‘Life was hell’: remembering the plight of a lost generation of Taiwan’s Japanese
Hundreds of thousands of Japanese were forced to leave the island after the second world war but many never forgot their adopted homeland
In February, the Tainan city government released a documentary film titled Tainan Stories about Japanese who lived in Taiwan during its 50-year colonial rule and who were repatriated to Japan after the second world war. The film was also screened in Osaka in April.
More than 300,000 eventually returned to Japan in the years after 1945. An estimated 80,000 who were born in Taiwan during the occupation became known as wansheng (Taiwan-born), or wansei in Japanese.
“As time passes and wansheng numbers decline, we’re afraid they will one day be forgotten,” said Lin Chien-hsien, deputy head of Tainan’s Department of Information and International Relations.
Lin also hopes the film will attract visitors interested in the island’s Japanese history – and not just visitors from Japan. The plight of the wansheng has long attracted attention from Taiwanese artists, writers, and particularly filmmakers.
Past cinematic productions include Hou Hsiao-hsien’s 1989 art-house masterpiece City of Sadness, Wei Te-sheng’s 2008 box office phenomenon Cape. No. 7, as well as the 2015 documentary Wansei Back Home directed by Huang Ming-cheng.
The story of the wansheng began in 1909, when the Japanese government began relocating large numbers of Japanese to Taiwan under a systematic migration policy.
