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 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, 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 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 the third map, with Taiwanese institutions in red and Japanese in blue, and one purported fusion in purple, demonstrate a permanent remapping of the sacred or physical terrains. 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 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 argue 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.

In narrating this history, I focus on three main categories of actors: elites, deities, and pioneers. The humans in this story belonged to the two main demographic groups that populated Jilong. The most numerous were the Taiwanese, or rather, the people who became Taiwanese through their engagement in the definition of both physical and imagined geography. 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 historically 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. (When I use the term “native,” I am referring to the islanders, not to the indigenous peoples of Taiwan).

This module demonstrates how space and place were created through these contested territorializing projects. 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 places are controlled through their description and delineation. Nevertheless, modified versions of these maps help to depict 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 historic and contemporary maps hide: the people who created space and place by applying meaning to it through their everyday interactions.

Central to these processes of de/reterritorialization were the construction, reinforcement, and transgression of a set of boundaries: those between Taiwanese and Japanese identities and their affiliated social groups; between sacred and profane; and between physical and imaginative geography. These boundaries were often porous and non-exclusionary. For example, physical and imaginative geographies overlapped as they were contested and defined. Similarly, points on a map do not indicate absolute or natural relationships between a place and an identity. Rather, they represent relationships that were fluid processes of construction and reconstruction.

Furthermore, this interactivity 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 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 of space and place in urban colonial Taiwan.

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