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Bodies and Structures 2.0: Deep-Mapping Modern East Asian History

Temple, City, Island, Region

The spaces and places that appear in this module exist at four distinct, yet intimately linked, levels of scale. I conceive of these scales hierarchically because, as physical entities that held specific meanings for the actors in the module, they encompass very differently sized pieces of physical terrain; and also non-hierarchically because, as concepts that were the products of social relations, none are inherently larger, more significant, or more powerful than another. Also, since the different scales overlap and intersect with each other, their boundaries were fluid rather than fixed.

To illustrate by example, the Japanese Empire occupied a regional geography that included Taiwan (island) and Jilong (city) as parts of its territory, both physically smaller than, and administratively subordinate to, the empire and its metropolitan core. Nevertheless, Jilong was the site of a much denser web of everyday interactions, and Taiwan held much greater significance as a focus of identification for many of the city’s residents. Individual temples occupied much less physical geography than a city—often less than one block of the cramped urban terrain—but they were the points of intersection that linked city, island, and region.

Historic processes of interaction, exchange, colonization, and war defined and gave meaning to each of these scales. These processes bound together the region that encompassed Japan, China, and Taiwan; natural geography alone did not create East Asia. Taiwan’s inclusion in this region depended upon historic events that brought it within the Qing Empire, including piracy, trade, European colonization, and anti-Qing resistance. Later developments, such as Japan’s Meiji Restoration and the expansionist policies of the Meiji government, shifted the island to Japanese control and promoted identity transformation in Taiwan. Everyday relations in the city drew on the changes at the island and region scales, and created a new ethnicity largely on the foundation of the temples. These institutions drew people into the city for annual festivals and periodic markets, knit the island together through incense-division and pilgrimage networks, and extended their connections to parent temples in distant parts of the region.

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The Construction of Taiwanese Sacred Geography
“In regards to the leadership of the people’s hearts,” said an article in the Taiwan nichinichi shinpō from November, 1896, “this is something that must have originated with the long-established system of temples. Now that Taiwan has become a part of Japan, we must of course maintain this system.” For the small town of Jilong, with a population of at most around 9,000 in 1895, that system contained a number of small institutions representing cults to local and imperial deities and quasi-Buddhist sects, many of which bordered on the heterodox. Three temples filled the core of this “long-established system,” the Qing'an gong, Dianji gong, and Chenghuang miao, all of which sat within a few blocks of each other in the heart of the area settled by Chinese from Zhangzhou and Quanzhou counties in Fujian Province. Although these temples themselves were not all that “long-established,” they nonetheless constituted the most significant pieces of sacred terrain when the Treaty of Shimonseki transferred Taiwan from Qing to Japanese imperial sovereignty. Once the Taiwan Government-General reached the conclusion expressed in the news article above and allowed temples to reopen, these three institutions, plus a few others, played increasingly important roles as leaders of the people's hearts.
As readers move through this pathway, they should be attentive to the roles of the islander/Taiwanese elites who established the temples, the deities that they enshrined within them, and also the overlapping scales of temple, city, island, and region that characterized both physical and imaginative geography. Also consider which perspectives operate, and dominate, on each page: The state or the everyday? The god's-eye or the person's eye?
The Japanese Occupation of Taiwan's Sacred Space
When Japanese forces arrived in Jilong, having fought their way overland after coming ashore at Aodi, along the coast to the east, they sought lodging and other facilities. The first iteration of the Taiwan Government General established its temporary offices in the building that housed the Qing Imperial Maritime Customs, in the northeast part of town, and the armed forces, under the command of Prince Kitashirakawa no Miya Yoshihisa, requisitioned at least two temples, the Dianji and Chenghuang, for their lodging. In the process, they broke several deity idols at the latter and blew up a portion of the former with an accidental weapons' explosion. These occupations were temporary, but reconsecration constituted a more profound invasion of Taiwan's sacred spaces. As Japanese settlers began to arrive in Taiwan, both government officials and private citizens, they established outposts of their own religious traditions, principally Buddhism and Shinto. One of the most convenient ways that Japanese Buddhist sects found to implant themselves in Taiwan was by taking over existing temples and setting up their own branches in the same places. This happened in at least three cases in Jilong: the Pure Land (Jōdō) sect made use of the Chenghuang Temple for a time, taking it over from the military; the Shinshū sect occupied the Longwang miao, not too far from the customs house; and the Sōdō sect took over the Shuixian miao, west of the harbor, before replacing the Shinshū at the former Longwang site. In light of these religious intrusions, the reterritorialization of the island's sacred geography was a key facet of Japan's colonization of Taiwan; in these instances, settlers rather than the Government General provided the motive force.
As readers move through this pathway, they should be attentive to the roles of the colonial state and the Japanese elites who established the temples, the deities that they enshrined within them, and also the overlapping scales of temple, city, island, and region that characterized both physical and imaginative geography. Also consider which perspectives operate, and dominate, on each page: The state or the everyday? The god's-eye or the person's eye?