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

The State and The Everyday

The two most prominent perspectives that pervade the history that I relate in this module are those of the state (or states) and those of the everyday (or groups and people).

State priorities shaped Japan’s colonization of Taiwan, beginning with the decision to make Jilong’s harbor the main point of access to and from the island and to prioritize its port and urban construction above all places save the colonial capital of Taipei. These priorities redesigned Jilong’s lay-out and municipal size, and its administrative hierarchies, and influenced the establishment and management of sacred spaces in ways that facilitated government access to these sites. They also shaped many of the maps that appear in this module, applying a need to delineate and fix to the physical terrain. The state perspective was most evident at the regional, island, and city levels of scale, but it was also deeply enmeshed at the street-level of the temple.

The everyday perspective was principally those of the people who moved through the city streets and built and made use of its institutions and enterprises on a regular basis. Everyday activities shaped the social climate of Jilong and gave meaning to the urban designs laid out by state planners. People went to temples to burn incense or perform other devotional acts; they carried deities along urban streets in order to inscribe scared geography upon the physical terrain; and they engaged with each other and with the state to define borders between social groups. This was the perspective through which residents manifested and defended ethnic identities around temples and within the city, the island, and the region.

These perspectives were deeply enmeshed with each other and, in combination, they facilitated the process of ethno-genesis that I outline in the main content of the module. In their everyday lives, people interfaced with religious and administrative hierarchies that connected their experiences in the buildings and streets of Jilong to similar spaces and peoples across the island.

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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?