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  • This article examines how the commercial success of Western-style confectionery (yōgashi) of the Japanese Empire was largely built on the capital and resources of colonial Taiwan. Building on existing studies that acknowledge the importance of Taiwan’s colonization in Japan’s sugar industry, this article explores the tension between sweetness and power in the Japanese Empire through the lens of Western-style confectionery, a product regarded as a symbol of progress and modernity. Through the examination of the activities of two confectionery companies—Niitaka Confectionery and Morinaga Confectionery—in Taiwan, this article addresses how the making of Western-style confectionery required raw materials other than sugar, such as bananas and cocoa, that were obtained through the means of colonialism. By expanding the studies on sweetness and colonialism from sugar to confectionery, the article shows that the sugar industry, confectionery manufacturers, and the Japanese state wove together a complicated network that formed the foundation of Japan’s rising empire of sweetness. It also highlights the significance of the colonization of Taiwan in the rise of Japan’s Western-style confectionery industry that has long been obscured in people’s memories of sweetness.

  • This article explores how the feminisation of Western-style confectionery was critical in bridging sweetness with modernity in interwar Japan. By examining three categories of Japanese women – the ‘female worker’, the ‘modern girl’ and the ‘good wife, wise mother’, it argues that the sweetness of Western-style confectionery was associated with the female body due to women's extensive involvement in the production process and performances in visual advertisements. As these women helped construct the cultural imagination of Western-style confectionery as a feminised product, their presence also unfolds the key links between Japan's rising consumer culture and the empire's growing power.

  • This chapter examines the historical evolution of Taiwan’s tourist image in Japan as a gourmet paradise from the context of postcolonial encounters in the 1960s to global tourism in the twenty-first century. To examine the textual and visual representations of Taiwan’s image, this research includes sources from travel magazines, guidebooks, and special editions on tourism in women’s magazines. In the 1960s, Taiwan was depicted as the ‘Orient’ in Japanese travel magazines, whereas the presence of food was not significant but often appears together with nightclubs and hostesses. As Japan’s economy boomed in the 1970s, guidebooks with rich visual images of cuisines began to replace literal travelogues in the making of the image of Taiwan. As this form of representation persists, Taiwan’s image as ‘the gourmet paradise’ continues to dominate the tourist market and shape Japanese general image on Taiwan. Moreover, after Taiwan’s generous donation to Japan for the recovery of the 2011 Tohoku earthquake, various travel media further embeds Taiwanese food with the trust and intimacy between the host and the guests. This ‘gustatory gaze’ toward food images in travel media can thus be considered as an embodiment of a more complex history of Japan’s exotic longings and intimacy toward Taiwan.

Dernière mise à jour depuis la base de données : 18/07/2025 13:00 (EDT)

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