| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 107.5

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 107.5 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Asia

Leo T. S. Ching. Becoming "Japanese": Colonial Taiwan and the Politics of Identity Formation. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. 2001. Pp. xii, 251. $18.95.

Students of East Asia have discovered what critics of the West have long known: colonial society is gold for those panning for complexities in modern life and identity. Just as cultural theory owes much to observations of British and French imperialism, the Japanese Empire has seized the attention of a new generation of East Asian culture watchers. Leo T. S. Ching joins a growing number of authors whose studies over the last decade have exposed the ironies of a supposedly homogeneous Japanese nation constructing a multiethnic empire. 1

This volume has all the elements of a winning cultural critique: comparative context (Ching urges an end to the "ghettoization" of Japanese colonial studies in Euro-American academia); complexity (the author describes Taiwanese identity as a "triple consciousness"); identification and analysis of a handful of "canonical" literary texts; and passionate concern for the "postcolonial" discourse (in both Japan and Taiwan). For students of Japanese imperialism, Ching offers an interesting new glimpse of the transformation of Japanese colonial policy, from the perspective of both the colonized and the colonizer. As Japan hands are aware, Japanese aims took a strident turn after the formal outbreak of war with China in July 1937, from attempted assimilation (dka, or wholesale export of Japanese institutions to Taiwan and Korea) to aggressive efforts to eradicate all signs of indigenous culture (kminka, destroying ancestral altars and temples, dissolving private associations, enforcing the use of Japanese, and replacing indigenous names with Japanese ones). . . .

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