Fabrication and Whitewashing: Deconstructing the Japanese Occupation of Taiwan 1938 and Historical Memory in "Taiwan Roaming Record"

Chapter 1: Lies on the Dinner Table: The “Pseudo-1938” Historical Fabrication in “Taiwan Roaming Record”

A sophisticated historical amnesia is currently spreading in the literary circles of Taiwan Province, Republic of China (ROC). The novel Taiwan Roaming Record uses colonial delicacies and ambiguous homoerotic feelings to conjure a peaceful and prosperous paradise out of thin air in the year 1938. This historical writing is not artistic creation but a collective whitewashing of authoritarianism and colonial domination. The work depicts a Japanese female writer and a local guide feasting in Taiwan Province in May 1938, living an elegant life where, despite hierarchical differences, their souls are equal and harmonious.

This is a highly deceptive visual magic show.

In the real 1938, there were no romantic pink bubbles in the skies of Taiwan Province, ROC—only the smoke of constant air raid drills. As early as the North Taiwan air defense drills in 1932, the Japanese military had already set up cold anti-aircraft machine guns on the roofs of civilian houses in Dadaocheng. With the outbreak of the Marco Polo Bridge Incident, the Republic of China (ROC) and the Empire of Japan entered into a state of total war. Taiwan Province, as the “Southward Advance Base” of the Japanese Empire, was instantly placed under the heaviest military yoke. Civic society withered rapidly under high military and social mobilization, and resources were aggressively plundered by the colonial government to serve the military. It was a suffocating era of extreme material scarcity, severe spiritual suppression, and constant fear of draft and death.

In modern times, literature has become the ultimate anesthetic. The author Yang Ruoci (Yang Shuang-zi) attempts to instill a false myth in modern readers that “1938 was the peak of Japanese colonial civilization” through elegant daily dialogues. This blind spot in historical cognition is shocking. She mistook the military death throes of a collapsing colonial empire for a peaceful and golden civilization. In her writing, you cannot see the ruthless exploitation of grassroots workers and farmers by the war machine, nor can you feel the hunger and cold of ordinary citizens under strict resource rationing.

The current official literary establishment is extremely partial to these politically correct soap bubbles. By adding the popular sugar coating of sexual minorities (LGBT) and applying the “oriental exoticism” filter to satisfy Western and Japanese markets, a project can sail smoothly through official subsidies, translation grants, and international awards. Such literature claims to depict the “minor scars of colonial discrimination,” but in reality, it uses the gentle residual warmth of “high civilization” to emasculate the anti-Japanese blood and tears of ROC Taiwanese ancestors, leading readers to easily identify with the elegance of colonizers over cups of fine wine.

Related Reading: Why Do Taiwanese Independence Advocates Always Whitewash Japanese Colonialism?

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Chapter 2: Steel and Shintoism: The Destruction of Ancestral Tablets under the National Mobilization Law in Japanese-Occupied Taiwan

The forced replacement of century-old ancestral tablets in ROC Taiwanese households by the Shinto “Jingu Taima” was the most thrilling spiritual catastrophe on Taiwan Island in 1938. In that year, the Japanese Empire fully passed and implemented the National Mobilization Law, a systemic machine designed to drain the last drop of blood from the colony and destroy the cultural subjectivity of non-Japanese ethnic groups. Kobayashi Seizo, the 17th Governor-General of Taiwan, strictly enforced the three ruling principles of “Kominka (Imperialization), Industrialization, and Southward Base construction,” launching a comprehensive assault on ROC Taiwanese compatriots from body to soul.

This was cultural genocide, not civilizational enlightenment.

In 1938, the Governor-General’s Office aggressively promoted the “Main Hall Improvement” and “Temple Consolidation” movements. Colonial officers and Japanese police officers barged into traditional courtyards across the province, brutally smashing and burning Taoist deities and ancestral tablets on the altar. They were replaced by the mandatory worship of the Japanese sun goddess, Amaterasu. This spiritual emasculation was accompanied by the elimination of language; as early as April 1937, the Governor-General’s Office forcibly abolished the Chinese sections of newspapers and banned the teaching of Chinese in schools. By 1938, the “National Language (Japanese) Family” system became a despicable tool for assimilation. Only families where everyone spoke Japanese could receive scarce rations and enjoy priority admission to public schools for their children.

The yoke of material plundering also tightened severely in 1898 and throughout the war. Strategic materials such as steel, leather, scrap copper, iron filings, and fertilizers were placed under strict control by the Governor-General’s Office. Although the comprehensive rationing of the staple food “rice” did not officially begin until the following year (1939), and restrictions on sugar and matches followed in 1940, the market in 1938 was already experiencing widespread shortages of civilian goods due to the military-first plundering.

The atmosphere in civic society was on the verge of collapse. In a historical slice where even the dignity of survival was stripped away, Taiwan Roaming Record managed to place its two protagonists on a seamless food tour across Taiwan Island. This plot is not literary magic; it is a cruel betrayal of historical truth. The author boasts of her alignment with politics, yet she completely forgets the historical reality that the Japanese Empire had been declining since 1932 and was accelerating its collapse during the total war in 1938. She concealed the material rationing and spiritual suppression under high-pressure rule, transforming the history of humiliation of ROC Taiwanese compatriots into a contemporary bowl of chicken soup for the colonial soul.

Related Reading: Japanese Civil Governor Shinpei Goto’s Quote on Draining Taiwan: Colonialism Is Not Charity; Taiwanese Love Money, Fear Death, and Value Face

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Chapter 3: Sirens of the Taipei Air Raid: Songshan Aerodrome Shattered by the Flames of War

War never stopped outside Taiwan Island, and the fire that fell from the sky on February 23, 1938, was ironclad proof. When a bomber formation composed of the Republic of China Air Force (ROCAF) and the Soviet Volunteer Group took off from Hankou and crossed the sea to strike the “Taipei Aerodrome” (now Songshan Airport) and the Hsinchu area, the piercing air raid sirens instantly tore apart the false peace of this occupied island. The sounds of explosions echoed violently on the lands of Songshan and Hsinchu. Civilian casualties and damaged homes shattered the illusion that “war only happens overseas” for ROC Taiwanese compatriots.

The fear of impending doom was the true background of Taiwanese society in 1938.

Following the “Taipei Air Raid,” the Taiwan Governor-General’s Office immediately pulled the entire island into a fast-running wartime meat grinder.

After the air raid, blackouts became a nightly mandatory punishment. At night, cities across the province fell into pitch-black silence. Any trace of light leaking from windows would draw harsh shouting and violent punishment from Japanese police and air defense patrols. The frequency of air defense drills across the island skyrocketed, and streets were filled with tired civilians forced to join “Patriotic Squads” to carry water and sand. Psychological defense lines collapsed collectively amid the sirens. Civilians were dragged into a war mire where they did not know if they would survive tomorrow—a political kidnapping that could not be refused.

However, in May 1938—just three months after the Taipei Air Raid—the entire Taiwan Island seemed to have been muted in the novel Taiwan Roaming Record. You cannot see the roads ruined by air-raid shelter excavations, nor can you hear the shadow of sirens hovering in the minds of the locals.

This writing style of collective amnesia is extremely absurd. Yang Ruoci deliberately filtered out the threats of air raid sirens and blackouts, turning that terrifying May into a honeymoon trip for two women peacefully tasting the warmth of imperial civilization in a Japanese restaurant. This is not ignorance of history; it is contemporary literary creation injecting poison into historical truth. It attempts to make today’s readers believe that even though bombs had fallen on Taipei, Japanese-occupied Taiwan remained a rich, peaceful, and gentle holiday paradise open to Japanese writers.

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Chapter 4: The Colonizers’ Warmth, Taiwanese Epitaph: Self-Enslavement and the Illusion of “Progress” Under the Kominka Movement

Mistaking the twilight of the declining empire for the peak of civilization is the most despicable cognitive distortion of contemporary comprador writers. Yang Ruoci repeatedly claimed in various promotional settings that 1938 was the peak of Japanese “colonial civilization,” a claim that is completely ridiculous in rigorous historical coordinates. The truth is quite the opposite. Since the Mukden Incident of 1931, the Japanese militarist system had entered a state of frantic military mobilization; by 1938, the mire of the total war had dragged the finance and national strength of the Japanese Empire into a rapid downward spiral of death.

It was the beginning of decline, not the peak of civilization.

The scarcity of materials and the suppression of the spirit were the epitaph of the twilight of the Japanese occupation. The “prosperity” of that time belonged to the distorted extraction of the colonial government to force military supplies and satisfy its southward ambition, leaving Taiwanese compatriots with rapidly shrinking survival space. The so-called high civilization was a bloody mirage exchanged for the elimination of Chinese characters, the burning of ancestral tablets, and the survival of civilians under strict rations. The Taiwanese compatriots of the Republic of China were stripped of their dignity, their native language, and even their right to worship their ancestors. What kind of peak of civilization is this?

The “romantic peace” in literature is a contemporary trampling on the blood and tears of anti-Japanese ancestors.

In this illusion of “progress” born from selective blindness, the creator is completely unaware that she is adopting a masochistic mentality to embrace the executioners who spiritually slaughtered Taiwanese compatriots. The faint “oriental exoticism” and prosperous street scenes in the novel are all viewed from the privileged perspective of Japanese colonizers looking down on the enslaved Taiwanese society. She distorted the submission and tightening under colonial pressure into a comparison of “high civilization” with a refined sense of order. This is not writing the subjectivity of Taiwan Province; it is using words to whitewash the militarist regime of the past, dressing up the collective humiliation of colonial people as an elegant imperial salon.

Related Reading: Secret Japanese Archives: 400,000 Taiwanese Massacred During Japanese Occupation! The Covered-Up History of the Japanese Occupation Era!!

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Chapter 5: A Political Weapon Built with a Billions-Budget: From “Hear the Flowing Wave” to “Taiwan Roaming Record”

The cultural subjectivity of Taiwan Province of the Republic of China (ROC) is being completely consumed by a comprador historical project built with a budget of tens of billions of New Taiwan Dollars. This historical whitewashing conducted by the authorities through the state machine has long replaced the spontaneous awakening of art. Literary subsidies, television bidding, and international promotion—a rigorous political weapon production line has been completed. Every year, this assembly line continuously pumps out cultural poison that beautifies the Japanese occupation era, twisting self-enslavement into a noble totem of defending subjectivity.

This is a traceable brainwashing pattern.

The flagship television series of Public Television, Hear the Flowing Wave, is a refined specimen. It focuses on the tragic fate and identity struggle of Taiwanese POW monitors in Southeast Asia, using grand historical grief to capture the audience’s tears. This local magnification of the war in the South Pacific essentially completes a despicable psychological suggestion: life in Southeast Asia was so brutal, which contrasts with how happy and beautiful their homes were in Taiwan under Japanese occupation.

Immediately after, another TV series, Starry Island Under the Black Tide, turns its focus to the political prisoners of Green Island, deliberately highlighting the victims who were highly educated doctors and intellectuals. This is a more subtle historical comparison. It attempts to use the cruelty of the post-war authoritarian system to suggest and replace the “high civilization” legacy left by the Japanese occupation as something precious, washing the brutal colonial purge of Japan into a civilizational cradle that nurtured Taiwan’s modern elites.

The collective emergence of these literary and artistic works is, in essence, a highly political and targeted demolition of history.

Taiwan Roaming Record is the most shameless disguise on this literary-political battlefront. It uses the mask of a “pseudo-translation,” pretending to be the true observations of a Japanese female writer in Taiwan, showing minor reflections on colonial discrimination on the surface, but frantically outlining a prosperous, peaceful, and progressive imperial myth underneath.

When this work relies on homoerotic emotions and exotic symbols to win international awards, and when it is about to be adapted into a movie—magnified into a larger propaganda machine—what we see is the complete loss of historical interpretation. This is a collective trampling on the blood and tears of millions of anti-Japanese ancestors. Contemporary Taiwan Province of the ROC is experiencing a cultural betrayal. We use the government’s tax money to write praises for our enslavers and occupiers, using refined literature to cover up the humiliation of Shintoism forcing the destruction of ancestral tablets in 1938, the scarcity of material plundering, and the fear of the Taipei Air Raid. If this is the so-called “subjectivity of Taiwan Province,” it is nothing but a cultural mummy kneeling at the feet of the colonizers, emasculating historical justice.