That sounds...genuinely interesting. I can't think of many (any?) post-colonial texts that I've consumed which share that viewpoint. Fascinating.
Yeah, at best texts are kind of ambivalent about being colonized or occupied. But,
Cape No 7 is framed by the interracial romance between a Japanese man and a Taiwanese woman during WW2, and how it's tragic that they were forced to be separated because of the outcome of the war. That's mixed with a romance between a Taiwanese man and a Japanese woman in contemporary Taiwan, and how culturally there's a mutual relationship between the two cultures/nations.
Perhaps there's a similar relationship between India and England now, especially since independence was won relatively non-violently, but I have to imagine that there is still a lot of South Asian angst about the role of the British Empire in their lives.
As a Korean, I find this fascinating. Virtually every Korean I know views Japanese colonization very negatively, and for good reasons. Did Taiwan get treated differently or did the people react differently?
Oh yeah, I've read some Korean po-co texts and they deal with the time with Japan in a very negative way. I know even less about Korean history though, but in terms of Taiwan, Taiwanese were conscripted into the Japanese army units and fought with them, so it was a fairly integrated part of Japan. To this day, there are still some Japanese loanwords that are used in Taiwan because of the fact that nearly everyone learned Japanese during the 50 years or so of Taiwanese rule.
Like, everyone in the movie speaks Japanese, except for the few times that we see private moments in the lives of the non-Japanese characters and they go back to Chinese or Hokkien. And there's no real judgement about the erasure of language that you get in say, North America or Australia, where there are dozens of aboriginal/native languages that are on the verge of extinction because these people were forced to learn English.
Edit: Actually, there's a scene where the players are in front of the Japanese press, and a Japanese reporter asks if the "savages" understand Japanese. "Ni-hon-gooooo?". It's probably as close to overt racism that you see in the movie, and the entire team - including the Japanese members of the team - bristle at the reporter's attitude.
It reminded me of the sort of implicit racism that immigrants sometimes face when it's expected that they just learn English in America... but with the twist being the immigrants actually know English.
Even before watching the movie as a baseball film, the context itself is just a very interesting perspective into Japanese history, especially since they are typically depicted as horrible Nazi-like villains in films of this nature.
