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By Root 1065 0

industrialization and had not yet fallen under the sway of its ultranationalist military camp, which would later rise to power in the 1930s. Formosa, Japan's first official colony, not only was of great strategic interest because of its proximity to China; it also represented an opportunity to showcase Japan's emergence on the global scene as a modernizing imperialist force. For whatever reason, Japan's occupation of Formosa differed strikingly from the policies it pursued in places like Burma, Indonesia, and Korea during World War II.

To begin with, in the first decades after taking over Formosa, the Japanese did not actively suppress the local culture. Whereas later the Japanese would ban Koreans from speaking and teaching in their own language, they permitted Formosans to speak their native Chinese dialect, taught Taiwanese children both Chinese and Japanese in Japanese-funded schools, and trained their colonial officers to speak Chinese as well. In 1922, Japanese authorities integrated the island's elite primary schools, allowing children of the Taiwanese gentry to study side by side with the children of Japanese colonials.25

One of the most important Formosan institutions that the Jap- anese left in place was the Chinese pao-chia system of local governance, under which groupings of approximately one hundred households were made collectively responsible for wrongful acts committed by individual members. By making use of the pao-chia system and allowing influential Formosan families to maintain their positions of leadership, the Japanese gained the loyalty of local elites. To the same end, Japanese colonial authorities granted business privileges to prominent Formosans, occasionally bestowing on them the rank of “gentleman” (shinsho). At the same time, the Japanese poured money into Formosan infrastructure and agriculture. They modernized Formosa's banking system; built roads, railroads, and hospitals; and vastly improved communications, sanitation, irrigation, and farming productivity. Crop yields increased so much that even after massive exportation of rice to Japan, Formosans ate relatively well compared to Chinese on the mainland.

There was certainly Japanese repression in Formosa, even before World War II. It is estimated that the Japanese military killed as many as 12,000 Formosan resisters during the initial period of Japanese rule. Yet to a surprising extent Japanese colonial authorities won over the local population. Eighty thousand Formosans served voluntarily in the Japanese army in World War II. Even today, many Taiwanese have an affinity for Japanese culture. Some who are old enough to remember the occupation still speak Japanese on occasion and remember the colonizers as people who brought order, modernity, and the rule of law. Had the Japanese pursued similar policies elsewhere in the “Co-Prosperity Sphere,” their bid for imperial hegemony might have been far more successful.26

The potency of intolerance is undeniable. There may be no force on earth so galvanizing, so identity-creating, so war-enabling as racist nationalism—unless perhaps it is religious fundamentalism of the jihadist variety. Yet fortunately for the world, the same elements that make these ideologies so ferociously mobilizing also set the limits on their reach.

It is astonishing in retrospect that the Germans failed to take advantage of the tens of millions of Russians, Poles, Ukrainians, and others who might well have become their enthusiastic supporters and soldiers. It is similarly surprising that the Japanese, who had seen in Taiwan how effective strategic tolerance could be in an occupied territory, chose nevertheless to brutalize and slaughter conquered populations elsewhere, guaranteeing the fiercest possible resistance to their rule. But it was the very same ideology that supercharged their rise to power—the same nationalist racial pathology, the same thirst for blood and ethnic cleansing—that prevented both Nazi Germany and imperial Japan from pursuing policies that might have better served their bid for world domination.