Isle of Time
Japanese Colonial Taiwan: Resistance, Modernization, and Wartime Mobilization (1895–1945)

Under the Rising Sun

25 Volumes

Vol. 1

The Treaty of Shimonoseki

On April 17, 1895, the Treaty of Shimonoseki ended the First Sino-Japanese War and ceded Taiwan and ...

2 images
Vol. 2

The Yiwei War

In the early summer of 1895, an enormous fleet darkened the sea off Cape Santiao near Keelung. It wa...

3 images
Vol. 3

The Yunlin Massacre

Between June 19 and June 22, 1896, Japanese troops burned their way through the villages of Yunlin, ...

Vol. 4

Armed Resistance

The early decades of Japanese rule were marked by persistent armed resistance, revealing the depth o...

3 images
Vol. 5

The Opium War

In early twentieth-century Taiwan, while "the Greatest Thief Under Heaven," Liao Tianding, leapt acr...

2 images
Vol. 6

Modern Infrastructure

Japanese colonial rule brought systematic modernization to Taiwan on a scale unprecedented in the is...

3 images
Vol. 7

The Greatest Thief

In the early twentieth century in northern Taiwan, while the Imperial Japanese Government-General fo...

1 images
Vol. 8

The Miaoli Trials

In the winter of 1912 a Hakka man not yet thirty took ship from Guangdong back to Miaoli. Lo Fu-hsin...

Vol. 9

The Taroko War

The high mountains of Taiwan were the homeland of Indigenous peoples who for centuries had bowed to ...

3 images
Vol. 10

Sun Moon Lake Hydropower

To remake Taiwan from a farming colony into an industrial base that could produce for the empire, th...

3 images
Vol. 11

The Chianan Canal Miracle

In 1920s southern Taiwan, while the gunfire of the "indigenous pacification policy" still echoed fai...

3 images
Vol. 12

Taiwan Parliament Petition

In the early 1920s, a group of Taiwanese students living in Tokyo began, under the lamplight of a fo...

3 images
Vol. 13

Awakening the Taiwanese Soul

In the Taiwan of the 1920s, as the armed resistance and outlaw legends of the dark night fell silent...

3 images
Vol. 14

The Chih-ching Incident

The Taiwan of the early 1920s stood in an unusual political season. In the wake of the First World W...

1 images
Vol. 15

The New Literature Movement

The Taiwan of the 1920s was living through a double awakening, political and cultural. As the parlia...

3 images
Vol. 16

The Erhlin Incident

Under Japanese colonial rule, Taiwan's sugar industry was built into one of the empire's most import...

2 images
Vol. 17

The Taiwanese People's Party

In the early 1920s, driven by the newspaper Taiwan Minpao and by lecture meetings held across the is...

3 images
Vol. 18

The Taiten Exhibition

In 1927 the history of art in Taiwan turned a new page. That year the colonial education authorities...

3 images
Vol. 19

Seediq Bale

After the fires of the Yiwei War died out in 1895, the Rising Sun flag was planted across the plains...

3 images
Vol. 20

The Koshien Dream

In 1930s Taiwan, while the wastelands of the south, irrigated by Hatta Yoichi's Chianan Canal, broke...

3 images
Vol. 21

The Guandaoshan Earthquake

At two minutes past six on the morning of 21 April 1935 the centre and north of the island were shak...

Vol. 22

Kōminka Movement

In 1937, gunfire at the Marco Polo Bridge crossed the Yellow Sea and bore down upon this island. As ...

2 images
Vol. 23

Wartime Mobilization

When full-scale war with China broke out in 1937, Taiwan's fate was utterly rewritten. No longer mer...

2 images
Vol. 24

The Takasago Volunteers

Japanese forces took Manila in January 1942, and the front kept moving south, closer to the equator,...

1 images
Vol. 25

Orphan of Asia

In 1943, as the fires of the Pacific War swept across the South Seas and censorship on Taiwan reache...