Three QuesTions wiTh SEIJI SHIRANE author of Imperial Gateway

1. What is your favorite anecdote from your research for this book?

Xu Zhiting illustrates the in-between status many Taiwanese subjects had in Japan’s wartime empire. At the start of the Sino-Japanese War (1937-45), Xu was detained in South China by Chinese authorities until Japan’s naval occupation of 1938. Upon his release, Xu was hired by the Japanese as a navy interpreter to help administer the region. Over the next few years, he made his way up the imperial ranks in South China’s police and education bureaus. Although Xu and other overseas Taiwanese were still relegated to second-class status below the Japanese, they took advantage of their linguistic skills and colonial subject- hood to find opportunities that placed them in supervisory positions above local Chinese populations.

How do you wish you could change your field?

Much of the important scholarship on Japan’s empire has focused on northern expansion in colonial Korea and Manchuria. I want to draw greater attention to colonial Taiwan and its pivotal role in Japan’s southern advance from 1895 to 1945. My book shows how Japanese expansionism in South China and Southeast Asia was shaped not only by Japanese imperialists but also by overseas Taiwanese subjects with their own visions and ambitions. Rather than viewing Japanese empire-building as something exported from the home islands, we need to re-examine colonies as originating sites for imperial policies and practices.

2. What do you wish you had known when you started writing your book that you know now?

I wish I had located Taiwanese oral histories earlier in my book project. Though some Taiwanese subjects—educated elites and anti-colonial activists—left written records about Japan’s southern expansion, most overseas Taiwanese in South China and Southeast Asia left few contemporary records. Fortunately, in revising my book, I was able to incorporate Taiwanese oral testimonies transcribed by historians of the Institute for Taiwan History (Taipei) in the 1990s. Such sources allowed me to include firsthand experiences of Han and indigenous Taiwanese subjects missing in Japanese official archives.

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