Under an Imperial Sun: Japanese Colonial Literature of Taiwan and the South
Faye Yuan Kleeman
University of Hawaii Press
Under an Imperial Sun examines literary,  linguistic, and cultural representations of Japan's colonial South  (nanpo). Building on the most recent scholarship from Japan,  Taiwan, and the West, it takes a cross-cultural, multidisciplinary,  comparative approach that considers the views of both colonizer and  colonized as expressed in travel accounts and popular writing as well  as scholarly treatments of the area's cultures and customs. Readers  are introduced to the work of Japanese writers Hayashi Fumiko and  Nakajima Atsushi, who spent time in the colonial South, and expatriate  Nishikawa Mitsuru, who was raised and educated in Taiwan and tried to  capture the essence of Taiwanese culture in his fictional and  ethnographic writing. The effects of colonial language policy on the  multilingual environment of Taiwan are discussed, as well as the role  of language as a tool of imperialism and as a vehicle through which  Japan's southern subjects expressed their identity--one that bridged  Taiwanese and Japanese views of self.    <P>Struggling with these often conflicting views, Taiwanese authors,  including the Nativists Yang Kui and Lu Heruo and Imperial Subject  writers Zhou Jinpo and Chen Huoquan, expressed personal and societal  differences in their writing. This volume looks closely at their lives  and works and considers the reception of this literature--the Japanese  language literature of Japan's colonies--both in Japan and in the  former colonies. Finally, it asks: What do these works tell us about  the specific example of cultural hybridity that arose in  Japanese-occupied Taiwan and what relevance does this have to the  global phenomenon of cultural hybridity viewed through a postcolonial  lens?    Simultaneously broad and admirably nuanced,Under an Imperial  Sun incorporates sophisticated scholarship with primary materials  to present a rich and complex picture of the workings of colonialism.