Can Ambivalent Heritage Embody a Nation? The Meaning‐Making of Japanese Colonial Legacies in Contemporary Taiwan

ABSTRACT This study explores how state and nonstate actors endorsed and utilised heritage from the Japanese colonial era to redevelop the cultural discourse supporting Taiwanese nationalism. Grounded in the methodological approach to social constructionism, this study examines how these actors created and recreated the meanings of ‘ambivalent’ heritage places to embody Taiwan as one ‘imagined community’. The results suggest that the state invented and reinvented the meaning of colonial‐era heritage to be associated with the political discourse of multiculturalism, social evolution and political modernisation, reinforcing its legitimacy. Following and even transcending the official narrative, nonstate actors elicited a meaning of the colonial‐era heritage as intertextually associated with rituals, happy memories, everyday environment and individual experiences, revealing who served as the nationalists reconstructing the ‘national’ culture in a social context.