Government-General of Taiwan (Taiwan Sōtokufu)

The Government-General of Taiwan (台湾総督府, Taiwan Sōtokufu) was the central colonial administration established by Japan following the Treaty of Shimonoseki (1895), which ceded Taiwan from Qing China to Japan. The first Governor-General, Kabayama Sukenori, was appointed in May 1895 and inaugurated the administration in Taipei on June 17. Law No. 63 of 1896 empowered the Governor-General to issue ordinances with the force of law, making Taiwan a separate legal zone under the Meiji constitutional order; although revised in 1906 and 1921, this delegated legislative power largely lasted until the end of Japanese rule.

Headquartered in Taipei, the Government-General exercised comprehensive authority over the island. Beneath the Governor-General a Chief of Civil Administration (from 1919, Director-General) supervised the bureaus, and the courts, railways, monopoly and communications services were attached agencies; the police and the hokō neighbourhood system extended control to village level. There were nineteen Governors-General: seven serving officers (1895–1919), nine civilians (1919–1936), and three more military men from 1936 — Kobayashi Seizō, Hasegawa Kiyoshi and Andō Rikichi. The headquarters building completed in 1919 is today the Presidential Office of the Republic of China.

In its early decades the Government-General suppressed armed resistance by force. During the Tapani Incident (1915), Governor-General Ando Sadami (安東貞美, in office 1915–1918) oversaw the suppression and mass trials that followed the uprising. The response — including 866 death sentences from a single tribunal, most later commuted — became one of the most notorious episodes of colonial judicial violence in Taiwan's history; the Musha (Wushe) Incident followed in 1930. At the same time it carried out land surveys and built railways, harbours, irrigation, public-health systems and a sugar industry, aiming to make the colony financially self-supporting and useful to the metropole.

From 1936 the Government-General pursued the kōminka (imperialisation) campaign — Japanese language, name-changing and shrine worship — and treated Taiwan as a base for the southern advance. An army volunteer system was introduced in 1942 and conscription in 1945. On October 25, 1945 the last Governor-General, Andō Rikichi, who also commanded the 10th Area Army, surrendered to the Republic of China's representative Chen Yi at Taipei Public Hall, and the administration's organs and property were taken over by the Taiwan Provincial Administrative Executive Office.