Friend and foe: Wei Te-Sheng on Taiwanese emotions towards Japanese colonization and the Japanese perspectives of Ryotaro Shiba and Yoshinori Kobayashi

Abstract

In Warriors of the Rainbow, Wei Te-Sheng sharply distinguished between heroes and villains in the 1930 Musha incident – the Taiwanese heroes fight against the Japanese villains. This contrasts with Kano, where Wei presents the romantic Orient of Japanese colonization through baseball games. Although his films are not always historically accurate in details, they realistically represent Taiwanese collective emotions towards Japanese colonization. Preferencing Japanese colonization over Chinese administration is not unusual in today’s Taiwan and thus not original to Wei. Taiwan’s Japanese colonial past was previously acknowledged by two well-known Japanese writers, Ryotaro Shiba and Yoshinori Kobayashi, in the late twentieth century when Taiwan newly asserted its freedom of expression. This article will analyse the role played by Japan in establishing the creation and projection of a unique Taiwanese identity in the field of popular culture by employing a ‘point of view’ framework from narratology.