While the Japanese attitude toward the past is annihilation, the Taiwanese is layering. In Japan, old buildings are often demolished, and new buildings on the same site leave no trace of the past. It is like watching another Godzilla movie. Tokyo is destroyed and rebuilt anew in the following week. This is an attempt to master the traumatic memory of WWII, the utter devastation of the city.

In Taiwan, new materials and structures seem to have been constantly added on the old structure. Cost is part of this tactic. It is much cheaper to keep adding. Imagine the cross-section of this building might look like: many layers of the past should be there like growth rings in a tree stump. “Here I was born, and there I died.”