Outcasts of Empire

Front matter

PAUL D. BARCLAY

JAPAN'S RULE ON TAIWAN'S “SAVAGE BORDER,” 1874-1945

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Part One. The Anatomy Of A Rebellion

1. From Wet Diplomacy to Scorched Earth: The Taiwan Expedition, the Guardline, and the Wushe Rebellion 43

2. The Longue Durée and the Short Circuit: Gender, Language, and Territory in the Making of Indigenous Taiwan 114

Part Two. Indigenous Modernity

3. Tangled Up in Red: Textiles, Trading Posts, and Ethnic Bifurcation in Taiwan 161

4. The Geobodies within a Geobody: The Visual Economy of Race

Making and Indigeneity 190 Notes 251 Glossary 293

PB he

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS AND TABLES

FIGURES

Japanese colonial-period ethnonyms for Taiwan Indigenous Peoples 9 Ino Kanori’s ethnic map, 1898 10

Picture postcard map of Taiwan’s ethnic bifurcation, ca. 1904 34

Two Atayal men engaged in “conjoined drinking,” near Wulai, Taiwan, ca.1900 45

Scorched earth guardline, ca. 1910 47

Surrendered Atayal at a stopover in Jiaobanshan, ca.1910 48

Weapons captured from Atayal peoples, ca.1910 49

Saigo Tsugumichi, Japanese soldiers, Paiwan headmen, and the interpreter Johnson, 1874 72

A certificate attesting submission to the Japanese Expeditionary Forces, 1874 73

. Relics preserved from the 1874 expedition, ca.1910 74 . Bottle and can from the meeting at Dakekan, 1895 84

The Linyipu District Administrative Office, 1898 92

. Gantaban men with severed heads, 1903 97

Guards warn of the approach of hostile forces, ca. 1910 107

. Cutting trees to build the scorched-earth barricades, ca. 1910 108 . Thelarge Taiwanese labor force, during construction of the aiyüsen, ca.1910 108 Porters hauling food and water for the guardline expeditionary troops, Cà.1910 109

. Watan Yura, ca. 1900 123

X

30. 31.

32. 33. 34- 35. 36.

38. 39. 40.

41. 42. 43. 44.

45. 46.

48. 49. 50. 51.

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS AND TABLES

Watan Yura, Koan, Aki, and Pazzeh Watan, 1903 124

Kondo “the Barbarian” Katsusaburo, ca.1910 130

Quchi-area residents posing with flag, ca. 1897 132

Kondo Gisaburo with Truku peoples, January 1915 137

Tata Rara with Japanese interpreter Nakamura Yusuke, 1896 143

Tata Rara with her Puyuma militia, 1896 144

Pan Bunkiet, ca. 1900 145

The Wulai School for Indigenous Children, ca. 1910 150

Jiaobanshan model school for indigenous children, ca. 1930 153

Atayal textiles from Japanese ethnological survey, ca. 1915 170

A diorama from the 1913 Osaka Colonial Exhibition with Atayal red-striped capes 171

Trading post at Jiaobanshan, ca. 1913 177

Atayal women wearing imported clothing and weaving traditional clothing, 1936 186

Map of Taiwan, 1895 193

Japanese census map, 1905 193

Ethnic map of Taiwan, ca. 1912. 193

An anthropology journal sketch of Watan Nawi, 1895 200

Jiaobanshan emissaries and Governor-General Kabayama as depicted in Füzoku gaho, 1895 201

Photograph of the Jiaobanshan emissaries and Japanese officials in Taipei, 1895 202

Photograph of Habairon, Motonaiban, and Washiiga, 1895 203 Ethnographic drawing of Habairon, Motonaiban, and Washiiga, 1896 204 Photograph of Habairon, Motonaiban, Ira Watan, Marai, Pu Chin, and Washiiga,1895 206

Textbook etching of Jiaobanshan emissaries, 1897 207

Jiaobanshan emissaries in fanciful setting, ca. 1900 208

Photo of Jiaobanshan emissaries in Western press, 1902 209

Etching of Sediq woman and Paalan headman in Ministry of Education textbook, 1904 210

Photograph of Sediq woman and Paalan headman, ca. 1897 210 Etching of Sediq woman and Paalan headman in commercial textbook, 1908 210

Photograph of Mori Ushinosuke, Japanese officers, and Truku headmen, 1910 220

Official commemorative postcard depicting indigenous customs, 1911 224 Men and women along the Quchi guardline, ca. 1904 226

Japan's Atayal allies along the Quchi guardline, ca. 1904 227

Dynamic and static maps of Taiwan ethnic diversity, 1912 231

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS AND TABLES xi

. Jiaobanshan as staging area for Gaogan offensives, ca.1910 234

Jiaobanshan woman with basket and pipe, ca.1930 237 Postcard sleeve, "Jiaobanshan's hidden savage border? ca. 1930 238

. Couple in Jiaobanshan, ca. 1930 238

Mountains of Jiaobanshan, ca. 1930 239 Contrasting photos of Jiaobanshan and Paalan, 1935 240

. Second-order geobody of Atayal 241

. Marai and Yügai of Rimogan, ca.1903 242

. Wulai dwelling and granary, ca.1903 243

. Yugai and Marai in textbook illustration, 1919 243

MAPS

The major indigenous ethnic groups of northern Taiwan 7

Overview of the major indigenous ethnic groups of Taiwan as portrayed in Japanese-period maps, ca. 1935 8

Taiwan, the Ryükyü Islands, the Langqiao Peninsula, Mudan, and Satsuma, in East Asia 51

. The Langgiao Peninsula, ca. 1874 53

Administrative centers, contact zones, and political boundaries in Taiwan,

1874-1945 58 Dakekan, Jiaobanshan, Quchi, Wulai, and Rimogan, ca. 1910 80

TABLES

Military encounters between the colonial government and Taiwan aborigines, 1896-1909 100 Sources of revenue for the colonial administration, 1897-1907 101

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The research for this book began in an undergraduate seminar room, decades ago. Since then, I have racked up a record of personal and scholarly debts disproportionate to the modest results achieved. These begin with my history professors at the University of Wisconsin, Alfred McCoy, Kathryn Green, Jean Boydston, John Sharpless, Kenneth Sacks, and Jiirgen Herbst. Thanks, Al, for encouraging me to think big.

Several mentors who became friends at the University of Minnesota shaped this project and have earned my eternal gratitude. Advisors Byron K. Marshall and David W. Noble steered a comparative dissertation project to completion and spent countless hours counseling me on matters profound and trivial. Ann Waltner, Ted Farmer, Jeani O'Brien, Steven Ruggles, David Lipset, Russ Menard, Jennifer Downs, Chris Isett, and Wang Liping were all generous with their time, energy, and ideas. My fellow graduate students Sean Condon, Yonglin Jiang, Joe Dennis, Yuichiro Onishi, David Hacker, David Ryden, Matthew Mulcahy, Rachel Martin, Jennifer Spear, Jennifer Turnham, Martin Winchester, and Jon Davidann were the best classmates and extended family a graduate student could hope for. Jeff Sommers is a permanent friend and colleague from before and after graduate school; his outlook and insight have shaped this book profoundly.

Indulgent hosts, true friends, and brilliant associates have promoted my research in Japan. First and foremost, Vicky Muehleisen, Yamamoto Masashi, and Jerome Young put me up in Tokyo more times than I can recall. Fumu Susumu at Kyoto University and Sasaki Takashi at Doshisha University sponsored my early research and opened their doors and offices to a neophyte. Arisue Ken at Keio xiii xiv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

University hosted me for a year of sabbatical research at Keio University and took the time to introduce me to everyone who was anyone in my area of research.

I emphatically thank Professor Kishi Toshihiko at the Center for Integrated Area Studies at Kyoto University for a residency, his friendship and guidance, myriad introductions, field trips, and workshops. Without Kishi-sensei’s enthusiastic support, this book could not have been completed. Thanks to Professor Hara Shoichiro, director of the center, for making CIAS like a home away from home.

My research in Taiwan has been utterly dependent upon the friendship and assistance of several scholars and friends. University of Minnesota classmate Peter Kang (Kang Pei-te) has hosted me, shown me around, and provided the foundation for my investigations. Chen Wei-chi (Tan Uiti) and Chang Lung-chih have been superb teachers, comrades, and loyal supporters from the start. John Shufelt is a true friend, intellectual compatriot, host, and fellow explorer of Hengchun Peninsula. Douglas Fix is an indispensable mentor and model friend; Doug has forgotten more than TI ever know about Taiwan. Caroline Hui-yu Tsai has written the most incisive and thoroughly researched institutional, legal, and cultural history of Japanese rule in Taiwan; more than that, she took great pains to host me at Academia Sinicas Institute for Taiwan History to finish research for this book. Paul Katz is a master of Taiwanese social history and religious studies and an endless supplier of shipped documents, connectivity, and nomunication. Professor Clare Huang (Huang Chih-huei) has taken me to field sites, introduced me to graduate students, patiently explained the nuances of the difficult postcolonial situation in Taiwan, and shared rare historical materials; she has changed the course of this research for the better. I also thank anthropologists of Taiwan Hu Chia-yu, Kuan Da-wei, Fred Chiu, Kerim Friedman, Scott Simon, Wang Peng-hui, Aho Batu, and Geoffrey Voorhees for camaraderie, mentorship, and vast repositories of knowledge. Wu Micha, Wang Ying-fen, Sandra Jiang, Lin Maleveleve, and Yayut Chen have extended many courtesies and made this project fun. Chen Yi-fang ofthe Puli Municipal Library opened new doors and contributed wisdom, energy, and enthusiasm.

From the Shung Ye Japanese Research Group on Indigenous Peoples of Taiwan, anthropologist, historian of colonial ethnography, and über-senpai Kasahara Masaharu has inspired, mentored, and supported my work for two decades. Thank you so much, Kasahara-sensei! I also thank Nobayashi Atsushi for hosting me at the National Ethnological Museum in Osaka and trying to keep me in the loop. Professors Shimizu Jun, Miyaoka Maoko, Ohama Ikuko, Yamamoto Yoshimi, and Tsuchida Shigeru have shared their networks, knowledge, and research in the true spirit of collegiality. Nagasako Minako at the Gakushüin Daigaku Archives provided access to collections and bibliographic support.

Thank you very much to Julia Adeney Thomas, Kirsten Ziomek, Janice Matsumura, Prasenjit Duara, Dennis Washburn, Chris Hanscom, Murray Rubinstein, Andrew Morris, Kenneth Ruoff, Hyung Il Pai, Rob Tierney, Alexis

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS KV

My colleagues in the History Department at Lafayette College have been there for me in numerous ways over many years. Special thanks to Tammy Yeakel, Deborah Rosen, Josh Sanborn, Rebekah Pite, DC Jackson, Bob Weiner, Don Miller, Andrew Fix, Rachel Goshgarian, Jeremy Zallen, and Christopher Lee for intellectual community and a place to call home. I thank my Asian Studies Program compatriots: Seo-Hyun Park for brainstorms and crucial bibliography, and Li Yang, Robin Rinehart, Ingrid Furniss, Il Hyun Cho, and David Stifel for their intellectual companionship and ongoing commitment to my professional and personal development.

I am fortunate to have accomplished and unselfish colleagues in anthropology at Lafayette College. Thanks, Andrea Smith, Bill Bissell, Wendy Wilson-Fall, and Rob Blunt, for not allowing me to caricature your discipline. EXCEL Scholars Wu Haotian, Linda Yu, Li Guo, Sun Xiaofei, Sharon Chen, and Ning Jing have compiled tables, abstracted articles, and translated Chinese-language and French documents into English for me over the years.

Digital Scholarship Services colleagues Eric Luhrs, Paul Miller, Charlotte Nunes, James Griffin III, John Clark, and Michaela Kelly have built databases, constructed maps, captured images, hosted workshops, and provided more support than could be reasonably expected. John Clark created the six beautiful maps for this book. Neil McElroy, Diane Shaw, Elaine Stomber, Terese Heidenwolf, Lijuan Xu, Pam Murray, and Karen Haduck at Skillman Library unstintingly supported this project with access to funds, images, texts, databases, and interlibrary loan materials, not to mention accessioning and processing all manner of ephemera and curios. They have spoiled me rotten.

Matsuda Kyoko’s pioneering research in the history of Japan’s colonial anthropology in Taiwan has been an inspiration. I am also heavily indebted to Kitamura Kae, Kondo Masami, Kojima Rei'itsu, Matsuoka Tadasu, Yamaji Katsuhiko, and Matsuda Yoshiro for conceptualizing and documenting the history of indigenous- Japanese relations with admirable depth, nuance, and creativity. These scholars have set a high standard for this field. In addition, Chou Wan-yao, Wu Rwei-ren, Ka Chih-ming, Wang Tay-sheng, and Yao Jen-to have produced masterworks in the historical sociology of Taiwan; even where I’ve neglected to cite them, their ideas permeate this book.

Thanks to Donald and Michiko Rupnow for the picture postcard that adorns the cover of this book, and for supporting this research with other rare and wonderful images. Michael Lewis, Elizabeth and Anne Warner, Richard Mammana, xvi ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Lin Shuchin, and David Woodsworth have kindly donated, lent, or provided access to their private collections. Without their generosity and public-spiritedness, this book would not have been possible.

Sections of “Gaining Trust and Friendship in Aborigine Country: Diplomacy, Drinking, and Debauchery on Japans Southern Frontier,’ Social Science Japan Journal 6, no. 1 (April 2003): 77-96, appear in chapter 1; "Cultural Brokerage and Interethnic Marriage in Colonial Taiwan: Japanese Subalterns and Their Aborigine Wives, 1895-1930, Journal of Asian Studies 64, no. 2 (May 2005): 323-60, in chapter 2; "Tangled Up in Red: Textiles, Trading Posts, and the Emergence of Indigenous Modernity in Japanese Taiwan; in Andrew Morris, ed., Japanese Taiwan: Colonial Rule and Its Contested Legacy (London and New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2015), 49-74, in chapter 3; and "Playing the Race Card in Japanese-Governed Taiwan, or: Anthropometric Photographs as ‘Shape-Shifting Jokers;" in Christopher Hanscom and Dennis Washburn, eds., The Affect of Difference: Representations of Race in East Asian Empire (Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2016), 38-80, in chapter 4. The editors and readers of these pieces offered valuable advice and suggestions.

Research for this book was funded by fellowships from the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Taiwan Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Lafayette College Provost's Office, and the Andrew Mellon Foundation. The Friends of Skillman Library and the Lafayette College Academic Research Committee generously supported the publication of this book.

Thank you, Asia Pacific Modern series editor Tak Fujitani and Professor Jordan Sand of Georgetown University, for encouraging me to write a book. Tak offered counsel, advice, and support and deserves many thanks for reading this manuscript in its entirety, and parts of it repeatedly. Jordan has been an unselfish mentor and colleague. The book was improved thanks to their kind attention. Any errors of fact and interpretation that remain, despite all of this help, are wholly my own.

At University of California Press, senior editor Reed Malcolm and production coordinator Zuha Khan are amazing. Thanks for your timely responses to queries large and small! Jody Hanson designed the beautiful cover for this book, providing a much-needed lift as I came down the homestretch. Also, my heartfelt thanks to copy editor Erica Soon Olsen and production editor Francisco Reinking for their heroic labors in seeing this project through to completion.

Finally, my parents, David and Mary Barclay; Keiko Ikegami; and dearly departed Papa Ikegami cannot know the depth of my gratitude. Uncle Bill, Uncle Akita, brother John, and sister Barbara, thank you so much for a lifetime of inspiration and always being there.

I dedicate this book to my wife, Naoko. She and our daughter, Megumi, have lived this project without complaint and have supported it in more ways than can be expressed in writing.

NOTE ON TRANSLITERATION AND TRANSLATION

Japanese-language words in the text are transliterated in the modified Hepburn system, except for the place-names Tokyo and Osaka. The default system for Chinese-language words is Hanyu Pinyin. However, Taiwanese personal and place-names that are commonly transliterated in Wade-Giles or other non-Pinyin systems have been left as I have found them. There is no standard system for transliterating Austronesian personal names. Where possible, I have followed usage from Chou Wan-yaos New Illustrated History of Taiwan. Korean words are romanized in the reformed system. The McCune-Reischauer system is used for names of authors and publications that are cataloged under this system.

All translations from Japanese sources are by the author unless otherwise indicated. Chinese translations are the author's adaptations of translations by research assistants Wu Haotian, Linda Yu, Li Guo, Sun Xiaofei, and Ning Jing.

xvii

Introduction

Empires and Indigenous Peoples, Global Transformation and the Limits of International Society

PROLOGUE: THE WUSHE REBELLION AND INDIGENOUS RENAISSANCE IN TAIWAN

On October 27, 1930, terror visited the small community of Japanese settlerexpatriates in the picturesque resort town of Wushe, an administrative center nestled on a plateau in the central mountains of Taiwan.' On that day, some 300 indigenes led by Mona Ludao raided government arsenals, ambushed isolated police units, and turned a school assembly into a bloodbath. All told, Monas men killed 134 Japanese nationals by day’s end, many of them butchered with long daggers and beheaded. Alerted by a distressed phone call from an escapee, the Japanese police apparatus, with backing from military units stationed in Taiwan, responded with genocidal fury. Aerial bombardment, infantry sweeps, and local mercenaries killed roughly 1,000 men, women, and children in the ensuing months. A cornered Mona Ludao removed to the countryside and then killed his family and hanged himselfto avoid capture. Subsequently, the Japanese government relocated the remaining residents of Monas village, Mehebu, forever wiping it off the map.?

Over the course of Japanese rule (1895-1945), the Taiwan Government-General forcibly relocated hundreds of other hamlets like Mehebu. The invasive and exploitative policies that provoked Mona and his confederates also eroded precolonial forms of social organization, authority, and ritual life among Taiwans indigenes. As it severed bonds between indigenes and their lands, in addition to prohibiting or reforming folkways it deemed injurious to its civilizing mission, the government-general nonetheless laid the groundwork for the emergence of Taiwan Indigenous Peoples as a conscious and agentive historical formation. By arresting the diffusion of Chinese language and customs into Taiwans interior, restricting geographic mobility across the so-called “Savage Border, dividing the colony into normally and specially administered zones, and sanctioning a battery of projects in top-down ethnogenesis, the government-general inscribed a nearly indelible “Indigenous Territory” on the political map of Taiwan over the five decades of its existence.

This book will argue that successive, overlapping instantiations of state power’s negative and positive modalities precipitated the formation of modern indigenous political identity in colonial Taiwan. This process paralleled other nationalist awakenings forged in the crucible of foreign occupation. As state functionaries smashed idols, compelled assimilation, and asserted the authority of a central government, their fellow nationals reified, commodified, and preserved the material, cultural, and territorial expressions of native distinction. These Janus-faced vectors of state building can be found wherever governments targeted citizenries, imperial subjects, or marginalized out-groups for inclusion into a new kind of national political space. Applying these axioms to the case of Taiwan Indigenous Peoples under Japanese colonial rule, Outcasts of Empire argues that the process Ronald Niezen dubs "indigenization" is a historical concomitant of competitive nation building in the age of high imperialism (1870s-1910s).

Rightly emphasizing the importance of transnational activist circuits, global NGOs, and the increased salience of international rights conventions, Niezen and others consider the decades following 1960 the incubation period for "international indigenism?* Laura R. Graham and H. Glenn Penny stress how indigeneity "emerged as a legal and juridical category during the Cold War era" in response to "growing concerns about environmental degradation during the twentieth century together with the emergence of human rights discourses. . . . "^ Writing about the Taiwan case study explored in this book, Wang Fu-chang asserts that indigenous political consciousness is a decidedly recent arrival, erupting in its current form in the 1980s

While recognizing the importance of the movements of the 1960s and beyond for indigenous cultural survival in the twenty-first century, this book argues that the early twentieth century is a better place to look for the systemic wellsprings of indigenism.* Rather than viewing indigenism as a postwar development enabled by a more or less functioning international system, Outcasts of Empire suggests that nationality, internationalism, and indigenism were mutually constituted formations, rather than sequentially occurring phenomena.

The pages that follow examine the politics, economics, and cultural movements that informed the Japanese colonial states partitioning of Taiwans indigenous homelands into a special zone of administration known as the Aborigine Territory. The administrative bifurcation of Taiwan began as an expedient measure in the 1890s, reflecting the dependence of the Taiwan Government-General on Qing precedents and straitened colonial budgets. By the 1920s and 1930s, however, the peoples today known as Taiwan Indigenous Peoples” were cast for good beyond the bounds of the colonial states disciplinary apparatus. The so-called Takasagozoku (Formosan Aborigines) were accorded a special status as imperial subjects because they were believed to lack the economic competence to thrive in the colony's “regularly administered territories.” In a more positive sense, indigenes were invested with a cultural authenticity that marked them as avatars of prelapsarian Taiwan antedating Chinese immigration, based in part on high Japanese appraisals of Austronesian cultural production.’ From the 1930s onward, the distinctiveness of indigenes as non-Han Taiwanese was elaborated and promoted by the state, the tourism industry, and intellectuals, laying the groundwork for the successor Nationalist Party government of Taiwan (Guomindang or GMD) to rule the island as an ethnically bifurcated political field.”

The deterritorializing and reterritorializing operations that underwrote the emergence of Taiwan Indigenous Peoples during the period of Japanese colonial rule had locally distinctive contours." But these interrelated processes were embedded in a global political economy dominated by a capitalist business cycle and international competition. In East Asia, the Japanese state refracted these transnational forces throughout its formal and informal empires. A parallel and instructive set of events in neighboring Korea illustrates this point.

In 1919, the Japanese state brutally suppressed a Korean uprising known as the March 1 Movement. That year, across the peninsula, around one million Koreans loudly protested the draconian administrations of governors general Terauchi Masatake and Hasegawa Yoshimichi (1910-1919) on the occasion of former king Gojong’s funeral. As was the case with the Wushe uprising of 1930 in Taiwan, the magnitude and vehemence of the protests were taken as a negative verdict on Japanese rule. The savagery of Japan's suppression of the uprising, which may have taken 7,500 Korean lives, became a source of national embarrassment. The sense that colonial rule should rest on more than naked force, and the awareness that the world was watching, impelled the Japanese state to embark on reforms that emphasized co-optation, the active support of Korean elites, and abolition of the most violent and hated forms of colonial police tactics, such as summary punishment by flogging.”

During the 1920s, the Korean Government-General launched a series of policies known as “cultural rule” in response to the March 1 debacle. As part of a larger program to legitimate itself, Japan's official stance toward Korean literature, architecture, music, and other cultural forms took a preservationist turn that tempered enthusiasm for the fruits of Korean ethnic genius with a wariness of insubordination and a long-standing belief that Koreans were developmentally laggard. The softening of the government's posture and policies entailed neither the implementation of a culturally relativist agenda nor the abandonment of the core principles of racial denigration. Nonetheless, Saito Makotos "cultural rule" policy represented a sea change, and it set into motion a series of reforms that laid bare the contradictory demands made upon the interwar colonial state.

On the one hand, state power was ultimately maintained through the threat of force and justified by a theory of Japanese racial superiority. On the other, the colonial state sought to attain hegemony through the politics of inclusion, which brought in its train practices that were conducive to the production of modern Korean subjects.? Henry Em summarizes the paradozical long-term effects of colonial rule in terms that mirror events in Taiwan:

Thus, contrary to conventional (Korean) nationalist accounts that argue that Japanese colonial authorities pursued a consistent and systematic policy of eradicating Korean identity, we should see that the Japanese colonial state actually endeavored to produce Koreans as subjects—subjects in the sense of being under the authority of the Japanese emperor, and in the sense of having a separate . . . subjectivity. . . .

It was in this sense that Japanese colonialism was constructive’ for both the colonizer and colonized. . . . Coercion, prohibition, and censorship, then were not the only (or even primary) forms through which colonial power was exercised. . . . there was a steady proliferation of discourses concerning Korean identity emanating from the Japanese colonial state itself —including studies of Korean history, geography, language, customs, religion, music, art—in almost immeasurable accumulated detail. . . . For the Japanese colonial state, the goal of exploiting Korea and using it for its strategic ends went hand in hand with the work of transforming peasants into Koreans, or Chosenjin."4

Two parallels are in evidence here. First of all, well-coordinated attacks on Japanese state power (March 1 in Korea and Wushe in Taiwan), followed by clumsy and disproportionate responses (the open firing on civilians in Korea, the aerial bombardments in Taiwan), actuated regime change. In Taiwan, the heated debates surrounding the Wushe Rebellion pitted Japan's opposition Seiyükai (Friends of the Constitution) against Governor-General Ishizuka Eizo, who was allied with the ruling Minseito (Popular Government Party). The Seiyükai capitalized on the Taiwan Government-General’s incompetence to call for the resignation of Ishizuka, who actually stepped down along with his inner circle, a reshuffling reminiscent of Saito Makotos ascension to the governor-generalship of Korea in 1919.5

Again echoing events in Korea, the cowed successor administration in Taiwan called for a renovation of "Aborigine Administration" and a shift from rule by naked force and intimidation to government by co-optation and delegation. Importantly, for our purposes, Taiwanese highlanders were thereafter governed as members of ethnic groups, whose cultural, political, and economic distinction from the rest of Taiwan was selectively preserved, with certain elements even celebrated by colonial administrators, metropolitan voters, and consumers in Taiwan and Japan alike.'^ As was the case for Japanese cultural rule in 1920s Korea, the new era of aborigine administration proved compatible with the emergence of a discourse on ethnic integrity, one that overrode localisms. The artifacts and structures that coalesced during this period would then resurface in the postcolonial era in the form of indigenous ethnonationalism."

In contrast to Korea, public expressions of indigenous patriotism were suppressed in Taiwan for over four decades after the Japanese Empire crumbled in 1945." The 1.5 million migrants to Taiwan in the Chinese Nationalist Party (GMD) exodus represented yet another wave of colonization for Taiwan's majority population.” During a long stretch of one-party rule under martial law (1949-87), GMD-sanctioned history excluded discussions of indigenes as autochthons because it regarded Taiwanese history as a regional variant of mainland China’s.”°

After martial law was lifted in 1987, politicians put distance between themselves and the GMD by supporting an indigenous cultural renaissance to signal the island’s distinctiveness from the mainland.” On a parallel track, the founding of the Alliance of Taiwan Aborigines in 1984 ushered in a wave of organized indigenous activism.” Thereafter, coordinated action between Han Taiwanese nationalists and Indigenous activists produced a number of political and cultural reforms aimed at promoting a measure of autonomy and correcting the most egregious forms of public denigration. As a result, the notions that non-Han peoples are the island’s original inhabitants and that Taiwans multiracial composition should be celebrated rather than overcome are mainstream political positions?—much as they were in the 1930s, when Japan ruled the island.

Within this broader context of renaissance and revival, Puli-based freelance writer Deng Xiangyangs energetically researched oral and documentary histories articulate a local perspective on the Wushe uprising that posits indigenes as anticolonial heroes and avatars of an authentic, pre-Chinese Taiwanese past. Deng’s books draw on biographical and family histories and photographs culled from his local network of Sediq acquaintances.^ Along with graphic artist Qiu Ruolong, who also has extensive contacts and family relations in the Sediq community, Deng coproduced a television drama and childrens book about the Wushe Rebellion. Qiu and Deng have popularized the heroic suffering of the Sediq people, the harsh labor conditions and sexual harassment that contributed to the revolt, and the brutality of the Japanese counterattacks. All of these themes were subsequently dramatized in the blockbuster John Woo production Seediq Bale (2011), a featurelength film that recounts the story of the rebellion in romantic hues that recall Last of the Mohicans and Dances with Wolves.”

As I watched and rewatched this film, I was struck by its fidelity to the Japanese inquest reports into the causes of the rebellion. The main characters, the key scenes, and the plot structure are immediately recognizable to anyone who has sifted through the documentation generated by the rebellion. Insofar as some Japanese characters are made out to be racist buffoons deserving of grisly deaths, this film can be considered anticolonial. At the same time, its deep engagement with a reservoir of colonial-era tropes, documents, and narrative structures highlights the entanglement of colonialism and postcolonial nationalism that marks the Korean experience, shown here in a new context: the making of an indigenous people.

While there were similarities, as noted above, the complex process by which residents of Mehebu and Paaran (see map 1) became Sediq was different from the trajectory that saw natives of Seoul, Gyeongju, and Pyongyang transformed into Chosenjin (people of Joseon, or Koreans). In the case of Taiwan Indigenous Peoples, the translocal, subimperial, and putatively organic identities fostered under the government-general' variant of cultural rule were not Taiwanese, per se, but by turns Indigenous Formosan (Takasagozoku) or attached to particular ethnolinguistic groups (Amis, Bunun, Paiwan, Atayal, Tsou, Rukai, Saisiyat, and Yami) (see map 2).

For example, in 1930, Mona Ludao and his followers appeared in official documents, journalism, and commercial publications as “savages, “barbarians,” or “Formosan Tribes” (banjin, seibanjin, banzoku).^* In many respects, they were governed as such: policy before 1930 emphasized their backwardness, mainly by excluding them from the tax base due to purported economic incompetence. The translocal identifier banjin ascribed little importance to matters of ethnic identity and was, in fact, symptomatic of a pre-Wushe Rebellion approach to governance that paid scant attention to subject formation.”

In the press, in government statistics, in police records, and in ethnological writing, indigenes were also identified as members of particular units called sha in Japanese (Mehebu and Paaran, for example). The sha were units of governance pegged to residential patterns, although they did not necessarily reflect local conceptions of territoriality and sovereignty. Rather, the category sha (in Chinese, she) was imposed by the Qing, long before the Japanese arrived, as a blanket term for any indigenous settlement or cluster of hamlets.” Like the banjin designator, affiliation with a sha did not confer ethnic or cultural status upon the governed.

Terminology anchored in derivatives of the terms ban and sha suggested continuity from Qing times and a relative disinterest in indigenous interiority. On the other hand, as early as 1898, Japanese ethnologists began to classify residents of Monas hometown of Mehebu as Atayals. This neologism originated with Ino Kanori and signaled a different way of imagining Taiwan's non-Han population(s). The term Atayal first appeared in Japanese documents in 1896 to identify an ethnic group noted for facial tattooing, a common language that spanned several watersheds and valleys (and sha), and the production of brilliant red textiles.” The term Atayal, which connoted membership in a culture-bearing ethnos, rarely surfaced in policy-making circles during the first two decades of colonial rule. From early on, however, the term was inscribed in an academic counterdiscourse, as exemplified by a color-coded map. The maps novel subethnic components— territories for the Atayal, Bunun, Tsou, Amis, Paiwan, Puyuma, and Tsarisen peoples— overwrote Qing-period cartographic voids. This architectonic prefigured today’s officially sanctioned view of Taiwanese multiculturalism (see figures 1 and 2).