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Date 2021-03-19

Title

The Establishment of the Japanese-Language Fiction in Taiwan in the 1940s and Taipei Imperial University

Author

Chang, Wen-Hsun

Assistant Professor, Graduate Institute of Taiwan Literature, National Taiwan University

Abstract

Modern Taiwan fiction made its official debut the 1920s. It entered a “period of dormancy” when the Chinese-language column on the newspapers was canceled by the Japanese colonial government in 1937. With the publications of Nishikawa Mitsuru’s Literary Taiwan (Bungei Taiwan) and Zhang Wen-huan’s Taiwan Literature (Taiwan bungaku) in the beginning of the 1940s, modern Taiwan fiction began to revitalize. This was contingent upon the influence of the movement of Japanese Imperial Rule Assistance (Taisei yokusan) had on colonial cultural policies, as well as on how Taiwanese intellectuals took advantage of such policies. This kind of historicization is well accepted in existing literary histories.

This essay argues that such historicization over-emphasizes the active, invasive quality of “Japanese mainlanders in Taiwan” (naichi jin) represented by Nishikawa Mitsuru, resulting in a skepticism that essentializes all literary activities of “Japanese mainlanders in Taiwan” as related to politics and the “movement of imperialization” (kôminka). With a discussion of the introduction of such literary journal as “Taiwan University Literature” (Taidai bungali) and from an analytical angle of “literary field,” this essay explores a possible foundation of cultural capital shared by the two opposing campaigns of “Japanese mainlanders in Taiwan” and “Taiwanese people.” This essay studies the human and academic networks of Shimada Kinji, a professor at the Imperial University, and Nishikawa Mitsuru and Huang De-shi, leaders in the literary field in the 1940s, to stress how academia has interfered with and contributed to the establishment of literary field, and even transcended military and politic influences.

Nishikawa Mitsuru, who independently began his own literary enterprise as early as the 1920s, and Huang De-shi, who came from a prestige family of Sinology, have both utilized their connections to academia and knowledge productions under Japanese imperialism, thereby acquiring and transforming related cultural capital. Additionally, the intervention from the Imperial University has brought much creative incorporation of historical tales and folklores to the changing landscape of Taiwan fiction. Foregrounding writers and theorists as “agents,” this essay aims to move beyond a nationalist frame to highlight the complex relationship between the structure of Taiwan literary field and Taiwan literature in the 1940s.

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Bulletin of Taiwanese Literature
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