Commemorating the Second World War and the Bereaved Families in Postwar Taiwan
Commémorer la Seconde Guerre mondiale et la question des familles endeuillées dans le Taïwan d’après-guerre
p. 189-218
Résumés
During the Second World War, the people of Taiwan, under the Japanese colonial rule at the time, were mobilized to support and fight for Japan’s wartime empire. By the end of the war, more than 100,000 Taiwanese had been sent to work in battlefields across the Asia-Pacific; among them, more than 30,000 were killed in action. In most countries, wartime loss of lives has been commemorated continuously and publicly, by the bereaved families, concerned citizens, as well as government authorities at various levels after the war. However in postwar Taiwan, due to various political and ideological reasons, no official ceremony was ever conducted by government authorities and no public memorial was ever dedicated to commemorate Taiwanese wartime experiences, particularly the loss of lives. This paper examines how the Taiwanese bereaved families, under these rather unique circumstances, found and created “civic” (non-official) ways to express their grievance and commemorate wartime losses of lives. Utilizing oral history by Taiwanese bereaved families and ethnographical records, this paper seeks to delineate the process and identify venues through which war memories of the Taiwanese has been (re-)constructed against an enduring and conspicuous absence of official commemoration. In particular, this paper focuses on the cases of mementos, pilgrimage, and religious/spiritual activities. It argues that these various ways of “civic” (non-official) commemoration help the bereaved families in postwar Taiwan to confirm what Judith Butler calls the “grievability” of lives and effectively serve as a “closure” for the surviving family members in coping with the trauma of loss of lives. Furthermore, “civic” (non-official) commemoration creates what Avishai Margalit calls a “moral community” that goes beyond and challenges the boundary of nation-states.
Au cours de la Seconde Guerre mondiale, la population de Taïwan, alors sous domination coloniale japonaise, a été mobilisée pour soutenir l’empire du Japon. Plus de 100 000 Taïwanais ont été envoyés sur les champs de bataille de la région Asie-Pacifique ; parmi eux, plus de 30 000 ont été tués au combat. Dans la plupart des pays, les familles endeuillées et les autorités politiques commémorent les pertes humaines survenues en temps de guerre. Cependant, dans le Taiwan d’après-guerre, pour diverses raisons tant politiques qu’idéologiques, aucune cérémonie officielle n’a jamais été organisée ni aucun mémorial construit pour commémorer cet épisode du passé. Cet article interroge la façon dont les familles taïwanaises endeuillées ont réussi par des moyens « civiques » (non officiels) à exprimer leur peine et à rendre hommage aux victimes. S’appuyant sur des matériaux d’histoire orale recueillis suivant une méthode ethnographique, il tente d’identifier les processus et les moyens mobilisés afin que les souvenirs de guerre des Taïwanais soient (re)constitués en dépit de l’absence persistante de commémoration officielle. Il se concentre notamment sur les souvenirs évoqués, l’organisation de pèlerinages et d’activités religieuses/spirituelles. Nous voulons démontrer comment ces diverses formes de commémoration « civique » (non officielle) aident les familles endeuillées du Taïwan d’après-guerre ; retrouvant ainsi ce que Judith Butler nomme le « deuil » des vies qui sert de « terme » pour les survivants face au traumatisme de la perte. En outre, la commémoration « civique » (non officielle) crée ce qu’Avishai Margalit appelle une « communauté morale » susceptible de dépasser, voire de remettre en cause, les frontières des États-nations.
Entrées d’index
Mots-clés : Seconde Guerre mondiale, famille, deuil, commémoration, mémoire
Keywords : World War II, family, mourning, commemoration, memory
Texte intégral
1During the Second World War, as the Japanese military pushed into the Chinese mainland, Southeast Asia, and islands across the Pacific, Taiwanese were recruited and sent to work (and at times fight) in foreign and remote lands across Asia and the Pacific. Some of the major overseas destinations included Hainan Island, the Philippines, New Guinea, and Rabaul (in present-day Papua New Guinea).1 According to the statistic compiled after the war by the Japanese Ministry of Health, there were more than 80,000 Taiwanese-native soldiers and more than 126,000 “non-combatant military personnel” (gun-zoku 軍屬) recruited or mobilized by the Japanese colonial and military authorities.2 Among them, more than 30,000 were reported dead.3
2Since the end of the war, history of the Second World War has been written extensively in Taiwan. However, since the Republic of China (ROC) government took over Taiwan in 1945, official account and public discourse of the war in postwar Taiwan has been dominated by the mainland Chinese experiences and view(s) of the war. For more than fifty years under the auspices of the ROC government, the war had been unequivocally represented as a victorious war, as experienced by those who fought alongside the Allied. In post-war China, as Timothy Brook finds, “many Chinese are unprepared to look behind their collective memory of suffering and resistance”. The “myth of resistance”, Brooks further points out, has been used by political elites in post-war China to establish their “moral legitimacy”.4 Under this dominant discourse of the “war of resistance” (kangzhan 抗戰), the experiences of the people of Taiwan, having fought alongside the Japanese—in other words, against the Chinese—in the war, clearly became problematic to the post-war Chinese collective memory. As a result, native Taiwanese wartime experiences have been long ignored in the public discourse in postwar Taiwan.5
3In most countries, the bereaved families, citizens impacted, and government authorities from different levels have commemorated, continuously and publicly, wartime losses of lives after the war. Aside from the political, and often nationalistic in modern time, agenda of state and politicians, commemoration of the dead at war served very important function to the bereaved families. To borrow from Jay Winter’s studies of representations of war, it is a “struggle against forgetting”.6 After a loved one was lost in the war, bereaved families commemorated his or her death as a way to remember this lost family member. Unlike the passing of a person in peacetime, the death of a person in war usually occurred in the battlefields without any family members around. Therefore, the bereaved families usually had neither first-hand account nor complete information about the death. This made commemoration of the dead at war unique, because it allowed the bereaved families who did not personally witness the passing of the loved ones to confirm the death. And more importantly, to the bereaved families, proper and continuous commemoration that took place in public ensured that the life and death of the loved ones would not be forgotten. Therefore, as commonly observed in most postwar societies, there is a constant need for commemoration.
4However in postwar Taiwan, due to political and ideological reasons stated above, no official ceremony was ever conducted by government authorities and no public memorial was ever dedicated to commemorate Taiwanese wartime experiences, particularly the loss of lives. The history of more than 200,000 Taiwanese soldiers who fought on the side of the Japanese and more than 30,000 of them who died as a result was hardly ever discussed, let alone commemorated, publicly in postwar Taiwan. And consequently, in public discourse, even the concept of “Taiwanese bereaved families” (Taiwan yizu 台灣遺族) did not exist.
5So under these rather unique circumstances, how did the Taiwanese bereaved families deal with their losses? This article will examine the “civil” (non-official) ways through which bereaved families in Taiwan expressed their grievance and commemorated the loss of their loved ones in war.7 Furthermore, it will compare the situation in Taiwan with bereaved families that have been widely studied, such as in the American Civil War and the First World War, to better understand the meaning of commemoration to bereaved families in Taiwan.
Longing for Confirmation
6As the War ended in August 1945, to the Taiwanese bereaved families, the war endured for a much longer time. Because neither the ROC government nor the Japanese government took (immediate) responsibilities in looking for the mobilized Taiwanese after the war (and the colonial rule) ended, information concerning the whereabouts of Taiwanese serving abroad during the war was rather scarce and unverifiable. Under such circumstances, bereaved families in Taiwan continued to long for information that could help to confirm the condition—dead or alive—of their loved ones.
7One of the earliest written accounts concerning the longing for information by bereaved families in postwar Taiwan can be found in a prose published in a local newspaper in 1954.8 The author wrote, in 1953, about the condition of her family after one of her elder brothers was recruited to work for the Japanese military in Singapore in 1942. During the first few months, her brother continued to write back to the family. But later on as her brother was moved frequently with the troops and living condition in Taiwan became rather unstable, the family could not get in touch with him during the final year of the war. After the war ended, her family still heard no word from or about him; and three years after the war, while her mother continued to wait for the return of her brother, her father concluded that his son had died and decided to install a plaque to worship him. However, in 1951, his name appeared in a newspaper article, reporting the upcoming return of Taiwanese prisoners of war from Manus Island. This report gave great hope and joy to the family, particularly to the mother and the grandfather, who took down the plaque, broke it in half, and threw it away, expecting the safe return of their son and grandson. When the first group of released Taiwanese returned from Manus Island to Keelung (a port city in northern Taiwan), the father went to meet with them and was told that his son would be released later that year. And a few months later, newspaper reported again that the second group of released Taiwanese would reach Taiwan on the day after Mid-Autumn festival. The family was thrilled by the news, and the parents took the author to Keelung, expecting her brother’s arrival.
8On the way to Keelung, her mother was full of hope and excitement, and said to her: “we go as a group of three, and we will return as a group of four”. But as her family waited at the dock and saw the released Taiwanese getting off the ship one after another, her brother was nowhere to be seen. Finally, her parents went up to the group and asked about her brother; one of the released Taiwanese replied: “He fell terribly ill a few days before the departure; because there was no doctor, he died. Here is the box containing his ashes”. Upon hearing this, her mother fainted and collapsed to the ground.
9Because the author used a penname, there is no way to verify the identity of the author and the details of her story.9 However, her story succinctly presents the emotion of bereaved families in postwar Taiwan, particularly attached to years of uncertainty and longing for confirmation whether the loved ones were dead or alive. Furthermore, this story was by no means an isolated case; many Taiwanese bereaved families gave accounts of similar experiences and emotion, many years after the war ended. A journalist from Japan, Motoi Saesato (基 佐江里), visited and interviewed several Taiwanese bereaved families in the 1980s. One of these was Mrs. Peng Man-mei (彭氏滿妹), who was seventy-year-old when she was interviewed in 1986. Her husband Peng Shou-qian (彭壽乾), born in 1911, was recruited into the Japanese military as a gun-zoku in 1941 and sent to serve in Manila. Mrs. Peng did not hear of the death of her husband until 1977, when she received a “notice of combined enshrinement” (hesi tongzhishu 合祀通知書) from the Yasukuni Shrine (靖國神社) in Japan.10
10Cases discussed above clearly show that some Taiwanese bereaved families endured more than thirty years of uncertainty, constant worry, and waiting in vain.
11Across the world, similar situation can be found in many postwar societies. Scholars who have studied the American Civil War and the First World War have shed light on this issue. In her work This Republic of Suffering, Drew Gilpin Faust points out that nearly half of those soldiers who died in the American Civil War were undocumented; these soldiers were supposedly dead, simply because there was no information. Therefore, bereaved families never knew how their loved ones died. This lack of information or verification, or “the unknown destiny of the lost loved ones”, dragged the bereaved families into a “vacuum of uncertainty”. Under these circumstances, as Faust argues, “such losses remained in some sense unreal and thus ‘unrealized’”.11
12In her study of post-Civil War America, Faust puts the study of war—particularly the “unfathomable loss”—in the context of survivors, and analyzes how “ordinary Americans… struggling to come to terms with their losses”.12 Faust argues that one of the most significant impact of war was on the survivors:
Most noncombatants felt war’s cruelest impact not in their own illness or death but through the sufferings of the soldiers who were dear to them. The blow that killed a soldier on the field not only destroyed that man but sent waves of misery and desolation into a world of relatives and friends, who themselves became war’s casualties.13
13To the bereaved families who lost loved ones, the war continued after the last shot was fired on the battlefields as they “suffer a living death of spirit, heart, and hope”.14 It shows that to those who survived the war—particularly the bereaved families, the “loss” resulted from war was profound and continuous. Therefore, how to deal with the physical and psychological “losses” became a daunting and unsettling task for the bereaved families, many years after the war. In this process, as Faust points out, the bereaved families “struggle to separate themselves from the dead through ritual and mourning”. This is critical because the bereaved families “must assume new identities established by their persistence in face of others’ annihilation”.15
14While bereaved families in many postwar societies experienced similar uncertainty and longing for confirmation, in postwar Taiwan the time span of uncertainty and longing was further extended and exacerbated by the lack of government assistance and public attention in postwar Taiwan. After the war ended, the Japanese government, which took the Taiwanese to war, abandoned its commitment and responsibilities to the Taiwanese veterans and bereaved families completely. And the ROC government, which took over Taiwan as a victorious power, paid no attention to the plight and need of Taiwanese veterans and bereaved families. This situation made it much more physically difficult and mentally challenging for bereaved families in Taiwan to obtain any information about their loved ones who had not returned from the war. As a result, this “vacuum of uncertainty” for the bereaved families lasted much longer in Taiwan, compared to other postwar societies, and made what Faust called the “crisis”—resulting from the lack of information16—persist for several decades in postwar Taiwan.
15Take the bereaved family of Mr. Li Lincai (李琳彩) as an example. Li was recruited to serve overseas as a gun-zoku during the war; but after the war ended, he was prosecuted for killing an Australian prisoner-of-war in Borneo and convicted by the Australian military court as a war criminal in 1946. Li was sentenced to death and executed.17 Li’s family heard of his death soon afterward, from released Taiwanese war criminals returning to Taiwan. However, because there was no official notice or physical evidence to verify the death of Li, Li’s mother continued to keep faith and expected a “surprise return” of Li many years after his execution.18 Clearly, response and emotion shown by Li’s mother was exactly what Faust described: while there was no verification of the life and death of loved ones, bereaved families continued to live in a “vacuum of uncertainty”. Under such a condition, the death of loved ones became, and continued to be, what Faust describes as unreal and thus “unrealized”;19 thereby some bereaved families, such as Li’s mother, could not accept the death of their loved ones.
16To many bereaved families, the most direct and profound impact of the war occurred at the moment of hearing the death or “loss” of the loved ones. As in the American Civil War, information about deaths was often “wrong or entirely unavailable” and “survivors found themselves both literally and figuratively unable to ‘see clearly what…has been lost’ and instead encouraged to deny it”.20 Faust argues, “[s]uch denial represented its own kind of loss, an abandonment of emotion and sensibility that was a death in itself, another dimension of war’s dehumanization”.21 Similarly, as in the aforementioned case of Li’s family, bereaved families in post-war Taiwan also encountered and suffered from this “dimension of war’s dehumanization”. However, the unique situation of postwar Taiwan makes the reading of war commemoration different and challenging.
17Unlike bereaved families in most postwar societies who have been supported, to different degrees though, by the respective state governments in conducting war commemoration in public, bereaved families in postwar Taiwan had no support from any state government in conducting war commemoration. Instead, under the ROC government the public discourse of the war, based on what Timothy Brook calls the “myth of (China’s war of) resistance”, effectively prohibited bereaved families in postwar Taiwan to commemorate their loved ones who died fighting against the Allied forces in public. Under these circumstances, bereaved families in Taiwan either re-appropriated existing war commemoration as approved and supported by a state authority, or developed their own “civil” (non-official) ways to express their grievance and commemorate wartime losses of loved ones. This is similar to what James Scott described as “a social space in which offstage dissent to the official transcript of power relations may be voiced”, or the “hidden transcript”.22 In doing so, these re-appropriation or development of “civil” ways of commemoration served as a closure to the bereaved families’ years of uncertainty and longing for confirmation. In the following sections, this article will identify and analyze the significance of several “civil” ways of commemoration, including civil rituals, retrieval of the remains, invention of memento, and pilgrimage, to bereaved families in post-WWII Taiwan.
Civil Rituals
18While the ROC government, till today (2024), has never hosted any commemorative service dedicated to those Taiwanese who lost their lives in the war, the bereaved families have organized or utilized various civil rituals to “console the spirit” of the deceased in postwar Taiwan. One of the rituals through which the bereaved families commemorated their loved ones was religious ceremonies (fahui 法會), often performed by Buddhist monks at temples. One of the earliest accounts of Buddhist ceremony commemorating the Taiwanese who died while serving in Japanese military service was found in Tainan in 1952.23 Notably, this ceremony was named “protecting the nation and resolving disaster” (huguo xiaozai 護國消災), and was dedicated to commemorate the spirit of both “compatriots massacred by the communist in mainland China” alongside with those who “were recruited to serve in the Japanese military and died”. In addition, the host of this ceremony advocated to “prohibit slaughtering animals” in town for one day.24
19A few years later in 1956, the remains of 53 Taiwanese who died in service abroad during the WWII were repatriated, under arrangement by ROC’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, to their native Zhanghua (彰化) county in central Taiwan. When the county government received the remains, it temporarily placed them at a local Buddhist temple and notified the bereaved families. On the following day, a ceremony was conducted at the temple “to redeem the lone spirit returning from abroad”, “to pray for the eternity of the soul”, and “to protect the nation and guard the hometown forever”. And more significantly, invitation to this ceremony was extended specifically to bereaved families, allowing them to pay tribute to the spirit by “dedicating incense and offering sacrifice”.25
20Conspicuously in these ceremonies, there was the “hegemonic public conduct” or “public transcript”, as Scott described,26 which served the interest of the state. On the earlier occasion, the ceremony brimmed with the ROC’s ideological hegemony of “anti-communism” by commemorating the deceased Taiwanese alongside with those “compatriots killed by the communist bandits in the (Chinese) mainland”.27 And on the later occasion, all those Taiwanese who died were explicitly described as being “forced into service by the Japanese warlords” (riben junfa 日本軍閥).28 While this description was contrary to the actual historical condition of mobilization in Taiwan during WWII, it allowed this repatriation and the subsequent commemoration by the bereaved families to fit into the ROC official “anti-Japanese” narrative of war of resistance. And to further demonstrate their worldly pursuit of political interest, both ceremonies explicitly stated the larger purpose of conducting such ritual as “protecting the nation”.
21In addition, these ceremonies were also conducted under another “public transcript” of Buddhism, by promoting the prohibition of animal slaughtering on one occasion,29 and celebrating the birth of Buddha (at the two thousand and five hundred anniversary of the birth of Sakyamuni 釋迦牟尼) on another instance.30 However, under the “public transcript”, these ceremonies enabled the bereaved families to conduct a public commemoration of their deceased loved ones and thereby fulfilled the social function of commemoration needed by the bereaved families. This “hidden transcript”, found in Buddhist ceremonies, effectively served the interest of the Taiwanese bereaved families and thereby turned these Buddhist ceremonies into anti-hegemonic commemoration in postwar Taiwan.
Retrieval of the Remains (of the Deceased)
22To many Taiwanese bereaved families, the absence of physical evidence confirming the death of their loved ones made it difficult, if not impossible, to accept their death and furthermore “to separate themselves from the dead through ritual and mourning”.31 Many, of course, wanted to see the most critical and direct evidence of death, the remains (or “bones”) of the deceased. But during the immediate postwar years, to retrieve remains of Taiwanese war dead from battlefields abroad, mostly across the Pacific and Southeast Asia, turned out to be nearly impossible.32 While the war was still raging, conditions on the battlefields often made preservation of remains a challenging if not infeasible task; and after the war ended, neither the ROC nor the Japanese government prioritized the issue. Under these circumstances, most Taiwanese bereaved families never saw the remains of their deceased loved ones. And to most bereaved families in Taiwan, the issue of remains had never been resolved since the end of the war. They neither recovered nor retrieved any remains of their deceased loved ones from abroad. While diplomatic ties between ROC and Japan were severed in 1972 , some bereaved families in Taiwan continued to organize and visited Japan, with little if any government support, looking for the remains of Taiwanese war dead. However, as reported in 1983, their visits were to no avail; no remains were recovered, and the only things brought back to Taiwan was “sands of spirit” (lingsha 靈砂), which was mistaken or misconstrued by some Taiwanese bereaved families as the remains, from the compound of the Chidorigafuchi National Cemetery (千鳥ヶ淵公園戦没者墓苑), Japan’s national war cemetery in Tokyo.33 While the report from 1983 was not the last one about Taiwanese bereaved families looking for the remains of their deceased loved ones, it clearly demonstrated how eager these families had been to locate and retrieve the remains of Taiwanese war dead after WWII.
23Another example regards the thousands of Taiwanese aboriginals who were mobilized and recruited, starting in 1942, as the Takasago Giyutai (in Japanese 高砂義勇隊; or Gaosha yiyongdui in Chinese) to serve in the Japanese military across the Southwest Pacific;34 many, if not most, died on the battlefields and their remains were never recovered. In 2000, more than seven hundred surviving members and bereaved families of the Takasago Giyutai, from across Taiwan, set up an organization, Taiwanese Aborigines Takasago Giyutai and Bereaved Families Cultural Association (Taiwan Yuanzhumin Gaosha yiyongdui ji yizu wenhua xiehui 台灣原住民高砂義勇隊暨遺族文化協會). The founding statement of the association pointed out that after decades of the end of the war, the bereaved families were still looking for ways to locate where their loved ones were buried on the battlefields and to repatriate the remains back to Taiwan for a proper burial.35 That same year, several surviving members of the Takasago Giyutai were interviewed; they recalled that their comrades who died on the battlefields were cremated collectively and the remains were never returned to Taiwan.36 These stories showed that at the dawn of the 21st century, bereaved families in Taiwan still considered the repatriation of the remains of their deceased loved ones from WWII an unsolved issue.
24Some Taiwanese bereaved families did report having received some kinds of personal items of the deceased loved ones as proof of their death. One of the most common items returned from the battlefields was “hair and nail”, usually brought back by surviving comrades. Mr. Qiu Siguan (邱四管), who was eighty-eight years old when he was interviewed by Motoi Saesato in 1986, recalled that after the war ended he received nothing but “hair and nail” of his second son, who died fighting in New Guinea.37 Mr. Qiu Shunfa (邱順發), who was sixty years old when he was interviewed, also reported receiving similar items from his older brother, who also died fighting in New Guinea.38
25In addition, some bereaved families in Taiwan reported that they received “bones” or remains of the deceased after cremation in the battlefields, brought back from abroad by surviving comrades. But more often than not, bereaved families later found out that what supposed to be the remains turned out to be nothing but substitutes. Mrs. Lin Zhaozhi (林招治), whose husband Lin Shimu (林石木) was recruited to serve in the military as a gun-zoku and sent to New Guinea in 1944, was expecting the return of her husband after the war ended. She recalled that as she was living in Keelung at the time, she went to the port everyday to meet Taiwanese soldiers and gun-zoku returning from abroad. One day, a ship arrived carrying boxes of remains of deceased Taiwanese; as the crew called out names of the deceased one by one, Mrs. Lin unexpectedly heard her husband’s name. Comrades of her husband brought back hundreds of matchbox-sized containers, and Mrs. Lin was given one with her husband’s name written on it. She was told that her husband died during an air raid in late 1944, and his remains were kept in the container. When Mrs. Lin opened the box, she found two pieces of white coral stone. Under the circumstances, when Mrs. Lin later set up a tomb for her late husband, she could put into it only his hair and nails, which were taken before he left for the battlefields.39 This chapter will further discuss how bereaved families in Taiwan dealt with the lack of physical evidence in later sections.
26Since the mid-1950s, on a handful of occasions, concerned parties from both Taiwan and Japan took joint action to repatriate remains of Taiwanese war dead from abroad. And as reported, among these Taiwanese war dead, many died in Japan. In 1956, for example, 311 boxes of remains were repatriated from Japan to Keelung, “to be properly buried and to console the bereaved families”; all these were Taiwanese who died during the war in Japan.40 Throughout the process, the Taiwan Provincial Government worked with ROC’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Embassy of Japan; it subsequently notified the bereaved families and asked them to come to claim the remains of their loved ones from Keelung municipal government.41 In another case in 1973, a newspaper in Taiwan reported that a Japanese man named Yoshioka Kazuo (吉岡和夫), who was planning to visit Taiwan for a sightseeing trip, expressed his intention to return the remains of a Taiwanese who died in WWII to his bereaved family. According to Yoshioka, this Taiwanese named Zhang Fuxing (張福星) was a member of the Youth Aviation Squad (shaonian hangkong dui 少年航空隊) of the Japanese Army, who died in the Allied air raid in Japan in August 1945. Yoshioka, as the commanding officer of the Squad to which Zhang belonged, helped to cremate Zhang and had kept the remains in a local Buddhist temple for nearly 30 years. As Yoshioka found an opportunity to visit Taiwan in 1973, he appeared in Taiwan’s newspaper hoping to send a message to the bereaved family of Zhang and return the remains to Taiwan.42
27While there was no further report or records on the collection of remains mentioned above, it would be fair to conclude that some Taiwanese bereaved families, unlike the aforementioned Mrs. Lin who received only an empty box shortly after the war, were able to receive documented remains of loved ones starting from the mid-1950s. It should be further noted that the location of the death, in Japan as compared to battlefields across the Pacific and Southeast Asia, might be a crucial factor in allowing the bereaved families to retrieve the actual remains. This factor of location was also found in the case of another Taiwanese bereaved family, the Jiangs, who also recovered the remains of their loved one from Japan in the mid-1950s. While the Jiangs’ story looked similar to those discussed above, it was rather unique in defining the relationship between the bereaved families in Taiwan and the remains. In most cases, the bereaved families in Taiwan were rather passive until a third party from Japan—an individual or agency—took action in returning the Taiwanese remains; but in the Jiangs’ case, it was the bereaved family from Taiwan that took the initiative to locate and retrieve the remains.
28According to the account by the head of the family, Mr. Jiang Congxiang (江從祥), his son Jiang Qiguan (江麒官) went to Japan and studied in Kumamoto in 1940. Qiguan was later recruited to work in the military and, unfortunately, killed in an air raid in October 1944. Mr. Jiang was informed that Qiguan’s remains were kept in a Shinto shrine in Kumamoto, thereby made a request to ROC’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs for assistance to repatriate the remains to Taiwan in 1956.43 After much negotiation between concerned parties between Taiwan and Japan, Jiang Qiguan’s remains were eventually returned to Taiwan in 1957.44
Memento
29For the bereaved families who did not have any information about how the loved ones died and were denied to collect (or see in their own eyes) any remains of the loved ones, there was an “incomplete” relationship between the dead and surviving families. One the one hand, resulting from the lack of confirmation, they could not properly accept or deal with the death of the loved ones and thereby never succeeded in re-defining the relationship between the dead and surviving families. On the other hand, with no remains, no funeral, and no burial (at best a tomb containing personal effects of the deceased such as clothes), bereaved families had no place/space and no tangible objects to commemorate the deceased.
30As Faust finds in her study of the American Civil war, in dealing with their “losses”, some “effort” was required on the bereaved families’ side in “[m]aking a death real, feeling and accepting its certainty.” 45It often involved simultaneously physical and psychological action; particularly, bereaved families “sought material evidence” to convince themselves to accept the “unfathomable and intolerable news” of deaths. Physical, visible, and tangible evidence helped to “make loss real” and “render death palpable”, and became “irrefutable evidence” that served as “foundation for emotional acceptance of loss”.46
31In addition, the “creation of visible symbols of grief” was also needed, to allow the bereaved to “rehearse and enact the new roles” they now occupied in postwar society.47 To wives, parents, children, and siblings, customs of mourning such as funerals, “a formal period of bereavement”, and mourning dress are particularly significant as these are symbols that defined “new identities—widows, orphans, the childless—that now defined their lives.” More importantly, these symbols enabled the bereaved families to draw expectations to a close, as they represented “hope and anticipation of an end to the disruption of loss.”48 Without physical evidences—such as the remains—bereaved families had to find other means to accept the death. As the following sections will show, the invention of physical memento became the common means of commemoration by bereaved families in Taiwan.
32For example, “hair and nail” of an individual, taken before he left for the war or brought back from the battlefields by his surviving comrades after he died, were commonly regarded by bereaved families as the only physical evidence—of the life and death of a deceased loved one—used in family commemorations. In the aforementioned bereaved family of Mr. Li Lincai, it was reported that while waiting for Li’s return, Li’s mother “preserved every item related to Li well, kept them away from being stained or damaged, treated them as life itself.”49 However, seven years after Li’s family first heard of the news of his execution, Li’s surviving comrades (released Taiwanese war criminals) brought back Li’s “hairs, nails, and savings account book”, together with a farewell letter written by Li before his execution and a blood-stained cloth Li wore at his execution, to Li’s family in Taiwan. Having seen these items, Li’s mother suddenly collapsed and started crying, as her “seven years of dreaming Li’s return shattered like a glass tossed on the ground.”50 Li’s mother then treated every item as her “treasures”, including “an urn containing (Li’s) remains sent by the Japanese authorities, the silk cloth (wrapping the urn), the blood-stained cloth, (Li’s) last words (in the farewell latter), all cherished.”51
33While Li’s mother’s response was heart-wrenching, it also demonstrated that to Li’s family, every item representing Li’s “life and death” had been regarded as memento to commemorate Li. And more importantly, as Faust points out, these “material evidence” which served to “embody” and “render death palpable”,52 allowed the bereaved family to “realize” and accept the death of the loved ones.
34To the Taiwanese bereaved families, the personal items discussed above indeed served as mementos—physical evidence of a deceased loved one—in family commemorations. However, in comparison, these items failed to serve the public and social function that was needed in commemorations. As in post-WWI Britain, bereaved families adopted other items that were invested with “public acknowledgement” from a third party as a memento.
35Neil Hanson found that bereaved families considered several items as mementos after the war. First, the next of kin of a deceased soldier received a bronze medallion (a memorial plaque, 4 and 3/4 inches in diameter) issued by the government, on which the name of the deceased was engraved along with the image of Britannia and a lion and circled by words of “he died for freedom and honour”. Commonly known later as the “Dead Man’s Penny”,53 many bereaved families in Britain considered this bronze medallion crucial in family commemorations; some built a shrine around it at home.54 In addition, bereaved families received a letter known as the “King’s Message”, with a facsimile signature of King George V, and a commemorative scroll with the name of the individual deceased soldier.55
36To the bereaved families in Britain, these items were considered important not simply because they were issued by the government or signed by the head of the state. Items such as the “Dead Man’s Penny” were regarded as important mementos of the deceased loved ones because they provided publicly acknowledged evidence in commemoration. Having been handled by a third party, the “Dead Man’s Penny” or the commemorative scroll meant that the commemoration—and the knowledge of it—of an individual war dead was not limited to the bereaved families. With a third party involved in making and distributing such memento, the commemoration of an individual war dead became a public and social matter. To the bereaved families, in what Winter described “a fight against forgetting”, it was important that their deceased loved ones would be remembered after they themselves passed away. While public ceremonies or memorials also served such public function of commemoration, physical evidence such as mementos from a third party provided a concrete guarantee to the bereaved families that the death of their loved ones was publicly acknowledged and thereby would be remembered without interruption.
37Memento such as the “Dead Man’s Penny” and the commemorative scroll from post-WWI Britain demonstrated that bereaved families needed physical pieces of evidence to serve the much-needed public and social function of commemoration. Notably, some Taiwanese veterans pointed out the significance of mementos to bereaved families in Taiwan. For example, in 2000, several surviving members of the Takasago Giyutai proposed to find and identify military name tags collected from battlefields and distribute them to bereaved families, hoping this would bring the much needed “closure” to bereaved families of their deceased comrades.56
38In post-WWII Taiwan, however, because the ROC government did not commemorate or pay tribute to the death of Taiwanese who served and fought for Japan in WWII, the ROC state has not produced anything that could be regarded as a memento. It was against this perennial lack of such memento that the aforementioned Takasago Giyutai veterans proposed in 2000, more than half a century after the war ended, to find military name tags collected from battlefields as mementos. And more importantly, for the bereaved families in Taiwan, the continuing lack of memento meant that they could not find ways to properly fulfill the public and social function of commemorating several decades after the death of their loved ones in WWII.
39The situation changed, unexpectedly, in 1977 when a document from Japan reached many bereaved families in Taiwan. It was a written notice from the Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo, Japan, informing the Taiwanese bereaved families the “combined enshrinement” of their deceased loved ones. For example, the aforementioned Ms. Peng Man-mei recalled that she heard nothing about her husband after the war, and only learned about the death of her husband when she received the notice issued by the Yasukuni Shrine in 1977.57 The family of Mr. Zhang Jinbo (張金波), who served as a gun-zoku during the war, also received the notice issued in 1977, with the following content:
Army gun-zoku Zhang Jinbo the Spirit 3663
On 17th of October, Showa (昭和) 35 (1960), at this Shrine a ritual of combined enshrinement was performed at the main temple
This serves to notify your honorable bereaved family
On 10th of June, Showa 52 (1977), Chief priest of Yasukuni Shrine
40The significance of this notice, as a piece of physical evidence and memento in commemoration, to the Taiwanese bereaved families will be discussed shortly. However, it is important to first review the process that led to the issuance of the notice in 1977. According to the notice received by bereaved families in Taiwan, the Yasukuni Shrine conducted the ritual of “combined enshrinement”—of the Taiwanese who supposedly died in service of the Japanese nation—first in 1960 (Showa 35) and again in 1965 (Showa 40). But notably, at the time, the Yasukuni Shrine did not contact or inform the Taiwanese bereaved families, and the “combined enshrinement” of the Taiwanese dead was not widely known to the bereaved families in Taiwan. This act, however, began to attract attention from the Taiwanese bereaved families in the 1970s. In 1975, some Taiwanese bereaved families began to organize to seek war compensation from the Japanese government, with the support of some activists and volunteer groups in Japan.58 In order to make such demand, bereaved families in Taiwan needed written record of the death and service of their deceased loved ones. It was at this point that some of them turned to the Yasukuni Shrine, as they knew of the “combined enshrinement” conducted in the 1960s and believed that records and documentation of the death of Taiwanese servicemen could be obtained from the Yasukuni Shrine to legitimate their demand for compensation as bereaved families. Upon receiving such inquiry and request from the Taiwanese bereaved families, the Yasukuni Shrine responded rather positively. Subsequently, in 1977, many bereaved families of Taiwanese war dead received a notice of “combined enshrinement” from the Yasukuni Shrine.59
41But after the notice of “combined enshrinement” was issued and subsequently distributed to the Taiwanese bereaved families, it did not work out as the latter had hoped for. The Japanese government simply disregarded such documentation as the notice issued by the Yasukuni Shrine and continued to deny its responsibility for the service provided by the Taiwanese during WWII, and thereby refused to play any role in offering veterans’ benefit to the surviving Taiwanese soldiers and gun-zoku any or compensation to the Taiwanese bereaved families. In other words, the notice from the Yasukuni Shrine did not carry the legal-binding effect expected and thereby did not bring any tangible, pragmatic, or immediate benefit to the Taiwanese bereaved families.
42However, the notice, as a piece of physical evidence, was given other meanings by bereaved families in Taiwan. With the name (and the military rank) of each individual deceased Taiwanese written on it, and the seal of the Yasukuni Shrine as well as the signature of the shrine official attached, the notice of “combined enshrinement” unexpectedly established a connection between the individual deceased Taiwanese, his bereaved family, and the Yasukuni Shrine as a third party. And this connection made the notice a memento that served the much-needed public and social function in commemoration, as testified by many Taiwanese bereaved families. Many Taiwanese bereaved families kept the notice of the Yasukuni Shrine; and often mentioned the notice when talking about the loss of their loved ones.
43A bereaved family, also by the surname Zhang from southern Taiwan,60 best illustrated the significance of this notice to the Taiwanese bereaved families. As shown in Photograph 1, the notice the Zhangs received was dated in 1977 (the same year as the aforementioned Zhang Jinbo); however, the year of “combined enshrinement” was specified on the notice as 1965 (Showa 40, five years later than the aforementioned Zhang Jinbo). In the Zhang family ancestral hall in southern Taiwan, the notice from the Yasukuni Shrine was framed and placed in the middle of the altar, just below the plaque dedicated to all the Zhang ancestors. It showed that to a bereaved family like the Zhangs in southern Taiwan, the notice from Yasukuni Shrine was conspicuously regarded as a memento, which was placed in the context of family as highly as the ancestors’ plaque, to commemorate the deceased family member.
Figure 1: Ancestral altar of the Zhang family, with the notice of “combined enshrinement” from the Yasukuni Shrine framed and placed at the bottom61

44Why did a notice from Yasukuni Shrine matter so much to the bereaved families in Taiwan? From a nationalistic perspective, it is easy to conclude that bereaved families in Taiwan continued to feel attached, if not loyal, to the Japanese nation-state decades after the colonial rule ended. But if we look beyond this nationalistic perspective, which by itself is problematic, the notice from Yasukuni Shrine was significant because it was a piece of paper from a third party. As discussed earlier, in terms of physical evidence from the dead, bereaved families in Taiwan relied mostly on personal items left behind by the deceased in commemorations; the most notable ones were “hair and nail” and clothes. While these pieces of physical evidence established the connection between the deceased and the bereaved families, they did not provide the “public acknowledgement” that other physical evidence such as the aforementioned “Dead Man’s Penny” often provided in post-WWI Britain. Thereby, the notice of Yasukuni Shrine, which originated from a third party, became one of the very rare physical evidence that upheld the “public acknowledgement” needed in commemoration. If we juxtapose the notice from Yasukuni Shrine with “hair and nail” as physical evidence of the dead, it is clear that the former served public function while the latter served private function in commemorating the dead.
45From the perspective of “memento”, Taiwanese bereaved families kept and cherished the Yasukuni Shrine notice not because of the “enshrinement” or “recognition” of their loved ones by the Shrine. To these families, the notice did not symbolize the Yasukuni Shrine (or for that matter, the nationalistic ideology and identity it represented); instead, the notice was merely a physical item to commemorate the lost family member. As public discourse in postwar Taiwan has generally and continuously paid little if any attention to the Taiwanese wartime experiences, bereaved families in Taiwan never received any documentation or material evidence—such as the aforementioned “Dead Man’s Penny”, the commemorative scroll, or the “King’s Message”—to confirm the death of their loved ones. Therefore, the notice of “combined enshrinement” of the Yasukuni Shrine in the 1970s became the only material evidence connected to the lost family member that many Taiwanese bereaved families obtained after the war.
46And in comparison to the aforementioned “hairs and nails”, the notice of the Yasukuni Shrine was given an extra meaning, as it was individually identified and identifiable, with the name of the dead printed on it. This made the notice comparable to the “Dead Man’s Penny” and the commemorative scroll cherished by the bereaved in post-WWI Britain, as a memento that was visible and tangible so that the bereaved could use it to commemorate the lost family member and, probably more importantly in the “fight against forgetting”, to ensure the lost family member would be remembered ever after.
47Physical memento, or what Hanson calls “coinage of remembrance,”62 is critical in war commemoration. Particularly to those bereaved families who never retrieve the remains from the battlefields or never identify the final resting place of the lost loved ones, a memento that allowed and enabled them to commemorate the lost family members became more significant. As in the example of the notice issued by the Yasukuni Shrine, this was commonly found among many Taiwanese bereaved families.
Pilgrimage
48Since the late 1970s, bereaved families in Taiwan undertook another act of civil commemoration. It was an act related to, but not directly resulted from, the aforementioned “combined enshrinement” of the Taiwanese war dead by the Yasukuni Shrine in the 1960s. First in 1979, a group of Taiwanese bereaved families took a trip to Japan and made a visit to the Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo. This act was similar to those civil rituals Taiwanese bereaved families participated at various local temples in the 1950s, as it also entailed rituals to “console the spirit”. However, it was a new act of civil commemoration that was fundamentally different on two aspects. First, the bereaved families themselves initiated it; and secondly, it took the form of pilgrimage, as the bereaved families travelled from Taiwan to visit to a public place that was connected to the deceased loved ones.
49Similar action by the bereaved families is commonly found in other postwar societies, most notably in the U.K. after WWI. During WWI, many British soldiers who died in France (the “Western Front”) were buried on the battlefields, often with a makeshift marker identifying the burial grounds; and to make the situation more difficult, most of the makeshift markers were subsequently destroyed or displaced in the ensuing war. Therefore, most of these deceased soldiers never had their remains retrieved or returned home. To the bereaved families, as Hanson points out, “Even those who knew the last resting place of their loved ones faced difficulties and restrictions in commemorating them or visiting their grave.”63 The situation was the same for almost all bereaved families in Taiwan. Hanson further points out, many bereaved families in the U.K. subsequently “made a pilgrimage to the battlefields,” hoping to find “an untended grave in a forgotten corner,” the “last resting place” of the lost loved ones.64 Having been able “to walk the battlefield” where the loved ones had fallen, the bereaved finally were able to bid “farewell”,65 as the pilgrimage also served what Faust describes, to “render death palpable” and to make the loss of loved ones “real”.66
50A given space meant nothing to the bereaved families until a personal or personalized connection was made between it and the deceased loved ones. Plains and fields across France were just plains and fields until they were identified as the place where many British soldiers were killed. This connection was made only after a given plain or field in France was identified, by a third party such as a state authority or surviving soldiers, with the death of a particular British soldier; and thereby to the bereaved families of this particular soldier, this given plain or field in France became personal and the site of pilgrimage in commemoration of the deceased loved one.
51Similarly, making a pilgrimage to the battlefields was an act considered meaningful to bereaved families in Taiwan. As late as the year 2000, some bereaved families of the Takasago Giyutai continued to express their intention to visit battlefields where their loved ones had fallen.67 However, few if any Taiwanese bereaved families ever made the pilgrimage to overseas battlefields, due to various constraints. But an alternative site in Japan emerged in the late 1970s as a destination of pilgrimage by some Taiwanese bereaved families.
52As reported by Motoi Saesato, a group of bereaved families from Taiwan organized the first “pilgrimage group” (canbai tuan 參拜團) and visited the Yasukuni Shrine in April 1979; a second group followed in October.68 In addition, during the annual grand festival (reidaisai 例大祭) of the Yasukuni Shrine in April 1980, Taiwanese bereaved families organized another pilgrimage group and visited the Shrine; during the visit, the group gave a performance of “songs and dances of the Takasago people”—while performers holding the Japanese national flag in hands to emphasize the enshrined Taiwanese as “former Japanese soldiers”—at the “dedication stage” (hōnōdai 奉納臺) inside the shrine.69
53Some may consider, and even condemn, the visit by Taiwanese bereaved families to the Yasukuni Shrine as a manifestation of the “pro-Japanese” or simply “colonial” mentality and identity; but this view, clearly defined and confined by the highly political and nationalistic “frame of war” which became hegemonic in postwar East Asian societies,70 fails to take the historical context into account and thereby fails to understand the meaning of such a visit.
54From a comparative perspective, pilgrimages undertaken by British bereaved families after WWI help to better understand the meaning of Taiwanese bereaved families’ visit to the Yasukuni Shrine. According to its own record, the Yasukuni Shrine undertook the act of “combined enshrinement” of Taiwanese war dead in 1960 (Showa 35). However, to the Taiwanese bereaved families, the act itself did not create any connection between the Yasukuni Shrine and their deceased loved ones; the Yasukuni Shrine remained just a remote and unfamiliar site for many years after the “combined enshrinement”. But in 1977, with no governmental involvement from either Japan or ROC, the Yasukuni Shrine issued and sent the notice of “combined enshrinement” to bereaved families in Taiwan. To the bereaved families who received the notice, on which the name of their deceased loved one was specified, this piece of paper and the act of notification suddenly and immediately established a connection between those Taiwanese war dead and the Yasukuni Shrine. From then on, the Yasukuni Shrine became a site of commemoration for many Taiwanese bereaved families.
55The timing of the visit, which only occurred after 1977, by Taiwanese bereaved families to the Yasukuni Shrine showed that the Shrine itself—and the Shinto belief as well as the Japanese nationalistic ideology it embodies—did not matter to the Taiwanese bereaved families. Instead, such a visit represented a way of commemorating the deceased loved ones at a site that was considered to be connected—or rather, made to be connected only since 1977—to the Taiwanese war dead.
56As a space related to war, the Yasukuni Shrine was fundamentally different from the battlefields in France; but as a (postwar) site of commemoration for the bereaved families, they were in fact similar to each other. To the bereaved families in Taiwan, a visit to the Yasukuni Shrine was unique on several aspects. First, at the time (late 1970s to early 1980s), the Yasukuni Shrine was the only public space that was identified with the Taiwanese war dead. Secondly, due to various reasons,71 battlefields in the Pacific and Southeast Asia where many Taiwanese died during the war were hardly accessible to the Taiwanese bereaved families. In comparison, the Yasukuni Shrine was the most accessible foreign site related to the Taiwanese war dead. Similar to the visit by British bereaved families to battlefields in France, going abroad to the Yasukuni Shrine provided the Taiwanese bereaved families an opportunity to undergo personal “experiences”—which similarly took place in a foreign soil—related to the death of their loved ones. Such experiences then enabled the bereaved families to “make loss real by rendering it visible and tangible”72 and, more importantly, in a public space to serve the social function of commemoration. As both a public site of commemoration and a foreign destination, the Yasukuni Shrine thereby became the perfect and the only choice of destination for a pilgrimage for bereaved families in Taiwan for many years during the 1970s and 1980s.
57Since the 1980s, another destination emerged and attracted many Taiwanese bereaved families to pay visit there on a regular basis; it is Jihua Temple (Jihua gong 濟化宮) in Xinzhu (新竹) county, Taiwan. This Taoist temple, which was set up in 1961 by local residents (mostly working in mining industry at the time) to worship Guandi—the deified Chinese historical figure from the period of the Three Kingdoms73—was obviously independent from the Yasukuni Shrine and not set up to commemorate those Taiwanese who died in WWII. However, the “combined enshrinement” by the Yasukuni Shrine, the notification to Taiwanese bereaved families, and subsequent visit by Taiwanese bereaved families to the Yasukuni Shrine throughout the 1970s created a new context in which the Jihua Temple re-defined itself and brought new significance to bereaved families in Taiwan since the 1980s. According to a study by Po-zong Chen,74 in 1982 Jihua Temple unilaterally claimed that it had obtained the “List of Enshrined Deities” from the Yasukuni Shrine, and re-enshrined the Taiwanese war dead at its own site. However, the Yasukuni Shrine subsequently denied any connection or authorization to Jihua Temple; other concerned parties in Taiwan then accused Jihua Temple of fabricating the List and debunked Jihua Temple’s claim of enshrining the Taiwanese war dead. As a result, Jihua Temple did not attract much attention from the Taiwanese bereaved families for many years.
58But in the 1990s, Jihau Temple managed to provide verified documentation of individual Taiwanese war dead, based on information identical to Yasukuni’s “List of Enshrined (Taiwanese) Deities” (supposedly obtained from un-official sources), as “proof of death” to some bereaved families in Taiwan. Subsequently, these families used such documentation to file for and succeeded in claiming payment—as authorized by laws concerning the “special condolence money to the bereaved families of Taiwanese war dead” (Taiwan jumin zhenwang zhe yizu zhifu teding diao wei jin 臺灣居民陣亡者遺族支付特定弔慰金) adopted by the Japanese Diet between 1987-1988—from the Japanese government. As Chen points out, “the temple thus turned around public opinion and has been recognized ever since as a significant venue for comrade-in-arms and bereaved families in commemorating the war dead”.75 As late as 2019, many bereaved families continued to make pilgrimage from different corners in Taiwan to Jihua Temple and make offering there to commemorate their deceased loved ones.76
59And in recent years, at last, some Taiwanese bereaved families began to make visits to battlefields and conducted commemorations there. I shall discuss this in the concluding section of this article.
Conclusion: Bereaved Families and Commemorating World War II in Taiwan
60I would like to end this chapter with a story from 2015, about an eighty-year-old aboriginal woman in Taidong, to illustrate once again the significance of (the lack of) commemoration of the war dead from WWII to the bereaved families in contemporary Taiwan. A Taiwanese anthropologist from Taidong, who adopted the aboriginal name Futuru,77 undertook a private war commemoration project, by the name of Wings for Takasago Giyutai, in 2013.78 He took a small group of aboriginal artists and assistants to Papua New Guinea and visited the battlefields where hundreds of Taiwanese aboriginal men had fought and died as members of the Takasago Giyutai. Most importantly, Futuru and his team conducted a commemoration service, according to the Taiwanese aboriginal practice of “consoling the spirit and bringing the soul home” (weiling zhaohun 慰靈招魂), on the battlefields. Before they left, they collected some rocks and sand from the battlefields and took them back to Taidong. In his account of the project, Futuru described what happened about one week after the team returned to Taidong: a vuvu (grandmother in Paiwan language) more than eighty-year-old, showed up, with a framed photo of a young man dressed in military uniform. She started weeping in front of rocks and sand brought back from battlefields in Papua New Guinea, and said:
My older brother, when you left for the war, Mother and I went to see you off. You told me before you left, ‘when I return I will buy you sketch books and pencils’. But, I have waited for you for more than seventy years.
61Futuru explained that the older brother of vuvu was named Alucangalj Demalaljat, a noble member of the Paiwan tribe, who joined the Takasago Giyutai in 1943 and went to Papua New Guinea to fight in the war but never returned. From observing what the vuvu did, Futuru concluded:
Seventy years later, Alucangalj Demalaljat returned home. He was now buried together with his deceased family members in the family cemetery; finally, he became a part of the ancestral spirit.
62More than seventy years after the end of World War II, the bereaved families in Taiwan continue to fight an unfinished war in commemorating their deceased loved ones.
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Wang Horng-luen 汪宏倫, 2014, “Dongya de zhanzheng zhikuang yu guozu wenti: dui Riben, Zhongguo, Taiwan de kaocha” 東亞的戰爭之框與國族問題: 對日本,中國,台灣的考察 [Frame of war and issue of nationalism in East Asia: an investigation of Japan, China, and Taiwan], in Wang Horng-luen汪宏倫 (ed.), Zhanzheng yu shehui: lilun, lishi, zhuti jingyan 戰爭與社會: 理論,歷史,主體經驗 [War and society: theories, history, and subject experiences], Lianjing chubanshe, Taipei, p. 157-225, 648 p.
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Zhu Changqi Lingshiguan 駐長崎領事館 [The Consulate in Nagasaki], 27 February 1957, “Wei chengbao Jiang Qiguan yigu zhuidaoshi qingxingyou” 為呈報江麒官遺骨追悼式情形由 [Report on the memorial service of Jiang Qiguan], (ROC’s) Ministry of Foreign Affairs archives, 11-29-01-18-016, p. 107-108
Notes de bas de page
1 Based on the list of destinations, compiled from four different oral history projects carried out between 1995 and 1997, in Tang & Chen (eds.), 2001, p. 254-260.
2 Tang & Chen (eds.), 2001, p. 35.
3 Cai Jintang, 2006, p. 121.
4 Brook, 2005, p. 6.
5 For a detailed study, see Lan, 2013, p. 801-852.
6 Winter, 2006, p. 12.
7 So far there has been no systematic study of bereaved families in Taiwan; only a handful of scholarly works and oral history touched upon this issue. For example, see Chen, 2019, p. 165-198; Li, 2005; Motoi, 1986.
8 Bi Yuan, 1954.
9 It can be confirmed that in the early 1950s, several groups of convicted Taiwanese war criminals serving in Manus Island were released and returned to Taiwan. Notably, they were commonly referred to as “prisoners of war” in Taiwan’s news reports. See Lan, 2014.
10 Motoi, 1986, p. 243.
11 Faust, 2008, p. 267.
12 Ibid., p. 165.
13 Ibid., p.142-143.
14 Ibid., p.143.
15 Ibid., p. xiv-xv.
16 Ibid., p. 267.
17 Li, 2005, p. 116-117.
18 Ibid. p. 122-123.
19 Faust, 2008, p. 267
20 Ibid., p. 144.
21 Ibid., p. 145.
22 Scott, 1990, p. xi.
23 Lianhe Bao, 12 April 1952.
24 Ibid.
25 Lianhe Bao, 17 May 1956.
26 Scott, 1990, p. xii.
27 Lianhe Bao, 12 April 1952.
28 Lianhe Bao, 17 May 1956.
29 Lianhe Bao, 12 April 1952.
30 Lianhe Bao, 17 May 1956. While the exact year of birth was not confirmed, it is common to celebrate Buddha’s birth in April or May.
31 Faust, 2008, p. xiv.
32 It should be noted that retrieving the remains from battlefields abroad was no easy task for the Japanese; see the account of a Japanese veteran collecting “bones” from Papua New Guinea decades after the war ended in Happell, 2008.
33 Lianhe Bao, 10 July 1983. Miyama was the head of the volunteer association (Hoshi kai 奉仕會) of the Chidorigafuchi National Cemetery; Huang was the leader of a group of Taiwanese bereaved families. For an introduction of the Chidorigafuchi National Cemetery, see its website, URL: https://www.env.go.jp/garden/chidorigafuchi/english/index.html (accessed on 2020/07/25).
34 Poyer & Tsai, 2018, p. 50. Takasago Giyutai was often translated as “Takasago Volunteers”; however, this translation is misleading. The original meaning of “giyutai” and the actual recruitment were not necessarily voluntary. Thereby, this paper will adopt the original term “giyutai”.
35 Lianhe Bao, 18 December 2000 (a).
36 Lianhe Bao, 18 December 2000 (b).
37 Motoi, 1986, p. 260.
38 Ibid., p. 261.
39 Ts’ai, 1997, p. 452.
40 Lianhe Bao, 3 May 1956.
41 Ibid.
42 Lianhe Bao, 27 October 1973.
43 Waijiao Bu, 1956, p.65.
44 Zhu Changqi Lingshiguan, 1957, p.107-108.
45 Faust, 2008, p.145.
46 Ibid., p.146.
47 Ibid., p.146-147.
48 Ibid., p.147-149, 170.
49 Li, 2005, p. 125-126.
50 Ibid., p. 123.
51 Ibid., p. 122-123.
52 Faust, 2008, p. 146.
53 Hanson, 2007, p. 232
54 Ibid., p. 232
55 Ibid., p. 233. Additional information can be found at the Imperial War Museum website, “Next of Kin Memorial Plaque, Scroll and King’s Message”, URL: https://www.iwm.org.uk/history/first-world-war-next-of-kin-plaque (accessed on 2020/07/20).
56 Lianhe Bao, 18 December 2000 (b).
57 Motoi, 1986, p. 243.
58 Chen, 2019, p. 176 and 185.
59 It was reported that the notice was issued by the Yasukuni Shrine, but distributed to bereaved families in Taiwan indirectly through various channels and organizations. See Chung, Chen & Shen, 2015, p. 70.
60 Due to concern of privacy, the full name is not disclosed here.
61 The author would like to express sincere gratitude to Mr. Zhang Jingwei for providing the information and photographs. Mr. Zhang conducted fieldwork in southern Taiwan and visited the Zhang family ancestral hall in 2010. For consideration of privacy, the name of the deceased was not shown in the photograph and the location of the Zhang family ancestral hall was kept confidential.
62 Hanson, 2007, p. 234.
63 Ibid., p. 232.
64 Ibid., p. 234.
65 Ibid., p. 231.
66 Faust, 2008, p. 146.
67 Lianhe Bao, 18 December 2000 (a).
68 Motoi, 1986, p. 185.
69 Ibid., p. 209.
70 The “frame of war” was a concept proposed in Butler, 2009. For further discussion and its relevance to East Asia, see Wang, 2014.
71 It was contributed by the lack of government assistance and diplomatic relations, restriction on foreign travel, and lack of information.
72 Faust, 2008, p. 146
73 For further studies of the meaning of Guandi worship and its historical change, see Duara, 1988.
74 Chen, 2019, p. 165-198.
75 Ibid., p. 166-167 & 185-186.
76 Ibid., p. 189-193.
77 His Chinese name is Cai Zhengliang (蔡政良). He is currently an Associate Professor at National Taitung University.
78 For further information, see Cai Zhengliang, 2011, and Futuru, 2013. A brief introduction of the documentary Wings for Takasago Giyutai is available at URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NI7GNR-np8w (accessed on 2020/07/15).
Auteur
-
Shi-chi Mike Lan
National Chengchi University

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