battlefield relics, and preserved mementos from diplomatic exchanges also became subject to Japanese public consumption, either as exhibited items, sites of pilgrimage, or photographed objects. In fact, by the early twentieth century, Japanese publications about the events surrounding the 1874 invasion showed a marked preference for photographs of relics, landscapes, and monuments over the drawings, paintings, and sketches that proliferated in the 1870s. This essay explains how these various objects and landscapes were brought into play as symbols, and how they have been repurposed in accord with a number of viewpoints and subject positions from early 1900s through 2015.

A century before the Internet era, anthropometric photo graphs of an Atayal woman named Paazeh Naheh (ca. 1880–ca. 1910) went viral. From 1903 through the 1920s, her image was propagated via several forms of mass media, including picture postcards, international exposition displays, magic lantern slides, photo albums, geography textbooks, and newspaper file photos. Her image most commonly appeared in the form of “race cards”—picture postcards that feature anthropometric photographs. Race cards were much more than the exemplars of asymmetrical power relations, mimetic imperialism, and ruthless essentialism they appear to be at first sight. The evidence discussed below suggests that, in early twentieth- century Taiwan, race cards functioned as what W. J. T. Mitchell has described as the “shape- shifting jokers.” Through the artifices of captioning, cropping, and framing, publishers created race cards that indeed dehumanized their subjects, as the literature on anthropometric photography and imperialism would predict. Nonetheless, the original photo graphs were not an attempt at dehumanization. They were made by ethnographers and tourism- industry photographers to counter the idea that Taiwan indigenous peoples were savages who could be killed off with impunity. The state may have had genocidal intentions, but these race cards proposed an alternative vision of the place of indigenous peoples within Japan’s first formal colony.

1903 年から1920 年代までの間にハゼヘ・ワタンと呼ばれた女性の肖像写真が様々な媒体を通して広がった。おそらくその画像は、明治時代の日本で一番よく知れ渡った台湾原住民の肖像だと考えられる。何故ハゼヘ・ワタンの肖像がそんなに目立ったのか、という謎がこの論文の課題である。一番重要な理由は、その流通のタイミングであった。1903 年1 月頃、台湾総督府の樟脳専売局に関する活動の影響で日本政府と「屈尺蕃」の有力者との関係が親密になった。その状況の下で初期の人類学者森丑之助は、1903 年2 月に、ウライ社の頭目の娘ハゼへ・ワタンを撮影した。その直後、ハゼへ･ワタンと他の「屈尺蕃」の複製し易い大型写真が1903 年の大阪内国勧業博覧会と1904 年のセントルイスの万国博覧会に展示された。1904 年9 月からの日露戦争の記念絵葉書ブームに便乗した台湾総督府は、1905 年6 月に最初の記念絵葉書セットを発行した。1904 年から1920 年までの「絵葉書全盛期」に屈尺の方面で森が撮影した人々は、日本人とアメリカ人にとっては代表的なタイヤル族の画像になったのである。

As a non-Western example that straddles the early-modern and modern periods, the case of interethnic marriage in Taiwan under Japanese colonial rule takes on special significance. Resembling the Senegalese, Five Civilized Nations, and Sumatran examples cited above, interethnic marriages in Taiwan served a number of political and commercial functions in the early modern era. When Han Chinese immigration began to overwhelm Aborigine communities in the eighteenth century, however, instances of abuse became prominent. Conforming to the larger pattern, Han-
Aborigine unions eventually earned the opprobrium of Qing elites who feared the destabilizing consequences of Chinese settler marriages into Aborigine families and
polities. This cycle would repeat itself under Japanese colonial rule but with an interesting twist. Marriage between Japanese colonists and Aborigine women did not fade from the scene as an early modern marchland became a colonized territory—nor did these unions provoke official horror over the security ramifications and image problems associated with mixed progeny and men “gone native.” Instead, the government-general embraced interethnic marriage as a solution to the problem of “Aborigine administration” in Taiwan’s rugged mountain interior, where armed resistance to Japanese rule simmered well into the 1910s.

From the 1870s, agents of Japanese southward expansion recorded numerous instances of participation in alcohol-centered exchanges in Taiwan's interior. For foreigners entering the camphor-rich highlands of treaty-port Taiwan, sharing cups and providing gifts of distilled spirits were prerequisites of trade and diplomacy. Following the annexation of Taiwan in 1895, Japanese officials feasted prospective Aborigine allies with liquor and food to secure allegiance to the colonial government. By century's turn, however, this strategy came into conflict with the financial imperatives of making Taiwan into a putatively modern colony. A general, colony-wide pattern emerges from the state-sponsored ethnographic records investigated herein. From the view of Japanese officialdom,Taiwan Aborigines ceased to be allies or foes to be negotiated with over ladles of fermented potables, instead becoming troublesome subjects who were nonetheless ethnologically interesting for their variety of locally brewed beverages and consumption rituals. In the end, officials and publicists regarded the Aborigines as impoverished primitives whose drinking habits held them back from making economic progress.This essay elucidates a long-term dynamic in the history of empire while describing something of how colonialism was experienced by those at the far periphery of Greater Japan in the early twentieth century.

This comparative study of the so-called "Igorot Problem" (head-hunting) in Japanese colonized Taiwan and U.S. colonized Philippine islands argues that the a controlled comparison of the two cases reveals a similar array of ideals and attitudes towards imperial mission between Japan and the U.S. Different outcomes in the implementation of these ideals were due to the different resource endowments and terrains of the two colonies, not the national character of the respective colonizing powers.

When Japan joined the late nineteenth-century “scramble for colonies” by annexing Taiwan in 1895, the perceived urgency of “civilizing its natives” prompted questions about the nature of “civilization” itself. How could the Japanese, who had for centuries considered China to be civilization’s very fountainhead, “civilize” an island largely populated by Chinese immigrants and their descendents? The writings of Inō Kanori (1867–1925) can be viewed as an attempt to resolve this dilemma. In his ethnology, Inō adopted the Middle Kingdom view of “civilization” as
“conformity to Chinese customs and obedience to the Qing”. In his historical writing, however, Inō regarded the custodians of Chinese civilization, the Qing dynasts, as “backward” for failing to prosecute a “civilizing mission” among the island’s non-Han indigenes. In both historical and ethnological modalities, Inō conceptualized Taiwan Aborigines as losers against the Han Chinese in a centuries-long “struggle for survival”, thereby accusing the Qing of neglect, while portraying the Japanese as guardians and enlighteners of the Aborigines. By invoking an EuroAmerican “civilizing mission” discourse, Inō argued that Japan’s Aborigine policy, by contrast to the Qing’s, confirmed its place among the civilized and modern colonizing powers.

The current era of globalization began in 1415 with the Portuguese conquest of Ceuta (off the coast of Morocco), the first enduring overseas European colony. In subsequent centuries, Anglo-Europeans and Japanese managed to control, at various times, virtually the entire inhabitable planet. Only a few nations escaped direct control of these colonial powers. None escaped their spheres of influence.