Set in Hengchun, Pingtung County, a resort town on the southern tip of the island of Taiwan, Cape No. 7 is a romantic comedy about a motley group of amateur musicians who must overcome their differences and work together to perform the opening act for a seaside concert headlined by a Japanese pop star who has been hired by one of the resort hotels. The pop star’s advance person, a young woman named Tomoko, has been tasked with whipping the local amateurs into shape lest their lackluster performance spoil the show. But Tomoko, a failed model who speaks Mandarin but not the local language, Minnan, bristles at having to wrangle the inexperienced and disparate musicians, who prior to their selection at open auditions have never played together and who each have troubles of their own impeding their ability to perform harmoniously.

The biggest challenge to the band’s success is the surly attitude of lead singer and guitarist Aga, the only professional musician in the group. He resents having to perform with amateurs, but his real problem is his deeply wounded self-esteem. Having failed to make a name for himself in the Taipei music industry despite fifteen years of trying, he has returned to rural Hengchun in disgrace and grudgingly accepted a job as a letter carrier that his stepfather has arranged for him at the local post office. Like Tomoko, Aga hates his job. He shows up late for work, delivers only a fraction of the letters and parcels he is given, and leaves work early to go brood at the beach, dumping the undelivered mail into a large box at home.

Part of the charm of Cape No. 7 is its ability to efficiently adhere to formula (Hu 2008). As in many romantic comedies, the two leads, Tomoko and Aga, start out antagonizing one another but eventually fall in love. On the morning after their first intimate encounter, Tomoko finds an opened parcel among the undelivered mail in Aga’s apartment. The package is addressed to a woman named Kojima Tomoko at Cape No. 7, an old address from a system used during the colonial period that is no longer in use. Inside the parcel, Tomoko finds seven love letters written in Japanese in 1945 to Kojima Tomoko and, upon reading them, is moved by the passion they exude. She urges Aga to deliver the letters. But he counters that it is impossible, since the address no longer exists and he has never heard of a local woman with a Japanese name. The two lovers quarrel, break up, and then pine for each other. The remainder of the film follows Tomoko and Aga as they try to put aside their resentments, stage a great concert, deliver the old love letters, and resolve their feelings for one another before Tomoko must return to Japan.

Another formulaic element the film delivers effectively is the parallel love story, specifically the 1945 love story between Kojima Tomoko and the nameless Japanese man who wrote her the seven love letters. In fact, the parallel love story frames the action of Cape No. 7. The film opens with a voice-over from the unknown man, reading his first letter (in Japanese) as the screen fills with an image of the repatriation ship carrying him back to Japan. The war has ended in defeat for his country, and he must leave Taiwan and his position as a colonial school teacher as well as the young Taiwanese woman, Kojima Tomoko, his former student, for whom he has never openly declared his love. At various points throughout the movie, one of the seven letters is read in voice-over, accompanied by appropriately sentimental music, in a way that highlights the challenges of the budding intercultural romance between Aga and Tomoko. As Brian Hu has observed, “Narrating a present romance in terms of a past romance is a staple of Asian teen romance.… The parallel stories bolster each other’s credibility”; Hu suggests that because the two romances in Cape No. 7 intercut with each other throughout the course of the movie, “they seem to grow in importance to the point where the final reference to the old couple gives just enough melodramatic momentum to make us believe in the contemporary one” (2008).

There are noteworthy parallels between the two love stories in Cape No. 7. Both deal with an intercultural romance between a Taiwanese and a Japanese. Both involve a woman named Tomoko 友子, whose name signifies “friendship.” Both include the challenge of imminent separation, as the Japanese lover in each must return to Japan. Indeed, in the 1945 romance, the Japanese lover is already sailing for Japan. But the differences between the love stories are even more remarkable, particularly in light of the historical colonial relationship between Japan and Taiwan. In the 1945 romance, the male school teacher represents the colonizer and the female student represents the subaltern colonial subject, who benefits from the education of the colonial school system. In the contemporary romance, the roles of male colonizer and female subaltern have been reversed. Tomoko in 2008 represents the imperialist power, but now she wields soft power—J-pop music, fashion, intercultural exchange. Aga, the unruly subaltern, needs to be “tamed,” but not in the way the 1945 imperialist educated his Taiwanese sweetheart. Rather, through Tomoko’s gentle influence Aga learns to value and cherish all that distinguishes his hometown of Hengchun: the town’s “melting pot” population, which includes young and old, Hoklo, Hakka, Han, indigenous people, and even some foreigners; local customs, history, and folk music; and even the tourism business that has given him the big break that his fifteen years of toil in Taipei never did—a chance to share the stage with an internationally acclaimed Japanese pop star Atari Kousuke (playing himself). Indeed, the concert ends with a multicultural rendition of the German song “Heidenröslein,” with Aga singing in Chinese and Kousuke singing in Japanese, whereby, to quote Chiao-ning Su, “they transcend cultural differences and produce something beautiful… presenting a Utopian image of globalization” (2009, 185). So while Japan-Taiwan relations in the colonial period emphasized the “assimilation” 同化 (tong hua or dōka) of the colonized, as reflected in the Taiwanese Tomoko assuming a Japanese name and learning to speak, read, and write Japanese,2 contemporary Japan-Taiwan relations as portrayed in Cape No. 7 privilege self-awareness, mutual respect, and free and productive exchange within the context of both the local and global communities.

The reason why it took over sixty years for the seven love letters to be mailed to the Taiwanese sweetheart is alluded to repeatedly in the letters themselves, in which the Japanese school teacher refers regretfully to the cowardice that prevented him from confessing or acting on his love for Kojima Tomoko. In the end, it is revealed that upon his return to Japan, the man stored the letters away in a wardrobe, where they sat untouched for decades until his daughter discovered them while disposing of his personal effects after his death. As the daughter explains in an accompanying letter she encloses for Kojima Tomoko, she had never known of her father’s unrequited love, and she felt that Tomoko should receive the letters and thus know how ardently her father had loved her. The Japanese school teacher’s admission of timidity and uncertainty subverts the image of decisive and authoritative imperial power, perhaps humanizing the colonizer to some extent.

Wei has faced criticism for the arguably soft focus with which he presents Japanese colonialism in Cape No. 7 and also for romanticizing the colonial relationship by foregrounding “love letters from the colonizer” and implying nostalgia for the colonial era (Y. Wang 2009, 264–66). But if the Japanese school teacher’s love letters suggest imperial longing for the colonial subject, the ultimate failure of the colonial project is repeatedly highlighted in recurring scenes of the repatriation ship carrying the colonizer back to Japan and in continual reminders of his unrequited love. There is also the unmistakable message that where imperial hard power ultimately failed, cultural soft power—whether in the form of colonial-era education or Japanese popular culture of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century—has fostered international relations and cultivated meaningful exchange.

If Wei’s portrayal of Japan-Taiwan relations in Cape No. 7 exposed him to accusations of “Japanophilia” (Nojima 2016), his violent depiction of the Wushe Uprising and the oppression of the Seediq people by their Japanese colonizers opened him up to accusations of “Japanophobia” (J. Wang 2018). Several reviews of Seediq Bale in English-language media decried the barbarity of the film’s violence, particularly its frequent depictions of the Seediq custom of taking enemy heads as trophies, and attributed to the film a naked Taiwanese nationalism.3 But such a reading of the film is too simplistic and disregards the director’s stated desire to depict a significant event in Taiwanese history that generally has been overlooked, both in popular media and in school textbooks (Xie 2012; Wu 2014), and to foreground the cultural perspectives of the Taiwanese, not only in Seediq Bale but in all his films (Nojima 2016; Kolesnikov-Jessop 2008). Moreover, as Hiro Aida observes, if Wei’s motivation was to stir up Taiwanese nationalism, it seems unlikely that he would have made a film focused on aboriginals, who comprise only two percent of Taiwan’s population, or specifically about the Seediq people, who represent a mere fraction of that two percent. Aida argues that Wei’s true intention is “to rescue aboriginal history” (2016, 91).

Set in Wushe Township in the densely wooded mountains of what is today Taiwan’s Nantou County,4 Seediq Bale begins by introducing Mouna Rudo, the eventual leader of the Wushe Uprising, as a teenager. Mouna and several other Seediq youths from the Tgdaya clan group discover a hunting party of Bunun warriors5 trespassing on their ancestral hunting grounds and poaching their game. The impetuous Mouna launches a daring attack on the Bunun poachers, singlehandedly takes the heads of two of them, and manages to escape their counterattack with only a flesh wound. He is rewarded for his bravery with the distinctive facial tattoo of the Seediq warrior, indicating that he has become a “true person” (the meaning of the phrase Seediq bale). Subsequent scenes show Mouna growing into a strong, fierce warrior and a leader of the Tgdaya clan who clashes regularly with enemies, particularly the rival clan group, the Toda.

Following this introduction, there is a brief montage depicting events from modern Taiwanese history: the ratification of the Treaty of Shimonoseki in 1895 at the end of the First Sino-Japanese War, through which the Qing Empire ceded Taiwan (Formosa) to the Japanese; the formation of the Republic of Formosa; the Japanese invasion of Formosa and the subsequent defeat of the republic’s military forces; the fall of the republic; and the beginning of Japan’s campaign to pacify the Taiwanese—particularly the indigenous people—who stand between the Japanese empire and the natural resources of the empire’s new colony. Mouna and his clansmen wage several battles with the Japanese colonizers, who have also recruited Bunun warriors to fight the Seediq, but eventually the Seediq are subjugated. They must give up their firearms and, more significantly, their traditions, including the custom of collecting the heads of their enemies as trophies.

The narrative then jumps forward twenty-five years. Seediq villages have been replaced by colonial settlements with schools, stores, post offices, and homes built in the Japanese style. Seediq warriors have been reduced to working as laborers and porters for the Japanese, resentfully harvesting trees from their ancestral forests and hauling logs down from the steep mountains on their backs. The men of Mouna’s Tgdaya clan are singled out for special abuse and humiliation at the hands of the colonial police force. But Mouna, the Tgdaya chief, can do nothing but drown his misery in wine. In a telling scene, Mouna listens to the entreaties of Dakis Nobing, a young Seediq clansman who has assimilated to Japanese ways, attended a Japanese normal school, and now works as a teacher in one of the colonial schools. When he advocates for accepting the civilized life offered by the colonizers, Mouna scoffs at the benefits of Japanese “civilization”:

After enduring a particularly galling humiliation, several young men of the Tgdaya clan severely beat a Japanese policeman, who then spitefully rejects Mouna’s attempts to make amends and promises a forceful reprisal to the full extent under colonial law. Realizing that his clansmen will surely die languishing in a Japanese prison, Mouna decides to stage a preemptive attack at an upcoming athletic meet at the local elementary school for the colonists’ children. He knows that the uprising he is planning will ultimately result in the death of all warriors involved, but as Seediq lore has taught him, a warrior who does not shed blood defending the ancestral hunting grounds may not cross the rainbow bridge and be welcomed by the ancestors into the eternal hunting grounds. As he tells a young clansman, “a Seediq bale can lose his body, but he fights to keep his soul at all costs” (Wei [2011] 2012).

The remainder of Seediq Bale portrays the brutal assault on the athletic meet in which over 130 Japanese men, women, and children are viciously murdered, as well as the protracted punitive action taken by Japanese colonial police and the Imperial Army. Although vastly outnumbered and outgunned by the Japanese forces, the Seediq warriors retreat into the mountain forests and harass the enemy with guerilla attacks. Eventually the Imperial Army resorts to aerial bombardment of the territory, employing mustard gas bombs. All the insurgents die, just as Mouna had foreseen. After the uprising has been put down, the Japanese general who led the punitive action muses admiringly about the similarities between the fighting spirit of the Seediq warriors and that of the Japanese samurai. But like the samurai, the Seediq warriors have become history.