"Monitoring Cross-Straits Information"

"Monitoring Cross-Straits Information: Japanese Censorship of Chinese-Language Publications in Colonial Taiwan"
日時：2012年5月10日（木）17:00-18:00
会場：東京大学東洋文化研究所1階　ロビー
http://www.ioc.u-tokyo.ac.jp/access/index.html
報告者：Seiji Shirane (Princeton University, Ph.D. Candidate, History)
報告要旨
This presentation examines attempts by Japanese officials to control the flow of political and cultural information from mainland China into colonial Taiwan during the 1920s-1930s. While previous scholarship has focused on assimilation and Japanese-language education policies, the question of how the Government-General of Taiwan (Taiwan sōtokufu) censored Chinese-language publications has been largely neglected. Just as the Japanese established economic and migration policies restricting the flow of goods and people across the Taiwan Straits, the monitoring of Chinese nationalist and anti-imperial publications was critical to the stability of colonial rule. Through a close-reading of the Taiwan Publication Police Reports (Taiwan shuppan keisatsuhō) from 1929 to 1932, I analyze how Japanese official censors read,interpreted, and edited Chinese-language materials such as newspapers, propaganda pamphlets, and school textbooks. By comparing banned Chinese geography textbooks with those published in colonial Taiwan and the Japanese metropole, I illustrate the Sino-Japanese struggle between competing Pan-Asian visions on both sides of the Taiwan Straits. I argue that it was not just a Han-centered Chinese nationalism that Japanese officials feared, but a broader discourse on a Pan-Asian alliance of "small and weak minzoku"--including the Taiwan aborigines--against the imperial powers.