Diaspora as Mind: Making Sense of the Experiences of the Japanese Silent Minority in Postwar Taiwan

CEAS Colloquium, Spring 2010-2011

Allen Chun Research Fellow, Institute of Ethnology, Academia Sinica, Taiwan

This is a preliminary paper based on a project on a neglected community in postwar Taiwan, ethnic Japanese, most of whom were married to ethnic Taiwanese, who settled and continued to live during the postwar era after the restoration of the Nationalist government.  While the rise of indigenization in recent years has shed light on the oppressed history of Taiwanese and aboriginal first peoples as well as a need to recover sources of traditional culture and identity among politically repressed groups, through critical multiculturalism, few have advocated the plight of long settled non-Han ethnicities, who were subject to the same conditions of cultural assimilation and political anonymity.