In an effort to keep pace with Korea, the Government-General of Taiwan launched a programme designed to institutionalise the human and social sciences in the early 1920s.

This included the creation in 1922 of the Taiwan Government-General Committee for the Compilation of Historical Materials (Taiwan sōtokufu shiryō hensan iinkai 臺灣總督府史料編纂委員會)1 and the establishment of Taihoku (Taipei) Imperial University in 1928.   

The Committee for the Compilation of Historical Materials (henceforth the Committee) was founded by the governor-general Den Kenjirō 田健治郎 (1855–1930, in office from 1919 to 1923)

by decree no. 101 on 1 April 19222. 

Mochiji Rokusaburō (mentioned in Part I) was appointed chair of the Committee and its related bodies3. 

His duties included supervising the Committee’s research and compilation work, which was carried out by a smaller team than its Korean counterpart.

Notable members included Tahara Teijirō 田原禎次郎 (1868–1923), classical Chinese expert Ozaki Hotsuma 尾崎秀眞 (1874–1952)4, Inō Kanori, who was back in Taiwan specifically for the Committee, linguist Ogawa Isayoshi 小川尚義 (1869–1947), who had trained at Tōkyō Imperial University under Ueda Kazutoshi 上田萬年 (1867–1937)5, and Taiwanese supporters of the Japanese6. 

The initial objective was to produce a History of New Taiwan (Shin Taiwan shi 新臺灣史) that would serve as a counter-discourse to works published in continental China and elsewhere – the Taiwanese figure Lien Hweng 連橫 (1878–1936) and his Complete History of Taiwan7, published in 1921, echoes the Korean Pak Ŭnsik – by emphasising the specificity of Taiwan in relation to Asia and the island’s proximity to Japan. Lien’s work, which presented the unbroken history of Taiwan from the Sui Dynasty (605) to 1895, illustrates how the continuist view of history had become widespread. The title of the book planned by the Committee can also be translated as New History of Taiwan, but History of New Taiwan seems a more accurate translation due to the work’s emphasis on the period after 1895, as we shall see.

Mochiji set out the Committee’s objectives at a lecture in July 1922. The text was published in Japanese and Chinese the following month in the journal Taiwan jihō 臺灣時報.

The setting up of this committee was driven by our observation that the historical records of our rule in Taiwan since we took possession of the island 27 years ago, more than a quarter of a century ago now, have never been accurately compiled. If they were abandoned, the archives [relating to colonial rule] risk being lost as staff working for the government-general leave or die. The value of these documents must be recognised so that they may be presented to society and prevented from being lost. It is therefore urgent that we compile a complete history of the government-general. We plan to carry out and complete this work over three years, from Taishō 11 to Taishō 13 [1922 to 1924]. The motivations, content and general orientation of this historical project will be limited to those set out below8.

He went on to underline – like the Japanese historians of Korea – that Japan needed to revolutionise the paradigm applied to the writing of Taiwan’s history by rejecting earlier Manchu bureaucratic works.

Until now, “Chinese-style” works on the history of the prefectural government focused on its actions, failures and successes, not on politics and the economy, or the joys and hardships of the population. These bureaucratic publications cannot be considered pertinent due to the approach they adopted, which spurned contemporary methodology in history writing and in Western-style writing about the history of civilisation. The Committee’s work will thus seek to achieve a balance between Chinese-style prefectural histories and the form adopted by Western historical works, all the while respecting the objectives and contents defined for this project…. Historical facts are always linked to a wider context and are thus interconnected: isolated historical facts do not exist. For this reason, anyone wanting to write the history of the governance of Taiwan must be equally versed in the intentions of the government and popular sentiment, as well as in the political situation and popular sentiment within the Japanese Empire during the same period. Furthermore, these elements must be placed in the global context, highlighting the Japanese Empire’s place in the global dynamics of the period in question9.

This ambitious project was divided into five parts. Part one was to provide an overview of the island’s history and geography, as well as relations between Japan and Taiwan. However, the subsequent sections all focused on Japan’s conquest of the island and the history of Japanese rule since 1895. Extensive bibliographies (Tosho sōmokuroku 圖書總目錄 and Tosho kaidai 圖書解題) were also planned, just as in Korea. And yet, this initial History of New Taiwan never saw the light of day. Several factors caused the project to fail. One was the fact that supervision of the project was entrusted jointly to Tahara, Ozaki and Mochiji, the latter of whom had lived mostly in Tōkyō since the end of his term of office at the Government-General of Korea in 192110. The project was further hampered by the deaths of Mochiji and Tahara in 1923.

The outcome of this initial failure – as in Korea after the failure of the 1911 Hantō-shi project – was that supervision of the project passed from colonial officials to academic disciplinary specialists. In both Korea and Taiwan, a preliminary period of attempts at bureaucratically managed institutional projects was followed by one in which historians took control to develop more specialised projects involving archive compilation. The Japanese never abandoned their colonial projects, but they did make modifications. The new Taiwanese history project was entrusted to Murakami Naojirō, a leading historian in Tōkyō. He joined the Committee in 1923 to carry out research on the ancient history of Taiwan, meaning the period of European colonisations. At the Shiryō hensanjo where he worked, Murakami specialised in the history of international relations and the history of Spain and the Netherlands, the European powers that had colonised Taiwan in the seventeenth century.

Having been shelved in 1925, the project to compile a history of Taiwan was relaunched in 1929 by the new governor-general, Kawamura Takeji 川村竹治 (1871–1955, in office from June 1928 to July 1929). Supervision of the Committee (now called the Taiwan sōtokufu shiryō hensankai 臺灣總督府史料編纂會) was entrusted to Murakami, who by 1928 was a history professor at Taihoku Imperial University and became head of the Faculty of Literature and Politics in 1929. Under Murakami’s leadership, the history of the island’s colonisations definitively became the main focus of the project. The Committee’s new configuration placed it under the umbrella of the imperial university, making it part of a dynamic in which faculty staff from the History Department and members of the Committee largely overlapped.

The aim was no longer to write a comprehensive history but rather to compile archives and historical documents following – as in Korea – the model of the Dai Nippon shiryō published by the Shiryō hensanjo11. The Committee’s new objective was to produce two sets of historical materials consisting of either recent or ancient sources, or of specialised studies. In concrete terms, these were: 1) the Taiwan shiryō 臺灣史料 (Historical Materials on Taiwan) series, known as kōhon 稿本 and kōbun 綱文, which focused specifically on Japanese rule since 1895 and ultimately comprised 51 volumes; and 2) the Taiwan shiryō zassan 臺灣史料雜纂 (Miscellaneous Historical Documents on Taiwan) series, presenting the colonial government’s archives and comprising 7 volumes12. Only three copies of the first series, Taiwan shiryō, appear to have been published and the originals are extremely rare13. In contrast to Korea, Japanese historiography in Taiwan perpetuated late-nineteenth-century biases by focusing on the period of Japanese rule, or at best the history of the European colonisations, events seen as marking the moment Taiwan truly “entered” history. 

In fact, among all the corpora of archives and documents to be compiled, the 1929 archival project distinguished only between European or Manchu documents and Japanese documents. The historical events and dynamics of the period preceding the arrival of the Japanese were thus distinguished according to which power was attempting to control the island. The focus was not on the history of the island itself but of its domination: Taiwan’s Han populations were not considered worthy of interest and research on the aboriginal populations had been relegated to the field of anthropology, which also studied prehistory (as in Hokkaidō with the Ainu). This colonialist view in which all pre-colonial periods were seen as belonging to “pre-History” also existed in Africa and elsewhere in the Pacific, for example in New Caledonia.

The volumes on Japan, the Netherlands and Spain were supervised by Murakami, while those on China were overseen by Kubo Tokuji 久保得二, a professor who occupied the chair in East Asian Literature at Taihoku Imperial University. The composition of Taiwan shiryō zassan in particular, which was a compilation of miscellaneous sources and materials, reveals the interests of Murakami and his team and underscores his long-standing specialisation in Spanish and Dutch history14. Volume two of the series Taiwan shiryō zassan, for example, consists of a partial translation of the Daily Journals of Batavia Castle (Dagh-register gehouden int Casteel Batavia, Shōyaku Batavia-jō nisshi 抄譯バタヴィア城日誌)15, written by the governor-general of the Dutch East India Company (VOC) in present-day Jakarta (the port of Anping in Taiwan was formerly a VOC trading post). The translated extracts focused on Japan and Taiwan in an attempt to illustrate the historical links between the two. This same topic was the subject of a lecture given by Murakami to the Society for the Study of Archives on Japan-Netherlands Exchange Networks (Tōkyō Nichi-Ran kōtsū shiryō kenkyūkai 東京日蘭交通史料研究會) in Tōkyō in 193716. Although other subjects more closely related to Japan were also studied, such as the history of Japanese trading posts, European-Manchu history remained the central theme: volume three presented the diary of the Dutch naval commander Cornelis Reijersz, who served in Asia from 1622 to 1624 and launched the construction of Fort Zeelandia (Anping port, present-day Tainan); while volume four presented sources relating to the Manchu domination of Taiwan in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Although the History of New Taiwan was replaced in 1929 by an archival project, two general reference works on Taiwan were published almost simultaneously. One was Inō Kanori’s vast posthumous work A Cultural Treatise on Taiwan (Taiwan bunka shi 臺灣文化志), published in 1928, which definitively blurred the boundaries between history and anthropology by stressing how artificial the distinction between them was in the context of colonial scholarship on Taiwan. Despite constant improvements in the technical quality of historical research, Inō’s work illustrates how little the angles of scientific inquiry had changed since 1900. The same can be said of the second work, Teikokushugi ka no Taiwan 帝國主義下の臺灣 (Taiwan under Imperialism)17, published in Japan in 1929 by Yanaihara Tadao 矢内原忠雄 (1893–1961)18. Yanaihara held the chair in Colonial Policy at Tōkyō Imperial University and was yet another researcher to focus on the Japanese colonial regime. After 35 years of colonisation, the content compiled in both Taiwan and the metropole showed the same concentration on the aboriginal question and a loss of interest in the history of the island itself.

But let us now turn our attention to the two imperial universities in the colonies and their history chairs.

Why create the colonial universities? Despite the apparent unity of Japanese imperial policy, the context in Taiwan and Korea was markedly different. To understand this, we need to widen our focus a little. In Taiwan, the hard sciences had always been dominant and the factors leading to the creation of the Faculty of Science and Agriculture at Taihoku Imperial University reflected a longstanding desire to merge the research facilities in place since 1895 in the field of agronomics, pharmacopoeia and tropical diseases. In 1909 these facilities were affiliated to the Taiwan Government-General Research Institute and then incorporated into the Central Research Institute (Chūō kenkyūjo 中央研究所) in 1921, when management of the hard sciences was centralised. In a sense, the policy adopted in Taiwan was characteristic of the interwar period and comparable to that of the USSR, the Republic of China and France19. It had no equivalent, however, in metropolitan Japan or Korea, where the regime’s main concern was to counter anti-colonial resistance.

In February 1922, a revision of the ordinances governing education in Korea and Taiwan made it legally possible to open universities there, and for Koreans and Taiwanese to attend them20. Although the education systems in Korea and Taiwan were theoretically unified with that of Japan, they continued to be administered by the respective governments-general21.

In Korea in particular, the reform paved the way for local initiatives launched by the colonised peoples: in June 1922, the Society for Korean Education (Chosŏn kyoyukhoe 朝鮮教育會), headed by Yi Sang-jae 李商在 (1881–1927), took advantage of the newly relaxed legal framework to propose a national (i.e. Korean) university comprising four faculties in law, literature, economics and science22. This idea was discouraged by the colonial government, which restricted public fundraising appeals, and the project ended after the “convenient” disappearance of some of its backers. Nevertheless, such projects hailing from Korea’s independence movement drove Japan to create an imperial university there.

A preparatory school (Yoka daigaku 豫科大學) opened its doors in April 1924. Then in 1926, Keijō Imperial University (Keijō teikoku daigaku 京城帝國大學) opened a Faculty of Law and Literature (Hōbunka daigaku 法文科大學) and a Faculty of Medicine (Ika daigaku 醫科大學) with its own teaching hospital.

Later, in 1941, the university was endowed with a Faculty of Science (Rikōka daigaku 理工科大學). In 1929 the university held 49 chairs in the Faculty of Law and Literature and 26 in the Faculty of Medicine, with a teaching body comprised of 70 professors and 43 associate professors, and a student body of around 500. The teaching and research undertaken by this university and its counterpart in Taiwan (see below) focused on “traditional” subjects, just as in Japan. Although students in the Faculty of Law and Literature’s History Department could take classes on China and Korea, the majority of courses covered general subjects like administrative law, the penal code, Western history, economic policy, diplomatic history, Russian, Ancient Greek and Latin23. In other words, these were universities “in a colonial context” rather than “colonial universities” per se. Korean students, who followed courses entirely in Japanese, represented around one third of the student body. This was a fairly high proportion for a colonial institution, compared, for example, to the University of Algiers under French colonisation24. However, they remained in inferior positions25.

In Taiwan, the decision to create an imperial university reflected the previously mentioned drive to centralise research in the hard sciences and also followed a similar move to institutionalise research in Korea. The Government-General of Taiwan decided to emulate Korea by creating a Japanese-style general university. Just like its Korean counterpart, however, Taihoku Imperial University (Taihoku teikoku daigaku 台北帝國大學), which opened in 1928, was not controlled by the Japanese Ministry of Education but by the colonial government26. It initially comprised two faculties: the Faculty of Literature and Politics (Bunsei gakubu 文政學部), and the Faculty of Science and Agriculture (Rinō gakubu 理農學部). In 1930, each faculty had 20 chairs. A Faculty of Medicine (Igakubu 醫學部) was created in 1936 and in 1938 it took over the running of the Taiwan Government-General Hospital, one of the oldest institutions in the colony. The influence of the war saw a Faculty of Technology (Kōgakubu 工學部) established in 1943, while the Faculty of Science and Agriculture was split into two separate entities27. Until the end of Taiwan’s colonisation, the research conducted at Taihoku Imperial University continued to have a southern, nanshin-ron 南進論 bias, referring to the doctrine advocating military expansion into South East Asia and the Pacific Islands, while the work carried out at Keijō Imperial University had a northern, hokushin-ron 北進論bias, reflecting the idea of a “Korea-Manchuria sphere”. The subjects explored by historical research in the colonies thus tended to extend into the neighbouring territories.

Between 1928 and 1937, Taihoku Imperial University was headed by renowned Oriental historian Shidehara Taira, introduced in the section on Korea. The two universities established in the colonies were elite institutions, open to a select number of students, as was generally the case prior to 194528. Taiwanese students represented a quarter of the student body in 1943, except in the Faculty of Medicine, where, as in Korea, they were more numerous29.

The creation of the Faculty of Law and Literature in Keijō, in 1926, saw two chairs in Korean History established: “Korean History Chair N^o 1” (Chōsen shigaku daiichi kōza 朝鮮史學第一講座), initially held by philologist and historian Imanishi Ryū, and “Korean History Chair N^o 2”, held by historian Oda Shōgo. When Imanishi died in May 1932, he was replaced the following month by archaeologist Fujita Ryōsaku, who had been an associate professor at the university since 1926 and was head curator at the Government-General Museum. As for chair number 2, it remained empty for several years following Oda’s retirement in November 1932 before being taken up in 1939 by Suematsu Yasukazu 末松保和 (1904–1992), a specialist in ancient Korea who had been an associate professor at the university and was a member of the Committee for the Compilation of Korean History30.

In parallel, the faculty also had two chairs in National History (Kokushigaku 國史學)31: the first was taken up by Tabohashi Kiyoshi 田保橋潔 (1897–1945) in 1927 and the second by Matsumoto Shigehiko 松本重彦 (1887–1969) in 1929. Both remained in their respective positions until 1945. Tabohashi was a historian of international relations and specialised in what was known as the “Far Eastern question”, meaning the history of the tensions between China, Korea, Japan, Russia and the Western powers since the mid-nineteenth century. This subject was also popular in France at the time, as evidenced by the mid-century work of Pierre Renouvin. The links between the metropole and the colonies are clear: Suematsu and Tabohashi both hailed from the Department of National History at Tōkyō Imperial University. Tabohashi, who graduated in 1921, had previously worked for the Committee for the Compilation of the History of the Meiji Restoration and at the Shiryō hensanjo. Keijō Imperial University also had two chairs in Oriental History, as well as a course in Western History as of 1941, taught by the specialist in French economic history Takahashi Kōhachirō 高橋幸八郎 (1912–1982), who was close to the Annales school of French historians32.

According to the South Korean historian Cho Donggŏl, “a dual system took shape in which the Institute for the Compilation of Korean History was tasked with organising and disseminating primary sources and with presenting the colonial historiography to the population, while Keijō Imperial University was responsible for mass-producing books and articles validating this historiography”33. This needs qualifying however: although the colonial historiography did function according to just such an arrangement, the Chōsen shi project compiled by the Institute (mentioned in Part I) was perhaps more impressive for its volume than for its contents – which were simply a compilation of ancient sources – and as we shall see further on, the scholarly outputs of the various learned societies consisted either of general-public texts or of general overviews of a given subject. Finally, it was not only the Faculty of Law and Literature’s History Department that published a bulletin covering Korea and other cultural areas; the faculty’s three other departments also published bulletins to a greater or lesser extent in the field of Korean Studies (including linguistics).

The subjects explored as part of Korean history largely mirrored the questions examined by Japanese Oriental scholarship in the late nineteenth century. At the top of the list were the ancient history of Korea, the Chinese colonisation of Korea during the Western Han Dynasty (the Lelang Commandery, etc.) and the question of “Japan-Korea” relations (kankei 關係), notably with regards the “Japanese” protectorate of Kaya (Mimana) during ancient times34, and the invasions by Toyotomi Hideyoshi in the sixteenth century35. Suematsu was an important figure in post-colonial Korean Studies and his role warrants a more detailed discussion than is possible here (for example, his post-1945 production of working indexes and bibliographies)36. Of the 94 dissertations submitted in Keijō’s History Department until 1943 – 37 of them by Korean students and 57 by Japanese – 33 focused on Korea37. No Korean students wrote a dissertation on national (i.e. Japanese) history.

At Taihoku Imperial University, the number of chairs in the Faculty of Literature and Politics evolved over the years within the four human and social science departments established in 1928: Philosophy, History, Literature and Politics. Three chairs were directly concerned with Taiwanese society. The general organisation of the chairs and focus of historical research were as follows38: The History Department (Shigaku-ka 史學科) initially had three chairs in Oriental History, History of the South Pacific (Nanyō shigaku kōza 南洋史學講座), and National History. To this was added a chair in Ethnology (Dozoku jinshu gaku kōza 土俗人種學講座), which was thus structurally linked to the History Department but focused exclusively on Austronesian aborigines39. Then in 1930 a chair in Western Historiography and Geography was established. This configuration and distribution of research responsibilities was specific to Taiwan. The three chairs in Ethnology, History of the South Pacific, and Anatomy N^o 2 (created in 1936) were devoted to studying Taiwan40. Finally, between 1934 and 1942 the Department published an annual report entitled Shigakuka kenkyū nenpō 史學科研究年報 (History Department Annual Report)41.

The only thing that set the imperial universities of the colonies apart from their metropolitan counterparts was the “local” focus of their research and their chairs dedicated to the colonial society and/or its history. They thus adopted, albeit at a later date, the same tripartite division of historical research seen in the metropole – national history, Oriental history and Western history – in addition to the chairs in “Colonial History”42.

The chair in the History of the South Pacific was assigned to Murakami in 1928, just as he was appointed head of the Committee for the Compilation of Historical Materials. He was assisted in his task by the associate professor Iwao Seiichi 岩生成一 (1900–1988), a specialist in the history of Japanese settlements and Japan-South East Asia relations, and by the lecturer Yanai Kenji 箭内健次 (1910–death unknown). Like Murakami, both were graduates of the History Department at Tōkyō Imperial University and Iwao had also worked as an assistant at the Shiryō hensanjo43. Murakami was initially sent in 1928 on a one-year study trip, financed by the Government-General of Taiwan, to the Netherlands, Great Britain, Spain, Portugal and the Dutch territory of Java. 

At Taihoku Imperial University, Murakami, Iwao and Yanai were to study the history of the South Pacific, in other words, to expand the focus of research beyond the colonial conception of Taiwan’s history that had prevailed since the late nineteenth century and which had previously been limited to the period of Japanese rule. As previously noted, Murakami had a predilection for the history of the Dutch and Spanish colonisation of Taiwan44. Learning these two languages was thus an integral part of the South Pacific History curriculum. Murakami ultimately published some 120 works on the subject. He was also given the chair in Western Historiography and Geography when it was created in 1930. When Murakami left in 1935, the South Pacific chair was taken over the following year by Iwao, while the chair in Western Historiography and Geography was entrusted to Sugawara Ken 菅原憲 (dates unknown). Finally, the History Department’s research programmes sometimes involved anthropologists, who as we saw belonged to the same department. In 1937 for example, Utsushikawa Nenozō 移川子之藏 (1884–1947), who headed the chair in Ethnology, was sent to the National Archives of the Netherlands to photograph a substantial volume of documents relating to the Dutch colonisation of Taiwan in the seventeenth century.

This notwithstanding, the students themselves – some of whom were Taiwanese – changed the orientation of the South Pacific History section’s research outputs. This contrasted with the situation in Korea, where Korean scholars had their own research structures independent of the Japanese (see below). On the one hand, Murakami’s group focused exclusively on the history of the Dutch and Spanish colonisations of Taiwan and on the history of Japan’s relations with the European colonial powers present in South East Asia. The titles of the seminars taught on Murakami’s South Pacific History course, as presented in the faculty’s annual report, show a focus on the study of Spanish and Dutch documents and archives (which also concerned the Philippines), and on the study of these two languages (but emphatically not Chinese)45. On the other hand, as remarked by Taiwanese historian Chen Weizhi 陳偉智, who has studied the dissertations written by students on the course: among the thirteen graduates supervised by Murakami, Iwao and Yanai, four students (including one Taiwanese) wrote a dissertation on the history of seventeenth-century Taiwan proper, including two on the historical figure of Koxinga46. This shows that while the subject was generally avoided, it was not entirely supressed as it was after 1945 under Chiang Kai-shek.

This final section provides a brief overview of the historical and philological societies linked to the colonial institutions, as well as their main publications47. Since figures are much more eloquent than a sterile inventory, suffice it to say that colonial Korea had no less than five major learned societies dedicated to Korean history, and while Taiwan once again cannot compare, it made up for it in the field of anthropology, which for fifty years was highly productive. Let us now look at some of the most significant publications of these societies, which will also shed light on the circulation of scholars among the different structures and institutions.

The most important of these societies was certainly Chōsen shi gakkai 朝鮮史學會, the Korean History Society, founded in 1923. Chōsen shi gakkai can be considered the first institutional learned society specialising in Korean history, all periods and research themes combined, although it is impossible to establish a link with the post-1945 period48. This society stood out for the number of collective works and reprints of older works it published. Headed by Oda Shōgo, then an official in the colonial government, its other members included historians Kuroita, Miura and Imanishi, architectural history specialist Sekino Tadashi 關野貞 (1868–1935)49, and Korean scholars50, giving the Chōsen shi gakkai an entirely official appearance. Nevertheless, unlike the Institute for the Compilation of Korean History, its research was not led from the top down and merits a more detailed presentation. It provides a much clearer picture of the academic face of the colonial historiography than the Chōsen shi produced by the Institute, which as we saw, was merely a annalistic compilation of documents.

From September 1923 to November 1924, Chōsen shi gakkai published its fifteen-part Korean History Lessons (Chōsen shi kōza 朝鮮史講座). These fifteen fascicules were originally distributed to members of the society but in 1924 were published in three volumes containing some forty lectures51. The proposed general outline for Korean history is set out in volume one. Although not fundamentally different from that proposed by Hayashi Taisuke in 1912, or by other early-twentieth-century works, in reality its contents were much more clearly defined. The colonial authors contributing to this 1924 publication also worked on the 1933–1935 book Japanese History Lessons, published by Iwanami, illustrating the esteem in which colonial research was held in the metropole (7 fascicules on Korean history out of a total of 130). Ultimately, the colonial historiography of Korea had a much greater presence in Japan than that of Taiwan (which was not included in the Japanese History Lessons series, for example).

Another major work by Chōsen shi gakkai was the Compendium of Korean History (Chōsen shi taikei 朝鮮史大系), the title of a five-volume general history of Korea published in 1927. This extensive yet erudite textbook features references to books and academic journals from Japan and to archaeological reports and annexes in Chinese. The ancient periods (Lelang and the Three Kingdoms) are presented by Oda, with the rest of the compendium composed of manuscripts taken from Hantō-shi, notably texts by Seno and Sugimoto. Finally, there was the republication of the thirteenth-century Samguk yusa by Chōsen shi gakkai in 1928, under the supervision of historian Imanishi.

The history of Taiwan and Korea was systematically studied throughout the entire colonial period, from the 1890s onwards. The period from 1890 to 1940 can be divided into several distinct phrases, as I have endeavoured to show in this paper. Work began during the pre-colonial period and was characterised by studies conducted by Oriental scholars (i.e. sinologists) from the metropole. This was followed by initiatives aimed at establishing general histories of Korea and Taiwan, and finally by the creation of institutions tasked with producing archival series. These endeavours culminated in the creation of specialised chairs at the colonial universities founded during the interwar period. The histories produced were “colonial” in the sense that they emanated from the colonising power and its agents, and concerned the colonised territories.

However, the question of the nature of this historiography has several possible answers. Generally speaking, Japanese academic scholarship in Korea and Taiwan can be described as having been produced “in a colonial context” rather than being specifically “colonial” in the sense of having some distinctive characteristic. Yet more than any other field, the colonial historiography was particularly prone to being imbued with a kind of “coloniality” due to its object of study and its commanding position over the colonised society, in a context where anti-colonial discourses were systematically invalidated.

In the empires of the modern era, colonial history was often synonymous with the history of colonial conquest, in other words, it resembled a “colonial epic”. This was the case in Africa52 and in much of the work carried out in Taiwan. The study of ancient worlds, notably in the Mediterranean, seemed on the face of it unrelated to the history of the colonised societies and connected instead with the history of earlier settlements. This was also true for the discovery of the ancient city of Great Zimbabwe (in what was then Rhodesia) in Sub-Saharan Africa53. In this context, the cases of Cambodia in Indochina and colonial Korea, where histories of the countries themselves were written – based on archaeology in Cambodia and a combination of historiography and archaeology in Korea – seem exceptional in the sense that genuine studies of the colonised society were undertaken. This in turn raises the question of the legacy of such research in the post-colonial era. In Korea, as in Indochina, the existence of an emminently ancient past, and the sense of their having a “mission”, captivated colonial scholars, who did not hesitate to compare the importance of their work, in particular on the Three Kingdoms (first to tenth centuries), to the research carried out in the Mediterranean. 

The concept of Japanese colonial historiography thus actually points to two different realities in Taiwan and Korea. Nevertheless, as this paper has shown, Japan’s entire body of colonial historiography was part of a unified “system” that included metropolitan Japanese scholarship on East Asia and, as of the interwar period, the archive specialists at Tōkyō Imperial University’s Shiryō hensanjo. This configuration contrasts markedly with that, for example, of the French colonial empire, in that it involved a single network of scholars (mirroring its counterpart of colonial officials). Accordingly, studying Japanese colonial historiography means simultaneously studying modern Japanese historiography. It also reveals a distinctive feature of Japanese colonial scholarship, something only visible if we adopt an empire-level view, as I have attempted to do here. Doing so also raises the question of the links between colonial history and national history: the way these fields were established virtually simultaneously in Japan and the colonies, the way “national history” specialists from the metropole dominated scholarly networks in the colonies, the sharing of a common perception of history by coloniser and colonised, who paralleled each other in writing a “national narrative” type history, albeit with very different motivations.

Japanese colonial historiography ultimately appears to have been a means for the metropole to exert its power, regardless of the subjects examined. Indeed, the aim was as much to control what was written about the dominated society as it was to bring to a close the independent history of that country in order to facilitate its incorporation as a “region” of Japan. By definition, these two aspects were intertwined: only Japanese scholars were authorised to express their opinions, while dissenting voices were merely tolerated and anti-colonial ones were completely invalidated. All of these differing opinions resurfaced after Japan’s colonial empire was dismanteled in 1945, when a “decolonisation” of Japanese scholarship took place and Oriental Studies was divided into separate disciplines focusing specifically on Korea or Taiwan (for example via the Japanese Society for the Study of Korean History, founded in 1959). The post-1945 period also saw nationalist historiographies come to the fore, particularly in Korea, the only ex-colony to achieve independence, while Taiwan found itself absorbed by the Republic of China54.