ABSTRACT
As the Japanese nation modernized its navy and army as a result of the First Sino-Japanese War (1894–1895), the Qing Dynasty handed them Taiwan, their first colony beyond Hokkaido and Okinawa. Referencing samples of poems (such as epigraph) appearing in the largest of the Japanese newspapers, the Taiwan nichinichi shimbun (Taiwan Daily News), this chapter explores how poetry both reflected colonial needs and issues facing the Japanese during the early colonial period and how poetry publication itself adapted to the new colonial situation. 2 Japanese poetry in traditional forms relies on typologically ordered (around seasonal words and referents) and highly conventionalized matrices of association that assumes a setting in Japan, inclusive of place names as well as climate. Adapting poetry to the new associative and common intertextual horizons for use in Taiwan by Japanese poets was not easy. As tanka and modern haiku in Japan reflect established practices that have roots in the constellation of flora and fauna of a more northern climate, Japan continued to frame the social imaginary as projected in established Japanese poetic configurations of what could seriously be considered as poetry or poetic.
