¹ This annotated translation is an expanded and revised version of Hiroaki Sato's translation of “The Volunteer,” first published in 2016 in Taiwan Literature: English Translation Series no. 37 (eds. Kuo-ch'ing Tu and Terence Russell).

² Following the 1919 revision of the education laws, junior high school 中学校was set at five years for those who finished elementary school (those beyond age 12).

³ 公学校Established in 1898 to teach Taiwanese children Japanese. In 1923, the law was revised to teach the same subjects as in Japan. It corresponded to the 6-year elementary school小学校. In 1941 the laws were further revised to merge the schools for the Taiwanese with those for the Japanese, calling both kokumin gakkō, “people schools,” imitating the German Volksschule.

⁴ The education law revised in 1907 changed the 4-year ordinary elementary school 尋常小学校 and 4-year higher elementary 高等小学校 to a 6-year ordinary elementary school and 2-year higher elementary school.

⁵ 国語 kokugo, “national language,” that is, Japanese, to distinguish it from gaikokugo, a “foreign language,” in this case Chinese.

⁷ That is, Tokyo.

⁸ 専門学校. Also translated as “vocational school.” So called because such a school was dedicated to one “profession,” such as medicine, law, or commerce. It would correspond to today's college or university.

⁹ In those days, the BA had as much weight as a professional degree or even a PhD these days.

¹⁰ During the period when Japan had colonies and other territories, the Japanese distinguished between naichi, “in-land,” referring to Japan proper, and gaichi, “out-land,” overseas, referring to all the rest.

¹¹ 皇民化錬成 kōminka rensei. Kōminka meant “turning (Taiwanese) into Imperial citizens,” which today may be called “Japanization,” and rensei, “training,” “drilling,” a word with some religious overtones. At the time Japan was under “the emperor system.” Under the system, all Japanese could be called kōmin, “the emperor's subjects,” which led to the idea of extending the term to the peoples in Japan's colonies, hence kōminka. The term was officially promoted by Governor-General Kobayashi Seizō (1936-1940) in 1939 as one of the “three main policies”: kōminka, (further) industrialization, and turning Taiwan into a base for Japan's expansion to the South Seas. It included prohibition of the use of the Chinese language in newspapers, promotion of changing names into Japanese-sounding names (see next footnote), promotion of respect for Shintoism, and promotion of the use of the Japanese language at home and adaptation of the “Japanese way of living,” such as tatami, shoji, and other aspects of Japanese housing.

¹² 改姓名 kaiseimei, “name reform,” that is, changing names to sound and look like Japanese names. Because of Chinese influence following a brief period of Dutch rule in the mid-seventeenth century, most Taiwanese had Chinese names.

¹³ Unidentified.

¹⁴ Soldiers seriously wounded in battle, who, after being hospitalized, were often out on the streets begging for money in Japan, and, apparently, in Taiwan as well. These men usually had no relatives who could care for them.

¹⁵ Changshan, the traditional Chinese one-piece dress, the so-called “mandarin dress.”

¹⁶ The Government-General of Taiwan built a red-brick cigarette factory behind Taipei Station, in 1911. 陳柔縉『日本統治時代の台湾』 (2014), pp. 131-145.

¹⁷ Full name, 勤行報国青年隊 Kingyō Hōkoku Seinentai, Devotional Patriotic Youth Corps. In the 1920s the Government-General of Taiwan started promoting the formation of “youth units” (seinentai) in municipalities for social education that included religious, spiritual (Shintoist) elements. During the latter half of the 1930s, as Japan intensified its war in China, the Taiwanese GG strengthened militarization of these units. The Devotional Patriotic Youth Corps was the result. 宮崎聖子：植民地台湾における青年団の変容

¹⁸ 神人一致 shinjin itchi. This idea was put forward and emphasized with the restoration of the emperor to his ancient status in the second half of the 19th century. A similar idea was also promoted by people like Deguchi Onisaburō (1871-1948), one of the founders of the religious sect Ōmoto-kyō. The Japanese government, regarding it as a pseudo-Shintoism detrimental to the Emperor System, tried to suppress it by persecuting members of the sect.

¹⁹ Reading of the name tentative.

²⁰ 柏手打つ kashiwade (o) utsu: the Shinto way of offering prayers with both hands open.

²¹ The word まつり matsuri originally meant both “rite” (festival) and “government,” with the emperor being the supreme human embodiment of kami to undertake both. Later, two different Chinese characters came to be applied to differentiate the two:祭 sai (Japanized pronunciation of Chinese ji) and 政 sei (Chinese zheng), hence the later phrase 祭政一致 saisei itchi, “unity of church and state.”

²² 大和ごころ Yamato gokoro, similar to 大和魂 Yamato damashii, “Yamato spirit.” Yamato started out as the name of a small area of what today is known as Nara, but later it became the symbol of all of Japan. Around the 11th century, Yamato gokoro meant something like “Japanese (indigenous) talent” as opposed to “Chinese talent.” This idea easily turned into something chauvinistic later.

²³ 国体 Kokutai. Central theme emphasized by Neo-Confucianists toward the end of the Edo Period (1603-1868) developed the term, which at the time connoted a special emperor-based state; in the 1930s it came to connote a sacred, inviolable state.

²⁴ 二重橋 Nijū-bashi. It is the iron bridge at the entrance to the Imperial Palace. Often, the stone bridge spanning the moat next to the Imperial Palace Plaza is mistaken for the one so called. In prewar Japan, the bridge became the embodiment of the emperor.

²⁵ The act of severing one's own little finger with a knife (or a sword) has been known, in recent years, as a custom among yakuza to show contrition or pledge solidarity with a group. A blood oath usually takes the form of wounding one's finger to draw blood.