From Honto Jin to Bensheng Ren

This book attempts to use numerous volumes of mostly unpublished diaries for examining issues of Taiwanese identity. Using the diaries of two Taiwanese intellectuals, the author examines how the Taiwanese national consciousness emerged and was reconstructed under the Japanese and Chinese Nationalist rule between 1920 and 1955, suggesting that a multi-dimensional Taiwanese national consciousness was created in the 1920s. Nevertheless, between 1937 and 1945, it was reconstructed by the imperial wa