On Retrocession Day, October 25, 1945, half a century of Japanese colonial rule ended at Taipei’s Zhongshan Hall. Overnight, Taiwanese went from imperial subjects to citizens of a republic. But it would take decades for the Republic of China — Taiwan's official name — to fulfill its promise of equality and democracy.
00:0080 years ago, in the building behind me, half a century of Japanese colonial rule in Taiwan was about to come to an end.
00:21And while it's now used as a performance venue, Zhengshan Hall looks a lot like it did back then.
00:27At the time of completion in 1936, the hall was the fourth largest public auditorium in the Japanese Empire.
00:34And with its green roof tiles chosen to disguise it during air raids, it's symbolic of a period of Japanese rule that ended with World War II.
00:42Taiwan was part of the wider Japanese Empire from 1895 as a colony of Japan.
00:48Japanese officials who thought about how to integrate it into the empire, use it as a sort of test ground in a sense for how they could both dominate a new colonial territory,
01:02but also create a new kind of middle class that they hoped would be loyal to the Japanese Empire.
01:09To develop this middle class, the Japanese built universities and schools all over the island, part of larger infrastructure modernization efforts.
01:17Zhengshan Hall was built as part of a wave of public works across Taiwan.
01:22Now, those included the streets outside, the pipes beneath our feet, and even Taipei Main Station, which is just down the street.
01:31By 1906, the average Taiwanese male could expect to live to just over 28 years old.
01:37By the late 1930s, that had risen to 41.
01:40Infant mortality rates dropped considerably under Japanese rule, driven by improved hygiene in hospitals.
01:46In terms of education, Taiwan went from around 5% literacy in 1905 to over 70% by 1943.
01:55By the end of World War II, school enrollment had risen to over 70% across every ethnic group.
02:01But these statistics don't tell the whole story of state-sanctioned oppression, cultural erasure, language suppression, and racial hierarchy.
02:09The Taiwanese were not recognized as full citizens.
02:14So they were not entitled to full citizen rights or obligations.
02:19And to serve in the military to the Japanese was an honor and also, in a way, it's a right to serve in the military.
02:29So the Taiwanese, in a way, were denied this right or obligation.
02:35Changshan Hall was erected on the site of a demolished Qing Dynasty-era office, built by thousands of local laborers who worked up to 12 hours a day and often earned only a third of what Japanese workers made.
02:48They had no say in its design.
02:50The Japanese empire, while it proclaimed on one hand to be this kind of racial harmony of East Asians together, of course, the reality is a much more kind of strident hierarchy with Japanese at the top.
03:04Japanese rule was punctuated by political repression.
03:07Over 1,000 were executed in the 1915 Tapani incident.
03:12And in 1930, Japanese forces used mustard gas to suppress indigenous uprisings in the Central Mountains.
03:19In Taiwan cities, women were forced into sexual slavery as comfort women.
03:24And in its schools, local languages suppressed.
03:27The Pan-Asianism, the often very racially defined way in which Japan ran its empire in the pre-war years, persisted into the way in which they treated other ethnicities who were recruited into service.
03:44In World War II, as part of Japan's empire, Taiwanese were conscripted to fight abroad while their cities, green roofs and all, became targets for Allied bombings.
03:53And when the war ended, people in Taiwan again had no say in their fate.
03:57At the end of November 1943, Winston Churchill, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Chiang Kai-shek, the leaders of the three Allied powers in Asia, met for a major conference at Cairo, which, amongst other things, made it clear that after the war, certain islands and also territories that Japan held, such as Taiwan, will be returned to the Republic of China.
04:20As the conference in Cairo ended, the Allied leaders released a statement agreeing that the island of Taiwan would be handed over to the Republic of China on October 25, 1945.
04:33That date is still marked in Taiwan as retrocession.
04:36Now, this room looks much as it did 80 years ago when Japanese colonial rule over Taiwan came to an end about where I'm standing right now.
04:45Now, light would have been pouring in through these windows behind me, through cigarette smoke and the pop of flash bulbs, as Rikichi Ando, the last governor general of Taiwan, came forward and signed the island over to Chen Yi, its new Republic of China leader.
05:01Retrocession ended 50 years of colonial rule in Taiwan, but not political repression or hardship.
05:07How did the Taiwanese experience retrocession?
05:12In short, it's from the initial jubilation and relief to, later on, disappointment and dread and then anger.
05:26Taiwan would go on to be run as a one-party state under the Kuomintang, whose iron-fisted rule lasted nearly four decades.
05:33It would take until the 1990s for the country to truly deliver on its own ideology of democracy, pluralism, and the freedom to choose one's own identity.
05:46Now, 80 years after the end of Japanese rule, Taiwan has democratized, stabilized, and achieved genuine self-determination.
05:54A society looking to the future while carrying a complex past.
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