The Taiwan POW Camps Memorial Society held a Remembrance Day service at a memorial park on the site of the former Kinkaseki copper mine on the northeast coast of Taiwan on Sunday for prisoners of war who suffered at the hands of the Japanese Imperial Army during World War II.
While there was a shared sense of sadness at the marked absence of any former POWs at the POW Memorial Park in Jinguashih (金瓜石) — inaugurated in 1997 near Jiufen (九份), Taipei County — there was also a feeling that one of the founding objectives of the society was being honored by the presence of relatives of some of the POWs, many of whom traveled to Taiwan for the first time to pay their respects to their loved ones at the site of the Kinkaseki camp.
More than 1,000 allied soldiers, sailors and airmen were forced to work as laborers at the camp, which was the most infamous of the 16 Japanese POW camps in Taiwan during World War II.
Society director Michael Hurst said Kinkaseki was one of the worst prison camps in the entire Far East in terms of the conditions and treatment the prisoners received.
Wilf Robinson arrived for his first visit to Taiwan from Australia a week earlier to find out more about his uncle, British soldier William Carson.
After just three months in Kinkaseki, Carson was so ill he had to be moved to another camp in the south of Taiwan, where he died aged 32 when an allied bombardment mistakenly hit the camp.
After seeing the mine, prison and museum, Robinson said he felt an affinity not just with his uncle, but with all the POWs.
“These people are left and lost ... and not remembered, now I feel that I have arrived here to take William Carson back home. It is important to me and my family,” Robinson said.
Eileen Astley, who arrived from England on a first-time visit with her daughter, Lin Mount, and son, Mike Farmer, was married to Jack Farmer, a former British inmate at Kinkaseki.
Astley said Farmer didn’t tell her he had been a POW until right before they were married. Despite a disfigured leg due to copper poisoning in the mine, the family said he never spoke of his experiences in Kinkaseki.
After seeing the mine, Mount said she was struck by the sheer distance the men had to travel just get up and down the hillside before even going down into the mine.
“It’s very powerful to finally see it,” Mount said.
Art Scholl, a member of the US Veterans of Foreign Wars, attended the memorial for the seventh time and was asked to lay a wreath on behalf of the POWs, as he was the only veteran attending who had witnessed military action in the Pacific.
A visibly emotional Scholl recalled how the ship he served on in the US Navy was attacked by a kamikaze pilot in May 1945.
This year’s service was cosponsored by the Australian Commerce and Industry Office in Taipei, which alternates with the three other Commonwealth representative offices to hold the memorial service.
The Coast Guard Administration (CGA) and Chunghwa Telecom yesterday confirmed that an international undersea cable near Keelung Harbor had been cut by a Chinese ship, the Shunxin-39, a freighter registered in Cameroon. Chunghwa Telecom said the cable had its own backup equipment, and the incident would not affect telecommunications within Taiwan. The CGA said it dispatched a ship under its first fleet after receiving word of the incident and located the Shunxin-39 7 nautical miles (13km) north of Yehliu (野柳) at about 4:40pm on Friday. The CGA demanded that the Shunxin-39 return to seas closer to Keelung Harbor for investigation over the
National Kaohsiung University of Science and Technology (NKUST) yesterday promised it would increase oversight of use of Chinese in course materials, following a social media outcry over instances of simplified Chinese characters being used, including in a final exam. People on Threads wrote that simplified Chinese characters were used on a final exam and in a textbook for a translation course at the university, while the business card of a professor bore the words: “Taiwan Province, China.” Photographs of the exam, the textbook and the business card were posted with the comments. NKUST said that other members of the faculty did not see
The Taipei City Government yesterday said contractors organizing its New Year’s Eve celebrations would be held responsible after a jumbo screen played a Beijing-ran television channel near the event’s end. An image showing China Central Television (CCTV) Channel 3 being displayed was posted on the social media platform Threads, sparking an outcry on the Internet over Beijing’s alleged political infiltration of the municipal government. A Taipei Department of Information and Tourism spokesman said event workers had made a “grave mistake” and that the Television Broadcasts Satellite (TVBS) group had the contract to operate the screens. The city would apply contractual penalties on TVBS
A new board game set against the backdrop of armed conflict around Taiwan is to be released next month, amid renewed threats from Beijing, inviting players to participate in an imaginary Chinese invasion 20 years from now. China has ramped up military activity close to Taiwan in the past few years, including massing naval forces around the nation. The game, titled 2045, tasks players with navigating the troubles of war using colorful action cards and role-playing as characters involved in operations 10 days before a fictional Chinese invasion of Taiwan. That includes members of the armed forces, Chinese sleeper agents and pro-China politicians
RSS