Peddling Postcards and Selling Empire: Image-Making in Taiwan under Japanese Colonial Rule

Abstract

Picture postcards were an important element of Japanese imperial propaganda, though they have yet to receive the scholarly attention they deserve. This paper argues that the Taiwan Government-General played an active role in the production and dissemination of picture postcards to propagate a particular view of life in the ‘Aborigine Territory’. To promote ethnic tourism in the wake of the bloody 1930 Wushe Uprising, and to construct Taiwan's majority Han population as ‘inauthentic’ as part of a wider ideological offensive against China, Japanese colonial postcards portrayed Taiwan Indigenous Peoples as isolated, culturally intact, and indebted to a benevolent state. The most widely circulated picture-postcard images of Taiwan Indigenous Peoples were produced by a coterie that included photographer Segawa Kōkichi, publisher Katsuyama Yoshisaku, watercolorist Lan Yinding and Aborigine Affairs Chief Suzuki Hideo. The documentary traces they left behind reveal a series of cross-cutting social and professional ties that bound them together as an ‘interpretive community’. Their location in centers of colonial culture, commerce, and government, along with the internal consistency of their vision, well positioned them to not only peddle postcards, but to sell an empire.