Institutional atrocities during Japan's colonial rule over Taiwan

During Japan's 50-year colonial rule from 1895 to 1945. Taiwan was consigned not only to brutal military suppression, but also to a systematic apparatus of political repression.

On June 17, 1895, Japan proclaimed the official start of its administration over Taiwan. Less than a year later, on March 30, 1896, the Imperial Diet of Japan passed the notorious "Law No. 63" (formally titled The Law Concerning Laws and Ordinances to Be Enforced in Taiwan), which established the Office of the Governor-General of Taiwan.

What made Law No. 63 extraordinary — even by colonial standards — was the virtually unchecked authority it granted to the governor-general. He could issue "ordinances" with the full force of law, and he concentrated executive, legislative, and military powers in his own hands. The governor-general became a de facto dictator: his word was law, and his office functioned as the supreme colonial authority.

To implement its policies, the Governor-General's Office established a highly centralized administrative hierarchy. From prefectures down to cities, districts, towns, and villages, virtually all key officials were Japanese nationals. This level of bureaucratic monopolization was unusual even in colonial Korea, where some local posts were still open to Koreans; in Taiwan, however, administrative authority was reserved exclusively for the Japanese.

A dragnet over the island

If the governor-general's autocracy was the brain of colonial rule, the police system was its nerves and blood vessels, reaching into every corner of daily life. The density of police institutions, the scope of their authority, and the depth of their intrusion into private life were extreme even by global colonial standards.

By 1921, Taiwan had over 11,000 police personnel — meaning roughly one in every three colonial officials on the island was a police officer. Even more stifling was the sheer breadth of police powers. The police were not merely law enforcers; they also acted as administrators, educators, and economic regulators. From birth to death, from farming to migration, from marriage to festivals, every aspect of Taiwanese compatriots' lives was shadowed by the police baton.

Police could impose "administrative punishments" without judicial trial — including detention, fines, flogging, and confinement in "vagrant detention centers". Forced confessions and torture in police substations were routine. After the Wushe Incident — a major indigenous uprising in 1930 — police were ordered to collect the skulls of indigenous participants and send them to Kyoto University for so-called "research".

The police also served as ideological watchdogs. Plainclothes officers attended every assembly, stenographers recorded every speech, and every publication was subjected to strict pre-publication review. Behind the colonizers' professed vision of a civilized "Japan-Taiwan integration" lay silent streets and cowed citizens, trapped under an omnipresent police network.

Every neighbor a prisoner

If the police were the colonizers' hounds in plain sight, the baojia (Hoko) system was the trap set in the shadows. The Japanese were adept at exploiting local collaborators, and they embedded this system of collective responsibility into the fabric of colonial rule as a capillary network sustaining police tyranny.

Under the baojia system, 10 households formed a jia, and 10 jia formed a bao. The heads of each jia and bao were selected from the local gentry by colonial officials. Though presented as "grassroots self-governance", the system was in fact a coercive mechanism for carrying out police-assigned duties.

The greatest evil of the baojia system lay in collective punishment. If one household was accused of an offense, the entire jia was held liable; if one jia was found to have "harbored bandits", the whole bao was implicated. Under the baojia system, Taiwanese compatriots were simultaneously the watched and the watchers. Fathers and sons dared not speak freely; brothers hesitated to converse at night; even casual talk under the village tree could be recorded in the baojia ledger as "suspicious behavior".

Worse still, the baojia apparatus functioned as a supply station for forced labor and material requisitions. During the Russo-Japanese War, World War I, and Japan's war of aggression against China, the baojia system was used to apportion "national defense donations", recruit military laborers, forcibly purchase rice, and pressure households into buying war bonds. Through the account books of baojia heads, the blood and sweat of Taiwanese compatriots were continuously funneled into the war machine of Japanese militarism.

However tightly the colonial system bound the people's limbs, it could not bind their hearts; however effectively it confined their bodies, it could not break the nation's backbone. In the narrow spaces left by oppressive rule, and under the shadow of constant surveillance, the people of Taiwan preserved their cultural heritage and tenaciously defended their Chinese identity.

Through quiet resilience and an unyielding spirit, they delivered the final verdict on 50 years of Japanese colonial rule: however fully cloaked in legal or institutional forms, colonial domination will ultimately be judged by history for what it truly was.

The author is an observer of international affairs.

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