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70th anniversary of Japan's WW2 surrender
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Lee Sai-kun (far left, standing) pictured in 1939 when he worked at a police station. Photo: SCMP Pictures

New | Willing recruit: A Taiwanese man makes peace with his father's wartime links with the Japanese army

A military blanket and a badge are reminders of Lee Sheng-li's complex family legacy - and wider divisions on Taiwan and across the strait

It was a secret that retired Taiwanese military school lecturer Lee Sheng-li dared not tell his family before now - and one his wife still cannot fully accept.

In June, Lee revealed to them the role his father played in the second world war - as a willing member of the Imperial Japanese Army. He decided to share it because he is about to give the last of his father's belongings from the war - a military blanket, copper badge, barometer and army pack, among others - to a museum in mainland China.

"I had to tell them now because I am going to say goodbye to my late father's mementos, which I decided to donate to Yunnan Provincial Museum in Kunming soon," Lee said. "I kept the secret because my wife's family hated the Japanese very much."

Although his daughter took the news well, his wife had a more difficult time, and she still views the items as "garbage".

The Lee family has roots that span several sides of the Asian conflict, and to this day, their lives remain deeply influenced by the complex relationship of victim, oppressor and colonised subject.

His father, Lee Sai-kun, was 16 when he was recruited by the Japanese to work at a Tainan police station in Taiwan. Japan had ruled Taiwan since 1895, when the Qing government ceded control of the island after losing the first Sino-Japanese war.

The foreign rulers were not universally accepted - farmers in the mountainous region resisted surrendering their land - but most Taiwanese came to appreciate the changes the Japanese government introduced, he said.

In 1940, when Lee's father turned 20, he joined the ranks of the - Japan's military force comprising men recruited in Korea, which it controlled at the time, and Taiwan as contract workers. A total of 126,750 Taiwanese were hired for non-combatant military service between 1937 and 1945, and 80,433 soldiers were recruited into the imperial army between 1942 and 1945, according to official Japanese figures. The number of mobilised Koreans reached 154,907 by the autumn of 1944.

Many of the Korean recruits were sent to fight in the Kwantung Army in China's northeast, but the Taiwanese were sent to battlefields in Southeast Asia as the colonial government thought they would not be willing to kill mainlanders, according to Professor Ho Szu-shen, a historian at Fu Jen Catholic University in Taipei.

A total of 30,304 Taiwanese were killed in the war, and their names are listed at Tokyo's Yasukuni Shrine. Among them is Lee Teng-chin, the elder brother of former Taiwanese president Lee Teng-hui.

Lee Sai-kun worked as a non-combatant in Taiwan and was sent to Japan for further study in early 1945. He returned a few months later when Japanese Emperor Hirohito announced the end of the war.

Several thousand Japanese, mostly experts in agriculture and industry, stayed on the island, further deepening the locals' ties with the foreign power.

All that changed in 1949, when Chiang Kai-shek's Kuomintang forces lost the Chinese civil war and retreated to Taiwan. Among the war migrants were the parents of Lee Sheng-li's wife. They blamed the Japanese for what had become of their homeland. The imperial army had weakened the Kuomintang forces, they felt, which allowed the Communist Party to expand its foothold, ultimately deciding the outcome of the civil war. Their daughter still carries their anger with her.

"They are the descendents of the prominent Song dynasty [960-1279] Yang warrior family from Zhuji in Zhejiang province. Her grandfather was a famous local Chinese herbal doctor, while her father is a former Kuomintang official," Lee said. "But they lost everything when Japan invaded China - causing the KMT to lose its regime in 1949 - and they had to flee to Taiwan."

After moving to Taiwan, Lee's in-laws found that many Taiwanese viewed the Japanese with admiration, which spurred them to look down on the locals, Lee said. KMT officials, however, were seen as "outsiders" and deeply corrupt. Dislike turned into widespread hatred with the 228 Incident, triggered when an inspector beat a woman selling untaxed cigarettes in Taipei on February 27, 1947.

Over the following weeks, local outrage grew into open revolt and the KMT moved forcefully to suppress the uprising. Estimates of the number killed during the "White Terror" over the four decades that followed vary from 10,000 to 30,000. Lee's father witnessed the brutality of the soldiers.

The chaotic initial period of KMT rule served only to make the colonial era seem more peaceful. "It's a pity the KMT troops sent to take over Taiwan were not disciplined and refused to understand Taiwan's developments, but instead adopted coercive measures when dealing with local people, which provided opportunities for some [of the remaining] Japanese to fish in trouble waters," said Professor Arthur Ding Shu-fan from National Chengchi University in Taiwan.

Lee's father tried to adapt to the KMT's political climate. Lee Sheng-li remembers studying Putonghua as a child with his father. "Hiding secrets was the only way of survival for my father because of his background," Lee said. "He concealed everything he could [from outside people], and threw away his helmet, belt and other Japanese military supplies that he couldn't keep easily."

His mother had never hidden the family's connection to the imperial army from her son. But father and son never spoke of it directly until Lee Sheng-li was in his 40s.

The island's residents continue to hold a complex view of Japanese colonisation. In August, former president Lee Teng-hui dismissed the administration's efforts to mark the 70th anniversary of Japan's defeat, saying it was a show for Beijing's benefit.

"Seventy years ago, Taiwan and Japan were of one country," he was quoted as saying in magazine.

"Taiwanese people at the time were no doubt Japanese subjects and they did what they could to fight for their motherland." But it was simply untrue that Taiwan had joined the mainland's eight-year war of resistance against the Japanese, he said.

Lee Sheng-li views it slightly differently. "As someone born during the Japanese colonial period, my father realised he had been brainwashed. But he started to self-reflect," Lee said. "He found the Japanese had introduced a very fundamental imperialist and militarist brainwashing of all Taiwanese in the 50-year colonial rule, with its impact continuing today."

In 1990, his father, then 70, visited Nanjing in Jiangsu province, the KMT's former capital on the mainland, and Huangshan, or the Yellow Mountains, in Anhui province after the Taiwanese authorities allowed some residents to visit their ancestral hometowns.

He brought back pines from the mountains and planted them in the family backyard, telling his son the trees, which grew by driving their roots into the cracks of cliff faces, had showed him the true nature of the Chinese spirit.

He died in 1996 but left his son a note: "Go to the mainland and promote cross-strait cultural exchanges."

"My father believed that a lack of communication and cultural differences has caused misunderstandings and discrimination between locals and non-locals, which is also the root of today's political conflicts between the KMT and the opposition Democratic Progressive Party and their advocates," Lee said.

"He hoped I would inherit his vision of easing tension between the two parties, as well as the two political regimes across the Taiwan Strait."

 

This article appeared in the South China Morning Post print edition as: Making peace with a father's past
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