%0 Journal Article
%T Pro-colonial or Postcolonial? Appropriation of Japanese Colonial Heritage in Present-day Taiwan
%A Yoshihisa Amae
%J Journal of Current Chinese Affairs
%D 2011
%I German Institute of Global and Area Studies, (GIGA)
%X Since the end of World War II, the Kuomintang (KMT) (Guomindang) government has erased all traces of Japanese rule from public space, deeming them ˇ°poisonousˇ± to the people in Taiwan. This frenzy, often termed ˇ°de-Japanizationˇ± or qu Ribenhua in Chinese, included the destruction and alteration of Japanese structures. Yet, with democratization in the 1990s, the Japanese past has been revisited, and many Japa-nese structures have been reconstructed and preserved. This paper examines the social phenomenon of preserving Japanese heritage in present-day Taiwan. It mainly investigates religious/ spiritual architecture, such as Shinto shrines and martial arts halls (Butokuden), war monuments and Japanese statues and busts. A close investigation of these monuments finds that many of them are not restored and preserved in their original form but in a deformed/ transformed one. This finding leads the paper to conclude that the phenomenon is a postcolonial endeavour, rather than being ˇ°pro-colonialˇ±, and that the preservation of Japanese heritage contributes to the construction and consolidation of a Taiwan-centric historiography in which Taiwan is imagined as multicultural and hybrid.
%K Social science
%K applied science
%K Architecture and design
%K Colonial history
%K Preservation of historical monuments
%K 300
%K 306
%K Taiwan
%K Japan
%K contemporary
%U http://hup.sub.uni-hamburg.de/giga/jcca/article/view/403