【Article by GCIT】
The Master’s Program in Global Communication and Innovation Technology (GCIT) hosted a two-part guest lecture series on March 10 and 17 in their core course “Between Tradition and Modernity: Comparing Cases of Taiwan and Other Asian Countries”, featuring Associate Professor Yoshihisa Amae from the Department of Taiwanese Culture, Languages, and Literature at National Taiwan Normal University. Drawing on his extensive personal experience and field research, Professor Amae simplified complex issues of East Asian colonial history and modernity. By leading students to explore the "grey zones" of history hidden within popular culture, he fostered a highly interactive and intellectually stimulating environment that drew enthusiastic participation from GCIT students.

Professor Amae opened by reflecting on his own positionality — a Japanese scholar married to a Korean spouse — as a lens through which to challenge mainstream historical narratives. Grounding his approach in the concept of "liminality," he argued that the most revealing histories are often found not at the center, but at the edges.

Through rigorous archival research and field investigations, Professor Amae reconstructed the life histories of the Korean minority who remained in Taiwan after 1945. Long overlooked by both academic scholarship and public memory, this community has existed within the historical fissures left by the collapse of the Japanese Empire.

To illuminate these "grey zones," Professor Amae offered a striking example: the discovery of Russian cannons in the mountains of Taiwan. This unexpected artifact opened a broader discussion on the layered complexities of the February 28 Incident and the contested legacies of Japanese modernization. His core provocation was clear — even decades after empire's end, individuals remain deeply implicated in the liabilities of colonial heritage. For students in the room, it was an invitation to ask how that history still quietly shapes who we think we are today.

The second lecture shifted from buried history to living culture; specifically, the political dimensions of "nostalgia" for the Japanese colonial era in contemporary Taiwanese society.
Professor Amae drew a sharp contrast between Taiwan and Korea's divergent postcolonial paths. Korea designated Japanese an "enemy language" and actively sought to purge colonial symbols from public life. Taiwan, by contrast, moved in a different direction: absorbing and localizing colonial structures, reframing them not as wounds, but as "cultural heritage."

At the center of this discussion was the documentary Wansei Back Home, whose social resonance illustrated how nostalgia can become an engine of cultural entrepreneurship. Across Taiwan, colonial-era Japanese dormitories have been converted into cafés and museums, in t spaces that simultaneously respond to urban redevelopment pressures and resist the homogenization of city life.

Yet Professor Amae was careful to stress that this is not simply sentimentality. The selective embrace of Taiwan's Japanese colonial past, its maps, photographs, and aesthetic symbols, is a deliberate act of meaning-making. It is Taiwan's effort to construct a multicultural, island-centered historical narrative.


[全球傳播與創新科技碩士學位學程獲文化部與教育部高等教育深耕計畫補助。]