Abstract
The educational policies of Japanese colonization were one channel to introduce western music to Taiwan. This form of western music education called the shoka education was a result of the adaptation of western music during the early Meiji period in Japan, and it was implemented in Taiwanese elementary schools since the middle Meiji period.
In this paper, we analyze the articles, related to shoka, from the periodical Taiwan's educational academy and try to understand the circumstances relating to shoka education in Taiwan during the Meiji period. In this periodical, we discovered some valuable so far not utilized materials regarding shoka education. Since 1901, the periodical was edited by Taiwan's educational academy, whose predecessor was the Japanese Educational Academy (kokugo kenkyu kai) that was established in 1898, and the members of the academy were almost all educators. Through these periodicals, we can understand that the writers, who are almost all Japanese teachers, are teaching the readers how to think about shoka education and how to teach shoka at that time. This is one focus of the present study. We also used some literature to supplement the deficiency, from 1895 to 1901, before the periodical was launched.
This paper is divided into three parts. The first part explains the process of introduction of shoka education in Taiwan. The second part analyzes the materials found in Taiwan's educational academy that are relevant to shoka education during the Meiji period in Taiwan and the third part contains our main observations.
Then we draw two conclusions regarding the goals of implementing shoka education in colonial Taiwan in the Meiji period. One concerns the cultivation of the spirit, and the other is the training of singing and hearing ability. Also there were some teachers who thought about how they could let the children enjoy singing more. Nevertheless, shoka education in Taiwan's Meiji period tended to concentrate more on the cultivation of sentiments than musical education.
On the other hand, from the article written by a Taiwanese teacher, we have gathered that the Taiwanese were not conscious of the fact that the relationship between music and lyric for shoka are important. Also, they did not realize that shoka was an acculturation of western music. On this evidence, we can conjecture that for Taiwanese who lived in the Meiji period it was difficult to understand that shoka was not original Japanese music but was derived from a kind of western music.
