Abstract
The field trips that Taiwan’s education institutions conducted in the said country under the Japanese rule had features that distinguished them from those in the Japanese mainland in terms of ethnic characteristics and eclectic selection of destinations. These differences originated from Taiwan’s position as a colony. The schema of Japanese rulers and Taiwanese subjects formed the foundation of the field trip system from the initial stages of its introduction in Taiwan through to the 1940s. This was particularly pronounced in comparisons of the tour objectives between Taiwanese students on Japanese homeland tours and Japanese students on Taiwan island tours in the field trips that were introduced at the Taiwan Governor-General’s National Language School. In the 1910s, the middle section of the school introduced field trips to Southern China. As a result, the number of schools among secondary education institutions that conducted field trips to Southern China increased in the 1920s. Moreover, commerce- and business-related higher education institutions conducted tours to Southeast Asia, Northern China, Manchuria, and Korea. The selection of destinations outside of Taiwan for tours was a reflection of the Taiwan Governor-General’s foreign policy on field trips, and, at the same time, a reflection of relaxation in the absolute subordination of Taiwan to the Japanese homeland. With the introduction of tours to Southern China, the relationship between the Japanese homeland and Taiwan was treated as relative, making it difficult to find disparities between Taiwanese and Japanese in terms of the significance of field trips. From the 1920s onward, reaffirming the field trip to the Japanese homeland has become a deliberate goal. Secondary education institutions that have a high number of Taiwanese students, and which have conducted tours of Southern China, have now started to conduct Japanese homeland tours again. Two aspects of this phenomenon coexisted in contradiction: The Japanese homeland was no longer the mandatory choice for field trips, and the Japanese homeland tour was reinstated in order to strengthen colonial rule. In the 1930s, field trips permeated into elementary education institutions, and in this period, Japanese children were required to go on Japanese homeland tours. Taihoku City (Taipei), for example, has been holding Japanese homeland field trips for elementary school children. Because of this, the reputed dominance of Japanese children over Taiwanese children has had a noticeable decline, a development that can be attributed to the renewed relationship between “the governing” and “the governed.”
