Fifty years

Taiwan was ceded to Japan in 1895 at the end of the first Sino-Japanese War, and held until Japan's surrender in 1945 — fifty years, and the whole of Japan's colonial period on the island.

What was built

Japan invested heavily and deliberately: a north-south railway, harbours including this one, sugar and camphor industries, sanitation systems that ended the malaria and plague that had made the island notorious, and a school system that produced very high literacy by the 1940s.

None of this was philanthropy. It was extraction infrastructure, and the political system was colonial — Taiwanese people were governed, not represented. In the later years the kominka assimilation campaign pushed Japanese names, Japanese language and Shinto observance, and around 200,000 Taiwanese served in the Japanese military.

The comparison that matters is not with Japan. It is with the Kuomintang administration that followed in 1945, and with the 1947 crackdown and the four decades of martial law that came after it.

Why the memory is different here

In Korea and China the Japanese period is remembered with straightforward bitterness. In Taiwan it is remembered comparatively — and the comparison is with what came next.

The February 28 incident of 1947 and the White Terror that followed killed and imprisoned very large numbers of Taiwanese, including much of the Japanese-educated elite, and martial law lasted until 1987. A generation who had grown up under Japanese rule found the successor government worse.

That is the specific historical reason Japanese visitors are often received with unusual warmth here. It is not amnesia and it is not approval of colonialism. It is a comparative judgement, made by people who lived through both.

What you will actually notice

Taiwanese has absorbed a lot of Japanese: o-ba-sang, o-ji-sang, tatami, bento, o-den. The night market's tianbula is the word "tempura" attached to a fish cake. Older people in their eighties and above may speak fluent Japanese and may be visibly pleased to use it.

Japanese food is everywhere and is not treated as foreign. Japanese tourism to Taiwan and Taiwanese tourism to Japan are both enormous. And when the Tohoku earthquake struck in 2011, Taiwan's donations were among the largest in the world — a fact Japanese people know and mention.