Taiwan’s Youth Casts Trendy Eye on Japan

Like many self-respecting young Japanese women, Joyce Chen chooses her wardrobe with care. She takes fashion cues from the Japanese teen magazine Non-No, studies the clothes of Japanese soap opera stars and pays close attention to style in Japanese music videos.

Then she goes shopping at boutiques such as “100%,” whose women’s wear is exclusively Japanese. Today, Chen sports a trendy T-shirt over blue-and-white checked pants, a simple but expensive ensemble direct from the Land of the Rising Sun.

Therein lies the rub. Chen is not Japanese but Taiwanese. And she knows that her middle-aged parents, mindful of Japan’s 50-year domination of Taiwan earlier this century, would not approve of her devotion to Tokyo chic.

So she resorts to a little subterfuge. “I lie,” Chen, 20, admits sheepishly. “I tell them it was made in Taiwan.”

Throughout this island, Taiwanese youth are lapping up just about everything to do with pop culture from Japan. Young adults spend their pocket money on Japanese designer labels. Teenagers swoon over Japanese pop singers. Students neglect their homework to watch Japanese cartoons or read Japanese comic books. Children of all ages clamor for Japanese toys.

In the latest twist in a long and deep relationship between the two nations, the definition of cool for the young here comes not from the West, on the other side of the Pacific, but elsewhere in the East, across the East China Sea.

And the elders are not amused.

At best, they claim indifference, dismissing the trend as a harmless fad sure to wane as quickly as it waxed. At worst, they are downright alarmed, shaking their heads and talking darkly of a “new colonialism” taking root among Taiwan’s youth.

“Be careful!” warned a Taiwanese newspaper headline only half-jokingly. “Your kids are becoming Japanese.”

Concern has even prompted some lawmakers to urge the government to foster a stronger sense of Chinese heritage in schoolchildren, lest Japanese influence subsume it entirely.

“They’re worried that the next generation will be totally spoiled by Japanese culture,” says professor Hsu Chieh-lin at National Taiwan University, the leading expert here on Taiwan-Japan relations.

The complaints may sound similar to fussing by the French, who see their proud national traditions imperiled by the invasion of American music, media and McDonald’s.

Japanese pop culture, which is often a derivative of its U.S. counterpart, has nowhere near the pervasive sway in Asia that things American do. Indeed, in many areas of Asia the wartime-era animus directed at the Japanese still runs deep.

But the situation here is far more complex, raising prickly issues of Taiwanese history, nationality and ethnic identity in a state that was once under Japanese rule. For many, the controversy has dredged up memories of the past and posed new questions about the future of Taiwan’s ties with its economically powerful neighbor.

Most of all, it has exposed Taiwan’s profound ambivalence toward its erstwhile colonizer, which ran the island with an iron fist but laid a firm foundation for its current success. Between 1895 and 1945, Japan’s imperial forces crushed Taiwanese resistance, meted out beatings to lawbreakers and exploited Taiwan’s abundant agricultural resources. But they also made vast and enduring improvements for the local Han Chinese population, from infrastructure to education, public safety to public health, turning Japan’s first colony into a model for the rest of the empire.

“We have a kind of weird feeling about the Japanese,” says S.K. Sze, 64, a retired Taipei businessman born and schooled under the Japanese regime. “Taiwan was ruled by them for 50 years. [But] we cannot deny their contribution to the basis of Taiwan’s modernization. That is a historical truth.”

Colonial Past

Evidence of Japan’s former sovereignty over Taiwan is everywhere, sometimes in startling juxtaposition with signs of its present influence.

The railway tracks that zipper the island were put in by the Japanese. So was the extensive network of roads, which now swarms with thousands of cabbies and residents honking the horns of their Toyotas. Taiwan’s airfields also have their roots in the Japanese occupation.

In Taipei, the president’s office is the old Japanese governor’s mansion, a dignified red-brick structure built in 1912. Some wags joke that it is still occupied by a Japanese leader: President Lee Teng-hui, 74, who attended a Japanese-run elementary school in Taiwan, went to college in Kyoto (before attending Cornell University in Upstate New York) and speaks Japanese fluently--better, some say, than he does Mandarin.

Flanking his office are two other organs of the state, the Supreme Court and the Bank of Taiwan, both housed in their original Japanese buildings. Ditto the state guest house, the railway station and the central post office.

A more modern marker of Japanese influence lies just a few blocks away from the civic plaza: Hsimenting, the city’s version of Melrose Avenue. The area is so crowded with teenagers and stores stocked with trendy Japanese merchandise that legislator Roger Hsieh likes to take Japanese visitors there for tours. “We call Hsimenting the ‘Harajuku’ of Taipei,” says Hsieh, referring to a fashionable Tokyo shopping district.

Hsieh, 62, a member of Taiwan’s main opposition party, was a young boy when Japan left the island after losing World War II. Like the president and others of their generation, he speaks fluent Japanese. And like many of his peers, Hsieh found himself more at odds with his Chinese brethren who began arriving by the thousands from the mainland after the war, proclaiming a glorious reunification, than with Taiwan’s former occupiers.

Indeed, Hsieh now supports stronger political links between Taiwan and Japan while advocating full independence from China, another deep source of ethnic conflict on the island.

“Japan is still our great neighbor. We should build up our connection,” Hsieh says. “If we want to enlarge our economy, we must shake hands with Japan.”

But his position is not shared by everyone in Taiwan’s legislature. Some believe that the state already is far too cozy with Japan, which ranked as the island’s No. 1 investor last year, with a massive trade surplus of $13.8 billion.

Last fall, members of the fledgling New Party called for a boycott of Japanese products after a right-wing Japanese youth organization put up a lighthouse on the Diaoyu islands, whose ownership by Japan is disputed by China and Taiwan.

Other politicians even accuse the Taiwanese government of encouraging young people’s infatuation with Japanese mass culture.

“The government leaders in Taiwan are responsible for making the youngsters lose their sense of self-identification as Chinese,” declares Kuen-chen Fu, 45, chairman of the international affairs committee of the New Party. “Lee Teng-hui himself has always promoted the superiority of Japanese values and standards and Japanese culture. Even the textbook used by elementary schools in the Japanese days in Taiwan is regarded by him as much better than the textbook we are using now in public school.

“That’s ridiculous.”

Youths’ View of Japan

Taiwan’s schools nowadays do not gloss over history. They tell plainly of China’s humiliating defeat in the Sino-Japanese War, how it ceded Taiwan “in perpetuity” to Japan in the Treaty of Shimonoseki, how Japanese imperial forces ruthlessly quelled a republican movement on the island.

But such concerns are too far in the past to mean much to the younger generation, who have no qualms about their love of Japanese things.

Take Joyce Chen, the 20-year-old who keeps close track of the latest in Japanese haute couture and rocks to the Japanese band Dreams Come True. “I felt a little guilty at first,” she concedes, “but now it’s OK.”

Likewise, 18-year-old Jackie Lao is not bothered by what seems to be ancient history. More important is what looks good on his reedy frame, which he drapes in garb that he asks friends to bring back from their visits across the East China Sea.

“Japanese clothes are more stylish and good-looking,” says Lao, who spends as much as $110 on a shirt. “American clothes are big and baggy.”

The displacement at the heart of the Taiwanese youth experience of American pop culture, which dominated for decades, by the Japanese version has been remarkably swift.

Rise of Japanese Trend

It began in earnest four years ago with the introduction of Japanese programs on cable television, which is carried by 75% of Taiwanese households. Within a short period, teenage girls deserted the American sitcom “Mad About You” for Japanese “matinee idol dramas,” rough equivalents of “Beverly Hills 90210.” Boys forsook reruns of “The Simpsons” for Japanese animation, with its humor and depictions of clownish violence.

Johnny Tsai, a Taipei travel agent, still ships videotapes to his three children, who now live in California’s San Gabriel Valley. “Cartoon is the international language,” he says, “and most cartoons are made in Japan.”

Four new cable channels broadcast nothing but Japanese programs, from slapstick variety shows to samurai films. Taiwan’s own non-cable networks, which had previously been forbidden from airing such programs, also feature Japanese fare now that President Lee has dropped the ban.

Then there are the comic books and trendy magazines such as Non-No and Check, thick with fashion layouts and thin on text. Japanese singers such as willowy Namie Amuro, whose “Sweet 19 Blues” album is in Taiwan’s Top 10, also fuel the made-in-Tokyo craze, although Madonna remains popular.

Much of the appeal of Japanese things is practical, young people note. Japanese clothes fit them better than Levi’s. The faces of Japanese actors and pop stars resemble their own. Japanese TV shows portray situations and a society they relate to more easily.

“It’s all Asian,” says Tomoko Chang, who supervises one of the four all-Japanese cable channels. “There’s no gap to bridge. There are so many things in common between the cultures, like traditional values.”

Several youths also fondly cite Japan’s knack for creating fun little gadgets such as the Tamagotch, a computerized toy whose name means “cute little egg.” The Tamagotch has become an overnight sensation in Taiwan and Japan, easily rivaling the Tickle Me Elmo doll’s popularity in the U.S.

The gadget is an electronic egg that “hatches” a chick. In response to chirps every few minutes, the toy’s owner must then push various buttons to feed, play with, clean up after and discipline the chick, or else it dies.

The Tamagotch craze has caused enough consternation among parents and teachers that a Taipei city official counseled immediate action against the toys, lest they disrupt the children’s education and home life.

“We’ve got to prevent these toys [from] taking over the kids’ lives,” Chen Yung-teh, a City Council member, told the Taipei-based China Times newspaper.

But, he added, “we can also take the opportunity to instill in them the sense of responsibility that comes with raising a pet.”

Elders’ Mixed Feelings

It was yet another illustration of the ambivalence with which the older generation views Japan and its influence here, unwilling either to condemn wholeheartedly or embrace unreservedly.

Many recall the clean, educated, efficient society the Japanese established on Taiwan, free of crime, corruption, opium smoking and disease. They speak with open admiration of Japan’s economic and technological recovery after World War II.

Still, the rush for Japanese goods among young people puzzles Taiwan’s elders.

“I don’t know why it happened,” legislator Hsieh says. “But you can’t stop it.”

The trend may yet amount to nothing, some contend.

But that does not resolve Sze’s mixed feelings. “I just can’t understand why they’re interested in foreign Japanese fashion,” he says.

“I’m not so comfortable with the Japanese. They’re too powerful,” he says. “Somewhere in your mind you still think, ‘They are Japanese.’ You cannot eradicate that from your mentality.”

Then he sighs. “But times have changed.”