Shelley Rigger

and really emulating features of Western societies and especially Western militaries and economies that they believed had enabled the West to become so successful in colonization.

And they were like, all right, we're going to show that you can't colonize us because we're going to be just as good at colonizing other people as you are.

Interesting.

But in Taiwan in particular, they're...

concept was this is going to be a model colony and we're going to show how modern Japan is because we're going to build roads, we're going to build reservoirs, we're going to build railroads and industry and telegraph lines in Taiwan to show that Japan is a modern country and can do all of these modernizing things.

So one of the features of colonization in Taiwan was it was actually quite developmental.

The Taiwanese population at the end of the Japanese colonial period was more educated than pretty much any other population in Asia.

Hmm.

So, you know, it was kind of a mixed bag.

It was definitely colonization and there was a certain kind of assimilationist spirit there.

So Taiwanese were educated in the Japanese language and they were encouraged to take Japanese names.

They were drafted into the Japanese army during the invasion of China, which started in the 1930s.

But at the same time, looking back on it, a lot of Taiwanese recognized that it was also a period of order and development for Taiwan.

So how does Japanese colonization end?

Taiwan's Japanese era ended in 1945 with the surrender of the emperor.

So for Taiwanese, this was a really weird moment because on the one hand, they had been Japanese subjects for 50 years, which if you think about it, you know, in the early 20th century, that's much of a lifetime for most people.

Yeah.

They'd been Japanese subjects, but they knew themselves to be ancestrally, culturally, linguistically Chinese.

So...

For many people in Taiwan, what they realized was that what was coming next, which was going to be a Chinese government, was something like a return, but also something new.