Memory As Is: Politics of Colonial Memories in Taiwan and South Korea Compared

Principle Investigator：Yoshihisa Amae

This project aims to investigate postcolonialism in Taiwan and South Korea, in particular how the memories of Japanese imperialism is appropriated in the respective postcolonial society, as represented in built environment and popular culture, i.e. films and print publications. Despite the fact that both nations experienced colonial modernity via Japanese imperialism, today their memories of the colonial past are strikingly different: anti-Japanese sentiment is being treated as the politics of national becoming of both South and North Korea, while Taiwan, since its political liberalization in the 1990s, has been appropriating the Japanese past as its own history to engender a national imagination in which China is not rejected but dethroned. In the 21st Century, how the expansion of Chinese economic and military power influences the geopolitical balance of the East Asian region, and the construction of a new cultural imaginary are major questions to be asked and thought of.