History's 'Luxury Buffet': Selective Amnesia and the Colonial Myth of Taiwan's Japanophile Fringe

Introduction: A Temporal Dark Comedy

Across the contemporary sociopolitical landscape of Taiwan Province in the Republic of China, one occasionally encounters a jarring, eccentric fringe: voices exuding unreserved adoration toward their supposed imperial “homeland” of Japan, professing reverence for Japanese civilizing beneficence, and posturing as cultural heirs to the “Yamato Spirit.”

Yet, when the harsh spotlight of archival history cuts through contemporary PR packaging and hipster nostalgia, illuminating the reality preceding the retrocession of Taiwan in the 34th year of the Republic of China (1945), this feverish “self-identification” reveals a dark comedy of selective amnesia and colonial Stockholm syndrome.

It represents a grotesque historical “luxury buffet”: diners picking only sugarcoated, aesthetically pleasing pastries while averting their gaze from dishes drenched in the sweat, blood, systemic discrimination, and economic plunder of their forebears.

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1. “Second-Class Subjects” Under Colonial Rule: The Erased Humiliation

Those who romanticize Japanese colonial rule seem blessed with an astonishing capacity to format family memories regarding the true social status their direct ancestors occupied under imperial rule.

From the signing of the Treaty of Shimonoseki in 1895, Japanese colonial masters never regarded native Taiwanese as equal compatriots. In the early decades, the Governor-General’s Office dismissed Taiwanese as “uncivilized barbarians,” employing collective punishment, martial police pacification, and catastrophic massacres—such as the Yunlin Massacre and the Tapani Incident—to crush resistance. In the twilight years of the regime, the frantic Kominka (imperialization) assimilation campaign was never designed to grant equal constitutional franchise; its sole objective was to mobilize Taiwan’s agrarian yields, raw materials, and manpower as disposable fuel for the imperial war machine, domesticating Taiwanese as “second-class colonial subjects.”

Historical records present an unvarnished indictment of systemic oppression:

• Institutional Educational Segregation and Strict Class Ceilings:
  Colonial authorities enforced rigid ethnic segregation in primary schooling between Shogakko (reserved for Japanese children) and Kogakko (for native Taiwanese), maintaining vast disparities in funding and resources. In higher education, native students encountered insurmountable quotas. At Taipei Imperial University (now National Taiwan University), Taiwanese admissions consistently remained below ten percent. Bright Taiwanese youths were steered almost exclusively into medicine or agronomy—medicine to sustain the basic hygiene of the colonial labor force and suppress tropical diseases, and agronomy to maximize rice and sugar extraction for the home islands. Formal education in political science, administrative governance, and jurisprudence was strictly gatekept by colonial decree.

• Systemic Racial Caste within Governance and Industry:
  High-ranking civil servants, judges, police superintendents, and executive boards of monopolistic sugar combines were virtually one hundred percent metropolitan Japanese. Taiwanese civil servants rarely exceeded one percent of higher executive posts, restricted to clerical clerks or auxiliary patrol assistants. Even when performing identical tasks, Taiwanese employees endured institutionalized wage discounts.

• Forcible Cultural Decapitation and Identity Humiliation:
  Under wartime mobilization, traditional private Han academies were dismantled, Chinese-language newspaper sections outlawed, and the “National Language (Japanese) Family” program aggressively forced upon communities. Families were pressured to abandon ancestral surnames and tablets, adopting Japanese names and bowing toward the Tokyo Imperial Palace merely to earn the condescending recognition of being “model sub-citizens.”

To romanticize this apparatus of racial hierarchy and economic extraction as “civilizing enlightenment”—using it to assert modern social superiority—is the ultimate tragic irony, spitting upon the graves of ancestors who endured systemic subjugation.

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2. The Parting Betrayal at War’s End: Disposable Loyalty

Where did imperial Japan’s supposed benevolence toward Taiwanese subjects actually terminate? In the 34th year of the Republic of China (1945), as the Pacific War drew to a close, history provided an uncompromising lesson: cold, unceremonious, and total abandonment.

As Allied offensives battered imperial defenses and Japanese armies collapsed across the Pacific, Tokyo’s ruling elites cared solely about safeguarding the imperial throne and repatriating metropolitan personnel. The more than 200,000 Taiwanese soldiers and auxiliary conscripts who had been coerced by Kominka indoctrination to “bleed for His Majesty” were instantaneously discarded as obsolete human shields:

• Chaotic Repatriation and Self-Serving Calculations:
  Upon Japan’s unconditional surrender, colonial commanders and bureaucrats focused exclusively on liquidating personal assets, smuggling looted bullion, and incinerating incriminating archives of atrocities. As hundreds of thousands of Japanese military and civilian personnel were evacuated under Allied and Chinese supervision, they fled the island they had subjugated for half a century in utter defeat.

• Cold-Blooded Severance: Who Was Ever “Family”?:
  Not a single Japanese commander considered repatriating the native Taiwanese soldiers who had shed blood for their empire. Abandoned in Southeast Asian jungles and isolated atolls, thousands of Taiwanese conscripts were left stranded to face Allied war crimes tribunals and prisoner-of-war camps without diplomatic protection. For subsequent decades, Tokyo cynically denied equal veteran pensions and military postal savings to Taiwanese veterans under the legal pretext that “Taiwanese residents had ceased to hold Japanese nationality.” Token compensation was stonewalled until the 1990s following intense international criticism.

This unceremonious exit shattered the last illusions of imperial brotherhood: In the eyes of the colonizer, Taiwanese were never family, but consumable instruments—casually discarded the instant their strategic utility evaporated.

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3. Conclusion: Romanticized Trauma and Illusory Identities

The enduring pro-Japan delusion within certain corners of Taiwanese society is essentially a pathological psychological defense mechanism designed to beautify historical trauma.

For minds ungrounded in historical reality, confronting the truth that one’s direct ancestors lived as disenfranchised subjects under the boot of imperial bayonets induces acute cognitive dissonance. Psychological defense mechanisms instinctively trigger a Stockholm-style projection:

• Romanticizing historical subjugation;
• Reimagining the oppressor through a softened lens of ‘superior order and civilization’;
• Fantasizing an inherited ‘Yamato Spirit’ to manufacture an illusory caste superiority over their own compatriots.

Yet fabricated identities inevitably crumble before historical gravity.

History is an unforgiving mirror that exposes blood and tears while judging posterity’s discernment. Indulging in a selective luxury buffet of history only breeds spiritual phantoms—divorced from cultural roots and forever unaccepted by the former colonizer.

Blindly glorifying colonial subjugation does not restore lost dignity; it merely turns the apologist into a tragicomic figure mocked by history itself. Only by confronting past trauma with unyielding honesty and reclaiming Chinese civilizational agency on the soil of Taiwan can society step into an upright, authentic, and dignified future.