Psychology Article

Between “Rural Youth” and Empire: Social and Emotional Dynamics of Youth Mobilization in the Countryside of

Colonial Taiwan under Japan’s Total War

SAYAKA CHATANI

WHAT TURNS PEOPLE INTO passionate supporters of a state ideology? The history of the twentieth century, the “age of extremes,” impels us to account for numerous mass mo- bilizations that took place under the banner of a political ideology.1 For some time now, scholars have looked to the role of the state as the most powerful agent in the temporal space of modernity in shaping beliefs and behaviors. The amorphous power of the modern state has been explained through a variety of concepts, including hege- mony, control, discipline, persuasion, and governmentality. These concepts have pro- vided tools for analyzing the seemingly puzzling phenomena of widespread popular support during even the most brutal regimes. Work on fascist and communist regimes has shown that the state exercised a pervasive cultural power—Fascist Italy estab- lished what Victoria de Grazia has called a “culture of consent” through Opera Nazionale Dopolavoro, the national leisure organization; the Nazis promised happi- ness and success to the members of the Volksgemeinschaft (community of the people); Stalinism offered a utopian socialist civilization to industrial workers.2 As historians have pointed out, the tactics of establishing hegemony were never perfect. The space of negotiation between the state and its subjects has thus become a rich area of inves- tigation through which to determine the nature of mass politics in the twentieth cen- tury.3

I am extremely grateful to Xu Chongfa, Huang Yuanxing, and all the interviewees in Taiwan for sharing their personal histories with me. I would also like to thank Charles Armstrong, Carol Gluck, Susan Peder- sen, Andrew Nathan, Gregory Mann, Naoko Shimazu, K. M. Lawson, Pieter Judson, Belinda Davis, and the members of the Migration and Citizenship thematic group at the European University Institute, including Rainer Bauböck and Laura Lee Downs, as well as the anonymous reviewers for the AHR, for offering help- ful feedback on previous versions of this essay. This research was supported by generous funding provided by the Center for Chinese Studies in Taiwan and the Social Science Research Council in the U.S.

1 The phrase comes from Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century, 1914– 1991 (London, 1994).

2 See Victoria de Grazia, The Culture of Consent: Mass Organization of Leisure in Fascist Italy (Cam- bridge, 1981); Martina Steber and Bernhard Gotto, “Volksgemeinschaft: Writing the Social History of the Nazi Regime,” in Steber and Gotto, eds., Visions of Community in Nazi Germany: Social Engineering and Private Lives (Oxford, 2015), 1–25; Stephen Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization (Berkeley, Calif., 1997).

3 Recent works include Giulia Albanese and Roberta Pergher, eds., In the Society of Fascists: Accla- mation, Acquiescence, and Agency in Mussolini’s Italy (New York, 2012); Steber and Gotto, Visions of

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Bottom-up empirical studies suggest a different approach to this theory-driven framework. Many investigations of “everyday history” have shown that both the state and people are embedded in messy social dynamics. Even in totalitarian states, rapidly changing, intertwining layers of social relationships define the character of mass poli- tics. Since Alf Lüdtke’s inspiring call in the 1980s for reconstructing the history of or- dinary people in Nazi Germany, the field of everyday history has expanded to under- line the vibrant sphere of daily life.4 The field has not only sharpened its analytical edge, viewing politics through social identity, bonds, grudges, and aspirations, but also expanded its geographical scope, reaching Mao’s China and Kim Il Sung’s North Ko- rea.5 Although these studies have shown the heterogeneity of the social sphere and led us sometimes to question the totalitarian nature of these regimes, however, there is one aspect of state control, namely ideological indoctrination or brainwashing, that remains unilluminated by historians of the everyday. A number of epistemological is- sues are relevant here: Can we access people’s inner thoughts, and if so, how? Does an embrace of state ideology mean that state power has permeated an individual’s psyche? People’s mindsets can be exceedingly fragmented, as Jan Plamper underlines in reminding researchers of popular opinions in Stalinism about “the mind-boggling diversity of human thought, utterance, and action.”6 While these challenges remain, everyday history can still provide a promising entry point for a study of ideological in- doctrination—its attention to social relationships rescues us from both the sea of su- pra-historical individual particularities and the deterministic dichotomy of the state and its subjects. In other words, fleshing out local tensions and contexts that shaped the course of action for both the state and individuals allows us to, however partially, uncover the social mechanism of ideological indoctrination.

The mobilization of youth in Taiwan by Japanese imperialists during the Second World War offers a unique vantage point in this regard. The longest-standing of Ja- pan’s formal colonies (1895–1945), Taiwan exhibited one of the most extreme cases of assimilatory ideological mobilization during this period. One representative phenom- enon was the “volunteer fever” (shigannetsu) that swept through Taiwan when the Japanese army started recruiting colonial volunteer soldiers in 1942. The volunteer soldier program created a “blood-application culture” (kessho bunka), so named be-

Community in Nazi Germany; Geoff Eley, Nazism as Fascism: Violence, Ideology, and the Ground of Con- sent in Germany, 1930–1945 (London, 2013). In the field of Japanese history, Yoshimi Yoshiaki’s iconic Kusa no ne no fashizumu: Nihon minsh�u no sens�o taiken (Tokyo, 1987) has now been translated into En- glish as Grassroots Fascism: The War Experience of the Japanese People, trans. Ethan Mark (New York, 2016).

4 See, for example, Alf Lüdtke, ed., The History of Everyday Life: Reconstructing Historical Experiences and Ways of Life, trans. William Templer (Princeton, N.J., 1995); and on Stalinist Russia, see Sheila Fitz- patrick, Everyday Stalinism: Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times—Soviet Russia in the 1930s (New York, 2000).

5 See Steber and Gotto, Visions of Community in Nazi Germany; Patrick Bernhard, “Renarrating Ital- ian Fascism: New Directions in the Historiography of a European Dictatorship,” Contemporary European History 23, no. 1 (2014): 151–163; Paul Corner, ed., Popular Opinion in Totalitarian Regimes: Fascism, Na- zism, Communism (Oxford, 2009); Alf Lüdtke, ed., Everyday Life in Mass Dictatorship: Collusion and Eva- sion (New York, 2016); Jeremy Brown and Matthew D. Johnson, eds., Maoism at the Grassroots: Everyday Life in China’s Era of High Socialism (Cambridge, Mass., 2015); Suzy Kim, Everyday Life in the North Korean Revolution, 1945–1950 (Ithaca, N.Y., 2013).

6 Jan Plamper, “Beyond Binaries: Popular Opinion in Stalinism,” in Corner, Popular Opinion in Totalitarian Regimes, 64–80, here 75.

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cause many young men signed applications in their own blood to express their “pure loyalty” to the empire.7 In the first year, 425,961 people applied for 1,000 open spots. That number rose to 601,147 in the second year, and to 759,276 for 2,000 available spots in the third year. Considering that in 1940 the total male population in the main age group targeted for this program (17–30) was 633,325, these were extremely large numbers, even compared to the similar “volunteer fever” in colonial Korea, where as many as 303,294 youth applied for 6,300 open spots in 1942.8 The majority of appli- cants, particularly in the initial phase, came from farming families, who constituted 42 percent of Taiwan’s total population, despite the fact that volunteer soldiers were paid far less than laborers hired by the military.9

The colonial setting of this mobilization, especially the empire’s transition from a coercive foreign occupier to a persuasive ruler, offers us an analytical advantage in tracing state-society interactions. Colonial states by their nature exercised an uneven and porous kind of power. In other cases where the state generated a degree of public enthusiasm about colonial youth mobilization and soldier recruitment, we find major adjustments in rhetoric and highly targeted recruitment—the British collaborated with tribal chiefs or designated certain “martial races” for soldiering and policing, and Vichy France called for a revitalization of the grand medieval “Angkorean spirit” in youth mobilization in wartime Cambodia.10 In Taiwan, the Japanese, too, initially found it difficult to gain public support, plagued by the lack of legitimacy and an unfa- miliarity with local customs and languages. There was, literally and perceptibly, a great distance between the imperial center and the people at the colonial periphery. Despite facing the typical challenge of “dominance without hegemony” during the first few decades, however, the Japanese pursued a set of governing principles for Tai- wan that adapted direct rule and assimilation to the Japanese system, as if they en- joyed the status of a “strong” state. They transplanted many homeland-tested social engineering techniques and, during the period between 1937 and 1945, worked fer- vently to Japanize the populations.11 How an empire that started out as a weak colo-

7 Chou Wan-yao (Zhou Wanyao), “Riben zai-Tai junshi dongyuan yu Taiwanren de haiwai canzhan jingyan,” Taiwanshi yanjiu 2, no. 1 (1995): 85–126, here 97–102.

8 Kond�o Masami, S�oryokusen to Taiwan: Nihon shokuminchi h�okai no kenky�u (Tokyo, 1996), 371– 373; Naimu-sh�o, Taiheiy�o senka no Ch�osen oyobi Taiwan (1944), cited in Miyata Setsuko, Ch�osen minsh�u to “k�ominka” seisaku (Tokyo, 1985), 62. On military recruitment in colonial Korea, see Brandon Palmer, Fighting for the Enemy: Koreans in Japan’s War, 1937–1945 (Seattle, Wash., 2013); Takashi Fujitani, Race for Empire: Koreans as Japanese and Japanese as Americans during World War II (Berkeley, Calif., 2011).

9 Kond�o, S�oryokusen to Taiwan, 371–373. In the first three months, 58.6 percent of the applications were from the agricultural sector alone. That number does not include those in other industries from ru- ral villages.

10 By way of a comparison between the volunteer soldier program in Taiwan and soldier recruitment in the British colonies, see, for example, Ashley Jackson, “Motivation and Mobilization for War: Recruit- ment for the British Army in the Bechuanaland Protectorate, 1941–42,” African Affairs 96, no. 384 (1997): 399–417; Andrew Selth, “Race and Resistance in Burma, 1942–45,” Modern Asian Studies 20, no. 3 (1986): 483–507; M. Y. Effendi, Punjab Cavalry: Evolution, Rule, Organisation, and Tactical Doctrine— 11 Cavalry (Frontier Force), 1849–1971 (Karachi, 2007); Anne Raffin, “Youth Mobilization and Ideology: Cambodia from the Late Colonial Era to the Pol Pot Regime,” Critical Asian Studies 44, no. 3 (2012): 391–418, here 398–400, quote from 399.

11 The colonial government adopted some uniquely Taiwanese governing methods as well, such as the baojia system. But even the supposedly “local” baojia system was reinvented by Japan’s colonial strat- egist, Got�o Shinpei. On the baojia system, see Hui-yu Caroline Ts’ai, Taiwan in Japan’s Empire Building: An Institutional Approach to Colonial Engineering (New York, 2009), 98–105. At the same time, because of Japan’s strong emphasis on assimilation, many historians of Japanese colonialism presume the strength of state power (and individuals exercising agency within it), applying Foucauldian analytical

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nial state with no grasp of public sentiment was so quickly able to create a mass base of national-imperial enthusiasts is a puzzle that forces us to open up the black box of colonial social dynamics.

Youth mobilization serves as a window into this perplexing process. A narrow fo- cus on “volunteer fever” might lead one to hastily attribute it to the power of the state alone: young people, monitored and pressured by schoolteachers and local officials, submitted applications in groups, hundreds and thousands at a time. At the same time, many educated Taiwanese youth maintained a critical view toward the island- wide movement to apply. The resulting combination of persuasion, discipline, and re- sistance could be readily explained within the framework of the confrontation be- tween the powerful state and the agency of individuals. But a more careful analysis of longer-term youth programs and people’s everyday experiences in them reveals that even at those moments when the domineering power of the state over its subjects was most conspicuously on display, the relationships between them were never dichoto- mous. Mobilized individuals never defined their own subjectivity solely, or even mainly, vis-�a-vis the imperial state. Despite the ubiquity of state propaganda recited by mobilized youth themselves, their decision-making took place in response to a vari- ety of social relationships and tensions. In the case of Taiwan’s “volunteer fever,” Jap- anese youth training programs contributed significantly to creating the phenomenon because they took on social importance. Village youth associations (part of the na- tional Seinendan network), provincial youth training institutes (seinen sh�urenj�o), and the program of the Taiwan Patriotic Labor Youth Corps (Taiwan Kingy�o H�okoku Seinentai) conventionally represented the machinery of indoctrination that imposed discipline and ideology on colonial youth. But the most important function of these institutions was to reconfigure social relationships and the positions of rural youth in the social structure by exacerbating some of the existing social tensions. In other words, rather than erasing localities and individualities, these institutions helped to fuel the development of local identities, tensions, and emotions.

Individual accounts are useful because they reveal subtle changes in social posi- tions.12 Two individuals from the countryside of Xinzhu province, Huang Yuanxing

terms. See Todd A. Henry, Assimilating Seoul: Japanese Rule and the Politics of Public Space in Colonial Korea, 1910–1945 (Berkeley, Calif., 2014), 3; Ts’ai, Taiwan in Japan’s Empire Building; Fujitani, Race for Empire; Theodore Jun Yoo, The Politics of Gender in Colonial Korea: Education, Labor, and Health, 1910–1945 (Berkeley, Calif., 2008). Although he does not apply Foucauldian methods per se, Leo T. S. Ching emphasizes the cultural power exercised by the Japanese Empire during this period, deliberately shifting the previous colonial project of assimilationism to the issue of identity struggle of the colonized. Ching, Becoming “Japanese”: Colonial Taiwan and the Politics of Identity Formation (Berkeley, Calif., 2001), 113–125. On Japan’s drive for assimilation, see, for example, Mark E. Caprio, Japanese Assimila- tion Policies in Colonial Korea, 1910–1945 (Seattle, Wash., 2009); Oguma Eiji, “Nihonjin” no ky�okai: Oki- nawa, Ainu, Taiwan, Ch�osen Shokuminchi shihai kara fukki und�o made (Tokyo, 1998); Komagome Takeshi, Shokuminchi teikoku Nihon no bunka t�og�o (Tokyo, 1996). The phrase “dominance without hege- mony” is from Ranajit Guha, Dominance without Hegemony: History and Power in Colonial India (Cam- bridge, Mass., 1997).

12 A number of oral interviews and memoirs of Taiwanese ex-soldiers who fought in the Japanese army have been published since the 1990s. The primary aim of their projects has been to reestablish “Taiwanese” memories of the war, which had been mired in the “Chinese”-centric narratives promoted by the postwar Guomindang regime. Historians at Academia Sinica in Taiwan have taken the initiative in this regard. Key publications of memories and interviews include Chou Wan-yao (Zhou Wanyao), ed., Taiji Ribenbing zuotanhui jilu bing xiangguan ziliao (Taipei, 1997); and Hui-yu Caroline Ts’ai (Cai Huiyu), ed., Zouguo liangge shidai de ren: Taiji Riben bing (Taipei, 1997). On the issue of public memory of Tai-

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and Xu Chongfa, can serve as typical examples of those who joined imperial youth training in the late 1930s and early 1940s. They both came from average rural families in poor villages and became, as they openly admit, firm supporters of the Japanese im- perial ideology. In the aftermath of the Second World War, Xu, at the time an assistant instructor at the youth training institute in Xinzhu province, brought home a library of personal letters from trainees, instructors’ notes, attendance records, newsletters, and photo albums the night before Guomindang forces came to seize the facility. These pre- viously untapped sources vividly reveal the socioeconomic conditions and gendered ex- periences that pushed youth into the embrace of imperial mobilization, as well as their worldviews, which had yet to be influenced by the final outcome of the war or postwar Guomindang rule.

With the help of these personal materials, we are able to see how interactions be- tween social dynamics and state institutions generated certain emotions in individuals, which then served as a basis for the radical indoctrination of young men.13 Studies of youth mobilization, unlike studies of children and childhood, have rarely brought up the centrality of emotions.14 This is perhaps because state bureaucrats, social experts, and young people themselves defined the category of (particularly male) youth in terms of discipline and self-control—the opposite of emotional beings. In the case of Japan’s colonial history, Japanization campaigns as a whole are seen as a machine- like means of coldly oppressing indigenous ways of life. For historians, the forceful conversion of ethnic identity (even “ethnic cleansing”) has become common analytical parlance.15 But as the stories of Xu and Huang show, it was the development of a new emotional community during youth training that ensured participants’ ideological commitment, self-discipline, and allegiance to the empire. The prewar Japanese na- tional-imperial ideology extolled agrarianism, lauded youth as pillars of the nation, and held up the soldier’s fit, strong body as the masculine ideal, thereby emotionally emancipating colonial village youth, who had developed a deep grudge against the ur- ban, the educated, and sometimes the older generations in local social contexts. Through youth training, which provided intense bonding experiences, the participants gained a sense of moral superiority and confidence to challenge the social hierarchy. Viewing the mobilization in this way frees us from a fixation on mutually exclusive ethnic identities. The social and emotional mechanism of creating “ideal Japanese na-

wanese soldiers in the Japanese army, see Shi-chi Mike Lan, “(Re-)Writing History of the Second World War: Forgetting and Remembering the Taiwanese–Native Japanese Soldiers in Postwar Taiwan,” Posi- tions: Asia Critique 21, no. 4 (2013): 801–851.

13 With regard to the focus on emotions, this article is inspired by Barbara H. Rosenwein, “Problems and Methods in the History of Emotions,” Passions in Context: Journal of the History and Philosophy of the Emotions 1, no. 1 (2010): 1–32, http://www.passionsincontext.de/index.php?id¼557. See also Stephanie Olsen, ed., Childhood, Youth and Emotions in Modern History: National, Colonial and Global Perspectives (New York, 2015). But in this article, an “emotional community” refers more literally to a group of emo- tionally connected people, not to the theoretical boundary assumed in concepts such as “emotional forma- tion.” In other words, the kinds of emotions shared by those who took part in youth training matter less for my analysis than the fact that they strongly bonded with one another.

14 When historians discuss emotions of teenagers, they tend to describe them as “children” rather than “youth.” See the ambiguous categories of children and youth in Olsen, Childhood, Youth and Emo- tions in Modern History.

15 See Miyata Setsuko, Ch�osen minsh�u to “k�ominka” seisaku (Tokyo, 1985); Ch’oe Yuri, Ilchae malggi singminchi chibae chŏngch’aek yŏn’gu (Seoul, 1997).

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tionals” out of colonial village youth was not fundamentally different from that in the Japanese countryside after all.16

It is not a coincidence that twentieth-century regimes of all kinds placed great em- phasis on youth mobilization. Youth as a sector of the population had become a con- crete category that gave legibility to the abstract “masses.” For state officials and so- cial leaders, guiding this “impressionable” group of people was key to mass control. But that does not mean that the state singlehandedly activated “youth” as the focus of mass politics. The rise of the category of youth in the political sphere resulted from larger changes in modern industrializing societies, particularly the increasing sensitiv- ity to distinctly divided generations—a decade of difference in birth years now meant a substantial difference in experiences and consciousness.17 Many studies on uni- formed youth mobilization in the early twentieth century, be it the imperial and colo- nial Boy Scouts, Mussolini’s Opera Nazionale Balilla, the Nazis’ Hitlerjugend, the Soviet Komsomol, or the Japanese Seinendan, point to the fact that the new genera- tional perceptions were the cause, not the result, of the popularity of such groups, al- though these groups further widened generational divisions.18 Youth mobilization in Taiwan also became a focal point of intense interactions among the state, society, and individuals. Far beyond the colonizer-colonized relationship, it showcased the nature of mass politics in the early-to-mid-twentieth-century world.

THE MOST UNIQUE CHARACTERISTIC of youth mobilization in the Japanese Empire was its emphasis on rural space, whether in the Japanese metropole or in the colonies. This was because of the historical heritage of the rural-based Seinendan, which car- ried out the empire-wide “disciplining” and “nationalization” policy directed at young populations.19 Regarding the Seinendan in the metropole as the perfect tool for trans-

16 On youth mobilization in the Japanese countryside, see Sayaka Chatani, “Youth and Rural Mod- ernity in Japan, 1900s–20s,” in Richard Ivan Jobs and David M. Pomfret, eds., Transnational Histories of Youth in the Twentieth Century (London, 2015), 23–44; Richard J. Smethurst, A Social Basis for Prewar Japanese Militarism: The Army and the Rural Community (Berkeley, Calif., 1974).

17 Richard Ivan Jobs and David M. Pomfret, “The Transnationality of Youth,” in Jobs and Pomfret, Transnational Histories of Youth in the Twentieth Century, 1–19, here 3–4.

18 A large number of studies have been done on these groups. Some of the relatively recent ones in- clude Anne E. Gorsuch, Youth in Revolutionary Russia: Enthusiasts, Bohemians, Delinquents (Blooming- ton, Ind., 2000); Timothy H. Parsons, Race, Resistance, and the Boy Scout Movement in British Colonial Africa (Athens, Ohio, 2004); Michael H. Kater, Hitler Youth (Cambridge, Mass., 2004); Jobs and Pom- fret, Transnational Histories of Youth in the Twentieth Century; Mark Roseman, ed., Generations in Con- flict: Youth Revolt and Generation Formation in Germany, 1770–1968 (New York, 1995); Sayaka Chatani, “Nation-Empire: Rural Youth Mobilization in Japan, Taiwan, and Korea, 1895–1945” (Ph.D. diss., Co- lumbia University, 2014).

19 Some historians have framed the Seinendan as a part of a top-down militarization of feudalistic rural populations; see Smethurst, A Social Basis for Prewar Japanese Militarism; �Oe Shinobu, Kokumin ky�oiku to guntai (Tokyo, 1974). Others investigate more local contexts in which the Seinendan operated and even view them as a sign of the widespread democratic mindset; see Hirayama Kazuhiko, Seinen sh�udanshi kenky�u josetsu II (Tokyo, 1978); Kan�o Masanao, Taish�o demokurashı̄ no teiry�u (Tokyo, 1973), chap. 2; �Ogushi Ry�ukichi, “Seinendan jishuka und�o no ayumi,” Gekkan shakai ky�oiku, March 1989, 88– 95; �Okado Masakatsu, “Meib�oka chitsujo no henb�o,” in Sakano Hiroshi et al., eds., Gendai shakai eno tenkei (Tokyo, 1993), 65–108. The Seinendan has recently drawn scholarly attention as a tool of colonial social engineering in Taiwan. See Miyazaki Seiko, Shokuminchiki Taiwan ni okeru seinendan to chiiki no hen’y�o (Tokyo, 2008); Chen Wensong, Zhimin tongzhi yu “qingnian”: Taiwan zongdufu de “qingnian” jiaohua zhengce (Taipei, 2015).

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forming people, colonial officials in Taiwan and Korea turned to the countryside to implement uniformed youth mobilization, unlike other empires and totalitarian re- gimes, which mainly targeted urban youth. This attempt, however, did not resonate in the local social relationships in Taiwan before the start of the Second Sino-Japanese War in 1937.

Colonial officials in Taiwan initially made the critical mistake of underestimating the deeply social, apolitical role played by village youth associations in the Japanese countryside. Such groups had been common in traditional rural communities for cen- turies; they typically organized communal festivals, farming collectives, and peer gath- erings to support the rural life cycle. The new Meiji monarchy (1868–1912), however, assigned them a new mission: spreading a national consciousness among village youth. In Meiji, they started promoting the modernization of lifestyles and agriculture in re- sponse to the popular discourse of “youth” as the engine of modernity. Through the Russo-Japanese War (1904–1905) and World War I, officials standardized these asso- ciations and established a national network for them, giving them the uniform name Seinendan so that they would match the European model of youth organizations. The state mobilization ignited a series of reactions by village youth, who viewed the Seinendan through the lens of their immediate social relationships. Some aspired to improve their peripheral positions against urban supremacy; others used the re- sources provided by the Seinendan to challenge familial and village rules. Their en- thusiasm led to rapid institutional expansion. By the late 1910s, the Seinendan had peaked at 18,000 groups and 2.9 million members, numbers that remained roughly unchanged until World War II. This means that almost every village had a Seinendan group, whose members included almost all the young men between roughly twelve and twenty-five years of age.20 Through the Seinendan, village youth steadily devel- oped a sense of autonomy, pride in themselves as “modern rural youth,” and better job prospects; state officials, in turn, were able to achieve their goals of improving suc- cess rates on the conscription examination, modernizing agricultural methods, and spreading the ideologies of agrarianism and an emperor-centered nationalism.21 In short, the Seinendan became an important social sphere for farm youth through which the state could also influence their social relationships.

By the early 1920s, the institutional robustness of the Seinendan had drawn the at- tention of the leaders of Japan’s colonies. Following the colonization of Taiwan in 1895, Japanese colonialists had moved quickly to establish colonial elementary schools and Japanese language centers across the island. But the Japanese faced an unfamiliar diversity in Taiwan’s social systems. While the semi-urban coastal towns were characterized by the social stratification of classes following the value system of Qing China, in the mountainous inner regions there were volatile ethnic tensions among different immigrant groups from China and indigenous aboriginal tribes. On the one hand, this diversity and the absence of central control facilitated Japanese in- terventions in local affairs; on the other, the Taiwanese (particularly rural) population remained indifferent toward Japanese rule. Most of the colonial directives were read- ily accepted, only to be ignored later. Introducing the Seinendan in Taiwan was sup-

20 Kumagai Tatsujir�o, Dai Nihon Seinendanshi (Tokyo, 1942), Appendix, 61–67. 21 Smethurst, A Social Basis for Prewar Japanese Militarism; Chatani, “Youth and Rural Modernity in

Japan.”

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posed to aid the process of transforming the Taiwanese people into a population com- mitted to Japan’s imperial nationalism.22

The colonialists’ plan to establish Seinendan-like youth groups in Taiwan started at the provincial level. In 1915, for example, the governor of Xinzhu province in northern Taiwan, Mimura Sanpei, established the Xinzhu Youth Group, trying to or- ganize six thousand youth “in order to improve youthful morals and to have them practice the Japanese language.”23 A more systematic effort by the colonial govern- ment started in 1926 with the establishment of the Bureau of Education (Bunky�o- kyoku), a new office dedicated to the education of Taiwanese youth. Vice Governor- General Got�o Fumio, the face of the bureau, had been known as a top leader of Seinendan associations in Japan and emphasized the importance of organized youth training for the governance of Taiwan.24 In 1930, the colonial government officially issued an act to standardize youth groups throughout the island and named them Seinendan.

Around the early 1920s, “youth” became an established social category in Taiwan- ese society at large. The new generations that had attended Japanese schools and grown up as Japanese rule was being consolidated formed an increasingly vocal sec- tor. Some became new leaders in their villages, while others turned to the anticolonial movement, but both groups echoed the mission of “youth.” Interestingly, even anti- colonial leaders viewed the Seinendan as an effective tool for spreading a Taiwanese national consciousness. In 1920, Xu Qingxiang published an article, “Encouraging the Local Seinendan,” in Taiwan Youth (Taiwan Qingnian), a magazine through which Taiwanese students in Tokyo and their Japanese supporters advocated self-determi- nation for Taiwan and anticolonial nationalism. Xu urged the establishment of school-centered Seinendan that would mirror their Japanese counterparts, begging the “dear wise youth” who read the magazine to “please look at how actively youth in every city, town, and village [in Japan] work and how earnestly society gives them guidance and support.”25

Caught between colonial and anticolonial leaders in the competition to establish Seinendan-style youth groups, people accepted their initiatives only in ways that made sense in their own social relationships. Instead of rural villages, it was in major provin- cial towns that a number of youth groups appeared—and disappeared—in the 1920s. Newspaper reports focused on the groups’ political affiliations, which shifted fre- quently. Beneath the façade of the political battle, these groups grew steadily because they developed a social function as elite youth clubs regardless of their political colors. The groups allowed members to solidify their ties with colonial officials or anticolonial elites, socialized the sons of dominant families into ruling circles, and helped them ob- tain official or business positions.26

22 See Chatani, “Nation-Empire,” chap. 5. 23 “Ikanishite shiteikinenbi o shukusuruka,” Taiwan nichinichi shinp�o, May 28, 1915, 7. 24 On Bunky�o-kyoku, see Chen Wen Sung (Winston) [Chen Wensong], “Seinen no s�odatsu: 1920-

nendai shokuminchi Taiwan ni okeru seinen ky�oka und�o: Bunky�o-kyoku setsuritsu o ch�ushin ni shite” (M.A. thesis, University of Tokyo, 2000).

25 Xu Qingxiang, “Chih�o seinendan o kansh�o su,” Taiwan qingnian (Tâi oân chheng liân) 1, no. 5 (1920): 45–48. See Chatani, “Nation-Empire,” chap. 2.

26 Chatani, “Nation-Empire,” chap. 5.

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Around the same time, colonial authorities sought to embed the Seinendan more deeply in the social contexts of rural villages to fight the anticolonial opposition. They defined the organization’s mission as alleviating the problem of increased stratifica- tion among the rural classes and the lack of social mobility available to peasant youth. In Xinzhu’s rural areas, three decades of colonial rule had shifted the social structure. In the nineteenth century, the atmosphere in these villages had reflected the volatile yet fluid frontier society, characterized by violence between Chinese settlers and in- digenous aborigines. By the 1920s, the frontier feel was long gone, having been replaced by a stable class hierarchy centered on large landlords.27 In the late 1920s, the number of tenant disputes rose, and the worsening living conditions of tenant farmers became a political issue.28 While anticolonial leaders failed to capitalize on this situation, colonial agents found an opportunity to refurbish the role of the Seinendan.

In effect, the rural class hierarchy served the colonizers’ goal of shifting the locus of battle away from the sovereignty issue to village society. In the late 1920s, when the Bureau of Education launched a series of programs for youth training in Taiwan, they harshly criticized the elitist nature of the existing youth groups. In Xinzhu province, schoolteachers sought to end the dominance of the landlord class in youth groups in favor of “model rural youth.” They proposed that promising farmers be recruited from among elementary school graduates and that the group be used to train young minds rather than as a social club for upper-class families.29 Echoing the imperial ide- ology of agrarian superiority, the schoolteachers looked for a crack in rural social rela- tionships through which they could turn their advocacy into a social force in young farmers’ lives.

In the 1930s, the colonial effort to frame the Seinendan around the social concerns of the Taiwanese countryside continued. Institutionally, the groups varied widely in their scale, popularity, and activities. One way in which the Seinendan appealed to mar- ginalized young farmers was by creating a new image of “rural youth” as modern, hard- working, and masculine, a symbol of Taiwan’s future. In 1931, the Xinzhu police de- ployed a musical band made up of Seinendan members at the head of their automobile parade, distributing 20,000 brochures to promote traffic rules.30 Twice a week, Seinen- dan members from various regions demonstrated their mastery of Japanese on the ra- dio show Kokugo fuky�u no y�ube (Evening of the Promotion of the National Language [1930–1933]).31 The association’s new magazine, Kunp�u (Summer Breeze [1932–]), cre- ated a shared discursive space for members and colonial Seinendan advocates. Many of

27 On the social transformation of Xinzhu villages, see ibid. 28 Left-leaning authors, such as Yang Kui and Lai He (Loa Ho), started taking up the theme of the

exploitation of Taiwanese peasants in the 1930s. Colonial social activists often discussed the rural prob- lem in the journal Shakai jigy�o no tomo around 1929. See also Taiwan S�otokufu Keimu-kyoku, ed., Tai- wan shakai und�oshi: Taiwan S�otokufu keisatsu enkakushi dainihen ry�oTai igo no chian j�oky�o ch�ukan (Taipei, 1939), 999, for the number of tenant disputes between 1924 and 1929.

29 Miyajima Yutaka, “Hont�o n�oson seinendan shid�o no jissai,” in Shinchiku-sh�u, ed., Seinendan shid�o ronbunsh�u (Xinzhu City, 1932), 119–150, here 126–128.

30 “Shinchiku-sh�u no k�ots�u seiri,” Taiwan nichinichi shinp�o, October 2, 1931, 3. 31 For example, see “Ch�unanbu chih�o o fukumu rajio h�os�o kokugo fuky�u no y�ube,” Taiwan ky�oiku

363 (October 1932): 92–93; “Ch�unanbu chih�o o fukumu rajio h�os�o kokugo fuky�u no y�ube,” Taiwan ky�oiku 368 (February 1933): 97–98. On Xinzhu youth’s performance in the show, see Yazawa Hideo, “Sangatsu j�usannichi kokugo fuky�u rajio h�os�o ni shutsuen sareta Shinchiku-shi no minasama ni: Nihonjin nara Nihongo de hanase,” Taiwan ky�oiku 357 (April 1932): 133–135.

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its articles stirred youth’s desire to “rise in the world” and argued that success was pos- sible for rural residents without a higher education. Newspapers and Kunp�u widely re- ported the rescue and relief activities of the Seinendan in natural disasters.32 Aided by widespread elementary education and Japanese literacy, these events and media reports gave the Seinendan social recognition and touted Taiwan’s proud “rural youth” of the new era.33

The wartime mobilization of village youth both continued and destroyed the Sei- nendan’s previous effort to permeate Taiwan’s rural societies. On the one hand, it continued to build the image of modern “rural youth” against the dominance of the landlord class. On the other hand, colonial officials ignored Taiwan’s social contexts and imposed a one-size-fits-all scheme on imperial Seinendan mobilization. Most no- tably, while the Taiwanese Seinendan had not incorporated a military ethos because military service was still unthinkable in the colony in the early 1930s, that changed abruptly with the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War in 1937. The imperial state was now projecting the image of a “model hamlet soldier,” symbolized by the Japanese Seinendan, onto Taiwanese Seinendan members. When the war started, the colonial government compelled all male youth and all unmarried female youth to join the Seinendan, causing the membership numbers to explode. Between 1938 and 1939, the number of members jumped from 94,770 to 440,649.34 In June 1938, the Taiwan Seinendan Federation was established as part of the larger network of the Greater Ja- pan Seinendan Federation, accompanying the streamlining of the local institutional networks. At the inauguration of the federation, the youth declared four resolutions: “We will complete the National Spiritual Mobilization Movement. We will volunteer for patriotic labor [kinr�o h�okoku]. We will establish Japanese-speaking villages and towns. We will perfect national defense.”35

With standardization, officials found themselves caught in the looping dilemma of top-down youth mobilization: they had envisioned the Seinendan as local groups that would be spontaneously organized by Taiwanese villagers, but the required standards hindered that possibility. They had hoped that non-official local figures would take charge, but most of the people who held managerial positions in the Japanese mobili- zation scheme were “rich intellectuals who enjoy[ed] debating ideologies” and “lack[ed] passion” in practice.36 In this situation, “rural youth” again became both a

32 “Daishinsai ny�usu,” Kunp�u 36 (May 1935): 37; “Shush�onari seinendan,” ibid., 4–34; “Shinpo sei- nendan no jihatsuteki h�oshi,” Taiwan nichinichi shinp�o, April 27, 1935, 3; “Dait�otei seinendan kara ky�ugohan ga shutsud�o,” Taiwan nichinichi shinp�o, April 28, 1935, 2.

33 By the 1930s, Taiwan had achieved relatively high levels of schooling and Japanese literacy even in remote villages. According to the colonial census, the rate of school enrollment among school-aged chil- dren rose from 33 percent to 57.6 percent between 1930 and 1940. Hirotani Takio and Hirokawa Tosh- iko, “Nihon t�ochika no Taiwan: Ch�osen ni okeru shokuminchi ky�oiku seisaku no hikakushiteki kenky�u,” Hokkaid�o daigaku ky�oiku gakubu kiy�o 22 (November 1973): 19–92, here 62. The principal of a public ele- mentary school in Beipu village recorded that in the central part of the village, the schooling rate in 1934 was 77 percent for male children and 35 percent for female children. Shimabukuro Kangi, Hoppo ky�odoshi (Beipu, 1935), 27–55.

34 More precisely, the rapid increase was recorded between 1937 and 1939. In 1937, male Seinendan members numbered 25,909, female members 10,411. In 1938, those numbers jumped to 62,906 and 31,869 respectively, and then to 269,906 and 170,743 in 1939. Miyazaki, Shokuminchiki Taiwan ni okeru seinendan to chiiki no hen’y�o, 88, 257–263.

35 “Sensei,” Kunp�u, August 1938, 7. 36 “H�ok�o und�o genchi h�okoku: Genni imashimubeshi h�ok�o und�o no ch�ush�oka,” Shinkensetsu, July

1943, 28–29, here 28.

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means and an end for the authorities in their desire to reach colonial society. Japa- nese officials expressed an even greater determination to expand the training of vil- lage youth who had firsthand knowledge of their villages: “The future of our campaign relies to a great extent on the commitment of these youth. Youth desire excitement and inspiration. We should direct responsible work to them.”37

MORE THAN TWO DECADES OF trial and error on the part of colonial officials in Taiwan in engaging with local society through the Seinendan shows a common limitation of colonial rule. But in creating a symbolic image of modern “rural youth,” they initiated an important social change. Beyond symbolism, for many young people in the Xinzhu countryside the sea change in their social position happened in 1938, not through the expansion of the Seinendan, but through the establishment of another type of training program, the seinen sh�urenj�o (youth training institute), by the provincial government. The new program improved youth’s life prospects and gave new meaning to the sphere of youth training as a whole.

Built near the beach of Nanliao in August 1938, the new training institute was de- signed to provide more intense discipline than the Seinendan. Sixty young people were selected from village Seinendan groups for thirty days of training.38 The instruc- tors scheduled one-month sessions almost back to back in order to reach as many young people as possible. Officials were eager to compare their youth mobilization ef- forts to those undertaken by the Nazis: “Even the Adolf Hitler School is eight years of education, but Xinzhu province’s youth training institute is going to complete it within thirty days,” they bragged, underlining the intensity and effectiveness of the training before it even began.39

The institute adopted the dojo style of training—a popular method in the metro- pole that emphasized the bodily mastery of the Japanese national spirit through group living. The village youth who either volunteered to join or were selected by school principals first underwent a physical examination.40 The teachers organized the train- ees into groups of six, and the youth then conducted all activities as part of their indi- vidual groups, including eating, cleaning, and sleeping.41 Their daily schedule was rig- idly designed and demanded military-like punctuality. They were awakened at 6 A.M. to the sound of a Japanese drum. Male trainees then ran to do misogi, a Shinto-style morning prayer ritual, in the ocean, wearing only a fundoshi (loincloth). After morn- ing exercises and a simple breakfast of a bowl of miso porridge, they listened to lec- tures on Japanese imperial history, rural village problems, and moral stories. Before or after lunch, they did outdoor activities, practiced martial arts, worked at the con-

37 Ibid., 29. 38 An unpublished report from May 1943, Kishiwa Tadashi, “Joshi shid�osha renseikai” (provided by

Xu Chongfa), briefly describes the difficulty that Xinzhu officials had in getting a permit from the colo- nial government. The participating youth constructed a new sh�urenj�o building in Matsugane in the back- yard of the Shinchiku Shrine in late 1943. In the very first term, twenty young men trained for thirty days. Women’s training for the first few years lasted twenty days.

39 “Iyoiyo kaishi o kettei shita Shinchiku sh�uritsu seinen sh�urenj�o,” Shinchiku shinp�o, August 1, 1938.

40 Peng Qingshun and Liao Dayan, “Nikki,” D�ok�o 181 (October 5, 1938): 5–7, here 5. 41 “Sh�uritsu seinen sh�urenj�o kuniku no jissai,” D�ok�o 181 (October 5, 1938): 1.

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struction site near the Xinzhu Shrine, plowed new land for vegetables, and marched through the city and mountains. After an hour or two of leisure time in the evening, they practiced seiza, a formal way of “proper sitting” that entails kneeling on the floor with the buttocks resting on the heels and the ankles stretched so that the tops of the feet are pressed flat. In that position they listened to a concluding lecture before retir- ing to sleep at 9:30 P.M.42 A female participant recalled that “seiza on the hard floor was the most difficult for farm youth, because their ankles were too stiff to stretch flat.”43

The hallmark of the institute was the intense socializing experience. Painful train- ing was a key component, intended to nurture friendship and a feeling of mutual trust. This goal was clearly manifest in Xinzhu’s biweekly newsletter on youth training, D�ok�o (The Same Light). The pain the trainees endured was the main topic in their confessional reflections, through which D�ok�o underscored the transformative quality of sh�urenj�o training. In a roundtable interview, the twelfth-term graduates admitted their initial reactions to physical pain and discomfort:

The seiza sitting was the most painful. The first two times I cried, but when I listened to

the governor’s fifty-minute lecture in seiza, it was surely painful, but I was happy that I could finally bear the pain for so long.

FIGURE 1: The Graduation Ceremony for the Eighth Term Trainees of the Xinzhu Province Youth Training Institute, October 15, 1939

(Photos reproduced courtesy of Xu Chongfa)

42 “Dai 13-ki sh�uren gy�oji yoteihy�o,” 23 (detailed time schedule, 1941, provided by Xu Chongfa). 43 Interview with Jiang Zhaoying, Qionglin, Xinzhu province, June 29, 2011.

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Doing misogi in the rain the first few times was very cold, and I shivered.

I left a few pieces of root vegetable at the first meal, but Yamada sensei told me to eat

them all, so I ate them with my eyes closed. I thought I could not take it anymore.44

These reflections stressed that overcoming the pain together was a big part of the mastery of Japanese-ness. In combination with photos of their activities, in which youth are shown exhibiting perfect uniformity and discipline, the vulnerability ex- pressed in their remarks put a personal face on the otherwise fear-provoking scenes of training and highlighted the friendship that allowed them to share their weaknesses with one another.

Discipline was promoted not only through the strict regimen, but also through deep affective bonding. For the first time in their lives, the young people received in- tense attention from the Japanese instructors. There were three full-time Japanese teachers as well as one or two Taiwanese assistants. They lived in the same building, ate the same amount of the same food, and adhered to the same schedule as the train- ees. As expressed in their personal letters, published essays, and roundtable inter- views in D�ok�o, the graduates appear to have developed intimacy with the instructors. Some described the teachers’ devotion as equivalent to parental love: “The teachers even taught us how to scoop rice and hold chopsticks. Their kindness surpassed that of our parents.” The teachers’ own discipline impressed the trainees: “I cannot forget that Kitamura sensei did not move even a bit during an hour-long seiza, saying, ‘It hurts everyone in the same way, but you have to overcome that.’” Some descriptions of their physical interactions accentuated the level of intimacy: “I will not forget that when I had a pimple that was so badly swollen that I did not want to even touch it my- self, Yamada sensei squeezed the pus out for me.”45

Young women began training at the institute in July 1939, working with female

FIGURE 2: Misogi, a Shint�o-style prayer in the ocean

44 “Dai 12-ki sh�urensei ni kans�o o kiku,” D�ok�o 244 (May 20, 1941): 6. 45 Ibid.

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teachers. While they, too, went through rigid training that included physical exercise, their afternoon activities focused on learning skills and manners representing the fem- inine attributes of Japanese culture, including cooking, sewing, music, flower arrang- ing, archery, and dancing.46 They were told that an action as simple as washing one’s face was an opportunity to develop Japanese spirituality—a misogi for women.47

Trained separately, they had only occasional contact with the male trainees. But in the articles in D�ok�o and in letters to their teachers, female trainees exhibited a simi- larly strong sense of appreciation and intimacy toward their instructors.

The institute taught the trainees how to become “young pillars” back in their vil- lages, and the Seinendan groups were supposed to be the first targets for their influ- ence. D�ok�o stressed the achievements of the graduates in almost every issue. An arti- cle titled “A Shining Star of the Village, a Warrior of the Soil, an Institute Graduate, Huang Kunxuan” featured a model young farmer dedicated to new agricultural tech- nologies and Japanese language education in Yangmei.48 Another graduate, Huang Rongzhe, implemented activities from the sh�urenj�o in his Seinendan in Zhongli— waking up at 6 A.M., running to perform misogi, and doing morning exercises or volun- tarily cleaning the streets.49

Even if these graduates intended to play the expected role of invigorating the local Seinendan as D�ok�o advised, in reality their experience at the institute often had the

FIGURE 3: At the Shinchiku (Xinzhu) Shrine

46 “Taib�o no joshi sh�urensei iyoiyo chikaku ny�uj�o,” D�ok�o 199 (July 5, 1939): 1. 47 Kishiwa, “Joshi shid�osha renseikai.” 48 “Buraku no my�oj�o, tsuchi no senshi, sh�urenj�o sh�ury�osei Huang Kunxuan kun o tou,” D�ok�o 185

(December 5, 1938): 6. 49 “Miyo!! Wak�odo no moyuru t�oshi o!! Shinshin no sh�uren ni, kokugo buraku no kensetsu ni kekki

seru Sekit�o seinen bundan,” D�ok�o 186 (December 20, 1938): 4.

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reverse effect. On the one hand, the training there did transform the trainees. It cre- ated youth who were no longer indifferent but more committed, and consequently more frustrated. The graduates were increasingly dismayed to realize that their enthu- siasm could not inspire the still largely indifferent village youth back home. In a letter to one of the instructors, a female graduate of the institute wrote that she and another institute graduate were “working hard for the Seinendan, but the participation rate is not great. The members are not united; they are individualistic and insincere.”50 She regarded a graduation certificate from the institute as an automatic sign of a trans- formed mind. When that was not the case, she felt betrayed: “There are some gradu- ates whose minds are so wicked that I cannot believe they also went to the institute.”51

On the other hand, many had a hard time coming back from the intense bonding ex- perience and fitting back into the circles of village youth, let alone being able to exer- cise leadership. Another graduate wrote, “When I clean up [the school] with the school principal in the morning, other people say, ‘She’s showing off because she went to the training center’ behind my back. I don’t do it in order to be praised. I felt really lonely.”52

The graduates also experienced social alienation in their family relationships. They were expected to influence their relatives, but as a consequence of their efforts, families became a site of colonial confrontation and negotiation. Their most impor-

FIGURE 4: The seiza style of formal sitting

50 Chen Fengjie (a twelfth-term female trainee) to Xu Chongfa, December 11, 1943 (provided by Xu Chongfa).

51 Ibid. 52 Liu Chunzi to Xu Chongfa, August 15, year unknown (most likely 1943 or 1944) (provided by Xu

Chongfa).

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tant task was to encourage their parents to learn Japanese. D�ok�o published a message from a trainee:

Mother, I thank you and Aunty for traveling so far from home to visit me at the institute.

When Mother visited me in the office, we talked a little in Taiwanese. I felt really terrible at the time. Since I had decided that I would speak no Taiwanese during the one-month

training period, I felt embarrassed in front of those outside the room. Mother, please go

to the Japanese Language Center and study hard. I want you to be able to speak Japanese at any time and with anyone as soon as possible.53

Such articles pressured D�ok�o’s young readers to tell their mothers to do the same. It became a goal for them to earn a certificate for a “Japanese-speaking household” by educating the older people in their families.54 For the older generations in many farm families, who had been able to avoid any serious interactions with Japanese colonial- ists, their children were suddenly an unfamiliar colonial and foreign element in the household. For female trainees, acquiring a level of learning above that of their par- ents meant overturning the generational and gender hierarchy altogether. The subver- sive role of young women was highlighted in the September 1939 issues of D�ok�o, which featured a series on the female trainee Zheng Liangmei, who had fallen seri- ously ill and died during the second term of women’s training. On her deathbed, D�ok�o reported, she talked in Japanese to her mother, who could not understand the language, and sang the Japanese national anthem, “Kimi ga yo.” D�ok�o depicted the

FIGURE 5: Female trainees in yukata, a Japanese summer garment

53 “Ok�asan e,” D�ok�o 184 (November 20, 1938): 5. 54 “Ok�asan ni 3-kanen keikaku de kokugo ky�oju hajimemashita,” D�ok�o 189 (February 5, 1939): 7.

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tragically alienating scene, fictional or not, as a heroic achievement by Zheng Liangmei.55

The reports in D�ok�o tell us that the goal of the institute was to transform individ- ual young people into ideal Japanese subjects through ideological instruction and then let them become the source of change in their villages and families. To be sure, the trainees’ time at the institute seems to have had a great impact on them. The most intense experience, as revealed in their personal letters, appears to have been social and emotional rather than ideological, however. Being chosen to go to the institute became the mark of a new social status. At the same time, the training at the institute not only generated a sense of bonding among the participants, it also reconfigured so- cial relationships back home in their villages and families, and consequently produced a sense of alienation, which neither the trainees nor the instructors had expected to happen. It forced the graduates to shape new self-images that distinguished them from other village youth.

HOW DID YOUNG PEOPLE VIEW the rapid change in their social relationships? In a series of interviews I conducted with Huang Yuanxing and Xu Chongfa in 2011, they helped me situate the experiences of youth training in the context of their personal lives and social surroundings. In essence, they framed their experiences in terms of climbing up the ladder of youth training, viewing their shifting social relationships as a sign of suc- cessfully overturning social hierarchies.

Huang Yuanxing was born in Beipu village, Xinzhu province, on August 24, 1925,

FIGURE 6: Listening to a lecture

55 “Kimi ga yo sh�ojo!!,” D�ok�o 203 (September 5, 1939): 8.

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the second son in a farming family of Hakka origin.56 After their father died, his elder brother became the main source of family labor. Although his family owned some land, Huang remembered, “we did not have money, and [that is why] none of my seven sisters went to school. Instead, five of them were adopted by other families in exchange for cash.” He entered an upper-level curriculum after finishing a six-year el- ementary school in March 1939, but soon quit it, mostly because his family did not have money for him to continue into middle school anyway.57 While helping his family in farming, Huang joined the village Seinendan and performed well. When he became the branch leader, the head of the group (the Beipu elementary school principal) se- lected him to go to the training institute. He endured a painful time there: “the train- ing was militaristic and strict—they had a very unique training called misogi . . . There was a teacher called Nemoto Kenji, who I did not know was Taiwanese at the time, who was particularly strict. He often shouted loudly at us.”58

When Huang met Nemoto Kenji at the institute, Nemoto spoke sophisticated Jap- anese, exhibited Japanese mannerisms, and had gained the full trust of the other Jap- anese teachers. Only after the end of Japanese colonial rule did Huang Yuanxing find

FIGURE 7: Female trainees doing physical exercise in the ocean

56 The Hakka are an ethnic group in China and surrounding areas. Many Hakka migrated to Xinzhu province in the mid-nineteenth century. The Japanese authorities often confused them with the Canton- ese, but the Hakka remain a distinct ethnic group with their own language, customs, and beliefs.

57 After graduating from the six-year primary program, children with means could either take the school’s upper-level curriculum for two to three years, or go on to other secondary education, including the middle schools, agricultural schools, and normal schools.

58 Interviews with Huang Yuanxing, Beipu, May 9, 20, and 30 and August 18, 2011.

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out that Nemoto also had a Chinese name, Xu Chongfa. The third son of a carpenter in Guanxi village, also in Xinzhu province, Xu was only three years older than Huang. He had to give up middle-level education as well because the family could not pay for it, but he mail-ordered lectures from Japan and studied the entire curriculum of the middle school of Waseda University by himself while working as a carpenter. Even to- day he looks upon the completion certificate that Waseda University mailed to him, dated April 1, 1939, as a personal treasure. He became the branch leader of the local Seinendan in November 1939 and went to the institute in 1941, when he was nineteen. Because of his outstanding grades on academic exams, Xu immediately became the representative of the sixty trainees and gave a speech at the graduation ceremony.

It was the Taiwan Patriotic Labor Youth Corps (Taiwan Kingy�o H�okoku Seinen- tai) that turned youth training into a “ladder” to honor and prestige for Huang and Xu. The colonial government started the Labor Corps program in March 1940, gather- ing 200 to 300 men around twenty years old, and engaging them mainly in construction labor work for three months at a time. They went to one of three sites, Taipei, Hualian, and Taizhong, either to construct shrines or to work on the highway being built be- tween Hualian and Taizhong.59 The program emphasized the mastery of Japanese- ness through physical labor—“through labor, group living, and training, let them physi- cally understand the essence of the Japanese spirit and ‘selfless patriotic service’ [mes- shi h�ok�o], and complete their character as imperial subjects by training their minds and bodies.”60 Reflecting the prevailing excitement about Japan’s initial victories in the Second Sino-Japanese War, colonial officials attached prestige to the Labor Corps program by casting it in the image of military service, which was not implemented in Taiwan until 1942. D�ok�o stated, “In Korea, they started the volunteer soldier program [in 1938], and achieved a good result. We should not forget that the result of our Patri- otic Labor Youth Corps has a special meaning. It is a good opportunity to measure the progress of youth in Taiwan.”61 Xinzhu officials repeatedly discussed the symbolic meanings of the Labor Corps’ equivalent of military service.62

Youth had already come to realize that prestige and social alienation were two sides of the same coin. The Labor Corps program aroused a sense of being “select ru- ral youth” among the participants. When they came back from service, they were called “reservist corps members” (zaig�o taiin), echoing the title of respect given to mil- itary reservists (zaig�o gunjin) in Japan.63 At the same time, the sound of “reservist” also meant further detachment from their native home and society. Anticipating an- other frustrating encounter back home, Xu Chongfa, who joined the Labor Corps in Hualian, wrote in his diary five days prior to the end of his service, “When I return to the village, I will have to act differently as a reservist member . . . Training will become useless if I go back to being like the other youth in the village.”64

59 “16-nendo ni okeru kingy�o h�okoku seinentai no kunren,” Taiwan chih�o gy�osei, June 1941, 25. 60 �Ota Toshio, “Hont�o seish�onen no kunren ni tsuite,” Taiwan chih�o gy�osei, June 1941, 2–8, here 6. 61 Miyao naimu buch�o, “Kingy�o h�okoku seinentai ni toku,” D�ok�o 217 (April 5, 1940): 1. On Korean

military service, see Palmer, Fighting for the Enemy; Fujitani, Race for Empire. 62 “Seinen shokun wa mazu dantai ky�oiku o ukeyo,” D�ok�o 218 (April 20, 1940): 1. 63 “Dai 4-ji kingy�o h�okoku seinentai kaitai h�okokushiki ni okeru chiji kakka kunji y�oshi,” D�ok�o 243

(May 5, 1941): 3. 64 Xu Chongfa kept a diary during his time in the Patriotic Labor Youth Corps. This entry is dated

October 1, 1941.

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It was not only their climbing the ladder of youth training that generated the per- ception that they were a select group. After completing the training series, the gradu- ates gained new job opportunities. Job prospects had a strong psychological effect on improving their self-esteem, especially by allowing them to be compared to urban, ed- ucated youth, who had had better access to salaried jobs. After returning to Beipu from Labor Corps service near Wushe in Taizhong, Huang Yuanxing found his career prospects suddenly improved. He immediately signed up for the four-month teacher- training program and became an elementary school assistant teacher in September 1943. In an interview nearly seventy years later, he justified his participation in colo- nial youth training, saying, “I was able to get a job only because I went to the Labor Corps program, but only the graduates of the institute were qualified to get into the Labor Corps . . . In order to go to the institute, they had to do well in the local Seinen- dan . . . I felt lucky that even though I could not pursue a formal education, I was able to become a teacher just like those who went to middle school or normal school.” As the war continued, an increasing number of Japanese teachers and officials were con- scripted, leaving positions open to local youth. Teaching was a popular occupation among the young people in the village, partly because teachers had a large presence in their everyday lives, and also because teachers, as well as policemen, could move on to other governmental positions.65 Though Huang’s family’s finances gave him

FIGURE 8: Physical training at the Taiwan Patriotic Labor Youth Corps (Taiwan Kingy�o H�okoku Seinentai) site in Hualian, September 30, 1941

65 Miyajima, “Hont�o n�oson seinendan,” 132; Ts’ai, Taiwan in Japan’s Empire Building, 56.

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only limited options, he reflected that he had made the right decision in pursuing a ca- reer through youth training because, he said, “I did well in the end.” He continued as a schoolteacher until his retirement fifty-seven years later.66

Although Huang Yuanxing’s career trajectory was more common, Xu Chongfa ex- celled as a “model rural youth.” After coming back from the Labor Corps in Hualian in 1942, Xu was recruited to become an assistant instructor at the institute. The Japa- nese teachers gave him his Japanese name, Nemoto Kenji, and under that name he played the role of the strict, sometimes intimidating, and spirited teacher until the end of the war. Even with his continuing belief in the excellence of Japanese-style youth training, Xu admitted the importance of the job prospects it afforded: “The in- stitute was popular because the graduates could become school teachers without go- ing to normal school. Women could also become assistant nurses.”67 The tightly con- trolled wartime economy meant that a large number of people, both in Japan and in its colonies, lost their jobs. Despite the slogan “Eight Corners under One Roof” (i.e., “a world united under the Japanese emperor”), ethnic discrimination was rife in the job market across the empire. When “getting a job was extremely hard for Taiwanese people, and it felt like rising to heaven if you could find a salaried job,” four months

FIGURE 9: At the construction site

66 Interview with Huang Yuanxing, Beipu, May 9 and 30, 2011. 67 Interview with Xu Chongfa, Shakang, May 20, 2011. Another Xinzhu resident, who did not even

join the Seinendan, let alone the institute, also remembers that “the Xinzhu sh�urenj�o was famous because the graduates could become teachers.” Interview with Huang Rongluo, Zhudong, Xinzhu province, May 3, 2011.

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of intense training away from home was a golden opportunity to broaden one’s hori- zons.68

The fact that these men were seeking practical benefits does not mean that they saw the Japanization campaign only instrumentally. The ideological conviction and pragmatism were mutually reinforcing. On many occasions, Taiwanese youth defined their self-value according to the metric of Japanese nationalism and competed against one another. The ranking system of the Labor Corps, for example, fanned competitive feelings among youth from different provinces. As in the military, they all started as second-rank trainees, with two chances to move into the first rank and then to a sepa- rate upper rank. Xinzhu youth felt most competitive against those from Taipei prov- ince, the colonial capital. A participant in the first-term Labor Corps program wrote to the institute teachers, “It seems that there are many getting sick among the Taipei team, but we on the Xinzhu team are fortunately all doing well without any accidents . . . There was an announcement of our grades on April 23, and 19 out of 24 Xinzhu members advanced to the upper rank, whereas 11 out of 40 Taipei people did.”69

Newspapers frequently reported the number of upper-rank trainees from Xinzhu, and the Xinzhu governor urged the prospective participants to achieve even better re- sults.70 The thing that Huang Yuanxing remembered most clearly about the Labor Corps was the pressure to become an upper-rank trainee. He understood it in terms of ethnic rivalries: “Because the previous draftees from Xinzhu had earned a good reputation and received outstanding grades, I thought that as a Hakka youth from Xinzhu, I would do everything to become an upper-rank trainee.”71 He also narrated the history of youth programs backwards, saying that the purpose of the Xinzhu youth training institute was specifically to train Hakka youth to beat other Taiwanese in their achievements at the Labor Corps.72

Provinces and ethnicities were not the only boundaries recognized by the competi- tors. They harbored animosity toward urban youth both in and outside of Xinzhu. “Those from urban areas talk a good game, but their practice does not live up to their words,” one Labor Corps reservist complained.73 In contrast, aboriginal youth train- ees were highly respected. Labor Corps members often wrote that the Takasagozoku (aborigines) were “pure” and “excellent”74 During his Labor Corps service, Xu Chongfa felt ashamed when he did not have a suntan, because the instructors often asked him to build furniture while other trainees were engaged in outdoor labor. Tanned skin became a masculine symbol of hardworking “rural youth,” which also el- evated the image of dark-skinned aboriginal youth.75

In the same way, the sense of rivalry with intellectual youth grew stronger. Urban youth who had higher education degrees made Xu and many Seinendan youth defen-

68 Interview with Jiang Zhaoying, Qionglin, Xinzhu province, June 29, 2011. 69 “Kingy�o h�okokutai yori genki na tayori,” D�ok�o 220 (May 20, 1940): 7. 70 “H�okoku seinentai no Shinchiku sh�utai kaeru,” Taiwan nichinichi shinp�o, May 28, 1940; “Dai 2-

kai kingy�o h�okoku seinentai ni taisuru Miyagi chiji no kunji,” D�ok�o 227 (September 5, 1940): 3. 71 Interview with Huang Yuanxing, Beipu, May 9, 2011. 72 Ibid. 73 “Zadankai kingy�o h�okoku o kataru,” D�ok�o 221 (June 5, 1940): 6. 74 Ibid. 75 Many of the letters from female graduates to Xu Chongfa, as well as an interview with Jiang

Zhaoying, Qionglin, June 29, 2011, mention how impressive the dark, slender, strong bodies of male trainees were.

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sive about their lack of formal schooling. It hurt Xu, who was confident in his aca- demic ability, when someone with more education beat him in youth training.76 When he later became the representative of all the upgraded trainees during the Labor Corps program, it meant more to him than just doing well as a Xinzhu youth. It was also the achievement of someone who had only very basic schooling. Back in their vil- lages, youth with only an elementary education continued to harbor the same feelings toward the well-educated. Huang Xiuying, a female graduate of the institute, wrote to Xu in February 1945, frustrated by the intense competition to get a position in the vil- lage office. “What is it about a graduate of the women’s school that makes her supe- rior to me? I believe I am by no means inferior to her. Seeing the person who wasted three years studying [in school], I felt really miserable, but society is on their side. Fac- ing this issue, I felt that society is so pointless.”77

The formation of their social identities and self-esteem as rural, minimally edu- cated, hardworking Xinzhu youth evolved as part of an emotional community that de- veloped at the institute. In other words, it was a sphere where personal feelings and political (or ideological) beliefs interfused, united inseparably in the face of various social battles. The graduates referred to the institute as “the home of our hearts” (kokoro no furusato) when they later shared the frustrations and excitement they had experienced in the Labor Corps and in their villages. The solemn melody of “Umi yukaba”—an imperial martial song about being prepared to die for one’s lord—repre- sented the bond that developed among the teachers and trainees, who wrote to each other long after graduation.78 In their letters, they often said that they would work as hard as possible in volunteer labor and at local Seinendan inspections because they did not want to embarrass their teachers.79

Not all village youth experienced the nurturing of new social identities through youth training. On the one hand, when participation in local Seinendan groups be- came mandatory in 1937, it lost its appeal to upper-class youth, who had appreciated the elitist nature of the earlier youth groups.80 The class gap is apparent in many auto- biographical novels later written by Taiwanese intellectuals, which often cynically de- pict the village Seinendan as a group of ignorant peasants brainwashed by the Japa- nese colonizers.81 On the other hand, it remained difficult for the poorest strata of farmers, those who were struggling to survive, to fully participate in Seinendan activi- ties. They could not afford to leave for four months to attend the institute and the Labor Corps program. During wartime, a new social sphere opened up mainly for the

76 Xu Chongfa, diary entry of June 9, 1941. 77 Huang Xiuying to Xu Chongfa, ca. late February 1945. 78 Xu Chongfa and his friends sang “Umi yukaba” a few times without my soliciting during my visits.

He also preserves personal letters. Wu Wentong, “Sh�urenj�o no shosensei ni,” D�ok�o 199 (July 5, 1939): 6. The graduates were given one another’s addresses after the graduation.

79 My sources here are Xu Chongfa’s diary and many of the letters he received. 80 Miyazaki, Shokuminchiki Taiwan ni okeru seinendan to chiiki no hen’y�o, 293. An interviewee who

used to live in Nanzhuang, Miaoli, in Xinzhu province, confirmed that those who aspired to higher edu- cation were not interested in Seinendan activities even if they resided in the countryside. Since his grand- father encouraged his sons and grandsons to obtain higher education, he also decided to attend the agricultural school and aspired to go to college later. He was “not interested in local Seinendan activi- ties,” although he knew they were gathering in the elementary school. Interview with Huang Rongluo, Zhudong, August 15, 2011.

81 For example, Wu Zhuoliu, Ajia no koji (1956; repr., Tokyo, 1973); Zhong Zhaozheng, Zhuoliu (Taipei, 2005).

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second and third sons of rural families, especially those who owned a small farm or shop.82 Their families could spare their labor temporarily, but they could not afford higher education, as was the case for Xu and Huang. Those who were recognized as “model rural youth” through the training series had a good chance to fill the positions that became vacant when Japanese teachers and low-rank officials were conscripted and left Taiwan, even when competing against more educated youth.

WHEN THE VOLUNTEER SOLDIER PROGRAM was launched, these young men viewed it as the new top rung on the ladder of youth training programs. The Japanese cabinet passed the Army Special Volunteer Soldier Program Act for the colonies in 1938. It was not implemented in Taiwan initially, mainly because of concern about Taiwanese ethnic kinship with the enemy state, China.83 This delay in recruitment, compared to its earlier start in Korea, stimulated Taiwan’s pro-assimilationist leaders and led to an overheating of the Japanization campaign.84 Once the program started, the volunteer soldier, especially because of the intense competition, symbolized the most prestigious achievement for Taiwanese men who pursued Seinendan-based youth training. In terms of both job prospects and social recognition, the volunteer soldier program promised to remedy the marginalization of farm youth overnight.

In this environment, many young men could not separate their personal urge to apply from the social pressure on them to do so. An official Xinzhu province newslet- ter reported that youth rushed to the counter as soon as the city hall started accepting applications, “almost like a battle scene.” The number of applicants in Xinzhu prov- ince reached 20,586 in the first two weeks.85 Being a proud imperial youth, Xu Chongfa not only felt the need to apply, but also desired to pass the examination. While he was working at the institute, he expressed his wish to attain this new honor in his notes, writing, “Staying in the institute makes me a quiet person. I really hope I will become a volunteer soldier next year!”86

The Seinendan had an amplifying effect on mobilization, in that the participants’ volunteer fever motivated other people to join the war effort, and that further in-

82 I collected thirty-one names of those who attended the institute from Huang’s hometown of Beipu and had Huang Yuanxing discuss their family backgrounds. Most of them, although their families origi- nally lived near the mountains, ran small shops by the late 1930s in Beipu town. Interviews with Huang Yuanxing, Beipu, August 18, 2011, and Wen Qingshui, Beipu, August 23, 2011.

83 When the colonial government in Taiwan finally launched the volunteer soldier program in 1941, army officials planned to start conscription in ten years, after examining the results, but they decided to move the plan forward to 1944 in Korea, and subsequently began it in Taiwan in 1945. Kond�o, S�oryokusen to Taiwan, 39–55. For more details, see Chou, “Riben zai-Tai junshi dongyuan yu Taiwanren de haiwai canzhan jingyan,” 85–126.

84 Kond�o, S�oryokusen to Taiwan, 34–45. The movement to implement the volunteer soldier program was popular not only among pro-Japanese Taiwanese elites. The demand for military service had been coming from home-rule activists since the late 1920s. They viewed it as a way to achieve equality between Japan and Taiwan.

85 Ichiy�o sei, “Shiganhei, kenpeiho, kangofu, sh�uka seinen no s�oshingun,” Shinchiku-sh�u jih�o 58 (March 1942): 72–73.

86 Xu Chongfa, “Seinendan o megurite” (“Visiting Various Seinendan,” a work-log diary), October 7, 1943. In the interviews, he insisted that he had passed the exam but had not gone because the institute needed him. Oddly, this could not be verified by any documentation despite his meticulous records on other details. Whether true or not, his repeated insistence on this point, decades after Japan’s defeat, shows his striking desire to have become a volunteer soldier.

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creased the social pressure on Seinendan members. The female gaze played a power- ful role. In an essay in a colonial official journal, a young woman named Yang Qinghe expressed her excitement about seeing and hearing volunteer soldiers. She described it as an almost sensual experience: “Late at night, when I hear military songs sung by those coming back from military drills, I immediately recognize that ‘that is a soldier,’ and ‘that is a volunteer soldier’!” She was surprised to hear a Japanese friend express- ing similar excitement, saying, “They are volunteer soldiers!”87 Young women pres- sured their male counterparts in different ways. For example, 140 female Seinendan members in Zhudong county vowed that they would not marry anyone who had not applied for the volunteer soldier program.88 Similar stories were reported all over Tai- wan.

The prestige that came with being a volunteer soldier transcended the boundaries between social groups, elevated the status of “rural youth,” and exerted pressure on intellectuals as well. Literature that supported the Japanization campaigns (k�omin bungaku) directly connected the “model rural youth” to the volunteer soldier. In a fa- mous short novel from 1941, Shinganhei (The Volunteer Soldier), the young author, Zhou Jinpo, treated the act of applying to the volunteer soldier program as the final test for the internalization of the Japanese way of thinking.89 Although the novel nar- rates the dilemma of Taiwanese intellectual youth with deep sympathy, it ends in the triumph of the acts of village youth (submitting blood-signed applications) over the logic of intellectuals (rationalizing Japanese dominance). Whether or not this idea resonated among readers, the superiority of “rural youth” reached the discourse of in- tellectuals.

Still, farm youth, selected after a fierce competition, soon came to feel the same bitterness that intellectual youth often experienced about the consequences of Japa- nizing themselves. When they joined the Japanese army after six months of additional training in Taipei, the Taiwanese volunteer soldiers got their first taste of what life was like within a truly Japanese-dominant social structure. Their superiors were mostly conscripted Japanese. The volunteer soldiers found themselves to be far better qualified as soldiers than their Japanese colleagues, and yet the Japanese superiority in status was absolute. The Taiwanese encountered violence and bullying on a daily basis from older Japanese soldiers.90 Their sense of humiliation was similar to what elite Taiwanese youth had experienced in middle school and other Japanese-domi- nated institutions of higher education since the 1920s.91 The more interactions they had with the Japanese in their cohort, the more bitter Taiwanese youth became, espe- cially knowing that they were the select few in their own society.

Universal conscription was something very different from the volunteer soldier program. The mandatory aspect was the opposite of the exclusivity accorded to the volunteer soldier, which had been a crucial element in stirring the volunteer fever. Still, the celebration of masculinity and the excitement of war influenced many rural conscripts. Huang Yuanxing was one of those who readily accepted his conscription

87 Yang(shi) Qinghe, “Nissh�oki no motoni: Josei no tachiba kara,” Shinkensetsu 5 (March 1943): 50–51. 88 “Shiganhei o shigan senu seinen towa kekkon sezu,” Taiwan nichinichi shinp�o, January 14, 1942, 3. 89 Zhou Jinpo, “Shiganhei,” in Nakajima Toshio and Hwang Yingzhe, eds., Sh�u Kinpa (Zhou Jinpo)

Nihongo sakuhinsh�u (Tokyo, 1998), 14–37. 90 For example, Miyazaki, Shokuminchiki Taiwan ni okeru seinendan to chiiki no hen’y�o, 291. 91 For example, J sheng, “7-nenkan no ky�ogaku seikatsu o kaiko shite,” Taiwan minp�o, April 1, 1938, 10.

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notification, which he received while working as an assistant teacher at the elementary school.92 But there were many cases in which Taiwanese youth tried to escape the call of duty. In the final months of the war, rural populations were already subjected to food rationing, required to donate anything made of metal, and forced to save money in the governmental banking system, not to mention the daily air raid alarms. Con- scription inevitably made many people fearful and angry.

During these last few years, when the military increased its reliance on youth across the imperial domains and yet faced growing skepticism within colonial society, colonial officials embraced a strategy of using the gap between the younger and older generations more markedly. They attempted to maintain the pretense that youth and officials were pursuing the same social agenda, calling on “pure” youth to persuade their “ignorant old parents” if they opposed their children’s desire to apply for the volunteer soldier program.93 Schoolchildren were presented as the model for the rest of society in Japanization campaigns. Nagata Tomiki, an elementary school teacher, noted that it was popular among students to call each other by their Japanese names even in personal letters. Contrasting this to adults whom he heard saying, “Even if we adopt Japanese names, we do not get any rights or one sen of profit,” the teacher la- mented, “Why are they not able to join the children and try harder?”94 Some elite Hakka parents viewed this strategy of generational divide-and-rule as a threat to their ethnic heritage and attempted to counter their children’s rapid Japanization by teach- ing them about the Hakka’s historical roots. Yet, this did not close the generation gap. Huang Guohui recalls that he developed hostility toward his father, who preached to him about the proud historical origins of the Hakka in the Central Plain of the Yellow River. “I thought, ‘My father is uneducated and ignorant, is very con- ceited, likes empty talk, and gives me all kinds of bullshit orders,’ and began to despise him.”95 He even took out a Japanese scholar’s book that his brother had brought back from Tokyo and showed his father that his stories were nothing more than myths or legends.96 The wartime mobilization made both a scientific mind and unconditional faith in the empire markers of Japanized youth. By exacerbating the generational di- vide, state officials attempted to maintain the social ground for mutual co-optation with young people in their effort to extend Japanese nationalism.

HISTORIANS OF TOTALITARIAN REGIMES often find it difficult to identify the locus of ideo- logical mobilization. Many see social groups such as workers, peasants, and the urban middle class as units that shared similar reactions to the regimes, assuming that the social benefits that each group enjoyed or did not enjoy largely determined their atti- tudes toward the state ideology.97 Militant youth groups, whether the Hitlerjugend or

92 Interview with Huang Yuanxing, Beipu, May 30, 2011. 93 �Osawa Sadakichi, Rikugun tokubetsu shiganhei annai (Taipei, 1942), 3. 94 Nagata Tomiki, “K�ogakk�o ky�oin no nayami,” Shinchiku-sh�u jih�o 46 (January 1941): 73–74. 95 Tai Kokuki [Dai Guofei], Tai Kokuki chosakusen 1: Hakka, Kaky�o, Taiwan, Ch�ugoku (Tokyo,

2011), 112. 96 Ibid., 93. 97 For example, see Detlev J. K. Peukert’s classic work Inside Nazi Germany: Conformity, Opposition,

and Racism in Everyday Life, trans. Richard Deveson (New Haven, Conn., 1987). Many of the contribu- tors to more recent volumes, such as Albanese and Pergher, In the Society of Fascists, and Corner, Popu-

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the Komsomol, constituted one independent category in such analysis. Their urban, youthful character and desire for adventure and rebellion against parental authority are often pointed out to explain their enthusiasm for the state projects.98

In the Japanese Empire, “rural youth” became a unique social layer in a similar way, but contradicted the typical categorization of militant uniformed youth. These men were the central workforce who shouldered the socioeconomic functions of the countryside, unlike the urban adolescents and students who were mobilized in other totalitarian regimes. One could argue that their desire to subvert the social hierarchy was even fiercer as the result of a deep and pervasive grudge against the social struc- ture in general.

At the same time, their anti-urban and anti-establishment sentiments could have gone in a completely different direction. In fact, the groups of peasants and rural com- munities described by historians of Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy showed little en- thusiasm for state mobilization. The messages of the state and the rural psychology did not differ much—the Nazis discursively constructed a “new type” of farmer, while country dwellers harbored feelings of alienation from the urban political culture.99

These elements did not lead to successful rural mobilization, however. Instead they generated suspicion and active opposition on the part of rural residents, especially when policies conflicted with their family, religious, and village traditions and val- ues.100 As an assimilatory colonizing power, Japan’s wartime regime was far more hos- tile to the local values of Taiwanese villages. Yet Taiwanese village youth exhibited an overwhelming enthusiasm, which culminated in the “volunteer fever,” entirely throw- ing away the rural pattern detected in the European cases.

How did the Japanese Empire appeal so strongly to young men in the colonial countryside while avoiding the backlash of opposition seen in rural peripheries under other totalitarian mobilizations? Did the state exercise enormous cultural and discur- sive power that brought about a universalistic transformation of individuals? Taiwan- ese youth, as exemplified by Xu Chongfa and Huang Yuanxing, indeed experienced personal transformations. In youth training they internalized the rhetoric of Japan’s agrarian and militaristic imperial nationalism, celebrated their changing identities, and endeavored to challenge social hierarchies. In many ways, they nurtured a revolu- tionary mindset similar to what many historians of Stalinism, fascism, and Nazism have been trying to uncover as a foundation for regime support.101

Far from being the work of the controlling state, however, the process of transfor- mation was almost entirely conditioned by the Taiwanese trainees’ immediate social

lar Opinion in Totalitarian Regimes, also adopt these social groups–based analyses. See also Sheila Fitz- patrick, “Popular Opinion in Russia under Pre-war Stalinism,” ibid., 17–32, here 20–21.

98 For a brief and useful summary on this point, see Sheila Fitzpatrick and Alf Lüdtke, “Energizing the Everyday: On the Breaking and Making of Social Bonds in Nazism and Stalinism,” in Michael Geyer and Sheila Fitzpatrick, eds., Beyond Totalitarianism: Stalinism and Nazism Compared (New York, 2009), 266–301, especially 270–275.

99 Willi Oberkrome, “National Socialist Blueprints for Rural Communities and Their Resonance in Agrarian Society,” in Steber and Gotto, Visions of Community in Nazi Germany, 270–280; Jill Stephen- son, Hitler’s Home Front: Württemberg under the Nazis (New York, 2006).

100 See also Paul Corner, The Fascist Party and Popular Opinion in Mussolini’s Italy (Oxford, 2012). 101 For example, see Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain; Jochen Hellbeck, Revolution on my Mind: Writing a

Diary under Stalin (Cambridge, Mass., 2006); Christopher Duggan, Fascist Voices: An Intimate History of Mussolini’s Italy (New York, 2013).

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tensions, opportunities, and relationships. If we were to focus solely on their private writings, such as Xu Chongfa’s diaries, religious repetitions of the glory of the em- peror and the empire’s goal of uniting Asia as well as existential explorations of the self could easily be found. When such expressions are situated in Xu’s relational and social surroundings, it is clear that he and his cohort aspired to become modern “rural youth” who could exert moral authority over urban youth, educated youth, and the older generations. Despite their sincerity, becoming an “ideal Japanese subject” was a goal insofar as it allowed them to attain that moral superiority. In creating this param- eter of personal transformation, the pragmatic benefits, especially job opportunities, gained by this specific social demographic group were crucial. In other words, identity transformation required materialistic assurance. For them, the tangible advancement of their social positions was a source of psychological emancipation.

The assertion that social dynamics, not individual introspection, deserve more at- tention as the locus of ideological indoctrination also comes from the centrality of the collective sharing of emotions at the local level. The observable emotional community that existed among institute graduates was a product of the long-term interplay of many social tensions and the colonizers’ intentions. The process began with the con- struction of “rural youth” as a social category at the turn of the 1930s. It reached the next stage when young villagers were grouped together to represent that category. And finally, their newly nurtured personal bonds created an echo chamber of emo- tions for these youth. No matter how private the individuals may have felt their trans- formation to be, it would not have borne the same level of emotional energy had they not shared it with their circle of peers. The outbursts of passion seen in Taiwan’s “vol- unteer fever” were the end result of a long social process. In the youth’s view, the ide- ology did not exist in their inner selves or in the realm of the state. It existed in their ever-shifting social relationships—the experiences of bonding and alienation and the local sense of rivalry, humiliation, and self-worth—the central arena of their lives, through which the imperial state and individuals found ways to engage with each other.

Sayaka Chatani is a FASS Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of History, National University of Singapore. She is completing a book manuscript with the working title “Sons of the Nation-Empire: Rural Youth Mobilization in Japan’s Imperial Domains,” in which she compares the experiences of village youth in the Seinendan in the Japanese, Okinawan, Taiwanese, and Korean peripheries. Her article “The Ruralist Paradigm: Social Work Bureaucrats in Colonial Korea and Japan’s Assimilationism in the Interwar Period” appeared in Comparative Studies in Society and History 58, no. 4 (2016): 1004–1031. She is also working on a history of various ideological conversion programs that targeted soldiers and POWs in the 1940s and 1950s.

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