JAPAN’S OCCUPATION OF TAIWAN, 1895-1945

Although the Chinese government had had reluctantly agreed to transfer the island to Japan, people living on Taiwan had their own agenda. On May 23, Taiwan declared itself a republic and set up an independent government. With that government came an army and a mobilization to resist occupation by the Japanese. The founders of the 1895 Taiwanese “republic” shrewdly took Western political labels and applied them to ad hoc institutions, unsuccessfully attempting to obtain French support against the Japanese occupation.²⁰ It took the Japanese military five months to pacify the island, and for four more years the Taiwanese mounted an insurgency campaign that wore on the Japanese.²¹ As one Japanese baron put it: “Japan had made no preparations whatever for the administration of the island at the time of its acquisition.”²²

The insurgency, which in some cases employed terrorism and sabotage, precipitated a forceful Japanese crackdown and severe suspicion on the part of the Japanese of Taiwanese natives. Over time, a large-scale police state was established on Taiwan: by 1943, police forces-only one-sixth of which were Taiwanese natives-accounted for 14 percent of the population of Taiwan.²³

Despite the insurgent violence that cropped up periodically until the occupation ended in 1945, the Japanese pursued an extensive plan of legal, political, and economic reforms that transformed Taiwan from a provincial, subsistence economy into a modern, relatively successful society. The colonial model used by Japan was extremely centralized, with near-total control being vested in the governor-general.

Taiwan was widely regarded in Japan as a political and economic albatross. It was an almost totally undeveloped backwater, and many Japanese were skeptical of the ability of ethnic Chinese to modernize. In some ways, however, Taiwan’s backwardness was conducive to the Japanese colonial agenda. There were essentially no existing institutions that had to be changed; all modern legal, political, and economic structures could simply be imposed onto a blank political slate.

Additionally, the abruptness with which Japan’s empire itself came together was advantageous. As Japan expert Hyman Kublin pointed out, the colonial architects “did not… have to contend with the inertia, dead-weight, and accumulated debris of imperial systems that had literally grown like Topsy nor was it necessary for them to cope with the manifold vested interests created in an extended process of historical change.”²⁴

The infrastructure and legal reforms imposed by Japan were lasting contributions that played a large role in Taiwan’s precipitous progress in the first half of the twentieth century. However, Japan as a colonial power also tended to plunder its colonies and direct monies back to the imperial government. Kublin noted that the Japanese “understood to their full satisfaction their purposes in engaging in colonialism and pursued their objectives with relentless and unswerving logic.”²⁵ Aside from its strategic importance to Japan, Taiwan was seen as a place to demonstrate the efficacy of Japanese political and social reforms, as well as to generate revenues for the betterment of the empire.

Some reforms were of particular importance, with land reform being perhaps the most revolutionary. Until the Japanese occupation, legal claims to land on Taiwan were murky at best, and there was no fair, effective means to adjudicate conflicting claims. In a way that greatly benefited the Japanese Empire, the governor-general instituted a program by which land claims were institutionalized. In so doing, much of the land was deeded to the government-which was, of course, Japanese. Though the long-term effect of the reform was remarkably positive in that it created an enduring system of property rights on Taiwan, in the short-term Japan managed to line its pockets significantly with the reform’s spoils.²⁶ The benefits to Taiwan in the medium- and long-term, however, were striking. The reforms updated the taxable land area of Taiwan from the previously registered eight hundred-ninety thousand acres to 1.5 million acres.²⁷

Agricultural reforms were also staggering. Largely out of fear of renewed insurgency, the Japanese disarmed large numbers of indigenous hunters, forcing them into a growing, modernizing agricultural industry. Here again, though, the Japanese government had figured out ways to direct much of the immediate gains from modernization to its own coffers. It diverted many of the resources traditionally dedicated to rice production (which could be exported without processing) toward sugar production, which locked Taiwanese farmers into selling their sugar cane to Japanese sugar mills, which enjoyed monopoly status and the ability to fix prices. Japanese consumers suffered alongside Taiwanese farmers, paying higher prices for the monopoly-priced sugar than they would have on the world market.²⁸

As mentioned earlier, Japanese police were omnipresent on Taiwan. The scattered yet nagging insurgency caused substantial fear in the new Japanese empire, and Japan had no intention of being run out of Taiwan by an indigenous uprising. Legal reforms were crafted in a manner that would help ensure Japanese security. The system of pao-chia, or mutual responsibilities, locked indigenous Taiwanese into a system in which social pressure prevented criminality, because many would be punished for the crimes of a few.

The combination of land, agricultural, and legal reforms increased the amount of land area under cultivation to 2.11 million acres in 1941. The value of Taiwan’s foreign trade increased more than thirtyfold between 1897 and 1939.²⁹ Japanese public health measures dramatically reduced the spread of infectious disease, which had been rampant before the introduction of modern vaccinations and treatments. Infrastructure improvements were similarly remarkable: advances in roads and railways, ports and shipping, telephone and telegraph all set Taiwan on a course of social revolution away from the primitive subsistence agriculture of the 1890s toward the modern society that was to emerge there in the twentieth century. Given all of those changes, Taiwan’s political, social, and economic development diverged more and more from that of mainland China. The two entities were becoming very different societies.

NOTES:

20. For a thorough history of the republican experience in Taiwan, see Harry J. Lam-ley “The 1895 Taiwan Republic: A Significant Episode in Modern Chinese History,” Journal of Asian Studies 27, no. 4 (August 1968): 739-762.

21. A. J. Grajdanzev, “Formosa (Taiwan) under Japanese Rule,” Pacific Affairs 15, no. 3 (September 1942): 311-324.

22. Shimpei Goto, “The Administration of Formosa (Taiwan),” in Shigenobu Okuma, Fifty Years of New Japan (London, 1909), vol. 2, p. 530. Cited in Hyman Kublin, “The Evolution of Japanese Colonialism,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 2, no. 1 (October 1959): 67-84.

23. Edward I-te Chen, “Japanese Colonialism in Korea and Formosa: A Comparison of the Systems of Political Control,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 30 (1970): 126-158.

24. Kublin, p. 68.

25. Ibid., p. 83.

26. By one account, in 1942 the Japanese government owned approximately two-thirds of the land in Taiwan, with Japanese corporations and businesses owning much of the remaining third. See Grajdanzev, “Formosa,” p. 318.

27. Joseph W. Ballantine, Formosa: A Problem for United States Foreign Policy (Washington, D.C.: The Brookings Institution, 1952), p. 35.

28. Ibid., p. 39.

29. Ibid., pp. 41-44.

SOURCE: Ted Galen Carpenter, “America’s Coming War with China: A Collision Course Over Taiwan“, Palgrave Macmillan, 2005.