About a month ago I attended the East Asia Popular Culture Association
conference in Taipei, Taiwan, which was actually my first ever academic
conference. While I don't intend to go into particulars about what the
EAPCA itself was like, I do want to say that I finally understand what
my colleagues and supervisors mean when they say that conferences are a
good place to get in contact with people working in the same areas. Long
story short, the EAPCA was fun and informative.
What I really
want to talk about is my own ignorance. Thanks to staying in Taipei and
being around a great number of scholars who work on Taiwanese culture, I
realized just how little I knew about Taiwan.
Prior to my trip,
I had no idea the extent to which Taiwan's history was tied to Japan. I
did not know that Taiwan was at one point a Japanese colony. I did not
know that there was a generation of Taiwanese who were more literate in
Japanese than Chinese (which caused enormous problems when China banned
use of the Japanese language after Japan seceded). I knew that anime and
manga were popular in Taiwan, but I was not aware that the dynamics of
Japanese popular culture in Taiwan was so utterly complex.
It's a
little difficult to wrap my head around. While the United States has
its own history with Japan, and the popularity of anime and manga in the
US has resulted in people speculating about the influence of the former
onto the latter, it is nowhere near the same as the relationships in
history and culture that exist between Taiwan and Japan.
As it's
not my specialty though, I'll refrain for now from positing any
hypotheses of my own. In the mean time, I'll be glad to read what other
scholars have to say.
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