Strolling through the quiet narrow laneways and along the hiking trials in and around the postcard-like Taipei County township of Jinguashih today it's hard to imagine that anything untoward could ever have taken place in the sleepy little backwater hamlet.
For WWII history buff, Michael Hurst, however, Jinguashih represents a dark side of the nation's past and one that until recently was little but a footnote in history books.
From November 1942 until the surrender of Imperial Japanese Army in Taiwan in August 1945, the township was home to the infamous Kinkaseki "Hell Camp." Over 1,000 British Commonwealth and Allied troops were interned in the camp at one time or another and all were forced to work in the local copper mines.
The POWs were subject to inhuman treatment, denied the most basic of medical facilities, flogged by their jailers -- some of who were Taiwanese. And many prisoners were, quite literally, worked to death.
Following the surrender of Japan, the surviving POWs were shipped home and the camp's wooden buildings were dismantled piecemeal by the local populace. The only evidence of the once notorious POW camp to survive the looting were several concrete foundations, a half-dozen wall supports and a solitary concrete gatepost.
A visit to the township by Hurst and members of the Canadian Society in late 1996 was to change all this, however, and at the same time prove to be the beginning of an odyssey that would see Hurst traversing the island in search of Taiwan's long forgotten role in WWII.
"People knew all about the Bridge on the River Kwai, but very few knew about Taiwan's POW camps and the suffering endued by the allied prisoners at them," said Hurst. "So, with the help of the Australia New Zealand Business Association and the British Chamber of Commerce we formed the Kinkaseki POW Memorial Association with the goal of honoring the POWs and erecting a plaque at the site of the camp."
A memorial plinth was erected at the site of Kinkaseki in November 1997 and the first memorial service was held that same month. Since this initial service, members of the expat community and many of the ex-POWs and their families now make the pilgrimage to Jinguashih every November to participate in the annual event.
Two months prior to the 1997 service, Hurst set out to thoroughly explore the site of the notorious POW camp. He spent 10 days scratching and digging in the undergrowth at the site of the camp, along the pathways the prisoners used and at the mine entrances.
During this time Hurst unearthed over 100 artifacts, ranging from porcelain coat hooks to medicine vials. The most significant of all his finds were fragments of a white rice bowl bearing the emblem of the Japanese military star. The site of a foreign national didn't go unnoticed by local residents and, whether he liked or not, Hurst and his digging became a bit of a spectacle.
"I was on my hands and knees all day digging and scraping in the ground," he said. "I think people started to refer to me as some kind of Indiana Jones of Taiwan."
While local residents considered Hurst's excavations to be somewhat of an oddity, several of the town's more elderly residents proved to be of great help to Hurst in his search for the past. News of the committee's aims soon spread and it wasn't long before Hurst began receiving phone calls from government agencies, all of which were keen to support the POW project.
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