跨帝國史的臺灣鳳梨產業—專業技術的遷移與轉化：從美國夏威夷到臺灣

A Trans-Imperial History of Taiwan’s Pineapple Industry: Migration and Transfer of Colonial Expertise from U.S.-Controlled Hawaii to Japanese-Ruled Taiwan

本文檢視了夏威夷鳳梨產業移轉至太平洋戰爭前的來龍去脈，從而追溯台灣現代鳳梨產業的根源。日本移民在美國的移民經驗，以及日本帝國由移民主導的殖民主義，如同一縷經線串起了泛太平洋各地，並在明治23年(1890)至昭和5年間(1930)，造就出移民知識與農耕專業技術從北美輸入東亞的現象。自夏威夷返回亞洲的日本再移民(remigrants)，帶回了美國學到的殖民理念，以及歷經調整的美式農業殖民技術，無不對日治台灣的經濟發展造成重要影響；不只如此，這些農耕專業技術也融入和整合至官方政策當中。

This essay unveils a historical origin of Taiwan’s modern pineapple industry by examining its connection to Hawaii before the Pacific War. The complex entanglement of Japanese immigrant experience in the United States and imperial Japan’s migration-led colonialism forms a central thread in the transpacific connection, which involved the transfer of the migrant knowledge and farming expertise from North America to East Asia between the 1890s and the 1930s. Not only did the reverse movement of Japanese remigrants from Hawaii, their U.S.-bred colonial ideas, and the adapted techniques of American-style agricultural colonization inform the processes of government-supported economic developments inside Japanese-ruled Taiwan; but also their colonial farming expertise was co-opted and incorporated into its official policies. This essay examines examples of inter-imperial negotiations, exchanges, and fusions of settler colonial thinking and practices between the two Pacific empires: United States and imperial Japan. My discussions entail close and constant attention to material bases of the inter-imperial transfers, that is, the migrant bodies that moved between the political economies of America’s white-settler empire and Japan’s Pan-Asianist-settler empire. Thus, my analysis is not concerned simply with some ideas and techniques that were floating between one imperial sphere and another. It intends to illuminate the contingent and yet inseparable ties between the transferred colonial expertise, and the human migration that carried it from U.S.-controlled Hawaii and transplanted it in Japanese-ruled Taiwan.