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

Sacred Geographies of Urban Colonial Taiwan: Jilong's Geography in Transformation

Colonial regimes, almost by definition, engage in the deterritorialization and reterritorialization of the spaces into which they insert themselves. This practice, however, is not unidirectional or simply imposed upon the colonized terrain, it is a contested process in which all actors assert their claims to territory 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 site of the first headquarters of the Taiwan Government-General, and then more substantially as the primary port of entry soon after Japan claimed control of Taiwan in June 1895. The town, its harbor, its terrain, its people, all of these facets left Japanese control in 1945 in radically transformed conditions, the most obvious aspects of which--the different physical and urban topographies visible in the two historic maps above--should not be taken as evidence of the successes of Japanese colonial rule. Nor should the quantity and distribution of temples during the 1930s in the third map, with Taiwanese institutions in red and Japanese in blue, and one purported fusion in purple, be seen as an indication of a permanent remapping of the spiritual terrain. Very much to the contrary, a spatial exploration of the sacred geographies within Jilong reveals a different process and outcome: the construction and assertion of Taiwaneseness through temples and their associated festivals, in opposition to Japanese efforts to reconsecrate Taiwan through Shintō and missionary Japanese Buddhism.

This module highlights the contested process of de/reterritorializtion of physical and sacred space partly through its cartographic content. The pages rely heavily on maps, both modified historical maps and new maps created by the author, to situate readers in the physical terrain of Jilong and to demonstrate the transformation of sacred territory that occurred in that place before, during, and after the era of Japanese colonization. Each page opens with a map that locates it in physical space and, in most cases, indicates the sacred spaces significant to that page. These opening maps are intentionally devoid of political or cultural boundary lines, in order to emphasize the importance of the sacred locations--that is, the temples--that were the key sites of contestation and the advancement of particular territorializing projects. These elements emerge much more clearly in the maps within many of the pages, in which I have used historic maps--one from 1885 and one from 1929--to demonstrate both the physical transformation of Jilong during the Japanese occupation and, more importantly, the physical locations of each of the key temples and, through color-coding (see above), the broadly-defined socio-cultural sacred affiliation of each one. With these maps it is possible to see the advance and retreat of Taiwanese and Japanese sacred space, as well as how the struggle to project spirituality mapped onto and demarcated the physical terrain.

Furthermore, the interactive nature of the Taiwanese and Japanese projects is reinforced by the module's structure. Clicking on specific segments of the radial diagram below reveals the pathways to which each connects, and the intersection of pages, media, and chunks of sacred space. The module diverges along two main pathways--one Taiwanese, one Japanese--and then subdivides within each. However, some of these threads converge, and then converge again, as at moments when individual projects either combined efforts or launched new forms of conflict. All threads come together at the end to depict the failure of Japanese efforts to inscribe on Jilong a purely Japanese sacred geography, and the post-1945 full florescence of religion as a key marker of Taiwanese identity.

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