Building and Fracturing the Local: Identities in Japanese-Era Urban Taiwan, 1910–37

The structural and social contexts of Japanese rule in Taiwan provided the settings for the construction and modification of multiple identities. Cut off from the immediate influence of the Chinese state and society via the Treaty of Shimonoseki, Taiwan and its residents addressed Japanese colonization with multiple forms of resistance and accommodation, but first and foremost as a reality that they could not avoid. Adapting to their new context promoted shifts in several layers of nested identities. Most prominent, in both the history and historiography, were the national and ethnic identities, the manifestations of Taiwanese consciousness, that emerged during the 1920s and 1930s. No less significant were local identities tied to particular sites of residence, which served as important precursors and/or facilitators for these more expansive regional identities.

A central factor in the construction of local identities was the urbanization promoted by colonial policies that advanced the physical and economic development of what became Taiwan’s major cities. In these locales, and especially in the northern port city of Jilong, groups of Japanese settlers joined with native elites in expressing a civic ethos and developing new local, urban identities. This paper will explore the ways in which Taiwanese and Japanese created a Jilong identity that brought them together in the service of the city and themselves, but which was also fundamentally bifurcated in ways that drove these groups apart and accentuated their respective, and less compatible, group identities. It will do so through an examination of local social organizations and a vibrant local history movement, both of which flourished during the middle decades of Japanese rule.