Not Your Model Colony: a guest essay by Esther Kim

Plus, cultural and human rights events in Taiwan

Dear all,

We have a special treat for you this week: a guest essay by Esther Kim, a writer who moved to Taiwan last year. Her funny and wise piece looks closely at something that bewilders many visitors here: Taiwanese nostalgia for Japanese colonialism. From the scrupulous preservation of Japanese architecture to women who dress in kimonos, the experience is particularly alienating for people of Korean descent. (In sharp contrast, the Koreans took a literal wrecking ball to a government building built by the Japanese.) If you’re new to Esther’s work, we also recommend checking out her beautiful essay on the “compulsion to grow something, a new life, even a sprout, in the face of death,” as well as her meditation on Younghill Kang and her newsletter about events in Asia. We’re delighted to share her work here.

Also, Michelle recently wrote a piece for the Paris Review Daily about the re-release of City of Sadness, a film that describes the inherent worth of preserving a free mind amid totalitarian conditions. Thank you to substack readers in Taipei who came to watch it with us.

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Not Your Model Colony

A year ago, when I could barely get Mandarin’s four tones right, my boyfriend, J., kindly told me I kept calling myself a cow and not a New Yorker. Shopping was impossible; my languages — English, Korean, Spanish — were useless in Taipei. So I dragooned him into a bustling Sogo mall one weekend to help interpret and navigate the home appliances. Our mission was simple: to buy a rice cooker. But it was complicated by one factor: I needed a Korean rice cooker.

We circled the floor, but among the spiffy vacuum cleaners, toaster ovens, and air purifiers, I could not find Cuckoo, the brand my family has used at home for over a decade. I texted my mom for help. She was asleep in New York, twelve hours behind. J. suggested the futuristic white Panasonic one. I hemmed, hawed, and finally relented, and we went with the familiar Zojirushi elephant.

That evening, over video call, my mom scolded, “You got the Japanese one? Why didn’t you get the Korean one?!”

“I told you that I can’t find any Korean ones here!”

“Even Costco sells Korean rice cookers now, Yune-kyung-ah—very expensive ones!” she bragged. “The pressure is a lot better for making rice. The rice gets really chewy and delicious.” Japanese bad, Korean good. It was the same old story. Thanks to my mom, my daily experience of Taiwan’s relationship with Japan (and its notable lack of Korean produce, appliances, beauty products, restaurants, and so on) has led me to consider the differences between Taiwan and Korea.

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It doesn’t take an eagle eye to see how very Japanese Taipei is in its architecture and etiquette. The etiquette felt familiar to Korean-American me; the architecture, less so. By etiquette I mean, in part, the service industry’s deep politeness. Whether it’s a product of present-day diplomatic relations or of fifty years of colonization, the capital still feels Japanese, from flashy department stores like Sogo, Breeze, and Shinkong Mitsukoshi to the remnants of 1920s and ’30s Showa-era architecture on university campuses and in dorms, izakayas, spa hotels, teahouses, and administrative buildings.

We lived near National Taiwan University’s palm tree–lined campus, so whenever I felt homesick for my family’s garden in New York I would bike to the experimental farm to watch the sun set over the green rice fields. In the dense thicket of Taipei’s people, motorbikes, and narrow buildings, this open field let me imagine for a few minutes that I was back in New York’s formerly agrarian suburbs. It was a rare space that allowed me to remove myself from the relentless clockwork rhythm of the city, which seemed to center around chasing after the garbage truck. This nearby faded blue wooden bungalow, I later read (in English), was also Japanese. It served as the research workshop of Dr. Eikichi Iso, who successfully cultivated the preferred short-grain white rice variety preferred by Japanese consumers.

Scattered throughout the island, colonial Japanese remnants abound. I would later visit and find them irritatingly beautiful: in Taichung, there was the Miyahara eyeglass shop and the police dormitory, now a literary museum. In Tainan, there was the Hayashi department store. The whole island is dotted with agricultural storehouses or factories from the imperial era now reclaimed as Cultural Parks. The way Taipei lovingly preserves and restores these imperial fragments as cultural heritage struck me as utterly strange: a world apart from its sister city, Seoul.

Korean hot takes

In 1995, when I was five, Seoul took a wrecking ball to the Japanese Governor-General’s building in Gwanghwamun Square. It had been the seat of power for Japanese rule over the colony from 1910 to 1945. “Weird Western style—it didn’t fit in with so many other buildings,” said my dad. Built in 1916, this administrative center was designed to obstruct the old residence of the Joseon dynasty, Gyeongbok Palace. But the demolition was controversial. The building had been functioning as the National Museum for nine years. Some argued the Joseon palace itself was a symbol of an outmoded government; the Imperial building could serve educational purposes as a space of decolonization. Others argued that demolition was a necessary part of South Korea’s new democratization in the 1990s and could wipe the slate clean for a new relationship with Japan. (During the reign of the first post-war president, Rhee Syngman, it had fallen into intentional disrepair. It was only renovated under the regime of Park Chung-hee, who used it for the central government starting in 1962.) After three years of heated debate, the Governor-General’s building was finally demolished, its steeple buried underneath the Independence Hall. Seoul kept another colonial remnant, however: Seodaemun Prison, where thousands of Koreans were held, was converted into a memorial. By contrast, Taiwan’s Governor-General building is home to the Presidential Office today. What remains of the Japanese prison in Taipei is a wall in Da’an.

The bad blood between the Koreas and Japan runs so deep that it seems every other year one nation will boycott the other, which will counter-boycott, prompting the first to counter the counter-boycott. South Koreans are first in line to protest when Western celebrities obliviously wear (or, in the case of actor Steven Yeun in 2018, even “like” a photo of) the Rising Sun flag. Growing up in New York, I could barely distinguish the facts from the fictions in my mom’s lectures. From rice cookers to you name it, she never failed to deliver a Korean hot take:

On tigers in our folktales:

• Wild tigers used to roam Korea’s mountains. They’re all dead. Because the Japanese killed them all.

On museums:

• The Metropolitan Museum curators are wrong. Good Japanese ceramics are actually Korean. The Japanese kidnapped the best Korean potters and forced them to work in Japan.

On spring:

• They’re saying the cherry blossoms in Washington D.C. are causing terrible allergies this season. That’s because they’re Japanese. Korean cherry blossoms do not cause allergies.

While I found her conspiracy theories (or truths, depending on who you ask) to be a bit much, the more I researched the colonial era in graduate school—the segregated movie theatres; the ban on our language; the forced conversions and name changes; the Japanese teachers embedded in our schools, striding about classrooms with glinting swords in their belts—the more I understood her vehemence.

No doubt hers was inherited. In East Goes West, Younghill Kang, a pioneer in Korean-American literature, describes his first vagabond nights in Manhattan as an immigrant in 1929. He likens sleeping in a terrible shelter to something familiar to many across the Pacific, my paternal great-grandfather included: “The only experience I have had to compare with this was in a prison of the Japanese. But the people—Korean revolutionists—had been put there for a single integrated feeling, a hard bright core of fire against oppression.” Kang detects no sense of solidarity among the men in the shelter. He alludes to his participation in the March 1919 Uprising along with at least half a million Koreans who demonstrated across the peninsula for months to protest Imperial rule, but the police and military crackdown was swift and violent. The more I learned, the more closely I identified with Black and Indigenous American history.

From West to East, former administrative buildings and statues are nodes for ideological battles over public spaces. I doubt the South Korean strategy of demolishing these imperial remnants actually heals colonial scars. The Koreas’ militant patriotisms seem to me a frightening extension of that era, although some argue that we sleep peacefully at night because rough men stand ready to do violence on our behalf. Given that the postcolonial governments were actually headed by Imperial Japanese–trained leadership (an experience shared by Park Chung-Hee and Chiang Kai Shek), it will take far more to find peace, truth, and accountability—to right the story.

Taiwan’s loving restoration of these imperial buildings struck me as somewhat troubling, veering into what Svetlana Boym calls “restorative nostalgia” in the context of post-Soviet cities. Or, as our Taiwanese-Australian friend jokingly put it one evening, “nostalgia for our colonial overlords.”

Historical cosplaying in Beitou

One cold spring day, I came face to face with Taiwan’s vastly different pro-Japan stance from that of the Koreas. J. and I took a cab north to Beitou for a winter getaway. We turned the hairpin corners slowly, stopping finally next to the Beitou Museum, formerly the Kazan Hotel, completed in 1921. The most luxurious spa hotel of its day, it naturally became a popular luxury destination once the Japanese finished building the New Beitou railroad stop.

In its heyday, Japanese and Taiwanese men–invariably men—would visit the Kazan Hotel for its salutary effects, the mountain air and sulfuric hot springs. And, of course, for the girls (geishas). Today, the hotel no longer pipes the wonderful creamy waters into its bathing rooms, but I quickly discovered that it keeps its history alive in other ways.

We removed our shoes and wandered the hallways in socks. It was beautifully designed and constructed to balance light and dark, interior and exterior.

Padding up the slick lacquered steps, I glimpsed something through the screens that knocked the wind out of me. Inside the Grand Room (Ohiroma) on the second floor, a group of fifteen women dressed in elaborate kimonos were chattering in Mandarin, clearly enjoying the weight of the garments and admiring themselves.

I tried to imagine present-day Koreans dressed in formal kimonos in an imperial-era building, cosplaying history. I couldn’t. Wouldn’t happen. (To explain this in American, it was like seeing black Americans dress up in antebellum costumes at a plantation.) And if it did, and they dared to post pictures of themselves online, they’d probably ignite total public outrage.

Of course, the colonies had different experiences. But this longing for an imagined past seemed disturbingly naive.

While I recognize that diplomatic reasons tie Taiwan’s hands in terms of criticizing this critical ally, I know too that it’s a toxic myth that Taiwan had a fine time under the Japanese colonial administrators.

As the story goes, the Japanese regime was “far less brutal” (to use Nikkei Asia’s words) in Taiwan than in Korea. Korea was the military base for invading China, and governed with an iron fist. (Never mind that Taiwan served as the base for invading Southeast Asia.) But far less brutal to whom? Indigenous memory departs from the story here. In the Musha uprising of 1930, Seediq people were slaughtered by Japanese troops. And colonial rule disproportionately affected women. The Ama Museum, run by the Taipei Women’s Rescue Foundation, documents stories of girls who were captured, providing an essential counternarrative. Also, not all Taiwanese elite supported the Japanese regime. In a photobook about Taichung, I learned that Taiwanese intellectuals were inspired by the Irish rebellion against the British, studying their tactics in 1907. (In Literary Journal of Taiwan, they continued to discuss the Irish struggle for autonomy and independence in 1920. Officials and citizens in Taichung mounted a resistance under the Yellow Tiger Flag.) But the colonial administrators’ quashing of resistance was so complete that Japan now is remembered as the “helpful” colonizer that created the basis for Taiwan’s subsequent economic miracle.

Of course, it’s no secret in South Korea that chaebol wealth—Samsung, LG, and Hyundai included—originates from families who worked with the Japanese empire. As historian Bruce Cumings writes, “The Japanese succeeded in compromising a modern, liberal elite.” (Given that Samsung amounts to 25 percent of South Korea’s GDP, that’s a formidable Goliath to the labor unions’ David.)

“In Japan, the imperial impulse may still not be dead,” notes Cumings. For one thing, their politicians make active, persistent efforts to erase and deny war crimes both domestically and internationally. A rabid ultranationalism is allowed to founder in Japan. “With Japan’s record in China, perhaps there is some sincere reflection. There is almost none in regard to Japan’s activities in Korea,” writes Cumings. Yet it’s worth noting, too, that, as in Europe, there has always been a strong internationalist current of anti-racism alongside anti-fascism in the Japanese left tradition, which provided fertile ground for the struggles of Koreans. Unfortunately, the Cold War killed off these possibilities.

Visiting Beitou, it struck me as deeply weird that Taiwanese people remember Imperial Japan with such warmth, admiration, and even gratitude, framing it as the great modernizer and part of a claim to a more civilized culture. Most former colonies have a more ambivalent relationship with their colonizers.

Tainan girl

Traveling south showed me something hearteningly different. That spring, J. and I left Taipei for the first time and went to Tainan. While he was at an academic conference, I wandered the streets alone, falling for the city’s grand banyan trees and Qing ruins. I delighted in its graffiti, maritime gods, sword-clenching lions, late night dumpling stalls (open past 10 p.m.!), and lazing uncles barking in Hokkien over cigarettes. I found Tainan a wonderfully loud contrast—a relief, really—from Taipei’s regimented, reserved living.

I walked past the roundabout to the stylish Hayashi Department Store. Built in 1932 and five stories tall, it was the first department store in Taiwan to have a working elevator. Across the street stood another monumental example of Shōwa-era architecture, the Land Commercial Bank, built in 1937 during the Japanese occupation. From the rooftop, café patrons could overlook and contemplate the formidable bank. I considered its columns and then took the antique elevator down. While browsing cheerful textiles and local artisan goods, I felt the ghosts of shopgirls gliding up and down the stairs, smiling at customers in the elevator, discreetly fixing their hair and lipstick in century-old mirrors. The old building was charming. But the Shinto shrine on the roof was a disturbing reminder of forced conversions.

Back on the street, I noticed a group of foreigners, guys in muscle tanks, pausing at a bronze statue of a girl. I paid it no mind that first time, but when I returned later with J. we stopped to read the sign. He translated the text: This bronze statue represents a slave, a comfort woman.

She was unlike the South Korean statues I knew well, which depict an impassive girl seated on a bench. The face exuded Buddhist or Zen detachment. The sculptors who created her were husband-and-wife duo Kim Seo Kyoung (김서경) and Kim Un Sung ( 김운성). They submitted their proposal for the public art project in 1992, and the first bronze memorial was finally installed in Seoul outside the Japanese embassy in 2011. Through the 2010s, similar girls, copies of the bronzes, and memorial plaques were commissioned and installed around the world.

This Tainan memorial statue stood upright. Her face wore a grimace. Her dress clung to the curves of her adolescent body.

She raised both hands above her head. In fear, or in surrender? It was hard to read her expression. Across the street, the imperial buildings of modern commerce towered over her.

It moved me to see her here in this symbolic space. “We are not a conquered people,” lyrics from a Canadian First Nations band rang in my head.

This small bronze statue, the first and only in Taiwan, represents the victims and survivors—somewhere between two and four hundred thousand of them—who endured military rapes across the Pacific. And while these imperial buildings assumed monumental power, the girl’s raised hands represent a collective challenge and, hopefully, the potential to give voice to the victims of the very structures which these buildings represent.

Taiwan’s bygone Imperial era came at great human cost. This tiny memorial was evidence that there are communities here who wrestle with the colonial past, supplying footnotes, revisions, and counternarratives.

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On the war

Michelle and Albert here: We’ve been following the news in Israel and Gaza with heavy hearts and a shadow hanging over our days. Words are insufficient. We hold the victims of Hamas’s attacks in our hearts; we hold the victims of the bombings in Gaza in our hearts. No child or baby should ever be harmed. We were particularly struck by this tweet by Nadia Fadil: “Watching French news. My heart aches. I see beautiful lives in Israel. They had names, faces, mourning parents. Gaza, on the other hand, is missiles, deads, destroyed buildings. Many. But no names. No faces or mourning parents. There are no beautiful lives in Gaza.” In a Lawfare podcast, Noah Efron speaks movingly about Israelis’ “genius for affinity and fellowship,” and we join him in believing that it can and should expand to embrace the Palestinians, whose right to self-determination we endorse. Can we hold all these views, all these people, simultaneously in our hearts without compromising principles? We think and hope so.

We’ve heard from a trusted source that humanitarian aid can be donated here.

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Invisible Nation and upcoming events!

Vanessa Hope’s Invisible Nation is an urgent film that ends (spoiler) with President Tsai’s powerful words to Taiwanese people: “I often tell our young people: as Taiwanese, we don't have the right to choose to sit at home. We only have one choice, and that is that every Taiwanese has to go out, to every corner of the world, and make the world see Taiwan.” We hope to write more about this in the future. The next showing is at the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam and we’ll keep you posted about other screenings.

We’ve always meant to provide a list of cultural and human rights–related events, and at last we have:

• October 20 to November 29: National Human Rights Film Fest, broadcasting across the whole country and even Kinmen Island. The open ceremony has just been held at SPOT Huashan Cinema Taipei.

• October 21 to November 12: World Press Photo will tour Yangming Mountain Taipei. A group of Dutch photographers created the foundation, based in Amsterdam.

• October 24 to 30: An iconic Taiwanese Gezi Opera Team will perform at the National Center for Traditional Art in Yilan.

• October 26 to November 25: A photography exhibit of migrant workers in Taiwan is on display in Taichung.

• October 27: Live Music by Fire EX, a local band who composed the theme song of the Sunflower Movement, at Tiehua Creative Village in Taitung.

• First and third weekends of November: An environmental group making bags from abandoned fishing nets collected from Penghu will run a stand at Pier2 Art Center in Kaohsiung.

• The National Human Rights Art Festival has just announced a series of events on the theme of well-being in Tainan. 

• Until November 21: An exhibit on Ukrainian women is being held at the National Human Rights Museum.

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And we took a trip to the stunning Taroko Gorge: