Eighty years ago, Taiwan was at the center of Japan’s collapsing empire. Allied POWs were being freed, and locals faced the realities of occupation, forced labor and collaboration during World War II. Today, as memories of the war fade with the generation that survived it, historians are left examining the country's wartime history.
00:0080 years ago, Allied prisoners of war were being liberated from across the collapsing
00:21Japanese Empire.
00:22I was taken prisoner in Singapore, from where I was sent to Thailand and compelled to help
00:29and built a railway, during which time at least 50% of the people that were sent there died
00:36of cholera, dysentery, dysphoria and malnutrition.
00:40From Thailand, I returned to Singapore and was embarked on board a Japanese ship which
00:48was to take us to Japan.
00:50Throughout September of 1945, former Japanese colonial subjects in Taiwan worked to rescue
00:56and feed British and American air and seamen that had, until very recently, been their
01:02captives.
01:03Now, I've come across Taiwanese in a way, and this is uncomfortable because where I have
01:08come across them was as guards on some of what became known as the hell ships, you know, that
01:15some of the American POWs were riding on to be sent to Japan.
01:20Located at the geographic center of the Japanese Empire, Taiwan was an ideal transit point for
01:25POWs being shipped north to Japan's main island on squalid, airless, overheated ships.
01:31My father came to Taiwan, which of course was Formosa then, in one of the hell ships, and
01:37they were held at the docks and kind of humiliated in front of the locals.
01:41Ann Wheeler's father was one of more than 1,000 POWs forced into slave labor in a mine in the
01:47mountains above Kielong, in what is now New Taipei.
01:50In total, about 4,000 captured soldiers and airmen were held in 14 camps across the island.
01:57The camps were overseen by the Japanese military, but some relied on locals for staffing.
02:02Discipline and orders ultimately flowed straight from Tokyo.
02:06Just months before the end of the war, 14 Allied airmen were executed here, shot or beheaded on the orders of Japanese authorities.
02:16And while they were guarded by Taiwanese prison guards, it was Japanese military police that were carrying out the killings.
02:23Today, this is all that's left of the walls of Taipei prison.
02:27Now, these walls were built from stones taken from Taipei's old city walls, laid by laborers who had little say as colonial subjects in the future of their city.
02:39Still, even under colonial rule, many of the 200,000 Taiwanese who served in the Japanese military volunteered when the call came from Tokyo.
02:49They were deployed alongside forced conscripts, taking on roles across Southeast Asia and China.
02:55Before 1941, Japan was mostly focusing on the war in China.
03:02And some Taiwanese started to serve and to be recruited as interpreters in China for a good reason, because most Taiwanese were descendants of immigrants from Southern China.
03:17So they shared common language and culture with people in China, especially in Southern China.
03:24And while most translation work was bureaucratic and innocuous, at times it served far darker purposes.
03:31Malaysian director Lau Kek Hoa has spent years interviewing members of Southeast Asia's Chinese diaspora about the war.
03:38Make use during the situation when they need translation.
03:42When you come to Mexico, you need to question people.
03:46You need to spot out who are the ones to be killed from the nail leaves, who are the ones to be spat.
03:51All those kind of location, situation, Taiwanese soldiers would make use because of the language proficiency.
03:58Between 1937 and 1945, up to 20 million civilians were killed under the Japanese empire through massacres, forced labor, famine, and disease.
04:08In Southeast Asia, the death toll included up to a million in the Philippines, as many as 4 million in Indonesia and up to 2 million in Vietnam, along with hundreds of thousands more in Burma, Malaysia, and Thailand.
04:22The starved bodies of the liberated people bear witness to the sort of existence left to them by Japan's co-prosperity sphere.
04:30Although Taiwanese were stationed across the empire, many were victims as well as perpetrators, forced into service, some as child soldiers.
04:38Most Taiwanese are kind of stuck in a colonial system of bad choice A, worst choice B.
04:45You don't really have many choices.
04:47So I'm not sure it's necessarily Taiwanese not looking at their responsibility until recently.
04:54I think it's more an issue of the inability to kind of openly discuss those possibilities and to discuss the historical narrative because that door wasn't open due to martial law.
05:06Eighty years after the war's end, every allied POW ever held in Taiwan is now dead.
05:12And the generation of Taiwanese that held them captive is fading fast.
05:16With first-hand witnesses disappearing, the task of reckoning with Taiwan's wartime past falls to historians, who try to make sense of choices made under extreme circumstances.
05:27I think we need to look into wartime responsibility, not in a legal sense, not even in a political sense.
05:34But I think we need to look into wartime responsibility in terms of remembering.
05:40And by remembering what Taiwanese had experienced and done during the war, I think it will only help us to better understand the essence and the nature of war.
05:54With Japan collapsing and Republic of China rule just weeks away, September 1945 began a period of rapid change for Taiwan.
06:03Peace had come to much of Asia, but its people still faced years of violence and political turmoil, leaving little room to confront wartime responsibility.
06:12Eighty years later, Taiwan is still shaped by that turbulent past.
06:17Eason Pan, John Tsu, Jeffrey Chen, and Bryn Thomas for Taiwan Plus.
06:24Day 1921
06:25Tindy, and Bryn Thomas for Taiwan.
06:26Tindy, and Bryn Thomas for Taiwan, where this man, Cassandra, who's a friend of mine.
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