De-Japanization
After taking over Taiwan, the Nationalist government immediately launched comprehensive "de-Japanization" and "re-Sinicization" policies. Japanese was banned in public spaces, Japanese-style place names were replaced with Chinese ones, and school instruction switched from Japanese to Chinese. Social organizations, legal systems, and administrative practices formed during the Japanese era were completely overhauled.
However, this rapid cultural transformation caused severe social ruptures. Taiwanese intellectuals educated in Japanese …
However, this rapid cultural transformation caused severe social ruptures. Taiwanese intellectuals educated in Japanese suddenly lost their linguistic tools, becoming effectively "illiterate" under the new regime. The cultural chasm between native Taiwanese and mainlanders deepened steadily, becoming a significant root cause of future social conflicts.
This volume examines the policies and impacts of this cultural transition period, exploring the deep contradictions in language policy, educational reform, and cultural identity.
In Chen Yi's plan, the hardest part of taking over Taiwan was not administration but what he called psychological reconstruction. After fifty years of colonial schooling the island's educated class thought in Japanese and wrote in Japanese, and the authorities held that unless the change of language and culture was completed quickly, the new rule would have a form and no content. The Taiwan Provincial Mandarin Promotion Committee, established on April 2, 1946 under Wei Chien-kung with Ho Jung as his deputy, took a surprisingly careful approach: it argued for working through the correspondences between Taiwanese and Mandarin — reviving the vernacular first and reaching Mandarin through it, rather than drilling phonetic symbols. The real break came from a different order. On October 25, 1946, the first anniversary of the retrocession, the Administrative Executive Office abolished the Japanese-language editions and sections of newspapers and magazines. Administratively this was a clear, enforceable, symbolic date. In its effects it abolished overnight the publishing outlet of every fully educated person on the island. The official reasoning never varied: Japanese was an instrument of colonization, and to keep it was to keep the enslavement. There was no malice in that judgment, but neither was there a thought for one thing — what had been abolished was not only a script but the expressive capacity a whole generation had spent twenty years acquiring.
Isle of Time