Book review: Tales of the miraculous and mundane

Taiwan Through Foreign Eyes is a collection of 18 short stories by 14 authors. Most of the writers are foreign, though some have Taiwanese ancestry. The book’s subtitle, though, needs closer examination. We’re told by the editor, Christopher Logan, that Stories from the Miracle Days refers to the 1990s, a decade that he considers had an allure that’s missing today. But the only reference I could find here was in a story about the last evening in Taiwan of someone who isn’t sure he really wants to leave. He meets someone he hasn’t seen for 15 years who says they last met in the mid-1980s. In addition, nothing about these stories seems to me particularly old-fashioned. It may be true that a dangki, or spirit medium, is today harder to find than in a story about someone who consults one about a stolen gold ring, but for the most part Taiwan appears much as it is today. The only big difference, perhaps, is that Christopher Logan no longer lives here but in the US state of Oregon, where his publishing company, Deep World Publishing, is based. The reality seems to be rather different. Logan says in his Introduction that these stories were meant to be published after his book Culture Taipei! but that this was delayed until 2003. Either way, Taiwan Through Foreign Eyes clearly comes from the same period, but has had to wait 20 years to see the light of day. Logan tells us, for instance, that two of his authors wrote their tales when they were still schoolboys at the Taipei American School, but that they went on to Harvard and Pomona. This volume, in other words, has all the appearance of a collection of stories given a belated unity, and possibly charm, by being set in

By Bradley Winterton

Revamping tradition

Architect Tammy Liu (劉真蓉) recalls being stumped when studying in the Netherlands a teacher asked her to describe Taiwanese culture. No matter how much she pondered, nothing came to mind. “Our education system doesn’t teach us about Taiwanese culture — at least when I was in school,” Liu, 40, tells the Taipei Times. And that culture for Liu is small town Taiwan, with its temple festivals and performance troupes and old streets (老街), with all manner of delicacies and handicrafts. Liu’s experience overseas is common for Taiwanese. Raised in an education system that downplays the nation’s vast and fascinating folk culture or views its association with society’s shadier elements as an embarrassment, the idea that it could in part define Taiwanese identity was avoided. No longer. Today the president appears at Jenn Lann Temple’s Mazu Pilgrimage or the culture minister shows up to the opening of a new building at Tainan’s Nankunshen, because they know that doing so attracts votes at election time and brings in tourist dollars. But greater acceptance among the mandarin class has come at the expense of authenticity. UPDATING TRADITION Daxidaxi (大溪大禧) manages to avoid these pitfalls. The two-week cultural festival, which is curated by Liu and supported by the Dasi Wood Art Ecomuseum (桃園市立大溪木藝生態博物館), is taking place in and around Puji Temple (普濟堂) in Taoyuan’s Dasi Township (大溪) until tomorrow. In addition to parading Guan Gong (關公), the temple’s patron deity and the Chinese god of war and martial arts, around Dasi today and tomorrow, the festival has included music performances that combine temple tunes with rap, exhibitions of photos of temple volunteers and local artisans, as well as an installation on how to make a vow to the god. The festival taps into the emerging interest in old-time Taiwan by updating some traditions so

By Noah Buchan

Trunk call: the comeback of skimpy Speedos

Back in the 1950s, the lifeguards of Bondi Beach, Sydney, were not only charged with rescuing surfers and scanning for sharks. In their role as “beach inspectors” they were also responsible for ensuring that swimsuits conformed to New South Wales state regulations. At least 7.6cm of fabric was required over the thigh, no navels were to be exposed and shoulder straps had to be “sturdy.” One of the best-known beach inspectors was Aubrey Laidlaw, who had already laid down the law when the first bikini debuted on the beach in 1946. By the turn of the 1960s, the “Bikini Wars” were in full swing. Laidlaw and his inspectorate patrolled the beach with tape measures, methodically escorting scantily clad women away. But one morning in 1961, he saw something that astonished even him — men in Speedos. He called the police and had them arrested for indecent exposure. Laidlaw and his tape measure are long gone, but in certain backwards-looking jurisdictions — Britain, America — the Speedo-wearing male remains an object of discrimination and ridicule. No item in the male wardrobe is so exposing. None demands such brazenness, such balls. But neither is any so liberating, or so practical, say truly committed Speedo-wearers. “You have way more freedom in Speedos,” says Luke Day, editor of GQ Style, who has no fewer than 51 pairs “in current circulation,” including a denim pair by Rufskin and a knitted pair by Maria Aristidou, though mostly he prefers plain white. “I like as much exposed skin for tanning as possible. And they’re so much less restrictive than shorts. That’s the whole point of them. That’s why Tom Daley wears them to dive in,” Day says. As Daley himself once explained to Graham Norton, who wondered why his trunks had to be quite so tight: “If you’re spinning around the

By Richard Godwin

Purr-fect pick-me-up

If your idea of the purr-fect day is spending it curled up with convalescent rescue cats and a coffee, then one cafe in Vietnam has you covered. Ngao’s Home Cafe in Hanoi is a loving home for 15 felines, many of whom were abandoned or found injured after being bitten by dogs or suffering serious accidents. “I try to help cats with difficult backgrounds, to heal their physical and mental wounds,” said 24-year-old cafe owner Nguyen Thanh Binh ahead of International Cat Day on Saturday. The cafe has clawed its way up the favorite list of many cat lovers since it opened last month, offering coffee and cuddles but also the chance to give the animals medicine and even engage with them on a deeper level. “When I come to this cafe, apart from playing with the cats, I can hear their stories and empathise with them,” 20-year-old student and customer Le Hoang Yen said. Many cats in Vietnam are cherished pets but others are sold for their meat, which is considered a delicacy in parts of the country. Thieves have been known to steal cats which can then be sold on for consumption. Owner Binh was inspired to start the coffee house, which runs as a non-profit, after spotting cats in cages, and others who had been injured by thieves. “Once me and my friends have the cats, we first bring those who with injuries or medical problems to a vet. Then when they get better, I take them here to the cafe for even better care,” he said as he stroked a fluffy white feline, blind in one eye. He also hopes one or two customers might be tempted to take home more than a coffee. “I will help them find new owners — ones who really love them.”

Hey Bro, there is help

Matiu Brokenshire once threw an axe at his partner in anger. Today, the 45-year-old works with a service credited with stopping hundreds of domestic violence cases in New Zealand, helping other men like him. The 0800 Hey Bro hotline has provided advice to about 2,000 abusive men and linked them to other services to stop them harming their partners. “I started the journey to uncover my own trauma,” said Brokenshire, who also works with New Zealand Police on tackling family violence. “I grew up in a world where this was normal. My mother used to strap me when I was a child and hit me. I was a victim of domestic violence for years,” he said. Brokenshire, who is indigenous Maori and has a son with his former partner, said he struggled with his violent behavior and drug addictions — until he got help eight years ago. “When I met my son’s mum, she was an angry, broken person and in the first three months, I had committed violence against her. Then it became weekly,” he added. Since starting a new chapter, he has joined a growing number of men, some of them ex-abusers, working to stop domestic violence in New Zealand. ‘HORRIFIC’ RECORD New Zealand has long had a progressive reputation and was the first nation to give women the right to vote in 1893. But women’s rights campaigners say sexism, drug and alcohol addictions, poverty and exposure to violence as a child have all contributed to a poor record on domestic violence. Police investigated more than 133,000 family harm cases in 2018, the latest year for which data is available, and were called out to respond to a family violence incident every four minutes. “Domestic violence is one of the biggest problems we have in New Zealand and we know it affects educational outcomes and creates mental health problems,”

By Preeti Kannan

‘Disgusting’ study rating attractiveness of women retracted

A widely criticized peer-reviewed study that measured the attractiveness of women with endometriosis has been retracted from the medical journal Fertility and Sterility. The study, “Attractiveness of women with rectovaginal endometriosis: a case-control study,” was first published in 2013 and has been defended by the authors and the journal in the intervening years despite heavy criticism from doctors, other researchers and people with endometriosis for its ethical concerns and dubious justifications, with one advocate calling the study “heartbreaking” and “disgusting.” The study’s conclusion was: “Women with rectovaginal endometriosis were judged to be more attractive than those in the two control groups. Moreover, they had a leaner silhouette, larger breasts and an earlier coitarche.” Coitarche is the age at first sexual intercourse. Rectovaginal endometriosis is a severe form of the disease in which tissue similar to the lining of the uterus — called endometrium — grows outside the uterus, often attaching to other organs and causing pain, scarring and sometimes infertility. One in 10 women and other people with a uterus of reproductive age have the disease. ETHICAL STUDY? The women taking part in the study had not given their consent to be judged for their attractiveness and did not know this was happening as part of their medical consultations. The study received ethics approval and was publicly funded by the University of Milan school of medicine. The authors asked the women about their sexual history and measured their body mass index, waist-to-hip ratio and breast-to-underbreast ratio. Only Caucasian women were selected for inclusion in the study. Authors have defended the study, saying that knowing if certain phenotypes — or bodily characteristics — were more susceptible to severe endometriosis would be useful. The lead researcher, Paolo Vercellini, an obstetrician and gynecologist at University of Milan and past president of the World Endometriosis Society, said: “Several researchers

By Gabrielle Jackson

Taiwan in Time: The ‘no problem’ doctor

Aug. 10 to Aug. 16 They called him the “No Problem Doctor” (沒關係醫生) because that’s what he always told his patients when they couldn’t pay up. Operating the only clinic in Changhua County’s Pusin Township (埔心) during the 1950s, Hsu Tsai-chih (許再枝) knew that life was difficult in his remote hometown. “They barely had enough to survive, so it was pointless to chase after them for the money,” an 81-year-old Hsu told the United Daily News in 2002. “I just went with the flow, some offered to pay me back years later but I had already forgotten about it.” Sometimes, patients who received Hsu’s help for free felt too ashamed to go see him again, and their conditions worsened. The affable physician reportedly lost his temper whenever he found out, yelling at the patients for neglecting their health. Hsu had no intention of retiring at the age of 81, working tirelessly for another 10 years. He received the Medical Dedication Award (醫療奉獻獎) three years later, his acceptance speech consisting of one sentence: “I’m old, I don’t talk much and I’m not good at speaking.” He died in his home on Aug. 12, 2016. TIRELESS PHYSICIAN There are no biographies on Hsu, except for a picture book published by the Pusin Township Office in 2017. The earliest available article on Hsu ran in the United Daily News in 1999, describing the then-79-year-old as the “only physician in Lotsuo (羅厝) village” who had no intention of retiring. “Over 50 years, Hsu has treated four generations of the same families, and many old patients refuse to see anybody but him,” the report states. “They pleaded with him to continue practicing, and he is happy to do it too.” In response to his children asking him to retire, Hsu said, “It makes me

By Han Cheung

In Southern Taiwan, a Portuguese name for Spanish mackerel?

The Taiwan of yesteryear was dominated in whole or in part by the Dutch, Spanish, Qing Empire and Japanese. But is the Taiwanese name for a popular edible fish derived from the Portuguese language? Cheng Wei-chung (鄭維中), an associate research fellow at Academia Sinica’s Institute of Taiwan History, says yes. The fish in question is the narrow-barred Spanish mackerel, which was listed in early 18th century Qing local gazetteers as Taiwanese specialities alongside milk fish and mullet, according to Cheng’s paper, “Mullet, narrow-barred Spanish mackerel and milkfish: Multiple contextual developments of three certified seafood specilaities in Taiwan, from the Dutch period to the initial years of Qing rule” (烏魚、土魠、虱目魚：多元脈絡下荷治至清領初期臺灣三種特色海產的確立). The native name of the Spanish mackerel was recorded as tutuo (土魠). It’s one of five mackerel species commonly found in Taiwan. TRACING THE NAME Efforts to precisely identify tutuo began in 1906 when Hans Sauter took a large sample of fish varieties from the markets in Takao (today’s Kaohsiung). Sauter, a German entomologist and ichthyologist who had arrived in Japanese-ruled Taiwan the previous year, ended up staying in the colony until his death in 1941. Sauter sent specimens to two leading ichthyologists in the US, David Jordan — later a key figure in the scientific naming of the Formosan landlocked salmon, but better known as the founding president of Stanford University — and Richard Richardson. In 1909, Jordan and Richardson published a catalog of Taiwan’s fish varieties based on Sauter’s specimens. They identified tutuo as Scomberomorus commersoni, noting: “Native name To to. One specimen, 21-inches long from Takao.” Scomberomorus commerson is common in the seas around Southeast Asia, Australia and as far north as Japan. In the south of China, it’s known as majia (馬加魚), but the Dutch called it koningsvis (國王魚, literally “kingfish”) during the 17th century. In the Dutch

By Katy Hui-wen Hung

Highways & Byways: The wetlands of Beimen

I didn’t expect to spend more than three minutes out of my car, yet the sun was so brutal I put on my hat before approaching the seawall. Beimen (北門) is the flattest and most sun-baked part of Tainan. It lacks trees and people. In wintertime, the weather is often delightful. It wasn’t yet mid-morning in the hot season, however, and I felt like a leaf shriveling in the desert. Atop the seawall but facing inland, I could see dozens of the rectangular ponds which account for a significant percentage of Beimen’s “land” area. Some, no doubt, were dug to produce salt by evaporating seawater. In a few, paddlewheel aerators were kicking up spray, but I didn’t notice as much evidence of fish farming as I’d expected. Taiwan is lush and crowded, but the lack of greenery and human activity here bordered on the eerie. Back in the car and moving north on Provincial Highway 17, I passed Nankunshen Daitianfu Temple (南鯤鯓代天府), then turned left. Willing to give my heat endurance another test, I parked at Beimen Important Wetland (北門重要濕地) and set out on foot. The wetland is substantial but spoiled. The Ministry of the Interior’s “Ramsar Citizen” Web site admits only small portions of it are natural wetland, much of its 1,791 hectares being abandoned oyster farms and collapsing salt pans. The trash alongside Jishuei River (急水溪) looked like it’d been dumped there by humans, not carried in by the tide. Building Expressway 61 through the heart of the wetland can’t have been good for local ecosystems. After five sweltering minutes down by the water’s edge, I left, feeling utterly unimpressed. I still had high hopes for Shuangchun Coastal Recreation Area (雙春濱海遊憩區). I’d been before, years ago, and knew I could at least expect some shade. Since my previous visit, the recreation area

By Steven Crook

A Thousand Cuts: inside a chilling documentary on Maria Ressa

“For years now, I’ve been saying that I feel like Alice falling down the rabbit hole, with talking cards all over saying off with my head.” As her life has grown increasingly surreal, the journalist Maria Ressa has gained a newfound sympathy for the dazed girl in Wonderland. In the course of her Zoom interview, she also claims to feel like one of the characters in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, benumbed by a constant stream of media stimulation. She feels like Cassandra as well, doomed to speak truths that fall on deaf ears. And she sometimes feels like Sisyphus, he of the unending boulder-push. These days, she finds it all too fitting to think of her life in grandly literary or mythological terms. In the time since Rodrigo Duterte was elected president of the Philippines in 2016, Ressa has found herself locked in a good-and-evil struggle of Campbellian proportions. As the co-founder and CEO of the Filipino news outlet Rappler, she’s been one of the major bulwarks against his brutal regime, reporting on the extrajudicial killings and aggressive misinformation campaigns in spite of state-sponsored intimidation to the point of open threats. Ramona Diaz’s new documentary A Thousand Cuts captures this unfolding conflict as Duterte ramps up his opposition and files cyber-libel charges against Ressa, one in a handful of lawsuits that could place her in prison for up to an entire century. You’d probably start to see yourself as a tragic hero of Grecian legend, too. As Ressa and Diaz congenially crack each other up via videochat, however, they hardly seem like our final line of defense against the encroaching spread of fascism. The two women share a friendly, warm dynamic that began under more tepid terms back in 2004. Diaz had just completed her debut feature, an Imelda Marcos documentary that led

By Charles Bramesco

Eyeing big China box office, Hollywood bows to censorship: report

The lure of the massive Chinese market has led Hollywood to readily self-censor its films to please Beijing, according to a new report by Pen America, an anti-censorship group. Screenwriters, producers and directors in the huge US film industry are changing scripts, deleting scenes and altering other content, afraid of offending Chinese censors who control the gateway to the country’s 1.4 billion consumers, according to the report released Wednesday. The actions include everything from deleting the Taiwanese flag from Tom Cruise’s bomber jacket in the upcoming Top Gun: Maverick, to removing China as the source of a zombie virus in 2013’s World War Z. But it also means completely avoiding sensitive issues including Tibet, Taiwan, Hong Kong politics, Xinjiang and the portrayal of LGBTQ characters, the report said. Faced with blacklisting and other punitive measures, Hollywood producers are even censoring films not targeting the Chinese market, in order to not impact others planned for Chinese theaters, Pen America says. “Steadily, a new set of mores has taken hold in Hollywood, one in which appeasing Chinese government investors and gatekeepers has simply become a way of doing business,” the report said. LUCRATIVE MARKET Pen is a global organization which speaks out for the protection of freedom of expression for writers and artists worldwide. It says Beijing enforces one of the world’s most restrictive censorship systems, and numerous members of the group’s China arm have been jailed, including Nobel Peace Prize laureate Liu Xiaobo (劉曉波), who died in 2017 while serving an 11 year prison sentence. Censorship is now centralized under the Chinese Communist Party’s Central Propaganda Department, which decides whether a foreign film gets access to what is soon to be the world’s largest movie market. Only a handful of foreign films are released in China each year. The market’s importance is clear. Hollywood films like Avengers: Endgame and Spider-Man: Far

A search for the essence of dance — and life

It is not often to hear someone talk about how much they enjoyed their time in quarantine — but Pichet Klunchun, a Thai dancer/choreographer/artist, has built his career by going against convention and conventional thinking. I caught up with Pichet — who is back in town to perform his latest work, No. 60, this weekend as part of the Taipei Arts Festival — by telephone on Saturday last week, just after he had moved out of his quarantine hotel. Spending 14 days in isolation — even from the other dancer who will be performing with him — was a chance for some quiet reflection, Pichet said. “I really enjoyed it, because in my life I am always in the studio, always practicing,” he said before adding one very large caveat: “But if this was before 2020, I think I would have died — no Internet, no Messenger, nothing.” And this from a man who when he is not choreographing, performing, teaching or running his own theater in Bangkok, has also become a well-known painter. It is a good thing he came through quarantine with a positive outlook, because he and his team face another round of 14 days in quarantine when they return to Bangkok. But first, there are two shows to do for the festival, only the second time — technically — that his company has presented No. 60, which had its world premiere in Japan at TPAM (Performing Arts Meeting in Yokohama) on Feb. 15. It was presented in October last year as a “work-in-progress” at the Esplanade — Theatres on the Bay in Singapore as part of the da:ns festival. While the show is very new, the ideas behind it date back to 2001. “The concept of No. 60 was trying to find a way to understand my dance technique, from

By Diane Baker

Movie review: The Good Daughter

“Why would anyone want to see this film?” A-long (阿龍), one of the subjects of The Good Daughter (阿紫), asks director Wu Yu-ying (吳郁瑩) after watching the documentary. From a commercial standpoint, A-long is right. The documentary lacks drama, especially compared to the tales we read in the news about Vietnamese brides in Taiwan. The characters in the film gossip endlessly about the fate of these women, but for every one that makes the headlines, there are countless more like the titular Azhe (阿紫), who endures an uneventful, hardscrabble life with a disabled garlic farmer in Yunlin County, while sending as much money as she can to her destitute family back home. But it’s this ordinary slice of life format that allows Wu to dig deep and explore the nuances and unspoken subtleties underneath the increasingly common transactional arrangement of Taiwanese men purchasing foreign brides. Six years and two children later, the relationship still seems largely utilitarian, but Azhe and her husband A-long are comfortable with each other to the point of joking about her being deported. While A-long is a kind and decent enough fellow, he only married her at his mother’s insistence. The two often bicker and his relatives are never shy to voice their dislike of Azhe in front of her and her children. A-long knows that Azhe is with him for the money, but he defends her against his mother and brother and refuses their demands that he divorce her. Azhe is resentful that her siblings in Vietnam don’t do enough for their parents. Yet she still asks A-long for money to help her brother fix his house while her own children don’t have enough cash for school activities. However, she admits that her love for them is the only thing that keeps her from running away.

By Han Cheung

China’s assertiveness is becoming a problem for its friends, too

In the regular drumbeat of arrests of alleged Chinese spies, one case last month stood out. It did not involve the US or another rival of China, but Russia, whose security services accused a prominent arctic scientist of selling classified data on technologies for detecting submarines. Meanwhile a court in Kazakhstan in October convicted the Central Asia nation’s preeminent China specialist of espionage, a move widely interpreted at the time as a warning against increased meddling by the superpower next door. Both men maintain their innocence and if China is spying on Russia, Moscow is surely doing the same. Even so, the fact the two cases were made public suggests an more assertive China has become a concern for nations considered its partners, too. Countries such as Russia, Iran and Kazakhstan need to still get the investment, trade and in some cases diplomatic support they want from Beijing, while preserving some economic independence and pursuing foreign policy goals that at times conflict. “These are all fragile relationships,” James Dorsey, senior fellow at the S Rajaratnam School of International Studies at Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University, said of the web of ties between China, Russia and Iran, plus Turkey. “They have been extremely good at finding common ground and managing differences, but it is very opportunistic.” Most of the focus has been on China’s economic partners in the so-called Global West — from the US to Europe to Australasia — as they roll back once enthusiastic engagements amid growing alarm at President Xi Jinping’s (習近平) heavy handed response to COVID-19, including the emergence of so-called wolf-warrior diplomacy, plus Beijing’s crackdown on the pro-democracy movement in Hong Kong. The UK recently reversed a decision to let tech giant Huawei Technologies Co Ltd build parts of the nation’s sensitive 5G networks, and suspended an extradition treaty with Hong Kong. France and

Book review: Not quite Chinese

“Though Chiang was born in Siberia, she displayed the virtues of a traditional Chinese woman,” said then-president Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) following the death of Chiang Fang-liang (蔣方良) in 2004. “She was a good mother and a good wife who always put her family first.” Leaving aside the Confucian morals, there are two striking features about Chen’s statement. Firstly, Chiang Fang-liang was born about as far from Siberia as possible within the former Russian Empire. The only time she ventured east of the Ural mountains was on a train to Vladisvostok. From there, she proceeded by steamer to Shanghai, never to see Russia again. It was April 1937, a few weeks before her 21st birthday. This leads to the second point: For the rest of her life, Chiang Fang-liang lived among Chinese and Taiwanese, almost exclusively speaking Mandarin with the thick Ningbo accent she acquired at Xikou (溪口), the ancestral home of Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石). Having wed his son Chiang Ching-kuo (蔣經國), she was irrevocably committed. The Belarusian Faina Vakhreva had vanished, replaced by the Chinese Chiang Fang-liang. But Chen could not quite bring himself to call her Chinese. Instead, she merely “displayed the virtues” of a Chinese woman. That even Taiwan’s president was clueless about Faina’s background seems surprising. But as Mark O’Neill reveals in China’s Russian Princess: The Silent Wife of Chiang Ching-kuo, Faina was mysterious to all but her family and the select few with whom she associated. In this first English-language account of Faina’s life, O’Neill, a Hong Kong-based writer, integrates primary sources — interviews with Faina’s daughter-in-law, the owners of Taipei’s “Russian” Cafe Astoria and her notorious youngest son, the late Alex Chiang (蔣孝武) — with Chinese-language biographies and memoirs. More arbitrary are the conversations with everyday Taiwanese, which O’Neill relays without indicating why they offer

By James Baron

Shot in translation

Scott Saulters wasn’t sure if his film had just taken one of the two top prizes at a recent film competition. Although Saulters has been in Taiwan for 15 years and is proficient in Mandarin, the award ceremony for the inaugural “Bi Tian Iann” (眯電影) short film contest was conducted entirely in Hoklo (also known as Taiwanese), a language he can’t speak. “I thought I heard it, but I didn’t want to look too excited,” he says. Despite his limited command of the tongue, Saulter’s entry, Wu Yu Tzu (烏魚子, mullet roe), took first place in the amateur category of the competition, which called for three-minute submissions with at least 80 percent of the dialogue in Hoklo. The contest was organized by PTS Taigi — the PTS’ Hoklo-language channel launched in July last year, along with the Taipei Film Commission and the Taipei Culture Foundation. “I wasn’t really too concerned about making a film in a language I cannot speak, as I can speak Mandarin, which is close enough to not make it a completely foreign experience,” Saulters says. It helps that Saulters’ partner, Patty Zhu (朱宥琳), is a Taiwanese stage actress whose mother tongue is Hoklo. Zhu, who stars in Wu Yu Tzu, says the two began writing and shooting shorts after the COVID-19 pandemic put her out of work. Saulters, who works for a gaming graphics company, returned from a business trip to the US right before the 14-day mandatory quarantine was imposed. Believing that they would be permanently stuck at home, the two started setting up the scenes for Wu Yu Tzu. “The [Centers of Disease Control] told me two days later that they had made a mistake,” Saulters says. “But we had already made the plans.” RHYTHMS OF HOKLO They looked up film competitions and found that “Bi Tian Iann” fit

By Han Cheung

The last survivor

To the casual observer, 95-year-old Lee Hak-rae could be just another elderly person in Japan. Surrounded by pictures of his family and paintings by his great-grandchildren, Lee potters about his cluttered living room on the outskirts of Tokyo. But Lee is obsessed by brutal events of 75 years ago that have defined his life: his recruitment into the Japanese army from then-occupied Korea in 1942; his role in building the Thai-Burma railway; being designated a World War Two criminal; and how, he says, he was tossed into the dustbin of history by both Japan and South Korea. Since recovering its sovereignty under the San Francisco Peace Treaty signed in 1951, and reviving military pensions in 1953, Japan has given a pension supplement that can add up to about US$41,000 a year to military veterans. That includes war criminals and their families, government officials say. Japanese wartime leaders convicted of war crimes by an Allied tribunal are honored at Tokyo’s Yasukuni shrine. The treaty also meant Koreans who fought for Japan lost their Japanese nationality, and with it, entitlement to such assistance. More importantly for Lee, the men have never been afforded the attention and a sense of closure given to their Japanese counterparts. “Listen to me. Why are they treating us differently?” says Lee, switching in a barely audible voice between Korean and Japanese. “It’s unfair and doesn’t make any sense. How can I accept this unbelievable situation?” Lee said as he clutched dog-eared clippings documenting his years of campaigning for recognition and compensation. Lee was among 148 Korean war criminals convicted after the war. Now he is the last survivor. Twenty-three of them were executed and he too was sentenced to death by hanging as Kakurai Hiromura in 1947. His sentence was commuted on appeal to 20 years. He was released on parole from a Tokyo prison in

By Park Ju-min