Abstract: In 1895, Taiwan became Japan’s first colony and as soon as the Japanese arrived on the island, they experienced an urgent need of establishing their own image as “civilized” colonizers to justify the “civilizing mission” in the colony. The representation of the body, particularly of nudity, was one of the most prominent characteristics that demonstrated the destabilization of Japanese colonial authority in contact with local inhabitants. By (re)covering the body of the colonizer, the Government-General in Taiwan intended to draw and maintain the colonial hierarchy. This presentation will analyze how the Japanese body, when moving from the metropole to the colony of Taiwan, was regulated by the colonial authorities. It examines this process of auto-domestication of the body of the colonizer by revealing its connections to previous Japanese bodily experiences during the Meiji period, in contact with Westerners, as well as to the bodily experiences of the colonized people in Taiwan.