Japanese women in colonial Taiwan in the 1930s

This chapter aims to reveal how Japanese women living in colonial Taiwan adapted to life in Taiwan and how they formed their identities by analyzing Taiwan Fujinkai (1934–1939), a Japanese magazine published in colonial Taiwan in the 1930s.

I focus on the 1930s because it was the period when the Japanese community was well-established and included many second- and third-generation Taiwan-born Japanese. During this period, I observe that there was a specific phenomenon that some Japanese came to consider themselves to be “Taiwanese” because colonial Taiwan itself was a territory that was physically and mentally closer or more familiar than imperial Japan.

By analyzing articles in the Taiwan Fujinkai, we can observe that Japanese women in colonial Taiwan were in a difficult situation because they were influenced by imperialism and patriarchy [local Taiwanese Confucian expectations]. Furthermore, although they were Japanese because they lived in Taiwan, they were considered to be inferior to those Japanese who lived on the Japanese mainland. Yet, at the same time, because they belonged to the imperial ruling group, they could not integrate themselves into Taiwanese society. As a result, they formulated and created their own community based around the journal Taiwan Fujinkai. It is interesting that the word usage of Taiwanese women in Taiwan Fujinkai was not only used by ethnic Taiwanese women in colonial Taiwan but also by Japanese women born from Japanese and Taiwanese intermarriage families.