Pingtung County nonagenarian Yang Tien-fu (楊天富), a Japanese merchant marine veteran, is one of the last living witnesses to the sinking of the Japanese landing craft transport ship Tamatsu Maru during World War II.
The Tamatsu Maru was torpedoed and sank with the loss of 5,000 lives off the coast of the Philippines near Luzon on Aug. 19, 1944.
Historian Nien Chih-cheng (念吉成) said Yang’s story will be included in his latest book about the Pacific War, which has the tentatively titled of Tears of Bashi Channel (巴士海峽之淚).
Photo: Tsai Tsung-hsien, Taipei Times
Yang, 91, recently talked about some of his wartime experiences with the Chinese-language Liberty Times (the Taipei Times’ sister newspaper).
After graduating from a public high school in Checheng Township (車城) at 16, Yang said he took the entrance exam for a merchant marine engineer’s course in Kobe, Japan, without telling his family.
Having passed the exam, he entered the program in April 1943, and after graduation, he was assigned to the cargo ship Osaka Maru, which ran supplies to a Japanese garrison on Saipan Island.
“That was how I got into the Pacific War,” he said.
The Osaka Maru was torpedoed by Allied submarines on May 25, 1944; Yang made it onto a lifeboat with an experienced sailor, Masayuki Tanaka, and six Japanese servicemen.
Although the lifeboat had ample potable water and rations, the six servicemen succumbed to psychological distress and depression, and only Yang and Tanaka survived.
After being rescued, Yang and Tanaka were transported to Samal Island, where he was drafted into a “temporary enlistment” to help with Japanese defenses, he said.
After the island was blockaded by an Allied fleet, most of the food ran out, and the Japanese troops subsisted mainly on stockpiled soybeans and they had to evade Filipino guerrillas, he said.
His knowledge of how to cook green mangoes, green bananas and cassava helped him and many of his comrades survive until they were able to be evacuated to Japan, he said.
He was then assigned as an engineer to the Kibitsu Maru, a merchant ship that had been converted into a military transport bristling with anti-aircraft batteries.
The Kibtitsu Maru left the port of Moji in Kyushu in August 1944 and joined the Tamatsu Maru and other ships in a convoy carrying units of the elite Kwantung Army to the Philippines, he said.
After the flotilla reached the Bashi Channel, Allied submarines torpedoed the Tamatsu Maru and sank it, he said.
“The surface of the sea was covered with the corpses of my comrades. I saw Japanese soldiers holding their rifles shouting ‘Long live the emperor’ as they drowned. Korean soldiers shouted ‘eomeoni,’ their word for ‘mother.’ It was a terrible sight that I cannot forget,” he said.
The Kibitsu Maru was evacuating 500 sick or injured women of “special status” from Manila when it came under incessant air attacks on Aug. 7, 1945, that forced it to flee the Bashi Channel to Siaoliouciou Island (小琉球) off Pingtung.
The attacks were so intense that he was ordered to replace a wounded machine-gun loader and a blast blew his helmet off, he said.
“I took a cooking pot made of copper from the kitchen and put it on my head as a helmet. It was a dangerous battle,” he said.
Years later he ran into Hidetsugu Nakajima, a survivor of the Tamasui Maru, in Pingtung’s Hengchun Township (恆春), he said.
“We shared a very sad history,” he said.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching