Asia

Paul R. Katz. When Valleys Turned Blood Red: The Ta-pa-ni Incident in Colonial Taiwan. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. 2005. Pp. xvi, 313. $59.00.
In this book, Paul R. Katz introduces one of the most significant instances of anti-Japanese violence in Taiwan’s history to the English-speaking audience. Katz’s account, influenced by Paul A. Cohen’s landmark work on the Boxer Rebellion, History in Three Keys: The Boxers as Event, Experience, and Myth (1998), focuses on three areas. First, he describes the event: “the broad range of political, socio-economic, and cultural factors that helped spark this particularly dramatic act of armed resistance during Taiwan’s colonial era” (p. 5). Second, he examines Japanese colonial policies that contributed to the one-month conflict and how the incident shaped the subsequent development of Japanese rule. Third, Katz situates the events of 1915 within broader historiographical contexts. Here, he makes an important contribution to the field, as the author makes connections between Ta-pa-ni and Taiwanese, Chinese, and global colonial history. Taiwanese historiography is bedeviled by attempts to force events in the island’s past into either a Chinese (unification) or Taiwanese (independence) national narrative. Katz, however, casts a skeptical eye on all the political agendas that have sought to claim the tragedy of 1915. One key aspect of this work is the author’s discussion of the overlapping and shifting identities of the island’s inhabitants, none of which could be considered simply “nationalism.”. . .

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