ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on how Taiwanese writing Japanese poetry situated themselves in relation to others—other Taiwanese, aboriginals, and Japanese—and justified their lives, practices, and positions within the colonial context of modernization and the rise of Japanese militarism. In writing Japanese poetry, these Taiwanese both mimicked Japanese poetic practices and to various degrees situated themselves as “others” to their colonial masters, as well as outsiders with respect to a colonial metropolitan perspective that placed its center in Tokyo. The poems explored show a truly broad spectrum of positions by which Taiwanese found meaning by engaging a working symbolic register and poetic practices that consistently reiterated the production of pleasure (jouissance) that writing poetry afforded, particularly in the context of their role-playing in society at large: participating in practices associated with being like a Japanese, which at New Year’s are particularly conspicuous. This chapter also explores the social-symbolic-ideological mechanisms manifest in the poetry as practiced in various forms, specifically in terms of what may be explored as modes of typological intertextuality (discussed in the introduction) in conjunction with interdiscursive (modern, open) matrices of association in contemporary Japanese poetry in traditional forms in the colonial period. These poetic assemblages are predominantly predicated on phrases borrowed from a vast matrix of affective clichés, each appropriate for a given range of situations and conventional responses basically evoking a sympathetic emotional response through skilled pastiche.
