Scientific Forestry and Ecologies of War in Taiwan during the Japanese Colonial Rule

• In Event: Merchants, Agents, Technology, and Force: Empire and Natural Resources in East and Southeast Asia, 1800-1945

Abstract

This paper explores the intersection between the environmental history and the Science and Technology Studies by using forestry in Taiwan under the Japanese colonial rule (1895-1945) as a case. In 1895, the colonial government of Taiwan was eager to transform Japan’s first colony’s “jungles” into the empire’s “resources,” and introduced what Euro-American empires had long practiced in their colonies—so-called scientific forestry—in devising an effective environment-governing regime. By the late 1920s, however, these practices became so poor in both timber production and environmental conservation that forestry experts desperately termed forestry as “the shame of Taiwan.” Yet, as the Japanese Empire prepared itself for the war in the 1930s, Taiwan’s forestry was renowned as a “role model” to show how Japan could make use of a scientifically devised regime to effectively and efficiently govern the environment. How could the reputation of Taiwan’s forestry undergo such dramatic changes? Making use of a large set of documents left by Japanese forestry companies, my paper illuminates this unknown page of the environmental history of Japan. I argue that scientific forestry could be put to use because the colonial government eventually rendered certain critical concepts and practices in scientific forestry into what STS scholars call “boundary objects,” thus satisfying needs of an array of actors (both human and non-human, and the colonizing and the colonized) that constituted Japan’s “ecologies of war.” I conclude by outlining how Japan’s colonial legacy gave shape to the course of Taiwan’s environmental politics in the postwar era.

Author

• Kuang-chi Hung, National Taiwan University