Review: Becoming "Japanese"

Bibliographic Data: Ching, Leo T. S. Becoming “Japanese”: Colonial Taiwan and the Politics of Identity Formation. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001.

Main Argument:

…the problem of Japanese colonialism lies not only in political and economic exploitation, but also in its imposition of Japanese culture and customs onto the Taiwanese and the aborigines. … By formulating the problem of Japanese colonialism solely in terms of of the violent imposition of Japaneseness onto the colonized, it remains oblivious to the gap between cultural identification and political discrimination, between becoming Japanese and not having the rights of a Japanese citizen. … I argue that Japanese or Japaneseness, Taiwanese or Taiwaneseness, aborigines or aboriginally, and Chinese or Chineseness--as embodied in compartmentalized national, racial, or cultural categories--do not exist outside the temporality and spatiality of colonial modernity, but are instead enabled by it. (7, 11)

( Identity in coloniality )

Critical assessment: This was not the book I wanted or was entirely expecting, which leads me to conclude that there is still at least one book to be written about the Japanese colonization of Taiwan. It's not that I think Ching is wrong about anything that he says; it's just that I actually wanted a book about the actual process of colonizing Taiwan, and this isn't it.