Remembrance of warriors past
Japanese tourists have been visiting Wulai for decades. With its cherry blossoms and hot springs, this mountain resort south of Taipei has always felt a little like Japan. But earlier this month, Japanese tourists had a new attraction to visit - a small memorial park honouring indigenous Taiwanese who died fighting for the Japanese army during the second world war.
Hundreds of thousands of Taiwanese, including many aboriginal people, volunteered or were drafted by the Japanese. They were sent to the front lines to fight Americans and Australians in Southeast Asia during the final, bloody years of the war in the Pacific.
In the first few decades of Japan's colonial rule of Taiwan, members of the Atayal tribe - who live at high altitudes deep in Taiwan's rugged high country - bitterly resisted the extension of Japanese rule into their traditional lands. But by the 1940s, the Atayal - especially those in Wulai, just 20km from Taipei - had received a Japanese education, spoke Japanese and thought of themselves as Japanese subjects. That is why some of the few surviving veterans and their descendants welcomed the memorial, built largely with funds raised in Japan.
But the park infuriated Chinese nationalists in Taiwan - and it's not hard to see why. Last Friday, eight or nine Japanese flags left over from the opening ceremony were still flying over it. The flags bore commendations calling the indigenous fighters 'volunteers who paid their country [Japan] back with bravery'. A memorial stela reads: 'May their souls rest in their homeland'.
Other stones are inscribed with the Japanese anthem and a poem in Japanese claiming that the 'souls of the fallen are hoping that the Yamato spirit can be restored'. The Yamato - or Japanese - spirit is a euphemism for Japanese nationalism and pride closely associated with the more unsavoury side of Japan's political right wing.
But the park is on land owned by Taipei county, whose new commissioner is a staunch Chinese nationalist. He ordered it closed and the Japanese flags taken down. He told Japanese tourists at the site that the memorial was an insult to indigenous Taiwanese and a distortion of history. When the visitors argued that they were paying their respects to their war dead, he told them to remember that they were on the territory of the Republic of China's Taiwan province.
But the commissioner's reaction was overly shrill and out of step with the public mood. While many Taiwanese object to the Japanese nationalist tone of the memorial park, they also feel that the once-forgotten veterans of the Pacific war need to be recognised and remembered.
Taiwan has reached a consensus that its dark past must not be forgotten. It is a lesson that its larger neighbours would do well to reflect on.
