The magazine, Taiwan Aikoku Fujin, was published during the early phase of the Japanese colonial occupation of Taiwan (1908–1916). The main purpose of this essay is to show that the magazine played a great role as a medium for propaganda about the Japanese Government’s colonial policy, focusing on the least-studied fact that the magazine published many koudan texts, a Japanese traditional oral literary art that usually onsists of heroic war tales told by professional storytellers.
Four points are explored in this essay: (1) an explication of the nature of the propaganda in Seitoku Watanabe’s “Koudan Aikoku Fujin” (1915), which appeared in the magazine; (2) an analysis of the representations of “Sinsengumi” and “War of Bosin” in terms of the (con)texts of the magazine; (3) an attempt to specify the pretext of Watanabe’s text (possibly Ouchi Fukuchi’s “Onna Rounin” [1902]); and (4) a comparative study of Watanabe’s text with Masuda Tarou Kajya’s drama entitled “Seiban Shuurai” (1913) to illustrate the nature of the propaganda of the two texts.