It’s early June in downtown Taipei. I am walking along Roosevelt Road, smothered by the thick, humid air that will fill every crevice of this city for the next six months. Stained concrete façades sweat below dripping air-conditioning units as streams of scooters whizz by.

I pause at the rare sight of a vacant lot. Here, on one of the city’s busiest, most prohibitively expensive streets, there is nothing but a dilapidated wooden shack. It belongs to a colonial domestic vernacular of Japanese wooden houses. Hundreds lined this street eighty-one years ago, when Taiwan was still a Japanese colony and before the road was peculiarly named after the 32nd US president.

The neighbourhood around me, Guting, was once called Kotei-chō and was home to many of Taiwan’s five hundred thousand Japanese residents. Academics and civil servants in particular were drawn by its proximity to the colonial government district and to Taipei Imperial University, today’s National Taiwan University. It is difficult to imagine a distinguished professor living here as I peer over a crumbling wall at the remains of a bathroom. A small tree has begun to grow between the tiles; in its shade, the house’s newest tenant, a black cat, sleeps.

I soon reach another wooden house in the narrower alleys behind Roosevelt Road. This one has been restored as a fine-dining restaurant, its tiled roof and timber frame beautifully preserved. Its owner tells me it once housed visiting Japanese professors at the university, then invites me in for a drink and a brief escape from the heat.