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Bodies and Structures 2.0: Deep-Mapping Modern East Asian History

Pioneers

A pioneer is one who conceives of themself, or is perceived, as one who opens, claims, and demarcates new territory or charts new directions, in geographic, intellectual, political, or other terms. However, perspective is very important in defining this category of actor: a self-described pioneer might look to others as an invader, a colonizer, an oppressor. In the context of this module, the Southeastern Chinese who settled in Taiwan, including those who moved into the northern part of the island during the 18th and 19th centuries, conceived of themselves as pioneers who opened new territories for settlement and economic exploitation. Those who migrated from Fujian’s coastal regions, in particular, came out of a much longer tradition of seafaring and long-distance trade. They took as their principle deities Mazu (a sort of patron saint for travelers) and Kaizhang Shengwang (who was known for opening up parts of Fujian). However, these same pioneers intruded upon indigenous territories and contributed to the destruction of indigenous society. On the Japanese side, the settlers also saw themselves as pioneers, in the sense of opening Taiwan to modernity and civilization, and they carried with them deities that also had associations with clearing new lands and development. From the perspective of those who resided in Taiwan before 1895, these Japanese pioneers often threatened established communities and their practices. Readers should keep in mind these complexities regarding the human and divine pioneers in this module.

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Sacred Geographies of Urban Colonial Taiwan: Jilong's Geography in Transformation Colonial regimes, almost by definition, engage in the transformation of the spaces into which they insert themselves. This practice, however, is not unidirectional or simply imposed upon the colonial terrain, it is a contested process in which all actors advance their territorial visions through methods that include asserting ownership, restructuring the physical geography, and passive and active forms of resistance. Jilong (Keelung) became a site for processes of de/reterritorialization under Japanese colonial rule when it emerged, briefly, as the location of the first headquarters of the Taiwan Government-General in June 1895. Those processes intensified when Jilong served as the primary port of entry for most of the fifty years of Japanese rule. The town, its harbor, its terrain, its people, all of these facets left Japanese control in 1945 in radically altered conditions. The most obvious aspects of these changes--the different physical and urban topographies visible in these two historic maps--is not evidence of the successes of Japanese colonial rule. Nor does the quantity and distribution of temples during the 1930s in a third map demonstrate a permanent remapping of the sacred or physical terrains. A spatial exploration of the sacred geographies within Jilong reveals a very different outcome: the construction and assertion of an ethnic Taiwanese identity through temples and their associated festivals, in opposition to Japanese efforts to reconsecrate Taiwan through Shintō and missionary Japanese Buddhism. Most observers of Taiwan, and most Taiwanese, concentrate their discussions and analyses on Taiwanese nationalism, in both the present and the past. However, I suggest that competition over the ability to define sacred geography, combined with the fundamental flexibility of ethnic and national identities, promoted the construction of Taiwanese ethnicity in opposition to Japanese assimilation.

The Taiwanese, or rather, the people who became Taiwanese through their participation in the definition of both physical and imagined geography, constituted the largest portion of the population in Jilong. These people, called “islanders” (hontōjin or bendaoren 本島人) by the Japanese who colonized Taiwan, had genealogical roots in Southeastern China and had settled in the island during the two centuries of Qing rule over the island (1684-1895). They came from different homelands, or “native places,” spoke different languages, and fought with each other over land and resources. Even though they were outsiders by comparison to the indigenous peoples who had been the main human inhabitants of Taiwan before these Southeastern Chinese arrived, by the advent of Japan’s rule, most had gone through a process of localization or nativization (bentuhua 本土化). From the perspective of the other main ethnic group living in Jilong, the Japanese settlers, the Taiwanese were natives who needed to be transformed and uplifted through Japanese influence. Both the islander/Taiwanese locals and the Japanese settlers asserted control over physical and sacred terrain, often in competition with each other. (When I use the term “native,” I refer to the islanders, not to the indigenous peoples of Taiwan. However, indigenous groups also contested with Japanese over sacred geography, including well after the end of Japanese rule in Taiwan, such as when a group went to Yasukuni Shrine in 1979 and demanded the return of the spirits of their ancestors who had been enshrined there for service to the Japanese Empire in World War Two (Ching, Becoming "Japanese").)

In narrating this history, I demonstrate that these contested territorializing projects created space and place in colonial Jilong. The projects themselves involved self-conscious efforts to define the physical terrain through modern cartography, state policy, and social activity of a largely religious nature. I highlight the first of these in particular by using a number of historic maps, most of them created by the Japanese colonial government, which present a flat, totalizing vision of space in which states attempt to control places through their description and delineation. Nevertheless, modified versions of these maps highlight the points of intersection between sacred and profane, between physical and imaginative geographies—that is, the temples and the territorial cults of their principal deities. In using them, I bring out what the state's maps hide: the people who created place by applying meaning to space through their everyday relationships. Points on a map do not indicate absolute or natural linkage between a place and an identity. Rather, they represent the results of the fluid interactions between three main categories of actors: elites, deities, and pioneers. These actors contributed to the construction, reinforcement, and transgression of a set of porous boundaries between Taiwanese and Japanese identities and their affiliated social groups; between sacred and profane; and between physical and imaginative geography.

The module's structure, depicted in the diagram below, highlights this interactivity and fluidity. Clicking on specific segments of the diagram reveals the pathways to which each connects, displaying the density of connections that shaped the emergence of Taiwanese ethnicity.

The module contains six pathways. The first, “Sacred Geography: Definitions,” provides an important conceptual entryway, and I encourage readers to explore its pages before proceeding into the the main body of the module, which follows pathways that address the Taiwanese and Japanese efforts to define and control the sacred and profane. Both of these threads link to a fourth, on the competing festivals that highlighted the efforts to claim and occupy both physical and imaginative geography; and to a fifth that depicts the failure of Japanese efforts to make Jilong a purely Japanese sacred space. The module ends with a brief examination of the post-1945 florescence of religion as a key marker of Taiwanese identity. Links to explanations of key concepts are scattered throughout the module, so that readers will better understand how islanders/Taiwanese and Japanese created space and place in urban colonial Taiwan.
The Dianji Temple: History
The Dianji gong was the second of the main temples established in Jilong, and it represented the particular character of the settlement of North Taiwan. Across the southwest and central coasts, the regions with the longest history of Chinese settlement, Quanzhou people generally arrived first and in larger numbers, but in the north, it was the Zhangzhou (both places are marked on the map on the Sacred Geography and the Everyday page) settlers who preceded and predominated. These people honored one deity in particular, a figure known as Kaizhang shengwang, the Sage Lord who opened Zhangzhou, in addition to Mazu. These Chinese pioneers of northern Taiwan brought their pioneering deity with them, and installed him within the Qing'an Temple, alongside Mazu. As Jilong's status among Taiwan's port towns rose during the late 19th century, its growth promoted in part by foreign interest in the island's tea, sugar, and camphor, local residents decided that the Kaizhang shengwang needed a home of his own. In 1875, they built the Dianji Temple in his honor, a few blocks east of his previous abode. By doing so, they designated a new piece of sacred terrain in the small town, one with historical and institutional threads that connected it to the Qing'an, with the street that ran between them serving as both a physical and metaphysical conduit.
Japanese Sacred Spaces in Jilong
Japanese Buddhism and Shinto followed closely in the wake of Japan's military and administrative colonization of Taiwan, as settlers and officials carried familiar spirituality out of the home islands and used it to transform the colony. Part of their motivation to do so derived from the "religious wars" that emerged in Japan during the Meiji period, when new laws enforced the separation of Shinto deities from their long-term homes in Buddhist temples and the creation of officially-sanctioned Shinto shrines, and legalized religious freedom. This new framework promoted intense competition for adherents and resources between Shinto, Buddhist, and Christian groups and institutions. The energy thus generated, when transported overseas, translated into a strong missionary zeal among Japanese Buddhists in particular. Shinto adherents did not embrace a similar proselytizing agenda, but given Shinto's close affiliations with the new Meiji state and its key symbol—the Emperor as kokutai—settlers and officials both placed great importance on using Shinto to make Taiwan Japanese. Not only could they alter the political and spiritual terrain of the island by exporting the recently-constructed administrative hierarchy of shrines into Taiwan, they also could use Shinto, as an example of modern, rational, and civilized religion, to challenge the spiritual backwardness of the peoples of Taiwan. The Government General wasted little time in setting up the Taiwan Shrine (Taiwan jinja) on a site north of Taipei, which they classified as an imperial shrine (kanpeisha) and enshrined therein three deities of pioneering and reclamation and to Prince Kitashirakawa, who had died of malaria in the campaign to pacify southern Taiwan. In Jilong, settlers played the more important roles in inserting their religious institutions into the urban landscape.