Making history accessible
Filmmaker Wei Te-sheng discovered an intriguing question while looking through Taiwanese historical materials: Why was there a baseball team in the era of Japanese rule composed of Han Chinese, indigenous people, and Japanese? The multiethnic team not only became the top squad in Taiwan, they made it to the final of Japan’s famed National High School Baseball Championship at the Koshien Stadium. Wei took this story and transformed it into the award-winning film Kano (2014). To faithfully recreate the sights and sounds of that era, he consulted digital archives and did much historical research, including field research and interviews with participants in the events of the time, before finally moving this inspiring story to the silver screen. He had previously made a movie about the Wushe Incident called Seediq Bale: Warriors of the Rainbow (2011). In these films, threads drawn out of historical materials were crafted into motion pictures that are highly accessible to ordinary people.
To turn dry historical data into works that people find interesting requires an interpreter with a background in history and skills in combing through data and in storytelling. Tsai Hui-pin points to Chen Roujin (1964–2021), whose professional background was in journalism, as a representative author of popular history books. Chen published many books on society and daily life in the Japanese era, such as Advertisiang: Old Brnds, Fashionable Goods, Salesmanship, Seeing Modern Life in Taiwan from Japanese-era Advertising; Everyone Is an Era; and The First Experience of Western Civilization in Taiwan. She wrote about themes by collecting and organizing materials from digital archives including travel writings, diaries, letters, and newspapers, and used a storytelling format to introduce the lifestyles of people living in those days. Her books enable readers to readily absorb information, and they successfully spread knowledge about the lives of Taiwanese under Japanese rule.
Tsai Hui-pin says that that if the Taiwan studies that have developed since the 1980s were an airplane, then databases and digitization would be the wind that lifts it into the air. Our island has a complex past, having been governed in turn by the Dutch, Spanish, Zheng Chenggong, the Qing Dynasty, and the Japanese, leading to great cultural diversity. We have also experienced an era when discussion of certain topics was forbidden, but today we live in an age of freedom and openness. With the help of open data, digitization, and databases that are diverse and accessible, although we cannot travel through time, we can explore our own origins through digital historical materials. Only by better knowing ourselves can we tell the world the stories of Taiwan.
The settings depicted in Wei Te-sheng’s film Seediq Bale: Warriors of the Rainbow (2011), about the Wushe Incident of 1930, were based on information gleaned from a great quantity of historical materials. (photo by Kent Chuang)