DESTABILISING TAIWANESE: A CASE STUDY OF TAOYUAN MARTYRS’ SHRINE

29 April 2024 Adrian Chiu 

Written by Ai-Ting Chung.

Image credit: provided by the author.

Located on a mountain in northwest Taiwan, Taoyuan Martyrs’ Shrine inscribes the history of Taiwan under Japanese rule (1895-1945), of the Martial law period led by Kuomintang (1949-1987), and of a hybridised Taiwanese society nowadays influenced by neoliberalism. With the transformation of the shrine into the martyrs’ memorial and currently into a tourist spot, I wonder what the cultural reference of this Taoyuan Martyrs’ Shrine stands for. This project analyses the discourse surrounding the martyrs’ shrine to rethink the tension between the officials and the citizens during the construction and restoration processes. I reexamine the discourse related to the Martyrs’ Shrine to explore the ideology of the Japanese Empire and the KMT regime, the trans-/formation of national identity from the late nineteenth century to the contemporary, and the political and neoliberal dilemma of how to restore and reintroduce this architecture to the people in Taiwan and oversea. The history of the Martyrs’ Shrine illustrates how coloniality shapes the national identity, and this history leads to my question of whether “Taiwanese” is a fusion of Japanese and Chinese identity. The shrine represents the disparate horizons among different groups of citizens in Taiwan, showing both the presence and lack of Taiwanese identity.

Originally built in 1938 as part of the Japanification during the peak of Imperial Japan’s expansion, the Shinto shrine (jinja) in 1946, during the Kuomintang-led regime, became a memorial (or Martyrs’ Shrine, zhōng liè cí) for the martyrs who died in the revolution—Guangzhou Xinhai Uprising in 1911, and soldiers of Republic of China who died in the Sino-Japanese War (1937-1945) despite that many soldiers in Taiwan, especially indigenous people, fought for Japan during the war. In 1984, the Taoyuan local government planned to demolish the shrine and reconstruct the building into a modern martyr’s memorial. Still, the architect, Li Zheng Long, who was initially one of the contestants for the design of the memorial for the martyrs, believed that restoration of the shrine was more valuable than building a new memorial. Initiating a public debate, Li finally got support from the public to restore the shrine and completed the restoration in 1987.

Since all the shrines built in Imperial Japan overseas were demolished, Taoyuan Martyrs’ Shrine became the only overseas shrine that survived. In 1994, the Martyrs’ Shrine became a protected historic site, and the local government started to develop the place into a tourist attraction in the 2010s. In 2014, the Taiwanese film KANO, depicting the story of the Kano baseball team in 1930s Taiwan, used the shrine as a shooting location. In 2017, the local government of Taoyuan started to develop the Martyrs’ Shrine into a tourist spot and agreed to invite Japanese Shinto gods (three gods of pioneer, kaitaku sanjin) into the shrine for tourists to worship. As shown in the video by Taoyuan Jinja Showa 13, run by Plan C Ltd. Co., during New Year’s Eve in 2023, the Shinto Priest from Tottori Shrine in Hokkaido flew to Taiwan to practise the rituals in Taoyuan Shrine. The crowds were mostly satisfied with the cultural experience in the video. However, in March 2023, with unresolved controversy, these gods were sent back to Japan. Looking into the history to unpack the cultural symbolism of the Taoyuan Martyrs’ Shrine, I further ask: 1) What kind of Shinto gods were in the shrine? 2) Who are the martyrs? 3) What kind of discourses were used against demolishing the shrine? 4) How does the Martyrs’ Shrine live in the pastiche of the neoliberalist consumer society?

Research about the shrine has been done in Taiwan since the late 90s. The Shinto gods worshipped were Prince Kitashirakawa Yoshihisa (kitashirakawa-no-miya Yoshihisa-shinnō), the Three Gods of Pioneer (kaitaku sanjin), the Meiji Emperor, and the Goddess of Harvest (Toyōke bime no kami). Prince Kitashirakawa is still enshrined in Yasukuni Jinja. Officially, he died in Tainan due to the disease in 1895 and was enshrined commonly in the shrines in Taiwan. However, rumours say that he was killed in the action of the Taiwanese Hakka guerrilla in Hsinchu. The interpretations of this historical figure illustrate how the discourse of coloniality shapes the national identities in Japan and Taiwan. As for the Three Gods of Pioneer, they are rarely enshrined in Japan mainland, but commonly enshrined in Hokkaido, arguably the first colony of Japan. The shrines overseas empowered the imagination of Imperial Japan as a Shinto nation of expansion. To educate the people in the colonies, the Imperial Japanese government made a policy of “a shrine per neighbourhood” in the 1930s, and that was when the Taoyuan Shrine (1938-1945) was built. As part of the Japanification policy, the shrine could also be seen as a creation of colonial modernity. This colonial modernity is a top-down control of the nation-state, whose aim was to stabilise the social identity of its people—Japanese model citizens—by negating the individual subjectivity (e.g. the Hakka guerrilla remains to be rumours).

Along with the end of the Japanese colonial era, the Taoyuan Shrine should have been demolished under the KMT regime; however, the local government at the time, having a tight budget, decided to use the shrine as a holy space for resting the martyrs’ spirits. Like the Shinto shrine for Imperial Japan, the martyrs’ memorials were a means for the KMT regime to imagine the power of the ROC nation-state; therefore, the martyrs were the ones who fought for the ROC against the PRC regime. Different from what the KMT government expected, the local government in 1946 elevated the president and supporter of “Taiwan Democracy Nation” (1895), Liu Youngfu and Qiu Fengjia—both were once Qing officials—as gods and put them next to Koxinga. The martyrs in the Martyrs’ Shrine also included Dakis Nawi and Dakis Nobing, the model citizens of Imperial Japan among the Indigenous people in Taiwan. Both committed suicide during the Musha Incident (Wushe Rebellion, 1930) against the Japanese authorities. The contrast between how the KMT regime and the Taoyuan Martyrs’ Shrine defined the martyrs shows that the imagination of the national identity is unstable. This holy space gradually became a vessel inscribing how different groups of people negotiated their national identity by projecting themselves to the environment. Even though the Martyrs’ Shrine is still a state-controlled product of colonial modernity, it allows an alternative illusion from the mainstream discourse on martyrs.

Yin-Ju Pan, in the thesis “The Construction and Competing Discourse on the Meaning of the Holy Space: From Taoyuan Shrine to Taoyuan Martyrs’ Memorial”, historicises the restoration incident of Li Zheng Long and argues that in 1984—right before the end of the martial law—the power of the nation-state has gradually gone down. The people were finally brave enough to make decisions against the government’s will. However, I argue Li’s restoration does not signify the decline of the nation-state power. It has gradually mutated into a consumerist society in which animism, nationalism, and coloniality can be consumed as profitable cultural products. The Taoyuan Martyrs’ Shrine nowadays shows how the nation-state steps into the next phase of registering its people to the neoliberalist society, in which nationalism is consumed with coloniality. Inspired by Paul Barclay’s discussion of imperialism, indigeneity, and nationality in Outcasts of Empire: Japan’s Rule on Taiwan’s “Savage Border,” 1874-1945, I argue the Taoyuan Martyrs’ Shrine, like indigenism, is a historical concomitant of nation-building. What the process of nation-building brings is the high velocity of capitalism. When the holy meaning of either the martyrs’ memorial or the shrine declined, the pastiche of neoliberalist consumerism dominated the space. With the conversion of historical meaning and national discourse to profitable cultural symbols, the relationality between the self and the environment is bonded with consumption rather than the power to flip the social identity or stereotypes.

The issue of re-enshrining the Shinto gods in 2022-23 reflects how the people in Taiwan are inclined to the consumerist model and depoliticise/de-historicise what happened and is happening in the Martyrs’ Shrine to welcome a familiar yet exotic cultural experience. The promotional slogan of Taoyuan Jinja Showa 13—without a flight ticket, we make you immersed in Japan in a split second—reflects how the tourists in Taiwan transform the Martyrs’ Shrine into a product of cultural imagination. It is also noteworthy how the company avoid mentioning the place also as a martyr’s memorial to shape the imagination. Due to the complicated nature of the Martyrs’ Shrine, this nonhuman entity becomes a transitional space, allowing cultural experiences and illusions to occur. The space is given specific social meanings during different eras as if it is alive. The consumerist society is speeding up the slow death of the Taoyuan Martyrs’ Shrine. To anthropomorphise the Taoyuan Martyrs’ Shrine, I wish to see this space as a nonhuman entity allowing discourse on coloniality against the dominant neoliberalist society run by the nation-state power. By revisioning the vision of the Empire, I seek to articulate the past and present of the Taoyuan Martyrs’ Shrine to envision its future.

Ai-Ting Chung is a PhD candidate in the Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures at the University of Oregon. My fields of speciality include anime studies, film and media studies, literary criticism, as well as East Asian colonial history. My dissertation, Decoding Anime: National Discourse and Identities of Japan and Taiwan, historicises the transnational animation industry in Japan and its former colony, Taiwan, and analyses identity transformation in animation texts in the two countries from the late 1980s to the 2010s. This essay on Taoyuan Martyrs’ Shrine is my attempt to expand the discourse of coloniality beyond anime studies.