A Tale of Two Histories: Taiwan, Korea and Japan

To commemorate the 70th anniversary of Japan’s surrender in World War II, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe delivered an official Cabinet speech in which he expressed remorse for Japan’s past deeds and the sufferings endured by many during the long and brutal Pacific conflict. He did not, as some had hoped, renew any apologies made by previous leaders or make any new ones.

Abe’s carefully calibrated speech precipitated criticism. The bulk of it came from South Korea, a country that bore much of the yoke of imperial expansion. Between 1910 and 1945 it was a colony of Japan. In response, South Korea’s media fired a united volley across the mediasphere: Abe did not go far enough in his non-apology (they wanted him to renew previous apologies and make new ones), nor were his words sincere.

The response is rather unsurprising, given the negative perception of Japan among South Koreans – elites and ordinary citizens alike. Anti-Japanese sentiment and (South) Korea’s colonial experience are integral and deliberately cultivated aspects of the country’s national identity. Given that, Scott Snyder, director of the U.S.-Korean policy program at the Council on Foreign Relations, was quoted in an August 12 Wall Street Journal article (“South Korean Struggles With Legacy of Japanese Colonization”) asking as a sort of surrogate for Japan itself, “Japan has a fair question: Is Korean grievance insatiable?”

An insatiable grievance it may seem, but is it the same for all former colonies of the Japanese empire? Nick Kapur, a historian of modern Japan at Rutgers University, says no. Kapur tweeted on August 14, in response to query by economist Noah Smith as to whether “studying history can sometimes do more harm than good,” that “A good question to start with is why nobody in Taiwan hates Japan – literally nobody – when they did just as bad stuff there.”

Is it true that the Taiwanese do not hold as deep a grudge against Japan as the Koreans do?

Scott Simon, professor of sociology and anthropology at the University of Ottawa, thinks so. With nearly 20 years of ethnographic fieldwork in Taiwan under his belt, Simon has come to appreciate the complexities of historical memory in Taiwan. In an interview conducted over email, he explained to me some of the reasons why antipathy toward Japan is hard to come by in Taiwan.

One reason comes down to the difference in opinion between the two historical groups in Taiwan. “The Mainlanders, who came to Taiwan with the ROC [Republic of China] beginning in 1945, had just come from fighting a war against Japan,” Simon explains. “They quite understandably held a deep hatred of Japan. They were approximately one-seventh of Taiwan’s population by 1949.” This group includes the defeated Kuomintang Army and its leader, Chiang Kai-shek, who retreated to the island following their defeat at the hands of the Chinese Communist Party during the Chinese Civil War. “They had a difficult time adjusting to the ‘Native Taiwanese’ who had lived through 50 years of Japanese administration, wore Japanese clothing, lived in Japanese-style homes, and spoke Japanese but rarely Mandarin,” Simon says. “So, there is less of a feeling of grudge in Taiwan – because there are different ethnic groups in Taiwan with different historical experiences with Japan.”

There is also the issue of colonial legacy. It is widely understood that Japan brought modernizing reforms to the colonial peripheries, Taiwan and Korea included. While debates on colonial modernity are long and fierce, Simon thinks the legacy is a largely positive one in Taiwan. A more positive association with Japan “was surely reinforced by a positive experience with colonial rule. The Taiwanese came to enjoy improvements in public health (elimination of rabies and a host of tropical diseases), drinking water in Taipei, roads, railways, ports, the most modern irrigation system in Asia, agricultural improvements, industrialization, public schools and universities, etc.”

Simon’s explanation isn’t merely an apologia for colonial rule. In addition to the modernizing reforms, there is a certain emotional connection between native Taiwanese and the Japanese, which Simon thinks is “almost systematically ignored”:

The Taiwanese endured Allied bombings during the War. They thus had personal experience of war with the Japanese rather than against the Japanese. This profound emotional experience made the Taiwanese very different from the Chinese (some of whom had suffered the Nanking Massacre; and others also had very negative experiences of Japanese violence).

Whereas in Korea the Japanese are often depicted as colonial oppressors and resistance fighters are regularly reproduced in movies and theater as the nation’s martyred heroes, the perspective from Taiwan is quite different.

It would be foolhardy to suggest that all Korea needs to do is simply look past the bad and embrace the “good” of its colonial experiences – indeed, the comfort women issue and other instances of forced labor basically ensure that there will be no overcoming of the legacy issue anytime soon. Moreover, Japanese resistance was once a powerful force for national solidarity in hard times and it is difficult – if not impossible – to imagine the “resistance” part of this narrative ever being erased. Still, it is interesting to think, in a hypothetical kind of way, what Korean society might be like if history was remembered differently.