Taiwan Times is an indispensable research tool for Taiwanese Studies. Published as a Japanese magazine by Taiwan Governor House during the Japanese occupation (1895-1945), it contained articles and statistical materials of many fields. In its earlier version, Taiwan JIHO Database only includes Taiwan Times published between 1919 and 1945. In order to make the collection more complete, TBMC recently added Taiwan Association Report , the former version of Taiwan Times , dating back to 1898.
The database covers almost the whole period of Japanese Occupation. Issues included were Politics, Industry, Trade, Transportation, Military, Education, Judiciary, Police, Civil Engineering, Technology, Handicraft and Arts. In addition, it also included the poetry and novels written by famous Japanese writers who lived in Taiwan at that time. All of these collections are precious documents for Taiwan studies and the acceleration of these studies became foreseeable after martial law was lifted in 1987 in Taiwan . With Taiwan Times on CD-ROM published, researchers are able to expand and complete their research in a very reasonable amount of time. The CD has been made even more useful because it has a Japanese retrieval function created for Japanese researchers.