Article #5 in A Seven-Article Series >>>>> An Overview of the History of Taiwan: The Case for Independence

The Japanese Period of Rule, 1895-1945

Qing rulers were loath to give up the Liaodong Peninsula of Manchuria, and they were humiliated by the indemnity provisions of the treaty, but they relinquished Taiwan with a notable lack of protest.

 

The Taiwanese themselves, though, put up a stiff resistance against the occupation of their island by the latest outside claimant.  On 25 May 1895 (38 days after the signing of the Treaty of Shimonoseki) one Tang Jingsong declared himself President of the new Republic.of Taiwan.  Tang, whose base was in northern Taiwan around Taibei, gave recognition as vice president to a notable figure from the Taizhong area by the name of Qiu Fengjia.  And Lin Yongfu, leader of a group in the Tainan area known as the Black Flag Militia, was declared head of the military forces of the fledging republic.  But Japanese forces soon landed near Jilong, then more came ashore at Lugang (on the west coast), and by 7 June Japanese troops occupied Taibei.  By this time Tang Jingsong had already escaped aboard a British ship bound for Xiamen, and within a few days Qiu Fengjia followed suit.  Lin Yongfu, meanwhile, put up quite a fight, keeping the Japanese well occupied in an effort to secure the southern part of the island until 19 October 1895, at which time Lin did make his own exit.  This ended the effort to establish a new and independent government headed by Taiwanese people, but anti-Japanese resistance continued for many years.  By 1903, 20,000 Taiwanese and 5,300 Japanese people had lost their lives in the violent conflict that accompanied Japanese seizure of the island.  Not until 1902 did violent protest across Taiwan substantially subside;  scattered protest would continue throughout the Japanese tenure of control on Taiwan, but for the most part the colonial overlords were able at this point to proceed with their policy initiatives without fear of serious sustained violence.

 

Those initiatives revealed the Japanese to be ruthless, predictable, enormously skillful rulers who adeptly extracted the agricultural, forest, and mineral wealth of Taiwan while introducing significant elements of modernity to much of the Taiwanese populace.  Under the vigorous Governor General Kodama Gentaro and his civil administrator Goto Shimpei, extensive geological, demographic, and cultivated land surveys went forward.  The colonial regime simplified the land tenure system, doubled cultivated land subject to taxation, and expanded the value of taxes collected on agricultural production four-fold.  Other highly effective resource extraction devices were put in place, including government monopolies on opium, salt, camphor, and tobacco;  savings accounts located conveniently at postal centers;  and excise taxes on various goods consumed out of addiction, habit, or luxury.

 

The Japanese brought a level of efficiency and completeness of control to the governance of Taiwan that the island’s people had never before witnessed.  The presence of the colonial administration was exerted at the highest level in provinces (shu) centered on the key cities of Taibei, Jilong, Taizhong, Tainan, and Gaoxiong.  And that control reached right down through other sizable municipalities (shi), counties (gun), townships (gai), and subtownships (ku), all the way into the island’s villages (sho). Eighty-seven branch Agricultural Associations connected administratively to the Central Agricultural Research Institute in Taibei served efficiently to disseminate the latest agricultural initiatives, even as they served as additional mechanisms of imperial control.  The two functions could be seen in finely tuned coalescence when the imperial administration decided in the 5 May 1926 Japanese Rice and Grain Conference to speed dissemination of the ponlai rice strain, preferable to the Japanese by comparison to the traditional Taiwanese zailai strain.  From just 400 hectares in 1922, cultivated land given to ponlai increased to 139,000 hectares by 1928 and to 400,000 hectares in 1944.[vi]  The Japanese superintended the world’s first Green Revolution through advancing new high-yielding strains of rice and sugar, and by erecting an island-wide network of irrigation systems, many of them benefiting from highly sophisticated engineering feats represented quintessentially by the Taoyuan (completed in 1928) and the Jianan (completed in 1932) dam and reservoirs.

 

The great bulk of the Taiwanese population, its farmers, were subject to a high level of economic exploitation under the imperialist regime, but health and sanitation improved greatly and, accordingly, the incidence of dread diseases such as cholera, small pox, and bubonic plague radically diminished.  The Japanese also encouraged a minimal literacy for the general population and in 1943 made school attendance through the third grade mandatory.  In 1904 only 3.8% of the Taiwanese populace attended any kind of school.  By 1917 that figure had risen to 13.1% and continued to grow steadily until in 1943 the percentage of school-age children in attendance for academic instruction had increased to 71.3%.

 

The Taiwanese elite enjoyed more benefits from the Japanese administration, tapped as they were for key civil service posts and able increasingly as the Japanese tenure moved toward the 1930s to place their children in middle schools, Taiwan Imperial University in Taibei, and in a number of universities in Japan.   Travel and study in Japan came much into vogue for the Taiwanese elite.  By 1922, 2,400 Taiwanese students were matriculating at universities in Japan, and by 1942 that figure had increased about 150% to 7,000.  And by 1945, the year that the Japanese had to make their exit from Taiwan, 30,000 Taiwanese were living in Japan.

 

The years 1915-1930 featured a relative relaxation of authoritarian control by the imperialist regime on Taiwan.  In this atmosphere, Taiwan’s educated populace exerted vigorous efforts to gain greater political autonomy.  These efforts mostly focused upon gaining greater participation within the context of continuing control by the Japanese imperial administration.  In 1923, members of the restive and politically aware middle class formed the League for the Establishment of a Taiwanese Parliament (1923).  When their remonstrations gained little result, many members of this organization became more radical, moving toward a stance of demand for independence.  This engendered a breakaway organization, the Taiwanese Federation for Local Autonomy, formed by those who continued to hold a moderate position.  But members of this organization themselves eventually moved leftward, precipitating the formation of the conservative Taiwanese Federation for Local Autonomy by those who felt that as a practical matter, and in line with the loyalty that many members of the Taiwanese elite had developed toward the Japanese regime, autonomy within the Japanese Empire was the better way to go.

 

During the same years when this lively political discussion ensued, Taiwan’s writers engaged in vigorous debates of their own.  Writers stepped forward to argue for a literature that used modern expressions and explored current themes focused on issues of genuine interest to the Taiwanese population.  This sort of appeal was similar to the baihua (ordinary speech) movement in China and surfaced during the “New versus Old Debate” (xinjiu wenhua lunzhan) of 1924-1926.  In 1931-1932 came the Nativist Literary Debate” (xiangtu wenxue lunzhan) in which several prominent writers attempted to advance the Minnan dialect as the means for literary expression.  But in the course of the 1930s it became clear that the main language for literary work would in fact be Japanese.  Most writers by this time had been educated primarily in the Japanese language and used it, even when voicing anti-imperialist sentiment, exploring themes pertinent to the lives as lived by people on Taiwan, and advancing issues of interest to the Taiwanese populace in publications such as the Taiwanese People’s Newspaper (Taiwan minbao).

 

As Japanese armies spread down the coast of China from 1937 forward;  then occupied Canton (1938), Hainan (1939), Luzon (1942), and through Southeast Asia to the Burma-India border, a more thoroughly militarized style of governance had great impact on Taiwan.  Taiwan became a major industrial center for processing bauxite, iron ore, crude oil, and rubber from Malaya and Indonesia.  Harbors in Jilong and Gaoxiong were improved and other seaports identified for receiving and shipping critical wartime goods.  Transportation networks became more elaborate, mines and industries received technological upgrades, massive new hydroelectric installations were built, and ever more sophisticated financial institutions were created for investment in all of this activity in Taiwan, with the Japanese zaibatsu taking a key role.  The Japanese took firm control of the Taiwan Strait in 1940, and Governor General Hasegawa Kiyoshi became a point man in establishing the Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere (Tai Toa Kyoeiken).  This Japanese imperialist thrust came with energetic propaganda efforts through the Imperialization Movement (kominka) on Taiwan that sought to give the Taiwanese people a vision of greatness as residents within Greater Japan.  By 1945, 80,433 Taiwanese servicemen had contributed to the Japanese war effort, as had 126,750 civil employees.

 

The enormously formative period of modern Taiwanese history under Japanese authority came to an end in September 1945 with the Japanese concession of defeat in World War II.  By October, yet another outside governing authority claimed power on Taiwan.  This was the Nationalist regime of the Guomindang, which was poised to experience defeat by the Chinese Communists in the course of the 1945-1949 Chinese Civil War.