Becoming "Japanese" : colonial Taiwan and the politics of identity formation /

This relatively small volume constitutes a powerful theoretical analysis of an important issue in Taiwan's modern history: the (trans)formation of its cultural and political identity under the 50-year Japanese colonial rule (1895-1945). While the change of Japan's colonial policy toward Taiwan from assimilation (doka) to imperialization (kominka) is the point of departure of his research, Ching (Duke Univ.) concentrates on how the Taiwanese negotiated between different possibilities in their search for identity. This search became more difficult and challenging for the Taiwanese after 1937 when Japan launched the kominka movement, whose goal was to make the Taiwanese become Japanese, hence pushing the identity struggle to the personal level. Ching's study introduces a new aspect to postcolonial studies, which so far has been mostly confined to Western colonialism. By noting that China as a cultural entity has always loomed large in the background, Ching calls attention to the triangular relation (not the usual colonizer-colonized binary) in Taiwan's identity formation. Regrettably, the author misspelled a few well-known names in Chinese, such as Nanjin (Nanjing) and Liang Ch'i-tsao (Liang Ch'i-ch'ao). Graduate students and faculty. Q. E. Wang Rowan University