National Dong Hwa University on Wednesday opened an exhibit of the personal collection of the late Cheng Teng-shan’s (程登山) research of the Takasago Volunteers, reviving memories for many Aborigine visitors regarding those “dark days.”
Hualien County Sioulin Township’s (秀林) Aborigine Village Interaction Committee Director Tang Ching-hsia (湯慶夏) said his father had told him that many men — including Tang’s father — from the village were taken away by the Japanese during World War II.
We did not know they were going to serve in the Takasago unit, Tang said.
The “Takasago volunteers” refer to Taiwanese Aborigines drafted by the Japanese colonial government in the 1940s to serve in the Imperial Army in Southeast Asia.
While his father had returned, many did not and it was a sore subject for elders in the family and the village, Tang said.
Cheng,a Truku, had been dean of Heping Elementary School and dedicated his life to researching the issue, hoping to obtain from Japan compensation for the families of the deceased.
Tang remembers Cheng visiting every household in his village, asking if any members of the family had been drafted by the Imperial Japanese and, if they said they had been, making meticulous records of their names and history.
“We are truly thankful to Cheng and his campaign for our rights,” Tang said, adding that it was due to Cheng and many others like him that the Japanese government had begun to pay compensation to the survivors or their families through the Red Cross Society.
The university has blurred certain pictures to respect the privacy and right of personal information for some individuals, officials 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:
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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