Staging the Police: Visual Presentation and Everyday Coloniality

Abstract

This chapter examines the police and colonial hygiene in interwar Taiwan under Japanese rule from the perspective of colonial modernity in everyday life or everyday coloniality. I examine in general terms how a special type of police and hygiene exhibition came to be organised by the Taipei Police in 1925.¹ Japan’s participation in world exhibitions can be traced to the end of the Tokugawa period, as early as 1862 and 1867. In 1903, a Taiwanese exhibit called the Hall of Taiwan (Taiwankan) appeared for the first time in the fifth Japan Domestic Exposition (naikoku kangyo hakurankai in Osaka. Five years later, in 1908, the first trade exposition took place in Taiwan (Taihoku bussan kyoshinkai By 1925, the practice of organising exhibitions in Taiwan had been well established, following the bureaucratic pattern developed in Japan but shaped by scientific knowledge applied to the colonial setting.² Thus the Taipei police found it expedient to follow suit. The Taipei police hoped that the masses (shomin) could be aroused by a variety of propaganda techniques to the idea of self-policing (jikei) and mutual protection (kyoei), no doubt influenced by the popularity of expositions.³