Conclusion: Japan's Imperial Art World
double process
What was the place of Taiwan on the artistic map of the empire? The answer to this question illuminates the contingency of the artistic practice on the shifting understanding of place under Japan's colonialism.
Literature scholar Nayoung Aimee Kwon reminds us that to view colonial subjects as naturally and effortlessly speaking the imperial language negates the violence of imperial censorship and the propaganda policies of assimilation (Compare Kwon, Intimate Empire, 190-91.).
KWON 2015 (157-158) As the colony was rigorously incorporated into the discursive space of empire, the spread of modern imperial technologies in education, transportation, and the mass media appeared to link the vast areas of the empire into an imagined community of a broader scale and a more complex affiliations than theorized by Benedict Anderson. => (158) The circulation of the chihoo-ban (local or regional edition) of the metropolitan newspaper Osaka mainichi, which appeared daily across the vast territories of the Japanese empire, created a spectacle of an imagined imperial community that, by the 1930s, appeared to link the metropolitan center of Tokyo to the peripheries of the Naichi proper: from Kyushu, Wakayama, Hokkaido, and Okinawa all the way to the gaichi hinterlands of Karafuto, Taiwan, Korea, and Manchuria.
KWON 2015 (240) It may be worth emphasizing here that I am not making the claim that there was indeed widespread acceptance of the notion of an “imagined community” that seeped into all aspects of the empire - from the official to the popular level. In fact, when we keep in mind that Japanese language imperial newspapers were being read by only a minority throughout the colonies, namely the colonized elites and Japanese colonial settler communities for the most part, one must question just how pervasive the notion of an “imagined community” infiltrated the everyday experiences of the general population living in the empire. An attempt to theorize any overarching sense of the shared experience of an “imagined community” on the scale of empire would require much more complex examinations that I have room for here, and it is not my purpose to make general pronouncements about the effectiveness of imperial ideologies on any grand scale. What I would like to highlight here for the purposes of my own project is the significance of such an image of an “imagined community” that was being circulated in the mass media throughout the empire at this time. It is also important to point out that such an image of a putative imperial community linked by the imperial language was accompanied by violent imperial assimilation policies aimed at the censorship of vernacular languages and customs, and by the repression of vernacular cultural productions and assemblies of the colonized. (…) This book focuses on the ironic simultaneity of the emptiness yet pervasiveness of such an image of a harmonious “imagined community” in the light of the violent repressions of difference and conflict upon which such an image was constructed. IMPORTANT <=> (163) the chihoo editions of the Osaka mainichi … played a significant role in the circulation of the dual logic of assimilation (incorporation) and exoticization (differentiation) through the vast regions of empire. By the 1930s, the Osaka mainichi was being circulated daily throughout the regions of the Naichi and gaichi, seemingly linking these areas into a spatial continuum of an imagined imperial community of an “empty homogenous time,” reminiscent of what Benedict Anderson theorized on the scale of the nation-state. => (164) The overwhelming impression garnered through the pages of the imperial daily Osaka mainichi was that of the empire linked into a smooth continuum through modern imperial technologies and economic prosperity. For the readers of the Osaka mainichi throughout the ever-expanding empire, the borderlines of empire seemed to be opening up for the benefit of all.