Picture this: You’re a man of means in colonial Taiwan—a government official, say, or a business leader—and you want to show off your status to your peers. Where do you go? The photo studio, of course. The city of Taipei, called Taihoku under Japanese rule, had more than a dozen studios at the start of the twentieth century, finds scholar Joseph R. Allen.
Modern photographic technology was popularized in Japan in the 1890s by Boston-trained printer Ogawa Kazuma, and the Japanese in Taiwan were quick to jump on the bandwagon. Besides Japanese bureaucrats and businessmen, the local Taiwanese elite flocked to photo studios as well. As these gentlemen posed and preened, a new, colonial modern style emerged.
Allen, who trawled colonial-era photo albums and business directories for his research, notes that
[p]hotographic portraiture of the upper and middle ranks of the colonial population, both ruler and subject, has a special position in the early ideological machinery of the Japanese colony, for this is where the photographic image most clearly demonstrates its constitutive power.
In the early colonial period, publications often contained collections of high-profile personalities’ portraits, starting with the depiction of high-ranking Japanese colonial officials began in 1896, with an illustrated account of the Japanese conquest of the island. The business directory Taiwan shisho meikan, which came out in 1900, featured nearly 180 portraits and listings of colonial administrative and business personnel, while the Taihoku Club, a social and recreational organization, published an album in 1901 with the photographs and brief biographies of more than ninety of its distinguished Japanese members.
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“Most portraits follow the widely shared conventions of the time,” Allen observes, “either half or three-quarter body shots of uniformed, medal-laden figures, serious in demeanor, and with heads turned slightly away from the camera, approaching the three-quarter profile.” This style, associated with Meiji modernity, contrasts with what he calls
the conventions of the traditional East Asian “ancestor portrait”—face front, full body, seated with legs spread […] Such vestiges of earlier portrait styles remain in the mix throughout most of the colonial period, but there was also a steady march toward a new, very modern look.
For example, lawyer and banker Soeda Juichiro appears in the Taihoku Club album “in a most club-like pose,” as Allen puts it. He has a spaniel at his feet, a shotgun slung over a shoulder, and a bag of birds in his hand. Soeda plays the part of the quintessential colonial “gentleman hunter” to a tee, Allen remarks—“even though this is a studio photograph with rather puny prey.”
On the last page of the Taiwan shisho meikan, though, Allen finds an intriguing glimpse of a different segment of society. A photograph of a local businessman casually dressed in traditional Chinese attire is printed side by side with that of one Wang Zhitang, who poses formally in a studio in a suit while decked out with “a modest collection of medals.”
“The two Taiwanese businessmen contrast starkly with each other, representing two reactions to the colonial world,” Allen writes.
Yet “even the mimic man Wang cannot fully embody…colonial modernity,” for the simple reason that, as a Chinese man, he lacked significant facial hair. Chinese men in Taiwan “could cut off their queues,” Allen writes, referring to the Manchu-era hairstyle, “dress in a variety of colonial uniforms, and outfit themselves with other modern paraphernalia, but they seldom could grow the Japanese- and European-style beards.”
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By documenting lushly hirsute Japanese officials alongside their beardless counterparts, portraiture preserved a photographic record of colonial subjects’ visibly inferior status.
Yet the camera was also capturing a growing blurring of the boundaries between the Japanese and Taiwanese urban elite in colonial society. Amid imperial rhetoric promoting “shared script” and “shared culture,” colonized Taiwanese subjects begin to adopt the Japanese kimono for special occasions, which also distanced them from the island’s indigenous population.
“Although the Taiwanese could never actually ‘become Japanese,’ in the still and mute frame of the photograph, they could sometimes ‘be as Japanese,’” writes Allen.
Toward the end of the colonial period, portrait photography records yet another cultural shift. The ethnicity of the Japanese and Taiwanese men taking studio shots can no longer be differentiated by a choice between modern or traditional pose and attire. Now, “most men are dressed in coat and tie, and the image is waist- or bust-high with a frontal gaze,” Allen reports.
As the clean-shaven look became associated with modernity, gone too is “the extravagant full colonial beard, which so distinguished colonial rulers in the early decades,” he writes. By this point, “an unusual form of colonial mimicry” has developed. Even though Japanese colonials and Taiwanese subjects continue to live in a divided society, both groups come together in their acceptance of a new, westernized ideal image.
“Although there were other markers that maintained colonial identities and divisions,” Allen writes, “such as personal names and spoken language, this visual ambiguity of the photographic portrait conspires with other social convergences…to further confuse cultural distinctions that are the base of colonial rule.”
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