About the Book

This book is concerned with the nature of Japan’s colonial administration in Taiwan – developing the concept of "colonial engineering", that is, how Japanese colonial governance restructured the local space of the island, thus contributing to the shaping of an imposed discipline of order in Taiwan. Working from primary sources, the author looks at how a combination of governance technology and social and political grafting was able to shape the Japanese bureaucracy in Taiwan into a disciplined tool for social control.

The initial chapters discuss the baojia or hokô system. During the years of Japanese rule in Taiwan, the hokô was fundamental to Japanese control over rural Taiwan. The author explores how the hokô first evolved into the basic infrastructure of colonial local administration and, in the second part of the book, details how the hokô became a vehicle for Japan's wartime mobilization after 1932.Part III examines Japan’s wartime administrative reforms, taking wartime Taiwan as a case study for understanding how Japan’s colonial engineering functioned during war. The final section of the book looks at how Japanese rule has been framed historically in narrations of wartime experience and how it has come to affect the cultural and political identity of the modern Taiwanese.