Taiwan and Its Contexts

Imagining Musha: Historical Violence and the Politics of Representation Michael Berry University of California, Santa Barbara [email protected] It was during the height of the Japanese colonial period in Taiwan, and virtually all forms of armed resistance had long been suppressed. But all of that changed one fall morning in Musha (Wushe), a small town nestled deep in the mountains of central Taiwan and occupied primarily by aborigine tribes. October 27, 1930 was the date set for the annual track meet to be held at Musha Elementary School. The event, however, turned violent when Mona Rudao of the Atayal tribe led more than 1,200 tribesmen on an ambush resulting in the death 136 Japanese – the entire colonial presence occupying Musha – in a bloody event that would be called the Musha Incident. The Japanese responded with a massive deployment of troops and state-of-the-art weaponry to suppress the uprising, even going so far as to recruit other pro-Japanese tribes to hunt down the perpetrators. This Second Musha Incident, as it was later characterized, culminated with the near extermination of the Atayal tribe and the forced exile of the few survivors away from their ancestral homeland of Musha to Chuanzhongdao, (present day Qingliu).” The Musha Incident (including the Japanese response) has become one of the most contested sites in modern Taiwan history. Over the course of the past seventy-five years, the image of Musha in popular culture has been radically transformed and repeatedly reinvented to serve different political, cultural, and historical agendas. This paper will examine the Musha Incident through the lens of the cultural representations it has inspired. Spanning the 1930s to the present and traversing different artistic mediums (novels, short stories, poetry, graphic novels, television miniseries, and film screenplays), this paper will trace the evolution of how artists, writers and filmmakers have imagined Musha and explore what those representations can tell us about historical representation, cultural identity, and the power of political hegemony. Paper Abstract, prepared for the April 2007 Yale conference Taiwanese Families in Transition: An Economic Analysis