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

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 needed 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, 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 a more long-lasting invasion of Taiwan's sacred spaces involved reconsecration. 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 space. 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, a key facet of Japan's colonization of Taiwan was the reterritorialization of the island's sacred geography; in these instances, it was settlers rather than the Government General who 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?

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