Andre’s Reviews > Becoming Japanese: Colonial Taiwan and the Politics of Identity Formation > Status Update

Rather, the bodily procedures must presuppose the furtive presence of the colonial state and the massive mobilization effor...

It is writing like this that makes me now quit this book!!!!

If this were written in German I might be able to understand all those "big" words but as this is written in English I often ask myself what he is writing about.

The text flows better without all those words that I don't understand. This has gotten so boring that I am thinking of skipping ahead to the next chapter.

No wonder I am progressing so slowly with this, the author gets into blablablabla territory.

Reading how the USA & Co. acted towards Japan after WWII reminds me so much of their behavior towards West Germany afterwards, so incredibly similar in my eyes. Which also makes me pissed off even more when I hear claims that somehow the USA raised Holocaust awareness in Germany. If they cared at all it was very low key, Germans did raise awareness on their own.

This book is from 2001 so I will give the author a pass when he asks what western power ever spoke of compensation for their former colonies, because I am pretty sure my country did. Then again, who knows what he understands under compensation or even "The West" as he mainly speaks of the British and the French empires so far, the rest are only shortly covered or barely mentioned.

How does he define "The West" here? He speaks of the time during the Cold War, so is all of Europe "the West" in his mind?

His statement about Taiwanese being made "incomplete" Chinese due to Japanese colonialism and then how few knew of CHiang Kai-shek or spoke Mandarin could be interpreted as if this is due to Japanese colonialism, when, as far as I know, most residents of Taiwan had never spoken Mandarin for centuries at those times, the majority language was Hokkien.

"Watsuji...occupying the position of the Japanese imperialist in China, refused to see the structural similarity between Japanese and Western imperialism...launches a strong condemnation of Anglo-American imperialism and Eurocentrism...here is "a displacement of a certain colonial guilt about the imperialism of his own country that finds its outlet in the description of the brutality of Anglo-American imperialism.""

In Taiwan the sudden void left by the Japanese colonizer after "liberation" was filled not by the Taiwanese but by the takeover army from mainland China. The graft and corruption of the mainlanders fostered in the Taiwanese a deep resentment against the Chinese, and they consequently reconstituted and reimagined their colonial relationship with Japan.
That is so ironic.