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ABSTRACT
This article examines interethnic marriage (naitai kyōkon) in colonial Taiwan in the early 1930s, which was a key site of contestation over the imagined imperial future. Its reading of political discourse on interethnic marriage alongside marital advice columns in colonial Taiwan’s largest daily newspaper, Taiwan nichinichi shinpō, reveals the contradictory ways in which interethnic marriage emerged in the popular imaginary as a site where the future of the empire could be consolidated – or undermined. Despite official endorsements of interethnic marriage, the pages of Taiwan nichinichi shinpō reveal widespread opposition to interethnic relationships. Such opposition – often rooted in racial prejudice – was simultaneously criticised as an obstacle to the state objective of ‘harmonious integration’ (naitai yūwa) and excused by marital advice columns due to concerns about sexual propriety. Amid widespread anxiety about upholding conservative sexual morality, advice columns were reluctant to unequivocally encourage enthusiastic young people to enter into interethnic marriages. Instead, they implied that colonial intimacy should be treated with caution. What emerges from these incongruous attitudes is an image of a colonial society still deeply ambivalent over how best to manage colonial intimacy and the future direction of the empire.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank my supervisor Professor Simon Avenell for his incisive comments on numerous drafts of this publication and expert guidance throughout my doctoral programme. Professor Eika Tai and Dr Sayaka Chatani generously provided feedback on this article as part of a mentoring programme organised by the Asian Studies Association of Australia. I would like to thank both for their invaluable comments in developing this article, and Professor Edward Aspinall for arranging this wonderful opportunity. I would also like to thank Associate Professor Ruth Barraclough and Associate Professor Carol Hayes, and the two anonymous reviewers, for their insightful comments. Professor Hyaeweol Choi also provided crucial support and encouragement in the early stages of this project, for which I am deeply appreciative. This article draws on archival research undertaken in Taiwan while a visiting scholar at the Institute of Taiwan History, Academia Sinica in 2018. I would like to thank Dr Michael Liu, Dr Yawen Ku and Shihlun Lin for their kind support in making my stay at Academia Sinica a productive one.
Correction Statement
This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.
Notes
1. In this article I use Taiwanese to refer to ethnic Chinese residents of Taiwan. Aboriginal Taiwanese communities were governed separately and did not feature prominently in the discourse of intermarriage. As Barclay (Citation2005) has noted, government officials facilitated marriages between Japanese and Aboriginal Taiwanese as a strategy to manage aboriginal territories.
2. All translations are my own unless otherwise noted.
3. Taiwanese and Korean colonial subjects were considered Japanese nationals (nihonjin) under the 1899 Nationality Law. The discourse on interethnic marriage typically avoided using the term nihonjin. Naichijin was used instead to refer to ethnic Japanese, while Taiwanese were referred to as hontōjin (islanders). Aboriginal Taiwanese were commonly distinguished from hontōjin as banjin (savages).
4. The slogan ‘impartial benevolence’ professed that Japanese imperialism did not discriminate between ethnic Japanese and colonial subjects but treated both equally due to the Japanese emperor’s benevolence.
5. The absence of a koseki system meant that amendments between koseki registries in the colonies and the metropole could not be made, which was a legal requirement for a valid marriage. For more on the legal formation process and the implications of the koseki system, see Tai (Citation2014a), Nomura (Citation2010), Oguma (Citation2017, esp. 494–496), and Yi (Citation2017, esp. 101–167). The koseki system also had gendered implications as women typically entered their husband’s koseki upon marriage, and therefore took on the status, and nationality, of their husband (Brooks, Citation2014; Chen, Citation2009). In colonial Korea, interethnic marriage faced similar problems and there was initially no mechanism to legally register a marriage, despite government endorsement of Japanese–Korean marriages (Yi, Citation2017, esp. Part 1).
6. Two newspapers, Taiwan shinpō and Taiwan nippo, were combined in 1898 to form Taiwan nichinichi shinpō. Taiwan nichinichi shinpō was printed in Japanese, except for a short Chinese-language section that was published from 1905 until the 1937 ban on Chinese-language publications (Liao, Citation2006, 84, 90).
7. For an overview of the domestic practices of interethnic couples and their relationship to gendered marriage patterns, see Huang (Citation2013). Interviews with interethnic families in colonial Korea also reveal the limited efficacy of interethnic unions in spreading Japanese customs (Kim, Citation2020, esp. 117–125).
8. There were also notable examples of Japanese intellectuals who opposed intermarriage due to miscegenation, including Nagai Hisomu and Tōgō Minoru (Robertson, Citation2005; Tai, 2014).
9. A petition from a Korean man seeking to legally register his relationship with his Japanese wife also precipitated action by the Government-General of Korea (Yi, Citation2017, 64–65).
10. Yi (Citation2020) has identified a similar phenomenon underpinning the corresponding rhetoric of naisen yūwa regarding Korea in the 1910s and 1920s.
11. To my knowledge there were no matchmaking services for interethnic couples in Taiwan. In Korea, the Association of Practising Naisen ittai (Japan and Korea as one body), a semi-private organisation founded by Pak Namgyu, offered matchmaking services for interethnic couples (Kim, Citation2020, 118–125).
12. Colonial courts upheld the legal necessity of parental approval in marriage, ruling in 1908 that parents must agree to a union and in 1937 that unless the parents consented a marriage could be annulled provided the bride was under 25 years of age and the groom under 30. There were limits, however, on parental authority, and in 1919 the court ruled that the consent of the groom and bride was also essential (Chen, Citation2014, 216, f65).
13. This is perhaps a reference to the so-called ‘hybrid vigour’ thesis which posited that ‘mixed blood’ children were in fact physically superior to ‘pureblood’ children. For more on Japanese eugenicists’ views on miscegenation, see Oguma (Citation2002, esp. Ch. 13) and Yi (Citation2017, 362–384).
14. The willingness of the advisor to highlight the possibility of divorce here stands in sharp contrast to examples of intra-ethnic couples where the column recommended, for instance, that a Taiwanese adopted daughter-in-law marry her prospective Taiwanese groom even though he had abused her (Ishikawa, Citation2015, 127–128).
15. In her discussion of Japanese-language colonial Korean literature, Poole identifies how family narratives could be used to express reservations about state visions of the ‘happy fascist’ future (Poole, Citation2014, esp. Ch. 6). My reading of interethnic marriage discourse extends this idea, situating colonial intimacy as a principal site where competing visions of the colonial future were articulated.
16. A more direct translation of kōminka is imperial subjectification. The kōminka movement involved transforming colonial populations into imperial subjects.