Too little effort has been made in Taiwan to research the role the country played in the Pacific Theater of World War II, wasting an opportunity to establish wartime history from a Taiwanese perspective, academics said at a seminar yesterday.
“There are many relics, preserved or faded away, and stories, told or untold, in Taiwan that preserve the memory of war, but most people often talk about World War II like it happened elsewhere,” National Chengchi University historian Tai Pao-tsun (戴寶村) said at the seminar, which was focused on history in Taiwan between 1941 and 1949.
Nine theses were discussed at the seminar, which was organized by Taiwan Extra-Patriot Veterans Association (TEPVA) for the second consecutive year and is aimed at promoting academic research on the nation’s recent war history.
Many of the thesis authors, including Tai, lamented that most of the information cited in their studies came from either the US or Japan — a result of Taiwan’s inadequate preservation of relics, documents and oral history as well as the education system implemented by the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) government after it took over Taiwan.
If not for these reasons, it would be hard to explain why some young people today would think that it was Japan, rather than the US, that bombed Taiwan during the war and why few are aware that the Presidential Office building, known at the time as the Office of the Governor-General, suffered a direct hit and extensive damage in a bombing raid in Taipei in 1945, they said.
Tai and Tu Cheng-yu (杜正宇), a doctoral candidate of history at National Cheng Kung University, said conducting more research into Taiwan’s history during the period would help people understand more about the nation’s role and strategic significance in the war, as well as Taiwanese’s lives during the Japanese colonial period.
The authors intended to demonstrate the value of more research by covering a wide range of topics in the seminar, including the US’ bombing of the Okayama Airfield — now known as Gangshan (岡山), Kaohsiung — Japan’s deployment of special attack speed boats in Taiwan and Penghu, the recruitment of student soldiers in 1945, Japan’s invasion of the islands in the South China Sea, as well as the KMT government’s recruitment and kidnapping of Taiwanese to be soldiers to fight in the Chinese Civil War.
According to statistics from the Japanese Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare, more than 30,000 Taiwanese soldiers were killed in the Pacific War, 15,000 of whom are listed as missing in action.
Hundreds of thousand of Taiwanese were directly or indirectly involved in the war, said Lee Hsueh-feng (李雪峰), who was among 8,000 Taiwanese boys between the ages of 12 and 14 who went to Yamato City in Japan’s Kanagawa Prefecture in 1943 to build fighter planes.
More than 300 of those boys died during the Allied bombing of Japan and never returned home, Lee said, adding that the more one knows about war, the more he or she understands that peace should be cherished.
The period between 1943 and 1949 for Taiwanese was probably so unique that it would never be replicated again, Lee said.
“Some of us fought for Japan, some for the KMT and some for the Chinese Communist Party. And some did more than one,” Lee said.
An essay competition jointly organized by a local writing society and a publisher affiliated with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) might have contravened the Act Governing Relations Between the People of the Taiwan Area and the Mainland Area (臺灣地區與大陸地區人民關係條例), the Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) said on Thursday. “In this case, the partner organization is clearly an agency under the CCP’s Fujian Provincial Committee,” MAC Deputy Minister and spokesperson Liang Wen-chieh (梁文傑) said at a news briefing in Taipei. “It also involves bringing Taiwanese students to China with all-expenses-paid arrangements to attend award ceremonies and camps,” Liang said. Those two “characteristics” are typically sufficient
A magnitude 5.9 earthquake that struck about 33km off the coast of Hualien City was the "main shock" in a series of quakes in the area, with aftershocks expected over the next three days, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said yesterday. Prior to the magnitude 5.9 quake shaking most of Taiwan at 6:53pm yesterday, six other earthquakes stronger than a magnitude of 4, starting with a magnitude 5.5 quake at 6:09pm, occurred in the area. CWA Seismological Center Director Wu Chien-fu (吳健富) confirmed that the quakes were all part of the same series and that the magnitude 5.5 temblor was
The brilliant blue waters, thick foliage and bucolic atmosphere on this seemingly idyllic archipelago deep in the Pacific Ocean belie the key role it now plays in a titanic geopolitical struggle. Palau is again on the front line as China, and the US and its allies prepare their forces in an intensifying contest for control over the Asia-Pacific region. The democratic nation of just 17,000 people hosts US-controlled airstrips and soon-to-be-completed radar installations that the US military describes as “critical” to monitoring vast swathes of water and airspace. It is also a key piece of the second island chain, a string of
The Central Weather Administration has issued a heat alert for southeastern Taiwan, warning of temperatures as high as 36°C today, while alerting some coastal areas of strong winds later in the day. Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門) and Pingtung County’s Neipu Township (內埔) are under an orange heat alert, which warns of temperatures as high as 36°C for three consecutive days, the CWA said, citing southwest winds. The heat would also extend to Tainan’s Nansi (楠西) and Yujing (玉井) districts, as well as Pingtung’s Gaoshu (高樹), Yanpu (鹽埔) and Majia (瑪家) townships, it said, forecasting highs of up to 36°C in those areas
RSS