About This Issue
Amid the pandemic, once-busy international travel routes fell silent, suspended between sky and sea. Taiwan’s successful public health response redirected the desire for travel back to the island itself. At this moment, Xunfeng presents in full a nearly century-old family photo album from Japan documenting a journey around Taiwan. Containing some 130 silver gelatin photographs—still shimmering with fine points of light—alongside aerial maps and handwritten notes, the album preserves traces of thought and memory. Long covered in dust, it now emerges as a time capsule of Taiwan’s history.
In July 1936, the diary’s author traveled with his family aboard the Asahi Maru, crossing the ocean and landing at Keelung Harbor on the island’s northern tip. Over roughly twenty days, they completed a full circuit of Taiwan, photographing everyday life, local landscapes, and Indigenous cultures, while recording observations on infrastructure, products, and industrial development. This mysterious album passed from an antiques dealer into the hands of a cultural history collector, and its origins remain unknown. How it survived war and ocean currents over nearly a century—eventually returning to Taiwan with the travel memories of one family—may itself be another story waiting to be uncovered.
During the voyage, the diarist photographed a young girl and noted: “Shaoko likes Johann Strauss’s operetta Die Fledermaus.” This detail suggests that a gramophone accompanied the journey. From here, the issue expands to introduce Japanese scholar Tanabe Hisao’s 1922 expedition to Taiwan to collect music, as well as the 1914 journey of record merchant Okamoto Kashitarō and Taiwanese musicians to Tokyo for recording sessions—reconstructing a soundscape shaped by voices and music at sea.
Ports, ocean liners, and dense maritime routes carried the slow-swaying romance of overseas travel, while trains running day and night along the island’s longitudinal railway signaled the arrival of a rapidly changing era. Modern transportation was a key driver of mass mobility during the Japanese colonial period and laid the groundwork for the tourism industry. The emergence of travel magazines further testified to this growth. In 1924, leveraging its global shipping network, Osaka Shosen Kaisha launched the magazine Umi (The Sea), whose contents reveal the flourishing domestic and international travel culture of Japan from the 1920s through the 1940s, as well as the impressions of Japanese cultural figures visiting Taiwan.
The Governor-General’s Office actively promoted tourism in Taiwan, aiming to showcase colonial “progress” while implicitly displaying national strength and fostering exchanges between the island and the metropole. Journalist Tokutomi Sohō visited Taiwan in 1929 at the invitation of the government; his cultural observations closely reflected the perspective of the ruling authority. By contrast, writer Nogami Yaeko undertook a round-island journey in 1935 during events marking forty years of Japanese rule. Compared with Sohō’s assertive southern expansionist ideology, Nogami approached foreign cultures with a more sensitive and empathetic gaze.
During her visit, Nogami noted that while riding a train from Chiben to Taimali, local Taiwanese and Japanese passengers never once exchanged greetings—an observation she used to highlight the issue of colonial integration. This can be read alongside the experience of Taiwanese physician Wu Hsin-jung, who addressed class divisions within train compartments in his poem “The Racing Villa.” Yet train travel around the island remained a favored leisure activity among Taiwan’s literary youth during the period. Drawing from Wu’s diaries, this issue traces his 1940 round-island journey by rail, blending travel with visits to friends.
In the early twentieth century, as modernization accelerated, cities undergoing rapid and dazzling transformation also became subjects of literary imagination. This issue concludes by introducing the Tokyo journey of the legendary writer Weng Nao. For him, the journey was inseparable from youth itself. Arriving in the imperial capital filled with longing, he wandered through a city he had clearly reached yet never fully attained—a distant place, dreamlike and magical, perpetually charged with mystery and the unknown.
ISBN 9772518947009 04
