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.
I must be on my way, though, and following the curve of an even narrower alley, I come unexpectedly upon an entire compound of newly restored Taishō era houses. They once served as dormitories for Japanese employees of the Bank of Taiwan. Now they sit vacant, almost sterile, awaiting their next purpose.
At the end of the alley, I realise I’ve made it to Guling Street. Despite rarely appearing in guidebooks, it has become something close to a pilgrimage site for film lovers. On the evening of 15 June 1961, a 16-year-old boy stabbed his girlfriend seven times in the chest and watched her die here. The incident later inspired Edward Yang’s 1991 four-hour epic A Brighter Summer Day.
“Eight years of war with the Japanese. Now we live in a Japanese house and listen to Japanese music,” says the perpetrator’s fictional father as the family eats dinner within the shōji-screened rooms of their Guling Street home.
Yang’s characters belong to the 1.2 million mainland Chinese who fled to Taiwan with the Kuomintang, or Chinese Nationalist Party, after its defeat by the Chinese Communist Party in 1949. Many moved into houses left behind by Japanese occupants who had departed hastily after Japan’s surrender in the Second World War four years earlier.
For the youngest of these newly arrived Mainlanders, coming of age in a post-colonial landscape marked by geopolitical contradictions must have been especially disorienting. As I pass several more remnants of Japanese houses in various states of disrepair, I imagine the generations who once lived in them, trying to make sense of their new surroundings, searching for answers in the walls.
I turn at the Guling Street Avant-garde Theatre, a Japanese police station-turned-Chinese broadcasting centre-turned-Taiwanese independent theatre, then walk down Nanhai Road. A brown-brick early-Shōwa modernist building comes into view. Its doors open onto a grand, ballroom-like entrance hall, though its time as a colonial showcase has long passed. Today, as the National 228 Memorial Museum, it houses a permanent exhibition on the 228 Incident, the 1947 massacre carried out under Chinese Nationalist rule.
Crossing a skybridge, I reach Chien Chung Boys’ High School. Its red-brick Meiji-era façade and clock tower recall Tokyo Station, while the palm trees and bronze statue of former leader Chiang Kai-shek return it firmly to its Taiwanese surroundings. More unexpectedly, the students have dressed Generalissimo Chiang as a KPop Demon Hunter for their graduation celebrations.
It begins to rain, and I hurry beneath the canopied entrance, where an elderly man is taking pictures of the statue with his phone.
“Do you know who that is?” he asks.
Assuming he is puzzled by the costume, I tell him I think it is from an anime.
“No! That’s our great former leader. Chiang Kai-shek!”
He laughs as he continues photographing his ‘great former leader’ dressed as a fictional Korean idol.
I have been foolish enough to leave my umbrella at home and, frankly, do not want to linger any longer outside a school with a camera. So I take my chances and cross the road, skirting the perimeter of the National Museum of History before slipping through a metal gate into the Taipei Botanical Garden.
This garden was once a Japanese nursery and home to Taiwan’s oldest herbarium. A restored early-Shōwa wooden bungalow stands among its trees, its tiled roof, weatherboarded walls, and shoin-style rooms facing the dampened garden. The botanists have since given way to a particular species of retired uncle armed with a comically oversized wildlife lens. Beneath the footpaths we share lie the archaeological remains of Taiwan’s earliest human settlements.
The sky darkens to a deep grey and, within seconds, I am standing in torrential rain. I take cover beneath a plastic lotus leaf attached to a frog-shaped telephone box.
“For you!”
An elderly lady in a plastic poncho has appeared beside me, holding out an umbrella. “For me? How can I return this to you?”
“No.”
Before I can thank her, she disappears back into the rain.
The unpredictable Taiwanese summer has brought my walk to an early end, and I make for Xiaonanmen metro station. My next destination, the Japanese entertainment district, will have to wait. Clutching my new umbrella, I think about the day’s human encounters and their way of softening the darker histories around them.
I see something similar in the buildings I have passed, each one having shed the identity assigned by its colonial architects. Together, they suggest a city that has learned to evolve through uncertainty, carrying the marks of each era without allowing them to prevent life from moving forward.
◾ Millie
Around the World
Millie’s walk illuminates how Japanese architecture from the Meiji, Taishō, and Shōwa periods took root in Taipei during the early 20th century, and how it has evolved into the present.
Our neighbourhood guidebook goes into depth on how these periods remain present in Tokyo today. Its pages lead you through the post-war black markets and mid-century shopping streets of Nishi-Ogikubo, the pre-war bookshops of Jinbōchō, the Meiji-era geisha-town roots of Kagurazaka, and more.
Until the end of this month, Members receive free worldwide shipping on Tokyothèque Neighbourhoods: Volume One. Membership also includes access to our library of paid articles and digital maps, and enables the continued free delivery of this newsletter. We’d be glad to have you with us. — AJ ⦿
