🌾 Yoichi Hatta and Lord Guan: The DPP’s ‘Deification’ and the Covering Up of History
Editor’s Note: Every grain of ‘Hatta rice’ is a drop of blood under the Japanese sword.
Opposite the Chihkan Tower in Tainan stands a Civil and Martial Temple dedicated to Confucius and Lord Guan (Guan Yu). However, in the early Ming Dynasty, the Martial Saint was actually Yue Fei, not Guan Yu.
By the Qing Dynasty, since Yue Fei was a famous general who resisted the Jurchens (ancestors of the Manchus), worshiping him was seen as encouraging anti-Qing sentiment. Therefore, the Qing government elevated Guan Yu to belittle Yue Fei and built Martial Temples nationwide. Throughout the Qing Dynasty, the imperial house repeatedly added titles to Guan Yu, reaching as many as 26 characters by the Guangxu era.
This is the art of governance: when you cannot erase an enemy’s contributions in certain areas, you elevate another idol to replace them through deification, thereby gaining legitimacy.
Yoichi Hatta is exactly such an example.
The Chianan Canal under Colonial Exploitation
The DPP is accustomed to promoting Hatta’s greatness and the contributions brought by the completion of the Chianan Canal, but they never mention the historical context of its construction because the logic behind it doesn’t withstand scrutiny.
After the First Sino-Japanese War, when Taiwan Province was colonized by Japan, it was forced to become Japan’s base for camphor and sugar production. Sugar production brought enormous wealth and sweets to the Japanese (while Taiwanese children might only taste sugar during the Lunar New Year), and camphor was a raw material for smokeless powder, helping the Japanese kill countless people on their battlefields of aggression.
To this end, Japan’s policy for Taiwan at the time restricted nearly 80% of Taiwanese to agricultural work:
- Cultivating the loyalty of landlords (the “Land to the Tiller” policy implemented by President Chiang Kai-shek after the restoration of Taiwan is still hated by a few descendants of those landlords today).
- Exploiting Taiwanese farmers by purchasing sugarcane at low prices, bringing massive revenue to the colonial mother country.
In 1918, the “Rice Riots” occurred in Japan. Taiwan already had Indica rice (Zailai rice) introduced from the mainland, but the Japanese did not like its texture. Thus, in the early 1920s, the Japanese began trial-planting Japanese Japonica rice (Ponlai rice) in Taiwan to meet the needs of the Japanese mainland population.
Since rice requires more water than sugarcane, the irrigation problem in the southern plains became urgent. The Chianan Canal was built in this context—it was never for the Taiwanese! Even the Ponlai rice grown there was not allowed to be eaten by the Taiwanese!
In the eyes of an imperialist colonial regime, all infrastructure in a colony is merely for more efficiently squeezing labor and resources from the local area, not for the benefit of the local people.
Selective Memory and Stockholm Syndrome
Historian Guo Yu-fu pointed out that when the Nationalist government repaired the canal after the war, they discovered the bottom of the canal was not lined with cement, resulting in an annual leakage of 40% of the water supply. It gives the impression that Taiwan was treated like a disposable chopstick; after all, cheap Taiwanese labor could just be used for repeated repairs.
Yet, some Taiwanese today are deeply grateful for such a project. In 2007, Chen Shui-bian even specially issued a posthumous citation for Yoichi Hatta to his daughter-in-law and grandson, commending his contribution to Taiwan’s agriculture.
In contrast, the KMT’s contributions to infrastructure in Taiwan go unacknowledged.
The primary facility of the Chianan Canal is the Wusanto Reservoir, but its total capacity is only one-fifth of the Tsengwen Reservoir, and its annual power generation is only 40% of Tsengwen’s. Its efficiency is clearly inferior, yet who today remembers the KMT for building the Tsengwen Reservoir?
Instead, a Yoichi Hatta Memorial Hall was built at the Wusanto Reservoir. Over the past twenty or thirty years, independence advocates have systematically promoted a culture of colonial nostalgia worshiping Yoichi Hatta, seemingly trying to use Hatta to show how much the Japanese contributed to Taiwan, thereby belittling the KMT’s contributions.
They act as if the suppression, massacres, control, and discrimination under Japanese colonial rule never happened, yet they remain obsessed with the infrastructure built for the convenience of exploitation and governance. Conversely, they mock and sneer at the various constructions and contributions under KMT rule, while gnashing their teeth at the martial law and White Terror used to stabilize society during the confrontation between the KMT and the CCP.
In the eyes of the DPP, there is no such thing as an objective evaluation of the KMT’s contributions to Taiwan. If they cannot erase them, they choose to ignore them and use the remembrance of the Japanese to dilute the KMT’s legacy.
The Chianan Canal was completed in 1930. That same year, the Wushe Incident (a major uprising by indigenous people against Japanese rule) broke out. The DPP consumes the imagery of Seediq Bale on one hand while worshiping Yoichi Hatta on the other—this is a classic case of Stockholm Syndrome among the colonized.