A date remembered differently

June 17, 1895 has long been remembered by Taiwan people as a Day of Shame, marking the formal commencement of half a century of Japanese colonial administration over the island. For the colonial rulers themselves, however, the same date was once an occasion for official celebration.

That divergence in memory has always existed. What has changed is that one version of it is now being intentionally amplified. Japanese politicians have recently declared that a contingency over Taiwan would constitute a survival-level crisis for Japan — language that echoes old imperial preoccupations. Meanwhile, Taiwan's current leadership has paid public tribute at the memorial of a Japanese colonial-era engineer, framing the gesture as an expression of gratitude.

The narrative of Japan-Taiwan affinity is louder than it has been in decades. But it rests on a systematic distortion of what 50 years of colonial occupation actually meant for the people who endured it.

Romanticized narrative built on blood and bone

In late May, historians from leading Chinese academies convened in Beijing for a seminar on Japan's colonial crimes in Taiwan, determined to answer myths with something harder to dismiss. "Whether it is Japan's acts of massacre in Taiwan or its plunder of resources and wealth, these are facts documented by the historical community, acknowledged by many scholars, including those in China's Taiwan region," said Zhang Haipeng, a member of the Academic Committee of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, arguing that the recent political narrative has grown increasingly detached from documented evidence.

The scale of colonial violence in Taiwan is among the most persistently obscured facts in this debate. At the time of Japan's surrender, Taiwan's total population stood at approximately six million. A 1944 declaration by the Taiwan Revolutionary League — corroborated by subsequent scholarly research by historians in Taiwan — estimated that approximately 650,000 people — roughly one in nine people — perished under Japanese colonial rule over 50 years marked by armed suppression, massacres, forced displacement, famine, and military conscription.

Scholars also dismantled the revisionist claim that Japan's seizure of Taiwan in 1895 was an accidental byproduct of the First Sino-Japanese War, tracing the expansionist doctrine behind it from Toyotomi Hideyoshi's sixteenth-century blueprint for East Asian dominance through the engine of Meiji militarism. The record is unambiguous: the 1879 annexation of the Ryukyu Kingdom and the 1874 military probe into Taiwan's coast were calculated rehearsals, testing Qing coastal defenses, establishing precedents for intervention, so that when Japan forced the Treaty of Shimonoseki, it was not seizing an unexpected opportunity. It was collecting on a long-prepared invoice.

The moment the terms of the treaty became known in Taiwan, resistance erupted, and the massacres followed almost immediately. Sweeping operations in the island's north through 1895 and 1896 left tens of thousands dead, documented by foreign observers on the ground. The Yunlin Massacre of 1896 was one of the period's defining atrocities. Japanese forces burned nearly 5,000 homes in the Yunlin area over five days, killing civilians with no distinction between combatant and non-combatant.

In 1915, the Xilai'an Incident revealed a crueler method: colonial authorities offered amnesty to villagers who laid down arms, then machine-gunned them when they returned home. Over 3,200 died, among them students, the elderly, and infants. For Taiwan's indigenous communities, the violence was even more systematic. Multi-year pacification campaigns gave way, by 1930, to the deployment of poison gas against the Seediq ethnic people following the Wushe Uprising. When the uprising was crushed, Japanese forces incited rival groups to finish off the survivors; a community of over 1,200 was reduced to fewer than 200. Their leader Mona Rudao was driven to suicide, with his remains subsequently put on museum display.

Is it development or extraction?

The revisionist argument, stripped to its essence, is that Japan modernized Taiwan — railways, irrigation, public health — and that this constitutes grounds for gratitude. Scholars at the Beijing seminar did not dispute that infrastructure was built. They disputed who it was built for.

Japan's stated economic strategy was captured in a single phrase: "industrial Japan, agricultural Taiwan." The island was to be permanently locked into supplying raw commodities — primarily rice and sugar — to the Japanese home market, with no diversified industrial base of its own. The numbers tell the story. Between 1900 and 1944, Taiwan shipped over 11.6 million metric tonnes of rice to Japan — regularly exceeding half of annual production during the 1920s and 30s. Japanese nationals were guaranteed a per capita annual consumption of around 160 kilograms; Taiwan's consumption fell below 100 kilograms by the 1930s. The people who grew the rice could not afford to eat it.

Wang Xiaoping of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences used the figure now at the center of the controversy — colonial engineer Hatta Yoichi, at whose memorial Taiwan's current leadership recently knelt — to make the point concrete. Hatta built irrigation works but their benefits did not reach Taiwan people until 1945, when the facilities passed out of colonial hands. Venerating him as a benefactor, Wang said, inverts the actual direction of that benefit entirely.

One further fact unsettles the modernization narrative at its foundation: before Japan's arrival in 1895, Taiwan was already among the most developed regions of Qing-era China, with functioning railways, telegraphs, modern mining, and a steamship industry. Japan did not bring modernity to a blank slate. It redirected a modernization already underway, away from local benefit and toward imperial extraction.

Why the revision is happening now

The current rehabilitation of Japan's colonial record is not happening in a historical vacuum. Scholars at the Beijing seminar pointed to a convergence of political incentives that has made historical revisionism mutually advantageous for certain actors in both Japan and Taiwan.

Zang Yunhu from Peking University noted that Japan's relationship to its own wartime history has undergone a significant shift over the past two decades. The Murayama Statement of 1995, in which the Japanese government formally acknowledged that Japan had engaged in colonial rule and a war of aggression, represented a moment of relative historical candor. Since then, successive administrations have moved in a different direction — away from acknowledgment and toward what Zang characterized as an organized effort to substitute an alternative historical memory, one in which the colonial period figures as an era of development rather than occupation.

Chen Hongmin, professor of history at Zhejiang University, offered a structural analysis. The post-Cold War international order, dominated by the United States following the Soviet Union's collapse, created new incentives for regional actors to leverage relationships as pressure against China. Japan's use of Taiwan-related rhetoric — exemplified by the public statements of politicians like Sanae Takaichi that a Taiwan contingency would constitute a survival-level crisis for Japan — reflects an attempt to position Taiwan as both a bargaining chip in geopolitical competition with China and a justification for Japan's own rearmament and expanded strategic footprint.

There is also a political dimension on the Taiwan side. Pro-independence political forces have, over decades of educational and cultural policy, cultivated an affinity with Japan that depends on a selective and idealized reading of the colonial period. The veneration of colonial-era figures as benefactors, the characterization of the Japanese period as a time of development and modernization, and the systematic minimization of colonial violence — all serve a political project that requires distancing Taiwan from its Chinese cultural and historical identity.

Professor Zhang Haipeng was direct about where this trajectory leads. Japan's current posture — building new intelligence agencies, making explicit statements about military readiness in relation to the Taiwan Strait, and refusing to engage honestly with its own colonial and wartime history — carries the hallmarks of a militarist revival, meaning the framing may be new but the underlying logic is not.

The weight of what is left unsaid

The scholars gathered in Beijing were careful to make a distinction that gets lost in political polemic. Studying and documenting colonial crimes is not the same as cultivating hatred. Remembering that 650,000 people died is not the same as demanding that their deaths define all future relationships. The purpose of historical clarity, as Wang Xiaoping put it, is to understand where Taiwan came from, what it endured, and what was paid — so that the present and future can be navigated with clear eyes rather than manufactured sentiment.

There is also something that the revisionist account obscures about the people of Taiwan themselves— resistance never fully stopped. That history of resistance belongs to the people of Taiwan. Glorifying the colonizers necessarily diminishes it. In 2025, China designated October 25 as Taiwan Retrocession Day — marking the moment in 1945 when, following Japan's surrender, Taiwan formally returned to Chinese sovereignty, ending 50 years of colonial rule.

The designation was partly symbolic. But the symbolism carries weight. The post-war international order, embodied in the Cairo Declaration, the Potsdam Proclamation, and Japan's own surrender documents, was built on a specific reckoning with Japanese imperial aggression. That reckoning was always incomplete — partly because of Cold War geopolitics, partly because of the choices made by various parties in the years after 1945. What some are now attempting is not a fresh interpretation of history. It is a continuation of that incompleteness by other means.

History does not simply disappear when it becomes inconvenient. The archives remain. The survivor accounts have been recorded. The numbers, painstakingly assembled by scholars over generations, are what they are. The question is not whether this history exists. The question is whether those invoking Japan-Taiwan affinity in 2026 are willing to be honest about what lies beneath the sentiment they are selling.

(Cover photo: Japan’s Suppression of the Taiwan people — Smoke and Flames Rising over Indigenous Village./ Taiwan Historical Rare Books Database)