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

The Temple Regulation Movement

[NOTE TO EVAN: Please change the opening of this paragraph to make the page work as the starting point for a path reached directly from the module landing page as well as from the end of the "Competing festivals" path.] By the time these festivals were held again, structural factors had begun to shift in ways that made preserving the Joint Deity-Welcoming Festival less important than protecting the temples themselves. In September 1936, the Taiwan Government-General launched the Kōminka Movement, roughly defined as a set of policies that aimed at the complete and rapid assimilation of all Taiwanese as good, loyal Japanese subjects of the Emperor. A core aspect of Kōminka was the extension of Shinto across all of Taiwan's physical and spiritual terrain and to this end, the Government-General issued policies in 1937 and 1938 that constituted what it called the Temple Regulation Movement (Jibyō seiri undō). The movement's objectives were to establish more shrines, replace ancestral altars in Taiwanese homes with altars to Shinto deities, and amalgamate Taiwanese temples into fewer institutions before, ideally, reconsecrating them as shrines. These policies amounted to a full-scale attempt to reterritorialize the sacred geography of Taiwan by making it coterminous with Japanese sacred space.

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