英文摘要 |
While the Japanese colonial government was launching its land survey in Keelung during the early colonial period (1898-1905), there was a series of land ownership disputes between Japanese owners of building lots ("diji zhu") and Taiwanese owners of buildings ("cuo zhu") in the Keelung city area. Taiwanese scholar Jiang Bing-kun sees these events as a form of colonial plunder. He considers the traditional multiple land ownership system in Keelung city equivalent to the system in effect throughout the rest of Taiwan, where the Taiwanese owners had actual control over their building lots and Japanese owners merely had the right to claim a fixed rent from Taiwanese owners. Therefore, Jiang believes, the Land Survey Bureau's eventual granting of land ownership to Japanese owners demonstrates a violation of Taiwanese land rights by the colonial government. However, Japanese legal scholar Nishi Hideaki recently put forth a different analysis in terms of jurisprudence by examining the reports of the Provisional Investigation Committee of Taiwan's Old Customs and contemporary newspaper materials. He suggests that land ownership customs of building lots in the Keelung city area were distinct from those in the rest of Taiwan. According to his reasoning, Japanese owners in the Keelung city area possessed the rights over the buildings and the land, and also had the right to demand rent increases or to terminate leases with the Taiwanese owners of buildings. It was a simple relationship of land lease. Therefore, he thinks that the Land Survey Bureau's resolution for these disputes was legitimate. This paper reconsiders these events by studying the historical materials of the Provisional Land Survey Burean of Taiwan and contemporary newspapers from the perspective of legal and social history, and finds both of the previous explanations erroneous and incomplete because they only partially consider the legal social history of the disputes. In the first stage, the Land Survey Burean's local investigation committee and the law court of the Governor-General's Office held that the Taiwanese owners possessed complete ownership rights and nullified the claims of the Japanese owners. During the second stage, dissatisfied Japanese owners took advantage of Taiwanese owners' unfamiliarity with the modern legal culture and fabricated evidence to prove that the Keelung city area's land ownership system was unique within Taiwan. This act of forgery led senior investigators of the Land Survey Burean to alter the original verdict and affirm the sole land ownership rights of the Japanese investors. It is true that the outcome of these events was a form of colonial plunder, but its process was disguised by the workings of modern jurisprudence. |