00:00The book is called the Bible on the Okutama River in Tokyo, the Japanese village.
00:23Go Masao, born Ujeng Nan, was 17 years old when he joined the imperial Japanese military.
00:30Eighty years later, he's built a monument at a temple near his home in Yokohama,
00:34one of just a handful honoring Taiwanese who serve Japan.
00:41There are only a few facilities to honor the war dead.
00:45One deep in the mountains in Japan, one in Okinawa, and now this one in Yokohama.
00:50I want people to understand that 30,000 people lost their lives.
00:54At the time, he was the only Taiwanese in his training unit and deployed to Korea in the closing months of the war,
01:02far from his birthplace in what's now Taiwan's rural Yunlin County, then under Japanese colonial rule.
01:12Air raids would happen over Shinjuku, and we'd have to hide our planes and gliders in the woods.
01:18Even if we wanted to train, we couldn't.
01:20There were air raids on Tokyo until May.
01:22From the airfield, we could see fires burning nearby.
01:26But in the end, the bombs didn't hit us, so I didn't feel scared at all.
01:31While Goh's memories of the war remain vivid 80 years later,
01:34the stories of the 200,000 Taiwanese he served alongside have largely been ignored by the Republic of China,
01:41the official name of Taiwan.
01:43When the ROC government took over Taiwan in 1945,
01:48they were dealing with former enemy subjects.
01:51Taiwanese or Japanese colonial subjects up to the end of the war.
02:00An estimated 30,000 Taiwanese soldiers died serving Japan during the war.
02:05Today, while ROC soldiers are honored at Taipei's National Revolutionary Martyrs Shrine,
02:10there is no official memorial for those who fought for Japan,
02:14meaning many families are left, honoring their ancestors abroad.
02:18I'm standing on the approach to one of Japan's most important religious sites.
02:24Yasukuni Shrine honors those who died serving Japan from the late Edo period until the end of World War II.
02:30Established in 1869, it enshrines the spirits of about 2.5 million people,
02:36including Taiwanese people, who served under Japanese rule during that period.
02:41Some 27,000 Taiwanese are memorialized at Yasukuni as kami or Shinto deities.
02:47While some Taiwanese families are willing to travel to the shrine to honor their ancestors,
02:51go Masao-o, want something closer to home.
02:55It would be good if we had shrines nearer to us.
03:00Yasukuni is, of course, fine.
03:02And Japanese people might ask,
03:03what about Yasukuni Shrine? Isn't that enough?
03:06But shouldn't every prefecture have its own shrine?
03:09Even if Yasukuni serves as the main shrine or honden,
03:12local branches are still necessary.
03:24Taiwanese service people should not only be memorialized at Yasukuni Shrine.
03:29My view is that there should be memorials all over Japan, wherever you go.
03:33Some Taiwanese do not visit Yasukuni.
03:36Some, particularly indigenous Taiwanese,
03:38were conscripted into Japan's military unwillingly,
03:41and the shrine's traditions do not reflect their beliefs.
03:45Others criticize it for failing to acknowledge Japan's wartime crimes
03:49and for enshrining convicted war criminals.
03:53Yasukuni says it seeks to honor all those who served equally under Japan's flag.
03:58But for Go, it's all about commemoration.
04:01He says Taiwanese soldiers like himself have been overlooked in the war,
04:05and all those who served and sacrificed deserved to be recognized and remembered.
04:10If I were to die now, no one here would pray for me.
04:18If I were to die now, I wouldn't be remembered by people in Japan because I would be gone.
04:23Even though I've lived life in Japan, if I were to die, no one here would pray for me.
04:28But in the end, he's on a personal mission to honor his comrades who served and sacrificed
04:37in the largest war in human history 80 years ago.
04:41Ryan Wu, Jeffrey Chen, and Bryn Thomas for Taiwan Plus.
Comments