July 1 to July 7
Huang Ching-an (黃慶安) couldn’t help but notice Imelita Masongsong during a company party in the Philippines. With paler skin and more East Asian features, she did not look like the other locals.
On top of his job duties, Huang had another mission in the country, given by his mother: to track down his cousin, who was deployed to the Philippines by the Japanese during World War II and never returned. Although it had been more than three decades, the family was still hoping to find him. Perhaps Imelita could provide some clues.
Photo courtesy of National Central Library
Huang never found the cousin; instead he stumbled across Tsao Hui-le (曹輝樂), another former Taiwanese soldier who had been stranded in the Philippines since the war ended. Going by the name Francisco Masongsong, he was Imelita’s father. What’s more, he and Huang were both Hakkas from Miaoli County.
Tsao had all but given up hopes of going home by then. He had hid his identity — even from his wife and children — in fear of being tried as a Japanese soldier, and he could not fly to Taiwan because he didn’t pay enough taxes to qualify for overseas travel. His family had moved to Hsinchu County, so his letters never reached them.
With Huang’s help, Tsao finally returned to Taiwan on July 1, 1978. A year later, Tsao moved home for good with his Filipino wife, Imelita and five other children.
Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
Tsao is considered extremely lucky, as fewer than 20 stranded Taiwanese soldiers made it home between 1956 and 1994. Academia Historica statistics show that more than 50,000 Taiwanese died or went missing during the war, and many families, including Huang’s, never stopped looking for them.
HIDING IN A CAVE
Although the Japanese did not formally conscript Taiwanese into the army until January 1945, they had been recruiting young and able-bodied men for the war effort through various means. Academia Historica estimates show that about 200,000 Taiwanese were involved in the war effort.
Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
Tsao’s case received much media coverage, but many articles contain contradicting information, writes Yang Wen-chiao (楊文喬) in a 2022 study published in Taiwan Folkways (台灣風物) magazine.
Tsao never spoke much about how he joined the army at the age of 16 (some reports say 14 or 15), but media reports emphasize that he was forcefully conscripted, which fit the rhetoric of that time. Many were indeed coerced into service, but the kominka movement — an attempt to bury historical and cultural connections between Taiwan and China beneath pro-Tokyo sentiment — had also brainwashed countless youth into patriotic subjects of the Japanese Empire.
In any event, Tsao was sent to Luzon along with a group of friends from his hometown of Toufen (頭份), Miaoli. Tsao served as a ground service mechanic at the Clark Air Base, which was built by the US but overrun by the Japanese in 1941.
There’s almost no information about his service, but he fled with a contingent of troops in November 1944 after US forces bombed the base. During three weeks on the run, Tsao saw his comrades fall one by one to airstrikes, exhaustion, illness and hunger. By the time he reached the Arayat Mountains, he had been separated from his friends.
Some sources say Tsao took shelter in a cave with other Japanese and Korean soldiers, but soon he was the only one left. Chang Chiang (張強) writes in the Miaoli County Government’s Local Characters (鄉土人物) publication that Tsao was terrified of ghosts as a child, but by then he was more scared of humans and wished that ghosts would visit him so he could have someone talk to.
Tsao only ventured out at night to gather bananas, coconuts and sweet potatoes, and by July 1945 he was severely malnourished. He finally made his way down the mountain, and was found collapsed in a field, his limbs swollen and his belly bloated, by the daughter of a local farmer.
UNREAL ENCOUNTER
Tsao spent six months recovering and helping out at the farm before heading to Calamba City, where he found work at a Chinese bakery. He posed as a half-Chinese, half-Filipino and obtained citizenship in 1950, upon which he served three years in the army, working for the Americans this time, Chang writes.
Tsao then returned to the bakery and married a fellow employee, and they had eight children together. He later became a construction contractor, and although money was tight, they got by.
Over time, his hopes of returning to Taiwan faded.
By the late 1970s, Tsao’s third daughter Imelita was working at a factory owned by Taiwan’s Cathay Ceramics (國泰陶瓷), while Huang had just arrived as the company’s deputy general manager. Imelita knew little about her father’s past besides the fact that he was “Chinese,” and Tsao asked her to have him write down his name and hometown.
When Huang saw that Tsao was also from Miaoli, he summoned him to the office. Tsao was reportedly very emotional, repeatedly asking, “Is this real? Is this a dream?”
Back in Taiwan for Lunar New Year in 1978, Huang visited Toufen and asked around, finally locating Tsao’s brother-in-law, who told him that Tsao’s family had moved to Beipu (北埔) in Hsinchu.
In Beipu, Huang met Tsao’s younger brother and other family members. They had long presumed him dead, and even placed a spirit tablet for him in the family altar. Tsao’s mother had died 12 years earlier, still mourning her lost son in her final days. As soon as they found out Tsao was alive, they covered the tablet with red paper, marking his “rebirth.”
MEDIA ATTENTION
Huang contacted the the Chinese Association for Relief and Ensuing Services (中華救助總會) and the Pacific Economic and Cultural Center (de facto Philippines embassy then), who paid for Tsao’s plane ticket.
After everything was set, Huang drove Tsao 120km to Manila International Airport and flew with him to Taoyuan since Tsao had never been on a plane before and didn’t speak Mandarin.
They arrived to a massive media scrum. Ever since the dramatic return of Suniuo (See “Taiwan in Time: The last holdout of Morotai,” Jan 3, 2016) in 1975 after he hid in the mountains of Indonesia for 30 years, unaware that the war was over, the public was highly interested in other missing soldiers.
Tsao was not the first straggler to return from the Philippines. In 1956, Kao Chang-chin (高長欽) and Lin Chiu-tan (林秋潭) made the news after surviving in the jungles of Mindanao for 11 years.
After a tearful reunion at the airport, the family headed to Tsao’s brother’s house, where he still kept Tsao’s belongings such as his school uniform and pencil case. Tsao returned to the Philippines a month later to bring his family to Taiwan; they arrived on July 29, 1979, moving into an apartment in Beipu donated by the Hsinchu County Government. All the furnishings and appliances were provided by Beipu locals.
Yang writes that Tsao probably received the best treatment out of all the returnees. Others around the same time received less attention, such as Kuo Mu-jung (郭木榮), who had been stranded in Vietnam. Kuo was deported in 1979 and sent to a refugee camp in Hong Kong, from where he managed to contact his family. He arrived home in March 1980.
The final soldier to come home is probably Wu Lien-yi (吳連義), who was sent to Hanoi in 1944 as an agricultural officer. His multiple appeals to the Red Cross and the Japanese government over the decades were denied. It wasn’t until the Taipei Economic and Cultural Office in Vietnam was established in 1992 did he get his chance, finally stepping foot on his homeland again at the age of 71. Wu only stayed for three months before returning to Vietnam, as his entire life was there.
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