[quote]
I forgot to mention Taiwan’s home rule movement and it’s success during the last years of the Japanese administration of gaining some involvement in a democratic process at the grassroots level. No, it wasn’t full-fledged democracy, but it was an important step in the right direction. Obviously the Japanese colonial administration came to believe the majority of citizens had come to see themselves as Japanese and thus trustworthy enough to take part in the colony’s governance. Who’s to say that in another 50 years Taiwan’s government would not have resembled that of HK’s, with a great number of Taiwanese serving as legislators, judges… ?[/quote]
I’m sorry, but to be blunt, that is a lot of bullshit. The Taiwanese home rule movement, while barely tolerated, at times was for the most part supressed under the Japanese colonial administration. It’s success as you call it during the last years of Japanese rule is an interesting way to phrase it(by interesting I mean wrong). Especially considering that the deprevations of war fostered within the Japanese government an especially natural reactionary urge to suppress all manner of discontent. In fact, the last political group of such, the League for Attainment of Local Autonomy(Taiwan chihojichi renmei), was already outlawed by the Japanese colonial authorities by 1936.
Most Taiwanese were not allowed into the Japanese colonial system. That a few anomalies surfaced and were present is not representitive of Japanese benevolence and largess, but quite the opposite, wholesale systematic discrimination and repression in all social, political, and economic spheres. The vaunted Japanese educational reform that many stress only went so far as providing primary education for low-skilled and unskilled labour. Secondary education in colonial Taiwan was generally denied to the local people and was really only instrumented on Taiwan when ironically enough local elites were sending their children off to Japanese universities. The colonial administration, fearing that many of them would return and outrank them in the bureaucratic hierarchy began initializing a program of secondary school education for local Taiwanese, of course these new institutions being naturally of inferior quality to the education Japanese settlers would receive on the island. Even as late as 1937 I believe and perhaps later, the majority of students in secondary education in colonial Taiwan were Japanese and not Chinese despite numbering only 5% of the total population.
You cite that the Japanese administration somehow came to believe that the colonial regime believed that the majority of Taiwanese saw themselves as Japanese and thus trustworthy. History, rather than your fanciful imagination shows quite the opposite. The 1920’s were the years in which the home rule movement in Taiwan was most prominent and for 15 years between 1921 and 1936, petitions were sent to the Japanese diet on the issue of local autonomy and for 15 years, the topic never even made it out of commission. The home rule movement a success? No, quite the contrary it was a pitiful failure.
The home rule movement itself was never a universal feature in colonial Taiwanese politics at that, but rather the movement was universally led by the most conservative elements of Taiwanese society. The elements of the Taiwanese-left regarded them as intellectual cowards and as being too passive. Instead they chose to emphasize radicalism in the vein of other Asian anti-colonial movements.
This is a major point of contention between me and Taidu advocates. Being that without a solid historical basis for their cause, a superficial awareness of certain historical facts will lead them to spontaneously erupt in either historical fabrication or obsession over droll banalities. (e.g. Taiwan is diverse, look at all the Portugese and Dutch influences…) (Taiwanese are not Chinese, see 2% aboriginal!) (Taiwanese are different from Chinese because we enjoy eating sushi).
What disgusts me the most of course, is the fawning apologia for Japanese colonialism that oozes from the Taidu separatists and their western running dog lackies. To be frank, the adulation of Japanese accomplishments on Taiwan are a carefully nurtured self-serving and self-perpetuating myth fostered by bitterness and resentment towards the KMT and mainland arrivals who so painfully dissappointed them. That the Japanese colonialists were somehow better than the KMT is a psychological phantasm created out of emotional insecurity.
Now of course the last paragraph is just my opinion, and as most people are well aware, I am a fairly no-nonsense reunificationist so you will have to take it with a grain of salt.
. Shouldn’t have a damn thing to do with what you look like, we’re all human beings.
