Cai Peihuo's Inner Territory
“I am very disappointed in the 180,000 people of the mother country who have moved to Taiwan – the bureaucrats, the people, the propertied and propertyless…. But I have great trust and hope in the masses of the Japanese metropole.”
Thus begins Cai Peihuo's (蔡培火) 1928 manifesto, Nihon honkokumin ni atau (To the citizens of the Japanese metropole). The manifesto aimed to introduce a metropolitan Japanese audience to the discriminatory structures, policies, and practices that constrained the lives of Taiwanese Chinese residents in Taiwan. Judged from the perspective of Cai's own goals, the manifesto did not have its intended impact. At the minimum, newly enfranchised Japanese voters did not take to the polls to reform the uneven structure of the Japanese Empire. Instead, in the years following the manifesto's publication, the central government fixed the empire even more in place by abandoning the rhetoric of eventual assimilation for one of immutable cultural difference.
Cai's manifesto demands our attention, however, not for its political impact but for its insistence that reforming inequitable political hierarchies could only be achieved by questioning spatial ideologies.
Nihon honkokumin ni atau makes it case for reforming the political hierarchy of the Japanese Empire in terms of space. Cai forges a spatial argument for political equality in a number of ways, from the language he uses to define social groups within the empire to the logic underlying his claims for self-rule in Taiwan. Most important, he rejects the spatial imaginary of the empire as a core-periphery formation, in which the center holds power over the periphery. Instead, he argues that such a framework only became possible with the enactment of universal male suffrage in 1925. Now, on the verge of the first post-Universal Suffrage Act election, he presents "citizens of the Japanese metropole" with their first, and only chance, to prevent such a spatialization of political power from coming into being.
This module uses the manifesto to explore how spatial politics shaped the experiences of elite colonized activists throughout the Japanese Empire and their demands for change. The main pathway analyzes the central thrust of Cai's argument. Sub-pathways unfold to show how the circumstances behind the manifesto's production shaped Cai's focus on place as the key to political freedom in the Japanese Empire, and how Cai's own spatial politics reproduced imperial spatial hierarchies in relation to the rights of the indigenous peoples of Taiwan.
Use the tree visualization below to follow the module's pathways.