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This paper examines the trends and challenges of Taiwanese studies in Japan, focusing on political history. The first section reviews Taiwanese studies in Japan in recent years, with a focus on political research. The second section discusses the issues to be worked on for this discipline's future, especially pertaining to the discussion on "external" and "internal" legitimacy for the postwar Republic of China (ROC) government in Taiwan. The third section examines ways to comprehend the changes in the ROC's status in Taiwanese politics and society after the political transformation began in the 1970s. Taiwanese studies in Japan have long emphasized revealing the characteristics of Taiwanese society and history. Although such an attitude is still quite important, this paper highlights that knowing how to value the "Chineseness" of the ROC government in Taiwan is also an important subject. Further examination of the link between international and internal politics in Taiwan will be one of the most important subjects for future Taiwanese studies in Japan on politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How does the notion of state security inform national approaches to managing cross-border in-migration in the increasingly interconnected but volatile Northeast Asian region? This paper explores this question by focusing on the intermestic politics of labor importation. Specifically, it theorizes the multidimensionality and multifunctionality of security fears that inform Japan's and Taiwan's approaches to the admission of low-skilled foreign workers. The paper proposes a comprehensive conceptual framework that explicates these relationships and argues that Northeast Asian labor importation regimes were formed at the intersection of a threefold logic of state security. Whereas economic security acted as an enabling (inclusionary) factor in both Japan and Taiwan and motivated the acceptance of foreign workers, internal security in Japan and external security in Taiwan acted as constraining (exclusionary) factors, which directly and distinctively conditioned the resulting policies. Moreover, ever since their inception in the immediate aftermath of the Cold War, the divergent policy regimes have been interlocked in these economic-internal and economic-external dynamics of state security. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study focuses on the Japanese and Taiwanese dancers who—in the 1940s and under the auspices of the Japan Broadcasting Corporation—performed for the Japanese army on the frontlines of combat as a visiting entertainment troupe of comfort (Imon-dan). Imon-dan performers, unlike Ian-fu (comfort women), were professional artists even before the war. During the Sino–Japanese War, the Ministry of the Army deployed entertainment troupes of comfort who were professional performers to entertain soldiers stationed in the Japanese occupation area. Such troupes included Japanese, Korean, and Taiwanese dancers because wartime Japan occupied Taiwan and Korea. This paper tracks one route to Burma in 1941 using new information from several people and a video recording. Consequently, the Japanese government used the Imon-dan in this instance to promote Japan's support for Burma's independence. These encounters resulted in modern dancers interacting with Taiwan and Japan. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The long-term trend towards later and less marriage in the low-fertility countries of East and Southeast Asia has continued into the early years of the twenty-first century, and indeed accelerated in Japan, South Korea and Taiwan. This paper examines the extent to which this is a general trend cutting across all educational attainment groups, and the extent to which it can be explained by increasing proportions in the educational categories characterized by higher levels of singlehood (in the case of females, the higher levels of education). In the countries where the rise in singlehood has been the steepest, changing educational composition has played a relatively minor role in the case of women. For men, in all countries examined, it has played only a minor role, or actually worked against rising singlehood. The paper examines likely reasons for these trends. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to reconnect the history of modern Japan with that of Japan's colonies by examining debates over the legal inclusion and exclusion of colonial Taiwan in 1899. It examines why and how an inconsistent legal structure evolved within the Japanese Empire. I argue that the creation of the Japanese nation was intertwined with the empire, and that this can be seen in the discriminatory deployment of the Family Register and Nationality Laws. Japan included Taiwan within the scope of the Nationality Law to achieve full sovereignty over its territory but also excluded the colonised people of Taiwan from the family register system to deny them citizenship. The rapid reconfiguration of the idea of 'Japan' under the strong influence of the West added significant ambivalence to this process, and thus to the making of the nation-empire. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Examining the plight of the Taiwanese, who were pawns in the larger conflict of World War Two, helps us to understand the complicated process of the breakdown of the Japanese empire. The postwar legal adjudication of BC class Japanese war crimes in East Asia is a key element in unwinding the historical complexity of postwar power shifts, the formation of a Taiwanese identity, and its connection to Japan's postwar foreign relations goals. This paper considers three inter-related issues - analyzing how Japanese rule was restructured in the postwar former colonies, dissecting the prosecution of lower-level Japanese war crimes, and resolving the conundrum of collaboration within the former empire. These problems are tied intimately together due to the transformation of postwar identity and colonial politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1593, 1609 and 1616 three very different attempts were made by the rulers of Japan to establish formal diplomatic and trade links with Taiwan. The 1593 approach consisted merely of a letter that proved impossible to deliver, while the others involved sending well-equipped fleets to the island. Both the latter expeditions were led by prominent Christians in efforts that ultimately came to nothing, in spite of being backed up by very meaningful threats of military intervention. This paper argues that it was largely the nature of Taiwan itself that frustrated Japan's schemes. Taiwan had no overall ruler who could participate, willingly or not, in the accepted modus operandi that had been applied to Korea in 1592 and Ryukyu in 1609. This was an approach based on the tributary model. Instead Taiwan's fragmentary structure of aboriginal tribes laid it open to a more western-style form of development involving the establishment of a military base and colonisation, a means that was to be exploited by the Dutch in Taiwan a decade later to the astonishment and rancour of the Japanese. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1624, the Dutch East India Company established a colony on Taiwan. When Dutch authorities moved to tax and restrict Japanese traders, who had been sailing to the island for a number of years, they encountered immediate resistance spearheaded by Suetsugu Heizō, a Nagasaki official and merchant heavily invested in the Taiwan route. As part of his struggle against the Dutch, Heizō attempted to drag the Japanese state into the conflict by engineering a fake embassy formed of 16 aboriginal men recruited from a village in Taiwan and transported to the center of Tokugawa power in Edo. This paper explores the embassy and uses it to consider why powerful Asian states like Tokugawa Japan displayed so little interest in overseas expansion, creating a vacuum of power that European overseas enterprises rushed enthusiastically to fill. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 1874 Taiwan Expedition was a watershed event for early Meiji journalism, for it was during this conflict that Kishida Ginkō (1833-1905) became Japan's first war reporter. At a time when newspapers had only started to become a feature of daily life in Japan, Ginkō's pioneering coverage of the Taiwan campaign was an important demonstration of the newspaper's potential to the Meiji authorities, and his coverage likewise gave many readers their first concrete understandings of the reporter at work. This paper examines Ginkō's extensive writings on Taiwan with the goal of illuminating how the campaign, its setting, and the Taiwanese aborigines were understood by and represented to the Meiji reading public. It shows that more than simply conveying information about the Expedition to the reading public, Ginkō's reportage strove to situate the project as part of a broader colonial agenda that would impart 'civilization' to the indigenous population. In columns that stressed Japan's long-term strategic interests in the area, Ginkō called upon his readers to imagine themselves as part of the enterprise. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is an attempt to reconsider the opposition between consumption and production in social sciences through a detailed analysis of the production of Chinese subtitles for a pirated Japanese adult video (AV) clip in Taiwan. We demonstrate that the way local pirate merchants provide Chinese subtitles is very much guided by the sexual roles of men and women, or what Sahlins calls a cultural code, in Taiwan because this makes Japanese AVs look “natural”, and thus sexually appealing, to Taiwanese viewers. More importantly, the same cultural code also serves as a model for Taiwanese viewers to consume Japanese AVs; otherwise, the reproduction of Japanese AVs will not be sexually appealing to them. Seen in this way, the relation of production and consumption is not as opposed as is commonly thought. It follows that arguments that either production or consumption offers a better mode of investigation of a cultural good are misleading, because they presume that production and consumption entail different lines of logic when in fact both follow the same cultural code. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]