Article #3
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.[i] 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.
