| Abstract |
This study is one of the researches concerning students literary works of Taihoku Higher School (a higher educational institution existing in Taiwan for 24 years during the Japanese colonial period), and discusses how Japanese alumni built images for Taipei and why they had such memories for the city. The study chiefly analyzes the 27-page booklet of Picture Book: Songs of Taihoku, a collection of 21 works of poems, articles and prints edited and published by Ichiro Tanaka, a Japanese alumnus of the school, after he returned to Japan after World War II. During his 12-year (1934-1946) residence in Taipei, he had studied at Kabayama Normal Elementary School and Taihoku Prefectural Second Middle School and graduated from Taihoku Higher School in 1943. This study classifies Taipei images in each work into four types: (1) pastoral, (2) metropolitan, (3) vital, and (4) Taiwanese, with characteristics of each type illustrated respectively. Secondly, this study probes into how these Taipei images were formed based on the school life of Tanaka and his social contact with cultural workers. Lastly, the study tries to answer why these literary works are filled with nostalgia by focusing on Tanaka’s postwar living environment (including his experience of being repatriated to Japan and his contacts with former classmates), in order to explore how Japanese who used to live in Taipei remember the city and what meanings this memory has brought to them. |
