May the Stones keep preaching: Re-appropriated colonial Shinto Shrines in Taiwan as new sacred spaces

Built during the Japanese colonial period from 1895 to 1945, colonial Shinto shrines in Taiwan were political symbolisms embodied in religious architecture. This article showcases these shrines’ various forms of existence as sacred spaces in current Taiwan, in spite of the post-colonial Kuomintang authority’s instructions in 1974 to eliminate majority of these colonial eyesores. How much of the Shinto sacredness are present in the contemporary consideration of ‘conservation’, when the political connotations are put in the equation? With visual documentations and individual stories acquired through narrative interviews, the paper showcases two contrasting categories of methods adopted in re-appropriating colonial Shinto shrines in Taiwan since the early post-war era to now. These methods range, from KMT’s persisting (but failing) eradication of colonial signs in the early post-war period, to the current local creative practices in re-appropriating these ‘colonial heritage’ to various types of sacred spaces. The paper first outlines the causal link between such variety of approaches in re-appropriating Shinto shrines with Shinto’s never prominent presence in Taiwan’s belief systems; it proceeds to showcase, nevertheless, how the ‘sacredness’ of the original ‘preaching stones’ of Shinto shrines in many cases became instrumental in producing the new spaces. With such vibrant range of approaches, (un)intentionally Taiwan conserves many of the physical structures of these Shinto shrines.