The "Modern Marco Polo" visits a colonial police state: Harrison Forman and government public relations in Japanese ruled Taiwan
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Abstract
- On April 1, 1938, the photo journalist and travelogue writer Harrison Forman began a short tour
of Taiwan. Only a few photographs from Forman’s excursion were published, as part of his
1940 Horizon Hunter: The Adventures of a Modern Marco Polo. Recently, however, over sixty
additional photo negatives from this 1938 visit have been made available to researchers. Like the
published photos, a great majority of Forman’s unpublished photographs were of Taiwan
Indigenous Peoples. By 1938, wrote Forman, Taiwan had become a police state ruled by
suspicion, secrecy, and fear. Nonetheless, the intrusive colonial state encouraged the production
and dissemination of photographs of a certain type. This paper analyzes Forman’s unpublished
travel notes and photographs, along with those of contemporary Western visitors to Taiwan, to
ask why the Indigenous Territories, which had symbolized Japan’s shortcomings as a colonizer
from the 1900s through the 1920s, had become the Government General’s preferred window
upon the colony in the late 1930s.
| Title | The "Modern Marco Polo" visits a colonial police state: Harrison Forman and government public relations in Japanese ruled Taiwan |
|---|---|
| Creator | Barclay, Paul D. |
| Publisher | Proceedings of the 2010 International Conference on Taiwan Studies: Taiwan under Japanese Rule: Cultural translation and Colonial Modernity |
| Academic Department | History |
| Division | Social Sciences |
| Organization | Lafayette College |
| Date Issued | 2010 |
| Date Available | 2013-02-22T14:43:05Z |
| Type | Article |
| Language | English |
| Bibliographic Citation | Barclay, Paul D. (2010) "The "Modern Marco Polo" visits a colonial police state: Harrison Forman and government public relations in Japanese ruled Taiwan." In Proceedings of the 2010 International Conference on Taiwan Studies: Taiwan under Japanese Rule: Cultural Translation and Colonial Modernity (pp. 139-152). Santa Barbara, CA: University of California, Santa Barbara. |
| Standard Identifier | Handle 10385/1112 |
| Permalink | http://hdl.handle.net/10385/1112 |
| Rights Statement |
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|
| Rights Holders | Regents of the University of California |
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