‘Prison’ as a machinery, was an extreme type of modern architecture, in which the space—power relation embodied; as a result of the existence of walls, the prison was enabled to follow out the rule of law, discipline as well as modern nation—state, but unknowingly. Michel Foucault once enumerated six types of heterotopia, the first were prisons, while the last but not least, colonies.2 That was, to say nothing of the Taihoku Prison, a colonial prison built in Japanese Taiwan (1895-1945). 

     There were two research questions: firstly, to put the Taihoku Prison under the context of modern prisons in the same period, and to clarify the relations and influences behind; especially compared with its prototype, the Pentonville Model Prison in North London, and the colonial prisons established in the British Raj, and the Model Prison in Beijing designed by the Japanese as well. Secondly, to examine how modern notions being materialized through the arrangement of spaces, from a macrocosmic view of the city via the City Improvement Plan, to a microcosmic view of space and conduct beyond the scope of imprisonment, but enlightenment.

     Even if the Taihoku Prison was no longer existed, the study attempted to reconstruct it by way of gleaning the archives of newspaper at that time, articles written by the designer, records from the Japanese politicians, and diaries kept by Taiwanese social movement leaders during their detention; assisted with the enactments and essays from the jurisprudential point of views as well as the author’s personal experience working in a juvenile prison for about two years. 

1  Yosaburo Takekoshi, Japanese Rule in Formosa (London: Longmans, 1907), 196.

2  Michel Foucault, ‘Other Spaces: the Principles of Heterotopia,’ Lotus Intl, 48-49 (1985-86): 9-17.

Keywords: Colonial Prison, Multiple Modernities, Spatial Analysis and Comparison, Taihoku Prison, and Taiwan under Japanese Rule.