After centuries of marginalization, women's writing has long been absent in the Taiwanese literary history, including that during the Japanese colonial rule. Following the 1987 termination of martial law in Taiwan, a canonical series of Taiwanese Authors Corpora (1991) brought together into publication a variety of Japanophone and Sinophone Taiwanese works written during the Japanese colonial rule, especially those being banned during the immediate post-war years. The purposes of this publication were to introduce these works to post-war generations who had never experienced the Japanese colonial rule and to reconstruct colonial memory of resistance.As demonstrated (Lu 2007), though a number of women writers had emerged since the Japanese colonial rule, and at least 25 of them have published their works in Japanese between the 1920s and 1940s, none of them were selected for inclusion in the Corpora.Questions to be addressed in this paper include: what might have caused such gender-imbalanced decisions on publishing the translation of Japanophone Taiwanese writing under the socio-political background of 1990s in Taiwan? What were the intensions of the decision makers of publishing-related activities at the time and is it true that the Japanophone women's writing is unrelated to those intentions? By considering the international discourses on the contradiction between feminism and nationalism (Woolf 1938; Ueno 1999, 2004; Chiu 1996; Li 2015) and drawing on the development of feminisms in Taiwan, Japan and Korea since the early twentieth century, this research investigates the possible reasons why women's writing has been excluded from this anthology.I will use the editor's introductions of each volumes and project director's prologue and memoir as evidences to support my argument. In so doing, we might be able to envision an archival gap that was created by such gender-imbalanced decisions in the longstanding male-dominant history of literary and publishing communities in Taiwan, and then be able to fill the gap in the future.
Keywords: Japanopne Taiwanese women's writing,Taiwanese Authors Corpora,canonical translation series, publishing communities
