Politics, popular culture and images of Japan in Taiwan

Abstract

In Taiwan in the 1990s, there was such an explosion in the demand for Japanese popular culture that the phenomenon was given the term ‘Japan Mania Boom’ (hari fengchao). The mania for Japanese products and, to some extent, for Japan itself, has since waned, but these products still remain in demand. The spread of Japanese popular culture (henceforth, pop culture) began with the lifting of Martial Law in 1987, and the mass importation of Japanese products that followed. It was enhanced in the early 1990s when Taiwan cable channels began to broadcast Japanese drama on local television. The importation of Japanese drama was accompanied by Japanese manga (comics), anime (cartoons), fashion, and pop music. These began circulating as part of an underground culture, but rapidly gained widespread acceptance and entered the cultural mainstream. As a result, even newspapers and broadcasting companies that had typically taken an anti-Japanese stance had no choice but to respond to popular demand. This demand, which begun as a trickle in the 1980s, rocketed in the 1990s. Taiwan is not the only East Asian society where there is a high level of demand for Japanese popular culture. People in mainland China and South Korea – especially the young – have evinced a similar attraction to Japanese pop culture and fashion. However, Taiwanese attitudes to Japan and things Japanese are distinctive from those typical in China and Korea, where perceptions of the ‘real-world’ or ‘political’ Japan tend to be overwhelmingly negative. Since the end of the Japanese colonial era, sentiment with respect to Taiwan’s erstwhile colonial masters has included both anti- and pro-Japanese feeling, as well as the above-mentioned ‘mania’ for Japanese culture. The formation of and changes in popular sentiment towards Japan reflect Taiwan’s peculiar historical context, including but also transcending the legacy of war and colonisation. The present chapter traces the shifts from post-colonial anti-Japanese sentiment to the Japan Mania of the 1990s, with reference to this historical backdrop, and examines the images of and sentiments towards both Japan and Taiwan itself that we see refracted through the prism of popular culture.